Pilgrims Way

by Abdulrazak Gurnah

  ‘Because you’re not studying music?’ he asked, wanting to persuade her that he was talking about something different.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, frowning, dissatisfied with his summary. ‘But in other ways too. Just that it doesn’t look as if I’m going to be the kind of person he would think of as successful . . . and I wish I could’ve been. But I really am not like that. I imagine him thinking that I’m just not ambitious enough. That I’m . . . frivolous. Perhaps he doesn’t even think that. Do you see what I mean?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘I always felt nervous of him,’ she continued. ‘Always afraid that he would misunderstand me. You could tell with somebody like him . . . you could feel the things he wanted for you. He didn’t push or anything like that, but you could see his disappointment when you failed him.’

  ‘Like with the music,’ he suggested.

  She smiled. ‘Yes. But in other ways too.’

  ‘Do you feel that you’ve failed . . . yourself?’ he asked. ‘You said you didn’t want to be what they wanted of you.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, lying down and turning away from him a little. ‘I don’t know if those are just excuses. I didn’t want to be a nurse, I knew it as soon as I arrived here. I knew before, but I could not think of anything when they asked me what else I would do. I used to say that there were things I wanted to do, I just didn’t know what they were yet. He was disappointed, I know that. But I didn’t want to study music. It was such labour . . . and for so little.’

  She turned over to look at him, to see how he was taking what she was saying. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m sounding pathetic. If I had anything in me I would’ve told them all to get stuffed, wouldn’t I?’

  ‘No, I think you’re brave and interesting,’ he said. ‘Not a bit pathetic.’

  She smiled her gratitude and stroked his face. ‘But I was such a mouse, such a drip! I think I just desperately wanted to get away from home in the end.’

  ‘Why did you want to get away?’ he asked, watching as tears began to trickle down the sides of her face.

  ‘It was stupid,’ she said, turning away again. ‘I thought they disapproved of me, all of them. There was my father wanting me to be clever and sensitive, and my mother resisting him and hanging on to me as some image of herself. And Richard was always mocking, mocking. And Hugh . . . I blame myself really.’

  ‘Who’s Hugh?’ he asked so peremptorily that she turned to him sharply, a frown on her face. ‘Who’s Hugh?’ he asked with an oily, grovelling tone, and earned himself a caress that was something between forgiveness and gratitude.

  ‘He was the first boy I went out with, and almost the last,’ she said. Then collecting herself, she laughed. ‘How did I get to be talking about him? Why aren’t you stopping me?’

  ‘Because I want to know who Hugh is,’ he said. ‘And I already dislike him. His very name turns to bile and corrodes my ears.’

  ‘Oh, no no, he wasn’t important,’ she said, waving his jealous passion aside with an intensity that contradicted her words.

  ‘Why were you so desperate to get away from him then?’

  ‘He encouraged me,’ she said. ‘Tried to help me. He told me I could still play music in my spare time, and nursing was a good profession because I could have children and return to it later. He wanted me to do my training in Leeds where he would be going to university. He thought we would marry and live together for the rest of our lives. I refused to go with him. I went to London and then came down here.’

  ‘Why didn’t you want to go to Leeds?’

  ‘We started sleeping together that summer,’ she said, as if she had not heard his question. ‘It was the first time for me. Usually he was gentle, almost timid, but in his love-making he was angry with me. He wanted me to go with him, but I refused. So he punished me, humiliated me for having lost my awe of him. Oh, I used to worship him!’

  ‘You’re lying,’ he said. ‘You’ve never worshipped anyone. You’re too contrary, too full of grumbles.’

  ‘That’s nice,’ she said, smiling at him and looking pleased. ‘I used to feel proud that he’d chosen me.’ She watched as he rose out of bed and wrapped a kikoi round his middle. ‘Where are you going?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t really want to talk about this man any more,’ he said, walking towards the door. ‘And . . . it’s time I got up. Those were the St Alphege church bells announcing midday, and I never lie in bed in the afternoon. He sounds great.’

  ‘He was all right,’ she said, sitting up and watching him.

  ‘You should’ve gone to Leeds,’ he said, with his hand on the door.

  She nodded. ‘Set up house and skivvy for him and provide him with all the comforts of home. I felt I was pushed into something permanent, that everybody was beginning to treat us that way. I wanted a place of my own first. I always had that ambition. There, one ambition at least, to have a flat of my own where I lived alone, and where I could come and go as I pleased. Not for ever . . . just for as long as I wanted to.’

  ‘It sounds more fun than it really is,’ he said, pulling the door open. ‘You end up wishing for someone to burst into your room and ask interfering questions. To take your mind from recognising the misery of the memories that come back to you. You end up missing people that you never realised you even remembered.’

  She sat watching him for a long while. ‘You were talking about your parents before,’ she said. ‘And I never let you finish.’

  ‘Shame on you!’ he said, before running downstairs to chance his life in the shower. He had felt misunderstood at first, when she started talking about her people. He had never spoken about his parents to anybody, had been too guilty and pained to be able to talk about them, and was hurt that his effort to do so was unceremoniously pushed aside. He understood the inadequacy she spoke of, had sensed it from the beginning, and was now glad that she had offered him a glimpse of its meaning.

  ‘Tell me,’ she said when he came back. ‘I’m sorry I went on like that. You were saying that the only things you remembered were those that made you feel bad. Tell me about your parents. I showed you mine, so you have to show me yours.’

  ‘I’ll tell you later,’ he said. ‘You’d better get up now or the powerful juju of the St Alphege bells will blister your bum with sores. There’s a legend about them. If you hear the bells in bed in the afternoon you get bedsores.’

  ‘Tell me,’ she said after they had eaten a huge breakfast of sausages and eggs. ‘Otherwise I’ll feel you’re just punishing me for talking too much earlier.’

  He shook his head, not knowing what to say, not sure that he should begin at all. ‘I don’t think I’ll ever see them again,’ he said, beginning at the end, then sitting silently while guilt and failure overwhelmed him. She started to speak but he stopped her. He shook his head, apologetically demanding her silence. She started to rise, to go to him, but he shook his head again, peremptory with warning. She sat back in her chair and watched him in the grip of his misery. After a few moments he sighed and then puffed heavily, clowning the passing of the pain. It was then that there was a loud knock on the door, and its melodrama made both of them smile.

  ‘Karta,’ he said as he went to open the door.

  Karta was made shy by Catherine’s beauty. Daud had told him nothing about her, and he stared at her with a look of dumbfoundment. She smiled and shook hands with perfect ease, unaware of the effect she was having. Daud thought he understood how Karta felt. The women they knew looked damaged, like themselves. Always straining too hard and seeming to be dissembling, to be uncomfortable with themselves, out of their depth. That was what it meant to be a stranger in a place. Catherine shook hands without thought, completely confident of her social graces whatever doubts troubled her smiling face.

  ‘How are you?’ Karta asked, speaking with a serious voice. Daud watched with barely suppressed impatience as Karta tiptoed to the cupboard to fetch himself a glass. When he returned from the kitchen
with his drink of water, he had obviously pulled himself out of his surprise. He talked about a film he had seen the previous evening at the university. ‘Do you like films?’ he asked Catherine.

  ‘Yes, I do,’ she said. ‘Although I don’t know the film you’re talking about.’

  ‘This bush man despises them,’ Karta said, pointing at Daud. ‘He thinks that people who like films are just incapable of reading books. That’s the trouble with people like him. They read a little bit and discover their own ignorance, and then they think that everybody’s in the same state. So they insist that we all take the same medicine. That’s the trouble with you, bro.’

  Daud was a little surprised at first by this assault but he did not defend himself against its injustice. He assumed Karta did not really mean him any harm but was just puffing himself up. He listened without protest or smile while Karta brought in his Masters and his trips to London and beyond. Most of what he said was addressed to Catherine, but he could not avoid a surreptitious glance at Daud now and then.

  ‘Well, I’d better be going,’ Karta said after a short while, putting his glass down on the floor. ‘I only came round to say hello. I’ll see you another time, my bro. I’ll see you too, I hope.’ This last was meant for Catherine, and was accompanied by a long look that made Daud feel a twinge of fear.

  I’ll kill you, you fucking baboon, Daud thought. He saw her smile at him and heard her say how nice it had been to meet him. He got up quickly and started to see Karta out. Standing outside the front door, Karta leant towards Daud and whispered Good luck. Daud restrained himself from smashing the door in his face.

  Later in the evening they went out for a drink. As they walked round the spiked iron chains that surrounded the war memorial, he remembered a girl he had seen standing there once in drenching rain. She was selling poppies on Remembrance Day, in the shadow of the cathedral. Her raincoat was belted tightly round her waist, and with her free hand she beckoned him. She told him that she could give him a good time for a price. While he reeled backwards at the blasphemy, she undid the top button of her coat and leant a little towards him. He asked if what she was doing wasn’t illegal, and she said she had a permit, grinning at his gullibility. He told her it was against his religion, and she said it was against hers too but she needed the money. He said he had no money. She asked him how much he had. She was slim and dark, as he remembered her, and at first glance he had thought her attractive. Her face looked ugly when she smiled, and the rain had reduced her hair to a trailing mess. He told her he had VD and made his escape. He told Catherine about her but she doubted that such things could happen here.

  In the pub they found seats in a bay window that curved almost completely around them, giving them the feeling that they were sitting in a glass case, and that all comers could see them as they sat talking. A group of students, elaborately ragged and dirty, were arguing a point in the middle of the floor. One of them walked away in a huff to play the fruit machines by the toilet doors. She wondered if he would be like them when he was a student again, but the idea was so ridiculous that she chuckled. Elbows on the table, chin cupped in two hands, he too was watching the students, wondering at their swagger. At a nearby table, an idling young trendy shouted to the old man facing him that he was from Holland. I’m Dutch, sir. Elephant hide thonged his neck to set off his white vest.

  ‘I used to share a room with a girl from Malaysia,’ Catherine said suddenly. ‘The way we’ve been silently sitting here reminded me. And this afternoon . . . She used to talk a lot. You couldn’t stop her once she started. Something about her way of talking was wrong though. It wasn’t her accent or her English, just that despite her smiles and her bright voice she was on the point of cracking. She was utterly miserable. She used to get letters from home, every other day, and she used to read them out to me. Word for word! She used to explain what the meaning of this was and what the meaning of that. In Malaysia we have this, in Malaysia we have that. All the people in the letters had to be explained, whose uncle he was and what he looked like. Then the photos would come out, and then the tears. She cried every night. I felt sorry for her, at first. She was having so much trouble in her ward. She was so small and looked so fragile, and she was in a ward with one of those huge sisters who terrified her.’

  ‘A dumpling eater,’ Daud suggested, making light of what he suspected she was going to tell him.

  ‘I disliked her in the end,’ Catherine said in an ashamed voice. ‘I used to complain about her to the other students, saying that she was exploiting me.’

  His heart ached for the Malaysian girl. He said nothing while he wondered if he went on at people like that.

  ‘I was very cruel to her,’ she said, dejection on her face. ‘I requested a transfer . . . because I could not bear to listen to her. I was thinking about this morning, when you wanted to tell me about how things come back to you. And I would not stop talking. That’s how the Malaysian girl used to be with me.’

  ‘Nothing like it,’ he said, laughing with relief. ‘I won’t request a transfer.’ He had imagined that she was going to say something about him, accuse him of burdening her with his misery, of being a morbid bore. Instead he found himself being asked to be magnanimous, reassuring her that she was unselfish to a fault. He took her hand off the table and kissed it. He thought of the way Karta had behaved and wanted to put in a good word for him. He did not want her to think Karta spiritless, and he disliked the way he had been with him, rushing Karta off as he had. In the end he did not say anything, thinking he would wait for her to see him as he could really be. Karta did not need any help from him.

  The Dutchman at the next table was talking about cricket. The old man listened with a look of contentment. His hearing aid was turned down as usual, but he liked company and this seemed a good lad. Anyway, there was no point turning it up. He was speaking some foreign lingo, no doubt. The Dutchman repeated the word cricket several times and in the end got up to demonstrate an ordinary looking off-drive. We have been playing cricket in Holland since 1903, he shouted as if he suspected the old man of doubting his word.

  Catherine and Daud sat in silence, she leaning back in her lounge chair, he sitting upright on his padded stool. Behind him, the white-vested Dutchman was filling the air with his goodbyes, discouraged by the old man’s unresponsiveness. The students were talking quietly, having settled their differences, laughing now and then with arrogant confidence. The old man at the next table, now deserted by the Dutchman, turned his attention to them. Daud had seen him countless times in the pub. He walked up to their table and stood uncertain for a moment or two, smiling at them his facile grin of the empire. Daud glanced at the old man’s hands to see if they still dripped blood from the wogs he had slain across the globe. The old man said hello.

  ‘Where you from then? Hong Kong, eh?’ he asked cheerfully, sitting down. He glowed at them both, fractionally longer at Catherine. ‘I spent a long time in Hong Kong. Travelled all over the world, matter of fact. Cape Town, Durban, Alex, West Indies, you name it. I’ve fought in Burma and Abyssinia for King and Country . . .’

  Daud gulped as he watched the old man’s hands quivering with the atavistic thrill of remembered slaughters. He glanced at Catherine, but she only had a distant, polite smile on her face, humouring the old man. This man has killed human beings, he wanted to scream at her. Look at him! Look at those hands innocently quivering round the beer glass! Those same hands were wrapped round the throats of Allah knows how many innocent wogs across the globe!

  ‘I’ve nothing against you darkies,’ the old man said, turning to Daud and making his mouth fall open with terror. ‘I always say, you want to see ’em in their own country. Cheerful as you like, always eager to please. It’s only when they come ’ere that they turn nasty, ’cause of a few rotten apples that give ’em a bad name. Oh, I got nothing against you lot. But it’s cold here, innit? Whatchu think of the weather? Whatchu think of the winter, eh?’

  They walked home by the
cathedral gate, down the lane lined with shops. In between trying to persuade her to take the terrifying old man more seriously, he pointed out the inn where Charles Dickens had stayed. She tried to imitate the way the old man talked, holding her quivering hands out in front of her. Daud attempted to hush her, glancing round to see if the old man was following them. I tell you that man’s a killer. You heard him yourself.

  Approaching on the narrow pavement was a group of youths with wide shoulders, short hair and flashing grins. Daud groaned and covered his eyes for a moment. They were passing a paper parcel full of chips between them, and Daud remembered now why he had disliked eating chips in the street. He felt Catherine’s hand tighten on his arm.

  ‘I don’t like Pakis,’ said the beefy leader.

  ‘Get out of our fuckin country, nigger.’

  ‘How much didcha pay for her, you fuckin wanker?’

  ‘You Tarzan me Jane.’

  They parted in the middle and Catherine and Daud walked through.

  As they passed somebody blew a raspberry and another scratched his armpits. Grunt grunt.

  ‘Did you see the way they parted in the middle there?’ Daud asked, elated as he always was by the narrow escape. ‘They recognised the moral superiority of their foe and retreated. Death to the infidels! Did you see the way my trusty blade went snicker snack through the rabble?’

  They hurried down the sleeping Palace Street, from where ecclesiastic Doges had ruled the Anglican firmament for centuries. It was now an antiquity of windowless flint walls, its pavements broken by high-arched lamp-posts at the end of which hung gloomy lanthorns of ancient design. Behind the walls rose the dormitories of the venerable boarding school created out of the cathedral’s monastery in Henry VIII’s time. Down King’s Lane, past the ironmongery and the King George I where a pile of snow once slid off and nearly killed Daud as he was walking past. Whether an accident or not I cannot say, was how he liked to finish the story. Left past the boarded-up garage with grease marks running out into the road. Left into Bishop Street. The church once owned all the houses down these streets, he told her. Have I told you that before?