Pilgrims Way

by Abdulrazak Gurnah

  It was a beautiful morning in December, bone-dry and hot. The excitement of the first few weeks of the school holidays had gone, and they were feeling the burden of all that time and freedom hanging on their hands. They had wandered in the museums, gone for long walks on the beach, played endless games of football and cards, stayed up into the early hours of the morning, gone for picnics and cycling trips. They were bored. That morning they were sitting on the sea wall behind the dried-fish warehouses, Forodha ya Papa, watching the fishermen clean their boats and the Chinaman on the other side of the creek hanging strips of shark-fin on a line in the backyard of his shop. Little boys were playing between the pillars of the Harbour Police boathouse, as they had done when they were younger. Rashid suggested they borrow a boat and go sailing. He went one way, Daud went the other. He got a boat, Daud didn’t. It was always the same. Rashid could not help taking command. He was so suited to it, but he was still sensitive to the name Daud had given him. They treated it as a joke but Daud knew that he tried hard to make sure that the name Bossy was not justified. They talked of friends they could recruit for the trip, but the decision was taken out of their hands. Daud laughed as he remembered Yunis appearing on the sea wall, and how he and Rashid had clambered into the outrigger and cast off, afraid that they might be forced to take him with them. Yunis was nicknamed Wire, because it was obvious that he had some wires disconnected in his head.

  Dear Catherine, I wish you were with me so I could sob in your arms, and feel the warmth of your body making the pain softer. I wish you were with me so I could tell you how hard it has been to live another life like this. I could tell you about Wire and how guilty I felt as I watched him standing on Ras Matengo looking our way and smiling in his vague fashion. He was used to people running away from him. You could see he was born mad, and that in his old age he would wander the streets with a beard as long as your arm and eyes that lit up in the dark. Yet we had been friends at one time. I’d been very ill with something, one of those near-fatal bouts that we call fever, and could be anything from a mild flu to cholera, and was taking a long time to recover. By the time I was well, I had lost track of all my friends. They were all doing other things. So Wire and I came to spend a lot of time together. He was going to build a ship and sail it himself. The people at the Shipping Control Office knew him and called him Captain to please him. He could only talk about ships and about India. If you talked to him about anything else his eyes went blank and he stopped listening. Everybody bullied him because they knew he was mad. I saw a little boy of six urinate in his mouth once while he lay asleep under the shade of a tree. Wire stood up and left without saying a word and with a vague smile on his face. The adults watching laughed and patted the boy on the back, predicting that he would be a real man when he grew up. Wire was so helpless, so terrified, that he lathered at the mouth with fear when he had to walk past a group of jeering youths. But under the line of trees by the dockside very few people bothered us. I boasted to him about how well I was doing at school while he listened contentedly, blasting off lentil farts now and again. He lied to me about his father’s estates in India.

  The estates were important. They were the reason for the ship-building, for the family could not afford the passage back home. Wire had a huge store of incredible stories which he always ascribed to some Indian sage. Did you know that if a man stood by the sea and peed, and did not lose his nerve, that he could pee for ever? Indian sages have proved this. Did you know that a man’s soul lived in his throat? That was why to kill a man’s soul you had to thròttle him. He had read this in a religious book. His grandfather had kept elephants in India and had once caught his elephant keeper trying to have sex with a bull. Did you know that the old Aga Khan used to have his shit weighed every day, to see how much weight he had lost in the night? He loved talking, most of all about his father’s estates in India.

  Yes, I know he was mad, my darling. So what was I doing messing around with a nut like that? That was what my parents wanted to know. His father was mad too, if anything he was even more mad. He was supposed to be a shopkeeper but all he ever had in his shop were boxes of rusty nails and showcases with old fishing-hooks and twine. If anybody stopped to shoot the breeze with him or give him a good morning, he asked him for money. He went to the mosque every day, and after the prayers he asked people for money. Whenever a customer appeared at his shop, the barber opposite him, another Indian, would shout out a warning: Watch your pocket, watch your pocket. He’s going to ask you for money. Why don’t you go back to India, you filthy Bombay scum? Why you come and spoil everything for us? And everybody laughed, winking at each other behind the barber’s back while one Mhindi abused another in the language that they used to abuse both of them. Bombay scum, shit-scraper, lentil-eater, are ma, curry-eating bloodsucker. Nothing seemed to touch the old man. He went to the Welfare Office and filled in countless forms and got nothing for it. He laughed and chatted with the clerks, and took no notice when they told him to go back to India. He walked with his fixed smile through abuse and blows, and asked all and sundry for money. He was mad, but with a kind of courage and persistence too. I saw a man in the streets here once just like that, an old man with a carefully trimmed beard and a grimy Salvation Army cap. In one hand he carried a deep, leather hold-all with a bunch of flowers sitting on top. He was only a small man, a little bent, but as he walked he twirled a cane high over his shoulder and the pavements cleared in front of him. On his thin wasted face was a look of stubborn determination. That was how Wire’s father looked, thin and small, with a sunken jaw that had no teeth left, but with a blankness in his face that mere words and blows would never be able to reach. In his own way, Wire had something of that look already, so that despite his leathery and flabby appearance, as if he was something that lived under the ground, he had a doggedness that persuaded his tormentors to leave him alone in the end. And you know how he will end up – disappointed and alone, and very crazy.

  I did not think all this as I watched him standing at the water’s edge on Ras Matengo. This comes back to me now. I begin to understand a little how crazy the man must have felt in that place. Go back to India, you shit-scraper! And India, profligate enough with its talented sons, let alone its damaged ones, wanted him as little as that place did. Shipwrecked on the island he tried to beg for a return passage, while his son planned to build a ship in which they would all sail away home. In their separate madness, they both wandered the streets, naked and abandoned among strangers.

  Rashid laughed at Wire. He was ashamed of Daud’s friendship with the idiot boy. He mimicked Wire’s mad mannerisms from the boat, and ignored the look of disapproval that Daud gave him. Rashid peeled his shirt off and leaned back, stretching in preparation for work. The sun was beating down on his bare chest, shining in his eyes. Bossy was in his element. He lived almost on the water-line, and had gone sailing with his father and the other fishermen from about the time he could walk. Daud knew nothing about boats, and could only be trusted to carry out instructions, a state of affairs which Rashid exploited for as many laughs as he could.

  It hurts to talk about you like this, as if what has happened has not happened. I can see you stretching like that in the sun, with the light in your eyes. To the island and back before dinner, you said. I could not understand why you would want me to be your friend. While Rashid was winning prizes in his first year at Sharif College, and being spoken of by the teachers as a future head-boy, Daud was being clouted by the same teachers for not paying attention. Rashid was a champion swimmer, a national record-holder over 440 yards. He was an aggressive and skilful footballer, and a very useful slow left-arm bowler. He was fair-skinned and handsome, and wore a wristwatch with a silver strap. It was given to him by the English Club for taking seven of their wickets for 23 runs. Daud could not understand why such a paragon would want to befriend him.

  Sister Wesley had been watching him for some time, peering in through the smoked-glass window in the theatre door. She
came in so suddenly that Daud did not have time to rise from the anaesthetist’s chair he was occupying, or to lift his chin from the end of the mop on which it was resting. For a moment he panicked, unsure where he was. And even when memory came surging back, the half-cleaned theatre seemed different, brighter and larger than before. The Sister stood just inside the theatre door, watching Daud with dislike. She was a tall woman with short black hair cut in a fringe. She had struck Daud as very dark when he first met her, reminded him a little of the look of some of the women at home, although her complexion and colour were obviously European. She disliked him from the second she clapped eyes on him, lashed him with as much sarcasm as she could decently manage without getting embroiled in a squabble with an orderly. In return, Daud became quietly unco-operative when he was made to work under her. He took a small revenge by starting a rumour that there was a touch of the tar-brush somewhere. He had told Staff Nurse Chattan that Wesley’s ma was a Bengali ayah who had married into the family of her employers. He had been gratified to find that a version of the story was very quickly in circulation.

  ‘Having a rest?’ she asked him, drawing her words out in a superior accent. ‘Well, when you’ve finished cleaning the theatre, you can go. The chores that remain to be done are a little beyond your qualifications, I think.’

  ‘Yessum,’ he said, rising slowly to his feet.

  ‘You can go,’ she repeated more loudly, as if taking no chances about being misunderstood. ‘You might as well! We’ll do our best to manage without your expert assistance.’

  ‘Yessum!’ he burst out, shuffling his feet and dropping his eyes. He considered throwing in a cringe as well but feared she might mistake his attitude. ‘I go now now, missus!’

  ‘I’ve told you before, I’m not your missus,’ she flared, and left.

  ‘You should be so lucky, you ugly arsehole,’ he called after her. She disliked him so much that she would give him two hours off his shift? He ran round the theatre with the damp mop, thinking that it would still be early enough to persuade Catherine to come out for a drink.

  13

  Catherine lived in a double-fronted house, with a path down the middle of a garden that was filled with rose bushes in resplendent bloom. Two steps led up to the huge front door, which was recessed into the porch. He knew she shared a downstairs flat, and glanced towards the open sash window from which came the sound of a flute. The music did not even stutter when he rang the bell, and he assumed that she lived in the flat with the curtains drawn across the windows.

  The woman who opened the door looked at him with interest but did not invite him in. She was tall and a little gangling, with sharp features and flushed, flaring nostrils. There were sharp creases in her uniform, and he guessed she was getting ready for night-duty. Her looseness of limbs and posture softened her appearance, made her seem disarranged and homely, rather than as sour as her etched features suggested. Her little movements had a kind of lasciviousness that seemed unconscious, and as she stood by the door she was not unwelcoming. Yet he was intimidated, fumbling with his words. Her eyes spoke of years of cynicism and boredom. She must have only just got up, he told himself. That was why her eyes were heavy and watery.

  ‘Cathy’s not in,’ she said.

  ‘Where has she gone?’ he asked, distressed by the news, and scotchihg the memories that had begun to stir to life in his mind. He realised that he had been getting his story ready for her. Uncovering his wounds for her like a beggar.

  The woman did not answer immediately but a smile appeared at the corners of her mouth. ‘Did she know you were coming?’ she asked, frank amusement in her eyes. ‘She’s gone out with her boyfriend.’

  ‘To the jazz club,’ he said at once, without thought, feeling the bottom of his life drop out.

  ‘That’s right,’ the woman said, looking pleased that he knew about that. ‘You’ve only just missed them. You can catch them up in no time, if you haven’t parked too far away.’

  ‘That’s right.’ He grinned at her and took a step back.

  ‘Shall I tell her you came?’ she asked, glancing down the street to see where he had parked his car.

  He shrugged as he walked backwards, inviting her to do as she liked. He smote his brow, parodying his anguish. The woman laughed, and Daud grinned as if he had intended the joke for her. She leaned forward, waiting to see what he would do next. When he waved from the bottom of the path, she shrugged her shoulders with disappointment, reluctant to see him go.

  ‘Hey, what’s your name?’ she called out but he just waved without answering. ‘I’m Paula,’ she shouted to him as he hurried away.

  Dear Catherine, It doesn’t matter. I guessed all along anyway, and it doesn’t surprise me that a damsel as fair as you should have a crop of rich bloods, dashing you about all over the place. They are your own kind of people. To tell the truth, I didn’t really know. I wondered, though . . . I called for you tonight to tell you about a friend. I called him Bossy. It doesn’t matter very much any more. One morning in December, when we were both seventeen, I lost him. Today a letter came to bring him back to life. No, I had not forgotten him, but I have learnt to live with his death, his non-existence. To think of him as an accident, a contingent that another contingent overtook. He knew now what he had intended, to hurl himself into her loving arms and sob his tragic history to her. Then she would have gasped at the insupportable misery of his life, and marvelled at the fortitude that held such virulent poison in check. This placid, contented bozo that you see strolling these quiet streets, he would have declared, has seen the glint of the sacrificial blade in its swift rush for his delicate throat. To look on the resolution in his eyes and the unfurrowed calm of his brow, you would hardly guess his torment.

  It surprised him that he could keep the pain of her absence separate from the memory of Bossy. He would have expected it all to overflow the same cup, merge into the same noxious brew that would poison and unnerve him. Dear Bossy, She is the best thing that’s happened to me here. I can feel it. I don’t think she can, though. How do you mean I should do something about it? This character who’s taken her out probably wears jackets and owns things like farms and cars and riding ponies. I don’t know what she was doing with me. It was always going to be this way in the end, that she would go back to the comfortable ways she knows. Can you blame her? My house smells and my body reeks of lassitude and self-pity. Do you think I can hide things like that? What do you care about such things? That heartless land has already turned you into dust.

  When he got home he slid into a chair, stretched his legs out before him and shut his eyes. The low hum of the grain factory was mixed with the sound of fast-flowing water running through the sluices of the disused mill nearby. He had not been home long when Karta turned up, hammering on the door as if to wake the dead. Karta’s eyes appeared at the letter box like twin glimmers in a tunnel. ‘Put your trousers on and let me in, bro,’ he called out.

  Daud let him in then went upstairs and lay on the bed. He resisted the temptation to read Karim’s letter again. He felt no urge to talk to Karta about the letter, or about Bossy. They knew each other without those complicated histories, without alienating details of cruelties and persecutions. After a while he rose and went down. Karta was lounging in a chair, one leg thrown elegantly over the arm. He was toying with a packet of cigarettes, staring at it as if engaged in an inner gazing that preoccupied his sight. Daud saw that he was annoyed, and felt he could understand that Karta should resent the lack of welcome, and the exclusion from his concerns. Suddenly Karta flicked the cigarette packet in a wide arc and watched it land on the table. He smiled with triumph and turned to glance at Daud.

  ‘Where is she? Where is the creature I found you with the other day?’ Karta asked. ‘There’s one question I’ve been meaning to ask you, you know. How did you manage to lure that creature in here? I mean no offence, bro, but what’s a clean-cut bourgeois chick like that doing in your hovel?’ He spoke languidly, as if bored an
d irritated by the question before it had even passed his lips. He stirred in the chair and turned to look at Daud, who did not smile as Karta had expected him to. Karta grinned and raised his arms in mock surrender. ‘All right, where is she?’

  ‘At the jazz club,’ Daud said, walking to the cupboard for a tin of soup.

  ‘You look ill,’ Karta said after a silence. ‘Your face is haggard and woe-begone, and you look fucked and knackered, if I may so observe. I presume she’s going with somebody else?’

  ‘Yes,’ Daud said reluctantly. As he reached into the cupboard he saw that the arm of his jumper was shiny with sweat and grease. It seemed suddenly an emblem of the squalor of his silly life. He pulled the jumper off and tossed it into the brown armchair. He watched with amused interest as Karta shuddered.

  ‘Don’t get yourself worked up over nothing,’ Karta said casually, making a matter-of-fact observation. ‘A woman is always two-faced. You can’t trust one bitch of them. Especially these clean-cut English ones. There’s only one thing they want from a black man.’

  Daud’s ears were humming. His leg was throbbing with an inflamed vein. He had gone to the doctor with that bad leg, and had dutifully listened to a lecture about the danger of a thrombosis. The doctor had explained how he was to rest his leg, and Daud had nodded. I’ll let the servants do all the work, he said. What difference did it make? Maybe one day soon they’d find him dead with an enormous clot stuck fast in his bicuspid valve.

  ‘Is that what you’re looking miserable about? Don’t let me down, bro! You look long in the tooth like that for one of them two-faced bitches? She looked too neat and uptight for you anyway,’ Karta said. ‘Let me tell you something, bush-boy, and you listen carefully and drink deep from the fount of wisdom. However much a woman sweet-talks you or gives you the big eye, you remember one thing. Don’t trust her an inch. My ma told me that when I was so high, and I haven’t found reason to doubt her word on that yet. I’ve come close, teetered on the brink, but then the words of my ma came flying to my rescue. A woman’s a two-faced nothing, remember that, son. You better make that your catechism too. Because when that sweet-talking’s done, and the big eye’s had its fill, she’ll leave you just like that. She’ll go find herself another mug like you.’