Pilgrims Way

by Abdulrazak Gurnah

  But Karta was not in. The man who opened the door came back to tell Daud that Karta had gone away. For a day or two, he thought. Did Daud want to leave word for him? They had a notice board. Or he could ring him the next day if he wanted to take the number.

  ‘No, don’t trouble,’ Daud said. He would have liked to ask the man his name, and get him to talk about his work, his research. Anything so he did not have to return to the house just yet. He thanked the man and left, smiling ruefully to himself as he reflected that he had been in England for too long, and had learned the reticent bad manners of the natives. He thought also how much he envied Karta these civilised trappings, a desirable residence and intelligent company. Yet Karta always spoke of the students he shared with as if they were contemptible half-wits. Daud wondered how much Karta’s absence had to do with the fight with Lloyd.

  There was always Lloyd. He kept inviting Daud to go round and meet his parents. What better time than now, after the beating that Karta had administered? Daud could arrive as the messenger of a gospel of brotherhood and tolerance. He knew, from what Lloyd had told him, that the father was inclined to believe in jungle bunnies and coons. He would not have been amused by the sight of his injured son, abused and assaulted by a Jungle Jim run amok. Daud could preach co-existence to him with unctuous hypocrisy, the way the victorious always did to the defeated. But the victory, if it was that, had not been his, and the Lloyd clan could hang on to their cruel delusions for a little longer. In the end he went back to Bishop Street, with only the cricket highlights to look forward to, although 437 for 9 was a lavish enough feast.

  Catherine came at around ten. She grinned at him as if her arrival was a conspiracy they had both shared. He let her in but would not allow her to pass until she had submitted to a long embrace. She was still wearing her uniform, and about her was the smell of hospital wards and disinfectant.

  ‘How’s the farmer?’ he asked, although he disliked the anxiety his question implied the instant the words were out of his mouth.

  ‘He knows about you,’ she said, sitting at the table, then leaning back to stretch her tired body. ‘I told him last night. I didn’t think it was right not to. He surprised me too. He was so upset, wanted to know who you were, what you did. It was strange, not what I expected at all. He pleaded that I shouldn’t leave, when I thought he would get angry and storm off.’

  He said nothing, hardly dared breathe. His mouth felt dry. He waited for her to continue, and she looked at him with a kind of complacent happiness, pleased with herself.

  ‘I wanted him to stop asking me questions and go away, so I could come back here. But he wouldn’t go, especially after you rang. He knew it was you. He called me all kinds of names,’ she said and shrugged. ‘He insisted on knowing your name. When he found out . . . He said he could not understand how I could touch you. How I could sleep with you! He kept calling you all these things, nigger, wog, that sort of thing. It was almost funny in the end. He wouldn’t go, kept on pleading. Until early morning he was still there. It was so unexpected. I wouldn’t have believed it. I didn’t think he would feel like that. I thought I was the one who should feel flattered. He’d chosen me. He took me out to all these places.

  ‘We go round as a little group, you know. All the men are doctors, and all the women are nurses. Some of the older women have been passed from one man to another, although that’s not what we call it. Like Paula. The lucky ones marry their doctors and whisk them away. That’s what I was into.’ She looked at him, unsmiling and inviting his censure. ‘I felt squalid, and too weak to do anything about it. Like the brazen girl at school who pretends that she likes being pushed into the English store and mauled by the boys. I felt I should know better, but I did nothing. I hated it so much when I came here. But I thought I had to stick it out. I was afraid they would think me weak at home if I didn’t. That’s when I moved out of the nurses’ home to where I am now. I thought I would have fun, anyway. Going out, having a man. Whenever I caught those looks from the other nurses I pretended they were just envious, but I knew it was really the same contempt I felt for women like Paula. It never occurred to me that Malcolm felt any different really. He didn’t treat me as if he did. He took me out, bought me drinks, slept with me.’

  ‘Don’t keep saying it like that,’ he said.

  ‘But he did! That’s how he made me feel.’ She looked at him with assurance, prepared to explain, to persuade. ‘It was such a relief when I began to tell him. Then you rang, and that made me feel good. He wouldn’t go. I knew he wouldn’t go until I slept with him. So in the end . . . I did, so he would go.’ She looked at him again, waiting to see if he had anything to say. He said nothing, but in the end a sudden grin of elation escaped him. It was the contemptuous way she spoke of sleeping with him that filled him with joy. On your bike, farmer boy.

  ‘He’ll be back,’ Daud warned, adding a dash of fear in his voice to hasten his rival’s transformation into a demon.

  ‘Yes, I know,’ she said, not sounding annoyed enough for Daud’s liking. ‘He told me. He said he wouldn’t give up just like that. He was there tonight. I rang home before I left work, and he was there waiting. He’s got no right to do that. He doesn’t own me. Do you know last night he asked me to marry him? I told him not to be ridiculous. He just could not bear the idea of me going away. I was like a toy he was losing.’ Daud was surprised by the offer of marriage. She was elated by her escape, and the discovery of the ascendancy over the doctor and was dismissive of him. Perhaps later she would see the matter differently. Daud kept quiet, happy to hear his rejected rival abused. ‘I think you’d better stay here until things calm down,’ he said, injecting as much horror and shock in his voice as he dared. ‘You don’t know what an enraged doctor is capable of.’

  ‘Of course I’m staying here,’ she said with a sigh. Then she flashed a small grin and shut her eyes.

  17

  He dreamed that night that Lloyd had joined a regiment of Hussars and had ridden over Sister Williams’s fence in his gleaming uniform, snatched a bottle of sherry out of her hand and refused to leave unless she agreed to let him ravish her. Daud found this image of Lloyd so difficult to credit that he woke up with a headache. To his further consternation, Catherine began to talk a little guiltily about her doctor. Daud had much preferred the abuses for which she had condemned him, even though they were painful to contemplate. Her doubts about whether she had treated him shabbily had an ominous ring.

  ‘Shabbily!’ he urged her. ‘This man thinks you’re a diseased woman. He thinks you’re some kind of sex freak because you want to be with me rather than his pink-skinned self. He thinks I’m a diabolical monster! How can you treat someone like that shabbily? Nothing is too shabby for a horror like that!’ There was more, but he did not want to win the doctor any unnecessary sympathy by running amok. He gritted his teeth and listened as Catherine tried to rehabilitate the man’s character. It was what Daud had been afraid of, that the offer would seduce her into taking the doctor’s affection seriously again.

  ‘I keep thinking of what he must be feeling. I had no idea how involved he was. Marriage! I mean you don’t offer marriage just like that, do you? Imagine that you loved someone enough to want to marry him, and just when you think that all’s well, it turns out there’s somebody else. I’m not really that bothered about what he said . . .’

  ‘Well I am!’ he interrupted, launching a swift counteroffensive. ‘That’s how it begins. You may think that he said all those nasty things because he was disappointed. Ah, poor doctor, he was only a little upset. That may seem to you to be a good reason for him calling people like me a nigger monster, but not to me. Next week he’ll turn a blind eye to some poor black woman’s disease. And a month after he’ll gloat over an underfed little piccaninny that’s been beaten to death by its mother, crazed and hapless on drugs and despair. All because he’s upset, when normally he likes nothing better than to kiss little coon babies’ buttocks. Words like that don’t com
e out of the blue. They come out of what we think.’

  ‘Aren’t you exaggerating?’ she asked, grimacing with distaste.

  ‘Do you think so? He probably does that already.’

  ‘What do you take him for?’ she shouted, glaring at him. ‘Anyway, it was about me . . . I meant I’m not bothered what he said about me.’

  ‘Well I am. You may not mind that he treats you as he wishes . . . Look at the way he used you. Even on the night when you were telling him to go, he wanted his bit of flesh first.’

  She laughed. He was annoyed with himself for having brought that up. It made him sound petty but he could not imagine that she would find any defence for such a brutish act of vengeance. ‘So what?’ she asked, looking at him with a mixture of defiance and anger. ‘What does that make me then? It was hardly that great an imposition. I’ve been sleeping with him for months, and I’ve been sleeping with you, and there were others before both of you. What do you take me for? A little virgin dairy maid taken advantage of by a wicked squire?’

  He made no reply. He imagined that in this scene he was the naive and idealistic lover. Why did they all take him to be so naive? Bossy, and Karta, and now her. They sat in an uncomfortable silence, turning back to cups of coffee that had grown cold. ‘Do you think he was serious about marriage then?’ he asked, trying to expunge any mockery from his tone, and posing the question, he assured himself, entirely out of academic curiosity.

  ‘You don’t think so?’ she asked, keeping her voice level but unable in the end to stop herself smiling. ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so really. It was completely unexpected. I suppose that was what he thought I wanted. Perhaps he didn’t mean it, but intended it to buy him a small delay. Then in a month or two he’d have left me . . . or something like that.’

  ‘I don’t think he meant it,’ he said with finality.

  ‘I don’t think he did either. I was looking at the way I’d behaved because I was beginning to feel that I’d behaved badly. Then you get so angry, and make him into some kind of monster. Anyway, you’d better go to work. I think you’re going to be late.’

  The thought of Solomon rampaging round the changing rooms, checking the clocks and looking for him, made Daud laugh. ‘Will you come here after work? Or go back to the flat?’ he asked.

  She was silent for a long moment. ‘You won’t misunderstand me, will you?’ she said. ‘I have to go back to the flat. Be by myself for a while, and think things out. And I really fancy a bath.’

  ‘If he . . . comes? Will you be all right?’

  She gave him a brief look, followed by a pitying smile. He was lucky, he thought, to escape without another lecture on his innocence. ‘I’ll have to deal with it,’ she said. ‘I’ll have to know how to deal with him.’

  He shrugged and stood up to leave. ‘Good luck.’

  ‘You’re a bloody bully,’ she said angrily. ‘I have to sort it out with him. I can’t just leave it like this. It makes me feel bad enough as it is. And I need a little more time . . . rushing from one thing to another won’t do any good, will it?’

  He nodded. ‘You’re right,’ he said reluctantly. ‘You’d better take your time.’

  She looked suspicious, thinking he was being sarcastic.

  ‘I guess I’m afraid he might persuade you back,’ he said and stopped.

  ‘You afraid?’ she asked, and he was unreasonably pleased by her incredulous tone.

  ‘It’s pay day today,’ he said. ‘I’ll get some food for tomorrow and cook a lavish dinner. Will you come?’

  He ran most of the way to work but still arrived twenty minutes late. He changed as quickly as he could and went to Solomon’s office, expecting to have to cringe in front of the Ineffable Locksman. May I address your wise self? Do tell me if I’m rushing you too much. These are interesting days in my life. I begin to feel unusually light. I feel I can take to the air, at times I feel invincible. You’ve been warned! Solomon merely glanced up and twitched his lips. Daud hastily retreated, wondering what event had occurred to deprive him of his scolding. At least, he consoled himself, he had not been denied the disposal corridor. He discovered the reason for Solomon’s good temper in the sluice area, where three trolleys of dirty instruments and mountains of bloody linen awaited his attention. The night staff had been working flat out and had had no time to clean up. Daud had already seen the frightening size of the morning lists. With the addition of the emergency trolleys, he would be kept amused for most of the morning. He gave Solomon a small round of applause, appreciating the subtler qualities of this morning’s malice.

  Dear Clive Lloyd, You’re on your own! I can’t be with you this morning while you take on the England cricket team. My services are required in the interests of surgery and humanity. Have no mercy on Tony Greig! Crush him! Tony Greig went on to make 89 not out before close of play, taking England to 238 for 5. This was better than the 90 all out Daud had predicted. Aside from the number of runs the Boer made, he made them with style and a bit of dash. And he was still there, intent on getting even more! Also the wage packet Mrs Coop had given him was slimmer than he had anticipated. A mistake, she assured him, which would be put right in his next pay, a whole long week away. He went home with a sinking feeling that he would find something smelly had been pushed through his letter box. He found a letter from Piano Keys, regretfully demanding rent. In something of a high dudgeon he fetched pen and paper and arrayed them on the table, composing a fierce reply in his mind as he prepared himself a sandwich. Dear Piano Keys, You do not deserve the tolerance with which I treat you. You shame the sobriquet that I have borrowed for you. After all, you’re nothing more than a slum landlord.

  When he came to it, he wrote a letter to Catherine instead. He told her how he had left his home, about the forged passport, the bribes, the bogus health certificates. He described the suspicion of the Immigration officials at the airport, the terror of the machine-gun turret on top of the airport control tower, the long walk across the tarmac to the steaming aircraft. He told her how he had expected a bullet to end that endless journey. He was young then, he explained, and inclined to be melodramatic. Catherine. He liked to say the name to himself. He saw her with her brown hair streaked with gold, sitting waiting for him to arrive. He saw her as she had been in his house, roused to anger by the filth in which he lived, lying beside him like a gift from the gods.

  By the time she came the following day, he had cooked the meal and was waiting for her. When he opened the door to her she smiled.

  ‘Did he come?’ he asked.

  She nodded. ‘It’s over.’

  They sat in the darkening living room, the dirty plates in front of them, the television blaring from next door. ‘You must be tired,’ he said, dropping what he hoped were heavy hints. They took their coffee upstairs, lying on the bed to be near each other.

  ‘You ran away,’ she said after reading his letter. ‘All that danger to come to this? Is that what makes you sad?’

  ‘I don’t think so. Maybe sometimes it does seem like a lot of wasted effort. All the labours you put to survival are in aid of this? As if you had a choice. But no, it’s not that. It’s being a stranger. That is what’s so crushing. The community you live in carries on in its complicated way, and it is entirely indifferent to you. It requires nothing from you, and in return you are a complete irrelevance to it. You are free. But you’re also without any function. Do what you like, it makes no difference. You see, sometimes it’s tempting to think of yourself as in some kind of exile. Exile means there is no choice. There’s a purpose or a principle behind what you do. But really the matter is much less lofty than that. The principles, if they survive the crushing of the spirit, turn out to be mean, self-deluding little ambitions. I want to be an accountant. That kind of thing. Perhaps the real ambition is to escape. Not to escape the particular, the threat to life and fulfilment, but to escape as a kind of drama that gives meaning to life. As you say, this is what you run to, this is what you escape to. Instea
d of soaring with like-minded idealists, you are grubbing among the lumber of your little life-raft, trying to remember the reasons for this shipwreck.’

  She said nothing, watching as he shrank into his desolation. She felt she understood something of his loneliness but did not want to seem impatient. After a moment he started to talk again. He told her of the furtive farewell he took of his parents, whispering behind the front door, before he set off on his own for the taxi park.

  ‘Can you go back?’ she asked at last, when he would say no more.

  He shook his head, then shrugged. He told her of the weight of his father’s arm on his shoulder as he said goodbye. Then he had gone rushing out of the house, too full of anxieties to worry about what his parents felt. ‘Now I think how cruel it was, leaving them like that. At the time I thought they were fussing. It didn’t feel like I would never see them again. It didn’t feel that way at all. I think how I must’ve hurt them acting like that. And the trouble is that I can’t just meet them and make it all better. You know, buy them a bunch of flowers and say sorry. They remain like that, standing behind that door whispering their goodbyes, feeling bitter at my impatience. That’s how I remember them. And that’s how they’ll remember me.’

  He stopped and gave her a startled look. He had not thought of raising that picture of them, had not fully imagined it himself. He would be burdened with that image of them for ever.

  ‘I have a feeling that you’ll be meeting them sooner than you think,’ she said.