He lowered his arms and threw her a pleased smile. When he saw that she remained unimpressed, he made a face and began to walk towards the graves. She was tired of the stupid game, she thought. She was a little scared and did not mind admitting it, but more than that, she thought it was ridiculous. He reached the headstones and bent to read the inscriptions. She wished he would hurry, it seemed unnecessarily provocative. It was not even funny any more. Her heart leapt when she saw some movement among the trees at the edge of the churchyard. Gradually and unmistakably an object began to define itself out of the shadows and grew into men. She called out his name, hissing out an urgent whisper instead of shouting her alarm, but he waved her down without turning round.
As they walked towards the crouching figure of Daud, it was obvious that no juju had conjured these beauties. They were the representatives of the times, six of the best that the National Health, Social Security and Child Benefit could produce. While the shock-troops of modern European civilisation thus approached him, the poor warrior from across the sea was crouched among the dead, looking for a symbolic scrap with a long-forgotten ancestor.
They saw him and hesitated only briefly. Did it not occur to them that this could be one of the dead? One of the spirits? It seemed a strangely catastrophic failure of imagination to her. They saw a man crouching in the middle of a graveyard at an early hour of the morning and they never thought to turn and run. She called out his name, urgently now, and saw him turn to face them. But it was too late. He glanced towards her and shrugged. She felt that she had failed him. She should have stopped him going into the graveyard, she thought, as if that would have prevented the pain that would befall him now. He began moving backwards to prevent them ringing him. What could he hope to achieve, raised as he was on rice and fish gruel, against the Manifest Destiny of barbarian rule? They called him nigger spook. He tripped on a gravestone and they fell on him, seeking to recapture the old glory by slaying a wog in their own right.
They beat him, calling him names and taunting him with questions that did not need an answer. She heard his voice above the others. I thank you, Men of England. He tried to rise, to fight back, but they were too many for him. When she went to him they took no notice of her, handing her off with a preoccupied Piss off. She picked up a long, pointed lump of kerb-stone. Watch it, one of them called. The crazy bitch! Thin blonde hair flying, one of them knocked the stone out of her hands and punched her full in the mouth, sending her toppling backwards. You stupid bitch! he said, standing over her, hands on hips. He kicked her with carefully gathered effort and she threw up in an uncontrollable spasm. They beat him until he lay senseless in the shadow of the church.
After the flower of England had ridden off into the sunrise, she went to him and wept for his mangled body. ‘I’ve broken my arm,’ he said proudly when he came to. She found him sitting up when she returned from calling an ambulance, leaning against a headstone and smiling. ‘Did you see the way I charged those evil knights? Did you see how they scattered?’
He saw that she massaged her abdomen, wincing as she probed the pain. She told him of the man who had kicked her, described him to Daud as if she expected that he would know him. When he praised her bravery, she made a mocking face at him. ‘What a compliment from a great warrior!’ she said.
The ambulance men made a joke about reviving the dead. One of them recognised him. Daud asked them if they could put the siren on. You some kind of royalty? the ambulance man asked him. The Sister in Casualty insisted that Catherine wait outside but Daud made a fuss. ‘She’s wounded as well,’ he urged. The Sister relented in the end, giving Catherine a long, suspicious look. She felt Catherine’s belly and had her X-rayed at the same time as Daud, but she was inclined to pay him her serious attention. While they waited for the X-rays the Sister told Daud about a fancy-dress party in the sisters’ home. She had gone in a grass skirt, dressed up as a hula girl. He passed out when the doctor arrived and started to feel his broken arm.
They allowed Daud to stay in Casualty until Sunday afternoon. Sister Agnes Kirk, the plump old Angel of the Battle of Kut, came to see him while he was asleep. She wiped an imaginary lock of hair off his forehead with tears in her eyes. Catherine told him this when she came to collect him on Sunday afternoon.
‘She recognised you. It was strange. She became all flustered and upset. She’s really going senile, isn’t she? Poor old cow!’
‘I must’ve reminded her of the Mesopotamian campaign,’ said Daud, trying to understand the agitation that Sister Kirk’s behaviour caused him. Could he have been in Kut during the battle? In some other manifestation? ‘What is so senile about that? Why shouldn’t the good lady grieve over my injuries?’
Catherine made a face, unimpressed by his heroics. ‘What campaign?’ she asked, bending down to help him lace up his shoes.
The taxi driver sat morosely behind the wheel while Daud tried to squeeze into the back seat without jarring his wounds. He smiled at Catherine through gritted teeth, making much of his bravery under torture. He winced when she patted him ironically on his good shoulder. She shook her head and sighed. When they got home he refused to sit on the settee, saying it hurt his knee, and she exploded. ‘Stop it! Stop making such a fuss about a few bruises.’
By early evening his body throbbed with fever. He went to bed but could not sleep, sweating and turning as he looked for a painless shape. Late at night, after she had dropped off to sleep, he thought of his parents. His heart bled with uncontrollable panic. How he’d failed them! How he’d neglected them! She woke up when he started rambling. You must stop this, she said.
He sat down to write a letter after she left for work. It was too late, he thought. How could he explain to them all the things that had happened? How could he describe England’s luminous dusk and say to them that it had not all been pain, after all? He wrote anyway, greetings and abject apologies, asking for forgiveness as he had always thought they wanted him to. He walked to the post office and posted the letter as soon as it was finished. In the afternoon he watched Fredericks and Greenidge torturing the England bowlers, scoring 182 for none in 138 minutes. Greenidge hit the ball as if he intended it personal injury, rising to square-cut it as if it was a loathsome pest.
He told her about the letter when she came home, and she patted his face and grinned, and he grinned back with a kind of pride. He really had done it. Soon enough he was on the cricket, and that wiped the smile off her face. He watched the whole of the final day. With the series already won, and everybody agreeing that the pitch was easy, a draw was the expert prediction, but Daud had a feeling. Holding was the graceful assassin, and no moment was sweeter for Daud than when he yorked Greig for 1. Daud danced round the house, yelping with mocking laughter and whirling his good arm like a demented dervish. When Catherine came home, he ignored her plaintive pleas and insisted on telling her the full story of the day’s play. 203 all out. Greig 1. West Indies won by 231 runs. In the end she fell asleep, which he found hurtful.
‘How about visiting the cathedral this afternoon?’ he asked her on Saturday.
‘Why?’ she asked, grinning with surprise. ‘On second thoughts, never mind why. I’ll give you a conducted tour. No moans and groans, okay? You go round obediently and look at all the things I tell you to. No arguments!’
The cathedral grounds were thronged with people, but most of them were standing back, skirting the building, diffident in their admiration. Catherine led him confidently to the main porch and halted him there. He looked up at the stone carvings and the intricate filigree that shielded the saints from the brazen gaze of the pilgrims. He stopped listening to her long before they entered the building, moved by a passion he could not yet name.
In the nave he turned his eyes heavenwards with unashamed incredulity. The pillars will outlast God himself, he thought. He hurried towards the altar, giving the gaudy pulpit the briefest of glances. It had a clumsy grandeur, but neither dignity nor grace, he thought. It seemed to him the wo
rk of self-aggrandising priests. He resisted Catherine’s insistent tugging and looked with satisfaction at the grubby altar cloth and the heavy tarnished cross that stood on it. They had a more authentic look, he thought. She showed him the transepts, and the memorials to knights and kings. Then, as if keeping the best until last, she took him to the chapel of modern-day saints and martyrs, remembering on this occasion the slaughter of Martin Luther King. He hurried back to the nave and stood under its fluted vaulting, feeling himself soaring at the sight of the incredible grace of the stone and the light. After that he did not want to see more. He wanted to leave.
‘This was not meant for God,’ he said. ‘This was to celebrate the ingenuity of man. We’ll come another time. It’s incredible. How did a bunch of barbarians in wolf skins build this?’
‘I don’t like this awed manner you’re adopting,’ she said, dragging him away. ‘Most of it was built by foreigners anyway. Even the stone comes from Caen. It’s just a massive Gothic pile standing almost next door to your rot-infested hovel. And it’s stupid not to visit it.’
‘No no,’ he protested. ‘It’s much more than that.’ Ducking and weaving between the crowds in Sun Street and Palace Street, he tried to explain that what they had seen was more complicated. ‘How could feeble barbarian man do all that? What for? Ask yourself that. He was not celebrating the glory of God when he created that. He was showing himself and his time how resourceful and ingenious he was. And that’s why all those millions of pilgrims have been coming here for centuries . . . Hey, don’t walk so fast! They all came filled with faith or sin, but also with another feeling, that they mattered in the scheme of things. And the suffering and pain made that feeling real, gave them strength. Do you see? Why are you walking so fast?’
‘Because I’m trying to get out of this fucking crowd!’ she shouted.
‘Don’t you see?’ he said when they were back in Bishop Street. ‘That’s why those pilgrims came, and were so filled with passion, unlike these gawkers who stare with open mouths at everything they see. They came thinking that they were suffering because of who they were, or because of what they had done. Then they saw that incredible vaulting, built by people they didn’t know. They must’ve realised then, must’ve known that the same faith that had driven them on their pilgrimage had created this stone pile that they had come to worship. It wasn’t about God. It was about the resourcefulness to create something huge and beautiful, a monstrous monument to the suffering and pain that we travel thousands of miles to lay at some banal shrine. And it’s been going on all the time. Don’t you understand? Don’t you see?’
She was attentive but sceptical, watching his agitation with a frown of mild disapproval. ‘I’ll make some tea,’ she said.
‘Wait,’ he begged. ‘Let me finish. What links all these pilgrims is the same desire to break out of their limitations, to go beyond what they know . . . to change their lives.’
Later, when several cups of tea had dampened his optimistic fervour for continuity, he spoke to her of his own pilgrimage. How he had come, he thought, to beard the prodigies in their lair, to possess their secrets and hotfoot it down the mountain paths to the safety of his people’s hidden valley. He had come, carrying a living past, a source of strength and reassurance, but it had taken him so long to understand that what he had brought could no longer reach its sources. Then it had started to seep and ooze and rot. It became a thing, maggoty and deformed, a thing of torture. And he began to think of himself as a battered and bloated body washed up on a beach, naked among strangers. Like Bossy in the end . . . The reality was so much more banal. He had come for the same kinds of reasons that had made barbarian wolf-man build that stone monument, part of the same dubious struggle of the human psyche to break out of its neurosis and fears. When he had had a rest, he promised her, he would release the bunched python of his coiled psyche on an unsuspecting world.
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
Abdulrazak Gurnah is the author of seven other novels: Memory of Departure, Dottie, Admiring Silence, By the Sea (longlisted for the Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Award), Paradise (shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Award), Desertion (shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize) and The Last Gift. He is a Professor of English at the University of Kent, and was a Man Booker Prize judge in 2016. He lives in Canterbury.
Also available by Abdulrazak Gurnah
Admiring Silence
Masterfully blending myth and reality, this is a dazzling tale of cultural identity and displacement
He thinks, as he escapes from Zanzibar, that he will probably never return, and yet the dream of studying in England matters above that.
Things do not happen quite as he imagined – the school where he teaches is cramped and violent, he forgets how it feels to belong. But there is Emma, beautiful, rebellious Emma, who turns away from her white, middle-class roots to offer him love and bear him a child. And in return he spins stories of his home and keeps her a secret from his family.
Twenty years later, when the barriers at last come down in Zanzibar, he is able and compelled to go back. What he discovers there, in a story potent with truth, will change the entire vision of his life. ‘Through a twisting, many-layered narrative, Admiring Silence explores themes of race and betrayal with bitterly satirical insight’
Sunday Times
‘I don’t think I’ve ever read a novel that is so convincingly and hauntingly sad about the loss of home, the impossible longing to belong’
Michèle Roberts, Independent on Sunday
http://www.bloomsbury.com/author/abdulrazak-gurnah/
http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/admiring-silence-9781408883969/
Dottie
A searing tale of a young woman discovering her troubled family history and cultural past
Dottie Badoura Fatma Balfour finds solace amidst the squalor of her childhood by spinning warm tales of affection about her beautiful names. But she knows nothing of their origins, and little of her family history – or the abuse her ancestors suffered as they made their home in Britain.
At seventeen, she takes on the burden of responsibility for her brother and sister and is obsessed with keeping the family together. However, as Sophie, lumpen yet voluptuous, drifts away, and the confused Hudson is absorbed into the world of crime, Dottie is forced to consider her own needs. Building on her fragmented, tantalising memories, she begins to clear a path through life, gradually gathering the confidence to take risks, to forge friendships and to challenge the labels that have been forced upon her.
‘Gurnah etches with biting incisiveness the experiences of immigrants exposed to contempt, hostility or patronising indifference on their arrival in Britain’
Spectator
‘A captivating storyteller, with a voice both lyrical and mordant, and an oeuvre haunted by memory and loss’
Guardian
http://www.bloomsbury.com/author/abdulrazak-gurnah/
http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/dottie-9781408885659/
Memory of Departure
Vehement, comic and shrewd, Abdulrazak Gurnah’s first novel is an unwavering contemplation of East African coastal life
Poverty and depravity wreak havoc on Hassan Omar’s family. Amid great hardship he decides to escape.
The arrival of Independence brings new upheavals as well as the betrayal of the promise of freedom. The new government, fearful of an exodus of its most able men, discourages young people from travelling abroad and refuses to release examination results. Deprived of a scholarship, Hassan travels to Nairobi to stay with a wealthy uncle, in the hope that he will release his mother’s rightful share of the family inheritance.
The collision of past secrets and future hopes, the compound of fear and frustration, beauty and brutality, create a fierce tale of undeniable power.
‘Gurnah writes with wonderful insight about family relationships and he folds in the layers of history with elegance and warmth’
The Times
‘Gurnah is a master storyteller’
Financial Times
http://www.bloomsbury.com/author/abdulrazak-gurnah/
http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/memory-of-departure-9781408883983/
First published in Great Britain 1988
This electronic edition published in 2016 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
© Abdulrazak Gurnah, 1988
Abdulrazak Gurnah has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.
This is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author's imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All rights reserved. You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
50 Bedford Square
London
Pilgrims Way Page 25