Gravel Heart

by Abdulrazak Gurnah

  ‘You can’t imagine what that time was like,’ my mother said, trying again to describe it. ‘You cannot imagine the terror of it, the arrests, the deaths, the humiliations. People were driving each other mad with rumours of new outrages, new decrees, with news of further sorrows. But yes, you can imagine, you must try. Nothing stands between us and atrocities but words, so there is no choice but to try and imagine.’

  In those first weeks it was impossible to believe that life could ever be any different from the panic they lived in at that time, she said. They all did what they could to show the men with guns that they were obedient, harmless, pathetic people without the slightest spark of defiance or rebellion. There was nothing to fear from them. They would not dream of causing their new rulers any annoyance or irritation. It took a while, but their lives became tolerable somehow amidst that terror. They stayed indoors at first, afraid of the dangers of the streets, except for Bibi, who went out to check on neighbours and to go to a shop whose keeper she knew and who had offered her some supplies. Anyone could see that she was a foolish old woman and not worth the trouble of terrorising. When they started to go out more regularly, it was to see how changed and quiet the streets were, how some houses stood empty or had new people staying in them, how armed men in unfamiliar uniforms stood on street corners or wandered into shops to help themselves to what they needed. They learnt to avoid eye contact, to avoid provocation, to avoid looking at the acts of malice performed in plain sight.

  ‘After a while,’ my mother told me, ‘it becomes as if these things did not really happen like that, as if you’re exaggerating if you speak of them. So you stop speaking and they recede even further away, become even more unreal, become even less possible to imagine, and you tell yourself it is time to move on, let them go, it is not worth the bother of remembering. But they do not let you go.

  ‘Our Bibi lived in Kikwajuni. Her house had an entrance room that was also the kitchen, just like ours has, but it was small and dark like a cave. She made sesame bread to sell and she cooked with firewood because that was what she had always done. The wood smoke made the walls black, and she herself had a shrunken, smudged look, as if the smoke had blackened her and dried her out. Her bread was famous, and perhaps the wood-smoke had something to do with that. Her customers were boys and girls on errands from their mothers, who came to the house throughout the afternoon and early evening because that was when she did her cooking. They were regular customers and she knew everybody who came and asked about their mothers and brothers and sisters. She did business in the old-fashioned way, accepting the coins without counting, refusing to raise prices, under-charging on a good order, throwing in a bread or two as a gift because a child was ill at home, and somehow she made enough for all of us to live on.

  ‘The house had one room beyond the kitchen where we all slept. The washroom was in the small walled yard at the back, where Bibi also kept her supply of firewood stacked on a platform a foot above the ground because she was afraid scorpions would hide in it otherwise – as if scorpions were afraid of heights. She was so afraid of scorpions! She had only ever encountered one as a child and then just briefly as it fell out of a cloth she picked up off the ground and immediately disappeared into a crack in the wall. For the rest of her life, she was on the lookout for scorpions to which she granted magical powers of hurt.

  ‘When we went to her after they took Baba away, she took us in without grumbling and comforted us as well as she could. We were her only relatives in the world, she said, not once but repeatedly. By that time she had been a widow for over thirteen years and had outlived her only son by a decade. My mother was her younger sister’s daughter, and in her sister’s absence she was Bibi’s daughter too. She said these things repeatedly, not forcefully, not insistently, and somehow it was reassuring and comforting. My mother said she was blessed. Wallahi, she would say, that woman is an angel. There was no room for complaint over the blows that had befallen us one after the other, Bibi told us. Someone wiser than us knew what it all meant. We were to say alhamdulillah and do what we could. She cried silently while we sobbed, warmed water for us to bathe with, and gave us her bed while she slept on the floor. The coir in the mattress was lumpy and old, and the room was small and stuffy, but it was all she could offer and it was not nothing. When my mother protested about how much work she was doing for us, Bibi scolded her sharply and told her it was none of her business. A child should not begrudge a mother’s love. She went to the market every morning to buy what was needed for our meals and get supplies for her business, a gaunt, shrivelled, tireless old woman who lived as if the world was a kinder place than it was, and who could not walk a few feet without someone greeting her by name and wishing her well.

  ‘After a while, my mother fretted that we were a burden to Bibi. My mother was not used to being this dependent, she who had always lived her life surrounded by family and laughter, waited upon by servants, beloved by her husband, made plump by contentment and affection. She who had slept in a comfortable upstairs room where a breeze blew through the open window all night long now lived an overcrowded life where she could not keep herself or her children clean. It was not what she was used to. She slept on a rope bed whose coir mattress was infested with vicious bedbugs which bulged with our blood. When we crushed the bedbugs they smelt like festering wounds, like decomposing meat. The room we slept in reeked of sweat and smoke and some nights my mother could not sleep at all because of our restlessness and Bibi’s snores on the floor beside her. But her greatest ordeal was using the unlit and cockroach-infested bathroom and latrine. She whispered to us about how revolted she was by everything in it but we were not to say anything to Bibi. She tried to make things better but could not manage it. Her helplessness made her feel useless. She did what she could to help in the kitchen, but it was not work she was used to and she often seemed to get in Bibi’s way, disrupting her customary preparations with questions and suggestions. The smoke was too much for her, and she did not have Bibi’s endurance or her touch for bread-making.

  ‘Then at last we had word from a freed detainee to confirm the rumour of our father’s death. The man stopped Bibi in a lane and told her in a whisper that he had heard it from a witness, who swore in the name of God that he had seen the act with his own eyes. We did not know if the man who witnessed our father’s death said the act or if he described what was done to him, but that was what Bibi said and we did not ask for more details because the news made my mother break into a wail of despair. She sobbed for hours on end, clinging to us as we sobbed with her and then stopped and started each other off, again and again, until we were exhausted. For the next few days, my mother sat grieving, weeping silently, shattered and drained, unwilling to believe what she had known for weeks. Then one morning, her eyes swollen and her body sagging in misery and exhaustion, she announced what she planned to do. It was hopeless from the start.

  ‘She was ashamed to have become such a useless victim of events and to know no way of ending them or lessening their tyranny, she said. Her voice was hoarse and thick from crying as she spoke. Everything had always been too easy for her in her life and now she was useless and could not cope, a spineless snivelling wreck. They had all become like that, too ashamed of their puniness to feel anything like indignation or rebellion, to know how to resist these monstrous wrongs, and all they could manage was a subdued, helpless grumbling among themselves. Thousands of people were forced to leave because they had no work or money, and had no choice but to throw themselves on the mercy of a brother or a cousin living in a more fortunate place, further up the coast or across the ocean. Now she would join them, said my mother, to see if she could manage something with the help of relatives or acquaintances who had gone on before to Mombasa or even further afield. It was a time of turmoil, their lives torn apart like that, and they were forced into a kind of callousness in order to survive. She hated abandoning her children … that was what she said and my heart leapt at her words … just the conte
mplation of the idea made her feel worse than anything she had ever done in her life, but she could not be a burden forever. She would go out there and see what she could manage, and then she would send for them. It would not be for long, just a few months, and then they would be together again. For days she talked like that. Bibi might have said something about the futility of such talk, but she did not. She might have said this is how life finds you, now bear up and do what you can to preserve yourself and your children, but she did not. She murmured, she fed us and warmed the water for our baths.

  ‘But before my mother could carry out her desperate plan, before her preparations to leave had even progressed beyond words and words and endless oaths never to forget her children come what may, she fell suddenly ill. It was like an order issued by a spiteful force outside her. She was sitting on a little stool in the yard, grating a coconut for the lunch-time pot of cassava, one of the kitchen duties she had taken on, when a powerful blow made her lean back and pant for breath. She started to slump to her left and could offer no resistance or even call out. That was how we found her, half-fallen over and panting for breath. I don’t think she could have known what felled her because her mind never cleared after that, at least not so far as anyone could tell because she did not say another word we could understand. It was not a fever because she did not have a temperature nor was it anything in her gut because there were no signs, you know, no … ’

  She gestured behind her but did not say the words.

  ‘There was Bibi and us children and we knew nothing about these things. My mother had lost consciousness and was trembling all over and all we knew to do was to take her to the hospital, Bibi on one side of her in the taxi and Amir and I on the other, between us holding her upright, as if it was important that she should not lurch or slump to one side. It was not far but the taxi was not allowed through the hospital gate and we had to help our mother to walk as best we could, heaving her dead weight without a word spoken between us.

  ‘We went to the accident department first but could not find anyone to speak to. There was one nurse on duty and she strolled past us calmly as Bibi tried to explain what had happened, just walked past as if no one had spoken to her. I don’t know how a nurse could behave like that. When she did not come back, we joined the dozens of other people in Out Patients, who were waiting for the arrival of the doctor. We sat on a stone bench and said nothing for a while, just like everyone else, holding on to our mother while she trembled and groaned. The room was large and all its doors were wide open but that did not disperse the smell of waste and disease. There were people of all ages there: a fatigued old woman with her eyes closed, leaning against a younger woman who was likely her daughter, a baby wailing without pause in its mother’s arms, its eyes clotted with infection, young women in no obvious distress, and men and women in the exhausting grip of one of the many illnesses that befall people like us who live in the poor countries of the world.

  ‘There was a male orderly in attendance and when Bibi approached him to report our presence he waved her away without saying a word. He refused to allow anyone to address him about his or her ailments, cutting off whoever it was with a swipe of the arm and an imperious finger pointed towards the concrete benches where everyone else was waiting. To those who were too persistent to obey immediately, he addressed a few brutal words of warning, which soon sent them wearily away. He then retreated to a glass cubicle, a look of distress on his face, shuffling his papers and hiding from the people he could do nothing for. No doctor had turned up by early afternoon and the orderly told them all to go home, take an aspirin and try again the next day. The Out Patients hours were over and he was locking up. The duty doctor must have been feeling unwell. Go home, nothing to be done now, come back tomorrow. He’ll be here tomorrow. I’m locking up now.

  ‘Bibi went to find a taxi and we took our mother home. Throughout the night she struggled more and more to breathe and to say something, but she only managed explosive gasps now and then in which a confused noise that resembled a word could be heard. By the following morning her breathing was such a torment to her that we dare not move her, dare not speak to her in case she attempted a reply, dare not leave her, could not bear to listen to her. A few hours later she died. She could no longer breathe. Her heart burst. I was fourteen and Amir was ten, and I was relieved my mother’s agony was over. It may sound terrible to say that but it was a relief when it was over.

  ‘After my mother died, I realised I did not have a photograph of her. We had left so much behind in the old house and were afraid to ask for it back: clothes, furniture, clocks, books, photographs. Then as the days passed I began to fear that I was losing the memory of my mother’s face. My eyes could not focus on her and my mother’s features became imprecise and shifting. When I moved closer, my mother moved her head slightly, turning her face away, hiding from me. It was because I had not really looked at her when she was alive, had not looked at her as if I intended to remember her face always, had not held her hand while she struggled for breath and had not properly loved her as I should have done. The thought made me feel panicked and ashamed, but as the weeks passed my mother’s face slowly came back to me – sometimes a flash of her eyes or the shape of her smile as her face retreated into shadows – but slowly the details emerged and every night, for a while, I called her image to me before I fell asleep in case she tried to hide herself away again. I still call up her face at night sometimes, just to see if she will come.’

  2

  AFTER BABA LEFT

  Saida and Masud, those were their names, my mother and my father. They met at an event organised by the Youth League of the Party when they were both at school. I got that information from pestering my mother about when they first met, pleading with her while she sat in a sullen silence. ‘It’s just a simple question, Ma,’ I persisted. Her reluctance to tell me was part of her general reluctance to talk about my father and herself as they used to be. In the end she told me that it was something organised by the Youth League: they were always nagging us and bullying us in those days, to volunteer on building sites, to sing praise songs to the President every morning, to attend rallies. It was just bullying. But she would not say more about Baba and her and it went on for years like that. If I gave her direct factual questions, sometimes she answered those but not if I wanted details of how it was with them.

  I know that he was twenty-one and she was twenty when they married, not too young by our customs. I was born two years later, and just a few days after that Bibi died. After her death, Uncle Amir moved into the house with us too. So at last I was present on the same stage as the main actors in my early life although it would be a while before I had any understanding of the events that I was part of. Uncle Amir was the prince of our kingdom and I grew up adoring him. He made me laugh and brought me little presents and let me play with his transistor radio. When I had a piece of fatty meat on my plate that I could not eat, or a slice of kidney or a lump of yoghurt, he took it away before my mother noticed. But I adored him because my parents did too; I did not stop to think why they did so.

  My father was a different man then from the father I knew later but I was too young to form memories of him I can deliver in a lucid narrative. I just remember a kind of gentleness and that heaving laughter and other endless, very clear little fragments: sitting on his lap, a hug, a story, the look in his eyes as he listened to me. I do not remember who took me to my first day in Koran school when I was five. I expect he did because he was very eager I should begin as soon as I was allowed to. I can remember clearly that the first lesson was the letters of the alphabet, which my mother had already taught me. Aliph, be te, he, khe. I can see that moment as if I were there now looking on. It was definitely my father who took me to my first day in government school when I was nearly seven, and there our first test was to read the alphabet backwards starting with Z. This was to thwart the cheating ruses of the colonised, just in case we had memorised the sequence of letters without re
ally learning to read them. But my mother had also taught me how to read the Roman alphabet so my first day there was a happy one.

  In that year I started government school, where I was happy from the very first day, my mother began work in a government office, and one of Uncle Amir’s friends opened a hotel for tourists in Shangani called the Coral Reef Inn and appointed him the manager in charge of social activities. It was the beginning of a tourist invasion which no one had seen anything like before. It took a little while to get going properly but that was when it started. The government relaxed foreign exchange regulations and people from rich countries wanted to come in and take a look at our derelict little island. It was also in that year I was seven that my father left us.

  The moment of his leaving passed without my noticing at first. The everyday turmoil in my seven-year-old mind must have been absorbing and profound because it took me some time to understand that something important had happened to our lives. I slept in the same room as my parents and immediately registered my father’s absence, but when I asked after him my mother told me that he had gone away for a few days. It was the beginning of a series of important lies which my mother would tell me for the next many years, but when I was seven I had no reason to disbelieve her. It would have seemed to me like the usual comings and goings of the grown-ups, whose affairs were never completely comprehensible to me. I did not understand then that the air of mystery was sometimes fugitive and devious, and sometimes an attempt to disguise anxiety and muddle. Uncle Amir had also been away for a few days but then he came back just before my father went away.

  In that confusion I did not realise the meaning of my father’s absence, until finally I began to understand that he was not living with us any more. For several days the idea frightened me in a physical, heart-racing way, as if I had lost my grip on my father’s hand in a huge crowd of strange people some distance from home, or slipped over the edge of the sea-wall into the black-green water so that my father could not hear my screams. I imagined him distraught that he could not find me and take me home. I was literal in my anxieties at that age and those were my recurring images of abandonment: I was lost in a crowd or sinking soundlessly in the black-green water off the wharf.