Gravel Heart

by Abdulrazak Gurnah

  ‘His new relatives are big people,’ my mother said sarcastically, although it was true.

  The wedding was imminent and there was no question of the newly-weds moving into an old slum. That was how my mother mimicked the way the powerful relatives talked about us, though I had not heard anyone except Uncle Amir use that word for our house. They would only live in the flat for a short while because he was due to take up a diplomatic posting soon after the wedding. He came to see us every few days, once driving Auntie Asha’s new white Toyota Corolla. He did not stay for long that time, because he had to leave the new car some distance away and was not sure how safe it was there. ‘Who would dare touch a car with government plates? He just wanted to tell us that he was driving a new car,’ my mother said afterwards.

  It was as if his time in Europe had anointed Uncle Amir with even more glamour, and vigorously polished his halo of personality and style. Perhaps it was my mother’s sarcasm about his new relatives that started me off but I found myself resisting Uncle Amir’s seduction in a way I had not done before. Or perhaps I was getting older (I was nearly thirteen!). He moved in a different way. The jerky restless movements were more restrained. His manner was unhurried, like someone who knew that admiring and envious eyes were always on him. He laughed differently, in a more controlled manner, giving a demonstration of how to laugh with restraint. Now and then the old joker broke out, and then Uncle Amir would grin mischievously at us, as if he had used strong language but did not want us to take offence. But I did not completely resist seduction. I cherished the gifts he brought me, among them a short-sleeved jersey with UCD written in big letters across the back, which I wore whenever it was clean so that it was faded and threadbare in a matter of months. I loved the photographs of their travels in Europe that Uncle Amir displayed when he was in the mood: sitting at a table in a pavement café in Brussels, Auntie Asha and him in front of the Eiffel Tower, both of them standing by stone lions in a park in Madrid, strolling round Regent’s Park Zoo, leaning against a parapet by the Thames. Uncle Amir’s and Auntie Asha’s presence made those places more real to me and less like fantasy cityscapes on TV.

  The wedding was a grand affair attended by ministers and ambassadors and army uniforms and their wives, the guests swaggering in their suits and stroking their jewels. The celebrations were held in a marquee erected in the private gardens of the house of the former vice-president, Auntie Asha’s father. My mother was persuaded to sit on a podium with the dignitaries while the speeches were made, and I was required by Uncle Amir to wear black trousers and a tie. Afterwards I wandered the grounds and gaped at their extent and their serenity and the labour that had gone into creating that atmosphere of tranquillity out of such shrill air. Soon after his wedding to Auntie Asha, Uncle Amir was posted to the consulate in Bombay for a three-year mission. Before he left for India he bought me a bicycle as a gift, which changed my doubts about him to shamed gratitude.

  I was in my second year in secondary school when my sister Munira was born. By this time I had a better understanding of the situation we were in. My mother had never said anything to me about what was going on in her life and nor had Uncle Amir. No one outside had said anything to me either, not even in mockery, except once, but bits and pieces had drifted into view and I had added them up. I had understood that something shameful was connected to my father, which was why it was a matter not to be spoken about. I had acquiesced to this prohibition because I too felt the shame for my father and my mother regardless of the cause. I was surrounded by silences and it did not seem strange that I was not to ask questions about unspoken events in the past. It had taken me a long time to add things up because I was an inept and unworldly child with eyes only for books. Nobody taught me to see the vileness of things and I saw like an idiot, understanding nothing.

  I saw my father every day when I cycled to Mwembeladu with his basket of food. I did that as soon as I came home from school and then went back for my own lunch. I no longer waited at the front of the shop for him to come out but went right to the back, greeting Khamis’s wife before going to my father’s little room. My father did not go out very much apart from in the morning to sit at his stall in the market, although he did not do much selling, helping out if he was required and sometimes leaving early to return to his room. I took him clean clothes every Saturday, and clean bedding which I changed while he ate his food. If he let me. Sometimes he asked me to leave the bed alone and I would have to wait until the following day or the day after that to change the sheets. My daily visit did not take long, often I was in a hurry to get back for my own lunch. I put the basket of food on the small table that my father kept clear and where sometimes he read, or did his sewing repairs, or just sat still with his hands folded together, staring out of the window with far-gazing eyes. Then I picked up the basket with the empty dishes and asked if he was well and if there was anything he needed. I waited a moment to see if he would speak to me, which sometimes he did and sometimes he did not. Sometimes he said, I am content, alhamdulillah. Then I walked through to the front of the shop, said goodbye to Khamis, mounted my bicycle and rode home. That was what I did every day.

  I was fourteen years old then and a person can feel old and wise at that age even when he really had no idea, and what he took for wisdom was only a precocious intuition arrived at without humility, just a little shit working things out for himself. I thought my father was a spineless and defeated man who had allowed himself to be humiliated into silence and craziness, that he had lost his mind or had lost his nerve, and I thought I had an idea why he had turned out like that although no one had told me. I thought my father was shameful, the owner of a shameful, useless body, and had shamed himself as well as me. I also knew that when my mother went out some afternoons, it was to see a man, and sometimes a car dropped her off two streets away in the evening. I thought she was ashamed of those visits and that they were something to do with the sadness in her life. When she came back from those outings sometimes she did not speak to me for hours.

  Once I began to understand what was going on, which was perhaps a year before Munira arrived, I expected to be mocked at school and in the streets, and could not imagine that boys of my age could restrain themselves from the malice. But it happened on one occasion only, when a boy made fun of a pair of shoes my mother had given me, whisperingly asking if they were a gift from my mama’s friend. It had never occurred to me that the gift was from this man. The boy who said this was very big, almost an adult, and he said those words to me with a taunting grin, looking to goad me into a reaction so he could beat me up. I turned my back on him and pretended I had not heard the whisper, ignoring the jeering laughter that lashed across my shoulders. Like father like son, I too turned away meekly from shame. I never wore those shoes again. My mother did not mention the man’s name or even his existence until just before my sister Munira came, when her body was beginning to swell and grow hard, and by then I did not need to be told.

  ‘His name is Hakim,’ she said, with her hand on her belly. ‘The baby’s father. He is Asha’s brother. Do you know who I mean? You see him on television sometimes.’

  I did not speak. I could not bear the smile on her face as she said his name. I had seen the same smile when we saw him on the TV news and it was then I guessed for the first time that he was the man she went to see. I looked away when his face came on the TV after that. When she said his name to me, images of that hard-headed man passed through my mind. Did she say habibi to him when he touched her?

  ‘Do you know who I mean? You met him at Asha and Amir’s wedding,’ she said.

  I nodded. I saw him, I did not meet him. I could see the look of pain on my mother’s face because of my silence. I nodded to reassure her, to make conversation. I saw the man sitting dead-pan on the podium reserved for the bride and groom and their important guests. My mother sat up there too, looking beautiful. She had pleaded hard to be excused but Uncle Amir would not have it. I did not know about that man a
nd my mother then. I was busy breathing in the aroma of brute power all around me.

  ‘His Excellency the Minister,’ I said, and my mother chose to smile, to make light of my sarcasm, to pretend I was teasing.

  ‘He is the father,’ she said again, touching herself on the bulge, smiling unawares again, pleased with what seemed to me her grotesque disfigurement. ‘I would like you to meet him, to show him courtesy.’

  I did not know what to say then. She looked suddenly so helpless, so unhappy.

  ‘He has asked me to marry him,’ she said after a long silence.

  ‘Why does he want to marry you? Isn’t he already married?’ I asked.

  ‘To be his second wife. He wants me to be his second wife,’ she said.

  ‘Why does he want a second wife?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s not that strange. He wants to be able to see the baby. He wants the baby to have a father,’ she said. ‘But I said no, I’m already married.’

  ‘Then why are you having his baby?’ I asked.

  My mother shook her head and looked away. We were both being stupid because she could not speak openly to me and I could not restrain my bitterness. I saw she was annoyed with the way I took her words but I did not know what else she could have expected of me.

  ‘What did he say when you told him that you were already married?’ I asked. ‘It probably wasn’t news to him.’

  She shrugged, refusing to placate me. ‘I can’t talk to you when you are like this,’ she said.

  ‘Did he say, we can soon take care of that? He is a big man, why hasn’t he already taken care of that?’ I asked. ‘Why hasn’t he taken care of it in all this time?’

  She shrugged again, and closed her eyes as if my questions were a matter of great tedium to her.

  ‘What happened between you and Baba?’ I asked.

  My mother opened her eyes to look at me. I had never asked that question before, not exactly like that, with that directness, with that degree of dislike, with that intensity of blame. He had left when I was so young and my mother and I had found a way of speaking about his absence that avoided conflict. Whenever I asked for details she deflected or ignored me and I did not persist for fear of causing her pain or making her angry. I had always blamed my father for his absence, suspected he was guilty of something that made him cringe in shame as he did. So I had never asked the question in that way before, forcing the issue, demanding of her. She appeared to give thought to it for a moment and then just shook her head. I knew she was not going to tell me anything. Somehow I knew that she did not have the words to tell me what I needed to be told. ‘I don’t know how to tell you. It is too bad. I caused him grief, and he has made it into a kind of piety,’ she said. ‘I cannot put right what I’ve done.’

  ‘Was this man part of what you did to cause him grief?’ I asked.

  ‘Don’t say this man. Yes, he was,’ my mother said.

  ‘Was it because of this man that Baba left us?’ I asked.

  My mother shook her head again, and was silent. ‘It was because of what I did that he left,’ she said at long last, and I saw that she was reluctant to continue, that she would refuse to talk even if I pressed, that the wretchedness of it was too much, that she would walk away and lock herself in her room and sob, as she had at other times when I had insisted to be told. I could not bear to hear her do that. ‘I cannot undo what I have done. I did not know he would ruin his life,’ she said.

  ‘Is Baba so sad because he still loves you?’ I asked.

  My mother glanced at me and smiled, no doubt amused by my naivety about the human capacity for hatred. ‘You ask so many questions. I don’t think so. Perhaps he is sad because he is disappointed and ashamed of what he thought he loved. Do you know what I mean? Then he chose to ruin his life.’

  I shivered because I was listening to a half-truth. It happened when she lied to me or told me an incomplete story about her absences. ‘Why did you do it?’ I asked, and then watched as my mother wiped a hand across her brow and turned her face away from me.

  After Munira’s arrival, I became disobedient and difficult. I did not always respond when my mother called me, and I walked away from her when she rebuked me. There were times when I found her repulsive and could not bear to be near her. I did not hide my disdain from her. I shut myself away in my room whenever I was home and kept out of her way, doing schoolwork or reading. When she sent me on an errand I took hours and sometimes deliberately bought the wrong thing or sometimes bought nothing, just put the money back in her hand without explanation and walked away as she shouted with rage. Once she sent me out to buy a tin of powdered milk for Munira’s feed and I returned with a can of fly-spray. I suppose that was the limit. She was not producing enough milk and Munira was yelling at her and I played that prank on her. She shouted at me then with such ferocity that Munira began to scream, and I turned round without a word and went to get the milk.

  It did not stop me, though, and I intensified my disobedience with adolescent perversity and malice. The next time she asked me to buy bread from the café, I came back forty minutes later with a box of buttons that I had gone all the way to Darajani for. In the house, I carried out various acts of sabotage. I destroyed the fridge, cut the aerial wire for the new TV, and stole or hid anything else that I thought was a gift from my mother’s lover. I intended to smash all the expensive toys that were bought for Munira because I knew their source, but I found myself unable to do so. To my surprise, because I had hardened myself to this mission of destruction, I found that I liked having her with us when I had thought I would not. I liked holding her and feeling her compact completeness and her plump helplessness. So I only sacrificed the odd toy I thought too ugly to survive.

  My mother was surprised at first by the campaign of destruction, and pleaded with me to be sensible, but later she said nothing when every few weeks something else was broken or disappeared. When once the man planned to visit, and my mother told me about it, I stayed away all day, walking for miles out of town and returning home exhausted in the dark. I could not tell her, but I grieved for the air of barely perceptible melancholy she carried around her all the time, and I was made sad by the thought of the hard-faced man exchanging intimacies with her and mocking my poor Baba. She never let that man visit the house again, at least not that I knew.

  A few months after Munira came my mother installed a telephone in her room. I guessed it was so that the man who was her lover could ring her to ask about the baby. I bided my time for the opportunity to cut the wires and crush the mechanism as I was sure I would do sooner or later. Then I found out that I could hear the shrill ringing of the phone clearly in some parts of my room even with the door shut. Sometimes I could even hear Munira crying and my mother’s voice soothing her. We had lived so quietly before that I had not noticed the way sound travelled between the rooms. I would have heard the television except that she hardly ever watched on her own, and when she did often turned the volume down low.

  It did not take me long to work it out. The sound came from behind a framed print of a Bombay skyline, which dated back to the days when Uncle Amir worked for the travel agency. I left it on the wall because it was the only framed picture I had in the room and because I loved the sweep of the bay in the foreground. On the floor below the print was an old pencil stub I had not seen before. When I removed the print, I found a hole in the wall about one centimetre in diameter, and guessed that the pencil stub had fallen out of it. It looked as if the hole might once have been where an electric wire came out of the wall to the light switch. The pencil stub fitted into it perfectly. When I took it out again and put my eye to the hole, I found out that my mother’s bed was directly in my eyeline. She was not in the room at the time, so I put the pencil plug back and hung the picture in front of it again. I understood immediately that through this hole Uncle Amir had spied on my parents.

  When I was a child and Uncle Amir lived with us, I adored him. He had been there from the earliest days of my
life, always teasing and laughing and saying outrageous things about people. He never told me that I should not do anything, not in those young days, and sometimes he winked at me behind my mother’s back when she told me off. He knew what was going on in the world, knew about songs and films and football stars, knew about what to like and not to like. To me as a child Uncle Amir seemed fearless and smart. Afterwards when he left to study, and then to travel everywhere as a diplomat, he became a figure of legend and glamour to me. He always came back with something for me, a token of one of the exotic places he visited: a shirt from Miami, a digital clock from Stockholm, a mug with the Union Jack from London. There were times when I wished Uncle Amir was my father, rather than the silently sorrowful and bedraggled man to whom I took a basketful of food every day. It was a wish that made me feel treacherous and unworthy, a sleazy and muddled little boy, a betrayer, but I did think it more than once.

  Later I grew less in awe of him without losing the feeling entirely, but finding the hole in the wall was perhaps when I first began to have doubts about my uncle. It seemed such an ugly, sly thing to do. I thought I should tell my mother about the existence of the hole, in case it should be discovered one day and thought to be my handiwork, but I did not. I never dared to look through the hole, but every now and then, when I was in the mood for their company at night, I switched my light off and took the wooden plug out so I could hear Munira and my mother in the other room, just voices and scratchings. I did not try to listen. That was how I learnt about my uncle’s plan for me.

  Uncle Amir, after a sensational few years, had become a senior diplomat in the London embassy. He and Auntie Asha had two children now and the whole family were back for one of their periodic visits. Uncle Amir had put on weight, and his manner had become more deliberate, as was appropriate in a man of his eminence. There was at times something menacing in his manner, a hardness he had obscured with his high spirits and bubbling laughter. He was not as restless as formerly. He used to cross and uncross his legs repeatedly, and his dangling foot would waggle as if it had a life of its own, but now his legs were still for long moments, only breaking into a twitching frenzy for a few wild seconds now and then.