Gravel Heart

by Abdulrazak Gurnah

Mark whistled in a way that was meant to show surprise and appreciation. ‘That’s a long way away in Africa, isn’t it? Way down there below the equator, the other side of the world.’ I nodded and waited for what I thought was coming next. The dark continent. ‘Darkest darkest Africa,’ he said obligingly. ‘Zinjibar,’ he continued, using its old Arabic name. ‘We read about that as children in Lebanon.’ His real name was Mousa, he said, but for business purposes he called himself Mark. It made customers feel more comfortable.

  ‘I thought you were West Indian when you came to ask for a job,’ Mark said. ‘Until you said your name.’

  ‘Don’t they have any Salims in the West Indies?’

  He shrugged. ‘Not that I’ve heard of. I don’t like West Indians,’ he said.

  ‘Why not?’ I asked him.

  ‘I have my reasons,’ he said.

  *

  The café closed on Christmas Day and I stayed in my blue and white room on a campus that was silent and almost empty and wrote a long letter to my mother. In it I told her about my new life, about the studies and my struggles with them, about Mark and the café, about the foods we served there and how they were prepared. I did not expect her to care about that last bit, it was only a way of saying to her that I was living such a different life from the one we were used to. I wish I could like it more here but I like some of it, I told her. I described how in winter it gets dark by three in the afternoon but in midsummer it stays light until ten at night. I told her about things I found striking, about the little tangles I got into, about mishaps that had befallen me, and I made myself sound ridiculous and at odds with my circumstances, making myself into a joke, stumbling about in this new life I had worked so hard to arrive at. It made me happy to write in that tone, and I hoped it would make my mother smile as she read it, her silly son blundering about clumsily in the big world. I did not ask her anything about her life. This was just a frivolous little Christmas gift. I followed up the letter with my first postcard to Munira, who would be ten years old now, I realised. So much time had passed.

  My routine settled into such a pleasing pattern that I started to feel happy. I was required to read books that opened up the world for me and made me see how much roomier it was than I had imagined. I read books which gave me courage and helped me to see, and I imagined that I bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes. But there were also moments when I wondered if I was in the right place, studying for the right degree. Salim Masud Yahya, what are you doing here? Perhaps everyone had moments like that. Some of the material I was asked to read estranged me with its showiness and its relentless knowingness and its pointlessness, as it seemed to me. Some I found humblingly incomprehensible despite my best efforts, and I was caught between admiration and contempt for people who spent a lifetime composing and disseminating artefacts of such over-wrought ugliness. Then when I came to write, I found that I had understood something after all and that there was a way through it, which I was beginning to discern. Take heart, take heart!

  *

  That summer I moved in with a friend I had met at the café. His name was Basil, an Economics student from Greece. He had just completed his degree and was due to start on an MA in September. He rented a flat with his girlfriend, who was also an Economics student from Greece and whose name was Sophie. Basil was tall, elegantly dishevelled and unhurried, serving customers with such graceful tranquillity that even Mark, who preferred an appearance of speed, did not bother to shout at him. At the end of his shift, Basil tossed a thin scarf over his shoulder with a careless flick of his palm before he went out into the street.

  Sophie’s father was born in Arusha. ‘It was his talk about his life in Arusha that made me pay attention rather than just think of Africa as one large dark and troubled land,’ she said. ‘It made me see it in detail, so to speak, and that’s probably why I want to work in development studies. I feel there’s a connection somehow.’

  Sophie had glowing dark eyes and short unruly dark hair and so I fell secretly in love with her in no time at all. My virginity was becoming an intolerable burden to me. Sophie hung a hammock in the bay of the living-room window and lay swinging in it in the evening, reading, making notes, writing letters, while Basil listened to music through headphones as he read his professional journals or pored over his computer. They made love almost every night, which I could not help being aware of because Sophie came noisily to her climax. I heard them stifling their laughter and giggles afterwards, and then heard Sophie’s soft footfall as she went to the bathroom. I liked to imagine that she walked there naked from her bed. Some nights I waited for her tormented groans before trying to go to sleep myself. Sophie told me that I was too modest and must learn to assert myself. I thought she was being flirtatious in a way I was familiar with. You are such an innocent, she said when she wished to make fun of me. Such a proper Indian Ocean boy.

  One weekend Peter came down, and Basil hired a car and drove all of us to Beachy Head where we spent two nights in a rented cottage, walking, cooking, drinking, playing absurd card games late into the night. I did not know that I was not to see Peter again after that weekend. I remember on our last night together he said to me, You like the feeling of sadness, don’t you? It’s an immaturity on your part. Later I wondered if he was also speaking about himself. Some months later he sent me a postcard from Cape Town to say that he was back home now that his country was free. Let’s not lose touch, brother, he wrote, but we did.

  *

  I auditioned for a part in a production of The Winter’s Tale. The director, Dr Hobson, was our Shakespeare tutor, a soft-fleshed, overweight man who smelt of old sweat. He always wore a greyish-green tweed jacket over a dark jersey, and although he changed regularly, all his clothes smelt. When I went up for my audition, Dr Hobson asked what experience I had in drama and I mentioned the three one-act plays I had appeared in at school, one of them in Kiswahili. Dr Hobson did not react when I mentioned the titles of the plays. One was by Chekhov, because our teacher admired his work for reasons none of us could understand. All the characters were quivering, nervous aristocrats who seemed about to collapse from sheer terror of life. Another was by Rabindranath Tagore, which the same teacher chose for us to give us a sense of the arts of the world. Theatre isn’t all Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw and the rest of that exhausted crew of imperialists, he told us. The Kiswahili play was written by one of our teachers. It was called Msitiri Mwenzako, which I translated for Dr Hobson as Save Your Friend from Shame. That one had comedy and treachery and intrigue and a scene of explosive screaming rage. Dr Hobson made a note on his pad and then said thank you and offered me a part in the stage manager’s team.

  Dr Hobson did not want me in his play. I had heard that he was a BNP sympathiser and even wrote material for their campaigns, so I turned up for rehearsal whenever I could and watched everything that went on, sitting there silently while our director became irritated. I was also an admirer of one of the actors, whose name was Marina and who was in one of the literature classes I took where I first came across Herman Melville: There go flukes! I was a distant admirer of Marina, which did not stop me from being secretly in love with her too.

  In the three years I had been in England until then, I had kissed some girls at parties when words were not required – snogged some girls at parties when it was dark and the music was loud and everyone had had a few drinks. To be honest, I was snogged by three girls at three separate parties when I had done little to deserve their attentions. One of them told me, as she was pulling my shirt out and reaching into my jeans, that she would have gone to bed with me if I weren’t black, but since I was, she wouldn’t. I asked if she would do it if I were Chinese. She thought for a moment and said she would. She went back to snogging me after that and I made no effort to resist even though honour required that I should repel her and walk haughtily away.

  Marina only had eyes for handsome Robbie, who was easily the best actor in the cast. It did not make any difference. She w
as too beautiful for me and I was content to admire from a distance. She had thick black hair and bright brown eyes with a slatey glitter in them when she turned her head suddenly towards the light. While I was slouching in the wings at some point on the evening of the final dress rehearsal, Marina came gently up to me and without saying anything embraced me, fully and deeply. At that moment, as she held me close, her whole body pressed against mine, I guessed that she knew why I had gone to all those rehearsals. Then she lightly kissed my neck. After a moment she pulled back and I saw Robbie watching us, standing only a metre or so away. His eyes were venomous in that half-light, and I felt Marina start in my arms before she disengaged herself. That night Robbie played his part like a pimp in a rage and there was a scene after the performance. Marina avoided eye contact with me afterwards, and I slunk away to my guttersnipe place in the shadows without further protest. There was only one performance, to a parochial audience who knew the actors personally and sometimes laughed for the wrong reasons.

  I dreamt longingly about that embrace and the suspended kiss that I think was about to follow. I knew I would always remember the moment and I fell even more deeply in love with Marina. Maybe I should have been braver, should have sought her out afterwards. Our doubts are traitors. There was a clue I was missing, some way of being that would allow me to carry out audacious acts without hesitation.

  Basil and Sophie left that summer. We promised to write to each other, and I had to swear repeatedly that I would go and stay with them in Athens the following summer. As we parted, Sophie embraced me and said: I’ll never forget you, and I said: I’ll never forget you either. We remained in contact for a while after they returned to Greece, but then the postcards became irregular and slowly dried up.

  *

  I moved to a large house in Fiveways that I shared with five others, all foreign students. I heard about the room from another student who was working in Mark’s café. It was a dirty house and I thought it would be cold in the winter. The windows were loose and rattled in the wind. The carpets and rugs were threadbare scraps that were impossible to clean but which produced fibres and dust that gave all of us allergies, probably for life. The woodwork was damp and the whole house was enveloped in a powerful stench of rot that hit me like a diseased miasma when I entered, and I knew it was not good for any of us. But it could not be helped.

  *

  The café was busy, the pavement tables always full in the beautiful late-summer weather. Mark took on a new waiter because of the extra business, but he also said the café needed another young woman on the staff. It would be more reassuring and pleasing for the tourists to see another female waiter. That was when Annie came to work with us and put an end to my torment. To me she seemed a perfect Mark recruit. She was quick, always polite and helpful to the customers, chatty in the kitchen and never late. It was work she had done before and she was confident and relaxed about it. Mark put her on the pavement area, and Annie performed out there as if it was a stage, slipping between the tables and smiling at passers-by as they hesitated about coming in. By the end of her second day Mark smiled whenever he looked at her, even when she was not looking back.

  Annie was slim, had a slightly round face, short brown hair, was of medium height, and was at that age when all of these features were in some kind of balance that was perfectly pleasing. But what made her even more attractive was the self-possession with which she moved around the café, never faltering or mishandling, her every movement certain, or so it seemed to me. Mark paid her warm attention, but that was his way with women when they started at the café. He flirted with them for a while as if he was practising his courtship skills, and when they knew they were loved, he turned down the volume without quite giving up the chat and left them to get on with their work. Business is business.

  In any case, Annie had already made her own choice, and to my astonishment she had chosen me. She flashed me friendly smiles and came to me if she had a problem or a question she could not deal with. Once she put her hand on my arm as she spoke to me, and another time she leant against me briefly during a quiet moment. On the Saturday at the end of her first week, in the lull after the lunch crowd, she asked me what I was doing that evening.

  I shrugged. ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘What about you?’

  ‘I am going home and I’m going to make myself a carbonara,’ she said, her eyes open and frank and smiling. ‘Do you want to come and share it with me?’

  ‘I love carbonara,’ I said, laughing at how easy she made it for me.

  It had been a long hot day but as we left the café a cool breeze blew in from the sea. I caught Mark’s eye as we left and there was a smile in it. We walked from the café because it was a nice evening and she only lived in Fountain Road, about twenty minutes away. Her face glowed with dried sweat, and her eyes were shiny with laughter and excitement. I don’t know what I looked like. Some short while into the walk she took my hand, and as we turned into Fountain Road she stopped on the pavement and kissed me, swelling her lips and opening them for my tongue. Her flat was on the third floor, and she opened her arms in a sweeping gesture, welcoming me in. It was still bright outside and a large window let in light on the living area. The bed was in an alcove around the corner, and she went there and I followed. She did not make a carbonara that night, instead we made love for hours. It did not feel like the first time, intuition telling me what to do when I would not have known before. In any case, she knew what she wanted and guided my mouth and my hands to what she desired. Later, she held on to me for a long time as we lay beside each other, our lips touching in long languid kisses. Yallah, I should have known it would be like this.

  I lost all sense of time when the light went from the sky but it did not seem as if either of us wanted to sleep, and I found myself talking between caresses with a freedom I had not known before. Perhaps it’s always like that the first time. I don’t know if everything I said was true but it flowed sweetly from me. She ran her hands over my body and said again and again, You are so beautiful. Me? We must have fallen asleep at some point because I woke up suddenly in the very early light and remembered where I was. Annie was fast asleep beside me, lying on her side facing me, breathing lightly. I smiled with incredulous pleasure at my memories of the night, and I thought I saw a small smile on her lips too.

  I must have fallen asleep again because I woke up much later when Annie put her hand on the side of my face. It was past eight and I was already late for the café. I splashed myself in her tiny shower, regretting that I had agreed to work every available day, and rushed down the stairs after a hurried kiss. Come straight back after work, she said. We’ll have the carbonara. I was an hour late and the café was buzzing, everyone at full stretch with Sunday morning breakfasts and pavement customers lingering over their newspapers and espressos. Mark did not make eye contact and in my elation I hardly cared. His eyes roved with satisfaction over the crowd of people in his café. When it was time for him to notice me he looked very deliberately at his watch and said, Fucking is fucking and business is business.

  The café only opened in the morning on Sundays, and after work I took a detour through Church Road, looking for a toothbrush, and found myself delaying my return to Fountain Road. Something niggled. It was a sense of having neglected something, of being in the wrong. As I walked on Church Road that Sunday morning I felt a stab of grief, a pang of guilt for my Mama and my Baba and the sorrow of their lives. The night with Annie had been a lavish joy and it was a self-indulgence I had no right to. I pushed the thought away and took the next turning towards her flat. She let me in as soon as I began to speak in the door phone. The carbonara was ready in a matter of minutes and we sat eating under the big open window, with our plates on our laps.

  We went back to bed for the afternoon and for a while it felt as if these languorous pleasures could go on endlessly, but we could not, of course, and afterwards Annie explained how things were. She was not apologetic or sentimental about what she had to
say, a confident woman who knew how to take care of herself.

  ‘My boyfriend works on the ferries. David. He’s doing Portsmouth to Santander, so he’s due back on Monday morning. Before that he was on the Portsmouth to Caen route, an overnight trip coming back the next day. That was where we met when I worked in the ferry restaurant. It was good on the ferries for a while, different and exciting, glamorous, working odd hours, meeting crowds of new people every day, but it was not for me in the end. I could not cope with the long hours into the night, and when I got tired the sea made me ill. Anyway, when I started at the café on Monday…’

  ‘Was it only a week ago? It feels as if I’ve known you longer,’ I said, and the interruption earnt me a few extra caresses.

  ‘Anyway, I knew David was going to be away all weekend,’ she continued, smiling in anticipation, ‘and I fancied a fling while he was away. I love doing that every now and then, when I get the chance. Did you not notice how much I fancied you? Was I too obvious?’

  ‘I thought you were very discreet,’ I said.

  ‘Do you know what I really like about you apart from your beautiful body? That you speak so softly and hold me as if I would slip out of your hands if you were careless,’ she said. ‘I love that. But you won’t be able to stay tonight. I need time to clean out the place and wash the sheets and make the place as it was before David comes back on Monday. I need to get your smell out of my hair.’

  I smiled to myself as I walked home, soft-spoken beautiful body, you proper Indian Ocean boy. It was absurd, even flies do it – was it Romeo or Mercutio who said that? – but I still felt as if I had done something brave and daring.

  Annie did not think it was anything permanent between David and her, maybe or maybe not, but she was living in his flat and he paid the rent, so she had to respect that. Maybe we could have another weekend like that some other time when he was away. Annie stayed at the café until the end of August, and I went to Fountain Road on three other nights in that time. At work she did not touch me, or only briefly, but blew me kisses if she thought no one was looking. She was at the café for just over a month, but it seemed like a full season to me and filled my days with excitement and an unfamiliar anxiety. Annie banished the memory of my longing for Marina and, for a time, the memory of everything else: one fire puts out another’s burning, one pain is lessened by another’s anguish. At the beginning of September she moved to Portsmouth with her boyfriend. That had been the plan all along but in the end she was not so sure. What was there in Portsmouth?