Gravel Heart

by Abdulrazak Gurnah

  The debate itself was entirely unmemorable: the venue was a room on the second floor and the only people there were the chair, the four organisers and the four debaters, two from the boys’ school and two from the girls’. Most of what I remembered later concerned Saida. I had seen her in the streets a few times without knowing who she was, just a pretty girl in a cream-coloured mtandio veil, which was the fashion then. But sitting in that debating room with her I could see she was beautiful, and that was the moment for me. When it was my turn to make a contribution to the debate … I was the second speaker and only had to talk for one minute … I saw her waiting for me to speak with her head bent to one side like this, as if making fun of someone participating in an intellectual conversation. I felt slightly mocked but I knew it was meant as a joke so I tilted my head towards her, acknowledging her interest, waiting for my tongue to unglue itself from the roof of my mouth. To my relief, the words began to stumble out of my lips and continued to do so for the required length of time. I threw in an expansive gesture towards the audience of eight as I felt myself coasting along on the tide of drivel and added a small bow towards the chair as I came to a close. Saida liked that, I could see. Her eyes had a bright spark in them, amused by my airs, so I added an additional flourish with dead-pan passion, just to make her smile. That is how it started for us, those little gestures and smiles during that absurd debate. The organisers split the vote precisely between the two teams so no one won and no one lost, in the enviable spirit of communal unity. Afterwards we four debaters walked together for a while, laughing at the comedy we had participated in, before heading for our separate destinations, but by then I knew Saida’s name.

  I looked out for her after that, I thought about her every day, I became obsessed. When I saw her she was often with school friends, still in their uniforms, and sometimes as I cycled past she gave me a restrained little wave. The other girls saw and laughed. I did not know what to do, or even whether I should do anything or just wait to see what would happen next. I don’t know what it is like for young people today but we were brought up thinking that to address a respectable young woman who was not a relative was to insult her. It was not something people spoke about, how to go about it. I had seen young men in the cinema meeting girls, smiling at them with teeth gleaming, riding in open-topped cars with them and even kissing them, but I had not seen anyone I knew doing that. I thought I would just wait and see what happened next. I came up with several schemes but I did not have the nerve to carry them out. They were all silly anyway. In time I came to know that her grandmother made sesame bread for sale, and in desperation I thought I should go there and try to catch sight of Saida and perhaps speak with her, just like any other customer, but I could not make myself do it. It would be too obvious and perhaps she would not like it.

  I was then nearly eighteen, in my last year at school, resisting my mother’s pleas for me to leave and join my father in Dubai. I had my home, I did not want to wander the world like a beggar without a country. That was what I said to my mother again and again: I will stay here and wait for life to return. And in a way I knew to be absurd, I did not want to leave because of Saida. This was a secret I kept to myself and mocked myself for, but I could not deny its reality. It caused me pain to think of her. It caused me pain to think how she would mock me if she knew. It caused me to whisper to myself that I had fallen in love with her. Does that sound ridiculous to you, hearing your white-haired father saying something like that about your mother? I missed her every day but had to restrain myself from searching the streets for her, for fear of being discovered and made fun of for my childish love. So I learnt to make the ache I felt for her a part of my life, an obsession I could live with at a tolerable intensity. I did not know what else to do.

  When I finished school, my mother Mahfudha’s pleas for me to depart for Dubai became plaintive. She did not want to leave me behind. What would my father say – that she had abandoned their only son? And who would look after me if I fell ill? Who would cook for me? Had I thought of that? I would have to eat a filthy stew in a café every day and that was bound to make me sick in the end. She was right about the filthy stew in a café but she did not know that I would come to like it. Where would I turn to if I needed help? I would learn bad ways. Anything could happen to me in this dangerous world. What did I think I would find in this place? You can imagine the rest of it. I hated it when she spoke to me like that. Her voice changed pitch, her eyes looked pained and she made me feel selfish and cruel. When I tried to explain myself she raised her voice even louder, shaming me with her pleas and, in the end, her tears. Sometimes I thought she raised her voice on purpose, so that our neighbour Bi Maryam would hear her and add her voice to my mother’s, so that the whole world would know that I refused to leave.

  My sisters, both younger than me, also pleaded with me to go. They wanted their beloved brother to come with them, it would not be the same without me. They would lose me if I stayed behind. I listened to them and shed tears with them and felt chastened, but I refused to leave. I tried to explain but did not know how to make them understand that I did not want to lose my freedom to be where I belonged, where I knew how to live. I would not have known that that was what I was clinging to by staying, and so would not have known the words to use. And even if I had known the words, my tongue was too thick to shape them so they would come out right. I would not have been able to say that I did not want to live under my father’s tyranny again, because my mother and my sisters would have found that hurtful. Nor could I say that I did not want to lose Saida before I had even spoken to her and discovered if she had any feelings for me.

  When it was clear that I would not change my mind and agree to leave with them, my mother became angry with me and refused to speak directly to me for two days, and my sisters sulked and only spoke to me in wounded and sarcastic tones. But it could not last like that, and in the end we all became resigned to the way things had turned out and made peace with each other. I helped with their passports, queuing up day after day at the Immigration Office until I was granted an interview. The officer asked me questions addressed to my mother and sisters, and I answered for them as I was allowed to because I was a man. They were issued with temporary permits that would be valid for three months and could only be used to travel to Dubai and back. If they did not return while the permits were valid, they would not be able to travel at all and would have voluntarily forfeited their citizenship. I found it difficult to understand the point of this meanness, and it confirmed me even more in my decision to stay. I did not want to become a homeless wanderer in the world.

  When the tickets came, my mother distributed what she could not take with her among her neighbours and acquaintances. The tickets were delivered by hand, passed from person to person from Dubai until they arrived at our house. Why? So that the authorities would not learn of our plans. There was so much vindictiveness in those days that you could just picture some official tearing those tickets up for no reason, or, if he had enough wit and know-how, selling them to someone else. My father also sent some money for me and that could only be sent by hand to trusted hand, otherwise it would never have arrived. My mother gave what was left of her dowry jewellery to me as a memento and for safe-keeping, four gold bracelets and a chain, because she was afraid the khabithi immigration officials would steal them from her when they searched her before boarding. It was illegal to take anything but the skin on your back and a few rags when travelling out of the country, just in case you were spiriting away the nation’s wealth. You can imagine the immigration officers performed that part of their duties with great thoroughness. Then, on the scheduled day, we all took the taxi to the airport, and I stayed there and watched until the plane disappeared, knowing that my mother and sisters were not coming back, not ever, and thinking that perhaps I would never see them again.

  *

  In the silence around us I could hear the night settling down. It must have been around ten, and the distant tr
affic noises had ceased, and the café TVs and radios had been turned off and most people except the tourists would be on their way home. Baba was quiet with his own thoughts for a while and then he looked enquiringly at me.

  ‘Is it getting late for you? Did you want to get back to the flat? We can continue tomorrow,’ he said. ‘The mosquitoes are bothering you, aren’t they?’

  ‘No, no, they’re not,’ I lied.

  ‘I’ll spray,’ he said. ‘Let’s go out for a bit of air.’

  He got up and closed the window, and told me to wait outside while he sprayed the room. Afterwards we went for a walk to let the poison work. The street lights were on and a handful of shops were still open, the ones that stocked meagre groceries for the poor, stale bread and tinned fish and condensed milk. We walked up one side of the road and down the other, stepping over rubbish and round the folded-up furniture of the street-sellers. Someone was lying curled up in a doorway, a shadowy lump covered with a mat, and as we walked past he said my father’s name. He was the watchman for the line of shops and the trestles and derelict trolleys of the traders. It was a self-appointed task and in return he had somewhere to sleep and the shopkeepers gave him a few pennies for breakfast when they opened up. We leapt over a muddy culvert and crossed the empty road and were soon back in Baba’s room. I sat on a mat on the floor, leaning against the wall, waiting for Baba to resume his tale.

  *

  It was just before my mother and sisters left that I went to work for the Water Authority, just a few months after I finished school. It was the era of national sacrifice. The United States and its friends had their Peace Corps and VSO and Dan Aid and other volunteer programmes, the Soviets and the Cubans had their Young Pioneers marching in uniform and preparing to serve the party and the nation, and many newly independent African states created national volunteer service schemes to promote an ethos of discipline and service. The volunteer aspect of the scheme that I and my generation experienced was a wordy metaphor, which lent dignity to the enterprise. It was compulsory volunteer national service and this was how it worked for us.

  The government assigned all school-leavers a job for minimal pay, mostly as assistant teachers in country primary schools to fill the posts taken away from senior teachers like my father. Once the Ministry of Education had taken its quota, the rest of the school-leavers were distributed elsewhere, to government offices in town, or to the army if they were thought politically reliable and physically fit, or for further training if they were lucky and well connected. I got lucky because one of my friends, Yusuf, the one I sometimes played coram with in the Youth League games room, had a father who was powerful enough to have our names removed from the Ministry of Education list. It was a simple matter. Yusuf mentioned it to his father, who arranged things in one brief conversation on the phone. Yusuf went to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where his father worked and where he himself intended to make a career, and I was sent to the Water Authority, not so glamorous perhaps, but not very far from where we lived.

  Nowhere was very far from anywhere in that town, at least not at that time before it sprawled into the countryside, yet after every two streets the area had a different name and insisted on using it. It was pointless pedantry, like poetry, a delight in complexity, a relish for detail, a stubborn refusal to forget what was known. The precise naming had no practical use since no one could get lost in that town, at least not the people who lived in it or not for long. Visitors would know only a few of the names, and most of the time would not know where they were in the perplexing maze of lanes, and anyway, most of the names did not appear on any street signs and no one ever used a map. It was only a small town, and if you did not know where you were, you just walked on until you did, or if you did not mind looking foolish, you asked.

  Working in a government office meant that I wore a clean shirt every day and did not have to take it off because my work made me sweat bare-chested in the sun. I did not have to wait on the caprice of a contractor or put up with shouted commands while passers-by laughed at me. I did not have to wait patiently at the end of each day to be paid for my work and to learn if I would be required for the next. I sat at a desk not far from an open window letting in the breeze from the sea. When the tide was out in the heat of the day the air also brought in the odours of the filthy creek across the road from our office, and sometimes the smell of garbage from the landfill a little further up the road towards Saateni, and sometimes other, less identifiable smells, which made me think of wood-smoke and burnt hide. When the tide was in, the sun glittered on the water and illuminated the ceiling of our gloomy office with its rippling reflections, and a cool sea breeze blew in over the water.

  The building was known to be the place where a famous Scottish traveller from a small town called Blantyre (population 9,000 in 1881) had lived for several months while he gathered himself for a journey to bara and the deep interior, where he hoped to find souls in need of succour as well as the source of an ancient river, the discovery of which would bring him everlasting fame. It was a conceit of the time that the existence of anything, a river, a lake, a mountain or a beast, could not be assured unless a European person had seen it and wherever possible named it. The river that the Scottish traveller was there in that house preparing to seek already had a name of great antiquity but did not have a source verified by a European. When the tide was in and the breeze blew over the glittering water, I imagined the Scottish traveller sitting by the window, glancing towards the small blue mosque across the road or looking over to where the creek opened out to sea, and dreaming of home and salvation. I could not imagine the traveller’s thoughts when the stench overpowered the air but I suspected they would dwell on his unworthiness for the fate he had selected for himself. It was that kind of stench.

  Our office was probably like many other government offices at that time, staffed by recent school-leavers without much knowledge and with not much to do, who were respectful and fearful of authority. Everyone was fearful of authority because in recent times we had seen how stern it could be, especially with those it suspected of being reluctant in their submission to it. Authority relished its fearsome reputation and thrived on it. It went about its ugly business as if no one could see what was happening, or remember who was doing it or why.

  My team in the Water Authority office dealt with the supply to the town. We had less to do than our colleagues who dealt with the countryside, where the government was digging wells and laying pipes to villages and districts that had never had running water before. The countryside team was busy in its righteous task whereas a lot of the time there was no water supply to the town, either because the electricity was cut off and there was no power to work the pumps, or the pumps were broken and awaiting repair, or an unforeseen event other than these predictable mishaps had occurred. The pumps were often broken, sometimes for several days while a part was sent for from the mainland or from further afield. People learnt to cope: storing water, digging a well, doing without.

  The water distribution system was old, most of it built by Sultan Barghash in the 1880s in the twilight days of Omani rule as the British were impatiently shuffling in the shadows of our small corner of the world, waiting to take charge. Before he became the sultan, Barghash had been exiled to Bombay by the British for attempting to displace his elder brother Majid, something the Omani princes felt compelled to do whenever opportunity presented itself. Their own father was reputed to have killed his cousin with his own hand, at the age of fifteen, to become the sultan: a sharpened jambiya in the chest during a royal banquet and then a chase through the countryside until the cousin dropped dead from his wounds, the accursed Wahhabi usurper.

  The British had no business interfering in this internecine mayhem – they had not yet taken our little territory in hand for its own good – but they did so anyway because they wanted the world to run as they liked it, even if it was only a caprice on their part. Exile this one, replace that one, hang the malcontents, even bombard
the whole town … why not? It was necessary in order to establish who was superior and had the power, and who should do precisely what he was told. Historians can always be found later to offer weighty policy explanations that prompted one petty meddling or another, to describe avarice and destruction in reasonable words. Alexander the Macedonian wept when he thought there was no more world to conquer, but he did not know how much of it there really was and how much of it needed to be put right and with what sternness. He had no idea how many sweet morsels lay hidden behind mountains and beyond deserts and across oceans, let alone that there was a whole New World to plunder.

  In Bombay Barghash had his eyes opened to many things, among them the luxury of running water. When his brother Majid conveniently died young, Barghash returned as sultan and, among other magnanimities conferred on his subjects and himself, he built palaces and gardens and hamams. He installed running water and flushing toilets in his little town when such luxuries were unheard of in most European cities, although they were probably available in San Francisco and St Louis and New York City because the Americans wanted the world to see how advanced they were. The Americans were contemplating the construction of the Panama Canal around then, with its artificial lake and its six huge locks to raise and lower ships from one ocean to another, so a flushing toilet system would have been child’s play to them. But Sultan Barghash ruled over a few small islands, not a continent, and perhaps even to describe what he did as ruled was to flatter him, so providing running water for the town was an arduous enough undertaking for him. In any case, Sultan Barghash’s magnanimity was exercised over a hundred years before, and this world had aged and changed since then and his small town had grown. Some of the underground concrete pipes in the old town were cracked, and there was constant seepage and unaccounted water loss, so that even when the pumps were working, it was difficult to maintain adequate pressure. There was no money for repairs, or what money there was was in demand elsewhere, and there were so many other matters gone wrong in our lives and in our minds that to dwell on them was to despair.