Desertion

by Abdulrazak Gurnah

  It was even more complicated when Aunt Mariam came with the nephews. Sometimes Hassanali did not know where he was sleeping until moments before his head hit the pillow. He did not know how he would begin to explain all this to their mzungu guest. It would be easiest if they just gave up their room to him. Malika could move in with Rehana and he would sleep in the hallway. Then when the mzungu had regained his senses, they could ask him what he wished them to do.

  2 Frederick

  FREDERICK TURNER WAS ON his way to the estate when he first heard the news. He went to the estate every Tuesday morning, events allowing. Events were letters and reports and reading, a lot of it tedious and peaceful and all of it amenable to postponement, so really, since his posting in the town he had not missed a ride to the estate. He rode there in the morning, stayed the afternoon and evening and rode back early the following morning. It kept him informed, took him out and about so he could see things for himself, and kept the estate manager Burton on his toes, not that he came directly under his authority. It was Burton himself who had called on him in his first week in the town, when he came in to check for mail, and invited him to visit whenever he wanted. They were the only Englishmen there, so in a sense there was some obligation in addition to the pleasure of the ride. Burton was an amiable and conscientious enough fellow, medium height, big round face red from the sun, heavy build and a lumbering manner. He had the very look of a sunburned English farmer. He was very knowledgeable and inventive in his field, a bit of a scientist even with all his experimental projects, his ponds and sluices and nurseries, but he had a reluctant, burdened air about him, and a beachcomber disposition which made Frederick suspect that he would make problems for himself if left alone too long. There was that odd stare that he had at times, as if he was contemplating lunacy. Frederick thought Burton looked forward to his visits, for the company and the conversation, and a chance to indulge in some sociable drinking. Not only was he the only other Englishman in the district, he was the only other company, the rest being Bohra Gujarati and Arabs, and of course the mongrel natives. It would have been absurd not to socialise with him.

  His talk was all about the Uganda Protectorate and the interior highlands and the lakes, and all the great estates that were going to be created up there when the railway was finished. According to Burton, that was the whole point of the Protectorate. Politicians and newspapers loved the grand language of global manoeuvres, so to them and the other armchair rulers of the world, the Uganda Protectorate and the railway were to secure the headwaters of the Nile against French mischief. To Burton, and according to him, many other hard-headed people like him, it was to open up the beautiful high country in the highlands, always intended for European occupation, and currently squatted on by stone-age vagrants and blood-thirsty pastoralists. Burton talked in that hard language when he wanted to show that he was unsentimental about the world, usually after a drink or two. Frederick had not been up to the highlands yet, although he thought he would go and have a look one day, just to have a look. That was the work Burton wanted to do, to manage a great sprawling estate, like the ones he had seen in the Eastern Cape in South Africa. Frederick had his doubts if Burton was made of that kind of material. That sort of authority and command, not to say cold-blooded determination, was not acquired in one or two generations, except by the immensely gifted, and Burton already spent enough time joining the labourers in their drumming and dancing sessions to indicate that he was not that manner of exceptional.

  It was also a good ride to the estate. He went riding most afternoons, north along the beach which was clear for miles to the river, or south around the bay to the point, but the ride to the estate went over some rough ground and kept him in trim. It gave his stallion Majnoon a bit of work to do as well, and he needed it, the fractio devil. His groom Idris rode with him on the mare Sharifa, so both his Arabs had a good hard run at least once a week. He had brought both the Arabs and Idris with him from India and had had nothing but regrets over the matter. It was not because the horses gave him trouble, or that Idris did either, despite his lugubrious airs. It was because of the dreadful fly infestation in the area, which with horses began with fever and oedema and ended with paralysis and death. Only donkeys survived around here.

  His horses were beautiful, and it filled him with grief to discover the depredations that awaited them, but by then it was too late and he had already brought them with him. It was so stupid of him not to have found out beforehand, so completely regrettable. If he had known while he was still in India he would have made arrangements, of course, and probably advantageous ones. They were a bit of a bargain when he acquired them. A Sindhi landowner had some problems with a consignment of cotton he was due to deliver to a British company, and Frederick was able to help. The landowner in turn was able to advise Frederick on the purchase of an Arab stallion, and threw in the mare at a price that was almost a gift. It was for the memsahib when she returned from home leave, he said. (Only Christie did not return.) Gracious and excessively generous, it might seem, but then Eastern hospitality and gratitude can be misunderstood, especially when extended to a government servant. There are notorious examples to prompt suspicion, of course – Clive, Hastings and Thackeray’s nabobs – but those gentlemen robbed state treasuries and emptied warehouses whereas Frederick had merely expedited some procedures. The landowner’s generosity was to do with a more gracious way of living, he thought, an attitude to obligation that England had lost because her rulers were querulous and envious.

  Idris came with the horses, or was too besotted to be parted from them. His name meant steadfast and truthful, so his landowner told him, after a personage in the Holy Book. Frederick had not had time to study the Koran, but he could vouch that the names suited his man. He was wiry and sinewy, and not much given to smiles, but he was tender with the horses as if they were his own blood. Frederick entertained dreams of an equine dynasty for a while, but Sharifa refused to oblige despite Majnoon’s best efforts. Not all was lost for the poor beasts, though. He had sent word to the Club in Mombasa, and had received one enquiry from a Mr Cowan who was stationed at Fort Smith and was down on the coast for a vacation. Frederick in turn had invited Mr Cowan to come and visit and inspect the animals himself. Mombasa was only two days’ sail away.

  Idris was not enthusiastic about the weekly trips to the estate, saying that the horses did not like it there because the frogs bothered them. There were rather a lot of frogs because of the irrigation ponds, but Frederick had a good idea that it was Idris, who in his Rajputana way was fastidious about the company he kept, who did not like it on the estate. He refused to sleep in the quarters for the estate workers, most of whom were former slaves, it has to be said. They had been lured away from their owners some years ago and found work with the company, while this was still company territory. Since the declaration of the Protectorate, there was no longer any question of slavery, of course. Burton was teaching them to play cricket, and had dreams of offering a challenge to the town, when it got round to making a team out of all the Indians there. In any case, Idris refused to share the men’s quarters. Instead, once his care of the horses was done, he spent his evenings on the estate sitting on the veranda steps, in sight of his employer, reading the Koran by the light of the hurricane lamp or dozing, waiting for the evening to be over. A few hundred feet away, there was the sound of talk and laughter from the labourers’ quarters, which every so often erupted into acrimonious banter, the conversation of men without women. Lanterns here and there burned with the soft golden glow of coconut-oil wicks. Burton sometimes tried to cajole Idris to join the men, or offered him a drink as a joke, both of which Idris declined with unsmiling courtesy. Frederick sympathised, and found Burton’s fier bantering distasteful. When he was ready to sleep, Idris slipped away to the stables which Frederick had had specially built for his weekly visits, and which had a purpose-built platform where Idris spread his bedding.

  It was Idris who hurried up alongside, soon aft
er they set out, to tell him about the wounded man. As they turned north before the market, to avoid the stinking, winding alleyways around it, and the crowded, squalid holes-in-the-walls that served as shops, they passed the dark office of the Bohra wakil Siddiq. Frederick knew quite well it was the wakil, it was his job to know. He was one of only two wakils in the town. But he also knew that Indian wakils were slippery and rapacious, a low form of life which battened like hard-shelled ticks on the hides of the ignorant and the helpless. He had seen them at work in India, crooks and money-lenders in all but name. He was prepared to have official commerce with the unctuous being, but that did not mean that he had to know him while he was out for a ride. The wakil came out when he saw them riding past and shouted something, which Frederick ignored. He shouted again, and this time Idris said something back and stopped to listen to the reply. Frederick knew they were talking in Kutch, and heard the word Angrez, so he assumed they were talking about him, some puerile witticism or another. Then Idris hurried up alongside to tell him in his brutal English that an Angrez was very bad hurt.

  It was Siddiq himself who led the way. First he shut and locked the huge studded doors of his office, adjusted his gold-embroidered cap and made a grand gesture for them to follow. Frederick sneered at the hunchbacked little man. When he saw him heading towards the warren of alleyways that led to the market, he called out for him to wait. Majnoon would live up to his name in those rutted overcrowded passages. He dismounted and handed his reins to Idris. He glanced at his groom, expecting a look of anxiety or concern that he was setting off on his own into the native quarter, with an unknown Indian as his only guide, but Idris seemed untroubled. He dismounted too, and took the reins, and then almost instantly began to walk away towards the shade of a tree. Frederick followed the wakil, smiling to himself, a tiny bit disappointed that Idris had not shown more concern. He was a hard man, Idris, which was why he employed him, but he also felt a kind of care and fondness for him. He thought Idris saw himself in some kind of an alliance with him, a pact he had agreed to when he accepted pay from him and consented to follow him as his groom. In his antique code of honour, he was nothing as squalid as a servant. Frederick sometimes caught him looking at him with a gaze that he could only describe as emotional, even devoted and steadfast, a manly love. He thought Burton caught that look too, and Frederick thrilled to hear Burton say once, That man will die for you. He wondered what Idris would do after he sold the horses. Frederick reminded himself to ask after Idris’s family and to give him a gift for them.

  The wakil leading the way in front of him was a thin, wrinkled, fair-complexioned man with the curved spine that Frederick assumed came from a lifetime of crooked clerking. (A wrinkled old man of monkey cunning, Frederick tried the phrase to himself two or three times, to lodge it in his mind until he could write it down.) He was dressed in a white cotton jacket buttoned up to the neck, tight-fitting trousers, tan leather slippers and the green gold-embroidered cap. His movements were generous and various, too many flourishes and bows and toothy grins for Frederick’s liking. Something about him made Frederick think of one of Dickens’s milder sinisters – quite unctuous. In a moment they had plunged into the narrow crooked lanes of the dilapidated native town whose roofs almost met above his head. His posting here was nearly four months old, but this was only the third time he was venturing into these reeking streets. The surfaces of the lanes were so eroded by rain and slimy streams of sewage, and so covered with rubbish, that Frederick had to watch his every step. As soon as they entered into the gloom, he was surrounded by a hum, a noise without words, as if he had entered an enclosed space where many people were muttering in an undertone. It was a heap, smelling of garbage and drains. The whole place needed to be knocked down and swept away, but he had no funds fo such works.

  He forced himself to take shallow breaths, even though his instinct was to swallow huge heaving gulps to relieve the sense of suffocation he felt in the crowds and the alleyways. People looked at him and looked again, and he heard preceding him the cry of mzungu. People sitting outside their houses stood up in surprise and perhaps anxiety. One old man stepped forward and kissed his hand. Frederick was not unused to such acts of devotion. Older natives sometimes kissed his hand because they mistook him for the man who had freed the slaves some years before. Frederick did not discourage their deference. It did no harm and made some things easier. He saw grins all around him, and he could not be sure if they were kind or otherwise, if they were amused by the old man or derisive of him. The shopkeepers in their hole-in-the-wall shops called out to him, tempting him with one of their foul wares, objects which it beggared belief could provide a living for them: a tiny pile of charcoal, a couple of oranges, a handful of eggs and, least attractive of all, the ragged dirty vendor crouched over it all.

  Children waved dementedly to him and tried to cross his path, calling him mzungu mzungu, as if otherwise he would have missed seeing them. He heard other things but could not catch anything clearly. He did his best not to. Let them shout their filthy words, why not, for all the good it would do them. Their voices irritated him, like the buzz of insects or the bleating of animals, like the whines of decrepit street-women in a London dockyard alleyway. The banyan ahead of him was waving his arms excitedly at the crowd, calling out in exasperation, making a show of urgency and impatience. Frederick was tempted to give his excitable backside a prod with his riding crop, and tell him through gritted teeth to conduct himself with rather more dignity before he made a complete fool of both of them. He strode on as best he could, keeping no less than two paces between himself and the wakil ahead of him, trusting in the irresistible force of his momentum to clear a path ahead. Frederick was not a big man, but he was well and strong, so he wasn’t troubled by the crowds and their noise, not really. He was more troubled by the possibility of embarrassment and mockery, in case he slipped into the slimy gutters or was buffeted by a religious lunatic. No one needed any reminders in this part of the world about how unyielding British power could be, and if they did, the awesome events at Omdurman the previous year, word of which had spread this far, would concentrate minds anew. But sometimes native crowds were abominably and recklessly excitable, and so he found it helpful to think angry and ugly thoughts about them to keep his unease in check.

  He wondered who the wounded man was. The likeliest was that it was someone from the Lutheran mission up north in the delta, which had stayed on even after the signature of the 1886 spheres of influence agreement and the departure of the German post. Some years before he came, so he had heard from Burton, there had been a Masai massacre near there, and the Methodist missionary and his wife and a score of their charges had perished. A fearless man, by all accounts, going about everywhere armed with nothing more than an open umbrella, boating up and down the river as if he had never heard of a crocodile or a poison dart. It must have won the respect of the local natives because they did not bother his mission and some even joined it. It was a less common outcome than most people imagined – missions saving souls – at least in his experience.

  Still, it was astonishing that the Masai had raided that near the coast, and that they should have chosen a humble man of God and his flock as their victim. They ranged over great swathes of the interior as if it were a primeval playground for their blood sports. What was that line in Shelley’s ‘Mont Blanc’ about the huge rocks scattered about the mountain, as if that blasted landscape had been a playground for primeval godlings of earthquake and storm? The Masai were the unruly godlings of the shrivelled landscape in the interior of this land. The common wisdom was that the Masai only raided for cattle, like the lion only attacked for food, but Frederick thought both had a taste for blood and cruelty, and prayed that he would never have to put his theory to t test. There could have been a Masai raid on the Lutheran mission, or if not Masai then another marauding tribe, the Galla or Somali or another wandering band of idlers. The river drew them down as if it were a funnel, as rivers had drawn barbarian
tribes since time began.

  He had also received word from Mombasa that the Methodists were planning another mission, nearer the town this time so they could fish more safely, and a Reverend Holiday would be on his way in due course. But when the good Reverend was ready, he would be sure to come by sea from Mombasa rather than overland. This poor devil was more likely to have wandered in from the interior.

  No, the picture in his mind as they picked their way past mounds of rubbish and crumbling houses with their rotting doors, was of a bedraggled troop of loyal natives standing by a rough stretcher they had fashioned to carry their good priest to safety. It made him think of the two devoted Zanzibaris who a few years before had carried the embalmed body of the saintly Dr Livingstone thousands of miles from the great lakes to the coast in Bagamoyo. First they took out his heart and buried it in the place where he died, then they embalmed the body. How did they think to do that? Where would two native porters have got the idea for such a grand symbolic gesture from? Imagine two farm labourers or two navvies at home coming up with such a notion. Perhaps the good doctor left instructions, but even then, why didn’t they drop the body into the nearest marsh and stride off home? What a saint he must have been to inspire that kind of fidelity in his people. A bedraggled troop of urchins and layabouts was at his heels, although fidelity was not what was in their minds, more like the morbid curiosity for suffering and sensation that afflicted idle and empty minds.

  The lane suddenly ended, and opening up before him was a bright sandy clearing. He stopped in surprise, struck by how pleasant the open space was. Someone charged into him from behind, and without looking round he lashed out with his riding crop and felt it striking flesh and bone. There was a shrill, childish yelp, followed by laughter, and Frederick could not restrain a smile. There was a small whitewashed mosque at the top corner of the clearing with a road running beside it. The two shuttered windows and the door, which was half-open, were painted a beautiful Mediterranean blue, like the colour of the Madonna’s robe in a Titian painting. At the end of the clearing nearest to them, on his right, was a grimy café with some marble-topped tables and benches outside. What were marble-topped tables doing in this neck of the woods? Beyond the café were stone dwellings, some of more than one storey, and the rest modest but clean and in reasonable repair. Another lane opened into the clearing, and now he saw that there were several other lanes that did the same. On his left were more dwellings, with door curtains gently billowing in a breeze that seemed to come from the widening road that ran by the other side of the mosque towards open farmland in the distance beyond. Frederick could feel the breeze where he stood, and wondered where he was and why no one had told him about this pleasant location in this derelict town. He tried to work out in his mind its position on the map in his office. The wakil, who had also stopped and was half-turned towards him, pointed beyond the dwellings on Frederick’s left, smiling and nodding in self-congratulation.