Desertion

by Abdulrazak Gurnah

  Then what happened some months later confirmed to Hassanali that he had been right in his ugly foresight. A messenger came from Ali Abdalla the trader, whom everyone called Msuwaki for some reason, offering marriage to Rehana. She saw when Hassanali conveyed this message to her that he felt vindicated and sad at the same time. Perhaps he even felt ashamed for her. In their eyes, Ali Abdalla was an old man, sixty, white-bearded, a trader in whatever came his way, and with two wives and a grown-up family somewhere in Arabia. A whiff of scandal was attached to his name, which Rehana did not know the details of and did not want to know, and in any case it was none of her business. People were always making scandal out of scraps. He probably made his offer because he wanted a woman for sex, and he was too old for the indignity of paying for it with someone off the streets. She understood that. Older Arab men made a show of their piety with such marriages, picking up widows and divorcees when they were going cheaply, or even sometimes a luscious young girl from a family overwhelmed with debt. The dowry in such marriages was usually only nominal as the families concerned were eager to have the woman taken off their hands and given some respectability. And it could all be done in the name of piety and esteem, rather than lust and greed. That was why Hassanali was ashamed for her, and perhaps of her, that she should receive such an offer, as if she was ruined or hapless.

  ‘I shall say no, shan’t I? Thank you but no,’ Hassanali said, looking down into his coffee cup. They were sitting on the mat in the ill-lit yard after a cold supper of lunch-time left-overs, and Rehana felt dispirited and discontent, and thought Hassanali felt the same. She could not understand why she felt useless and alone, at fault, and why Hassanali should look so dejected, as if they had both failed at something, at life. She should have cooked something, even some beans or spinach. She determined after that that she would never give them cold supper again, never allow the weight of congealed rice and vegetables to sink through them like inadequacy.

  So when Azad turned up in their lives in the middle months of that year, it was like an unexpected gift, a blessing. Hassanali would have considered himself fortunate to have him as a friend, and was made proud by his admiration for Rehana, and incredulous that he should wish to be married to her. He was so excited by Azad’s proposal that he had to struggle to restrain himself from embracing him and making him part of their family at once. Azad was young, friendly, open, daring. He had sailed hundreds of miles in a boat to an unknown land, that was daring. Then he had stayed on to act as a business agent when he could only speak a few words of the language, that was even more daring. Yet he was at ease and happy, and had given them unstrained affection and made no demands. Hassanali had watched him and Rehana with sly and unbelieving anticipation, noting their interest in each other with wary hope. Really, it was more than he could ever have hoped for, and that was what he told Rehana when she said they should wait, or think, or ask Aunt Mariam to come and ask questions. You’ll never find anyone better, he had said, and she knew he was right. When Hassanali reported that he had put her questions to Azad, and he had replied that he was not married and that he desired nothing more than to live with her in happiness, she smiled her consent and sent word to her aunt. They were married the day after she arrived.

  Perhaps it was more than she deserved. For months she was lost in him, as if he had possessed her and transformed her. She felt herself beautiful and ample, smiling to herself when she thought of him, and tolerant of so much that had seemed aggravating and paltry before. Day after day she rejoiced at the miracle of his body beside her, at his embraces and his laughter. He travelled for his business, but not unbearably at first, and every time he returned she felt he possessed her even more. It was so unexpected, the feeling of intimacy and closeness, as if he were part of her flesh. When the musim finally came, and his captain returned, Azad became very busy, travelling and supervising the gathering of all the merchandise he had negotiated. They did not see very much of him in those last weeks.

  He said he woul have to go back with the captain, to make sure he would get hi cut of the profits when the merchandise was sold. Business is business, and you had to look after your share or you would be cheated. Yes, of course the captain was a relative, and he would make sure there was something for him, but wealth is a corrupter of the most pure of souls, and even the captain his relative, who was by no means the purest of souls, might be tempted. When he had seen to his affairs, he would return as soon as he could, and by then his Rehana would be big with their first child, he hoped. She was reluctant, she begged, but he consoled her. This is how people like us make a living: travel, trade and make our way in the world. I will go and I will come back, and if we are blessed I’ll bring back something of God’s bounty for us. Hassanali told her to stop being a fool, and to stop giving Azad a hard time. That was how it was for so many people in these parts, she knew that. When the musim turned that year, he went to join his ship in Mombasa, and then not another word for the next five years or probably ever.

  They thought he would send word if he could, and when he didn’t Rehana feared that the ship had met disaster. Their father Zakariya used to tell them that that was how his own father had died, drowned on a return musim trip when his ship perished in a storm in the Arabian Sea. It had taken his mother weeks to find out, and it was only when the merchants decided that the ship must be lost that she had no choice but to admit his death. His name was Hassanali too, and when Zakariya was old enough he himself went on the musim trip, perhaps to look for his father. Luckily he found his little Hassanali, so he did not bother going back and therefore did not drown. So Rehana’s first terrible thought was that the ship was lost on the way back to India. Hassanali asked people how he could find out, and some of the people asked for them among traders and merchants. No, the ship had not met disaster, so they could expect their young man with the next musim. But he didn’t come, and after a while Hassanali was ashamed to ask. He had abandoned them, abandoned her, and gone back to his Indian life laughing at her love and her hunger, chuckling at their gullibility. Yet she could not be sure that he had not met some misfortune, and might not turn up one day and speak of the trials that had befallen him and kept him away. That was how it was, although she had known somewhere inside her within the first few months that he would not be back. She had dwelt on his departure for years, so that now all that was left was bitterness. She hardly allowed herself to think of the exhilaration of those early months. It made her feel a fool, and as memories of him turned into bitterness, she found a need to blame Hassanali for the way he had talked her out of her caution about him, although she never said this and resented her restraint. Her life became a muddle in this way, resentful, depressed, sleeping late, missing him. She could not stop herself missing him, even when she hated everything about him, his existence, his name, his voice. She did the work in the house as she had always done, but more listlessly and intolerantly now, and part of her congealed into something heavy and sour.

  Aunt Mariam came to visit them every few months as she had used to before Azad came. She had kept away in those seven months or so after Rehana’s wedding, to give her the time and the space to be happy she said, but after he left on the musim she started coming again, to keep her company and, Rehana suspected, to be on hand in case of a pregnancy. But there was no pregnancy, and as his absence lengthened, she abandoned her probing questions and made reassuring noises when Rehana lamented. It was she in the end who took things in hand. After nearly two years of Azad’s disappearance, with Aunt Mariam coming and going every few months, Rehana and Hassanali were still captive to their misery. So she stayed. Stayed on. She stayed from Mfungo Mosi until Mfungo Mosi, a whole year. She spent Muharram with them, Maulid Nabi, Miraj, Ramadhan, Sikukuu Ndogo and Sikukuu Kubwa. She even sang a satirical song about the guest who stays and stays until she is removed by force, inviting them to protest that her presence was no imposition.

  As always when she was around, and the passing of years seemed to make no dif
ference to her, she made everything about her hum and buzz. There were visitors, of course, and visits to be returned. They had the mattresses unpacked, the kapok dried in the sun to rid it of smells and bugs, and then repacked in new marekani calico. She had the windows in the yard repaired and the walls whitewashed. Hassanali grumbled at the expense but he smiled as he did so. It made the yard clean and new, and made the plants seem lush and shapely in contrast. Aunt Mariam started a business, frying samosa and bajia which she made to order for functions and some for Hassanali to sell in the shop. Fishermen turned up at the yard door with strings of fish for sale, and she argued and debated with them as if she intended buying enough for a banquet rather than the handful they needed to accompany their rice or cassava or bananas. But the fishermen still came the next day, setting up a clamour by the yard door and sometimes handing over a fish without being asked, just for the pleasure of bargaining with Aunt Mariam.

  Rehana could not stay in bed while all this was going on, she did not even want to. Aunt Mariam moved into her room with her, and bustled her out of bed at the same time as she got up, charming her irresistably into activity. She asked Rehana to read her a few pages of the Koran every day, because her eyes were going now, and she had never really been able to manage the big suras for herself, and she, Rehana, was such a good reader. At the age of ten Rehana could read the Koran from beginning to end, and some of it she knew by heart. (Although soon after that age she had to stop attending classes as she began to bleed and was therefore at peril.) Aunt Mariam persuaded Rehana to make dresses for her, as she used to for herself, and then praised the results to such an extent that other people wanted dresses made too. Finally, she persuaded Hassanali that it was time to think of taking a wife. She didn’t say so, and perhaps she didn’t even think it, but a wife for Hassanali would also be company for Rehana, and would lift both of them out of the muddle they had sunk into. She knew exactly the person, she told Hassanali, whenever he was ready, though it was best not to wait too long to decide. ‘I would marry you myself,’ she told Hassanali, ‘if I didn’t have so many other proposals from rich bachelors to think about.’

  So Malika came, and brought happiness to Hassanali and allowed their lives to change. Rehana learned to think of Azad as a mistake she had made. She had no means to do anything about that mistake. She could try to have the marriage ended, but what would be the point? Time was against her. It was ten years since their mother died, and she was twenty-nine years old. Old. And there she was, Malika, the spinach all cleaned and now starting on dressing the fish, humming her lullaby or whatever it was, probably thinking of what she and Hassanali would be doing to each other when he came in for his rest. For now that Malika was there, he had taken to shutting the shop for a couple of hours after lunch, for a rest. It made Rehana smile to herself, even though she also felt envious of them. She rose to her feet and held the finished dress out away from her, turning it round to see that all was well. She felt some satisfaction at the thought of the woman who would come later in the afternoon to collect the dress she had brought to her for making. She thought she would be pleased. She folded the dress and sat down again, and as she did so she felt the book she had taken from the wounded man bump against her thigh. She could not believe that she had thought he was Azad, the man who taught her longing and loathing in equal measure, and taught her to loathe herself even more than him. He is not coming back, thank God, because what would she do if he turned up? What was she to do with the mzungu’s book? She couldn’t even read the words it was written in, and it was certain to be in his language. She couldn’t throw it away now, because the man who collected their rubbish for burning always rummaged to see if there was anything worth saving for sale, and when he found the book would take it to the government European and report them as thieves, in case of a reward or a handout. She could bury it, although if that was discovered it would look like sorcery or the malicious fantasy of a disturbed woman. She would have to carry it around like a burden, hiding it until discovery, or until her death, when people would mock her for her petty spinsterish pilferings.

  4 Pearce

  THEY SAT ON THE veranda after a supper of goat-stew and rice. Burton, the manager of the estate at Bondeni, had come to meet the invalid and make acquaintance. He was a thick-set man, with tangled black hair and a sternly trimmed moustache. The care of the trimming made him seem fussy, Martin thought. In his baggy clothes, he looked lumpy and perhaps unwell, but had looked worse when he arrived in his khakis. Since sunset, they had been steadily consuming, gin and lime juice for Burton, Scotch and water for Frederick and Martin. He kept pace with them for a while, although without their thirst and relish, and drank so as not to appear unfriendly or tiresome. Once they were well set in their bickering conversation about the future of the Empire, their voices raised as they became heated, Frederick lost interest in topping up Martin’s glass and left him to his own devices, only calling upon him now and then to take sides with him on some issue or another.

  Burton wanted no allies, quite sure that the future for British possessions in Africa was the gradual decline and disappearance of the African population, and its replacement by European settlers. It would happen inevitably, unavoidably, in his firmly-held opinion, so long as events were left to themselves and there was no interference from busybody officials, or at least not obstructive interference of the kind that prattled on about responsibility for the welfare of the native.

  Martin thought there was something staged about the exchanges, Englishmen in the colonies talking seriously about public issues. Burton’s voice even became crisper, raised in register, precise with authority. It could have been for his benefit, but perhaps it was also for their own, to make themselves feel significant and present in the world. Never mind the loneliness or the servants or the illnesses or the nagging anxiety about being where they were and doing what they were doing. There was the world to worry about. It was the way men talked after a drink or two, suppressing the petty discomforts of every day with talk of grand affairs.

  ‘This continent has the potential to be another America,’ Burton said, speaking with stubborn emphasis, as if he expected to be received sceptically. ‘But not as long as the Africans are here. Look at this region. The niggers here have been corrupted by the Arabs, by their religion and their . . . their perfumed courtesies. The Arabs themselves do not amount to much. They are mostly bluster, not capable of a day’s work unless their lives depended on it or there is a bit of loot and pillage in it. Before we came this way, this was pirate country. When the winds were right, the Arabs came raiding all along the coast, kidnapping and looting at will, making slaves. When the winds turned they sped back to their caves to play with their booty. The sooner they are impoverished and expelled, the better.’

  ‘Maybe so,’ Frederick said, conceding the point about the Arabs, but looking for mischief. Martin had already heard enough to understand that Burton said the ugly things and Frederick deliberately provoked him into excess. ‘But you’ll have to admit they brought a bit of order to these parts. You’ll have to admit that.’

  Burton took his time, swishing the gin in the glass contentedly, and when he spoke his voice was mild, resisting Frederick’s prodding. ‘Despite the pretence of order that the Sultan of Zanzibar represents, without our presence here this would return to pirate country in one season. The savage African in the interior, now that’s a different animal altogether. He is doomed, what’s left of him. He will just pine and starve and die off in the encounter with civilisation. No need to bleat to me about morality or responsibility. It’s inevitable, it’s scientific. There is no cruelty in this outcome, and it has happened everywhere, again and again, in exactly the same way.’

  ‘I’m inclined to think you derelict in your duty as a servant of the Empire,’ Frederick said in a pompous voice that was meant to signal that he was not serious about the charge. ‘To tell you the truth, I’m inclined to think you derelict in humanity. I do have a responsibility t
o the natives, to keep an eye on them and guide them slowly into obedience and orderly labour.’

  ‘That is precisely what I mean, obstructive interference. The more we do for them,’ Burton said, his voice rising again, ‘the more they will demand, without having to work for any of it. In time they’ll expect us to feed them while they carry on with their barbarisms. They will hate us and still expect us to have their welfare as our obligation. They will see it as their entitlement. You won’t get much orderly labour out of them, not left to themselves.’

  ‘That is why I said guide them,’ Frederick said. ‘That is our responsibility.’

  ‘Force them, you mean,’ Burton said. ‘You can only make them work by coercion and manipulation, not by making them understand that there is something moral in working and achieving. For us. They won’t understand that. That’s why they still wear skins and live in huts made of leaves and dung. They are quite content with that, and will kill to defend that way of life. You can talk as much as you like about responsibility, but if you want prosperity and order in Africa you have to have European settlement. Then we can turn this into another America.’

  ‘We’ll have to murder to achieve that,’ Frederick said, glaring, and then took a large gulp of his Scotch. ‘Though the way you’re talking, it doesn’t seem that you think that is such a terrible thing.’

  ‘No, yours is a position deficient in intellectual manhood,’ Burton replied amiably. Martin saw that Burton had slipped away from Frederick’s provocation and was now provoking him in his turn. ‘We are already murdering them. We murder them to make them obey us. In reality we simply have to leave them to their own devices without interference and they will do their dying themselves.’