Desertion

by Abdulrazak Gurnah

  ‘I came to thank you for your kindness,’ Martin said. ‘I am Martin.’

  The shopkeeper nodded to show that he had understood and gave his name, Hassanali, and Martin nodded back. The wakil nodded too, approving these exchanges. Perhaps it wasn’t what he had expected but Martin guessed that for a man as worldly as he took the wakil to be, there was always method in everything, and the possibility of some advantage in anything. Mashaallah, mashaallah, the old men said, marvelling at Martin’s Arabic. He loved the way his halting knowledge of the language had always won him friends in his travels, and now here too. He was not at a loss to understand why. After a few minutes of such cordial exchanges, Martin was seated on the bench with the old men, who made room for him when normally, perhaps, they spread themselves out more luxuriously, and submitted himself to an interrogation. The bench was in the shade and a breeze blew from the direction of the mosque, but Martin felt himself sweating heavily. The wakil waved his umbrella furiously at the crowd, and each time he waved another small section of the crowd dispersed. Martin saw that Hassanali was reluctant to leave them and serve his customers, and that the wakil stayed nearby, leaning on his umbrella in front of the bench, keeping an eye on things, reluctant to give up charge of him. The self-assured craggy-faced man with a stubbly grey beard led the proceedings. He touched Martin lightly on the thigh and told him his name was Hamza bin Masuud, and this one was Ali Kipara and that one there was Jumaane.

  ‘So,’ Hamza said, speaking slowly in Arabic so that everyone should understand, ‘Mashaallah, you have amazed us, o sheikh mzungu. I have travelled from Lindi to Kismayu and even to Aden, and I never came upon a mzungu who spoke Arabic or Kiswahili. If you had spoken when we found you a few days ago, looking like a corpse, and had spoken to us in Arabic, and had spoken thus at that dangerous hour, I think we would have taken you for a servant of the infernal one. Tell us, ya Martin, how has this come to be and what brought you this way, walking in rags and so close to death. Tell us.’

  It could have been an opening to a new episode in One Thousand and One Nights an invitation to begin a tale. So he did, keeping everything brief although he could see that his listeners had plenty of time and were eager for more details. He had been travelling with a hunting expedition in the interior, but they wanted to go even further to the west, so he then decided to come down to the coast.

  On his own?

  No, no, but on the way he had been separated from his guides and had had to get here on his own.

  Who were these guides? They must have robbed him and abandoned him. Were they savages?

  Somali.

  A Msomali never gets lost. They must have robbed you. You are very lucky to be with us, ya Martin. God looked after you, say alhamdulillah, say thank you God. And your health? Is it restored? Your brothers and your children will be very relieved to hear that.

  It was the shopkeeper he had come to thank, who was now back in his shop, glancing towards their conclave with some anxiety. He saw Hassanali call for someone inside, and saw the shadow of a woman in the gloom of the doorway at the back of the shop. He wondered if that was the woman Frederick had said was feeding him some kind of muck when they arrived to rescue him. A while later, when Martin was politely listening to tales of other wanderers who had been lost and how they had found their way home, he saw the woman in the shadow of the door again and saw Hassanali rise to collect a white porcelain jar from her, which he passed on to the wakil who passed it to Martin. It was lime juice, he could smell its freshness. Only one jar came out and Martin hesitated, but the wakil waved him on officiously. Drink, drink. He offered the jar to the men on the bench, all of whom wordlessly refused, making graceful gestures of gratitude. So Martin drank the lime juice greedily, and was himself grateful for the contentment it gave him. At that moment, the muadhin began the call for the noon prayers, and the old men and most of what was left of the crowd started on their way towards the mosque or home. Hassanali came down from his perch and invited Martin to join them for lunch. Nothing very lavish, only their usual midday meal, and the wakil too can stay if he wishes. Martin protested that he had put Hassanali and his household to enough trouble, that he had simply come to thank them for their kindness and not to impose on them further, that he was already too deeply in their debt. No need lunch, the wakil said in English. This man asking good politeness. No sir, lunch with DO.

  But Martin wanted to stay, and had made his reluctant flourishes out of courtesy, to give the shopkeeper the chance to withdraw. Would they have enough food? He guessed the instruction would have gone out some time back when the woman first came to the door. He wanted to stay because of the way Frederick told the story of his rescue from their hands, his suspicion of them when Martin knew there was nothing for them to rob him of, the disdain with which he imagined Frederick treated them. The story of how Frederick returned to shout at them and shake them filled him with embarrassed anguish. How he had raised his riding crop at the shopkeeper and said to him: If you’re lying to me, you black dog, I’ll whip the skin off your back. Frederick himself had told the tale, making mock-thunder and terrible operatic faces, standing up on the veranda to demonstrate, right hand raised, still clutching his cigar, while the left held a glass. The buffoonery on the veranda may have been an exaggeration, but Martin was sure the ugly threats were not. He wanted to stay and do something that was uncomfortable to him, to sit with them in their modest house and eat their modest food, and struggle to find conversation with them. Not to shake hands and leave a few coins, thank you chaps, but to show them that he felt nothing but gratitude, no suspicion and no disdain. So in the end he sent the wakil back with a message to Frederick that Hassanali the shopkeeper would personally deliver him home later in the afternoon.

  Hassanali shut the shop with deliberate care, or perhaps was taking his time in the great heat, and then he took his guest into the house through the backyard door. He called out and pushed open the door, and ushered his guest into the yard. There was no one in sight. The yard was white and green, whitewashed walls and green windows and lush bushes growing in pots: roses and lavender and a pale green bush with leaves like geraniums whose scent, he knew, would fill the night air. On his right was a thatched awning on poles, with a mat in interlocking patterns of blue, green and pink spread out underneath it. To his surprise, the food was already laid out on the mat, and covered with a cream cloth to keep off the flies and dust. How had they prepared for an additional eater so quickly? Hassanali showed him the washroom at the end of the yard, which to Martin’s relief was dark but clean. He had no idea what they would have managed to get together in the hour or so since his invitation to lunch, but in such matters the thought was weightier than whatever splendour was on offer. He thought he had smelled rice and fish, and there was bound to be fruit. He had never seen such a variety of fruit as there was in this town.

  Hassanali invited him to sit on the mat, smiled to see him remove his sandals first and then went to the washroom himself, while Martin sat on his own, conscious of being watched by the woman who must be inside, looking out at him from the gloom of one of the windows. When Hassanali came back out from the washroom, his grey-flecked moustache glistening with moisture, he went inside the house and returned followed by two women. His first thought was that they were his wives. Hassanali pointed at him and said his name, a smile on his face. The younger woman smiled too, but the other one looked at him with beautiful glowing brown eyes and did not smile. That was what he saw first, those eyes.

  ‘I hope it will not offend you if we eat together,’ she said to him in Arabic, correctly, not unfriendly. ‘We always do.’

  ‘This is a great kindness, thank you,’ Martin said.

  They sat down on the mat, Martin struggling with his knees and ankles and feet which seemed to jut out at all angles while his hosts seemed effortlessly comfortable with their joints. When the cloth was removed, he saw a platter of rice, and a variety of other dishes served separately: spinach, fried fish,
a vegetable stew, potatoes cooked with rosemary, and flat bread sprinkled with sesame seeds. Hassanali poured water from a brass kettle for Martin to wash his hands and then offered the same service to the other two. They all ate from the same platter, using their hands and reaching for handfuls of the side dishes as they wished.

  ‘It’s delicious,’ Martin said after a mouthful. No one responded so he too kept quiet and concentrated all his faculties on making as little mess as he could. He was distracted by the closeness of the women’s hands and wished he could glance up at the elder of the two wives.

  Once the initial rush was past, Hassanali interrupted his rapid and efficient consumption with conversation. His Arabic was halting, and he had to make many appeals for help to his sister Rehana (ah!), who had a gift for the language, as their father did. When Hassanali appealed to Rehana for assistance, Martin too had a long look at her. She had pulled the shawl off her head and thrown it across her shoulders, like a scarf, so it would not get soiled in the food. At times Rehana had to take over the conversation for a moment or two when Hassanali faltered, and Martin gave her his full attention with a kind of disbelief at the anguishing beauty of her eyes and the delicate movements of her face. She did not smile much, and did not look down or away when he stared at her while she spoke, so he did not either. He felt a charge growing between them, and looked away reluctantly in the end, in case he gave offence. He guessed that they all saw him staring at her, and felt his colour rising at his discourtesy. What would they think of him? To go into these people’s house and stare at the women.

  ‘Was it you who was giving me food when they came?’ he asked her, starting again what he had really come here to do. Oh my God, get out of here if you can’t behave with courtesy. She nodded. He continued: ‘I came to thank you all for your kindness, and to apologise for the suspicion that fell on you. It was a human thing you did, and I am for ever in your debt for your kindness . . .’

  ‘No, no, apologies are due from us,’ Hassanali interrupted. We did not even come to ask after you, for fear of causing offence to your government brother, when keeping away was a greater offence to God and the kindness He asks that we extend to each other. We did not know how we would speak to you either. So we kept away out of fear of the angry mzungu when we really wanted to know that you were recovered and getting better.’

  And so on, in a happy few minutes of generosity and mellifluous courtesies. But Martin was all the time aware of Rehana beside him, and turned to look at her at every opportunity. She listened to Hassanali’s enthusiastic friendliness with an ironic and mildly disbelieving smile. How could he find out about her? What did he want from her? Was she married? Was it right? How could he see her again? Did he dare? Stop this ridiculous nonsense. What had come over him? If nothing else, just to see her, to look at her and watch her face move and her eyes glow, to take pleasure in seeing her. When it was time to say goodbye, he said: I hope I’ll see you again soon, but he said that in a way which included all of them, when what he really wanted was to say it to her.

  An Interruption

  I DON’T KNOW HOW it would have happened. The unlikeliness of it defeats me. Yet I know it did happen, that Martin and Rehana became lovers. Imagination fails me and that fills me with sorrow. I had thought that even without knowing the details of their affair I would be able to get to the truth of it, for imagination is a kind of truth. I do not mean that as a Romantic solipsism: it is only what I am able to imagine that is true. I mean that even with very incomplete knowledge, we can imagine what might have been, and how it might have come about and proceeded, but I find that in the case of Martin and Rehana I cannot settle on a sequence of events that seems likeliest.

  Or perhaps I am reluctant to imagine it, as I have found myself doing with the events that preceded this moment, out of a squeamish reluctance to intrude into affairs that could only have been constructed out of unlikely subtleties. Perhaps I am reluctant out of fear that I will find myself unable to resist repeating the cliché of the miraculous in imagining such an encounter. I don’t want to find myself saying they fell in love as soon as they caught sight of each other and the rest followed, that they looked into each other’s eyes and into each other’s souls and abandoned every other demand that circumstances made on them. Can that kind of thing be true? Do such things happen? And even if they do, how can they be written? The predictability of such a banal explanation makes me squirm with disbelief. It’s our age. We think we know that the miracle is a lie and we always look for the hidden or suppressed explanation. We would rather have greed and lust as motive than love. We are reassured by slyly mocking references to our squalor, our smells and our expulsions, than to our trembling modesty, or to our quivering desire for affection. We are not even allowed souls any more, and our secret inner spaces are merely sites of unresolved turmoil, raw with throbbing wounds.

  None the less, whether I am able to imagine it or not, I know that Rehana Zakariya and Martin Pearce became lovers. I have no choice but to try and give an account of how their affair might have happened. Martin arrived back at Frederick’s house, his head pounding from the glare and the heat. His mind was turning on Rehana’s fluid face, the movements of her features and the complicated depth in her dark eyes. He shook hands with Hassanali, who had insisted on accompanying him to the door, and thanked him for his hospitality and for his kindness. He had not, after all, been able to hand over the gift of money that he had borrowed from Frederick, sensing that such a gesture would cause offence, or at least a scene, and in either case would diminish the generosity of their hospitality. It would have made him seem petty and mean-spirited, as if he thought he had found a value in money that was commensurate with human kindness. He wondered if he should do it now, between men who understood the regrettable value of the commodity in this imperfect life. It was not repayment for their generosity, but a generous gesture in itself, a reciprocal kindness. But something unmistakable in Hassanali’s manner prevented him, something sensitive and fragile.

  ‘Thank you for visiting us. You’re welcome any time. Our house is yours,’ Hassanali said, and then the glare swallowed him.

  That was how it started. He could not let matters rest there. He could not say to himself that Hassanali and his neighbours had been dutiful to their sense of responsibility and had looked after him as their custom and humanity required. He could not say: consider that in my gratitude for your succour, I will not fail to return your kindness to someone else in need, and thus the human chain will have one tiny link added to it. Nor did he remind himself that he, in turn, had done more than was required of him as one of a suzerain people. He had gone to offer his thanks for their dutiful care of him and his regrets for the clumsy and unnecessary suspicion and abuse they suffered. That should have been that, and Hassanali and his neighbours would have returned to their medieval niceties and Martin would have continued with his convalescence while waiting for a ship to take him home. (If he had been a medieval prince, he would have sent a purse of gold and jewels after his safe arrival among his subjects, and he would have become a legend in these parts.)

  Only he could not forget her. Perhaps he said to himself, I cannot resist, I cannot stop myself. As he thought about her, his yearning (it very quickly became that) picked up strength with every recollection. There were moments in the days and nights that followed when he shut his eyes and deliberately evoked her, and felt her as if she was very close to him, felt her gaze on him and a slight tremble of her breathing on his face. In any case, he had not been grateful enough for their kindness, and it was smug and complacent of him to think that a single visit was gratitude enough for the open-handed welcome they offered him. Hassanali had been insistent on this. Our house is yours. They would think him ill-mannered and self-important if he did not make another visit.

  A few days after the first time, he went back to the shop, to sit with the old men who were flattered to have the mzungu come back for a chat, and called the coffee-seller over to serve
their guest. They were not used to such simple and unexpected courtesy from a mzungu, that he should call by for conversation and a sip of coffee. They were not used to Europeans. The ones who had lived in the town or passed through in recent years had had no time for such trifles, going about their important affairs with stern absorption, impatient of delays, impelled by some desire which made them intimidating. The ones a few of the townspeople had seen in Mombasa seemed the same, deliberate and purposeful, always watchful, easy to irritate. This one was unhurried, was happy to listen and spoke casually, making conversation in his unexpected Arabic.