Desertion

by Abdulrazak Gurnah

  Perhaps Martin had had the craftiness to send Hamis with a gift of fish and bananas to Hassanali’s house a day or two before his visit, announcing himself an intimate of the family, or at least one in its debt, and thus making possible another invitation to visit. Hassanali watched jealously from his perch in the shop, straining to hear the old men’s incorrigible chatter, and then invited his mzungu to lunch again, to show those chatterbox sages whose friend Martin really was. That was how Martin saw Rehana again, and then found a way and opportunity to approach her. But would Hassanali really have invited him again? Once was impulsive hospitality, a generous gesture that the moment called for, twice would have been complicated and calculated, like a design. Even if there had been a second invitation, because the generous impulse had not yet worn off, how would Martin have approached her? How would he have found an opportunity to say anything to her that would have led to such an unimaginable outcome?

  He wrote her a letter declaring his passion for her and arranging a meeting. He wrote in Arabic, labouring with the unfamiliar script, because although he spoke Arabic after a fashion, he had no practice in writing in it. A love letter in Arabic, or perhaps in any language, required a command of convention and metaphor which was quite unlikely to be within Martin’s grasp of the language. But he had spent all that time in Egypt, and he probably knew Edward Lane’s Modern Egyptians and his translations of One Thousand and One Nights, in both of which he would have found many hints and examples on how to proceed in matters of love. This was not Egypt though, nor the fantasy land of Haroun al-Rashid, nor was this a matter involving glittering princesses of Persia and China, and so Lane’s florid prose might not perhaps strike the right note. None the less, Martin wrote a letter in Arabic, and however clumsy the effort, it signalled his intent and purpose. To a woman’s guardians, intercepted correspondence was conclusive evidence of improper advances, and therefore the danger of discovery confirmed the seriousness of the desires the letter expressed. It was, furthermore, a time-honoured method of conducting a courtship where casual meetings were not easy, especially among the wealthy and the literate, of course, but even among the less fortunate. It was the kind of transaction whose meaning was impossible to mistake, even if you could not read a word of the letter. Perhaps Martin Pearce would have said to himself again and again, I cannot resist, I cannot stop myself. Oh God, why will you not teach me restraint?

  In any case, the intrigue proved irresistible for Rehana, who had found herself unable to stop thinking about the Englishman. She replied cautiously but not discouragingly, waiting for a second letter or a third before agreeing to a meeting.

  Hamis was the messenger, of course. Martin had taken trouble over Hamis, addressed him courteously, flattered him politely for avocations upon his person and rewarded him generously (with Frederick’s money) for various necessary errands. He knew how susceptible powerless people were to such banal gestures, how much they valued appearance of generosity and humility. So after eating at the house for the second time, Martin sent another gift of tea and fruit to the family, and when Hamis delivered that, he also slipped a square of paper folded small into Rehana’s hand. Or if Hamis took exception to this request to be a messenger of passion, as some men do however lowly their circumstances because they see such services as degrading, maybe the cook would have done it. In fact, cooks were ideal vehicles for such traffic, because theirs was women’s work, carried out in parts of the house where men who could employ cooks did not always bother to visit and where carefully folded notes could be transferred safely. And because their work was unmanly, it made them seem less threatening to women’s virtue. Perhaps it was this appearance which made some cooks so ferociously aggressive and foul-mouthed.

  Or the wakil! No, the wakil would not have done it. He was too respectable for that, and neither Martin Pearce nor Rehana were important enough for such a risk. Discovery would have been too damaging for a man whose profession depended on an appearance of integrity and propriety, even though everyone believed that lawyers had none. Nor would he have had the access to the house and the women that a servant would, and would not have been able to deliver the letters to Rehana. It had to be Hamis or the cook.

  How would an Englishman, so visible in that place, have found a ruse to do any of these things? The people he was among would have been curious of how he went about his affairs. They would have kept their eye on him. They would probably have talked about the unimportant things he did which they found unusual and strange. How could he have done anything so unusual without the whole world knowing his every move? Perhaps the whole world did know and Martin did not care. Frederick knew, because Martin told him after his second visit. Frederick remembered the beautiful woman who had chased him out of the house, and nodded cautiously at Martin’s enthusiastic report. He resisted asking if Martin had lost his mind, but he did say that he hoped he knew what he was doing. Martin explained that he wanted Frederick to know so that he would not be embarrassed. Nothing may come of it, but he had written a note to her, and he wanted Frederick to know in case of trouble.

  ‘So long as this Residence and this office are not involved,’ Frederick said. ‘Take care, old chap. These characters take such things seriously. Well, everyone takes such things seriously. Let me tell you a story about a fellow in India. He got into a situation like this, a local beauty caught his eye and he went along with it. Soon he was in it so deep that it needed a considerable settlement to extricate him from the rage of her relatives. The Divisional Secretary was not the slightest bit amused, and the fellow was transferred with the ludicrous scandal preceding him. And do not waste your sympathy on the local beauty. Aside from the fat gratuity she earned for her family, she promptly made eyes at a tea-planter sahib and went off to keep house for him in the hills.’

  ‘Yes,’ Martin said.

  Would Frederick have dared lecture Pearce in this way? Would it have exceeded some latitude that gentlemen, even of their unaristocratic, middle-class ilk, have allowed themselves? In any case, that evening (perhaps) Frederick talked for the first time about his wife Christabel, Christie, who had gone back home from India, refusing to return. Indian voices grated on her nerves. He told her native voices grated on everyone, but she would not hear of it. She said they made her unwell. Those grating, whining voices, made her want to scratch the inside of her head with her nails. And she thought the empire was evil, making them greedy and cruel to those pathetic people who could not know better. ‘She is a poet,’ Frederick said, ‘and something in her revolted at the way the rigours of empire degraded finer feelings, the way it made us into charlatans and bullies, as she put it. Brought out the worst in us, she said. She would not relent,’ he said, and nodded tersely. After a moment’s silence he added: ‘I don’t know if she might not be right about that charlatans and bullies.’

  But still, even if there was a way of doing it, what would have made Martin reckless enough to want to begin an affair with a woman like Rehana? These were not sophisticated and worldly people, Rehana and Hassanali and Malika, not aristocratic idlers whose indiscretions were screened by luxuriant gardens and high walls. They lived behind a shop, under scrutiny of their neighbours, all of them squeezed up against each other and in the grip of an anxious ethos about women’s sexual honour. The women only went out to visit each other or to go to the market when they had to, or to go to a function: to a wedding or a reading after a funeral, to commiserate and congratulate a neighbour after childbirth, or to wheedle a loan in time of need. They were not people who had any knowledge or interest in clandestine love affairs, and who punished each other mercilessly for any indiscretions in such matters, with ridicule and shame and worse.

  This was 1899, not the age of Pocahontas when a romantic fling with a savage princess could be described as an adventure. The imperial world observed some rigidity about sexual proprieties. The empire had become an extension of British civic respectability, and while that allowed for some high spirits and adventure, it no lo
nger included dalliances with subject floosies, at least not from its officers, at least not officially. There were wives and mothers to consider, and missionaries, and public opinion and dignity and the effect of everything on commodity prices on the Stock Exchange. Martin Pearce was not a naïve young sailor from a rural backwater or a swaggering urchin emboldened by imperial pride, who was overwhelmed by the strangeness of his surroundings or was touched into impetuousness by the beauty of an exotic jewel or a muscular amazon. What would have made an Englishman of his background – university, colonial official, a scholar – begin something like that with the sister of a shopkeeper in a small town on the East African coast?

  Perhaps he wasn’t the one who began it at all. Perhaps she was the one who followed up their first meeting. Rehana could not help smiling when Hassanali came to tell them that he had invited Martin for lunch again. She smiled because he was so pleased with himself. Mwengereza wetu kaja kututizama, Hassanali said, smiling back. Our Englishman has come to pay us a visit. While Malika hastily removed the washing from the line and swept the yard and sluiced the room of necessity, Rehana washed lentils and salad to extend the dishes on offer and make the lunch seem suitable for a guest. He sat with them so comfortably, friendly and at ease, treating them as benefactors to whom he was obliged, looking at her with unsettling frankness. She had not expected anything like that. After that second visit with them, and his friendly gifts, keeping his notebook from him seemed like a kind of malice. Two days after his visit, in the afternoon, she set off with a tense heart for the government mzungu’s house. She was tense out of fear of the government mzungu and his accusations, but she was also tense in case there was an embarrassment, in case the an she had come to see rebuffed her or treated her slightingly. She had considered whether to ask Hassanali to accompany her, but she thought she would do this better on her own. She was won over by Pearce’s modest manner, and she thought he would not make a fuss about the notebook, would take it back quietly and keep the matter to himself. She also wanted to see the immodest longing in the way he looked at her one more time.

  When she got to the government house, she found the office was shut and the front door was bolted from inside. She followed the wall round until she came to a garden door, which was only pushed to. She stepped into the garden, calling out hodi, announcing herself. It was a shaded yard, with a young palm tree in the centre and some bushes along the walls. While the street outside trembled with the heat, the shaded yard was cool and fragrant even that early in the afternoon. Across the yard from the house and screened with a trellis of flowering vine were the servants’ rooms and the kitchen. There was no one in sight. She called out again, thinking she would go after that if there was no answer. After a moment, his astonished face appeared at an upstairs window.

  Perhaps she thought she had nothing to lose, that all that remained for her was a lifetime in that bright yard behind the shop, making clothes for women who only paid her a pittance, or only offered her affection and promises in return. That does not sound so intolerable, really, not for a woman who had lived her whole life in the back of a shop in that town, and who was used to women’s lives such as hers. Perhaps she was much more reckless or courageous or wilful than I imagine her. Azad’s abandonment had made her stubborn, less sensitive to what others thought best for her, slightly more indifferent to opinion. Men left while women stayed behind and died after a lifetime of wheedling and scraping. So when she reached out with the notebook, and Martin took it and then grinned, and then after that held out his hand to invite her into the house, she took his hand and followed him in.

  What did Burton think about it all? What did Burton have to say about Pearce? Would one beachcomber have felt a stab of sympathy for another? He would have seen it as an amusing and uncomplicated affair of lust and its gratification, perhaps, and would have thought less of Martin for his lack of restraint and discretion, for making a fuss about such an ordinary matter. That would have been at first. Later he would have sneered at the ardent self-delusion of such a love-affair, no doubt. The man has gone too far, he would have said. He really has gone too far this time. Did the affair result in a quarrel between Rehana and Hassanali? It must have done. He must have berated her for losing all sense of what is proper or bearable. He must have ranted at her for the embarrassment she had brought upon him. He must have suspected that she had lost her mind.

  What I know from my brother Amin is that it did happen, that Rehana Zakariya and Martin Pearce became lovers, that Martin Pearce left for Mombasa, and that a short while later, under pretext of going to visit relatives, Rehana followed him there. She lived with him in an apartment he rented in the leafy district near where the hospital is now, which was where Europeans lived at that time. Martin and Rehana lived openly together, for a while, until he left to return home. At some point, Pearce came to his senses and made his way home.

  My brother Amin knew this story because it had consequences for him, but he could not tell me much about it for various reasons, the most important of which was that I was not there when he could have told me. He could have written about it in a letter, but he chose not to mention it, not for many years. There are some things you cannot simply write in a letter, that require intimacy, that need an encounter. Then in a letter some months ago he mentioned Jamila for the first time since I left. I had thought often about Jamila and Amin and what had happened between them and what it still meant. In some ways, his silence about her made me understand things I would not have thought about him, and made me think about obduracy and anguish. When I wrote to tel him about Grace, he replied to say that my news filled him with sadness and made him think of Jamila. That was the first time he mentioned Jamila in any of his letters, the first time in all that age since I left home, and the suddenness with which he brought her back into our lives made me want to write their story, Jamila and Amin. Perhaps it was a way of not thinking about Grace. I don’t know. I had time on my hands. I had no one to placate and wheedle affection from, and I wanted to think about Amin, to bring him closer, to remember the things that were now lost to me.

  At that time, I thought there was something tragic in Amin’s life, a profound sorrow, whereas my own life and its glooms were the result of mismanagements and timidity. In any case, the impulse to write their story did not go away, and after putting the idea off for some while, I decided to make a start. But when I began to think about these events and that life, I found I had to give an account of how they might have started. I could not begin without imagining how Rehana and Martin might have come together, and all I had of that were a few scraps of gossip and scandal. I decided that the Englishman’s first appearance was where I would start. Now that I have arrived at the critical moment, I find myself suddenly hard up against what I cannot fully imagine.

  There is, as you can see, an I in this story, but it is not a story about me. It is one about all of us, about Farida and Amin and our parents, and about Jamila. It is about how one story contains many and how they belong not to us but are part of the random currents of our time, and about how stories capture us and entangle us for all time.

  PART II

  5 Amin and Rashid

  ACROSS THE ROAD FROM them was a huge crumbling house. The outer rendering had eroded in places and exposed the coral and earth filling. The wooden shutters on some of the windows hung on by a miracle, and tattered rags of cloth fluttered in the heat and gestured towards privacy. Sometimes fishing nets hung out of the windows. The men in the family were fishermen, and sometimes brought their nets home and hung them out of the windows for some reason. The crowd of people who lived in the house went in and out without seeming to notice anything precarious about the building, and the chickens which roosted in all corners and angles of the stairs did not seem concerned either. To Rashid the house smelled of ruin, and his senses could already anticipate the clouds of dust as the floors collapsed in on themselves. It also smelled of fish-scales and chicken-droppings, and of human breath, like t
he inside of something living. It had no electricity, and after a few steps into the gloom it felt as vast as a cave. When it rained hard in the musim, he expected the house to be washed away, but it wasn’t. It stood like that, year after year, on the point of collapse, obdurate like history.

  Their house was light and airy, because their mother liked it that way. The first thing she did when she came home was to open all the windows to let in the breeze, regardless of anyone’s wishes, all the time asking questions, and getting everyone on the hop. Do I have to do everything in this house? She liked it like that too, a bit of confusion and chaos around her, at least for a while.

  There were three of them: Rashid, Amin and Farida. Rashid was two years younger than his brother Amin, who himself was two years younger than their eldest sister Farida. Two years, one month and twelve days. Amin liked to number, to count and chant the days to annoy Rashid, when such things still had the power to irritate and diminish. Two years, one month and twelve days, and it will always remain like that, whatever you do, whatever you say, for ever and ever and ever. At some age, Amin could say that again and again, tirelessly and pitilessly, for ever and ever and ever, and for some reason, Rashid found this chanting painful, until in the end he would throw himself on the floor and sob. Then Amin would fall silent and watch his brother sobbing, awed by the depth of his anguish. That such pain should result from his teasing words, that such heaving sobs were even possible in Rashid’s little body. He would pat him gently to calm him down, and sit beside him and soothe him, smiling at the sublime drama.