Desertion

by Abdulrazak Gurnah

  It was a wonder to see them together, his mother and father. He was thin and tall, and she was ample and getting ampler with the years. Perhaps he was not tall compared to the well-proportioned giants in other places. It was a small place with small people, and he was tall for there. His face was thin too, made more ascetic by the greying beard he trimmed to a point. His shirt-sleeves were always buttoned-down, and in everything he did he seemed measured and neat. It was an appearance which could not possibly be true all the time, but that was the impression he gave. He walked with a slight stoop and often wore a slight frown, but when he spoke his voice was clement and his face was on the brink of a smile. Some people called him Msafi, clean, especially as the word had a vague rhyme with his name. In another place he would, perhaps, have been called fastidious.

  She, on the other hand, was short and plump, more likely than not to look dishevelled and hurried, straggles of her stubborn hair evading the pins that were meant to keep it in check. Her manner often seemed overstated, her look of surprise too wide-eyed, her indignations over-acted. She bubbled with schemes, with unfinished business, but she also had a gift for listening. When she was at home, all conversation and observation was inevitably addressed at her, everything focused and dispersed through her. She knew exactly the moment to stop what she was doing and give someone her full attention. People called her Mwana, because she was the youngest in her family. Mwana means child. Her real name was Nuru, which means Light, although now only Feisal called her that.

  At the age of nineteen, Amin duly enrolled at the teaching college, which itself had been established only a generation or so before, to prepare for a career as a teacher. One among his peers at school had been sent to study medicine in England by parents who could afford the expense, others were sent to study in India, in Egypt and perhaps elsewhere. Several others had dispersed to seek a future among the network of family and relatives up and down the coast and in the interior. That was how it always was. People got up and left when the opportunity came. But Amin did not look for opportunities. He did not wish to leave. He had made his decision, and had every anticipation of being a teacher for the rest of his life. Perhaps it was a way of thinking which is only possible in small places, and perhaps the world has become more restless than it was at that time.

  Farida too had made a decision about her life. A couple of months after she returned from Mombasa, she apprenticed herself to a dressmaker in Vuga, Mrs Rodrigues, a Goan woman with pretensions to fashion because some of her customers were wives of the colonial officials. They only brought in repair work, adjusting hems and loosing waists, but their custom was enough to allow Mrs Rodrigues to write on her name-plate: By Appointment to Her Majesty’s Government. The bulk of her business was making dresses for all sorts, but the Europeans gave her prestige. Farida worked there in the mornings and afternoons and took work home to finish off in the evenings. She received no payment of any kind for the first six months, and only a pittance after that. Mrs Rodrigues, who was a quiet, smiling, soft-spoken woman with hard and inflexible opinions, told Farida that really she should be grateful for the advanced skills she was teaching her, and the quality of client she was introducing her to, and not to expect any payment at all until she was fully trained. The money that she gave her was done out of kindness. Did she not give her tea and a slice of cake every morning for gratis? Farida planned to start her own business when she was ready, and thought she had no choice but to put up with the meanness.

  Her mother Mwana loved sewing, and had her own sewing-machine, not an unusual acquisition in that time and that place. So she helped her with the tricky tasks that she brought home, sewing on the lace and ribbons, stitching the button-holes, and so on, crouched over the pool of light under the bulging forearm of her machine. It was recreation and a pleasure for Mwana, so she said to her daughter. Sometimes they worked late into the night because Farida had promised her employer to deliver the work the next day, and she could not bear the scolding that would follow if she failed. Her mother often complained of strain in her eyes.

  She worked for Mrs Rodrigues for three years. Every time she suggested leaving to take in her own work at home, Mrs Rodrigues talked her out of it, offering her more pay, frightening her with the risks. Farida allowed herself to be persuaded and stayed, but after three years she had learned enough to start taking in work at home. At first she did this for friends. They brought a picture cut out of a magazine and said they wanted a dress like that, and Farida would do her best, working on weekends or in the evenings. It took a long time to complete a dress, and the friends called round, and complained and chatted and no one minded. If the result of this labour was not exactly like the picture in the magazine, it none the less looked good, for Farida had a talent for cutting and sewing, and could study a picture and produce a dress not too unlike it in the end.

  The pace of the house was completely transformed when Farida started to work fro home. In the morning, Farida did not appear until after everyone had left, but when they came home at lunch-time, it was to find her firmly in charge. One by one they went to the kitchen to pay their respects, the mother to enquire and interfere, the father to hand over the fruit which it was his special task to buy on his way back from work, the brothers to sniff the pots greedily and get in the way. After lunch, everyone milled around helping. Then Feisal and Mwana retired for their afternoon rest, and Amin and Rashid went off to their consuming round of adolescent activities: sports, homework, wandering the streets, playing cards, and Farida got started for the day on her sewing work.

  It was at this time, when Farida was beginning to gather customers for her sewing, and Amin was confidently in his examination year for the School Certificate, and Rashid was following less assuredly in his wake, and Maalim Feisal had refused his first offer of a headmaster position, that Mwana collapsed at work and was advised to retire at the age of thirty-nine. She was diagnosed as suffering from glaucoma and suspected hypertension. She was distraught at the thought of how much trouble she was going to be to everybody, weeping silently and unexpectedly in company. ‘I will go blind and you will have to look after my useless body,’ she said. ‘O yallah, alhamdulillah.’

  They sat with her and comforted her, crying themselves because they too had no doubt that she would go blind. The doctor had only mentioned the possibility, but the horrific prognosis was like a curse to Mwana and her family. So their mother stayed at home and started again. She was irritable and becalmed because she did not have to juggle with complicated arrangements, but after a while she began to ease and slowly altered the tempo of her life. There were doctors to visit, a trip to Mombasa to consult a specialist, an operation to release the pressure in her eye. There were spectacles for short-sightedness, new diets, a medication regime, exercises, and life became pleasingly chaotic again if rather more subdued.

  When Rashid reached his final year at school, he was still talking big, to his friends and his brother, and to his parents. He had grown more stubborn and difficult with the years, and liked to think of himself as a bit of a dissenter. In his last year at school he would not stop talking about leaving. This way of thinking had crept up on him unawares, and made itself evident in the way he was unable to restrain the irritation and scorn for so much around him. It was the things he had come to know and the books he had read that gave him an idea of the world that was ampler than anything he saw in the lives they lived. This place was stifling him, he said: the social obsequiousness, the medieval religiosity, the historical mendacities. He had a powerful vocabulary, and he was only seventeen. He’ll go far, his friends said, if it isn’t all hot air. Amin listened and smiled, teasing him and agreeing with him in turn. His mother was troubled as always about him, despite her own troubles, but she too could not help being swayed by his rage. What is going to happen to this mad boy? His father sat with him at length, encouraging and cautioning, don’t be such a dreamer, be practical, what do you want to do? In the end, family and friends swung behind his b
ig talk, and listened to his discontented account of their lives and urged him and advised him to work and aspire to his dream of the great world.

  It was his teachers, in the end, who came up with the practicals. They marvelled at how he had grown from the ordinarily talented chatterbox student, to the confident and assured one who wrote the stern and mature pieces (in a bright schoolboyish way) that he did. They took the credit for this transformation. He was equally stern with Macauley, or Shakespeare, or Islam, and was precociously witty about it too. The wit was inclined to be supercilious but that was just high spirits, and time would see to that. Oxbridge material. His teachers were British, at least the ones with clout were, and perhaps they had taught Rashid to study their world so well that now they could not help but be impressed at what they had produced. They helped him apply to British universities, coached him to sit the scholarship examinations, imposed on him a regime familiar to them from their own far-away school days. It was as if they had entered into a conspiracy with him The harder they made Rashid toil for knowledge of their world, the more Rashid wanted to succeed in it. It was more subtle than it appears, not only a desire to succeed and please, but something more seductive: the more complex his understanding became, the more it seemed that this world became his. The history and literature teachers, who were the ones who took him in hand, gave him texts to study that they never mentioned to the other students: Carlyle, J. S. Mill, Darwin, T. S. Eliot. Every Saturday he had to stay behind after classes for additional tuition with one of the teachers, who often offered him the passages he had read with some incomprehension in digestible form. Sometimes there was a surprise test, asking him in turn to bring up what he had digested.

  So while Farida was launched on her dressmaking business at last, and Amin was a student at the teaching college at the age of nineteen, preparing for a career as a secondary school teacher, Rashid was in the final arduous stages of his flight from home.

  6 Amin and Jamila

  AMIN CAME HOME FROM the teachers’ college one afternoon to find Farida had a client with her. That was not such a surprise. This was the time of day when women called on each other and conducted normal women business, which was to keep the fabric of life in good repair. There were exchanges of news, congratulations and condolences, of courtesies and kindnesses, and of whatever luscious or tart scandals had surfaced in recent times. The ground was prepared for the betrothal, years in the future, of recently born babies. Ailing bodies were commiserated over. Favours and loans were discussed and exchanged, and the shortcomings of husbands and sons, and the world they presided over, were enumerated and lamented. It was also a convenient time to discuss the design of a new dress, or to weigh the virtues of satin over muslin, or the high yoke over the gathered waist, and so this was also the time that Farida conducted business with her clients.

  He knew her name was Jamila and had seen her before but had never seen her this close and had never spoken to her. He had always thought her beautiful. So close to her, he saw that her face was slim and subtly featured, something in it moving all the time. Her eyes were the colour of dark amber. They had light and movement, a kind of life, and a willingness to be amused. Her body was shaped like completeness. She had one of Farida’s fashion catalogues open on her lap, and a length of material spread out on the mat where they sat, so he knew she had come to be measured for a dress. She smiled at him, a polite greeting, but it had something languid and knowing in it which Amin thought made her seem glamorous, someone who had travelled and who knew about the world. As he stood in front of her, frozen in admiration, he saw her smile broaden and her eyes glow for a second. Farida smiled too.

  ‘My younger brother,’ Farida said.

  ‘Is this Amin?’ Jamila asked, smiling, her voice thicker than he had expected of someone so slim and so subtly beautiful. ‘Your mother was asking after you a moment ago.’

  Amin put his bag of books down and sat in the nearest chair. If his mother had been there, he would have been bustled away. His mother did not like either Rashid or Amin to sit in the room when there were women visiting. They were expected to make their respectful greetings, and if the women concerned had known them since they were children, they were expected to listen smilingly to their affectionate banter and then disappear. They were too old now to hang around women, and would only inhibit conversation and earn themselves unsavoury reputations. She was especially vigilant with Farida’s clients since they were usually young women, not because she thought anything dramatic would happen, but because she did not want any talk. She did not want to hear her sons accused of disrespect to one of her neighbours’ marriagable daughters. But his mother was not there, so he sat down, staring. Farida made a small impatient noise, which made him turn towards her. Her eyebrows were raised, in enquiry, in warning.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked. Amin smiled at her and then got up to leave, but did not go. ‘Is something the matter?’

  ‘No no,’ he said.

  ‘He speaks,’ Jamila said, her voice rounder now, teasing him.

  ‘Karibu,’ Amin said, turning towards her. You’re welcome.

  ‘Are you studying?’ she asked, glancing at his bag. ‘Where are you studying?’

  ‘At the teachers’ college,’ he said, stopping in the doorway.

  ‘Ma’s looking r you,’ Farida said, giving him one of her mock-furious looks behind Jamila’s back. He gave them a small wave and went through into the house.

  ‘She was asking about you,’ Farida told him later, after their parents had gone to bed. She often worked late into the night at her dressmaking, sitting in the front room with the radio turned down low. Amin sometimes sat with her for a while, to give Rashid more time at his revision in their bedroom. Rashid could not do his work if Amin was in the room, even if he was only lying on his bed reading quietly or even sleeping. And if he was not able to do his work, then crisis, self-doubt and silent sulks loomed. In any case, Amin liked sitting late into the night, reading while Farida chatted intermittently and the radio played listeners’ requests from far and near. His work at the college did not make enormous demands on him, and much of the reading was for his own pleasure and interest, and did not frighten him with the sense that he would have to be clever about it later. So he did not always mind breaking from it to listen to Farida, for he could go back and read the page with the same pleasure when she finished. He found her company easy, and her chatting was not insistent. She talked, he listened, and sometimes talked back and she listened. Then he went back to his book or his notes, and she to her buttons and bodices. They were fortunate in this ease with each other. Most of her talk was of people and what they had done, and what she thought they were about to do. Their father called it gossip when Farida and their mother were in full flow, but to Amin it did not sound any different from what the men did when they talked among themselves, except that the men were a lot more malicious. Perhaps the women were like that too, when they were among themselves.

  ‘The one who was here today,’ Farida said. ‘She was asking about you.’

  ‘Asking what?’

  ‘How old you were, what you were studying, when you were going to finish, you know,’ Farida said, giving him a sly smile. She said she’s seen you but she didn’t know who you were. Do you know who she is?’

  ‘Jamila. I’ve seen her,’ Amin said. ‘Tell me more. Tell me about her. What did she say?’

  Farida grinned. He could see that she was enjoying this, and he knew she loved whispered confidences and tortured secrets. She had one of her own which she had told him, swearing him to secrecy. He thought at first that she told him so that she could have someone to share the tensions and terrors of her secret love affair, but he came to understand later that she was thrilled and proud to be in love. She met him in the year she spent as a schoolgirl in Mombasa. The older girls from her school walked home by a certain route, walking together as a group, and a group of boys from a nearby secondary school somehow always intersected with this r
oute. They didn’t even stop. They walked together for a while, laughing and teasing and making eyes. Later, among themselves, the girls selected which of the boys they wanted as their boyfriends, and through sisters and cousins sent word to the boys. Farida chose hers, tall and slim and serious, Abbas, and told her cousins who sent word to his sister, and he started to write to her. There were no meetings, no kissing or going to the cinema or anything like that. No furtiveness or scandal. It was as love should be, those daily encounters in the street, during which, perhaps, hands might brush against each other, and there were the anguished secret notes which passed from sister to cousin to Farida.

  When she had to return to Zanzibar because she could not get through the entrance examination, it was a tragedy. The failing was sad. It made her feel stupid, when she could see silly girls passing just because they could do long division better than she could, and only because their parents paid for extra private tuition. So that was bad enough, but the real tragedy was leaving Abbas, who had told her in one of his letters that she was always in his tormented heart (and he was in hers, she told him). The cousins thought that their parting was a serious enough calamity for the lovers to be be allowed a tryst, nothing too irresponsible, perhaps left on their own for a few minutes on a walk on the beach. They began negotiations with Abbas’s sisters, but Aunt Saida found out and forbade the plan. Well, she didn’t really find out anything in particular, she guessed that something daring was being planned and issued a blanket prohibition on pain of the direst punishment. Nobody wanted to upset her, or make trouble for the lovers. So they did not even get the chance to walk hand in hand on the beach or anything people in love like to do. Amin was sceptical about this last bit, thinking that Farida was trying to spare his brotherly honour and protect Abbas from fraternal outrage. Walking hand in hand was a marriagable offence in certain quarters.