Desertion

by Abdulrazak Gurnah

  Anyway, Farida returned to Zanzibar, a dubu without her boyfriend, and in those first few weeks she was heart-broken – she pressed a fist to her chest to show Amin where it hurt – from having lost Abbas and having lost her cousins in Mombasa. It was like having some part of her cut off. Had he ever felt like that? Then he had not known real heartache yet. Images and smells of Mombasa came to her in her dreams, and when she woke up in her own bed at home, she could not stop the tears.

  When she first came back, she used to spend the morning with Aunt Halima, helping her with household chores as she used to before she left, and one day her aunt made her sit down and tell her everything. She could not take the long looks and the sudden sighs any more. As she confessed, Farida’s agony was such that she wept for the whole hour that it took her to do so, speaking and wailing at the same time, and having to repeat herself before Aunt Halima understood her. Aunt Halima was distraught at first, then when all her efforts at consolation failed to have any effect, she sat there grinning at the magnitude of Farida’s misery and in the end she offered to have Abbas write to her using their address. Her husband Ali would have to know, of course, since he collected the post, but he could be relied on to be discreet. Amin smiled to think of Uncle Ali’s face when he was asked to be part of this conspiracy. He loved mischief and hoaxes and deliberately ambiguous signals. When someone was telling a story which turned on a misunderstanding, especially if it was one that was cynically engineered, Uncle Ali was always the first to see it coming and start chuckling. People saved up such stories for him, and laughed to see his glee. He would have chortled at the idea of a secret correspondence as if it were a kind of practical joke.

  That was how it had been since. Abbas was still writing to her, and she was writing to him, and four years later they were more in love then ever. In his letters he always said he was dying of longing for her. Farida first told Amin the secret after he finished school, initiating him into adult intrigue and clandestine passion and the intricate ways of the world.

  ‘Why is it a secret?’ Amin asked, completely missing the point. ‘You are twenty-something years old and he is probably older. Why can’t you say to Ma and Ba that you love each other and you would like to get married?’

  ‘Don’t be so childish,’ Farida told him, her mouth open in exaggerated horror at this reckless suggestion. ‘Because we can’t, not yet. You’ll understand why later on. I can’t tell you now.’

  ‘Why not?’ he asked.

  ‘Because you’re my brother,’ she said, aghast at his naïvety.

  That did not help him much, but Amin had to be content with being the recipient of tantalising whispered confidences hinting at other secrets for the time being, and occasionally to share in the torment of misunderstandings and doubts. The misunderstandings and doubts arose, quite rightly, from the writing, in interpretations of the letters and especially the poems they wrote to each other which, Amin could take Farida’s word for it, expressed their innermost feelings and uncertainties. Was that sentence meant as a joke, or was it an inadvertent expression of irritation? Did the poem she sent him really capture what she had meant to say? Did his poem mean what it said or did it mean the opposite? ‘You know what poems can be like,’ Farida said. ‘A poem can fill you with joy one day, and then on another reading can cast you into the very depths. I’ve told him I don’t want any more poems, but he can’t resist, and nor can I.’

  ‘Resist what?’ he asked.

  ‘Writing them,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, he writes them. I thought he copied them from somewhere.’

  ‘From where?’ she asked, giving him a quick, suspicious look.

  ‘You can buy books full of them, you know.’

  ‘No, he writes them,’ she said after a moment’s thought. ‘And so do I.’

  ‘You write poems too?’ Amin said, incredulous. ‘I don’t believe you. Let me see them.’

  ‘No,’ she said sharply. ‘They’re not meant for you. And I don’t see why you should be so surprised that I write poems. Or is it that you think me too stupid?’

  Not too stupid, but he had not thought of Farida as interested in anything in particular, certainly not in writing poetry. She was always laughing and talking and sitting close together with other women in an affectionate group, and that was what he thought she did and all she wanted to do. Instead it turned out she had a lover in Mombasa to whom she wrote love letters and with whom she exchanged poems which they each wrote themselves. So that was what she did in all that time she spent alone, and that was the meaning of the smiles that hung on the ends of her words. The thought of Aunt Halima and Uncle Ali as the secret postmen made him smile too, to think of the sharp words that would be said in tensely hissed whispers when her mother found out. He looked at Farida differently after that, at someone who was capable of an intrigue of that magnitude and at someone who wrote poems that she refused to show to anyone else but Abbas, someone who had a life she kept safe from everything around her. The first time he saw Aunt Halima after Farida told him, he could not stop himself grinning. Aunt Halima gave him a long, suspicious look and frowned, commanding him not even to mention whatever it was that was making him grin like that.

  Despite his misjudged surprise about the poems, Farida continued to offer him precious confidences, flashing an envelope at him sometimes, or talking to him unguardedly (so she made it seem) about her lover. Abbas was training to be an engineer with the Marine Authority in Mombasa, and had almost completed the first stage. The manager had told him that he was doing very well and he was putting his name forward for a further training course in England when the opportunity arose. The manager is a mzungu, she told him, in no doubt that Amin would understand that this gave the approbation greater weight. The praise of a mzungu was minted of the same true coin as his ingenious machinery and his infinite expertise. Amin was also the first to know that Abbas was planning to visit the following year, at the completion of his preliminary training. He had relatives who lived in the town, on the outskirts, but he couldn’t remember for certain the name of the area. He was planning to stay with these relatives for a month or so. His mother was coming too. It would be the first time that Farida had seen him for four years and more, but in some ways it felt to her as if it was only yesterday.

  ‘Is he coming to ask for you?’ Amin asked. It was usually mothers or aunts who asked other mothers and aunts in such circumstances. ‘Is that what the mother is coming for? You’d better tell Ma, you know.’

  She hushed him urgently, and he was not sure if this was the wrong moment in her narrative for him to be given any further information on the matter, which of course was still secret, or whether she was hushing him from anticipating in case of bad luck. She grinned as she hushed him, asking him to be content with that.

  ‘Will you live in Mombasa?’ Amin asked, and Farida hushed him again, her grin even wider. ‘Will you go to England with him when he goes for his training? Why can’t I see the poems?’

  ‘Because they belong to someone else,’ she said, but he could see she liked being asked.

  So when she told him about Jamila asking about him, her tone was lowered as it was when she spoke of her own secret love. This is what she told Amin about Jamila. ‘You know that big house in Kiponda,’ Farida said. ‘You go past the old cemetery with the huge baobab in it on your right. Then you go past the bicycle mechanic n your left, and after the mechanic’s shop, right opposite the big Indian school, there’s a turn on your left as if you’re going to the hamam. You know those lanes, and that big house there after the turning . . . that’s where she lives. It’s their house, the family house, that big house. She lives downstairs and the family live upstairs, her mother, her father and her two elder brothers with their families. She lives downstairs on her own. I couldn’t do that, not in a big house like that. Have you seen it? Do you know the old house I mean? It must be dark inside, like a tomb or a cave. Like Bi Aziza’s house. Although Jamila’s house is not a haunted ruin li
ke our neighbours’. Can you imagine living downstairs there, a woman on your own? It’s asking for trouble. I would be too afraid . . . of both the shetani and the talk. When Jamila married, the family made a flat for her and her husband out of those downstairs rooms. They must’ve been stores or shops with a separate front door. People talk about her, you know. They talk about her a lot.’

  ‘What do they say?’ Amin asked, feeling sad for her.

  ‘Well, she insisted on having the flat with its own front door, and people said she was secretive and arrogant or worse. Why couldn’t she live like everyone else? Why did she have to be alone? What was she hiding? She had to have this done to the flat, and she had to have that wall knocked down and that window replaced. Her husband was wealthy, somebody she met on her travels, Nairobi or Dar es Salaam or something like that. Perhaps he paid for the renovations so they could be on their own. He did some kind of business. I don’t know what kind of business. Just business, I’m not sure what exactly. After a year or two, he left her and then divorced her, and went back to wherever he had come from. It surprises you, doesn’t it? Why does it surprise you?’

  ‘She looks as if she knows things. She looks so worldly,’ Amin said.

  ‘And then she marries some swaggerer,’ Farida finished for him, nodding. ‘Well, perhaps she doesn’t know as much as she looks. He toyed with her for a while and then he left her, like these dirty old men who take a new wife every year and then divorce her a few months later. It’s surprising that Jamila should get caught like that, I suppose. Her family have no needs they can’t meet, so I don’t even know why she bothered with this man.’

  ‘Perhaps she loved him,’ Amin said, meaning to be sarcastic, but Farida looked at him with a foolish smile, as if he had said something charming.

  ‘Anyway, everyone expected that Jamila would move back upstairs with her family after her husband left, and someone even sent word to enquire if the flat was available for rent, but she refused to move. So then people started to say she must be getting up to something, living there alone with her own front door. Then after that she started this travelling. People say it’s business, but I don’t know about that or about what kind of business she does. I know she has relations in Mombasa and even further up the coast. I’m surprised you don’t know about her. People talk about her a lot.’

  ‘People! They say such terrible things about everyone that sometimes I just don’t listen,’ Amin said.

  ‘So you have heard something,’ Farida said, grinning triumphantly. ‘Come on, what did you hear?’

  Amin hesitated. ‘I’ve seen her pass by, and then heard people say who she was, what her name was. But I don’t remember hearing anything bad about her, if that’s what you mean. Only that her grandmother was a European man’s woman, you know, his mistress,’ he said.

  Farida nodded portentously. ‘She was. In Mombasa. I don’t think she’s still alive now. She can’t be. But even when she was, no one went to visit her, and she didn’t go out anywhere. We passed her old house once. Jamila’s mother is their child, Bi Asmah. Look at her skin. It’s like milk, so creamy, even though she’s so old. She came here to marry, and probably to escape people’s talk in Mombasa. I think she was brought up by relatives, but I expect everyone talked to her about her mother’s scandalous life. People’s talk can cut you to shreds.’

  ‘Well, that’s nothing to do with Jamila, what her grandmother did,’ Amin said. ‘It’s useless malice and gossip. I don’t know why people do that. There’s much to be said for kindness. When is she coming again? What else did she ask about me?’

  There is much to be said for kindness. That was so like Amin that Farida smiled when he said it. He would listen to his friends tell a story of thoughtlessness or cruelty, or a story of pettiness or neglect, or to another variant of unkindness, and after a moment of reflection he would say that. His friends laughed at him for it. Those not so friendly to him thought it a pretension of virtue, a genre of courtesy which was prevalent among those who affected gracious airs. His real friends did not see cynicism in him, and when they laughed at him it was not always unkindly, and not always to his face, but they laughed at him none the less, and took his lament as a kind of naïvety. They searched him out with tales of everyday brutality to hear him say his sorrowful words. Then when he did, they chortled convulsively and swallowed their laughter, or if they were good enough friends, they laughed openly and teased him for his impossible kindness. You’re too good for this world, they said.

  The night after he heard Jamila’s story, he dreamed about her. He was sure it was her, although at the beginning of his memory of the dream she was only a presence sitting in a yard in the dark. She was silent at first but he knew she was there. He felt her there. Something vibrated in the air. She began to hum almost inaudibly, and slowly the sound strengthened and her voice rose in a modulation that hovered out of reach of his hearing. But he felt her there, and her humming voice burred against his skin. Her silhouette grew solid like a thickening of the night. In her song he heard the notes of primitive sorrow, notes of loneliness and of fear of pain. Later he saw her in a dimly lit room, perhaps underground or in a cave, lying on her back, fully dressed on a mat. A long-haired beast squatted on her belly, looking guilty but unmoving, paralysed by obsession. The desperation of the beast was so clear that Amin woke up, and feared that he had cried out, but Rashid was breathing easily a few feet away from him. He’s probably dreaming of Oxbridge, Amin thought.

  The next day he cycled past her house. Two or three times a week he went swimming with friends after college, and on this next day, on his way to call on them he took the road which led to the hamam. The street was narrow and deep in shadow at that time of the afternoon, and the house stood across the top of it, making a junction. Another street ran in front of the house in both directions, although that street too would be forced to twist and turn to avoid other houses and so on. That was how the old town was built, short narrow streets and deep humming silences. If you rode a bicycle down these streets, your thumb constantly worked the warning bell and your fingers stroked the bicycle brakes. The house was painted in a creamy whitewash, a little tarnished by the rains. The windows in the upper floors were painted an ashy green, with fanlights above them in the shape of arches mounted with stained glass. The windows on the first floor windows were shut, although some of the blinds were open to let in air. The second-floor windows were wide open, as were the huge carved front doors, allowing a good glimpse of a paved courtyard. He did not think the house looked like a ruin. He thought it looked roomy and airy and subdued. He saw a smaller, plainer door to the side of the house, which looked like an entrance to an office or a store. The downstairs window facing the street was the only one on the ground-floor level. It was shut, but all its shutter-slats were open. He gave a long intricate ring on his bicycle bell as he went past the window. No, it did not look like a ruin at all.

  Their swimming arrangements were impromptu. Whoever felt like swimming called round on the others, and whoever felt like it came along. Sometimes it turned out to be a crowd of five or six of them, sometimes it was two. They never went swimming on their own, especially not at that time of the year when the seas were rough before the beginnings of the monsoons. Some people kept away from the sea altogether at that time, but it was so hot and dusty that Amin preferred to be tossed around in the water, even though it was exhausting swimming in it. But friend after friend was n at home, so he gave up after the third attempt and cycled slowly past the playing fields, along the avenue of casuarinas which was always cool at any time of the day, and headed for the beach by the golf-course. They were not there either.

  He turned back along the hospital road, past the Victoria Gardens and then left after the courthouse to a secluded beach which they often came to for a swim. A lawn sloped down from the back of the courthouse to the beach, and on either side were two huge houses with walled-in gardens which looked out to sea. He had heard that from the upper floors of t
hose houses, a person could see all the way across the channel to the mainland, although how that information was come by, he was not sure. At some time in the distant past, the houses belonged to merchants and Omani nobility, and they were built in the style they favoured, battlements and terraces, and huge blank walls to thwart the curious. At the time of Amin’s visit that afternoon, British colonial officials lived in all the houses along this stretch by the waterside: perhaps the chief justice in one of them, or the medical officer or the attorney general in the other. There was no one in sight. Near him, a young palm tree twisted and turned its fronds improbably on their stalks, sinuous and snaky, seductively writhing in the wind, lifting its bedraggled hair with transparent intent. Amin sat under a huge casuarina tree, the ground beneath it littered with its dry kernels, and watched the sea churning. He loved the roaring silence of the sea at this distance from the shore.

  It struck him that he had no idea who the British officials living in these houses were. Sometimes people came out on the terraces overlooking the beach and watched them swimming, sometimes they waved, and sometimes it felt as if they wished them away. Neither he nor his friends nor anyone he knew had any idea who the people who lived in these huge houses were, except that they were the rulers of the land and that they were relentless in keeping themselves separate. Someone knew who they were and wha they did, of course: their servants, or their staff in the offices wh e they ruled. But Amin hardly ever caught sight of a European face in the streets, except perhaps that of one of his teachers or the unmistakable day tourists from the liners that stopped on their way to and from Europe. Yet there must be a whole crowd of them secreted away behind the walls of such houses, living quietly. Amin wondered what sense they made of the people they ruled. He imagined they would simply seem a babel of agitation and tetchiness, their cries and their gasps merely the whines of the subjected at any time.