Desertion

by Abdulrazak Gurnah

  He saw a door in the garden wall behind him was now open, and standing in the doorway was a man who looked as if he might be the gardener. He wore long brown shorts and a ragged white shirt. His feet were bare. Amin saw the cool shade of the garden through the doorway. Hands on hips, the gardener watched Amin for a few minutes, challenging his presence there. Amin waved to him and looked away, stretching himself out on the grass, refusing to be intimidated. They did that sometimes, the courthouse gardener and the ones from the other houses. They stared at them like that when they came here for a swim, as if they were invading their masters’ privacy. But the gardener’s presence there over his shoulder spoiled the feeling of tranquility he had begun to feel under the trees. He grew more aware of the casuarina kernels digging into his back, and so he mounted his bicycle and rode away. On his way home he rode past the house again, and this time saw a little girl come out of the huge carved doors, one of which was now shut. He gave a cheerful tinkle of his bicycle bell, and she smiled.

  That night he had to go over a statistics homework with Rashid, who was driving himself to anxious distraction over his examinations for the certificate and the scholarship. He spent most evenings with Rashid, doing the same revision exercises to keep him company, testing him on what he knew, listening to his endless anxieties. The examinations were due in six weeks and Amin had already offered Rashid his opinion that he did not think he would survive until then if he did not calm himself.

  ‘But you’re cle r,’ Rashid told him. ‘It’s no good telling me not to worry. Some of us have to struggle for every slight thing we learn. This statistics is incomprehensible to me. Pointless witchcraft. But to you it’s easy and probably useful in some way. How can I keep calm? I’m going to fail.’

  ‘Your teachers love you. You won’t fail.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Rashid asked, looking pleased and glowering at the same time. ‘Do you mean they’ll fix the examination? I wish they could. Or are you saying I’m a creep?’

  ‘Everybody says you’re a creep,’ Amin said. For a while the statistics had to be put aside while the two brothers sorted out a more urgent matter, bouncing each other off the walls and the beds, and making such a racket that their mother banged on their door and asked them if they had gone mad.

  ‘No, Ma,’ Rashid called out in a whining voice. ‘Amin is bullying me again.’

  ‘Stop that both of you,’ their mother yelled. ‘Open up, open this door at once.’ She stood at the door and raged at them, although as always it was Amin who bore the brunt of it. Amin refused to cooperate after she left, but Rashid knew they would be back at it the next day.

  The next day was Friday and a whole crowd of them went to a football match in the afternoon. Then there was a long cycle ride to the country on Sunday, as far as Bububu, and a picnic and a swim. Then back to college on Monday and the usual round of waiting for buses in the middle of the afternoon, homework, friends, revising. The rains came during this time, lowering the sky for days and then releasing torrents of clear crystal water that refreshed everyone. At first it was as if everything had been reborn: trees swayed more self-importantly than before, house-roofs gleamed through the rust, roads sparkled, but as the rains continued day after day, the gutters filled up with debris that the water had swept up in its rush, drains overflowed and pools and puddles formed everywhere. Roofs leaked and water found its way into the limestone mortar and loosened the fabric of the houses, some of which collapsed suddenly in the night. The ruin opposite their house lost some mortar and a shutter or two, revealing even more of its bones and molars, but it gave no further sign of surrender. There was no way of avoiding the mud and the muck in the streets, everyone had to pick their way through it as best they could. Leather sandals sprayed muddy water over clothes, and the leather itself soon rotted. In a few days the mosquitoes arrived in hordes, and the fevers started. Children playing in the rivulets of water picked up jiggers and infections in their feet. After classes, there was nothing to do but sit under cover and play cards or gossip. When the rains first arrived they were a release from the sun, the oppressor, whose appearance every day was the return of the tormentor. A month of dark skies and downpours made everyone smile whenever the sun burst through.

  One afternoon during this season, several days or perhaps weeks after the first time, Amin came home to find Jamila sitting on the mat as before, a mail-order catalogue in her lap (for the fashions) and a piece of satiny material spread out on the mat between her and Farida as before. His mother was sitting in a chair under the window to catch the light, writing a letter. When he saw Jamila he felt an unexpected sensation of relief, as if he had feared that he would never see her again. He had thought about her often since that first time, but in a suppressed, guilty way, as if he had entertained improper fantasies. She held out her hand, smiling, and he leaned forward and took it, lightly, just touching her. He sat down in a chair nearby, smiling, a knot of pain in his chest. She was so beautiful it made him hurt to look at her. He had pictured her frequently, imagined her face as he lay in the dark, but that was something flat and still compared to the face before him. Her skin glowed and her features moved delicately, her eyes smiled with an uncomplicated ease.

  ‘How are you?’ she asked, speaking lightly in her deep voice, making conversation. ‘They really keep you late in that college, don’t they?’

  ‘We have classes in the afternoon,’ he said, and thought he heard his voice squeak slightly from excitement.

  ‘Farida made my dress so beautifully I’ve come to have another one made,’ Jamil said.

  He wanted to ask if it was the dress she was wearing, but he feared that he would sound too bold. ‘She is a very good dressmaker,’ he said instead, and was certain he heard his voice tremble.

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ his mother asked behind him. ‘Are you getting a cold? You didn’t get caught in the rain, did you? No, well what do you want here? Go and put your books away and take your father’s spectacles to him. He’ll be at the café. He forgot them, and by now I expect he’ll be convinced that he dropped them somewhere. Go on, what are you doing here? Oh, and could you buy me a 30-cent stamp? I’m writing to Aunt Saida, and I’ll want you to go and post the letter for me later.’

  When he glanced at Jamila he saw she was amused, almost laughing at the way his mother was pushing him out of the room. That is how mothers are, her eyes said, always hurrying you off somewhere. He went to his mother and kissed her hand in greeting, as he had done every day when he came home since he started school at the age of seven. And as she did every time he did so, she kissed his hand too. He saw that her eyes were luminous and watery from the strain of writing. ‘Go,’ she said. ‘Go and get your father’s spectacles. They’re by the side of the bed.’

  ‘I loved studying,’ Jamila said suddenly.

  ‘You were clever,’ his mother said, relenting for a moment. Everyone said so. I didn’t teach you, but everyone who did said so.’

  ‘Which school did you go to?’ Amin asked, relishing her, her face, her voice, her smile. This was new to him, the sensual depth in the pleasure he found in looking and listening.

  ‘I went to Forodhani and then St Joseph,’ she said. ‘After St Joseph I went to a business college in Mombasa, and did shorthand and typing. Then after working there for a couple years, we came back to start a business services bureau here.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Amin asked.

  Jamila shrugged. ‘Well, it didn’t work anyway,’ she said, smiling at him. He had heard the we and thought of her divorce, but she seemed untroubled. We always ask each other which schools we went to, Amin thought, and who we knew there. Sometimes it was like a way of claiming kinship.

  ‘Amin, put your books away and take your father his spectacles,’ his mother said, unable to take any more. ‘And don’t forget the stamp. See if Rashid needs anything, or take him out with you. He’s been stuck in there since he came home from school. He’ll injure himself with all this studyi
ng.’ Her irritation and bullying were also a kind of boasting. Look how courteously my sons obey me even when I’m capricious. Look how hard they work.

  That night he dreamed about her again, and dreamed about the beast squatting on her. He was that beast, he thought when he woke up. He had been the beast all along, but had refused to recognise himself, an ugly obsessive creature trembling with feelings and desires that he would do better to suppress and deny. But why should he trouble to deny? It was only a fantasy, a pleasurable play in which he imagined her face, and imagined her holding him and lying with him. Imagined her eyes smiling and glowing for him. She would laugh if she knew, and everyone else would be horrified. To her, and to everyone else, he was probably awkward and clumsy, a big child ignorant of the world. She was a woman, had travelled, had known love, for he was sure it was love that had made her marry the man she had brought back with her from Mombasa. She was a woman who knew she was beautiful, and would laugh disbelievingly if she knew what encounters he imagined with her. Well, there was no need for her to know that he lay in the dark with her, that he stroked her and spoke to her.

  He often cycled past her house after that afternoon, perhaps every other day, sometimes every day. The huge carved doors were always open during the day, and sometimes he saw children playing in the courtyard. The smaller door to the side was always shut. He saw her coming out of the Municipal Offices one afternoon and wondered if she worked there. She was some distance from him and he walked behind her without trying to catch up. She wore a buibui in the streets, as all women were expected to do, but her face was uncovered.

  Once she walked past him into the cinema as he was standing outside with a group of friends waiting to go in. She was with two other women and a young girl dressed for an outing. He thought the young girl was the same one he had seen coming out of the house that first time, and had given her a cheerful tinkle on his bicycle bell. Jamila smiled at him, easily, and said his name. He waved to her. One of the other women looked back and smiled at him too. His friends teased him, calling him film-star names for attracting those smiles, and he played up to it, squaring his shoulders and strutting a bit, but he knew that, like him, they did not take those smiles to be anything more than friendly. Or at least they knew that none of them were up to doing anything about them. Those were grown women, and it needed worldly men to know how to make smiles lead to anything.

  The examinations were soon upon them, and expelled all other thoughts from their minds. It was remarkable how examinations turned them all into troops of children again. Rashid was suddenly so sure of his chances that Amin began to fear that he really would confuse himself with over-confidence. Amin had to take examinations too at the end of his first year, but these were not given the global impact that Rashid’s were. It was as if no one had taken a scholarship examination before. The school year ended with the examinations, and then groups of young people wandered the streets all day, or went cycling to the country, or slept until the middle of the day, or whatever else they liked. That was what holidays meant to most young people, lazing and aimlessly wandering the streets. There were a few unfortunates whose families ran businesses that required their services, but even they were able to escape without too heavy punishment, especially during the holidays after the examinations, when parents felt obliged o pamper their offspring for their efforts.

  It was also the period of musim, and crowds of sailors and traders thronged the streets and the open spaces, watched more vigilantly than in previous years, at least in recent times, by a battalion of the Coldstream Guards. In more distant days, the musim had been a boisterous and unruly time, when blood sometimes flowed in the streets from the high-spirited adventurers who came with the winds, and people locked up their children for fear of kidnapping. None of them knew that that was the last musim they would see. The Coldstream Guards were there that year because in addition to all the other momentous events of that month, there were rallies and campaign drives to the countryside to stir up the vote for the last elections before independence, which were to be held later in the new year. Amin sometimes caught sight of Jamila at the rallies he attended, and at the literacy classes. She was one of the activists, trying to persuade women to register for the vote. Literacy was a condition for registration, and Jamila was part of the group that ran classes for women at the main party branch, coaching them to write their names and dates of birth, which was all that was required to prove competence. Rashid volunteered to assist with the teaching at the local party branch, and their mother volunteered Amin as well.

  There had been a failed election six months earlier, ruined by riots and a stalemate result. Political differences between the parties had become irreconcilable, as perhaps they do in small places with intimate histories and grievances that never fade, or at least that rarely need to be re-examined in the light of pressing events. There were few events pressing enough to make people think twice about their loyalties. Not yet. The riots were a shock to the young people, but perhaps not so shocking to the elderly who had seen street fighting and even the odd throat-cutting in the early years of the century. These new riots too would be put in perspective by later events, but in the innocence of the times, they seemed like an appalling lapse in manners, like family members abusing each other in public. There was still a great deal for us to learn about what harm we were capable of doing to each other, and how easy it would become once we had begun. Anyway, a new election was due, and it was by then known that independence was due at the end of the year. The stampede had already started elsewhere: French West Africa and French Soudan suddenly brought forth a dozen new African nations. The British had launched Ghana and Nigeria on the long road to their glittering futures, and our own neighbour Tanganyika was suddenly and more modestly on the same road. The traffic between African airports and Lancaster House in London, where all the constitutional conferences (what a laugh!) took place, must have been thick and constant.

  Ramadhan arrived at that time, so really, it was one thing after another in those months of that year. The coming elections charged the air, and people already had a taste of what was to come, with ministers of the caretaker government driving about in black Austins with special number plates and the sultan’s flag on their bonnets. It made the approach of independence more real, that flag on the bonnet.

  One long, hungry afternoon in the middle of Ramadhan, when schools and the college were closed for the duration of the fast, Amin was lying on the sofa in the living room reading while Farida was standing at her worktable, ironing a finished dress. Everyone had new clothes made for Idd at the end of Ramadhan, so this was Farida’s busiest time in the year. Their parents were sleeping away the hungry afternoon hours in separate rooms, their mother in Farida’s room and their father in his own bed. Husband and wife avoided each other during their afternoon siesta at Ramadhan, to be on the safe side. For even the feeling of desire, even for the lawfully wedded one, broke the fast. Lusting thoughts of any kind did that, and Amin suspected that his own feats of hunger amounted to nothing in the Almighty’s ledger. One of the surprises of growing up, he had discovered, was that fasting did not inhibit sexual excitement, quite possibly the opposite.

  There was a knock on the outside door, which they kept locked during these hungr afternoons because it opened directly into the front room and some neighbours could not resist an open door. It was Jamila, who had come to have dresses made for her niece. Amin stood up to shake hands, and then sat in a nearby chair, listening to Jamila explain that the dresses were a surprise for Idd, so could Farida make them using another dress as a model rather than measuring the girl herself. She gave her instructions and Farida noted everything down with the unfussy and unsmiling efficiency which always impressed Amin. Farida’s face usually broke into a grin whenever you caught her eye, except when she was taking instructions from customers. Amin pretended to read but looked up every few seconds to watch her face, her hands, her lips and thought her every movement a vision. When Jamila
finished her explanations, she turned in Amin’s direction. He thought she knew he had been thinking of her in the way he had been. She asked him what he was reading and held out her hand for the book. He took it to her and then sat down again in a chair nearer to her. It was a paperback of Dr Zhivago, which a friend who had gone to visit relations in Dar es Salaam had brought back for him. She asked him about it and he spoke about the greatness of the writing and the compulsive narrative.

  ‘I must borrow it from you when you’ve finished,’ she said, holding it out to him.

  He went back to the sofa with it and sat down, and soon after that she got up to leave. She looked his way for a second and waved to him without saying a word, and for some reason that felt more intimate than if she had spoken. Farida returned to her ironing without saying anything either, but looking thoughtful now. He thought she looked disapproving. She knows about my mania, he thought, and sat on the sofa in a tense silence, pretending to read, expecting words of mockery from her. But she said nothing for a while and then asked him to turn on the radio so that the noise would wake up the parents. Their mother liked to do the Ramadhan meals herself, although she was kind enough to allow Farida to help. And the sound of the radio was sure to get their father out of bed and out of the house. The voices of the sheikhs with their Ramadhan sermons grated on him. He thought they were hectoring and too holy to be true, and as soon as the tajwid which opened the afternoon programmes was over, he was on his way. He went to sit at the café with his friends until the siren went for sunset, when they all shared their first cup of coffee of the day before going to the mosque.