Desertion

by Abdulrazak Gurnah

  Sometimes he came home between the café and the mosque, to get Amin and me to go to prayers. Perhaps the talk at the café was dull, or he had become irritated with someone’s argument but did not want to make a fuss, or he had heard that there was to be a reading in the mosque for a neighbour who had died. For whatever reason, he sometimes thought to himself of his two growing sons lounging at home instead of going to prayers, and he came back especially to chase them out instead of going about his usual routine. So when I first heard his raised voice, and had not heard the muadhin calling the isha prayer, I thought he was shouting at me to go to the mosque. Naam I called out with alacrity (I love that word alacrity), because I knew how it hurt him when he thought us disrespectful. Naam is the politest form of yes, and anything less counted as disrespect to my father. I went out to the living room and saw Amin standing inside the front door, his sandals still on, evidently having just arrived home. His face was still but his eyes were wide with panic. My father was facing him, his back to me, stiff and stooped, his angry posture. He must have shouted at Amin as soon as he stepped through the door. My mother was sitting in the corner by the window, where she usually sat, her head lowered, her right hand massaging her brow. Farida was standing next to her sewing-machine, her body pressed to the wall, watching our father. Her eyes turned towards me for a second and I saw that they were large with anxiety. She frowned, briefly and distractedly, as if my presence was a complication.

  ‘Feisal, please don’t shout,’ my mother said, ‘there’s no need.’ I heard from her voice that she had been crying. Amin heard it too and looked at her. My father turned to look at me, his face taut and frowning, his eyes sparking, perhaps wondering who I was and what I was doing there. He turned back to Amin, took two strides towards him and raised his arm with his palm open, and then stood there, arrested, unable to hit his beloved son, waiting to be reprieved. He had not hit us in years, and only a handful of times before that, an irritable slap or a smack in the arm to punctuate a stern lecture. My mother said his name again, and he lowered his arm and walked to sit on the sofa near her. I saw that his body was shaking, perhaps with rage, perhaps with hurt and fear.

  ‘How could you do something like this?’ my father said. ‘You bring shame on us and on yourself. You have no thought except your pleasure. You ruin your life, as if you have no head to think with. As if no one has ever taught you anything or given you any idea of what is right and what is wrong. As if you’re nothing more than a beast, without feeling, without respect for yourself or for anyone else. I don’t even know what to say to you.’

  What happened? I wanted to ask. What has he done? But the surprise and anxiety I felt at what I was witnessing deprived me of words, which was as well, because I think if I had said anything I would have been instantly expelled. My father had spoken quietly, but his face was scornful and the force of his words charged the air, he who only spoke gently even in sternness.

  ‘Please explain this matter to us,’ my mother said, looking up and taking her hand away from her brow. She lifted her agonised face at Amin, her eyes large and glistening, the fingers of both hands knitted together and clasped in her lap, tense but patient. The silence seemed to last some minutes.

  ‘Who told you?’ Amin asked, his voice deep and tragic.

  ‘Amin,’ his father said wearily, unable to suppress the merest smile, the merest wince of ironic amusement. ‘It doesn’t matter who told us. Your every act is an admission that what we’ve heard is true.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’ve heard,’ Amin said quickly. Nor have I, I wanted to say. What happened? I want to know too.

  ‘We want to understand,’ my father said. ‘What your mother asked you was to explain how this could have happened. How could you be so foolish?’

  The muadhin’s call drifted in among us, and we waited in silence until he finished, as custom required. It was a providential silence, because during it I saw my father sigh and unfrown his face. He closed his eyes for a moment and his lips moved as he silently accompanied the muadhin’s words: Allahu akbar Allahu akbar, Ashhadu an laillaha ila llah, Ashhadu ana Muhammad rasulu llah. At the end of the muadhin’s call, my father’s lips twitched in a familiar gesture, whose meaning was something between a shrug and a shake of the head, between resignation and perplexity. I saw my mother glance towards him. I think I saw something pass across Amin’s face too, as he glanced from one of them to the other. Perhaps that was the moment when he made his decision.

  ‘I love her,’ Amin said in the deep silence that followed the muadhin. That was all he said, that was his explanation, at least for the time being, and the way he looked after he said those words, lips pressed tightly together, made it seem as if he thought it was enough explanation.

  My father rose to his feet, his face an unrevealing mask, his eyes lowered. He slipped on his sandals and left to go to the mosque, without saying a word, without requiring us to follow. He was good at exits. He would go away, after a long look, slip silently away without a word of rancour or blame, and leave you to stew in your sin, so that next time you saw him you were almost willing to be forced into admission and repentance. It was the teacher in him, perhaps, how to manoeuvre us into compliance without brutality.

  ‘Love who? What’s he done? What’s going on?’ I blurted, as soon as he was out of the door.

  ‘You, go to prayers,’ my mother said, but I ignored her as I would not have been able to ignore my father. He took such petty defiances so much to heart that I did not dare disobey him, but with her, orders came in a steady and relentless flow and so could at times be disregarded. She wiped her eyes briefly, and then beckoned Amin towards her. He sat down on the sofa where my father had sat a few minutes before, his eyes on the ground.

  ‘Did she trick you? She did, didn’t she? She must have done,’ she said bluntly, certain and sure of Amin’s gullibility. He said nothing, his eyes lowered, his face glowing with sweat. Her voice grew increasingly scornful as she spoke.

  ‘Do you know who she is? Do you know her people? Do you know what kind of people they are? Her grandmother was a chotara, a child of sin by an Indian man, a bastard. When she grew into a woman, she was the mistress of an Englishman for many years, and before that another mzungu gave her a child of sin too, her own bastard. That was her life, living dirty with European men. Her mother, that same one in their big house there, the one who thinks she is someone with her silks and her perfumes and her gold jewellery, that is the child of that mzungu. She doesn’t even know who her father is, except that he is some English drunk that her mother took home. When her husband brought her back from Mombasa, he knew all this, but they are a rich family, so they don’t care what anybody thinks. They’ve always done as they wished. This woman that you say you love, she is like her grandmother, living a life of secrets and sin. She has been married and divorced already. No one knows where she comes and where she goes, or who she goes to see. They are not our kind of people. They are shameless, they don’t think of anyone else but themselves. You say you love her, what do you know about love? You don’t know people like her. We trusted you. Your father . . . You saw, you’ve broken his heart.’

  A shudder went through Amin.

  ‘You know what he’s like,’ she continued, her voice fractionally less scornful, slightly gentler, reeling him in. This was also her habitual role, to bludgeon and placate, to soften us up for submission. They were good at their work, but we must have been very easy to manipulate, schooled in obedience. ‘He’ll come home and he will say nothing, but you’ll know that his heart is breaking. He is so proud of you. You must have nothing to do with her, and you must beg his pardon, otherwise you’ll lose him. And he’ll lose you. He’s getting old now, I don’t know how he’ll take all this. And my sight is going every day, so soon I won’t be much use to him. We trust you, don’t forget that, despite everything. Promise me you’ll stop going to her.’

  Amin shook his head slightly and said nothing, like a stubborn, sullen
child refusing to cooperate.

  ‘Promise me,’ she shouted and slapped him on the back of his head. ‘Look at me when I’m talking to you. Do you want to kill him?’

  Amin got to his feet and moved away, a look of rage on his face. He turned to look back at her as if he would say something, but whatever it was remained stuck in his throat. I expect it was to say that he would not promise, but he could not get the words out. I heard him go into our room and bolt the door behind him. I had understood during the exchanges that Jamila was the woman they were talking about, because everyone knew the story of her grandmother in Mombasa having an English lover. The idea filled me with wonder, that Amin loved her, that he could stand in front of his parents and say that. What did it mean? They wrote love letters to each other, and embraced and kissed, and gazed on each other’s naked bodies and made love? It had never occurred to me to imagine Amin making love to anybody, let alone to a woman like Jamila. I thought her glamorous and part of the adult world, more than that, part of the sinning adult world of mistresses and scandals, and I suppose I didn’t think of my brother as even an adult. I caught Farida’s eye and realised that I was smiling at the thought of Amin’s antics. She smiled back, at least with her eyes.

  ‘That devil,’ I said.

  ‘It’s no laughing matter,’ my mother said angrily. ‘I told you to go to prayers. Come on, get out of here, go, go now. And I don’t want this getting told to anybody outside of this house. Do you understand that? You, blabbermouth.’

  When I got to the mosque, the prayer was already into the second rakaa. I stood in line and joined the prayer. I couldn’t see my father. The mosque was crowded and I was up against the back wall, when he was likely to be right up in the first line of worshippers. In any case, it was improper to look around you during prayers, for every word you said and every movement you made was addressed to God, and He did not like you to be desultory in your attention during your address, turning your head this way and that way and thinking about who knows what. You crossed your arms across your chest, lowered your eyes and submitted your whole self to Him. When the prayer was over, I had to make up the rakaa I had missed, and it was only when I had completed it that I was able to look around the mosque properly for my father. He was standing outside on the steps by now, a friendly, courteous smile on his face, talking with someone, waiting for him to find his sandals before they began walking down the steps together. Other people too were standing talking, or walking away in twos or threes, dispersing, going home for supper or to the café to listen to the news on the radio. It was a jolt to see him looking so effortlessly at his ease when he knew there was dirty work to be done at home, and I saw in that ease why it would be so vital to him to make Amin renounce his love.

  Amin could not fight them off. They made them stop. That night they chased Farida and me away to our rooms (Farida protested, I went quietly) and sat with Amin until he promised to stop seeing her. I don’t know what they said to him or exactly what promises he made, but I can guess. They would have kept him there forever until he promised to give her up, tangled him with their hurt and their fear for his disgrace, and Amin with his kindness and his dutifulness would not have been able to resist their love. Perhaps it was even simpler than that, and he knew what he would have to do the moment they appealed to his trust. He had been the reliable one all his life. That was how he knew himself, and how he had won the love and respect of his parents and beyond, and I think he would have found it impossible to say to hell with all that. So, in a way his affair was over by the time I found out about it, and afterwards Amin refused to talk about it to me.

  I joked with him and tried to flatter his skills at seduction, but he would not talk about how he had done it and what had happened between him and Jamila. I even tried to hypnotise him by shining a torch on the ceiling while we lay in bed and telling him he was under my spell, but still he refused to speak. Then he made such a good job of seeming to have finished with the affair that there was no reason to disbelieve him. I had a terrible time keeping quiet about what had happened, especially when Amin seemed to have done with it all and no harm could come of speaking about it to friends. He went to college and came home and went out with his friends, like his old self, except perhaps that he was more silent than he used to be and read longer and longer into the night. In any case, by then I was close to my departure and I had concerns of my own, and when I thought of Amin and his affair it was as an adventure that almost ended up as trouble.

  It was such a long time ago. I was in the throes of my own drama and my self-absorption, at the start of my great adventure which I know now I thought of as noble and deserved. I could not help thinking of what befell Amin as something slightly comic, an escapade. In my questions and promptings, I tried to get him to talk about Jamila like that: so what did you get up to, you merciless ram? He refused to talk and I was left to imagine their affair from the meagre resources of my own experience, which were extremely meagre. Even his silence seemed like a kind of worldly cunning, a sophisticated kind of subtlety. It was courteous to the lover without diminishing the triumph of the conquest, when boasting and explicitness would have made it sordid and clumsy.

  I was young, and about love and sex I only had second-hand narratives of the place and the people I had grown up with, as anyone of my age and ignorance would have done. My elder brother had been making love to a beautiful, divorced woman and had been found out, the daring devil. I don’t think I was envious. I was used to Amin getting there ahead of me in most things, and I never doubted that I would get there too in time. No, in truth I probably thought I was the one to be envied, the scholarship winner, justly rewarded for his talent and for his resourcefulness, whereas Amin was merely getting up to the dangerous mischief young men found irresistable.

  When you were the age I was when I left, and brought up the way I was, you only heard about love and sex from the margins of conversations. You overheard things when your elders were talking dirty. Respectable older people did not talk about such matters anyway, at least not in the hearing of youngsters, and those who did, did so to provoke and mock, to express their worldliness and affirm their manliness. These latter, who were mostly younger men or men of reputation, did not mind having adolescent boys on the edges of their street conversations, listening and laughing at their manly cynicism. They turned love into a comedy, a farce, whose denouement was expected to be brutal. The lovers were spied on and their intimacies became the source of smirks and giggles. Another lover was beaten up by relatives, and humiliated in some slapstick fashion. Or another became notorious for the brutality with which he jilted his lover. Love was something transgressive and ridiculous, an antic, or at best an exploit. Amin’s was an exploit, and his silence turned it into something more, turned it into a plan or a calculation, no doubt to be deftly executed on another subject in due course. It was in that way that it seemed merely a dangerous mischief, doing what daring young men do to amuse themselves.

  Only I was there at the confrontation when they exposed his affair and made him end it. I saw his anguish then, his face glowing, his silence. I felt the tense significance of the late-night conversation from which Farida and I were excluded, and imagined the pleadings and the ultimatums. Yet I chose to misunderstand it all and make him into a seducer, chose to ignore his silence and vulnerability in favour of the comic narrative of love I was so familiar with. I don’t think I could have done any different. As I said, I was young and overwhelmed with self-significance, and nobody’s doings seemed more interesting than mine.

  I don’t remember leaving, not really. I remember the airport and who was there to see me off, and getting on the plane, but I don’t remember the few days before or even the last night. At least I don’t remember the feeling of it, the detail of it. I remember Amin saying on our last night together that I would miss the independence celebrations later in the year, and I remember him saying to me that I should send him anything good that I read. I promised that I would.
I remember Farida crying at the airport, the embarrassment of it, and I remember my parents’ smiles when I looked back for the last time. I remember them waving. Even if I strain I cannot hear a word they said. Such paltry mementoes.

  London London! I have seen London London! In his great poem New York’, Leopold Sedar Senghor exclaims like that at his first sight of Harlem:

  Harlem Harlem! I have seen Harlem Harlem! A breeze green with corn springing from the pavements ploughed by the bare feet of dancers

  I didn’t know the poem at that time, but when I did come to read it, it reminded me of my view of the city for the first time, there below as the plane circled before landing. It was like a miraculous rising out of emptiness, as if I had not known of its presence there over the horizon. Senghor’s exclamation was not because he did not know that Harlem would be there, of course, but was a cry of fulfilment at a vision of something abstract and wished for, a mannered flourish at having reached that place at last, the scene of the Harlem Renaissance and of the diasporic African vitality which his poetry celebrated. London did not have that sense of identification for me, and I caught no sight of a bare foot ploughing the pavement into supple life. Neither did it have the spiritual and creative resonance Senghor sought and felt in Harlem (‘Listen to the far beating of your nocturnal heart’), nor did it have the Mother Country delusions whose disappointment dispirited so many West Indians, but it was for me, as it was for many others in different ways, an abstraction of mythic proportions. It was an impossible destination now arrived at, a place of unexplained potency and mystery, rich in associations with our own endeavours. My own exclamation, if I had known to make on would have been an egotistical one. There it is and I am now h e. Aren’t I the one!