Desertion

by Abdulrazak Gurnah

  I remember, these were the first ones I sent him: The Mystic Masseur Go Tell It on the Mountain A Passage to India. I bought them from a second-hand bookshop in Charing Cross Road. I stood outside for an age, looking at the display in the shop window, unable to pluck up the courage to go inside. In the end the shopkeeper, who was an Indian man of mature middle age, came out and called me in. He asked me if I had been in London long, unsmiling, even a small thrust of the chin as he asked, speak up, you trembling insect. I felt no hostility towards him. I recognised these scowling gestures as the privilege of age, but I also felt a kind of care behind them, an extension of intimacy, and could imagine my father or my mother speaking to me in the same way. I told him that I had been in London for a few weeks, and he nodded, but I saw that he also suppressed a smile. He asked if I was looking for anything in particular. I said I was looking for some interesting books to send to my brother, and he suggested those. I wonder now about that shopkeeper, how he ended up on that street selling books, and whether his smile had something sardonic in it. Here is another blundering one to put through the anguishing mill, I imagine him thinking. I wonder whether he knew that when he suggested those books to me, it was as if he had lit a torch to illuminate a darkened path.

  I went back some long while later, about a year or so after the first time, and found someone else in the shop. From the way he greeted me when I entered the shop, I guessed he was German or Dutch. My ear was not well enough tuned to recognise the difference at that time, hearing only a slight thickening of the voice. I was probably making my guess from appearance as much as from anything else. He smiled and went on with his work, and after a few moments of irresolute browsing, I wandered away.

  Amin wrote me a letter on the night before the independence ceremony. I still have it, a beautifully written letter whose tone is subdued and reflective, hoping for the best at a time of grandiose optimism. I haven’t looked at that letter for years, and I don’t think I ever will, but I remember the tone, the shapeliness and restraint. He always wrote so well, with such wit and self-possession that I often found myself smiling as I read, not because what he had written was funny but because it was so pleasing.

  There was an it on the television news about our independence ceremony. We were on TV. The pictures were black and white in those days, and the ceremony took place at midnight as such ceremonies did, to add a touch of mystic symbolism to the ritual, to make it into sacred play, a literal handing over of the burden of rule. From the brief clips of film, shot at night in insufficient light, it was impossible to recognise the terrain, to see the casuarinas that lined the beach or to hear the sound of the sea a few feet away. All it was possible to see was the lowering of the flag and the soldiers marching past, and Prince Philip standing to attention. On his right stood the sultan in his black robes, and on his left the British Resident in his white uniform and feathered topee. The straining voice of the reporter made the scenes into an episode from the landscape of Empire so familiar from newsreels, with everyone behaving honourably according to their degree. It was over in a moment or two, and the pictures moved on to something else. Almost exactly one month later I was tuned to the BBC World Service evening news, and heard a report describing the overthrow of the new government. The report was sent by an amateur radio operator who was the wife of one of the colonial officials who had stayed on as part of the hand-over administration. Or perhaps she was not an amateur radio operator, but someone trained and armed to do exactly what she did in the event that what happened should happen. At the moment of speaking, her voice anxious and loud, her words hurried, she was hiding under a bed in her bungalow. She was hiding there because bullets were flying overhead. The announcer gave her name, and I recognised it as that of the games and swimming instructor at the women’s teachers’ college. She cut a dashing figure at Inter-Schools sports events, blowing whistles, handing out winners’ tickets, bustling about with ambitious strides. It was she, in any case, who announced our most recent ugliness to the world.

  In the days that followed there was news of more violence, and of mass slaughter, and brief, knowing analyses by journalists and expert commentators, but there was no word, no letter, and it was only weeks later, when what had happened was no longer arguable, that disbelief and fear and shame began to turn to an understanding of the terror that had overwhelmed our home. When the first letter came from Amin weeks later, it was brief and cautious, and had obviously been opened. It was to say they had received a letter from me that day, but had not received any of the others I mentioned sending. That they were all well, and I should take care. I understood from that letter that he could not write freely, and that I was not to do so either. I told my friends that I had received news at last, and that none of my family were killed or hurt, as we had all feared. They shared my relief as they had shared in my anxiety and lamentation in the preceding weeks, and after that I rarely raised the subject with them. Sooner or later we would all have our turns at lamenting distant tragedies, and would have to learn to grieve with restraint.

  Some time later, I received a letter from my father, battered and folded and posted in Mombasa, telling me that terrible things had happened, that there was danger and that I must not think of returning. I did not know what to write, afraid of causing them difficulties, and when Amin’s letters came, at long intervals, they were brief and businesslike. Ba has lost his job, as have a lot of other people. Many things have changed. Ma has not been able to get medicine for her eyes and her sight is troubling her. She grumbles about it, as you would expect. But all is well and everyone sends regards.

  In the months that followed, I began to think of myself as expelled, an exile. I make it seem a gradual process, and indeed it took months for me to find the words for the condition I was in, but I felt the sense of it a lot earlier. My father’s letter about not returning stunned me, paralysed me with quiet panic. Where was I to go if not return? What did he mean I was not to think of returning? Where else could I go? It was after this surge of fear subsided, and the days passed and there was no reprieve, no further letter cancelling the instruction of the previous one, that I looked for words to explain what had happened, words that I whispered to myself in shame and self-mockery. For the first time since arr ing in England, I began to think of myself as an alien. I realised I had been thinking of myself as someone in the middle part of a journey, between coming and going, fulfilling an undertaking before returning home, but I began to fear that my journey was over, that I would live all my life in England, a stranger in the middle of nowhere.

  In time I drifted into a tolerable alienness. Living day to day, this alienness became a kind of emblem, indeterminate about its origins. Soon I began to say black people and white people, like everyone else, uttering the lie with increasing ease, conceding the sameness of our difference, deferring to a deadening vision of a racialised world. For by agreeing to be black and white, we also agree to limit the complexity of possibility, we agree to mendacities that for centuries served and will continue to serve crude hungers for power and pathological self-affirmations. No matter, I uttered my lies and thought them a greater truth, and found a kind of self-affirmation in raucous songs of grievance and rebellion (of which I partook in spirit more than in voice). I had my eyes opened to the even bigger lies that had us all tangled and bound beyond relief. In the midst of the uproar about wars, and civil rights and apartheid, with a sense of being present while the pressing issues of our world were being argued over and fought for, I was drawn away from the complicated cruelties that were happening at home. They could not be inserted into this conversation, with its pared-down polarities and uncluttered certainties, and I was only able to suffer them in silence and guilt when I was on my own.

  I studied, I drifted away from my foreign student friends or we went our own inevitable ways. Andrew lasted the longest. We went on a hilarious holiday to the Lake District on his last vacation before he returned to Ghana. It was still possible in those days to turn
a corner in the streets of a small town or follow a bend on a country road, and come face to face with someone who was astonished, flabbergasted, struck dumb, by the sight of a dark-complexioned person. We had plenty of that in the Lake District, and not all of it was funny really, but we played up to it, pretending to be anything but who we were. We were Brazilians, two princes from Madagascar, novice priests from Panama, and when I told Andrew about the Italian phase of my childhood, we even tried out being Italian for a while. It seemed that people were prepared to believe anything about us, although it is possible that they were humouring us because they thought us unstable and childish. We thought it was hilarious, anyway, when perhaps we were only young people who thought our jokes funnier than anyone else’s, and who pretended to look on everything as if it was a bland form of the absurd.

  He is now in the United States, teaching sociology in a college in Montana. Ghana did not work out, it turned into a cesspit like everywhere else. He calls me once a year or so, or perhaps less frequently than that, but somehow or the other we have not manged to meet again, even on the times when he has travelled through London. I don’t suppose now we ever will. How will I ever find my way to Montana and what would be the point of it? Each call seems more strained, our conversation forced in brightness. The questions we ask each other are gestures towards a friendship that neither can fully return. I wonder sometimes what makes him call me, at what seem to me such strange hours. I never call him, although I feel I should. I don’t know what to say, where to begin. I wonder if he calls me because memories have made him sad, or if his life is lonely, or whether he feels a desire to speak to me out of a mood of generosity and well-being, or if he had just had a recollection of something we had done that made him smile. Now as I think this, I feel sad at the way our affections and friendships are so steadily and thoughtlessly depleted by apathy.

  While I am on the subject, I will describe what I know of the other good friends I met when I first came to England. Amur was offered a temporary post with the Arabic service of the BBC World Service. He was to work in radio when he returned to Sudan, and this temporary position was a form of training. So at last I was able to enter Bush House, pass through the monster doors of the building and strut up its sweeping staircase and through its warren of offices and studios. I remember Amur got me into the building by making up a schedule in which he needed to interview me. Perhaps security was more casual at that time, because I don’t remember anyone checking or asking any questions. Bush House was disappointing, naturally, when you are used to imagining it as a voice crackling through the sky over thousands of miles, conveying news of the world with an impartial solemnity. The hall and the stairs lived up to these expectations, but the studios and offices were low and cramped and stuffy and crowded. Everywhere hummed with industry and purpose, though, and I confess I was envious of Amur. He was only there for a few months and then returned to Sudan, after which I lost track of him completely. Sometimes, in those purposeless nostalgic moods when you make plans to track down all your long-lost friends but which never even last until the break of day, I have thought I would find the frequency for Radio Sudan and catch him describing the waters of the Nile or the arid plains of Dofar, and at least confirm to myself that he is of good voice. But before morning, I would have told myself that his words would be meaningless to me and I would not even know if it was the same Amur, and that more likely than not he was now working in a school in Dubai or Sharjah rather than waxing lyrical on Radio Sudan.

  Sundeep, as I mentioned, has become a writer of some fame. He spent a year living in Malawi and wrote a stylish and satirical novel about that country, an irreverent comedy about post-imperial absurdities, mocking the colonial bwanas who effortlessly became expatriates without budging from their carefully tended government bungalows. I don’t suppose the bwanas minded or cared that much about the novel. They knew who had built those bungalows and much else besides, and who had the moral right to occupy them and stroll in the intricately planted gardens. But President Banda did not like it and had the sale of the book banned in Malawi. Sundeep was well out of harm’s way by then, and having his book banned by a President-for-Life who was just reaching the peak of his authoritarian career did not do his reputation any harm. Since then, Sundeep has written other stylish and provocative books and has found many admirers. I’ve read most of his books but I no longer look forward to them. I think that despite their zest and fluency, they have grown increasingly certain of their judgements, and to be too certain of anything is the beginning of bigotry. It is a liberal dogma, a paradox in itself, which if taken too far leads us to the idea that frivolity is the only authentic seriousness. I don’t mean to go that far. Sundeep has found a subject in Africa, and in his books he returns there again and again, but what he writes about the people there is intolerant and needlessly scornful, something of an exhibition, something like his youthful self. I haven’t seen him either in all these years, although I wrote him a note of congratulation when his first novel came out.

  Ramesh is now an economist of international renown, an advocate of moral limits to economic development. He is quoted in solemn editorials and consulted by governments and UN agencies, and holds a Chair in Economics at Grandiose University in the United States (I can’t remember which one). I went to listen to one of his talks when he did a visiting series at the LSE, and he was cautious and deliberate as ever, but there was no mistaking the poise and conviction with which he spoke. I got close enough to greet him, and he gave me a restrained smile which did not reach his eyes, and I guessed from the look in them that he did not recognise me at first. When he did, he nodded solemnly while I grinned in anticipation of something friendlier, and then he asked me if all was well. I said all was not bad and that I hoped all was well with him. He hesitated for a moment and then looked away. I would have felt bad if I had not spoken to him. Even at that moment I thought of Saad, and how he used to torment Ramesh, and the thought made me smile. I don’t know what happened to Saad after he left.

  Anyway, this was later. At that time, after the dispersal of my friends, I was swept along by the logic of my circumstances, living day to day, studying, set on an ambition I did not know would be there wa ing for me. To do what was required for that unacknowledged ambition meant that I had to surpass the standards they had set for themselves, even as I found much of what they represented hateful. So I hated what I had to do, and hated that I had to do it, and felt a sense of triumph when I succeeded in doing it. To anyone who knew me, it would probably have seemed I worried more about the appropriate critical language in which to conduct the argument of my dissertation than about the affairs of the far-away place I left years before, when alone in the rooms I lived in my student squalor, I wept with grief and guilt for those I had lost. When Amin’s taciturn letters came, I dreaded them as if they were accusations, although their tone was always mild and even eased as their lives became less terrifying. I wrote back steadily, not frequently, minding my words. Often I felt that what I had to say was bland or even feigned, and then I tried harder to send news, something with substance and detail: where I had been, what I had done, the railway strike, the weather. The primroses are in bloom and I wish I could describe to you the delicacy of their creamy colour, as subtle in its way as the fragrance of jasmine on a cool night. It is suddenly sunny and beautiful, and the landscape is transformed. Gardens are full of flowers and the trees in the parks are big with leaves. You can’t imagine what England is like when it turns green. Once in late spring I saw marigolds in snow that had fallen unexpectedly in the night.

  I pictured Amin reading those words to my parents and Farida, and saw their looks of disappointment and bewilderment. Why is he telling us these things? Does he not understand that we live in fear and confusion and scarcity? Why does he not send us something instead of this blather? I sent them a calendar with photographs of the countryside once. I could not make the strivings and the anxieties that I lived with seem important enough to co
nvey to them. I could not even make them important enough to myself, not as words.

  Then at last, after years of what now seems incomprehensible labour, I was able to write one day and say that my studies were over, that I had successfully completed my Ph.D. and had miraculously found a job in a university. The university was out of London, in the south, which suited me very well. I was glad to leave the huge old city with its multitudes and its grime, and live in a small town. That would suit me very well. I would live in a quiet street on the edge of the town, grow a little garden and work at my profession. For relaxation, I would take peaceful walks in the quicksilver dusk or go to the cinema. I had a reply in the same week, like in the old days.

  Beloved, you have made us very proud. Many, many congratulations. When I read Ma and Ba your letter, earlier this afternoon, they both started to weep. First him, tears running down his face, snuffling and trying to control himself, then her, joining in and sobbing, then the rest of us, weeping as if we had lost our senses. I think we were crying because we were proud of you. Despite being so far-away, on your own, and with all the worries and the difficulties that must be with you every day, despite all that, you were brave and persevered until you achieved what you had gone so far to achieve. I think we were also crying because life had robbed us of you, because now we would have been thinking of welcoming you back. Well done, my little Italian. When I finished reading, Ba took the letter and read it through himself, although he had already read it once. He is not well now, Allah preserve him, and he does not go out very far any more. These have been difficult times, hard for everyone, but harder for some than for others. After reading the letter, he put it in his shirt pocket and went off for a walk, and everywhere he went, as I discovered when I went out later, he told people your news. If it was up to him, he’d have put it on the radio this evening. I think he has over-extended himself, and is now fast asleep on the sofa. Farida is still here with us, and she too sends many congratulations. She is married to Abbas now, at last. They had to wait for the papers. The wedding was a few weeks ago, and she will be leaving in a few days to join him in Mombasa. She tells me to tell you she will write to you when she gets there. Don’t hold your breath. Send news about your little house in the c ntry when you move, but for now Ma and Ba send their blessing, and love from all of us. Amin.