Desertion

by Abdulrazak Gurnah

  She was attacked. It happened on the night of the uprising. They were looking for the minister, who was not at home, so they went to look for him at her flat. She opened the door to them. We all did. No one knew how to resist or what to do when the gun butts and the boots started hammering on the doors. They attacked her after that. When I heard, in the talk in the street days afterwards, I tried not to hurry away but I went to her flat. It was morning, but there was a curfew on gathering in the streets. There were gunmen everywhere, and some walls were pocked with bullet holes. A few houses had been burned down. When I got to her flat, I knocked on her door for several minutes but it did not open. I said who I was but there was no reply. I felt a movement above me and looked up. Someone was at the window above me, and I stepped back into the road to see who it was, but the person who was there retreated further into the room. I thought it was one of her brothers. I stood in the road for a minute or two, looking up, waiting, but no one came back. I didn’t dare shout, and I didn’t know if the attackers found their way into the house. The house might be full of injured women, and they would not want a stranger asking after such shameful wounds.

  Perhaps it was because of the minister that they attacked her. Or perhaps it was because she is beautiful and talked about in that dirty way. One day, I heard that she had left. The whole household has left and that huge old house is locked up and empty. Hundreds are leaving, thousands are expelled, some are forbidden to leave. They want us to forget everything that was here before, except the things that aroused their rage and made them act with such cruelty. I forget myself and write these things that will cause me trouble if they are found. I don’t know how she left or where she went. Sometimes I wonder whether those who leave know what they’re doing. There may not be a way back.

  I don’t know why I started writing this. I think it was because I had so much tim and I felt that something momentous had happened to me. I s rted to write to replay the anguish for myself. I think in some way I still felt that there was a way back to her. In some way, if I felt tragic enough, someone was bound to take pity and say: go back to her, you deserve her, you have suffered enough. Since those weeks ago when I saw her in the minister’s car . . . Poor minister, they captured him and humiliated him as they did all the other ministers. They’re all in jail on the mainland now, guests of President Julius Nyerere of Tanganyika, who glows with pleasure at what has befallen us. Since those weeks ago when I saw her, this writing has become a burden. Now, after the killings and the expulsion, it has also become dangerous. Today I began to think that I had found a reason to go on writing these bits and pieces. She has gone, Rashid has gone, so many others have gone. Those of us who remain are almost too frightened to live. Writing these scraps will be to tell myself that I live. It will be a way of not forgetting.

  It is late. Ba is fidgeting next door, and soon he will knock on the door and tell me to switch off the light. He worries if any of the lights are on late. He thinks that will attract the gunmen, who will take us for plotters or who will find it hard to resist the opportunity to intimidate us. Farida is not allowed to sew late at night as she used to and I am not allowed to read into the early hours. Ba closes the windows and bolts the door at nine in the evening. The streets are empty. No one goes out at night.

  It was nine months ago when I promised myself to write in here so that I would know I am alive. I have not written anything and yet I am still alive. How foolish. I am now a qualified teacher and have been posted to a country school. Ba has lost his job. Dozens of teachers have lost their jobs, and been replaced by people like me and by school-leavers. It is just meanness. He is crushed. When we were younger and Rashid was still here, I used to think that nothing bad could happen to us. Ma and Ba were so hard-working, so unassuming, such good people. What could happen? Then I lost her, and Rashid left and everything changed. Now Ma and Ba are dispirited and frightened. She does not want me to take the posting to the country school. I tell her that it is safe in the country now, unless the soldiers wish to make it unsafe, and they can do that anywhere. She shouts at me, calling me naïve and a fool. I promise to try and have the posting changed, but I won’t. I would like to work in a country school. I’m good at breaking promises. I would like to know the names of trees, and learn to tell wood from its smell.

  Ba does not say much. His stoop is more pronounced and his frown is permanent. He stutters unexpectedly. He still observes his café ritual but most of the people he used to sit with have gone or are in jail. Most of the day, he sits at home and reads and then goes to the mosque. When Farida told them about her lover Abbas in Mombasa and how she wanted to go and join him, he cried. Not howls and sobs, just quiet tears running down his face. Poor Ba, there is no reason for anyone to know of his existence, but in some way he makes me believe in virtue, in the possibility of it.

  We are all becoming increasingly addicted to the mosque. The government delivers its socialist lies and we all rush for the mosques. The days are getting darker in every way. Food is becoming more scarce. There are power cuts and water shortages. So it’s inevitable that mosques will get fuller and prayers last longer. I find an unexpected pleasure in this communion.

  Very quickly we have learned the limits of our expectations, and somehow the terror has slightly diminished as a result. We sit at home or in our chosen corners in the streets, and talk about the latest rumours and upheavals. We have lost our fastidiousness, many of us. We say that things are getting better every day. Those who said they would have nothing to do with the evil people who now run our affairs, have had to learn to do so. No one mocks them. People work if they have work. They marry and have children. Old enmities bring their venom to the surface. Young people grow up and leave if they can.

  The streets are so empty. So many people locked their houses and left: for Dar es Salaam, Mombasa, Nairobi, Dubai, India. They probably still have their keys in a safe place for their return. Their houses did not stay empty for long, though. The government took them over and distributed them among themselves, but their occupation is forlorn, dark and unloved. Many of the houses have crumbled into the streets from lack of care. One day in the last rains, our neighbours’ house collapsed at last. The upstairs wall went first, so there was time to get everyone out of the house before everything collapsed in a heap of perished mortar and stone and rotten beams and scattering chickens. No one was hurt, and there was even some laughter and hilarity that the old ruin had gone at last, although our neighbours were not that amused. But it also felt as if something else had changed, something big had gone out of our vision. Everything looked different when you glanced out of the window.

  Today we had news of Rashid. He has completed his studies after all these years. It seems incredible, and as incredible that he is anything to do with us. Ba waited until I came home from work, and then pulled the letter out of his shirt pocket. He goes to the post office himself these days, every day, he has so much time. Usually there is nothing to collect. So as soon as I came in, I saw the airmail letter in his pocket even before he pulled it out. He gave it to me and told me to read it to Ma, who cannot read any more because of her eyes. The letter was open, so Ba must have already read it himself. Farida was somewhere inside, and he called out for her to come. I read Rashid’s letter to a full house. His tears began after the first few lines, after I had read the main item, which fortunately Rashid got to very quickly, because I could see the alarm on my mother’s face as she waited to hear what the letter was to announce. She thanked God softly when I read that he had finished his studies, and his silent weeping turned into sobs. She said Ba’s name, straining to see him as he sat on his own on the sofa, but he said Read, commanding me. I read on, how grateful he was for the way they had brought him up to care about studying and excelling, how sad he was to be so far away, how fortunate to find a university position in England, and the description of the house in a quiet street where he would grow a garden. By the time I finished the letter we were all weeping. I don’t
know why for sure: relief that he had not stumbled, sad that he was not with us, crying for our own sorrows that we could not share with him, and that everything has turned out as it has.

  I felt at that moment . . . No, I knew then that we had lost him. It was not a new thought, but the description of that quiet street on the edge of town made me certain that we will not be seeing him again. It makes me long for that street myself. In one of his letters he had sent me a picture he had cut out of a calendar, of a small lake and green hilly countryside. He said it was where he had been with one of his friends for a holiday, and how beautiful it was. What would make him return here? To do what?

  Ba took the letter from me and left to announce the news to the world. I sat with Ma and Farida and reminisced about the little Italian, and missed him. Then I started a reply which I finished this morning. It feels like the end of something. Farida leaves in a few days to join Abbas. I’ll have them all to myself soon.

  Some days everything seems so close, and the events of years seem like yesterday, everything squeezed up and crammed to bursting. I think about her every day. No one ever mentions her name and I dare not ask what has happened to her. I asked Farida once and she looked pained, and annoyed with me. I meant to ask if she knew an address so that I could write to her, but I didn’t and perhaps I would not have dared to write. I did not ask again, and Farida did not mention her. I think her look of pain was to tell me to forget her. I can’t forget her. I imagine myself with her. For hours on end sometimes. I relive the times I was with her, and I am astonished at how much I can still remember even after all these years, and how real it feels. Today I lay on the bed bes e her while she talked about that first time on the evening of Idd when I first held her in the dark and called her beloved. She loved telling that story and laughing at my eagerness for her. My hands stroked her as she spoke, stroked the firmness of her thighs and the cusp of her hips. There was a thud of a door shut too vigorously upstairs, and she stopped speaking. I looked at her to see if she was frightened or startled but she had gone and I was lying alone in the dark. The memory of that door thuds through my body as if it has just happened.

  I remember walking home after meeting her for the first time, and the terror I felt for what lay ahead. That terror never left me, but it was made small by the exhilaration I felt when I was with her, or even when I was not. Sometimes when I walked home after being with her, I could not stop myself grinning with joy every step home. Then I listened again to all the tender words and the promises we made, and was incredulous. I still hear those words and promises, but now they don’t make me incredulous. Sometimes they fill me with shame and a strange and irresistible disgust. I cover my ears and cringe but I cannot stop myself hearing them. I cannot imagine how she looked or how she felt or what she thought of me when she heard about what I had done. I cannot imagine the terror she would have felt when those men attacked her.

  I could not abandon them. I could not disobey them. Here they are. She is now blind and fearful. She sits at home all day and all night. Sometimes I forget that she is in the room because she is so silent. She likes to look at the photograph album. We only have one. She runs her hand over the photographs and describes them while I turn over the pages. That’s the one of Farida in Mombasa with her cousins on the beach near Tiwi, that day we took the ferry at Likoni. This is Rashid in the school play. He’s wearing that huge false beard and pretending to be the wazir Barmaki. She only speaks of Rashid as a child. When he wrote to say that he was married to Grace she only asked if it was an English woman and then fell into one of her silences. Days later she told me to get an airmail form for her. Write this down, she said, exactly as I say it. Then she dictated ugly words and threats which I pretended to write down. The blind talking to the one-eyed. I did not post the letter although I told her I did. They never mention her, Grace. I don’t know why they are so surprised or so distraught. What did they think he would do? That he would live alone all his life? How is it that even the best of people are also unkind?

  She laughs and comes to life as she runs her fingers over the photographs she can’t see any more. She does not grieve over these photographs. But often she grieves, and she sits silently until you speak to her. Then she only tells me to get on with my work, with marking or reading, and not to take any notice of her. I remind myself to speak to her about what I’m doing, to speak without inflection, as if I were making a casual conversation. Sometimes this makes her laugh because my intention is too transparent, and she tells me to stop prattling at her. She can’t hear herself think. The silences can be deadly, and we sit there paralysed by them.

  When Ba is at home, he often puts the radio on, and then she spars with the announcers, challenging their news and catching them out on the lies. In the country of the blind, who needs eyes, she tells the announcers.

  Ba goes out for long walks in the mornings. He goes to the waterfront and strolls among the fishing boats. Then he goes through the lanes until he reaches the market. He buys some fruit and vegetables and walks home via the post office. He cooks the vegetables when he gets home, slices the fruit and puts my share aside for when I get home from my school in the country. Aunt Halima sends over a basket of food for our lunch, because Ma has burned herself too often trying to cook on the charcoal seredani. Farida has sent an electric hotplate but often there is no electricity, and even with a hotplate Ma is not safe any more. She has given up, I think. She is overwhelmed by what has happened, and the loneliness.

  He trembles. He never goes out after lunch. Sometimes he sits outside and reads, and if there is a reading at the mosque for a neighbour who has died he goes to that. Otherwise he sits at home and he trembles at raised voices and the raucous, hateful speeches of government ministers on the radio. He won’t allow me to go out at night, not as if I am a child he fears for, or because he thinks I’ll get up to something evil. I don’t think so. It’s because he is afraid something will happen to me and they will be left alone. It makes me happy to think that one day soon they will die. I don’t say that because I hate them or blame them, but because it will bring the loneliness and emptiness to an end. I think it makes them happy too, to know that they will soon die. It makes me happy to think I will die.

  I have become something of a minor actor in ceremonies of death. It began with my frequent attendance at the mosque. I found the communion strangely comforting, although I could not always believe the things I was saying. I became familiar with a variety of prayers and ceremonies. I could not help taking them in. After a time people directed their questions at me as if I was a scholar, or asked me to recite a prayer as a gesture towards what they took to be my piety. That is how I found myself assisting at funerals and readings. Now it is expected of me. When someone in the neighbourhood dies, I am one of those who is summoned to assist with the arrangements. So many people have left, and now there are only the children and the elderly, who like to think that neighbourly voices will mourn their passing. It does not feel like handling the dead.

  I say almost nothing about the dead. I go through the motions of what is required. I plead for their lives in the hereafter. It’s like a trick. There is nothing out there, but if it will make you feel better, lying there without voice or breath, I will plead that your life hereafter be attended with mercy. The living find meaning in that, in imagining where the dead live and in praying for their equanimity and rest.

  Today it rained. It poured with rain from dawn until early afternoon. It brought the aged ones to their feet, laughing and exclaiming, Ma leaning on Ba and shaking his arm with something like the old mischief. It brought children out in the streets, running and splashing in the floods of rainwater and overflowing roof gutters, racing hastily made rafts of matchboxes and coconut husks.

  A letter arrived from Rashid. I did not hurry to read it. He writes brief, desultory letters now and then, and he always sends regards from Grace to Ma and Ba. I pass them on to no effect, and send their regards to her when I write. I feel his w
eariness in the letters he writes, and I suspect that my laboured replies are just as revealing. When I came to read his letter tonight, it said that Grace has left him. It was anguished and I felt sore and distressed for him. I could only imagine him as my younger brother who was so full of talk and a vulnerable bravado, and I ached to think of his loneliness in that strange place. I began a reply which I’ll finish tomorrow, but I found that to imagine how he feels I was thinking about Jamila, so I’ve told him something about that in the letter. I haven’t written or mentioned her name in all these years. That’s why I want to wait until tomorrow, to read the letter in broad daylight and see how it feels.

  I don’t think I’ll mention Grace to them, especially not Ma. She is ailing, breathing heavily and painfully. The nurse at the hospital told us it’s her lungs and nothing can be done about it. There’s no doctor to examine her at the moment, not for a few days, for some reason we could not find out. The pharmacist refused to sell me anything without knowing what is wrong with her. So now she is heaving for breath and lies sleepless in their bed, and he lies fussing beside her. I can hear them as I write this.

  It was a release to mention Jamila to Rashid. I don’t know what use these scraps can be put to, but writing to him about her will let him see how stupid people can be, how stupid I am. Maybe I’ll send these bits to him. I don’t know how long I’ll be able to write or work, and I don’t know what will happen after that or how we will all live. One eye is almost gone now.