Desertion

by Abdulrazak Gurnah

  I am beginning to think that the dark and the silence are a kind of bliss. If our rulers forbade us music and banished the radio and the television, I don’t think I would mourn. It sounds bad to forbid music, like the sternest of Wahabbis, as if life and gaiety were banned, but I would have that in return for silence.

  Sorrow has its gifts. Ma went four days ago and brought an end to her suffering. Ba seems to have found some energy from her going, and he has started going through their things and talking about her and their life together. Farida is here for the mourning, and she has brought her book with her. So at last I get to read her poems. She read one to him last night, and he listened and commended her when I thought he would cry. It was a poem about Ma when we were young. He listened and smiled and said yes, that was how she was. He wants Farida to help him go through Ma’s things. I think he just wants her to be with him for company. I don’t know how long he’ll last. He seems strangely energetic. It saddens me that he will not see Rashid before he goes. It saddens me that I may not see the little Italian before my sight goes, or hear him breathing nearby, and chattering his gibberish.

  The radio has broken down and we can get no news. The water has been cut off for most of the day because something has broken down in the pumping station. We no longer know how to make anything work. We don’t know how to make anything for ourselves, not anything we use or desire, not even a bar of soap or a packet of razor blades. How did we allow ourselves to get into this state?

  A Continuation

  SOME SHORT WHILE BEFORE I read Amin’s notebooks, I attended a conference in Cardiff, organised by someone I had known as a graduate student and with whom I had recently renewed contact. When we were students, we were writing our dissertations at the same time, attending the same research seminars, playing squash twice a week. We were friends, in the way of these things. Then we got our jobs and headed in different directions, and completely lost touch. I never heard anyone mention his name and never came across anything he had written. I am quite certain he would be able to say the same about me. I thought about him now and then, perhaps because a name reminded me of him or something equally accidental like that. Then he wrote me an email, having got my address on the university website where all our names and addresses are listed out of absurd vanity. He wrote because he said he remembered a conversation years ago when we discussed Othello, and that at the time he was so impressed with my argument that he tried to persuade me to write something about the play. He said in his email that he hoped I had. In any case, he was now organising a conference on the treatment of mixed-race sexuality in English writing, and he wondered whether I was interested in contributing a paper. It would be lovely to meet again and catch up on the interim, he said. I thought so too, and agreed to go.

  Instead of offering a paper on Othello, which I never did write despite his flattering suggestion, I did one on race and sexuality in settler writing in Kenya. I made some low-key observations on the fiction as well as on some memoirs, remarking on the absence of sexual encounters in this writing or their sublimation into gestures of pained patronage or rumours of tragic excess. In the discussion phase of my presentation I mentioned the story of Rehana, or what I knew of it, as an example of the kind of story which failed to appear in this writing. I mentioned which town it had taken place in, approximately which period, and its unexpected consequences for her granddaughter Jamila. I did not at that point know Pearce’s name. Well, it wasn’t much of a paper, nothing challenging or ambitious, more like a brief chat about issues that interested me in this writing.

  There were only six participants in the session, most of the others having chosen to attend a parallel one on William Faulkner. I probably would have done too if I hadn’t had to give my paper. After the presentation, one of the participants came to speak to me. She told me how interesting she had found the paper (these are the necessary courtesies of such moments), and wondered whether she could talk to me about the story of Rehana and her affair with an Englishman. I waited to hear more, already shrivelling from contact. She was an attractive woman, in her late thirties perhaps, some years younger than me. I waited because I wanted to know how we should proceed. I was weary, and wary of encounters. After Grace I had made no effort to start anything with someone else, and my life was painful and lonely as a result, but it was calm and manageable. I am not usually vain in this way, and do not assume that every encounter is an attempted seduction, more likely the opposite, but sometimes there are complications which do not amount to seduction, misunderstandings, wounds, embarrassment. So I waited.

  She told me her grandfather was briefly a DO in a small town on the Kenya coast at the turn of the century, the same town I had named as the location of Rehana’s story. He had written a memoir of his colonial service, which did not last very long, and in this brief memoir, which was never finished, he mentioned an affair between a native woman and an English traveller, although he named no names. She wondered if this might be the same story I had referred to, because the point of her grandfather mentioning this affair was that the English traveller lived openly with his native lover for a while, and that was unusual. The point was also to say, as I had argued in my paper, that such affairs were doomed. The English lover went home and the native woman took up with another man.

  That was how I met Barbara Turner.

  We spent the evening together, and she told me a great deal more than I could have expected. Her grandfather was Frederick Turner, who came back home on leave in 1903 and never went back into the colonial service. His wife hated the empire, and he missed her too much to carry on. So he became a teacher of literature at the University of Nottingham where Christabel, his wife and now a published poet, had admirers and influence. It was during this period that Frederick Turner began the memoir. He put dates in the margin of each installment of the work. The last installment was dated June 1905. Their first son John, Barbara’s father, was born in June 1905. That may have been why Frederick abandoned the memoir, overwhelmed by the arrival of a perfect little progeny. I don’t know how serious an undertaking the memoir was, whether it was to fill empty days, or was a burst of nostalgia for the other life which spent itself soon enough when baby John arrived. By this date he had probably also renewed contact with Martin Pearce, who lived nearby in Newark. That too could have been the reason for abandoning the writing. He would not have wanted to offend a friend. In fact, Martin and Frederick became firm friends, and even though Martin moved to London to take up a post as a researcher at the British Museum, the families visited and kept in touch.

  All this might have been expected. I had a name now for Rehana’s English lover and for the colonial officer who looked after him. That Martin Pearce turned out to be an orientalist is not that surprising, although Frederick Turner ending up as a teacher of literature was. He could do no worse than many others in that pursuit. That both Martin and Frederick survived the war was their good fortune. Martin was sent to Mesopotamia as an antiquities expert and Frederick stayed safely at home. What was unexpected was that Pearce’s daughter Elizabeth was Barbara’s mother. She told me the story of these connections briefly on this first meeting, but later she told me more. For my purposes here it is enough to say that Barbara’s mother Elizabeth was Martin Pearce’s only daughter (although we know she was not), and that she married Frederick Turner’s eldest son John. It was Elizabeth who told Barbara about the identity of the Englishman who had an open affair with a native woman. After Frederick’s death (1940), Elizabeth read the memoir and asked her mother-in-law Christie Turner if she knew who the Englishman lover was. Your dad, she said. By then Martin Pearce was also dead (1939) and secrecy was pointless. Death was all around them.

  I explained my interest in the story. I told Barbara about Jamila and Amin, but at first all she seemed able to take in was that there had been a child, that her grandfather had had a daughter with his native lover.

  Her name was Rehana, I told her. Rehana Zakariya, not native lover. Sh
e named her daughter Asmah, the one without sin. And Asmah named her daughter Jamila, which means beautiful.

  Jamila is my cousin, Barbara said. There were two elder brothers too, I told her. I have two elder brothers as well, she said.

  A few days later Barbara’s mother Elizabeth wrote me a note, inviting me to lunch. I had asked to look at the memoir, and she in turn had asked me to meet her. Barbara was not invited. She did not want me to think ill of her father, she said. She was in her late seventies, but still well and alert, almost matronly in her appearance rather than feeble or worn-out. She cooked a light but elaborate lunch: corn soup, baked salmon and spinach, and a spiced apple tart. Barbara had reported the story I had told her. She wanted to know about Jamila and about her mother. I told her what I could. She had had no idea that there had been a child. Not even Frederick could have known that, but her father must have done. At least he must have known she was pregnant when he left her to return home. She asked me if I knew if her father had ever written to Rehana and the child, or visited them. I said I didn’t know. I have a sister, Elizabeth said. Her husband John would have loved that. He died two years ago, she said, and then after a brief pause she added: I still can’t believe that he’s gone. She asked if her sister was still alive and if I knew her name. I said her name was Asmah but I didn’t know if she was still alive. She asked me to write the name down for her, and asked if there was a way of getting in touch with Jamila, or her mother if she was still alive. I said I would ask.

  Soon afterwards I received and read Amin’s notebooks, and I understood that despite my real desire to do so, I would not have been able to imagine the anguish of their lives. After that I knew what I would do. It was time to go home, in a manner of speaking, to visit and to put my fears to rest and to beg pardon for my neglect. It would give them pleasure, and give me pleasure, and would bring to life nerves and fibres that had lain unrefreshed for too long. Barbara asked if she could come with me. What for? I asked her, surprised. It won’t be that easy for you in that place, different customs, discomforts. I said this but I wanted her to insist. I wanted her to say that she was coming whatever I said, because she wanted to be with me as well as everything else. I wanted her to say that she would miss me if I was away for so long, as I knew I would miss her. She probably knew me well enough now to know what a timid creature I really was, that I wanted her to come but was reluctant to cause a stir.

  ‘Perhaps we’ll be able to find Jamila,’ she said. I don’t know, I said. Everything is scattered, dispersed to the farthest corners of the world. No one can find anyone. Someone will know, she said. She had read what I had written. I was done with it, I told her, done with the writing, another abandoned memoir. It had got me to the point where I feel like trying again, where I feel like starting again. Even if that were no more than an illusion, it is one that gives me a sense of well-being, and that is quite enough.

  ‘I’ll have to write and explain about your coming, in case it upsets Ba. You’ll have to sleep in a separate room, you know,’ I told her, and the comedy of that at our ages made us both smile.

  Abdulrazak Gurnah

  DESERTION

  Abdulrazak Gurnah was born in Zanzibar in 1948 and teaches at the University of Kent. He is the author of six novels, including Paradise, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Award, and By the Sea, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist.

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  Memory of Departure

  Pilgrims Way

  Dottie

  Paradise

  Admiring Silence

  By the Sea

  FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, JULY 2006

  Copyright © 2005 by Abdulrazak Gurnah

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either

  are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is

  entirely coincidental.

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