Memory of Departure

by Abdulrazak Gurnah

  For

  Leila and Sarah,

  and SVG

  by the same author

  PILGRIMS WAY

  DOTTIE

  PARADISE

  ADMIRING SILENCE

  BY THE SEA

  DESERTION

  THE LAST GIFT

  Contents

  by the same author

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

  Also available by Abdulrazak Gurnah

  1

  My mother was in the backyard, starting the fire. Snatches of the prayer she was chanting reached me before I went out. I found her with her head lowered over the brazier, blowing gently to coax the charcoal into flames. The saucepan of water was ready by her feet. When she glanced round, I saw that the fire had darkened her face and brought tears to her eyes. I asked for the bread money, and she frowned as if loath to be disturbed from tending the flames. She reached into the bodice of her dress and pulled out the knotted handkerchief in which she kept her money. The coins she put in my hand were warm from her body, and felt soft and round without edges.

  ‘Don’t take forever,’ she said, and turned back to the fire without raising her eyes to my face. I left the house without greeting her and was sorry as soon as my back was turned.

  She was then in her early thirties but seemed older. Her hair had already turned grey, and the years had ruined her face, etching it with bitterness. Her glance was often reproachful, and small acts of neglect provoked her into resentful stares. Sometimes her face came to life with a smile, but slowly and unwillingly. I felt guilty about her, but I thought she might have smiled to greet me into manhood.

  I walked through the dark alley that ran by the side of the house. Heavy dew had settled the dust in the air and glazed the tin roofs of the roadside huts. Although pitted and cratered with pot-holes, the road seemed more even and solid than the mud huts that flanked it. This was Kenge, where the toilers and failures lived, where wizened prostitutes and painted homosexuals traded, where drunks came for cheap tende, where anonymous voices howled with pain in the streets at night. An empty bus drove by, growling and lurching on the broken road. It was painted green and white, its headlights weak and yellow in the morning light.

  The clearing round the mzambarau tree was empty so early in the day. From the green mosque came the hum of prayer, the faithful clustered in a saving huddle. In the distance a cock crowed. Jagged ends of rock had thrust through the earth in the square, a peril for unwary feet. With the rains, the earth would turn into fields of sprouting grass, but it was now the middle of the dry season.

  Kenge was very near the sea. The taste was always in the air. On muggy days, a smear of salt would line the nostrils and the ears. On soft mornings, a sea breeze came to chill the heart at the start of a new day. In years gone by, the slavers had walked these streets. Their toes chilled by the dew, their hearts darkened with malice, they came with columns of prime flesh, herding their prize to the sea.

  The Yemeni shopkeeper gave me the loaf of bread without a word. He wiped his hand on his shirt before taking my money, a mendicant’s deference. On his face was a servile smile, but under his breath he uttered a muttered curse.

  I found my father praying when I got home. He was squatting on the ground in the backyard, his legs folded under him. His eyes were closed and his head was lowered on his chest. His hands, folded into fists, were resting on his knees, the index finger of his right hand pointing at the ground.

  I sliced the bread, then went to wake my sisters. They slept in my grandmother’s room, the walls of which were always condensed with the smell of armpits and sweat. Her shrunken body lay in folds, arm hanging over the side of the bed. Zakiya lay beside her. She was the elder of my two sisters, and she was already awake. Saida was always harder to rouse. She rolled away as I shook her, turning her back on me and grunting her discontent. I became irritated with her, and in the end held her by her shoulders and rocked her.

  ‘Eh! What are you doing?’ snapped my grandmother, roused from her sleep by Saida’s whining. ‘Be careful. Do you want to kill all of us? Be careful! Don’t you ever listen?’

  We called her Bi Mkubwa, the Elder Mistress. She looked frail and kindly but was cruel without mercy. I heard her muttering behind me as I turned to leave.

  ‘Don’t say anything. Don’t bother to greet anybody. Come back in here!’ – suddenly shouting – ‘You little shit! Who do you think I am? Come back here!’

  I stood outside the back door, waiting to give in to her screaming. I heard her wail for my father, her voice rising like someone in pain. He was still squatting in the yard in front of me, praying. My mother glanced at him, but his eyes were shut to the screaming around him. She shook her head at me. There you go again. She hurried inside for my books, leaving me alone with my father for a moment. She gave me a slice of bread and a penny for a cup of tea. It was the morning of my fifteenth birthday.

  At Koran school, which I had attended from the age of five, I had learnt that boys become accountable to God at the age of fifteen. Girls reach this maturity when they are nine. It is to do with secretions. So God has decreed.

  ‘When you’re fifteen,’ my father had told me, ‘It’s between God and you. Every sin you commit, His angels will enter in your book. On the Day of Judgment, the weight of the evil you have done will be measured against the good. If you obey the teachings of God, you will go to heaven. If you sin, you will burn in Hell. You will burn to your bones, then you will grow whole and burn all over again. And you will go on like this for ever. There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet. We must pray five times a day, fast during Ramadhan, give zakat every year, and go to Makka at least once in a lifetime, if God gives us the means. God has divided Hell into seven depths. The deepest is for the liars and hypocrites, those who pretend to be devout when there is doubt in their hearts.

  ‘Every day you must thank Him that you were not born a kafir or a savage, that you were born of parents who can teach you of His Glory and His Wisdom. You are one of the faithful of God, a creature of God. In a few years you will be fifteen, you will be a man. Learn to obey Him now or you will burn for ever in the fires of Hell.’

  On the morning I was fifteen, the same bus took me to school as did every other morning. The same faces were on the bus with me, the usual girls sitting together and apart from us, reared into self-conscious anxiety in the presence of men. I searched among them for the one I favoured. Her hair was spread across her shoulders. She held herself with a stiffness that made nonsense of my desires. The girl next to her looked gentler. They were sitting in front of me and I did not even dare ask their names. I thought of dream nights when the blood flows warm . . . on the morning I became a man.

  On the way back from school, I went into the gloom of the whitewashed mosque. The floors were covered with gaily-dyed matting for the congregation to sit on. I went in among them and opened my account with the Almighty.

  Clouds of dust rising and rising, churned up by tramping feet. Trees glare hard-headed at the noon sun. Tortured by the power of the heat, the sea turns and turns and wastes and evaporates, and turns into mist and vapour, coagulating in the chill that follows the sun.

  As I approached the waterfront I could smell the fish-market. Some of the fishermen were still about. Most of them worked at night, and went home to sleep at the sound of the midday call to prayer. Every night they pushed their tiny boats into the water and disappeared. Some of them did not return for several days, and then came back with a shark or a swordfish that they had defeated in battle. When I was younger, I used to think it was a glamorous and free life, a man’s li
fe.

  The salt wind from the sea washed over me. The smell of the docks, round the curve of the breakwater, mingled with the rumble of hooves. They were loading cattle for the islands. Livestock did not do well on the islands because of tsetse fly. So, every month local traders loaded diseased old borans into dhows and took them across.

  I saw old man Bakari walking along the muddy beach towards the steps. When I was small, Bakari used to tell me about the sea and fishermen. He was always kind to me. Sometimes he gave me a piece of roast cassava or some fish to take home. He said the sea frightened him. He said people did not really know what the sea was like. A monster, he said. Deep, deep, so deep that you can’t believe it. There are mountains and plains, and many human remains. And sharks that feed. One day . . . And the shrill cries of the water-birds. A death pit. His body was like a wounded, deformed muscle. He squinted at me for a moment, and then he grinned.

  ‘How are you?’ he asked. ‘And your father and your mother?’

  ‘Ahlan mzee Bakari, they’re well.’

  ‘And school? Are you doing well? You will be a doctor one day,’ he grinned.

  ‘All is well.’

  He nodded his approval.

  ‘Alhamdulillah. Say Alhamdulillah for these kindnesses that God shows us,’ he said, and waited for me to thank God too. ‘Oh well, I must be going to my bed. Give my regards to your parents.’ He waved his arm and walked away, an old man, bent and bowed.

  Sometimes Bakari went mad. He beat his wife and children. Once he set his wife on fire. He broke a chair over one of his daughters and she still suffers from fainting spells and can hardly speak properly. Afterwards he was contrite, locking himself away and praying to God for forgiveness, begging God to kill him, begging his family to pardon him. He was afraid they would have him put in the mad hospital. Nobody came out of there. They beat their prisoners there, to find out whether they were really mad or just hashish smokers looking for a roof.

  Bakari used to say that God was the only truth in the world. And if He wished to give him a faulty head, that was His business. We can only do what we think is right, what we think God wants.

  The sea air was good for the pain in my chest. The tide was going out and the fishermen’s dugouts lay on their sides in the mud, the outriggers festooned with weed. The sun beat on the green and slimy beach, raising a stench. Beyond the breakwater, a Port Police launch sped towards the harbour. A ship was coming in.

  I knew I would have to go home, because I belonged to them. If I did not return, they would come to seek me. Then they would beat me and love me and remind me of God’s words. In and out of the rooms and into the yard they would chase me, beating my flesh. Never listens to anyone, He’s ashamed of us, of his name. Look at the liar now. What could we have done to deserve him?

  ‘He never listens,’ my grandmother would say, stoking my father’s rage.

  ‘Hasn’t he had enough?’ my mother would protest, hovering on the edges, anxious for her wounded fledgeling. In the end she would withdraw into her room, looking stern. What’s the good of that? It was better by the dirty sea, away from chaos and humiliation.

  In the distance the ship drew near, carrying its shipload of Greek sailors and Thai rice.

  They often told me how weak I was when I was born. My brother Said was born eighteen months before me. He was named after my grandfather, who was some kind of a crook. On the day Said was born, my father got drunk and was found crumpled in a cinema car-park. My grandmother read prayers over the new arrival, asking that God protect him from the evil of other people’s envy.

  When I was born I caused my mother a great deal of pain. My grandmother said someone should be called to read the Koran over me, asking God to keep me alive. They washed me with holy water from Zamzam and wrapped me in cloths inscribed with lines from the Book. They persuaded the Lord to let me live. Three years passed before Zakiya came. Neither Said nor I paid much attention. What’s the good of a sister? Said beat me often. He was the elder. He said it was to make me tough. Said had many friends, and when he was six he was already fucking boys. He taught me to chase stray cats and beat them with twisted metal cables. We raided walled gardens to steal fruit. We baited beggars and madmen. Said forced me into fights with other boys, to toughen me up. Often in frustration he would shove me aside to finish off a fight that I was losing. When I went home, cut and bleeding, he would get a beating. Next time you get into trouble I’ll kill you, you bastard. Do you hear me? my father would tell him as he pounded him. After a while, my grandmother would intervene. My mother would take me out into the yard. Said would sob his heart out in my grandmother’s room. Many nights my father did not sleep at home.

  Said was never quiet. He was always arguing, bullying and getting a beating. He would laugh while my mother tearfully appealed to his better nature. He always cried when my father beat him, throwing himself around the room and screaming with pain, winking at me when he thought father was not looking. Said was very big. When people saw us together they said that he would disinherit me at my father’s death. When Said was given money for sweets, he paid little boys to take their shorts off in a quiet corner. He tried to persuade me to join him. Sometimes he brought a boy to me and said that the boy wanted me to fuck him. He would whisper urgently . . . I tried to feel as he did, but I was a disappointment to him. I bought sweets with my money, and always gave him half of them.

  Once we were all arrested for beating one of the boys in the neighbourhood. Said tied him to a tree and then caned him. The boy’s father reported us to the police sergeant who took all of us to the station. I liked the sergeant because he let us go into the station and play with the handcuffs. If he arrested a thief, he allowed us to come into the office to watch him telephone headquarters. When he got us to the station he took out a big book.

  ‘There are names in here,’ he said, rapping the book with his knuckles. ‘These are evil people. And once your name is in here, then you go to Court. Do you know what they do to children in Court? They send them to prison in a forest.’

  He pointed at me and told me to go home. I fled without a moment’s hesitation, bringing a smile to the sergeant’s face. When Said came home, all he told me was that the sergeant had given them a warning. In the end, all the sergeant did was to inform my father. Said got a beating. I hid under the bed.

  One day, rummaging in a dustbin, I found a five-shilling note. I asked Said if I should take it in to the people whose dustbin it was.

  ‘Don’t be a fool,’ he said. ‘You found it.’

  ‘But it’s wrong,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t belong to us.’

  ‘Who said?’ he asked.

  ‘Father.’

  He grunted his contempt.

  ‘But it’s like stealing,’ I insisted.

  ‘You’re so stupid,’ he said coldly, hurtfully. He started to walk away. I ran after him, clutching the five-shilling note. We bought two ice-creams each, and bajia and mbatata and chocolates. We sat in the public gardens, Jubilee Gardens as they then were, under a leafy, shady tree and had a picnic. We bought a plastic football and went back to the gardens to play with some of the other boys there. We walked home with the football under my arm and two bars of chocolate in Said’s pocket. Said said that we could hide the ball under some sacks and then discover it there a day or two later. When we turned into the backyard there was no one around. Said took the ball from me and ran to the empty sacks.

  ‘What are you doing?’ shouted my father, standing at the door.

  He walked over to the sacks and took the ball out. They were convinced that we had street-begged for the money, or even worse. I said we had found the money, which annoyed my father. He said I was insulting his intelligence, and did I think he kept his brains in his shithole? Said glared at me, warning me not to say anything, to keep quiet and take a beating. I told them that we had found the money in a dustbin. Said raised his eyebrows heavenwards. A sudden silence fell over all of us. I did not know why what I had said was
so shocking.

  ‘So!’ my father said, turning to Said. ‘You found the money in a dustbin!’

  I could see my father beginning to swell, his eyes glaring. Said started to sniffle.

  ‘What dustbin?’ my mother asked, stepping between Said and my father. ‘What were you doing? You’re lucky you haven’t caught a disease. What were you after?’

  She grabbed Said’s collar and started to take him away. My father stepped forward and pushed her aside. Said retreated hastily, and my mother whimpered softly, her eyes filling with tears.

  ‘I’ll tell you what he’s after in a dustbin,’ said my father, walking towards Said. ‘He’ll look in dustbins for what he can’t get at home. And when he doesn’t find it there either, he’ll look for it in somebody’s bed, having his arse fucked. You little bastard!’

  I wanted to say that it was I, not Said . . . I was too afraid. Said had stopped his snivelling and was watching my father with unwavering concentration, poised for flight. My mother was now openly sobbing, her body rocking slightly as if she were in prayer.

  ‘I warned you,’ my father said, beginning to crouch. ‘I warned you. I’ll break your neck for this!’

  Said turned and ran, and my father felled him with a blow on his right shoulder. It sounded like an axe soaking up meat. Said’s knees buckled, and his mouth gaped as he struggled for air. My father stepped forward and stopped within inches of the heaving body of his first-born. He kicked him in the stomach. He kicked him again as he tried to get up. He beat him with his fists, butted him with his head, bit him on the wrist. He beat him until his bowels opened.

  ‘Leave him be!’ my mother screamed, throwing herself at my father. ‘You’ll kill him!’

  He knocked her down. He turned on her and snarled like an animal. His arms were shooting out, smashing the air with fury, my mother on the ground. He turned back to Said and screamed and roared at him. He beat him with real anger and hate, the sweat streaming off his arms and down his legs. The cunt. And in the end he stood over him, feet wide apart, and shouted, Have you had enough? He stood over his first-born and shouted, Have you had enough?