The Last Gift

by Abdulrazak Gurnah

  His then housemate, Monzoor, who was doing an MA in Law, must have thought he had launched Jamal on the road to safety, and pressed him to come to the mosque with him for Friday prayers. Jamal said maybe, but first he would learn a little more. Manzoor was disappointed, but determined. ‘It is not learning that comes first, but recognition of God’s oneness and completion. We are Muslims. God has favoured us with the gift of this knowledge and He has promised us many wonderful things. He has required obedience and submission in return. You have not been obedient and you have not submitted. There isn’t much time,’ he said. ‘Your sins have been mounting for years. Ignorance is no excuse. You must begin putting your account right otherwise you will be denied all the good things God has promised us. Come to prayers with me, and you will please God and He will reward you.’

  Maybe, Jamal said, and managed to resist salvation. He would first learn a little more.

  Then not so long after that first meeting came the 9/11 bombings in New York, and the wars that followed, which made knowing more imperative. He would have attended the group anyway, but now he did so with the need to hear different voices on what was happening in the world. He went diffidently, and he thought the others did too, not to find solutions or to hold forth against the hatreds released by these events, but to understand what little it was possible to understand. The Islam Reading Group, despite the anxiety it no doubt caused the university authorities, was just another academic seminar, a talking shop. Their subject that Wednesday evening was the Zaydis Shia in Yemen and their doctrinal differences with other Shia sects, the Ithnaasheri and the Ismaili.

  Jamal’s first thought before he knew anything about the casualties, was: Let it not be the Palestinians. All they had at first were the deceptively familiar images of a plane flying serenely across the New York sky before ramming into one of the towers and bursting into flames. Moments later they saw the other plane, flying unhurriedly, so it seemed, into the other tower. And his first thought was let it not be the Palestinians who have done this, because if it is, they will now lose everything as the Americans turn their wrath on them. Then he thought, let the buildings be empty. Let it not be Muslims who have done this. Let it be maddened drug barons or crazed criminals. But of course it was Muslims, and they were proud of what they had done. And the towers were not empty but crowded with people.

  In the days that followed came the stories of senseless deaths and terrifying near misses, of people hurling themselves from the burning towers, of heroic rescues and anguished loved ones waiting for news. The images of the planes exploding into the towers played again and again on television, and he felt that he had witnessed them before they happened, and in a way he had, in all the disaster movies that had rehearsed these moments like a foul prophecy. What those movie images had not foretold was how unpredictably dangerous and fragile the world they lived in had suddenly become, how they all felt in danger of attack now. It had not occurred to him before to imagine what living in danger of attack felt like, as thousands of people must feel in many parts of the world. He had thought of the rights and wrongs of what they endured: in Palestine, Chechnya, the Congo, but he had not even tried to imagine what living in that danger felt like. Perhaps it did not feel like much after a while but became something pervasive and crushing, and you trusted to instinct and luck, just hopping from one near miss to another, resigned to terror. It made him realise how safe he had believed the world they lived in to be.

  Those planes exploding into the towers, the hard-headed brutality of that act of terror, whatever its rationale, changed that. He understood that such desperate acts of violence were the response of the weak against the strong, and that what made them repulsive was also part of their impact, their unpredictability, their indiscriminate destruction. Those planes exploding into the towers, and the death of three thousand people and near deaths of many others, released a rage and panic that would lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of other people, to the destruction of countries, to mass arrests, to torture, to assassinations and to more acts of terror. He did not know this as he watched the images and listened to the stories, but he knew that retribution would follow because that was what it meant to be a powerful state, and that what was to come would be worse than what they were looking at.

  For some reason, he feared for his father. He thought of him and how agitated he became about the killings in Bosnia, how he shouted at the reporters and especially at Douglas Hurd, the British Foreign Minister at that time. Would they allow this if these people were not Muslims? In Europe? In this day and age? When Hurd appeared on the screen, his father would listen for a few seconds as the leather-backed statesman went through his mollifying patter, and then start accusing him of murderous cynicism. You don’t believe a word you are saying, you liar. What you really mean is I don’t care what happens to these people because they are not like us. His father did not think of Bosnians as Europeans, really, but thought of them as more dark-skinned, like us. They were Muslims, after all. Even though the nightly evidence on television when Muslim Bosnian spokesmen were interviewed demonstrated that they looked nothing like us, he was unable, or perhaps never tried, to give up his ambivalence in demanding that they should be treated as Europeans while still believing that they were like us, and it was because they were like us that they were not protected against Serb bloodlust.

  Jamal worried how the images of the destruction of the towers would agitate his father. He could imagine his irritation with the knowing analyses of the world, which every news report seemed unable to resist, but he feared he would get impatient with the solemn self-righteousness of the politicians when he knew, when they all knew, that war was being planned. He feared his father would say hard-hearted things about the dead.

  He heard people saying that the Americans had brought it upon themselves with their bullying and manipulation. But it could have been any of them in there. Even if you think that the American military were arrogant and swaggering bullies, this act was indiscriminate mass murder. He saw people dancing for joy in some parts of the world. Maybe they thought that what they were seeing was a clever television trick. Maybe they didn’t believe what they were being told. Maybe they thought the numbers dead were untrue. Maybe they could not feel sympathy for the dead because they could only gloat over the violence against America and so could not take in the murder of the innocent.

  He thought of the march that tried to prevent the war. There were hundreds of thousands of them demonstrating all over the world. He had never been on a march before, except for the noisy exhibitions they sometimes put on at university about the parochial concerns of student life: campaigning for lectures to be made available online, or protesting against a pay strike by academics at examination time. The era of the demo had long since passed, and to him those events were like distant myths of self-indulgent times, the wild music, the crazy sex, the sit-ins, the demo itself, the heroics of the Grosvenor Square anti-Vietnam War rally in 1968. That rally was eight years before he was born, but he had seen a film about it and heard about it, and it made him wonder where those marchers found the audacity to do what they did. Perhaps they suspected that nothing much was really going to happen to them. It was true that the leaders of those mobs had long since burned their waistcoats and cut their hair, and become headmasters and MPs and government ministers and business executives, but they had a bit of spark then, a bit of loud-mouthed daring.

  He had a clear memory of the anti-capitalism riots in 1999, but that seemed more like organised combat than a demonstration, both sides uniformed and masked and dementedly violent. The march on 15 February 2003 was peaceful, a mass coming together made up of people who doubted the wisdom or justice of inflicting war on Iraq. Most of them would have trembled at the idea that they were activists or even political. Most of them were not there to exhibit their anti-social prowess or their political radicalism, but their outrage at what they suspected was their government’s deception. Many of them were marching for t
he first time, as was Anna, as was Nick, as was Jamal, and were there to say no, to add their own little bit to the widespread scepticism that this war was necessary. For Jamal, in any case, it was a desperate yell of protest at the swell of ugly rhetoric that required him to be mute, that required his compliance with the violent designs of people whose goodwill he thoroughly doubted. Compliance, that was the vogue word of the time, and he did not want to comply. Somehow, they expected that if enough of them turned out, their government would be forced to pause and listen, although Jamal had his doubts that the military machine could be halted.

  Bush and Blair took no notice, of course. They took no notice of those who marched, or of others who did not march but raised their objections in other ways, and went right ahead with their war. It made Jamal wonder what it meant to be a citizen: how millions of them listened to what they were told, and thought about it and were not persuaded, how so many people, all over the world, spoke their reluctance and outrage and disagreement, and yet how all this made no difference.

  Hanna said he was naïve to have expected the protests to make any difference, although he had not really expected that, and had joined the march without much hope. He heard a man on the radio spitting with restrained rage: ‘There are real terrorists in the world,’ he said, ‘and they have to be destroyed or kept penned in their own wild lands. You can’t expect the government to take any risks with that. The march was fine but it is an image of a fantasy world, as if you can deal with terror by giving the terrorists a sermon.’

  The war had started by then, and havoc had descended on Iraq. They saw repeated images of Iraqis cheering the arrival of Americans and the joyous toppling of statues of the tyrant, and the hard men who understood realities declared that the Iraqis themselves wanted this war. Their army did not even bother to fight. They wanted the Americans to win. And look, the war is all over, and we are witnessing the barbarian encampment burning. It will be messy for a while and then get better.

  What an irony it was that when this war that Ba had dreaded began he was lost in his own deep fog and these new horrors hardly penetrated through his confusing pain.

  In the middle of the night, which sometimes came early and sometimes came late, in those hours before dawn, when the world was silent around him, he lay awake and felt his body rotting inside him. He ran a hand down the bony carapace that was holding everything together and thought that one day soon it would collapse into the melting rot inside him.

  It was such a long time ago, more than forty years and in real time even longer ago, yet in the silence of the midnight hours those days of his life came back to him with absurd clarity. Even where a thin mist obscured past events, he sensed and felt the meaning of what his memory was trying to recall. It was unrelenting, this labour his mind was engaged in despite his desire to forget. Everything seemed so close, however long ago it happened. He felt those times like a thud in his chest, and he felt the heat of the breathing bodies that appeared to him.

  Words were coming back to him, and he was eager for them when at first he had not cared. Now he wanted the words back so he could talk, so he could tell her about his years of silence, so he could describe to her his wretched cowardice. At times he was confused about the things she told him and the names she mentioned. Who were these people? But he remembered so much, everything it seemed, about the other life he abandoned.

  He remembered his years as a college student, that was the happiest time. He had never told her about that. It was like a new life, moving to town with Fawzia’s relatives, moving away from the tyrannous parsimony of his father’s house. Perhaps he should have stayed and found what happiness he could there. Maybe he would have done some good if he had stayed instead of spending his life stranded in a place where he could do nothing of any use to anyone, only aching with guilt now his body was too frail to resist. Perhaps he should have stayed and shared in the calamities that befell them. No good thinking like that now he was fit for nothing. At times he felt he had done everything wrong, at other times, not everything. There were times when he felt that he could rest. For years that had seemed a mercy, that some things he had done were well done, but now it was a struggle to hang on to that reprieve.

  He had a good time at the college, though. He remembered how he went to the college the week before the start of term, to pay his fees and collect his papers, and how afterwards he walked the tiled corridors and the shaded paths in the grounds with a feeling of incredulity. That he should be allowed here. When term started, he found out that he knew no one, but the instructions were so clear that he just had to follow the herd and obey the rules. That was what was new, the discipline, first of all. There were so many new rules, but no one shouted or waved a stick, or stood arms akimbo glaring at the students as if looking to pre-empt a stampede. The teachers were polite and patient, and the students followed the rules to the last detail and were polite themselves. Perhaps some of the teachers sneered at their ignorance, but even that they did politely.

  They played games. There had been no games in his old school, but at the college they did athletics and cricket and badminton and volleyball, some of them games he had never even known existed. These were English games, and it might have been excusable not knowing about them if the British had not colonised them. It was less excusable that he had never heard of algebra or geometry or physics or logarithm tables in his country school, when this was knowledge it had taken the whole world to bring into being. Even the subjects he had studied before were taught differently in the college. There was a library, with hundreds of books that he could take home to read if he wished. It was like all his schooling until then had taken place in a small room, a small empty shut-away room. Then someone had opened the door and he found out that the room was a tiny little cell in a huge building. There were wide corridors and verandas on all sides, and he was free to walk around if he wanted, or more likely if he dared, because his ignorance was so complete that he was intimidated by everything and was pleased enough with the little steps he was taking.

  That was the picture of his college that still came back to him, those early days of starting there, the extent of his ignorance, the incredible content of learning. He was sixteen years old when he started and he was there for three years. It was the happiest time and he yearned for that time always. He made friends, he learned to swim and he went home to his little room with Fawzia’s relatives and did what work he was given to do every day. At first he went back to Mfenesini every Friday afternoon and came back on Sunday evening. He wanted to lessen the burden on the relatives who kept him, but after a while he went home less often. His brothers treated him like a hero, wanting to hear about what he learned and flattering him for every little triumph he recounted, but his father laughed at his college uniform. Look at this poor stooge, look at this karagosi, he said, look at the airs he gives himself. Go and say your prayers. After prayers, he made him get into his old rags and gave him dirty work to do, just so he would not forget to be humble. Nobody eats for nothing in this house.

  Othman the miser, his great bully of a father. And yet once, he had seen him sob like someone who had lost his mind. He would never have thought him capable of such tears. They heard cries coming from the road at the other end of the lane, a man shouting and a donkey braying in fright. His father ran down the lane to investigate and he followed. Both his brothers were working at the other end of the farm and did not hear the cries at first. When Abbas and his father reached the road, they found a man beating an exhausted donkey with a thick stick. He stopped for a moment when they appeared, surprised to see them. His head must have been pounding so hard with fury that he had not heard their noisy rush through the tangled lane. He was frothing at the mouth with rage. The donkey was lying on the road, too exhausted to rise or struggle, twitching involuntarily with terror. After the briefest hesitation, the man resumed his work, lining himself up to deliver blows to the tenderest parts he could reach, the mouth, the belly, the meat of the donkey�
�s haunches. His father, Othman the miser, yelled again and again for the man to stop, in the end falling on his knees and covering the donkey’s head with his body to prevent the blows landing there. The man pulled his father off angrily and threatened him with his stick. His father sat on the ground a few feet away, weeping and sobbing uncontrollably, his glasses smeared with tears. In the end, his brothers Kassim and Yusuf Kimya came, and the three of them dragged their father away. He wept for hours, rocking and holding his head, so that they began to fear that he had lost his mind. Perhaps he did for a while, but in the light of day he was back to his mean old self, standing in the yard with his short hoe, yelling for his sons to get to work. The brothers went to the road to look, but there was nothing there, just a small pile of dung, which insects were busily carting away.

  During his second year at the college, he did not go to Mfenesini every Friday afternoon but occasionally stayed in town. He expected rebuke from his father for shirking and was anxious that his brothers would think he was learning to forget them, but his absences somehow meant that his father treated him less angrily when he did go. The occasions of his visits home grew less frequent as the year passed. The aura of town, and college and study must have made his life seem complicated and busy, while theirs was weeding and digging and labouring. He could feel the difference growing between them. When he went home for the vacations, he was even allowed to sit in the shade with his books for an hour or two now and then, so long as he did not abuse this great privilege. By the end of the second year, he was staying in town all week. He did not do anything very exciting. He went to college, did his work, strolled by the sea with his friends or went to watch a football game. On Fridays he went for prayers at Msikiti Jumaa in Forodhani and was now and then invited to eat with the family of one of his school friends. Sometimes he attended the rallies, which were then happening as politics was building up.