For Abadi and Ahmed
who have both travelled well
by the same author
MEMORY OF DEPARTURE
PILGRIMS WAY
PARADISE
ADMIRING SILENCE
BY THE SEA
DESERTION
THE LAST GIFT
Contents
by the same author
The First Journey
A Common Failing
The Maiden’s Return
A Picnic on the Cliffs
The Image of an Idea
First Love
Something Broken in Her Whole Life
A River Journey
Coup and Counter-coup
Bearing Gifts
The House in Horatio Street
Expectations
A Good War
A Trick of the Light
The Wooded Path
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
Also available by Abdulrazak Gurnah
The First Journey
1
Dottie first heard the news of her sister’s labour on the factory Tannoy. The voice booming through the public address system did not say that she was being urgently summoned to attend a birth, but Dottie knew. She hurried away with a feeling that this was a moment she had already lived through. In the office she was told that the hospital had rung with a message. Sophie had collapsed at work.
In the cab to the hospital she wondered if there was something she should do, some preparation she could make. It was a short journey from Kennington to Tooting, but the traffic was heavy and their progress was slow. At last the taxi came to a shuddering stop at the hospital entrance, and Dottie stepped out into a patch of autumn sunlight that had evaded the buildings around her. The ward sister smiled and told her that she was too late. The baby had already arrived. Sophie must have been in labour for a while before she collapsed, the sister said as she guided Dottie to the patient’s bedside.
Sophie’s exhaustion was plain in her face, but through her tiredness shone a small smile of triumph. Haltingly, searching for words, she told Dottie how she had been rushed into a cab from Kimberly Street in Waterloo. The cab driver had refused payment, she said, telling her she would be his good luck. At the hospital, the nurses had been kind. They had washed her and shaved her, and Sophie had been ashamed because she had made the bath water filthy. Then the baby came and it was so perfect. Didn’t Dottie think so? To her surprise, the nurses asked for a name for the baby. She had not thought they would ask her straight away, had thought she would have time to talk to Jimmy first. But the nurses became annoyed, Sophie said, and after they had been so kind. So she gave them the name she had been thinking of.
‘I called him Hudson, Sis,’ she said, looking at Dottie with uncertainty.
Dottie said nothing for a while, and then talked about the baby’s perfection, and the pain her sister must have borne for so long. She sat beside Sophie and watched the baby sleeping in his metal cot. She made cheerful conversation about their plans, knowing that her sister was waiting for her to say something else. Sophie’s hand lay in hers and she stroked it absently, tutting at the groans of pain that her sister made now and then. She knew that Sophie wanted her to say how pleased she was about the name. It was their younger brother’s, and Sophie was waiting to hear her say that naming the baby after him was right because they had loved him so much. Dottie watched the baby and stroked Sophie’s hand abstractedly, smiling with an unconscious wince whenever she caught her sister’s eye, or whenever Sophie moaned with the pain in her body and between her thighs. She hoped that Sophie would soon fall asleep. But although she dropped off for a short period, her eyes flew open with sudden anxiety and turned blearily at Dottie.
‘It’s a lovely name, and the baby looks just like Hudson,’ Dottie said at last, and heard Sophie gurgling with pleasure and relief.
‘Does he really look like Hudson?’ Sophie asked, grinning with delight.
‘Just like him,’ Dottie said.
In a few moments Sophie was asleep. Dottie sat silently beside her for a long time, grateful for the solitude. Out of the corner of her eye she saw that her sister’s hand was stirring uncertainly, and she reached out and held it again. Sophie sighed heavily in her sleep.
2
Dottie was the elder by two years, although she and Sophie had been born close enough to each other to be christened in the same church, Our Lady of Miracles in Leeds. That was how she remembered it, although she was not certain. Sometimes she thought it was Our Lady of Sorrows, but that sounded melodramatic, as if she was trying to make a case of herself, and she preferred the brighter name. There was an old disused well in the church-yard, she remembered that, and remembered the terror it filled her with as a child. She had carelessly glanced down into its giddy depths once, and even now, whenever she thought of it, she felt again the hand that had clutched her shoulder with a cry of warning. She could no longer hear the voice, and could not say if it was her mother or someone else. Be careful, don’t you know the hump-back lives down there? When the explanation came, it was always in a man’s voice, his voice. For years she dreamed of falling in and finding herself in the clutches of the creature who lived at the bottom of the well and who came out at night to gaze with longing at the living world of the church-yard. It was such a long time ago that she could not be sure how many of the details were true and how many she had altered to suit her needs. The stories jostled each other in her head despite her. Sophie often told her that she made these things up, to make an argument and be unpleasant.
Dottie had been christened Dottie Badoura Fatma Balfour. They were names she relished, and she sometimes secretly smiled over them. When she was younger she used to imagine and fabricate round the names, making childish romances and warm tales of painless sacrifice and abundant affection. In her absorption, she sometimes played the games in a soft whisper and was mocked and told off for talking to herself. She persisted in her games despite the ill-tempered correction that was administered for her own good. They told her, those teachers or whoever they were, that all people were the same, and that she would do best to realise that she now lived in England, and she should determine to do what she could to make herself acceptable. She could do more to help herself to that end than behave in such an obstinate and dreamy way.
Her whisperings might give the wrong impression, a kindly teacher warned her. They might make people believe that she could not cope. Don’t play with fire. Don’t tempt fate. When in Rome you have to do as the Romans. Pull your socks up. She heard that from them several times. We don’t do that in England, dear, they told her when her ignorance caused offence. The criticism made her feel like a sinner, or like a traitor.
Yet it was not because she attempted to assert herself that these criticisms descended on her. She would not have dreamed of protesting against the proper pre-eminence of England, nor had she for a moment considered questioning or challenging its rectitude. So all that Dottie could assume, in those early days, was that they knew of the secret hours she spent dwelling over those beautiful names. The whole world must have found out about her secret vices and taken them for treachery. In reality, the circumstances of her life had turned her into Dottie long before she was in any condition to protest, long before it might even have occurred to her to think otherwise. She would not have thought of claiming that the childhood life she led was her own, let alone that she should be able to give a name to it.
She frowned now as she sought to control her worry, and the fear that she felt for the child that Sophie had brought into the world. As if things were not hard enough. As if Sophie herself was anything more than a big, fat child! That she should call the boy Hudson . . .
3
Dottie thought of herself as having failed with
Hudson. It was not that anyone had expected anything different from her, but it had fallen to her to look after him from an early age. And she had failed to prevent him from self-destruction. When they were children, their mother was often ill, and when she was not ill she had other things to attend to. Dottie had learned to do things in the house, and look after her sister and brother. Hudson was difficult, and she herself was too ignorant to be of any real help to him. She had watched Hudson grow angry with them as he grew up, despising them for the cruel blows life rained on them, as if there was anything any of them could have done about it. They did what they could for him, bore for him whatever burdens he could not carry. Hudson took whatever they offered him with sulky ill-grace, suffering the adoration that his mother and his sisters lavished on him, and allowing them to spoil him with their devotion. Sophie showered him with love, fondling and kissing him whenever he let her. More often than not, he fought her off, shouting and complaining about her fumbling embraces. On rare occasions he allowed himself to be taken into her arms, reluctant and tense at first, then slowly allowing himself to melt, curling up against her girlish plumpness with long-suffering sighs.
By the time he was eleven, it was no longer possible to compel him to do anything he did not want to do. It was no use appealing to his better nature since he was in the process of training himself not to admit to one, and had learnt to pre-empt criticism with torrents of abuse. If Dottie attempted to force him he ran away from her, or if he could not he screamed with frightening abandon. She could not bear the screaming. It sounded like a person being slaughtered.
He became obsessed with being an American, and started to talk with a clumsy imitation of an American voice. He was different from all of them, he said. His father was an American Negro. In Hudson’s story the father was a fabulous creature who was part of the glamour of America: a tap-dancing, smiling man in a suit who rode in huge white Cadillacs and spent his days going from hotels to apartments, as everyone did in the movies. Nobody talked of who Dottie’s father was, or Sophie’s, he reminded his sisters. Nobody knew, not even their mother.
Sometimes their mother caught her breath as she looked at one of them, reminded of something in the way they looked, but it never came to anything. Their mother’s life had become so confused. She would shake her head and smile because she could not remember. Hudson taunted his sisters about that, calling them bastards and making monkey noises at them. Once he found a picture of a cannibal chief in a Tarzan comic and went running up to Dottie, crying, ‘I’ve found your daddy! Look, look, I’ve found him.’
Dottie slapped him across the face and dragged him to a mirror. ‘Who do you think you’re laughing at?’ she asked him. He wept at the humiliating explanations she offered him.
‘My daddy is an American, not a savage!’ he cried, squeezing his eyelids to shut out the pain. ‘Your daddy’s a savage. My daddy has a green car and lives in a big building in New York. He’s tall and rich, not fat and ugly like Sophie. And Sophie’s daddy is a savage. But my daddy is a soldier and lives in America. I’m not a bastard. I’m not a bastard like you. When I grow up . . .’ There he halted in his tracks and glanced guiltily at Dottie, overcome by his inability to imagine his grown-up self. He glared at his sisters with unfeigned bitterness, wounded by the indignity and the childishness of his protest. When he was older he would go to New York to find his father, he declared, and ran out into the street.
4
The fabulous American had been among the black GIs who had been sent over to England from 1942 onwards until the end of the war and beyond. The early contingent caused havoc in quiet English towns and raised the bogey of bestial couplings of the ape-like monsters with milk-skinned English maids. Hands and hearts were wrung in the letter columns of national newspapers. Questions were asked during Prime Minister’s Question Time. Discussions took place at the highest levels, at Cabinet meetings and over state banquets. Her Majesty’s Secretary of State for War, Sir James Grigg, prepared guidelines to British officers to instruct that troops, especially the ATS, avoid intimate friendships with black soldiers. The War Cabinet approved the guide lines, on condition that they were kept confidential. The British press were asked not to refer to them. So, accordingly, directives were issued by government officials that black troops were to be kept strictly away from white female service personnel, whom they could easily rupture with their huge members, causing havoc to the logistics of war. They were not to be admitted in restaurants and bars that were frequented by white American soldiers as this would cause problems when or if they returned to the United States. Some restaurant managers, their zeal for the war effort fired up by their greed for dollars, excluded empire soldiers and officers as well, despite the emblems these foreigners wore in the service of the King-Emperor.
Hudson’s father would not have been surprised by any of this. He was quartered in Carlisle, and accepted the antagonism of English people with a cynical pretence of indifference. None of it was worth spending years in a military prison for. It was in Carlisle that he met Dottie’s mother. Her name was Bilkisu, but her children had not known this. She called herself Sharon. They knew she came from Cardiff and that she had run away from home when she discovered that her parents were planning a marriage for her with someone she had only just met. She had told her children often, when her despair had mellowed with drink, how she had never been back to that cruel city.
She had once known the name of the village where her father was born and could recite the names of her mother’s family to fifteen generations, she told them, but she had forgotten all that as she had so much else from those times. Sometimes she talked bitterly of her father, and blamed him for the way her life had turned out. At other times, her face wreathed with smiles, she told them of his eccentric kindnesses and his transparent masquerade of the fierce patriarch from the mountains. She kept these tales of her father deliberately vague, sometimes mixing up details and pretending to have forgotten something important. She did not want her children bothered with all that stuff. She did not understand until it was too late, and perhaps not even then, that her children would need these stories to know who they were. The children, in turn, learned not to ask questions, accepting with instinctive courtesy that these were not things their mother could happily talk about.
5
So they did not know that Bilkisu’s father was a Pathan called Taimur, and that he had had youthful adventures that were like the wildest fantasies. At the death of his father, whom he could only remember as a large beard, he had been taken away by his half-brother to herd sheep on a distant mountain pasture. He was his half-brother’s share of the inheritance, along with the sheep and a large trunk containing brass goblets of many designs which the old man had had a life-long passion for. Taimur cried a lot at first, missing his mother, but his half-brother beat him severely and taught him that he should bear life’s burdens without grumbling.
Taimur begged to differ, and as soon as he had learned the general direction of his home he set off in search of his mother. His half-brother caught him quite easily and took him back to the sheep. He told him stories of the Devil that lived in the mountains, to frighten him and keep him from running away. The Devil took many shapes, sometimes a wheeling hawk or a mountain antelope with a shaggy, silvery pelt, but its favourite shape was that of a beautiful woman with long black hair and ruby lips. She frequented the mountain paths, pretending to be lost. With her hair windswept and dishevelled and snagged with thorns, with tears streaming from her hazel eyes, weeping bitterly of her loneliness and homesickness, she would ensnare the traveller into stopping to aid her and then turn him into her slave. Instead of being frightened, as he was intended to be, Taimur grieved for the poor abandoned Devil while his half-brother gnashed his teeth at the creature he was describing. As he moved from pasture to pasture with the animals, Taimur kept his eyes open for the woman with ruby lips but never once caught sight of her.
The next time he was ready to run away, he t
ook the precaution of giving his half-brother a good crack on the head with a sharp stone before leaving, to give himself a decent start. He reached his old home to find that his mother had been taken as wife by a man from another village, and that his half-brother was already around, looking for him and spreading stories of Taimur’s treacherous attack. He realised then that it was his half-brother who was the real Devil in the mountain. And if he allowed himself to be found, if he did not escape at once, he would be a slave all his life. He set off on motherless wanderings across wild mountains, where petty chieftains ruled the face of the earth to their autocratic pleasure, with the power of life and death over their subjects. At night he lay under a wild, chaotic sky and felt the world hurtling underneath him, and thought the stars only existed because he was there. If it were not for him, lying on the hard earth, neither sky nor mountains would be visible. Nor would the sun or the hazy scrub of the granite foothills appear in the morning.
His wanderings came to an end when he was adopted into the family of one of the great chieftains who ruled the waking world. He lived in the chieftain’s household for several years, looking after the goats and tending the orchards. He served the family joyfully in return for food, and he knew that he could live with them all his life and there would always be something for him. When there was no work in the fields he helped with repairs in the houses, or the stables. He was adept at all the tasks required of him, and his unfailing enthusiasm endeared him to his adopted suzerain. Sooner or later his master would help him find a wife, and would pay for the modest hospitality to celebrate it. Members of the family were already teasing him about a wedding and children of his own. The wife-to-be would not have long black hair and ruby lips most likely, but she would be a companion to him as he grew older and fell ill.
Dottie Page 1
