Pilgrims Way

by Abdulrazak Gurnah

  But she said no. ‘I can’t go out tonight,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. I’m expecting a phone call. Perhaps . . .’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said quickly. ‘It was just a thought.’

  Dear Catherine, It was a mistake to ask you, an even bigger mistake to panic when you said no. I panic at the slightest excuse, I’m ashamed to say. My cowardice, which is immense, is due to the sort of upbringing I had. My mother listened to too many of those hygiene programmes on the radio. I grew up in the dark days of imperialism, when Public Health officials took their duties seriously. What else could they do in the God-forsaken places they chose to install themselves in as civilising czars? One of these duties was the broadcasting of horrifying and, no doubt, accurate accounts of the depredations the human body was prone to in a tropical climate. My mother listened to all these broadcasts, and took them all very seriously. So, if there are any retired officials listening, out in the fastness of Cumbria, or snug in some Cotswold cottage, thank you. You can stop luxuriating in the lower infant mortality rate, the virtual extinction of malaria, the control of epidemics of intestinal diseases, and consider the harm you have done to the molly-coddled survivors.

  My mother boiled our water, dosed us with castor oil and quinine, and washed our arses twice a day with soap and water. We were not allowed to buy cooked food, wash in the river or sleep in the open. We were not allowed to ride a donkey in case we became infested with fleas. She was worried about TB, bilharzia and VD, and she did her best to protect us. An unusually smelly fart earned you a double dose of castor oil, and on bad days, an examination of the orifice. A mildly festering wound aroused fears of gangrene and amputation. An itchy penis provoked lengthy and detailed scrutiny of the abused member. A careless cough precipitated a merciless interrogation about the state of health of the chests of one’s friends and associates. The result of all this, dear Catherine, although I’m sure you’ve already guessed, is that I’m afraid of everything. And you said no when all seemed well. Why did you do that? Where will I find the strength to ask you again?

  During the afternoon, which he spent entirely in the disposal corridor, he contacted most of his usual correspondents. He paced up and down, reviling himself for being so laughably clumsy, and abusing her for being a sulky foreigner. Whenever things looked as if they were getting out of hand, he dashed off a calming letter. Dear Sir Gary, May you live for ever. The thought of Sir Gary never failed to soothe him. Dear Herr Nietzsche, he ranted when irritation overcame him. This obsession with the will seems to me just a short-cut to beastliness. Endless monsters have tormented us since fuck knows when, all screwed up with their wills. Why bother making a formal declaration out of it? If you had asked Idi Amin what it was that he thought he was doing, he would have explained himself in your terms. Assuming he was capable of something so inexpressive of the will! There’s no need to scoff. Take Macbeth if Idi Amin does not suit you.

  Dear Catherine, he began again. I wanted to tell you about my mother’s obsession with hygiene. I wanted to tell you about my separation from my people, and about the guilt I feel that they seem to have abandoned me. I wanted to tell you this.

  6

  He lived alone out of choice, he insisted. He relished his solitary existence, and did not usually invite people to visit him at all, or only very occasionally, and never out of necessity. He was self-sufficient, sophisticated and utterly without fear, the very model of independence and grit. So she needn’t think that just because she had refused his invitation to dinner that this mattered in any way at all to him. It might have ruined his weekend and filled him with thoughts of his unworthiness but that was no stranger to him. Was that clear?

  He knew that she lived near the hospital, in one of those large Edwardian houses whose owners had moved on to other things. The houses were now flats and bedsits, let out to nurses and students to provide a tidy income for the owners, until the next wave of gentrification hit the district and they could be sold for a fortune. On the Sunday evening he went strolling in that general direction, retracing his morning route to work. It was a warm, dry evening, and the streets had a dishevelled, impromptu appearance, as if caught out by the fine weather.

  He did not intend to call on her. He would prowl in her garden or hide in the conifer hedge and wait for her troubled face to appear at the window. Then he would set up a howl of distress in the quicksilver twilight, and watch her start with knowledge of her guilt. Catherine, Catherine. He would leave before she could speak, scuttle into the laurel bushes before she could redeem herself with a few words of kindness. He might even strangle her puppy, and leave it dangling off a branch at the end of her handkerchief. He turned back before he reached her street. What did you take me for? he scoffed. A character out of a book? Some hysterical, alienated foreigner or something?

  The neighbours on both sides of his house had their televisions on, blaring through the thin walls as if they were in the next room. He tried his own set, with the sound turned down, to check what they were watching and decided to retreat upstairs. He did not grudge the extra rent he paid to live this way, partly because he did not always pay it. Karta had suggested moving in, but Daud had refused. He kept the extra room as a place to go to for a change of scenery, he told him. Once or twice Lloyd had muttered about needing somewhere to go for a day or two, to escape his parents, but Daud had played dumb, as he had to discreet attempts by some of the foreign student friends of Karta to hire his room for a little private screwing.

  He had once shared a house with another student, a Nigerian called Ray. They had been friends before they found the house, talking for hours about politics and music, arguing about football and cutting a caper in the streets when high spirits overcame them. They had ended up not speaking to each other, and Daud knew that the fault was as much his as it was Ray’s. He could not bear the way he lost control of his own life. He had to consult Ray about what they ate, had to worry about what Ray was doing before he could play a record, go out or even go to bed. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, he would hear him pacing around in his room, talking to himself.

  And Ray never flushed the toilet. Daud would go to the toilet in the morning and find great logs of shit in the pan. When he could bear it no longer, he asked Ray if he would mind using the flush. Ray had not said another word to him for the two months that remained of his academic year. He did not even talk to himself any more. There was an uncanny silence in the house that was only ever broken by the sound of things: footsteps on the stairs, a door banging, the clank of crockery being stacked on the drainer. Ray flushed the toilet, but when the time came to leave, he returned to London without saying goodbye, and Daud had never heard from him again. On the few occasions he went to London, he worried about running into Ray and dreaded the embarrassment of having to pass him without a word.

  It was after Ray’s departure that he had inherited 9 Bishop Street and since then had ruled over it in unquestioned supremacy, living a life of self-denial and squalor, of quiet desperation and inner frenzy, as was his right and choice. He reflected that it was after moments of rejection such as he had suffered at the hands of Catherine that his mind became a moral battle-ground, a victim of competing desires and a prey to the conflicts in his soul. Should he allow himself to become demoralised or should he grit his teeth, clench his fists and demonstrate the black man’s dignity in adversity? Should he run amok or retreat into an incredible sulk, singing spirituals like Sidney Poitier in The Defiant Ones? Should he give up his job? Grow locks? Should he become an existentialist and achieve his apotheosis at the moment of his destruction? Why couldn’t she have dinner with him? He hoped she understood the responsibility of her actions.

  He had his late duty on a Monday, at his own request. The shift started at one in the afternoon and finished at nine in the evening. This gave him a longer weekend, and nothing ever happened on Monday evening, so he was not missing anything by being at work. Nothing ever happened during the weekend either, but that was not
the point. Mr Solomon, the Superintendent of Theatres, was sitting at his desk complacently regarding the work rota when Daud arrived. Solomon was cleaning his fingernails with a penknife, now and then putting his fingers in his mouth to suck a stubborn bit of muck out.

  ‘You’re in the back this afternoon, my lad,’ said Mr Solomon in his abrupt voice and twitched his mouth in a parody of a smile.

  Daud always took care with Mr Solomon, who was unwaveringly hard with him. It filled him with awe that he had never seen Mr Solomon sweat, or go red in the face. He kept himself steady whatever the provocation. He never changed, and so far as Daud was concerned, he never even tried to pretend that the world was inhabited by anything but monkeys. Daud left Solomon’s office without expressing his fulsome admiration for such a desperate philosophy. Dear Ineffable Solomon, It’s a relief to find you the same when all about you are losing their marbles and refusing invitations to dinner. Only do you always have to put me in the wash-up? Can’t you be a paternalistic racist and put me somewhere less messy? Can’t I be your token ethnic minority equal opportunities showpiece?

  He saw on the list that Dickie Bird, the orthopaedic registrar, was wielding the knife. Mr Richard Bird quite liked being called Dickie Bird, especially by the menials like orderlies and porters. He was an unpleasant man who enjoyed making faces about our coloured brethren, by which he meant the Pakistani who was his staggeringly inept assistant. Dear Mr Dickie Bird, This is one of your coloured brethren speaking. I get tired of these innuendoes you are so fond of. Does it occur to you that the great-grandaddy of you all, old Hippocrates himself, could trace his ancestry to a bean merchant from Harar? So there.

  He was pleased to see also that the instruments Sister for the afternoon was Sister Lucy Williams, a soft-spoken, polite lady whom he always thought of as a reincarnation of Jane Austen. Her hair was thin and dark, and parted in the middle. He had once overheard her having an argument with Florence Nightingale. He had been cowering behind the steriliser for warmth, during the depths of winter when the thin glazing of the disposal corridor was no protection against the weather. She had been filling the machine with instruments, and became irritated with something that kept going wrong. Suddenly she lashed into the memory of her holiness, the Great Florence, unaware of his astonished presence. This is your fault, Miss Nightingale. If it wasn’t for you I wouldn’t be here. He knew nothing of her personal life, for she was one of those people who rarely figured in conversations over coffee. He hoped she enjoyed what there was of it. Perhaps, though, she spent endless, lonely hours at home, drinking herself to death and wishing that a Russian cavalry officer would leap her garden fence and have dinner with her. Perhaps she was not arguing with Flo at all but writing to her.

  Dear Catherine, The ennui is getting to me out here. It can kill you sometimes as it stretches endlessly ahead of you. I pace up and down these long empty back corridors, counting until the numbers are just a jumble in my brain. Sometimes I hide in the disused radium store, so I can talk to the skull and cross-bones warning on the door. Admit it, you were pleased that I asked you, weren’t you? But you were right to refuse, I think. You probably found the idea quite strange. I understand why you refused more than you do yourself. I know that you will dutifully protest at this. You see, I know you better than you realise, although not as well as I would like to. And without saying so, you will feel impatience at my absurd sensitivity. Good Lord, you’ll think, don’t they ever give it a rest? Can’t these buggers sing any other tune? Can’t we just be people living in the same place, sharing and learning from each other? Can’t we just make the decisions that seem right to us without having race or something thrown at us? Well, no, you can’t. I know it’s a dreary business, especially when you give so much of your time and selfless concern and your generous care. This is not to mention your quiet and unsung rejection of cheap racism, and your approval of such measures as Bengali folk-dancing on TV and your often declared crush on Sidney Poitier. I kinda dig him myself, honeychile. After all this, do I dare connect your rejection of me with my socio-cultural and sub-cutaneous deprivation? How can I explain to you that we are an unfortunate people who don’t know about gratitude? We know about resentment, about frenzy. We are quick to take offence, primed to blow. So next time I invite you to have dinner with me, your best course will be to say yes, and look pleased about it. Otherwise I will make up my mind to be annihilated. You have heard about how we do it, haven’t you? How, when the time requires, we can glaze our eyes and go off in search of the leaf-mould dungeons of our benighted grandfathers? How we can let the precious gift of life depart from us as if it were a trinket in order to show somebody how upset we are? You have heard, I’m sure, of the spiritual intensity of our sulks. I’ve thought a lot about you since I last saw you, and I feel that it is in your interest to be associated with me.

  Dear My Daddy, This is long overdue, I know that. The only good thing about what I’m doing is that I can see the avenue of chestnuts from here. The trees are full of leaf at the moment. It would have pleased you to see them. The work is dirty and my position is humble. I bet you never thought I would be doing this kind of thing when you handed over your life’s savings to me. Regards to everybody.

  When Daud first came to work in theatres, Solomon had put the word out that he had been in some kind of college or seminary. For reasons that Daud never understood, Solomon announced him as formerly studying to be a priest. There were many such occasions when he suspected that the old desperado was making fun of him but he was always won over again by his utterly unflappable cynicism. Sister Wintour, who had been a missionary in Biafra, was one of the few people who remarked on his studies. Everybody else ignored the interesting possibility that Solomon had presented to them. To have a refugee from a seminary in your midst, reduced to the humble calling of wiping pus off an operating table, and not to pursue him with impertinent questions and wild prognostications! Nothing more was required to convince him that he was dealing with a bunch of dumpling-eating Moloch-fodder. Was this what the Ineffable was trying to show him? Was this his way of telling him that imagination died in these catacombs? O Wisdom Incarnate!

  Sister Wintour had already heard of him when Daud was sent for a short, introductory spell of night-duty. She had a reception ready for him. She was the Mother Superior taking confession, gathering the prodigal son to the bosom of mother church. Staff Nurse Chattan was to be the bemused heathen who might inadvertently be struck by the Light while witnessing this touching scene of spiritual reunion. The Sister spoke to Daud as if they had a great deal in common: God, the desire to serve, Africa. She told him she could guess the doubts and terrors that would have driven him out of the seminary. She could understand how after witnessing the incredible degradation to which man had been reduced in Africa, he should begin to doubt the wisdom of the controlling Hand. But God works in His own ways, and places the burden of understanding on us more often than we realise. Do not spurn this opportunity of advancing Christ’s message on earth, she begged. I’m a Muslim, he announced, entirely to her disbelief. The Staff Nurse giggled and the good missionary was routed. ‘Islam has done nothing but harm in Africa,’ the Sister counter-attacked. ‘As if things were not hard enough for the black man already!’ It turned out also that the soul of the black man was being destroyed by smoking and drinking. His whole culture was under threat from eating bread and tinned mackerel. Tinned mackerel? Instead of yam and stockfish, she explained.

  About Biafra she said only that it became very difficult once the war started. Both their house boy and their cook had gone off to join the Army. ‘To do a bit of looting, most likely,’ she offered. ‘Honestly, as if anyone could imagine Boniface and Barnabas with guns! It meant the mission had to find us another boy to serve at table. It wasn’t easy at that time to find anybody who was properly trained. And we had to find another cook. Oh, the meals this new cookboy turned out! The most ridiculous things! Boiled beef and carrots, liver and onions! Good Heavens, where was
the pepper soup and the pounded yam? We ate African food. It was so annoying.’ The Staff Nurse, wiser in the ways of the world than appearances suggested, spoke to him quietly after the Sister had gone for her snooze. He told her that he had to leave his studies because he ran out of money. She nodded sympathetically. ‘I’m a Muslim too,’ she told him, giving him her skinny smile. ‘Take no notice of the missionary madam. Islam is good.’

  That was also the night when he witnessed his first emergency Caesarean. The panic was prodigious. The telephones were ringing, the Sister was running, and the Staff Nurse was hysterical. When the midwife arrived, she was out of breath, her glasses were all steamed up and she had no time to change into theatre clothes but stormed in wearing her ward uniform. The patient, a Nigerian woman called Mrs Abubakar, followed close behind her, attended by an Egyptian surgeon. The woman was obviously in agony, and when the blankets were removed, her bedding was covered in blood. Where’s Mr Waring? the Sister yelled. The midwife hushed her and the young Egyptian surgeon looked even more frightened. He slashed the belly open and yanked the baby out, but it was too late. Mrs Abubakar lost her baby and very nearly her own life. The surgeon did not know how to stop her bleeding. He was complaining as he worked. Waring, the consultant, had told him to see to the patient because she was one of his people, he said. By the time Waring arrived, furious at not having been called earlier, he found his frightened assistant in tears. The midwife had just been in to announce the baby’s death. Waring completed the operation in a silence that was broken only by the soft, suppressed sobs of the young doctor.