Gravel Heart

by Abdulrazak Gurnah

  When I asked my mother about Baba in the days that followed, she told me again and again that he had gone away for a few days. When the few days were up she said that my father did not want us anymore. She told me that in a way that made me understand she did not wish to speak about it for long. She did not speak with anger but in a voice that was both sharp and resigned at the same time, her eyes bright and glistening, threatening to spark into a rage or fill with tears. It made me reluctant to ask further questions, although I did, again and again, and she did not spark into a rage. She rarely did and I hated it when that happened. She said such ugly things. When I asked if I could go and see Baba wherever he was, she said no. He does not want to see any of us. Perhaps one day. In the end, whenever I asked her why Baba did not want us any more, she sucked in her breath as if I had hit her or else made her hands into fists and turned away, refusing to look at me or give me an answer. I don’t know for how long she did that but it seemed a long time. It was at that time that my mother’s unhappiness began.

  Later I knew that my father moved to a rented room at the back of a shop in Mwembeladu which was owned by a man called Khamis, who was related to him in a distant way on his father’s side of the family. My mother took Baba a basket of food every day for years. Day after day, she came home from the Ministry of Constitutional Affairs where she worked, cooked our lunch and took Baba’s share to him in Mwembeladu, walking there in the fierce early-afternoon sun. At first Uncle Amir told her to stop but she took no notice and made no reply, only sometimes she pulled a face of pain and disgust at her brother, and once she pleaded angrily for him to leave her alone. They had a shouting argument about it then and at other times too. Later, it would be my chore to take the basket of food every day to the room at the back of the shop. But that was some years later and by then my father had no interest in me. It seemed that when he gave up my mother’s love, he lost all desire for everything.

  My father no longer worked at the Water Authority in Gulioni. He had been dismissed from there. He was no longer a clerk in a government office. He lived on his share of the takings from the market stall where he worked for several hours every day. He went to the market every morning and returned to the shop just after noon. His hair and beard grew bushy and then both began to show signs of grey, making his face glow darkly in that shaggy tangle. He was then about thirty and the signs of age in his young face made people stare at him, and some of them must have wondered what sadness had befallen him, although many others knew. He did not speak willingly and walked through crowds with his head lowered and his eyes deliberately vacant, not wishing to see. I was ashamed of his abjectness and lethargy because even at the age of seven I knew how to be ashamed. I could not bear the way people looked at him. I wished my father would disappear without trace, forever. Even later, when I delivered his basket of food, he hardly spoke to me and did not ask me anything about what I was doing or how I felt. At times I thought he was unwell. Uncle Amir said he was doing it to himself, there was no need for it. There was absolutely no need for it.

  Just after Baba left, Uncle Amir moved jobs, from the Coral Reef Inn to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which was what he had always wanted. He had worked at a travel agency for some years before moving to the hotel, and those years were like a preparation which sharpened his hankering for the great world, he said. He wanted to travel, to see the world and then to contribute his experience to the progress of his people. That was his dream. Uncle Amir often talked big like that. Whenever he was around he filled the house with his voice and his laughter and his busyness. He told us about the important people he worked with and how they admired him and his style, about the functions he went to and the new people he met there, about how one day he was going to be a big man, an ambassador, a minister.

  In those years, our house was made more comfortable. Uncle Amir would have preferred to move to a larger house in a more comfortable neighbourhood. It’s not as if you’ll have to pay the rent, he said many times, but my mother always interrupted him and changed the subject. I’m fine here, she said. Sometimes they glanced at me, and I said I was fine there too because I thought that was what they wanted to know. It took me a long time to work out what they were talking about.

  The government had straightened many of the roads in the area we lived in, knocking down small houses because they were backward slums, and building modern blocks of flats instead along the widened and brightly-lit new roads. These blocks were painted in various bright colours and built in different parts of town and even in country villages, where they loomed over the weathered village houses like a menace. There were times when there was no electricity, which meant the roads were dark and the pumps did not work so the water did not run because the pressure was too low to deliver it to the upper floors, and the people who lived in the flats complained about the smell of the blocked toilets in the heat. A few streets, including ours, escaped the clearances and lived on in a tangle of lanes. Sometimes I heard my mother and Uncle Amir arguing about where we lived: so noisy here, no privacy from stupid interfering loud-mouthed neighbours, that woman is always bickering with everybody, this house is a slum and every day I have to look at those monstrous ugly flats. Uncle Amir often described our house as a slum. They argued about other things too, about money and about the lunch basket for Baba. Uncle Amir sometimes stormed angrily away, saying mocking words over his shoulder. He said he would move to his own flat at some point soon, but in the meantime they could at least modernise the kitchen. So various people appeared to instal an electric cooker and fit cupboards, a sink, work surfaces, a washing machine, wire-mesh at the window to keep out the bugs, a ceiling fan, a freezer. You can make iced buns and cakes for us now, and steak and chips, Uncle Amir teased my mother, knowing how little she enjoyed cooking. These were foods from his hotel-working days, and he sometimes rhapsodised about steak and chips to annoy my mother when she served green bananas, or rice and curry yet again. Uncle Amir was always joking and making fun.

  Both our bedrooms were air-conditioned now, and Uncle Amir had a colour television installed in his room. The television boomed out in our house and could be heard in every room. As soon as Uncle Amir came home he switched the set on just to see that it was still working as it should because there were times when it did not. Then he would get angry with it and fiddle and fiddle until he got it to work, although sometimes it remained blank for days on end. When he did not succeed he said abusive words about the electrician who fixed it for him and went off in search of him. In the end he found another electrician, who told him that the aerial was not properly adjusted, although that did not mean the end of Uncle Amir’s anguish over his television. At these times it exasperated him so much he shook his fists in rage at it and promised to kill it, but I think he also did that to make us laugh.

  I still slept in a cot in the same room as my mother, but Uncle Amir teased me that I would not be doing so for a great deal longer because he was planning to move to his own flat and then I would have to give up the cot and sleep in a room of my own like a grown-up. He knew that I did not like any of these ideas. I liked sleeping in the cot in the same room as my mother and I loved listening to the stories she told me when she was in the mood. Also, I did not want Uncle Amir to leave.

  He was always coming and going, Uncle Amir, always fidgeting, unable to sit still for long, his legs crossing and uncrossing, ankles jittering restlessly. He needed to do things, he said. He could not just sit around staring at a wall. He played music or watched television with his door open, played the guitar and sang at the top of his voice as if he was still playing with the band like he used to when he was younger. He talked about one plan or another, making fun of my mother or of me, laughing and prodding and provoking. So when he went away the following year an unexpected silence descended on our house and us. I was too young to understand precisely where he was going and why, but he explained it all anyway and later explained it again. He was sent on a three-year International Rel
ations course to University College Dublin, intended, he told my mother and me, for future high-flying diplomats. Those words International Relations at University College Dublin stayed with me for years even though I did not know their full meaning.

  ‘It’s a very prestigious programme,’ he told us, ‘very difficult to get into, very generous stipend paid by European governments. Do you know what a stipend is? It’s like a salary, only more classy. It’s Latin. Do you know what Latin is? It’s an ancient language spoken in prestigious universities. Only the very best people are selected for this programme, people like your Uncle Amir. Do you know why they have a programme such as this? It’s so that people with personality and style will be fast-tracked to the top.’

  Almost no time seemed to pass between the announcement of Uncle Amir’s selection and his departure for Ireland, so eager was he to go. He liked to do things that way, he said, get on with them. He planned to do a six-month refresher language course, and at the same time get acclimatised to the Irish way of doing things. He did not need the refresher, he said, but it was all covered by the scholarship, so why not, and he would be getting his stipend from the first day.

  When Uncle Amir left to go to Dublin to study to be a diplomat, I moved out of my mother’s room. From time immemorial I had slept in my cot at one end of my parents’ large room. It had a curtain strung across the middle of it to give them privacy. Then my father left us, and I shared the room with my mother, and in our unsettled life she did not always bother to draw the curtain between us. When Uncle Amir left, I was moved into his room. My mother threw Uncle Amir’s television away because she said it was junk and more trouble than it was worth. Some time afterwards a brand-new set arrived, which she put in her room because she said it was not right for a child to have a television in his. I could go into her room and watch with her sometimes, whenever I wished, but she did not really like to watch the cartoons, and turned the volume down when I watched them, and chased me off to bed at the earliest opportunity. She liked to watch the news and then endless dramas with women in long dresses and men sitting behind huge desks, all of them living in enormous mansions and driving long, gleaming cars. When I said it was boring, she told me not to take it seriously, then it would seem more amusing. When I tried to see the funny side of the dramas I failed because I could not understand what the people were saying and my mother talked over everything, re-telling the story as she wished it to be and chuckling at her own wit. Sometimes she turned the sound off completely and we watched the silent goings-on on the screen while my mother made up comic stories about what was happening.

  When I moved into my own room, I did not like to shut the door on myself. I was so alone in there. A small window high on the outside wall overlooked the lane but I did not leave it open at night because then the darkness surged in and filled me with fear. I missed sleeping in the same room as my mother, who sometimes sang softly to herself as we lay in the dark or sometimes spoke about the past times she could bear to talk about. You have to grow up stop crying don’t be such a baby you are nine years old, she told me when I made a fuss about being alone. I covered myself from head to toe as soon as I switched off the light so that I would not hear any of the small scurrying night noises, and I never left the safety of the mosquito net until daylight reappeared. I adjusted these arrangements as I grew less fearful, and especially after I learnt to read books from beginning to end, when I stayed awake longer and forgot about being afraid. When I was a little older, I read so late into the night that my mother sometimes knocked on my door and told me to switch off the light, but it took a while to get to that. I did not lose my fear of stealthy night noises, not realising that everyone felt like that.

  At about the time when I moved to my own room or soon after, the woman neighbour who lived at the back of our house died and a short while later her son disappeared. He was a fisherman and it was said that one day he went out to sea alone in his outrigger as was his practice and never came back. Their house remained empty for some years and then turned into a ruin. Later, when I went to live in other places, I realised that ours was a house without echoes, its noises muffled by the soft walls.

  I began delivering the daily lunch basket when I was eleven years old. My father had been gone for many years then and I had become used to not hurting when I thought of him. The sight of him looking so shaggy and beaten in the streets helped me to do that. I had seen so little of him since he left us, and he was so silent and far away when I greeted him as we passed in the street, that I was not sure he knew who I was any more. What I knew was that he wanted nothing to do with me. I was afraid of him because he seemed like someone who was unpredictable, someone who had lost his mind. So when my mother asked me if I would take the basket of food to him, I could not restrain my shameful tears and said that I did not want to because I was afraid of him. I expected my mother to get angry, to yelp at me with the unexpected fury that occasionally overcame her, but she did not. I saw that she was making an effort to control herself. She made me sit with her and she explained that I should never fear my Baba, because he was the only Baba I would ever have, and that when I had finished crying I was to dry my face and take the food to him and wish him good health. I did not really see how thinking that he was the only Baba I would ever have would make me less afraid but I appreciated the effort she was making and did my best to suppress my anxiety.

  The next day I delivered the basket to the shopkeeper Khamis, a silent slow-moving man who said my name softly and smiled as he accepted the basket and said hujambo to me: Salim, how are you? You have come to see your Baba. I hoped that my father was not in and I could leave the basket and go, but he was in and Khamis called him to collect it himself and to greet his son. When Baba came out, I could not look him in the eye and could only mumble a greeting. He took the basket from me and thanked me, then handed me yesterday’s empty basket for me to take home. It was like taking food to a prisoner. My father was always in when I took his basket to him and he handed me the empty one every day for years. I got used to it after a while, and within a few months I could not believe that I was once afraid of him in whose eyes, as I learnt to look into them, I saw only detachment and defeat.

  In exchange for taking away the television, my mother allowed me to keep one of the boxes of my father’s old books in my room. There were several of them. She did not care much for reading but thought it was good for me. There is nothing more important than reading, she told me, although later when I became an avid reader she counselled moderation. When she woke up in the night to use the bathroom and saw that my light was still on in the early hours on a school day, she banged on my door and shouted for me to go to sleep. I was about ten when I learnt to read a whole book, all words and no pictures, and I remember it was a book called The Tempest Tribes, found in one of my father’s boxes, about people who lived in jungles and mountains and caves and who rebelled against their tyrannical jungle king because a kind stranger from England came and explained to them how unjust and backward their jungle king was. On reflection I think the story must have happened somewhere in Asia because there was a beautiful princess in it, and there was no story with a beautiful princess set in an African jungle. I did not understand all of it, sometimes because the words were new and long, and sometimes because I could not work out what was going on, but I read every page regardless. After that I started on another book and another one after that. It took me a long time to read through the whole box and I did not read everything in it. I found it easier to read the mysteries and Westerns and the alfu-leila-uleila stories. Then I went to my mother for another box and it went on like that until I had all five of them in my room.

  One day I put one of the books in the basket for my father, and slowly over the months and years that followed I delivered more of the books with his lunch, after I had read them to my own satisfaction. Some of them I re-read several times before I parted with them, especially the mysteries and the Westerns. I read Riders of the Purple
Sage six times before I handed it over to him, and even then I was not certain I was doing the right thing. Some of the books I did not part with at all because I never tired of them: Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, and the Arabian Nights stories. The story of the humble woodcutter who stumbled on the young bride imprisoned in a cellar by a jinn haunted me for many years: how he fell in love with her and tried to help her escape and how the jinn took his revenge. When eventually I delivered the basket directly to my father’s room at the back of the shop, and he allowed me in there to sit with him for a while, I found the books lined spine upward in an old fruit crate, like objects he cherished.

  In the meantime Uncle Amir came back from Dublin in triumph. He returned with his girlfriend, Auntie Asha, who had herself been doing her A-levels at a boarding school in Suffolk. She was the daughter of the former vice-president, and had been Uncle Amir’s girlfriend even before he went to Dublin. She visited him there several times, and during the vacations they travelled to London and Paris and Madrid. They were now betrothed. His living arrangements were all in hand, or in his future wife’s hands, my mother said. A flat was rented for him even before he returned, because apparently there was no room for him and his belongings in the old house.