Gravel Heart

by Abdulrazak Gurnah

  I wondered once again how she had got to be so brisk and confident. Mama had never been anything like that, or if she had it must have been before my time, so I guessed that it was a quality Munira inherited from her other parent. The flat was in Kiponda, and she parked her car in the yard in front of the Ismaili Jamatkhana. The huge main door looked new and Munira said it had recently been renovated. The Aga Khan Trust was spending a lot of money repairing old Ismaili buildings and re-laying the pavements all over the old town. You wait until you see Forodhani, she told me.

  ‘It’s not my car,’ Munira explained, ‘it’s my sister’s but I can borrow it whenever I want. She is away studying in Boston, so you just have to say if you want me to drive you anywhere. I’ll be taking it back later in the afternoon and you can come and meet the rest of the family if you want. Daddy is in the Ministry of Defence now but he is nearly retired and only works part of the day. We could go and greet him when I return the car.’

  I did not reply for a moment. ‘I’ll go and greet Baba this afternoon,’ I said, regretting that I had not been able to stick to my plan to stay in the hotel. It was to avoid this tangle of obligations and courtesies that could not be refused without guilt that I had wanted to do so. I could not have my father finding out that the first person I went to visit on my return was not him but the destroyer of souls. ‘Maybe later,’ I said.

  I did not go directly to Khamis’s shop but took my time walking through the streets. I met people who recognised me and jumped to their feet to greet me. How could they still remember me after all these years? And how did they all manage to look the same when I felt so transformed? When I reached the shop, I saw Khamis sitting on a bench under an awning, older and heavier but still the same, while a young man was serving customers behind an aluminium-clad counter. Khamis knew me immediately and got to his feet, chuckling with pleasure and extending his hand. After our greetings he said, ‘Go in there, he is sleeping probably. Give him a shout.’

  Baba was not sleeping. He was sitting at the table reading, just as he used to several years ago, only now he was wearing glasses. He took the spectacles off and continued sitting for another minute or so after I appeared in the open doorway, contemplating me, and then he stood up and extended a hand to me. I ignored the hand and embraced him, and felt how slight and thin his body was. His hair was white and receding and cut very short. I gave him the bag of presents I had brought for him, a couple of shirts and books and confectionery, and Baba accepted the bag with gracious words and then put it aside without looking into it. After a few more minutes of greetings and questions he said, ‘Let me get changed and then we can go for a walk.’

  At first we did not speak as we walked. I saw that I was now taller than my father and I could not remember that being so obvious before I left. We walked slowly and I thought he faltered at times, as if he was struggling to keep his balance. I had felt his frailness when I embraced him and as we walked I could see it in his step and in his smile. He touched my arm now and then and said something affectionate or admiring … how well you look … with an openness so unlike the way he used to be. We stopped at a café and ordered tea. I could not relax because the café was noisy with shouted orders and raucous banter between the customers and the staff, and everything was greasy – the cups, the tables, the buns that came with our tea. It was not always grease that was visible to the eye, it was ingrained in the café’s atmosphere and decor. I won’t get used to this, I thought, but I did because it was Baba’s favourite café. There were cleaner ones elsewhere, but this was where he came at least twice a day for a cup of tea and for his supper because he knew the owner from school days.

  *

  We spent several days in gentle nostalgic conversations and repeated visits to the café before we approached the hard questions. I went to him in the morning and we took a walk for him to do his chores, buy some fruit for his lunch, get new batteries for his radio, stop at the café for a bun and a cup of tea, and then we went back to his room and talked for a while until lunch-time when I went to be with Munira, who liked to have the mornings to herself for revision. Daddy’s cousin, Bi Rahma, came in the morning to prepare lunch for us and clean the flat and bring greetings from the big house, which I had not yet visited but was due to do imminently.

  Later in the afternoon I went to see my father again and we sat with Khamis for a while and then went for another walk to the sea-side or strolled the streets as people do at that time of day, exchanging greetings, catching up. When are you coming back to join your father? Did you bring your family with you? What do you mean, you’re not married? This was how it was for the first few days, and conversations with both my father and Munira were mostly about me. What had it been like for me all these years? What was it like living in London? Where did I work? What did I do? Are the English as arrogant as they seem?

  I gave an upbeat account of my life in England and to my surprise it lifted the burden of the years slightly. To my even greater surprise I found that I missed it. When I asked my father any questions he replied in his own way. He did not answer directly and I did not press, and hardly ever prompted him. I thought I was being careful not to panic him but Baba was talking with complete fluency and it seemed without reservation, and I began to feel that sooner or later he would tell me all there was to tell. I just had to let him do it his own way. I was surprised by his fluency, not only because he had been so silent before but because I could not remember him being so well informed.

  At the beginning of the following week Munira went away to Dar es Salaam to take her final examinations in Business Studies and planned to be away for four days. On the first night she was away, Baba invited me to join him at the café for a supper of goat curry and parathas, with a side-dish of fried red mullet. The food was glittering with grease but Baba addressed himself to it without hesitation. He was enjoying himself, leaning forward to avoid dripping on his clothes. I ate with diligence because I did not want jokes about having become an Englishman. It was food I loved too, but I preferred it in the home-made style: a lot less oil and not quite so many bones and such cheap cuts of meat. Baba laughed when I told him that, heaving a little as he used to years ago. He said that he had developed a taste for café rubbish and had missed it when he was away in Kuala Lumpur. It made him nostalgic for his youth. I said I did not think it could be good for his health, all that grease, but he waved that away without replying.

  Afterwards we went back to his room and he talked for so long that in the end I stretched out on the mat while he lay on his bed, talking through the night. At times he prevaricated in his way, approaching a crisis in the telling and then turning away from it. But as the night wore on, he grew confiding and intimate. He wanted, it seemed, to tell me everything. He could not tell the story directly, and sometimes broke off for lengthy periods when I thought he might have fallen asleep. He could not do the telling as if it was a testimony or a summary. He talked and then stopped, as if living again what he had described or checking it for accuracy, reluctant to revisit certain events at times and at others smiling and fluent, leaning up on one elbow to see how I had taken what he had said.

  Some of it came from what my mother had told him because it concerned events he could not have been present at. Sometimes he remembered a detail that required him to rewind to a moment he had described earlier, and then to consider how that may have changed something else. Once I asked him a question because I had not understood a detail and that threw him for some moments, and he was silent as if recalled to his senses. Then he asked me if I really wanted to hear all this old stuff? Was I not tired? Did I not want to return to my mother’s flat in Kiponda and get some sleep? I did not ask any more questions after that. I left my father to roam through his account as he chose.

  In the morning I went back to the flat for some sleep and returned later in the afternoon to see Baba again. We took a walk around town while he pointed out places that he had talked about. Our old house and the warren of l
anes nearby were still there, as were the blocks of flats on the main road, but there was garbage and litter in the lanes and the backs of the blocks of flats were filthy, with black iridescent pools and pieces of metal junk and abandoned furniture. There were so many people everywhere and so many more cars on the roads and so much more noise than I remembered. Then after our walk we went to the café for our greasy portion before returning to Baba’s room for more of what he wanted to tell me. So then another night of talking and listening followed. At some point late on this second night when the streets were already dark and silent and in his telling he was approaching the time when love failed, when he lost my mother, Baba rose and switched the light off. It will be easier for me to say these things in the dark, he said. His voice in the darkness seemed very close to me. This is what he told me.

  9

  THE FIRST NIGHT

  My father, Maalim Yahya, was a teacher, as you know. He taught religion in the same school you went to as a child, although by that time he was no longer here and you never met him. I should say he taught the religion of Islam not the idea or philosophy of religion. I don’t know if religion was still taught like that when you were at school.

  My father was a religious scholar. He had been a Koran school teacher for many years before he went to teach in the government school. He would have started teaching in Koran school when he was a boy himself, once his teachers discovered that he had an understanding of the word of God and the intelligence to learn it and instruct the little ones in its power. It was not difficult to recognise the ones who were gifted in this way, and for some of them, knowledge in the word of God was a blessed route for their scholarly talents. They became local legends and were celebrated by ironic and teasing tributes as they walked the streets. My father Maalim Yahya was a young person like that. People were teasing him about his learning when he was still a teenager, and in time he became a man of renown, and someone whom others always pushed forward to lead them in prayer. It was a tribute humble people without treasure or power bestowed on one of theirs. Lead us in prayer and we will honour you. When Maalim Yahya led prayers he recited the longest and most complicated suras without a hitch or a stutter and with perfect recall, as far as anyone could tell, and when invited to do so, he would explain chapter and verse of any theological issue a member of the congregation cared to put before him, and he would do so with unanswerable fluency. Such talent could only be a gift from God.

  Not only was he a scholar, he was of the generation whose entire understanding of the world was informed by religion and its metaphors, which is not to say that he was an ignorant man with a medieval cast of mind although he did believe in the existence of evil as a force that preyed on human life, in the form of malevolent spirits who roamed the air and besieged the frail and the indecisive. He knew and cared nothing, or almost nothing, about Europe’s learning and triumphs, nor was he interested in its history of frenzied wars and conflicting nationalities, and so he would not have known to turn to them for historical explanations of the world we lived in. He knew the results of Europe’s violent will, as the whole world did. Nor did he pay much attention to the doings of other religions or peoples, which to him were distant crowds of strangers going about their incomprehensible business on the twilight edges of the world. Nothing that they did mattered to anyone but themselves. When an explanation was needed for a dilemma or an event, there was always an appropriate example to be found in the life of the Prophet or his companions or in the tales of the prophets who had preceded the Nabi, sala-lahu-wa’ale. In addition there was always wisdom and illumination in the reflections of the endless stream of scholars who followed from the days of the Prophet. As my father used to say: we thank God for His gracious mercy in making such guidance known to us.

  Even stories Maalim Yahya told to us his children were always ornamented by reference to religious wisdom or were episodes from the life of the Prophet. He spoke about these matters without insistence, as if these were only innocent reflections circulating in his mind or something that had just occurred to him in the course of the conversation, not as if he was trying to force something down our throats, which he was. I was absorbed by his limitless knowledge, which was capable of addressing any issue I asked him about, and doing so in unhurried detail accompanied by several examples. Sometimes I hoarded a question for a day or two, until I found a moment when my father was in the right frame of mind to answer, not tired or preoccupied or suffering one of his monstrous headaches. For then I knew I would get one of his lush detailed answers rather than something curt.

  Like what? Do you mean, what kind of question? Once I asked him what his name meant. I was going through an obsession with the meaning of names at the time. My father liked questions like that because of the way they could be opened out. He told me: Yahya is the name of the prophet that the nasrani call John, your mother’s name Mahfudha means someone who is protected by God, your sister’s name Sufia means someone with a clean heart, like a sufi. He told me that I was named after Abdalla ibn Masud, the shepherd boy who became the sixth convert to Islam. He told me how that untutored shepherd boy became the greatest scholar of the Koran and its most esteemed reciter and interpreter during the Prophet’s lifetime. He told me about the time Abdalla ibn Masud spent in Kufa and about the other scholars he met there and their teachings and contributions to scholarship. That is what belief can do, he told me, it can confound and astound the ways of men, and raise the most humble to great and noble achievement. You are named after a great man, he told me.

  It was strange that Maalim Yahya ended up teaching in a government boys’ primary school because he did not go to that kind of school himself and had not studied in the Roman alphabet. It was at first a matter of fulfilling his obligations to the community, which required him to undertake this duty. He would otherwise have fed his family by teaching in the Koran school for all his days and lived the ascetic life of a religious teacher without complaint, accepting the tiny amounts of money parents paid for their children to be taught the words of God and the handouts and gifts when they came from wherever they came. That is how scholars lived. To Maalim Yahya, the life of a religious scholar could only be one of dedicated vocation, one of humility and respectable poverty. In time, my father came to be grateful for the government school-teacher salary, which he collected steadily every month and which enabled him to provide unexpected decencies for himself and for us. His real work was learning and transmitting the word of God and the knowledge of His commands. It was work he was dedicated to and which gave him a sense of fulfilment. All the boys he taught in government school attended Koran school as well or had done so in the past, as we all had to. They already knew what the school syllabus required him to teach them, but he taught it to them anyway. What harm could it do? Everyone got very high marks in his class, otherwise what kind of Muslim boys were they?

  You might wonder how my father ended up being a government school teacher. The colonial government had had to agree to the teaching of Islam as a way of reassuring parents that schools were not going to steal their children’s minds and turn them into unbelievers. It was not easy to persuade the parents at first. Nobody wanted the government schools anyway. What was the use of them except to turn the minds of the children? There were well-known stories of the mellifluous boastings of the missionaries and their ruses, and no cunning could be put past the British when it came to getting their way. The parents stood firm, keeping their children away from government school until Islam was put on the curriculum. So Maalim Yahya, who himself had never been to such a school but could discourse on the hadith and its interpretation over centuries, and could recite chapters from the Koran and the funeral prayer without a text, was recruited to teach in one of the colonial government schools. Other scholars were recruited to fill similar posts in other schools, in order to allow colonial education to enter their children’s lives. It is such an irony, isn’t it, that it is religious scholars like my father who made colonial educati
on possible.

  When I was quite young I used to accompany the Maalim to the mosque and to other events where he led people in prayers and in the observance of the rites. Then I would carry his loose-leaf books for him or pass him his spectacles or his tasbih when it came time for him to tell the rosary, and carry messages back and forth as required. I knew that my father liked to have me beside him on these duties, and I won smiles and affectionate pats from many people, and I loved the feeling of belonging and being one of many. They called me the little saint and predicted that I would follow in my father’s ways, laughing at my precocious piety but pleased with me too. I eased away as I grew into my teens, blaming schoolwork for my absence from my father’s side. It must have been obvious to him and to everyone else that I was lying, that I was making my escape. I studied in the same school as my father taught, and he would have had a very good idea of what work was expected of me. He must have been deeply disappointed that my love of religion and its scholarship turned out to be so shallow.

  Those were the years of independence and then the revolution, and so many things changed after that.

  *

  Baba paused in his recollections and looked away. I remembered Mama struggling with memories of those times, and when Baba’s silence had lasted for several minutes I told him that, to bring him back from wherever he had gone. He looked up but continued to sit silently for a while longer. Then he took a sip of water and continued.

  *

  A year or two after the revolution my father lost the government school job, as did so many senior teachers and civil servants. He would have known it was coming. The government announced that it was to save money and to sweep away the privileged remnants of another era. That was how matters seemed to the new rulers and their fraternal socialist advisers from the German Democratic Republic and Czechoslovakia, who had allocated themselves the education portfolio in our affairs (while the Chinese took over the hospitals and the Soviets advised on security and the armed forces). The advisers probably used stronger words than sweep away the privileged remnants of another era. They probably used muscular and cruel words like purge the system and excise the rot, cut prune incinerate, just as the Soviets had done to them in their mania for slash and burn as a process of reform. The only reform possible for those you suspect is extermination or expulsion, cut prune incinerate. In short, most senior administrators and teachers tainted by any association with the previous era knew that sooner or later they were to be removed from their jobs. Some of them were people who had become used to a dignified and wealthy existence, and could not imagine themselves or theirs reduced to such an extent. The disregard and poverty they subsequently felt no doubt seemed harder for them by contrast with their old existence, although in reality it was just as hard for people like my father, whose life had always been close to the edges of decency: cramped spaces, humble food, and hardly anything left over when all was said and done.