Desertion Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Praise

  PART I

  1 Hassanali

  2 Frederick

  3 Rehana

  4 Pearce

  An Interruption

  PART II

  5 Amin and Rashid

  6 Amin and Jamila

  PART III

  7 Rashid

  8 Amin

  A Continuation

  DESERTION

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  Copyright Page

  Praise for Abdulrazak Gurnah’s

  DESERTION

  “Affecting. . . . A meditation on African history, estrangement, and loss.”

  —The New Yorker

  “A novel with the wonderfully intriguing promise, from the very beginning, of being not only a roving command of time and place but of charged sensibilities. A promise more than fulfilled. . . . The emotional range of relationships that come about between colonisers and the people of the mapped countries has never been better evoked than in this work.”

  —Nadine Gordimer, author of The Conservationist

  “A lyrical, intensely felt work. . . . Gurnah writes beautifully and perceptively, adopting different tones for each of his characters, and lacing their stories with bits of wit and humor.”

  —The Nation

  “Searing. . . . Will make you miss a meal or two until you get to its dramatic conclusion.”

  —Essence

  “As beautifully written and pleasurable as anything I’ve read. . . . Gurnah’s portrait of the society’s complexities is the work of a maestro.”

  —Mike Phillips, The Guardian (London)

  “Lyrical. . . . Watching a talented writer such as Gurnah lead us through such intense, rich conflicts is powerfully moving.”

  —Richmond Times-Dispatch

  “Treads on . . . colonialist themes with grace [and] delicacy. . . . [Gurnah’s] skill as a writer is clear in this book. He manages to do what many novelists fail to—find convincing voices for a variety of characters in several genres to create a nearly seamless multilayered story.”

  — Chicago Life

  “A poignant lament for lives overwhelmed by cultural forces. . . . There are no equivocal judgements in Gurnah’s tender prose.”

  —The Independent (London)

  “[A] beautiful story about forbidden love and the collision of cultures.”

  — Newsday

  “Abdulrazak Gurnah’s lyrical writing brings the feel of a different place and culture, the agony of separation, the mixed blessings of political independence and the weight of family. Seldom have the multiple felicities of first love been so movingly described.”

  —The Providence Journal

  PART I

  1 Hassanali

  THERE WAS A STORY of his first sighting. In fact, there was more than one, but elements of the stories merged into one with time and telling. In all of them he appeared at dawn, like a figure out of myth. In one story, he was an upright shadow moving so slowly that in that peculiar underwater light his approach was almost imperceptible, inching forward like destiny. In another, he was not moving at all, not a tremor or a quiver, just looming there on the edge of the town, grey eyes glittering, waiting for someone to appear, for someone whose unavoidable luck it was to find him. Then, when someone did, he slid forward towards him, to fulfil outcomes no one had predicted. Someone else claimed to have heard him before he was seen, to have heard his beseeching, longing howl in the darkest hour of the night, like that of an animal out of legend. What was undisputed – although there was no real dispute between these stories as they all added to the strangeness of his appearance – was that it was Hassanali the shopseller who found him, or was found by him.

  There is luck in all things, as there was in this first arrival, but luck is not the same as chance, and even the most unexpected events fulfil a design. That is, there were consequences in the future that made it seem less than accidental that it was Hassanali who found the man. At that time, Hassanali was always the first person about in the morning in this locality. He was up before dawn to open the doors and the windows of the mosque. Then he stood on the steps to call the people to prayer, pitching his voice to all corners of the clearing in front of him. Salla, salla. Sometimes the breeze carried similar calls from nearby mosques, other cryers chiding the people to wake. As-salatu khayra minannawm. Prayer is better than sleep. Hassanali probably imagined the sinners turning over irritably at being disturbed, and probably felt indignant and self-righteous satisfaction. When he finished calling, he swept the dust and the grit from the mosque steps with a feathery casuarina broom whose silent efficiency gave him deep pleasure.

  This task of opening the mosque, cleaning the steps, making the call to prayer, was one he had appointed himself to for his own reasons. Someone had to do it, someone had to get up first, open the mosque and make the adhan for the dawn prayers, and someone always did, for his own reasons. When that person was ill or grew tired of the charge, there was always another person to take over. The man who preceded him was called Sharif Mdogo, and had come down with fever so badly in the kaskazi two years ago that he was still bedridden. It was a little surprising that Hassanali had volunteered himself to take over as the dawn cryer, though, not least to Hassanali himself. He was not zealous about the mosque, and it required zeal to rise at every dawn and bully people out of sleep. Sharif Mdogo was like that, the kind of man who liked to barge into complacency and give it a good shake. In addition, Hassanali was a worrying man by nature, or perhaps experience had made him that way, had made him anxious and cautious. These semi-nocturnal chores tortured his nerves and disturbed his nights, and he feared the darkness and the shadows and the scuttlings of the deserted lanes. But then these were also the reasons he offered himself for the task, as a submission and a penance. He started doing the duty two years before the dawn of this sighting, when his wife Malika first arrived. It was a plea that his marriage should prosper, and a prayer for his sister’s grief to end.

  The mosque was only a short stroll across the clearing from his shop, but wh he started making the dawn call to prayer, he felt obliged to do as his predecessor Sharif Mdogo had done. He entered nearby lanes, more or less shouting into bedroom windows as he walked past, bellowing at the sleepers. He worked out a route which avoided the chasms and caves where the worst of the shadowy mischief lurked, but he was still prone to seeing spectral visions hurrying away into the darkest parts of the streets as he approached, fleeing the prayers and holy words he uttered as he exhorted the slumbering faithful. These visions were so real – a monster claw glimpsed at the turning of a lane, discontented spirits softly panting somewhere behind him, images of gross underground creatures which glowed and faded before he caught proper sight of them – that often he performed his tasks in a sweat despite the dawn chill. One morning, during another anxious, sweat-drenched round, when the dark lanes pressed in on him like the walls of a narrowing tunnel, he felt a rush of air on his arm as the shadow of a dark wing caught the corner of his eye. He ran, and after that decided to end the torment. He retreated to the mosque steps to make his call, a short walk across the clearing. He added the chore of sweeping the steps to make amends, even though the imam told him that calling from the steps was all that was required, and that Sharif Mdogo had been zealous in his duties.

  Hassanali was crossing the clearing on this dawn when he saw a shadow across the open ground begin to move towards him. He blinked and swallowed in terror, nothing unpredictable. The world was teeming with the dead, and this grey time was their lair. His voice croaked, his holy words dried up, his body left him. The shadow approached him slowly, and in the fast-approaching dawn, Hassanali thought he could see its eyes glittering with a
hard, stony light. This was a moment he had already lived in his imagination, and he knew that as soon as he turned his back, the ghoul would devour him. If he had been in the mosque he would have felt safe, because that is a sanctuary which no evil can enter, but he was still a long way from there and he had not yet opened the doo . In the end, overcome with panic, he shut his eyes, babbled repeated pleas for God’s forgiveness, and allowed his knees to give way under him. He submitted himself to what was to come.

  When he opened his eyes again, slowly, peering out as if he was lifting a sheet under which he had been hiding from a nightmare, it was to see the shadow slumped on the ground a few feet from him, half on its side and with one knee bent. Now in the brightening light he could see that it was not a spectre or a shadow or a ghoul, but an ashen-complexioned man whose grey eyes were open in exhaustion only feet away from his. ‘Subhanallah, who are you? Are you human or spirit?’ Hassanali asked, to be on the safe side. The man sighed and groaned all at once, and so announced himself as human without a doubt.

  That was how he was when he arrived, exhausted, lost, his body worn out and his face and arms covered with cuts and bites. Hassanali, on his knees in the dust, felt for the man’s breath, and when he felt it warm and strong on his palm, he smiled to himself as if he had managed something clever. The man’s eyes were open, but when Hassanali waved his hand in front of them, they did not blink. Hassanali would have preferred that they did. He rose carefully, incredulous about the drama he was now part of, then stood for a moment above the bundle groaning at his feet before hurrying to call for help. By this time it was dawn. The exact moment of greatest felicity for the dawn prayer was swiftly passing – it was only very brief – and Hassanali had not performed the duties expected of him. He feared that the regular early morning worshippers would be annoyed with him when they woke up later and discovered that they had drowsed through the morning’s blessing. Most of these worshippers were elderly men who needed to keep their accounts healthy and up-to-date in case of a sudden summons. But he should have remembered that they also no longer slept that well, fretted the whole night long and could not wait for the dawn and the call to prayer to release them. So even as Hassanali set off to seek help, worrying about having failed in his duty as the muadhin, some were stepping out of their houses to find out why there had not been a call that morning. Perhaps some even worried if Hassanali was well, or if something had passed him by in the night. There were witnesses, then, to the man’s first appearance, people who gathered round his wide-eyed body and saw it slumped like a shadow in the open ground in front of the mosque.

  Hassanali returned with two young men he had found huddled half-asleep against the café doors. They worked there and were waiting for it to open, clinging to the last moments of rest before the day’s antics began, but they rushed to help when Hassanali shook them awake. Everyone liked to help in the old days. When they arrived at the scene, urgent behind Hassanali’s increasingly self-important strides, it was to find three elderly men standing a few paces from the body, watching it with fastidious interest: Hamza, Ali Kipara and Jumaane. These were the stalwarts of the dawn prayers, who stood directly behind the imam in the congregation, and who were the coffee-seller’s first customers every morning. They were men well past their best years, wise men who expected their lives’ endeavours to be considered unblemished, and who kept their eyes open and on the world that passed them by. They did not usually stir for anybody but themselves, and thought their age allowed them to act in this way. So they were not really three elderly men because everyone knew who they were, but by the measure of their time and place they were old, and their infirmities were part of their dignity, and their unbending display was perhaps an attempt at fulfilling what was required of them. For whatever reason, they now stood there, feigning indifference and making casual remarks while the young men and Hassanali rushed about. Hassanali opened the mosque and the young men fetched the rope bed, the one used for washing the dead. Hassanali winced but did not say anything. The young men lifted the moaning body on to the rope bed and prepared to carry it away.

  All of a sudden, there was a brief tussle between Hassanali and Hamza about where the sick man should be taken. Hamza was an imposing man despite his age, with a lined, gnarled, greystubbled face and glaring eyes. He had been a rich simsim merchant in years gone by, but was now simply rich. His sons made money for him in a butchery business in Mombasa. He was sensitive about the awe due to him, and liked to be deferred to on any matter of the slightest importance. He liked to be treated as the informal jamadar thereabouts. In their prime, Ali Kipara had been a basket-weaver and Jumaane had been a house-painter, so both knew their place with the jamadar and occupied it when called upon to do so. Hamza began to walk away, tetchy and impatient, calling on the helpers to follow him. It was obvious that the moral duty to the exhausted man lay with Hassanali who had found him, and who therefore was obliged to offer care and hospitality to him. Hamza knew this as well as anyone else, but perhaps Hamza did what he did to remind everyone that he was a wealthy man to whom such acts of mercy were an obligation.

  In any case, everyone politely ignored Hamza, even his fellow sages, and the man was duly carried on the rope bed to Hassanali’s shop. The door to the adjoining yard, which was also the entrance into the house, was too narrow for the bed with the body on it, so the two young men lifted the body and carried it into the yard, then placed it on a mat under the thatched awning attached to the house.

  The three elderly worshippers squeezed into the yard as well, casting swift glances around. There was not very much to see but none of them had been inside Hassanali’s yard before and could not suspend curiosity even at this dramatic time. It was a large yard, running the full length of the house. There were plants in pots, two curtained windows facing out of the house, one either side of the inner door, a paved platform for washing clothes, a cluster of seredani for cooking and at one end of the yard the washroom and the room for necessities – an ordinary yard. They might have noted the recently whitewashed walls and the lushness of the pot-plants, among them a red rose, a lavender in bloom and a bristling aloe.

  The crowd of six stood unspeaking around the body for a minute, as if surprised about the way everything had turned out. Then, after a moment, there were several opinions about what should be done next, spoken one after another, like pledges to an obligation. We should call Mamake Zaituni the healer. And someone should fetch the Legbreaker. I believe someone should go and tell the imam at once, in case he needs to say special prayers against contagion or worse. That was Hamza, as always going for the grand gesture. Hassanali nodded unprotestingly to the suggestions and ushered the small crowd out. They went reluctantly but they had no choice. It was only the drama of the groaning man that permitted their presence in the privacy of his home in the first place, so Hassanali only had to spread his arms and wave them gently for everyone to turn towards the yard door.

  ‘Thank you, thank you all. Will you please ask Mamake Zaituni to come?’ he asked, putting himself even further in his neighbours’ debt.

  ‘Without a doubt,’ Hamza the merchant said in his self-important voice, waving his stick at one of the young men. ‘Go, go, you, there is someone’s life here.’

  There were parting suggestions. Don’t touch him until Mamake Zaituni comes. I won’t touch him. Don’t move him until the Legbreaker arrives. I won’t move him. If you need any help . . . I’ll call. Hassanali shut the yard door without bolting it – he did not want to seem too inhospitable – and returned to the traveller on the mat under the awning. He was suddenly wary, anxious about being alone with the man, as if he had allowed himself too near a wild beast. Who could he be? What kind of man went wandering alone in the wilderness? He remembered now he had said that to the man as he lay on the ground: Who are you? The noise of their arrival was sure to have woken up his wife and his sister, who were probably already standing behind the window curtains, waiting to come out and see what was going on. Al
l of a sudden he was afraid that he had done something stupid in bringing the sick stranger home. The thought set off a shiver of anxiety across his sternum.

  He looked on the man with a marvelling smile. What was a stranger, wounded in the wilderness, doing on the mat in their yard? It might as well have been a flying horse or a talking dove. Such things did not happen to them. He remembered his terror when he had first seen his shadow and taken it for a hideous ghoul. Many things frightened him, a grown man. Sometimes his life loomed so large on him that he saw shadows everywhere. It could have been an ugly malicious anything at that uncertain time between light and dark, between the real and the undead world, but perhaps he should not have thrown himself on the ground in the way that he did. If it had been a spectre it would have smiled before pulverising his soul. Hassanali’s smile was as much for his soft-fleshed timid self as it was for the man at his feet. For this was no spectre, and no more ugly than the next person. His face was drained and covered with straggly, untrimmed, greying hair. His eyes were still open, bleary and unseeing, although even as he looked he thought he saw them blink. His breathing was shallow, softly panting, and behind it was a hardly audible groan. His arms were scratched and pierced by thorns. The calico smock he wore over trousers and sandals was grey with dust and use. It was torn and mended, streaked and stained, acquired in his wanderings perhaps rather than brought from wherever he started out from. No one would start a journey with such rags. The sandals were tied with strips of cloth, and around his middle, worn like a belt, were the remains of a brown shirt. Another strip of the same material made a headband across his brow. Hassanali smiled at the melodrama of his costume, exactly like that of an adventurer lost in a desert, or like a fighter. The thought made his stomach lighten. Had he brought a bandit to their house, a marauder who would kill them all? But no, the man was half-dead, perhaps himself a victim of bandits.

  ‘Who is it?’ his sister Rehana asked behind him.