Admiring Silence Page 11

  A man with large hair sculpted to a blunt point over his forehead came to sit nearby. He was dressed in a pin-stripe, diplomatic-corpse fancy-dress suit for our guys, but in his case there was a kind of urban, streetwise toughness overlaying an inappropriateness in his manner, and there was a certain stutter in the language his body spoke in that costume. When I glanced at him again, casually, our eyes met. His seemed to leap with interest, while I looked instantly away. There was something of the flabby devil in his appearance and in his parasitical airs, something of the government flunkey on a spree. I feared people like him, instantly and perhaps unfairly. I could imagine him alighting at whatever hell-hole it was in which he had gained the ascendancy to travel the world in this state of privilege, taking his monkey-suit off, donning his gum boots and overalls, and strolling off to the torture room to pull off testicles with pliers and attach electrodes to other vulnerable parts of the human body. And if he didn’t do precisely that himself, then he knew people who did or who ordered others to, and he would sit laughing with them over the duty-free booze he had brought with him from his travels while they chatted about the hilarious scam they had all been able to pull on their pathetic victims.

  My neighbour on the flight was friendly, with a shiny round face that seemed incapable of restraining a grin. The shine was mostly sweat, which he wiped with a large hand-towel he carried over one shoulder like a shawl. I expected not to enjoy his company, but he was so charming and pleasant that I found myself telling him of my trip and of my life in England, talking to him with a freedom that was mildly intoxicating. I even told him about Emma, though I made that uncomplicated. He, in turn, spoke about the law school he was attending in London (he seemed a bit old for that) and his forthcoming marriage. That was why he was going home. I asked him which number wife this was, and he laughed good-naturedly and said that he was too poor for that kind of thing. Even now, the marriage was not his idea, but his parents were worrying that he was leaving it too late, so he had agreed in order to keep the peace. He was free with advice and news when he discovered how long I had been away, which I didn’t mind as much as I thought I might. But when he touched on my paranoias – everything is different, everyone’s gone, don’t feel guilty about not coming back earlier – it made my stomach turn to liquid and I had to dash for the toilet.

  It had been dark when we left London, so there was nothing to see as we flew over Africa, just an occasional light which from that distance looked like a flaring bonfire or a spume of burning gas. In the morning, the land below looked barren and empty, forbidding in its starkness. We flew over what seemed like a dirty rivulet in hard-baked, brown flinty sand, and the pilot informed us that it was the Nile. Tiny clusters of houses adhered to its edges here and there, like lumps or disfigurements on the straight line of the river. Later, the sight of Lake Turkana was shocking for the rocky, bare emptiness that surrounded it in all directions. Then the landscape changed suddenly as we left Kilimanjaro over to our right and approached the coast, dotted now and again with copses and, at times, vast expanses of green. Eventually we caught a glimpse of the limitless ocean and saw regiments and battalions of coconut trees marching towards the empty beaches. Then we crossed the grey still waters of the channel between the continent and our island. Everything seemed so familiar as we flew low over the island that I felt my eyes watering at the clarity of memory which had preserved these pictures so effortlessly, without renewal or exertion.

  As we were waiting to disembark, my companion was back at work with his towel, smiling at my nervousness and wishing me luck with benignly malicious glee. The heat and smell of the earth struck me as if for the first time. I didn’t remember it like that, not the humid fumes of decomposing vegetation and baking earth which made me heave for breath. The terminal building was new, squat and anonymous, all glass and steel, with a viewing balcony on the first floor. Some way to the right was the old building, looking small and decorative with its crenellations and red-tiled roof and heavy wooden railings, like a pavilion in an ornamental garden or a villa on a Mediterranean hillside. As we walked across the tarmac I felt as exposed as if I had stepped off the plane naked, or as if my clothes were too baggy or too tight, or too colourful and ridiculous, as if I were a refugee from a circus. I looked out for familiar faces on the balcony, and I saw one that seemed as if it could be my stepfather. After such a long time, and from such a distance, I could not be sure, so I waved to be on the safe side. The man I had waved to stared for a moment and looked behind him, then turned back towards me with a look of surprise. He was too young to be my stepfather, I could see that now.

  My half-brother Akbar clapped me on the back as I stood waiting for my luggage. I hadn’t noticed him approach from behind me, and after the mistake with the man I had taken to be my stepfather I had stopped searching the faces so hungrily, in case I embarrassed myself again. He looked so much younger than I expected. We shook hands as if we were meeting again after only a brief absence, smiling shyly at each other, and speaking the ritual words of greeting without emphasis or exaggeration. He pointed to the gate and through the bars I saw my mother jumping up and down with excitement, smiling and waving, and saying something I could not hear. Beside her was a young woman I did not recognize, but I knew it must be my half-sister Halima. She had been so young when I left. She was waving too, frantically. Suddenly I felt overwhelmed with relief at this welcome and affection. I don’t know what I expected, but I think it was blame and long looks.

  I sat between my mother and Halima in the back of the ancient taxi while Akbar sat in the front beside the driver. My mother, too, looked less changed than I had expected. Her head was covered with a buibui, though it was pulled back far enough for me to see that her hair was thin and white. But her face looked firm and full of life, and her laughter and her voice seemed as familiar as my own. She had lost a little weight, and seemed leaner and more assured than I remembered her. She kept her eyes on me as she talked, telling me their news, asking for mine, touching my grey hair between sentences and smiling. I caught the eye of the taxi-driver in the rear-view mirror, a man as old and grizzled as his motor, and he looked tense and preoccupied, apparently not at all touched by this reunion scene.

  We ran into the first road-block about half a mile from the airport. There was no one by the barrier, but beside the road was a building which I remembered as a police station. This area, three miles out of town, had been a European enclave before independence. It was no doubt on the airport side of town for convenience, but perhaps also to expedite matters should a hasty evacuation prove at all necessary. I remember cycling past at times to visit the ruins of Sultan Ali bin Humud’s palace, which were by the sea about a mile or so from the main road. Ali bin Humud had abdicated the Busaid throne in 1911 while in Paris after an imperial junket in London, a royal wedding or a coronation or some such, to which all the boogie chiefs and rajahs and sultans of the greatest empire the world had ever seen were invited so that they could look on England’s works and despair. Sultan Ali had already seen England’s works, having gone to school and grown up there, and having only come back to his island kingdom to reign over his puritanical Omani barons and their black vassals when his father died. No more parties, no booze, no Ascot, no excruciating dalliances, just flowing robes and family intrigues and prayers and prohibitions. After two years of this, during which the Sultan built himself a modern palace by the sea, he returned to Europe to attend the celebrations of his suzerain and protector, and refused to come back. It was fitting in some curious way that the district around his abandoned palace should become home to a colony of the people he had chosen as his own. The ghosts in that ruin would probably have found their company convivial and fitting.

  He wasn’t the first in his family to make a dash for Europe. His great-aunt Salma had run off with a German diplomat some years before. The German had caught sight of her on a terrace of the house next door to the one he had rented, and he had fallen in love with her. They both f
eared that discovery would mean horrible retribution for the dishonour her affair would bring on the family, and they were right to do so. Her crowd thought a great deal of such things. So they ran off together. She changed her name to Emily and they went to live in Berlin, but within months Herr Reuter was run over by a tram, and Salma was left with her memories and her loss. She had the good sense to write a bestselling autobiography, though, which Ali bin Humud did not.

  Right next door to the ruins of Ali bin Humud’s modern palace were Bishop Weston’s church and hostel. Frank Weston had been a hero of his time, a righteous Victorian churchman who had scoured the countryside, both on the island and across the waters, for slaves he could rescue and convert. He sheltered those who chose to escape, preached to them the words of the God he so loved, and taught them to read so they could study the Good Book. It caused him great distress when he came to hear of the wanton practices that his young charges indulged in in the hostel where he offered them sanctuary, but he did not despair. Nor did he think it necessary to pass this information on to the good people back home who raised funds for his mission at church bazaars and such like. I used to visit the church when I went to wander around the ruined palace. The warden of the church grounds told me once that there was a tunnel running from under the palace to the port, so that Sultan Ali bin Humud could bring in slaves for his pleasure, even though the traffic was illegal by 1910. If there really was a tunnel, and the warden became understandably evasive when I asked for its whereabouts, then it was more likely that the Sultan had had it built so he could make his escape back to Europe one dark night. In the museum there is a photograph of Frank Weston at dinner, and when I saw it I could not forget that he was an Englishman in a colony, dressed as if he was in Hampshire and eating pudding.

  As I cycled past the villas all those years ago, I used to admire their neat gardens and bright colours, pinks and blues and even one (I remember) which had a chequer-board design. They were all built by the government’s public works department, probably to a plan drawn up by an architect in a London office, and were only occupied by European staff. Naturally, they had needed their police station nearby, in case of rowdiness or worse. The police station had then looked as neat as the villas, brilliantly whitewashed, and with plump bushes and the radiantly colourful and papery flowers of the bougainvillaea lining the driveway to the front porch. Even the policemen at this station had looked decorative and crisply turned out, their ironed khaki shorts stiff and shiny with starch, the tassles of their carefully brushed tarbooshes glistening and full. And I have a memory of a flagpole which one of the policemen was always running a flag up, though I could only have seen that once or twice. Now the walls were spattered with mud and the yard in front of the building was as bare as an earthen floor. No bushes or bougainvillaea or flagpole or whitewashed stones to mark out the drive, not even the spiked ornamental chain which I realized now had been a jaunty attempt to suggest an English suburban garden in these tropical climes.

  Akbar gave the taxi-driver some money at the road-block, then we waited in the car in tense silence. Beyond the station, by the dirt track which eventually led to Ali bin Humud’s palace, a group of people stood under a tree as if waiting for a bus, a small crowd, not speaking, all looking in our direction. ‘What’s the idea?’ I asked, just wanting to know what was going on.

  ‘Wait,’ Akbar said, as if to warn me from doing anything rash.

  ‘It’s a check-point,’ the taxi driver said bitterly. ‘If you don’t stop they shoot. They’re in there watching. When they are ready they’ll come out, and if you don’t give them money they search the luggage and confiscate this and that. Then they know you, and next time you come through here in your taxi they make trouble about the car, about your licence, for your passengers . . .’

  He stopped abruptly, for someone had appeared on the porch. The policeman stretched and then strolled capless towards the car. When he was nearer I saw that he could not be much more than twenty, and I didn’t think there was any pretence in the way he was rubbing sleep from his eyes. His uniform was clean but crumpled, no sign of starch or the shining blisters of a hot iron, and of course there was no tarboosh. That had gone even before independence. The taxi-driver greeted him effusively, jumping out of the car and going round to open the boot. It must have been then that the money changed hands because he was back in a moment, shouting his farewells to the policeman as he started up his ancient Austin. ‘Mal’uun. They are nothing but thieves,’ he said. ‘But what can you do? If you don’t give the dogs something they take everything.’

  ‘At least you don’t have to pay it out of your own pocket, Mzee Hamza,’ Akbar said, smiling but firmly reminding the driver that his loss was less in this than the passengers’. Mzee Hamza laughed happily, almost with a kind of pride.

  ‘Who did you think you were waving to?’ Akbar asked, twisting in his seat to grin at me. ‘When you were walking across the tarmac, who did you think it was? He looked astonished.’

  I shrugged. ‘I don’t know, I thought I recognized him.’

  ‘I was up there on the balcony, and I can tell you he looked astonished. Who did you think it was?’ He was still grinning, but underneath the grin I thought I saw something harder, a willingness to be awkward. I couldn’t remember that about him, that he had a hardness in him. Perhaps it was an expression of his self-confidence and maturity, or the inkling of an antipathy to me.

  Then my mother began talking again, until we reached the next road-block and had to go through the same performance again. I realized as I looked out of the car window that I had expected more change. Everything looked familiar, if shoddier than I remembered. I was not to see the changes until later, when we got into the old town, and later still when I went across what used to be the old creek. The old town was where the Arabs and the Indians and the more prosperous of the rest used to live. The houses there were built in the traditional style of the coast, out of coral stone and plaster. Some were huge, rambling mansions, with balconies and courtyards, and even enclosed gardens. Even the more modest houses were built to last, with huge, carved doors ornamented with elaborate knockers and sometimes brass chasing along the edges of the frame. All the government offices, the hospitals, the schools were on this side of town, which jutted out as a headland, surrounded by the sea. This headland had at one time almost been cut off by a creek, and the only way to get to the other bank was by boat. The district was called The Other Bank. On the far side the houses were mostly made of wattle and mud, although people built sturdier houses as their fortunes improved. Some areas were not electrified, were without running water or a sewage system. The British filled in the creek, so that by the time I was growing up it had almost disappeared, but the differences did not go away. What I saw when I went wandering in the old town was what I had already been warned to expect: whole areas where houses had been allowed to collapse, gloomy, shut-up streets which had once been clamorous bazaars, broken drains releasing sewage into the narrow streets, where it snaked in little stinking streams through which people walked. It was far too deliberate and pervasive to be neglect, it was more like vandalism. The Other Bank had broad, well-lit streets, new blocks of flats, parks and so on. I would have been lost there within minutes if Akbar had not been with me. It did not take much cleverness to see the sweetness of the government’s petty revenge.

  When the taxi reached the house Akbar said, Go greet him. He’s in the shop. I’ll take your things upstairs. My stepfather was already coming round his desk as I reached the wide doors of the shop, his face impassive and unsmiling. I stepped forward quickly and bent to kiss his hand. He touched me on the shoulder, tentatively. I thought I felt distaste in that touch, but perhaps it was only my paranoia. I know I cringed with guilt and shame, and tried to imagine which of my crimes was uppermost in his disgust. Then he turned and shuffled back behind his desk. Welcome home. He looked unwell, so much thinner than he used to be, so feeble. ‘Go wash,’ he said, making me feel like a c
hild again. ‘Get some food. They’ll have food ready for you upstairs.’

  I turned and did as he said, and wished I’d resisted, had asked how he was, told him that I would go up in a minute but could I just have a seat and chat with him first? And while we are talking like this, I would say, will you explain to me why you could not even manage a smile to reassure me that I was not just something repulsive which had turned up in your life again? Could you not even say Alhamdullilah for my safe return? He looked so ill. Why had nobody said anything to me? The shop looked so empty, bare to the bone. Was everything that bad? But I said nothing like that, said nothing, just turned away and went round to the side of the house where the front door to the upstairs flat was.

  ‘What did your father say?’ my mother asked when I went upstairs.

  ‘He said, “Go wash. Get some food,”’ I said, and they thought this hilarious.

  I am going to have to go to an earlier history. It can’t be helped, because I will now have to tell this story differently. My father died before I was born. That is what I was used to saying, even thinking, though I knew it was not true. I have no image of him, no description, no photograph, not even a scrap of his writing. When I knew about him he was no longer there, and my mother had a way of speaking about him as if he had died. All I knew was that he had been a teacher, and we had lived in the apartment with the terrace where the rose and lavender bushes had once grown in old kerosene tins. I still see glimpses of that apartment we had lived in until I was seven, and the reception room with one window that had a view of the sea. I remember that some evenings my mother would spread a mat on the terrace and stretch out in the dark, with the light from the kitchen thickening her shape, her eyes open and staring at the crowded sky. And that from below us in the street would come the noise of people talking and distant music from the radio in the café down the road. Though these were public noises, there was something intimate and inclusive about them, like the sounds of a house.