The Last Gift Read online

  Then one night he saw her. It was not that he had not seen her before, but that was the night he really saw her. She was a young woman who lived next door to the relatives he was living with. He caught sight of her from his window and thought her attractive. He was just looking, eyeing up the daughter of the grand family that lived next door, that was all. Her father was a businessman, a merchant, a man of means and some eminence in the neighbourhood. He owned an electrical-goods shop and a butcher’s stall in the market. One of his sons ran the electrical shop and the other the butcher’s business, and they were wealthy enough for each of the sons to own a car. He had never seen the young woman in the street, because when she went out she was covered from head to toe in her buibui. He only guessed that it was her because he saw her coming out of the door. But on her terrace she walked about uncovered, unaware of his gaze.

  It was at the beginning of his third year at the college, and his life of quiet outward content had no knowledge of girls or women. He listened to some of the other boys talking of their adventures and affairs with envy, and he was not sure if he should believe them, but he did not think such excitements were likely to befall him. He liked to look at the beautiful women he passed in the streets. Not all of them covered up as his neighbour did, and some of them knew how to wear the buibui so that it did not conceal anything of importance. Later he fantasised and guiltily sinned on his own. He did not know how to take matters beyond that, and did not even think of that on that first night he really saw her. He thought she was beautiful, that was all, and started to look out for her on her terrace. It wasn’t a crime. He was just taking a look, not even thinking of anything, not even interested in anything, just enjoying how she looked.

  He used to watch her from his little slit of a window. The relatives of his sister’s husband lived on the third floor of a tall narrow building. They had two rooms to themselves and he had a small storeroom, a tiny cell, which he fitted into tightly. There were no shutters and no glass in the window, just a hole in the wall about nine inches wide and two feet high. A cool breeze blew through it at twilight, and sometimes when it rained he felt the lightest sprinkling on his feet. When it rained hard and the wind was blowing in the wrong direction, he rolled up his thin mattress and moved his books to the top end of the bed. He had glimpses of the sea over the top of the neem trees alongside the dockyard warehouses, and he looked down on the terrace of the house next door with its potted shrubs and washing lines.

  If he thought about how snugly he fitted into that room, he sometimes found it difficult to breathe. When he raised his head from his books there was nowhere to look but out of the window. He was very happy in that room even though he was anxious and felt unworthy about many things. He was eighteen. He was poor, a charity case. He was shy. He had no confidence. That was how he thought of himself. He had no skills apart from his diligence in studying. But he remembered that it was a happy time in that room. He was in his last year at the college, which had been like a new world to him. He was doing well there, and soon he would be offered a job as a teacher and would have a respectable living for the rest of his life.

  The relatives he lived with were poor; there was no electricity in the house and no running water. The water had to be fetched from the standpipe in the street every day and carried in buckets up those three flights of stairs to the storage tank in the kitchen. The bathroom was shared by everyone in the house, and was on the ground floor, a dark frightening room, which he only visited out of utter necessity. Their meals were humble, but his relatives were kind. He was courteous and grateful, and they were pleased with his gratitude. They treated him like a son of the house, sending him on errands or to fetch a bucket of water from the standpipe, telling him off for oversleeping or for working too hard, or for missing a reading for a neighbour at the mosque.

  He watched the girl from the window because she was there in front of him. That night, as he sat there at his window looking out on the dark, ready to go to bed, she came on the terrace with a candle. She put the candle down and pulled off her shift in one movement. She stood naked in the candlelight for a few seconds and then reached for a cloth that was on the clothes line and wrapped herself in it. She could not have known he was there because he had not lit a lamp in his room. She never took her shift off again like that, but after that first time he had his own picture of her in his mind. Even after all these years he could still see her, that unexpected movement when she reached to the back of her shoulders and pulled off her shift, and revealed her slim naked body to the candlelight. He had nowhere to sit in his room but on the bed and that was next to the window. It did not require any planning for him to be watching her whenever she came out while he was in the room. Perhaps he became infatuated with the sight of her but he did not intend anything more than to look. Where would he have got the daring for that?

  Then one day she saw him looking and did not seem to mind. After that he often sat by the tiny window, reading his books and looking at her as she sat with her chores or leaned against the terrace wall, looking out towards the sea. He watched her as she hung out the washing, or as she sat in the shade picking stones out of rice, or as she watered the plant pots in the late afternoon or even as she just sat there in the evenings. Sometimes at night, as he lay in bed by the window, he heard voices coming from the terrace, and he thought that was the family catching the breeze at the end of a hot day. Just a little harmless flirtation, he said to himself, teenagers making eyes at each other from the safety of their homes. But her father caught them out in their little game. He came out one twilight evening and found his daughter sitting on a mat, and turned round quickly enough to see Abbas at his window with the lamp glowing beside him. Abbas did not think anything serious would come of it. The merchant was a man of means, and he was just a boy living next door with his penniless relatives, taking a peep at his daughter. For a while, he would have to cross the street when he saw the father but if he kept out of the way, the memory of him at the window would soon fade. After all, he was only just looking out, maybe not even looking at his daughter. If she happened to be sitting on the terrace when he was looking out, how was that his business? But that was not how it was to be.

  The girl’s aunt lived with them, and had lived with them since the death of the girl’s mother many years before. The girl’s father told the aunt about what he had seen and she raised the alarm. She said if the girl was sitting there uncovered instead of running inside as soon as she spotted the boy, then the harm was already done. The aunt was someone who knew about things, and knew how a story can change as it passes from hand to hand and how it can grow into a different shape, especially where it concerned a young woman’s reputation. She went in search of Abbas’s sister, Fawzia, whom she knew from weddings and funerals that they both regularly attended.

  One day Fawzia came and told Abbas that he had been summoned home to Mfenesini. She would not tell him what it was about, and when they got there he saw that there had not been any summons, that it was all her doing. She made a big show out of it. She gathered everyone together, their father, their mother, his two brothers, who all came together nervously, expecting her to announce a tragedy, that she had been divorced by her husband or he had been jailed for smuggling or for pilfering at the Public Works Department where he worked. She told them that Abbas had dishonoured the daughter of the rich merchant who lived next door. Abbas was frightened by the announcement, and felt a sudden leap in his chest as if he had lost his footing on the edge of a high wall. That’s complete rubbish, he said, but Fawzia ignored him and provided more details of the outrage the merchant felt and how she had been called in to convey it to the family. Abbas could not understand what she was doing or what it meant. Their father did a lot of shouting, which he did happily enough whenever he had the chance, but now there was dishonour to consider as well.

  I knew it would end like this, he shouted. I knew it, I just knew it.Those European teachers and their school have turned your head. The
ir books have taught you to give yourself such airs that you think you can go and fuck a rich man’s daughter. Now they’ll beat you in the streets like a dog, you don’t know these Yemeni merchants. That’s what happens to a poor boy whose head gets too big. Someone knocks it off. Like this, he said, slapping him hard across the back of his head, and then he gave him another slap to make his point clear.

  His mother sobbed as his father ranted, and his sister interrupted him whenever he tried to speak. She told everyone that the only honourable thing to do was to propose marriage, and that she was going back to town that same afternoon to do that in the name of the family. Nobody had better try to stop her because she could not hold her head up if her family did not behave honourably in this matter. His father and his brothers gave Abbas sly grins and his mother’s sobs died down. They had expected beatings and abuse from the merchant and his powerful friends, not talk of a good marriage. After a day or two Abbas began to grin slyly himself too, even though at first he had been alarmed at the way things were going. He had no objections to marriage. He was old enough by their practices and he would soon have a job, and he already knew that the girl was beautiful, and that the family was wealthy. Within two weeks, which passed in an exhilarating blur, the marriage was arranged and consummated, and he had moved in with her family. Fawzia was very pleased with her work and told Abbas several times how grateful he should be to her for saving his life.

  In the hours before dawn, he lay humbled in his defeated body, trembling with weakness and the anguish that he felt about the young woman he so unexpectedly married when he was eighteen. A shiver of revulsion and self-hatred ran through him. The first few weeks were wonderful. His wife, Sharifa, was as beautiful as that first sight of her in candlelight promised. He had no idea of the pleasures the body was capable of, and how easy it was to rid himself of anxieties and inhibitions about what to do as a husband. After the wedding he moved into Sharifa’s family home because the room he lived in was only a store, hardly big enough for him on his own. He moved in with her father, her aunt, and two elder brothers and their wives and children in their large two-floor apartment above the row of shops. They were given a room on the top floor, next to the aunt and the kitchen and the bathroom and the terrace on which he had first seen Sharifa. The rest of them lived on the floor below, the father in a big room that looked out over the street, and the brothers and their families in two rooms at the back of the house. There was also a reception room on that floor, a place where the women of the house received visitors. He stood on the terrace in the evenings, sometimes, and looked up at the little window to see if he could catch sight of his old self brooding there.

  No, he was happy. He could not believe that such luck had come his way. He had never known so much space and privacy before. They had a room all to themselves with many small comforts he was enjoying for the first time in his life. They had a spring bed and a radio, and a rug on the floor. He spent all the hours he could spare in that room. He talked with his new wife when she was not busy with her duties. He revised for his final examinations, which were coming very soon. He listened to the small radio her father had given them as a present from the shop. It was like a retreat from the world. They had eggs and maandazi for breakfast. They ate meat and fish every day, all of them except the father eating the afternoon meal together under the awning in front of the kitchen, crowded on the mat that was rolled out and rolled up before and after each meal every day. The father ate alone from a tray sent to his room. Every Friday they had pilau made with mutton. It was a life of luxury, alhamdulillah. All that was required of him was to do his schoolwork, eat until he was full and wait for his wife to finish her chores.

  That room he shared with Sharifa was like a deep shade under a tree, like a gentle sea breeze blowing at evening. It was like one of those blessings in a story, he thought, except that the joy of it was real. A shy, hard-working and faithful youngster is showered with good fortune and builds a house with a garden for his beloved and his long-suffering parents. He did not build a garden and did not want to live with his parents ever again, but he had his beloved. Yes it would have been like one of those blessings, except those things don’t happen in real life, and every blessing has a poisonous thorn hidden in it. As he became used to the excitement of his new life, he could not miss how poorly and disrespectfully her family treated him. After a while he began to see that Sharifa did so as well, at least in front of the others. Every day it seemed to get worse.

  He fidgeted in his sick bed, trying to evade the host that crowded him. I can’t be bothered with remembering all that now, those arrogant little pharaohs. I can’t be bothered with all this.

  The brothers were always teasing him and laughing at him in their worldly way, treating him like a stumbling innocent blundering through life. They were notorious men. Every evening, in their separate cars, they parked in discreet places to wait for women who came in search of them. They were both married. Their wives were from Aden, and preferred the dust of Yemen to that of the little black island with its incomprehensible yabber, which they hardly bothered to speak properly. They went visiting in Aden every year or two with their children and stayed away for months. If they gave any thought to what their husbands did to amuse themselves while they were away, they never spoke these thoughts, and he did not think even Sharifa knew her brothers’ reputations in the town. He did not think it would have mattered to the brothers if she knew, or if the wives were absent or present. None of it would have made much difference to their prowling.

  When the brothers made fun of him, he laughed too, because everyone else did and he did not want it to seem that he minded, and perhaps the laughter was not meant unkindly. They had been hospitable, they had given him affection, and he was a lot younger than they were. They laughed at his youth and his innocence, and he told himself not to mind, but still, he felt silly about almost everything when they were around. Their wives covered their heads when he walked into the room, and spoke in a coded language of their own invention (they were sisters), but he was sure that what they said was mockery of him. Sharifa’s father gave him money in front of everyone, as if he was an employee, as if he served him. He did not give him the money at a regular time, but randomly. Sometimes he gave him coins and sometimes he gave him notes. It was like he was giving money to a charity. When the aunt thought he had got something wrong she rebuked him like a child, snapping at him and raising her voice so the whole house would hear, and even his wife laughed at him then. It seemed to him that people in the street could hear her shrieking at him. There were times when he wondered if the aunt was deranged. Her outbursts were so violent and out of proportion. He could not help but feel the humiliation even though he tried to talk himself out of it.

  They would get used to him, he said to himself, especially after they began to see that he deserved their respect. They frightened him, and he thought they knew they did. He hated them. After a while it made him suspicious that they treated him with so little respect. Once he began to think like that he could not get the thought out of his mind. He thought they laughed at him to mock him, and laughed at his father and brothers, who had acted like starving freeloaders at the wedding. He thought they were mocking him for his poverty and for their country ways.

  All the happiness and contentment he had felt about his future receded from him. The first thought in his head when he woke up in the morning was that he would have to bear their contempt. The thought filled him with an anguish so deep that he found it incredible to think of it now. He was young, deferential, used to having little in his life, and had no understanding of the unrelenting arrogance of the rich and the self-regarding. His stumbling inadequacy in the face of these circumstances made him feel hateful even to himself.

  One night, late at night, after they had made love and were talking softly – he shut his eyes and could feel her beside him – Sharifa told him that she was not a blood daughter to the merchant. She told him she had never known her real fat
her, who died suddenly in his twenties, when she was a year old. She did not remember anything about him. No, she did not know what he had died of. No one talked about such things. You don’t ask what people died of. They died because their time had come. Her mother then moved in with her brother, the merchant, but she too died soon after that, of fever. No she didn’t know what fever, just fever. Why was he asking ridiculous questions? Was she a doctor? She was three years old when her mother died, so she did have a memory of her, only one very powerful memory and almost nothing else. She remembered playing near her while she was cooking on a seredani, probably just out there in the kitchen or under the awning. She stumbled and knocked the pot off the fire. She would have fallen into the fire if her mother, by some miracle, had not plucked her up into safety. Her hands were scalded by the pot but that was all, otherwise she was unhurt. That was all she remembered of her, how she plucked her out of the fire and then was so frightened that she slapped her for her clumsiness. After her mother died, she grew up as a child of the household, and the merchant and his wife, may God have mercy on her soul, treated her like a daughter. He had always treated her like a daughter. Abbas asked what the merchant’s wife died of, and Sharifa slapped him hard on the thigh.

  Then he found out that Sharifa was pregnant and at first he was overjoyed about that. The very idea that a child he had made was on its way! Only as the weeks passed and her date grew nearer, he began to think that the baby was coming too soon after the wedding. Once he began to think like this he could not stop. After his examinations were over and he had so much time on his hands, these thoughts would not leave him alone. He began to fear that the child was not his. That there was some trick, some plot, that they had trapped him to save her from dishonour, that the child was someone else’s, and that something vile had happened that they were trying to hide. That the wedding had been arranged hastily to save her and the family from embarrassment. That after the child was born and his wife had been saved from dishonour, he would be forced to divorce her. He was sure his sister had known about this, and had received a gift from the family to arrange it. There was nothing easier to do than divorce a wife. Just one little word will do it. Was that why the brothers were treating him with such mockery?