The Last Gift Read online

  He did almost nothing for himself. Maryam cleaned him and fed him and medicated him, and he paid no attention. She took him to the surgery once a week, dressing him and then taking him downstairs one step at a time, and then driving him there. He sat silently while she debated his symptoms and his treatment with the doctor. They had been adversaries for years, and Abbas smiled as he watched them battle over his sick body. He expected that it was an inward smile, which did not show on his face. The doctor wanted him to do exercises, take a walk every day.

  ‘You like reading,’ she said, speaking each word clearly as if he had trouble hearing her. Hearing function not impaired. ‘Walk to the library and read there for a while. Exercise is very, very important for you. You must make more effort. You must tell yourself that you will get better. Attitude is very important in therapy.’

  Mr Kenyon must have said attitude, then. ‘I can’t sleep,’ he wanted to say to her, not properly, everything is uncomfortable, my head, my throat, my belly, but when he spoke only thick slurred noises came out of his mouth. He lay on the bed with eyes open, keeping as still as possible. Maryam slept on a camp bed, which she wedged between the wardrobe and the window, and left him the whole bed to himself. It was to give him room to sleep in comfort, she said, but perhaps it was also to get away from his smell and his decrepitude. Even then, he often could not sleep. The smallest sound woke her up so he had to lie rigid until he heard her breathing change. But sometimes he could not help himself, and the nausea and stomach pains overcame him and he heard his voice shrieking in the underground chambers of his mind, on and on like an animal dying. Then on other nights he lay still, unable to sleep, and in the corners of his mind he saw pulses of red and green light where the pain lurked, waiting for him to draw near.

  There was a tangled path from the road, easy to miss when you did not know what you were looking for. He was on his way home from school. It was a long walk on the narrow country road, stepping into the verge now and then to allow a cart or a passenger lorry to drive past. The verge was dense with palms and trees, and gave him shelter in the early afternoon heat. It was an hour’s walk from school to home. He was the only one in his family who was sent to school. What a battle that had been, going to school. His father saw him as he came out into the open. He was weaving a basket for the vegetables that would go to market the next day, and he paused in his work to shout at him. ‘Get to work, you maluun. Do you think you have slaves here?’

  That was his father. His name was Othman, a hard mean man who gloried in his toughness and who always spoke in a shout. Now, as Abbas lay there in the dark, broken by disease in a stranger’s land, he saw his father standing in the yard in the afternoon sun, his saruni rolled around his thighs, a half-woven basket on a tree stump in front of him. The short hoe that he always took everywhere with him lay at his feet. His short, muscular body was as hard as a fist, and he stared at Abbas with careless ferocity. That was how he looked at everything, ready to scrap with everyone, animal or human, and his appearance of rage was not diminished by the large thick-rimmed spectacles he wore at all times except when he went to sleep. Whatever he did, his father managed to look dangerous and comic at the same time. Abbas had been looking forward to his lunch, but he knew that to say anything would be to provoke his father intolerably. Instead he asked if he could say his prayers first, thinking he would be able to sneak a few mouthfuls of whatever his mother had put aside for him. He saw his father grin at his wiliness, but he was a pious man, and could not refuse anyone his prayers. ‘Hurry up,’ he said. ‘Don’t keep God waiting, and don’t keep me waiting either.’

  His father had a smallholding, a couple of acres with some fruit and coconut trees, all growing anyhow, as if they found themselves there by chance rather than anyone having planted them that way. He also grew vegetables to sell in town, and no one in the family could be spared from the daily labours of this work. He never tired of telling his children that he had grown up poor and had worked hard all his life, and he did not want to be poor again. No one in his house was going to eat for free. Everyone had to work for the food he stuffed into them. His boy children were his labourers on the land and he made them work as hard as he did. His wife and his daughter were like servants, watumwa wa serikali, as his mother liked to say. They fetched water and firewood, cooked and cleaned, at everyone’s bidding all day long, from sunrise to sunrise. God damn this life of a dog.

  His father’s one indulgence were the pigeons. There was nothing exceptional about these pigeons, no trailing tail feathers or cocky plumes. They were the ordinary dark-grey plebeians to be found all around them, in town and in the countryside, but he built houses for them, which he tied to the trees, and scattered handfuls of millet for them in the yard to see them descending to feed around him, and chased away crows and cats with passionate hatred. He protected them as he did not protect his children. He allowed none of his children to molest them, and so one of their rebellious pleasures was to catapult a pigeon to the ground and roast it over a fire, which they made far away from the house. But even the pigeons did not distract him for long from the unrelenting supervision of his labour camp.

  They worked like that, all of them, the whole family, but they lived a hard and poor life without comfort or luxury. It was because their father was such a miser. He hated spending money. He had dug a hole in the ground under his bed where he kept a locked chest for hiding his money. Then he built a trapdoor over the hole, which he kept padlocked. It was like a vocation, or something he had sworn to, an oath taken as a penance to spend as little money as possible. They wore ragged clothes and slept on mats on the floor. They hardly ever ate meat, and even then it was only the knuckle bones of a goat boiled for soup. He was a mean man, all right, mean with money, and mean in the way he saw things. Allah karim, he said if any of their neighbours asked to borrow money for some emergency. God is generous. Ask him for a loan, not me. But still, they were better off than most of their country neighbours, because they lived in a stone house with a latrine at the back rather than a hut made of mud and sticks, and doing their business in a hole in the ground in the bush. The meanness and labour in their house made Abbas feel different from other children. Their lives were just as poor, but they seemed to have time to roam the country roads and raid fruit trees and play long games of mwizi na askari, when he was always hurrying home to sneak a couple of mouthfuls of cassava or bananas and work on the land. Parsimony – it was a word he learned later, but when he did, it truly described his childhood, and even its sound reminded him of the sinister and unnecessary poverty they lived in.

  He was the youngest, and he had two elder brothers and an elder sister. One day, when he was about seven, his eldest brother Kassim took him to the school, which was a hard walk from their home, a mile and a half at least. Their father did not like it. The only thing they will teach him at that school is how to be lazy and how to give himself airs, he said. But Kassim had often seen the children at the school while he waited for the bus to take their coconuts and okra and brinjal to town. He saw how cheerful and clean the children were. He heard their voices reciting and murmuring across the road. Abbas knew that sound because sometimes he accompanied his brother to town, apparently to help and learn, so that one day he too could take produce to the market, but really because his brother knew he enjoyed the bus ride. He was so small that he could get a ride for free, so their father did not mind so much.

  They waited for the bus under the tree, and across the road they heard the little children reading and reciting softly to themselves. It was a sound that made Abbas smile, and it was a happiness he would have liked to share. He knew that Kassim would have liked that too, for himself. He told him so. Kassim was then thirteen, nothing but a skinny boy who had been a labourer all his life. He was too stupid by then to go to school. It was too late for him. That was what he said as they stood under the tree across the road from the school, waiting for the bus to town. His brother Kassim. Then in a café in town where
they stopped for a bun and a cup of tea, they heard someone on the radio talking about how it was everyone’s duty to send their children to school, and how noble it was to seek knowledge even if it took them as far away as China. His brother asked who the speaker was and they were told it was the new qadhi, an enlightened man who wanted to change things, who wanted to make people think about their lives. He did a weekly sermon on the radio, and he talked about how people should look after their health and think about their diet and be charitable to their neighbours, and he said that to take care in these matters was a duty to God. In every sermon he said something about sending children to school.

  One day, a meeting was called under the big tree and someone from the government came to speak to them. It was in the afternoon after Friday prayers, which were held right there under the tree, because the mosque nearby was not large enough and the congregation overflowed into the clearing anyway. His father was there, as was Kassim and his other brother Yusuf, who was so quiet that he was nicknamed Kimya, silence. Kassim na Kimya and their little brother Abbas who was also kimya, the children of the miser Othman. The man from the government was tall and thin, and dressed in a kanzu and kofia. He prayed with them before he spoke, and when he did speak it was with the same urgency as the qadhi on the radio. He told them that now the war was over, the government was ready to improve the lives of its subjects. The war was news to Abbas, but later he would understand. This was 1947. The man from the government spoke at length about the benefits of education and encouraged everyone to send their children to school in the new year that was about to begin. They walked home in silence, their father striding ahead as usual and the three brothers quiet with their own thoughts.

  That evening Kassim said in front of the whole family that Abbas should go to school. Their father snorted and threatened and everyone fell silent, but Kassim did not back down. He argued and pleaded and whined at their father for days on end. It was enough that all of them were ignorant beasts of burden, but if the government wanted the young ones to go to school, then it was not right to prevent that, he said. What harm could it do? Their father tried to shut Kassim up with abuse – you don’t understand anything, you ignorant little puppy – and when that did not stop the pleading, he just ignored him and looked away. Then on the day the new school year began, two weeks after that meeting under the tree, Kassim took Abbas by the hand and without saying a word to their father, he walked with him to school. When school was over that afternoon, Kassim was waiting to walk home with him, and Abbas saw that he was bruised from the beating his father had given him, but the next morning Kassim took him by the hand again and walked him to school, and that was the end of that. Tears came to Abbas’s eyes as he lay silently in the dark remembering that first day, remembering his brother.

  That was the first big moment in his life, that school in Mfenesini. For years he had tried not to think of these things, and sometimes he even persuaded himself that he had forgotten many of them. His tears there in the dark were for his brother Kassim as much for himself on that January morning in 1947, nostalgic old man’s tears for two people now lost to him in a frenzy of panic and guilt. He tried hard not to think of so many things, and for years he thought he succeeded, even if at times he was taken unawares by something that struck out of nowhere with unexpected ferocity. Perhaps it was like that for many people, ducking and weaving through life, wincing as glancing blows landed now and then and putting up a ragged rearguard against a strengthening adversary. Or perhaps life wasn’t really like that for most people, and time brought with it calm and reconciliation, only he had not been so lucky or did not recognise his luck. Despite his evasions, he had known that time was wearing him down, and that it was getting harder to shrug off the matters he should have put right but had avoided. Now he was ill and worn out, unable to busy himself or distract himself, lying in the dark waiting for the pain to arrive.

  That school in Mfenesini. Think about the school in Mfenesini. He drew a diagram in his mind. There were three blocks: the central one faced the road and the two smaller ones were at right angles to it, making an open quadrangle. Between the central building and the road were flower beds and shrubs, and from one of the bushes hung a length of metal rail that was the school bell. The timetable teacher, as they called him, kept an alarm clock on his desk, and when a period was over he instructed one of the children in the class he was teaching to run out in the garden and strike the metal bar twice with an iron rod that hung beside it. At morning break and at the end of school, he strolled to the bell himself, and struck out a vigorous and joyful medley, which made the children cry out with pleasure. The walls of the classrooms were three foot high. There were no doors or windows so the children could hear and see what was going on in the other classes, that is, if they dared to look. Behind one of the side blocks was the yard where they played during the break, and beyond that were the latrines. Different classes took turns to clean the latrines at the end of every day. It was good to be made to learn about keeping things clean, their teachers told them. In their homes they lived with filth as if it was their God-given right. Here at the school they would learn the benefits of cleanliness and health. Their teachers were fierce and barked at the children sooner than speak to them. Most of them walked around with a guava cutting or a cane or a ruler, and waved it around threateningly to keep order and distributed strokes when required. The strokes were not really serious and after the first year all the children pretended the ruler or the stick did not hurt. It was all part of school, it was what made you learn.

  Whenever he was needed, his father took him out of school for a few days. He did this triumphantly, as if he was making a stand against a cruel law. Abbas was put to work weeding or packing or whatever else he could manage at his age, so their father Othman the miser could gloat to his children that everyone in his house worked for the food they ate. These interruptions slowed him down at school, added a whole year in the end because in addition to the weeks his father kept him home during that class, he also fell ill with fever and had to stay in bed for a long time. His teachers told him off for missing classes, but it was a country school and he was not the only one who had to miss classes now and then. Despite his disregard for school, his father sometimes came to the school on the way to town, and went from class to class until he found his little son, and then looked at what was going on with an amused smile. There was enough reluctant affection in that smile to make Abbas smile to himself as he remembered, or thought he remembered. Maybe that was just an old man’s sentimental lie. Maybe there was no reluctant affection at all in his father’s smile, just scorn.

  Well, then, smile or no smile, there was the huge tree on one side of the road, and on the other was the school. During school hours they were not allowed to cross the road, even during their morning break. He did not remember anyone ever explaining why. School rules were there to be obeyed, not to be quibbled over. It was as if once across the road they would escape into the foliage and disappear, although the classrooms were open to the sun and air, and there was no fence or wall around the school grounds. Perhaps the teachers just wanted to make sure they were safe and within sight. The children watched the hubbub that went on under the tree whenever they could. It was a small country market with people selling and buying: fruit, vegetables, eggs, firewood. There was a kiosk selling tea and snacks. He often thought of that little country market under a tree, no, perhaps not thought, more like the image appeared in his mind as he made ready to sleep or when he drifted into memory. The image that came to him had depth and texture, it was not a picture. He felt the warm breeze and heard the laughter of the people buying and selling. Sometimes a new detail appeared, a face he had forgotten to think about for forty years, or an incident whose significance he suddenly understood after all this time. He had seen places like that on TV, not Mfenesini, but places like it. And when he saw these other places, he also saw Mfenesini better. How did that happen? Once they were watching something on TV abo
ut Sudan, and they saw a market under a tree and he said, Mfenesini.

  ‘What’s that?’ Maryam asked.

  ‘That’s where I went to school,’ he said. She asked him to write it down so she could see how it was spelt. He should have gone on then. They had more time after the children left, and he should have gone on, but he fell silent and she did not make him speak.

  It must have been the buses that made the teachers nervous, not that there were so many of them but they were unpredictable. Sometimes nothing went past for an hour or more, and then a bus packed with people hurtled out of nowhere and pulled up by the market. If the bus was on its way to town, it stopped to load up with produce or, if it was on its way back, it stopped to let people off. That market was a small torment for the children. They could not keep their eyes away from all that business across the road. Their teachers were constantly demanding their full attention, and that meant keeping their eyes fixed to the front, even if all they were doing was reciting a multiplication table from memory or listening to the teacher reading a story. Someone was always getting a clip round the ear for letting his eyes wander. It was always boys, girls were not hit, not by the male teachers and all their teachers were male. If a teacher hit a girl, her parents came to school to complain, as if he had done something indecent to her.

  When something happened under the tree, like a fight or someone toppling off his bicycle, whoosh, the whole school got on its feet, despite the teachers. Abbas smiled in the dark as he remembered that. The teachers worked so hard to keep them quiet and obedient, like it was a point of honour for them to do so. Sometimes it was as if they failed as teachers if the children so much as twitched or scratched themselves. How their teachers loved that deep submissive silence. But they could not make that silence endure. They could not quite keep the children in check. Something always happened, some small insurrection, irrepressible laughter, an undaunted boy whose cheek could not be suppressed.