Gravel Heart
Abdulrazak Gurnah
‘The beginning of love is the recollection of blessings: then it proceeds according to the capacity of the recipient, that is, according to his deserts.’
Abu Said Ahmad ibn Isa-al-Kharraz,
Kitab al-Sidq (The Book of Truthfulness) (899),
trans. Arthur J. Arberry (1937)
PART ONE
1
A STICK OF CANDY FLOSS
My father did not want me. I came to that knowledge when I was quite young, even before I understood what I was being deprived of and a long time before I could guess the reason for it. In some ways not understanding was a mercy. If this knowledge had come to me when I was older, I might have known how to live with it better but that would probably have been by pretending and hating. I might have faked a lack of concern or I might have ranted in angry outrage behind my father’s back and blamed him for the way everything had turned out and how it might all have been otherwise. In my bitterness I might have concluded that there was nothing exceptional in having to live without a father’s love. It might even be a relief to have to do without it. Fathers are not always easy, especially if they too grew up without their father’s love, for then everything they know would make them understand that fathers had to have things their own way, one way or another. Also fathers, just like everyone else, have to deal with the relentless manner in which life conducts its business, and they have their own tremulous selves to salve and sustain, and there must be many times when they hardly have enough strength for that, let alone love to spare for the child that had appeared any old how in their midst.
But I also remembered when it was otherwise, when my father did not shun me with an icy silence as we sat in the same small room, when he laughed with me and tumbled me and fondled me. It was a memory that came without words or sound, a little treasure I hoarded. That time when it was otherwise would have had to be when I was very young, a baby, because my father was already the silent man I knew later by the time I could remember him clearly. Babies can remember many things in their podgy sinews, which becomes the problem of later life, but it is not always certain that they remember everything in its place. There were times when I suspected that the fondling memory was an invention to comfort myself and that some of the memories I recollected were not my own. There were times when I suspected they were put there for me by other people, who were dealing kindly with me and were trying to fill in the empty spaces in my life and theirs, people who exaggerated the orderliness and drama of the haphazard tedium of our days, who preferred that what came to be was signalled by what had passed. When I reached this point I began to wonder if I knew anything about myself because it was most likely that I only knew what people told me about how I was as an infant, at times one person saying this and another saying that, forcing me to bow to the more insistent one and occasionally selecting for myself the younger self I preferred.
There were moments when these guilt-ridden thoughts became absurdly insistent, though I thought I could remember sitting in the sun beside my father on the doorstep of our house while he held a stick of pink candy floss into which I was about to sink my face. That was a memory which came to me as an arrested instant without conclusion, a moment without preamble or direction. How could I have invented that? I just was not sure if it had really happened. My father was laughing in that breathless way of his as he looked at me, as if he was never going to be able to stop, his arms squeezed to his ribs, holding himself in. He was saying something to me that I could now no longer hear. Or perhaps he was not speaking to me at all but to someone else who was there. Perhaps he was speaking to my mother in that heaving, laughing way.
I expect I was wearing a tiny vest, which came to just below my navel, and had nothing on below. I was sure of that, most probably. That is, I was sure I was probably not wearing anything below my vest. I have seen a picture of myself in the attire, standing nonchalantly in the street in that standard costume of male tropical infancy. Girls were not allowed to wander around like that, for fear of accidental damage to their chastity and decency, although that did not mean that they were spared what was bound to happen. Yes, I am sure I have seen that photograph once – a fuzzy, incompletely developed print most likely taken with a box camera – of a half-naked native boy of about three or four years old, staring at the camera with a look of pathetic passivity. Most likely I was in a mild panic. I was a fearful child and a camera pointed in my direction perturbed me. Little could be made of my features in the faded photograph and only someone who was already familiar with my appearance could have been sure it was me. The print was too pale to reveal the scabs on my knees or the insect bites on my arms or the snot down my face, but clear enough to show the tiny bunch that swelled between my legs, as yet unscarred and unblemished. I could not have been older than four. After about that age, adult jokes about the little abdalla and how it was soon going to lose its cap begin to hit their mark and make little boys cringe with terror at the forthcoming circumcision, and an old woman squeezing a boy’s testicles and shuddering and sneezing with pretend-ecstasy was no longer funny and began to feel like mockery.
In fact, I can be definite that photograph was taken before I was five because some time during that year and before I started Koran school, I went on a taxi ride with my father and my mother. The taxi ride was a rare event, and my mother made much of it, filling me with anticipation of the picnic we would have when we reached our destination: vitumbua, katlesi, sambusa. On the way, the taxi stopped at the hospital – it won’t take long, my father said, then we’ll be on our way. I took his hand and followed him into the building. Before I knew what was happening, my little abdalla had lost its kofia and the outing had turned into a nightmare of pain and treachery and disappointment. I had been betrayed. For days after that I had to sit with my legs wide apart, exposing my turbaned penis to the healing air while my mother and my father and the neighbours came to look on me with big smiles on their faces. Abdalla kichwa wazi.