Gravel Heart(34)

Love, Salim





5

THE LITTLE UTOPIA

I had coveted the life of a student, the scholarly community, living on campus, attending seminars, but I found myself on the edges of this university life and hardly said a word in class. When I spoke it sounded wrong: not the grammar and the arrangement of words but something deeper, as if I was making things up and my stumbling efforts were evident to everyone. I did not have the self-possession of the other students and I felt uncomfortable among them.

I was surprised by how many causes and injustices they were passionate about: liberation politics in South America, paedophile operations in South Asia, the persecution of Roma people in central Europe, gay rights in the Caribbean, the war in Chechnya, animal rights, genital cutting, NATO in Bosnia, the ozone layer, reparations for colonial plunder. I had told my mother that there were people from everywhere in the world in London but that was not how I had lived my life there. I never spoke to any of its world-citizenry about the realities of the lives they had left behind. Even in the OAU house, we picked up bits of information about each other but did not probe. I did not know anything about Peter’s family until Amos, in his confrontational way, asked him how he would be classified in South Africa – this was towards the end of the apartheid days – and Peter reluctantly replied that he would be classified as Coloured. Amos, it turned out, had been a child soldier in the Biafra war, but we could not ask him anything about it because his eyes filled with tears the moment he blurted the words out and then he rushed out of the room.

Everything is complicated and questions simplify what is only comprehensible through intimacy and experience. Nor are people’s lives free from blame and guilt and wrong-doing, and what might be intended as simple curiosity may feel like a demand for a confession. You don’t know what you might release by asking a stupid question. It was best to leave people to their silences. That was how it seemed to me but it was not how it seemed to my fellow students. If the posters and the campaigns and demonstrations were a guide, any injustice in the world seemed to be theirs to claim, accompanied by frivolities that were like a celebration of disorder. They were fortunate people who desired to own even the suffering of others. It seemed that after all that going around the world their ancestors did and their descendants continue to do – all the effort and the carelessly inflicted misery – people in England now wanted to live a good life, to observe the decencies, to abhor hatred and violence, to give all that up and respect everyone’s humanity.

I started work at the Café Galileo at the beginning of term. The café’s owner, Mark, did not smile much and was watchful at all times like a herdsman with his flock. His eyes roved over everything and he was everywhere – supervising in the kitchen, helping out with preparation of food, serving at tables, sitting behind the till – and when regular customers he liked came in and it was not too busy, he would take coffee with them and relax in conversation. He was a serious man, and even this relaxing had a working air about it, heads bent close together, talking or listening with small frowns of concentration and occasionally bursting out into raucous ribald laughter, which I knew must have been prompted by a dirty joke. Mark was not English. He and his regulars spoke Arabic. Their bodies moved differently as they spoke: the shrugs, the hand gestures, the shape their lips made as they spoke, the way they laughed and the frequency of Libnan and Beyrut in their conversation made it clear where they were from.

Then one Sunday morning I found out for sure. A dishevelled-looking and hung-over Mark sat silently sipping a strong coffee, looking exhausted. Then he said to me, speaking wearily: ‘Salim. Where are you from with a name like that?’

I poured him another coffee and said, ‘Zanzibar.’

Mark whistled in a way that was meant to show surprise and appreciation. ‘That’s a long way away in Africa, isn’t it? Way down there below the equator, the other side of the world.’ I nodded and waited for what I thought was coming next. The dark continent. ‘Darkest darkest Africa,’ he said obligingly. ‘Zinjibar,’ he continued, using its old Arabic name. ‘We read about that as children in Lebanon.’ His real name was Mousa, he said, but for business purposes he called himself Mark. It made customers feel more comfortable.

‘I thought you were West Indian when you came to ask for a job,’ Mark said. ‘Until you said your name.’

‘Don’t they have any Salims in the West Indies?’

He shrugged. ‘Not that I’ve heard of. I don’t like West Indians,’ he said.

‘Why not?’ I asked him.

‘I have my reasons,’ he said.

*

The café closed on Christmas Day and I stayed in my blue and white room on a campus that was silent and almost empty and wrote a long letter to my mother. In it I told her about my new life, about the studies and my struggles with them, about Mark and the café, about the foods we served there and how they were prepared. I did not expect her to care about that last bit, it was only a way of saying to her that I was living such a different life from the one we were used to. I wish I could like it more here but I like some of it, I told her. I described how in winter it gets dark by three in the afternoon but in midsummer it stays light until ten at night. I told her about things I found striking, about the little tangles I got into, about mishaps that had befallen me, and I made myself sound ridiculous and at odds with my circumstances, making myself into a joke, stumbling about in this new life I had worked so hard to arrive at. It made me happy to write in that tone, and I hoped it would make my mother smile as she read it, her silly son blundering about clumsily in the big world. I did not ask her anything about her life. This was just a frivolous little Christmas gift. I followed up the letter with my first postcard to Munira, who would be ten years old now, I realised. So much time had passed.