Gravel Heart(58)

I refused a confrontation, I could not even contemplate one. It would have been unthinkable disrespect for me to defy my father, but I found my own way of evading and escaping his demands. I hid from him, I lied to him, heading in the direction of the mosque and then slipping into a lane that took me towards the cinema or the café. I think he knew what I was doing but he did not try too hard to catch me out, and I in turn carried out my evasions with enough care to appear obedient and respectful to my father’s wishes. So my disobedience when the summons came for the family to travel to the Gulf was unheard-of audacity. I flatly refused to leave. It would have been harder for me to do so to my father’s face, but as he was not there, I could say to my mother that I was not going and nothing was going to make me change my mind. This was my country, I told her, and I was not going anywhere like a homeless vagrant, to beg for mercy from people whose language I did not even understand. What was out there that was so desirable I should give up everything I knew? I would stay here and wait for life to return. My mother and my sisters waited for me for a whole year while I finished school, hoping for me to come to my senses and to stop being so stubborn. They passed on stories of the good life in the Gulf that were current then: how respectful and pious people were, how easy it was to get a job, a house, a car, how brightly lit the hotels, how full the shops, how ingenious the gadgets, how good the schools, how generous the state. They believed these stories themselves, and either through inexperience or desire did not suspect them for fantasies of migrant labourers. They passed them on to me, pressed them upon me, because they wanted me to change my mind and leave with them, but I would not, even though those were terrible and violent times. There was another reason I did not want to leave and that was your mother.

*

I could not restrain a smile when Baba said that. ‘I’ve been waiting for her to come into the story,’ I said.

He held his hand up palm outwards as if to restrain me. Be patient.

‘She never talked about how it was with you two,’ I said. ‘She refused to tell me anything.’

He looked surprised and thought about that for a moment. ‘I loved your mother,’ he said. ‘I loved her even before she became your mother. Does it embarrass you for me to talk like this?’

I shook my head and he smiled but I could see that his eyes watered with emotion. I waited for him to continue.

*

She was one of the reasons I did not want to leave although I did not say this to anyone, not even to your mother – that is to say, not at the time I was being summoned to Dubai. I would not have known how to say such a thing to her. The thought of saying anything to her, let alone something as provocative as that I loved her, terrified me and made me struggle for breath. I mean that exactly. I had this problem when I was younger, that if I panicked my tongue felt as if it had swelled and filled my mouth and I could only make drowning, gurgling noises. It had happened a few times with my father, sometimes with teachers, and once with a policeman who stopped me for riding a bicycle at night without a light, and I knew it would happen if I tried to speak to her.

And if I did manage to get those words out against the odds, I had a good idea of what she would do. Yes, I expected she would look pityingly at me and burst into uncontrollable laughter. I was pitiful and worthless, an ugly young man with a thick tongue, meagre schooling and no prospects, the very emblem of ineligibility. In addition I was too thin, my feet were large, my ankles were fat, and I was no good at anything in particular whereas she was a beauty. But I could not give up the possibility of winning her love, not give up just like that without trying. I mocked myself, abused my absurd fantasy, but I could not stop thinking about her and talking to her even when she was not there. It was not something I learnt, this way of being with her, it was not something I heard people talking about. Something of her slipped into my body and fitted there so snugly that I knew it would never leave or diminish.

I met her at a debate organised by the Youth League of the party … Oh, you know about that! So she did tell you something … As you well know, any association of the Youth League with lively juvenile fun, even of the unruly kind, would be mistaken. The Youth League liked to speak of itself as a cadre of radical political workers that had been transformed into a revolutionary vanguard … that kind of Bolshevik double-speak. It was an organisation packed with hot-headed ideologues, not all of them youthful, who spoke a language of force and confrontation and blood-letting and cruelty. Their pronouncements and proclamations were intended to expose, accuse, implicate and call for the arrest of the enemies of the Party and the State, which were one and the same thing. Only one political party was permitted, a convenience many African states allowed themselves at the time so they could proceed about their affairs without any annoying questions or opposition from imperialist stooges, social malcontents and sexual perverts.

Several Redeemers and Their Excellencies the Guardians of the Nation had already made the intellectual case for one-party state rule, and only revilers of African civility still sought to argue that it was an authoritarian practice. Elections were regularly held, which the President and his government always won. Why shouldn’t they? Who did they expect to win if not the President and his government? Some unemployed homosexual? A reformed housebreaker? The obstinacy of these opinionated disparagers stemmed from their failure to understand the complexity of African cultures: African citizens preferred the one-party state with a powerful virile leader mounted on it.