Gravel Heart(83)

*

‘Aren’t you going to stay?’ Munira said as my month was drawing to an end and I talked to her about calling at the travel agent’s office to confirm my flight. ‘Stay for another month, think it over, don’t leave yet.’

‘I’ll think it over when I get back there,’ I said.

‘What’s the big attraction? Is there someone you are returning for?’ she asked.

‘No,’ I said, ‘nothing like that. Just a lot of bits and pieces to sort out, bits of life.’

‘All right, go away and think about it and then come back,’ she said. ‘I know you’ve got a good job in London but as Daddy told you, there’s work for you here if you want it.’

*

My father asked me the same question. ‘What’s the big attraction back there? Is there someone you love? Is there someone waiting for you to return?’

I smiled despite myself at the faces my father pulled from the embarrassment he felt as he asked the question. We were not used to having conversations like that, and had only just recently got used to having conversations at all. I loved that way of putting it: someone waiting for you to return, just you. I wiped the smile off my face and said: ‘No, there is no one waiting for me. You mean a woman, don’t you? I loved a woman some time ago. Her name was Billie, but I lost her. Her family discouraged her. Or maybe she did not love me enough in return.’

‘You’ll love again,’ Baba said.

‘You didn’t,’ I said.

My father said, ‘You can’t live alone.’

‘You did,’ I said.

‘I didn’t. I lived with the misery of love gone wrong, and I almost lost my life,’ he said. ‘Until that old man came back and took me away. Maybe sometimes you have to be forced to do things that are good for you, or force yourself.’

I shook my head. ‘It isn’t like that,’ I said. ‘I told you before. I want to see what will come out of what has befallen me. I have been corrupted by possibilities. Remind me again of those words you told me when I left last time, something about blessing and love.’

‘I can’t remember exactly any more. My father used to say those words at one time. Something like: the recollection of blessings is the beginning of love,’ Baba said. ‘He meant the love of God, not the profane thing we are talking about. Maybe it still works for mere sinful mortals as well.’

*

I was on edge, tense on the journey back to London. I had learnt to pay attention to such feelings, as if something was putting me on the alert.

Baba died minutes after I boarded the flight to Addis Ababa. I had a six-hour stopover in Addis Ababa airport but then the flight was cancelled and I spent a miserable twenty-six hours there before they found a seat for me. I boarded the overnight flight to London and arrived in Putney a day later than I should have done. I received Munira’s call later that morning to say my Baba died on the afternoon I left and was buried the next day. The reading for him was held during the night I was stranded in Addis Ababa. It was a stroke. He said he was tired and went to lie down. When Khamis’s young man Ali took him a coffee in the afternoon to wake him up, he was gone.

‘You would not have been able to get back in time, even if you had not been stranded,’ Munira said. ‘Your Baba had some money put aside, and his old friend Khamis looked after everything. They were like brothers, those two.’

I thought of how my father used to be many years ago and how at times I suspected that those silences were reserved only for me, that to other people he was as garrulous as a shopkeeper. I thought of his eyes, which sometimes looked as if they had glimpsed an ancient sorrow. I remembered once watching him as he stared at his feet for a long time. Then he said, These toenails, they keep growing. You don’t get a moment’s peace from them. Such agonies occupied poor Baba in those days. But that moth-eaten man who used to be was not the one I was with until a couple of days ago when I decided to return to England. I should have stayed. What use was someone like me to this England? But then what use was someone like my father anywhere? Some people have a use in the world, even if it is only to swell a crowd and say yeah, and some people don’t.





A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

Abdulrazak Gurnah is the author of eight novels: Memory of Departure, Pilgrims Way, Dottie, Admiring Silence, By the Sea (longlisted for the Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Award), Paradise (shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Award), Desertion (shortlisted for a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize), and The Last Gift. He is a Professor of English at the University of Kent, and was a Man Booker Prize judge in 2016. He lives in Canterbury.