The Last Gift
Authors: Abdulrazak Gurnah
The Last Gift
A Novel
Abdulrazak Gurnah
Contents
1
One day, long before the troubles, he slipped away without saying a word to anyone and never went back. And then another day, forty-three years later, he collapsed just inside the front door of his house in a small English town. It was late in the day when it happened, returning home after work, but it was also late in the day altogether. He had left things for too long and there was no one to blame but himself.
He felt it coming, the collapse. Not with the dread of ruin that had idled by him for as long as he could remember, but with a feeling that something deliberate and muscular was steadily bearing down on him. It was not a strike out of nowhere, more like the beast had slowly turned its head towards him, recognised him and then reached out to smother him. His thoughts were clear as the weakness drained his body, and in that clarity he thought, absurdly, that this must be what it felt like to starve or freeze to death or to have a stone crush the breath out of your body. The comparison made him wince despite his anxiety: see what melodrama tiredness can induce?
He was weary when he left work, with that kind of weariness that sometimes descended on him inexplicably at the end of the day, more so in recent years than before, and which made him wish he could sit down and do nothing until the exhaustion had passed away, or until strong arms came to pick him up and take him home. He was old now, getting old, to say the least. The wish was like a memory, as if he remembered someone doing just that a long time ago – picking him up and taking him home. But he did not think it was a memory. The older he became, the more childlike his wishes at times. The longer he lived, the nearer his childhood drew to him, and it seemed less and less like a distant fantasy of someone else’s life.
On the bus, he tried to work out the cause of his fatigue. He still did that after all these years, tried to make sense of things, looked for explanations that would diminish the fear of what life allowed to happen. At the end of each day he retraced his steps until he found the right combination of mishaps that had left him so feeble at the close of it, as if such knowing (if it was knowing) really alleviated his distress. Ageing, that was what it could be for a start, wear and tear, irreplaceable worn-out parts. Or hurrying to work in the morning when no one cared or was troubled if he was a few minutes late, and when sometimes the effort and the anxiety left him breathless and aching with heartburn for the rest of the day. Or a bad cup of tea he had made himself in the staff kitchen that had made his gut bubble with incipient diarrhoea. They left the milk out in a jug all day, uncovered, gathering dust and breathing in the corruption they brought to it in their comings and goings. He should know better than to touch that milk but he cannot resist the lure of a sip of tea. Or simply he had expended too much inexpert exertion, lifting and shoving things he should have left well alone. Or it could be heartache. He could never tell when that would come, or where from or for how long.
But as he sat on the bus, he knew that something unusual was happening to him, a gathering helplessness that made him whimper involuntarily, the flesh on his body heating and shrinking and an unfamiliar emptiness taking its place. It happened unhurriedly: his breathing changed, he trembled, sweated, and saw himself curled up into that familiar slump of human abandonment, the body expecting pain, dissolving. He watched himself beside himself, a little panicked by the sly, irresistible dissolution of his rib cage and his hip joints and his spine, as if body and mind were separating themselves from each other. He felt a sharp stab in his bladder and became aware that his breathing was rapid, panicky.
What are you doing? Having a seizure? Enough hysterics, breathe deeply, breathe deeply
, he told himself.
He stepped off the bus into the February air, a day of sudden cold, shivering and weak, breathing deeply as he had instructed himself. He was not dressed for it. Other people around him were wearing heavy woollen coats and gloves and scarves, as if they knew from practice and familiarity how cold it really was, which he, despite many years of living here, did not. Or maybe, unlike him, they listened to weather reports on the TV and radio, and then were only too happy to fetch the heavy garments they kept in their wardrobes for just such purposes. He was wearing the coat he wore for most months of the year, enough to keep off the rain and the chill, but not too warm when the weather was mild. He had never been able to make himself pile up clothes and shoes in a cupboard for different occasions and seasons. It was a habit of frugality he no longer needed to practise but had never been able to break. He liked wearing out the clothes he was comfortable in, and liked to think that if he saw himself approaching he would recognise himself from the clothes he wore. On that cold February evening he was paying for his abstemiousness, or tight-fistedness, or asceticism, whichever it was. It was his restlessness perhaps, the habit of mind of a stranger unreconciled to his surroundings, dressing light so he could throw the coat off quickly when the time came to move on. That was what he thought it was, the cold. He was improperly dressed, for his own stupid reasons, and the cold was making him tremble out of control, with an inner trembling that made him feel that the timbers of his body were about to give way. Standing at the bus stop, at a loss about what to do, he heard himself groan, and understood that he was beginning to lose track of events, as if he had dozed for a moment and woken up again. When he forced himself to move, his arms and legs were boneless, and he breathed in short, heavy sighs. His feet were leaden and numb, opening up into stinging cracks of frozen flesh. Perhaps he should sit down and wait for the spasm to pass. But no, he would have to sit on the pavement and would be taken for a derelict, and he may never be able to get up again. He forced himself to move on, taking one laborious step after another. It was now important to get home before he ran out of strength, before he fell down in this wilderness where his body would be torn to pieces and scattered. The walk from the bus stop to his home usually took him seven minutes, five hundred steps or thereabouts. He counted sometimes, to drown out the racket in his head. But on that evening it must have taken longer. It felt as if it was taking longer. He was not even sure if his strength would last. He thought he passed people, and at times he staggered and had to lean against a wall for a few minutes or seconds. It was no longer possible to tell. His teeth were chattering and he was sweating heavily by the time he reached the door and, after opening it, he sat down in the hallway, allowing the heat and the nausea to overwhelm him. He could not remember anything for a while.
His name was Abbas and, although he was not aware of it, his entrance had been noisy. His wife Maryam heard him fumbling with the keys and then heard him bang the door shut, when usually he slipped in quietly. Sometimes Maryam was not even aware that he was home until he stood before her, smiling because he had caught her out again. It was one of his jokes, making her jump, as she always did, because she had not heard him come in. That evening, Maryam started from the noise of the keys in the door and felt a moment of quite ordinary pleasure at his arrival, and then the door banged and she heard him groan. When she went out to the hallway, she saw him sitting on the floor just inside the door, his legs open in front of him. His face was wet with sweat, he was panting for breath and his eyes were opening and shutting in confusion.
Maryam knelt beside him, saying his name, ‘Oh no, Abbas, Abbas, what is it? Oh no.’ She took his hot wet hand in hers. His eyes closed as soon as she touched him. His mouth was open as he struggled for breath, and she saw that the insides of his trousers legs were wet. ‘I’ll call an ambulance,’ she said. She felt his hand tighten slightly on hers, and then after a moment he said, groaning,
No
. Then in a whisper he said,
Let me rest
. She sat back on her heels and waited beside him, alarmed by his helplessness and unsure what to do. His body heaved in a spasm of pain or nausea, and she said his name again, tightening her hold on his hand. Then after a short while she began to feel his agitation subsiding. ‘What have you done?’ she asked softly, murmuring to herself, murmuring to him. ‘What have you done to yourself?’
When she sensed that he was trying to rise to his feet, she put his arm over her shoulder and helped him struggle up the stairs. Before they reached the bedroom he was trembling again, and Maryam took his weight and forced him over the remaining few steps to the bed. She undressed him hurriedly, wiped him where he had soiled himself, and covered him. She did not think why it was necessary to undress him and clean him first before covering him. Perhaps it was just an instinct about the dignity of the body, a superfluous courtesy she had not reflected upon. Then she lay beside him on top of the covers while he shook and groaned, sobbing loudly and saying,
No, No
over and over again. When the trembling stopped, and Abbas was no longer sobbing, and even seemed to be falling asleep, Maryam went back downstairs and called the surgery’s emergency number. The doctor appeared within minutes of her call, which she did not expect at all. The doctor was a young woman Maryam had not seen at the surgery before. She hurried in, smiling and friendly, as if nothing exceptionally frightening was happening. She followed Maryam upstairs, glanced towards Abbas and then looked around for a place to put down her bag. Her every movement was considered and seemed to be telling Maryam not to panic, and she did feel herself growing calmer now that the doctor was here. The doctor examined Abbas, took his pulse, listened to his breathing with her stethoscope, checked his blood pressure, shone a light in his eyes, took a urine sample and put a litmus paper in it. Then she asked him questions about what had happened, repeating her questions several times until he gave satisfactory replies. Her voice and manner were courteous and solicitous rather than concerned, and she even found time to share a smile with Maryam as they discussed what needed to be done next, her teeth dazzling white and her dark-blonde hair glowing in the bedroom light. How do they teach them to do that? Maryam wondered. How do they teach them to handle wounded bodies with such calm assurance? As if she was dealing with a broken radio.
The doctor called an ambulance, and at the hospital they told Maryam that Abbas had suffered a diabetic crisis, short of a coma but serious enough. They told him it was late-onset diabetes, which happens to people as they grow older. Normally it was treatable, but because he did not know he had it and had not received any treatment, he had developed a crisis. It was too early yet to tell in full what damage that might have caused. Was there diabetes in his family? His parents, his uncles or aunts? Abbas said he did not know. When the specialist physician examined him the next day, he said that the diabetes was not life-threatening but that, judging from his motor responses, he had probably suffered some brain damage. There was no need for alarm. He might regain some of the lost functions or he might not. Time would tell. He had also suffered a mild stroke. Regular checks would clarify his condition and treatment, but in the meantime he would remain under observation in hospital for another day and if there were no further events, he could go home. He was issued a long list of prohibitions, was put on medication and instructed to take sick leave from work. He was then sixty-three years old, although that was not all there was to it.