The Last Gift (18 page)

When the brothers made fun of him, he laughed too, because everyone else did and he did not want it to seem that he minded, and perhaps the laughter was not meant unkindly. They had been hospitable, they had given him affection, and he was a lot younger than they were. They laughed at his youth and his innocence, and he told himself not to mind, but still, he felt silly about almost everything when they were around. Their wives covered their heads when he walked into the room, and spoke in a coded language of their own invention (they were sisters), but he was sure that what they said was mockery of him. Sharifa’s father gave him money in front of everyone, as if he was an employee, as if he served him. He did not give him the money at a regular time, but randomly. Sometimes he gave him coins and sometimes he gave him notes. It was like he was giving money to a charity. When the aunt thought he had got something wrong she rebuked him like a child, snapping at him and raising her voice so the whole house would hear, and even his wife laughed at him then. It seemed to him that people in the street could hear her shrieking at him. There were times when he wondered if the aunt was deranged. Her outbursts were so violent and out of proportion. He could not help but feel the humiliation even though he tried to talk himself out of it.

They would get used to him, he said to himself, especially after they began to see that he deserved their respect. They frightened him, and he thought they knew they did. He hated them. After a while it made him suspicious that they treated him with so little respect. Once he began to think like that he could not get the thought out of his mind. He thought they laughed at him to mock him, and laughed at his father and brothers, who had acted like starving freeloaders at the wedding. He thought they were mocking him for his poverty and for their country ways.

All the happiness and contentment he had felt about his future receded from him. The first thought in his head when he woke up in the morning was that he would have to bear their contempt. The thought filled him with an anguish so deep that he found it incredible to think of it now. He was young, deferential, used to having little in his life, and had no understanding of the unrelenting arrogance of the rich and the self-regarding. His stumbling inadequacy in the face of these circumstances made him feel hateful even to himself.

One night, late at night, after they had made love and were talking softly – he shut his eyes and could feel her beside him – Sharifa told him that she was not a blood daughter to the merchant. She told him she had never known her real father, who died suddenly in his twenties, when she was a year old. She did not remember anything about him. No, she did not know what he had died of. No one talked about such things. You don’t ask what people died of. They died because their time had come. Her mother then moved in with her brother, the merchant, but she too died soon after that, of fever. No she didn’t know what fever, just fever. Why was he asking ridiculous questions? Was she a doctor? She was three years old when her mother died, so she did have a memory of her, only one very powerful memory and almost nothing else. She remembered playing near her while she was cooking on a seredani, probably just out there in the kitchen or under the awning. She stumbled and knocked the pot off the fire. She would have fallen into the fire if her mother, by some miracle, had not plucked her up into safety. Her hands were scalded by the pot but that was all, otherwise she was unhurt. That was all she remembered of her, how she plucked her out of the fire and then was so frightened that she slapped her for her clumsiness. After her mother died, she grew up as a child of the household, and the merchant and his wife, may God have mercy on her soul, treated her like a daughter. He had always treated her like a daughter. Abbas asked what the merchant’s wife died of, and Sharifa slapped him hard on the thigh.

Then he found out that Sharifa was pregnant and at first he was overjoyed about that. The very idea that a child he had made was on its way! Only as the weeks passed and her date grew nearer, he began to think that the baby was coming too soon after the wedding. Once he began to think like this he could not stop. After his examinations were over and he had so much time on his hands, these thoughts would not leave him alone. He began to fear that the child was not his. That there was some trick, some plot, that they had trapped him to save her from dishonour, that the child was someone else’s, and that something vile had happened that they were trying to hide. That the wedding had been arranged hastily to save her and the family from embarrassment. That after the child was born and his wife had been saved from dishonour, he would be forced to divorce her. He was sure his sister had known about this, and had received a gift from the family to arrange it. There was nothing easier to do than divorce a wife. Just one little word will do it. Was that why the brothers were treating him with such mockery?

He tried to persuade himself that he would cope with the meaning of all these thoughts when it was necessary. Why worry himself with suspicions when what he needed to do was to harden himself, to grow into a man and learn to plot? He had passed his examinations, had been allocated a school where he would begin teaching in the new school year and he would have a job for life. But he could not convince himself. He could not make his body uncoil from a tense knot of anticipation, could not look at his image in the mirror. He began to hear things in what his wife said and thought that she had been forced to marry him to hide her shame when she had known another. He was convinced that something vile had happened in this house. He dared not find the words for it. He was convinced that many other people knew about what had happened and were getting ready to have a good laugh at the skinny cuckold. The place he lived in was like that. They would laugh at him for the rest of his life, pointing him out as he walked past and tell the story of his stupidity. He believed this, and became afraid. After six months of marriage, his wife looked as if she would deliver any day. He was certain that there were many people in the town who were already counting. They had nothing better to do. So in early December
1959
, when he was nineteen years old, he ran away from her and from his country and from everything and everyone he knew. That was the courageous and admirable thing he did. He ran away.

He lay in the dark and felt the trickle of tears running out of the corners of his eyes. No good now, weeping like a baby after all that time. He must have made a noise because he heard Maryam stirring, and then she called out his name. Abbas. After a moment, he said to her: Mfenesini.

Flight

3

Mfenesini, he said. She sat up in the dark and asked what that was. Then when he said it again and it still made no sense, she switched on the torch that she kept beside her camp bed, pointing it away from him. He too was sitting up in bed, looking towards her. In the middle of the night. She went over to him and put the bedside lamp on. He said the word for the third time. She thought he was rambling, just woken from a dream about that faraway place in Africa where he came from. ‘Mfenesini,’ he said for the fourth time, smiling. ‘My school . . . where I went to school. I told you before.’

She gave him the notebook that she kept beside the bed, for him to write something down when he could not say it, and he wrote Mfenesini. He could not write for long, the muscles in his right arm and leg were still weak, but he could write a few words. He was talking more now and attended speech therapy four times a week, eager to get the words back. He walked to the health centre himself, for the exercise, timing himself each time. It was only a short distance away. When he was well it would have taken ten minutes, to the bottom of their street and left, straight down the road. Maryam walked with him the first two times, but then she had to do her voluntary afternoon at the Refugee Centre, so on the third time he went on his own and he was fine. He went on his own after that, taking his time. It was late summer and the weather was kind, and he walked slowly, using a stick to take the weight off his right leg. She watched him go sometimes, her brave Mr Boots. The doctor told him that the latest scan showed that the damage to the left side of his brain was not as bad as it had first seemed and he was making excellent progress with the aphasia. What he needed to do now was to build up his strength, attend all his therapy sessions and be cheerful. Fat chance about being cheerful, but he was obedient about therapy and exercises, and the words were coming back. It was not always easy to understand him, but the words were coming back, and his mind was clear. Each time he said more, his happiness brought tears to her eyes.

She looked at the word he had written in the notebook and then spoke it, looking at him. He nodded, smiling. ‘This was the name of your school,’ she said, and he nodded again. ‘Where is that?’ she asked.

When she asked him this
where
question before, he replied
back home
or something like that and then changed the subject. The monkey from Africa. This time he said Zanzibar without any hesitation. She gave him the notebook again and he wrote down the word. The word was not a surprise to her, for despite his caution, it had slipped out of him a few times. ‘Tell me about Zanzibar,’ she said, but he shook his head and began to weep. He cried so easily these days. She sat beside him on the bed, holding the notebook in her hand, and watched as his weeping turned into sobs. When his sobs subsided, and he had wiped his eyes and calmed himself, she went downstairs and brought back the atlas and made him show her where Zanzibar was. Then he began to talk, a little bit at a time, from a long time ago, before he came here. She sighed silently to herself, wishing that there had not been so many years of secret hesitations. Why did Zanzibar have to be such a secret? Whenever she had asked him where his home was, he said East Africa. Then he said he only went back once, when his ship docked in Mombasa for a few hours. There was no time to go ashore and all he had was a view of the town. So she guessed that home was Mombasa.

The night was beginning to lighten, and she saw that he was tiring. He had probably been awake for hours, thinking about Mfenesini, so she said she would make them some tea. When she came back upstairs he was asleep.

Later that night he told her more. She waited for him to start when he was ready, but when evening came and they were upstairs in the bedroom and he still had not returned to what he had started in the middle of the previous night, she prompted him. She did not trust her knowledge or her memory, so she made him write the difficult names down in the notebook or made him spell them. He told her that he grew up in the country, near Mfenesini, that place where he said he went to school. On the second night he only talked about that: his father, Othman the miser; his brothers Kassim and Yusuf Kimya; his mother, she was always just Ma; his sister Fawzia (write the names down). Then he told her about the day Kassim took him to the school in Mfenesini. It was called Mfenesini because a huge tree grew by the roadside, and its fruit is called fenesi. She tried to say the word, and he made her say it several times until she got it right. Fenesi. She liked saying that word, fenesi, it made her feel as if she had something hidden under her tongue. He described the fruit to her but she could not picture it. Like a rubbery green bag with sweet, soft sticky flesh inside, he said. He drew a picture, but she had never seen a fruit like that before. In the end she found out that fenesi was called jackfruit in English, because the next day she got a book from the library, one of those large botanical books with lots of pictures, and they went through it until they found the fruit. It was not an attractive fruit but it made both of them happy to find it. He did not know it was such a well-loved fruit, and that it was found in so many places in the world, although he had seen it in his travels here and there. When she read him what it said about it he was surprised, and really shocked to find out that it had been written about by historians and kings and philosophers. Our ugly stupid fenesi, he said, who would have thought there was all this science and poetry dedicated to it. Then after that she had to go back to the library and find more books about the jackfruit. They found out that the emperor Akbar did not like the fruit, and she never even knew there had been an emperor Akbar in the world or what he had done that was so grand. It was the Jesuit mission to China that first described it to Europeans. Did he know there was a Jesuit mission to China? It was all new to her. Yes he did, he said, but not much more than that. So then she had to go to the library and ask them to find him a book about the Jesuit mission. That was how he was when he found a story that interested him, off to the library to get them to find him more books. They knew him there.

In the days that followed he told her more, and she took the notebook from him and wrote the names herself because the writing slowed him down. She made him check the spelling to make sure she had written the word right. That was at the beginning, when he first started to talk. Then later she had to be patient because sometimes he was not himself, pained by his memories or just distraught because she was there and he could be distraught with her. He became angry, fidgeting and gesticulating at her when she wrote something down, accusing her of plotting against him, speaking in a language she did not understand. Utanifanyia fitna, he said. Can you spell that for me? she asked. After a moment, he did and she wrote the words down in the notebook. When he was deeper into what he was telling her, when he was neck-deep in his shame, he did not seem to mind whether she wrote anything down or not. He came out with things, and sometimes went backwards and forwards as if he could not stop. Or as if he was circling away from what lay ahead.

One night he told her about the college and his happiness there. He described the buildings, the sea, walked her down the corridors and the long country lane that led to the main road. He wanted her to see it, to be there in the afternoon with him when they played football, to feel the breeze blowing from the sea. He hesitated and stuttered, struggling with words, but he did not seem to want to stop talking about that college. How could he keep quiet for so long with the memory of such happiness? But she did not ask him. From the beginning she had determined that she would not ask him anything that might seem like a challenge, in case he lost courage and stopped.