The Last Gift by Abdulrazak Gurnah Read Free Book Online Page B

thought the story of his mother’s abandonment was real. Probably not. When he was a child everything felt so unlike the world he knew in some other place in his mind, that he did not know how to disbelieve anything. But at some point he must have realised that it was a real story and he clutched at any new detail that his mother released. By the time he was a teenager, and could be spoken to with greater openness, his mother had settled into her own style of disclosure. Jamal was nervous of disrupting the pattern, of making her wary of speaking about such things to him. Hanna was less obedient, more confident of getting what she wanted from her Ma. She asked for events to be made clear, for names to be repeated, and to be told what happened to people who figured in the stories. How far is Exeter from here? Where were your mum and dad living now? How did Mauritius get its name? Her questions forced their mother into asides and explanations and out of the confiding tone in which the most intimate details emerged. When Jamal was on his own with his mother, he let her speak uninterrupted, relishing the deliberate way she added depth to the picture, pausing to allow a forgotten detail to emerge, surprising herself with something she had forgotten to remember before. And Jamal did his best to make no challenge when he noticed any contradictions. He did not know then that stories do not stand still, that they change with new recollections and rearrange themselves subtly with every addition, and what seem like contradictions may be unavoidable revisions of what might have happened. He did not know this consciously, but he had an instinct for listening, which amounted to the same thing.
    Once, while he was still living at home, Ma was talking about Exeter and a bad winter there when everything froze. One thing led to another and she began to reminisce, and as she talked she grew sad: about how she never visited there since they left in 1974 , about friends she had lost touch with, about Ferooz. Ba was also in the room and he looked up from his crossword as he sensed Maryam’s mood and boomed out, It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr Boots , which was one of their jokes about when they first met.
    Ma smiled. ‘I do wish I could find Ferooz, though,’ she said, looking at Ba.
    Jamal knew that her mother had tried to get in touch with her adoptive parents but could not find them. They all knew that, she often talked about how after Hanna was born she had wished for a reconciliation more than anything, how she regretted losing touch with Ferooz. She did not talk in this way in front of Ba, at least Jamal had not heard her do so. Then when she did, he looked at her with a discouraging look.
    ‘Why do you worry yourself about those people?’ he said, snapping at her. He must have heard the snap, because when he spoke again he made his voice sound sane and persuasive. ‘They did not treat you well. At least you tried to find them, which is a great deal more than they will have bothered to do for you, I can assure you of that. You tried to find them and you failed, so now there’s nothing more you can do. Forget them.’
    It was a tense moment, and Jamal saw that his mother held his Ba’s look for a moment before he dropped his eyes to his crossword. He understood that the look she had given Ba was a kind of challenge: I don’t want to forget them. I don’t want to be like you . What could have happened that was so bad that it made her run away, yet was not bad enough to prevent her yearning for reunion? Maybe nothing in particular. Perhaps she had just been impetuous, a girl of seventeen making a romance of her life, and then she waited too long to admit her regrets. It was in such moments that they seemed a strange family, these moments they approached and then retreated from, these stories and events which made brief unexpected appearances and then disappeared amid long looks and drawn-out silences.
    Why was Ba so silent about his