Admiring Silence by Abdulrazak Gurnah

Author:Abdulrazak Gurnah
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 1996-08-14T04:00:00+00:00

2

Sometime during my second week at home I received an unexpected visitor. He turned up just before lunch, full of apologies for the awkwardness of his timing, but he had just heard from Akbar that I was back and so he thought he would call on his way home from work, and he was sorry he had not had time to bring me even a small token to welcome me back. Just about all he had been able to pick up in the the rush were these few prints of the old waterfront before it was destroyed by the Royal Naval bombardment in 1890. Had I come across them before? A researcher from the university history project had found them in the Ministry archives and had had some copies made. In one of the prints, three barefoot Marines from an Irish regiment posed with their guns across their chests, in front of the trophy of a sprawled black body. One of them had his naked foot on the dead man’s head.

My visitor said he had seen me at the mosque the other day, from a distance, and had been unsure, but this morning Akbar had confirmed that it was indeed I, and he thought he had better come and greet me, empty-handed though he was. How kind, but no, he would not stay for lunch, shukran. We were standing just inside the front door, and no, he would not come upstairs and intrude at such a time. Would I have time to call on him at his office the next day? Or the day after, if that was more convenient? It would please him very much if I would. There were many things for us to talk about. La, la, no, he really would not stay for lunch. His family would already be waiting for him to begin lunch, ahsante sana. Until tomorrow then, inshaallah.

My visitor was the Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Culture, and although I had heard his name mentioned and had been to school with one of his younger brothers or cousins, I had never met him before. I couldn’t imagine the many things we had to talk about in his office. No one upstairs was interested in my visitor, except Akbar.

‘He could be useful,’ he said. ‘I’ll come along.’

‘What for?’

‘You won’t know the way,’ he said.

‘What about your work?’ I asked.

‘What work? We won’t do any work here. We just turn up at the office and hang around and then go home.’ He worked at the Ministry of the Environment, and it was true that he did not seem to spend much time there. He turned up at the house two or three times every morning, on the thinnest of pretexts. He had heard that there was some good fresh beef at the market, so he was going to get some before it was all gone. Or one of the fishing boats had brought in a large catch of tuna out of season, and he was going to the beach to see if there were still a few slices going.

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