By the Sea by Abdulrazak Gurnah

Author:Abdulrazak Gurnah
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2021-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Silences

5

ISTOOD by THE OPEN door of the flat, leaning on it with an outstretched left arm. It was a studied pose, a prepared position. I saw him as he took the final turning in the stair, pausing briefly with his right hand on the banister, the light of the huge landing window falling on him. In the morning, the sunlight that got through the passages between houses shone directly through that window, and held particles of dust and organic debris suspended in sinewy wisps. But by early afternoon, the light only trickled down the surrounding walls, and glowed thin and grey on the stairs. He stood in the watery radiance of that afternoon light, his face clean-shaven and lean, his body leaning slightly forward. His face was drawn and closed-down, a guarded face. I would have looked twice at him in the streets, in the streets of England, and wondered if I knew him, and wondered if he was who I thought he was. So often I have walked by people in English streets, surprised by how strange and alien they looked there, and wondered guiltily if they were someone I knew, when I knew they couldn’t be. I think I would have walked past him too, and thought how in some odd way he reminded me of someone I once knew, without perhaps worrying at the reminder long enough to give a name to the memory. Even, perhaps, hurrying away from the memory before it became solid enough to take a grip of me and summon other thoughts I had safely penned away. As time has passed, so many clean, sharp details have grown fuzzy and imprecise. Perhaps that is what it means to grow old, the effects of sun and squall wiping away line after line of the picture, turning the image into its furry shadow. Though even after all the fading and furring, so many lines still remain, now seeming like even sparser fragments of the whole: a warm look in the eye when the face is lost, a smell that recalls a music whose melody is out of range, the memory of a room when the house or its location is forgotten, a field of pasture by the side of the road in the middle of a void. So time dismembers the images of our time. Or to put it in an archaeological way, it is as if the details of our lives have accumulated in layers, and now some layers have been displaced by the friction of other events, and bits of contingent pieces still remain, accidentally tumbled about.

I wish I could say that I remembered the eyes that looked at me as I stood at the door of my flat, eyes that tried to conceal everything behind blank equanimity and failed, but I think I would have walked past them if I had not known they were coming to meet me. I would have felt their resolute disinterest and suppressed mine. I moved my hand from the door when he began on the last few steps, squaring up to his approach.

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