The Last Gift (34 page)

‘Why did you take me?’ Maryam asked. ‘Were you not worried about taking a bastard child of unknown people? A dark child. And all the trouble I had with those other parents. Did that not worry you? What made you take me?’

Ferooz did not reply at once. She looked again at Vijay, and Jamal thought she was composing herself, selecting which answer to give, the simple one or the complicated one. In the end, he thought, she decided on the simple one.

‘We wanted to help someone,’ Ferooz said, a note of pleading in her voice. ‘It was his idea at first. He said we had been fortunate in our lives. We had health, we had happiness, we had prosperity, and we should help a child whose life was unfortunate since we could not have one of our own. So we asked for a child to look after and they gave you to us. We thought we would give you care and shelter as if you were our child, until you were able to find your own way. To me you were like my own.’

Maryam rose to her feet and went to Ferooz. She hugged her and kissed her, and then went to Vijay and did the same. They headed back to Norwich on the late-afternoon train. Ferooz was tearful in farewell, hugging Maryam and both Anna and Jamal. They all shook Vijay’s limp hand while Ferooz pointed to his invisible smile. On the train, they left Maryam to her thoughts until she was ready to speak.

‘It is very likely that I’m Polish,’ she said, amused by this additional complication in her life.

‘Half Polish,’ Jamal said. ‘Don’t forget the darkie.’

‘But what Pole would call her daughter Maryam?’ their mother asked.

‘A Jewish Pole,’ Jamal said. Maryam shook her head but Jamal pressed on. ‘If that turns out to be the case, and since Jewishness travels in the maternal line, that makes all of us Jewish and entitled to be citizens of Israel if we wish.’

‘Maryam is not a Jewish name,’ Maryam said.

‘On the other hand,’ Jamal continued, ‘the darkie with the light complexion could be an Arab on some special training in a Military College nearby. Maryam was the name of his beloved mother, and when your mother gave birth to you, she named you after his mother.’

‘Maryam is not a Jewish name,’ Maryam said again, firmly. ‘I checked. I already thought if the name is Jewish and I checked. The Hebrew form of the name is Miryam.’

‘In that case there can be no further doubt in the matter. Our Polish grandmother was seeing an Arab and not a Jew,’ Jamal said.

Anna wrote: Think about that critical vowel! She is already following up, talking of Freedom of Information and calling in police files for her alleged mother’s name. She is even using the language – ‘calling in files’ and ‘alleged mother’ – all that sort of legal-sounding speak. She must have picked up something working at the Refugee Centre. When she has the name, she plans to check passenger lists to Australia and South Africa in the weeks after her birth, and continue following the woman’s tracks until she finds her. I doubt that she’ll get very far with police files. Her mother committed a crime in abandoning her, and her case is still open. The police will not release the file of a continuing investigation.

Jamal wrote: My writer friend next door loves the critical vowel. He and Lena have really hit it off, and Lena is beginning to claim him as her discovery. If I were Ma, I don’t think I would want to chase all this up. Like I don’t think I really want to find the woman Ba abandoned or her child. Our brother or sister, I should say. Not desperately. Do you? Is it bad of me? But I want to go to Zanzibar, definitely.

Anna wrote: Will we really go to Zanzibar? Or will it remain a nice story, a pleasing possibility, a happy myth? When I think about it sometimes I feel anxious, as if I’m approaching new disappointments and possibilities of rejection. It’s not because I feel I belong there or that I’m owed a welcome, but since knowing these things, I feel myself suspended between a real place, in which I live, and another imagined place, which is also real but in a disturbing way. Maybe suspended is too dramatic, tugged then, tugged in a direction that I sometimes find myself trying to resist. I am looking at a picture of an Eritrean woman holding her daughter in her arms, maybe two or three years old, and behind them a shelter made of tin and old rubbish. They are both wearing rags, but the woman’s hair is carefully coiled as if she had prepared herself for this photograph. She very nearly manages a smile for the photographer. It was in one of Nick’s magazines, which had fallen behind the desk. The woman is frowning, and looks weary and worn out, a ­beautiful woman whose body has been cut and slashed by hunger and custom. Almost certainly her genitals and her daughter’s genitals have been mutilated, and both she and her daughter are hungry. My mind is crowded with my little thoughts when our world is full of so many unspeakable anguishes. Sometimes knowing about such things makes me feel ashamed to be well. xxx.

Jamal wrote: She makes me think of Ma’s women at the refuge. It’s not all hopeless. Talking of Ma, here’s the latest: she is thinking of buying an exercise machine. These are critical times. Do you think she’s met someone? Of course we’ll go to Zanzibar. I want to see that tree where our father was shelling groundnuts while the great world was churning just out of eyeshot. I’m writing a short story. Another father story. Such a predictable immigrant subject. I am going to call it
The Monkey from Africa!

A Note on the Author

Abdulrazak Gurnah was born
in 1948 in
Zanzibar and teaches at the University of Kent. He is the author of seven novels which include
Paradise
(shortlisted for both the Booker and the Whitbread Prizes),
By the Sea
(longlisted for the Booker Prize and awarded the RFI Témoin du Monde Prize) and
Desertion
(shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize).

By the Same Author

Memory of Departure

Pilgrims Way

Dottie

Paradise

Admiring Silence

By the Sea

Desertion

Copyright © 2014 by Abdulrazak Gurnah

All rights reserved. You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce, or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. For information, write to Bloomsbury USA, 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018.

Published by Bloomsbury USA, New York

All papers used by Bloomsbury USA are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in well-managed forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

library of congress cataloging-in-publication data has been applied for.

eISBN: 978-1-62040-329-7

First published in Great Britain 2011

First U.S. Edition 2014

This electronic edition published in February 2014

Visit 
www.bloomsbury.com
 to find out more about our authors and their books.

You will find extracts, author interviews, author events, and you 
can sign up for newsletters
to be the first to hear about our latest releases and special offers.