The Last Gift by Abdulrazak Gurnah Page B

hands.’
    It was after they both left home that Hanna raged like this, about the secrecy and their suppressed and dissembling lives. For a while, the matter seemed to possess her, then somehow she found some way of coping with it. It was university that did that, and the new friends she met there, and the love affairs, and academic success. As she made her way in the big world, the frustrations of being Hanna Abbas, growing up in a small modern house in Norwich with parents who seemed to her to be out of their depth, became less urgent. She was fully Anna now, and hardly ever talked about her difference in the same way. Instead it became an embellishment of her Britishness. Once he teased her and said that perhaps he should change his name to Jimmy, and maybe that would make him less fretful. He saw that he had hurt her, that he had made her seem treacherous to herself.
    ‘I hate the name Hanna,’ she said. ‘I don’t know where they got it from. Anyway, you’re the one who called me Anna.’
    ‘I know, I know,’ he said, placating her. ‘When I was a baby and couldn’t say the whole thing. Only teasing.’
    Jamal had not got to where she was yet, but perhaps prudence led inevitably there. He could not quite make himself say home , when he meant England, or think of foreigners without fellow feeling.
    He used to think that there were not many people who knew as little as he did about his parents. He used to imagine that other people knew who they were, and who their grandparents were, and where they lived and what they did. They would have uncles in Ireland and cousins in Australia and in-laws in Canada, and perhaps an awkward and disreputable relative who had cut himself off from everyone. They had obligations and get-togethers and tiresome relations. That was what normal family life was like, from what he could tell, whereas they were a vagabond family, wanderers without connection or duties. He had learned different since he started his doctoral research on migration movements to Europe, had learned something of how precarious, how mean, how resourceful the lives of these strangers were, how blood-soaked some of their stories were. He learned to be patient for the story that he knew his Ba would tell him one day. He looked at his father, breathing regularly in his drugged sleep, so recently close to departure, and thought perhaps the time for the telling was not too far off. If you stop struggling so hard against it, life can be quite tolerable, he whispered to his father, but he was not sure if he believed that himself. Why didn’t his Ba do more with his life? Why didn’t he want more? But was it so little what he did and what he wanted? It was not so little to spend so many years waiting in patient silence, knowing that one day he would be struck down just like this.
    What did you do? Jamal whispered to his father. Did you kill someone? Were you a torturer? Were you a crusher of souls?
    Maryam came back from dropping Hanna off at the station, and Jamal gave her the chair he had been sitting on. She touched Ba’s hand and Jamal expected the eyes to fly open again, but nothing happened.
    ‘He opened his eyes while you were were away,’ he told her.
    ‘What! Did he speak?’ she asked.
    ‘No, he just opened his eyes wide and then shut them again,’ Jamal said. ‘I don’t think he woke up. I think it was like a twitch.’
    Maryam went to tell the Sister who came to have a look and assured them that he was sleeping and was doing fine. Why didn’t they go and have a rest themselves and come back tomorrow? The way he was going, the doctor may well let him wake up tomorrow. On the way home, Maryam asked Jamal how long he was staying for and he said for three or four days. He’d see how things went. He was moving to a studio flat in a few days. He said studio flat with a self-mocking inflection. It was just an upstairs bedroom with a partitioned shower and toilet, but it would be a change from living in a