أزبــكيـة

  Paradise Abudlrazak Gurnah   He wept for his mother and father when he could. At times he panicked at the thought that their images were turning faint in his recollection. The sound of their voices or a particular quality they possessed - his mother's laughter, his father's reluctant grin - came back to reassure him. It was not that he pined for them, and in any case he did so less and less with each accumulating moment, rather that his separation from them was the most memorable event of his existence. So he dwelt on it, and was saddened by his loss. He thought of things he should have known about them or could have asked them. The bitter fights which had frightened him. The names of the two boys who had drowned after leaving Bagamoyo. Names of trees. If only he had thought to ask them about such things perhaps he might not have felt so ignorant and so dangerously adrift from everything.