A Girl From Zanzibar

by Roger King

  “Evening, Geoffrey.”

  He looked at me, trying, and failing, to place me. “Evening.”

  I went to walk on, embarrassed, but then on second thoughts was bold: “We’ve met. By the fort. Weeks ago.”

  “Oh ... yes. How are you?” He rested the weight of his briefcase on the bonnet of the Suzuki.

  “Very well.”

  “I’m sorry... your name?”

  “Marcella. I live here. How are you finding Zanzibar?”

  “Oh, you know, the usual difficulties.”

  “We specialise in difficulties here.”

  “You know... it’s not easy to talk to people.”

  “It must be lonely for you. You should try the Elephant Bar. My aunt owns it. You met her too.” I started to move off; the conversation had already gone on long enough to qualify for tomorrow’s gossip.

  “The Elephant Bar? OK. Oh ... Marcella. I don’t know ... would it be inappropriate if I were to ask you to join me for dinner at Africa House? I’m sorry—you know—I don’t even know... perhaps you’re married or something. Just to talk, of course. A friendly face, you know. Sorry. Maybe people don’t do that here—you know, strangers, different customs ... It’s only ...”He was turning red again. Well, why had I been so keen to run into him anyway? In for a penny, in for a pound. And he was suffering. “Seven-thirty?”

  “Yes. "Yes, seven-thirty. Good.”

  “But you must be in the dining room when I arrive. You understand? I can’t go to your room or wait on my own. Our customs.”

  “Yes, I’ll be there.”

  “And no shorts, Dr Sutton.” While I was giving cultural instructions I thought I’d slip in a personal preference.

  “No shorts? Oh, OK.”

  I was excited, but not that excited, when I walked across the road to Africa House. It was not like I had fallen in love with The English Boy. My interest in him had simply expanded according to my lack of interest in everything else around me. It’s true I imagined romantic events—falling in love, an invitation to England, marriage, eternal happiness—but I recognised even as I imagined them that these fantasies were a product of my situation, not of the man. Sometimes I had worked through similar scenarios with Bent, the youngest of the Danish team, as leading man. And Bent, who ran the milk processing plant, was as empty and obvious as the shiny pipes of his dairy. No, it was a bread-on-the-water sort of thing, a random attempt to stir up my torpid life in the belief that almost any outcome would be an improvement. I felt there was no harm in him. There was reassurance in his awkwardness and tendency to blush. He was no Didier with charming manners, smart clothes and a French car to dazzle me. Still, just entering Africa House was bold. The staff would recognise me and there would be talk.

  The inside of the old building was drab, shadowy and untended. It felt abandoned. I walked through the billiard room with its massive wreck of a table and its three high judges’ chairs, fixed in place, thrones for Englishmen. Now their ghosts were looking down on me. There was no noise except for the distant banging of a door, no sign of guests or staff: the quiet after a revolution, though the revolution had been twenty years before.

  The dining room was upstairs and by the time I had made my way to the top of the long, bare staircase, drawing closer to the banging door, I was ready to find Geoffrey and a little scared that I might not, so that my greeting had a greater warmth to it than any feelings I had towards him.

  “Oh, Geoffrey, you’re here!”

  “Did you think I wouldn’t be?”

  “No, but I’m glad you are.” He stood up awkwardly, the heavy chair scraping on the wood floor, and I gave him my hand. “And you’re not wearing shorts!”

  The long dining room was empty except for us. At the far end the high arched windows had long ago lost their glass. The only disturbances were the creaking of dust-laden ceiling fans and the periodic slamming in the wind of the door leading onto the roof terrace. Oddly, the door’s glass was intact. I sat down across from Geoffrey, a distance greater than was natural since the tables and chairs left behind by the British were built on an unnaturally large scale, perhaps because their owners wanted to believe themselves giants. In my case the furniture made me feel like a child.

  “The waiter said he would find something for us.” “It’s all right. I’m not very hungry.”

  “So, Marcella, you were born on Zanzibar?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’re ... from the Asian community?”

  “I’m Goan.”

  “Goan. Of course. From Portuguese India. That accounts for your name. Do you speak Portuguese?”

  “A few words. English is my first language.”

  “What else?”

  “What else? Oh, some Konkani, a bit of Arabic, a bit of Gujerati. I can get by in Swahili.”

  “I don’t think I’ve heard of Konkani.”

  “Why would you have heard of it? It’s our language— the Goans. Only the old people use it much. Geoffrey, you have so many questions! Am I your research project? You’re famous on Zanzibar for your questions, do you know that? People don’t like it, you know.”

  He looked down at the stained tablecloth, then pushed his glasses back up his nose. “I’m sorry. I was just interested.” He spent a moment looking crushed before continuing. “Sometimes I ask questions when I’m nervous. Attractive women make me nervous.”

  “I make the big international expert nervous? Well, thank you.”

  There was a silence. “Shall I go and look for the waiter?” He half rose.

  “No, don’t run away. In any case you don’t know what you might find out there. It’s better to wait—Zanzibar time. I don’t really mind questions. I’m used to Europeans.”

  “Marcella—is it all right if I call you Marcella?” He made it sound like an anthropological question rather than a matter of my preference.

  “Geoffrey, you already have. We natives are really quite friendly. I call you Geoffrey, you call me Marcella. Or would you prefer Dr Sutton, Dr Sutton?”

  “No.”

  “By the way, Dr Sutton, is there a Mrs Sutton back home in Blighty? Little Suttons?”

  “No, I’m not married.”

  “But maybe a girlfriend, a live-in girlfriend. Europeans often don’t marry these days.”

  “No, no one special.”

  “Someone not very special, then? Someone you just roll in the hay with?”

  “No. Actually, no.” I’d made him blush again.

  “You see, Geoffrey, you’re not the only one who can ask questions.” I stretched out to give him a friendly kick under the table.

  The waiter was a thin old African I had seen leaving the hotel a thousand times without ever wondering what he did. Now he stood motionless next to us, withholding the bowls of soup he held in each hand. I knew what was in his mind: Geoffrey had told him that he was to have a lady visitor and the kitchen staff had made a special effort to scavenge the food for their English guest and his English lady. Now he discovered that the lady visitor was just the naughty Goan girl who had grown up across the street.

  “Salama,” I offered.

  “Brown Windsor,” he replied and plonked the plates down in front of us.

  I gave Geoffrey a smile and he smiled back, broadly this time, not the little embarrassed smile. Nice. He said: “British food. The worst in the world.”

  “We’re lucky to have it. The Danes are eating cassava. We Zanzibaris have taught the experts from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation to eat like peasants. They spend all their time begging our farmers for food.”

  “Zanzibar’s not so bad.”

  I made a face.

  “No, you’ve got your problems but you’ve avoided some big mistakes. You don’t have big inequalities in wealth like some African countries.”

  “No wealth at all.”

  “The streets aren’t full of a mixture of Mercedes Benzes and beggars.”

  “We don’t allow either.”
/>
  “No traffic jams. No pollution. "You don’t have advertisements everywhere making people want things they don’t need and can’t afford.”

  “Geoffrey, there’s nothing to buy.”

  “That’s not Zanzibar’s fault. That’s the West punishing you for being socialist.”

  I opened my mouth to argue but found no words. Seeing this, Geoffrey continued. “And it’s quiet here, peaceful. The beaches are empty and unspoiled. Europeans dream of beaches like yours.”

  “We dream of Europeans.”

  “Maybe, but you could be worse off. Food is a problem of course. And corruption—but that’s everywhere. And you have the essentials. I’ve seen blocks of flats and a big hospital...”

  “Without medicine or doctors.”

  “Even a funfair.”

  “It’s locked up.”

  “Then there’s all that history. "You have one of the most exciting histories in the world. Zanzibar ruled half of Africa. Everyone came here. I look at the people in Jami- turi Gardens—all those different ethnic groups mixing together, the traditional dresses, the local food for sale. Not the ice-cream of course, that looks completely out of place.”

  “But they all hate each other. And, by the way, the ice-cream’s mine.”

  He was not listening. “Look at your own group, the Goans—how long since the Portuguese arrived in Goa?”

  “A long time. I don’t know.”

  “Almost five hundred years, I think. Vasco da Gama stopped in Zanzibar in fourteen ninety-nine, then went on to India. The Portuguese overthrew the King of Goa a few years later. But of course you were trading between India and Africa for a long time before the Europeans arrived. When did your family come?”

  “We never talk about it much. It’s complicated, you know. I think people used to go back and forth. A few generations, I suppose.”

  This man knew more about my history than I did. I was embarrassed. The conversation lapsed and in the silence I realized I had been animated, interested. Geoffrey’s rosy view of Zanzibar seemed crazy, yet I couldn’t convincingly dispute it. I had nothing to compare it with, while he had been everywhere. It was a topsy-turvy world like the ones I used to invent as a child, where people walked on ceilings and things fell upwards. In Geoffrey’s world, having nothing was good, the fact that no one wanted to visit was an advantage and the proximity of murderers to their victims was a cause for celebration. It was infuriating but exciting; it made it seem that I could, if I chose, walk out of my Zanzibar state of mind and simply choose another. I felt less imprisoned and I wanted more of this. We spooned the cold Brown Windsor and caught our breath.

  ONE DAY, WHEN I WAS ABOUT SEVEN, I LED MY SISTER

  downhill past Africa House to the city beach where the fishermen mended their nets, only slightly beyond the strict boundaries of our lives. The innocence of childhood in Zanzibar was carefully contained by the sense that the world outside our little community was serious and unsafe. It was there in the faces of aunties and uncles with their watchful eyes, and knowing this, we pushed against the borders of our world in measured ways, cramping the full opening of our angelic wings. But on this occasion I insisted that Maria follow me, using her older sister’s sense of responsibility against her. Maria was shy, with a taste for order, leaving open the naughty role for me. At the beach a grinning old African gestured an invitation to his boat, which was little more than a canoe, and while Maria hung back, I jumped in. I wriggled my way down into the narrow hull between the crossbars of the outriggers so that she could neither prize me out nor leave me behind and was forced to come along.

  To find myself among the waves was as much of a surprise as if I had learned to fly. They seemed so much higher now that we were bobbing on them. I screamed in delight as we slid down hills of water, while Maria gripped the sides of the boat in terror. The bony old fisherman, a dirty crimson fez planted on his head, just smiled a wordless gap-toothed smile down at the two of us from where he balanced on the boat’s high stern.

  From a trough between waves I looked up to find that Zanzibar had entirely vanished. Instead, there was a new horizon of solid water, a substance I had previously regarded as transparent. Everything I had ever known was momentarily gone—all those massive buildings that made up the little city that was my world, all the harbour and its boats, all the bustling people, all that had ever concerned me—-and I was made silent, greatly impressed by this immense magician’s trick. At this moment Maria began to cry, but I remember only being quieted and excited by the revelation.

  Probably, we were only a few hundred yards from shore. The fisherman’s grin turned to a look of concern at Maria’s bawling and we were quickly returned to the beach where two uncles waited to scold us and upbraid the fisherman in as full a way as their Swahili would allow. I tried to go to the old man to thank him, but at seven I was too small to make such independence stick. Our uncles ushered us home to my mother’s indulgent punishment.

  Mummy had told me that she was sure I would travel one day. There was a look in me, she said. I looked like a bird set to fly, by which I took her to mean my beaky nose, my attention lost to distant dreams, my legs tensed under me, always ready to spring from my doorstep perch. She told me this, I now think, to say that I was not like her, who was weak and stayed at home, less like her than I imagined. Yet we were of a type, both five-foot-two, both slim with skinny calves, big teeth for big smiles. I took comfort in my different nose, which I saw as strong and questing—though it is in fact too large to be perfect and has a Semitic crook to it—compared to the small, snub thing between my mother’s cheeks. My nose would lead me away into the world, was all I saw in it.

  Years later, in England, there was a third moment of revelation that I can add to my spare collection: a moment of childhood abandon at sea, a topsy-turvy dinner at Africa House, and, the last, the opening of an unsuspected door in prison. By then, my life in London had come to an end and Benji had entirely vanished, leaving me alone with the darkest of thoughts.

  Prison does tend to make you think, and in Cookham Wood it was actively encouraged. The hapless Nigerian drug couriers, who were the largest group among us, gave it the name Cookham College and pretended to their relatives at home that their extended absences were because of foreign study. Some earned certificates proving this to be true and returned home with improved prospects for civil service jobs. We were all innocent at Cookham College, in our way, all astonished to be there.

  When I signed up for the Open University degree in Social Studies, I was required for my first essay to research the history of my home. My tutor imagined that I would write about Zanzibar but instead I gave him the story of Bayswater; I hadn’t even considered the choice. It took my mind much longer to arrive back in Zanzibar.

  I learned from my research that the silly name—Bayswater is in the centre of London, has no bay and isn’t on the water—was an abbreviation of Baynard’s Watering Place, the spot in Kensington Gardens where, three hundred years before, the River Westbourne had been captured and channeled east to supply the City of London. The river is still there, underground, gurgling beneath the streets; without my knowledge, it had been below me all the time. I learned too, that in those days Bayswater had still been country and the conduit had gained its name because it was located in a field belonging to the Baynards. Except it turned out that Baynard was a distortion of the more foreign Bainiardus, after one Ralph Bainiardus, an associate of William the Conqueror, whom I had heard about at school. Colonists, it seemed, immigrants.

  It’s hard to explain now the thrill that this first little piece of research gave me. For years I had been rushing around London, all present tense and future hopes. Then the music had stopped and I felt like the awkward one who could not find a chair. In my dislocation I lifted up the simple familiar name of my neighbourhood and found it to be more than it seemed. I scraped at its familiar grime and found a person, a history, a source of water. Then, further back, it led to wars and foreign la
nds. I tried to extend my discoveries and find out where this Bainiardus came from. Wasn’t that a Roman-sounding name? But didn’t William come from France? Normandy? Where was that? My skills and the books at my disposal were not equal to the task but I now knew how it was to sit at a table in a library and be led from my own life backwards and forwards across the world and time. I only had to scratch the surface of what I knew to make good my escape. All the time that I was carelessly carrying Bayswater on my lips, I had also carried within me another Marcella I had not noticed, one ready to step out of the shadows and make some meaning of the noise and wilfulness. My unreflected life was becoming reflective —except I could not have said that then and all I knew was this new sharp thrill of disturbance to my stunned immobility.

  ONE OF ZANZIBAR'S HUGE, UGLY CROWS SAILED IN

  through a glassless window and surfed to a landing on the filthy cloth of the table next to us. Then two more, selecting tables of their own. In our conversation’s lull, we were not great enough to deter them. First they went to the sugar bowls, then they pecked at the congealed food they found on the cloths. We watched while the first crow departed at its leisure, launching itself from the table’s edge and dropping lazily before arcing up through the window and out into the night. The others were still not done when the waiter returned, carrying plates of grey beef, mashed potatoes, greens of some sort, cassava, all covered in gravy the same colour as the meat. The remaining crows eyed him, recognised him as foe and made slow, insolent departures.

  “Do you want something to drink?” Geoffrey asked. “Beer?”

  I nodded. “Or water.”

  “Two beers, please.” The waiter stepped back but said nothing.

  “You may not get your beer,” I said after he had left. “My aunt has all the beer.”

  “We’ll see.”

  Geoffrey worked steadily through the shades of grey —the whitish, the orangish, the greenish—while I played with mine. “You’re hungry,” I observed.