‘What have you been doing?’ demanded the angry Master. He glanced at his watch and looked round the table for sympathy. We sat silently while Ali measured out the soup and placed a bowl in front of each of us. I feared to swallow in the silence, taking tiny sips of the soup and keeping firm control of the movements of my Adam’s apple. Bwana Ahmed left as soon as he had taken his last spoonful of soup, mumbling a perfunctory Excuse me.
Salma sighed. ‘I don’t think it’s been a good day.’
‘How was your day? I hear you’ve been to work.’ I looked at her as I spoke, and I saw the muscles round her mouth relax a little. She still looked miserable. ‘What kind of work do you do?’
‘I just work part time in a bookshop,’ she said, tucking her hands under the table. ‘I wanted a year off before I started at the University. Daddy thinks I’m stupid, but I didn’t want to just go on from school to university . . . like going through a machine. I wanted to do something different.’
‘Like working in a bookshop.’
‘Yes, I know. It’s very tame, isn’t it? If I was a man I would have found myself a job on an upland farm, or signed up as a sailor,’ she said, smiling.
‘How about a big-game hunter?’ I suggested.
‘Very funny,’ she said. ‘You don’t know how hard it was to persuade Daddy to let me work at all. He said people would talk. In the end he got me the job at the bookshop, just to keep me quiet. It’s not . . . very adventurous, but it’s better than nothing. Anyway, I wonder what else Ali has got for us to eat?’
‘Not another biriani, I hope.’
She made a face when I said that. I realised that I had spoken the words as a kind of apology, and the face was a way of dismissing the subject as of no importance.
‘Will you be going to Nairobi University next year?’
She nodded.
‘I met somebody who’s a student here,’ I said. ‘We came together on the train.’
‘He must be a postgraduate,’ she said after a moment of thought. ‘The students went on holiday last week.’
I was getting a new angle on Moses Mwinyi. He would not have neglected to tell me if he was a postgraduate student. I was looking forward even more to meeting him again.
‘Did you finish school this year?’ she asked me.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘The same time as you.’
‘Were your results all right?’
I explained that the results had not been released by the government. Once I started I found myself unable to stop. She listened to me without saying a word. She smiled when I insisted that I was sure that I had done very well, but it did not seem like mockery. Ali interrupted us with a dish of water-beans and a plateful of parathas. He made a comical face at Salma and she grinned, no longer tense, and shook her head to stop him from saying anything about Bwana Ahmed.
‘So things have become very difficult now?’ she asked after he had gone.
‘Yes,’ I said, unwilling to enter the conversation.
‘Discrimination?’ she asked. The word sounded innocent, spoken by somebody who had not yet experienced its full squalor. I sensed some scepticism in her tone, some reluctance to credit the response that she expected me to make.
‘Something like that,’ I said.
‘Like what?’ she asked, frowning.
‘Like . . . yes. There is discrimination. People are victimised because they don’t have a black skin. It’s revenge. They are paying back what they owe. People are afraid. Harsh things happen. Cruel things are done. I think it hurts everybody in the end. I think it’s bad for everybody. We all end up being a little less human.’
I felt her resistance. I returned to the parathas and beans. We were silent for a while, then she began to talk about the war in Nigeria. Such a stable country . . . what’s Africa coming to . . . we'll end up like Latin America. Bwana Ahmed coughed in the living-room. Salma stopped instantly, surprised as I was that he had been sitting in there all the time. She mouthed: We’d better go in.
‘I think I’ll go for a walk,’ I said after we had finished eating.
Bwana Ahmed looked up from his sheaf of papers as I walked through, but he said nothing. I hesitated, wanting to stop and explain. I felt that they wanted me out of the way, that there were things they needed to say to each other.
It was damp outside. I walked in the deep darkness, astonished by the noise of the night. I had grown up in a town, alleyways to the left and right, where crickets and cicadas skulked in corners of rooms and cheeped tentatively. In rural Nairobi they were in full song, scratching the night air with abandon. I walked for a long time, lit part of the way by the yard lights of the great houses I passed. It was the dogs that turned me back, a pack of scavengers which stopped its work and regarded me with more than passing interest. When I got back I found that the terrace door had been left unlocked. Neither Salma nor her father were about, but there was a tension in the air, a disturbance, and I guessed that they had fought in my absence. I hoped it had been about me.
I heard a woman scream and I went out to the kitchen to see what was going on. I assumed that Ali was exercising his manhood. I stood in the dark, looking out of the glass door, wondering if I would be able to distinguish the shape and power of Ali’s fist as it landed on his wife’s face.
In bed I could only think of Salma. Whatever was to happen to me in years to come, I knew that I would never forget her. I lay in bed and wondered what it must feel like to be wanted by a girl like her. I imagined her turning to me in the morning and asking me to run off to the Ruwenzori with her . . . even to the Bahr el Ghazal . . . or all the way to Alexandria. I wanted to ask her about her mother, and the silence about her.
I had intended to be up early, to show willing, but I found that Bwana Ahmed had already left. I had thought to ask him for a lift to town and for directions to the University. Talking of Moses with Salma had reminded me how much I had enjoyed him, how he had seemed alive and uncomplicated. I wanted to see if he had really lied to me about being a student. It did not matter very much about the lie, even seemed in character. It would have tripped from his tongue with the facility of practice, fulfilling the needs of the moment. Going to see him was also going to be a way of declaring my independence, to show that I had my own complicated life outside the begging-mission that I was on.
I found Ali sitting at the kitchen table, fast asleep. I tried to tiptoe out again, but he stirred and sucked back the long thread of saliva that was dangling out of his mouth. Without needing the time to shake the sleep out of his head, rub his eyes with balled fists or lazily scratch his belly, he grinned. He got up without a word, grinning, and started to fry me an egg.
‘I hear there are a lot of big shops on the coast,’ he said, stifling a yawn.
I ran away to the living-room. I heard Ali behind me hiss with surprise. It was raining again, and I stood by the open glass doors, watching the fine, slanting strokes line the air, feeling as if I was in prison.
‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ asked Salma. She was wearing a scarf round her neck, of a yellow, brown and red stripe design, knotted to one side with the two ends hanging down like floppy ears on either side of her shoulder. Her hair was pulled off her face as it had been the first time I had seen her. She stood beside me at the open door, leaning against the door frame like the bad girl in an old movie. ‘Look at the fields. Aren’t they beautiful? Don’t they look romantic?’ She glanced over her shoulder at Genghis Khan, who was standing in the archway looking wounded. ‘Ali, are there people on the hills? Are there people living on the hills? You don’t know? Daddy says nobody lives there, but I’m sure he’s wrong.’
‘I don’t know, Miss,’ he grumbled, determined to show his hurt. ‘Your breakfast is ready, Mr Hassan.’
Salma glanced at me for a second, trying to catch the note of grievance in Ali’s voice. It was that look that confirmed that the bright thing was acting out a game whose purpose I did not yet understand.
‘Have you ever been there
, Ali?’ she asked in her new breathless voice. She seemed to be in the grip of a wonderful discovery, and paused to catch her breath, taking in a deep draught of the hill air. Ali glanced at me, was inclined to smile but resisted the temptation. He lowered his eyes without making an answer. ‘Perhaps we could go there while you’re here,’ she said, whipping round to me. ‘Would you like to? We could take a picnic.’
To the ends of the earth! To rumble storms in their coming . . . all the way to Alexandria! No fire nor desert shall stand in our path . . . anywhere, except on muddy tracks to see little homesteads of suspicious farmers scratching a living out of barren hillsides. The rain, lashing across the empty fields and sky, looked beautiful enough from where I was.
‘No, I don’t think I’d like to go,’ I said.
She laughed. ‘No, nor would I. We’ll only find that people do live there,’ she said, walking ahead of me to the dining-room. ‘They’ll stare at us and answer our questions with angry grumbles, and try to sell us something we don’t want. Anyway, I wasn’t serious. Listen, I’ll be going to town later, to see a friend at the University, and I thought you might want to come, to look up your friend.’ She smiled as she said this, but I sensed the apprehension, as if she was afraid I would turn down her invitation or perhaps misunderstand it. I was grateful that she was trying to be so bright and cheerful, trying to make me feel welcome.
‘I’d love to go,’ I said. ‘That’s exactly what I was thinking of doing . . . ’
We sat at the table, and Ali gently, but with an averted face, slid an egg on a plate towards me. He brought her a grapefruit, sliced in half and cut away from the pith.
‘I don’t want to look fat by the time I’m thirty,’ she said, catching my surprised glance at the despised fruit. ‘It’s in the family. Look at Daddy. We’re all like that.’ She smiled distantly, as if something entirely different was going through her head.
‘Your aunt . . . my mother, she’s not fat,’ I said.
She shook her head and then looked away, discouraging me from asking the obvious question about her mother. ‘We’ll have to wait until the rain stops before we can go,’ she said.
In the end we left while it was still raining. She saw the bus pull up at the stop near the house, and she ran out, waving and shouting for me to hurry. I think she was anxious to leave before Bwana Ahmed came home for lunch.
‘We don’t have much time,’ she said when we were on the bus. ‘I just want to buy a couple of things . . . a present for my friend Mariam . . . and you need a new pair of shoes, I think. Then we’ll go to Mariam’s.’
‘Won’t Mariam like my shoes?’ I asked.
‘Mariam will love them. She’s a romantic like that, very impractical. She doesn’t like anything that’s usual, or normal. Her family live in Nairobi, but she insisted on taking a room at the University. You’ll see, she thinks she’s a great rebel . . . and always wants to do what everybody else doesn’t want. She drives everybody mad.’
‘She sounds nice,’ I said.
We went to Kenyatta Avenue, barging through the crowds and arguing with the pavement-sellers. The pavements were slushy with mud, and crowded with people tripping and kicking each other. An insistent street-seller took a shine to me, and persistently tried to unload a gold-plated Seiko wrist-watch on me. Salma encouraged him, telling him that I was the son of one of the richest men in Lamu. In the end we escaped into River Road, and went into every haberdasher’s shop down that street. I was conscious most of all of being with her, brushing against her now and then, relishing the appeals she made for my opinion. I enjoyed being authoritative about the texture of a piece of material or the vulgarity of its design. She egged me on, discomfiting the traders and forcing them to drop the price, only to appeal for their sympathy in the end when I still refused to be convinced. Now and then I caught the tail-end of a lingering look, and I wondered if I was over-playing my role. She insisted I try on several pairs of shoes that I knew were beyond my means. I bought a pair of plimsolls: made in Hong Kong.
We went into a boutique – coloured lights and tinsel hanging off the ceiling – where all the clothes had a foreign label and the prices were laughably unreal. Salma bought a scarf for Mariam. At least you know it’s quality, she said, showing me the Marks & Spencer label. There was a café in the shop and we stopped to have an ice-cream. The ice-cream came in large, canoe-shaped dishes and was smeared and sprinkled with fruit sauces and nuts. In the middle of the concoction stood a bar of Flake, looking in that context like a hardened lump of faeces. I tried not to laugh, for Salma seemed to be eyeing her colourful barge with serious interest. My steely resolve collapsed as I conveyed the first spoonful towards my mouth, and I shot ice-cream and nuts all over the table as I succumbed to a fit of hysterics.
I tried everything. I shut my eyes, I asked for a straw . . . I watched Salma eating hers with relish but I could not eat that ice-cream. We left the shop with Salma’s reproaches ringing in my ears. That’s the most expensive ice-cream in all Nairobi. Didn't you see all those white people eating in there? And you spit it all over the table. The ice-cream was called Hawaiian Suntan, and whenever I got myself under control, Salma would say the name and start me off again.
‘It’s too late to go to Mariam’s now,’ she said as we walked back to Kenyatta Avenue. ‘If you hadn’t taken so long over your Hawaiian Suntan . . . ’
Bwana Ahmed was already home when we got in, late in the afternoon. It was clear he disapproved, although he smiled and asked us about our trip. There was an edge to his smile and an undertone of mockery in his questions. Later in the evening, led on by encouraging nods and smiles from Salma, I talked about home, about the coast, about my parents. He said very little, but he sneered openly and sometimes glanced angrily at Salma. I don’t think he realised how completely his face revealed his feelings. I was sure that the argument had been about me the previous evening, with Salma coming to my defence. I could not understand what Bwana Ahmed could have taken exception to. He had invited me and I had come. What was the fuss about? I was determined now that I was not going to be chased away by his rudeness. He might not give me any money, but I would get my holiday.
Even as I thought that at the time, I suspected that I was missing the point, that I was only incidentally the cause of the tension and that there were other things going on that I did not yet understand. In the end Bwana Ahmed sighed and dropped his eyes. Salma glanced at him, and it was impossible to miss the flash of anxiety in her eyes. I wrapped up my account as speedily as I could and fled.
I found Salma in the kitchen the next morning, talking to Ali. He was pounding and kneading dough with the inattention of long practice, leaning a little towards her as she spoke.
‘I’ll bring your breakfast,’ he said abruptly, as soon as he saw me, inviting me out of the kitchen.
Salma laughed, encouraging the stupid fart in his childish sulks, I thought. How could she laugh at a man who could fry an egg in his sleep and nightly beat the shit out of his wife? I went back to the living-room to ponder this betrayal. He rushed me through breakfast, explaining to Salma that he was very busy.
‘He’s baking,’ she explained.
‘What?’
‘Bread, just ordinary bread,’ she said.
‘Boflo, we call it on the coast.’
Boflo. The word suddenly brought back a memory of home. The fishermen cleaning their dug-outs and watering their nets, punching holes in the water which flashed up like fragments of light. Wave-crests rearing out of the green sea. Weeds washed up on the beach like sunburnt dreams, washed and left, sinking into the wet, porous sand. In the distance a tiny boat bobs and bucks on the surface, frantic and purposeless. A log of sea-salted wood lies rotting, disembowelled, on the beach, laid open like the belly of a dolphin.
I thought of the first time I had seen her, the blouse tight across her chest, her shoulder-blades rising against her tautened skin, frightening me with her unrelenting self-control. Now she sat back in her
chair with a heavy sigh. She looked up and waited a moment as if gathering resolve. ‘Were you angry with us last night?’ she asked.
‘Was he angry because of me?’ I inquired.
‘No, not really,’ she said, looking pained. ‘It’s difficult to explain . . . but . . . sometimes he makes things look worse than they really are.’
‘Is it because I’m here?’
‘No, I don’t think so,’ she said after a long time.
She wanted me to know that she was lying. She was trying to tell me that I had failed. I was not even saddened by it. I was more saddened by the thought of losing her friendship, her companionship, even though I understood that her attention arose out of his treatment of me.
‘Why did he ask me to come?’ I asked.
She looked away, and I thought then that it was wrong of me to test her loyalties in that way. I did not take the question back, and we sat in silence while it dissipated itself. A bee flew into the room, and she stood up, watching it. It flung itself against the radio then fell to the floor, its wings buzzing with distress. She ran to the kitchen and returned with a broom, shoving it towards me with a smile. I took the broom and smashed it against the bee. Its belly broken, oozing white pus, it slowly stretched itself in relief. Its sting moved in and out of its socket like an animal aroused. Its eyes stared mildly out of its unbending body.
‘I just wanted you to sweep it out,’ she said.
She walked across to the radio and turned it on. An English voice was speaking of the early Christian missions in Uganda: Colonial administrators manipulated local, regional, and ethnic differences . . . She switched the radio off.
‘Let’s go,’ she said. ‘Let’s see if we can catch Mariam today.’
I was surprised by the emptiness of the place. She had told me that the students were on holiday, but I had not expected the tomb-like silence of the buildings or the dreariness of the deserted grounds. Mariam was a graduate assistant at the University, staying on during the holidays to complete her dissertation. Salma told me it was something to do with the history of art.
Memory of Departure Page 12
