This Side Jordan

by Margaret Laurence

  The glasses clinked, and the laughter of tipsy women shrilled up to the whirring fans. Outside the bungalow, the thorny bougainvillaea boughs, purple-black in the night, scratched and tapped at the windows.

  Out of the crowd Nathaniel saw Miranda Kestoe walking serenely towards him, smiling, her straight black hair braided across her head, her yellow smock clinging to the swollen lines of her body.

  Pregnant European women looked all belly. Their legs were so thin and their breasts so small in contrast. Nathaniel looked with pleasure at Aya. She was big-breasted, and the folds of her green and orange cloth took away her body’s clumsiness.

  He smiled. False Nathaniel. He wanted only to scowl, as Victor would have done. There was honesty in that. But he smiled.

  ‘Well, hello – how are you?’ Miranda cried. ‘I’m so glad to see you again.’

  Reluctantly, he introduced her to Aya. Miranda spoke to her in a great flood of cheerful words, mainly about the baby. It transpired that their children were due about the same time. Miranda made much of this fact.

  Aya looked confused, answering Miranda’s questions in one or two abrupt words. Nathaniel felt ashamed, and angry at his shame.

  ‘My wife understands quite a lot of English,’ he said, ‘but she does not speak much.’

  ‘Oh –’ Miranda’s face fell, ‘of course. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘It is nothing,’ Nathaniel replied uncomfortably, fingering his spectacles.

  He could feel the sweat gathering on his thighs. He thought it must be soaking through the thin grey stuff of his trousers. Horrified, he glanced down at himself. But of course it was not so.

  ‘I was so interested to learn that you’re teaching a course in African civilizations of the past,’ Miranda was saying gravely. ‘I’d very much like to find out something about that subject. How could I?’

  Nathaniel mentioned several books, and fidgeted with embarrassment as she produced a pencil and wrote down the names on the back of a cigarette packet.

  ‘Your school –’ she went on, ‘it’s a private school, is it?’

  ‘That is correct.’

  ‘Can anyone start a school here?’ she asked innocently.

  ‘Yes –’ his voice was cautious, ‘anyone can start a school.’

  ‘I mean – I’d always wondered. There seem so many private schools here. Isn’t there any check on standards?’

  ‘Not unless you want to get your school on the government-aided list. Then you must have it inspected by government. Otherwise – no. Some schools are good. Some only take the villagers’ money.’

  He wondered dimly why he had said so much.

  ‘And yours?’ she asked.

  ‘I am an employee, Mrs. Kestoe. Naturally I think it is a good school.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she breathed, ‘of course. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean –’

  ‘Do not worry,’ he said, suddenly magnanimous, ‘it is a natural question.’

  ‘Your students – what do they do after they leave school?’

  He looked at her suspiciously.

  ‘I do not know,’ he said at last.

  ‘You don’t help them to find posts, I suppose?’

  ‘No.’

  He wished she would go away. He could not see what she wanted. But the fact that she had hit upon this particular problem seemed uncanny and rather frightening to him.

  ‘I don’t know if this would be in their line at all, but my husband’s been looking for some intelligent boys to train as clerks. They might be groomed for administrative posts later on. I just wondered – do you think any of your boys would be interested?’

  ‘They would be interested,’ Nathaniel said politely, without enthusiasm.

  ‘Why don’t you go and see him about it?’

  ‘I do not think your husband would be very pleased to see me, Mrs. Kestoe.’

  Miranda flushed.

  ‘I’m sorry he was rude. He doesn’t realize how people will take what he says. Please – I wish you’d go to see him.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Nathaniel lied. ‘Perhaps I will go.’

  Miranda seemed satisfied. She veered away from the subject now, as though she felt it might become unresolved once more if they touched it.

  ‘Tell me – those wonderful names on the mammy-lorries – I suppose they have some significance? Flee Oh Ye Powers Of Darkness, Lead And We Follow – there must be hundreds. Political significance, I mean, as well as religious?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Nathaniel said agreeably, ‘they have significance.’

  He wondered what he could possibly tell her if she enquired further.

  ‘I always liked the one called Baby Moon,’ Miranda said.

  Then she was gone. Around Nathaniel, the glasses clinked and the laughter shrilled. He stood quietly, wondering how soon it would be polite to leave.

  ‘What troubles you, Nathaniel!’ Aya asked.

  ‘Nothing. I – I do not like these people.’

  She shrugged.

  ‘You talk to them well.’

  ‘Do you think I do?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You have something to say.’

  He looked at her, unaccountably moved by her determination. He did not want to receive this kindness from her, but he could not stop himself.

  ‘Do you really think so?’ he said.

  Aya nodded and turned away, but not before he saw the tears in her eyes.

  Nathaniel knew he was not the sort of man who was fated to meet friends on the street. It was always his luck to run into someone he didn’t want to see. He was not surprised one afternoon, therefore, to see the Kestoes.

  They did not see him. He wondered momentarily if they had purposely not seen him. He was about to turn and walk in the other direction. Then he saw what the trouble was. They were sitting in their car and Johnnie was stabbing angrily and futilely at the starter.

  Glancing up, Johnnie saw him.

  ‘Hi!’ Johnnie shouted. Then, in a low voice to Miranda, ‘There’s your pal, Manda. Maybe he’ll give us a push.’

  Miranda waved cheerily to him, and Johnnie leaned out the window.

  ‘Hey, Amegbe, I’m stuck. My battery’s low. Give us a push, will you?’

  Nathaniel was paralysed. He did not know what to do or which way to move. His white shirt had been clean that morning. He would get it all smeared with grease, or dust anyway, and Aya would complain.

  From the corners of his eyes he could see two crippled beggars squatting beside the gutters, grinning up at him. Several khaki-clad drivers in peaked caps were waiting for their European masters’ wives to finish shopping. A few mammies had pitched their vegetable and fruit stalls on the street. Over the tomatoes and the heaps of green oranges, their eyes stared up at him, beady and avid. A gaunt, sharp-featured Hausa trader in a white Muslim robe stopped spreading out his wares.

  They were all looking at him, waiting for the joke. Waiting to see the teacher, the man of business, with his briefcase and glasses, push a car like a bush-boy.

  Nathaniel’s sweating hands shifted the briefcase from one side to the other.

  To Johnnie Kestoe, he was just another African, to summon like a servant.

  And what if, having buckled to this humiliation, he put his shoulder to the car and it would not move?

  All those drivers were standing around, and the street was full of men who were obviously labourers. Why did not Johnnie Kestoe ask one of them? Because he would have had to dash them? Or because any African was the same as any other to him?

  ‘Well, come on!’ Johnnie Kestoe shouted.

  Nathaniel half staggered a step or two. He stretched out his hands in a kind of mute appeal, and then, despising the gesture, clamped them to his sides.

  ‘Really, Mr. Kestoe,’ he said, ‘it is not easy for me – I suffer from rheumatism – always, this season, with the dampness –’

  ‘Oh God!’ Johnnie exploded, his dark hair dancing angrily over his forehead.

  Miranda’s face was strained.
She touched her husband’s arm.

  ‘Please, Johnnie – if he’s got rheumatism –’

  But Johnnie was out of the car. He did not even glance towards Nathaniel.

  ‘Rheumatism, my foot. Bloody Africans are all the same. You’ll have to take the wheel, Miranda.’

  He put his hands and right shoulder to the back of the car.

  Miranda leaned out of the driver’s window, towards Nathaniel.

  ‘I’m sorry –’ she said. ‘He doesn’t mean –’

  ‘O.K. Now!’ Johnnie yelled.

  Miranda released the hand-brake and put the car into gear. The street sloped down, and although Johnnie had to push hard, he did not have much trouble in getting the car rolling.

  He jumped in, still shouting directions to Miranda, and they drove off. Neither looked back.

  The beggars began their steady whine again – ‘Mastah, I beg you –’. The drivers returned to their gossip. The Hausa trader stacked the rest of his wares and began advertising them in a deep monotone. The mammies plucked at dresses of passing European women – ‘Madam, I got fine fine tamantas. Fine too much. You like?’

  Nathaniel stood there woodenly. He felt ill. Where was the triumph of showing them he was not a servant, not a slave to be summoned? Gone. Only a sour taste.

  Then it occurred to him that Johnnie Kestoe had not pushed the car himself before, because Miranda, being pregnant, had not wanted to take the wheel.

  He realized suddenly that if Johnnie had seen a European acquaintance, he would have asked the European to give the car a push.

  And the European would have done it. Unquestioningly, as an equal, with no thought of insult.

  Why had he not thought of that before?

  Rheumatism. Rheumatism. The first thing that came to mind. Of course they knew he lied.

  His muscles ached with shame.

  Nathaniel sometimes went to the British Council reading room to look at the periodicals. The chairs were upholstered and comfortable, and in the late afternoon there was rarely anyone to bother him.

  But he had forgotten that today was the class in African drumming. Miranda was standing beside the pair of Fontomfrom drums in the corridor. With her belly carried round and rigid before her, she and the Fontomfrom looked like a trio of drums. Nathaniel could not help grinning, and she, trustingly, took the grin to be one of greeting.

  ‘I’m a little early for my class,’ she said, breathlessly conversational. ‘I usually am. I don’t want to risk missing anything. It’s so tremendously interesting.’

  ‘Have you been taking the drumming class for long?’ he asked politely.

  ‘Only a month. I’m not much good yet, of course.’

  Shyly, she reached out to the Fontomfrom and her hands beat a few clumsy rhythms. Nathaniel, who could not look at her for embarrassment, shifted his briefcase from one hand to the other. In a moment, if she did not stop, he would be forced to sneeze or blow his nose.

  She did stop. She turned to him, smiling.

  ‘It’s fascinating, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ Nathaniel agreed obligingly, ‘fascinating.’

  Why not? Make her happy. He waved one hand extravagantly.

  ‘Our people are wonderful drummers,’ he cried.

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said reverently, ‘I know. It’s very complicated, isn’t it, the drum language and the symbolic meanings? I wonder if I shall ever be able to understand any of the messages? I do want to find out a great deal more about it.’

  The English were incomprehensible. Either they despised Africans or they seemed to want to turn themselves into Africans. Nathaniel remembered Victor telling him of a certain European woman who married an African doctor. That woman used to wear ‘cloth’ and carry her baby on her back, thus disappointing her African in-laws who had hoped she would bring back from England a fine pram with a fringed top. Her husband, Victor said, always dressed in expensive English suits and spoke of ‘going home on leave’ to London.

  Miranda was even more extreme. She wasn’t satisfied with learning the ‘dono’, the thonged drums African women used. Oh no. Not at all. She had to be the Kyerema himself.

  ‘You will learn, Mrs. Kestoe!’ Nathaniel cried. ‘It is only the language of a simple people. You will learn easily. Why not?’

  She looked at him doubtfully.

  ‘Do you know anything about drumming?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I know nothing.’

  ‘The man in the moon is a Drummer,’ his father had said once, hawk eyes glinting with a cruel humour. ‘You must be very careful. If you watch him for a long time you may see him lay his drumsticks on his drums, and then you will die.’ And the child Nathaniel had peeked up at the sky between his fingers and then snapped his eyes shut and run back to the hut in blindness, tripping over tree roots as he ran.

  Miranda Kestoe would be enchanted. Folklore. The mythology of the drums. Poor little black boy, afraid to look at the moon. How quaint.

  ‘I know nothing about it,’ Nathaniel repeated angrily, ‘nothing.’

  She dropped the subject with that obvious tact that English people had.

  ‘By the way,’ she turned from the drums and faced him, forcing him to look at her, ‘you haven’t been to see my husband yet about those boys.’

  ‘I have been busy,’ Nathaniel said.

  ‘Is it –’ she hesitated, ‘is it because of what happened the other day? The car, I mean? It must have looked awful to you. I’m terribly sorry. Johnnie’s not like that, really. Only, he doesn’t think I ought to drive now –’

  ‘It was not that,’ Nathaniel interrupted desperately. ‘I prepare my next term’s lectures in the vacation. I have much reading to do.’

  ‘Oh, well –’ she said, appearing to believe him, ‘in that case – you’ll go when you can?’

  Nathaniel almost told her bluntly that the meagre cream of the crop did not interest him, that it was only the failures he worried about. But something stopped him from saying it.

  Some of the boys who would fail School Certificate this year would be bright and ambitious. If they could get in with a business firm –

  He must be crazy.

  ‘I will think about it,’ he promised casually.

  ‘There’s something else I wanted to ask you,’ she said. ‘I’ve been looking for someone who could explain the things in the market to me. It seems a bit of an imposition to ask you, but – do you suppose you could come with me one day? Just for a quick whip round.’

  ‘There’s nothing much to see. It’s just – an ordinary market –’

  ‘ To you, perhaps. It’s all new to me. I’ve been around once or twice by myself, but there’s so much I’d like to ask about, and I –’

  ‘I’m very busy,’ he evaded. ‘I work in the Public Library every afternoon these days –’

  ‘After work, then? The market doesn’t close early.’

  Nathaniel fingered his glasses. The memory of his lie about the rheumatism made him unable to think of an excuse now. Why did he not tell her the truth? But she stood there, waiting confidently, certain he would be delighted to go with her. He did not know what to say.

  ‘All right,’ he said finally, and it was almost a sigh, ‘I’ll go.’

  So Nathaniel did show her the market, one afternoon the following week.

  Miranda’s car was waiting for him when he left the Library. The driver gave Nathaniel a long amused stare. Nathaniel was thankful when they reached the market and got out.

  They were sucked into the whirlpool of humanity that swirled unceasingly around in the small square. There were rough shelters for the sellers, but these had long since been outgrown and the stalls spilled out onto all the paths and crazily winding by-ways.

  ‘Come on,’ Miranda said, ‘let’s go to the vegetable stalls first.’

  It was his own doing, this. He would see it through. He would be calm, perhaps a little amused. The way Victor would have been.

  He tried not t
o look at her, pressing ahead, huge in her billowing smock. The mammies at their stalls grinned at him. Nathaniel did not speak good Ga, but he had no trouble in following the gist of their comments.

  A rag-clad labourer, carrying a headload of empty kerosene tins, passed close in front of them. His eye caught Nathaniel’s.

  ‘Is it yours?’ he shouted gaily in Ga.

  ‘Be quiet, you!’ Nathaniel snapped.

  It would have been easy to reply in kind. He could have had the whole market shaking with laughter. But he could not.

  ‘Oho!’ the man said rudely, jostling him, ‘it’s easy enough to put it in, but when it comes out, it’s a different colour. Watch out, brother!’

  The big-breasted market women showed their teeth in wide bawdy grins, and their laughter, warming as liquor, entered into Nathaniel. They could not read, but they could read him or anyone. No one was private, but what did it matter?

  Nathaniel threw back his head and laughed, and the deep warmth of his voice made Miranda turn around.

  ‘You watch yours,’ he called to the labourer, whose head-load rattled and banged with his mirth, ‘and I’ll watch mine.’

  ‘Mastah, you got sense,’ one of the women cried in pidgin.

  Miranda was smiling.

  ‘They’re very friendly,’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ he cried, in a voice like Victor’s, ‘very friendly, Mrs. Kestoe! We Africans are very friendly!’

  She gave him an odd glance.

  ‘I can guess what they’re saying,’ she said dryly.

  Startled, Nathaniel saw from her face that she knew. He had underestimated her. Victor would not have made that kind of mistake.

  All around them, African women walked tall with their laden brass headpans shining. In the mud, a child crawled, crying, its mother lost, its nose pouring mucus onto its lips. Almost under the host of padding, pushing feet, a man sprawled sleeping, nearly naked, his head on his hands, his genitals lying flaccid across one leg.