The Ghosts of Eden

by Andrew JH Sharp

  Auntie Beryl was still writing but said, ‘Whose idea was it to go to the shops?’

  Michael hoped that Simon would own up, but then he remembered that Simon was not yet Saved, so he said, ‘We were just doing some good on the Sabbath.’

  ‘A disarming reply, Michael, but the Jewish Sabbath is Saturday, not Sunday.’ She put some papers in a drawer and started looking through another stack.

  Simon found his voice. ‘No one told us that before. How were we to know?’

  ‘Your aggrieved tone is hardly appropriate, Simon, and in any case breaking the rules is not allowed on any day.’

  ‘Actually, Jesus did,’ Michael said quickly. He was not going to let Auntie Beryl tell off a Great Man Of Faith like himself.

  ‘You’re not Jesus,’ Auntie Beryl said and added, more to herself than to him, ‘or some Latter-Day Saint.’ She hunted in a wooden pencil box and took out a paperclip.

  Michael pressed his point. ‘I was Led By God to see Mr Patel.’

  ‘And who led you, Simon?’

  Michael looked down at the floor. That was the trouble with Auntie Beryl; she always had an answer, and she wasn’t even concentrating.

  Auntie Beryl folded her hands in front of her and looked up at them over her glasses. Her eyebrows were grey like rain clouds. ‘You’ll both have to stay on your beds for an extra hour this afternoon at rest time.’

  She dismissed them.

  Michael glared at her. Auntie Beryl was very clever but she would be sorry on Judgement Day when God showed her in the big book that she had punished them for doing God’s work. He thought Auntie Priscilla understood, but she was a bit mad. God worked in mysterious ways.

  ‘You said that God said they were diamonds,’ Simon said as they made their way down the corridor. He sounded more disappointed than angry.

  ‘I think I made a mistake.’ He didn’t think he could explain to Simon about Tests Of Faith.

  ‘My dad says that God helps those who help themselves,’ Simon said.

  Michael thought about that. By the time he had reached the dining room he had had an idea on how to help himself so that God could help him; so that God could help him to help his father to get a Zephyr. He would do it as soon as he got home.

  Four

  Stella and Bernard, Michael’s mother and father, woke at 5.45am for Quiet Time with God to a wind-up alarm clock inside a sock. The sock was Bernard’s way of moderating its more shrilling tones. ‘Brilliant academically, but so impractical he can’t tie his own shoelaces,’ was how Bernard had been described to Stella before they had met at missionary training college. Stella had been enthralled.

  It was still dark in their bedroom so Stella blearily raised the glass of the paraffin lamp on her bedside table, removed the remains of a cremated moth, turned up a little more wick and lit it with a match. Out here in the hill country, twisting miles from any town, there was no electricity. Only the major towns were wired into a grid, although even there the electric light era was to be temporary, a false dawn, a short interlude between the long ages of fire-lit nights before colonisation and the long, snuffed-out nights of dictatorship to come.

  Bernard, even at this sacred time of the day, set to work immediately, scribbling with a pencil in a hard-cover notebook, ragged along its binding from frequent use.

  ‘Must you work during your Quiet Time? Can’t you just listen to God?’ Stella asked.

  Bernard wrote on furiously.

  ‘We have to talk about whether we’re still going to let Michael go and stay with Simon. Miss Simpson took me aside when I picked him up. She said his friend Simon was not a good influence. Henry and Rhonda are very worldly. What do you think, Bernard?’

  Bernard looked up from his notebook but Stella was not sure whether he had been listening. She found Bernard both frustratingly lacking in spontaneity and reassuringly considered in judgement.

  ‘I’m listening most carefully to God. He places ideas into my mind and it’s my duty to write them down before they slip my memory. I’ve just seen how I can better translate the concept of justification by faith.’

  ‘OK, but what about Michael?’

  ‘Michael?’

  Stella repeated herself.

  Bernard was silent for a full half minute and then said, ‘He has to be exposed to the real world. We can’t be the salt of the earth without being willing to be sprinkled out. What good are we in a glass salt cellar?’

  ‘He just seems a bit young, darling. He’s more sugar than salt. Not ready. Very impressionable.’ She worried about Michael; he was so eager to please and so enthusiastic, but in that lay the danger: he looked on the Almighty as his personal and ever-ready assistant, recruiting him for all his schemes. She could see a fall coming.

  Bernard said, ‘There are two ways to learn to swim: thrown in at the deep end or paddling in from the shallow end. I agree that Henry and Rhonda represent the deep end, but I think we’ve equipped Michael with good water wings so he won’t sink.’

  On spiritual matters Bernard was the head of the household so Stella submitted. Had she profoundly disagreed she would have reclassified the issue as a practical matter, rather than a spiritual one, then made her own decision and not bothered Bernard with it. He had enough to cope with in his work.

  Bernard always went straight to his study after breakfast although this was as reliably delayed by the ritual of looking for his black-rimmed glasses in any of many locations, in a track from bedroom to bathroom, to outside toilet, to dining room.

  In his study, surrounded by heavily annotated books, Bernard was translating the Word of God from the original Hebrew and Greek into the vernacular. Each dialect required its own translation lest incorrect meanings became forever embedded in the consciousness of the recipients. For some dialects there was still no written grammar and no standardised spelling, so Bernard interrogated his native colleagues in the Theological College, testing every grammatical construction until he was sure that the meaning was pure. Stella would overhear Bernard verbalising his thoughts: ‘The form of the simple imperative when preceded by an object prefix is the same as the subjunctive . . . that’s a labial consonant, that’s a palatal . . . that would explain the idiomatic use of the perfect stem . . .’ She was used to Bernard periodically rushing out of his office and, unable to let emotion infect his speech, saying quietly, ‘I’ve found a new tense,’ or ‘I’ve uncovered a declination rule. Most unique form.’

  Word by word by word Bernard was disclosing the person of God to a people that had been in the dark since, well, since time began. Stella felt proud: her husband was revealing the very voice of God to the goatherd and the cattle owner, just as William Tyndale, four centuries before, had made known the same to the ploughman and the blacksmith.

  After finding Bernard’s glasses Stella took tea to her father, Arthur, who, long retired from his life’s work as a doctor at a mission, lived in a small rondavel cottage in the garden. Stepping outside with a tray, she greeted Kapere, their night-watchman – afflicted with clouded corneas, and a squint that gave the impression that he was keeping half a watch for some danger from the heavens – performing his last task of the night (his only task, she thought): lighting the wood fire for the water boiler. Smoke gushed from the aperture in the blackened bricks and poured up over the top of the drum into the ocean of the lightening sky. Kapere wore a long fur-lined coat which had made its way to East Africa in a container full of winter wear from a Lutheran charity in Sweden. Stella was in charge of distributing the aid to the needy, although it was handed on again and again by barter or obligation. It was not uncommon even on the hottest days to pass a man or woman wearing a thick shearling or fox fur coat.

  In the cottage Stella opened her father’s curtains and went to see if he was still breathing. He increasingly occupied the land across the Jordan, deliberately uncurling his grip on this world and entwining himself in the arms of the Father. Every morning Stella braced herself to find that he had left his body ly
ing in the bed and ‘gone home’, or even that the bed was empty; that he had vanished, taken by God like the patriarch Enoch. ‘And Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him.’

  Her father had few visitors for his friends had all been ‘promoted to glory’ before him, although still some came from far for advice, for remembrance of lost times, for wisdom, for a blessing. Old men, barefoot and dusty, would come and stand patiently outside his cottage door. Stella would bring down sweet tea and sweet bananas and tell her father that he had a visitor. Later the visitor would leave as softly as he had come, walking down the road in the valley and then out onto the plain. When Stella asked him who these callers were he would say something like, ‘That was Erasto Ndimbirwe. He also loves the Lord. I told him we must endure; that it wouldn’t be long before we see Him face to face.’

  On questioning her father further, he might add, ‘He was the hospital driver in the late thirties. I first met him when he was brought into the hospital with a spearhead stuck in his leg. He had walked to see me then as well.’

  When her mother had died suddenly a few years before, Stella had considered moving her father to the Pilgrim’s Repose nursing home in Dorset, close to a church that had supported the mission. There would be many faithful visitors from the church, but it would be subjecting him to a cruel exile for he had lived half a century in Africa. He had inhaled its air for so long that to deny him now would be as heartless as withdrawing cigarettes from a forty-a-day smoker in his eighth decade. The England he had sailed from had, in any case, sailed with him – two wars and wave upon wave of social change had created another country from the one he had left; a country increasingly hostile to what he represented, thought Stella. Not that he would have complained, for the source of his contentment had long passed from the ‘things of this world’.

  Stella went to empty Arthur’s commode. She carried it to the back of the house where the path led to a purple-garlanded bougainvillea bush within which was a small outhouse: the toilet. The latch was broken so she pushed the door open, but had to put the commode down to lift the seat. She held her breath as she bent but the sewer smell swamped its way into her nostrils. No one lingered in this room. Large bluebottles squatted on the flaky whitewashed walls. Little red smudges of swatted mosquitoes specked the walls. Strange how the blood did not darken with time. The flies, drunk with the odour, spun noisily around and around in crazed loops when disturbed. She emptied the potty down the ‘long drop’: a distant slop sound marked the arrival of its contents below. Leaving promptly she headed for the house, taking a heady breath of the relatively perfumed air outside. The path skirted a stubbly lawn that sloped away to a luscious banana grove; below the banana trees lay a valley, moist and sleepy, swathed in mist and light smoke from the still smouldering compound fires of the previous night. The other side of the valley rose steeply in terraced plots except for a small ravine cutting into the hillside, filled to its brim with trees, from which emanated a dawn chorus: tropical style with squawks, rasps and booms. The head of the valley opened out onto the plain, honeyed in early morning light, where the cattle herders roamed.

  ‘Long drop and view,’ she exclaimed to herself. Their lives in Africa: the filth and the beauty, the pain and the elation, the excitement and the terror, the daily dramas. And now the day would fill with myriad complexities and vexations. For a start the house girl was away at another funeral, or was it another wedding or another visit to a sick relative? How would they ever build a new nation with so many time-consuming social obligations?

  Stella felt that her mother’s generation of missionaries had had it easier, for they had kept their home a castle into which they retreated when tired. Behind the walls her mother would rest, sew, arrange flowers, read or write – undisturbed. The gap in the fiery-red hibiscus hedge surrounding the house was the gate through which her parents had, early in the day, travelled out and then, when the night reasserted itself, journeyed in. Out to cure the sick and feed the hungry, in to receive their own balms. Nowadays that smacked of snobbery for ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.’ She felt it right that the new generation of missionaries had rediscovered a Christian imperative for inclusiveness. The African Christians were now ‘partners in mission’ and ‘brothers and sisters in Christ’. They were all ‘one at the foot of the cross’.

  Eager to right previous wrongs, she and Bernard had metaphorically torn down the hedge and opened the door. So the English habit of restoring the self through withdrawal from the world came up against the African way of rejuvenation through sharing the self. Now they were suffering a fantastic invasion. She would find strangers ironing their clothes in her laundry, a pot of animal parts simmering on the hot plate, a mother in labour in her sitting room begging for a lift to the hospital many miles away, or a man with a bicycle on the porch hoping to sell her the bunch of chickens hanging by their legs from the handlebars. Each person had to be greeted, the well-being of the other (as well as near and far family and friends) fully established before the salutation process ended in a drawn out mutual liturgy of praise to God and his works, personal and general. The extrication was as protracted, but Stella constantly reminded herself that these interactions were where the soul of the Bakiga community resided – what was missing in her own culture – and to enter that community she must immerse herself in its interactions. Still, she sought out the occasional place to hide. Even if it had to be inside the bougainvillea bush.

  Now she saw that trouble was coming to her early in the day. Silas, the gardener, was approaching with the grin of a man possessed and the stride of a man with a purpose; worrying, because normally Silas moved only when pushed, and then in random directions – a Brownian motion. He would have been sacked long ago by other expatriate employers, an Indian employer or even the Ministry of Works whose workers sat beside the potholed roads in their laterite-stained uniforms observing the slow passage of time, one of them occasionally chipping at a culvert with the only available spade. She consoled herself by reminding herself that her role as an employer was entirely charitable, so there was no risk to Silas.

  ‘Madam, greetings this morning, and how did you spend the night?’

  ‘I spent it well.’

  ‘And how is your good husband?’

  ‘He’s well.’

  ‘And how is the good doctor?’

  ‘Fine, fine. Silas, is there a problem?’

  ‘There’s not a problem but there are no wheels on the car.’

  Stella hurried with Silas to the drive. There were no wheels on the car. It sat on little brick towers under its axles. Very neat. Stella stood rigid, running through alternative explanations to the obvious: Bernard, absent-mindedly generous, had let someone borrow the wheels; Bernard had asked Mr Khan, the mechanic in town, to replace them in a two-stage process; the government had removed them for disinfection; it was a practical joke, and Silas was about to roll around laughing instead of standing around grinning.

  Accepting the truth, Stella called for Kapere. At the urgency of her shout, Kapere came running around the side of the house holding his spear firmly in his right hand.

  ‘I’m here quickly, madam.’

  ‘Did you hear anything last night?’ she asked. His eyes as they were, there was no point in asking if he had seen anything.

  ‘No, madam.’ He sounded a little unsure.

  ‘I don’t want you to say no if you did. Did you not hear anything at all last night?’

  ‘Yes, madam.’

  ‘I don’t want you to say yes if you didn’t. There’s no need to say what you think pleases me. The truth has sufficient pleasures. Oh, never mind, I’ll fetch Bernard.’ She let out a little choked noise.

  ‘I’m so sorry, madam,’ Kapere and Silas said together, shaking their heads.

  ‘It’s OK; lots of people in Africa have cars without wheels. It’s just . . . it’s just going to be very inconvenient.’


  Bernard took some time to surface from deep contemplation, but as soon as he had registered Stella’s distress he leapt up and dashed for the door.

  ‘No need to run,’ she said. ‘The robbers have left.’

  They stood looking at the car as if studying a sculpture in an exhibition, occasionally moving to look at it from a different angle.

  ‘It does appear from the scene of the crime that this was a well-planned heist,’ Bernard said, bending down by an axle.

  ‘We know that, darling. The question is not whether it was well executed but what we’re going to do about it.’

  Michael appeared with his shy friend Tomasi. ‘Hey, who’s taken the wheels off the car?’

  Something in her son’s voice sounded false. Almost as if the missing wheels were no surprise. ‘We’re just discussing that, dear. Your window is nearest, Michael. Did you hear anything last night?’

  ‘Only Kapere snoring,’ Michael replied.

  Kapere looked sheepish. Stella made herself calm while Bernard stayed calm. To show anger in Bakiga culture was a sin worse than theft – or falling asleep whilst on night duty. A wrong could not be righted by the other wrong of anger.

  ‘I think we’ll talk about that another time,’ she said to Michael.

  She looked over to the flowerbed to see that Silas had decided he could not help with the car and was furiously weeding out the geraniums she had planted at the weekend – showing his sympathy by trebling his gardening efforts.

  ‘How are you going to get to the convention?’ Michael asked. He turned to Tomasi and said loudly and slowly, ‘Now my dad’s going to have to get a Zephyr 6.’