Zambezi

by Tony Park

  ‘You’re not the only rich man in Africa.’

  ‘How about money plus local knowledge and contacts? You know the resources at my disposal’

  Hassan was aware the man was just being cautious. It paid to be in his line of business. He guessed he knew that Hassan’s change of mind had been brought on by the sudden death of the person closest to him.

  ‘OK, Hassan. We can meet. At the hotel. The one you wanted to buy a few years ago.’

  ‘I’ll come by boat. At the beach bar, on Tuesday, midday.’

  ‘I will be there.’

  He replaced the portable phone in its cradle and sat down heavily on the bar stool. As he poured another Scotch the shaking in his hand caused the neck of the bottle to tinkle on the rim of the heavy cut-glass tumbler.

  He stared again at the photo of himself with his father and twin brother, Iqbal.

  The brothers dressed differently, they wore their hair differently, they dated completely different types of women. Who was his girl at the time the photo was taken? Felicity, that was it. The blonde from conservative middle England who’d been a classmate at university. She’d said she loved his hair. She’d sought him out – not surprising as he gave his father’s Zanzibar address to almost any pretty girl he met. Iqbal had spoken of a Pakistani girl, from a reputable family, who was returning to her home country In so many other ways the brothers were growing apart, but neither of them could turn a blind eye to a pretty woman.

  Their eyes, however, marked them as twins. So similar, as blue as the Indian Ocean, his mother had always said. Yet even here, in this blurred snapshot, one could see different souls behind each pair of indigo portals. Hassan’s sparkled with carefree abandon – he’d either just had sex or was about to, he couldn’t quite remember which. Iqbal’s were cooler. Distant. Barely tolerating the forced bonhomie of the reunion, eager to get back to something else, something more … meaningful. His woman? No, she was already in Pakistan by then, and he would follow a few days after the brief holiday on the island. Was it a woman who had lured his brother so irrevocably away from his own world?

  No, he didn’t think so. It might have been easier for Hassan to understand his brother, and his fate, if he had been led to it by his prick. But it was something with an even stronger influence, something which Hassan had never had, that separated them so completely.

  Faith.

  Sometimes, when he sat on the verandah and watched a breathtaking sunset – he remembered one particularly vivid crimson and gold cloud show he and Miranda had witnessed before making love – he was tempted to believe there was a God. But his God, at least the God of his father and his brother, would not tolerate his union with the American woman, an unbeliever. His father had married outside his religion, although Hassan’s mother had apparently promised to convert. She never did, though, and her husband never forgave her, and not only for her failure to relinquish Christianity. Neither the Christian nor Muslim god had blessed the union of the elder Hassan bin Zayid, tour guide and coffeeshop owner of Stone Town, Zanzibar, and Margaret Wilks, British Overseas Airways Corporation air hostess, of Buckinghamshire, England.

  ‘The only good thing that ever came of it was you two boys,’ their father had told Hassan and Iqbal on many occasions. Usually after he had partaken of the better part of a bottle of expensive Scotch.

  The funny thing was, Hassan remembered his mother saying almost exactly the same thing when he last saw her. He had few recollections of her from his childhood. Margaret had left Zanzibar for good shortly after the twins’ third birthday. All Hassan remembered was a golden-haired woman singing to him and, significantly, crying. The only version Hassan had of the marriage was his father’s.

  ‘She left you boys. Abandoned you when you were tiny What mother would leave her children?’

  One night when the boys were eleven they snuck out of their bedroom window and dropped as silently as they could onto the tin roof of the next-door dwelling. It was a favourite game, scrabbling across the interconnected rooftops, peering through skylights and neighbourhood windows, daring each other to leap the gaps between houses. On this night they were returning to bed, after seeing old Mrs Jamal getting undressed – an experience neither of them wanted to repeat – when they overheard their father’s baritone voice. The smell of his Marlboro cigarette smoke wafted up from where he sat on the stone steps leading to the reception area of the small hotel he owned. Another man sat in a plastic chair beside the steps. Hassan didn’t recognise the stranger’s voice, but that didn’t matter.

  Thinking his sons were tucked in bed asleep, his father was telling the story of his failed marriage.

  ‘She was a beauty, that much was true.’

  ‘And good, eh? I hear the English girls love it,’ the stranger interjected.

  Iqbal looked at Hassan with puzzlement in his eyes. He thought his mother was bad. Hassan shrugged, just as confused.

  The elder bin Zayid gave a little grunt. ‘Yes. At first, I suppose. As in any marriage. Except we weren’t married.’

  ‘Ah … and she got pregnant.’

  ‘It happens, Bilal.’

  ‘But a foreigner … why didn’t she have an abortion? Surely you offered.’

  ‘I did. But she would not hear of it. I didn’t mind marrying her.’

  ‘But your father?’

  ‘God rest his soul, he refused to speak to me.’

  ‘What’s an abortion?’ Hassan whispered.

  Iqbal pantomimed a hand holding a knife, then plunged it into his belly ‘Women kill their own children when they do not want them.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Yes. Mohamed’s sister, the older one. She has a woman’s magazine, from England. There is an article in there about it,’ Iqbal explained, revelling in his worldliness.

  ‘I’m glad our mother didn’t do that!’ Hassan said.

  ‘Shush! Listen.’

  Their father stubbed out his cigarette. ‘Everyone thought I was mad, of course, not just my father. I was shunned but, to tell you the truth, I didn’t mind at first. I had a sexy, worldly wife and I wanted the children.’

  ‘So what was the problem?’

  ‘She said she wanted to come live here, to quit her job, to which I said, “Of course, this is the way it should be.’”

  ‘What was wrong with that?’

  ‘Even me saying that. She said she was making decisions because they were what she wanted, and that if she wanted to return to work when the boys were older, then she would.’

  ‘A woman working while her children are at home? Preposterous.’ Bilal shook his head emphatically.

  ‘That’s what I told her. I also suggested that she might like to dress a little more conservatively once we were married. That did not go down well either.’

  ‘Why do they insist on dressing like whores, these western women?’

  Hassan senior smiled. ‘Of course, I didn’t mind when we were dating, but she was pregnant with my sons, and we were married, so I naturally thought she would start acting like a proper, modest wife. But me telling her to do things only made her do the opposite.’

  ‘In Pakistan, we know how to treat women.’ Bilal held up a fist.

  Hassan senior nodded. ‘I never hit her. Maybe I should have.’

  ‘Let’s go,’ Hassan whispered to his brother. He had a feeling he didn’t want to hear any more of this conversation. He had recently found a photograph – old, faded, dog-eared – in the drawer of his father’s desk. The study was out of bounds, but his ballpoint pen had run out of ink and he needed another in order to finish his homework. His father had been downstairs in reception, welcoming a couple of foreign tourists. Amidst the clutter of the drawer was the picture. It was of a slender, fairhaired woman in a uniform. She was standing outside the terminal at Zanzibar airport, the name visible in the background. She had one hand on her hip and a handbag hanging on her shoulder.

  Hassan had replaced the photo, wondering if it was his mother.

&nb
sp; ‘No, this is just getting interesting,’ Iqbal insisted.

  ‘So things got worse?’ Bilal asked.

  ‘They were good for a while. She settled down while she was pregnant, but there were problems after the birth.’

  ‘Medical problems?’

  ‘No, it was her head. She was depressed. We had a nanny, of course, an African woman whose husband had drowned while fishing. She had a baby boy of her own, little Juma. Ended up raising my two in the end. But the boys’ mother … it was as if she didn’t want them. It was strange, because she had been against abortion.’

  ‘Women are strange creatures.’

  He shrugged. ‘Anyway, she got used to the boys, but after a few months she started all that nonsense again about going back to work. I mean, jet-setting around the world, here today, gone tomorrow … how can a woman raise kids like that, Bilal?’

  ‘Impossible.’

  ‘Of course, I forbade it. She threatened to divorce me.’

  ‘On what grounds – that you cared about her and wanted her to be a good mother?’ Bilal’s incredulity was clear from the tone of his voice.

  ‘She said it was like being in prison. Like I was treating her as my slave.’

  ‘This is no prison. More like a palace.’ Bilal looked up at the four-storey whitewashed hotel, sandwiched between a souvenir shop and the small cafe Hassan had owned when he met the twins’ mother. The boys hastily ducked their heads back away from the rain gutter as the stranger looked up.

  ‘It got worse. I went to the mainland for a few days, on business. I came home a day early and there was a man in my house. An Englishman.’

  ‘A married woman entertaining another man in the family home? Were they … ?’

  ‘They were clothed, if that’s what you mean. Having coffee at ten in the morning, on my balcony, in my home. She didn’t try to hide him. Said he was a friend. That’s what made it worse, Bilal, that she had no shame about having a strange man in the house.’

  ‘So, had she been sleeping with him as well?’

  ‘Yes. The truth came out eventually. She said I did not pay enough attention to her, treated her more like a slave than a wife. What a joke. At least from a slave I would have had sex.’

  Bilal shook his head and made a clucking noise with his tongue.

  ‘She said the man had just come to offer her a job. He was from the airline. I told her that there was no way she was going back to work. I said her job was raising her beautiful young sons. She told me she didn’t feel like the children were hers any more, that the nanny was doing a better job than she ever could. In that, Bilal, she was right.’

  Hassan thought about what his father had said. It was true: the only motherly figure he had ever known was Aisha, his nanny and Juma’s mother.

  ‘It is late, and I should let you get back to your business, Bilal,’ Hassan senior said wearily.

  ‘Tell me how it ended.’

  He shrugged and stubbed out his cigarette on the hotel steps. ‘Simple. She left. No note, for me or the boys. One day we woke up and she was gone. Back to England, I presumed, and the bloody village of Oving in Buckinghamshire where she came from.’

  He sought her out, against his father and brother’s strongest wishes, when he started university. All he had to go on was the name of the tiny village, Oving, where her family was from.

  Outside the train cold rain pelted the windows of the British Rail service from Marylebone. Inside it was stiflingly hot. The countryside was still alien to him. More a universe than a world away from the cluttered bustle of Stone Town or the palm-fringed white beaches of the coast.

  The town of Aylesbury was the end of the line. An overweight lady with a turned-down mouth directed him to the bus terminal. It was the middle of a work day and the bus was empty, save for an elderly couple who ignored him. He was beginning to think the English a cold race. Perhaps some of the bitterness his father felt towards his estranged wife was not totally without merit after all.

  Aylesbury’s suburbs of crammed council houses soon gave way to verdant pastures and tiny villages of whitewashed cottages with thatched roofs. A ruddy-faced woman in a green waterproof jacket and Wellington boots walked a pair of beagles in the drizzle, her breath a white mist. Hassan wondered how his mother could have forsaken Zanzibar’s weather, let alone her twin toddler sons.

  In Oving, Hassan walked along the grassed verge of a narrow two-lane road and came to the high brick walls of a country manor house. He stopped and stood on tiptoe. Over the wall he could make out manicured lawns and hedges, and a gravel path fringed with lichen-covered statues. The great home seemed to have a frontage as big as the House of Wonders, the sultan’s palace in Stone Town.

  There was money here. His father was wealthy – he had to be to send two sons out of Tanzania to study: three hotels now, two on Zanzibar and another in Dar on the mainland – but this was a different class of wealth.

  ‘Quite a pile, isn’t it?’

  Hassan turned and saw a thin-faced man with curly grey hair. He guessed him to be in his early fifties. He wore faded grey overalls and carried a pair of garden shears.

  ‘You look too smartly dressed to be a thief casing the place, but I’ve not seen you around the village before.’ The accent was soft, with a slightly rolling lilt.

  ‘I’m looking for someone, a distant relative,’ Hassan replied.

  ‘That so? I’m Ernie. I do most of the gardens around here. Lived in the village all me life.’

  ‘Do you know the Wilks?’

  ‘Mrs Wilks passed away just last year. But you’d know that if you were related, surely?’ the gardener said, raising an eyebrow.

  Hassan saw the suspicion in the man’s eyes. ‘I’m from abroad. Tracing the family tree, so I’m not close. Mrs Wilks, you said? That must be …’ he stopped himself from saying ‘my grandmother’ as he didn’t want news of his arrival all over the village, in case it embarrassed his mother, ‘Margaret’s mother?’

  ‘Yes, yes. That’s right. She’s living in the big house, next to her mum’s old place.’

  ‘Could you give me some directions to her house, please?’

  Ernie looked him up and down, unashamedly assessing him. ‘I’m heading that way right now.

  Doing the hedges at the house two up from Margaret’s. I’ll take you there.’

  Hassan had to stretch his legs to keep up with the older man as he turned down a narrow lane that led to the heart of the tiny village. At the end of the street he saw a quaint pub, called the Black Boy, and an old stone church. Ernie stopped outside a thatched cottage with a bed of red roses out the front.

  ‘This is it,’ he said.

  Hassan opened the wooden gate. He looked back and saw Ernie waiting. Probably wanted to make sure everything was OK, Hassan thought. He was suddenly very much not OK. His heart thudded. His mouth was dry. He wiped his hands on his jeans. There was a heavy brass knocker on the wooden door. He knocked and a few moments later the door opened.

  It was her. He had sneaked a peek at the photograph in his father’s desk drawer whenever he could, until he had been caught. His father had said nothing, simply taken the picture from him and torn it into tiny pieces. She was still beautiful, though there was something not quite right about her.

  Her hair was blonde, her eyes the same blue as his, but they were shadowed and recessed too far into their sockets. Her face was too thin. She wore a baggy red jumper over jeans that encased slender legs. In her high-heeled boots she was only an inch or two shorter than his six feet. She put a hand to her mouth.

  ‘Morning, Margaret,’ Ernie called from the gate. ‘This fellow says he’s family. I showed him the way here.’

  She blinked. ‘Urn, yes. Thanks, Ernie. Good of you to help. I’ve been expecting him for some time.’

  Ernie looked puzzled, but nodded and forced a smile. ‘I’ll be on my way, then. Just doing Joanne’s hedges.’

  She waved, to show him she was all right.

  ‘I’m
…’ Hassan began.

  ‘I know who you are.’

  It hadn’t been anger in her voice, or surprise, or resentment. Certainly not love. More a tone of resignation, as though she had, indeed, been expecting him and now he had finally come.

  ‘You’d best come in, Hassan.’

  He wiped his muddy feet on the doormat and had to duck a little to get through the door. It was warm inside. The furniture was modern, in contrast with the seventeenth-century exterior. The ceiling was not much higher than the doorframe and, though he could stand up straight, he felt very confined.

  ‘How did you know it was me, and not…’

  ‘Iqbal? You were the same when you were tiny. You were always hanging off my skirt, and Iqbal was always running after his father. I knew that it would be you if either of you ever came looking for me. Sit down, I’ve just boiled the kettle. Tea?’

  He was suddenly very angry There was so much to talk about, so much for her to explain, and she wanted to make tea. He had expected an outpouring of emotion. ‘Coffee, if that’s OK.’

  He took a seat on the white leather sofa and looked around the small living room.

  ‘Are you living in England or just visiting?’ she asked from the kitchen.

  His eyes were drawn to a beechwood wall unit. Above the television was a family portrait. His mother, but not his family A man with red hair in a uniform of some kind, two girls, in their early teens by the look of it. Pretty, with Margaret’s eyes. His eyes. ‘Studying. I’m doing a degree in economics at Cambridge.’

  She returned with two cups and took a seat in an armchair opposite him. ‘Good for you. I’m pleased you turned out smart. Pleased Hassan is making enough money to send you abroad to study And Ikkie?’

  Hassan smiled. He knew how much his twin would hate that babyish nickname. ‘Arts, with a philosophy major, at Cape Town. He wasn’t interested in coming to England.’

  She noticed him looking at the photo again. ‘I remarried. Soon after … soon after I returned home.’

  ‘The man in the photo, your husband. He is a pilot?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said guardedly, trying to guess how much he knew, how much he had been told.