Theft

by N. S. Köenings

  Ezra coughed, one hand at his side against the lip of the black hold. The man whose face was like a mango gave him a sharp look as if to say, Stay there, then sputtered at the officer, “Who’s responsible for this, my man? An outrage!” To Iffat. “You call this a business? What am I to do?” To the awful pair. “Where can we complain?” The policeman gave him space: he was allowed to collar Iffat. There was a game to play.

  In her other life, in Philadelphia, in America, which was very far away, Lucy helped to run a shop. An experienced service girl, she was good at looking blank, at maintaining a still face no matter what went on behind. The noise had been a trial. Are they hitting him? she’d thought, and then, because she was self-absorbed, could always feel her insides like a house, or ship, its struts and pillars more demanding than anything outside her: My holiday, that it should end like this! The big man seemed aboil. His heavy face, ruddy from the start, was flushed. A down of sweat clung to his mottled jaw. Beads flew. A look that Lucy did not like passed over his face. She tried thinking of her suitcase, which she understood was gone, but didn’t dare to take the other step—what was in it—because she knew exactly what and couldn’t face it then. She thought, most loudly, I mustn’t fall apart.

  The other men, a pair, no, boys, white, too, languid-limbed and furred, had hair that had not, Lucy thought, been washed in weeks on principle, hair like women’s, down their backs in tails, but thin. She thought: They’re balding at the brow. On the bus she’d eyed them with disdain, was sure that they’d been high. Following their elder’s lead, the boys edged in with narrow jackal mouths towards Iffat and the driver. One said, “We need our stuff back, man.” The other said, “That’s right. They took my guitar.”

  Ezra’s head hurt, that swollen eye on fire. Iffat and the copper. He was not surprised, but his feelings had been trampled. Not a nice thing, not a nice thing this, this stealing from the customers, not good in the least if one hoped to keep one’s job. Iffat was not, after all, the boss. The real boss was in this city, not far off, and there was another, that man’s brother, in an office by a lake, and another brother on the coast, keeping all ends of these channels sealed, all right, and they were crooks in their own way, or worse, but not like this for all to see in the bus park after dawn. Picking pockets was one thing, was discreet, but this was crazy pride. Ezra thought himself a fairly honest man; alone, he could not have thought it up. But would he have objected? Why didn’t Iffat say, cut him in, at least? Ezra’s mouth: aleak, a line of blood or mucus slid over his chin and down along his throat like ice or boiling oil. In the other stillness that was the blooming of a bruise, his side shook like an engine. He watched. That busy clump of men; and a bit apart from them, not too far from him, the girl, still standing near the bus, a knocking at her knees, her hands at work before her, blinking like a toad. Traveling women like she was were less dangerous than men.

  Ezra reached out to the bus flank for support. “I did not know,” he said. Lucy didn’t want an explanation. She simply wanted this: a room, a bed, and a closed door please, if she could only be alone. But she was briefly interested in him. She’d never seen a man beaten before, not like that, and hadn’t he been horribly astir, legs spread in the dust, each breath like a plunge? His swollen eye, the stains on his torn shirt, combined to make him look—this thought was a dart, a quick fish rising and then gone—ruined and sincere.

  When Lucy was alert, she was: good at spotting shoplifters, gauging how much money someone had to spend, knowing had they come to browse or buy, or to hide from something else. But that was Philadelphia, in Mr. Kershaw’s Germantown Boutique on Walnut Street, where she had worked for years, where she knew how things stood. And this was quite another place. She did not know how to take him. Though her eyes were focused on his face, she saw (instead of the high cheeks, sharp nose, long eyes set far apart) the moments of the bus ride in which he had appeared. Had this man not shelved all their bags himself, commenting on which was heavy and which was so worn it might break? Did he not have the key? Was he not a suspect? But had he not also, startling her as she moved through the aisle and reached for balance to his headrest, offered her some baobab fruit and nuts?

  Lucy couldn’t tell. She did not care at all for the sweating suited man or for his undulating voice, which was thick and serious in the middle of his words but knife-sharp at the edges, and she did not trust the boys. She had, from the first, felt ogled by the driver. As for the pinched, plump officer in shades? Though she herself had never broken any law, she did not for all that have any faith in the police, did not like the thought of answering to, explaining. The tout was small, as she was. He’d been beaten, suffering, was not part of the group, and for the moment at a disadvantage. In her own and different way, wasn’t she, as well? She wished none of it had happened, that she’d stayed longer on the coast, found another place and were, instead of all of this, waking to the heady smell of seaweed. Toast and eggs and tea.

  Ezra mustered up his breath and said how lucky they had been, how they might have been held up or perhaps killed, and how some busses were hijacked and the travelers dropped off in the wilderness to make their way on foot, if lions did not eat them. His low voice was soft. Beyond them she could see the sky, the buildings, the city rising up. The two tall boys, greasy T-shirts plastered to their chests—caved in, Lucy thought, then thought how cold caves were—danced as if on pointed toes. “No, man, no, man. What about our stuff?” It was a chorus now, our stuff, unlined faces crumpling, mouths opening again and closing, heads ashake and all their dirty hair with a dull gleam, swaying down their backs. The young one said, again, “They took my guitar!” and the companion slapped his hip to emphasize the awfulness of it; hand like a tambourine. The older man’s big chest heaved up and out and down; his fists clenched and unclenched. Iffat made thick soothing sounds. Everything in my power my good sirs and there will be some forms.

  Ezra understood another thing: at any moment that same officer would turn to him and say, “And what does this boy know?” and that would be the end. Ezra, not all that wise to city ways, quite yet, did know what fall guys were. Iffat would remain in charge and Ezra would get fired.

  Lucy fingered her own dress, just there by her thigh, and although something was threatening to rise in her, something she’d feel later—shock, an outrage that she did not quite understand—she told herself that it was not so bad. She was gifted, too, at reciting little formulas that sometimes kept her steady. I still have money with me, and my ticket. I can still go home. Aware of Ezra at her side, Lucy worked her toes in her flat shoes and saw something at last: those three could plant themselves beside the empty yawning of the luggage hold all morning, saying, No, man, and Preposterous, all day, and it wouldn’t change a thing. Lucy turned to Ezra, quietly, and said, “Excuse me, please. But is there a hotel?”

  Ezra pointed at himself; he couldn’t put his weight on his two feet without a little help. Could she give a hand? Though the effort cost her—of being in the world at all, and of helping someone (the words presence of mind ran through her mind like rabbits on a mill)—Lucy pulled him forward, one hand in the bus tout’s, the other pressed tight to her belly, where beneath her buttoned dress the money and her papers hung still from a bulky canvas belt. “Hurry, please,” he said, although he limped, moved towards her like a broken cart. “This way, follow me.” And while the fat man in the linen suit said, “I’ll file a complaint,” and the two thin boys said, “Yeah,” and no one looked to see, the two of them shoved off.

  On Railroad Street, as though they had consulted one another and agreed that they would not lay him out flat, Ezra’s injuries let up on him a bit. He was able to take stock. His face hurt, but the leaking at his lip had stilled, in its wake a steady pulse. He saw the street before them through one open watering eye. The other like a clamp on the right side of his head. Through tears he could not control and which he wiped at now and then with the soiled sleeve of his shirt, Lucy, next to him, came in and out
of focus. She was, by nature, a slow and careful walker. And although his side hurt, and he couldn’t move as quickly as he liked, her pace—stilted, one foot before the other as if afraid the pavement would snap back—disheartened him. Though she’d given him a good excuse—he has not run away but is assisting our poor customer, who has had a serious shock—he wanted to be rid of her. He had the last house wall to build, the uncle to take care of, other things, a man who made him sweet. There was Iffat to rethink. My aching side and eye.

  To calm himself, he counted off her traits. Her hair, he thought, was the color of red earth, tied back in a short tail that was thick, might crackle if you touched it, like a brush, or wire. Even through his tears, she was clearly freckled, which disgusted him a bit, but skin couldn’t be helped. The fresh blue of her dress, which did not change, no matter how he blinked, did please him. He began to feel, as he did not for the three whom they had left behind, a little sorry for her, though not much. Probably she’d lost, what? a camera, some jewelry. She’d have more of that at home. She couldn’t know how lucky. But still. He was not unkind. She was in need of buoying, too. “Come along.” He urged her on with the low sweep of a hand. “It’s going to be all right.”

  A sign: “Abuu’s Guest and Rest.” A white housefront, rising up four stories high, at every floor the drooping leaves of potted plants above a balcony’s edge. On the street, the entrance to a stairwell. Lucy looked at Ezra. Sore, he raised his head to show her, tried to lift his arm to point. A cry caught in his nose. He winced. Perhaps a rib was broken. Lucy did not know what to make of Ezra’s stopping and his frown—that swollen eye like beef, skin sunlit like a slick—the grunt. The stairwell loomed, green shadow. She felt for the first time specifically afraid. Screaming, she thought, would not help. Her fear showed on her face—a tightening at her narrow mouth, a stiffening in her arms. Ezra felt a patient thing inside him fold and cede to something else. He had a fleeting image of her breasts, which he thought were not large, and in his mind a moment the idea of her belly and her legs rose and left him cold. There’s nothing there, he thought, and it almost made him laugh. But then he thought she couldn’t know he hadn’t taken all the luggage, hadn’t helped someone in the darkness with the latch. Understanding made him tired. I don’t want you, Ezra wished to say. I am not a thief. He wanted to lie down. “You’re here,” he said. “That’s it.” He left her on the steps.

  Lucy watched him go. In the street (hot now, dust-filled air glowing with the day) men and women, bicycles and carts, more busses, cars, were hefting into life. The street looked strange to her, not one of her own avenues, with elms and cobblestones and pharmacies and homeless men she knew, bag women with caddies, and not either like the coastal streets, Indian, Arab houses on a seafront, dhows in the far blue. This was something else: the city that she had been told would not be nice for her. She did not want to be out there again, could not have found her way back to the bus stand, much less to a different hotel, alone. She thought about how Mr. Kershaw or one of the girls at the boutique might act. Much brighter, much more capable than she. Helen, touching up her lipstick and showing with a twirl a good bit of her leg: “Into the frying pan!” she’d say. Fiona, who was elaborately gloomy, who liked tarot cards and smoke, would have added, “It isn’t in your hands,” and sadly ushered her up the shaded stairs, to destiny. She heard Mr. Kershaw, too, explaining that fine girdles like these, standard ones in the old style, could not be had elsewhere, that they came direct from Austria, and that tradition wasn’t cheap: “What else can you do?” The beaten man was gone, she could barely see the top of his bent head over the early crowds of people that were filling up the walks, seemed to come from nowhere. “That’s it,” he had said. She closed her eyes and went.

  Ezra understood these places: the street-side premises of Jahazi Coastal Travel, the back door to the private office where bus touts went for pay, Iffat’s place above the bus stand restaurant (the Zam-Zam, which was always busy), and the walk down Railroad Street, where backpack tourists stayed, and where he’d taken Lucy. And he knew the other bus park, past the railroad yard and clothing market, where people came and went in minivans and pickup trucks from places that were not part of the city. He knew this place and the other, but the town that lay between these few familiar points made him quick and anxious. Whatever Lucy might have thought, the city wasn’t his, and was not safe for him. No time to nurse his wounds. No telling what else might befall him if he fell or stumbled here.

  Ezra had come out just three years before, and, when he wasn’t on the bus, lived on the far edge of a sprawl called Ukilala, along Ujenzi Road—a narrow thing, well graded, Ujenzi Road kept traffic moving to the west, inland. Goods and people crammed and packed and skidding, speeding heedlessly elsewhere. Now and then pedestrians and goats were killed on it because the drivers were in haste. Many chickens died. It wasn’t legal building there. People without permits or associates built in Ukilala, because, apart from the fast road, the city didn’t care for all that land, its people; it was tricky to police, it didn’t really count. Permits were expensive, difficult to get. But, presence being two thirds of a battle now and then, you could begin without one, lay down a foundation, make a home among the trash heaps, wait and see how long it would remain.

  The uncle had come in from the countryside after a drought, had sold most of his cows and come out there to build. Once the house was done, he’d bring his wife, the grandchildren, anyone who languished in the village. Ezra’d come with him to help, and together they were making this: a three-room house with a front stoop and a courtyard on the inside, for gathering water in a cistern and for cooking when the girls were safe and sound. The uncle had been thrilled with Ezra. Ezra helped him find things, learned to bargain for cement, where mangroves could be gotten cheap, or, failing that, where fences were not good and where it would be possible to steal a pole or two. The house was good, and very nearly done. The next thing was to finish the far wall, put frames into the windows, and after that, a rope bed for the uncle and his wife to share, and a grass mat for the hallway. Home! At least there’s that, he thought. The uncle would take care of him, and if not him, the neighbors, Tillat the seamstress, maybe, with her tricky hands, Gideon Juma from the radio shop, or, best of all, perhaps, Habib, his friend who lived next door. Habib. He would be all right.

  The blood was drying now, and those wet tears had stopped. He grew accustomed to the world seen through one eye: the spaciousness of this part of the city, which was almost an outskirt, nearly calm, unpeopled, just before the rise. Blue sky unlike the color of the woman’s dress, much deeper, opaque with rains to come; house crows, black flecks in the acacias; a flame tree in full bloom. He sensed the other bus stand by the sounds—gun of engines, creaking, slamming, fleet boys, cardboard trays of hard-boiled eggs balanced on their heads, their footsteps in the rubber thongs a rhythmic thudding on the ground, the sharp clapping of coins held loosely in their fists, money calling money; and the shouts: Majengo, Pirika, Hanakitu, Ukilala! Drivers and the bus touts (who did work like his, but whose drivers couldn’t steal as Iffat had, because the trips were shorter and the riders magpie-eyed, had less that could be shopped) grumbling, calling out. He saw the colors, too, the painted sides of busses: here, not the cleanly stenciled strokes of paid sign painters who’d studied for just this and could make any word look suited for high trade, but curly washes of wild paint, “God’s Best Bus,” “Hassan’s Happy Line,” “Hallelujah Host!,” and, Ezra’s ride, “Ufakiri Speed.” All around, women’s bright, fresh dresses, men’s brown cowboy hats and patterned shirts, the schoolkids dressed in green. At least his feet were fine. His feet knew where to go.

  Ufakiri Speed had just come in, and there was lots of room, most people heading in, not out, at this hour of the day. The driver knew him and he helped him up, said, “I’m so sorry! You be careful now,” but didn’t ask for more, kept quiet, had seen worse in his day. Ezra, creaking, groaning, too, took a window seat. Once he’d
bathed and gotten sorted out, he thought, he’d sit out on the stoop and his uncle would come out to drink coffee, and they’d talk and work things out, look at how things stood. Later he would get a message to Habib. Ezra sighed, the van came into life, and next his grateful ribs and tired chest closed gently round his heart and let him fall asleep.

  Upstairs at Abuu’s Guest and Rest, Lucy, though her throat felt oddly tight, was conscious of relief at the sight of a big woman. Abuu’s wife, wide-browed, round-cheeked, clean, perfumed, alert, was manning the reception. “Hallo, you’re welcome!” she called out. Lucy’s voice was shrill, unsteady. She managed: “Is there room?” The woman motioned to a set of keys behind her, hanging from a hook among a row of other hooks. She had no trouble telling when a person was unsettled, she was keen that way. Looking steadily at Lucy—because steadiness can spread, from one person to another—she asked for a deposit, which Lucy took a long time to hand over. There was the dress to be unbuttoned, slyly, at her waist, and the search inside the pouch, the crumpled bills, which she could not look at in advance but held balled in her fist as she zipped and buttoned up. The woman took her passport, eyed it, closed it, gave it back. “Lucy,” she said, with approval. Her voice was like a balm. “You came on a bus?” Lucy nodded, kept her mouth closed. Aware now of a sharpness in her bowels, a trembling in her throat, she was afraid to say too much. It was the suddenness of things, the fact of luggage disappearing in the night, things taken when you didn’t even know. Wasn’t it quite wrong to think something was safe only to find a gaping when one looked, an empty hold, with nothing? “Yes.”

  The woman dropped the pen she had uncapped and slid down from her stool. She moved slowly, too, but she was large and graceful. Lurching softly, holding her own back, then touching the long counter for a moment, she came around to Lucy’s side, made a tsk sound with her mouth, and placed a hand on Lucy’s elbow. Lucy leaned against it. She saw the empty bus-hold and her vision blurred, tenebrous dots. What’s happening to me? Lucy’s voice was thinning, but she heard herself: “I think I should lie down.” She wasn’t thinking straight. She tried to focus on the woman’s fine, plump feet moving in their sandals, tried to think, Bright shoes, that red, watched the woman’s ankles at the hem of her black coat. With the prospect of a room at last, with quiet, with an able woman showing her the way, all the brittleness she’d felt tamped down, prevented, at the bus stand was right there in her limbs, a cracking. It isn’t in my hands, she thought, feeling her heart race. What else is there to do?