Theft

by N. S. Köenings

  They walked along the balcony. Lucy, dizzy all at once, looked over the low ledge into the atrium. A bicycle down there, a palm tree in a tin, the cistern and a tap. Cracked basins in a pile. The details steadied her. Down the hall, the woman snapped a padlock down and drew the tongue aside, pushed inwards with her foot. “Number ten,” she said. Lucy came towards her. “Your towels.” A rough, bleached stack dropped into her hands, a key settled on top. “Just there. Is everything all right?”

  Lucy hadn’t looked into the room, but it had to be all right. “Thank you,” Lucy said, meaning it as much as someone like her could, as someone in her state, thinking first of all, I am going to sleep. The woman stood and watched her for a moment, as if about to ask, Are you sure you are all right, but Lucy braced herself against the doorframe and said, tight face like a snarl, “Yes, that’s all, I think.” The woman’s face closed then, and she turned back towards her files and countertop, one hand at her back.

  Behind the double doors, Lucy-who-had-lost-her-things let her purse fall to the floor, unbuttoned her blue dress, which also fell, covering her feet. She stood very still a moment, in the center of the room. Her hands moved to her head and clutched it, paused, and then, dissatisfied, fluttered off like birds to land, arms crossed, on her shoulders, as if she would hold herself. She couldn’t. Shivering and folding slowly at the waist, she felt the belted pouch and tried to loose its clasp, could not. Thought about her ticket, how yes, yes, it’s safe in there, then gulped and felt her throat close and her lungs constrict and then begin to shake. She tried to think about the things they sold on Walnut Street: brassieres, housedresses in three styles, four kinds of underwear, all decent, girdles, for shapes that really needed them, for back pain, large ones for incontinence, with flaps, and nightgowns, long and buttoned robes in white, in pink and blue. She recited model numbers, A23, A24, C62, P6, found that she could not recall which were the sleeved gowns and which the undershirts. She closed her eyes, which—like that Ezra’s, Lucy thought—were burning. Her hands moved down again then, rubbing at her throat, her bones, finding and then holding on to her small breasts as if she owned nothing else at all, and next she missed her bathing suit as if it were a child, and then was bent over quite in half and felt she couldn’t breathe.

  When Ezra woke up in the brightness—full day now, not too far from noon—Ufakiri Speed was halfway where he wished it. They’d passed the biscuit factories, the fields where prisoners labored, and the textile markets. They had gone up all the hills. Below them to the right, far beyond the miles of plantain groves and trash heaps, the city sat on a horizon, a blurry, distant clump, so small now that most of it could fit in his one eye. The aching in his side, which had subsided with his sleep, rolled up and came back. It rattled, tapping at his chest and hip like something trying to get out.

  He tested out his arm and found it stiff, still sore. He felt a man beside him, a pressure on his other hip that came from the outside. His neighbor turned to him—Ezra caught a narrow plane of dark brown shirt, rolled up at the cuffs, a well-fed arm, plumping near the wrist, in a wobbling periphery the promise of thick thighs. “My friend,” the neighbor said, in that way people have of bringing others into conversation, others they don’t know. “You are now awake. What happened to you?” Ezra groaned, tried to smile, and at his lip a crust of blood cracked and he stopped. “It’s nothing,” Ezra said. The wrist and hand rose up and curled over the edge of the narrow seat ahead. “I was afraid to sit, when I came in,” the man told him. “I thought you were dead.”

  The driver overheard. Hot laugh in the rearview mirror; he didn’t have to turn. “I had to tell him you were sleeping. I told him, ‘That one’s always fighting, but nothing gets him down.’” It wasn’t true at all. But the driver had a fantasy of fighting, liked the kung fu films, wished he could fight better, and admired people who withstood. And it was a kind of joking that made Ezra feel all right, better. He winced, but said, keeping his mouth small, “That’s me. A fighter.” “No, really, you all right? Are you going to a clinic?” When he said, “Ukilala,” the driver and the neighbor shared a look and didn’t speak. Ezra wondered if his voice was softer than he heard it. “Just to Ukilala,” Ezra said again.

  A bead of blood rose in the cracking at this lip, far juice from a dried orange. The neighbor shifted in his seat. In the rearview mirror, Ezra saw the driver shake his head and say, “O-o-ohh!” and the neighbor, softly, said, “I’m so sorry, sorry, I’m so sorry,” as if someone had died. The movements of the bus shoved Ezra closer to the window, and he pushed against it with his shoulder. He heard: “Going to see the ruins, eh? See what’s left behind?” “Don’t tell me you lived there!” Then, because now they could believe he didn’t know and saw that they should speak more kindly: “Were you right on the road?” Ezra’s swollen face could not show his frown. “I’ve been on the coast,” he said. “Now I’m going home.”

  The neighbor’s silence was a weight. The driver pressed his lips together, tight, though one sharp wayward tooth, longer than the rest and jutting, showed there like a sign. The man in the brown shirt did Ezra a kindness. He turned and brought his shoulders round, pressed against the seat ahead of him, so that Ezra’s eye could see his face when he said the next thing. A round face, well fed but not meanly so, not the kind of fat that was an insult or a sign of taking money from the poor. Round eyes set quite close. Eyebrows thick and sparse at once, dark dots in a line. Sweat on a wide nose. “Oh, my friend. Don’t say you haven’t heard?”

  “What’s that?” Ezra said, trying to lean in. The neighbor brought his hand down from the seat in front of them and touched Ezra on the arm. “They’re widening the road. At dawn, today, you know.” He stopped. The driver grew impatient, didn’t like the way some people gave bad news in slow bits. “Listen, man. The Caterpillars came,” he said. “Chop-chop. Tore the whole place down.”

  Before Ezra could think, Ufakiri Speed’s left tires fell into a pothole and the bus jumped, veered too close to the edge, and for a moment the fast wheels were caught on the wrong side of the grade. The passengers behind them shouted, cursed the driver’s inattention, and told him to do better. He brought them back up with a lurch, a triumph. “For myself, I thank God,” he said. “Wide roads. That’s what this country needs.” He was angry, with the man in brown and his wide face, and with Ezra, who’d come in looking like he couldn’t help himself, who’d collapsed in the first seat and gone to sleep so quickly. “Humans are not cows,” he said. “We know how to suffer.” Things were what they were. Poor Ezra.

  At Ukilala, the neighbor helped him down, blessed him with a sad and gloomy look, told him to be strong, then went on with his journey. It was hot; the flies were coming out. Ezra felt one at his mouth. His head twitched. Part of him was glad he couldn’t see it all. What the neighbor’d said was true. Permits cost too much, permits were denied, the city didn’t want these people here. And that meant, every now and then, sometimes here and sometimes there, that bulldozers arrived and without any notice tore people’s houses down. This wasn’t news to Ezra. Nor to anyone. Operation Whatnot. All over the place. But that it had happened here, right here while he was gone, was another shock. The curbside was a shambles, there was no denying it. He was first of all aware of rubble at his feet, of jagged cement blocks all across the ground. The gouges, gullies in the earth.

  The things he’d known at the bus stop—a strip of sand before the houses, where boys sold cigarettes and gum, stands for T-shirts and old shoes, were gone. A sea of broken stuff. Things not crushed—what had once been a wooden table, dry stumps here and there, split off from the top—were torn or cracked, on sides or upside down. Bottles, flour sacks, a broken chair, a crippled goatskin stool, a bright red dress with pleats, through its neck a gallon jug and splintered wooden spoon, shards of broken glass. A woman’s yellow dance shoe, buckle loose, the stuffing of a pillow. A portrait of the president, its skewed frame partly covered by a Chinese metal bowl. Dust and rubble. R
uin.

  Behind him on Ujenzi Road the cars and trucks whipped by, some busses, throwing up in clouds what had been torn down—the cement dust, the lime! The air tasted like chalk. If trucks could think, they would have had these thoughts: more room for us, more room. And it was true. A lot of room for trucks, now. Ezra tried to think: How far had they been from the road? Not as close as this, right? Uncle had insisted on the garden in the front, for the daughters and their girls—who lived for roses, didn’t they, and jasmine? Had the space left for the garden been enough to keep the house alive?

  He tried remembering with his feet. Here and there he saw things and knew exactly what they were. Along the way, a patch of what had once been Gideon Juma’s radio bar: sesame sweets and kwassa, soukkous, kidumbak and taarab tapes, shortwaves, now and then a boom box, players for cassettes. The wooden sign he’d nailed up just below the little shack’s tin roof was jutting from the ground (the slats, bright red, green, and gold) from a pile of what had, just the day before—while Iffat was making plans, he thought, while I was counting cash—been radios: now a mat of black plastic and wires, the glittering of resistors, red, black, yellow beadlets in the sun, a puddle of blue batteries. Tangled audiotape, shining like burnt grass. Gideon, Ezra thought, never left that stand, guarded that equipment with his life—who would want them now? The scavenging, he thought, could not have started yet.

  He was struggling to find a clear space for his weight when Tillat the seamstress came to him, from which direction Ezra couldn’t tell. But suddenly Tillat was there, holding up a cupboard door, a nice one, nakshi-carved with lotus flowers, bright brass handle at the edge. “Ho! Ezra. Where’ve you been? Where were you when we fell?” Tillat had been drinking. She was laughing, the three teeth she still had awiggle in her mouth. “Widening the road,” she said, “widening the road!” She handed him the cupboard door, and Ezra took it from her, set it down. “The cupboard’s gone,” she said. “I still have my machine, thank God. But you know what?” Tillat steadied herself on his arm, not noticing his wounds at all. He felt her sour breath and took it in, as if the smell would keep him sharp. “I had three orders in and half paid for pretty curtains. Curtains. I’ll never see that other half. For what windows, I ask you?” Ezra didn’t speak. He was thinking of the luggage hold, of this, of Tillat’s cloth, and even about curtains, of the things that happen that a person doesn’t know.

  Suddenly Tillat was gone from his one eye and Ezra set the door down at his feet and turned to look for her. She was not far away, behind him, holding her wide skirts high above her knees. He could hear her moan. That laughter. Her whimpers troubled him, for his own sake, and hers, too. Tillat was a force, a strong one, clearheaded even when she drank. If old Tillat was whimpering like this, what about the uncle, who was given now and then to dazes, to not responding when one spoke? What about the radio man, whose eyes teared up when the Kudra Birds or Morning Star sang sweet songs about love?

  He called out to her. “Where’s Gideon Juma gone? Still here?” Tillat laughed, this laugh so hard that she bent over and it sounded like a cough, a private falling down. “Still here? Ho! A part of him remains.” She gestured to the ground with a thin arm, then with a wild look in her eye, she shook her wrist at him like a woman showing off a ring. “He left some fingers here, my love. I haven’t found them yet.” Someone, she said, squeezing the words out, someone—she could not recall exactly who, mind you—had dragged him to the clinic. “He was in here when they came! Drunkard, don’t you know.” In a sudden billow of hot dust, Ezra couldn’t see her.

  Standing in the midst of things, Ezra felt some thanks for his own injuries, which were broiling now, pulsing in the heat. Glad his side was hurting. Pain enough right here, he thought. Tillat, lifting up one foot and then another, began a dance among the radios. “What about my uncle?” Tillat didn’t answer him, was reeling now, pulling up her skirts. Ezra closed his eyes. A barb curled in his stomach just below his ribs and he stopped a moment at a pile of cement moldings, hearts and stars and diamonds, disordered now, but high enough to lean on. His hand closed over them and he had to laugh a little, too. Here’s Habib’s new wall. Graceful Habib Pawpaw, who sold vegetables and fruit—bananas, guavas, coconuts when he had the luck to find them, papayas most of all, and who, a lot of people knew, made real money singing on the other side of town, where he called himself Habiba. Habiba Pawpaw, who made Ezra laugh, who talked to him as though he really liked him, and for whom the uncle only felt disdain. That sweet fruit stand was gone—but that fruit stand, and the square he’d kept free for the nursery he’d planned, had saved his little house. Habib’s place was all right.

  Ezra turned then towards the uncle’s, wishing as he did so that both his eyes were closed. The garden had done something for them, yes. But now it was a pit, and the front half of the new, not yet finished house was gone—not exactly gone, but buckled and reordered, crumpled, not strong and square where it had been; huddled like a pack of just mixed cards or an accordion pressed shut against the inner courtyard wall. The three front rooms were lost. He did not take the time to think about Tillat—to think, I understand now, I know why she was laughing, why she was standing on the radios kicking at the wires, why her skirts were high. Ezra couldn’t take another step. He started laughing, too, until he couldn’t hear the trucks behind him anymore, until his one good eye had closed and tears were streaming from it, real ones now, not simply from disruption of the flesh. He knew that laughing wouldn’t help, he knew this and he sniffed, spread his fingers out across his thighs and tried to hold it down. It wasn’t funny this, at all. But his laughter rose like a sick thing. He couldn’t help himself.

  Habib Pawpaw saved him. In a high and lilting voice, like a bird calling from nowhere, Habib, who always said things twice, said, “Ezra, Ezra.” That voice was aiming for him. Ezra felt it and was glad, and then Habib was right there next to Ezra, telling him and telling him to stop.

  There’d been too much laughing since the morning, stuttered waves from gaping mouths and sneaking up in sudden barks and pops from others who did not think they were afraid, and Habib understood far better than some that even if you learned to shut it off, which you could do, it could take you over any time at all, even after years, and each time it rose up it was much harder to control. “Calm down, calm down,” he said. “Basi, now, yes, basi.” Ezra, laughing still, opened the one eye. All at once, Habib said: “Stop that or I’ll hit you,” and Ezra was surprised enough at hearing Habib Pawpaw—so gentle he kept food aside for cats and even gave them names—say he’d hurt someone, that quiet came at once.

  He tried to look at him and to believe in what he saw: Habib was not hurt. Both of his hands whole. Feet right there where they should be at the bottom of his legs. A bit of blood on his white gown, not white now but brown. But Habib was neither bent in half nor weeping. His wandering eye still wandered. He was even smiling, and his sweet face, lit partly by the sun, looked almost as it should. “Ezra, Ezra,” Habib said again.

  He seemed to understand that Ezra was not well—had suffered other things than this, and that this, on top of whatever else it was, had made poor Ezra fragile. Habib moved in close and put his arms around him from behind to hold him up. “Your uncle is with me, with me,” he said. Ezra could feel Habib’s breath on his shoulder, soft, like cardamom and tea, and the way that Habib held him made Ezra feel as though he’d been washed up by a wave, that he could rest, at last. Habib said again, as if in a song (and this made Ezra wish to cry in a clean way, with relief, instead of this hard laughter), “Your uncle is all right, all right.” Ezra heard all right, all right, and when he let his weight fall back, Habib’s sweet mouth crooned into his ear.

  At Abuu’s Guest and Rest, although she did not know that that was what they were, and could not have told the time, Lucy woke to the powdery and muffled sounds of early afternoon. A lot had happened while she slept—an entire morning in the life of the hotel. A city’s life, indeed. She’d missed:
Abuu, the woman’s husband, stepping out, headed to the market where he would be shopping for some time and next would sit with other men like him to drink coffee in glass cups; the arrival of the girl who did the washing and who cooked, that girl who was a flirt. Lucy missed the sound of street boys high from shoe-polish and glue saying hey now would she trade a sniff for a quick fuck and the girl’s loud laughing back. Her thumping up the steps and next her sweeping all the floors, the scraping of the brush, shuh-shuh-shuh-shuh-shuh, which Abuu’s wife told her to quiet down because the white guests who slept late didn’t like the sound. Laundry being done, the taps, their rapid jet of water. The slapping, mossy sound of feet. Just before eleven, floating on a sea of engine growl and rattle, radio tunes, the prayer calls; a silence, then the rush-rush-woop of someone sifting rice. The quiet of a mealtime. At one o’clock, the stores closed. Taxi drivers stopped to rest if they’d been at it for a while. The city sounds receded. Abuu took up the front desk and sent his wife to sleep. The air went thick and slow, slept, too, and into this fat quiet, in the swelling median of a gentle midday pause, Lucy finally woke.