Theft

by N. S. Köenings

  After one too many giggles, he thought Ayeesha’s pals perhaps were smarter than their tests showed. He sensed them getting free, that they took advantage of his gazing to do things they should not. Doodling designs for henna, for example, which they were not allowed, or planning tricks on him. Helpless, he feared humiliation. He tried to shake himself. Too much, the teacher finally thought. There are other girls to think of, girls who need my help. I must, I must, he told himself, reduce my looking at the girl Ayeesha’s feet! There were state exams to shoot for, after all, and lessons to be made. He struggled. And because there was some strength in him, some vision in the mist, before the girls could say to anyone—their brothers, parents, village leaders, for example—that surely he was mad, the teacher took a turn.

  Tugging on the blanket sharply like a mother snapping at a sleeve to get a brutish boy’s attention, Shama interrupts. “Listen, what does she think?” she asks me. Who? I say, frowning so she’ll know I am annoyed. “Ayeesha, the girl? This teacher man of yours, okay, I see. But what about Ayeesha?” Shama’s leaning forward so her chin is not far from my bed. In the light from the high window, her cheeks have a gray glow. “This is about Ayeesha, have you been listening at all?” But half of Shama’s pleasure lies in contradicting me. She lets the blanket go, and, watching, blows hard air through her nose. She won’t speak unless I do. “Well, what about the girl?” I ask. Shama shakes her head. She says, “I would not stand for such behavior.”

  Shama, I believe, has visions of herself firmly in control, issuing refusals, and pointing out injustice. She would like Ayeesha to be ferreting her feet under the hem of her long gown, or drawing, inappropriately, her feet up from the floor to hide them at her bottom, between her flesh and chair. Think? I say. She isn’t thinking, Shama, this thing is happening to her. Shama raises her eyes sadly to the window and nods her head just once, as though motioning to someone I can’t see, to say, Just listen to this talk. She looks at me and shakes her head some more.

  I say, She doesn’t think, Shama, she’s just sixteen and she isn’t very bright. “Bright?” Shama has an ear for double-talk. “Just wait, you, this is how you started.” She makes her voice sharp in her nose, set to mimic me: “‘Such a head for numbers, isn’t it? Such a clever, shapely girl.’ Oh, ‘Will get an office job!’ But can’t see teacher’s eyeballs suckle as if toes could give out milk? What a story.” Come on, Shama, I say, the foot thing’s almost done. “All right, all right,” she says. She covers up her own toes with her hand and smoothes the blanket down. “Go on.”

  Now then, I will say, too good to be upset by a minor interruption. To free himself of thoughts of feet, the teacher moved his eyes. “Well, finally,” says Shama. Yes, Feet stay on the ground, he told his sorry self. Your eyes must leave them there. The teacher man decided he should seek out higher things. But sensible will only go so far. So, I say, eywah, he looked up. But lucky? Or unlucky? When he saw Ayeesha’s face, his mistiness and vagueness became something else entirely. A face is mightier than feet. He understood his destiny, or something. He approached her and he spoke. I offer you tuition, said the teacher. When all the girls have gone. On Thursday afternoons. His voice shook hard, but his courageous eyes did not. Ayeesha, if you’re wondering, thought this was just fine. She did vaguely consider office work, and it was clear this teacher liked her. So why not? A girl with unformed aspirations, a girl exactly on the verge, you see, should take help where she can. Tuition, Ayeesha told her mother. Free. So I will pass the state exams.

  Ayeesha’s mother, a hard-worked woman whose proud head was ever-cradled by a bitter cloud of worry for the future, in the end, agreed. First, a smarter child is all you can depend on when the men you had have died or otherwise escaped. And second, if the teacher had designs on this fine girl, Ayeesha’s mother might have something she could trade (a teacher, don’t you know, must keep a reputation). Ayeesha, for her part, focused only on the nearest of the future, was delighted. Her own family—a mother, sister, little boys, no dad, and no one old—had none, really, to speak of. And we shall not speak of them. But weren’t men the ones who did things, could find long roads in the world? The teacher man was strange, she knew, but still, he was a man. She piped up, he listened. She could see he would be gentle.

  So. Cool room, cool desks, blue shadows from the yard, Ayeesha’s fingers wrapped around a pen. A little bit of work. Tender teacher asking questions, probing at her mind. Bidding her recite all manner of wise things—GDP and GNP, for Peru and for Korea, verses, a sura here and there. At first he was quite proper. Then? You know. He couldn’t help it, in the end, though it did occur in steps.

  With Ayeesha, after the other girls had gone, the teacher liked to sit down at his desk. No need to pace the room with only one sweet girl to talk to. Moreover, if he sat, and she sat, too, he couldn’t see her feet. He could focus on her face. How bright and handsome this girl was! One day, he asked Ayeesha to come closer, which she did. She brought a chair across the tiles, not lifting it but dragging it so that with the sound of wood on floor there slid a heavenly thick stroke all up the teacher’s spine. He must have known what he was doing—for closeness, we agree, gives rise only to itself.

  On another afternoon, as she scrawled the word gratuity in English on a sheet he had prepared, he touched Ayeesha’s hand. Ayeesha, surprised but not surprised, let out a comely gasp, curled her hand into a ball, unfurled it, and touched his. Something in him melted. Ayeesha put her pencil down and rose. She had seen this looming, after all, why not get up to meet it? Teacher also rose. Next he draped his arms around her and gave a mighty squeeze. “I’ve never done a thing like this!” exclaimed this tenderest of teachers, chin hairs all aquiver, concealing with his shoulders and his back the verses he had written on the chalkboard earlier that day for his students to absorb. Nor had our Ayeesha, but, splendid feet still firmly on the ground, certain without having ever tried them of her very special skills, she wiped the board with him. They shook, they shivered, Ayeesha gave out dainty giggles now and then and the teacher man a moan. Just kisses and some pressing, mind you, nothing too dramatic. But still! When the thrilled and shaken twosome finally left the room, the poetry was gone, embedded now among the folds and pockets of their astounded clothes.

  Just as I expect, Shama takes a moment to talk back. “This I don’t believe,” she says. “He didn’t do the thing?” There’s a shudder and a roundness in the way my Shama’s mouth offers up the three words do the thing. I smile. I wait while Shama waits for me. But her whole face has gone sour and she won’t wait very long. “He kissed her, that was all? Listen, I will hear a thousand lies before I die and for some I may be a fool. But this? A girl wrapped right around his neck and letting him embed things in her clothes, and he stops at just a kiss?” I say, What, you want them hot-hot in the classroom? I wonder, as I often have, what Shama’s own man did when she was straight and slim. He’s useless now, but surely in his youth he had a fetching move or two.

  Don’t you like romance? If I did not know better I would say Shama snarls at me. “Romance, he says.” She’s talking to that unseen friend of hers, who sympathizes quietly with Shama’s every doubt. “It’s all a trick,” she says now. “He’ll make her think it’s only kisses and one day he will lock the door behind her and go fishing in his pants.” When Shama is upset it’s often best not to respond. I wait. I pluck at the frayed edge of my blanket. I raise my face up to the avenue of light that links my window to the floor. There’s a hint of frying in the air, and something sour, too. I’ll wait until she’s begging me to talk. Smell that? I ask. Wouldn’t some jelebies do us good, Shama, or some gulab jamun? Visheti, if you please? You know, I say, as far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing more to tell. And sugar would be sweet.

  But Shama comes around. “All right,” she says. “But remember I have things to do upstairs. Cleaning, cooking, looking at the television. Fruit juices to make. So if there’s something good here, you ought to hurry up.” Something
good, she says. As though I am not the good thing that she needs, adoring tales aside.

  At first the kisses and the clutching were enough for this girl’s teacher. But one day, he had a catchy thought. As Ayeesha struggled to describe, in writing, the geography of Spain, the teacher (misinformed as to the precise relation between local theater and cash, and the economy of film) declared, “I’ll make you a star.” She squinted at him in the dimness of the room. “A star?” He rose up from the desk and looked, for once, away from her into the courtyard. Being in some sense an artist, he deciphered in the dust motions and potentials that Ayeesha could not fathom. “Oh yes,” he said. He took a great, loud breath that swelled his concave chest and gave him, for a moment, the look of a proud bird. “I am a playwright, don’t you know?” The teacher’s fate was sealed by sight, ten toes, good feet, and eventually a face, but Ayeesha’s domino was the sound of an idea. “Don’t you want to act, Ayeesha? To speak my words, perform fantastic feeling? Make an audience cry?” Acting. Yes. Why not? Maybe she’d been waiting just for this her whole, entire life. Shama likes this moment, too. She’s quiet. I go on.

  Ayeesha’s first: she played an educating mother, touting modern methods to keep one’s children clean. Next, she made a moving, socialistic speech while boys acting the part of Britishmen were sheepish to the left. Ayeesha’s mother said she couldn’t see what playacting in the courtyard had to do with state exams, but it was certain the most modern villagers approved. Ayeesha’s teacher sent word to her mother that Ayeesha was the most capable girl he’d ever had the pleasure to— And Ayeesha’s mother thought, Teachers know their business, and turned her eyes away. In Ayeesha, who found unexpected satisfaction in the accolades, and in declaring noble feelings, the acting seed was sown. For almost a full year Ayeesha studied, acted, stroked his glowing face when no one saw, and all in all thought her trembling teacher fine. He himself had longer visions of the two of them, well married, putting plays on with a parading, endless stream of students, for years and years, until their own plump kids were writing plays for blooming actors in new courtyards, and it was time for him to die.

  But girls as bright and gifted as Ayeesha often feel that something sharp in them will perish if they simply settle down. One Friday, after a successful piece that centered on the benefits of state-supported inputs for the growth of river wheat, Ayeesha’s eyes got bigger. Her slender lover’s city friends, with whom the teacher had attended university, had come down for the show. Precocious and demure, good-humored, well proportioned, and apparently naive, she charmed them. The teacher let her sit among them in the modern city style and allowed his friends to tease her. They had, they said, enjoyed her soundly in the play. These young men from the city seemed, and were, wise and quite artistic. Nothing like her playwright, who, she saw now very clearly, had come down in the world. Ayeesha saw a future vista, gleaming.

  One of the sophisticated visitors—whose heart contained not simply enervated blood but also a real vision (and who knew, besides, a professional director and someone else in casting)—must have seen it too. He whispered to her when he left, and slipped into Ayeesha’s sweaty hand a scrap of folded paper. What was written there? His own sister’s address. And this other little bundle? Bus fare, too, quick thinker. Ayeesha kissed her teacher man that night, expressly making promises she knew she could not keep. Later on she kissed her sleeping mother. The bus fare was exact; the address was neither false nor dangerously shabby. The teacher’s city friend was true. He did put her in films.

  Because Shama interrupts me, pulling at the sheet and saying “Psst,” I am lifted out of Egypt, no longer on my way to Cairo in an early morning bus, and find myself in bed. “So?” she says. “What about the boy, this Khaled?” Shama is, as usual, a step ahead of where I want her. First it was Ayeesha before she came into her own, and now she wants the boy. What about Ayeesha, I ask her, what about her, first? “That’s his mother, hanh?” Shama, light of my dim life she is, finds it hard to sit and wait. I remind myself that if she didn’t love me she would not come every day and ask me for some talk. I remind myself that Shama took me in and that without her I might be somewhere else indeed. I remind myself as well of other, painful things.

  But, I want to know, was Ayeesha too ungrateful? Should she have told her mother? Kept the money for herself? Used it on a sewing machine to set up her own shop? What would you have done? And, what I am always thinking, Shama, what about your sister? Shama doesn’t pay attention in the way I want her to, but today I will insist. Ayeesha. Did you like her? Shama lets go of the sheet and she reclines again. She sometimes likes her own voice, too. “Like her? You want me to listen close, then you ask me to stop and think now did you like her? I should do two things at once? And life’s not about like, old man,” she says. Shama’s closed one eye, and she curls her nose at me. She wears a tiny stud there made of glass. It twinkles. “This is all for what’s-his-name, this Khaled, is it not? Or did I hear you wrong?”

  I know why she’s focused on the boy. Shama knows my tricks, you see, that I have girls beneath my pillow and think one of them’s for her. She wants and does not want Ayeesha. Both eyes open now, she’s saying something serious. “I know what you are thinking,” Shama says. “But she’s nothing like my sister.” The glass shard flashes like a signal. “My sister, for example,” Shama says, “did not know what boys were for. And if you think”—she’s stretching now, pushing with her hands down on the floor to lift her bottom up and get right on her feet—“that girl could spell a single word in English, well, I’m Jomo Kenyatta.”

  Shama is not Jomo Kenyatta. Heroine, perhaps, but on a one-man, dim-room scale. Though faith in her I have, she could neither sway a crowd nor bring the British to their knees. Plus Mr. Kenyatta was as straight and slender as an arrow, almost—well, almost—to the end. Okay, I say. But what about the bus ride? She couldn’t have met a nice young man who put some shillings in her fingers and told her where to go? Been led away somewhere? Shama doesn’t think so. “Too scared to walk to school without me by her side,” she says without a bit of doubt, as if she’s thought about this question for some years, though she often says I think about her absent sibling far more than she does. She’s bending over now, picking up the bowl my soup came in, and reaching for the tray. Her back makes giant shadows on the wall. “You said this was about a boy, old man.” She thinks my sister-medicine is just a fool idea. “You don’t treat what doesn’t hurt.” Of course I think she’s lying. That vanished little sister has been sliding gummy hands along her Shama’s shoulder blades and neck now for some years, don’t think I don’t know.

  “Wait a little, Shama. Wait, okay? The boy’s not far away.” Shama looks down at the empty bowl and senti platter. “The boy,” she says, although her voice is not quite right. She is not ready to look up. This all began exuberantly, with us avoiding sisters, but now we’ve hit a sharp thing in the air. It was foolish work, perhaps, to start this story with a boy. We both remember now why I am not allowed upstairs.

  Before I moved into Shama’s downstairs room, I slept in her uncle Akberali’s shop. I made no secret of the fact that he was only being kind and that I gave him nothing, but Akberali liked to tell his friends that I was his night watchman. A Samburu man had been employed for years, to watch the shop from the outside. That man, with his violet gown and spear and glorious braided hair, checkerboard beside him, was wide awake all night, a professional, an expert. But when I met him, Akberali felt a sudden need for someone with the goods, you see, someone else for the inside. Night watchman! I slept among the sugar sacks and boxes, turning in my sleep and slapping at the walls whenever I awoke to the nasty sounds of mice. I’m not a guard, I’d joke with Akberali in the morning, I’m a cat, which made Akberali smile. When the shop was open I boiled coffee for the customers, who sometimes came to sit. Now and then Akberali stroked me as he passed when no one saw, just here along my chin, or there, along my arm, as though I were a girl. He sometimes spent an evening wi
th me. Things were fine with us until Akberali died. His wife—a skinny thing, nothing round to speak of, hard skull full of missing teeth—sold the shop and shoved off to Nairobi. She had no use for any cat. And so Shama took me in, because, just like Akberali’s, Shama’s heart is soft for wicked things like me.

  I used to visit all the time, up there, before my feet became too heavy to be taken up the stairs. This is what we say. “You can’t manage without help,” says Shama. “If you went up the stairs, with your fallen-asleep feet, you’d need three of us to hold you. And what if the steps broke underfoot?” This is Shama wanting to forget the truth about my exile, what Shama’s husband’s mother maintains happened with the boy. I don’t complain as I once did. It is easier to leave things as they stand, sometimes. As Shama also says, when she is not insisting that truth is all we need and lies are serpents in the wrinkles of our clothes, “Better to have people think exciting things, or what? Never mind that they’re not true.” Perhaps she says this to be kind. In any case, at present, Shama wants the boy, and now that we’ve paused awkwardly and both remembered what we have contracted not to mention, I am ready to proceed. Do you have time for this? I ask. That boy is really on his way.

  Shama’s face looks vaguely like her uncle’s in the dissipating light. Her compact forehead is a smooth, familiar dome. She sits herself back down, but keeps her hands flat on the floor beside her to imply she’s in a hurry. “All right,” she says, opting for some courage. “But boy there’d better be.” I think, How unafraid we are. Sisters, boys, lost girls, escapes, and little loves, all looking very separate, I see, but very much the same. Now then, Shama, I tell her. Girls don’t make a baby by themselves. First we need a man.

  In films, Ayeesha tried on varied loves like gowns and paint and shoes. She liked to take up new emotions and to feel them very deeply. She meant every word she said the moment that she said it. How sweet to be a sister! Ayeesha told herself—never minding she had left some small, dear siblings weeping in the country. How dear to be abandoned by a brutal, brooding man! Yet she, and no one else, just yet, had always done the leaving. How sad and dark to be bereft of one’s own pious, loving ma. Ayeesha’s mother, ruthless in her piety, let us not forget to say, had quite forgotten her.