It was not that Zulfa wished to be in Husna’s place. She’d been married. She had cooked and cleaned and swept and sliced the throats of chickens for Kassim Majid’s guests. She’d burned medicines for him and hosted all his visitors: healers, who hobbled up the hill with plain baskets dangling on their arms, denying (coyly so, because really, they were hungry) that they wished to stay for meals; Kassim Majid’s relatives, who asked for money (which he never once released); and neighbor women, who came to take a close-up look at the poor thing who’d granted their own young girls reprieve. She’d rubbed herself with scented oils the way she had been taught; she had suffered all her husband’s doings. She knew what being married was, she thought.
What she liked about being with Masoud Hamad was feeling free: that he took her places she wanted to go; that he wanted to please her; that he so wanted to please her that he had opened up the Fancy Store and let her make some money of her own, which she could choose to spend. If he ever married her, she thought, pleasing her would no longer be so vital. And besides, she told herself, she had other things to do.
But seeing Husna made Zulfa feel afraid. Husna did look happy. Despite the other wives, perhaps even due to them, Husna lived in pleasure. Perhaps the other wives were happy, too. If Zulfa asked herself, Why aren’t I happy as they are, she sometimes blamed Masoud. But she also felt a trembling at her feet and remembered more frequently than ever that she really did want to seek and see the world. My freedoms here are temporary, Zulfa thought. So, after seeing Husna, not knowing what else she should do, Zulfa took her tiny Chinese key with her everywhere she went.
When she saw Masoud next, Zulfa’s feelings burst, and she crossed a crucial line. They had been standing on the highest hill in town, among Masoud’s father’s clove trees, looking out across the rice fields and the many miles of dusty boughs at a sliver of blue sea. Assured of his good taste, Masoud said, “From Kenya,” and handed her a tiny packet wrapped in pink translucent paper. Zulfa eyed his fingers for a moment, as though they were an interesting gadget, and then, without quite knowing why, as though they were a mousetrap. She looked up at Masoud and felt her eyes go narrow. Oh, there was something soft about his face, she thought, but could that be enough? She sighed. She didn’t wait to be alone. Inside the packet was a slender russet vial of thick halud, topped with a gold cap the size of a small marble. She looked back at Masoud and saw him hold his breath. But instead of thinking what a gift it was, of how sweet the oil would smell, a question came to her: Did he bring Husna the same thing? She held the vial between her first finger and thumb. Did he give her nineteen bottles, and I’m getting number twenty? In an unexpected dissolution that Zulfa at first did not understand, the skin around her mouth and nose suddenly went loose, her legs beneath her burned.
Masoud quickly brought his hands towards her, to catch her if she fell. “What’s wrong, mpenzi wangu?” In the clove trees, his voice echoed. A cluster of wild pigeons panicked in the leaves. “Star of my sky, my love,” he said. “How have I upset you?” He knelt beside her and tugged her free hand down so that she would join him on the ground. He found a desiccated palm frond and slipped it just beneath her buttocks before they touched the earth.
Zulfa wept from fury. She knew the reasons for her anger. Specifically, she was angry at Masoud for bringing her a gift that she desired. More generally, she was angry that he took such good care of his wives. She was also angry that he had given her the Fancy Store, pretending he was doing it for free.
How merrily he could pretend! So merrily that she relaxed, sometimes, and thought, Masoud and I will be a pair of man and woman friends, like this, forever. Yes, she liked him, sometimes she really did. And then she would remember that everything he gave her had a secret string attached, a hopeful little noose. When he says how nice it is that I am free, he only means he likes it now. When he says he’ll let me travel, he means he’ll let me visit Warda in the city, call me every day, send his cousins after me, and fetch me in a week. Zulfa knew what marriage was. She would have to find another girl to mind the store six months into the thing—or worse, Masoud would find one on his own. When he sat down beside her and laid his knuckles lightly on her face, Zulfa didn’t say these things. If you didn’t keep some things very quiet, Zulfa told herself, you’d drown.
“What is it, dear?” Masoud asked, in his smooth and round, fine, best loudspeaker voice. Zulfa scowled at him through her tears, thinking, I’m going to see America, do you understand me? If she had spoken out then, in the black shade of the clove trees, if she’d laid it on the line, things might have gone differently between them. But her tongue was cold and fat, and she didn’t think he’d understand. All she felt was mad.
Masoud thought she couldn’t speak because she was too full of love, and so of course he sympathized. “Basi, basi,” he said softly, stroking Zulfa’s shoulder. “Stop. I’m going to send someone on my behalf to tell your father that I’m ready.” He slipped his arm around her. “We’ll tell him right away.” Masoud thought Zulfa was finally admitting that a pretty house, a television, and a freezer might be all it took for joy. It was just the right thing to have said. Zulfa’s weeping had made her feel confused, but when Masoud said, “We’ll tell him right away,” she felt her tears go dry. Her world came into focus.
She felt newly like a beast with thick strong legs and wicked teeth. When Masoud moved to squeeze her towards him, Zulfa pulled his hand down from her shoulder to her mouth. She opened wide and clamped down on his forearm. She bit him near the elbow, where his warm flesh was the softest. She drew blood. Masoud, for his part, looked as though she had, before his very eyes, transformed herself into a dog. Shocked, really. Terrified. He fell and she rose. He twisted on the ground. His face was horrible. He looked as though he might start crying, too.
Zulfa’s tongue felt loose again. Looking down at him from a long height, she said, “You won’t, Masoud Hamad. You won’t. You won’t, and don’t you dare.” She was thinking, Don’t you ever listen?
They had gotten up the hill on Masoud’s Honda, and though it sometimes seemed to Zulfa that she’d forgotten all the footpaths she’d once known, she made it back to Usilie through the brush. It seemed to her for once that, just as she insisted to Masoud but couldn’t ever prove, she could indeed find her own way.
After the proposal in the clove trees, Zulfa’s private cash box acquired a pleasing shine. “You keep a third of everything,” Masoud had said. “No tricks.” Zulfa had kept track from the beginning. She’d been storing savings all along. But when she got home the day she bit Masoud, she opened the blue notebook to make doubly, triply, sure that she’d been taking what was hers. She opened her own box and the next, the box in which she kept the profits due Masoud. She counted out the stuff four times, in different ways: first the small notes, then the big ones; then the other way around; then the coins before the cash; then the coins from small to big—the silver tens and fifties to the hundreds; then again, reversed.
Biting now and then at the slender cap of her pin-striped Speedo pen, she made careful calculations. Bit by bit, avid, angry, wounded, Zulfa sensed a new economy on the open pages, its parameters now injury and love. Feeling justified and true, possessed, she determined a significant additional percentage. Her eyes drilled through the blue notebook and at the numbers written there and down into her lap until her eyes swam and her legs and fingers hurt. Then, with all of that—the cash, the coins, the records, more—underneath her pillow, she slept through dinner and past the prayer call at dawn. In the morning, Warda told Habiba she thought Zulfa was sick, and Habiba brought a bowl of lemon-chile-pepper-plantain-broth, to make her daughter better.
The doors of Our Price Is Your Price Fancy Store did not open for a week. Masoud’s arm was healing nicely. The shock was what had hurt the most. His boiling love for Zulfa had not cooled. As he moved between Usilie, Hausemeki, and the third wife’s little village, he stopped eight times at Habiba’s, pretending to be passing by on business.
But the messages he gave Habiba for her daughter were like this: Please, is she very ill? Will she see me now? When will she forgive?
At first Habiba was protective (“No, she isn’t well” or “She’s not seeing anyone”), and then she grew ashamed. (“Please, Masoud, don’t come for a few days. I’ll see what I can do.”) Habiba wanted Zulfa to get up and be as well as she had been. But she knew that Zulfa had been living in a dream. Habiba was approaching Abeid’s view of things. Masoud takes good care of his wives, Habiba thought, maybe better than my husband does of his. How could Zulfa back out now, after all he’d done for her? Clearly, Masoud hadn’t given up, and, no matter what he’d said to Zulfa, or what Zulfa said to everyone, about the Fancy Store being nothing but a business, the shop had been a ruse. Habiba thought, I know how men are.
The seventh time, Masoud told Zulfa’s father, “We’re in business together, Mzee Abeid. What am I to think?” Mzee Abeid, on his way to Babu Issa’s and wishing he had not run into Masoud, grunted sadly at the ground. Masoud wouldn’t leave him be. “If you’re a businessman, Mzee, you can’t let a rope go slack.” Mzee Abeid was not a businessman, but he admired businessmen and felt at least in theory that if a person made a promise, he should really carry through. He also felt that if he could, he’d like to make Masoud feel welcome. Who would take poor Zulfa off their hands if this man changed his mind? Pointing with his head in the direction of his second household, as if in explanation, Zulfa’s father said, “You know how women are.”
The last message Masoud brought, the one that finally pulled Zulfa out of bed, was “Your moods are bad for business.” But before she went back to the Fancy Store, she invited Masoud into Habiba’s house and stated her position. “I won’t be married to you yet,” she said, after a soft pause adding “dear.” How much he had missed her! How tired and delicate she was. In the gentle morning light, arranging cups and opening the thermos, she looked almost wifely, Masoud thought. “First, as I have told you many times, I am going to travel.” She poured two tiny cups of coffee. After so many parched and desperate days, Masoud was happy just to be beside her. The coffee tasted good.
“I’ll work with you until I get the money to take myself a trip. I have a cousin in the U.S.A.,” Zulfa continued. “And others are in London. I’m going to visit them to say I’ve been, that I have seen it with my eyes.” Zulfa’s chin was set, but she wasn’t angry anymore. She felt that the divorce from old Kassim Majid had been granted her precisely so she could do something important. Looking at the plain, flat face of the Toshiba, Zulfa said, “When I come back, I’ll marry you.” Her dim reflection added, “If you’ll let me go, I’ll love you. Then we’ll make some babies.”
Masoud heard I’ll marry you, and babies. He thought any baby Zulfa had would be more lovely than the moon. His cup shook in his hands. When he set it on the mat, he spilled some of the dark stuff in the weave. Zulfa looked down at his fingers, then at the mouth-shaped emblem on her business partner’s arm. “But I’m not marrying you just yet.” She dribbled water on the coffee stain and wiped it with a cloth. She didn’t mention traveling again. Masoud left Habiba’s with a bouncing in his knees
Zulfa took up her old place at the counter the next day. In her notebook, she made lists of things to do. When Masoud’s cousin passed, she offered him some bills, and he gave up the cell phone for an hour. She called a school friend of her brothers’ on the big island of Mjimkuu and asked him to please find her a fare. (“Maybe for my mother,” Zulfa said. “I am planning a surprise.”) She telephoned Habiba’s younger sister, who also lived there with her husband. She dropped hints about how she might make a visit, vaguely, sometime soon. She gently fished, as though she didn’t need it, for important information. And everything she learned she wrote in the blue book, in a special, secret code.
When Masoud came to see her, she was kind and reassuring. She didn’t mention London or the U.S.A. Masoud thought Zulfa was finally getting used to how things were. Whenever he reminded her, just to feel his heart balloon, that they were going to be married, Zulfa smiled at him the way she had when they’d first spoken at Nazir’s. “Be patient, now,” she’d say. The more her notebook filled with information, the more her cash box swelled, the easier it was to smile up at Masoud and not remind him of the condition she had set. Sometimes she forgot she’d ever mentioned babies.
Babu Issa at the coffee stand was glad things at the Fancy Store were back to normal. He was as good at math as Zulfa was. When the Fancy Store was open, Babu Issa sold more sweets. From his hilltop threshold at the gristmill, Babu Omari looked down to where Babu Issa’s men were drinking and over to the Fancy Store. Now and then Zulfa’s high voice carried on the breeze, and, head spinning, Babu Omari would think how nice it would be when Masoud married Zulfa.
Mafunda said, “Maybe that Kassim Majid was just a one-time fluke.” Maybe Mzee Abeid’s unlucky girl was having a sea change. Mafunda’s pantaloons were frayed by then, but her faith in marriage wasn’t. She didn’t know exactly when the final wedding would take place, but she believed it was already in the works. Hadn’t she seen Warda and her sister walk right into Husna’s yellow house?
Warda, for her part, had had enough of being home. Suddenly the city with its traffic jams and ice cream cones seemed very good again. She called her husband from a friend’s in Baharini town and arranged for him to meet her when she got off the boat. “I can leave without a worry,” Warda told Habiba, “now that Zulfa’s taken care of.” Warda, feeling personally responsible for Zulfa’s transformation—how obediently she sat behind the counter now, how carefully, how obsessively, she kept the books—was proud. On her last day, this time by herself, she went to visit Husna, and they had a lovely talk.
Masoud had for the moment seen the wisdom of letting Zulfa do things on her own. He had her do inventories all alone and asked her to write up lists for orders. He cut down on his visits. He wanted Zulfa to relax. If she gets comfortable enough, he thought, she will understand that I cannot live without her. It wasn’t that he wished to marry Zulfa and then lock her up and never let her go outside. She could keep her post behind the counter, for at least a little while. And he did have languid dreams about traveling with Zulfa. He just didn’t think she meant it when she said she’d rather travel on her own. What would Zulfa do all by herself, without anyone for company? Without a person to take care of her? What would people think? Zulfa, Masoud told himself, was feisty and confused.
Mafunda, watching from her place before the hardware store, thought Masoud was doing the right thing. Zulfa has no discipline, no sense, she thought. She needs a man to set her straight. Mafunda felt admiration for Masoud Hamad’s approach. He was waiting for Zulfa to come out with it herself: When will you send someone to discuss me with my dad? At least that was how it seemed. One morning, gathering her bowls and buckets and making ready to go home, Mafunda said, “Masoud Hamad has finally learned his lesson.” She got up and shook her dusty skirts. “No noisy lion eats.”
Certainly that was how it looked. But finally, after two months of only passing by, of inquiring politely, of smiling carelessly at Zulfa, Masoud’s resolve collapsed. He started up again. “Zulfa, let’s get married.” “Zulfa, let me go talk to your father.” “Zulfa, let’s make our plans now.” “Zulfa, Zulfa.” And Zulfa, who had sworn that she would never weep again if Masoud Hamad were present, and who could keep a promise better than most people she knew, felt her heart go cold. She was becoming so adept at calculations that she could make them in her head.
When Masoud, exhausted, heart in tatters, came to Zulfa in the noontime and told her he was tired of her freely fooling with his love, Zulfa felt like a cold kipupwe rain. “You want me to marry you before I’ve seen the world? Is that what you are saying? Is that really what you want? Is that what you are telling me?” She plopped a glossy stewpot on the counter with a clang. To Masoud, her jaw and chin together seemed enormous as a truck.
He sat down on the glittering silver sof
a Zulfa’d ordered him to get. He made his voice as gentle as he could and clutched his hands between his knees. “We’ll go traveling together, dear, I promise.” Zulfa raised her chin at him, not feeling any warmer. “We’ll go to London, you and me. And then we’ll visit Texas. But let’s get married first, okay?” Zulfa pulled a sheaf of kanga cloths from a shiny plastic sack and sat down on the floor. Masoud leaned towards her, holding out his hands. “This waiting for you for so long is eating up my liver, Zulfa. It’s killing me,” he said.
Zulfa knew all about things eating up one’s liver, how painful unfulfilled desire was, and how you could feel that you were dying. She turned her face away from him and gave attention to the colored cloths that she was sorting from the sack. She scoured them for misprints. The first one said, in a black design of rice grains, Forgive me, Ma, but living in the world is hard. The next one, red- and yellow-checked: I promise I know nothing, so why look at me that way? Another, purple like a plum: Light teeth, dark soul. No, no errors there. Zulfa made a stack.
“Zulfa, darling. Answer me.” Masoud’s voice was all atremble, not what it had been that day at Nazir’s Tailoring and Petrol Stand. “All right,” she said. “All right. I’ll tell you what, Masoud.” Zulfa put the kangas down and looked right into his eyes. “If you leave all your wives, you can marry me before I travel.” Masoud made a sound, at first, that was something like a laugh. Zulfa continued, very steely. “And don’t think I want any kids to raise from you. You give up on them, too. Cut off, split up, bye-bye. And then come back to me, and we’ll see what we will see.” Zulfa was feeling strong, as if someone else were speaking through her. Oh, the way the words slipped out! Very, very easy. Her teeth in her soft mouth were razor blades, or knives. If he can ask me to give up what I want, she thought, then I can do the same. She wished to teach Masoud a lesson. If he were worth anything at all, as good a catch as he insisted that he was, he would surely turn her down.
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