The Old Drift

by Namwali Serpell

  Casting a look of disgust at Isa still sleeping beside him, he sat up and went to take his bath. When he found yet another tag bleeding its ink into the soap, he decided to make a thorough sweep of the house. He gathered all that he could find and went out to the yard behind the kitchen, where he lit an mbaula. Pyjamas dampening in the dew, he dropped handfuls of price tags into the embers, humming ‘Awaara Hoon’ to himself as the curling, blackening action began.

  * * *

  Sibilla had taken advantage of her grandmotherhood to resume doing some household chores, to let her body serve as it wished. She had gone outside to pluck some fresh eggs from the chicken coop for breakfast when she saw her son-in-law with his bonfire. She paused and put her hands on her hips, peering through her hair at him. What on earth was he doing? The smell of burning paper was pleasant but there was another smell, bitter as tarmac. Ah. Ink. He was burning the silly little price tags.

  Sibilla felt a wave of pity for the man. Motherhood hadn’t warmed up Isabella one bit. Even with the extra padding pregnancy had lent her figure, the woman’s bones were still made of ice. As soon as Daddiji left for work, Isabella spent her whole day sticking numbers on things, the frenzy in her eyes somewhere between panic and glee. Now she seemed to have infected her husband with her mania.

  Daddiji grinned stupidly: ‘Good morning, Nonna Sibilla! Fine-fine morning, isn’t it?’

  ‘It is just okay,’ Sibilla mumbled and proceeded to the chicken coop. Naila would be awake soon. The child needed breakfast – and protection.

  Sibilla refused to intervene in a paper war, but she was growing concerned that, unbeknownst to her parents, little Naila was becoming obsessed with money. Sibilla had recently discovered a world globe covered in the girl’s rickety scrawl – Naila had priced all the nations with a felt-tip pen. The prices were laughably off and Sibilla had been amused to see that Zambia was worth the most: K100. But Naila had started collecting stray kwacha, too – from the kitchen table, her mother’s purse, her father’s bedside table – and storing it in an old cigar box. Sibilla was disturbed by this – the bills were worth very little but it was still theft – yet she hesitated to tell the girl’s parents. She wished to remain non-aligned in their peculiar Cold War.

  * * *

  The Saturday that this price war finally came to an end began with Isa at Shoprite doing the food shopping. Naila was at home with her nonna, Daddiji snoozing over a Times of Zambia. Isa wandered the aisles and compared the imported goods, running her fingers over the plastic-wrapped produce and the colourful boxes of cereal. The wheels of her mind were rolling along like the four wheels of her trolley – except only three of them were running smoothly. The fourth wheel stubbornly stuck and spun. Part of Isa’s mind was fretting. This tag campaign could not last forever, and it was the only thing standing between her and another pregnancy.

  The truth was, Isa’s reluctance to have another child didn’t really have anything to do with money. It had to do with an image she couldn’t shake. It was from three years ago, when Naila had only just learned how to walk. That day, Isa had been standing in her underwear in front of her closet, trying to decide what to wear, when she felt a pinch. She winced and looked down. Naila was clutching Isa’s calf, gnawing at her knee like a holy fool. She was probably just teething, rubbing her gums against the bone, but Isa frowned down at her in befuddlement. What a stranger this human still seemed to her.

  Shaking her head, Isa turned back to her closet and caught a glimpse of herself in the full-length mirror. She stopped and stared at the unfamiliar bulges, almost architectural, that now carved her torso. In a flash, she thought: This child did this to me. And right then, in that moment of petty regret, Isa saw that she was bleeding, a splotch spreading up her white panties like a red hand cupping her crotch. When the pain came, it was so intense that she vomited.

  She cleaned herself up, left Naila in her nonna’s care, and took a taxi to the doctor. He gave her an exam, told her she’d had a miscarriage, gave her a pill and sent her home. Isa told everyone she was having a bad menstrual period and a migraine and needed to be left alone. She didn’t tell Daddiji what had happened, knowing that his caterpillar eyebrows would stitch into a look of concern that would only irritate her. And she dared not tell Sibilla, who had on more than one occasion made oblique comments about what an ‘unnatural’ mother Isa made. Isa felt vaguely ashamed, as if her body had betrayed her. While she healed, while she mourned the lack of a baby to mourn, she staved off Daddiji’s nightly advances.

  Things went back to normal and they dove back into their usual lovemaking. And then it happened a second time. Again, Isa went to the doctor alone and, again, nobody noticed because she always did things alone. She had kept it secret once, so it only made sense to keep it secret this time too. After the third miscarriage, it became too painful to keep trying, to keep running up against her body this way. That was when Isa started making Daddiji use contraceptives all the time and arguing that they didn’t have enough money to grow their family. This was the true origin of the Battle of the Price Tags.

  Somehow, by virtue of this domino effect of secrecy and subterfuge, Isa’s life had become a closed circle. Even now, mingling in the supermarket with other middle-class Zambian shoppers, she felt set apart. How had her mother, a freakshow of a woman, managed to find a sense of belonging here? How had her father, a drunk and a racist to boot, managed to die surrounded by love and respect? Isa paid for her groceries, ignoring the cashier’s polite greeting, and directed the driver to load the bags into the boot. She didn’t speak as he drove them home, staring instead at the traffic outside, the buyers and sellers on the side of the road.

  Isa was so focused on her own loneliness that she was doubly disconcerted to find a crowd of people outside her house when they got back. As soon as the driver turned onto their road, they both saw the cars parked up and down the driveway, some on the kerb.

  ‘Ah, Madam, it must be a funeral,’ he said, glancing at her in the rearview mirror.

  This seemed unlikely, but what if it was the prelude to a funeral – an accident, an emergency? What if the spinning wheel in her mind had been a premonition? Terror zoomed into the centre of Isa’s chest. Oh God, oh God, her pulse was chanting as she jumped out of the car, pushed past the lingerers in the driveway towards the front door, and started wrestling through the crowd of people inside. She found what she sought in the kitchen: Naila sitting cross-legged on the floor over a cigar box overflowing with kwacha. Isa swooped down and picked her up. Daddiji strode into the kitchen, counting out change, joking with a man who was clutching an old boombox.

  ‘Welcome home, Bella!’ he beamed at her.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Isa looked over Naila’s head at him. ‘Who are all these people?’

  ‘All these people?’ His eyebrows darted up and down. ‘They’re customers! I put an ad in the paper. We’re selling the things you kindly-kindly priced for us.’

  Everything went: the furniture and the cutlery and the plates and the books and even the little Lord Vishnus. That ought to have been the end of it: the house swallowed in emptiness, the mice in the ceiling now audible. Naila doing knobbly-kneed cartwheels across the parquet. The members of the family eating with their hands like real Zambians, sleeping on the floor like poor ones. Isa and Daddiji back to their nightly tussle.

  But there was one final parry. It came after they had replaced all that was replaceable and properly forgotten all that was not. Naila had got a new bed, bigger than the one they had sold. Isa sat in a chair beside it, watching her daughter sleeping, Naila with her milk-tea cheeks, with eyelashes so thick and dark they looked wet. What would become of Isa’s precious little girl if she were to wake up and look down and discover the final trump card in this stupid game between her parents: a blank price tag – or was it a receipt? – tied with a thread to her big toe?

  * * *

  It turned out
Isa was already pregnant again, from that delirious night before the Battle of the Price Tags began. This time, it stuck. Seeing this as a sign, she gave herself over to the business of her children. Isa grew fat and recalcitrant over the next four years, a period that Daddiji called The Proliferation and during which she gave birth to three more daughters. In photographs taken around the turn of the twenty-first century, Isa’s smile was hidden between plump cheeks, and no matter how Sibilla coaxed her to look at the camera, her eyes were either off seeking some child crawling or stumbling into potential danger, or gazing down at the one in her arms. She became addicted to the drug of breastfeeding – the smarting relief and the chemical high of locking eyes with her baby. Isa finally had the captive audience she had always sought.

  ‘Everybody else lives with their children,’ Daddiji grumbled. ‘Must we live for them?’

  They did seem outnumbered on Sunday mornings. Gabriella was picking her nose, preferring what she found there to her breakfast. Lilliana was sitting in her high chair in her forest-green onesie, a volcano of giggles and burps, dribbling a lava of scrambled eggs. Naila was scraping hers across her plate, whispering ‘kwacha’ when she pushed them one way, ‘ngweeee’ the other way.

  ‘You will never know the depth of a mother’s love,’ Isa said indignantly, shifting baby Contessa from one breast to another, dripping milk over her own plate.

  ‘If you’re such a loving mother, why are the workers in this household bloody legion?’

  ‘Don’t play with your food!’ As Isa reached forward to scold Naila, her nipple plopped out of Contessa’s mouth, which opened wide with surprise and then umbrage.

  ‘Why so much shouting-shouting?’ Daddiji shouted.

  Contessa started wailing and that set Gabriella off.

  ‘And where are your precious workers now when we need them?’ Isa yelled back.

  ‘It’s SUNDAY!’ Daddiji bellowed. ‘I think we can handle one day a week without—’

  Naila covered her ears and imagined her sisters’ heads exploding one by one – plop! plop! plop! – like overripe fruit. They were already halfway there, with their big cheeks. The Proliferation had been hardest on Naila. She had been swaddled in the warmth of her parents’ attention for years. It felt as if a blanket once large enough to wrap twice around her was now shared with fitful creatures who tugged and yanked at it all night, leaving parts of her body exposed: her foot or her arm or her back. This was the worst thing about being a sibling: you never knew when you would feel the chill.

  * * *

  Isa relished her daughters’ obedience but did not enjoy enforcing it. So, after a few years, she created a regimented routine to rein them in – and make them profitable. She named the family business Lovely Luxe Locks Ltd. It turned out that, after all her worries, the girls had indeed inherited their grandmother’s genes but in just the right proportion – their hair grew at twice the normal rate. Sibilla refused to participate in this enterprise, and the workers washed their hands of it, saying that it looked like witchcraft, that it was like inviting a curse to come inside for tea. Management therefore fell to the eldest. Naila was then ten years old.

  Every morning, after their breakfast and bath, Naila ushered her sisters through a set procedure – shampoo, rinse, condition, rinse, air-dry, oil and comb.

  ‘How long until harvest?’ Gabriella would ask.

  ‘Soon,’ Naila would say, weighing the hair in her palm. ‘You’re almost ripe.’

  ‘What if it runs out?’

  ‘It won’t,’ Naila would reassure her sister, smoothing her tresses down her back.

  When Naila had finished combing the other two girls as well, four-year-old Contessa especially squirmy, she would line them up by descending height in the corridor outside the master-bedroom door. Naila was at least two feet taller than her sisters, and from her viewpoint, their heads always looked like a shimmering black waterfall.

  Mother usually emerged around 8 a.m. She was like a goddess to her girls, with her long skirts, her grey eyes, her red lips. Naila, Gabriella, Lilliana and Contessa would face her as she stalked the corridor before them, hands clasped at the base of her spine. Then she’d pause before each girl in turn and ask: ‘What are you made of?’

  Every once in a while, one of the girls tried to give a different answer: water, bone, snow, sugar, animal, vegetable, mineral. But Mother did not want innovation. She simply waited until each girl gave the correct sound-off.

  ‘Hair.’

  ‘Hair.’

  ‘Hair.’

  ‘Hair.’

  Naila sometimes mentally echoed the question back: And what are you made of, Mother? She pictured Mother’s lips turning down as she said: ‘I’m made of veils.’ This seemed the likeliest answer because of the wedding photograph on the bedside table in her parents’ bedroom. Naila often snuck in to stare at it – Mother suspended in mist or dust, translucent layers with a sepia tint.

  * * *

  Naila asked about it once. Love Luxe Locks Ltd had managed three harvests thus far. She and Mother were packaging hair into packets in the dining room, wrapping it around cardboard and squeezing it into plastic rectangles.

  ‘Where’s the dress?’ Naila asked.

  ‘The dress?’ Mother looked up from her busy hands but her eyes immediately skipped off to her other three daughters. They were playing quietly in the corner, their newly shorn heads making them look like little monks. Bald Gabriella made a zooming noise and bald Lilliana started beeping – they were being spaceships. Bald Contessa was near tears – she did not know what sounds to make.

  ‘Your wedding dress,’ Naila pressed, keen to take advantage of having Mother alone.

  ‘Wedding dress.’ Mother stared at the packets on the table. ‘It was your grandmother’s.’

  ‘Nonna’s?’

  ‘Yes. She was beautiful in her day, you know.’ Mother’s voice was growing irritated. She began sewing hair onto a wig scalp – it was Gabriella’s, the shiniest and thickest.

  Naila knew her grandmother was beautiful in her day because she was still beautiful now – but it did take a moment to process the picture of Nonna in a white dress. Naila had only ever seen her in those big, colourful West African dresses with embroidery lathering the chest.

  As if they had conjured her, Nonna Sibilla appeared in the doorway, removing the shawls with which she veiled her appearance outside the house. She was coming from the Italian School, where she spent a few days a week using fairy tales and puppets to teach the students how to speak the language of her childhood. She had offered to teach Naila and her sisters too, but Mother had declined the offer. The girls attended Namununga, a mixed school with mostly Indian teachers, English-language instruction, and a high tolerance for practices like tonsure. The way Mother saw it, why would they ever need to know Italian in Zambia, anyway?

  Naila watched her sisters race to their nonna and throw themselves into the folds of her purple boubou. Nonna expertly feigned wonder at their shaved heads, running her hands over the fuzz on their skulls. Naila knew Nonna disapproved of the family business: she had tried to explain to Naila once why it was wrong, using words like servitude and slavery and child labour. But her sisters looked less like slaves and more like puppies to Naila, nestling up to Nonna, all giggles and warmth, exaggerating the force field of their love to prompt their mother’s notice. Rather than hush them, Mother looked to Naila, who gathered them up and whisked them out, giving Nonna a peck on her hairy cheek as she passed.

  In the sitting room next door, Naila organised her sisters into a new game, offering absentminded suggestions – they could devise an alien language or introduce a robot – until they were once again absorbed. Then Naila snuck to the door between the two rooms and cracked it.

  ‘…least I finally have a job,’ Mother was saying.

  ‘This is a job?’ Nonna Sibilla gave a throaty c
ackle. ‘Using your children to pay your bills?’

  ‘I have not harmed a hair on their heads.’

  ‘Everything you do harms the hair on their heads! And poor Naila is made to—’

  Naila held her breath at the mention of her name but Mother veered in another direction.

  ‘They are not like you,’ she said. ‘It is not their friend. It’s just hair. And it literally grows from their heads. An infinite resource. In fact, you could—’

  ‘I could what?’ Nonna interrupted. ‘Join you? Give you my…infinite resource? No. Just be happy that your girls didn’t inherit this thing that I have.’

  ‘But they did! They inherited the best part of you – their hair grows much faster than mine. Five centimetres a month! Do you know what kind of profits—’

  ‘Profits! What has become of you, Isabella Corsale?’

  ‘It is Isa Balaji now,’ Mother said calmly.

  ‘I considered this. Maybe it is a cultural difference?’

  ‘Oh, stop!’ Mother moaned. ‘It’s a business. I married a businessman, remember?’

  ‘Balaji was always just a middling man—’

  ‘A middleman, not—’

  A cry erupted from the playing girls. Mother glanced at the door and Naila curled behind it, her pulse thudding in her ears. She raised her eyebrows at her sisters, and an index finger to her lips. They quieted.

  ‘You hear them?’ Nonna said. ‘They are people. Not looms! Not things!’

  ‘But they are things,’ said Mother. ‘They are the only perfect things I have ever made.’

  Nonna was silent. Something cool passed over Naila’s skin, raising goosebumps.