The Old Drift

by Namwali Serpell

  In the middle of Kalingalinga, there was a dump, a pile of rubbish even taller than the spires of the compound’s homegrown churches, and with a stench so potent it lingered like a song stuck in your head. On the edge of the dump was the Auto Department, a vehicular graveyard – a Mitsubishi more rust than red, a third of a Land Rover, a half-buried Beetle that resembled upended roots. The compound kids would climb inside these wrecks and ‘drive’, honking their noses, revving their throats, their feet pumping invisible pedals as they looked through the paneless windows.

  The kids sometimes used leftover scraps to build toy cars modelled after those husks. These wire cars and jeeps and trucks were like three-dimensional line drawings, each detail bent into perfect place – windscreen, wheels, gear stick, seats. To drive, you used a metal stick that interlocked with the front axle so you could steer it as you ran, the vehicle creaking ahead, its not-exactly-circular wheels leaving wobbly tracks in the dust. Over the years, as the dump filled up with better rubbish, these toy vehicles got fancier, updated with tin-can panels and rubber wheels and plastic headlights.

  Jacob loved the Auto Department. Ever since he had discovered that half-wreck of an aeroplane at Lusaka City Airport four years ago, he had belonged to the electric world. He liked to make things in general, but nothing gave him greater pleasure than to galvanise them. No sound was more beautiful to his ears than the twitch-rattle-hum of an object coming to life in his hands. He could rejig a Discman, reassemble a foreign plug to fit a Zambian outlet, make a mixer spin its blades again by surgically removing a dead cockroach from its innards. But he lacked the bravado of the hawkers who strutted the roads, the ‘amplifiers’ who shouted the wares and prices of the market women. And what’s the use of goods you can’t sell?

  * * *

  Matha had long intended to force Godfrey to taste the brine she had wrung from her pillow every morning for the last three decades while she waited for him to come back to her. Then he showed up in her garden with some kind of death certificate, took one sip, and spat it right out. The night of his return, Matha sent their grandson out to find his own supper and invited Godfrey inside No. 74. They sat side by side on her bed, their arms brushing. A paraffin lamp shot gold into a corner. It was quiet but for the two-tone chant of the crickets and the mutter of rain outside.

  Godfrey was issuing a chain of words, strung together with no logic but chronology: and then and then and then. Matha barely heard him. Where did you go? Where did you go? Where did you go? she was thinking. Finally, he implored her directly, ‘Matha, I was dying the bicycle was broken the Land Rover hit me…’ He trailed off. She looked at him. She bit her salty lips. She threw away her thinking and pulled his head to her chest.

  They lay down together in her narrow bed. He didn’t kiss her, but he touched her wet eyes with his fingers. She ran her hand over his matted hair and the silken scar on his neck. She removed her jersey and chitenge and petticoat. He kept his tatty natty suit on, unzipping his fly when the time came, as if to take a piss. Her thighs ached as they rolled open, a yawning feeling in the tendons. As they rocked together, a distant pleasure stirred in her. The bed was creaking. Her shoulder was bumping the wall. Godfrey finished with a shudder. He rolled over, zipped up and fell asleep. Matha lay still, an acidic ache in her belly, squeezed in the gap between the bed and the wall. She closed her eyes and tried to remember.

  * * *

  At certain hours of the day, the traffic lassoing Kalingalinga tightened and knotted. In that listless slo-go, an albino girl would approach to beg through the windows. She was in her teens, bewitching and piteous both: her red-rimmed eyes looked raw yet exotic – rare in both senses – her scabby feet a special touch. Bazungu tourists and NGO workers in their cars were highly susceptible to her mewling. Little did they know that while they were busy mourning her plight and reaching into their pockets, the girl’s brother was slipping his arm, dark and slight as a shadow, through a back window to pluck out a purse or a briefcase or a rucksack.

  Once he had his spoils, the siblings would grab hands and race away into the compound, deftly navigating the alleys between lean-tos and shacks and breezeblock cottages. Sometimes, before darting off, the girl stole an mbasela from her benefactors – a little token to sweeten the deal. Just as the Brit or the Australian or the Israeli handed her one or two pin of kwacha, she would reach up and snatch the glasses off the bridge of their pointy noses. Sunglasses, prescription glasses, prescription sunglasses – these would all sell well.

  When Jacob first met the albino girl, she was wearing three pairs: tortoiseshell frames propped in her blonde afro, gold-rimmed bifocals around her neck, and aviator shades over her eyes. Her brother, in a sky blue shirt with white writing and a picture of a crown, was loaded with loot too, straps criss-crossing his chest, bags dangling at his hips. One bag – a small black leather one – had the distinctive pout of a camera case. Jacob walked over and plucked it up from where it hung from the boy’s shoulder. Jacob turned to the girl, who was clearly the boss.

  ‘Zingati?’

  ‘That Aka kothyoka thingie?’ she said, her aviators blank. She named a price anyway.

  Jacob unbuttoned the case, took out the camera and turned it over in his hands, dabbling at its buttons, fingering the loose lever. Then he knelt on the ground and pointed the lens at her.

  ‘Ah-ah, it is not even digito,’ she complained, meaning they wouldn’t get to see a preview. But her brother posed, crossing his arms over his chest and making American westside signs. The girl gave in, putting a hand on her hip and her other elbow on his shoulder. Jacob looked in the viewfinder, then pushed the air to signal that they should step back. The moment they did, he got up and bolted, twice-poached camera in tow.

  * * *

  When they next ran into him, the girl cried bloody murder and the boy stomped around him like a Nyau dancer, hackles and fists raised. Jacob lifted his hands in surrender, then pulled out the camera. He had fixed the lever and replaced the battery with one from the dump.

  ‘Not bad, hey?’ the girl said, running her freckled fingers over it.

  She looked at him through the viewfinder, gave a smirk, then turned, motioning for him to follow. The three of them strode through the compound towards the market on its periphery. Jacob wondered for a moment whether they were taking him to Gogo’s tomato stall to report him. But instead the girl stopped in front of a stall that sold sweets in single units, down to the individual Smartie. The seller, listening to an evangelist bleating on the radio, barely raised her eyes as they clambered over plastic sacks to the back, where a canopy was spread on the ground. The boy lifted it with a flourish. Laid out in furrows was a cornucopia of plunder: a heap of spectacles like skewered bath bubbles, a sloppy stack of iPods and phones, a tangle of earbuds.

  ‘So you can fix these kinds of thingies?’ the albino girl asked, hands on her hips.

  Jacob crouched over a heap of Nokias and picked one up with a grin.

  Solo and Pepa were orphans. They had been passed between the homes of distant relatives so many times that no one remembered any more how they had got their names. Maybe they had been named ‘salt and pepper’ – the albino bright as light, her brother dark as night – without regard for which was which. Or maybe Solo was short for pensolo, the lead pencil to his sister’s white sheet of pepala. They lived alone together now. They stole as a pair, ate as a pair, slept curled together like a sloppy yin yang.

  Jacob was the first person they had ever let into their two-part existence. Within a year, their little Kalingalinga squad had developed a perfect system: Solo hunted for goods or pickpocketed them, Jacob patched them up, and Pepa got them sold. But then warnings spread among the expats to avoid the albino girl on the road past Kalingalinga. And the Auto Department started to run dry of spare parts to fix the things they stole.

  There were rumours that there was better rubbish to be found, however. So-called
E-Dumps had started to spring up all over Lusaka. These housed leftover gadgets, not from the rich, the apamwamba, the been-to class of Zambians, but from the places they had been to: America, South Africa, China, all of the countries that had run out of room to discard their obsolete and broken tech. These nations were now paying to ship their ‘e-waste’ to what they considered the trash heap of the world. Little did they realise they were jump-starting a secondhand tech revolution.

  * * *

  In the midst of her plans for bitterness and grace, Matha hadn’t considered that, when Godfrey came home, she might not stop crying. As it turned out, she simply carried on. Drip, drop, a shower, a squall, and in between, the seep of time. Had her man not come back? Had her love not returned? Yes but after that first night, she and Godfrey didn’t have much sex or even much conversation. She felt obliged to feed him and give him a bit of money for beer. He mostly just sat on her stoop, drinking it and smoking mbanji, the rain leaving spiky splotches on his feet.

  His grey dreadlocks, his laziness, his drinkardliness, made him seem like a dead man, even if that certificate he carried with him was in error. The rain had run the ink but Matha could see that it had been issued at a hospital in Mazabuka. Why had he been there? Why had he come back? Where did you go? Where did you go? Where did you go? Maybe, she thought as she stared at his back in the door frame of No. 74, he had just been away too long. Maybe their love had run all the way through the season allotted to it. Maybe even heartbreak breaks if you give it enough time.

  * * *

  ‘Iwe, Engineer!’ Pepa shouted. ‘Do not kawayawaya, just choose. This is not Pick-andi-Pay!’

  She was standing on the highest summit of an E-Dump near Town Market, glancing over her shoulder in a halting rhythm like a stuck pedestal fan. She glowed like a beacon with her pale hair and pale skin, and she had the worst eyesight between them, but she was the only one responsible enough to be lookout. She didn’t trust the guard they had bribed with a bottle of gin. And there were other gangs of techno-poachers too, some of whom carried big, heavy ibende – those wooden sticks for grinding grain could just as easily grind bones.

  Solo raced up to her, holding a dusty black oblong over his head in triumph. He circled his hips, raised a foot, popped his hips twice.

  ‘Chongo iwe!’ Pepa whispershouted, squinting at her brother.

  Solo hadn’t said a word but he quieted his hips and brought the DVD player he had scored over to her, crunching broken glass, jumping nests of cables and skirting two PC monitors kissing screens along the way.

  ‘Nice…one…’ Pepa said, turning it over, caught up in admiration and calculation. They could easily resell it in Bauleni if Jacob could fix it. She called out to him again: ‘Engineer!’

  Jacob, crouched behind a leaning tower of keyboards a few yards away, ignored her. Pepa sucked her teeth and glanced anxiously over the concrete perimeter wall of the E-Dump, which was topped with broken glass.

  ‘Jacob! Tiye, iwe!’ she shouted. ‘It’s time to book! Solo—’

  Her brother was already skittering down the spiky hill of plastic and glass towards Jacob.

  ‘It is a toy. A choppa,’ Jacob explained as Solo knelt beside him. Jacob turned it in his hands to show it off. It was white and spindly, about the size of a dove. He had found a shell-like controller nearby. Solo shrugged. It wouldn’t bring much money on resale. Jacob glared at his friend. Of course a thief wouldn’t understand. Once upon a time, Jacob too had been a mere thief. But machines had become more than money to him.

  Jacob had been the driving force behind the reconnaissance mission to this gentrified wasteland. Ever since he had learned about the Zambian Space Programme, about how brilliant a cadet his gogo had been, he had become obsessed. Who knew technology was a family tradition – in his very blood! For the first time, Jacob could see a connection between his hands and his mind, and it was precious. He turned from Solo with disgust.

  Just then, they both heard a commotion at the gate – the guard they had bribed was loudly blubbering excuses in Nyanja. The boys looked around for Pepa. She was already squatting behind a flat-screen TV, clutching her knees, her silver eyes flashing with fury and fear.

  * * *

  Sometimes Matha eavesdropped on Godfrey and Jacob. The two males in her life often sat on the stoop together, Godfrey answering his grandson’s questions between sips of beer. Matha would scrape salt from her ears with a matchstick, position herself at her table under the window and listen. Godfrey spoke like a living man when he reminisced – Zamrock songs on the radio, A luta continua! in the streets, miniskirts and bell bontons squeezing everyone’s bums.

  His talk often drifted to the Zambia National Academy of Science, Space Research and Philosophy. He hinted at the Academy’s revolutionary underpinnings but never admitted outright to the espionage or the bombs. Instead, he told stories about Matha’s cats – ‘named after the disciples! I asked her, “And does that make you Jesus?”’ – and about Ba Nkoloso’s morbid pranks and even about her sister – ‘Cookie was a too-pretty girl, that one!’

  Not anymore, Matha thought pettily. Not that she would know. She hadn’t seen Nkuka in years. And Ba Nkoloso had died in 1989. Matha had read about the funeral in the newspaper, the weeping politicians and the crowd of mourners at the Anglican cathedral – there had been plenty praise for his freedom fighting and no mention at all of his Space Programme. Listening to Godfrey’s words carving a spiral into the past, it felt as if the great man and his dreams had risen from the dead.

  Godfrey was vague whenever Jacob probed him about the actual technology, though: the mulolo swing, the mukwa catapult, turbulent propulsion. Matha frowned. Did Godfrey not remember the four stages of combustion? For months, she chopped vegetables or ironed clothes at the table by the window, her irritation gradually rising. Godfrey’s dullard answers reminded her of her time in disguise at the Lwena Mission School, when she’d had to suppress all she knew for the sake of secrecy.

  Then, one day, while sweetening her tea, Matha overheard Godfrey call a piston a pistol. It could have been a slip of the tongue, but she was so flabbergasted that her teacup was half full of sugar before she noticed. She searched for a pencil, then snatched up the only book in the place, the Bible that old Mrs Zulu had left behind years ago. Matha opened the front door and squeezed herself between the two useless males on her stoop. She turned to an empty page at the back of the Bible. And as they stared at her wet and furrowed face, Matha Mwamba sketched out a diagram of an engine.

  * * *

  ‘Stop! Thiefies!’

  A short man in an army uniform was racing towards the rackety mound of electronic waste, waving a black club overhead. The belt at his waist sagged under the weight of a holstered gun. The E-Dump guard they had paid off with Hendrick’s gin stumbled along behind him, having obviously partaken in that liquid bribe. Shaking his head to sober up, he overtook the soldier and grabbed Pepa’s chitenge to pull her down the rubbish heap and onto a patch of dirt. He knelt heavily on her back. She bucked and shrieked, her feet hammering the ground. Solo was cowering behind his DVD player, but the soldier knocked that shield away, swung at the boy’s head with the club, and knocked him down.

  The soldier turned to Jacob with a menacing look. Jacob curled away, cradling his toy helicopter to his chest as blows began to rain upon him. The beating was like the soldier himself – nasty, brutish and short. When it was done, he kicked at Jacob, bullying him over to where the other two were already lined up on their knees. Pepa was trying to hold her torn chitenge together. Solo’s crusty swollen eye looked like an anthill. Jacob clutched his chopper, bruises throbbing on his back. The drunken guard stood swaying before them. The soldier strolled back and forth, snorting with contempt, his glittering cross necklace swinging with each step.

  ‘Satanical children!’ he shouted. ‘Have you no rrrispect?! Stupit thiefies! You do not know we can d
etain you like that,’ he clapped his hands past each other.

  The E-Dump guard nodded at this a little too hard and nearly fell over.

  ‘Must we beat you again so you can understand?’ the soldier continued.

  At this, the guard stepped forward and slapped Solo’s head.

  ‘No!’ the soldier complained. ‘We must turn the other cheek!’

  ‘Sorry, bwana,’ said the guard, staggering back in confusion.

  ‘I meant the other cheeks! Maybe their backsides can understand better than their brains.’

  ‘Please, bwana,’ Pepa begged.

  ‘Turnaround, turnaround!’ the guard said as if singing the playground song. He prodded them until they were on their hands and knees, bums rounding up behind them. Then he backed away as the soldier raised his stick.

  ‘Don’t! Come! Heeya! Again!’ he shouted in sync with his blows. Solo and Pepa cried out with pain. Jacob stayed silent but the last blow knocked the helicopter out of his hands.

  ‘What have we got here?’ the soldier asked with slitted eyes and reached for it.

  Jacob snatched it back with a snarl. The soldier laughed and raised his boot to kick him. Just then the guard vomited. The thin yellow gush splattered onto the ground and splashed up the soldier’s boots. As he stepped back in disgust, Pepa scrambled to her feet and pointed behind her.

  ‘Can you see? The DVD machine?’ she said. ‘You can have, sah. We can fix it up.’