The Old Drift

by Namwali Serpell

  The soldier laughed. He stepped towards her and stood inches from her shaking body. They were nearly the same height.

  ‘You? Can fix that?’

  ‘No, but he can,’ she pointed at Jacob. ‘But not here.’

  Pepa explained in a rush that the tools Jacob needed were in Kalingalinga. She could have lied about where they lived – Solo widened his eyes at her when she said the name of the compound – but Pepa was a savvy girl. The jewelled cross hanging from the soldier’s neck looked expensive. His interest in the machine suggested that he had DVDs to play. She clasped her hands and promised the soldier that he could collect it, properly fixed, just-now, now-now.

  ‘I want that one as well,’ the soldier said, gesturing at Jacob’s chopper. ‘When it’s fixed.’

  * * *

  It was dark by the time Jacob got back to No. 74 Kalingalinga. Matha was sitting at her table, pulling a comb through her salt-brittle hair when she heard him greet Godfrey on the stoop.

  ‘Ah-ah! But what happened?’ Godfrey exclaimed with a chuckle. ‘Has there been a coup?’

  ‘Ah, no,’ said Jacob shyly. ‘We had a small fight.’

  ‘I can see you have some battle scars, young comrade!’

  Matha had to stop herself from running outside. She stood by the window and listened as Jacob described scavenging in an E-Dump, getting beaten up by a guard and a soldier, bribing them with gin and stolen goods. When had her grandson become a kawalala? And Godfrey – idjot man – was busy responding with jokes and encouragement! Did he feel nothing for the boy? He hadn’t even asked her about the pregnancy she had written to him about decades ago, as if he hadn’t realised that Jacob’s existence implied a mother somewhere, his daughter. Matha noticed that Godfrey’s voice sounded clear and healthy now – staying with her had reinvigorated him, brought him back from the dead. And he had brought her nothing in return.

  ‘Aha! Very resourceful!’ he was saying to their grandson. ‘In every society, Ba Nkoloso said, there are the haves and the have-nots and then there are the ones who are brave enough to take!’

  Matha heard the clink of bottles and a pause the length of a sip.

  ‘And your spoils of war?’ Godfrey asked. ‘How does this electronical thing work?’

  ‘This one is the controller. I just have to get some batteries and fix—’

  ‘Foolish boy,’ Godfrey burped. ‘This one is not for that one. You have the wrong controller.’

  ‘But they are the same colour,’ Jacob protested.

  ‘Can you not read, boy?’ Godfrey laughed. ‘This one is Digit-All. That one is Panasonic. They do not match.’

  There was a pause. Tears zigzagged down Matha’s cheeks. The door opened and Jacob slunk inside. She took one look at his cut and swollen face and slapped him across it. Jacob stared at her, the shock in his eyes giving way to hurt. Without a word, he crept around her, unrolled his sleeping mat, and curled up under a blanket, his useless white toy beside him.

  * * *

  Jacob opened his eyes to a pale blur. It slowly clarified into the geometric eyes of his new helicopter. He sat up, wincing at his bruises, and reached for it. The toy had some dents and scratches and was spattered with mud and blood. But it was still elegant, its surfaces smooth, its blades as fine as fish gills. The front windows were intact and you could see the pilot inside, a tiny white man with a cap. The sun rose higher and peeked into No. 74, casting the shadow of the toy against the far wall. Jacob spun its blades, watching the giant grey fins whir on the wall. He was sure he could make it work.

  He trotted off to the public latrines and when he returned, he found his gogo sitting on her stoop. He wondered where Ba Godfrey had gone and why she had taken his usual spot. Her mouldy Bible was in her lap, a pencil in her hand. His helicopter was perched at her side, light as a bird on its skids. She beckoned him. He sat on the ground across from her, shifting on his sore buttocks. She opened the Bible and began drawing inside it, slowly and carefully, not with the swift strokes she’d used for those engine diagrams the other day. When she was done, she placed the book in his lap, then started as if recalling something, and turned it around so it faced him.

  A feeling crowded between his eyes, salty and stinging and sharp. Jacob knew all about machines and gadgets. He knew that electricity moved in a strange jerky way, and that when it flowed into several things, it could be divided without loss, though that might make things overheat and spark out. But though he was now fifteen years old and though he could recognise STOP signs and the number 74 on Gogo’s gate and the labels on his favourite foods, Jacob did not know how to read.

  Gogo bounced a fingertip on the page and pointed at the helicopter to make her point: the same letters were on its nose. Jacob pulled the controller from his pocket and saw what Ba Godfrey had tried to explain last night. There were different words on the two gadgets. Jacob looked at his gogo, at her familiar rutted cheeks. Of course. Only Matha Mwamba, Star Afronaut, could teach him how to be a real engineer. He moved to sit next to her, keeping the book in his lap.

  ‘Show me?’ he asked.

  And she did.

  2012

  It took a while before Jacob got that helicopter to fly. He found the right-sized batteries for it and the right controller to pair it with using Bluetooth. He unscrewed the belly of the toy to remove the circuit board. He resoldered the fritzed-out wires with his grandmother’s help, Gogo wearing kitchen gloves so that her slick palms didn’t short it. The mechanism was simple – lift and thrust – the goal even simpler: to fly. It should have been as easy as the moment in a dream when you realise gravity has no force and you step off a cliff and soar. But still the chopper did not rise.

  Jacob couldn’t figure out what was wrong. He would connect the controller and the toy – the two blinking in counterpoint – and press ON. The helicopter, now mottled with fingerprints, would shudder to life, the propellers on its head and tail drifting round, spinning faster and faster until they were whipping blurs. The helicopter would lift one skid at a time and hang in the balance. But then, every time, it would tilt over and tumble into the dust.

  Meanwhile, Pepa was pressuring him about the DVD player.

  ‘At least you can fix that one,’ she said, hands on her hips.

  It had been several months but she worried that the soldier with the shiny cross would show up at Kalingalinga any moment to collect.

  ‘We do not have the right parts,’ he said.

  They were in the old compound dump, picking through dregs. Jacob tossed the husk of a car radio aside with disgust. ‘We have to go back to the E-Dump in town.’

  ‘Were you not beaten? Did you not see that gun? What if he is a Youth Leaguer?’

  The nation’s new president, ‘King Cobra’, was a rabble-rouser who railed against government cronies for being elitist and against Chinese mining companies for ignoring safety standards. When his Patriotic Front party had won the election last year, his Youth Leaguers had rioted in the streets. To the average Zambian, these young men seemed more like thugs than patriots.

  ‘He looked like Defence Force to me.’ Jacob shrugged and walked away from his friends and off towards the Auto Department. What did it matter? A man with a gun was a man with a gun. It wasn’t that Jacob wasn’t afraid of the soldier. He just felt helpless to do anything about him. Jacob wandered among the dead cars, their rusted frames like unburied bones. The Auto Department had been dry for ages.

  A gruff voice called out to him. Jacob scanned the dump. It had come from a half-jeep – or rather from a shape inside it that now grew an arm. It waved. Ba Godfrey. Jacob hadn’t seen his grandfather since the night he’d come home bruised and bleeding from the E-Dump. As he neared, he saw a blue, red and white carton in Ba Godfrey’s lap. Shake Shake. Maybe that was why Gogo had turfed him out.

  ‘Mwana!’ said Ba Godfrey. ‘How is it?’

  �
��It is just okay, bashikulu.’ Jacob stuck his hand through an aperture to greet him.

  ‘So you see where I have landed?’ Ba Godfrey gestured at the grove of defunct vehicles. ‘In the graveyard after all.’ He laughed. ‘And what brings you to my humble boat?’

  ‘Looking for parts.’

  ‘Aha! For your choppa! Did you find the proper remote?’

  ‘Ya. But I need some other things.’ Jacob glanced over his shoulder. ‘This place is clapped.’

  ‘Mmm.’ Ba Godfrey nodded. ‘Have you tried that new ka wood pile?’

  ‘Ah, no, I cannot use wood. I need tech.’

  Ba Godfrey clambered out of the vehicle and brushed off the buttocks of his maroon flares. ‘They have some good electronical things as well,’ he said. ‘Let me show you.’

  They met Solo and Pepa again on the way. As Solo walked ahead with Ba Godfrey, listening to a lesson on the political history of dreadlocks – ‘Ba Nkoloso would not cut his hair until Zambia was free!’ – Pepa nudged Jacob and whispered in his ear.

  ‘We do not have time to hang about with a bashikulu.’

  Jacob shrugged, eyes fixed on the bedraggled hems of Ba Godfrey’s velveteen flares. He felt an obscure solidarity with the old man, who had been banished to the Auto Department just as Jacob had been banished to Gogo’s three years ago. Following Ba Godfrey they made one turn and then another until they were in a maze of kantemba selling cigarettes and Mosi. One more turn and they stood before a blue building with a white base.

  It looked familiar. Jacob practised his new basic reading skills, mouthing the words: One Hundred Years Clinic. This was where the trail for his mother had gone cold. The place had been upgraded since then. Apart from the fresh paint job, there were security lights and a satellite dish and you could hear a generator chugging away in the back. Ba Godfrey was standing under a mopane tree a few yards away. ‘There!’ he pointed. It was a scatter of scraps, mostly wood but metal too, the leftover materials from refitting the clinic.

  They didn’t find what Jacob needed to fix the DVD player, but it was a trove nonetheless. Under Pepa’s direction, the squad got to work dividing the stuff into piles – wood with rough edges like sugar cane, metal bars twisted like liquorice, a bent circular saw, some half-empty cans of blue and white paint. At the end of the day, they built a low grass fence to hide the stash and left Ba Godfrey there to guard it.

  The old man settled right in. This was a softer spot to squat than the Auto Department, and more profitable: he whittled toys from bits of scrap wood and traded them for the booze and mbanji on which he seemed to subsist. Pepa decided it was a good place for them to hide their spoils until Jacob fixed the two machines she had promised the soldier. Solo was always happy to spend more time near Ba Godfrey, with his wild stories and rasta look. Jacob had his own reasons for wanting to keep an eye on the women going in and out of that clinic.

  * * *

  One morning, they found Ba Godfrey in particularly good spirits. He was sitting under the mopane tree, two drippy cans of paint open at his side, a plank of wood across his knees. He was using a leaf to coat it in white.

  ‘Greetings, revolutionary youths!’

  Solo and Pepa waved and set about sorting through materials. Jacob sat with his grandfather under the tree, fiddling with his helicopter. Ba Godfrey offered him a Mosi.

  ‘Ah, no,’ Jacob demurred. ‘It is still morning.’

  Pepa was shaking her head happily. ‘I still cannot believe we found this place.’

  ‘It is the mulu.’ Ba Godfrey raised a piece of bark to point at the crumbly redbrown termite hill. ‘It is our godsend! It has hidden the goods from everybody else.’

  Ba Godfrey dipped the shard of bark into the can of blue paint, traced a short vertical line on the now white plank, and launched into a detailed treatise on the wonders of the African termite. You could use it for bait on a fish-hook or in a hunting trap. You could eat it for supper yourself, if you were so inclined. As builders, the termites were most magnificent. They constructed cathedrals, towers and spires, pillars and pavilions. You could use the material of their mounds to make clay bricks for housing. Their faeces fertilised grasses and crops and bowa…Ba Godfrey trailed off as he leaned back to scrutinise his sign.

  Jacob glanced at it, trying to read it. What was a ‘rip bed’? And why was there an eight in the middle?

  ‘You know,’ Ba Godfrey mused, ‘Ba Nkoloso used to teach us about these insects for political purposes. We must be like ububenshi! We must work together, busy-busy, building things. We must scrounge with intelligence, we must use what is around, even if it is our own wastage. Let us praise the termite! Although, we must be vigilant against them in our line of business.’

  Pepa looked up. ‘What’s our line of business?’

  ‘Furniture.’ Ba Godfrey stood up, holding his sign. The three young people gathered around him to look at it.

  ‘But what does “rip” mean, bashikulu?’ asked Jacob.

  ‘Arra eye pee. This is standing for Resting in Peace,’ Ba Godfrey said. ‘RIP Beds and Coffins. The perfect kingdom for a dead man to rule!’

  ‘But bwana, are you really dead?’

  ‘Mwana, that is what government says with official documentation. So it must be—’

  Ba Godfrey’s words were swallowed by the growl of a vehicle. A black SUV skidded around the corner of the clinic and parked, sending up a cloud of dust. They all stepped back, coughing and waving their hands. A car door swung open. Something bright flashed in the midst of the swirling red. It was a cross. The soldier from the E-Dump had found them.

  * * *

  Jacob often had dreams about the crashed aeroplane he had stumbled upon at the Lusaka City Airport when he was a boy. Sometimes it became whole again and he was its pilot. Sometimes he woke up just as it hit the ground and burst into flames. But even though he had complete freedom to roam around Kalingalinga, Jacob had never tried to sneak into the airport across the road to see it again. That adventure, that straying, had occasioned Lee Banda’s entrance into his life, which had in turn occasioned his mother’s exit from it. The airport had come to seem a chancy, cursed place.

  The number of aircraft that landed there had dwindled over the years. Only once in a while would a zipping or rumbling overhead signal that a private plane was arriving, bearing a shah or a minister or a ‘special guest’ of government. Security had amped up. The bougainvillea fence had been replaced with a concrete wall topped with a musical score of wires – definitely electrified – and someone was paying for a powerful generator: though power cuts happened all the time these days, the lights blasting from the walls at night never trembled or died.

  ‘Over here!’ Pepa seethed, her eyes flashing under those lights now.

  The three of them were behind the perimeter wall of the airport. According to the soldier, this was in fact the back wall of a warehouse and if you dug into the soil underneath it, you could pull out the breezeblocks in the bottom two rows. Pepa pointed down at the telltale signs of wear in the crevices where they had been chipped loose. The boys knelt down and started digging into the tough dry-season dirt.

  When the gap in the back wall was big enough, Pepa wriggled through it into the warehouse. Jacob and Solo waited for their cue. Instead of Pepa’s soft whistle, they heard a screech and the cascading sound of falling boxes. Jacob jumped down and dragged himself through the gap, scraping his stomach.

  ‘Pepa?’ His foot hit something soft – ‘Ow!’ she said – then something hard.

  ‘Am fine,’ she snapped. ‘There is a cat in here.’

  Jacob pulled out his old Nokia, turned it on and waved it around like a torch. Its blue light floated fairy-like over Pepa’s face, over the garish split in her lip from the soldier’s last visit. She was lying under a pile of small white boxes. She sheepishly unearthed herself.

  Jacob picked up a bo
x. ‘I. P-p-p…eepon?’

  ‘Oh, iPhone! I know those!’ Pepa rose excitedly from her crouch.

  Just then, Jacob’s Nokia went dark and something swooped at their heads. Pepa squealed. Jacob felt something graze the tip of his ear, soft as Ba Godfrey’s velveteen suit. Jacob turned his phone on again and cast the light around the room. A shadow flickered and fluttered among the bigger boxes stacked against the walls.

  ‘It is just a bird,’ he said as the phone went black again. The just-a-bird screeched. ‘A bat?’

  He felt Pepa’s glare in the dark. Why hadn’t he fixed the DVD player and the chopper in time? The short soldier had located them easily. Everyone knew the chidangwaleza in Kalingalinga: ‘I just asked for the white muntu!’ he’d laughed. When he had found them empty-handed in the yard by the clinic, he had recruited them to do this job in lieu of the electronics they owed him. Or rather, he had knocked them around for a bit – Ba Godfrey watching helplessly, tied to the mopane tree – until they had agreed to steal for him. They were the perfect skinnymaningi weasels, as he put it, to crawl through the hole in a wall.

  ‘Come on,’ Jacob exhorted Pepa now. Under the intermittent light of the Nokia, they ferried the boxes in the warehouse out to Solo through the gap in the wall. When they were halfway done, Jacob felt a flapping wind at his cheekbone. Pepa shrieked again.

  ‘Enough!’ she said and tore through the plastic wrapper of one of the iPhone boxes. She tugged the lid off, plucked the new phone from its bed and pressed a button on its top edge.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘We will leave it. I just need…’ She swiped right to open and up for the control centre and touched her finger to the torch app. ‘Light.’

  She placed the phone on the ground, pulled her jumper off, and they resumed ferrying. The next time the bat swooped at their heads, Pepa threw the jumper over it and down it tumbled. Jacob almost applauded. They continued their labour, ignoring the sounds from the corner – flibberti-thump, flackata-bump – and the jumper’s manic flapping. When they had taken as many boxes as they could carry, Pepa wriggled out first. On an impulse, Jacob picked up the iPhone and aimed its light at the jumper. Two red pinpricks gleaming evilly through the weave. He shuddered, pocketed the phone, and birthed himself outside again.