‘What do you make of it? Would you take The Corporal as a client?’ I asked Maaza.
‘Fuck. I think I am too old to learn that a fact does not add up to a whole truth, and truth is not moral but ethical…that sin, crime — could have infinite triggers that might actually be good. For a lawyer. I feel fucked and strangely high,’ she answered and laughed.
‘I hope Miriam’s cousin is sane. That is all I can hope right now,’ I said to her as I laughed as well.
26
Miriam
‘We are our own predators.’
An emergency at home! My father was in the Intensive Care Unit at Nairobi Hospital. My mother thought it was a heart attack — they were running a bunch of tests. He might have to be flown to the United States or South Africa if he worsened. We the rich don’t die in Kenya, I couldn’t help thinking. Either way, he would love to have his two sons by his side, and she wanted me to catch the first flight out. If he were to die before I got there, my mother would never forgive that I was busy chasing a story, and for The National Inquisitor. And I did want to go home and see him — the cold war with my parents could not continue. And while my future was with The National Inquisitor, I did want to do stories that I cared about, that mattered. An oxymoron to some — that one could write stories that matter for a tabloid, that I would want to become a serious tabloid journalist, but it is my medium; it is what I am good at.
And that is precisely why I could not leave yet — I had a few hours before the last flight. I did not want to think about the worst, the gut-wrenching pain I would feel if he passed away while I was in Addis, and the guilt. But I was where I was supposed to be for my story. And if I was where I was supposed to be, then the choice before me, to leave Addis or stay, had to be false.
In a strange way, it made me my father’s son — his life was a singular pursuit of power and wealth, and mine was writing good stories. I lied to my mother, told her I would be catching the first flight out. She made me promise.
Maaza was downstairs at the hotel lobby waiting for me. Maaza and I, the self-appointed Bonnie and Clyde of Tizita, we said to hell with everything and made the journey to Miriam’s village to talk to her cousin.
***
To visit the village where Miriam once lived was to be disabused of all that you knew about Ethiopia. Even I, who should have known better after visiting Kidane’s rural home, was still shocked by the greenness of the highlands. Bob Geldof, and much later, Bono, had pulled a number on the world; they had redefined the image of a whole continent to one that was always holding a beggar’s bowl — a black hand stretched out for blessings from a white hand — with the help of African leaders for whom suffering immediately translated into dollars and pounds.
Ethiopia had always been great for Kenyan nationalism. Yes, much had changed, and now Ethiopia rivalled Kenya and was even poised to beat it in the much-coveted race towards being the best wards of global capitalism. But national memory still retained the old Ethiopia of starving kids, the country’s soundtrack stuck on the song “We Are the World.” Ours was a national memory fed a steady diet of how much better off we were than our neighbours. Parents even today warn their kids not to waste their food because of the starving kids in Ethiopia. And, of course, during wedding parties, the drunken uncles and aunts reminded us that our Kenya was the land of milk and honey that was being sucked dry by the Ethiopians, Sudanese and Somalis.
So, the Ethiopian highlands and their abundance of deep healthy green, from grass to the coffee plantations, were, in spite of myself, a surprise. A deep, rich green going into the horizon, a Garden of Eden where the foliage is so thick that it seems like all you have to do is drop a seed and it sprouts right up before your eyes. Looking at this greenery, one understands why the Italians failed to conquer and colonise Ethiopia. No people would give this up without a struggle to the death.
Maaza could see my look of embarrassed confusion, but she merely shrugged it off as we drove up to a small wooden gate that opened up to Aamina Hakim’s small compound. I imagined being Miriam and losing my family to famine and wars, to be that alone, and I could see why her cousin, the sole keeper of her memories, was important to her.
Call it a bias of youth, but I had always associated the word ‘cousin’ with someone young, and the first thing I noticed as Aamina welcomed us to her hut and started making tea was how old and frail she was.
Miriam had given me some things to bring to her — clothes, shoes, a solar-powered mobile phone charger and some Kenyan tea and coffee. And, in true Miriam fashion, she had rigged one of the boxes so that a balloon popped out and burst. Instinctively, we fell to the ground, even old Aamina, and it was with much laughter that we dusted ourselves off.
‘Yes, now I know Miriam sent you. She was always playing tricks on us, wrapping little pieces of soap like candy, covering cow pies with grass — oh, how our unsuspecting feet suffered! She was always up to no good. Doesn’t surprise me she works as a bartender,’ she said, laughing.
‘You keep in touch?’ Maaza asked.
‘On and off over the years. I am glad she is finally doing some singing — what a waste of talent. It is never too late; as long as you are breathing, you can turn a life around.’
She talked really fast, like she was running out of time.
‘She was singing as a child?’ I followed up.
‘Her and her sister — what wonderful voices! They knew pain from a young age; that is why when they sang, you could hear tears even in their most joyous songs. Their father, a farmer, was killed in the Ogaden. Her husband lost to the war. And then her sister died from AIDS—’
‘AIDS? She told us she died fighting against the Eritreans?’ I asked.
‘We are a society of secrets — everything under lock and key. She suffered alone because no one spoke about it — shame and secrets. All the tragedies landed on their doorstep to spare the rest of us. And God has given us long lives so that we can live for those who died,’ she said, clearly wanting to believe that was the case. It did not make sense any other way.
‘Children?’ I asked her.
‘No, they had not got into it yet,’ she said, winking at Maaza.
She asked me to help her with a trunk that was underneath her bed. She dug into it and emerged with some cassette tapes and letters and handed them over to me, pointing to a small, soot-darkened, formerly metallic-coloured tape player.
I picked one at random and played it. The first song was a duet — two kids singing “Silent Night,” only they did not know the words but could mimic the lyrics. But some of the cassettes were not of children playing and recording themselves. Some of them were semi-professionally produced, and they were all of Miriam’s sister. Pulling one of the cases open and looking at the credits, I found Miriam credited as one of the backup vocals singers.
On the tapes, I found only one Tizita song by her sister, but her voice was no longer the same; it sounded weak and old — ravaged by AIDS, Aamina explained. And that is where Miriam emerges from the background vocals, her sound so physical and alive that I could hear her helping her sister walk along, and her sister, being older, rejecting the help. And so Miriam walks not quite in the background and not alongside her. I hear her walking one step behind, propping up her stubborn sister every time she falters. Every now and then, they fall to the ground, and Miriam helps her up. And once she is up and walking, she slaps Miriam’s hand away. Her sister, though she sounds frail, when held up by Miriam so that her remaining strength can go into the song, comes alive out of the old cassettes.
It made sense that there was no way of understanding Miriam outside of her sister. That talent — to have lived so close to it and in its shadow, to have recognised it as better than hers, and then for it to be lost, unrealised. To have watched that happen to a person she loved and looked up to, a person who had even helped define her own voice, would have come at a cost. That, compounded by the loss of her entire family, would have made the price exorbitant. It meant that she could n
ot manage the intensity of her own life and the intensity demanded of her by the Tizita. It had to be one or the other, and she had chosen life over her gift.
After making us drink her tea, Aamina wrapped up Miriam’s belongings in a small box and walked us to her doorway. As Maaza and I walked back to her car, she pointed up to a perfect moon, half shadow, half light. I saw it so clearly that I could feel the crunch of my boots on its rough surface.
‘This Miriam of yours — that is some life. I hear that story every day at work, and each time I get angry. War and death — all of her pain has been caused by another human being, someone like her. That is what I can never understand — that we cause each other misery; rape, torture and murder each other. We are own predators,’ she said, as we tried to process Miriam’s story.
***
Maaza drove me to the airport so I could catch my last flight. She was beautiful, intelligent and passionate; she had my kind of sense of humour. If you added her good income, she was my ideal woman on paper, but there was nothing between us. It would have taken too much effort to fan the little sexual tension between us into a full-blown relationship. It felt right that we work and play together and be there for each other in the future. It was as if we both could anticipate crises in our future that would require that we help each other out and were saving our friendship for that. It could be that I had not yet recovered from The Diva’s lesson at her juke joint, or from my rather poor performance at the orgy.
‘Goodbye, my brother,’ Maaza said as we hugged.
‘I hope to see you soon, my sister,’ I said. ‘Thank you,’ I added as we let go.
‘Thank me by sending me the stories worth my effort, okay?’ she said, and gave me her business card. I did the same.
‘This is like we are becoming strangers, working our way backwards,’ she said.
‘My name is…,’ I said, playing along.
‘Good luck with everything,’ she said, and playfully shoved me into the security line.
27
‘I am ready to bring them back.’
I arrived at JKA to be immediately whisked to my father’s bedside. No customs; my mother’s driver literally met me by the plane. I asked him how my father was, but he did not reply. I asked him where my mother was, and he said he did not know. I understood enough to let it pass — the people who worked for my mother had no respect for me. In me, they saw an ingrate, and they knew they were more likely to rely on my brother for future employment when my parents passed. I called her, and she said she had just left the hospital, but I should go see him.
My father, it was now confirmed, had suffered a heart attack — no surprise there, really, given his daily Tusker and nyama-choma habit. He had just undergone open-heart surgery and was slipping in and out of consciousness. I placed my hand on his and looked around the hospital room. To make my father feel more at home, my mother had brought in some photographs; none of them were of her family. They were photos of them with the who’s who of Kenya. She had accessorised the room in other ways: expensive curtains and a massive flat TV screen.
I was holding his hand, feeling sorry for him. Did he take secret pleasure in knowing that his wife had been fucking the most powerful man in the country? I did not want to imagine it, but I was angry enough to walk myself through porn videos I had watched — where the husband sits on the bed and watches as another man fucks his wife, holding the man’s dick for his wife to suck and sometimes joining her in getting a facial. At some level, I could not help thinking, it could have been them playing out their sexual fantasies — power and sex rolled up in one. It could have just been that: three consenting adults in cuckold sexual fantasies, something they would have done anyway as professors or accountants.
I had once asked my brother whether he knew.
‘Yes. But why the fuck do you care about our parents’ sex life? That, to me, is what is so sick,’ he had answered angrily. ‘They have been good parents, no?’ he had then asked more gently.
‘Fuck no,’ I said, and we both shared a rare laugh.
‘I think what bothers me the most is that it is with someone who has ruined the country, killed people,’ I had defended myself.
‘We have never lacked for anything. Everything else is either none of your business or politics,’ he tried to conclude for both of us.
All roads lead us to our deathbed, I thought as I leaned over to say goodbye, for the moment, to my father. He tried to will himself into full consciousness, but the drugs won, to my relief.
I left the hospital and went to The National Inquisitor bureau to report to Alison. She immediately wanted to know where I was with the story and for me to file my travel receipts. I explained that all I needed was to finish my write-up on Miriam and cover the final competition, which was in four days. But before then, Miriam was going to a wedding, and I was going to be her date.
***
It was a big wedding, one bringing two wealthy families, one Ethiopian and the other Kenyan, together. I had never met the bride or bridegroom, which was surprising to me — I prided myself on knowing the Nairobi wealthy and celebs. Wealth was on display — from the expensive cars to the decorations, to the outfits worn by everyone else besides Miriam and me, the odd couple for numerous obvious reasons. Miriam was dressed in a long, blue dress and red high heels that were a size or two bigger — she had shrunk, she swore. I was dressed in a white Ethiopian shirt with lions embroidered along the buttons, which I had bought at the airport. The symbolic nature of the union, two peoples, two cultures and two nations, was drummed into everything — from napkins with Ethiopian and Kenyan flags to our singing the two national anthems to kick off the ceremony.
Miriam knew the grandmother of the bride; they had formed a friendship on first arriving in Kenya and navigating the immigration mazes together. This she explained as we were being seated close to the high table. The wedding dragged on and on, as Kenyan weddings do. Politicians gave speeches, clergymen preached, uncles and aunts spoke, presents were given, or more aptly, donated — from a king-size bed to pots and pans to a brand-new Peugeot from the parents. People starved, children cried, one or two old people fainted — but finally we ate, the taps to alcohol were opened, a wedding band started playing the usual standards — “Malaika,” Houston’s “I Will Always Love You,” and, of course, “Islands in the Stream” by Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton.
By early evening, the wedding was now a raging party, and Miriam was having fun dancing and drinking with her old friend, while I sampled the various whiskies. At some point, her friend went to the microphone and said she had a special gift to the married couple — a Tizita by one of the best but unknown singers of her generation.
‘The bitch ambushed me,’ Miriam happily whispered to me.
‘You can use the practice; the competition is in two days,’ I said in solidarity.
As she got on stage and started singing, trying to get the band into the right key and rhythm, I knew it was going to be a failed performance, and I started to dread the carnage. For one, the saxophonist was playing off key. The guitarist, we couldn’t even hear. There were too many false starts, notes helter-skelter. They would seem to get on the same groove, then something would happen, and they would come undone. But the wedding crowd loved it. It was a gift in the deepest sense of the word — an artist put on the spot, on stage, warts and all; to see the music being made.
A blind man playfully yelled that he was going to rescue his lovely Miriam and tapped his way onto the stage with one hand, the other carrying an expensive-looking krar.
‘Ladies and gentlemen…Gabriel Afsaw!’ Miriam announced him.
The Ethiopians recognised him because they yelled out his name and crowded the stage to hear him. He set up shop as the rest of the band quieted down and, as if on a volume dial, his krar and Miriam’s voice came up to the forefront. The more I listened to his krar and her voice, the more I could not help feeling that he was seeing, blind as he was, something in its barest
essence — sound, perhaps? Sensing sound? An image for an artist, would it not be a sensation? A feeling?
The band came back in. The saxophonist had given up his sax for a harmonica, and he was breathing in and out a jagged wailing sound, then showing off in a loving way that he could dig even deeper by drawing a sound so long and varied he ran out of air and took long, painful breaths — as if to say, Only by dying a little can you play the perfect note.
If I did not know any better, I would have sworn that Miriam and the blind man were lovers. The sound of the blind man’s krar against the harmonica — he was snapping the strings so fast that it felt like sound had become a physical entity, pushing out wave after wave. Miriam’s singing and his krar were in a heated debate, like one between cheating lovers, the sex that comes from a pathological relationship. So they argued, threatened fire and brimstone, dug into each other’s old wounds; they laughed and loved together. Sometimes the drummer wanted to hug them and calm them down, and other times he would threaten and shout at them. And the harmonica kept digging them out of their quarrelsome world to remind them of the love they had lost, or risked losing, or were making.
Miriam’s voice. At the end of each phrase, I could hear it. There was a rasp, sometimes empty air, like she had spit close to the mic, rapidly flicked her tongue so that her voice also became breath that became sound. A contained roar, a roar of rage, love — any two extreme emotions — what would that sound like? The answer was the voice we were listening to, somewhere between the wail of ‘someone has died,’ and the wail of ‘someone has been born.’ What could be better than for that wail to be expressed by multiple voices and instruments? An orchestra on stage? Or just a single, solitary krar? The answer was in her voice, which, to my ear, contained many voices, like someone possessed by a choir. Like Kidane’s voice, only hers was older.
Unbury Our Dead with Song Page 16
