My Secret History (46 page)

I had never traveled these roads with another person. I had always gone alone. It was wonderful to be with this woman. We talked about books we liked. We took turns quoting poetry we had memorized. She recited Wordsworth and T. S. Eliot; I did Baudelaire and Robert Frost. We chanted “Ozymandias.” We sang folk songs, and when it grew dark in the winding roads of Kisoro, we sang Christmas carols.

We arrived at the government rest house at ten o’clock after a twelve-hour drive, and took turns in the bathroom. The dining room was empty. The African waiter brought us steamed bananas and stew, and bottles of Primus Beer smuggled from the Congo—the border was nearer than Kampala. The insects were loud. We sat on the veranda, where it was cool enough to wear a sweater. I could see the lamplights in the huts through the trees and could smell the smoke of the cooking fires.

“God, I love this place.”

“I’m glad to hear you say that,” Jenny said.

I loved the smell of woodsmoke, the clayey odor of the dirt road, the racket of insects, the sound of a jangling bike and its feeble bell, the fragrance of the jacaranda after rain, and the way the giraffes loped when they hurried, the great hot distances of the day and even the simpler evocative smells of the rest house, the varnish and floor wax and cooking bananas.

“Maybe we should turn in,” I said. “We have to drive again tomorrow.”

In our room there were two single beds. Jenny had thrown some clothes on one, and I had done the same with the other—so we had each staked a claim.

But after I turned the light out I said, “Can I get into bed with you?”

She was silent. Was she asleep so soon?

“I promise to behave myself,” I said. “I just want to snuggle next to you.”

“Okay,” she said. I could tell from the way she said it that she was smiling.

Her skin felt damp and warm in her cotton nightgown. She was perspiring slightly. She went to sleep and began to breathe softly in a dreamy way. I could not sleep. My heart was pounding. I was awake, with wide-open eyes.

I touched her, and this woke her. She drew away.

She said, “You promised not to.”

As I kissed her and lifted her legs and parted them she said “No,” but the sound she made when I entered her was a sigh like a yes.

*   *   *

I saw my class, and then we set off. It seemed an empty land. There were few people in between the towns—no villages, only animals. We drove in the darkness of the high forest and then broke through to the plains. In one place there was a herd of elephants. We tried to count them, but got to sixty and lost count, distracted by the crested cranes and the wildebeest nearer the road. We said nothing about last night.

“Did you know a wildebeest is a gnu?” Jenny said.

She also knew Grant’s gazelle from Thomson’s gazelle, and the names of the various thorn trees. She told me that elephants grieved when one in a herd died—they actually mourned and trumpeted and sometimes tried to bury the carcass.

We continued north to my listening group at Katwe, where there was a salt lake, and to Lake Edward, which was full of hippos, some up to their nostrils in water and others grazing and snorting and shitting—whirring the lumps with their tails, like shit hitting a fan. We went past the copper mine and the deserted railway station at Kilembe, and we entered the region of tea estates—still there were no people, only the lovely dense tea bushes. It was sundown when we reached Fort Portal. We stayed at The Mountains of the Moon Hotel and made love again.

We crossed the mountains on a narrow road through the Ituri Forest. It was shadowy and damp in the forest and we were pestered by pygmies when we stopped to rest. These people were smaller than the ferns and they hid and threw stones at the car when we refused to take their picture. When I blew the car horn they vanished, thinking I was going to drive into them. I was glad to have Jenny with me, in this forest. I realized that I could carry on for a long time—as long as we were together I had no reason to go back. We slept in each other’s arms in a narrow bed at Bundibugyo, and a few days later we drove north to Gulu, where she had asked to go. The road turned from mud to sand, zebras watched us change a tire, and we were stopped at a roadblock by toothless Acholi soldiers with shiny faces and wicked-looking rifles. They asked for bribes; I paid up—and Jenny was chastened by the casual menace of those men. Gulu was hot, and its only sound was that of locusts howling. The thin trees were penetrated by the sun, so there was no shade. Hawks
hovered over grass fires, occasionally dropping on mice and snakes that were put to flight by the flames.

It was only ten days of travel, but at the end of it we knew each other well—so well that when we arrived back in Kampala I kissed her and said, “I love you.”

I had always felt that love was a word that had been worn smooth by overuse, and yet she seemed slightly shocked when I said it.

She did not say that she loved me. Instead she used fond and oblique expressions that tantalized me. If she had been American I would have known what she meant—if she had been African it would have been much plainer to me. But she was English, and the language could be as maddening and ungraspable as smoke. I meant a lot to her, she said. She was as happy as she had ever been with anyone, she said. The trip had been tremendous fun, she said. She had been desolated by having to come back to town, she said. She would miss me enormously …

I wanted more. There was no more. She was going away. Within a few weeks she passed her exams and had her diploma. She delightedly told me that she had been posted to a bush school in the highlands of Kenya. Wasn’t it absolutely super?

I said yes, because she seemed so pleased. But I was sick at the thought of it.

“How could the Ugandan Ministry of Education send you to Kenya?”

“I was sent by the British Ministry of Overseas Development,” she said. “It’s a three-year scheme.”

It was the first I had heard of it. She was part of a high-powered economic aid program; but she had never mentioned
it. It was partly that she never boasted and seldom talked about herself; and also that I had done most of the talking.

“I know the white highlands,” I said, and she winced. But that was how they were known even with Jomo Kenyatta as president. “It could have been worse, I guess. They might have sent you to Zanzibar.”

“I’d love to go to Zanzibar,” she said.

I found her enthusiasm very discouraging and wanted to say
What about me?

“What if you got married?” I asked. “What would the ministry say?”

“It’s just for single people—couples aren’t as flexible. Anyway, I have no plans.”

Before she left we spent four days at Lake Nabugabo, where there was no bilharzia, and so we could swim. We lived like castaways in a cozy hut, cooking our meals on a wood fire and drawing water from a well. I paddled her in a dugout canoe to the leper colony on the island—we had brought them sheets to be made into bandages. We gathered wild flowers and pressed them into Jenny’s book. We made love. And driving back to Kampala she said it had all been tremendous fun.

She cried when she left for Nairobi. She took the overnight train. On the platform there were Indians, Africans, British, refugees, Greeks from the Congo, Belgians from Rwanda, people going only as far as Tororo or Jinja, or nine miles down the line; other people leaving for good, with everything they owned, and their servants watching them like orphans. Everyone was saying goodbye differently.

“Don’t be sad, honey.”

“I’m not sad,” she said. “I’m so excited to be starting I can’t control myself.”

“I’ll miss you.”

“I’ll miss you, too”—but would she have said that if I hadn’t prodded her?

“I’ll write to you.”

She said, “I’m terrible about answering letters.”

I hated that.

“Can I visit you?”

“It’s so far!” she said, but in a surprised way, as though the thought had not occurred to her that I might want to visit her.

The whistle blew. A bell was rung on the platform. It was a steam train—noisy, drawing attention to itself, and it gathered speed slowly. No other vehicle on earth seemed to depart so reluctantly or with such self-importance.

I walked beside it, feeling forlorn, and when the train finally left it took a part of me with it. I felt physically incomplete, as if I’d suffered a stroke—part of my body wasn’t working. For the first time in my life I understood why lovers always talked about their heart. It seemed the most fragile part of me, and I could feel it squeezing below my throat.

I went back to my squawking parrot and sat among the books he had gnawed, feeling a paralyzing sadness.

I had always loved being alone, and so departures—no matter whose—left me feeling free, even happy. Parting from someone allowed me to go back to my life—my real life, which was always interesting to me because it was hidden. This secret life was usually peaceful and in my control. It was not a refuge or a hole I crawled into to be still and silent. It was an active thing with noisy habits, and it contained the engine of my writing.

It had been a succession of departures in my life that had made me feel bold—sometimes like a pilgrim and sometimes like an adventurer. I took pleasure in seeing myself as wolfish and slightly disgraceful. I had loved being with Rosamond in London, but I had felt liberated in going away; and the same with Francesca in Accra and Femi in Lagos. In Kampala I had always regarded the prospect of a night with Rashida as exciting, but the next morning I had never wanted her to stay longer, and those afternoons at the Botanical Gardens could be very long. I liked sleeping alone. It was only alone that I had good dreams. Sleeping with a woman often gave me nightmares. I never tried to explain it. It was only that in my life so far I had been happiest when I was alone and had elbow room. I liked to wake up in that same solitude.

But from the moment Jenny left, I missed her. Her train pulled out and I went home like a cripple. I saw Rashida on my way through Wandegeya. She was just leaving the Modern Beauty Hair Salon where she worked, and I recognized her white smock and pulled up next to her.

“Hello
habibi
. Are you a nurse?”

“Yes,
bwana
,” she said, without a missing a beat. “I have some
dawa
under here”—and she touched her smock. “It is good medicine. It will make you feel strong.”

That was the relationship: corny jokes. I felt friendly towards her but nothing more. She was a person I had once known.

I was too confused to write to Jenny, and when I did my letter was incoherent. It was an attempt to hide my jealousy, my sadness, my loneliness and fear. I simply said I missed her. And I told her how when I was writing it there was a scratching on the window above the bed. I had looked up and seen the big lemur eyes of the bush-baby. He seemed to be appealing to be let in. I gave him a piece of banana, keeping him outside. He seemed sorrowful. I wanted to take him into my arms, and I became tearful as I watched him. That story was true.

Love did not seem the right word to explain how I felt. I was physically sick, I felt weak. I missed Jenny, but I also missed myself—I missed that other person I had been when I was with her. I had not been a tease or a manipulator or a baboon wagging his prong at her. I had wanted to please her. She had made me kind and generous, she had made me patient. I liked myself better behaving that way, and because she had left I had lapsed back into being the other person. No, it was not love but rather a kind of grief—I missed her and this other self. She was the daylight that had showed me my secrets, and most of them weren’t worth keeping.

I never lost this grief, but along with it I was also angry that she had left me. Then the anger passed and self-pity replaced it. I sat in my room listening to the mutters of my parrot. In my office I went through the motions of working; and I hardly spoke, because all my sorrow was in my voice.

People said, “Are you all right?”

They knew I wasn’t.

When I said I was fine they knew I was lying, because of the sadness in my protest. I was sure that they talked about me all the time in the Staff Club.

They were too hearty with me. They made a great effort to be friendly. Their effort made me feel worse.

Crowbridge said, “Are you leaving?”

I shook my head. “What gave you that idea?”

“Someone mentioned the University of Papua-New Guinea the other day and you went all quiet.”

People in Uganda were always looking for a new place to go, permanent and pensionable jobs in the tropics—warm disorderly countries which offered good terms of service. This university in Port Moresby was the current one.

“I’m not going anywhere,” I said.

“Excellent,” Crowbridge said. “There’s a good chap.”

He bought me a drink. I drank slowly, sadly; I didn’t have the energy to get drunk. I simply grew sadder.

“How’s your Nubian?” Crowbridge said.

Then I felt much worse, and I left without saying anything, knowing that I had made myself conspicuous and pitiful.

At home I managed to make myself drunk and wrote a fifteen-page letter to Jenny, gasping as I scribbled and finally collapsing over it. When I read it the next morning I tore it up. It was a harangue. It contained phrases from a book I had been reading, Kafka’s
Letters to Milena
—morbid love letters. My own would have frightened her.

It would have been convenient, I thought, if we’d had a mutual friend to tell her about me: Andy loves you—He’s really suffering—He’s in terrible shape—He’s quite a good writer, you know—And he’s director of the Institute—only twenty-six!—But God, we’re worried about him—He’s never been like this—We hardly recognize him—He hasn’t been the same since you left.

I could not say such things myself. I didn’t want to excite her pity. I wanted her to love me in return and for us to talk about the future.

In my loneliness, feeling abandoned, I made plans for both of us—marrying Jenny, having children, getting a job in Hong Kong or Singapore. I wanted to get away from Africa, which now made me feel like a failure—and Africa was my rival for Jenny’s love. I also resented her, because she had destroyed my love of solitude, invaded my secret life; she had made me need her.