African Quilt : 24 Modern African Stories (9781101617441) (11 page)

And yet I did not stand there long. I went down the broken stairs and out of the house, leaving the window hanging like the page of an open book, adding my destruction to all the others just as careless, that were bringing the house to the ground; more rain would come in, more swifts and bats to nest. But it is the ants who bring the grave to the house, in the end. As I pushed the swollen front doors roughly closed behind me I saw them, in their moving chain from life to death, carrying in the grains of red earth that will cover it.

They were black, with bodies the shapes of egg-timers. I looked up from them, guilty at waste of time, when I felt someone watching me. In the drive there was a young man without shoes, his hands arranged as if he had an imaginary hat in them. I said good morning in the language of the country—it suddenly came to my mouth—and he asked me for work. Standing on the steps before the Williamsons' house, I laughed: “I don't live here. It's empty.”

“I have been one years without a work,” he said mouthingly in English, perhaps as a demonstration of an additional qualification.

I said, “I'm sorry. I live very far from here.”

“I am cooking and garden too,” he said.

Then we did not know what to say to each other. I went to the car and gave him two shillings out of my bag and he did what I hadn't seen since I was a child, and one of Inkalamu's servants used to take something from him—he went on his knees, clapped once, and made a bowl of his hands to receive the money.

I bumped and rocked down the drive from that house that I should never see again, whose instant in time was already forgotten, renamed, like the public buildings and streets of the territory—it didn't matter how they did it. I only hoped that the old man had left plenty of money for those children of his, Joyce, Bessie—what were the other ones' names?—to enjoy now that they were citizens of their mothers' country. At the junction with the main road the bicycle on its side and the man were still there, and a woman was standing on the veranda of the store with a little girl. I thought she might have something to do with the people who owned the land, now, and that I ought to make some sort of acknowledgement for having entered the property, so I greeted her through the car window, and she said, “Was the road very bad?”

“Thank you, no. Thank you very much.”

“Usually people walks up when they come, now. I'm afraid to let them take the cars. And when it's been raining!”

She had come down to the car with the smile of someone for whom the historic ruin is simply a place to hang the washing. She was young, Portuguese, or perhaps Indian, with piled curls of dull hair and large black eyes, inflamed and watering. She wore tarnished gilt earrings and a peacock brooch, but her feet swished across the sand in felt slippers. The child had sore eyes, too; the flies were at her.

“Did you buy the place, then?” I said.

“It's my father's,” she said. “He died about seven years ago.”

“Joyce,” I said. “It's Joyce!”

She laughed like a child made to stand up in class. “I'm Nonny, the baby. Joyce is the next one, the one before.”

Nonny. I used to push her round on my bicycle, her little legs hanging from the knee over the handlebars. I told her who I was, ready to exchange family news. But of course our families had never been friends. She had never been in our house. So I said, “I couldn't go past without going to see if Inkalamu Williamson's house was still there.”

“Oh yes,” she said. “Quite often people comes to look at the house. But it's in a terrible mess.”

“And the others? Joyce, and Bessie, and Roger—?”

They were in this town or that; she was not even sure which, in the case of some of them.

“Well, that's good,” I said. “It's different here now, there's so much to do, in the territory.” I told her I had been at the independence celebrations; I was conscious, with a stab of satisfaction at the past, that we could share now as we had never been able to.

“That's nice,” she said.

“—And you're still here. The only one of us still here! Is it a long time since it was lived in?” The house was present, out of sight, behind us.

“My mother and I was there till—how long now—five years ago”—she was smiling and holding up her hand to keep the light from hurting her eyes—“but what can a person do there, it's so far from the road. So I started this little place.” Her smile took me into the confidence of the empty road, the hot morning, the single customer with his bicycle. “Well, I must try. What can you do?”

I asked, “And the other farms, I remember the big tobacco farm on the other side of the river?”

“Oh that, that was gone long before he died. I don't know what happened to the farms. We found out he didn't have them any more, he must have sold them, I don't know . . . or what. He left the brothers a tobacco farm—you know, the two elder brothers, not from my mother, from the second mother—but it came out the bank had it already. I don't know. My father never talk to us about these business things, you know.”

“But you've got this farm.” We were of the new generation, she and I. “You could sell it, I'm sure. Land values are going to rise again. They're prospecting all over this area between the bauxite mines and the capital. Sell it, and—well, do—you could go where you like.”

“It's just the house. From the house to the road. Just this little bit,” she said, and laughed. “The rest was sold before he died. It's just the house, that he left to my mother. But you got to live, I mean.”

I said warmly, “The same with my father! Our ranch was ten thousand acres. And there was more up at Lebishe. If he'd have hung on to Lebishe alone we'd have made a fortune when the platinum deposits were found.”

But of course it was not quite the same. She said sympathetically, “Really!” to me with my university-modulated voice. We were smiling at each other, one on either side of the window of the big American car. The child, with bows in its hair, hung on to her hand; the flies bothered its small face.

“You couldn't make some sort of hotel, I suppose.”

“It's in a mess,” she said, assuming the tone of a flighty, apologetic housewife. “I built this little place here for us and we just left it. It's so much rubbish there still.”

“Yes, and the books. All those books. The ants are eating them.” I smiled at the little girl as people without children of their own do. Behind, there was the store, and the cottage like the backyard quarters provided for servants in white houses. “Doesn't anyone want the books?”

“We don't know what to do with them. We just left them. Such a lot of books my father collected up.” After all, I knew her father's eccentricities.

“And the mission school at Balondi's been taken over and made into a pretty good place?” I seemed to remember that Joyce and one of the brothers had been there; probably all Inkalamu's children. It was no longer a school meant for black children, as it had been in our time. But she seemed to have only a polite general interest: “Yes, somebody said something the other day.”

“You went to school there, didn't you, in the old days?”

She giggled at herself and moved the child's arm. “I never been away from here.”

“Really? Never!”

“My father taught me a bit. You'll even see the schoolbooks among that lot up there. Really.”

“Well, I suppose the shop might become quite a nice thing,” I said.

She said, “If I could get a licence for brandy, though. It's only beer, you see. If I could get a licence for brandy . . . I'm telling you, I'd get the men coming.” She giggled.

“Well, if I'm to reach the mines by three, I'd better move,” I said.

She kept smiling to please me; I began to think she didn't remember me at all; why should she, she had been no bigger than her little daughter when I used to take her on the handlebars of my bicycle. But she said, “I'll bring my mother. She's inside.” She turned and the child turned with her and they went into the shade of the veranda and into the store. In a moment they came out with a thin black woman bent either by age or in greeting—I was not sure. She wore a head-cloth and a full long skirt of the minutely-patterned blue-and-white cotton that used to be in bales on the counter of every store, in my childhood. I got out of the car and shook hands with her. She clapped and made an obeisance, never looking at me. She was very thin with a narrow breast under a shrunken yellow blouse pulled together by a flower with gaps like those of missing teeth in its coloured glass corolla. Before the three of them, I turned to the child rubbing at her eyes with hands tangled in the tendrils of her hair. “So you've a daughter of your own now, Nonny.”

She giggled and swung her forward.

I said to the little girl, “What's hurting you, dear?—Something wrong with her eyes?”

“Yes. It's all red and sore. Now I've got it too, but not so bad.”

“It's conjunctivitis,” I said. “She's infected you. You must go to the doctor.”

She smiled and said, “I don't know what it is. She had it two weeks now.”

Then we shook hands and I thought: I mustn't touch my face until I can wash them.

“You're going to Kalondwe, to the mine.” The engine was running. She stood with her arms across her breasts, the attitude of one who is left behind.

“Yes, I believe old Doctor Madley's back in the territory, he's at the W.H.O. centre there.” Dr. Madley had been the only doctor in the district when we were all children.

“Oh yes,” she said in her exaggeratedly interested, conversational manner. “He didn't know my father was dead, you know, he came to see him!”

“I'll tell him I've seen you, then.”

“Yes, tell him.” She made the little girl's limp fat hand wave goodbye, pulling it away from her eyes—“Naughty, naughty.” I suddenly remembered—“What's your name now, by the way?”; the times were gone when nobody ever bothered to know the married names of women who weren't white. And I didn't want to refer to her as Inkalamu's daughter. Thank God she was free of him, and the place he and his kind had made for her. All that was dead, Inkalamu was dead.

She stood twiddling her earrings, bridling, smiling, her face not embarrassed but warmly bashful with open culpability. “Oh, just Miss Williamson. Tell him Nonny.”

I turned carefully on to the tar. I didn't want to leave with my dust in their faces. As I gathered speed I saw in the mirror that she still had the child by the wrist, waving its hand to me.

A
BDULRAZAK
G
URNAH

Gurnah was born on the island of Zanzibar, a part of Tanzania, in 1948. He emigrated in 1968 to Great Britain, where he earned a doctorate at the University of Kent in 1982. For a brief period from 1980 to 1982, he was a lecturer at Bayero University Kano in Nigeria, but he has spent most of his academic career at the University of Kent, where he is a lecturer. Among his many novels are
Memory of Departure
(1987),
Dottie
(1990),
Paradise
(1994),
Admiring Silence
(1996),
By the Sea
(2001),
Desertion
(2005), and
The Last Gift
(2011). His fiction often reflects the enduring effects of colonialism and slavery on the problems experienced by Africans today. Gurnah's biography,
My Mother Lived on a Farm in Africa,
was published in 2006.

Cages

(1992)

T
here were times when it felt to Hamid as if he had been in the shop always, and that his life would end there. He no longer felt discomfort, nor did he hear the secret mutterings at the dead hours of night which had once emptied his heart in dread. He knew now that they came from the seasonal swamp which divided the city from the townships, and which teemed with life. The shop was in a good position, at a major crossroads from the city's suburbs. He opened it at first light when the earliest workers were shuffling by, and did not shut it again until all but the last stragglers had trailed home. He liked to say that at his station he saw all of life pass him by. At peak hours he would be on his feet all the time, talking and bantering with the customers, courting them and taking pleasure in the skill with which he handled himself and his merchandise. Later he would sink exhausted on the boxed seat which served as his till.

The girl appeared at the shop late one evening, just as he was thinking it was time to close. He had caught himself nodding twice, a dangerous trick in such desperate times. The second time he had woken up with a start, thinking a large hand was clutching his throat and lifting him off the ground. She was standing in front of him, waiting with a look of disgust in her face.

“Ghee,” she said after waiting for a long, insolent minute. “One shilling.” As she spoke she half-turned away, as if the sight of him was irritating. A piece of cloth was wrapped round her body and tucked in under the armpits. The soft cotton clung to her, marking the outline of her graceful shape. Her shoulders were bare and glistened in the gloom. He took the bowl from her and bent down to the tin of ghee. He was filled with longing and a sudden ache. When he gave the bowl back to her, she looked vaguely at him, her eyes distant and glazed with tiredness. He saw that she was young, with a small round face and slim neck. Without a word, she turned and went back into the darkness, taking a huge stride to leap over the concrete ditch which divided the kerb from the road. Hamid watched her retreating form and wanted to cry out a warning for her to take care. How did she know that there wasn't something there in the dark? Only a feeble croak came out as he choked the impulse to call to her. He waited, half-expecting to hear her cry out but only heard the retreating slap of her sandals as she moved further into the night.

She was an attractive girl, and for some reason as he stood thinking about her and watched the hole in the night into which she had disappeared, he began to feel disgust for himself. She had been right to look at him with disdain. His body and his mouth felt stale. There was little cause to wash more than once every other day. The journey from bed to shop took a minute or so, and he never went anywhere else. What was there to wash for? His legs were misshapen from lack of proper exercise. He had spent the day in bondage, months and years had passed like that, a fool stuck in a pen all his life. He shut up the shop wearily, knowing that during the night he would indulge the squalor of his nature.

The following evening, the girl came to the shop again. Hamid was talking to one of his regular customers, a man much older than him called Mansur who lived nearby and on some evenings came to the shop to talk. He was half-blind with cataracts, and people teased him about his affliction, playing cruel tricks on him. Some of them said of Mansur that he was going blind because his eyes were full of shit. He could not keep away from boys. Hamid sometimes wondered if Mansur hung around the shop after something, after him. But perhaps it was just malice and gossip. Mansur stopped talking when the girl approached, then squinted hard as he tried to make her out in the poor light.

“Do you have shoe polish? Black?” she asked.

“Yes,” Hamid said. His voice sounded congealed, so he cleared his throat and repeated Yes. The girl smiled.

“Welcome, my love. How are you today?” Mansur asked. His accent was so pronounced, thick with a rolling flourish, that Hamid wondered if it was intended as a joke. “What a beautiful smell you have, such perfume! A voice like
zuwarde
and a body like a gazelle. Tell me,
msichana,
what time are you free tonight? I need someone to massage my back.”

The girl ignored him. With his back to them, Hamid heard Mansur continue to chat to the girl, singing wild praises to her while he tried to fix a time. In his confusion Hamid could not find a tin of polish. When he turned round with it at last, he thought she had been watching him all the time, and was amused that he had been so flustered. He smiled, but she frowned and then paid him. Mansur was talking beside her, cajoling and flattering, rattling the coins in his jacket pocket, but she turned and left without a word.

“Look at her, as if the sun itself wouldn't dare shine on her. So proud! But the truth is she's easy meat,” Mansur said, his body gently rocking with suppressed laughter. “I'll be having that one before long. How much do you think she'll take? They always do that, these women, all these airs and disgusted looks . . . but once you've got them into bed, and you've got inside them, then they know who's the master.”

Hamid found himself laughing, keeping the peace among men. But he did not think she was a girl to be purchased. She was so certain and comfortable in every action that he could not believe her abject enough for Mansur's designs. Again and again his mind returned to the girl, and when he was alone he imagined himself intimate with her. At night after he had shut up the shop, he went to sit for a few minutes with the old man, Fajir, who owned the shop and lived in the back. He could no longer see to himself and very rarely asked to leave his bed. A woman who lived nearby came to see to him during the day, and took free groceries from the shop in return, but at night the ailing old man liked to have Hamid sit with him for a little while. The smell of the dying man perfumed the room while they talked. There was not usually much to say, a ritual of complaints about poor business and plaintive prayers for the return of health. Sometimes when his spirits were low, Fajir talked tearfully of death and the life which awaited him there. Then Hamid would take the old man to the toilet, make sure his chamber-pot was clean and empty, and leave him. Late into the night, Fajir would talk to himself, sometimes his voice rising softly to call out Hamid's name.

Hamid slept outside in the inner yard. During the rains he cleared a space in the tiny store and slept there. He spent his nights alone and never went out. It was well over a year since he had even left the shop, and before then he had only gone out with Fajir, before the old man was bedridden. Fajir had taken him to the mosque every Friday, and Hamid remembered the throngs of people and the cracked pavements steaming in the rain. On the way home they went to the market, and the old man named the luscious fruit and the brightly coloured vegetables for him, picking up some of them to make him smell or touch. Since his teens, when he first came to live in this town, Hamid had worked for the old man. Fajir gave him his board and he worked in the shop. At the end of every day, he spent his nights alone, and often thought of his father and his mother, and the town of his birth. Even though he was no longer a boy, the memories made him weep and he was degraded by the feelings that would not leave him be.

When the girl came to the shop again, to buy beans and sugar, Hamid was generous with the measures. She noticed and smiled at him. He beamed with pleasure, even though he knew that her smile was laced with derision. The next time she actually said something to him, only a greeting, but spoken pleasantly. Later she told him that her name was Rukiya and that she had recently moved into the area to live with relatives.

“Where's your home?” he asked.

“Mwembemaringo,” she said, flinging an arm out to indicate that it was a long way away. “But you have to go on back-roads and over hills.”

He could see from the blue cotton dress she wore during the day that she worked as a domestic. When he asked her where she worked, she snorted softly first, as if to say that the question was unimportant. Then she told him that until she could find something better, she was a maid at one of the new hotels in the city.

“The best one, the Equator,” she said. “There's a swimming pool and carpets everywhere. Almost everyone staying there is a
mzungu,
a European. We have a few Indians too, but none of these people from the bush who make the sheets smell.”

He took to standing at the doorway of his backyard bedchamber after he had shut the shop at night. The streets were empty and silent at that hour, not the teeming, dangerous places of the day. He thought of Rukiya often, and sometimes spoke her name, but thinking of her only made him more conscious of his isolation and squalor. He remembered how she had looked to him the first time, moving away in the late evening shadow. He wanted to touch her . . . Years in darkened places had done this to him, he thought, so that now he looked out on the streets of the foreign town and imagined that the touch of an unknown girl would be his salvation.

One night he stepped out into the street and latched the door behind him. He walked slowly towards the nearest streetlamp, then to the one after that. To his surprise he did not feel frightened. He heard something move but he did not look. If he did not know where he was going, there was no need to fear since anything could happen. There was comfort in that.

He turned a corner into a street lined with shops, one or two of which were lit, then turned another corner to escape the lights. He had not seen anyone, neither a policeman nor a night watchman. On the edge of a square he sat for a few minutes on a wooden bench, wondering that everything should seem so familiar. In one corner was a clock tower, clicking softly in the silent night. Metal posts lined the sides of the square, impassive and correct. Buses were parked in rows at one end, and in the distance he could hear the sound of the sea.

He made for the sound, and discovered that he was not far from the waterfront. The smell of the water suddenly made him think of his father's home. That town too had been by the sea, and once he had played on the beaches and in the shallows like all the other children. He no longer thought of it as somewhere he belonged to, somewhere that was his home. The water lapped gently at the foot of the sea-wall, and he stopped to peer at it breaking into white froth against the concrete. Lights were still shining brightly on one of the jetties and there was a hum of mechanical activity. It did not seem possible that anyone could be working at that hour of the night.

There were lights on across the bay, single isolated dots that were strung across a backdrop of darkness. Who lived there? he wondered. A shiver of fear ran through him. He tried to picture people living in that dark corner of the city. His mind gave him images of strong men with cruel faces, who peered at him and laughed. He saw dimly lit clearings where shadows lurked in wait for the stranger, and where later, men and women crowded over the body. He heard the sound of their feet pounding in an old ritual, and heard their cries of triumph as the blood of their enemies flowed into the pressed earth. But it was not only for the physical threat they posed that he feared the people who lived in the dark across the bay. It was because they knew where they were, and he was in the middle of nowhere.

He turned back towards the shop, unable to resist, despite everything, a feeling that he had dared something. It became a habit that after he had shut up the shop at night and had seen to Fajir, he went for a stroll to the waterfront. Fajir did not like it and complained about being left alone, but Hamid ignored his grumbles. Now and then he saw people, but they hurried past without a glance. During the day, he kept an eye out for the girl who now so filled his hours. At night he imagined himself with her. As he strolled the silent streets, he tried to think she was there with him, talking and smiling, and sometimes putting the palm of her hand on his neck. When she came to the shop, he always put in something extra, and waited for her to smile. Often they spoke, a few words of greeting and friendship. When there were shortages he served her from the secret reserves he kept for special customers. Whenever he dared he complimented her on her appearance, and squirmed with longing and confusion when she rewarded him with radiant smiles. Hamid laughed to himself as he remembered Mansur's boast about the girl. She was no girl to be bought with a few shillings, but one to be sung to, to be won with display and courage. And neither Mansur, half-blind with shit as he was, nor Hamid, had the words or the voice for such a feat.

Late one evening, Rukiya came to the shop to buy sugar. She was still in her blue work-dress, which was stained under the arms with sweat. There were no other customers, and she did not seem in a hurry. She began to tease him gently, saying something about how hard he worked.

“You must be very rich after all the hours you spend in the shop. Have you got a hole in the yard where you hide your money? Everyone knows shopkeepers have secret hoards . . . Are you saving to return to your town?”

“I don't have anything,” he protested. “Nothing here belongs to me.”