My Secret History

  “Whose is it?”

  She said, “Yours!” and laughed in a taunting way.

  She kept it up and my blood ran cold. I was so worried that I started to do calculations. It was hopeless, because I could not remember when I had made love to her—all the times. But I said it was impossible and I tried to seem very certain.

  “Get on me,” she said. She rolled onto her back and lifted her legs. Foreplay was unknown in that country.

  I could not perform. The mention of her baby, the size of her belly, and the sun streaming through the window all killed my desire. I had been genuinely afraid by the easy mocking way she had said, “Yours!”

  I suggested that instead of making love we have a cup of tea. She said okay and hopped out of bed. Captain made us breakfast and while he was out of the room I asked her how many months?

  “Three or four,” she said.

  I screamed, “I haven’t touched you for six months!”

  “Don’t make noise,” she said and squinted at me.

  “I am not the father.”

  She said, “I was just joking.”

  “Black humor.”

  She said she had no idea who the father was, but when the baby was born she would go to the Chiperoni Blanket Factory and compare the child’s features with the men in the rag room, and then she would know.

  Captain took her into town on the bike and that night I brought home a different girl. I always saw Abby on Sundays, because there was only one evening show. These days she never stayed late. Her coach had told her to drink a lot of milk and to sleep well. She was training for the race that would get her to Rhodesia.

  I asked her why—though she was in training—she let me make love to her.

  “Because I am so close to you,” she said.

  This seemed very tender.

  “My house is just this side. It’s easy.”

  The township was a mess—it smelled, it was muddy, it was noisy, and at night it was so dark that if you weren’t careful you would fall into a ditch. All these were characteristics of the country. But there was no crime. The Africans in Kanjedza were too poor to get very drunk, and they worked too hard to stay up at night raising hell. There was cooperation—people helped each other, minded each other’s children, cooked for each other, did their washing together at the standpipe: clothes in the morning, dishes at night. They were village courtesies, and though it seemed an unlikely place to find them practiced, the Africans saw nothing unusual in it. The township was not a mess to them. They said they were proud of their cement huts and tin roofs. But they were city Africans and rather lonely.

  In spite of the bleakness and the outward dirtiness of the huts, the broken and smeared windows, the ragged curtains and splintered doors and the way they put boulders on the roof to hold the tin down—in spite of this, when the African girls emerged from the huts they were fresh-faced and clean, in starched blouses and pleated skirts. All day they lurked looking frumpish in sarongs and old coats and rubber sandals; but when they went into town they were dressed up and unrecognizable. They wore pretty dresses and the men wore neckties and jackets.

  Harry Gombo wore a three-piece suit and carried a carved walking stick. He usually wore a felt hat, too.

  “Do you like my sombrero?” he said.

  We were on our way to the Kanjedza shop everyone called the canteen.

  “We call that a porkpie hat,” I said. “You’re a snappy dresser, Harry.”

  He told me that he had grown up in the low-lying town of Port Herald and had never worn more than a pair of shorts until he was eighteen.

  “And then I went about in a little singlet.”

  “What’s a singlet?” I said, taking out my small notebook.

  “A vest.”

  He meant an undershirt.

  He said, “But you Americans have everything.”

  “There were a lot of things I didn’t have.”

  He said he was surprised, but he believed me. And when I didn’t say anything more, he asked, “What things?”

  I thought awhile. I wanted to be truthful.

  He said, “A gun?”

  “No, I had a gun.”

  “What, then?”

  “Sex, mainly.”

  He said, “I poked my first girl when I was eight or nine.” He was smoothing his silk tie as we approached the canteen. Then he sat on the bench in front, but very carefully, to keep the creases in his trousers. “When did you start?”

  “Too late—later than I wanted,” I said. “When you have to wait a long time for things you never get enough.”

  “Sex is like eating.”

  “America’s a very hungry country, Harry.”

  “I had a white woman once. She was big and fat. I loved her. But she was transferred. Her husband was in the Forestry Commission.” He smiled gently and said, “Doris.”

  “What are we doing here?”

  He stood up and tapped his walking stick on the veranda of the canteen.

  “Cuff links,” he said.

  African girls were what I needed. Just after I left Harry I saw Abby hurrying to her house.

  I said, “Want to visit me, sister?”

  If they said yes it meant everything. I sometimes said, “Want to go upstairs?” This was regarded as a great joke, because the houses all had one story. But that upstairs business was also unambiguous.

  Abby said, “Okay.”

  As soon as we finished making love she said she had to go quickly—she was late for running practice.

  “Why did you come with me then?”

  “Because you wanted me.”

  I walked with her to the track and on my way home a barefoot girl beckoned me from beside the Lalji Kurji Building. I was curious. She said, “Do it to me here,” and leaned backwards against the fence, bowlegged.

  “I can’t.”

  She laughed because I was ridiculous. Didn’t I see it was the only way? She said she lived in a small hut in Chiggamoola with her mother. She demanded that I begin. She said, “Put it in.”

  “My feet hurt. I’ve got wicked arches. I have to wear cookies in my shoes.”

  She was still laughing.

  “That’s why I can’t do it standing up.”

  One Friday, feeling eager, I asked a girl named Gloria to come home with me. She said she couldn’t leave without her friend, a skinny girl no more than fourteen. The girl was in conversation with a sinister-looking man in sunglasses—one of the black miners who worked in South Africa and who often showed up at the Bamboo.

  “I have bought this girl a bottle of beer,” he said, when I took the little girl’s arm. “I can’t let her go just like that.”

  He meant that for this two-shilling bottle of Castle Lager the skinny girl was his.

  I said, “You should be ashamed of yourself, brother.”

  The young girl wore greasy makeup—skin lightener, mascara, and lipstick. Her face was a popeyed mask. But she had no shape. Her yellow dress hung straight down like a school uniform. She bent over like a boy to buckle her plastic sandal and I saw she was wearing school bloomers.

  “What’s your name, sister?”

  She said something that sounded like “Boopy.”

  “You’d better come with us,” I said, and put my arm around Gloria. I could feel her dark sinuous body beneath the loose dress. She was still damp from dancing and touching her excited me—it was like holding a snake against me.

  Back at Kanjedza I locked Captain into his room, gave Boopy some blankets, and showed her where to sleep in the hallway. I made love in my room to Gloria and later woke her again. She said she was too tired. She said that she wanted to sleep—a sort of apologetic complaint.

  “Take my friend.”

  “No!” I said. I was shocked, and I waited for her to react.

  But all I heard were snores from Gloria, and her snoring made me wakeful. I lay wide-eyed in the darkness of my room, breathing in little sips.

  The young girl Boopy snuffl
ed and swallowed when I woke her, and then she giggled a little and held me. Caressing her, I was running my fingers over all her bones. She was very thin but she had large bush-baby eyes. She was a child in my arms, but as soon as I took her on the floor she snorted and sighed, and she moved like a woman who knew what she wanted.

  None of my students lived here in the township—they were too poor even for this place. A few lived in the slum, Chiggamoola, but I never saw them. And so I had more freedom than I had ever had at my house up at Chamba.

  I sometimes visited Rockwell at the house. It was not friendship, though I felt friendlier now that I saw less of him. It was curiosity, and a suspicion in my mind that one day he might hang himself. I liked to think that I might interrupt him and prevent it.

  He had refused to hire a cook. He said, “They don’t wash their hands. They don’t boil the water. It’s dirty.”

  “That’s Nyasaland. That’s the world. That’s the norm, Ward.”

  “America’s clean.”

  “America’s unusual.”

  He lived on peanut butter sandwiches. “Hey, it’s good. They grow peanuts here.” His lips were always bluish. “Kool-Aid,” he explained.

  The Africans told me that Rockwell was wopusa, which meant crazy and cruel, as well as stupid; and he was cheap, refusing to hire anyone to cook his food or tend his garden. I said that Americans did not have servants, but I knew that Africans resented whites who lived alone and separate, and who didn’t offer them work. I didn’t like ratting on Rockwell, but I could see that living by himself, so far from Africans, he was becoming even stranger. What did he know about Africans?

  I asked him this question.

  He said, “I’ll tell you. You very seldom see a bald one.”

  He had a way of nodding that was almost as alarming as the things he said.

  “I’ve been thinking about bald people a lot recently. Ever notice how bald men often have cuts and scabs and wounds on their heads? You always see a Band-Aid up there. Now why is that?”

  I said, “I’m not sure, Ward.”

  “I am just so grateful to you for handing over your chimbuzi to me. Chimbuzi, huh? Learning the language, huh?”

  “It’s coming right along, Ward.”

  “But I get scared,” he said. “When I finish it I’ll have nothing else to do.”

  That fear made him go slowly. The chimbuzi was much bigger than I had envisaged—great beehive stacks of bricks were accumulating and from what he had so far built I could see that he had made an elaborate design.

  “Look familiar?” he asked me one day.

  I said, “In a way.”

  “I based it on The Alamo. See the way the wings shoot out?”

  What kept me from reporting him to Ed Wently was the fact that he got on so well with Miss Natwick. When he had reached the end of his tether, she would tell me. They sat together in the staff room every recess, drinking tea and eating dry cookies. After Deputy Mambo and Mr. Nyirongo left the room, Miss Natwick said, “You can’t teach these people anything.”

  “That’s just what I was going to say.”

  “I’ll shepherd those lambs who’ve cast their idols well away,” Miss Natwick said, seeming to quote a hymn. After a moment, her face hardened and she added, “And if they haven’t, bugger them.”

  Miss Natwick would then offer Rockwell a Kitkat or a chocolate finger from her handbag and they would be there until Deputy Mambo returned for another cup of tea.

  Sometimes the school seemed hopeless—not simply the shambles Miss Natwick said it was, but chaos. It was always on the verge of flying apart. But it held. I thought: This is Africa. This is the world. It is not chaos but only disorder. Dirt is the norm. Bad water is the norm. Filthy toilets are typical. Stinks are natural, and all dogs are wild. If you walk barefoot hookworms bore into the balls of your feet. Stretch out your arm and mosquitoes inject sleeping sickness into it. Sit still for a moment and fleas leap onto your body. Embrace your lover and you get lice. Because this is the world. America is very unusual.

  I went to Abby’s race at the track in Zimba. She had trained and slept well and drunk milk. But it did her no good. She came fifth in the two-twenty. She said she was through with running—it was too much for a woman with kids. She was better off, she said, collecting tickets at the Rainbow Cinema and fooling with me.

  That was another day, and that night another night.

  5.

  The best way to teach English, I felt, was to get in there and start them talking. I asked questions, I had them chant the answers, I made them compete, and when I ran out of prize candy I gave them cough drops from Mulji’s, which they liked just as much. Miss Natwick complained that the students said “What?” instead of “Pardon?” and she objected to their saying “You’re welcome.”

  People complained that things happened too slowly in Africa, but my experience so far was that everything moved too quickly—it was a time of rapid change, and the change inspired hope and confidence. In a matter of months the students had taken on American accents. They said, “I wanna” and “I gudda” and “I’m tryanna” and “I dunno” and “Whatcha doin” and “Whaa?” The popular songs helped. I heard a little girl named Msonko sing, “Put your sweet lips a little closer to the phone—” Miss Natwick wrote to the minister of education. She got no reply. There was no minister of education. There wouldn’t be one until July.

  “No one’s in charge,” she said. “They’ve just shut up shop.”

  “Flew the coop is more like it.”

  “Blimy, the way you Yanks talk.”

  “Suspended animation,” I said. “Politically.”

  “Ward Rockwell is very well-spoken though,” she said. “But you’re as bad as the students.”

  “Your needlework class is waiting, Miss Natwick.”

  I was in charge! I was headmaster!

  Of course the students overdid the lingo; but it was also a political act. They had been taught by the British to say “Pardon” and “chaps” and “My singlet is very tatty.” They had learned expressions like “It’s jolly hard” and “He’s a cheeky devil” and “Pull your socks up”—and they didn’t wear any. The country was about to become independent, and so learning to talk American was a way of getting even with the British.

  They didn’t hate the British. They hardly knew them. They were somewhat beaten and bewildered, and they felt their country was a flop—they knew they were in the bush—and so they blamed their confusion on the British. When they were angry, which was usually when they were drunk, they could be very self-pitying and abusive. But the antagonism did not go very deep.

  It was simple, I knew. Like many other Africans they were very lonely. The end of colonialism meant that they had woken up and found the world very large. Being poor was only part of it. They felt small and weak. And every day they were reminded of this by big strong Americans. It had probably been a good thing that the British ignored them. We took them seriously, but the gulf between us seemed to make them very sad. They did not know what to do or where to go.

  And then it occurred to me that we were tempting them.

  “I want to go to the United States,” Deputy Mambo said. “I want to go to Kansas City.”

  Kansas City was always mentioned in songs.

  “And Pasadena.”

  That was a new one on me.

  “Mr. Rockwell is from Pasadena. He says there are no Africans there. That’s why I want to go.”

  Willy Msemba wanted to go to New York. It was the setting of My Gun Is Quick. He wanted to meet a “tomato.”

  It made them more lonely when we said we were leaving next year and that they would be running the school.

  “I want to go to your country,” Deputy Mambo said.

  I did not believe he was serious. It was temptation—a moment of envy and fantasy. I could not imagine why anyone would want to leave Africa. Was it because they had no novelty in their lives? It was the curse of being poor—monotony. And
so they were attracted by anything new. Language was one such novelty: the American way. They had started saying “Lemme see” and “I wanna do it” and—frequently—“I gudda get outa here,” meaning Nyasaland.

  They were eager to learn. I was still an English teacher, although I had taken over all the headmaster’s duties. But being headmaster was no burden. I had discovered early in my life that promotion made life easier. It was simpler to be a headmaster than a teacher, better to be a teacher than a student, and the hardest job of all was the janitor’s. Eddyson Chimanga, the pigeon man, had the longest hours, the heaviest work, and the worst pay. Teaching English was a sort of penance I performed.

  The American way of speaking was picked up by the girls at the Beautiful Bamboo, too. All of them now spoke English fairly well, and most of them were better at it than my students—a bigger working vocabulary, full of exotic items. Faak. Saak. Beech. Sheet. Bustud. Demmit. Deets. Breek. Us whole. Shooting. It was not only the Peace Corps Volunteers who took them home; it was also their listening to popular songs in a concentrated way. I wanna hold your hand, they said. And, Whuddle I do when you’ve gone and left me.

  In a short time—just months—the American language had spread widely and taken hold.

  If you don’t like it, an African girl said to me one night at the Bamboo, and she showed me her drunken face, shove it up.

  I laughed. Perhaps this was what it was like to have children and watch them grow. They were learning.

  Lemme get this thing off. It was Margaret, a thin Angoni girl, struggling with her dress and doing a little two-step as she danced out of it.

  It always excited and amazed me to see how women’s clothes looked so small and shriveled when they took them off. A man’s made a bulky mound, but a woman’s were no more than a tiny heap, and insubstantial, like a shucked-off snakeskin.

  Hey, cut it out! she said. Not so fast! Gimme a chance!

  I suspected that the students too spoke that way and for the same reason—because they liked us. They wanted to imitate us. They were lonely. They really did want to get out of the country. It made our jobs as teachers easier, and it enlivened every weekend for me.

  It was very pleasant to be liked. To be conspicuous and liked was the best of it. I felt special. I was young and far from home: I belonged here. It was the easiest place in the world to be. All week I was headmaster, and then on weekends I walked into the Bamboo with a buzz of excitement, thinking: Whatever I want …