My Secret History

  “I have a request, Mr. Headmaster, sir,” he said. He was always slavishly polite when he was being hostile. “About morning assembly. In addition to stories and what-not I suggest we sing a song for Kamuzu.”

  The man on his badge—Hastings Kamuzu Banda.

  “Which song?” I said.

  “ ‘Everything Belongs.’ ”

  I had never heard it. “How does it go?”

  Deputy Mambo folded his arms across his Youth League shirt and put his head back and yelled the song in Chinyanja:

  Everything belongs to Kamuzu Banda

  All the trees

  Belong to Kamuzu Banda

  All the huts

  Belong to Kamuzu Banda

  All the cows

  Belong to Kamuzu Banda

  All the roads …

  “I get the idea, brother.” It was tuneful but ridiculous. “But I don’t think there’s much point in the students singing that, do you?”

  He did not reply. He moved his lips over his teeth and pressed them together, and he glared at me. I wondered whether the brown spots on the whites of his eyes meant he had a vitamin deficiency.

  I had not had any strong feelings about Mambo until he showed up in his red shirt and announced that he was a member of the Chamba Youth League. I could not forgive him for those two Israelis. I could hear them, even now, shrieking orders on the football pitch.

  I said, “The songs we sing are boring, but at least they’re harmless.”

  “We want ‘Everything Belongs.’ ”

  “And Banda—who is he?”

  It was just an expression—a rhetorical question. I knew who Banda was. But Deputy Mambo answered me.

  “He is our Ngwazi.”

  It meant conquerer.

  “And Chirombo.”

  It meant “great beast.”

  “Our messiah.”

  “Give me a break,” I said.

  He was still staring at me with his brown-flecked eyes.

  “Founder and Father of the Malawi Congress Party. Life President of our Motherland, Malawi.”

  “Look, brother—”

  “I am not your brother. I do not drink beers. I do not osculate with town girls wearing tight dresses and ironing their hair.”

  I glared at him. I hated this, and yet I had been expecting it for months.

  “As long as I am headmaster of Chamba Hill Secondary School we will not sing the ‘Everything Belongs’ song. Is that clear?”

  On the last day of June I was visited by a man who said he was from the Ministry of Education. He was English, and very pleasant. He said he liked the look of the school. No one ever praised the place, and I was grateful to this stranger.

  “I didn’t realize Nyasaland had a Ministry of Education.”

  “It doesn’t,” he said. “I’m with the Malawi Ministry of Education.”

  Hearing that gave me a late-afternoon feeling of something coming to an end.

  “We’re just getting sorted out,” he said. “We’re appointing headmasters to schools.”

  “Chamba has one,” I said, meaning myself.

  “Right you are,” he said, and consulted a file. “His name is Winston Mambo and he’s to take over immediately.”

  I made a little grunt of complaint.

  “Can’t make much difference to you, old boy,” he said. “You’ll be gone in a matter of months.”

  “How do you know?”

  He smiled and said, “You’re a bird of passage.”

  All the way home I kept thinking of that expression.

  * * *

  Mambo moved into the office and I found a cubbyhole in the science block. He fired Miss Natwick, he gave the Israelis lockers in the Staff Room—I had denied them that—and he allowed them to join us for morning coffee. He started a Youth League branch for the Fifth Form and organized the lower forms into troops of Young Pioneers. The schoolyard was thick with red shirts.

  His first morning assembly was typical of the ones that followed: a Bible reading, a passage from a speech by Doctor Banda, the song “Everything Belongs to Kamuzu Banda,” and a pep-talk.

  “He’s not even the official president yet,” Rockwell said. “This is still a British colony.”

  It wasn’t, but what Rockwell said was partly true.

  It was a much stranger situation than that. It was nothing, it was an interval, between the British leaving and the Africans taking over. But it was a short interval—a moment briefer than an eyeblink in the history of the country. For the whole of my time in the place so far no one had been in charge. The Africans were hopeful and they felt free. There was no government. Everything worked. Everyone belonged.

  But now I felt it was the end of the day and we all faced a long night.

  Mambo said, “We will run the school the African way. According to our ancient traditions.”

  “Reading the Bible, dressing up in red shirts, singing about Kamuzu, following Israelis around the football pitch. The African way!”

  “The Israelis are our friends.”

  I did not argue. I was glad to be relieved of the tedium of the headmaster’s duties—doing the register, keeping track of supplies, balancing the timetable. But with Mambo in charge the school almost immediately took on a preachy political tone, and Mambo—whom I knew to be a creep—became annoyingly pious. I saw that he had become headmaster not because he liked the school particularly but because he wanted something more. He was ambitious. This was his way of moving on.

  “We will have special independence celebrations at Chamba Hill Secondary,” he said. “Parades, demonstrations, cakes, and a bonfire. The minister will come and plant a tree in front of the chimbuzi.”

  This was at the first staff meeting.

  “Wait a minute,” Rockwell said.

  “I have the minister’s reply. Mr. Likoni is delighted to accept this invitation from his former school. I have budgeted for a small blue-gum tree to plant.”

  “I built that latrine,” Rockwell said. “That’s all my work. I know you started it and provided some bricks, but I had to tear it down and start again from scratch. So it’s all mine.”

  “We want to give thanks for its completion,” Mambo said.

  “Then write to the Tenth Street Tabernacle and mention the Faith Fund of the Pageant for People Overseas.”

  Mambo was scowling at him with speckled eyes, and showing his full set of teeth. He had the appearance of an old-fashioned mechanical bank, the same meaningless mouth and cast-iron features.

  “It is our new school latrine. It must be inaugurated.”

  “I already inaugurated it,” Rockwell said.

  “It must be done properly,” Mambo said.

  “There’s only one way to inaugurate a latrine—and I did it, fella.”

  Rockwell was not on hand the day Mr. Likoni arrived in his ministerial car. He used the road that had been trampled and cleared by students searching for tickeys. Not many months before, Mr. Likoni had begged to use my bicycle. Now he was in a new Mercedes. He had a driver. He wore a pin-striped suit and new shoes. He cut a red ribbon and planted a slender blue gum in front of the chimbuzi. He did not speak to me. He praised Chamba Hill Secondary and he praised Mr. Mambo. He led the students in the “Everything Belongs” song.

  That night I found Rockwell at the Beautiful Bamboo. It was his form of rebellion, he said. He had been there since noon. Thinking, he said. But he looked as though he had been crying.

  “What about?”

  “Words,” he said. “I could never ask a girl her box number, could you?”

  To prevent him from plunging in on that subject, I said, “You missed a memorable occasion. Imagine making a ceremony out of opening a public toilet! The minister cut the ribbon and made a speech. That guy used to borrow my bike.”

  “I wish I had a woman,” Rockwell said.

  I turned and stared at the African girls seated at the tables, and dancing, and leaning against the wall, all of them watching us.


  “Funnily enough, I don’t think of them as women,” he said. He looked puzzled and alarmed. He said, “I’d rather get drunk.”

  There were tears in his eyes.

  “I had a girlfriend. That was before I joined the Peace Corps. It didn’t work out. If I was kissing her in her house and the phone rang, she always answered it, and she always talked about an hour.”

  He said nothing for a long while. The jukebox played Chuck Berry singing “Maybelline,” and then Elvis’s “Return to Sender” and then “Knockin’ On My Front Door” by the El Dorados. The ideal woman of rock and roll songs was a crazy little mama.

  “If I met someone who didn’t answer the phone at times like that I’d marry her.” He put his head in his hands, and started to sob. But he was saying something.

  “What is it, Ward?”

  He raised his red eye to me and said, “God, that was a beautiful toilet. I was going to have some more urinal candy shipped over. Some great flavor.”

  After that, we drank without speaking, until at last he burped and said, “It’s time to go home.”

  I looked at my watch.

  “I mean the States,” he said. “Stop in Paris first.” Peeris.

  “I don’t care if I ever go back,” I said. I realized that I meant it. I felt strangely solitary saying it. A moment later someone pinched me with a hard hand and put a friendly arm around me. It was an African girl. Crazy little mama.

  “Hello, sister.”

  “Hey, man,” she said.

  9.

  On a cold drizzly afternoon in July—Malawi’s independence day—I rode my bicycle into town. I could hear music coming from the stadium, and howling crowd-voices, and applause. But the celebrations had nothing to do with me. I was just a foreign teacher; Mambo was headmaster. I hated seeing my students doing their Israeli marching, and I hated the Youth League in their red shirts. But most of all I sensed that this little phase was ending, and I was sorry, because I had liked living in a place that was neither a colony nor a republic. It had been nothing with a name, and very pleasant: it had resembled my own mood. In this special interval I had been able to pursue my secret life.

  The natural place for me that day was the Beautiful Bamboo. I realized then that a bar is a safe neutral place, where I had a right to be. And the fact that there were African girls in the bar made it friendlier. More than that—it was where I belonged. Looking around, I saw that at one time or another I had slept with every girl I could see.

  They were draped over the chairs and leaning on the bar and staring out the window at the rain. It was too wet and cold to go to the stadium, and anyway, the main independence celebration was in the capital. It was taking place at the moment. The radio was on. I could hear the band playing “Everything Belongs to Kamuzu Banda.”

  “This rain is very strong,” I said in Chinyanja. The word I used for rain, mpemera, was very precise. It meant the sweeping rain driven into the veranda by the wind.

  “Sure is,” a girl said, and another said, “Yah.”

  How long had they been replying this way?

  The Beautiful Bamboo had never looked dingier. It was filled with hairy smells and the droning odor of wet shoes and muddy boots and sodden clothes. The shadowy darkness seemed to make it stinkier, and the noise didn’t help—the shouting African men, none I knew, and the radio competing with the jukebox, playing “Downtown” by a British singer.

  And over the radio came the sounds of the Malawi Police Band. Until today there had been no Malawi Police—who needed them? But the band was playing so that students all over the country could do their Israeli marching. In the Zimba stadium Mr. Mambo was standing under his headmaster’s umbrella, taking credit for his goose-stepping students as he had for Rockwell’s chimbuzi.

  Rosie was heavily pregnant. She went back and forth with a tray. I bought a bottle of beer and sat alone, near the radio, to drink it. I bought another bottle. Twelve was my limit. I had a long way to go.

  The Chiffons were singing, “He’s So Fine.”

  “What these stupid colonialist people did not understand,” Doctor Banda shrieked, “was that we Malawians want to be free! That is why I came from London. They called me! I heeded the call. Kwacha, they said—”

  His words were drowned by a group called The Shangri-Las singing “Leader of the Pack.” I could no longer hear the independence celebration clearly on the radio, only its crackle. An orange light glowed in the large plastic dial. I could feel the warm radio tubes on my face. It was not like a radio at all but rather like a device for heating a room.

  Rosie came over with her tray. Her dress was tight against the ball of her big belly.

  I said, “Kwacha.” Dawn: it was the slogan.

  She said, “Hey, ya wanna beer?”

  I said yes, and it frothed when she opened it.

  Was that squawk Doctor Banda’s nagging voice on the radio? Americans said he was a charismatic leader. I never saw that. I suspected that he was insane. That freed me. What he said made no sense. But he was their problem.

  It was then, in the noise of the Bamboo, that I was certain the interval was over. It had been an instant, no more than a tick or two of time. How rare it had been, how unexpected. I had seen it all. I was where I wanted to be, and I’d had everything I wished. I was still like a man on an island, among African girls. They were willing, unsuspicious, careless, and pretty. They did not attach the slightest importance to sex. It was too brief to be called pleasure, but it was fun. I felt very lucky.

  The drunker I became the luckier I felt. I was braced against the bar feeling nothing but gratitude; and I was glad I was twenty-three. I felt, living in the far-flung world, I had everything.

  One of my luckiest instincts lay in being able to tell when I was happy—at the time, not afterwards. Most people don’t realize until long afterwards that they have passed through a period of happiness. Their enjoyment takes the form of reminiscence, and it is always tinged with regret that they had not known at the time how happy they were. But I knew, and my memory (of bad times too) was detailed and intense.

  So I made the most of those hours and days. I knew when a moment was rare. This was one, and there had been many in the months that preceded it. It warmed me like sunlight. But as I sat in the bar that day I felt the shadows lengthening, I sensed the light fading.

  I thought: It was bad before under the British, and it will be bad in the future with a greedy government; but it’s perfect now.

  Jim Reeves was singing, “This World Is Not My Home.”

  Grace climbed onto the barstool next to me.

  “Give me one beer, father,” she said.

  The radio was still going, the dial was lit; a howl of Kwacha! came from the cloth on the loudspeaker.

  “Kwacha,” I said, giving Grace the beer.

  “Rubbish,” she said. “Where have you been keeping, Mister Handy?”

  “Here and there.” There was too much to tell: my VD, the hospital work; Gloria and her village; changes at the school—Mambo, his Israelis, the latrine ceremony, all that. “But I’m back now.”

  She was drinking—slurping. She scratched her dark forearm slowly, a sound like sandpaper.

  “You are still living on Kanjedza side?”

  “Yes, sister.” I sipped my beer and became abstracted, thinking of a story about a waiting room. But in this waiting room no one is what he or she seems. The man with the little girl is not her father—he is a child molester.

  “You are still having that smart house?” Grace said.

  “Sure. Come over and see it.” And I thought: The married couple are actually saying goodbye—she is going to meet her lover, he’s off to visit his mistress. The cowboy is a homo.

  “First I want to dance here.”

  “We can dance, and then you can come over to my house,” I said. The little boy has a fatal disease, and one of them—probably the nun—has a hand grenade. But it was an impossible story to write—too static. No action.
“We can go upstairs.”

  Grace laughed in her throat—a kind of gulping.

  “That’s a very pretty dress,” I said.

  “Seven pounds at the Indian shop,” she said. “And shoes. Three pounds.”

  That meant expensive, stylish, smart. She was boasting.

  “So what about it?” I asked.

  She stared at me.

  I thought: A story about coincidences—enormous ones. A man goes out to buy some cigarettes for his wife and is hit by a car. At the same moment she electrocutes herself with her hair dryer in the bathroom. Upstairs their infant daughter sleeps soundly, not knowing she is an orphan. No, forget it.

  “Let’s go, sister.”

  “Not just yet,” she said, and laughed again. Unwelcome laughter was so irritating. She kept it up.

  Could I ever get used to that laugh? Another story. A divorce. It was the way she laughed, your honor.

  “First you give me money,” Grace said.

  This sobered me. I considered what she had said and found that I was very shocked.

  I thought of a story in which the most innocent and dependable person one could think of demands suddenly: First you give me money.

  I said to Grace, “Maybe I’ll ask someone else—another girl,” and glanced around.

  “She will want money.”

  Why had I not guessed this would happen?

  The radio was going, Banda at the stadium leading a hymn, “Bringing in the Sheaves.”

  Just about then—because the hymn continued in my dream—I fell asleep where I sat, with my head on my arms.

  “Sorry,” Grace said, waking me with her hard fingers stabbing me in my spine.

  Night had fallen while I slept. The Independence Celebrations were over. African girls sat quietly at the tables in the Beautiful Bamboo. They watched the door, but no one entered. A few of them muttered as I left with Grace—and I was limping, still waking up.

  We went back to my house in the darkness, saying nothing, listening to the trees drip as we walked. Captain had left a small tin oil-lamp burning in my room, and in this feeble light Grace undressed. She hung her blouse and skirt on the back of a chair; she folded the rag she called her cardigan. She stood her shoes side by side against the wall.