My Secret History

  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.

  I wrote her friendly letters and suppressed my fear. If she rejected me I knew I would leave. I applied—just to be sure I had an alternative—for a job in Kuala Lumpur and one in Oulu, at the University of Northern Finland.

  Three weeks went by. My impatience affected me like a fever. I felt ill, I stayed in bed, and the bush-baby appeared at the window like a mocking demon. One night I went to the Staff Club, not because I wanted to but because I knew that if I didn’t I would become the subject of further gossip. I found the energy to get drunk, and when I went home I burst into tears. I realized that I was moved by the thought of myself alone, drunken and blubbering. I had never wallowed like that before—and my pleasure in the pathetic melodrama horrified me.

  One day I thought of killing myself, but when I went through step by step—the locked door, the note, the rope, the noose, the kicked-over chair—I laughed and embraced life and felt vitalized by the thought that I would never kill myself.

  I might kill Jenny, though. I’d never leave her, I’ll never stop loving her. But I might kill her.

  When she wrote at last, four weeks after she left Kampala, I felt worse, not better.

  It was a postcard, a picture of a goofy Kikuyu man with varnished-looking skin and dents in his face. He was carrying a leather shield and a curio-shop spear. The message said, Dear Andy, Some settling in problems (no water!) but the girls are sweet and the other teachers very helpful. I have my own house and inherited the previous tenant’s cook. Very hectic at the moment, term starts Mon., but I’ll write again when I get a chance! Love, Jenny.

  Three things bothered me about the note—that it was short and breezy, that it made no reference to the six letters I had written, that it did not invite my affection. I hated exclamation marks. She was fine, she was happy; and knowing that made me miserable.

  I could not call her. The phone lines to Kenya were always out of order, and when they worked you heard a faint deep-in-a-well whisper that made you feel lonelier, because you had to shout at the voi
ce that was always saying Talk louder. I can’t hear you.

  How could I shout the things I wanted to say? How could I stand to get a mouse-whisper in reply?

  When Friday came I was restless. I went to sleep drunk and woke up at four o’clock in the morning on Saturday, wondering what to do. I saw I had no choice: there was only one thing. I dressed in the dark and got into my car and drove away, out of Kampala. The streets were empty. The forest outside town was black, but as dawn broke I saw Africans washing near their huts and waiting for buses and heading for the cane fields. I had breakfast at Tororo and then crossed the border. The immigration official on the Kenya side yawned at me—both a greeting and a growl—as he stamped my passport. At midmorning in Western Kenya five African boys with dust-whitened faces jumped out at me from the elephant grass at the shoulder of the dirt road. They had just been circumcized and become men: they showed it by howling at me and shaking painted shields. Farther along there were baboons sitting on the road grimacing at me with doglike teeth. The road went on and on, past tea and wheat and corn and cactuses and stony hills and mud huts. The mileposts told me I was nearing Nairobi. The sun was going down over Muthaiga as I turned north on a narrower road. Just before seven o’clock my headlights illuminated the sign UMOJA GIRLS SCHOOL. It had been a twelve-hour drive, but I wasn’t tired. I was excited—more than that, my nerves were electrified.

  I turned into the driveway, between thick hedges, and went slowly. There were heavy red blossoms on the bushes and big brown petals flattened in the dark wheel tracks.

  Two girls in green school uniforms stepped aside to let me pass. But I stopped.

  “Where is Miss Bramley’s house, please?”

  “That side,” one said, and the girl next to her muffled a giggle.

  Only then, hearing that sound behind the girl’s hand, did I have doubts. They rose in my throat and made me queasy. What if this was all a huge mistake? I had not warned Jenny I was coming. She might be with a man—or out of town for the weekend. Maybe she had gone to the coast. I knew nothing about her life. Everything that had seemed right to me before, and for the whole of the long drive, now became uncertain. I felt awkward, even fearful, after I spoke to those African girls. I almost went away then, but I forced myself to go on.

  Her house was behind another hedge. Every building here was hidden by foliage. Her lights were on. I did not go all the way. I switched the engine off and eased the door shut, and walked to her window.

  She was with an African man. I watched. I could not hear anything. She stood facing him—he was simply staring, listening. She was smiling. Was he her lover? It didn’t matter, I told myself. It just showed me how little I knew her.

  I wanted to leave. I was trembling. I couldn’t interrupt—didn’t want to. It wasn’t right. I was such a blunderer. Perhaps she had written me a letter, which had arrived that morning in Kampala; but I hadn’t received it because I was on the road. Perhaps the letter said, Dear Andy, I have been putting off writing this letter, but I can’t put it off any longer …

  It was a twelve-hour trip back to Kampala, it was almost two to Nairobi. But how could I go back right now? I had to reject the idea; I was exhausted. But I would have to go, because now I understood the brief postcard, the long silence, the girl’s giggles. I was sad, but I had to knock and see her, so that I could say goodbye.

  She could not speak when she answered the door. Her face seemed to swell with unspoken words. I took it to be the shock of acute embarrassment. I began to apologize.

  “I couldn’t call you,” I said. “I thought I’d visit. Don’t worry—I’m not staying. I can see that you’re busy—”

  I was still talking but she wasn’t listening.

  She smiled and said, “You’re wearing takkies!”

  I had dressed in a hurry. I wore a black suit, a T-shirt, dark glasses, and tennis sneakers—takkies. It was the Kenya word for them.

  Behind her the African had become very still.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt,” I said.

  Now we both looked at him.

  He said, “Mem, chakula kwisha? Wewe nataka kahawa?”

  “He’s your cook!” I said, much too loudly.

  “I’m afraid so,” she said, and she turned to the African, “Kwisha, asanti sana. Hapanataka kahawa. Kwaheri, John.”

  “Why don’t you want a coffee?”

  “Because I want to be alone with you,” she said.

  When he left, Jenny said, “He makes fruit salad and dumps it into the bowl with yesterday’s leftover fruit salad. I eat a little and he adds a little every day. The bowl is always full. It’s a bottomless fruit salad. I’ve been eating it for more than three weeks. Surely that’s not healthy? I was just explaining—oh, Andy”—and threw her arms around me—“I’m so glad to see you. I’ve been missing you. I can hardly believe you’re here.”

  We went directly to bed. We made love, then dozed and woke and made love again.

  In the darkness of her bedroom I said, “I love you.”

  “I love you, too.”

  “I mean I really love you,” I said. “I’m in love with you.”

  It was a hopeless word. It didn’t work. But when she hugged me, I could tell from the way she held me, from the pressure of her body, that she was happy and that she probably did love me.

  She was smiling the following morning.

  “Do Americans always wear takkies with a suit?”

  I stayed until Tuesday. We walked to a nearby hotel, the Izaak Walton. It was on a trout stream, whites came up from Nairobi to fish here. We had dinner and walked back to Umoja Girls School in the dark. We drove to Meru, to look at Mount Kenya. We inhaled the Jacaranda. Morning and evening we made love.

  When in my life had I not looked forward to setting out in the morning and leaving, alone? But I hated the thought of leaving Jenny. I was consoled by the thought that she seemed sorry too.

  She said, “Will you come back?”

  “What do you think?”

  Three weeks later I returned. And then she visited me, coming by plane and landing at Entebbe. We spent the weekend together—making love, talking, procrastinating, and finally hurrying to the airport so that she could catch her plane that Sunday night.

  It was a winding country road and so full of people walking and riding bikes, and so crowded in places with children fooling around that it took all my concentration. It was not until after she had gone that I recalled her taking my hand and saying casually, “By the way, my period’s late. I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about.”

  9.

  Popatlal Hirjee was a goldsmith. His eyes were yellowish under heavy lids. He was very fat, and his hands were so plump that the three or four rings he wore were buried by the flesh of his fingers. He sat crosslegged on cushions in his shop, like a pasha. When I picked up the gold wedding rings he had made he dropped them into a jangling set of scales and counterbalanced them, throwing weights into the opposing pan and sorting them. Then he dug a diamond out of a brooch and set it in Jenny’s ring.

  He never moved from his seated position, and he did all this sorting and weighing without speaking. His breathing—the heavy man’s gasp—had the sound of something being scorched.

  His assistant said, “We can write names in them—your name in her ring, her name in yours. And the date.”

  I wrote this information on a scrap of paper. Popatlal Hirjee gouged the names and the date on the inner surface of the rings. Hers said Andre 4-Aug-68.

  “Bariki,” the goldsmith said. Blessings on you.

  I drove one last time to Umoja in Kenya, and picked up Jenny and her two suitcases. On our way back to Kampala we stopped at Eldoret for the night. Two days later we woke in each other’s arms.

  “We’re getting married today,” I said. “I love you.”

  To wake up and say that seemed reckless and wonderful.

  We went together to the Kampala Registry Office. The contract was read to us by an African in a three-pie
ce suit. Our witnesses were my Indian friends, Neogy and Desai, and their extravagant signatures appeared on our marriage certificate. We gave a party at the Staff Club and before it was over we drove towards Fort Portal, stopping for our first night at Mubende at the rest house near the witch tree, and the next day at The Mountains of the Moon Hotel, where we spent a happy week.

  The night we arrived back in Kampala the bush-baby appeared at the window—not looking for food, not even restless, but simply watching. He returned on successive nights, and over the next few weeks, with his large eyes staring in, my life changed.

  Jenny said that Hamid would have to go. We couldn’t have a parrot and a child in the same house—and how could I stand the damned bird gnawing my books and shitting on my furniture. And Jackson went too when Jenny discovered that he hid garbage in kitchen drawers; I hadn’t been able to break him of the habit. We hired Mwezi—her name meant moon—a bucktoothed woman who made scones and who longed for the baby to arrive. The house was cleaned, perhaps for the first time since I had moved in.

  The bush-baby watched; it asked for nothing more. It came and went, and was no longer a portent. I had my own bush-baby now. I loved waking beside her, I eagerly left work and hurried home to her. My habits changed. I seldom went to the Staff Club. Jenny was the only person I needed. We went out together—eating, drinking; sometimes we went dancing. I bought presents for her—an ivory carving, a silver buckle from Zanzibar, some kitenge cloth. We took long trips to West Nile and Kitgum to visit my student listening groups. I became very calm.

  And my novel came alive. It was about Yung Hok, the Chinese grocer—the only Chinese shopkeeper in the country, the ultimate minority, a single alien family. I had once seen him as vulnerable, but now that I was married I saw that he was strong and that he was part of a family—he had a wife and children I had not noticed before. He wasn’t a symbol of anything. He was himself, an unusual man. He was something new in my experience, and he made me see the country in a new way. This made him vivid, and so I was able to write about him. For my spirit and inspiration I silently thanked Jenny. I worked in the spare bedroom, delighted that Jenny was nearby. I had no reason to think about leaving Africa now. I was at last home.