A Girl From Zanzibar

by Roger King

  In his Jeep Ron could talk without facing me, which seemed to make him bolder. “I thought you should know,” he said, “there’s a silly story going around that you were deported from England before you came here. That’s the trouble with a small college. There’s not much for people to do but gossip about each other. You might want to put the story straight before it gets out of hand. Nip it in the bud.” He was driving very slowly, making the half mile last.

  “And do they say why I was deported?”

  “I haven’t heard that.”

  I ran through the possibilities of being tripped up by the truth. I knew no one in America. My old world and the new world of Moore College were about as likely to collide as for an asteroid to bang into the earth and smash it to smithereens. What Ron had told me was as much as the college president knew or had wanted to know. And that was supposed to remain secret. I reminded myself that the policy of keeping my distance was a good one.

  “Yes, it’s true. I’m an international criminal. Terrorism, arms deals, drugs, that sort of thing. Maybe you’d prefer me to walk after all?”

  “No, please don’t misunderstand me. I don’t mean to pry. I just thought you should know.”

  “Well, thank you, Ron.”

  I let the silence grow until we stopped in the snow- banked clearing the college plough had made in front of my porch. I opened the car door an inch and looked across at him. His lips moved twice with things he was bursting to say but could not. I laughed and showed mercy, patted him on the shoulder as I stepped down. “Don’t worry, Ron. It’s nothing serious. A little trouble with the London police. I was protesting against racism.” That was good enough for him.

  “I thought it must be something like that.”

  “I thought you didn’t believe it at all.”

  “Well, there’s usually something in rumours, isn’t there? Some innocent seed. Rumours are an interesting phenomenon.”

  “Very interesting. Goodnight, professor.”

  As I slammed the door and waved goodbye, I saw he was still speaking, but the Jeep was soundproof and I pretended not to notice.

  An assertion from the dinner party caught up with me as I clumped my feet free of snow on the doormat of my house, and it nags at me still. After the false story of my marriage to a Portuguese had been essayed and abandoned, the talk had turned away from the subject of me to the story of an absent colleague who had been belatedly accused by a grown-up daughter of having sex with her during her childhood. I found I could add nothing to this conversation: the thirty-year delay in accusation, the hanging on to injury as if it were a jewel, the intimate presence of a father during youth, the sexy excitement they all seemed to find in their subject, the exposure of the subject itself; these were all odd and foreign to me. Finally, after more wine, Dean Goodrich, the oldest man present and the one with the deepest voice, brought the discussion to a conclusion. “I don’t care whether he’s innocent or guilty,” he declared. “We’ve known him twenty years as a friend and colleague and we’ve come to love him. If he turns out to be an incestuous rapist, well, he’s our incestuous rapist!”

  The assertion nags at me, though I have never met the man in question. I think it’s just the last sentence, with its suggestion of blanks to fill: She may be a .... but she’s our.... I keep hearing it. I cannot think of the words for my offence, and cannot think who in the world might claim me and forgive me anything for the sake of my belonging.

  In Zanzibar, in nineteen eighty-three, Mrs F claimed me and I resented her for it then. Always decisive, she decided one day that it was time to deal with the problem of me and barged into my room, declaring, “Marcella, it’s time you showed yourself. You must walk down to Jamituri Gardens with us. People are wondering what is wrong with you.” Her view was, I think, that I might be an idle, flirty, disrespectful, irreligious and foolish Goan, but I was her Goan.

  I was bored enough and lonely enough and dispirited enough to be incapable of effective resistance. And Mrs F had, after all, loaned me the money to start my taxi business in Dar. She owned the only bar on Zanzibar, and was one of the few who could still make money on the island. Since the day my father—her brother—died when I was four, she had never doubted for a minute that everything our family did was her responsibility, nor had she ever shown for a minute that this labor might be one of love.

  Recently, in my queen-sized Vermont bed, I dreamed of Mrs F I dreamed of her portly body exactly superimposed on the map of Zanzibar, floating like a fat foetus in the Indian Ocean. She was peaceful, and smiling gently, though in life she rarely smiled, and never gently. When she did force a smile it was usually for the rare white man who found his way to her Elephant Bar, and the result was oddly upside-down, the ends lower than the middle. While everyone else has become smaller with the passage of time, Mrs Fernandez has grown larger.

  I can see us now, three Asian women on their nightly stroll, unconsciously displaying all the cultural irresolution of the Goans, our little group of Lusitanised Catholics from India. Mrs F leads of course, stately in a sari, her belly carried out in front like armour. To her right and always a step or two behind is Mummy, absent-minded in one of those simple cotton dresses that British missionaries introduced everywhere. And to the left, also a little behind, comes me in T-shirt and jeans, the headphones of the Walkman—for which I no longer have working batteries—around my neck. I am hanging back in a tiny assertion of my reluctance. Mummy is hanging back just out of the habit of following.

  A decade and a half later, I can still walk it in my mind, this ritual evening stroll in the last of the day’s heat, downhill through the city’s jagged alleys to the bald little park by the harbour, that had been the garden of the Sultan’s palace before the revolution. Everyone would be there; it was the day’s only event and I hated it for that. Our route to the sea passed close to the Goan Cathedral, St Joseph’s, far too big and grand for us, and this was excuse enough for Mrs F to spike her monologue with routine complaints about my failure to attend church. “You have responsibilities,” she insisted, “Goa is the Rome of the Orient,” as if I hadn’t heard that before. I let my eyes reply for me, boring resentment into her back while she glided over pocked paths and gracefully skirted the corners of dilapidated buildings.

  Inside St Joe’s, which I remember as being the same sugary pink and blue as my faded bedroom pin-ups, there was stored a relic of St Francis Xavier, the patron saint of Goans. Walking past I thought how creepy it was to chop off his finger and send it all the way from India for the comfort of a couple of hundred emigrant Catholics on Mohammedan Zanzibar, and how odd it was that I had not thought this before. There must have been a time when the Portuguese in their Rome of the Orient, thought Zanzibar a prize and that the Goans might win it for them. That was before Goa, Zanzibar, and even Portugal, had ceased to count for anything. Then I wondered whether I was mistaken, and had only imagined the finger.

  While I followed my own thoughts, Mrs F talked, trailing words over her shoulder for us to catch as best we could. She used the evening strolls down to Jamituri Gardens to review the condition and morale of her Goans. There were infractions of behaviour—frequently involving drink and my favourite uncle, Uncle John—and loose elements who needed to be bonded into usefulness through marriage or employment. There was consideration of the enemy too: the necessary accommodation of the governments of Zanzibar and Tanzania, the drift of the political wind, what the Hindu and Moslem Indians were saying about us, whether the African Moslems would step up their fundamentalist demands and their hypocritical objections to alcohol, who should be guarded against or pandered to, the possibilities for revival of business on the island and the danger of new violence. Interspersed with equal weight, and likewise requiring no response, there was the subject of me, my jeans, my hair, my immodest ways, the absurdity of French or Arab boyfriends, my ridiculous fantasies of escape, a fretting refrain that this time turned out to be preparation for the necessary, but unpleasant, task of offe
ring me a compliment.

  “Marcella!” she said loudly, jerking me out of my reverie, but not turning to look at me. “You’re a bright enough girl when you choose to be and I think you’re a natural businesswoman. Some people have it and some don’t, "Your mother doesn’t and your sister doesn’t, but I think you do. You might as well do something useful while you’re here.”

  I glanced across at my mother, at her station on the other side of Mrs F. She was lost in her own thoughts, untouched by the slight. A girlishness had reappeared in her gait in the years since Maria and I left home. She had given up on cares, leased them out to Mrs F for the duration. Her face, though, had aged of its own accord, the cheeks flatter than I remembered, her complexion duller.

  Into my silence Mrs F added, “So, do you have any ideas?”

  “I haven’t given it a moment’s thought. I’m not planning to stay. I’m going back to Dar, then to Europe.”

  “And have they given you a passport yet?” She did not turn when she talked to me; she just left the words behind her for me to collect.

  “Not yet.”

  “And your French boy, have you heard from him?”

  “Yes.”

  Strictly speaking this was true. There had been one lonely postcard rattling in my PO Box, complaining of hard work back in France and remembering the good times we had in Dar. No ticket. I’d written Didier a long letter in reply and my pride wasn’t going to let me write another.

  Ignoring my reply, Mrs F pressed on. “Well, since you’re here and you have some money, you may as well put it to good use. I have an ice-cream machine coming from the mainland, one of those where the ice-cream comes out of the spout. I intend to put it in Jamituri Gardens, by the water. There’s nothing for people to buy there except for bits of sugar cane, or the cassava and stew the Africans cook. It’s not a new machine, but it’s perfectly good. All you’ll have to do is buy the supplies and keep track of the money. My nephew Louis will sell the ice-cream for you and you can pay him whatever you think fit. Anything is better than the nothing he earns now. I’d do it myself if I wasn’t so busy. As it is you’re one of the few people I’d trust to make a go of it.” She replenished her breath with a loud inhalation.

  The package landed in my hands with a thump, too unexpected to be dropped. While I’d been spending my days dreaming in a sweaty fog, Mrs Fernandez had been busy tying me into place. I was off-balance, hot and bothered. We had reached the oldest part of the city where the houses pressed in closest, and instead of slowing down, she had speeded up. Mummy and I, as her lightweight outriders, were left to contend with the clutter of Zanzibar: the corners of buildings sticking out into the street, stone platforms where shopkeepers used to squat when they still had something to sell, Zanzibar’s famous carved doors, hanging massive and neglected, the occasional palm tree starved for light among the buildings, sauntering men, headscarved women hugging the wall and looking furtive with their shopping, laundry hanging down from lines between the buildings, the odd bicyclist, the odd incongruous road sign—Children Crossing!—left over from the British who had foolishly tried to invent order for us. No cars, of course, no money for them, no room, no petrol. I felt battered, flustered and at a disadvantage. I had been someone in Dar. My taxis took in two thousand shillings—a hundred dollars—a day!

  “Mrs F, slow down, please!”

  “We can’t slow down, Marcella. Who knows who’s listening?” Mrs F waved airily at the layers of closed shutters reaching up to the sky. “Windows are ears. Have you forgotten everything?”

  “I’m not staying in Zanzibar.”

  “If you leave, you can sell it back to me. Who can tell when you’ll get your passport?”

  “Look!” exclaimed Mummy, from her own world, “the sea!” at the point on the walk where every day we saw the sea.

  Our route opened up here, emerging through the city walls into Jamituri Gardens. Beyond the park was the water of our broad harbour, empty of ships these days, except for a couple of stranded hulks. A few sailing dhows showed on the open sea, smaller and shabbier than the ones I remembered from childhood. Zanzibar was going backwards. There were the usual rumours that the Soviet Union or the United States were ready to fight over the use of our harbour as a naval base. We believed that all the world coveted us at the same time that we believed that all the world had forgotten us.

  My attention was caught by the African boys making wild, exuberant dives from ruined pilings, then by two carefully dressed and supervised Gujerati children staring at them with intense admiration. The food hawkers were clustered untidily in the centre of the field, and I imagined the ice-cream stall standing on its own by the water’s edge, just where the two Indian children stood.

  I said, now I had caught up with Mrs F, “You would need the Party’s permission to put it in the park.”

  “I have that.”

  She had unexpected influences.

  “And what is ice-cream made of anyway? I don’t know anything about ice-cream.”

  “I believe milk is important. Zanzibar does have cows. And the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations has sent some Danes to reopen the East German dairy plant. We should visit the Danes. They’re the only other Europeans here.”

  I said, “Why are you always saying that, that we are Europeans? We’re not Europeans. I’m sure the Danes don’t think we’re Europeans. We’re Indians. Anyone can see that.”

  “We have European names, some of us have European blood. We’ve been European for four hundred years. We eat beef. We drink alcohol. We ballroom dance. We’re European.”

  “Just because our ancestors were the first to jump into bed with the Portuguese when they arrived in India, doesn’t make us European.”

  Mrs F was not to be diverted from business. “You’ll need petrol of course. For the generator. That will be your biggest problem.”

  My success with taxis in Dar had been dependent on my brilliance with petrol and now I reflexively boasted, “I can always get petrol,” only to see a slight smile of victory exercise its way across the face of Mrs F.

  In my dull fog of waiting, the ice-cream machine turned out to be a dot of light. The idea was good, I now had to admit. My mind had roused itself from torpor to march briskly around the calculation of costs and revenues, the likely market, the logistical problems to overcome, bringing me back to life. I could find no argument against it.

  So it was, some months later, after the cooler monsoon winds from southern Africa had passed on and the heat had steadily increased again through September and October—and my weekly visits to Omar had borne no fruit—that on our first lap of Jamituri Gardens, I walked into Mrs F’s soft, suddenly halted, posterior. I had been admiring with an ambivalent pride the queue tailing back from my stall, now the most cheerful spot in the park, and it had just struck me with satisfaction that the only plastic anywhere in sight was in the two decorative ice- cream cones framing the awning above Louis’s head.

  “New European!” Mrs F hissed. Her tone suggested that the new European must have smuggled himself past passport control to be here without her knowledge.

  I looked across the park. In between the city and the water, people milled in groups, all drawn from their homes by the undiscriminating mercy of the retreating sun. The Africans and Shirazis were in their robes, the Arabs in theirs, the Indian groups in their particular garbs, every sub-group of every group, distinct, brushing close yet remaining separate. I could map and name the borders between them: memory of the sixty-four massacre; trading rivals for a thousand years; feelings of social superiority; religious enmity; taint of former slavery; suspicion of informing to the authorities; suspicion of plotting rebellion. And there at the very far edge, motionless and quite alone, was Mrs F’s new European, a man of about thirty dressed in shorts and sandals. He was standing with his back to the sea, staring up at the wall of the fort, which was a bit like going to the cinema and facing the projector.

  “Volunteer?”
suggested my mother, hoping for contradiction.

  “Expert!” Mrs F obliged. “Look, there’s his car.” We knew all about the statuses of our Europeans.

  “Maybe he’s American.” My mother was cheerful at the idea that his inexplicable presence might be explained in this way.

  “Don’t be foolish, Isabella. Americans stopped coming twenty years ago. They don’t come to socialist countries. What do you think, Marcella? You’re an expert on European men. Is he French?”

  I looked. His shorts were baggy and creased and the sleeves of his long-sleeved shirt were unevenly rolled. Hair fell over his face. “Not French. Not smart enough. Not Danish—not fair enough. Not German. Not Italian.”

  “Russian?”

  “Too alone.”

  “What then? Don’t keep us in suspense.”

  “Maybe English.”

  “English? Are they back?” Mummy asked.

  “We’ll see,” said Mrs E She set off again and, as we drew closer, we went quiet with concentration, just three innocent Asian women walking.

  He stood at the bottom of the wall, looking up, as if the fort’s stonework held crucial information for him. Since we first saw him, he had not once turned towards us, but just as we passed he stepped back into our path and, still without looking, asked, “Is this part of the Sultan’s palace, this wall?”

  The question could only be for us, yet it seemed impossible that it should be. People in Zanzibar did not start conversations this way. They did not demand information. They did not begin to talk before testing the water with greetings. They did not address total strangers, or speak with their backs to you. The degree of delicacy and tentativeness we brought to our social encounters was that of people tip-toeing among light-sleeping lions. And solitary men absolutely did not address unaccompanied women of different race in Jamituri Gardens. The object of our attention had come to life against all natural laws, and we were shocked. Mrs F was lost for words. It was wonderful. We shambled to a halt in disarray.