A Girl From Zanzibar

by Roger King

  After a moment, he turned towards us and pointed up at the wall, repeating more loudly, “Sultan’s Palace?” Then taking in our blankness, mumbled, “Oh, sorry, you don’t speak English.”

  “Of course we speak English!” But once she had asserted this, Mrs F’s mouth opened and closed several times without any further words emerging. I think she wanted to give him a lecture on Goans being Europeans but then saw the difficulty of her position.

  I said, “No, this is the fort. The Sultan’s palace is down there. Or maybe you want the old palace, The House of Wonders.”

  “Oh...” He pushed metal-framed glasses back up his nose and wiped away some sweat. “Thank you.” Now he was staring at me as he had at the wall, as if I was the new location of the secret code. “I’m sorry. You speak very good English.”

  “So do you,” I replied enthusiastically, and watched a gratifying blush spread upwards from his neck. “The Sultan left ages ago,” I added for the sake of it.

  “I know. I know. Nineteen sixty-four. Chased away by the Okello rebellion that put Karume in power. The end of the Omani Arab dynasty. Five thousand Arabs massacred. At least. Led to the union of Zanzibar with Tanganyika to form Tanzania.”

  I watched a renewed stupefaction overtake Mrs F, as if our new acquaintance had just gratuitously offered her a technical description of his wedding night. We did not talk of these things. Not in public, not anywhere. I had never before seen her so completely routed. She staggered slightly with dizziness. “We must go,” she muttered in a low voice to us, not him, and abruptly set off.

  “These dents,” he said to me, his attention turning back to the wall, “were they made by British cannonballs during the eighteen ninety bombardment?”

  Mrs F had gone a few steps, then discovered that neither myself nor my mother had fallen into formation.

  “Are you English?” my mother asked suddenly and brighty, though it was obvious that he was.

  “Oh ... yes.”

  “I don’t know about the cannonballs,” I offered.

  “I’m Isabella D’Souza,” announced Mummy, as if she’d just discovered it.

  “Oh, I see. Geoffrey Sutton.” He wiped his hand on his shorts, then didn’t offer it.

  “I’m Marcella. And that,” I added as we moved away to join the glowering Mrs F, “is my aunt, Mrs Fernandez.”

  I LIKE MY STUDENTS. THEY ARE TOUCHING, SOMEHOW, these untidy young people set in the neatness of their college landscape. They seem to have no idea of grace or beauty. How can it be that these privileged children of such a big, rich and confident nation are so fragile and lost? Moore, it turns out, particularly specialises in the troublesome children of the wealthy, who for their own reasons do not wish to be like their parents.

  The college has hired me to teach Multi-cultural Studies, but no one has told me what this is. I asked the dean, Dean Goodrich, and he offered with obvious reluctance, “Well, we’ve always felt we are too Eurocentric at Moore, too white. Teach the students about people from other cultures. "You did your thesis on Third World immigration, didn’t you?”

  “But that was about Bayswater in London.”

  “Well, you can teach them about that. At Moore, we don’t like to tell our professors what they should teach, we prefer to trust them. Look, don’t worry. You can teach about yourself, ''you’re about as multi-cultural as you can get. Frankly, Marcella, it’s all new to us. Teach whatever you like.” It felt more like carelessness than trust.

  At first I prepared complicated lessons, working out all my conclusions in advance. I set out to show the students how, taking the longer view, cultures are just the outcomes of people who moved from somewhere else and would move on, how nothing is separate, permanent, fixed or owned. I was warning them away from the vanity of simple certainties, not understanding how few certainties they held.

  On the day of my first class I arrived early, nervous, overdressed in a dark business suit, and believing the blackboard to be central to classroom teaching, I listed on it, before the arrival of the students, five names: Timbuctu, Xanadu, Shangri-la, Zanzibar, D’Souza.

  After the dozen or so sleepy students had finally shushed themselves into silence and settled to wonder at me, I read the list out loud. How they roll off the tongue, our gorgeous trisyllabic names. I had no way of knowing what these young Americans already knew and I offered them the lovely names to test and tease them, and to claim the upper hand.

  “The last one,” I said, “is me, Marcella D’Souza. What do the others mean to you?”

  “They’re all imaginary places,” was the first reply, the one I had wanted.

  “OK,” I said, “Any other ideas?”

  “Isn’t Xanadu in a poem?”

  “Good. So where are these places?”

  “Nowhere. They don’t exist in the real world.”

  “True only in one case, I think. Do you know which one?”

  “Timbuctu?”

  “No, Shangri-la. That’s from a story. The rest are real. Timbuctu is still there.” I waited, but nothing was ventured. “It’s in West Africa. In the nation of Mali. In the Sahara desert now.”

  “Isn’t Zanzibar in Africa, too?” offered a girl with strikingly clear blue eyes, who had chosen to sit close to me.

  “Yes. Good. Off East Africa. In the Indian Ocean. And Xanadu?”

  Then I explained, arriving at my point, that all three had once been great places. Timbuctu was the ancient centre of trade and learning for the vast Mali and Songay empires. Xanadu in China was the site of the Mongol Emperor’s summer palace, though now reduced to the market town of Shangtu in Inner Mongolia. And Zanzibar, I said, was the centre of a cosmopolitan trading empire reaching across Africa by land, and by sea to Arabia, Persia, Asia and beyond. These were places, I told them—my pale, perplexed students—that a more primitive Europe once envied and feared, old reputations that lived on as myth, leaving behind an inexplicable, exotic resonance to Western ears. But, exotic places, I then told them, are just places that you haven’t taken the trouble to learn about. The same with people.

  While I was in prison, I had looked all this up in encyclopedias. In all the years since I left Zanzibar it had nagged at me, the disparity between the light I saw in the eyes of strangers when I mentioned Zanzibar, and my own recollection of its difficulty and darkness. They said it was exotic, and that I was exotic too, so that no word has lead my heart to drop more quickly, with its careless declaration of my unknowability, my absolute unbridgeable separation from the speaker. I watched for similar examples of foolishness and found the other names. I thought there might be a lesson for my students there, for the difference between what is true about the unknown and what is imagined. And there was something for me too, a slyly subtle plea that I might be embraced.

  But all this was too much for them too soon, too much of my concern and too little of theirs. They looked blank, even resentful. Some were still eating their breakfasts, and not knowing America’s casual ways, I thought this might be insolence, though I lacked the confidence to correct it.

  The girl with the intense blue eyes—her name was Julia—came to my assistance. “Maybe, she said, we can talk a bit more about these places to help us to understand.”

  “All right.” I turned to the board, placed my finger on it, pushed away the compelling thought that I was a charlatan with no business being in this classroom, and took a breath, “Does anything come to mind when you hear this name, Zanzibar?” A silence. “Just the first thing that comes into your head.”

  “Somewhere exotic.” A boy, of course.

  “A Bob Hope film.”

  “What?”

  “An old film, ‘The Road to Zanzibar.’ It was about slave girls wearing those see-through pajamas.”

  “OK. OK, Arabs and slaves, then.”

  “I think of a tropical island.”

  “Very good. "You see, you do know something about it. Actually the state of Zanzibar is several islands. Unguja and Pemba are the l
argest. Unguja is usually called Zanzibar Island because Zanzibar City is on it. They’ve all been in a union with mainland Tanzania since nineteen sixty-four. So, what else is it known for?”

  “Spices.” Julia had been holding back.

  “Yes, their main export is a spice. Do you know which one? No? Cloves. The whole of Zanzibar smells of clove trees.” Why did I choose to tell them this, putting romance back into it?

  “Have you ever been there?”

  “As a matter of fact, I have. A long time ago.”

  Now, well into the semester, my lessons spin out more easily. It seems that what they want from me is less understanding than clues on how to live their lives. From me, the woman from Zanzibar and London who has only just arrived. And who has, by the way, spent the last eight years in jail. My life hardly seems a basis for anyone’s lessons. Yet they think, the girls at least, that in the movement of it I must have learned something that could be applied to them. They do not see me as halted, alone in my house, with hardly any sort of life. Instead they see a measure of glamour, independence, mystery, blessing me with this reflected image. So the classes unravel more pleasantly: I start to teach, they start in with their questions, which I try to answer, and the hour is gone. One girl told me recently, “You’re my role model,” and after the class, walking alone back to my house, I suddenly burst out laughing at it, the first time I laughed in ages.

  I should not have favourites, but Julia is my favourite. She’s about my height—a little taller—with fair hair that she calls dirty blonde. The directness of her look and manner sometimes unnerves me, as does her lovely conviction that at bottom, both people and the truth are always good. She has appointed herself my unpaid research assistant.

  “Do you know that film?” I asked one day as she fell into step with me on my way home. “ ‘The Road to Zanzibar’—the one someone talked about in class.”

  “It’s a comedy. Have you heard of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby? It’s not going to teach anyone much about Zanzibar.”

  “Still, I’d like to see it. To see what Americans think of us.”

  “'You’re from there?”

  “Among other places.”

  She brought it to my house the following week. “Professor D’Souza, I’ve rented the video of that movie. Do you have a VCR?”

  I do. We watched it together on my couch. The opening titles had drawings of slave girls. There were evil Arab slave traders, and white adventurers in search of romance and fortunes in Africa. The Africans were background and the story never seemed to reach Zanzibar itself.

  “That was so embarrassing,” said Julia at the end. “Watching it with you next to me. I feel like I should apologise for America. We just think we can use any place any way we want.”

  “Don’t be so serious.”

  “But it’s racist.”

  “Not the worst racism I’ve seen. Everyone always misunderstands everyone else. That’s the rule.”

  But she can be very earnest, Julia. Sometimes she is too much of a child for her age, sometimes too much of an adult.

  At the door, she was still upset. I laughed it off—it was nothing—but I could not reassure her. “I shouldn’t have brought it,” she said.

  “No, it was amusing.” I hugged her through the thickness of her anorak and felt the softness of her cheek against my own. "Young enough to be my daughter, I thought to myself—if I’d started at seventeen. But then Ali would have had to be the father, and any daughter of his would surely not have the earnestness of this daughter of Mennonites. I made a mental note to find out about the Mennonites, who promised to be another case study of human migration to add to my collection.

  I have not become as close to any of my colleagues as I have to this young woman. But I’m new here, therefore in a sense also young. She teaches me about America and I teach her about the world. We’re both beginners of sorts and I like the balance. I must be tired of being taught new things by men older than myself.

  I seem, in fact, to have entirely given up on men. I’m not looking for a man. The pug-faced Ron has called several times and I have made excuses to rebuff him. I put something to sleep in prison, made a dead zone in me that enfolds the past, safely enclosing love and intimacy. I lead this new life aside from it, careful not to disturb. What is left is enough for me: to do diverting work, earn a living, endure the ache of loneliness without looking for a remedy, to live among strangers who will never understand who I am. I will settle for this, knowing how close I have been to having less. I will care for my students a little, safe with this unequal, transient affection.

  I sometimes do miss sex, the weight of it, the brush of skin on skin, an event not all of my own doing. There may be, I admit, an unauthorised peeping self that watches to see what men might be looking for in me. And sometimes I do miss sharing the small daily things. I find myself talking to myself in the way I once did with Benji. I point out the hilltop view I recently discovered, or praise the friendly people in the Moore general store, or articulate a witty thought I had, or note the itchy pimple on my bum, or the deer I saw—my first. I loved the deer for its company and its beauty, and joined myself to it, the two of us slim and nimble, unwillingly conspicuous against the Vermont snow. When it fled from me in fear of its life, I felt stupid tears come close. Sometimes I still talk to Benji in my head, and worry that this is mad, and then go on to wonder where in the world he might be and whether he is alive. Then I pull myself away from this, recalling the obsessive early days of prison and the darkness that they brought on me, so that I scold myself into taking satisfaction from what I have, this safety, this quiet, this work, this chance to settle, this sufficient life.

  Under my porch light, as she was leaving, Julia made one of her switches from seriousness to silliness that catch me by surprise. “Have you ever seen a snow angel?” In reply to my blank look she threw herself backwards onto the cushion of snow bordering my drive. I had no idea of what she was up to. She moved her arms up and down in the snow, then jumped to her feet. “Look!” The impression was of a body with wings made by her moving arms. “See, an angel!”

  I brushed the snow off her anorak, lost for words, enchanted and embarrassed by the innocence. Eventually I said, “I’ve never seen one before.”

  “Make one.”

  “Me? No. I’m not wearing a coat. I only have a long coat anyway.”

  “Snow brushes off.”

  I looked at the smooth, unmarked snow next to Julia’s angel and imagined how it would be to let go and fall back into its softness. My body wavered, but the moment passed. I was holding too much to me that I could not drop; the abandon would be false, not innocent. I shook my head. “I don’t think so, Julia. I’m too old to be a snow angel. Maybe next winter.”

  “When you’ll be younger?” She gave me a shrewd look, which I ducked by smiling and moving to close the door.

  THE ENCOUNTER WITH GEOFFREY IN JAMITURI GARDENS

  might not have changed everything for me forever if ex- President Karume had been a better educated and less arrogant man. But Karume was both ill-educated and a dictator so he saw no reason why he shouldn’t personally design Zanzibar’s only modern hotel and locate it sceni- cally on a coastal swamp. When pieces of the Bwawani’s long, low buildings began to move off in different directions and the carpets turned moldy and the Yugoslav manager ran away, Zanzibar no longer had an international hotel for foreign visitors. Therefore, there was nowhere for Geoffrey to stay but the decrepit Africa House, right under my bedroom window.

  I watched his coming out and his going in. When he left Africa House, he stopped for a moment in its doorway, as if there might be traffic to consider. Usually his hand moved briefly to the zip of his fly, just checking. Then he flicked down the dark lenses over his glasses and walked the few steps to his Suzuki jeep with its UN logo on the side. There was only room for one vehicle in the triangle left between the buildings but he never had any competition for parking. He threw an old leather briefcase on
to the passenger seat and walked around to the driver’s side, then drove off. I noted that there was a patch of thin hair in the middle of his scalp. He never looked up to my fourth-floor window.

  Our house was a tall thin building that was not quite finished when my father died and had remained unfinished for twenty years. It was supported on two sides by bigger, older buildings and over time its unfinished concrete had blended into the crumbling stone of our neighbours. We lived on the top floor and the flats below gave my mother enough income for her needs, which were almost none. Africa House, across the road, a lower, older building, was once the British Club, but now barely functioned as a government hotel for visiting middle- level officials.

  I did not only watch Geoffrey, I listened to stories about him. According to Mrs F, “The English Boy” had offended Lars, the head of the Danish UN team. She adored Lars, who went to church and who had validated her Europeanness by giving his ten-year-old son to her for piano lessons. Apparently, Geoffrey asked too many questions. He upset people. Gossip had it that he had insulted the Minister of Finance, the Permanent Secretary of Natural Resources and most of the Party leadership. He seemed to have no idea of the disturbance he was causing. In the villages, he told the party cadres that he did not believe their official records and provocatively tried to ask questions of the villagers themselves. I watched him return to Africa House in the evenings, always alone. He was sweaty and dusty and dragged his case out of the car as if it were a body.

  Of course I was intrigued by this friendless man; he had started off so brilliantly by rendering Mrs F speechless. Then, while I was paying my weekly respects to Assistant Passport Officer Omar Khatib, and calculating how large a gift, or how much of me, would be considered an adequate tribute, Geoffrey was blithely demanding of government ministers what they had done with the foreign aid money. This was roughly equivalent to a drunk lurching through a mosque with a glass in his hand. Cheering, in its way. Finally I managed to arrive at our front steps at the right moment.