by Roger King
“I travelled to the south of the island today, to Makan- duchi. To talk to village women.”
“And did they talk to you?”
“Oh, yes. They talk when you get them away from the men.”
“And what do the men think about that?”
“They don’t mind once they understand what I’m doing.”
“Geoffrey, nobody understands what you’re doing.”
He looked surprised. “Oh, it’s just research. To see how different policies affect different groups. So aid money can go to the right people. Does that make any sense to you?”
It didn’t really. I thought about it until my silence pulled him from a long attempt to cut his meat and he lifted his head. Then I asked, “Aren’t you worried about making enemies?”
“Enemies?”
“You’re choosing between different groups on Zanzibar. You’re asking where money went. These things make people crazy.”
“Crazy? Why?”
“Because if you’re giving money to the right people, you’re taking it from everyone else. That’s how we see it. And the money’s gone into someone’s pocket.”
“Maybe it’s different if you live here. I’ve got the UN behind me. And the government knows I’m sympathetic to socialism. I think that helps.”
“You think so?” Maybe he was right; the idea was so strange I had nowhere to put it. It was a different way of thinking. Maybe he was exempt. Either he was brilliant and fearless or stupid and fearless. Both possibilities made me wish the table narrower so I might be closer. I was fascinated by the fearlessness, like a moth drawn to the only remaining flame on Zanzibar. I said, seeking to demonstrate an independent intelligence, “There was an article in the Daily News the other day about how research was just a modern name for spying.”
“How did they reason that?”
“Something about foreigners asking lots of questions, then going away and writing reports we never see.”
“Well, I think I’m the only foreign researcher here now. And I want to help.”
“You’re not a spy, then? Not James Bond with fast cars and lots of beautiful women?”
“Sorry. Except tonight, of course.” He looked back down at his plate and I enjoyed keeping my eyes on him, while his blush spread. He was hopeless at compliments. Finally, he added, “Who would want to spy on Zanzibar anyway?”
“Geoffrey, you mustn’t say that. The people here would be so insulted.”
The custard came. Custard and nothing. No mention of the beer. The night was cooling now and the slamming door had ceased its racket. Between the rooftops I could see the full moon reflected on the sea. The tall narrow tooth of my father’s house across the street looked substantial, if plain. I looked up at my dark bedroom window just to make sure I wasn’t there. No, I was here.
Geoffrey said, “This is the first real conversation I’ve had in four weeks. "You seem very cosmopolitan. Have you travelled much?” He did look grateful.
“On a clear day you can see how far I’ve travelled. To Dar and back.”
“I’m surprised.”
“Well, I have a lot of European friends. I had a French boyfriend.”
He nodded.
“Gone back to France now.” Was I encouraging him? “And we Goans like to think of ourselves as Europeans.” “I know. A tradition of working with colonial powers.”
I was not sure I wanted agreement on those terms, but I ignored it. “But I want to travel.” And I blurted out the whole story of Didier and Omar and the problem of my passport, my disappointed dream of Europe, my frustration at being trapped back in a place I had already left, my hatred of being under everyone’s eyes. I gushed like a fool. I showed myself.
“Europe may not be what you imagine.”
“You live in London?”
“Just outside.”
“Isn’t London nice? Compared to Zanzibar?”
“It’s big. There’s a lot of cultural life.”
“Lots of shops? Red buses. Underground trains. I haven’t even been on an overground train.”
“"Yes, all that I suppose. You might not like the weather.”
“Cold?”
“And wet.”
“I wouldn’t mind. I’m tired of hot.”
“London isn’t what it was. There’s high unemployment. More violent crime. More beggars.”
“No!”
“'Yes. Hundreds of people living in cardboard boxes because they don’t have homes.”
“'You’re making fun of me.”
“No, really. We have Mrs Thatcher. The poor are getting poorer, the rich richer.”
The world was on its head again. In Zanzibar we were doing well and London was full of beggars. “What about people like me? Are there many people there like me?” “Asians? East African Asians? lies, quite a few.”
“In cardboard boxes?”
“Actually, I’ve never noticed Asians in cardboard boxes. The East African Asians I’ve met were all doing quite well.”
“Business?”
“Yes, usually.”
“You see!” I did not wait for his reply; I wasn’t going to have my dream argued away. “And you have a home, don’t you?”
“"Yes. I’m one of the lucky ones. I have a job at a university.”
“I’d be one of the lucky ones too. All my European friends were lucky.”
“That’s because the unlucky ones don’t travel.”
The old waiter’s arrival at our table caught us by surprise. He carried two bottles and was cheerful, showing the two or three drunken teeth left in his smile. “Beer!” he announced, and filled our glasses with ceremony. Somehow the warmth of our conversation had warmed him too. Perhaps it had proved to him that the naughty Goan girl from across the street had not after all fallen into prostitution with foreigners. Or perhaps he was just flushed with his success in finding beer, or had drunk some himself.
He gave Geoffrey a hand-written bill on a torn scrap of paper. “I am going, sir. You can stay.” The permission was superfluous; the hotel was open, airy and empty of both staff and customers. The world could fly through it without obstacle.
“Cheers.” Geoffrey clinked his glass against mine.
“Here’s to getting your passport.” We drank, then he asked, “Are you staying with your family?”
“With my mother. My sister is married and lives in Dar.”
“Your father?”
“We lost him a long time ago.”
“He died?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t sound sure.”
“I’m sure, but they never found his body. It was at the time of the revolution.”
“I thought it was the Arabs who were killed.”
“Well, he was killed too. I don’t know. I was five at the time. We don’t talk about it.”
“Sorry.”
“You Europeans always want to know about the past. Analyzing everything. We don’t want the past. We don’t want to think about it. My head is in the future. I just want to draw a line”—I drew one on the tablecloth— “and say, my life starts here.”
“Sorry, Marcella. I can be insensitive.”
“No, it’s me. I don’t usually talk like this.”
I had surprised myself with my passion. But it was true we did not talk about my father. My father’s death had made my mother sad and the sadness had evolved into an all-embracing vagueness that never left. At least, I thought I remembered a livelier, happier mother from before. If I ever pressed her on the past, her vagueness expanded to include all history. There’s no sense to be had, don’t bother looking for it, seemed to be her position.
“I’m just interested in what it was like to grow up here. Interested in you, I suppose.”
I relented. “It was nothing special. Just like anywhere. We played games, visited our aunts and uncles, went to school.” Then I found myself telling him all sorts of silly, petty things, and his promptings did not feel like research. They fe
lt like attention. I told him that we played jumping games on the flagstones and skipped with a rope in our courtyard, that I was the naughty one and my sister the careful one. In those days Mummy helped look after a little cafe for Mrs F and we played there. Fun for me at nine was carefully carrying a brimming glass of fruit juice to a customer without spilling it. There was a family photo of me doing it: a face full of seriousness, a thin cotton dress that drooped at the back. I did my homework on a cafe table while the heat and humidity puffed up the pages of my exercise book. I told him of my drunken uncle John, who played jazz on the piano and whose bottles we sometimes hid. I told him silly things, like how my classmates were always asking the teacher to let me tell them stories and I would make up fantastic tales about trap doors and secret passages. Aided by the beer, I poured myself immoderately into the novelty of Geoffrey’s interest. “I stopped telling stories when I was about ten,” I concluded. “I became shy.”
“You’re not shy now. I’m shy.”
“You? The world traveler? Well, it’s true I’ve seen you blush. So what about your childhood?”
“The London suburbs. Very boring.”
“Not to me.”
“Were you always a dreamer, Marcella?”
“You see, you ask questions but don’t answer them.” “Because I’m shy. Well, were you?”
“I’m not a dreamer. I’ve done things. I had my taxis in Dar, my business here.”
“I didn’t mean it badly. It just sounded like your sister was the dull sensible one and you were the little girl with the ideas who dreamed of something wonderful.”
We didn’t do this, analysing childhood for clues to the adult life. Adult life was what was served to you, the boy you had always known, the family business. It was Geoffrey’s dizzy, topsy-turvy world again: adults made by children, not the other way around. I liked it. I said, “You think too much,” and I reached over to gently rap his forehead with my knuckles. Then I sat back and watched Geoffrey until I could no longer resist adding, “So, Mr Expert, am I going to get something wonderful?”
He took the question seriously, bless him. “You might. At least, something that you now believe would be wonderful.”
Which was good enough for me. I looked out to where the moon’s reflection on the sea had become sharper and brighter. The dining room was suddenly bleak. “Geoffrey, would you like to go for a drive?”
“Now? Where?”
“Maybe the coast road.”
“OK... Yes, all right.”
The self-consciousness that had left him during the conversation now returned like a tide and made me regret the impulse, so that I said, “Well, maybe not. It’s late and no one must see us.”
“No, no. I’d like to.”
I directed him out of the city, a short drive past the central playing fields and onto the road that ran close to the shore. There was no other traffic and we were both quiet. We were soon beyond the few street lights and we drove slowly, as befitted travelers without a destination or certain purpose, heading into the bush along a potholed road of crushed coral.
“Shall I turn around, or do you want to stop?” He put me in charge.
“Let’s stop for a moment, look at the sea. No, off the road. Go onto the beach behind the palms. "You never know who’s watching.”
We parked facing the beach, the moon, the sea. It was quiet, just the creaking of contracting metal and the lapping of small waves. Well, here I was. If he tried to kiss me, I would let him. He said, “Let’s stretch our legs.” We walked to the edge of the water. “Is fishing very important to Zanzibar?” he asked.
“I think so. For food.”
We turned to walk back. Well, it was all right. Maybe I really only wanted talk from this man. Then we bumped into each other and he leaned over to kiss me. At first he was off centre, then too hard on my lips, then, just as I was relaxing, he pulled away.
“Sorry,” he said. “I couldn’t resist.”
“It’s all right.”
Which he took as permission to kiss me again, this time forcefully. When I responded, he surprised me. His hands were suddenly everywhere, my breasts, my bottom, between my legs, as if the first kiss had been so large an obstacle that once overcome he could not imagine any other impediment.
“Geoffrey, no!”
He immediately fell back and looked so mortified that I found myself adding, “It’s not safe here. Come over by the trees.”
We sat on the sand in the moonlight. We were still too exposed. I remembered that officially the penalty for adultery was death, but did not tell Geoffrey. I let him put his hand underneath my blouse, undo my jeans, while I strained my ears for sounds of movement in the bush. I tried to remember how far we were from a village, from an army camp, whether fishermen ever slept on this beach. I helped Geoffrey pull off my jeans, then put them under me in hope of keeping out the sand. I was exposed and he still had his trousers on, though now we were pushing them down to his knees. My mind was busy, divided. I was imagining Moslem zealots dragging me through the streets to my house—it would be me, not Geoffrey, I thought—when he caught me by surprise by pushing into me, no knocking at the door, abruptly getting a gasp of my attention.
“Are you all right?” he asked, freezing.
I considered. I was. “Gently,” I said, and held him in my arms to calm him. “Go slower.” I kept my eyes open and watched while he closed his, screwing up his face in some sort of internal struggle. My body was with him while my mind processed thoughts about death penalties, raping soldiers and invasive sand, and my ears listened for footsteps but heard only the lapping of the sea. Then I was looking from Geoffrey’s clenched face to the moon and stars, and with my guidance Geoffrey’s mouth had gone to my breast, and thought was nearly chased away, when he gasped, “Can I?”
I ran through the calculation I’d already made, “Yes, go on.”
He came immediately, collapsing on top of me with a groan, leaving me some laps short of a high tide. It was a complicated, busy, odd lovemaking, and I could not tell whether the sum was good or bad.
After a minute of stillness, he lifted his weight from me and rearranged me, as if packing away something fragile, “'You’re beautiful, Marcella,” he offered.
“Thank you, Geoffrey,” I replied.
I'VE BECOME A SECRET WATCHER OF FAMILY FEUD,THETV show. In the early afternoon I lie on my couch and watch American families compete over who knows most about what the average American thinks. It’s a competition to see who is most normal. I’m fascinated. As far as I can judge from Family Feud my colleagues are not normal Americans.
Without going outside, I’m learning a lot about America, including that the biggest fear of Americans is speaking in public, a surprise this, since they seem to do it so readily, including the contestants. Can there be so little else to fear? The news is full of guns and murder. But I’ve also just learned that most Americans believe that when their dogs dream, they dream mostly of cats. To give so much thought to the dreams of pets argues for a wistful tenderness. The more I watch, the more I feel I am on strange, swampy ground. I told my students yesterday that Americans were exotic, strange, impossible to understand. It was a sort of joke, to turn the tables and make a simple point, but they just looked at me with open mouths.
According to Family Feud, the circumstance that most encourages a husband to be unfaithful is the possession of wealth, which I guessed right for once, something true around the world. And I learned that everyone in America knows about something called the tooth fairy, a pagan spirit that leaves money under the pillows of children, the ghost of lost teeth. I thought that might be worthwhile for an immigrant to remember, important knowledge for fitting in. When the tooth fairy leaves money, the average American believes the normal amount is one dollar.
I haven’t found anything half as useful as Family Feud in the sociology books that are supposed to tell me what remains in America after the immigrants are melted down. The thing about this programme is
that it tells you what Americans think the others do, not what they actually do: the shared myths of being American. “We asked a hundred Americans what they thought was ...” goes the miniature host, before asking the contestants to guess what the hundred Americans thought. When I first saw the programme by accident, before fascination turned into a daily addiction, I was uncomfortable, embarrassed. The two competing families jumped up and down with enthusiasm. Big beefy men and bespectacled matrons, old age pensioners even, bounced with excitement because they had got an answer right and won five hundred dollars. It was so undignified that I felt for their humiliation. Now I am less embarrassed, which proves the progress I am making.
They have names from everywhere, these families: the Mionettas, the Fongs, the Koslowskis, the Martinezes, African-Americans with British names like Smith or Davies. They all jump; they all shout and scream in the same way My efforts to make sense of my multi-cultural job description have been disrupted by my exposure to Family Feud and its perfect erasure of immigrant distinctions. They all jump and smile. They are all disappointed but brave when they fail. The Fongs turn out to be as skillful at knowing what other Americans think as the Davies or the Mionettas. The money produces the same glee. I am fascinated by this show of unanimous accord.
I admitted my vice to Julia, who was scornful, so that I felt abashed. “That’s a horrible show,” she said. “That’s not America. I can’t believe you watch that!” One of the things about Julia is how outraged she can get over small things.
"IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN A THIEF. IT MIGHT HAVE BEENsomeone he insulted. Or it might be because he was a spy, or because he asked the wrong questions. Or because someone thought he was from the World Bank. Or it might have been the Moslems, or someone who doesn’t like white people. Or it might just be something between the Europeans. It could even be over a woman. Or, who knows, a boy. Or maybe he just tripped and banged his own head. He’s foolish enough for that. Don’t you think, Marcella, that he’s foolish enough for that?”