A Girl From Zanzibar

by Roger King

  I thought about Zanzibar and Benji in Zanzibar. About Mrs F lying dead there, among the ashes of her bar. About the mother I had not known and the father I hardly knew, both murdered. How it had all followed me around, though I had tried to out-distance it, my personal Zanzibar weather. I thought then how I would never go back, however much Benji needed me. Then I thought how this new life, this house, those student papers on the table, was not, after all, sufficient. Then I said, out of this moment of separation, out of the aloneness, out of an arcing back to a fuller past, out of a belief in friendship, out of the sheer desire for hope, out of the sudden possession of a good idea, “Benji’s in Zanzibar. He’s cooking up some new trouble. Money laundering, I think. He’s been in Zanzibar all this time. He could still make you a businessman.”

  I watched Ashraf carefully. He was calm, the sign of a busy mind.

  “Zanzibar,” he said at last. “Not so far from Moputo after all. Completely off the map. Of course, it’s your home. But we knew you didn’t go there. No one thought of Benji going there.”

  “He has a plan to make Zanzibar the Hong Kong of Africa. Financial services. After they declare independence from the mainland Tanzania.”

  Ashraf was walking around the room now, chuckling. He sneaked a lively glance at me. The idea seemed to be taking. “That crazy man. Perfect. The Hong Kong of Africa. And they want a coup. I think he needs me, don’t you?”

  “That’s what I was thinking. That’s why I’ve told you. Benji needs you because he trusts people. He’s in love with wickedness but you know he’s not wicked. He has bad judgement. He can’t recognize wickedness in others. You know wickedness, that’s why I’ve told you where he is. So you can protect him. I’m trusting you. Trusting you one more time.”

  “Marcella, are you trusting me because I’m wicked?”

  “And because you could make a fortune. And because you were our friend once. And because you need a fresh start too. I think you need to escape these people too, don’t you?”

  He was standing in front of the window now, smiling at me in a fixed way, as if leafing through my layers of thought, looking for a bottom. The whiteness outside the window frame made a portrait of him.

  “Good!” he said finally, and set himself in motion, an easy stroll across the room. “I’m for Zanzibar, then.” He gave the impression that his work was done and that he was leaving at this very minute to assume a new life helping Benji in Zanzibar, just as soon as he picked up his overcoat and gun.

  I said, “They’ll love you there,” and then, “You’re not going now, are you, Ashraf? You’ve not even finished your tea.” And I moved too, also unhurried, leaning forward to pick up the gun by its nose, as if to test its weight, removing it from his trajectory across the room, which now curved instead towards his tea on the mantle shelf.

  “They’ll love you in Zanzibar,” I said. “You have the same religion.”

  “Islam? I’m hardly devout.”

  “No, conspiracy. You wanted me to get rid of this for you?”

  He smiled slightly but did not reply. Instead he picked up his cup, drank from it and watched me with apparent approval as I slipped into my coat and boots and slipped the gun into my pocket. I sensed that something had changed in Ashraf now, and what was new in him was pleasure. And what he was enjoying, I thought, was that I had given him a delicious new uncertainty, a danger, a game with sufficient at stake to make it worth the play. Ashraf, I remembered, was indestructible. He never lost.

  The parting look I gave him as I closed the door and moved out into the world of snow, was, I felt, ridiculously coy. I headed up into the field behind the house, chose a drift and plunged my arm deep into it, then took the gun from my pocket and placed it at the bottom of the burrow, its barrel pointing away. From the direction of the house, now no longer visible through the snow, came the bang of the door and Ashraf’s voice calling out, “Marcella!” a catch of laughter and mild complaint in it. Then I was unable to decide or move, staying frozen in position, my arm still in the snowdrift, my hand still clasped around the gun. The snowflakes became very interesting to me, the way they landed on my coat, were pinned for a moment like butterflies, then reduced themselves to ice and water, destroyed by my heat.

  What had caught me was the shocking idea that I might be sending someone to kill Benji in Zanzibar. I could not know. You never could know. It rose up in me that there could be no life for me, no life of any sort, if Benji died and I was the cause of it. If I killed the only one I loved, my only responsibility in this world, what would be left for me but a wretchedness worse than death? Did I imagine that I was preventing anything by taking Ashraf’s gun, that they did not have a thousand guns? Did I really believe that Ashraf could be trusted and that I could bet Benji’s life on the soundness of my bright idea? I thought of the newspaper photos of the dead Indians in South Africa, the blankness of their eyes. I removed my arm from the hole and my frozen fingers were still closed around the gun.

  Ashraf was moving towards me. As I strained in his direction, I heard him curse and remembered the shiny, unsuitable city shoes he wore. I made out a shadow that was gradually turning into a person. Before he came close, I moved away, my boots more suitable, calling out, “Ashraf, how can I trust you? How can I be sure you will not go to Zanzibar and harm Benji? Or that someone else won’t? "You’re a mercenary. I can’t pay you. And when have Benji’s plans ever really worked out? I shouldn’t trust you.”

  “Marcella, Marcella.” His voice was quiet and calm, inviting me to stay close. “What are you talking about? Nobody’s going to be harmed.”

  I moved off again, into deeper snow, which powdered over the tops of my boots.

  “Marcella, where are you going? Wait! I can’t walk through this stuff... You’re right not to trust me. You should never trust anyone completely. But make a judgement. You used to be good at judgements. I’m tired of this life. And Benji is my friend. You know I don’t hurt my friends.”

  “People die in Zanzibar.” This sounded pathetic to my ears.

  “I’ll make sure nothing happens to Benji in Zanzibar. I promise.” Ashraf was keeping up with me now in spite of his shoes. He had learned to master the snow. “Hey, Marcella, stop. This stuff is cold. I’m not dressed for a hike. You’re from the tropics, remember? You’re from Zanzibar.”

  The falling snow was so dense now we were out in the open field that I could no longer make out where the sky ended and the ground began. I lost Ashraf and looked back down the field, straining to see him materialise again. Then his voice reached me, not very far away. “Hey, Zanzibar girl!” Only Benji called me that.

  If I was to act at all, this was the time to act. I tried to make a calculation. There was Benji in Zanzibar, with his hopes. There was prison, the awfulness of that, but also the notion that society owed me a crime. I remembered fear, the unacceptability of living with it, and violence, and how it had always dogged me in spite of my refusal. In London, it was Ashraf who had come into my home and brought violence with him. I thought of the Vermont life that I would lose, and then that this was of little consequence. I calculated that a body here would not be discovered until spring. I thought of Ashraf’s dangerous ability to survive, and that I should act before he came within the span of a deer’s leap.

  I pointed the gun into the unreal whiteness, moved the catch, and when I thought I saw a greying of the snow that might be the shadow of a figure, I pulled the trigger, astounded really that it worked, surprised to be transported into American TV land, and affronted to discover that the gun had a spiteful little will of its own, kicking back at me. There was no response from Ashraf except that the shadow became larger and denser, bordering on the corporeal. But, my decision made, I thought at least I must be its good manager, so I fired again and again and again.

  Ashraf’s shape loomed bigger, then abruptly smaller, then disappeared, falling, diminishing to nothing far too rapidly for flight. I stood still, quite calm, in the perfect quiet. Is t
here anything else in the world like falling snow, so immense an event without the slightest sound? The friendly snow with its soft persistence overcame my shoulders, making them white, and while I stood listening, it completed its make-over of me by filling in the remaining black on my coat’s sleeves and chest. There was no sound, no movement. I wiped the gun clean with a tissue from my pocket, then let it drop, leaving both it and Ashraf to the kindness of the snow.

  THERE SHOULD BE SOMEWHERE I COULD GO, WHERE I

  would be met with a warm embrace and the comfort of the familiar, but there is not. I had weighed the no place of the road against the place of Zanzibar—its smallness, its ghosts, the light-sleeping lions, Saint Frankie’s little finger—and had chosen no place. I had weighed no one against Benji—his warm body, the hair of his chest, the ancient memory of being held—and had chosen no one.

  There is no going back. The devils that chased my ancestors to Zanzibar from all across the world still chase me. They chased me into London and out of it. Snapped at my heels and herded me to Vermont, then saw me out of there. I try to take solace from my own words to my students proving that history is just movement, turbulence, mixing, and that everything is temporary and provisional when looked at in the proper frame. But I sometimes dream of conforming myself to the shape of a loved body in the night, and I sometimes mourn my confiscated home in Westbourne Grove, its treasures long handled by strangers, mourn even the borrowed house in Vermont that held me for a while.

  Julia was wrong about love, but right about my needing to see more of America. I’ve been driving across the country for seven days now, to this cafe in Tehachapi, with its row of photos recording its earlier destruction by earthquake. The hills to the east, where I just came from, are covered by wind farms, whole landscapes inhabited by gatherings of tall white windmills that stop and start according to their own intelligence. They seem like quiet settlers from a more advanced world. Friendly aliens like me. Wind farms: an expression so strange that it fills me with the pleasure of possibility. I strive to think of the similarly unexpected. Factories of solitude. Earthquake gardens. Homes for tired thoughts. For some reason I think of monsoon winds and the unpriced scent of cloves on Zanzibar.

  I have discovered that it is possible to travel across the United States and stay only at motels owned by Indian families. Not American Indians, but Indians like me, like my father. Like Mummy. Sometimes in small, emptied towns in the middle of America, they own the only motel, and are the only Asians. Often they have come from East Africa like me, usually propelled here from Uganda by my friend Idi. This was a gift from the sky.

  On my first day from Vermont I stopped, exhausted, at a small-town Pennsylvania motel that looked inexpensive and approachable. My first motel. As I walked up to the office, my anxiety was all about what they would make of me, this dark-skinned foreign woman travelling alone to their town with no good excuse, and whether I would be safe. I opened the door and was inexplicably surrounded by the scent of curry. From the room behind the neglected office came the sound of an Indian family eating in full voice: the clattering of plates, the broken voice of an old lady laying down the law—Gujerati, I thought—children chattering, mainly in English, a mother distributing dishes here and there, the low, complaining tones of a man trying to establish family order. I listened for a minute, then rang the desk bell, feeling tearfully hopeful that a greeting in Swahili might be a common language.

  I’ve been passed on from town to town across America, Indian motel to Indian motel, a spider’s web of Indian-ness spanning all of the USA. The theories all say that immigrants huddle together for security, but these families seem determined to spread themselves thin. I’ve talked to them, my journey westward becoming slower as it has progressed. I’ve asked how they found their motels, who helped them, how they raised the money from other Indians, what they will do to help their relatives find their motels, the businesses they would like to move on to when they can free themselves from living behind the shop in hopeless towns and contending with the vile, violent, oversexed, drug-crazed habits of their customers. I’ve asked the parents what they miss most, what they need, and the children what they plan to do, which rarely includes motels. We have talked together about their stays in England, and the relatives still there. Sometimes they know Zanzibar. Last night the grandfather at the motel in Tehachapi—a slow, poor mountain town—lit up with his recollections of Zanzibar City when the Arab Sultan still ran it under the protection of the British. He and his friends visited there from Kenya, he said, for the wild good times of those days, the bars and nightclubs and the beautiful, famously sinful, women.

  I’ve been signing a new name to keep me safe: Stella Souza. Stella for Mrs F; Souza because the phone books here will lose me among the dozens of Souzas, thanks to Spain and Mexico. No more gorgeous, trisyllabic names. I’m talking business with my new acquaintances, having a few ideas. They like me. My mind is picking itself up to march a little. I’m not dead, only lonely and sad from loss. I recognise this as a sort of hope, an expression of capacity. It’s not the sort of hope that grabs at happiness the way I did in Bayswater. Nor is it the sort of hope that tries to fit me into a place already made for me, like Vermont. It’s a sort of simple faith that, if I am patient, and if I am busy, and if I am kind, the space within me will someday be filled, that the world has created a woman from everywhere, belonging nowhere, because it has some use for her.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Helen Marx is a brave and gracious publisher. Grateful thanks also go to Jeannette Watson at Books & Co., my editor Ruth Greenstein, and Lisa DeSpain at Helen Marx Books, all of whom have conspired with Helen Marx to make publication a delight. Jonathan Rabinowitz of Turtle Point went out of his way to help the process along.

  A special thanks goes to Grace de Almeida in Tanzania, without whom the book would not exist. Andrea Barrett was the novel’s first reader, and a good friend to it and me. Liz Benedict, Mordicai Gerstein, Tony Giardina, Molly Giles, Betsy Hartmann, Joann Kobin, Marisa La- bozzetta, Peter Matlon, Karen Osborn and, importantly, Amy Rowland each contributed something good and nothing bad. Dominique Simon shared the ups and downs and should know how much this has meant.

  Because this book was written during a long illness I am particularly grateful to the MacDowell, Ragdale and Yaddo artist colonies for the refuges they generously provided.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Born in London, Roger King is the author of four other novels, Horizontal Hotel, Written on a Stranger’s Map, Sea Level, and Love and Fatigue in America. He worked extensively in Africa (including Zanzibar) and Asia for various UN agencies. Since 1997 he has lived in Leverett, western Massachusetts.

  There is more about Roger King’s novels, and his international and film work, at: www.rogerking.org and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_King_(novelist)