‘God is Great!’ screamed my father in his joy, kicking me in the ribs.
My grandmother told me that she had always felt a premonition in her breasts, that I would feed and grow on the love of the family, and one day turn against it. She wriggled with anticipation and righteous pleasure as she told me of the torments that awaited me in this life. She told me of diseases that afflicted the eyes, the bowels and the genitals of heretics. What will you worship now? she asked me.
My mother told me to beg forgiveness, that I should not read so many books. She said that if I lost God I would be on my own in a world that was full of danger. She told me to look for God, to try again, to ask forgiveness.
The worst pangs of hunger had left me as I walked the streets, and I turned away from the road home and headed for the creek. I walked over the bridge across the little stream that ran into the creek and turned to watch the water sink into the sea. In the distance was the thin dark line of the wireless tower. The sea stretched endlessly, without the breakwater to interrupt my vision. I watched the shimmering delight of the waves as they came in, felt their strength and the depth from which they came.
A man walked past me and then stopped and turned and stared at me. I groaned to myself. He came back and stood next to me, leaning on the bridge and staring out to sea in that empty afternoon. I could sense his bulk beside me. I knew he was after my arse. I glanced quickly at him, and he caught my eye and leered. I heaved off the parapet. He straightened too, smiling and looking dangerous. I tried not to look nervous. Nice view, he said, smiling at his little victory. He spoke with just a hint of teasing, with just a hint of love-talk. He turned again towards the sea.
‘Very pretty,’ he said. He turned a full, fleshy grin on me. His teeth were flecked with bits of food and tobacco stains. His chin was covered with tiny pimples that spread from under his lip to the heavy folds of skin above his Adam’s apple. His lips were thick and covered with loose, dead skin. Bits of wool and mud and grass had matted into his hair. His thick neck bulged out of a shirt that was stained green under the armpits. He was my nightmare of a sadistic bugger, a rapist.
‘Beautiful,’ he said, allowing the word to pass his lips slowly while his eyes wandered over me. His tongue stroked his lips in a parody of sensuality. He waited, smiling at me. With a sudden grimace, he cleared his throat and spat a lump of yellow phlegm into the water. He swallowed rapidly to moisten his dry throat. He turned back to me and there was a hard calculating look in his eyes. I looked for a long moment at his repulsive face, and I saw him smile contentedly to himself, biding his time.
‘How old are you?’ he asked after a while.
‘Haven’t I seen you with my father?’ I asked him.
‘I haven’t done anything,’ he said. ‘What are you trying to say?’
I smiled at his terror and started to walk away.
‘If you need any money don’t be afraid to ask,’ he shouted after me. I heard him laugh and it required an effort to prevent myself from breaking into a run.
I was tired of fighting off bashas. In my first year at school, Abbas, a classmate, had given me a penny every day of the school year to soften me up for the big fuck. On a day he was to go for a dental check-up, he came into school especially to give me my penny. His family was rich and he commanded the services of all the thugs in the class. I was to be seen as his plaything, on his payroll. Sometimes he stared at me all morning, through English, Arithmetic and Nature Study, knowing that the teacher and the other childen were watching him with knowing smirks. If I looked in his direction, he would slowly wet his lips with his tongue. I knew that one day he would try to touch me, he would try to shame me in front of all the other boys. I thought that if he did I would bring a knife to school and kill him.
I was grateful for his money. By the time we came to the seduction scene he was paying me a shilling a day, and we were both much older. We laughed away the moment we had both been dreading for years.
It was assumed that if you were quiet and frail then you could be forced into a corner and fucked. In my first years at school I fought often to dissuade aspiring lovers. It was not necessary to win these fights and I almost never did. What was important was to show that you would fight however unequal the battle. To many of the boys it was just a sport, a way of showing off their masculinity and virility. The teachers smiled at it too. I could have done with Said.
I felt that God had put a blemish on me, that He was punishing me for Said’s excesses. I thought that the torment would never end. I never spoke of it to anybody at home. I was too ashamed. I felt that if I was treated this way, there was something in me that made the boys do it. Then I won a fight.
Walking home after school one day, I met Sud, one of my tormenters. He followed me, telling me how much he loved me and how much he was willing to pay for me. It was three shillings, I think. I stopped to wait for him. He blew me long slobbering kisses as he approached. He came up to me and caressed my cheek with his hand and then slowly kissed his fingers one by one. The loafers sitting outside the tea-house across the road from us cheered him for every kiss. Sud turned with a smile to acknowledge them. I leapt on him then, smashing my fist into his face, and falling on him with my knee buried in his crotch. I punched his face with manic fury. My fists hurt me as I hit him and the knuckles of my left hand were bleeding. I did not feel much pain then. His mouth and nose were leaking blood and his eyes were filled with fear. He struggled from under me and ran.
I stopped only long enough to raise a fist at the tea-house bums before running after him. I could see Sud’s friends rushing to the rescue. I hurled Sud to the ground, landing a few more joyful blows before his friends arrived. He struggled from me and crawled under a vegetable stall. I waited until his friends reached us, daring them to avenge their craven friend.
After that the teasing seemed to stop. I was even approached by boys who wanted to be fucked. After a while you began to weigh every kindness, to doubt every stranger you met. At times you ran screaming from a well-meant compliment or you misunderstood a helping hand. That was how you protected yourself.
Next door to us was a brothel. Two men and two women lived in the house with the old man brothel-keeper. All four seemed dirty and frightening, and invariably drunk. They were the whores that men paid to sate their lusts on. I found it hard to believe that anybody could get any pleasure out of those tired broken bodies.
Then that man on the bridge . . . big and shameless, with a face and a body that time had depraved. I could see Said in him, Said as he would have become.
After the funeral, my father said: God will make you pay for the boy’s death. My grandmother said I had stood and watched him die a terrible death. What hope is there, she said, when brother murders brother? My mother told me to stop crying and that I could not help what had happened. They made me live years of guilt for a wrong I had not done. And then it was possible to hone self hate and remorse into a tool for causing pain. Creatures rose in the night to suck my blood and bloat me with waste and sin. I fought them in the way they had shown me. I paid them back pain for pain, silence for silence. I learnt how to reject them.
There were times when I tried to talk to my mother, to tell her how things were, and to feel her stroking me with her particular gentleness. I wanted to tell her of the fury of the sea as it battered the beach and of the wails I had heard while standing on the bridge. I tried to tell her that I had heard my grandfathers weep, felt the heat that crinkled their brows, felt the retch that built up in their guts, the odour of maize and suffering in their farts.
But I could see the pain that I caused her, and thought that she could not bring herself to forget her loss. I made her say to me: Said was our first-born. He was dear to us. And you watched him die . . . In my fantasies I made her say that to me. She hushed me with tales of angels hovering in the air, of streams running with honey, of gentle music in the air. She was the same woman I had seen all my life, always in pain, always unable to give c
omfort or to find comfort, not knowing how.
‘You shame me,’ she said to me the week before I became a man. ‘You know nothing of your father’s struggles. He tells me you pass him in the street and you don’t even greet him. If you hate him that much why don’t you leave? You eat the food we put before you and you don’t spare a thought for him. He sits at the docks all day filling in forms for people who can’t write. Who do you think he does that for? Can’t you at least show him some respect? Don’t start crying again, hush! You’re almost a man. How did you come to be this way? How have we failed you?’
I cried then, and she held me in her arms and rocked me, and I felt as I had wanted to feel as a child, powerless in the hands of those who knew better. It is strange now to think that we could all live like that, absorbed with our resentments and hates.
The beach bleached by the sun, bone-white sand. Tiny crabs were digging holes to hide from my feet. I pursued one and killed it, and gave it a solemn burial before I set off for home.
2
Manhood arrived largely unremarked: no slaying of a ram, no staff and scroll and the command to go seek God and fortune. There were occasional jokes about finding me a wife. My father made the jokes, my mother scotched them with a fierce look.
The boys at school knew that they were now men. If we could, we refused to obey a teacher who commanded too brusquely. We all began talking seriously about the future. Independence was just round the corner, and we spoke of the opportunities that it would bring to us. That was not the way it turned out, and I think we knew that even as we deluded ourselves with visions of unity and racial harmony. With our history of the misuse and oppression of Africans by an alliance of Arabs, Indians and Europeans, it was naïve to expect that things would turn out differently. And even where distinctions were no longer visible to the naked eye, remnants of blood were always reflected in the division of the spoils of privilege. As the years passed, we bore with rising desperation the betrayal of the promise of freedom.
After three years of independence, it was clear that the future had to be sought elsewhere. On the verge of leaving school, I lay in wait for my father one afternoon. I had to wait for him to rise from his nap, wash and get changed. It was late by the time he was ready, looking smart and carrying a subtle scent of prosperity. He stood smiling for a while, repeating the word England softly. I thought he would laugh and walk away, throwing an apt proverb over his shoulder.
‘Are you thinking of a scholarship?’ he asked at last.
I nodded. He smiled and shook his head.
‘You won’t get it,’ he said.
I nodded. He sat down and crossed his legs, leaning back in the chair, chin in hand.
Since independence he had found himself an office job in the Ministry of Works. He had recast himself as a respectable and relatively eminent member of the community. He had not abandoned his old friends entirely, but now saw them discretely and less regularly. He dressed the part now and perfumed himself with sandalwood. He still chased whores, though, and still staggered home drunk on some nights.
We were sitting in the guest room, which I can never dissociate from Said’s death, our legs almost touching. He carefully brushed dust off his cuffs, sighed patiently and raised interrogative eyebrows at me.
‘So . . . where will you get the money?’ he asked. ‘This government won’t give it to you, be you as clever as the devil. They don’t waste their money on Arabi rangi rangi. Unless you want to go to Cuba to learn to be a freedom fighter. Or you want to go to Bulgaria to learn Esperanto. How will you get there?’
‘I can find a job when I get there,’ I said. ‘Work and study.’
‘And I can put my head in a bucket of water and gurgle,’ he said. ‘But where will that get me? You don’t know how hard these things are. I asked you how will you get there?’
He looked at me expectantly but I said nothing. How did I know how I would get there? I would find a way.
He made an impatient clucking noise. ‘You have to be very tough for this kind of thing,’ he said.
I nodded meekly. I was relieved that he had not laughed me out of the house, or accused me of abandoning them. I suppose I had also thought that he would be angry when he found out, and I had wanted to get the unpleasantness over with. So I was prepared to listen dutifully to any advice. He grinned at me and shook his head. The dust was beginning to settle on his cuffs again. The screams of children playing outside came in through the open window. The heat was coming in waves off the whitewashed walls.
‘Wait a minute,’ he said.
He got up quickly and went into his bedroom. He returned with a large map of Africa. He hitched his trousers up and got down on his knees. He adjusted himself and then spread the map out in front of him.
‘It’s an old map,’ he said, and glanced at me as if he expected me to say something. I removed from my mind the thought that he looked foolish down there, for fear that it might show in my face. He pointed decisively in the region of Lake Nyanza. We’ll make camp here and attack the enemy at dawn. He traced a route from Kampala – who would think of going there now? – through the Bahr el Ghazal and down the Nile. I pictured myself on Cleopatra’s barge, glinting with bronze and gold leaf, with its fountains and leviathan leitmotifs leaping in the equatorial sun. ‘All the way to Alexandria,’ he said.
He traced the route back. Alexandria! The city of the great conqueror! And here the Ruwenzori: two-headed Mountains of the Moon, rumbling storms in their coming. And here is Adowa where the Ethiopian monks deflowered the pride of Italy. Near the mouth of the Tana was where the Shirazi princeling, fleeing the wrath of his master, sat to wipe his arse before discovering the Blue Nile. He laughed as he mocked his own excitement.
‘Yes, you go,’ he said with a sigh as he came back to his chair. ‘Show them that we’re not all finished. The things they do to us in this place . . . ’ He leant forward and laid his hand on my thigh: ‘Only one thing. Don’t lose your faith in God. When you go to these foreign places . . . ’
He grinned and leant back. Suddenly he chuckled and shook his head: ‘You’re a secret one,’ he said. ‘Don’t tell your mother. She’ll start to cry or something. You leave this to me. First you need a passport. I know someone in the Immigration Department. He’ll help us.’ He made a sign to indicate that money would change hands. He glanced at his watch and made a face of surprise at it.
‘You leave the passport to me,’ he said. ‘I must go now. It’ll be a great journey. I wish I was young too.’
He flicked his cuffs, glanced at his watch again and left. He left me feeling more optimistic than I thought I should. It became a small conspiracy between us, and we would talk about it when we were alone. My optimism did not last. I suspected that he was playing a game with me, that his enthusiasm and tales of attempts to bribe officials were a fiction, an elaborate hoax. Sometimes a look of amused malice would pass across his face. I was reluctant to believe that he would play with me in such an elaborate and cruel way. Then one afternoon, several weeks after our first conversation, he came home from work in a terrible temper. He did not speak to anybody, but this was not unusual. Every now and again he caught my eye, and I knew that I was part of his anger in some way. I left the house and wandered the afternoon streets to keep out of his way.
I went back to the house to find him waiting for me in the guest-room. He beckoned me in as I made to walk past. He was the scowling, gruff-voiced tyrant again. It was very hot in the house, and the dust had risen from multitudinous corners so that the air rasped with grit.
‘Where have you been?’ he asked, the sweat standing in angry bubbles on his forehead. I saw that he had not taken his habitual shower and afternoon nap, mortifying himself into a rage. I waited in silence, hoping that he would continue talking without an answer from me, hoping that he would burst out with his grievances and anger and then leave me in peace. He scowled, waiting for an answer.
‘To the docks,’ I said.
�
�I’ve been waiting here,’ he burst out. ‘I haven’t even had a wash, and you’ve been playing at the docks. You want this, you want that, but you want somebody else to do it for you. You don’t care what humiliations you put people through. I went to all this trouble . . . and you’re playing in the docks.’
He stood up suddenly and I tensed, thinking that he was going to hit me. He pointed to the chair he had been sitting in, and I sat down. He paced in front of me, turning to glare at me now and then. I’m getting tired of this, I thought. I’m a man now.
‘I had no one to look after me,’ he said suddenly. ‘I had no father. Did you know that? But you . . . you expect me to see all these people, suffer all this . . . disrespect. And what do you care? You go and play at the docks.’
He stood at the window, a hand gripping one of the bars. ‘I spoke to the Immigration man today,’ he said, speaking more softly and looking away from me. ‘He told me there’s a new law. He said I can’t apply for a passport because I’ve been in prison. Did you know that I’ve been in prison?’
His face did not change, and the question came casually. He cleared his throat and I watched him swallow the phlegm that he had brought up. I had pictured him standing in the dark of the tailor’s junk-yard, the smell of rotting fruit turned sour by goat droppings and piss, while at his feet the little boy whimpered. I pictured him gloating over the shattered body: Have you had enough?
‘It’s better you should know this from me,’ he said, frowning. ‘I committed no crime . . . but people never forget.’
The boy walks the streets now in rags, clean out of his mind. Little children taunt him and pull his trousers down for a joke and put old mango stones and bits of cassava up his anus. He was searching my face, looking for signs, looking for sympathy.
Memory of Departure Page 3