by George Rosen
Atherton crossed the paved road in a pool of shadow a hundred yards beyond Kigeli’s one electric beacon, the flood that lit the dragon on Bimji’s Agip gas station. He slipped through the chickenshit-crusted shanty yards that sided the market square and threw himself to the ground behind the hedge in back of the main street shops. He was already panting. His hands were already cold.
Atherton bellied over, as quietly as he could, to a spot where he could look underneath the hedge. Barely a dozen feet away, he could see the back window to Bimji’s office reflecting the night’s dim starlight. He could hear Guantai singing a low chant to himself, in front of the store, but he couldn’t see the watchman. If he was going to know when the old man went to the privy he would somehow have to get closer, into the narrow, grassy walkway that separated Bimji’s shop from its neighbor.
Atherton began to scrape at the dirt beneath his chest. The only quiet way through the hedge would be under it. Fifteen minutes later, the red dirt jammed into his nails, he wriggled through the gap at the base of two bushes into Bimji’s storeyard, stepped gingerly around the piles of Chinese cookware and old Land Rover fenders, and made his way to the grassy passage. He slumped against the far wall in a spot where he could observe the watchman and still remain unseen from the street.
Guantai had barely moved since the time Atherton had last seen him, nearly forty-five minutes before. The low Kigeli chant was still on the watchman’s lips, half-spoken, half-sung. With his staff, he rapped the short metal legs of the flaming jiko in rhythm with the song. The cookfire’s shadows—the staff, the flap of Guantai’s trenchcoat, the ear of corn in his hand that swelled to an immense club—played across the wall just feet in front of the Englishman. The watchman’s gin bottle stood warming by his bare feet. Every minute or so, breaking his song, he took a slow, methodical pull of the liquor, his lips lingering on the glass.
Finally, after Atherton’s own bladder had began to nag him uncomfortably, Guantai suddenly shook his head from side to side, pulled himself up with his staff, and shuffled away toward the privy. Atherton broke to the back yard, looked about wildly, then grabbed the bananas from his pocket and smashed the corner pane of Bimji’s office window. He clutched at the latch, swung the screenless window open, and pulled himself up and over.
The Asian’s office seemed to glow in the dark. The streaks of yellow on Bimji’s desk, the fading sweeps of whitewash on the walls, even the thick red polish on the cement floor pulsed in the near-blackness. Atherton’s eyes buzzed. He pulled the rag mask, with its faint, sick smell of oil, down to his neck and taking off his shoes, padded to the door behind the shopkeeper’s desk.
The strongroom door gave at once to the Englishman’s shoulder. The ease unnerved Atherton. This was all going wrong, he told himself. He should have planned some way to know when Guantai returned from the privy, some way to see. Fumbling, he lit a kerosene lantern that stood on the windowless closet’s one small table, then paused to stop the trembling of his hands.
The lantern, the table, the cash box pushed against the wall, nothing else. The austerity dismayed Atherton. He did not know what he had expected—piles of skins from Bimji’s supposed poaching, perhaps, a cache of jewelry—but some hidden luxuriance, some secret, guilty wealth. Instead, he found a lightless monk’s cell, barely different from his own rented room.
And a cash box with a pick-proof, keyed lock. There would be no combinations, no tumblers to hear fall, only a smooth steel padlock that took some insane and special cylindrical key. Panic began to fill Atherton. He had never actually seen the cash box locked before. He had just assumed that Bimji used the best of the locks the Asian himself sold—the West German ones with the combination dials—not something private.
From outside Bimji’s office, Atherton heard scrapings, shreds of music, the creaking of wood. He tried to quiet himself, with Guantai, sure to have returned from his call of nature, now no more than twenty feet away through the walls. Yet his heart pounded still; the breath in his throat raced.
Atherton raised the cash box above his head and studied it. He felt ashamedly like an ape thrown some new toy. The lock itself was hopeless and the edges tight and secure. The only way in would be to saw the bolt, if he had a saw, or simply smash the whole bloody mess open without making a sound. He put the box back on the table and gently tried to lift the lid. In the flickering light he could not be sure, but there seemed to be some give.
A crazy adrenaline confidence returned to Atherton. Holding his breath, he pressed the box between his elbows and began to pull it apart with all his strength, straining, even after he was certain his fingertips were bleeding, pulling with every ounce of his arms’ muscle, but quietly, and still tearing, as if his whole body was split in two, until the moment he dropped the box on his unprotected toes.
The shout brought Guantai at once. Atherton could hear the footsteps into the shop, behind the counter, into the office, at the desk, behind him. He didn’t care. Huddled over, clutching his wounded foot, Atherton saw himself for an instant, not trapped in the Asian’s secret cell, but riding down the road in a limousine, like a government official. Except the flag on his bumper was neither the Kenyan banner nor the Union Jack. All he could make out was a private stain of color: a flag of his own, threatening, indecipherable. In pain, blinking, Atherton lifted his head to Guantai.
The watchman stood above him, a flashlight in one hand, the staff in the other. A sharpened panga swung in the trenchcoat’s canvas belt.
“Mr. Atherton?” The old Mau-Mau was speaking English, the words softened by alcohol and his toothless gums into something deferential, apologetic.
“Yes. Why yes, I . . .”
“What are you doing? It is not good.”
Atherton realized that he was as much stunned by the fact of conversation as by being caught. It occurred to him that he hardly ever spoke to anyone in Kigeli.
“Well, I . . .”
“Wait.” Guantai vanished.
Atherton knew there was no point to running now that he had been discovered. The cry would be up. Besides, he realized with a sinking feeling, he didn’t know how much weight his foot could take. He picked up the cash box from the floor—still intact—and replaced it carefully on the table.
There was something to be said for prison. The Provincial cells were just down the road, spread along a high plateau beside the ravine. Every evening, in his walks to and from the mission hedge, he could see the smoke curling from the cook fires. The wives of the prisoners prepared their husbands’ dinners in the vacant land beyond the barbed wire fence, boiling millet and vegetables in open sufarias while the convicts’ children clung to their mothers’ skirts. They would all be a bloody sight closer together than they were now, Atherton sighed, and, for a change, someone would be taking care of him.
“Come out, muguru.”
Atherton heard the words from somewhere in the Asian’s office. He limped out of the small strongroom and stood beside the yellow-streaked desk.
“All the way, muguru.” Again, Guantai, disembodied, used the Kigeli term of address—man, age-mate, brother. One of us. “Outside.”
Finally, Atherton saw the old man through the broken window.
The watchman was back in Bimji’s yard now with five of the other guards: the same bare legs, the same baggy trenchcoats, the same staffs and pangas. Atherton swung away the glass and crawled through the office window. He lowered himself to the ground, wincing as the wounded toes touched the earth.
The aged African faces circled about him.
“You should not be a greedy man, muguru, you should show respect.” Guantai pounded the red dirt with his staff. The last things Atherton saw, before losing consciousness, were the other staffs raised high and the shining flats of the panga blades, catching starlight, as the old men closed in.
When he awoke, Atherton was in the forest, his head resting on a cushion of pine needles and wild banana leaves. He could feel the bruises covering his body. His ribs
ached; his mouth tasted of salt. He tried to pull himself up, felt a stabbing pain in the back of his head, then paused to rest. The full force of the morning light struck him, even through the leaf canopy above. The sun was already climbing.
Atherton rolled up his sleeves past the dried, cracking stains of blood and studied the mounds of purple swelling on his arms. The memory of the night before was clear in his mind. He would go to prison now. It was all for the best. He rose again, this time more slowly, and searched for a way out of the trees. Somewhere to his right were the town’s morning sounds: the punctuated, repetitive whine of a backhoe working, the muffled ringing of truckloads, poorly fastened, making turns on gravel roads. Atherton walked toward the sound and brighter light and noticed someone had put his shoes back on his feet.
A vain impulse to make himself presentable took hold of Atherton. From where he found himself, it was no more than a hundred feet, through a blind of bougainvillea, to the road that led from the Kigeli shops to the mission schools. He tried to straighten his hair and to adjust his jacket which, oddly, was again right side out. The Kamba policeman who supervised what passed for Kigeli’s rush hour would be standing in the road before Bimji’s Agip station. The watchmen would surely have told him.
Through his mass of soreness, Atherton was comforted to find that his toes were now doing better. He walked down the roadway, kicking up red dirt with an increasingly lighter step, and reflected on the compensations of jail. It would at least be a clean break with his drudgery, and if the term were not too long, a chance to begin again. His family would be summoned and he would see them daily. And if a white laborer was an oddity to be pampered, how much more so a white prisoner! Someone would come up with the money to bribe him a reasonably decent standard of living, maybe even something for his children’s school fees. Someone would help him. Someone would take pity.
Atherton made the rise and curve that took him to the main street. At the sight of the Englishman, the Kamba officer, in shorts, Sam Browne belt, and white traffic gloves, dropped his hands. He peered into the sunlight, then, breaking into a large smile, waved once at the white man and returned to his mystical, ignored signing at the trucks.
Atherton stopped in his tracks, motionless, until a careering Land Rover drove him to the wooden sidewalk. He looked again at the policeman, clearly oblivious, then hurried down the walkway to Bimji’s. The shop doors he passed were half open, half closed, the watchmen gone or just leaving, their jikos white ash. In Bimji’s door, Guantai stood leaning on his staff and smoking a thin cigarette. His eyes were bloodshot and tired. At the Englishman’s appearance he nodded, and walked away.
Atherton looked at the smashed crystal of his new watch and strode into the store. He could hear the Asian’s voice from the back room, a complaint. On reflex, he walked into the office and stared at the intact window-pane above Bimji’s desk.
“You want something?” The shopkeeper remained seated, peering down through the rimless glasses he wore only for doing accounts.
“No. Yes. I’d like . . . I want . . . a beer.”
“Now? At mid-morning?”
“I’m thirsty.”
“Very well.” Bimji nodded to the cooler that stood by the shop doorway. Atherton retrieved a Tusker from the pool of lukewarm water in the case and opened it.
“The money, please.”
Atherton froze, then fished a ten-shilling note from his pocket and threw it on the yellow desk. The Asian folded it once, then stopped. For the first time since he had entered the room, he looked at the Englishman’s face.
“A bad night, Mr. Atherton?”—he forced a smile—“I know how it is. Not that I drink, but I do understand. Just get to work on time, please.” The Asian pocketed the folded note and returned to his numbers.
Atherton held tight to his beer bottle and backed out the door. He ran to the front, whirling around as if he were being chased, and stumbled to the grassy alley by the store’s side. They hadn’t told Bimji. They hadn’t told anybody. The bastards were not going to let anything change. There was not going to be any prison or wives cooking for him or money or punishment. Nothing was going to be different. Their equanimity was like a bloody tank plowing through the jungle. Nothing was going to change.
He smashed the bottle and sought to calm his trembling hands. A ragged line of dried blood ran along the tips of his fingers where they had pressed in vain against the edge of the Asian’s cash box. Atherton wrapped his hands underneath his armpits, tight against himself, like a man chilled to the bone. Then he rose and walked to the Land Rover parked in front of Bimji’s store. He climbed to the back and picked up a sack of beans, two hundred pounds of dried lentils, and swinging it to his shoulder, bowed his bruised back against the sun.
Mexico, 2004
A Second Language
Benson decided to study Spanish because after forty years it didn’t seem to him that he had gotten that far with English. He returned to the south of Mexico, where two decades before he had gone with his first, his only, wife. He had set enough money aside to last for one month, including the Spanish lessons, if he stayed somewhere modest.
He looked for a small hotel on the Internet and found one in Oaxaca with its own website and goose. The goose was called Andrés and it danced—a simple animation, three images, a step, a bow, a turn of the head—above the room rates, a picture of the courtyard, and a view of the mountains from a rooftop patio with azure walls and extravagant greenery.
Reassuringly, the Casa Reynaldo was also mentioned in the guidebooks. The rooms were said to be clean and comfortable, Reynaldo was a real person—the owner—and reviewed as genial, and Andrés was a real goose who would play with children. Benson wrote Reynaldo an e-mail in Spanish, unavoidably without accents, given his shareware program, and reserved a room. He apologized for his grammar.
Soon he sat in the courtyard, eating oatmeal and papaya. The trees, cloaked in vines, stretched above the rooftop and rustled, from halfway up, in the breeze. The sunlight dappled the tabletop and the milk jug and the faces of the contented English couple across from him, who came from Uxbridge, or Oak’s Bridge, and were travelling around the world, although the Pacific was going to be extremely hard to negotiate on a limited budget. The patches of light moved with the leaves and the wind and wandered over the couple’s faces, darkening a cheek, then an eye, then half a nose, as if the two were spaniels auditioning coloration.
Benson listened intently—somewhere, in Peru, in Ecuador, there were still steamships, and propeller-driven planes that were old, but cheap—but, as the sun moved over his shoulders, its touch was too warm, the bougainvillea too purple, the strange little spiky flowers, whatever they were, too yellow for him to focus. Somewhere behind his chair, across the cobbled street, probably next to the demure, for Mexico, suburban church he had seen on each walk to the zócalo, a cock crowed. Roosters were crowing at all hours of day and night, an endless supply of false and redundant dawns. He had barely slept his first two nights, and then, on the third, only succeeded by melding the rucurucucus into his dreams. Look! They were saying, there is a tree growing atop each church tower. The sidewalks are littered with vanilla beans. Everywhere there is something remarkable.
The English couple bubbled on, dazed by their bravery at leaving everything behind. Benson nodded and plucked at his papaya. The bell at the gate rang and Reynaldo’s ten-year-old son opened it. More sunlight poured in, nibbling the silhouettes of two women. The taller one juggled a backpack and a sparkling metal suitcase of the kind his father had travelled with in the fifties, made to withstand attacks and pressure and clumsiness, and held the smaller, older woman’s hand. They stepped forward into the courtyard and three dimensions—the younger woman, with worry in her eyes, elegant in a billowy black dress, the older wearing an ancient huipil, embroidered in faded parrot colors, over khaki trousers—then vanished into Reynaldo’s room with the desk and the big keys and the postcards of the ruins of Monte Albán. Feathers brushed Benson
’s leg. Another rooster crowed, right underneath his table.
The school of Spanish for those who did not speak it was a single-story building of cream stucco, already falling apart from the climate or the Richter seven-point-several that had shaken the valley in 1999. The cracks webbed out over the front, but the lines were neatly patched with a plaster painted a turquoise of heartbreaking purity. Everything seemed under control. Inside, the school’s director determined with a twelve-question interrogation—How did you come here? Where will you go? Do the ruins of ancient civilizations please you?—that Benson was sufficiently far along for a private tutor. This pleased Benson, because despite a natural modesty, he was reluctant to try to speak Spanish in a group of the equally inept. That was, in fact, how he had often felt when conversing in his own language, as if in a roomful of wounded talk. But he was dismayed when the tutor emerged from a back room as a clearly North American man in his forties named Otto, with hair dyed a Leslie Howard yellow and a gleam of sweat at his lips.
They sat at a formica table in the school’s front room.
“I have traveled everywhere,” Otto told Benson, in what sounded to Benson like defensive but nevertheless authentically accented Spanish. The tutor waved a frayed cuff of his long-sleeved white shirt toward the mountains and the hard-to-navigate Pacific that lay beyond the barred window, “and I have learned much. But speak of yourself,” he said, gazing hangdog into Benson’s eyes.