“Wait a moment,” said the grandmother to the young woman. “My mjukuu is tired. I’d like her to have a drink.”
Siti hid her frustration behind a forced smile and went into the house. She came out a moment later with a glass of tea and a saucer of sugar. Nkamba dove her fingers into the sugar to take as much as her fingers could hold.
When the haircut was finished, Adimu got up and Arafa’s daughter hurried to wrap up the blue cloth where the hair lay like gold threads.
“Stop!” said Nkamba, approaching Siti. “Those are mine.” She grabbed the edge of the drop cloth with the same force she held the scythe during the harvest.
“Give me the hair or pay me for the time I’ve wasted on the zeru zeru,” shrieked the woman without letting go.
“I will pay you for the blade,” Nkamba retorted, yanking the cloth so sharply that the young woman released her grip. Adimu’s grandmother counted out the money and left it on the stool and then took Adimu’s hand, the blue cloth tucked under her arm. She marched among the huts, looking for a blazing fire but found only a few embers that had nearly gone out. She thought of another solution. She went to a latrine, pushed aside the palm leaf that covered the hole, and let the hair fall.
Nkamba returned to Siti’s house and tossed the cloth at her feet as if she were sloshing out a bucket of water. She left with quick steps, pulling Adimu behind her while the spectators, waiting in line for their children’s turn, murmured and sneered.
“You could have stolen less sugar!” Arafa’s daughter had shouted after them.
That night, Nkamba turned on her mat in the hut to look at her sleeping granddaughter. Unfortunately, she didn’t have a hat for Adimu. If she let the child’s hair grow, her scalp would be protected and no one would attempt to keep her extraordinary hair. With that, Nkamba fell asleep.
20.
Every day that Adimu took the goats to graze, she learned you can love animals with the same intensity that you love people. She studied the temperament of each beast and used that knowledge to make her task easier, whispering words of encouragement to the more docile animals and scolding the arrogant ones. The little herd took the place of longed-for companionship. Once she ran into Ramadani while the goats were grazing. Observing how gentle Adimu was with her herd, he smiled at her. She smiled back. If only he was closer to my age, she thought, maybe I’d have a human friend.
Although initially she continued to wait with her herd for her father along the canal, he no longer walked that route and, after several weeks of praying that he’d come, she had given up, preferring to take the goats to the clearing where the grazing was better. Adimu figured her father had stopped going to the fields, but Sefu had been taking another path to get there. Better the long way home than running the risk of meeting the zeru zeru, he considered.
Adimu’s need for contact with others was continually frustrated, sometimes by the reality of her life and other times by her grandmother’s words.
“You are different,” Nkamba had said. “Only a white girl like you can be your friend. You should appreciate what you have rather than think about what you don’t have.”
Adimu would sometimes misinterpret her grandmother’s sternness for a lack of affection. She was too young to understand that love comes in many shapes and often hides behind masks that make it unrecognizable, nor could she know that love, even though it runs deep, does not offer an antidote to undo mistakes. Nkamba did her job the best she could, and she believed her job was to toughen up her granddaughter.
Once, when Adimu had been particularly angry over her lot in life, she demanded to know how she could possibly appreciate what she had when she had nothing. To teach her a lesson, Nkamba made her go an entire day without drinking water. In the evening, after having begged her grandmother for just one sip, Adimu had understood what Nkamba meant. She would need to accept that the goats were her only friends, at least until another white girl like herself came along to keep her company.
Adimu learned quickly to barter what she had for what she desired and, since there was nothing she craved more than friends, sometimes she exchanged a tuft of her hair for the chance to play with the other children. The lucky boys and girls would run home with their treasure, certain to make their fathers happy.
Nkamba became aware of the price her granddaughter paid to receive the slightest bit of attention from her classmates, and her anger was such that she threatened to take her back to Siti to have her head shaved if she didn’t stop selling herself. Adimu cried so hard that her eyes grew puffy and red like ripe apricots. Nkamba, however, was not heartless and tried to think of alternative ways the child might amuse herself in isolation so she wouldn’t have to stoop to buying playmates.
“You can draw on the walls of the hut,” she told Adimu that same evening. She gave her a little awl. “Use your imagination; engrave whatever you have in mind,” she suggested. “The only thing you have to do is stay away from that place.” Nkamba pointed to where the phone number of the protected community was engraved.
Adimu loved the idea and, in her free time, she decorated the walls from top to bottom, filling them with the things she desired: a little girl just like her, a house with windows, and a television. She outlined the shapes and added colors with her imagination. One afternoon, Adimu accidentally decorated the place where the telephone number was engraved, drawing over the last two digits. In place of the numbers were now the eyes of an imaginary friend.
Nkamba thumped her fists on her chest when she saw her granddaughter’s only means of escape from her hellish existence on Ukerewe had been erased. So anxious was she that her thoughts were muddeled and her gaze could lift no higher than the floor. She found a small piece of paper that Adimu had lying around and she carefully recopied the numbers of the community in Tanga that remained etched on the wall. Since Nkamba was not able to read, she spent a long time replicating the shapes from the wall just so. And then she hurried to the shop where there was a public phone. The shop owner saw the fragile woman running at a good clip for someone so old, clasping in her grimy hand a scrap of paper.
“The last two symbols are missing,” she wailed. “How can I call?”
The owner didn’t have an answer and asked her son for advice.
“No problem,” he said as soon as the situation was explained. “You can find the right number by dialing ninety-nine times.”
“Do you mean make ninety-nine phone calls?”
“Yes,” said the boy. “But you might get lucky and find the number you’re looking for before the ninety-ninth call,” he sniggered.
Nkamba’s feet stirred up clouds of dust that swirled around the hem of her dress as she walked home. She had never been lucky. Ninety-nine phone calls meant, as the youth had explained, the number of your fingers ten times. Who had enough money for that? She told herself she was stupid not to have committed the six symbols to memory. They had been right before her eyes for so long. How could she have been so careless? As hard as she tried, the numbers remained hidden in the meanders of her memory.
After some time, Nkamba found several pieces of chalk for Adimu. Finally her objects had a color apart from the dull brown of the walls and the bright, earthy colors of her imagination. As the walls were completely covered with her drawings, each time she wanted to carve a new figure, she had to erase what was underneath with a damp rag and wait for the mud wall to dry.
“I’m tired of drawing everything with my same color,” said Adimu one evening.
“As long as white plaster is what they put on the outside of public buildings on this island, it will be the only color you have to play with, and you should feel lucky to have it,” Nkamba scolded. “These two colors,” she added, pointing to the mud brown wall and the white chalk, “are, and will always be, the only colors in your life.”
One rainy afternoon, Adimu carved a group of people onto the wall. She wanted to sketch the most beautiful drawing ever. She started with her grandmother and herself and t
hen outlined her father, tall with the enormous feet she remembered from that day when he’d put a hand on her neck. She drew children—lots of them, all the same size and with their arms extended. She drew the woman doctor and the lady who bought her ice cream, and she left a place for herself in the center. When she finished the drawing, she laid her palms over the children and imagined walking hand in hand with them. Making believe, in this way, became her favorite game. She was always the leader of the group. She and her friends went to school together, to the lake together, and they ran after a real ball, not one made of rags. They were always hand in hand. Up high, next to the ceiling beam, Adimu drew the sun and colored it with chalk.
“It has to be white,” she explained to her grandmother, “because the yellow sun in the sky burns my skin.”
21.
Sarah spent the afternoon in Dar es Salaam. Her thirteenth wedding anniversary was in three days, and she was food shopping. No restaurants and no cooks—she was giving the kitchen staff the evening off. She, by herself, would lay out the special dinner in the garden at White House. Pâté and Cornish pasties as appetizer, followed by lamb pie and mashed potatoes, roast beef with horseradish sauce, and finally a rich assortment of desserts. A real English meal. Charles was an imposing man, but he was always too busy to bother with such an unproductive activity as eating. Perhaps confronted with the traditional dishes from his country of origin, his appetite would increase, Sarah reasoned, and her husband would appreciate the gesture of a meal prepared just for him.
Her shoes felt tight, and her back ached when she boarded the evening flight for Mwanza, her suitcase heavy with tins and cartons imported from Europe. As the plane was taking off, she admitted to herself that she had overestimated—she’d bought enough food to feed the two of them as well as the entire staff of White House. She watched the lights of Dar es Salaam fade, swallowed by the night and altitude. What if her husband had made last-minute appointments? If so, her plans to spend time alone with him would be ruined. They had fallen into the habit of spending all their “together time” with friends. Sarah thought about the word “friends.” Could they define the people they saw regularly as such? Dinners, lunches, receptions, benefits—when they “socialized,” they did little more than finalize business transactions. What hypocrisy!
She’d done her best to integrate with the foreign community of Mwanza. She had dedicated time to afternoon activities for students at the British school, participated in organizing cultural events, and even enrolled in an advanced Swahili course, which she began after running into Adimu and her grandmother at the grocery, the only hobby she had derived satisfaction from. She liked speaking with her husband in a foreign language that was so familiar to him. However, it had been difficult to meet anyone with whom she could establish a real friendship. Most of the English women in Mwanza were descendants of wealthy colonists or spouses of businessmen, like her husband, who concerned themselves with being trophy wives. For a short time, she had volunteered at an orphanage that was managed by an Anglo-American couple in the suburbs of Mwanza. Although she felt more vital when helping the orphaned children than she had ever felt in her life, after six weeks, she’d quit…with regret. Charles disapproved of volunteer work—“Work should be paid” was his refrain—though he wouldn’t have pressured her to resign. She quit because it had aroused those feelings of long ago, ones she didn’t like. Helping the orphans brought her back to that time in her life when adopting Adimu seemed like a possibility and then that terrifying moment when Charles said never and turned into a stranger.
One evening in Mwanza while they were having dinner, Sarah had succeeded in putting her finger on her anxiety. Her thoughts traveled to the children at the orphanage who needed everything, and she was hit by the insight that injustice prevails over fairness. She would have liked to speak about her feelings with Charles, even if she knew his response: “That’s the way the world goes,” he’d say. Then would come his comforting smile, a tender caress, and he’d hand her money to give to the needy.
She’d stirred the trifle in her dessert dish and observed how the drops of sherry mixed with the cream. Money could resolve the most pressing needs but not the objective reality. That was when she understood: If she continued volunteering at the orphanage, Charles would become a stranger. It wouldn’t be a passing feeling. Their paths would separate forever. She could not imagine living without her husband; she had built her life around him. She was his shadow. How could she go forward without the man who provided her the protection and love she desperately needed?
After having raided the supermarkets in Dar es Salaam and before taking the plane back to Mwanza, Sarah had visited a shop that sold things for children. She liked to stop in whenever she had the chance. The tiny clothes reminded her of the ones her mother had sewn for her dolls when she was a girl, and she was enchanted by the wooden toys and carillons. On that particular day, she bought an electronic music box. It played various tunes depending on which button you pushed. Sarah walked up to a beggar child on a street corner and gave him the box.
He turned it around in his hands without knowing how to play with it, and Sarah—clumsy and caught unprepared by his reaction—laid her hand on her chest and ran away, feeling stupid. Africa continued to set before her a world she couldn’t penetrate. Whatever she did seemed to be inappropriate. Though she had, by then, accepted she was looking at reality through an out-of-focus lens, her sense of impotence and uselessness sometimes stung her like a thorn pushed deep into her heart.
On the day of her wedding anniversary, she prepared the dishes well in advance. When she heard Charles arrive home, she made a quick check in the mirror in the entry hall of her updo and pink lip-gloss and rushed out into the yard to welcome him. She was as excited as a schoolgirl. She had put on a new dress and arranged her hair with care, and the table was shiny with candles and fresh flowers that she took great pains to arrange, creating a splash of color on the lawn.
“Happy anniversary, dear. Come, sit down.” She greeted him with a kiss.
Charles stopped in front of the table, a large roll of papers under his arm. “I want to show you something.”
“I’ve cooked dinner for you all by myself,” she cooed, stroking his cheek. “Let’s eat, and then you can show me.”
Charles set the roll on a chair and began to move the silverware and dishes onto the serving cart next to the table.
“What are you doing?” Sarah asked.
“It can’t wait. It’s too important.”
Charles cleared off the table and unrolled the papers until they covered the linen tablecloth. The delicate cutwork embroidery vanished under the thick, grayish paper. A sharp odor of ammonia drowned out the aroma of the food.
“Come close and look,” he said, putting on arm around her waist.
All sorts of lines intersected to form something similar to a large building.
“What is it, Charles?” she asked, annoyed.
“Look closer.”
Sarah had little desire to play guessing games. She worked long and hard to organize and prepare dinner, and her husband—for the umpteenth time—was placing work before her and their marriage. She said nothing, though, and directed her empty and disappointed gaze at the paper. Whatever it is, it can go to hell, she thought.
Charles announced with pomp, “The Fielding Health Center of Ukerewe.”
“A clinic with our name. On Ukerewe?”
“That’s right,” he replied enthusiastically. “What do you think? Where should we put the benefactor’s plaque?”
Sarah’s only thought was of where she’d like to put the piece of gray paper that was eclipsing her lovely spread.
“What are we talking about?” Her question was cold.
“About the hospital I’m building here on Ukerewe with my name, or rather, our surname on it,” he said. “That way, if we need a doctor when we’re on the island, we’ll know where to find a qualified one. Without even waiting our turn.”
He laughed. “So, where should we put the signage?”
Sarah sighed. “Charles, I’m having a hard time understanding you. Why do you want to build a clinic on Ukerewe when there’s already one here? Where’s the need for that?”
“The one that’s here is outdated and falling down.”
“Well then, improve it, refurbish it. For heaven’s sake, with the money it will cost to build a new one, you could make the existing hospital the most efficient in the entire country!” Sarah was exasperated. Mostly she wanted her husband to notice how perfectly silky was her pâté, how the candles were the exact hue of those that lit up the reception room on their wedding day, how her skin glistened from a Parisian lotion she bought in Dar es Salaam.
“Darling,” Charles said slowly. “I’ve, of course, considered that. The point is if I want to have my name on it, I have to build it from scratch.”
Sarah shifted her eyes away from her husband and to the bone china piled on the cart.
“Do you know any other man in Tanzania who has a hospital with his name on it?” asked Charles playfully.
Sarah stood up.
“Where are you going?”
She waved away his question while Charles continued to study the blueprints.
Sarah said, “At least make sure there are wards for women and children.”
Charles was busy lifting his fork to his mouth.
“Look at me, Charles. This is important.”
Her husband turned his face toward her, but she could tell his attention was elsewhere.
“If you absolutely must build your hospital, promise me you won’t forget the women and children. Please. And AIDS.”
“Why all this interest? Do you really think it’s necessary?”
“Of course I do. It should specialize in women and children’s health, and infectious diseases. Don’t you know that in this part of the country, young women most often die from complications of childbirth, that the infant mortality rate is among the highest in the world, and that those sick with AIDS nearly outnumber those sick with malaria?”
Then She Was Born Page 10