“Kito!” I whisper-shout. “Kito, what are they saying now?”
Kito listens and then says, “Your mother said that Asu’s too old for school and Chui’s the only other child she has here. She says her other sons stayed in Arusha.”
I wonder what it would be like if Mother’s statement were true and I had stayed with Enzi to finish out the coffee harvest season. For a small part of a second I imagine how nice it would be, just the two of us, living together and working and making money. But then I sigh and remind myself of the truth: Looking the way that I do, I would never be allowed to work in the village, and Enzi never really liked spending time with me, anyway. The silly dream unravels.
I realize that Kito has been talking for a while without noticing that I’m not listening to him anymore.
“What did you say, Kito? I missed that.”
“The schoolteacher’s leaving now, Habo. Your brother’s going to start school tomorrow. Is school fun, Habo?”
I think about my old school in our little village. Every day during the midday break I would go sit under the wild mango tree at the edge of the school yard. I would close my eyes and focus on the feeling of the wind as it hissed through the grass and swept over me, and I watched the other boys playing. They ran and shouted around the sun-baked playing field. They held races. They kicked a tattered football around between two sets of goalposts. I would watch and watch, but could never join in. I hated watching.
When I was young enough not to know any better, I went home and complained to Asu, but what could she do about the boys in the yard?
“You’re like a lion,” she told me, “golden all over. Does a lion run around playing with the little black antelopes? No. He sits on the hill and watches them. Nothing that’s golden is common, Habo. You must stay uncommonly still.” And that was that. In the six years I went to that village school, I spent my days watching the antelopes play without me.
It’s lucky that I’m still in my corn cave so Kito can’t see the anger on my face. I keep my voice happy.
“Ndiyo, Kito. School is fun. You’ll like it when you’re old enough to go.”
“Do you wish you could go to school with Chui?”
“No, Kito. I can’t go outside. I’m happy to stay here where it’s safe.” Again, I’m glad Kito can’t see my face as I lie.
“Okay, he’s gone,” says Kito. “You can come out now.” I hear the shush of Kito’s backside against the sackcloth as he slides to the floor and tugs away my millet door.
“Asante,” I say, and pull myself slowly into the world of the real people.
Up until the schoolteacher’s visit, Chui had been doing odd jobs in the neighborhood: picking up trash, running errands, shining shoes with a piece of old shirt. Everyone has been doing what they can to make money so we’re not so much of a burden on Auntie. Four more mouths is a lot to feed. Especially when one mouth spends all day hiding instead of helping. But Tanzanian law states that all children over the age of seven have to go to school, and now the schoolteacher has found us out and Chui will have to go. I wonder if Chui will have trouble catching up. It doesn’t seem like so much time has passed, but it’s mid-August now and he’s missed over three weeks of school. Now it will be just Asu and Mother who work to pay for our keep. Now it will take that much longer to save up the money we need to travel to Dar es Salaam.
Auntie has a job at the new Victoria Fish processing factory. She managed to get a job for Mother at VicFish, too, since her husband’s uncle is the floor manager’s stepfather, but she wasn’t able to extend her influence enough to get Asu a job. Mother and Auntie take a dala-dala out to the fish factory every morning at five, before it is fully light.
Since she couldn’t get a factory job with them, Asu had to find something else to do. It took many days of walking around the rich neighborhoods, knocking on every door, for Asu to find something. Being a farm girl with a different accent and hard hands made it impossible for her to get work as a housemaid or a nanny, which she was hoping for, but she finally found work as a laundry girl for a few rich families. Now, every morning, Asu gets all cleaned up and takes a purple dala-dala over to the fancy neighborhoods of Isamilo and Nyakahoja to work.
The first day Chui goes to school, the house is eerily silent. The two oldest cousins, Asu, Mother, and Auntie are all working out of the house. The two younger cousins and my brother are all at school. It’s just me and Kito in the house until lunchtime, when the half-day schools let out. Auntie told me to watch Kito the best I can, but to hide when anyone comes. There’s an old woman down the street who sometimes comes by to give him food and make sure he’s all right, and sometimes a neighbor or two or a child skipping school will come in and play. I always have half my attention on him and half on the door. Even though there aren’t that many people who come to visit, it still feels like I spend most of my time hiding under the sacks.
Albino, I whisper to myself as I lie there, staring at the ceiling of dry kernels pushing out against the sides of the bag like babies waiting to be born. I roll the word around on my tongue, tasting it. Just like the long clothing Asu always forced me into as a child, the weight of the label is uncomfortable, but it fits and I have to wear it. Albino. After a few weeks of practice, I decide I like it. At least, I like it better than zeruzeru. That name meant “nothing.” At least being an albino is something.
Today, though, when I dive into the corn cave at the sound of the door opening, I’m surprised to hear Asu’s voice.
“I’m home!” she calls.
“Asu!” cries Kito.
“Habari gani, sweet one,” I hear her say. Then, “Habo, it’s okay. I’m by myself. You can come out.”
I wriggle my way out gratefully.
“Why are you home so early?” I ask. Asu is standing inside the door, a huge bundle of laundry tied in a sheet beside her. Beads of sweat dot across her nose.
“The washing machine in the Njoolay house is broken.” She grins. “And the repairman cannot come until tomorrow, no matter how much Mrs. Njoolay screamed at him on the phone. So that means that today”—she waves to the pile beside her with a flourish—“I’m going to be washing the laundry here.”
I smile. Having Asu home for the day is a rare treat.
“We’ll help, won’t we, Kito?”
We head out to the back patio, where the fire pit is. Kito helps Asu lay the fire, and she hangs the big laundry kettle over it.
“You stay there,” says Asu, filling the kettle a bucket at a time from the tap in the side of the house. I try not to bristle at the fact that the tone she’s using is the same one I use when I’m talking to Kito.
“But I want to help you.”
Asu shakes her head. “No. It’s too dangerous.”
I peek around the door and calculate angles.
“If I crouch down behind the woodpile, against the wall, no one will be able to see me from the road,” I argue.
Asu chews on her lower lip, thinking about it.
“And I’ll still be in the shade, so you don’t even have to worry about me getting burnt,” I add.
For a few moments, Asu just stands there, considering. I inch out and settle myself behind the woodpile, not waiting for her permission, pleased to see that I was right about being invisible and shaded.
“See?” I say. I know Mother and Auntie would kill me themselves if they knew I was out in the yard in the middle of the day, but I want to get out of the kitchen, and the chance to finally be helpful outweighs my unease. Anyway, I want to show Asu that I can look out for myself.
From my hidden corner, I reach out and start feeding dry corncobs into the fire. I smile widely up at her. She sighs.
“Oh, all right,” she says, and goes to get another bucket of water.
I don’t say anything more but inside I’m crowing in triumph.
When steam rises of
f the top of the pot in great billows, Asu throws the soap flakes and sheets into the pot and starts to beat them around in the water with Auntie’s laundry pole. I’m in all my usual long clothes, and Asu is standing right over the laundry pot. Both of us are sweating a lot. Mwanza is not only hot but sticky too, even in the dry season. Kito doesn’t seem to notice the heat. Right now he’s chasing bugs around the edges of the fire. When he catches them, he brings them over to Asu or me. We tell him what a clever little boy he is.
“Asu, tell me about your day,” I say.
“What do you want to know?”
“Everything,” I grumble. “I’m stuck in a pile of grain sacks for half the day, and I’ve never seen Mwanza except the night we came in the pitch-black. Tell me everything. Then I’ll be able to think of that when you’re gone.”
Asu looks off in the distance for a moment.
“Well, today is a Tuesday, so I work for the Njoolay family. But let me tell you about the Msembo family, because they’re more interesting.” She winks at me and continues. “When I’m going to work at the Msembo house, I take the purple dala-dala from the corner of the fish market and ride down Makongoro Road. We turn onto Uhuru Street and cross the city, heading away from the wharves. People get on and off. I can smell the food from the street vendors.” She puts a hand on her belly, dramatically. “I always want to eat, but I don’t want to get my clothes dirty before work, so I don’t. In the center of town I switch to the yellow and blue dala-dala. This gets me to Isamilo, and from there I can walk to the Msembos’ house.”
Asu pauses to heft a steaming sheet out of the kettle with the paddle and put it into the rinsing bucket. She beats it around in the cold water there until all the soap is gone from the cloth, then lifts it out again. She takes one end and I take the other and we twist the sheet between us, making sure it doesn’t ever touch the dirt, until most of the water is gone out of it. Water drips off Asu’s elbows as she lifts the sheet over the line. Then she’s at the soapy pot, beginning the process again with the next sheet.
“Once I get to the front of the Msembo house,” she continues, “I’m still not inside. It’s a very grand house. There is a huge garden around it on all sides, so green it hurts your eyes to look at it. And around the garden, there’s a great, tall wall with broken glass and barbed wire along the top. To get into the house I have to go up to the gate and talk to the man on guard. He stands there all day with his big gun on his shoulder and opens and closes the gate for people.”
“Is it scary to talk to the guard with the big gun?” Kito asks.
Asu flashes him a quick smile. “I bet he’s almost as bored as Habo in the grain sacks,” she says, “standing there all day long in his little hut, not able to go anywhere or talk to anyone. No, he’s not so scary.”
Again she moves the sheet through the washing and rinsing process. My sleeves are wet now from helping her wring the laundry dry, and I shove them up past my elbows so they don’t annoy me as much. My white arms gleam wetly against the white sheets as I twist.
“Once you’re in the house, what’s that like?” I ask, to get her talking again.
“The house is huge. It’s probably bigger than all the houses on our street put together. Mrs. Msembo likes it clean, and there are seven girls who work there every day to make sure everything gleams. Even though I’m only supposed to be doing laundry, I help the other girls in the house when I can, because otherwise it would just be too much to do. Mrs. Msembo checks the work, you know.”
“How does she check it?” asks Kito, letting his latest bug crawl up his wrist.
“She’ll come up and hold her hand over a table or counter.” Asu purses her lips together, puts one hand on her hip, and holds the other out in front of her, palm up, miming Mrs. Msembo’s actions. “And if she can’t see the reflection of her hand clearly enough to see the rims of her fingernails, you have to clean it again.”
As we slowly work our way through the pile of laundry, Asu tells us all about the Msembos: Governor Msembo, who has eyes like a lizard and is up for reelection in a month’s time, and the two children, who are spoiled and throw tantrums and break things when they don’t get what they want. She tells us about the room full of hunting trophies from Mr. Msembo’s safaris, the room full of fine china and crystal that Mrs. Msembo uses to host great dinner parties, and the cabinet full of magic talismans that she discovered one day when she was dusting.
“I wonder if any of Alasiri’s elephant ended up in that cabinet,” I say when she tells us all the things she found there: animal feet and teeth, powders rolled in snakeskin, bundles of twigs tied together with strips of hide.
“Your elephant, too, remember? You and Chui were hunters that day,” Asu reminds me.
I make a face at her.
“Me, I would never feel right with that much luck medicine in my house,” Asu continues. “You can bet I closed up the cabinet quickly and went on with my dusting!”
As the sun creeps across the sky and the rest of the family begins to return home, Asu tells us about the gleaming modern kitchen with its two large refrigerators to keep things cold all the time and the large electric ovens and stoves where the girl who cooks prepares meals for the family. She tells us about the pet dog that yaps and bites, but that Mrs. Msembo treats like a third child, insisting it have its own plate of food at mealtimes.
“And they have meat at least once every day, sometimes twice! Can you imagine?”
I can’t.
Asu tells us then about the other girls she works with: Halima, the shy cleaning girl, and Aisha, who complains so loudly you can hear her from three rooms away, but whose cooking is so good that Mrs. Msembo will never fire her. She tells us about the gardeners and the guards who come in and share lunch with the house girls, and how they all chat about their families and plans for the future when they’re rich. Asu talks and talks, and although my hands are wrinkled and sore from wringing wet sheets, I’m happy because my mind is finally full of images of a world beyond the kitchen of Auntie’s house.
The next morning, after everyone has left for the day, I’m sunk into a daydream where I’m walking with Asu through every bizarre and beautiful room of the Msembo house when Kito comes up and demands my attention.
“I’m bored, Habo,” he says. “Make me something.” He’s holding a piece of firewood and a knife.
I smile. This has become a familiar game for us. Those first few days I was in the corn cave I was so bored that I whittled pieces of wood into chips to use as fire starters, nothing more. But a few days after we arrived I saw Kito looking out the window at a boy playing with a top and decided I would make him a toy. I made a very bad top: It was not at all balanced and kept falling over to one side, but you would have thought I’d given Kito the world. His eyes lit up and he rolled that lopsided top across the floor for hours.
That’s when I started whittling in earnest. I tried to make him a truck and, when that failed, I turned it into a boat. I made two more boats so he could have a fishing fleet. He put corncobs in the boats, pretending they were fishermen, and brought me millions of imaginary fish. I carved him a little dog to accompany the fishermen. Again, it wasn’t any good, but again, he loved it. So I kept carving.
Now, nearly a month after we started this game, Kito has a little village of houses, and donkeys and dogs and cats, and a dozen little wooden fish for his corncobs to catch in nets we made out of spare string. On my fifth try, I even managed to make him a truck.
“That piece won’t do, Kito,” I say, taking the wood out of his hands. I hold it sideways for him. “See, there’s a big hard knot here, and bugs have made trails through the rest of it. It’ll crack the minute I put a knife to it.”
Kito frowns. I heave myself onto my feet and take his hand.
“Come on, let’s go pick out a better one.”
I take Kito outside the house and over to the woodpi
le. I put the termite-ridden piece on top. “Look for one with no bugs,” I tell him, and we hunt around for a better piece of wood. Soon, I’ve found one. It’s straight, with no bug holes or knots, and it’s not so dry it’s splintering.
“Here, this one’s good,” I say. I turn to Kito to ask him what he wants me to make for him today, and find myself looking into a familiar shining smile.
“Hello again,” says Alasiri softly.
8.
No, he can’t be here. I watched him return to the wilderness. He can’t be here, leaning against the railing of the side yard, looking at me with a smile that is like coins in someone else’s hand, all shine and no warmth.
Yet here he is.
At the sound of Alasiri’s greeting, Kito whirls around from where he was digging in the woodpile. His eyes go wide as he sees the tall man talking to me, seeing me. No doubt his mind, like mine, is replaying Auntie’s many warnings about not being seen, about the importance of hiding. Of what could happen to me if I’m found.
Auntie’s voice shrieks in my head, reminding me that it’s the middle of the day and I’ve come outside without checking first to make sure the road was empty. That I simply walked out, as if I didn’t have a care in the world, playing with bits of wood for everyone to see. Alasiri or no, I have to get inside. It’s not safe for me to be out like this in Mwanza.
Kito must have come to the same conclusion, because he runs up to me and starts to push me toward the house. His little brown hands pushing against my belly are almost comical, but the fright in his voice is not.
“Habo, go!” he whispers loudly. “Go! Hide!”
I retreat a few steps until the tall woodpile and the side of the house shield me from view of the road. In the doorway I stop and look at Alasiri. He’s still leaning on the fence, and now he’s laughing.
Golden Boy Page 7