Zanzibar

by Giles Foden

  In spite of the rural poverty surrounding it, the city was still a city, a busy port connecting the interior to the trade routes of the world – as it had done since the bad old days of the slave trade, in which it played a central role. Dar-es-Salaam had its dives and traffic, its banks and hustle. But in the main it was laid-back, easy-going. Miranda liked to go to the Salamander Café for English-style fish and chips, and to eat ice cream at a place called the Sno-Cream Parlour. She had also become a member of something called the Yacht Club, which had a superb little private beach near her embassy-supplied house in Oyster Bay.

  The house itself, a bungalow, stood among some old coconut groves on the fringes of the northern suburbs. It gave her a great deal of pleasure, although in the first few weeks she was burgled so often – nothing major, just a few things here and there – that she had to employ a nightwatchman. He only carried a staff, and to begin with she doubted whether such a simple weapon would deter any thieves. But the pilfering stopped, so his presence clearly had some effect. He also opened and closed the gate for her car.

  Miranda soon found the small, interconnected world of expat life rather lonely, and the constant have/have-not interactions with the poverty-stricken Tanzanians difficult to handle with dignity. At first she threw herself into making her house nice, which meant cleaning out the remnants of the previous occupant – the person she had replaced at the embassy: spilt popcorn at the back of one of the kitchen cupboards, a packet of out-of-date condoms under the bed. Jerry Mintz clearly hadn’t been much of a cleaner, since many of the kitchen utensils were dusty and there was mildew in the bathroom. She took on a housegirl, Florence – who slapped round the teak floors in flip-flops, following her instructions to the letter, but very slowly – and began to make lists of things she needed: fabric for new curtains; sink and bath stoppers (none in the house whatsoever); bug spray; a high-powered flashlight for when there was a power outage. Another problem was the air conditioner, one of those old-fashioned, water-extraction types. She was sure it was bad for her health.

  The air conditioner was replaced. Other things were purchased, installed, utilised. Nisha Ghai, an Asian lady who worked at the embassy, took her to a shop to buy a rug for the lounge parquet – showing her how, on the good ones, the design on the back was as complex as the design on the front. The shopkeeper, a wonderful old Parsee with a goatee beard, piled the carpets one upon the other, unrolling each with a showman-like flourish.

  So a sort of life took shape. The months and days came and went, and she slipped easily into the routine of existence in what are called the tropics. Months and days, and hours and minutes and seconds. Slow, monsoon-country time, carrying her along in its stream like a leaf in a culvert.

  She learned, quickly, that this time was measured not by clocks and calendars but by a change in the weather, by coursings of dry and damp air, by the endless renewals, the constant cycles of heat and fecundity that were governed by the coming and going of the rains. She’d caught the mid-March ones just after she arrived. The old hands at the embassy said they were coming but she had felt it in herself anyway, during those first, hot, dusty days – felt, as the plants seemed to in their trembling leaves and nodes, faint animations of the future, a feeling that some urgently needful release was on its way.

  The first visible sign was the sky’s upturned blue platter turning rusty brown, and the few white clouds upon it gradually changing colour like a gathering bruise: pink, yellow, black. Then the first raindrops fell: heavy single drops, lookouts for the massed battalions to come, dashing and pocking the ground like bullets. Finally the full armour of the sky was loosed, as the pregnant, discoloured clouds delivered their long-held burdens.

  When the turbid water curtain came down, it was as if the land itself were breached. The dropping green surge swept all before it, sending rats and twigs scurrying into holes, men and women into houses. The massive panel of water would begin gnawing at the laterite roads, which the grader’s tooth had so valiantly sharpened all through the dry season. Everywhere it fell it brought new life, but at the time it seemed like damage, this sopping of maize and cassava plantations, this felling of the very saplings last year’s rains had nourished. At river banks, on mountain sides, whole chunks of earth fell away as if bitten by some giant beast, dispersing in the torrent or tumbling down the escarpment.

  Nature tried to revenge itself on man, it seemed to her – the storms battering the tin roof of her bungalow and beating brisk tattoos on the embassy’s satellite dishes – but inflicted the worst of its wild turmoil on itself. Yet it was afterwards, in the calm, that its true power was revealed, forcing green shoots and riotous blossoms upwards in a mass of vegetation – out of land that, just yesterday, had been scorched earth.

  She loved to watch the charged, electric storms and listen to them drumming on the roof rat-tat-tat like that. But it was an uneasy wonder, one that gave her pause. To some, she knew, the spectacle was no spectacle, but something of great necessity. The coming of the rains was of far more importance to ordinary Tanzanians on their shambas than to Miranda or her colleagues. For them the rains were not just a show or a mere inconvenience. Many expatriates she’d met seemed, on the other hand, to regard the rains – the whole of Africa in fact – as a springboard for their own fantasies. Fantasies of fulfilment or annihilation, desire or death, each according to their particular suggestion.

  Miranda prided herself on having resisted this decadent, illusory view of the continent. Work was the perfect remedy for that kind of thing. Application to the diurnal round, daily life and its chores. But her tasks at the embassy were not absorbing enough to support such an ethic. Lying on the beach at the Yacht Club in Oyster Bay, surrounded by aid workers and the diplomatic corps of various nations, she sometimes wondered if she were not letting her ambitions drain away. As the weeks passed, she no longer thought quite so much about building a grand, successful career, or even about finding a husband and raising a family. The twin poles of her hopes began to wilt slightly, like the candy bars she sometimes brought back from the PX for the kids who clamoured round her gates when she arrived home. She didn’t feel unhappy exactly, just a bit aimless. There was something about living on the edge of a warm ocean like this that undermined her ambition. It wasn’t surprising. Stretched out on the sand at the Yacht Club, looking out over the ocean at sunset, it took no effort to feel that you might, like the merchantmen of old, drift all the way to India.

  Ray liked to play golf, and sometimes she accompanied him to another club, the Gymkhana, which had nine holes of ‘black’ greens – that is to say, oiled sand rather than grass at the holes, so they could be easily maintained during the dry season. The Gymkhana’s name went back to the days when English colonials used to run horse-racing and dressage competitions, but that was all gone now, like most vestiges of the British Empire in Tanzania, which had not been as anglicised as she’d heard Kenya to be. It did have tennis courts, however, made of the same red clay as the murram roads. But after one frustrating encounter it became clear Ray was so far below her in ability that it wasn’t worth them pursuing that sport together. Miranda missed Kirsteen. Not just for tennis; she needed a girlfriend to run her dreams by, or to let her down gently in the wake of disappointments.

  As gently as she herself, at lunchtime that day, or any other, would step down to the refectory, her shadow interfering with the light of the tombstone windows as she took the concrete stairway down into the corridor … leading to her customary seat in full view of the gardens (oleander: beautiful, poisonous), where she’d eat rice salad (grains unburnished), fruit (a Zanzibar apple) and drink a polystyrene cup of cranberry juice (good for the urinary tract).

  Always too, this lunchtime or any other, Miranda would push her dark hair behind her ear to stop it falling into her food, and she’d likely be wishing, as fork came to mouth, she could cope better with being alone. But being in a sunny place and near the ocean made one want to be with someone, just as much as it
sapped one’s will to work.

  Ray – she reflected, this lunchtime, seeing him come in – he was happy in his own company. He made much use of the embassy library, which was well stocked with everything from Shakespeare to science fiction.

  She watched him walk over now, tray piled high with burger and fries and a carton of milk. He sat down, winking at her.

  ‘What –’ he asked forcefully, as he opened the carton, ‘are you doing tonight?’ He began jigging around. ‘Dancing? Glancing? Backing and advancing?’

  ‘Ray … you’ll spill it on me!’ She shook her head. ‘Not much.’

  ‘There’s a great-looking new Nintendo game in the PX. Yoshi’s Story. The character’s this friendly, lizard-like dinosaur who eats fruit. Bit like you.’

  He eyed her apple core, and took a long draught of milk from the carton. ‘If I get it, I might let you have a go.’

  ‘Excuse me, just how old are you?’ she said.

  He smiled wolfishly, milk on his moustache. ‘Look, it’s either dino capers with Yoshi or rowing with Virginia Woolf for me tonight, and I know which I prefer.’

  He paused, then frowned, shaking his head. ‘Actually, I don’t think I do.’

  Nourished by junk food and low culture as he was, Ray favoured more highbrow stuff so far as his borrowings from the library went. It was not unusual to find him sitting on a bench in the courtyard deep in something difficult. He ordered other books via Amazon.com, and when the cardboard boxes arrived at his desk, he would whoop with delight.

  ‘So whaddya say, my little fruit bat?’

  9

  ‘Barracuda!’

  Leggatt pointed with his pipe. About fifty yards away from the boat, Nick saw a pair of powerful, gun-metal fish leap out of the water.

  ‘Chasing sardines,’ said the old man, putting the smoking pipe back in his mouth. ‘See there?’

  Nick looked more closely. The water, which had been clear and calm, was now boiling with small fish. He watched in silence as the surface became increasingly agitated by the panic-stricken shoal. Thousands strong and densely packed, it was ripping to and fro in an attempt to avoid the predators. As their relentless pursuers drove back underneath, the top layers of the sardine shoal began to leap out of the water, forced up by the seething mass below.

  Hundreds upon hundreds of the little silver fish plumed up in a shining cascade. Again Nick saw the gleaming torpedo of one of the barracuda, this time taking an unfortunate sardine in its teeth in mid-air before splashing back down.

  Just as suddenly as it had happened, the commotion was over.

  ‘I think we’ll have some of that,’ said Leggatt, with a grin.

  He cast out. Nick followed suit. They both waited for the three-ounce spinners with their wire traces – those powerful jaws would cut through any nylon line – to sink a little.

  After a few moments, winding their reel handles, they began to retrieve.

  ‘Pole-pole,’ Leggatt said, in Swahili. Nick had learned the phrase already. Slowly, slowly.

  He hadn’t expected to come fishing, but when Leggatt had greeted him at the clove farm, and said they were going to have to catch their lunch, he’d readily assented. He hadn’t been fishing since he’d arrived. It was something he had used to enjoy doing with Dino and – in the long-distant and sweetly remembered past – with his father. He had no problems with it as a conservationist, either, since it struck him as illogical to eat fish at a restaurant yet refuse on principle to go fishing. So long as you ate what you caught, that was his law.

  It is written, he thought to himself, with a chuckle. Weren’t things looking up?

  In addition to a small beach, the clove farm had its own slipway, bigger than the one at the Macpherson. Rather than taking the Winston Churchill, which was too large for their purposes, they had pulled down a speedboat belonging to the old man. It was a fine piece of work, with brass and walnut fittings and a powerful motor. Leggatt said he had bought it off an Italian hotel owner who was retiring.

  Now, as they stood winding back in, the sun gleamed on the brass and the varnished wood. Nick stared out in front of him. In an instant the sea seemed to have turned from clear to jade-green. It was also calm again, and he found it hard not to imagine the spectacle he had just witnessed as some kind of vision. Once more the ocean had simply folded its secrets back into itself. All he could hear was the faint lapping of water against the side, and the clicking of their geared reels.

  Then Leggatt spoke up. ‘They might not be in the mood to bite after such a feed. Cautious as a housewife sometimes. But they’re greedy sods, too, and when you hook one you’ll know about it.’

  Nick’s line was in. Streaming bright droplets back down into the water, it swung about wildly in front of them.

  ‘Careful,’ said Leggatt. ‘You’ll have me snagged.’

  Reaching out, Nick grabbed the line a few feet above the glistening lure, with its poor representation of an open-mouthed, wide-eyed, small-sized fish; then he brought the whole complex arrangement, swivel, barrel sinker, second swivel, finally the wire trace and artificial lure, over his shoulder. Steadying himself against the rocking of the boat, and turning slightly to one side, he cast out.

  A fishing cast is a strange tract of time, and even the most proficient fisherman cannot be quite sure how it will turn out. So when Nick’s spinner found the right spot, hitting the water almost exactly where the sardine shoal had been convulsing, he felt a sense of pride and accomplishment.

  He was about to say something to Leggatt, but hadn’t uttered a word before there was a drag on the line.

  ‘Something there, I …’ But the pull was gone. ‘Thought I had one,’ he explained with some embarrassment, beginning the retrieve again.

  ‘Sometimes they just explore it,’ said Leggatt, on the point of casting himself. ‘Take it in their mouths and test it.’

  Pausing on the reel, Nick watched the arc of Leggatt’s cast. It was to the left of his and, landing with a faint splash, went a good deal further out. He imagined the bright-eyed lure, a mixture of chrome and moulded plastic, sinking below the surface, swaying a little in the current. A couple of curious seabirds flew over the place where the water had broken, drifting down on white motionless wings.

  Suddenly Nick’s own line thumped hard. He felt the impact of the take between his shoulder blades, as energy was transferred down the line. He gave out a little cry as, at a terrific rate, the line span off the reel.

  ‘Don’t strike!’ said Leggatt, urgently from his side.

  ‘Why not?’ replied Nick, anxiously, watching the line unspool.

  ‘He’s rushing with it. Let him go awhile or you’ll snap the line. Now … slowly, mind, take the strain.’

  Nick did as he was told, lifting the rod gently so that the force was transferred to it gradually. The rod began to bend and for a few seconds the fish appeared to check. Then it was off, darting to left and right, covering a lot of water until checked again.

  It was running at speed. Nick arched his back against the pull and put his foot against the gunwhale to stop himself going off balance. Reeling in his own line, Leggatt came and stood behind him, all the while murmuring softly, like a mother to an infant.

  The fish battled ferociously for a good ten minutes, swimming strongly in every direction. Once, coming up near the surface, it seemed to shake its head like a dog, sending a different kind of vibration down the line. At another moment it appeared to have given up, and the line slackened. Nick gave the rod a brisk tug.

  ‘Don’t force it,’ insisted Leggatt. ‘Let it run about.’

  But it was already off again. The line sang as Nick pumped and dragged. The strain was constant now. His wrists began to ache.

  After ten to fifteen minutes had elapsed, the fish began to weaken. Nick was able to bring it closer to the boat. Leggatt stepped forward with the gaff in one hand and the landing net in the other.

  ‘Careful now,’ said the old man. ‘Lines this close can sn
ap like sewing thread. Leave the brake off just in case.’

  He was right to warn Nick, because the barracuda – they could see it now, swirling angrily just beneath the surface – gave a final determined fight for freedom, switching left and right and even going under the boat before it was eventually subdued. Leggatt plunged the gaff into its neck and scooped it, still struggling, up inside the net.

  ‘Must be twenty pound or so,’ said the Englishman as he boated the fish. ‘You ought to be proud of yourself.’

  But Nick didn’t feel proud, he felt exhausted. And, as his quarry lay gasping at his feet, slightly ashamed.

  ‘Damn,’ said Leggatt as he used a pair of rusty old pliers to extract the hook from the lower jaw. He had scraped his hand on the sharp teeth.

  He sucked the wound hard as they rode back. ‘I’ve seen blokes lose a finger from inflammation,’ he explained, holding it out.

  Nick looked at the red gash in the old man’s puckered skin. It didn’t look so bad.

  Back at his farm, Leggatt made them gin and tonic as his cook prepared the fish. They talked in the cool of the living room. There was no glass in the windows, just lattice screens that filtered the light and allowed a pleasant breeze to pass through. The place was decorated with an array of fearsome tribal masks and spears and other artefacts, including a matching pair of sea chests inlaid with brass and ivory, and an old grandfather clock telling the wrong time.

  ‘So, what are your plans?’ asked the old man, who had changed into a white linen shirt.