by Vamba Sherif
She seemed taken aback by the sudden outburst, and was about to leave when William reached in his pocket and placed some money firmly in her hand. ‘For tomorrow’s food,’ he said jokingly. ‘But don’t tell Old Kapu. Otherwise he might throw me out of his house.’
She left them, her laughter ringing like a noon bell.
‘You are spoiling them, Mr Mawolo. What would I do if you were to leave tomorrow and I was left alone to face them?’
‘What you do every day, Old Kapu. I’m sure that after I’ve left they would have forgotten I was ever here.’
The palm wine arrived as the two were dining – a sumptuous dinner that consisted of newly harvested rice and smoked meat stewed to the marrow in a sauce of wild mushrooms. The men washed down every mouthful with palm wine, but even at this point the wine did not loosen their tongues. Instead a solemn silence, forced upon them by the attention they paid to the food, lingered on long after they were finished.
Later, Old Kapu placed a pinch of snuff on his tongue and leaned backward on his chair, fully relishing the tobacco.
He must be in his seventies, William thought, still strong and wiry, unyielding to the influence of the palm wine. Most of the old man’s teeth had fallen out, but he still looked young, however, and his skin was smooth, with little or no hair at all. Perhaps, William thought, such men never aged and died armed with the full vigour of a youth of twenty.
Night met William stifling a yawn, tired after a long and eventful day. The light that accompanied the night went off minutes after it had come on, throwing Wologizi into a nervous darkness. One of Old Kapu’s many wives brought out a hurricane lamp and placed it on the stool between the two men, but its light was not enough to shun off the deep darkness that enveloped them. At length Old Kapu sat up and spat a generous residue of snuff in the dust.
‘I’ll show you to your room,’ he said.
On standing up, the old man felt a shearing backache which forced him back into his chair. He let out a groan.
‘The pain is like our generator,’ he said at length. ‘It comes and goes unexpectedly, sometimes leaving me paralysed.’
Old Kapu refused William’s offer of help and waited until the pain subsided. With the hurricane lamp in his hand, he led his guest to a room which faced a long corridor that ended at the back of the compound. To the right of the door stood a grandfather clock.
‘It’s been out of order for years,’ Old Kapu said.
‘Maybe I can help you with it,’ William said.
‘Do you repair things?’
‘It’s what I do for a living.’
The room was furnished with a nylon-covered table, on which stood a hurricane lamp that cast a forlorn light around the room, giving it an eerie aspect. Most of the green painting on its walls had peeled off, and it had no window or ceiling. As a result, William could hear the women gossiping in the other rooms.
Later, one of them, the woman he’d given some money to that afternoon, knocked at his door. ‘Your bath is ready,’ she said.
‘What is your name? I forgot to ask you this afternoon,’ he said playfully.
‘Hawah Lombeh,’ she answered.
She was a head shorter than he was, and he noticed that she could not muster the courage to stare him in the eyes. William reached out to touch her face. It felt very coarse, inflicted by hard work and the scorching sun of that region. She pulled away in panic.
‘Tell me what Old Kapu does,’ he said.
She shook her head. Suddenly, so that she had no time to react, he drew her to him, and caressed her weather-beaten face until she moaned, until she could no longer refuse him or his request.
‘He’s the town chief,’ she whispered.
That was all. Hawah Lombeh broke away from him then as though in anger, terribly distressed, and her figure receded into the darkness of the long corridor. Even when he could no longer see her could still hear her footsteps, hear her crash into something, whimpering as she regained her balance.
The bathroom was located at the far rear of the house, a shed of bamboo trees without a door, but the darkness served as cover as he squatted on a bed of pebbles. The water was pleasantly warm, and he relished every drop. Joyful shouts suddenly rose from the compound to greet the lights that had come on. Conversations that had been subdued before now became boisterous, and between the cries of children bent on attracting attention, the women related the events of the day. William listened to their voices, captivated by their warmth. They sounded so familiar, plucked out of a distant past, that a sense of longing took hold of him; the longing for moments he wished he’d been raised in Wologizi and could live there forever like one of them.
It was on a night such as this, in a town such as Wologizi, that as a child he would lie awake in bed, listening to his aunt singing a song in the other room. She would throw remarks at him, which were all about seriousness, most often about how hard he had to work to excel at everything, especially at school. That was long before their smooth and predictable life came to an abrupt end.
Once inside his room, he put off the light and retired to bed, sober as if he had not had a single drop of palm wine. He listened to the voices of the gossiping women, cheerful at one moment but punctuated with melancholic tones at another, voices that were at once sensual and harsh. But, after listening to them for more than an hour, he hoped they would die down, for the radio station awaited him. William wanted to slip out of the house that night and to the mansion with the intention of repairing the radio. But every time he attempted to leave, a cough or a noise would prevent him from opening the door and crossing the long corridor out of the house. Eventually he gave up and succumbed to sleep. However, within minutes, he was jolted out of his rest by a voice, which rose in a singular, heartrending dirge, tearing the silence of the night asunder. The song continued until the small hours and stopped only when a cock finally crowed, announcing the crack of William’s first dawn in Wologizi.
He’d not slept a wink.
CHAPTER 3
William waited until the entire household had awoken and someone had knocked at his door announcing his morning bath before leaving his room. The wailing voice still haunted him, and he thought that whoever had died must have been very dear to the person whose voice had filled the night with such grief. At the entrance to the bathroom he found two bucketfuls of warm water instead of the customary one ready for him, but could make neither head nor tail of the generosity. While carrying the buckets into the bathroom, he felt eyes on him, but when he turned towards the doors and windows of the houses at the rear of the compound, he saw no one. Then a female voice broke into laughter, and he understood: it was Hawah Lombeh, the woman who had betrayed her husband by revealing his occupation to William. He shouted out his gratitude to her but she pretended with her silence not to have heard him. Finished with his bath, he went to his room. It took him a while to get dressed, and later he emerged in another suit, red against a background of ochre dust and bluish sky, his sooty skin glowing in the soft, morning light.
Some children, impressed by his good looks and peculiar steps, crowded about him. They imitated that gait that marked him out everywhere, but their steps were not as supple as his, so they implored him to teach them. But he only laughed, amused at their eagerness. ‘Come and lend me a hand,’ he asked them instead when ready to repair the grandfather clock. Together they carried the clock out of the house and placed it on a table under the same mango tree where he’d drunk palm wine and dined with Old Kapu the other day.
The children watched him work, affected by the solemnity he brought to his work, but suddenly he stopped.
‘We are going to play a game,’ he said.
They all shouted their consent. The game consisted of a number of questions, he told them calmly, and anyone who answered them correctly would be treated to a bowl of hot rice pap.
‘What is the name of the paramount chief?’
The children were silent, turned to each other as though t
hey’d not understood him, and then one of them spoke:
‘We cannot say, Mr Mawolo.’
‘Come on, tell me.’
‘They told us not to talk about him.’
Just then, the children saw Old Kapu emerge from the house to join them, and fearing his outburst they dispersed.
‘So you are a man of your word.’
Old Kapu took a seat beside him, folded his baggy gown between his legs, and bit into a kolanut. The ease with which William worked impressed him. In less than an hour the old man saw the grandfather clock, which had stood still in his house for years, begin to tick the time away, as though nothing was wrong with it.
‘I have a favour to ask of you,’ Old Kapu said.
William, curious, nodded.
‘Follow me,’ the old man said.
‘Tell me what it is,’ William said.
There was a note of reluctance in his voice, and despite his effort to conceal it he thought that the old man noticed it, so he decided to come up with an excuse to hide this reluctance.
‘I’ve not yet had my breakfast.’
Old Kapu bellowed at his wives who were at the rear of the compound, and in an instant one of them appeared. She was taller than the old man, but he drew himself to his full height and slapped her hard across the face, sending her crashing into the dust.
‘Mr Mawolo tells me he’s not had his breakfast!’
‘It’s not their fault,’ William intervened.
Old Kapu turned to him, trembling with rage.
‘I told them I would buy some rice porridge.’
This was not true. William rushed to the woman and helped her stand up. She seemed unsure whether he meant well; her face expressed both gratitude and suspicion, as if she was certain that after it was all over, he would deliver her to her husband to be thrashed again. When William apologised to her for causing her so much trouble, her suspicion was confirmed: the stranger was either from another world or was in league with her husband. Men were not to be trusted.
Old Kapu’s anger was not assuaged, for he insisted that he was the host and would make sure William was fed whatever he desired. The sugared porridge materialised within the hour, and the old man joined William, bewailing the inefficiency of his women.
‘They are good for nothing, Mr Mawolo.’
They swallowed the porridge while the morning sun steadily burned their backs. Once again, the old man repeated his request.
‘You have to see it to understand,’ he said.
Old Kapu sounded desperate, and so in the end William agreed. The two men had not gone far when they encountered a group of militiamen on the main road. The men, numbering in their dozens, carried rusty guns and wore ill-fitting khaki uniforms, heavily creased. They were drilling, raising prickly dust, their gazes vacant. Their commander, a tall, skinny man with copper-coloured face, wore a police uniform. When he saw the two men, he stopped and his brazen gaze rested on William for a while. Then he changed direction, as though he could not tolerate what he saw, bellowing commands in a raspy voice.
Wologizi was now clearly behind them, and the two were walking up an ochre-red path, steadily climbing up a hill. It was evident to William that they were heading for the mansion. From that point, Wologizi looked rustic and poor, a sharp contrast to their destination. Before the two could climb the hill to the mansion, Old Kapu veered off the path and led him towards the town hall. They crossed a field of high, dewy grass and entered a building which smelled of gasoline.
‘This is the generator which supplies Wologizi with electricity,’ Old Kapu said. ‘It’s been repaired many times in the past but the same problem keeps recurring: it keeps switching itself on and off.’
Old Kapu threw William a glance, but because the latter chose to remain silent, he added: ‘I want you to repair it, Mr Mawolo.’
William shook his head. ‘I don’t think I can,’ he said.
‘I’ve seen what you can do.’
William circled the machine, deep in thought, and when he circled it again he paused and heaved a long sigh, as though he’d arrived at a difficult but inevitable decision.
‘If I’m to repair the generator,’ he said, staring Old Kapu square in the face, ‘I would need to be here day and night.’
Old Kapu seemed beside himself with joy.
‘That can be easily arranged, Mr Mawolo. You can stay at the mansion for the period it takes to repair the generator. I’ll go to town to ask some women to prepare the house for you. It’ll be ready before sunset,’ the old man said, and as a gesture of appreciation he patted William on the shoulder before leaving.
William went up to the mansion and waited under the acacia tree for the women, but they failed to appear within the hour, and so he took off his coat and set to work. First he swept the front of the house, and then hauled water from the nearby well in which he soaked some rags and went on to clean the living room. He was so immersed in his work that he did not notice the young woman until she coughed to attract his attention. When he turned, he saw her standing in the path of sunlight which streamed in a single shaft through the main door, lighting up her amber- coloured skin. She lifted her gaze and locked it firmly with the pair of male eyes that feasted on her, that glided along the contours of her slender body. He heaved a sigh akin to a moan, and when he caught a whiff of her scent it fired his imagination, for it was at once as delicious as the smell of fresh, hand-crushed flowers.
‘We’ve come to tidy up the mansion,’ she said.
She went to work immediately, assisted by a bevy of young women. The cleaning lasted for more than three hours. William, anxious to settle in that huge mansion, to make it his home, and from there go about his work, hurried the women on. ‘With this pace it’ll take you days to finish,’ he said. The remark was intended to elicit a response from the young woman, but it failed because she was doing her best to avoid him. There was something elusive about her, he thought, a distance he could not bridge. Moreover she apparently managed to slip out of the house before all the others.
William was standing at the window on the second floor and watching each of them leave, but there was no sign of her. Silence settled on the mansion after their departure, and he went upstairs to admire the result of their work. The rooms exuded the scent of a habitable place, the spiders were gone. Each room was furnished with the same kind of exquisite chairs and tables as in the living room downstairs, and each was adorned with a large portrait of the president. In one of the rooms, the largest in the entire mansion, was a life-size portrait of the president. It dominated the room like an ever-expanding presence.
It was in this room that he encountered her. She was sitting on a king-sized bed, her hands folded on her lap, her head held up, borne by a cylinder-shaped neck with beauty lines, and she was gazing at him.
‘I know why you are here,’ she said.
There was a crisp edge to her voice that captivated him as much as her beauty, and he marvelled at her calmness.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘The moment I heard the town-crier calling on all the young women to help with cleaning the mansion, I knew that its occupant must be the person the town has been expecting.’
She laughed then, and to William her laughter sounded like a mockery, when in fact it was to compliment herself on correctly guessing the purpose of his being in that border town.
‘I’m listening,’ he said.
‘You came to investigate the disappearance of the paramount chief,’ she said, and he caught a crack in her voice.
‘What if that was the case?’
‘Then I warn you to be very careful.’
‘Why should I be?’
She was silent; her hands were not resting on her lap any more but she’d leaned backwards against the bed, her arms supporting her, her breasts straining against her tight colourful clothes.
‘Tell me about the paramount chief.’
She sat up and shrugged.
‘Paramount
chief Tetese is like any leader, hated and loved by his people. That’s his story. It’s nothing uncommon.’
‘How did he disappear?’
She broke into laughter as though she was about to tell him the oddest thing he’d ever heard, and that proved to be the case.
‘Rumour has it that our paramount chief Tetese was being carried in a hammock when he vanished into thin air.’
William pondered on this revelation. A hammock was an ancient form of transportation, so why did Tetese choose it and nothing else as his sole means of transportation? Moreover, the vanishing act troubled him, for a man did not just vanish in such a way.
‘Who were his carriers?’
‘I don’t know,’ she answered.
She sounded exasperated, almost angry with him, as if those were questions others had to answer, not her.
‘Yet you say he was being borne in a hammock.’
‘That’s what I heard.’
‘Why are you telling me all this?’
‘Because he was my father.’
‘I see,’ William said, ‘I see.’
It was all he could do not to conceal his utter amazement at this revelation. Her name, she told him, was Makemeh. She left the room then, and he followed her out into the fierce sun. On her way to the gate, about to leave him, she told him that from that day onward she would be solely responsible for his culinary demands.
‘What do you mean?’
She turned and took a few steps towards him.
‘Do you know the most effective way people employ to get rid of their enemies in this forest region, Mr Mawolo?’
He shook his head, confused.
‘They poison their food.’
She sounded matter of fact, almost uncompromising, and he watched her disappear behind the heavy gate, leaving him shivering in the chilling aftermath of her words. Seated under the acacia tree, he realised how wary he was of her but also how much he longed to see her. Just minutes after she was gone it became apparent to him that he was incapable of waiting to see her again and he rushed down the hill after her in hot pursuit.