by Wole Soyinka
‘You first,’ he says.
She goes first.
When he is done, without wiping the beads of shower water off his skin, he pulls her to him and kisses her gracelessly, and then he asks her to close her eyes.
‘I have something to show you.’
After two seconds, he asks her to open her eyes. His embroidered hat is off. He is bald, with just small bushes of curly white hair at the back of his head. Without his hat, he looks thirty years older.
‘Please don’t leave.’
There is a way he fucks: in chunks, like he is about to give up, and then going back to the beginning and starting again, like a generator that is running out of fuel.
‘You have beautiful eyes.’
She kisses him angrily and shuts him up.
She wants to ask how old his daughter is, but instead, she thinks about how changing the position of your reading table or reducing the distance between your bed and your window can suddenly change your life completely.
He seems to have forgotten that she is there with him, and as she watches him in the dim light she feels like she is watching a man masturbate inside her. She drifts off again and begins to think about the man she once dated – and how her dreams were as big as the space between the four walls he paid rent for.
When he is done, he collapses next to her. A few minutes later, he lights a cigarette and offers her one. Then he kisses her. There is a way his kiss tastes; one can tell that it is the last one.
‘You never told me your name.’
‘It used to be Anah.’
‘Why is it not Anah now?’
She is tempted to tell him about the man who gave her that name, but by the time she decides, he is already asleep. She rests on the bed for a bit. As she watches the ceiling, a strange feeling of incompleteness engulfs her. She feels like she is part of a circle that is broken and she doesn’t know what to do with herself outside this circle. She dresses and leaves.
The man in whose boat she rides to Shela Beach later that morning has long curly locks, all dyed brown. He does not remember her from before. She asks him if he enjoys what he does, just like Issa asked him when they were riding in his boat a year ago.
They talk about Nairobi, and he refers to it as if it is another country. He tells her that in his thirty-two years, he has never taken the bus. She has heard this story before.
‘I have no need for the bus. I don’t want to know what’s beyond the bus.’
‘They hate us there,’ he says, after a long silence. As he says this, he cuts through the water with his speedboat, angrily.
She knows what he means. She wants to contribute to this conversation somewhat, to tell him about the pool of blood that day on the street. Before she speaks, he points at another island across the lagoon where mansions and luxurious guest houses stand, their oppressive and clean white almost swallowing the blue in the ocean.
‘Two years ago, those used to be our wells.’
He cuts through the water angrier this time.
‘A woman was killed there, and then the others started to leave. No one lives there now.’
He asks her what she would do if a man walked into her house and started bringing down the walls. She does not answer.
Later, she walks on a thin pavement at the edge of the ocean, walking back to where schoolgirls seem to be coming from, where everyone else seems to be coming from.
She spots more writings on walls, more writings on docked boats and others that bob in the ocean. MRC (Mombasa Republican Council), Lamu sio Kenya. Pwani sio Kenya. Lamu is not Kenya. A flag here, and a sketch of a currency there.
She comes back to a restaurant and looks for somewhere to sit. She asks the waitress if she can get a table for one. They offer her a table for two. The binaries of the world refuse to leave her alone.
In the evening, the sun sinks and the lights come up. In the darkness, the shacks in Lamu town and the private guest houses on Manda beach become equal, reduced to light bulbs, each one of them a mote in the oppressive darkness, squeezed into size by the pompous ocean.
Beyond the shack under which she listens to the ocean and watches a Swahili pre-wedding celebration on the street, the water is a few inches away from her, but quiet in the dark. The man wearing the embroidered hat from the night before is leading the dance procession of men. He is the groom’s father.
She thinks about the previous year’s Maulidi festival.
She wants another cigarette.
She should call her father.
from the novel All Our Names
Dinaw Mengestu
Looking out at the capital from our secluded corner reminded me of a story my father had told me about a city that disappeared each night once the last inhabitant fell asleep. He was good at telling stories – not great, like my uncles and grandfathers, who revelled in the theatrics. Compared to them, a story was a solemn occasion delivered in a calm, measured voice that nonetheless left a lasting impression on anyone who was listening. He told me that story about the city that disappeared at night shortly after I developed a sudden, irrational fear of the dark. I must have been ten or eleven at the time, old enough to have known better than to be afraid of something so common and simple as the end of the day, and well past the age of bedtime stories, but for the first few nights of my terror, my father indulged me. He told me one night about the countries thousands of miles to the north of us where months went by without the sun setting – hoping I would find comfort in knowing that the world didn’t end simply because the lights went out in our village.
According to my father, the city in the story was once a real place. ‘I’m not inventing this for you,’ he said. ‘Everything I tell you is true.’ I believed him in that semi-conscious way that children have of dismissing reality in the hope of finding something better. ‘For hundreds of years,’ my father said, ‘that city existed as long as one person dreamed of it each night. In the beginning, everyone kept some part of the city alive in their dreams – people dreamed of their garden, the flowers they had planted that they hoped would bloom in the spring, or the onions that were still not ripe enough to eat. They dreamed of their neighbour’s house, which in most cases they believed was nicer than their own, or the streets they walked to work on every day, or, if they didn’t have a job, then of the café where they spent hours drinking tea. It didn’t matter what they dreamed of as long as they kept one image alive just for themselves, and in many cases they would pass that image on to their children, who would inherit their house, or attend the same school, or work in the same office. After many years, though, people grew tired of having to dream the same image night after night. They complained. They bickered and fought among themselves about whether they shouldn’t abandon the city altogether. They held meetings; each time, more people refused to carry the burden of keeping the city alive in their dreams. “Let someone else dream of my street, my house, the park, the intersection where traffic is terrible because all the roads lead one way,” they said, and for a time, there were enough people willing to take on the extra responsibility. There was always someone who said, “OK, I will take that dream and make it my own.” There were heroic men and women who went to sleep each night when the sun set so they could have enough time to dream of entire neighbourhoods, even those that they had rarely if ever set foot in, because no one else would do so. Eventually, though, even those men and women grew tired of having to carry all the extra parts of the city on their backs while their friends and neighbours walked around, carefree. They also wanted their dreams, and one by one they claimed their independence. They said, “I am tired. Before I die, I want to see something new when I sleep.” Then the day came when no one wanted to dream of the city any more. On that day, a young man whom few people knew and no one trusted went to all the radio stations and shouted from the centre of the city that he alone would take on the burden of keeping their world alive each night. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll dream of everything for you. I kn
ow every corner of this city by heart. Close your eyes at night and know that you are free.”’
From then on, everyone in the city believed they were free to dream about foreign lands, countries they had read about or that had never existed, the lovers they hadn’t met yet, the better husbands or wives they wished they had, the bigger houses they wanted to live in someday. The people gave that young man their lives without knowing it. They had given him all the power he wanted, and even though they didn’t know it, they had made him their king.
Weeks, months, and then years went by. People dreamed of living on the moon and the sun. They dreamed of castles built on clouds, of children who never cried, and while they dreamed each night, their king erased a part of the city. A park disappeared in the middle of the night. A hill that had the best view over the city vanished. Streets and then homes were erased before dawn. Soon the people who complained about the changes went missing. One morning, everyone woke to find all the radio stations and libraries gone. A secret meeting was held that afternoon, and it was agreed that the city should go back to the way it had been before. But by then no one could remember what the city had looked like – buildings had been moved, street names were changed, the man who ran the grocery store on the busy intersection had vanished. There was another problem as well. When asked to describe what the city looked like now, no one could say for certain if Avenue Marcel and Independence Boulevard still intersected, if the French café owned by a Mr Scipion had closed or merely moved to a different corner. It was years since anyone had looked at the city closely – at first because they were free to forget it, and later because they were embarrassed and then too afraid to see what they had let it become.
Those who tried to dream of the city again could see only their house or their street as it looked years ago, but that wasn’t dreaming, it was only remembering, and in a world where seeing was power, nostalgia meant nothing.
I thought of telling Isaac that story, but I didn’t know how to explain it to him without sounding foolish. The president cut the lights at night, he might have said. So what? He did it because it made it harder to attack. And though that was the obvious reason, I would have wanted to argue that there was also something far worse happening. The city disappeared at night, and, yes, he wanted to protect his power, and what better way to do so than to make an entire population feel that just like that, with the flip of a switch, they and the world they knew, from the beds they slept on to the dirt roads in front of their houses, could vanish.
When the doors to the house opened, Joseph was standing on the other side, his tie undone, as if he had just finished a long night at a wedding, drinking and making speeches. He looked at once exhausted and relieved; whatever doubts I had about being welcome vanished as soon as I saw him again and he waved us in with a generous smile and dramatic sweep of the hand. Had I paid closer attention, I might have noticed that, as before, I hardly registered, and that all of his attention was devoted solely towards Isaac.
‘You boys must be tired,’ he said. ‘I apologise for making you wait outside like that. I hope we didn’t offend you. My colleagues are a bit nervous and aren’t used to speaking in front of others.’
He was the only man I had ever met who spoke like that. It wasn’t the accent but the words themselves that were striking, at once formal and yet seemingly more gentle, as if he were trying not just to communicate but to elevate whomever he was speaking to on to the same privileged plane on which he existed.
‘We didn’t mind,’ Isaac said. ‘We would have been happy to stay outside longer.’
It had been decided that Isaac and I would share my room on the top floor, and Joseph, the three other men, and the two soldiers with them would take over the rooms on the first and second floors.
‘We are going to need all the space we have,’ Joseph said. ‘This is just the beginning.’
As he talked, two of the house guards quietly entered, carrying a mattress that must have belonged to one of them. Joseph stopped them just as they were climbing the stairs. He had them turn the mattress over so he could see both sides, and then said something in Kiswahili that made both of them smile and Isaac turn away in embarrassment.
That was the second time Isaac and I shared a room – the first had been back in the slums, after Isaac was kicked out of his house. Neither of us had slept well that night, fearful about what would happen next. I felt a similar fear that second night, though it was hard to know what lay behind it. We were safe in that house, at least for the moment, but there was something else at risk. Isaac seemed to know that, too. He didn’t say a word to me after we entered the room, just undressed in the dark and went straight to his mattress, which had been placed opposite mine, next to the door. It fell to him to say that everything would be OK, even if we were both certain that it wasn’t. As tired as I was, I couldn’t sleep while he was visibly disturbed. I turned my back to him so he couldn’t see that, though I was lying perfectly motionless, I had both eyes wide open.
Either my performance was better than I thought or, after an hour of silently waiting, Isaac no longer cared. Sometime around 3 a.m., Isaac rose from his bed. I didn’t turn around to see him, but I could hear him pull back the sheet and put his pants on. He opened the door just enough to slip out; not until I was certain that he was gone did I turn over.
Whatever I had been afraid of left with Isaac. With him gone, I was asleep in a few minutes. I suppose I knew that night where he had gone, and I suppose I also knew that he was trusting me not just to keep that knowledge to myself, but to ignore it altogether. There was no secret to guard, nothing to deny, because, according to the deal we had silently struck, nothing had happened.
When I woke the next morning, Isaac was back in his bed. His pants and shirt were strewn on the floor just as he had left them when he arrived. He was, to my surprise, deeply asleep. I had never felt protective of him before. I had seen him injured, beaten, and knocked unconscious, and all I had ever felt was pity or sadness and maybe a bit of envy for his reckless courage. He had never needed me to come to his defence, and to be honest, I wouldn’t have known how to. Had I woken him up and told him that when it came to me he was safe, he had nothing to worry about, he would have kicked me out of that house, and we would never have spoken again. I wanted him to know that, though, and so I did the only thing I could think of: I picked his clothes up from the floor. I folded his pants and shirt, just as my mother had done for my father and for me – a seemingly insignificant gesture that was still one of the things I missed most about living so far away from home. It had something to do with knowing that even in your sleep you were watched over, and that each morning, no matter what mistakes you might have made, you had the right to begin again. I laid Isaac’s clothes next to his bed, which was how my mother had always done it; before leaving, I swept my hands over his shirt and pants to shake off the dirt and smooth out the wrinkles as best I could.
Number 9
Nadifa Mohamed
I have to take care on this floor. My narrow, high-heeled boots struggle to find purchase on the smooth white marble, flecked here and there with brown fossilised shells, relics of prehistory within the steel, glass and concrete of Hammersmith Broadway. I pause for a moment by the Tube entrance and gaze at the flower stall heaving with buckets of roses, tulips, irises, sunflowers, and baby’s breath and wonder if he will bring a bouquet with him. I stand like a pebble in the cascade of commuters and take a deep breath. I won’t get the Piccadilly line, I decide, the vertiginous escalators, the bad-tempered rush through the corridors and the awkward intimacy of a strange man’s heart beating against my ribs in the humid carriage are the last things I need right now. I take the battered iPhone from my coat pocket and double-check exactly what he said in his last text:
loking forward c u by statu at 7
He is the fourth from the site and the tallest so far, 6’3” according to his otherwise bare profile. What he lacked in words he made up for in photos, he had uploa
ded eighteen from his travels but wore large mirrored sunglasses that concealed half his face in most of them. In the handful from Dubai you could see the remains of a woman who had been closely cropped from the images; a heavily henna-painted hand draped over his shoulder, the hem of an ornate abaya and gold sandals beside him and in one close-up the reflection in his lenses of a pretty girl with deep dimples in her cheeks and a red, lacquered smile. Even from that dim image I knew I wasn’t as attractive as her. I’m not the kind of woman who makes men’s eyes light up or who turns their heads in the street but neither do they seem disappointed when they meet me. The hijab has actually seemed to make them more intrigued in the few months I’ve been wearing it. The religious guys in ankle-skimming gowns and white prayer caps surreptitiously check me out now rather than scowling and muttering under their breaths, the white guys are the worst though, staring into my eyes as if I’m a snake that might be charmed.
I take the lift to the bus station and check my reflection in the glass doors. I look smart, presentable in a raspberry wool coat and black trousers. My threaded eyebrows are so perfectly arched they open up my otherwise small face. The black scarf around my hair is folded intricately around my jaw and held in place by a constellation of diamanté brooches. My stomach performs a small flip as the lift reaches the floor. I am early enough to take the bus and at this time the routes into central London are quiet; I can put my bag beside me, stretch out my legs and listen to my music in peace. I flip the music player to the next song and hear snatches of Arabic, Somali, Hindi before I finally settle on bass-heavy R’n’B. Walking lazily to the bus stop I speed up when I see a number 9 to Aldwych pull into the kerb. I press the Oyster card against the reader and see that the balance is low again, the money from my temp job at the hospital haemorrhages into these machines; I’m getting sick of struggling in this city alone, coming home to nothing but bills on the doormat. The route begins in the bus station and the Polish driver is still wiping crumbs from his thick blond moustache after his short break. I yank open the narrow, horizontal window to clear the smell of smoked kielbasa from the air and take my favourite position on the right-hand seats above the wheels. I sit a little higher than everyone else and the double-glazed panel serves as a picture frame to the snatches of city we catch from traffic light to traffic light. I know this route intimately, years of un- or under-employment kept me chained to London’s buses, my internal clock in tune with the timetables and particularities of certain routes and even certain drivers. I know the impatient, the rude, the generous, the late, the lecherous, all by sight. I also know this ring road beside the station and the tall, modern office building outside of which a young woman was raped recently, and the Iranian supermarkets and restaurants garlanded with strings of light bulbs. The Kensington Olympia is hosting a wedding show and I turn my head at the couples exiting with plastic bags full of the crap that weddings seem to involve these days. Would tonight be the start of that journey for me? I needed to become like one of those women on the street, they were neither perfect nor very individual, but had moulded their relationships into something real and tangible that others could see. I would make him believe that I was the right one for him; he could close the laptop and step away because I would be all that he was looking for. He had written that he would consider women up to the age of thirty-four, my real age, but I had told him I was twenty-nine. I had fibbed that I work in public health but in all honesty I sit on reception at an outpatient ward. I also said that I had travelled to Doha and Thailand and Brazil but haven’t left London since a visit to my grandparents a decade ago. All of these details are insubstantial; they say nothing of whether I will be devoted, faithful, fertile, the qualities that these men are looking for deep down.