The Old Drift

by Namwali Serpell

  Matha braved the gauntlet of lewd, smelly men at the entrance to the shebeen, and waited for her eyes to adjust to the dim. There he was. Godfrey was sprawled in a chair, his silver cape lousy with sweat stains. Reuben stood over him, holding forth about Jimi Hendrix. Godfrey tried to take a swig from his Mosi, then held the empty bottle complainingly to the light.

  ‘Is this where you’ve been hiding?’ Matha laughed as she walked up to him.

  Godfrey stood up with a grin, swayed towards her, and ran a finger along her jaw.

  ‘The Americans reached the moon,’ he remembered, his grin dwindling. ‘Tragic, man!’

  ‘Not you too.’ She rolled her eyes.

  ‘Your cats,’ he said. ‘Where will your cats go now, Matha?’

  She ordered a Mosi and they went and sat under a tree outside to share it. He took a thronging gulp and passed it to her. She sipped it shyly though they both knew it was far from the first time she’d had a beer. She was being shy to show her love, being small to make him big.

  ‘So, what did Dr Nkoloso say?’ he asked.

  ‘That we should have been studying the moon and not each other.’

  ‘But Matha,’ he slurred. ‘You are my moon! You are my star and my sun and…’

  ‘The sun is a star, Godfrey.’

  ‘Oh-oh?’ His eyes twinkled at her. ‘Is it? Ah, you are too bright for me.’

  ‘Ba Nkoloso also said we are mistaking ourselves for stars. With the band and whatnot.’

  Godfrey harrumphed. ‘Asking to make a little money is only fair after five years!’

  ‘He says we have disrespected him and traded glories for pittances. He’s angry about the Just Rockets. Ati he didn’t teach us to defy gravity so we could dance for imperialist tourists.’

  ‘Ah-ah, but he is the one who taught us how to perform tricks for bazungu!’

  ‘Oh, mind you, he now says the space stuff was serious! Can you believe?’

  ‘Ha?’

  ‘Yes! Ati it was our true mission all along. The man has truly lost his mind.’

  ‘So now we were really-truly going to the abysses of outer space?’ Godfrey grinned. ‘Not secretly rescuing our nation from’ – he imitated Ba Nkoloso’s voice and diction – ‘bondage and the pangs of misery and the eternal tantalising agony of slavery, serfdom, servitude, imperialism and fascist colonialism?!’

  They laughed together, their shoulders bouncing off each other. Godfrey sighed to a stop.

  ‘Where will you go now, Matha?’ he slurred, leaning back against the tree, his eyes sliding shut.

  ‘Mars?’ she chuckled wryly and took a bigger swig of their Mosi.

  But hearing Ba Nkoloso’s scolding come out of her own mouth had only made her feel worse. Why had he shamed her for love? And why had Godfrey not said ‘where will we go?’ just now? It was a sad scene altogether. Matha cheered herself up with busyness. She paid the drinks bill, bundled the two former astronauts into the back seat of Reuben’s car, and slid into the driver’s seat. As she drove down the dirt road away from the shebeen, laughter began to wriggle in Matha’s belly. Blundering in and out of the ditches like this reminded her of the good old days, rolling down hills in drums for anti-gravity training. She looked in the rearview mirror to say so, but the men were both asleep, Reuben snoring like a warthog, Godfrey’s silver cape making him look like a big robot baby.

  * * *

  By her own lights, Nkuka was the only Mwamba who had made something of herself. After their mother had died in prison, and Matha had run away, their father had moved to his younger sister’s farm outside Kasama. By then, more schools were opening their doors to the female sex, and the neighbours were sending their daughters to be educated. Mulenga was clearly a lost cause. So Mr Mwamba sent Nkuka in her brother’s place.

  Each morning at dawn, Nkuka walked two miles to the new Kasama Girls Secondary School. Nkuka was not as clever as her sister, and she was older than the other students, and there was one term when she had to drop out for lack of funds for the uniform and exercise books. But although Nkuka still despised Ba Nkoloso for ruining her family, her old tutor had taught Nkuka an important lesson at his Roadside Academy. He had shown her how to think like a muzungu.

  When they put the 1965 Standard Exam in front of Nkuka, with diagrams and questions that made you choose from a list, she heard his voice clearly in her head. If you can see the tree, you can go to the tree. Here to there. If this, then that, and the same with the other. Nkuka found that she could pierce the clutter on the page and see the patterns beneath it. She was one of only three girls at Kasama Girls who passed that year.

  Nkuka was eighteen years old by then. She had grown into her timidity, learned to infuse it with energy so that her shyness became coyness, her silence a kind of grace. And she knew how to present herself, how to keep her clothes clean and her hair and skin oiled. Her civics teacher began to take an interest in her. Mr Mwape was in his twenties, a thin, snivelling man who wore two oversized suits on alternating days and had bald patches in his afro like a diseased plant. One day after school, Nkuka brought him finkubala as a snack and asked if he needed any help. Soon, she was cooking his lunch and washing his two suits for him.

  Mr Mwape convinced the headmaster to hire her for part-time domestic work, and her father to let her move from her aunt’s farm to the dilapidated quarters behind the school. Nkuka shared it with four girls, but she had her own tiny room, which Mr Mwape could now visit. She accepted his overtures, canny enough to keep it quiet and to keep it going, knowing that this skinny man, with his hang-em-highs and spotty afro, could give her a way out. And he did.

  Two years later, Mr Mwape smudged some numbers and used his connections in Lusaka to procure a job for himself and admission for Nkuka to the secretarial course at the Evelyn Hone College of Further Education. Previously a whites-only facility, it now admitted a few dozen freshly minted Zambians.

  It took Nkuka four days, a car, a train and two buses to get from Kasama to Lusaka – a chongololo journey, as slow and segmented as a caterpillar. By the time she arrived, she was too exhausted to be impressed by the height and span of the main campus building off Church Road. She did notice the clock attached to its outer facade though. Nkuka had seen clocks before, of course. But this one was not bound inside a circle; its numbers were its frame. This was wondrous to her, less because she cared about time or technology, and more because it was her first encounter with a design that made her feel something. It made her feel free.

  The Pitman’s secretarial course was easy: typing, shorthand, filing. This kind of work – training the fingers to sally and sort – suited Nkuka well. Mr Mwape gave her a stipend for food and for lodging in a city council hostel – a small bedroom shared with one student, the kitchen and bathroom shared with six. Cookie, as the other girls immediately nicknamed her, spent the rest of her allowance keeping herself in fashion. Mr Mwape visited on Sundays when his wife and children were at church; the only condition of their arrangement was that Cookie not get pregnant.

  Most of the other girls at Evelyn Hone – they called themselves the Eves – were apamwamba, the black and brown daughters of government officials and civil servants. Cookie took advantage of their fancy magazines and wardrobes for fashion ideas. She would match these to the closest McCall’s sewing patterns, which she reused by tracing them onto newspaper. For material, she had the leavings of stain-and-fade-resistant Dacron, waxed cotton and Crimplene that the rich girls bought at Mistry’s. And when she couldn’t borrow someone’s Singer sewing machine, she sewed her outfits by hand. Her stitches were so neat, her designs so clean, that she was soon taking commissions and receiving payment in kind.

  Cookie was the first Eve to start wearing trouser suits (McCall’s #2087 and #2169). The trousers were so long and wide that the cuffs dragged, collecting detritus that orbited her ankles. As soon as she came back from class, she wo
uld take off her flares and replace them with a withered chitenge. Staring through the gridded window above the kitchen sink in the hostel, she would scrub the bottoms of her flattering trousers, then drape them on a wire over the sink. She would carefully dry her hands and coat them with Vaseline. And only then would she join the other Eves at the kitchen table, painting their nails with infinite coats of polish, reading out the raciest passages from withered Mills & Boon paperbacks, drinking cup after cup of tea, and humming to the soul music scratching out of their blue Supersonic radio.

  * * *

  When Matha pitched up at the hostel one evening, her bedraggled boyfriend in tow, Cookie sighed, welcomed them into the kitchen, and put the kettle on to make them some tea. She had no choice – Matha was the only family member who knew that a married man was keeping Cookie in comfort, school and fashion. Matha was wearing dusty maliposa and an old, cracked bomber jacket over a chitenge wrapper and a sweat-stained UNIP t-shirt. The sleepy dude standing behind her, whom Matha introduced as Godfrey, was decked out in an absurd silver cape. Ba Nkoloso’s work, Cookie thought bitterly.

  That lunatic had killed her mother, undone her father, turned her brother to drink. But worst of all, Ba Nkoloso had reduced her little sister – lovely laughing Matha – to this. This boyfriend of hers was a common muntu. Tall and handsome, sure. But ignorant. Rabble. Godfrey had vegetable-dull eyes and an mbanji-slow tongue and a thick keloid scar on his neck, a lump bursting through the skin that reminded Cookie of a knot in baked bread. She couldn’t stop staring at it as Matha let her tea go cold, explaining in great detail why the Zambian Space Programme was over. Good riddance! thought Cookie until she turned from the scar to look at her sister and realised that Matha was asking for a place to stay.

  It was tight and tenuous living in the hostel. Cookie paid her roommate with a Wrap-A-Rounder Dress (#9119) to find another bed so Matha and Godfrey could use it. Their furtive coupling, their chatting and canoodling, kept Cookie up all night; in the mornings, her washing and rattling woke them up. The room felt ruffled, night and day trading off in a noisome relay.

  About a week after Matha and Godfrey had moved in, Cookie came home from Typing II class to find a troop of young men in green outfits lounging in her tiny bedroom. They were propped at different levels of the room – on her desk, her floor, her bed – like monkeys in a tree, smoking cigarettes and drinking beer and fingering instruments, imitating the notes of a song plinking out from the Supersonic, which they had filched from the communal kitchen. Godfrey flashed his big white grin at her from his perch on her pillow. ‘Shani, mulamu?’ he said, then went back to pick-pick-picking at the strings of his guitar.

  ‘Not your sister-in-law,’ Cookie muttered as she stomped out of the bedroom and down the corridor, pushing past a dreadlocked guy dabbling on what looked like an electric kalimba. In the kitchen, three Eves were at the table, sulking over their homework. Matha was standing at the stove, whistling obliviously. She had tied a chitenge under her arms for an apron and was clutching a big flat wooden spoon. The nshima in the pot before her was roiling and leaping like a rowdy crowd. Matha glanced at Cookie as she recklessly added more mealie meal to it.

  ‘Howzit, sisi?’

  ‘Who are these muntus, Matha?’

  ‘The Just Rockets!’ Matha laughed, then her eyes softened. ‘Friends, Nkuka. Comrades!’

  ‘We are not supposed to have males in the hostel,’ Cookie huffed. ‘You know that.’

  Matha gave her a look. ‘Really, Nkuka? You are one to talk about having males – ow!’ She winced as a bubble on the surface of the nshima burst onto her thumb.

  ‘Ach,’ Cookie sucked her teeth as she crossed the kitchen in two strides and grabbed the spoon. ‘You were always so bad at this,’ she said and took over stirring the thick porridge.

  She couldn’t say more, not with the Mwape situation, and certainly not with an audience – the Eves in the corner were already staring and whispering. Matha smiled sweetly around the singed thumb she was sucking as she backed out of the kitchen, then darted out into the corridor. As soon as she was gone, the Eves in the kitchen launched into a griping session. It was too loud in here, it was too crowded, how could they study? Cookie placated them by inviting them to the party. The Eves glanced at each other, then giggled and ran off to change clothes.

  Cookie seethed as she continued to prepare the food, her sweat making her trouser suit (#2120) feel even heavier. But muscling her way through the cooking lit a spark in her marrow. By the time she served the meal – nshima, kalembula and kapenta on shared plates to be held on the laps and palms of the guests crowding the hostel – Cookie was flushed and tingling.

  Watching with pride as everyone stuffed their faces, she drank a well-earned Castle and looked over the new arrivals in her bedroom: Youth Brigaders and musicians and a few students from the fancy new University of Zambia. Debates leapt back and forth across the room, arguments bouncing about as if this were a football pitch, the question a spinning ball. The two beds had been propped on their sides to make more room, and several Eves were dancing between them, hips circling in loose loops, lips between their teeth.

  Big Gold Six played ‘Ti Chose Smith Bampando’, which tumbled into ‘Four Year Plan’, which gave way to Spokes Mashane. Alick Nkhata’s voice honeyed out from the wireless and the rock musicians rolled their eyes as the Eves closed theirs dreamily. When the Dark City Sisters came on with ‘Langa More’, Cookie opened another Castle and joined the dancing. The wayaleshi did its best, bleating out those swaying, rocking soul songs, songs that stretch the time of courtship to accommodate comings and goings, lingering and touch. The guys and girls danced with coiled control, brushing the tips of their shoes and bumping the edges of their hips. The brink was the point.

  The music receded from an event to an atmosphere as the smell of mbanji drifted into the air, a gift from the radical UNZA students. Thoroughly tipsy, Cookie wandered into the kitchen to work on her sewing plans, which coincided with her romantic plans in the form of the perfect wedding dress: McCall’s #2020 pattern but with lace, tulle and beaded wrists. She was deep in a flow of tracing bow patterns from an old issue of Vogue when she heard a booming voice within the party’s cacophony. She looked up from her sketches. The voice boomed again. She jumped up and left the kitchen, squeezing past the bodies corrugating the corridor.

  She stood in the threshold to her bedroom, craning her head around a tall bearded guy in a striped sweater. Godfrey was fast asleep in an armchair, Matha on the floor at his feet, her head tipped back onto his knee, his hand casually draped across her throat. The other guests, wilted by the weed and the late hour, were leaning around the room, gazing at someone in its centre, nodding their heads with furrowed brows, trying to seem sober. Cookie ducked around the tall guy and that’s when she saw that telltale helmet, blatant and ancient and stained as a full moon. Edward Mukuka Nkoloso was speaking, or rather, speeching, the gap between his front teeth issuing an occasional whistle whenever his vehemence took his own breath away. He poked a hole in the air with his finger. Sweat poured from under his helmet like his face was melting.

  ‘…appreciate this celebration, which is very important to recognise the triumphs we have achieved in the struggle for liberation. But I must castigate you youthies as well! You have been lazy! You have been slouching, eh? Where is your passion? Where is the unflinching resolution and unbending dedication to freedom and justice? I call upon you, especially the girls! You must think, eat, sleep and dream the struggle for freedom! You think you are already free?’

  The party guests clucked and shook their heads in agreement. The bearded boy next to Cookie turned and scolded her, ‘You are not free, ba sista, you are not!’

  ‘How can we be free if we are squabbling like monkeys over a mango? We must unite! I call upon you, the youth, to join me at the African Liberation Centre, safe house for freedom fighters from our neighbouring coun
tries!’

  Here several of the guests clapped. A drunk Eve on the floor let out a languorous ululation like a glugging drain. Matha had stood up and she was beaming at Ba Nkoloso, nodding fervently at his words. Cookie’s feet grew slippery in her patapatas.

  ‘Revolutionary youth! In death, revolutionaries are solidly immortalised into a battling ram! Let us tighten our belts and let us be prepared to die in the ranks of the liberation struggle!’

  Applause erupted like thunder. Praise rained down from the very ceiling. Even the Eves – these young women whose mouths pursed around their proper English, who carried their books in navy British Overseas Airways Corporation bags to flaunt their families’ flights to London – even they began to channel their mothers. They danced and sang the old songs, bending forward, raising their arms, trembling their fingers, shaking their heads in a fury of joy. The two men on either side of Ba Nkoloso lifted him up so that his fist could punch even higher.

  Cookie pushed through this delirium of patriotism to the centre of the room, where Ba Nkoloso was rising like a column. She shouted up at him, and then screamed, and when all this still went unnoticed, she tore off her suit jacket. She did not go topless. Cookie was no Mama Chikamoneka. But she was wearing a mere camisole beneath her jacket and this drew attention. Young men and women backed away from her, their eyes locked onto the nipples poking through the satin. The noise in the room simmered to a murmur. Ba Nkoloso’s bearers lowered him in front of Cookie.

  ‘You,’ she whispered, her eyes quivering.

  ‘Nkuka?! Is that you?’ He smiled broadly.

  ‘Iwe!’ she said louder and poked him in the chest. The room gasped. This was horrifically rude. Ba Nkoloso raised a hand. ‘It’s okay. This one is like my niece. She is unruly, like her name. Hottest part of the flame: Nkuka! The ember! Her mother was a martyr of our revolution—’

  Cookie leapt forward at the mention of her mother. ‘You let her die like a dog! You took her from us!’ – Matha wrapped her arms around Cookie from behind, hugging her away from Ba Nkoloso before she could strike him. But Cookie kept shouting from the prison of Matha’s embrace: ‘And you stole my sister. Now the whole world is laughing at us! Space Programme!’ She spat. ‘They called my mother a whore and now they are calling my sister a fool! Why were you lying to people, telling them she is going to Mars with a cat—’