My Secret History (35 page)

Moosh said that this latrine was too good for Africans.

“They can be happy with a hole in the ground.”

“Ever hear of cholera?” Rockwell said, and I admired the fight in him. “Africa’s number one killer?”

Yonny said, “Human life means nothing here.”

After school, the Israelis drilled the students, showed them how to march in step and twirl banners, and they screamed at them unmercifully. I heard the drums beating from the cleared piece of ground they called the football pitch.

I asked a Fourth Former named Malenga what he thought of the Israelis. He used a word that he had once applied to Americans, that meant “skilled in everything” (
nkhabvu
).

“Give me an example.”

Just today, Malenga said, the younger one Yonny had taught several of the boys how to get free of an enemy interrogator. While you were standing, facing each other, you looked him
straight in the eyes and without blinking or moving your head you kicked him furiously and broke his shinbone.

“They’re tough guys,” Malenga said.

I hated Deputy Mambo for arranging the visit of these soldiers. But now I saw Rockwell in a new light. I had thought of him as crazy and possibly dangerous, but in contrast to the Israelis Rockwell seemed a man of principle and good sense. He had his eccentricities, this toiletmaker from Pasadena, but beneath it all he had a humane mission. I had been too hard on him. While I had spent my weekends at the Bamboo Rockwell had put in extra hours on the latrine.

He had just about finished the roof. On rainy days he worked inside, painting and tinkering.

“I think I’ve got these urinals licked,” he said, and then in a whisper, “Hey, what about these Israelites? Are you going to let them push you around?”

“Wently told me to play ball.”

“I got the name of the Israeli ambassador,” Rockwell said.

“Are you going to report the soldiers?”

“No. The name spooked me.” Rockwell was still whispering. “Ambassador Shohat. Get it?”

I said no.

He said, “Sometimes names are messages. Like Lorne Greene, like Faye Dunaway, like that Scotch guy that runs the Nyasaland Trading Company, Dalgliesh.”

I said, “Ward, please—”

“See, Lorne Greene is really ‘lawn green.’ And Faye Dunaway—‘fading away’. Huh? You have to really think to get the message.”

“What about Dalgliesh?”

“Dog leash,” Rockwell whispered. “And that guy Shohat is ‘shoe hat.’ In other words, head to toe. It kind of worries me.”

After revising my opinion of Rockwell, here he was again, getting weird. But I blamed the Israelis for this.

I was putting in extra time as headmaster, to prove that I was still in charge. I stopped seeing Gloria and went back to taking the Bamboo girls home at weekends. On weekdays I started at seven, unlocked the buildings, met the teachers at seven-thirty, and then banged the piece of railway track to call the students to assembly.

In the last week of June, Deputy Mambo came into my office, this time without knocking. It was one of his red-shirt days—shorts, knee socks, badges. How could he wear that cruel face of Doctor Banda and not expect to scare me?

“I have a request, Mr. Headmaster, sir,” he said. He was always slavishly polite when he was being hostile. “About morning assembly. In addition to stories and what-not I suggest we sing a song for Kamuzu.”

The man on his badge—Hastings Kamuzu Banda.

“Which song?” I said.

“ ‘Everything Belongs.’ ”

I had never heard it. “How does it go?”

Deputy Mambo folded his arms across his Youth League shirt and put his head back and yelled the song in Chinyanja:

“I get the idea, brother.” It was tuneful but ridiculous. “But I don’t think there’s much point in the students singing that, do you?”

He did not reply. He moved his lips over his teeth and pressed them together, and he glared at me. I wondered whether the brown spots on the whites of his eyes meant he had a vitamin deficiency.

I had not had any strong feelings about Mambo until he showed up in his red shirt and announced that he was a member of the Chamba Youth League. I could not forgive him for those two Israelis. I could hear them, even now, shrieking orders on the football pitch.

I said, “The songs we sing are boring, but at least they’re harmless.”

“We want ‘Everything Belongs.’ ”

“And Banda—who is he?”

It was just an expression—a rhetorical question. I knew who Banda was. But Deputy Mambo answered me.

“He is our Ngwazi.”

It meant conquerer.

“And Chirombo.”

It meant “great beast.”

“Our messiah.”

“Give me a break,” I said.

He was still staring at me with his brown-flecked eyes.

“Founder and Father of the Malawi Congress Party. Life President of our Motherland, Malawi.”

“Look, brother—”

“I am not your brother. I do not drink beers. I do not osculate with town girls wearing tight dresses and ironing their hair.”

I glared at him. I hated this, and yet I had been expecting it for months.

“As long as I am headmaster of Chamba Hill Secondary School we will not sing the ‘Everything Belongs’ song. Is that clear?”

On the last day of June I was visited by a man who said he was from the Ministry of Education. He was English, and very pleasant. He said he liked the look of the school. No one ever praised the place, and I was grateful to this stranger.

“I didn’t realize Nyasaland had a Ministry of Education.”

“It doesn’t,” he said. “I’m with the Malawi Ministry of Education.”

Hearing that gave me a late-afternoon feeling of something coming to an end.

“We’re just getting sorted out,” he said. “We’re appointing headmasters to schools.”

“Chamba has one,” I said, meaning myself.

“Right you are,” he said, and consulted a file. “His name is Winston Mambo and he’s to take over immediately.”

I made a little grunt of complaint.

“Can’t make much difference to you, old boy,” he said. “You’ll be gone in a matter of months.”

“How do you know?”

He smiled and said, “You’re a bird of passage.”

All the way home I kept thinking of that expression.

*   *   *

Mambo moved into the office and I found a cubbyhole in the science block. He fired Miss Natwick, he gave the Israelis lockers in the Staff Room—I had denied them that—and he allowed them to join us for morning coffee. He started a Youth League branch for the Fifth Form and organized the lower forms into troops of Young Pioneers. The schoolyard was thick with red shirts.

His first morning assembly was typical of the ones that followed: a Bible reading, a passage from a speech by Doctor Banda, the song “Everything Belongs to Kamuzu Banda,” and a pep-talk.

“He’s not even the official president yet,” Rockwell said. “This is still a British colony.”

It wasn’t, but what Rockwell said was partly true.

It was a much stranger situation than that. It was nothing, it was an interval, between the British leaving and the Africans taking over. But it was a short interval—a moment briefer than an eyeblink in the history of the country. For the whole of my time in the place so far no one had been in charge. The Africans were hopeful and they felt free. There was no government. Everything worked. Everyone belonged.

But now I felt it was the end of the day and we all faced a long night.

Mambo said, “We will run the school the African way. According to our ancient traditions.”

“Reading the Bible, dressing up in red shirts, singing about Kamuzu, following Israelis around the football pitch. The African way!”

“The Israelis are our friends.”

I did not argue. I was glad to be relieved of the tedium of the headmaster’s duties—doing the register, keeping track of supplies, balancing the timetable. But with Mambo in charge the school almost immediately took on a preachy political tone, and Mambo—whom I knew to be a creep—became annoyingly pious. I saw that he had become headmaster not because he liked the school particularly but because he wanted something more. He was ambitious. This was his way of moving on.

“We will have special independence celebrations at Chamba Hill Secondary,” he said. “Parades, demonstrations, cakes, and a bonfire. The minister will come and plant a tree in front of the
chimbuzi.
”

This was at the first staff meeting.

“Wait a minute,” Rockwell said.

“I have the minister’s reply. Mr. Likoni is delighted to accept this invitation from his former school. I have budgeted for a small blue-gum tree to plant.”

“I built that latrine,” Rockwell said. “That’s all my work. I know you started it and provided some bricks, but I had to tear it down and start again from scratch. So it’s all mine.”

“We want to give thanks for its completion,” Mambo said.

“Then write to the Tenth Street Tabernacle and mention the Faith Fund of the Pageant for People Overseas.”

Mambo was scowling at him with speckled eyes, and showing his full set of teeth. He had the appearance of an old-fashioned mechanical bank, the same meaningless mouth and cast-iron features.

“It is our new school latrine. It must be inaugurated.”

“I already inaugurated it,” Rockwell said.

“It must be done properly,” Mambo said.

“There’s only one way to inaugurate a latrine—and I did it, fella.”

Rockwell was not on hand the day Mr. Likoni arrived in his ministerial car. He used the road that had been trampled and cleared by students searching for tickeys. Not many months before, Mr. Likoni had begged to use my bicycle. Now he was in a new Mercedes. He had a driver. He wore a pin-striped suit and new shoes. He cut a red ribbon and planted a slender blue gum in front of the
chimbuzi
. He did not speak to me. He praised Chamba Hill Secondary and he praised Mr. Mambo. He led the students in the “Everything Belongs” song.

That night I found Rockwell at the Beautiful Bamboo. It was his form of rebellion, he said. He had been there since noon. Thinking, he said. But he looked as though he had been crying.

“What about?”

“Words,” he said. “I could never ask a girl her box number, could you?”

To prevent him from plunging in on that subject, I said, “You missed a memorable occasion. Imagine making a ceremony out of opening a public toilet! The minister cut the ribbon and made a speech. That guy used to borrow my bike.”

“I wish I had a woman,” Rockwell said.

I turned and stared at the African girls seated at the tables, and dancing, and leaning against the wall, all of them watching us.

“Funnily enough, I don’t think of them as women,” he said. He looked puzzled and alarmed. He said, “I’d rather get drunk.”

There were tears in his eyes.

“I had a girlfriend. That was before I joined the Peace Corps. It didn’t work out. If I was kissing her in her house and the phone rang, she always answered it, and she always talked about an hour.”

He said nothing for a long while. The jukebox played Chuck Berry singing “Maybelline,” and then Elvis’s “Return to Sender” and then “Knockin’ On My Front Door” by the El Dorados. The ideal woman of rock and roll songs was a
crazy little mama
.

“If I met someone who didn’t answer the phone at times like that I’d marry her.” He put his head in his hands, and started to sob. But he was saying something.

“What is it, Ward?”

He raised his red eye to me and said, “God, that was a beautiful toilet. I was going to have some more urinal candy shipped over. Some great flavor.”

After that, we drank without speaking, until at last he burped and said, “It’s time to go home.”

I looked at my watch.

“I mean the States,” he said. “Stop in Paris first.”
Peeris
.

“I don’t care if I ever go back,” I said. I realized that I meant it. I felt strangely solitary saying it. A moment later someone pinched me with a hard hand and put a friendly arm around me. It was an African girl.
Crazy little mama
.

“Hello, sister.”

“Hey, man,” she said.

On a cold drizzly afternoon in July—Malawi’s independence day—I rode my bicycle into town. I could hear music coming from the stadium, and howling crowd-voices, and applause. But the celebrations had nothing to do with me. I was just a foreign teacher; Mambo was headmaster. I hated seeing my students doing their Israeli marching, and I hated the Youth League in their red shirts. But most of all I sensed that this little phase was ending, and I was sorry, because I had liked living in a place that was neither a colony nor a republic. It had been nothing with a name, and very pleasant: it had resembled my own mood. In this special interval I had been able to pursue my secret life.

The natural place for me that day was the Beautiful Bamboo. I realized then that a bar is a safe neutral place, where I had a right to be. And the fact that there were African girls in the bar made it friendlier. More than that—it was where I belonged. Looking around, I saw that at one time or another I had slept with every girl I could see.

They were draped over the chairs and leaning on the bar and staring out the window at the rain. It was too wet and cold to go to the stadium, and anyway, the main independence celebration was in the capital. It was taking place at the moment. The radio was on. I could hear the band playing “Everything Belongs to Kamuzu Banda.”

“This rain is very strong,” I said in Chinyanja. The word I used for rain,
mpemera
, was very precise. It meant the sweeping rain driven into the veranda by the wind.

“Sure is,” a girl said, and another said, “Yah.”

How long had they been replying this way?

The Beautiful Bamboo had never looked dingier. It was filled with hairy smells and the droning odor of wet shoes and muddy boots and sodden clothes. The shadowy darkness seemed to make it stinkier, and the noise didn’t help—the shouting African men, none I knew, and the radio competing with the jukebox, playing “Downtown” by a British singer.