My Secret History (36 page)

And over the radio came the sounds of the Malawi Police
Band. Until today there had been no Malawi Police—who needed them? But the band was playing so that students all over the country could do their Israeli marching. In the Zimba stadium Mr. Mambo was standing under his headmaster’s umbrella, taking credit for his goose-stepping students as he had for Rockwell’s
chimbuzi
.

Rosie was heavily pregnant. She went back and forth with a tray. I bought a bottle of beer and sat alone, near the radio, to drink it. I bought another bottle. Twelve was my limit. I had a long way to go.

The Chiffons were singing, “He’s So Fine.”

“What these stupid colonialist people did not understand,” Doctor Banda shrieked, “was that we Malawians want to be free! That is why I came from London. They called me! I heeded the call.
Kwacha
, they said—”

His words were drowned by a group called The Shangri-Las singing “Leader of the Pack.” I could no longer hear the independence celebration clearly on the radio, only its crackle. An orange light glowed in the large plastic dial. I could feel the warm radio tubes on my face. It was not like a radio at all but rather like a device for heating a room.

Rosie came over with her tray. Her dress was tight against the ball of her big belly.

I said,
“Kwacha.”
Dawn: it was the slogan.

She said, “Hey, ya wanna beer?”

I said yes, and it frothed when she opened it.

Was that squawk Doctor Banda’s nagging voice on the radio? Americans said he was a charismatic leader. I never saw that. I suspected that he was insane. That freed me. What he said made no sense. But he was their problem.

It was then, in the noise of the Bamboo, that I was certain the interval was over. It had been an instant, no more than a tick or two of time. How rare it had been, how unexpected. I had seen it all. I was where I wanted to be, and I’d had everything I wished. I was still like a man on an island, among African girls. They were willing, unsuspicious, careless, and pretty. They did not attach the slightest importance to sex. It was too brief to be called pleasure, but it was fun. I felt very lucky.

The drunker I became the luckier I felt. I was braced against the bar feeling nothing but gratitude; and I was glad I was
twenty-three. I felt, living in the far-flung world, I had everything.

One of my luckiest instincts lay in being able to tell when I was happy—at the time, not afterwards. Most people don’t realize until long afterwards that they have passed through a period of happiness. Their enjoyment takes the form of reminiscence, and it is always tinged with regret that they had not known at the time how happy they were. But I knew, and my memory (of bad times too) was detailed and intense.

So I made the most of those hours and days. I knew when a moment was rare. This was one, and there had been many in the months that preceded it. It warmed me like sunlight. But as I sat in the bar that day I felt the shadows lengthening, I sensed the light fading.

I thought: It was bad before under the British, and it will be bad in the future with a greedy government; but it’s perfect now.

Jim Reeves was singing, “This World Is Not My Home.”

Grace climbed onto the barstool next to me.

“Give me one beer, father,” she said.

The radio was still going, the dial was lit; a howl of
Kwacha!
came from the cloth on the loudspeaker.

“Kwacha
,” I said, giving Grace the beer.

“Rubbish,” she said. “Where have you been keeping, Mister Handy?”

“Here and there.” There was too much to tell: my VD, the hospital work; Gloria and her village; changes at the school—Mambo, his Israelis, the latrine ceremony, all that. “But I’m back now.”

She was drinking—slurping. She scratched her dark forearm slowly, a sound like sandpaper.

“You are still living on Kanjedza side?”

“Yes, sister.” I sipped my beer and became abstracted, thinking of a story about a waiting room. But in this waiting room no one is what he or she seems. The man with the little girl is not her father—he is a child molester.

“You are still having that smart house?” Grace said.

“Sure. Come over and see it.” And I thought: The married couple are actually saying goodbye—she is going to meet her lover, he’s off to visit his mistress. The cowboy is a homo.

“First I want to dance here.”

“We can dance, and then you can come over to my house,” I said. The little boy has a fatal disease, and one of them—probably the nun—has a hand grenade. But it was an impossible story to write—too static. No action. “We can go upstairs.”

Grace laughed in her throat—a kind of gulping.

“That’s a very pretty dress,” I said.

“Seven pounds at the Indian shop,” she said. “And shoes. Three pounds.”

That meant expensive, stylish, smart. She was boasting.

“So what about it?” I asked.

She stared at me.

I thought: A story about coincidences—enormous ones. A man goes out to buy some cigarettes for his wife and is hit by a car. At the same moment she electrocutes herself with her hair dryer in the bathroom. Upstairs their infant daughter sleeps soundly, not knowing she is an orphan. No, forget it.

“Let’s go, sister.”

“Not just yet,” she said, and laughed again. Unwelcome laughter was so irritating. She kept it up.

Could I ever get used to that laugh? Another story. A divorce. It was the way she laughed, your honor.

“First you give me money,” Grace said.

This sobered me. I considered what she had said and found that I was very shocked.

I thought of a story in which the most innocent and dependable person one could think of demands suddenly: First you give me money.

I said to Grace, “Maybe I’ll ask someone else—another girl,” and glanced around.

“She will want money.”

Why had I not guessed this would happen?

The radio was going, Banda at the stadium leading a hymn, “Bringing in the Sheaves.”

Just about then—because the hymn continued in my dream—I fell asleep where I sat, with my head on my arms.

“Sorry,” Grace said, waking me with her hard fingers stabbing me in my spine.

Night had fallen while I slept. The Independence Celebrations were over. African girls sat quietly at the tables in the Beautiful Bamboo. They watched the door, but no one entered.
A few of them muttered as I left with Grace—and I was limping, still waking up.

We went back to my house in the darkness, saying nothing, listening to the trees drip as we walked. Captain had left a small tin oil-lamp burning in my room, and in this feeble light Grace undressed. She hung her blouse and skirt on the back of a chair; she folded the rag she called her cardigan. She stood her shoes side by side against the wall.

There were so many ways that a woman got into bed—all the postures that meant
I’m joining you
, and the slow, reluctant movements a woman made when she was simply tired, the way she lay down flat, with no sideways motion, as though she were alone.

But I was still awake, and shortly I was on Grace. Her eyes were open, but her body seemed asleep.

“Are you finished yet?” she said.

And then I could not continue. I rolled over and looked at the ceiling. Even in this cold season, Captain had draped the bed with a mosquito net. It looked mockingly like a bridal veil.

“Do you want to stay?”

“It will cost more.”

I was thinking about Africa. What an excellent place it was in the dark, and how lucky I was to be out of America and out of Vietnam. I could go on living, and from here in Central Africa I had a good vantage point on both those places; I could begin to write something that was my own. I considered the word
nocturnes
. There was no writing here at all, and
nocturnes
was a word that had to be written—no one ever said it, which was why it was still so beautiful. I had tried to write a story about these African girls, but it kept coming out funny. I did not know that its comedy was its truth. I needed to write, because so much had happened to me to make me feel lonely, and writing about these past events was the best way of being free of their power. The thought stirred me and made me want to live a long time.

That took seconds.

Grace slammed the door hard and woke the dogs, and people started calling out, and cocks crowed, as light appeared in slashes between my curtains—another day. Though something had ended in Africa I was still smiling. I wanted to go on remembering this.

No one looks more like a displaced person than an Indian in an overcoat. My friend, S. Prasad, the writer, was waiting for me behind the glass doors at Victoria Air Terminal. His winter clothes, and his thick meerschaum pipe, and the way he glowered—his complexion was more gray than brown this December day—made him seem forbidding. But I knew better. He was an unusual alien: he knew everything about England, he had an Oxford degree, owned his own house, and had published half a shelf of books. He had won five literary prizes. “I don’t want to hear about prizes,” he sometimes said, making his famous face of disgust. He had lived here since he was eighteen. Still, he called himself an exile. He said he didn’t belong—he looked it in his winter coat. Seeing me, he frowned with satisfaction.

He told me about his being an exile as we crossed London in the back of a taxi on the way to his house. I was listening, but I was also rejoicing in the weather.

In Uganda, where I now lived, the sun’s dazzle filled the sky, so most days there was no sky. After that dangerous and squan-dered-looking sunlight, England this wet day looked like a city underground. It was cold, it gleamed, it was black, it seemed indestructible. But this was only a holiday interval for me. I was tired of spending hot drunken Christmases in Africa. This time I would do it right—stay here, sing carols, tramp through the snowy streets; then back to the jungle.

“I have no home,” Prasad was saying, biting his pipestem. “You Americans are so lucky—you can always go home. But how
can I go back to that ridiculous little island? Exile is a real word for me, you know. These chaps—”

We were at a red light and men in bowler hats and black suits, like a crowd of morticians, were crossing the road in front of our taxi.

“—these chaps have no idea. They have pensions and families and houses and, good God, they have children. They’re secure. They’re doing very nicely—probably putting a few pence away. What is that bespectacled son of a bitch looking at?”

It was a skinny-faced Indian in a pin-striped suit, waiting for the light to change and glancing at S. Prasad as we drove off.

“Pakistanis. They’re everywhere,” Prasad said. “Can you blame the English for complaining? They’re no better than your bow-and-arrow men.”

I said nothing, because I knew he was only half serious, and he was at his best when he was allowed to range freely. He was an intensely private and usually silent man, which was why when he stepped out and began to speak he could be startling. Also, he tested his opinions on perfect strangers.
I hate music
was one of the first things he ever said to me. He never repeated it, and so I assumed he probably did not mean it. Now he was talking about Pakistanis and Islam and Mr. Jinnah.

I was transfixed by the people—the pretty girls in short skirts, the purposeful way they walked, the curve of their thighs, and all the hurrying people, so different from the shufflers in Wandegeya.

Prasad saw that I was interested, but before I could speak he said, “London does not swing for me.” And he smiled. “It might for you, Andre.”

We crossed a bridge over the Thames and we seemed to be traveling outdoors for the length of it. I got a glimpse of the river and the pale winter light: white sky, black buildings. Then darkness again on the far side, and the taxi buried us in south London.

“I should move from here,” Prasad said, as the taxi slowed on a narrow street of bulgey brown brick houses. “I’ve put this little place on its feet. It’s time to go.”

The house looked freshly painted—bright trim, a new gate, a garden in which the slender trees still flew tiny white tags from the nursery.

“You ring the bell,” Prasad said, pocketing his latchkey. “Sarah likes a little drama.”

His wife appeared a moment later, and threw her arms around me, and exclaimed, “Andy!”

“I’ve been thinking of a small flat in an area that is uncompromisingly fashionable,” Prasad was saying behind me. I could tell he was biting on his pipe. “Haven’t I, darling? Oh, do go in!”

I had been an admirer of Prasad’s writing for about four years when we met by chance in Africa. He said he was passing through; he was restlessly working on a book that he carried from hotel to hotel. He read some things of mine and said, “Promise me one thing. That you will write about this place.”

He meant Africa. I promised I would. And so we became friends. When he and Sarah left Africa he urged me to spend Christmas with them in London. Christmas was a long holiday in Uganda, where I was teaching—three weeks of rain and stifling heat, and nothing to do but drink. And there was nothing to keep me there—I had no family. So I gladly went to London. I was grateful for Prasad’s invitation.