My Secret History (47 page)

I wrote her friendly letters and suppressed my fear. If she rejected me I knew I would leave. I applied—just to be sure I had an alternative—for a job in Kuala Lumpur and one in Oulu, at the University of Northern Finland.

Three weeks went by. My impatience affected me like a fever.
I felt ill, I stayed in bed, and the bush-baby appeared at the window like a mocking demon. One night I went to the Staff Club, not because I wanted to but because I knew that if I didn’t I would become the subject of further gossip. I found the energy to get drunk, and when I went home I burst into tears. I realized that I was moved by the thought of myself alone, drunken and blubbering. I had never wallowed like that before—and my pleasure in the pathetic melodrama horrified me.

One day I thought of killing myself, but when I went through step by step—the locked door, the note, the rope, the noose, the kicked-over chair—I laughed and embraced life and felt vitalized by the thought that I would never kill myself.

I might kill Jenny, though. I’d never leave her, I’ll never stop loving her. But I might kill her
.

When she wrote at last, four weeks after she left Kampala, I felt worse, not better.

It was a postcard, a picture of a goofy Kikuyu man with varnished-looking skin and dents in his face. He was carrying a leather shield and a curio-shop spear. The message said,
Dear Andy, Some settling in problems (no water!) but the girls are sweet and the other teachers very helpful. I have my own house and inherited the previous tenant’s cook. Very hectic at the moment, term starts Mon., but I’ll write again when I get a chance! Love, Jenny
.

Three things bothered me about the note—that it was short and breezy, that it made no reference to the six letters I had written, that it did not invite my affection. I hated exclamation marks. She was fine, she was happy; and knowing that made me miserable.

I could not call her. The phone lines to Kenya were always out of order, and when they worked you heard a faint deep-in-a-well whisper that made you feel lonelier, because you had to shout at the voice that was always saying
Talk louder. I can’t hear you
.

How could I shout the things I wanted to say? How could I stand to get a mouse-whisper in reply?

When Friday came I was restless. I went to sleep drunk and woke up at four o’clock in the morning on Saturday, wondering what to do. I saw I had no choice: there was only one thing. I dressed in the dark and got into my car and drove away, out of Kampala. The streets were empty. The forest outside town was black, but
as dawn broke I saw Africans washing near their huts and waiting for buses and heading for the cane fields. I had breakfast at Tororo and then crossed the border. The immigration official on the Kenya side yawned at me—both a greeting and a growl—as he stamped my passport. At midmorning in Western Kenya five African boys with dust-whitened faces jumped out at me from the elephant grass at the shoulder of the dirt road. They had just been circumcized and become men: they showed it by howling at me and shaking painted shields. Farther along there were baboons sitting on the road grimacing at me with doglike teeth. The road went on and on, past tea and wheat and corn and cactuses and stony hills and mud huts. The mileposts told me I was nearing Nairobi. The sun was going down over Muthaiga as I turned north on a narrower road. Just before seven o’clock my headlights illuminated the sign
UMOJA GIRLS SCHOOL
. It had been a twelve-hour drive, but I wasn’t tired. I was excited—more than that, my nerves were electrified.

I turned into the driveway, between thick hedges, and went slowly. There were heavy red blossoms on the bushes and big brown petals flattened in the dark wheel tracks.

Two girls in green school uniforms stepped aside to let me pass. But I stopped.

“Where is Miss Bramley’s house, please?”

“That side,” one said, and the girl next to her muffled a giggle.

Only then, hearing that sound behind the girl’s hand, did I have doubts. They rose in my throat and made me queasy. What if this was all a huge mistake? I had not warned Jenny I was coming. She might be with a man—or out of town for the weekend. Maybe she had gone to the coast. I knew nothing about her life. Everything that had seemed right to me before, and for the whole of the long drive, now became uncertain. I felt awkward, even fearful, after I spoke to those African girls. I almost went away then, but I forced myself to go on.

Her house was behind another hedge. Every building here was hidden by foliage. Her lights were on. I did not go all the way. I switched the engine off and eased the door shut, and walked to her window.

She was with an African man. I watched. I could not hear anything. She stood facing him—he was simply staring, listening.
She was smiling. Was he her lover? It didn’t matter, I told myself. It just showed me how little I knew her.

I wanted to leave. I was trembling. I couldn’t interrupt—didn’t want to. It wasn’t right. I was such a blunderer. Perhaps she had written me a letter, which had arrived that morning in Kampala; but I hadn’t received it because I was on the road. Perhaps the letter said,
Dear Andy, I have been putting off writing this letter, but I can’t put it off any longer …

It was a twelve-hour trip back to Kampala, it was almost two to Nairobi. But how could I go back right now? I had to reject the idea; I was exhausted. But I would have to go, because now I understood the brief postcard, the long silence, the girl’s giggles. I was sad, but I had to knock and see her, so that I could say goodbye.

She could not speak when she answered the door. Her face seemed to swell with unspoken words. I took it to be the shock of acute embarrassment. I began to apologize.

“I couldn’t call you,” I said. “I thought I’d visit. Don’t worry—I’m not staying. I can see that you’re busy—”

I was still talking but she wasn’t listening.

She smiled and said, “You’re wearing
takkies!”

I had dressed in a hurry. I wore a black suit, a T-shirt, dark glasses, and tennis sneakers—
takkies
. It was the Kenya word for them.

Behind her the African had become very still.

“I’m sorry to interrupt,” I said.

Now we both looked at him.

He said,
“Mem, chakula kwisha? Wewe nataka kahawa?”

“He’s your cook!” I said, much too loudly.

“I’m afraid so,” she said, and she turned to the African,
“Kwisha, asanti sana. Hapanataka kahawa. Kwaheri, John.”

“Why don’t you want a coffee?”

“Because I want to be alone with you,” she said.

When he left, Jenny said, “He makes fruit salad and dumps it into the bowl with yesterday’s leftover fruit salad. I eat a little and he adds a little every day. The bowl is always full. It’s a bottomless fruit salad. I’ve been eating it for more than three weeks. Surely that’s not healthy? I was just explaining—oh, Andy”—and threw her arms around me—“I’m so glad to see you. I’ve been missing you. I can hardly believe you’re here.”

We went directly to bed. We made love, then dozed and woke and made love again.

In the darkness of her bedroom I said, “I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

“I mean I really love you,” I said. “I’m in love with you.”

It was a hopeless word. It didn’t work. But when she hugged me, I could tell from the way she held me, from the pressure of her body, that she was happy and that she probably did love me.

She was smiling the following morning.

“Do Americans always wear
takkies
with a suit?”

I stayed until Tuesday. We walked to a nearby hotel, the Izaak Walton. It was on a trout stream, whites came up from Nairobi to fish here. We had dinner and walked back to Umoja Girls School in the dark. We drove to Meru, to look at Mount Kenya. We inhaled the Jacaranda. Morning and evening we made love.

When in my life had I not looked forward to setting out in the morning and leaving, alone? But I hated the thought of leaving Jenny. I was consoled by the thought that she seemed sorry too.

She said, “Will you come back?”

“What do you think?”

Three weeks later I returned. And then she visited me, coming by plane and landing at Entebbe. We spent the weekend together—making love, talking, procrastinating, and finally hurrying to the airport so that she could catch her plane that Sunday night.

It was a winding country road and so full of people walking and riding bikes, and so crowded in places with children fooling around that it took all my concentration. It was not until after she had gone that I recalled her taking my hand and saying casually, “By the way, my period’s late. I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about.”

Popatlal Hirjee was a goldsmith. His eyes were yellowish under heavy lids. He was very fat, and his hands were so plump that the three or four rings he wore were buried by the flesh of his fingers. He sat crosslegged on cushions in his shop, like a pasha. When I picked up the gold wedding rings he had made he dropped them into a jangling set of scales and counterbalanced them, throwing weights into the opposing pan and sorting them. Then he dug a diamond out of a brooch and set it in Jenny’s ring.

He never moved from his seated position, and he did all this sorting and weighing without speaking. His breathing—the heavy man’s gasp—had the sound of something being scorched.

His assistant said, “We can write names in them—your name in her ring, her name in yours. And the date.”

I wrote this information on a scrap of paper. Popatlal Hirjee gouged the names and the date on the inner surface of the rings. Hers said
Andre 4-Aug-68
.

“Bariki,”
the goldsmith said. Blessings on you.

I drove one last time to Umoja in Kenya, and picked up Jenny and her two suitcases. On our way back to Kampala we stopped at Eldoret for the night. Two days later we woke in each other’s arms.

“We’re getting married today,” I said. “I love you.”

To wake up and say that seemed reckless and wonderful.

We went together to the Kampala Registry Office. The contract was read to us by an African in a three-piece suit. Our witnesses were my Indian friends, Neogy and Desai, and their extravagant signatures appeared on our marriage certificate. We gave a party at the Staff Club and before it was over we drove towards Fort Portal, stopping for our first night at Mubende at the rest house near the witch tree, and the next day at The Mountains of the Moon Hotel, where we spent a happy week.

The night we arrived back in Kampala the bush-baby appeared at the window—not looking for food, not even restless,
but simply watching. He returned on successive nights, and over the next few weeks, with his large eyes staring in, my life changed.

Jenny said that Hamid would have to go. We couldn’t have a parrot and a child in the same house—and how could I stand the damned bird gnawing my books and shitting on my furniture. And Jackson went too when Jenny discovered that he hid garbage in kitchen drawers; I hadn’t been able to break him of the habit. We hired Mwezi—her name meant moon—a bucktoothed woman who made scones and who longed for the baby to arrive. The house was cleaned, perhaps for the first time since I had moved in.

The bush-baby watched; it asked for nothing more. It came and went, and was no longer a portent. I had my own bush-baby now. I loved waking beside her, I eagerly left work and hurried home to her. My habits changed. I seldom went to the Staff Club. Jenny was the only person I needed. We went out together—eating, drinking; sometimes we went dancing. I bought presents for her—an ivory carving, a silver buckle from Zanzibar, some kitenge cloth. We took long trips to West Nile and Kitgum to visit my student listening groups. I became very calm.

And my novel came alive. It was about Yung Hok, the Chinese grocer—the only Chinese shopkeeper in the country, the ultimate minority, a single alien family. I had once seen him as vulnerable, but now that I was married I saw that he was strong and that he was part of a family—he had a wife and children I had not noticed before. He wasn’t a symbol of anything. He was himself, an unusual man. He was something new in my experience, and he made me see the country in a new way. This made him vivid, and so I was able to write about him. For my spirit and inspiration I silently thanked Jenny. I worked in the spare bedroom, delighted that Jenny was nearby. I had no reason to think about leaving Africa now. I was at last home.

At about this time I saw an item in the
Uganda Argus
entitled
AMERICAN WRITER DIES
. It was Jack Kerouac. He was forty-seven. Years ago he had seemed old to me. Now he seemed young—much too young to die. The item did not say how. I thought about him, and how I had read
On the Road
, and I could not remember whether I had liked it. I continued writing my own novel.

I always had lunch at home now. Mwezi usually cooked it, and after we had sent her away we made love in the afternoon and had a nap before I went back to work.

One of these afternoons, waking from the deep and sudden sleep produced by energetic sex, I looked across the pillow and saw Jenny turning away. She was murmuring, trying to stifle her sobs. The bush-baby appeared at the window—listening.

“What’s wrong?”

She said, “Everything!” and began to sob out loud.

“Please tell me,”

I said, horrified to see her so distraught.

“Isn’t it obvious?” It was not obvious to me.

She said, “I feel miserable.” Her crying was not dry breathless hysteria or panic; it was slow painful sobs like waves breaking.

What made this so awful was that I was so happy—until that moment. I had never been so happy: I had told her that many times. I told her again, and this time it made her scream.

“Of course you’re happy!” she said. Her face was wet, and the fact that she was naked made her crying seem worse. I could see misery in her whole body.

I got up and handed her my bathrobe, because I couldn’t bear to look.

She said, “You haven’t had to quit your job. You have work, you have money. I’ve given up everything—even my name. I never wanted this to happen. I have nothing to do.”