Читать книгу The Book Keeper - Julia McKenzie Munemo - Страница 12

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THE FIRST TIME I saw Ngoni, I was eating lunch in the Bard College cafeteria. I looked up from my soup and there he was across the room, a point of stillness in the surrounding mêlée. Framed by the cafeteria’s wide-open doorway, he didn’t move while people pushed their way by and around him. His face was filled with uncertainty and confusion and confidence despite being out of place. He wore a round, flat-topped felt hat that didn’t cover his ears and a tan cotton jacket with a pattern that, from a distance, looked like a map of the world. His lavender pants didn’t reach his ankles, and I worried what was protecting him from the upstate New York winter that raged out the window behind me.

Looking at him made me shy, embarrassed, so I turned back to my soup. As I did, I thought I felt an invitation in the crinkling near his temples. A light behind the trim wire-rim glasses on his face. Picking up my spoon, I chided myself. He didn’t smile at me. He can’t see anyone particular in this sea of white faces.

The next day I rushed into the cafeteria for a quick lunch between classes. A South African student I hardly knew ushered me to a table and introduced me to the man I would marry. He told me his name but I couldn’t hear it, he named his country but I couldn’t place it. He made a joke but I couldn’t follow it. I just looked into his soft brown eyes and smiled. When I walked away, my whole body vibrated.

In my bed that night, I turned off the light and closed my eyes and saw his profile as if in silhouette—the curve of his chin and lips, the round of his nose, the tall forehead and the spot where it met his hairline. I followed that line in my memory, tracing it to the tidy crush of curls on the top of his head. I still didn’t know his name.

I opened my eyes some hours later into a darkness I couldn’t change. I was too surprised by the contents of my dream to find the light switch. This dream had recurred throughout my childhood, but I hadn’t had it in years. Its premise was always the same—my father is really alive—but the circumstances changed every time. In this one, we were speaking on the phone. He said he was living in New York, writing under a pseudonym. When he named it, I recognized the author—a literary hero I’d been reading for class—my God! That’s really you?

But eyes open in the dark, the name was smoke.

SATURDAY NIGHT, THE first party of the semester over. Ngoni accepted an invitation to the local diner. Liz—my closest companion since our first day on campus—drove us over the bridge and across the Hudson, started interviewing him from our side of the booth. I sat across from him, really seeing him now that I could be still and watch. His eyes were set wide apart in a face shaped like an owl’s. His nose was broad and—I noticed when he removed his glasses and wiped his hands across his eyes—marked on either side by dark spots where those trim wirerims rested. He didn’t smile much, and when he did I couldn’t tell if it was because he thought something was funny or because he was tired of the talk, thinking of ways to escape.

“Do you have any siblings?” Liz asked.

“A sister.”

“Older or younger?”

“Younger.”

“What do your parents do?”

“My father passed when I was sixteen.”

“I’m so sorry,” I interjected. Our eyes met for a moment. My dad is dead, too, I wanted to say. I wanted to take his hand.

Liz again, though not unkindly, “And your mother?”

A pause. “My mother’s not around.”

Too personal too fast. I changed the subject, asked for the bill, got us out of there. Back on campus, we left Liz at her room, found our own spot in the lounge down the hall.

I asked only the safest questions.

“What will you do after this year?” was one.

“I want to attend graduate school to study colonialism,” he said, as though this were perfectly obvious. I had to stop myself from asking why a young black intellectual from Africa would want to study the first thirteen colonies of the United States, my only definition of colonialism.

“The best programs are in the U.K. and the States,” he said.

It was a physical jolt, my relief that he might return.

At some point I took his hand, led him back to my room. We talked late into the night. We started, then, to draw the lines of similarity, the lost fathers, the ties that would bind. The bright fluorescent hallway lights were sharp in my eyes when he opened the door to leave. I leaned in and kissed his cheek. He says now that’s when he knew.

When he was gone, I slipped into the bathroom that separated my room from Liz’s and took down the small laminated U.S. map she’d tacked up on the wall, flipped it over to see the other side, on which was drawn the world. I put my finger on Africa and quickly found Zaire—I’d written a report about it in sixth grade, and its familiar shape marked the only country I recognized on that continent. I searched all around and then drew my finger south before landing on a country shaped like the head of a rhinoceros. Zimbabwe. Landlocked, with a river following its northwestern border, Botswana and South Africa along the southern one, Mozambique curled around it to the east. I hung the map back on the wall, leaving the world side showing, and held my finger on Zimbabwe awhile, tracing the rhinoceros horn and thinking about Ngoni’s place on the planet—a place I knew nothing about.

WITHIN A COUPLE of weeks, Ngoni and I had established the routines of college lovers. We knew the times and locations of each other’s classes, knew which nights were best for sleepovers, didn’t have to ask about when we would eat dinner, where we would sit at breakfast.

One night he told a story to the ceiling as we lay side by side on the futon I’d dragged from home to replace the narrow dorm-room bed. “My father was mentally ill,” he said. “But in Zimbabwe, we don’t think illness comes from nowhere. We believe there’s been a possession.”

I conjugated the word and realized a beat too late that he meant a spirit had possessed his father. I thought of Poltergeist and snow on a TV screen, had no frame of reference for what he meant. He was describing a culture so unlike my own, a place where even mental illness had a different name, a different definition. A world I was sure I would never understand without my own handles to hold it by. A world without the guideposts I’d grown up requiring.

There’s been a possession.

* * *

IT’S JANUARY OF 1980 and I’m five and a half years old and my father is just dead. The house on State Street is full of love and fear and confusion and lasagna. I stand in the dining room loud with people, looking for my mom. My hand rests on the warm haunches of our loyal black Lab, Shandy. She hasn’t gone on a run in a while. Her haunches are getting thick.

The light in the room comes from a large paper globe that hangs over the dining room table, which itself is round and has lion claws for feet that scare my toes when I eat. We haven’t sat at that table since Dad left for the loony bin. I consider crawling under it now to hide from all these people—maybe Mom would look for me then?—but the lion claw feet.

I need Mom because I have a question in my heart that I don’t know how to ask and I think maybe with all these people around I’ll be brave enough to speak. Why hasn’t Dad’s picture been in the corner of the screen when Channel 3 Eyewitness News is on in the mornings yet, the way other dead people’s pictures are in the corner of the screen? When are they going to come on the TV and explain why he’s dead? Because I would really like to know.

I’ve been watching the news every morning since he died, crawling up onto the stool at the long kitchen counter across from Mom and her thick black coffee, no toast. “Tea and toast?” she asks me, and I nod. But my throat hurts when people talk to me these days, so I just turn and watch the TV that sits on the counter and wait for Dad’s picture to appear.

But right now there are all these people who knew him and Mom is nowhere and I’m not sure where to look for her and I’m afraid that if I take my hand off Shandy’s back I’ll lose my balance and fall through the holes I have just learned are all over this house. There are so many dark corners.

Behind me is the living room with the red couch Dad napped on, and my older sister and brother are sitting there with plates of food on their laps and grown-up hands on their shoulders. At least that’s what I think they’re doing, but I haven’t been able to look at them the last few days because I don’t recognize their eyes anymore and I can’t tell if they know how to talk. I don’t want to talk.

In front of me is the kitchen with cooking aunts, and the knees of one of the aunts look just like Mom’s knees, and I’m scared if I see them I won’t be able to stop myself from hugging that knee, and what if it’s the wrong knee? So I just stay in the dining room. I just stay between.

Then someone says my name, and I look up and swallow, and the giant paper globe light is blocked out by a man’s bald head. It comes down to my level before he speaks.

“When will I see your first novel, Jules?” the man asks. “You’re always watching everything. You’re sure to become a writer, just like your dad.”