Читать книгу The Book Keeper - Julia McKenzie Munemo - Страница 22

12

WE’VE PLAYED IN this scene before. Hot sun hit winter skin in the airport parking lot. Tendai talked and talked as she drove us to the house. The city, the suburbs, rushing past us in a blur. The gate on Marlborough Drive, the toot of the car horn, the clatter and clink of Gogo’s bracelets. Julius, swept into her embrace, was the only new piece. It was November 2003, and he would be one in a month. We were in Zimbabwe to stay this time. Six months, a year? As long as it would take for Ngoni to finish the research for his dissertation into Zimbabwe’s responses to drought in the previous decades. I had a few freelance projects in my bag to bring in some money to supplement his grants. I listened to Gogo’s loud laughter, I looked for Sekuru in the shadows.

When I stepped into the cottage we’d stayed in before, I realized I was looking at it with new eyes. I was a mother now. I saw things I hadn’t seen the first time. I toured the small kitchen, opening windows as I went to create a cross-breeze and cool the baby down. I walked into the bathroom and looked at the water heater strapped to the ceiling above the tub and wondered how safely it was hitched up there, if it might fall on my son in the bath. What other dangers had I been oblivious to before he was born? What other aspects of this place, of this life, was I only awake to now?

In the bedroom, I pulled back the curtains above the headboard to let in the breeze and settled Julius into the king-sized bed for his nap. Decided I needed to lie down for a while, too, so I settled my own body around his. No one expected me to sleep away from him here, and I couldn’t sleep away from him because since he was born something had shifted and I needed to always be near him. My new tiny family filled an emptiness I’d carried my whole life and quieted the fears in my head and opened up places in me I thought had died with my dad. When we were all three together in a bed I didn’t feel his ghost, could focus just on what was in arm’s reach, just on what was real. Right now what was real was me and my boy in a bed in Harare, Zimbabwe, across the world from everything I knew.

Some hours later Ngoni came in and said we should unpack. Time to wake the baby and start getting used to the time change. My eyes were foggy, but I thought I saw something on the floor. I squinted to focus, and there, in a room in which food had never been served, were hundreds, maybe thousands of small, red ants. All over the spot on the floor where I would put my feet if I were getting out of bed. Right in the place where I would put Julius down, urging him to walk on his own, after his nap. Right in between the bed and the wardrobe, where I would stand if I were getting dressed in here. Blending into the dirty carpet, which was once beige, I almost didn’t see them, but all of my verbs were now subjunctive and I wanted to run away. The carpet was moving.

I called to Ngoni who had gone to get our bags. “I don’t remember these from last time,” I said, trying to keep my voice calm. My mother’s eyes quiet. “If we stay here, we’ll need to do something about them.”

“These aren’t the kind that bite,” he said, frustration hardening his brow.

Apparently I should have known that, and apparently their biting was all that should trouble me about ants. I was not allowed to be worried about this thing at this time. I was weak, and American. So I squared my shoulders and slid on my sandals and unpacked, treading over ants each time I moved from the bed, where my suitcase lay open and exposed, to the dresser, where Ngoni put newspaper down on each shelf so that our clothes didn’t touch the wardrobe’s wood. And I’m the American?

By morning, Ngoni had dug out the lavender-oil bug spray he teased me for buying four bottles of before we left New York. Maybe the long night’s sleep had softened him to my worries, or maybe the ants had started to bother him, too. I held Julius on the bed and watched as Ngoni sprayed the oil all over the carpet and swept up piles and piles of ants as they ran away from the smell, which didn’t kill them but did repel them—for as long as it lasted. Later we learned that scouring powder repelled and killed them, so the next scene involved white powder all over the floor, and more piles of ants being swept up by my tired husband, who was now muttering about newspaper apartment listings.

As we whispered plans in bed that night, I almost didn’t notice that Ngoni had leaned one of Sekuru’s old golf clubs against the wall next to his side of the bed. I made myself not ask about it, and doted instead on the sleeping baby between us, grateful again that there was no crib. I was exhausted, and even my worries started to shift into dream. When I woke up, it was very dark and I heard a dog barking. I couldn’t tell how close, or if it was the dog that lived there. I could see that Ngoni’s eyes were open, too, and I put out my hand to feel Julius’s body, still soundly asleep. Did something need to happen, were we worried? But Ngoni rested his hand on my hair and like a child I was soothed back to sleep, letting him worry if worrying was necessary. I drifted back into dreams, listening to the dogs.

* * *

IT’S 1978 and Dad has just pulled into the driveway after his trip to the sesshin. I’m tucked into the corner of the faded white wing chair in the living room, rubbing my fingers up and down the red piping on the chair seams, worn and shabby. I look through the dining room and its heavy round table with lion’s claw feet. I see past the large paper globe over the table, the Persian rug underneath, the tall wooden cabinet with glasses that clink when we run crashing through, that clink when he just walks. I see into the kitchen and he is, at first, just a shape passing by the window. Thumb in my mouth, eyes on kitchen shadows. I wait for the squeak of the door on its hinges, and as soon as I hear it he’s inside. He doesn’t call out right away, like usual. He doesn’t hang up his coat but just stands there, like he’s wondering if this place looks different to him now.

Then he’s walking toward me. Can I see the difference in his stride, or have I inserted it? Do I burrow deeper into the folds of fabric? What happens next?

* * *

SOME DAYS LATER I poured boiled water from the teapot into a thick plastic container that I set on top of the fridge to cool. Inside the fridge were six of these thick plastic water bottles, white and canteen-shaped, with a short bottleneck. Also a loaf of bread, a fat chunk of margarine, a package of bright pink sausages called Vienna dogs that when sliced into revealed regular hot dogs under the colorful casing, and five eggs resting on a plate. Everyone told me you didn’t need to refrigerate the eggs in Zimbabwe, but old habits et cetera, and it wasn’t as though they were taking up precious space.

I reached into the cabinet for the peanut butter, remembered I’d forgotten to buy jelly, and realized we were out of milk. I glanced at Ngoni and Julius reading on the couch as I went out the door, headed to the big house with an empty cup in my hand to borrow some. The walk took about three seconds. About as far away from the house, but in the other direction, was another, slightly smaller cottage. If the yard were a face, the cottages would be the uneven eyes, the big house would be the nose, and the broken, empty pool would be the not-smiling mouth. The back porches of each house all faced each other in a sort of courtyard; the centerpiece was the banana tree. Ngoni’s uncle Dakarai had lived in the smaller cottage since 1995, when he returned from Wales, after his marriage dissolved. He didn’t come out much, and I’d hardly seen him since we arrived.

On my way across the yard I saw the household dog run out of the big house. Close behind her was Dakarai, about thirty pounds lighter than last time we were here, throwing his shoe at the dog and shouting “Fucking asshole.” There wasn’t a lot of swearing at this house—the God channel on the television served as a constant reminder. As I walked toward Dakarai from the porch I remarked that I too found this dog annoying. She was too eager to be petted, too slobbery with her licking, and, I’d heard, had a habit of sleeping through break-ins.

Dakarai repeated that the dog was a fucking asshole and, as we passed one another in the wide doorway, he shoved his body against mine, knocking me into the doorframe before rushing back to his cottage. It could have looked like an accident, it could have been an accident, but I saw his wide-open eyes as he neared me, I saw him measure the space between us before his shoulder and hip hit mine. All of my muscles squeezed together as I ran in for the milk and raced back to my cottage quick as I could. The fact was, I was fine. Nothing happened. It could have been an accident. I kept repeating this to myself as I finished making lunch, which I did in a hurry, my eyes darting around the room. Should I tell Ngoni what had happened, or was I being ridiculous? Would Dakarai storm into our cottage in a rage, or had I made the entire thing up?

When I could quiet myself, I saw Ngoni clearly. He sat with Julius on the floor with a puzzle. He was calm and quiet, maybe quieter than usual. When he looked up at me standing in the doorframe with plates of peanut butter sandwiches in my hand, there were circles under his eyes. He looked as though he had become suddenly exhausted. But I also saw resolve set into his forehead. Ngoni, I realized, knew that Dakarai was having a bad day. He knew what that looked like and was readying himself to wait it out.

He stood up and motioned me outside, persuading me that eating inside, no matter how much more private, was intolerable with the heat and the ants. I wondered, though, if he just felt better with Dakarai in his sight line. As we ate our sandwiches, Ngoni and I tried to talk and play with the baby. It was hard to ignore, though, Dakarai straddling the back of a wooden chair on the porch of the big house, smoking as he glared at us. I wondered if we reminded him of what his life could have been with Cati, if it was my race that brought about this episode. If he’d have been fine if I’d never come. I thought about my father then, and if he would have been fine, too, if I’d never come. If everything was moving along just great in his family before I was born. I tried to picture Dad’s episodes, plaster this scene in Harare onto a map of State Street to see if they fit. Did my father ever shove someone into a doorframe? Did any of his cousins who struggled with mental illness ever shove someone into a doorframe? And what about here in this family I was now entering? Did Ngoni’s father ever shove someone into a doorframe? If this is what madness looks like, will we recognize it if it comes again?

A few hours after lunch, Ngoni went to check on Gogo. He knew she suffered during Dakarai’s episodes. And because it was quiet now, because I didn’t expect to see Dakarai at the big house, I squared Julius on my hip and we walked over, too.

But the kitchen was empty, which was weird. There was normally at least one woman—sometimes a maid, more often Ngoni’s grandmother—in there preparing dinner by that time of day. We walked through the small dining room and no one sat at the table. I took a breath, looked Julius in the eye and smiled, and walked through the doorway into the dark living room, committed now to being there even with these warning signs that something was off. The forest-green couches, the brown carpet, the heavy wood tables all resisted the glare of the sun at the windows. There was a large cross hanging over the doorway I was standing under now, and I thought of it as mistletoe. I wanted it to protect me, or anoint me, or bring me a happy surprise.

Two nephews of Ngoni’s grandparents—college kids living here while they went to school—were watching a soap opera on the TV under the window. They sat in front of it on the floor like children, awkward smiles on their faces. It took me a moment to see that they were shell shocked. That these boys had seen something I hadn’t, and were scared. They watched this show because they needed to laugh. They needed to look at characters on a screen. When Ngoni headed into the back of the house to find Gogo, I didn’t follow. Though I’d been let into the back bedroom several times by then, it was still a place with boundaries, a place I knew only to enter if invited.

Julius and I stood behind the kids on the carpet and kept our attention on the stupid show on the TV. We were all laughing when Dakarai walked in.