Читать книгу Double Men: A Short Story from the collection, Reader, I Married Him - Namwali Serpell - Страница 7

DOUBLE MEN

NAMWALI SERPELL

A FRIENDSHIP THAT FAILS to negotiate dogs and chickens is doomed to wither, even a friendship that has weathered decades of hardship and tedium. Mama Lota and Nanjela had raised children together; performed birth and death rites in tandem; carried loads, light and heavy, as one. Now that there were no men left in their households, they depended on each other, hooked their everydays, the tasks of tending to body and home. In a small field, they grew enough greens, beans, potatoes, cassava, yams, groundnuts and maize to feed themselves, and kept the surplus in Mama Lota’s storehouse. They gave the damaged but edible leftovers to widows even less fortunate than they.

Mama Lota bought the dogs because the storehouse had been robbed again. This time, she’d caught them in the act. She’d burst through the door with furious shouts, her chitenge haphazard, her barely-there hair uncovered, light spoking erratically from the lantern she held aloft. The boys fled, crawling from her hailstorm, except for one boy who, Mama Lota speculated later to Nanjela, must have been raised by a bitter woman who beat him too hard and too often. His lackeys scurried pitiably around him but this boy alone stood, lengthening up like a thread of smoke, his fist wrapped around a stone Mama Lota had thrown. He spat and threw it back. It struck her above her left eye, knocked her over, knocked her out and turned her eyebrow into a red smear that healed later into a purple cross, which everyone said made sense since her husband, long deceased, had been a pastor.

Those thieving boys had broken in through the one small window in the storehouse across from the locked entrance. When Mama Lota toppled across the threshold, they ran away through the door she’d burst through, ran right over her body, their pockets and hands full of all they planned to sell. And just for the sake of it, they stole the lantern that had tumbled from her hand.

This was why Mama Lota had sent her nephew to purchase the Doberman Pinschers. Not because of the stolen food, nor the requited stone, nor even the wound it had opened. It was this pettiness of taking her lamp, which her husband had received as a boy from a muzungu hunter he’d fetched game for, and which he had polished every night of their marriage, whistling pleasantly through the gap in his front teeth. Mama Lota liked to remember him this way: nearby, his mouth and hands occupied. And now the glass and metal thing that reminded her of a lost person – it, too, was gone.

“They can’t even use it,” Mama Lota complained in her high, soft voice as she poured Nanjela a cup of tea a few days later. “Where will they find the paraffin?”

“Heysh, these boys,” Nanjela replied in a trembly baritone, glancing at the bandage over her friend’s eye.

They were in Mama Lota’s kitchen, sitting on a pair of rickety chairs inherited from the church when Pastor Chisongo died. The women watched the steam untangle above their teacups, shaking their heads at the old, familiar nightmare: able-bodied males with nothing to lose.

A ferocious noise scraped through the window – a snarling, snatching sound. Nanjela started. The dogs were quarrelling. “But is it good to have these … doublemen around?” She shuddered. “They’re like demons.”