Читать книгу Always Another Country - Sisonke Msimang - Страница 13

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The odour of teeth

IN THE MIDDLE of 1981, just before my family left Lusaka to go to Nairobi, I experienced an unexpected violence on the quiet edge of a big yard.

The scene of the crime is 10 Kalungu Road and on the morning of the violence I am dropped off at the Sangweni house, as I am on most days. Mummy greets Aunty Angela with a wide smile and they discuss the pick-up plan. Aunty nods at Lindi and Dumi who are wolfing down their breakfasts and says, ‘These guys have sports after school today so I’ll go out and fetch them at about four-thirty but Praisegod will be here to look after Sonke.’

Mummy says it’s fine and tells Aunty that she will come by at five, five-thirty. She waves goodbye and I dig in for a second breakfast. Ten minutes later, as Lindi and Dumi pile into the back of Aunt Angela’s car, I hop onto Praisegod’s bike and he rides me to school. Praisegod is a dutiful servant. Compared to others, his life at Kalungu Road is easy. There is little need for protocol with the Sangwenis. Uncle Stan works for the United Nations as a fairly senior official, which means a lot in terms of stability and comfort. Mummy often says that, despite the perks and benefits that come with a UN job, Uncle Stan is completely without Airs and Graces. To which Baba always says, ‘That’s good because Aunt Angela would not know what to do with him if he suddenly developed them, given what a humble soul she is.’

◆ ◆ ◆

On the day in question, Praisegod whistles a joyful tune. As he works, clipping the hedges and sweeping the ground underneath the mulberry tree, he hums and chirps as though there is an assortment of birds in his voice box. He sounds like he is hiding an exotic and dying species in his throat. Maybe he is mimicking birds he kept in his youth.

This is not unusual. He is the best whistler I have ever heard – even to this day I have never met another person who had the gift Praisegod had. When he whistles is he imagining that he is flying? Is he imitating a bird that he heard in his youth? Is he even conscious of it or does the sound merely come out?

I never ask him these questions, which is a pity but not strange. It isn’t that I am not inquisitive. I have plenty of questions about worms and moths and neighbours and cars and the shape of the clouds. It simply doesn’t occur to me that he might have another life. In my mind, Praisegod exists for the sole purpose of tending to the garden. He would not breathe if there weren’t packages to be carried to and from the car. If it weren’t for me to take to school and keep company maybe Praisegod would turn into an overgrown statue standing in the middle of the garden.

Like all middle-class African children, I am accustomed to living with domestic workers. I know that they are always to be spoken to politely and respectfully. In our house we call women servants Aunty and, later, when we move to Kenya and there is an askari planted in front of our gate, we call him Brother Patrick because he is only a few years older than me.

Although Mummy and Baba tell us all the time that we should be respectful to servants – both in our home and in the homes of our friends – we understand that there are alternative ways of treating The Help and that, in other households, The Help are treated very badly indeed.

Sometimes when the grown-ups are talking in the sitting room we overhear things that are not meant for little ears. This usually happens when we are deliberately still, crouched in the flowerbeds underneath the big living room window. We hear things we should know nothing about: madams beating The Help until the vessels in their eyes burst; The Help that has to be carried out of the house by The Boy who has stood as a silent witness to the crimes of the madam. Our eyes widen as we hear about village girls sent home abruptly when the swelling of their tummies can no longer be ignored.

The Help are whispered about when children are around.

‘That child was only fifteen when she started working there, but you know how Malawian men are. They will marry a twelve-yearold if their mother tells them to.’

We giggle and make sick eyes when Aunty Pulane – one of Mummy’s closest friends, who has a sharp tongue and even sharper eyes – says, ‘No wonder that man has never spent a single night in his own bed. She caught him fondling the helper’s son.’ They invoke God’s name and somehow it is insufficient to say it in English.

‘Thixo!’ says Aunty Angela, invoking the deity herself. The rest shake their heads in knowing disbelief.

When certain visitors come over, it is hard to forget the things that have been said about them from the safety of the Kalungu Road settee.

The women’s responses – their rejection of the acts, but their tacit acceptance of the inevitability of this behaviour – make the abuses seem like a natural extension of men’s bodies. They never ask why men do the things they do. What some men will do is taken as a given. Instead, they are interested in why the child was not better protected. They want to know how the mother could not have foreseen that this would happen. They have unflinching common sense, so they are not concerned with the politics of blaming women. Instead, they want to know how to keep their girls safe. They are the kinds of mothers who don’t let their guards down for long enough to let their daughters get close to fire.

Though there is never any significant drama with our servants, the general rules of engagement for maids and madams are very clear. Middle-class men are allowed to do what they like to maids. They can lurch for breasts. They can get home early and lock all the doors so that no one knows what they are up to. Boys can bed the neighbours’ housegirls and learn how sex works, and they can deny the children that swell bellies after those liaisons. Servant women are given no such leeway. The most minor infraction – a slowness in standing up when the wife of the house comes in, or a long face when a request to borrow money is declined – can signal the beginning of suspicion, or worse, the end of patience.

This possibility of brutality, no matter how remote (and often it isn’t remote at all), keeps the domestic labour system in Africa running smoothly. Because of this, African servants are trustworthy and hard-working and generally mute on matters that do not concern them. There are those who pilfer and, yes, there are some who beat the children in their care. But these are relatively rare exceptions.

By and large, servants are loving and kind and reliable. This is not because the poor – who have no choice but to clean our homes and care for our babies – are better or humbler than the middle classes. It is because they have no choice. This is as true now as it was when I was a child. The exploited have much to lose, so they stay in line.

Praisegod, it turns out, is a rare and malevolent exception.

◆ ◆ ◆

Look at him. Watch him now as he fades into the trees, into the soil and the grass. He knows how not to be noticed. His skin is the colour of amnesia; his eyes have the dark-brown tint of forgetting. His features are nondescript. He is a man who looks down all day, sweeping and raking and planting. You can assign him whichever lips and nose you wish because you will soon forget them anyway. There is nothing about him that will make you think twice about his character or his intentions.

You will assume that he is here only to collect his wages and to excel, in his own private ways, in the menial tasks at hand. You tell yourself, as you look at his blunt face, that he finds some satisfaction in sweeping the driveway and stacking logs. Look carefully, for this is a young man. He is gentle with children and deferential with the father of the house. Barely out of his teens, he listens carefully to the instructions of the madam and inspires confidence because he so rarely meets her eye.

This everyman, this most lowly of African men, a mere uneducated servant, is broken. His soul had probably already been smashed by the time I was born. It must have happened when he was only just a boy. Maybe his father wounded him. Maybe his mother pummelled him. Maybe, because he was left-handed, they tried to drown him in a stream to see if the demon inside would come out. Maybe, on his first day of school, the letters began to swim before his eyes and, in fear and misery, he wet himself. And maybe, after the welts had risen on his buttocks from the caning, as he was running home to cry in his mother’s arms, maybe he was hit on the back of the head by a stone, and maybe he fell, then, and awoke alone and concussed.

And maybe after that, after the headaches and the vomiting had subsided and he was left only with the memory of not being safe, maybe from then – which may have been from as early as he could remember – maybe after all that, everything was too hard and too complicated and little girls like me, with our endless questions and beaming smiles, with our almond eyes and neat braids, with our impossible expectations, and our offerings of brimming cups, maybe we now make him remember the times before he was broken. For those who have never been consoled, remembering is an awful burden to bear. What better way to ease a load than to forget it was ever there? What better way to forget than to be a child again, to play the games that children play, to exist as an innocent, in the time before wounds and pain and memory?

I am speculating, of course. But I have the luxury to do so: I have been a resilient victim, far more capable of survival in the end than a poor, broken man who himself was a casualty – the victim of a stunted revolution. I am not being brave – only honest. What happened to me was a bad thing, for sure, but worse happens every day to people who are in no position to recover. I tell it to show that it is awful and also that it isn’t the end of the world.

◆ ◆ ◆

So let us go there. Let us begin with the minute when he says to me, ‘See?’ with all the gentleness of a mild summer day. ‘Come. Come see this.’ He is smiling as though he has a secret to tell, so I crouch down beside him and look at the grasshopper he has captured in his hands. I marvel. ‘Can I hold?’ I ask, fearless as ever. He has something else to show me, he says and so I follow, traipsing behind as he leads me towards his quarters.

This is ancient history now, but I can never tell it without wanting to stop the reel at this moment; without wanting to make myself turn around and walk away before I enter the cool, well-shaded room at the edge of the property. I want Aunty Angela to come out, wiping her hands on her apron, to say, ‘Sonke, let’s go and buy some bread at the French bakery,’ but it’s too late for that now.

I hesitate at the door: I have been warned many times before not to go inside his room, because nobody wants me badgering him and disturbing his privacy. The room is cool and dark and sparse.

His bed is narrow and neatly made up and the room smells like he does: old sweat and tobacco and something acrid and musty and strong.

I enter.

He sits on the bed and pats the space next to him so that we are seated side by side. My legs dangle loosely and I am not afraid. He moves quickly and is suddenly on top of me and then I am afraid. I am very afraid and there is fear in my bowels and drums in my blood and everything in me wants to live and die at once. But it is too late to decide which way it will go – life or death. It is too late and my powder-blue shorts are off and I am fighting to keep my panties on and he is trying to snatch them down and I am clenching so hard that he cannot roll them down any further and then he is ramming against me with his body and trying to prise my legs apart and then his breath is in my face and he is heavy and he smells so awful I want to cry and vomit at the same time and then he asks, ‘Is it nice?’

I say yes.

The ‘yes’ unlocks a door and he tenses up. He stops holding my arms so tightly and he just lies there. He is sticky and so am I. I am sore from where his fingers have gouged, and from where his penis has tried to enter me. He has not succeeded but he has hurt me.

I am hurt.

I lie underneath him and he is hot and he smells awful and tears leak from the corners of my eyes. Then he sits up and buttons his trousers. He does not look at me. I get down from the bed and put my shorts back on and I do not look at him either. I move away from the bed and stand a few feet away, next to the door, waiting as he finds his own feet. Then he takes my hand and we walk, as we have walked many times before, hand in hand. We walk into the bright blinking day and I am not crying. I let go of his hand somewhere in the garden and I pick my way across fallen mulberries and papayas. I slip quietly into the house and then, once I am there, in the cool of the kitchen, away from the garden and the over-lush smell of ripening fruit, once I am leaning forward at the sink and drinking a glass of water, I make up my mind about what has just happened. I solemnly swear that he will never touch me again. I do not even cry, because I just know, in myself, exactly what I need to do to be safe.

◆ ◆ ◆

Afterwards 10 Kalungu Road no longer feels like home. Mummy still drops me there before school and I continue to stay after, but now I cross the veranda quickly and never stay in the back yard. In the afternoons I am Dumi’s shadow. I stick to him and Cousin George, even when they are being mean and telling me they have boys’ things to do. When Lindi is home, I glue myself to her side and I don’t even care when her friends call me the tape recorder and shush each other when I appear at her bedroom door. ‘You know she’s just gonna run and tell the grown-ups what we’re saying,’ they snicker. It doesn’t bother me one little bit. I am a hard little ball inside and my mission is simple, clean, crisp. I will be fine, as long as I avoid the garden.

A couple of days after the incident, Aunty asks Praisegod to ride me to school on his bike – as he has many times before. ‘No,’ I say, interrupting her instructions to him.

‘Why not, Sonke? I have to go into town today. It will make everything much easier, big girl.’ No. I begin to cry. It is the first of many times that I will break my crying rule in the long months that follow.

A few times, when Aunty Angela needs to go to the shops, she suggests that I stay behind because ‘Praisegod is here.’ I refuse. I join her, each and every time, and soon she doesn’t bother asking. She simply says, ‘Come dear, I need to quickly run to the bakery.’

While my confidence grows with each new act of rebellion, it doesn’t occur to me to tell anyone about what Praisegod has done to me. Not for one minute do I even consider this. Not as I straighten myself up and walk into the house. Not as Aunty Angela says, ‘Where were you?’ Not when Mummy comes to fetch me. Not when I am in the back seat looking out of the window as we drive home with my babbling sisters putting their jammy fingers all over me. Not even on that day when they try desperately to put me on the handlebars of the bike so that he can ride me to school. Not as I squirm and kick and finally manage to break loose and run up the tree that stands over the gate.

Telling would put everyone in the unbearable position of having to do something about it.

‘Why did you go there when we have told you not to so many times?’

‘What happened?’

They will ask this with panic squawking through their voices.

And in the telling of the tale, when I respond, I will not know how to explain the quietness of the room and the awful betrayal of my lungs which never once gave me breath enough to howl.

Telling someone, telling anyone, will be the same as telling them all and it will box me for them. It will make me an outsider, a child who trails whispers and who will grow up and be followed by the lingering scent of ‘Why?’ If I tell them they will soothe me and hold my hand and tell me it will all be fine, but I will be marked. From then on, they will wonder, quietly and perhaps in my presence. They will ask why I never screamed. I will still be their child but I will be altered – damaged and no longer innocent. They will no longer be able to say of me, ‘Oh, that one never bothers anybody.’ I will be troubled.

◆ ◆ ◆

A few months after the incident, Mummy and Baba tell us that we are moving. We are going to Kenya because Baba has a new job working for one of the agencies of the United Nations, just like Uncle Stan. This news is no surprise. For weeks Mummy and Baba have been sitting together at the kitchen table, talking late into the night, discussing Something Important.

I am floored when Mummy says that they aren’t taking me with them. I will have to stay in Lusaka for three weeks after they have left so that I can complete the school term here, while they set everything up in Nairobi. Baba’s contract begins a month before the school term ends, so Mummy explains that it makes the most sense for them to leave me here.

She announces it very matter-of-factly. ‘We will drive to Nairobi, and you will stay here. Baba will use the ticket the UN has given him to fly back to Lusaka to get you at the end of term. Then the two of you will fly back together.’ I start to cry, and Mummy doesn’t fully understand why. ‘You love that house, Sonke. You’ll be with Lindi and Aunty and Uncle and Gogo Lindi will come and see you every day if you want. I’ll ask her myself.’

I am mortified and petrified and resolute in my opposition to the plan. I am not opposed to moving to Kenya but I am dead set against sleeping in that house.

◆ ◆ ◆

On the day of the big departure, we drive over to the Sangwenis’ house in the fully loaded car. The adults talk for a while and drink tea to delay the inevitable. After some time, Baba and Mummy exchange looks. He stretches on the couch, a long languorous unfolding of his limbs, which signals to Uncle Stan that the time has come.

Uncle clears his throat and marks the occasion – as is his wont – by giving a speech. With his combed-back thicket of hair that is delicately greying, and his professorial maroon-and-green argyle cardigan, Uncle Stan is nothing if not solemn. Even when he is angry – which is rare – he speaks slowly and carefully. He is not a man prone to outbursts. And so it is that when he draws himself up to his full height to deliver a farewell sermon, he imbues today’s departure with an air of serious quietude.

He talks firstly about where we come from. He speaks of Humble Beginnings and Man’s Capacity to Triumph Over Adversity. These are phrases he uses often, especially when he refers to Masondale – the village in the Natal Midlands where he and Baba were raised.

He takes the opportunity to remind us that the architects of apartheid did not intend for Masondale to ‘produce men of courage and conviction and dignity. And yet all our stock is like this. We are sprung from the loins of people who have never allowed themselves to be conquered.’

As he speaks, he uses Baba’s home name, the name that he grew up with. In exile, Baba has assumed a new name: Walter, which was his father’s Christian name. He shed Matthew, the one given to him at birth, when he crossed into Francistown in 1962.

Uncle Stan continues, speaking slowly and with great deliberation. ‘We are descended from people who are noble both in word and in deed. Matthew, Ntombi, girls – travel well on this new journey. Make us proud.’

Then it is hugs and kisses and waves and smiles, and everyone is saying how brave I am to not even be crying and the car is pulling out of the driveway and onto Kalungu Road. Aunty Angela takes my hand and we turn to walk back to the house.

I cross the veranda and go to the sink in the kitchen to get a glass of water. I look out and see Praisegod sweeping under the mango trees in the back garden and suddenly I feel, in the most intense way possible, that I am only seven years old and it feels like too small a number in the face of so big a task and so I drop the glass and find myself running.

There isn’t really anywhere to go, so I dive under the dining room table and I start to wail. I lock myself behind the sturdy legs of the chairs and grip the chunky wooden knees of the table as though my life depends on it. Aunty Angela – bless her – thinks that I am embarrassed that I broke the glass. Correcting her would be too difficult. It would raise too many other questions and so I don’t.

Instead, I sniffle and look out at her through the wooden bars, my limbs indistinguishable from those of my mahogany refuge. ‘It’s okay, Sonke,’ she says, coaxing me to come out. I can only heave; words may hurt, but the sobs offer release.

After some time Aunty pads away and goes to the bedroom. I sit under the table no longer weeping. I can still hear him sweeping outside. Then that, too, stops and all I can hear is the distant sound of a manservant whistling.

◆ ◆ ◆

In the three weeks that pass between their departure and Baba’s return, I do not utter a single word to Praisegod, and nobody notices. The initial battles I fought to prevent him from taking me to school have been won so there is no need for me to restate my position. Aunty takes me to school, and Praisegod stays well away.

I survive the weeks by playing on the streets and staying out of the yard in this place that is no longer really my home. At night I think about his breath. I hear myself say yes and blood warms my face. The softly grunting tangled and dirty man who, on that day, was not the Praisegod I had come to know is never far from my thoughts.

Then it is over. Baba comes back and we drive to the airport and I am sitting on a plane next to him and Kalungu Road is on the ground and we are up in the sky and the clouds are beneath us and Praisegod is getting further and further away. I am moving at what feels like faster than the speed of light and underneath us Zambia has disappeared and instead it is the Serengeti and within it are thousands of acacia trees and scores of brown rivers, and wildebeest and elephants and ostriches, none of which I can see but all of which are in a picture book on my lap. My eyes and my mouth are a triad of awestruck Os and I have finally allowed myself not to think about the fear in my belly. I am all imagination now and Praisegod is far, far away.

When she sees me at the airport Mummy hugs me longer and harder than she ever has before. She tilts my face towards her and says, ‘Ha! No scrapes on your knees?’ I shake my head, grinning and trying not to cry. ‘Nothing?’ She inspects my arms and my legs and for a minute I wonder if she knows and I secretly hope that she does so she can march back to Lusaka and Crush His Skull, the way Baba always threatens to do to other drivers when they block him in traffic. But the moment passes and instead she says with a wistful smile, ‘Well, then you must be growing up, my girl!’

In Nairobi there is no Praisegod and no back garden, only a maisonette on Ngong Road. This is just at the turn-off to State House, which means that every day motorbikes and police cars wail past us, with the president somewhere in the middle and a body double pretending to be him in another car right in front of him or right behind him or, who knows, perhaps sitting right next to him prepared to be sacrificed in the event of an assassination attempt. I am trying to say that I am in this new place where I can breathe again. I am in this new place where, this time, I will know better than to trust a man who whistles like a bird and whispers like a friend.

I fold away the stink of his fingers and the odour of his tobaccostained teeth. In time I will force myself to forget his face; its contours will shadow. His body will not be so easy to displace but I will teach myself that I was strong and I will remind myself of all the ways I fought him and made myself live. And my memories will be rich and they will be bigger than him. They will click in my head like a showreel and make me everything that I am. They will tell me the legacy of my childhood is so much bigger than anything one man could undo.

Mummy puts purple iodine on my knees and kisses me before bed.

The German Girlfriend tells me not to trust The System.

Dr Kenneth Kaunda believes in us all.

Copper is the colour of the mud after it rains.

I pin a tag on which Baba has written ‘Danaus chrysippus’ onto his pinboard and the powder from the butterfly’s wing smudges on my thumb.

Even in my frightened silence I believe in the strength of my own bones. I believe in the tough sinew that keeps my legs moving. I have faith in the muscles of my arms that pull me up and swing me over. I trust in my pumping heart and in the sturdiness of my ribcage. Through those weeks that turn into months that become years of what you might want to call silence, I speak to myself. I tell myself the truth, which is that he is wrong and everything about me is right. I believe in my bones because I have others who believe in them too.

Today, across the yellowing decades, I remember the tobacco on his tongue and the marijuana seeds under his nails; and beneath them I can still taste his sweat. I still feel the weight of his dead dreams some days when I wake up, and this is fine. What matters most is that – like Scheherazade – I said yes so that I could live.