Gravel Heart(61)
‘No, no, they’re not,’ I lied.
‘I’ll spray,’ he said. ‘Let’s go out for a bit of air.’
He got up and closed the window, and told me to wait outside while he sprayed the room. Afterwards we went for a walk to let the poison work. The street lights were on and a handful of shops were still open, the ones that stocked meagre groceries for the poor, stale bread and tinned fish and condensed milk. We walked up one side of the road and down the other, stepping over rubbish and round the folded-up furniture of the street-sellers. Someone was lying curled up in a doorway, a shadowy lump covered with a mat, and as we walked past he said my father’s name. He was the watchman for the line of shops and the trestles and derelict trolleys of the traders. It was a self-appointed task and in return he had somewhere to sleep and the shopkeepers gave him a few pennies for breakfast when they opened up. We leapt over a muddy culvert and crossed the empty road and were soon back in Baba’s room. I sat on a mat on the floor, leaning against the wall, waiting for Baba to resume his tale.
*
It was just before my mother and sisters left that I went to work for the Water Authority, just a few months after I finished school. It was the era of national sacrifice. The United States and its friends had their Peace Corps and VSO and Dan Aid and other volunteer programmes, the Soviets and the Cubans had their Young Pioneers marching in uniform and preparing to serve the party and the nation, and many newly independent African states created national volunteer service schemes to promote an ethos of discipline and service. The volunteer aspect of the scheme that I and my generation experienced was a wordy metaphor, which lent dignity to the enterprise. It was compulsory volunteer national service and this was how it worked for us.
The government assigned all school-leavers a job for minimal pay, mostly as assistant teachers in country primary schools to fill the posts taken away from senior teachers like my father. Once the Ministry of Education had taken its quota, the rest of the school-leavers were distributed elsewhere, to government offices in town, or to the army if they were thought politically reliable and physically fit, or for further training if they were lucky and well connected. I got lucky because one of my friends, Yusuf, the one I sometimes played coram with in the Youth League games room, had a father who was powerful enough to have our names removed from the Ministry of Education list. It was a simple matter. Yusuf mentioned it to his father, who arranged things in one brief conversation on the phone. Yusuf went to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where his father worked and where he himself intended to make a career, and I was sent to the Water Authority, not so glamorous perhaps, but not very far from where we lived.
Nowhere was very far from anywhere in that town, at least not at that time before it sprawled into the countryside, yet after every two streets the area had a different name and insisted on using it. It was pointless pedantry, like poetry, a delight in complexity, a relish for detail, a stubborn refusal to forget what was known. The precise naming had no practical use since no one could get lost in that town, at least not the people who lived in it or not for long. Visitors would know only a few of the names, and most of the time would not know where they were in the perplexing maze of lanes, and anyway, most of the names did not appear on any street signs and no one ever used a map. It was only a small town, and if you did not know where you were, you just walked on until you did, or if you did not mind looking foolish, you asked.
Working in a government office meant that I wore a clean shirt every day and did not have to take it off because my work made me sweat bare-chested in the sun. I did not have to wait on the caprice of a contractor or put up with shouted commands while passers-by laughed at me. I did not have to wait patiently at the end of each day to be paid for my work and to learn if I would be required for the next. I sat at a desk not far from an open window letting in the breeze from the sea. When the tide was out in the heat of the day the air also brought in the odours of the filthy creek across the road from our office, and sometimes the smell of garbage from the landfill a little further up the road towards Saateni, and sometimes other, less identifiable smells, which made me think of wood-smoke and burnt hide. When the tide was in, the sun glittered on the water and illuminated the ceiling of our gloomy office with its rippling reflections, and a cool sea breeze blew in over the water.
The building was known to be the place where a famous Scottish traveller from a small town called Blantyre (population 9,000 in 1881) had lived for several months while he gathered himself for a journey to bara and the deep interior, where he hoped to find souls in need of succour as well as the source of an ancient river, the discovery of which would bring him everlasting fame. It was a conceit of the time that the existence of anything, a river, a lake, a mountain or a beast, could not be assured unless a European person had seen it and wherever possible named it. The river that the Scottish traveller was there in that house preparing to seek already had a name of great antiquity but did not have a source verified by a European. When the tide was in and the breeze blew over the glittering water, I imagined the Scottish traveller sitting by the window, glancing towards the small blue mosque across the road or looking over to where the creek opened out to sea, and dreaming of home and salvation. I could not imagine the traveller’s thoughts when the stench overpowered the air but I suspected they would dwell on his unworthiness for the fate he had selected for himself. It was that kind of stench.
Our office was probably like many other government offices at that time, staffed by recent school-leavers without much knowledge and with not much to do, who were respectful and fearful of authority. Everyone was fearful of authority because in recent times we had seen how stern it could be, especially with those it suspected of being reluctant in their submission to it. Authority relished its fearsome reputation and thrived on it. It went about its ugly business as if no one could see what was happening, or remember who was doing it or why.