Gravel Heart(63)

The house was rented but since it was now illegal to be a landlord, the owner was too frightened to ask for rent. Officially the house belonged to the government, but with so many houses confiscated in this way, the government office that dealt with gazetted property – that was the coy phrase for the plunder – was still catching up with the administration and had not yet got round to billing sitting tenants. If the house had been a mansion by the sea it would have been a different story, and one of the swaggerers would have had it without delay, but since it was only a two-roomed hut down a dark lane, it had to wait its turn for official recognition. It was an arrangement that suited the government office well enough as it provided opportunities for earning a little more money by selling favours and expediting processes.

In the meantime, I decided to clean the house. I had never lifted a finger to clean anything while my mother and sisters were there, even though at times I had winced at the greasy walls and the mouldy bathroom and the smell of unclean bedding. Now that I lived in the house on my own, I found its filth unbearable. I stripped the beds in the big bedroom where my mother and my sisters used to sleep, washed the sheets and the mosquito nets and aired the mattresses. I washed a few items every day when I came home in the afternoon and hung them on the line in the backyard. They were usually dry by the time it got dark. I collected the books my father had left behind and whatever clothes my mother had not given away and all the little ornaments I did not like and packed everything in a trunk. I did not know what to do with that. Although I would have liked it to disappear without a fuss, I pushed it against the wall for the moment and threw a cloth over it. I folded all the clean sheets and bedding and put them away in the wardrobe. I knotted the jewellery my mother had given me for safe-keeping and hid it under the bedding. When I finished with the big bedroom I closed the door on it and started on the small room where I slept.

After that I cleaned everything in the large entrance hallway: the cupboard with the pots and pans, the braziers, the primus, the mat, and with some of the money my father had sent with the tickets, I paid a house-painter to whitewash the walls and ceiling. The whitewash only turned the walls grey, but I was sure there was a thinning of the smells of grease and sweat and condensed breath. When all this was done, I was ready to start my new life. The house was streamlined and sleek, free from clutter and a lot less grimy.

My neighbours Mahsen and Bi Maryam watched this frenzy with friendly amusement and mocking sarcasm but I took no notice. I loved the freedom of my solitariness. Sometimes the sound of cockerels crowing at dawn made me smile in my sleep, as if I had never heard cockerels at dawn before. Some evenings I went to the cinema, and despite the censors’ watchfulness, found enough of the film there to make it worth the outing. I did not know living alone would be like that. I went out to be with friends when I felt like it, or now that I could, I stayed in and read.

It was difficult to find new books at the time but so many people who departed left theirs behind that second-hand bookshops were overflowing. I visited one run by a young Indian man in Mkunazini whose name was Jaffer. I had been in secondary school with Jaffer’s younger brother some years before and had briefly been friends with him before he was sent off to a private school in Nairobi. His family were ambitious for him and relatives in Nairobi took him in to help him, and maybe the family were the kind who were always hedging their bets and sending one son here and one son there in case things went wrong in one place or the other. The family owned a clothes and sewing supplies business, a haberdashery, but its entire stock was looted during the revolution, and in the uncertainty and anxiety that followed, the remainder of Jaffer’s family took flight for Nairobi after the son who had preceded them, leaving Jaffer behind to stand guard over the house and furniture until he could dispose of them.

In the meantime, he transformed the family haberdashery into a second-hand bookshop, and surrounded himself with piles of books that he arranged on the shelves where bolts of cloth used to lie and placed some of them spine-up on the old shop counters. Jaffer suggested that if I would like to make up a boxful, he would let me have it at a discount. So the two of us walked up and down the counters, and even went into the back-store, while Jaffer, who loved his bookshop and had always wanted to have one, offered advice and opinions. He talked as if he had sampled much of his stock personally or perhaps he could not resist slipping into his trader patter and pretending that he had. I made up an arbitrary library of detective novels, a four-volume collection of Sir Walter Scott (because I had seen the film of Ivanhoe), Westerns, mysteries, an abridged A Thousand and One Nights, an old children’s encyclopaedia (Jaffer threw that in as a gift) and a Collins edition of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. The letters in the Shakespeare were tiny and the paper wafer-thin, but the book was still fat and heavy, at least two inches across the spine.

I had never read a Shakespeare play before, so when I got home I opened that tome with curiosity, fully expecting to be daunted. I tried the opening scenes of a few of the famous plays – Julius Caesar because we had read Mark Antony’s speech in a class anthology, Macbeth because I had seen an illustrated comic edition and knew there were witches and ghosts in it, The Merchant of Venice because of the shocking idea of the pound of flesh – but I could not manage more than a few pages in each case. Then I started another one and was drawn effortlessly into the text. It was The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and I read the play late into the night. I did not try another for several months, resting on my laurels for the time being and consuming the mysteries and the Westerns, reading and re-reading the ones I liked. That was when I started buying those boxes of books from Jaffer whenever I could afford it. When I was not out in the evening, I ate a cold supper of potatoes and radishes and pickles and, if I had no chores to see to, read for hours on end. I found such unexpected contentment in this lonely and eventless existence.