Gravel Heart(69)

The year you started government school Saida talked about looking for work too, because perhaps after two miscarriages it seemed a second child was not destined to come. You were at government school in the morning and Koran school in the afternoon, and only at home to have lunch and change out of one uniform into another. I went to the market for her and did all her errands. I have nothing more to do but cook and clean and sleep all day, she said. A friend had told her about a clerical post in the Ministry of Constitutional Affairs, and she decided to go and enquire.

In that year when you started government school, and where you turned out to be a gifted pupil from the first day, one of Amir’s new acquaintances in the world of travel opened a hotel for tourists in Shangani. It was called the Coral Reef Inn, and was funded by big international money, which people said was money laundering of gangster loot: drug money, kickbacks, prostitution, slave labour. Perhaps it was the same crowd of financiers who were turning so many places in Kenya into package-holiday ghettos for tourists from Europe. None of us knew the details of such arrangements. Someone upstairs took his commission and no nuisance questions were asked. The whole world was run like that, not just our little puddle of it.

Amir was appointed assistant manager in charge of social activities: arranging music and bands, hosting events, supervising the pool staff, organising spice tours to the countryside. It was a job made for him, he said when he told us about it, someone with personality and style. He was then twenty-five years old, a handsome and charming worldly young man, inclined to think of himself in glowing terms. This was just the beginning, he said, and filled the house with words and laughter. It seemed to me that he had been living off us for years, wearing down my affection with his conceited chatter. I wished the talk was more about finding a place of his own to rent, but I dare not say that, especially to Saida, who would glower at me and accuse me of meanness.

*

Baba was lying down on the bed towards the end of his account, and after a moment he turned away to face the wall. I heard the bitterness and weariness in his voice, and before long I guessed from his breathing that he had dozed off. I too was weary and stiff from sitting on the floor although I would have stayed there for as long as Baba wanted to talk. I switched off the light and stepped out of his room. Ali, the young man who served in the shop, slept in an alcove by the front door, and he let me out and locked up after me. I walked the silent streets back to Kiponda, keeping to the main roads and avoiding the gloomy shrouded alleyways.





10

THE SECOND NIGHT

I tried to sleep late into the morning but I was no longer used to long hours in bed. Sometimes I lay for hours waiting for the light so that I could get up. Even though I had been up so late the previous night, I heard the muadhin calling for the dawn prayers at four and was only able to doze intermittently after that, running images of the events Baba had told me about through my mind. Then quickly the noises in the tiny square in front of the house made any idea of sleep impossible. Three lanes opened into the square so it was a crossroads of a kind: the grocery shop opposite was open for business, the machines in the tailor’s shop downstairs were whirring, pedestrians sauntered by amidst shouted conversation and cyclists rang their bells and called out greetings as they wheeled past. It was not unpleasant and I could imagine how Mama would have loved it here, living in the midst of things.

When the water came on I switched on the pump to fill up the tank, then showered and washed some clothes. I went for a walk down to the sea and spent the rest of the morning reading. I was giving Baba time to himself. I didn’t know if he needed that time but I had sensed his bitterness as he fell silent in the early hours and I knew there were difficult things still to be said. Late in the afternoon I went round to the shop and found him sitting outside with Khamis, already dressed for an afternoon stroll. We walked through hectic streets at first until the crowds thinned towards the old prison and barracks.

‘I kept you up late last night,’ he said.

‘You fell asleep,’ I said, laughing at him.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I was tired of talking.’

We stopped at a café in Mkunazini for a cup of tea and listened in to the usual mad tales of the conspiracies and intrigues that seethed in the world and then headed off for a meal of Baba’s favourite café rubbish nearer his home. I knew that he would not resume talking until we were back in his room and I think there was a kind of preciousness in his self-discipline. He wanted the ceremony of it and he did not want me to be distracted, and after a while I got over my impatience and was content to wait. When we were back in his room, he continued talking into the second night.

*

Late one afternoon, there was a knock on the door. I was just recently home from work, had showered and was lying on the bed while Saida was ironing and telling me about her interview for a position at the Ministry of Constitutional Affairs. You were not yet home from Koran school, which you were still attending in the afternoons. The young man who knocked on the door held on to his bicycle with one hand while we shook hands. His eyes were bright with the news he had come to deliver to us.

‘I work at the Coral Reef,’ he said to me, which was the hotel where Amir worked at that time. The young man was thin and nervous, perhaps unwell. ‘Amir has been taken away,’ he said. ‘I saw it. A white Datsun with government plates. They came this afternoon.’

‘Taken away where?’ I asked him although I understood what he said. My pretence of not understanding was a way of putting off knowing, but also of wanting more details. ‘Wait,’ I said, reaching out to delay him as he made to mount his bicycle and leave. ‘What’s the hurry?’ I said. ‘Wait, don’t go yet. Who took him where?’