Africa39 (28 page)

Later that same evening, the man in the hat invites her outside for a smoke. She follows him. He leans on the rails separating the floating bar from the water and they listen to the ocean slapping against the tanks that hold the bar above the water. There is something even more threatening about the calmness of the ocean in the dark. In the near distance, she can see Lamu town, numerous dots of light emanating from the high windows.

He hands her a cigarette. She accepts it.

‘You don’t look like a smoker.’

‘I don’t smoke,’ she says, holding it up for him to light.

Then she holds the lit cigarette between her fingers, watching the stick burn into ash, and then eventually the ash giving up, falling into the ocean. She asks him to light another one, and they sit in silence, both of them inhaling.

The traveller does not smoke. She however loves the smell of nicotine and the dark that grows on the hands of smokers from many years of cigarette burns. As she watches the ash drop into the sea, she thinks about her father, and wonders again if she should call him. She pictures him sitting somewhere in the dark outside his house, smoking one cigarette after another. She can hear his cough.

When they are done smoking, the man in the hat asks his friend for the keys. His friend looks at her and smiles. He then calls the man in the embroidered hat aside, whispers something to him, and then gives him a key. The traveller whose name is not Anah follows the man in the embroidered hat to a speedboat.

In no time, they are back in Lamu town. He leads her to a hotel with a carved teakwood front door. She follows him up the stairs to the rooftop, where she can see almost all of Lamu town sleeping below her. The man tries to kiss her, but her lips are cold, too cold to kiss. He then removes a handful of leaves from his pockets. He smiles at her. She smiles back. He places a pinch of the leaves on a piece of paper and rolls them into a stick. Then he lights it and puffs. He hands her the roll and she smokes it, without a question. From the rooftop, they watch the old town orbit around the building. The more they smoke, the faster the town revolves. They laugh at nothing in particular and at such things as the wind.

He comes to stand next to her, and when he touches her, it is as if thousands of hands have touched her face. She wants to ask him if he knows Issa. He pushes her to the wall and kisses her, without removing his hat and he begins to walk back to the building. She follows him down the stairs, and when they get to the room, she demands that they take a shower first.

‘You first,’ he says.

She goes first.

When he is done, without wiping the beads of shower water off his skin, he pulls her to him and kisses her gracelessly, and then he asks her to close her eyes.

‘I have something to show you.’

After two seconds, he asks her to open her eyes. His embroidered hat is off. He is bald, with just small bushes of curly white hair at the back of his head. Without his hat, he looks thirty years older.

‘Please don’t leave.’

There is a way he fucks: in chunks, like he is about to give up, and then going back to the beginning and starting again, like a generator that is running out of fuel.

‘You have beautiful eyes.’

She kisses him angrily and shuts him up.

She wants to ask how old his daughter is, but instead, she thinks about how changing the position of your reading table or reducing the distance between your bed and your window can suddenly change your life completely.

He seems to have forgotten that she is there with him, and as she watches him in the dim light she feels like she is watching a man masturbate inside her. She drifts off again and begins to think about the man she once dated – and how her dreams were as big as the space between the four walls he paid rent for.

When he is done, he collapses next to her. A few minutes later, he lights a cigarette and offers her one. Then he kisses her. There is a way his kiss tastes; one can tell that it is the last one.

‘You never told me your name.’

‘It used to be Anah.’

‘Why is it not Anah now?’

She is tempted to tell him about the man who gave her that name, but by the time she decides, he is already asleep. She rests on the bed for a bit. As she watches the ceiling, a strange feeling of incompleteness engulfs her. She feels like she is part of a circle that is broken and she doesn’t know what to do with herself outside this circle. She dresses and leaves.

The man in whose boat she rides to Shela Beach later that morning has long curly locks, all dyed brown. He does not remember her from before. She asks him if he enjoys what he does, just like Issa asked him when they were riding in his boat a year ago.

They talk about Nairobi, and he refers to it as if it is another country. He tells her that in his thirty-two years, he has never taken the bus. She has heard this story before.

‘I have no need for the bus. I don’t want to know what’s beyond the bus.’

‘They hate us there,’ he says, after a long silence. As he says this, he cuts through the water with his speedboat, angrily.

She knows what he means. She wants to contribute to this conversation somewhat, to tell him about the pool of blood that day on the street. Before she speaks, he points at another island across the lagoon where mansions and luxurious guest houses stand, their oppressive and clean white almost swallowing the blue in the ocean.

‘Two years ago, those used to be our wells.’

He cuts through the water angrier this time.

‘A woman was killed there, and then the others started to leave. No one lives there now.’

He asks her what she would do if a man walked into her house and started bringing down the walls. She does not answer.

Later, she walks on a thin pavement at the edge of the ocean, walking back to where schoolgirls seem to be coming from, where everyone else seems to be coming from.

She spots more writings on walls, more writings on docked boats and others that bob in the ocean.
MRC
(Mombasa Republican Council)
, Lamu sio Kenya. Pwani sio Kenya.
Lamu is not Kenya. A flag here, and a sketch of a currency there.

She comes back to a restaurant and looks for somewhere to sit. She asks the waitress if she can get a table for one. They offer her a table for two. The binaries of the world refuse to leave her alone.

In the evening, the sun sinks and the lights come up. In the darkness, the shacks in Lamu town and the private guest houses on Manda beach become equal, reduced to light bulbs, each one of them a mote in the oppressive darkness, squeezed into size by the pompous ocean.

Beyond the shack under which she listens to the ocean and watches a Swahili pre-wedding celebration on the street, the water is a few inches away from her, but quiet in the dark. The man wearing the embroidered hat from the night before is leading the dance procession of men. He is the groom’s father.

She thinks about the previous year’s
Maulidi
festival.

She wants another cigarette.

She should call her father.

from the novel
All Our Names

Dinaw Mengestu

Looking out at the capital from our secluded corner reminded me of a story my father had told me about a city that disappeared each night once the last inhabitant fell asleep. He was good at telling stories – not great, like my uncles and grandfathers, who revelled in the theatrics. Compared to them, a story was a solemn occasion delivered in a calm, measured voice that nonetheless left a lasting impression on anyone who was listening. He told me that story about the city that disappeared at night shortly after I developed a sudden, irrational fear of the dark. I must have been ten or eleven at the time, old enough to have known better than to be afraid of something so common and simple as the end of the day, and well past the age of bedtime stories, but for the first few nights of my terror, my father indulged me. He told me one night about the countries thousands of miles to the north of us where months went by without the sun setting – hoping I would find comfort in knowing that the world didn’t end simply because the lights went out in our village.

According to my father, the city in the story was once a real place. ‘I’m not inventing this for you,’ he said. ‘Everything I tell you is true.’ I believed him in that semi-conscious way that children have of dismissing reality in the hope of finding something better. ‘For hundreds of years,’ my father said, ‘that city existed as long as one person dreamed of it each night. In the beginning, everyone kept some part of the city alive in their dreams – people dreamed of their garden, the flowers they had planted that they hoped would bloom in the spring, or the onions that were still not ripe enough to eat. They dreamed of their neighbour’s house, which in most cases they believed was nicer than their own, or the streets they walked to work on every day, or, if they didn’t have a job, then of the café where they spent hours drinking tea. It didn’t matter what they dreamed of as long as they kept one image alive just for themselves, and in many cases they would pass that image on to their children, who would inherit their house, or attend the same school, or work in the same office. After many years, though, people grew tired of having to dream the same image night after night. They complained. They bickered and fought among themselves about whether they shouldn’t abandon the city altogether. They held meetings; each time, more people refused to carry the burden of keeping the city alive in their dreams. “Let someone else dream of my street, my house, the park, the intersection where traffic is terrible because all the roads lead one way,” they said, and for a time, there were enough people willing to take on the extra responsibility. There was always someone who said, “OK, I will take that dream and make it my own.” There were heroic men and women who went to sleep each night when the sun set so they could have enough time to dream of entire neighbourhoods, even those that they had rarely if ever set foot in, because no one else would do so. Eventually, though, even those men and women grew tired of having to carry all the extra parts of the city on their backs while their friends and neighbours walked around, carefree. They also wanted their dreams, and one by one they claimed their independence. They said, “I am tired. Before I die, I want to see something new when I sleep.” Then the day came when no one wanted to dream of the city any more. On that day, a young man whom few people knew and no one trusted went to all the radio stations and shouted from the centre of the city that he alone would take on the burden of keeping their world alive each night. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll dream of everything for you. I know every corner of this city by heart. Close your eyes at night and know that you are free.”’

From then on, everyone in the city believed they were free to dream about foreign lands, countries they had read about or that had never existed, the lovers they hadn’t met yet, the better husbands or wives they wished they had, the bigger houses they wanted to live in someday. The people gave that young man their lives without knowing it. They had given him all the power he wanted, and even though they didn’t know it, they had made him their king.

Weeks, months, and then years went by. People dreamed of living on the moon and the sun. They dreamed of castles built on clouds, of children who never cried, and while they dreamed each night, their king erased a part of the city. A park disappeared in the middle of the night. A hill that had the best view over the city vanished. Streets and then homes were erased before dawn. Soon the people who complained about the changes went missing. One morning, everyone woke to find all the radio stations and libraries gone. A secret meeting was held that afternoon, and it was agreed that the city should go back to the way it had been before. But by then no one could remember what the city had looked like – buildings had been moved, street names were changed, the man who ran the grocery store on the busy intersection had vanished. There was another problem as well. When asked to describe what the city looked like now, no one could say for certain if Avenue Marcel and Independence Boulevard still intersected, if the French café owned by a Mr Scipion had closed or merely moved to a different corner. It was years since anyone had looked at the city closely – at first because they were free to forget it, and later because they were embarrassed and then too afraid to see what they had let it become.

Those who tried to dream of the city again could see only their house or their street as it looked years ago, but that wasn’t dreaming, it was only remembering, and in a world where seeing was power, nostalgia meant nothing.

I thought of telling Isaac that story, but I didn’t know how to explain it to him without sounding foolish. The president cut the lights at night, he might have said. So what? He did it because it made it harder to attack. And though that was the obvious reason, I would have wanted to argue that there was also something far worse happening. The city disappeared at night, and, yes, he wanted to protect his power, and what better way to do so than to make an entire population feel that just like that, with the flip of a switch, they and the world they knew, from the beds they slept on to the dirt roads in front of their houses, could vanish.

When the doors to the house opened, Joseph was standing on the other side, his tie undone, as if he had just finished a long night at a wedding, drinking and making speeches. He looked at once exhausted and relieved; whatever doubts I had about being welcome vanished as soon as I saw him again and he waved us in with a generous smile and dramatic sweep of the hand. Had I paid closer attention, I might have noticed that, as before, I hardly registered, and that all of his attention was devoted solely towards Isaac.