Africa39 (37 page)

Ostrich feet bends over the table and says something to Kato.

‘No! I don’t want to go there again. Help me big bro.’

‘Stop it.’

‘I can’t go there again.’

‘I said stop it!’ Ostrich feet bangs the table. The bang hits directly into my bladder. I jump off the chair and press my legs together to contain the rebellious urine but it spills. Through the white pair of shorts, down my legs, to the rubber sandals Ostrich feet gave me this morning.

‘And you? Going anywhere?’ Ostrich feet glares at me.

I slump back on the chair.

Kato has resumed sketching, forefinger grazing the table like it would perforate through the wood. The left hand shielding his sketch is trembling. He keeps glancing at me as if it is my fear that he is sketching.

I'm Going to Make Changes to the Kitchen

Ondjaki

 

 

 

 

 

how terribly absurd

it is to be alive

Luis Eduardo Aute,
Sin tu Latido

 

I've picked my ashtray up again.

My little ashtray, made by hand and with feeling.

Feelings are like ashes – suggestions of past attachments and pleasures.

The kitchen is empty. Silent. My ashtray survived all the kitchen earthquakes. Tiny little ashtray, made from sweat and pieces of me. In the small hours. Far from the kitchen.

Near to me, I have an unlit cigarette, an old lighter cased in dark wood, a lit incense stick, a window onto the unlit world, two or three lit stars, brown sandals, a faint smell of rice, a fresh teardrop and my ashtray. My ashtray.

 

The unlit cigarette greets my dry, desiring lips. I smoke a sort of future. A sense of peace takes hold of my hands and breasts. I savour the prospect of the pleasure that will soon be ignited.

The ritual is underway. The smoking will come later. The burning in the eyes, the itching of the hands.

‘You shouldn't smoke so much.'

Father smokes more than I do. And he hasn't the habit of lingering over yet-to-be-lit cigarettes. I discovered the ritual by chance. In a protracted search for a lighter. Rituals come to us to show us how to survive our other routines.

I won't enter the kitchen with the unlit cigarette. I try not to mix private rituals and marital environments. Or, to put it more openly: perhaps everything in the kitchen has become invadingly private.

‘Above all else, you must love your husband.'

 

The lighter is the same one as always. That's why I call it old.

It hides from me on Sundays. Doesn't want to be found. But I know of plenty of matches in this house. It occurs to me that matches can ignite kitchens as well as cigarettes.

But I resist.

‘Everything has to be at peace in the house, so that you can love your daughter.'

If one day my daughter turns out to be a smoker, I'll have to give her a simple lighter. I'll have to remember to say to her: with this lighter, if you have the heart and your fingers have the will, you can ignite a kitchen. She'll laugh. Assume her mother is being playful. You shouldn't play with fire, Mother. Well no, dear. But there are kitchens and there are kitchens. Here's hoping you never need to know about fire.

The lighter is the same one as always because it hides from me but wants to be found. The kitchen never hides.

 

When I light the incense, the lighter licks at the smell of cinnamon, lavender, opium. A lit incense stick is not much like a star, but I think of stars whenever I light incense. These associations of ideas have never been explained to me. Since being married, I've lost any sense of what the word kitchen means to other people.

‘You have a home to care for. Everything else is of little relevance.'

Father likes words. He likes the word relevance.

The smoke from the lit incense tells me stories. Recollections of people from different cultures, people I've never been acquainted with. Paths. Myths. Pains suffered by women other than me.

‘Perhaps it's time you thought less about yourself.'

The smoke of the lit incense lets me know if there's any wind in the heat of the night. The dense lonely night.

 

I keep the house lights switched off so as to watch the red breathing of the incense. And there is wind. A mild, windy-breeze.

‘Keep the house tidy. The home clean.'

Outside my window is the switched-off world. Because I believed in it when it was switched off. I'll have to unbuild it first, then rebuild it anew. In celebration, if possible. In rediscovery. In bloom.

The world appears switched off to a woman who looks at the world from her window and feels switched off from it. The woman has an unlit cigarette in her dry mouth. The woman has a quarrel with her kitchen. Or perhaps with more than just that.

I call my window ‘window to the switched-off world', obviously, because I wanted a different window or a different world. A world with a different kitchen.

 

When I light an incense stick, I think of stars. When I visit lit stars, by looking at them, I think of the desert.

‘In short, you will try to be a dedicated wife.'

Because the desert could be the mirror the stars use to revive their shine. The prints left by camels' feet are not tracks, they're not boundaries: they're mysteries. Poems we can't see or digest. It's impossible to see so close up.

One day, my daughter's eyes will surely shine with passion. Love will harbour in a new quay. Without saying a word, like a mature woman, she'll surely present the shine for me to comment upon. Here's hoping I have the clear-sightedness and courage to warn her: tell your partner not to get too close, or he might lose sight of you. ‘Oh, Mother!' my daughter will say. And she'll understand.

 

My sandals are always close to my body. Grounded, airy and malleable. Unlike men.

‘You must be patient with your husband. Patience and dedication.'

The sandals take me from the kitchen to the living room, and from the living room to the bedroom. They protect me from the coldness of the floor; they don't protect me from the coldness of the kitchen. They make me walk almost silently. If I leave them in the bedroom, it's because I require absolute silence. I haven't left them in the bedroom today, and so I talk.

I wanted a salty smell to come in through a gap in my window. Not necessarily the sea. Perhaps a forest, perhaps a mountain. Spaces of freedom and positive emptiness. Places the sandals have yet to show me.

I have my sandals close to me. As comfort, as a second skin.

From the kitchen comes the innocent, Indian smell of rice. Gentle basmati afternoons. The poetry of my hands in contrast to the drama of my nights.

‘You have to find a way to understand him. To understand and accept.'

Garlic in the rice and on my nails. I don't wash them properly. To leave traces. A bay leaf. A little salt. I remain still while it gently bubbles. I leave the kitchen and await the smell of readiness in another room. The basmati of my past, without the collateral damage caused by certain flights. A tranquil time when I was the wife of a tranquil man. A man who laughed and cried. I'd started to cook rice at night, as is done in other homes.

Sometimes this strange stillness comes to me, even when I'm unaccompanied. I can tell by the smell that whatever's cooking has reached its optimum point. I'm hesitant. Lately I'm hesitant whenever I have to enter the kitchen.

Still. I try to get myself moving.

 

More than everything else, what's taken me by surprise is a teardrop. They don't usually come so early.

Worried, I realise disorder has entered my tears. I usually sense the approach of feelings that bring their onset. Light tremors. Particular thoughts. Queries and poems.

I call it the unexpected teardrop, and its coming could be worrying. A certain existential tiredness. The end of prolonged pressure. This teardrop, today's teardrop – I think – is different. It announces, if anything, a new season. I'm crying because the tough times will soon be over. I'm crying because the past is too recent, as are the words. I'm crying because I'm rediscovering myself.

‘Is it really so hard for you to understand that this country is at war?'

Is it really so hard for you to understand, Father, that I never wanted war in my home?

 

I've picked my ashtray up again.

I light the cigarette. I extinguish the flame beneath the rice. I like the rice to cook through in the leftover steam. Let it soften; allow the taste of garlic to intensify.

I made this ashtray with my own two hands and all the feelings I had back then. I made it for you. You still shared cigarettes and moments with me. You flew different planes from those that drop bombs on people. Our relationship was far from war, from the screaming, the bombs. Our kitchen, the wood that you polished, rested undisturbed every night. The small hours were ours. Far from the kitchen.

‘Perhaps your seeking God might be a solution.'

Father hadn't yet started with his ridiculous advice. Our daughter could greet you before bedtime.

I didn't want to know the number of your plane. I found out because they told me unexpectedly, and no one can constantly guard against being given the key to their suffering. I don't know how long it will take us to forget – will we forget? – the number of times you, the way you, the brutality with which you ripped out the cupboards in the kitchen. I found out what your plane was called today. The bombs. I found out everything. Though really I knew all along. Knew from your eyes, from your hands ripping the love from our home, tenderness disappearing out the window. At the beginning of our life together, I said let's escape this war. It's too late, you said. I was pregnant; you were busy with your flights.

My voice. My silence.

My heart, frightened and wrecked.

The kitchen is empty.

I switch off the stove and ask myself again how my ashtray survived all the kitchen earthquakes.

There is great disquiet in our house. There's our daughter who needs raising.

I smoke the cigarette.

I want to change out of my skin.

I look at the ashes in my ashtray, like feelings that lack density. I'm left holding onto nothing. Like soldiers after violent combat, that's to say, like their losses. What they lose of themselves.

I just wanted to tell you: I'm going to make changes to the kitchen.

 

Translated by Jethro Soutar

Rag Doll

Okwiri Oduor

In the thick yellow air, the wind hums in the bramble, pushing engorged berries against the twigs, so that thorns prick them and the jam inside starts to trickle out.

Tu Tu and Mama wear matching lace dresses with bows sewn on to the back. They each try on a wide-brimmed hat that they found fluttering in the dust devil outside their window, and when it falls over their faces and covers their eyes, Mama pulls at the latch and tosses the hat back to the dust devil.

With her hands on her hips, Mama says to the dust devil, ‘Next time, bring us something we can use, you hear?’

Tu Tu imagines it – the dust devil will knock on the dusty pane and say to Mama, ‘Here are some things you can use, Solea,’ and there, on the window ledge, shall be poinsettias and sugar icicles and browning pages from autograph books, pages that read, ‘Just wake ’em up in the usual way, Spencer – we’ll leave
“Flight of the Bumble Bee” for some other time.’

Mama takes out jute bags from the pantry and they pull strings out of their corners and fasten the strings like ribbons round their tresses, and then they bow at each other and giggle like girls who fry their hair and light scented candles and go to the cinema with silk handkerchiefs pinned to their cardigans.

Hand in hand, they march across the yard, crumbling anthills beneath their bare feet, singing,

Snuff out the sun

And pour porcupine juice

In Tu Tu’s keyhole.

They pick only the crimson berries, the ones that pulsate and burst in their fingers, and they tie them inside the scoop of their frocks, and the hot jam runs down their legs and glues together the spaces between their toes.

In the dying light, they race each other across the yard, fireflies crackling in their hair, lighting their path. Tu Tu slips on a moist snail and she clutches at the hem of Mama’s frock so that Mama slips too, and the two of them crumple down in a heap, laughing and sputtering until their panties are soaked and their tresses are filled with dead grass and earthworms.

When the dust devil comes back, Tu Tu and Mama run to the window and pull at the latch and push their heads outside. This time, the dust devil has brought them a porcelain jar with a chip broken off its mouth. Mama takes it in her arms and cradles it, singing,