Golden Boy (6 page)

“Luck!” he says, and starts the Jeep again. I tell myself it's the uneven road that is making me feel like vomiting, not the fact that the old man's eyes follow me, never blinking, until his lantern is only a dot in the distance and the dust clouds from our tires hide him from my sight.

We get onto the road to Mwanza again and continue west. Alasiri sings along loudly with the
Bongo Flava
playing on the radio and talks to Mother. He asks her about where Auntie lives and what we will do in Mwanza. Mother is polite and answers everything he asks, but her answers are vague and give little information. Asu is also no longer flirting with him, and I'm glad that they're both acting this way. I don't want Alasiri to know where we'll be. I don't want to ever see him again. I don't want to help him ever again. And though his Jeep eats the kilometers a hundred times faster than we could walk, I wish we were still on our own and had never met up with this luck hunter.

It's late when Alasiri pulls over to the side of the Sirari-Mbeya Road in the city. We're surrounded by dark houses and closed shops. I wish we had gotten here sooner so that I could have seen a bit of what the city looks like, but I'm content to finally have finished the trip with this man.

“So, this is where we part from each other,” he says cheerfully. “All you have to do is keep walking along this road and you'll be at the center of the city. Then you can head to where your family lives. Come on! Get down.”

We get out of the car and pull out our bundles. Mother and Asu thank him while Chui and I stand at a respectful distance.

Alasiri drives away, taking a hard right at the intersection. Asu helps Mother rearrange our belongings into travel packs we can balance on our heads. I know I should try to be useful, but instead I stare after Alasiri, just like the
mganga
stared after me. I stare until the red glow of his Jeep's lights dim away in the distance. I stare until I am certain he isn't coming back. Then I heft my bundle onto my head and join my family, walking through the dark along the final stretch of the long road to Mwanza.

It's well past midnight by the time we arrive at Auntie's house in the Kirumba fishing neighborhood just north of Mwanza's center. The road is a pale stripe, crowded by the hunched shadows of the fish market. To our left Lake Victoria shines dark and wet like a dog's eye. We turn away from the water and walk uphill, winding past houses and tall rocks that cut into the sky like broken teeth. Finally we get to a small house near the top of the hill. I can't see much, only that the walls are some pale color that glows a little in the moonlight. The dark doorway is set into the concrete-block wall.

“Hodi hodi!”
Mother calls into the darkness. “Neema! Sister!”

There's the snap of a switch and I can see the glow of electric light leaking out between the pieces of wood in the door and around the edges of the shutters on the windows. The door is opened a crack and then flung wide. I can see vague shapes behind her that must be my cousins, but they can't get out because Auntie is so fat, she fills the doorway. I look at her jealously, thinking what it must be like to have that much to eat all the time. Maybe if my father had stayed, my mother and sister would be that fat. Instead, we all look like we have missed meals.

“Raziya!” Auntie gasps when she sees Mother. “Raziya, Raziya! You made it! Come inside.” Mother is hauled forward in her sister's embrace, and the rest of us shuffle in, too. Auntie is still talking as I shut the door softly behind us. “Oh my goodness, it's been so long since your phone call, I didn't know what to think!
Karibu! Karibu sana!
How was your trip? Are you all right? You're so skinny! Let me look at you!”

“Here we are, Neema, here we are.” Mother is slightly breathless, caught between her sister's hug and her questions. “
Asante, asante sana.
We've had quite the journey! I will tell you all about it . . .”

But she doesn't get the chance to tell Auntie anything, because just then, Auntie sees me. Her eyes lock onto my face. Her mouth drops open.

I can imagine how I must look in the harsh light of the electric bulb hanging by its cord from the ceiling—like a blue goat: all the right shapes in all the wrong colors. I had hoped that meeting family would be less awful than meeting strangers, but I can hear my cousins whispering among themselves, and Auntie's eyebrows are so far up her forehead, they brush her head wrap.

“Was he born like that?” she asks, pointing straight at me.

Mother sighs deeply. “
Ndiyo.
I don't know what made him like that. He's not like the others.” There is a small pause during which I move the dirt on the floor around in small circles with my big toe. I try to pretend that I can't feel their eyes on me like physical blows.

“Is he a . . .” Auntie seems to be struggling for words. “Have you really brought a
zeruzeru
into my house?”

I flush a dark red under my hat.
Why does everyone always have to pick on me?

“What are you talking about?” Mother snaps. “Why are you calling him that? He may be unusual, but he is not an animal!”

In the middle of this whole awful evening, it makes me feel good to hear Mother defending me.

“Raziya!” Auntie snaps back. “I'm not insulting him! He
is
a
zeruzeru,
an albino. It's true that some call people like him demons or ghosts, and some say they're animals, but
zeruzeru
is only a term that means a person like him—all white and yellow where he should be dark. How could you not know this? Did that worthless farmer you married take you so far out into the country that you never heard any news at all?”

I see Mother stiffen at this description of Father, but she doesn't contradict her sister.

There is another pause where I feel the eyes on me again. They burn the edges of my mind, but they are nothing compared to the burn inside me now. Auntie used a word to describe me.
Albino.
There is a word for people like me. I'm not the only one.

Zeruzeru,
the word I always thought referred to a type of animal, really does refer to me. The knowledge swims around and around in my head like a fish trapped in a rock pool. No one in my family has ever known what to call me before. I have never known what to call myself.
Albino.
I test the word in my head, seeing how it feels. It doesn't feel comfortable and I decide to think about this more later.

I'm so deeply sunk in my thoughts that for a while I haven't heard anything said around me in Auntie's house. But now I look up and find that everyone in the room is shouting at one another at the tops of their voices. No one is pausing to let the other finish, and their voices cross and tangle like a badly woven basket.

Asu is shaking her finger at Auntie, who has turned almost purple with the effort of shouting at Mother. Mother is shouting right back, tears streaming over her cheeks. She gestures at us, at our bags stacked just inside the door.

“How can you ask us to leave?” Mother screams at Auntie. “You, my sister? My only living relative? How can you turn us out to starve on the streets when you have a house and strong sons and a husband? Look at my children! Look at them!” Her voice goes shrill. “They are too young to work anywhere that will pay us enough to live. What am I to do if you turn us away? What?”

The last word comes out as a loud sob, and Mother buries her face in her hands. Asu and Auntie stop yelling at each other and stare at Mother in silence. Asu reaches over and puts her arm around Mother's shoulders. From where I stand, backed up against the wall, I can see her elbow jump up and down with the force of Mother's crying. I don't know what to do. There is a short, awful silence. Then Auntie huffs out a sigh.

“I won't turn you out into the streets, Raziya.” Her gaze wanders over to me, then flinches away again. “But you don't understand what you're asking. Come. I'll make some tea, and we'll talk.”

Auntie puts a pot full of water on her gas stove and adds tea leaves and milk. Leaving it to boil together, she has us all sit down in the main room. Mother, Asu, Chui, and I untie our stools from our bundles and add them to the ones belonging to Auntie's family. We sit there quietly while we wait for the tea to boil, but the quiet is full, aggressive, the way the empty space around a hive is filled with the knowledge of wasps. I feel a growing fear of the words that will soon swarm out.

To distract myself, I look around the room at my cousins. There are five of them: The three oldest are tall and wide like Auntie, but the two youngest are slight with delicate faces. It makes me wonder what my uncle Adin looks like. The five of them throw glances at me while we wait, but only the littlest one meets my eyes. I look down at the ground between my feet. Finally the tea is ready, and Auntie pours it into a row of cups lined up on the counter. Other than the splash of hot liquid hitting the bottom of each cup, there is no sound even though there are ten of us in the room.

Auntie's oldest daughter hands everyone a cup. She puts mine on the floor in front of me. I bend forward, pick up the cup, and sip it slowly, blowing on the steam. The warm, deep feeling of tea with milk settles into my belly, and I tell myself to relax and enjoy it. Auntie lowers herself onto her stool with a sigh and finally starts talking.

“I don't know what life was like for you and your
zeruzeru
in Arusha province,” Auntie begins, “but here in Mwanza, having an albino in your family is a dangerous thing.”

I hunch my shoulders.

“Why?” asks Asu, leaning forward.

“Well,” says Auntie, “times are difficult.” This comment is greeted by silent nods from my family. We know times are difficult. We had to leave our home because of how difficult the times are. Auntie doesn't seem to notice. She is staring straight at Mother, talking as if the rest of us are not even in the room. “People are hungry and out of work. The drought is very bad.” She waves her hand around, as if trying to scoop more problems out of the air. “In difficult times, people will do almost anything to get better luck. They visit the
waganga
and ask them for spells and charms.”

Mother nods.

“How does all this relate to Habo?” Asu asks.

“Well,” Auntie says with a sigh, “here in Mwanza, people believe that albinos bring good luck.”

I look up at her, startled. Usually I'm underfoot or unable to help. The idea that people might see me as lucky is a pleasant change. The idea is so exciting that I speak up for the first time since we entered Auntie's house.

“If I'm lucky, why did you say it's bad to have an albino in your family?”

Auntie looks at me, surprised, I suppose, to hear me speak. She holds my gaze for a minute, but then drops it. She looks down at the floor as she continues.

“Perhaps I misspoke. It is not that people consider albino
people
to be lucky. People consider albino
medicine
to be lucky.”

There is a silence as we try to understand what she has just told us.

“Albino medicine?” prompts Asu finally. Auntie looks uncomfortable, and the silence stretches. Then she straightens her shoulders and looks Mother in the eye.

“The
waganga
here in Mwanza kill people like your son and use the parts from their dead bodies to make luck.” Auntie's words run together. She spits them at us like rotten fruit, quickly, as if she cannot wait to get them out of her mouth.

“No.” A strangled gasp comes from Mother. If there were any other sound in the room, we would not have heard it. But there are no other sounds; it's as quiet as if everyone in the world has stopped breathing. “No, that's impossible!”

“It's not impossible!” Auntie snaps. “It happens all the time. Just last week, Charlie Ngeleja, an albino man who lives—lived—just on the outskirts of town, was having dinner with his wife when three men came out from the bushes with machetes. Charlie asked them to sit down and join in the meal, but the men said, ‘We are here for something else.' And they killed him, Raziya, killed him just like that. His wife ran for help, but by the time she got back, it was over. They took Charlie's legs and his hands and his hair. They left the rest of him there like garbage.” Auntie's voice is still strong, but there are tears making tracks to her chin. She goes on, softly: “The police did nothing, even though people knew who had killed Charlie. It is a terrible, terrible thing, Raziya. But it is not impossible.”

She finishes to silence. I no longer know where to look. My gaze roves slowly around the circle of my cousins, looking for a single smile to tell me this is a joke. There are none. Instead, my cousins stare at me with wide eyes.

“They take body parts?” asks Asu with a note of hysteria in her voice. She is looking at me with wide eyes, too.

Auntie's smallest boy twists a length of fishing net in his hands. “They say if you tie an albino's hair into your nets, you'll always catch fish.”

“The hands and the skin are for luck in business,” adds the girl who gave me the tea.

“And if you put albino legs on either side of the entrance to a gold mine, you'll get rich very fast,” the tall boy with the start of a mustache says.

“Even the children have heard of it,” says Auntie, as if this means something special.

I put my cup of tea on the floor, no longer able to drink it. I hug my knees to my chest and put my head down onto them so I don't have to see anyone looking at me anymore.

“People will try to kill him?” Chui's whisper of disbelief fills the silence.

“Now you see, Raziya,” Auntie continues, “why we didn't want you to stay. Charlie was a man who had grown up here. Everybody knew him. Everybody knew his parents, his wife, his children. And still they killed him. Nobody knows your boy. He will be too easy to take.”

I look around. Mother is breathing in short, shallow breaths, and her eyes are unfocused. Beside me Asu is sitting very still. Chui is looking at me as if he's never seen me before.

Would it be worth it to kill
me
if it's enough money to save the family, Chui?
I turn away, sickened.

“Really, Raziya,” Auntie says, “how could you not have heard of it? More than twenty albinos were attacked just this past year. There are speeches on the radio telling the whole country how it must stop.”

“We had to sell our radio five years ago,” Asu says, her voice hollow.

“Well,” says Auntie, “now you know.”

Asu jerks to her feet. “We have to leave! Mama, we have to leave now and go somewhere else. We can't stay here. We can't let them kill Habo!”

“No,” says Mother softly. “No, we can't.”

But I don't know if she is saying no, we cannot let them kill me, or no, we cannot leave. I feel like someone has tied a rope around my chest and is pulling it tighter, tighter. The sweat on my neck and palms feels cold even though I know the room is warm.