Authors: N. S. Köenings
With Sarie out so often in the early afternoons, at first he felt at sea. Her absences surprised him. Now and then he wondered:
what could she be finding in a house he hadn’t seen? He pictured her. Sarie was a woman of good size. Strong-boned. But of
all those
burly bones, he thought, not one—
not one!
—contained a deep curiosity or the kind of nimble smarts with which all his limbs and noggin were really rather full. Not
Sarie. Unlike the man she’d married, Gilbert thought, she was not an intellectual. For example: she didn’t care for books,
or History, or Knowledge, or Fascinating Facts. One day—Gilbert winced, remembering—she had even thrown a precious tome by
Justus Grand (
The Portuguese in Africa
) down onto the floor and kicked it half across the room to end under the table, so that he had had to fold himself in three
to get it back. Why was she insistent, suddenly, on throwing herself so regularly out among the people? Did she expect to
learn something that Gilbert didn’t know? He had that pamphlet, after all, about Dawoodis, and a recent master’s thesis (a
commercial history of Ismailis and Ithna’asheris in the town of Vunjamguu) that a man from the local university had once generously
passed along. Why should she be on the loose out there in the sun, taking his small daughter to an alien home without good
information, which
he
could have found out for her, had Sarie only asked, among his many books?
Part of him was mildly roused. But another part of him excused her daily visits to Jeevanjee and Sons (Gilbert, with what
he read about such families, was imagining a Store, an Inc., a Sundries Shop or Co.). He put on a generous hat:
It is
, he thought, smiling,
a little competition. She wants to show that she knows something, too
. He even took some pity on her: she
had
had an exciting time in the mountains of Jilima with the Sisters; living in the city, Gilbert knew, had been difficult for
her. But what could he have done?
Poor Sarie, looking for her youth. Let her try
, he thought.
She might learn how Muslims eat
. He smiled.
But she will never understand the reasoning that lies behind it all
.
And yet another part of him, a quiet part, was glad. Sarie’s
absences exposed him to a different kind of silence. Sarie, if at home, was quiet, this is true. But in another stillness,
the one left by her outings, Gilbert found a strange and not unpleasant peace. Sarie’s ordinary silence, no matter how maintained
or smooth, had a roar and rumble to it. Without Sarie there, the flat was truly, fully still. It seemed to him almost as if
the place had never been entirely at rest. Consider: he could read his books and putter without feeling Sarie’s eyes upon
him. He could put his feet up on the coffee table, not caring how they smelled once he had taken off his socks. He even found
that his attention span increased a fraction, so that a book he might have once put down to fetch another in its stead could
lie open, cared for, present in his lap much longer than was usual. He didn’t feel unhappy. In this other part of him, he
didn’t
mind
that she went out! How odd! And so he opted not to mind too much what Sarie really did. Something small was changing.
As Bibi, down the road and just around the corner, gathered up supplies for her brown fruit, Sarie told her husband that she
and Agatha were going to make another visit. “A good thing for our daughter,” she announced, rounding up the peach and lemon
sweets that she had bought the day before. “She needs activity and walks.” This, though a new concern for Sarie, Gilbert could
in no way deny. Agatha, despite the lectures they received sometimes from Council folk—enormous Hazel Towson, most of all—did
not go to school. She roamed. She hid in hollow places, sometimes scared her father. He could not but agree that Agatha might
benefit from outings. As Sarie said, so plaintively, accusingly, because she liked to blame her husband for anything she could,
“She has not even here the easy tree to climb.” Sarie expected him to quibble.
But to her surprise: “Indeed,” he said. “You’re right.” And so the two set off
Once his daughter and his wife had made their way into the courtyard, he opened up the tin they kept in a corner of the kitchen
and took out several bills, which he slipped into his pocket. He replaced the tin responsibly, then counted slowly to one
hundred to make sure that no one would come back. Oh, he didn’t mind this privacy at all! His skin, his limbs even felt good.
Satisfied, he pulled on his socks and shoes and organized his hair so that it hid a great part of his scalp. He was going
to buy a book.
Gilbert’s stepping out into the courtyard, hand in pocket curled around his cash, coincided with the appearance of the Arab
from the islands, tired Mr. Suleiman, from the light blue door of his own first-floor flat. Gilbert had just then been about
to move with some determination directly towards the street, but now he paused, unhappy. He was not adept with neighbors,
not at all. He hoped that Mr. Suleiman was not going to walk, too. What should a person say to an old man like that when one
lived beside him? He’d known what to say to Arabs in the courthouse, how to make them wait—but things were different now,
and that wouldn’t quite do. He didn’t like to think about two neighbors taking the same route, not saying a word. Uncomfortable,
indeed. It was not, he thought, as if he could ever buy the Arab drinks at the Victorian Palm, or expect the same from him.
Arabs
, Gilbert thought with satisfaction,
are well known not to drink
. Mr. Suleiman, in bright-white robe and fine-stitched cap, fumbling with a cane, frowning at the sandy ground through spectacles
done up with silver tape, occupied, thought Gilbert, quite another world. Shy, hoping that the darkness covered him, he hid
behind the door.
Ah. It seemed that Mr. Suleiman was not planning a stroll. Instead, the narrow man made his slow way in the opposite
direction, tottering towards the plum tree in the corner of the courtyard where the old Morris taxi stood. Once there, he
set the walking stick against the fender and peered inside the cab. As Gilbert watched, the old man, half-bent in the sunshine,
opened up the driver’s door, which, crooked at the hinge, jogged down with a creak. He did not get inside—rested one palm
on the frame and cocked his grizzled head. A little breeze picked up his gown and showed a slender bit of unfit, bony leg.
Gilbert shook his head. Watching from the darkness, he felt a little sorry for his neighbor, for the old dead Oxford cab.
He thought,
Old men! Nothing works these days!
Perhaps Mr. Suleiman would find what he had come for, turn around, go back into his flat. Should Gilbert hide and wait? But
the old man simply stood. A damson fell down from the tree and landed not far from his feet, but still he didn’t move. Gilbert
sighed. Wondering how long Mr. Suleiman would be there in the sun, communing with his car, he rubbed his fingers at the cash
roll in his pocket. He didn’t want to wait.
No
, he thought,
I mustn’t let him stay me
. So that an onlooker might think he had not seen Mr. Suleiman and was therefore not being impolite at all, he held his breath
and turned his head towards the building’s wall. Without looking behind him, he marched into the street.
And now, now to find a book!
Released, he headed towards the sea.
As Gilbert walked under the awnings, hiding from the sun, Agatha and Sarie, seated comfortably beneath the fans at Hisham’s
Food and Drink, were waiting. Ismail and Ali, who now and then helped out a man who ran a shop of largely smuggled goods on
Urasimu Road (a Mr. Essajee, who had enjoyed Majid’s literary paper and been sad to see it fold), had been encouraged by their
father to step
their helping up. They’d started working every day, and on some days even took Habib. The boys came home sometimes at lunch
but did not stay for long. At Hisham’s, Sarie waited.
Agatha sipped passion juice through a red-white pinstriped straw and watched the sweet brews bubbling in their cases at the
wall. Sarie ordered ice, the thick kind, kulfi, with cardamom and cream (which the Frostys did not make, which Sarie knew
from long ago, Jilima, a cool place by Mukhtar’s Drink Emporium), and eyed the clock above the door. Thinking of her husband’s
library, Sarie estimated that ten days of such treats for herself and her daughter were equal to a medium book, or a pair
of heavy pamphlets.
It is my right
, she thought, with a new sort of satisfaction.
She looked down at Agatha. Her single daughter baffled her. She had never been quite certain what to
do
with Agatha, what one did with children (growing up with Sisters had not helped). Though she would not have refused any good
things for her child, it wasn’t quite that Sarie sought them out. But thinking now and then that Agatha had needs, deserved
things, as
she
did, made her Sarie’s ally.
We need something, too
, she thought.
Sometimes she made motherly attempts: at Hisham’s, she tried giving Agatha a wink, but she was not rewarded. Agatha ignored
her, and Sarie turned to the bright clock again, now tapping her heels against the tiles of the scuffed floor. Finally. Time
turned. Mr. Jeevanjee would now be by himself—except, of course, for Tahir, who, though he had brought them all together,
Sarie thought did not really count. She wiped Agatha’s wet mouth with the corner of her dress, pushed their dishes to the
edge of the long table, and took her daughter back into the street.
All this Bibi saw from Mansour House, where she was sitting on the balcony. When Hisham’s door opened down there, she’d shivered,
stopped her needle short. As a cook might keep an eye on
cakes that still have some way to rise, she watched the two with care. She’d seen them come and go. She knew they’d gone to
Mad Majid’s that once. But she wasn’t certain yet that this was a routine. She slipped the needle twice into her sheet to
keep it safe and narrowed her sharp eyes. She saw that Sarie stepped not left but right, and was now taking her daughter up
Mahaba Street. If only Bibi could keep track of the European woman’s short lavender gown, if she saw them pass that mosque…
! Then she’d know that she was right. She watched. Indeed.
Eywah
, Bibi thought.
From there, from there to little Kudra House. Imagine, oh, yes. Yes! But isn’t he insane?
She was so happily considering the British woman’s fate in Majid Ghulam’s house that she did not respond when Mama Moto called
her down for lunch. She scooted to the balcony’s edge, slipped each arm through a concrete-bounded heart, and, for just a
moment, clasped her hands together. Mama Moto called again, but Bibi didn’t answer.
Let Mama Moto wait
, she thought.
I’ve other foods to eat
.
The book stand Gilbert liked the most was managed by a Christian from Fufuka who stayed at the cathedral grounds and took
his morning tea with the French and Belgian Sisters. The salesman, proud of his association, often said,
Que la paix soit avec vous
and
Que Dieu vous bénisse
, whether passersby bought books from him or not; he was apt as well to give out blessings in several local tongues, some
he’d known himself, and some the Sisters taught. Like Sarie, Gilbert thought, the bookman, too, was given to inscrutable,
surprising formulations, but from him these were charming. And also, he had style. The bookman wore a bright green fishing
cap high up on his brow, to which he now and then affixed a modest paper bloom. And, even more important, his chosen volumes
(some missing quite coincidentally from the Mission’s
well-stuffed shelves) often suited Gilbert. He felt buoyed by that hat, which he could see already, bobbing, from the corner.
He felt free, satisfied, and pleased.
Today
, thought Gilbert,
I will make a find
.
Indeed, perhaps the fates colluded here to break a coming blow. Gilbert was in luck. For the price of two kilos of kulfi and
a jug of passion juice, or a pair of canvas shoes (so Sarie would have said), he acquired for his collection, dust jacket
and all, a rare volume called
The Happy Sons of Sindbad: Years of Arab Seamanship in the Very Bluest Sea
, by a Dutchman named DeFleur. The Christian man, because he liked to satisfy his customers, and also because Gilbert Turner
was not any good at bargaining, beamed, too. Gilbert stepped away, new book shiny in his hand. The vendor tipped his hat.
Although the city’s Central Post Office rose up just behind the table, Gilbert often visited the bookstand without checking
for letters. The one correspondence he engaged in had a proper schedule: once a month, a letter and a wire; he knew when to
expect it. Had it not been for
The Happy Sons of Sindbad
—a russet thing whose dust-coat showed an arty ship in ink, asail on a brown sea, and caused Gilbert to scan the harbor line
for vessels like the one that graced his book—he wouldn’t have gone in at all. On the wide and black-hatched water, Gilbert
recognized three ngarawa riggers, the ever-present tugboat, a tanker (run aground and still for many years, like the Morris
in their yard), and, hulking and cloud-white, a cruise ship in the distance. No dhows or mtepe ships. Nothing. Gilbert sighed.
With no Arabian Sons heave-hoing on the rise, he turned, and there it was, before his open, disappointed eyes: the Post Office,
an elaborate rose-columned thing behind a row of pines. Unaware that small acts sometimes bear big fruit, Gilbert registered
the pillars and thought:
Let’s try, why not, for fun
, and made his way inside.
As he entered that cool space, he felt businesslike and free. He
liked going to the Post Office, taking up his key chain and moving past the service windows as though he had a purpose. Not
seeking stamps or glue, he did not have to stand in line to face a surly teller with the strangeness that had come, it seemed
to him, in the wake of Independence. Checking on his private letterbox, bypassing the queues, Gilbert did not have to feel,
as he sometimes did, that he was like a party guest who, having stayed well past the end of things, is still, impolite but
helpless, begging for his cake.