“This is still Nyasaland,” I said.
But we both knew that it was nothing. Nearly all the white settlers had left, and only the British governor general still hung on — he had been delegated to hand the place over to Banda.
“I’d like to hear Willy’s side of the story,” I said, because I felt that Mambo was pressuring me.
“They all smoke,” Miss Natwick said. “Heavens, where do they get the money from? They’re supposed to be so poor!”
To her, smoking meant just that. She did not know what ganja was. It would have thrown her if she had.
“I think he steals it,” Deputy Mambo said. “I hope the headmaster does not approve of stealing.”
All this time Willy Msemba was smiling his crooked smile.
“What have you got to say for yourself?”
He looked at me and, though he knew me, in his drugged condition it was as though he was seeing me after a very long time. He seemed surprised: What was his old friend doing here! His eyes were loose and sort of drowned-looking.
“Allo, Mister Andy!” he said in a gurgly voice.
Miss Natwick went pah hearing him use my first name — and not even Andre but Andy.
“Mr. Parent,” she said, in a correcting way, talking to him. “At Salisbury Academy we always said, ‘Headmaster, Sir!’ ”
“I see him Farraday night,” Msemba said to Miss Natwick, and gave her the same strange grin.
“What’s this about smoking under the trees?”
But he ignored me. He was deaf and still smiling, his eyes rolling and his head wobbling. Now he turned to Miss Natwick.
“He go jig-jig.”
“Listen to me,” I said.
“Mister Andy!”
“I regard this as a serious infraction of the rules.”
“Oh, yes, this guy like to dance too much!” the student said to the room at large.
“I won’t tolerate smoking at this school.”
“What is this imbecile talking about?”
“Ask him how he came by the money,” Deputy Mambo said.
Msemba said, “He twist and shout!” He stamped mud off his feet. He cried, “Beetriss!”
“I don’t understand a bloody word of this.”
He was saying Beatles but I decided not to translate.
Mr. Nyirongo frowned through the window and turned his swollen tongue on me and stared with sad eyes, Miss Natwick was squinting. Deputy Mambo had loosened his grip on Msemba.
For the fact was, I was now at the center of attention, not Msemba. I was twenty-three. I had been headmaster only two months, since Likoni left, and these people had wanted my job — still wanted it. They claimed I was not doing well, was not mature, dressed sloppily — was an American. And yet they could not deny that the school ran as smoothly as ever, and was certainly cleaner than it had ever been under Likoni. And I had plans.
“Everybody like this guy,” Msemba said. “Especially the girls!”
Rubber mouth, I thought. His lips were the texture and color of an inner tube, and they were still flapping.
“For punishment,” I said, trying to shut him up, “make ten bricks.”
“And especially—”
“Twenty bricks! Now get back to your classroom. And what about you teachers?”
No one was listening to me. Msemba took several odd sliding dance steps, and then he began to stamp, as if he were killing roaches.
“Like this one,” he was saying.
“Get him out of here,” I said to Deputy Mambo.
“He is being insolent,” Miss Natwick said. “The bloody cheek!”
Msemba nodded, seeming to agree. He said, “Dancing with African girls.”
“Take him away,” I said.
“African girls!” Msemba said.
He had the African inability to pronounce the word Africa. It came out sounding like “Uffaleekan.”
Deputy Mambo said, “What is this boy saying?”
“Even my sister!”
“That’s a euphemism,” I said.
“Every day!”
“That’s a lie,” I said. “Now off you go.”
Deputy Mambo’s face had gone blacker, but it was creased with little whitish lines — his eyes tiny, his mouth clamped shut, his nostrils huge and horselike in fury. He wrenched Msemba’s arm and hustled him out of my office, taking his anger with me out on the boy.
Mr. Nyirongo chewed his tongue a moment longer and then moved away, his chin at the level of the high windowsill.
“Monday mornings at the Academy after prayers,” Miss Natwick said, “one would read off their names. The offenders would line up in front of the entire assembly. The headmaster took out his birch, and one by one he bent them over a chair and thrashed them. ‘Thank you!’ ‘Next!’ They passed out sometimes. Some were sick where they stood.” Her teeth were dull yellow bones. “Salisbury.”
“Likoni tried that. It didn’t work.”
“Because he didn’t hit them hard enough.”
“This isn’t Rhodesia, Miss Natwick.”
“That’s pretty bloody obvious.” And she left.
Threshed, possed out, bleddy: it was an amazing accent.
After school that day, and long after the students had gone home — their smell of soap and dirt and a stillness that was like a sound lingered in the empty classrooms — I saw Willy Msemba making bricks. He was no longer smiling. The effects of the weed had worn off and left him groggy and dazed.
“Easy punishment,” Deputy Mambo said. “More like playing.”
Where had he come from? But he often popped up. He had the envious person’s habit of creeping out of nowhere, and he was critical in an envious way too.
I decided not to hear him.
We watched together. Msemba had trampled a hole full of wet clay that he had dug and soaked. He then softened it with his feet, and mixed it with straw, and crammed it into brick-sized boxes, and tipped it out on the ground to dry. He was nearly done. His legs were muddy to his knees, and there was clay from his fingertips to his elbows. That was the point, really — that and our necessity for the bricks: a new latrine.
“He should have had a hundred bricks,” Deputy Mambo said. “He should have been beaten with a stick.”
But he was staring at me like a preacher, and I knew what he was thinking: African girls.
So now I was in the doghouse, not Msemba. I had been made headmaster after Mr. Likoni was appointed minister of education in the new government that was coming in three months. The promotion was not a comment on Likoni’s ability. He was a drunkard who had once taken a course at Aberystwyth in Wales. He had hung his certificate on the wall. There were no more than a dozen university graduates in the country. It was very easy to rise. I was a good example of that.
I had been in Nyasaland seven months as a Peace Corps Volunteer. I was too far in the bush, on too bad a road, to get many visitors. There were angry stray dogs near the mud houses. Quail ducked into the grass. Owls sat on the road all night. We had greeny-black land crabs that looked like small monsters. We had hyenas — they tipped over my barrels. I used to see the hyenas loping off in their doggy seesawing way when I returned to the house after midnight. We had snakes. The hill behind the school was a huge rock that I had once thought of climbing; but now the idea tired me. We had thirty different kinds of birds but no one knew their names. Mbalame, people called them, and it was the same word for plane. My house was high enough so that I could see Mount Mlanje, the whole plateau, in the distance — blue and flat-topped, with dark green tea planted beneath it. There were no other Americans at the school. That suited me, because I regarded myself as something of a loner, and rather a romantic figure, in my squashed hat and wrinkled suit and stained suede shoes.