“I have bought this girl a bottle of beer,” he said, when I took the little girl’s arm. “I can’t let her go just like that.”
He meant that for this two-shilling bottle of Castle Lager the skinny girl was his.
I said, “You should be ashamed of yourself, brother.”
The young girl wore greasy makeup — skin lightener, mascara, and lipstick. Her face was a popeyed mask. But she had no shape. Her yellow dress hung straight down like a school uniform. She bent over like a boy to buckle her plastic sandal and I saw she was wearing school bloomers.
“What’s your name, sister?”
She said something that sounded like “Boopy.”
“You’d better come with us,” I said, and put my arm around Gloria. I could feel her dark sinuous body beneath the loose dress. She was still damp from dancing and touching her excited me — it was like holding a snake against me.
Back at Kanjedza I locked Captain into his room, gave Boopy some blankets, and showed her where to sleep in the hallway. I made love in my room to Gloria and later woke her again. She said she was too tired. She said that she wanted to sleep — a sort of apologetic complaint.
“Take my friend.”
“No!” I said. I was shocked, and I waited for her to react.
But all I heard were snores from Gloria, and her snoring made me wakeful. I lay wide-eyed in the darkness of my room, breathing in little sips.
The young girl Boopy snuffled and swallowed when I woke her, and then she giggled a little and held me. Caressing her, I was running my fingers over all her bones. She was very thin but she had large bush-baby eyes. She was a child in my arms, but as soon as I took her on the floor she snorted and sighed, and she moved like a woman who knew what she wanted.
None of my students lived here in the township — they were too poor even for this place. A few lived in the slum, Chiggamoola, but I never saw them. And so I had more freedom than I had ever had at my house up at Chamba.
I sometimes visited Rockwell at the house. It was not friendship, though I felt friendlier now that I saw less of him. It was curiosity, and a suspicion in my mind that one day he might hang himself. I liked to think that I might interrupt him and prevent it.
He had refused to hire a cook. He said, “They don’t wash their hands. They don’t boil the water. It’s dirty.”
“That’s Nyasaland. That’s the world. That’s the norm, Ward.”
“America’s clean.”
“America’s unusual.”
He lived on peanut butter sandwiches. “Hey, it’s good. They grow peanuts here.” His lips were always bluish. “Kool-Aid,” he explained.
The Africans told me that Rockwell was wopusa, which meant crazy and cruel, as well as stupid; and he was cheap, refusing to hire anyone to cook his food or tend his garden. I said that Americans did not have servants, but I knew that Africans resented whites who lived alone and separate, and who didn’t offer them work. I didn’t like ratting on Rockwell, but I could see that living by himself, so far from Africans, he was becoming even stranger. What did he know about Africans?
I asked him this question.
He said, “I’ll tell you. You very seldom see a bald one.”
He had a way of nodding that was almost as alarming as the things he said.
“I’ve been thinking about bald people a lot recently. Ever notice how bald men often have cuts and scabs and wounds on their heads? You always see a Band-Aid up there. Now why is that?”
I said, “I’m not sure, Ward.”
“I am just so grateful to you for handing over your chimbuzi to me. Chimbuzi, huh? Learning the language, huh?”
“It’s coming right along, Ward.”
“But I get scared,” he said. “When I finish it I’ll have nothing else to do.”
That fear made him go slowly. The chimbuzi was much bigger than I had envisaged — great beehive stacks of bricks were accumulating and from what he had so far built I could see that he had made an elaborate design.
“Look familiar?” he asked me one day.
I said, “In a way.”
“I based it on The Alamo. See the way the wings shoot out?”
What kept me from reporting him to Ed Wently was the fact that he got on so well with Miss Natwick. When he had reached the end of his tether, she would tell me. They sat together in the staff room every recess, drinking tea and eating dry cookies. After Deputy Mambo and Mr. Nyirongo left the room, Miss Natwick said, “You can’t teach these people anything.”
“That’s just what I was going to say.”
“I’ll shepherd those lambs who’ve cast their idols well away,” Miss Natwick said, seeming to quote a hymn. After a moment, her face hardened and she added, “And if they haven’t, bugger them.”
Miss Natwick would then offer Rockwell a Kitkat or a chocolate finger from her handbag and they would be there until Deputy Mambo returned for another cup of tea.
Sometimes the school seemed hopeless — not simply the shambles Miss Natwick said it was, but chaos. It was always on the verge of flying apart. But it held. I thought: This is Africa. This is the world. It is not chaos but only disorder. Dirt is the norm. Bad water is the norm. Filthy toilets are typical. Stinks are natural, and all dogs are wild. If you walk barefoot hookworms bore into the balls of your feet. Stretch out your arm and mosquitoes inject sleeping sickness into it. Sit still for a moment and fleas leap onto your body. Embrace your lover and you get lice. Because this is the world. America is very unusual.
I went to Abby’s race at the track in Zimba. She had trained and slept well and drunk milk. But it did her no good. She came fifth in the two-twenty. She said she was through with running — it was too much for a woman with kids. She was better off, she said, collecting tickets at the Rainbow Cinema and fooling with me.
That was another day, and that night another night.
5
The best way to teach English, I felt, was to get in there and start them talking. I asked questions, I had them chant the answers, I made them compete, and when I ran out of prize candy I gave them cough drops from Mulji’s, which they liked just as much. Miss Natwick complained that the students said “What?” instead of “Pardon?” and she objected to their saying “You’re welcome.”
People complained that things happened too slowly in Africa, but my experience so far was that everything moved too quickly — it was a time of rapid change, and the change inspired hope and confidence. In a matter of months the students had taken on American accents. They said, “I wanna” and “I gudda” and “I’m tryanna” and “I dunno” and “Whatcha doin” and “Whaa?” The popular songs helped. I heard a little girl named Msonko sing, “Put your sweet lips a little closer to the phone—” Miss Natwick wrote to the minister of education. She got no reply. There was no minister of education. There wouldn’t be one until July.
“No one’s in charge,” she said. “They’ve just shut up shop.”
“Flew the coop is more like it.”
“Blimy, the way you Yanks talk.”
“Suspended animation,” I said. “Politically.”
“Ward Rockwell is very well-spoken though,” she said. “But you’re as bad as the students.”
“Your needlework class is waiting, Miss Natwick.”
I was in charge! I was headmaster!