“March,” he said.
“What if they’re busy?”
“They cannot be busy.”
This was a very different Deputy Mambo. I wanted to kick him out of my office. But it was not my independence celebration. I could not complain that no one had told me about the Chamba Youth League. It had probably begun on some weekend, when I had been attending to other things.
That same afternoon two soldiers arrived in a Land-Rover. They wore khaki uniforms and polished combat boots. I took them for Germans. They said they were Israelis. Yonny was about my age; the other one, Moosh, was a fat, older man. Deputy Mambo had sent them. They showed me a letter authorizing their visit.
I said, “Mambo teaches Third Form geography — rainfall, our friends the trees, and what is a volcano. No one gave him permission to invite the Israeli army to the school. Know what I mean?”
“You can check,” Moosh said, and turned his back on me.
I called Ed Wently from the post office in Zimba after school, but while I was describing Mambo the Youth Leaguer and his Israelis, Wently said, “Play ball,” and hung up.
I had never minded when Miss Natwick had implied I was incompetent as headmaster, and it had pleased me to see Rockwell take the latrine seriously. But Mambo in his red shirt I found disconcerting. It seemed he had a secret life, too. And the Israeli soldiers at what I considered my school irritated me. Apparently I could not get rid of them.
Yonny tried to be friendly in a bullying soldierly manner. I said I didn’t like soldiers marching around the school. He turned this into an antisemitic remark and said, “No one likes Israelis.” Yonny lisped. I had an irrational feeling that people who lisped usually told the truth. Moosh was grumpy. One day he surprised me by saying that he liked to dance. This slob liked to dance? But he showed me a few steps and for those seconds he was a different person, and very light on his feet. I complimented him and in return he criticized me for being friendly towards the students — too easy on them, he said.
It was not long before they began criticizing Rockwell, too. They said they could not understand why he spent all that time shingling the building.
Rockwell said, “Because I want to have it finished by Independence.”
They wanted to know what the thing was.
“Sanitary facilities. Rest rooms.”
“It’s a latrine,” I said.
“You Americans,” Yonny said, showing me his tongue when he lisped the word.
Moosh said that this latrine was too good for Africans.
“They can be happy with a hole in the ground.”
“Ever hear of cholera?” Rockwell said, and I admired the fight in him. “Africa’s number one killer?”
Yonny said, “Human life means nothing here.”
After school, the Israelis drilled the students, showed them how to march in step and twirl banners, and they screamed at them unmercifully. I heard the drums beating from the cleared piece of ground they called the football pitch.
I asked a Fourth Former named Malenga what he thought of the Israelis. He used a word that he had once applied to Americans, that meant “skilled in everything” (nkhabvu).
“Give me an example.”
Just today, Malenga said, the younger one Yonny had taught several of the boys how to get free of an enemy interrogator. While you were standing, facing each other, you looked him straight in the eyes and without blinking or moving your head you kicked him furiously and broke his shinbone.
“They’re tough guys,” Malenga said.
I hated Deputy Mambo for arranging the visit of these soldiers. But now I saw Rockwell in a new light. I had thought of him as crazy and possibly dangerous, but in contrast to the Israelis Rockwell seemed a man of principle and good sense. He had his eccentricities, this toiletmaker from Pasadena, but beneath it all he had a humane mission. I had been too hard on him. While I had spent my weekends at the Bamboo Rockwell had put in extra hours on the latrine.
He had just about finished the roof. On rainy days he worked inside, painting and tinkering.
“I think I’ve got these urinals licked,” he said, and then in a whisper, “Hey, what about these Israelites? Are you going to let them push you around?”
“Wently told me to play ball.”
“I got the name of the Israeli ambassador,” Rockwell said.
“Are you going to report the soldiers?”
“No. The name spooked me.” Rockwell was still whispering. “Ambassador Shohat. Get it?”
I said no.
He said, “Sometimes names are messages. Like Lorne Greene, like Faye Dunaway, like that Scotch guy that runs the Nyasaland Trading Company, Dalgliesh.”
I said, “Ward, please—”
“See, Lorne Greene is really ‘lawn green.’ And Faye Dunaway—‘fading away’. Huh? You have to really think to get the message.”
“What about Dalgliesh?”
“Dog leash,” Rockwell whispered. “And that guy Shohat is ‘shoe hat.’ In other words, head to toe. It kind of worries me.”
After revising my opinion of Rockwell, here he was again, getting weird. But I blamed the Israelis for this.
I was putting in extra time as headmaster, to prove that I was still in charge. I stopped seeing Gloria and went back to taking the Bamboo girls home at weekends. On weekdays I started at seven, unlocked the buildings, met the teachers at seven-thirty, and then banged the piece of railway track to call the students to assembly.
In the last week of June, Deputy Mambo came into my office, this time without knocking. It was one of his red-shirt days — shorts, knee socks, badges. How could he wear that cruel face of Doctor Banda and not expect to scare me?
“I have a request, Mr. Headmaster, sir,” he said. He was always slavishly polite when he was being hostile. “About morning assembly. In addition to stories and what-not I suggest we sing a song for Kamuzu.”
The man on his badge — Hastings Kamuzu Banda.
“Which song?” I said.
“ ‘Everything Belongs.’ ”
I had never heard it. “How does it go?”
Deputy Mambo folded his arms across his Youth League shirt and put his head back and yelled the song in Chinyanja:
Everything belongs to Kamuzu Banda
All the trees
Belong to Kamuzu Banda
All the huts
Belong to Kamuzu Banda
All the cows
Belong to Kamuzu Banda
All the roads …
“I get the idea, brother.” It was tuneful but ridiculous. “But I don’t think there’s much point in the students singing that, do you?”
He did not reply. He moved his lips over his teeth and pressed them together, and he glared at me. I wondered whether the brown spots on the whites of his eyes meant he had a vitamin deficiency.
I had not had any strong feelings about Mambo until he showed up in his red shirt and announced that he was a member of the Chamba Youth League. I could not forgive him for those two Israelis. I could hear them, even now, shrieking orders on the football pitch.
I said, “The songs we sing are boring, but at least they’re harmless.”
“We want ‘Everything Belongs.’ ”
“And Banda — who is he?”
It was just an expression — a rhetorical question. I knew who Banda was. But Deputy Mambo answered me.
“He is our Ngwazi.”
It meant conquerer.
“And Chirombo.”