I wanted to say You’re lucky, but I didn’t dare. I disliked her for making me fearful of saying it. But she was lucky, I was convinced of that. It seemed perverse of her to be so unhappy. But then didn’t pregnant women get fits of depression like this and wasn’t this all attributable to that? The bush-baby clinging to the window grille seemed to see it that way.
Jenny complained a bit more, then described what she hated about being a memsahib, and she said that she hated dealing with Mwezi. These were mostly irrational grievances and because of that I was able to understand them. She was being cranky.
Then she sat up and said, “I came here to teach Africans.
That was the only thing I wanted. And you put a stop to it.” That was when I lost my temper.
I said, “Teaching Africans what? How to speak English. How to do math. That’s ridiculous. I’m sick of doing it — sick of hearing about it. Half the students here are married and have families, and they pretend they’re schoolboys. They say they want to go abroad and study. They’re lying — they want to get out and never come back. They hate their lives. They want a ticket to England or America. They hate farming. They want to wear suits and neckties. Those girls you were teaching will all end up in a village pounding corn in a wooden mortar. They’ll have ten kids each and a drunken husband. What is the point of teaching anything here except farming?”
“You dislike Africans, I know you do,” Jenny said.
“The only friends I’ve had for more than four years here have been Africans — and some Indians. What you’re saying is bullshit. You don’t know me.”
“You make remarks about them,” she said. “Don’t deny it. When we were in Moroto—”
“You mean, those bare-assed Karamojong? Was I supposed to pretend they weren’t naked? I’m standing there with you and those men and I see four huge salamis swinging back and forth, and so I make a remark about a delicatessen.”
“It was so cruel,” she said. “You could have pretended you didn’t see anything.”
“Oh, God,” I said. By now I was dressed — and I was late for work. “That’s perfect. Pretend you don’t see their dongs. Pretend this is a real city. Pretend they don’t kill each other. Pretend they don’t envy and hate you. Pretend you’re not white. Pretend they’re not staring at your tits. Pretend your teaching is helping the country. Pretend you’re not here to have a grand old time in the bush. Pretend that in a few years there’s going to be a big improvement in Uganda. Pretend the president is not a total asshole as well as a murderer, a torturer—”
I stopped, because Jenny had begun to cry again.
“You want a job? You can have mine. Then I can stay home.”
“You’d hate that.”
“I’d love it,” I said. It was what I wanted most: to sit at home all day, working on my novel. “I’d love to sit in that room and write.”
“I don’t have a room!” Jenny said. “This is your house! Everything is yours. I hate it!” She was sobbing terribly and choking.
“Please don’t cry,” I said. She let me hold her.
She said, “I am so unhappy.”
“Maybe you’re feeling lousy because of the baby,” I said.
Her eyes went cold. She said, “Jesus, you don’t know anything, do you? This baby is the only thing that makes me happy.”
The word baby made me look up: the bush-baby had gone. At what point in our yelling back and forth had the little creature taken itself away?
“What about me?” I said. “Don’t you love me?”
“I don’t even know you,” she said sorrowfully and wiped her tears away.
There was no conclusion — only a parting, because I had to go back to work. I felt dreadful, and I felt overwhelmed; I had no answers. Would it always be this way?
I worked on my novel, and I was surprised that I was able to continue it. It went as smoothly as ever. It was a relief and a consolation. My hero, Yung Hok, ran his grocery store and made plans; he too had a private life. But Mrs. Yung Hok, who up to now had been enigmatic, took on a life of her own and became a character. She was a very discontented person and had violent fits of anger, and sometimes when she screamed at her husband he went silent and his neck seemed to shorten, and he squinted like a small boy being nagged by his mother.
10
I had married a pretty girl who turned into a dissatisfied woman very quickly. But it was not over. Another woman began to emerge in her. Jenny changed again, she became bigger and blanker and rather slow. Her shape altered, she was quieter, she slept more, she developed a passion for pineapple juice. She was a different person altogether, with different thoughts. She was softer, slower, a bit weepy. She was heavy, she was earthbound. The change fascinated me — and it released me from my terror of being accused by her of having subverted her life. Now she had another life, too.
We always went shopping at the market on Saturday mornings. One sunny Saturday, we were driving down Kampala Road, and had just passed the twittering bats, when we saw an Indian approaching on a motor scooter. He waved and his machine wobbled as he slowed down.
He was screaming.
“Go back, go back!”
He looked absurd, screaming on the empty street, in this sleepy part of town, with the sunshine beating on the trees and making green shadows, and all those twittering bats.
“They’ll kill you!”
Another car drew up behind me. The Indian looked over his shoulder and then back at us, and he screamed again. Once I had heard that same scream — when an Indian was being set upon by an African, late one night; Rashida had found it exciting. It was utter panic.
The car behind me was beeping for me to move. I looked and saw an African at the wheel, gesturing for me to move on.
Jenny said, “What’s wrong with that Indian?”
His face was gray, he had flecks of spit on his lips. Now he was raving at the car behind me.
“Go back!” he screamed. “They will kill you!”
His Hindi accent made the words somehow less urgent.
I said, “What’s up?”
He did not reply. He jerked his motor scooter, nearly tipping it over, and rode away — climbing the curb and speeding down a dirt path between the trees.
It was very confusing — only a matter of seconds had passed.
“Oh, shit,” I said, feeling fuddled.
Jenny’s mouth was gaping open. In a voice I did not recognize as hers, she said, “Look.”
Far ahead, at the crest of the road, where I expected to see cars I saw people, ragged Africans, all men, a crowd of them as wide as the road. They plodded along towards us, motioning, and a moment later I heard their cries. They passed a shop and broke its windows, they passed a car and overwhelmed it, they were gesturing with sticks, they were flinging stones.
The car behind me was still beeping, and the African driver — as though he was part of this trap — was pushing his hand impatiently at me. He stuck his head out of his window and called out Move along!
It was the bursar, Wangoosa, a man I had never known to raise his voice. His eyes were small and his teeth huge, and he was angry that I was hesitating. And he was so close to me that I couldn’t reverse my car. Nor could I go forward — the ragged African mob was coming nearer.
I tried to make a turn, to go around Wangoosa and get away. It was an awkward maneuver on such a narrow road, and as I struggled with the steering wheel, Jenny began to cry.
Then the mob was on us. The windshield was punched apart. It broke quickly into pieces so small they dropped like liquid into our laps. Jenny screamed as blood appeared on her knees and hands.