Uhuru Street (18 page)

This time he readily relinquished the phone number in Bayreuth, and the address. He did not care any more: he did not want to lie, to resist, to stay whatever the cost. He would gladly go back knowing he had tried. The only thing that nagged at him was the thought he had betrayed the men in Bayreuth who had offered to help him. He asked the two officers if he could call Bayreuth to tell them where he was but they smiled.

The men drove him to Bayreuth. Clouds were in motion above, and it was intermittently sunny; the road was a clear grey ribbon in front of them, cutting through greenery in a scene that could have come out of a story book. He wondered if
Heidi
was set in these parts. Perhaps
The Sound of Music
? It all seemed unreal, he could very well be dreaming. They entered town and after a while parked beside some blocks of flats.

On their way to the eighth floor in the last building, Karim wondered if this was really the end, the whole immigration ring to be arrested thanks to him. With trepidation and curiosity and feeling above all like a schoolboy being accompanied to the headmaster’s office, he walked between the men who eventually stopped outside a door and knocked stiffly.

There was a short interval and the sounds of some fumbling at the door, after which it was opened, wide, releasing a blast of food smells that stunned him. Karim was gently pushed in by the elbow and had to step over a towel on the floor. There were three men and a woman in the flat. One of the men was an African, from Nigeria, and he was at the piano. The woman, in a mini-skirt, was German. Of the two remaining men, one was from Sri Lanka – Anand, his host – and the other from India. All with papers in order. To Karim the room exuded a homely warmth that was as comforting as an embrace. He wondered how the smell of the cooking had been kept inside, then saw the wet towel that had been used to block the space under the door. The two officers were invited to look inside in the bedrooms and they did. After a peek in the kitchen, they left.

When the two men had been seen to have driven off, pandemonium broke loose around him. The door burst open and five more people – four men and a woman who had been hiding in a German neighbour’s flat it appeared – stormed in. And the guest became the centre of attention. Everyone seemed to be speaking at once, asking him questions, skipping his answers, offering advice. They told him not to worry … or to start worrying … What happened at the airport? they asked, how did the officers get hold of him? what answers did he give? … The mini-skirted woman, her face so close to him he could smell her perfume, was telling him, ‘… this is Bavaria. Big feet. Leather aprons. You know? Yodelei-o. Hitler started off here you know …’

He didn’t know. ‘Wagner, Wagner, Wagner,’ said the German neighbour and started walking stiffly about the room singing in a bass voice. The second woman had one of her legs on the arm of a sofa and acknowledged Karim’s glance with a smile. The Nigerian had started playing the piano. The Indian was walking around looking at wall hangings. A plate was thrust in Karim’s hand, he
was escorted to the kitchen. Anand was telling him how he could go to Canada via Hamburg.

‘You will be let off in a boat some miles from the coast. Throw away your passport. Say you are from Lebanon. Beirut … Don’t worry. The Canadians can’t tell the difference yet. But there is some risk involved, and some money …’

The ships that pass here no longer carry portents of faraway, impossible worlds.

The same harbour, in front of me. The tall-spired grey cathedral behind me on the right. The pipe fence on which I perch, nervous of pickpockets and the traffic screeching at the back of me; a gust of sea breeze to cool the heat still pulsing in my veins after the long walk. Before me a rolling patch of grass down which I remember as a child doing somersaults. And I remember looking up intently at some ship passing slowly through the narrow channel, at the white-clad passengers leaning out gaily against the railings, waving at us. Strangers whose worlds we had no cravings for at that time, mere curiosity.

All worlds are possible now. Shadowy cargo vessels cheerlessly ply these waters, bringers of unaffordable goods, reminders of deprivation, enticements to get up and go. Silent pipers, whom we follow by jet planes, those who can, and stretch ourselves between lives as contrary as the ends of a cross.

I returned, I suppose, because I always returned, ever since those student days I spent abroad. But a broken home also pushed me out as did concern for a palsied father spending his last years alone. There was an element of escape in my return as there was once in my leaving. So what right did I have in proposing, in holding up beggarly promises to someone who’d never made the voyage out even once and was now finally promised the world?

I remember my first day back. I had been brought home the previous night, had been made aware of the new airport road during the drive, a dual carriageway, some other sights, but shutting them out, closing my consciousness, until I had properly set my foot on the ground the next day. After ten years of absence, I had told myself, the reclaiming had to be a ritual, complete, not something done in wondrous spurts. In the same state of wilful unawareness I went to bed under a mosquito net. In the morning walking into the Msimbazi print shop from the back entrance – having walked down the stairs from the flat above – I paid polite tribute to the old Heidelberg still panting out wedding invitations which is all it is good for now. And then, saying my goodbyes I stepped onto the pavement. It was bright outside, reassuringly brilliant, the rude early-morning sun almost instantly roasting the skin and making the sweat glands run. And then, crazed, numb, wound-up, I set off.

I walked down Msimbazi, reached the crossroads at Uhuru, headed straight for it: Amina Store, the name sign no longer above it, only one of the three SALE signs extant outside on the wall, others posted over. I went up the stairs at the side of the building to the second floor; with bated breath, a peep inside the flat through the barred window beside the door: empty. It looks the same; she could have gone to school and her parents could be downstairs in the shop. Or do I imagine, delude myself it is the same? The silence jeers, and I walk down more slowly than I came up. And then, after this ritual, others. Up Uhuru Street – this once beloved street that looks so narrow and small now, I grieve for it. Past shops blaring music that sounds familiar but I haven’t heard. It is Ramadhan and men in kanzus and kofias must have come back from prayers somewhere. I hurry past Pipa Store – the corner grocery store where the legendary fat man used to sit, now a tailoring shop, the old shop sign half visible. Past Mnazi Moja grounds, and with beating heart to the street, the building, where I
lived as a boy for so many years from whose second-storey balcony I saw her, Amina, that day – the mother of my daughter as they say here – but then simply a remarkable girl who came to borrow Tranter’s
Pure Mathematics
from me.

I walked to the second-hand bookstore where Mr Hemani instantly recognised me as a former Perry Mason fan, went past Empire Cinema where Mahesh the manager would chase us out of X-rated Italian James Bond imitations. And then along Ocean Road, past the hospital, past the Upanga Mosque, to the Boys’ School, making two stops on the way to drink a soda and cool off.

Thus my first reclaiming of Dar.

You say no. Superficial.

I recall the German who sat next to me on my flight back. A tall man with a huge brown beard, glinting glasses, big teeth. An incessant smoker. An expert on literature from our part of the globe it turned out. He heard my story a little impatiently then got his point in.

‘Yes, yes. I would like to recommend a novel. It’s called
Time Reversal.
Yes?
Time Reversal.
It’s about a young man – like you – who returns to his home country, or tries to, but he dies on his way back. Yes?’

It’s fine, I said in my mind, for you to prognosticate my life. Next you’ll quote me Thomas Wolfe. He did. So now I have to live according to the dictates of irony, I fumed inwardly, become slave to an aesthetic. We’ll see.

At the Boys’ School which was a father to a generation, the tennis courts were grass-grown, a huge storage shed covered part of the cricket ground. The halls were quiet when I got there, yet how could they have competed with the chatter of decades past, the clamouring voices in my brain. A teacher, a couple of students looked up curiously as I walked past, a nervous ghost returned to haunt buildings, impotent against the people inside.

In the physics lab a faded certificate hung on a wall in a black wooden frame. A humble-looking document, it could have been a barber’s licence. I walked over to it. It was the certificate a former classmate, Nanji, had won for first prize at the annual East African Science Fair. Fifteen years ago. I wondered how many fourth, fifth, or sixth formers, now buzzing in little groups along the benches, would identify with it. Rajabu the lab assistant had been hanging around the school a lot longer. A walking archive, if such things are important. He knew where each of the former teachers went to, under what conditions they had left. He identified me that day, he was one living thing in the school I could clutch on to and I did so desperately. Through him I met the physics master.

The equipment in the lab didn’t work. The DC supply at which Mr Bashir, a former teacher, used to stand trembling before turning it on, hadn’t been repaired since he ultimately damaged it before returning to India. Old (then new) UN-donated science supplies that needed fixing or installing. I don’t know how, I answered the physics master. Wheatstone bridge, potentiometer, simple circuits, perhaps. But atomic physics experiments, those exciting windows to the universe: no.

But perhaps there was a way. I have stretched myself thin after all. I got hold of Lateef, another former student, in Jeddah. Upon secondment from Bell Canada to the Saudi Government, he earns tax-free dollars and avoids the cold; and grinning his naive, good-natured grin he awaits his messiah to take the Muslims out of their misery. I remember standing with him in Toronto outside a Chinese restaurant. Euphoric, happy, stretching out his arms wide: ‘Great country, vast. You should see it from coast to coast. Relish it.’ Less than a year later he was in Saudi Arabia. For him it was a short hop south from there to Dar. He has come now several times and brought new equipment. He has no hope for the country though. The roads, the schools, the hospitals – every pothole,
every malfunction delights him in its confirmation of his prediction. But for this his old school – almost all African now – and the Asian boys and girls from the other non-government schools whom he meets after mosque and encourages to see the world, he is the messiah, and I the philistine.

On one of his visits I took him to meet our former history teacher Fahndo, now force-retired and living on the charity of a former student (one of his worst he says) and writing a ‘history.’ A secretive Fahndo, this one, much poorer, and not wanting to tell us what the ‘history’ is about.

We talked of old times, and Almeida.