It was a Sunday afternoon, and I was on the road to the deep, inner South West. I was beginning a one-year Legal research diploma the next day in Nyende — a small, lesser-known town which many non-natives would never consider visiting. There was nothing much to see or do in Nyende, except this newly-built Research Institute that had opened the town up to a flood of entrants beyond the borders.
In the early 1990s, the monolingual country I was to live in had been ripped by the delirious desire to effect a sterilized uniformity of human beings. An outburst of hatred — that evil spirit behind all world wars and mass-killing sprees — welled-up, and years and years of tenuous domination erupted in a chaos that nearly erased an entire people. There had been other cycles of cleansing before, but this one happened on so shocking a scale that in the struggle to forestall recurrence, there arose an era of forced reconciliation, surgical cleaning of old wounds, purging of sins, and the sewing up of bits and pieces of broken souls.
This was my second visit to the place. The first had been for a mere two days, as a tourist, but then, we had kept to the capital city only. I had travelled with my parents and Grace, my sister, on a particularly adventurous Christmas holiday. Grace and I were excited because our parents had finally agreed to bring us here, and quite curious to see what all the hysteria was about this small country. It turned out to be eerily calm and menacing. The capital is called Montano Bay. It was tidy but not exactly beautiful. If it was beautiful, it had the loveliness of a steel-lined scientific lab.
The atmosphere gave me a gold-fish-in-a-tank feeling, like there were eyes watching me from the top, sides, and even bottom. As we drove around the city’s few monuments, I thought I saw the same man in a striped crisp-brown shirt and khaki shorts; jumping onto a motorcycle here, standing at a distance there, staring into space nonchalantly, buying juice at the counter in the supermarket, always busy doing something, sometimes in a hurry and sometimes taking his time, but never far away from us.
Grace and I turned to him with faces wrought in shock and amusement.
“What just happened?” Grace inquired.
“It record the voice,” he replied.
“Oh my God! You recorded him? Does he know?” she shrieked.
“No,” the driver laughed. “I record every call that come.”
“Does the person on the other side know?” I asked.
“No,” he replied, and then turned to his phone quickly. “Look, I show you.”
He went on to display an application on his phone that neither of us knew existed until it became available to the public nearly three years later, and that day was five years ago!
I was reluctant to come back here; to the stiff noses sticking out from under soldiers’ caps, the hawk’s eyes bleeding down on me and sifting through my every thought — born, and yet unconceived. I was uncomfortable in the day, when the sun was out, and the air was warm, and I was uncomfortable in the breezy night air, even though the streets were brightly lit with a blue and white glow on every corner. I thought I should have felt safer here; since my own hometown was barren of such sophistication and composure — with its dusty, daytime chaos and dark, dangerous streets at nighttime. And yet it was hard to breathe here.
In the city I come from, when night falls it’s as if Thomas Edison was never born. Driving a car is like hopping through a minefield, not knowing when you will jump onto a hidden grenade. As your eyes strain to see through the bright headlights of opposite traffic, you suddenly stumble on the silhouette of a pedestrian leisurely crossing the road. You stamp the brakes, missing them within a hair of their body. You let out an angry jeer and pump the hoot, but the figure walks away just as slowly and unbothered as if they had not almost been killed. Then just as your foot touches the accelerator, another figure pushing an empty cart also cuts in.
It’s a city that defies sleep. Despite the ubiquity of lightless streets, ill-constructed roads, and iron-rod wielding thugs, small shops selling sugar and milk are open to the wee hours, motorcycle taxis wheeze in and out of pubs and clubs, pedestrians navigate non-existent sidewalks, and the traffic police neglect their wives to make quick money off drunk drivers.
But for all its newness and cleanness, every hour in Montano Bay made me miss home. I told myself I could never live here. Now, by some unforeseen design, I was back again, this time as a student in an arbitrary location inside the interior.
I had packed up my bags with a sour, dread-filled heart. . I knew I had to do it. I needed a bulkier curriculum vitae to help my career on, but even before I set off, I already missed my sister. And my boyfriend Mark. Just a month before, Mark had gotten a new job that took up all his time. He barely looked at me anymore. He never had time to speak. At first, I was happy for him, but then I became jealous; his job got all the attention. My last image of him was of a face lost inside a phone screen as the bus rolled away.
The road to Nyende was sparsely lined with tall trees that dropped to the valley like a neat brick staircase strewn with grass. The sun shone fiercely throughout the day. I had travelled in a mini bus with twenty-three fussy strangers. Inside the bus was stuffy because no one wanted the windows open. When I attempted to open mine, a man with a ragged old hat tapped my shoulder and motioned for me to close it. I was relieved when the bus finally pulled into Nyende’s deserted bus station at nine on that Sunday evening. As soon as my suitcase touched the floor, I drew the curtains, let loose the mosquito net and fell asleep on top of the flowery bed cover, with the white fluorescent light on.
I found harmony with my room much more easily than I had imagined I would. I had thought it would take me a bit of time to get used to my new surroundings but found my place between those four walls instantly. It had quite a bit of walking space and was furnished with just about all the furniture I needed; a well-sized bed with side tables, a reading table, and a chair. My next-door neighbor was a woman who often travelled to Montano Bay. We shared a bathroom and toilet, but I rarely saw her; and when I did, she had the jumpy restlessness of a rabbit caught in a trap. I did not know her second name, or whether she had a husband or children, but I supposed she did because she always went home for the weekend as soon as classes ended. Sometimes, when I was standing in our bathroom, I would hear her footsteps coming towards the door, but once I ran the water at the sink, she would walk away.
It was an airy room with a high ceiling, big windows on the right side and a whiteboard and projector in the front. The chairs had a small writing table affixed to them and were organized in two columns and five rows. All the nationals sat together and we, the foreigners too, somehow found ourselves around each other, easily distinguishable by the language we spoke. I sat on one of the few seats remaining and looked about. There were no familiar faces. As I began to tap at my phone, our first lecturer walked in; a dark-skinned man of medium build and a head patterned with chalk-white curls.
Richard Nyerere was confident and widely read. He spoke loudly and slowly, gazing over the class with a sharp look whenever his sentences halted. He was quite energetic for his age, jumping around from one end of the room to another. I liked that he had such passion for teaching.His electrifying personality eased us into life at the institute. He might not have been aware of this, since he asked for questions at the end of the lecture, but he was not one who liked to be challenged. I suppose he was not too keen on students who assumed themselves too clever in his opinion.I had not intended to raise my hand. In fact, it seemed that I saw it rise up on its own just as soon as he had made the statement. He pointed at me.
“Yes?” he said.
“That legal suit you are speaking of was about fraud and not embezzlement. I think the one about embezzlement was the Arnold Sitenda v Zambia.”
“I doubt it. I doubt it. Actually, I am sure it is the one. There is a thin line between the two, and most people confuse the two.”
I went on to explain. I knew I was right because my undergraduate research paper had been on the subject. Only I was shocked by my own insistence because I had never been one to barely breathe a word in class.
“Well, I think I am not mistaken. It is about fraud. But, okay, I will check my facts and make sure; I will get back to you tomorrow,” he responded.
It was a post-graduate class with the feeling of being in high school. There were those too eager to please the lecturers, the academic show-offs, and those who were troubled by nothing, or so they wanted to seem. I must have been grouped among the show-offs. And in the easy-goers corner, the chief easy was a guy named Kayn. Sometimes I heard him snickering with his friends while I was speaking, at times even whispering loudly, “Break time!” as he chuckled at his own hilariousness.
I had to blink twice the first time I saw Kayn. He laughed like a bear. That loud, boisterousness reminded me of Mark, but it was really the uncanny resemblance that took me aback.He was almost the same height, had the same dark skin set like clay, a firm face, and the same mischievous smile. Kayn was younger than Mark though, by at least five years.He was still excited about proving his machismo with the women. I saw him make his rounds in class, singling out girls he knew would be flattered by his attention.
Sometimes, when I turned around during lectures, I saw him with one arm spread conceitedly over the top of his chair, dangling onto the chair of the girl seated next to him. One or two times he was rubbing her shoulder or whispering into her blushing ear and laughing. I despised his behavior and made sure that it showed on my face. But I couldn’t help noticing him.
One of my first friends at the institute was a classmate called Peter. He was perpetually causal. He was not my usual choice for a friend — a social media addict forever embroiled in Twitter wars and keeping up with his Snapchat family — but I somehow found it easiest to talk to him. We sat in the same row in class, and he had made it a habit to turn and smile at me whenever I raised my hand. It was an unspoken understanding between us that I raised my hand sometimes just so I would make Kayn uncomfortable.
One of those afternoons where we had a research assignment to present, we huddled in our assigned groups around the classroom as we waited for the class to begin. The stakes were high because all our research counted in the final marks awarded for our diplomas, and we had spent two days working on it. Kayn was the first to go up. He walked to the front with an exaggerated swagger about his shoulders, and as he began to speak, there were abrupt bursts of giggling from some of his group members.
It did not take me long to realise that he was reading our assignment. My eyes fixed on him, seething as my temperature flame, and anxious whispers swirled around me.
“Sheila, this guy stole our assignment,” Peter said.
“I know, what do we do?” I panicked.
“We have no time. Within a few minutes, Kayn’s presentation will be finished, and we will be called up.”
I sighed.
“Let’s ask questions when he is done. I’m sure he does not know his sources, or any in-depth knowledge about the work. Maybe that will show the lecturer they know nothing about what they are saying.”
I sighed. I could not believe that Kayn would be so nasty. I had been hoping that I was wrong about him.
Our questions did poke holes in their presentation, but it did not prevent both groups from being invited to the Faculty dean’s office when our research sounded suspiciously similar. We got a stern warning. A similar mishap would lead to discontinuation. My eyes bore into Kayn’s as I stood up to leave the office. I was surprised to find what looked like remorse in his eyes. I walked away suddenly feeling sorry for him.
The scandal got overtaken by time and events. There was a national period of mourning, to commemorate the country’s infamous last madness, during which no parties, or no noise, was allowed; so we spoke in whispers when we talked about the skulls and bodies we had seen on our visits to the mass burial grounds. We did not know how to comfort the nationals when we saw them crying with blood-red eyes at the gravesites. Their mourning would be eternal.
On the night after the memorial period ended I spent several hours on phone with Mark, quarrelling about how little attention he gave me. It was the same quarrel we had been having over and over again. I had heard myself say the same words before and knew what his response would be even before he said it, but still, it did not make sense.
“You spend two days without talking to me? How do you think that makes me feel?” I asked.
“How many times do I have to explain to you that I have been busy?” he said.
“Busy doing what? If you can’t create the time, then maybe I’m not that important to you.”
“If that is what you are going with, okay.”
I stood in disarray with my back to the wall as my vision became blurry.
There was a knock at my door. I switched off the phone as Mark was speaking and put it on the table. I was tired of the tears and the shouting. I peered through the curtains. It was Peter.
“Why? What do you mean?” I asked.
“There are some guys here who do not like you,” he said.
“I already know that.”
“Yes, you know who I am talking about.”
I looked away hoping that nothing would betray any partiality for Kayn. I had begun to suspect that my primeval attraction to men who seemed to be a challenge had arisen again. I was determined to fight it this time.
“What are you up to?” Peter said, determined to change the atmosphere.
“Nothing, really. I was on the phone,” I replied.
“Are you okay?” he whispered, “You don’t look okay.”
“I am. Just having a hard day,” I replied.
“Is it about that incident in class?”
“No.”
“Alright, I won’t leave you behind looking like this. Come with me; I was on my way to have supper.”
My body shook as I stirred at three that night. There was shuffling outside my window and a howling noise in the distance. I remained stiff, on my back, afraid to move for fear that whatever it was had already made it into my room.
My pulse quickened as the noise deepened sequentially. With an instant jump, I bolted to the door, scratched around for the light switch, and pressed it down. Opening an inch of the curtains, I pressed my head against the cold iron burglar proofing and peeped through the window. There was a figure standing just outside. I pushed the curtain closed and then opened it again almost immediately. It was Kayn standing outside my window.
I opened my door slightly.
“Kayn, what’s going on?” I asked, my voice hoarse.
“I heard something,” he gulped.
“What did it sound like, because I think I also heard it,” I said, stepping outside as I looked around the steep night.
“Man, I don’t know, but there’s some lousy thing making noise out here. Do you think maybe some chaps here failed to rest in peace?” His eyes were still groggy, but he had lost his solemn tone.
“So you are afraid of ghosts?” I laughed.
He crinkled his eyes and smiled. I was not prepared for it. His smile was sinful and mischievous, something I knew I should not indulge, but which was nevertheless beautiful and inviting.
“I was just walking around the block to make sure everyone was safe…mostly you,” he said.
He was a flirt, of course. I already knew this. But I needed something to pass the time, at least a few more minutes where I was not alone, listening to dark, sorrowful sounds.
“I wanted to tell you something, he continued. “The assignment, it was not me.”
“Who was it?” I replied, immediately on my guard again.
“I can’t say, but it was someone else in my group. It was supposed to be a joke, but it went too far…And I told him off you know. But I promise it won’t happen again.”
I had not expected an apology. I did not know what else to say except that it was okay.
His eyes lingered on my face for a moment, and then they lightly brushed against my chest. I remembered then that I had run out of my room in my slinky nightdress and I subconsciously attempted to cover myself by folding my hands over my chest.
“You know, all those things I do and say in class… I only do to get your attention.”
“I don’t believe you,” I said with mock-seriousness, unable to keep from smiling.
He bit his lip and tilted his head, touching my body with his eyes for a few seconds. Then he lifted his shaking arm and squeezed my shoulder. “Have a good night, Sheila.”
Just like Mark, he could with just one movement, make me forget my resolve. As I locked the door behind him, my shoulder hot from where he had just put his hand, I wondered how two people could look so alike but exist in different times and places.
Usually, I woke up before the fog had lifted but it was a Saturday, and I had nowhere to go. I hugged my blanket and listened to the sound of the town waking up. A motorcycle rode noisily on the other side of the fence outside my window, its brakes screeching as it slowed down at the big hump. The night guard whistled as he walked by my window with his radio. Slowly and reluctantly, I forced myself out of bed.
I picked up my phone and dialed Mark’s number. The operator said that his phone was off the network. I cancelled the phone call and threw my phone violently against the bed. I guess he had decided to forget me after all.
In the afternoon Peter tapped at my window and called my name. I knew it was him even before he spoke. He always tapped my window in the same way. I decided somewhere in the middle of our conversation that I would not tell him about my encounter with Kayn. I could not explain my sudden change in what I thought about him. It had been one of the core bases of our friendship that we both couldn’t stand him. I asked Peter if he had heard the noises at night and he nodded his head and said with a forced laugh, “Of course! I know everything that happens here.”
I laughed too even though there had been a strange gravity in his voice when he had spoken.
“If you want to go out tonight, I will pick you up later. Look at you; you are so bored aren’t you?” he chuckled.
“You know I am. See you later then.”
At eight, Peter was back at my door. I let him in, and he sat on the bed as he watched me, standing in front of the mirror putting my mascara on. He simply smiled and kept staring throughout the ordeal.
As I walked back into the room, he did not take his eyes off me.
“We go?” I asked.
“Yes, let’s go.”
We walked past the classroom and library towards the row of shops that lay like a silhouette against the towering buildings of the school. In the last shop in the corner, there were round plastic tables and chairs arranged on the outside verandah where some of my classmates sat having supper. The shrewd owner of the bar-shop made sure that everyone in her bar always had a bottle of beer or gin in hand.
I waved a general hello as Peter ran in to get seats for both of us. As soon I sat down, a stout man called Benjamin, probably in his mid-thirties and one of the older ones in our class, came staggering towards our table and grabbed the chair that Peter had brought for himself. Peter was inside the bar getting supper.
“I’m so happy to see you,” he said.
I smiled, looking around the table at the three other men who were watching to see my reaction.
“This girl!” he turned to look at the others, “A verre verre bright girl.”
I shook my head and smiled again.
“Whenever she talks in class, I rissen, I rissen, because I know that she arrrways talks sense!” He shouted.
The guys at the table laughed and one of them said, “Benjamin leave the girl to settle down.”
“No! No!” he protested, “You young men, if I was you, I would have…”
“Benjamin, that’s my seat,” Peter said, holding his plate and bottle of beer.
“You go and find somewhere eres,” Benjamin replied.
Peter’s jaw tightened, making the muscles in his neck more pronounced. “I said get out of my chair,” he repeated.
“Get out of his chair man, gwe Benjamin,” said Sean, one of the guys at the table.
“Okay, okay, okay, okay,” Benjamin said as he struggled to stand up. Gripping the sides of the chair he pushed himself up, and without fully standing up, he walked away from the crowd and into the shadows where we could hear him laughing by himself.
“Are you drinking anything?” Peter asked me.
“What do they have? Wine, maybe.”
“Get whatever you want. You know it’s the end of the mourning period,” he teased.
“And you know I always buy my own drinks,” I retorted with a smile.
I disappeared into the crowd, passing through the centre of the tiny room where happy people had begun to dance vigorously as the drinks loosened their inhibitions.
“You have wine?” I asked the petite woman who owned the shop. She had the face and body of a twelve-year-old.
“Wine?” I said again.
“Is finished,” she said brashly.
I looked up at the box of wine on the ragged shelf above her head. In my hometown, no small business owner ever said that anything was finished. Even when they did not have what you were looking for, they sped off to get it from a competitor themselves.
“Is finished. Finished,” she said as she picked it up and shook it.
“What about that one? How much?”
“Bailey? I bring for you.”
“How much?”
“You take anything; they will pay.” She pointed outside.
“No. No. I pay. Now.”
She took the money resignedly, and she pointed at one of her workers to pick the box from the shelf. As he poured it into the glass, she leaned back against the counter, her eyes locked on the dancing and shouting crowd with amusement. It was an unusual sight for a national to dance or show excitement in public. They always just stood around nudging each other whenever they saw the foreigners dancing. They thought we didn’t understand their language, but we knew that they whispered to each other about how crazy we were.
The sting of the night air struck me as soon as I stepped outside again. As I lifted the glass to my mouth, I saw Benjamin staggering towards our table again. He gripped the table tightly as if he was hanging off a cliff. The weight of his grip had tilted it towards his swaying body, knocking two beer bottles to the ground. Someone quickly pulled the table and set it straight again.
“Gwe Benjamin!”
“Ehh! Benjamin! Be serious!” they shouted as he fell backwards into the grass.
“Do you want to leave this place? There’s another party at Sean’s house,” Peter whispered.
The party at Sean’s house had a more sophisticated crowd, with more expensive alcohol and cultivated laughter. It was a spacious brick house filled with echoes, the way a house where only men live would be. The living room was stripped of its single brown and yellow sofa which was placed in the middle of the compound, while the dining area had a small out-of-place fridge. Groups of five or six people sat on the sofa while others set up at different corners of the house and compound. There was another group standing at the back of the house, whom I glimpsed through the open window. They were holding a separate party, smoking and puffing what I later came to understand was marijuana.
I sat on one of the empty plastic chairs that were lying around. The sky was velvet blue with twinkling confetti sprayed over it. I looked towards the wrought iron gate and saw Kayn making his way to the house. When he saw me, he smiled and ran up the front yard excitedly.
“Are you friends now?” Peter said with gritted teeth.
“It’s a long story,” I mumbled.
Peter said nothing and walked away. He was not one to be so touchy, but something was different that night. I made to go after him, but someone gripped my hand.
“Sheila, hey!” Kayn said, pulling me to himself.
“Hey!” I replied, immediately forgetting Peter and his impetuous change of temper. He had vanished somewhere inside the house.
“Did you ever find that ghost you were looking for?” I teased, turning to Kyle.
He stood puzzled for a moment; then he laughed that bear-like laugh.
“Ohh! Noo, I didn’t. Let me get you something to drink.”
“I already have one,” I replied.
“Don’t worry about it!” he shouted over his shoulder, already striding towards the verandah where there was an alcoholic drink set-up. He was back before I could properly protest.
“This is what you were drinking, right?” he said, lowering his voice as his breath caressed my ears.
I was almost sure that even he wasn’t truly listening to the music but suddenly, he stood up animatedly and shouted “DJ! DJ! Volume! Volume! Sheila come and join me.”
I followed him towards a shadowy part of the lower compound. When there was finally no one in sight, he held my hand and drew me to his body. I swayed closer and closer as our movements became more effortless and in sync. Soon his hands were clutching my waist.
He smiled as he pulled me even closer; the fingers around my waist became even tighter. Nervously, I drew my face upwards and saw his mouth coming towards mine. I stood transfixed as the cold, moist lips perched like a bird onto my own, finding warmth on my tongue and pushing towards the inside of my mouth, first lightly and then with a firm resolve. His hands smoothed down my waist to the top of my hips, and he seemed to be contemplating whether to move farther down or up. My mind was slipping into a bottomless hole when I felt a sharp nudge on my arm.
“Get your hands off her!” Peter commanded in a hushed but deadly voice.
Kayn was unexpectedly calm. Judging by the sullen grimaces on his and Peter’s face, they seemed to understand each other quite well. I stood unbalanced on my feet in the grass, asking Peter what was wrong. He did not flinch.
“You tried, and you failed. You are a coward man. Leave the rest of us to do what you failed to do,” Kayn laughed mockingly.
Peter’s hand shook with anger as he pointed at Kayn. “What did you put in her drink?”
I tugged at Peter’s sleeve and he faced me with a sharp turn of his head. Eyes blazing fiercely, he spoke in a voice he was clearly trying and failing to control, “Do you know what he was doing outside your window last night?”
“No? How do you know? …I don’t know,” I stammered.
Kayn walked menacingly up to him until his chest was lingering above Peter’s head. Peter was a few inches shorter than Kayn, and I was certain that because of their difference in height, Peter would get hurt.
But Peter poked Kayn in the chest and pushed him back. “I am warning you…”
“Who are you to warn me?” Kayn bellowed with a glint in his eyes.
I stood on the side confused about what was happening. The more I tried to make sense of what Peter was saying, the less it made sense to me. My head was spinning as I shouted to Peter. “Let’s go, Let’s go! Take me back to my room!”
In a flash, there was a pounding sound, and Peter’s left cheek was bleeding. He snarled as he jumped at Kayn’s neck and pushed him to the ground.
There was a thump and scramble as they both hit the ground. The music back at the house was suddenly clear to me again, and I contemplated running back to call someone to disentangle the two men, but I froze when I saw what was held in Peter’s hand.
Peter, one hand pinning Kayn’s chest to the ground, was pressing a small golden pistol against the side of his opponent’s head.
“No, no, no!” I could not tell if my voice was coming out of my throat or I was just thinking it. “Peter! Why do you have a gun? Please, don’t…”
“I won’t hurt you, don’t be scared of me.”
“Okay, please, let him go.” I begged.
“You are blind, Sheila. You are blind.”
“Yes, I am, I’m sorry.” I bubbled, my throat choking up with tears.
“You don’t know who I am. But I know you. I have been there for you. Don’t cry; I would never hurt you.” Kayn closed his eyes tightly like a man who had accepted his end, but his hands clawed at the grass as if to give him the strength to receive his death.
Peter slowly removed the gun and placed it in his pocket, making all his actions seem as delicate as if it were not him who had just done what he did. He pulled himself up and walked quickly away from the panting Kayn.
I glared at Peter until the image of him disappeared into the night. With a quick glance at Kayn, who lay almost motionless except for the rapid rising and falling of his chest, I picked up my bag and ran to my room.
But I stopped in terror when I saw a figure hunched on the ground in front of my door. I thought it was Peter, but then I saw the arch of his long back and the way his hair reached the base of his neck. Mark was here to see me.