Abyssinian Chronicles (69 page)

At first it was very exciting to hear people’s edited versions of themselves, especially how they had got money for passports and air tickets and what they had experienced in Sweden, Britain or America. But as it became a weekly and sometimes daily event, with bored souls
coming to Keema’s just to watch television and to listen to music and to gossip, it became tedious. They were almost all economic migrants, despite the political-refugee guises some had donned because it was the only way to enter the country. The majority of them had washed their garments in the humiliations of the camps and were marked by the years of waiting in limbo for permission to stay, but they were now brimming with resilience and optimism. Most of them did back-breaking jobs in greenhouses, on farms, in meat-packing factories and in all sorts of dirty places. They arrived at Keema’s with the blaze of hard labor in their eyes and the anvils of fatigue grinding their overworked limbs. I could appreciate their need for frequent visits to such a popular haunt. I gradually appreciated their reluctance to take me in, for who was I to them? How could I survive without working? What was I looking for here? What was my secret? How could I be trusted?

Privacy was a rare delicacy, which I savored in measly portions. Nostalgia-laden conversation from the sitting room penetrated the walls of my bedroom and made it impossible to rest or to think while the visitors were around. I was forced to join the group and masticate the cud of jaded conversations. The parties were a torture. Thirty or more people would invade the house, smother it in perfume and aftershave, and make the walls vibrate with noise, music, dancing, arguments and the endless gurgles of an overworked toilet. The arrangement suited Keema very well: during the week, she left at seven and returned at seven; on weekends, she wanted to party, to please her friends and to meet her contacts because, as I found out, she got paid for housing these people in transit to Britain or elsewhere. The preparations alone took a day or two, what with the shopping for drinks and eats, the cleaning of the sitting room and other rooms, the cooking of meals and the frying of chicken to be eaten through the night, and the whole energy-consuming atmosphere of a bar before opening time. The meals would be eaten early, and then people would start arriving, ushering in the drinking, dancing and feasting that would last until the small hours of morning. A big quarrel or a fight between two women over a man or two men over a woman would stir up lingering passions and gossip.

The ghetto resembled Uganda during the guerrilla war: the day belonged to the forces of law and order, the night to pirates and their minions and victims. In order to gain a taste of both worlds, I gradually
took to nightcrawling and visiting the haunts of small-time drug dealers and users. From around eight o’clock on, the culverts, certain nooks of the behemoths and some well-known cafes came alive with customers. A customer came in, whispered something, handed over cash and got a little parcel wrapped in plastic. At the culverts, some customers could wait no longer and just turned round, faced the wall, opened their parcels and rubbed the fiery powder into their mucous membranes.

Crack users had their own haunts, often derelict houses, where they squatted, lighted a fire and put the rock on a spoon, which they put over the flame. It was quite an experience to watch bliss grab a face, permeate its fibers, soothe its bones and then turn around and desert it. The tight muscles would then slacken, the mouth would gape and drool, the eyes would glaze over and the body would furl like a deflated balloon. Souls passing through this purgatory looked frighteningly tormented. They resembled a viral-plague victim in the throes of a hellish fever. Finally, as the talons of hell sank in, the souls would ooze from both terminals or climb to groggy feet to look for another fix. That was when switchblades flashed. I always extracted myself from the spot before flashing steel could be pushed under my nose.

Along the culverts, in spaces about meter apart, stood youths in baggy clothes with caps pulled over their eyes, waiting for customers. They reminded me of crocodiles ambushing their prey, immobile and dedicated to the point of letting flies go in and out of their mouths. And sure enough, the prey would come looking for the powder of ecstasy. These were dangerous places, and the worst thing that could happen was getting caught in the cross fire of some little fight or stickup. The police never lifted a finger. Police policy was to arrive after the flames had died down, or rather when one of the combatants had been knocked out cold or killed. They never concerned themselves with threats: if somebody threatened to harm you, the police never did a thing till he honored his threat. And many criminals were released as fast as they were arrested. This sort of danger, this uncertainty, added an edge to my prowls.

The knife was the symbol of respect here. Youths with baggy clothes often had one, mostly two- or three-inch devils. I was more afraid of being cut up than of getting shot, but whatever little fears I had did not keep me from going out at night and watching junkies
shoot drugs into blue veins in defunct lifts and under the stairs, women sucking or fucking men for money, and men and women fighting over drugs, money or nothing.

The scariest thing about the ghetto was that people were moving every day. No single day passed without somebody moving in or out. Starved of intellectual occupation, I would sit on the railing at the entrance and watch men and women lifting furniture in and out of vans. The junkies I saw sleeping or reclining in pools of urine and vomit and saliva under the culverts on Sunday mornings seemed to rise, shed their degraded bodies, don muscular ones and move fat, hissing sofas, creaking double beds, glass-fronted cupboards and bulky suitcases out of waiting vans and up the endless stairs. Later, the muscled figures whisking furniture up and down stairs seemed to wilt under my gaze and become the blank-eyed zombies craving their fix day in and day out.

Gradually, I started reaching out to Africa in diaspora. It was hard because of the language barrier, and because I did not work or go to nightclubs or do drugs. I looked around for a library where I could borrow some books and hopefully meet people, but there was none. I finally asked Keema’s naughty girl to arm me with the rudiments of the Dutch language in exchange for favors and a little money. I built up a crude arsenal of everyday Dutch, waiting for my chance, and when one night I came upon a woman who was being stalked by the crocodiles under the culvert, I was happy. My reaction to the situation was perfect. When I saw her, with the crocodiles a few meters behind her, I said out loud, “I am sorry for being late, darling. I should have met you at the station as I had promised.” My view was that the boys had not really wanted to do her any harm. If they had insisted, they would have caught up with her long before I met her. Instead, they followed her at a distance, called her names and asked her to blow them. I found her perspiring and out of breath. She could hardly think quickly enough to mouth the words, “Yes, where have you been all this time?” but when she did, the crocodiles stopped, looked at her and me for one long moment and then slowly turned back. It was the night that had saved her from further humiliation. The boys could not see me clearly, and neither could I make out their faces. They must have considered the possibility that I had a gun or connections in the underworld. They just played into my hands.

The woman thanked me and invited me home for a drink. Her name was Eva Jazz. “I have to be somewhere, I am sorry,” I said, just to test her. She insisted, and I knew that she was single or a single mother determined not to work through her horror alone. I dreaded the prospect of being greeted by two or three sullen children who had been waiting all evening for their mother. It was a two-hundred-meter walk through a park softly lighted by spaced roadside lamps, and I could see her eyeing the flower bushes warily.

As it turned out, there was nobody at home. She was thirty years of age, starting to bulge at the front and the back, and I kept thinking about my maternal aunt Kasawo. Eva was half white, half black, but looked whiter than some white people I had seen that week. She had a flat face and silky jet-black hair, which she covered with a dark blond wig. She confronted the world and its lechers, marauders, crocodiles and strangers with a cold look. Yet she could deploy a nice smile that made her face inviting. I liked the smell of flowers that hit me when I entered her flat. It was quite a departure from Keema’s overused air.

Eva had fat furniture, a huge hi-fi, a big collection of records and videos, and many pictures of herself and her family on the wall. I was disappointed not to find any books in the house, except for her telephone directory, television guide and a heap of fashion magazines. Her bathroom was filled with skin-toning creams, perfumes, powders, shampoos, toothpicks, nail files and many bizarre-looking objects of body care whose purpose I could not fathom. I was amazed. The stuff could fill a small boutique in Uganda. I kept imagining her in there feeding her skin for hours, and the trouble she took to select the day’s facial weaponry from such a formidable armory.

The first meetings were easy. We kept skirting each other, hiding behind the banalities of weather, life in the ghetto, talk about drugs, young people and music. She was surprised to hear that I was from Uganda. She thought I was American or Jamaican. I asked her whether she knew where Uganda was, and she just laughed. I got the message. I did not pry or try to force information down her throat. The spotlight was mostly on her. She was working in a retirement home on the white side of Amsterdam and had a son, two sisters and three brothers in the Caribbean. She had been in the country for the last fifteen years and generally felt at home. Her life revolved around her work, a few
friends, visits to clubs and not much more. She was generally not interested in what went on in the country or in the city or in the world. I was disappointed. What, then, was I going to learn from her?

At that juncture, I tried to say something about myself—my education, my teaching experience, the wars, my experiences in the Luwero Triangle—but she was not interested, and I quickly gave up. It was American pop music that turned her on and made her explode into flame like the torch of a fire-eater doused in paraffin. She could not praise Gregory Hines, Lionel Richie, James Ingram, Michael Jackson, Prince and Aretha Franklin enough. My knowledge in that zone was shallow, garnered as it was from old magazines, but I was only expected to listen. She inundated me with details of their personal life. I tried to change the subject to literature but got no response. Hollywood, though, made her sing. Her knowledge of Hollywood films and film stars was endless. She knew when films were made, and by whom, and who had starred in them. She knew the difficulties they had had in shooting or marketing this or that film, and which releases deserved being hits and which were simply overhyped. Romantic comedies, musicals and adventure films were her favorites. At such times, I wanted to leave, but she was not done yet. The catwalk had to be stormed. I had no interest in clothes and who made them and who modelled them, but once she got started, there was no stopping her. At the back of my mind was the idea that I too would get my chance in the sun and inundate her with information about places and facts and books she did not know. I would make
her
writhe and squirm. I was wrong.

The moment liquor was introduced, conversation, or rather the monologues, started glowing with passion. I learned that she had taken to drinking when she gave up smoking, which had done nothing for her weight, in addition to making her sweat and puff. Frequently, in a frustrated reaction to her weight and her work, she would attack men.

“Dogs, dogs, dogs,” she said in a very American accent. She might have been a character from a Spike Lee movie.

“And what does that make you?”

“They lie all the time.”

“And you swallow the lies,” I said excitedly. This was our first real dialogue. “And in turn you lie to them.”

“Now you are defending your kind,” she said, almost angrily.

“I love a good discussion. Monologues work better on stage.”

“At least you should have supported me and waited for me to give you the details.”

The women I dated back home found it hard to tell me about their conquests and defeats. They felt it was much better if a man did not know everything about a woman’s past. Eva did not care; she liked it. It liberated something in her. She quickly got very deep into the subject of men, and, with eyes glittering, she idealized six-foot-six types, men who towered over her like lampposts. My impression was that she was always waiting or looking out for one. To begin with, she had bought a huge bed, and in her spare closet were two huge robes and an assortment of fancy but very large sandals. I looked at the pop posters on her wall and knew that it was not alcohol but the real Eva talking. I felt lucky I wasn’t her ideal man. The preparations she had made for the arrival of her Prince Charming were enough to give more cautious types an impression of desperation.

Amidst alcohol fumes, she invited me to share her bed. This rather surprised me. Why hadn’t she waited to know me better? Were there no six-foot-six types waiting in the wings? It came as no surprise when I almost failed. My thoughts were elsewhere. Jo Nakabiri suddenly invaded my head, would not let go, and instead of transforming this woman beside me into a wet-dream goddess or at least something I could drool about while I did the job, thoughts of Jo just made me softer. Of course, I could have put on my pants and left, but that would probably mean it would be my last time here. I still wanted to know more about this woman. I turned to those marathon foreplay maneuvers and licked all the sweat from her neck, her arms, her stomach and every dash of her stretch marks. I attacked her armpits and sucked all the hairs, ingesting her bottled perfumes to the point of feeling dizzy. I inflamed her with calculated thrusts of my tongue. After a good half hour, with her squirming, sweating, oozing and puffing, I finished the job. Older women are nefarious drainers of younger men’s energy; they are hard to satisfy, and are vocal about jobs half done. During those gruelling sessions, I paid for all the food and alcohol and water I had touched. As I growled with a mediocre orgasm, I knew that Eva would be my last older woman ever.