The Book of Secrets (27 page)

Mariamu spoke to him, but she did not say much. She had never been one for lengthy conversations; and now, as before, on certain matters she was completely silent.

So whenever he heard of the presence of maalims and joshis or others of whatever faith who had acquired local renown for their knowledge of the world of spirits, he went to consult them. To each he showed a half page from the book. Of each he asked the same questions. Where is she? What is she? Who killed her? What is in the book? Tell me about the jiv, the soul.

None of them could give him the exact answers. But they all concurred: the fact that she had returned to him, made her home with him again, so to speak, was proof that she had left something undone, had something yet to take from or give to the mortal world.

But what? — Pipa thought. Why doesn’t she tell me what it is?

“Sometimes, my friend,” one maalim, going further than most, told him, “all that these returned souls want from us is forgiveness in order to be released …”

Having heard this, Pipa went home trembling with the thought that he would release Mariamu. Why not? — she was dead, let her rest in peace. He would keep the book she had given him; and he had her son. He went to her shrine, sat in front of the book, and said, “I forgive you, Mariamu, if you sinned. Go now and rest in peace.”

But that night Mariamu came to him, turning the maalim’s
reasoning on its head: “I thought you forgave me already … back in Kikono … why then send me away now? And how do you expect me to leave my son?”

“Isn’t he my son too?” Pipa said angrily.

He had been clever there, he thought. But Mariamu said nothing and made him angrier still.

And so Mariamu remained, as did Pipa’s questions to which she would give no answer.

Pipa learned the English alphabet from his son, who was eleven years old now, tracing over the letters like a child as the two sat in the shop in the afternoons. At other times Aku read to him from his school readers. This is a dog. A farmer went trotting upon his grey mare: bumpety, bumpety, bump. Rule Britannia. It is the duty of all subjects to be loyal to their king. The boy was not sure when his father’s limit was reached, at what point his mind simply refused to take in any more. But he read, and helped his father say words with him.

Several times Aku saw Pipa at the shrine, through the crack where the door was hinged, bent over something, poring over it — trying to read. He would come out quiet, at peace. Once, he emerged from the storeroom and said to the boy, “Can you write ‘Mariamu’?” The boy wrote on his slate. Pipa looked around for a piece of blank paper. He couldn’t find one. He became frantic. Finally, he took one of the last pages of a ledger and found a pencil stub. The boy scrawled
Mariamu.
Pipa took the piece of paper to the storeroom, studying it in his hand as he walked, and emerged a half hour later, rubbing his eyes and pleased with himself. He had read the book: one word in it.

The boy had felt his heart beating fast when he heard that word, Mariamu, his mother’s name, on his father’s lips. It brought
them a little closer together. Until now he had been told nothing more than that his mother was dead. Now he knew: all his father’s devotions at the shrine were to his mother. But he was afraid to ask his father about her yet.

Then a strange episode occurred that made him even more aware of her.

He was eleven years old. For a few days there had been much veiled discussion between Pipa and Remti, about some “they” who would be coming to visit. Pipa had fumed and raged. “After ten years they show their faces — for what? Now that he is almost grown, do they think they’ll take him from me — or turn him against me? …”

The boy began wondering: Were “they” his other relations? Would they take him from Pipa and Remti as he’d been taken once from Khanoum?

The day they were to arrive there was much anticipation. The children were given new clothes to wear and instructed not to go outside. The rooms were swept more than once. At last, in the afternoon, the visitors came: a thin sickly woman, a robust bigbosomed lady who was older, two girls, and a man who was their local host. The adults all sat on the floor and the guests were given water. The children were presented and were admired before they, too, took their places on the floor. When Aku’s turn came to be shown off, the happy scene broke down. The older lady began: “What a beautiful child! And the girls like angels! Such prosperity in the home!” And then, before anyone could respond: “Oh my poor darling if she had only lived to see all this …” With open palms she beat her white bosom, once, twice, and the women started wailing and the two men, at first taken by surprise, looked down and had tears in their eyes. The younger children giggled a bit before the older girls shushed them. Remti offered vague words of comfort.

As suddenly as it had started, the wailing stopped. The big
woman, wide-eyed, looked around. “But this is not good,” she declared. The younger sickly woman, her daughter Kulsa, who was Mariamu’s mother, blew her nose and said, “What’s happened is done with.”

This was the long-delayed sog ceremony after the death.

“She was a good soul,” Mariamu’s grandmother announced. She was the type called Zanzibari, one given to dramatic exhibitions of emotion.

The mood relaxed, tea was drunk, with biscuits, and they all talked matter-of-factly about “She,” who apparently had been a great soul. When “She” died, there had been a peaceful smile on her face; a star had fallen from the sky during the funeral ceremonies.

Before the visitors left, Aku was brought before them once more. With tears and hugs he was given a present and told to visit his grandmother in Mombasa.

After they had gone, Mariamu, his mother, became real for the boy. She had had a mother and a grandmother of her own; what else? He began to feel that he belonged to more than just his father. But the world of adult machinations, appearances and disappearances, bewildered him still. Khanoum he remembered somewhat vaguely now. She had said she would come to him, but she never did.

Remti was a patient woman, bringing up a growing brood of girls, longing always for a boy. She did not resent the girls, the older ones helped with the younger, and about the house; they sang together while oiling hair, or cleaning rice and grain; and of course there were numerous squabbles. With the boy, Remti was less close — both remembered the circumstances of his arrival. But she was not unkind. With a pang of regret at not having her own
son, she saw him grow older; soon he would be another man in the house. Her daughters would eventually be married away, and he would remain, its master when her husband was old or dead; unless she had a son of her own. Also, she knew that it was a son who preserved a woman in her old age.

She had her way around her husband, his moods, his obsession, which she treated as if it was a disease. She had known him a long time, longer than he had known his first wife. She could remember the day he first came to her home, with his mother, shy and gruff, and how her father had taken to teasing him as though he were a younger brother. He had set eyes on one of her sisters first but had been discouraged by the ambitions of her parents.

She was a good-looking woman of high spirits, astutely keeping out of her moody husband’s way most of the time. But on festive Thursdays, cleverly and with determination she worked her charms on the man, coming to be beside him in the shop, solicitous, intimate, and good-humoured; he somehow expected that and responded. On those afternoons the rooms filled with the cloying sweetness of halud vapour, and she would bathe, and oil her hair and scent it with jasmine. She would have his clothes cleaned and pressed and together they would walk to the mosque with the children. They would return in high familial spirits and eat the evening meal in a festive atmosphere, her every move long and slow and voluptuous in the colourful frock and pachedi she generously filled. Still sweet-talking him, she would guide him to bed, in the corner away from the children, while the oldest girl turned down the lamps.

With the street sense he had picked up, the boy always knew the moment when his father mounted her — the rustling bedclothes, his growls, a short sharp cry from Remti, then an anxious pause followed by her tremendous sigh of abandon. And, after masturbating in his corner in the dark, the boy would lie awake for a long time, thinking about who he was, and about Mariamu,
the mysterious creature with whom he was linked. For every time the name, or “She,” was mentioned, a look, two looks, fell upon him.

If Thursday night was the boy’s period of agony and sleeplessness, until he got up at four in the morning and trudged to morning prayer, the following night was his father’s. All day Pipa would be in a foul mood; even the beggars were not spared on Fridays, their day. After prayers he’d go to play cards with other shopkeepers at the seashore, returning late after smoking bhang. On these nights Remti would find a pretext to sleep with one of the younger children.

One such Friday night the boy woke up to see a big shadow beside him; he opened his eyes wide and saw his stepmother, lying between him and the fourth girl, Zarina. The perfume on her from the previous evening was faint but sweet. For minutes he lay on his side, looking at her back curving towards him, his heart, his body aching, and then he edged himself closer to her, first to smell the halud, the jasmine, still lingering, then closer still until he was just touching her — and finally the wet release and his choking, confused torment. He was pressed against her, and she said angrily, “Move away.” He began to cry then, and she turned and held him. “Did you have a bad dream?” she asked, and he said, “Yes.” She must have guessed his torment — while her husband groaned in his. From then on, on the nights he found her close to him, he would move against her and find comfort, and admit to a bad dream afterwards. Her kindness then made him love her.

For Pipa those Friday nights belonged to Mariamu. He would dream or think about that wedding night, what a calamity it had been; how different from his other wedding night, with this healthy, spunky girl from Moshi — who had responded as he had expected, after which he had looked at the stain and knew, and handed over the bloody sheet to the women waiting for it.

Images would come to his mind of Mariamu and the Englishman together in the
ADC
’s house in Kikono, grotesquely suggestive; but they were kind, these spectres, shadowy and blurred … nevertheless sinful, deeply hurtful.

He would dream, too, about the days after, when they had risen above the hurt, lived up to their vows, become closer.

Yet she was not only a voice, an image in the past. She spoke to him in the present, as when she said, “Oh, but how easily men forget. You are happy now.” The next day he had sent dried fruit, milk, a pachedi to mosque.

But she did not rest.

Another time: “Don’t you think.… We hardly had time to start a home.” She looked alluring, inviting, sitting on a chair fanning herself. Her nose stud sparkled, she had on the sparkling green pachedi (Was it really so fine as this? he wondered). And she gave a thin wistful smile before looking away. He had sent some furniture to the mosque as a result, but a little angrily because of the cost. He bought one chair back at the subsequent auction of goods and kept it in the storeroom which was her shrine.

“You don’t have to give me anything,” she said. “I come only to be with you sometimes, and to watch over you. And the boy. Do you mind that so much?”

Once he asked her, “Did you and the mzungu —”

She disappeared.

If the book were not there he would forget her. But it was there. How clever she had been — he admired her fondly — to leave the book for him, so that he could never forget her.