Their boat rounded the breakwater in evening twilight and the nahodha ordered the sail lowered as he made a cautious approach into harbour. The tide was out and he was not sure of the channels, he said. It was after the kaskazi monsoon and in the period before the winds and currents turned south-easterly. Heavy currents at that time of year sometimes shifted the channels. His boat was heavily laden and he did not want to get stuck on a sandbank or to hit something on the bottom. In the end, after debating the matter with his crew, he thought it was too dark to approach the quay in safety, so they dropped anchor in shallow water and waited for morning. There were lights on ashore and a few people moving about on the quay, their elongated shadows stretched out ahead and behind them in the gloom. Beyond the quayside warehouses the town sprawled and the sky was amber from the glow of the setting sun. Further to the right the dimly lit shoreline road shaped away towards the headland which after a while ran out to the darkness of the country. Hamza remembered that from the time before, how the road ran past the house where he lived, and how then it narrowed down to the tight aperture that opened out into the interior.
Out to sea, the sky filled with stars and a huge moon began to rise, illuminating the heaving water beyond the breakwater and the frothing crest of the reef in the distance. As the moon rose higher, it submerged the whole world in its unearthly glow, turning the warehouses and the quayside and the boats tied up alongside into insubstantial silhouettes of themselves. By then the nahodha and his three crew members had eaten their meagre ration of rice and salt-fish, which they shared with him, and settled themselves to rest, stretching out in a tight cluster on the sacks of millet and lentils which were their cargo. So he lay close too, listening to their conversation and their profanities and their gloomy homesick songs while the boat pitched with the surge of the incoming tide. They fell asleep almost in unison, their breaths drawing deeply a few times and then suddenly falling silent. After the momentary stillness which followed their voices, the boat resumed its agonised creaking as the sea tugged and pulled at it in its unrest. He lay on his good side but he could not prevent the pain from returning, so he drew back from the cluster of men and put some distance between them. After a while he moved away completely for fear of making them restless with his sleeplessness. He wedged himself into a space that provided some distracting discomfort from his aches, and somehow he fell asleep.
At dawn they poled the boat in to the quayside, working silently in the mauve light. The tide was now fully in and the vessel rode high on the water. The nahodha declined his offer to help with unloading the cargo. He grinned with benign disdain, baring his stained teeth with amusement.
‘Do you think this work is a joke?’ he said, looking Hamza up and down in friendly mockery. ‘You need skill to do this and the strength of an ox.’
Hamza thanked the nahodha who had agreed to give him passage without payment and shook hands with the crew. He walked carefully down the plank to the quayside, his whole body tense with the effort of suppressing the pain in his hip, now made worse by a night spent wedged in the boat’s ribs. None of the men had asked about his pain, although they could not have failed to notice his limp. He was grateful for that because sympathy in such situations required disclosure in return. He did not look back as he walked along the almost empty quayside but he wondered if the nahodha and his crew were watching and perhaps talking about him.
He walked through the port gates, which were open and unguarded, and proceeded towards the town. He passed people heading for the port, striding on their way to work. This was not a part of town he knew well. He had lived on the edges and hardly ever visited the centre, but he did not want to seem uncertain or lost so he too strode as purposefully as the pain in his hip allowed and looked out for a familiar street or building. At first the street he was on was wide and lined with neem trees, but soon it became narrower with other side-streets leading off it. As he walked further a slight panic began to rise in him. People were coming out of the side-streets, sure of their way, and he still did not know where he was. It became difficult to navigate as the crowd thickened, but also calming. He was on a busy road so his hesitation and uncertainty would not show as clearly. Sooner or later he was bound to recognise something. When he stumbled on the old Post Office building, he sat down on a step outside with relief and waited for his panic to diminish. Pedestrians and cyclists went past, mingling with the occasional car that nudged its way patiently through the crowd.
He sought the quiet streets after the Post Office, a little clearer now on where he was but still not really that sure. He walked aimlessly down cool shaded lanes and past half-open doors and overflowing gutters. He crossed wide roads past cafés crowded with breakfast customers and then slipped again down narrow alleyways where houses leaned towards each other with an intimidating intimacy. Hamza was not at ease in streets like these, with their aromas of cooking and stagnant sewage and with the echoing voices of women in their shuttered yards. He felt like an intruder. He walked on anyway, relishing the anguishing strangeness the alleys provoked in him, at once familiar and forbidding. He realised after a while that he was walking the same streets again and attracting interested glances, so he forced himself out of the circuit he had stumbled into and headed in a different direction.
It was mid-morning when he came to a yard whose wooden gates stood wide open. An earth road ran past, and across and to either side stood residential houses, which made the yard appear part of the ordinary life of the street. Something held him there for a while and then he came closer, thinking this looked a likely place to find work or at least a moment’s rest. Through the open gateway came a clamour of voices and the banging of hammers and an air of honest labour. Two men were changing the wheel of a van jacked up on a pile of bricks, one was on his knees with the wheel in his hands, the other standing beside him, holding a spanner and a hammer in readiness. The big one on his knees was talking in boisterous tones. It was from him alone that the clamour came. His head was turned towards his companion whose lips were parted on the brink of laughter. The companion’s head was large for his body, so large that it was impossible to overlook. Hamza glanced towards them and heard enough of the mockery and swagger and tortured laughter to recognise the familiar tones of street banter meant to be overheard. The two men paid no attention to him as he stood nearby, or perhaps pretended not to notice him.
Beyond the two men and the van, and under a young coconut tree in a corner of the yard, a boy was hammering nails into a packing crate. There were three other crates nearby already secured and an open one full of wood shavings. Another two youths, no more than boys, were carrying a hot metal pot between two poles and heading towards the building occupying the whole of one side of the large yard. From the smell he guessed the pot contained oil or varnish. The building’s doors stood wide open and he could hear timber being worked inside, the sound of a saw and a plane and intermittent hammering, and he could smell the astringent perfume of wood shavings. A small door at one end of the workshop building was open, and through it he saw a man sitting at a desk, bent over a ledger, wire-framed glasses resting low on his nose. Hamza limped towards him, walking slowly, taking short steps, making every effort to disguise his injury.
The man behind the desk was dressed in a loose long-sleeved shirt of thin cotton material, and he looked cool and comfortable. His head was shaved and his scraggy little beard was flecked with grey. His embroidered cap lay on the desk beside the ledger. He was in his early thirties, sturdily built and strong-looking. Bent over his desk in the way he was, he seemed like a man completely absorbed in his own affairs, every inch the owner of the yard. Hamza stood in the doorway without speaking, waiting for the man to look up and invite him to enter the office, or to chase him away. It was a cool morning and he had become used to waiting. He stood there for what seemed several minutes, cautioning himself against showing any sign of impatience or restlessness. The man looked up sharply, as if he had been aware of him all along but had suddenly run out of patience. He perched the glasses on top of his head and looked at Hamza with the unhurried self-assurance of a man who had found his rightful place in the world. He frowned briefly but did not speak, waiting in turn for Hamza to announce himself and his business. After a moment he tilted his chin slightly, which Hamza took to be a high-handed invitation to speak.
‘I am looking for work,’ he said.
The man cupped his hand round his left ear, for Hamza had spoken softly.
‘I am looking for work, please,’ Hamza repeated more loudly, and added the courtesy because he wondered if the man wanted him to plead, wanted him to show some humility.
The man leaned back and folded his hands behind his head, flexing his shoulders, taking a moment’s respite from his labours. ‘What kind of work are you looking for?’ he asked.
‘Any kind of work,’ Hamza said.
The man smiled. It was a bitter, disbelieving smile, that of a tired man about to have his time wasted. ‘What kind of work can you do?’ he asked. ‘Labouring?’
Hamza shrugged. ‘Yes, but I can also do other work.’
‘I don’t need labourers,’ the man said abruptly in a tone of dismissal and turned back towards his ledger.
‘I can read and write,’ Hamza said, a hint of defiance in his voice, and then, remembering his circumstances, added: ‘Bwana.’
The man looked directly at him and waited, wanting more precision, more details. ‘What class did you reach?’ he asked.
‘I didn’t go to school,’ Hamza said. ‘I was taught a little … then I learned by myself mostly.’
‘How did you do that? Oh, never mind, can you keep book?’ the man asked, pointing at his ledger, but Hamza knew he was not serious. He did not think a merchant would allow a stranger to keep book for him.
‘I can learn,’ he said after a long moment.
The man sighed and took the glasses off the top of his head. He rubbed the bristles on his scalp with his right palm, making them rustle softly. ‘Can you work wood?’ he asked. ‘I could use someone in the workshop.’
‘I can learn,’ Hamza repeated, and the man smiled again, less bitterly this time, perhaps even a little kindly. Hamza felt a small spasm of hope from that smile.
‘So you can’t work wood but you can read and write. What was the last work you did?’ he asked.
Hamza had not expected this question and he realised he should have done. He took so long to reply that the man pushed his glasses back on to his nose and bent over his ledger again. Hamza stood where he was, just inside the doorway, and waited while the man wrote something. He wondered if he should go before the man became irritable and ugly with him, but he was unable to move as if paralysed. Then after several minutes the man looked long and wearily at him, capped his pen, picked up his cap and said to Hamza, ‘Come with me.’
That was how he so unexpectedly came to work for the merchant Nassor Biashara. The merchant later told Hamza that he took him on because he liked the look of him. Hamza was then twenty-four years old, without money and without anywhere to stay, in a town he once lived in but knew very little of, tired and in some pain, and he could not imagine what the merchant could like about the look of him.
Nassor Biashara led him out to the yard and called to the boy by the packing crates. The merchant was shorter than he looked bent over his desk but he strode out with brisk, urgent steps and was on to the boy before he had begun to move towards them.
‘Take this man to the warehouse. What did you say your name was? Tell Khalifa I will be along there shortly,’ the merchant told the boy, whose name turned out to be Sungura although it was not his real name. Sungura meant rabbit. It also turned out that he was not a boy but an adult man the size of a slim twelve- or thirteen-year-old whose mobile, ashen and weathered face told a different story from the impression formed on a first casual glance. There was something familiar about his features, which were angular and sharp, with high cheekbones, a pointed chin, thin nose, furrowed brow: a Khoi face. Hamza had seen many Khoi faces in recent years. In the frail-looking body of an ailing teenager the face looked a little sinister. It was more likely that it was not a Khoi face but of a kind he had not come across before, from Madagascar or Socotra or a far-flung island he had never heard of. Their world was full of strange faces since the recent war, and especially in these towns along the shores of the ocean, which had always drawn people from across the water and across the land, some more willingly than others. But perhaps it was nothing like that, and it was just the face of a man who had grown up in want and pain, or who had been afflicted with one of the many agonies which stalked human life.
Sungura led off and Hamza followed. As they passed the men fixing the van, the big one on his knees made a sucking, kissing noise and rolled his eyes in drooling suggestive fashion at Sungura, signalling barely controlled desire. His face was round and roughened by tough bristly stubble. The second man, who was dressed in ragged calf-length calico shorts, laughed and giggled foolishly, and it was clear that he was the vassal in the court of the bully of the yard. Sungura did not say anything and his expression did not change but Hamza sensed that his body cringed. Something about his manner told Hamza that he was used to this treatment, and that he was often required to carry out degrading chores. After they turned out into the road, he slowed and glanced at Hamza’s hip. It was to tell him that he had seen his limp, one maimed person picking out another, and he was inviting him to set the pace.
They walked slowly through dusty crowded streets lined with shops overflowing with merchandise: cloths, frying pans and stew pans, prayer mats, sandals, baskets, perfumes and incense, with every now and then a fruit-seller or a coffee-stand. The morning was warming up but not yet hot and the crowds were still good-natured in their jostling and shoving. Carts barged their way through pedestrians, their drivers calling out in warning, bicycle bells tinkled and cyclists snaked a passage through the press of bodies. Two elderly matrons shuffled on unconcernedly and the crowd parted around them as if they were rocks in the middle of a stream.
It was a relief after several minutes of walking to enter a wide, shaded lane that led to an empty clearing fringed with a cluster of warehouses. There were five of them, three in one building and the other two standing separately but side by side. Nassor Biashara’s warehouse was on the corner of the clearing by the lane, standing on its own. The unpainted wooden door was half-open but it was too dark to make out anything in the gloomy interior. Sungura walked up to the doorway and called out. After what seemed to Hamza like several minutes, he had to call again before a man emerged from the shadows of the warehouse. He was a tall thin man of about fifty, clean-shaven and with greying hair. He was neatly dressed in a checked shirt and khaki trousers, more like an office-worker than a warehouseman. He looked from one to the other of his visitors, his face unfriendly and frowning, then said to Sungura, ‘What are you making all that noise for? What’s wrong with you, you idiot?’ His tone was fussy and scornful, as if at any moment he was likely to spit out something foul. He pulled a clean handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his hands.
It had not seemed like such a lot of noise to Hamza but Sungura did not protest. ‘Bwana Nassor said to bring him. He’s coming himself. I’m going now,’ he said and turned to leave.
‘Hey, what are you talking about?’ the warehouseman said but Sungura walked on without replying or looking back, his gait diffident yet obstinate. The man made a snorting noise at Sungura’s retreating back and said something Hamza did not fully catch. The warehouseman raised his arm in greeting to Hamza, pushed the door open wider and pointed to a bench just inside. He sat on it as instructed and felt the man’s eyes on him, studying him.
‘What’s this about? Are you a customer?’ he asked.
Hamza shook his head.
‘What did he send you for?’
‘I’ve come to work,’ Hamza said.
‘He didn’t tell me anything about that.’
The man he took to be Khalifa waited for him to say more and then shook his head irritably when Hamza did not. He stood still for a moment longer, bringing himself under control, then nodded slowly and repeatedly with an air of exasperated resignation. After another look followed by a deep sigh, he walked back into the shadows of the warehouse. It seemed such an unnecessary performance, a sour man by all appearances. If this was the one the merchant tajiri wanted him to work for then so be it. He would learn.
From the outside it did not seem like a large warehouse, no more than sixty paces long perhaps, the size of a six-roomed barracks block. It was built of coral stone and mortar, some of it exposed where the outer skin had eroded, and was roofed with tin. If there were any windows they were closed and only diffused light entered from under the eaves. As Hamza’s eyes became used to the gloom, he saw crates and boxes on the near side, and stacks of bulging gunny sacks further inside. He thought he could smell timber and hide and perhaps engine oil, and the deep smell of weathered jute fibre. The smells brought back memories of his earlier times in this town. He looked out into the clearing. A man was walking across the far end of it but otherwise there was no movement. It was a large clearing, perhaps seeming more so because it was empty. The doors to all the other warehouses were closed. It was a forlorn, silent place, abandoned and somehow derelict although none of the buildings were damaged. It was a sight that drained resolve.
He shook his head to clear his mind of such thoughts, resisting his tendency to gloom. Grief reduces resistance, Pascal used to say. He smiled as he remembered Pascal. He was fortunate to have the prospect of work so soon after arriving in the town although he should remain cautious, not count his blessings before he was sure of the job. It had been many months of wandering, many years, and now he was making yet another start in the company of a spectral host of accusers. His return to the town was unexpected. When he fled it had seemed like an undoing of a life but for now it has ended with the futility of him returning to where he had been before, older, half-broken, empty-handed.
Hamza did not know what job the merchant wanted him for. He waited on the bench with eyes lowered from the glare, grateful for the shaded doorway, grateful for the rest. The pain in his hip was easing a little, he was sure of that. It did as the day moved on and he walked around, but he could not do that for long. He still needed frequent rests. He would just have to manage the pain better. The alternative was to allow it to overwhelm him and turn him into an invalid, as the war had done to so many. That did not bear thinking about. It had taken a long time, but he had eventually healed. Then, after leaving the mission, he had pushed himself too soon and lost track of what his wounded body could bear. He would have to manage better. As he sat on the bench he knew he was nearly worn out, distressed, on the verge of exhaustion. His head pounded and his eyes ached. He needed to sleep. His body had become used to subsisting on very little food but not yet to a permanent lack of sleep.
Hamza thought he heard faint noises from further back in the dark warehouse and wondered how Khalifa could see in the gloom, how he could move about so silently without stumbling into the merchandise. He had been sitting on the bench for a while when he saw a movement out of the corner of his eye and he was startled to see that Khalifa was standing a few feet away from him, just inside the warehouse, eyes glowing as he regarded him. Hamza looked away first, and for a while thought he could feel Khalifa’s eyes on the side of his head. When he turned around again there was no one there. He was not alarmed. Khalifa seemed too fastidious and proper to be a menace, and Hamza was weary and only slightly bemused by his eccentric behaviour.
The merchant Nassor Biashara was in a hurry when he arrived, wearing a cream linen jacket and cap, on his way to do other errands. Hamza stood up from the bench, ready to carry out instructions. ‘Khalifa!’ the merchant called out. ‘Where is he? Khalifa!’
He appeared after a moment. ‘Naam, bwana mkubwa,’ he said, his tone ironic and mocking. Yes, big master.
‘This is our new man,’ Nassor Biashara said. ‘I’ve sent him here to help you in the stores.’
‘Help me with what?’ Khalifa asked insolently. ‘What are you up to now?’
The merchant took no notice of this truculence, speaking in a firm business-like voice. ‘Have you cleared a space for the new delivery? He could help you with that. It should be here in the next few days.’
‘It’s done,’ Khalifa said, wiping his hands for emphasis.
‘Sawa,’ Nassor Biashara said. ‘The van will come for the timber as soon as they’ve changed the wheel. It could be a while because they have to take the other tyre to the mechanic to be repaired. That van is costing me a fortune. Anyway, show him the ropes. He could help with the loading. He’ll be our night-watchman from now on. Bring him to the yard after you lock up so he’ll know the way. I have to go to the bank now.’
‘What’s your name?’ Khalifa asked after the merchant left.
‘Hamza,’ he said.
‘Hamza what?’ Khalifa asked with what Hamza thought was surprising rudeness. In his turn he shrugged. He was not obliged to reply to such questions, asked in such a tone. He sat back down on the bench. ‘Who are your people?’ Khalifa asked, as if he thought Hamza had not understood his question.
‘That is none of your concern.’
Khalifa smiled. ‘I see – something to hide, eh? Never mind. You can start by sweeping up this litter,’ he said, indicating the area in front of the warehouse doors, which was mostly litter-free. ‘You’ll find the broom behind the door … and don’t make too much dust. Haya haya, you haven’t come here for a rest.’
Hamza was bemused by such rudeness. He swept the yard as instructed and made a small pile of dust and litter beside the doorway, then sat back down on the bench. When the van came for the timber, Khalifa opened a barred window and the warehouse was flooded with the late-morning light. The loud-mouthed one of the pair Hamza had seen earlier in the yard, whose name was Idris, idled about in the shade of the warehouse, smoking and shouting heckling encouragement while Hamza helped his ragged partner load up the timber. This was in the form of roughly planed planks headed for the workshop. They were pale pink in colour and Hamza could not resist bending down to breathe in the scent of the wood. Khalifa stood beside the warehouse door and followed them with his eyes but did nothing to help. It only took a few minutes to load the van and afterwards Khalifa sat on the bench while Hamza sat nearby on a crate. It did not seem as if there was anything more to do. He wanted to ask Khalifa the name of the timber but the look of quivering disapproval on his face restrained him.
‘Our night-watchman,’ repeated Khalifa, smiling disdainfully at Hamza before looking away across the clearing. ‘What is it that he has really brought you here to do? What is he up to? Has he promised you a job as a warehouse keeper? Our night-watchman! One look at you and the robbers will run as fast as they can in the other direction, terrified for their lives, eh? Our tajiri has hired a night-watchman! Why now? There has been valuable merchandise in here all these years and he never once thought of hiring a watchman before. He’ll give you a sheet of marekani to cover yourself and a little stick and make you sit here all night with all the shetani and the ghosts that live here. He gets nervous about his money sometimes. It’s this new equipment he’s buying, I expect. You don’t look like a watchman. Watchmen have bulging thighs and shining skin and big testicles. I can’t think why he chose a weakling like you to be his watchman.’
Hamza smiled at this unprovoked attack but could not think of anything to say in protest. He would not have chosen himself to be a night-watchman either.
‘You look ill,’ Khalifa said. ‘You must’ve prodded some better instinct in him, made him remember anxious times of his own. He gets stupid ideas sometimes. Did you hear him being the big businessman? I’m going to the bank now. What a busy man!’
Khalifa sighed heavily and leaned back against the warehouse door with his eyes shut. His face was narrow and ascetic in some way, the face of an abstemious man perhaps or one who had known bitterness and failure. Hamza sighed silently at the thought of working for such a sullen and peevish man.
‘There’ll be nothing here soon,’ Khalifa said after a long silence, working his mouth as if preparing to spit something out. ‘You should’ve seen this place as it was before: full of traders and people mingling and bargaining – the coffee-seller with his stand over there, carts bringing goods from the port, the fruit-seller with his gari, the ice-cream vendor with his trolley, and everywhere noise and bustle and loud talk. That place, boarded up now, was a café and there were people selling juice and cassava in the middle there. There was a stand-pipe to one side here with water clean enough to drink. Now look at this place. No one comes here. Everywhere is as dry as a bone. Those warehouses there –’ he said, indicating the block of three ‘– a contractor has taken them over from the Bohra tajiri Alidina. What a man that was! Have you heard of the Bohra Alidina? Those were his warehouses, although he had stores and other warehouses in countries all over these parts, all the way to the Great Lakes. He was trading with India and Persia and England and Germany. Now they store cement and toilets and pipes in there when once they were full of grain and sugar and rice. You’ll see, every other day the contractor sends a truck here and they load it up and take things away to furnish rich people’s mansions. People were coming and going from here once all the time, buying and selling, the whole place bustling with life and trade, but now it’s just where our betters store what we can’t afford to have.’
Khalifa was silent again for a while, lost in his anger, glancing at Hamza now and then with a look of discontent as if expecting a response from him. ‘What’s wrong with you? Can’t you speak?’ he asked finally, and sucked in his cheeks and worked his jaws as if he was chewing something acid and sour. Hamza sat there without a word. After a while, as they waited silently, he felt Khalifa’s anger recede and heard his breathing change and its measure subside. When he began to speak again it was with far less rancour than before, as if he had resigned himself to whatever had once irritated him.
‘That other store, that belongs to the Chinaman.’ He pointed to the other detached property. ‘He keeps dried shark fin and sea cucumber and vipusa in there – you know, rhino horn – and those other things they like in China. He keeps them in there and then every few months, when he has enough, he loads it all on to a ship and sends it off to Hong Kong. I don’t think it’s legal but he knows how to stay out of trouble and how to keep the Customs boys happy. They like those things in China, to make their zub hard. He never rests, that Chinaman, nor does he let any of his family rest. Have you seen his house? There are trays of noodles drying in the backyard, flocks of ducks waddling about in the mud in front, his grocery kiosk is open from dawn until late at night … and all the time he is dressed in shorts and a singlet like a labourer, working every hour of the day and night. Have you heard him speak? He sounds just like you and me … none of that fong fong fong you expect from a Chinaman. And all his children are the same. If you listen to them speak with your eyes closed, you’d never guess that you were listening to a Chinaman. Have you heard them speak?’
‘No, I haven’t,’ Hamza said.
Khalifa looked at him for a moment then he said, ‘Don’t you know the Chinaman? I don’t remember seeing you before. Are you a stranger here?’
Hamza was silent for a while. ‘Not really,’ he said.
‘Not really what? Still hiding,’ Khalifa said, smiling wearily. ‘Why don’t you just lie? It’s easier that way and you save yourself trouble. Just lie and then it’s over. Otherwise it sounds like you’re hiding something.’
‘I’m not a stranger here,’ Hamza said. ‘I lived here a few years ago but then I went away.’
‘Who are your people?’ Khalifa asked again.
‘They live a long way away,’ Hamza said, lying as Khalifa had instructed him to do.
‘Have you wandered far? You look as if you have,’ Khalifa said, a look of mild disdain on his face. ‘Tell me, were you in the war? That’s what I thought when I saw you. You look like a vagrant.’
Hamza shrugged and did not reply, and Khalifa did not press him. Soon after the call for midday prayers, he locked up and they walked back to the main yard. It was now hot but not unbearably so and the walk was pleasant until they reached the busy road with the shops. The overflowing wares added to the congestion on road and pavement. The chaos and din and the irritable invective of the noon crowds forced them to shove and force themselves past people who were also intent on making their way home or else to the market or the mosque as quickly as they could. Nassor Biashara was not back from the bank yet, so while Khalifa sat outside the merchant’s office to wait, Hamza went to the now silent workshop, drawn there by the smell of wood and resin. He found an elderly man sitting in a corner embroidering a cap. He looked up over his glasses and returned to his embroidery. Hamza assumed this was the carpenter having his lunch break. He spoke a greeting and made ready to retreat.
Around the workshop were various wooden items: a recliner, small tables, an ornately carved bench, a sideboard with smaller items on it – bowls, cabinets – some of them in wood the colour of bronze and some in a pale wood, many of them in states of incompleteness. It was as if the carpenter was working on several items at the same time, or else there was more than one carpenter.
The smell of wood was very strong here and Hamza wondered what kinds they were. His furniture repair work at the mission had been the fumblings of a novice, fixing what had loosened or fallen apart. He knew nothing about timber but he thought its smell wholesome, natural. He picked up a handful of shavings from the floor and inhaled them. The elderly man looked up from his embroidery and said, ‘Mvule’ and Hamza stored the name away gratefully. He went towards another pile of shavings, which was where the astringent smell was coming from, and before he even reached it the elderly man said ‘Msonobari’ and then smiled as if he was playing a game. ‘Mvule lasts forever, it’s harder than metal,’ he said. ‘Are you looking to buy?’
‘No, I have come to work for the merchant,’ Hamza said. The elderly man made a grunting noise and returned to embroidering his cap.
When Hamza went out to the yard again, he saw that Khalifa had gone. He sat in the shade to wait for the merchant’s instructions and was still there when the leisurely return to work began in the afternoon. A man he had not seen before walked through the yard to the workshop. His hair was jet black and shiny, tied back in a ponytail. He strolled in casually, quite unhurried, and shouted obscenities at Sungura as he walked past. Hey, you little bastard, tell your mother to oil herself well. I’ll be calling for her later tonight. Sungura cackled with laughter like a teased child, exposing a mouthful of tangled teeth.
Hamza sat waiting throughout the afternoon. He saw Idris and his sidekick stretch out in the van for an hour or two before making themselves scarce. He was still there when the old carpenter and his slick-haired assistant closed the workshop and left. He felt foolish waiting for so long but he had nowhere to go, and he was tired, and he did not know if the merchant even remembered his existence. The merchant returned to the yard some hours later, just as the muadhin was calling for the afternoon prayer. Sungura was the only other person there, waiting to lock up. Nassor Biashara was surprised to see Hamza waiting for him.
‘What are you doing here?’ he said. ‘Have you been here all this time? What’s the matter with you? Go home now. You can start at the warehouse tomorrow.’