It had become so that she thought of him all the time. When he came to the house in the morning for the bread money, she restrained herself from speaking to him in case Bi Asha heard her. In her book of sins speaking to a man was equivalent to making an arrangement for a secret meeting with him. Hamza said, Habari za asubuhi and she said, Nzuri, and handed over the basket and the money instead of touching him or pressing herself against him. When she passed his room and could see the window was open, she had to resist the temptation to lean in and talk for a moment or hold out her hand to him. Sometimes she called out a greeting but dared not stop. She felt a small leap of elation every time he knocked on the door, and felt the beginnings of a smile on her lips, which she suppressed in case she seemed eager and flurried when she opened the door. She longed for the brief moments she saw him. She no longer called him for his slice of bread and cup of tea. It’s like you are the owner’s dog, she said to him one morning. She now knocked on his door and brought breakfast on a tray to him. He was always ready, waiting for her with a smile. One morning, as she was about to hand the money over for the breakfast bread and buns, she touched his hand, it seemed accidental but of course it was not, and just to make sure she held it for a brief second more. Not even an idiot could misunderstand that.
‘Your leg is improving, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘I can see from the way you move.’
‘It’s getting better,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’
The moment was coming when what needed to be said would be said but she was not sure if she should press matters forward or wait for him to act. She did not want him to think she knew how to do such things, for him to think that she had done such things before. She wished she could confide in Jamila and Saada, and many times the words were on the tip of her tongue but something held her back. She wondered if it was from fear that they would mock him and tell her to come to her senses and not act in such a self-disregarding way with a man whose people she did not know. Perhaps they would think him a penniless wanderer, not that she was anything more than that herself. She was a woman, they would say, and in the end all a woman had was her honour and was she sure he deserved the risk? She did not dare mention him to Khalida either, because she would only tell her friends who would howl with laughter and encourage Afiya to audacities she was not really up to. Anyway, what was the rush? She did not feel impatient and even liked the tense anticipation of fulfilment.
At other times she was afraid she would lose him, and he would move on as he had come, heading nowhere in particular but away from her. She had understood that much about him, from looking and listening, that he was a man who was dangling, uprooted, likely to come loose. Or at least that was what she guessed from what she saw, that he was too diffident to make the decisive move, that one day she would wait for him to come to the door for the bread money and he would not appear and would be gone from her life for ever. It was a fear that filled her with dejection, and at those moments she was determined to give him a sign. Then the moment would pass and she would be back with her own caution and uncertainty.
She thought about him so much that she was at times distracted in company. Jamila noticed and laughingly asked who she was thinking about. Had somebody asked for her? Afiya laughed too and moved the subject on and did not tell her what had happened recently at home. Just the day before Jamila caught her out in her reverie, Bi Asha had come back from one of her afternoon visits and said to her, smiling with unaccustomed archness, ‘I think we are going to have some good news for you soon.’
It could only mean that a proposal was on the way. That was another fear. It had been several months since the two rejected ones, and Bi Asha had begun to murmur that they may have been too hasty and would now have acquired a reputation for arrogance in their expectations. Bi Asha’s smile of relief and pleasure filled Afiya with dread. She did not ask any questions about who the suitor might be or who had made the enquiry for him. Bi Asha gave her an appraising look and came to her own conclusions, but these were probably not any cause for anxiety because the smile remained on her face. When Jamila had asked her the question, Afiya’s mind was fixed on the ways she might let Hamza know how she felt. Should she write him a note? Should she lean into his window and say I can’t stop thinking about you? What if he did not return her feelings? It was agony, made so much worse for her because she had time on her hands and could not speak about him to anyone.
*
Hamza also had troubles on his mind. On many occasions he walked the shore road in the direction of the house where he once lived. He was there for several years, from when he was no more than a child taken away from his first home to when he ran away to join the schutztruppe. He spent many of those years penned in the shop of the merchant who owned him, except for the several months he went with him on a long and arduous journey to the interior, walking with the porters and the guards for weeks on end across country that astonished and terrified him at the same time. The merchant was in the caravan trade, and Hamza knew later that the Germans wanted this trade to end, and wanted to be in charge of everything from the coast to the mountains. They had had enough of the resistance of coastal traders and their caravans and had dealt sternly with them in the al Bushiri wars, when it became necessary to demonstrate to the bearded rice-eating slave raiders that their time was up and German order had taken over. At the time Hamza did not fully understand much of this, even as he travelled in the interior and heard of the approach of German power. What he understood was his own bondage and powerlessness, and really he hardly understood that, but he felt how it crushed his spirit and turned him into a ghost.
In the time he lived in the merchant’s shop, he hardly ever visited the town. From first light to late evening, he and another older boy stood in the shop and served the stream of customers. After dark, they closed up the premises and slept in the back. He was troubled that he could not find the house again. The shop had faced the road and there had been a walled garden along one side of the house and a stand-pipe where they had made their ablutions. There was no sign of the place now, and where he thought it used to stand was a grand-looking house painted a soft cream colour. It had an upstairs floor, a latticed veranda running all along its front and a low wall enclosing a gravelled front yard. He walked past the house several times but even after repeated visits had yet to find the courage to knock on the door and ask what had happened to the old place that once stood there. Here, many years ago, he would tell whoever opened the door, I saw my cowardice and timidity glistening like vomit on the ground. Here I saw how humility and diffidence was turned into humiliation. He did not knock and he did not say any of that, instead he circled round and headed back to the town.
There were parts of the town where he was no longer a stranger, and in the late afternoons and early evenings he walked these familiar areas. Sometimes he sat in a café and had a snack, or lingered on the fringes of a conversation or a card game. People greeted him or smiled at him or even exchanged a few words without asking him any questions or offering any information about themselves. From overheard conversations he could put names to some people and even learned brief histories of them, although those could well be exaggerations prompted by the café ambience.
Tucked away down one street he saw a group of people sitting on a bench opposite the open door of a house where a small group of musicians were rehearsing and a woman was singing. He stopped there for a while and stood in the street in the bright light of the hissing pressure lamp, which illuminated the rehearsal room and the group of people sitting and standing outside. The woman’s song was full of yearning for her lover to whom she cited example after example of her devotion. The words and the voice filled him with longing, with grief and with elation at the same time. During a break in the music he asked the youth standing beside him what was happening.
‘Are they rehearsing for a concert?’
The teenager looked surprised and then shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘They play here and we come to listen. Maybe they play at concerts as well.’
‘Do they play often?’
‘Nearly every night,’ the youth said.
Hamza knew he would come again.
*
Mzee Sulemani’s goodwill increased after he learned that not only could Hamza read but he could read in German. He delighted in giving Hamza a sentence and asking for a German translation. He was happy to join in Mzee Sulemani’s game, a small repayment for the gift of the carpentry skills he was learning from him.
Lead us on the road that is straight, make us steadfast without doubt or scepticism, without shadow or regret. How do you say that in German?’ the old carpenter asked, a look of happy anticipation on his face.
Hamza did the best he could but there were times he had to admit defeat, especially with the more mystical or devotional pronouncements. Mzee Sulemani uttered some proverbial wisdom and waited with a smile while Hamza fumbled. The carpenter laughed equally at his successes and his failures and applauded him anyway. ‘I only went to school to read the Koran and then just for a year. After that I was sent to work as my father and his master required.’
‘His master?’ Hamza asked although he thought he already knew the answer.
‘Our master,’ Mzee Sulemani said with composure. ‘My father was a slave and so was I. Our master freed us in his will, may God have mercy on his soul. It was my father’s wish that I should learn to be a carpenter and the master allowed it. So I had to stop attending school and go to work. The few suras I know, I learned by heart. Alhamdulillah, even those few have freed me from the condition of a beast.’
Mzee Sulemani described Hamza’s skills to the merchant who chose to ignore this information for a while, then one day he asked, ‘What is this about you being able to read and speak German? Where did you learn that? I thought you told me you did not go to school.’
‘I didn’t go to school. I picked it up here and there,’ Hamza said.
‘Where exactly? Mzee Sulemani tells me he gives you lines from the Koran and you translate them into German. You don’t pick up that kind of German here and there.’
‘They are very poor translations. I do my best,’ Hamza said.
Khalifa was present during this exchange, and he smirked at the merchant and said, ‘He has his secrets. A man is entitled to keep his secrets to himself.’
‘What secrets?’ the merchant asked. ‘What is this about?’
‘That’s his business,’ Khalifa said, pulling Hamza away, chuckling with the pleasure of frustrating Nassor Biashara.
That evening Khalifa told his friends at the baraza the story of Hamza’s linguistic prowess and the merchant’s questions and how Khalifa had frustrated him. Maalim Abdalla was a teacher and, of course, a well-known reader of newspapers in English and German. Khalifa was a former clerk to Gujarati bankers and to the pirate merchant. So it was left to Topasi, who had not had the luxury of being able to attend school, to express delight and admiration for Hamza’s skills, especially for the additional fact that he had learned to do this without going to school. ‘I have always said school is a waste of time. Begging your pardon, Maalim, not your school of course but many of them. You can learn just as well by not going to school.’
‘Nonsense,’ Maalim Abdalla said without hesitation, and no one contested the matter, not even Topasi, especially because at that moment the tray of coffee appeared and Hamza rose to collect it from Afiya. He saw from her smile in the shadows that she had been listening to the conversation. He put the tray on the porch for the old friends and went off to the mosque for isha. The others now let him go without protest or query. After prayers he walked the streets for a little while as usual and then headed back. He found that Khalifa’s friends had left to go home for supper and he was sitting on the porch on his own.
‘I kept some coffee for you,’ Khalifa said. ‘She can read and write too,’ he said, indicating the door of the house, undoubtedly referring to Afiya but not saying her name. It was the first time he had made any reference to her. It had occurred to Hamza before that she moved around silently and diffidently, and Khalifa acted as if she were invisible. That could be his way of being courteous to an unmarried woman in the house, drawing a veil over her by not mentioning her name or calling attention to her. Or it could be a way of being courteous about his own wife when speaking to someone who was male and not a member of the family. Hamza did not dare to ask for fear of offending. He was not family and the womenfolk in the household were none of his business. He would find a way to ask sooner or later, he told himself, but not now. They sat with their coffee in silence for a while and then both rose at the same time. Khalifa went inside with the tray while Hamza rolled up the mat and slipped it inside the door.
*
It came to her during the night. She had heard them talking about how good his German was so she thought she would ask him for a German poem. Not even a dummkopf could misunderstand that she was asking him to translate a love poem for her, which was as good as asking him to write her a love letter.
‘So you can read and write in German,’ she said to him in the morning as she handed over the bread money. ‘Can you find me a good poem and translate it for me? I can’t read German.’
‘Yes, of course. I don’t know very many but I’ll find one.’
At the end of the working day when she spoke to him about a poem, he walked again on the shore road and found a shaded place on the beach where he could sit for a while. The sea came over jagged rocks here and the beach was not popular with either fishermen or swimmers. He loved looking at the waves from here, just gazing for a while, following the line of the surf with his eyes, watching it come in with a muted roar and then retreat with an impatient hiss. Before leaving work he had slipped into the merchant’s office while he was talking to Mzee Sulemani and picked up a piece of paper from his desk. It had the merchant’s name and address printed across the top but it would be no difficulty to tear that off. A love letter had to be delivered in secret, and the smaller in size it was the more easily it was concealed.
The only German poems he knew were in the book that the officer had given him, Musen-Almanach für das Jahr 1798. He took the first four lines of Schiller’s ‘Das Geheimnis’, and translated them for her:
Sie konnte mir kein Wörtchen sagen,
Zu viele Lauscher waren wach,
Den Blick nur durft ich schüchtern fragen,
Und wohl verstand ich, was er sprach.
He wrote them out on the piece of paper he had stolen from Nassor Biashara’s office, trimmed it so that it was only just big enough for the verse, then folded it so it was no wider than two fingers. He knew how it would look if this scrap of paper were intercepted. If Afiya was Khalifa’s wife as he feared, then at the very least Hamza would be thrown out of his room accompanied by a stream of abuse and perhaps some fully justified blows. But things had gone too far for him to hesitate any more, and the following morning as he met Afiya at the door, he slipped the square of paper into her palm. On it he had written:
Alijaribu kulisema neno moja, lakini hakuweza –
Kuna wasikilizi wengi karibu,
Lakini jicho langu la hofu limeona bila tafauti
Lugha ghani jicho lake linasema.
She was already waiting at the door when he hurried back from the café, and as she took the basket of bread and buns from him, she did not let go of his hand. She wanted to make sure he did not misunderstand her. ‘I can read what your eye is saying too,’ she said, referring to the last two lines of the translation: My eye can see for certain / the language her eye is speaking. Then she kissed the tips of her fingers and touched his left cheek. A short while later, when she brought him his breakfast tray, she slipped into the room and into his embrace.
‘Habibi,’ she said.
‘Are you his wife?’ he blurted out while she was in his arms and they were clinging to each other. It took her by surprise. She was relishing the moment, holding his sweet body in her arms, and he asked if she was a wife! She pulled back from him and felt his arms restraining her. ‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered.
‘Whose wife?’ she asked, alarm in her eyes too.
He hooked a thumb towards the house behind him. As his meaning became clear to her, the alarm in her eyes turned to mischief and she smiled as she sank back into his arms. ‘I’m nobody’s wife … yet,’ she said before freeing herself and leaving.
*
It was a Friday morning when Afiya slipped into the room and embraced him and afterwards left him speechless with joy. On Fridays they only worked half-days in the yard. Almost everywhere else also shut down at midday so that people could go to juma’a prayers in the main mosque in the town. Not everyone went, of course, despite the early release from work, only those who were obedient to God’s command and those who had no choice, mainly children and the youth. Neither Khalifa nor Nassor Biashara went. Hamza did – the little saint – because he liked sitting among a crowd of people in such benign mood, listening without paying full attention to the painstakingly devout words of the imam’s sermon. He had not been forced to go as a child and now it gave him pleasure to make his own choices. Then he knew, he just knew, Afiya would find a way to come to his room in the afternoon. He kept his window closed and the door slightly open, and in the glaring heat of early afternoon when sensible people stayed indoors or lay down to rest, she came dressed in her buibui on her way to somewhere. The room filled with her scent as he shut the door. They kissed and caressed and murmured to each other for an exhilarating few minutes, but when he tugged gently at her buibui whose slippery material prevented him from properly feeling her body, she shook her head and freed herself from him. Afiya said she had to go otherwise Bi Asha will miss her and make a fuss. Her excuse for coming out was to go to Muqaddam Sheikh’s shop for the eggs she needed for the dessert she was making.
‘What’s the rush?’ he said.
‘She knows the Muqaddam’s shop is only a few minutes away.’
‘Do you have to work for her?’ he asked, reluctant to let her leave.
Afiya looked surprised. ‘I don’t work for her. I live here.’
‘Don’t go,’ he said.
‘I must go now, I’ll tell you later,’ she said.
For the rest of the day he dwelt on the memory of her embraces and rebuked himself for being ridiculous with impatience. It was also the last Friday before Ramadhan and the sighting of the new moon that evening filled the day with even more excitement. Bi Asha appointed him to take word around the neighbourhood, to make sure everyone knew about the new moon so the blasphemers had no excuse for eating or drinking in ignorance during the following day. He took a long walk instead and kept out of her way, having no wish to be mocked as a pious busybody.
So much changed during Ramadhan. Work started later and many shops and premises did not open until the afternoon as people slept to shorten the day and then stayed up late into the night. The merchant considered these practices lazy and old-fashioned and asked his employees to work their usual hours, but he could not persuade all of them to agree. Khalifa took no notice of the merchant and closed the warehouse at midday and went home to sleep. Idris and Dubu and Sungura pronounced themselves exhausted with hunger and thirst at some point in the early afternoon and collapsed for a sleep in a shady place in the yard or simply slunk away. Mzee Sulemani insisted on his lunch break during which he said his prayers and recited the suras of the Koran that he knew by heart and then worked on his embroidered cap. He regretted, he told Hamza, that he could not read the Koran properly, as that was what people were required to do during Ramadhan, to read a chapter of the holy book every day until all thirty chapters were finished by the end of the month.
Eating arrangements also changed, not just the daylight hunger and thirst but how the misery was brought to an end. Ramadhan was a communal event and it was considered virtuous to make the breaking of fast after sunset into a shared meal, so instead of going off to find something in a café, Hamza was invited inside to eat the food of the household. Ramadhan food was always special as the cooks took greater trouble and had more time to plan and prepare. The delicious meals were also a reward for the stoicism of the day. Hamza broke fast with Khalifa on the porch where in the traditional way they shared a few dates and a cup of coffee and were then called inside to the modest feast Bi Asha and Afiya had prepared and which they sat down to eat with the men. It was not the quantity but the variety of dishes that made it into a feast, and they talked about the food and praised its preparation as they ate. Even Bi Asha was more mellow than she had been in the past and found teasing words to say to Hamza about his growing skills as a carpenter and his newfound fame as a reader of German. Next thing we know you’ll start composing poetry, she said. Hamza just managed to resist looking at Afiya but made enough of a movement before he arrested it for Bi Asha to look towards its intended direction and then back at Hamza, who dropped his eyes and busied himself with the fish.
After the meal he sat on the porch with Khalifa where they were joined soon after by Maalim Abdalla and Topasi, and sometimes other neighbours who stopped by for a chat. Ramadhan evenings were full of talk and comings and goings. On other porches or in cafés that stayed open late, marathon games of cards or dominoes or coram went on, but on Khalifa’s porch no such frivolity was entertained. There the talk was still focused on political intrigue, human foibles and old scandals. Hamza went walking the streets, which were thronged with people, and sometimes he stopped to watch one of the games or to listen to the raillery among street wits. The musicians had stopped playing after Ramadhan began but he hoped it would only be for the first few days. Every night during the previous weeks, the group he had first heard by chance played a short concert for their devoted audience of whom he had become a member. They played for sheer love, it seemed, because they never asked for money and no one offered to pay. Some nights the woman sang, and in time Hamza came to hear several of her repertoire of love songs and was moved by the longing expressed in them. He wished he could bring Afiya to listen to the music, but he did not know how he could do that or even when he could tell her about them. Now that Ramadhan was here there was no breakfast, and no need to collect the money for bread and buns from the café. He was careful not to look at her when he went to eat the evening meal inside but he knew that their exchange of glances had been intercepted by Bi Asha, who now watched him suspiciously.
Then on the first Friday of Ramadhan, at the same time as she had done the previous week, Afiya slipped into his room whose door he had left ajar. They embraced and undressed fully and made love with sinful hunger, hushing and shushing each other in case they were overheard.
‘It’s the first time,’ she whispered.
He paused for a second and then whispered back, ‘Me too.’
‘You expect me to believe that?’ she said.
‘Maybe it doesn’t make any difference,’ he whispered, laughing, pleased that he had not failed and that she had taken him to be more experienced.
‘We shouldn’t be doing this during the fast,’ she said later as they lay naked on his mat. ‘The only way this can be right is if you promise to be mine and I promise to be yours. I promise.’
‘I promise too,’ he said, and they both chuckled at their absurd love-talk.
She reached across his body and put her right hand on the scar on his left hip. She ran her fingers over it for several seconds, stroking it and feeling it as if she would smooth its jagged contours. Just as she was about to speak he reached up and put his left hand over her mouth.
‘Not now,’ he said.
Gently, she took his hand away. ‘All right, it’s your secret,’ she said, and then saw that there were tears in his eyes. ‘What is it? What happened to you?’
‘It’s not a secret. Just not now, please, not this minute,’ he said pleadingly. ‘Not after love.’
She shushed him and kissed him, and after he had quietened down she held up her left hand so that it was close to his face, then she flexed her fingers as if she was trying to make a fist but the palm would not close. ‘It’s broken. I cannot grip with this hand,’ she said.
‘What happened?’ he asked.
She smiled and reached for his face with her damaged hand. ‘That’s what I asked you and you burst into tears,’ she said. ‘My uncle broke it. He was not really my uncle, but I was living in his house when I was younger. He broke it because he said it was wrong for me to know how to write. He said, what will you write? You’ll write ugly things, you’ll write notes to a pimp.’
They lay in silence for a while. ‘I am very sorry. Please tell me more about it,’ Hamza said.
‘He hit me with a stick. He was in a rage when he found out I could write. My brother taught me but then he had to leave so I went back to live with my uncle. When he saw I could read and write, he lost his temper and hit me across my hand, but he hit the wrong hand so I can still write. But it makes chopping vegetables hard work,’ she said.
‘Tell me from the beginning,’ he said.
She stood up and started to get dressed, and he did too. She sat in the barber’s chair while he stayed on the floor, leaning against the wall. ‘All right, but after I tell you and I ask you about what happened to you, you will not push me away?’
‘You are my beloved. I promise,’ he said.
‘I’ll be quick because I have to go and help Bimkubwa with the cooking. I’m supposed to be visiting a neighbour and if I’m late she’ll send someone there to fetch me.’
Then she told him how her brother came back for her when she was ten years old when she did not even know she had a brother, how she lived with him for a year and he taught her to read and write, and then he went off to war. ‘My brother Ilyas,’ she said.
‘Where is he now?’ Hamza said.
‘I don’t know. I haven’t seen him or heard from him since he went to the war.’
‘Is it not possible to find out?’
She looked at him at length. ‘I don’t know. We tried,’ she said and then glanced down at his hip. ‘Did you get that in the war?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘During the war.’
*
That night after breaking fast Khalifa sat on the porch as usual but for some reason his two old friends were late in coming. Hamza sat with him to keep him company when he would rather have gone for a walk to see if the musicians were back performing again. They made casual conversation for a while and Hamza mentioned the group. Khalifa as usual knew about them and their history without stirring from his porch. ‘The power of rumour and gossip,’ he said with a smile. ‘They stop playing during Ramadhan, only holding rehearsals indoors. The pious ones don’t approve of anything festive during the holy month. They want us all to suffer and starve and rub our foreheads raw with prayers.’ Then out of a lengthy silence, and without looking at Hamza, Khalifa said, ‘You like her.’
When he turned to look at him, Hamza nodded.
‘She is a good woman,’ Khalifa said, once again looking away and speaking softly, taking any note of challenge from his voice. This was a delicate matter. ‘She has lived with us for many years and Bi Asha and I have watched over her like our own. I need to know your intentions. I have a responsibility.’
‘I didn’t know you were related,’ Hamza said.
‘I promised her brother,’ Khalifa said.
‘Ilyas?’ Hamza said.
‘So you know about him. Yes, Ilyas, he lived here in this town with his little sister when he came back from his wanderings. He got a job at the big sisal factory because he could speak good German. They liked that. It was at this time that we became friends. It was soon after we were married living here. Ilyas sometimes brought the little girl when he visited us. Then when the war came he joined up, I don’t know why. Maybe he had started to think of himself as a German, or maybe he always wanted to be an askari. He used to tell the story of how a Shangaan askari kidnapped him and took him to a mountain town where he was released and cared for by a German landowner. He told me once that since that encounter with the Shangaan, he had secretly thought it would be surprisingly fulfilling to be a schutztruppe. Then when the war came he could not resist. We don’t know if he is alive still. It’s eight years now since he went to the war and we have not heard from him since. I promised to keep an eye on her,’ Khalifa said. ‘I don’t know how much you know about her.’
‘She told me about her relatives in the country.’
‘They treated her like a slave. Has she told you that? The man she called her uncle beat her with a stick and broke her hand. When he did that she sent me a note – yes, that’s right. Ilyas taught her to read and write, and I told her if she was in trouble she was to write a note addressed to me and give it to the shopkeeper in the village. That’s what she did, the brave little thing. She wrote a note and the shopkeeper gave it to a cart driver who brought it to me. So I went and got her and she has lived here for the last eight years. It will do her good to make her own life now,’ Khalifa said. ‘Have you spoken to her?’
‘Yes,’ Hamza said.
‘That makes me happy,’ Khalifa said. ‘You must tell me more about your people, your lineage. What are the names of your father and mother, and what are the names of their mothers and fathers? You can tell me this later. I have seen enough of you to be reassured but I promised Ilyas. I feel a responsibility. Poor Ilyas, his life was attended with difficulties yet he lived under a kind of illusion that nothing bad could ever happen to him on this earth. The reality was that he was always on the point of stumbling. You could not imagine someone more generous nor anyone more self-deluded than Ilyas.’
Hamza had begun to think of Khalifa as a sentimental bearer of crimes, someone who took a share of responsibility for other people’s troubles and for wrongs done in his time: Bi Asha, Ilyas, Afiya and now Hamza, people he quietly cared about while disguising this unexpected concern with outspoken brashness and persistent cynicism.
*
Afiya came again to Hamza’s room the following Friday but this time she told Bi Asha that she was visiting her friend Jamila who had moved away from her parents’ house to the other side of town, so they knew they had the whole afternoon.
‘I surprise myself with my audacity,’ she told him. ‘Telling lies, sneaking into my lover’s room in the middle of a Ramadhan afternoon, having a lover at all. I would never have thought I had it in me, but I don’t know how I could not come when you are lying here a few feet away from me.’
They made love in whispers and then lay in the afternoon gloom without talking for a while. Eventually he said, ‘I can’t get over how beautiful this is.’
She ran her hands slowly all over him as if learning him by heart, over his brow, his lips, over his chest, down his leg and the inside of his thigh. ‘You cried out,’ she said. ‘Was it your leg?’
‘No,’ he said smiling. ‘It was ecstasy.’
She slapped his thigh playfully and then massaged the scar on his hip as she had done before. Tell me, she said.
He began to tell her about his years in the war. He started with the morning march to the training camp, then the boma and the drills in the Exerzierplatz, how exhausting but exhilarating it was, how brutal the culture was. He told her about the officer and how he taught him German. He told her quickly at first because there was so much to tell. She listened without interruption and did not ask questions, just giving a soft gasp now and then in reaction. When he talked about the officer she shook her head slightly and asked him to repeat what he said, and he saw that she did not want him to rush quite so much. He slowed down and provided more details: his eyes, the unnerving intimacy, the language games he liked to play. He explained about the ombasha and the shaush and the Feldwebel.
‘He did this, the Feldwebel,’ Hamza said. ‘At the very end of the fighting, when we were all exhausted and half-mad from the bloodletting and cruelty we had been steeped in for years. He was a cruel man, always a cruel man. He cut me down in a rage, with his sabre, but maybe he always wanted to hurt me, I don’t know why. It was because of the officer, I think.’
‘How because of the officer?’ she asked.
He hesitated for a moment. ‘The officer was very protective of me. He wanted me to be close to him. I don’t know why … I’m not sure why. He said I like the look of you. I think some people … the Feldwebel and maybe the other Germans too … thought there was something wrong in this, something improper … something … too much, too fond.’
‘Did he touch you?’ she asked softly, wanting him to be explicit, wanting him to say what he needed to say.
‘He slapped me once, and sometimes he touched my arm when he talked to me, just lightly, not touching like that. I think they thought he was … touching me. He said things like that to me, the Feldwebel, ugly accusing things. It shamed me, his obsessive cruelty, as if I had done something to deserve it.’
She shook her head in the gloom. ‘You are too good for this world, my one and only. Don’t be ashamed, hate him, wish ill on him, spit on him.’
He was silent for a long while and she waited. Then she said, ‘Go on.’
‘After I was injured the officer had me taken to a German mission, a place called Kilemba. The pastor there was a doctor and he healed me. It is a beautiful place. I was there for more than two years, helping in the mission, getting better, reading the Frau’s books. When the British medical department took over, which took them a while, they told the pastor his medical training was not up to official requirements. He was not a fully qualified doctor. They wanted to upgrade the mission infirmary to a rural clinic but could not let the pastor be in charge of it so he decided it was time to return to Germany. It was time for me to move on too. I took work where I found it and then moved on, on farms, in cafés and eating houses, sweeping the streets, as a house servant … anything I could get. It was hard sometimes, with the leg, and probably in the end I overdid it, but I worked in Tabora, Mwanza, Kampala, Nairobi, Mombasa. I had no destination in mind, or at least I did not think so at the time,’ he said, smiling. ‘Only now I can see I did.’
After another long silence while his words sank in, Afiya got up and began to dress.
‘It must be getting late. I want to hear everything, I want to hear more about the good pastor and his mission and how he healed you, but now I must go,’ she said. ‘She will be angry if I’m late back because she has become suspicious. She told me someone has made an enquiry for me, but it is too late now. I am no longer available. When you come in to break fast I will still be smelling of you. I’ll miss loving you until next time. As I listen to you, I also think of Ilyas. He is older than you. Did I tell you that he sings beautifully? I imagine what it must have been like for him in the war and if he is well somewhere, talking to someone like you are talking to me.’
‘We can find out. We can try,’ Hamza said, correcting himself. ‘There are records. The Germans are good with records. Then you’ll know what happened to him.’
‘What can we find out? Maybe this way I don’t have to know for sure, and what happened has happened. If he is well somewhere, my knowing does not make any difference to him, and if he is well somewhere, perhaps he does not want to be found,’ she said. ‘I must go.’