It was a time of ease for Hamza compared to preceding years. The strain in their living arrangement with Bi Asha and Khalifa lessened as the weeks and months passed by or maybe they became inured to it. They found ways of avoiding each other without seeming to be at loggerheads, of not seeing Bi Asha’s accusing looks and not hearing her growling undertones. Hamza learned to keep out of her way so well that often he only saw her briefly when he came home from work in the afternoon, although her voice was never far away. Afiya was always the first up, but Hamza was usually awake, unable to sleep deeply once it was light. She made the tea while he washed and then he left the house before Khalifa and Bi Asha came out of their room.
When he arrived at the yard, Nassor Biashara was always already there. They greeted each other and the merchant gave him the key to the workshop without any conversation and sometimes without even looking up from his precious ledgers. After Mzee Sulemani arrived, the three of them met briefly to discuss the schedule of the day’s work and Nassor Biashara sometimes joined them in the workshop, putting finishing touches to bowls and cabinets or passing a critical opinion on a new design. He was making plans to build padded sofas and needed to employ an upholsterer in due course, but for the time being he was experimenting with the frames. The demand for furniture was constantly rising. His freight business was also expanding, and contrary to Khalifa’s predictions, investment in the propeller had proved to be a great success, attracting more business than could be conducted by one boat and requiring the purchase of a larger motorised vessel. Nassor Biashara liked to call it his steamer. The merchant’s affairs were flourishing so much that he designed a signboard, which he carved and painted himself and had Sungura fix on the yard gates: Biashara Furniture and General Merchandise.
‘I think we’ll have to extend the workshop and bring in new equipment,’ he said, looking at Mzee Sulemani first, whose expression remained blank, and then at Hamza who nodded in support. ‘This is a big yard, isn’t it? We could build a new workshop right across here, properly equipped to win government contracts – school desks, office furniture, that kind of thing. We can keep the old workshop for home orders and vanity stuff. What do you think?’
The more he spoke about the new workshop, which he did often in the following weeks, the more he addressed Hamza whom he was lining up to run it, so it seemed. The British mandate government had announced an expansion in school-building and a literacy drive, which was the source of Nassor Biashara’s excitement about a government contract. The administration was also expanding its activities in agriculture, public works and health care. If nothing else it would show the Germans how to run a colony properly. All these departments and projects needed offices and offices needed desks and chairs. Hamza nodded with carefully judged enthusiasm as Nassor Biashara, who now preferred to be called a businessman and not a merchant, talked himself into the new venture. Sooner or later Hamza would ask for a big pay rise but for the time being he bided his time.
He delayed going back for lunch to allow Khalifa and Bi Asha to eat first. By the time he arrived they were usually finished and making ready for their mandatory siesta. He ate lightly, some rice and spinach and whatever fruit was in season. Sometimes he had a paratha, a small piece of fish and a bowl of yoghurt and then went back to work. In the afternoon after he returned he had a wash and lay down to rest for an hour or so, and if she was in Afiya joined him in their room and they talked and reprised the day. Often she was out visiting then, seeing her friend Jamila who was now a mother, or Khalida, Nassor Biashara’s wife, or else attending one of the stream of obligatory functions that filled women’s daily lives: memorial gatherings after funerals, betrothals, weddings, sickbeds, visiting a mother and her newborn.
In the evening Hamza strolled the streets and met the people he had come to know and befriend, especially one of the musicians in the group he went to listen to whenever he could. His name was Abu and he was a carpenter as well, a few years older than Hamza. They met after the maghrib prayer in a café by the bridge across the creek and talked with others who were regulars there and who made room for him. Hamza was not much of a talker, in a gathering of big talkers, so he was always welcome. The tone of their conversation was light-hearted and irreverent, often salacious, and it seemed to him they vied with each other to see who could make the most outrageous banter. At times the comedy was so low and so irresistible that his sides ached from laughing and yet afterwards he knew that nothing of any consequence had been said and that he had wasted his time in shameful frivolity. Some evenings Hamza went with Abu to the rehearsal room and sat with the musicians for an hour or so while they played and practised.
Then he returned to the house – he was not yet able to call it home – and sat with Khalifa and Maalim Abdalla and Topasi while they pondered the state of the world and turned over and analysed the latest outrages and gossip. At that time the administration had started publishing a Kiswahili monthly magazine Mambo Leo, to inform those who could already read about world and home affairs, about good practices in farming, about medical hygiene and even sports news. Khalifa bought a copy, which he passed on to Hamza and Afiya when he finished with it. Maalim Abdalla came to the baraza with his own copy and informed his friends about whatever interesting item in there had caught his eye, which often needed dismantling and debunking and exposing. At other times he came with an old copy of the East African Standard, the settler newspaper from Nairobi that his friend who worked in the District Commissioner’s office borrowed for him on an extended loan. Some of the stories in the Standard provided compelling discussion material for the three sages, especially the heated exchanges between settlers who wanted to remove all Africans from Kenya and make it what they called A White Man’s Country, and those who wanted to remove all Indians and only allow in Europeans but keep the Africans as labourers and servants, with a sprinkling of some savage pastoralists in a reserve for spectacle. The propositions and their defenders sounded so strange that it was if the settlers were living on the moon.
Hamza left them after collecting the coffee tray from Afiya and went to the mosque for isha. Off you go, little saint, Khalifa always cheered him away. When he returned, he went straight to their room where Afiya joined him for the sweetest part of the day. They talked for hours, reading old newspapers, catching up with each other’s lives, looking into the future, making love.
*
One night she woke up with a start beside him. She gripped his upper arm and whispered his name. ‘Hamza, shush, shush … stop now.’
His face was wet and his body was drenched in sweat. There was a sob still in his throat as he came awake. They lay quite still in the dark, Afiya’s grip firm on his upper arm. ‘You were crying,’ she said. ‘Is it him again?’
‘Him, yes. Sometimes it’s him, sometimes the officer. Or else the pastor. It’s always them,’ he said. ‘Only it’s not the person so much, it’s the feeling they bring.’
‘What feeling? Tell me.’
‘A feeling of danger, terror. Like great danger is bearing down and there’s no escape. Such noise and screams and blood.’
Then they lay still again in the dark for a long time. Much later she asked, ‘Is it always the war?’
‘Always. Before, when I was a child, I was often troubled by nightmares,’ he said. ‘Animals consuming me while I lay prone, unable to move. It did not feel like danger somehow, more like defeat, like torture. Now when the nightmares come, they terrify me. Like what is coming at me will crush me with great pain, will make me suffer torments and I will drown in my own blood. I can feel it filling my throat. That is the feeling I dread, not the person. But sometimes it is him, the Feldwebel. I don’t understand why seeing the pastor should make me feel like this. I don’t know how he comes into it. He healed me. I stayed on his mission for two years.’
‘Tell me some more about him,’ she said. ‘Tell me about the tobacco sheds and the fruit trees and the books the Frau lent you to read.’
She sensed him smiling in the dark. ‘You were listening then. I thought you’d fallen asleep when I told you about the Frau pastor. The pastor was a very thorough man and the tobacco shed gave him much pleasure, I think. There he was in full control. He always wanted to be right, he could not help it. It was as if he had to force himself to listen to other people, to teach himself to be kind. It made you wonder that he chose to be a missionary. I think it was she who taught him to be forbearing when his natural inclination was to be stern. She was effortlessly good and thoughtful and generous. I will never forget her. She lent me books, yes. She gave me their address in Germany. She said I should send them news now and then. She wrote it in that Heine book I told you about.’
‘Maybe you will write one day,’ she said. ‘Maybe you will be able to forget that terrible time one day even if you don’t forget her. Sometimes when I am away from the house I think I will come home and find that you are gone, that you have left me and disappeared without a word. I don’t know if I understand everything about you yet and I am so terrified that I will lose you one day. I lost my mother and father before I even knew them. I don’t know for sure if I remember them. Then I lost my brother Ilyas who appeared like a blessing in my childhood. I could not bear to lose you too.’
‘I will never leave you,’ Hamza said. ‘I too lost my parents when I was a child. I lost my home and very nearly my life in my blind desire to escape. It was not much of a life until I came here and met you. I will never leave you.’
‘Promise me,’ she said, stroking him and signalling her readiness for him.
*
Five months after their wedding, Afiya miscarried her first pregnancy. She told Hamza when she missed her second month but instructed him not to speak about it. Who was he going to tell? he asked. They could not help smiling and indulging in pleasant fantasies about the Forthcoming, as they began to speak of the life within her, speculating on gender and names. She did not even dare call it a pregnancy, reminding him that Ilyas had told her that their mother miscarried more than once. She waited for nine days after her third month before announcing to Hamza that it was now certain.
‘It’s a boy,’ she said.
‘No, it’s a girl, he said.
The following afternoon, on the tenth day after her third missed period, Bi Asha spoke to Afiya. At first she glanced at her lower abdomen and then she looked into her eyes for a long moment.
‘Have you fallen?’ she asked.
‘I think so,’ Afiya said, quite surprised that she had guessed when they were so careful to keep things to themselves.
‘How many months?’ Bi Asha asked.
‘Three,’ Afiya said hesitantly, not wanting to sound too definite in case it aroused Bi Asha’s disdain.
‘About time you fell,’ she said, with not a hint of gladness in her voice. ‘Only … women often lose their first.’
The next day, as she was hanging out the washing in the yard, Afiya felt something wet on her thigh. She hurried to her room and found that her underclothes were dark red with blood. Bi Asha, who was also in the yard at the time, followed her into her room and helped her to undress. She fetched some old sheets and made Afiya lie down.
‘Perhaps you won’t lose it,’ she said. ‘The clothes are not very bloody. Just rest and let’s wait and see.’
The bleeding continued for the rest of the morning, steadily staining the sheets Afiya lay on. She remained still throughout, slowly becoming resigned to the loss. When Hamza came back for lunch, Bi Asha at first tried to keep him out of the room. These were matters for women, she said, but he brushed her restraining hand away and went to sit with his wife.
‘We celebrated too soon,’ Afiya said through her tears. ‘I don’t know how she knew. She said I would lose it. She wished that on me.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s just bad luck. Don’t pay any attention to her.’
The worst of the bleeding was over by the next morning although there was still some spotting. After three days there were no signs of blood but Afiya was exhausted and without strength and trying hard not to feel sad. Bi Asha told her she must rest but she shook her head, got up and did what chores she could manage. Somehow word of her misfortune got out as word always did by some means, and her friends Jamila and Saada came to visit and Khalida, who never visited because of Bi Asha’s feud with her husband, sent words of commiseration and an offer of whatever help she required. In the meantime Bi Asha fussed bossily over her, preparing a soup made from maize, including the silk, which she said was good for Afiya, and meals that she said were appropriate for her feeble condition: sautéed liver, steamed fish, milk jelly, stewed fruit. She was like the Bi Asha Afiya had known as a child, her voice still hard-bitten but her strokes kindly.
This period of grace lasted while she convalesced. After three weeks the special meals stopped and the sharp edge began to return to Bi Asha’s voice. The loss of the pregnancy made Afiya feel more of a wife to Hamza. He was tender with her for days afterwards, holding on to her even in their sleep, his hand resting on her shoulder or her thigh. He softened his voice when he spoke to her as if loud tones would upset her. After several days of this treatment and his abstemiousness from making love to her, she reached for him and whispered to him that his attentions were now overdue. He was worried that she was hurting, he said, but she soon demonstrated that he had no reason to be concerned. It was strange also that the loss made her feel more independent of the constraints of the house, a grown-up person, almost a mother. She went out to the market every morning and made decisions about what to prepare for the household’s lunch without consulting Bi Asha beforehand. She bought what looked best and what took her own fancy, nothing unusual, just bananas that looked dark green and plump or yams or cassava freshly dug from the soil or newly harvested pumpkins that glistened with wax. To her surprise, Bi Asha did not make any objection, only now and then scolding her and mocking her if she thought a purchase too expensive or if a dish went wrong. Where did you get this okra? It’s rotten, that kind of thing.
Most afternoons Afiya went to visit Jamila and Saada, who now ran a small dress-making business from home, and she sat with them and took on small unskilled tasks they allowed her to do: sewing on buttons, measuring and cutting the lace and ribbons that everyone loved to have on their dresses. In time they gave her more complicated tasks, and gradually she learned how to measure material from a dress a customer wanted copied, how to cut it to best effect, and to choose the lace and the ribbons and the buttons from the Indian haberdasher’s shop to which her friends took her. Since all the customers were acquaintances and neighbours of the sisters, they charged only a pittance for the work they did. It was as much to fill the empty hours after the daily household chores as for the money that they did it, gladly doing something that engaged them and required skill, to ease the frustration of the hemmed-in lives they were forced to endure.
Afiya fell pregnant again several months later, just over a year after their wedding. She told Hamza after her second missed period and they waited chastely until they were safely past the third month before beginning to speak of the Forthcoming, and then only between themselves.
It was at about this same time that Bi Asha’s pains started – not that she did not suffer occasional aches and pains like everyone else did, but this was different. They were preparing lunch when Bi Asha rose from the kitchen stool to fetch a fan because she was feeling hot and a sudden excruciating pain stabbed her in the lower back. It was so sudden and so fierce that she had no choice but to collapse on the stool again with a cry of alarm.
‘Bimkubwa,’ Afiya cried and rose to her feet with arms outstretched. Bi Asha held on to the extended hands and uttered an unaccustomed whimper. Afiya kneeled down beside her, holding her trembling hands and murmuring softly, ‘Bimkubwa, Bimkubwa.’ After a few minutes of silent panting Bi Asha heaved a great sigh and then arched her back to test if the pain was still there. Afiya helped her to her feet and she took a few steps around the yard without any mishap.
‘Lo, that was like someone had cut me in half,’ Bi Asha said, her hands massaging her sides just above the pelvis. ‘Go and fetch a mat for me. I’ll lie here on the floor for a while. It must have been a spasm.’
Later that evening, Bi Asha asked Afiya to massage her back as she had always done since she was a child. She stretched out on a mat in her room while Afiya kneeled beside her and massaged her from the shoulders to the hips. Bi Asha groaned with contentment and afterwards thought she felt much better. But the pain did not go away. She complained daily about the ache in her sides, which sometimes caught her so unexpectedly that she could not prevent a cry. As time passed she became worse. The pains began when she rose from her bed and stayed with her most of the day, then they came to her during the night as well while she lay trying to rest.
‘You should go to the hospital to have that checked,’ Khalifa said. ‘You can’t just go on groaning and doing nothing about it.’
‘No, which hospital? They don’t treat women there,’ she said.
‘What nonsense! I’m talking about the government hospital,’ Khalifa said, inclined not to take her complaints too seriously. ‘They’ve been treating women there since German times.’
‘Only pregnant women,’ she said.
‘That is no longer true if it ever was. The government wants all of us to be healthy so we can work harder. It says so in Mambo Leo.’
‘Stop your drivel, you hopeless man. You think you’re funny,’ she said. ‘Leave me alone.’
‘What about the Indian doctor?’ he suggested. ‘We can get him to come here. He makes house calls.’
‘He is just a waste of money. He’ll take my money and give me coloured water, which he will say is medicine.’
‘Not at all,’ Khalifa said, smiling and teasing her. ‘You’re just afraid of the jab. You know he gives everyone a jab for almost any condition. Some people become so addicted to the jab that they refuse to pay unless he gives them one. We’ll get him to come and see you. He’ll give you one injection and you’ll soon be better.’
It was evident now that it was not Bi Asha’s back that was hurting but something inside, in the soft part above her hips. She sat on a mat in the backyard for long periods, her eyes closed, emitting an involuntary groan every so often. Her expression was scowling and sullen, and the unmistakable source of her misery was her own body. Afiya tried to anticipate the chores Bi Asha might have thought were hers. Bimkubwa, let me do it, she said when Bi Asha was taking a broom to the backyard or gathering clothes and bedding for the laundry, but she was proud and pushed her away, saying, I am not an invalid.
Her appetite diminished and she began to lose weight. After one or two mouthfuls of cassava or rice she gagged, unable to swallow. Afiya prepared bone soup for her and mashed some fruit with yoghurt and sat with her while she ate, in case she needed help. In the end Bi Asha’s pride gave way and the pain forced her to her bed, groaning and almost delirious. Khalifa pleaded with her to go to the hospital or at least to see the Indian doctor but Bi Asha said no, she did not need that kind of attention. She did not want strange men poking at her with that instrument they wore around their necks and then put on your heart to drink your blood. Instead she asked for the maalim, the hakim.
‘What do you think he’ll do? Say a prayer and make you better. You’re an ignorant woman,’ Khalifa said, turning to Afiya for support, hoping she would add her own words of persuasion. ‘You are not important enough for the hakim to come to you. He only goes to the houses of the eminents and the moneybags. His prayers are not cheap. There is something wrong with your body. You need to see a doctor.’
‘Perhaps we can call the doctor to come here,’ Afiya suggested. ‘He visits patients at home sometimes. I know he does.’ She did not say she knew because the doctor had visited Khalida when her son was ill with jaundice, in case the name provoked Bi Asha into further resistance.
Bi Asha smiled her derision. ‘Then he can charge us even more for his rubbish. Go to the hakim’s house and explain to him the pain I am enduring. Ask him what he advises I should do.’
Afiya went to the hakim’s house as instructed. It was by a mosque and beside an old cemetery. Its continued use had been forbidden by the Germans many years before for fear of infection and contamination, and their threat to dig it up was only averted by the outbreak of war. The British administration did not renew the threat but upheld the prohibition on new burials, ordering that the cemetery grounds be kept clear of undergrowth to prevent the spread of malaria.
Afiya was shown into a downstairs room just beside the front door. She was nearly six months into her pregnancy so she sank carefully to her knees and squatted as comfortably as she could while she waited for the hakim to appear. There were thick straw mats on the floor and a book-stand on which rested a copy of the Koran and an inactive incense burner beside it which nevertheless gave off a scent of ud. The window, which was barred, was wide open and a soft light filtered in through the overhanging branches of the neem tree outside, which was the sole survivor from the clearing of the adjoining cemetery.
The hakim was an elderly and ascetic man of considerable eminence and respectability. He was dressed in a brown sleeveless robe and wore a close-fitting white cap. Afiya had not spoken to him before and was a little awed by his air of assured self-possession. He did not smile or beckon but slipped silently to his place beside the book-stand and listened without speaking while Afiya described Bi Asha’s condition. When she had no more to say he asked after Bi Asha’s age and her general health. His voice was deep and pliant, accustomed to addressing multitudes. Then he said Afiya should come back in the afternoon, to collect something he will prepare to bring relief to the ailing woman.
When she went back in the afternoon he gave her a small porcelain plate with a gilded border on which were written lines of the Koran in a dark brown ink. He explained that the ink was an extract of the flesh of the walnut, which itself has medicinal qualities. He also gave her an amulet. His instructions were for her to pour half a coffee-cupful of water, very carefully, on to the plate until the holy words dissolved. She was not to stir or add anything to the liquid and once the writing was dissolved she was to pass the plate to the ailing woman to drink. The amulet was to be strapped to her right ankle. Afiya was to bring the plate back in the morning so that he could prepare it for her to collect another dose in the afternoon. Afiya accepted these objects with both hands and then handed over the small purse Khalifa had given her for the hakim who accepted it without checking the amount. This treatment went on for several weeks without diminishing Bi Asha’s pain.
As the days went by, word got out that Bi Asha was very unwell and neighbours and acquaintances began to call on her. She received them in the guest room because she did not want to be thought seriously ill, but then she began to allow her visitors to come to her bedside. It was they who persuaded her that she should see the mganga who lived nearby. I’ve seen her before, it did no good, Bi Asha said. No, not that one, her visitors persisted, people speak well of this one. She knows medicines.
The mganga came to the house and was closeted with Bi Asha for a long time, asking her questions while she examined her. Bi Asha asked that Afiya should stay with her. The mganga was a very thin woman of uncertain middle age, her eyes kohled and intense, her movements commanding and precise. She talked almost constantly while she was with Bi Asha, even ventriloquising some replies to the questions she addressed to her. After her first examination she left some herbs which Afiya was to steep in warm water and give to Bi Asha to drink before bed. It will help her to sleep, the healer said. The mganga came every day after that and rubbed potions and balm on the painful areas, which made Bi Asha groan with contentment and pronounce herself much improved. She made Bi Asha lie on her back on the floor and covered her completely with a thick blue calico cloth for several minutes. Then she made her lie on her left side and ripple her body from head to toe. She made her repeat this on the right side, while she read prayers over her and sang words Afiya did not understand. This ceremony was performed for four days and afterwards the healer left instructions for the food Bi Asha was to eat, even if only a spoonful or two every day. Still, the pain did not go away and the mganga whispered to Afiya that perhaps they needed to call in a spirit healer in case it was not the patient’s body that was the problem, in case an invisible had taken her.
‘I told this to her,’ the mganga said. ‘Only a spirit healer will be able to hear what the invisible desires before releasing you. But she shook her head as if she knows better. Without a spirit healer, how can she know what the invisible wants? You have to know how to make it speak.’
Afiya did not tell Khalifa about this conversation because she knew he would scoff, but she told Hamza who said nothing. In time Bi Asha was so bedridden that she needed to use a bedpan, and it was then that Afiya saw the blood in her urine. There were small lumps of faeces in the pan as well so at first she was not sure where the traces of blood came from, until the next time when she had a pan with only urine and tiny clots of blood in it.
‘Bimkubwa,’ she said, holding out the pan. ‘There’s blood – dark blood.’
Bi Asha turned her face to the wall, evidently not surprised.
‘Bimkubwa, you must go to the hospital,’ Afiya said.
With her face still turned away, she shook her head and then shivered all over in a fit of trembling. Afiya told Khalifa who went without further hesitation to fetch the Indian doctor, but he was not able to come until the following morning because he had been called away. The doctor was a short plump man in his fifties, silver-haired and mild-mannered. He was dressed in a white shirt and khaki trousers like a government man. He asked Khalifa to leave the room and Afiya to remain. At first he asked questions and looked to Afiya to corroborate the replies. All the defiance had gone out of Bi Asha and she answered him in a defeated voice but without reluctance. How long had she seen blood in her urine? What did she have for breakfast, for lunch? Was she able to keep food down? Where did it hurt most? Did she know if any relative had suffered similar pains in the past, her mother or her father? Then he examined the places in her side where it hurt most. Afterwards he told Khalifa and Afiya that at first he thought the blood in the urine was bilharzia in the bladder, but it was more likely that her kidneys were failing. The kidney failure could itself be the result of untreated bilharzia, so she would have to go to the hospital to be tested for that. It was possible, though, that matters were even worse than that because he felt a lump in her side that might well be something dangerous. They should not have waited so long.
She was X-rayed at the hospital and found to have an advanced growth in her left kidney and a smaller one in her bladder. She also had the bilharzia worm but it was quite certain that the growths were advanced and very likely malignant. The Indian doctor told them that the hospital had asked her to return for further X-rays in case there were more growths, but he said it was up to her to decide. There was no treatment possible for the growths they found but he was able to give her medication for the bilharzia. To Khalifa he said it would now be a matter of a few months only and the best he was able to offer was pain-killing injections. Khalifa thought it was right to tell her so she could prepare herself and her affairs. He told her that the doctor offered to give her pain-killing injections if she wished, and he could not help smiling as he told her that. Doctor Sindano, he said. He wondered, without saying anything to Bi Asha but voicing the thought to Afiya, if now was the moment to reconcile his wife with her nephew Nassor Biashara, undeserving though he was. It was not right to leave such rancour behind. He did not say this to Bi Asha because the news she had received was already too much for her. He had not thought she would go before him. She was always so strong.
Afiya went round to see Khalida, Nassor Biashara’s wife, to tell her about Bi Asha’s illness. She was heavily pregnant now, nearing the end of her term, and the stairs in their house exhausted her. ‘Baba asked me to tell you this,’ Afiya told her, making it clear that the information was also an implied invitation to visit the dying relative.
Khalida came to the house for the first time that afternoon. She kissed Bi Asha’s hand as she lay in her bed and sat on a stool beside her, making the kind of conversation people did by a sickbed. It was a low-key reconciliation, and neither Khalida nor Bi Asha made any drama out of it. After about an hour Khalida wished her better health and left. Bi Asha heaved a great sigh after she left, as if at the end of an ordeal. All resistance went out of her as she lingered with them in her last days. She drifted in and out of delirium, muttering incomprehensibly, sometimes in tears.