Afiya delivered her child at home, attended by the midwife who had had a hand in the arrival of scores of other babies in the town. Like many others, Afiya preferred to go into labour in the presence of women she knew than to suffer the attentions of complete strangers, so despite the administration’s Maternity Health campaign she did not go to the new clinic for the birth. The midwife was sent for as soon as her waters broke, as was Jamila who had promised to be with her during the birth. Her labour started in late afternoon and went on through the night and into the late morning of the next day. Hamza was sent to the room used to receive guests, where Khalifa also took refuge. No one slept much during that tense time. They left the doors open so they could hear Bi Asha, and Khalifa was up and down to her as she called out for him, groaning with weariness. The backyard door also stood open and the dying woman’s groans mingled with Afiya’s intermittent gasps of pain. Hamza sat on the back doorstep for a while in case help was needed and because he felt so useless sitting inside. When the midwife came out and saw him there she chased him away. It will be a long night yet, she said, and it was not seemly for the husband to be sitting so expectantly by. He did not know what was unseemly about it but he obeyed and returned to the guest room.
A neighbour came in the morning to look after Bi Asha so Khalifa could go to work, and the women persuaded Hamza to go too. There was nothing for him to do and they would send for him when there was news. He went reluctantly, feeling bullied by the women when he wanted to be nearby while Afiya was in pain, and within reach when the Forthcoming arrived. No call came throughout the morning and he could hardly keep his mind on the work. Khalifa appeared at the workshop just after the noon call to prayers, anxious for different reasons to be back, and they went home together. It was the good neighbour looking after Bi Asha who told them that Afiya had given birth to a boy. Hamza found her lying in bed, exhausted but triumphant, while Jamila stood grinning nearby and the midwife silently went about her work.
‘We were just cleaning up before sending for you,’ Jamila said.
They called the baby Ilyas. That was decided before his arrival, Ilyas if it is a boy, Rukiya if it is a girl.
After the birth, Bi Asha appeared to fall into a deep doze, not quite fully asleep but not awake either. She did not take any food and did not seem to wake when the neighbour or Khalifa rolled her over to remove the towelling they wrapped around her middle as a nappy. Her breathing was deep and laboured but she no longer made the weary groans of recent days. On the third day after the birth, Jamila prepared lunch for the household and then went back to her own family. She said she would come again the next morning. Afiya was already on her feet and she resumed her household chores while the baby napped. Later that afternoon, without coming awake once since the baby’s arrival, Bi Asha passed away in unaccustomed silence.
For the next few days they were engaged in the obligatory observances of her passing, and it was only after they were over that the household began to assume its new shape without Bi Asha. In public, Khalifa wore the sombre face of a mourning husband out of respect for Bi Asha, and even at home some puff seemed to have gone out of him although they had known for months that she was passing away.
‘It is so final, that is what is surprising, what I did not properly understand,’ he said, ‘that this person is gone forever.’ He looked at Hamza and then could not resist a touch of mischief. ‘Unless you believe the fairy story that all the dead will one day come back to life?’
‘Shush, Baba, not now,’ Afiya said.
‘Well, we have to make some changes anyway,’ he said. ‘We can’t have the two of you and the little one in that store room in the yard while I live like a lord inside an empty house. So this is what I suggest now. You two move inside and take the two adjoining rooms, and I’ll move out into the yard. You will need the space and I would like some fresh air. What do you think? We’ll get some new furniture for the other room so you can sit there and receive your guests, and the little prince can play and invite his guests.’
Afiya suggested that they punch a hole through into the front store room and make that part of the interior of the house, then they could still keep the guest room for visitors or if someone came to stay. Who would that be? The words remained unspoken but they all knew she meant in case of the elder Ilyas’s return. They debated these suggestions for a while before deciding what best to do while Hamza reminded both of them that it was not their house and they had better talk to Nassor Biashara before knocking down any walls. It is now indisputably Nassor Biashara’s house and he might well want us to leave, he said. Khalifa waved this away, He wouldn’t dare, he said.
Despite his level-headed practical manner, though, something seemed to have gone out of Khalifa. He went to the warehouse in the morning and grumbled about the waste of time every day. He sat with his friends on the porch in the evenings and spoke his outrage with more restraint than he used to, and even tutted at Topasi when his gossip became too fanciful when before he would gleefully have elaborated on it. To Afiya and Hamza he said he needed to make new plans, do something more useful than sit on a bench outside a warehouse for the rest of his life. There are all these schools the government is opening up, perhaps I can become a teacher, he said.
Nassor Biashara also had new plans. Building works on the new workshop were under way and new machines were on order. ‘It will take some months for the workshop to be ready,’ he said to Hamza. ‘And when it’s ready I want you to run it. When the machinery comes, I will arrange for someone to come from Dar es Salaam to train you. Mzee Sulemani will continue in the other workshop making our regular items. In the meantime, we will need to find a new carpenter to work with him on the sofa and armchair line … maybe young Sefu is ready, what do you think? Or how about your friend Abu? He is a carpenter, isn’t he? I think he just does odd jobs for people at the moment. Ask him if he wants a regular job working for me. You will also need an assistant to work with you, someone properly trained, maybe more than one if we get going. Perhaps that’s a better job for Sefu. He’s young, he’ll learn quickly.’
‘Abu will come with me, he’ll learn just as quickly as I will. Sefu already works with Mzee and knows what’s required there,’ Hamza said.
‘As you wish,’ Nassor Biashara said.
‘Pay rise?’ Hamza suggested.
‘I will increase your pay. In fact, I will double it once you start the new workshop. Find yourself somewhere to rent and get away from that miserable house.’
‘What about Khalifa?’
‘He can find somewhere to rent too,’ Nassor Biashara said.
‘Are you trying to get him out of the house?’
‘I would love to do that. I could get a good rent for that property,’ he said.
‘Rent it to me then,’ Hamza said.
Nassor Biashara laughed in surprise. ‘You are a sentimental fool,’ he said. ‘Why do you want to worry about that old grumbler?’
‘Because he is Afiya’s Baba,’ Hamza said.
‘I’ll think about it,’ Nassor Biashara said. ‘What makes you think you’ll be able to afford it?’
‘You are a good businessman. You’ll not want to make your new workshop manager miserable by charging him an unreasonable rent.’
‘You’re turning into a conniving little manipulator! First you charm that old grumbler so that he takes you into his house, then you seduce his daughter and bamboozle the old carpenter with your German translations, and now you are trying to blackmail me,’ Nassor Biashara said. ‘I told you, I’ll think about it.’
*
The construction of the new workshop progressed at speed. Nassor Biashara was as excited about his new plans as he had been by the arrival of the propeller a few years before. This will be another brilliant idea, he said, and even Khalifa did not mock. Mzee Sulemani looked on indulgently and turned his attention to training their young apprentice to take over when Hamza was no longer available to him. After the gleaming equipment arrived and was connected to electric power, an Indian machinist and carpenter arrived from Dar es Salaam to train Hamza and Abu. His father’s company was the importer and distributor of the machinery and also the owner of a sawmill and a transport company. He demonstrated for Hamza and Abu over three days with Nassor Biashara hovering in the background. After three days and repeated test runs with the saws and the grinders and the frets, the Indian machinist made ready to go, promising to return when required and certainly at the end of the year for a service check. Take your time. Don’t take any risks with the machinery, he said. Nassor Biashara expected this new partnership to grow and for the sawmill to be the supplier of timber for the new enterprise, and he showered the young man with thanks and goodwill.
These were contented years for Afiya and Hamza. Their child was well, learned to walk and to speak and seemed to have no blemish. When he was still a baby, Hamza took him to the hospital for the recommended vaccinations and watched diligently over his health. Child deaths were not uncommon but many of the illnesses that took them away were avoidable, as he knew from his time in the schutztruppe which took good care of the health of the askari. In the year of Ilyas’s birth, the British were in the early stages of the mandate awarded to them by the League of Nations to administer the old Deutsch-Ostafrika and prepare it for independence. Although not everyone noticed at the time, that last clause was the beginning of the end for European empires, none of which had dreamed hitherto of preparing anyone for independence. The British colonial administration took the mandate responsibility seriously rather than just going through the motions or worse. Perhaps it was just a lucky confluence of responsible administrators, or it was the compliance of the people who were exhausted after the rule of the Germans and their wars and the starvation and diseases which followed, and were now willing to obey without defiance so long as they were left in peace. The British administrators had no fear of guerillas or bandits in this territory and could get on with the business of colonial administration without resistance from the colonised. Education and public health became their priorities. They made a big effort to inform people about health issues, to train medical assistants and open dispensaries in far-flung parts of the colony. They distributed information leaflets and conducted tours by medical teams to instruct people on malaria prevention and good childcare. Afiya and Hamza listened to this new information and did what they could to protect themselves and their child.
They also made some changes to the house. With Nassor Biashara’s permission, they punched a doorway in the wall of the old store room and made that part of their bedroom, which was now large and airy with windows looking out over the street. When Ilyas was old enough to get about, he had the run of all the rooms and the yard and even Khalifa’s room. Khalifa loved him to totter in there and climb up on the bed with him.
One of Hamza and Afiya’s sadnesses was their failure to provide Ilyas with a brother or sister. Twice in the next five years Afiya was pregnant and then miscarried in the third month. They learned to live with this disappointment because everything else was going so well, or that was what Hamza said to Afiya when she was made sad by her failure to keep another pregnancy. Another disappointment was the continuing silence about the elder Ilyas. There was still no word from or about him. It was now six years since the end of the war and it caused Afiya much anguish that she could not decide whether to give up hope and grieve or keep thinking of him as alive and on his way home. After all, she lost him for nearly ten years once before and then he turned up like a miracle.
‘Everything is going well,’ Hamza insisted. The new workshop was a success and in his prosperity Nassor Biashara was generous to them. ‘I’ll ask Maalim Abdalla to make enquiries again.’
Maalim Abdalla was now headmaster of a large school and had good contacts with the British administrative office through his friend in the District Officer’s staff. He offered Khalifa a job as a primary school teacher of English but he was still dithering, not really sure if he wanted the bother of disrespectful twelve-year-olds. He was kept pleasantly busy in the warehouse with the growing prosperity of the business, and so much at ease in the new arrangement at home with his room in the yard that his contentment was evident in his appearance. He was not really sure if he wanted to start a new profession at his age. He was busy being a grandfather. He always had a little something for Ilyas: the sweetest banana in the market, a segment of ripe red-fleshed guava, a flapjack. Where is my grandson? he called as he came in. In their favourite game Ilyas sometimes hid while Khalifa pretended to look for him although his hiding places were often easy to guess.
He was a handsome slim boy, and it became evident as he grew up that he was drawn to silence. His silences did not seem troubled although Afiya was not always sure and wondered if there was a sorrow in him he did not yet know how to speak. Hamza shrugged and did not say that sorrow was impossible to avoid. At times Ilyas sat in the same room as he did while Hamza lay stretched out on a mat and neither of them spoke for long periods. It seemed to Hamza that this silence was a place in which his son found refuge.
When he was five years old the world economy went into a great Depression, not that he knew much of it. Ilyas grew up in these years of austerity when Nassor Biashara’s affairs once again went into decline, and everything in everyday life became scarce and expensive. Government plans for new hospitals and schools were abandoned, and workers were laid off and went hungry in towns and villages and on the land. It seemed that bad times never left them for long. Nassor Biashara did not lay off any of his workers but he reduced their wages and quietly reopened the smuggling business he had run during the war, buying supplies from Pemba and bringing them in without paying customs duties and then selling on at inflated prices. They all had to live.
With time on his hands, Khalifa began to teach Ilyas to read. You’ll be going to school soon, so might as well get started now, he said. Ilyas listened open-mouthed to Khalifa’s stories, which he mixed in with reading and writing exercises to keep the boy interested. Once upon a time, he would begin, and Ilyas’s eyes would lighten and his mouth slowly slacken as he was drawn into the tale.
‘A monkey lived on a palm tree by the sea.’
It was a story Ilyas knew but he did not smile or grin in recognition, only his eyes softened in expectation.
‘A shark swam past in the water nearby and they became friends. The shark told the monkey stories of the world he lived in across the water in Sharkland, about its luminous landscape and happy population. He told him about his family and friends and the celebrations they held at certain times of the year. The monkey said how wonderful his world sounded, and how he wished he could see it, but he could not swim and if he tried to get there he would drown. It’s all right, the shark said, you can ride on my back. Just hold on to my fin and you’ll be quite safe. So the monkey climbed down from the tree and sat on the shark’s back. The journey across the water to …’
‘Sharkland!’ Ilyas filled the gap Khalifa left for him.
‘The journey to Sharkland was so exhilarating that the monkey exclaimed, You’re such a good friend to do this for me. It made the shark feel bad and he said, I have a confession to make. I am taking you to Sharkland because our king is ill and the doctor said that only a monkey’s heart will make him better. So that’s why I’m taking you there. Without any hesitation the monkey said, Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I didn’t bring my heart with me,’ Ilyas declared, grinning with delight as he supplied the line.
‘Oh, no, the shark said. What shall we do now? The monkey said, Take me back and I’ll fetch it from the tree. So the shark took the monkey back to the tree on the shore, and he rushed up the palm and the shark never saw him again. Don’t you think that was a clever little monkey?’
Ilyas did not remember much of his early days at school, but later his teachers praised him for his neat work and his obedient manner. They sometimes pointed him out to others as an example: Look at Ilyas, why can’t the rest of you sit quietly and get on with your sums. Despite that, the other children did not persecute him or take much notice of him. He stood by and watched the boisterous play of the other boys, and at times was dragged in to take part if an extra body was needed to make up a team.
He suffered his small share of the unavoidable indignities of childhood. Once he misjudged his need to urinate and underestimated the distance from classroom to toilet. On another occasion he was found to have picked up lice from another boy in the class and had to have his head shaved. On his way home one day he stubbed his toe on a protruding rock and as he fell a piece of broken bottle cut into his calf. When he reached home his foot was covered in blood and Afiya wept at the sight of his injury. She strapped his calf and walked him to the hospital where his eyes roved over the hospital grounds while they waited outside the clinic, returning again and again to the casuarinas swaying so elegantly in the breeze.
One day he got lost. He went with his father to watch a boat race at the waterfront. The boats were coming into the finishing line and Hamza was craning his neck for a glimpse of the outcome when he realised that Ilyas was no longer beside him. He rushed in all directions looking for him but could not see him. In the end, frantic now that he had lost their precious little boy, he hurried home in the hope that someone who knew the child had found him wandering the streets and had taken him there, but he was not home either. So he headed for the Government Hospital to see if by chance his son had been injured and he found him sitting silently under the serene casuarinas, watching them sway elegantly in the breeze. Hamza sat beside him and breathed in deeply a few times to calm himself.
‘Is there something wrong with him?’ Afiya asked Hamza, who shook his head emphatically.
‘He forgets himself sometimes, that’s all,’ he said. ‘He’s a dreamer.’
‘Like his father,’ Afiya said.
‘He looks like his mother to me.’
‘Do you think he looks like my brother Ilyas?’
He shook his head. ‘I don’t know, having never met the elder Ilyas.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Our Ilyas is much more handsome. I’ll ask Baba.’
Her lost brother was never far from her thoughts and Hamza sometimes wondered if it had been a mistake to name the boy after him, if that made the absent one ever-present and refreshed the anguish of his loss. The memory of him more often than not made Afiya sad although at times she remembered the happy times she had spent with him. After they spoke of him she sometimes fell silent in a way he was beginning to recognise and it took a while for her to extricate herself from such recollections.
‘I wish we knew what happened to him,’ she said. ‘I wish I knew how to find out for sure, but I don’t. You are the one who has travelled and worked everywhere and fought wars in many lands. Sometimes when I hear you talk about the people and places you saw, it makes me bitter that I have been penned here all my life.’
‘Don’t be unhappy. It’s not as you imagine out there,’ he said, holding her while she shed gentle tears in the dark.
He asked Maalim Abdalla once again if there was any news from his friends in the British administration and he said no. No one was interested in a missing askari. There were so many unaccounted dead that it was impossible to get information on an individual. The number is not even known, hundreds of thousands of them most likely, among them carriers on both sides and civilians in the south who starved or died from the influenza epidemic. Among the askari also many died from diseases. It is a long time now since his sister lost touch with him, the maalim said. I fear it can only mean one thing.
Afiya heard from Khalifa about a campaign to recruit young mothers to train as midwife assistants. The new maternity clinic was a big success, although expectant mothers only went for the antenatal events and most of them refused to deliver there. They wanted to recruit more midwife assistants to provide a comprehensive service, including visiting mothers at home. The candidates were required to be literate enough to write basic notes and read simple manuals, and to be fluent in Kiswahili. It was thought their experience of childbirth would benefit other expectant mothers to whom they would also be able to communicate with nuance rather than just issuing instructions and prohibitions. When she told Hamza he was enthusiastic. You fit all the requirements, he said. There is such a need for it, and you yourself will learn new skills.
*
Ilyas was eleven years old when the whispers started. He was used to playing alone, he was an only child. Maybe his temperament inclined him that way anyway, his contented silences, as they seemed to Hamza. In his games he made a variety of blameless objects play major roles in his stories: a matchbox became a house, a small pebble was the British warship he saw in the harbour, a discarded thread-spool was the locomotive that growled into the centre of the town. As he manoeuvred these objects he told their stories in an intimate voice only audible to him and his playthings.
Early one evening, just as it was turning dusk, Hamza came home from an afternoon stroll by the sea. That was his routine, a late-afternoon walk by the sea and then directly to the mosque for the maghrib prayer. On this occasion he was a little early so he decided to go home first. He was on his way to the washroom in the backyard to perform his ablutions before heading to the mosque when he saw Ilyas sitting on a stool near the side wall, facing away from the doorway. He did not seem to notice Hamza’s arrival. He was speaking in an unfamiliar whisper, his face lifted, not narrating a story or pretending to be a house or a rabbit but apparently addressing someone tall standing before him. Hamza must have made a noise or his presence might have disturbed the air because Ilyas looked round quickly and stopped speaking.
Perhaps, Hamza thought afterwards, he was memorising a poem or a passage from his English class. His teacher was fond of that method of learning, making his pupils copy the poems into their exercise books, learn them by heart and then recite them while he corrected their pronunciation and awarded marks. It was a frugal and pleasant use of the teacher’s time. He preferred his pupils should think of the poems as something they would treasure for life – or that was what he told them whenever there were signs of rebellion. Some of his choices surprised Hamza when he read them. He was not familiar with them or with English poems in general but they seemed to him demanding or even incomprehensible material for children of his son’s age. Hamza himself had only a modest grasp of English but knew he was a more fluent reader than Ilyas. He was not sure what any eleven-year-old would make of ‘The Psalm of Life’, or ‘The Solitary Reaper’. On the other hand, the pastor had thought Schiller and Heine were too much for him but Hamza had found something in them in his own way. So after he saw Ilyas whispering in that way for the first time and had time to reflect on the sight, he guessed the boy was practising a recitation for class.
He came home again at the same time the next evening but Ilyas was out somewhere and not in the backyard speaking strangely. Hamza checked that for a few days just to be sure. Their sleeping arrangement was that Afiya and he slept in the old front store room, which now had a door to the bedroom once occupied by Bi Asha and Khalifa. Ilyas slept in the inner room, which also had a desk made for him by his father where he could do his schoolwork. The door between the two rooms was rarely closed although a curtain hung in the doorway to give the parents privacy when they wished it. Hamza stood beside the doorway some nights, listening intently for Ilyas’s whispers, but heard nothing. He did this for several nights in a row until he was sure that what he had heard that evening at dusk was the boy practising a recitation.
Khalifa was now approaching sixty and spoke of himself as a man on his last legs. He did wobble a little at times, when he made a sudden turn or rose to his feet after sitting cross-legged for a long time, but it still provoked Afiya when he said that. She told him not to wish misfortune on himself or one of these days his wish might be granted. It also provoked Maalim Abdalla, who was now an eminent officer in the Education Department, a school inspector and no longer a teacher. He liked to tell Khalifa that he would not talk about being on his last legs if he had a proper job to do instead of secreting smuggled goods in a warehouse. They were still there on the porch most evenings, Khalifa, Maalim Abdalla and Topasi, giggling over racy gossip, catching up with the world and exposing its endless excesses. Hamza sat with them for a while at times, and sometimes brought them their tray of coffee as he used to, sharing that duty with Ilyas, but he liked to spend part of the evening inside, sitting in the guest room listening to Afiya talk about her day at the clinic and browsing through the old newspapers that Khalifa and Maalim Abdalla passed on to them. Several new ones had appeared in recent years: in Kiswahili, in English and even in German for the settlers who chose to remain after the war. Ilyas sometimes sat with them, listening or reading, but he was usually the first to go to bed.
‘There’s something here about pensions and back-pay for the schutztruppe,’ Hamza said, reading in the German newspaper one night. ‘It says there is a campaign to persuade the German government to resume paying pensions now that its economy is coming out of the Depression. You remember, they stopped them a few years ago.’
‘No, I don’t,’ Afiya said. ‘Did you ever receive any money?’
‘You had to produce a certificate of discharge. I didn’t have one of those. I was a deserter,’ Hamza said.
‘Will my brother Ilyas receive a pension? Maybe we can find him like that.’
‘If he’s still alive.’ Hamza regretted the words as soon as he said them. Afiya put her hand to her mouth as if to stop herself from speaking, and he saw her eyes suddenly brimming. She had spoken about the possibility before and it was he who had asked her not to give up hope. Now it was he who spoke abruptly about his passing.
‘It makes me feel so bad that we don’t know,’ she said in a broken voice.
‘I’m sorry …’ he began but she hushed him and glanced towards Ilyas who was still in the room, his eyes large with hurt and fixed on his mother.
‘Anyway, you were not a deserter, you were injured, slashed by a maddened German officer. Does it not say anything there about a pension for the injured?’ she asked.
He understood that she was making conversation to distract Ilyas, so did not say that the pastor had told him that in the German Imperial army he would have been court-martialled and shot for running away and discarding his uniform. He did not know if that was true or if it was the pastor once again cutting him down to size. He was in no state to run when he left his company and it was the pastor himself who had ordered the uniform to be burned, for fear that the British would send him and his family to a detention camp for giving aid to a schutztruppe. Hamza did not want their pension anyway. ‘It says that the General is still working hard for his troops in Berlin, so maybe everybody will get their pension,’ he said. ‘The settlers here love the General.’
During school holidays and on days when Afiya was at the midwife clinic, Ilyas came to the timber yard with his father. Sometimes he stayed all morning, at others he wandered off on his own for a while and then returned when he was ready to go home. Mzee Sulemani greeted the boy with smiles and let him do small jobs in the workshop. He even taught him how to embroider a cap. When Idris was in full flow with his filthy talk he had a captive audience in Ilyas now as well as Dubu, and it seemed at times that he exerted himself to even lower depths to entertain the boy. Nassor Biashara, who still worked from his small office despite his prosperity, was often forced to intervene and silence his foul-mouthed driver. You’re poisoning the boy’s mind with your dirty talk. Ilyas grinned at the drama and waited for more. On their way home for lunch they went to the market to buy fruit and salad, and some afternoons after work the boy joined Hamza on his walk by the sea for a while before heading back to the house. They did not talk much, that was not their way, but sometimes Ilyas held his father’s hand as they walked.
After the baraza on the porch concluded, Khalifa usually locked the front door and went to his room in the backyard. On his way to bed he sometimes stopped for a word if they were still up but often he went by with just a wave. One evening he said Hamza’s name as he walked past but did not stop. Afiya and Hamza looked at each other in surprise at his abrupt tone of voice. She mouthed, What have you done? He shrugged and they shared a smile. He hooked a thumb towards the porch. Perhaps they bickered over something out there. Better go and find out.
Hamza found Khalifa sitting cross-legged on his bed, and he lowered himself carefully as he always had to at the foot, so that they faced each other.
‘I wanted to have a word with you on your own after what Topasi just told me,’ Khalifa said. ‘It’s all right but I wanted to have a word first to see what you know. It’s about the boy, about Ilyas. People are talking about him. He walks long distances into the countryside on his own. People find it strange that a twelve-year-old town boy should walk for miles into the countryside on his own.’
‘He likes walking,’ Hamza said after a moment, smiling but also troubled that the boy was the subject of discussion in this way. ‘He often walks with me while I limp along. Maybe he likes to stretch his legs properly at times.’
Khalifa shook his head. ‘He talks to himself as he walks. He walks along the wide country paths talking to himself.’
‘What! What does he say?’
Khalifa shook his head again. ‘He stops talking when someone comes near. No one has heard what he says. You know that for many people that is a sign of …’ He paused, unable to say the word, his face puckered with repugnance for the imputation.
‘Maybe he is reciting the poems his teacher sets them at school. I’ve heard him do that. Or maybe he is making up a story. He likes to do that. I’ll tell him to be careful.’
Khalifa nodded then shook his head yet again, his eyes turning to Afiya who stood just inside the room. He waved her in and waited while she closed the door. ‘You have not told him,’ he said, and she shook her head. ‘Two days ago I was resting here late in the afternoon,’ said Khalifa, addressing Hamza and lowering his voice to a whisper. ‘I am not usually here at that time of day, as you know. The window into the yard was open but the door to this room was closed. I heard someone talking, very close, an unfamiliar voice, a woman’s voice. I could not hear the words but the tone was grieving. I thought for a moment that it was her, Afiya, but then instantly I knew it was not. It was not her voice. I thought it was a guest with a sad tale talking to her, then I remembered I had heard Afiya calling out to Ilyas as she left the house a short while before. It was alarming. Someone was in the house unannounced.
‘I got up from the bed to have a look but I must have made a noise because the voice immediately stopped. I opened the curtain and there he was, Ilyas, sitting on a stool by the wall. He was surprised, not expecting me to be there. Who was talking to you? I asked him. No one, he said. I heard a woman’s voice, I said. He looked puzzled and then shrugged. I don’t know. What are you smiling at?’
That last question was addressed to Hamza who said, ‘I can just picture it. That is his favourite reply to any question he does not want to answer. I don’t know … what are you so worried about, Baba? He must have been pretending to be a grieving a woman in a story he was making up.’
Khalifa shook his head emphatically, beginning to show signs of impatience. ‘I spoke to Afiya when she came back. I told her about the unfamiliar voice I had heard. You weren’t there, Hamza. It was a strange old voice, grieving and complaining at the same time. I saw as soon as I began that she knew about this voice. Tell him.’
Hamza was now on his feet, leaning against the bedpost, facing Afiya. ‘I have heard him,’ she said, coming closer, keeping her voice down. ‘He has always done this, playing those games where he speaks all the parts. Two times now I have heard him speaking in the way Baba describes, a grieving voice, here in the backyard. He did not see me standing at the door and I waited because I did not want to shock him or make him feel bad. I thought it was like sleepwalking and I should let him wake up when he was ready. One night when you were sleeping, I heard a noise from his room and found him wincing and turning and moaning in that voice.’
‘Something is troubling that child,’ Khalifa said.
Hamza turned to him with a look of rage on his face but he did not speak for a moment. He knew they were waiting for him. ‘Maybe he was having a bad dream. Maybe he has a rich imagination. Why are you talking about him like this, as if he is … unwell?’
‘He walks on country roads talking to himself,’ Khalifa said, raising his voice in irritation. Afiya instantly hushed him but he was not finished. ‘People are talking about him, and it is they who will make him unwell if we don’t find help for him. Something is bothering that child.’
‘I will talk to him,’ Hamza said with a note of finality. He glanced at Afiya and began to move towards the door.
Don’t panic him, she said when they were alone.
I know how to speak to my son, he said.
Only he was not sure how to speak to him about this, and days passed without him doing so, withstanding Khalifa’s questioning glances with a deadpan expression. There were no further reports of Ilyas’s strange whispers for a few days and Hamza was tempted by the thought that perhaps the episode was over and they were safe. Then on Saturday, when Hamza was heading to the music club, Ilyas asked if he could come too. The club belonged to the players he had first heard several years ago. By now they were an orchestra and they gave a free performance to a small audience on Saturdays. They only played for an hour and were finished by five o’clock, then continued their rehearsals behind closed doors. They walked home by the sea and because Hamza had relished the music and was warmed by the absorbed silence of Ilyas beside him, which made him think that he too had relished it, they stopped when they saw an empty bench at the waterfront and sat down to look out to sea as the sun set behind them. Hamza tried to think of an opening that would allow him to approach the subject of voices. He tried and rejected several before eventually he said, ‘Do you have schoolwork to do this weekend?’
‘I have to revise for an algebra test on Monday.’
‘Algebra? That sounds complicated. I never went to school, you know, so I didn’t learn any algebra.’
‘Yes, I know. This is not really difficult, we are only doing very simple algebra at the moment,’ Ilyas said. ‘I expect it will get very difficult later.’
‘No poems to learn then? Hasn’t your English teacher given you any to learn this week?’
‘No, he makes us recite the same ones again and again,’ Ilyas said.
‘Is that what you recite when you take your long walks in the country? The poems?’ Ilyas turned to look at Hamza as if he was waiting for his father to explain. Hamza smiled to show that this was not a rebuke. ‘I’ve heard about your long walks and how you say things aloud. Are you reciting those poems?’
‘Sometimes,’ Ilyas said. ‘Is it wrong?’
‘No, but some people think it’s strange. They say you’re talking to yourself. So when you practise your poems or you’re making up a story, it’s better to do it at home or at school. You don’t want ignorant people to say you’re crazy, do you?’
Ilyas shook his head and looked defeated. Just at that moment the burning disc of the sun dipped below the town’s skyline behind them and Hamza was able to change the subject. In a few moments it was dusk and they were on their way home.
*
The Italians invaded Abyssinia in October 1935 and brought talk of war back into their midst. They captured Addis Ababa in May 1936 and alarmed the British enough to begin a recruiting drive over the next two years for their colonial army, the King’s African Rifles, which they had largely disbanded during the austerities of the Depression. Not only was the administration concerned about Italian intentions towards their colonies, they were worried about the German remnant in the old Deutsch-Ostafrika, which they expected to be anti-British and pro-Hitler. They also feared that Italian violence against Abyssinian resistance, which included chemical weapons used against civilians, would stir up the Somali and Oromo and Galla people who had not fully reconciled themselves to British rule on the northern frontier. War and rumours of war filled the newspapers.
Ilyas’s whispering malaise, which so alarmed his mother and Khalifa, subsided for several months after that conversation with Hamza by the sea. They were relieved that it had turned out to be no more than a brief episode of childish behaviour. Then talk of war and recruitment of an army brought the whispering back. Afiya found her son slumped on the floor beside his bed late one evening, his hands over his ears.
‘What is it? Is your head hurting?’ she asked, kneeling beside him. She saw there were tears running down his face. He was thirteen now and it was an unusual sight to see tears on his face.
He shook his head. ‘It’s the voice,’ he said.
‘What voice? What voice?’ Afiya said in alarm, knowing they were back in trouble again when she had thought they were safe.
‘It’s the woman. I can’t make her stop.’
‘What is she saying?’ Afiya asked but Ilyas shook his head and said no more. He sobbed in gentle gasps and seemed unlikely to stop, so in the end Afiya helped him to his feet and made him lie on his bed. To her relief he was very soon asleep, or pretending to be. When she asked him the next morning if he was all right, he said curtly that he was well. Is the woman still there? she asked but he shook his head and went off to school.
It was only a brief respite. Another episode occurred a few days later when they woke in the middle of the night to hear his cries. He was calling out his name, Ilyas, Ilyas, but in a woman’s voice. Hamza climbed into bed with him and held him in his arms while he struggled. When he calmed after what seemed like hours, Hamza asked him, ‘What does she want?’
‘Where is Ilyas?’ the boy said. ‘She says, where is Ilyas? Again and again.’
‘You are Ilyas,’ Hamza said.
‘No,’ he said.
Khalifa said to Afiya, ‘He is asking for your brother Ilyas. I knew it was a mistake to call him that. All this war talk has brought it back. Maybe he is blaming himself. Or you. Maybe that’s why he speaks in a woman’s voice. He is speaking for you. There is no one here who can help him. If you take him to the hospital they will ship him to an asylum a hundred miles from here and put him in chains. We have to look after him ourselves.’
After that the voice came every night asking for Ilyas. ‘We have to do something,’ Afiya said. ‘Jamila thinks maybe we should see if the hakim can help him.’
‘She grew up in the country,’ Khalifa said mockingly, addressing Hamza. ‘They believe in all that witches and devils business. You’re a religious man so maybe you might also see if the hakim can give you a little powder to chase the demons away.’
‘Why not?’ Hamza said although he had no faith in that kind of religion. So Afiya once again visited the hakim as she had when Bi Asha was unwell and came back with a gilded plate with verses from the Koran written on it. She ran some water on the plate to dissolve the words and made Ilyas drink it. The signs did not abate even after repeated doses of dissolved holy words. Now Ilyas no longer left the house. He was losing weight and sleeping long hours in the day because his nights were disturbed. Afiya was distraught and grew increasingly desperate. One night, as Ilyas lay gently moaning his name, she said aloud and in agony, Oh my God, I can’t bear this torture. It was after that night she decided to call a shekhiya whose name was given to her by the mganga neighbour who had come to see to Bi Asha in her last days.
‘What will she do?’ Hamza asked.
‘If he has been visited the shekhiya will tell us.’
‘Visited by what? I told you, she grew up in the country. We’re going to do witchcraft in our house,’ Khalifa said, going to his room in disgust.
The shekhiya entered the house in a cloud of incense, so it seemed. She was a small pale-complexioned woman with a sharp-edged handsome face. She greeted Afiya brightly and began talking cheerfully as she took off her buibui, which released another cloud of incense and perfume, and then she settled herself down on the mat in the guest room. ‘That sun is fierce out there. I stopped to rest wherever I found some shade but look at me, I’m covered in sweat. It makes you long for the kaskazi to arrive and bring us a breeze. So, my child, are you well, and is your household well? Alhamdulillah. Yes, I know, your loved one is troubled otherwise you would not have called me. Haya, bismillahi. Tell me what has been troubling him.’
The shekhiya listened with eyes cast down as Afiya described the episodes and the voices, her fingers toying with a brownstone rosary. She wore a red shawl of flimsy material and a loose white shift that covered all of her. Only her face and hands were exposed. The shekhiya did not ask any questions while Afiya spoke but raised her head now and then as if struck by a detail. Afiya circled the events back and forth, not sure if she had managed to convey the force of what she was describing, until in the end she began to feel that she was rambling and stopped.
‘He calls out the name Ilyas, which is his name as well your brother’s who did not come back from the last war. You don’t know if he is lost or still living and stranded somewhere. His father was also in the war but came back,’ the shekhiya said, and waited for Afiya to confirm. ‘I will now see the boy.’
Afiya called out and Ilyas came in, looking frail and a little nervous. The shekhiya smiled brightly and patted the mat beside her for him to sit down. She gazed at him for a moment, still smiling, but did not ask him any questions. She closed her eyes for what seemed a long time, her face solemn and composed, and once she raised her hands, palms outwards, but did not touch him. Then she opened her eyes and smiled again at Ilyas, who shuddered. ‘Haya, you go and rest now,’ she said. ‘Let me speak alone with your mother.
‘There is no doubt that your son has been visited,’ the shekhiya said. ‘A spirit has mounted him. Do you understand what I am talking about? It is a woman and that makes me hopeful. Women visitors talk, the males sometimes just blunder about angrily. She speaks to him – that too makes me hopeful. From what you have told me she has not hurt him and from feeling the boy here beside me, I don’t think the visitor means him harm but we have to find out what she wants and what will placate her and then provide that if it is possible. If you are willing, I will bring my people here and we will purify the boy here in this room and listen to what his visitor demands. The ceremony will not be cheap.’
*
Several people came to know of the coming ceremony and none but Khalifa mocked as Hamza had feared they would. Mzee Sulemani asked about Ilyas but did not say anything about the ceremony. Hamza did not imagine that the old carpenter would approve. I will pray for his health, he said. Nassor Biashara knew the details from his wife who had heard about them from Afiya herself. He too asked after Ilyas and said with a shrug, Might as well try everything. Hamza knew that they now had no choice but to go through with the ceremony even though he himself had deep doubts about it. He had heard about it in the schutztruppe where there were regular ceremonies in the boma village every week among the Nubi families, but he knew that Afiya had become distraught and frightened about it, had driven herself frantic with anxiety. She was making herself ill.
He did not argue or scoff about the ceremony as Khalifa did. He had his own guilty idea that it was his trauma which was the source of what was tormenting his son, an aftermath of something he had done during the war. He could not think what it could be so there was no logic to this sense that it was something in his past which generated the evil air. Then there was the lost Ilyas. They had named their son after him and somehow established a connection between them, made the boy bear the tragedy of Afiya’s loss, share in her guilt that their efforts to locate her brother or discover his fate had failed.
The Frau’s address was in the copy of Heine’s Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland. When the pastor saw Hamza with it, he said, ‘What are you doing with that book?’
‘The Frau lent it to me,’ he said.
‘She lent you Heine!’ The memory of his shocked surprise still made Hamza smile with glee even after all these years. ‘And what have you made of it so far?’ the pastor asked.
‘I am making very slow progress,’ Hamza said humbly, knowing how it provoked the pastor when the Frau praised his ability to read German, ‘but I was interested to learn that there was a time in Germany when men made the sign of the cross when they heard the nightingale sing. They took her for an agent of evil, as they did everything that gave pleasure.’
‘That is exactly what I would’ve expected of an ignorant reader,’ the pastor said. ‘You can only understand the frivolous in Heine while his deeper thought escapes you.’
When the pastor decided to return to Germany and Hamza made ready to leave too, the Frau gave the book to him and wrote her name and address on the title page. It was an address in Berlin. Write and tell me when something good happens to you, she said. Hamza had thought of writing to her before to ask if there was a way of finding out about Ilyas from the records in Germany. He was discouraged by the audacity of the idea. Why would she bother to find out? How would she know about the records of the schutztruppe askari? Who cared what happened to a lost schutztruppe? In addition, he was discouraged by his own lack of a return postal address. Recently the Biashara Furniture and General Merchandise Company had acquired a post office box so now that problem was solved. He composed a brief letter to the Frau, reminding her of who he was and explaining his search for his brother-in-law. Did she know how they could find out what had happened to him? He copied the letter on to a sheet of the company’s headed paper, addressed an air-mail envelope and took it to the Post Office on the same day. That was in November 1938.
*
After the isha prayer on the evening of the appointed day, soon after Hamza sent off his letter, the shekhiya arrived at the house with her entourage. She was dressed in black from head to toe and her eyelids and lips were kohled. Her woman singer and the two male drummers were dressed more casually in ordinary clothes. She closed the window and lit two scented candles. She then sprayed the room with rose water and started the incense burners, one of ud and the other of frankincense. She waited until the room was filled with scent and fumes before she summoned Ilyas and Afiya and asked them to sit against the wall. No one else was to come in although she did not close the door to the room. She sat cross-legged in front of Ilyas and Afiya with eyes closed. Then the drummers began, beating a gentle rhythm while the woman singer hummed.
Hamza sat on his own in their bedroom, the door open in case he was required. He remembered that the ceremonies lasted a long time and sometimes became loud and disorderly and people were hurt. Khalifa sat on the porch with his friends and tried to ignore the drumming and the singing. More people walked past than usual that evening, curious for a glimpse of what was going on, but they were disappointed. Both the front door and the window were closed, so all they saw were three elderly men sitting on the porch pretending that nothing unusual was happening inside.
The drumming went on for an hour, for two hours, monotonous and getting louder. The singer raised her pitch but her words were as incomprehensible as before, if they were words at all. The shekhiya was reciting prayers but they were inaudible in the din and rhythm of the drums. She kept the incense burner fuming, adding coals from a pot she kept beside her. At some point during the second hour, Afiya’s head dropped and Ilyas’s followed a few moments later. She began to mutter and after a while that became a word: Yallah. Yallah. By the third hour both Afiya and Ilyas were rocking back and forth in a trance as was the shekhiya. Suddenly Ilyas fell over on to his side and Afiya screamed. The drummers and the singer took no notice, nor did the shekhiya stop speaking her prayers.
By this time Khalifa had shut up the house and was sitting on the bed in his room, Hamza beside him, waiting for the drama to come to an end. Just before midnight, the drumming stopped and the two men approached the room. They saw Ilyas lying on his side on the floor while Afiya was leaning against the wall, her eyes wide open in exaltation. Without turning around, the shekhiya waved the two men into the room while the drummers and the singer rose wearily and went into the yard to eat the food they had asked to be prepared for them.
The shekhiya then told them, ‘The visitor lives in this house. She was already here when the boy was born. Someone died soon after he was born, and the visitor left that one and mounted the boy. She is waiting for Ilyas and in her anguish she will trouble the boy. There will be no cure until you find him or find out about him, only then will the visitor learn to live with the affliction of his absence and stop tormenting the boy. Until you have that knowledge you will have to call me whenever the boy suffers a crisis and we will perform another ceremony to placate the visitor. She does not mean to harm the boy. She is in anguish herself. She wants to see Ilyas.’
After that the shekhiya collected her fee and the gifts she had requested and at that late hour left the house with her entourage, leaving a perfumed silence behind her.
Hamza helped the exhausted Ilyas to his feet and to their bed in case he needed attention in the night. I will sleep in the boy’s bed, he said. He went back to check that all was well and saw Khalifa standing in the doorway of the guest room.
‘What nonsense! All the perfume and drumming and stupid wailing!’ he said. ‘That woman knows a source of income when she spots one. She has worked out what Afiya wants to hear: Find your brother. The story about a love-besotted devil is the kind of rubbish even Topasi will not believe. Anyway, maybe that will calm the boy down and settle his nightmares or whatever they are. The only bit that made sense was that thing about the devil being in Asha all along. That comes as no surprise to me.’
*
The shekhiya ceremony took place a few weeks before the arrival of the kaskazi with its dry steady winds, just before the beginning of the school year. There were no further episodes of voices during those weeks and the boy gradually lost the tense expectant look that was characteristic of him at the time. He was subdued and withdrawn at first but his manner was obliging and affectionate. It seemed that the treatment had done enough to rid him of the voices and the fear they induced in him, at least for the time being. Khalifa said it was because the old witch had terrified the boy and that had made him give up his whispering nonsense. Afiya kept an anxious eye on her son, secretly fearful that the treatment could not possibly have been a cure.
His school had a new headmaster at the beginning of that year. He was also Ilyas’s English teacher and he did not ask his students to memorise poems. Instead he had a zeal for handwriting and for writing in general. They had a writing exercise in every class, painstakingly copying out in their best hand the short passages the teacher wrote out on the blackboard. No more of those lazy tedious lessons when one boy after another stood up to recite the same poem while the teacher sat contentedly at his desk. They had to write a story to a given title for homework every week, to be collected by the class captain first thing on Monday mornings. Ilyas took to this new regime with a passion. With the teacher’s encouragement, his stories grew longer with every new attempt, and were written in a careful hand that the teacher showered with praise. Over the months of that year, his stories featured monkeys, feral cats, encounters with strangers on country roads, a cruel German officer who ran berserk with a sword and even a story about a fifteen-hundred-year-old jinn who lived in the neighbourhood and visited a fourteen-year-old boy. He wrote his stories with dedication and unmistakable pleasure, sitting at the desk Hamza had moved to the guest room so his son could work undisturbed. Ilyas sat there for hours, writing in his note-taking book first before copying the finished product into his homework book on the Sunday night. They all read his stories: Afiya, Hamza and Khalifa. When he was especially pleased with one he sometimes asked to read it aloud to them.
‘That boy has a rich imagination,’ Khalifa said admiringly. ‘It’s such a relief that he has taken up writing instead of whispering.’
‘Like I said, maybe that is what he was doing all along,’ Hamza said smugly. ‘Making up stories.’
Afiya looked doubtfully at both of them. Had they really already forgotten that blood-curdling voice, the tears and the pain-wracked cries in the middle of the night? Was that just stories waiting to be told? To her it had seemed like torture. She did not think she could bear the endless drumming and those incense fumes of the shekhiya and her entourage again. For now the boy seemed excited and confident in his new accomplishments, but she remained fearful of a recurrence of the monstrous voice.