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Present
Sarah Jensen
Uganda, East Africa
The last thing in the world Sarah Jensen wanted to be was awake. She had grown accustomed to the sound of rain drumming on the tin roof but now a new sound disturbed her sleep and brought her unwillingly into the unwelcome present. The room was stiflingly hot. Evidently the power had gone out yet again and the fan was no longer moving the moist air.
Sarah wanted to pull the sheet over her head and return to sleep. She was determined to stay in this room and stay asleep until her grandmother was ready to admit defeat and take her home. Unfortunately, sleep was now impossible. The drooping mosquito net had plastered itself against her face and once she had swatted it away, she was wide awake and listening to a confusion of loud voices right outside her window.
She sat up, pulled back the curtain and looked out into the damp and dreary cement compound. She could see her grandfather, magnificent in a snowy white shirt and striped tie. His blue-black African face was shiny with sweat and distorted with fury but his eyes were invisible behind his sunglasses. Sunglasses! They hadn’t seen the sun in three days. Sarah’s grandmother was an equally arresting figure, standing ankle deep in mud, her pink skin glowing as she confronted the man she claimed as her husband. Her cloud of pale hair was curling itself into long white ringlets under the constant deluge of rain. Her tie-dyed skirt was spattered with mud and a once-white, fringed shawl was slung around her shoulders. She looked, Sarah thought, as she must have looked some sixty years before in the Summer of Love - just very much older, but, from what Sarah could tell, no wiser.
Sarah had no interest in the ongoing argument between her grandparents. The legality of their hasty traditional marriage and equally hasty separation, sixty years previously, hardly mattered now. There had been a baby, Sarah’s mother, and now there was Sarah. What did it matter how it came about? Sarah was here now. She had met her grandfather. Now she wanted to go back to America. She wanted to go home and this was not home.
Sarah looked past her grandparents and focused on a large African woman wrapped in brightly colored cloth who was, once again, beating on the crippled kid. That’s what Sarah called the boy in her own mind. The crippled kid, was not a politically correct description, but it was Sarah’s mind and she felt she had the right to fill it with whatever thoughts she wanted to think.
The kid was hopping on one foot because the fat woman had already kicked away his pathetic homemade crutch and he was screaming in outrage. The woman was trying to tie something around his neck but he kept grabbing it from her and throwing into the mud from which she would retrieve it with more shouting or cursing, and try again.
The boy’s eyes were wide with terror. He was just a little kid, maybe eleven or twelve years old, and the woman was big and very strong. Well, Sarah knew something about being little and overlooked and she felt for the poor kid. On impulse, she marched out of the room, barefooted it across the compound and with one well-placed shove, pushed the fat woman into the mud. The woman landed on her large backside with a satisfyingly loud squelch.
Silence fell. All eyes turned to look at Sarah.
“I’m going back to bed,” she said to her grandmother.
Her grandmother gave her an irritated glance “What’s your problem, Swot?”
“What’s my problem?” Sarah shouted. “Everything here is my problem, and my name isn’t Swot, it’s Sarah.”
“Well, I like to call you Swot,” her grandmother said stubbornly, “and I don’t see any problem here.”
Sarah reached out and grabbed the object that the fat woman was holding. It was a little leather bag on a string. “This is my first problem,” she said. She directed her anger at the fat woman. “The kid doesn’t want to wear it. He told you that last night and he’s telling you now. Just leave him alone.”
She could see that the fat woman was gathering her breath to express her outrage and out of the corner of her eye she could see her grandmother headed for her either to hug her or hit her - Sarah didn’t know which. That’s the way it was with Sarah’s grandmother, not that Sarah could ever call her grandmother, or gran, or anything warm and cuddly. She was allowed to call her Brenda, because, as Brenda had explained to Sarah as soon as Sarah was old enough to speak, Brenda was her given name.
Sarah was preparing to stand her ground against her grandmother and everyone else in the house, when the moment was interrupted by yet another loud noise. Someone was pounding urgently on the huge metal gates that enclosed Grandfather Herbert’s compound.
All eyes turned toward the gate as the guard opened the man-door and looked outside. When he pulled back the bolts and opened the gate, a man on a motorcycle roared into the compound. Dressed in blue jeans and a gray tee shirt spattered with mud and wearing an enormous crash helmet, he skidded to a halt so suddenly that he splashed mud on the tie of Herbert Kahwa, Sarah’s grandfather.
During her brief stay in Herbert’s compound, Sarah had gained the impression that her immaculately dressed grandfather was a man who was generally feared. She expected an angry reaction from him or his guards at this loss of dignity but he remained surprisingly silent and passive behind his dark glasses. Two of his henchmen stepped forward to grab the motorcycle but they were too late.
The rider dropped the motorcycle to the ground and tugged impatiently at his helmet. A shock of white hair appeared and then the deeply lined, face of a very old white man. He turned to face the shocked little tableau.
“They’ve killed the Peace Corps worker,” he shouted in a voice that was pure Virginia. “They dumped him on my front porch.”
“Another one of John Kennedy’s ideas gone bad,” Sarah’s grandmother remarked loudly. She approached the old man and looked him full in the face. There was what Sarah could only think of as a “pregnant” pause as the two old people looked at each other.
“Rory Marsden,” Brenda said.
“Songbird,” the white man replied in a tone of disbelief.
Songbird? In what lifetime, Sarah wondered, had Brenda been called Songbird?
“What did you do with my cows?” Grandmother Brenda Songbird asked.
“What cows?” the man asked.
“My bride price. The cows Herbert paid to marry me.”
“We ate them,” the man said impatiently. “What are you doing here?”
Brenda turned to Herbert. “He didn’t return them.” she said, “so we’re still married.”
Herbert flicked the mud off his tie before taking Brenda by the shoulders and lifting her out of the way. He stood face to face with the white man. “Tell me again,” he said in his deep rumbling African voice.
“It was years ago,” Rory, the white man said, “when you and Songbird were married. You paid three cows for her.”
“I don’t care about that,” Herbert rumbled.
“I do,” Brenda said. “It means I’m still your wife.”
Herbert ignored her and kept his attention on the white man. “Tell me about the Peace Corps worker”.
“Multiple stab wounds.” Rory’s voice was tight with anger. “Dumped on my porch. It looked like he’d been in a hell of a fight.” He hesitated and his voice softened. “He was just a kid, just a really nice kid. Why do they have to go so crazy when they come here?”
He splashed through the mud to the verandah where Sarah stood. “Welcome to Africa, kid,” he said, and then he sat down suddenly on the cement as though his legs had given way. For a moment his face drooped with exhaustion and then he seemed to gather a last vestige of energy and looked at Sarah with curiosity. “Who are you? Where did you come from?”
“She came with me,” Brenda said. “She’s my granddaughter and Herbert is her grandfather. She is also a genius.”
Sarah winced. Why did Brenda have to keep saying that?
“Genius?” Rory looked at Sarah. “Really?”
“So they say,” Sarah replied, “but I am also a person.” She glared at her grandmother. “I am not just defined by the fact that I am intelligent,” she said.
“No, of course not,” Brenda agreed, “but she did graduate from college last month, and she is only eighteen. She finished High School at fourteen.”
“So, she’s the daughter of ...” Rory queried.
“She’s the daughter of my daughter Monica, and Herbert is Monica’s father, so he is Sarah’s grandfather.”
“Family reunion?” Rory asked.
“Some reunion,” Sarah muttered.
She couldn’t think of anything else to say on the subject of her grandmother’s reunion with the African husband she had not seen in the past sixty years, so she turned her back on Rory Marsden and went back into her room, slamming the door behind her. She sat down on the bed and buried her head in her hands. So, she was a genius, so what? Life would have been so much easier if she had been born beautiful instead of smart. Unfortunately, the mirror didn’t lie. It had always confirmed Sarah’s own opinion of herself, horrible hair, mud-colored eyes, skinny legs. She was a loser in the complicated gene pool of her family.
Her reflections on her own lack of beauty were interrupted by someone knocking on her door. It was a very timid kind of knocking - nothing that could possibly emanate from Brenda who pounded loudly whenever she wanted Sarah to join in the ongoing family squabble. Sarah opened the door and admitted the crippled kid who hopped over to the bed and sat down. His earlier terror had passed, now he just looked incredibly sad.
“He was my friend,” he said, in careful, soft-spoken English.
Sarah dragged her mind away from the contemplation of her own shortcomings and gave some thought to the fact that Rory Marsden had come to report the violent death of a Peace Corps worker.
“Who was he?” she asked
“Zach,” the boy said. “He was really nice. He was not a fighter. He would never be in a fight. He’d come into the village every night and play football with the kids, and sometimes he’d just sit and talk with me. He was going to help me get my leg fixed. He said he knew a doctor.”
“Oh!” Sarah didn’t really know what else to say. Her high I.Q. and her rapid progress through high school and college had left her with no friends her own age and no experience at offering sympathy or putting herself in someone else’s shoes, but obviously something was required of her.
“I’m sorry,” she said. It was the best she could do.
The boy said nothing and continued to sit on her bed looking dejectedly down at his twisted leg.
The silence grew uncomfortably long. Sarah searched for something else to say and realized that she didn’t even know the boy’s name and so she asked him.
“I’m Matthew,” he told her. “I am in S1.”
Sarah had no idea what that meant or why that was significant, but she pressed on. “I’m Sarah.”
“Your grandmother calls you Swot,” Matthew said.
“It’s a nickname,” Sarah explained. “A swot is someone who studies hard but actually I don’t need to study.”
“Your grandmother says you’re a genius,” Matthew said. “I wish I was a genius.”
“No, you don’t. It’s highly overrated. I would give anything to be normal.”
“So would I,” Matthew whispered.
Nice going, Sarah said to herself. He can’t even walk properly and I’m complaining about the fact that I’m brilliantly clever and I don’t even have to work hard in school - very tactful.
She was grasping for something to say when the need to speak was cut off by a loud clanking sound outside. After an initial roar, the sound finally settled down to the steady purr of an engine.”
“The generator,” Matthew said. “Now your fan will work.”
It did. The blades started to move and the moist air began to circulate.
“Why have they turned it on now,” Sarah asked, “why not last night when it was so stinking hot?”
“They will be charging their phones so they can call Kampala,” Matthew replied, “to report the murder.”
So, Matthew was calling it murder. He was probably correct. Apparently, the Peace Corps worker had been stabbed like a pin cushion and his body has been dumped at someone’s door so, even if he had brought it on himself by getting into a fight, it was still technically murder.
“Who would want to kill him?” Sarah asked.
“I don’t know,” said Matthew. He paused and changed the subject. “Is your grandmother really the first wife of this house?”
“That’s what she says,” Sarah replied. “She says she married Herbert years ago when he was a student and they had a baby. That baby is my mother, and that makes Herbert my grandfather. It’s all a big fuss about nothing. I don’t think the marriage lasted more than about a week and then she returned to America and never spoke to him again - until now. She never divorced him so I suppose they’re still married.
“If she is the first wife,” Matthew explained, “then she will be senior wife and responsible for our discipline. Is she kind?”
“Kind?” Sarah repeated. “I don’t know. I’ve never thought about it. She’s not unkind. She’s just careless.”
“I think that would be better,” Matthew said as he hopped to the door.
Sarah followed him out and very nearly tripped over a bundle of extension cords draped across the verandah. She traced them back to an orange generator running noisily in the corner of the compound. Like a web of umbilical cords all of the wires sprouted phone chargers and phones with a person attached to each phone. The whole mess was supplying power to every one of Sarah’s grandfather’s male compatriots and they were all engaged in loud conversation, shouting above the noise of the generator.
Rory Marsden was shouting louder than anyone else in his Virginia English and Sarah gathered from his side of the conversation that he was talking to the US Embassy. The conversation was not going well.
“Zach”, he shouted. “That’s all I know. Don’t you have records? He’s one of yours.”
He paused, listening. “Nyalawa’” he shouted. “Rory Marsden, Nyalawa. Dammit man, you know where I am.... No, you can’t just leave him here. I know it’s tricky, but someone has to be told. The kid has parents. Just do your best but keep my name out of it... Who? ... I don’t know. You’re supposed to know these things. You’re supposed to tell me. I can’t do everything for you.”
He cupped a hand over his other ear and strained to hear what was being said by the embassy official. He shook his head and took the phone away from his ear. “Lost the damned signal,” he muttered.
Sarah looked around the compound, thinking what a strange conversation she had just heard, although, of course, she had only heard one side of it. Nonetheless something seemed a little off. She wondered if anyone else had noticed, but all the other people were staring at their phones and shaking their heads. One by one they crossed to the verandah and released their phones from their umbilical cords. Someone turned off the generator. All was silent except for the steady drip of water from the roof onto the muddy ground.