A Girl From Zanzibar Read online

  PRAISE FOR A GIRL FROM ZANZIBAR:

  Marcella D’Souza is a wonderful invention, a latter-day Candide, an East African on a picaresque voyage of discovery…There is no safe haven, this brilliantly prescientnovel suggests, and nothing to hold onto. For better or worse, we are all migrants now.”—SUZANNE RUTA in THE NEW YORK TIMES

  “Roger King’s excellent novel, “A Girl From Zanzibar”…is a delight.”—THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

  “A humane thriller subtle enough to avoid all sentimentality, while resting on a core of conscience.”—POLLY SHULMAN in NEWSDAY

  An engaging and subtle tale that unites far-flung worlds in the person of a complex, intriguing heroine.” —KIRKUS REVIEWS (STARRED)

  “An explosion of a novel, a fictional tornado whirling through the contemporary chaos. This book has more lives than a cat—all of them electrifying, and none of them exemplary.” —SHIRLEY HAZZARD, author of THE GREAT FIRE

  Winner of the BABRA Award for the best novel of 2002

  A GIRL

  FROM

  ZANZIBAR

  ROGER KING

  © 2002 by Roger King

  Design and composition by Melissa Ehn at Wilsted & Taylor Publishing Services

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  To my sister Gillian,

  and her sons, David, Michael and Peter.

  ZANZIBAR

  . . .a cesspool of wickedness, Oriental in its appearance, Mohammedan in its religion, Arabian in its morals. . . a fit capitalfor the Dark Continent.

  HENRY DRUMMOND IN TROPICAL AFRICA 1888, CITED IN THE 11TH EDITION OF THE ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA, 1910-1911

  ♦

  LIFE

  BEFORE

  I UNDERSTAND NOW WHY MOORE COLLEGE WANTEDme. I satisfied all their quotas: woman, Asian, African, Arab, European, black, brown, person of colour. I am the perfect package only because I am not like them. On the forms they sent off to government a place was, after all, waiting for me. Was there a box for ex-convicts that they might also have checked? If I tried to explain my innocence, I fear my colleagues would smile irritatingly and tell me that I need not, that guilt was fine with them.

  It’s so cold here the snow squeaks, like walking on mice. This morning I put on the black Harrods coat that has survived from London, my bright new Timberland boots, a cheerful red beret, a soft wool scarf—which they call a muffler here—and gloves, and walked up into the field behind the house just to hear the sound of it. Then I turned and stopped, marvelling at the quiet. I was far away, alone and safe. I breathed deeply and felt my nostrils ice closed, then unpeel.

  When I finally let my attention go from my nose to my eyes, I found they were fixed on the little wood house the college has given me. I took in the pretty glitter of the icicles hanging from its eaves and noticed that the fascination had not ended but was focused now on the chimney with its twist of smoke. Then I remembered — with a shock that something so old and small could be remembered —

  that when I was a new schoolgirl in Zanzibar, a European nun had made us draw houses like this, small square ones with mysterious tails. We obeyed her, but the oddness must have left its impression: the houses we knew in Zanzibar were tall, jammed together, and built of massive stone. Zanzibar can still catch me. Sometimes it arches over to Vermont as if the puzzle of London had never come between.

  I have been here long enough to become vulnerable to memory. Three months of Vermont quiet, and now the soft weight of snow, have muffled the world and enclosed me with my thoughts. The president of Moore College thinks he is kind to give me time to settle before I must teach, but I am ready for distraction.

  When I left Zanzibar for England at twenty-five, I hoped for no memories, not knowing that I might later need them for sense. I wanted to draw a line above the past and say, my life starts here, brightness above the line, darkness below. I dreamed of a young woman—myself —standing in the window of a well-lit upstairs room of a fashionable London house. There was a party. I held a drink. My dress displayed my shoulders and was expensive. I was smiling, chatting. Possibly I was the hostess. It was a picture that could only have come from films or magazines. Oddly, in this imagining, I was also the pensive, shadowy girl standing in the street below, looking up at the woman in the window. This was all I had for Europe, a luminous promise of vague happinesses and unknown possibility, to set against the ghosts of Zanzibar.

  It was nineteen eighty-three when I left and all that moved in Zanzibar then were its ghosts. The government was broke and hopeless. The east European communist advisors had abandoned the island and nothing had come to take their place. There were no telephones in the telephone boxes they had built, no water in their taps. The People’s Funfair was locked up and our only modern hotel, the Bwawani, was closed. No tourists came to coo at our palm trees and tropical beaches and tell us we were paradise on earth. We had no food for them, nowhere for them to stay. What we had were skeletons left over from the slave trade, living memories of a murderous revolution, a sharp terror of witchcraft, and all the gossip that the sects and subsets of Africans, Asians and Arabs could muster. I was twenty-five and did not want to be there.

  I had already made one escape and was back against my will. As soon as I was able, four years earlier, I had left the island and my family for the mainland and the Tanzanian capital. In Dar-es-Salaam, I had done well enough. I was a taxi owner. I had a French boyfriend. Now I wanted a passport so I could go further, but the government had insisted that I must return to Zanzibar to submit my application. As the little plane landed I imagined myself a long-legged flamingo, just lightly touching base before soaring off again on a much longer migration. I quickly dropped off presents for my mother—things she could not obtain on the island: scented soap, toothpaste, a brassiere, tins of corned beef—and hurried to the office of Omar Khatib, Assistant Passport Officer for Zanzibar. And so rushed headlong into one of those exquisite moments when the natural course of a human life collides with the unnatural barriers of government to produce a perfect immobility.

  He was a dark-skinned African, shorter than my five- foot-two, with a foolish little belly pressing out against his loose shirt. His face was dotted with a thousand pockmarks, as if his mother had taken one look at her baby and battered him with a hairbrush. In fairness, his smile was rather sweet. A good Moslem, I’d say, a family man, a small man in a small job. Not a bad man.

  Perhaps I was a little arrogant, but the morbid stillness frightened me, who wanted movement, and my confidence was new and thin. I was still impressed with myself for having made a life in Dar, with money to spend and European friends. Now that I was back home I hugged this slight cosmopolitan identity to myself. For my first visit to the passport office I wore blue Levis, a pale silk blouse, earrings, a coral clip in my hair and the headphones of a Sony Walkman around my neck. I think I owned the only Walkman on the island.

  I handed over my identity papers and filled in the forms, finding a space for myself on Mr Khatib’s desk between the high columns of decaying manila files. He watched from the other side, protected in his fort. I was speedy, brisk and European; he folded his hands over his stomach and maintained a Moslem calm.

  “So, Marcella,”—he looked at the form—“you want to leave us? Not for too long, I hope.”

  “Just a holiday.” I wanted to be lying.

  “Good. We’d miss you, one of Zanzibar’s flowers. You know about the currency restrictions, of course.”

  “The government won’t let me have my money, Yes. How long will it take to get my pas
sport? I need to travel soon.”

  “It depends. It has to go through Dar-es-Salaam.”

  “But in Dar they told me I had to come here! I live in Dar-es-Salaam. They said that since I was born in Zanzibar, I had to apply here. That Zanzibar was separate from the

  mainland in passport offices.”

  “They were correct. Everything they told you was quite accurate. We are separate in passport offices, but not separate in issuing passports. It’s all Tanzania. That is the nature of the Tanzanian Union. Our papers must go to the mainland.”

  “Will it be more than a week? I need to look after my business in Dar.”

  “It might be more.”

  “Then I should go back until it’s ready.”

  “Unfortunately, that would be a problem. I have to send your papers to the mainland, so you will be unable to travel out of Zanzibar. But we are happy to have you back, I am sure your family must be happy too. Your mother is alone these days, I think.”

  I checked myself and looked at him. Did I know him? Zanzibar was small. I asked, “Could it be much longer than a week? A month?”

  Omar Khatib gave his sweet smile and indicated with his hands that it was for someone higher, maybe his boss or Allah, to dispose. “Shall I send in your application?” He offered it back to me.

  “Is there another way?”

  “I fear not. No other way.”

  The weeks dragged by, sloughing away my thin-skinned confidence with them. After my first meeting with Omar, I visited him every Thursday morning. He insisted that I call him Omar. While all over east Africa the Asians were being vilified, hounded and even deported as economic parasites, he took a careful pleasure in paying me compliments and celebrating my continued presence. “There’s a silver lining, Marcella,” he told me, after the customary tea and contrition. “The world’s loss is my gain.”

  The rest of my time I spent in my childhood bedroom, hiding from busybody eyes, playing disco and staring at the wall of once-precious magazine pictures of film stars, that were now faded to pinks and pale blues. My older sister, Maria, had gone to the mainland after very properly marrying a very boring Goan accountant. The schoolmates with any spirit had all left and the ones remaining were complacent wives. My Arab boyfriend from schooldays, Ali, my first lover, had gone to be a businessman in Oman and now existed only as the occasional clumsy note, which he always signed, Your fiance, Ali. A joke, I assumed. I lay sweating high up in my fourth floor bedroom, headphones on, hoping that something would move, even if it was just a breeze to molest the curtains that kept out the sun. Maybe Ali was serious. So far I’d only claimed him as a fiance when I needed to put off unattractive men. Now I daydreamed that I might marry him next time he returned, then escape to Oman. While I dreamed and brooded, Mummy was often somewhere in the house, a pretty woman no longer noticed by men to be pretty. We met only for meals and then we hardly talked. She lived in a happy, dotty world of her own, where everything was decided by my father’s sister, Auntie Stella, alias Mrs Fernandez, known to everyone—including me —as Mrs F.

  I tried to blame my French boyfriend, Didier, for my predicament, but could not quite make anger work. Though the passport was supposed to be for joining him in France, I could not entirely keep from myself the idea that Didier was just an excuse. When we met he was employed by Peugeot in Dar, and I had just bought two battered Peugeot 304 taxis. We fell into bed and at the time I was happy for the change. My previous boyfriend had been Arab, as were all of my previous boyfriends. Arabs had a thing for me, and I preferred them to Goans, who presented the danger of being stuck at home in a marriage. But a European promised an even greater separation, so I was receptive when Didier explained to me that everything French was better than everything else and then introduced me to oral sex. My previous boyfriend’s preference had been to come in my armpit, which I thought was normal until Didier told me it was not.

  Through the parties Didier took me to, and the discos at the Kilimanjaro Hotel in Dar, I met young European aid volunteers and had the odd experience of being treated as if I too was a young visitor to Africa. I dressed the same way as they did, failed to practice the same religion, enjoyed the same food and drink. My English was usually better than theirs and their Swahili often better than mine. I was shy at first, watching carefully and wondering if there might be something, after all, to the puzzling assertion of Mrs F that we Goans were really Europeans in disguise. I saw that these young people ordered themselves in ways that were unfamiliar to me, according to the usefulness of their work and their education. Though Didier had more money than the others, he was not the most respected. There was something back in Europe that held more meaning, and the volunteers expected to be something better there than employees of a car manufacturer. They were only dipping into Africa, these Europeans, and their real lives were elsewhere. I came to want a real life too. If I could have thought clearly lying in my sweaty Zanzibar bed, I would have recognised that this was to blame for my predicament, not Didier.

  Every now and then a new, dear friend would leave for good, to resume his or her life in Denmark, Germany or Holland. I went to the airport for the hugs, kisses and tears, and it was always, “Marcella, when you come to Europe, you must visit me.” I smiled my big, silly smile and was too ashamed to tell them that I did not even have a passport.

  When Didier was recalled by Peugeot at short notice, it was tears again—mine this time, though I was far from being in love. I feared I was losing the world. “When I’m settled,” said Didier, “I’ll send you an air ticket.” Then he added, “Why not?” a mysterious question that I took to be a Frenchman’s version of “No problem.” The next day I went to apply for a passport and found that, like Joseph and Mary, I had to go back to the place of my birth for the paperwork. And instead of finding a new world, I found myself returned to the one I’d set myself to leave.

  I SLEEP WELL HERE. THE WOODEN HOUSE THE COLLEGE has given me turns out to be so old that they do not know its age, at least a hundred years, perhaps two hundred, far older than my Victorian flat in Bayswater that I once loved so much, and where I loved Benji so much, the only home I’ve ever owned. When I first caught sight of the house and took in its wooden walls, I thought it was a summer cottage, something temporary and seasonal, not serious. I am not used to wood houses. In London everything was brick; wood was for garden sheds. And in Zanzibar City there was the stone, so impressive that the jealous British called the city Stone Town, just to steal away its grandeur. That I have a wood fire in my wood house seems wonderfully perverse. I am taking pleasure in accommodating myself to a home made pleasant by the use of others, putting wilfulness aside, domesticating it like a cat.

  In the months since I arrived, straight from the airport, to become Marcella D’Souza, Assistant Professor of Multi-cultural Studies—such a joke—at Moore College, I have neither added to nor subtracted from the furnishings. The furniture is solid, wooden and worn, but it was made well and everything works perfectly. The drawers draw, the heavy doors close with neat clicks, the plentiful lamps all light. When I cook I find all the pots and pans I need, which aren’t that many. This is unexpected, that America could turn out to be quiet, old and made to last.

  They are awfully discreet, my colleagues. There are only twenty-five of them and the village we live in is hardly more than the buildings of Moore College, the homes of the professors, a white wooden church with a little white spire, and a white village meeting house. One shop. Amongst all this quiet and whiteness, I am the only foreigner and the only one, apart from four or five students, with a brown skin. If this excites their interest they are careful not to show it.

  I have not encouraged them. Only twice have I accepted invitations to dinner parties and the most curiosity I have encountered was from my neighbour at one of these. A bearded colleague from the English Department asked, in a voice that included the whole table, “Marcella, your name, D’Souza, would that be Spanish?”

  “Portuguese.” A
nd I gave him my famous smile but no elaboration, so that he nodded and hesitated before daring to venture further, wondering perhaps if the Portuguese were generally as dark.

  “And ... you lived in Portugal?”

  He wanted more, this man. There was a glint of interest behind the spectacles, a shard of manliness. I gave him a closer look: maybe late thirties like me, a bit heavy, a bit ugly with the small nose, big glasses and beard, unironed clothes like all the other men. I only liked that his expression was intent and that he had the cheek to press me—even as I weighed up ways to evade his curiosity.

  Before I could properly organise my words, Professor Chen, who was skinny and blonde and had the louder voice, broke in. “Ron, don’t be so nosy. I’ve got a Chinese name and I’ve never lived in China.” To me, she explained, “Something my ex-husband left me with.”

  “Husbands can do that,” I agreed, though I’ve never had one.

  In any case, this agreeableness on my part seems to have settled my generally discreet colleagues on the idea that I am the divorced wife of a Portuguese man whom I have left behind somewhere, probably England, and about whom I prefer not to talk. There’s a residual caution left in me that insists there is advantage in others not knowing too much truth. It was prudent in scheming Zanzibar, was coaxed into an art form in London under Benji’s influence, and turned out to be a useful survival skill during my tenure at Cookham College, also known as Cookham Wood, Her Majesty’s Prison for Women. Yet I would love to be open and free, able to know the truth and tell it.

  Ron insisted I needed a ride back to my house, which sits at the end of its own unpaved road half a mile from the village. I would have been happy to walk. The roads were white with a new snowfall and the brightness of a snowy landscape at night is still amazing to me. It’s so safe here that even the darkness seems friendly. I said I’d enjoy thinking while I walked home, but he insisted that I did not yet appreciate the deadliness of Vermont’s cold.