And Then Life Happens (10 page)

Suddenly, Miss Doyle, a British woman, stood up and came marching to the back.

“That's enough! I've had it up to here with you!” I realized with surprise that I alone was the target of her anger. “Who do you think you are?” she shouted at me. “I will not tolerate this behavior. Do you understand me?” Her face was completely red with rage.

“What did I do?” I asked in shock. I had been behaving no differently than all the other girls.

“You must think I'm stupid. But I'm not! I know for a fact that you started this noise.”

For a moment, I was speechless. Why me? Weren't all of us laughing?

“We—” Again I tried to defend myself.

“I don't want to hear another word from you!” she broke in. “You will be quiet immediately!”

It had gone dead silent on the bus. All the girls were staring at Miss Doyle. We had never seen a teacher so angry, and none of us comprehended what had made her so furious.

“But it wasn't me!”

“Don't say it wasn't you. I know it was you. You think you can do whatever you want. But not with me!”

She did not let up. I was the instigator, I should admit it and stop lying, she shouted.

Then something inside me suddenly cracked. Completely unexpectedly, I burst into tears. I doubled over. Like a limp rag doll, I sat there and wept uncontrollably. A floodgate had opened, and the flow of tears could simply no longer be stemmed. Everyone was shocked, especially Miss Doyle, who now tried every means to calm me down. But it was futile. However hard I tried, I could not stop crying.

And suddenly, to the utmost surprise of my schoolmates and the other teacher chaperone, Miss Doyle began to weep as well. No one knew what to do. In tears, the British woman said that she had always known that I hated her. That was why I was constantly making fun of her, just to provoke her. Sobbing, she apologized for her angry outburst and for not handling the situation differently.

I didn't understand what she was talking about. My crying fit shook me and would not stop. When she tried at one point to draw me consolingly toward her, I recoiled. Then she started weeping again. None of the stunned girls left the bus. There was a pervasive sense of helplessness. We had long since arrived at one of the boarding school houses. It would not be long before the lights went on inside and the sleepy faces of curious girls appeared at the windows.

Suddenly, one of the Blue Rags suggested fetching Peggy Flint, because it was known that I got along well with her. Shortly thereafter, my favorite teacher came on the bus. Thirty pairs of eyes watched her intently. When she saw me sitting in the back weeping, she immediately came over to me, bent down, and asked what was going on. I tried to answer, but instead of words there came only sobs and tears.

“You need something to calm you down,” Peggy Flint finally said, and asked the driver, who was still sitting patiently, though somewhat uncertainly, at the wheel, to drive us to the school sanatorium. The other girls reluctantly got off the bus, and I was brought to the sanatorium. There I was given a tranquilizer, and it was decided to keep me there overnight. Miss Flint stayed with me until I had fallen asleep.

*   *   *

I never found out what my favorite teacher told the school administration about my crying fit. In any case, I was kept in the sanatorium for five days. And I seemed to really need that time, for I still remember waking up completely exhausted that first morning and doing nothing but sleeping in the days that followed. I was told that my breakdown had been a delayed burnout reaction to the difficult situation at home. Miss Flint wanted to send for my father, but I was opposed to that because I shied away from speaking to him about my problems.

Miss Flint visited me every day. I found out that Mrs. Wanjohi, our headmistress, had reacted to the incident with shock and astonishment. No wonder, for she knew me only as a cheerful, lively, extroverted student, who shrank from nothing and was always in the thick of things. When I finally returned to classes, everyone helped me find my feet again. Only Miss Doyle avoided me as much as she could. I actually felt sorry for her. How could I explain to her that I had not cried so hard because of her, but because of everything that had happened in my life over the past several years? Among those things were my experiences at the home of my Uncle Odima, where I had had to seek shelter during one school break.

 

8.

R
ENEWED ACUTE FINANCIAL DIFFICULTIES
had forced my father to give up our rented house in Woodley, where we had lived for almost eight years. Now we had nowhere to stay and were dependent on relatives and friends to put us up. There was no space anywhere for our things. Many things got lost at that time: the classical music records my father loved so much, as well as books, paintings, clothing, and kitchenware. We children watched our home disintegrate—and could do nothing to stop it.

When the next break began, my father brought me directly from school to Ngara, the neighborhood where my Uncle Odima lived with his family. I was to spend the next several weeks with him.

Uncle Odima, whom I later called “Soda Uncle,” because he worked at a beverage company for years, had come to Nairobi as a teenager. At that time, my father had found a school for him and taken on the payment of his school fees. My father let him live with us until he had graduated from high school. Years later, my father and I now stood at his door. No sooner had we entered the house than I sensed that something was wrong. There was tension in the air. The atmosphere in the small living room was oppressive. Uncle Odima's wife, Catherine, whom I knew from previous years, did not smile when she—with obvious reluctance—gave me her hand. She was quite clearly not pleased about my presence. I felt like an intruder.

My aunt's behavior toward my father and me was unambiguous. Outwardly, my father didn't let it bother him, instead behaving as if he were at home. In retrospect, I assumed that he did that for me. He knew quite well that Catherine did not want us in her home. But he needed a safe place for me to stay.

Uncle Odima was not yet home when we arrived. As soon as he returned from work, all would be well, I thought. Surely he would set his wife straight and demand that she treat us, his closest relatives, with the necessary respect. After all, he had lived with us for years. He would remember that my father had paid all his expenses back then and gotten him his current job. Interestingly, my uncle had even adopted my father's name, because he knew that it would open doors for him. As Bonifus Odima Obama, he enjoyed all the advantages that were initially associated with the name Obama.

But when he returned home to Ngara that evening and stood in the doorway of his small living room, he seemed to have forgotten all that. At the sight of us, he acted just as irritated as his wife had. He didn't smile, greeted us only tersely, and disappeared into one of the rooms, from which he did not emerge until dinner was served. I was completely confused. Was this man really my favorite uncle, who had taken me on his best friend's motorcycle in Woodley and had so often brought us sweets? This man here was a stranger to me. I felt the sense of loneliness that had so often accompanied me since the breakup of our family well up in me again. Besides my father and my brother, this uncle was all that remained of our former family—indeed, of a whole era. He had lived with us; he had to understand what I was going through. But his behavior expressed in no uncertain terms that he wanted nothing to do with us, that we represented too heavy a financial burden for him.

Uncle Odima's apartment was very small; besides the living room, there were two small bedrooms and a tiny kitchen. One of the bedrooms was allotted to my father, while my uncle and his wife shared the other one with their two-year-old son, Daniel. And where was I supposed to sleep? I looked around in confusion. And where did the maid, who was rattling the dishes in the kitchen, spend the night?

Shortly after dinner, everyone went to bed. My father had gone out, which I didn't even hold against him. Because how was someone supposed to remain in an apartment with such an unwelcoming atmosphere? Our whole situation was probably even more oppressive for him than it was for me.

Catherine turned out the light in the kitchen and told me as she walked by that I could sleep on the floor in the living room with the maid. She did not show me where the bed linens were, however. So I asked the maid. She pointed to a thin, rolled-up mattress in a corner and a brown blanket. “You can share my things,” she offered. I thanked her and helped her move the furniture against the wall and unroll the mattress in the middle of the room. It was not the first time that I slept on the floor. That often occurred at my grandmother's in Alego. But there it was always an adventure to sleep with other children on a huge papyrus mat. Most of the time we were so tired from playing that we didn't even feel the hard floor and fell asleep immediately. That evening, however, in my former favorite uncle's apartment, I couldn't sleep. The floor was made of cement; I felt its hardness through the thin mattress whenever I moved. On top of that, it was cold with two people sharing the thin blanket. For a long time I lay awake and wondered desperately how I would get through the next four weeks in this house.

The next morning, I had to get up before sunrise with the maid. The living room had to be put back in order because my uncle and his wife ate breakfast there before work. My father, who had not come back until night, was still asleep. I was supposed to help prepare breakfast, which was completely fine with me, because I didn't know what to do with myself. Plus, I already sensed that my aunt would not approve of my sitting around doing nothing in the living room. But at least little Daniel was there. I was looking forward to his company, for it promised distraction. So I would attend to him. Unfortunately, it did not work out the way I'd imagined. With each passing day, my aunt treated me a little bit more like a second maid, and soon Daniel, too, began acting recalcitrant and fresh. Because I did not have to look after him, I ignored him as much as possible from then on.

*   *   *

In Ngara, I didn't know anyone, and the unfamiliar surroundings intimidated me. So I stayed in the house most of the time. Only now and then I was sent to the kiosk or a store. And when I simply couldn't stand it anymore in the cramped apartment, I would visit Aunty Jane in the nearby Kariokor neighborhood. I would stay there until the approaching darkness forced me to return to Ngara. Jane, my mother's younger sister, was always happy to see me and had a smile to spare for me. But apart from the few visits with my father—he had moved into a cheap hotel after he brought me to my uncle—or Aunty Jane, I stayed in the ground-floor apartment, which was dark and cold. It had a tiny balcony, which was in the back, for the building was on a hillside. For hours I would sit there and gaze at the Nairobi River, a brownish polluted sludge that flowed along sluggishly. On our side, the bank consisted mainly of rampant reeds and garbage. On the opposite bank grew corn and
sukuma wiki,
a type of collard greens common in Kenya. But there was filth everywhere there, too. The collard greens were grown by people who resided on the bank in wretched huts made of corrugated cardboard and plastic.

The bleak landscape before my eyes matched my inner landscape only too well. In both, things looked gray and hopeless. Nonetheless, I envied the poor people on the other side of the river their home. I imagined that, despite everything, in the midst of their poverty they had intact families. But at the same time I was aware of what misery that destitution must have involved. I thought of my father, who, although he didn't live in one of those cardboard huts, was now poor. And I sensed that the despair that arose from poverty was not to be underestimated. For that reason, I was anxious, but also sad: Those people were much worse off than I was.

One day, when I was again on the small balcony looking across the river, I was overcome by the horrible feeling that things would never look up again. I could not imagine how my father would ever manage to find a way out of our plight. However hard he tried, he simply could not get a job. (At the time, I had no idea how closely linked this struggle for survival was with political power struggles.) For me, the school exams were approaching, and here with my uncle, in this oppressive apartment, I was incapable of studying. I was constantly freezing—in August it was quite cold in Nairobi without heating, with temperatures around 50 degrees at times—was always hungry, and felt isolated and abandoned. I looked down at the river. The balcony hung over the ground due to the hillside. As I gazed into the depth, I was suddenly seized by the desire to jump, wondering what would happen. Perhaps I would meet my end, I thought naïvely, and then all the suffering would be over. The balcony was probably too close to the ground for the fall to be deadly. But at that moment, I only wanted all the pain to cease.

Just as quickly as the desperate vision had appeared, I recoiled from it. I rushed back into the dark living room, fleeing my own thoughts, and set to work helping the maid prepare dinner.

*   *   *

Despite all my family problems, I passed the final exam and was accepted into Kenyatta University, where I studied fine art and education. (In those days, you could not study German at the university.) I actually didn't want to study in Kenya at all, for I had begun in high school to apply for an international scholarship. And because only four students in our graduation year took German, I was confident about finding financial support. As high school students, we were often invited to German-Kenyan events and cocktail parties. There, I spoke to many people about my desire to study in a German-speaking country in order to improve my knowledge of the language.

At one of these parties, we German students met Munyua Waiyaki, the Minister for Foreign Affairs. He was impressed that we had such concrete plans for the future and promised us to keep an eye out for funding opportunities.