Uhuru Street (17 page)

There was a sombreness in the compartment in spite of its brightness, a grim quietude. When he heard a voice it seemed as if
it echoed from a distance. It felt eerie because he realised that the train did not move silently but with a steady rumble, which he had to strain to hear through the loud silence. Around him, everyone else sat composed into this stillness, belonging to it, until their stop came and they got up and left.

A conductor came by and clicked his ticket. ‘Bayreuth,’ he said, pointing at the ticket in his hand.

‘Yes. Change at Pegnitz?’ Karim asked.

The conductor gave him his ticket, saying a lot of words including ‘Bayreuth’, and walked away.

Karim looked helplessly around him at the several people who had looked up, then went back to staring out of the window.

He felt strange, preoccupied by an anxiety that allowed no other thoughts, even of home. His one objective was to get himself and his two bags to Bayreuth. There, a phone call or a taxi.

A station came with a name in large letters and ‘Bayreuth’ in smaller. Obviously this was not Bayreuth. Why put two names to confuse foreigners like him?

Finally
PEGNITZ
in large letters and some people got up. But he had to be sure. He looked at his neighbour.

‘Excuse me, sir. Is this Pegnitz?’

He had to clear his throat and repeat.

The man leaned towards the window and gave a quick look outside. ‘Ja. Pegnitz.’

The boy hurried out, pulling his suitcase, the hold-all over his shoulder.

The train disappeared and the station cleared of everyone except him, of all sound except his shuffling. It was overwhelmingly dark. Not a soul, he thought, isn’t anyone else going to Bayreuth? … With a sinking feeling he realised that the train which had just pulled out was on its way to Bayreuth. That’s what the conductor must have said.

Wearily he put his suitcase down against a wall and sat on it. The night was thick with mist. Overhead a sharp silvery half moon sliced through scattered clouds. In the distance, the lights of a town – life somewhere far away – and cars. But not a sound. If something happened to him, if his throat were slit in this godforsaken place, if he met a ghost or a vampire, no one would know. How stupid, he thought, to venture out like this into the unknown. But he had been pushed out, ever so gently. From a sitting-room full of family in Dar into this utter, utter loneliness under an alien sky.

There was a time, not many years ago, when a bread cart would go creaking down Uhuru Street, pulled by one man in front, pushed by another at the back. It would stop at the street corners and boys or servants would run up and buy bread for the evening or the following morning. Hot steaming loaves huddled in the cart under a green tarpaulin cover. Often at his home they had bread and butter for supper, with sweet creamy tea.

Now there were daily queues for bread and sugar; milk came in packets from the new factory, diluted, sometimes sour. There were rumours that boys would be recruited to fight Idi Amin, the tyrant to the north. And others that Amin would send planes to bomb Dar.

The body of an Asian woman had been found on a beach, mutilated, hanging from a tree. Another, an elderly widow, had been hacked to death by robbers in her flat.

Three times his family’s application for immigration to Canada had been rejected. For all three failures his mother and two sisters blamed their father. They were right, his father simply didn’t have the heart to pack up his life and move to a cold climate. At each interview he blurted out something that was obviously inappropriate, that raised the interviewer’s eyebrows and made the rest of them squirm. Each time though, he had a plausible explanation.
After the last interview, when they returned home once more without ‘medicals’, there had been the biggest row. As usual they were in his parents’ bedroom that was also the sitting room. His mother was sitting on the bed, braced for the quarrel, his father – resigned to it – was fiddling with the telephone as if unsure whether to make a call or not.

‘You didn’t have to tell the man that you keep money ready for the robbers – that you joke with them: “Business is bad, next time there will be more” …’

‘I thought he would like it – think I’m good natured or something.’

‘
Good natured.
A fool more likely. You could see the expression on the man’s face.’

‘The young punk. Come to sit in judgement on us. You know why there is no bread? The Canadians brought a new machine for baking bread at the state bakery. Throw away the old ones they said. Automatic! Well, the machine’s broken and there are no parts. Meanwhile someone in Canada’s made a bundle. Canadian aid!’

‘You’ve been listening to that socialist again!’ His mother practically screamed.

‘Shiraz’s a clever chap.’

Once more Shiraz Uncle’s name entered the home like an evil spell bringing disruption. His father seemed to sense this as soon as he had uttered the name. Shiraz Uncle was his father’s educated sister’s even more educated husband, and reputedly a supporter of government policies. At the mere mention of his name, Karim’s mother’s face would contort with rage. Already she was getting flushed and breathless, bosom heaving, searching for words. Sometimes in such a state she got up and went to the kitchen where Karim’s two sisters would join her. This time she exploded, pounding her chest twice, saying ‘I die! I die!’ and weeping forcefully, at which point both his sisters started wailing. His
father, who thought he had successfully waylaid his wife’s querulousness with good humour and a change of subject, was caught off balance.

‘What, now?’ he began in embarrassment, and looked towards his son to see if even he had resorted to tears.

It was then that the telephone rang, shrilly cutting into the scene, startling most of all his father who was standing next to it.

An operator at the phone exchange had been bribed so his mother could talk long-distance with her family. This was after she kept on complaining about how difficult it was for them to make long-distance calls and how easy for those in Canada. They had a television now, although there was no local TV station and they had to make do with poor reception from Zanzibar. His father even got hold of smuggled foreign goods like cellophane wrapping and soft ‘squeezable’ toilet tissue and Kleenex. And Avon beauty products for his mother and sisters who in mosque came to be called the Avon ladies.

‘Oh the hell we live in!’ sobbed his mother over the phone. Her face was wet with the copious tears dripping off her chubby cheeks. At the other end of the line a hushing, comforting voice was just audible. It was usually her brother who called, to whom she was close. After a while his father spoke on the phone, receiving a good ticking off, finally getting furious: ‘Call her back if you want to!’

Then surprisingly, like the end of a storm, calmness returned as if nothing had happened and that night they could hear their mother and father talking in barely controlled husky tones in the other room.

His sisters had studied shorthand, typing, bookkeeping and anything else available and were now simply idling, reading Mills & Boon love stories or helping around while waiting to be taken to Canada.

The happiest times in Karim’s life had been when one of his
other uncles, his father’s brother, had returned with his family from Pakistan after a miserable time there. There had followed happy years, with two families, seven children, living together in adjacent flats. Then his uncle’s eldest son who was in Canada sponsored his family; it was only a year since they had left.

His intellectual uncle, Shiraz, had no intention of going to live anywhere else. In fact the government itself sent him abroad several times and Shiraz Uncle always returned, happy to be back, for which many regarded him a socialist fool. But it was Shiraz Uncle who, on returning from Germany recently, told his father of a way to send his son abroad.

‘If you want to send him, this is one way, but I don’t see why you want to or what’s the hurry.’

‘I don’t think I’ll do it,’ said his father. ‘Karim’s never been away. I don’t think he’ll want to go in that manner. What do you think, Karim?’

Karim was the only other person in the shop, and he said, ‘No, I don’t want to go like that.’ His father was right. He couldn’t bear the thought of separation. And his uncle spoke of an indirect route through Germany, where he didn’t know a soul

But that evening Karim mentioned the possibility briefly to his mother and sisters, as a novelty, an idea typical of his crazy uncle. But they jumped on it, never letting go for an instant, and he was overwhelmed.

‘Your father’s no good, you be the man now. God will preserve you. Think of your sisters. Do it for them.’

He had no choice. His silence – brought on by his mother’s tender words of solicitation, her trust, her hand on his brow, her quivering lips, her sweet Avon smell – was taken for assent, and they were joyfully discussing the details of his trip when his father entered the room. His mother looked up at her husband in triumph, his sister Yasmin said joyfully, ‘Karim says he’ll go to Germany.’

Karim looked at him, expressionless. For the first time his father looked beaten.

A warm bright light was shining on his face, making him aware of his unwashed face, sticky neck. ‘Polizei’ was a German word he understood and the light moved up to a spot above him as a kindness. After some moments he could see the two policemen who were looking at him, telling things to him and to each other. They were quite young and he thought one was perhaps even younger than him.

‘Bayreuth,’ he said and it seemed that they were walking away, leaving him alone, but they turned and spoke and the younger one came up to him and gestured for him to pick up his bags.

‘We go. Police station.’

His heart sank. So be it then. He had been so dispirited, and now, woken up from a dream about home into this bleak deserted train station, he felt terribly depressed. And a trace relieved even at the thought that he would be sent back home.

They drove him to a square brick building which was the police station, walked him to a room at the back that had a table in the middle and some chairs. The door clicked shut behind him and he realised that it was probably unlocked. He sat down on a chair, lay his head sideways on the table between his arms and slept as he had often done out of exhaustion in school.

He was woken up by the sound of a chair scraping the floor. A middle-aged plump woman was wiping the floor with a mop. He watched for a while in amazement. From time to time she glanced at him. After that chore, she began wiping the window panes meticulously. He thought he had never seen anyone wiping window panes before. The room was chilly, the woman was wearing a sweater. The sun was shining brilliantly outside, somewhere, but not entering the room.

When he stood up, uncertainly, the woman left the room in a
hurry, closing the door behind her. A policeman walked in; not one of the two who had picked him up last night: this one was older and plumper, balding. The policeman accompanied him to the washroom. Karim did nothing but stare at himself for a while in the mirror: he felt dull, out of touch with the face looking at him. Not the face he woke up with each morning, excited about the day, taking his time shaving and bathing despite his sisters’ pleas to vacate the bathroom, singing joyously … If the policeman standing at the door had told him that it was not his face but that of someone else behind him, he would have believed it. Wearily he went back to the room. Two men in civilian clothes were waiting for him. They gave him coffee, examined his passport, began questioning.