The Book of Secrets (11 page)

West of Kikono, beyond the bushes that formed a natural boundary of the town, was a small wood, which he had observed from the hilltop Mission, a dark green stretch running northwards, following a seasonal stream. There were native villages there, in the oasis, but he had never visited them — the villagers came regularly to town, for celebrations and to buy provisions, and brought their hut taxes with them. On more than one occasion he had been tempted to change direction and go towards that silent green presence, so distinctive in this landscape of red dust and thorny scrub. But each time something else, farther, had tempted him away. This day, though, he gave in to his instincts and found himself walking towards the wood. The mysterious drums in the night had beckoned from there, had finally proved irresistible.

He crossed the thorny scrub behind the line of buildings that
included the Swahili mosque, and a little later realized that he was walking along a footpath. The grass was taller and greener, the ground was soft and falling gradually, but overhead the sun was merciless on one so foolhardy as to forsake shade at midday. Suddenly the path stopped, and a few yards farther he was inside the forest. He was struck by several sensations at once. The cool shade, the tall, still tree trunks around him, interminable ranks of them stretching in front of him, the silence so deep he could hear his heart beat, his breath draw. Only when he looked directly above him did this darkness seem to have any limit — birds flying, leaves fluttering, sunlight trickling in, filtered by the foliage.

He walked a few steps, leaves and twigs crackling beneath his feet — wondering if he should turn back, sighting a chameleon, wondering further if he should have brought along a rifle or companions at least — and then he stopped, pricking up his ears to the sound of running water. He walked towards the gurgling, now more distinct and reassuring, almost animate, and arrived at a swift stream, brown water rushing between steep banks. At this juncture, where the trees held back to let the stream through, the sunlight fell vertically and broke into shimmering fragments upon the water surface. There were several ways of crossing. Stones had been placed at shallow points, but to reach these he would have to climb down the bank. A little farther upstream the banks rose and came close together. Here a log had been thrown across, which he covered in three steps. He walked some more through the forest until he came to a clearing where stood a village. It was from here, he guessed, that the drumbeats of a few weeks ago had come down to oppress him.

He was welcomed with shouts of “Jambo!” and “Shikamoo!” and given a stool to sit on and milk to drink. In the common area some women in khanga cloth were at work; two toddlers played on the ground. A herd of goats passed in front of him, in the charge of two almost naked boys with spears and shields. He was
brought mangoes and bananas to eat, but declined. He was seated in shade, where a host of mosquitoes descended upon him, so he moved his stool out in the sun. An older man arrived and bowed to him, then sat on the ground close to his feet, asking if he had a cigarette. Some young men arrived, with friendly smiles, and asked what he had come for. Just to see how they were, Corbin replied. He talked with the men in Swahili and was told that there was fever in the village. He asked if there was a mganga, a healer, there who cured sickness. They smiled. He said they should come to his office for medicine. He told himself he should talk to the Mission ladies about quinine and write to Mombasa about supplies. He did not know what he had expected to find here; it seemed so ordinary, like dozens of villages he had seen. And yet the drumbeat in the night.… There were layers of life here clearly inaccessible to him, deliberately hidden from him. Finally he got up to go, realizing he had been away too long. As he turned he saw two of his askaris come to meet him. He was a little annoyed, and not a little relieved.

As they emerged from the bushes and reached the edge of the town, in some haste now, a figure appeared from behind the line of houses there and stood near the mosque. It was Mariamu. He had not seen her since her release from the Mission. As he passed she did not look at him, but turned her covered head away as modesty and custom demanded.

He was now walking parallel to the row of houses. She was behind him. In a sudden mischievous move, he turned, catching her unawares, and met her eyes. She stood tall, her red pachedi having fallen on her shoulders, revealing her long thick black hair, her eyes dark and deep — a vagrant with the bearing of a queen, as she refused to turn away a second time.

Who should be waiting for him when he got back but the indefatigable mukhi, with a suggestion.

“Two birds with one stone, bwana, as the proverb goes.” Jamali nodded his head in affirmation of his brilliant idea. “Mariamu will be your housekeeper and cook for you — better even than your Thomas. She has training — both in Swahili and Indian … Punjabi, Gujarati. She will sleep in the kitchen outside. Until the young man Pipa comes and takes her away. God willing.”

Corbin couldn’t have agreed more. The girl was now his responsibility too. As Jamali put it, what better arrangement than that the girl be housekeeper to Bwana Corbin, who could keep an eye on her? The girl’s wedding had been postponed too long, said the mukhi, due to her problems with the spirit. It would now take place in five weeks, during which time it was better if she lived where she was not reminded of her unhappy experiences. Corbin was pleased at this outcome, this show of the towns-people’s renewed trust in him. And Jamali went away happy, rubbing his hands, very much the successful troubleshooter. “Perhaps you’ll invite us to dine next,” he grinned from the doorway, pointing to an oversight that brought red to the Englishman’s cheeks.

The mukhi was right about Mariamu’s cooking, though the
ADC
’s one-person residence made little demand of her gifts. And she slept not in the kitchen but in the spare room.

7 June, 1914

2 cushions. 6 tins cake (raisin). 4 oxtongues.

Oatmeal biscuits. ½ doz. whisky. Tins of marmalade and jam.

— disabuse Mariamu — extent of
ADC
’s resources and kitchen.

— Sunday breakfast for the local bigwigs — maandazi and baazi, which the coast is so famous for. Fish. Fruit.

11 June

Poor wretch, she has a temporary home now before that brute of hers comes to take her away.… I do not know what to make of her — the impetuous girl who walked in past my askari and
spoke directly to me, then the silent girl who left chapattis for me on Thursdays, the girl humiliated by the maalim’s switch, the proud girl holding her uncovered head high and staring directly at me, and now the quiet and shy housekeeper. Which is the real one?

There was a rustle of clothing, and he looked up from his diary, giving a start at the sight of her sitting on the floor in the doorway that led to the back. She was staring intently at him, her chin resting on a fist supported on her drawn-up knees, her pachedi fallen from her head. She lifted it over her head and turned her face away, but she did not get up.

He did not know what to say at first, but then grinned sheepishly and came out with “What do you see?”

“You write many letters.”

“Some,” he said. “But mostly to myself.”

“To yourself?”

“Why, yes. In this book.” He gave it a thump.

She smiled, and then got up.

“May I have some water?” he said.

She fetched him a glass and looked away as he drank.

This became a regular rendezvous, a ritual, and he started looking forward to it. After supper and a stroll outside, he smoked his pipe, then sat down to write, and like a genie (were there female djinns, according to the mukhi’s Book?) she would appear.

“What did you write today?”

“That you are a good girl.”

“But you wrote for a long time.”

Naturally afraid and shy of him because of his status, and because he was a man, she became forthright only when he opened up to her. Perhaps this was also because he was a foreigner. He was surprised, startled at this rapport, and he rather enjoyed it.
He had never talked to anyone of her race like this before. He asked her about herself, and she inquired about him. Bit by bit, a little reluctantly at first, they let out pieces of their past, those that would be understandable to the other.

Her mother, she said, was the mukhi’s sister. Her father had died in Mombasa and her uncle had arranged a remarriage with a local Kikono man that had turned out to be a disaster. The stepfather was a railway coolie who had run away and never stopped dreaming of returning to his native Punjab.

“Don’t you think of your home?” she asked.

They talked in Swahili — his, broken — and in gestures, and some misunderstandings were comical.

23-24? June

… I found myself explaining the political map of Europe to her — the countries, the languages — drawing crude comparisons. How to explain my reason for being here, leaving that fairyland to come to this darkness, where the kerosene lamp casts our long shadows on the walls and outside the hyena barks and the night owl shrieks — where I have no one of my kind. To help you, your people, I offered. She looked nonplussed. On orders from my Sultan, then. That, she understood.

Her stepfather … she said.

“He’s called Simba, isn’t he, Rashid the transporter?”

She laughed, apparently at his use of the nickname.

Her stepfather knew about spirits, she said. He had seen them come as simba, lions, when he worked on the railway. And because his journeys took him places, he knew the local languages and so could talk to the shetani who haunted her.

The shetani hated her mother the most, after which he hated her uncle Jamali, the mukhi. She didn’t know why. He made her
say cruel things to her mother, and do
evil
things. Her mother would sit all night beside her when the shetani came, she would call her brother the mukhi to come and say prayers. She wrote letters to a holy woman in Mombasa and received many prayers from her. She bought tawiths, with Quran inscriptions inside them, and made bracelets for her. But the shetani was too strong. Finally, with her brother’s permission, Mariamu’s mother went to the maalim, who was not of the community.

“What evil things did you do?” he asked gently.

She lowered her eyes. “What the spirit told Rashid …”

To tell her about Nairobi, the big city, he once showed her some photographs: the bead market on Government Road; himself at the wheel of a car; Dr. Ribeiro’s zebra-drawn buggy; Anne and Edwina in front of their house on the verandah, servant in kanzu beside them.

“Your two mothers,” she called the two women. He wondered if she was mocking, and eyed her sharply.

One night as they talked he heard an unusual sound outside — an uncertain step, an exclamation, not the reassuring thump of the askari — and he went out to look. Flinging the door open, he saw the stepfather, Rashid, sneaking away, and shouted angrily at him, threatening to shut him in the lockup. Then somewhat amused and embarrassed he came back inside. The girl had fled to her room.

Then, some days later, he saw the mukhi’s wife hovering at the back of the house. “It is new moon’s night,” she said. “The girl doesn’t have clothes for mosque, so I brought some.” Later when Mariamu came out, she looked, he thought, rather lovely. Through some quirk of fate, he mused, the ruffian Pipa had been most lucky in his choice of bride. Corbin had a drink, went out for a walk in the dusk, and passed the mosque, where ceremonies were in progress. He would, he thought, offer his patronage to the girl: if she was in trouble, wherever her fate took her, she could call on him for help. It would never be hard to find him. He
went back and waited for her. When at ten o’clock she hadn’t appeared he went to bed.

He woke that night shivering horribly, realizing in that feverish state that what he had feared had struck. He got up, stumbled to the table to look for water, found some, mixed it with brandy, and drank it. He stumbled back to bed, fell into it. Later he became conscious of a cool sensation, hot aching eyeballs, the smell, the weight on the bed of another body. Mariamu was putting compresses on his forehead.