‘Who are you?’ I asked. The woman held me in her gaze for a few moments.
‘I’m Serah. Serah Kholifa. Your sister.’
Yes. It was your Aunt Serah. I didn’t recognise her, so many years had passed since I had seen her. She had been just a small girl. Now she was studying in Liverpool. Oh, yes, I knew this. But the distance was great. She had written suggesting I visit during the holidays, when they came. But they were a long time in coming, I never made it. On my college registration form Serah was listed as my next of kin. That day when she arrived at the sanatorium, she had only to take one look at me to see what had to be done. She took me away from that place.
We left in a taxi. I was impressed at that, how easily she made it happen. At the gate I swung my head this way and that.
‘Have you forgotten something?’
I replied I was looking for Bobbio, my friend. She frowned and the wrinkle appeared on her nose again.
‘Oh, yes. I remember him.’
‘He was here.’ I couldn’t see him any longer. ‘I never asked him what he wanted.’
My sister looked at me. ‘Oh, Mary,’ she said. ‘I expect he came to tell you something.’
And she took me in her arms and held me.
How long ago, how faraway it had all seemed. The smell of the earth. The whiteness of the sun. The way night arrives like a thing unto itself, instead of the creeping darkness that comes to steal away the sunlight. I returned home the way I departed. I stood on the deck watching the coastline widen in front of me, felt the sea breeze, the molecules of air, salt and water attaching themselves to my skin. Even the whiff of fish and oil at the dock was like a perfume. And the people! The pride in them as they looked and never looked away. For the first time in a long while I saw myself again, reflected in their eyes.
That’s it, my story. Why do I tell it to you? Not so that you may feel sorry for me. No. But because that day you came home — the very first time, when you brought your new man and your babies, I saw in you a glimpse of something that brought the memories of that time back. Not in a bad way. Not in a way that hurt, but rather an echo of something I have known. I watched you then, and I have been watching you ever since. At that time you were nervous, smiling and laughing maybe too much, trying too hard in front of your husband and your children, your fingers fluttering like butterflies in front of your mouth. And the same again when you came back to us a few weeks ago. Until yesterday when you came out, for once not wearing one of those T-shirts that show your nipples, but in a gown Aunt Serah let you borrow.
And today you asked me to braid your hair. All that combing and fussing with those hair creams that have to be imported from America had become too much trouble, you told me — here, with only river water to wash your hair. So I plaited your hair, just as I did when you were a small girl, me on a stool, you sitting between my knees. And while I worked the strands I let you listen to my story.
And now I look at the change in you and I feel happy. For I know what it is to forget who you are. To feel the pieces falling away. To look for yourself and see only the stares of strangers. To search for yourself in circles until you’re exhausted. And I wonder if my story means something to you. If perhaps what happened to me, little by little, isn’t the same thing you felt happening to you. The very thing that brought you back home.
12 Serah, 1978: The Dream
Well, this story is no secret. Heaven knows, there are no secrets in this town.
Congosa! Gossip. It’s what people here do all the time, because they can’t be bothered to work. They stick their noses into other people’s business and think they know it all, but of course they don’t.
The truth is we were the envy of the whole country. Because we were the dream, did you know that? Every parent prays for a special child, and then suddenly — a whole generation of us. As though some maleka, some angel somewhere up above had tripped and scattered her load of blessings all at once. We were the gilded ones. We went this way and that, flying on the wings of our dreams. Me to England. Yaya first to Germany to study design and then architecture in England. We did not miss what we were leaving behind, when we kissed each other goodbye there were no tears. Only Ya Memso cried a little to see us go, but even then there were more tears of joy mixed up with the tears of sadness.
Neither of us looked back at the old, only forward to the vision of the new.
People will always say women forget the pain of childbirth, which is strange because I remember it perfectly clearly. What you do forget, utterly, is why you once loved somebody. The physical pleasures, the joy of a newborn, the disappointments, the betrayals, these things you can remember — but when love itself is gone, it vanishes without a trace. It leaves nothing behind.
When I think about Ambrose now, all I can really remember is his voice.
He had a way of speaking. He would tell me I was beautiful. ‘You aah beautiful,’ a long exhaled sound, like a sigh, as though he couldn’t quite believe it himself. Often, when he spoke on the telephone the person at the other end didn’t realise they were talking to a black man. He was particularly proud of that. And then there was the way he dressed, so stylish and so neat; when I first met him I thought he must be from Senegal or another of those French places.
There was a black American girl on our course. African American as they say now. She liked to hang around the African students, and when she talked everything was ‘black this’ and ‘black that’. She called me sister. ‘Sistah’. That’s the way she said it. For some reason it made me giggle, even though I liked the way it sounded. I didn’t think like her. We didn’t think like her. We hadn’t reached that place yet. To be honest, I’m not sure we ever did.
She told me I walked like a queen. I longed to be Carmen Jones. I took up smoking: Sobranie Cocktails, with gold tips and pastelcoloured papers; spent hours hot-combing my hair in the same style as Dorothy Dandridge. Later I changed and had an Afro, because by then they were all the rage. People told me I looked just like Cleopatra Jones.
Well, Ambrose certainly treated me like a queen. When we went out he would hold doors open for me to walk through. If I was carrying a parcel he would insist on taking it from me. He invited me to eat in restaurants where he called for the wine list and talked to the waiters without bothering to look at them. When the food came, those same waiters served me first, only coming to Ambrose second. And he behaved as though this was the way it should be, and I pretended I was used to it although the opposite was true. The way I was raised, only after all the men had eaten did the women sit down to share what was left. And it was the women who fetched the water and carried the heavy loads.
I loved him so much I even used to buy Ambrosia Creamed Rice. Just for the name. Bloated, sweetened, milky grains: nothing like rice at all.
These are the things I remember. As for the rest, the years — like an army of silverfish — have eaten them away.
Some months after we met we spent a weekend in Lyme Regis. Ambrose had promised to show me Venice. ‘Show you Venice,’ he had said, and the words slid off his tongue. Of course I knew he had never been there, but what did it matter? The way he spoke made me believe in him. It would have been impossible for us to travel, we were overseas scholarship students, we would have needed visas. Still, for a few weeks I let myself dream about it.