Chapter 8
What We Are Afraid Of
For four days she took the Matatu and did not look at the fourth row.
It was easy, in a way. The fourth row, on the right, by the window, was empty. A woman in a church hat had taken it on the Monday, and a man with a sack of onions on the Tuesday, and by Wednesday it was simply another seat. Nadia sat in the third row, on the left, with her bag on her knees, and looked straight ahead at the back of Mzee Kasozi's flat cap. The rumba played. Tosh shouted. The window that did not close let in a thin cold wind.
Nobody said anything. Tosh, who noticed everything, kept looking at the empty seat and then at her face, and once, on Tuesday, opened his mouth, and shut it again, which was the most delicate thing she had ever seen him do.
She did not answer the messages. There were eleven on the first night, and nine on the second, and then they stopped, which was worse. She lay on her bed and held the phone above her face and watched them arrive. I'm sorry. Please talk to me. I will say whatever you want. You don't have to answer. I am outside your gate. That one she answered.
Go home, she wrote.
I will. I only wanted to see if the light was on.
It's on.
Okay, he wrote, and the dots came and went a long time, and then: Goodnight.
She had gone to the window. The lane was dark and wet. At the end of it, under the one streetlight, a long thin figure in a grey jacket was standing still with his hands in his pockets, looking at her bulb. He did not wave. After a minute he turned and walked away.
She had sat down on the bed and cried until her head ached. She was not even sure what for. It was not that she did not believe him. That was the strange part. She believed him entirely. She believed that he loved her, and that he had been afraid, and that he had meant none of it as a trick. It was only that every time she thought of the ballroom, and the gold, and the standing ovation, she saw the small clear space between his world and hers, and the way he had stood in it all this time, in his canvas shoes, looking across.
He knew, she thought. He knew the whole time how wide it was. And he let me think it wasn't.
On the fifth day, a Friday, a message came at ten at night.
I'll be at the Banda stage tomorrow at 6 a.m. I will wait till 9. If you do not come, I will understand. I will not text again unless you do. This is not a threat. It is just a thing I wanted to say once, properly, to your face, and I'll take whatever you give me.
She read it in the dark, with the bulb off. She did not reply.
At a quarter to six the next morning, she was standing at the gate with her coat on.
It was cold, and a thin grey fog was lying on the road. The stage was nearly empty. The woman in the green apron had not yet come. A boda man was asleep on his motorcycle with his head on the handlebars. Under the tin roof of the shelter, on the bench where they had eaten rice and beans, a man sat alone with two paper cups of tea beside him, one in each hand, as if he were holding a pair of scales.
He had been there a long time. She could tell by the way he sat. His shoulders were hunched. He was wearing the grey jacket, with the patched elbow, and the canvas shoes, and his hair had grown back a little, so that it stood up in a soft dark brush. There were circles under his eyes like thumbprints.
She stopped at the edge of the shelter.
He turned his head. He did not stand. He looked at her for a long, long moment, as one looks at a bird that may fly away at any sound.
"You came," he said.
"I said I would think."
"You did not say."
"No." She came in and sat down at the other end of the bench, with a careful space between them. He held out a cup. She took it. It was hot, and sweet, with ginger, and it went down her throat like a small mercy. "I'm still angry."
"I know."
"I'm not ready to stop."
"I'm not asking you to." He cradled his own cup. "I only want to say it. All of it. And then you can do what you like."
"Okay."
"May I start at the beginning?"
"Please."
He told her.
He told it badly, at first, in jerks and starts, staring at the road. He said that his father was Gerald Mugerwa, and that his father had built Fresh Basket from a stall of onions. He said that he had been born in a hospital in Nakasero and sent to a boarding school in Mbarara at the age of nine, because his father had believed in discipline, and that he had cried for three months and then stopped. He said that his mother was the kindest person he knew and had never once said no to his father in public. He said that his brother, Joseph, was an accountant in Toronto and had been told, at the age of twenty-two, that he was free to go, and had gone, and had never come back, and that every time Joseph called, their father's face changed.
He said, "I was the one who stayed. And then I wasn't."
"Why not?"
"I couldn't breathe." He turned the cup in his fingers. "It sounds spoiled. I know it does. I have thought about it a lot. A boy who has everything and says he can't breathe. But that was it. Everywhere I went, there was a place already made. A desk. A title. A car. A chair at the head of the table, which my father pulled out for me, every Sunday, like a man holding a coat. And I thought, if I sit in it, I'll never find out what I am. I'll be a Mugerwa. I'll be the son. I'll be whatever he needs." He shook his head. "So I went to Nairobi for a year. I worked in a studio, as a nobody, under a different surname. I lived in a room the size of this bench. I took matatus. It was the happiest year I ever had."
"You used another name?"
"My mother's. Njoroge." He smiled, very faintly. "She is half Kenyan. I use it sometimes. It is not a lie. It's just a door."
"Is that what you called yourself in Kampala?"
"No. I only said Eli. Nobody asked, and I did not say." He looked at her. "I want to be very clear. That is not an excuse. I knew what I was doing. I knew that if I said my name, you would stop seeing me. And I wanted so badly to be seen."
She did not answer. She held her tea.
"When I came back, I rented the shed in Kireka. I took the taxi. I wore the same jacket. I lived on what I earned, which was very little, doing freelance drawings for architects and a man who made wedding invitations." His mouth twisted. "I even stopped using my card. I wanted to know if I could do it without his name. If the idea was good enough to stand alone. I was proving something."
"To whom?"
"Him. Me. I don't know." He rubbed his face. "And then, in June, a girl got on the Matatu, with a blue folder and a very straight back, and said, Is this seat taken?"
"I did not say that. You said it."
"I said Not yet. You said Is this seat taken."
"I said it in June."
"Yes. But I saw you three weeks before that, on your first Monday." He gave her a quick, sidelong, shy look. "You got on at Banda. I had been on the Matatu for months and I had never noticed the stage. And you got on, with your hair in a very tight bun, and sat in the third row, on the left, by the window that does not close, and you took out a piece of paper and looked at it as if it was an exam. I thought, She is afraid of something and she is not going to say."
"I was not afraid."
"You were terrified. You had your thumb in your mouth."
"I did not!"
"The corner of it. Like a child." He was smiling now, helplessly, the way he did, from one side. "I thought you were the most interesting person I'd ever seen on a bus. I watched you for three weeks."
"That is deeply disturbing."
"I know. I'm sorry. It was at a distance. It was entirely respectful."
"You are a stalker."
"I am a very shy man."
She was laughing. She had not meant to. It came out of her, a thin wet rustle of a laugh, and she put the cup down and covered her face with her hands, and her shoulders shook. When she looked up he was watching her with such naked, wondering relief that her throat closed.
"Oh, Eli."
"I'm sorry."
"Stop saying that."
"I'll stop. I'll start saying other things." He put down his own cup. "May I say the rest?"
"Say the rest."
"I should have told you in September. After the taxi park. I knew then, that it had gone wrong. I knew you were hurt, and that I was the one who had made it worse. I had a speech. I went to the shed and wrote it on the wall. And I looked at it, and I thought, If I say it now, I'll lose her. So I did not say it. And then the day I might have, I was too happy."
"That is the worst reason I've ever heard."
"Yes."
"You weren't afraid of losing me. You were afraid of losing it. The thing you had. The place where nobody knew."
He was silent.
"Weren't you?"
"Yes," said Eli, finally. "Both. I was afraid of both."
The sun was coming up. The fog thinned and lifted in long white scarves, and the road emerged from under it, grey and wet, with a line of boda men beginning to stir. Somewhere a cock crowed. The woman in the green apron had arrived at last and was setting out her basin of maize, with a sidelong, interested glance at the two figures on the bench.
Nadia was sitting with her arms wrapped round her knees.
"I have something to tell you," she said.
"You don't have to."
"I do." She did not look at him. She looked at the road. "It's only fair. You gave me yours."
"It's not an exchange."
"It is. It's the only way." She took a breath. "I don't earn enough."
He waited.
"I don't earn enough to live. That's it. That is the whole of it." She heard her voice go thin, and kept going. "I get four hundred and fifty thousand shillings a month. I pay two hundred and fifty for the room. I send a hundred and fifty home. That leaves fifty, and transport is forty, so it leaves ten. For everything. For a month."
He said nothing. She heard him breathe out, very slowly.
"My mother thinks I earn a lot. I told her it was enough. I told her... I said things. It's good. It's fine. I'm saving. She has told the whole of Walukuba that her daughter is working in a big firm in Kampala and will soon have a car." She laughed, without a sound. "She calls every night at eight. And every night I say, No problem, Mama. And I look at the wall."
"Nadia."
"I'm not finished." Her eyes were stinging. She blinked hard. "I've borrowed from my neighbour. Twice. I have not eaten lunch since August. I fainted in the taxi park and I told you it was a diet. I've lied to my father, who gave me a hundred thousand shillings he'd saved from the electricity. I have not told one single person in my family the truth. I've been saying I'm fine for ten months."
"Why?"
"Because if I stopped, it would all fall down." She said it simply. "That's the thing. It is not only that I'm ashamed. I am, but that's not it. It's that they're all leaning on it. My mother, my brother, my father. They are all leaning on me, a little, like a wall. And if I move, even slightly..."
"They fall."
"They fall."
"Or they find another wall."
She turned her head and looked at him.
"I'm not saying it's easy," said Eli, carefully. "I don't know what it is to have a family that depends on you. I have never had that. I've had the opposite. I've had a family that you can't depend on, in the other direction. They are so solid, they do not need you. They only need you to be the right shape." He shook his head. "But I do know what it is to hold a thing very still because you are afraid of what happens if you let go. I have been doing it since I was nine."
"What is it you're afraid of?"
"Becoming him."
"Your father?"
"Not the whole of him. The part that is..." He searched. "The part that is right. About everything. He is a good man, Nadia. That's what makes it so hard. If he were cruel, I could leave. But he is wise and fair and generous, and he built it all with his own hands, and when he says, This is what I've given you, I can't say he is wrong. I just know that if I take it, I will never be able to put it down. I'll be an old man in a chair, with a gold watch, making speeches about onions."
"It's not a bad life."
"It is not a bad life. It is not mine." He looked at his hands. "I am more afraid of being comfortable than of being poor. That is a very easy thing to say if you have never been poor. I know. I hear it. It makes me ashamed."
"Don't be."
"Why not?"
"Because it's true." She said it before she had decided to. "It's not a competition. You were afraid of your thing and I was afraid of mine. They are different. But they're the same shape." She stopped. She was surprised at herself. "I think, if we had told each other in June, we would have laughed."
"We would have been insufferable."
"We'd have been very boring. Two people on a bench, comparing their fears."
"I like that," said Eli. "I'd have liked that."
They sat for a minute without speaking. The sun was up, a hard gold disc over the hill. A school bus rumbled past, and the children in it waved at the two young people on the bench. Nadia waved back.
"You still did it," she said, quietly.
"What?"
"The lie. The thing you did. It doesn't go away because we had a nice talk."
"No."
"I'm still angry."
"I know."
"I don't know when I'll stop."
"You don't have to stop. You can be angry and be here. I think that's allowed." He turned to her. "I'm not asking for it to be over. I'm only asking for the chance to be someone who doesn't do it again."
"Do you promise?"
"I promise nothing about the future. I can only tell you what I'll do." His voice was low and steady. "I will not hide anything from you. If there's a thing I'm not ready to say, I will say, I'm not ready. I won't pretend there's no thing."
She considered it, for a long time. A hen came out of the maize basin, looked at them, and walked away.
"That's a very good rule," she said.
"I made it up on the bench."
"It's the best thing you've done."
"I know." He almost smiled. "Is it one for you, too?"
"What?"
"I'm not ready." He said it gently. "Instead of I'm fine."
She went still.
"Because I think," said Eli, "that you've said I'm fine four hundred times to me, and I have believed it four hundred times, and each time I was wrong. And I'd like to stop being wrong."
Something happened in her face. She felt it go. It was not tears. It was something quieter, a muscle that had been clenched for a year, letting go all at once, like a hand opening.
"I'm not fine," she said.
"Okay."
"I'm very much not fine."
"Okay."
"I'm hungry. I'm tired. I'm owed rent. I'm lonely, and I'm frightened, and I'm angry with you, and I love you, and I do not know what to do with any of it."
He did not say anything. He put out a hand, palm up, on the bench between them, in the old gesture, and she looked at it for a long time.
She put hers in it.
"Show me the shed," she said.
It was nine o'clock. They had finished the tea. The woman in the green apron had given them each a cob of maize, without being asked, and watched them eat it with a face of such blissful satisfaction that Nadia had to look away.
"Now?"
"Now."
"It's a mess."
"I've seen your notebook. I want to see the box."
"It's not a good box yet."
"Eli."
"All right." He stood up, brushing crumbs off his jacket. "But I warn you. It smells."
It was twenty minutes by taxi, in the opposite direction, along a rutted road behind the railway line at Kireka, among small workshops and open-air garages where men in overalls were beating dents out of lorries. The shed stood at the end of a yard, in the shade of a eucalyptus tree. It was a long, low, rust-coloured building with a corrugated roof, a wide door, and a hand-painted sign above it that said, in bright blue letters, POA BOXES. Underneath, in smaller, shakier writing: Cool, cheap, and yours.
"Poa," said Nadia.
"It means cool. In Swahili. Kenyan slang, mostly. It's what you say when something is fine." He fumbled with the padlock. "I thought, a name that means cool, for a box that keeps things cool. And also, when someone asks how you are, you say, Poa. You say it's fine. I thought, it would be nice for something to really be."
She stood in the yard with the sun on her face and looked at the sign. There was a lump in her throat that would not move.
"It's a very good name."
"It's a terrible one. No one can say it."
"I can say it."
"You are a very forgiving woman."
"I'm not," said Nadia. "I'm only reading it."
He pulled back the door. Inside, the shed was dim and cool and smelled, as promised, of foam and warm plastic and something sharp and chemical. It was a large space, crammed with workbenches and drums and racks of tools, and tall shelves along one wall piled with boxes. White boxes. Grey boxes. Blue boxes with red lids. A hundred of them, in every size, stacked like the pieces of a giant's game. A woman in a yellow overall, kneeling in the middle of the floor with a welding mask pushed up on her forehead, looked round, and said, "Ah! The goat!"
"Tina."
"I thought you would never come." Tina got up, wiping her hands. "He has been unbearable. He has been talking about nothing else for days. He has said your name forty-one times. I counted."
"I have not."
"Forty-one. I am a precise woman." She held out a hand, to Nadia, and then, instead, pulled her into a hard hug that smelled of metal and soap. "I am sorry for the other day. I said a stupid thing. I have been told off."
"By whom?"
"By him. By me. By my husband, who says I am a danger." She let go. "You must be hungry. Eli, make her something."
"I was going to."
"Not the chapati, it is two days old. Make the eggs."
"I am making the eggs."
"He is a very good man with an egg," Tina confided. "It is his only skill."
Nadia walked slowly along the shelves. She touched a box. It was light, and smooth, and cool under her palm, with a lid that closed with a soft, satisfying click. She opened it. Inside was a clean white lining, with a groove to drain the water. She closed it again.
"This is the one?" she said.
"That's the eleventh."
"What is wrong with it?"
"The foam is too thick." He had come up beside her, with a spatula in one hand. "It keeps the cold in, but it's too heavy. And it costs thirty-one thousand to make. I need it at twenty-five."
"That's all?"
"That's everything."
"It's wonderful."
"It is thirty-one thousand shillings."
"It's wonderful," said Nadia, "and you're being impossible. Listen to me. I have seen four hundred printed things this year. I have seen what people make when they don't love it. You love this." She laid her hand flat on the lid. "I could see it in the notebook in September, and I can see it now. Anyone could. That is what's wrong with your pitch."
"What?"
"You say insulated container. You say low-cost cold chain solution. You told me you said low-cost cold chain. To a banker. In a tie."
"It's the correct term."
"Nobody has ever wanted to buy a correct term." She turned. "What do you call it when you're not pitching?"
"A box."
"For?"
"For the woman with the fish."
"There." She pointed at him. "That. Say that."
He stared at her.
"A cold box for people who sell in the sun," said Nadia. "Twenty-five thousand shillings. Pays for itself in a month. That's the whole thing. You put it on a page. You put a picture of a woman with a basin on her head. You do not say solution. And you take it to a man who has a fish stall, not a man who has a degree."
There was a long silence in the shed. Tina had stopped moving. A drip fell from the roof somewhere with a small, clear sound.
"Say that again," said Eli, slowly.
"Which part?"
"All of it."
She said it again. He took the notebook out of his pocket, and tore out a page, and wrote it down, standing, with his tongue between his teeth, in his quick cramped hand. Then he looked up at her. His face was alight.
"You are," he said, "the cleverest person I know."
"I print funeral programmes."
"You are a genius who prints funeral programmes." He grabbed Tina's arm. "Did you hear it? She did it in two minutes. I have been doing it for two years."
"I heard," said Tina, drily. "I would like it noted that I have been saying the same thing since March."
"You said it in welding."
"It is the same."
"It is not. You said, Cut the foam."
"That is also a pitch," said Tina.
Nadia was laughing again. She stood in the middle of the shed, among the boxes and the drums, in the thin warm light that came down from the roof, with a man on either side of her arguing about foam, and she found that the knot in her chest had gone slack. She did not know when. It had simply stopped.
They ate eggs on upturned crates, in the doorway, in the sun, with Tina on a bucket and a plate of bread between them, and Nadia, who had not had a hot breakfast in four months, ate three. No one said anything. No one looked at her. Tina talked, at length, about her husband's church, and the cost of steel, and a woman at Owino who had threatened to throw a fish at her. Eli sat very close, with his knee touching Nadia's, and said almost nothing at all.
Afterward she helped him wash the plates in a basin behind the shed. It was a small yard with a stand-pipe and a rope of washing, and a patch of marigolds somebody had planted in an old tyre. She stood in the sun with her sleeves rolled up and her hands in the cold water, and he stood next to her, drying, and neither of them spoke.
"Nadia."
"Mm."
"What would you like me to do?"
"About what?"
"About your family." He folded the cloth. "About the money. I know you do not want me to give you any. I won't. I've heard it. I want you to know I won't. But there may be other things."
"Like what?"
"I don't know. You could tell me when you're afraid. Or when you have a bill." He hesitated. "I could sit next to you while you look at it."
She stopped, with a plate in her hand.
It was such a small thing. It was nothing like what she had braced for. She had expected an envelope, a gesture, a generous grand rescue, and had steeled herself to refuse. She had not expected a man offering to sit next to her while she looked at a bill.
"That," she said slowly, "I could do."
"Good."
"I'd like that."
"Good." He took the plate. "You will have to tell me the truth, though. Not fine."
"I know."
"And I'll tell you mine."
"All of it?"
"As much as I can find."
She dried her hands on her dress. She looked at him, at the tall thin figure in the sunlit yard, with the cloth over his shoulder and a smear of foam on his cheek, and she saw, with a pang that was half grief and half something else, that he was still afraid. Not of her. Of the thing itself, the whole slow wide open future. He was standing very straight, as a man stands who is waiting for a verdict.
"I'm still angry," said Nadia.
"I know."
"It's going to be a while."
"I can wait."
"But I think..." She stopped. She started again. "I think I would rather be angry with you than fine with someone else."
He did not move.
"That is the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me," said Eli, in a voice that shook. "I'd like it on a plaque."
She laughed, and stepped forward, and put her arms round his waist, and laid her cheek against the front of his shirt. He smelled of eggs and foam and pencils and warm cotton. His arms came round her at once, tight, as if he had been holding them up for a week. She felt his chin drop onto her hair. She felt his whole body let go.
"Poa," she murmured, into his chest.
"Poa," said Eli.
On Monday morning, at a quarter to seven, she got on the Matatu at the Banda stage.
It was a clean, cold, golden morning, with the fog lying low in the valley. The woman in the green apron was turning her maize. Tosh, hanging out of the door, was shouting, "Banda, Banda! Move in, move in! There is space!" He was wearing his cap backwards, and there was something odd about his face, a sort of severe, trembling neutrality, like a man trying not to laugh at a funeral.
Nadia climbed in. She went down the aisle past the woman in the church hat and the old man in the safari suit. The fourth row, on the right, by the window, was occupied. A long thin man in a grey jacket sat there with a notebook on his knee, looking straight ahead, as if he had never been anywhere else in his life.
She stopped.
"Is this seat taken?" she said.
He looked up.
"Not yet," said Eli.
She sat. The Matatu lurched forward. Rumba began on the old cassette, a long rippling guitar. Behind them, from the door, Tosh coughed, a single, enormous, explosive cough, and began to hum a tuneless wedding march.
Mzee Kasozi did not turn round. But as the vehicle rolled out onto the road, in the pink light, the old man reached out, without a word, and with one finger turned the volume up.