Paul Theroux - My Secret History

“Hello, sister.” Everything was very simple. All the African girls seemed like one girl, uncomplicated and enthusiastic and pretty. I was probably no more than a white person to them, but a sympathetic one, and an American. I spoke the language, I knew how to make them laugh.

One said, “I love you because you dance with us.”

We were dancing to “Mrs. Brown You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter.”

Then the political talk was talk of independence. It was a kind of nervousness that trembled through the country — or at least through Zimba, and the Beautiful Bamboo Bar, and Chamba Hill Secondary School. It was like the expectation of a parade, the way people get to their feet and fidget just before they hear the band. The day was only two weeks off.

After morning assembly one day I had a visit from Deputy Mambo. He was wearing a red shirt, flapping shorts, and knee socks. He carried a stick. He also wore new shoes. Africans wearing new shoes always made me wary. They looked as though they wanted to kick something.

“I must speak to you,” he said, and then added slyly, “Headmaster.”

“Come in, brother. Who are you supposed to be?”

“I am a Youth Leaguer,” he said. “I am organizing our students for the independence celebration.”

He did not seem to recognize me. It was as though he was peering dimly out of his uniform, sort of hiding behind it.

“What does that badge say?”

It was a stiff embroidered disk pinned under his Doctor Banda button.

“Chamba Youth League.”

Chamba had a Youth League?

“No one told me anything about it.”

“I am telling you. We are arranging the independence. There will be flags, fireworks, demonstrations, and what-not.”

“What are the students supposed to do?”

“March,” he said.

“What if they’re busy?”

“They cannot be busy.”

This was a very different Deputy Mambo. I wanted to kick him out of my office. But it was not my independence celebration. I could not complain that no one had told me about the Chamba Youth League. It had probably begun on some weekend, when I had been attending to other things.

That same afternoon two soldiers arrived in a Land-Rover. They wore khaki uniforms and polished combat boots. I took them for Germans. They said they were Israelis. Yonny was about my age; the other one, Moosh, was a fat, older man. Deputy Mambo had sent them. They showed me a letter authorizing their visit.

I said, “Mambo teaches Third Form geography — rainfall, our friends the trees, and what is a volcano. No one gave him permission to invite the Israeli army to the school. Know what I mean?”

“You can check,” Moosh said, and turned his back on me.

I called Ed Wently from the post office in Zimba after school, but while I was describing Mambo the Youth Leaguer and his Israelis, Wently said, “Play ball,” and hung up.

I had never minded when Miss Natwick had implied I was incompetent as headmaster, and it had pleased me to see Rockwell take the latrine seriously. But Mambo in his red shirt I found disconcerting. It seemed he had a secret life, too. And the Israeli soldiers at what I considered my school irritated me. Apparently I could not get rid of them.

Yonny tried to be friendly in a bullying soldierly manner. I said I didn’t like soldiers marching around the school. He turned this into an antisemitic remark and said, “No one likes Israelis.” Yonny lisped. I had an irrational feeling that people who lisped usually told the truth. Moosh was grumpy. One day he surprised me by saying that he liked to dance. This slob liked to dance? But he showed me a few steps and for those seconds he was a different person, and very light on his feet. I complimented him and in return he criticized me for being friendly towards the students — too easy on them, he said.

It was not long before they began criticizing Rockwell, too. They said they could not understand why he spent all that time shingling the building.

Rockwell said, “Because I want to have it finished by Independence.”

They wanted to know what the thing was.

“Sanitary facilities. Rest rooms.”

“It’s a latrine,” I said.

“You Americans,” Yonny said, showing me his tongue when he lisped the word.

Moosh said that this latrine was too good for Africans.

“They can be happy with a hole in the ground.”

“Ever hear of cholera?” Rockwell said, and I admired the fight in him. “Africa’s number one killer?”

Yonny said, “Human life means nothing here.”

After school, the Israelis drilled the students, showed them how to march in step and twirl banners, and they screamed at them unmercifully. I heard the drums beating from the cleared piece of ground they called the football pitch.

I asked a Fourth Former named Malenga what he thought of the Israelis. He used a word that he had once applied to Americans, that meant “skilled in everything” ( nkhabvu ).

“Give me an example.”

Just today, Malenga said, the younger one Yonny had taught several of the boys how to get free of an enemy interrogator. While you were standing, facing each other, you looked him straight in the eyes and without blinking or moving your head you kicked him furiously and broke his shinbone.

“They’re tough guys,” Malenga said.

I hated Deputy Mambo for arranging the visit of these soldiers. But now I saw Rockwell in a new light. I had thought of him as crazy and possibly dangerous, but in contrast to the Israelis Rockwell seemed a man of principle and good sense. He had his eccentricities, this toiletmaker from Pasadena, but beneath it all he had a humane mission. I had been too hard on him. While I had spent my weekends at the Bamboo Rockwell had put in extra hours on the latrine.

He had just about finished the roof. On rainy days he worked inside, painting and tinkering.

“I think I’ve got these urinals licked,” he said, and then in a whisper, “Hey, what about these Israelites? Are you going to let them push you around?”

“Wently told me to play ball.”

“I got the name of the Israeli ambassador,” Rockwell said.

“Are you going to report the soldiers?”

“No. The name spooked me.” Rockwell was still whispering. “Ambassador Shohat. Get it?”

I said no.

He said, “Sometimes names are messages. Like Lorne Greene, like Faye Dunaway, like that Scotch guy that runs the Nyasaland Trading Company, Dalgliesh.”

I said, “Ward, please—”

“See, Lorne Greene is really ‘lawn green.’ And Faye Dunaway—‘fading away’. Huh? You have to really think to get the message.”

“What about Dalgliesh?”

“Dog leash,” Rockwell whispered. “And that guy Shohat is ‘shoe hat.’ In other words, head to toe. It kind of worries me.”

After revising my opinion of Rockwell, here he was again, getting weird. But I blamed the Israelis for this.

I was putting in extra time as headmaster, to prove that I was still in charge. I stopped seeing Gloria and went back to taking the Bamboo girls home at weekends. On weekdays I started at seven, unlocked the buildings, met the teachers at seven-thirty, and then banged the piece of railway track to call the students to assembly.

In the last week of June, Deputy Mambo came into my office, this time without knocking. It was one of his red-shirt days — shorts, knee socks, badges. How could he wear that cruel face of Doctor Banda and not expect to scare me?

“I have a request, Mr. Headmaster, sir,” he said. He was always slavishly polite when he was being hostile. “About morning assembly. In addition to stories and what-not I suggest we sing a song for Kamuzu.”

The man on his badge — Hastings Kamuzu Banda.