“Why do you let her treat you that way?” I asked Helen a few weeks later. “Why are they all so cruel?” It was break and we were sitting in the cold yard, on the steps of the ruined terrace. There were signs of spring: trickles of water inside the walls of the building, a change in the air. By then I was somewhat resigned to the routines of the Orphan Exchange. But I didn’t understand why the teachers were so erratic or why several of them had singled Helen out for extra abuse. That morning Ms. Scatcherd had beaten Helen on the shoulders with a switch; she accused Helen of “daydreaming.” I was holding a snowball against the welts now, trying to alleviate the swelling.
“Perhaps they don’t get enough to eat, either,” said Helen. “Ms. Scatcherd is always more sane after lunch.”
“But why is she so mean to you? You’re one of the best students. You never give her any trouble.”
“I think the teachers are angry with me. Or afraid? No one ever came back from an exchange before, and they know they can’t get rid of me now because my father would find out.”
“But why are they afraid?” I asked. “Was it so bad?”
“It was strange, but not too bad. We had better food there. I think they were testing cold medicine; they kept giving me nasal sprays. But I was only gone for a week, and the drug trial I was assigned to was supposed to go on for a year. So I never found out exactly what they gave me and they didn’t explain anything.” Helen reached over to take the snowball from me. She added fresh snow and handed it back. “That feels good.” The bell rang, Helen covered her shoulders and we went back to class.
As spring came, conditions improved at the Orphan Exchange. There were food deliveries from newly reconquered territories in the southlands. We were given vitamins and aid workers arrived with powdered milk and books. My hair grew out slowly (never before or after that time have my hair and fingernails grown so slowly!) and I felt a little more familiar to myself.
But something was wrong with Helen. She had a fever and a headache, she was tired; then a weird rash appeared on her face and spread all over her body. One morning she threw up her breakfast.
“You have to go to the infirmary,” I said.
Helen shook her head. “Better not,” she said.
But I made her go. We stood at the door of the infirmary. It had once been a kitchen and though the ovens and refrigerators had been removed to another part of the building and beds and medical equipment stood at rigid angles to the walls, there were still traces—the fume hood, the hatch for passing plates from kitchen to servers—that somehow gave a suggestion of cannibalism in the accidental conjunction of the culinary and the medical.
Helen and I stood in the corridor peering through the narrow window in the door. Helen knocked and for a while no one answered. Eventually the nurse came up behind us and we jumped as though we’d been caught misbehaving.
When the nurse saw that it was Helen she said, “Come in, quickly,” and then she stopped me as I tried to follow. “Are you sick, too?” she asked.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“Go back to class, then, we’ll take care of your friend.”
I protested but finally Helen said, “Go ahead, Jane, I’ll be OK.” So I left her there.
Perhaps I only imagined that the teachers conspired to keep me away from Helen. After class I tried to go to the infirmary but the maths teacher demanded that I go over a test we’d taken three days before; then it was time for dinner and then Ms. Temple asked me to run an errand for her. I went to bed in a doubtful frame of mind. When all the girls were at last asleep I crept out of the dormitory and made my way in my nightgown, barefoot through the cold corridors, terrified. When I came to the infirmary the nurse wasn’t there and there was only one other girl, a very young child who slept tightly curled in her crib, her thumb half in her mouth.
Helen was sitting up in bed. Even in the half-light I could see that her face was covered in red blotches. I climbed in with her and she drew the covers over both of us. She was feverish; I went and brought her a cold pack and got back into bed.
“Don’t leave me, Jane,” she said.
“I won’t,” I whispered. We fell asleep spooned together like little cats.
I woke up in my own bed the next morning.
I dressed hurriedly and ran to see Helen before breakfast. Her bed was empty and the other girl was still asleep. The nurse came in wearing her coat and gloves, followed by Ms. Temple.
“Where is she?” I cried.
“She’s gone,” said Ms. Temple.
“She’s dead?”
Ms. Temple hesitated. “Yes. I’m so sorry, Jane.”
“But where is she?”
“We sent her back to her family.”
And that was that. Helen was gone. I grieved her stubbornly, publicly, slowly. Years went by and my grief became private and steady. The war dragged on.
When I was fifteen I was exchanged. I was lucky: instead of being a guinea pig like Helen had been, or a sex worker or a scullery maid like some other girls, I was sent to an enormous house in the middle of nowhere to be an au pair for a girl named Adele who spoke only French. The dad was seldom at home and the mum was ill; she was kept in seclusion in a suite at the top of the house and I was warned not to speak to her. It was a strange household but the servants were kind and there was an enormous library; Adele and I used to spend days there reading, drawing, eating cheese and fruit and junk food (Pringles, Snickers, Coke—the dad had connections, I had never seen so much decadent food). We spoke mostly French and I even managed to become a little plump. It was easy to forget that half the world was trying to annihilate the other half. We seldom saw drones there; the sky was empty and huge. Time passed, the war sputtered out and finally ended, Adele grew up and was about to go to university and I found myself free and at my own disposal for the first time in my life.
I owned nothing, but Adele wrote me a reference and signed her dad’s name. She gave me enough money to get by for a little while. I stuffed a backpack with food and left feeling pleasantly unencumbered.
I took a train to the city I had lived in as a child. It was barely recognisable to me; none of my old landmarks had survived. It was wonderful to walk in the city by myself under the midday sky without fear. I found a bombed house in our old neighbourhood that had a few intact rooms and I slept there. Every day I walked around the city, knowing I ought to look for work but reluctant to speak to anyone. On the third day I was walking near the devastated business district when someone called my name.
I turned and it was Helen. Beautiful Helen, confident Helen—she was ravaged now, disease had made her old, had robbed her of her golden hair and her clear skin, she was pocked and stooped—but she was my Helen and she was alive.
For a moment I was too surprised to react and I saw that she was ashamed and thought I didn’t recognise her. Then I ran to her and embraced her and we cried.
We bought coffee and buns from a food truck and sat together on a bench in a park. “What happened?” I asked.
“They were testing biological weapons,” said Helen. “They gave me smallpox and then my father wanted me returned to the Orphan Exchange and they gave me the antidote, but it didn’t quite work. That’s why the teachers didn’t want me there. So when I got sick I was sent back to the lab, because I was contagious.” Helen sighed. “I’m so relieved to see you, I was afraid I might have infected you.”
“I’m OK. I guess I was lucky.”
“I thought they were testing cold remedies.” She looked away. “Am I hideous, Jane?”
“Not to me.”
“Liar.”
“Helen,” I said, “did you ever find out—what did they exchange us for? What did they get? Money? Food?”
She said, “All they got was protection. I mean, in exchange for us, the place did not get bombed. So the other girls were protected in exchange for a few of us being handed over to the horror show.”
“So they got nothing in exchange for us.”<
br />
“Or everything—life.”
“You are so calm about it.” My eyes welled with tears.
“I’m alive. So are you.” She leaned over and kissed me. I kissed her back.
We had found each other and we stayed together. We got boring jobs, we moved into a tiny flat above a bakery and we made a home together. When it eventually became legal, Reader, I married her. It was enough; it is enough. We walk together in the evenings through the peaceful city, hand in hand, not speaking much, moving slowly, our thoughts drifting until it is time to turn towards home. My Helen. I wouldn’t exchange her for anything in the world.
DOUBLE MEN
NAMWALI SERPELL
A FRIENDSHIP THAT FAILS to negotiate dogs and chickens is doomed to wither, even a friendship that has weathered decades of hardship and tedium. Mama Lota and Nanjela had raised children together; performed birth and death rites in tandem; carried loads, light and heavy, as one. Now that there were no men left in their households, they depended on each other, hooked their everydays, the tasks of tending to body and home. In a small field, they grew enough greens, beans, potatoes, cassava, yams, groundnuts and maize to feed themselves, and kept the surplus in Mama Lota’s storehouse. They gave the damaged but edible leftovers to widows even less fortunate than they.
Mama Lota bought the dogs because the storehouse had been robbed again. This time, she’d caught them in the act. She’d burst through the door with furious shouts, her chitenge haphazard, her barely-there hair uncovered, light spoking erratically from the lantern she held aloft. The boys fled, crawling from her hailstorm, except for one boy who, Mama Lota speculated later to Nanjela, must have been raised by a bitter woman who beat him too hard and too often. His lackeys scurried pitiably around him but this boy alone stood, lengthening up like a thread of smoke, his fist wrapped around a stone Mama Lota had thrown. He spat and threw it back. It struck her above her left eye, knocked her over, knocked her out and turned her eyebrow into a red smear that healed later into a purple cross, which everyone said made sense since her husband, long deceased, had been a pastor.
Those thieving boys had broken in through the one small window in the storehouse across from the locked entrance. When Mama Lota toppled across the threshold, they ran away through the door she’d burst through, ran right over her body, their pockets and hands full of all they planned to sell. And just for the sake of it, they stole the lantern that had tumbled from her hand.
This was why Mama Lota had sent her nephew to purchase the Doberman Pinschers. Not because of the stolen food, nor the requited stone, nor even the wound it had opened. It was this pettiness of taking her lamp, which her husband had received as a boy from a muzungu hunter he’d fetched game for, and which he had polished every night of their marriage, whistling pleasantly through the gap in his front teeth. Mama Lota liked to remember him this way: nearby, his mouth and hands occupied. And now the glass and metal thing that reminded her of a lost person—it, too, was gone.
“They can’t even use it,” Mama Lota complained in her high, soft voice as she poured Nanjela a cup of tea a few days later. “Where will they find the paraffin?”
“Heysh, these boys,” Nanjela replied in a trembly baritone, glancing at the bandage over her friend’s eye.
They were in Mama Lota’s kitchen, sitting on a pair of rickety chairs inherited from the church when Pastor Chisongo died. The women watched the steam untangle above their teacups, shaking their heads at the old, familiar nightmare: able-bodied males with nothing to lose.
A ferocious noise scraped through the window—a snarling, snatching sound. Nanjela started. The dogs were quarrelling. “But is it good to have these . . . doublemen around?” She shuddered. “They’re like demons.”
“The Doberman breed is good for protection. I picked the angriest ones!” Mama Lota smiled, then frowned. “I’m not going to suffer for some stupid child who throws stones at his elders. And just takes.” She sucked her teeth.
“I don’t know,” Nanjela shook her head. “I think they’re eating our chickens.”
The Dobermans were indeed rapacious. They had rather sensibly begun to supplement the leftovers Mama Lota gave them with mice and birds and snakes—and yes, the occasional chicken from the coop behind the storehouse. The fonder they became of her, the more broken little corpses would the two young dogs lay at Mama Lota’s feet. She’d pick the carrion gifts off her steps with a grimace and scold the grinning beasts. “Foolish monkeys,” she’d frown, then smile, patting them on their warm, flat, black foreheads as they wagged the knots where their tails had been.
But they were not foolish. That was a sentimental view to take about such vicious creatures. Nanjela discovered just how vicious the very next morning. She had gone to visit Mama Lota to plan the bonding ceremony, the elaborate two-week affair that would preface the wedding. Nanjela’s daughter, Nayendi, was to marry Mama Lota’s nephew, Lukundo. The old friends were finally going to join their families. This was the wedding for which they had been saving chickens.
As Nanjela headed to Mama Lota’s that fateful morning, she tried to consider the match objectively. After Nayendi had graduated with top marks from her boarding school, she’d taken a position at a bank in town. It was a prestigious but lonely job, one that had soon forced the girl to reach out for companionship. A distant cousin, Mary, had introduced Nayendi to Lukundo, who had dropped out of school to work as a mechanic. Only after they had fallen in love had they realised that his aunty and her mother were the closest of friends. At least this is what cousin Mary, the matchmaker, claimed. Nanjela wasn’t sure how far to trust this relative, with her underwear for clothing and make-up like a badly iced cake. But Nanjela couldn’t deny that Nayendi had done well to find such a handsome, prosperous husband. And what a boon that he was Mama Lota’s nephew!
“Odi! Anybody home?”
Mama Lota’s metal gate, peppered with rust holes, whistled in the breeze. Beyond it, nothing stirred but for a pair of doves in the avocado tree, deep in a saddest song competition. Mama Lota, a late riser, was probably still asleep. Nanjela opened the gate and stepped quietly towards the house to wake her. Then she saw, and remembered, the new dogs. They were untied, dozing by the door, the red dust around them scoured with paw prints. One stirred, an ear snapping up like a sail, then down again. Nanjela closed her eyes, crossed herself thrice, and recited a prayer to her ancestors. When she opened her eyes, both dogs had risen, eyes and teeth glinting, ears at full mast.
Nanjela turned and ran. The dogs leapt after her. They did not bark and she did not scream and the morning was eerily quiet as she raced back through Mama Lota’s gate and down the road. She was lurching through her own gate when one of the dogs yanked at her wrapper. Shouting “Futsek!” she slammed the gate across his body. He yelped and darted back, her wrapper still hanging from his jaws, dragging in the dust. She locked the gate and backed away from the wooden slats, which shook with the force of the doubleman throwing himself against it.
Reduced to her underwear and her heartbeat, Nanjela stumbled inside. Trembling, she bathed and changed into a new wrapper. She sat for a while and prayed. She tried to continue her day: cooking, eating, sewing Nayendi’s white wedding dress, cooking, eating, sleeping. But when she rose the next morning, a picture rose with her: the dogs, silent furies; her small body struggling at the gate; the dragging chitenge; her white bloomers incandescent with shame.
She sat on her veranda, listlessly washing her feet. She could feel rather than see the sun emerging behind the smoke from the charcoal pits. Birds snipped the morning quiet into ribbons of sound. Women with buckets of water on their heads drifted down the road, chatting softly. Mothers and daughters. Nanjela watched them bitterly. Her own daughter was coming home today. The bonding ceremony would begin, and she and Mama Lota would become sisters. But none of this eased her. Nanjela felt sure everyone had seen, that the story of her bloomers was spinning through the village, gathering laughter. If only the dog h
ad killed her. Or bitten her leg. Better pity than jokes.
She might have laughed it off herself if she’d been able to sit with her friend and drink tea and talk it over. But they were all too busy with the thrum of the imminent wedding. In a few hours, Nanjela would have to dress up to meet her future son-in-law, who would kneel before her, offering food in exchange for her wisdom. She had in fact already met Lukundo, a few weeks ago, staggering insouciantly as Mama Lota’s demonic dogs pulled him along, straining at their leashes. Lukundo was tall like his aunty, and wore town clothes so casual they had to be expensive. He had a smattering of pimple scars and one of those big, shiny smiles that made Nanjela shake her head. Yes, indeed. Nayendi had done well for herself.
Nayendi, with her terrible, indisputable goodness! Nanjela felt a pang for the little girl she’d once had—the naughty busybody who had once set fire to the curtains, just to see. That was long ago, though, long before Nayendi had started carrying herself like a new wife, doing all her chores, saving her small moneys for school fees. Nanjela knew this undue rectitude had to do with her first-born daughter Anjela, who had renamed her mother for life, only to die of tuberculosis. Such a slight. A cough, a spot of blood. Sorrow. It was after her sister died that Nayendi had started trying to be two daughters in one. But there was something arrogant—wasn’t there?—in the idea that she could be enough for her mother, could make up for the hole that Anjela’s death had made in Nanjela’s chest, a hole like a hole in the ground too big to fill, a hole you could only ever cover up and maybe make a trap with.
There she was now, the perfect daughter, standing by the gate, waiting for Nanjela instead of shouting into the yard like any other relative. Nayendi was wearing a decent skirt suit that had somehow escaped the dust from the road. She had always managed to avoid the dirt, even as a child. Goodness, but Nayendi was pretty now, her skin smooth and reddish like groundnut skin. It was nearly almost tiring how decent and pretty she was. Although the smile Nanjela hid behind her hand as she walked towards her daughter was genuine, her spirits sank when she saw the leather suitcase at Nayendi’s side: brown and spotless and just the right size. It was nearly almost unbearable.