Please Do Not Disturb Read online

  Patrick begged me to talk to Tafumo, to plead his case, ask Tafumo to spare him. I didn’t admit that these days I had no more access to Tafumo than the man on the street. Instead I told Patrick he was being irrational, paranoid. I assured him that Jeko was just intimidating him to fiddle the books. And in part, I believed what I said. The truth was that for a long time very few people had actually vanished. After Levi, the country settled into decades of economic prosperity and, for a period, Tafumo became that very African oxymoron: a benevolent dictator.

  However, more recently, since the financial crash, when charity and loans dried up, the rumours began again. Two ministers, who had been suspected of subversive activity, had vanished a few months ago. But most of us suspected they had fled to Zambia or Mozambique. I had intercepted calls from them, calls from outside the country, so I knew they had run away. And I said all this to Patrick but he didn’t respond, he simply stood in front of me, with his head cast down. Then, before he turned to leave, he looked up just long enough for me to see his dark eyes filling with tears.

  I walked down to the end of the garden and saw some of Patrick’s servants were still living there, waiting for him to return, eating dinner on the hard mud compound just outside the kaya. Dusk had set in and the only illumination was from a fire and an outside light above the kaya door that splattered weak yellow light around the figure of a woman and a child. Flying ants bashed against the bulb and fell dazed to the floor. The woman picked them up, plucked their wings, and threw their bodies into the frying pan where they sizzled and popped into blackened mince. The boy was expertly rolling nsima into a ball, punching a hole into it with his thumb, filling the hole with the mince, tipping his head back to drop the dirty blob into his mouth. Then the woman sat, methodically dragging a metal comb through her hair in slow sensual motions, placing it back in the coals before repeating the movement. When I got closer, she sprang to her feet, ironing her chitenge with her hands. She made the slightest gesture and the boy scampered, leaving his metal bowl of food, which was quickly clouded with flies.

  ‘You know me,’ I said. She nodded and I caught a whiff of burnt hair.

  ‘Where has Patrick gone? Did they leave in someone’s car? With a friend?’

  She looked puzzled, as if it were a trick question. Then she turned, her bare feet slapping the soil as she ran into the kaya. I went after her and when I got to the door I looked in and she was crouched in the gloom, her boy tucked up in the corner, watching. A uniform hung on a nail; the only other clothes she had was a threadbare chitenge draped over a mattress on the floor. Her sink was a plastic bowl. Neatly arranged on a piece of folded newspaper was a bar of Lifebuoy soap, a comb with many missing teeth, a tub of Vaseline and a Bic pen. A life’s worth of possessions.

  I shouted, ‘Don’t you run from me,’ but she turned and handed me some paper. ‘This is the place for Patrick’s mother.’

  As I returned to my car, I considered heading straight to the address. But it was a few hours’ drive away and I was exhausted, the ceaseless pain from my tooth acting like a hole through which all my energy drained. So instead I drove the short distance home.

  Ezekiel, my guard, waved and opened the gates. I glanced at the blinking light of the security camera as I drove in. ‘Everything ok, Ezekiel?’ He came to attention, an old man’s best impression of a soldier. ‘Yes, sah, all safe and all sound.’ I’d bought him a new uniform, but he insisted on wearing his old one. He’d wear it until it disintegrated, shredded off him like old skin. His cheap polyester dungarees, an insignia of a lion on the chest, had been repatched so many times it was hard to discern their original colour. And instead of the army boots I’d got him he had on his dirty wellingtons.

  When I got into the house Ruby was washing dishes. ‘Evening, master, would you like some dinner?’ She wiped her hands on a tea towel and awaited my reply. Just to the left of her I saw my reflection in the kitchen window and was struck by how we now seemed the same age. When I first hired Ruby she’d seemed ancient, a grandmother, a woman old before her time, worn out by a hard life. Now I’d caught up and we looked like contemporaries, me and my old maid. ‘No, I’m not hungry, thank you.’

  She turned back to the sink but I stayed, studying her. This old servant, in her blue headscarf – I’d never once seen her hair – with her cracked mud-brown heels: she was the thread that weaved through everything. I’d hired Ruby when Hope and I first married and she had cared for me, cooked for me, and then accepted Rebecca as my new wife. And when Rebecca died Ruby had cared for Solomon.

  I left her to clean up and went to check on Solomon. I sat on his bed, watching him sleep a while before I went to my bedroom, opening the door to my walk-in wardrobe where I kneeled down. Sweeping aside my shoes, I used my fingernails to pull up the floorboard, and into the space below I secreted my folder. Having replaced the board, I realised I was too tired to even make it to bed. So I lay on the floor, allowing exhaustion to smother me.

  Hope

  Love has a life of its own. After he beat me, our love lived on. After I left him and went to live in the palace, it lived on. When he tried to reconcile he ruined it by boasting about a new promotion. Even as I sat hating him – hating all foolish men and their silly pride – our love lived on. When he became a minister and attended palace meetings, when we saw one another but no longer talked. When he remarried so quickly and finally had a son. Even when his second wife died recently, my love still believed he might try me again. I was disappointed and relieved when he didn’t. Yet still, our love lived on.

  When I left him, friends told me to leave Bwalo. But why should I leave a country I loved? So instead I packed up my life and went to live in the baobab wing of the palace. I knew the day I moved in that the palace had become more than just my livelihood. It became my shelter and my cage, my home and my life. And I realised how important it was to keep my position there. But I understood something about Tafumo that would ensure I kept my job. It was a simple thing but it didn’t flow with logic. It moved against the current. People assume tyrants desire capitulation. But if you submitted to Tafumo, he disposed of you. So as staff came and went, only Essop and I remained. I stayed because I never completely submitted. Essop joked that he stayed because Tafumo hadn’t noticed he was still there.

  Did it flatter me that I was never fired? Did I believe unseen emotions tied us? I suppose such foolish notions may have filled my head from time to time. Nursing a powerful, charming man, it’s hard for emotions not to creep in. And I wasn’t always an old woman, you know; I still carry the young woman I was inside me.

  Sometimes when Tafumo took residency at his lake house – away from the ludicrous palace and inhuman scale of everything – more human-sized thoughts settled in. He took a skeletal staff: Jeko, Chef, and he never went anywhere without Essop, who he called Lin, his tongue. One summer he had ministers up to the lake house and they drank and basked on the rocks like sea lions. That night Tafumo suffered a migraine.

  When Essop came to get me, he caught my arm and said, ‘Take care, Hope.’ In my rush, I assured Essop I always took care of him but when I got to the room, I saw Essop wasn’t asking that I be good to Tafumo. He’d been warning me to watch myself. Tafumo smiled like a drunken monkey. He was naked. This was long before his body became a part of my ordinary every day – before I helped him dress and swapped his colostomy bags – so I was shocked. Below his leathery belly his cock swung like the thick rope off a buoy. He demanded a vitamin injection. A concoction created by his doctor, which had no vitamins in it but was a brew of amphetamines and testosterone. I was preparing the injection, expelling bubbles, when I felt a claw bite my thigh. I turned, thinking he was falling, grabbing hold for support, but the hand was shooting up my skirt and I slapped him, swiping the needle across his hand. We stopped, watched blood rise in a thin smile, I felt heat pour off him, that same rage that Josef released upon me so many times. But Tafumo cooled. He slumped back, hung his head and, like a wounded
animal, raised his paw for me to mend.

  When I returned to my room, Essop was there asking if I was ok. I told him I was fine but the moment he touched my shoulder, tears came, and I pressed my body into his, the first contact in years that wasn’t violent but tender, like a brother protecting me against the world.

  Life went on, the incident was never mentioned, and it sunk into the vague sediment below memory. But that faint scar, like a pencil line a child tried so hard to rub out, reminded me it was true. It happened. The line drawn across a time when I’d been a foolish girl and Tafumo the great King had proven himself to be just another man. A time when I’d still believed the world was good, that truth and faith were all I needed and that Levi really had died in an accident. I looked at that line now as I pushed Tafumo around his palace to look at all his paintings, to remind himself of his own importance.

  Tafumo gazed at one of his favourite landscapes and I stood patiently waiting, tuning in to the sound of the sprinklers outside, imagining the twisted hoses to be a feast of snakes tittering as they wasted water, jeering at the parched land that lay beyond the palace. I hated this musty old museum room. Like many others, it was modelled on some room in Buckingham Palace: gloomy, dark, oppressive. And many of these paintings were counterfeits of those that hung in the Queen’s own residence, this replica room full of fake Masters. Even the palace air conditioning was kept low, a brittle chill pervading the rooms. So utterly British was the atmosphere that at times I was surprised to see Africa outside. As if the windows were paintings and the paintings were windows. The dark bulletproof glass enhanced the illusion that the windows framed exotic African art, while the paintings captured real views of the glum English countryside.

  On the way back to Tafumo’s bedroom we stopped short. Down the corridor came another fake, another counterfeit. This one a copy of Tafumo himself; a young and powerful doppelganger. Young Tafumo bowed, ‘Excellency.’ And Old Tafumo nodded. Then Young Tafumo walked on, off to warm up the nation, to drive down streets lined by people waving flags and chanting, ‘Ta-fu-mo!’ Sham double of a sham leader.

  After my shift, I walked down the warped corridor to my room. I remembered Tafumo giving me a string of pearls not long after the lake incident. I got them and went to the kitchen where Essop was sipping tea and I joked, ‘Are you the cook these days?’

  ‘Might be a good move,’ Essop replied. ‘I could impress you with my cooking instead of boring you with my folk stories.’

  ‘You’re in the right job. You bore me well.’

  Essop wore the same clothes he always had, frozen in the eighties with his bad suits, and something about this made me happy. He handed me a bag. ‘Chef said it’s beef with horseradish, as you like. Maybe I could make you lunch one day. We’ve not sat for a long time.’

  ‘That’d be nice. Have you found yourself a good wife yet?’

  With a cheeky smile, Essop joked, ‘I’m married to Tafumo.’

  ‘That’s a shame because I’m married to Tafumo too.’

  When Essop whispered, ‘So many wives so little love,’ I quipped, ‘So many servants so few friends,’ and we shared a secret smile.

  I sat and Essop poured me some tea. I added milk. He watched me closely and when I looked up his eyes shot down as I said, ‘What story will you bore me with today?’

  ‘The biggest story of all. The story of a nation. Our history is not the one in textbooks,’ he paused, ‘no offence to the great history Josef wrote . . .’ I waved my hand to show no offence was taken, and Essop continued, ‘Like all nations, ours was built on the backs of slaves. When the Ngoni came they made the Tumbuka their slaves. The Ngoni sliced the tongues and lips off the Tumbuka. Some Ngoni women grew their thumbnails especially for the purpose of gouging eyeballs out of Tumbuka rebels.’

  ‘That’s disgusting, Essop.’

  ‘History is disgusting, Hope. When missionaries came they asked the Ngoni if they could educate their children. But the Ngoni were too smart for this trick. Ngoni didn’t want Christians softening their violent hearts. So instead of sending their own children, they sent the children of their Tumbuka slaves. So you see. The Ngoni sowed the seeds of their own demise by permitting their slave children the power of education. Only a generation later, those children of slaves were equipped to thrive in the new world, leaving the Ngoni for dust. It was these educated Tumbuka children that grew up and took on important administrative and colonial positions. It was these slave children that grew up and rewrote their own Tumbuka history and even convinced the white man they were the more powerful tribe and, according to their history, they had the rights to large tracts of Ngoni land. One of the rare times history has been written by the losers. The Tumbuka out-foxed their oppressors. Over time, Tumbuka became the official language, metaphorically slicing Ngoni tongues. Tumbuka used words as spears and because of their education they continued to be chosen for important bureaucratic jobs, as Ngoni grew weak and incapable of adapting. So you see, Hope, ultimately victory will go to the slaves, to servants, teachers, nurses, translators, who each day rise quietly to the top. The seeds of the future live in the children of slaves.’

  I sipped my tea and said, ‘I know, Essop. I’m a child of slave children. I am Tumbuka.’

  Essop smiled gently and replied, ‘Yes, Hope. I too am Tumbuka.’

  Josef

  When I woke on my wardrobe floor I was too tired to move. My tongue strummed the raw nerve of my tooth and the pain jolted me to my feet. I went to Solomon’s room and listened to the rhythm of his breathing. His desk was piled with books. I flicked through Bwalo History, a book I’d written. Every Bwalo child knew the first sentence by heart: A barefooted boy left his village to begin a journey that ended in him becoming King.

  According to the book, Tafumo was descended from the great Chewa tribe, ‘splintering off the tail of the mfecani, settling on the spine of the lake, to build the bones of our glorious nation’. Textbook-Tafumo was a boy whose village was razed by colonial police, whose father was murdered, who walked miles to find a man who educated him and sent him to the uk to train as a doctor, to learn the ways and weaknesses of the British so he could return to Bwalo to defeat them.

  All lies. Tafumo was distinguished only by greed. His mother died in childbirth; he fattened himself on her, emerging a brilliant sword drawn from a weary sheath. He was born in a nameless village, son of unknown parents from a small, unremarkable tribe. Most men accept their insignificance but into hollow obscurity Tafumo poured legend.

  The greatest lie was that Tafumo was Bwalo born. In fact, his village was on the wrong side of the border. But as many hands wear a rough oar smooth, so a story many times told will start to ring true. Now even I struggled to feel false splinters. But I knew that first sentence, the most apocryphal-sounding, was true. Only a detail was missing: A barefooted boy left his village to begin a journey that ended in him becoming King, and by his side walked his friend, Sefu.

  Tafumo didn’t walk alone. I walked with him. I have always walked with him. Our true story lacked the drama that seasoned the textbook. Our village wasn’t burned, our fathers weren’t slaughtered. It was a more basic story that began the day a man drove to our village and showed us there was more to the world than mud, maize and chickens. A man with a car and a suit: unimaginable things for boys born in dirt. And while the rest of us wanted to talk to the man and touch him, Tafumo wanted to become him. The man had a car radio that we listened to for so long the battery ran flat and we had to jumpstart his car. And while the village talked about the magic music box, Tafumo remembered something else: a news report of the Queen saying her Commonwealth covered a third of the earth. It sparked a hunger in Tafumo for more than just food.

  That night Tafumo told me we were going to become great men. We were to run away, educate ourselves like the man with the car. Tafumo knew of a missionary school across the border. My parents were dead and I lived with my aunt and, though I knew I would miss her, I trusted Tafumo. He had alwa
ys protected me and I trusted him with my life. Due to lack of records, our age remains a mystery but I suspect we were barely teenagers when we ran away.

  Following only vague direction we trekked through bush, terrified of animals. That area now has no animals, the wild has been driven north in search of moisture, but back then it was overrun by lions. We barely slept. Waking each morning more tired than the last, until Tafumo fell ill and for days I carried him on my back. And while I carried him, he told me what our story was. Speaking in a daze, like a witch doctor in a trance, he said we were born in Bwalo, from a powerful Chewa village that had stood against colonial tax, fought to the death, and we were all that remained.

  Words poured from his lips like sustenance for our starving bodies. Nodding and walking, I digested my new life as delirium dissolved my past. I couldn’t know it then but his story would one day elevate us from dirt to power, mud to mansions. I carried him for days until finally we came to a courtyard where children sat in the shade of the kachere tree, writing with chalk on slate as nuns sang the ABC.

  A priest ran over to us, ‘Children, what’s happened?’ I was about to tell him we’d run away, that we needed to go back to our village. But before I spoke, Tafumo whispered from my back, like a voice in my head, ‘We are Chewa. Our village was burned by colonial police. We need help, Father, we have nowhere to go.’