Rémy Ngamije

Wicked

The first time she touched Salman’s hair she felt a sliver of envy. Why would men be blessed with such beautiful hair? They did not need it for job interviews. They did not need it to entice their lovers. Salman had laughed when she said that. “Then according to you,” he had replied, “my daughter will easily find a job and have her fill of men. The first one is okay. But the second one I’m not sure about.”

He had said it so casually—my daughter. She had asked if his daughter had a mother.

“Of course,” Salman replied. “My wife.”

The first tendrils of wickedness had snaked their way through her. He had looked at her intently and waited for a reply. Instead she had finished eating, thanked him for the meal, and exited the restaurant quickly. He had called her for a couple of days but she refused to answer.

Salman’s black curls were soft unlike her hair which was coarse. The chemical treatment she gave it every other month could never sink deep enough to her genes where it mattered most. Sooner or later the coarseness came back through the roots, prompting another enrolment in the hour-long course of gossip and potential scalp burns at her hair salon. The first time Salman had ran his hands through her straightened hair he said he preferred the natural texture. Despite his insistence that he liked her because she was real, because she was not like other girls with long, fake nails, and caked-on makeup she still refused to wear it the way he wanted. Men had a way of saying they wanted natural things without actually wanting natural things.

She watched Salman sleep, breathing deeply and slowly. She wondered what words he had whispered to his wife when they were still young and new, the vows he had made to always protect and provide, the magic words of parenthood they said when they agreed on their daughter’s name.

She wondered how Salman felt knowing he had failed to protect them and to provide for them. She could never know how he felt about being unable to unite his family under one roof. It was not something they ever spoke about. More than once she wanted to ask him how he felt about his fruitless search for his family. Perhaps, she thought, the search was a ritual he carried out to maintain his standing and rank as a husband and a father. She looked at Salman and sighed again. She thought about how much she would later miss this moment with this man when she arrived back at her place. She would miss this room that made her feel wicked.

The green walls were cracked. They were pitted in other places as though they had been the victim of a drive-by shooting. The square space in the wall masquerading as a window filtered the late afternoon sunshine so that yellow and orange rays hit the opposite wall. Faded magazine and newspaper cuttings of George Weah and Jay-Jay Okocha pasted on one wall passed for decoration. An Arabic prayer she could not read hung above the door. The bed on which they lay was metal and old. The springs had squealed during their shy sex, with the lovers shamed by the noise made by their efforts—they tried to slow down, to be discreet with their needs so the awkward sounds would not sell out their wants. When they slumped on it afterwards it looked like a kangaroo’s joey-laden pouch. The mattress was covered in floral-patterned sheets, the flowers’ colours were faded, probably from being washed too often. Washed, away, she thought, along with whatever wicked acts they bore witness to. She wondered if she and Salman were the only ones who came to this place, this room with its yellowed plastic fan that creaked whenever it windmilled wafts of semi-cool air across the room, its cracked sink where Salman splashed his face with cold water—when the tap was not broken or when the water was flowing—and its cupboard full of wire coat hangers. The wooden bedside table held Salman’s cassette radio, the only accompaniment they ever had for their romance. No flowers, no chocolates, no expensive perfumes, no lingerie—they had the black radio which squeaked its music into the room. When the Nairobi heat lulled them to sleep her dreams would seem only half real with Ismaël Lô’s “Tajabone” playing in the background.

Today, Salman had brought Bob Marley and the Wailers. As “Wait In Vain” floated from the treble-heavy speaker she thought of this moment, this hot afternoon when everything was sweet, when her concerns and struggles seemed far away, when their bodies pushed away worries of him leaving soon to go to Dadaab to continue his search for his wife and daughter. It also seemed to presage the time when he would not be in this room with her. At the end of the week he would take a rickety Starbus to Garissa and alight at the refugee camp, passing parked Toyota Land Cruisers and miles of wire fencing, to scroll through the lists of fresh arrivals, scanning for Aaminah and Calaaso Ghedi. She had never seen pictures of Salman’s wife and daughter. She imagined the wife would be pretty with a long, oval face, a high forehead, and jet black sheaves of hair she would hide beneath a hijab. The daughter, she thought, would be demure, lanky and thin until the days of womanhood changed her and her fortunes forever.

Salman made the journey to Dabaab once a month. When he left she would sadden and become heavy, moving through the world like a woman deep in pregnancy, eager to be released of her burden and at the same time afraid of what the future held. She became snappy. She became anxious. She was lonely. She fell silent for long periods at a time, bereft of words, her happiness stolen from her. When Salman was away, she became all the things she vowed she would never be for or to men both in their presence and in their absence.

The First Never was dependence. Never again, she vowed, would she be shackled to a man like a dog to a post. She had a job. She made her own money. She bought her own clothes. In time she would drive her own car and then own her own house, perhaps in Kilimani or Kileleshwa. She would never be dependent on a man to provide for her, to take care of her when he saw fit, when he needed favours or the comforts of her thighs.

The Second Never banned patience and compromise, the twin gospels men used to trick women into becoming their mothers, their sisters, their confidants, their lovers, and their therapists all in one exhausting combination while they managed to remain themselves, unschooled, underdeveloped, untethered. Kamwe! No more trips to jail to bail out a boyfriend. If the next one was arrested he had made his choice; he wanted the company of other men. She felt sour whenever she thought about all the money she had lost in bribes and bail money for her last boyfriend. The bottom of her stomach fell out when she recalled the three separate evenings she spent travelling between ATMs to withdraw all the necessary shillings she needed to bribe her way into the police station and then pay for his bail. She had risked rape and robbery for him. She had been a patient girlfriend. She had been a compromising woman. He had repaid her in frequent, lengthy, and unannounced absences. Never again! The money she spent on him could have bought her a holiday in one of the places she saw on the television. Malaysia-Truly-Asia, I-Love-New-York, or any of the other places in the world she had never visited.

The Third Never outlawed waiting. If time waited for no man she was certain it did not care for women at all. She would never wait for a man again.

But in the days before Salman boarded the battered bus to look for his family she became all of these things. She became more than these things to him, for him, and when he was gone she felt like she had become less to herself. Salman left her hoping he would find what he sought. At the same time she hoped he did not. Her prayers were an exercise in contradiction. “Please bring him back,” she whispered feverishly into her clasped hands. When he returned she would be glad he had come back. “Safely,” she said. And alone, she thought to herself.

Sometimes, during their weekends together she would wake with the sun gone, with Salman still asleep next to her, his reddish-browness muscled and pressed against her own darkness. Salman called her his cup of Kenyan coffee whenever he undressed her, a compliment which eroded her resolve and all the Nevers she said she would never ever be again. But by the time he placed his mouth upon her breasts she had been reduced to desirous dependence, eternal patience, and willing compromise. She was happy to wait.

Lying on his bed she bunched the softness of his hair in her hands and then teased it out in its fine individuality. She stretched a curl until it was straight. The feeling of it in her hands would linger long after she had taken her matatu back to Rongai and the apartment she shared with her cousin so that whenever she came across anything with fibrous strands she would stroke it to relive the connection. Like her cousin’s wig, the one she lived with who told her there were many men like Salman, men who needed many half lives to make them whole. Or the tassels at the end of the rug that knotted themselves despite her best attempts not to tread upon them. Even her mother’s knitting wool and the scarves she made. Her hands sampled all of these in longing reminiscence, each texture never coming close to the softness that so bewitched her fingertips. Despite the abundance of strings to stroke there was no substitute for the thread that was Salman.

This was going to be a tough week for her. It was filled with the potential for Salman to find his family and the wicked hope that he would not.

She felt her heart flutter coldly.

She was being unfair.

She was being wicked.

She wanted Salman to find his family. She wanted him to be whole. She wanted his daughter to grow up with a father. She wanted his wife’s ears to hear all of the whispered indecencies of lust and all the promises of love that Salman lavished upon her. She wanted Salman to find peace at the end of his pilgrimages.

She also wanted him to come back to her, to this room, and to the next moment just like this.

This week she would take detailed minutes and she would diligently file reports. She would allow her boss to pinch her buttocks when she came to present him with a list of the week’s meetings. She would sidle away from his touch politely, never saying no, never saying yes, carefully staying in the middle ground which did not cost her the job which stayed the cruel control of the First Never. 

It helped her situation slightly that her boss’s wife had come to work one day and stalked around the office, scrutinising every female employee, weighing up each woman’s beauty, and gauging whether they were a temptation for her husband or not. The boss’s wife had floated past her desk without so much as a second glance. Clearly she was not pretty enough. But the junior secretary had been thoroughly appraised with a look that acknowledged the presence of competition. The look had warned. The look had also pleaded.

And at the end of the week, after dodging her boss’s hands, she would not even be able to run to Salman’s which knew all the points of pressure and pleasure.

There would be no arrangement to meet in this room in Eastleigh, a suburb of spices and fabrics, of colour and colourful crowds. Eastleigh, where Salman and anyone who looked like Salman were the target of prejudice and violence after Westgate. There would be no shillings for the man at the counter who probably thought she was a prostitute. There would be no long walk down the corridor. No key, no turned door knob, no hesitant hello, no frantic kissing, no fracas of friction, no quick pause, no eager resumption, no tinge of regret, no sadness, and no sleeping Salman’s hair to caress.

Her cousin had told her there were no rights in love back when Salman was about to become a string of Saturdays to savour. She had walked into the apartment and her cousin, watching a Nollywood film about a family whose fortunes had been squandered by a demon-possessed son, looked up at her in surprise. She was back too soon from her “date.” She had sat on the sofa with her cousin and they finished the film together, talking about Salman all the while. Her cousin listened to the promises she had made in her past to safeguard her future self. “Surely,” she told her cousin, “Salman’s honesty about his wife and child meant something."

“Foolish,” her cousin had replied. She began to undo her thick braids in preparation for washing her hair and going to the salon. “The first thing my boyfriend told me was that he had a wife and three children. He said he loved his wife and nothing would change.” She carried on frankly. “There’re no rights in love, my dear. The sooner you know that the better.” A thick braid hung undone, unshod of its plaited dignity. She began to help her cousin undo her braids. “Who did my boyfriend give his vows to? His wife. Who does he complain to about her now? Me. I am for better and she for worse. Who cooks for him? His wife. Who does he whine to about her ugali and her wet fry that he doesn’t like? Me. Who gave him children? His wife. But who does he fuck like it’s the first time? Me.” Her cousin detangled a particularly persistent knot. “Honesty? It doesn’t mean anything.”

She had looked at her hands in shame, slick and shiny with the oils her cousin applied to her hair to keep it soft.

“I see that you’re hurt by this truth,” her cousin said, “but love doesn’t have any legislation. There are no rules. If things work out then they work out. If they don’t, well, that’s also part of life. You know this. You had a boyfriend. You’re not the only one who wasn’t someone’s somebody. There’s no return policy on love, my dear.”

“I didn’t say that I love him.” 

Her cousin snorted. “You’ve been walking through this place touching your hair absentmindedly. Looking at yourself in the mirror for too long. Only a man can make a woman do things like that.”

“It isn’t love.”

“If it isn’t then it isn’t. But if it is, be careful.”

Salman slept as she dressed. She combed her hair and put the brush in her handbag. She put some lipstick on her lips. She opened the door gently and stepped into the corridor.

“Nakupenda,” she said to the closed the door. She felt the joyful release of the truth.

Then she felt sad.

And then she felt wicked.

Rémy Ngamije is a Rwandan-born Namibian novelist, columnist, essayist, short-story writer, poet, and photographer. His debut novel The Eternal Audience Of One is available from Blackbird Books and Amazon. He also writes for brainwavez.org, a writing collective based in South Africa. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Namibia's first literary magazine: Doek! His short stories have appeared in Litro Magazine, AFREADA, The Johannesburg Review of Books, The Amistad, The Kalahari Review, American Chordata, Doek!, and Azure. His poetry has been anthologized in My Heart In Your Hands: Poems From Namibia (forthcoming from UNAM Press, 2020). His short story, "From The Lost City of Hurtlantis To The Streets of Helldorado (or, Franco)", published in American Chordata, was shortlisted for Best Original Fiction by Stack Magazines in 2019. More of his writing can be read on his website: remythequill.com