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Left in Swahili

Kate Kimball

    Anne needed to exchange a hundred dollar bill, and she wasn’t sure about crossing the street to the bank because there weren’t any traffic signals. She was arguing with Abasi about getting directions. He stood next to her, consulting a map, the sheen of sun on the fold of his neck, insisting that they walk another block to the bus stop. It had to be over a hundred degrees. At home, Abasi would have been inside watching television or talking on the phone, and she would have had to beg him to venture out. He wasn’t much into adventure or exhaustion, but Anne was always convinced that she could change this. It was this reason that she had stayed married for the last few years.
    “Why can’t we just cross here? We can still be in time for the meeting,” Anne swatted a fly from her face. The sweat on her back made her feel like insects were crawling all over her. Her cotton dress pressed against her sides, and she pulled them from her, knowing that she looked ridiculous.
    “I know where to go, just give me a minute...I just need to read this.”
    Abasi looked down at the map, folding a corner underneath.
    “You look like a boy scout,” Anne said.
    Abasi ignored her. She breathed in the exhaust from a truck that swerved by them, almost running along the curb. Anne fanned her face, staring up at one of the high rises in the center of town. It looked like a gust of wind would make it topple over. Abasi argued that it had one of the best restaurants in the city, but Anne doubted this, staring at the windows that looked as though they had never been washed.
    “I thought the UN was notorious for having the best maps in the world.”
    “There’s nothing wrong with the map,” Abasi inched closer, and looked back and forth between the map and the street signs. Anne knew she was giving him a hard time for no reason. Really, she was thrilled that she finally was in the place where he grew up. She thought it could bring them closer. They had come to Nairobi to meet with Mwangi Kipnegro, who was also a UN delegate. There were some changes with development in parts of Kenya and Somalia, and Abasi had even hinted that they might be moving to one of those countries soon as an assignment. He kidded with her often, telling her to keep her bags packed. “Tomorrow we could be on the other side of the world.”
    Abasi had been working with the UN for over fifteen years, and in the eight years that they had been married, Anne knew very little about his job. She often joked with Abasi and told him that he was a collector of secrets. She had a few friends who were married to CIA employees, and they always exchanged friendly banter about how little they knew about what their spouses did for a living. Anne, who was open about anything, baring even the most intimate details on a first meeting with someone, found it ironic that her marriage worked with Abasi, who told her very little about anything. Her friends always joked with her and told her how opposites always attract. “Besides,” one friend had said, “Everyone knows you are addicted to anything that isn’t American.”
    Anne coughed a little, trying to get Abasi’s attention. It was useless. She shifted her weight, rocking back and worth.
    “Look, just wait here and I’ll be back in five—”
    Anne didn’t even give him a moment to argue with her. She hadn’t even planned what she was going to do—but she was tired of waiting. She walked out into the middle of the congested street, and one by one, the cars slammed on their breaks. A white truck swerved to the curb. A yellow cab almost hit her, and was within inches of her legs when she looked directly into the driver’s eyes, as he rolled down his window and cursed at her in Swahili. He wagged his finger over and over and his mouth widened in such a way that she, for a moment, thought he could swallow her whole.
    She stared ahead at the green door of the bank that stood out against the building that looked as though it was getting ready to fall to the ground. She could hear Abasi calling her name, but she never looked back. She felt her stomach tighten a little. She straightened her dress, swept her sandy hair from off her neck and removed the elastic from her wrist. She was soaking—partly from the heat, partly from fear. Grazing death from time to time was the only way that she could ever be sure she was alive.

    Anne was a woman that experienced everything through the physical reaction to the body. She knew she was sad when she felt tears. She knew she felt happy when she was filled with the urge to smile or laugh. Love with Abasi was painfully intimate, sometimes to the point that he had said he felt as though she knew everything about him and he had nothing left to himself. She did have a way with exposing him. Allowing her to do this was one of the things she loved about him most, even though it scared her a little and she was afraid she would one day lose him.
    They had made love quickly the morning they arrived to the hotel. They were both exhausted, but the time change and the brightness of the day kept them from sleep. Anne felt the familiar curve of Abasi’s shoulder brush hers as he thrashed back and forth, throwing a leg in and out of the cream-colored sheets. She sat up, pushed her hair to the side of her face, and touched the side of his face. She had put her arm around Abasi and had started unbuttoning his shirt. He laughed a little.
    “Can’t we just sit here for a moment? Just be. We don’t need to do something all of the time.”
    She had done that with him for less than a minute before she became restless again. She stared at the wall and thought about making more coffee. She wanted to do something, anything, to cease the familiar humming inside her mind. She felt completely disoriented. On their first date, she had told him that she was like trying to read Arabic, and that eventually, everything would visually run together like a wave of curls. Abasi had laughed and had told her that the Arabic alphabet was actually very distinct and he could distinguish one letter from the next. He wrote the letters out in pen on a napkin, giving their pronunciation, opening his mouth wide, smiling when she tried to argue with the way he sounded the letters. “I’m still in the beginner’s course,” he had said. “But, I will make it to the advanced one in no time.”
    That morning, she pulled at his arms. Please, her touch told him. I can’t be anymore. Abasi had eventually relented and he went quickly, vigorously, almost to the point where Anne felt pain. This was what she enjoyed. In that moment, she felt as though she could break in half and melt like ice all over the bed. After, she held his hand and smiled.
    “Now, I am officially exhausted,” Abasi had said.

    “You don’t need to always worry me,” Abasi told her when she returned. She held up the shillings and laughed. “There are other ways to be entertained. This isn’t like New York, you know. If something happens here and you have to go to the hospital, it can be more dangerous than getting in an accident—”
    “I know—”
    “And it can be difficult with figuring out the travel insurance and the coverage—”
    “I know—but I did get directions. We have to go over to Kenyatta Highway. We might just need to take a taxi. I know Mwangi said to take the bus, but...”
    Abasi shook his head. Anne was struck by the difference in him. He seemed sullen here, as though the very act of being in his home country aggravated him. He had seemed much more at peace when they went to Costa Rica for three months for his UN assignment and he spent every free hour reading Spanish dictionaries and practicing his accent. During that time, he had spoken to her in a way that felt irresistible. She pulled him to her, listening to the curl of “R” in his throat. Abasi said that she was bella. Abasi said solo idioma nunca es suficiente.
    “He’ll be disappointed that I don’t even remember the routes. I mean, they only changed a couple. I feel like I’ve forgotten everything.”
    “It’ll come back,” Anne told him, moving to take his hand. “Going home is like riding a bike. Once you get on, it all comes back to you.”

    Anne felt the familiarity of New York City along the streets of Nairobi once Abasi agreed to follow her, even though it meant forgetting the taxi. It was like Abasi had once said, no matter what—home always finds There was no stopping it. It was as if Nairobi was the black and white version and New York—the remake in Technicolor. They were both so classic and decadent, something that belonged to postcards or museums, but never to the people who walked it day after day. She thought of the corner pavement next to the gym she went to every morning and how when the light hit it a certain way, it looked as though it was filled with diamonds. The library, where she worked, had a fountain that was filled with coins that gave off the same shine. She saw the same patterns in the streets of Nairobi—the same subtle shine on the roofs of cars, in the smiles of the people, in the corner pavement that bordered the streets.
    In Nairobi, the buildings, various shades of gray, blue, and salmon, reflected the people—always in a state of trying too hard. She shielded her eyes, brushing the dust off of her leg when she stopped at the street corner, waiting to cross. The peeling paint, breaking signage, cracked glass windows, littered walkways seemed out of place with the stalwartness of the structures. They were supposed to be everything a city stood for. They represented dreams and hard work and the aspiration of wealth—or a vision, which was always a good idea in theory—but, somehow, never quite worked. They were always waiting, coming undone, falling apart at the seams.
    The wind ran through them, the dust clouding their windows and doorways. The echoes of traffic sounded off their doorways—the sound of something unsettles. Abasi had told her how he had spent days in his youth waiting for the bus. He had waited for hours. Now, she looked through the corner building window and saw the security guards in front of the bus stop, surveying the traffic and the crowd of people in their blue long-sleeved uniforms.
    The men wore suits and ties. There were never any wrinkles. What she liked most was their shoes. Abasi had always argued that he could never justify spending hundreds of dollars on a pair of dress shoes, and yet here were men walking along the filthiest street she had ever seen, with polished dress shoes. One man stopped near her, taking his cell phone out of his pocket and answering curtly. She smelled his cologne and thought instantly of the patrons she helped in New York who stopped by on their lunch break, begging for access to some locked document. In the winter, the men would leave a trail of snowflakes in the foyer, brushing the flakes away to keep everything in place. Here, it was the same. There was never anything out of place, even when the men carried something heavy or had an armful of groceries; it was as though the suit was the shadow they could never be without.

    “Honestly, I can’t make out a word you’re saying,” Mwangi Kipnegro said to Anne when she went to introduce herself. “Where did you say you were from?”
    “New York.”
    “She’s from the city,” Abasi said, passing the file to Mwangi, and opening his menu. “She grew up there—a real New Yorker.”
    Anne could tell this did not impress Mwangi. Abasi had told her how Mwangi had lived in more than twelve different countries and that was why he made three times as much as him. “He’s a little serious, but you’ll figure him out,” he had told her days before the trip.
    “A real New Yorker, huh? Did you vote for that Obama?” Mwangi asked.
    Abasi shot her a look and laughed. They sat in a covered restaurant that was open to the street and it was hard to hear over the sound of buzzing mopeds and people calling to each other. People often complained about Anne’s speech. When she was younger, she had an impediment that caused her to slur some of her words. She had worked on it, though, and felt that she could pronounce words as good as anybody else. But, people often went to her husband for the translation of what she was trying to say. It was as though no one believed her.
    “It might just be me,” Mwangi waved his hand. “I’m not a native English speaker.” Abasi and Mwangi laughed. Anne ordered a glass of wine, and watched as the waiter poured it quickly. At home, Anne had a space for everything at the table. Here, it seemed as though the table was set as an after thought. The forks and knifes differed in placement on every table. At home, the table was a place of stillness. It had a center piece—a glass vase with a plant and a beta fish inside. It was a birthday gift to Anne from her boss. The fish, which they named Blue, sat in the tank, moving ever so slightly to let them know she was alive. It was a tradition to stare at the bowl during dinner and to comment on how they needed to get a dog or cat or something more alive. Abasi caught her eyeing the tables in the room, and he smiled a little.
    Mwangi refused the wine. “Too sweet,” he said. “What is it that you do for a living?”
    “I work at a library. I do collection development.”
    “You collect fines?”
    “No, I work in development...acquiring new books and manuscript collections.”
    Anne was used to the glazed over look that people had when she explained her job.
    “She works at getting hard to find books,” Abasi said. “Rare books.”
    “Can’t you find them in America? What’s rare about them?” Mwangi laughed. “They have stores that sell nothing but books!”
    Abasi joined with him in laughter, and for a second, Anne wondered what he really thought of her profession. He had once told another UN delegate that she was an educator and he had been interested in talking with her about the all-boys school that his fourteen year old son went to. Another time, he had told another delegate that she worked in research and that she helped the medical students at Columbia.
    “Things are different globally,” he had once said. “Really, few countries even have publishers for stories. Everything is nonfiction. And children’s books? Forget it. Most countries in Africa have only a few publishers who will even consider them. It’s really all about the pictures and what type of stories you are selling. Plus, you need to be from that region. There are publishers who only consider you if you’re...say...a native Ugandan or something.”
    Now, she wondered if it was really her job that embarrassed him, or if it was the way she refused to take more risks in her professional life.
    “Risks should take place in your personal life,” she had said to him. “Not the other way around. That’s what travel and sports are for—adventure, adrenalin, adversary.”

    Mostly, they ate in silence interspersed with Swahili. Sometimes, Mwangi would catch himself and switch back to English so that she could feel less left out. She listened to the small chime of the silverware on the china. A candle flickered in the breeze and the sun was setting and filling the sky with its magic.
    Abasi and Mwangi soon became engrossed in conversation. It seemed that they flipped several dialects, and she wasn’t even sure if they were speaking in Swahili anymore. Anne had almost flunked French in high school. Her teacher let her take home the final exam and use the book and she still never scored higher than 60%. She had told Abasi on their first date that she would never be able to learn any foreign languages. She had felt that he needed to know that up front. Abasi had an interest in languages from his youth. He had told Anne of trying to make up his own tongue when he was younger, and how his mother became quite frustrated with him.
    “She wanted all of her children to speak English,” he had said. “Swahili was for visiting grandparents...and the gibberish I was saying, well, she wouldn’t stand for it. It was a hard thing to let go of, though. Children have a way with expressing their imaginations, and that was the way I had expressed mine.”
    Anne had the same interest in language, but it was more of an interest in what was silently communicated than what was made verbal. She felt as though she had been in the process of constant translation for years—from one relationship to the next. One man liked to be touched a certain way. Another required a certain look to be reassured. There were lessons to be learned from that, but she didn’t always know what they were.
    Anne had been married a few times. The first was to a British man, who had an affair with their neighbor, and the second was to an Indian, named Mr. Punjab Khalijal, who insisted that she call him Mister Khalijal at all times. The first time she had seen Abasi, she thought she could really be in love. He was almost 6'3, lean, and had a small space between his bottom teeth when he smiled. She found it endearing. He felt like the type of person she could say anything to. She was surprised to learn that he had never been married, and that at thirty-eight, didn’t have any children.
    “Not a chance,” he had said when she asked him. “I am not much into things I don’t have control of. You can never control a child. Everyone should know that.”
    Mostly, she thought she was in love. She didn’t even need to remind herself of that, but every once in a while, like now, she did.

    “You need to learn Swahili from me,” Mwangi said with a laugh. “You know about Swahili, right?”
    Anne had nodded. Abasi had told her its history—how it was created by Arabs who had inter-married with Kenyans on an archipelago off the coast. They thought it would be a unifying language.
    “It doesn’t hold our people together,” he admitted after he tried to get her to learn a few words. She couldn’t get the accent right and soon gave up.
    Abasi had told her about reports that he translated in his office, the tongue that he returned to again and again. She thought about the reams of images she had seen over the past few years—broken faces, cut limbs, collapsing buildings, burning bodies that felt like a translation of Ground Zero. She looked over his shoulder as he read the articles in Swahili and thought about how it seemed to fit people that didn’t belong together.
    “You definitely should let me teach you,” Mwangi said. “I am an excellent teacher.”
    “Ah...Mwangi, Anne is not much for languages,” Abasi told him.
    “What? You said she works in a library...you do, right? Books? Stories? Education? Surely you must have learned something.”
    Anne shook her head. She didn’t know how to tell him how she mainly flipped through books for the pictures. She became easily bored when she attempted to read a book from start to finish, and stopped half way through. Abasi had tried to encourage her to join a book group with some of the other people he worked with, but it always seemed like a waste to her. She just liked the feel of books—their solid spines, the way the pages felt in her hand, the promise of having so much to say.
    “Maybe you haven’t found the right language,” he said. He poured more sugar in his coffee and stirred it with vigor.
    “Or, maybe you haven’t found the right thing to talk about. That’s the real trick. You want to know how I learned Mandarin? Pieces of china.”
    Mwangi told them about how he had found pieces of broken china all over the coast of Lamu when he was in his twenties. “It got me thinking, you know? About beginnings, roots—what holds together, what pulls us apart as a people. Everything is based on common language. One thing I can never convince people of is that China had to be in trade with Kenya at some point. I mean, all along the coast are these pieces of broken Chinese pottery that are washed up on the shore.”
    “How do you know they’re Chinese?” Anne wondered if Mwangi was threatened by being sent to China when he misbehaved as a youth. Was that a common thing in Africa like it was in the United States? It had always seemed to be at the edge of the earth and whenever she was bad, her mother had told her she would end up there, cleaning walkways.
    “By the blue and white and coral paints. It really puts a very different twist on the history—who first came here and what they all did. I feel like I’m always trying to put the past together to sustain things for the future.”
    Anne nodded, wanting to know more.
    “I have a whole jar of those China pieces,” Mwangi said, wiping his mouth on the napkin. “I carry it around with me, you know? A kind of superstition—something for luck.” He reached down and brought the small glass jar from his briefcase. It reminded Anne of the jar of buttons her mother had kept on her bureau. She always thought she might have a need to sew one on. But, she never did. If a button came off, her mother would throw the jacket or blouse in a corner of the laundry room and take it to the Goodwill. She never bothered with reparations.
    Mwangi passed the jar to her, and as she opened the lid, she was struck by the small white and blue pieces. “Look at these, Abasi. They really do like they’re different.”
    She passed the pieces to him. She watched as he felt their sharp edges and turned them over in his hand. He lifted them to his nose and smelled them. “They smell like the Indian Ocean,” he said. She thought of how Abasi had talked about swimming off the shores of Mombasa and without a care in the world when he was younger. “It’s when I came here that everything changed,” he said. When she followed his suit and lifted the pieces, she found nothing—only the faint smell of the city.

    “Why do you insist on approaching everything like an argument? I mean, it was just a meeting, and there are things to go over and I told you this, remember?” Abasi paced back and forth in the hotel room, taking off his tie and throwing it in the corner with the same vigor that Mwangi had when he paid for dinner.
    “Are you embarrassed?” She insisted. “Tell me.”
    “We’ve had this conversation before, you know? No. I’ve never been embarrassed. I honestly don’t even know where you got that notion.”
    Anne thought of her British husband, the way that he had once written a poem about her struggle with a speech impediment and published it without her knowledge. He had said he meant it to be endearing. But when she read the lines, she felt exploited. She had run naked down the beach on the shore of his hometown, and had screamed when she went skydiving over Fiji. Yet, his words made her feel exposed in a way that she could not comprehend. It was as though he felt that he had to speak for her, and that she couldn’t do it herself.
    “It’s like you have to do everything...like you don’t even think I can speak for myself.”
    Abasi shook his head. She knew that he had little patience for her need for reassurance. He often told her that he could only tell her how much he loved her so much before he grew tired. He was easily bored with repetition and had difficulty with expressing his real emotions anyway. He had, on several occasions, blamed this on his culture. At other times, though, he blamed it on his father.
    “You know what I said about Mwangi. Remember? We had things to discuss, things that needed to be reported on.”
    “That’s not the point, you know? It was the way...” Anne stopped. She honestly couldn’t figure out the language to put her words in. She could hold his hand, kiss his neck, breathe softly into his ear, but that would mean nothing now. There was too much that was always lost in his translation.
    “There are some things that I can’t talk about with you, remember? We have had this argument from the start. Here, things are better off left in Swahili.”
    Anne shook her head. She immediately felt as though the room was closing in on her, as though the very walls could speak against her or swallow her whole. She paced back and forth, ignoring Abasi as he started to untie his shoes. She wanted to run and run, to erase the hum of dinner, the sound of mopeds, every bright star in the sky.
    “Anne, are you okay?” For a second, she looked in his eyes; saw the earnestness of the man who had touched her so often with so much promise. She thought of pieces of china and the way they felt in her palm. She stared at him, thought about every place he had taken her to, the way her voice seemed erased by the touch of his hand. She could get it back, she could. She could open her mouth and overwhelm him with the volume of her speech. She closed her eyes then, thinking of the way she felt on the streets of Nairobi. She remembered the way her sweat brought her to life.



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