Read African Quilt : 24 Modern African Stories (9781101617441) for Free Online Page A

strength in the eyes, the purpose, was something Bryan didn’t have. They had strong faith in those days long ago.
    Biographies of explorers who were educated in Edinburgh; they knew what to take to Africa: doctors, courage, Christianity, commerce, civilization. They knew what they wanted to bring back: cotton—watered by the Blue Nile, the Zambezi River. She walked after Bryan, felt his concentration, his interest in what was before him and thought, “In a photograph we would not look nice together.”
    She touched the glass of a cabinet showing papyrus rolls, copper pots. She pressed her forehead and nose against the cool glass. If she could enter the cabinet, she would not make a good exhibit. She wasn’t right, she was too modern, too full of mathematics.
    Only the carpet, its petroleum blue, pleased her. She had come to this museum expecting sunlight and photographs of the Nile, something to relieve her homesickness: a comfort, a message. But the messages were not for her, not for anyone like her. A letter from West Africa, 1762, an employee to his employer in Scotland. An employee trading European goods for African curiosities.
It was difficult to make the natives understand my meaning, even by an interpreter, it being a thing so seldom asked of them, but they have all undertaken to bring something and laughed heartily at me and said, I was a good man to love their country so much . . .
    Love my country so much. She should not be here, there was nothing for her here. She wanted to see minarets, boats fragile on the Nile, people. People like her father. The times she had sat in the waiting room of his clinic, among pregnant women, a pain in her heart because she was going to see him in a few minutes. His room, the air conditioner and the smell of his pipe, his white coat. When she hugged him, he smelled of Listerine mouthwash. He could never remember how old she was, what she was studying; six daughters, how could he keep track. In his confusion, there was freedom for her, games to play, a lot of teasing. She visited his clinic in secret, telling lies to her mother. She loved him more than she loved her mother. Her mother who did everything for her, tidied her room, sewed her clothes from
Burda
magazine. Shadia was twenty-five and her mother washed everything for her by hand, even her pants and bras.
    â€œI know why they went away,” said Bryan. “I understand why they travelled.” At last he was talking. She had not seen him intense before. He spoke in a low voice. “They had to get away, to leave here . . .”
    â€œTo escape from the horrible weather . . .” She was making fun of him. She wanted to put him down. The imperialists who had humiliated her history were heroes in his eyes.
    He looked at her. “To escape . . .” he repeated.
    â€œThey went to benefit themselves,” she said, “people go away because they benefit in some way.”
    â€œI want to get away,” he said.
    She remembered when he had opened his palms on the table and said, “I went on a trip to Mecca.” There had been pride in his voice.
    â€œI should have gone somewhere else for the course,” he went on. “A new place, somewhere down south.”
    He was on a plateau, not like her. She was fighting and struggling for a piece of paper that would say she was awarded an M.Sc. from a British university. For him, the course was a continuation.
    â€œCome and see,” he said, and he held her arm. No one had touched her before, not since she had hugged her mother goodbye. Months now in this country and no one had touched her.
    She pulled her arm away. She walked away, quickly up the stairs. Metal steps rattled under her feet. She ran up the stairs to the next floor. Guns, a row of guns aiming at her. They had been waiting to blow her away. Scottish arms of centuries ago, gunfire in service of the empire.
    Silver muzzles, a dirty