The Garbage King Page 4

  In spite of his loathing, Mamo wanted to run after him, to beg, plead, threaten, anything, as long as the man would take him home. He held himself back. It wouldn’t do any good. It would only make things worse.

  ‘Tesfaye,’ the farmer said to the boy, whose name Mamo now heard for the first time. ‘Show him what to do. Take the cattle down to the river with him.’

  ‘I’ll be late for school, Father,’ Tesfaye said. ‘I’ll get a beating.’

  The farmer raised his hand.

  ‘Are you arguing with me?’

  ‘No, Father. Yes, Father,’ Tesfaye said, turning away, resentment stiffening his shoulders.

  He ran inside and came out a moment later with a pile of books under his arm and a stick in his hand. He began to round up the cows, tapping their rumps with the stick. Slowly, one after the other, they lumbered out of the compound with the two boys walking after them.

  ‘Who’s your father?’ Tesfaye asked suddenly. ‘Why has he sent you away from home?’

  ‘He’s dead,’ said Mamo.

  ‘Where did he come from?’

  ‘Up north. He was a soldier.’

  ‘Where in the north?’

  ‘I don’t know. He died when I was small.’

  ‘Where’s your mother?’

  ‘Dead.’

  ‘That man said she was a—’

  ‘He doesn’t know anything about me,’ Mamo interrupted furiously. ‘He doesn’t know anything.’

  They walked on in silence.

  ‘You don’t know much, either, do you?’ said Tesfaye. ‘You don’t know about your parents. You don’t know about cows. I bet you don’t even know where you are.’

  ‘What do you mean? I know more than you do, country boy.’

  ‘How many years were you in school?’

  Mamo hesitated.

  ‘Nearly two, but . . .’

  ‘You didn’t even finish second grade? Bet you can’t read.’

  ‘I can,’ lied Mamo.

  ‘What’s twelve times seven?’

  Mamo felt hot red blood rise in his face and his fists tightened.

  Tesfaye laughed.

  ‘You get back at me, you get cheeky with me, and my father’ll have the hide off your back.’

  ‘Like your teacher’s going to have your hide today when you’re late for school,’ Mamo retorted swiftly.

  Tesfaye bit his lip and scowled.

  They reached the bottom of the lane without speaking. The cows didn’t need directing. They turned left automatically and followed the well-worn path that led down the hill towards the river. One paused and turned her head to nibble at a lush plant growing out of the bank. Tesfaye shouted and drove her on with a thwack on her rump.

  ‘That plant’s poisonous,’ he said. ‘You’d better watch it, city boy. If you let the cows eat that stuff, they’ll die, and my father will kill you. I mean it. He will kill you. Stone dead.’

  They had come out now on to a slope above the stream. Twenty or thirty cows were already there, grazing slowly over grass that had been cropped so close it resembled green velvet. Two herd boys stood together talking, propping themselves up on their long sticks and watching curiously as Mamo and Tesfaye approached.

  ‘Go with them,’ Tesfaye said. ‘They’ll show you the grazing lands. Bring the cows home tonight in one piece if you want to stay alive.’

  He threw the stick at Mamo, who caught it in mid-air, then he turned round and began to run, his bare feet kicking up the soft red dust of the path as he went.

  The two herd boys stood still and stared at Mamo. He stared back at them. They looked younger than him. One was about nine or ten, and the other could only have been six or seven. They wore old shammas, grey now rather than white, wrapped round themselves like cloaks, and their knee joints looked large in their thin legs. They watched unsmilingly as Mamo’s cows walked between theirs to reach the edge of the stream.

  ‘Are you from up there?’ the bigger one said at last, jerking his chin up towards the farmer’s homestead.

  ‘I suppose so,’ Mamo said reluctantly. ‘I’m supposed to be working for them. I’m from Addis. I don’t know about farms and cows and stuff.’

  The two boys exchanged excited looks.

  ‘From Addis Ababa?’ the big one said.

  ‘Have you ever seen a TV?’ said the little one.

  They looked friendly and curious.

  ‘Course I have,’ said Mamo. ‘Loads of times.’

  Suddenly the smell of the bar where his mother had worked was in his nostrils, the cigarette smoke and beer and disinfectant. He’d been able to watch a whole five minutes of TV sometimes, before she’d shooed him away from the door.

  ‘Have you ever been in a car?’ the tall one said.

  ‘No, but I’ve been in a bus. You go so fast everything outside looks like a kind of blur.’

  He was expanding a little in the warmth of their interest.

  ‘Tesfaye’s father’s an old terror,’ the older boy said. ‘You’ll have to watch out the cows don’t get scratched or anything. He beats Tesfaye for nothing.’

  ‘My father’s an old terror too,’ said the little one.

  The other snorted.

  ‘Your father? He’s the softest man in Ethiopia. He’s already given you two calves of your own.’

  ‘Yes, look, can you see them?’ the little boy said proudly. ‘That one at the back, he’s mine, and the white one flicking her tail. Aren’t they beautiful?’

  The boys turned to scrutinize the cattle, focusing carefully through narrowed eyes. The big boy suddenly leaped forward, waving his arms. He ran down to the stream and tapped his stick on the flank of a black cow who was heading away from the others upstream towards a deeper pool of water.

  ‘She’s one of yours,’ the little boy said. ‘You’d better get down there and keep an eye on her. She’s always getting into trouble, that one is. There’s deep mud in that bit of the stream. She could sink right in and get stuck.’

  ‘I can’t look after her. I don’t know what to do,’ said Mamo frankly, dropping his superior city air.

  The little boy smiled up at him.

  ‘I’ll show you. I’m a really good herd boy, my father says. I’m going to be a farmer like him when I grow up and have a huge herd. I’m going to be really rich.’

  As the morning wore on, Mamo began to feel a little better. The two boys, Hailu (the older one) and Yohannes (the little one), were friendly. They bombarded Mamo with questions about city life. Had he ever seen a real game of football? Had he been in an aeroplane? Weren’t there thieves everywhere in Addis Ababa?

  (‘People thieves, they’re the worst,’ Mamo answered sourly to that one.)

  In return for his answers, they looked after his cattle and showed him what to do. They taught him the cows’ individual foibles – how this one liked to stray and that one always followed the others. They pointed out the dangers – the slippery banks where the cows could fall and break their legs, the various poisonous plants and the thorn bushes where they could tear their hides.

  They showed Mamo the fruit of the prickly pear, ripening on the cactus hedges that surrounded the fields, and taught him how to get at the sweet insides without pricking his fingers on the spines.

  When midday came, and the sun was burning down, they sat under a tree on a hillock while the cows grazed quietly along the verges of the lane.

  ‘Tell us about the TV again,’ Yohannes said. ‘What’s it like, really?’ Mamo stifled a yawn.

  They’re nice, but it’ll be like this, on and on, for ever and ever, he thought. If I don’t get away from here, I’ll go mad.

  ‘Hey look!’ Hailu jumped to his feet. ‘That old one of yours is getting into our field!’

  Mamo scrambled after him. He waved his stick clumsily round the cow’s head. She lumbered on, pushing further through the gap in the hedge which led into the field in which fresh green crops were growing. Hailu shoved him out of the way, and with a few deft taps of
his stick drove the cow out into the lane again.

  ‘That’s our best field,’ he said, frowning critically at Mamo. ‘You mustn’t let them get in there. We’re going to get a bumper crop off it this year, my father says. I ploughed this end of it myself. It was the first time I’d tried. It’s really difficult. You have to be really strong.’

  There was pride in his voice.

  They belong here, Mamo thought. They love this land. I’m just a servant to them.

  Depression settled on him. He looked round with disgust. Fields and little homesteads stretched across the rolling plain to a fringe of blue mountains far away. It could be a desert as far as he was concerned, or a prison, even. There was nothing for him here.

  Hailu and Yohannes sensed his mood. They stopped chivvying him with questions. They began a complicated game of their own, which they had obviously played many times before, and hardly spoke to him for the rest of the afternoon.

  Mamo’s heart sank even further as the time came to drive the cattle home. The other two would go off in different directions from the drinking place by the stream. He would have to manage the last part himself. And once back at the homestead, he would be face to face again with his stern, frightening master and the hostility of his son.

  ‘I like you better than Tesfaye,’ little Yohannes said, as their ways parted. ‘He bullies us sometimes.’

  Mamo’s heart lifted a little.

  ‘I like you,’ he said.

  ‘Be careful when you get to that turn in the lane, going up to your place,’ warned Hailu. ‘The old black one always tries to go off there.’

  ‘Thanks,’ nodded Mamo.

  ‘See you tomorrow.’

  ‘Yes, tomorrow.’

  I needn’t have worried about this bit, he thought, as the cows ambled up the last steep bit of the path towards the homestead. They seem to know the way by themselves, but he followed Hailu’s advice and was ready with his stick at the bend to head off the black cow.

  When he reached the entrance to the compound he looked up and saw the farmer standing there, his arms crossed, silently watching him. He waited till all the cows had come in and inspected them minutely, one by one, from head to tail, without saying a word.

  ‘Get them into the stable,’ he said curtly, and turned back into the house.

  Ato Paulos, Dani’s father, came home late. The guard, old Negussie, had been on the lookout by the double gates, ready to run out of his little shelter to open them a full hour before he heard the beep of the car in the road outside.

  Dani had been leaning over his books in a corner of the sitting room, half-heartedly reading and rereading a piece about rainfall and evaporation in his geography textbook. The words slipped in and out of his mind without leaving any impression, while every word of the story which Zeni was telling Meseret on the verandah outside, brought a vivid picture to life in his head.

  Her voice stopped abruptly as Ato Paulos’s footsteps crunched across the gravel towards the steps.

  ‘Good evening, sir,’ she said nervously.

  ‘Baba!’ cried Meseret, and Dani could see her in his mind’s eye hurling herself forward and wrapping her arms round his knee.

  She’s the only person in the world who’s not afraid of him, he thought enviously.

  Ato Paulos walked into the hallway. Dani bent his head again over his book. He could feel his father’s eyes like twin lasers on the back of his neck, and he sat still, praying that he would go away.

  After a moment, he heard him move on down the corridor and open the door of the main bedroom where his wife had been resting all afternoon. He heard her murmur something, but couldn’t quite make out the words. His father’s answering voice, though, was loud and clear.

  ‘I know I’m late. I’m sorry. Trouble with the suppliers again. No one’s prepared to take responsibility. If I want anything done I have to see to it myself, down to the smallest detail. It almost makes me wish I was back in the army. If these young chaps were under my command I’d make them hop like fleas.’

  Ruth spoke again, too quietly for Dani to hear, but he heard his father say, ‘No, get them to dish up in half an hour. I’ll change first.’ His voice softened. ‘How are you? Did you sleep this afternoon?’

  He had moved into the bathroom, and Ruth raised her voice to reach him.

  ‘A little. I’m all right.’ She coughed nervously. ‘A letter’s come for you.’

  ‘Oh? Who from?’

  ‘Dani’s headmaster.’

  Dani’s heart gave one painful thudding kick, then settled into a fast beat that made him breathless.

  ‘Wants to put the fees up again, I suppose.’

  There was the sound of running water, then the tap was turned off. Ruth spoke again, her voice more nervous than ever.

  ‘No, it’s not about money. Promise you won’t be too angry.’

  Dani’s hands were sweating. He balled his fists and dropped his forehead down on to them. He heard his father march back into the bedroom, and there was a long moment of silence.

  He’s reading the letter, he thought.

  Then he heard a scrunching noise, and he knew that Ato Paulos was screwing the letter up and hurling it away from him.

  ‘Failure, all the way down the line. Test results disappointing. Participation in class minimal. Poor prediction for end of year exams. What am I going to do with him, eh? What?’

  His mother’s voice was inaudible again. Dani stood up, taking care not to let his chair scrape on the floorboards, and stole across to the door.

  ‘No,’ his father was saying, and Dani could hear that he was trying to keep his anger on a tight rein so as not to upset his wife. ‘You must face facts, my dear. The modern world’s not like the old days, when your father got your brother a job in a government department because he was who he was. You’re nothing now without qualifications. It’s a skills-based economy. If Dani doesn’t make something of himself, no one else can do it for him. You know that, Ruth.’

  ‘Yes, but . . .’ Ruth began.

  ‘My God,’ Ato Paulos swept on. ‘When I think how I had to work to get where I am!’ Dani knew now what was coming, almost word for word. ‘No rich parents around to spoil me. No lazing around beside swimming pools. I didn’t know the feeling of a pair of shoes on my feet till I was twelve years old. Sheer hard grind, and scholarships which I earned for myself all the way. The Military Academy doesn’t take fools, I can tell you. Do you know how many boys competed for a single place in those days?’

  ‘He’s good at some things,’ Ruth said, and Dani imagined her laying her hand on her husband’s arm. Hot tears of gratitude stung the insides of his eyelids. ‘His writing is excellent, Ato Mesfin says, and—’

  ‘Writing! Stories!’ Ato Paulos was clearly finding it harder and harder to hold his temper in check. ‘You leave this to me. I’m going to sort things out with him right now. No, Ruth, you are not to get up. I won’t have you distressed over this. Daniel can’t hide behind you any longer. He’s got to face up to reality.’

  The blood seemed to rush to Dani’s head, and for a couple of seconds he felt almost faint. He thought for a wild moment of hiding under one of the armchairs that stood with perfect neatness around the walls of the sitting room, but knew that he’d be discovered at once, and dragged out ignominiously.

  Instead, he scurried back to the table, and was sitting there with his eyes down unseeingly on the page of his book when his father strode into the room and shut the door with a click behind him.

  Dani forced himself to turn and look at him.

  ‘Do you know what your headmaster has to say about you?’ Ato Paulos began, his voice grating with the fury he had been suppressing.

  ‘No, Father,’ whispered Dani.

  ‘Failure to work. Failure to pass tests. Failure to participate in class.’ Ato Paulos ticked each item off his fingers. ‘And I’ll add some more. Physical slovenliness. Lack of application in sport. Laziness. Childishness. Inconsiderateness. U
psetting your mother.’

  Dani sat with his eyes down, staring miserably at the dark brown border that ran round the edge of the pale brown rug.

  ‘What have you got to say for yourself?’

  Ato Paulos crossed the room and stood over his trembling son. Dani tried not to cower away from him.

  ‘Nothing, Father. I’ve done my best. I . . .’

  ‘Do you realize what I’m saying? Do you understand how serious all this is?’

  ‘Yes, Father.’

  ‘I suppose you think that because I’ve worked hard all my life, come up from nowhere, and made a decent living, you can sit back and sponge off me for the rest of your life, like some pampered little playboy.’

  ‘Honestly, Father, I don’t—’

  ‘I’m giving you an ultimatum, Daniel.’ Dani could sense that his father’s hands were itching with the desire to slap him. He concentrated on sitting as still as possible so as not to set anything off. ‘You’re going to pass your end-of-year exams with flying colours, do you hear? If you don’t . . .’ Dani gulped and shut his eyes. He would be threatened now with the beating of a lifetime. ‘If you don’t,’ Ato Paulos went on, ‘I’ll send you down to Jigjiga to my old Somali batman. If anyone can make a man of you, Feisal can. He faced a lion when he was your age with nothing but a spear in his hand.’

  Dani’s head jerked up. He was staring at his father, appalled. This was the last thing in the world he had expected. He remembered Feisal only too well. Feisal had lived in the servants’ quarters behind the house for years after Ato Paulos had left the army, and had run the compound with military precision. If a ball had strayed on to a flower bad, violent reprisals followed. If one of the flowerpots that flanked the steps up to the front door was accidentally chipped, Feisal’s scolding practically blistered the paint on the compound’s big metal gates. Ruth had begged her husband again and again to get rid of Feisal, and he had at last reluctantly agreed, sending him off home to Jigjiga with a handsome sum to buy a small house for his retirement. A few beatings at home would be nothing compared to a sentence with Feisal.

  ‘I’ll work, I’ll pass, Father, I promise,’ he said faintly.

  Ato Paulos, aware that his threat had hit the mark, nodded with satisfaction.