The Two Hearts of Kwasi Boachi: A Novel Read Free Page A

survive. My son Quamin works on a tea estate in the Preanger. The two little ones, Aquasi junior and my daughter Quamina Aquasina, were born of women that live and work on my land.
    I had to stop there, for into my mind’s eye surged a bevy of ladies wearing party hats, smiling and hiding behind their fans. It cannot be helped; their celebrating my arrival in their midst half a century ago amounts to the same thing as celebrating the fact that, thanks to me, they have had something to gossip about all these years. I am not married. My children were born of gentle native women with whom I live in free love. They are much talked about in the parlours of Buitenzorg. Suddenly the prospect of addressing an audience made up of tattletales and vultures repelled me. I reflected that they might be less amused if I ventured to tell them how I once attempted to court a white woman in the theatre at Batavia, in the manner of their own Dutch men. After all, that manner permits young ladies first to pick their husbands and then their lovers, so they have nothing to complain about.
    It goes like this: a gentleman with a mind to love does not leave his hat in the cloakroom, but takes it inside and places it on the rim of the balcony in front of him. This is a signal to the ladies, whom he fixes with his opera glasses. He gestures how much he is prepared to disburse. If she raises her left hand to fan some air at her cheeks she is favourably inclined; waving the right hand means the bidding is too low or that a renewed advance should be made elsewhere.
    I made no headway myself. It cannot have been my hat that you found unappealing, Ladies, for you did not object to being seen next to less stylish models than mine. Thank God for the native women hovering around the tempeh stall by the stage door, where luckless men such as I could buy their favours for a cup of rice. But the love of Adi, Lasmi and Wayeng, the mothers of my heirs, has delivered me from seeking love among the rejects. I love them as they love me. I will leave to them all I possess, and I find more fulfilment in our children than I can ever explain to a Batavian audience in a few factual statements.
    So I tore up my first draft. It was correctly phrased, but how can a life be summed up in dates and figures? The crucial events do not follow one another in orderly fashion, like the staging posts along the Great Post Road to Surabaya. The tracks have been effaced. Why is it, when one shuts one’s eyes, that some people come to mind and not others?
    Ahim is right—quite contrary to his custom—when he says that I am plagued by dreams during my afternoon rest. Even if I do not sleep, as soon as I close my eyes the memories come thick and fast. But I rarely picture Java. The images that flood my memory are never of the people I encounter daily, nor of animals, nor even of the dense greenery that has been the setting of so much of my life. Judging by my memory, fifty years in the Indies have gone by in a flash, whereas a falcon hunt at Het Loo palace back in Holland has lasted forever. The archives of the mind are wanting in indexes—save for a few catchwords maybe. But perhaps these are all that is needed.
    Sometimes I imagine that God is interested only in the broad sweep. We leave our marks on the white canvas and we cannot make head or tail of the result. But He, a creative artist if ever there was one, takes a few steps back and sees what the smudges represent. If He manages to recognize me in the cautious daubings I have left behind, that is the best possible proof of His existence. I have always held that, for people like me, it is best to make one’s mark in the margins of existence, inconspicuously. But in retrospect I am struck by how much of the last fifty years is a blank. Is that cause for celebration?
    21 February
    All this talk of anniversaries reminds me that it will be fifty years tomorrow since my cousin died. I think it was then that I lost the ability to be at