Arnie and the Box

When I woke up inside, it was dark and clammy. My mother used to wipe the tears from my face with hands dry from pounding maize. She cooed to me, and I was a child. She made me out of strings and lace, little things stolen from around the house of the master. I remember less and less, the little threads of me undone. I find odd pins in me, odd pains in me. I’m odd and start and stop and start again.

My name is Arnauld, I cannot remember why it was given. I was born on the estate and worked the kitchens from youth. I was never allowed to address the master, but I saw plenty of his family. I helped his sons with their dogs and guns; I helped his wife once when she needed malaria tablets.

Long and broad the corridors up to the back stairs stretched. Once, I was caught stealing cigarettes and I ran from the avenging hand of the provincial chef, hiding in the wardrobe in the room of Annalise, the master’s youngest.

Amongst the coats, floating from their hanging place, was a tin that caught the light, the type a young child keeps things in that they want private from prying eyes. I had to resist rapping my nails against it to hear that tinkle-tinkle-tinkle noise I get from shining the silverware.

Next to it was a box, hidden purposefully from view. It was about the size of my head – I know because I held my face to it. Its brown paper held a hollow luminescence in the dark cupboard. My legs began to cramp.

The dark face of the box seemed to crinkle with secrets; my fingers traced the lid. I couldn’t bare to know what was in there, it would hurt me. I kept crouched amid the dark, shivering and waiting for shouts to recede.

Hours later I crept out from my hiding spot. Annalise was asleep on the bed, and I could get so close to her heaving form. Laudanum was on the dresser in a mottled bottle; the scent wafted through the room, accompanied by fresh jessamine.

I crept back through the house where I had been chased from. In my stead I saw the stableman, dark Basem, throttled with a riding crop. They cackled as they broke through him. I felt only relief.

Later, my mistakes were forgotten, written into history on Basem’s proud black face. Their calls for service drowned out the calls for prayer: ‘Arnie! Shine those shoes for Monsieur Pierre!’

They’re rummaging now, finding more to do. I awake within the darkness but the ceilings are too bright, different ceilings shining differently. Mother and her people lift me and drop me, I am dragged about into light like the plaything I am.

When we play together she’s an angel and she tells me I’m a pretty princess. She sticks things on me or in me and I worship her. When it’s time to go away again I feel sad but my face can’t move without her so I ball everything up like the string that made me.

Back from market day, Griezemont lay in the distance, a dusky rose of an estate. Red were the terracotta rooves, undulating in the umber light. Red were the backs of the workers, striped with whips for their service. When the workers first came they were promised much, and more. When they left they were few, and their laments cracked great fissures about the sky.

Basem came back a Bedouin, desert lessons learned. With Zulu war cries he led a band of black youths below the terracotta rooves. From inside, the flintlock pistols rattled.

The Leonberger dog was dragged forth and drained of its innards, royal purple spilled onto the veranda. The pampas grass was cleared for a scaffold and in their pressed linen suits the master and his brothers were hung. To and fro, zephyrs danced about the swinging bodies.

From amongst the baying crowd leapt up bloody cries:

‘Nglada!’

‘Zombeezee!’

‘Putain!’

‘Alhamdulillah!’

The box they put me in is black from the inside. I see black from inside it and when it is opened I shield my eyes, or rather, they are shielded. I forget what I see outside the box, but I remember being lifted from it, in her waiting arms. ‘Playtime!’ The word rings amongst the corridors, a nasally language I half-remember learning.

Gargantuan giants roam the fields, breathing charcoal air. I die outside the box (I think) so I can only half-remember them, but I still see my mother, different each opening. She plaits her hair so prettily or sings a song:

‘Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques,

Dormez-vous? Dormez-vous?

Somalamadiimaaa…’

Then it’s time to go away again.

The family fled, but I didn’t follow them. Hakim and Basem stole the horses and rode down some of the master’s women. I could hear horror in the barn. The newspapers say Algeria is ours now, and they are leaving by ship.

I kept the tin and a lock of the hair I cut when she was sleeping. The yellow on the tin reminds me of her wallpaper. We had put it up in the baking heat while the master listened to her play at arpeggios in the music room. I kept the brown paper box too.

I have little else but the goats I took from out of the pen when the men were drunk, and a name I don’t use. Those who know ‘la langue’ get dirty looks and pushed out of the mosque.

I emptied the tin on the shores of Oran, where the seabirds crest the day. Little threads and buttons marked imprints on the sand, littering shadows.

The box is in front of me again. It is the size of my face - I know because I’m holding my head to it, as though, sea-shell-like, I can hear the rolling life within. With a tremor, I open the box and sharply invert it. The brown paper cuts my skin.

Into the shallows drops a pin-struck doll, a crude facsimile of a servant girl. It has over-exaggerated features, a caricature of our sun-daubed race. Black hair, black face, red lips, a pretty doll’s dress of silk.

It gathers up the salty water with its twisty grin. Soon it shall be nothing more than a bloating corpse, carrying away (seaward) dim memories of hate.

The man left me here, the tide is coming in. I cannot move my head, which means someone must be looking. I hope it is my mother, and that she will scoop me from the shallows and dress me up again and place me with the others in her wooden paradise and sing her songs to me and dance and swing me about the room whilst she sings her songs in her nasally tongue and plait her hair while I watch and grin.

I hope my mother comes soon. I cannot move, and-

I am bloating. I cannot-

I hope-

I-