The House on Karafuu Street

You smelled Zanzibar before you saw it.

That was what everyone had told Mara Marlowe, on the long voyage out: at the club in Aden, in the bar of the hotel in Mombasa, at the rail of the little British India steamer that made the overnight run down the coast. You'll smell it first. Cloves. From miles out at sea. Mara had smiled politely and assumed it was the kind of thing old colonial hands said to newcomers, like you'll never want to go home and never drink the water.

It was true. At half past five on a morning in the middle of October, 1955, standing at the rail in a crumpled linen jacket with a cup of ship's tea going cold in her hand, Mara smelled it: warm, sweet, sharp, drifting across the flat grey water on a wind that came from somewhere ahead in the dark. Cloves. And under the cloves, wood smoke, and salt, and something green and rotting and alive that might have been mangrove swamp, and something else that Mara would learn, later, was simply the smell of a very old town by a very warm sea.

Then the sun came up, all at once, the way it does near the equator, and there it was.

Stone Town lay along the shore like something poured out of a pale jug: a long, low jumble of white and cream and ochre houses, flat-roofed, crowded together right down to the water's edge, with the green of palms behind and the tall white tower of the Sultan's House of Wonders standing over everything, its clock face catching the first light. Minarets. A fort with crenellated walls the colour of old honey. The gleam of a dome. And in the harbour, between the steamer and the town, dozens of dhows, riding at anchor or drawn up on the sand: big ocean-going ones with high carved sterns, small fishing ones with a single lateen sail, their hulls black and brown and painted with eyes at the prow.

Mara had seen photographs. The photographs had been black and white, and small, and attached to a memorandum from the Colonial Office with the heading ZANZIBAR PROTECTORATE: PUBLIC WORKS DEPARTMENT: SECONDMENT OF ARCHITECTURAL OFFICER (TOWN PLANNING): UNSAFE BUILDINGS SURVEY. They had not prepared Mara for this.

A tall elderly man in a white kanzu and an embroidered cap was standing at the rail a little way along, looking at the town with an expression of quiet, complete contentment. He saw Mara looking, and smiled.

"Karibu," he said. "Welcome. Your first time?"

"Yes," said Mara. "It's—" Mara searched for a word and couldn't find one.

"Yes," said the old man, as if Mara had found it. "It is." He nodded toward the town. "My family has lived there for two hundred years. Every time I come home from the mainland, I stand here at this rail, and I think: it is still there. Still standing." He looked at Mara more closely, at the linen jacket and the cardboard tube of drawings under her arm. "You are with the government?"

"Public Works," said Mara. "I'm an architect. I've come to survey buildings."

Something changed, very slightly, in the old man's face. It was not unfriendly. It was more careful.

"Ah," he said. "The road."

"I don't know anything about a road," said Mara. "Not yet. I've only got a memorandum and some photographs. I'm meant to survey buildings that might be unsafe. So that nobody gets hurt."

The old man considered this, and seemed to decide that it was honest.

"Then you will hear about the road very soon," he said. "Everybody in the old town has heard about it." He turned his cap a little on his head. "The government wishes to make a wide street, for motor cars and drains. A good thing, they say. But to make a wide street, you take down the houses on either side of a narrow one." He looked at the town. "Our houses look tired, some of them. Very old, very tired. But tired is not the same as unsafe." He smiled. "I hope you will remember that, when you are looking."

"I'll try," said Mara.

"Inshallah," said the old man, and picked up his bag, and walked away along the deck. Mara never learned his name. But Mara remembered the words, all through the months that followed. Tired is not the same as unsafe.

The steamer could not come alongside, so they went ashore in a lighter, a broad flat boat rowed by four men who sang as they pulled, a call and an answer, over and over, while the town grew larger and louder and brighter ahead. Mara sat on a tin trunk in the stern with the cardboard tube across her knees and tried to look at everything at once.

The waterfront was chaos. Porters in ragged shorts and vests shouting and laughing, carrying sacks on their heads. Customs men in white uniforms with brass buttons. Women in black buibui, the long robe that covered them from head to foot, standing in groups with baskets, their faces framed by black cloth, talking fast and low. Indian clerks in white shirts with ledgers under their arms. A goat. Two goats. An Englishman in a solar topee, which nobody had worn for twenty years, purple-faced and shouting at a porter in loud, slow English. A man with a tall brass coffee pot with a long curving spout, clicking little china cups together in one hand to call customers, like castanets. The noise and the heat and the smell of cloves and fish and wood smoke came at Mara all at once, like a wave.

And there, standing in the shade of a customs shed, mopping his face with a large handkerchief, was a sandy-haired Englishman of about fifty in a crumpled white suit, holding up a piece of cardboard on which someone had written, in capitals, MARLOWE — P.W.D.

"Marlowe? Splendid. Splendid. Tennant. Cuthbert Tennant. Town Planning." He shook Mara's hand vigorously. "Good voyage? Hot? You'll get used to it. Nobody does, but you'll get used to it." He waved at a porter to take the trunk. "We'll get you settled in your rooms, and then tomorrow I'll take you round the old town and show you what we're up against. Marvellous place. Marvellous. Absolute death-trap, half of it. No drains to speak of, streets you can't get a handcart down, let alone a fire engine. People living in houses that ought to have fallen down in the last century." He beamed. "That's where you come in."

They walked up from the waterfront into the town, behind the porter with the trunk, and the streets closed round them almost at once.

Mara had never seen anything like it. The lanes were so narrow that in places you could have touched the houses on both sides with outstretched arms, and they twisted and branched and doubled back like the passages of a shell. The houses rose up three and four storeys on either side, white and grey and weather-stained, their plaster flaking to show the rough coral stone underneath, with carved wooden balconies leaning out overhead so that the sky was only a bright, crooked strip far above. Along the foot of the walls ran stone benches, built into the houses themselves, where old men sat in white robes and caps, talking, playing a game with counters on a board, watching the street go by. A bicycle bell rang. A child ran past with a tray of flat breads on her head. From somewhere above came the sound of a radio playing music Mara had never heard before, and from somewhere farther off the long, rising call of a muezzin.

And the doors.

Every house had one, and every one was different. Great heavy doors of dark wood, taller than a man, carved from top to bottom with flowers and vines and chains and fish and lotus leaves, set in carved frames, studded with rows of pointed brass bosses that gleamed in the shade. Some had square tops, with lines of Arabic carved into the lintel. Some had rounded arched tops, carved like the sun rising. Some were cracked and grey with age and some were polished like new furniture. They were not like doors at all. They were like the faces of the houses, or their signatures.

On one of them, a magnificent arched door set back in a deep stone porch, with a stone bench on either side, someone had chalked a large white cross. And under it, in capitals, P.W.D. — UNSAFE.

Mara stopped.

"Ah," said Tennant, following Mara's gaze. "Yes. That's one of ours. Karafuu Street. That whole side's due to come down for the widening, but that one's the worst. You'll survey it properly, of course. Formality, really." He mopped his face. "Merchant family. Clove people. They've been making rather a fuss."

Above the door, on a balcony behind a carved wooden screen, something moved. A shadow. A pale sleeve. Then it was gone.

Mara stood looking up at the empty balcony for a moment longer than was necessary. Then Tennant said, "Come along, come along, you'll get sunstroke," and Mara followed him on, down the narrow lane, toward whatever came next.