Adé: A Love Story (12 page)

I felt the liquid displacing what was already there, the blood beneath the skin. If I could have moved my arm, I would have immediately rubbed the spot where the needle had punctured me, but I couldn’t lift my limbs. I felt like an amputee. Where were my legs? Why couldn’t I turn my head? I thought perhaps there was a brace around my neck, but I could not reach up to check. I
watched the nurse go from bed to bed, taking temperatures, administering injections with the same needle, holding a little cup of juice for each patient who was swallowing pills. I could barely make them out, but I could tell the other patients were thin, gaunt, hunched. Their affliction all carried the same affect, a kind of downward pull, and I wondered if they had malaria, or whatever it was that I had, too, and if I looked like them.

The medicine left a metallic taste in my mouth, and I felt my eyes closing. That same sense of going underwater, of leaving that place, descended upon me. I woke up at noon the next day to Adé rubbing my forehead and reading poems in my ear. He had found
The Captain’s Verses
in my bag. I smiled at his face, his beautiful, open, loving face. And I rested my cheek in the cup of his hand.

“Hello,
mpenzi,
” he said, continuing in our half-English, half-Swahili language. “You are safe, don’t worry. My mother cannot come because it is too far for her and she has the children to look after, but I am here. Khadija is cooking for you. She is making all of your favorites. Are you hungry? I have here some
mchicha
with coconut rice.”

I tried to get up onto one elbow and fell back down. I didn’t feel hungry, I felt empty. But I needed Adé to feed me again. I needed to know I was still alive. I took the forkful of rice he offered into my mouth, and then, things began to change yet again. I loved Adé, but I could not understand this hospital. What was I doing there, what was wrong with the other patients? How had I gone from sweet spaghetti and our little room at the top of the town, to a place that felt like a holding cell for the dead and dying? I heard Miriam’s voice in my head.
The real Africa.

I knew there was no such thing, and yet. Perhaps this is what
she wanted all along. The Africa she saw on television, where people were poor and naked and hungry and dying of AIDS. Where we Westerners, stripped of the niceties and conveniences we took for granted—like new needles and private hospital rooms—would have to live by sheer will. In the real Africa, we would have to wake from our lazy slumber and shake off our ignorance born of so-called privilege. We would have to grasp the nettle of our raw, human potential and respond to the uncertainties of life. But again: I was not interested in such a mission.

I looked at Adé, extending the fork again and again, whispering encouragements, and I saw, for the first time, not a stranger, but a person from another place, another world. I saw someone I loved but could never fully know. Adé knew how to talk murderers out of pulling the trigger. His father had abandoned him and his mother for four other wives and twice as many children. His island did not have a hospital. He made his living with precise movements of his hands and knowledge of the sky, chiseling flowers into wood for the rich, and knowing the direction of the wind as he steered his dhow. He lived in a house with no electricity and no running water, and shoveled feces from the bathroom—the hole in the ground at the back of his mother’s house—every month. Five times a day Adé washed his hands and arms, knelt on a beautiful rug, and prayed to an invisible God.

But it was more than this. Yes, I could see it now. It wasn’t him, it was
me.
I had done what I swore I would not do:
I
had romanticized Africa. I had accepted Adé’s life before I realized what it might mean for my own.

Three weeks later, the worst was over. The chaotic storm had miraculously let me down with no permanent bodily harm, but the
undertow was moving in quickly. Chloroquine had been pumped through my veins for so long that everything tasted bitter; the metallic taste of it invaded my mouth, my lungs, my everything. The fever had cooked my body so thoroughly that every pore was wrung clean from the burning.

Adé had made friends with everyone in the hospital by then, and I knew it was probably those friendships that had saved my life. The hospital had almost no resources, and was full of people dying of incurable diseases, but Adé had made sure they gave me clean needles. Three nurses tended thirty patients, but my bedding was changed every day. Food came to me like clockwork in little tins wrapped in cloth. Dr. Simba was rarely available, but I was told he checked my blood daily to chart the activity of parasites. I had cerebral malaria and a rare meningitis. I needed ongoing treatment, treatment I could only get in America, but I was getting better.

In my newfound moments of coherence, my eyes found Adé sitting in the chair beside my bed, and he would make me laugh by reminding me of all the silly things I did, like saying
au vipi
to Mugo. Soon he began giving me tidbits of news: Amina had given birth to a baby girl. His brother Mumin had been accepted to the University of Nairobi. Nuru was praying for my recovery.

And then a few days before I was due to be discharged, I was stronger and the news grew more serious. Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait. The United Nations had levied sanctions against Iraq. All cargo going in and out of that country was suspended. And now there was a no-fly zone over all of north and east Africa—especially the coast where we were—because it was
predominantly Muslim. I had to get home, but all commercial flights had been cancelled indefinitely.

Adé shifted in his seat, his normally sunny face a mask of gray, and explained slowly, carefully, as if recounting a story from long ago, that my family had been calling for daily updates and he’d called them back, pouring coin after coin into a pay phone in town. They had been trying to cut through the chaos since he first told them I was in the hospital. My father was devastated by the news but, having seen tragedy, sprang into action, reaching out to powerful clients, friends, relatives. Strings were pulled and favors called in. And then, just that morning, Adé received a call from the American Embassy in Nairobi. A special plane had been arranged and it would come to get me the next day at one o’clock. I would need to take the ferry to Lamu in the morning, and then wait for the plane to land on the island’s tiny airstrip. It would be on the ground for twenty minutes. If I missed the window, I would not be able to leave for weeks, perhaps months. I might die.

Here, Adé paused. “Farida,” he said. “There is something else.” He looked up and I could see, for the first time, in the weeks of him caring for me, that he had aged. He was no longer the boy who had never been to the city, no longer the young man who believed that life could be better, freer, somewhere else. He had met me, and left his island to find a harsher, less forgiving world. He looked at me and held my gaze, holding me as best he could for the impact.

“There is only one seat on the plane.”

And then the bullet blew a hole straight through me.

I LEFT THE
hospital that afternoon and the nurses watched, wondering, I am sure, how it would all play out. Adé and I had become a spectacle, a couple in one of the Bollywood films the people of Malindi loved so much. Our love was exotic, tragic, destined; each incident in our story propelled the movie along. Adé gathered my few belongings and the bag of medicine that Dr. Simba had prepared for the journey. I nodded as the doctor signed the release and ordered me to check into a hospital as soon as I arrived in New York. The parasites were aggressive, and I would need to be monitored. I nodded again, and glanced back once more at the giant room where I had spent the worst weeks of my life. My bed was stripped; all traces of me, of Adé sitting by my bed feeding me coconut rice, were gone.

The nurse called a taxi and Adé lowered me gently into it, telling the driver not to rush, that his wife was still weak. His wife. It was the first time he had said it. We looked at each other, resolute, as he slid into the seat beside me and took my hand. The driver slowly navigated the narrow streets in the old town of Malindi and I became acutely aware that we would shortly be spending our last night together. I ran my hand over his again
and again, trying to memorize the length of each finger, the depth of each crease, the contours of each patch of softness. I stared out the window at the men heading home for evening prayer, at the groups of women in their
buibui
walking, the sun setting behind them a deep orange. I breathed deeply, as if I could inhale the whole world with him in it, and grasped Adé’s hand a little tighter before pressing my forehead against the windowpane between me and the dusty chaos, the faded stone facades, and the promise of a future I had thought was mine.

When we arrived at his cousins’ house, Khadija was cooking mango soup. Asma walked me over to the bed to show me how she had covered it with a breathtaking piece of silk-and-cotton fabric, a precious piece of blues and browns, no doubt pulled from her marriage trunk. I sat on the bed with big cotton pillows behind me, and Halima came to lay her head in my lap. We sat there for a long time, me stroking her hair as she sobbed, telling her it was going to be all right.

Adé entered the room with my medicine and a glass of water shortly after dinner. I had managed a few bites from the huge tin tray Khadija had placed before me, but the effort had been exhausting. Adé could see it in the way I moved, and quietly asked if he should pack my suitcase. We both checked the clock, gauging the time before we slipped beneath the beautiful bedspread for the night. It was nine o’clock. The ferry left at eleven the next morning. I nodded, and Adé pulled my suitcase out from under the bed. At that moment, an extraordinary alertness came over me and I became very still. I didn’t want to miss anything, as if the tenderness infusing his every movement was important and true and the summation of everything, and my only purpose now
was to bear witness. I could see he was trying hard not to cry as he folded my red and purple
kangas
and gingerly gathered my gauzy undergarments. He was attending to me as if to a precious child, his devotion a wish for everything to be easy, even as I was preparing to leave.

It occurred to me that I was the girl from America who taught him that the country on the other side of the ocean was not so far away. He was the Swahili boy who taught me how to find joy in limitations, and showed me that home was not a physical place, but something much larger and more mysterious. Adé’s love meant that even if I could not bridge the entire world, the gaps of my life were not insurmountable. I was lovable, complete, just as I was. Another me, an unbroken me, was possible. As I watched, part of me wished that he would take control and tie me to a bedpost in the middle of the room—anything to make me miss the plane. But Adé was not looking up. He was not reading my eyes. If he did, he would see that even though he thought this was now our fate, one of us could try, at least, to stop to it.

But Adé believed that life was held together by law. He could still apply a Swahili saying or
sura
from the Qur’an to any heartache with precision. And yet I could see that our time together had taught him that words could not always protect him, that he, like many others he’d never truly fathomed, could suffer a blow from which he might not recover. This recognition had not hit me, for I did not yet have an understanding of all that I’d be leaving behind. I did not yet know that in leaving Adé, I was not just leaving him, I was leaving everyone who loved him, whom I had also come to love. I would probably never see Nuru, or any of the people I had come to think of as family, again.

And so, while we held each other through the night, I reassured
him. I will be back, my love. There is nothing to fear. It will only be a little while. I just have to get well and do some arranging, and then we’ll be together again. I stroked his back, and went on and on about our future: when I would return, when he would visit me, when I would call, at what phone, at what hour, how we would struggle through the static to reassure each other of our love. He had bought postcards, dozens of them, and given me half, each one with an address written neatly in the designated square. He would have bought stamps, he told me, but I would have to get them in America. I smiled at him, at his thoughtfulness, the way he remembered every detail, the way he knew how to love in this complete way, conscious of it all, and yet rising to act with optimism in the face of all that appeared futile.

It was a long night, with Adé’s body high above and inside of me, a night of heat and loss, ecstatic exclamations, and desperate cries of mourning. And when we peeled ourselves away, I could feel the tissue of our fresh new love tearing in two.

Adé woke me up at eight with a kiss on my forehead and when I opened my eyes, I was terrified.

“Khadija has made breakfast for us,” he said softly.

I struggled to raise myself from the bed and stumbled, but Adé righted me and, together, we made our way to the kitchen. Halima was staring vacantly at her plate. Asma was gone, I did not ask where. I could barely taste the food. Toast with jam and butter. Hard-boiled eggs. I ate for strength, but nothing else.

The rest of the morning was a blur, perhaps because the whole time I was wiping tears from his eyes, or Adé was wiping them from mine. The first two hours were a farce; we kept
bumping into each other as we tried to move through space and time as discrete bodies, each of its own volition. We had been together for months, day after day, night after night, and by the end, I rarely left the house without him. When he wasn’t working or sitting with his mother, he was with me—cooking, eating, talking, laughing, joking, making love. How would this separation work? We breathed the same air. Our bodies had changed shape to fit each other. I had never been so close to anyone in my life. Where would he go after the plane took off? What would he tell his mother and sisters? The imam? Would I be the cause of shame, disappointment, anger?