Ahmed's Revenge (17 page)

Since the little tusk had taken on a crude kind of significance to me, I didn't really want to burn its tip, but my father was not relenting. He wasn't going to tell me it was acrylic, if, indeed, he could remember that it was, until I proved it, so I put the hottest part of the flame right on the tusk's tip, where it was only about a quarter of an inch thick. The match Jules had left me, however, was a poor one, and the flame wouldn't stay. It licked at the tusk, but it was too democratic, bouncing around too much and licking at the surrounding air as well.

“That's enough,” said my dad. “You'll burn your fingers next.”

He was right about that, but I held the match longer anyway, only my fingernails touching the wood. There was a strong sense of authenticity about the tusk, a firm refusal on the part of this excellent material to burn.

“Ouch!” I finally said. I dropped the match onto the chessboard, then swept it away with my hand.

“Is it discoloured?” my father asked. “Get a sponge and try to wipe it clean.”

There was a smoky kind of stain on the tusk. I took the chamois from the chess-board and was able to wipe much of it away using that. “Wow,” I said.

“Wow, my backside,” said my dad. “What did you expect? After living your whole life in Africa, did you think an elephant tusk would easily burn?”

“I thought it was fake,” I told him. “Small as it is, I thought this was one of the tusks that Mr Smith made, for Julius to smuggle and for you to sell to the outside world.”

My father looked at me for a long time. Since I'd let the whole thing out, I was sure he was about to tell me everything now, forgetting to use, for a moment, the excuse of a weakened mind. In the end, however, all he said was “Well, I guess it wasn't.” And then he placed the rest of the pawns on the board and went off to his room to bed.

Had I had another match I might have tried again; had I several I would have taken my father's prize queen, who had watched everything from the palm of my other hand, and put her face in the fire. But Jules's one match was gone and I was alone and nothing was burned, not the tusk I now held in the hand with the queen, nor my husband's letter, which would have done the match's bidding quickly and without complaint.

I put the tusk in the chamois next to the queen. The tusk was longer than the queen was tall, but not by much, by less than an inch, I'd say, and it was lighter in colour. I put the chamois in my apron pocket and went out onto the verandah again, to look at the stars. On our farm, with no city lights to bother us, the stars would come down close. Indeed, when Jules and I slept outside they would sometimes lose their timidity altogether, settling around us so snugly that they seemed like sequins on our dressing gowns. I remember that I used to want to make love when we slept outside but that Jules usually did not. He told me once that it was because he didn't like to expose the pinkness of his bottom to the hands of the night, but in truth I knew it was because the grandeur of the world made him feel too insignificant, too small. He wanted to breathe the night air and he wanted to listen, to aim himself outward, and to pray.

This is what I was thinking about on my father's verandah as I took the tusk out again, as I clutched the antique queen in my left hand, and let the tip of the tusk travel south to nose its way under the apron and the loosely belted pants that I wore. The stars above me were nearly as fine as they were on the farm, with only the dim kitchen light to bother them, and the tusk and the queen had grown warm together inside the folds of their chamois and while I let the tusk work its way through the forest that it found down there I kept my eyes on the queen's carved face and thought I could see that it was as flushed as my own.

Could I remember Julius Grant while acting in such a sad and solitary way? While that tusk was meeting a tiny replica of itself and getting that replica to behave, I stared so hard into the queen's face that rather than making the world expand, which is what always happened when it was Jules and the stars and the farm, now everything wanted to contract, the entire universe rushing in. I could see the queen's cheek-bones and how her jaw was firmly set and how her lips were pursed in a tight and pleasurable sort of way, as if her hand, too, was busy somewhere, down underneath her gown.

Is it too much to admit, too much to write down, that so shortly after the dawn of my widowhood I did this, forcing a release that I couldn't find in my heart or in my mind? For a long time I thought I would leave this part of my story out, but here it is, and as I exercised the wrist and fingers of my right hand, as the face of the queen seemed to let her lips part too, I tried to purge myself of the pain that Jules had caused me with his death and his deceit and his lack of faith. I tried to find my love for him again by concentrating on its physical aspect and ignoring all the rest. It was a poor idea, I suppose, for in the end I was ecstatic and embarrassed and trying to be quiet all at the same time. And when I finished and the thrill was gone, I wasn't truly satisfied, I was simply outside in my father's lawnchair, all alone.

I languished on the verandah until the muscles in my thighs calmed. Then I got up and faced the house, its lit kitchen door reminiscent of Mr N'chele's, but quiet and welcoming just the same. And though the person who entered the house was the same person who'd left it, when I walked down my father's shadowy hall, I somehow came to feel different about Jules's death and the mystery of the tusks and my husband's unlikely decision not to tell. My change in mood wasn't forged from further knowledge of the facts, or from the simple passage of time, which dulls even the most grievous insults. Rather, it was based on the idea that Jules had placed that little tusk in the box and mailed it to me not only as proof of what Mr Smith had been up to, but also so that I could have something to hold on to, something to remember him by.

It was not a Friday, but because I didn't know what to do next, at five o'clock the following afternoon I found myself sitting in the cafe of the Norfolk Hotel, sipping a shandy and looking around for Ralph. I had telephoned Detective Mubia, but he was out, so I left word that I would be at the Norfolk and then went there to sit and wait. Since Mr N'chele had talked to me only in mysterious little doses of a line or two, I would try to make the detective be more forthright, hoping his natural tendency toward full disclosure would get the better of him over a glass of whiskey or a cup of tea.

Across the street from the Norfolk was the National Theatre, where I'd had tap and ballet lessons as a child and where, during the fullness of my merry youth—until I went to London and met up with Jules—I would occasionally audition for plays. I knew, since I had called him, that the detective might come, but as I sat there I decided to finish my drink and go over to the National Theatre anyway, to try for a different kind of reconnection with my past.

The dusty centre of Harry Thuku Road was easy to cross, considering it was past quitting time on a Monday afternoon, but the car park of the National Theatre, where I'd left the Land Rover only half an hour before, was now busy, and there were people waiting at the theatre's front door. I edged my way by the people, past the ticket seller in his ungilded cage, and into the foyer, where I immediately heard singing, a woman's voice, coming from the stage. There was an audition or a rehearsal going on, so though I kept my body in the foyer, I parted the curtains to watch.

The woman was African and she was superb. She was singing something from
Madama Butterfly
, that opera's one truly memorable song, and as I stood there listening I realised that I knew the singer, or had known her during years gone by. When I'd worked at the university she had been the friend of a physics teacher there, but shortly after I left the university I heard that she'd gone away, to London or New York or maybe Milano, making her way in the outside world. I hadn't known her as well as I'd known Ralph, but now, in the course of two days, if I include the awful fact that Mr Smith had been part of my childhood too, I'd seen four people that I had known before. Such a thing is not unusual, I suppose, but in six years of living on our farm I'd hardly seen anyone at all.

The woman's voice went right to my heart. I could have stood listening to her for the rest of the night, but I'd only been there a minute when the director stopped her, thanked her, and told her she could go. So when she left the stage, I went outside again and walked around the side of the building, trying to find the doors to the rooms where I had learned to tap and studied ballet.

There was a time in my life when my mother, not my father, was central to my swelling self, when my mother was the pivot on which my young life turned, and this ballet studio reminded me of that time. My mother had been a dancer, and for a few short months she brought me here twice a week, sitting down on the floor at the back to watch. That is the strongest memory I have of my mother, seeing her sitting there. Often, when I try to think of her, all I can conjure is a sense of thick curtains and the medicinal odour of the room in which she died, but for those few months at least, my memory wants to tell me, it was my mother who taught me how to dance.

I expected the back studio door to be locked, but it wasn't, and when I stepped through it I found the opera singer there, staring into a mirror and stretching her mouth in unattractive ways. The door hadn't been quiet, but she was concentrating, and didn't let my presence improve the expression on her face at all.

I was about to leave, since I was interrupting and since I could tell in an instant that the studio didn't look the same, but the singer suddenly looked up at me in the mirror and said, “I think a beautiful sound should come out of a beautiful face, don't you?”

She had a most beautiful face, so I was a little irritated by the comment. Though hearing her sing had made me want to cry, I didn't want any more contrivance, and I wasn't about to assure her that her face could equal the music she made. But instead of leaving I shrugged and gave a weak reply. “I don't suppose it would do for the face to be absolutely horrible,” I said.

This made her shut her mouth and turn. Her eyes were wide-set and honest, her forehead high, and the mouth she had been stretching was a no-nonsense kind of mouth.

“I remember you,” I said.

It was clear that she didn't remember me, but she came closer, peering at me with those eyes. “You don't work here?” she asked. “You're not on the theatre board, I hope.”

“I was only peeking in to marvel at how my old ballet studio had shrunk. I'm Nora Hennessey. We met years ago when you used to come around the university. You had a physics teacher friend who was musical too.”

I was sounding terrible, overly urbane and glib, with a lilt to my voice. I had sometimes been possessed by the unfortunate desire to impress people in the past, but it hadn't appeared in years, and I was surprised by its sudden emergence now, when I had so many other things to worry about.

The woman looked at me hard, and suddenly I found myself thinking of what had happened on my father's verandah the night before. I put my hand in my pocket, closing it down on the tusk.

“Of course,” she said. “You worked there somehow, didn't you? And you were in a few plays. An Ibsen or an O'Neill. You played strong women and after that you married someone and bought a farm.”

We both laughed at her tidy and accurate summation of my life. I told her that luckily enough for the local audiences, I hadn't auditioned for a play in seven years, and then I somehow asked her if she wanted to walk back to the Norfolk with me, to join me for a drink. To spend time with someone who knew nothing of my recent problems seemed a proper tonic, and I hoped that she would come. Her name, I remembered, was Miro.

I sometimes fear there's too much randomness in my story, too many of the arbitrary activities of everyday life. This Miro, for example, had stayed out of my mind for years. She had nothing to do with Jules or the problems I was having now. She had nothing to do with anything, yet because I felt self-conscious sitting at the Norfolk bar alone, because, in fact, I'd gone there on a Monday looking for a Friday man, I now have a vaguely remembered acquaintance coming into my story like a regular player with a regular part to play. And though my impulse to invite her for a drink had everything to do with the fact that she didn't know what had happened to me, what else would I do with her once we were settled in our chairs but tell her? How could I relate to her, except as a kindred spirit and a sympathetic female ear?

I stood in the car park while she changed into street clothes, but when I looked toward the front door of the National Theatre again Miro was there, and I understood that the small crowd I'd passed before weren't ticket purchasers but fans. Miro took all the time she needed to sign her name on old programmes and to chat. As I watched her I imagined her solitary exits in London or New York, the loneliness she'd encountered wherever it was that she had gone.

When she broke away we walked across the street quickly and without speaking, until the dust of the car park and road no longer had much chance to invade her nose and mouth. “I get hoarse so easily,” she explained.

In the bar my original table was taken so we had to sit in the back. We were against a wrought-iron railing that looked toward the National Theatre car park and separated the bar from the sidewalk and street below.

“Now,” said Miro, “tell me about this farm of yours. Don't tell me about all the hard work. I want to hear about the satisfaction that comes at the end of the day.”

The question was humourous and seemed entirely sincere, but the expression on Miro's face told me also that she expected stories of a special kind. She wanted a success story that was entirely contrary to whatever had happened to her in the singing world. Maybe that had been her own motivation for coming along.