Ahmed's Revenge (2 page)

There was a small two-storey building at the end of the block, around the corner to the right. The building actually seemed like someone's home. It was separated from its neighbours on the street, standing alone and dark. A person could walk along narrow pathways on either side of the house, and that's what Jules did, choosing the pathway nearest him and entering a side door halfway down.

What was I supposed to do, what would anyone do in circumstances such as these? Julius and I had a marriage that really was based on trust, that wasn't just a word in our case, but a kind of easy-to-handle general rule—the way a wedding ring binds a finger, that's the way trust bound Julius Grant and me. But this situation was beyond me. Not long ago we had been at the French Cultural Centre watching Jules et Jim, and a half a day before that we had been on our farm, overseeing our harvest and looking out at the Mara plains. And now I was at the dark end of Loita Street alone, and my husband was inside the building at my side. My normal frame of mind would have told me to go back to the hotel and wait, but try as I might, I couldn't find my normal frame of mind.

I had not thought so at first but there were, after all, lights on inside the house, turned down low. Seeing them gave me the idea to go up to the front door and knock and ask whoever answered if Julius Grant could come out and play. I thought such a tactic contained the proper lightness of touch and might even get me off the hook for following him when whatever Jules was doing turned out to be fine. But as I got closer my courage left me, and I suddenly veered past the front of the house, following instead the path Jules had taken, the one that led to that ominous side door. Once I was on the path I walked quickly, in my usual no-nonsense kind of way, and by the time I got to the door, all my courage returned. I was prepared not only to knock on it but to turn the handle and go inside, just as Jules had done. Unlike the door in front, however, this side door had a window, and through a crack in its curtain I saw a scene that stayed my hand. My husband was there, standing by a table and drinking from a bottle of beer. I had expected a woman, I admit it now, but what I saw was stranger than that, both better and worse at the same time. I can hardly say the word, but what I saw was ivory, the raw material. My husband, Julius Grant, was standing in a room full of yanked-out elephant tusks.

Let me say right now that no one I knew was farther from the complicated world of poachers, no one was farther from Kenya's illegal ivory trade, than Julius Grant. Still, though that window didn't afford me more than a couple of seconds' worth of looking, I know what I saw. My husband was next to the table, a dark expression on his face, and all around him tusks were tied together in bunches, on top of the table and beside it and everywhere across the floor. They weren't long tusks, not three feet on the average, and they hadn't been cleaned. Jules's bottle of beer was before him, its liquid an unsettled sea. There was no one else in the room, but I caught sight of someone leaving through a doorway to my right. I saw the bottom half of a medium-brown jacket, and the black heel of a shoe. The room was a kitchen, I knew, because there was a sink and a refrigerator on the far side.

I jumped away from the window, but I didn't duck back the way I had come. Rather, I ran toward the rear of the house, where there was another low building of some kind. I did consider that the wearer of the jacket I'd seen might be back there too, but I also knew that a beeline in the general direction of the hotel would afford me the best chance of not being caught by Julius or someone else coming out of the front door. I ran quietly, but I didn't run slowly, and soon I discovered that the path led into someone's small
shamba
, a garden, believe it or not, which I immediately tumbled into, severely scratching my thigh. I shouted, but I got up before anyone could come and lurched onto another path that led to an adjoining street on the block's far side. Though I had a lot of trouble trying to think, I certainly knew enough to continue moving. I wanted to be back in our room at the New Stanley Hotel, feigning sleep, by the time Jules returned. So I let it all out, sprinting along Kenyatta Avenue like a schoolgirl, all the way down to Kimathi Street.

I was exhausted and sweating, and my thigh was bleeding a lot, so as soon as I got back to our room I jumped into the shower, stopping only to hide my filthy clothes. I found part of a large thorn in my thigh and pulled it out, and since neither Jules nor I had brought pyjamas with us, when I was done I crawled into the bed, naked but dry, a small towel wrapped around my thigh. I tried to calm myself, to regain my natural optimism and to make my heart-beat slow down. I tried to believe that Jules would tell me everything the moment he came in, but whatever I told myself, what I had seen made no sense at all. Julius Grant was a coffee-growing man, that was how he lived his life, and if I knew anything about him, it was that he did not suffer poachers. He hated the bastards, and he absolutely celebrated the wildlife on our farm, even the elephants who sometimes came crashing through. But it was also clear to me that Jules had started our fight, all that rubbish about calling me Jim, so that he could storm out of the hotel and get over to that kitchen on Loita Street without my knowing about it.

My mind was teeming with the images I had seen, I couldn't make it slow down, but by the time I heard the door open, I was nevertheless able to lie still. And sure enough, when Jules came in he was contrite. “Hello, Nora dear,” he sang. “Nora Barnacle home from the sea.” Nora Barnacle indeed. When Jules drank he liked to pretend that he was James Joyce, and it was all I could do to keep from sitting up and calling him Jim.

But Jules was a thick-bodied man and a good slow lover, I haven't said that yet. I also haven't said that I made love with Jules on the night we met. My father was staying in London and I was visiting him and Jules was a houseguest of the man next door. It was a hot summer night and I was sitting on my father's porch, watching people walk by and thinking vaguely of Kenya and England, of the vast differences between them, and the direction my life was taking, when Julius came out and told me his name and asked if I'd like to join him at the pub. He was polite and funny and I told him “Sure.” I was twenty-four then, nearly twenty-five, and I remember feeling that there had already been too many men in my life. There had been five, and Jules, by the end of that night, was number six, making a neat half dozen, and ending my experimental period once and for all.

Jules believed I was asleep when he got back, but he was determined to awaken me by going down beneath the sheets and playing. And though I didn't forget about the house on Loita Street with all those horrible tusks, I soon enough put the image aside, since everything he did down there was an apology, everything for my pleasure, nothing for his, and I knew he would tell me about it anyway, in his own good time.

The next morning, however, neither of us said a word. Since I didn't ask him, Jules didn't have to lie, so oddly enough it was only I who lied that day. When we got out of bed there was blood on the sheets, and when Jules said he was surprised, I turned my leg away, telling him only that several hours after all our ruckus my period had come. Then I sent him down to the chemist's for some sanitary pads, while I quickly went to work on the real wound I had.

By that I mean the tear in my thigh, not the larger wound, the one that neither Jules nor I, as it turned out, would ever be able to do anything to heal.

When Jules and I got back home again we had the welcome prospect of hard work to keep conversation at bay. I decided that I wouldn't say anything about what I'd seen on Loita Street, that I'd wait for him to speak no matter how long it took. Still, a hundred times I was on the verge of ripping it out of him, and a hundred other times, I swear, I knew that full disclosure was on the tip of Jules's tongue, ready to step out and clear the air between us without me forcing it at all. But, alas, neither of us spoke. It was harvest time and we had people everywhere, crews to feed, sheds to tend to and equipment to repair, an endless array of lorries coming and going in the afternoon light, taking our coffee to the processing plant. It was a hard harvest that year, the hardest we had had, and it left no time for serious talk. We could eat and we could discuss what tomorrow might bring, but that was all. Sleep was third on our agenda and it was always the longest item.

During past harvests, I guess I am inclined to say, every little disturbance, even such a thing as a broken-down lorry on the road, seemed to define vitality for Jules and me. Every unexpected event, however awful at the time, was a lesson in what it meant to be alive and involved with something that we loved. We worked our farm together, and when we ate our evening meals, we sat on a porch that looked over miles and miles of the kind of land that God must have created first, if He created it at all. We had a small pond about eighty yards from our porch, and often at dusk, while we drank our coffee or finished a bottle of wine, animals would come out of the surrounding bush to drink, the way the biblical animals must have done, not quite the lion and the lamb together, maybe, but certainly the lion, and sometimes the leopard, and giraffes and impalas and warthogs. Since I am a daughter of Kenya it may seem strange that I find it thrilling still, and the truth is that when I was young and used to go on safaris with my dad, I didn't think nearly so much of it as I do now. But I was educated in England, and there I learned the lesson that I had started at the top, or conversely, that if there's a scale of beauty and wonder in the world, I had grown up on that scale's heavy end. And when I came back with Jules tagging along, anxious to start a new life with me, I never took it for granted again.

All of this is not to say that there weren't frustrations for Jules and me even before the thorn of his secret started festering in my thigh and in my heart. Working the land as we did was always hard. The Maasai were constantly coming around, once setting down a whole village on land that we intended for planting, and for a time we couldn't catch a leopard that killed the farm animals we used to keep, one or two a week, for an entire year. But, my God, the gifts of the planet were so abundantly laid at our door. Even when elephants trampled a coffee crop, wandering through like fat ladies in a seed store, as they did in ‘71, I could never quite summon the outrage that such an act deserved, though I had to stop Jules several times from running for his gun. Jules loved elephants, I've already said that, but he loved his coffee more, and he did everything he could think of to keep them off our land.

We had been back from seeing
Jules et Jim
for a fortnight when one evening there was a disturbance out by our pond. Jules was in the bathtub, washing the day's work away, and I was at our desk writing checks on our Kenyan shilling account so that Jules, who was going back into Nairobi the next morning, could visit the merchants and pay our bills. Our pond, of course, was only a convenient watering hole from the animals' point of view, so fights of one kind or another were a common affair out there. Elephants, however, because of all the fences we put up to keep them out, were not common at all, and I was moved quickly away from my bill paying by a single elephant trumpet, a weak kind of broken bugle call.

“Julius,” I mildly said, but Jules had the water running and didn't hear.

I walked out onto our porch and listened again. There were some Maasai camped five miles or so on the other side of the pond, well down toward the Mara plains. Jules had told me they were there. I hadn't seen them yet, but the first thing I saw when I went outside were two young
morani
warriors standing there, close to the house, spears and bodies erect. I don't know much Maasai so I spoke in Kiswahili.

“Did you arrive just now?” I asked. “Did you see an elephant nearby? Was that an elephant that I heard, or was it some other sound?”

If elephants were going to run across our farm, this was about the best time for them to do it, because we'd just finished our harvest, but any farmer will tell you that no time is a good time for them to come. It would mean that our break was broken somewhere, our defenses down, and even if they stayed out of the coffee, our trees and outer buildings might get knocked around. Elephants on a Kenyan farm were the breathing equivalents of tornados in the American Midwest, and I knew that if they were there, we had to do something fast to get them turned around.

“There are too many elephants now,” said one of the Maasai, “but this time only one small calf is at your pond. Tell Bwana to bring his gun.”

Our pond had a spotlight next to it, but our generator wasn't switched on. Since I had a torch on a table just inside the door, however, I decided to ask the Maasai to walk me down to the pond and show me. A lost little elephant calf wasn't so bad. If we could scare it into moving off our land and back down toward the rest of the herd, we might still avoid damage.

“My husband is bathing,” I said. “He'll be out when he's done.”

I took the torch and came down off the porch and the three of us headed toward the pond. It could be a dangerous walk alone at night—even our African crew stayed pretty close to their dormitory—but with the morani there the animals would scatter, and I thought we'd be fine.

Our foreman had heard the elephant too and had pulled the cord to our generator, quickly lighting the pond. After that he came out to join us. Our foreman's name was Kamau and he had worked for the Kikuyu man before us, so he knew everything about the farm.

“They say there's only a single calf,” I told him. “Let's just get it out the way it came in. You can take someone down to fix the break after it's gone.”

At the pond, which we approached quietly and from the downwind side, there was indeed an elephant, a baby standing no more than three feet tall. Although this might seem like good news, it wasn't. Maybe such a small calf couldn't damage much, but I was sure it had been followed in by lions, that that was the reason for its pitiful sound, and with such an easy kill at hand, the lions might not be intimidated by the presence of myself and Kamau, or by the Maasai. Even if this baby's mother showed up it might be difficult to avoid a kill at our pond, and if that happened our routine would be disrupted, either by the unmovable carcass and the scavengers it would bring, or by the mother elephant's wrecking of our farm in her grief and rage, her desire for revenge.