Ahmed's Revenge (29 page)

“Daddy,” I said, “Dr Zir.”

Since it was his move, my father didn't respond, but Dr Zir was so startled that he almost knocked his chair over as he tried to stand.

“Nora, darling,” he said. “Come in, dear, and how do you do? And, oh, you shouldn't have.”

Ralph stepped forward to shake his hand, but did not, thank God, extend the greeting by giving him the wine box that the doctor clearly thought was a gift. Instead he put the box on a table by the door. And when my father finally moved his chess piece, he stood up too.

“Did it help to get away, Nora?” he solemnly asked. “Did it do you any good to be alone for a while?”

“We've parked the farm lorry in front,” I told Dr Zir. “I didn't want to chance taking it home.”

Both men went over to the window, pulled back the curtains, and looked at the lorry. The box on its back made it look strange. “When did you get that one?” my father asked. “I thought your lorry was a flatbed.”

I told my entire story then, so far as I knew it. When I mentioned Ahmed, my father at first seemed to think I was talking about a man, and when I said I believed that the tusks in the lorry were real and that the ones at the museum were the crowning example of Mr Smith's craft, the point of everything he had done so far, my father sat back down. I hadn't yet mentioned Mr Smith's own father's humiliation, or the son's decision to make revenge a by-product of his endeavour, but my father's face was so pale that I feared going on.

“I've been reading about the museum's opening,” said Dr Zir. “I've even got tickets—one of my colleagues at the hospital gave them to me today.”

“When is the opening?” I asked. “I don't even know that for sure.”

“It's Monday,” said Ralph. Since my father had his face in his hands, and since Dr Zir was searching for the tickets in the pockets of his worn-out vest, Ralph had gone over to the couch and picked up a newspaper.

“Monday morning, ten o'clock,” he said. “President Kenyatta will be there, as will the vice president and everyone else. It says here that the folk dancers and singers are rehearsing tomorrow. It also says that the taxidermist and the contractors will be working through the weekend to get everything done.”

“I was the Minister of Wildlife for five good years,” said my father. He was looking up with tears in his eyes and his voice had such resonance yet expressed such shame that I thought he was about to let everything out. When he got up and came over to me, however, all he said was “They should have invited me.”

I looked at my father standing there. He seemed much older than the number of his years, he was fragile and wayward of mind, he was contemptible for what he had done, and he was all the family I had. I thought of him slapping Mr N'chele and shoving him down the stairs. My father was a big man, and that had been in 1956, when he was undoubtedly fit and strong. I could see the expression on his face as he turned from the top of the stairs and took my hand, walking with me back down the hall to his office door. It was nothing like the expression he had now. Then there had been arrogance in his eye and he had walked slowly, looking satisfied and proud.

I asked Dr Zir if I could leave the lorry where it was—I would take my father up the path and home. Their chess game wasn't over but the doctor said I could do what I liked, and when my father nodded I took his arm. Ralph took the box again, and we made our way back out the front door.

I got the little model of Ahmed from the lorry; then Ralph and I followed my father into the valley and onto the path. The valley was dark, but my father knew the way so well that he left us behind. We could hear him, and we could see him, sometimes, in the odd patterns of darkness, but twice I had to call, asking him to slow down. When we got to the edge of our own yard, however, my father was waiting there. “I don't want to go inside,” he said. I stepped past him, looking around to make sure everything was calm, but it wasn't fear of a dangerous house that kept my father standing outside.

“In the morning, Dad,” I said. “It will all start to unfold tomorrow.”

“Our family has always been small,” my father said. He shook loose from me when I tried to take his arm again. He was speaking not to me but to Ralph on his other side. “Only Nora and me and her mother years ago. When Julius came along I didn't like him at first. He had a strange way of speaking and I didn't want him around.”

“It's natural for fathers to resent the men who take their daughters away,” said Ralph.

“But when we were working together Julius was quick and thorough. He did a fine job. He knew more than I did and he was faster at knowing it, and his shipments were always on time. Do those things count for something when a man looks back, after his life has turned wrong?”

I tried to move my father across the grass again, but he was a heavy man, and as he refused to go I imagined him turning and slapping me, pushing me down into the valley and watching me fall.

“I'll bet his farm was run well too,” he told Ralph. “I've found that when a man is thorough, his thoroughness is uniform.”

“It was well run,” I said. “Now let's go inside.”

My father finally took a step toward the house but Ralph stopped him by suddenly speaking passionately. “I've never seen such a farm,” he said. “Even after all this ruin I can tell that it was very well managed, very well run. The current mess is superficial, it doesn't take the eye of the farmer to see that.”

I was surprised at Ralph. I hadn't thought, on any serious level, that he'd taken stock of the farm. He'd been so quiet out there, in fact, that I assumed he was only trying to get through a horrible day. My father, however, was moved by Ralph's words. “Oh, thank you,” he said, and then he walked straight into the house, forcing Ralph and me to follow along. Beatrice had left a snack for him on top of the piano, a thin sandwich and a glass of milk.

“You play, don't you?” my father asked Ralph. “You will, won't you, while I eat my snack?”

When I went into the kitchen to make sandwiches for Ralph and me I could hear my father going on. He was friendly and talkative again, not eating his sandwich until I came back with ours.

“However this thing unfolds, it will begin tomorrow,” I said again, “so let's eat up and get you to bed.”

My father nodded and it was just then, as I stood there with an unwanted bite of sandwich in my mouth, that the idea of having Ralph sleep over entered my head. I'd intended to lend Ralph my father's Land Rover, to thank him and send him on his way, but when my father took his plate into the kitchen and walked down the hallway to his room, I found myself saying something altogether different. “Do you want a beer, Ralph?” I asked. “Do you want to sit out on the verandah for a while, or would you rather go?”

My God, had I brought Ralph home to help me with the tusks, or in order to regain my equilibrium with Jules by exacting a final revenge of my own? Could I take Ralph to my childhood bedroom ten days after my husband had died? Was I still so angry with Jules that I could do something like that?

“A beer,” said Ralph, “the verandah.”

The smallest bottles of beer in our refrigerator were the Tusker Premiums with the foil around the top. I took two and opened them and followed Ralph outside.

“Why have you never married, Ralph?” I asked as soon as we were sitting down. “In all these years why haven't you ever taken a wife?” It was difficult to see Ralph in the odd patterns of light, but when he spoke he contradicted what he'd told me in the market that day.

“I was married,” he said matter-of-factly. “As it is with your husband, my wife died.”

Could that be true? Could he have left such a thing unsaid for so long, could I have simply not heard about it in the expanding smallness of our town?

“She was killed in a road accident,” said Ralph. “She was driving one of our safari vans and swerved to avoid a pothole. A
matatu
hit her head-on.”

Ralph's words seemed rote, as if he'd said them that way many times before, and I wondered how often he changed the order in slight little ways. Was he still experimenting or had he long ago left it alone? I considered how I would tell about Jules's death, whether I would easily find a way. I looked at Ralph but held my next question back, sensing that he would answer it anyway.

“That was in 1966,” he said, “eight years ago now. Her death was horrible, but beneath it all was the unavoidable fact that we had married too young. And I have to say that the worst thing for me was that I felt relieved when she died. Is it bad to say so if it's true?”

It had been another long and impossibly difficult day. Nothing was impossible anymore, but I was struck dumb by Ralph's words. Could he be telling the truth, could such a thing be universal, or had Ralph read my mind? And would I speak of Jules this way after only eight years had gone by? Would I say, “He was killed on our farm. A lion mauled him and then he was shot”? Would I say, “Beneath it all was the unavoidable fact that I felt relieved when he died”? Would I say it the same way every time?

I suddenly felt like falling to the ground and weeping, in grief not only for poor dead Jules, but for our inability to grieve properly. All I did, however, was tell Ralph that what he said sounded too cold.

“Did you not love her then?” I asked him calmly. “When she died did you not mourn?”

Did Ralph understand my questions, with their rigid diction and negative syntax? Did he know I loved Julius Grant too much when he died, and that I was furious with myself now?

“She was leaving,” said Ralph. “She had told me as much on the morning of the day she died. She was an educated girl.”

From the verandah we could see into the kitchen. On the counter was the wine box containing Jules's arm, and on top of the wine box, with its two tiny tusks touching the window pane as if about to tap, stood the model of Ahmed the Elephant, eight inches tall. From where I sat I could see the model well enough, but had I not known what it was I could never have made it out. It seemed a jumble of circular lines and angles, and its bones somehow seemed black, as if someone had pasted a peculiar ebony rose on the glass. I tried to make it be an elephant again, but it was stubborn, insisting on the abstract, the way a fortune teller's bones do when they're cast on the ground.

“A couple of nights ago I was attacked by monkeys,” I told Ralph. “They came up from the valley. They hid in the avocado tree, attacking me when I came home.”

Ralph glanced into the valley, then turned to look at the tree. We had put our beer bottles on the table between the two lounge chairs where we sat. In the moonlight Ralph's pants and shirt looked clean, though I knew them to be streaked with dirt from the work he'd done. He sat near me but his face was impossible to see.

“One of my wife's complaints was that I was not ambitious,” he said. “She told me I didn't have a master plan.”

“If Jules had been unfaithful to me with women I would consider getting even in kind,” I answered. “That would have been easy, but he was unfaithful in the oddest possible way.”

When Ralph stood up, preparing to go, I felt relieved. It had only been a few minutes since I had the idea that I could ask Ralph to stay, but now I knew that that was wrong.

“We should sleep,” I said. “Will you help me again tomorrow?”

Ralph said he would help me not only tomorrow but every day, and I picked up the beer bottles and turned to take them inside. Ralph's bottle was still one-third full but the beer in my bottle was gone. “Do you want to finish this?” I asked.

“If you will allow me I will take it with me in the car,” said Ralph.

That was all. We didn't speak once we were back in the house, and when I gave him the keys and showed him to the door again he didn't turn around.

Alone in the kitchen I leaned against the counter and peered out the window at the spot where we'd just been. I could see everything plainly, the pattern of the lounge chair ribs on the moonlit ground, the tops of the trees in the valley, and the movement that their leaves made in the wind. I could even see two wet circles on the table made by the beer bottle bottoms.

If I could see everything so clearly from here, then why, when I was out there, did I have such trouble seeing things inside? Now the little elephant model was before me, still looking out. I touched it and lifted it off the wine box and turned it in the air and set it down again. Whatever happened, I would keep this little elephant as my own. Without thinking about it I reached up and took Ahmed's left tusk out of his skull again. I hadn't touched the right one, but it looked locked in place, and this left tusk was worn better anyway, its end less pointed. Though I worried that the solitary habits of my widowhood were starting far too soon, I would have turned and taken the tusk with me to my bedroom, I think, if I hadn't suddenly been sure that Ralph was back, that he'd come in quietly and was standing at the kitchen door.

“Our time has passed, don't you think?” I said, but when I turned, my entire body stern, there was no one there to scold. Ralph stood only in my mind, and when I turned again I put the little tusk back in Ahmed's skull, pushing it in until, this time, I heard it lock in place.

I went to my bedroom alone after that, no Ralph, and my hands empty at my sides. There was a connected bath, and as I let the water roar and watched the room fill up with steam, I remembered poor Detective Mubia again. I went back into my bedroom and picked up my bedside phone: 222-222. His number had been my mantra for so long. As I listened to the phone ring and heard the water in my bathroom splash, I knew, of course, that Detective Mubia would not be there. I saw the charred logs of my husband's ever-ready campfire spread out before me on the ground, and as I watched them I had a clearer vision of what the next few days would bring. Tomorrow I would begin my engagement with Mr Smith, finally taking the baton my husband had handed me with his note, finally knowing what to do. And with that baton I would run the rest of the race with speed and determination. And I would not pause, this time, until the race was done.