Borderless Deceit (27 page)

Dearest Anne-Marie,

I've spent three days in a country that's so inspiring it forces you inward
.

On the surface the trip was entertaining. Samson and Nikko were good company; the scenery was breathtaking. But isn't it scary how once you're truly out of your routine you see how contemptible it is? This all the more so if you're in a place which generates endless questions that normally you're too busy to ask. Although we were a jolly group there was time for solitude – hours of bouncing around in the back of a Jeep. I learned you don't have to go into a
monastery to have ideal conditions for meditation
.

In the overall scheme of things, what I thought about was, well, pretty drab stuff, nothing you and I couldn't gab on about. But in the wide-open, wild surroundings some themes which otherwise get pushed aside became significant. At least, they seemed to. The three days were a whirlwind of ecstasy, even transcendence, but indulgence too
.

What kinds of questions? Here's a couple. Where lies the line between being alone and being lonely? Or, is it so noble to be intellectually productive if it means you ignore your biology? I should say I had my birthday in East Africa. It brought my body more or less to the half-way point of its reproductive phase. Fifteen years to go. You could compare that to turning seventy-five
.

I wrote you before that we – Samson, Nikko and I – established a wholesome little triad in Geneva. It was that way in Kenya too. Easy going. Amusing. Travelling on a corporate jet means comfort. (Is there a moral dimension to that?) Having seen Samson on his home turf, I believe he may well one day be a patriarch leading his country with generosity and wisdom. As for Nikko, I learned his manners are finely tuned. But he has another side, a dark energy which he keeps closely leashed. He's a good-looking man, Anne-Marie. Spending hours together in close quarters in his plane, we developed a rapport. Though that's all it was…

Two hours go by – Rachel has long finished composing the letter she will write – and Nikko slips the pen into a pocket, closes the leather binder and removes his glasses. Relaxed, smiling pleasantly, he knocks on the door to the flight deck. The co-pilot jumps into action. He makes his way to the back, poking around compartments, returning like a cellarer with trays of gourmet cold cuts, chateau wines, starched napkins and silver cutlery.

“Back to our day jobs tomorrow,” Nikko announces, lifting a glass, sounding as if it's worth celebrating. “But I enjoyed Kenya. We should go again. Take up Samson's offer.”

Rachel considers this. “I'd go again,” she says slowly.

In silence they seem to weigh what this may mean until Rachel breaks it by asking brightly if he chose the wine they're drinking. He did, and Nikko gives a charming description of a little known, world-class vineyard not far from Frankfurt, near the hillside mansion where he has his wife and children. “Actually, it's mine now. I bought it last year,” he admits sheepishly. Out come stories of harvesting grapes, hunting boar, fishing trout and celebrating saints' days in country inns with the working folk. Rachel visualizes this world. This banker, she concludes, will turn on a dime. One moment he brutalizes, the next he beatifies.

In Geneva, next morning back in her routine, and all through that day and the next, Rachel, on autopilot, might never have been away. But this is only an appearance. Back in the UN meetings, although she seems to concentrate on the voices of interpreters arriving via headphones, she's really reliving being on the savannah in a four-wheel drive dividing the hot plains with walls of turbulent dust. Actually, something of the African experience is touching her all the time. At inconvenient moments it arouses sensuality in her, making the spaces she's in – mostly UN committee rooms – seem sterile. When the condition becomes acute she removes the headphones and leaves to find a coffee, because, really, to feel that way in that place, surrounded by a pack of cloned diplomats, is too ridiculous.

Nikko has phoned. He did as soon as he was back in Berlin to say he arrived fine, and again two days later to let her know he was sending a platinum watch to Samson as a thank you.
From both of us
. A week later (he's in the air between Berlin and Moscow) he calls to pass along the pilots' greetings. “Tell them they're brilliant,” Rachel replies. She hears Nikko shout this forward. Then he's back in her ear. “The pilots want you to know…,” the timbre of the banker's voice is finely tuned, as in a well-considered confession, “… the plane never flew more smoothly than with you on board. They believe you made it fly higher. You got us close to the divine.”

“It sounds like you're on a high right now,” she laughs. “Anyway, you men, doing your crisscrossing of continents, have a good time.”

Two months go by. No more calls. Rachel concludes she's heard from the banker for the last time. But suddenly he's back, on the
phone, in the same manicured voice, this time during a short hop from Muscat to Kuwait. “Heard from Samson,” Nikko explains. “The wildebeest migration has hit Masai Mara. Feel like going for a look? I can be in Geneva late Wednesday. That would give us Thursday and Friday to see the spectacle. I've got to go to Kenya anyway for a business meeting on Saturday and can fit that in on the way back. It'll be on a farm on the slopes of Mount Kenya. You'd be back in Geneva early Sunday. Can you squeeze it in?”

Rachel throws a lightning glance at the calendar on her desk and shows no hesitation. Lightly she says, “I think so. Sounds like fun. Yes. I'd like to go.” She sounds uncomplicated, even breezy, but her voice masks delight.
Feel like going?
she repeats to herself silently. To have a respite from Geneva's humdrum? To be in Nikko's provocative company for a while? To pursue her affair with East Africa?
Feel like going?

Four days later, memory and expectation mingling, Rachel sets off. The greeting at the airport is warm – a short, tight clinch and kisses to the cheeks end with a light one on the lips.
Good to see you,
and,
You look wonderful
. It's all familiar now – the jet, the pilots, the comfortable cabin, Nikko's urbane conversation. During the in-flight meal he lets a piece of news drop. Samson won't be joining them, a sudden political obligation. Nikko makes it sound inconsequential, as if announcing a slight delay in their arrival.

Rachel, not skipping a beat, sizes up the new dynamic. “That's unfortunate,” she says distantly. “I was looking forward to hearing what you'd say to each other when we ran into lions.”

“How so?”

“Well, bankers and finance ministers, hunters and carnivores, I was looking forward to the spin you'd put on it.”

Nikko, grinning, takes her hand and squeezes it. “We'll miss him.”

With or without Samson, the safari has been organised to the last detail. In Nairobi a Cessna is waiting to take them for a brief morning flight across Masailand to the Mara. In the air Rachel asks the pilot if Lake Magadi is out of the way. Nothing is ever out of the way in the limitless world of a Kenyan bush pilot. He adjusts course immediately, veering south. Soon enough a hundred kilometres away Mount Kilimanjaro rises up through a circle of clouds, and ten minutes later
the pilot points down to the right. From her perch Rachel, seeing the pewter lake, the white-lined soda shores, the surface of the water brushed here and there in pink, all of it framed by empty umber hills, thinks back to the morning when she celebrated. She tries to locate the very spot, to see it from up high, and when she thinks she's found the bluff (a convergence of several lines of beaten-down grass, perhaps their tracks, can be discerned), a look of faint bemusement is traced in little lines around the corners of her mouth. The confrontation with herself that day, it was a credible experience. To a degree it was transforming and as such it is still with her. But the mood is different today. On impulse, stealing a page from Nikko's book of charm, she takes and squeezes his hand. “It's as beautiful from up here,” she tells him, “as it was down there.”

He leans over to look out, ending up half resting in her lap. On the way back up he halts, studies the flashing in her eyes and places a kiss on her mouth. “A belated happy birthday,” he explains.

“Exquisite timing,” she mocks, then looks again to view the bluff slipping away beneath the Cessna wing.

The plane banks west, away from the Rift's dried-out floor. Now they're over land draining into Lake Victoria and feeding the Nile. The descent is towards a vast, verdant, fecund plain bound to the north by an escarpment and to the south, ignoring a political border, stretching without interruption towards the Serengeti's immense and mysterious expanse. The Cessna approaches a landing strip, a rectangle of beaten back vegetation, in a remote corner of the reserve, first making an overpass a few dozen feet off the ground to ensure no animals, dead or alive, or other obstacles exist, before touching down and hobbling to a stop. A four-wheel drive is already creeping forward from beneath some trees, and minutes later Rachel and Nikko are deposited into a trim and neat enclosure containing a smattering of tents. A dozen joyous Africans are clustered at the centre: cooks, drivers, servers, cleaners, gardeners, mechanics. And emerging from this cheerful gathering is a huge, Sumo-wrestler of a man.

“Me, I am Mr. Onyango,” he announces, laughing volubly. The very name is cause for celebration. “I am welcoming you and informing you that you will be putting up with me as your camp manager.” The laughter rises in volume and tone until it peals, a
veritable carillon. “I am also saying you may live according to your own faith, I do not discriminate. As for me, I am Christian. And you may consider it not unfitting, surrounded here, in this place, by God's greatness, that my first name is Noah.” Noah's fleshy arms spread wide in an embrace of all things living while his massive dancing jowls dance out tolerance and good will. He continues. “And I believe it is our honour to call you Mr. Krause and Miss Dunn.” Once satisfied that his new guests have arrived in splendid comfort, he begins to name his disciples. One by one – some shy, others self-assured, but all proud that their pronounced names act as gifts to the visitors – they take a step forward. The introductions over, Noah spreads his arms once more, not so much as an embrace this time, more as a blessing. Fingers snapping from both his hands send the troop scattering to their tasks. Only a park ranger seems to march to a different drummer. This small, wiry man in a ribbed military-green sweater with a beret stuffed under an epaulet and a cartridge belt around his waist remains silent and stands apart at the camp entrance. An enormous rifle, twice as big as he, dangles casually from a hand.

Lunch, Noah announces, will be served in half an hour. Leading Rachel to her tent he informs her he has twelve children. Amongst them Sarah, Miriam, Deborah, Ruth, Esther and Rachel. Noah's happiness is limitless when Rachel says that's her name too. “My child,” he croons, “my child. Rachel was Jacob's favourite. Did you know? She was so very beautiful. Like you. And she bore him Joseph, the most blessedly handsome child of all.”

“Your daughter Rachel, she has children?”

“Not yet. But I am very confident. As I am for you. It is God's will.”

Twenty minutes later Rachel and Nikko, positioned at a teak table in deep shade under a thick, hut-like grass canopy, receive the camp manager's briefing on personal safety. Peter, the ranger, a few paces back, stands silently leaning on his rifle. “Out there, you will be saying to yourself
This is the Garden of Eden,
but like that it turns…” Noah's hands produce a single loud clap. “Christians – it is no secret – survived the difficult centuries because we existed in numbers. But once upon a time Christians were few and scattered and were thrown to the lions. That is how it is out there. You have no protection if you are not in numbers. So do not wander, not on your own. If you wish to live, if
you wish to love God with every breath, if you wish to demonstrate your faith for many years to come and watch your children grow up, do only as Peter says. That gun, let it be like Jesus, let it be your shield and sword. We love the animals out there – we do – but they are also hungry brutes.”

If Peter is listening, it doesn't show. His saviour's role seems incidental. His eyes and ears are cocked towards the ocean of grass outside the camp. Animism seems to be his form of religion.

Noah rattles off the long list of don'ts and ends with a finger pointing to heaven. This is a sign of anticipation, not an invocation of a higher witness, because after a pause he declares, “Drinks.” Behind a nearby tarpaulin, a worldly clatter begins. “If you have questions, it would be my great honour to answer them.” Noah brings his palms together and bestows a beneficent smile on both his guests.

The banker does have questions – about the migratory route of wildebeests, and, can leopards be baited to approach the camp, and, how many elephants are in the park? And so on and so forth. The camp manager, it emerges, was once a park ranger too, in the days when he was lean. His answers weave together rich descriptions of animal behaviour. Fables of hyenas, wild dogs, cheetahs, puff adders and other species Rachel's only ever seen in zoos. Noah tells stories of survival, of the Mara's timeless cycles, and of modernity, of eyewitness accounts of raiders seeking trophies, or meat, or raw substances such as rhino horn required by Asians seeking virility. A waste, the camp manager claims of modernity, so deplorable, so replete with depravity. Daily vigilance is necessary to combat Satan's power. As Noah does his pronouncing, Rachel's admiration for this latter day agent for species survival, this patriarch of the savannah, grows.

Air rustling in the leaves of eucalyptus trees wafts in a rich scent of gum resin mingling with that of dried grass. Rachel presses her feet to the soil to steady herself because the beauty of the moment – the exotic smells, Noah's mesmerizing stories of nature, the thatched canopy, the fanciful surroundings – threatens to become overwhelming. The brim of her safari hat yields to a downward tug, so that her face becomes half-hidden. She appears to be absenting herself. But the opposite is happening. Her concentration on what her senses are delivering is acute.