Green City in the Sun (110 page)

     And then she died.

     Deborah remained for a while at the bedside. She had come to Kenya full of hatred for this woman who had driven her away; now she saw only the reposed face of an old woman whose death symbolized the death of a history.

     When she finally stood up, Deborah's eye fell upon the crucifix over Wachera's bed. It was Jesus, hanging on his cross. But the figure was African. Deborah stared at it. She had never seen one before. When her aunt was still alive, all religious statues in the mission had been imported from Europe and were white. This black Jesus seemed to Deborah to be all wrong, almost blasphemous.

     But then, as she looked again at the dark face against the hospital pillow and the rows of dark faces down the length of the sleeping ward, and as she thought of the African sisters in their blue habits, she realized that in her short time back at the mission she had seen no white faces.

     And suddenly Deborah realized that the black Jesus was proper after all.

     T
HE RAIN HAD
stopped by the time she returned to her room at the Outspan. To her surprise Jonathan was getting ready to leave.

     "Simonson called," he said. "I have to go. Bobby Delaney's body is rejecting the latest series of skin grafts. He has a rampant infection, and he's in critical condition. I'm going to Nairobi and make reservations on the first plane out. I want you to leave with me, Debbie. I'll wait for you at the airport."

     He kissed her and then said, "You said you wished you could talk to your aunt. Open the journal where I've marked it. It might help. I love you, Debbie. And I'll be waiting."

     When he had gone, she sat down on the sofa and picked up the journal. Jonathan had marked, she thought, a rather insignificant passage. It was dated 1920, and Grace had written about a letter she had received from her brother Harold, back at Bella Hill. But as Deborah read the passage now, more carefully and with a newer eye than when she had first read it, she began to see what Jonathan meant. Grace's elegant copperplate script read:

     
Another letter from Harold. He continues to persist in the notion that we cannot possibly be happy here in British East Africa and that we must soon return to Suffolk. His argument is the same old tired one that he used when he tried to dissuade me from leaving in the first place. "Suffolk is your home, "he repeats like a parrot. "Here is where you belong. Here is where your people are, not among strangers who will only think you an intruder. They won't know your ways. They won't understand you."

     Deborah looked up from the journal and stared at the misty blue dawn breaking through the forest. These words sounded so familiar! Where, other than here, had she heard them before?

     And then she remembered: Christopher, fifteen years ago, standing on the riverbank and saying, "... Always remember Kenya is your home. Here is where you belong. Out there, in the world,... you will be a curiosity, and you will be misunderstood.... Promise me that you will come back."

     She looked down again at the journal:

     
I wrote at once to Harold and told him to abandon the subject once and for all. I have chosen British East Africa as my home, and here I shall stay. It is what I have chosen to do. If history had been peopled by the likes of Harold, where would we be today? If one never followed the call of the spirit or ventured into new worlds, how tiresome a place this would be! It is in the nature of the human to move on, to experiment, to look at the horizon and wonder what lies beyond it. When my time comes, I pray that I shall not be as ossified as my brother, that I shall have the courage to say to a future Treverton: Seek your destiny where your heart leads. Always remember and cherish the place of your birth, but then go your own way, as a child must leave its mother.

     D
EBORAH ASKED
A
BDI
to wait at the entrance for her. She went first to the bronze memorial that stood at the side of the mission church, where, next to it, was Grace Treverton's grave. Deborah saw evidence of loving care in the small patch of ground; the nuns kept the grass weeded, the flowers neatly tended. The marker was simple—DR. GRACE TREVERTON, OBE, 1890-1973—but the monument was a tribute both to the artist who had cast it and to the woman it represented in such a lifelike way.

     Deborah gazed up at the figure on the pedestal. She wore a long, old-fashioned skirt with high-buttoned shoes and a long-sleeved blouse with a brooch at her collar. Strangely, her head was bare. In one hand she held her sun helmet; in the other, a stethoscope. And she was eternally facing Mount Kenya.

     Deborah stayed for a moment in the peace of the churchyard; then she continued on to Grace House.

     "I was hoping to see you again," Mother Superior said, greeting her in the little museum. "I wanted to thank you for being with Wachera in her last moments. I've informed Dr. Mathenge of his grandmother's passing.

     Deborah explained the reason for this morning's visit. "I've decided to take you up on your generous offer, Mother Superior, to take something from among my aunt's things."

     "By all means. What would you like?"

     Deborah walked to a display case. "This necklace. You see, it didn't belong to my aunt. It was my mother's. Someone very dear to her gave it to her many years ago."

     "A beautiful piece," the nun said as she unlocked the case and withdrew the necklace. "Ethiopian, is it?"

     "Ugandan. I'm going to write to my mother and let her know I have it."

     At the door, as they were saying good-bye, the nun hesitated, as if there was something she wanted to say. "I was wondering, Dr. Treverton, if I might ask you something."

     "Certainly. Ask me anything you like."

     "You see, I was so unsure that I had done the right thing in writing to you, taking you away from your work and bringing you all these miles.
Was
it you Wachera was asking for?"

     Deborah thought for a moment; then she smiled and said quietly,

     "Yes, it was."

     D
EBORAH HAD ASKED
Abdi to drive her to Ongata Rongai, and so now they were parked in the same spot as before, a safe distance away from the cinder-block structure that served the Wangari Clinic's medical ministry. A large crowd was waiting patiently as the visiting doctor saw to them, one person at a time, with the aid of a nurse and the young man who played Swahili songs to God on his guitar.

     Deborah got out of the car but stayed by it, watching Christopher as he worked.

     The air was cool, breezy. Colorful
kangas,
hanging on a line in the small marketplace, fluttered like bright pennants. The smell of smoke mingled with the aromas of goat, cooked food, and animal dung. It was the smell, Deborah thought, of Kenya.

     She watched Christopher take babies into his arms, examine them, and return them to mothers with sternly spoken instructions. She saw him look into the mouths and ears of old men and listen to the modestly uttered complaints of women. She saw him use instruments, apply bandages, inject needles, and press his stethoscope to emaciated chests. She watched how he smiled at times, frowned at others, but always maintained the dignified, authoritative doctor air that kept his patients in awe of him. And she watched how the pretty nurse at his side worked so well with him, anticipating him, sometimes laughing softly with him and the children. They prayed together with the people, and every so often a special look passed between the nurse and Christopher.

     Deborah thought of Terry Donald's doomsday words about the end of the whites in Kenya; she recalled Mama Wachera's dying utterance; she pictured the black Jesus on the cross. But Deborah knew that the traces of colonial pioneers like her grandfather would never be totally erased from East Africa; the hand of the white man had left an indelible mark.

     Because there it was, in the midst of that hope-seeking crowd, in the person of Dr. Christopher Mathenge.
He
was Grace Treverton's true, lasting legacy.

     
Kwa heri,
Deborah's lips said, mouthing a silent good-bye.

     Then she got back in the car and said to Abdi, "Take me to Jomo Kenyatta Airport, please. I'm going home."

S
HE CAME SEEKING ANSWERS.

     Nineteen-year-old Ulrika had awoken that morning with the feeling that something was wrong. The feeling had grown while she had bathed and dressed, and her slaves had bound up her hair and tied sandals to her feet, and brought her a breakfast of wheat porridge and goat's milk. When the inexplicable uneasiness did not go away, she decided to visit the Street of Fortune-Tellers, where seers and mystics, astrologers and soothsayers promised solutions to life's mysteries.

     Now, as she was carried through the noisy streets of Rome in a curtained chair, she wondered what had caused her uneasiness. Yesterday, everything had been fine. She had visited friends, browsed in bookshops, spent time at her loom—the typical day of a young woman of her class and breeding. But then she had had a strange dream ...

     Just past the midnight hour, Ulrika had dreamed that she gotten out of bed, crossed to her window, climbed out, and landed barefoot in snow. In the dream, tall pines grew all around her, instead of the fruit trees behind
her villa, a forest instead of an orchard, and clouds whispered across the face of a winter moon. She saw tracks—big paw prints in the snow, leading into the woods. Ulrika followed them, feeling moonlight brush her bare shoulders. She came upon a large, shaggy wolf with golden eyes. She sat down in the snow and he came to lie beside her, putting his head in her lap. The night was pure, as pure as the wolf's eyes gazing up at her, and she could feel the steady beat of his mighty heart beneath his ribs. The golden eyes blinked and seemed to say: Here is trust, here is love, here is home.

     Ulrika had awoken disoriented. And then she had wondered: Why did I dream of a wolf? Wulf was my father's name. He died long ago in faraway Persia.

     Is the dream a sign? But a sign of what?

     Her slaves brought the chair to a halt, and Ulrika stepped down, a tall girl wearing a long gown of pale pink silk, with a matching stole that draped over her head and shoulders in proper maidenly modesty, hiding tawny hair and a graceful neck. She carried herself with a poise and confidence that concealed a growing anxiety.

     The Street of Fortune-Tellers was a narrow alley obscured by the shadow of crowded tenement buildings. The tents and stalls of the psychics, augers, seers, and soothsayers looked promising, painted in bright colors, festooned with glittering objects, each one brighter than the next. Business was booming for purveyors of good-luck charms, magic relics, and amulets.

     As Ulrika entered the lane, desperate to know the meaning of the wolf dream, hawkers called to her from tents and booths, claiming to be "genuine Chaldeans," to have direct channels to the future, to possess the Third Eye. She went first to the bird-reader, who kept crates of pigeons whose entrails he read for a few pennies. His hands caked with blood, he assured Ulrika that she would find a husband before the year was out. She went next to the stall of the smoke-reader, who declared that the incense predicted five healthy children for Ulrika.

     She continued on until, three quarters along the crowded lane, she came upon a person of humble appearance, sitting only on a frayed mat, with no shade or booth or tent. The seer sat cross-legged in a long white robe that
had known better days, long bony hands resting on bony knees. The head was bowed, showing a crown of hair that was blacker than jet, parted in the middle and streaming over the shoulders and back. Ulrika did not know why she would choose so impoverished a soothsayer—perhaps on some level she felt this one might be more interested in truth than in money—but she came to a halt before the curious person, and waited.

     After a moment, the fortune-teller lifted her head, and Ulrika was startled by the unusual aspect of the face, which was long and narrow, all bone and yellow skin, framed by the streaming black hair. Mournful black eyes beneath highly arched brows looked up at Ulrika. The woman almost did not look human, and she was ageless. Was she twenty or eighty? A brown and black spotted cat lay curled asleep next to the fortune-teller. Ulrika recognized the breed as an Egyptian Mau, said to be the most ancient of cat breeds, possibly even the progenitor from which all cats had sprung.

     Ulrika brought her attention back to the fortune-teller's swimming black eyes filled with sadness and wisdom.

     "You have a question," the fortune-teller said in perfect Latin, eyes peering steadily from deep sockets.

     The sounds of the alley faded. Ulrika was captured by the black Egyptian eyes, while the brown cat snoozed obliviously.

     "You want to ask me about a wolf," the Egyptian said in a voice that sounded older than the Nile.