Green City in the Sun (94 page)

     "I'll be all right," she said in bewilderment, overcome by the power of his touch, of the passion in his voice. What had happened to him? Where had this intensity come from?

     Deborah reached up and removed the sunglasses. He was gazing down at her with eyes that, generations ago, had measured the progress of lion in tall, tawny grass. She was captured in that look; she felt energy pass from his hands into her arms. Christopher overwhelmed her. She was suddenly breathless.

     "Deborah," he said quietly, holding her, "I won't tell you not to go. I haven't that right. You must go. You must become the best that you can be. But... promise me, Deborah, that—"

     She waited. A warm breeze stirred the overhead branches. Sunlight moved on his handsome face.

     "Promise you what?" she whispered, her heart racing.
Say it, Christopher. Please say it.

     But the words wouldn't come to him. It had happened too quickly, the sudden leap from loving Deborah Treverton as a friend to loving her as a woman. In an instant it seemed to Christopher that a terrifying threshold had been crossed—one which he had not seen coming, had not been aware of stepping over. He was unprepared for this sudden rush of desire, this unexpected, outrageous impulse to take her into his arms and kiss her. And more.

     He didn't know how to say it. He thought of California, of the men there whom Deborah was going to meet, men who were like her—white. She would go away from Kenya, Christopher realized in fear, and she would never come back.

     "Deborah," he said at last, "promise me that you will always remember Kenya is your home. Here is where you belong. Here is where your people
are. Out there, in the world, you will be a stranger. You will be a curiosity, and you will be misunderstood. The world doesn't know us, Deborah; they don't know our ways, our dreams. In England I was treated as an oddity. I was engulfed by people eager to make my acquaintance, but I made not one friend. They cannot imagine what it is like to be Kenyan, how unique we are. They can hurt you, Deborah. And I don't want you to be hurt."

     She was lost—in his eyes, in his hold. The strange, frightening world he spoke of no longer existed, only this patch of river and herself and Christopher.

     "Promise me," he said in a tight voice, "that you will come back."

     She could hardly speak. "I promise," she whispered. And when his hands left her arms and he turned abruptly away, she felt the sunshine go out of her life.

S
ARAH WAS ANGRY.

     After two weeks of searching Kenya for her "look," she had come to the terminus of the road here on the coast, and she was no nearer to the end of her quest than when she had first started.

     As she walked the ancient streets of Malindi, an exotic, decaying town that had once been an Arab slave port, and took in the blinding white walls, the veiled women, the crowded markets and flowering mango trees, feeling as if she were walking through a century far in the past, Sarah's exasperation mounted.

     She had begun her pursuit along Lake Victoria, where she had visited the Luo people. She had studied and sketched them—at work, in the market, over their cook fires—and had found that for the most part the men wore slacks or shorts, and the women wrapped
kangas
around themselves. She had gone next to the Masai and the Samburu people, and she had found plain red
shukas
, either knotted over the shoulder or wrapped around under the armpits, on both men and women. Kamba and Taita
women also wore
kangas
, sometimes even over a European dress or blouse and on their heads as scarves. Red seemed to be the dominant color, and that was due to Kenya's ocher soil; brown was also prevalent, particularly among people who still wore loincloths and capes made of soft leather. Here on the coast, with its strong Arab influence, Sarah found Muslim women dressed entirely in black, so completely veiled that only their eyes showed, and Asian women in bright saris imported from India. She had traveled the length and width of Kenya, her sketchpad was full, and the hoped-for inspiration had never come.

     She wished Deborah could have come along with her. They could have made a holiday of it, driving Dr. Mwai's Benzi and visiting the countryside. It would have been a nice sendoff before Deborah went to America, and Deborah would have had advice or would have listened to Sarah's ideas. But there was a going-away party for her at Kilima Simba Safari Lodge in Amboseli, and Deborah had to attend. So she had gone off with Terry Donald, while Sarah had explained her problem to Dr. Mwai, who was sympathetic and had let her borrow his car.

     Now the two weeks were up; the Benzi had to be returned. Sarah had been everywhere and seen everything, and she had nothing to show for it but a hundred uninspired drawings.

     She sat on a bench that overlooked a broad sweep of white sand beach and lime green coral reefs, in the shade of a palm tree, and watched the hesitant progress of a group of Europeans as they explored the perimeter of an ancient, crumbling mosque.

     Tourists, convinced of the stability of Kenyatta's government and reassured that there would be no more revolutions, were starting to pour into Kenya. New hotels were going up in Nairobi and here on the coast; luxurious game lodges were springing up in the bush; Volkswagen minibuses were taking to Kenya's roads, chasing game and stopping at villages for picture taking. They were even coming as far north as Nyeri, on their way to Treetops Hotel; once Sarah had caught some Americans trying to take Mama Wachera's picture outside her hut.

     As Sarah observed the group climbing through the abandoned Muslim graveyard, searching for an entrance into the deserted mosque, she took in
their polyester pantsuits, their blue jeans and T-shirts. And she thought:
Why should
we
be the imitators? Why should we want to look like Americans? Why can't they imitate us?

     She pictured again the young women of Nairobi, fresh out of secretarial college, walking smartly down the sidewalks in protective groups, confident, laughing, their hair proudly cornrowed as if to tell the world that they, like their country, were now liberated and independent. But they wore European styles, and poor imitations at that!

     
Paris once led the fashion field
, Sarah told herself as she got up from the bench and began walking again.
Ten years ago it was England. And now it's America. When will it be Africa's turn?

     This was her first visit to the coast, and she felt almost as much a stranger here as tourists must. There was very little about Malindi that resembled the rest of Kenya. It was exceedingly old, having been founded by the Portuguese centuries ago. It had flourished under the rule of the sultan of Zanzibar. Malindi was like something out of the
Arabian Nights
, Sarah thought, with its old Arab bazaars, domes and minarets, narrow streets and pushcarts. Men sat around in long white robes, smoking bubbly pipes and drinking coffee out of tiny cups. The women were furtive black shapes sharply etched against whitewashed walls. On the beaches, palm trees leaned with the wind, their great green fronds nodding toward the ancient town. Out on the water among the coral reefs, fishermen steered their picturesque dhows, triangular white sails painted upon a deep blue sky.

     Malindi was a beautiful and enchanting town full of mystique, Sarah thought. But it was hardly typical of Kenya.

     As she strolled among hibiscus, frangipani, and bougainvillaea, through the busy charcoal and fish market, by the seedy-luxurious villas of the past rich, her sketchbook in hand, Sarah considered the Turkana people, whom she had observed in the north. With their precious camels, which they used not as beasts of burden but only for milking, with their men in their peculiar caps made of clay and ancestors' hair, and with their preoccupation with bodily ornamentation, they had seemed so alien to Sarah that she had thought they, too, were not typically Kenyan.

     When she arrived at Birdland, a large ornithological zoo, she paused to
gaze at an Asian family picnicking on the grass among tamarisk and flame trees. The father wore a European shirt and slacks and a turban on his head; the mother and grandmother wore saris of bright turquoise and lemon yellow; the children were in ordinary dresses and shorts. Quite possibly, Sarah knew, these were descendants of the original Asian workers who had been brought out from India to build the railway more than seventy years ago. No doubt these three generations enjoying lunch on the grass had been born and reared in Kenya. And yet, ironically, Sarah, like most Africans and whites, did not consider the Asians Kenyan.

     Frustrated, she continued walking. She headed toward the beach, where afternoon winds were starting to ripple the creamy dunes and cast sunlight speckles on the green water. She felt her irritation verge upon despondence. Was there no one, she wondered, among all the tribes and peoples of this country, who was truly Kenyan? Even her own Kikuyu had abandoned tradition. The men had given up the
shuka
for trousers, and the women wore
kangas.

     Where, then,
was
Kenya's style?

     She sat down on a low moss-covered wall and watched fishermen in their long white skirts haul in the day's catch. She smelled the salty perfume of the Indian Ocean, listened to the cries of sea gulls, felt the sun on her arms.
Kenyan sun
, she thought,
which shines equally upon us all.

     She opened her sketchpad and went through her drawings: of Masai warriors jumping; of a Kisii soapstone carver; of a Samburu herdsman leaning on his staff. Sarah had sketched the eyes of Muslim women peering shyly over black veils; she had captured a happy Tharaka bride wearing no fewer than two hundred belts of cowry shells; Pokot women danced on a page, breasts bare, loops of earrings standing out from their heads. Sarah had even drawn an African businessman hurrying down a Nairobi street, briefcase in hand. And here was the smiling doorman of the new Hilton Hotel. Finally, she came to the last sketches in her book: the new, young women of Nairobi in their fake American look, which clashed with their proud, intricate African hairstyles.

     Sarah looked up from the sketchpad and wondered where, in all these sketches, was Kenya.

     The warm wind was building up. It fluttered the pages of her pad. A thin veil of sand raced over the dunes. Palm fronds rustled and slapped against one another. Sarah shaded her eyes and squinted out over the green-to-blue water. The hour was growing late. She knew she should be getting back to Nairobi. And yet she couldn't move.

     Sarah was suddenly, inexplicably fixed to the spot.

     It was as if the rising tropical wind held her prisoner, as if the whispering palms were urging her to
stay, stay
.... She stared at the sky, at the breakers rolling through distant reefs, at the shifting dunes, and suddenly she wanted to draw.

     Turning hastily to a fresh page, Sarah pulled a pencil from her purse and began sketching.

     She was hardly conscious of doing it; the pencil seemed to move on its own. Her hand flew over the paper, depositing lines and curves and shapes. She outlined and shaded. Her eyes went from the pad to the vista, back to the pad, rapidly, while the scene slowly emerged on the sheet.

     And when she was done, barely minutes later, Sarah blinked in amazement.

     She had captured the ancient beach on paper. Not just its likeness, for any camera could do that, but its
spirit.
There was
life
in the sweeping lines and arcs; one could almost hear the crash of the waves, the calls of the gulls. The penciled water seemed to undulate. And even though it was only gray lead, there was color in the picture. Sarah could see it; she could feel it. And her heart began to race.

     Turning to another blank page, she changed her position on the low wall and began to draft the pretty little mosque hidden a hundred feet away behind tamarisk trees. When that was done, she sketched the narrow street with its Arab latticework balconies. And when the soul of Malindi was committed to paper, she closed her eyes and pictured the Amboseli plains, where lions roamed and flat-topped thorn trees held up the sky. Her hands flew. Page after page went by. She brought out fresh pencils. The afternoon waned; Africa's winking twilight was nearly upon her. But still she sketched.

     She drew the shoreline of expansive Lake Victoria and the peaks of Mount Kenya and Mount Kilimanjaro. Her mind's eye saw round huts
and Masai manyattas and Turkana tents, and her hand put them on paper. She drew birds and animals; she breathed life into wildflowers. And then there were clouds, great herds of them, moving around a central, dazzling sun. Finally, sunsets and sunrises went into the sketch-book, and the way the Chania tumbled over its riverbed, and the smoke curling up from her grandmother's cook fire, and the local bus from Karatina taking women back from the market to their various farms.

     When Sarah had filled every page down to the last one and there was no more room, and all her pencils were dull, and she realized in surprise that she now sat in the darkness of night, she felt a strange, almost frightening emotion wash over her.