Yes, Ellen thought, the white man’s method. Kick ass. Yell, scream, get red in the face. And on his side, the native smiles and nods and works as slowly as possible and pretends to be stupid, and all the time he’s robbing you blind. And both sides are satisfied with the arrangement.
“The worst of it is,” Frank was saying, “I can’t be too visible here, because I’m white. Some son of a bitch’ll tell the police at Kakamega there’s a white man hanging around Port Victoria, and we’re screwed. So I’m gonna have to camp out.”
“Camp out? In a tent?”
“Yup. That’s why I came out today, to pick the site. Up in the hills there. If I leave it to Charlie, he’ll pitch the fucking tent on a scorpion’s nest. And if I live through it, he’ll act stupid, like it was a mistake.”
“I was just thinking the same thing,” Ellen said.
“Come on for a hike.”
They walked back up from the lakeshore through the unending rain, and Frank spent a useless moment by the trucks yelling at Charlie about breakage. Then they walked on, diagonally away from the village, up a steep rocky slope covered with gnarled low shrubs and stubbly green new growth. Bony trees were farther up toward the ridge.
Looking back, Ellen saw two small boats approaching the shore near where they’d been standing, each carrying two men and several lumpy sacks. The sound of their outboard motors was obliterated by the rain. Smugglers, probably; no, certainly.
The steep hill made for hard climbing, particularly since both the mud and the rocks were slippery under their boots. Concentrating on the climb, they spoke no more until they reached the ridge and had started down the much gentler slope on the other side. Perhaps because of the earlier mention of the Jhosi plantation, during the silent walk uphill Ellen brooded on her problems for almost the first time since leaving Kisumu, and after they’d reached the top she astonished herself, as they walked along on the nearly level land, by suddenly saying, “Frank, do you know that Lew’s having an affair?”
He frowned at her, uncomprehending. “With you,” he said.
“No, with somebody else.”
“Greedy bastard.”
The phrase made her believe Frank really did know nothing about it, so she said nothing more. They walked along, Frank glowering out ahead of them, apparently thinking about nothing but the right place to pitch his tent, until he looked at her again and said, “Who’s the lucky girl?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
He stopped entirely. “Listen,” he said. “Are you one hundred percent sure?”
“Of course not. Nobody is until the other person suddenly tells you. And the other person always does suddenly tell you.”
“People are shits,” Frank said.
“True. I was hoping you could confirm or deny.”
“Lew doesn’t confide in me,” Frank said. “Not that kind of thing, anyway. He’d be afraid I’d go sniffing after you myself.”
“He’d be right,” she said, smiling despite herself.
He held a hand up, dangling it from the wrist as though broken. “I got burned once.”
“Oh, it wasn’t that bad.” Not liking the way the conversation was tending, she looked around and said, “How about over there? For your tent.”
He stared in the direction she was pointing. “Where?”
“There, where the land rises a little.”
They walked over to the spot, a low knob or mound, overgrown with weeds and shrubs but treeless. The bony trees were all around, like layers of barbed wire protecting this hillock. Neither the town nor the lake could be seen. “Possible,” Frank said. “Very very possible.”
“It’ll be drier than the land around it, but still protected.”
“Sure.” Frank turned in a great circle, looking at the view without delight. “Home sweet home,” he said. “Jesus. In some previous life I must have been one hell of a villain.”
21
Lew was at the wheel of the Morris Minor, in the rain, with Ellen in the passenger seat beside him, on their way to Balim’s office. And it was at the corner, barely half a block from their house, that he saw the gray Citroen parked on the verge and knew at once it was Amarda Jhosi’s car.
Amarda herself was behind the wheel; he saw her smile through the rain-streaming window as he drove by. Had Ellen seen? Glancing at her, he saw she was looking for something in her shoulder bag.
Driving on, he experienced a sudden surge of erotic memory. The second trip to Nairobi in particular came back to him with the force of hypnotic suggestion. That was the time Balim had not come along, and Amarda had met him in that same Citroen. “I just have something to pick up at a friend’s house,” she’d said as they’d driven away from the airport (and Ellen). “It isn’t out of the way.” The friend, of course, had not been at home, and when Amarda had said, “You might as well come in,” the radiance of her smile had answered all his questions. She was the round-breasted Indian Princess, slowly smiling, soft and young and very willing to learn.
The third time, with Balim along, the connection with Amarda had been more hurried, more guilty, less ecstatic; but still he had followed her eagerly into the storage shed behind her house, rolling with her on the rough burlap sacks, surrounded by the clatter of the rain.
There had been no more trips to Nairobi, which was just as well. Amarda was wonderfully enjoyable, but she was also dangerous, and while she had asked for nothing, he couldn’t help the guilty feeling that he had taken her gift somehow under false pretenses. It was better to let the affair die from inanition.
But now Amarda was here, in Kisumu, smiling at him half a block from the home he shared with Ellen. Do we really have to pay for our falls from grace, every single one? I don’t want to lose Ellen, he thought, and glanced at her profile beside him in the car. It was probably just his imagination, but she looked awfully stony.
Lew had to struggle to keep his mind on what Balim and Isaac Otera were saying. The railroad that came to Kisumu, they told him, was not the main line it had once been. The true main line now angled northward at Nakuru, then ran west into Uganda, leaving the much-struggled-for track to Kisumu nothing but a branch. This branch had been more recently extended northwestward, paralleling the lakeshore but running farther inland, and terminating at Butere, thirty miles away.
It now appeared that at some time in the last two weeks a shipment of sewing machines—fifty-seven machines, crated separately, from Japan—that should have been delivered to Balim here in Kisumu had unaccountably not been offloaded from the freight train and had wound up in the terminus at Butere. “Now,” Isaac said, showing his annoyance by shuffling the various documents and manifests and flimsies in his lap, “some railway officials in Butere are making trouble.”
With his sad smile, the smile suggesting that yet again the human race had justified his worst suspicions, Balim said, “It’s a bribe they want, of course. Chai. The questions are: first, How much? and second, To whom? It is one of those moments, my dear Lew, that call for a firm hand and a white face.”
Lew grinned, trying to appreciate Balim’s humor and stop thinking about Amarda here in Kisumu. Did she mean to talk to Ellen? What was going to happen? He said, “I’ve got the idea.” To Isaac he said, “Do we have a name?”
“Two names.” Isaac extended a small sheet of paper marked in blue ink with his small neat handwriting. “One is Kamau Nyaga, who calls himself assistant terminal manager. I phoned a railway friend in Nakuru, and at the moment the manager’s position at Butere is unfilled, so this fellow is making hay while the sun shines.”
Balim chuckled. “An odd metaphor, under the circumstances,” he said, with a nod toward the windows, against which the rain was streaming.
“Lew knows what I mean,” Isaac said, at his prissiest.
“Yes, I do.” But, he thought, what does Amarda mean?
“The other,” Isaac went on, “is called Godfrey Juma. He is freight master and has been there for a very long time.”
“We have bribed him before,” Balim said drily. “That is, Frank has. You can give him Frank’s best.”
“I will.”
“Unfortunately,” Isaac said, “we cannot tell from here which of these two has authority, or even the physical control of the shipment.”
“We don’t,” Balim pointed out, “wish to bribe the wrong person.”
“I see that,” Lew said.
“It’s as bad as having two women,” Isaac said with a sigh.
Lew peered sharply at him; had he meant something by that? But Isaac’s face was as open and innocent and humorless as ever. Feeling grim, Lew got to his feet, saying, “I’ll see what I can do.”
“Merely do your best,” Balim suggested. “Romance them both, but only plight your troth with one.”
Oh, for God’s sake. “That’s what I’ll do, then,” Lew said, and got out of there before they could drive him any more crazy.
The gray Citroen was in his rearview mirror, beyond the rain-running back window. Being on a mission where face was of importance, Lew had been given one of Balim’s better cars, an almost undented black Peugeot. He had barely steered it out of town, heading northwest through the rain on the B1, when the gray Citroen appeared behind him.
He didn’t notice it at first, because he’d been thinking about Ellen. Was it possible for a woman to clench her lips? Leaving Balim’s building, going out to the rain and the Peugeot and the uncertainties of both Butere and Amarda, Lew had kissed Ellen good-bye, and it had seemed to him that her lips were harder than usual; corrugated, almost. Or was that merely paranoia? Or guilt? “Shit,” he said out loud, driving along, and that was when he glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the Citroen.
His first impulse was to hit the accelerator, but of course he couldn’t do that. Nor could he hit the brake and stop, not here on the main road out of Kisumu. So he kept driving until he reached Kisiani, where he took the small unpaved turnoff to the left. Not far out of town he found a place where farm vehicles had beaten a path in to the right past a cluster of trees. He made the turn, jounced around behind the trees, and stopped.
The Citroen was huge in his mirror, like a brooding shark. Lew stepped quickly out into the rain, wanting the meeting to take place in her car, not his.
“Surprised?” she said, smiling at him in uncomplicated happiness as he slid into the Citroen.
“More than I can say.” Slamming the car door, he took her in his arms and kissed her; not because he wanted to, but because he knew very well it was what he was supposed to do.
But then he did want to.
It was in the role of hero that he had first met her. He was the hero and she the damsel in distress. He was the handsome stranger and she the beautiful virgin in the bosom of her family. He was Lochinvar and she—Except that, in the poem, Lochinvar’s damsel was named Ellen.
His own Ellen had seemed an irrelevancy then, not mentioned in sagas. But she did exist, the outer world did exist, and the wall he’d built between reality and fantasy had crumbled this morning when he’d first seen Amarda’s car half a block from his house. The damsel in distress doesn’t drive two hundred miles to get laid.
In the Citroen now, sex finished, the beast slaughtered yet again, the two of them sprawling on bedlike reclining seats, it was possible at last for Lew to move in the direction of rational thought. So far from being a helpless orphan, Amarda at twenty was a grown woman capable of getting what she wanted out of this world. How much did she want Lew, and for how long? How much trouble did she want to make? What did she intend to do about Ellen?
The Citroen was like some cave on an asteroid somewhere. The interior was very warm now, the windows completely steamed over, and the rain—filtered through tree branches—thudded erratically on the roof. In this setting, the girl naked and luscious beside him, Lew set out to end the relationship. “Urn,” he said.
“Don’t say anything.” Her murmuring voice was languorous with satisfaction. Her small warm hand traveled slowly down across his chest and belly.
“Um!” He sat up, turning away from her hand, trying desperately to think of something to say. “What time is it?”
“The clock works.” Her rejected hand, not seeming to mind, gestured idly toward the dashboard.
He barely looked at the thing. The point wasn’t the time but his reaction to time. “I’ve got so much to do today,” he said.
“Mmmmmmmm.”
Dear Lord. He risked a look at her; how could he give that up? Almost without his collaboration, his hand stole forward to touch that breast. “You are something,” he said.
But then all at once she was brisk, sitting up, stretching—he held the bowl of her belly and dreamed he’d live in the cave forever—saying, “It is late. I have to get back; I have to see Mr. Balim.”
Cold reality. Drawing back his hand, hunching himself protectively over his lifted knees, he said, “Balim? What for?”
“That’s why I’m here.” She leaned forward to pull a box of tissues from the shelf under the dashboard, then looked back with her sunniest smile. “Aren’t I clever?”
“I’m sure you are.”
Cleaning herself like a cat, she said, “My grandmother had more questions. Also bills to be paid, extra expenses. I convinced her I should drive here today, much better than asking poor Mr. Balim to fly to us every time.”
“Of course.”
“You make me so messy,” she said comfortably, balling up tissues. Her grin when she looked sidelong at him was filled with the innocence and freshness that made him her fool. “I wanted to see you on your home ground.”
“Am I different?”
“Sadder, I think. I don’t know why.”
“Ellen,” he said, forcing the name out before he could stop himself. He had to bring this to an end, no matter what his body wanted.
She looked first startled, then hurt, as though he had betrayed some pact between them. “Oh, dear,” she said.
“I don’t want to lose Ellen,” he said. “But I don’t want to hurt you.”
“And you think it has to be one or the other.”
“Sometimes I think it’ll be both.”
Turning away, she rubbed a small circle in the steam of the side window so she could peer out at rain-soaked farm fields. “Ellen is very beautiful.”
“That isn’t—”
“And very sophisticated.” Amarda turned back to him, an intelligent, wistful child. “She is very exciting,” she said, “and you are very exciting.”
“Amarda, don’t—”
She put her hand over his mouth, to silence him. It was the hand she’d used to clear the steam from the window, and it was cold and damp. She said, “Lew, please. Wait. Do you have any idea what my life is like?”
That stopped him. Had he ever wondered about that? When Amarda was not imprisoned in the tower in his mind, what was her life like? She took her hand back from his mouth, but he didn’t speak.
She said, “We’re poor people, who were rich. I was born in Africa, but I’m a foreigner. Even if there were Bantus in whom I was interested—and there are not—I would not be permitted to become friends with them. And they could only want me to humiliate and cheat.”
“Class,” he said, floundering. “Other people, other—” His hands made vague gestures.
“—Indians,” she finished for him. Her eyes burned with an intensity he hadn’t known she possessed. She said, “Three generations of Africa have emasculated our men. You see them on the streets in Nairobi and Mombasa, narrow boys in fancy silk shirts, buying and selling cheap cars and cameras. I shall inherit land; the family will survive; we won’t always be poor. Those boys would love to court me, give me rides on their motorcycles, marry me, take my land, give me babies, and forget me.” She shrugged, a very bitter gesture. “One day, that’s what will happen.”
Thinking of Young Mr. Balim, knowing she had told him the truth, he still tried to deny it, saying, “That doesn’t have to—”
> “But it does.” Now she looked at him as though he were the child. “What do you think? Shall I go to London, walk along Sloane Street, be discovered for the fashion magazines? Shall I return to India, a land even my father wasn’t born in, and find hundreds of lovely friends, thousands of eligible suitors?”
“Oh, Amarda.” He couldn’t even argue anymore.
More softly, resting her hand gently on his, she said, “Lew, don’t you know how exciting you are to me? There in my kitchen, with your breezy manner of adventure and derring-do, and even a thrilling suggestion of crime in the background. Not some awful crime like murder, but a thrilling crime: smuggling, piracy. Lew, you were the only hero I’d ever met.”
They’d shared the fantasy! “Oh, Jesus,” he said, wanting merely to undo everything. After all, she really was the waif, and she did need his protection. And he had no solution for her. He wasn’t a hero, he was a fraud.
She said, “Lew, I know you’re not my hero. We can just pretend for a little while, and then you’ll go back to your airwoman.”
He shook his head, eyes downcast. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m not.” Her more impish smile showed now, the way she’d smiled while taking him into the empty borrowed house. “It’s wonderful with you,” she said.
“And with you.”
She leaned forward to kiss him, very chastely, closed lips to closed lips. “Next time in Nairobi,” she whispered.
Next time. Why was he so weak? Why couldn’t he stand up and say no like the hero she claimed he was? “All right,” he said.
Her fragrance filled the Peugeot because it was on his body. He drove north, switching to the B8 at Luanda (where Frank and Ellen had taken the road the other way, to Port Victoria), and arrived at Butere shortly before two o’clock. The railroad station, a small brick colonial reminder, was a very sleepy place, with a dozen skinny ragged men snoozing or smoking in the dank waiting room, away from the rain.
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