In the back seat of the Landrover, a shudder gathers low in Rachel’s body and rises. It hardens her nipples. Since no one’s looking back from the bench in front, she lifts one hand to squeeze her breasts. Four hundred times in Vienna, she thinks. And since then not once.
“How much longer to Narok?” Rachel half shouts towards the front, sounding annoyed, restoring the brim to a higher position.
“Not so very far now,” Samson answers. “Tortured enough?” “I’m making the most of it.”
In Narok there’s lunch with the Town Council. Rachel, thoroughly professional, inquires into health care, education, life expectancy, infant mortality, the availability of clean water – things like that. Speeches run on about plans to develop the town – great dreams and meagre prospects rolled up into one. There are lightning visits to gaunt structures – a school, an infirmary, a tanning factory and a store with trinkets for tourists. Then the convoy roars off. On the road again, away from the political role, Rachel in the back seat feels liberated.
The afternoon’s route is south, then it curves east. Sometimes there’s a road, sometimes a track. They progress over dried-out plains speckled with flat-topped acacias. Rocks ping away rhythmically inside the fenders; dust clouds explode from the wheels.
“Are we trying to get somewhere special before sundown?” Nikko asks. Samson nods. He wants to show them flamingoes. The travellers, mostly silent, hypnotised by the twisting, curving, up and over path continuing hour upon hour, watch it transform. It ceases being a line leading; it becomes a living force pulling. It seems to know why they’re on it; only it can predict where they’ll be arriving.
At last on a bluff the convoy halts, Samson indicating this is the place they’ll camp.
With joints stiffened from too much sitting they spill out. Rachel rolling her shoulders, walks forward to explore the edge. Far below, an elongated lake comes into view. Quiet and undisturbed, it fills the valley like a perfect mirror allowing the depth of the sky to reach deep into the earth. On the near side in shallow water, a flock of flamingoes stands thick, forming a sheet of solid pink. Its edges wax and wane as small formations of birds arrive and others take flight. The activity is ceaseless, a welter of patterns. In flight, the birds, in line, just over the water, are twinned by their reflections, until they settle or pass from sight past a rocky outcrop which hides the lake’s extension.
Samson and Nikko come up. Rachel turns. “So lovely,” she says. “Like a jewel.”
“Twenty-four carat,” Nikko agrees. “Worth the drive.”
They pick their way along the ridge, Samson explaining the Rift Valley’s lakes and why flamingoes favour them. Back in camp, the tents are up and beer comes out. The minister and the banker fall into a discussion on investment in tourism while Rachel, sipping slowly, studies a sky that’s discarding the world. That whole evening she doesn’t say much.
Early next morning – it’s still dark – she awakens. The camp is silent. Unzipping the tent she steps out, takes a camp chair and walks the hundred yards towards the ridge. The chair is set facing east where a strip of intense red on the horizon is widening, the colour thinning – as if being stretched to fill an ever larger chunk of sky. It turns into apricot orange. It licks upwards, transforming into a wall of yellow and finally becomes a silver dome.
There’s a rustle in the dry grass. Rachel turns. Nikko’s awake too. He halts next to her. “You’re like a film director in that chair.”
“I wanted to watch the day begin.”
He sits down cross-legged on the grass. “No finer vantage point than this.”
“Actually,” Rachel confesses, “I’m celebrating. It’s my birthday. I’m turning thirty.”
“Your birthday! Congratulations. We’ll organise a party.”
“No need. I’m declaring the whole thing over when the sun shows.”
“Well,” he says brightly, “that still allows a couple of minutes.”
“It’s all I want.”
“You make it sound as if you’re turning sixty. Thirty isn’t a bad age.”
“By thirty you’d expect to have something to show for the years.”
Nikko nods. Benign, patient as a Buddha, he’s quiet until a sliver of sun peeks over the distant hills. “Well, that was a very jolly party.”
Rachel, appreciating this light touch, smiles. “Thank you, Nikko.”
“A present. There has to be a present. How about I promise to publish a book listing your achievements. It would be a hefty volume, I’m sure.”
“You brought me here. That’s present enough. I won’t forget it. Sorry to sound heavy before.”
“Don’t worry. You know, Germans go overboard celebrating birthdays. I think they want at least one day a year when they’re not moody. Maybe the other way around, your way, is better. How did you celebrate last year?”
Rachel says she ignored her twenty-ninth, but Nikko tells her he enjoyed his fortieth two years ago, which was a family outing on a chartered tall-masted sailing ship that did some island-hopping in the South Pacific.
“I once had one hang-gliding in the Alps,” Rachel counters.
“You could do that from here and enjoy a perfect landing down there amongst the flamingoes.” Behind them the camp is stirring. “Can I at least mention it’s your birthday?” Rachel shakes her head. It’s been shared enough already.
The rest of the day has the muted feel of a theatre after a show when the curtain is down. Camp is broken; the convoy winds its way along a trail down to the lake for a closer look at the flamingoes, then swings north to Nairobi. Miraculously the road turns tarmac, a signal for Samson to ask how they liked Masailand. Nikko’s answer comes quick. “Hated it,” he says. “Every minute was tedious. Except for the bouncing. That was the good part. It taught me how to keep change in my pocket. No small feat that, seeing I had a finance minister beside me.”
Samson, grinning, swings around to Rachel for her opinion.
“Masailand was perfect,” she says, “except for the spear. Too bad someone gave Nikko that spear. It scared off the lions.”
The minister clasps a huge hand on the banker’s shoulder. “You see my cleverness,” he says. “You have to come again. Next time to see lions.” At the airport, raising his staff like a baton, he completes the thought. “Next time we’ll go on a real safari. Next time the roads will be very bad, so very very bad. The next time even the best banker will have to let go of the change in his pocket. I guarantee it.” The staff comes down indicating it’s decided.
Once the jet is up and cruising, Rachel and Nikko take stock. The Rift, the Masai, the campsites, the flamingoes, how Samson waving his magic wand made everything happen. There’s a lull and Nikko, pulling out a leather binder thick with papers, remarks casually, “I’ve been thinking about you turning thirty.” Rachel, waiting, watches him dig out reading glasses, breathing on them, rubbing the lenses with a cloth. “I’ve been wondering,” he continues, “whether you’ve always had it all, or whether you learned quicker than the rest of us how to hide your flaws.”
Rachel studies his mannered way of cleaning glasses. She breaks into a slow smile. “Hide my flaws? I told you this morning. I’m stuck. Isn’t that a big enough flaw?”
Nikko seems surprised. “Stuck?” He positions the glasses on his nose with both hands, carefully, like racers adjust their goggles. “Being stuck isn’t your problem. Your problem is the opposite.” He bends his head forward, studying Rachel over the top of the lenses. “You’re doing at thirty what others get around to at fifty, or sixty. Your problem is living too quick.”
The eyes above the lenses have frozen into a dead stare. Rachel mocks their coldness with a smirk and in this asymmetric lock she sees Nikko’s intensity switch get flicked to on, as during the lunch on the boat and the meetings of the committee when she caught him studying her from a distance. His coal-black eyes are spewing fierceness. Coming at her, Rachel feels, is a will bent on penetrating hers. “If living too quic
k is a problem,” she says calmly, “you’ve got it too. What’s your solution? I’d like to know.”
Nikko snorts. His head moves, a few times up and down, then back and forth. Ambiguous movements. An expression of admiration that his will was reflected? Or is he admitting he’s been found out? Or both? Rachel interprets it simply as an indication that his thoughts are moving on to other matters, for he begins rifling through the stack of documents, sizing them up, taking deep breaths, readying himself for an assault on his work. Rachel takes out a book and begins reading, intermittently stealing glances at the banker beside her.
The way he adjusted his spectacles, like goggles against the wind, it really did signal the beginning of a contest, because he’s racing through the papers as if he wants to go faster than the jet screaming through the atmosphere at thirty-thousand feet. Behind the rimless lenses, lips pursed, chin jutting out, Nikko is the perfect image of an implacable, no-shades-of-grey businessman. He devours in an instant the contracts, agreements, letters, and memoranda. There are swift judgements and abrupt executions. His tools? Swirling signatures, or notes of dissatisfaction scrawled violently onto margins, or strokes of pure contempt ripped down the pages diagonally from top right to bottom left. Rachel observes the pen from which this flows. An elegant instrument, heavy, made of gold. It lies in his hand as threatening as the Masai spear. The banker’s notations, she suspects, are stabs into the breasts of underlings, and each brutal diagonal slicing represents a goring of some poor sod’s soul. Rachel reflects on this. Violence on paper. Is that a cause or an effect of running a bank? Or are such habits acquired by all who live life in the fast lane? Staring at her open book, not flipping any pages, Rachel requires an audience for her thoughts and begins to write a letter in her mind. Soon enough she’ll put it down on paper and send if off.
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.
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