“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.
After lunch they wait for the heat of the day to pass. The camp torpor suddenly breaks into commotion with the guests grandly ushered into a Land Cruiser, Peter slamming their door shut, climbing into the cab to ride shotgun, and reaching up to yank at a hatch-like opening in the roof above the back compartment. It’s just big enough for a pair of torsos. With a grunt he gestures that this allows them to stand up. He then snaps a finger forward and the vehicle swings into motion.
Driving along trails or creeping off-track through the grass, they take in the Mara’s wealth: zebras, giraffes, buffaloes, gazelles, foxes, a distant rhino. They halt where a stream widens into pool. Soon enough, a few metres away, a hippo wells up from the deep. The beast, startled by the intrusion, opens jaws big enough to snap off a wheel, but Peter disdainfully stares down into the rosy throat. It’s a standoff and the animal sinks back down. Next they arrive in a vale, acacias everywhere, with the spaces between the trees, as far as the eye can see, filled with wildebeest, tens of thousands of them. Freakish creatures, wildebeests are, but as a herd they have the dignity of a slow-flowing river. The Land Cruiser circles, then cuts a corridor through the quirky, grunting, sideways leaping animals. It’s either the noise or the concentrated volume of so much life, but Rachel and Nikko, on their feet, poking up through the hatch, are stunned and watch the animals in silence. Eventually the Land Cruiser verges off, aiming for a rise with an outcrop of rock and a stand of trees. Fifty yards along Peter squints. A raised hand brings the vehicle to a halt. After a few seconds he points and says, “Lion.”
Rachel and Nikko strain their necks. All they can make out are tree trunks, the rock wall, and areas of shade. But then they too disentangle colours and forms and make out two tawny silhouettes half-hidden under an acacia. The vehicle eases in that direction while they lean forward through the open roof. They cram to the side to watch the cats – a played out male and a groggy female – which, with exceptional disinterest, observe them in return. This is the moment they’ve been anticipating and Rachel and Nikko are elated. They’re big! Look at those paws!
For a moment Rachel thinks of Samson. Lion worship began with him. Suppose Samson hadn�
��t had that political obligation. Would she then be listening to a succession of school boy insults going back and forth in imitation American and English accents? Samson: Hey man, you, Mr. Banker. You’re fearless and noble, right? And you’ve laid your hands on a spear. You ready now to step out and tickle them lions? And Nikko: Listen, old chap, I don’t need to prove potency. I would observe as I scrutinize that pair that it rather reminds me of ministers of finance. Why? you may ask. I do believe it’s their sloth and splendid detachment.
But Samson isn’t there and Nikko has quietly put an arm across her shoulders to share the majestic sight. Rachel moves in closer. When the shaggy male blinks boredom and the sleepy female yawns, Nikko studies her face, waiting for a reaction. She imitates a growl and feels increased pressure on her shoulder. The male rises then, does a turn and plops back down. Peter signals it’s time to move on because even in the wild two sleeping lions are engrossing only for so long.
For Rachel the remainder of the afternoon is like a timepiece winding down. Actually, it’s been ticking methodically for a while, measuring intervals between signals of all kinds. In Geneva, she counted the days between Nikko’s call from near Muscat and the departure for Kenya, and speculated non-stop about the reasons for the trip. Was it really just to view a million gnus migrating? During the night flight down, as they talked with an energy that bordered on ardour, three times he took her hand to squeeze it. Three signs. This morning when the Cessna banked over Lake Magadi there was that brief kiss and the charming reference to her birthday. And now – the pair of lions being the catalyst – whenever they rise through the hatch to view another natural marvel there’s a playful shoving hip to hip. An avalanche of signs. And the intervals between are getting shorter.
The game run takes them to remote corners of the Mara. They see cheetahs (a female and three tumbling, clawing, biting cubs which prompt a moan from Rachel); they run into elephants flapping their ears; on a track they discover a hapless python, run-over, flattened in two places; and on trampled patches everywhere they watch the savannah’s hyperactive cleaning corps, clusters of vultures picking at bones to prepare them for years of bleaching. But Rachel’s concentration has become fragmented. It swings between attending to what Peter is laying out and Nikko’s dominating presence. Back and forth between these two poles, between watching nature and feeling nature, the pendulum clock ticks.
And when at dusk, as a crimson-maroon sunset fades rapidly to black, the vehicle delivers them back to camp and they retake their place at the table under the grass canopy, the patriarch of the savannah welcoming them with chilled champagne, and they listen to the hordes of cicadas shrieking out accompaniment to loud melodies of extreme death played out in the distant darkness, and they dine on antelope and drink fine wines and end the meal with chocolate eclairs which are followed by tumblers of cognac which themselves seem to signal that they should rise to move out of the artificial light, and once enshrouded by darkness, still holding their glasses, Nikko reaches for her waist with a free arm, it is then that the countdown ends. She wraps her free arm around him too and they kiss again and again. “I’m going to my tent,” Rachel says, catching her breath and slipping away.
Her bed is covered by mosquito netting, a tent within a tent. In the dark she slips out of her clothes and waits under the sheet, passing the minutes by stroking her belly and rubbing a thumb over the tips of her breasts. It isn’t long until a footfall nears, the tent flap opens, closes, and there’s the sound of a bathrobe or just a towel, dropping. Rachel spreads apart the entrance to the netting. “Want to crawl in with me?” she says, as if they’re children playing in a garden.
An embrace, lips, tongues and hands exploring, a build-up of power, a too-quick release – it confirms to Rachel that all along there was an unspoken plot. Voices murmuring in the dark expose it.
I’ve wanted you ever since I passed you that first glass of champagne on the boat.
I thought that.
And you?
I was learning how to read you.
Was it difficult?
I don’t think I’ve finished yet.
When did you think we might be lovers?
When you called last week.
Last week? I thought about it from the beginning…What my imagination has put me through.
Mine got seriously going this morning.
This morning?
Over Lake Magadi, when you kissed me.
And you imagined what?
A longer kiss…and this.
In post-love’s freeing-up, Nikko, his voice a low quaver, reveals he was fascinated by Rachel’s moodiness when they were in Masailand, that he restrained himself from gawking whenever she moved through the camp, and how he wanted her the morning of her birthday when she waited for the sun to rise. Throughout, his hand moves up and down over her outline, as if she is a sculpture and his task is to polish. Such beauty, he marvels. Exquisite shoulders. Lovely breasts. The roving hand comes to a rest on Rachel’s hip and Nikko coils down to attack her waist with love bites. Unfair, she breathes, that’s exploiting a weakness. She wrestles back, the struggle going through several rounds, punctuated by cadences of dirty chuckling. Victory eventually is hers and on top she has the freedom to set the pace. All the time she hovers she’s satiated by a feeling that in the darkness the banker’s fiery eyes are on her.
Neither really sleeps that night; a muscle moved on one side of the narrow camp bed draws a twitch on the other. Just before daybreak the cook’s voice outside the tent tells them tea and biscuits are ready. An absurd situation, Rachel thinks, spending twelve hours on a jet to view animals in an evolutionary setting and, once here, giving in to basic desires, which means no sleep, thus finding yourself in a leaden state though euphoric mood, which creates an overwhelming new desire, that is, to spend the whole day lazing in bed, which isn’t possible, because the hours in the Mara are few and precious and should be spent viewing still more animals in their evolutionary setting. Catch-22. Nonsense. Good for a laugh. Nikko asks why the cheerfulness. Because of the night, Rachel explains over pre-dawn tea, because we’re here, because another day is starting.
But more than just another day is starting. Its contents and that of days to come – acts, thoughts, imaginings, all the elevated workings of the brain – are now unfolding against an altered backdrop. Take the first thing that happens, the game run with Peter issuing concise directions in Swahili to the driver. The exchange between the two Africans sounds secretive. And that’s what’s different with the passengers in the back too: they also have a secret, a delicious, irreverent, salacious, we’ve-tricked-the-world secret. At each eye contact Rachel and Nikko signal they jointly own something new.
As for Peter’s secret, he has either disentangled the savannah’s pre-dawn bedlam of shrieks, or has an unerring intuition for the morning’s killing spots, because his course takes them directly to a treelined creek. Soon enough in the faint light they come across two female lions busy stripping a buffalo of its hide. The buffalo, when it fell, ended up half submerged in water. On the inclined carcass the cats, red-jawed, claws spread wide for balance and methodically tearing off flesh, scarcely notice the intruders. Rachel and Nikko are up through the hatch to study the feeding, but today’s closeness is different than the day before. Today their pressing together is no longer a dare to see how far they can go. Today there’s ownership.
Beyond that, Rachel also finds she can now give full attention to Peter’s pointing. No silent chronometer’s ticking is casting a veil. The temperature on the savannah goes from agreeably cool to pleasingly hot, as does Nikko’s humour. With gusto he compares the comportment of gnus, hippos, buffaloes, and all and sundry herbivores and carnivores to people he has known. Caricatures, verbal line-drawings, spill out. “That giraffe, see it pick leaves from out between thorns on that tree. See those fleshy lips twist to get at the good stuff? Well, my head of foreign exchange does that. All day long, with each transaction, he skews his mouth
and rolls his squirming lips, lifting profit from between thorns. And that rhino forever smelling the wind, see the heavy head, the dysfunctional horn, the absence of motion? That animal is ruled by inertia. Study the director of mergers and acquisitions in any German bank, and you’ll find he behaves just like that.” When a secretary bird parades by, pounding a claw down on a rodent, swallowing it whole, Rachel joins in. “Your chief financial officer?” she asks.
Back in camp Noah is soon conducting them through lunch; the afternoon is lolled away on low chairs in a shady part of the encampment; the approach of dusk gets them moving again for more grasslands drama; another imperial dinner ends with a determined retreat to Rachel’s tent. The flap is scarcely down before safari garments drop to the ground and they clamber into the netting’s space, the tiny enclosure that is as copious as the Garden of Eden.
The morning after – it has a lazy feel because the departure is unscheduled – culminates in a send-off marked by happiness. “Do not forget,” Noah advises – one hand holding the Land Cruiser door, another pointing to the sky – “that God does not know time.” Wrinkles spread from his dancing black eyes. “The Mara is his place. It will be as yesterday when you return. The same pleasures await you.” His pearly teeth show a wide grin. “God has decreed it.”
Nikko clasps Noah’s shoulder and says. “I like your version of God.”
“Take care, Noah,” Rachel says.
“Joseph.” Noah’s pointing finger descends from up high until it’s aimed at her. “Don’t forget Joseph.” He slams the door.
“Joseph?” Nikko asks when the Land Cruiser is moving.
“A bible story he told when he showed me my tent.”
“Such a God-fearing man but in such an agreeable way. I’m glad we did this, Rachel. I’m glad we came.”
Borderless Deceit Page 21
