“Amen,” says Rachel, turning around for a last wave.
On the Cessna, Rachel’s thoughts replay the Mara. Pleasure, tenderness, enchantment – feelings which linger. Her eyes take in the land below; the undisturbed plain is giving way to an explosion of farms, little ones judging by the hundreds, maybe thousands of tin roofs reflecting the sun. Another partial thought arrives, a recollection of something said days ago when the trip began. Distantly she asks, “After Nairobi, aren’t we having lunch somewhere?” Scarcely interested in the answer she begins a vague calculation that at eight people a farm nearly a million people could be down there subsisting on a splinter of earth which they will fly over in twenty minutes. But although it’s her own tally, it doesn’t make a strong impression, not in the mood she’s in. She only half hears a confirmation that, yes, Nikko does have a business meeting, after which there will be a lunch. “A short meeting,” he reassures her. “An hour, two at the most. I think I told you it’s on a farm, to the west of Mount Kenya. We’re not going to Nairobi. We’re flying there right now.”
“A farm?” Rachel continues studying the flecks below, dabs of red and green between the innumerable little mirrors. She thinks back to their earlier visit when they drove to the Rift with Samson. She developed a checklist then and runs through it now. For each shamba below there will be a cow, a goat or two, some maize, banana plants, beans, a swarm of children and a farmer’s wife hacking at the earth with a hoe.
She hears Nikko speculate that the word farm may not be appropriate. “Not the type of a farm that has a barn and a tractor and a few chickens roaming in the yard. Bigger than that. Don’t know how big. Maybe half the size of Schleswig-Holstein. So farm isn’t a good way to describe it. Duchy would be more like it.” Rachel hears that the owner is an Egyptian – Morsi Abou-Ghazi – who’s been after Nikko to drop by. “He wants to contribute to international projects through philanthropy. I advised him to set up a foundation. What’s the most pressing challenge in Africa, Rachel? The future of the children. Don’t you agree? That’s the focus I advised him to take. Rural development centred on children – health, nutrition, education – that sort of thing. I suggested the foundation should push new concepts, try innovative ideas, be avant garde, take risks. Nothing to lose. Hasn’t everything else here failed these last fifty years?”
Rachel’s interest ignites. For two days her brain was set to receiving – watching nature’s rhythms from the Land Cruiser, soaking up Noah’s fables over lunches and dinners, being smothered half unconscious by the sensuality of the nights – but the pleasant apathy comes to an instant halt. The notion of a foundation comes straight from a world in which she knows her way around, and there’s a few things she wants to know. New concepts? Based on what developmental philosophy? Innovative ideas? Coming from which think tanks? Risk taking? Using what model to measure impacts? She begins an interrogation which continues until the world of bleak subsistence below is left behind. Many of Nikko’s answers are on the mark; Rachel scatters murmurs of approval. Finally she asks, “This foundation, where will it be located? Berlin? Cairo?” Nikko begins to massage her forearm and laughs. “Too early for all that. You’re going very fast. Faster than we can. But you can help decide. Let’s get into it with Morsi. We’ll have a lively lunch.”
The first impression of Morsi Abou-Ghazi’s Kenyan farm is provided by a landing strip of smooth tarmac long enough for a jumbo. Two business jets and a few smaller planes are lined up on the apron. The Cessna taxis over, directed to a vacant spot by a figure in baggy shorts, knee-high socks and ankle boots. When the prop has jerked to a stop he yanks the cabin door open.
“Welcome to Ruai Farm,” he announces. The grin is crooked but good-natured, in sync with fair, tousled hair. “I’m Evlyn, Ev. Farm manager. Your kit,” – he jabs a thumb over his shoulder at Nikko’s jet – “it got here half an hour ago. The crew is in the guest house. Mr. Abou-Ghazi’s keen to see you, Mr. Krause. Sorry to hear you’ll be with us only a short time.”
“This is my friend, Rachel Dunn,” says Nikko when they’re standing on the tarmac.
There’s no stopping Evlyn’s grin. “I know. My pleasure, Miss Dunn.” He leads them to a four-wheel drive engineered for extreme driving, a Porsche Cayenne, opens a front door for Rachel, a back door for Nikko and trots around to get in behind the wheel. “I’ll take you to the house, Mr. Krause. Fatigued, Miss Dunn? There’s a guest apartment to freshen up before lunch. But if you like, I could show you a few corners of the farm.”
The reply is serene. “I’m Rachel…”
“Rachel. Fair enough.”
“And I’d love to see the farm. How big is it?”
Farm sizes matter to Evlyn. “Eighty thousand acres,” he asserts, cocking a proud eye in her direction.
Rachel does a quick calculation. “About thirty thousand hectares,” she declares in a tone that says both numbers deserve admiration.
Evlyn nods. “I’d say so. The perimeter track is forty miles.”
Rachel turns to Nikko in the back. “Eighty thousand acres, a forty-mile boundary, that’s sort of a duchy.”
“Duke Morsi,” Nikko observes and winks.
“Duke Morsi?” Evlyn exclaims. “That’s good!” Elated, he hits the steering wheel with his palm. “Haven’t heard that one. Guess that makes us The Duchy of Ruai.” He beams like a schoolboy.
“Sure,” Nikko consents. “Duke Morsi of Ruai.”
“Is he a peaceful duke?” Rachel asks. “Or one of the warring ones.”
“As I know him, he’s a philosopher type of duke,” says Nikko. “Patron of the arts, celebrated benefactor.”
“Anyway,” Evlyn humbly adds, “when he isn’t entertaining visitors he’s very quiet.”
The Cayenne glides over a gravel road into a hollow with stands of eucalyptus trees, then powers past stables and corrals and Africans putting sleek ducal horses through their paces. At the entrance to a wide and open garden Evlyn eases to a halt. “That’s Gichuhi.” He points to a white-uniformed attendant. “He’ll look after you, Mr. Krause.”
Gichuhi is soon leading the banker past gurgling fountains and tall exuberant roses in full bloom through an arch into an inner courtyard. From her line of sight, a snapshot only before Evlyn eases the Cayenne back into gear, Rachel sees columns forming an arcade. As in a cloister. No, she corrects herself, the atrium is too ornate and the style too oriental. It’s more like a palace, but not of a duke, more an emir’s kind of palace.
An hour later she’s back, striding behind Gichuhi through the same courtyard, following a water course cut out of marble fed by a fountain, under Moorish arches, over mosaic floors, past a colonnade of basalt lions, marching deeper into a complex inspired by A Thousand and One Nights.
She’d learned some things from Evlyn by then. Nikko had scarcely slammed the Cayenne door when Rachel worked her charm. Not much prompting was needed because, with the banker gone and a northern woman showing interest in his world, affable Evlyn couldn’t be stopped. First topic, himself: Kenyan-born, meagre education, bush savvy even as a child, professional hunter before twenty, game warden by thirty, farm manager at fifty.
“A man of Africa,” Rachel ventured.
“There’s a few of us around.” Again the grin, a trickle of vanity and a flood of self-effacement.
“And black Africans accept you?”
“Thirty years ago there was some tension. No problem now, not up here in the highlands. They expect us to contribute, you know, add what we can, I mean management. With good management they do fine.”
“The name of the farm, the Duchy of Something, what’s it about?”
“Ruai. A thornbush. The first Brit who owned the place named it. Interesting plant. Not much to look at, not now, dead as a fossil at the moment, but after the rains it flowers. Then the bees go to work. Excellent honey. Very special. Maybe he thought it symbolic, you know, land of milk and honey, that kind of thing.”
“Beekeeping? In these part
s?” The subject struck Rachel as esoteric and she abandoned her original line of thought about a different but no less fascinating question – why was there an oriental palace out here in the middle of vast grasslands. She launched a barrage of enthusiastic questions. “Who keeps the bees?”
“My chaps – the farm hands, the herders – all of them. Cash income on the side.”
“They keep African bees? Isn’t that the killer bee?” A certain concern about the deadliness of animal husbandry on Ruai farm was filtering into Rachel’s voice.
Evlyn picked it up and sucked in his breath dramatically. “They’ve been known to kill,” he admitted, pointing a finger to the land outside the windscreen and drawing out an arc, as if to say it happened everywhere out there. “They get riled. Yes they do. They’re kali kali. Ferocious as anything. Been stung a few times myself. Can’t blame the bees you know. Africa’s been roughing them up, pushing them around since the dawn of time. But we’ve found ways to keep ’em settled.”
Rachel’s interest switched, apiculture giving way to ecology, and ecology to economics. Evlyn obliged. At the core, in Africa, all farming is disaster management, he solemnly confided. On the flanks are the lions and leopards threatening cattle and sheep; invading elephants terrify the farmhands; cyclical scourges – droughts and locusts – undermine the basis of everything, which is the grass. Evlyn’s narration of the rhythms of Ruai Farm reminded Rachel of the legends she listened to as a child coming from the lips of her grandmother, except here they seemed more real. Evlyn, as he talked, pointed left and right at clusters of Brahman cattle with big humps on their backs, at giraffes going about their peaceful business, and on the trails at the bounding gazelles. Farming as a spectacle, thought Rachel.
“And why does an Egyptian want to own all this?” she asked on the way back. Time was running out for the line of questioning she had wanted to start with.
Evlyn thought this over. “Well, we’re on the equator on a plateau a couple of thousand metres high. There is no finer climate. It’s peaceful if you discount a bit of minor cattle rustling. Mount Kenya over there – you can’t see it now inside that stack of clouds – it peeks out late in the day. The scenery is really something then. So that’s why I’m here. As for Mr. Abou-Ghazi, why he came, why he built that house, he hasn’t said. So I don’t know. He doesn’t even come here all that often. Mostly when he does he stays alone. Sometimes he has visitors. They come from everywhere – all the skin colours you can imagine. He flies them in. They go on safari up in the Nyandarua, or to the Northern Frontier District. Sometimes they have parties – the girls brought in from Britain. Some like to go riding. No bother for us. We just get on with farming. The main thing is, Mr. Abou-Ghazi pays. Regular as clockwork. And,” Evlyn patted the steering wheel, “he outfits us with kit like this.”
“What’s his business?”
“Shipping. Containers. He once said he surfed a wave of new technology.”
“But he is also a philanthropist.”
“I didn’t know that, not before today. I’d say today is generally different. You’re not like the others. You’re smart. You lift the place. Marvellous if that was the new trend.”
“You sell yourself short, Ev,” Rachel said quietly. “You and Ruai – you’re symbiotic. I can’t think of a better union. No visitor can lift you higher.”
“You’re talking about the farm. I’m talking about his Alhambra.” A pause. A thought crystallized which set Evlyn grinning. “You heard me. Alhambra. A visitor here called it that. So I looked it up. Granada, right? Moorish kings?” Rachel laughed and nodded. “So that makes me a Grand Vizier, right?”
“Oh yes,” she confirmed. “A step up from being steward to a duke. Why don’t you dress the part. A big turban with a plume. You’d look spectacular.”
Evlyn merrily beat the Cayenne steering wheel, four, five times and cried, “My chaps would think I’d gone bonkers, kichaa kichaa.” He reached behind him into the back seat and pulled out a jar. “For you. Ruai honey. Godspeed. Come again any time.”
And now, led by Gichuhi through marbled hallways radiating architectural harmony, Rachel considers Evlyn’s remarks. Has he walked these corridors? she wonders. No visitor could lift these spaces; these spaces do the lifting.
Gichuhi brings her to a terrace lined with potted citrus trees and a view towards the towering nimbus peacefully settled over Mount Kenya. Rachel runs through images she has of the Egyptian, combining impressions from Nikko and Evlyn, and of this house. Middle-aged, hawk-nosed and bald? Or youngish, moustached and rakish? Or old, greying and pot-bellied? But time for fantasy runs out. The men come striding up and she sees she missed. Morsi is not young, but not old either, nor is he bald, or hawk-nosed. But he is dark. And he has liquid eyes, deep pools that seem sad, as if they’ve seen too much of the pointless misery in the world.
When Nikko introduces her, Morsi takes Rachel’s extended hand with both of his. His worldly weariness comes at her, but with an overlay of questioning. Rachel raises a flippant eyebrow. How, she asks herself, can this man be a merchant? Surely he’s a psychic, someone living in a spiritual mode, used to looking inward.
“Rachel?” Morsi responds to her name. The Egyptian accent makes the R sound generous. Rachel…it comes out in Morsi’s voice as an extended roll. “A lovely name. You must be proud of it.”
Try to imagine the scene, Anne-Marie. A lovely terrace, blue sky, fluffy clouds, the sun warm but not burning and before me Nikko the banker and Morsi the shipping magnate. Both quite beautiful. My turn to speak. I said I found the house delightful, the essence of Arabia in the middle of Africa! It seemed to amuse them. Nikko said nothing, but he winked. His way of egging me on. He likes to ignite things. Maybe he was thinking we’d have a burning debate over a drink before lunch. But Morsi’s eyes were so watery I thought they would extinguish whatever Nikko seemed to want to set ablaze. Morsi is very courteous. He asked if my farm tour had been agreeable. I said it had been a discovery…of happy horses and fat cows and naturally of bees. He didn’t know about the bees. I showed him the jar of honey and said I discovered that although the bees are well looked after now, they really needed more evolutionary time to become domesticated. His farm was in a prime location for that. This seemed to puzzle him and he proceeded to pour sherry. I asked why he built this precious house, what was the inspiration? It’s my culture, he said. A thousand years ago the style was considered dignified and so it is today. It is a retreat, a sanctuary, a place to contemplate. Why here, I asked, why build a hermitage on a grassy knoll in East Africa? It is the equator, he said. Being on it, living on the line that divides the world, the idea inspires me. He asked if I thought his idea was corrupt. I said I thought it could make sense.
Over lunch we talked geopolitics. My fault. Can’t help it. Naturally each of us had a different perspective – diplomacy, finance, commerce. But on some subjects our views merged. Not too interesting when that happens and I suppose for a while we sounded about as dynamic as three old aunts drinking tea. We seemed only to stoke each other’s indignation over useless politicians. Finally I asked about the foundation for children in poor countries. Morsi fell silent and stared at the table. Nikko said that when he and Morsi talked about it earlier they worked out the size of the endowment necessary, but hadn’t had time to go into the legal structure. Did I have suggestions? I was ready to set out some options, but Morsi looked up then. If you’d seen him, Anne-Marie, you’d have thought he was about to weep, as if he thought humanity’s future was dismal and he was personally responsible. Softly he explained the Morsi Abou-Ghazi Foundation would do enormous good. The children, Rachel, he said several times, rolling his r’s. The children. We must help them. It’s not their fault if they die of hunger and disease. The previous generations are so clearly responsible.
Maybe the foundation is a complex form of atonement for him. But for what? What does he think he’s done wrong?
I wanted to talk practically because it’s true,
the right kind of foundation could change the fate of thousands. So I made suggestions for linking it to the broader international development effort. The whole time he was looking at me with a mixture of hope and innocence. When I finished he didn’t speak for about half a minute. I thought he was thinking about his foundation some more. But no, because finally he said: Rachel, do you have children?
In that setting that was a strange question. I wanted to ask, Do you? but Nikko began talking about his. Charming stories. He’s got quite a brood. Like you.
Well, an eccentric lunch. The elegant setting, the talk of putting up a fortune for a humanitarian idea done so casually you’d think they do it every day, the banker being practical and down to earth, the merchant acting like a mystic, and me, gadfly, enthusiastic about everything. If Morsi is a businessman, he’s unlike any I’ve met. Evlyn, the farm manager, mentioned there were parties attended by classy English women. I imagine they go wild over him – handsome, fabulously rich, terribly vulnerable. It’s charming. But does it add up? I don’t think so. But then, who am I to talk about things not adding up?
Anne-Marie, dearest, are you thinking this whole trip doesn’t add up? That it was unwise of me to travel with a married man who should be spending his free time with his wife and children? Not only the lunch was eccentric. The whole experience was. Beautiful but eccentric. But none of it was planned. It just developed. And it may go on for a while. What else can I do except rationalise it by insisting I’m not out to displace anyone’s family? On the plane back to Geneva I told Nikko that.
When they depart Ruai, Mount Kenya has shaken its cloudy burden. The take-off is towards the mountain and when the jet does a graceful, lazy bank towards the north, Rachel’s view, as Evlyn predicted, is exquisite: a jagged half-molar rising from a colossal mound, soaring above the equatorial snow line. The land below slowly changes into near desert with tantalising combinations of whites, yellows and reddish-browns, sometimes in stripes, sometimes in blotches. Rachel’s attention is fixed on the textures and the colours (the other times she flew over Africa were at night), while Nikko hauls out a briefcase and disappears into his work. As before, he goes through a metamorphosis, the conviviality sent packing, the documents attacked with savage energy. What is it about running a bank? Rachel muses. The business makes him more cruel and unforgiving than the land below.
Borderless Deceit Page 22
