Grace

by Calvin Baker

  “What do you tell her?”

  “Yes.” She laughed with her eyes and kissed my cheek.

  “And the rest?”

  “I think if all those ways of looking at the question exist it must be rich and complex enough to sustain so many different ways of looking; the richest, most complex thing there is, which we know less about than we do the cosmos, so only a fool would think to say anything definitive. Maybe when gods walked the earth and showed themselves to us, there was certainty. Except they retreated from us, or we from them, and now—thinking that by knowing the laws of the universe we know the universe—we celebrate our reason as all there is, like little baby children who believe themselves grow. And still, it is there for us. And somewhere, I like to think, they are smiling, watching lovingly while we bumble about, claiming to know their intent, except it really is just a great mystery. So what do I know? I have given up on theories of love. All we can have is the experience and practice of it, allowing the rest to work through us. That is enough. We were willing and ready and submitted. That is what matters. Unless we decide to go all the way as seers do. But for us it is probably best to simply accept it.” She squeezed my hand.

  I did not tell her I did not agree with all of it. I had no theory of my own, or anything more adorned than that she made me a better man. That was satisfaction enough, as we lifted through the sky, and fell asleep against each other.

  When we woke again the Rift Valley had split open below us, ample and lush. We had a five-day safari planned. After that I would report my story, and eventually we would meet back in Farodoro. Beyond that we did not have plans.

  “Where would you like to live?” I asked, as the plane descended.

  “With you. Wherever you wish,” she indulged me, not too convincingly. “Let’s just enjoy ourselves, and not talk about it yet, because if you wish to live somewhere I do not, we are going to have a fantastic little fight. You will begin with whatever argument you have readied in your mind, and it will be some kind of tautology or other, which I will tenderly deconstruct, for your own good, with actual facts, so there is no winning for you that way. Next, we will start psychologizing, and after that it will be all down to the emotions. You will throw up both your hands, and say, ‘Please. Just listen to me, woman.’ Of course you will not say the last, because you are not stupid that way, but you will think it, honey, and I will overhear.

  “I will calmly point my finger, right here.” She poked my chest playfully. “And say, ‘I heard you plenty. Is that the best you got? Cause if it is, you just see here, man.’

  “Yes. It’s going to be an exquisite little fight. I wish we could have it now, but I’m too tired, so just you wait. We’ll argue, and eventually get through it, as soon as we agree. But in the end, you’ll see you will agree with me, and everything will be beautiful again.”

  “When I agree with you?”

  “Yes. And you know why you will?”

  “Tell me.”

  “Because I would follow you—if you had somewhere to go with meaning for you, even if it was simple as, ‘This is where I truly wish to be right now.’ You do not, though, and I do. But you are going to make us go through that awful fight first. That is fine, as I said. I’ll win, and off we’ll go happily ever after to make a real home for us.”

  We had been going twenty straight hours by then, and were boarding our final flight over the dense, red valley and equatorial vegetation, then up into the spindly mountains, where the engines of the plane could be heard laboring to clear the peaks.

  We landed on a narrow, old-fashioned airstrip beside a tin-roofed terminal, and made our way through customs behind locals laden with oversized suitcases and appliances brought back from the world beyond.

  Whenever I arrived on the continent what I first noticed was not poverty, or the customs agent’s thinly-veiled request for baksheesh, or even the heat. What I felt when we disembarked in Africa was the sense of ease I always re-encountered upon arrival. Where in other countries I always met, or feared meeting, some occluded notion of who I was, in Africa the things that clouded the distance between others and myself was more subtle. If someone who did not know you needed to casually question your intentions or intelligence or humanity, he would find a better reason than your skin. Where there was enmity it was over real resources, or judgment against a true offense caused by some legitimately fucked-up thing about you, or your tribe.

  Beyond that I was expected to wear the mask of my social self as everyone did, understanding these were merely masks, and only those who took them too seriously, with no space between self and mask, were harmed. Everyone else knew there was an interior beneath the surface of everything. The outside mattered, but only just so. I observed the sense of release I felt as an invisible burden lifted. Then I noticed the heat, and soon after that my own foul temper.

  We had emerged into the humid arrivals hall, where the air was oppressive as a truncheon, and I retrieved my mental list of everything that drove me crazy about Africa, all of which boiled down to the fact that generations after decolonization, the electricity still did not work. Maybe that’s blaming the victim, or maybe it was a reasonable minimum standard for an international airport; in whichever case the air-conditioning and lights in the hall were out, and we were lost in the sea of people.

  Sylvie’s mood was undampened and I tried to keep mine to myself when I saw how invigorated she was by the new landscape beyond the glass doors. “It’s so beautiful,” she said. “It’s like an Eden.”

  “It’s like hell,” I returned, as we searched for the driver from our tour company amid the bustle of the hall.

  “Relax, we’re in paradise. Besides, you must know by now how sad it makes me feel when you criticize everything.”

  I was uncertain how to respond as I realized she was serious. “I did not know.”

  “You don’t know everything. Maybe sometimes, not even yourself and what you are feeling. How much sadness and anger—outrage and indignation at the world, but also just pure leaden rage—you carry. Or how much that weighs and space it takes up.”

  There are seemingly insignificant things people say in close quarters, whose substance takes a while to come clear. Maybe it’s something they’ve said before, maybe you disagree, but you stop and hear it fully for once, because you realize it is bound up with, if not everything mean in the world, but a radius you can affect. She was not angry or skeptical or annoyed. She was hurt, a thought I could not bear. “What do you want me to do?” I asked. “Tell me how you would have me be instead.”

  “Like I said, just relax. Stop weighing and comparing and ranking and judging everything you see. Only take it in and experience it every once in a while, the way they did in Eden.”

  She gave my hand a quick squeeze, and released it when she spied our names on a neat, hand-stenciled sign across the hall. We began toward it.

  Our driver was a jauntily dressed man in his mid-twenties, named Ali, of mixed African and Indian extraction, boundless energy, and morbid good cheer, as he helped us with the luggage and led us to a waiting Range Rover.

  “I see you survived the flight,” he remarked as we exited the heat of the terminal. “You know they crash sometimes.”

  We loaded into the truck, where he had been listening to bangra at full volume, which he quickly cranked down. “Sorry, boss,” he said, not fully apologetic. “It’s my theme song.”

  I eyed him warily, still undecided how reliable he was, as I realized I had forgotten to exchange currency, and announced I was going back to the hall to buy some of the local money.

  “Don’t bother with the touts here in the airport,” Ali advised. “The bank machine will be broken, and the brokers will only offer you ninety percent of the bank rate.”

  “What is the right rate?”

  “I can get you forty percent over the listed one any day of the week. Fifty on Sundays.”

  I told him I was going to go to the restroom before the long drive, and ventured ba
ck inside, unconvinced of his claims. When I checked around the hall, though, it was as he said: the powerless ATM had a cardboard out-of-service sign affixed to it, and the currency kiosk took too large a markup. I exchanged two hundred dollars to be safe, and returned to the car.

  “Did you check?” Ali asked.

  “Yes, Ali,” I said.

  “I would have checked, too,” he replied. “It is no offense to me, boss. But I can get you the best rate. Anything else you require, just let me know. I am the man for the job.”

  “Thank you, Ali.”

  “Air conditioning or window, boss?” he asked, as we pulled away from the curb.

  “Ali. Don’t call me boss.”

  “Whatever you want, sahib. Hakuna matata,” he turned and winked to me. “Means, don’t worry.”

  “The window, please,” Sylvie laughed gaily.

  He powered the windows down with the push of a button on his console, and hot air suffocated the interior of the car, until we cleared the parking lot and sped out onto the dense, new black road, which he navigated expertly through airport traffic, skirting the edge of the city to point us up toward the cool, green hills.

  “How is lady boss?” he asked. “Is the air too much?”

  “I’m fine, Ali. Thank you for asking.” I caught Sylvie’s reflection in the side mirror as she smiled, and I began to relax at last.

  An hour later we were in the bush, with nothing around except an occasional zebra or giraffe herd by the side of the road, which by then had turned into a pretty improvisational affair. We continued climbing up over a range of hills, where the sweet air cooled enough to begin to hush our jangled nerves.

  The vegetation thinned once we reached the other side of the hills, near our base camp on the plains, a set of low mud-colored buildings, with a brick-lined walkway and sparse garden, which, like the rest of the vegetation on the plains, was in the midst of a drought, though not so parched as the wilderness.

  Our rooms were airy and simple. There was a sitting area with a sofa, a large bed draped with mosquito netting, and two nightstands. Out back we discovered an open-air shower, where we bathed in the cool waters and dying sun, before heading to the dining room. The beer at the bar was stored unrefrigerated in a dark pantry, but was cool to the touch, and refreshing when we drank it.

  As we sat, the chef could be seen in the outdoor kitchen, and when he noticed us he came to let us know there would be eland for dinner, and offered something to tide us over if we were hungry.

  We were, and he provided bread and fruit, along with some roasted peanuts, all fresh and good. Out in the field beyond the kitchen there was a commotion from the camp askaris, who could be heard chanting energetically, arranged in a circle, moving in turns in the distance.

  “What are they doing?” Sylvie asked, trying to get a better glimpse. The barman demurred to answer, but Ali, who had come into the dining room, told her.

  “Drinking the blood from the eland.”

  “Why?” she asked. “Don’t they get meat too?”

  “In their tribe they drink the blood first, because it is life, and it is a sin to them to waste it.”

  He offered to arrange for us to try some, but we stuck with our bread and fruit.

  That evening we had a supper of the just-butchered eland, with garden vegetables, then sat around a fire on the broad lawn, where we were joined by a group just in from Tanzania. They had all been traveling awhile, but had met each other in a bar near Kilimanjaro. They were already sick of each other, though, and after not too long we were sick of them, too.

  There were three couples: one Australian; one British—she was Scottish, he was an Englishman; and an American couple from New Jersey with squeaky voices, who worked for an NGO. We called them the Coalition. The Americans we named Higher and Higher, because of their voices, which were like brittle glass. I did not like their politics either—their beliefs were State Department boilerplate and not their own. But mostly I hated them because of those voices. The Aussies I disliked because they were Australian. I had nothing special against the Brits yet, besides the ostentatious understatement the English specialize in, and Edward’s red pants—the leisure uniform that year of men who did not work for a living and their acolytes—and the fact that they were riding with the others.

  All of them were full of talk about what they had seen, and—after a few beers—what they had heard about the rebels on the other side of the mountains. After that, they were full of “Who do you know in London?” and “How about New York?” and “Where did you go last year?” “Where did you study?” “Isn’t the Aussie dollar surging?” “Hasn’t the price of classified Bordeaux just gotten crazy?” “It is the Asian speculators.” “It buoys the Aussies as well, though” and “Now even Everest is gone all to hell.”

  “Say, have ever you met the queen?”

  “Why, we see her every year at Ascot.”

  “What’s Ascot?”

  “A horse race.”

  “Oh my God! You guys hang out with the queen?! Like how awesome is that?!”

  “Like totally awesome!! How come you get to go to the races with the queen?”

  “Not exactly with the queen, dear.”

  “Well, no, not exactly with her, dear,” Effie said. “But we are more than just in the stadium.”

  Sylvie had greater patience than I did, and managed to humor them a bit longer to make certain my irritation did not show enough to put them against us.

  I had moved over to a corner of the fire alone, and, when she joined me there under the evening stars, I asked whether she was in the safari club already. “Just because they are not thoughtful people does not mean we should be less thoughtful when we deal with them,” she said cheerfully.

  “That’s generous of you.”

  “It’s not for them,” she corrected me, as they grew drunkenly loud on the other side of the fire. “It is for myself, and how I want to be in the world.”

  I was always moved by the depth of her integrity, how she did not care how others were but remained always true to herself regardless of what there was to lose or gain, and tried hard to be the same way in every action she made and every word she spoke. It made me feel serene to be near, and I loved her for it.

  Back in our room we closed the wooden shutters over the window, casting out the world and sealing ourselves in absolute night, and only the occasional sound of them still out on the lawn. But even that could not dispel the tranquility of that deep, certain darkness, the cool, ironed sheets and warmth of her there next to me.

  The next morning we were awakened at dawn by the sound of the camp’s grey parrot squawking across the lawn, and made our way to the canteen for a breakfast of ugali, the local porridge, fruit, and hot chai. The Coalition was hung over, complaining the food was not much to speak of, until we finally loaded our packs into a large, military lorry, built to move troops and supplies over the roughest roads, and were off, just after sunrise, across the plains.

  We reached our next station by evening, a cluster of platforms high in the trees, covered in white canvas. After we unpacked they fed us again, and we climbed the ladders for an early night, in order to get a good start the next morning on the game in the lowlands.

  32

  We awoke high in the trees, and from our roost watched the sunrise; and under the sun, the savannah rolling into the far distance. At the horizon’s edge the silhouette of mountains greeted the plain. The jewel-like dew in the grasses all the way across the savannah reflected back to us the minutes-old light like miniature stars, insufflating us with a feeling of indestructible well-being.

  Looking out from the treetops was like looking back in time itself, and, from our ancient perch, the rising sensation of glimpsing with the spirit’s own eye, for a vanishing moment, how people must have first looked at the world.

  After joining the others for breakfast in the dazzling early stillness, we hoisted ourselves into the back of the lorry with our daypacks and set out
for the plains. The brush was already awake with matutinal animals going to water: the rhinoceros, aloof with power; the graceful, anodyne giraffes; the unruly zebra herds; and everywhere the hyenas lurking, slick and lowdown in the grass.

  By midday we still had not seen much large game, though, until we happened upon a pride of elephants plashing in the mud to cool themselves from the torching heat.

  “Yes, they do bury their dead sometimes,” Ali said, answering the inevitable question. “They use tools. They have names. They do everything we do.”

  The others thrilled and snapped photos with impossibly large camera lenses. I had been on safari before, and was content to soak in the landscape, and clicked sparingly when I had a good shot of the landscape, or animals, or Sylvie, beaming with joy from the bounty of the wide open land.

  After the elephants wandered off we drove down to the lake, where a group of villagers had paddled in dugout canoes from the other shore, working their way up and down the banks, trading maize, meat, tin pans, corn liquor, and cloth on a floating market. We bought fruit and nuts from them, which were safe to eat, and took our lunch in the shade near the shore.

  After supper that evening we saw our first leopard, dashing across the plains after a Grant’s gazelle he had separated from the herd. “Look at the cheetah,” one of the others called, before another corrected him.

  The big cat gave chase, and in the truck some of us were for the leopard, and some for the antelope. When it started, and cut back toward the herd, the leopard seemed to flag, and those who were for the gazelle cheered, until the leopard lunged up in a great desperate leap to take it down.