by Lily Tuck
The medical dictionary had gone on to describe how in the tradition of melancholy, a person feels an inexplicable sense of loss and Liliane could not help but count up Irène’s: the loss of the sunny apartment in the Charlottenburg district of Berlin; the loss of her parents—despite her fraught relationship with Waldemar and the absent, ineffectual Louise—the loss of her home on Rue Raynouard in Paris and all her belongings, including the silver, the china, the paintings, and her elegant Patou suits and her Revillon furs; the loss of Rudy, even though Irène has admitted that she was never in love with him.
“I respected your father,” she had told Liliane, “but I was always a bit afraid of him.”
“Why did you marry him then?”
“I had to get away. Get away from my parents, get away from Germany.”
“But you must have had other reasons,” Liliane persisted.
“Rudy was kind.” Irène stopped a moment to reflect. “He was generous,” she added.
“But still . . .” Liliane said.
“I was very young and ignorant. I had never had a boyfriend,” Irène tried to justify herself. “As a matter of fact,” Irène continued after a lengthy pause during which she repeatedly smoothed the lap of her robe, “I was frightened. Even after we were married, I wouldn’t sleep with your father.”
“What?”
“It’s true,” Irène confessed, “and he never forced me. He said he would wait until I was ready.”
Again, Liliane is silent.
“Tonight?” Rudy asks Irène each night before he goes to bed.
“No, not tonight,” Irène answers.
“Soon?”
“Yes, soon, I promise you.”
“You know I love you.”
“I know.”
“You know I would never hurt you.”
Irène does not answer.
“Good night, darling,” Rudy says after waiting a moment longer, then he leaves the bedroom and goes into the next room to try to sleep.
“Good night,”Irène answers.
“And when were you . . . ready, I mean?” Liliane had asked her mother.
Embarrassed, Irène shrugged. “Silly of me, I shouldn’t have told you that. And, of course, I had you, chérie. That should answer your question.”
The loss of Claude.
Claude, the love of Irène’s life—romantic, dashing, impetuous, charming, lucky, sexy Claude!
Rudy, on the other hand, was in love with Irène.
“How is your mother?” Is the first thing Rudy always asks Liliane when she arrives in Rome.
“Fine,” Liliane always answers—not quite true since Irène overdosed she seems quite fragile and nervous. To calm her, the doctor has prescribed Miltown.
“Is she still painting?” Rudy asks.
“Yes, she goes to a studio several times a week.”
“I always told her she had talent,” Rudy says, sounding pleased. “And what about tennis? She played a good game.”
“She won the women’s singles championship last summer.”
“And Gaby,” Rudy asks after a while. “Is he well?”
“He’s fine,” Liliane answers, although again it is not the truth. Gaby has had a heart attack and was hospitalized for a week. In addition, he has been told to stop smoking and drinking. But Liliane does not tell Rudy this.
Irène’s sister, Barbara, has always liked Rudy.
“We’ve stayed in touch,” she tells Liliane. “Ever since the old Berlin days when we played field hockey at the same club,” she gives a laugh, “and even after he and Irène were divorced. And I remember running into him in Paris—it was years ago and the first time I had left Germany since the war—I was attending a conference and all of a sudden there was Rudy walking down the Champs-Élysées. He was with Tolia—do you remember Tolia?” Barbara asks. Not waiting for a reply, she says, “I hadn’t seen Tolia in nearly twenty years and the next thing I knew, your father and Tolia were taking me to lunch at an elegant Russian restaurant called Korniloff. We had caviar, a big bowl filled with it—beluga, the best kind, Rudy said—I had never tasted caviar before and Tolia knew all the waiters by name and spoke to them in Russian. We had such a good time talking over old times. Also, I will always be grateful to Rudy.” Barbara adds, “I told him how I wanted to go to America but I did not have enough money and right away, he promised to lend me the money. He was so generous.”
“Yes,” Liliane agrees. “Generous to a fault.”
“How is Rudy?” Barbara then asks.
Already nearsighted, Rudy has cataracts in both his eyes.
“He can hardly see,” Liliane says. “Yet he insists on driving the Lancia. One day he is bound to have an accident or kill someone.”
Somewhere Liliane had read that cataract surgery is one of the oldest medical procedures in history. Bronze instruments that could have been used for that purpose have been found in excavations in Babylonia, Greece, and Egypt. The article went on to describe how the first recorded operation was performed in India in 800 BC by a doctor named Sushruta Samhita, who wrote how he used a curved needle to push the opaque phlegmatic matter out of the way, then how the patient blew it out through his nose, and afterward, how the eye was irrigated in breast milk—disgusted, Liliane did not read further.
In addition, Rudy suffers from severe bouts of gout, caused by elevated levels of uric acid in the blood. The uric acid crystallizes and forms deposits in the joints and tendons causing almost intolerable pain. Rudy is allergic to the medications that act as inhibitors and, each time he has an attack, he has to seek relief with an injection of steroids in the joint that is affected and that, too, is excruciating.
Rudy’s health has deteriorated rapidly; he has been in and out of a clinic in Rome. He walks with a cane and his hands—the fingers swollen and curled—are often so stiff that he cannot undo the zipper of his trousers fast enough and, helpless, he pees inside them. “He is having trouble taking proper care of himself,” the Italian doctor has warned Liliane. “Too many of his joint surfaces have been destroyed.”
“The last time I saw him,” Liliane tells Barbara, “he was so lame, he could hardly get across the street.” She pauses and shakes her head. “I can’t believe how he has changed.”
“Poor old Rudy, and he isn’t even that old,” Barbara says.
“And Tolia,” Barbara says, “I wonder what has happened to him. I remember he was in love with Uli. He wanted to marry her. But I always quite liked Tolia,” she adds, laughing.
And did you see Tolia again? Liliane wants to ask Barbara but does not.
After lunch at Korniloff, the elegant Russian restaurant, Barbara tells Rudy and Tolia that she has to get back to her conference. Already, she says, she is late. Rudy, too, says he is late for a meeting and he kisses Barbara good-bye.
“Keep in touch,” he tells her, “and don’t forget my promise.”
“I won’t forget,” Barbara answers. “Thank you.”
“Do svidaniya”—good-bye, Rudy tells Tolia.
Turning to Tolia, Barbara starts to say good-bye to him as well.
“Do you really have to go?” Tolia is holding Barbara by the arm. “Can’t you stay a bit longer?” he pleads. “We haven’t seen each other in such a long time.”
She hesitates.
“Come on, Babutz,” Tolia says, calling her by her old childhood nickname. “Let’s have one more drink—for old time’s sake.”
Back inside the Russian restaurant, they sit at the bar and order two glasses of vodka—Tolia pronounces it “wodka”—and again two more; then, slightly tipsy, they walk arm in arm the few blocks to Tolia’s apartment where they make love.
Afterward, Tolia tells Barbara, “I should have married you, Babutz.”
“But Uli was smart to refuse you” is how Barbara, pleased, answers
him.
Barbara has stayed in touch with Uli. In her letters, Uli has expressed her concern that the violence occurring in neighboring Kenya will spread to Tanganyika. The group responsible were the Mau Mau, who were made up primarily of members of the Kikuyu tribe seeking land reform and, more important, the end of the British colonial rule. The origin of the name Mau Mau is unclear and possible explanations are: an anagram for Uma uma, which means “get out get out,” the range of mountains bordering the Rift Valley, or the Kikuyus’ war cry.
The first European Mau Mau casualty occurred in October 1952. Eric Bowyer, who lived on an isolated farm, was surprised by a Mau Mau in his bath where he was hacked to death. His two house servants were also hacked to death. A few months later, on January 1, 1953, Charles Ferguson and Richard Bingley, who were dining together in Ferguson’s remote farmhouse in the Thomson Falls district, were hacked to death and dismembered. Twenty-three days later, another attack became the most notorious and most sensationalized Mau Mau crime. Roger Ruck, a farmer in the Rift Valley, and his pregnant wife, Esmee, a doctor who ran a dispensary for Africans, were taking an evening stroll in their garden before going to bed when thirty Mau Mau attacked them with their machetes. The Rucks were slashed to death and their bodies were left on the veranda. The attackers then ransacked and looted their house. Upstairs, they found six-year-old Michael Ruck asleep in his bed and they killed him as well. (Newspapers both abroad and in Kenya, published gruesome photos of Michael and his bloodstained toys lying scattered all over his bedroom floor.)
These last three killings, which were reported in the British papers, sent the white community into a panic. What made things worse was the rumor that the Mau Mau had been let into the Rucks’ house by the cook. The servants’ collusion in the murders of their masters made the attacks more frightening and unpredictable and made every black man suspect.
Graham Greene, a journalist in Kenya at the time and a contrarian, tried to make light of the situation and wrote: “To the English, it was like a revolt of the domestic staff. It was as though Jeeves had taken to the jungle and had sworn, however unwillingly, to kill Bertie Wooster.” A year later, the burning down of the fashionable Treetops Hotel, where Princess Elizabeth was staying with Prince Philip when she learned of King George VI’s death and her succession to the throne of Great Britain, by Mau Mau activists was another blow to British authority.
The Mau Mau’s savage attacks were not restricted to the white population. They also attacked their own—Kikuyus who were loyal to the British. The most brutal instance took place on the night of March 25, 1953, in the settlement of Lari, where the Mau Mau herded the villagers into their huts then threw gasoline on the thatch roofs, setting them on fire and burning alive the people trapped inside; they also viciously hacked down anyone who tried to escape, throwing them back into the flaming huts, thus killing ninety-seven innocent Kikuyu men, women, and children.
The British were no less brutal. Once a state of emergency was declared, they launched mass arrests and deportations. First screening centers, then detention camps—more like concentration camps—were set up and designed as a rehabilitation program, known as the Pipeline. Their goal was to interrogate and make the detainees renounce their Mau Mau oath. Conditions were harsh—little food, no sanitation, enforced silence—and brutality, torture, and mutilation were the standard procedures for the treatment of the detainees; a huge number of men were hung without even a semblance of a trial. Although the Pipeline was primarily designed for adult males, several thousand young women and children were detained in a camp in Kamiti. Babies were born in captivity, many got sick and died; women were humiliated and raped. These camps were later called a British gulag, and compared to Bergen-Belsen specifically—a chilling comparison considering that they existed within a decade of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps.
By 1960, the official end of the conflict, the number of fatalities among Kenya’s more than thirty thousand white settlers was surprisingly low: thirty-two dead and twenty-six wounded. By contrast, the Mau Mau murdered nearly two thousand African civilians and wounded close to another thousand. As for the Mau Mau, the number of those who were executed by the British or who died in the detention camps from torture, malnutrition, or disease—pulmonary tuberculosis was rampant—vary from an appalling fifteen thousand to a still more appalling thirty thousand.
Uli has known Bibi, the nurse-midwife on the sisal plantation, since Bibi was a child and it was she who urged Bibi to go to nursing school in Dar es Salaam. Now, Bibi delivers babies and tends to the sick—and tends to Uli, who comes down with malaria. Although not the life-threatening kind (Plasmodium falciparum), Uli’s type of malaria parasites (Plasmodium vivax) causes first chills, then sweating and a high fever. Uli sweats through her nightdress, her sheets, soaking her mattress. And during the entire time—three wearisome days—Bibi, loyal and uncomplaining, never leaves Uli’s bedside.
The European doctor comes in the late afternoon of the second day and prescribes chloroquine for Uli. Afterward, tired from his medical rounds, he joins Claus on the terrace. They each drink a glass of whiskey and watch the sun go down on the sisal fields.
“In the 1920s,” the doctor tells Claus, “it was discovered that black Africans have an intrinsic resistance to malaria but no one knew why. It was not until a few years ago that researchers working in Madagascar found that a great number of the people they tested who had vivax malaria—the type of malaria Uli has—were Duffy-negative—”
“Duffy what?” Claus interrupts, frowning.
“The name comes from a hemophiliac whose serums contained the antibody, but what it means is that most African blacks lack the so-called Duffy proteins on the surfaces of their red blood cells to which the vivax malaria parasites attach, and that makes them immune.”
Claus calls for Nyatta, one of the houseboys. Nyatta does not answer and Claus calls again, louder. When finally Nyatta arrives, Claus says, “Didn’t you hear me?”
“No, bwana.” Nyatta shakes his head.
Not sure whether to believe him, Claus asks Nyatta to bring two more whiskeys, one for the doctor and one for him. When the drinks arrive, the two men sit in companionable silence. They can hear Nyatta and Andrea and the cook, Juma, in the kitchen, preparing the evening meal—sounds of water boiling, the clatter of pans, something frying being stirred. They can also hear the men talking to one another in Swahili.
“Do you trust them?” the doctor breaks the silence and asks softly, pointing toward the sounds with his chin. “You’ve heard, of course.”
“Yes. Dreadful,” Claus answers. “The poor Ruck family and that poor child.”
As for the servants, how can he be sure, but he does not want to answer the doctor. He does not want to expose his growing unease—speaking of it will only make it worse. Instead he says, “Nyatta and Andrea are good boys. I’ve known them since they were children. They grew up on the estate.”
Juma, the cook, has been a bit surly of late. Last night, the chicken was not cooked thoroughly enough—the meat at the joints was still pink. When Claus pointed this out, Juma shrugged his shoulders and said something about the stove not working properly. But Juma, Claus has also heard, is having wife problems, which may account for his bad mood. A few months before, Juma took another wife, a third wife, and his two other wives, who are older, resent the third wife. She is young and pretty and lazy.
At the thought, Claus shakes his head—Uli is wife enough for him.
“What is it, Claus?” the doctor asks, observing him.
“Juma is an excellent cook,” Claus answers. “You should stay for dinner.”
When Barbara finally arrived in the United States in the mid-fifties, she did not know whether to tell Irène that Rudy had lent her the money for the airfare. More than the airfare. And Rudy did not lend her the money, he had given it to her. He does not believe, he told her, in lending money.
“It’s the quickest way of losing a friend,” he said, “You either give money or you don’t, but you never loan it.” Rudy was emphatic about this. “I also believe,” he told Barbara, “that things come around. You never know. One day, someone may give me money when I need it.”
She and Irène were sitting in the living room waiting for Gaby to come home for dinner. Gaby also had been generous to Barbara. He has sponsored Barbara and signed an affidavit that she would not become a public charge. In addition, he and Irène have offered to lend Barbara money while she went back to school and took refresher courses so that she could practice medicine again.
“I have enough for now,” Barbara had told them.
“Don’t worry, if I need more money, I’ll ask,” she also tells Irène, who had mentioned the loan again.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. In fact . . .” Barbara hesitated. She prided herself on being honest. “In fact,” she repeated, “Rudy gave me some money.”
“Rudy gave you money?” Irène asked, surprised. “Why did Rudy give you money?”
“I ran into him in the street in Paris, with Tolia,” Barbara started to explain. “You remember Tolia?”
“Yes, I remember Tolia,” Irène said, frowning. “Tolia is a thief. Didn’t he go to jail? But what has Tolia got to do with Rudy lending you money?” She sounded irritated.
“Nothing. Except that we had lunch at Korniloff, a Russian restaurant—”
“I know Korniloff’s,” Irène interrupts. “It was full of those impoverished White Russians forever whining about their lost titles and their estates. And I hated those heavy pirozhkis and blinis.” Irène made a face.
“I told Rudy that I wanted to come to the States,” Barbara continued, trying to ignore Iréne, “but I didn’t have very much money and—”
“Stop! Don’t tell me!” Irène had gotten up from her chair and, her hands on her hips, she stood in front of Barbara and asked, “Did you sleep with Rudy?”
Shocked, Barbara answered her in German, “Nein, nein, Rehlein.”
