Green City in the Sun

by Wood, Barbara

  Jumping up from the window seat, Rose said, "Why didn't I think of it before?" and ran from the bedroom.

  Njeri followed her mistress downstairs and found her in the library—a musty, rarely used room that was all leather and brass and lined from floor to ceiling with books.

  "It must be in here!" Rose said as she frantically searched the shelves. "Help me, Njeri! It's this big and this thick," she said, outlining an invisible book with her hands. "The cover is made of paper, not leather. And it's—it's—" She moved along the shelves, rapidly scanning the spines. "It's a green book, Njeri. Hurry!"

  Bewildered, the African girl, who had never learned to read, went to one wall and slowly searched the leather and gold books for one made of green paper. Behind her she heard her mistress exclaim, "Oh, we must have a copy! Surely Grace gave one to us!"

  Rose flew along the bookcases, rising onto her toes, then dropping to search the lower shelves. There were so many books, so very many....

  "Memsaab?" Njeri said.

  Rose turned. When she saw the manual in the brown hands, she cried, "Yes, that's it! Grace's book! Bring it over here, into the light."

  It was the fourth edition of When You Must Be the Doctor, published back in 1936, still crisp from having never been looked through, and yellowed and dusty from neglect. Rose ran her finger down the table of contents. "Here," she said, tapping the page. " 'Wound Infections.' 'Fevers.' 'How To Take Care of a Seriously Ill Person.'"

  She pulled a pad of paper and a pen from the drawer and began writing.

  NJERI TREMBLED WITH fear as a short while later she and her mistress stood on the threshold of the kitchen door, facing the darkness. Like most Kikuyu, the girl had an instinctive fear of the night.

  This time their arms were loaded with carefully packed bundles, made up from a list gotten from the manual. Rose had found a thermometer and aspirin in her bathroom cabinet, and sugar, baking soda, and salt in the kitchen, to which she had added Vaseline, cotton balls, a watch with a second hand, three thermoses of boiled water, and two flashlights—all recommended in Grace's manual.

  Looking across the garden at the black wall of forest, where the kitchen light ended, Rose was overcome with dread. Then she thought of General Nobili lying on the cold stone floor of the greenhouse, and her resolve came back.

  "Let's go," she whispered, and started down the steps.

  She looked back. Njeri stood frozen.

  "I said come along!"

  The girl stayed close behind her mistress as they hurried down the path. "Pray that he is still alive, Njeri," Rose whispered as they plunged into the trees. "Pray that we are not too late."

  They ran through the forest, with unseen ghosts and imagined ani-mals snapping at their heels, and arrived at the greenhouse shaking with fear and cold. Rose went straight to the general and found that he was still alive.

  While Njeri held the flashlight, which trembled in her hands so that its beam quivered over the unconscious man, Rose opened the manual to the page headed "How to Examine a Sick Person" and went through a methodical check of his vital signs.

  Because his pulse was weak and thready, and his skin damp, indicating that he was in shock, Rose turned him onto his side and elevated his feet with bricks. His respirations were a reassuring sixteen per minute, and when she lifted his eyelids and shone a light in them, she found his pupils equal in size and reactive to the light—good indications, according to Grace's book. But his temperature was too high.

  So Rose, following the instructions in the book, turned to the page headed "Very High Fevers" and read: "Brain damage can result if a high fever is not brought down immediately."

  She pulled the blanket off him, as the book instructed, so that the night air could cool his body; then she poured a cup of water and dissolved two aspirin tablets in it. Lifting the general's head in the crook of her arm, she put the cup to his lips. He didn't drink. She tried again. The aspirin was necessary to bring the fever down.

  She turned to the book for help and read in bold print: "NEVER GIVE ANYTHING BY MOUTH TO AN UNCONSCIOUS PERSON."

  Rose set the cup aside and settled the general's head back on the pillow. She continued to read. Under the heading "Danger Signals" she found "A day without drinking liquids—see page 89." She turned to that page and read, in the unsteady beam of Njeri's flashlight, about the dangers of dehydration.

  Rose looked at her watch. She estimated that he had been unconscious for twelve hours. "He must have fluids soon," she murmured, "or he will die of dehydration. But what can I do? I can't get him to drink. He needs the water, and he needs the aspirin to bring the fever down. It's a vicious circle!"

  She gazed down at the face bathed in the glow of the flashlight. She wondered how old he was, where he came from, if he had a family who was worrying about him.

  Njeri's teeth began to chatter.

  "Go back to the house," Rose said. "I'll stay with him."

  But Njeri crossed her legs and sat down on the floor, the flashlight cradled in her skirt.

  "If I send for medical help," Rose said softly, "then he will be returned to the camp. But if I try to take care of him by myself, he might die. What shall I do?"

  She felt his forehead again. It seemed cooler and drier than before. She searched for his pulse and thought that it had slowed a little, felt stronger. His breathing, too, appeared to be easier now.

  "Njeri, give me that basket." Rose mixed a rehydration drink according to the recipe in Grace's manual: sugar, salt, and baking soda into clean water. She tasted it to make sure it was "no saltier than tears," as Grace had written, then set it next to the cup with the dissolved aspirin, in readiness. If he regained consciousness, she would give him both to drink.

  But if the general did not regain consciousness by dawn, Rose decided, then she would go for help.

  SUNRISE BROKE OVER the top of the stone walls of the greenhouse, sending pinpoints of light through the overhanging eucalyptus branches. Rose stirred in her blanket, aching from having slept on the floor. She raised up and searched for Njeri in the milky light. It appeared that her maid, now that it was day, had left.

  Rose looked at the stranger. His eyes were open. He was staring at her. They watched each other for a long moment, Rose wrapped in her blanket, the general lying on his side facing her, his head on the pillow.

  Remembering the feel of the knife at her throat, the painful way he had twisted her arm, Rose was suddenly wary again.

  He opened his mouth. He tried to speak. But all he could do was make a dry, throaty sound.

  Rose picked up the rehydration drink and held the cup to his lips. He sipped at first. Then he drank it all down and let his head fall back to the pillow.

  "Are you in pain?" she asked gently.

  He nodded.

  She brought the second cup to his lips, the one containing aspirin, which must have been bitter, for he grimaced. But he drank all that, too, and when he rested back on the pillow, he seemed to breathe more easily. "Who—" he began.

  "I am Lady Rose Treverton. And I know that you are General Nobili."

  His dark eyes were fixed on her questioningly. Then he said, "Did I hurt you?"

  She shook her head. Her hair, having come down from its pins while she slept, tumbled over her shoulders.

  General Carlo Nobili stared at it almost in wonder. "I know who you are," he whispered. "You are one of God's angels."

  Rose smiled and laid her hand on his forehead. "Rest now. I'll bring you something to eat."

  "But where—?"

  "You're safe here. And you can trust me. I am going to take care of you and see that no harm comes to you ever again."

  The general closed his eyes, and his body relaxed.

  36

  T

  HE EXPLOSION OCCURRED EXACTLY AT NOON, DURING THE Muslim call to prayer. Extensive damage was done to the police fortress on the outskirts of Jerusalem, and five British soldiers were killed.

  "It's that bloody Menachem Begin
," David Mathenge overheard his commanding officer, Geoffrey Donald, say.

  And thus began the intensive manhunt for the underground terrorist that brought David out of his cot in the middle of the night to muster with his regiment and wait in the cold and damp September night for orders from Captain Donald.

  It was coincidental that David was in Geoffrey Donald's African regiment in Palestine. When he had volunteered to join the British Army at the outbreak of war, he had not expected to be assigned to mere garrison duty but had hoped to be able to fight Hitler's racist Nazis. Nor had David expected to find himself under the command of a man he had despised for seven years.

  Ever since the day of his escape from the Nairobi jail and subsequent exile in Uganda, David Mathenge had carried a special hatred for the Trevertons and, because of his friendship with that family, also for Geoffrey Donald, a man whom David was now forced to salute.

  David had been in Palestine for four years and was by now familiar with its various fighting camps—Arab, Jewish, British. The terrorist bomb that went off in the British police fortress had to be the work of Menachem Begin's Irgun; it couldn't have been the work of the Haganah, the Zionists' secret army, David knew, because it always gave advance warnings so that people could escape. The fight was over whose homeland this mandated territory was. It seemed to David Mathenge, who, like all Kikuyu, was deeply tied to the land and understood territorial possession, that this was a tribal issue.

  There were the Arabs, who had lived here for centuries, being pushed off their ancestral lands by European refugees, Jews fleeing Hitler. The Jews claimed this land as their own by right of ancestral legacy. And in the middle sat the British, catering to both parties, making and breaking promises with both. It was no wonder, as far as David was concerned, that Menachem Begin, fed up with Churchill and his empty words, had turned his terrorist tactics not upon the Arabs, his natural enemy, but upon the British. That was why the police fortress outside Jerusalem had been targeted.

  David was utterly miserable.

  What had happened? Where had his life gone wrong? Four years ago, when the colonial government had launched a massive recruitment drive for the King's African Rifles, David Mathenge and thousands of other young Africans like him had eagerly joined up, believing that Hitler was going to invade Kenya and cart them away in chains. The young Africans, newly out of school, unemployed and anxious for action, had been convinced that they were marching off to fight a monstrous evil and that they were going to have the glorious opportunity to defend their country, freedom and democracy, and their way of life. Outfitted in a smart new uniform and a hat with the side brim turned up and fixed with a plume, David had paraded proudly before the eyes of his white officers, feeling like a warrior going into battle, and had left his homeland to discover that the world was a far, far bigger place than he had ever dreamed. At the time he believed that joining the British Army was the smartest thing he had ever done.

  Now he realized that it wasn't. David decided that the smartest thing he had ever done was to stay on in Uganda after Chief Muchina, ill and dying—from a thahu, people whispered, placed on him by Wachera—had dropped all charges against David and had declared the arrest a false one. David had been free to go back into Kenya, but he had opted to stay in Uganda and attend Makerere University, from which he had graduated three years later with a degree in agriculture.

  He had learned farming and farm management. Now he was ready to take back his land from the Trevertons.

  But when will that be? he asked himself as he left the barracks, rifle slung over his shoulder. For years his mother had been promising the reinstatement of his lands. Had she not placed a thahu on the Trevertons? And didn't Wachera's curses always work? But not quickly enough for David. "The Treverton coffee estate is doing well," Wanjiru had written in her last letter. "The white girl Mona is running it herself." This was not what David had joined the King's African Rifles for—to waste his time in a dry, godforsaken country where the people were determined to annihilate one another, with him in the middle, the target of both sides because he was a British soldier, while the Trevertons grew fat on his land!

  David was overcome with misery.

  What was there to love in this arid Palestine? In the summer the heat was killing, and hot winds seared one's lungs; in the winter there were gray, relentless rains and a biting cold he had never felt back in Kenya. David's heart was heavy for his homeland. He yearned for the forests, for the clean mists of Mount Kenya, for the songs of his people, for his mother's cooking, and for Wanjiru's love.

  Wanjiru...

  She was more to him now than just the woman he loved and hoped to marry; Wanjiru had come to personify all the things he was homesick for. Wanjiru was Kenya. He longed for the comfort of her embrace.

  When David saw the large transport trucks starting to line up, their headlights filling the compound with unnatural brightness, he realized that a massive search was being organized. Where would it be this morning? he wondered as he walked over to one of the trucks and struck up a conversation with the driver.

  "Petah Tiqva," the man said, referring to a small town not far from Tel Aviv.

  David nodded and leaned against the fender. The mandatory authorities were fond of saying that "bloody Petah Tiqva is a nest of terrorists." And they weren't wrong. British intelligence was well aware that the groves and woods surrounding Petah Tiqva concealed armories and were the secret training grounds of rebel forces. It was a dangerous area to search; British soldiers didn't like going into Petah Tiqva.

  It seemed to David that this was all his duty ever consisted of these days: searching for the elusive Menachem Begin. If David wasn't manning roadblocks and inspecting every car coming into and going out of Tel Aviv, then he was searching through hotels or interrogating pedestrians in the street or knocking on doors at midnight and getting people out of bed. The search for Begin was escalating; the British were frantic to find the man who was sabotaging their communications and civil offices. And now that David Ben-Gurion, leader of the Jewish Agency and Begin's archrival, had as much as declared war on Begin, cooperating fully with the British in their search, all Palestine was being turned upside down.

  There was even a reward posted: fifteen thousand dollars to the man who delivered Menachem Begin to the authorities.

  He must be a fierce warrior, David Mathenge thought, to have thoroughly confounded British intelligence for four years, to have pulled off so many successful acts of sabotage, to maintain such strong leadership over his underground army, the Irgun, and all without having once been caught. To be constantly on the move, always one step ahead of his searchers, was, in David's opinion, the work of a clever and brave man. In fact, the British had only a vague idea of what Begin looked like. When they conducted house-to-house searches, David and his men were told to look for a "Polish Jew, in his thirties, who wears glasses and who has a wife and small son."

  "I hope they find the bastard this time," the truck driver said as he lit a cigarette. "That bloody Begin thinks all we're good for is target practice. And I don't like going into Petah Tiqva. One of these days it's going to be booby-trapped. You mark my words. Begin's going to start a bloody civil war. The Arabs will sit back and laugh while the Jews kill one another off, doing Hitler's work for him."

  David looked at the driver, a ruddy-faced man who spoke with a Scots accent. It was only on such occasions as this, when mustering for duty or manning a post, that white soldiers talked to the men of David's regiment. Otherwise, there seemed to be an invisible barrier or some strange, unuttered law against racial mingling.

  It had surprised the Africans, when they had arrived in the mandate, to discover they had separate quarters and a separate mess from the rest of the battalion. Back in Kenya it was accepted that the Africans didn't mingle with the white settlers—that was simply the way it was and always had been—but they had expected the army to be democratic. After all, they all wore the same uniforms and served the same cause,
didn't they? Only last week David had learned that African soldiers received less pay than their white counterparts.

  This had come as a shock. A few of his comrades had complained about the discrepancy, declaring that a private was a private, black or white, and should receive the same pay. But the officers, all white, had reminded the African grumblers that they were better off than their countrymen back home and should be thankful that the army took them instead of leaving them behind to toil like women on the farms.

  David watched the trucks line up, the armored cars and tanks, the machine guns, and road-blocking equipment. He knew that they were going to surround Petah Tiqva entirely, penning in the unsuspecting inhabitants, and that his regiment would be sent in to conduct a search for Begin.

  He recalled now an incident in Haifa in which three soldiers had encountered a booby trap. He himself had been just a few steps behind them and had narrowly escaped being killed.

  Was Begin waiting for them right now in Petah Tiqva? David wondered. Was this an Irgun ruse? Would today bring his Palestinian tour of duty to an abrupt, bloody end?

  David didn't want to die. He wanted to go home. To Kenya. To Wanjiru.

  Sitting down on the bumper, he pulled her letter out of his pocket and read it in the beam of the headlight. She had written:

  We are praying for the rains. Last week I had leave from the hospital. I went up to visit your mother. We went into the forest and found an old fig tree, where we prayed together for rain.

  Your mother is well, David. I read your letters to her, over and over. But I do not read the newspaper to her, the accounts of the war in Palestine. We read of the bombings, David, of the land mines, of the torture and murder of British soldiers. What is this fight all about? Why are you there? If Masai and Wakamba were fighting, would Kikuyu step in between? No. Let Arab and few work out their differences. This is not your fight, David. I do not understand why you are there.