The interior of Sarah's house took Deborah's breath away.
It was one of the old colonial mansions once used as retreats for aristocratic settlers, like Deborah's grandparents, when they came into Nairobi for Race Week. But there were no portraits of Queen Victoria or King George here, no regimental swords on the wall, no Union Jack, no animal heads, stuffed and mounted. It was as if, she thought, Sarah had taken a broom, swept out all evidence of colonial imperialism, and brought in ... Africa.
Woven rugs covered polished red-tile floors; leather sofas were protected by blankets from India; rattan chairs were strewn with batiked cushions. Every inch of wall space was taken up with carefully hung African masks, carved and painted, some exceedingly old, representing the tribes and nations of the continent. Deborah recognized many of the artifacts displayed around the room: Samburu gourds, a Masai lion's mane headdress, Turkana dolls, a Pokot calabash, spears, shields, and baskets. It was like a museum.
"I realized about ten years ago," Sarah explained as she invited Deborah to sit, "that African culture was rapidly vanishing. So much was becoming forgotten; old skills were ceasing to be passed along; old ceremonies were being abandoned. So I started to collect certain items that I knew would someday be quite valuable."
Sarah said something to the elderly servant, then sat on a leather sofa and crossed her legs. But her posture was stiff; she appeared to be a woman on the move even when she was sitting still.
"It's a beautiful collection, Sarah."
"I've had it appraised. It's worth nearly a million shillings."
"Is that why you have guards and dogs?"
"Lord, no. I'd need those even if my house was empty. The guards and the dogs are there to keep the thugs out. But thanks to my special friendship with General Mazrui, I am quite safe here. Just to be sure, though, I pay a monthly magendo to the local police."
Deborah didn't understand. "Thugs?"
"Surely you have them in America!" Sarah said with a hard laugh. She glanced at her watch and then in the direction of the kitchen. "There's crime everywhere you go in the world, Deb. You know that. In Kenya we have our gangs of thugs. It's because of the high unemployment rate. The official figure is ninety percent unemployed. Nairobi is full of jobless, restless young men. You saw them?"
Deborah had seen them. They traveled in pairs or packs, fairly decently dressed youths full of education and energy with no place to go, no jobs to support them.
"They attack private residences," Sarah explained. "About twenty or thirty of them will single out a house and assault it in the middle of the night with clubs and battering rams. Only last week my neighbor next door was awakened by the sound of an attack. He managed to get his wife and children into a closet upstairs, where they waited while they heard the gang downstairs cleaning out their house."
"Couldn't he have called the police?"
"What good would that have done? The man simply refuses to pay magendo."
"Magendo?"
Sarah rubbed her fingers together. "Bribe. Money is the only language that people understand these days. And money is the only way you can survive."
She clapped her hands sharply together and said, "What is taking that old fool so long? Simon! Haraka!"
The elderly servant in the kanzu appeared at that moment with a tea cart. Under Sarah's keenly watchful eye he poured from a silver samovar with all the finesse and flourish of a servant from the old days, and Deborah wondered if he had once worked for a British master. It also surprised her that Sarah had adopted that system.
As Sarah invited Deborah to help herself from the plates of sandwiches and biscuits, fruits and cheeses, she said, "How long will you be in Kenya, Deb?"
"I don't know. Until four days ago I hadn't even known I was coming!"
"What's your life like in California? Is your medical practice profitable?"
Just then a young girl in a maid's uniform came into the room and waited to be acknowledged. Seeing her, Sarah waved her over, said to Deborah, "Pardon me a moment," and looked at the sheet of paper the maid held out. "No, no," Sarah said with a trace of impatience. "Tell the cook I want cold cucumber soup, not leek! And the Cabernet Sauvignon instead of the Chardonnay."
Sarah spoke in Swahili, and Deborah listened. "The seating plan is all right, except for ..." Sarah took a pencil from the maid and wrote on the paper. "Put Bishop Musumbi on the ambassador's right. Place General Mazrui here, next to the foreign secretary. And tell Simon the dancers are to be assembled and ready to perform at nine o'clock sharp."
When the maid was gone, Sarah turned back to Deborah with apologies. "If I don't keep right on top of them, things don't get done right. These girls from the country are so slow!"
Deborah found herself staring at her old friend. Was this sharp-edged Nairobi socialite the same Sarah who had once sat barefoot on the bank of the Chania, wishing for a miniskirt? Deborah felt the colonial mansion shift around her, as if it, too, were suddenly uncomfortable.
"Don't you ever get lonely, Sarah? Living in this big house all by yourself?"
"Lonely! Deb, I don't have time to be lonely! There is always something going on at my house—nearly every night. And the weekends are taken up with houseguests. And over the holidays, of course, my children visit."
"Children!"
"I have two boys and three girls. The boys are in school in England, and the girls are in Switzerland."
"But you said you never got married."
"How provincial of you, Deb! I thought you were a liberated woman. Marriage isn't necessary for a woman to have children. I wanted babies, not a husband. You know, Deb, the Kenya male is a very macho male. If ever I married one, I would be subservient to him. He could even take over my business! My children had five different fathers. That was the way I wanted it. And now they're receiving European educations. When they return to Kenya, they'll have assured places in the proper society."
Deborah looked down at her tea. Something was wrong. Sarah seemed so hard around the edges, so competitive. She talked about women's liberation and used words like macho and had reverted to a system of master and servant that she had once denounced. When Sarah had come through that plain doorway back at Mathenge House, Deborah had been overjoyed with relief to think that her old friend hadn't changed. But Deborah realized now, sadly, Sarah had changed. With each passing minute, the woman sitting across the room from her was slowly turning into a stranger.
In another room a telephone rang. Simon came in a moment later and murmured something to his mistress. She replied in Swahili, which Deborah could understand: "Tell them I am on my way."
But Deborah needed to know something first, before she left Sarah's house. "What happened?" she asked. "After I left? What did you do?"
"What could I do, Deb? I survived! At first I used my grandmother's money to buy Mrs. Dar's old sewing machine. I made a few dresses and took them around to the Nairobi shops. But when that money ran out"—she paused to replace her cup in its saucer, a graceful, measured gesture—"I had no choice but to go back to the Nairobi bankers who were willing to deal with me for certain 'favors.' And I found out after a while, Deb, that there was nothing to it. Such a bloody silly thing pride is!"
Sarah paused. She glanced at her watch, then continued. "I eventually became quite successful. I bought out smaller firms and reduced my competition. When I saw there was no profit in making dresses for the typical Nairobi secretary, I gave that up and went into designing originals, which brought me a lot more money. It was a very smart move for me." Sarah twisted the copper bracelets around and around on her wrist. "Now my dresses are sold all over the world. There's a shop in Beverly Hills that carries my line, and another on the Champs-Élysées in Paris."
"I'm happy for you," Deborah said quietly.
"And are you a success, Deb? I seem to recall you had a rather quaint idea of running your aunt's mission after she was gone. I hope you gave that up!"
"I'm in practice with another surgeon. We'r
e doing well."
They fell silent, awkwardly, avoiding each other's eyes. Finally Deborah asked about Christopher. "He's doing well," Sarah said rather perfunctorily, and followed it by asking after Deborah's mother.
Deborah didn't tell her the truth: that she had felt so sick fifteen years ago, thinking that she had made love to her own brother—she had been so angry with her mother for having never told her the truth—that Deborah had written a terrible, hateful letter to her mother, venting all her sickness in it. Two weeks later she had received a reply in the mail, but Deborah had torn it up without reading it. After that several more letters came from Australia, all thrown away without being opened, until finally the letters stopped coming.
"Sarah," Deborah asked, "do you know why your grandmother is asking for me?"
"Haven't a notion. She probably wants to rattle some chicken bones at you or something." Sarah rose, graceful and stately, like a queen dismissing an audience. "I'm sorry, Deb. But I really must get going. You're sure about tonight?"
"I'm positive. I have to get up to Nyeri." At the door Deborah paused to look at this stranger who had once been like a sister to her. "Where is Christopher, Sarah? Do you ever hear from him?"
"Where is he? Let me see. What day is it today? I imagine he's at Ongata Rongai."
"You mean he's in Kenya?"
"Of course. Where else would he be?"
"I looked him up in the phone book—"
"He's listed under the name of his clinic. Wangari. My fool brother found Jesus a few years back, after his wife died. Now he is a lay preacher as well as a doctor. He does charity work among the Masai. As if they would ever be grateful! I've told him he's just wasting his time."
A silence descended; it seemed to roll out from behind the African masks, from under old tribal drums, from calabashes and elephant grass irua skirts. Deborah imagined the colonial house shifting again, as if it were as bewildered and lost as she, and the whispered footsteps of Sarah's many unseen servants seemed to be saying, The past is dead, the past is dead....
63
D
EBORAH'S DRIVER WAS A FRIENDLY YOUNG SOMALI NAMED Abdi, who wore slacks and a Beach Boys T-shirt and, on his head, a white knitted cap indicating he was a Muslim who had made the pilgrimage to Mecca.
"Where do we go please, miss?" he asked as he placed her suitcase in the trunk of the small white Peugeot.
"To Nyeri. The Outspan Hotel." Deborah paused. Then she said, "I would like to stop first at Ongata Rongai. It's a Masai village. Do you know where it is?"
"Yes, please, miss."
It took them some time to inch their way through the traffic congestion and onto one of the major roads leading out of the city. Deborah rode in the back seat, looking out at Nairobi.
She wondered what the population numbered now; it seemed so much more crowded than when she had left. And she counted so few white faces in the ceaseless tide of pedestrians that she wondered how small a minority they were now.
Because of a traffic accident up ahead, they were stalled for some minutes on Harambee Avenue, in front of the Kenyatta Conference Center. Deborah was afforded a more careful look at the beautiful new edifice, and she saw what one didn't see on the postcards—the signs of neglect, the lack of repair and upkeep, the overall seediness of an otherwise remarkable piece of architecture. Here, as everywhere else in the city, she saw the street people: cripples; beggars; little girls holding starving babies. But on the other side of the fence, in the parking lot of the center, there were lines of shiny limousines.
Abdi took Haile Selassie Avenue and followed it to Ngong Road, which carried them eventually out of the dense city and into increasingly less developed, more rural countryside. Soon they entered Karen, a district of green farms, woodland, and houses of the wealthy. As they sped along roads of cracked and potholed tarmac, Deborah gazed at the old colonial houses they passed, set back behind protective trees, with high fences and guards in uniform.
Then there appeared the simple shambas, where women were bent over in toil. Once these vast acres had belonged to European farmers; now they were broken up into postage-stamp African holdings.
When they came upon a group of tourist minibuses parked at what appeared to be an undistinguished shamba, Deborah asked Abdi what it was.
He slowed the Peugeot and said, "Finch Hatton grave. You see Out of Africa, miss? You want to stop?"
"No. Keep driving, please."
She looked back at the tourists milling about with their cameras. The need for pilgrimages, Deborah thought, seemed to be a universal human trait.
The road dipped, traveled through forest, came out upon acres and acres of puny farms, through dilapidated villages, and past roadside "taverns," boxy structures made of tin and cardboard, where men sat in idle clusters with bottles in their hands.
Deborah questioned her inexplicable feelings of being in an alien land; it was as if she were in a country she had never visited before. Could she truly, in fifteen years, have forgotten the extent of Kenya's poverty, its brutally defined classes, its massive base population of women and children living on bare subsistence? Had fifteen years' absence painted a deceptive patina over the uglier realities of East Africa, as the guidebooks did?
She arrived at last at Ongata Rongai, a Masai village of ramshackle masonry and muddy paths. Facing the road was the "town center," typical of Kenya villages: crude cinder-block structures with tin roofs, painted in awful shades of turquoise and pink, one with a sign that read MATHARI SALOON &HOTEL, BUTCHER &ANIMAL FEEDS. Old men loitered around the dark doorways or sat in the dirt, their clothes little more than rags. The village itself was a haphazard cluster of rude structures, many without doors and windows, all oriented toward a stream bed, where cows stood in dung-filled water, which Masai women were drawing up into drinking gourds. Overall there was an atmosphere of defeat and despair.
As Abdi maneuvered the Peugeot past stone huts and the rusting hulks of abandoned autos, naked children followed, their faces covered with flies, their arms and legs like sticks, bellies bloated with hunger. They stared at the white woman in the car with eyes too big for their heads.
When Deborah found what she was looking for, she said, "Stop here, please."
After turning off the motor, Abdi got out and came around to open her door. But she shook her head. Puzzled, he got back behind the wheel and waited.
Deborah was staring at a plain stone building with a wooden cross on its iron roof. Parked in front was a Land-Rover with letters on its side that read WANGARI CLINIC. THE WORK OF THE LORD. Wangari, Sarah had told her, had been Christopher's wife's name.
She decided that he must be inside the building because the crowd waiting outside was facing a closed door. Deborah watched that door. She was afraid to blink as if that would make it vanish.
Finally the door opened. When she saw the man who came out, Deborah's heart jumped.
He hadn't changed, not at all. Christopher walked with the same loping grace of his youth; his body was still slender, his movements hinting of concealed masculine power. He wore blue jeans and a shirt; a stethoscope hung around his neck. When he turned, Deborah saw the glint of sunlight off the gold rim of his glasses.
The crowd surged forward at the sight of him. It was then that Deborah saw that all the children were carrying something. A few held bowls in their little hands; many clutched empty bottles; some, she noticed in surprise, were holding what looked like hubcaps. She discovered the reason for this in the next instant, when massive cook pots were brought out from the building and set on a long wooden table outside. The children lined up in a strangely quiet, orderly fashion, their mothers, nearly all carrying babies, standing respectfully off to one side.
And then, as a young African, who was sitting cross-legged in the dirt, struck up a chord on his guitar and started to sing, the feeding of the children began.
It was an eerie scene. There was no pushing, no competition, no greed. Just the wordless doling out of what look
ed like maize porridge into whatever container a child might have brought. While this was going on, with the servers singing along with the guitar player—a Swahili hymn which Deborah recognized—Christopher and a nurse began examining patients.
The nurse was African, young and pretty, and she, too, sang the hymn as she worked.
Abdi glanced in the rearview mirror at his passenger. "You want to go now?" he asked.
Deborah looked up. "I beg your pardon?"
Abdi tapped his wristwatch. "We go to Nyeri now, please, miss?"
She looked out the window again. She thought of getting out of the car, walking down to the clinic, and saying, "Hello, Christopher." But something held her back. She wasn't ready to face him just yet.
"Yes," she said. "We'll go to Nyeri now."
THE THIKA ROAD cut through a plain of piecemeal cultivation. Deborah glimpsed, at one point, a modest little mosque among acacia trees. Beyond lay homely factories: Kenya Breweries, Firestone Tires, paper mills, tanneries, and canneries. Some, strangely, appeared to have been abandoned.
Telephone and power lines followed the highway; there were Shell stations, and billboards saying, COKE IS IT! A sign advertising Embassy Kings cigarettes read SAFIRI KWA USALAMA, "Drive in peace." The highway was a river of cars—Audis, Mercedes, Peugeots. Many had I LOVE KENYA on the bumper. Matatus, nine-passenger vehicles crammed with perhaps twenty people or more, chugged by. Another roadside sign warned: BEWARE OF HOW YOU DRIVE: TWENTY-FIVE PEOPLE DIED HERE IN MAY 1985.
When Abdi unexpectedly steered the car off the highway and pulled into the parking lot of the Blue Posts Hotel, Deborah said, "Why are we stopping here?"
"Very historic place, miss. All tourists stop here."
She looked out at the old, squat building that was hardly a shadow of its former colonial glory. The Blue Posts had once been a resort for white settlers. Now there were signs advertising grilled chicken necks and barbecued goat ribs.
"I don't want to stop here," Deborah said. "Let's get on to Nyeri."
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