“Sara had to get him out of Nairobi. They couldn’t afford to go back to England—”
“So she came here,” I say, finishing what he does not wish to make explicit: that Sara aligned herself with my father to escape a city which would ostracize them both.
“I have something for you—” Nate says, dropping the subject and turning to rummage in the front seat of his jeep. When he turns around, he has a package in his hand—something wrapped in a bit of newsprint. He hands it to me and I pull open the paper. Inside is a triangular black stone, its edges ridged and sharp.
“What is it?” I ask, lifting it from the paper. It is cool and smooth against my fingers, and it is so black that it seems to swallow the light.
“An arrowhead. Obsidian. Did your mother ever find one here?”
I shake my head, feeling my finger down the blade. Where the blade thins to transparency, it is sharp enough to cut through skin.
“Someone made it—hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of years ago. It suggests that early man was here in East Africa long before most paleontologists have suggested. So perhaps your mother wasn’t wrong after all—”
“Do you not need to take it back with you?” I ask, looking up at him, feeling the weight of this object in my hand, the history that it carries and my own sense of gratitude that he has remembered.
“We found several. This one is for you.”
“Thank you,” I say, smiling.
“I am glad you will have it,” he says, laying a hand on my shoulder and smiling down at me.
When he is gone I wrap it back in the paper and slide it into my pocket. Perhaps it will bring me good luck.
—
IT IS ONLY WHEN I am back in my room, and I unwrap the paper, turning the obsidian over in my hand, that my eyes fall to the crumpled bit of newsprint in which it was wrapped. A headline leaps out at me:
AN APPEAL TO THE TOILING, OPPRESSED AND EXHAUSTED PEOPLES OF THE WORLD
I smooth the paper out and lift it to the light to read it better. It is a political speech of some sort, printed on cheap paper. Phrases leap out at me. Words that burn.
We must put a stop to a condition in which the strong can by force of arms compel the weak to assume what conditions of life the strong may desire; every people, be it great or small, must be the master of its own fate.
I feel as though I can hear the speaker shouting over the crowd. Hear his passion. See the sweat running off his brow as his voice lifts, as his message gathers potency. I have never heard language like this. Every people, be it great or small.
Workers! Exploited, disfranchised, scorned, they called you brothers and comrades at the outbreak of the war when you were to be led to the slaughter, to death. And now that militarism has crippled you, mutilated you, degraded and annihilated you, the rulers demand that you surrender your interests, your aims, your ideals—in a word, servile subordination to civil peace.
I turn over the paper—what country is he talking about? Russia, I think. The name of the speaker is Russian. This is the language of Communism that my father and Sara say is so dangerous; the red devil. But this man could almost be talking to the Africans in Kenya. And what conviction in the words—
They rob you of the possibility of expressing your views, your feelings, your pains. The press gagged, political rights and liberties trod upon—this is the way the military dictatorship rules today with an iron hand.
I think about the Kikuyu newspapers; the African schools shut down in Kenya; the sweep outside of Nakuru; Kenyatta arrested. Was this pamphlet accidental? Had Nate Logan meant for me to read it? The paper feels like a message, there for me to make something of it if I am willing.
—
ON CHRISTMAS EVE, my father cuts a coconut palm for the sitting room, and I find some of our old Christmas decorations and hang them up. Harold comes home for two days. He has not shaved, and where the thin, blond stubble does not spread, his skin is a thick dark color, and his hands are black. His eyes show up very white, as though he is staring at us from behind a mask. His mother sends him to wash, but when he comes back there is still black in his hairline and around the edges of his fingernails.
“What is it?” she asks, turning his hands over.
“Boot polish,” he says.
“Why?”
My father answers for him. “Makes it harder for the Micks to spot them when they’re in the forest.”
I wait for him that night—the radio on—but he does not come.
—
THE QUEEN MAKES her first Christmas broadcast and says of the forthcoming Coronation, “You will be keeping it as a holiday; but I want to ask you all, whatever your religion may be, to pray for me on that day.” Sara orders two dozen souvenir spoons in hallmarked silver, showing the Queen’s profile.
Harold disappears on Christmas morning and is not back for lunch. Jim has cooked a feast—turkey, roast potatoes, swede, carrots, Christmas pudding and stollen, but we are all brittle with tension, and we take little pleasure in the meal.
After lunch I go to Harold’s room, at the end of my corridor, to see if perhaps he is hiding there, but it is empty. From the light in the corridor I can see a pile of photographs on the desk. He must have developed them in the night. I lift a corner of the curtain to see better. The photograph shows a Kikuyu child of about four, naked, sliced open by a machete so that her guts—swollen in the heat—bulge out of her waist. A Mau Mau killing. I look away, sickened, but there are more spread out over the table. Men and women, some naked, some clothed, all black. Careless strokes of the machete slicing open buttocks and lopping off ankles. Not strokes designed to kill with any kind of speed. There is one photograph of a line of dead men—Mau Mau—on the ground tied to stakes by their hands and feet, like pigs that have been hunted. I recognize the officer standing over them. It is Steven Lockhart. And there is another that shows Steven Lockhart crouching next to a man who is being pinned by an askari. He is holding a pair of long steel pliers in one hand.
I jump when I hear a noise behind me. It is Harold. He walks over to where I am standing, drops the corner of the curtain and pulls a cloth over the photographs.
“I’m sorry,” I say, backing away from the table. “I should not have looked.”
He doesn’t say anything.
“Why have you taken so many?” I ask, unable to help myself, revolted by the photographs, as if each one is a murder he has committed, though I know it is not his fault.
When he does not reply, I say what I have been wanting to tell him since he came back. “Nate Logan came to find you. He is looking for an assistant. He wanted to know if you could help him with his work. Perhaps it would not be too late for you to go.” Harold grips the table with both hands, his shoulders hunched, and I do not dare to say anything more.
I remember, later, the photograph Harold had taken of my father and Sara—my father’s barely contained desire, her indifference, the shame that suffused it; the other photographs, raw and physical, of the Kikuyu boys working on the farm—and I understand that for Harold these images are the articulate outpouring of all his desire, his anger, his shame and his fear.
—
IN THE AFTERNOON, I walk over to the new shamba with stollen to give to the children who remain. Kahiki comes with me, carrying his bow and arrow, and a young boy, who carries the yards of cloth I have brought for the women. We walk across open grassland, zebra and kudu cropping at the short, dry grass, jerking up their heads to look at us.
The new shamba rises out of the earth in front of us. A scattering of small, round thatched huts with low doorways, smoke seeping up into the still blue sky. Three girls I do not recognize come to the boundary and sing as we approach. The sound lifts beautiful and arresting into the clear light.
An old woman with gray hair hangs washing on the thorn fence of the boma. The cattle will be driven in h
ere later, and the thorn enclosure closed to keep off lion. The grass around the huts has already worn away to earth, under the tread of so many feet. I hand out slices of stollen and yards of cut fabric as my mother used to do. It will make clothes for the year ahead.
The woman finishes hanging clothes and beckons to me with a stiff, brown hand. I hesitate for just a moment. What possible danger can she pose? I stoop inside the low door. The fire burns in a pit in the floor. There is no chimney, just a small hole for light, and the hot sweet smoke, the thick mud walls and the darkness create a hypnotic fug. This is where she will sleep tonight, in the small alcove, with her grandchildren next to her, one warm body pressed to another. We sit on the packed-earth floor of her hut. She sways as she sits, whittling a piece of wood, not looking at me. Time unravels. The world outside seems very distant. She presses the wood into my hands. I turn it over—trying to see what it is in the near darkness. Then I make it out—it is the crude carving of a baby. I do not know what it means.
The light is fading when I emerge. The sheep and goats are scattered across the plain, walking back to the bomas, bringing the night air with them. They are a ragged bunch of matted hair and bleats which seem to want to hold back the dusk which is rapidly falling. Some crop the short, yellow grass that still remains in patches here and there, and are moved roughly on. A man shouts as he pushes them along. Two identical black-and-white lambs jump instead of walk, leaping into the air, their joy setting them free. A dog scratches its fleas in the dirt and gets up to sniff around, the heat receding, his night beginning.
As we leave I see Michael talking to a man outside his hut. His eyes glide over me, then back to the man he is talking to. He has seen me, but he will not stop. This is his world, not mine, and he does not wait on me. I bite back disappointment. I have not spoken to him since the night Juno had her puppies, and I miss his company at the stables.
When Christmas is over three more Europeans have been recorded dead. Not as many as Mau Mau promised, but their deaths take their toll on all of us.
XIX
It isn’t until the New Year that I pluck up the courage to go through the trunks that belonged to my mother. I walk down to the stables and drag them out into the yard, under the overhang of the barn. Michael is still overseeing work at the dip, and I am alone here except for Juno and her puppies. I lift the lid of the first trunk, releasing into the dry air the almost tangible smell of my mother, aromatic and soft, like cedar wood. I have the sudden sensation that she is standing over me, but when I look up there is nobody there, just the clapboard wall of the barn, dark and worn against the clear blue sky. A lizard darts up the wall, stops, flicks its tail. Everything is quiet except for the grating of the cicadas.
Inside the trunk are things I haven’t seen in years: my mother’s dresses, letters, photographs and books. There is a folder with my name written on the front. Inside is my birth certificate, a photograph of me as a baby, a few of my drawings. Long ago I had written For Mama across one of them.
I am choked with longing. I want to be a child again. I want to have back all those years with her that I missed. Everything that has passed since seems empty and meaningless. I was whole then, and I feel as though I might never be whole again. I am crying, for her, for myself, for everything that cannot be undone.
—
A MONTH INTO the New Year comes news of a massacre. The first we hear of it is on the wireless.
Last night, a band of terrorists thought to be some two hundred strong, attacked a location of professed loyal Kikuyu at Lari. It is believed that over one hundred and fifty peaceful Kikuyu were murdered. Women and children were sadistically disemboweled and whole families, who refused to open their doors, were burned to death. One man, who escaped into the bush, said that the terrorists . . .
Lari instantly becomes a byword for the savage bestiality of the Mau Mau. The following day the Standard says that Mau Mau tied ropes around the huts, to stop those inside escaping; that babies were chopped into pieces in front of their mothers.
I walk down to the stables, the newspaper folded in my right hand. Michael is in the garage working. I give him the paper. It is an accusation. I am shocked by the brutality of what has happened at Lari. There is no room any longer for political sympathies. I can tell from the way he takes it from me that he already knows about the massacre.
“How could they do such a thing?” I ask, my voice full of the horror of it.
He glances at me, then unfolds the paper.
“It’s utterly senseless.”
“Not completely senseless,” he says, reading the article. “You won’t read it in this paper, but the attack was targeted. They wanted to kill the families of those who supported the giving up of Kikuyu land to the British.”
“By killing women and children?”
He looks up from the paper. “The British gave these families land as a reward for their support. By killing the inheritors, they prevent them benefiting from the corruption of their fathers.”
“You cannot excuse such brutality!”
“No. But you should remember that these are men who have nothing. They have no home, no livelihood and no land on which to raise crops and farm. They are driven by desperation.”
“But it is not human—to hack people to death with pangas.”
“Would it be more humane if they had killed with guns?”
“You sound almost as though you disagree with me.”
“I disagree with this paper’s refusal to present the political narrative that explains what took place; I disagree with your assumption that what you read here is the whole truth.” He points to the newspaper. “What it doesn’t say is that the government retaliated that night, killing twice as many in the reserves; women and children, with equal brutality.”
“How do you know?”
“Men have legitimate voices, even if they are not sanctioned by your press.”
I remember our first lesson. Prospero’s tyrannical hold over the reins of civility. Authority is not a substitute for truth.
“I do not believe you,” I say, putting out my hand to take the paper back. He holds my gaze, a slight smile on his face, absorbing all my anger, so that I find I want to hit out at him. How has he managed to gain such power over me? To say these things to me without concern that I will repeat them to my father? His trust feels almost like a form of control. He is taunting me with it, and it frightens me. This closeness between us. As though it will close round me like a trap. I feel as if I have raised a Frankenstein and now I cannot put it back to sleep, and soon my father will see what I have done.
“I do not believe you,” I say again, trying to hold on to a truth that is not his. “The newspaper would have reported it if it was true.”
He folds the newspaper and gives it back to me, his long fingers brown against the paper. I take it from him and feel his gaze still on me. I meet his eyes—dark and white together—full of a soft strength, a surety in himself, as though I am only a child refusing to see the scope of the world we inhabit. He is not threatened by me, and I do not see why he should not be.
—
I DREAM THAT I am standing with my back against the garage wall. Michael is walking toward me. There is a knife in his hand and I am afraid. But when his other hand touches me—the hand without the knife—it is dry and warm. He pushes back my hair, his hand circling my neck, pulling my head into his chest, and I hold myself against him, sobs choking in my throat. “It’s all right,” he says, and it is his voice, and I realize in my dream that I have wanted to hear his voice speaking just for me. And I am crying for one thing but wanting another. His hand slips down my spine, touches my lower back, and I lose my weight against him. With a shock of pain I feel the knife enter me—his hand, driving it in. I feel the sharpness of the blade, the release of blood, and his body now hard and implacable against me as he pushes the blade deeper.
/> I wake up, my heart racing, my head tangled in another place in which Michael has cut me open. I lie there for a moment—trying to calm my mind. Nothing helps. My nightdress is wet and sticks to my back. I push myself upright and sit with my legs hanging over the bed, in the dark, my heart still pounding. The secret—what I know about Michael’s past—weighs heavily on me. Perhaps I have been naive. Perhaps I shouldn’t have trusted him at all. I feel an urgency, compelling me. I want to see my father. It is as though in this moment I might lose him—and I have a chance to stop it happening. Tears wet against my lips, my breath heaving, my mouth open in a silent cry. There is an ache inside me, a pain—like grief—that burrows through me, sickening and full of anguish. I know there is purity in this feeling, which comes with the midnight hour—I should not wait until morning. It needs to happen now.
I pad across the floorboards. If I can wake my father—tell him what happened when I was staying with my uncle at Uplands, what I saw Steven Lockhart do, how he scares me; if I can tell him about Michael—perhaps I will cut through the barrier that separates us. He might put his arms around me as he did when I was a child. I walk through to the sitting room. The sofa gapes emptily at me, the blankets thrown back. On through the short hall, the door bolted, the silence buzzing in my ears. Here is the door to my parents’ room, ajar. I haven’t been inside since—when? Since I played checkers with my mother on the floor, the day before we left for Uplands.
He is just across the threshold. Everything that has divided us seems meaningless in the dark dead of night. I put my hand out to push open the door and freeze. I can hear it now—a breathing, a stirring. I hesitate. Her breath lifts into a short high panting, a seesawing, that alternates with the rhythmic chafing of the bed against the floor. I can hear her nakedness. His nakedness. The photograph that Harold took—his hand was grasping her buttocks, his head turned into her shoulder, hiding his hunger. It is what I hear as I stand outside the bedroom. In his silence, in the grinding of the bed, is all his need, his wanting, his vulnerability. And I know there is no place in it for me.
Leopard at the Door Page 20
