“Plastics,” I said, “acrylics, you say?”
Kind as he seemed to be trying to be, Mr N’chele nevertheless did not seem to have a comfortable relationship with specific speech. He was doling out what he knew, handing me these tidbits reluctantly.
“Were they selling plastics or buying them?” I asked. “Tell me the rest, let me leave here tonight with more than I brought in.
“But I’ve just told you,” he said. “Think about it for a while. They were exporting artificial elephant tusks to Europe and selling them there as real. They were selling fakes, tusks made of an acrylic combination, quite ingenious. I don’t doubt that the Europeans have laws against what they did—it was my son’s plan, in fact, that your father would get caught on that end—but in Kenya they were simply making wonderful replicas and fooling everyone with what they made. I was fooled, your husband was no doubt fooled. Everyone thought it was a joke worth playing. My son said your husband believed that anyone who would buy such things was getting what he deserved.”
“But if all that is true, why didn’t he tell me?” I asked. “I admit it sounds like something Julius might do, but he wouldn’t keep it from me. If it was a joke he’d want to share it, to include me in it all.”
That was the heart of the matter for me—why I had been left out—but I also understood that it was stupid to ask Mr N’chele, and that I had probably let the heart of the matter for him go for too long.
“Tell me why your son hates my father so,” I said. “What did my father ever do to him?”
Mr N’chele stared at me so hard that I took my hand away and cut another piece of steak. I ate it and pushed my plate aside.
Finally he said, “You were present that day, my dear, and you were not so young. Is it possible that you remember nothing, while my son remembers it all? He was a good son when he was small, but what your father did festered in him, first turning him bitter and then turning him around. For a while he wouldn’t speak to me or let me tell him what I thought about it. And when he did finally speak, the nature of his speech had changed.”
Mr N’chele was by then looking at me as if he was waiting for an apology, as if my ignorance of whatever had happened was an ill-mannered pretense. But what could I say? My father could be blamed for a lot of things, no doubt, but could he be blamed for the fact that this man’s son had turned out bad? It was a preposterous suggestion and it made me angry. Jules was dead, but instead of finding solace in trying to discover why, I was sitting here talking with this old man. I looked at my watch and moved on the seat.
“It’s late,” I said, “and I’ve left my father alone.” But Mr N’chele didn’t hear me. His mind was running along channels of its own.
“It was an uneventful day,” he said, “and it promised to remain so. Otherwise I would not have taken my son along.”
“What day?” I asked. “Tell me what year it was, at least.”
This time he heard the sharpness in my voice and responded with true surprise. “Why, 1956, of course. Do you mean to tell me you’ve been serious all along, you really don’t remember? It was the year before your father got the wildlife job. I had gone to his office to complain about his elephant book, about what the book implied.”
My father’s book? What the hell was he talking about?
“Elephants oj Tsavo and Other Lands?” I asked, as if it could have been another.
As soon as I spoke the words I felt something unhinging slightly, far back in my brain. But I also felt my energy flag. Things were getting too far a field, the day had gone on for too long. I wasn’t paying attention to business anymore.
“I really must go,” I said.
“How old were you in 1956?” Mr N’chele asked. “Were you ten that year, were you twelve? How is it that you don’t remember? My son remembers everything and he was only fourteen.”
I was trying to stay calm, to keep something in reserve for the long drive home, but this conversation was really dragging me down. It wasn’t 1956 but 1974.
“I was twelve,” I said. “I’ve got to go home now.” But Mr N’chele took hold of my arm.
“I will tell you why you remember nothing and my son remembers almost nothing else,” he hissed. “Though you were twelve years old, your father’s life, the examples he set, taught you not to care, that’s all. He taught you not to notice ordinary Africans. Who knows, maybe you thought it was a joke, but if the roles had been reversed, your father’s and mine, believe me, you would have remembered it well.”
“What would I have remembered well, Mr N’chele?” I asked, stammering a little as I spoke. “Jesus Christ, what do you want me to know?”
Mr N’chele stiffened, as Detective Mubia had when I’d sworn earlier, and said he wouldn’t tell. He said telling would be easy and I should remember it on my own.
If there was a time in my life when I might have sought the kind of ministry this man wanted to provide, now was not that time. I was exhausted from digging graves and cleaning house and rolling around on the ground.
I thanked Mr N’chele for the dinner, and when I slid out of the booth, the nightclub came alive. All during the time I’d sat there I’d had the sense that we were alone in the room, alone in a world of our making, a manufactured realm, but now the crowd surged up to meet me, pulling me away. Was it a weekend or a weekday? Was it a Saturday night? African girls were swirling around the dance floor and pushed up against the bar, the moon-faced white men among them like planets among the stars.
On the stairway going down, Mr N’chele’s private waiter caught me and handed me a folded cocktail napkin with another message inside. “Give my son what he wants,” said the note. “After that everything will turn out fine.”
I nearly went back up the stairs when I read that note. I turned and then I turned again and then I turned once more, as that lioness had done in our yard. It was there for me if I wanted it—all I had to do was dig. It was not, after all, something I had forgotten so much as something I had long ago decided not to know. There was a moment when I could have reached it right there on the stairs, I think, but in the end I lurched out of the nightclub and went directly back to my car.
At home, if my father was asleep, though I was as tired as I had ever been in my life, I wouldn’t go directly to bed, I knew. Rather I’d find a chair on my father’s verandah and sit overlooking his valley, watching for monkeys coming up from below. The monkeys would come slowly if they came, and when they got to the edge of our yard they would stop, they would see me and be afraid.
This is what I would do late on the night of the fifth day after my husband’s death, late on the day I had dug his second grave, an arm’s length deep, before striking the side of a snake with the open palm of his dead and detached left hand.
9
A Message from Julius Grant
When I got back to my father’s house he was indeed asleep, but I didn’t go out onto the verandah. I went straight to my bedroom and got on top of my bed, and the next thing I knew it was well past noon on the following day. I awoke with my father’s knock at my door, and with the idea that the events of the night before hadn’t really taken place, but had been an odd dream, Mr N’chele an invention of my growing obsession, my decision to focus all of my energies on figuring things out.
“Nora,” said my father, “are you quite all right?”
“Are you alone?” I answered back.
“Beatrice is cooking. Come and eat some food.”
Beatrice had been my father’s housekeeper for fifteen years.
She lived in the servants’ quarters out back and kept the place clean and ready, even when my father was gone. When Jules and I occasionally slept at the house, Beatrice came in to cook for us, but she and I had never been on overly friendly terms. There had been another housekeeper when I was a child, an ayah, and I had missed her for a decade after she’d gone.
I opened my bedroom door and asked, “Where is Dr Zir?”
My father was dressed in
a dark-green safari suit with boots and a rumpled light-green hat. He struck a pose again, waiting for a compliment.
“If the suit fits…,” I said.
“Oh, Nora, be kind. Julius and I would never do anything bad. You should know that about both of us by now. We thought it was a lark, a swindle of those who needed swindling, nothing more than that.”
“Frauds illegal, Dad,” I said. “So is smuggling, last I heard.”
But since the night’s rest seemed to have given my father his lucidity back, I stopped, fearing too much serious talk would use it up. Instead I spoke lightly, asking him what he wanted to do with his day.
“It’s bacon and eggs for breakfast,” he said, “and then I want to go down to the post office to check my mail.”
By the time we got to the kitchen Beatrice was ready to leave for church. She would not have worked at all on a Sunday if it hadn’t been my father’s first real day at home. Beatrice was wearing her church uniform, a light-blue dress with a white head-wrap, and she looked fine. She was a member of a charismatic Christian sect and liked to spend all of Sunday standing in a field, dancing and playing her drum. My father had told Beatrice that we were going into Westlands after breakfast and that we would give her a ride. Her church didn’t have a building but met in the center of one of the Westlands roundabouts.
There was a lot of food on the table and when I saw it I sat down. My father loaded his plate and I loaded mine. There was fresh milk and mangoes, and after we finished the food Beatrice had prepared, I got half a cooked chicken from the fridge and we ate that as well, arms moving out and back, the tension between us somehow lessened.
Beatrice was in the back seat of the Land Rover when we went outside. She seemed impatient, but when we pulled through the gate her mood brightened. It was a glorious day, the sky was clear, and the deep purple of the jacaranda trees was all along the road. Since this road led directly into West-lands, we would drop Beatrice at the roundabout and then go to the post office, where my father could unlock his mail box and peer inside. When my father was younger his mail box was always full, but not anymore. I had a key to the box and used to check it whenever Jules and I were in town, but only a half dozen times since he’d lived in London did I find anything that actually needed forwarding to my dad. Now that he was back, however, I knew we would have to go to the post office every day.
When we stopped at the edge of the roundabout Beatrice jumped out of the car. We could see that her congregation was already there, singing and warming things up. Beatrice was the last to arrive, and that made her run.
“If we’re going to stay in the house we need to get some food,” I said. “We ate everything just now that we could have saved for tonight.”
“Dr Zir is coming to dinner,” my father said. “Or I am going to his house, I don’t remember which anymore.”
It was Sunday but there was one market open, so I told my father I’d drop him at the post office, do the shopping, and pick him up in a half hour’s time. It would take him about a second to check his mail box, but he loved walking the streets, looking in the shop windows and stopping at a bakery for coffee and a roll.
I waited until my father crossed the street, then searched around for a place to park. Though my life was in turmoil, shopping had always been a favorite activity of mine. When the farmwork overwhelmed us, Jules and I would often make plans to move back into town someday, either into my father’s house or into one of our own, and whenever we made such plans I always got the most pleasure from thinking about going out alone and shopping, buying everything that such a house would need.
After I parked the car I took the empty baskets that Beatrice had put in the back seat, and saw that I’d left Jules’s file folder in the Land Rover overnight. I didn’t think that what was written in the folder was important anymore, but it was all I had, so I shoved it down into the empty shopping basket. After that I remembered the pistol, and reached under the seat and pulled it loose too, putting it in the bottom of the basket and covering it with the file.
So here I was, early on a Sunday afternoon, the sky high and clear and the vegetable market before me, and I had an automatic pistol at my side. When I got out of the car three boys ran over, one carrying roses and the other two each holding a bag of apples that they wanted me to buy. The roses were red and perfect, held together by rubber bands, and the apples were green. “I’ll take them all,” I said. When I spoke Swahili the price went down, and when I asked the boys to put them in the back of the car they all hung around, leaning against the Land Rover like security guards.
I started to browse the tomatoes and fruits, started, against my conscious will, to picture eating with my father again, revisiting my earlier life but with the added routine of tracking the fault lines of his mind. I would question him during meal times, I decided, unravelling everything while he ate.
I bought more mangoes and passion-fruit and sweet-looking onions for a salad I know, and when I picked up the coconut and radishes and plantain I imagined curries and stews, vegetarian masalas and a Yorkshire pudding that my mother used to make. The butchers were all closed, but I would come in the morning again, or send Beatrice to buy roast beef and ground pork, silverside or topside, for other half-remembered recipes that were tucked away somewhere in my mind. In this way I resolved to try to engage the rest of the hour, the rest of the day. I filled two baskets and had to call one of the boys from the car to help me carry them while I carried what remained. Until further notice I’d approach my problems with a shopper’s mind, listing things and checking them off, consuming them and throwing them away.
But I had spent too much time, I had shopped in too leisurely a way. I tipped the boys and locked the Land Rover. Jules’s file folder and that automatic pistol of mine were now beneath the fruits and vegetables at the bottom of the basket, so I left them there, and walked off toward the bakery that my father always chose. This bakery had outside tables, and from way down the road I could see my father sitting there. What I saw, however, wasn’t a lonely old man with a roll in his mouth, but an engaged old man who was reading his mail. Surely not, I thought, surely he’d picked up a flyer or an ad, but as I got closer I could see that it was a real letter that my father had, and next to the roll on his plate was a small package as well.
“What’s this?” I said. “You’ve just returned and someone is letting you know how they are? I like that. I’m always around and I don’t get three letters a year.”
The tone and energy of my comment pleased me, but when my father looked up he didn’t smile.
“I’m sorry, Nora,” he said. “I shouldn’t have opened it. It is addressed to you, and I can’t understand what it says.”
I never used my father’s post office box so the letter couldn’t be for me—Jules and I had a box of our own at the downtown post office I’d passed the evening before—but to please my father I took the letter from his hands. He was holding only a single sheet, yet on the table before him there were perhaps a half dozen more. It was a long letter, and in order to open it my father had had to tear the envelope in a wide and circular way.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “Anything in your mail box ought to be opened by you.” But when I looked at the first page of the letter I lost my cheery tone. The letter was from Jules. This is what it said:
My dearest old Nora:
If you’re reading this then things are in a muddle for my idea was to take it from your father’s P.O. box myself, once things settled down. I was going to get your father’s key, retrieve the package I’ve sent along, and then stand where you’re standing now and burn this letter, all the while swearing to myself that I’d never do anything so stupid or dangerous again. I’ve even placed a match down inside the envelope to start the fire.
Ah well. Nora, you are no doubt wanting to know why I didn’t have the guts or whatever to let you know about everything in person, and I swear I don’t know the answer to that one myself, except to say that I was too
embarrassed, and that until just about now I thought that the story would go better as an anecdote, something to talk about after the fact, don’t you see, once it was over.
Listen, Nora, everything started as a lark. One night, well over a year ago now, your father was visiting from England, and he invited me out on the town. Do you remember that night? We were staying at his house and I told you we would be back shortly but it was very nearly dawn before you saw us again. When we left the house I thought we’d get a beer at the Parklands Club and then maybe stop at one other place and then come home, but your father said he had arranged for me to meet some special man.
He was acting very odd, your father, and would only give me directions, turn here, turn there, until he had me way down in the industrial district, you know, nearly past the game park and then in there somewhere on the other side. When I say that your father was acting odd I mean in a cheerful way, like the cat who ate the canary, so I was inclined to humor him, since I had never seen him that way before. Though I was driving it was quite like I was blindfolded, quite like after we arrived wherever we were going I’d find you there ahead of us and that some kind of surprise party had been arranged. The day, as it happened, was very close to my birthday, and that is actually what I thought.
He wouldn’t talk except to give me directions, but finally we came to a warehouse, and your father actually told me to honk on the horn, three times short and one time long, like the beginning of Beethoven’s Fifth. Imagine my state of mind, Nora. He was happily mysterious and I was ready to feign polite surprise, and completely ready to engage myself in whatever it was your father had in mind. After all, this was the first time since I’d met him that he’d ever invited me out for a drink, and because I wanted him to like me a lot better than I thought he did, I was ready for anything, come what may.
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