Ahmed's Revenge

by Richard Wiley

  Ralph took a long time, but when he finally came back he had a wooden box with him, a well-made affair that had once held four bottles of good French wine and still had the coat of arms of the winery embossed on its side. The wine had been a gift from Jules on our first wedding anniversary, but because we’d been immersed in the work of the farm at the time we had put the wine away and hadn’t remembered it until our first orchard fire, when first we worried the animals with our outlandish ways. The box was perfect. It contained the original straw that had padded the wine, and it was wide enough and long enough to contain my husband’s arm.

  Ralph saw the arm across my lap. He saw the transferred ring and said, “I am sorry I took so long.”

  The box was nailed shut, but its lid came off easily under the even pressure of Ralph’s hands. And when he held it out to me I lifted Jules’s fingers from my knee, moving the whole thing to the waiting straw. It was a grand feeling, like lifting a scar from my soul, but all I could think to say was “Now at least I’ll have something to display at his wake on Saturday. When our friends and neighbours come, now they can pay tribute to his arm.”

  After the box was closed I apologised to Ralph for my self-absorption. “Will you continue helping me?” I asked. “Will you take the crowbar and force the lid off this larger box as well?”

  Ralph said he was glad to have work to do, so I got up and put the small box, the only true coffin left in my domain, over on a bit of clean ground. I think I expected a long moment of exertion, as the lid to the contraband box tried to keep itself down, but in fact this lid behaved much like the one on the wine box. Its nails screeched a moment; then they gave way with so little work that I imagined Ralph could have opened it, also, with his hands. As soon as the lid was loose Ralph let it fall to the other side, down into the hole from which it came.

  What I expected was dozens of tusks, a cornucopia, an obscene array, but what I got was harder to deal with than Jules’s arm had been. There were just two tusks in the box, longer than the bed of my lorry, old and scarred and impossibly grand, with the circumference, at their thickest spot, of a young elephant’s leg. These were the largest and most glorious tusks I had ever seen. They were unmatchable, the tusks of a lifetime, and my first thought, once I could think at all, was that there was nothing in the box to pad them, no straw, as in the wine box, and no proper velvet cushions to signify their beauty and their worth.

  I leaned against the box but for the longest time I couldn’t make myself understand. I tried to remember Jules’s letter, which Mr Smith had taken away. In the letter Jules said that what he wanted to do was hurt the man who had most hurt him, and if these tusks belonged to Mr Smith, then he had certainly done that, though in Mr Smith’s father’s kitchen I had seen fourscore smaller tusks with my own sharp eyes.

  I put my hand inside the box and touched the tusk nearest me, and finally I saw that these giant wonders had not been buried alone. Sitting between the tusks, in the oval enclosure made by their natural bend, was the skeletal construction of a small and perfect elephant, a model eight inches high. It was like something one might use in an anatomy class or an expensive gift that a wealthy parent might buy for her child, and it had a single tusk coming out of the right side of its small skull. The tiny elephant’s tusk was the same colour as the two mammoth ones that surrounded it, with identical markings that made it look old, and as I looked at it I felt my heart go upside-down. In the left pocket of my skirt my hand touched the missing piece that would make the puzzle whole, my talisman all these days, the crutch I’d leaned upon in such a wide variety of ways.

  “These are Ahmed’s tusks,” I said.

  I walked around to the far side of the box and took my own tusk from its warm and lonely bed. There was a cavity in the left side of the tiny elephant’s skull, and when I pushed my own tusk into it, the fit was fine, with no resistance and no room to spare. It was like putting a key into a lock, I suppose, for as I placed it there, another door opened inside me and understanding finally flooded in. Mr Smith had stolen Ahmed’s tusks and replaced them with acrylic models he had made, that had been his intention all along. It was the theft of a lifetime, a grand and dazzling plan, but Detective Mubia had found out about it and immediately told his dad—that was the detective’s second job, after all. And just when Mr N’chele’s outrage was at its height, just when he’d demanded that his son return the tusks or he himself would go to the law, Jules had stolen them. It was an unproven deduction, perhaps, but I knew in my bones that I was right.

  I don’t know how long I stood there, but even when I heard the lorry engine cough and realised that Ralph was bringing it a few feet closer, I couldn’t take my eyes away. My own tusk seemed happy now, absurd as that may sound, and I noticed that the chipped side of its tip, that flattened part that had worked for me so well, was mirrored perfectly by the huge tusk that rested at my side.

  Ralph got out of the lorry and fixed the hoisting arm in place and dropped the lorry’s rear gate. And when he got to the box, when he looked in and once again saw the off-white expanse and the decades’ worth of scars, his face grew soft.

  “How beautiful they are,” he said. “How great he must have been when he was alive.”

  “Do they look real to you, Ralph?” I asked. “Do they look manufactured at all?”

  “Oh, they are real,” he said. “Can you imagine the strength it must have taken to carry them around? These are teeth, Nora, do you understand that? Incisors on the rampage, that’s what they are. Ahmed was Africa’s glory, Africa’s past retold.”

  “Let’s load them as they are,” I said, “box and all. Let’s put them on the lorry and take them back to town.”

  It was nearly two o’clock when I said that and by the time the work was done it was four. Ralph and I didn’t speak again as I locked up the house and fixed things around the farm. We didn’t speak until after we had passed through Narok, until after we had stopped at the petrol station to hire some more guards, until we were on the road again and noticed that there was trouble ahead, that there was a police vehicle waving at everyone and telling them to pull over to the side. This wasn’t a tactic of Mr Smith’s, as I feared at first, but a bad accident. It was a surprise, therefore, and a small pleasure to realise that when the policemen saw us they waved us through. They removed their hats and were quiet, taking a moment to ignore those dying around them, in order to salute in honour of someone who had died before.

  18

  Tusker Premium

  The National Museum, where Miro’s father worked as an assistant curator, had been closed for the past two months, but there were always long queues at the ticket windows. Ahmed the Elephant had recently died and the people interested in buying tickets to see his tusks and skeletal remains were legion. Schoolchildren would be coming by the busload, office workers in Nairobi would be given time off, and village leaders from as far away as Lake Victoria wrote, asking whether entrance fees could be waived for the children of the poor. All this was in anticipation of the exhibition’s opening, which was still a few days away.

  Without question the most remarkable public event of the year was the death of Ahmed, who’d been under twenty-four-hour guard during the entire first half of the decade. The guards had been posted by presidential decree as a protection against poachers, a situation that allowed Ahmed to die of natural causes—at a game reserve in Marsabit, way up north—but that greatly restricted his freedom and his movement. If Ahmed’s tusks were Africa’s glory, as Ralph had said, then there was irony in the last four years of Ahmed’s life. He had been a prisoner of his own grandeur and his age, just like the continent. And a second irony was that although his life had been protected, people weren’t prepared for his death. Ahmed’s carcass was left in the sun too long, and when he was finally brought to a taxidermist in Nairobi he was peppered with scavenger bites, and the initial stages of rot had set in. His hide was beyond saving but the taxidermist prepared him for exhibit anyway, building a s
keletal elephant ten feet high, with his stunning tusks swooping toward the ground. It was an exhibit that Jules and I had looked forward to. We read about it in the papers and told each other that once the crowds died down we’d go.

  And now, as Ralph and I worked our way into Nairobi after dark, I understood that we had seen a part of the exhibition without paying our fees. Mr Smith must have broken into the taxidermist’s and switched the tusks, and that, of course, meant that what Ahmed himself now wore, what the schoolchildren and lunchtime visitors and village elders would soon line up to see, were Mr Smith’s acrylic replicas, the coup of his entire criminal life, his extraordinary and mammoth duplicity.

  To steal Ahmed’s tusks was everything to Mr Smith, I saw that now. He didn’t care about making smaller tusks or fooling the tusk-buying world—that had been a product of the chance he’d seen to punish my dad. Those were prototypes, the tusks Jules and my father had been shown, and my little tusk, the one I’d been transferring from pocket to belt, my little phallic partner during this endless week and a half, was the smallest one. It was an almost perfect plan. The value of Ahmed’s authentic tusks, to an Arab king or among rich North Americans or Japanese, was incalculable, for they were the purest representation of the capitalist collector’s rallying call: one of a kind. They were the largest and most famous elephant tusks in the world, and they had taken sixty-five years to grow.

  How furious Jules must have been when he discovered the truth, how he must have raged! Now that I understood the enormity and sophistication of Mr Smith’s plan, now that I could believe completely in Jules’s surprise, I could also finally believe what he said in his letter, that he hadn’t told me because he’d been embarrassed beyond speech of any kind, able to focus only on the idea of turning things around. And the real truth must have come to him very late, at just about the time I saw him in Mr N’chele’s kitchen that night.

  I guess I felt some relief at knowing everything, but what should I do now? What could I do with Ahmed’s actual tusks, and how was I to deal Mr Smith a final blow?

  I offered to drop Ralph at his office, but he said he’d see me safely home. And on impulse, when I got to Dr Zir’s gate, I turned in there. Who knew, Mr Smith might be in my father’s drive right now, waiting to hijack my leverage away.

  Dr Zir’s lights were on but he didn’t open the door when I sounded my horn, so I knew that my father was there with him, that chess had prevented Dr Zir’s hospitable nature from bringing him outside. Dr Zir’s dogs greeted us, barking and jumping up as we got out of the lorry, but Ralph had the wine box in his hands, and when the two dogs sniffed it they immediately settled down.

  “My father’s house is up there,” I told Ralph. “It’s a brief walk through the valley, a short drive up the road.”

  When we got to Dr Zir’s door I said, “Open it.” I was speaking under my breath, to a vision of the slow-moving doctor inside, but Ralph thought I was talking to him and reached for the latch, stepping back again as the door swung wide. Dr Zir’s house was larger than my dad’s, but we could see the two men right away, in the middle of the living room, seated at the chess-board and staring down.

  “Daddy,” I said, “Dr Zir.”

  Since it was his move, my father didn’t respond, but Dr Zir was so startled that he almost knocked his chair over as he tried to stand.

  “Nora, darling,” he said. “Come in, dear, and how do you do? And, oh, you shouldn’t have.”

  Ralph stepped forward to shake his hand, but did not, thank God, extend the greeting by giving him the wine box that the doctor clearly thought was a gift. Instead he put the box on a table by the door. And when my father finally moved his chess piece, he stood up too.

  “Did it help to get away, Nora?” he solemnly asked. “Did it do you any good to be alone for a while?”

  “We’ve parked the farm lorry in front,” I told Dr Zir. “I didn’t want to chance taking it home.”

  Both men went over to the window, pulled back the curtains, and looked at the lorry. The box on its back made it look strange. “When did you get that one?” my father asked. “I thought your lorry was a flatbed.”

  I told my entire story then, so far as I knew it. When I mentioned Ahmed, my father at first seemed to think I was talking about a man, and when I said I believed that the tusks in the lorry were real and that the ones at the museum were the crowning example of Mr Smith’s craft, the point of everything he had done so far, my father sat back down. I hadn’t yet mentioned Mr Smith’s own father’s humiliation, or the son’s decision to make revenge a by-product of his endeavour, but my father’s face was so pale that I feared going on.

  “I’ve been reading about the museum’s opening,” said Dr Zir. “I’ve even got tickets—one of my colleagues at the hospital gave them to me today.”

  “When is the opening?” I asked. “I don’t even know that for sure.”

  “It’s Monday,” said Ralph. Since my father had his face in his hands, and since Dr Zir was searching for the tickets in the pockets of his worn-out vest, Ralph had gone over to the couch and picked up a newspaper.

  “Monday morning, ten o’clock,” he said. “President Kenyatta will be there, as will the vice president and everyone else. It says here that the folk dancers and singers are rehearsing tomorrow. It also says that the taxidermist and the contractors will be working through the weekend to get everything done.”

  “I was the Minister of Wildlife for five good years,” said my father. He was looking up with tears in his eyes and his voice had such resonance yet expressed such shame that I thought he was about to let everything out. When he got up and came over to me, however, all he said was “They should have invited me.”

  I looked at my father standing there. He seemed much older than the number of his years, he was fragile and wayward of mind, he was contemptible for what he had done, and he was all the family I had. I thought of him slapping Mr N’chele and shoving him down the stairs. My father was a big man, and that had been in 1956, when he was undoubtedly fit and strong. I could see the expression on his face as he turned from the top of the stairs and took my hand, walking with me back down the hall to his office door. It was nothing like the expression he had now. Then there had been arrogance in his eye and he had walked slowly, looking satisfied and proud.

  I asked Dr Zir if I could leave the lorry where it was—I would take my father up the path and home. Their chess game wasn’t over but the doctor said I could do what I liked, and when my father nodded I took his arm. Ralph took the box again, and we made our way back out the front door.

  I got the little model of Ahmed from the lorry; then Ralph and I followed my father into the valley and onto the path. The valley was dark, but my father knew the way so well that he left us behind. We could hear him, and we could see him, sometimes, in the odd patterns of darkness, but twice I had to call, asking him to slow down. When we got to the edge of our own yard, however, my father was waiting there. “I don’t want to go inside,” he said. I stepped past him, looking around to make sure everything was calm, but it wasn’t fear of a dangerous house that kept my father standing outside.

  “In the morning, Dad,” I said. “It will all start to unfold tomorrow.”

  “Our family has always been small,” my father said. He shook loose from me when I tried to take his arm again. He was speaking not to me but to Ralph on his other side. “Only Nora and me and her mother years ago. When Julius came along I didn’t like him at first. He had a strange way of speaking and I didn’t want him around.”

  “It’s natural for fathers to resent the men who take their daughters away,” said Ralph.

  “But when we were working together Julius was quick and thorough. He did a fine job. He knew more than I did and he was faster at knowing it, and his shipments were always on time. Do those things count for something when a man looks back, after his life has turned wrong?”

  I tried to move my father across the grass again, but he was a heavy man,
and as he refused to go I imagined him turning and slapping me, pushing me down into the valley and watching me fall.

  “I’ll bet his farm was run well too,” he told Ralph. “I’ve found that when a man is thorough, his thoroughness is uniform.”

  “It was well run,” I said. “Now let’s go inside.”

  My father finally took a step toward the house but Ralph stopped him by suddenly speaking passionately. “I’ve never seen such a farm,” he said. “Even after all this ruin I can tell that it was very well managed, very well run. The current mess is superficial, it doesn’t take the eye of the farmer to see that.”

  I was surprised at Ralph. I hadn’t thought, on any serious level, that he’d taken stock of the farm. He’d been so quiet out there, in fact, that I assumed he was only trying to get through a horrible day. My father, however, was moved by Ralph’s words. “Oh, thank you,” he said, and then he walked straight into the house, forcing Ralph and me to follow along. Beatrice had left a snack for him on top of the piano, a thin sandwich and a glass of milk.

  “You play, don’t you?” my father asked Ralph. “You will, won’t you, while I eat my snack?”

  When I went into the kitchen to make sandwiches for Ralph and me I could hear my father going on. He was friendly and talkative again, not eating his sandwich until I came back with ours.

  “However this thing unfolds, it will begin tomorrow,” I said again, “so let’s eat up and get you to bed.”

  My father nodded and it was just then, as I stood there with an unwanted bite of sandwich in my mouth, that the idea of having Ralph sleep over entered my head. I’d intended to lend Ralph my father’s Land Rover, to thank him and send him on his way, but when my father took his plate into the kitchen and walked down the hallway to his room, I found myself saying something altogether different. “Do you want a beer, Ralph?” I asked. “Do you want to sit out on the verandah for a while, or would you rather go?”