Ahmed's Revenge

by Richard Wiley

  The choirmaster was watching the Samburu dancers impatiently. He seemed to be complaining to one of the museum officials, saying the Samburus were taking too long. It was then that I saw my father. He approached the choirmaster and the museum man, Dr Zir behind him, nodding as if he were a military aide.

  “Oh, oh, your father’s been asking to hear the singers now,” Miro’s father said. “I think that’s my cue.”

  When he walked past the Samburus, Miro and I followed, and though I was worried that my father might ruin whatever chance we had by saying something idiotic, his posture was impeccable and his old Ministry uniform really did let him look official and grand. There was something about the direct sunlight, I think, that made the cut of it stand out, the band braids on his shoulder all aglow. Everyone was watching him. Some of the Maasai had come closer to listen as the Samburu dancers were filing off the stage. When Miro and I got near I heard my father say, “Scheduling problems, don’t you know.” He was an old colonial dignitary, come unexpectedly, maybe, but full of the old colonial expectations. Only I knew that this was no act at all.

  My father was insisting that the Marsabit school choir perform between the Samburu dancers and the Maasai, and when the performance coordinator finally agreed, Miro’s father had to go over and explain everything to the Maasai. Real Maasai, people like Sosio and the others who lived out around my farm or up in the Loita Hills, didn’t worry very much about time, but these dancers weren’t from the Mara. They were members of a newly formed dance troupe housed just outside of town, on Langata Road. Their leader listened while Miro’s father spoke, and then he looked directly at my dad.

  “Wouldn’t he rather see us dance?” he asked. “White people can hear a choir anytime.”

  The choirmaster heard him and started to complain. “This is a Rendille choir,” he said. “What white person can hear that? We sing not only the familiar fare but traditional Rendille songs. No one knows them in Nairobi, black or white, no one here has ever heard them before!”

  The Maasai dance troupe leader had deep red ochre stains on his skin and wore a huge lion headdress over long braided hair, but he spoke English pretty well, and he seemed to hold his ground. Finally, however, the Rendille choir director pointed at the fifty boys and girls. “These young people will be disappointed,” he said. “They each knew Ahmed personally, you know. And they have never been to Nairobi before today.”

  The Maasai sighed and nodded his head. “You go next then,” he said. “After that maybe he will want to stay and watch us dance.”

  My initial idea was a far-fetched notion that had come to me upon seeing my father in his uniform that morning, but it was beginning to seem that what was happening now actually might allow me to drive my lorry into the museum’s new exhibition hall unopposed. Everyone was engaged by my father, and my father was in rare form, every inch of him the Minister of Wildlife again.

  Even after the Marsabit choir took the stage, I lingered, like a ghost watching an old world. Miro’s father was tending to my father and Dr Zir again, all three of them now sitting with the higher museum officials, in chairs that had been brought from inside. And when the choir started singing, Miro had to pinch me before I could make myself walk away. The first Rendille selection was chilling and innocent: a dead-slow rendition of “God Save the Queen.”

  When we got to my lorry the box was still on the back but there was a man inside the cab.

  “That took forever,” said Ralph. Ralph had changed out of his safari outfit and into a suit that nearly matched the one Miro’s father wore. I explained in a minute why I had asked him to come. “Give me the keys,” he said. “You two walk in first. Make sure no one’s there.”

  Walking into the museum from this direction made the mammal room seem less large. I could quickly see that it was still empty, that even those who might have been told to stay were standing somewhere near the front door, listening to the choir. No one was expecting trouble, after all.

  Ahmed was alone, the artificial tusks in front of him on the floor. Miro and I walked all the way up to them before Ralph brought the lorry, turned in a tight circle, and backed up very close to Ahmed, perhaps four feet away from his huge left side.

  Ralph jumped out of the cab, leapt up onto the bed of the lorry, and pried open the box. “Let’s do this fast and get out of here,” he said. He didn’t even look at the elephant.

  Each of Ahmed’s tusks weighed at least one hundred and fifty pounds, but Ralph reached into the box, grabbed one, and hoisted it onto his shoulder as if it were light. Miro and I reached up and took the hollow end of the tusk, then guided it to the floor and held it there while Ralph jumped down. The tip of the tusk was five feet above us in the air.

  Ralph moved in front of us, picked up Ahmed’s artificial left tusk, and had us steady it while he placed the real one in precisely the same spot on the floor. Then he got back onto the lorry and we felt the fake tusk lift out of our hands. “God Save the Queen” was over. It had been a long rendition, funereal in tone, and by the time the choir started its Rendille song we had replaced the second tusk and Ralph had lightly tapped the box lid shut again. He gave me the keys to my father’s Land Rover. “Go back outside and listen,” he said. “Meet me at your house when you get away.”

  Ralph jumped into the cab and drove immediately out of the mammal room and across the museum grounds. We could see him there, waving at the security guard, waiting for a break in the traffic. After that he was gone.

  That was all there was to it. It had been profoundly easy to do what we had done, to exchange the real for the artificial, the naturally grown for the manufactured. When Miro and I stepped back in among the crowd, the Rendille boys and girls had finished only their second song, and though my father and Dr Zir and the cadre of museum officials were flawlessly attentive in their chairs, the leader of the Maasai dancers was now impatient over at the side.

  The Marsabit choir’s third song was “Greensleeves.” I got the feeling that they had added it late, that they sang it because they felt it captured my father’s world in some way, but they nevertheless did an excellent job, an absolute longing for England in their tone. Now that I could take time to notice, I saw that the boys in the choir were younger than the girls, by so many years, in fact, that their voices intermingled as if there were no gender difference at all. The choir sang as one, really enthusiastic now, and the choirmaster, using the exaggerated body movements that were popular at the time, seemed completely connected with the majesty and power of the song. When I looked at my father I could see that he was connected too, won over not only by the singing, but also by young faces that seemed to contain only sweetness, by children who had nothing but music in mind.

  When “Greensleeves” was done the members of the choir looked up, and their Ahmed badges flashed in the sun. We applauded and the Maasai applauded too, an odd sight. Since I’d seen a lifetime’s worth of Maasai dancers, I squeezed Miro’s arm, waved at my father, and quickly turned away. I would take the Land Rover and go home, just as Ralph told me to do. And in a few hours, when I bumped into Mr Smith in the post-opera crowd, I would give him back his artificial tusks and take Jules’s bones away. Surely that would be enough, surely I could end things there. Mr Smith might never discover the switch I’d made, he might sell those perfect replicas to a sheik or a businessman who in turn might live his whole life through believing that the tusks he had purchased were real. The only questions that remained for me, then, were these: Did the rules of revenge demand that one’s enemy feel its full weight? Did Mr Smith have to know he’d been beaten before I could finally slow down?

  In twenty-four hours my husband’s wake would begin, in less than eight I would meet Mr Smith, but when I got into the Land Rover what I wanted most to do was read Jules’s letter again, on the chance that there was something in it that would help me answer complicated questions like those.

  21

  Un Bel Di

  In Nairobi expensive art suc
h as theatre has always been primarily supported by subscription. That’s why I didn’t have to worry about tickets for the opera that night. Jules and I had season tickets for opening nights at all National Theatre productions, and so did Dr Zir. For Jules and me it had been an unused patronage much of the time, but even so, when we arrived at the theatre all I had to do was go to the season ticket holders’ window and pick the tickets up. With Dr Zir’s we had four tickets for the three of us, so when I saw Ralph earlier in the day, I asked him to come along, to meet us in the foyer at a quarter to eight.

  Dr Zir and my father and I pulled into the car park at seven-fifteen, forty-five minutes before curtain time, all dressed up and in the farm lorry with the giant coffin on the back. Even though we were early, however, there was such a large crowd that it became immediately clear that parking would be impossible. There were already cars all over the lot, and well-dressed people walking toward the theatre lobby stared at us as if we’d made an absurdly wrong turn.

  Because I was driving and because there wasn’t space enough to turn the lorry around, I let my father and Dr Zir off at the door, then drove off toward the bushes at the back, where there were some more parking spaces by my old dance studio, the room where I had first discovered Miro.

  I hadn’t seen Mr Smith’s lorry when we entered the main car park. Back here there was an attendant who would park the larger cars of the officials and otherwise important people who had come. There were big cars with embassy flags on them—I saw the British High Commissioner’s Rolls—and there were several Kenyan government vehicles, long and dark. Drivers stood against the bushes smoking, and beyond the drivers, over by the farthest hedge but facing out, was a shiny new Mercedes-Benz flatbed lorry with Jules’s coffin on its back. It was a pitiful box compared with the one that held Ahmed’s tusks—it was filthy and dirty, just as it was when it came out of the ground.

  When the attendant came up to my window I was prepared to pay him to let me stay, but he said, “Good evening, madam, I have awaited you.”

  He opened my door, and after he helped me down, he got into the cab of my lorry and drove it in an impossibly tight circle, narrowly missing everything, and then backed it past all the fancy limos and into a space just in front of the Mercedes-Benz. The manoeuvre reminded me of the way Ralph had driven it in the museum earlier in the day. When the attendant came back I gave him five shillings and asked for my keys.

  “Oh, I must keep the keys with me,” said the man. “I must be able to alter my configurations should someone unexpectedly decide to leave.”

  He had my keys in his hand, and a peg board full of keys was nailed to my old dance studio’s door.

  “I need them,” I said. “I have to give them to someone inside.” I was ready to take the lorry back out onto the road again, to park it in front of the Norfolk Hotel or all the way down on Kijabe Street if he wouldn’t give me my keys, but first I asked, “What about that other big lorry back there, the Mercedes-Benz?”

  The attendant smiled. “In my car park even Mr Smith must comply,” he said. He walked over to the peg board and, lifting some others away, hung my keys under my enemy’s. “The two lorries together,” he said. “Mr Smith expressed the same concern but I put his mind at ease.”

  Walking into the theatre alone made me feel as if I should have Jules by my side. Quite suddenly I remembered that we had parked the farm lorry at the theatre once before. We sometimes used to try to coordinate opening nights with trips to town to buy supplies, and I remembered Jules’s speaking to a parking attendant, telling him to guard our purchases well. Could the same man have been working then, so many opening nights ago? Jules had loved the way our farm lorry insulted the vehicles that surrounded it, the way our farm clothes drew stares as we walked through the audience to our row.

  Jules’s opinion of his own hard work had been too high, and he’d been arrogant in other ways too, about such things as not dressing up, about somehow putting down the crowd. Now, however, as I entered the foyer, I wore formal mourning clothes, black on black, and severely combed hair. It was strange that I should be going out on the evening before my husband’s wake, and when I remembered Mr N’chele admonishing me for it before, I realised that one small part of Mr Smith’s plan was to add a final insult to his list of other crimes, to see me embarrassed in front of the gathered patrons, the power brokers and politicians of the town.

  “Good,” said my father. “They wouldn’t give me your tickets without you or Julius to sign.”

  “His wake is tomorrow,” I whispered. “I think now that I shouldn’t have come.”

  I might have made the decision to stay in the foyer, or perhaps even to go home again, but just then Ralph arrived. He took my arm and walked me back out to the ticket window, clean fingers strongly gripping my arm. “I was backstage just now,” he said. “Miro has had our seats changed. We are to be in the first row.”

  I don’t know why such a comment, such a trivial change of plans, should have made a difference to the sense of impropriety that I felt, but it did. If Mr Smith wanted me embarrassed, then somehow sitting in the front row would serve to turn that embarrassment around. It made me think of Jules in his farm clothing once again, unnecessarily visible and proud.

  The four of us went into the theatre together, but since Dr Zir’s two seats were in the back somewhere, Ralph and I ventured down the aisle alone. Though I wanted to, I didn’t look around for Mr Smith or for others in the crowd I would know, schoolmates and university colleagues and old family friends, people who’d known for decades that my father was capable of slapping another man. It seemed an extraordinary moment, as if I were permanently being defined, widowhood locked forever on my brow, a father’s daughter, beaten by the genes he’d passed on. I was sure that everyone was watching me, that the hush that had just then come over the hall was in observance of my entrance and not of the fact that the house lights had simultaneously gone down.

  “We’re almost there,” Ralph said, but all I could see was the orchestra pit, and around Ralph’s calmness all I could hear was cacophonous sound.

  Our two seats were in the centre of the front row, next to Miro’s father, who stood and embraced me when we arrived.

  “My dear,” he said. “It is good of you to have come, to honour my daughter on her big night.”

  When we sat down Miro’s father kept hold of my hand, and it was just then that applause greeted the conductor and the orchestra stopped its coughing and sweetly found its voice. It was good of me to have come out for his daughter’s big night. I turned around and stared at the full house behind me, black faces and Asian faces and white, like the intermingling of independent planets, together right now but with no common orbits on ordinary nights. I looked at Miro’s father again, and had the music not kept me from it, I would have told him that it wasn’t good of me at all, that I didn’t know his daughter, that we’d become friendly only just now. If the music hadn’t stopped me I would have said that I hadn’t come to hear her sing but to collect my dead husband, who was impatient with opera and was waiting outside. It was a horrible moment. All of my confidence from earlier in the day was gone, all of my sense of conclusion washed away with the rising sound.

  But I didn’t speak, of course, and such thoughts only served to make me late in paying attention to the opening scene of the opera’s first act. An American sailor was in a garden, anticipating the arrival of his bride, a young Japanese geisha girl. The sailor’s love was of the cynical kind—we knew it because he was singing and carrying on, telling a friend who was with him that he’d keep this Japanese girl, but only for a while, that though she was really quite lovely, what he looked forward to in his deepest heart was the day when he would return to America and find a real American wife.

  Until Miro came on stage I let my attention wander away from the awful attitude of the American sailor and the dark admonitions of his friend. They were both good singers, I suppose, but they reminded me of my father and Dr Zir: impe
rial England and its loyal Asian confidant. Still, the sailor’s tenor and the friend’s baritone worked together pretty well to cover up their limitations of power and range. Everyone in the opera was local. The sailor was a music teacher at the German school, his friend a Kimeru businessman, president of a company that imported engine parts and tyres.

  When I first met Jules in London I think our courtship was a lot like the one taking place on stage. I didn’t have the innocence or the youth of Madam Butterfly, but it was nevertheless I who fell in love first and hardest, I who most clearly heard that inner whisper telling me that Jules was the one. I believe Jules loved me during his life, I’m sure of it even now, but he loved the idea of Africa, the idea of high savannah, of elephants on the open range, at least as well. Since Jules was a romantic he thought of life in Kenya as romantic too, and he believed I shared his sense of adventure, whereas in fact elephants on the open range were for me a common girlhood memory, farming above Narok a prescription for season after season of unending toil. I’m not saying that I didn’t love our farm, that I don’t love it still, but that during our first year or two of marriage I altered my idea of what I loved until it became the farm, until I could see the world only through Jules’s eyes. That’s what love does, I guess, that’s what a woman does, I know. Since I loved my husband with all my heart, I simply quickened that heart, making it beat like his, until it loved what he did too.

  When Miro made her entrance there was a perceptible change in everything. I could feel it in the attentiveness of the audience and see it on stage in the postures of the American sailor and his friend, in all the extras who played members of her Japanese family and the citizens of the town. Even the orchestra seemed improved. When Miro sang her first notes they were plaintive and strong and haunting, and easy in their range. It was like the introduction of the world’s finest wine into a glass that still contained a sip or two of something poor. Next to Miro’s, the American sailor’s voice, which had to wind around it in the wedding song, seemed a stringy vine, and the friend’s baritone, though it held up better, made the friend seem slow. Who could fail to love Madam Butterfly when she could sing like that? And why couldn’t she see the duplicity of the American sailor when the rest of us could see it so well?