CHILDREN are
DIAMONDS
Books by Edward Hoagland
Essays
The Courage of Turtles
Walking the Dead Diamond River
The Moose on the Wall
Red Wolves and Black Bears
The Edward Hoagland Reader
The Tugman’s Passage
Heart’s Desire
Balancing Acts
Tigers and Ice
Hoagland on Nature
Sex and the River Styx
Travel
Notes from the Century Before
African Calliope
Early in the Season
Alaskan Travels
Fiction
Cat Man
The Circle Home
The Peacock’s Tail
Seven Rivers West
City Tales
The Final Fate of the Alligators
Children Are Diamonds
Memoir
Compass Points
CHILDREN are
DIAMONDS
An African Apocalypse
A NOVEL BY
EDWARD HOAGLAND
Copyright © 2013 by Edward Hoagland
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
ISBN: 978-1-61145-834-3
Printed in the United States of America
For my mother, and my daughter, and for Trudy
Map of Africa circa 1995
Courtesy of the Central Intelligence Agency
Chapter 1
• • •
IN AFRICA, EVERYTHING IS AN EMERGENCY. YOUR RADIATOR BLOWS OUT and as you solder a repair job, Lango kids emerge from the bush, belonging to a village that you’ll never see, reachable by a path you hadn’t noticed. Though one of them has a Kalashnikov, they aren’t threatening, only hungry. Eight or ten of them, aged eight or ten, they don’t expect to be fed by you or any other strange adult. Although you know some Swahili, you can’t converse, not knowing Lango, but because there is plenty of water in the streams roundabout, they are fascinated that you choose to drink instead from bottles you have brought. Gradually growing bold enough to peer into the open windows of your Land Cruiser, they don’t attempt to fiddle with the door or reach inside, seeing no food or curious mechanical delectables. The boxes packed there white-man-style are cryptically uninformative. Meningitis and polio vaccines, malaria meds, deworming pills, Ringer’s solution, folic acid, vitamin A, and similar famine fighters. However, they will remain as long as you do, and you don’t dare leave to take a leak because this fabric of politesse would tear if you did, as it would have already if they were five years older. You wish you could ask them if mines have been laid in the road recently by either the rebels or the government forces. Their fathers, the men of the village, haven’t emerged because they’re probably off with the guerrillas, and the women would not in a time of war—even the nun you are going to visit (a lay sister, although to all the Africans, a nun) has been raped, judging from what her radio message to the order’s little villa in suburban Nairobi appeared to convey. That’s why the footpath to their tukls is maintained indecipherably. The problem is your diarrhea. To pee in front of the children would be no big deal; the boys themselves pee in front of you. But diarrhea might amuse them enough to demystify you. They could open the car and loot it if you did that, or if you disappeared for a few minutes to relieve yourself. It’s a balance you must maintain as you work on the engine: friendliness and mystery.
Disasters can swallow you in Africa, and yet the disasters, too, get swallowed up, which may be why we rolling stones roll there. Visas are fairly informal and the hotels wildly variant, so you can live awhile on almost nothing if you need to, as your troubles seem to piffle in the face of whatever else is going on. To shuffle tourists around on a safari route or manage a bunch of Kikuyu truck drivers who shuttle loads from Mombasa up to Nairobi or on to Kisumu and Kampala takes no special skill. I’m nominally a teacher (when I haven’t had some kind of contretemps with an individual on the school board) and originally came over from America on the Salvation Army’s nickel to work in one of its schools for the blind. It went well. Needless to say, I cared for the kids, and supervisors who live beyond their selfish interests I don’t quibble with. But I did feel, over time, as if I might be going blind, too, which becomes a bit absurd when you are under these skies, in the midst of landscapes such as Africa’s. I went to Alexandria on a business venture but returned to Africa.
Tourists want to be good guys in roughing it, and I can cook over an open fire, chauffeur a Bedford lorry, and recognize the planets or make a rainy evening more interesting by telling yarns, while keeping the Samburus from taking advantage of the Ohioans, and vice versa. Goodwill is not the problem; mainly just incomprehension. The former are living on a dollar a day. But expats in a stew like Nairobi’s may also barter for their daily bread—clerk in a store that caters to Europeans, selling fabrics, carvings, baskets, masks, with a crash pad in the back for that extra pair of hands boasting New England English and a whitely reassuring smile who’s been hired for a stretch. Helps discourage robbers, in fact, to have a lug like me bunking in the place. Then there’s always the blond Norwegian girl who arrived on an international internship of some sort but is staying on for an indeterminate number of months because an Ismaili merchant of advancing years but local wealth (gas stations, an auto agency, an office building and adjoining mart) is loaning her his garden house for the pleasure of her company occasionally at the dinner table, presided over by a portrait of the Aga Khan. The gent just likes to see her beauty in the room. He has a plump, swarthy wife as old as himself, so he doesn’t intrude upon her privacy after supper or object if she accepts within the villa’s high brick walls a presentable Western freeloader of her own for fleeting visits. The Masai watchman has been clued in—it’s Kukuyu thieves he is hired to deter—but of course will turn away a mzungu like me, as well, if her nod turns to a frown.
But when you get a gig with a safari company, they will have a barracks to put you up in for the couple of days between the Amboseli and Serengeti trips. A schoolteacher like me probably “plays well with others,” so you may meet richer clients who, after the Tsavo and Masai Mara jaunt, will want to hire a knowledgeable companion for a solo expedition west into Uganda’s wilder parks, or south down the Indian Ocean coast, and not just to Malindi and Lamu, where everybody goes. This freelancing may then piss off an employer, but we’re speaking of a city splitting at the seams with squatter camps, swollen by an enormous flux of displaced refugees from within hungry Kenya itself, not to mention all the illegals from the civil wars afire in the countries that surround it: Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia, Congo, Rwanda. Look on a map—dire suffering—need I say more? And if you can drive an SUV or a Leyland lorry or ride herd on the Africans who do, and have the say-so of that Salvation Army major behind you, another do-go
od agency will have an opening in relief work for you pretty soon.
I do that, too. From gorillas right to guerrillas. I’ve chaperoned a perky Japanese fellow with binoculars hanging around his neck to eyeball the silverbacks in the Rwenzori Mountains; and next I’m venturing—or pussyfooting—slowly through Lord’s Resistance Army rebel territory in northern Uganda with tons of corn and sorghum for one of the refugee camps up in the war zone of southern Sudan. But, between those ventures, there’ll be the new San Francisco divorcée I ran into on the terrace of the Casino Club or the Thorn Tree Café, who has deplaned in Kenya to do the Karen Blixen, Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa thing in the very suburb—Karen, verging on the Ngong Hills—named for Blixen. Nearing forty, like me, she’s just bought a villa from a South Asian or an Anglo-colonial former grandee at a fire-sale discount. It appears to have everything: the tamarind and flame trees, passionflowers and bougainvilleas, the leopard foraging in the garbage cans at night, killing the cat and dog if they go out, and the faithful Kamba manservant, Mutua, who accompanied the house but now is becoming nearly as fearful of staying in it as she, with no white man in residence who knows how to handle a pistol. Her first car, a romantic vintage Land Rover, has already been hijacked from her at a stoplight at terrifying gunpoint; and bandits armed with machetes boost themselves over the neighbors’ walls, but when she tries to call the police—if the phone line does connect—they will ask her if she has “any petrol,” because they don’t. “Can you come and get us?” Wonderful colored tiles, crafted doorways of mahogany, teak beams, an inherited library of all the appropriate books—Adamson, Kenyatta, Lessing, Moorehead, Soyinka, Paton, Cary, Things Fall Apart, etc.—and a fairy-tale, gingerbread roof, but some nights she goes to the Norfolk Hotel to sleep, when she can’t raise a friend closer than America on the telephone, if it works. She hasn’t had time to find many of these in Nairobi yet, or an escort to take her places where she might begin to. So a “middle school history teacher,” from America, no less, but who knows some Swahili, and about motors, firearms, and the general East African maze, might be welcome to move in rent-free, after a look-over, if her long-distance harangues with her lawyer in California didn’t bore me to tears, once the novelty of the stage set wore off. She had pals in the Bay Area who, like the lawyer, told her she ought to have sunk her settlement money into Napa Valley real estate instead of this. Now nothing could be renegotiated.
She also liked my name—Hickey. I escorted her to the Carnivore nightclub, where harlotry and brutality acquired new imageries for her, and to croupiers’ tables at other places where the bouncers have you lift your hat to show them that no pistol is concealed underneath, but a white man who doesn’t score can solace himself with the little girls and boys waiting outside at three A.M. to offer him a blow job for the equivalent of twenty cents. Also, however, to the Leakeys’ marvelous National Museum, and the slightly swank dog show at the old racetrack, where the West with the Night lady, Beryl Markham, used to hang out; plus the fabled patio of the Muthaiga Club, which Beryl had already managed to join—Beryl played tennis and golf—and where divorce, according to legend, was the primary sport. Yes, Beryl was my landlady’s name as well, although she wasn’t a pilot, a horse trainer, or an author, like B. Markham. But she could brush her ash-brown tresses without the services of her Russian Hill hairdresser, glad to forgo being a bottle blonde for this cleansing period, while in Africa, she said. Quite a nice woman, she missed her therapist and paid for regular sessions on the telephone rather than trying our local quacks. Her son was a sophomore at Andover, so her trips home were going to be timed with those of his vacations that weren’t slated to be spent with his father.
Once she had rendered it crystal clear that my position as a temporary live-in did not entail conjugal rights, she granted me some, if only because it was so much easier to vent her feelings in dishabille. She enjoyed tantalizing me at cocktail hour, and I didn’t need to flatter her; she was wenchy as she mixed the drinks. I did tease her, though, because she’d finally bought a handgun for protection, when there were plenty of macho unemployed white hunters and former mercenaries around—now that shooting elephants was out of style and the apartheid wars were over and African dictators preferred black thugs—who could have run interference for her in an emergency much better than me. I wasn’t beefy, red-faced, and recognizable around town as the type that, if bandits broke into their girlfriend’s house in the dead of the night, could leap from a sound sleep, grab her ornamental six-foot Karamojong spear off the wall, and hurl it through the first of them. (A Frenchman, a Foreign Legionnaire, had actually done that—what a boyfriend!) But those guys, being even more downscale than me, were less presentable in the circles she aimed for or felt comfortable in. What in fact they were mostly doing for a living, now that no more Mr. and Mrs. Francis Macombers were seeking tutelage on the veldt, and in order to expiate their numerous sins, was lie behind sandbag emplacements in the desert heat defending U.N. and NGO enclaves in Mogadishu and other bad spots in Somalia that Hemingway would not have enjoyed either.
I couldn’t go to visit my Norwegian damsel at her Ismaili pasha’s villa in Thika and keep in Beryl’s good graces, but since she, that damsel, didn’t care, neither did I. Yet we were tiring of each other, nevertheless, Beryl and I. Beryl was used to computer innovators, grapevine splicers, or still whizzier, glitzier men with inherited capital to live on—even a polo player, whose photo, in whites, graced her coffee table. Politely, after a couple of weeks, I began to pack to leave without needing to be told; then was delayed because my glasses were stolen off my nose by a thief who reached in through the car window one noonday while we were stopped for a light, Beryl driving, which made it seem more stupid, since I didn’t have the excuse that my hands were gripping the wheel. We talked about our poor parents: how what had looked apathetic or shortsighted or lackadaisical to a kid now appeared more throttled, and of course you feel sorry for them anyhow once they’re safely in the ground. Her father had made his money as a go-getter, until he’d been shelved, after which he’d sat home for a year or two, running a comb through her hair every morning before sending her off to school. Earlier, I had noticed she liked me to do something resembling that, while she perched on my knee. But if she was mainly playing Meryl Streep, I wasn’t an adequate leading man.
More important, the neighborhood had changed. Our faithful Kamba houseboy, Mutua, cooked and served our meals on Irish linen and Spode plateware with cut-glass fingerbowls from checkerboarded, fine-wood cabinetry. Yet one block down, an elderly white woman, a lifelong Kenyan resident and the widow of a coffee rancher from the highlands toward the Aberdare Range, who had chosen not to decamp in the general white stampede after independence but to live out her last years alone in the outskirts of Nairobi with five or six African women as companions—defenseless, penniless Kikuyu crones, with no villages or relatives of their own, they said, to go to, and whom she offered protection in return for some few services, in their penury—was smothered in her bedsheets. It had supposedly been a charitable arrangement. Not having quite outlived her money, she’d taken them in, one by one, in exchange for the house being kept reasonably well dusted, behind its shrubbery, and being served breakfast in bed and perhaps other minor amenities. She could have hired more energetic retainers, but two or three of these wrinkled ladies had known her husband, and how she and he preferred their tea and scones, plus Scotch in the evening. A gentle presence—a thread of continuity on the wooded street—she simply disappeared from view: not puttering in her garden or looking in her mailbox. No housekeepers were visible around, although taxis were seen entering, and an unfamiliar young man opened the gate. She was stiff and decomposing in her bed when her accountant and a security bruiser from his office forced the back door. No autopsy would have been performed on such an individual, snugly tucked in, with no untoward marks on her skin, if the house hadn’t been stripped of whatever movables could possibly fit into a cab on a series of trips and the help ha
d all vanished. Nobody really knew who they’d been. But they must have possessed plenty of relatives and a web of villages out near Mount Kenya to flee to for a comfortable old age.
Nairobi’s beleaguered, superannuated white community remembered other suspicious, inconspicuous deaths and looked at their own impassive retainers—not that they would have wanted to risk hiring any young strangers as an alternative, however. Few pensions existed for old people. Without an extended family, they starved. So you continued to take somebody in, with no wages necessary, if you happened to have run through your own resources and just had a roof and rice and beans to offer. The bewildering sheer size of this new megapolis, with fetid, unmapped shanty-town add-ons, its eclipsed police force carrying rifles on foot patrol through the downtown avenues to try to shoot the car-thief gangs, since there was no other way of stopping them, scared the old hands as well as Beryl. Pickpockets were simply kicked to death by a mob of civilians, when anybody managed to grab one. I myself had seen it happen to a whimpering little boy not over ten or eleven—all those polished, sharp-toed, office workers’ shoes; you couldn’t have squeezed through the tightening circle of fifty or more middle-class men in suits to save him. I tried—it was iron—and left. The joke, if you can call it that, among us expatriates is that if you feel a hand grope for your wallet, the second thing to do is try to save the life of the pickpocket. This is a city veering into calamity, where transient whites like me still dribble in because it’s a hub for aid groups and yet a traditional wash-up spot for Anglo ne’er-do-wells who try to define themselves by where they have been and, more fleetingly, those parents who want their children to see wild animals before it’s too late; they are sometimes my bread and butter. With the AIDS pandemic, it will soon be too late for a number of things.
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