“Oh…I had a conversation with Miles a couple of nights ago. He said I would really enjoy them.”
She slid the book inside her back pocket and slapped it, boyishly.
“You know, all those guys think I’m such a retard because I haven’t read anything”—she smiled mischievously—“which, by the way, is the absolute truth.”
“Which guys?”
“You know, the Nairobi press corps. Yack yack yack, they’re always yacking about Heart of Darkness. I can’t bear them.” She sighed and shook her head. “Anyway…at least Miles is the only one who bothers to advise me about what to read. I really appreciate it. It makes me feel like I’m not completely hopeless once I step out of the bush.”
I realised she had a crush on Miles. He must have been the trigger to her European mission. She looked so different now, on the eve of her trip to London, than when I had met her for the first time at the camp. Suddenly I saw how unworldly she would appear among the London glitterati. How untrendy her clothes would seem, how out-of-date her conversation. How she could have been easily misjudged for just another Swedish farmer’s daughter who baked delicious cakes. One felt like giving her a lot of advice.
She stood up, ready to go.
“Thanks a lot, Esmé. And by the way, my birthday is the day after tomorrow and Nena offered to have a dinner party for me at her house. My place is too small.”
“Great.” We started to the door, but I suddenly turned back. “Wait! I want give you a little birthday present now.”
Afterwards I often wondered why I had had that intuition—to give it to her then, rather than wait for the day of her birthday. I ran to the bookshelf and took out an English translation of Ferdinando’s book. I scribbled on the first page.
“You said you wanted to read poetry. Here, this is my father’s.”
She lit up and flicked through the pages.
“Thank you! Oh this is so amazing!”She read my inscription. “Hey! Thank you so much.”
“If you want you can borrow some of my winter clothes before you go off,” I said. “I’ve got so much stuff in the trunk.”
“That would be incredible.” She gave me a squeeze and kissed me on both cheeks. “You are so wonderful, thank you.”
I watched her hop into her car and reverse, screeching the tires. She drove as aggressively as a man. I smiled and waved.
Another hybrid, I thought. Half boy, half princess; half warrior, half child.
There we were, in our pretty party dresses once again.
Even by Nairobi standards it was getting late, and Nena was starting to get annoyed.
“Typical Iris,” she said, looking at her watch, “to show up late for her own party.”
We heard a car in the drive. I saw Hunter walk in and instantly felt a shot of adrenaline: my heart beating like a hammer in my chest, my knees weak. My reaction amazed me. He took off his glasses, and brushed back his black hair with his hand. I could smell the cold air from his face: he must have come in an open car.
He went to kiss Nena.
“I’m so sorry to be late.” He held out a bottle of wine. “Shall I put this in the fridge?”
“Yes please. You’re not late; Iris hasn’t made her grand entrance yet.” I could tell she was angry. Iris always had this amazing talent for irritating other women, I thought.
I couldn’t have cared less that dinner was late. I gulped down my vodka and felt a pleasant tingle. Hunter came towards me with a drink in his hand.
“Haven’t seen you in a long time,” I managed to say flirtatiously.
“I haven’t been around.”
He looked pale and tense. He forced a smile.
“Unfortunately I have been to some very unpleasant destinations.” He raised his glass and looked straight into my eyes.
“To your obviously fabulous health.”
I laughed.
“And to yours.”
The phone had rung in the noisy room, and Nena went to answer it. It wasn’t her tone of voice, or what she said, which attracted our attention. It was the quality of her silence: it made us silent all at once. We listened.
“…What?…”
Her eyes went blank.
“…When?…”
The room was hushed now. We all looked at her. She put down the receiver in a stupor.
“Iris is dead.”
Nobody said anything. Nobody moved. We waited, frozen, for her to come towards us and sit on the sofa by the fire. She looked at the floor, her hands clutched between her knees.
“She had a car accident. She is…” Her mouth quivered.
She looked at us, imploringly, like a little girl.
“She is dead.”
It falls like a rock. When that word rolls down it takes only an instant to smash everything forever.
We stood, a frozen crowd of party guests—toasts still in midair, leg of lamb roasting in the oven—like crystallised Eurydices on the threshold of Hades. The word had been spoken. And now there would only be grief, tears, desperation.
We turned into a group of panicked ants, frantic, frenzied. We started ringing different numbers, drove into town, ran first to the hospital, then to the morgue. Peter, Hunter and Miles spoke, argued, bribed, handled the Kenyan bureaucracy which had taken possession of Iris’s body and had turned it into a thing, something which now required forms, certificates and signatures. Nicole, Nena and I sat numbly in every waiting room—the hospital, the morgue, the funeral home. We let them deal with it—overhearing their tense conversations with police officers, hospital staff—and smoked in silence under the fluorescent lights, red-eyed, our mascara streaking down our cheeks, like a spooky trio from a Venetian carnival.
The next day Iris’s parents came from the farm to complete the formalities. They were both blond, strong, simple, their English hardened by a Swedish inflection, their skin thickened by upcountry sun. They spoke little and, as if their grief had sunk into them too heavily, couldn’t manage to lift their heads.
I couldn’t get hold of Adam. I had no number for him. All I remembered was Colorado. I rang up the college in Boulder. When I asked the operator whether she would know of an upcoming lecture about East African safaris, she laughed at me.
“We’ve got hundreds of lectures, thousands of people stepping in here every day, honey. Which department you want?”
I hung up.
“We are gathered once again because of the death of a friend.”
Hunter looked at all of us assembled in the small church, his voice quiet and clear against the fresh stone of the walls.
“And it is not an unusual occurrence. We who live in Africa have had to learn to grow accustomed to death. People we love die, we keep losing them all the time. Yet each time death strikes it leaves us speechless, it seems impossible that it should have happened again. And yet it must be this very death, this darkness and this lingering fear, that makes people here feel so close to one another. It is the ever-present possibility of losing each other that makes our bonds so intense and so tight.
“Iris was killed the day of her birthday. She was only twenty-seven, but she had more experience than many older men in this country. She could shoot a gun, and she would have known how to handle a charging buffalo or a bandit. But instead she was killed by a drunken Kikuyu at a traffic light in Westlands, in broad daylight. Her shopping bags still on the back seat. So this reminds us that when death comes, it always comes unannounced, it is always cruel and ravenous. It is always mindless and absurd.” His voice quivered slightly.
He paused and looked at the ceiling.
“Iris had been given a name by her Samburu friends. They called her ‘The Rich One.’ I used to tease her about it. In fact sometimes I know I teased her a little too hard. But now I see how right they were.”
He stopped again. One could hear muffled sobs, whispers. Then, in the back of the church, the Morans started heaving and hissing, and the heaving became an undulating dirge. We turned to look at them.
They had come from very far to say farewell to their friend. Some of their faces we knew from her photographs. They stood erect on a line, wrapped in their bright red shukas, their long hair smeared with ochre, holding their spears, unflinching like a lost legion of the Roman Empire. The sound their lungs emitted was like the wind through the trees, like the water of a stream, like the breathing of a running animal. The vibration of their syncopated breaths rose like an organ blowing inside a cathedral.
We stood shoulder to shoulder in the tiny church holding each other’s hands while the Morans kept singing.
And it suddenly felt right, to be so close—all of us—mourning another death in Africa.
Late that night I heard a car pull into my drive. I was still awake, I don’t know why, but I knew it must be him as soon as I saw the headlights against the trees.
“I couldn’t sleep,” he said. “I was hoping you’d still be awake.”
“Come in. Yes, I couldn’t sleep either. Nobody can tonight, I’m sure.”
“I figured you and I would be the only two left on our own. Miles went to stay with Nicole.”
“How is he?”
“A wreck.”
“He really fell apart, didn’t he? Sit down, I’ll make you some tea.”
He followed me into the kitchen, not looking around. He didn’t seem curious to take in where I lived; he just walked in as if it was the hundredth time he had come to see me. He sat on the wooden table and watched as I filled the kettle.
“I’ll tell you what. Tea is great, but I’m starving. I haven’t eaten in two days.”
“Oh. Okay.”
I opened the fridge and took out bread and cheese, leftover chicken curry, salad.
“Now that you mention it, I haven’t had anything to eat either,” I said, feeling a sudden pang of hunger. “Forget tea, let’s have wine with this.”
In the cupboard I saw the leftovers of Iris’s cake. I took it out. It felt so odd in my hands, wrapped in plastic. Still fresh.
“She baked this for me,” I said hesitantly. “It’s…”
I stopped and looked at him, not knowing what to do.
Hunter stared at me gravely and then took it from me.
“Let’s have it.”
We pulled out two chairs and sat down to eat. The sight of food had made us so rapacious that we didn’t bother to warm up the chicken. We ate and drank in total silence, looking at each other as we ate, until there was nothing left. The previous forty-eight hours had drained both of us so much that I don’t think we had any energy left to feel uptight or nervous about being alone together, for the first time, that late at night.
The wine had warmed us and had fueled a feeling of peaceful exhaustion. We moved to the living room and I revived the fire.
“That was so good,”he said as he stretched out on the sofa, lighting a Rooster. “I couldn’t face another night of insomnia in my cold, empty place.”
I curled up at the other end of the sofa, at a safe distance from his body.
“I’m glad you came. I didn’t want to be alone tonight either.”
We didn’t say anything for a while. I lit my cigarette and I listened to the sound of our breaths exhaling the smoke.
Suddenly I realised how long—somewhere inside me—I had been wanting to see him like this. The two of us alone, on my sofa.
“It moved me, what you said in the church. About how people die here.” Hunter didn’t stir.
“Back in Europe you go home at night and all you worry about is how many messages you’ll find on your answering machine. Here you come home and you wonder if your friends are still alive.”
“You know,” Hunter flicked an ash on the floor and propped himself with his elbow. “If she had been told she was going to die like this, oh man, she would have hated it.”
“Why?”
“To die like a housewife coming home from the supermarket? Very unsexy.” He lay back on the sofa and looked at the ceiling. “She was so vain.”
I heard him sigh.
“Did that annoy you?” I asked.
“Sometimes. I guess because I felt that, like many other people here, her life was this perfectly planned magazine ad. If you buy it, this is what’s included in the price: adventure, sex, beauty, old colonial charm. And instead—this is probably what I was trying to say in the church—a fucking Kikuyu runs her over in the middle of town. And do you know what that tells us?”
“No.”
“It tells us, this is Africa, sweetheart. The rest is crap, interior decoration, advertising. Because Africa is a fucking drunk Kikuyu in a Nissan, you see? In the end that’s what did her in. That’s what I mean when I say this country is ravenous. It didn’t even give her the chance to make the exit she deserved. It doesn’t fucking care to make you look glamorous the day you die—”
“I think she thought the world of you.”
“I loved her,” he said angrily, almost snarling. “There was more life in her than inside a kindergarten. I was madly in love with her when I first came back.”
I flushed. Just hearing the sound of the words madly in love coming from him made me uneasy.
“And what happened?”
“I couldn’t follow her, she couldn’t follow me. We were living in the same country but we were seeing different things, all the time. Because of my job I had to put up with a lot of ugly stuff, and Iris—well you know how she is—she…”
We both noticed his use of the present tense, but ignored it.
“…she was too busy creating the perfect ad campaign for her life—the Beauty and the Vanishing Warriors mystique—and I resented it. She didn’t want to be brought down. She was never interested in the truth, if it meant seeing the ugly side of things. She hated that. She said I only liked her when I succeeded in making her unhappy.”
He paused, looked at the ceiling and then at me.
“Maybe she was right, who knows,” he sighed. “Maybe I got a kick out of spoiling her fun, but I believe there is a truth, and most of the times it is very ugly, very unjust and very cruel. Especially in this part of the world. And I believe in not ignoring it; otherwise I wouldn’t choose to do what I do.”
“I know,” I said. “It must be very difficult for you to join our little Karen dinner parties after being in Rwanda.”
He shrugged.
“That’s not the point. It’s very difficult to come back to anything after that.”
We were silent for a long time. Then he started again.
“The first time I saw the body of a dead man, I was shocked. It was in Somalia. It was bloated like a cow, the stench was unbearable. I said, There you go, your first corpse. When we arrived in Kigali at the very beginning, we could feel right away it was going to be a really ugly story, very different than Somalia, but we had no idea that we were going to witness a genocide. The first two days I would count the number of dead bodies on the streets. Then I stopped counting. All of us did. We didn’t even talk about it anymore.”
He looked at me so seriously, almost like a child caught doing something wrong.
“That first week in Kigali, the killing was so heavy, we couldn’t believe it was happening. The morgue was filled up to the ceiling, blood was streaming out of its shut doors. You would drive through a group of sobbing women at a checkpoint and know that they would no longer be there on the way back. Sometimes you did see them again, but lying dead on the ground. At night we climbed on the roof of the hotel and listened, horrified, to the screams of people being butchered all around us.”
“How do they…I mean, what do they use to…”
“Kill them? They carve people up with machetes or club them to death with these huge wooden rungus covered with nails. Apparently, when they break into a house and start putting the whole family down, people bargain and pay them money to use bullets instead. These Hutus are high on it. They run around in gangs of twenty or so, covered with blood, high on the violence and the physical strain. You know these guys’ job is to
kill all day, with their bare hands, people who are fighting for their life. It’s an incredibly hard physical task. You can see they are possessed, but at the same time it’s impossible not to feel the thrill, the immense energy that is produced by their blood lust.”
He stared at me, with a blank look. I reached for his lighter and he passed it to me mechanically, barely touching my hand. I think he wasn’t even seeing me any longer.
“The frightening thing is when you realise that a threshold has been crossed,” he continued, resting his chin on his knee and staring into the fire, his dark hair covering his eyes now. “The boundary which rules our lives and tells us every day how far the limits are set. These people have smashed that boundary and are running amok on the other side of it. That other side has no limits, there’s no turning back once you have reached it.”
He pulled his hair behind his ear and looked at me, as if almost surprised to find me there, listening.
“And it has nothing to do with being African. It has to do with being a human being. Only I guess in Africa the veneer between rational behaviour and madness is much thinner and quicker to wear out.”
I was starting to feel nauseous, overwhelmed, but there was no way I could stop him now. He wasn’t talking to me; he was talking to himself, as if performing a ritual, where by naming the horrors one by one he could make them disappear.
“Dead bodies are dead bodies. What kills me is wounded children. Sometimes you walk among what you assume are dead people, and suddenly you feel these small hands clutching at your ankles, or hear their cries in the distance. You can’t take wounded children in the car because the militia will stop you, the men will take them out and kill them before your eyes. So we stopped doing it.”
“Oh God, Hunter…” I covered my eyes with my hands.
“It’s the truth. I am not saying this to impress you. I only say it because it’s the truth.” He sighed heavily. “When I saw her body at the morgue…”
“Yes.” I nodded, and I felt a lump in my throat.
“Christ, I had made love to that body, but it was just another bloody corpse. My mind refused to register it as hers. I don’t know what it is that happens to your brain, it finds its own devices to survive, to keep functioning. It has nothing to do with cynicism; it’s survival instinct.”
Rules of the Wild Page 16
