“I’m on my way back to Africa right now,” he said.
“Are you?” Everything was falling into place. “I thought you never wanted to—”
“I’m an African boy after all, you know.” He smiled. “Ultimately, no matter what I plan, I always end up getting homesick.”
“I’m so happy you’re coming back.” I touched his wrist very lightly. “I’ve missed you.”
“The paper is posting me back to Nairobi.” He squeezed my finger between his for one second and then let it go.
“They decided after all I’m the best African correspondent they will ever get after I wrote that piece on the Rwandan anniversary.”
“When was that?”
“Right after you left, in April. The paper asked me to go back to write a story about Kigali a year after the genocide. I came through Nairobi for a day. You’d just left, I missed you by only a few days.”
“Oh. I had no idea. I heard you were going to Russia. I thought I’d never see you on the face of the earth again.”
“Oh well, I hope that made you a bit sad.”
“It did as a matter of fact.”
I stared at him, proud of what I had just said. He smiled, then lowered his eyes and started fiddling with his lighter.
“Well, it was a last-minute thing, I was the only staff who had been in Rwanda during the massacre, so they sent me in a flash when they realised that every network and magazine was going to do a story about the anniversary. I found myself back in Kigali twenty-four hours later.”
“Did you hate to have to go back?”
“Yes and no. I needed to see it again, in order to wipe out some of those memories. We were all back there, in the same hotel, a year later. The last time I had been there the owner had fled, leaving me and Ruben and Miles and hundreds of refugees without food or water, living in this abandoned place like in a trench. The place smelled of urine and blood. And it still smells like that, I recognized the smell immediately, the walls and the carpets are impregnated with it. I couldn’t believe this time they made us pay to stay there. Credit card machines and all.”
“Amazing,” I said, looking into my half-empty glass.
I realised I wasn’t prepared to listen to this again. All I wanted was to hear he had missed me as I had missed him.
“Now the lawns are clipped, the hairdresser is back in the hotel shop, the shell-shocked gardeners are back at work. You’d never know anything had ever happened. It was like superimposing a totally different picture in your brain. Like when I walked into the swimming pool and I saw this crowd of happy-go-lucky aid workers swimming and splashing around, getting a tan, I couldn’t cross out the memory of those hundreds of refugees actually fighting to drink the water out of that pool, only a year back.”
“It must have been inspiring for your story.”
“It was. And it was therapeutic too, in a cruel way. That everything ultimately can be wiped out and will sink into oblivion.” He looked at me sombrely. “That you can actually forget anything.”
“But can you really?”
“Yes. Of course. We all do. The more painful the memory, the faster you want to forget. You just replace the scene, superimpose another face.”
“Are you talking about us?” I don’t know where that came from. It flew out of my mouth.
“I am talking about a lot of things at the same time.”
I felt his eyes on me. I didn’t look; I knew my question had annoyed him. But I couldn’t help it.
Why had he come here like this, out of the blue? Had he planned this all along, going back to live in Africa and coming to track me down on his way? Or was this just an unexpected stopover between flights? It was always the same story with Hunter: he took me by surprise, in controtempo, and caught me unequipped with a decent strategy.
“Will you spend the night with me?” I asked abruptly.
“Yes.”
We let that hang in the air for a bit. It was comforting to stand on solid ground for a minute or two. Now at least we knew we had the night. And once you have the night, you can—theoretically—have much more.
“I have to leave very early tomorrow around six, though,” he added, slightly defensively. “I’m taking the early-morning flight to London.”
“It’s all right, I’ll book you a cab.”
I leaned closer to him, slowly traced the line of his collarbone with my fingertip and slid it in the hollow of his throat, feeling his blood pulse. It was getting dark. I didn’t want to waste time.
We kissed at last. Slowly, as if we had all the time in the world. I felt a warm flush hit the nape of my neck, then spread smoothly into my bloodstream. It was like thawing from hibernation.
Then, I don’t know, it’s impossible to remember. Our eyes locked, as if we were trying to keep each other from slipping away and vanishing again. We kissed and made love slowly, knowing we would start again as soon as we finished, and we kept smiling and whispering to each other, saying each other’s names over and over and shaking our heads as if in disbelief at the miracle of being together again, of touching each other, kissing, embracing; and as if to say oh no, there was no way we could be apart for so long ever again.
At last we lay still in the darkness. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so happy.
“Hunter,” I whispered, “do you love me?”
“Yes,” he said.
“That’s good. Because I am crazy about you. And I love you.”
It felt wonderful to finally say it. It was so simple, such a gift. I never wanted to hold it back from him again.
There was a short silence. I stroked his hair with the tip of my fingers and then his forehead and his lips.
We had finally reached somewhere together. Yes, now we would have to discuss the logistics, but that aspect of things didn’t scare me any longer. I would move out of Adam’s and…
He gently moved my fingers away.
“Esmé. I am coming to live in Nairobi with someone. Her name is Claire. You don’t know her.”
Suddenly the room was empty, we were inside a vacuum. As if someone had sucked out the sweet air, the magic mist, and the room had turned into a hollow cave. Cold and empty.
It was like a crystal smashing. It shattered in one second. Painful like a thousand blades through your heart. It makes me nauseous to remember it.
“I met her in London a few months back. I’ve asked her to come live with me. She’s someone I really care about.”
Every word he said fell in the room like a pebble on a marble floor. It had weight, it made a noise, one couldn’t misunderstand or be confused by its meaning. That was the unmistakable, hideous sound of the truth. Unevocative, pragmatic, straightforward. Hard.
Claire.
The syllable which destroyed my life.
I sat there frozen in the dark. What does one do, what does one say? Is one allowed to cry, to scream?
“But why did you come, then?” I managed to whisper, forcing my voice out of my dried lungs.
“I came because I needed to see you again before I—”
“Because you needed to make sure you had wiped me out”— I interrupted him—“like Rwanda. You came on the anniversary.”
“Don’t be like that. Don’t be bitter.”
I turned away.
“I’m not bitter. I’m destroyed.”
That silenced him. He lit a cigarette, blew out the smoke in a sigh.
“Why now? Why only now are you ready to say how you really feel about me?” he asked.
“Why did you make love to me like that?”
He didn’t answer. He looked at the ceiling, I knew his eyes were full of terrible sadness.
“What makes you think there is always an answer for everything one does?” he said slowly. “We are not these perfect machines performing rational tasks all the time.”
“But how can you say you love me and then plan your life with someone else?”
His voice hardened and his eyes went cold:
<
br /> “How can you say you love me and live with another man? You forget that you have been in this very predicament since the first day I met you.”
But it seemed so foolish, so absurd, that now he would make the same mistake.
“So what is this? Revenge?” I asked, my voice hardening too.
“I’ll tell you what it is. It’s very simple, maybe too simple for you. It’s only that I want to have a life, just like you do. I want to come home from all these terrible places where they send me and find someone smiling, happy to see me. I want to be with someone who doesn’t feel tortured or guilty for loving me, who doesn’t have to look at her watch. Who doesn’t need to lie. Does it sound terribly prosaic? Is that too homey for you, not glamorous enough?”
I put my hand over his mouth.
“Don’t. Please don’t say anything else to hurt me.”
We fell silent for a long time. I stopped my brain from thinking and put it in neutral.
I knew the light would come soon, I could hear the the birds in the trees and the garbage truck making its way down the alley. He would be gone then—at the break of dawn—just like a character out of a nineteenth-century novel. I could always run to the station and do my Anna Karenina bit on the tracks. But the image didn’t amuse me. I was too drained to invest any energy in trying to make myself smile.
I needed to say something final which would allow us to go our separate ways. It didn’t matter at this point if it was another lie. I just wanted to be able to breathe after he was gone. I needed desperately to lie in order to get some air back into my lungs and fool myself that I could accept his loss and the existence of Claire.
“Maybe that’s the best solution. It probably would never have worked between us anyway,” I said. “I’ll just have to get used to it.”
He didn’t say anything.
“I’m not angry at you or anything,” I continued, “I’m just sorry we made each other so unhappy. I wanted the opposite. But our timing has always been wrong, right from the start.”
“Yes. Timing,” he said, with a slight sarcastic inflection. “One always underestimates it.”
I got up and walked away from the bed. Away from him. For the first time I felt we really were no longer allowed to be that close, that we hadn’t the right. I turned on the shower and let the hot water wash away the pain.
The pink light seeped through the blinds and infused the room, but our faces were frozen. He got up and I watched him get dressed. He looked staggering in that soft light, I couldn’t bear it.
We heard the cab downstairs, then he kissed me very quickly on the lips.
“I’ll see you in Africa.”
And he was gone. I felt brittle. And then cracked.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer,
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
DYLAN THOMAS
Now I think I’ve learned the lesson of the drug abuser.
The whole point of going cold turkey is to shock your body in such a way that the stupid junkie in you will think about it twice before getting in that kind of trouble ever again. You cannot endure that pain more than once. I must have been a pretty tough case since I made myself go through it twice with Hunter. The second time—after he left me in the empty apartment in Rome—as he closed the door behind him, it actually felt like my heart had been shut forever inside a freezer. I remember the clang of the heavy metal door.
The sudden change of temperature cracked it.
I didn’t break down, I didn’t go to pieces. I ended up with this very fine scar.
I learned to live with it and eventually even found it rather attractive. The crack made me feel stronger, it gave me an unusual resolve. I felt like an old Japanese cup determined to outlast the new ones. All the more valuable for its unique seam.
“Are you sure?” Teo asked me when I told him I was ready to go back to Africa. “If you stayed a bit longer we could go to Stromboli, the water’s divine in June. We could rent an old house from a fisherman, go out in the boat every morning, then have lots of chilled moscato wine. We could climb up to the volcano crater under a full moon. We’d have such fun.”
It did tempt me, the sound of yet another mild Mediterranean summer. Maybe if I stayed longer I would eventually succeed in resurrecting my earlier self, and shed that excruciating feeling of loss. My earlier life seemed so much more tame, so exquisite, so tasteful. There seemed to be no risk of ever falling apart.
Then one night Nicole rang from Nairobi.
“Nena, Miles and I went to Laikipia for the weekend, got stuck in the mud, we broke down twice, it took us twelve hours to get up there. We got charged by a buffalo while we were changing a tire, I swear it nearly fucking killed us, we had to fly on top of the roof of the Landcruiser and sit there for three hours under the rain, getting smashed on vodka, waiting for this monster to leave us alone. It’s been a safari from hell, but we did have a blast after all. In Nairobi it’s still pouring and getting really cold. You don’t want to come back here, the weather is so miserable and everyone is in a bad mood.”
It sounded wonderful.
I suddenly longed for the smell of wood smoke in the rain—must be the acacia bark burning because you only get it in Africa; for the vast sky hanging low and wide over your head; for that feeling of danger and space. I wanted to feel that fear again, the fear of being smashed in the waves.
“No. I don’t want to swim in the Mediterranean,” I said to Teo. “It’s too polite.”
A week later I was back on a crowded plane, squeezed among a batch of ferocious holiday makers decked out in leopard prints and straw hats. They were loud, boisterous, and determined to get the most out of their two weeks on Malindi beach. This time I didn’t mind their company: their childlike expectations charged the aircraft with a cheerful energy.
At the first light of dawn I opened my eyes to find we were over Ethiopia. The light broke the spell of the night flight, when it seems impossible ever to reach a destination, encapsulated as you are in a spaceless dimension, surrounded by aliens in uniform. An odourless and timeless transit. Suddenly coming out of the darkness and finding myself on top of Africa, I swear I could smell it.
As we flew over Lake Turkana and I made out its shape in the desert, I felt immensely moved. Now I knew exactly where we were as I looked down at the scarred ground. The land below had ceased to be an abstraction.
Loyangalani, South Horr, Baragoi, Barsaloi, Wamba, Archer’s Post. I whispered the names one by one. Here we go, I thought, now I too can sing my bit of Africa.
How absurd to feel that I was coming home again. This place couldn’t possibly be home. But then why was it making me so weepy?
The peroxide blonde in leopard Lycra sitting next to me tried to concentrate on her precooked scrambled eggs but kept checking me out. “Are you going on holiday on your own?” she asked me suspiciously.
“No, actually I live here.”
“You live there?” How outlandish. To her Africa was just a brochure. White people didn’t live there, they just went on holiday.
“Do you work there?
“Sometimes.”
“Are you married?”
“No.”
She gave this some thought, then shook her head.
“Then why do you live there?”
I didn’t answer her, I don’t like discussing my life with strangers.
But I’ll tell you why.
It’s because of love.
Nobody ever moves to Africa for any other reason. It doesn’t have to be a woman or a man. It’s because of love itself. But I’ve just learned this. This answer is the gift I’ve just been blessed with. That day on the plane, when the woman in the leopard print asked me, I didn’t know it yet.
So I got back and Adam was there behin
d the glass door at Jomo Kenyatta airport in a brown moth-eaten sweater. His unshakable confidence in me, in my coming back to him no matter what, moved me almost to tears.
And then the smoky smell of firewood and cow dung and rain greeted me out on the road.
This was what I kept thinking coming back to Africa would feel like, and I was right.
I have been quiet and patient since I’ve been back here.
I have been this woman with a very fine scar. It is a secret scar that nobody else can see. I look at it when I’m naked and I have learned to love it.
It gives me power.
I have been wounded and the wound has made me stronger.
This is also what I’ve learned in Africa: the only whites who will heal are the ones who let themselves be wounded.
Now it’s July again, the coldest month of the African winter.
Nicole is right, the weather is miserable still and everyone has been in a rather bad mood.
It was July when I first came here two years ago, like Napoleon on a new campaign, moving his armies. I was so excited then that I don’t remember feeling this cold in my bones, like I do now.
Adam is back at the camp. Morag got a job with him after all and the clients apparently love her.
I suspect Adam does too.
I look at them together when I’m at the camp and I can’t help thinking they’re made for each other, and the realization doesn’t make me too sad nor angry anymore. Her swimming-pool eyes with no ripples still annoy me, she’s a harder Iris without gracefulness and without warmth. But she will be loyal to him as I have not been.
Adam and I are still in love in the way lovers who have lost each other are. Haunted by nostalgia: we both know that anytime now—anytime now—we’re going to have to part.
Hunter has been around town, jumping in and out of planes to his unpleasant destinations, and we’ve met several times since I’ve been back. We run into each other at the Karen dukas, at dinner parties, standing by our cars in the parking lot of the bank, keys dangling on fingers. We have adjusted to meeting like this, like two neighbours who greet each other in haste.
Now that we have sealed each other off, our hands never dare touch, we never get close enough to be able to smell each other. We avoid looking into each other’s eyes for more than a second or two. Our bodies are off-limits, and we keep that a very strict rule.
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