So, Nix, this is it. You are dead, and I am the one who is now 23. So what am I doing still alive? How long will my luck hold? What if it holds another ten years, another twenty? Is this how I want to live, or only how I wanted to die, pretty and poetic among the wildlife, a flash of glory moving too fast to catch, like you? What if, after everything, I am permitted an actual adulthood? What if I actually have to get a life?
AT THE SAMBURU village where Walt and Kathleen pay the village elder for a tour, Liam crawls into one of the many huts too short for Joshua or Walt to stand inside, scoots his body onto the animal skin rugs that cover the dirt floor of the sleeping area, the entire hut otherwise empty except for a fire pit, and rests from the heat of the sun. While the Samburu warriors hand Walt a spear and make him dance with them; while Fiona, laughing, takes a video; while the three older members of the family and Mary listen to the Samburu children—heads shaved in the fashion of this tribe, and most of those under five not wearing pants or underwear—reciting their numbers in English and French, their “chalkboard” nothing but the smooth side of a long strip of tree bark, their teacher hitting them upside the head with a long stick if they seem not to be paying attention, Liam naps. As Kathleen and Fiona try to navigate the makeshift open-air market the Samburu women have set up for their arrival, struggling to figure out which mama to buy a beaded necklace or carved impala from, when every woman’s goods are nearly identical, Liam begins to run around, pantomiming a game of chase with the nearby Samburu children, waving his arms until a few, first staring at him warily behind their dusty eyelids, begin to giggle and join in. As Fiona passes out to the children the cookies that she bought from their own village elder for five times what they would cost at the grocery store in town, Mary wanders back to the truck to sit with Joshua, who never bothered to get out to begin with.
If there is any truth to Africa, it is this: when you witness a demonstration of two warriors making fire, afterward they will try to sell you the sticks they used to strike the spark. These sticks are special, they will tell you. We go all the way to the mountains to get them. Africa is yours for a price. If authenticity is defined by a lack of economic exchange, forget it. You are a consumer and Africa is your photo op.
Afterward Kathleen and Fiona sit close together in the truck, knees touching, giant, beaded collars around their necks, admiring the amateurishly constructed jewelry and carvings they’ve acquired. Despite perpetually wearing sun hats, they are both tan by now, radiant. “That was the best thing we’ve done!” Fiona gushes to Joshua. “That was so cool!” Mary simmers in a stew of contradictory emotions. Who is she, of all people, to put a price tag on “experience”? The Samburu village is not a scam—it is not taken down and replaced with modern brick buildings and television screens the moment the tourists depart. It is real, it exists with or without anyone to pay admission. Who is anyone to judge Fiona for being moved by it, to judge the Samburus for benefiting from money they truly need? Liam sleeps again, his head against the windowpane. To him, Africa could be downtown Minneapolis, could be a playdate, could be his new house. He is the only one among them able to experience this place purely, and he is the one who will not remember it.
I have been writing to you about Africa, but the truth is that I am speaking from one small spot on the globe, one tiny hotel room, one finite body. I cannot pin down a continent. I have been talking to you about what this land can do to you, but here is the simple truth of what it can do to you: anything you let it.
This is not about Africa. This is about the scraps of me lost along the way, left behind in the wardrobe of Arthog House, in the hostel shower in Paris, under the low wooden bed in Osaka, along the Kenyan roadside like discarded trash. It’s not about sex either. If anything, that primal language of bodies has been the one space where Joshua and I have needed no translator, where we have always met as equals. It’s the rest of the time that we struggle with a language barrier, though we both speak English. It’s the rest of the time that I have been waiting around to be defined by him, by Kenya and Japan and Europe and London, by your death, by my illness. And still I don’t know who I am.
WHEN YOU LEAVE the Samburu National Reserve, the elephants always appear, as if to say good-bye. Here, it is nothing to find your vehicle surrounded by twenty, forty of them, going about their silent, peaceful business as you ferry your charges out of the park. Joshua, who knows elephants from home, says that they have tempers, that sometimes they charge, but Mary has never seen the Kenyan elephants be anything but gentle. Their eyes are huge compared to a person’s, but look minuscule set into those mammoth gray heads, the way stars look small in the vast sky. There are several calves among them, one baby so small it cannot be more than a few weeks old. “Elephants make excellent mothers,” Joshua tells his family of human charges, whom he will soon never see again. “They’re not like giraffes. They’ll take in a calf, even from another herd, if it’s lost—and they’ll never forget their own child. Elephants are highly intelligent and compassionate.” Walt begins to take a battery of photos, but Kathleen, Fiona, and Liam merely look out the open top, quiet as the elephants, watching. They have enough photos, and maybe they have seen enough elephants and no longer care. Or maybe they have seen enough elephants that they can finally see.
“How would you describe me?” Mary asked Joshua the night before, under their net. “When I’m gone, how will you remember me?”
“Gone?” he said. “I don’t want to think about that. Look at the way I smoke—my lungs could give out before yours. There are no guarantees.” But she knew that for all his words about living in the moment, the fact of her death was imprinted on him. Otherwise there would have been children, where now there will be none.
“Humor me,” she begged. “When you think of me, what do you see?”
Joshua grinned. “You’ve got a sexy ass. How’s that?”
“Good. What else?”
“You’re a great dancer. You’re the only white woman I’ve ever seen dance with African people and not look like a prat. You’re a strong swimmer. You don’t look strong, but you are.”
“More,” Mary murmured, her head on his lap. “More.”
“You make that little huffing noise with your nose. Like a small bull. When your sinuses act up.”
She bolted up to face him. “I make a huffing noise with my nose? That sounds disgusting!”
“No,” he said seriously. “It’s cute. Oh—and you never brush your hair but it always looks amazing. Your skin tastes like pretzels, but down here”—he touched her not for the last time, she reminded herself, not the last time yet—“you taste like orange squash.”
On the long drive back to Nairobi, where their safari will come to an end, they stop at the Nanyuki Children’s Home. This is something Kathleen set up from home, in Minneapolis, on the phone with Gavin, who must have had to scramble to find something to satisfy her, who left to his own devices would surely know nothing about an orphanage off the main road in an untouristed city. Kathleen, Walt, and Fiona spend two hours in a tiny grocery store buying supplies to bring as a gift. The store is the size of a small apartment in downtown Dayton and seems to have all of three people working at it; it is not remotely equipped to sell enough diapers, tampons, rice, sugar, notebooks, shoe polish, toothpaste, to supply eighty orphans for a month. Joshua plays ball with Liam in the parking lot, chases away peddlers who come with their shoddy metal bracelets, their postcards, trying to show Liam toys, thinking Joshua is his father and will buy their loot if his little boy whines. Joshua dismisses them in his pidgin Swahili with the unintentional but unmistakable authority of one who spent his formative years assured that those with black skin would do his bidding, even if he drinks with them now. He casually tosses the ball back to Liam, who cannot catch but tries, squealing, and every now and then, he yanks the boy by his shirt to keep him away from cars pulling in and out. It takes an extra truck—the store has one—to load all the goods Walt and Kathleen have purchased.
Kathleen leans against Mary for a moment, watching the workers load sacks of flour. “This whole thing,” she says, “cost about what it would to buy three weeks of groceries for a family of four in Minneapolis.”
“Everything you’re saying is physical,” Mary told Joshua. “My ass, my hair, my taste. That’s not me.”
“Who says?” He swatted her ass, tickled her until she laughed despite herself. “You feel that, don’t you? Maybe the separation between body and mind is just girly rubbish.”
“But body isn’t everything,” she insisted. “Do I believe in God? What do I think about my mother?” It was on the tip of her tongue to ask, Who was my best friend in childhood? but that would be a trick question because she had purposely never mentioned Nix and so what he knew of her was absolutely nothing. “What’s my favorite book?”
“What’s my favorite book?” he countered.
She opened her mouth, but there was nothing. “I’ve never seen you read a book,” she said at last.
“It’s Cry, the Beloved Country.” He sighed. “I’ve read it a half-dozen times. I used to take it with me into the bath at Arthog House even, when Sandor wasn’t hogging the tub—I lost my copy, though, a while back.” He flung his head back violently against the pillow. They had spent so long on the road in hotels that every conversation they’d ever had, it seemed to Mary, had taken place in a bed. “That’s the only book that ever spoke to me, the only one I bought on my own since I left school, so fine, I don’t read much, maybe it was a stupid question. So what? We have the rest of our lives to learn all these things about each other. That’s the whole point.”
After the truck is unloaded, the orphanage director calls the children out. She is a pretty woman, smartly dressed, urbane and educated, clearly from somewhere other than here. While Walt stands by with his camera, giant zoom lens protruding, the director arranges the orphans around their donated supplies: another photo op. One of the children is in a wheelchair, so they simply wheel him close to the sacks of rice and gesture to the others to cluster around. None of the children are smiling, despite all the goods. They are cleaner than the children at the Samburu village—they all have underpants—but they are even more somber in the face of tourists in their house. Unlike the Samburus, they are not proud of their traditions, cannot charge a fee; they are simply charity. Joshua helped the workers unload the truck, but now he is waiting in the driver’s seat of Gavin’s truck, sunglasses on, ready to roll. They are more than an hour behind schedule, thanks to the time spent in the grocery store, and it will be nightfall by the time they reach Nairobi. He is impatient, foot bobbing up and down, the muscles of his thigh visible through his pants; he runs his fingers through his hair the way he once did in London when his hair was long and straggly, only now there is nothing to fiddle with, so his hands come back to his lap, restless.
Mary wanders away from where all the orphans have gathered with the family, their white faces beaming as Walt snaps a picture. She heads deeper into the orphanage complex, hoping to find a toilet, since she desperately has to pee. Soon enough she locates it, past the girls’ and boys’ dorms, just a little wooden outhouse with two doors, segregated by gender. The stench inside would be overpowering except that she has been in Africa for nearly four months. A hole in the ground, though there is toilet paper at least. She squats, she wipes, she tosses in her squares, she tries not to breathe. Roughly forty girls, sharing this hole. Does the smartly dressed director use it, too, or does she have her own accommodations somewhere hidden? Mary wanders onward, toward an open door in the back through which she sees a crib.
As she enters the room, more cribs emerge into sight, like a flower slowly blooming: there must be ten or twelve in all. Inside most, children sleep, though a few are empty, their occupants perhaps with the other kids outside. It must be nap time for the babies. On the wall, several roaches crawl freely. Nanyuki isn’t tropical, not like Lamu or Mombasa, where the roaches are the size of small rodents; these are normal, American-style roaches, and Mary knows she would be a fool to think that children’s homes in American cities aren’t riddled with them, too. Still, she feels like screaming with something akin to impotent rage. Under a web of netting, one infant sleeps; she cannot be more than three months old, her worn-out Onesie pink. The other babies do not have nets over their cribs, but the staff must be making some effort to shield this one, owing to age or illness.
“Are these the babies with no mommies?”
Mary whirls around. It is Liam, jumping at the doorway, obviously having broken free of the photo shoot. “Where did their mommies go?”
“They’re waiting for them,” Mary says around the lump in her throat. “Their mommies just haven’t come yet.”
“I waited for my mommy,” Liam proclaims loudly. “I waited in Romania. I waited and waited, but my mommy was late.”
He is Romanian? Christ, who knew?
Filthy plastic toys are piled underneath a crib in the corner, a blanket tossed over them. Liam takes one look and hits the cruddy floor, crawling around, pulling off the blanket. Mary holds her breath, anticipating what he may find under there, but no, it is just the ridiculous cluster of toys: broken stuff it would not seem anyone on earth would want to touch much less play with, except that this curious little American (Romanian?) boy—who no doubt has an entire playroom full of the latest gadgets back home—apparently does. He bangs on some crusty red button, which yields a weak squeak. Delighted, he bangs some more.
Inside one of the cribs, a small girl—maybe two years old—stares at Mary, wordless. Most of the children in Kenya speak Swahili; even though the older ones learn English at school, Mary rarely hears them use it. She goes to the little girl, the toddler’s face a sharp triangle, eyes huge, and holds out her arms. The girl, amazingly or not so amazingly, reaches back, so Mary picks her up. Her bottom is soaked with urine, although Mary can feel a thick, squishy diaper under her clothes. Her thin legs circle Mary’s rib cage. How long has she been lying here?
Liam continues to bang and push around the toys. “This is ridiculous, you know,” Mary says to him, though he doesn’t even look up. “I’m supposed to be clean, like the girl in the plastic bubble. I’m supposed to avoid germs and rotten onions. I’m not supposed to be here, in Africa, holding a baby covered in pee. If I want to live long enough to have a baby of my own, I’m not allowed to do this.” She laughs out loud, buries her face in the little girl’s head, crying now, although Liam doesn’t seem to notice. If she were somebody else—if she were Nix—maybe she would march right outside to the director and volunteer to stay here, to work, to care for the children. Maybe she would forge her own life in Africa, independent of Joshua. But her illness demands narcissism, demands more care than she has granted it, and she is just being stupidy sentimental anyway—Nix didn’t even like kids. No, if she were Nix, she would march out to the truck and bum one of Joshua’s cigarettes; she would blow smoke in his face and say, You’re beautiful, but I’m leaving. She would say, I love you, but not enough for it to be all my life means. And so Mary carefully files this under the list she is starting to tally, the list of who she is: I confuse cowardice with kindness.
Instead she will wait until he departs for his next safari. Just past the New Year, while he believes they are saving up for tickets to America, where they will have a wedding. Instead she will leave behind nothing but a new copy of Cry, the Beloved Country, with an inscription that reads, Thank you, because that is all it makes sense to say. She will wait at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, the only white woman at the tiny, overcrowded café, but long enough in Kenya to no longer be bothered by the lack of space between bodies, to have stopped noticing her own deficiency of pigment. She will drink a coffee to quell the scraping in her stomach, to soothe the knowledge that she will never again touch him. Finally a woman alone in Africa, she will marvel at just how much fragile hope it takes to hurtle your body into the sky and across the ocean, back to a place called Home, when you no longer rem
ember what waits for you on the other side.
Where Are We Going, Where Have We Been?
(GREECE: ZORG)
Two blond girls stand on the balcony of a beautiful cliffside Greek villa. They are perched too high above the winding road to escape by jumping, and any passerby would probably not understand English if they shouted, Help! Nix and Mary would appear simply to be admiring the pretty view—which is exactly what they are pretending to do while Titus and Zorg mix cocktails in the kitchen. The two men are evidently unconcerned about leaving them alone, confident that there is no means of escape.
Nix feels as though she has landed in the middle of a play, one of those old-fashioned ones in which the characters are all in disguise and are saying things that don’t mean what they seem to mean. Zorg is playing the part of cohost, smiling and mixing drinks as though he has not brought two women here against their will. For their part, the girls are acting like gracious guests, oohing and aahing at the view, asking for drinks they do not want so that they can have a moment alone together. Only Titus, who actually lives here in this ultramodern, hiply gorgeous abode indeed worthy of being called a villa, seems unsure of his role, wandering around with a look of resigned tolerance on his face. Is his resignation to the fact that Nix has shown him no affection, and that in addition to footing the bill at lunch he is now forking over his alcohol to a girl who doesn’t plan to give him any? Or is he resigned to some more ominous plan of Zorg’s? Nix keeps a smile plastered on her face, heart hammering.
What seems clear to her above all else is that if one side or the other gives up the pretense of Nix and Mary being willing guests, things will quickly descend to a place to which none of the four really wishes to venture, and so they pretend, though Mary keeps pulling her inhaler out of her beach bag to forestall an asthma attack and an unraveled look has crept into her eyes.
A Life in Men: A Novel Page 13
