At the hotel, the walkway was blocked with a crowd—Boni and his morning’s catch, negotiating prices. Stanley stopped to watch. He seemed to have an endless supply of fish in his boat. Stanley peered over the side, looking for his tackle.
“Boni!” he called. “What are you using?” Boni grinned and stepped to the back of the boat. He held up a block of wood with nylon line and a hook attached to the end. Stanley shook his head. The man did everything with his hands. One had only to look at them; they were scarred with white lines, tough as leather. If he did this well with block and tackle, imagine what he’d do with something better. Stanley made a mental note to show Boni a wire line.
On the quay, Abdul was waiting for Stanley with the speedboat. Together they swept up the wide channels of the archipelago, passing between the white sands of Pelat and the green banks of neighboring Tomba, dense with mangrove. The trip to Kitali took roughly an hour, depending on the weather. This morning the air was still, the water calm; it would be a fast trip. Regardless of wind or weather, Abdul stood to steer the powerboat. The man had remarkable posture. Even with the boat at full throttle, he was as straight as a plank. Stanley found the combination of white noise and motion regenerative—thankfully, there was never an attempt to speak on the boat. He stood up when a clearing of makute roofs came into view.
Stanley mused, as he often did, about how this end of the island had a different feel to it. The quality of light and the exposure was softer and, perhaps because there weren’t as many colors to distract the eye, the effect was often soothing. When the low rumble of the motor quit, Stanley felt disoriented. It was too quiet. Instead of calm, the place seemed lifeless. For an anxious moment he questioned his judgment. “Too late,” he said to himself, but loud enough for Abdul to overhear.
“Bwana Wicks?” Abdul asked.
“Nothing, Abdul. Just a touch of buyer’s remorse.” He peered through his binoculars. Under an expanse of makute roof, the walls of his hotel were just beginning to rise. Around the periphery of the sheltered open spaces were a few meters of waist-high thatch. He found no movement under or around the roofs.
Abdul beached the boat and Stanley plodded up the steep dune to the half-finished huts. He found his contractor, Gus, and a few of the workers in the shade of the largest hut—what was to be the central dining area. Gus had come to the island from England to recover from the loss of his wife in an automobile accident. He had been driving. Though Stanley knew him only superficially, he was jarred by his transformation. In two years, Gus had gone from a soft-spoken, well-mannered Brit to a vulgar recluse. As Stanley approached, he found him sitting against one of the slender mangroves that anchored the walls in four corners, rolling a cigarette.
“Gus!” he called cheerfully.
Gus glanced up before licking his cigarette. “Hello, Stanley. You’re perspiring.”
“How’s it coming?”
“It’s not at the moment. We’re out of nails.”
Stanley touched his forehead. “Nails?”
“That’s right.”
“Good Lord, didn’t we just get a shipment a few weeks ago?”
“It’s going to be a big hotel.”
Wicks said nothing. Gus cupped his hands to light his cigarette. “They’ve gone to good use, every one of them.” He shook out his match. “It’s a good thing you came today. I was figuring on two or three days before I made it to your side of the island. We’re getting hungry over here. Slows things down.”
“You need provisions, of course,” Stanley said. “Tell me now and I’ll have them sent down tomorrow.”
“Potatoes, bread, long-life milk. Any produce you can muster. Tobacco and coffee.”
“Potatoes, bread, milk, et cetera. Right.” Stanley looked around. Gus waved a hand at him. “Have a sit-down, Stanley. Take a vacation from your vacation.”
Stanley smiled, propped his sunglasses on his head and sat in the sand. “Do you have one of those for me?” Gus put his cigarette between his lips and began rolling another. “How’s life in the bush?”
“Well, Stanley, it’s quiet. No wine, no women. No trouble.” Gus licked the cigarette, lit it and handed it to Stanley. “Come to think of it, that professor fellow was through here. Asked a few questions about your hotel. Good questions.”
“What’s he on about, any idea?”
Gus shook his head. “Funny fellow. I like him. He drank me under the table last night. Not easy to do. He’s got some interesting ideas, none of which I remember.”
Stanley dragged on his cigarette and decided that Templeton’s ideas were not a conversational priority. “Tell me, Gus, do you miss England?”
“Not really. It’s like a dream. I can’t remember it clearly.”
“Hmm, yes, it fades down here.” One of the workers interrupted them to reach for Gus’ tobacco.
“I just hope this place gets finished before the rains,” Stanley said. “The walls and the plumbing anyway.” He held his cigarette up and smelled it suspiciously. “Have you put stuff in these?”
“Just a bit.”
“Hmm.” Stanley exhaled and closed his eyes. A bit of hash meant a nap. Realizing he didn’t really mind the thought of a nap, he scooted himself against a palm tree and waited for the sensation of loosening to begin. Against the darkness of his eyelids, he imagined the hotel building itself, rising into the air without the aid of human hands, as if by divine will. “Like Stonehenge,” he whispered.
“What’s that?” Gus asked.
Stanley opened his eyes and found Gus in his field of vision. “It’s going to be a magnificent hotel, Gus,” he said softly before drifting off to sleep.
An hour or so later, Stanley woke up, his head clotted with thick, slow thoughts. Gus was gone. He sat up and dug his knuckles into his eye sockets, wondering where Abdul had got to. To distract himself from the unpleasant feeling that, by napping, he had somehow transgressed, he pulled the envelope from his pocket and settled into the constructive business of reading.
To Stanley Wicks:
Do you know about the power of belief? Maybe you believe in God, in the old gray-haired man upstairs you once pictured as a child. Quite possibly you haven’t thought deeply about him since because at about the same time you came to understand that comfort and security come from somewhere closer, that you could manufacture and purchase your deities. Belief, in your life, is just a word.
Perhaps I misjudge you. If so, don’t take offense. As a fellow Englishman I ask you not to make the mistakes others from our country have made, thinking the intellect and the pound are stronger than belief. You are farther from home than you imagine. It’s a lovely island but it is also an angry island.
Here they believe in witches and ghosts and curses and more than any of it they believe in the existence of evil. Real evil. Not devils with forks but invisible wisps that easily pass through solid matter. These innocuous little wisps begin to cloud the soul. It is when God is no longer visible in the soul that the presence of evil is known. Evil takes the form of an obstacle. A roadblock. We in the West would not necessarily recognize it, but for these people, evil is as frightening for what it takes away as for what it can become. It is surprising what can become evil.
While you feel like a pioneer, alone out here on the edge of the world with a resplendent vision—know there has been another, that you are not the first. Be careful. If you choose to ignore me, know that the dreams you have at night, the feelings of doubt that visit you in the course of a day are to be heeded. Do not continue to build. We are all limited, but we are not all conscious of our limits. Pay attention to doubt. This is a friendly warning but I would suggest you heed it as a threat.
Sincerely,
Nick Templeton
By nightfall, with the help of a little wine, Wicks was able to forget the letter. He slipped into bed with his wife almost happily. That night he dreamed he was asleep. He must have been sleepwalking in his dream when someone asked him to make a decision. Somethin
g urgent. But his eyes refused to open. He could not see what he needed to see in order to make the decision. Damn it, he thought, I’m asleep. Who can be asking me to do something when I’m asleep? He woke too early and went downstairs gloomily, wondering who the hell Nick Templeton thought he was.
CHAPTER
6
The Chichester
As his base, Templeton kept a room at the Chichester Hotel in Nairobi. It was the only information Ingrid had, the only contact he had left with the department. His last letter had been postmarked from Pelat, an island roughly two hundred miles north of Mombasa, which she would reach by plane after catching the overnight train to the coast. With luck, she would arrive the next day.
She landed in Nairobi at dawn, dropping through a cloudless melon-colored sky that seemed larger than Egypt, larger than any sky she’d ever seen. She instructed a cabdriver to take her to the Chichester and collapsed into the thick torpor of travel. The air was mild, and even at this early hour, there were bicycles and people along the roadside. She realized that by an act of pure will, she was once again far away. As soon as her funding was secure, she had pressed to leave Michigan ahead of schedule.
The night before she left, she had wrapped herself in a woolen blanket and lay on her couch in the dark while Jonathan stood on her doorstep. Finally, he had stopped knocking and slid an envelope under the door. She had watched it from her cocoon until she was too tired to be curious. In the morning, she pushed it under the rug with the toe of her slipper. Then she packed a duffel bag with clothes and a backpack with her PC, a hardback notebook, Templeton’s books on Swahili culture and a few others on the roots of Islam, a copy of the Koran in both English and Arabic, two lipsticks and some chewing gum for the plane. When she was done, she called a taxi and sat on her duffel to wait for an amount of time that was too short to read and too long to think about anything but what she might have forgotten. A faint voice inside her made her leap up and turn on NPR. I think I am afraid. I think that’s what this is. In the middle of the hourly news report, the voice grew louder. She waited nervously as it grew louder still. It seemed on the verge of actually saying something, something unpleasant. When the taxi honked, the voice rocketed out of her.
On her way out the door, she retrieved the envelope from under the rug and held it all the way to the airport, tapping its sharp corner against her knee. She waited until she was on the plane to open it. It was a photograph of the two of them taken by some waiter at a restaurant. They were laughing at the camera, a bottle of wine between them. On the back Jonathan had written, “Hard evidence of happiness.” She slid the photo into one of her books on Swahili culture and for the remainder of the flight used it as a bookmark.
The Chichester was a converted estate run by an elderly British couple, a sprawling structure with a comfortable lobby, dining room and bar in the main house, and guest rooms that unfolded off an open-air wing that bent around the garden, forming a horseshoe with the main house. As soon as she arrived, Ingrid went straight to the hotel’s office to see if she could book a seat on the train to Mombasa. An elderly, slightly confused British man in his pajamas informed her that there were no trains available until Wednesday. This was Sunday, he noted with some surprise, removing his glasses to clean them. “It’s rather easy to lose track,” he explained. She thanked him, slung her bag over her shoulder and went off to find her room, having no idea what she would do for three days.
The rooms were no more than a large shoe box with a door, a window and a bed. Most of them had makeshift closets; a few had sinks. At the end of the walkway there were two communal bathrooms toward which guests shuffled in flip-flops or untied shoes.
In room eleven, Ingrid had the longest, most perilous passage to the bathrooms. Insects patrolled the walkway: large spiders and beetles. Trapped at one end of the horseshoe, she experimented her first night with warning sounds and discovered that nocturnal insects weren’t threatened by clicking or hissing. They scurried across the rust-red tiles inches from her feet, darting out of nowhere as she passed, slithering into the darkness of the garden beyond the lit walkway.
The garden was more tropical than tidy, which was why, Ingrid guessed, it was so infested. In the morning, she wandered through its cheerful chaos, past the lacy mimosa trees to the purple blooms of a jacaranda. Along the trail were passion flowers and hibiscus roses. Trained along trellises were vines of bougainvillea, their clusters of magenta blossoms hanging heavy and bright against the white walls of the main house.
Ingrid sat on a stone in the garden with her journal, waiting for breakfast. Unfamiliar smells surrounded her. Meat was cooking in the kitchen, masking the sweet smell of the garden. She wrote: “I am here. I am early. I am tired. I am trying not to think beyond the facts because I am too tired to understand why I am here early.” She suspected that she wanted to catch Templeton making his final escape—to witness how he would do it, and toward what.
“I’m not trying to escape,” he had insisted before he left. “I’m not running from anything. You can’t presume the motives for the things I do—you can’t even guess at them.”
“You’re not coming back, are you?”
Templeton smiled. “Now, why do you say that?”
“Because I’ve been watching you. You know you’re not going back to the university. You’re ready for something else. I want to know what it is.”
Templeton’s eyes lost their focus. “It’s a feeling, really. That’s all it is at this point. I would like to tell you more but I can’t. It’s in the periphery. Sometimes I catch sight of it when I’m looking at something else. But then it’s gone.”
“Describe it.”
“Dear girl.”
“How will I find you?”
“I’ll send you something. But you’ve done well, Ingrid. You can take your own direction.”
“No. I can’t. The department doesn’t like me.”
“You mean they don’t like me.”
“Same thing.”
“Well, it’s time you learned to survive alone. Nothing worse than depending on something or someone for direction. Things and people can disappear overnight.”
“So you’re going to disappear. That’s what’s going to happen.”
“I didn’t say that, Ingrid. Calm down, now. Some days I wonder if I’ve taught you anything.”
Ingrid had nodded to avoid crying. “I’m sorry to be so pathetic.” Don’t leave me, is what she wanted to say. I’m alone here.
In the garden, birds screeched and Ingrid sketched a hibiscus rose. She added a bee at the center of the flower, though she had yet to see one here. A voice from behind startled her. “Go-Away birds,” it said. A gray-haired woman stood barefoot on a stone next to Ingrid’s. She was dressed in a flowing dress covered with embroidered butterflies. “Those are Go-Away birds,” she repeated. The woman swayed slightly as she looked up and pointed. “You can see them up there in the acacia, high up. Big black-and-white brutes with enormous beaks. And then there are the ibises, which fly over and make the most dreadful racket at six in the morning and six in the evening. Worse than Swiss clocks, those bloody birds. Kubwa dingi, as they say here. Big bad birds.”
“Are you Christa Chisham?” Ingrid asked.
The woman smiled girlishly. “Am I famous, then?”
“Your brother was a friend of Nick Templeton’s, from school. I’ve come to meet him.”
“They must have been at Oxford together,” Christa said. “With all those horrid spires. European architecture is so aggressive, don’t you think? So insecure. Always having to assert itself against God or whatever scared it most that century. I’m glad to have left such a passel of fear behind. I don’t miss it in the least. In Africa, there’s no fear at all. People live in mud huts. I’ve given up wearing shoes.”
“Do you know Nick Templeton? I think he stayed here.”
“Oh yes,” Christa said vaguely. “Tall man. Walked with crutches.”
“Crutches?”
/>
“Well, maybe that was some other friend of my brother’s. The hotel business is such a flurry of faces, I’ve long stopped memorizing them. There are only so many things a brain can hang on to. You’ve got to choose what you want circulating in your dreams at night. Strangers confuse the memory—every face can look so familiar.” She looked more closely at Ingrid. “You’re not a friend of Danny’s, are you?”
“No.”
“Danny’s our son. Mine and Henry’s. Women trickle through here looking for him. Lovely creatures, like you. He’s gone, I tell them. Swore off Nairobi years ago. Personally I think he’s hiding.” Christa winked. “I think he learned that from me.”
The night was impossibly loud, a constant din of insects, frogs, and, more distant, monkeys or birds. Something howled from a mile, maybe ten miles away. Ingrid was woken by a sudden cacophonous burst that left her wide awake, watching shadows travel across the walls. Light slanted into her room—a headlight? house lights?—backlighting a canopy of leaves and occasionally illuminating the pale transparency of a gecko migrating across the ceiling on its sure, sticky pads to the wall and back across the ceiling again. Trying to keep the gecko in view, she allowed herself to consider the viability of her proposal. The evolution of continental monotheism; how cultures around the world had all, in their own time and way, come to decide on one god. Perhaps something would come of it. Perhaps not. She felt none of the urgency she had felt in Egypt, the driving impatience that obviated sleep and food, proving what Templeton had suspected: that she was capable of hard, original work. She had carved herself a niche in an ossified department that was 90 percent petrified male. Templeton had urged her forward: “As quickly as possible, you must establish your credibility. The real work begins when they stop watching you like hawks. Remember, we live in a small, jealous kingdom with a few paltry treasures. You must rise above the squabbling and the envy. These geezers are threatened by the energy of youth. They’re busy signing autographs. They don’t want to be reminded that the work continues—and you, for one, must continue it.”
An Obvious Enchantment Page 7
