The Last Time They Met

by Anita Shreve

  He was made to wait an hour and a half, but, curiously, he did not feel impatient. He thought of Linda, endless occupation, exhausting every detail of their short meeting in the market: the surprise on her face when she’d seen him, the manner in which she’d looked away when Regina had said the word migraine, the way her fingers had trembled. He drank several gourds of the pombe, and knew himself to be distinctly drunk, which felt inappropriate to the occasion. From time to time, one of the African mzees blew his nose onto the ground, a custom Thomas could not get used to, even after a year in the country. He tried to make a poem as he sat there, but could form only disembodied and alien images that he knew would never coalesce into a single entity. He needed very badly to piss, and asked, Wapi choo, of the mzee beside him. The man laughed at his Swahili and pointed to a small shack a hundred feet from the house. Thomas was not surprised to find a hole in a cement floor, the smell so foul he had to hold his breath. Glad for Regina’s sake that she hadn’t come with him.

  When he returned to the bench that had numbed his butt, Ndegwa’s sister was waiting for him. His walk was surprisingly steady as he followed her into the darkened hut, and he was all but blinded by the sudden darkness after the sunlight. Ndegwa’s sister took the blinded man by the hand and led him to his seat. Thomas remembered the feel of the red vinyl before he could even see it.

  He would not have recognized Ndegwa’s wife. A tall headdress of purple-and-gold kitenge cloth hid the contours of her hair and head. Her body was sheathed in a caftan of similar colors. Thomas was, however, reassured to see the red platforms poking beneath the dress, the rhinestone ring on her finger. She sat — he thought, regally — with a glass of water on a table in front of her, and as she spoke, she took small sips. She did not seem the distraught wife of a political martyr or even a forensic scientist who’d had to excuse herself because her breasts were too big. Rather, she held herself as one who had inherited too soon a mantle of power, like the teenage son of a dead king.

  Thomas crossed his legs and folded his hands before him. He struggled to find appropriate words for the occasion. I’m sorry that your husband has been detained, he said. I’m hopeful that this will sort itself out quickly. If there’s anything I can do.

  —Yes.

  The yes matter-of-fact, as if she had expected the offer.

  —I saw your husband yesterday, Thomas continued. At the Thorn Tree Café. He told me he might be arrested. I had no idea it would happen so soon.

  Mary Ndegwa was silent and very still. Thomas tried to imagine her life on her mother-in-law’s shamba: would there be a hierarchy, a chain of command? Both women reduced to lesser status when Ndegwa came home on weekends?

  —He told me that if he was arrested, I should visit you, Thomas said.

  —I know this, she said.

  Thomas, disoriented, nodded slowly. You’ve been expecting me, then?

  —Oh, yes.

  And yet he himself hadn’t known until this morning that he would come. A lizard slithered on the wall. Mary Ndegwa adjusted her bulk on the settee.

  —How is your son? Thomas asked, the breasts reminding him of the child.

  —Baby Ndegwa is just all right.

  The pombe was already giving him a kind of hangover. Incredibly, he needed to piss again.

  —My husband said that you tell the truth in your verses, Mary Ndegwa said.

  Thomas was momentarily buoyed by the compliment, rare enough these days. Your husband is very generous in his criticism, but I can invent the truth when it suits me.

  —The truth may be seen from many doorways, Mr. Thomas.

  The pronouncement had the ring of having been rehearsed. He imagined a hillside of huts, all with open doorways, mzees standing at the thresholds and looking at a single light on a distant hill.

  His eyes adjusting, he could now make out dark circles around Mary Ndegwa’s eyes that spoke of fatigue. He half expected the record player to begin at any minute with another country-and-western tune.

  —Have they told you where Ndegwa is? Thomas asked.

  —They are keeping him at Thika.

  —Will you be allowed to visit him?

  She made a face as if to say, Of course not. Our government will not release my husband. They will not tell us the charges or set a date for trial.

  Thomas nodded slowly.

  —This is a fact that should be spoken of in many places, is it not?

  A tiny hitch inside his chest, a moment of enlightenment. Understanding now, as he had not before, why he had been granted an audience, why Ndegwa had sat with him yesterday at the Thorn Tree. Had the man been trolling for journalists? For Americans? Had Ndegwa choreographed his own detention?

  —This is a violation of human rights, Mary Ndegwa said.

  Thomas was hot beneath his blue sports coat, misshapen now from having been washed by mistake in the bathtub. He, the least political of men, even when there had been marches against the Vietnam War. He had gone simply to be there, to watch the people around him. That the marches might be a means to an end, he hadn’t much credited.

  —My government can detain my husband for years. This is not right.

  —No, of course not, Thomas said. I am happy to help in any way I can.

  —You and my husband spoke of these things?

  —Yesterday we talked briefly about the fact that he might be detained. Normally, we spoke of literature. And poetry. Words.

  Mary Ndegwa sat forward on the sofa. They have arrested demonstrators at the university. There are now fifty being detained along with my husband. Why have they been arrested? I will tell you, Mr. Thomas. To silence them. To keep them from uttering words.

  Thomas ran his fingers back and forth over his forehead.

  —Dissidence is only words, she added.

  It was a kind of catechism, he thought. I must confess I’m not much of a political man, he said.

  —What is a political man? she asked sharply, a sudden spark, noticeably absent before, in her voice. Do you recognize suffering?

  —I hope I do.

  —Injustice?

  —Again, I hope I would.

  —Then you are a political man.

  There seemed no point in saying otherwise. For her purposes, then, he would be political and would do whatever it was she wished: dispatch himself to embassy officials? Write eloquent letters? Call the press?

  Mary Ndegwa struggled to her feet. Come with me, she said.

  Thomas, having no wish to disobey, followed her. They left the house through a back entrance. Ndegwa’s mother, whom he had not seen that day, sat on a bench under a baobab tree. She held her head in her hands and shook it back and forth, crooning, or possibly keening, as she did so, and did not speak to them, or even appear to notice them. Old woman’s breasts and missing teeth. Fear for her firstborn son.

  They walked along a steep terrace through a mango orchard and bushes laden with red coffee beans. Mary Ndegwa held the skirts of her caftan, planting her red platform shoes firmly along the murram path. He noticed that they had been freshly polished. She stopped on a knoll.

  —Mr. Thomas, you have heard of the Mau Mau rebellion?

  —Yes, of course.

  —This is the place where Ndegwa’s father was executed, she said. He was shot in the back of the head by British soldiers.

  Thomas studied the ground, and reflected that once it had been soaked with blood.

  —He was made to dig his own grave before he was shot. His wife and children were brought out and forced to watch. Ndegwa was ten years old when he saw this.

  Thomas looked at the cross and its inscription: Njuguna Ndegwa. Freedom Fighter. Husband. Father. Go with God.

  Ndegwa, his friend, had watched a soldier shoot his father when he was only ten years old. Age mates. What, in his own childhood, Thomas wondered, had been remotely comparable?

  Mary Ndegwa put a hand on Thomas’s arm. He knew her words before she spoke. Yes, he wanted to say, he was a poet, standing in a d
oorway.

  * * *

  A dozen children, in shorts made gray with use and age, swarmed over the Escort — peering inside, turning the steering wheel, touching the radio. He patted the pockets of his sports coat and was relieved to discover that he hadn’t left the keys in the car. He’d have liked to give the children a ride but knew himself too drunk or dazed to do so.

  He pulled away from the shamba slowly, terrified he would hit a child, and drove along the steep terraces, distracted by too many thoughts, not sequential, that were crowding his mind for attention — so that he had only bits of sentences, half-told stories, pictures skittering behind themselves. Regina with her arms crossed; Mary Ndegwa with her fly whisk; Linda bent to pineapples.

  He arrived at the crossroads at Ruiru, not entirely sure how he had gotten there. A wrong turn? A left fork taken when he ought to have taken a right? He hadn’t been paying attention. The sign said Njia to the north, Nairobi to the south. It would not be truthful, he knew, to say that the wrong turns had been accidental. Njia: 80 kilometers. With any luck, it would take him an hour. He pulled to the side of the road and sat with the motor running, watching a matatu, loaded past possibility with people and luggage and chickens and goats, lurch recklessly past him. They were death traps, they told you in the training sessions. If you had to use one, sit in the back and wear sunglasses to protect you from shattering glass when the vehicle tipped over.

  Sunday afternoon, and Linda might be with the man she called Peter. They could be sitting on a verandah, or (he hoped not) lying in bed. He preferred to imagine her sitting alone in the doorway of a mud-and-wattle hut, reading. He didn’t try to tell himself that he was in the general neighborhood, or that it was perfectly acceptable to go an hour out of his way to see an old friend from home. He understood, even as he put the Escort in gear and turned north, exactly what he was doing.

  He traveled through dark forests of eucalyptus, between thickets of bamboo, and along moors trailing mists like veils, emerging to a landscape of soft green hills and broad valleys, watched over by snow-capped Mount Kenya in the distance. A buffalo stood in the middle of the road, and Thomas stopped the car just feet before he would have hit the massive beast. He rolled the windows up and sat unmoving. Of all the animals in Africa, they told you in the training sessions, the buffalo was the most deadly. It could kill a man in seconds, goring him with deadly accuracy, stomping him to death if the goring only wounded. You were supposed to lob stones at it, and theoretically it would run away; but Thomas thought the only strategy simply to walk slowly backward. In the Escort, he didn’t move. Cars piled up behind him, but no one honked a horn. After a time — fifteen minutes? twenty? — the buffalo, at its own stately pace, moved on. Thomas put the car in gear. He was covered with sweat now.

  The town of Njia was larger than he had thought it would be. He drove along a street called Kanisa, past a clock tower and a bar called the Purple Heart Pub. He stopped at the Wananchi Café and asked the proprietor, an old woman with scattered teeth and one bad eye, if she spoke English. She did not, but agreed to speak in Swahili, which reduced Thomas to words and phrases that could not be put into sentences. He said mzungu and Peace Corps and manjano (yellow) for the color of her hair and zuri for beautiful. The old woman shook her head but beckoned for him to follow her next door to another duka, where he bought a bottle of Fanta, his mouth parched, from nerves or from the drive. The woman and the man spoke in their own tribal tongue and seemed to argue extensively about the matter. As they gestured, Thomas listened to a group of street musicians with soda bottles and bottle caps. The air was cool and moist, like an early June day at home. Finally, the woman turned to Thomas and said, in Swahili, that there was a mzungu just off the Nyeri Road who was a teacher. Thomas thanked the pair, finished the Fanta, and left them.

  At a small church on the Nyeri Road, he needed only to say the words mzungu and Peace Corps to a sexton who was sweeping the steps. The man himself supplied the word beautiful.

  * * *

  The way was not so simple, after all. The road diverged twice, and Thomas had to guess at the correct fork, not having been given any clues at the church. As he drove, he ascended into a landscape washed clean by a recent shower. Water droplets from macadamia trees overhead sometimes stormed across his windshield. The air was so crisp he stopped the car to get out and breathe, just to taste it. And to slow his racing heart. He practiced the beginnings of conversations, preparing for all contingencies. The man named Peter would be there. Or Linda might be leaving to go elsewhere. Or she’d be frosty, not welcoming his visit. I was in the area, he rehearsed. I thought I’d just stop by. I forgot to ask you. Regina and I would like.

  In his electrified state, it seemed to him that the very road itself hummed and vibrated. Beyond his destination, a purple backdrop advanced, signaling a cataclysmic rain. He had seen these deluges before, the rain pouring straight down, as though someone had simply pulled a plug and let down a lake of water. The sun, behind him, lit up fields of chrysanthemums, vast improbable plains of yellow and mauve, and then, at the end of the road, the white stucco of a cottage, bright geometry against the blackened sky. A beacon, if he had chosen to see it that way. Rusty-red tiles made a pattern on the roof, and around the door and windows frangipani and jasmine climbed. An old Peugeot was parked in a driveway, and he left his own car behind it. Announcing himself to anyone inside the cottage, as isolated as a hermitage on an Irish cliff.

  She opened the door as he reached the steps, having had ten, maybe twenty, seconds to prepare herself, which was as good as no preparation at all. She had bathed or had been swimming, her hair in long ropes down her back. She wore a halter top and a kanga, a different-colored one than before. She did not dissemble, made no pretense that this was normal. She merely watched him. Standing face-to-face on a doorstep somewhere at the end of the world.

  Thomas said hello.

  Her face unreadable, her eyes searching his. Hello, Thomas, she said.

  In the light of the doorstep, he saw her more clearly than he had yesterday in the gloom of the market. Her face was washed clean, without artifice, a spray of freckles across her nose. She had sun wrinkles at her eyes, tiny commas at the sides of her mouth. Her lips were full and pale, with hardly any bow at all.

  —My desire to talk to you won out, he said, abandoning in the area and just stopping by. Recklessly, for he did not yet know if a man named Peter was within. Though it wasn’t much of a debate.

  She moved aside so that he could enter. It was a small room with two paned windows, casements rolled open to the air. A table with two chairs had been snugged up against one window. Armchairs, relics from the 1940s (Thomas imagined war-torn Britain, a Bakelite radio between) faced the other window. There was a low bookcase along one wall. A carpet, old and Persian, underfoot. A single lamp.

  There were flowers on a table, a kitenge cloth neatly folded over a chair. Behind the small dining area, a kitchen and an open door in the back. There was a sisal basket on a hook, a Makonde sculpture on the floor against the wall.

  The water fell from her hair, hit her shoulder blades and the parquet floor. She wore an elephant-hair bracelet on her wrist. She had amber earrings in her palm, which she hooked into her ears as she stood there.

  —You’ve come from Nairobi, she said.

  —I was in Limuru.

  She was silent.

  —I needed to see you.

  No man in evidence, despite the two of everything.

  —Your presence in the market was a shock, he said. I felt as if I were seeing a ghost.

  —You don’t believe in ghosts.

  —Having been in this country a year, I think I’d believe in almost anything.

  They stood facing each other, not a foot apart. He could smell her soap or her shampoo.

  —Your hands shook, he said boldly, and he could see that she was taken aback by this assertion. She moved a step away from him.

  —Simple shock doesn’t mean much in
itself, she said, not willing to credit the trembling hands. Our time together ended so abruptly, there will always be a certain amount of shock associated with you, no matter what the circumstances.

  An adequate defense. They moved further into the room. On the bookcase was a photograph, and he squinted in its direction. He recognized the cousins with whom Linda had grown up: Eileen and Michael and Tommy and Jack and the rest. A family grouping. There was another photograph, of Linda and a man. Who would be Peter, he thought. Not academic and anemic after all, but rather tall and dark and boyishly handsome. Smiling. A proprietary arm snaking around Linda’s slender waist. Her smile slightly less exuberant. Insanely, he took heart from this.

  —Can I get you something to drink?

  —Water would be good, he said.

  The birds outside were a frantic wind ensemble on a Sunday afternoon. They, too, signaled the approaching storm that blackened the kitchen window, even as sun poured in at the front of the house. A cool breeze, gusty, snapped blue-checked curtains. He watched her take a pitcher of water from the half fridge and pour him a glass.