The Immanence of God in the Tropics

by George Rosen

  He had been married to Rebekah Ndaru barely a year when the first young cousin had returned from Nairobi to their home district, pregnant and ashamed. He had been told by his in-laws in a ceremonious council of sugar beer and ancient milk—the same vile substance that, stored for months in a gourd, always seemed to Atherton to presage some disastrous family duty—that the child would need a father. They did not tell him directly that he was to be that father. Rebekah told him that herself in his bed. The cousin had already promised she would always show deference to the elder wife and she could be of use to the household. She could help in the fields, digging and weeding. The girl had said she would never return to the city.

  Atherton hadn’t the slightest notion how to make such a decision. He didn’t know what was allowed and what was forbidden. He didn’t know if he really had any choice at all. Was he permitted to feel imposed upon? Threatened? Upset? Was he permitted to covet the young girl’s body?

  Atherton did covet the young girl’s body. It was the hormonal fullness of her pregnancy, the shining luster of her skin, that tipped the balance for him. He dreamed of other children, his own, running through the tall grass of the compound. It was all addled together in his mind: the promise of new sex, the taste of sour milk, the starting of a dynasty.

  In the meantime, his kingdom was close to disaster. The corrugated tin of Rebekah’s roof leaked and there were rats in his own house. A man from the Government had convinced him to grow something called macadamia nuts on his land without telling him that it would take five years for the things to yield. Atherton had gone to Nairobi looking for work but the capital was now full of other white men, birds of passage, with more education than he could ever hope for, briefcases full of degrees and qualifications. They worked for the Government and the UN and an incomprehensible host of international commissions. They had their own bars and their own bar girls and cash flowed through their fingers.

  Atherton did know something about animals. He had been able to hunt and shoot when that was still a viable option. He was not a great white hunter, he would tell the tourists, but he was a good white hunter. But all hunting was illegal now. Sid Landers, an older man, born in Kenya, had suggested Atherton apply for a grant. That was where the money and the action were nowadays—universities and societies for the preservation of something or other that were willing to offer money to study the game. Sitting in a blind, taking notes on gazelle behavior: it did not seem all that taxing. But when Atherton actually confronted the necessary papers, the application was more terrifying than any leopard. He read it line by line and he could feel his heart racing and the sweat coating his palms. There was no way he could compete with some American graduate student who had the schooling and the proper words. Atherton didn’t even own a typewriter. He let the forms die and the deadline pass.

  The dream of work in Nairobi faded. Atherton returned to the provinces. In the small market towns like Kigeli, he could sell his labor to the Africans and Indians who owned the gas stations and the feed stores. They were willing to pay him, he knew, just to see a white man unloading their truck or working behind the counter selling matches and tins of condensed milk, quiet and deferring, an inexpensive badge of status for successful merchants. Then the second pregnant young cousin returned to Atherton’s shamba, this time from Mombasa with a story about an American sailor. There was another cut-rate baraza with his in-laws: more sugar beer, old milk, and another marriage. With a sense of doom, Atherton paid the necessary goats for the severely discounted bride-price and took the new wife into his bed. In the market clearing, he watched the oxen pushing the long bamboo spokes of the sugar-cane press and felt the same yoke on his neck, the same slow walk in endless circles.

  The young wives came to him in turn, walking across the grass in the cool air with thin shifts on their shoulders and a smoldering candle-lantern in their hands. With the new children that kept coming after the nights of thrashing on the thin rope cot, Atherton let his beard grow long, his hair shaggy. In his mind, the hairiness had something to do with virility, and with race as well. Not that he cared that much about racial differences. He cared and he didn’t care, but the African men were simply not as hairy as he was. They no doubt saw his facial furriness as something odd and extravagant, something animalian, a link to lower orders.

  But there were benefits, too. Atherton was convinced of this. It was tied in with the matter of hats. Sid Landers, who had children of his own by Kenyan women, said that hats were crucial, that the African children were just as lively and intelligent as the Europeans in the first year or two of life, but then the sun set in. The bones of the skull closed more slowly in the African, Landers said, and until the bones hardened, the brain was exposed in the gaps with only a thin layer of skin and the nappy hair for protection. Landers thought there wasn’t enough coverage from the tightly curled hair. The sun’s rays could dull the brain and stop the growth, especially in the thin air of the highlands. Thick hats were needed; Landers recommended fur felt.

  Atherton did not want to take chances with his children. He included without a second thought the two siblings of mysterious fathering. He could do nothing about the speed at which their skulls closed, but he could get them the hats. They were made of a cheap, mottled green fabric and were the clearest, perhaps the only, evidence of the children’s semi-European extraction. The dark skin, the hair and lips, of his sons and daughters were much more Kenyan than English. There was little to distinguish them, except the hats, from their playmates in neighboring shambas. Atherton had waited for signs of unusual intelligence in the brood—a longer attention span, some strange new facility—but as the years went by he had strained to see anything out of the ordinary. He thought that, perhaps, was his own defect, his own lack of training. It made him even keener to educate his children. But now, as he stood one Sunday in June, passing an Asian shopkeeper’s grain sacks from Land Rover to storeroom, he knew he hadn’t a fraction of the money he needed to pay the school fees of twelve sons and daughters.

  After his labor, with the sun about to start its quick descent, Atherton washed his hands at a tap in the yard and walked up the wooden steps to Bimji’s office for his pay. The storekeeper, a heavy man with hooded eyes, sat at an improbable oak desk that dripped papers and chips of ancient yellow paint. He had an improvised strongroom in the office, really no more than a closet, into which he disappeared for a minute before returning with a cash box. Bimji counted out Atherton’s bills from a stack of worn currency, and then a smaller pile for Guantai, the night watchman, who, leaning on a staff, waited patiently in line behind the white man.

  The twilight cool was beginning as Atherton walked down the wooded road toward the Higher School compound. Shreds of mist were joining in the low spots: the ravine below the prison, the valley folds that stretched over the mountainside, outward and down, to the desert lands far below. Atherton pulled the stained flaps of his safari jacket—a hand-tailored remnant from his hopeful first years in the country—up against his neck and the scratchy bottom of his beard. The breeze at his back, he rounded a corner into the cluster of neatly trimmed homes and propped himself against a hedge below the window where the Missionary Lady was undressing.

  Her name was Thompson or Thomas, something like that. Atherton had asked once, then found it more satisfying to be left vague. A teacher at the Girls’ School, she still dressed methodically for dinner, standing oblivious before the open curtain, confident in that neighborhood of schools and the old church that everyone, of whatever color, was deeply religious. As she changed her bra and panties, the white woman patted herself dry from the day’s heat with some kind of powder. Atherton imagined he could smell its perfume through the window. He followed her hands with his eyes, along the smooth flow of her skin, to the join of her legs.

  Physical love was becoming something of a sore point with Atherton. Keeping three wives happy, he would tell fellow drinkers at the Coffee Hotel bar—with appropriate coughs and what he felt was a wry
and knowing smile—was a bed matter, especially with African women. He would gesture to a corner where Webber sat nursing a Scotch, a textbook example of the difficulty. The Canadian teacher was married to a Kenyan woman, a Somali with a dazzling face and elegant carriage, who, as Headmistress of the Girls’ school, was brilliant and powerful as well. One look at the man, a red-haired, weary-eyed, emaciated stick of nervous energy, illustrated the problem. It was what happened when university degrees married each other, Atherton would say, then nod slowly over his pint.

  But Atherton’s own wives, however relentlessly satisfied he imagined them, were two hundred miles away. They had turned him into a kind of migrant worker, like the miserable bastards who would go off to the mines somewhere and dutifully send their paychecks home. He understood their desires. His women wanted a normal life: a shamba, a small house for each wife that wouldn’t wash away in the rains, children, friends in the compound. They wanted everything he could supply, except himself. So they had contrived to send him off to a quiet hellhole like Kigeli where he slept in a rented shack and fed himself out of bars and cheap hotels.

  The thought was unfair and Atherton knew it. He was not any worse off than any of a hundred other men. Everyone chased money over the hillsides, living—or hoping to live—in one place and working—or trying to work—somewhere else. At least he had a bit of land for his family. A drunken white settler moaning over the end of Empire had given his entire farm to Atherton in the bar of the Norfolk Hotel a week after the country’s independence. It was seven hundred acres of highland wheat fields and the settler, in a quite self-conscious gesture of despair, had thrown it away on a working-class youngster just over from England. Unfortunately for Atherton’s future, the settler had sobered up in the morning and discovered that legions of blacks were not going to overrun his property. On the contrary, if he wanted to leave, the Government was willing to buy his land at the market rate. The settler took them up on it and, guiltily remembering the boy at the Norfolk, carved out two acres for Atherton on the edge of a liana-strangled ravine. It would make a good house lot, he said. That was how Atherton, contriving a truck garden and a patch of coffee, became a landowner and a bachelor eligible enough for Rebekah Ndaru’s family to consider, all while still unemployed.

  The Missionary Lady buttoned the last of her garments and reached up, fully clothed, to twist off the bare bulb that lit her bedroom. Atherton breathed quietly for a moment in the darkness under the hedge where he sat. Then he stood up, brushed the yew needles from his jacket, and walked back to the main road.

  Atherton had never considered crime an open option until that night. To have to steal money from his employer to pay his children’s school fees was deeply embarrassing to him. It was shameful, he felt, until he realized that thinking in terms of shame, as if his every action were done in some public display, paraded before his in-laws and the man in the street, was African thinking. It was a sign that—in the missionaries’ sniffing phrase—he was going native. Atherton despised the people who thought that way, but he knew there was some truth to the idea. No one was going to watch. If he were going to steal successfully, it had damn well better not be in public. Here in Kigeli, away from his wives, away from his children, away from anyone Atherton knew, he should at least be able to take advantage of his own loneliness.

  And no one would show great sympathy to Bimji. The Indian storekeeper would have been hated, if he had been considered human. As it was he was merely wondered at, an uncouth, large-mouthed, fairy-tale dragon who stood at the gate between the Kigeli and the basic necessities of life. If you wanted a radio in Kigeli or a flashlight battery, a cigarette or a can of butter, a case of beer or a gallon of gasoline, you had to go through the Asian. He sold everything and had become the subject of local myth. He was said to dabble in poaching, his cellars piled with elephant tusks and leopard hides. He was wifeless and the late-night men of Kigeli, who wandered the streets sipping from Coke bottles full of sugar beer, swore that Land Rovers carrying kohl-eyed Indian boys emptied before Bimji’s house in the hours before dawn.

  But distaste and suspicion for the victim would not exempt Atherton from penalty if he were caught. The police were bastards, but he would rather be in their hands than trapped by the casual, nearly thoughtless, rage for criminal justice of the average Kigeli. There were no murders among the Kigeli, but there were executions. Atherton had once seen twenty grown men leaping on a hapless teenage shoplifter, smashing his face with sticks and fists. The watchmen of the town, who seemed to spend their whole lives curled in doorways asleep or squatting on their hams before banked coal fires, could wake to a howling viciousness at the cry of “Thief!” Still, the vision of the door to Bimji’s strongroom, blackness beyond, flickered in his mind.

  Atherton began to study Guantai’s movements. The watchman was at least twenty years older than Atherton. Like all the other Kigeli of his profession, he wore a woolen skullcap and an old British Army trenchcoat, the collar pulled up, in even the hottest weather. He was said to have been a Mau-Mau before Independence, a fighter in the forest. But that was a claim most would-be watchmen made to add cachet to their resumes. Storekeepers wanted a savage or a guerrilla at the door. They needed cutthroats and what they got were aged men of ambiguous strength, a corps of parallel hermits.

  The skin of Guantai’s hands was gray. He wore long, dangling earflaps—the legacy of a tribal youth—folded up and over the tops of his ears. Atherton had no idea where the watchman lived or how he spent his days. He would appear every afternoon in front of Bimji’s store with a staff and a sharpened panga, then, by the first hour after dawn, dissolve again into the streets.

  Atherton bought a Japanese watch from Bimji and began to time everything—when Guantai arrived, how long he took to eat the evening meal he brought with him in a battered stewpot, when he lit his fire, when he stretched his legs. The African seemed to spend endless hours staring at things. He would gaze unblinking at the stars, the silhouette of the mountain peak in the moonlight, the vibrating darkness along the hedge that ran behind the row of shops.

  For a week Atherton sat opposite Guantai on the wooden sidewalk that lined Kigeli’s main street. The two men were in full view of each other, but there was nothing unusual in that. Besides the corps of watchmen, the night streets held the regular drunks and the landless men who wandered the open, grassy square where, by day, women spread their onions and bananas on blankets for sale. At any given moment, fifteen men could be sitting in front of the shops on Bimji’s street, each staring at a bottle or the ground, silent with each other while the tin, creaking sounds of Congo music flowed out of the bars. Guantai acknowledged the white man’s presence with a wave of his hand. He seemed to suspect nothing.

  Back in his room, Atherton listened to combination locks. An ironmonger sold him a pile of the rusty hardware, by weight, and the Englishmen practiced with them, straining to hear the falling of the tumblers. If he could somehow get into the store around Guantai, he would have only to pry the strongroom door and unlock the Indian’s cash box before slipping back out.

  Atherton chose a Tuesday night for his job, then changed his mind. He wanted to extend the process. He was beginning to enjoy the planning, the conspiring with himself. Day after day he plotted, in his room, while laboring in the backs of trucks, even at the twilight rendezvous in the Missionary Lady’s hedge. The necessary calculations filled his mind. He found a satisfaction in identifying the small steps of the watchman’s life. With Guantai, the Englishman breathed on the cooking fire, nibbled the ears of salty corn, and stared at the night.

  But however much delight he found in contemplating the crime, and whatever fear he had of performing it, Atherton had to get the money before the start of the next school term, two weeks away. He finally settled on a Sunday evening for the attempt. Webber’s wife had scheduled a joint schools production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which was likely to siphon off some of the street traffic. Atherton had his doubts whether Sha
kespeare was really likely to attract the prospective vigilantes he was worried about. Still, there was some talk about the drama, and the twin girls who were to play Hermia and Helena, in the Coffee Hotel restaurant where he took his dinners. Even if only the town’s four policemen attended the production—and for complicated political reasons he only dimly understood, they might be required to—it would be a help.

  Atherton had calculated that Guantai went out to relieve himself seven times every night. It seemed to the Englishman excessive, but the toothless watchman was old and, as each night wore on, drank more heavily from the gin bottles that formed part of his salary from Bimji. The privy was nothing more than a trench behind an mbati blind—a rectangle of corrugated tin, propped by a few boards, that stood at the far end of the block of wooden storefronts. The trick would be to break into Bimji’s office through the high window that opened above the desk at the back of the Asian’s shop, and then, once inside, to keep quiet.

  Sunday night came. Atherton blackened his face and arms with charcoal. He fashioned a rough mask from a piece of rag that, even after he washed it for the purpose, still had a choking odor of motor oil clinging to it. Finally, for lack of any other suitable disguise, he wore his safari jacket inside out. Atherton realized the outfit made him look like one of the local madmen, the Africans with malaria-gnawed brains who wore dead flowers in their hair and listened to cardboard radios. Still, he hoped he would look more bizarre than identifiable.

  The night was sufficiently dark. By nine o’clock the moon was lost behind the mountain. From where Atherton hid, in a small plot of banana trees along the one paved road that led out of Kigeli, he could see the full two-block length of the town’s main street. The bars had seemed to empty some just before the start of the school drama. At least, the street was relatively quiet. The only men visible to the white man were the watchmen. Guantai and his fellows hunkered in front of their jikos, the blackened pots of flame before each shop forming two lines of pointed fire down the street. For an instant, Atherton remembered the runway beacons at Nairobi and the plane that had carried him to Africa from his futureless homeland. Then he rose, grabbed a pair of bananas from the tree above him to stuff into his pants pocket, and made his move.