Green City in the Sun

by Wood, Barbara

  They washed their hands in the afternoon when Njeri brought them tea, setting it out and then leaving. As Carlo and Rose ate the little sandwiches, they became aware of the darkening day. Clouds were rolling across the sky.

  When the first drops spattered on the skylight, Rose said, "I must go now.

  But Carlo suddenly took her hand and said, "No. Do not go. For once, Rosa, stay with me."

  She felt her heart tumble. She looked down at the dark hand that held her wrist—his first real touch. And it excited, frightened her.

  "Are you afraid of me, Rosa?" he asked softly.

  Carlo stood. He came close to her. "Stay," he whispered. "Stay with me tonight."

  "No..."

  "Why not?" With his other hand he touched her hair. "Do you want to go, Rosa?"

  She closed her eyes. "No."

  "Then stay."

  His nearness made her dizzy. The scents of a hundred flowers, in the warm, moist greenhouse, pressed in on her. She felt his fingers on her hair and holding her wrist. Although their relationship was platonic, thoughts of Carlo Nobili filled her every waking moment and her dreams as well. By day she approached him demurely chaste, but by night she fantasized....

  When she felt his lips on hers, her eyes flew open and she drew back. But he held her and said, "Tell me you do not love me, Rosa. Tell me."

  "Signor, please let me go."

  "My name is Carlo. I want to hear you say it." His grip tightened on her wrist. "Do you love me? If not, say so and I will let you go."

  She looked into his dark eyes and was lost. "Yes," she whispered. "I do love you."

  He released her. He smiled and tenderly took her face between his hands. Rose braced herself, but she barely felt his kiss. "Tell me what you are afraid of, my dear one," he murmured. "We are alone in here. No one can see us. Let me make love to you. I have wanted to do so since I first opened my eyes and saw one of God's angels."

  "No..."

  "Why not?"

  You'll hate me, she thought. I'll disappoint you, and then you won't love me anymore. Like Valentine...

  She bowed her head. "Because ... I don't like it."

  "Then I must see to it that you do." He put his arm around her and led her to the bed. She stiffened and prepared to resist him, but to her surprise, instead of making her lie down, he invited her to sit.

  The rain came down heavily on the glass roof. Carlo lit a hurricane lamp and sat next to Rose on the bed. He put his arm around her shoulders and drew her back so that they both rested against the wall. For a long time they sat and listened to the rain.

  Rose was confused. Part of her wanted him; part rejected him. She felt something close to desire for him, but it went no further than simple things—a touch, a kiss. Beyond that a wall of fear stood before her.

  He started to stroke her hair. He kissed her forehead. He murmured in Italian. She felt the warmth of his body through the silk shirt he wore; she felt his firm muscles, the harnessed masculine strength. Carlo had the power, she knew, to force her, as Valentine had once done. If he did that, then the spell would be broken forever.

  But there was nothing demanding about Carlo's actions. Rose sensed none of the urgency she had felt with Valentine. Ensconced in the warmth and glow of the greenhouse, surrounded by a jungle of ferns and vines and tropical flowers, with the rain pelting overhead, she began to grow languid. She leaned into Carlo's embrace. She tucked her legs beneath her and rested her head on his shoulder. It was becoming dreamlike—his soft voice, his touch, his comforting nearness.

  Then his hand went down to her thigh.

  "No," she said.

  "Please," he whispered. "Let me take care of you, my dear one." She tried to relax, tried to admit him into her body, but as his hand drew higher, she began to panic.

  "Rosa," he said when he felt her go rigid, "look at me."

  "I—"

  "Look at me."

  She drew her head back. His eyes were inches from hers. They seized her and held her while his hand continued its gentle exploration.

  "Open your legs," he whispered. "Just a little."

  "No."

  "Open yourself to me, Rosa."

  His hand moved inward.

  She gasped and stiffened.

  "Shhh," he said. "Do not fight me. Relax, my dear one."

  "What are you—" she began. She was breathless.

  "Keep looking at me, Rosa. I love you. I am telling you how I love you.

  Something strange was happening to her. Rose was startled. Carlo's hand moved slowly; his eyes looked into hers.

  She said, "Oh!"

  "Come to me, Rosa," he said. "Come to me."

  She was captured by his gaze. She couldn't move. But something was happening. "Wait," she whispered. "I'm going to—"

  "What? What are you going to do?"

  His hand continued its rhythmic caress.

  "Yes," she whispered. "Oh, yes."

  Then he touched her. Rose cried out as the wave swept over her. Then she seemed to collapse in his arms.

  Carlo took hold of her chin, lifted her head, and pressed his mouth to hers.

  "Carlo!" she breathed. "Oh, Carlo!"

  "Tell me what your dream is, my dear one. Tell me your dreams."

  Tears came to her eyes. She had had a dream once, years ago, when she had first come to Kenya. She had dreamed of becoming a real woman. She had thought East Africa would make her complete. Instead, the highland winds had carried her spirit away.

  But tonight, beneath the driving rain, in Carlo's arms, Rose began to dream again.

  She jumped up suddenly, and went to the door. "Njeri," she called through the pouring rain. The girl was sitting in the gazebo, waiting for her mistress.

  "Njeri, go back to the house. I shall be staying here. If anyone telephones or comes to visit me, tell them I am in bed with a headache and don't wish to be disturbed. Do you understand?"

  Njeri looked uncertainly at her mistress standing in the doorway. Then she said, "Yes, memsaab."

  Closing the door behind herself, Rose turned and looked at Carlo. He gazed at her with great tenderness. "And now, my dear one," he said, "will you dream with me?"

  "Yes."

  "And will you no longer be afraid?"

  "Yes," she said. "I will no longer be afraid."

  SHE FOUND HIM standing in the glade, gazing up at the moon and stars. His hair was blowing in the light breeze, his face set in concentration. He looked so tall and beautiful, Rose thought, without a shirt, so that the moonlight played its nacreous glow over his sinewy arms and chest. He was so magnificent that he seemed to Rose to have just been created, like Adam in Eden, new and magical and alone.

  But when she drew near, she saw the scars on his back, and her heart ached for him. There had been nights, in these two months of living together in love, when Carlo had cried out in his sleep. Rose had comforted him, and he had wept, finally telling her about the camp, of the atrocities inflicted upon his men. Guilt lay heavily upon the soul of Carlo Nobili. He was a troubled, deeply anguished man. He believed that he had abandoned his men and that he should have perished with them.

  She came up to him and touched his arm.

  "The war is ending," he said into the wind.

  "I know."

  He turned and looked down at her. "The end of our time here together has come. We can no longer go on like this."

  She nodded.

  "Will you stay with him?" Carlo asked.

  It was a subject both had carefully avoided in the past eight weeks. But the question came as no surprise to Rose; she knew it would have to be asked one day. "No," she said. "I will not stay with Valentine. I won't live with him anymore. I don't want to be here when he comes home."

  "What about your daughter? Your home?"

  "Mona doesn't need me. And Bellatu has always just been a house to me, never a home. You are my home, Carlo."

  "Then you will go away with me?"

  "Yes."

  "Wher
ever I say? Wherever I go?"

  "Yes."

  "I do not know what I will do, where I will go. My family believes me to be dead. I do not know what awaits me in Italy. Perhaps I will not return to my home but start somewhere new, in a new place. Does that frighten you, Rosa, that I am a man without a home?"

  "I am not afraid, Carlo."

  He drew her into his arms and pressed his face against her pale gold hair. "What did I do in my life to deserve you, my dear one? When I think of my years of sorrow, after my wife died... and the long, lonely years in the house of my ancestors, thinking that I would never love again. I was only half alive, Rosa, before I met you."

  He kissed her, very gently, then said, "I cannot promise you anything more than this, my dear one. This, and my eternal love and devotion to you."

  "It's all I ask. It's all I've ever wanted. I'll leave all this behind, right now, if it's what you wish."

  He nodded. "Then we will leave at once."

  AT THAT SAME moment Valentine was standing on the platform of the Nairobi train station and wondering again if he should telephone ahead and let Rose know of his unexpected leave or put it off just a little longer and make his homecoming a surprise.

  He wanted to make a show of it, a grand spectacle just like the old days, when everyone in the colony had said that Valentine Treverton was a master showman.

  Six blessed weeks lay ahead of him, of being in his own home, in his own bed, and eating real food. After three years in the wretched desert fighting the Italians, Valentine had but one thought in his head: to set foot inside Bellatu again.

  He was even looking forward to seeing Rose. Perhaps, he hoped, four years of loneliness would make her receptive to him.

  And so, finding a boy to carry his bags, Valentine headed away from where the telephones were and looked for a taxi. He had decided to make his homecoming a surprise.

  38

  W

  ANJIRU HAD DANCED IN THE RAIN. NOW SHE LAY BACK ON her new bed of goatskins, her naked body wet and shining, ready for David to come to her.

  She had waited for a long time for this night. There hadn't been an opportunity, five years back, when David had finally returned to Kenya from his Uganda exile, for them to enjoy each other. He had signed on for the army and had gone away, almost at once, to that terrible Palestine, where he had almost died.

  That was why David was home now, before the war was over, because of wounds received when his Jeep had hit a land mine. After twelve weeks in a hospital in Jerusalem, and four more in Nairobi, David was home at last, and he was hers.

  There had been two marriage ceremonies: the civil one, which the British authorities required, and the Kikuyu one, which the tribe required. It was the second one they were celebrating on this drizzly April night. All the family had come from the village across the river to share Wachera's happiness. David had paid thirty goats to Wanjiru's mother—a handsome price! He and his friends had then erected the walls of a new mud hut, after which, following ancient custom, Wanjiru and the women had spent the morning putting on the roof. Two weeks ago David's mother had made the ceremonial cut upon Wanjiru that would allow sexual intercourse, undoing the work she herself had done on Wanjiru at the irua, eight years ago. The wound had healed; Wanjiru now lay ready for her man.

  IT SEEMED TO David as if the celebrating would go on all night.

  He was morose. He wished he could be as joyous as his kin all were, dancing and passing around calabashes of surgarcane beer. But they were blissfully ignorant people; they were able to be happy, whereas David, too educated and too worldly for his own good, sat in the glum shadow of reality.

  For his wounds and service to the Crown, the British had given David a medal and an early honorable discharge. But nothing more. He had returned home to find there was no employment for him, that there was no place in Kenya for, as one person had put it, an "educated nigger." Although there were African teachers in "native" schools, and African clerks in some government offices, and a growing number of Africans in private business, no one seemed to need a bright young man of twenty-seven with a college degree in farming and an ambitious look in his eye.

  A calabash of beer was put into his hands, and he drank.

  He knew Wanjiru had gone into her new hut, which he and his friends had built next to his mother's. But he couldn't face his bride just yet. He was too full of anger, too bitter to go to her in love. So he drank down all the beer and reached for more. Across the fire, around which the young people danced, David saw his mother watching him.

  David estimated that his mother was fifty-five years old. If she had stopped shaving her head, she would no doubt show gray hairs. But her face was still smooth and beautiful; her long neck was graced with row upon row of beaded necklaces. She still wore the old-fashioned dress made of soft hides, and great loops of beads stood out on either side of her head.

  Wachera symbolized for her people the vanishing ways, a vanishing Africa. David saw his mother as a sort of sacred icon that represented the old order being erased from this land. She made his heart ache. All these lonely years! Without a husband, with no other children, living alone in a hut that had been torn down repeatedly and that she had rebuilt until the white man finally left her alone. David's mother, Wachera Mathenge, was now a legend all over Kenya because of her stand against the Europeans.

  Since his return David had spent many hours talking to his mother, while she had listened in silence. He had told her of his struggle in Uganda, as a student on his own, to graduate at the top of his class and of his painful, homesick years in Palestine, when his only comfort had been thoughts of coming home. And now, of how emasculating that homecoming really was, returning to discover that he was, after all, only a second-class citizen.

  "They praise us in the newspapers," he had said to her over the cook fires in her hut. "And on the radio. The government praises its 'colored' troops; Parliament cheers its 'native' heroes. They instill in us pride and self-esteem; they teach us to read and write and to fight for a unified cause—Luo and Kikuyu side by side. But when we return to Kenya, we are told there is no place for us, no jobs, and that we must go back to our homes on the native reserves!

  "Mother! All over the British Empire colonies are gaining their independence. I ask you: Why not Kenya?"

  David knew that he was not alone in his cry. Although the outbreak of war had brought an abrupt halt to a budding political awareness among Africans, which he had taken part in back in 1937, it was being rekindled. Even now, as he emptied another calabash of beer, David knew that convening in Nairobi was a secret meeting, a session of the Kenya Africa Union, in which certain key leaders—young, educated, and energetic men—were outlining their plan for Kenya's independence. It was also rumored that Jomo Kenyatta, the famous "agitator," was planning to return to Kenya, after a seventeen-year absence. With such forces in motion, and with the imminent return of seventy thousand African troops once the war was over, David was certain that the face of Kenya was going to be altered forever.

  It meant that his land would be returned to him.

  He rose on unsteady legs and turned to look up at the ridge that rose above the river. Just over the tops of the trees he could see the lights of Bellatu, that monstrous stone house which had been built with Kikuyu blood and sweat. Thinking of the white people inside that house—the Trevertons— David thought: Soon ...

  His mother came up to him and said, "Go to your wife now, David Kabiru. She is waiting."

  He went into the hut and stood just inside the doorway. A smoldering cook fire filled the air with smoke; it was warm and close within the mud walls; the smell of rain and beer filled his head. When he saw Wanjiru, stretched out, voluptuous and naked, a lump gathered in his throat.

  He felt like an impostor.

  A woman had the right to have a man for a husband. By Kikuyu law, if she was not sexually satisfied, if he did not give her children, if he could not perform like a man, then she had the right to cast him of
f and return to her family. David wanted desperately to show her how much he loved and desired her, to take her as a warrior should and give her pleasure. But he felt useless. He felt impotent.

  Wanjiru raised her arms and he went to her. Sinking down, David pressed his face between her large breasts and tried to tell her what was in his heart. But he had drunk too much beer. His tongue would not obey. Nor would any other part of his body.

  Wanjiru was patient at first, understanding more about men than most new brides did because she was a trained nurse. She caressed and soothed him. She murmured Kikuyu endearments. She moved her body in enticing ways. But when her efforts failed to coax a satisfactory response from him, when he remained limp in her hand, she felt her old anger flare up.

  Eight years ago she had had to goad David Mathenge into manhood, when he had stood on a tree stump spouting proverbs. Now she must do it again—on their wedding night!

  She sat up. "David, what's wrong?"

  He was devastated. The beer, his feelings of humiliation, his sense that the manhood had been cut out of him ...

  "The thahu is not on them!" he cried, flinging out an arm and pointing up in the direction of Bellatu. "It is upon me!"

  Wanjiru was shocked. And when she saw tears gather in his eyes and heard the tone of self-pity in his cry, she was revolted. Nothing made her more contemptuous of a man than his acting like a woman.

  "Leave me," she said, "and come back to my bed when you are a man."

  David stumbled from the hut. He glanced over at his cousins and uncles celebrating around the fire, then turned away from them and disappeared into the night.

  "I SAY," SAID Tim Hopkins when Sir James came to join him on the terrace, "there appears to be something going on down at the old medicine woman's hut. What do you suppose it is?"