I called Zack. No response. At least Ben had not said anything about the suited gunman hurting him. I will keep on trying, I said to myself, both upset and relieved that I did not reach Zack.
But the fact that I did not know where he was, along with the conversation with Ben, left me with more questions than answers, including his role in the mess. Why did Mark’s friend Joe want me locked up in a ward? And why had Mark disappeared? Where had the Rhino Man gone? I felt like I was lost in a maze where everything was visible, even familiar, but each path I took ended in a cul-de-sac, and I had to retrace my footsteps to the beginning.
I must get to the bottom of it. I felt comfortable with my decision to spend a few days and nights in Kambera.
• • •
Betty waited for me at the bus stop. Her belly seemed to have grown bigger within the last twenty-four hours, but she looked less overwhelmed by it, maybe because of the bright flowery maxidress she wore. She had a pretty face, despite the hardships that she bore on her thinning shoulders. Her braided hair was held back in a ponytail that made her head look a little pointed, but the style suited her well. She smiled broadly when she saw me, then covered her mouth with her hand when I removed my head scarf.
“Oh my, you cut your hair off? You look so different, but I like it.” She had said exactly what I needed to hear. That was why I had cut it short. To get rid of the lady from the Bronx.
Last night’s revelation had made me feel a more personal relationship with Kambera. As we walked back to Betty’s place, I noticed what I hadn’t the first time—the many women who sat outside creating hairdos that were really works of art. At my request, Betty had arranged for me to meet a few other women in the scheme. And of course, Wakitabu.
Betty first took me to see Grace Atieno, who lived about a fifteen-minute walk from Betty. She was a vibrant and extremely beautiful woman. She and her parents had been chased from their home in Naivasha. Her parents lived in the IDP camps. But she had to help them and her younger siblings. Unlike Betty, Grace did not care if people knew how she earned her living. She took the view that she was rendering a positive service to childless couples. “I just take care of their child for nine months and then leave the rest to them. It’s like babysitting, except easier, because the baby is in my belly. Some women are paid for wet nursing; I am paid for carrying them. I bring a little happiness to childless couples.”
In the early evening, Betty walked me to Philomena Wanjik˜u’s. Philomena’s father had been killed in post-election violence in Molo. Her mother lived in IDP camps. She had left to the city in order to provide for her three siblings and see them through school. Her story and Grace Atieno’s were almost interchangeable.
She was preparing dinner when we arrived. The kitchen was also the living room, and we sat there. The small house was sparsely furnished with the bare necessities: a table and three wicker chairs. On her wall, she had old ragged pictures of African American musicians pulled from newspapers and magazines. The King of Pop, Michael Jackson, took center stage, while a refreshingly young Whitney Houston graced the left wall, a picture so innocent that it exemplified the beauty of her voice before drugs removed her from music grace.
Philomena had been working several jobs and could hardly meet expenses when she heard about the wombs for hire and jumped at the opportunity. “Giving away that first child, my own blood, was not easy, but I needed the money. I really wouldn’t encourage you to go through with it. You see, the baby I gave away, I think about her all the time. I know she is in America, or at least that’s what they told me, so maybe her life is better there. But there are the small things. Does she resemble me in any way? This is the second baby, but I can’t go through with the arrangement. I thought I could, but I can’t. I want to keep the baby. I must.”
She was quiet for a few minutes and then looked up. I thought she was wondering whether to trust me.
“I plan to run away into the rural areas. They are very powerful people. But I will find a way. Even a hare is able to outsmart the bigger animals.”
I was going to add that these were animals of prey, then stopped: If art gave her hope and the courage she needed to go through with it, who was I to intrude with facts of a situation I hardly understood? Story. Song. Dance. Whistling, all plentiful in Kambera streets and houses. The images pasted on the walls afforded her moments of escape into dreams.
Later in the evening, Philomena showed me a tiny room with two single beds. “Your bed, my bed,” she said, and laughed. There was something endearing about laughter amid the squalor. Laughter embodied resistance against agents of gloom.
Some noise woke me up in the middle of the night, and I saw that Philomena’s bed was empty. I wondered where she might have gone and then remembered that the communal toilets were outside. I relaxed and settled back into the rather uncomfortable bed. The mattress was so thin, I could feel the springs under my back.
Then: “I told you, you can meet her in the morning,” I heard Philomena complaining.
I panicked, but before I could get out of bed properly, I saw a burly figure standing at the door to the bedroom.
“Who are you?” I asked, trying hard to control my shaky voice.
“Who are you?” the man retorted and started toward me.
He looked scary. Just then Philomena, in her blue cotton nightdress, stepped forward, a flashlight in her hand, and stood between us. But before she had finished saying, “Amina, this is Wakitabu,” the man had brushed her aside and was in my face. He grabbed me by the collar and pulled me close. His breath was a nasty mix of fish and cigarettes. I could see a scar above his eye; his receding hair was beginning to turn gray. I was now half sitting and half floating in the air. I could barely breathe, let alone talk.
“What do you want with Betty and Philomena?” he demanded.
“I . . . I have no job . . . I . . . want to join,” I attempted to say.
He had probably been following me around and knew I was Mugure. “Join what? Who told you?”
“The women . . . Betty . . . she’s my cousin. She told you,” I insisted.
He suddenly let go of my collar, and I fell on the bed. He stood by the bed, still looking as if he would punch me. “You go to the clinic tomorrow. If you so much as breathe a word to someone else, I will not spare you next time.” He pulled some rumpled papers from his back pocket, straightened them out on his lap as if ironing them, and then shoved them toward me. “Print your name here and then sign!”
I could barely see what it was I was signing. Philomena shone the flashlight on the paper, and I was able to make out “now property of Alaska Enterprises.”
“I didn’t say read, I said sign,” he barked at me.
I did and handed him the paper, which he folded and stuffed into his back pocket. When he got to the door, he shouted, “By the way, you will get a third of what’s due to you, another third when you conceive, and the rest when the baby is born. If you want more money, they can impregnate you with eight,” he said, and laughed.
And with that, the dreaded Wakitabu was gone. Philomena closed the door after him and apologized for his behavior. She didn’t have to; I understood perfectly that they needed to scare me half to death to make me feel that my every move was being watched, in the process making me sign my life away. Even Ben was trying similar tactics.
I started to cry. I felt hemmed in from all sides in America and Kenya by forces I could not comprehend. I needed to go back to my mother’s grave to find peace. Then I remembered her admonition that one must walk with the head held high and back straight, because slouching bent one’s body and spirit. I was my mother’s daughter. That made me feel better. I was not sure if I wanted to go to the Supa Duka, but I could not quit. It was a crucial part of the dots I was trying to connect.
17
The town where the Supa Duka was located was nicknamed Donkey City. From the moment I
got off the bus, I understood why. Donkeys were everywhere. I had to fight my way through lines of carts piled high with all sorts of goods, from used tires and sacks bulging with potatoes to white aluminum tanks. The starved gray beasts of burden shat and brayed as if in competition, and I walked gingerly to avoid stepping on a mound. I almost laughed when I recalled Kamau telling us about the demons that Susan had cast out from the bodies of the possessed. Had they relocated here?
The town could as easily have gone under the name Condom City. From the shopfronts on either side of the main street hung condom posters. Not just the shops on the main street but the whole town: Every wall was pasted with bills advertising Proctor condoms. Looking at the long-haul trucks parked along the roads, with young half-naked girls circling around them, I could guess why the condom was the dominant decor in this town built during the colonial era and which, by all indications, seemed to have resisted growth. The condom was the only sign of modernity, but then it also brought to mind the modernity of HIV.
I was actually happy to step into the Supa Duka, if only to escape the dust and wind. My eyes were burning and felt as if someone were pushing little pebbles into them. But once I was inside the premises, the prospect of what I was about to do hit me. What was the difference between me and the half-naked girls circling the trucks? If they could escape the virus by using the condom, their ordeal was brief if brutish, and I supposed one could always say, “No, not tonight.” But these others had to carry the pain of humiliation through nine months and then a lifetime of scars of the body and spirit. I was not here to play philosopher but to probe, I reminded myself. How far was I willing to go? The question loomed large. I wasn’t sure. I hadn’t planned this through. I had to proceed cautiously—ensuring, for instance, suppression of any trace of an American accent—but then I remembered that every youth in Kenya, even those who had never left the country, tried versions of Americanism. As for insemination, I was well aware that that they did not do the operation on the first meeting. But suppose they had changed their routine? I would have to insist that I had understood it differently or fight my way out, I told myself, recalling my training in martial arts.
The doors were open, so I stepped right in to face a balding man who sat on the counter reading a magazine. It looked like a normal general shop with all manner of items, mostly over-the-counter drugs, on half-empty shelves. I got confused and felt foolish, especially when the man looked at me from head to toe without moving.
“Daktari. Are you the doctor?” I asked timidly.
He rolled his eyes and pointed toward a blue metal door past the counter and went back to his magazine, which, I noted as I passed, was upside down. I took a deep breath and turned the doorknob. The door swung open, revealing a blue room. It held the smell I always associated with hospitals and medicine. There was nobody behind the reception desk. I heard some voices. When I stepped closer to listen, my heart was pounding. The voices and movement in the other room got louder, and before I could make out what was going on, a woman wearing a dark green uniform walked in.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
“Wakitabu sent me here. My name is Amina.”
“Your ID, please,” she said as she stepped behind the reception desk.
“ID? I don’t have one. I mean, er, I didn’t bring one. Wakitabu didn’t tell me to carry one.”
“You need a man to tell you to carry your ID? You women . . . Now, how in the world am I going to know if you are the Amina you say you are?”
“Why don’t you call Wakitabu?”
“Go home and come back tomorrow. With your ID,” she said without looking up.
I started to walk out, but at the door, I heard a man’s voice call out, “Simama!” I turned around to face a man with a huge Afro, looking for all the world as if he had stepped out of the sixties. His long white coat fell over brown corduroy bell-bottoms and a white turtleneck. A stethoscope hung from his neck. He introduced himself as Daktari, the Swahili name for doctor. “Bring the ID next time,” he said to me.
He asked me to sit down on a wooden bench in the reception area while he remained standing in front of me. “So, Amina, why do you want to do this?”
“I need the money. I don’t want to have to join the ranks of those hovering around the truck drivers.”
“Well, you will certainly make more here than those little whores. They give women a bad name.” He said this with arrogance.
“How much will I get?” I was trying to sound more confident than I felt.
“Didn’t Wakitabu tell you?”
“No, he said I should discuss it with Alaska,” I lied, to see if I could get more information.
“He told you that? Alaska?”
“The papers that I signed said Alaska,” I answered vaguely.
“Wakitabu will bring your money to you. I don’t discuss money,” he said, and I made a mental note that he had not elaborated on Alaska. “But I can tell you this, if they are twins, you get double. So pray for twins,” he said without any emotion.
“And if I get six? Wakitabu suggested eight.”
“The more you carry, the more you get,” he said, “but let’s take it step by step. Are you ready?” He got up and motioned for me to follow him, which I did through the back door.
“Are there side effects or complications that I need to be aware of?” I asked. “I hear that the uterus can collapse . . . pro—”
“Prolapsed uterus,” he said, proud to show his knowledge. “Rare, but it can happen. Everything has risks.”
“I want to do this until I meet my needs. One woman told me that once I start, I can’t get out of it. Am I in it for life?”
“You sure do ask a lot of questions. But we are professionals, my dear; don’t you worry your head about it.” He looked at me quizzically. “It’s all in your contract,” he added as an afterthought.
“Wakitabu took it with him.”
“It’s safe. But it does not deal with illnesses.”
I felt prickly heat under my arms. As I reached up to ward off the itch, I realized my hands were shaky. I had to keep my composure. I looked at everything, trying to make mental notes without appearing unduly curious. Finally, he led me through yet another door into a huge room filled with all sorts of medical equipment. In the middle of the room was a bed with overhead lighting. A state-of-the-art theater in Donkey City? Betty and Philomena had not been hallucinating.
A woman in a white coat who I guessed was the assistant stood by a bed at the far end of the room. The table seemed reserved for birthing. The man gave me blue overalls to put on. He pointed at a curtain and told me to change in there.
My heart raced. What if they knew I was Mugure and they were toying with me? What if I went on the examining bed and they injected me with something that induced permanent sleep? My son. Kobi. Would I ever see Kobi again?
“Everything, your jeans, remove everything,” the woman was saying.
“You may also want to use the bathroom before heading out this way,” shouted the doctor, pointing at a small door on my right.
The minute he said so, I felt the need to go badly. I half ran into the bathroom, a small clean space that smelled of disinfectant. My mind was racing. How was I going to get out of this now? I had made out okay so far, but I needed an exit strategy. Damn, I should have thought of this before. No time to panic . . . think! I felt so much freer after peeing. I washed my hands and walked back to face the consequences, wringing my hands to dry them.
“Relax, today is just the examination,” Daktari assured me as he gestured to the bed with his gloved hands. “When you come back next month, we will plant the seeds.”
He and his assistant were now in scrubs and face masks. The operating room was lit more brightly, and the temperature seemed cooler.
As I climbed on the bed, I tried to read the doctor’s eyes to catch s
igns of anything sinister. My body was screaming at me to run, but I willed myself to put my feet in the stirrups and lie down, readying myself for the ordeal.
The doctor pulled out a handheld device that resembled a microphone, and poured some lubricant on it. I had been to enough clinics to know that he was going to do a transvaginal ultrasound. As I watched the doctor get ready to insert the gadget in my privates, I tried to think other thoughts, which had worked for me in other clinics, but I could not escape the reality: This doctor probing my uterus was a criminal.
When I heard the doctor say, “You can get dressed,” I rushed to put on my clothes. The nurse tried to explain something about the next visit, but I could hardly wait to get out. I felt as if I would suffocate. I longed to breathe the air that I had so detested two hours earlier.
I welcomed the dust, the donkey carts, the shit, the braying. I could not understand why there was so much secrecy surrounding the Supa Duka, unless it was a cover for something that embraced more than the mass production of children for adoption. Then I heard a commotion from the market square. I was so glad to see so many people that I hastened toward them as if they had come out in big numbers for me. “What is going on here?” I asked a woman.
“Husband and wife are fighting over their kids,” she said.
I stood on tiptoe and saw a man with a stick in his right hand, fuming with anger. Standing in front of him was a white man shielding a woman. The woman would hurl a few choice insults at her fuming husband and then duck behind the gray-haired white protector, who spoke fluent Kiswahili, trying to calm the irate husband, in which he had succeeded, because husband and wife were now talking civilly.
“Who is that?” I asked a woman, referring to the white man.
“That is Father Brian,” she said as if this were an everyday scene in the community. “Very nice man. When he is not teaching cricket, he runs a food program for children. When we are in trouble with our men, we run to him,” she said, and laughed.
The Fall of Saints Page 14