Leopard at the Door

by Jennifer McVeigh

  VII

  I leave the dam, cutting across the valley through the cool acacia forest to the shambas. There is someone I want to find. Colobus monkeys chatter in the yellow branches of the trees overhead, and from somewhere in the forest comes the warning cough of a bushbuck. I hear the shambas before I come to the clearing. A lifting of voices filtering through the trees, a baby crying, the thump of a blade brought down on wood. Then a handful of children are at my legs, running in their bare feet, laughing and shouting, their shaved heads soft and warm beneath my palm.

  Small, hard fingers search for the sweets which I dig out of my pocket, prying them from my closed hand, their mouths momentarily silenced by the sucking of sugar. I do not recognize these children. Most of them were not even born when I left.

  In a clearing in the forest two dozen huts with thatched roofs are scattered across the hard ground. Smoke drifts into the pale sky. A scrawny cockerel struts across the dirt, crowing, and a dog trots up to us, sniffing Juno with easy familiarity.

  Outside the entrance of a hut, two women stand beating out colored mats. One of them—stocky and strong—stops when she sees me.

  “Aleela!” She raises a hand. It is Mukami—Jim’s second wife. My mother enlisted her help in the house, sewing, mending and making clothes for the children. She has a child on her back, folded into the bright colors of a cloth. She smiles at me, speaking in Kikuyu—too fast, and when I shake my head she switches into Swahili and I begin to understand. She wants to know if I am happy to be back, if I am going to stay at Kisima. “Yes,” I say, smiling, “yes.” A drove of children weave in and out of where we stand. “Which ones are yours?”

  “This one and this one,” she says, placing a hand on their backs, but the children move so quickly among each other that I cannot tell them apart. Their clothes are stained and torn, the toddlers drowning in old shorts that have been hitched up around their waists with string; I have never seen them look so ragged.

  Beyond Mukami waits another woman. “Njeri—” I say, breaking into a wide smile. I have found her. She smiles back, her wide, tapering eyes, edged with thick black lashes, glistening as she looks at me. Her head is shaved close to her skin as it had been when she was a child, throwing the smooth contours of her face into relief; brightly colored beads on her forehead shift against each other, a thousand drops of color. We were born in the same year, but I no longer see the girl I used to play with. She has a grace in the way she holds herself—none of my physical awkwardness.

  She raises a long, smooth forearm, reddened with ochre, and touches her hand to my cheek. “Aleela,” she says. I do not notice—right away—what I should have noticed at first. That her belly—beneath the cloth that is knotted over one shoulder—is swollen. She laughs softly when she sees that I have seen and takes my hand, placing it where the cloth parts beneath her breasts, on the hard warmth of her stomach. I feel her womb tighten and stretch beneath my hand as the baby moves.

  “When will it come?” I ask in Kikuyu.

  “Soon,” she says. In the strength of her hand holding mine to her belly is an understanding. Her mother was my ayah—she helped to look after me from the hour that I came crying into the world. My mother—immersed in her work—did not always have time for a small child. Njeri had shared her mother with me, without ever resenting it. We were brought up side by side when we were young, eating, playing and sleeping together. When her mother died two years ago, my father had written to tell me, and in the feel of this new life kicking beneath our hands, our shared sadness is transformed into joy.

  “Who is your husband?” I ask, curious to know what it is like to be married.

  She says a Kikuyu name, but I do not know it. “Jim”—she says, lifting her eyes to mine, shy suddenly, the word sounding awkward in her mouth, giving his English name. I feel a moment of surprise, of aversion, and struggle not to let it show in my face. Jim used to play with us in the kitchen at the farm; tossing us up in the air until we shouted for mercy; feeding us toffee on spoons, still warm from the pan. He had been like a father to Njeri. Sara’s words ring in my ears: his sweating, greedy body over hers, and now she is with child. But Njeri does not have a father or a mother. As the cook of a European family Jim is considered a good proposition for a girl in Njeri’s position; she needs a family who will care for her.

  “He called you Waceke—” I say, puzzled.

  She smiles again. “It is his name for me.” And I wonder if Jim deliberately kept her real name from me, knowing it would be difficult.

  There are two hundred Kikuyu men, women and children living in the shambas scattered across clearings in the forest. Most of them are out in the fields, or in the dairy, working for my father. I do not see in the faces of these women any sign that they have changed, that unrest has come to Kisima. Two girls I do not know pound maize with long poles, taking it in turns, and the rhythmic, knocking sound measures out time. A woman sits outside her hut, bent over on a stool, scraping and beating a hide to soften it. She stands up when she sees me, straightening out her back, grasping my hand in both of her gnarled ones. It is Wangari; she used to work in my mother’s garden.

  Then I see Joseph walking in from the field where the women grow sugarcane, beans and yams. He has a woolen blanket over his shoulders, and he nods his head, giving me a near-toothless smile. As he comes closer I see his eyes are milky in the sunlight. He has become an old man.

  “Aleela,” he says simply, smiling at me as he has always done, and I feel tears prick at the back of my eyes. He lived in the house with us. He witnessed every triumph, every knee scrape, every burst of tears. He was as much a part of my childhood as my parents, as the farm itself.

  One of the very small children keeps losing his trousers—they are too big for his waist, and he has to collect them from the dust every few steps and hang on to them as he trots to keep up with the others. I feel Joseph’s eyes, like mine, are watching him.

  “Your mother brought fabric,” he says, in Swahili, “and clothes. But now—” He gestures at the boy.

  “And my father?”

  He shakes his head slightly.

  The children have gathered round us, and they are tugging at my shirt. A few of them hold on to slates that they have dug out from inside their huts. “They want you to sing them a song—” Joseph says in Swahili.

  “Does anyone teach them English?”

  “Not anymore,” he says.

  I let them pull me to a bare patch of earth, where they sit quietly, waiting. I feel awkward now that they are watching me so intently. I try to remember the lessons my mother used to give here, when I sat side by side with Njeri, on the benches she provided. For a long moment I think nothing will come to me.

  Then I put both hands on my chest, and—feeling foolish—sing, “Aleela is here today, Aleela is here today, hi-ho the merry-ho, Aleela is here today.” Njeri is laughing, one hand on her belly, remembering my mother. I turn to the child nearest me, the one who was holding on to his ragged trousers. He is startled, his eyes as round as bronze pennies. The other children laugh at his embarrassment. Then one of them shouts out his name—Mumbi. And I crouch down, hold on to both of his tiny hands, and looking into his huge brown eyes I sing softly, “Mumbi is here today, Mumbi is here today, hi-ho the merry-ho, Mumbi is here today . . .” He giggles shyly, pleased at being picked out.

  —

  I WALK BACK from the shambas to the house, past the kitchen garden. It used to grow an immensity of fruit and vegetables, but now it is overrun with weeds, waist-high, smothering the vegetable beds and competing with the fruit trees. The chicken coop, which produced fine eggs for my mother, is empty; the wire has been torn out and lies straggling in the soil. In Kenya, work for Europeans needs an overseeing eye, and in my mother’s absence her garden has been left to go to seed.

  My father is not yet back from the dairy when I come in for breakfast. Sara is the
only one at the table. I stand at the door and watch her for a moment, not wanting to interrupt. Sparrows flit across the table, picking up crumbs. She has on a silk dressing gown, and she is reading a magazine from England.

  Breakfast. Cheeks of mango and thick wet slices of red pawpaw, their middles scooped out, their flesh granular and streaked with yellow. Bowls of sugar, a jar of sweet peas, a jug of orange juice covered with a beaded muslin to keep off flies. Fig jam, plum jam, peach jam. Tea from a neighboring farm. An apple turnover that Jim has made, and which she is eating delicately, sucking the sugar granules off her fingers one by one.

  Hull, with its miasma of concrete, its freezing winters, fuel shortages, and docked electricity seems like another world I dreamed up. There is no rationing here, no portioning out of sachets of sugar and our meager two ounces of butter and bacon, no limit on sweets and cakes, but a glut of all things. My grandmother—who struggled to scrape enough lard from her rations to cook Sunday dinner—would not have believed it. The farm is like an idyll of a perpetual English summer, before the war, and I feel a stab of guilt that this fantasy of home is being lived out here, in Kenya, when back in England it is nothing but a distant memory.

  “Rachel—” she says, without looking up, and I blush, realizing she knew I was standing there all along. “You’ve been out already?” She glances up at me, and I see a faint disapproval in her eyes as she takes in my dusty clothes.

  “Yes—” I say, sitting at the table. “I’ve been down to the shambas.”

  “Well, we’ll have to make sure there’s plenty for you to do, now that you’re back. Keep you occupied as a girl of your age should be.”

  “I was thinking I could give lessons to the children—” I pour out a glass of orange juice. “There isn’t anyone teaching them.”

  “Ah—” she says, sitting back and looking at me in amused appraisal. “I suspected as much.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re a sentimentalist. By all accounts your mother was the same—always wanting to make things better for the African.”

  “Shouldn’t we?”

  “Yes—as long as it doesn’t set up unreasonable expectations.”

  “Why would they be unreasonable?”

  She looks at me. “Show me a native who has ever benefited from an education.”

  “What about Michael?” His name sounds both familiar and strange; and I feel a moment of regret as I say it, as though by bringing him into this discussion I am somehow putting him at risk.

  “Michael—” she says ponderingly, tapping her fingernails against the tablecloth. “Oh yes—the mechanic. Well now, that’s a case in point. When he first started working here he was strutting about the farm like a peacock.”

  “What’s this?” my father asks, walking into breakfast. Mungai steps forward pulling out his chair and pouring his coffee.

  “Rachel was just saying that your mechanic was a fine example of an educated native.” She turns to me. “In the end I had to tell your father to ask him not to wear his uniform. We couldn’t have him distinguishing himself from the rest of the labor. Making it look as though all the Africans have a bad lot. Putting ideas into their heads.”

  “Sara,” my father chides softly, “he fought in the war—”

  “And what? That makes him entitled to the privileges of a European?”

  I expect my father to defend him but instead it is Sara who says, “He’ll only resent us, Robert, and then where will you be?”

  A small silence falls over the table. Sara breaks it by saying, “Rachel wants to start up a school.”

  “Not a school—” I say, hurriedly, embarrassed by how formal she has made it sound. “I thought I could teach the children for a few hours in the morning.”

  “Well—why not?” my father says, absently. Perhaps I want his approval. I am disappointed when he takes a sip of his coffee and opens his copy of The East African Standard.

  —

  “PAPA, have you been to the shambas recently?” I ask him when Sara has left the table.

  He looks up from his eggs. “Why?”

  “The children’s clothes—they’re dirty and tattered.”

  “Well—I can’t do much about the dirt.”

  I think of the shambas, the children’s ragged clothes, the washing strung up on the boma fence to dry. The Kikuyu who worked on the farm had made their way up from their lands around Nairobi many years ago, looking for work. Squatters, we called them, and my father had let them live on the land, grow their crops and graze their cattle, in return for work. They have almost no income and little access to outside help. “It’s not a case of washing. They’re ragged from being overworn. Most of them are half falling apart.”

  “What do you want me to do about it?” he asks, looking up, his voice hardening. He has a way, my father, of shutting down a conversation. An edge to his tone that is a warning. The conversation angers him, and I am not sure why. He was not, when I was growing up, unsympathetic to the Kikuyu who worked for him.

  “Mama used to hand out fabric, make clothes for the children.”

  “I’ll ask Sara to look into it—” His eyes hold mine, a challenge, and my heart beats a little faster.

  I swallow and say, “I could organize it. If it would be easier for her?”

  He gives me a fixed half smile. His eyes are cold. I can see he resents my involvement, the light it casts on the way things have changed. “I’m sure Sara would be more than capable, but if it’s what you want to do, then by all means go ahead.”

  —

  MY FATHER DRIVES into Nakuru the following day to pick up parts for his tractor. He gives me two hundred shillings and leaves me outside one of the large emporiums—huge, temporary structures smelling of incense, run by the Indians who came to Kenya to build the railway. Inside, the shelves are crammed with goods: rolls of printed fabric, boxes of lanterns, whitening powders, packets of insecticide, cake tins, ironing boards, mops and brooms and rows of cedar dining chairs—anything a settler might need to live. There are other women sifting through the aisles—women wearing trousers, men’s shirts and straw hats—and when I see them out of the corner of my eye, I can imagine for a moment that they are my mother, but as they come close I look away, realizing with a lurch of disappointment that I do not know them.

  I buy yards of colored fabric for the women, and two rolls of plain cotton for the children’s clothes, needles, pins and thread. At least I can do this for them. The Indian man at the till wraps it all in brown paper and twine, and holds it for collection.

  Afterward, I walk down to the Rift Valley Club where I have agreed to meet my father. In the street, men are unpacking a delivery for the fishmonger; baskets spill out ice and sawdust—lake fish from the Great Victoria Nyanza, delivered by the Uganda Railway, the lifeline for the Highlands.

  From the windows of the club I can see the green mountains rising up above Lake Nakuru, the waters of the lake flushed pink with the flamingos who stand with one foot sunk deep in soda mud. A woman drops into the chair opposite; a wrinkled face, thin gray hair hanging greasily to her shoulders, her head shaking slightly as she looks at me. “Caught three Micks last night,” she says, pointing with an arthritic finger to her folded copy of The East African Standard. I glance down and see a picture of three Africans—dreadlocks, wild eyes and white smiles, their chests naked under old army overcoats and animal skins. “Says the Africans will rise up and murder us all in our beds. A night of the long knives.”

  “Mother—” a man says admonishingly, hovering over her. “Sorry—” he says to me, grimacing in apology and taking her by the arm. She stands up and lets him lead her away, frail and suddenly obliging, leaving her newspaper behind.

  When they have gone, I reach over and turn the paper around. The article says:

  The Mau Mau kill for pleasure, coming down from the fore
sts with guns and pangas to cut open men, women and children; there are gangs of them living like animals beyond the reach of the law, and they take their vengeance on their own people for supporting the white man. They learned their guerrilla tactics during the war—and it is thought to be only a matter of time before they muster up the courage to start killing the Europeans whom they claim inhabit their lands, against whom their fury is really directed.

  The article is almost certainly fearmongering. There has been no violence against Europeans—only against the Kikuyu who refuse the oath, collaborators and police informers. But my heart is beating a little faster. Try as I might, I can’t put the picture of those men out of my head.

  —

  “MEMSAAB—” It is Mungai, stepping close to where I sit by the fire. “Mukami is waiting for you. Outside.”

  “What does she want?”

  He does not answer.

  The light outside is fading. I see Mukami and another woman standing like ghosts in the half light. Mukami gestures, and the woman unwraps the child on her back and places her feet down on the earth. The girl is scarcely two years old, and she squirms away when she sees me, unused to Europeans perhaps. I crouch down. She is naked below the waist, and I see immediately the wound which wraps around one thigh and across her buttocks, white and suppurating, the infection eating away at her flesh.

  “What is it?” I ask.

  “She fell into the fire—a few days ago. It is getting worse.”

  I place a hand on the girl’s forehead. She has a fever.

  “I am not a doctor,” I say, standing up.

  “Your mother helped many times,” Mukami says, not moving.

  Kisima is too far from Nakuru for the Kikuyu to make the journey when they are sick. I open my hands. “My mother was—” What is it I want to say? My mother was an adult? She was experienced? Neither of these things feels true of me; I have no idea how to help the child. “I will fetch my father—”