Leopard at the Door

by Jennifer McVeigh

  When I run the hose over her back the soap slips away, streaming down her legs. She looks smaller under the slick, wet fur. I push my hand across her back and over her head, squeezing out the soap, until the water runs clear. Sensing that I have almost finished—she erupts into motion, escaping my grasp and racing across the lawn, water trailing out behind her, lips pulled back, urging herself on with the manic enthusiasm of a puppy. She chases her tail, then gathers her back legs under her in a sudden spurt of speed and turns wide circles on the grass. I watch her, laughing. She stops and begins on a long joyful shake. Then—nonchalantly, as though nothing has happened—she sniffs the earth and pads off into the bushes.

  I sit on the grass, under the crisscrossed shade of the acacias behind the house, and take out a pair of knitting needles. I want to make a jumper for Njeri’s baby, for the damp, cold evenings when the next rains come. I begin to cast on stitches following a pattern I found in one of my mother’s books. After a few minutes Juno comes and stretches out on the grass in front of me. Her tan coat glistens in the heat, the fur tipped gold where the sun catches its edges. The clicking of the needles, the warm air, the shifting, flickering shade cast their languid spell over me, until the past has slipped its shackles and is spilling over into the present, like a waking dream.

  —

  MY MOTHER AND FATHER import ridgebacks from South Africa. Lion dogs, they call them in Kenya. They roam through the house, benevolently sniffing me, padding their huge paws, like lions, delicately past my stout, toddler’s legs. They sleep by the fire in the sitting room, or stretched out on the leopard skin rug at the end of my parents’ bed.

  Eric Bowker—our nearest neighbor—has collies, the Markhams have Staffordshire terriers, and together these dogs have made their mark on our local population, breeding with the local shenzi, so that the mongrels that wander at the outskirts of our lives, panting in the shambas, suckling their litters in the shade of acacia bushes are a perverted miscegenation of pure breeding, with patchwork coats, short legs and once or twice a ripple down their backs from a lion dog forebear. Occasionally they produce a throwback that looks like the spitting image of some great-great-great-grandfather who had been brought over on a ship from South Africa or England with a document confirming the purity of his heritage.

  My parents’ ridgebacks disappear for days—then reappear tattered and panting, their lips stretched back from their white teeth, pink tongues flecked with dry white foam, eyes red and slanted. My mother and I spend hours picking thorns from their coats, parting the warm, dry pads of their feet to remove splinters, wondering what adventures they have got up to in the bush on their own, and where they have slept. Occasionally my mother has to administer stitches.

  These dogs encapsulate the daring of adventure, and I sometimes follow them as they start out from the house, on sunbaked mornings, only to lose them in the bush as they find the scent that heads them off at a rolling gallop. Once they bait a lion and bring it right up to the house. The dogs snarl, paws deep in the dust, and the lion keeps its distance, grunting under its breath. My mother takes my father’s rifle from the cupboard in the bedroom, and shoots at it from the bedroom window; the only time I see her pick up a gun.

  For as long as I can remember I have wanted my own dog—but it needs to be a good one. Lion dogs are expensive—my parents do not have a breeding bitch, and they have no plans to buy one. When my mother is in Nairobi for the weekend, an African we don’t know appears at the house. Kahiki says he is mchawi—a witch doctor. A brass padlock hangs from one of his ears, his front teeth are missing and he is dressed in monkey skins. He uses an umbrella instead of a walking stick, and as he looks at us with his yellow eyes, I see that he carries something ragged and pliable in one hand. I stare at him from the dust of the yard, transfixed. The next day he is gone and he has left the soft bundle—a puppy—in front of the papyrus grass near the house. I can hear it mewling. The Africans are of two minds. Kahiki tells me it will die. Jim agrees with Joseph that the puppy is a bad omen—it has a maganga on it, the curse of witchcraft. I go to inspect it. Its ears are furless, and there are flies in its eyes that don’t move when I turn the puppy over. Its fur is matted together with a brown sludge on one side, and it does not smell good. It opens its eyes and looks at me. Through its exhaustion and pain I see a gleam of humor and tenacity. Its tail lifts a fraction from the earth in a slow upward motion. And although I have no surety that this dog will grow up to be worthy of my parents’ lion dogs, I know that I have decided and will not leave it to die.

  “It’s a shenzi,” my father says. “It will die.”

  I beseech him, but he is firm. “We don’t need another dog in this house, Rachel. And certainly not a watu dog.”

  “She will grow up to be strong. I know it.”

  “The watu won’t like it,” he says, shaking his head. It is not just Jim and Joseph. Word has spread of the mchawi. All the Kikuyu are saying that the puppy is cursed. “We will not take it in. End of story.”

  He calls Kahiki and tells him to take the puppy away, to give it food and water. I know he says it to appease me. I find the puppy on the old rubbish heap by the dairy, baking in the sun. A bowl of water has been left out for it, but it is too weak and too small to drink. I scoop it up, a dry hot bundle of ribs beneath my hands, and take it to the stables. I put it in a box in the corner of the unused stable and drip-feed it milk from my finger but it won’t suck. I have heard my father say that if a lamb won’t suck then it will die. My mother comes home that evening, but I don’t tell her. This is my secret and I won’t jeopardize it.

  I don’t go to my lesson that morning. A shadow falls across the open stable door. I look up in alarm. It is Michael. He crouches down and picks up the puppy in one brown hand and turns her over. Opens her mouth with his finger. She makes no sound.

  “Will she die?” I ask.

  “She needs worming,” he says.

  “You don’t think she carries a maganga?”

  “Ajali haikingiki,” he says, not really giving me an answer. Fate cannot be changed.

  I steal a worming tablet from my father’s office and give it to the puppy, opening her pink mouth with my finger, dropping half of the white pill into the back of her throat and massaging it down as I have seen my mother do with her dogs. I will her to live.

  The next morning she is a little better. I clean her up and begin to feed her from an old baby bottle, rejoicing when she starts to suck. Michael does not tell my secret, and when I bring my mother to see her—a week later—the puppy knows me so well, following, stumbling and leaping at my footsteps, that my mother laughs and tells me I can keep her.

  I call her Juno—the protector of women. She has lopsided ears. One stuck up and the other down. She is tawny gold with three black feet and she sits with such careful, exaggerated intent, holding back the energy that wants to send her careering into motion, that it is as though she is talking. I see in her the ridgebacks, and collies too, and I hope she will inherit the best of both breeds from her forebears. She is large-boned and quick-witted, and she carries the ridgebacks’ dark ripple of fur down the center of her back. Only my father is not happy. He will not hold her on his lap, and I think about the mchawi and wonder if he believes she will bring ill luck. A few months later my mother is dead.

  —

  JUNO RAISES HER HEAD from the grass to look at me, as if she can sense me thinking about her, pants for a moment, stretches her mouth—smacking her lips—then lays her head back down, eyes open. She loves the sun, as though something in her genes—some ancestral Northern European blood—cries out to make the most of it before winter comes. I push my fingers through her coat. It is warm against my hand, a blanket of heat, and I shut my eyes, letting the knitting needles fall to my lap, giving in to the sun and the simple contentment of being home. I do not think it is possible that violence will come here and corrupt our peace.

 
; X

  I stay away from the house as much as possible. It is Sara’s dominion, and she paces the corridors, walking restlessly from room to room, listening to the gramophone. I feel her frustration and her itching desire to get her hands on me and transform me into something that she can admire.

  I set up my mother’s sewing machine under the overhanging shade of the stables, on a workbench—two planks of wood on a pile of crates—and enlist Mukami’s help, drawing up patterns from my mother’s books, pinning them to the fabric and cutting them out. She works quickly, and we spend our mornings together in the quiet of the yard.

  Michael keeps to himself. Often I work for an hour, thinking he is there, but when I look over I see that he has left the garage so quietly that I did not hear him go.

  The sewing is more difficult than I had thought, and I make mistakes at first, and have to unpick long lines of stitches, my fingers turning red and sore. But I enjoy the feel of my mother’s Singer in my hands, the weight and simplicity of it, the turning of the wheel beneath my palm, my arm aching, the needle flickering up and down, a tiny sword of light.

  One morning, Harold walks into the yard with his camera. He lifts it in question, and I say, reluctantly, “All right.”

  He spends a few minutes taking photographs while we work. Later he gives me a print. It is taken from behind us; Mukami squatting down, bent over yards of fabric, Juno sprawled in the foreground, the side of my face just visible, one hand turning the blurred wheel on the glossy black machine so that the photograph has caught the whir of time, and I think it could be my mother sitting there, working.

  “Thank you,” I say, smiling up at him.

  —

  I WALK BACK to the house one morning to fetch a packet of needles from the bureau in the hall. Sara is standing in the sitting room at the window nearest me, gazing out onto the lawn and the track beyond. Her clothes are neat and uncreased, a leather belt gathering in the waist of her green dress. It looks as though she is waiting for someone to arrive. There are four or five farms close enough to make the two-hour drive to Kisima for lunch, to exchange farming news and recipes, and perhaps stay the night, but I haven’t seen anyone in the few weeks that I have been home. Loyalty to my mother, perhaps, or a dislike for Sara, who isn’t one of their kind and has made the decision to live with my father, unmarried.

  In the past, our isolation at Kisima hadn’t seemed so oppressive. It was broken by the university colleagues, photographers and friends who came up from Nairobi to see my mother, intending to stay a night or two and leaving after a week. And the Markhams—our closest friends—who drove over for the weekend, bringing gifts of food, settling in for long suppers under a full moon, hunting trips and fishing on the dam.

  There were other farming families fifty miles or so away, who dropped in from time to time, bringing their children—and I would have the rare experience of looking at a European of my own age—face brown and hair bleached white like mine—staring as an ape does when it is shown its image in a mirror for the first time. Once or twice we drove down with other families to the coast, mattresses strapped to the roof of our car, and camped. I remember the moon glittering on a black, phosphorescent sea; a dog yelping in excitement; bodies slick and wet against mine, running through the whispering surf. I do not know where these children are now. Are they still up-country? Or have they gone to England? I did not know them well enough to write to them now and search them out.

  Our only visitor has been Steven Lockhart, and I suspect my father puts up with him because we are all in need of company. Sara talks occasionally of going to Nairobi—the parties she and my father will take me to at one of the clubs, but no dates materialize. There were raised voices a few days ago when she sent out cards for a lunch party and letters came back declining the invitation. “All this tatt”—she said later, when we were having drinks, gesturing to the armchair which is molded to the shape of my father’s body, the table that bears the nicks and scars of many years—“greasy and threadbare. It’s not surprising no one wants to come.” I saw her afterward, looking at furniture catalogs, but my father says we do not have the money for new furniture—not yet.

  I do not mind the isolation. I grew up here. I spent my childhood roaming the farm on my own, and I relish the empty days; it is what I longed for in the cold, airless dormitory at school, ten girls crammed in a room. But as I watch Sara, I see that she is not happy—her posture is stiff with frustration and loneliness. I remember her saying, Why would anyone come back to this place? It occurs to me that she might not have wanted to come here; that circumstances in Nairobi might have driven her to Kisima.

  “Are you waiting for someone?” I ask.

  She speaks, without turning from the window. “Doesn’t it strike you as odd that nothing which has been built on this land has ever survived? No cities or temples—no old roads, no ancient empires, no graves or burial mounds? Nothing to prove that generations of Africans have lived and died here. And when we are gone—what will there be to show that we ever existed? We shall disintegrate like everything else into an awful, blistering, sunny nothingness. I didn’t expect it to be so—” She pauses, trying to find the right word. “So desolate, so barren.”

  “It isn’t barren,” I try to say. “If you would only go outside—”

  She turns and gives me one of her chill smiles. “The women who come up here with their children, Rachel—what are they here for?”

  “I am treating the child who was burned. She is getting better.”

  “Well, I don’t want their lice and their diseases near the house. Before we know it they’ll all be up here, asking for something or other. If you want to play doctor, you can do it down at the shambas.”

  I turn away from her, gritting my teeth in frustration. The girl’s burn is healing; her fever has lessened, but I should know better than to seek approval from Sara.

  —

  MICHAEL IS STANDING in the garage. His hands are wet with grease. The various parts of an engine are laid out on a tarpaulin at his feet. He looks up when he sees me.

  “Could you help me with something?” I shift my feet, conscious that this is an interruption.

  He wipes his hands on his overalls and follows me into the barn. There—at the very back—are more boxes crammed full of books on farming and coffee plantations, packets of seeds and breeding manuals. Among them is a wooden case. The radio my mother bought; the one that used to be at the house, before I left, that brought news of the end of the war and the atrocities in Belsen.

  I drag it out from between the boxes. “I thought you might be able to get it working.” My father has set a limit on the news—he says he does not want to listen to the scaremongering of politicians, says he refuses to let Mau Mau take over our lives—so we listen only to the news at six o’clock and I am left hungry for more. The house is quiet, and the days are long. I want to listen to other broadcasts, plays and music, and I want to know exactly what is unfolding in Kenya, just as it happens.

  The radio is heavy, and I struggle to move it over the earth floor. Michael squats down and grasps it in both hands, lifting it easily and carrying it outside.

  The surface of his workbench is scattered with metal tools, a circular saw, a few bits of wood which have been chewed up by a blade. He clears a space and slides the radio onto it. I watch him feel the wood veneer, brushing the dust off it, touching it with care.

  “You might not be able to get it working.”

  “It’ll work fine,” he says, picking up a screwdriver and opening the back.

  “How do you know?”

  “Your father brought it down here. I had a look at it for him.”

  “But you didn’t fix it?”

  “You don’t trust me?”

  “Should I?”

  He glances up at me, then looks down again. He takes the back off the radio, tipping the small screws into hi
s hand, and says, “She didn’t want it fixed. She wanted a new one.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She asked me to tell your father that it was broken. That I couldn’t fix it.”

  “And did you?”

  He doesn’t answer. It is a subtle deception of hers, but deliberate. To ask someone who works for my father to be complicit in deceiving him. There is something awful in it.

  He turns the radio over and slides out the metal structure that sits inside. It is a jumble of wires and dials, but his hands move delicately over the parts, unscrewing and twisting, bending the wires to their task, malleable under his touch.

  I lean against the bonnet of my father’s jeep, my shins striped with sunlight.

  “Where did you learn about machines?”

  “I was a radio engineer in the army.”

  “The army trained you?”

  “They picked out those of us that were literate. Turned us into signalers, medical orderlies, engineers.”

  “You told me once that you fought in Burma.”

  “Yes.”

  “What was it like?”

  He says nothing. Goes into his workshop and comes back with a length of wire.

  He looks at me when he comes out and says, “Tell me something.”

  “What do you mean?” I laugh nervously. He has caught me off guard. It is the first time he has spoken to me directly since I arrived. But he doesn’t reply. He is cutting the piece of wire, sliding it into the machine.

  When I don’t speak, he looks up, his brown eyes settling on mine, and I feel my stomach contract. He is watching me, judging me, and I am self-conscious. I want to tell him something that matters; my unhappiness in England, grief for my mother, my sense of unbelonging—I might have talked about these things a week ago, but they no longer seem a part of the present.

  Then I know what I want to say. That Steven Lockhart scares me—that I think he wants something from me. But I cannot talk to him about that, so instead I say, “It was Steven Lockhart—the District Officer—who killed the striker at the factory. I was in the room. I saw him do it.” I can see the blood, the African’s head snapping back, and—afterward—Steven holding me on his lap.