He holds me and for a long moment I give myself up to this—the warmth of his arms, the firmness of his chest against my head, the slow touch of his hands on my head, on my neck. Then he draws me away from him. He takes my hand.
We move on, slower now, pushing our way through the tight undergrowth. We drop down into a valley, scrambling over rocks. Moonlight falls through the fever trees, dappling the ground where we tread. There is a small stone dam at the bottom. Three zebra—drinking from the water—scatter when we approach, their hooves clopping on the dry stones. We are in the midst of the ghostly shadows of the old shambas, empty, deserted, soundless. My feet are raw—the sharp stones feel as though they are cutting right through the skin, and I go slowly.
Ahead looms the dark shadow of thicker forest. I follow him blindly into the trees, where the moon cannot shine, and everything is dark. There must be Mau Mau here. And animals hunting in the dark. We begin to climb. It goes on for what seems like hours, until I stop.
“What is it?”
I put a hand to my feet. The soles are wet when I touch them, sticky against my fingers. It is blood. I curse myself for not putting on the plimsolls that lay beside my bed.
“Just a little farther,” he says.
We climb down and up onto the other side of the mountain higher and higher, on and on until we emerge into a clearing. We are high up on the hill. I turn to look behind us, and there is the house lighting up the sky, orange and red, the smoke billowing black into the moonlight. Below us on the other side is the dam—a silver slip of water.
“We can stop here,” he says, squatting down, and I sit, with my back against a tree, a little apart from him, wishing he was closer. My head is ringing. The land is a living, breathing thing—an amphitheater of sound, and we are tiny in its midst. From all sides comes the murmuring and chattering of a million living things.
“Sara wouldn’t come,” I say.
He says nothing, and I swallow down guilt.
“What do we do now?”
“We’ll wait here for a few hours, then I will walk you back, close to the dam.”
“Why here?”
“I am scouting for them tonight.”
I watch him. The dark profile of his face as he looks out across the valley below. “They want to know how many police come. What direction they take.”
“Why did you not tell me?” I ask, after a long moment.
He looks at me. His eyes shining white in the dark. “You already knew.”
And he is right. I have always known, ever since I was a child, that his loyalties were divided.
I think about my father. Whether he will survive. About Sara—hands bleeding, trapped in the flames. A long time seems to pass, though it might be only a few minutes. It is hard to keep track in the darkness. Michael pulls a flask from his pocket and stretches out his hand to give it to me. The metal is cold against my hand.
“Stolen.”
“But you will drink all the same.”
I put it to my lips and remember Eric Bowker. Was it his? Had his lips touched the rim just as mine are touching it now? The water is cold in my mouth and tastes of metal.
Clouds drift across the sky, and darkness falls over us like a shroud. A clan of hyena move through the forest, calling to each other. A lone, lunatic wail, then the chattering and snapping of others, their voices echoing off the bowl of the land. Hyena are braver at night. A shiver grips me.
I know our time together is running out. Slipping through the hourglass faster than I can keep hold of it. The unspoken truth—that this might be the last time we shall see each other.
“I do not know my father,” I say into the darkness. “I do not even know myself.”
“And it scares you?”
“I have betrayed him.” My eyes well up with tears.
He must sense it, because he reaches out his hand and takes hold of my wrist. He draws me toward him, pulling me down between his legs. His arms settle over mine, and I know that in the touch of his body there is something that I will not find again. And it is slipping away from me.
“There is always a betrayal,” he says. “We all have to let something go—in order to be free.”
I lean my head back against his shoulder and shut my eyes. To be free. Is that what I am? Free?
“Who have you betrayed?” I ask.
“I have betrayed so many people that for a long time I did not know myself.”
“Tell me.”
“I used to wash dishes in the kitchen, before you were born. I remember the brown ceramic sink, propped up on stilts. The tap leaked, a constant dripping of water. Over the years it had made a small dip in the ceramic, rough to touch. One day I came in and a small crack had spread itself across the sink. Eventually it would be two halves. That was how it was with me.
“Your mother was knitting in the garden, and I watched. A long ball of wool fell off her lap and rolled out across the lawn. It was scarlet. I had never seen anything like it. I ran across the grass, picked up the ball, rolled up the thread and gave it back to her. That was the first betrayal.”
There is the touch of his skin against mine. And his voice, hypnotic, in the dark. “She set me to work in the kitchen. I had three shillings a month, and every Saturday she gave me sugar and salt to take home. I washed up the plates and saucepans, looked after the cats and dogs, fed the chickens, the ducks and the geese. I learned English in the kitchen. Your mother encouraged me. Hello. Master. Wool. Water. Hot. It singled me out at school. The teacher took special care over my education. When I was eight my father’s lands in the reserve were struck by drought, and he pulled me out of school. The teacher spoke to my mother, and she raised money from the village to keep me in school. They knew the value of an education for the whole community. But my brothers were not so lucky. There was no one speaking on their behalf.
“Your mother gave me paraffin and a lamp, so that when our shamba fell dark at seven o’clock, I could read into the night. When I came home from secondary school, I was wearing shorts and shoes, and my brothers were in their old clothes that smelled of sweat and animals. I was fourteen, but they were older. They talked about the land we had lost, the lies of the Europeans, the inequality of work. I struggled to agree. Look how far I had come. Look how much they had given me. The white man was everything he said he was. I put my brothers’ politics down to bitterness.”
“But you changed your mind.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“The war. Belsen. Eleven million people killed by the Nazis. Sixty million people dead in five years of war. It taught me that the white man had no prerogative over the word of God. No prerogative over the idea of what it is to be civilized.”
I had seen films showing the liberation of Belsen. Thousands of corpses, more bones than bodies, being thrown into vast trenches. Smoke, barbed wire and squalid huts where the living lay almost indistinguishable from the dead. Soldiers waist-deep in skeletal bodies. It was hard to believe that it was real.
“We had separate cinemas in the army, for whites and blacks. Our films were Westerns, gun-slinging, nice and simple. There was a British captain—we were friends. He smuggled me once into the back of his cinema. It was a film about a British family living in a city, strikes, hunger. There were white women cleaning the floors of the wealthy, begging in the streets. I was shocked. The British in Kenya had been careful not to let us see what life was like in England. In Kenya white women were always memsaab—they took tea and rarely dirtied their hands. Cleaning was something done by blacks. It occurred to me that this was why the British were in Kenya. Because in Kenya they didn’t have to wash floors—there were blacks to do it for them. This was why they would try and hold on to power at all costs. Their position as rulers in Kenya relied on the fiction that they were here to civilize, but they had no intention of sharing what they had
taken as theirs.”
I do not speak, listening to him unravel himself in the dark.
“In Burma I saw a soldier crying, an English boy about my age. I had seen him before—he didn’t want to be there, he was scared. He came up to me and said he wanted to write a letter home. ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you?’ It took me a moment to realize that he was asking me to write it for him. It was difficult for me to believe then that a white man might not be able to write.
“The army showed me that there was not one type of white man, which was what we had been told by the British in Kenya, but many. There was a driving instructor who gave his demonstrations sitting on the backs of Africans; there were American privates who had less influence than black American officers; there were the Irish—fighting for freedom from the English. And there were other nations that had wrested their independence from the empire: Indians who were on the brink of winning their freedom under Gandhi.”
His voice is soft and compelling in the night, slow and liquid. I hear the truth of what he says, in the richness of his voice. I do not want to hold it up against other truths, to test its veracity. I only want to listen.
“When we were in the trenches at the front, camped out in a bad position, the same boy—the one who was illiterate—said to me, ‘What are you doing here anyway? All you Africans? At least if I die it will be for my country. But what will your country have got out of it?’”
He laughs, softly. “It seems ludicrous now, but I had always imagined that I was fighting for England. It was the first time I had thought of Kenya as a country, as my country.”
He falls quiet. The house is a tiny, flickering ball of flame far below us. I can smell the bitterness of the smoke in the cool night air. My head rests in the dip between his shoulder and his neck. I hold his wrist with one hand, feeling out its surface with my fingers, the long smooth tendons on the underside, the hardness of the bone, the soft hollow where there is nothing but flesh, the steady throb of his pulse.
“And when you came back from the war?” I want to know everything; to store up this knowledge for the nights that will follow, when he will be far away from me.
“In the jungle the British soldiers painted their faces black, so they blended in as we did. Even the horses were given potassium permanganate to darken their coats. We sweated, fought, killed and ate together, one man indistinguishable from another. When we Africans—all seventy-five thousand of us—came back to Kenya, we hoped for recognition, that the same rewards given to European officers would be given to us—land and loans to stock the land. But instead we came home to discrimination, land loss, registration cards. So many of us had died for England in the war—where was the color bar then?
“We hoped our skills would help us press ahead with a new Kenya—that was what we had been promised. But Nairobi was a dirty, overcrowded place, sunk in poverty. There were eighty thousand Africans living in shanties in the east of the city. There were no opportunities, no jobs. We had no prospects. All our enthusiasm turned to bitterness. Burma market was run by soldiers who had fought in Asia—a black trade market. Anyone who has been there would have known why Mau Mau came about. I struggled to find work. My friends from the army were drinking, trading, stealing. I had a job selling charcoal for a while. Then I left to find work in the railway yards. Eventually I came back to Kisima.”
“But you didn’t stay,” I say, thinking that all the time he had been teaching me he had been carrying this bitterness and frustration.
“I couldn’t stay. My friends in Nairobi kept writing to me. I was in a strong position—with my education—there was so much I could do to help. I went to hear Kenyatta speak. He articulated for me everything I had experienced in Burma. He said that when the white man arrived, as strangers to our people, we had—in our hospitality—given them food and a place to stay. They were our guests; and now they claimed that our home belonged to them. It was time—he said—that they started behaving as our guests. I left Kisima—and was sucked into politics.”
“Uplands.”
“And everything that followed. It started to get dangerous. They began to make sweeping arrests in Nairobi. The movement became violent. I came back to Kisima.”
“You told me before that you didn’t come back to be political.”
In the dark there comes the single note of an owl marking out time.
“It is true. I was hoping to get away from the violence. But the struggle followed me here. This was the very heart of Mau Mau. I couldn’t avoid it. They wouldn’t let me. My whole family were oathed. Even if I had wanted to I couldn’t have resisted it. And—in the end—I didn’t want to.”
“What of my family?”
“That was another betrayal.”
Quietness falls over us. The hyena move past us in the dark. I hear their chattering, their calls feeling out layer on layer of darkness, receding into the valley below. Time falls away faster than I can hold it.
Some time later Michael stiffens. Below us two tiny beams of light are making their way to the house. I feel a lurching in my stomach.
“Headlights?”
“Yes.”
This is the beginning of the end. Of what will follow. Where is my father? I hope he is down there somewhere, alive. Would we have heard a gunshot from up here? And Sara—what of Sara?
Soon after there is another car. The house continues to burn—a beacon in the dark. We are too far off to hear voices, to see the light of torches.
The sky lightens, imperceptibly at first, until I can see my hands gray in the near darkness. The birds break the dominion of the night, puncturing the darkness, like pinpricks of light. A hollow, low dropping call rises softly from the dam, like the distant, wordless recalling of a dream. As the sky lightens again, the song lifts in volume. A birdcall like water slipping from a bottle. Frogs, squelching their throats in the water below. And the mist clinging to the valley, hanging like smoke over the mirrored surface of the dam. I sweep tears away from my eyes. There is a futility, a sense of human desperation, in the raising of this beauty over and over again, morning after morning.
Michael rises, the warmth of his body peeling away from me. I stand in the cold predawn light. The dress is ripped and blackened. My feet are covered in blood. My knees unlock stiffly as I push myself up.
“Why did it take us such a long time last night?”
“We walked around the mountain. It was safer. It will be fine now to go straight down,” Michael says. “We should go quickly. I will walk you down to the dam.”
“And then what?”
But he is moving already. The closeness of the night has fallen away with the darkness. He is no longer mine. I feel a tearing inside me. I follow him blindly down the track, limping across stones. We are down faster than I had imagined. When we are just above the dam he stops. He turns to me and I put out my hands, blackened from ash, to his dirt-stained shirt. I see now how ragged he is already, how filthy. The stubble that is beginning to cover his jaw is gray in the dawn, and shadows catch the angles of his face, making him appear suddenly as though he is an old man. I think—I may never see him when he is old.
“Is this a letting go?”
“Yes,” he says softly. His eyes, hooded and black in the half-light, settle on mine.
“Why?”
“The ground is shifting—it leaves no room for us.”
I lean my forehead for a moment against his chest and breathe deeply. There is nothing we can do to help each other, and our helplessness unravels me. I pull at his shirt. I want him to make things happen differently, to change the course that we are bound to follow. He stands and lets me, and all my defiance is meaningless. We are insignificant in the path of the fate that is drawing us apart. Like ants swept away by the movement of elephants.
The tears fall down my cheeks. He kisses me on the forehead. I reach up and hold his face and kiss h
im on the mouth.
“You are stronger than you think, Rachel,” he says. And he is gone.
—
I WALK DOWN to the dam and stand at the shoreline. The sun rises huge and heavy overhead, a burning, shimmering sphere that will pour its molten heat down on us later, but for now it is too low, and it holds in its breath only the premonition of what will come.
This was where we had swum. Where he had held me. Now I understand the anger in his face. The warning. Be careful, Rachel. He was telling me not to get too close, not to open him up because he would have to let go.
I walk up the track, skirting through the bush, so that I am above the farm. I pull myself into the branches of an old olive tree, balancing on my toes to avoid the raw soles of my feet on the rough bark, and look down on the house. It is a burned, blackened carcass. My eyes sharpen with tears. I suck air into my belly, as if it might steady the pain. Flames still lick at its edges, but the fire has burned itself out. I can see the innards of the house, poking out, walls burned away, floorboards crumbling. The house I grew up in, the house that holds the memories of my mother, like words in the pages of a book, crumbled to ashes. Something else turns heavily in my stomach. Guilt. I escaped when Sara did not—she must be dead, and her death is partly my fault.
A police truck is parked to the side of the house. Men are lying facedown on the earth, hands cuffed behind their backs. I recognize Mungai’s short, slight build, but I’m not sure if one of the other men is Jim. There is no sign of my father. Then I see Kahiki—his hand is bandaged, but he is on his feet. He is talking to a white officer. It is Steven Lockhart. I stare, motionless. I cannot walk down there now. I do not know what he will do to me. They have not seen me and I slither down and sit at the edge of the track, in the shade of the tree, holding my legs to my chest. I stay there for what must be hours. I am hungry. It is a long time since I have eaten.
An engine starts up, and I climb the tree again. They are rounding the men into the truck. Its edges catch the sun, bouncing back sparks of light. Steven Lockhart swings himself into the driver’s seat. The engine revs, and the truck drives away, followed by the second car, churning up a cloud of dust in its wake that rises into the air like smoke. I breathe out relief, drop to the ground, and walk down the track.
Leopard at the Door Page 29