Ahmed's Revenge

by Richard Wiley

  Ahmed's Revenge

  Richard Wiley

  Dzanc Books

  1334 Woodbourne Street

  Westland, MI 48186

  www.dzancbooks.org

  Copyright © 1998 Ahmed's Revenge by Richard Wiley

  All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher.

  A portion of this work was originally published in slightly different form in the Colorado Rev1ew.

  Published 2012 by Dzanc Books

  A Dzanc Books rEprint Series Selection

  eBooks ISBN-13: 978-1-938604-14-0

  eBook Cover Designed by Steven Seighman

  Published in the United States of America

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  For my family

  Acknowledgments

  The author wishes to thank, in the United States, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, for partial funding of his research; Gail Hochman, for her belief all these years, and for her tenacity; and Richard Bausch for keeping the faith.

  In Kenya, he wishes to thank Connie Buford for the use of her home in Nairobi; Ann and Ted Goss for answering his questions about animal behavior and poaching; and most especially David Bartholomew, for help and friendship on all kinds of levels.

  Author’s Note

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of my imagination or are used fictitiously. Any appearance otherwise is coincidental

  Ahmed

  This is a perfect fiberglass model of the famous elephant of Marsabit. In 1970, His Excellency President Jomo Kenyatta decreed that this elephant be placed under permanent 24-hour honour guard protecting him from poachers. He became a national symbol.

  Ahmed died of natural causes in 1974 and was prepared for exhibition by Zimmermans of Nairobi. Normal taxidermy methods could not be applied in the mounting.

  Hii ni sanamu dhabiti ya yule ndovu maarufu aliyeishi huko Marsabit. Hapo mwaka wa 1970, mtukufu rais Mzee Jomo Kenyatta alimpatia ndovu huyo ulinzi wa sberia ikalazimika alindwe usiku na mchana kutokana na wezi wa mawindo. Ahmed alifuka kutokana na uzee hapo mwaka wa 1974 na sanamu yake ikatengenezwa na kompani ya Zimmermans hapa Nairobi. Uten-(jenezaji ya kawaida ngozi haukauwezekana.

  STATISTICS

  Age at death 55-62 years

  Height at the shoulder 3 m (9’10”)

  Tusks: Right 3 m (9’9”)

  Left 2.8 m (9’4”)

  Weight of each tusk 67 kgs ( 148 lbs)

  (The above appears on a sign situated in front of the life-size replica of Ahmed in the National Museum in Nairobi.)

  Act One

  1

  Jules et Jim

  I had a farm in Africa too. My farm was not in the Ngong Hills but on even richer land about eighty miles west of Nairobi. To get to my farm you drive down off what is called “the escarpment,” into the Great Rift Valley and then up again, forty minutes or so north of the dusty Maasai town of Narok. My husband, Julius, and I bought the farm from an out-of-luck Kikuyu man in 1968, and when the rains came or when our evening reading didn’t suit us, we would sometimes get out Julius’s maps and notice that our farm, along with those of Isak Dinesen near the town of Karen, and Elspeth Huxley out Thika way, formed an obtuse triangle, with Julius and me at the pinnacle, which seemed right to us since we were alive and young and farming while those other two were not, one long gone and one buried, both of their lives mythologised in books and film and on the BBC.

  We were lucky to have found such a good farm quickly and to buy it with so little trouble. The Kikuyu man was anxious, which should perhaps have warned us away, but Julius wanted to grow coffee, and though farmers in our region had always grown wheat, everyone assured us that coffee would grow just as well. We had a soil study done and an analysis of the annual rains, and we rented a big shed in Narok where we could do our own drying and processing. At 6,200 feet we were certainly high enough for coffee, but I think we’d have gone ahead even without the studies. Julius thought that the growing of coffee was a godly kind of enterprise, something he wanted to do, and I, because I loved and believed in Julius, thought so too.

  It took a year for us to prepare the ground and hire a crew, to really get started with the work, but as anyone who has ever had a cup of our coffee can attest, it was worth the wait. Even from the very beginning, from that first harvest in December of ‘69, things were done right. Our coffee was rich and sure of itself, robust and flavourful. There were no tricks to our coffee, just as there were no tricks to our marriage. Julius said our processing foreman was a gift from God, but it was because of Julius that our coffee had none of that hickory-chicory nonsense that other growers sometimes tried to put in. I used to think that you could taste Julius’s character in each cup, but alas, maybe I was wrong.

  Here is the slogan Julius wrote for the sides of our first batch of burlap coffee bags: “One sip and you will know, Grant’s coffee is the kind to grow.” It was a little out of the way, as you can no doubt tell, but it was pure Julius, open arms to everyone, you too can grow your own. We actually argued about the slogan, and in the end I had a hand in calming it down. By the time we ordered the bags again we got rid of that senseless second clause. Strange to say, it has stuck in my head that maybe we shouldn’t have, maybe I should have left things alone.

  I like the story about Julius and the burlap bags because it helps me to remember his exuberance and his joy. The other story I want to tell is how his name stopped being Julius and became Jules.

  We had gone into Nairobi one weekend, it was in May of 1974, to see a film at the French Cultural Centre. Julius and I both knew French, and since those films were our only chance to keep up with the language, we went every month or so.

  The film we saw that particular weekend was François Truffaut’s Jules et Jim, do you remember it? Well, it’s a good film, very innocent and sweet, and to our great surprise, Julius looked like Oskar Werner, the actor who played Jules. I’m not talking about some slight resemblance here, but a dead-ringer kind of thing. Julius and that actor could have been brothers, they could have been the same man, and though Oskar Werner was not unknown, neither Julius nor I had ever seen him before. It was a silly thing, but, my God, Julius was proud. He’d had a couple of drinks before the film, and when it was over he was the cock of the walk, doing a rooster shuffle around the French Cultural Centre with his arms pulled back. Some of the French women in the audience started calling him Jules and flirting with him outrageously but in a funny kind of way. A few of them even asked him for his autograph, playing the whole thing out. Julius kept strutting, smiling till his mouth got tired, but all he would say was that Oskar Werner was too short, that it should be clear to anyone that he was taller and better-looking than the man on the screen.

  We stayed in Nairobi that night, at the New Stanley Hotel. Down in the restaurant Julius kept on speaking French and he drank too much wine. He went around the room introducing himself as Jules, saying it the French way, which sounds like “jewel” but with a soft and runny j. He irritated the real French patrons who happened to be about, and after dinner, when the coffee came, he was so critical of it that for a while I thought he and the maître d’ might actually get into a fight. In the end, however, the maître d’ laughed and Julius went out to our lorry and brought the man a small bag of Grant’s Coffee to make up for the scene he’d caused. I remember it all so well. That was one of the last bags of Grant’s Coffee with the original slogan on the side. Julius had been saving it to send to his uncle in Canada, but the ma
ître d’ got it instead. And what Julius got was a different name. After that Julius was Jules, most of the time. Surprising to say, it was an easy change. And during our more intimate moments I was occasionally Jim, a situation that didn’t make any more sense than that original coffee slogan did.

  I think the night we saw Jules et Jim was the strangest night of our life together, though there were certainly more dramatic ones. I didn’t think so then, but in retrospect, you know, it had to have been. Jules was drunk and he was in a randy mood, but he smelled too much like wine and his eyes were rheumy and his hair was standing up in a ridiculous cowlick. That was the first time he called me Jim, and I didn’t like it at all. He crowed that he wanted to call me by the name of the female character in the film, but he couldn’t remember what her name was, and I wouldn’t tell him, so pretty soon he started calling me Jim over and over again. “I want you, Jimmy, I want you, Jim,” he said, and I said back to him, spitting my irritation through a closed jaw, “If you want me call me Nora, that’s my name.”

  I should say that Jules was still speaking French and I didn’t like that very much either. I kept switching back to English. “Nora Grant,” I said, “call me Nora Grant, say it right now. And stop speaking French, Julius, your accent’s no good.” That was weak since both of us knew his accent was better than mine, but all his earlier flirting came rushing back to me then, and I got madder than I was before. The more I thought about it the more my anger came. I was willing enough to call him Jules, since that’s what he seemed to want, but what I wanted was my own true name, which I was happy with and loved. My name and the natural contours of my husband’s voice, I’d always thought, went together like coffee and hot milk, and were the perfect aphrodisiac. “Not tonight, Julius,” I shouted, “not on your life!”

  Already, only a short time after he’d been christened Jules, “Julius” was sounding punitive on my tongue, but no matter how I shouted and raved, Jules just kept saying “Jim,” and anyone who has ever been married knows what something like that can do.

  “Stop it, Julius!” I screamed. “Stop it right now!”

  “Jim, Jim, Jim,” he said, “Jim, Jim, Jim.”

  I began flailing around the room, searching for something to throw, when suddenly Julius stormed out of the place, slamming the door behind him. It was absolutely and powerfully strange. He got into the lift, somehow slamming that door too, and soon I saw him from our window, down on Kenyatta Avenue, walking away from the hotel.

  I sat on the windowsill and fumed, wondering how he could behave like that, but as is usual with me, no matter how I tried to hold on to it, my anger started leaving as soon as I was alone. Hadn’t Julius been weaving more than the drink would make him weave, I asked myself, and where in the world would he go? As the anger went out of me worry came in, so though I normally wouldn’t do such a thing, pretty soon I ran out of the room myself, leaving the lift and taking the stairs, reaching to the street in no time to follow my husband along.

  I was thirty-one that year and Julius was thirty-five. We had been married for six years and we were happy, so when I trailed him down Kenyatta Avenue I swear it was as protector, not as detective, that I went. It wasn’t very late, only a little after ten, but Nairobi could be dangerous to a man alone, especially if the man was weaving about as if he couldn’t defend himself. I had a little trouble catching up with Jules, but when I finally did, I slowed down, staying a block or so behind. I was beginning to feel foolish and putridly wife-like, and of course I knew that if Jules was robbed I wouldn’t be able to do much to stop it. I only worried about the reaction of Jules himself, to the robbers in my mind. My husband was tough, he had a low center of gravity, and he could box, so if a robber came out and told Jules to give up his wallet, the weaving might turn into bobbing, and Jules might knock the robber down. And if that happened Jules might really get hurt, for pangas and knives can beat boxing nearly every time.

  I thought Jules was going to the bar in the Six Eighty Hotel. He liked that bar with all its women of the night. We would, in fact, go there together sometimes, for a daytime bottle of beer when we were in Nairobi buying supplies. But when Jules turned across the street and up toward the central market I no longer had any idea where he was going. It occurred to me that he might just walk in a big loop, that he was cooling himself off and would come back to our room to call me Nora as I wanted him to, and when that thought got me I nearly turned around and ran back so that I could catch my breath and act languid when he stumbled through the door.

  Jules slowed when he got near the market, which, of course, was closed at that time of night. He turned down Market Street and walked to a corner on which there was a nightclub upstairs over a petrol station. Market Street was dark but he kept going, past the nightclub and down toward Loita Street, which was pretty nearly out of the downtown. By this time Jules had speeded up and not only lost his weave but was walking so assuredly that I knew he’d known where he was going all along. Ah-ha, I thought, the bastard had it planned. Following him got harder since we were the only two people on the road. What is my husband up to? I kept asking myself, but all I knew for sure was that the idea of me as protector was totally gone. Now I was a detective all the way.

  There was a small two-storey building at the end of the block, around the corner to the right. The building actually seemed like someone’s home. It was separated from its neighbours on the street, standing alone and dark. A person could walk along narrow pathways on either side of the house, and that’s what Jules did, choosing the pathway nearest him and entering a side door halfway down.

  What was I supposed to do, what would anyone do in circumstances such as these? Julius and I had a marriage that really was based on trust, that wasn’t just a word in our case, but a kind of easy-to-handle general rule—the way a wedding ring binds a finger, that’s the way trust bound Julius Grant and me. But this situation was beyond me. Not long ago we had been at the French Cultural Centre watching Jules et Jim, and a half a day before that we had been on our farm, overseeing our harvest and looking out at the Mara plains. And now I was at the dark end of Loita Street alone, and my husband was inside the building at my side. My normal frame of mind would have told me to go back to the hotel and wait, but try as I might, I couldn’t find my normal frame of mind.

  I had not thought so at first but there were, after all, lights on inside the house, turned down low. Seeing them gave me the idea to go up to the front door and knock and ask whoever answered if Julius Grant could come out and play. I thought such a tactic contained the proper lightness of touch and might even get me off the hook for following him when whatever Jules was doing turned out to be fine. But as I got closer my courage left me, and I suddenly veered past the front of the house, following instead the path Jules had taken, the one that led to that ominous side door. Once I was on the path I walked quickly, in my usual no-nonsense kind of way, and by the time I got to the door, all my courage returned. I was prepared not only to knock on it but to turn the handle and go inside, just as Jules had done. Unlike the door in front, however, this side door had a window, and through a crack in its curtain I saw a scene that stayed my hand. My husband was there, standing by a table and drinking from a bottle of beer. I had expected a woman, I admit it now, but what I saw was stranger than that, both better and worse at the same time. I can hardly say the word, but what I saw was ivory, the raw material. My husband, Julius Grant, was standing in a room full of yanked-out elephant tusks.

  Let me say right now that no one I knew was farther from the complicated world of poachers, no one was farther from Kenya’s illegal ivory trade, than Julius Grant. Still, though that window didn’t afford me more than a couple of seconds’ worth of looking, I know what I saw. My husband was next to the table, a dark expression on his face, and all around him tusks were tied together in bunches, on top of the table and beside it and everywhere across the floor. They weren’t long tusks, not three feet on the average, and they hadn’t been cleaned
. Jules’s bottle of beer was before him, its liquid an unsettled sea. There was no one else in the room, but I caught sight of someone leaving through a doorway to my right. I saw the bottom half of a medium-brown jacket, and the black heel of a shoe. The room was a kitchen, I knew, because there was a sink and a refrigerator on the far side.

  I jumped away from the window, but I didn’t duck back the way I had come. Rather, I ran toward the rear of the house, where there was another low building of some kind. I did consider that the wearer of the jacket I’d seen might be back there too, but I also knew that a beeline in the general direction of the hotel would afford me the best chance of not being caught by Julius or someone else coming out of the front door. I ran quietly, but I didn’t run slowly, and soon I discovered that the path led into someone’s small shamba, a garden, believe it or not, which I immediately tumbled into, severely scratching my thigh. I shouted, but I got up before anyone could come and lurched onto another path that led to an adjoining street on the block’s far side. Though I had a lot of trouble trying to think, I certainly knew enough to continue moving. I wanted to be back in our room at the New Stanley Hotel, feigning sleep, by the time Jules returned. So I let it all out, sprinting along Kenyatta Avenue like a schoolgirl, all the way down to Kimathi Street.

  I was exhausted and sweating, and my thigh was bleeding a lot, so as soon as I got back to our room I jumped into the shower, stopping only to hide my filthy clothes. I found part of a large thorn in my thigh and pulled it out, and since neither Jules nor I had brought pyjamas with us, when I was done I crawled into the bed, naked but dry, a small towel wrapped around my thigh. I tried to calm myself, to regain my natural optimism and to make my heart-beat slow down. I tried to believe that Jules would tell me everything the moment he came in, but whatever I told myself, what I had seen made no sense at all. Julius Grant was a coffee-growing man, that was how he lived his life, and if I knew anything about him, it was that he did not suffer poachers. He hated the bastards, and he absolutely celebrated the wildlife on our farm, even the elephants who sometimes came crashing through. But it was also clear to me that Jules had started our fight, all that rubbish about calling me Jim, so that he could storm out of the hotel and get over to that kitchen on Loita Street without my knowing about it.