Ahmed's Revenge

by Richard Wiley

  There was a vacant little church, the smallest I’d ever seen, sitting off the escarpment road, a mile or so past the area where all those baboons usually hang around and at just the point where the road finally turns and heads down into the Rift Valley proper. When my father saw the church he spoke for the first time, asking me to pull over. “For just one moment, Nora,” he said, “so I can say a prayer. I haven’t been here in years.”

  The church had been built in the 1940s by Italian prisoners of war, but it was empty now, broken down and dirty, a bad place to pray. Since it had been an occasional practice of Jules’s and mine to rest here on our trips to town, however, I did what my father asked, stopping the Land Rover at the spot where Jules used to park our lorry, under the shade of a giant eucalyptus tree at the foot of the church’s cracked front walk. The whole building was in utter disrepair, even the door didn’t close properly anymore, and the floor of the church’s only room was littered with rubbish.

  “We came here sometimes when you were a child,” said my dad. “Do you remember? The place was clean then. Your mother thought it was bad luck to pass by without stopping.”

  We were inside the church, but everything felt damp. I remembered those times, but I wanted to leave again quickly, so I only said, “It’s horrible now. Those days are over, Daddy. Mother’s dead. The Italian prisoners would be appalled.”

  The curtness in my voice surprised me, even though anger had been my accomplice for three days now, but all my father did was push a bit of the debris around with the toe of his shoe. It wasn’t the church’s condition that occupied his mind, nor was he thinking of my mother. He wanted to say something else and his expression was pained. I tried to be patient, waiting for him to remember and speak, but he finally knelt at the ramshackle altar instead. And when he got up again he ushered me back outside and found a shady place for us to sit down.

  “I would like to talk to you for just a moment,” he finally said. “I have something unpleasant to discuss.”

  Ever since Jules’s death, ever since the night of his wounding on the farm, I had been in a state of numb exhaustion, unable to sleep or to act in any animated way, and unable, as yet, to properly find that fog again and mourn. What I had been able to do, however, was focus on the tasks before me one at a time, to do what had to be done to clean up Jules’s affairs and get him buried, and I didn’t want that focus interrupted by my father’s unhinged mind.

  “I don’t want to hear it, Daddy,” I said. “I can’t concentrate now.” But my father had his right hand in the air, and he pushed my protest away.

  “Julius telephoned me late last week,” he said. “He called last Saturday night.”

  I admit I had expected platitudes, something about life being hard or learning to cope, but what was this? He was right, he did have something unpleasant to say, and it was that his senility had grown tricky and bold since last I’d met him.

  “That’s not possible,” I said stiffly. “Julius was injured on Sunday. The Saturday night a week before that we went to bed early, I remember it because the harvest was still going on.”

  I didn’t remember it because of the harvest but because it was the last time Jules and I had made love, Saturday night a week ago, at around nine P.M.

  “His call came very late,” said my father, “maybe three o’clock in the morning. He woke me up.”

  “He was asleep at three A.M.,” I said. “We were both exhausted from our work. You know how it is when a harvest is not yet done.”

  “He called me, Nora,” said my dad.

  The place he had chosen to sit down wasn’t peaceful. We were only a few feet off the road and a big lorry had just passed by fast, blowing dust around. These lorries always seemed to come in bunches, and because I didn’t want to get behind too many of them I told him we should go. “Let’s talk while we’re driving,” I said. “Let’s hurry up.”

  I stood and reached back down to help my dad, but he wouldn’t take my hand. “Never mind the traffic,” he said. “I’m telling you that your husband was in serious trouble when he died. He was concerned for his safety and he was worried about yours as well. He called because he wanted me to come down and help straighten things out.”

  “He did not,” I said. “What are you talking about, Dad? Try to think clearly. I don’t have time for this nonsense right now.”

  I was suddenly furious and my father knew it, but I let my words stand, only adding more softly, “I have to bury Julius tomorrow, you know. Can’t it wait until after that?”

  When my father didn’t answer I sat back down.

  “I was the Minister of Wildlife for many years,” he said. “Before independence most of these decisions fell to me.”

  I put my face in my hands but then looked up again quickly, deciding to try to talk him around. “Now you’re not making sense,” I said. “What does that have to do with anything that’s going on now? Did Julius call you up to remind you of what you had once been? If he called you, Daddy, tell me why. Otherwise let’s go.”

  Even though I had braced myself against it before his arrival, what I’d wanted from my father was comfort and love, the safe harbour of his living breath and arms. I didn’t want all this nonsense about what he had once been and I did not, right then, want any bad talk about Jules. Nevertheless I found myself remembering that house on Loita Street and asking one more time, “Did Julius call you because he was in trouble, or are you mistaking the time of the call? Perhaps it was some other Saturday night, some past time when we both telephoned just to say hello.”

  “Before that night I had never talked to Julius on the telephone,” my father said.

  It was very hard to make international calls from the farm, and, indeed, I myself couldn’t remember ever having called my father from there. We used to call once a month or so, but we always used the telephone at my father’s own house, in town.

  “If he called you on Saturday night I would have heard him,” I said. “Using our telephone is a noisy exercise. He wouldn’t have got through on the first try, he would have had to wait and raise his voice.”

  My father shrugged and said, “He called me and he told me that I should come.” He paused a second and then said, “I had my tickets, Nora, before poor Julius got hurt.”

  I stood up again, but my father stubbornly remained on the ground. I turned and looked back down at him, and suddenly I found myself asking the strangest question I had ever asked my dad. “When mother died was there a part of you that felt glad? Did some part of you feel a certain sense of freedom, a release, maybe, in the fact that she was gone?”

  “Certainly not!” my father said. “I cried like a baby when your mother died. I felt horrible, worse than you do now.”

  “When Julius died there was something in me that felt relieved,” I said. “I’m ashamed to say it, but some small part of me grew lighter when I was with him in that hospital room. Maybe it was a sense of renewed possibility, I don’t know, but it was a thought I’d had before. Listen, Daddy, in a way it was as if I was finally out from under him, as if my own real life had been on hold.”

  What I said was a deeper, or at least a more private, truth than I had ever told before. It had bothered me constantly while I’d been at my father’s house. I considered it shameful and disloyal. I loved Julius Grant with all of the power that was in me and I would never have thought of leaving him. Our life together had been good, better, most of the time, than good could be, but there was an undeniable moment when I was captured by the idea of life without him, and no matter what I did, I couldn’t make the memory of that moment go away. Even in the hospital room, even as I stood looking at his lifeless face and waited for that horrible dark fog to come near, even then there had been a small and terrible element of relief involved.

  I felt a little better for having said it out loud, but my father didn’t seem to have anything more to say about the truth I’d told, and I guessed that it was because I knew he wouldn’t that I’d told him
. It is easier to articulate the crimes of one’s heart to a man who isn’t really listening most of the time and who cannot remember very well when he is.

  When I tried to get him on his feet for the third time, my father was looking high up into the branches of the eucalyptus tree. He had his hands clasped around his knees and the expression on his face was not deep.

  “Come on, Daddy,” I said. “It’s time we got started again. There’s work to do once we get to the farm and I want to have some daylight left to do it in.”

  He looked at me and I could see him coming back.

  “Quite right,” he muttered. “I only wanted to stop a minute. Your mother liked it here, did you know that? Did I tell you that before?”

  My father stood up then and we were just walking down to the Land Rover when a dusty Toyota estate pulled in next to it. Detective Mubia was behind the wheel, the policeman from the hospital. He honked his horn and was waving at us as he got out of his car.

  “Jambo Mama and Daddy!” he said. “I have come to search you out. Dr Zir told me you would be in Narok by now, but here you are, still on this escarpment road.”

  I was worried by then that we’d never get to the farm, but I introduced the detective to my father anyway, using my father’s title: Nathan Hennessey, Minister of Wildlife, Retired. I had been Nora Hennessey before I was Nora Grant. The sound of my father’s title seemed to bring him completely around.

  “How do you do?” he said. He shook the detective’s hand and then he struck a pose, something I hadn’t seen him do in a decade or more, not since I was a child. My father looked like Mussolini when he did that, and I turned away, glancing back at the church and remembering my mother and the Italian prisoners of war.

  “I know your name very well,” the detective told him. “When I was a boy the Minister of Wildlife was often in the news.”

  It seemed clear to me that if Detective Mubia hadn’t seen us he would have driven all the way to the farm, and though he was the last person I would have invited to Jules’s funeral, his arrival didn’t make me unhappy at all. I’d been thinking about what he’d said in that hospital room, and even if he didn’t have news for me, I could use his appearance to dilute the strangeness of my dad.

  “What do you want, Detective?” I asked. “Has something happened that made you drive all this way?”

  There was something, but I got the idea the detective didn’t want to say it straight out. Instead he said, “This little church is pleasant. I have never been here before.”

  My father jumped and went back over to the church’s broken door. “Years ago it was delightful,” he said. “My wife…” And then he turned and stepped back inside.

  God, I thought, would I never get away from this place? If Jules were with us he’d have lost his mind, but since we could hear my father speaking in there, and we couldn’t understand what he said, there was nothing to do but go in and get him one more time.

  “Ah, but this is terrible,” Detective Mubia said when we squeezed through the door. “No one has cared for this place. This is the church of our dear Lord, Jesus Christ, a home for those who worship in His name. Let’s clean it up.”

  I had gotten the idea earlier that Detective Mubia was a religious man, and he proved it now not only by what he said, but by furiously bending down and picking papers up off the floor. “Are there no people living near here?” he asked. “Surely someone should have seen to the maintenance of this place.”

  I didn’t know whether or not people lived nearby, but the detective’s energy instantly infected my father, who started cleaning up too, snatching food wrappers from the far side of the room.

  “I’ll bet there are still coffee bags in the back of the Land Rover, Nora,” he said. “Run out and get a couple. This man is correct. Leaving this place filthy would be a crime!”

  My first impulse was to argue again, to flat-out refuse to go, but I knew the act of arguing would take longer than just getting the bags and helping them clean up the floor. Once outside, however, I could see the Rift Valley in the afternoon sun, with the road leading into it, cutting its vast flatness in half. The day’s quota of lorries seemed to have passed by, so it was quiet out there. A black-and-white colobus monkey, rare in these parts, played in the eucalyptus tree, but otherwise I was alone.

  In the back of the Land Rover I found burlap bags all right, old ones with Jules’s original slogan on their sides. These bags were made in England and had been a gift from my father several years before, at Christmas, I think, 1969.

  Because the church was tiny, it was pretty clean by the time I went back inside. The debris was in a neat pile by the door, so my father took a burlap bag and began stuffing it full, sweets wrappers and bits of rotten food and empty booze bottles disappearing from the floor.

  While my father worked I decided to ask the detective once again why he had come, but when I looked at him a different question came to mind.

  “Are you a believer, Detective Mubia?” I asked. “Are you a religious man?”

  It was an unnecessary question, even a stupid one, given what he’d just made us do, but if he was surprised by it he didn’t let it show. He just took a long second to straighten his suit and stand a little formally before he replied.

  “It is better to believe and know you are mistaken than to disbelieve and know you are correct,” he said.

  The detective looked pleased, though I didn’t know whether it was with the job they’d done on the floor of the church or the comment he’d made. My father was standing at the top of the wooden ladder with his head in the belfry, but he came back down when I said we had to go.

  It was then that I asked my original question one more time. “Why are you here, Detective? Why did you follow us all the way out from town?”

  “It is embarrassing to say that I have invited myself along,” he said, “but it has become clear that I must see how things stand on your farm, and if I wait any longer, things will stand differently than they do now.”

  My father had picked up the burlap bags, twisting their tops in his hands. “This is a family matter,” he said. “We don’t want the police involved.”

  I believed Detective Mubia would have turned around and driven back to town had I asked him to, but I held my tongue.

  I liked the man and I trusted him, and I knew as well as he did that there really was something to be solved. Once Jules’s funeral was over and I had endless amounts of time on my hands, I might even tell him about that night in Nairobi on Loita Street, after the French Cultural Centre film. Would it help his investigation for him to know about those torn-out tusks, ripped away like Jules’s arm? Would it help me survive the weeks ahead if I told him?

  Once outside the church again the detective got into his Toyota and sped on down the road. He turned toward Narok and was quickly out of sight.

  And when my father asked me to let him drive the Land Rover I surprised us both by handing him the keys. We had hours to go yet before we’d reach the farm and had already taken far too long, but this was a day for contrary actions and questions I did not intend to ask. Is that what grief would do to me, I wondered, as I got into the passenger’s seat on the car’s left side. Would it turn me arbitrary since it couldn’t make me cry?

  5

  Farm Life Further Disrupted

  The road was badly potholed and my father’s speed didn’t pay the slightest homage to it, but miraculously I slept, until the outskirts of Narok forced even my father to slow down, and a sense of safety woke me up. There were Maasai cattle on the road and dust was in my nostrils, but this strange sleep had been the best I’d had in three days. I was rested, and being near the farm again gave me my first fleeting sense that maybe, someday, I would actually be able to go on.

  “This is Narok,” my father said. “I haven’t been here in years.” He seemed rested too, and happy to see the dusty little town.

  There were more cattle than usual, and Maasai herders were everywhere. I asked my fa
ther to pull in at a petrol station at the far end of town, across the street from the Spear Hotel, so we could fill the tank and get away from the cattle dust for a while. Detective Mubia’s Toyota was already parked by a far-off pump.

  “We’ve seen that man before,” my father said. He was pointing out through the Land Rover’s front window. The car park was packed, but when I followed my father’s finger I saw a tall Maasai warrior, one of the two men who had tried to hold off the lions on the night of Jules’s wounds. I wanted to talk to this man, to thank him and let him know that Jules had died, but just then I realised that my father wasn’t pointing at the tall Maasai but at a shorter man, at Detective Mubia, who was walking our way.

  “My God, Daddy, we were with him at the church,” I said. “Don’t you remember? You and that man were the clean-up crew just two short hours ago.”

  Detective Mubia was at my window before I could clear my thoughts of the new extent of my father’s mental chaos, and by then the Maasai warrior was gone. Even so, I would have looked for him had the detective not opened my door, helped me out, and walked me a little away.

  “I have something more to tell you,” he said, “and something to give, which is in my car.”

  The detective was nervous now. He kept glancing over to make sure my father wasn’t following us. “It is most strange,” he said, “but the hospital personnel, the young nurse and some others, said you should have it before your husband’s funeral. And the nurse said she was sorry again, she said it many times.”

  My father had got out of the Land Rover and was heading toward the other side of the petrol station, where there were traders with beads and spears to sell, so I followed the detective over to his car, which was painted the same colour as his suit. The car’s windows were all rolled down, but when I looked through them from the driver’s side, I saw that the seats were empty, the entire car was clean. Detective Mubia took his keys out and opened the rear door. There was nothing in there either but a rectangular wooden box. I couldn’t even see a tool kit, nothing to use to fix the Toyota when it broke down. “I don’t understand,” I said.