6
Two Queer Birds
Why was I so horrible about my father, who was too old to stay out all night long and who had been showing signs of increased senility ever since his arrival the day before? Why was I so unfeeling, so unkind? Detective Mubia had told me that looking for my father in the dark would be futile, but it wasn’t like me to take my way of thinking from another person, from a recently met and out-of-place man.
As I lay on my bed I at first decided that I had acted that way because I had not yet found the grief and pain that had wanted to visit me when Jules died, that maybe some part of me hadn’t been satisfied with my performance outside on the ground, and I was making worry over my father wait in line. I loved my husband, and I had always believed I loved my father too, but nesting with the misery I was keeping at bay were two queer and unexpected birds. The first one I’ve mentioned before: At Jules’s death something in me began looking to the future with a sense of renewed possibility, a lightness in my broken heart that was brutalizing me nearly as much as losing Jules was. The second queer bird was this: With my father’s disappearance, though his fate was far less sealed than Jules’s, I was filled with such unfocused malaise that in my heart of hearts I didn’t seem to care what happened to him at all.
I’d switched on my bedside lamp and was playing with my wristwatch while thinking about my dad. There had been a small mystery with my watch over the last three weeks or so. It would run fine all day but would stop every night at twenty minutes to twelve. Since Jules and I were always asleep by then, we never actually saw it stop, but we’d check it in the morning. The watch never stopped at twenty minutes to noon, it would only stop at night.
I was fingering the watch and asking myself why it stopped, and also what my father could have done to bring out such ambivalence in a daughter who’d never been ambivalent before, when suddenly answers to both questions came clear. My watch was stopping because its battery was low. It had enough power to move the hands around, but every twenty-four hours it had to turn the date as well, and it didn’t have enough power for that. And when I understood the watch, because I understood the watch, I thought I understood my attitude toward my father too. During all of my life, when things were going fine, I had a full battery, enough power in me to love my father while never thinking critically about him at all. But as soon as I heard the voice on that tape, as soon as things went wrong, I couldn’t do it anymore. I had lost my power, my resources were just too low.
Does that make any sense? What I’m saying is that one moment I would have said that my father’s career as Minister of Wildlife was unblemished, and the next I knew that it was not. We lie to ourselves in odd kinds of ways, especially as children, I suppose, but here and now, many years after his career was done, many years after he had lost his wife and I my mother, and as I lay observing the second hand sweep around the face of my watch, I understood that my father was finally caught in some kind of late-coming retribution, some wild and improper scheme. And I could not go outside and look for him, I think, because I knew that retribution was at hand.
Those were the two queer birds I slept with that night, a feeling of liberation at the death of someone I loved, and a feeling of anger at a father who had avoided my anger for too long.
I had set my alarm clock for five A.M. but was up before it went off. I got shovels from our shed and collected all of the lanterns in the house, but I didn’t wake Detective Mubia, for during my restive night I had come up with the idea that I would purge myself of queer bird number one, at least, by digging Jules’s grave alone. After that I promised myself I would find a way to worry about my dad.
The beginning streaks of dawn had lit up the east but I still couldn’t see very well when I finally went out and found the orchard earth where I wanted Jules’s grave to be. This was our outside spot, the place where we occasionally slept and made love, our bodies blanketed by the endless array of stars. Jules loved this spot more than any other. It was here that he always kept a fresh campfire built, so he could light it with ease and lie beside it at a moment’s notice, one or two nights a month.
The morning was clear when the sun came up, the view of the valley unsurpassed. I could see a thousand wildebeests and zebra down there, moving out across the Mara plains. I could see elephants, too, much closer, heading into another wind, camped against it with their heads bent down, and I wondered, was this the herd to which that calf had belonged? Would its mother come charging back through our land again, solitary like me and angry with herself for feeling some secret release in it all?
I had put on old work clothes and cinched my belt tight about my waist, and when I took the first shovelful of dirt I felt better. The ground was softer than I’d expected it to be. I moved down a foot without much trouble, and then down two. I wanted to dig the grave deep, eight feet was my goal, and by the time Detective Mubia came out I had already achieved a third of it, though the hole wasn’t even, and not quite seven feet long.
“I will build a perimeter with string,” the detective said, “I will make the borders square.” He didn’t know where things were, but he returned to the house and came back quickly, with twine and a few short stakes with dirt on them, from the shamba behind the workers’ dormitory, where my father had been.
The detective was good with his hands, his work was quick and clean, and in a moment I was throwing earth up over a taut and definite outline, one that allowed me to make the grave sufficiently long even as I worked my way down. Detective Mubia had said several times the night before that he would help, but now he seemed to understand without my telling him that this work was mine to do alone, so instead of offering to relieve me he took another shovel and moved the displaced earth into orderly piles. Once he went back into the house to bring water, and another time he cut a piece of the string to eight feet, so that I could measure the depth of the work I’d done. Otherwise the detective stood by watching, and I took a kind of strength even from that.
I guess it should come as no surprise, since I haven’t stinted in describing the abundance of game on our farm, to hear that during one of my breaks from digging, when the grave was at six feet but didn’t want to go farther down, the detective noticed the patterned back of a giant python in the medium-tall grass a dozen yards away. This snake was one I knew, a kind of resident. It was eighteen or twenty feet long and usually spent its time closer to our pond, waiting for a dik-dik to come by or sleepily digesting the dik-dik that had come by the day before. I remembered a time when Jules and I were playing in the orchard and he actually pulled this snake’s tail, laughing and then running away. When the detective and I walked a little nearer to the snake we could see a bulge in its middle, so I knew we’d be fine. It would neither come closer nor go farther away.
It may be hard to understand why, but seeing that snake, having it come very nearly to the edge of Jules’s grave, put me in a peaceful frame of mind. I began to cry a little, this time soft and easy, and I began to remember what a good man Julius had been. Isn’t that the purpose of funerals, after all, to remember such things? I knew, because my father was missing and I had seen Jules among the tusks, that I might not be able to think of him that way again, but for that moment I had his goodness firmly in my mind, and I didn’t want to lose it until the funeral was done.
“Six feet is good enough,” I told Detective Mubia. I’d been digging for about two hours, so I guessed it was close to eight A.M. Dr Zir had said he would leave Nairobi by nine, that we should be ready for his arrival here by nine-thirty or ten. Because the generator had been on all night, I knew there’d be hot water, so I asked the detective to stay outside, and I went in to take a shower. I haven’t mentioned that I had it with me, but I picked up that .380 automatic pistol, which had been resting in the crook of a nearby thorn tree, and walked slowly back to the house.
I have never thought of myself as a vulnerable woman—I don’t think anyone thinks of me that way. I’m fit and strong and during ordinary
times I carry a certain self-assurance, a no-nonsense aura that I have fostered over the years. I am telling you this now because of what happened in the house shortly after I stepped out of my shower, hot and clean.
I was wrapped in a big towel, covering myself with it but also using one end to vigorously dry my hair, when I suddenly knew that I was not alone in the house. I picked up my pistol, pushed its barrel through the folds of the towel, and stepped down the hall.
“Hello,” I said.
I think I had expected Detective Mubia but there were two other men standing at my open front door. Beyond them I could see the pond.
The men were staring at the tip of my pistol, which came from the folds of my towel at a level just below my waist, but was aimed up. Of the two men I knew one. He was Kamau, our foreman, the man who’d shot Jules in the back. Kamau was carrying Jules’s hunting rifle, slung over his shoulder the way Jules used to carry it, but I immediately understood that aiming it at me was the last thing on his mind. He was nodding gravely, his jaw and his anguished eyes moving wildly.
“What do you want?” I asked.
“We have your father outside,” the other man said.
“What I want to know is what in the world are you going to do with him?”
I guess I had decided that a hard reply might give me more time to figure things out, but the one who’d spoken didn’t like it. He hissed and said, “This is not a joking matter. Your father says that he remembers nothing and your husband is dead. Now we are turning to you.”
“But I’m not in on it,” I told him. “I never was. I really don’t know a fraction of what my father does, even if his mind is gone.”
This first man didn’t seem to be armed. He was only a little older than me and he looked far more like a businessman than he did a poacher or a criminal. He was well-spoken and probably well-educated too. I had seen him before, I knew him, but I also knew that I wouldn’t be able to remember how.
“When your father was Minister of Wildlife his memory was fine,” said the man.
“That was before independence,” I said, “a dozen years ago. If my father did something wrong back then, what took you so long? How can you hold him responsible now?”
Even as I spoke I knew I was on the wrong track, working only out of my own meandering thoughts of a few hours before. But I had gained a little time, and maybe I had also made the man believe I didn’t know about the poaching, that I thought everything was political, that it was all about settling some old score.
The man didn’t answer, so since I was the one with the pistol, I spoke again.
“I need to get dressed,” I said. “Tell me what you want and get out of my house. Let me get on with my day.”
“I want only what is mine,” said the man. “Ask that fool policeman. Your father owes me money, too, but I am willing to forget about that. All I want now is my property back. There is no other way.”
He had kept his voice calm, so I spoke calmly too, asking “How much time do I have to sort things out, to find your property and give it back to you? Do I have a week? Do I have a fortnight? Do I have a month?”
The man looked at me carefully but ignored my tone. “Very well, you may have a week,” he said.
“Will you contact me?” I asked. “How shall I find you again?” But he said only, “Arrange everything by the end of next week.” He then turned and walked out the door. Kamau was right behind him, never having spoken at all.
I had dried inside my towel so I went back into the bedroom and jumped into clean clothes, a black dress with a low-cut front, over which I wrapped a black kikoi. This time I left the silver pistol in a hat box on my closet shelf. I combed my hair in a stroke or two and went outside to stare into the blue morning sky, off toward Nairobi, for the dot that would become the helicopter that was bringing Julius home. The sky was empty but when I looked back down again, there was my father, midway between the dormitory and the house, still perched on that old bench. He looked small and pitiful. He was sitting on his hands.
I ran toward my father, full of guilt, but just at that moment the helicopter was there, rising up out of the Great Rift Valley, coming over the orchard hill. I stopped in my tracks, black kikoi pulled tight around my shoulders, and when my father stood up, Detective Mubia joined us, running over from the orchard as if the helicopter were herding him, nudging him our way. The detective helped my father follow me over to a flat patch of earth next to the pond and we all waved, showing the best place for a helicopter to land.
It had been a calm morning but the helicopter reminded me of uncalm ones, of the days Jules and I liked so much when storms rattled our windows and made our farm stand up, turning everything alive. I could see Dr Zir in the front seat next to the pilot, and I could see a plain wooden coffin strapped beside him, outside, exposed to elements that could no longer move its occupant at all. When the helicopter settled and the noise went away, Detective Mubia stepped in under its blades and opened Dr Zir’s door. My father, who had taken my arm, and whose hand I now tightly pressed to my side, said, “I’ve known that fellow for years, Nora. His name is Zir.”
When the pilot got out and unstrapped the coffin, he and Detective Mubia lifted it up and carried it slightly off to the side. And though Dr Zir and my father were old, they rushed to help too, everyone following the detective’s lead, carrying Jules all the way over to the edge of his grave. A slight wind had come up by then, as if brought by the helicopter blades.
I had dug Jules’s grave in a diligent and single-minded way, purging myself of anger and doing my duty at the same time, but I realised just then that I hadn’t planned a service for him. I guess I thought I’d simply bury him without words, since adequate words would be impossible to find.
“I want to go into the house for a book,” I said. “Something to read from while we lower him down.”
“Me too,” said my dad.
I would have asked Detective Mubia to come so I could tell him about my encounter with our foreman and make him tell me about the other man, but when my father came with me, the detective held back. My dad kept pace beside me, hands behind him, clothing all a mess. He not only didn’t seem offended by my indifference to his last night’s plight, he didn’t, seem to have noticed it.
“Did they let you get any sleep, Daddy?” I asked. “Do you want to try wearing something of Julius’s when we get inside?”
“I slept like the dead,” said my father, but after a moment he remembered to add, “Nora, those men asked me questions all night long.”
Our small library, the one Jules and I kept in bookcases on either side of our fireplace, had been scattered by the intruders. I think I intended to give Jules a secular send-off, I don’t know, perhaps reading a passage from some favourite book of his, but among the pile on the floor I saw our Bible first, and my father immediately found a book that he himself had written and published in 1956, a book entitled Elephants of Tsavo and Other Lands. Daddy had worked in Tsavo Game Park when he was a young warden, and this book had helped him move up through the ranks. I’d read the book a hundred times as a girl, but it was not a serious work, and I kept it now only because he’d written it. The book was lean on writing but full of black-and-white photographs, like Who’s Who in the Zoo.
“You read from that and I’ll read from this,” said my dad.
His eyes had light in them again so I asked one more time if he wanted to clean up, but I couldn’t interest him in that. I think he’d have been content, as a matter of fact, just to pull up a chair and read from his book right there in the living room, amid all the clutter. He came along readily, however, when I reminded him that Dr Zir and the others were waiting outside.
During the time we were gone, Dr Zir and Detective Mubia had walked around to the back of the house and found flowers, roses mostly, but lilies and hibiscus and a long and viney strand of bougainvillea from the plant that grew up our bedroom wall. They had laid some of the flowers on top of the coffin, but each
of the men also held something colourful in his hand. It was a nice gesture, awkward and touching. Dr Zir was crying and Detective Mubia was looking down.
I had somehow imagined that more people would turn up, one or two of Jules’s friends from Narok, perhaps, and surely most of our field hands. But it was just the five of us, so when I got to the side of the grave I opened my Bible and started to read. Ever since I was a child, however close or far I might have been from religious faith, I have believed, just like Saint Augustine, that a random reading from the Bible would point the way, would give its reader a message, so I placed Jules’s face firmly in my mind and read the following passage: “Nevertheless let every one of you in particular so love his wife even as himself; and the wife see that she reverence her husband.” That made me stop. Random readings had never before worked so well. But by the time I looked at the Bible again, it was too late to continue, for my father had taken my pause as his cue.
“In its rush through the jungle a herd of African elephants makes the ground tremble,” he read. “They are the largest and heaviest animals of the dark continent. Forty or fifty of them in a herd may blacken the landscape for a wide area with their shadows.”
My father had a rich voice, far more appropriate than mine, and oddly enough, the sound of it invested his words with greater meaning than my own.
When he looked at me and nodded, I read again, from somewhere near the same spot. “So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loveth his wife loveth himself.”
“Praise Jesus, praise Jesus Christ and praise God,” said the detective, but I thought my passages were getting pretty self-serving, so I quickly found another page. Too late; my father took over again.
“Elephant herds stampede when alarmed at the approach of ivory hunters with their high-calibre rifles or the native who attacks them with arrows for their meat. But as a rule they shuffle along slowly and silently in search of a good grazing spot, stopping to coil their flexible trunks around roots and tree branches, which they eat in great quantities.”
Ahmed's Revenge Page 7