Ahmed's Revenge

by Richard Wiley

  I guess I thought that if I stopped reading my father would too, so I said, “My husband, Julius Grant, was an admirer of the peculiar. He was drawn to the absurd.” I don’t know why I said that. I hadn’t meant to insult my father, and I looked quickly at him to make sure I had not. I could see, however, that if I didn’t continue he soon would, so I read again, from the new place I’d found. “For God commanded, saying, Honour thy father and mother: and, He that curseth father or mother, let him die the death.”

  There it was again, and I thought, How could I have acted so heartlessly last night? Never mind all that idiocy about the battery in my watch, my father had really done nothing except come down from England to console me, so how could I treat him like that? I put my Bible away, trying simply to hold my sorrow in and think about Julius at the same time.

  “Herds retain their members for many years,” read my father, “and the individual elephants are loyal to the community.” He was crying by then, but though his voice shook, he read on, braving his own internal storm. “Led by the cow elephant they travel single file, keeping careful watch over the young and the sick. They step in the leader’s tracks, and when the last elephant has passed, the tracks are deep pits, making it dangerous for men to follow. Often they risk their lives to save a wounded companion too weak to fight or run away.”

  Now I was crying too. While listening to my dad I had recaptured the night of Jules’s wounding, could see it all so well. I saw that elephant calf again, mortally hurt, and I saw the other elephants, coming too late to rescue it and trumpeting their despair into the sky. I saw myself kneeling down, and I saw the steady eyes of the Maasai, crouched behind their spears like turret gunners. I understood that the calf’s mother would have tried to kill those lions had the lions not run away and I thought, How was my own behaviour in comparison with the mother elephant’s that night?

  My father stopped reading and closed his book. He had written those words in 1956, but though they’d had no impact on the zoological world, they were somehow essential to everything now, not only to Jules’s death, but to whatever my father was going to have to tell me about his relationship to that man. I watched him for a long time, wondering if what he’d read had been chosen at random also, or whether he was being tricky. Had he opened his book and let his fingers wander wherever they might, or was he trying to tell me something even now, as he stood there watching me cry?

  When the silence grew too long I asked Detective Mubia to help me lift Jules’s coffin down into the grave, but the helicopter pilot right away offered to take my part. We hadn’t rigged anything like lowering straps, and I hadn’t dug the grave with any extra room for standing, so the two men had to lean precariously over either end of the hole to lower the coffin to ground level, and then drop to their knees so they could take it most of the rest of the way down; they let it fall the last two feet or so.

  The coffin had been lowered with flowers on top. I threw in the ones I’d been holding, watched them land where Jules’s heart should be, then stepped aside so that the others, first my father, then Dr Zir, then Detective Mubia and the pilot, could throw their flowers in also. It had been too quick, but the end of my husband’s funeral was at hand. I reached back and got a shovel and rained earth down on Jules without saying anything more. I put my earth on his chest first, over the flowers we had thrown, then on his legs and across where I supposed his genitals might be. I saved my husband’s face for last, but when I got to it I covered it quickly, without any further delay. After that Detective Mubia took the shovel and the grave filled up fast.

  That was all. Inside the house we washed our hands and my father found Jules’s bottle of Bushmill’s and Dr Zir got five glasses from the kitchen. Detective Mubia and I picked up the living room, setting things straight, ordering the chairs and putting the books back on the shelves. If filling Jules’s grave took twenty minutes, cleaning my living room took ten. Though the house had looked trashed last night, it really hadn’t been. Nothing much was broken—half a dozen items from the kitchen, perhaps, and a lamp in the hallway.

  The whiskey glasses were filled and waiting. I thought the helicopter pilot, since he was working, would refuse a drink, but I was wrong. We held our glasses up. Julius Grant and I had been married for six years, we had broken our backs putting our farm together and building our life, and now I was toasting his trip to the other side with my confused father and his oldest friend, and with two strangers as well.

  The helicopter pilot flew off alone that afternoon. I expected Dr Zir to go with him, but he stayed behind. We put chairs out on our porch and drank tea until the sun went down, washing the feeling of the whiskey away. When the first animals arrived at our pond Detective Mubia sat up, pleased at their closeness and their variety. A warthog was there, and a dik-dik came right past us, from the coffee plants at the back of the house.

  “Let’s count them,” said Dr Zir. “Not the individuals, but the species, let’s keep track.”

  “Three,” said my father, though there had been only two so far.

  I went into our office for a pad and pencil and when I handed it to the detective, we all made guesses; before we knew it all of us were involved in the animal game, nodding quietly whenever a new species came to the pond. I looked at my father once and he smiled, saying, “Noah’s ark.”

  After the sun went down I stepped in and switched on the pond light. We had been in the dark only a few minutes, talking and looking at each other for a change, but when the light came on everyone focused on the pond again. On its far side now was a single male lion, small and young. The other animals had gone back into the darkness to wait.

  My father took my hand and squeezed it and I said, “Oh dear God, no.”

  “What’s wrong?” he asked. “What’s happened now?”

  Since I was looking across at the Land Rover I didn’t have to answer, for the detective remembered it too.

  “Ah,” he said, “the dead man’s arm. We forgot to bury it with the rest of him.”

  “Oh my,” said Dr Zir.

  “Forget it,” my father said. “We can bury it easily enough in the morning. We can dig another grave an arm’s length deep.”

  “Right-o,” said Dr Zir. “We will plant it next to the rest of him. Perhaps we will get a palm tree.”

  There was a moment of profound silence. It was impossible to laugh, but that’s what they all wanted to do. Dr Zir was looking down, utterly shocked and furious with himself, and my father had his mouth clamped shut and Detective Mubia was looking fiercely away. No one meant to be frivolous, least of all poor Dr Zir, and I remember thinking that the next day, when I went out to bury my husband’s arm, this moment on the porch would come back to me.

  I reached across the small expanse of porch and touched Dr Zir’s shoulder until we all settled down. Another species had come, a Grant’s gazelle, as if specially to honour the memory of Jules’s name.

  7

  Interrogating My Father

  The house was small, but no one suggested that anyone go out to the dormitory to sleep. My father and Dr Zir slept together in the little guest room that the detective had used before, and Detective Mubia, who spent most of the night watching animals from the porch, took charge of the living-room couch.

  In the morning I was awakened by the sounds of breakfast being made, and when I dressed and came out of my room I saw that both my father and Dr Zir were wearing aprons and cracking eggs into a big bowl. They’d cracked a dozen eggs for the four of us, and there was a raft of crisp bacon already on the kitchen table, a stack of toast so high that I thought it would surely fall over. I could see that Detective Mubia was still on the living-room couch, his red suit still on his body, his shoes beside him on the floor.

  My father and Dr Zir had been arguing about the eggs, but when I came out they turned and presented a unified smile. Detective Mubia moved his feet out of sight, then came up standing, slipping into his shoes and pressing down the sides of his suit as he
walked across the floor.

  “Did our leopard appear?” I asked. “Did you see him last night?”

  “He came like a ghost,” the detective said. “He had a pure white front and a tail that bobbed in back of him as if it was held up by a wire.”

  I didn’t remember cleaning up very well, but my kitchen looked orderly again, and I asked Dr Zir how long they’d been awake.

  “With the sun, dear,” he said, “with the cock’s crow, but quiet as mice until just now.”

  It was hard to guess from his appearance that Dr Zir was a medical man. He had a naturally sympathetic face, but otherwise he was ugly. He had small eyes with dark circles under them, and a big nose, a narrow mouth, and a weak jaw. He had incongruous features but they somehow worked to form a congruous whole.

  “After breakfast we need to settle down and discover a few things,” I said. I was speaking to my father, but he was putting plates on the table and didn’t hear, so I went into the office and looked at the desk and files, all of them still locked and undisturbed. Through the window I could see the Land Rover, and when I remembered that another burial duty remained, I went back through the living room and walked outside, past the car and onto the porch of the workers’ dormitory. This building was larger than our house and contained eight rooms, four to each side of a single hallway. It was a dreary place, dark at any time of day, but since we never had more than eight regular farmhands, it was decent housing, usually one person to a room. There was a shower in the building and a toilet out back. Some of our workers did occasionally bring their families to live with them in these rooms, but for the most part they lived alone. We paid them well, and when we needed extra pickers we hired them from the pool of men and women who were always available, down at the petrol station in Narok.

  The first room to the right of the main dormitory door was Kamau’s. It was dreadful to realize that Kamau had been working against us for who knows how long, that he no doubt shot Jules on purpose that night. When I tried the door to his room I assumed it would be locked, but it swung open quickly, startling me.

  “Hello,” I said.

  Kamau’s room hadn’t been cleaned out. His bed still had blankets on it, and his table, which he’d placed below the room’s only window, held a stack of letters, Nairobi postmarks on most of them, the rest from western Kenya. The letters appeared to be personal. The one I opened was written in Kiswahili and asked Kamau for money, saying that the money should come more regularly, as it always had before. Kamau had his responsibilities, the letter said, and he wasn’t meeting them. It was a stern letter, unfriendly and unsigned, and written in what I took to be a woman’s hand.

  I put the letter back in its envelope and was about to open another when the gleaming edge of Kamau’s panga caught my eye. This panga was Kamau’s baton, his swagger stick; he was never without it when he walked around the farm. It had a well-cared-for blade, and I remembered that Jules used to tease him by saying that though Kamau’s panga was the best and the sharpest on our land, no one had ever seen it do any work. It struck me as strange, then, even under circumstances such as these, that Kamau would go off and leave the panga behind. I checked his closet and his trunk, but besides the letters and the panga, his clothing and other personal possessions were gone. There was a small photograph of a woman and three children hanging next to the panga from a nail on the wall.

  I took the panga down, ran my thumb lightly across its blade, and kept it with me when I stepped back out of Kamau’s room. I was as sure as I could be that none of our other workers were involved with Kamau, for as I checked their rooms I noticed that they had been vacated in a much more orderly way. Even their crucifixes were gone from the walls, leaving shadows of crosses in the permanent dust. It was as if they had been ordered out but had been given time to pack. Kamau’s room, on the other hand, contained the disorder of a man who was lost, the disorder of hasty flight and chaos.

  As I was coming out of the farthest room I heard Detective Mubia calling me from the porch. “Mama,” he said, “the gentlemen have prepared our meal.” I tried to call him into the dormitory, to show him what I’d found, but when he didn’t come I took the panga and stepped outside again, the blade flashing in the morning light. I told the detective about Kamau’s room and then about the visit I had had nearly twenty-four hours before, from Kamau and his new boss, that hateful man in the business suit. I told him that the man had mentioned him, going so far as to call him a fool.

  “That is the man whose voice I know,” the detective said. “I knew it yesterday, but I could not speak his name. It is a city name, an unspeakable name, and one he has taken to make his own father angry.”

  Yesterday when I asked Detective Mubia to tell me what he knew he had ignored me, but I felt sure he’d tell me everything now. When I asked him, however, he would only say, “Come, let us go inside and eat. The key to everything is not out here.”

  There was a sense of forced heartiness at breakfast. My father was expansive, uninterested in talking about his night with the bandits but wanting to tell stories of the old days, about the Tsavo game reserve and the years when he was a warden there. The rest of us listened politely. Detective Mubia, who hadn’t heard the stories before, really did seem engaged, and since I couldn’t get the detective to tell me anything, I found myself trying to gain some sense of what was going on now by what my father said about the past.

  “Daddy’s real love was elephants, as you no doubt gathered from his book,” I said. “He had a dedicated concern for their well-being, he always tried to keep them out of harm’s way.”

  It was a blatant comment, but no matter how I hinted, I couldn’t move my father to mention poaching, nor could I make Detective Mubia say that other man’s name. So when Dr Zir started to clear the table, I stared into my father’s sallow eyes. If he knew what was going on, I wanted him to tell me now, but I was also strangely reluctant to ask. It seemed oddly necessary that my father volunteer the information, that the words come freely without my insisting on them. It was as if only that could save the relationship between us once the truth was known. I sat a little farther back and looked at the detective too. The answers I wanted were brewing inside both these men, but they wouldn’t come out until the brewing was done.

  I’d intended to use the time after breakfast to go out and bury Jules’s arm, but we all somehow went back into the office instead. The office was small, intended by the original owner to be another bedroom, I think, and since Jules and I often used it together, there were two desks in there. There was a couch under the window, and Dr Zir and Detective Mubia sat on that. My father stayed in the hallway outside. I opened the file cabinet next to the desk, pulling both drawers all the way out.

  “Julius was fastidious,” I said. “If he has anything written down, anything that will help us, it will be here.”

  I bent over the drawer and began looking through the files. Everything before me seemed to start with the letter C There were notes on coffee sales, notes on wages paid and owed, receipts from a dozen Nairobi businesses for supplies, and lists of orders made.

  I slammed the first drawer shut and began taking files out of the second, but this drawer contained coffee files too, and where the files ended, Jules’s collection of maps began. Jules had been a superb and enthusiastic cartographer, it was his hobby, and so we had hand-made maps for much of the country, everywhere we had ever gone. Jules’s maps were drawn with such detail that they always included the smallest roads. I pulled out the first map, of the Samburu region to the north and of the Rendille area around Marsabit. Jules often drew animals on his maps, small depictions of the game that was there, and at Marsabit he had drawn a wonderful likeness of Ahmed, the government-protected tusker who was always in the news these days. “Look,” I told the two men, “Jules was an artist. See what he could draw.”

  I had begun to cry again, they could hear it in my voice, but neither man said anything. Detective Mubia was examining the frayed front of hi
s lapel, and when I looked at Dr Zir he went out of the office and came back with his doctor’s bag. “Let me give you something, Nora dear,” he said. “Something mild will help to get you through the rest of today, something for tomorrow too.”

  Dr Zir’s watery eyes were shining at me. He held a pill box, no doubt containing sedatives, which would let me understand my father better if I took them, but I grabbed the doctor’s hand and firmly pushed the pill box away. He had a glass of water with him, and he surprised me by shrugging and taking a pill himself, quickly washing it down. And after that we all felt calm.

  I was putting Jules’s map back in the file cabinet when another file, behind where the maps were, drew my attention. It was an ordinary manila folder with a clipped-on label. “Elephants of Tsavo and Other Lands” is what the label said.

  “Hold on. What’s this?”

  “Elephants of Tsavo,” Dr Zir read. “How nice. He’s managed to remember his father-in-law.”

  Inside the file were three thin sheets of paper, each with lists of numbers on them. There was nothing about elephants in the file, and there were no hints as to what the numbers meant. Everything was in Jules’s hand, but other than that, nothing meant a thing to me. I showed the file to Detective Mubia, but he couldn’t make anything of it either. Dr Zir was starting to stare at us with my father’s unfocused eyes when my father himself appeared at the door.

  “That would be our code,” he calmly said. “No one knows it but Julius and me.”

  Detective Mubia got up and my father sat down, taking the three sheets of paper from my hand. “We were in very deep, Nora,” he said, “over our heads by a mile.”