The warehouse was brightly lit, but once inside I could see only one man standing there.
I didn’t want to stop reading, but when my father stood up to call for more coffee he bumped the table, sending the package and the other pages of the letter flying to the ground. Over the last half hour a breeze had come up and right away the pages started to blow away from the tables and down the empty road.
“Oh, grab them!” I shouted. ““Don’t let them get away!”
I really screamed, so four or five people helped us chase after the stationery, which was scattering all about.
“Oh, Father, damn it, damn it!” I cried.
My father was the slowest of the pursuers, but he nabbed the closest page and picked the package up, holding both of them above his head. I got a second sheet just at the edge of an open sewer, but a thin man dressed in a black business suit seemed to have the best luck in getting the rest. He was everywhere—each time he got a page he took off after another. He was so fast that I calmed down, sure he’d safely catch them all.
“Oh, thank you, sir,” I said. “I never would have got them back. Thank you very much.”
I noticed, as the man smoothed the sheets out and handed them to me, that Jules had numbered each page, so I tried to put them in order again. I had pages two, three, four, five, and seven.
“Daddy, do you have page six?” I asked, but my father’s hands held only the box and the first page.
“No page six?” the man said. “Let’s have another look around.”
He left me with the pages he’d rescued and went off again, in the direction the wind was going, away from the bakery and toward the place where Beatrice and her churchmates were singing their songs.
“I’ll be right back,” I told my dad, but my father wasn’t listening anymore. He’d sat back down again and was staring at his reclaimed roll.
I took my letter and the little package and went the way the man had gone, toward the singing, which was hard to hear because of the steadily rising wind. I wanted page six, but I’d been so involved in the first part of Jules’s letter that I wanted to continue reading as well, so I stopped again, leaning against a rail. Rather than read the letter, however, I opened the little box. It was thin and cylindrical, and when I first saw what was inside I must still have been under the influence of the shopping, for I thought it was a naked ear of corn, or a thin cucumber, maybe, that someone had peeled and put away. It was harder than any vegetable, though, and when I picked it up, prepared to let it go again should its hard exterior suddenly give way, its surprising weight made no further guessing necessary. It was a tiny elephant tusk, about seven inches long but with a big tusk’s curvature and with a surface that was marked and scarred. Its point was chiselled flat as if by use, and there was a slight chip on the tip’s inside. At its base the tusk was finer, the ivory thinner, and it had a more polished look. I leaned on the railing and rocked back and forth, clutching the tusk to me as though I could dig with it into Jules’s mind. At that point I saw the thin man crossing the road and searching around the edges of Beatrice’s crowd, so I stuck the tusk down into my belt and hurried after him. The little tusk immediately slipped down and was poking at my inner thigh, at the spot where that thorn had torn it nearly a month before.
When I got to the man, he was creeping along behind the drummers and singers and had stopped behind a woman who, from the back at least, looked a lot like Beatrice. All these women were wearing blue, so it was easy to see that a square of white paper was stuck to the back of this woman’s gown.
“Grab it,” I said, “take it down.”
I’d just reached him and we were both sort of crouched behind the congregation.
“You grab it,” he said, “you take it down.”
The woman had a big rear end and the paper was riding it well, conforming to its contours, and was even tucked into the folds of her gown. I handed the man the other pages of Jules’s letter and reached up, trying to find a loose end on page number six.
The etiquette of Beatrice’s church service seemed to be that each time the preacher said something the women would beat their drums and sway. I’d heard these drums all of my life but I had never come close enough to figure out their method before. When the preacher said, “Our Lord Jesus shows Himself in many ways,” I took hold of the paper and pulled.
“Ouch!” the woman said. She missed the beat of her drum and jumped around quickly, her drumstick raised in the air.
The woman’s shout drew everyone’s attention. The configuration of their circle didn’t break, but no one played her drum and everyone looked our way. Even the preacher was watching.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I dropped my letter and a page of it blew against the back of your dress.”
“That’s true,” the man said. “We both chased it over here just now.”
When the woman turned to look at us page number six stayed attached to her.
“Excuse, please,” she said, “but it is only that I have mended my gown.”
As she spoke it was suddenly easy to see that the square on her bottom wasn’t paper, but material. I could even see the stitching at its edge.
“Oh, my God,” said the thin man.
“He is everyone’s God,” said the woman. “Let’s praise Him.”
Jules had used good stationery for his letter, and this woman’s material was poor, so they met at that place where paper and cloth are cousins and they looked almost the same. I took my letter back from the man and held a page up so the woman could see that it was true. I was about to beg her pardon again, but the preacher took over and when he spoke everyone turned back to face him, once more banging their drums. It was only then that I actually did spot Beatrice, way across the circle, staring at me coldly from the other side.
“Let’s get out of here,” the man said. “Your page six must have gone a different way.”
He took my hand and led me back, helping me to cross the roundabout, where we ducked behind a building before either of us dared stand straight again.
“That was terrible,” I said, “and to lose a page of my letter is worse.”
“In that case let’s continue looking until we find it,” said the man. “We should split up. If you like I’ll take the farther reaches. It is also possible that the page is staying near your father, so perhaps you should look there.”
I was about to thank him again, and to ask how he knew my dad was my dad, when it became clear that this man knew me, that he was someone I had known before.
“Very well,” I said, but he saw my hesitation.
“I am Ralph Bunche N’deru,” he said. “I was your classmate at school. You and your girlfriends used to tease me by calling me Ralph Bunche Road.”
I remembered Ralph Bunche Road, one of the few black Kenyan boys in our school, but this man wasn’t him. Ralph Bunche Road had been skinny and quiet with his ears sticking out, and this man was handsome and tall. This man seemed self-assured, whereas Ralph Bunche Road had always looked to me as if he was about to break down and cry.
“I’ve changed,” he said.
He was off then, darting out from the protection of the building and over to the sewer so quickly that I thought he was going to leap it, the old schoolboy inside him showing off. When he got there, however, Ralph slowed and began searching among the grass, so I took the territory he’d assigned me, looking everywhere as I limped back toward my dad. I had been desperate to find page six just a few moments before—-it was Jules’s last letter, after all—but now I had that tusk, and I began to think that I would likely be able to piece things together using the pages that remained. By the time I reached my father I was a lot calmer than I’d been before. My father’s roll was gone, but his coffee cup was full again.
“Do you know who that was?” I asked. “Did you recognize the man who tried to help me just now?”
“Ralph Bunche Road,” said my dad. “I knew his father well.”
“You recognised h
im! I wouldn’t have known him in a million years.”
“He’s a travel agent now, a safari man. His father was a travel agent too. I was Minister of Wildlife when he was setting up and I helped him out. I’m surprised you haven’t seen Ralph in Narok. He used to take tourists out your way.”
Jules and I were too far off of the Narok-Nakuru road to get tourists, but in Narok, and when we went out toward the Maasai Mara, we did see them all the time. I was trying to think back to Ralph in school, but it was no longer clear to me whether I was remembering him or one of the other African boys. They were all running together in my mind.
“What’s the name of his company?” I asked, but my father didn’t know.
When I looked for him I couldn’t see Ralph anymore, so I pulled the tusk up into my belt again and sat down next to my father to wait, opening Jules’s letter once more.
The warehouse was brightly lit, but once inside I could see only one man standing there.
“You are late,” the man said. Your father had been excited when telling me he wanted me to meet this man, but now he was all business.
“Show my son-in-law what you showed me before,” he said. I think the man had intended conviviality. Behind him there was a table with three chairs and some peanuts and beer. But when he heard your father’s tone the muscles of his face hardened and he led us to the back of the warehouse, not talking again until we were standing beside a row of odd-looking machines, burners and an acetylene torch and ceramic ovens and boiling vats. It looked like a laboratory of some kind with broken molds all over the floor. “Here it is,” he said. “Look what it can do.”
“It makes tusks that look like real ones,” your father told me. He was suddenly excited again. “You won’t believe it, Julius,” he said. “No expense to the elephants and a great expense to the buyers! Ha-ha!”
The man poked a button and there was a racket and pretty soon he poked another button. The machine stopped and he unlocked its middle and opened the whole thing up. There was a tusk inside and the man asked my help in lifting it out…
This was not the kind of letter I could easily stop reading, but Ralph was back and I had to look up. He was empty-handed, but I thanked him anyway and then introduced my father, who smiled and said, “Ralph Bunche Road.”
“Do you remember me, Mr Minister?” asked Ralph. “It is nice to see you again.”
My father called the bakery girl, told me to pay his bill, and then asked Ralph to walk with him for a while. He grabbed Ralph’s sleeve as he stood, and when Ralph turned to him he said, “What’s new with you, Ralph? And how is your father getting along?”
“My father passed on,” Ralph said. “Three years now. As for me, I am still running Wildebeest Road—our small business has grown since my father’s days.”
“Good for you,” said my dad. He turned to me and said, “The name of his company is Wildebeest Road.”
To be sure, I’d seen Wildebeest Road vans out in the Rift Valley, but I had never connected the company with Ralph. And since I couldn’t think of anything to say, I asked stupidly, “Did you name it Wildebeest Road because we used to call you Ralph Bunche Road?”
It was an idiotic question but it made Ralph stop. “Maybe,” he said, “though I hadn’t thought about it until now. I just imagined it was a comfortable-sounding name and since we had to call it something, I suggested it to my dad.”
“You would have done better to name it Rhinoceros Road or Leopard Road,” my father said. “These tourists want assurances that they’ll see something grand. One of the big five. Wildebeests are a dime a dozen. They all want to see cats.”
Ralph smiled and I looked at him carefully, trying to find the boy I had known. I looked at his haircut, but though it was short, his ears didn’t stick out. The more I looked at him the more I wasn’t sure, though I clearly remembered the name, whether I remembered Ralph Bunche Road at all. Kenyan boys had been a long way from the forefront of my thoughts back then—was that what Mr N’chele had been trying to say?
We were at the car, and I unlocked my father’s side. Ralph helped him climb in and then walked me to the driver’s side.
“Do you have a family, Ralph? Do you have a wife, do you have children of your own?”
“Alas,” he said.
“Are you happy, then,” I asked, “without them?” It was an unexpected question, the kind of thing I would never have asked anyone before, and related, somehow, to what I had tried to tell my father back at the church. But I let it stand, keeping my look steady so that he might think I’d intended the question all along. What I really wanted to know, of course, had nothing to do with Ralph’s life, but whether or not he knew of the recent events in my own, and while I waited for him to answer I began to cry. Tears ran from my eyes with a kind of consideration for the rest of me. That is, they rolled down freely, leaving my composure otherwise intact.
I expected Ralph to be embarrassed but he wasn’t. He didn’t touch me, but he also didn’t look away. What he did do was reach into his pocket and bring out a pressed and folded handkerchief for me to hold.
“I heard about it, Nora,” he said. “It was in the newspaper the other day. Also, a few of us meet for drinks at the Norfolk on Friday afternoons and we talked of almost nothing else last time.”
“A few of you?”
“Oh, still the Hillcrest boys, and one or two others we’ve picked up along the way.”
What he meant, I understood, was that the African boys who had gone to Hillcrest School had kept in touch all these years. I knew they’d been close, but I hadn’t given them any thought since my school days, and the idea that they had spent last Friday discussing me made me stop crying and stand up tall.
“If I come next Friday, will I know any of them?” I asked. Ralph shrugged as if irritated and said, “How should I know?”
I got into the Land Rover, pushing the window open.
“When you get home you will be able to read your letter in peace,” Ralph said. “No more interruptions from various winds.”
“I’m sorry, Ralph,” I said, but I was not sure why.
When I started the car my father jumped. “Say good-bye to Ralph, Dad,” I said. My father, however, was looking out the wrong side of the car and couldn’t find him.
When we got home it was after four. My father went to his room to rest and I sat on our verandah alone. Seeing Ralph had been as strangely unsettling as seeing Mr N’chele had been, so I didn’t turn to Jules’s letter immediately but waited for a calm within me, a debris-free sea on which to sail my husbands paper boat. And while I waited I looked at the tiny tusk again. It really did look scarred, as if it had been a well-used tool during the entirety of an adult elephant’s life, and it still seemed absolutely real. I knew nothing of acrylics, but if this was put together by a man, then it really was a perfect job. There was no seam, and the jagged edges of the tusk’s hollow end were unsightly in places, I could see that now, as if living tissue had once been there and had dried.
Previously, when I tried to imagine what had attracted Jules to such an unlikely scheme, I’d come up with nothing, but with this tusk in my hand I was beginning to see the draw. Maybe there was a certain justice in selling phony tusks to the ivory hoarders of the world, a certain pleasure in making them think they were real. Maybe Jules really had understood it as an ironic joke. Wasn’t that like him? I asked myself.
Indeed it was, so I took a breath and asked myself that other question one more time. Even if all that was true, why hadn’t he told me about it? We had shared the work of our farm. We had shared our bed and our journeys to town and our films and our illnesses and our food. Jules and I had shared all of our lives, so why hadn’t he shared this with me? Did Jules think I wouldn’t understand?
I fell asleep on the verandah with this question lodged in my mind and when I awoke it was nearly dark. Jules’s letter was still in my lap, the tiny tusk weighing it down. When I raised it up my eyes knew exactly where they had lef
t off.
My God, Nora, the thing was heavy and it had the coloration and markings appropriate to age When I asked how he did it the man told me he had dyes that would vary the colors quite as much as nature did, and when I asked him how he got the thing so heavy he said it was a secret and he wouldn’t tell.
We saw tusks of various sizes, the tiny to the huge, proof positive in the accompanying box I have sent, and when we got back to the front of the warehouse your father was in a state. Now he wanted to sit at the man’s table and drink the man’s beer.
“I will sell them in Europe,” he said. “Think what a joke it will be. I am the Minister of Wildlife, Retired! All those would-be hunters will be standing in line!”
I understood right then, Nora, that what your father was about to ask me to do could get us in trouble, but I liked the idea too, I have to admit it, and with the beer and the man’s talk and your father’s compelling joy, before I knew it I had agreed to ship these things to Europe for him, to smuggle them out of Kenya in our coffee bags. Your father’s job was to be sales and distribution which, don’t you see, was actually the most dangerous part. If I got caught smuggling the things I would only need to prove that they weren’t real and it wouldn’t be smuggling!
Ah, but why didn’t I tell you about it, Nora, as soon as I got home? I guess it’s because there was money in what we were doing, and by the end of that first night we had all agreed that no one else should know. So for all this time, Nora, since shortly after the evening I’ve described, whenever I went to town I would pick up some of these artificial tusks and arrange one way or another to get them out of the country, the smaller ones stuck down inside bags of coffee beans, the larger ones in boxes marked machinery and the like.
Oh, Nora, you married such a fool. The longer things went on, though no one at the airport ever looked inside our coffee bags, the more I began to understand what.
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