My right shoulder was hit at just the place where Kamau had shot Jules, and though I tried to crawl forward, I couldn’t seem to move. I screamed, I think, and while I waited for the blood to come, other objects slammed in around me, bullets thudding into the ground. Let it end now, I prayed, let my father find me, let me ask my questions on the other side. I closed my eyes and was about to turn toward the onslaught, letting the bullets tear into my unloved breasts, but to my great surprise my father’s security guard came over and took hold of my arms, utterly fearless, and helped me stand. “Oh Mama!” he screamed. “Those filthy buggers! I didn’t see them come!”
I was sure I was dying, since now there was pain and I could also feel an ooze. The back of my shirt was clammy, and I thought the wound might be larger than the one Jules had. The guard was brave. He dragged me onto the porch, all the while screaming in Swahili, “I did not know they had come!”
Then, instead of applying first aid, he seemed to forget my wounds as soon as he got me settled. He ran back outside again, turned on the garden hose, and sprinted with it across our yard.
I thought the security guard was gallant, but I also thought he’d gone mad, so instead of staying where he’d put me I crawled over to the edge of the porch to watch. The guard had aimed the hose up into our avocado tree, and dozens of monkeys were now streaming out of it, throwing an occasional avocado at him, but pretty much giving up the battle, heading back down into the valley from whence they’d come. When they were gone the guard came back slowly, looking worried and winding up the hose.
“They sneaked in behind me while I was watching the road,” he explained.
He was sure I’d be furious, since watching out for marauding monkeys was a big part of his job, but I only asked that he scrape the mess off the back of my shirt and then help me inside. There was half an avocado on my shoulder blade, and when the guard tried to take hold of it his fingers and thumb burst through its skin, like five skaters going through the ice. “It’s a rotten one,” he said.
“Just turn the hose on again. Just let me step back outside.”
We had had dozens of security guards over the years, and this man wasn’t someone I knew well, so when I asked him to hose me off, he was chagrined.
“Only go and remove the shirt for Beatrice,” he said.
“It’s too awful,” I told him. “The smell will be horrid and it will mess up the house.”
The security guard’s hands were covered with the pulpy avocado, so when he turned the hose back on he washed them first, then lifted up a paltry stream.
“Give it some power,” I said. “Put your thumb into it.”
He did as I asked, and when I dipped my wounded shoulder into the stream, he held it steady while the hunks of avocado fell off. Even the seed had stuck to me, and when the water finally forced it away, I felt like Jules must have felt in surgery. I imagined I could feel the kindness of Dr Zir as he removed my bullet, and I thought, This world is made up of many people, not all of them working for Mr Smith, not all of them headed in evil’s way.
“That’s enough,” I said. “Thanks a lot.”
When the guard turned the hose off I picked up the avocado seed, holding it so that I could see it in the light of the moon. This is my husband’s heart, I told myself, small for not having within it the courage to include me, to open up and welcome me, no matter what kind of trouble he was in. And this is my own heart too, small for its selfishness, for its unexpandable quality, for its inability to focus on more than one thing.
This was also, of course, an avocado seed, driven into my shoulder by an attacking monkey, and when I walked over to the edge of the garden, to the edge of the slope that led to the valley where the monkeys had gone, I hefted the seed in my hand, wound up like a javelin thrower, and threw the seed up in an arch as if aiming at the moon. I could see it for an instant, but then all I could do was listen, the security guard beside me, both of us hoping to hear a monkey scream.
Is this what everything is really about, I wondered, revenge, getting even, keeping an even score? Judging from his letter, that’s what jules seemed to feel, but would I, if I could, turn my avocado seed into a rifle bullet and aim it at the fleeing back of Kamau or Mr Smith? I was hurt by that monkey, I somehow understood, in quite the same way I had been hurt by my husband and by my father too. It was painful, in part at least, because of its surprise. But I would survive, I knew that now. All I had to do was hose myself off and go on.
When I went into the house everything was quiet. My father’s bedroom door was closed, and in the living room the embers of the fire he had built were nearly gone. Out the back door I could see Beatrice sitting in front of her room reading her Bible by the light of a paraffin lamp. She had undoubtedly heard the ruckus of the avocado attack but had decided to stay in her chair with her God. Such constancy was what I needed now, and as I watched her I vowed that in the morning I would find it, somehow.
In the meantime, however, I went into my room to sleep. I cleaned myself up and climbed into bed, having left my door ajar so that the moonlight could play on the wallpaper in the hall and I could see in it the myriad images of childhood, which for me, strange to tell, had not been frightening at all.
12
Mortification Sets In
I should have known better than to suppose my father had gone to bed early that night. His penchant for staying up late was legendary. In the old days, when he went to bed at midnight my mother used to say that he was ill. It must have been the business with the avocados and the fact that he had slept a lot since his return from London that made me believe a closed bedroom door meant a sleeping father within, but at breakfast my father told me he had spent the night at Dr Zir’s. He had eaten there and he had stayed up late playing chess, finally falling asleep on Dr Zir’s front-room couch. He had asked Beatrice to build the fire, he said, so that it would be roaring, waiting to welcome me when I came home.
“We’ve also done some organizing,” he said. “Zir and I have set aside next Saturday afternoon for Julius’s wake. We’ll hold it here at home in the afternoon.”
“Julius is already buried at the farm,” I said. “He isn’t having a wake.”
My father had never lived in Ireland, but his Hennessey heritage came out to find him once in a while, especially after somebody died. I remember that at the time of my mother’s death he left the house open to visitors for two days, crying in front of them and bringing me out from my bedroom every hour or so to cry by his side. I had done it on cue, I had done it easily, simply because I knew that he wanted me to.
“Of course he is,” said my father. “Zir is sending out the notice this A.M. There’ll be an announcement in the paper the day after tomorrow.”
“Julius isn’t having a wake,” I said again, but then I said, “I am sure you’ve forgotten to tell anyone out by the farm. The few friends that Julius had didn’t live in Nairobi, you know.”
“I am aware of that, my dearest girl,” my father said. “Notices will be going to whomever you dictate as well.”
After he spoke my father pulled a notebook out from somewhere and before I knew it I was trying to remember the names of old friends, to conjure spellings and let old faces float up. Because little else weighed upon my father’s mind, it had not occurred to me that something like a wake would be weighing on it, but in a moment I got into the idea too, imagining our house a flower and full of friends. I even startled myself with the thought that had my father mentioned the wake earlier, we could have kept Jules in Nairobi. Had my father mentioned it earlier, I grimly noted, I might not have done that horrible thing with his arm.
When he left again, walking down into the valley of the monkeys to take the shortcut back to Dr Zir’s, I was alone in the kitchen with the same feeling I’d had yesterday, namely, no idea of what to do to pass the time. It was Tuesday and though Dr Zir would no doubt work fast, the wake wouldn’t be held until Saturday, so what could I do with the intervening days? Coul
d I go to bed again, sleeping until Tuesday morning became Saturday afternoon? Could I wake up to a house full of guests and be pulled from my room by my father to come out and cry? I didn’t know what I could do, but just then the telephone rang. Beatrice answered it and called me right away.
“Please,” she said, “it is Ralph Bunche Road.”
I was both pleased and somehow not surprised to be hearing from Ralph. I would tell him to come on Saturday, tell him to expect his invitation in the mail. When I said hello, however, it was Miro’s voice that answered back.
“It’s the real Ralph Bunche Road,” she said. “The place, not the person. What are you doing for lunch?”
She sounded like one of my old Oxford girlfriends. There was a briskness about her, a sophisticated tone that made me think of her as on stage.
“Nothing,” I said.
“I’ve got rehearsals at ten, but after that can we meet for a while? What do you like? Anywhere’s fine with me, only not the Norfolk again—if I stay too close to the theatre, no pun intended, I get butterflies.”
“How about Trattoria?” I asked, and Miro said, “Okay by me. Does two o’clock sound all right? Rehearsal will be over by then and I’ll be starved.”
It occurred to me that Madama Butterfly might open on the night of the wake, and I tried to ask about that, but Miro cut me off. “I’m late as it is,” she said. “I can see that the other singers have already gone inside.”
Miro hung up and I put our own phone back down on the piano. That was an odd conversation. She hadn’t been calling from her father’s house on Ralph Bunche Road, but from the theatre or perhaps from a phone box in the Norfolk bar. Otherwise she wouldn’t be able to tell me what the other singers were about to do. I remembered the scene from last night. Was Detective Mubia still sitting at our table with Mr Smith? Did they have their heads together, conspiring against me while they watched her call?
I stayed next to the piano quietly for a moment, but pretty soon I picked up the telephone again and found the number I wanted on a piece of paper taped to its side. The Norfolk Hotel not only had a bar, it had a hairdresser’s too, where Jules and I both used to go for haircuts. When the matron answered the phone I made an appointment for eleven A.M.
By the time I got off the phone it was ten, and when I went back into the kitchen to look for the Land Rover keys I could see my father again, trudging up from the valley with Dr Zir. The two of them were leaning into each other as they walked along.
I found the keys and put them in my pocket, hanging them up on that ubiquitous tusk. I then took two mugs down from the shelf and poured them full of coffee. There was fresh milk in a jug in the fridge, so I put a cup of it on the stove to warm. By the time the men came through the kitchen door the mugs of hot coffee were ready.
“Nora, sweetheart,” said Dr Zir.
I cut them each a piece of Beatrice’s apple tart, and while they had their coffee I told them that I had made an appointment to have my hair done. And it pleased both men when I added, “If this wake is really going to happen, I don’t want to look like I’m bereft.”
“In that case go to the Norfolk Saturday morning, not now,” said my father, but I jangled the keys at him and went out of the door. The drive was still strewn with rotting avocado flesh, but the night guard had cleaned the Land Rover, so I stepped over the carnage and got into the car. Somehow, where only yesterday I’d still been overwhelmed, dodging that cloud that had been stalking me since the afternoon of Jules’s death and not having the slightest idea what to do, this morning my heart was primarily at ease. All the way into town my lightness of spirit held, but when I entered Harry Thuku Road I did wish that I had another car to drive. If I parked the Land Rover in the National Theatre car park again, I felt, it would be like announcing myself, so I continued down quite a long way, turned onto Kijabe Street, and found a parking spot right away.
The Norfolk is a beautiful hotel, my favourite, even though when Jules and I came to town we mostly stayed at others. We could, of course, have stayed at my father’s house, but Jules liked hotels. He had a kind of obsession about making love in strange rooms, the opposite of his lack of desire when sleeping under the stars, so we had stayed once in the Six Eighty, once at the Milimani and the Boulevard and the Fairmont, and even one time at the Hilton.
The hairdresser’s was tucked away in the back, and when I went inside the matron greeted me warmly, as if I’d been there the week before. There were no other customers in the place just then, so she and her assistants called me immediately into the back room to wash my hair. When Jules and I came in from the farm this was usually my first stop. I loved the smell of the place and I liked looking through the hairdo books, at the strangely beautiful women. Their photos reminded me of the animals that we’d see at our pond. There was a catlike litheness to them, the lines of their jaws were predatory, their hair set like that of the ardent queen in my father’s chess set, pulled back in leonine tightness, or with strands of it swooping about their eyes. My father had been right in telling me that I ought to wait until Saturday to have my hair done, and it occurred to me that I might come back again, not only on Saturday, but on Wednesday and Thursday and Friday too. I would turn my hair perfect in daily installments as I stepped away from shock and grief, as I prepared to take up normal life again.
These were calming thoughts and I clung to them, but when the ladies tipped me back over the shampooing tub my idyll was interrupted by the matron’s chatty voice. “Did you hear about the trouble last night? I don’t know about Nairobi anymore. Even the Norfolk’s not immune.”
“What trouble?” I asked. Since I was looking up at the woman from the odd angle of the shampoo sink, what I saw was the soft underside of her chin and the weird movement of her lips, like an upside-down sting ray washed up on the shore.
My hair was heavy and I could feel the assistant’s fingers dancing over my scalp.
“It was ever so late,” said the matron. “Almost all of the customers were gone, but a man got killed in our bar last night, stabbed through the heart with a bread knife. He was a crazy man, a street beggar who had somehow got inside.”
When my shampooing was done and they sat me up again I felt light, as if the dirt washed from my hair had pulled the blinders from my eyes.
“Who killed him?” I asked. “What was the dead man’s name?”
They led me from one chair to another without speaking. When I was sitting down again, the matron shrugged, “Who knows the names of wild men off the street?”
Since I wasn’t having a perm I let the setting and combing go on with as little conversation as possible. I had to try to think clearly now. I had been in the Norfolk last night. Upon leaving I had seen Mr Smith sitting in my chair, and if this killing had anything to do with him, as I knew it must, then I also knew I had to get help, I couldn’t go on alone anymore. I hadn’t allowed myself to believe it before, but Mr Smith might harm me, he could easily do it, and he might also harm my father.
The shop door had opened a few times and the matron was greeting newcomers. “Did you hear about the trouble last night?” I heard her say.
When they were finished with me I paid them quickly, glad I didn’t know any of the other women in the waiting room. I’d been in there for an hour, but two hours remained before I had to meet Miro. I went out through the hotel foyer, past the magazine stand, and when I passed the bar I could see that lunch was in full swing, with most of the tables taken and all the waiters hurriedly walking by. I tried to see if last night’s table was occupied, but I tried too hard and the maître d’ came over and asked me if I wanted to sit down.
“I’m looking for someone,” I said, and then I asked, “Did something bad happen here last night?”
The maître d’ nodded solemnly. “Alas,” he said, “even we are not immune.”
“Who let the man in?” I asked. “And where did they take him when they took him away?”
The maître d’ looked at me a li
ttle keenly but answered my question. “He came in by himself, off the street and out of control. He attacked one of our customers and made the others run. When they took him away he was dead, so he went to the Nairobi Hospital mortuary, I suppose.”
I had more questions, but the maître d’ looked over my shoulder. “Do you need a table, sir?” he asked, and when I turned around I found Ralph standing there. Ralph wasn’t wearing his business suit this time but his Wildebeest Road safari uniform, tan khaki pants with a short-sleeved jacket. The Wildebeest Road logo was on his breast pocket. He looked smart.
“Are you working today?” I asked. “Are you heading out of town?”
“As a matter of fact I am,” said Ralph. “Cottar’s Camp and the Mara.”
“When are you coming back?” I guess I still had Jules’s wake on my mind. I hoped that Ralph would be in town by the weekend, that I could mention the wake to him and he’d say he would come.
“Thursday night or Friday morning,” he said. “The first and last nights we’re camping, so I’m not sure how long they will want to stay out.”
Because we were both standing in the maître d’s queue, Ralph offered to buy me lunch, and I found myself making a counter-offer. “Come with me for a little while instead,” I said. “I need help, Ralph. I will buy you lunch at Trattoria later.”
“I am hungry now,” Ralph said, but it was clear that he was coming along. I told him I had my car, but his Wildebeest Road van was parked right out in front, and when we got in, Ralph asked where I wanted to go.
“Nairobi Hospital,” I said.
Ralph shook his head, but, maybe out of respect for the recently widowed, he didn’t ask questions. He just put the van in gear, telling me he had to pick up his tourists at the Hilton Hotel at four.
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