Ahmed's Revenge

by Richard Wiley

  For an hour I’d been happy, listening to Ralph, but when we started to climb out of Narok again I began to see a certain rashness in inviting these people to spend the night. I’d made Ralph bring me so that I could follow the directions in my husband’s poem, just as I’d told him at the restaurant. I wanted to work, to dig the contraband from its hiding place, not fill the farm with tourists, possibly endangering their lives. It was unlike me not to have thought of such a thing before, and it made me worry about my own impulsiveness. Still, since it was nearly dark I knew I wouldn’t do any digging tonight. In the morning Ralph and his customers would leave and after that, I told myself, I’d go outside with my shovel and my nonspecific plan.

  We drove through the latent coffee, barren plants still thick enough to hide whatever damage the elephants had done, and into our yard. I knew the place had been guarded well enough by the Maasai, but I’d forgotten to worry about the condition of the quickly reassembled inside of my house, and when I remembered it I turned in my seat to apologise. The Cooleys, however, had just then turned in their seats too, all three of them looking at our pond.

  “My goodness,” said Dorothea. A couple of wildebeests were drinking. They looked like the ones in the logo on the side of Ralph’s van.

  “Is this where you live?” Michael asked. He leaned forward and let his hand touch my arm.

  Ralph parked the van next to the dormitory, and when we got out and slammed the doors, the two wildebeests trotted away.

  “I’ve got lights for that pond,” I told them. “One bright light. We’ll turn it on when it gets dark and see what comes to drink.”

  Since Michael had touched me in the van and was standing too near me now, I wanted to find a way to mention Julius pretty soon, and when I turned to him Michael himself provided it.

  “Surely you don’t live here alone?” he asked. “I’d think it would be too much work.”

  “I do now,” I told him. “My husband just passed away.”

  Michael closed his mouth and John said, “That’s certainly bad news,” but Dorothea came over and threaded her arm through mine. She didn’t speak, but it was a kind and helpful thing for her to do. I had begun to discover, since Jules’s death, that I missed the presence of other women in my life. I felt it with Dorothea and, of course, I felt it very strongly with Miro. But if I missed other women now, why hadn’t I missed them when Jules was alive? Why hadn’t I particularly noticed that in ever so many subtle ways I was going through my daily and my weekly and my yearly routine alone?

  Inside the house things were just as I had left them. No one had come in to ransack the place again, but the front room was arranged haphazardly, as if only bachelors used it now. The Maasai I’d hired as guards were nowhere around, so I asked Ralph to make tea while I went back outside to find them. Previously we had only hired Maasai guards when Kamau was gone and there were otherwise only temporary workers on the farm, but the petrol station man had never let us down, and sure enough, I found a Maasai sitting under a tree behind the workers’ quarters, a few feet from our generator. As I got closer I realised that this was one of the men who tried to help Jules on the night of his wounding, the same one I saw at the petrol station when coming back with my father from town. I thought Maasai boys would be guarding the place, not a warrior, and when the man looked up I said, “Oh mister, thank you for coming back.”

  I thought I remembered that this man spoke Swahili pretty well, and I was right. “I have killed the lion,” he quietly told me, “the big female. She ran but I followed her well, killing her only this morning with the sun.”

  He spoke so softly that I got confused and very nearly asked what he was talking about. But since he had a bundle on the ground beside him, I held my tongue while he opened it up. The bundle was wrapped in a red Maasai cloth which covered another wrapper of thick and sticky leaves, like pieces of parchment. Inside the leaves, warm as toast, was the big female lion’s heart.

  “I have waited for you,” said the Maasai.

  “I don’t know your name. My husband knew your name,” I told him, “but not me.”

  “I am Sosio,” he said, and for some reason he said that part in English.

  When Sosio stood away from the lion’s heart, I finally noticed the two Maasai boys whom the petrol station man had hired to watch the farm. They’d been seated on the other side of the tree and came around it now.

  “We will go,” Sosio said. “We only waited for your return.”

  They left so quickly then that I had to run to catch up, taking the nearest boy by the arm and pushing some bills into his hand.

  Because I had no idea what to do with it or how I could explain to Ralph’s three guests how I’d gone to see if my guards were around and come back with a lion’s heavy heart in my hands, I nearly left it by the generator for the scavengers who would come. But in the end I picked it up by the edges of its leaf wrapper. And when I came past the near side of the dormitory with it, there was Michael, standing in his starched white shorts and looking around.

  “What have you got there?” he asked. “What did you find?”

  His face was composed and pleasant, his eyes deep and earnest and bright. He was a kind and good man, I thought, someone who’d been looking forward to his Kenyan holiday for a long time.

  “You don’t want to know,” I said.

  I could see the others seated on the porch, teacups in their hands.

  “Oh, but I do,” said Michael. “That’s why I asked, you know, because I want to know.” He had his hands behind his back and was lightly rocking, very British, on the balls of his feet.

  “It’s the heart of a lion,” I told him. “Of a lioness, to be exact.”

  Michael laughed but then stopped laughing and stepped near. “Are you quite serious?” he asked. “Wherever did you get it? Wherever did you find such a thing?”

  “From the Maasai warrior who killed the lion. He gave it to me out back just now.”

  Michael’s eyes were open wide. I gave him a steady look, finally deciding to make his holiday as memorable as possible. “It’s in retribution,” I said. “She was the lioness who caused my husband’s death, who started it, at least. The warrior who brought her heart to me was here at the time but he couldn’t intervene. Come on, help me get rid of it. My husband is buried up here, just overlooking the plains.”

  It was only as I spoke that I had any idea what to do with the heart, but Michael, eyes like saucers now, readily followed me across the soft ground. Jules’s grave was unmarked, I hadn’t even ordered its headstone yet, but a dozen feet away from it stood our ever-ready campfire, fresh logs crisscrossed on top of burnt ones, and everything surrounded by stones. “Julius and I used to sleep out here sometimes,” I said, “and I’m going to have a small ceremony now, if only to honour the effort of the man who brought this thing back to me.”

  “Quite right,” said Michael. “Quite proper that you should.”

  Michael was keeping up a calm front, but it was all beyond me by then. Before I spoke I had no sense of wanting to perform any ceremony. I think I said it in order to give Michael his money’s worth, but my tongue was getting to be unreliable. I was still living each day under the whim of random impulses, and in order to keep them away I put the heart down and asked Michael about his own farm at home.

  “It’s sheep, mostly,” he said. “It’s in England.”

  “I did gather that it was in England,” I told him, “but where? Is it anywhere near Oxford? I lived in Oxford for a while.”

  “It isn’t, actually,” he said. “It’s up north, in the lake country, you know? It’s nothing like your place here, mostly rocky terrain.”

  Michael was friendly but I wasn’t really interested in his farm. My thoughts were still controlled by the lion’s heart and by my husband, buried twelve feet away. And since I couldn’t think of another thing to ask or to say, I picked the heart up again and began pacing around the perimeter of Jules’s grave. My God, I thought, i
t has been only a week since Jules died, three days since I buried him here, under this heavy blanket of ground, so what am I doing inviting all these strangers to our farm? What am I going to do with this lion’s heart, and after that, what am I ever going to do with my own?

  As I walked I thought about saying a proper prayer, something memorised when I was a girl, and then flinging the heart off the embankment, down the way the snake had gone. I considered digging it a grave of its own, and it even crossed my mind to take the heart back inside and boil it, slice it thin, and eat it on crackers to give me strength to continue with this charade. But in the end I could come to no decision and I surprised myself by saying so.

  “I haven’t got a clue what to do with this thing,” I let Michael know.

  “Well,” he said, “was your husband brave?”

  “Boy, I’ll say. He was a fool in more ways than I can count but he was almost always brave.”

  Michael smiled. “Did he have a good heart?”

  “Yes,” I said. “He was brave and he had a good heart, bigger than this one most of the time.”

  “Well, then, the heart of this lion was good, and of course by definition it was brave,” he said, “so maybe you could just draw that parallel and otherwise leave it alone. Let nature take its course, so to speak.”

  I held the heart up but instead of drawing parallels I found myself saying, “He wasn’t very honest, my husband, sometimes. And he had his shallow side.”

  “Ah, well,” said Michael. “His shallow side, yes.”

  “And he had no idea at all about intimacy. I mean of either the verbal or the emotional kind.”

  “So far as I can tell, that’s pretty much the definition of a man,” said Michael. “What was his nationality? What passport did he hold?”

  “He was Canadian,” I said, “from the English-speaking part.”

  “Ah, yes,” said Michael, “Canadian.”

  “He had a great knack for physical intimacy,” I suddenly added. “I wouldn’t want you to think that I was complaining about that.”

  “No,” Michael said. “Verbal intimacy was where he was weak, not the other kind.”

  “And my God he loved hard work. He loved this farm so much.”

  This time Michael only nodded. As I looked at him I knew that whatever ceremony I would ever be able to perform was over, and that an Englishman, an absolute stranger, had been its medium, in solitary partnership with my heavy lion’s heart.

  At the edge of the orchard, a few feet past our campfire site, there was the stump of what had once been a large jacaranda tree. Leaving the lion’s heart on the stump was exactly the right thing to do. I knew it because my own heart settled when I put it down.

  It was already very nearly dark and I said, “This will be gone before the moon comes up.”

  “Ah, yes, the animals,” he said. “I can’t wait to see them come to the pond.”

  When Michael and I got back to the house, John and Dorothea were still on the porch and Ralph was inside, mixing drinks. I went in to help, but Ralph was finished, and was cleaning up the kitchen before bringing the tray outside.

  “Listen,” he said. “Maybe we can work something out. I mean make your place a regular stop. These people are ecstatic, Nora. They love it here.”

  I smiled, then said I was going to stay inside and think about dinner. There was nobody like Beatrice up here, never had been. When the dormitory was full and the harvest was taking everyone’s time, we sometimes hired a cook for the workers, but Jules and I cooked for ourselves, and we did our own housework, too. Jules was adamant about it. That was something I could have mentioned at the ceremony. Jules was unusual in that way, always an equal partner where work was concerned.

  There wasn’t much food in the refrigerator, but we had a pantry full of staples, so I was able to find rice and spices and enough stored vegetables to make a proper curry. The one I knew how to make best originally came from Dr Zir. There was wine in the pantry too, and a little bit of clean linen in the bottom drawer of an old English bureau that I had.

  It was just about then, just about the time I was getting the linen out of the drawer, that I noticed it was too dark to work anymore with only the camp lanterns on, so I went back outside and stood behind the others for a while, listening to the quiet comments they made, while they strained to see as far as the pond.

  “There are usually giraffes,” I said. “Every night recently, right about now.”

  I stepped off the porch and headed for the dormitory. It had been Kamau’s job to start the generator, and in the beginning, during our first half year or so, Jules and I would run to the front window when we heard it burp into life, in order to watch the pond. It had amazed us that the animals, whatever might be drinking there, would never so much as raise their heads when the noise and the lights went on.

  As I pulled the generator cord this time, however, I knew that though the animals at the pond might not move, four heads would look up from the four wicker chairs on my porch, and I thought about the nature of composure, the simple act of responding, of living one’s life through.

  When I started back around the dormitory again everything was as I knew it would be. A dik-dik and a tommy were drinking, noses down, and the four people on the porch were watching me come. A giraffe had walked out of the bush on the far side of the pond and was looking everywhere at once, its high eyes taking in the other animals and the five of us as well.

  “It’s a glorious place,” Dorothea said.

  Her husband and brother both agreed with that, and before I went inside to see if the curry was done, we all saw a warthog and a small baboon. It would be a stellar night. And in later days, when I thought back on it, I would be glad that they had had at least that much. For in the morning things changed, and the change, don’t you know, was just as Miro had predicted it would be. It was not for the better, not to my advantage at all.

  15

  The Fire of Our Lions

  The dinner was good, and afterward we all stayed outside until midnight, talking some, but mostly watching the animals in silence. Since this time there wasn’t enough sleeping space inside the house, Ralph and I got clean sheets from the supply cupboard and made up three of the empty dormitory rooms. These were rooms that hadn’t been used by workers for a season or two. They weren’t spotlessly clean, perhaps, but I thought that with new linen they might appear that way, at least in the dark, at least for the single night that my guests would use them.

  When we finished, Ralph went back to the house to call the others and I stepped into Kamau’s room to look at it in light of what I knew had been his fate. I expected, I guess, that the room would give me something more than it had when I went in there before, but it did not. The table was still cluttered with his letters, and the photograph of Kamau’s family, though it had moved me in the first place, was merely a photograph now, camera-ready faces, a white backdrop to make their features clear. Kamau had been a careless man, that’s what his room said. He hadn’t known what he was doing, he didn’t know what he had done. I felt worse for Detective Mubia than I did for our foreman—that was my eulogy to Kamau.

  When Dorothea and John came into the dormitory I showed them the larger of the rooms we’d prepared. Dorothea seemed exhausted but leaned against her husband in contentment. “What a day,” said John.

  John’s abbreviated mustache appeared softer to me now. He was a veterinarian, of all things, but even as I watched him watching the game coming and going from the pond I found it difficult to imagine him with his sleeves rolled up. He had the physical bearing of a businessman, a stockbroker or a banker, perhaps.

  Ralph and Michael were to sleep in two smaller rooms nearer to the front of the dormitory, across the hall from Kamau’s. Michael wasn’t in his room, but Ralph was in his, and when I knocked he said, “Everything went perfectly. Thanks for the invitation, for the idea of having them stay.”

  I touched Ralph’s sleeve but was too tired to talk any
more, and though I really considered Michael a wonderful man for coaching me so well with the lion’s heart, I didn’t want to speak with him, either, or find him still sitting in a wicker chair on my porch.

  Back in the house I turned the pond light off and moved the dinner dishes from the table back into the kitchen. Michael hadn’t been on the porch, nor was he in the house, but before I could find the energy to muster up anything like alarm, I saw him through the window, coming down the path from the orchard in the dark.

  I went back outside and said, “It’s dangerous to walk around here. This isn’t England, you know.”

  “I had to see whether or not it was gone.”

  “It was, wasn’t it? No trace left on that stump, I’ll bet.”

  “It was there when I arrived,” said Michael. “I watched it get taken away.”

  Michael came closer, not up onto the porch, but to the spot where the weak porch light played on his face a bit more.

  “What animal was it?” I asked. “Who took the lion’s heart?” I could see now that Michael wasn’t composed. His white shorts were dirtied and so was his face.

  “You won’t believe it but it was a leopard,” he said. “I’m sure that’s what it was. I was just standing there, looking down into the valley to see what I could see, when it appeared out of the darkness. When I first noticed it, it was already sitting down, staring past the stump and directly into my eyes. It had a white front and a long stiff tail. It sat there watching me for the longest time.”

  “I know that leopard,” I told him. “He killed a Maasai cow last year and some warriors tried to hunt him. It’s a lot easier killing a lion.’’

  “This will sound odd,” said Michael, “but after a minute or two I lost my fear. I could tell that he wouldn’t harm me.”

  I didn’t like such talk. It reminded me of mistakes that Jules and I had made, mistakes that could easily lead to my having a dead tourist on my hands, but I only said, “Imagine having him around when you’re trying to run a farm.”