Ahmed's Revenge

by Richard Wiley

  “Tell me,” I asked, “how much do you suppose a new lorry costs? A Mercedes-Benz.”

  This was such an unexpected question that both men lost their critical attitude. Dr Zir was the first to thaw.

  “A new Benz? Oh my dear, it’s a bundle.”

  “In England you might pay twenty thousand pounds,” said my dad.

  “Pshaw! Not anymore,” said the doctor. “Twenty thousand last year, maybe, but more now, twenty-three or even twenty-five. Prices are going up everywhere.”

  When they started to argue the point, I left the room. Since I had dressed improperly for what I now had in mind, I went into my bedroom to change. Twenty thousand pounds, last year and in England to boot. That meant that in Kenya my new lorry would be prohibitive beyond belief and that therefore Mr Smith thought his offer to be grand.

  When I came out again I was dressed in my smartest clothes, clothes I hadn’t worn since my university job. My father was wearing his uniform and Dr Zir always wore a suit, so we were ready to go.

  “We have to hurry,” I said. “The day’s half gone.”

  “What do you want of me, Nora?” asked Dr Zir. “Do you want me to go home?”

  I took his arm then and said simply that he and my father should both go to his house, and when they got there they should warm up the lorry. “It’s old,” I said, “and needs to idle for a good long while.”

  After they were gone and I was alone in the living room I picked the telephone up off the floor, my fingers moving slowly in its broken dial. Miro answered on the first ring, and when I told her what I wanted from her, I could tell that she smiled.

  “Where I am concerned he’ll do anything,” she said. “But give us an hour, I have to go by the theatre for a final fitting of my kimono.”

  When I rang off I went out of the house and into the valley alone. The sky was clear and the monkeys were gone. At Dr Zir’s both men were in the drive, standing around the lorry.

  “I want you to take my dad and go in your car and find Ralph at his office,” I told Dr Zir. “Ask him to meet us at the National Museum at two and ask him to dress up, not to wear his safari clothes.”

  I was giving orders without much latitude in them, but both men hesitated only long enough to see if there was anything else I might say. Like Mr Smith, they could sense a real denouement, and so far as my father was concerned, all he wanted was to make amends, for me to tell him that he had done nothing wrong.

  “I’ll meet you there,” I said. Then I looked at my father carefully and said the words “Maybe after this we will be able to go on.”

  That was what he’d been waiting for, and it was only as I watched them leave that I thought of Jules again. Mr Smith not only had his body, but he had his pistol and his letter too, and I would insist that he give back all three. In the letter Jules had asked me to finish for him what he had so clumsily begun, and I suddenly wondered whether or not Mr Smith had read the letter carefully. It worried me, for if he had, then he might understand that though I’d been weak at the gravesite and sounded weak on the telephone, the word “revenge” was not an anagram. By that I mean that it could not be found in the letters that made up his offering. It couldn’t be found in “Mercedes-Benz.”

  20

  J14767

  I was stopped at the museum gate by a security guard, but ahead of me I could see various lorries not unlike my own, and when I told the guard that I was with the taxidermist, he let me through. On the museum grounds there was a lot of confusion and as many people as one might find at any large construction site. Less than three days remained until Ahmed’s unveiling, and security, I happily understood, was the last thing on anyone’s mind. Getting in had been easy. Now all I had to do was look as though I knew why I was there.

  I parked the farm lorry with the others at a spot near the back and walked past a crew working on the new building’s flower beds to the museum’s front door. I nodded at a man who was sitting there, then turned and headed directly toward him.

  “I’ve brought the last of what they need, but I’ve been working in the shop all this time,” I said. “Where’s the set-up? I haven’t been here in so long I’ve forgotten where the mammals are.”

  I spoke Kiswahili, in a very polite and friendly way, and the man said, “Everything is over on the near side. They are making a whole new room for this guy. I don’t know about now, but earlier this morning they were driving their lorries all the way into the building, through a big hole in the far wall.”

  I thanked him and said, “I wonder if they’re ready for me yet. Let me go this way first, find my boss, and ask him. If I drive in before they need me all he’ll do is get mad.”

  The guard gave me a look that said he knew how bosses were, and let me pass. It was true, I hadn’t been in the museum for years, and it had changed—grown larger and better appointed—since I was a girl. When I stepped through the door it was just after half past one. There was noise coming from somewhere, but I was alone in the entryway, facing an impressive collection of guns.

  To my immediate left was the museum shop, and when I saw that it was unoccupied too, I began to feel a little more at ease. I went down a long hall carefully, and once past the shop I made a sharp right turn and immediately found myself outside again, in an enclosed garden between the old section of the museum and Ahmed’s new room. This was an ordinary garden except for one thing; standing at its center was the largest elephant I had ever seen, twelve feet tall, not ten, with medium-brown skin that waved across his frame as if the wind had pushed it up, and tusks that stopped only an inch above the ground. He was impressive in his way, but anyone could tell that this elephant had never been alive. He was a fiberglass dummy, a fake-looking replica, from the tips of his tusks to the end of his tail. Judging from the sign that stood in front of him, he was supposed to be the guardian of the gate, here to approximate what the real Ahmed had looked like with his flesh and skin intact. He was Ahmed’s likeness and more than Ahmed’s size, but he wasn’t Ahmed, he couldn’t fool a child, and seeing him made me appreciate anew the quality and precision of Mr Smith’s work. The tusks he’d made were in some inexplicable way as much a wonder as the real ones were. Could I concede such artistry to a man who was evil in so many other ways?

  This plastic Ahmed watched the new mammal room, but when I walked past him and found myself inside again, there were so many workers that it was easy not to be seen by anyone. The room was large with a high ceiling and, as the guard had said there’d be, a huge opening at its unfinished end. I expected to see Ahmed again, skeletal and standing in front of me, a slightly smaller version of the one outside, but what I saw instead was more amazing than that. The whole floor of the room was laid with bones, large and small, and men were standing around looking at them as if they had no idea what to do. It seemed to me that it would be more than easy to kick a bone away, or break or misplace one. Everything was so haphazard, in fact, that it made me mad. My God, I thought, didn’t they realise that the work they had to do was special, that the grand opening was only a weekend away? I fumed where I stood, but in a moment I began to notice that there was a calmness in the air which seemed shared by everyone but me. This was Ahmed, all right, but Ahmed with his leg bones and his pelvis and his ribs splayed out, Ahmed with his tail and his spine and the enormous bones of his shoulders and skull all lined up on the floor. The more I looked, the more I realised that there was a method to the particular madness here. No one was kicking anything and, as a matter of fact, they all appeared to be waiting, ready, each man with a job to do. Ahmed’s tusks, those wondrous replicas that Mr Smith had made, were on the floor in front of Ahmed’s skull, and everything except the tusks was connected by what seemed to be lines of thick brown string. As I watched I began to hear a voice, though I was sure the voice had been there before. Almost incredibly I had wandered in at the exact moment of Ahmed’s rising, at the second the flattened elephant would stand. The voice told me that what I’d supposed to be string
was cable, and that they were just about to draw the cable tight, bringing the elephant bones up into the air like a ship in a bottle, making Ahmed whole. There were ladders precisely placed for the workers to climb upon, bolters and welders standing behind them like a formal rear guard.

  “Everybody should know exactly what to do,” said the voice of the man in charge. “Just like yesterday we have one easy chance. If we fail, the cables will tangle again and it will be late tonight or tomorrow before we can try once more. Let’s get it right this time. Is there any man who doesn’t know his task?”

  He spoke in English, a chancy thing to do. I could see him walking around in the widest possible circle, peering at the bones and into the eyes of his men. When he got back to his original place he said, “Very well, no mistakes now. Winchmen, start your engines.”

  It was all quite military and captivating, and obviously orderly. As soon as he spoke, two small engines burped into life at the corners of the room, starting up easily, but so loud they made further comment from the man nearly impossible to hear. They were high-pitched, screeching things, like lorry-size dental drills.

  “Phase one!” he screamed. I could hear him because he was comparatively nearby, but nothing happened and he had to scream again.

  “Phase one!” This time one of the engines bogged down into first gear, and as if pained into movement by a gigantic alarm clock, Ahmed’s head and his shoulder blades and the previously connected components of his spine woke up, turning a little on the floor and causing a number of men to grasp them before they actually lifted off. “Phase two!” yelled the man.

  Now the first engine changed voices and the other one fell in below it making all of Ahmed come to life. His head and shoulders were waist-high to the workers and the rest of him started to rumble, in a swinging, shimmying skeleton dance, the hip bone connected to the leg bone and so on. It was as if he were alive and shaking off a long dream of death, as if he were actually yawning and stretching on the new-made floor.

  This entire spectacle was far beyond strange. It was miraculous and seemed to me to promise—to prove—that change was possible, that anyone could undo the things he had done. I found myself concentrating on Ahmed’s left humerus, if that’s what it’s called on an animal his size. I fixed on it and conjured his bicep torn and flapping away, and imagined myself repairing it, fitting it back in there, making it work again.

  Once Ahmed was in place the cables were anchored to the walls, the engines stopped, and silence returned once more. The cables, taut and thin, led from the bones to the ceiling, like the strings of an absent puppeteer. The men holding most of Ahmed’s larger parts had climbed their ladders by then, and the men controlling his legs and feet, his rib bones and his tail, were stretching their arms outward or upward or down, and every man, though they all tried to hold their pieces still, shook the bones in a slight but constant way, making me lose my just-found feeling of hope and optimism. Once again it seemed that Ahmed was doing a dance, but not back into life anymore. Now he did a sad and slow shuffle to wherever it is that dead elephants go. Only Ahmed’s tusks were unmoving before me; lying solidly on the floor at his front, they seemed to be the gods that Ahmed’s dance was dedicated to, as if he hoped in his ascendancy to convince them to rise up and join him so that their wonderful weight would settle him down.

  It was incredible and absurdly moving. I was crying on the stairs I’d found to sit on, and my heart hurt in ways I can’t begin to explain or describe, hope and despair doing their own stiletto dance within it. Out in the room, though it seemed long past time for the next stage to begin, the men appeared to be captured by the event too, all of them aware of the pageantry.

  “Good,” the leader said quietly. “Look at him standing there. Everything’s fine.”

  After that it seemed to me that another long moment passed, but I’m not sure, for when I began to notice things again, the welders and bolters and seam hiders were all over the elephant, making him settle down even without his tusks.

  When I looked at my watch I was amazed to find that it was not yet two. I had been there less than half an hour, though it seemed as though what I’d witnessed should have taken all day. It would be a fine exhibit, with a wonderful Ahmed for every Kenyan to see. Then I noticed that the man in charge was coming my way, so I backed up into the darkness at the top of the stairs, finally going all the way up to the second floor. I watched the man passing below, and I could hear the workers going out the opening at the far end of the room.

  The second floor of the new building was poorly lit, but it contained an exhibition too, already prepared. Up here there was a gallery. On the walls, under lights that would no doubt shine brightly come opening day, were dozens of photographs from Kenya’s past. Directly beside me was a placard that read, “Freedom Fighters of the Early Days,” and in the very first photograph I saw President Kenyatta standing with a group of men. The caption beneath the photograph identified these men as Mau Mau leaders, key members of the early independence fight. The photo was taken on the occasion of Kenyatta’s presentation of a “Collector’s Letter” to each of these men, giving them the right to retrieve and sell the tusks of elephants who had died of natural causes; this was a gift from their country for having fought so well. I knew of such letters but I hadn’t known there were so many men who had them. In the photograph most of the men wore business suits. They didn’t look like revolutionaries, they looked like government officials, unsmiling and stern. One of them was familiar but I didn’t understand why until I studied the list of names below: this was Mr N’chele, Mr Smith’s father.

  It was an accident that I should have come upstairs at all, and a bigger accident that I should see Mr N’chele’s photograph and discover that he had an authentic Collector’s Letter filed away. What it meant was that Mr N’chele had the right to export tusks by presidential decree, that there was no real need to smuggle. And if Mr N’chele had a Collector’s Letter, Mr Smith knew about it and could more or less legally claim it as his own. No real need to smuggle! Such was the degree, then, of his willful involvement of my husband and my dad.

  I wanted to stay in the room a little while, to see if I could find photographs of Mr N’chele in his earlier days, say around 1956, but a commotion drew me down the stairs again. There was noise coming from the front of the museum, as if the queues had already formed. Since Ahmed’s room was now empty, however, I took a moment to bend down and touch the tusks that lay before him on the floor. The left tusk was the one I knew intimately, so I ran my hand across the bevel of its tip, over the spot that Ahmed had used most during the sixty years or so of his life. That these tusks were artificial seemed impossible now. They were worn and oddly coloured and covered with intricate layers of deep and shallow scars. They even bore his registration numbers from the Ministry of Wildlife files, J14767, just like his real ones.

  I heard steps behind me and turned, sure I’d be facing trouble, but Miro was there, with a man beside her who could only be her father.

  “I thought we might find you in here,” she said. “They’ve only just completed the set-up outside, they’ve just now finished the stage.”

  When she introduced me to her father I wanted to address him using his surname, but I didn’t know what it was. I had asked Miro on the phone that morning to talk her father into showing us around today, into letting us stand in the back during the rehearsals, while the opening-day performers were practising their acts. I had asked especially that my father be allowed to come, in the hope that his old Ministry of Wildlife suit might turn him into a dignitary, the rehearsal into a more formal affair. Now, however, it seemed a hopeless ploy and I had no idea what to do next, other than go outside. I’d been taking heart only in omens, like seeing Ahmed dance and finding Mr N’chele’s photograph upstairs.

  “You have a wonderful daughter,” I told Miro’s dad. “She is my closest friend.”

  It was an odd thing for me to say, especially since she’d no doubt told h
im we’d met just the other day, but Miro’s father smiled. “And no less do you have a wonderful dad,” he told me. “We were just speaking with him outside.”

  We’d been hearing the activity from out there for several minutes by then, but it was only as Miro’s father spoke that I realised what we heard most recently was music.

  “What’s happening now?” I asked. “How long will this go on?”

  Miro’s father was about a decade younger than mine. He was a gentle-looking man with white hair and a soft and ready face. He’d been an assistant curator for a dozen years but his primary work was in the main part of the museum. He had little to do with the new exhibition.

  “I’m not sure—I am in charge of weapons,” he said. “But I think the show will continue for quite a while.”

  We had walked back past the plastic Ahmed in his garden and into the main building once again. “From elephant rifles to pistols to poison arrows,” Miro’s father said, “if Kenya’s past had weapons in it, then I have collected them, catalogued them, and put them on display. Would you care to have a look?”

  I said I would, but we were back on the museum steps by then and the sun was so warm and time was so much of the essence that I also said it would have to be another day. A group of Samburu dancers were in front of us, jumping and chanting on a wooden stage that hadn’t been there when I’d entered the building forty-five minutes before. Below the Samburus were a bunch of Maasai, and beside the Maasai was a secondary-school choir that had come all the way from Marsabit, about fifty boys and girls in dark suits and dresses, each wearing a huge round badge embossed with a profile of Ahmed and a caption that said: Marsabit—Ahmed the Elephant’s Own Home Town.