Ahmed's Revenge

by Richard Wiley

  Mr N’chele had a big black sedan parked in the main lot, ready to drive his defeated son away, and he had another driver waiting to take my farm lorry to the museum, to make the last exchange. I was about to insist on going too, that was my intention, but when we got to the area of the official cars and the lorries, I seemed to remember a little of what I had learned from Madam Butterfly. And when I saw Jules’s coffin on the back of that Mercedes-Benz, I knew that my real job, my truest last job on this last and longest day, had to be to drive my husband home again. I could ask Ralph to go with Mr N’chele. Ralph could be my emissary, making sure that the final exchange was done, or I could even let Mr N’chele go alone.

  It was just then, just as I had made my best decision of the night, that I saw Miro standing by the door of my old dance studio, her face perspiring and tired. And my final surprise was that Detective Mubia was there too, safe and standing by her side. Earlier, at the opera’s end, I had wanted to find Miro and embrace her, but engagement with Mr Smith kept me from it, and I guess I believed also that after her spectacular performance she would need solitude for a while. But when I saw her at the studio door, when I rushed to kiss her and tell her what a glorious job she had done, it was the look of Detective Mubia that stopped me halfway up the stairs. The detective’s face was composed and serious and calm, its muscles sculpted once again into their old mould. And incredible as it was to see, his red corduroy suit was still on him, over a clean white shirt and tie. His jacket was straight and his trousers were whole, washed where they’d been dirty, patched where they’d been burned, mended where they’d been torn.

  Detective Mubia walked in front of us all, his head up high, and as he did so I realised that it was he who’d been responsible for what Mr N’chele said inside. Mr N’chele had come to his words not so much out of shame over his son or from his own ethical code, but because, after returning from my farm burned and broken and soiled, Detective Mubia had found Mr N’chele and told him that he must. In a word, Mr N’chele had once more done what he had to do to keep his awful son out of jail.

  Detective Mubia left without speaking, and when he was gone Mr N’chele opened the door to his car and pushed his son inside. The parking attendant then gave Mr N’chele and me our lorry keys and we exchanged them, just as we were supposed to do in the foyer, after Madama Butterfly. I asked Ralph to ride with Mr N’chele in the old farm lorry and I asked Dr Zir to take my father home in a taxi.

  So this is how it was when I walked across the car park and unlocked the door to the Mercedes-Benz. I was alone. Once inside the cab I looked at the gleaming knobs and the buttons and the windows that were so spotlessly clean. When I started the engine the sound was calm and low, and when I turned to look at Jules, to make sure he was securely tied, I saw my .380 automatic pistol and my husband’s last letter on the seat beside me. The pistol was dirty and the letter was ripped apart; several pieces of it had fallen to the floor.

  As I drove out of the car park the sky was clear and the moon was bright, and by the time I got to Kijabe Street no one else was on the road. As I passed the big roundabout, driving with one hand, I leaned down to pick up the pieces of Jules’s letter, to smooth them out on the seat beside me, even before I got home.

  That is the first stage of mending.

  Matching up the pieces that are torn.

  Act Three

  22

  Ahmed’s Revenge

  I could go on, I think, writing until I caught up with my present life—writing each day as I’ve lived it these last five years, a summary hour each night, before allowing myself to sleep. It’s a strange addiction, always telling what you know, always writing it down.

  But let me forgo all that and just say that in view of what happened after the opera, Jules’s wake was a sad and short affair. I reintroduced him to his skeletal left arm, putting it up the sleeve of his new black jacket, so he had a fleshy hand and a boney one, reminding everyone who looked at him that life was short. After the wake we buried him back on the farm, simple as that. And Mr N’chele was true to his word—he exchanged the tusks again, proving, I guess, that ivory and irony are anagrams, only a letter apart.

  As for me, I haven’t returned to the National Museum to see the place where Ahmed’s bones still stand, but it’s given me pleasure, all these years, to think of visitors from all over the world reaching across the cordon to touch Ahmed’s tusks in awe, to marvel at their length and circumference and the numerous scars that they have, evidence of Ahmed’s life and the battles that he won. That’s Ahmed’s own revenge, don’t you think, that the tusks they touch aren’t real?

  The real tusks truly are up in Marsabit, though. Six months or so after the final exchange Mr N’chele supervised the building of a museum up there, out at the edge of the park where Ahmed lived. The entire museum is a single stone room, very simple, but it’s got Ahmed standing at its centre, and around the outer walls it’s got photographs of Ahmed as he lived before the guards were posted, and photographs of the Rendille Children’s Choir singing “Greensleeves” with their Ahmed badges on. Ahmed’s Marsabit skeleton, I should say, is nothing like the one in Nairobi. In Marsabit his skeleton is abstract and angular, deeply primitive and made of black wood. It is unlike any elephant who ever lived, and in that it is superb. How stark and beautiful to see his authentic tusks coming out of it the way they do. Ebony and ivory—it’s extraordinary. I’ve been there many times. When Miro comes from New York, as a matter of fact, visiting Ahmed is the first thing she wants to do. Detective Mubia is back on the police force, by the way. I know it because Miro tells me. For five years now she has been the one sending money home, to pay his children’s school fees.

  One last thing. I want to tell you just in closing that Juliet is outside, playing in the orchard or down on the nearest side of the pond. As in the third act of Madama Butterfly, I’m bringing her to you late, at the end of my story, and with no hints of her before. I remember thinking that was a structural weakness in Puccini’s opera, but I don’t mind doing it myself, I don’t mind doing it at all. Today is Juliet’s fifth birthday, February 4, 1980, so it’s a red-letter day in more ways than one, for it is also the day I had told myself I would finish this memoir, the day I would finally stop spending my mornings in the office and would step out onto the land, taking up real life once more.

  My farm has changed a little bit over the years. Part of it is a tent camp now, like Cottar’s, where Ralph brings his tourists for a night or two, where he can see Juliet and me on his way to the Mara or on his way home. The tent camp is where the orchard used to be, with a view of the pond on one side, and a full view of the Mara plains on the other. It isn’t very far from Jules’s grave.

  When Juliet starts school in September we will have to move to my father’s house in town. Ralph will take over the entire farm, managing the coffee and the tent camp and living in the house. Juliet and I will come occasionally to visit her father’s grave, but eventually we will both turn into town people again, with full town lives to live. Already Juliet is talking about ballet lessons. Can you guess where those will be?

  When Juliet comes into the house in a minute she will have her daily job to do. She will take the lunch tray from my hands and walk with it to the dormitory and give it to Beatrice, who will feed my father, who spends his days staring at the pond, sitting on the dormitory porch on that same old bench. The evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones. Is that it or is it the other way around?

  There are more twists and turns to the story of one’s life than one realises—that’s something I’ve learned from writing all this down. We live our lives in three acts: the first, to know we are alive; the second, to try to understand; the third, to work and grow. That’s what I’ll teach Juliet, that’s her legacy from Jules and me, that is what she has to know.

  And when Juliet is grown up, who knows, maybe she will have her own tale to tell and will find her starting point in mine. That would be
good. In this family we are into the women’s generation now, and I think that kind of continuation would be fine. I like to imagine that Juliet will feel a certain peaceful recognition when she sits on the porch of her farmhouse, watches the animals at her pond, and lets her eyes wander down to the words her mother wrote so many years ago.

  I had a farm in Africa too. My farm was not in the Ngong Hills but on even richer land about eighty miles west of Nairobi. To get to my farm you drive down off what is called “the escarpment,” into the Great Rift Valley and then up again, forty minutes or so north of the dusty Maasai town of Narok.

  January 1976-February 1980

  Grant’s Coffee Farm

  Wildebeest Road, Kenya

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