Three Weeks in December (9781609459024)

by Schulman, Audrey

  “Look,” Otombe insisted, “look.” He was pointing with his whole arm.

  Newborn, Jeremy thought. I am a baby. He forced himself to survey the grass systematically in the area where the native pointed. He imagined the coup of posting home a photograph of himself sitting astride a dead lion.

  “Sixty yards,” said the N’derobbo. “Dark ears above the grass.”

  But Jeremy saw only grass, waving gently.

  “Gone.” Otombe let his arm fall while his eyes methodically searched. Standing now beside him, Jeremy realized this was the way the N’derobbo experienced the savannah, swimming through it, the grass up to his chest, holding only a single spear. The lion was somewhere out there. Jeremy understood now why he watched the grass around him with such care.

  “Where did it go?”

  Otombe shrugged.

  The savannah ran uninterrupted up to this small trampled clearing where the eland had fallen. One of the bearers was kneeling down, gutting the animal. There was the coppery smell of blood. The organs were quickly scooped out and tossed onto the ground. Woozy at the sight, he turned away while the two unfamiliar natives who’d followed the hunting party stepped forward to claim the innards. Behind them the grass trembled. Was it only the breeze? Even holding his gun as he was, Jeremy found himself stepping closer to the N’derobbo.

  Riding back from the hunt, Jeremy turned to see if any natives followed them now. The prairie behind them was empty, but he spotted the bundle of eland steaks balanced on the head of one of his WaKikuyu bearers. The bundle was tiny in comparison to the animal, fifty pounds taken from a half-ton creature. The meat was wrapped in the animal’s own hide and, from a fold in the pelt, a little blood escaped, dripping down the WaKikuyu’s neck. He remembered that moment while the creature had lain on its side, gasping for breath.

  Turning away, he decided to leave these men for now. He should not have taken the day off, even if it was Sunday—too much depended on his leadership.

  He sent the hunting party straight home while he journeyed back the longer way, following the railroad tracks, in order to check on the integrity of the newest section of embankment after last night’s downpour.

  Thus, when the sun set, he was riding Patsy along the tracks, getting close to camp, admiring the railroad’s clean line. Although the tracks’ final stop was supposed to be Lake Victoria, Jeremy had already figured out the lake would be merely an incidental layover to a much more important destination. This destination, the true purpose of the construction, had occurred to him as soon as he grasped the extent of the railroad’s likely cost. The proposed budget was almost four million pounds, an imposing amount all on its own, but it seemed unlikely the total bill would come close to being that low. The surveying team had been too rushed to map the terrain in detail. Without a thorough assessment, any estimate of cost could be only a guess, and there were so many possible complications in this foreign clime: attacks by hostile tribes, the Indian workers going on strike, army ants devouring the wooden railway ties, the difficulties of engineering the railway up the two-thousand-foot-tall Kikuyu escarpment, the havoc caused by rhino footprints and rain. No, on this continent there was little chance that the railroad construction would proceed smoothly, that everything would play out according to a plan developed in a tidy, temperate country. The final price tag for this railroad would be staggering even to the British Empire.

  And this was where the true destination or purpose became apparent. Once England had spent this much on a colony, it could not possibly let things continue as before, the tribes puttering around naked and hunting, the animals roaming free, the minerals lying untouched beneath the ground, the land unfarmed. No, long before this railway reached Lake Victoria, it would forcibly offload onto this land British values and lifestyles. Before this railway was finished, there would be cities built and English spoken, factories assembled and farms plowed, clothing worn and punctuality taught, the Christian god worshipped. Onto this wilderness would be mapped the straight and exacting lines of money and steel.

  In a few years, he thought, little in this land would remain the same. He was glad to have the privilege of residing here now, experiencing it in all its beauty.

  In the early darkness, he spotted something by the tracks. Seventy yards ahead, a tangled lump lay in the ditch at the bottom of the embankment, as though the passenger train were already running, and this was trash tossed from the window by some careless traveler.

  As he approached, a creature slunk away from the debris, dragging a piece after it and wiggling effortlessly into the nyika. In the darkness it was hard to be sure of the animal’s size: fox, hyena, or something larger.

  As he halted Patsy, she shivered as though cold. Laying his hand against her neck, he could feel that her breathing seemed a trifle heavy from their walk. She must be acclimatizing to the heat here. He would give her an extra dose of oats tonight.

  It was at this moment—his hand against his horse’s neck, his thoughts on oats—that he registered the trash was actually a corpse.

  From the way the Indian’s body was tangled up in the sheet of the unraveled turban, it appeared it had been rolled down the escarpment into the ditch.

  Five, perhaps six, seconds passed. Jeremy exhaled through his mouth.

  Swinging an unwilling leg over the saddle, he dismounted. His Grandpapi would do this without blinking, pick the corpse up, lay it across the pommel of the saddle, and ride back into camp with one hand grasping the seat of its pants, his jowled face revealing no emotion.

  Standing here beside the body, Jeremy took a moment to look up at Patsy’s familiar profile. In the darkness, the star on her forehead gleamed as clear as a light. To touch this body, pick it up, he would have to concentrate on something else, as he did at the dentist’s while the man’s pliers nosed about in his mouth searching for the rotten tooth. Numbers had always offered him a certain reassurance.

  The Metric System, he recited from memory, is derived from units of ten. Tera equals ten to the twelfth. Giga is ten to the ninth. Mega, ten to the sixth.

  Crouching down, reaching for the right arm, he noticed something was wrong with the face. He forced himself to breathe slowly. The skin was darker than normal above the mouth, stained perhaps by a birthmark or injury.

  Deci, ten to the negative one. Centi, negative two. Milli, negative three.

  He closed his hand on the bony wrist. Human flesh, chill to the touch. This close, he could see the mouth was propped open, something clasped between the teeth. For a moment he wondered if the man had choked on his dinner; that would explain the smell of cooking.

  Micro, negative six. Nano, nine. Pico, twelve.

  Reaching for the other wrist, he realized the object between the teeth was glowing. A live coal. The mouth charred. Sweet smell of meat.

  Into his mind flashed an image of the accounting book, the neat row of negative numbers cribbed beneath each man’s name. With an intuitive jump, he comprehended the railway’s penny-pinching imitation of a Hindu cremation. He fell back on his buttocks.

  The bush near him rustled. Perhaps the animal that had scurried away.

  Scrambling backward up the embankment, he flailed, slipping onto his side, mud coating his hip. Fumbling upright, he scanned the brush near him, his rifle finally at the ready.

  SIX

  Kigali, Rwanda

  December 9, 2000

  As the airplane pulled into the Kigali terminal, an announcement was broadcast, requesting in three different languages that the passenger known as Dr. Max Tombay deplane first. The flight attendants herded her down the aisle. Stepping out the door, into the sunlight, she saw at the base of the airplane’s stairs twelve officials in suits smiling up at her and holding up a banner that said “Welcome Panoply Pharmaceuticals.” In smaller letters beneath, the banner added, “Rwanda: A Great Place for a Factory.”

  She held tight to the railing, blinking. The trip here had taken twenty-two hours, three different flights. All tho
se fleshy breathing strangers packed in so close. The nubbly seats, the loud announcements, the mechanical air. She wasn’t supposed to move, not pace, not flap her hands. For twenty-two hours, strapped into her chair, the roar of the engines had whined in her head like a noxious gas.

  Now, exiting this plane, her feet were a little leaden from the tranquilizers. She stumbled slightly near the bottom of the stairs and four different arms in business suits were held out, wanting to assist. She stopped cold, out of reach, and waited there, eyes averted. After a pause, these hands were withdrawn. The flight attendants stood in the doorway behind her, whispering. A certain dry pressure in the back of her throat. She worked not to vomit.

  She didn’t address any one of the business suits around her, but instead talked in the direction of her left hand clinging to the railing. “I need a room to myself,” she said, “for twenty minutes.” She ignored the French phrase book in her bag over her shoulder; it was too far away. Instead, she just repeated her words more loudly. “I need a room to myself for twenty minutes.”

  One of the uniforms, maybe a translator, said something to the others about nécessit-a-something-or-other and chambre. Perhaps they assumed she had to make some phone calls, probably to heads of state, for they snapped into action, the whole crowd of them leading her into the airport, down a corridor and around a corner to an office that looked like it had been considered fancy in the 1950s.

  They clustered in the hallway, one of them addressing her, probably the first sentence of a welcome speech, smiling, rolling his hands out in a wide gesture as though this hallway represented all that Rwanda could offer.

  Before the translator could put these words into English, she closed the door in their faces.

  Space without people. Something close to silence. Switching off the lights to stop the busy electric hum, she crawled under the desk, tight ball, tight ball, fists over her ears, rocking and moaning soft vowel sounds like a sick cow.

  Later, she opened the door. She could at least function now. Five of the officials were still waiting, whispering among themselves. They turned, anxious and smiling. She announced she was ready and they led her back down the corridor. Not one of them asked a question. It was possible they’d heard her moaning.

  The parade of them walked straight through immigration, followed by several porters wheeling her bags, the lab equipment and food. They cut through the crowds to the front of the line where a nervous immigration agent stamped her passport without saying a word.

  She looked down to avoid the eyes of anyone who might be staring. All she saw were the hands and legs of the people she passed. Noted the median skin tone here was much darker than she was used to, close to the color of pumpernickel.

  Her own color was an amber shade exactly halfway between her mom’s ivory pinkness of a shaved mouse and her dad’s reddish brown of cedar mulch. Still, in Maine, the combination of these colors had always seemed to confuse others. The first day of kindergarten, for example, her parents had walked in with her. The teacher had understood her dad was her dad. Had greeted him, exclaiming what a beautiful little girl he had.

  And then hesitating, turned to her mom and asked, “Can I help you?”

  On many subjects, neurotypicals were capable of deriving enormous information from minimal data points. Her mother, in a two-minute conversation with a neighbor, could deduce so much about the person’s relationship, career and family life—information that Max would never have been able to infer. But on some subjects, normals seemed willfully thick.

  Science was her respite, the exactness of vocabulary and measurement. Whenever she learned a new term, she could feel the frisson in her mind, the sparkle of connection. All sorts of examples would suddenly be illuminated. “Surface tension” and “crown shyness,” they explained so much about the world, creating clarity where previously there’d been just a profusion of data.

  So of course she found people’s thinking and terminology about having darker skin confusing. It was so deliberately inexact, as though there were only two possible answers. At first sight, you either were black or you weren’t.

  Her mom said this toggle switch helped folks pretend the races were in separate encampments with walls built up between them. Max had difficulty with analogies, tended to take them literally. At her mom’s words, she’d pictured the gap between East and West Berlin, on either side those vast concrete walls, barbed wire, and machine guns. For the next few years, she kept an eye out for walls like this somewhere around Bangor, assuming one day she’d be asked to move to the no-man’s land between.

  Upon meeting her, people tended to ask where she came from. When she was young she’d answer, “14 Pleasant Street, second floor.” It wasn’t until she was nine that her mother had told her this question was actually an inquiry about her racial background. From then on, when Max replied, she worked to be clear. After stating she’d been born in Bangor, she added she was a mulatto. If there was a pause afterward, she tried to be helpful, “Possibly even a quadroon.” She assumed, in all situations, that specificity was good.

  The airport lobby was filled with people and luggage. She spotted the main doors leading out of the building and strode fast toward them. She needed to get out. She had to keep juking—left, then right, then left again—to keep some space between her and everyone else, a very shy quarterback running down the field. The officials and porters trailed after her, zigzagging. The translator was half-running after her, talking loudly in English. His accent was hard to understand, the rhythm of his voice so different. Something about the tonnage of coffee beans and tin ore exports this year. She plowed on, desperate.

  Pushing out through the doors, she walked straight into another crowd. She slammed to a halt, hands held up to protect her.

  And half the men in this crowd, the second they saw her, stopped in the midst of whatever they were doing. There was a single quiet moment, then they all rushed her, yelling out “taxi, taxi,” followed by prices in many languages and currencies. She went into a crouch, glancing around for some escape.

  A stranger halted the stampede. He stepped in front of her, holding up his hands and yelling out something in French, a declarative statement. The men grunted, stopped and turned away.

  “Dr. Tombay.” The stranger said, “I am Mutara Gusana, head guide from Karisoke. Dr. Dubois send me. I drive you now.” He held out his hand and she looked down at it. A calloused palm, dry skin. She was still breathing hard, couldn’t deal with touching anyone.

  “I don’t shake hands,” she said. “I have Asperger’s.”

  After a confused pause, he withdrew his hand. It seemed likely his English didn’t extend to the name of this syndrome. “Please to come with me.” Any sort of warmth had disappeared from his voice.

  The officials continued to follow her, the translator calling out information about the stability of their economy and friendliness of the people. The porters trailed behind with her luggage. The van was a beat-up Volkswagen from the 1970s, hand-lettered “Karisoke Research Station.” The gorilla painted above the name looked a little like a hairy man with a bad back hunched over.

  While her luggage was packed in, she glanced at Mutara and then away. This was the way she tended to get information about any person who stood close to her, a single fast stroboscopic picture of the person’s expression and gesture. At this speed the person’s face didn’t overwhelm her. On the other hand, she didn’t get all that much detail. He was a thin African wearing a blue shirt. She turned toward his shadow and asked, “The airport is full of people. How’d you know I was the one you were supposed to pick up?”

  There was a pause. His shadow cocked its head. Then its arm gestured toward the airport. “But look. It is clear. You are the only . . . What is the word?”

  She looked back at the crowds. She could do this since their faces were too far away to hurt her eyes. She saw, aside from being darker and half a head shorter than her, the Rwandan women wore designer jeans or ruffled skirts in viv
id colors, high heels and large jewelry. A significant number of the men had on suits, some a little threadbare but all perfectly pressed. Most of them dressed as though they were about to interview for a job they really wanted. Max, on the other hand, wore gray stretchy sportswear. Her only jewelry was her dad’s wooden beads strung round her neck on a simple string, her hair shaved as short as a Marine’s. Nothing about her was designed to impress anyone with her social standing or fashion sense.

  “American,” she thought. From the distance of a hundred feet, anyone could pick her out as American.

  “Blanc,” said Mutara. “You are the only blanc.”

  The laugh burst out of her nose, a phlegmy sort of snort.

  Her laughter was rare, but when it came, it geysered out. To fight it, she began to mentally recite the periodic table in alphabetical order, giving herself points for speed. “Aluminum, antimony, arsenic . . . .” Barium next? Her laughter faded as her eyes rolled upward, searching.

  The tropical sky above, for a brief disorienting moment, looked so much like the sky over Maine.

  The latch on the van’s passenger-side door was broken and had been replaced by a thick braid of plastic bags that tied the door to the glove-compartment handle. Once Mutara got in, he retied her door shut, then bent briefly under the dashboard to touch two wires together. In the van with him, she could smell his scent of spices, mud, and soap. Coughing, the whole van began to rumble like an outboard motor. She winced and reached into her bag for her noise-canceling earphones.

  “Money,” he shouted over the noise. “Never enough, no? Please not to lean on your door.”

  As they drove away, the officials waved. Yelling good-bye with as much emotion as though she were their beloved.

  She pulled on her earphones. From the edge of her eyes, she saw Mutara shift his torso slightly to watch her do this, then turn away. For the rest of the drive, he didn’t say another word. This was OK, preferable even.