Three Weeks in December (9781609459024)

by Schulman, Audrey

  She stared out the window. Not at all what she’d pictured. Way too many people bustling about, continuous stores and cement high-rises, palm trees and bougainvillea. Gradually the city was replaced by tiny farms, each an acre or less. The soil was the red of laterite, high in iron and aluminum hydroxides, a thin topsoil that washed away easily. It must be poor farming, but every inch of land was cultivated or built on, utilized in some way. Coffee, plantains, sweet potatoes. The entire country was crowded with people, working in the fields or by the houses, churning food in three-foot-tall mortars. Women strode along the roads with babies strapped on their backs. They walked the way she’d always dreamed of walking: perfect posture but not stiff, their hips and backs rolling and alive.

  Although Mutara drove along a two-lane highway, it was nothing like the interstates she was used to. Here, it was startling how many people and belongings could fit on a moped. On the back of one were strapped two young goats, swaddled tightly as babies, eyes narrowed into the wind. Tied on another was an industrial-sized sink, a child peeking out of it forlornly.

  Everyone wove from lane to lane, with little regard for the direction of traffic, unless the oncoming vehicle was bigger.

  About an hour into the journey, an oil truck abruptly pulled onto their side of the road, roaring toward them. It was painted to look like a shark grinning. Tires squealing, Mutara swerved out of the way, rocketing now along the dirt of the shoulder, nearly sideswiping a family of four on a motorbike. For a moment it seemed the truck would still hit them, looming over them. Max could see jagged scratches in its paint.

  There was a terrific clang as its side-view mirror broke off on the roof of their van and then the truck zoomed past, without having slowed at all.

  Even through her headphones, Max could hear the way all the cars around tooted their horns, the honks somehow very third-world, not loud and outraged at someone else’s transgression, but surprised and nearly joyful at survival.

  Mutara glanced sideways at her, then did a double take. She was still grinning. When the side-view mirror had hit, pieces of glass had spun through the air. The shimmering beauty stunning. Like the sky itself was broken and spinning.

  Death, to her, had never seemed that terrible.

  Satisfied, she leaned back, closed her eyes, and just let the smells of the landscape waft over her. She sniffed at the air. Some days, she imagined herself as a mole: unreliable blinking eyes, hiding in her burrow, poking out just her twitching nose to experience the world that way. Unlike vision or touch, smell never betrayed her, never shivered or popped, electric and confusing. Instead it grounded her. She might not be able to hug her mom or more than glance at her face, but she could bury her nose in her mom’s clothes all she wanted.

  On the wind rushing in the window, she smelled wood smoke, rotting meat, cow manure, human feces, and something that kept reminding her of cough drops until she opened her eyes to identify a passing tree as eucalyptus.

  In college she’d once met a woman who’d been born without a sense of smell. “Anosmia,” the woman had declared matter-of-factly, the way one might say, “Parking ticket.”

  And Max jerked back from the word as fast as though she’d been slapped.

  After three hours of driving, they parked in the lot of the Virunga National Park. Above them, the mountains loomed craggy and immense. Even here on the equator, two of the peaks had snow on them. Stepping out of the van, Max finally saw real jungle. Mile after mile of it swept up the steep sides of these mountains. No roads, no houses. Up there, the land would be empty of people except for a few researchers. Instead in every direction would be plants, massed thickly, rich and glossy. Waiting for her to study them.

  Fifteen porters were in the parking lot waiting for them. They were not dressed as nicely as the people in the airport. These men wore the cast-off clothing of different countries and climates: a Manchester United T-shirt, a pair of ripped Brandeis sweatpants, a woman’s cowl-neck sweater. All of the porters were barefoot except for one who wore ancient bowling shoes, the toes held together with duct tape. These men unloaded her bags out of the van and divvied them into approximately even allotments, then tied each pile up tightly in a sheet. Each man wove himself a padded crown of grass, hefted up his bundle and placed it on his head like some whimsical hat. Her Olympus microscope on top of two pieces of Samsonite luggage. Twenty boxes of tofu on her Plant Encyclopedia. Then, balancing these weights effortlessly, the men lit three cigarettes and passed them around, talking, while Mutara locked up the van. He pulled off his own clean and new-looking rubber boots to pack them away in his knapsack. Then standing in his bare feet, he neatly folded his pants up to his knees.

  Max wondered how they would travel this last leg of the journey. From the map she’d looked at with her mom, she knew the research station was located high on the shoulder of these mountains, probably five miles and six thousand feet straight up. These mountains were supposed to be a major tourist destination, so she searched for a gondola or some all-terrain vehicles or at least a wide paved path. She could spot nothing along these lines.

  Whatever language these men spoke, it wasn’t French. Their words were all bounce and rounded vowels. When the last cigarette was smoked down to the filter, they turned and in a line, luggage swaying on their heads, walked into the jungle, heading up what she now saw was the narrowest of muddy trails.

  Mutara followed.

  Max stared. Roswell and Stevens hadn’t mentioned this part of the itinerary. The slope was steep. The porters strode onward, making their ascent look easy. They began to disappear into the foliage, the bags waving good-bye from above the bushes. She glanced again up at the distant mountains peaks and then, having no choice, followed.

  The mud on the path was slick. It felt as though it had been raining here continuously for weeks. Before she’d gone a hundred feet, she slipped and fell onto both knees and one hand. As with most aspies, physical agility was not one of her skills. At the best of times she walked flatfooted and unsteadiy. Right now, she hadn’t slept in thirty-nine hours and the tranquilizers she’d taken on the airplanes seemed to have puddled in her feet. She stood back up, wiping the mud off her pants as best she could—mostly smearing it around—and then continued to climb.

  Three times a week she jogged four miles, but only indoors on a track, an utterly flat surface. She enjoyed running round and round that perfect oval, keeping neatly between the lines. Years of this had helped her balance and stride appear slightly more natural.

  But this path was definitely not flat.

  Within the first half hour, she fell three more times and gave up trying to wipe herself off. Hoping her bare feet might get more traction, as it seemed to for the porters and Mutara, she pulled off her loafers and tied them to her knapsack.

  With her toes, she could find a bit more purchase, but she was having difficulty now catching her breath, her ribs heaving. The van had climbed up the mountains a few thousand feet before it got to the parking lot. The air was getting thinner. The path went on and on.

  Every half-mile or so Mutara waited for her, crouched on his heels at a turn in the path, smoking a cigarette. Perhaps he was embarrassed for her—huffing, smeared in mud, plodding up the path—for he looked at the jungle rather than her. She struggled on toward him, progress slow. Finally, the cigarette finished, he pressed it out in the mud, got to his feet and walked on. She was still 20 feet down the path. An awkward robot, her gears straining. She didn’t complain or ask him to slow down.

  Two hours into the climb, he waited at a turn in the path until she was close enough to hear his voice. Perhaps he’d gotten past his embarrassment for she could sense his head was pointed toward her, studying her.

  “Do you wish the porters to carry you?” His voice puzzled.

  She imagined the porters clustered tightly around her, carrying her in a litter, the occasional thoughtless hand laid on her arm or ankle. “No.”

  He paused, his head still angled to regard her
. Then he turned and continued, moving up the path as smoothly as though this were a staircase, never seeming to consider where to place his feet or what to grab. He didn’t breathe hard, must have lived at this altitude for years.

  By the next time she caught up with him, even her hair was full of mud. She’d slid at one point nearly thirty feet before she managed to catch hold of a trunk and stop herself. Now, she came around a corner to find Mutara leaning against a tree, eyes closed, maybe napping. His clothing didn’t have a fleck of dirt on it. When he heard her wheezing, he pulled his head up.

  After a long moment, he said, “Feel for the tree roots with your toes. Use them like steps. Always hold onto a branch.”

  She followed the directions exactly, as she tended to do. They helped.

  Throughout her life, she’d studied how neurotypicals reacted when faced with adversity. Some struggled valiantly, but the majority gave up once the situation got unpleasant. When it came to long swathes of her life, unpleasant wasn’t a state she could discern. She’d been climbing for three hours. Her feet stumbled now from plain exhaustion. Each time she fell, she pushed herself back up and continued, working to step on the tree roots and hold onto branches.

  Mutara began to climb again, but several times he paused to glance back.

  At the next turn he waited until she reached him. It took her a long time. As she moved past him, her right foot slid out from under her.

  He grabbed her elbow, caught her. That sharp electric flicker. Even now—on her meds, avoiding processed foods, no longer a confused child—that flicker cut at her. As soon as she got her balance, she pulled back from his touch.

  “Please,” he said, “let me help.” No distance anymore in his voice.

  She examined his feet. His toes were spread wide, the feet braced in a V. His balance certain. This was what her feet would have to master.

  “Higher up where the gorillas live, it is sloped and muddy like this?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Then don’t help me. I need to learn how to do this.”

  SEVEN

  Tsavo River, British East Africa

  December 22, 1899

  The railway reached the eastern bank of the river Tsavo. The tips of the steel tracks poked out over the edge of the riverbank, pointing to the other side a hundred feet away. From up the river, floated the distant bangs and shouts of the men assembling the camp in the wide shady clearing at the next bend. Jeremy figured they would reside here for at least three weeks, until the bridge was complete, then they could build the railroad across the river to continue on the other side. He had told the men they should take the time to set the camp up well because of the duration of their stay.

  He stood now beside the tracks, examining the work site. In the shade of the lush trees along the bank, it felt ten degrees cooler than under the miserly thorn trees. Bending down to the river, he scooped water into his hat and clapped it purposefully onto his head. The water splashed down his neck and under his spine protector, shockingly cold. No more brackish drinking water imported from a hundred miles away. Also, for at least a month, the men would not have to hack through the razor-sharp nyika, clearing a path through the forest for the railway tracks. Instead, they could just build the bridge in this cooler shade, take dips in the river. Life would be easier on all of them.

  Those first few days he had worked on the railroad, he had looked forward to the monsoons finally coming, believing they would cool things down, make the work easier on the men. In his mind he’d been imagining a temperate drizzle. Instead the sheets of solid rain made it hard to see and hear. Each shovelful of soggy mud was three times heavier than when it was dry. Even breathing in the downpour took some skill. Yesterday, he’d been called over to see, after an exceptional twelve-hour deluge, a brand-new embankment—previously as hard as baked clay—quivering with the consistency of pudding. Under the weight of a fully loaded train, it sprayed out ten-foot-long jets of mud, the train itself gently rocking from side to side like a boat on the sea. In the end, the engineer had been too fearful to come to a full stop for fear the embankment would cave in, so the train was unloaded while it chuffed slowly on.

  Since the rains had commenced, the humidity had intensified. His clothes felt damp to the touch even before he pulled them on. His sweat never dried off; instead it dribbled slowly downward, gluing his underclothes to his skin, puddling along with the rain in his boots. Even without him performing any of the manual labor, he had started to develop heat rashes everywhere his body brushed against itself: under the arms, along the groin, even along the creases of his eyelids.

  The rains had also brought out the insects: scorpions, ants, termites, and beetles. Did they need the humidity to hatch or had they been here the whole time and the waterlogged earth forced them out into view? Yesterday he had watched a glistening five-inch-long millipede undulate its furry borders straight up the path toward the cooking tent, as confident as though it were the camp’s chef. The creature had weight and volume, its body thicker than his thumb. Eyeing its hard carapace, he was not certain he could crush it with his heel, even with all his weight behind it. Alan Thornton, the physician in camp, believed the bite of some millipedes poisonous. Jeremy let the insect go its own way.

  He had bites of different kinds all over his skin, on the bottoms of his feet, between his fingers, and behind his ears. He knew the Indians, with their more bared flesh and lack of shoes, must be worse off.

  Here, however, by the river, things would be different. Here they could bathe, clean their wounds, cool down. Everyone’s spirits would be raised.

  Glancing upriver, he saw, thirty yards away, a native sipping water from a cup made of a rolled leaf.

  “Otombe,” he yelled impulsively, then immediately worried he might be mistaken.

  The man looked behind himself as though considering disappearing into the undergrowth, paused and stepped forward instead.

  Once Otombe was closer, Jeremy called, “Will you go hunting with me again sometime?” He did not ask because he thought the N’derobbo had demonstrated great facility at the task. How difficult could it be to spot a tall animal out there on the savannah? No, this was just the first African he had met who could speak English with some ease. Jeremy wanted to know more about that moment he had sensed, standing out on the plains, grass up to his shoulders, wondering about the lion. Otombe’s expression was alert, his eyes sharp. He resided in a hut with a spear, the nyika everywhere outside, this terrible heat for most of the year followed by months of torrential rain. What was it like to be human, obviously intelligent, but living under the conditions of an animal?

  With his long gangly legs and bony arms, Jeremy knew he would not have survived childhood here. Sometimes, even now, long past the age where he could claim the excuse of growing limbs, when he tried for a burst of speed up the stairs or a fancy dismount off Patsy, his limbs twisted in some awkward way and he fell. If he had grown up here, he would have slipped into a ravine or tripped in front of a hippo, accomplishing something ungraceful and immutable.

  Otombe stood in front of him, thin and still, balanced in his dark body. “What do you search for?” he asked, his voice quiet.

  For a moment, Jeremy thought he was being asked about the aims of his life and he opened his mouth fearful of what might emerge. Then recalling his original request, he played for time, glancing up and down the river as though searching for an animal right now. Actually, when he thought back to the hunt he felt a twinge of shame at the ease with which the eland had fallen and the paltry number of steaks they had cut from the giant body, leaving the rest for the two natives and the hyenas. He had given pounds of the meat away to each of his jemadars and still he was eating it, by now in stews and sun-dried as jerky. To Otombe, he had given only a large slab of steak as well as the single silver coin that Ungan Singh had said was more than enough.

  At the time, taking the coin and the meat, Otombe’s face had shown no emotion, neither gratitu
de nor disgust. Jeremy wondered what type of man Otombe saw before him. Someone spidery and pale, overdressed in the heat, heavy-footed. A creature so incapable he required a horse to carry him about, a servant to cook for him, a mechanical train to transport in the materials to meet all his needs. A fragile temperate-zone rose, transplanted and fussed around.

  Jeremy rubbed his eyes. “What can be found here along the river?”

  “Of the big game, you can find hippo, crocodile, elephant, and lion.”

  “Have you killed all those?”

  Otombe looked down at the butt of his spear, twisting it in the dirt of the riverbank. “My tribe, we are not whites. We have no guns. We kill duiker, gazelle and dik-dik. Small animals.”

  There was a pause. The wind moved down the river, cool under the trees. Jeremy inhaled in pleasure. He had never realized before how much of his basic happiness depended on not being overheated, on not being thirsty or having sweat in his eyes. In this heat, how could you motivate yourself to go out and search for clean water, locate food? He found it hard to swing himself up onto Patsy, hard to pick up a spoonful of a meal already prepared and placed in front of him. He thought even Patsy felt this way. In Maine, she had always been frisky, kicking her heels up at the smallest excuse: a swaying branch, a flapping scarf. These last few days, she sighed instead when he mounted, picking her way forward only at a determined kick. In this heat, his hunger vanished. He was losing weight already and he did not have a lot to spare. Without the railroad shipping in his food and water, he did not believe he would have the will or skills to survive here more than a month.

  As though he knew Jeremy would not be able to choose which animal to hunt, as though he knew his objective was primarily to converse, Otombe added, “This ford is where the slave caravans stop.”

  “Used to stop,” Jeremy said, correcting his English.