Children Are Diamonds

by Edward Hoagland

  On her voice mail when we returned, Beryl heard a message of real estate import that teared her up. “I’m being dumped on. You can almost hear them laugh.” She drank too much at supper and began to burp, a telltale sign with her, then fart, and talk of her home tennis club, where hedge-fund managers scouted for a second marriage. We irritated each other—me cracking my big toe in bed, and baring my feet and scratching at the fungus patches on the soles—“strewing spores all through the house,” she said—which had annoyed my former wife as well. I claimed it was too hot for flip-flops. She tightly bunned her hair, not caring that I preferred it long and loose. Her experiment on this raffish continent was over, and our swan song—Ya-Ya’s and mine—was already playing, but speeded up discordantly when we all glimpsed a sticklike figure, as thin as a silhouette, vaulting over Beryl’s eight-foot front fence at sunset and, racing as though for his life toward the rear, scramble over that one as well. No chance to confront him, even had we dared to, or guess who was chasing him without opening the gate, which we were definitely not of a mind to do.

  “Oh, okay,” she decided after a minute, not explaining what she meant; but I knew that it was to take her medicine, cut her losses. A shell company had offered to buy the villa and doubtless turn it over for a profit after she left. In a few days, money materialized in her San Francisco account, besides what was going to remain awhile tied up in Kenyan red tape. She snagged an Air France seat, as the shippers were crating her impedimenta for seagoing transport, and sold her Land Rover to a tile-shop owner she’d been friendly with, for cash, which she laughingly took my advice on and folded into a belly belt, while bemoaning “another failure, another wild goose chase, another bath.”

  We drove Beryl to the airport, Wacuba, Ya-Ya, and me. She’d sequestered herself from people of her own class, I think, to cut her regrets. So we stayed a couple of held-over hours to keep her company at a lonely time, as well as for Ya-Ya to watch the huge passenger plane, first on the ground, then taking off. Especially in a Third World country where flights are late and last-minute bribes may be demanded, you feel better with a witness. It’s a sweeter, more solid departure, being seen to the gate. In fact, her British newsman, dropping by against her instructions, told the story of a tycoon he knew whose chauffeur had standing orders never to leave till the plane was out of sight; and sure enough, in Joburg one time, at the end of the runway it bloody crashed, and his limo sped straight onto the tarmac, beat every other vehicle to the flames, and his bloke pulled him out of the wreckage and got him to the hospital long before any ambulance would have.

  Ya-Ya, watching the silvery Airbuses and Boeings, five miles up, arrowing down the course of the Nile, had been told they were “for white people,” she said. So it was exciting for her to notice that half the passengers boarding the airliner alongside Beryl were not white. Then the lumbering, accelerating, breakneck, deafening, utterly amazing magic-carpet tilt, lift, and climb. Her life had not been such as to teach her to miss people unduly who vanished as though into the sky, or to complain at returning from Disneyland to her gritty cot at the shelter, with honking traffic outside. I did feel a pang for poor Beryl, knowing she would carry her problems back with her, just as she’d brought them to Africa from California in the first place. The roar at the airport had reminded me of Ruthie, too, waiting in her shell-shot church compound under the drone of the Antonov searching for a target to bomb or, conversely, for the rumble of twenty Bedford lorries carrying sorghum and corn to stanch the hemorrhage of deaths all around her.

  My hole-in-the-wall at the Arab’s was so much safer than what Al reported about Ruthie. She was eating Meals Ready to Eat, her last-ditch military rations, and my hospice patients had quietly coughed themselves to death. The checkerboarded patch of soil where, twice a day, kindergarten-aged children sat cross-legged in sixty or eighty squares chalked on the ground to have mush spooned into them was empty because there was no food. Every family fended for itself and carried a club, so that a hungry person watching others nibble a bit of nourishment had the choice of starving with a broken leg, if they tried to grab some, or just watching. Ruth, on the radio, didn’t spell out what she knew we could visualize because the Arab side, listening in, would want to hear that the Dinka civilians, behind the SPLA lines, were falling into chaos. Her curt phrases, “Ready to Eat,” “beds empty,” “quiet at the clinic,” “the Norwegians have had no deliveries either, but the Antonov is up near them,” sketched the tale. Most ominous was her word that Father Leo had stopped by: “Brought me stuff.” One could interpret that as meaning he and the Maryknolls were anticipating clearing out.

  When Al asked, “Want us?” she told him, “No, no.” “Because we’ll come with bells on,” he promised her, thereby committing me without asking me, though I was in the office, listening by the radio.

  “You mean you’d spring for a plane?” I asked, once we were off the airwaves. I sure didn’t want to drive again.

  “We’ll see.”

  Maybe if I could get behind a Ugandan army truck, with a squad of soldiers bouncing on the balls of their feet in back, it would feel safe—then sleep in a fenced compound in Atiak, with drinks with a colonel—or as part of a relief convoy, the drivers paid by the trip, not the day, pushing to get it over with. In the middle of the thing, I thought selfishly, a mine wouldn’t pluck me out.

  Al had aid projects near Addis Ababa and Dar es Salaam, and I accompanied him on the latter as a minder for two VIPs, decent, twinkly folks of Baptist good intentions, not like the Bechtel construction guys we drank with one evening. Though brutal themselves, they couldn’t hold a candle to the local Big Men in Nairobi, who, for instance, had been confining political prisoners in underground cells half full of water, so that they had to sleep sitting up and were perpetually wizened, with their feces floating all around them. The Bechtel and Halliburton engineers didn’t visit refugees, but my church wardens did, and I managed to introduce them to our three girls who needed strabismus surgery, after they had been to Kakuma camp and witnessed how Ya-Ya and the others would have been interned if their legal status were known. Kakuma is in the northern desert, and tens of thousands of Sudanese and Somalis were fenced in there: doubly so, because fenced apart from one another as well, with virtually no activities to occupy them, and the sand so hot at midday it burned their feet if they had no shoes. We saw two girls of a similar age hopping, screeching, toward a food distribution point—shrieking in both pain and fun because they had only a pair of sandals to share and, rather than take turns, found it less excruciating to each leap along with one leg held up. Surrounding Kakuma were even hungrier children, who weren’t fenced in and being fed by the U.N., belonging to the local Turkana tribe, whom we drove by without stopping to let them beg from us.

  So my church board chairmen, before they caught their plane, arranged through other contacts for an Asian doctor to schedule eye exams and surgery in a month or so for Ya-Ya, Tongkwoit, and Nyoka. What I was reminded of in the give-and-take of accomplishing this harked back to how tightly wound I must have been in negotiating in the States with vice principals, school board committees, and the like, either clamming up or getting myself fired for not shutting up on petty issues. Yet here, where sorcery as much as small talk was the gristle of so many neighborhoods, I could chat with visiting firemen and not break a sweat.

  I was never to hear from Beryl again, but Wacuba, the housemaid, walked clear downtown from Karen, carrying a plastic sack with her belongings in it, having been fired by the new owners, who wanted Luos instead of Kikuyus around, she said they’d said. The doorman at the New Stanley tipped her off to where I lived, when she showed up. I was closeted across the street at the Arab’s with a university student, a science major, who, for once, I wasn’t exploiting but infatuated with. I’d already bought her father a hearing aid and now she wanted school uniforms for her brothers and sisters, lying on one elbow with her mane of ebony hair half-covering her breasts, studying my face as if calculating
how hard I had fallen for her. Wacuba’s knocking broke up the power play. I phoned the few of Beryl’s acquaintances I had met; but no dice. Beryl had given her a hundred-dollar bill, more than a month’s pay, as severance, which I changed for her. She’d been afraid to take it to a bank for fear the police would be called to ask how she’d gotten it, or to a street hustler, who might simply snatch it.

  Josephine, my latest heartthrob, was amused, Wacuba being no threat and so far removed from her league. I’d given Josephine a cell phone the previous day, and she tapped this significantly, tucking it into her purse, as, seeing that I was going to remain engaged, she took her leave. I sat down to commiserate with Wacuba, who was crying while she folded Beryl’s payment into her socks, the last place muggers would look, for the trip home. The sunlight, on my balcony, shone white on her face.

  “Don’t walk,” I said. She shrugged. Already fond of her because of her kindness to Ya-Ya during our week at Beryl’s place, I pressed her not to, offering matatu money, plus some time now to talk, which was what she really wanted. We ordered tea; I explained aspects of Beryl’s position that more knowledge of America would have helped her understand. Then, to my surprise, she teased me about this Josephine—being “wound around her little finger. What is it that does that?” Not flirting, she invited me home to meet her five kids. Her brother-in-law had a car, so it would not be dangerous afterward to come back. She let slip, however, that her husband had died, not merely left her, as she’d always told Beryl, and thus she was more vulnerable than I’d realized, living with in-laws now that she had lost her job, with no absent husband in the family’s politics to stand up for those kids. And for expatriate employers like Beryl or me, death brings to mind HIV and AIDS. Had he? Does she? I asked, but she shook her head noncommittally.

  “What is this love at first sight?” she teased me again in the matatu. With so many hungry girls on the street, when and why did it start and stop? A particularly enticing nose and mouth, provocative hands and eyes. A man like me who had had his spells of going to strippers’ clubs couldn’t put into words why he begins to tip one performer and not the others. Twenty dollars in her G-string? It’s not her “measurements” or sympathetic heart.

  Wacuba’s brother-in-law lived out at the city’s eastward edge of the veldt but within sight of its sewage pools, glittering blue in the distance. He and his wife had built a bamboo-spike palisade completely around the little stucco house and patch of ground they rented, and densely planted every foot of soil available with corn, sharecropping a bit more for the landlord outside the fence. It was intricately, obsessively irrigated for thick productivity as insurance against such a disaster as this: Wacuba returning jobless, unannounced. Her husband’s sister and sister-in-law didn’t work except at caring for the collection of children they had, and cultivating the corn, though the sister was educated enough for a pink-collar typing job downtown, if it wasn’t a two-hour walk every day to hunt for one. She, like Wacuba, was bereft of a husband for unmentioned reasons, and the breadwinner left was Wacuba’s dead husband’s brother. He had a rickety Subaru whose door handles had fallen off, so that he had to climb out and use a screwdriver to let out the passengers he had picked up on the roadside, who had tired of waiting for a bus at rush hour. His gas tank was never full; he’d pay for a couple of gallons at a time as the shillings trickled in. Rather than give his sister or Wacuba a lift to hunt for jobs, Kariuki preferred to sell seats in the car as a sure income till the engine failed and have them weed, water, and hoe the corn in the meantime. It was frenetic—all of those young mouths to feed, and a sense of doom impending, common to so many Kenyan households, though a truce occurred in the mood, to offer hospitality in Wacuba’s name to me—and I would never have survived a walk with my possessions intact back to Moi Avenue in Nairobi. They even kept a watchdog—an obsequious but hypertense mutt loose at night, in a box during the day—which was unusual among a citizenry worried about where next month’s meals would come from. I filled the Subaru’s tank in exchange for a ride to the shelter that evening to look in on Ya-Ya.

  I was tutoring the accumulation of orphans who had settled in at STREETWISE, ADVOCATES FOR CHILDREN, beginning with the ABC’s. “How are you, Mr. Hickey?” they knew, but not how to spell it. The jowly, tan-faced eye doctor the Baptists had enlisted, who’d been kicked out of Uganda along with all the other “Asians” and therefore was habituated to a wildly fluctuating patient pool and ad hoc protocols, “far from London,” as he put it, having done a residency in Britain two decades ago, fit my three girls into a cancellation. (“The ayes have it!” he said.) And Al’s Somali wife, who in stockings and heels, as somebody’s executive assistant in a high-rise, earned nearly as much as he did, had taken such a shine to Ya-Ya’s karma since meeting her that she invited her to recuperate postoperatively in their house, where the chance of infection would be reduced, and where her daughters were fast-tracked for American or European schooling already. One even had a blue passport, having cleverly been born on a trip to Tulsa. Ya-Ya would never see the Nile again, Norah predicted: any more than she had revisited Mogadishu.

  Ya-Ya had divined that the brown man in a white coat with eye diagrams on his walls was the magician who was going to transform her future into a golden one, and her confidence was peeling off its timid mask. She was less apprehensive about hearing a snicker, although she still needed to screw her head around to discover a workable angle to look at anything. The doctor said that, though born in Africa, he expected himself and his family to be kicked out of Kenya eventually, too.

  “Idi Amin never lost the support of his people for doing that. You Americans like underdogs, but you are very choosy on who is an underdog and because you are never the underdog, it’s your amusement. Now that godless communism is over, you will try to convert even the Hindoo!” He smiled, waggling his head slightly in the Indian manner that signifies yes but appears to a Westerner like no.

  My Arab landlord also mocked me a little about how Israeli helicopter gunships are always, to Americans, supposedly the underdogs. But now he had heard from my new girlfriend, josephine, that I was experiencing bombing myself for a change, and not enjoying it, waking her with nightmares. He told another guest, a northern Sudanese, how I was earning my living, and the guy, a Khartoum businessman, burst rudely into laughter.

  “You lengthen the war! You feed people who otherwise would leave and let us negotiate a peace. And so they will die instead. And then we punish you by arming the war in Uganda because Uganda is in your pocket now, after Idi Amin, and we are just ‘ragheads,’ ‘sand niggers,’ to you.” He stared at me as though at a freak.

  Annoyed, I asked if it was true, as I’d heard, that Khartoum traded a Kalashnikov for every Ugandan child the Lord’s Resistance Army turned over to them at the airstrip near Torit where the LRA was resupplied, to be flown north and become slaves to rich families in the capital.

  “You’ve been watching too much Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Gone with the Wind,” my landlord interrupted humorously. He had ventures that took him abroad, even to Canada once, he’d told me. But the other businessman was not amused.

  “Your nuns, they don’t treat blacks who are naked, I have heard. Men who are naked in the bush: they reject them, send them away to die without medicines. What kind of a ‘missionary’ is that?”

  Having heard similar stories about the Catholics from Ruth, I didn’t argue with him with a cheap shot like what, anyway, are Muslim women permitted to do, out in the world, but said the lady I worked with was continually giving SPLA soldiers hernia exams, when she had a chance to. This shocked both of them so much they refrained from laughing. When I took advantage of their silence to mention starving children, however, they again seized what they considered the high ground by pointing out that America gives Israel its helicopter gunships to shoot rockets from the sky and kill the children of Gaza. I began to worry that I might lose my comfortable berth in this hotel, but my landlord only smiled, seeing I was stu
mped.

  The radio preoccupied Al and me. Our attention to other responsibilities, and even my sexual poker game with Josephine, stalled with dread about events on the Nile far away. The Maryknolls sounded as enigmatic as the Vatican concerning their plans, and Ruth as stubborn as a clam. “Mammoth,” she said, about her needs. The Norwegian trio chattered in their own language to their one-man base office in Nairobi, which for security purposes was as good as a code. But the pitch of their voices was not reassuring, and they didn’t bother to close in English, as ordinarily, in order to greet everybody else.

  I did promise, against my better judgment, to return if a food delivery was organized. Lone autos did seem to trigger the killer instinct in guerrillas, who might let a convoy of huge mufflerless lorries go by—not knowing which would be the last, to shoot its tires out. Though sincere, my pledge was not likely to be called because everybody knew that in the face of an impending offensive, no deliveries would occur. When not exhausting my infatuation with Josephine, I was showing a toothpaste marketer around the bureaucracy, which involved leaving bribes in envelopes in various desks, after putting up with the officeholder’s officious jollying that the best dentifrice was a twig tweaked off a toothbrush tree; every Kenyan boy would surely tell you that. The guy from Cincinnati talked about a level playing field—his Indian competitors shipping into Mombasa were underpricing him—but meanwhile had contracted an intestinal complaint. I had his hired driver take him beyond the metastasizing slums to the veldt, where we gazed at wide-open skies stretching over wildebeests and gazelles scattered toward the horizon, then to our street shelter, in hopes that he might spring for a substantial contribution to Streetwise. But he only bought soccer balls and basketballs, borrowing a ladder to nail up the hoop himself, and showing the kids how you dribble and shoot, before his Cairo plane.