“It’s a beautiful night,” she said dreamily.
He nodded and gave her a light squeeze on the fingers.
“We are still drunk, right?” she asked.
“We most certainly are.”
The crash had finally splintered all pretense of formality between them, like a bomb annihilating what was left of barriers and trenches, accelerating the process of their coming together. The accident, more than all the alcohol they’d been drinking, had finally earned them an intimacy. After all, their bodies had been rolling together in the air, bouncing and dancing in the front seat in what had felt like slow motion—like bodies of astronauts in space, she thought—and had reemerged from the wreck intact. At this point they both felt they were allowed to be quiet and give a rest to the exhausting flirting they’d been engaged in, up until they had fallen off the road.
“We can take a nap and lie on a bed for a while. We’ll take it from there,” he suggested, as though, after lying in a hospital bed for a few hours, they would be presented with a variety of desirable options they could choose from.
They reached the hospital as the sky was beginning to pale behind the trees.
The small building was an outpost built in the forties by the British for the white farmers and the officers who lived in the Northern District. It was a dainty cottage surrounded by flower beds and herbaceous borders blooming with agapanthus. It looked more like an old English lady’s residence than an emergency room for people shot by Somali shiftas or mauled by buffaloes. It sat right outside the northern side of the town and marked the border between two worlds. Anything south of the hospital still maintained a resemblance to civilized life: there were irrigated farmlands, trucks that daily drove pea and flower pickers to the fields or to the greenhouses; there was a bank, a post office, a small supermarket. Even a hairdresser. North of the hospital lay the Great Nothing: an endless desert dotted by thorny acacias and dust devils, nomads who spoke an incomprehensible clipped language and whose cheeks and foreheads were marked by tribal scars. The electricity line and running water stopped there, the faint phone signal tapered off and vanished a few miles into the arid scrubland.
At the hospital they had been let in by the night watchman, then a sleepy nurse had medicated their superficial cuts and wheeled them into a cozy room, assuming they were a couple. The head nurse, a tall Kikuyu lady with an elaborate braided hairdo, had actually referred to the stranger as “your husband.” Sonia had felt a thrill and didn’t think of correcting the mistake.
Now it was nearly eight in the morning, only a little time left before they’d be pulled apart and sucked back into their respective lives. In a matter of hours, long phone calls and complicated flight arrangements would have to be made, spouses and possibly children might appear to reclaim them.
Sonia glanced around the room. A stack of ancient videos sat next to a TV set, books in leather bindings were lined on a shelf, an old-fashioned cotton print on the curtains (shells? sweet potatoes? UFOs? She couldn’t tell what those funny shapes were) matched the print on the bedspread. He followed her gaze.
“Astonishing decor for a hospital in the middle of nowhere, right?” she said.
He was lying in his cot across from hers in the sunny room with a cut across his nose and a small bandage on his temple. He didn’t say anything, but looked at her long and hard.
“What?” Sonia asked, puzzled.
“We may as well do it,” he said.
Sonia pretended to ignore him, though a rush of blood behind her neck rose slowly, warming up her cranium and her face.
“I see no point in prolonging it anymore, since we’ve done it a hundred times already in our heads,” he said.
She swallowed hard. The blood now was rushing everywhere beneath her bruised skin, from the tips of her fingers to her toes, carrying a scintillating substance that woke up every pore. She had never felt this alert.
“No way. And besides, every bone in my rib cage hurts,” she said, playfully.
“We’ll do it softly,” he said, dead serious.
Sonia raised her eyes to the ceiling and gave no answer.
She wasn’t sure what to do with whatever time they had left, but she wanted to use it in a way that would be long-lasting. Having sex didn’t seem to be the most useful option: it was going to be over and done with too quickly and it would drain all the luminous force they had accumulated during their short life together as a couple. She knew exactly what would happen: they would spend all the energy that had built up in one go and they’d be left with nothing. Despite this sensible argument, all Sonia could think of was his body. His bare legs were muscular and tanned. The shape of his knees was perfect. He had beautiful, strong forearms. She longed to see the rest of him and feel his touch all over her.
The day before, her car had died on her way back from the village school. She had sat staring into the nothingness ahead of her windshield, with the resignation people must acquire when traveling through such remote parts of the world. She had tried to call the rental car office but there was no signal where she was. All she could do was sit and wait for someone to rescue her. It was about four in the afternoon and she figured that if nobody was going to drive by in the next couple of hours she would have to spend the night in the backseat, as it was unlikely that people would travel on that road in the dark. In her canvas bag she had a change of clothes and a warm jacket; she knew well how chilly it could get after dark in the desert. She happened to have a book, a torch, a half-full bottle of water and some chocolate biscuits she had bought in town on her way up, by habit.
When she was a child, way before cell phones came into the country, her parents were always ready for that kind of emergency when traveling in the bush: they never left home without food, water and a couple of blankets in case the car broke down. She did remember getting stranded a few times, having to spend the night on the backseat next to her little brother, to be rescued at the crack of dawn either by a group of park rangers in their khaki uniforms or by African farmers in a beat-up pickup truck. They would end up squeezing in their rescuers’ vehicle till they reached the next village. These rides always turned out to be cheerful occasions, filled with Swahili banter and laughs, with a stop for chai and hot fried mandazi as soon as they hit the first tea stall.
After seven years of European life, she found herself smiling at the predicament she’d found herself in. It was a reminder that there were still places in the world where one could vanish, be lost, be found and rescued by strangers.
She had dozed off only for a few minutes in the driver’s seat when the sound of a running engine approaching behind her startled her. The sun was low, about to set, and the first thing she saw in her rearview mirror were a man’s faded shorts and long legs, unlaced leather boots, an indigo blue shirt. A tap on her window. A mop of unruly hair, shades, a maroon cotton scarf wrapped around his neck.
Yes, she’d had a problem.
No, it wasn’t the battery. Yes, of course she had plenty of gas.
He insisted on lifting the hood and started screwing and unscrewing tops and bolts, rubbing the tip of the spark plugs with the corner of his shirt as men tend to do when presented with a broken-down car and a woman in the driver’s seat.
I’ve checked those as well, she said, but he pretended not to hear.
She stood next to him looking at the tangle of wires under the hood and answered his third degree.
She had come to write a report on an NGO just north of Barsaloi.
Yes, she had been driving by herself all the way.
No, she didn’t need a driver because she knew the road.
Because she had grown up there.
On a farm not far from here.
No, she hadn’t been back in a few years. She used to come visit, but she hadn’t now for a while.
She was heading to the airstrip outside the town to get on a six-seater back to the capital.
She was supposed to fly back to Europe the following da
y.
“Okay,” he said, “hop in my car, I’ll give you a ride to the airstrip. Forget the car. We’ll send a mechanic tomorrow.”
“Leave it. It’s a rented car, I’ll call them and they’ll take care of it.”
“Then get your stuff and I’ll drop you off.”
She sat next to him in the big Land Cruiser, filled with tools, carton boxes, muddy boots and towels covered in red dirt. They drove off and for a while neither one of them spoke.
She remembered him, of course. She didn’t feel like telling him, because it had been so long ago, at a time when she still lived in the country, and she didn’t want him to think she still remembered their brief encounter after all these years. He had changed, but he looked more interesting now that he wasn’t so boyish, with thin lines around his eyes. He lit a cigarette without asking her whether it might bother her.
“I remember you,” he said, breaking the long silence.
“Really? From where?”
“We met in the bathroom at Jonathan Cole’s house. You had on a pair of bright red sandals you had just bought in Italy.”
She opened her mouth, feigning bewilderment.
“Come on. How can you remember that?”
“We had quite a long chat in there, and I tend to notice women’s feet,” he said.
She had been putting on her lipstick when he’d wandered in with a drink in his hand. They had flirted—mildly, in the oblique way people flirt late at night at parties—and shared his vodka tonic while sitting on the edge of the bathtub. Then Consuelo Gambrino, the alluring Argentinean eye doctor, had walked in.
“What are you two doing here?” she had asked them mischievously, shattering the moment. Consuelo had pulled up a stool and had started speaking nonsense to him in her thickly accented English, ignoring her. Sonia had left the room, meaning to catch up with him later, but somehow she’d lost sight of him, or maybe he had left without saying goodbye.
“Yes,” she said, “I remember you now. You described in detail a scene from a book you were reading.”
“Did I? That sounds rather boring.”
“It was … it was the one with the lion and—was it the heart, the skin?—in the title. The part where the nun falls off the bridge. I actually bought the book afterward.”
“Did you?”
“Yes, you made me want to read it.”
“Did you like it?”
“I did.”
He turned and looked at her and said nothing. She felt nervous for having said that, as though it had been an admission of some sort.
“Sorry if I didn’t recognize you right away,” she added after a short silence, wanting to sound casual. “It’s been a very long time.”
“No problem,” he said and grinned. He knew she was lying and he liked that.
They asked each other polite questions, carefully steering away from the details of their personal lives, avoiding any mention of wife or girlfriend, children or husband. He said that for years he’d had a highly paid job for the UN, driving relief trucks into Sudan and Somalia. Now he worked as a manager on a sheep farm up-country. She suspected this change might have to do with having a family and settling down, though he didn’t wear a wedding ring. She mentioned the name of the foundation she worked for and told him how sometimes she had to travel to assess the state of the projects they funded. They had just started to finance schooling projects for girls in the nomadic areas of East Africa and she had been assigned to report on them because of her knowledge of the place. She didn’t delve into the details, knowing that he, having lived in the country for so many years, wasn’t going to be impressed by her job. It was mainly her friends back in Europe who always introduced her as a kind of heroine because she had lived in a couple of African countries and was working for the poor.
“Do you ever miss your life here?” he asked.
“All the time,” she said, and felt herself blushing. It seemed inappropriate to admit such a thing in front of him. A betrayal to the new life she had chosen.
When, almost eight years earlier, Sonia had made up her mind to move to Europe, it had seemed like a final decision. At the time she could no longer bear the corruption, the frustration of living in a hopeless country constantly on the edge of disaster where—if she was ever to have children—they would grow up like wild things without a clue about what was going on in the rest of the world and never adjusting to it. She convinced herself that she needed to live in a place where one would be able to go to a museum on a whim, see a movie, get proper clothes, eat decent food and be surrounded by people who could talk about ideas rather than dams, engines, electric fencing, wells and cattle. When she’d met the man who was to become her husband—a director of photography who’d come into the country to shoot a documentary on the Ndorobos, a disappearing tribe—she hadn’t let him escape without her, holding on to him with the resilience of a castaway grasping a wide, steady plank of wood.
She had adjusted very quickly to her new life—after all it was much easier to go from bush to city than the other way around. The “how to” instructions were easy and written on every wall; the comfort of European life was strongly addictive, she discovered, and one immediately forgot how to live without it.
Now that she felt something of an exile returning to her homeland, she’d been assaulted by nostalgia, not only for the raw beauty of the country, but for her former self, a person happy to live with few clothes, who didn’t wear makeup and who didn’t think much of crossing a river in a four-wheel drive.
Sometimes, in the city where she lived now, glancing around the crowd in the bus, she would single out a couple of faces. She recognized their shy smiles, the way they moved their open hands around their faces, the familiar singsong in their voices—certain words that she’d catch in the distance. Usually they would be cleaning ladies, sometimes they’d be young nuns or street sellers just arrived—she could tell from the clothes they wore. She couldn’t restrain herself from moving closer and closer to them, elbowing other tired passengers until she’d find herself standing right next to them in order to catch the gist of their conversation. She’d wait for the right moment to barge in and they’d open their eyes wide, stunned to hear a mzungu lady in her nice coat address them in their language.
“I grew up there.”
They would laugh and slap their thighs.
“So you are an African too!”
“Oh yes, sana kabisa,” she’d say and join their laughter.
Often she would not get off at her stop, wanting to prolong the conversation; the sound of Swahili was like music to her.
He hadn’t been exactly present in her thoughts for all those years; she seemed to have almost forgotten him, to have lost track of his existence as if he hadn’t left such a big impression after all. But the memory of that encounter on the edge of a bathtub must have been lingering somewhere beneath the surface—invisible, yet bobbing about. All this became clear to Sonia only once she sat next to him in the car, so that coming across him in such an unlikely circumstance seemed the obvious segue to their encounter of nearly ten years earlier, when she was still single, hadn’t settled anywhere yet and still had a sense that the future was a sheet of white photographic paper on which her life was still waiting to emerge.
They passed clusters of zebras, antelopes and small cattle herds led by men wrapped in red cloth, covered in colorful beaded jewelry. Just before it got dark they saw a leopard appear and cross the track ahead of them, its golden shape cut against the white dust. He turned off the engine of the car and they watched the animal move slowly across—a tight bundle of muscles and tendons—and disappear into the thick again. They looked at each other and didn’t make a comment; they exchanged a smile, as though the leopard crossing their way had been a good omen, or a special signal sent just for them.
He glanced at his wristwatch.
“It’s a quarter to seven. Can you still make your flight to Nairobi?”
“Oh. Forget it, it left
two hours ago. I’ll have to try to go tomorrow.”
She could almost hear them both think, Good, we have a little time.
Once they left the track the landscape changed, turned greener and the air cooler. They knew that now that the desert was behind them they’d reach town within an hour. They became aware that they’d have to come up with some sort of a plan in order to prolong the encounter. Neither was ready to let the other one go.
Behind a gas station, at the intersection of a small cluster of shacks selling wrinkled vegetables and Masai blankets, they saw a nyama choma sign painted on the side.
“They have good food here,” he said. “How about a snack and a drink?”
Sonia nodded, relieved that he’d taken the initiative.
The place was dimly lit by a string of red lightbulbs, empty except for a stocky man behind the counter, busy swatting flies away. He brought out what was left in the kitchen, cold chapatis, goat stew and sukumawiki, a meal that reminded Sonia of her childhood.
Suddenly a white woman with sandy hair walked briskly into the joint. She looked around and called his name.
“Hey, I saw your car outside, what are you …,” she said, and stopped, seeing he wasn’t alone.
He stood up and hugged her warmly, like an old friend. The two of them stood by the table and spoke briefly, while Sonia kept looking into her plate. She overheard the woman say something about a ghastly group of clients whom she had just driven to the airport, a problem with the power line, a lunch she was planning to have on Sunday.
“Please come and bring the children,” the woman said. “I’ve got to run now, give my love to Alexandra. Don’t forget Sunday.”
She moved away and quickly fluttered her hand in Sonia’s direction. Throughout the conversation with the woman he had seemed perfectly at ease and not in the least embarrassed to be seen with her, a fact that mildly disappointed Sonia. He sat down and ordered another round of drinks.
The Other Language Page 25