Rules of the Wild

by Francesca Marciano

  In the following weeks, waiting for Adam to come back, I led a very peculiar life. I had fallen under the tyranny of my new physical state: I moved in slow motion and felt as if I had cotton wool stuffed inside my brain. I would curl on the couch under a blanket with no thoughts, staring at the jacaranda trees outside the window until it grew dark. Wilson would slip into the room to draw the curtains and turn on the lights, and that would finally shake me from my trance.

  I found the company of others exhausting—plus I would fall into a narcosis by nine thirty at night—so I wasn’t much fun to go out with. The first thing I did every morning was dart to the mirror and study the profile of my belly. Yes, it was a small— insignificant to the untrained eye—but perfectly round belly. During the day I busied myself with a list of useless errands. I dyed all the mosquito nets, covered the armchairs in a new material, obsessively repainted my finger and toe nails.

  I started calling Teo more often than usual.

  “Help!” I said to him. “I’m about to redo the curtains! Do you think pregnancy alters one’s personality for good?”

  “No, I think you are just sliding into temporary hibernation,” he sighed. “It’ll pass. I read it somewhere.”

  We discussed names. We planned my trip to Italy to show off the baby. We ran up astronomical phone bills.

  Meanwhile Africa had started making the headlines again.

  Blood was pouring out of Rwanda and it looked like it would never stop. The Hutus were determined to wipe out the Tutsi, and what had started out seeming to be another African tribal war had swiftly escalated into a horrific genocide. Everyone in the West got used to photographs of slaughtered children, dismembered bodies on the first page of their daily paper. To them it must have looked like a remote nightmare, something which could only happen in a wild, godless, savage place like darkest and deepest Africa. It felt equally alien and faraway to us, the white tribe who lived around the corner.

  I stayed away from the papers, I couldn’t look at the photographs, they made me nauseous. My survival instinct had turned me into a sort of thick-headed selfish housewife, who pushed her shopping cart away from the upsetting covers on the magazine stand and headed for the ice cream instead. I just couldn’t handle death. Especially death in Africa.

  The “boys” had all gone in. They were flying in and out of Kigali, and each time came back in a darker trance. I had seen Miles and Ruben a couple of times. They no longer bore any trace of the vibrant Mogadishu buzz. This war was very different than what they had experienced in Somalia.

  When the UN troops had pulled out of Mogadishu a couple of months earlier, the hacks knew that was the end of the story, at least for the press. The world wasn’t going to give a damn about Somalia once the whites were out of there. The last time they flew in and met in the legendary Sahafi Hotel in downtown Mogadishu it had felt like the end of a glorious year in school. From now on they would be scattered in different parts of the world on new assignments. It was the end of something. Their Age of Innocence, in retrospect.

  So when Rwanda broke out, so soon after the end of the Somali story, the press corps almost rejoiced. Great, they thought, back into action with their pals once more. Their rite of passage wasn’t over yet.

  At the same time they were anxious to see what this would look like. They had sensed this one wouldn’t be anything like “Doin’ the Mog.” This time there would be only death and despair awaiting them.

  “They will never recover,” said Nicole. “What they have to see, photograph, will never leave them for the rest of their life.”

  We were having lunch on the terrace of the Norfolk Hotel. The restaurant was busy with the usual herd of khaki-geared families on their way to the Masai Mara.

  “I wonder how much of this they will be able to take,” she said.

  She had spent the night before with Bernard, Miles, Ruben and Hunter. Bernard had shown her some of the photographs he had taken. “Too shocking to be published” had been the response of his agency. They had all left again that morning at five, back into Kigali, hunting for more despair.

  Nicole looked pale, drawn, as if she had witnessed a murder. She shook her head.

  “I don’t know…It all feels so wrong.”

  “What feels wrong?” I asked.

  “To be sitting here, having Caesar salad.”

  “There isn’t much else we could do. Is there?”

  “No…of course not. But at least they are dealing with it. It’s a nightmare, but it’s what’s happening in Africa. Whereas”—she looked around, pointing at the tourists in “I love Kenya” T-shirts—“this is such a fucking joke.”

  I felt defensive.

  “It wouldn’t make you feel any better going with them to Rwanda.”

  “No. It’s not a matter of better. Better is not the point.” She looked tired.

  “I know, it’s so disheartening.” I sighed, and then I looked at my watch. “Darling, I really have to be going.”

  I put a few shilling notes on the table.

  “I have my appointment in ten minutes. The scan.”

  “Oh right. The scan.”

  She raised her head and looked at me as if from the bottom of a swimming pool.

  I was lying on the table, my eyes fixed on the ceiling. The lab technician and his assistant were staring at the monitor. Their silence felt too long. I tried to raise my head and look at the monitor, but I couldn’t see much. The technician coughed nervously. He was very tall, I remember thinking he must have been a Luo.

  “There is nothing here, madam.”

  “What do you mean nothing?”

  “No heartbeat.”

  I didn’t move. I waited a few seconds, but he kept silent.

  “What do you mean, no heartbeat?”

  “I think the baby is dead, madam.”

  I stormed into Singh’s office, without waiting for his secretary to announce me. I had driven from the lab feeling faint, my vision blurred. I had put my shirt back on inside out.

  I flung open his door like a killer.

  He looked startled.

  I sat down across the desk from him and I distinctly remember the steady tapping of his pen on a notepad as I blurted out what had just happened. The sound maddened me to the point that I felt like smacking him.

  “Isn’t there anything you can do?” I asked aggressively.

  “Nothing,” he said politely. “These things happen, especially in the first three months.”

  Then he lifted the scan against the light of his desk lamp and studied it carefully. I held my breath. Maybe, after all, there had been a mistake.

  “I’m very sorry,” Singh said. And put the scan back into its folder.

  “I haven’t done anything wrong. You said it would be okay to drive,” I said accusingly.

  Yes, he had said that. But even though I hadn’t done anything wrong, still it happened frequently.

  The phone rang. He spoke quietly, rapidly. The results were perfect, he said, would you come in two weeks’ time for another checkup? He then turned back to me. Unsympathetically, I thought.

  I felt like a black sheep who had drifted out of his flock, and whom he no longer had reason to care for.

  The technician he had recommended so highly had been incredibly rough, I complained, forcing back the tears. He had shown no tact. The baby is dead, he had said. Now, that language would be unheard of in Europe and—

  “Yes,” said Singh, “you are absolutely right. That’s unacceptable and I will make sure to reprimand him about that. But now it will be necessary for you to check into the hospital. This afternoon. We must remove the—” I don’t remember the word he used, but it was a technical term. It was no longer a living being. It had become a thing.

  I drove home like a stone. Like a stone I picked up my toothbrush and my pyjamas, told Wilson that I would sleep out. Like a stone I lay in my bed in the maternity ward of the hospital, took the drug, went to sleep. When I woke up an hour later, it had
been done. It had been painless. It was over.

  At home the phone was down, so I couldn’t call Adam to tell him. But it was better that way, because I didn’t feel like speaking to him. I didn’t want to have to say, Hold it, reverse, nothing has changed, we’re back to square one. All that future, which had stretched from now to the end of our lives, all that future which was going to make us one thing—a couple, a mother and a father—till the day we died, had shrunk back.

  I was back to not knowing what would happen next, to not belonging anywhere or to anybody. I could easily get used to that again, no problem: that was the way I had felt all my life.

  I didn’t feel like calling my brother either and saying, You know what? I was right: I was never meant to do this. I was never supposed to bury my earlier self and wriggle out of the fish tail. What a foolish thing to believe: I’m back down there swimming in murky waters, cold-blooded, covered in seaweed like all the women from my tribe.

  PART TWO

  Hunter

  CHAPTER ONE

  He put the Belt around my life—

  I heard the Buckle snap—

  and turned away, imperial,

  my Lifetime folding up—

  EMILY DICKINSON

  I’m still lying here, eyes on the ceiling. Everything feels quiet and white. Clinic-like.

  I am slowly taking all the bits of the story out of the box and putting them one next to the other, hoping to make some sense out of it. Hoping to find at least one answer to the many unanswered questions we have been asking each other. Me, Adam, Hunter. We have been torturing each other, relentlessly unloading our grief onto one another, and yet unable to find a single answer which could at least seal the bleeding wound. Where was the mistake?

  But then, do we really make mistakes, do we actually take the wrong turn, say the wrong thing? Is it possible to isolate the moment where we made the mistake, so that we could—theoretically—go back and undo it? Or is it more like losing a grip, a sense of direction? Is it maybe like falling asleep and letting it all happen while we keep our eyes closed? Yes, it is a bit like that, isn’t it? We pretend not to have seen or heard. Like children who lie frozen in their beds at night, eyes shut tight, while their parents shout angry words in the next room. Whatever it is that hurts, we want to keep it apart from us as long as possible, until the poison makes us so ill that we can’t fake it any longer.

  When did this poison start dripping slowly into my blood? Was it after the child? Was it after Iris? Was it because of Hunter or was it ultimately because of me? Now, on this winter morning, in the starkness of this white room and the emptiness I feel inside me, I finally see it clearly.

  It was because of me, and nobody else.

  Wilson knocks gently at the door.

  “Unataka kula nini kwa lunch, mama?”

  “No, thank you Wilson, no lunch. A cup of coffee, maybe.”

  He looks at me, lingering in the doorstep. He knows something is not right. I try to smile.

  “Hakuna tabu, bwana. I just feel a bit tired.”

  “Then rest, mama.”

  He moves gently to the window and pulls the white cotton curtains, to soften the piercing white light. His footsteps are light, like the steps of a dancer, as he leaves the room.

  Yes, it was because of me, but not me alone.

  This is not a gentle place.

  Don’t let this soft light fool you, nor the light steps of Wilson; there is no warm nest here where you can curl up and feel safe. This place will first take you in and then spit you out in the desert. You’ll be on your own, without shelter or shade, but you’ll know that it was always meant to be like this, since the beginning of time. This raw, this stark. Don’t let its beauty fool you.

  I didn’t think about the child. I wanted to forget as fast as possible.

  Adam called the night after I came back from the hospital—he was in Colorado, he said, he sounded excited—he had been invited to stay an extra week to give a lecture at the university there. Had had a lot of bookings and—

  I told him. Quickly, matter-of-factly.

  I could feel the disappointment in his silence. He said he was sorry, said he loved me very much. Should he come home?

  “Don’t worry, I’ll be perfectly all right.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Absolutely. It’s over now. There’s nothing we can do about it. I’m fine, really. I mean it.”

  I think he was relieved to hear that I could manage. It would be a problem to interrupt his trip right then. He explained to me how crucial this lecture was going to be for a number of reasons that I can’t recall now.

  “Of course,” I said, “you don’t need to explain. And as I said, even if you came back now, you wouldn’t be able to change anything.”

  He tried to cheer me up by telling me he had seen the Grand Canyon and how it had made him homesick. He said again he loved me very much and he missed me. All I remember thinking about that long-distance phone call was how long-distance it actually felt.

  The next day Iris appeared at my door. She had pulled her hair back into a tight braid, wore a crisp white shirt with khaki drill pants and looked as immaculate as a water lily.

  “Are you all right, for God’s sake? Nicole just told me what happened. You should have rung me, I would have taken you to the hospital. It’s mad to have gone all on your own.”

  She handed me a plate covered with foil.

  “Here, this is for you.”

  “I’m fine, really. I preferred to be alone. It wasn’t such a big deal. What’s this?”

  “A cake. I just baked it. Watch out, it’s still hot. God, I can’t believe you didn’t call any of us. This is what friends are for.”

  “I know, but…you baked this? Amazing. I didn’t think you baked cakes.”

  “Why?” She winked. “I’m a pretty average Swedish farmer’s daughter, you know.”

  We sat on the carpet around the coffee table in the living room and had her delicious spice cake with tea. It cheered me up to see her, and her attention touched me. She was quiet and low-key, which was pleasantly in tune with my mood.

  She said she was on her way to England in a couple of weeks, to see her publisher about her book.

  “They want it out before Christmas”—she absentmindedly flicked a cigarette ash into the empty teacup. “Which is great, you know, sales-wise.”

  Somehow she didn’t sound as self-confident as usual.

  “When will you be back?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I was thinking maybe I’d do research for a new project there. I think I’ve done all I can on this side of the ocean.”

  “You mean you may just move back to Europe?” I asked incredulously. It sounded like such an unlikely plan for Iris to make.

  “Well, why not? If it looks good. If the book sells. You know, at the end of the day there is just so much one can do in Africa. How many more subjects for a book can I come up with? Plus, I have never lived in Europe, so I wouldn’t be moving back. I would be moving for the first time.”

  “That’s right. Funny how that always escapes my mind.”

  “You see, people like me or Adam, we went to school here, we’ve never had a life other than this. He’s making a living out of it, and he can carry on like that as long as he likes, great, but I don’t want to turn into some pathetic matriarch running around with warriors until the day I die. I think I can do better than that. Don’t you think?”

  She looked at me expectantly. Her honesty had taken me by surprise.

  “Yes, of course you can…”—but then I wasn’t so sure. “Like what, though?”

  “I don’t know. That’s why I want to go. I need to see museums, art galleries, films. I want to be able to walk into a bookstore and buy photography books, look at other people’s work. Compare. How can I do any original work if I don’t compare it with other people’s?”

  “Compare, yes. That’s essential.” I had a feeling, judging by the assuredness in her voice, tha
t she had been lectured about all this by someone else.

  “You should go to Italy and spend some time there,” I suggested. “You must see Piero della Francesca, Giotto, Masaccio. You should go to Venice, Florence, Palermo, Naples. Oh yes, the south, you’ll love it there.”

  The thought of Iris, famished for knowledge as she was, going to Italy for the first time, thrilled me. Suddenly the quantity of beauty, of elevation, grace, harmony, in the art of my homeland, seemed unbearable. I felt dizzy thinking of it.

  “There’s so much to see! You’ll die. You’ll never be the same again, I promise you: you’ll look at this place in a completely different perspective afterwards…”

  It would be the equivalent of what had happened to me, I realized: the way I had fallen apart when I saw the sky and the vastness of northern Kenya. It had been as if all the curtains had dropped simultaneously and left me there, center stage, thunderstruck.

  “It’ll change you forever,” I insisted. “Promise me you’ll go. You must look up my brother. You’ll love him.”

  “Yes, I will. I’ll try”—but she was already thinking of something else. She looked around the room, her eyes staring off out of focus.

  “I was wondering whether I could borrow some books from you. I feel like reading something.”

  “Books? Yes, of course. What kind of books?”

  “I don’t know. I was thinking of poetry, maybe? T. S. Eliot, Whitman, whatever…and a Russian. I would like to read a Russian.”

  “A Russian.”

  “Yes.”

  “…Which one?”

  She shrugged.

  “I don’t know. Any one of them. Whoever you think is good.”

  I went to the bookshelf and took out an old paperback copy of Crime and Punishment.

  “Well, if you want to get into the Russians you may as well start with this one.” I pushed the book into her hand. “How did you get this idea about the Russians?”

  Iris was busy scanning the back of the paperback.