“Sopa, Simi,” Leona said. She used the Maa word for hello, even though Simi preferred speaking English whenever possible. “I am researching the doctor’s work today. Can you help translate?”
Simi hunkered and spoke quickly to the old man. He nodded and waved his cow tail faster.
“What do you want to know?”
Simi relayed Leona’s question without a blink. Leona was surprised. Maasai looked askance at premarital sex, and Leona knew her situation might cost her the relationships she’d built here.
“It’s for my book,” she assured Simi. And then she asked her to translate the detailed questions she had about the plant, where it was found and how much was used. Was it ingested or topical?
Later, when the old man stood up and shuffled home for tea, Simi turned to look at Leona. Leona tried to tell if Simi’s eyes held anger or sadness and, if so, for whom?
“You should have asked only me. I could tell you this information. Now it is possible that the others in the village will discover your secret.”
“Simi, it’s not for me,” Leona whispered, suddenly on the verge of exhausted tears. “It’s for the book.”
But Simi’s face was serious now, and she leaned close to Leona’s ear and whispered, “You have a baby...inside?”
Leona started as if her friend had slapped her. She looked down at Simi’s slim fingers resting on her arm. She glanced up at Simi’s face and then away again. What should she say? Knowing that Simi might disapprove or, worse, that she’d be reminded of her own pain made Leona frantic with embarrassment and anxiety.
“The man,” Simi whispered, her eyes serious and steady, “did he force you?”
Leona couldn’t stop the tears. Her eyes filled up and she used the heels of both hands to press into her eyes. “I’m sorry, Simi, I’m so sorry.”
Leona considered two things: it was not acceptable for unmarried women to have children out of wedlock and, because of that taboo, her status as a foreigner would be the only thing to prevent the community from banishing her. She thought of the precarious position Simi herself was in—married for three years with no children of her own. Would Simi’s desperation and the irony of the situation make her angry? That was a risk. Leona’s work here was going well, and she couldn’t bear the idea of leaving. She couldn’t bring herself to claim rape, but she could lie.
“My husband,” she said. It was not unusual for Maasai spouses to live apart.
“You never told me you had a husband,” Simi stated. Her voice was quiet, but Leona felt it like a warm current deep below cool water. Simi knew she wasn’t married. Simi knew this baby belonged to nobody, but she wouldn’t betray Leona’s secret.
“Your husband, he must be a strong man.” Simi smiled a small, sad smile. “He is living so far away in America, and still he can give you a baby!”
“Simi, I can’t have a baby.” Leona searched for a reason that Simi would understand, a lie to cover a truth that Simi would never really be able to understand. “My body is broken. It’s dangerous for me to deliver a child.” This was a reason a Maasai woman would see as reasonable. Not the other, not the choice Leona made to sleep with a stranger.
Later, after the village was quiet and dark and most families had settled around their fires in their little huts, Simi slipped through Leona’s door. She held a blue plastic bag filled with leaves.
“I found this for you near the river. Put some inside where the baby is.” And then she slipped outside again.
The leaves were rough and uncomfortable, and Leona worried they would somehow make her sick, poison her for her stupidity. But she slipped a few inside herself several times a day and waited for the relief of blood. It never came. Instead, her breasts began to hurt, she found herself thirsty and her jeans grew tighter and tighter. It was too late.
Leona considered driving to Nairobi to check herself into the hospital for the birth, but it was easier for her to force forgetfulness, and eventually she lost track of the days. There was work to do here. It had been a dry year and the year before had been dry, too. The Maasai in Loita were worried; cattle and goats had begun to get thin. Some of the baby goats had already died, their mothers too emaciated to produce enough milk. Years ago, the Maasai were free to go wherever the good grazing land was. In times of drought, they moved their herds a hundred and seventy miles to Nyeri, in the central highlands, where grass stayed greener and rains were more common. Under British rule, though, the government limited their movements and, with British settlers setting up their own farms, Maasai land was reduced further. The final nail in the coffin of the traditional Maasai way of life was the wildlife preserves. In the 1970s, citing the need for land and wildlife conservation, great swathes of Maasai land were designated as game parks. Grazing was prohibited.
Leona’s work was centered on discovering and mitigating the effects of the government-imposed strictures on the traditionally nomadic Maasai people in Western Kenya. She had the idea that if she could prove that the Maasai culture was changing, and that those changes would negatively impact Kenya in general, it would add fuel to the argument that the government should allow the Maasai more movement, more chances to keep herds healthy and more chances to survive. Her study was vital, life and death, and Leona took it that way—without the option of other grazing land, this culture could disappear as fast and as easily as the rivers and streams were drying.
She had no idea how pregnant she actually was. Thinking about how much time had passed made her panic, so she forced herself not to think about it, let alone plan for it. She hadn’t seen a doctor; she hadn’t had checkups. She spent the months trying to ignore her growing belly and forcing all thoughts of the future out of her head. She felt sick when the movements started—the tugging and sliding of her insides felt like a punishment. She watched Simi watching her grow, and when she let Simi place a hand on her moving belly, she wished fervently that the roles were reversed. After a while, the other women around her noticed, and that was a relief. They offered to help carry water and sent their own children to collect wood for Leona’s fire. And so it settled in—the silence, the forced ignorance. Leona worked constantly: watching the people around her and taking careful notes. The people in the village knew that she was there to observe their culture and way of life so she could write about them, maybe help them with the grazing problem. They knew her research meant she observed them and wrote in the notebook she always had with her, and that she asked questions incessantly about everything she saw. Leona began to draft what she planned to turn into her book, an academic study of the shifting cultural norms of the Loita Maasai brought on by laws limiting their nomadic heritage. She concentrated all her efforts on looking outward, and purposely pushed away what was happening inside.
That’s why her baby was born in the way of Maasai babies—in her dim inkajijik, the small hut made from thin branches covered with mud and dung. Only the embers in the fire pit lighted the birth, and when the baby’s eyes opened, they opened to a halo of wood smoke. The first face the baby saw was brown and wrinkled and adorned with strings of beads sewn onto strips of leather. The first sounds she heard were the women ululating four times to alert the village to the birth of a girl, their calls echoed by the lowing of cows.
Three days after the baby was born, Leona was curled around the infant on her bed. She was still so tired. She must have dropped off because the sound of a car engine and the shouts of people greeting one another outside slipped through her sleep. She lay still, for a moment forgetting everything, and grasped at the feeling of peace. It evaporated the moment she recognized one of the voices outside. When the tall blond man dipped his shoulders and neck to fit through her little door, she wasn’t altogether surprised. If he heard the story of an American giving birth, he’d know who it was. A white woman having a baby in a Maasai village would be big news. There was nobody else it could be. That he came, though, shocked her. She assu
med he’d avoid further contact, eschew responsibility. But there he was, and for a moment Leona was stunned into silence.
“How are you?” he said. His English words, though flattened by his British-Kenyan accent, were startling in their familiarity. Leona tried to discern his reaction to the birth from his voice, whether or not he was angry. She concentrated hard, but her vision felt fuzzy and her thoughts flipped too quickly to pin down and consider. He was so handsome, and she remembered how her body stretched toward him that night, like a plant craving light. Even now, a part of her pulled toward him. She thought of how it felt to be pressed into him, how her head had spun with alcohol and need and how she’d wanted him, and how he’d wanted her, too. But the person she was that night in the Chabani Guest House, the woman who’d used flowery shampoo and worn her tightest jeans, the woman who had not walked away when the blond stranger spoke to her...that wasn’t the real Leona. It wasn’t her, she reminded herself as she looked up at the man. Her cheeks reddened and she wished, for the millionth time, that she could erase the previous months and erase that night and erase that rare, stupid version of herself.
The man leaned down and studied the sleeping baby.
“A girl?” he whispered, and reached out as if he wanted to touch the baby with his fingertips to check if she was real, but he stopped before finger met cheek. He glanced at Leona’s face and then away again. She couldn’t read him. He folded his lanky body and knelt on the dirt floor next to where she lay, up on the raised bed of rawhide stretched and dried to stiffness on a frame of sticks.
Watching the man now, here, in her home, Leona realized that although she had no idea what he was called, she knew a lot of other things about him. He’d grown up on a cattle ranch in Solai—close to Maasailand—and had a profound understanding of the Maasai and a fluency in their ways. He knew many of the elders in Leona’s manyatta. This was what had impressed Leona the night they met and caused her to feel that unfamiliar yearning stretch through her. He made her feel comfortable, so she didn’t hesitate when he gently picked her hand up off the bar and told her to follow him to his room. She liked his coarse blond hair and his sunburned, peeling arms that wrapped around her in the night, and his wide, calloused fingers rough on her breasts. While it was dark and they were breathing together that night, she let herself think about how it might be to have a man of her own—one she wanted—to lie with every night. She hadn’t wanted that before, but under the darkness of that night the thought was as exciting as it was terrifying.
In the weeks after she’d met him, though she knew she’d been clear to him, brutally so, perhaps, Leona found herself hoping through the hot, still days. She couldn’t shake the suspicion that something was different. In the golden evenings when the sun pulled colors out of the sky and turned the landscape soft and blue, she scanned the horizon around the manyatta for the telltale clouds of dust a Land Rover would make if it were hurtling up the track toward her.
She hated herself a little more each day when it grew dark without him coming. And she hated him for causing her to hope that he’d ignore the way she’d brushed him off in Narok and come find her, anyway. The multiplying cells inside of her—his baby—had nothing to do with her confusing feelings about the man himself. This was her usual pain: wanting to be seen and loved but being utterly unable to let herself allow it. She accepted being alone, she liked it, but there was the occasional wondering. How would it be to share a life with a man? Maybe with this man? How would it feel to see him and to allow herself to be seen? Each evening when he didn’t appear, she nursed her disappointment by listing the reasons it was better to be alone. She knew them by heart—and she knew that however many items she listed, there was really only one reason: her own fear. This made her hate herself, too.
The dust gathered in her hair and made her itch, but she didn’t go back to Narok to shower. She lived with it, like the Maasai did. She was adjusting, she convinced herself, to the life of an embedded anthropologist. When she really understood she was pregnant, and it was long after she could do anything about it, she felt too paralyzed to make the effort to find out who the man was, exactly, and to let him know. She couldn’t imagine the conversation they’d have to have, or the decisions they’d have to make. It was too much. She told herself over and over again that she didn’t want a relationship, she preferred being in a place where everyone was different from her, where she could restrict her interactions and be just an observer. The man—the baby’s father—wouldn’t allow her to limit herself. He would require more than she felt she knew how to give. More than she wanted to give. Intimacy was a risky thing.
Now, here he was.
A Maasai woman, squatting in the shadows by the low embers of the fire pit, reached out and handed him a chipped enamel cup of chai. He took it and thanked her in Maa. He looked perfectly relaxed, happy even, to be there. Leona was grateful Simi had gone to the river; surely she would have noticed Leona’s discomfort. Surely she would have fit the pieces of the puzzle together. And what then? Leona felt a sudden anger burn in her chest—here was another man who walked in without permission, who settled in her space with no regard to whether she wanted him there or not.
“Were you going to tell me?” the baby’s father asked now.
Leona shut her eyes tightly. She answered in Maa.
“Go away. It’s not your child.”
“That’s bullshit, and we both know it.” He paused, then spoke so quietly Leona could barely hear him. “I didn’t have a good father myself, but I think I’d like to try to be one.” His voice cracked slightly. “Whether or not you want me in your life, the girl deserves a father in hers.”
“You had a shitty father? Well, so did I,” she said. “What makes you think you’d do a better job?”
She saw the man wince. His expression hardened. She knew she’d hit a nerve—she’d hurt him. She wasn’t happy about that, but she sensed a shift in his attitude and felt relief. If she had to hurt him in order to get him to leave her alone, so be it.
To her surprise, he spoke again. “Give me a chance to be a better father than mine, or yours, apparently.”
She felt hemmed in, strangled. Why wouldn’t he just go? Like a trapped animal, she bit hard. “A father is the last thing this baby needs. I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want you to know, because I don’t want her to suffer through a terrible childhood like I did. You’re not going to change my mind.”
* * *
Leona grew up watching the rain fall on the green, green grass in the yard of her parents’ home in Beaverton, Oregon. Her father was a surgeon—never around during the day—and her mother was only a shadowy presence, less a mother than a waft of perfume in another room, always on the way out, always saying goodbye. Leona was left home with a housekeeper who lazily vacuumed the Persian rugs and huddled on the back deck in her blue uniform smoking secret cigarettes and blowing rings into the wet sky. Leona had no siblings, and was never encouraged to bring friends home or to go to parties, so she was ignored at school. Not bullied, not sought after, but invisible.
If she were ever asked to sum up her childhood in one word, she would have said silent. Silence was forced on her. Her father’s infrequent presence was a dark thing, covered by night and a sleeping house. The crack of her bedroom door opening and the memory of rough skin pressed against Leona’s cheek, the dank smell of his breath and his wet lips hissing in her ear, “Don’t tell your mother. Don’t say anything to anyone. You’ll ruin it...you’ll ruin me.” Those nights Leona bit her soft inner cheeks bloody and raw to keep from making a sound.
Only once did she try to break the silence with her mother. Her father always left the house early, and at breakfast one day Leona unlocked her voice. Her mother smiled at her over her toast, and Leona whispered a phrase she’d chosen carefully, the canary in the mine. “Dad came into my room last night.” The coffee bubbled loudly in the percolator, and Leona found tha
t forever after, the sound made her anxious.
Her mother’s pause lasted a lifetime. Leona dragged her fork through the egg yolks on her plate, afraid to look up.
“Your father is under a lot of pressure at work,” her mother finally answered, and when Leona glanced up to explain what she meant, to spill it all out like a liquid from a broken bottle, she caught her mother’s eye. There was a tiny flicker there, a lit candle, and then the curtain snapped tightly shut over it. A shutter firmly closed against a possible storm.
After that, Leona kept the secret locked away from everything else. In the daytime she sat through classes at school, concentrating hard, always finding the correct answer. In the evenings, she sat at the kitchen table doing homework while the maid ironed. Her mother came and went, came and went, off to Ladies Auxiliary meetings or the Junior League. Leona’s insides turned to stone, but she never wondered if her mother noticed that her father couldn’t look Leona in the eyes.
The invisibility—the pressure not to speak—became a habit. It saw her through high school and college and, later, through her doctoral program in sociocultural anthropology. Leona grew a jagged space—a broken section deep inside. She learned that people, especially the ones closest to her, weren’t to be trusted.
She declared a major in anthropology because she felt she’d never learned to understand humans; her childhood had given her no great notion of how her own species worked. She was desperate to go as far away from her parents as she could. Leona wrote with skill and conviction and her Fulbright application was chosen. Three months later she was ensconced in a bathroom-sized mud-and-cow-dung inkajijik, in a manyatta filled with identical inkajijiks. They all circled the central livestock corral and were protected from lions and elephants by thorny acacia branches piled in a ring around the whole cluster. In the rare letters to her parents, Leona referred to her new home as a “gated community.”
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