He risked a smile. “That’s a hell of a lot for a two-million-year-old skeleton.”
“And—? So?” Natalie felt like a cigarette but didn’t want to smoke more than one a night.
“I suggested that we put our thinking caps on, work out what this creature was like—how tall, what sort of brain size, what his hands were capable of, whether he or she could speak, did he or she have an opposable thumb, what he or she ate—and then call a major press conference to announce what we have discovered.”
He crushed the remains of his second cigarette into the ashtray on the table.
“There’s no doubt in my mind that, put together, what we have is of worldwide significance—hugely important. And if we announced what we have, and at the same time made public the threat to the gorge, it would put immense pressure on the authorities to do something, to rein in Marongo and the elders. Our discoveries will put Kenya on the map, culturally but also financially and therefore politically—it adds to the country’s importance, will attract tourists and scientists. The economic impact could be significant.”
Natalie nodded. “I see all that, but I don’t see what your mother and you had to fight about.”
He sat back again. “First, my mother hates the idea of a press conference because, being of the old school, she believes we must publish in the scientific literature first—in Nature or Science or Antiquity, preferably all three. Second, and even more important, she hates linking the gorge—science—with politics, she hates raising the specter of the trial in the same breath, so to speak, as the discoveries in the gorge … she thinks it’s demeaning, that it tarnishes what we do here.”
He let a pause go by.
So did Natalie. “I can see all that would make Eleanor uneasy but is that really what you fought about?”
More screaming from the baboons.
He nodded. “It got pretty heated, yes. We were both steamed up, shouting. But it didn’t boil over until I said—in the middle of her resistance—that it was a pity our father wasn’t still around, that Jock would have instinctively understood what was needed now—”
“Oh, Jack—!”
He raised his hand. “It’s true enough. Dad would have reveled in this situation. He knew Kenyatta in the old days, argued with him, shouted at him, and Kenyatta shouted back, but there was a respect there, a mutual respect. Dad would have known that the solution to this crisis doesn’t lie in secret deals or negotiations with Marongo and the Maasai. It’s really about what kind of country Kenya wants to be—a tribal backwater or a modern scientific center.”
Jack was hunched forward over the table again. He lowered his voice. “You know, I think the real reason she didn’t come to dinner is that she wanted to calm down, to think about what I had said, before she heard what the rest of you had to say. She’s jealous of her authority, as you know, but she also knows she has to give way soon—to me and/or Christopher. She just didn’t count on me having this particular idea, now. She’s not happy with it, and she knows that a lot of publicity, much of it hostile, goes with the territory, but she also knows—deep down—that it could be a way out, a way forward.”
Another long silence, save for the baboons, among whom something disagreeable was clearly taking place.
“What do you think?” He leaned forward.
Natalie rubbed her eyes. The vapors given off by the hurricane lamp were stinging them.
“I can understand your mother’s objections. The scientific journals don’t like it if you go public first. But… yes, I agree, it may be a solution.”
In fact, her heart had been lifted by what Jack said, in a way that it hadn’t been lifted in weeks. “What gave you the idea?”
“Well, in a way, you did.” He put his hand on hers again.
“What do you mean? How?”
“When we were in the crater, you said you had talked with my mother about father’s womanizing. You also talked about failure, being in your twenties and failing and coming back from failure.” He rubbed the scar over his eye. “Well, you couldn’t know it, but father would never accept failure. The battles he fought, in the early years of the dig, were amazing, and half the time he fought those battles in public, in the media, manipulating them where he could, cajoling where he could, and—I feel sure, though I don’t know for certain—exaggerating here, fibbing a bit there, being creatively ambiguous somewhere else. All to get his own way, to recover from setbacks.”
He smiled ruefully.
“Thinking about my father, and how different he was from my mother, what a showman he was, I suddenly saw that he would have responded to our predicament over the trial in a very different way—and in no time the solution came to me. That’s another thing my mother finds hard to swallow, that I’ve inherited something of my father and that maybe, just maybe, his genes could rescue us.”
Natalie was still longing for another cigarette but, for the moment, held off. “Say you do hold a press conference along the lines you suggest—”
He nodded.
“Wouldn’t it provoke the Maasai? Maybe they would move on the gorge before the trial. All those warriors are just waiting …”
He shook his head. “That would show them to be savages. Marongo wouldn’t want that. His political power will come, if it does come, from showing that their customs are as evolved and as dignified as ours. Don’t worry about that.”
He smiled. “Worry about this instead.” He lifted Natalie’s hands and bent his head to kiss them.
For a moment, Natalie allowed her hands to be kissed. But she said nothing and then she slowly disengaged her hands from his. “I feel a whole lot better than I did half an hour ago. I realize there’s a long way to go and that your mother may take some convincing, but your idea has lifted a load from my mind.”
She was impressed, too. Impressed that he had used his interest in—and knowledge of—politics, to come up with a solution. What might be a solution.
He looked at her, a half smile along his mouth. Slowly, he reached up and touched the ball of his thumb to her lips, and then to his own lips.
“I said I wouldn’t stay long, but I have. Forgive me.” He got to his feet and picked up his pack of cigarettes. “But,” he whispered, “I’ll be back.”
• • •
“Found any more obsidian, Kees?” It was the end of the next morning’s digging and Natalie was stowing her kit into the Land Rover as Kees approached. They had been working near each other and would drive back together to the camp.
“No. Why are you so interested?”
“You know Mgina? That pretty girl who cleans our tents, who brings the hot shower water?”
Kees nodded.
“She’s getting married soon. I wondered if obsidian would make an ideal wedding gift—it’s local and she could maybe have it turned into jewelry.”
“Nice idea,” said Kees, “but I’m afraid I’ve not come across any more.” He threw some of his things onto the backseat of the Land Rover.
“You know,” she said, opening the driver’s door, “some anthropologists think that obsidian made the first mirrors and they speculate that that’s why obsidian was so valued in ancient times—it was felt to have mystical powers, throwing back images of people as if from another world.”
Kees frowned. “Wouldn’t ancient man have seen his reflection in water—in rivers and lakes?”
She nodded. “Rivers and lakes were worshipped, too, for all sorts of reasons, of course, because life depended on them, but I can quite see that reflections could have been very mysterious to early mankind.”
“When is this wedding?”
“I don’t know, in a few weeks I expect.” They both climbed into the Land Rover, with Natalie in the driving seat. Before she could switch on, Kees said, “I’ll keep looking and let you know if I find anything. By the way, I very much admire the stand you are taking over Mutevu.”
Natalie looked at him. “I didn’t think you were on my side.”
He s
hook his head. “I’m not. I just mean to say that I admire and sympathize with your inner strength, your steel. I wish I had it.”
Natalie put the key in the ignition. “I don’t understand, Kees. If you agree with everyone else, with the majority, why do you need inner strength? Why is steel so important all of a sudden?”
He wiped the beads of sweat from his face with his small towel. “There’s nothing sudden about it. I’m in a much more … what’s the word?… a much more profound minority than you and I’ve been in that minority for years without daring to tell anyone. That’s why I admire you.” He stuffed his towel in the back pocket of his trousers. “I’m homosexual.”
Natalie said nothing at first. But for a moment she forgot the heat. She reached out and put her hand on Kees’s arm. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t say anything because she couldn’t think of anything to say. She knew, at least in theory, that such a thing as homosexuality occurred but she was not aware of having met anyone before who was homosexual, or “queer,” as the unpleasant slang in Cambridge had it, though she was pretty sure some of the fellows at Jesus College were that way inclined. But until now the whole matter had been abstract, distant, for her, theoretical. She hadn’t really thought about homosexuality except in the most general, disinterested way.
“Why are you telling me this, Kees? And why now?”
“I … I thought it might give you some comfort … to know that I understand what you have been going through, that’s all. In some places in the world, homosexuality is illegal, people like me are jailed, the churches are against us, no one wants to know us.”
He wiped his lips with his hand. “You feel … you feel at times that you are all alone here in Kihara—I know, I’ve seen the way your face tightens, the way you look inside, the way the shine goes out of your eyes and they deaden. Like the other day, after you argued that Western ‘modern’ practices are as old as Maasai traditions, if not older. I should have said something before, I suppose, to comfort you. But I couldn’t … I couldn’t because it meant … it meant telling you what I’m telling you now and, with your background, with your father being what he is, doing what he does, in the church, I couldn’t be certain how you would react.”
“But now you’ve changed your mind?”
He shrugged. “I’ve been meaning to say something for days now, as the pressure on you has started to mount. But, as I say, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Now, here we are, just the two of us, with no one else around.” He wound down the window. “When you are homosexual, you can’t help but be sensitive. Remember when I snapped at Jonas, when he was talking about Amsterdam’s red-light district? Of course, he assumed I was heterosexual—and part of me hated that assumption. But I was too frightened to come clean—that’s what made me snap.” He rubbed his jaw. “I’m pretty sure that’s why Richard Sutton had such a temper—”
“You think Richard was homosexual?”
“I do, yes. I caught him looking at me in a certain way once or twice. I think he had his suspicions about me.” He smiled wryly. “Had we discovered each other, so to speak, then life here wouldn’t have been so … well, it would have been different. But then he was killed and that was that.”
Natalie turned the key in the ignition and the Land Rover’s engine sparked into life. She let out the clutch and the vehicle eased forward.
“I’d be grateful if you didn’t tell anyone else what I’ve just told you, Natalie. Some of my friends back in Holland are beginning to go public—‘coming out,’ they call it—but I’m not ready, not yet.”
She nodded. “Don’t worry, I wouldn’t dream of telling anyone else.” She changed up and accelerated as they reached the rough track that led back to the camp. “But Kees, may I ask you a question?”
“Sure, fire away.”
“I know next to nothing about homosexuality but … could a man, can a man be both homosexual and married?”
He smiled. “Oh, yes. It’s much more common than you might think.” He drank some water from a bottle and passed it across to Natalie. “I share a flat in Amsterdam with an older man, the cello player I told you about. Hendrik is forty-nine and until five years ago he was married, with two children. But, he says now, he always knew, deep inside him, that he was … well, the way he was, is. And because of the way he was, sex with his wife tailed off, she had an affair—and what Hendrik felt most at that point was, he says, relief. Relief that he could, as he put it, escape. Of course, the children have suffered but, he says, for the first time in his life, he is content. He’s a wine merchant and didn’t want me to come on this dig, but I couldn’t turn it down.”
Kees took back the water bottle from Natalie. “So you see, I—we, Hendrik and me—know all about being in minorities, how tough it is, how you can hardly think about anything else. But at least with you it will all be over after the trial. With me it’s going to last a lifetime.”
Natalie nodded as she slowed the Land Rover, to negotiate a tiny dried stream bed. But she didn’t really hear what Kees was saying. She was thinking about when she had returned the Wellington boot to Mutevu Ndekei and found Richard Sutton standing close by, in the storeroom next to the kitchen.
• • •
“Jack! Jack? Are you there?” Natalie scarcely raised her voice. There was more than an hour to dinner, the sun was rapidly setting, and the color was beginning to go out of the day.
Jack appeared. He was holding a book. He smiled. “A visit from Lauren Bacall. This is a first. Things are looking up.”
“Yes,” she said. “Fair’s fair. You’ve been to my tent lots of times. I’ve come to see how you live. Is your tent as tidy as your plane?”
“Nowhere is as tidy as my plane,” he growled, grinning. “So no, you can’t come in. I’d be embarrassed and ashamed.”
She grinned. “That gives me an advantage immediately. As you say, things are looking up.”
She sat on one of his chairs and he sat on the other. “What’s the book?”
He showed her. “Lolita. For an hour before dinner, I like to break away from the gorge—”
“And read pornography?”
“This is great literature, Dr. Nelson. Sexy, yes, but beautifully written. Have you read it?”
She nodded.
“You think it’s pornographic?”
“I think it’s pornographic and great literature.”
“Can a book be both at the same time?”
“Another time, Jack. Why I really came here is to ask if there is any news yet on your press conference idea? Has your mother bitten the bullet?”
“No. Complete radio silence so far. Sorry.”
“Can’t you press it?”
He shook his head. “It would be counterproductive. We just wait.”
At that moment, however, there was a commotion.
“Jack! Jack!”
They both turned. Daniel was running towards them.
“Daniel, what is it?”
“Wildebeest drowning, the Mara River at Olpunyata.” He took a deep breath. “Thousands of them.”
“Oh no!” cried Jack, jumping to his feet. “Not again?”
Daniel turned on his heel, without saying any more, and ran off in the direction of the Land Rovers.
Jack threw his book into his tent.
“Jack? What’s going on?” Natalie had stood up too.
“Come with me. I’ll explain as we go. We must hurry. Leave everything, my mother will make sure all our tents are closed up. We may be some time. Come on!”
Natalie, perplexed, followed as Jack pursued Daniel towards the Land Rovers.
As they approached, she could see him throwing ropes into the backs of the vehicles, and loading large game lights, a primus stove, and several cardboard boxes.
Daniel and Aldwai got into one vehicle and led the way out of the camp. Jack and Natalie got into the second, with Christopher and one of the other guards in a third. They drove on to the rough dirt road outside the camp and
headed north, which took them down into the gorge and then up the other side. It was coming on to dusk and when Natalie went to speak Jack held up his hand.
“Not just yet. This track is tricky at night, or dusk. Wait till we get through the gorge. It’s flatter on the plain.”
Jack didn’t drive too close to Daniel, not wanting him to be blinded by headlights glaring in his rearview mirror.
They rocked over stones and gullies, slowing every so often so as not to put too much strain on the axles. Jack engaged the low four-wheel drive to ascend the far steep side of the gorge. When they got to the lip and looked on to the plain, Daniel’s Land Rover was already a hundred yards in front.
“Now,” said Jack, as the terrain became flatter and smoother and softer, “you remember that long line of wildebeest that we saw from the plane the other day, when I was giving Christopher a lesson?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “One of the great mysteries of the wildebeest migration is that, although it has been going on for—oh, tens of thousands of years, if not more—every so often the animals choose to cross rivers that are, at the point where they make the crossing, literally impassable. Deep, swift running, steep sided. No one knows why, no one knows why they haven’t evolved the skill to choose safe crossing places, but every so often a catastrophe occurs. Sometimes ten years pass without anything happening, but when it does, when it does, thousands—thousands—die. That’s what’s happened now. We try to save as many as we can.”
Natalie let this sink in. Around them the landscape was indistinct, the darkness descending.
“How far is it?”
“Olpunyata? About an hour and a half.”
Natalie turned in her seat. Christopher’s Land Rover was about a hundred yards behind.
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