True at First Light

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True at First Light Page 27

by Ernest Hemingway


  We drank it off to the bottom of the glasses and Mwindi refilled.

  The next toast was a little rough but with the tendency of the times and the need to give our new religion some form of actionable program which could later be channeled toward the highest and noblest end, I proposed, “Tunaua.”

  We drank this solemnly although I noticed reservations in Charo and when we sat down I said, “Na jehaad tu,” trying to win the Moslem vote. But it is a hard vote to win and we all knew he was with us only in the formal beer drinking and the brotherhood and could never be with us in the new religion or the politics.

  Msembi came to the table and poured again and said the beer was now quisha and I said this was the hell of a kind of management and that we would saddle up and leave at once for Laitokitok for more beer. We would take some cold meat to eat on the way up and a few tins of kipper snacks. Mthuka said, “Kwenda na Shamba.” So we agreed to go to the Shamba and pick up a few bottles of beer if they had any to hold the group until we could reach another brewing Shamba or Laitokitok. Ngui said I should pick up my fiancée and the Widow and that he and Mthuka both were OK with the third Masai Shamba up the road. Pop’s gun bearer said he was OK and would be the protector of the Widow. We wanted to take Msembi but we were four and the Widow and my fiancée made six and we did not know what Masai we would run into. There were always plenty of Masai in Laitokitok.

  I went over to the tent and Mwindi had the tin trunk open and my old Hong Kong tweed jacket out with the money buttoned in the flapped-down inner pockets.

  “How much money you want?” he asked.

  “Four hundred shillingi.”

  “Plenty money,” he said. “What you do? Buy a wife?”

  “Buy beer, posho maybe, medicine for Shamba, Christmas presents, buy new spear, fill up car with petrol, buy whisky for mtoto of police, buy kippah snacks.”

  He laughed at the kippah snacks. “Take five hundred,” he said. “You want hard shillingi too?”

  Hard shillingi were kept in a leather pouch. He counted me out thirty and asked, “You wear good coat?”

  The coat he liked me to wear best was a sort of hacking coat which had also come from Hong Kong.

  “No. Wear leather coat. Take leather zip-up.”

  “Take woollie too. Cold come down from Mountain.”

  “Dress me as you wish,” I said. “But put the boots on very easy.”

  He had clean washed cotton socks and I put them on and he worked the feet into the boots and left them open without pulling up the zippers at the sides. Ngui came into the tent. He was wearing his clean shorts and a new sport shirt that I had never seen. I told him that we would only take the 30-06 and he said he had ammo. He wiped the big gun clean and put it under the cot. It had not been fired and the Springfield had been shooting with non-corrosive primers and could be cleaned at night.

  “Pistol,” he said severely and I poked my right leg through the loop at the end of the holster and he buckled the big belt around my waist.

  “Jinny flask,” Mwindi said and handed the heavy Spanish leather shell pannier to Ngui.

  “Money?” Ngui asked.

  “Hapana,” I said. “Money kwisha.”

  “Too much money,” Mwindi said. He had the key with which he had locked the tin trunk where he kept the money.

  We went out to the car. Keiti was still benevolent and I asked him formally what was needed for the outfit. He said to bring a sack of posho if there was any of the good kind that came on the stage from Kajiado. He looked sad when we left and his head hung a little forward and to one side although he was smiling the slit smile.

  I felt sad and wrong that I had not asked him if he wanted to go and then we were on the road to the Shamba. It was a well-worn road by now and it would be worn more before this is over, I thought.

  14

  MTHUKA HAD no finery except a clean shirt with a checked pattern and his washed trousers with the patches. Pop’s gun bearer had a yellow sport shirt with no figured pattern and it went very well with Ngui’s, which was muleta-colored red. I was sorry that I was dressed so conservatively but since I had shaved my head the day before after the plane had left and then forgotten all about it I felt that I must have a certain baroque appearance if I removed my cap. When shaved, or even clipped closely enough, my head, unfortunately, has much the appearance of some plastic history of a very lost tribe. It is in no way as spectacular as the Great Rift Valley but there are historical features of terrain which could interest both archaeologist and anthropologist. I did not know how Debba would take it but I had an old fishing cap on with long slanted visor and I was not worried about nor concerned with my appearance when we drove into the Shamba and stopped in the shade of the big tree.

  Mthuka, I found later, had sent Nguili, the young boy who wanted to be a hunter but was working as second mess attendant, ahead to warn the Widow and my fiancée that we would be coming by to take them to Laitokitok to buy the dresses for the Birthday of the Baby Jesus. This boy was still a nanake in Kamba and so could not drink beer legally but he had made the trip very fast to show that he could run and he was sweating happily against the trunk of the big tree and trying not to breathe hard.

  I got out of the car to stretch my legs and to thank the nanake.

  “You run better than a Masai,” I said.

  “I am Kamba,” he said, trying hard to breathe without strain and I could imagine how the pennies tasted in his mouth.

  “Do you want to go up the Mountain?”

  “Yes. But it would not be proper and I have my duty.”

  Just then the Informer joined us. He was wearing the paisley and he walked with great dignity, balanced on his heels.

  “Good afternoon, brother,” he said and I saw Ngui turn away and spit at the word brother.

  “Good afternoon, Informer,” I said. “How is your health?”

  “Better,” said the Informer. “Can I go with you up the Mountain?”

  “You cannot.”

  “I can serve as interpreter.”

  “I have an interpreter on the Mountain.”

  The child of the Widow came up and bumped his head hard against my belly. I kissed the top of his head and he put his hand in mine and stood up very straight.

  “Informer,” I said. “I cannot ask beer from my father-in-law. Please bring us beer.”

  “I will see what beer there is.”

  If you liked Shamba beer it was all right, tasting like home brew in Arkansas in the time of Prohibition. There was a man who was a shoemaker and who had fought very well in the First World War who brewed a very similar beer that we used to drink in the front parlor of his house. My fiancée and the Widow came out and my fiancée got into the car and sat beside Mthuka. She kept her eyes down except for short triumphant looks at the other women of the village and wore a dress that had been washed too many times and a very beautiful trade goods scarf over her head. The Widow seated herself between Ngui and Pop’s gun bearer. We sent the Informer for six more bottles of beer but there were only four in the village. I gave these four bottles to my father-in-law. Debba looked at no one but sat very straight with her breasts pointing at the same angle as her chin.

  Mthuka started the car and we were off leaving the village, all people who were jealous or disapproved, many children, the goats, the nursing mothers, the chickens, the dogs and my father-in-law.

  “Que tal, tu?” I asked Debba.

  “En la puta gloria.”

  This was the second phrase that she liked best in Spanish. It is a strange phrase and no two people would translate it alike.

  “Did the chui hurt you?”

  “No. There was nothing.”

  “Was he big?”

  “Not very.”

  “Did he roar?”

  “Many times.”

  “Did he not hurt anyone?”

  “No one. Not even you.”

  She was pressing the carved leather pistol holster hard against her thigh and then she pla
ced her left hand where she wanted it to be.

  “Mimi bili chui,” she said. Neither of us were Swahili scholars but I remembered the two leopards of England and someone must have known about leopards a long time ago.

  “Bwana,” Ngui said and his voice had the same harshness that came from love or anger or tenderness.

  “Wakamba, tu,” I said. He laughed and broke the rough bad thing.

  “We have three bottles of Tuskah that Msembi stole for us.”

  “Thank you. When we make the big rise we’ll turn off and eat the kippah snack.”

  “Good cold meat,” Ngui said.

  “Mzuri,” I said.

  There is no homosexuality among Wakamba people. In the old days homosexuals after the trial of King-ole, which Mwindi had explained to me meant when you gathered together formally to kill a man, were condemned, tied in the river or any water hole for a few days to make them more tender and then killed and eaten. This would be a sad fate for many playwrights, I thought. But, on the other hand and if you have another hand you are lucky in Africa, it was considered very bad luck to eat any part of a homosexual even though he had been tenderized in the Athi in a clean and nearly clear pool and according to some of my older friends a homosexual tasted worse than a water buck and could bring out sores on any part of the body but especially in the groin or in the armpits. Intercourse with animals was also punishable by death although it was not regarded as so fouling a practice as homosexuality and Mkola, who was Ngui’s father, since I had proved mathematically that I could not be, had told me that a man who had rogered his sheep or his goats was as tasty as a wildebeest. Keiti and Mwindi would not eat wildebeest but that was a part of anthropology that I had not yet penetrated. And as I was thinking of these facts and confidences and caring greatly for Debba who was a straight Kamba girl replete with modesty and true basic insolence, Mthuka stopped the car under a tree where we could see the great gap and break in the country and the small tin-roofed shine of Laitokitok against the blue of the forest on the Mountain which rose white sloped and square topped to give us our religion and our long and lasting hope while behind was all our country spread out as though we were in the aircraft but without the movement, the stress and the expense.

  “Jambo, tu,” I said to Debba and she said, “La puta gloria.”

  We let her and the Widow, who had been very happy between Ngui and Pop’s gun bearer in the red-and-yellow shirts and with the black arms and the delicate legs, open the tins of kipper snacks and the two tins of false salmon from Holland. They could not open them properly and one key was broken but Mthuka used a pliers to bend the tin back exposing the false smoked salmon that was Holland’s glory in Africa and we all ate, exchanging knives, and drinking from the same bottles. Debba wiped the neck of the bottle and its lips the first time she drank using her head cloth but I told her that one man’s chancre was every man’s chancre and after that we drank without ceremony. The beer was warmer than it was cool but at eight thousand feet and with the country we looked back over and the places we could see now as though we were eagles, it was lovely beer and we finished it with the cold meat. We kept the bottles to trade in and piled the tins together, removing the keys, and left them under a heather bush close to the trunk of the tree.

  There were no Game Scouts along so there were no people who had sold their Wakamba heritage to denounce their brothers and no worship of Miss Mary and the hangman or the puppies of the police so that we were free in a way and we looked back at the country where no white woman had ever been, including Miss Mary, unless it counted when we had taken her, unwillingly but with the excitement of children, onto the deck where she had never belonged nor known how its penalties equalized its small glories.

  So we looked back at our country and at the Chulu hills which were as blue and strange as ever and we were all happy that Miss Mary had never been there and then we went back into the car and I said to Debba, stupidly, “You will be an intelligent wife,” and she, intelligently, took hold of my place and of the well-loved holster and said, “I am as good a wife now as I will ever be.”

  I kissed her on the crinkly head and we went on up the beautiful road that swung strangely and curved up the Mountain. The tin-roofed town was still glistening in the sun and as we came closer we could see the eucalyptus trees and the formal road that, heavily shaded and with Britannic might, ran up to the small fort and jail and the rest houses where the people who participate in the administration of British justice and paperwork come to take their rest when they are too poor to return to their home country. We were not going up to disturb their rest even though it meant missing the sight of the rock gardens and the tumbling stream that, much later, became the river.

  It had been a long hunt for Miss Mary’s lion and all except fanatics, converts and true believers in Miss Mary had been tired of it for a long time. Charo, who was none of these, had said to me, “Shoot the lion when she shoots and get it over with.” I had shaken my head because I was not a believer but a follower and had made the pilgrimage to Campostella and it had been worth it. But Charo shook his head in disgust. He was a Moslem and there were no Moslems with us today. We needed no one to cut the throats of anything and we were all looking for our new religion which had its first station of whatever cross there was to be outside of Benji’s General Store. This station was a gas pump and it was inside the store that Debba and the Widow would select the cloth to make their dresses for the Birthday of the Baby Jesus.

  It was not proper for me to go in with her although I loved the different cloths and the smells of the place and the Masai that we knew, the wanawaki, eager and unbuying with their cuckolded husbands up the street drinking Golden Jeep sherry from South Africa with a spear in one hand and the bottle of Golden Jeep in the other. They were cuckolded standing on one leg or on two and I knew where they would be and walked down the right side of the narrow tree-shaded street that was still wider than our wingtips as everyone who lived on it or walked it knew and I walked hurt footed and, I hoped, not insolent nor pistol proud down to the Masai drinking place where I said, “Sopa,” and shook a few cold hands and went out without drinking. Eight paces to the right, I turned into Mr. Singh’s. Mr. Singh and I embraced and Mrs. Singh and I shook hands and then I kissed her hand, which always pleased her since she was a Turkana and I had learned to kiss hands quite well and it was like a voyage to Paris which she had never heard of but would have ornamented on the clearest day Paris ever had. Then I sent for the Mission-trained Interpreter.

  “How are you Singh?” I asked with the Interpreter.

  “Not bad. Here. Doing business.”

  “And beautiful Madame Singh?”

  “Four months until the baby.”

  “Felicidades,” I said and kissed Madame Singh’s hand again using the style of Alvarito Caro then Marques of Villamayor, a town we had once entered but been forced out of.

  “All young Singhs are well I hope?”

  “All are well except the third boy, who has a cut on the hand from the sawmill.”

  “You want me to look at it?”

  “They treated him at the Mission. With sulfa.”

  “Excellent for children. But it destroys the kidneys of old men like you and me.”

  Mrs. Singh laughed her honest Turkana laugh and Mr. Singh said, “I hope your Memsahib is well. That your children are well and all the aircraft are well.”

  The Interpreter said, in good condition, in the reference to aircraft and I asked him not to be pedantic.

  “The Memsahib, Miss Mary, is in Nairobi. She has gone in the aircraft and will return with the aircraft. All of my children are well. God permitting all aircraft are well.”

  “We have heard the news,” Mr. Singh said. “The lion and the leopard.”

  “Anyone can kill a lion and a leopard.”

  “But the lion was from Miss Mary.”

  “Naturally,” I said; pride rising in me of beautifully sculptured, compact, irascible and lovely Miss Mary
with the head like an Egyptian coin, the breasts from Rubens and the heart from Bemidji, or Walker or Thief River Falls, any town where it was forty-five below zero in the winter. It was a temperature to make warm hearts that also could be cold.

  “With Miss Mary there is no problem with a lion.”

  “But it was a difficult lion. Many have suffered from this lion.”

  “The Great Singh strangled them with either hand,” I said. “Miss Mary was using a 6.5 Mannlicher.”

  “That is a small gun for such a lion,” said Mr. Singh and I knew then he had done his military service. So I waited for him to lead.

  He was too smart to lead and Madame Singh said, “And the leopard?”

  “Any man should be able to kill a leopard before breakfast.”

  “You will eat something?”

  “With Madame’s permission.”

  “Please eat,” she said. “It is nothing.”

  “We will go in the back room. You have drunk nothing.”

  “We can drink together now if you wish.”

  The Interpreter came in the back room and Mr. Singh brought a bottle of White Heather and a jug of water. The Interpreter took off his Mission shoes to show me his feet.

  “I have only worn the shoes when we were in sight of the informers of religion,” he explained. “I have never spoken of the Baby Jesus except with contempt. I have not said my morning prayers nor my evening prayers.”

  “What else?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You rank as a negative convert,” I said. He pushed his head hard against my belly as the Widow’s son did.

  “Think of the Mountain and of the Happy Hunting Grounds. We may need the Baby Jesus. Never speak of him with disrespect. What tribe are you?”

  “The same as you.”

  “No. What are you written as?”

  “Masai-Chagga. We are the border.”

  “There have been good men from the borders.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Never say sir in our religion or our tribe.”

  “No.”

  “How were you when you were circumcised?”

 

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