by Mike Bond
He followed them downhill, with M’kele in the lead and Darius on point, and as he came down it was to a new life, for he knew he had truly died and been reborn, with the horror and beauty of every little thing made clear, every leaf and web and petal and crumb of soil. With remorse he looked into the scarred Somali’s eyes and knew he could not live enough for him. “I’m done,” he said, not knowing what he meant. “It’s over.” But there was not time now to think about it, calling at M’kele to pick up the pace as they dropped out of the mists and back into the world.
15
REBECCA WAS BARELY aware of the stiff camel saddle abrading her knees, of the rawhide lashing her wrists to the pommel, of her back arched so unnaturally by the high cantle and the camel’s uneven lurching stride, made worse by a terrain so rough it was as if rocks had been scattered infinitely deep across the land, broken and shoved aside to form near-vertical basaltic gullies or random, jagged, unclimbable hills. Her jeans and the skin of her outer legs and her arms were torn by two-inch thorns of umbrella trees and acacia scrub which the camels and Somalis seemed to saunter through unscathed; her neck was numbed by the constant whiplash of the camel’s ungainly gait, the way it loped up hills and jerked stiff-legged downslope while she snapped back and forth helpless on its back.
All this was nothing to the sun which bore down like a molten weight dropped from a great height, always, every millisecond, crushing her, flaying her shoulders through the white cotton shirt, as if the fabric were not even there, or worse, as if it magnified the heat. Sun lacerated her neck and the inside of her throat with each intaken breath; it was an oven from which she could not withdraw her face, her hair so hot it burned her skull.
Was it this morning she’d yelled at Milton, and ten minutes later he was dead? She’d yelled because the expedition wasn’t going well. Because the outcrops of earlier sedimentary rock she’d seen on the aerials had been less impressive on the ground. Because the normal mésalliance with Klaus had been even more arid than usual. Because she’d finally accepted that the officious knowledge and unadmitted insecurity which made Klaus a tolerable scholar made him intolerable as a husband.
Because she’d been so proud on this trip that, seeing him for the first time objectively, like another woman’s husband, she could finally find the light between them. Ashamed, but seeing nonetheless, and taking note for the future.
Now Klaus was wandering the desert, trying to retrace two sets of tire tracks in drifting sand and shifting lagas, the sun beating down on his head, blinding him too, begging him to stop, lie down anywhere on the sand and rest forever, let his body turn to clear white bone. And at night where would he hide, when the hyenas strip the flesh from you in seconds and crunch your bones like paper? With wild dogs calling for him to appease their hunger? And she’d snapped at him too this morning, because there was water in a fuel line— “How can that be when there’s no water for a thousand square miles!” she’d spat.
Again she saw Milton’s ebony chest being crushed by the boy killer’s bullets. She could see every split second of his death, the others’ writhing bodies—the awful blood everywhere—the metal coming out of the black barrel so hard, so vicious. Horrible, concentrated death in horrible pain, life wrenched away, all life’s loves, all our loves. Inside her head or out in the desert was the same, and the air inside her throat was very dry to keep from crying and her neck sore from forcing herself not to look down, not to look back.
If I’d left Klaus this wouldn’t have happened, she told herself. He’d have stayed at Koobi Fora, garnering international acclaim for his students’ finds which he so painstakingly disinters before the cameras, working out alternative theories of human evolution with visiting professors who all bring a bottle of his favorite eau de vie in tribute, and are careful to cite him in their papers. Is love just this? Does it always fade to this too-coherent awareness of the falseness in each other? Once love wasn’t this. But that wasn’t love, that was an irresponsible dream. Child’s play. I shouldn’t have done it. Maybe I’d have stayed closer to Klaus if I hadn’t had that other. Now what will happen to my sons?
“Mama!” A voice shrilled the word for woman in Swahili. “Hey Mama, don’t sleep—you fall off camel!”
Shaking herself, she looked down, dazed. Foreshortened by her height, Warwar seemed an emaciated dwarf in his dumpy tan burnoose, a burnt-down candle with a toadying, uneven smile and cheery black eyes full of death. “Need anything, Mama?”
She faced away from Warwar to the cobalt raw horizon, its far-flung blazing peaks, its torrid waves of sand and inconsolable mirages, the sedately rocking camel making the scene rise and fall as if seen from a boat upon a softly choppy sea. Mal de mer. Mal de mère. She’d been a mauvaise mère and now her sons would go back to Klaus’ parents in Lucerne and grow up in a sterile Swiss school.
She heard a little girl’s sob, then realized it was she, the mauvaise mère weeping for her orphaned sons. I will not let them see me do this, she told herself. She tried to efface the tears but her wrists were bound to the pommel and she had to lean forward to wipe her cheek on her sleeve.
She must remember that whatever was happening to her was meaningless against any African woman bent beneath her daily hundred pounds of firewood, her two-hour walk every morning from the water hole with a fifty-liter barrel on her head, her rows of corn and beans and squash and her mud hut needing patching and her belly full of children coming out one by one to clutch hungrily at her single, tattered skirt. Remember that.
“Wake up, Mama!” Warwar called, swatting the camel with his stick so it jerked forward and swung its head and snapped at her foot. “It’s just me, baby,” she said in English to the camel. “I didn’t do it.”
Moving closer, Warwar again jabbed his stick into the camel’s vulva; it whinnied and darted forward, waking the whitewoman. What good is she, he worried, if she falls and breaks her neck? More trouble than a child. Again he puzzled that these whites, so infirm and distanced from the world, should have been capable of overrunning Africa, worse than the locusts who eat the grain that makes the children’s bread. They’ve made a pact with the Devil, he decided, and the Devil’s given them use of his tools in return for their souls. But why does he want their souls, weak and divided and maggot-like as their bodies?
The Prophet was right, the world finds unity through opposites. Thus did he, Warwar, maintain the life of this strange half-woman in man’s trousers—her colorless face and hair uncovered, the outline of her udders plain for every man to see, her look and manner disrespectful—so he might win and own the beautiful Soraya, as pure as this one was defiled.
Evening approached, the time he loved the most, when the day’s heat faded as if the traveler had stepped down from his camel into the gentlest of streams, where a damp wind rustled the doum palms and the scent of tamarind forgave the day. As he would walk there with his Soraya, along the banks of the spring at El Jurta, where there will be only the sound of the new kids baaing for their mothers, and the joy of her tranquility behind him.
Readjusting the rifle on his aching shoulder, he tied the reins of the whitewoman’s camel to the tail of the one led by Rashid. He ran forward and, as required, walked wordlessly beside Rashid and Ibrahim for a few minutes.
“How goes thy beloved?” Rashid smiled.
Barely breaking stride, Warwar removed his sandal. Continuing barefoot, he pulled a long thorn from the sole, then removed the other sandal; the cooling rocks with their strong sure edges felt good against his feet.
“He’s so enamored he can’t answer,” Ibrahim offered.
“He should go back to her,” Rashid said. “His place, is it not with the women?”
“She’s weary,” Warwar answered. “Perhaps we might halt.”
“He changes the subject.” Ibrahim reshouldered his rifle, letting the barrel droop until it pointed at Warwar’s face. “Speaking of his whitewoman, whom he knows, without our saying, is impure…”
“He forg
ets, perhaps, that without his clan he’s nothing.”
“He does not see that.”
“His place then is truly with his whitewoman.”
“What kind of lover is he who disavows his beloved?” Ibrahim’s dark, craggy, bearded visage, outlined by the sun-bleached djellabah and deepening blue sky, seemed like a mountain Warwar could never climb. “What kind of man will he be who ignores the word of his elders and moves to attack alone, perhaps endangering his clan, so he can appear to have led the attack, can have first choice of the spoils?”
“He does not deserve to become a man,” Rashid said.
Warwar noticed how Ibrahim’s beard trembled in the wind, his eyes rubied by the sunset’s reflection on the sand. Ibrahim’s cloak smelt of goat grease and his rifle of oil softened by the sun’s dispersing heat; the sky behind his broad head was clogged with color—each tint contains all the others, Warwar thought—sensing that something else lay behind Ibrahim’s anger, that they could kill him now and invent a story for the clan, and have the spoils and woman’s ransom to themselves, saying he, Warwar, had died attacking the Land Rovers. His own rifle felt small and hard against his back, as a stone when one turns in sleep and lies upon it. The evening air tasted of a thousand dangers.
“Friend of my family,” he looked directly into Ibrahim’s mealy, harsh face, “when you put my blood upon the sand, don’t you lose your own? Am I not in the same clan? Have I not shared the same years with your own sons? Forgive me if my desire to please you has made me too bold.”
“When we’re young,” said Ibrahim, “we play at many lives. We’re great warriors with our friends, battling among the palm trunks, with fronds for swords and shields and palm nuts for bullets. As we grow older these dream lives fall from us as skins from the cobra; year by year they dry and blow away in the desert wind. Until we die we’re always shedding skins.”
“I don’t understand.”
“As you know the elders teach, don’t take the dream you live for life.”
“I regret I’ve angered you, when all I wished was your respect.” He permitted himself a quick look back at the whitewoman. “But how is he worth respect who threatens another who has not time to unshoulder his own gun?”
“You wish me to give you time?”
“No, my cousin. I am just trying to understand how one’s behavior should be.”
Ibrahim’s eyes softened. “You must decide if you are of this clan.”
“If not?”
“You are an enemy.”
“I am of this clan.”
“Then act as we say.”
“Yet by attacking the whites as I did, when I thought you all had fled,” Warwar spoke directly into Ibrahim’s face, “did I not capture them easily, without our blood being shed?”
“After he changes his skin,” Rashid laughed, “the young snake foolishly sleeps in the sun, and thinks the eagle won’t find him. He won’t grow old this way.”
“Return to the whitewoman,” Ibrahim said.
Through half-shut eyes Rebecca watched the boy killer return and untie her camel’s halter from the next one’s tail. She tried to find a reason why the heavy one had pointed his rifle at the boy, and could not. But where there is dissension there is hope, she thought, before days of no food and too much sun have weakened me. From here it was only two hundred kilometers west to Koobi Fora, or two hundred east to Moyale, on the border. In her mind she lifted up each of her sons and held him.
The depth of Ibrahim’s anger perplexed Warwar—too great for the occasion, it hid something beneath. When Ibrahim’s brother Yusuf had died, Ibrahim had been forced to take Yusuf’s two wives, both older than he and already with children. Ibrahim had been a good father to these children, the “sons” of whom Warwar had spoken. With many cows and goats of his own, Ibrahim now might be ready to buy a new wife, a younger one more to his taste and growing reputation. He sat on the council with Shor, the father of Soraya.
When, Warwar wondered, have I ever spoken of Soraya? Could Ibrahim know? If we sell this whitewoman, would he use his share as a bride price for Soraya?
His feet were tired; he halted to don his sandals, letting the distance grow between him and the others. He was thirsty; the rifle bothered his shoulder. Is Soraya just a dream I soon will shed? he wondered. Ibrahim has poisoned my mind, made me think like him. He could make his claim to Soraya and mine would be displaced.
16
THEY UNTIED her wrists and let her walk about for a few minutes, the heavy bearded one always following, his rifle ready. She ached to fall on the welcoming warm sand, but forced herself to keep moving, or her legs would stiffen and be useless later. The youngest Somali, the boy killer, was wandering the volcanic hills with the camels in search of forage. The heavy bearded one made her sit under a lava overhang and tied her ankles to a saddle. “I’m so thirsty!” she said in Swahili; he did not seem to understand. “Maji,” she cried, “tilia maji. Sikia kiu!” She pointed to her mouth, tried to catch his sleeve. He nodded gently, speaking in Somali as he retied her hands.
The breeze across the desert as the light died was so sweet she could almost drink it. To the west the dunes rose and fell with the cadence of the sea, crimson on their crests and shadowed in their troughs. In the very far distance was the pencil trace of sandy canyon she knew as Ririba laga; far beyond it the desert sloped up to the wide dark lava peninsula called Dukana, continuing somewhere beyond it to other lagas—Wata, Bulal and Kore.
But in a good day’s walk she might reach the Gabbra water hole, Balesa, beyond laga Ririba, if she could locate it and if she had no problems with hyenas. There, digging deeply, she might find water. Another day’s walk and she’d be in the deep canyons of Kore laga, where occasionally there was water. Leopards lived there, in the cliffs—surviving on the blood of their prey, the little desert antelopes, gerenuk and dikdik, who got their moisture from the desert scrub.
In Kore canyon, far above Kore laga, she’d made one of Klaus’ greatest finds—a young woman’s lower jaw, homo habilis, in a bed of exposed malbe tuff. The young woman had left this and nothing more—the jaw with which two million years ago she’d breathed, spoken, eaten, suckled at her own mother’s breast. She’d died young, by a stream through lush savanna, buried by riparian sediments and volcanic ash, while the stream beside her cut down into a canyon that in time turned into desert.
With teeth so young and healthy, Rebecca had thought, it’s unlikely you were sick—did you die by lion or by leopard, or in childbirth, the gift of a man you may not have loved, bringing forth another man perhaps, in the guise of a helpless child?
In the semi-darkness she watched the camels coming back, the boy killer like any pastoral Rendille or Boran youth returning the family’s herd to the manyatta at night. The men busied about the camels, the animals grunting and stamping. Steps whispered on the sand; the boy knelt beside her. “Here, Mama, you must be thirsty!” His pale burnoose leaned towards her; she clasped with bound hands the gourd he lifted to her lips. The taste was hot and putrid; she gagged but forced herself to drink, telling herself, this is strength, this is freedom.
There was not much, a mouthful of camel blood and milk in this gourd freshly rinsed with urine. Which man’s? she wondered. The boy’s? I need the salt. It’s normal. They do it. It won’t harm me.
It was down. She should ask for more but could not bear to. “I have hunger—njaa.”
“There was only this,” the boy said. “Soon we’re in Ethiopia, then chakula kingi—much food.”
I will not be with you in Ethiopia, she promised herself, digging fingernails into her palms to keep from ripping open his face. “No water?”
“You’ve drunk it all.”
“When will we be in Ethiopia?”
He hesitated. “In two nights.”
“I won’t live that long,” she thought of saying, to show she was weak and unlikely to escape. But if she seemed too frail they might tire of it all and simply shoot her. She bowe
d her head and his footsteps moved away; she raised her eyes to follow his sound into the darkness. If in two days you think you’ll reach Ethiopia then you’ll cross the frontier by the El Had water hole and over Selach Pass. And once you’re across the border no one from Kenya can follow you. Nor do the Ethiopians care about any white woman supposedly kidnapped in Kenya.
The three Somalis sat peaceably by the sleeping camels, the red eye of a pipe passing between them. In Nairobi, Rebecca thought, the families of the dead still don’t know. Living their normal happy lives, missing their husband, father, son or brother, not knowing he’s dead. Now who’ll pay their children’s school, for their homes and food? Who’ll drive down to Mombasa to tell the parents of W’kwaeme that the son for whom they’ve worked all their lives needs no further sacrifice from them? Klaus, stumbling round the desert beneath the bitter stars, holed up in a cave, surrounded by hyenas—perhaps dead already, bones scattered—he’ll be the one to do all this?
The night’s chill grew fierce. She huddled shivering under the rock, burrowed in the sand that was like countless tiny particles of ice that would not melt, her wrists tied to one camel saddle, ankles to another, the men still talking in their liquid rasping language like the wild dogs wailing from the laga, their voices obscured by depth and distance. Wild dogs that slink into camp at night and ripped off a sleeper’s face before he can fight back—what will they do to Klaus, alone out there? The same as they’d do to me.
But self-pity only makes things worse, she told herself. You’ll survive only if you think everything out and are lucky and stay strong and never waste time or sorrow on yourself. Only if you promise yourself nothing will defeat you, you’ll never give up and never lose faith. Promise yourself you’ll get out to pay for Milton’s children’s schools, the others’ families. That you’ve made a decision just like you decided to leave Klaus, before this all arrived. Just like that: be strong, even if you aren’t.