Ahmed's Revenge Read online

  My mind was teeming with the images I had seen, I couldn’t make it slow down, but by the time I heard the door open, I was nevertheless able to lie still. And sure enough, when Jules came in he was contrite. “Hello, Nora dear,” he sang. “Nora Barnacle home from the sea.” Nora Barnacle indeed. When Jules drank he liked to pretend that he was James Joyce, and it was all I could do to keep from sitting up and calling him Jim.

  But Jules was a thick-bodied man and a good slow lover, I haven’t said that yet. I also haven’t said that I made love with Jules on the night we met. My father was staying in London and I was visiting him and Jules was a houseguest of the man next door. It was a hot summer night and I was sitting on my father’s porch, watching people walk by and thinking vaguely of Kenya and England, of the vast differences between them, and the direction my life was taking, when Julius came out and told me his name and asked if I’d like to join him at the pub. He was polite and funny and I told him “Sure.” I was twenty-four then, nearly twenty-five, and I remember feeling that there had already been too many men in my life. There had been five, and Jules, by the end of that night, was number six, making a neat half dozen, and ending my experimental period once and for all.

  Jules believed I was asleep when he got back, but he was determined to awaken me by going down beneath the sheets and playing. And though I didn’t forget about the house on Loita Street with all those horrible tusks, I soon enough put the image aside, since everything he did down there was an apology, everything for my pleasure, nothing for his, and I knew he would tell me about it anyway, in his own good time.

  The next morning, however, neither of us said a word. Since I didn’t ask him, Jules didn’t have to lie, so oddly enough it was only I who lied that day. When we got out of bed there was blood on the sheets, and when Jules said he was surprised, I turned my leg away, telling him only that several hours after all our ruckus my period had come. Then I sent him down to the chemist’s for some sanitary pads, while I quickly went to work on the real wound I had.

  By that I mean the tear in my thigh, not the larger wound, the one that neither Jules nor I, as it turned out, would ever be able to do anything to heal.

  2

  Farm Life Disrupted

  When Jules and I got back home again we had the welcome prospect of hard work to keep conversation at bay. I decided that I wouldn’t say anything about what I’d seen on Loita Street, that I’d wait for him to speak no matter how long it took. Still, a hundred times I was on the verge of ripping it out of him, and a hundred other times, I swear, I knew that full disclosure was on the tip of Jules’s tongue, ready to step out and clear the air between us without me forcing it at all. But, alas, neither of us spoke. It was harvest time and we had people everywhere, crews to feed, sheds to tend to and equipment to repair, an endless array of lorries coming and going in the afternoon light, taking our coffee to the processing plant. It was a hard harvest that year, the hardest we had had, and it left no time for serious talk. We could eat and we could discuss what tomorrow might bring, but that was all. Sleep was third on our agenda and it was always the longest item.

  During past harvests, I guess I am inclined to say, every little disturbance, even such a thing as a broken-down lorry on the road, seemed to define vitality for Jules and me. Every unexpected event, however awful at the time, was a lesson in what it meant to be alive and involved with something that we loved. We worked our farm together, and when we ate our evening meals, we sat on a porch that looked over miles and miles of the kind of land that God must have created first, if He created it at all. We had a small pond about eighty yards from our porch, and often at dusk, while we drank our coffee or finished a bottle of wine, animals would come out of the surrounding bush to drink, the way the biblical animals must have done, not quite the lion and the lamb together, maybe, but certainly the lion, and sometimes the leopard, and giraffes and impalas and warthogs. Since I am a daughter of Kenya it may seem strange that I find it thrilling still, and the truth is that when I was young and used to go on safaris with my dad, I didn’t think nearly so much of it as I do now. But I was educated in England, and there I learned the lesson that I had started at the top, or conversely, that if there’s a scale of beauty and wonder in the world, I had grown up on that scale’s heavy end. And when I came back with Jules tagging along, anxious to start a new life with me, I never took it for granted again.

  All of this is not to say that there weren’t frustrations for Jules and me even before the thorn of his secret started festering in my thigh and in my heart. Working the land as we did was always hard. The Maasai were constantly coming around, once setting down a whole village on land that we intended for planting, and for a time we couldn’t catch a leopard that killed the farm animals we used to keep, one or two a week, for an entire year. But, my God, the gifts of the planet were so abundantly laid at our door. Even when elephants trampled a coffee crop, wandering through like fat ladies in a seed store, as they did in ‘71, I could never quite summon the outrage that such an act deserved, though I had to stop Jules several times from running for his gun. Jules loved elephants, I’ve already said that, but he loved his coffee more, and he did everything he could think of to keep them off our land.

  We had been back from seeing Jules et Jim for a fortnight when one evening there was a disturbance out by our pond. Jules was in the bathtub, washing the day’s work away, and I was at our desk writing checks on our Kenyan shilling account so that Jules, who was going back into Nairobi the next morning, could visit the merchants and pay our bills. Our pond, of course, was only a convenient watering hole from the animals’ point of view, so fights of one kind or another were a common affair out there. Elephants, however, because of all the fences we put up to keep them out, were not common at all, and I was moved quickly away from my bill paying by a single elephant trumpet, a weak kind of broken bugle call.

  “Julius,” I mildly said, but Jules had the water running and didn’t hear.

  I walked out onto our porch and listened again. There were some Maasai camped five miles or so on the other side of the pond, well down toward the Mara plains. Jules had told me they were there. I hadn’t seen them yet, but the first thing I saw when I went outside were two young morani warriors standing there, close to the house, spears and bodies erect. I don’t know much Maasai so I spoke in Kiswahili.

  “Did you arrive just now?” I asked. “Did you see an elephant nearby? Was that an elephant that I heard, or was it some other sound?”

  If elephants were going to run across our farm, this was about the best time for them to do it, because we’d just finished our harvest, but any farmer will tell you that no time is a good time for them to come. It would mean that our break was broken somewhere, our defenses down, and even if they stayed out of the coffee, our trees and outer buildings might get knocked around. Elephants on a Kenyan farm were the breathing equivalents of tornados in the American Midwest, and I knew that if they were there, we had to do something fast to get them turned around.

  “There are too many elephants now,” said one of the Maasai, “but this time only one small calf is at your pond. Tell Bwana to bring his gun.”

  Our pond had a spotlight next to it, but our generator wasn’t switched on. Since I had a torch on a table just inside the door, however, I decided to ask the Maasai to walk me down to the pond and show me. A lost little elephant calf wasn’t so bad. If we could scare it into moving off our land and back down toward the rest of the herd, we might still avoid damage.

  “My husband is bathing,” I said. “He’ll be out when he’s done.”

  I took the torch and came down off the porch and the three of us headed toward the pond. It could be a dangerous walk alone at night—even our African crew stayed pretty close to their dormitory—but with the morani there the animals would scatter, and I thought we’d be fine.

  Our foreman had heard the elephant too and had pulled the cord to our generator, quickly lighting the pond. After that h
e came out to join us. Our foreman’s name was Kamau and he had worked for the Kikuyu man before us, so he knew everything about the farm.

  “They say there’s only a single calf,” I told him. “Let’s just get it out the way it came in. You can take someone down to fix the break after it’s gone.”

  At the pond, which we approached quietly and from the downwind side, there was indeed an elephant, a baby standing no more than three feet tall. Although this might seem like good news, it wasn’t. Maybe such a small calf couldn’t damage much, but I was sure it had been followed in by lions, that that was the reason for its pitiful sound, and with such an easy kill at hand, the lions might not be intimidated by the presence of myself and Kamau, or by the Maasai. Even if this baby’s mother showed up it might be difficult to avoid a kill at our pond, and if that happened our routine would be disrupted, either by the unmovable carcass and the scavengers it would bring, or by the mother elephant’s wrecking of our farm in her grief and rage, her desire for revenge.

  The Maasai understood immediately what was going on and began producing noises that would make the lions think we were many and scare the little elephant away at the same time. The Maasai’s trick was a good one but it worked too well. The elephant calf jumped around in fear and, trying to run too quickly, fell to its knees in the mud.

  After that things happened fast. A big female lion came out of the darkness very close to us. I had my torch on her and I saw her look our way even as she gained speed. The elephant calf was on its feet again. It trumpeted another small scream into the night just as the lion hit it, smashing into it with the force of a lorry accident on the road and flipping the elephant all the way over onto its back. The lion planted her claws deep into the baby elephant’s head, and was biting the elephant deeply too, taking a large amount of the flesh of its neck between her jaws, puncturing the skin and holding on while the elephant wriggled around, still using all of its power but to no particular end, with no particular goal at all.

  There was a single moment of relative quiet then, when we could hear the breaking of skin and bone, before three other lions, two smaller females and a cub, came from the other side of the pond. These females moved nearly as fast as the first one had, and though the urgency of the kill was gone, they tore into the elephant calf too, one of them pulling fiercely on a hind leg, the other pushing its teeth into the elephant’s side. Even the cub, when it arrived, landed on the baby elephant’s middle, then rolled off and began attacking the poor thing’s trunk, which was coming off the ground haphazardly and waving at us in the savaged air.

  Though I’d lived in Africa all of my life I had never seen anything like this before. I didn’t feel very much personal danger, what with the two Maasai and Kamau standing near, but the kills I’d seen before had mostly been viewed through the safety glass of cars, and therefore were a bit like something I’d watched on TV. I knew that soon there would be other cats around, since these females, big as they were, couldn’t drag the little elephant very far away. Either the males and other lions of the pride were on their way already or one of the females would soon go off to fetch them. In an hour there could be a dozen lions eating at our pond. Not only that, but there would be hyenas standing just away, vultures circling above, and who knew what else. We wouldn’t be able to go anywhere near our pond for a day.

  Jules had come out of the house and was standing close behind me when I turned around. He had his rifle with him, slung over a shoulder of his white terry-cloth robe, and his hair was wet.

  “Oh shit,” he said, “god damn it, fucking A,” but he kept his rifle low. He had been in Africa long enough to know it was too late to do anything but swear.

  It was right about then, with Jules’s terry-cloth robe luminous in the moonlight, that we all seemed to get the idea of retreating at the same time. A lioness might be single-minded when stalking an elephant calf, but now there were three of them, not counting the cub, and one of them was beginning to look around. The Maasai started shouting again, an excited, high-up-in-the-throat chatter that sounded like a grazing-rights argument just before the spears come out, and Kamau took a step toward Jules, standing on the side of him where the rifle was still slung. And just at that instant the other elephants appeared across the pond. There had been a terrific amount of noise connected with the kill, so I wasn’t surprised that we hadn’t heard them. They came out of the dark like grey mountains out of a fog. There were two full-grown females, the one in the lead no doubt the baby calf’s mother, and since they weren’t wasting any time, the lions, though they roared like crazy for a brief second or two, turned toward us to go hide until things calmed down.

  We had stood stupidly watching for so long that by then there wasn’t a hell of a lot we could do. We were fifty yards from our house and, though I know I said I thought we’d be fine before, we had displayed a foolishness, an indifference to danger, not uncommon among people who have lived here for a long time. Still, the lions were running away from the elephants, not attacking us, so I thought that if we crowded together and stood still they might pass on by. Our house was off to the side of the way they wanted to go, and once the lions were past us, I believed, we could quickly run inside. The elephants would then either chase the lions beyond the workers’ dormitory and into the coffee behind, or stop to mourn the calf. Either way they’d make a great mess of things, but right then that seemed like a fair exchange all around.

  The two Maasai fell into a kind of kneeling crouch, their spears pointed up at forty-five-degree angles from the ground. This was a common warrior position, and was based on the perilous theory that an attacking lion would impale itself on the end of the spear before it actually got to the Maasai. I looked at their faces and they were calm, so since Kamau had immediately got down behind one of the Maasai, I got down behind the other. That left only Jules in a fully upright position, standing there shining in his terry-cloth robe. Jules took his rifle off his shoulder at about the time the first of the lions got near. She was still at least twenty feet away but she wasn’t passing by fast enough. The elephants had stopped at the carcass of the calf, and the lions, who were still looking back, stopped too.

  Because Jules was terrified, he wasn’t very quick with his gun, even though the lead lioness was undecided about what to do next and thus had given him time. She first took a step toward the coffee, then turned back toward the elephants again and then turned to look at Jules. The Maasai and Kamau and I had pivoted in the lion’s direction each time she moved. We were like human tank turrets, so she finally decided to run past us on Jules’s side. Jules got his rifle up but the lioness was there instantly. She ran at him hard, then fell back suddenly and rose up above him, dancing in the dirt like a fish on a line, and swatting at Jules with the wide-open claw of what I thought of as her right hand. She immediately knocked the rifle away, into the dirt a few yards from Kamau and me, and then she backed up and began turning in circles, furious and completely unsure of what to do. The other two lions and the cub were gone now, so we all stood up, moving, again, toward the house, the Maasai spears pricking into the night air behind us. And I only realised that something was seriously wrong when Jules didn’t come along. He had slumped to the ground and the white of his robe, from his shoulder to the cuff of his left arm, was turning slowly and deeply dark. I thought the lion had only knocked the rifle away, but now I imagined a shredded arm, though the terry-cloth didn’t seem torn at all. “Julius!” I called. “Oh Christ, get up and come over here! Let’s take care of it inside!”

  The Maasai warriors took a couple of steps back toward Jules, and Kamau went over and quickly got the rifle. The lion was roaring again, still unsure, but when Kamau fired the gun, Jules leapt off the ground, the lion disappeared, and so did the elephants, all of them running back around the pond. For a moment I thought that was the end of it but it was not. We all soon realised that Kamau’s bullet, while it had successfully scared the animals away, had entered my husband’s back just to the side
of his right shoulder blade, first sending him after the animals, then plunging him into the dried-out dirt a half dozen yards from where I stood. His robe rode up above his waist in an undignified way, and the moonlight bathed his buttocks and legs and the horrible, filthy ground.

  As soon as the shot was fired Kamau dropped the rifle and ran. One of the Maasai and I got to Jules at the same time, while the other hurried back toward the house, calling out for anyone.

  I was afraid to turn Jules over or even to touch his arm, but when we got to him he let us know he was alive, at least, by trumpeting out his own harrowing sound. I grabbed the spear from the Maasai and used its sharp tip to tear the cloth at the bottom of Jules’s robe. And once I had it started the Maasai and I pulled the robe apart quickly, making long thick strips of bandage.

  “Hold on, Julius!” I said. “We’ll just stop this bleeding and then I’ll get on the radio. Looks like you’ll be going back into Nairobi a day ahead of time.”

  I tried to keep calmness and order in my voice, but when we finally did turn Jules so that we could wrap the strips of bandage around his arm, calmness and order went away. What I supposed to be Jules’s left bicep was flapping free of his bone, and though there had been a good deal of blood on the robe, the worst thing was that the bicep appeared to be bloodless now, like a piece of thick shoe leather or the lolling tongue of a dead cow. I could see the plain white expanse of my husband’s humerus behind his bicep, desolate-looking and thin, like the handle of an unpainted hoe.