Ahmed's Revenge Read online

  Dr Zir had apparently followed the young nurse out of the room, for when I said, “Look how bright his eyes are,” there was no one there to reply. The only light in Jules’s room was in the centre of the ceiling, and it was reflected in his eyes, making them look glassy and slightly teared. I remember thinking that they were the eyes of a bad actor, someone pretending emotion when none was truly there.

  I was aware of small details and was in clear and sober control of myself as I watched my dead husband lying there. I felt a certain tenderness toward him, and a great desire to stay nearby, to prevent anyone else from getting near. There was something huge and dark coming into my consciousness too, like the bank of fog through which the Titanic must have sailed, or the darkness that had hidden those two grieving elephants so well, but as soon as I became aware of it I chased it away. I would, after all, be one of the slow ones, not plunging into misery and not in the middle, either, as I had thought before. I would step into grief little by little, I would take forever, like a bather at the edge of a cold sea.

  Dr Zir was back with a whole lot of people who rushed into the room pulling a cart. The young nurse took me out of the way, and the other doctors, if that’s what they were, stuck needles in Jules and then tried to shock him back to life by pounding on his chest with their hands and arms.

  “I was at his bedside always,” cried the nurse. “I left only when I saw you out the window, coming from the car park below.”

  She gestured toward the open window and then toward the chair where she’d sat, a chair that now contained Dr Zir, who was nearly as hollow-faced as Jules and was trying to catch his breath.

  “He was sitting up tall!” the nurse said. “He wasn’t happy but his eyes were open and he was calm!”

  I didn’t want to deal with such specifics, I didn’t care about this girl’s defence, but if she’d left the room only when she said she did, then even if Jules’s heart had given out on him, as these furiously working people all seemed to think, he would have died sitting up, his head slumped forward on his chest.

  “Stop talking!” I suddenly shouted. “Leave it alone!”

  Poor Dr Zir was still sitting, teary-eyed and stunned, in the nurse’s chair, and the nurse was crying, so when one of the other doctors pulled Jules’s sheet up, covering his hollow face and eyes, I tried to cry too. I turned back toward the window and tried to enter that horrible darkness that I’d felt before. I would ride the Titanic or I would sink it with my iceberg heart. But search as I might, I couldn’t even find the fog.

  “Please,” I finally said, “Dr Zir, take these people out of here, let me have a moment alone.”

  This somehow made the doctor jump, as if he should have thought of it himself, and in an instant everyone was gone.

  I sat down on the edge of Jules’s bed and pulled the sheet back from his face again. He had been staring up into whiteness, and I was irritated by that. Now was the time of Jules’s greatest introspection, yet no one else had thought to make it easy for him by closing his eyes.

  But though Jules’s eyes closed easily, there was nothing I could do about his mouth. It was locked open, giving him a stupid, aged look. His skin was already waxy, already a lot cooler than it had been before. I could find the softness of him only in his hair, which I touched lightly, as I would have if he were a child and I were pushing it out of the way of his eyes.

  I was alone with my dead husband in his hospital room, and what I wanted most to do was lock the door. I could feel that fog again, suddenly it was back, a great brooding mass of it, nudging up against the window, but I didn’t want to face it with the door unlocked, and there was no lock on the door. For a moment I considered pulling the nurse’s chair over and wedging it in under the knob, but all I did was stand and turn in circles in the centre of the room, staring up at the light.

  The sheet was bunched under Jules’s chin, so I went back over and pulled it up until only his hair was visible. After that I touched the hair again, drawing it out to its full length. I could see where his natural part was and I tried to arrange the hair so that the part was clean and sharp across his head, a straight little river with a dense forest on either side, like a tributary of the Zambezi or the Amazon.

  “Hello, Julius Grant, are you there at all?” I peered at that hair as if I were a god watching a landscape through the clouds. Then I stood and went around to the other side of the room and pulled the nurse’s chair closer to the bed and sat down.

  “This is a vigil,” I said. I think, as on the night before, I intended my words to sound only within my head, but they must have come out loud, for immediately the door opened and Dr Zir came in.

  “Did you call, Nora?” he asked. “Did you want me with you, dear?”

  The doctor came closer and behind him an empty stretcher nosed its way into the room.

  “We should take him downstairs and find out what went wrong,” said Dr Zir. “Do you want us to, or do you need more time?”

  I looked up at him but I couldn’t think of how to answer such a question, and I guess the doctor thought my silence meant he could let the attendants come all the way inside.

  “Where will they take him?” I wanted to know.

  The nurse had come back and had placed herself between me and the bed, so I couldn’t see what was going on. And I guess I was finally in the outskirts of that fog, for I couldn’t seem to concentrate anymore, could not decide to protest or to leave the room, to shout or to cry or to fall down.

  “Nora,” said Dr Zir, “the hospital staff has reported Julius’s death to a policeman who incorporates the hospital in his round. Do you mind if that policeman steps inside, asks you a question or two?”

  When the nurse moved out of the way I could see that the attendants had not yet done anything at all. They’d put the stretcher on the far side of Jules’s bed, between the bed and the window, but they were waiting for a signal from Dr Zir, and Dr Zir was waiting for me to say it was okay for a policeman to come into the room.

  “What does the policeman want?” I asked. “Have we broken any laws?”

  “It is procedure,” said Dr Zir. “Because his death was unforeseen.” He paused a second and then added, “Besides that, he was on hand.”

  There was a man at the door, half his body bending through it, and when I let myself notice him, he came all the way inside.

  “Good afternoon, dear Mama,” he said. “How are you today?” He stood stiffly and then he bowed, as if he realised the impropriety of his words and wanted to take the last of them away.

  “This is Detective Mubia,” Dr Zir softly said. “We all know him here. He is a very nice man.”

  “May God bless you and keep you,” said the detective. “May the angels loudly sing.”

  He was wearing a reddish corduroy suit, threadbare, with a white shirt and tie. He was a small man. He looked to be about my age but he had a severe face, a face chiselled or sculpted, perhaps by the awful things he had seen. He stepped past Dr Zir and stood where the nurse had been, right between Jules and me. I didn’t want the attendants to move my husband when I couldn’t see.

  “If you please,” said the detective, “tell me the particulars of your husband’s demise.”

  “He was shot,” I said, “and a lion tore his arm.”

  “Quite so, but I am referring to the particulars here at the hospital,” he said, “the particulars of the last hour or so, from when you returned here until just now.”

  “We’ve only been here a few minutes,” I told him. “The nurse said he was awake and sitting up.” My answers were clear, my voice not unhinged at all. I wanted to wail now, I wanted to fall onto the floor and moan, but I just sat there like an expert witness, calmly giving the details.

  The nurse spoke next, saying once again that Jules was alive only a minute or two before Dr Zir and I arrived. She swore that she had not left his side until she saw us get out of my father’s Land Rover down in the car park. She was still crying. Someone might have thou
ght it was her husband who’d died, the way she carried on.

  “The window was open,” I said. “Julius threw a pillow out and it landed on the ledge.” I still somehow had the pillow in my hands, so I lifted it up for Detective Mubia to see.

  “How do you know he threw this pillow?” the detective asked, turning away from the nurse and back to me. “If you had just come into the room, how do you know what propelled this pillow outside?”

  I shrugged. “He was alone,” I said. “How else could it have got there?”

  Detective Mubia took the pillow out of my hands. Turning with it he lightly pulled the sheet away from Jules’s face again. He let the pillow rest on the edge of the bed and bent to look into Jules’s mouth and nose. Finally I had had enough.

  “Hold on!” I protested. “Leave him alone.”

  What a profound infringement this seemed to be! I wanted to hurt the man, to push my fingernails into the flesh at his throat, but when I got out of the chair he stood up straight immediately.

  “I know it is difficult,” he said, “but who would want to see your husband dead?”

  Dr Zir stepped forward then, finally seeing the outrage in everything that was going on, but even to the doctor Detective Mubia held up his hand. He reached into the left pocket of his jacket and removed a key ring with no keys on it but a pair of tweezers and a pen-knife attached. He pulled the sleeves of his jacket up and very suddenly bent back over Jules, extended those tweezers into his open mouth, and, like a stage magician, quickly popped back up again.

  “I have found a feather,” Detective Mubia said. “It was stuck against the back of your husband’s throat and it came from this pillow, the one you found resting on the ledge outside.”

  He gave the tweezers with that single feather in their grasp to Dr Zir and then he picked up the pillow again, smoothing the pillow case down and running his hands across it. “Here,” he said. His hand had apparently run up against the pinprick of another feather, for he pulled one right through the pillowcase, holding it up for me to see.

  “Someone else came into this room. And that someone else left through the window, dropping the pillow on his way out.”

  The nurse put her hands to her mouth, playing her part all the way, and Dr Zir started stammering, but I pushed them both aside and followed the detective back over to the window.

  “Our someone else may have been waiting in a nearby room or he may have seen you arrive, just as the duty nurse did. He may have come into the room after she went out the door.”

  “That is not possible,” said the nurse. “I was not out of the room long enough for someone else to come inside. And when we came back, the room did not look changed at all.”

  That seemed beside the point and the detective said so. “When you came back inside you were not searching for changes in the room but for changes in the man in the bed. You saw only his death. At a time like that small changes in the room would have been invisible to anyone.”

  We all somehow looked at Jules again then, at his dead face covered and uncovered so many times. At the doctor’s bidding one of the attendants covered his face up once more, and then two of them lifted Jules off the bed, settled him on the stretcher, and rolled him quickly away. It was all too much, everything that had gone on, but though I wanted the private clarity of watching my husband go, Detective Mubia’s words were so powerful that I could concentrate only on the scene he had created in my mind, of someone stealing into the room, drowning Jules in feathers, and then quietly slipping away.

  “Do you know who our someone else might have been?” Detective Mubia softly asked when Jules was gone.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I have a thought but no good reason for having it.”

  That I would utter those words surprised me more than I can say. I hadn’t intended them, and until the words came out I didn’t have anyone in mind. But when I looked at the detective, hoping he wouldn’t press me, I saw that he seemed to understand, and instead of asking me to give him a name, he removed a wallet full of business cards from his pocket and handed one to each of us in the room. It was far too late, but now he seemed to sense the violation, to know that he had interrupted my grieving time.

  “I am sorry,” he said. “Please contact me when you are able to talk again.” Detective Mubia’s first name was Frederic, and his telephone number was all twos.

  The detective left the room, though by then I didn’t want to see him go. The nurse left after him, her calm returned, and I was alone with my neighbour and my father’s best friend, my childhood physician, who wanted so badly to console me but who couldn’t console me at all. I was consoled by the detective, not by Dr Zir—does that seem strange? I could not find comfort in sympathy, but had found slight solace by engaging myself in the problem, by following the detective to the window and by listening to what he had to say.

  As we went back down toward the car park Dr Zir tried to take my keys away, but I was too afraid of inactivity by then to allow him to drive my father’s car. As we walked I held Detective Mubia’s card in my hand, repeating to myself what the card said: Frederic Mubia 222-222, Frederic Mubia 222-222.

  It was my mantra, the focus of my entire brain, but the inclusion of his name made the mantra too long, so by the time we reached the car I had distilled it until it went like this: 222222, 222-222, 222-222. Pretty soon the numbers turned to letters, just as the one on Jules’s door had done, and as they marched across my mind the letters were all Zs, a perfect symbol for the waking sleep that is grief and sorrow and loss. Julius Grant was dead. Good-bye, Julius Grant, 222-ZZZ. The letters gave me a second semblance of order, until I had driven Dr Zir to his gate and was mercifully and horribly alone.

  4

  A Conversation By The Church

  But whether I felt grief or no grief, whether I was engaged in the mystery of my husband’s death or in the grip of unyielding sorrow, there were many things to decide concerning Julius Grant, and though Dr Zir had done the job of calling my father in London, in the end I made each decision alone. I decided against cremation, against sending his body back to Canada, where he originally came from, and in favor of burying him on a small hill overlooking the Mara plains, at a peaceful little corner spot in the orchard section of our farm.

  Dr Zir, bless his aging heart, supervised the embalming himself, very important in Kenya because inferior fluids were often used, and when my father arrived from London, Dr Zir picked him up at the airport.

  I spent the first two days after Jules’s death at my father’s house alone. I played the piano a little, repeating Detective Mubia’s telephone number over and over in my head, and I stared out at my father’s valley in a cold and cataleptic way. My father’s telephone rang often but I didn’t answer it, and when cars occasionally stopped at the gate, I watched from the window while the gateman, following my instructions, turned the cars away. The six years of our life together had been private. Jules and I had dined and played in town sometimes, but Jules had always made it clear to me that he didn’t want guests at the farm. So we had no real friends. We hadn’t really seen anybody in a good long time.

  It was on the morning of the third day that my father arrived. He was not terribly old, only seventy-two the previous autumn, but he had recently grown confused and was an unreliable witness for anything that had happened during the last three years or so. He’d had a series of mild strokes a few months before—I had been to London twice to see him—and since then, though his body wasn’t affected, he’d developed a strange quality of mind, especially if the day grew long. I worried that it would be difficult for him to make the journey to the farm, and in fact I wanted to tell him that I preferred to go alone.

  “The roads are terrible now,” I said, almost before saying hello. “Stay here, Daddy, comfort me when I need it, after I come back to town. Why make the trip for fifteen minutes of silence at the side of a lonely grave? I’m telling you, Julius wouldn’t mind at all.”

  “I’m goin
g, Nora, and I’m staying afterwards,” my father said. He had just got off an all-night flight, but when he spoke there was no confusion, and when he smiled at me and took me in his arms, the father of my youth came out for a while, emerging from the wrinkles and the sunken chest like an actor taking a bow.

  “We’ll handle it,” he said. “Put the two of us together and there’s nothing we can’t do.”

  I had planned on driving out to the farm in my father’s Land Rover later that afternoon. I wanted to stay in town only long enough to greet my dad, and have lunch with him, maybe, but then I wanted to go. Dr Zir was bringing Jules’s body out the next morning in a helicopter, so I tried a different tack, telling my father that he could more easily come then too. All he did, however, was turn me down again. He said, “I’ll ride shotgun for you, Nora. The good doctor can come with Julius in the morning alone.”

  There was a lot of work to do once I got to the farm. There was the site of Jules’s grave to prepare—I wanted to tell our crew to dig the grave deep—and a general clean-up to attend to, in order to rid the place of the havoc wreaked by those animals on that hateful night. I wanted Jules to be buried on an orderly farm, and come what may, I wanted furious work to occupy my time. That was how I would see myself through, and if my father came along he would be in the way, slowing everything down by insisting that the real wreckage of my life be examined in some immediate and impossible way. He’d be asking me every minute what I was thinking or how did I feel. I disliked such questions during the best of times, and they would be much harder on me now. But I also didn’t have the energy to argue with my dad. So since he’d just come on that overnight flight, I decided that my best hope was that he would want to sleep after eating and I could use that opportunity to write him a note and slip away.

  After lunch, however, far from wanting to sleep, my father suggested that we leave right away, before the afternoon traffic got too heavy on the escarpment road. I would drive, and he would ride quietly by my side. He would look forward to the sight of the Great Rift Valley again, but otherwise he would hold his tongue. Such was the nature of the promises he made. He didn’t promise out loud, but they were everywhere in his eyes.