Ahmed's Revenge (26 page)

“If you let us go, we will all look for soft ground. No more talk,” I said. “We'll find what you want and then you can take it away. I promise I won't interfere. I resign from my position as your opponent. I declare that I have lost.”

Mr Smith came up to me, arms above his head. I thought he would slap me out of my reasonable pose, but just then thick smoke sprang up from the backs of Detective Mubia's legs. The two men holding him had acted on Mr Smith's anger, not his words, and pushed the detective right up next to the fire.

I knew I couldn't speak again, that whatever happened next would be Mr Smith's call. My eyes were on the detective and behind him I saw Ralph and the others, frozen in this moment too, and I could also see, as clearly as if he were there, my own young father's arms raised. His image had replaced Mr Smith's above me and he was about to strike me down.

Detective Mubia didn't scream, even when his smoking trouser legs burst into flame. He would have died without speaking, I was sure, but Mr Smith told his men to let him go. As soon as his hands were free the detective leapt away, unbuckled his belt, and let his burning trousers fall to the ground. Ralph ran over to swat the flames. Smoke was everywhere, and the detective's thin legs were covered with white blisters.

In the first-aid kit there was burn cream, but when I made a move for it, Mr Smith stopped me. “No,” he said. His calm voice was back, but when he took hold of my wrist and told me to stand, that image of my father returned, arms still raised high. I was a little girl and watching now, no longer the victim of his blows. This was what I had almost seen, almost allowed myself to remember, a few days earlier, when leaving Mr Smith's father, when going down the stairs of that nightclub.

“We were in a hallway,” I said. “We were not at your father's place at all.”

For a second Mr Smith didn't know what I was talking about but then he did, and as he let go of my wrists, the image of my father went out of my mind.

“Yes,” he said, “that's right.”

Mr Smith was staring at me intently, and I believed I could see a less hostile expression in his eyes, a human element slowly appearing. Dear God, I remembered it now, how could I ever have forgotten? There had been a terrible argument, my father and Mr Smith's father yelling and standing near the top of a flight of stairs. I could see the bannister along the landing, with its thickly painted yellow rungs, and I could see the triangular shadows formed by a partially opened door at the bottom of the stairs.

“We were in that building on Market Street, outside of my father's office,” I said. “Isn't that right?”

“It was 1956,” whispered Mr Smith. “I was just a child.”

I could see it all. Mr N'chele had come to complain about my father's recently published book,
Elephants of Tsavo and Other Lands
, about my father's contention that all of the poachers in Kenya were Kikuyu. Mr N'chele called the book offensive and stupid and wrong—I could hear the words colliding in my head—and my father went berserk. He stopped shouting and raised his hand like an angry god and slapped Mr N'chele hard across the face, knocking him halfway down the stairs. I remember trying to believe only that Mr N'chele was doing cart wheels, but in my sudden flash of memory I saw the son now too, skirting around my father and flying down the stairs. He took my father's book and tried to tear it, screaming at us as he did so.

As I looked at him I understood that Mr Smith was seeing everything I was, but from a vastly different point of view. I had suppressed the incident, I'm ashamed to say, while he had relived it countless times, screaming at us, and plotting, through all these many years.

The others seemed frozen in various poses, a catatonic and surreal array. Ralph had somehow got the burn salve from the first-aid kit; he had it in his hands, and was crouched with everyone else, down around the detective, all of them looking at Mr Smith and me. Mr Smith's main henchman still had his
panga
out and was standing over them all, lips wet, arms waiting for the order to slice Detective Mubia's life away. I think it would have happened if I hadn't remembered that scene so well, but now Mr Smith's anger was deflated, and when he told them to, his men left the detective alone. They took up their shovels and began poking haphazardly, walking about again, looking for soft ground.

How long would I act the emissary, the fulfiller of my husband's last wish, the settler of scores, in the face of what I'd just remembered but should not have allowed myself to forget since the day it occurred? Could I not end it now, as I'd said I would before, by giving this hopeless man whatever he was trying to find? He hadn't intended to kill my husband but to exact revenge upon my dad. My husband's involvement had come through an invitation from his father-in-law, that was all, his death from the accidental configurations of a vile and fateful day. In modern parlance, in the West, at least, Mr Smith was a victim too, scorched by a childhood gone wrong.

The ground was softest where Jules was buried, and when the men got near that spot, a dozen feet to the east of the fire, I had to interrupt my newfound notions, keep the conciliatory thoughts I was having at bay. They had started digging in the hole I'd dug for Jules's arm, but they were quickly moving toward Jules himself, and that spot was off-limits. No matter what the past had done to Mr Smith or me, the rules of our engagement would have to allow that this one small rectangle be out of bounds.

“My husband's buried there. His bones aren't ivory,” I warned, “and the expression on his face will frighten everyone.”

I was sure those words would stop him, and if they had, I would have given everything up, I swear it, and kept my promise by finally telling him what he wanted to know. But in the short few seconds that my thoughts had run his way, Mr Smith's face had grown stony once more, that human element I had seen reburied under his own soft ground. He looked at me and laughed and told his men to dig where I had just said they should not.

My father did a horrible thing, I knew it now. Not only had he slapped a man down a flight of stairs in front of his child, but he had lived and worked dishonourably during his whole career. Though he'd been a good father in many ways, he had been a bad public man, neither ministering to the country's wildlife well nor calming the awful wild life within him. I knew it was true, but I also knew, from his wicked face and his laugh just now, that Mr Smith was a worse man than my dad. Detective Mubia had been right in calling him evil, for where my father was weak and arrogant, a racialist bully no doubt, Mr Smith was a man who had allowed the gift of perfect outrage to turn him perfectly wrong.

But whatever I thought, whatever knowledge I had gained, I knew also that if I didn't stop it, this horrible cycle would never end. Jules had wanted to get even with Mr Smith because Mr Smith had tricked him, and Mr Smith had tricked him in order to get even with my father. Jules was dead, and my dad was unreachable, though he was alive. It was in my power to end it, and I wanted to do it now, but Mr Smith wasn't letting me. In fact he was making me want to seek my own revenge, by daring to dig up my husband's grave, by never letting up, by going way too far.

“Very well,” I finally said. “I didn't think I'd be seeing him again so soon.” I stepped back over by the others, over by the bluff that led down to the valley below. Detective Mubia lay muttering, mad as Macbeth, on the troubled ground.

Since Mr Smith wasn't listening, I guess I hoped my words would stop his men, but these poachers, these grave robbers or whatever they should be called by now, didn't seem to have any idea that what they'd find at the end of their digging was a wooden box with my husband inside. They dug him up quickly, and before long we could hear the first taps on the top of the coffin.

“That's Julius Grant,” I said. “I hope he doesn't tap back.”

Maybe Mr Smith truly thought that the box contained some of his missing contraband. When his men pulled it out of its hole, however, he didn't suggest that they take the lid off.

“We can't dig everywhere,” he said. “You have a big farm. And what I have here is your husband, you say?”

“It's his body, anyway,” I whispered. “Shall I open it for you? Shall I show you the face of the man who has suffered most?”

Mr Smith looked at me for a long time but finally said, “No, we have just agreed that your farm is large. I will keep this box and let you find my property alone.”

After that he spoke Kikuyu, but I knew he was telling his men to carry Jules's coffin away.

“We have our own transport down the road,” he said. “You will find your lorry parked there. I suggest you use it to bring my goods back to town.”

Dorothea tried to protest, but the rest of us just stood there speechless as we watched Jules's coffin moving on the shoulders of the rotten pallbearers.

“By the week's end,” Mr Smith said.

Five of the poachers got onto the back of the lorry with the coffin and the sixth man got into the cab. Mr Smith was about to join him, my automatic pistol still tucked in his belt, when he paused for a second, staring over at us. He told two of the men to pick up Detective Mubia, to put the poor detective in the back of the lorry as well.

“You will have enough to do,” he said. “Let me take care of your garbage. I will dump it in town.”

When the engine started and the lorry began to move away, John took a couple of steps, but Dorothea got hold of his shirt, keeping him back with her one good arm.

“Let's go inside,” I said. “It's over now. We can wash up. We can tend to Dorothea's arm and take a look at Michael's, too.”

Michael had forgotten the cigarette burn but my comment made him look at it and say, “That poor charred man.”

When we got inside the house Ralph went straight to the radio in Jules's office. He wanted to call the police station in Narok, but I told him not to. Dorothea was sitting on my living-room couch and Michael was next to her with the first-aid kit in his hand. John was pacing the porch, looking off toward the pond. When Ralph came out of the office, he called John back inside. “You will get a full refund,” he told them all. “And my services for as long as you are here. Am I correct in assuming that you want to go back to Nairobi tonight?”

Dorothea's arm was sore, but it wasn't seriously injured after all, and Michael said he hadn't come to Africa merely to turn around and go home. John said what he really wanted to do was get a gun and follow the lorry down the road. I tried to give a speech then, to tell them how terrible I felt about everything, about Michael's burn and Dorothea's arm, about ruining their holiday and almost getting them killed. As I stood there watching them reinvest themselves, however, regaining a part of their original spirit, I regained some of my own original spirit as well. I, too, wanted to get a gun. I, too, would follow my lorry down the road. “God damn you, Mr Smith,” I said. “God damn you to hell.” And it was only when I glanced at the others that I realised that for once at least I hadn't spoken out loud.

Ralph's van had an opening in the roof for the easy viewing of animals, and Dorothea and John were already standing in it later that day, when I went outside to say good-bye.

“Honk if you see my lorry,” I told Ralph.

They left quickly—John and Dorothea sat down almost immediately and the top closed. I listened to the departing van and waited for the sound of its horn. Dust had risen up around the pond and then settled, and when the noise of their motor disappeared, the farm was quiet and I was alone.

I was exhausted and filthy and worried about what Detective Mubia's fate might be, so it surprised me greatly to notice that it felt good to be by myself again. It was the end of labour. It felt something like it did when the harvest was done and the workers were paid, something like it did when Julius Grant had found some excuse and gone, one more time, taking the lorry to town.

I was inside my house for what seemed a long time before I heard Ralph's horn telling me that there was some kind of honour among thieves, that Mr Smith had really left my farm lorry where he said he would. I cleared the table and washed and put away the cups and plates, and then I started the generator and hoovered everywhere throughout the house, pulling a lost pair of Jules's socks from behind the sofa in our office and finding a favourite old jumper of his stuffed between the mattress and box springs of the bed in our room. I started out slowly, since I intended to do only a light cleaning, but soon I altered my intentions, going several times to the storage shed for mops and buckets and a stiff-bristled brush. I moved the furniture from the living room to the verandah and when the floor was washed and shining I moved everything back inside again.

When our bedroom was as clean as the room in the front I took two suitcases from the cupboard in the spare room and packed Jules's clothing into them, leaving only his recently found jumper on the top of the bed. I locked the suitcases, carried them out to the dormitory, and threw them into one of the empty rooms. After that I took the occasional chairs from my verandah and scrubbed the whitewashed boards. I refilled my bucket and washed all of the windows of my house, both inside and out, noticing as I did so that the sun was going, that most of the day was gone.

After everything but my body was as clean as I could make it, I got into our shower and washed myself too, and before I dried and dressed again I washed the bathroom walls and polished the fixtures until their dullness disappeared. There is such peace in mindlessness, in the unthoughtful passage of time. I had worked for half a dozen hours before the sun went down.

I was in my living room and wearing a clean pair of trousers, with Jules's old jumper on over them and that little tusk of mine in my hand. I sat down on the freshly aired sofa and put the tusk on the table and looked at it from the distance of three feet or so. Here was the crux of the matter, the symbol of all that was at hand.