Ahmed's Revenge (4 page)

In the morning I was pulled from a dream I was having by our family doctor, who had not awakened me when he'd come in sometime during the night. I was asleep on a bench outside the surgery door. I had actually been inside the surgery twice, but I hadn't gone too close to Jules, for I wasn't clean, and I was afraid to see that humerus again, evidence of a skeleton too willing to shed its encumbrance of flesh, far too willing to come all the way out.

“Nora, dear,” said Dr Zir, “the operation is finished and our man is alive!”

Dr Zir, who is Indian, has been my doctor for all of my life. He is my father's age and he was my father's neighbour and best friend until my father moved to England. He was smiling as hard as he could when he woke me up, so I took it as a sign that maybe Jules was not only alive but out of danger too.

“May I see him?” I asked.

“We'll go in together,” said Dr Zir. “We can see him if we like, but he won't be seeing us for a while. I'd say tonight or tomorrow in the A.M. He's lost a lot of blood, Nora girl, and though we've filled him up again, he won't be quite the same, I'm afraid.”

We had been walking, while he talked, down two long hallways and up some stairs, and we had come to the door of a private room.

“But he's out of danger, is he not?” I asked. “Isn't that what you said?”

“Your husband is strong,” Dr Zir told me, “a muscle man in spades, but he will need a different kind of strength when he wakes up.”

Dr Zir paused briefly but he was extremely calm. “He's lost his left arm, Nora, and they've done a complete reconstruction of his right shoulder and chest. His right arm will surely be affected somewhat in its range of motion, maybe severely, maybe not, and there will be some nerve damage. Otherwise he's as good as new.”

“Julius is left-handed,” I said.

In my mind's eye I saw Jules unslinging that rifle, and I suddenly realised that that was what I had been dreaming about. Except in my dream the rifle was a fishing pole and the lion was a mangy barracuda, or some kind of junk fish dancing on the surface of a wild and frothy sea.

Dr Zir opened the door and we went into the room. Over the course of my life I have had a couple of stays in Nairobi Hospital myself, so I knew what I would find. The room was small and square, the walls a dirty white. The bed's headboard was against the cleanest wall, and to the right of the bed were a couple of tall windows, with a view of the doctors' car park and the helicopter pad down below. There was nothing on the walls of this room and there were no chairs for guests to use.

Jules's left side was facing us, and sure enough, his arm was gone. There wasn't the merest stub. His entire upper torso was wrapped in white bandages, with tape running back and forth across his chest in Xs and Zs. I shook my head and cried a little but I could tell that Jules was breathing fine, and I had no doubt that after the first day or two he'd take the challenge of becoming right-handed more or less in stride. My husband was tough in more ways than one. I told Dr Zir he had an optimist's heart.

“He doesn't know, of course?” I said, pointing at the missing arm.

A young nurse came in just then, carrying a hard-backed chair. “He does not,” said Dr Zir, “and so we are going to station this girl here throughout the course of the day and night. That way when he wakes up he will not be alone. When he finds his body part gone, someone will be here to introduce him to the trials that lie ahead.”

“That someone should be me,” I said, but Dr Zir told me that there was no chance Jules would awaken before six o'clock and very likely not for a number of hours after that. “This girl's presence is only a precaution,” he said, “a formality, if you like.”

I let him convince me that if I came back at four I'd still have hours to wait for Jules to wake up. It was early in the morning, after all, and the doctor told me that since he was going home himself, he could drop me at my father's house, where I could sleep away my weakness, prepare myself to be strong. So I went over to the bed and bent down and gave my husband a kiss. I kissed his lips, cleaned the dried blood away, licking the length of them with my tongue. Jules could always be counted on to lick back, but alas, his lips took my licking without comment, and I was undone by that.

“All right,” I told Dr Zir, and when he offered me his arm I fell against it, coughing once from way deep down, belching in a vulgar and unseemly way.

We left the room after tucking Jules in and watching the nurse sit down, and in the hallway I had the worst premonition. Though I was filthy dirty and wearing farm clothes, for an instant I knew that if I glanced down at myself I would find that I was clean, that I was dressed formally and in black. I also knew that Dr Zir was my father beside me, walking carefully and holding me up.

When I actually looked at him, of course, it was Dr Zir that I found, and when I glanced down it was only a wrecked bush uniform that I wore. But I have wished many times since that day that I had let my premonition play, that I had tuned in to that part of me that smelled something rotten floating in the morning air. Had I done so maybe I could have saved him, that's a repeated refrain. Maybe, had I stayed in the hospital, I would have Julius Grant with me even today, and I would be telling the story of the extraordinary difficulties he overcame in order to continue his life, instead of the story that I have to tell.

But I soon forgot my premonitions, and things went just as Dr Zir said they would during the rest of that day. Once inside my father's house I felt better, and once showered and in bed, I slept exactly as if I were exhausted by work and not by worry. I slept in my parents' bed, on what had been my mother's side, in the round-walled main bedroom of the house where I grew up, and when I awoke, at about two that afternoon, I looked out that bedroom window at the gladiolus and the bougainvillea, and at the avocado tree where, as a child, I had hidden to spy on my parents one time, watching while they made love.

At about two-thirty I called the hospital and was told that Jules was still out cold. There was no telephone in Jules's room, but I had the ward desk girl summon the nurse who was sitting with him, and she told me quite clearly that Jules had not yet shown any sign of waking. “I think six,” she said. “If you get here by six you can watch him open his eyes.”

If I have never had any regrets about purchasing the coffee farm, about moving into the deep country and working like mad every day of my life, it was Julius Grant who kept those regrets I've never had at bay. I would not have done such a thing on my own or with any of the men I had known before meeting Jules in London and bringing him home. What I'm saying is that before meeting Jules I was a city girl who thought a lot about her fingernails. I had a job at a local university and I had my chums and my rounds of restaurants and art exhibits, of dinner parties and the theatre and film. I had my own flat and my father's wonderful house to escape into whenever I liked. It was a romantic and a privileged life, living in Nairobi that way, going to London sometimes to see my dad. It had been, as a matter of fact, a great life, if a little empty on the inside, and it came very clearly back to me as I bathed again and dressed in clean clothing and looked out my father's bedroom window one more time, past the avocado tree and over the edge of the lush little valley that his property contained. Standing there, I could remember my past life perfectly, and I could, of course, remember the work of the farm, but I couldn't for a second imagine what kind of life I would lead from that day on. Jules couldn't farm, could he, with his left arm missing and his chest muscles torn away? Would we therefore become city people, would I become a city girl again, speaking city nonsense and driving Julius Grant around?

My father had an old Land Rover, a 1961, and I was pleased to find that it started up quickly, though I hadn't done my job of coming to start it for a month or so. I asked the security guard, who, except for the housekeeper, was the only remaining member of my father's household staff, to open the gate, and I had driven out onto Lower Kabete Road when I saw Dr Zir standing in front of his own gate and waving, as if he had been waiting for me to come.

“I've just been on the horn with the hospital,” he said. “What good news I've got—Julius Grant is sitting up in bed. His eyes are open and they say he's looking around.”

I'd been on the telephone with the hospital myself not half an hour before, and I was surprised. “The nurse told me six,” I said.

I did not feel happy, as the doctor clearly expected I would. I was angry with that nurse. I was to be there by six, I was to see him open his eyes. That's what she had said, and I had banked on it, letting it order my rest and my day. Because I loved my husband, and because any word of progress should have been lovely to hear, however, I looked at the doctor and smiled. I listened while he talked about how depressed Jules was likely to be, about the patience I would have to find in order to deal with his moods and help him with the rehabilitation of his remaining arm. But all the time I was thinking of that nurse with fury, just as Jules had thought of Kamau.

The traffic was light and we got as far as Haile Selassie Avenue without having to stop at all, but I was still absurdly angry, driving as if the Land Rover's steering wheel were the young girl's throat. When we arrived at the hospital proper, however, I quite suddenly let all that go. In the car park my hands fell loosely away from the wheel and the image of the nurse was replaced by one of Julius Grant sitting up, wide awake. And I made Dr Zir jump when I jerked around, fiercely staring into the back seat of the car.

I have been told many times over the years that people deal with grief in all sorts of ways, and I think it's true. Some feel it quickly, getting right to the point, whereas others have to dig for it, ferreting around. I think I fell somewhere in between. I had been tough and pragmatic all during the emergencies of the day before and I had got the job done, but now, after resting a little at my father's house, now that it appeared that Jules would live, I was realising the scope of what had happened and was having trouble getting out of the bloody car. First I'd been obsessed and raging at that unfortunate girl. Then I'd felt sure that Julius was in the Land Rover behind me, leering at me, laughing at the joke he had played.

Dr Zir came around and opened my door. He pulled me out and led me into the hospital and up the stairs to Jules's wing. The young nurse was actually the first person we saw as we turned down the hall, and she was smiling so sweetly that all I could do was smile back. When she opened her mouth, however, it was as if she knew what I had been thinking in the car. “He hasn't spoken,” she assured me. “I think he's waiting for you to do that.”

Dr Zir went to get Jules's chart and the nurse and I walked over to stand outside his room. The door was closed and its paint had peeled so much that the natural wood could be seen here and there. Jules was in Room 7, but the brass number was attached to the door by a single remaining nail and had swung around so that it looked like an italicised capital L.

When Dr Zir got back the young nurse opened the door. Jules wasn't sitting up but was lying down flat, and when I saw him my anger immediately returned.

“Who put him down again?” I demanded. “Does he get up and down by himself already, can he move around?”

Someone had opened the window, which was the kind that swung out and away from the building like a cupboard door. I went over to close it and found a pillow from Jules's bed on a wide ledge that ran along the building's side. Immediately I imagined Jules, frustrated and alone, discovering his missing left arm. I imagined him taking the pillow in his sore right hand and throwing it. The window was only about three feet from the bed, but it wasn't such a bad throw, considering we didn't know whether or not he'd be able to use the arm at all, and somewhere in my mind I understood that this, at least, was a good sign.

I was only at the window for a second, but when I turned back toward the bed the nurse was gone and Dr Zir was facing me, an odd expression on his face.

“Something strange has happened here,” he said. “This is unforeseen.”

I was on Jules's good side, the side with an arm to teach, so I went over and took his hand, ready to shake him gently awake, and resigning myself to be calm. Jules's hand was not exactly cold, but it was cooling, like an ember pulled from a long dying fire. I had been avoiding his face, but when I looked at it then, it seemed at first to be awake. His eyes were open and staring, and his mouth was open too, as if he were about to say something important, or to commit something I had told him to memory before going on.

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.