Ahmed's Revenge (6 page)

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 going, 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.

There was a vacant little church, the smallest I'd ever seen, sitting off the escarpment road, a mile or so past the area where all those baboons usually hang around and at just the point where the road finally turns and heads down into the Rift Valley proper. When my father saw the church he spoke for the first time, asking me to pull over. “For just one moment, Nora,” he said, “so I can say a prayer. I haven't been here in years.”

The church had been built in the 1940s by Italian prisoners of war, but it was empty now, broken down and dirty, a bad place to pray. Since it had been an occasional practice of Jules's and mine to rest here on our trips to town, however, I did what my father asked, stopping the Land Rover at the spot where Jules used to park our lorry, under the shade of a giant eucalyptus tree at the foot of the church's cracked front walk. The whole building was in utter disrepair, even the door didn't close properly anymore, and the floor of the church's only room was littered with rubbish.

“We came here sometimes when you were a child,” said my dad. “Do you remember? The place was clean then. Your mother thought it was bad luck to pass by without stopping.”

We were inside the church, but everything felt damp. I remembered those times, but I wanted to leave again quickly, so I only said, “It's horrible now. Those days are over, Daddy. Mother's dead. The Italian prisoners would be appalled.”

The curtness in my voice surprised me, even though anger had been my accomplice for three days now, but all my father did was push a bit of the debris around with the toe of his shoe. It wasn't the church's condition that occupied his mind, nor was he thinking of my mother. He wanted to say something else and his expression was pained. I tried to be patient, waiting for him to remember and speak, but he finally knelt at the ramshackle altar instead. And when he got up again he ushered me back outside and found a shady place for us to sit down.

“I would like to talk to you for just a moment,” he finally said. “I have something unpleasant to discuss.”

Ever since Jules's death, ever since the night of his wounding on the farm, I had been in a state of numb exhaustion, unable to sleep or to act in any animated way, and unable, as yet, to properly find that fog again and mourn. What I had been able to do, however, was focus on the tasks before me one at a time, to do what had to be done to clean up Jules's affairs and get him buried, and I didn't want that focus interrupted by my father's unhinged mind.

“I don't want to hear it, Daddy,” I said. “I can't concentrate now.” But my father had his right hand in the air, and he pushed my protest away.

“Julius telephoned me late last week,” he said. “He called last Saturday night.”

I admit I had expected platitudes, something about life being hard or learning to cope, but what was this? He was right, he did have something unpleasant to say, and it was that his senility had grown tricky and bold since last I'd met him.

“That's not possible,” I said stiffly. “Julius was injured on Sunday. The Saturday night a week before that we went to bed early, I remember it because the harvest was still going on.”

I didn't remember it because of the harvest but because it was the last time Jules and I had made love, Saturday night a week ago, at around nine P.M.

“His call came very late,” said my father, “maybe three o'clock in the morning. He woke me up.”

“He was asleep at three A.M.,” I said. “We were both exhausted from our work. You know how it is when a harvest is not yet done.”

“He called me, Nora,” said my dad.

The place he had chosen to sit down wasn't peaceful. We were only a few feet off the road and a big lorry had just passed by fast, blowing dust around. These lorries always seemed to come in bunches, and because I didn't want to get behind too many of them I told him we should go. “Let's talk while we're driving,” I said. “Let's hurry up.”

I stood and reached back down to help my dad, but he wouldn't take my hand. “Never mind the traffic,” he said. “I'm telling you that your husband was in serious trouble when he died. He was concerned for his safety and he was worried about yours as well. He called because he wanted me to come down and help straighten things out.”

“He did not,” I said. “What are you talking about, Dad? Try to think clearly. I don't have time for this nonsense right now.”

I was suddenly furious and my father knew it, but I let my words stand, only adding more softly, “I have to bury Julius tomorrow, you know. Can't it wait until after that?”

When my father didn't answer I sat back down.

“I was the Minister of Wildlife for many years,” he said. “Before independence most of these decisions fell to me.”

I put my face in my hands but then looked up again quickly, deciding to try to talk him around. “Now you're not making sense,” I said. “What does that have to do with anything that's going on now? Did Julius call you up to remind you of what you had once been? If he called you, Daddy, tell me why. Otherwise let's go.”

Even though I had braced myself against it before his arrival, what I'd wanted from my father was comfort and love, the safe harbour of his living breath and arms. I didn't want all this nonsense about what he had once been and I did not, right then, want any bad talk about Jules. Nevertheless I found myself remembering that house on Loita Street and asking one more time, “Did Julius call you because he was in trouble, or are you mistaking the time of the call? Perhaps it was some other Saturday night, some past time when we both telephoned just to say hello.”

“Before that night I had never talked to Julius on the telephone,” my father said.

It was very hard to make international calls from the farm, and, indeed, I myself couldn't remember ever having called my father from there. We used to call once a month or so, but we always used the telephone at my father's own house, in town.

“If he called you on Saturday night I would have heard him,” I said. “Using our telephone is a noisy exercise. He wouldn't have got through on the first try, he would have had to wait and raise his voice.”

My father shrugged and said, “He called me and he told me that I should come.” He paused a second and then said, “I had my tickets, Nora, before poor Julius got hurt.”

I stood up again, but my father stubbornly remained on the ground. I turned and looked back down at him, and suddenly I found myself asking the strangest question I had ever asked my dad. “When mother died was there a part of you that felt glad? Did some part of you feel a certain sense of freedom, a release, maybe, in the fact that she was gone?”

“Certainly not!” my father said. “I cried like a baby when your mother died. I felt horrible, worse than you do now.”

“When Julius died there was something in me that felt relieved,” I said. “I'm ashamed to say it, but some small part of me grew lighter when I was with him in that hospital room. Maybe it was a sense of renewed possibility, I don't know, but it was a thought I'd had before. Listen, Daddy, in a way it was as if I was finally out from under him, as if my own real life had been on hold.”

What I said was a deeper, or at least a more private, truth than I had ever told before. It had bothered me constantly while I'd been at my father's house. I considered it shameful and disloyal. I loved Julius Grant with all of the power that was in me and I would never have thought of leaving him. Our life together had been good, better, most of the time, than good could be, but there was an undeniable moment when I was captured by the idea of life without him, and no matter what I did, I couldn't make the memory of that moment go away. Even in the hospital room, even as I stood looking at his lifeless face and waited for that horrible dark fog to come near, even then there had been a small and terrible element of relief involved.

I felt a little better for having said it out loud, but my father didn't seem to have anything more to say about the truth I'd told, and I guessed that it was because I knew he wouldn't that I'd told him. It is easier to articulate the crimes of one's heart to a man who isn't really listening most of the time and who cannot remember very well when he is.

When I tried to get him on his feet for the third time, my father was looking high up into the branches of the eucalyptus tree. He had his hands clasped around his knees and the expression on his face was not deep.

“Come on, Daddy,” I said. “It's time we got started again. There's work to do once we get to the farm and I want to have some daylight left to do it in.”

He looked at me and I could see him coming back.

“Quite right,” he muttered. “I only wanted to stop a minute. Your mother liked it here, did you know that? Did I tell you that before?”

My father stood up then and we were just walking down to the Land Rover when a dusty Toyota estate pulled in next to it. Detective Mubia was behind the wheel, the policeman from the hospital. He honked his horn and was waving at us as he got out of his car.

“Jambo Mama and Daddy!” he said. “I have come to search you out. Dr Zir told me you would be in Narok by now, but here you are, still on this escarpment road.”

I was worried by then that we'd never get to the farm, but I introduced the detective to my father anyway, using my father's title: Nathan Hennessey, Minister of Wildlife, Retired. I had been Nora Hennessey before I was Nora Grant. The sound of my father's title seemed to bring him completely around.

“How do you do?” he said. He shook the detective's hand and then he struck a pose, something I hadn't seen him do in a decade or more, not since I was a child. My father looked like Mussolini when he did that, and I turned away, glancing back at the church and remembering my mother and the Italian prisoners of war.

“I know your name very well,” the detective told him. “When I was a boy the Minister of Wildlife was often in the news.”

It seemed clear to me that if Detective Mubia hadn't seen us he would have driven all the way to the farm, and though he was the last person I would have invited to Jules's funeral, his arrival didn't make me unhappy at all. I'd been thinking about what he'd said in that hospital room, and even if he didn't have news for me, I could use his appearance to dilute the strangeness of my dad.

“What do you want, Detective?” I asked. “Has something happened that made you drive all this way?”

There was something, but I got the idea the detective didn't want to say it straight out. Instead he said, “This little church is pleasant. I have never been here before.”

My father jumped and went back over to the church's broken door. “Years ago it was delightful,” he said. “My wife…” And then he turned and stepped back inside.