Ahmed's Revenge (7 page)

God, I thought, would I never get away from this place? If Jules were with us he'd have lost his mind, but since we could hear my father speaking in there, and we couldn't understand what he said, there was nothing to do but go in and get him one more time.

“Ah, but this is terrible,” Detective Mubia said when we squeezed through the door. “No one has cared for this place. This is the church of our dear Lord, Jesus Christ, a home for those who worship in His name. Let's clean it up.”

I had gotten the idea earlier that Detective Mubia was a religious man, and he proved it now not only by what he said, but by furiously bending down and picking papers up off the floor. “Are there no people living near here?” he asked. “Surely someone should have seen to the maintenance of this place.”

I didn't know whether or not people lived nearby, but the detective's energy instantly infected my father, who started cleaning up too, snatching food wrappers from the far side of the room.

“I'll bet there are still coffee bags in the back of the Land Rover, Nora,” he said. “Run out and get a couple. This man is correct. Leaving this place filthy would be a crime!”

My first impulse was to argue again, to flat-out refuse to go, but I knew the act of arguing would take longer than just getting the bags and helping them clean up the floor. Once outside, however, I could see the Rift Valley in the afternoon sun, with the road leading into it, cutting its vast flatness in half. The day's quota of lorries seemed to have passed by, so it was quiet out there. A black-and-white colobus monkey, rare in these parts, played in the eucalyptus tree, but otherwise I was alone.

In the back of the Land Rover I found burlap bags all right, old ones with Jules's original slogan on their sides. These bags were made in England and had been a gift from my father several years before, at Christmas, I think, 1969.

Because the church was tiny, it was pretty clean by the time I went back inside. The debris was in a neat pile by the door, so my father took a burlap bag and began stuffing it full, sweets wrappers and bits of rotten food and empty booze bottles disappearing from the floor.

While my father worked I decided to ask the detective once again why he had come, but when I looked at him a different question came to mind.

“Are you a believer, Detective Mubia?” I asked. “Are you a religious man?”

It was an unnecessary question, even a stupid one, given what he'd just made us do, but if he was surprised by it he didn't let it show. He just took a long second to straighten his suit and stand a little formally before he replied.

“It is better to believe and know you are mistaken than to disbelieve and know you are correct,” he said.

The detective looked pleased, though I didn't know whether it was with the job they'd done on the floor of the church or the comment he'd made. My father was standing at the top of the wooden ladder with his head in the belfry, but he came back down when I said we had to go.

It was then that I asked my original question one more time. “Why are you here, Detective? Why did you follow us all the way out from town?”

“It is embarrassing to say that I have invited myself along,” he said, “but it has become clear that I must see how things stand on your farm, and if I wait any longer, things will stand differently than they do now.”

My father had picked up the burlap bags, twisting their tops in his hands. “This is a family matter,” he said. “We don't want the police involved.”

I believed Detective Mubia would have turned around and driven back to town had I asked him to, but I held my tongue.

I liked the man and I trusted him, and I knew as well as he did that there really was something to be solved. Once Jules's funeral was over and I had endless amounts of time on my hands, I might even tell him about that night in Nairobi on Loita Street, after the French Cultural Centre film. Would it help his investigation for him to know about those torn-out tusks, ripped away like Jules's arm? Would it help me survive the weeks ahead if I told him?

Once outside the church again the detective got into his Toyota and sped on down the road. He turned toward Narok and was quickly out of sight.

And when my father asked me to let him drive the Land Rover I surprised us both by handing him the keys. We had hours to go yet before we'd reach the farm and had already taken far too long, but this was a day for contrary actions and questions I did not intend to ask. Is that what grief would do to me, I wondered, as I got into the passenger's seat on the car's left side. Would it turn me arbitrary since it couldn't make me cry?

The road was badly potholed and my father's speed didn't pay the slightest homage to it, but miraculously I slept, until the outskirts of Narok forced even my father to slow down, and a sense of safety woke me up. There were Maasai cattle on the road and dust was in my nostrils, but this strange sleep had been the best I'd had in three days. I was rested, and being near the farm again gave me my first fleeting sense that maybe, someday, I would actually be able to go on.

“This is Narok,” my father said. “I haven't been here in years.” He seemed rested too, and happy to see the dusty little town.

There were more cattle than usual, and Maasai herders were everywhere. I asked my father to pull in at a petrol station at the far end of town, across the street from the Spear Hotel, so we could fill the tank and get away from the cattle dust for a while. Detective Mubia's Toyota was already parked by a far-off pump.

“We've seen that man before,” my father said. He was pointing out through the Land Rover's front window. The car park was packed, but when I followed my father's finger I saw a tall Maasai warrior, one of the two men who had tried to hold off the lions on the night of Jules's wounds. I wanted to talk to this man, to thank him and let him know that Jules had died, but just then I realised that my father wasn't pointing at the tall Maasai but at a shorter man, at Detective Mubia, who was walking our way.

“My God, Daddy, we were with him at the church,” I said. “Don't you remember? You and that man were the clean-up crew just two short hours ago.”

Detective Mubia was at my window before I could clear my thoughts of the new extent of my father's mental chaos, and by then the Maasai warrior was gone. Even so, I would have looked for him had the detective not opened my door, helped me out, and walked me a little away.

“I have something more to tell you,” he said, “and something to give, which is in my car.”

The detective was nervous now. He kept glancing over to make sure my father wasn't following us. “It is most strange,” he said, “but the hospital personnel, the young nurse and some others, said you should have it before your husband's funeral. And the nurse said she was sorry again, she said it many times.”

My father had got out of the Land Rover and was heading toward the other side of the petrol station, where there were traders with beads and spears to sell, so I followed the detective over to his car, which was painted the same colour as his suit. The car's windows were all rolled down, but when I looked through them from the driver's side, I saw that the seats were empty, the entire car was clean. Detective Mubia took his keys out and opened the rear door. There was nothing in there either but a rectangular wooden box. I couldn't even see a tool kit, nothing to use to fix the Toyota when it broke down. “I don't understand,” I said.

Detective Mubia pointed at the box. “They insisted I bring it to you. I want you to take it out of my car, take it away now.”

I was still confused, but when I picked up the box Detective Mubia stood back and said, “Don't open it here.”

The box had Nairobi Hospital's logo on its side, and suddenly I did understand. That young nurse, the girl on whom I'd laid such blame, had sent me Jules's severed left arm, the only part of him that had died early enough for the rest of him to mourn! Good Mother of God, what a morbid remembrance! What kind of gift was this for a young nurse to insist upon?

“All right,” I said, forcing my voice to remain even. “What the hell is happening? Who would do this? What's the meaning of it? What nurse would think to send a dead man's wife his missing arm?”

The detective didn't want to answer. He searched his pockets and looked at the ground as if he had dropped something, and when I turned from him, rigid of eyes and mouth, I felt the weight in the box shift, a quick imbalance that let me know the arm was loose in there, its fingers rapping on the walls.

I faced him again. “You better speak,” I said. “You better tell me now.” But Detective Mubia shook his head and said only, “I didn't want to bring it but she placed it in my car.”

I stepped away then, quick and angry. Maybe my sense of propriety was entirely gone, but didn't sending the arm have more of the feeling of a taunt than an apology? Wouldn't anyone think so? As I carried the box over to the Land Rover I felt such an alteration in the air that it was all I could do to keep from flinging the damned thing away, from smashing the box on the oily ground.

The detective had walked with me, but when I looked at him again all I could find in his face was the absolute fact that he was glad the box was gone.

I put the box in the back of the Land Rover, wedging it behind the jack and covering it with one of the remaining coffee bags. After that I called my father. And without further comment I told Detective Mubia to follow us up the Narok-Nakuru road to our turnoff and our farm. We were less than an hour away, but it seemed to me that the trip had taken days, and there'd be no time to do anything when we got there, since darkness was less than an hour away as well.

We arrived at the farm at six-thirty, with enough daylight left for us to see that the place had been ransacked, that the house and its nearby coffee fields had been torn apart, the latter by mourning elephants, maybe, but the former, without any question at all, by men. We parked in front of the workers' dormitory; those doors too were open wide, and all our farmhands were gone.

This was too much, the last straw, and though I had my father beside me, the detective in the car behind, I embarrassed and surprised myself by falling out of the Land Rover, going down on
all
fours, and crying out loud on the ground. Now I became the abject weeper that I'd wanted to be all along, a woman whose losses came to her at once, a woman whose control was gone. My husband was dead, his body given back to me in hideous parts, my farm was in ruin, my life undone. This is how I'd wanted to act in that hospital room—it was there that I wanted this torment, not now, not in front of the empty dormitory with Detective Mubia walking over from his car.

I tried getting up but could only rise far enough to place my cheek against the Land Rover. I was mortified and wretched and alone, and I would have stayed there if Detective Mubia hadn't knelt down beside me, taken hold of my hand, and helped me to stand. “You have informed me that the helicopter comes in the morning,” he said, “and without your workers we must dig this grave ourselves. Show me the spot, I will begin right now.”

Since there's a complicated mythology, a taboo of sorts, about Kenyans and graves, it was an extraordinary thing for him to have said, and it did the trick of bringing me around. “There's a place on a ridge over there,” I told him, pointing, still weeping but keeping my filthy face down. “We call it the orchard. There are shovels in a shed at the orchard's near side.”

“Do you have a generator?” the detective asked. “If you do, let's turn it on.”

Enough light had already drained out of the sky so that the generator would soon be necessary even to see the house. “I'll take care of it and then I'll come out to mark the spot,” I told him. As I spoke I could feel my voice growing stronger, an improving posture wriggling up my spine.

“There are paraffin camp lanterns in that shed too, and there is extra paraffin in a can. Fill the lanterns and light them all—while we're digging they will keep the animals away.”

Our generator was behind the workers' dormitory, so I got up and marched that way. And since my father decided to come with me, I asked him to hold the torch that I'd taken from the Land Rover's glove box. Even though it was darker behind the dormitory than it was in front, I was able to start the generator quickly, pushing all its levers into neutral in the weak torchlight.

While the generator was warming up my father swung the light, and I saw that even back behind the dormitory things had been disturbed while I was gone. Oil barrels had been wrenched out from against the building's wall, one of them turned on its side, its cap removed, and oil spilt everywhere. I pulled the hose from the turned-over barrel and placed it in one of the standing ones. If the intruders had smashed the lights, then having a working generator wouldn't mean much, so without waiting any longer I threw the switch that took it out of neutral, quickly supplying power to our house, the dormitory, and the pond. To my surprise the generator immediately bogged down with the size of its load. Not only had they not broken any lights, but every light we had was on.

I was about to tell my father that we should forget digging Jules's grave, that we should find Detective Mubia and regroup inside the house, when a sudden blast of sound filled the air, stopping me cold. It was music, I think, but it was incredibly loud. My father put his hands over his ears and shouted, but just as I reached to throw the switch, which would cut off everything and pitch us into darkness once more, the volume went down and I understood that I was hearing a Mozart piano sonata, a favourite of Jules's and mine and something from our record collection inside.

I was once again about to cast us into darkness, very worried now and sure that there were people in my house, when the music stopped and a human voice took its place.