Green City in the Sun (107 page)

     The tea tray was set before them on a low coffee table.
"Asante sana
, Augustus," Terry said. Then he went on. "Foreign health agencies and medical missionaries are trying to push for birth control, but African men don't go for it. So the women, if they want it, practice it on the sly. If a man discovers his wife is taking the pill or using a diaphragm, he beats her senseless, and it's his right to do so."

     Terry stamped out his cigarette and lifted a fresh smile to Deborah. "Christ! Listen to me! What sort of reunion is this? I can't tell you how good it is to see you, Deb! What's it been like, living in California?"

     She told him about her life, but only superficially.

     "This bloke you're going to marry, does he want to come and live in Kenya?"

     "He's never been here. I don't know if he would like it."

     As soon as she said it, Deborah realized something that hadn't occurred
to her before: how little Jonathan knew of Kenya.
Then how can he possibly know
me? she wondered.

     "Miriam's out at the moment, visiting her sister. But she'll be home soon. I want you to meet her."

     "And the children?"

     "They're both in school. Wait a mo," he said, and stood up. Terry took two photographs from the mantel and handed them to Deborah. "This is Richard. He's fourteen."

     "He's a handsome boy," Deborah said, gazing at a younger version of Terry.

     "And this is Lucy. She's eight."

     Deborah stared. Lucy was African.

     As if reading her thoughts, Terry sat down, lit another cigarette, and said, "Richard's mother was my first wife. We got a divorce when Richard was a baby. That was when I was just getting started in Dad's business. Anne couldn't abide my long absences out on safari. And she was jealous of my female clients. So she left me and married an exporter in Mombasa. Richard spends half the year with me, the other half with Anne."

     "And Lucy?"

     "She's my daughter by my second wife, Miriam."

     "Kikuyu?"

     Terry nodded and exhaled smoke. "In fact, it's my wife's last name that I took. Mugambi."

     Deborah set the pictures down on the table. "Why?"

     He shrugged. "For survival mostly. There's a squeeze on to get the whites out of Kenya. An awful lot of prejudice against European businesses. I won't go into the details, but I saw that it was in my best interest to hold the agency under an African name."

     "I thought all that was over with years ago."

     "Since Jomo's death, back in 1978, things haven't been too settled in Kenya. Of course, there are blokes who disagree with me. But I speak from personal experience. Take my son's education, for example."

     Before he explained further, Terry called out for Augustus and, when the man appeared, told him in Swahili to bring a bottle of wine. "Special
occasion," Terry said to Deborah with a smile. "It's Kenya papaya wine, and I doubt it holds a candle to your famous California wines, but it's the best we've got."

     "You were telling me about Richard."

     "At this moment he's at a boarding school in Naivasha. But he's fourteen, time to move up to a higher level. The hitch is, the school I want him to go to has been totally Africanized. The King George in Nairobi, remember? Now it's the Uhuru Academy. There's a new headmaster, an African who absolutely will not allow any white boys to attend. What buggers me is that's the school my father attended when he was a boy. In fact, my father was in the very first class, when the school opened back in 1926. There's a plaque out front, listing the names of the founding pupils. Geoffrey Donald is at the top of the list. And then I attended, of course, in 1967. But the school's closed now to whites. And what's worse, there isn't another secondary school in Kenya that will take white pupils."

     "What will you do?"

     "I have no choice but to send him to a boarding school in England. I can afford it, mind you, but it's the principle of the thing. Richard's never set foot in England. Blast it, Deb. His great-grandfather was born in Kenya!"

     Augustus brought the wine and set it on the table with two stem glasses, then cleared away the tea things. Terry poured and handed Deborah a glass. She sipped it. The wine had a harsh, bitter taste.

     "What do you do these days, Terry?" she asked softly, to defuse his clearly rising anger. "Do you still escort tours, or are you strictly administrative now?"

     He laughed, lit another cigarette, and settled back with his wine. "I take out hunting safaris."

     "I thought hunting was illegal here."

     "Tanzania. It's legal there. I take Americans mostly."

     She spoke with reserve. "Is it profitable?"

     "You wouldn't believe how much so! I'm booked clear into 1991. When hunting was banned here, ten years ago, we hunters took off for other countries and looked for work. I did a lot of herd control in the Sudan. Culling, mostly, north of Juba on the Nile. The elephant population
had got too big and was destroying the crops. Those tusks over there"—he pointed to a pair, taller than a man, standing on either side of a doorway—"came from an old rogue that had been wounded with a musket loader. He was totally crazed. Killed about thirty Dinka tribesmen. I took him out with a single shot and asked to be paid in tusks rather than in Sudanese pounds, which are worthless."

     Terry tasted his wine. "Anyway, I'm doing a good business now in Tanzania. And getting paid in American dollars!"

     "But isn't it illegal to import hunting trophies into the United States?"

     
"Used
to be illegal. Jimmy Carter banned the importation of leopard, jaguar, and ivory. But the Reagan administration permits trophies that have been shot in countries where it is allowed. My clients are guaranteed one lion, one leopard, two buffalo, and two Grant's gazelles. I take them out for twenty-one days, provide them with camps and trackers, and they pay me thirty thousand dollars."

     Deborah didn't say anything.

     "I know you don't approve of hunting," Terry said quietly. "You never did. But we hunters serve a good purpose. We kept the poachers out of Kenya. We were the unofficial police force. When hunting was banned in 1977, the hunters moved out and the poachers moved in. They don't care how many they kill or in what manner. The result is the unremitting suffering and slaughter of game. Do you know there are only about five hundred rhinos left in Kenya?"

     Deborah gazed at the photographs of Terry's children. "I'm glad you're doing well," she said softly. "I've so often wondered..."

     "Yes, I'm doing well," Terry said as he refilled his glass and lit another cigarette. "But for how long? Kenya's a bloody unstable country, Deb. You're not blind. You've seen what conditions are. The Africans don't seem to know how to run things. Or else they don't give a damn, I haven't figured out which it is. At the top you've got a handful of sodding rich elitists who say sweet fuck-all to the twenty million who are slowly starving to death. Look at what they're doing to Mount Kenya. Cutting down all the trees with absolutely no planning whatever. They don't study the ecology; they don't replant; they don't think of the consequences of taking out entire forests.
The rivers around here are starting to run dry because the mountains are becoming barren wastelands."

     Terry shook his head. "Africans don't think of the future. They never have, not even in my grandfather's day. They use up all the resources and keep having babies. It doesn't occur to them to do something about tomorrow. Look at Kilima Simba, my father's old ranch. My grandfather had established a system of furrows bringing water from boreholes. But the Africans who live there now, on hundreds of little shambas, haven't maintained the furrows, and so now they've no water and their farms are turning to dust."

     Terry regarded Deborah with intense blue eyes. "Kenya's a powder keg, Deb. A ticking time bomb. With its skyrocketing birthrate, the famine is going to get worse."

     "I thought other nations were helping."

     He stamped out his half-smoked Embassy King and poured some more wine. "You mean USA for Africa? How much of that money do you think made it down to the people, Deb? I've got it on good authority that less than ten percent of those millions of dollars, generously donated by Americans, went to feeding the people. The rest? Well, just count the Benzes in the government parking lots. There's going to be another revolution here someday, Deb. You mark my words. And it'll make Mau Mau look like a bloody picnic!"

     "Then why do you stay, Terry?"

     "Where am I going to go? This is my country, my home. Old Moi can stuff off if he thinks he's going to scare us out!"

     Terry suddenly fell silent. He looked over his shoulder, in the direction of the kitchen, then said in a lowered voice, "I'll tell you, Deb. Come the next revolution, I'll be regarded as a bloody colonial—a scapegoat. Even though I've done everything I can—married a Kikuyu woman, changed my name—I'm ready to leave at the drop of a hat. And any white person who has any sense is prepared to do the same. I've been sending money to England, on the quiet. Bought a house in the Cotswolds. When the shit hits the fan, I'll take my kids out of here with just the clothes we stand in if necessary, and I'll start over in England. Survival, Deb, is what being Kenyan has taught me. And if you're smart, you won't entertain any thoughts of moving back here to live."

     The dogs were suddenly barking in the yard. When Deborah looked out the window, she was surprised to see that night had fallen and that it was starting to rain.

     "That'll be Miriam," Terry said, standing. "Please stay for supper, Deb. I promise not to be such a crepehanger. We have so much to catch up on!"

     H
E RETURNED HER
to the Outspan a few hours later. And because it was three o'clock in the afternoon in San Francisco, Deborah decided to call Jonathan.

     She tried their apartment first.

     While she waited for the hotel operator to get back to her with the call, Deborah took a hot bath. And as she soaked, she reflected upon her evening with Terry, which had been both enlightening and terrifying. But rather than scare her off, as he had seemed determined to do, his doomsday words were working a curiously opposite effect on her. The more she heard about Kenya's troubles, the more Deborah felt a sense of responsibility to do something about them.

     She was wrapping up in her bathrobe when a room steward came by to build a fire in her fireplace. As he worked, Deborah stood at the French doors which opened onto the veranda of her cottage, and she watched the light rain fall like silver dust in the glow from the windows. The gentle drizzle reminded her of another such cold and damp night, when a fire also crackled and the world beyond the windows was safely locked out. It was the night she and Jonathan had made love for the first time.

     "I've shied away from serious relationships," Jonathan's soft-spoken voice had said, "until now."

     Deborah, lying in his arms, staring at the leaping flames and feeling, for the first time, completely relaxed and at ease with a man, had listened to Jonathan open up, bit by bit, as he had not done so far in their yearlong friendship.

     "Why didn't you marry her?" she asked, referring to the woman who had hurt him years ago. "What happened?"

     It wasn't an easy subject for him to talk about; Deborah heard the hesitation, the discomfort, the carefully chosen words of a man confessing a secret pain perhaps for the first time. Deborah understood how he felt. Her own past lay safely concealed behind such unspoken confessions. Not even this man with whom she was falling in love knew of the crime committed in Christopher's hut, nor had she ever told him of the racial mix in her blood. It served no purpose, she believed, to parade her demons in public. Deborah had worked hard to bury the past; she had even invented falsehoods to explain away certain situations. Such as the problem of children. She would never have any because of her ancestry. It frightened her to think what an unpredictable grouping of her genes might produce. How could she chance to have a baby that was less white than its father? When would the hidden African part of her suddenly show itself and under what poorly timed circumstances? And so she had fabricated a medical history: "I can't have children. Endometriosis..." She had told it more than once—to Jonathan as well—so that she almost believed it herself.

     Now, after months of working together in the operating room, of smiling at each other over the tops of green masks, of sharing private jokes, of fighting to save lives, of discussing the mutual benefits of going into medical practice together, now, after a missed evening at the ballet and two glorious hours in front of his fireplace, she and Jonathan had taken the next determining step. Having committed themselves to each other with their bodies, Jonathan was now paving the way toward the spiritual commitment—through the confession of secrets and hidden pasts.

     "Why didn't you marry her?" Deborah had asked on that rainy night in San Francisco. "You were so close. The wedding was only a week away. What happened?"