Green City in the Sun (17 page)

     While waiting for Mario to join her, Grace caressed her small shamba with loving eyes. Overhead weaverbirds chattered in the trees, perched on branches like fat lemons, and starlings the color of deep blue mother-of-pearl played with little waxbills that were mousy gray except for scarlet faces and bills. There was the sweet smell of wild jasmine in the air and smoke from African cook fires. Up on the hill above her, work on the big house was still in progress. She could hear hammers and chisels ringing in the silence.

     As Grace drew her cardigan close to her chest, her eye was caught by something amiss. The four chairs on the veranda—their cushions were missing, again! No doubt the work of Sheba's friends. In the night young cheetahs came and played mischievously, pulling clothes off the line, carrying away the veranda cushions. Her welcome mat had disappeared weeks ago and was later found up a tree.

     Life at Birdsong Cottage meant constant vigilance to keep one's standards. It would be so easy, Grace realized, to give in and relax the rules of civilization, to allow the animals to have the run of the house, to relinquish the thatch roof to white ants, to allow one's clothes to run to rags, to let one's hair go uncombed, to forgo the evening bath; and some isolated settlers had done just that. The Stone Age, Grace knew, could be just a broom or a fork away.

     Mario came out of the house. He carried a warm cooking pot, a bag of grain, and a string of onions flung over one shoulder. He was a bright young Kikuyu who had been educated by the Italian fathers at the Catholic mission; there he had been converted to Christianity and had been given the name, following widespread practice, of the priest who had baptized him. When he had come of age and had gone through the circumcision ceremony of manhood, he had gone in search of employment with the white man, as so many African males were doing now that there was no warrior
class for them to enter. The cattle ranches were always their first choice, for cattle herding was an ancient and honorable occupation for men; James never lacked for cowhands. They shirked farm work like planting and picking because that was woman's work and therefore demeaning. Mario had not been able to join Valentine's house-building gang because he was from another clan and therefore an outsider, so Grace had hired him. She couldn't pay much, only two rupees a month, but he ate well and slept in a rondavel behind the house.

     He spoke English with an Italian accent, this young Kikuyu with the name of a Roman priest, and he wore khaki shorts and shirt, just like the native levies of the King's African Rifles. "Ready, Memsaab Daktari," he said, and showed her the pot.

     It had simmered all night, a stew of stunted vegetables mixed with maize meal. There was no meat because the Kikuyu would not eat wild game and Grace could not spare one of her own goats, nor was there any chicken because the men would not touch it, chicken being eaten only by women. But what Grace
had
dropped into it the night before was a rusty horseshoe, a traditional preventative against anemia.

     She had begun feeding the villagers a month ago when the last of their own grain had run out and their vegetable plots failed. They were now starving because the Kikuyu did not believe in preparing for the future. They grew only enough to eat and to use as barter, believing that tomorrow would somehow take care of itself. For that same reason it would never have occurred to them to dam the river, as Valentine had done, to ensure a water supply in times of drought, and even now, with the reservoir available, they did not try to think of an efficient means of delivering that water to their dying shambas. Every morning the Kikuyu women and little girls trudged to the man-made pond, filled their calabashes, and carried the water back up to the village, their bodies bent double. To dig a furrow to eliminate this daily toil would have meant change, and change was taboo.

     Grace and the boy left the veranda and struck off down the path that led away from Grace's house. To their right lay the trickling river; to their left rose the grassy overlook, which was now totally depleted of forest. From this path, looking up, Grace could just see the roof of Bella Two.

     It had been eight months since Grace and Rose's arrival in Africa, and Valentine was obsessed with having the house done by Christmas. He drove his Africans day and night, striding about the construction area with his whip, shouting, giving the boot to anyone he found sitting down. It had become the focus of his entire life: to have Bella Two finished in time for the gala celebration that was going to mark the official opening of the house. And it was expected to be quite the event. They all were to continue to live in the camp right up until the big night, when more than two hundred guests would arrive from all over the protectorate and sit down to a fabulous feast. There would be music and dancing, and afterward, when the guests all were comfortably housed in makeshift huts and tents around the grounds, Valentine would escort his wife for the first time upstairs to their new bedroom.

     Abutting the southern boundary of Grace's thirty acres was the clearing where Mathenge and his family had lived and which Valentine was now converting into a polo field. The chief had ordered his wives back across the river to live with the main clan, but two women had disobeyed: elder Wachera, his wife's revered grandmother, and young Wachera who was apprenticing with the old medicine woman. Of the seven original huts, only two still stood.

     A few weeks ago Grace had observed a strange confrontation between Mathenge and his wife's grandmother. Elder Wachera had politely informed the young chief that someone was tearing down the huts, and he had respectfully explained why, telling her to join the others across the river. The grandmother had quietly, almost shyly reminded him of the holiness of that ground because of the ancient fig tree, and the young warrior, in a diffident manner, had courteously asked her to obey his wishes.

     It had been a bizarre exchange. Clearly two revered ranks were at odds. Elderly Kikuyu were so honored in the tribe that it was taboo to utter their names, especially that of a medicine woman who spoke for the ancestors. But young warriors, particularly one who was now a chief and very nearly had the status of a
mzungu
, were also to be obeyed. As a result, neither had backed down. Wachera returned to her hut, there to remain forever, she declared, while Mathenge had stood proudly, his face a mask.

     Valentine, however, had vowed that his plans were going forward, and
he would have the old woman bodily removed if necessary.

     When Grace and Mario pushed through a stand of whispering bamboo to reach the path to the village across the river, they were halted by the sudden appearance of Mathenge. He did not see them but walked with a purposeful step toward the plantation.

     Grace held her breath. There went her adversary, the man she must win over, who had the power to grant her success or failure in Africa. A man she was afraid of.

     And he was the most beautiful human being she had ever seen.

     Mathenge was very tall with broad, rounded shoulders and a surprisingly narrow waist and hips. He wore a
shuka
made of americani knotted over one shoulder so that when he walked, his lean flanks and shapely buttocks were exposed. His hair was done in Masai fashion, in two sets of braids, front and back, plastered down with red ocher. Such a hairstyle took hours to arrange and bespoke the man's vanity. His face, too, told of utter conceit. Mathenge's Masai ancestry was evident in the high cheekbones and narrow nose, the boldly swung jaw. His manner was aloof, his expression not so much disdainful as that of a man who doesn't bother himself with life's trivialities.

     Grace watched him pass, his stride fluid, long arms swinging with supple grace; she realized she was holding her breath.

     The Kikuyu did not like straight paths but felt safer meandering. Their minds worked similarly: They never stated a fact directly but hinted at it and skirted around it, leaving one to draw one's own conclusions. In the same way that they feared a blunt statement as if it were a poisoned arrow, so did they avoid a straight road; that was why Grace and Mario now followed a twisting, indirect track to the village.

     It ran parallel with an ancient animal path where the recent spoor of giant forest hogs and elands indicated that animals were venturing down to Valentine's reservoir to drink. Because of the drought, much game was coming boldly out of the forest; now, too, new birds appeared among the reeds and bamboo: crested cranes, storks, and Egyptian geese. Mario declared he had even heard a rhino crashing through the bush during the night.

     As Grace walked among the juniper and mimosa trees, catching sight
of a parrot flashing red and yellow overhead, she felt as if she walked over land that had a soul. There was a pulse here that she had never felt in Suffolk. Here the landscape breathed, the earth gave off a living heat, the plants seemed to whisper, to bend toward her. The air was filled with a sense of expectancy, of waiting....

     The village entrance was concealed among trees and vines in order to trick evil spirits and thus to keep them out. Beyond the natural archway lay a clearing with perhaps thirty huts, all round, made of cow dung, and thatched. Blue smoke spiraled up from the pointed roofs to indicate habitation; cook fires must burn day and night, and if a fire went out, it was bad luck and the hut must be destroyed. It was a plain, homely little village because the Kikuyu had no art or architecture, did not carve designs or sculpt. Despite the lack of a harvest and the Spanish flu that had weakened the clan, the village was an anthill of industry. Everyone was working. From the very littlest girls tending goats to the married women pounding meager handfuls of millet to the grandmothers who sat with legs stretched in the sunshine weaving baskets, the scene proved the maxim that one never saw a Kikuyu woman idle.

     In their leather aprons stiff with dirt and grease, arms jangling with beads and copper, they tanned goatskins, stirred their paltry stews, and worked at their primitive pottery, using no wheel and baking the pots in the sunlight. With the exception of a few young women each wearing a woolly patch of hair on her head to indicate she was unmarried, all the heads were smooth-shaven and gleamed like brown billiard balls.

     There were no men in the village. Either they were working for Valentine on the opposite ridge or they were enjoying a beer drink under the shade of a tree. As Sir James had once said to Grace, "The women are the toilers; the men, the loiterers."

     When some children saw Grace, they dropped what they were doing and came hesitantly toward her. It was supposed to be a mark of status to have flies about oneself because that indicated the ownership of goats. The more flies meant the more goats and therefore more wealth and status in the tribe, and to brush the flies away was a terrible breach of etiquette. But Grace didn't care about etiquette when these little ones came forward and
she saw their faces plastered black with flies. She shooed the flies away with her hand.

     Protocol had to be followed before the food could be distributed. All the women smiled shyly at Grace and waited while elder Wachera came forward. Her venerable old body was nearly hidden beneath ropes of cowry shells and bands of beads. She walked with dignity and smiled, revealing gaps where her incisors had been extracted in girlhood as a sign of beauty. She extended a calabash to Grace. It contained a greenish mixture of sour milk and spinach, which Grace drank, knowing how little the family could spare it but knowing also that to refuse would give offense. Wachera said, "
Mwaiga
, "a long, drawn-out Kikuyu word that means "All is well, come or go in peace," the hail and farewell of all Kikuyu conversation. The medicine woman spoke demurely but with stateliness, being the senior and most honored woman in the village. She did not look directly at Grace because that would have been impolite.

     The dialogue then twisted and turned like the village path, hinting at the drought, suggesting the famine, with Grace struggling through and occasionally helped by Mario. She could not go directly to the point of the food she had brought as that would have been bad manners. Grace tried to curb her impatience. The children were
starving.
Their little arms and legs like sticks and their blown-up bellies were inclined in the direction of the cooking pot like blossoms following the sun.

     Finally Wachera insinuated that the lid might be lifted and that if some of the stew left the pot, she would not mind. Even then the children did not rush forward. Mothers came up, giggling behind their hands because they were unused to the presence of a white person, and made sure the handout was polite and orderly. None of the adults helped herself until the children were fed. Then Grace told Mario to hand the sack of grain to Wachera. As she received the sixty-pound bag and swung it easily onto her back, the old Kikuyu woman flashed Mario a look of disdain for having carried the sack into the village himself.

     Grace was now officially welcome in the village and was free to move about. She went first to the huts of women she had been seeing as patients. There was little she could do for them; they were down with the Spanish flu,
for which there was no cure. All she could do was talk to them, check their vital signs, and make sure they were being cared for. The huts were smoky and dark, the stuffy air stung with the smell of goat urine because the goats were always brought into the huts at night, and the flies were overwhelming. Grace knelt by each woman, carried out what examination she could, and murmured words of encouragement. Her eyes watered in the foul air and from the frustration of helplessness. If only these women would come to her clinic! She would put them into clean beds, sponge down their fevers, and see that they ate nourishing food.

     One woman lay outside her hut; it meant she was close to death.

     Grace knelt by her and felt the dry forehead. Release was only an hour or two away. How had they known, these women of the village? The Kikuyu possessed an uncanny prescience about death. They always seemed to know when it was going to come and were able to move the dying person outside. It was taboo to have someone die in a hut; it was also
thahu
for anyone to touch a corpse, and so the dying were moved while still alive. Once outside, they were left alone, waiting for the hyenas to come and finish them because the Kikuyu did not bury their dead.