Green City in the Sun (57 page)

     The name of the miracle drug, it seemed to her, began with P. She went to the medicine cabinet and peered through the glass doors. She tried to read the labels. Some were familiar to her; most were not. And none began with P. When she saw the morphine bottle, she decided to take it.

     As she was about to hurry out, she saw it: a small carton of newly delivered medicine. The name was on the box: penicillin. Grace's miracle drug.

     Seizing a few other items but having no real idea what she needed or in what quantity or even how to use them, Rose bundled everything into a linen towel and quickly left the infirmary.

     When she arrived at the glade, she found Njeri sitting in the gazebo with a bucket of water, a bottle of floor soap, one towel, and no blanket.

     
"Hand
soap, Njeri!" she said. "For washing hands. And a blanket and pillow. Run! And don't talk to anyone."

     Rose pushed open the door of the greenhouse and looked in.. The stranger hadn't moved. He lay in the diffuse light coming through the skylight, his battered body an obscenity among the colorful blossoms and potted fruit trees.

     She felt a strong emotion rush through her, an emotion that was at once familiar and yet alien. Rose had experienced this compulsion many times in the past—to rescue injured or orphaned animals and to protect and nurture them. But never before had she felt it toward a human being. It baffled her. This man was an enemy; her husband was in the north fighting Italians. And yet Rose did not see an enemy in the poor, abused body lying among her flowers. She was observing the prisoner not with her eyes but with her heart, and her heart saw only a living creature in need of help.

     She knelt at his side. He was still alive but, she feared, only barely. "Can you hear me?" she said. "I'm going to try to help you. I've brought medicines."

     He lay on his side, unresponsive.

     Rose reached out, hesitated, then touched his forehead. It was hot.

     She looked around the greenhouse. There was a clear space on the other side of her workbench, wide enough for a man to lie down. Setting aside her infirmary bundle, Rose walked around and slipped her hands under his arms.

     But she couldn't move him.

     "Please," she said, "you must help me to move you."

     He groaned.

     She started to panic. He lay exposed near the open door. Hardly anyone ever came to the eucalyptus glade, but if someone did, the stranger could be seen.

     And then Rose realized she had to hide him. It wasn't an action she questioned. Deeper, more complex currents were compelling her now: the instinct to protect any injured creature from its predators.

     She looked around again. There were her new rosebushes, lined up along the nearest wall and taking in the gentle sunlight, awaiting transplantation. Hurrying, Rose dragged the heavy pots over the stone floor until she decided there was enough room for the man. Then she came back to him and, by pulling and pushing, managed to move him out of the way of the door.

     Having first covered the floor with a blanket, she then laid the stranger down among her roses.

     T
HERE WAS NOTHING
Njeri Mathenge would not do for her mistress.

     Even though it was Memsaab Grace who had given birth to Njeri when she had lifted her from Gachiku's womb twenty-five years ago, and even though it had also been Memsaab Grace who had tried to save her from the terrible
irua
ceremony seven years ago, it was Memsaab Rose to whom David Mathenge's half sister was steadfastly devoted.

     Njeri could not remember a time when she had not longed to live in the
big stone house and be near the beautiful lady who looked like a sunshine spirit. From her earliest years, when she had run away repeatedly from her mother's shamba to spy on the lady in the glade, Njeri had always sensed a special magic in her memsaab. A sweet sadness engulfed the bwana's wife; she walked with an aura of melancholy that no one else seemed to sense but that the gentle Njeri, in her unique perception, felt sharply.

     They were always together, Njeri and Lady Rose. In the early days Njeri had crept from her mother's hut to sit with the lady in the glade, who never questioned the little girl's sudden appearance one day but who accepted her with a smile and fed her from the ever-present wicker basket. In those days Memsaab Mona, the lady's daughter who was the same age as Njeri, had also been in the gazebo with them, taking lessons from governesses. But then Mona had gone away to school in Nairobi, and Njeri had had the lady all to herself. After that Memsaab Rose had taken Njeri into the household as her personal maid, paying the girl three shillings a month, which Njeri turned over to her mother. Njeri now lived the perfect life: She wore the memsaab's castoff dresses; she slept outside her bedroom door in the big house; she brought up Lady Rose's morning tea and then spent an hour combing out the waterfall of hair.

     Njeri could not understand why her brother, David, or the girl Wanjiru didn't like the
wazungu.
Njeri worshiped them and their whiteness and wonderful ways, and she thought how dark and unwelcoming Kikuyuland must have been before they arrived.

     She chuffed along the path with her blanket, pillow, and bar of the memsaab's special Yardley Lavender soap, and she did it unquestioningly. Njeri never questioned her mistress's orders or actions, and never would.

     But when she walked through the door of the greenhouse, Njeri cried out and dropped her things.

     "Hush!" said Rose. "Come here and help me!"

     Njeri couldn't move. Old Kikuyu taboos rooted her to the stone floor.

     "Njeri!"

     The girl gaped at the man lying facedown on the blanket, his shirt removed, his back exposed. The memsaab was touching him—his wounds, his blood.

     Rose jumped to her feet, snatched up the dropped soap, and took Njeri
by the arm. "Stop gawking and come and help me! The man is hurt."

     Njeri went woodenly and knelt opposite the memsaab, but she couldn't bring herself to touch him. She watched as Rose gently washed the half-healed stripes on his back, watched those slender white hands, which never touched anything unclean or unbeautiful, bathe away the old blood and dirt, carefully dry the wounds, and then apply a healing salve.

     Finally Rose sat back and said, "That might help. I don't know what else to do. I think he has a dangerously high fever. He might die from it. Some of these wounds are infected, and they're causing the fever."

     Njeri's eyes moved over the stranger's back. Then she saw what her mistress must have also seen: old scars among the new. "He has been punished many times, memsaab."

     Rose studied the bottle of penicillin. She had no idea how much to give him. Too little, certainly, would be useless. But could too much kill him? What on earth
was
penicillin anyway?

     Her hands trembled as she filled the hypodermic syringe, doing it the way she had seen Grace do it, with two fingers through the metal rings, her thumb guiding the plunger. It was a heavy, cumbersome instrument, the needle seeming somehow much too long.

     When the drug was drawn up, Rose then looked down at the unconscious stranger and murmured, "Where do I inject?"

     Deciding that vaccinations ordinarily went into the arm, she cleaned a small patch on the hard muscle just at the shoulder and sank the needle in.

     He didn't react.

     
Dear God
, Rose prayed as she slowly depressed the plunger,
let this be the right amount.

     When she was done, she sat back and studied him. The stranger slept deeply—too deeply, she thought. And then she noticed what a clean, handsome profile he had.

     She felt the pulse at his neck. It didn't feel right. It was as though his heart were struggling; each beat felt like a desperate plea for help.

     Reaching out, Rose stroked the black hair matted to his forehead. "Poor man," she said softly, "whatever did you do to deserve such inhuman treatment?"

     She withdrew into silence, her blue eyes settling upon the dark head. Time came to a halt; the air grew moist and heavy with the smell of rich earth and exotic blossoms. Something skittered along the skylight. The sun moved behind a tall eucalyptus, softening the hues and shadows in the greenhouse. The two women, white and African, sat while the injured stranger slept between them.

     DURING HER LONG vigil at the sleeping man's side Rose was overwhelmed with a sense of helplessness and utter uselessness. With the body of this poor man stretched before her, his life beating slowly away, she loathed her weakness and inability to do anything.

     Near sunset Njeri reminded her mistress of the coming dark. Rose was terrified of the night and always took care to be home before daylight faded. But now she was reluctant to go.

     She laid a hand on the burning cheek and thought:
You will probably die in here sometime during the night, alone, in pain, and with no one to comfort you.

     But the dark did frighten her, and so at last Rose was compelled to leave the greenhouse. After making sure he was as warm and comfortable as possible, she paused at the door to look back at the pathetic form sleeping in the gloom.

     She thought of her tapestry. It was all she had to show for her life. And thinking of it, for the first time Rose despised herself.

     SHE COULDN'T SLEEP.

     After slipping into the house unseen, to avoid running into Mona, Rose had gone straight to her bedroom, where she now sat in the light of a hurricane lamp, gazing out the window at the dark forest.

     Unable to bear the silence, she turned on her radio, hoping for some music, but instead she heard the voice of a late-night news broadcaster. She
quickly turned the volume down and listened to the faint report: "Two of the Italian prisoners who escaped from the Nanyuki camp have been found. The third is still at large. He has been identified as General Carlo Nobili, the duca d'Alessandro."

     So he had a name now.

     Rose thought of him lying in the cold greenhouse, slowly dying. Would he waken, she wondered, and be terrified in his last moments of life? She thought of the wounds on his back—the old ones and the new—that spoke volumes of his cruel treatment in the camp. No
wonder he escaped. Perhaps the murdered guard deserved to die.

     Then she thought:
I should have done more for him. But what? What could I have done?

     Rose started to cry.

     She buried her face in her hands and wept. The bedroom door opened, and a ribbon of hallway light fell across the carpet as Njeri, who had never seen her mistress cry, looked in, baffled and afraid.

     Rose turned and looked at her maid. "Why am I so useless?" she cried. "Why am I such a useless,
ridiculous
woman? Anyone else might have saved that poor man! If Grace had been here instead of in Nairobi!
She
would have known what to—" Rose stared at her maid. "Grace!" she cried. "Of course!"

     Jumping up from the window seat, Rose said, "Why didn't I think of it before?" and ran from the bedroom.