Green City in the Sun (95 page)

     In a revelation that was like a blow, she realized she had been looking in the
wrong places.
Here, in this dime-store sketchpad now clutched between her hands, was Kenya. The East African "style" was not, she knew now, suddenly, excitedly, in the way its people dressed, but in East Africa itself. The Kenyan soul lay not in
shukas
or
kangas
but in its sun and grasses and red earth; in the smiles of its children; in the toil of its women; in the soaring of a hawk, the loping of a giraffe, the lanteen sails of dhows at sunset.

     Sarah began to tremble. She sprang up from the wall and ran to Dr. Mwai's car, holding the precious sketchpad to her breast. She didn't see the dark little streets she sped down or the dusky women who peered in curiosity from windows. Sarah saw only vast yellow savannas and herds of elephant, the desolate deserts of the north and marches of camels, the glass and concrete skyscrapers rising up from Nairobi's slums. And she saw it all in the colors and shapes of the new fabric she was going to create.

     Sarah Mathenge was going to give the world a Kenya look at last.

     "S
O LET ME
tell you what this bloke does," Terry Donald said as he opened his third Tusker beer.

     Deborah wasn't listening. Sitting with Terry in the observation lounge of Kilima Simba Safari Lodge, she was watching a lone bachelor elephant that had come to the watering hole to drink. The lodge was quiet now; all
the guests were in their rooms, changing out of swimsuits and into cocktail clothes. At sunset, when a great show of animals appeared at the watering hole, a hundred tourist cameras were going to click.

     "I've told you about Roddy McArthur, haven't I?" Terry said, trying to get her attention. He understood her distraction. She was leaving for America in two weeks. "Anyway," he went on, "what Roddy does when he hasn't any clients to take out hunting is, he goes off alone and bags the largest trophies he can find. He sells them to Swanson, the taxidermist in Nairobi, who processes them and keeps them hidden. Then, when Roddy does have clients, or some other bloke has clients who bag small trophies and are dissatisfied, the heads are switched by Swanson, on the quiet, you understand, and the clients go home happy with the big trophies they later boast they bagged themselves. Mind you, Deborah, I don't get into that. I think hunting should be kept an honest sport." He leaned over and tapped her on the shoulder. "Deborah?"

     She looked at him. "Sorry, Terry. My mind was wandering again."

     "I'll bet you're all packed and ready to go."

     No, she wasn't. In fact, as the day for departure drew nearer, Deborah's reluctance to leave grew stronger.

     It was because of Christopher.

     She could not get out of her mind their reunion down by the river, three weeks ago. She lived it over and over, filling her every waking moment with the memory of seeing him standing there in the sun. Each time she pictured Christopher, she felt the desperate rush of sexual desire that was growing within her every day.

     "You know, Deborah," Terry said, "I wish you'd let me take you out just once more before you go away for three years."

     She regarded Terry Donald. He was twenty years old, lean and sunburned, and ruggedly handsome like his father, Geoffrey, and his grandfather, Sir James. And he had a passion for hunting. When he had received his restricted license three years ago, Terry had taken Deborah on her first hunting safari.

     They had gone in Land-Rovers down to the Serengeti in Tanganyika. Because his license was restricted, Terry had not been able to hunt any of
the Big Five—elephant, rhino, buffalo, lion, and leopard. But they had come upon an old lion that had had a porcupine quill stuck up its cheek, all the way into its head, and it had made it crazy, attacking innocent villagers. Terry had brought the dangerous beast down with a single, merciful shot and had been allowed, because of the service he had performed, to keep the skin.

     Their second safari had been a year ago, just before Deborah had entered the University of Nairobi for her premed studies. Then she and Terry had gone into Uganda after elephant. After long, hot days of trekking through eight-foot-tall hyperenia grass, carrying heavy rifles, cartridge bags, and water bottles, of following tracks and droppings into dense forest and feeling sharp danger all around, they had found a small bull group with excellent tusks.

     Terry had given Deborah the honor of the first shot; but she had frozen, and so he had killed the best of the herd and had supervised the subsequent hacking away of the tusks. When, in a gesture of extreme generosity, he offered the ivory to Deborah, she had turned away.

     She had not been able since to convince him of her dislike of hunting and her disapproval of its being permitted in Kenya. Nor had Terry been able to make her see his side of it: that hunters performed a valuable service. They culled dangerously large herds, saved crops and villages from marauding rogues, and policed the poachers, who had cruel ways of killing the animals.

     Deborah shook her head and sipped her ginger ale. "No, Terry. I shall never go on safari again except to
look
at the animals."

     She wasn't even sure she approved of that because already new tracks were crisscrossing virgin wilderness as more and more tourists plunged across Kenya in search of game. Mightn't this human and gasoline invasion, she wondered, upset the delicate balance of nature? She had seen carloads of whooping and hollering tourists race after animals, causing zebras and antelope to stampede blindly. The holidaymakers drove their rented cars into the herds, breaking them up, unwittingly separating young from mothers, driving a group from its territory, tiring them out, weakening them for the predators lurking nearby. What thrill was there, Deborah wondered, in chasing poor beasts until they nearly dropped, just for the sake of a bit of film footage?

     Worse, the tourists were photographing the people. She had seen busloads pull up to villages with cameras out. Masai herdsmen, offended, would draw their cloaks up over their heads and turn away. The women would try to drive the intruders off with angry shouts. Such ignorance, they thought. Such lack of respect. The Africans knew that these
wazungu
were here to photograph animals. Did this then mean that they regarded the villagers as animals also?

     Deborah looked around the luxurious lodge. It had been the first of its kind in Kenya, and now there were many imitators, from the Uganda border to the coast. Geoffrey Donald owned three as well as his growing fleet of minibuses, the same ones that trucked the holidaymakers over Masai land. Kilima Simba Safari Lodge was serene, tasteful, and elegant. The guests arrived in groups, were dropped off by their weary African drivers, and entertained for a day or two with native dancing, poolside ease, gourmet meals, and an ancient watering hole, right here under the balcony of the observation lounge, to which the animals had been coming for centuries. Signs posted all around on the bamboo walls cautioned the guests to be silent, so that the animals would not be driven away.

     Tourists were starting to filter into the bar, wearing stiff new khakis which they had purchased in Nairobi and in which they looked nervously self-conscious. But it was all part of the Kenya adventure. They ordered drinks the bartender had never heard of—margaritas, Long Island iced teas—and browsed through the expensive boutique, where a pretty African girl sold clothes imported from America.

     Deborah looked out at the African vista. She heard the land breathe; she felt cool tropical arms reach out to embrace her. Once again the rest of the world—that fearful place which Christopher had so gravely warned her about—seemed to vanish, and she was all alone with the red earth, the animals, and the distant mountains.

     Christopher's voice echoed over the vast plains:
Kenya is your home. Here is where you belong.

     Deborah was suddenly forlorn. Three years seemed an eternity. How would she survive, cut off from the very land that sustained her? She would feel like a caged bird, deprived of the sky.

     
Do you love me, Christopher?
she asked the silence that drifted down from snowcapped Kilimanjaro.
Do you love me as much as I love you? With a terrible aching to be held, to touch, to kiss? Or do you think of me as a sister? Do you love me in the way you love Sarah? Would you have held her the way you held me, and spoken to her the way you spoke to me, if she were the one going to America? Will you perish when I am gone away from you, Christopher, as surely I will?

     "Can I get you another drink, Deborah?" Terry asked.

     If only Sarah were here, Deborah thought. She desperately needed to talk to her best friend; perhaps Sarah had the answer to the enigma that was her brother. But Sarah wouldn't have come to the lodge if Deborah had asked her; she was roaming Kenya in Dr. Mwai's car.

     "No, thank you, Terry," she said as she stood. "I'm going to my room for a while."

     "Are you all right, Deborah?"

     "I'm fine. See you at the party."

     Deborah hurried across the suspension bridge that joined the "nativestyle" rooms built on stilts to the main lodge, and once inside the room, she leaned against the closed door, gazed at the wilderness that stretched beyond her balcony, and silently cried,
Christopher!

     "A
SANTE SANA
," S
ARAH
said to the friend who had given her a lift up from Nairobi. She waved him off, then headed down the trail that led from the top of the ridge to her grandmother's huts on the broad riverbank below. She had said good-bye to the friend with a smile, but the smile had been forced. Sarah was, in fact, furious, and as she neared Mama Wachera, who was working in her herb garden, she cursed again every banker in Nairobi.

     They had turned down her request for a small business loan—every last one of them!

     When the medicine woman looked up and saw her granddaughter, she laid aside her hoe and went to embrace the girl. "Welcome home, daughter," she said. "I have missed you."

     The old woman felt small and frail in Sarah's arms. No one knew exactly how old Wachera was, but because of her girlhood memories—Wachera had already given birth to David, Christopher's father, when the Trevertons first arrived fifty-four years ago—it was estimated that the medicine woman was around eighty. Yet, despite her age and size, Mama Wachera was still a strong woman.

     "Is Christopher here, Grandmother?" Sarah asked before she went to her hut to put away her suitcase and fetch two gourds of sugarcane beer.

     "Your brother has not come back since the day he returned from across the water."

     Sarah changed out of her good traveling dress and wrapped a
kanga
about herself. When she brought the beer out into the sunshine, she wondered, Why was Christopher still in Nairobi?

     "He is disrespectful, Sarah," Mama Wachera said as she took the offered beer. "My grandson should be here with me. After all, soon he enters the school of healing, and then I shall never see him."

     "I'm sure Christopher means no disrespect, Grandmother. He must have a lot to do, to prepare to enter medical school."

     They sat on the earth outside Wachera's old hut, two African women, generations apart, drinking together in an ages-old ritual of feminine companionship and intimacy.

     "Tell me," Mama Wachera said, "did you find what you went searching for?"

     Sarah recounted for her grandmother the marvelous revelation she had experienced in Malindi and her wonderful plans for the future. But when she came to the part in her story about her attempts to secure some money in Nairobi, Sarah's voice grew bitter.

     "It was humiliating, Grandmother. They made me feel as if I were begging. Collateral, they said! In order to get a loan, one must prove that one doesn't need it! I showed them my sketchpad and the batik I've made. I said,
'Here
is my collateral! My future is my collateral!' And then they asked if I had a husband or father who would sign for the loan. Then they told me to go away. Grandmother, how does a woman get started in business?"