The Last Time They Met (16 page)

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Authors: Anita Shreve

Tags: #Contemporary, #Fiction, #Romance, #Adult

BOOK: The Last Time They Met
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He hadn’t wanted to believe that Kenya was dangerous and had balked at the idea during the training sessions, which had focused relentlessly on survival, as if Thomas and Regina were soldiers engaged in guerrilla warfare. And of course they were, this particular war born of poverty and not of politics. So great was the difference between the rich and the poor in the country that travelers were occasionally hacked to death with pangas. Great-coated askaris with swords stood guard at the ends of the driveways of the European houses. Tourists were robbed so often in the streets and on buses, the joke about the contribution to the GDP was growing old. Corruption rippled through the government and blossomed at the top. Thomas hadn’t believed it then, but now he did. Already he’d been robbed seven times, twice of his car. Once, the entire contents of the house had been stolen, even the curtains and the telephone cord. Regina had been crushed to lose her Maridadi cloth and her Kisii stone sculptures, and he’d been panicky about his poems until he realized he’d memorized every one of them.
Never carry a day pack, they told you at the training sessions. Never stop at a crossing and consult a map (to do so instantly marked you as a tourist). Never wear jewelry or flashy sunglasses. Look as poor as possible. Easy for Thomas, who wore the same pair of khaki shorts and white shirt every day except Tuesdays, the day Mama Kariuki came and did the laundry in the bathtub. And if you do have a wallet or a purse stolen, be careful not to yell, “Stop, thief!” because other Kenyans would chase the suspect, and if they caught him, would try to beat him to death, a horrific attempt at execution before a largely passive audience that Thomas had helplessly observed more than once.
He took a seat at the Thorn Tree, the outdoor café of the New Stanley Hotel, and ordered a Tusker. He opened the newspaper and gave it another glance.
MALARIA SWEEPS NORTHERN PROVINCE. KILLER LION MAULS PARTY CHIEF
. His eyes glazed over an article about land disputes. He noticed the word
brother
in a piece about a Luo businessman who’d been murdered by his and was reminded of his own brother, Rich, and of the fact that he was coming in a month. They would go on safari together to Ngoro Ngoro and the Serengeti, Thomas promising to take him to the coast, where you could buy the most powerful dope he’d ever smoked. In Malindi, even the women chewed miraa, a twig that was a sort of natural speed. He wouldn’t tell Rich about the bhangi or the miraa or about the prostitutes, either, who were cheap and beautiful and dangerous with disease.
A shadow passed across his table. Thomas took it for a cloud, but, glancing up, he saw a man hovering over him, the man smiling, waiting to be noticed.
—
Ah, Mr. Thomas, you have lost yourself.
Thomas stood.
No, Ndegwa, it is you who have been lost, but now you are found again.
Ndegwa, his teacher, his age mate, chuckled. Thomas’s attempts to mimic the African idiom never failed to amuse Ndegwa, even in the early days, when Thomas had taken a poetry class at the University of Nairobi, the only white student in a roomful of younger Africans and Asians. Privately, Thomas had thought the quality of the work poor, though he’d have been the first to admit to an inability to criticize art produced in another culture. Queried, the other students would doubtless have said his work was self-indulgent, that it lacked political content. Ndegwa, however, had not felt that way. Indeed, he’d seemed almost to favor Thomas, a remarkable feat of literary impartiality, particularly considering Ndegwa’s Marxist views.
Thomas shook hands with the massive Kikuyu, Ndegwa’s bulk shot forward in a tight-fitting gray suit, his purple-black skin dusty with a patina that wasn’t dust at all, but rather color added to the color. He was a big-shouldered and big-bellied man, someone who, indeed, seemed cut more from a political or financial cloth than from that of a literary poet.
—
You know what it is they say about a Tusker?
Ndegwa asked.
Thomas smiled and shook his head.
—
Sit down my friend, and I shall share with you my story of a Tusker.
Thomas sat, and Ndegwa leaned toward him conspiratorially.
—
The first day you are in my country, you look into your Tusker and you find a worm. You are disgusted, and you give the beer to the street.
Thomas smiled, knowing that a joke was coming. Ndegwa was heavy-lidded and sensual, his shirt a thick, rough cotton Thomas had seen often in the country.
—
After the first month you are in my country, you look into a Tusker and you find a worm. And you say, “There is a worm in my beer.” And you calmly pick it out and put it on the street and then you drink your beer.
Ndegwa chuckling already, his teeth stained pink. Around them German and American tourists were drinking, the decibel level rising as the hour moved toward noon. Thomas saw a journalist
—
Norman something
—
he knew from a London paper.
—
But after a year, my friend, you look into your Tusker and you see the worm, and you say, “There is a worm in my beer.” And you take it out and eat it for the protein. And then you drink your beer, and you give nothing to the street.
Ndegwa laughed loudly at his own joke. Thomas made a show of looking into his beer, which made Ndegwa laugh even more.
—
Time to eat the worm, my friend. You have been in my country how long?
—
Just over a year.
—
Is it so much?
Ndegwa managed elegance, even with his bulk, even on the tiny metal café chair. Kimathi Street was thick with shoppers on the Saturday morning. Ndegwa glanced at the African women while Thomas looked at the white women. Although just then, a cocoa-skinned girl with a gazelle neck and a shaved head passed them, and Thomas couldn’t help but examine her. She was dressed in European clothes and red stiletto heels, her throat swathed in gold rings. She looked an exotic slave, though she couldn’t have been more than fourteen years old. The Asian man she was with was short and plump, his suit expertly tailored. Child prostitution in Kenya was epidemic.
—
And how are you?
Thomas asked when the girl had passed.
—
Oh, I am just all right. I have no bad luck.
Ndegwa shrugged, the smile fading, taxing belief in his pronouncement. Ndegwa was a brilliant teacher, able to excise the fat from Thomas’s lines of poetry with quick swipes of his pen, even as Thomas watched.
Though my government is telling me I cannot write any more poems.
Thomas took a quick sip of beer, thought about the worm.
Why?
Ndegwa rubbed his eyes.
They are telling me that my poems mock our government and our leaders.
Which, of course, they did.
—
And so I have been warned.
Thomas lightly jolted from complacency. Ndegwa was a better teacher than a writer, though his work was haunting and rhythmic and seeped into the bones the way music did. And even though the words themselves were often not memorable, the distinct cadences of Ndegwa’s verse drummed themselves inside the head.
—
You’re not serious,
Thomas said.
—
I am afraid I am very serious.
Thomas was disoriented by Ndegwa’s calm demeanor.
What if you stopped writing for a while?
Thomas asked.
Ndegwa sighed, picked his teeth with his tongue.
If you were told you could no longer publish your poems because your words revealed unpleasant truths about your government that the government did not want its people to know, would you stop?
A decision Thomas would never be forced to make. And one he’d never had to consider. Unpleasant words about his own country were practically a national pastime.
Ndegwa turned his massive body sideways to the table and gazed out at the crowd. The poet had a Bantu profile. Oddly, he wore a woman’s watch.
—
In my country, they give you a warning so that you can settle your affairs. And then they arrest you. The warning is a prelude to the arrest.
Ndegwa coolly drank his beer. Following a detainment, Thomas wondered, what happened? Imprisonment? Death? Surely not.
—
You know this?
Thomas asked.
—
I am knowing this.
—
But what about your wife and baby?
—
They are gone to my homeland.
—
Jesus.
—
Jesus is not helping me too much.
—
You could flee.
Thomas scrambled for a solution, thinking like an American: all problems could be solved if only one could imagine the solution.
—
To where? To my homeland? They will find me. I cannot leave the country. They will confiscate my passport at the airport. And besides, my friend, if I go, they will arrest my wife and son and threaten to kill them if I do not return. This is standard.
On a Friday noon, near the end of term, Thomas had lingered in the classroom while Ndegwa had read
—
and edited
—
his last bit of work for the class. Then Ndegwa had glanced at his watch and had said he needed to catch a bus to Limuru. His wife had given birth to their firstborn son just the month previous, and he wanted to travel to the family shamba to be with them for the weekend. Thomas, wishing to postpone as long as possible the thin haze of tension that would obscure the landscape of his weekend with Regina, had volunteered to drive him
—
an offer Ndegwa happily accepted. Thomas and Ndegwa made their way into the Highlands, past the tea plantations and along a route that paralleled a dirt path. Men in pin-striped suits and old women bent under loads of firewood watched the passing car as if Thomas and Ndegwa were envoys on a diplomatic mission. Along the way, they discovered they were age mates, born on the same day in the same year. Had Thomas been a Kikuyu, Ndegwa explained, they’d have been circumcised together when they were twelve, would have been isolated from their families and community for a period of several weeks while they became men, and then would have been welcomed back into the fold with a great deal of ceremony. Thomas liked the concept: becoming a man in his own culture was a vague and unspecific thing, unmarked by ceremony or even awareness of the event, defined as it was, if at all, individually and idiosyncratically. When you took your first drink? Had sex? Got your license? Got drafted?
Thomas and Ndegwa parked when the road ran out. They wound their way down a long murram path to a rectangular mud building with a rippled blue tin roof. Except for a small patch of hard-baked dirt in front of the house, all the other soil had been cultivated. The house stood on a rise in sun so bright Thomas had to squint his eyes nearly shut. An elderly woman emerged from the house wearing a kitenge cloth tied around her body and another cloth wound around her head. Ndegwa introduced Thomas to his mother. A wide gap in the bottom row of her teeth, Ndegwa had later explained, was the result of six teeth that had been deliberately pulled in adolescence to enhance her beauty. The woman came forward and shook hands and squinted as she listened to Thomas’s name. Behind her, Ndegwa’s several sisters shyly filed out, greeting Thomas just as their mother had done. A fire burned to one side of the front door, and a young goat lay on its back with its throat cut. Ndegwa began the skinning in his role as host. He hadn’t even taken off his suit coat. Thomas felt narcoleptic from the altitude, queasy about the goat. He watched Ndegwa’s knife make the first cut into the skin of the leg and peel back a bloody flap, and then turned to study the banana trees. One of the women, in a blue pantsuit and red platform shoes, stepped forward and introduced herself as Mary, Ndegwa’s wife. She was wearing a large rhinestone ring. Thomas wasn’t sure he’d ever seen such swollen breasts. Her platforms sank into the mud with her weight, but together, they negotiated the thin strip of grass that separated the banana trees from the maize fields.
The house was surrounded by a garden of moonflowers and frangipani, the scent so intoxicating Thomas wanted to lie down right there on the ground. The mildly hilly landscape was divided into intricate patterns of cultivation: just the shades of green alone made him dizzy. On the hills were other mud-and-tin huts, and overhead the sky was the deep cobalt he’d come to expect in the country. An ordinary day in Kenya, he reflected, would be cause for celebration in Hull.
Mary ordered a child to boil water on a charcoal burner, then invited Thomas to step inside the hut.
A red vinyl sofa and two matching chairs decorated the central room. In its center was a small plastic table, so that to sit down, Thomas had to climb over the table. The floor was dirt, and Thomas wondered what would happen to it in a heavy rain. Outside, through the doorway, the sun lit up a landscape of colors so garish they hurt the eye. He knew he’d never be able to describe them: it had something to do with the equatorial light and the quality of the air
—
very fine. If you couldn’t describe a country’s colors, what did you have?

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