Adé: A Love Story (10 page)

“I have never been in an elevator,” he said, thrilled.

“I know,
mpenzi,
” I said, laughing. “I know.”

We lay in our rented room all day, recovering from the bus ride beneath threadbare blue blankets, making love, pressing hard
against each other to stave off the wicked chill. It had been so hot when Miriam and I were here, I was not expecting such a drop in temperature, and yet there it was, again, the unpredictable.

At exactly six the next morning we prepared methodically, almost ceremoniously, for what lay ahead. I wrapped the colorful, embroidered money belt Miriam had brought me from Thailand around my waist and covered it with the modest white shirt I had worn to the
shamba.
I paired it with a long black skirt I had made in Lamu, hoping my modesty would telegraph synchronicity with the sober Christianity that dominated this inland city. Adé velcroed his identification papers, stashed in a waterproof, plastic sandwich bag, inside a beige zippered pouch we had bought especially for the trip, around his ankle.

By seven thirty we had taken our breakfast of toast and juice from the tiny buffet in the hotel basement, and set off for the American Express office in the nicer part of town. I redeemed five hundred dollars of my dwindling funds in U.S. currency, tossed a thick packet of letters Miriam had left for me into my bag without a thought of their contents, and then we headed for the passport office. Adé was determined to arrive early. He did not want to be the first in line because he thought that would attract too much attention, but he wanted, at the same time, to get it over with.

Others had the same idea, but from the moment we entered the huge processing room in the innocuous city building and confronted the bleak row of cubicles, each manned by—Adé told me—a member of President Moi’s tribe, it was clear by the way the workers all raised their heads and glanced at me, looking me over, trying to read me, that my presence meant something, though neither of us could determine what, and whether it would help or harm. The bus ride flashed through my mind. No matter
how hard I pressed the reset button, I could still feel the butt of the gun against my cheek. The debilitating powerlessness. And I could not stop thinking that by staying in this country, I would be subjecting myself to such treatment by choice.

The eyes of other Kenyans bore into me as we waited for hours in the line of blank, expressionless faces fanning themselves with their meticulously filled out forms. A few other Americans sat on backpacks, standing every few minutes to move up in line. They joked with each other and shook their heads at the interminable wait but remained relaxed. I should have felt an affinity with them, but I didn’t. We did not share the same fear. They had not been on the bus.

Finally, we arrived at one of several identical desks and spilled out our story, only to be directed to another line and made to wait again for “the person in charge of passports and visas” as opposed to only “passports.” Then the office broke for lunch, during which brightly colored plastic thermoses and little balls of cloth-wrapped food appeared on desks, and workers merrily swapped jokes and told stories.

At last we met Mugo, the short, sturdy-looking official with warm eyes assigned to our case. My first thought: a piece of cake. But then I noticed Mugo’s body language as Adé spoke to him in Swahili and explained our intentions, the way he leaned back in his chair and took stock of us. I saw contempt slide across his eyes. He was older than Adé; he thought Adé disrespectful. The smug downturn at the sides of his mouth suggested that he found Adé’s tribe beneath him. He pressed his lips together in anger. Adé had won an opportunity to leave the country. Once Adé received
his passport, he would be in another class, one that soared above Mugo’s. At some point, Mugo realized that he would have to stop his mind before it went off the rails, and he abruptly cut Adé off with a wave of his hand. He responded in English, looking at me as if Adé had said nothing at all, and reached into his desk for a thick stack of papers. “Fill them out,” he said, “and come back in three days.” He would speak to us then.

I swallowed my fear and stepped boldly forward—the money of the operation. I assumed the position and reached into my wallet for one of the crisp twenty-dollar bills I had requested from American Express. I lay a twenty on top of the stack. I was deferential, but also jocular. We all knew I was speaking in shorthand. Was there someone else in the office that could process the forms more quickly? He looked down at the money and laughed.

“Ah, so you are familiar with the way things work here, I see. No ordinary
mzungu.
You have been here for some time.”

I jumped at the chance for camaraderie. “Yes, yes, I know how it goes. We take care of each other,
au vipi?
”

Adé nudged me from behind when I said those last words and a current ran between us.
Au vipi
was a Swahili phrase that Adé had taught me, a phrase we used often because it summed everything up so well.
Au vipi? Isn’t it? Isn’t it true? Isn’t that right?
At first, Adé used it after explaining something to me. Like why a son should always take care of his mother, or why I should let his friend Abu Bakar walk me to the store at night.

“Because if you go to the store alone, Farida,” he said, “the men will look at you and wonder why you are alone, and they will think you are free, like any other woman from America. But if Bakar is with you, they will know he is taking you for me because
everyone knows Bakar is my friend, and so it is the same as you and I going to the store together, even though I am here taking care of my grandmother. You will be safe then,
au vipi?
”

Isn’t that right? Do you understand?

In turn, I added
au vipi
to my repertoire of seduction. I would move over Adé’s body in our little room and rub against him saying, “This feels good to you,
au vipi?
” And he would look up at me sheepishly and smile his shy, excited, private smile at me, his first lover. “You want me now,” I would say, “
au vipi?
Are you ready for me,
au vipi?
You want me to do this,
au vipi?”
And he would nod, yes, yes, yes. I want. I want. I want. And I would throw back my head and laugh, and then every other time he said
au vipi,
we both laughed because it had this other meaning, too. It meant we wanted each other and had our own language for it. It meant there was another truth.

I put down another twenty as Mugo considered my question, and then he took the money. “Fill out these forms and come back tomorrow,” he said, still avoiding Adé’s gaze. “I will see what can be done.”

We started walking back to our room, the daunting forms tucked into my shoulder bag. I noticed the crisp blue sky and riotous bougainvillea dotting the city for the first time. I told Adé it reminded me of San Francisco, one of the places where I grew up, and hoped we would soon see together. I put on my most optimistic face and said I thought things had gone reasonably well, considering everything we’d heard before leaving the island. Adé did not agree. He said that the people of Mugo’s tribe looked down on the people from the coast. It had always been that way, he said. They believed in their churches. They did not believe in the Prophet Mohammed. They thought Swahili people were
stupid, backward. That Swahili people thought they were better because their skin was lighter and they kept to themselves. And now the Kikuyu had all the power, and could do with it what they wished. It was simple; it was devastating.

He was quiet. I wagered it would take two weeks. He bet me two months.

We stopped for food in the restaurant of a hotel for tourists and expats—several of whom were reading the
International Herald Tribune.
I craned my neck for glimpses of the headlines, and saw a notice that my president was seeking a “Push on Operation Persian Gulf,” and then turned my attention back to Adé, who was studying the menu with irritated befuddlement. I looked down at the laminated page. Shrimp cocktail. Club sandwiches. Banana daiquiris. I hadn’t had a sip of alcohol, let alone seen dozens of bottles of it, for weeks, but here the bar took up one whole wall of the dining room. Adé did not believe in even sitting so close to the stuff, but I could tell he was trying, for me, for us, for the future.

I ordered hamburgers and fries—there was no fish, or rice, or greens of any kind—an orange Fanta for him, and a virgin mint julep for me in an ironic nod to the stinking realities of colonialism. I chuckled as I ordered, but Adé did not, and I did not have the energy to explain the joke, the reference to plantations, to slavery. Instead, I brought out the forms and read them as we waited for the food. They were in English, which I found deplorable, and there were dozens of questions. They wanted the names and addresses of the brothers and sisters of each of Adé’s parents, along with the names and contact information of all of Adé’s schoolteachers from primary school onward, as well as all of his employers. If the applicant owned his own business, how
had he raised funds to start it? Whom did it serve? If it was a business for tourists, did the applicant have the proper license from such and such bureau at such and such address? If not, it would have to be acquired before the passport application would be considered.

For each question we would have to leave unanswered, I tallied a twenty-dollar bill. By the time the food arrived, the total exceeded seven hundred dollars.

Adé was no stranger to hamburgers and fries, but after weeks of lentils, coconut rice, and cassava, we could barely digest the meat, and fell into our narrow bed back at the hotel as if drugged. Adé fell asleep immediately, but I lay there in the dark, thinking of Mugo, and the long line of bodies we would encounter the next day. I turned on the light and pulled out the papers. I tried to make headway, but there were too many questions I could not answer. When I lay back down, Adé instinctively reached his arm around me and pulled me closer. I wrapped my legs around his, and nuzzled my face in his neck, inhaling deeply. My faith had suffered a blow, but my love for him, my devotion, remained.

Hours later I woke up ravenous and dressed quickly. I craved eggs, the slick white outer oval and pasty yolk inside, the symbol of life hidden inside the protein-rich orb. I wanted these and maybe some juice—mango, papaya, something orange and
tamu,
sweet. Adé, who usually slept so lightly and seemed always ready to spring into the day, was unmoving in the metal bed, his long body wrapped tightly between the thin sheets shielding him from the cold of Nairobi’s altitude.

Downstairs the desk was unmanned, but I didn’t notice the
aberration. The streets were deathly still, but even that didn’t register in my First World mind. I blithely walked the recently swept street from the hotel down to a shop I knew, and found it shuttered. I kept walking until I found another, similarly padlocked and impenetrable. Then I came to a corner where I had seen vegetable stands the evening before, but there was no one and nothing in sight, not even a remnant of one of the crudely constructed stalls, or a dirty orange peel left on the ground. As if in a dream, I wondered if I were the only living person left on Earth. Where were the voices and movement of other souls, the music blaring from the
matatus,
the screeching of worn tires on even more worn asphalt?

And then I felt, without hearing, the rumble of trucks, and then all at once they were upon me, real and monstrously loud. Columns and columns of tanks were rolling through the city. They were gigantic and immediately served at least one of their purposes, which was to make me feel small—very, very small, inconsequential. I could be crushed with one turn of the wheel as if my life, our lives, and everyone we brought with us, our mothers and fathers and their mothers and fathers, and all the mothers and fathers before them, were meaningless, not even a full entry in the annals of humankind.

Instead of running, which would have been futile, I stopped moving and became my own pounding heart. Sweat streamed from my armpits like urine. Soldiers were perched on top of the tanks, and hung from the sides like components of the machines themselves. Huge guns were strapped to their bodies, ammunition sashed over their hearts, red berets atop their heads, their dark faces inscrutable but for the flash of excitement in a few
grinning mouths anticipating the kill. As each tank passed me, I was assessed and dismissed, held in the sightline of a weapon, caught, then released. This happened thirty or thirty-five times.

I held my breath, counting the steps back to Adé, and carefully charting the path in my mind. But then a boy stepped out of the shadows of a dilapidated building across the street with columns left behind by the English. He had on short pants, a ripped T-shirt with a faded Coca-Cola logo, and worn-out tennis shoes—the kind travelers often leave behind or give away before returning home, where new shoes could be bought easily and cheap. He started running, but the shoes were a few sizes too big and slowed his progress. He could not have been more than twelve or thirteen years old. The soldiers yelled at him in English, then Swahili, and then in a language I did not recognize. When he did not respond but kept on running, one of the mechanized men pulled the trigger. I watched the boy fall to the ground. I was the only other person on the street. The shooter tilted his gun to me, the witness, as his tank drove by. I wanted to vomit.

When I began to breathe again, I did not know what to do. I felt the butt of the gun against my cheek, and knew better than to cross the street. The tanks had passed. The boy was dead, bleeding out on the sidewalk. I made my way slowly back to our room, and found Adé waiting anxiously.

I walked in, and he jumped up. His face was overcome with fear. Where had I been? Another guest at the hotel, a Dutchman, had told him about the protests at the university. Troops had been sent in to quell the “disturbance.” I should
not
have been on the streets, he said, should
not
have left without him. I nodded and told him, shaking, about the boy, and he folded me into his arms
and held me, again. I felt all of his concern, but also a creeping numbness. I could not imagine a day when Adé would turn against me, but I could, for the first time, imagine something far worse: death, imprisonment, or cruelty at the hands of a foreign government. Dictatorship and secreted civil wars created a terrible isolation for the people who lived within their unfolding. I saw a hideous and surreal picture of reality with no escape. Adé would not mistreat me, but I had not considered the state. And suddenly I felt less than I had yesterday, and far less than I had the week before. I was losing something. I was going dark.