Dust (14 page)

Not blasphemy.

Bloody.

Blood had seemed to leak from too many holes there. A cut bled. Sunset bled. Sheep bled. Red mud roads bled. Sunset-sunrise bleeding. Oozing life, seeping death. The full moon bled on water.

She was not afraid of death. She had a list of her intimate dead, friends, people she once knew, beloved strangers. But she had also lived through an odd internecine war, seen bleeding headless bodies, bleeding bodiless heads, miscarried old love, watched practice fireworks of hope-to-be-better Kenya.

She had escaped to England from Kenya long before Kenya’s Independence Day. At Heathrow she almost flung herself on the tarmac in foaming glee. Home. Where death was wrapped in decorous packages—very well-mannered.

Now, glaring at the night, she snarls, “I’ll win.” She informs Kenya, “This one’s mine.”

Then.

Head over the sink, knees trembling, head pounding. The morphine wearing off into memories of crimson Nandi-flame-tree flowers lying crushed on earth roads. A smile. Even if she would not speak the name, she could write it.

Selene creeps over to a small blue desk.

Hospital notepaper, a faux fountain pen, and cramped fingers stretch out, stoking memory’s fire:

Darling Isaiah
,

There is a story behind every no, every maybe. Make of this what you will. One of the loveliest of patients here signs off his chemotherapy sessions by declaring, “When the wells are dry, men seek to drink at a mirage.” Keeps us laughing. This is a story about a dry well. If you look—I pray you don’t—you will find it close to a house of gargantuan pretensions, a pink folly. This is a small part of the story of the man who dreamed it, built it, and offered it to me: Hugh Bolton. You’ve idolized him as your father. I fled his desert, left him with his gift, for I had found you, and for you I would have forsaken my life
.

Hugh
.

We were as young as our generation could be in the sad season after the war when we met. We eloped eleven days later, certain, in the way of fools, that we had been created for one another. We sought adventure in blank-slate kingdoms where we owned the rules and would remake a country in our image. Your generation, son, so easily discards the burdens of history and its mind-the-gap strictures. For us, leaving was a bold act, and we left England, with its weary nostalgia for a past that had been burned to ash with our far too many war dead. Hugh and I skipped into a ship that was heading out to the Kenya Colony
.…

That year, 1950, Hugh and Selene had berthed in Mombasa. As they walked up the pier at Kilindini Harbour, a deluge of sights, scents, and sounds startled Selene. Stiff, she followed instructions. Half an hour later, on the boat rowing them ashore, laden with steamer trunks and luggage, she turned and stared at the ship, flapped at the cloud of insects, noticed that the sky was overcast, and thought:
Let’s go back, Hugh
. She turned to tell him. He was laughing; he touched her face and gestured widely. “We are home, my love, we’re home.”

On Mackinnon Square, the Union Jack fluttered. Later, the noontime train chugged with them over three hundred miles on a narrow-gauge track up to Nairobi. Selene retreated into nonengaged observation after the train stopped at the railway station. There, in the bustle of a pompous, gentrified swamp, she felt that everything and everyone existed for
the entertainment of this pulsating, living, breathing landscape.
It’s toying with us
, she thought.

It had started to rain.
Is this a sign?
It had been raining in Cambridgeshire when Hugh and Selene met. Because they were preoccupied with escaping the damp, their umbrellas had bumped and got entangled. They had exchanged umbrellas as they giggled. They swapped stories of origin. Hugh was a soldier who had skimmed through war’s amphitheater, a disgusted and detached witness. She was an Anglo-Indian—more Indian than Anglo, truth be told, but that had been streamlined by very English picnics, books, parties, and music, the latter made a torment by a mother who played “Flight of the Bumblebee” when Selene had been naughty. Old but suspect money, world travelers with lost secrets, a swarthy-skinned father obsessed with keeping his three daughters’ skins fair and lovely. On impulse, eleven days later, Selene and Hugh got married in a rained-out civil ceremony with a retired butler and cleaner as witnesses.

When Selene summoned the courage to take Hugh home and introduce him, Selene’s mother scrutinized his ginger hair, insipid features, a complexion that if he had been a woman would have rendered him an English rose. “Good choice,” her mother had said. “He is adequately English.” And even though she played “Flight of the Bumblebee” afterward, it was
con allegria
.

On a steam train traveling through the Kenyan landscape, she discovered pure air and light, a proliferation of life, and the might of the Rift Valley. Hugh and Selene got out in Naivasha and found their plot of land, with its view of a hippo-inhabited, bird-filled lake.

They smelled roasting calves at parties to which they had not yet been invited. They reveled in the sight of a lake of myriad moods around which assorted species gathered, with seasonal pastoralists bringing livestock down to drink. Vestiges of paradise.

There was so much to do. They needed a home. They needed to make money. They started by camping out, and laughed and danced, and made love under starlight next to lemon-green thorn trees within earshot of moaning hyenas. They built a temporary shelter and were found by the right kind of servants, who bowed at every turn of phrase.

Hugh started work on their five-bedroom stone bungalow. Selene researched horticultural options after she had ruled out long-haired sheep and Jersey cows. When the house was done, Hugh started to paint as he once did at the university. His watercolors were vibrant and defied lines to cavort on the canvases. Needlepoint was Selene’s skill, and the flowers that she wove were brilliant and fecund. Together, they studied the soil, experimenting with crops, failing, waiting for rain, digging and planting, and mobilizing human beings whose lives, dreams, and cultures were as far away from their own as universes can be. Loam, clay, sand. Blending soils. Planting grass, herbs, and flowers. Some took root. Hugh had an idea. They could become vintners. Selene agreed. So they ordered vines from Italy and South Africa. Hugh had hired a tractor with borrowed money and prepared the ground. They worked with fifteen shamba boys to plant vines. They waited.

The vines thrived.

Neighbors would call in to exclaim at the sproutings and plot their own wineries. They had already sized Hugh and Selene up and found them acceptable. An exhilarating beginning, full of hard work, experiments, dreams, plans, building, borrowing, and always starting again. Genial neighbors, the Thompsons: middle-class accents, plump, proper, Anglican, and polite. They had named their four children after animals, rivers, and trees: Topi, Oryx, Tana, and Acacia. They played backgammon, listened to Wagner, and wondered what other crops might take in this glorious land. Selene drank down glasses of champagne mixed with Guinness, and later, with Hugh, she laughed at the proper Thompsons and their untamed children.

After the rains, at their five-course dinner, Selene asked, “Wouldn’t it be lovely to have a child?”

Hugh had leapt across the table, knocking over the flower vase to land on her lap, his arms around her, clinging. “A son! My son!”

The first of Hugh’s “my”s.

Kenya was seeping into Hugh. His eyes had deepened, gone grayer, bolder, older. His cheeks were sunken, contoured, scarred, tinged with heat, his skin mottled. He laughed much louder, head thrown back.

Selene watched him.

Uncontained
.

In time, whatever Hugh desired, he touched and claimed.

The houseboy: my Kavirondo.

The Waliangulu hunter: my tracker.

The cook: my
mpishi
.

The all-purpose repairman: my Indian fundi.

The boatman: my Lamu oarsman.

The dead elephant: my trophy.

Kenya: my country.

Selene:
my wife
.

One day, Hugh told her, “Darling, James Thompson says he’ll introduce us to the Colfields over at the Muthaiga Country Club. They can present our names for membership.” He beamed at Selene.

No
, she prayed.

“Civilized company to keep, good for us,” said Hugh.

“Kenya,” declared Hugh one afternoon as he bounced into the house, returning from one of his spontaneous bush forays, and peeling off rain-dampened clothes, “Maasai. Means ‘ancient place of eternal purpose.’ ” He paused to point to an invisible space beyond the lake. “My Mkamba told me that ‘Kenia’ means gleaming substance. Like jewels, darling, though my tracker—odd chap—did contend that ‘Kenya’ was a word for ‘ostrich.’ But think, what a delectable convergence is our Kenya, dear, eternity glitters. As we shall.”

Yes, Hugh
.

Selene sought refuge in decorating the home, adding throws, changing wall colors, surrounded by the servants who kept the rhythm of the day ticking.

Mwihaki, the maid.

Karanja, the gardener.

Noormohamed, the head cook, whose shepherd’s pies were of legendary repute.

Lisabeta, the assistant cook.

Linus, the kitchen toto, who synchronized his moods to Selene’s signs of pleasure or displeasure.

Lazaro Agwaro, houseboy, who had been a signal man in Burma.

“Boy, what was Burma like?”

“Hard, memsahib.”

“What did you do?”

“Nothing good, memsahib.”

“What did you see?”

“Bad things, memsahib.”

Penina, ayah and housekeeper, employed in anticipation of children-to-come, was still underutilized.

Two Labradors.

One feral cat.

A mongoose.

One Sykes’s monkey.

A troop of colobus monkeys.

Several duikers.

Five giraffes.

And Hugh.

Selene started to call herself a
collector
. Picking up and fitting pieces and things to life. She also changed. Head tilted, eyes lucid, she would listen, even to concealed messages in tapping fingers, and inhale a truth, which she stored for later use, in her dreams.

An unexpected massive storm rode into Naivasha over Easter, three years later, expanding the lakeshore. It had started as a spitting, backlit gray cloud. It blasted the landscape for five weeks nonstop. Selene and Hugh waited, one of their infinite Kenya waitings. Hugh set up an easel on the porch facing the lake and imagined the temper of the storm in, over, within the lake, in fierce colors and shades. A column of vodka and gin bottles memorialized this interlude. Then they watched the vines rot. Some hardy stems loitered but eventually turned feral.

Uncontained
.

It should have been paradise. Selene had asked, “Hugh, what do we do now?” It was sensible to return to England.

“Start again!” said Hugh, guffawing. “Bloody good storm, what?”

Selene deflated.

He can no longer see the small things
.

Resolution. She would outwait this country.

The tempest unshackled Hugh, and he roamed deeper territories. Safari after safari, and an assortment of guns entered the house, as did
a parade of slaughtered creatures—heads, skins, tusks. All those things they had never needed until they came to Kenya.

Selene abhorred the look of dead animals. Hugh the predator made her nervous. She decided to stay behind in Naivasha to wait out Hugh’s hunts.

The first birth: a girl, at Nanyuki Cottage Hospital—a late-term miscarriage. Selene named her Elise, and when they had taken her away, she wondered how a mere turn in a footpath could lead to a woman lying on her back alone in a hospital bed staring at a stark white high-vaulted ceiling.

I’m becoming smaller
.

Hugh!
Selene called out before covering her mouth, crushing need into tears. Hugh was, as always now, somewhere else in Kenya. She had stopped asking where he was going, with whom and why. Selene checked herself out of the hospital. Traveled overnight back to Naivasha, where, the next day, Penina administered chicken soup and a green soup made of unknown ingredients, until her body recovered. Selene started to garden, planting dahlias. She tilled the land and purchased a pair of long-haired milk-producing goats. They thrived and produced more goats. Every night she dreamed of the stark, honest blast of an English winter.

Hugh came home hauling the tusks of four dead elephants. “Where’s the baby? What is it?”

“
She
died,” Selene says. “Tea, dear?”

“Thank you. Died? Oh, bugger!”

For five seconds Selene hoped Hugh would cry. He wrestled a torment, which puffed and then deflated his face, and said, “Was looking forward to raising a real Kenya lad. Must not wallow, though. We’ll try again.”

“Yes, dear. Scones?”

Refuge in caricature. Play-acting.

She was good at this.

Selene waited.

The ferment was not long in coming.

Restlessness.

She plucked news from the frothing landscape.

National happenings.

A death.

Mission-reject Lucas Pkiech in a battle with British forces.
Postwar dinis
. Hugh relished the phrase. Intimate details of battle, as if he had been there. “The color of blood drying in Kenya’s sun is more intense than at other battlegrounds, darling. Copper and something in between.”

Lovely
. Selene winced.
How do you know all this?
She clutched the battle scars of her womb, their empty bounty. Hugh mixed copper on his palette. Color of blood from a hemorrhaging miscarriage, one spectacle Hugh had missed.

The duke of Gloucester came and baptized Nairobi a city.

“Must go home,” she told Hugh.

“You
are
home, darling. Start a craft, get busy. Cheer up!”

“Must go home.” Selene’s arms clasped her body. Her voice sounded whiny, and Hugh turned his head, eyes slit, mouth firm.