In the Belly of the Elephant (38 page)

Don wiped his forehead with a hanky and smiled. “Oh well, it was worth a try. I’m glad you came.” He shrugged. “If you change your mind, let me know.”

I didn’t think I would, but who knew?

I gave Don a hug. He grinned. Another goodbye. I walked through the glass doors, across another stretch of tarmac, and onto another plane.

Chapter 39

A Circle of Kerosene Light

September/Shawwal

Back on the runway of Kenyatta International Airport, I stepped out of the plane into the cool of 5,500 feet. The air smelled of flowers and dried the last of Mogadishu’s dampness from my clothes. As I descended the stairway, my feet grew lighter with each step. Tricia and Bob waved from behind a high chain-link fence. They were holding hands and smiling.

The tarmac warmed the soles of my feet through my sandals. Inside the terminal, I approached a customs agent who glanced at my passport and smiled, “Welcome to Kenya.”

Amidst the noise and bustle of the baggage claim area, scenes from Somalia kept creeping back—grim, hopeless faces, soldiers and guns in Mogadishu’s streets and markets, refugees, imminent war. Darkness and damp squeezed into my throat. I turned my passport in my hands, ran my finger over the gold embossed eagle that clutched arrows in one talon and an olive branch in the other. Inside, on the third page, was my visa to Somalia with the footprint of an exit stamp next to it. My ticket out of prison. And for the first time, really, the
first
time, I understood. A current shivered to the end of each and every nerve.

Somalia, Beirut, Soweto, Afghanistan—there, but for the grace of God, went I. I possessed freedom not because I had worked for it as my ancestors had, or risked imprisonment or death. I possessed freedom simply by the grace of where I had been born. Unlike the refugees of Coreoli, unlike James, Gnalima, Laya, and Nassuru, when wars broke out, floods destroyed a season of crops, or despots ruled by gunpoint, I could get on a plane. I could fly away from the bloodbaths of Liberia, the poverty of Upper Volta, the sorrow of Somalia.

The randomness of who was born free, who was born oppressed, rich, poor, loved, or abused, was so utterly and profoundly unfair. The world of Africa teeming around me, I bowed my head. But I could not make the injustice go away. I could not imagine it around a bend or over a waterfall. So, for that moment, I closed my eyes in gratitude for who I was, simply by the luck of the draw, and thanked the spirits of my ancestors.

I gripped my passport and tucked it into the pouch beneath the waistband of my pants, then pressed the crescent moon and star against my skin. It was time to go home. There would be time to gather myself together, to become stronger. And there would be time again, to come back. I picked up my backpack, breezed through customs, and exited into bright sunshine and a sky full of clouds so high and white my eyes watered.

My plane is about to take off. I still have no ticket; my luggage is still lost. Out the airport window, the lake winks and shimmers in the sun. I turn and walk out the airport door onto the end of a dock. The same tall man is on the boat, waiting. I walk down the dock and step onto the boat. The boat casts off and catches a current out onto the wide expanse of the water.

The warble of a bird awakened me, the distant howl of a monkey, soft Kikuyu voices alongside the crackle of a fire. I lay in my sleeping bag with my eyes closed, surrounded by the sounds of dawn in a campground on the Serengeti. I remembered the dream and decided then that when I got home, I would track down Steve. Like Laya, Steve had loved me unconditionally; had believed me to be a goddess just as I was. And I had left him.

I pointed out to you the moon and all you saw was my finger.

I had grown up some the years we had not seen each other. I had trusted to
ubungqotsho
. Maybe he had, too.

Scratching and a breathy
hoo hoo
came from just outside the tent. Slowly, I unzipped the canvas flap, peeked out, and met the eyes of a small monkey with a long tail. The monkey picked at tufts of grass, watching me with quick jerks of its head. Five other “camp” monkeys strolled the grounds, inspecting other tents. The Kikuyu cook clapped his hands and sent the monkeys scurrying. The last and largest monkey shook a limp hand at the cook as he knuckled his way to the trees.

I slipped on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, soft from wear and just the right amount of dirt, and crawled out of the tent. The rising sun painted a thicket of thorn trees with salmon colored light. The camp monkeys trouped into the branches of the trees and screeched at all of us to get our lazy butts out of bed so they could ransack our tents while we went on safari.

Bob crawled out of the tent next to mine stretched, and scratched his tangled mop of hair.

Mbulu, the cook, handed us two mugs of steaming coffee.

Bob and I took our coffee and sat on a log by the fire.

You know what they say about the glories of coffee on a crisp morning in front of a campfire. Take that and add freshly brewed Kenyan coffee and a front-row view of the plains and hills that formed the cradle of humankind, and you have perfection.

“Did you hear the lion roaring last night?” Bob cupped his hands around his mug. I nodded. “Sounded pretty close.”

I had not yet seen a lion, and wasn’t sure if I wanted to, not up close anyway. Don’s story about the lion, the wolf, and the jackal came to mind. Tricia shuffled up and bent to warm her hands at the fire.

“Those damned noisy monkeys.” She yawned. “Where’d you get the coffee?”

Mbulu brought over a cup, smiling.

“
Asante
,” Tricia said and sat. She blew the steam from the top of her mug. “Did you hear that lion last night?”

Bob and I nodded.

Tricia sipped her coffee then yawned again. I told them the story about the lion, the jackal, and the wolf.

“I’m glad you’re not taking that job,” Tricia said. “I’m assuming this means you’re coming home now.”

I saw myself in Aunt Nonnie’s kitchen, at a table surrounded by family, eating a supper of baked ham, scalloped potatoes, and mustard pickles.

“Think Dad will let me in the house?”

“I’m sure he will.” She paused. “Though, I wouldn’t be telling stories about Drabo anytime soon.”

“Who’s Drabo?” Bob looked from Tricia to me.

I shook my head, imagining the look on everyone’s face if they knew. “Nothing will have changed there.”

“Maybe not, but you have and I have. And Bob.”

I told Bob who Drabo was. He raised an eyebrow and nodded.

Kisu whistled and motioned us toward the van. It was 6 am, time to head out on
safari
.

We drove out of camp and turned north toward the Sekenani Gate where we entered a Masai village. A group of women with shaved heads were dressed in bright red cloth and wide collars of multicolored beads. A yellow dog with Rocky’s pointed nose and brown eyes sat in the shade of a hut. The same kind of yellow dog who had kept me company through so many solitary sunsets. Who chased chickens and gave me eight puppies. Several small boys ran past and the dog trotted off.

We left the village and climbed a hill along a dirt track.

Dikdiks raised their delicate antelope heads above the grass. Baboons strolled among outcroppings of thorn trees, turning to watch as we passed. We drove by ostriches and hyenas and caught sight of warthogs at the edges of bushy areas. All of them in family groups, each watching out for the others.

A trio of buzzards flew in a high-altitude circle. Kisu drove the van in the direction of the vultures until we reached a solitary tree. A pride of lions lounged in a lazy circle around the gutted carcass of a zebra. As the van drew near, I counted five female lions and three cubs. Two of the cubs scampered around a lioness, climbing on her back and pestering her until she sent them tumbling with a swipe of her paw. The lionesses watched the van approach with bored looks, as though we were just another animal on the food chain they were too full to bother with.

The van stopped ten feet from the pride. A cloud of flies buzzed from the torn body of the zebra to the blood-crusted muzzles of the lions. The grim reapers of the Serengeti. Adrenaline pumped through me like flushed water through plumbing. People weren’t meant to be this close to lions, unless, of course, they were lunch.

Despite the dry air of Masai Mara, sweat seeped from my palms. The lionesses watched us, hypnotizing me with their golden eyes. Here was death, quiet and watchful in the day, alert and deadly at night. But they were beautiful and proud.

What would the Serengeti be without the lion? Though certainly more beautiful and more frightening, when it came to death, was the lion really any different from meningitis or a gas leak? The lion killed to live. Meningitis used the body to reproduce, evolve, and spread. A gas leak was just a plain tragic accident. None of them were malicious acts, just three things in nature that did the job.

Do you think you are the only one who has lost someone to death?

It was Drabo’s voice inside my head.

People die every day, even people we love. The rest of us live.

Drabo had tried to tell me. Hamidou had shown me. Death by natural causes or by accident was not an evil creature
.

Foolish Miss Soosan, thinking that by blowing, she could chase away death.

Sometimes it could be chased away by a string, or by a necklace of bone and gold. Sometimes by vaccinations, sometimes by rehydration fluid. The little girl in Liberia could have lived had we given her fluid early on, had her mother boiled her water, had she been better nourished. Some death should come later than sooner. But we cannot stop it altogether. Luc had been a healthy baby, but there was no vaccination against meningitis. His death could not have been prevented anymore than Lily’s could have. How could she have known she had a gas leak?

Africa had taught me there were two kinds of death. There was man-made death, the evil kind that haunted Somalia. That death, I would never accept. Then there was death as part of life. The kind of death Foequellie and Dori had shown me. The kind that Drabo and Hamidou had understood and accepted.

Kisu drove off slowly, then accelerated over the dirt path, across the plain. I watched the lions blur until they blended into the grasslands, trees, and distant mountains.

Back at camp, after a late-morning breakfast of scrambled eggs, bacon, and bread, Tricia crawled back into her tent to take a nap. Bob and I walked the perimeter of the campground and found a shady spot under the umbrella of a thorn tree’s branches. I crouched at the base of the trunk.

The cool of morning was long gone. The camp monkeys had disappeared. A heavy quiet grew with the heat of the day, broken only by the chirping of cicadas.

Bob sat on a broken log. You’ve liked it here, living in Africa.”

I turned to Bob. His brown eyes were soft and kind. I wanted to be able to explain. I wanted him to understand five years of loneliness, heat, sickness, laughter, death, hard work, and love. But how do you sum up something like that? How could someone who had never seen Foequellie, who had never been to Dori even begin to understand?

“Dori was a good place. A true place.”

“But not a place you could stay?”

I shook my head. “Do you know, I haven’t lived in one place longer than two years since I left home at eighteen? Wandering around for eleven years. I liked it up until a few years ago.”

“Is that why you’re not taking the job in Somalia?”

“Yeah, partly. But mostly, I’m just tired. But I feel bad about it, like I’m abandoning everyone I’ve known in Africa.” I took in a deep breath, then laughed sadly. “I still believe it’s good work, that we have to try.”

A breeze blew off the plains and the tree branches sighed.

Bob picked a stalk of grass. “You can always come back.” He chewed the end. “You don’t always have to pick the hardest job, you know. There’s all kinds of work to be done. There’s nothing wrong with starting with the people closest to you.”

Mom, Dad, my aunts and uncles, Republicans, Democrats, Americans. “It also helps to stay in one place long enough not to have to panic about getting things done.” Bob stared off toward the horizon. “You know, longer than two years, maybe.”

I stared at Bob as goose bumps rose along my arms. Like the old
marabou
.

He has lived in that very spot for many years. It is his place.

I saw the fields of Idaho, the land my grandfather had homesteaded. The place where my soul lived. I had been looking so hard for a place to belong, when what I needed to do was sit down in one place
long
enough to
be
.

Small birds peeped from a nearby copse of bushes, music so sweet it curled around my heart and brought tears to my eyes.

Like the people of Foequellie whose ancestor spirits lived in the town cottonwood tree, like the people of Dori and Sambonaye, I would return to the place where my ancestors lived, preserve and pass on its stories, accept its people and their imperfections, ride through its political and natural disasters, and sit down long enough to make it into a place where my heart could stay.

In the story of Elephant and Spirit Rain, out of stubbornness and pride, Elephant died rather than ask Rain to return. I wouldn’t wait that long.

Accept the rain as it comes and people as they are.

After all, couldn’t a house be built in the middle of just about any road?

*

By afternoon, clouds had gathered over the western horizon sending distant rumbling over the plains. Sheets of rain fell as gray lines against the sky.

We spent late afternoon cruising the dirt paths of Masai Mara. Herds of elephants splashed dirt over their backs, and a black rhino, a
real
one, ran and snorted alongside the van. Giraffes galloped in slow motion. It was a place of such immensity and sheer beauty, my heart expanded with it.

Back at the campsite, as the sun set, Mbulu prepared the evening meal over a large fire. Cutlery and plates lay in precise rows along the wooden dining table. I stood in line behind Tricia and held out my plate for grilled steak, potatoes, and spoonfuls of cabbage slaw. Over dinner, I looked down the long table at the shared food and the laughing faces and thought of Laya, Aissatou, Issa, Hama, and Ousmann.