One Day I Will Write About This Place (18 page)

Over the years, I learned to look at her amiably. She filled me with a fake nostalgia that was exactly what I felt I should be feeling because a lot of poetry-­loving black people seemed to be spontaneously feeling this. I never again attempted to look beyond her costume.

I stand under her picture; I can see trails of our pencil marks, childish scribbles still visible under new coats of paint. She is younger than me now; I can see that she has girlishness about her. Her eyes are the artist’s only real success: they suggest mischief, serenity, vulnerability, and a weary wisdom. I find myself desiring her. And I am willing to admit that this could be, too, because she has started to look like it is funky to look somewhere in this new Zap Mama, Erykah Badu, Alek Wekky world.

I look up at the picture again. Then I see it. Ha!

Everything: the slight smile, the angle of her head and shoulders, the mild flirtation with the artist. I know you want me, I know something you don’t.

Mona Lisa. Nothing says otherwise. The truth is that I never saw the smile. Her thick lips were such a war between my intellect and my emotion. I never noticed the smile. The artist was painting “an African Mona Lisa.”

The woman’s expression is odd. In Kenya, you will see such an expression only in girls who went to private schools or were brought up in the richer suburbs of the larger towns. That look, that slight toying smile, could not have happened with an actual Nandi woman. The lips too. The mouth strives too hard for symmetry, to apologize for its thickness. That mouth is meant to break open like the flesh of a clapping Sunday.

…

I wake up early, and walk out of the gate and up the hill to catch a view of the lake and the town.

I am avoiding Baba. He has been gracious so far—­has said nothing, but a chat is looming. Clearly Mum has insisted on taking care of my situation. So, maybe he won’t say anything. I am racked with guilt. All that money wasted on my degree. He is about to retire. Chiqy is in boarding school now—­and will need to go to university.

We live in a house on the slopes of Menengai Crater. This used to be a whites-only suburb.

While I was reading all those distant English books as a child, the idea of spring made its way into my picture of my childhood environment, Milimani. We have no real spring—­we are on the equator. But for me, spring was every morning, dew and soft mists, and the lake still and blue in the distance, sometimes all pink with flamingos rippling with a breeze, and rising like leaves to whirl and circle in the sky. Autumn was September, when the jacaranda trees shed all their purple flowers and the short rains began—­and the idea of an autumn, of a spring, was also resident in the imagination of the English settlers who planned this leafy place, and thought of blooms and bees and White Highlands made into a new English countryside.

Old colonial homes like the one I was brought up in are the solid material matter of this town, pretending to be its complete beginning, and stubborn in our minds.

Yesterday Jimmy was dispatched—­by Mum for sure—­to take me for a long drive in his new banker’s car, and compassionately collect information.

“Do you want to talk?” he asked.

I did not know what to say.

He bought ice cream.

After a few awkward minutes, we drove out of town, and he introduced me to the woman he plans to marry. Carol.

“Don’t tell them yet,” he said.

In the first past we know, there are small gaseous memories of old, old people, the Sirikwa, some who lived at Hyrax Hill a mile or so away. They built irrigation canals at the escarpment I can see from here. Ten miles above us, on this hill, is Africa’s second-largest caldera, after Ngorongoro. There is a road to the summit, and from there you can see the massive saucer-­shaped crater, twelve by eight kilometers, five hundred meters deep, on its sheer cliffs. It was formed eight thousand years ago, after its last major eruption.

Over a hundred and twenty years ago, one of the decisive battles of a great war is said to have taken place here. For centuries the Maa military complex—­a cattle-­keeping civilization—­had dominated much of Kenya’s hinterland. As the cattle were the currency of trade for many Kenyan societies, including my own, the Gikuyu, the Maasai’s great herds made them the wealthiest society in the Rift Valley. They were our bank of protein. Because of this, most of Kenya’s towns are named by the Maasai. Nakuru means
dusty place.
Menengai is said to mean
place of corpses.

The British built their railways, roads, and satellites; then came the people and roads we built after Independence, on the same model, somewhat skewed and uncertain. Then as our parents served warm beer and oat porridge, the Jetsons arrived on television: slouching, gum chewing, marketing America.

And brewing inside this space, from fifty or so ethnic histories and angles, is Kenya—­a thing still unclear, picking here, marrying across, choosing there; stealing here, and there—­disemboweling that which came before, remaking it. Sometimes moving. Sometimes not. Some say all we do is turn, like rotisserie chicken, on the whims of our imperial presidents, Kenyatta and Moi. They run around the country all day, every day, to see whether we are browning well enough for supper.

I was about fourteen years old when Baba and I spent a night in a shabby old colonial hotel, the Devon, in Nairobi. I was all pimples and uncertainty. Things were awkward. Baba and I had never shared a hotel room on our own before.

He started a lecture on keeping the bathroom tidy; we talked about my maths grades, which were, as usual, abysmal.

I defended myself by saying, “If I had 10 percent in maths, and I am among the top five students, it means I did very well.”

We both laugh nervously. Then he frowned, and his lips got very managing director. I was sure there would be more to talk about, but not here. Home is the place where such battles are fought with traction, Mum invisibly deciding the parameters of the battle—­thrust, withdraw, attack, push all buttons.

Go nuclear.

Baba sat on his bed in his vest and read the paper for a self-conscious while, then stood. My face was, as usual, hidden behind a novel. Every movement was louder than it should have been. He then stood around awkwardly for the longest moment—­surely all of one minute.

Then he a-hemed and said “I think I will go out and play the slot machines”—­and I nodded, relieved, and he turned away, and this is the reason I will remember that day so clearly; his hand missed the doorknob, and he stumbled as he stepped out, this person I know never to be clumsy, and I can feel it as loud as an ocean in a shell, the way his body has always turned back to the trunk of his life—his work and family—­and done its duty, and now he found in a small shocked moment that he could not just cruise out, jacket over shoulder, whistling and free.

…

I don’t know how to explain my situation to them. I walk past the line of jacaranda trees that line government houses. I turn off the main road and follow the path, to avoid Baba’s morning drive to work. There is a small faded house here, right at a corner, with a large rocky garden that stretches downhill to border State House. It used to have a swimming pool, which is now gray and green and empty. It is one of several houses that were given to the children of Old Man Bommet, whose sister was married to the president.

A short gnarled old tree has twisted around and back on itself like a dog leaning to nibble an itch on its back; it has a rich brown bark, few leaves, and orange flowers that look like anemones. It must have been common in this area before memories of Surrey and Anglo-Bangalore changed the landscape in the 1930s: jacaranda and eucalyptus and straight stems, in straight lines. You can find this tree all over the wild parts of the crater forest. I don’t know its name.

There are stories about the rising jets of steam, that they are the ghosts of old Maasai warriors trying to make their way to heaven and being pulled back by the gravity of hell. For years there were stories about a giant fog-­colored umbrella that rises above the floor when it rains, and covers the crater, so the ground below remains dry. There are also stories, lots of them, about people who disappeared down the crater for days, and were found later, disoriented; they could not remember what happened.

The old pattern has reversed: power was in the hands of the cattle keepers two hundred years ago; now it is in the hands of the squatters, the subsistence farmers, the tillers. They adapted to the changing world faster. A hundred years ago, a surplus of grain would buy cattle. The Gikuyu would buy cattle from the Maasai. By 1920, any surplus was converted into cash, and the economy of the Maasai collapsed.

Our new home, a few hundred meters from the house where I was brought up, is on the last line before the blue gum forest that extends all the way to the rim of Menengai Crater.

I heard them come in last night, the
moran
(warriors), and their cattle. The strong smell of urine and dung flooded our house, and old throaty songs, and the cowbells. They sang the whole night, and for a while I could pretend that time had rolled back, and I sat among them, as a biblical nomad, or much as my great-­grandparents would have. I decide to spend some days traveling around, to avoid my parents, to follow
a road and think about things other than what is wrong with my life.

What a wonderful thing, I think, if it was possible to spend my life inhabiting the shapes and sounds and patterns of other people.

I’ve got a part-­time job. Driving around Central and Eastern provinces and getting farmers to start growing cotton again. I have been provided with a car and a driver. Baba and some friends have invested money buying an old government cotton ginnery, which is being privatized. He asks me if I want to do some agricultural extension work for them. I say yes. They are starting to have confidence in me. I have been helping Mum in her shop and running errands. I promised myself that I would not read any novels while I was sitting behind the counter in her small florist shop. Sometimes I dash across to the club and sit on the toilet for half an hour with a book and a cigarette, but mostly I have been present in the world. Last week, at breakfast, I was going on and on about some theory or other, and Baba burst out, “I don’t understand, I don’t understand, you are so intelligent, I don’t understand why you are so…”

Mum sent a sharp warning to him across the table, and he stood up and left. It’s good I am no longer an egg. So much better than the silence.

My colleague Kariuki and I are on the way to Mwingi town in a new, zippy Nissan pickup. The road to Masinga Dam is monotonous, and my mind has been taken over by bubblegum music, chewing away, trying to digest a vacuum.

That terrible song: “I donever reallywanna killthedragon…”

It zips around my mind like a demented fly, always a bit too fast to catch and smash. I try to start a conversation, but Kariuki is not talka­tive. He sits hunched over the steering wheel, his body tense, his face twisted into a grimace. He is usually quite relaxed when he isn’t driving, but cars seem to bring out a demon in him.

To be honest, Mwingi is not a place I want to visit. It is a new district, semi­arid, and there is nothing there that I have heard is worth seeing or doing, except eating goat. Apparently, according to the unofficial national goat meat quality charts, Mwingi goat is second after Siakago goat in flavor. We Kenyans like our goat. I am told some enterprising fellow from Texas started a goat ranch to service the ten thousand Kenyans living there. He is making a killing.

South African goat tastes terrible. Over the years in South Africa, I have driven past goats that stared at me with arrogance, chewing nonchalantly, and daring me to wield my knife.

It is payback time.

This is why we set out at six in the morning, hoping that we would be through with all possible bureaucracies by midday, after which we could get down to drinking beer and eating lots and lots of goat.

I have invested in a few sachets of Andrews Liver Salts.

I doze, and the sun is shining by the time I wake up. We are thirty kilometers from Mwingi town. There is a sign on one of the dusty roads that branches off from the highway, a beautifully drawn picture of a skinny red bird and a notice with an arrow: Gruyere.

I am curious, and decide to investigate. After all, I think to myself, it would be good to see what the cotton-growing situation is before going to the district agricultural office.

It takes us about twenty minutes on the dusty road to get to Gruyere. This part of Ukambani is really dry, full of hardy-­looking bushes and dust. Unlike in most places in Kenya, here people live far away from the roads, so one has the illusion that the area is sparsely populated. We are in a tiny village center. Three shops on each side, and in the middle a large quadrangle of beaten-­down dust on which three giant wood carvings of giraffes sit, waiting for transport to the curio markets of Nairobi. There doesn’t seem to be anybody about. We get out of the car and enter Gruyere, which turns out to be a pub.

It looks about as Swiss as one can be in Ukambani. A simply built structure with a concrete floor and simple furnishings, it nevertheless has finish—­nothing sticking out, everything symmetrical. I notice an ingenious beer cooler: a little cavern worked into the cement floor, where beer and sodas are cooled in water. This is a relief; getting a cold beer outside Nairobi is quite a challenge.

Kenyans love warm beer, even if it is boiling outside. Since I arrived in these parts, I have had concerned barmaids worrying that I will get pneumonia, or that the beer will go completely flat if it is left in the fridge for more than twenty minutes.

The owner walks in, burned tomato red, wearing a
kikoi
and nothing else. He welcomes us and I introduce myself and start to chat, but soon discover that he doesn’t speak English or Kiswahili. He is Swiss, and speaks only French and Kamba. My French is rusty, but it manages to get me a cold beer, served by his wife. She has skin the color of bitter chocolate. She is beautiful in the way only Kamba women can be, with baby-­soft skin, wide-­apart eyes, and an arrangement of features that seems permanently on the precipice of mischief.