The Last Time They Met Read online

  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 the
ir 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?

  On the walls were framed Coca-Cola ads and severely posed photographs of family groupings. From a battery-operated record player crooned, improbably, an American twang: Put your sweet lips a little closer to the phone. Thomas was offered a glass of warm beer that he drank straight down. Mary laughed and poured him another. He tried not to look too surprised when she told him that she, too, was a poet, and that she had a degree in forensic medicine from the university at Kampala. She’d retreated to the family shamba, she explained, for the birth of her first child, who was then a month old. She asked him why he was in the country. He was in the country, he said, because Regina was, and Regina was in the country because she had a grant to study the psychological effects of sub-Saharan diseases on Kenyan children under ten years old. The grant was with UNICEF. From time to time, Thomas noticed, Ndegwa retreated to the back of the house to speak with men who had come especially to see him, and Thomas vaguely understood it had something to do with politics.

  —My husband says you are a wonderful poet.

  —Your husband is very kind.

  —In your country, writing poems is not dangerous work?

  —In my country, writing poems isn’t considered work.

  —In my country, such a thing is sometimes very dangerous. But you are not writing of my country?

  —No. I don’t know it well enough.

  —Ah, said Mary enigmatically, patting him on the knee. And you will not.

  Two sisters brought in a sufuria filled with pieces of burnt goat. A leg bone was sticking out. Ndegwa sliced the crispy black meat on a wooden table with a machete and passed bowls of the glistening goat around the room. Thomas held his plate in his lap until he watched Mary use her fingers. The grease on the rhinestone was fantastic.

  The eating was painful. Ndegwa presented Thomas with a bowl of choice morsels reserved for the guest of honor. He explained that these were the goat’s organs — the heart, lungs, liver and brain — and that they were sweet. To encourage Thomas, Ndegwa drank the raw blood which had been drained from the goat when it was slaughtered. Refusing the delicacies was not, Thomas already knew from having been in the country half a year, an option — not without embarrassment to himself and insult to Ndegwa. Thomas didn’t care whether he himself was embarrassed, but he guessed he didn’t want to insult his teacher. His gorge rose. He stuck his fingers into the pot, closed his eyes, and ate.

  Another African experience, he knew at once, that could never be described.

  After a time, Mary rose and said they must all excuse her because she was uncomfortable and needed to nurse her baby. Ndegwa laughed and added, Her breasts are so big, she is now a bent tree.

  The good-byes, Thomas remembered, had taken an hour.

  —Now you know where to find us, you will come again, Ndegwa said to Thomas when he was leaving.

  —Yes, thank you.

  —Don’t get scarce.

  —No. I won’t.

  —We will have two goats next time.

  —Perfect, Thomas said.

  * * *

  —When will the arrest be? Thomas asked Ndegwa at the café.

  —In a week? Two weeks? In five days? I do not know. Ndegwa flipped his hand back and forth.

  —Is a poem worth dying for?

  Ndegwa licked his lips. I am a symbol to many who are like me. I am a better symbol arrested, where my people can hear of me and read of me, than if I flee.

  Thomas nodded, trying to comprehend the political act. Trying to understand the reasoning of a man who would put himself and his family at risk for an idea. All through history men had died in droves for ideas. Whereas he couldn’t think of a single idea worth dying for.

  He wanted to tell Ndegwa that his work was too good, that it shouldn’t be sacrificed for politics. But who was he to say? In this country of so much suffering, who could afford the luxury of art?

  —Stay with Regina and me, Thomas said. They’ll never look for you in Karen.

  —We shall see, Ndegwa said. Noncommittal, having committed himself elsewhere. As good as arrested already.

  The big man stood. Thomas, shaken, rose with him. A feeling of helplessness overtook him. Tell me what I can do, Thomas said.

  Ndegwa looked away and then back again. You will go to visit my wife.

  —Yes, Thomas said. Of course.

  —This you will promise me.

  —Yes. And did he see then, on Ndegwa’s face, the tiniest flicker of fear?

  * * *

  Thomas paid for the beers and left the Thorn Tree. He felt dizzy and disoriented. It was the beer on an empty stomach. Or Ndegwa’s news. A man ap
proached him, naked but for a paper bag. The bag was slit up the sides to allow for legs, and the man was holding the two openings closed with his fists. He looked as though he were wearing diapers. His hair was dirty with bits of different-colored lint. He stopped in front of Thomas — the American, the easy mark. Thomas emptied his pockets into a pouch the man had slung around his neck.

  He needed to find Regina.

  He passed the street that led to the Hotel Gloria, where he and Regina had spent their first night in the country, not realizing it was a brothel. The sink had been stopped up with a brown matter he hadn’t wanted to investigate, and when they’d woken, they’d been covered with fleas. A woman was passing him now, carrying a child on her back, the baby’s eyes clouded with flies. Thomas needed a drink of water. Colors seemed louder now, more garish; sounds bolder and brighter than they’d been an hour ago. He remembered the first time he’d seen a long red trail of shiny ants and how he’d realized too late they were crawling up his leg. At Gil Gil, a naked woman had lain motionless on the asphalt paving of the courtyard. Naked men had hung from barred windows. They had spit at his feet. Why were so many without clothing in this country? The vision in his right eye was replacing itself with hundreds of bright moving dots. Not a migraine, please, he thought — not now. SCHOOLGIRL DIES AFTER CIRCUMCISION. He remembered the night express to Mombasa, the rhythm of the rails sexually intoxicating. He and Regina had shared a narrow bunk, and it had been a tender night between them, a kind of truce. He’d been reading Maurice, by E. M. Forster. Where had he left the book? He’d like to read it again. Kenyans hated homosexuals, never mentioned them, as though they simply didn’t exist. Rich was coming, and maybe Thomas would let him chew the twigs. What had his mother written? The gas lines were terrible. THREE AMERICANS BEHEADED. Would the car still be there? Or had he not paid enough? Pots and clothing were for sale in the street. A storefront window advertised a Cuisinart. Regina would be seriously worried now. He’d had Welsh rarebit yesterday at the Norfolk, and in his imagination he could still taste it. In reality, he could taste the Tusker. Words. They haunted him in the night. Once twenty lions had walked past him. He had stood frozen, at the side of the car, unable even to open the door to get in. Regina screaming silently from within. They’d gone up to Keekorok with a low battery and four bald tires. The gearshift had come off in his hand. Another time, on a safari, when everyone had left camp, he’d stayed behind to write. He’d been attacked by baboons, and had had to fend them off with a wooden spoon and a metal pot. WITCH DOCTOR HELD IN RUGBY FIX. MAN CAUGHT IN ZEBRA TRAP. At a party at the embassy, a woman in a white suit had taken him for a spy. The air in Karen tasted like champagne. It was even better in the Ngong Hills. He longed for their coolness, for the green of them. He leaned his head against the wall of a building, the cement hot and rough, not soothing. Regina would have the medicine in her purse. If only he could get to a quiet room. He remembered a cave with thousands of bats overhead, Regina falling to her knees, terrified. He’d pleaded with her to move, and in the end, he’d had to drag her out bodily. I am just all right. I have no bad luck. A pleasantry, not meant to be taken as truth. Ndegwa was having spectacularly bad luck. Or was he simply creating it? RAINS CAUSE HAVOC. POOR WATCH HOMES BULLDOZED. AMBULANCE FOUND FULL OF IVORY . Regina would be furious at first, angry to have been kept waiting. But she’d relent when she saw the migraine.