A Change in Altitude Page 6

  Diana, tight-lipped, led them off the Ngong Hills. Arthur, Margaret noticed as they made a turn, was bringing up the rear.

  Later, there was talk of postponing the big climb. But Margaret was adamant. They would go. Diana insisted as well. “She’ll be fine,” she predicted. “Perfectly fine.”

  When she had returned to their own cottage, ants invaded Margaret’s dreams as they would a picnic lunch: the giant brown euphorbia tree outside her bedroom window seemed to be coming through the screen and poking her from time to time. Patrick gave her pills. The welts began to itch, and then to bleed when she scratched them. Patrick covered her with bandages to keep her from scratching the welts raw. At night, she was terrified by what might be under the bed. She wore only platform shoes and watched her feet incessantly when she began to venture out of the house. She thought to herself that she wouldn’t be able to see the summit of Mount Kenya because she wouldn’t dare take her eyes off the ground.

  On Wednesday night, when Margaret was, as Diana had predicted, perfectly fine, Patrick and she heard banging on the front door. Patrick grabbed a thick stick he kept in the closet. He told Margaret to go to the bedroom and lock the door, but she didn’t. How would Patrick survive if she locked him out? Patrick called through the door, and even Margaret could hear Diana’s voice. Diana stepped into the living room just as Margaret came around the corner. With Diana was Adhiambo, the children’s ayah, holding a cloth over her mouth and nose, trying in vain to cover her face.

  “She says she’s been raped,” Diana announced. One had only to look at the young African woman to know that something terrible had happened to her. Her blouse was torn, and her pink-and-red khanga had a long mud stain running from her ankle to her hip.

  “She came to us for help,” Diana said. “But I can’t have her in the house when the children wake up. I simply can’t. Not in the state she’s in now. I’d like to leave her here with you, if that’s all right. Well, it has to be all right. In the morning, James will walk her home and make sure her room is securely locked.”

  “Sure,” Margaret said, reaching out her hand to beckon Adhiambo in. Margaret stopped, aware of the terror Adhiambo might feel at a stranger’s touch. Or would a woman’s touch be welcome?

  Diana wiped her brow with the back of her arm. “Trouble comes in threes,” she said.

  It wasn’t until Margaret had shut the door that she wondered what number Diana was on.

  Adhiambo wouldn’t speak. Patrick wanted to get her to a hospital, but she shook her head vehemently when he suggested it. The cloth she was using to hide her face was bloody, and Margaret noticed a swelling at her eyebrow, nearly an egg. She gave Adhiambo a glass of water. Margaret wanted to ask her what had happened, but she already knew the woman wasn’t ready to talk to anyone. Patrick, frustrated, picked up the phone.

  “No,” Margaret told him, and he put it down.

  “At least let me take a look at her.”

  Margaret explained to Adhiambo that Patrick was a doctor and that he just wanted to check to see if she was all right. Again, Adhiambo shook her head and headed for the door.

  Margaret raced around and stood in front of her. “No one will touch you,” she said. She turned and backed through the living room, encouraging Adhiambo to follow her. Margaret urged the woman into the bedroom.

  “I will run you a bath,” Margaret said. Adhiambo stood still. There were small bloody smears where she had walked. Margaret saw the scene: the broken window, the bits of glass underfoot.

  “Before you get into the bath, please check your feet. You might have stepped on glass. Wait until the bleeding stops before you get in. If you need plasters for after, I have some in the medicine cabinet.”

  Margaret entered the bathroom and opened the taps in the tub. From a shelf, she took two fresh towels, which she set upon a dressing table. Before she let Adhiambo in, she found a set of clean underwear, a khanga, and a blouse. Adhiambo and Margaret were roughly the same size. She set the clothes on the dressing table as well. She nodded, and Adhiambo entered the bathroom. For a moment, Margaret wondered about suicide. She found Patrick’s razor and the pair of scissors in the cabinet and muttered something about needing them. The woman seemed too beaten down to have the energy to take her own life. Margaret left and shut the door.

  She stripped the bed and made it with clean sheets. Again, she took certain personal or harmful items of Patrick’s and hers from drawers and gave them to Patrick to stash elsewhere. She asked him to get out the air mattresses they had purchased for the climb and start blowing them up. Margaret sat at the edge of the bed, then nervously got off it to put her ear to the door. She heard no crying. Only the occasional swish of water. Margaret couldn’t even begin to imagine what the woman was thinking.

  When Adhiambo emerged in Margaret’s clothes, her hair wrapped in a towel, she was carrying her own dirtied clothing in a neat ball made by her blouse. Margaret held her hands out to take them, but Adhiambo quickly moved away from her. Instead, Margaret gestured to the bed. She put her hand on its taut blanket. Adhiambo nodded, unable to demur or refuse. She was beyond all niceties now.

  Before Margaret left, she turned down the bedspread, exposing the sheets. She had an image of Adhiambo lying on top of the blanket, trying to disturb the bed as little as possible. Already the woman was shivering. Margaret wanted her under the covers.

  When Margaret shut the door, Patrick was finishing with the second mattress. His face was red. He pinched the nozzle and took a breath. “This is going to be a bitch at higher altitudes,” he said. “Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea.”

  Margaret’s hands, always the first indication of shock, started to tremble.

  “You should have let me call for help,” he said.

  “She wouldn’t have gone.”

  “Maybe she’s really hurt. Internally. I could have examined her.”

  “You saw her. She almost left. Then what state would she be in? And where would she have gone?”

  “Fucking hell,” Patrick said.

  “We’ll let her sleep. In the morning James will come, and she’ll talk to him, I think. Then he’ll tell us what happened. At that point, we may be able to get her to go to a clinic.”

  “You think so?” he asked.

  “No. She’ll never accuse anyone. She’d be a pariah, perhaps ostracized from her family. You saw her face.”

  “Shamed.”

  “Yes, shamed. It isn’t like at home.”

  Patrick shook his head. “There,” he said when he had finished blowing up the second mattress. He collapsed onto his back.

  They unrolled the sleeping bags. They had no pillows. Patrick found their down jackets and punched them into pillows. Not a perfect arrangement, but good enough.

  “I have to pee,” Margaret said, “but I don’t want to disturb her. She might scream, seeing someone open the door.”

  “A bucket, then.”

  “Do we have a bucket?”

  “We have a cooking pot.”

  “I’m not using a cooking pot. I’ll have to go outside.”

  Margaret put on sandals. The welts were ugly, but they no longer itched. She was barely off the kitchen stoop when she squatted to one side. Dozens of moths, some as big as small birds, beat at the panes of glass in the door, trying to get to the kitchen light. When Margaret finished, she ran into the kitchen as if being chased. She extinguished the lamp. With the moon to guide her, she made her way to the makeshift beds. The sleeping bag was slippery and cool.

  “I meant to zip them together,” Patrick said. He reached out and touched her neck. She snaked her hand up from the sleeping bag and held his.

  “Diana said trouble comes in threes,” Margaret told him.

  “You believe that?”

  “No. Yes. Maybe.”

  “Then what number is this?”

  “From whose point of view?”

  “Diana’s. She’s the one who said it.”

  “I have no idea,” Marga
ret said. “Do the ants and Adhiambo make it two? Or does the plumbing fiasco, the ants, and Adhiambo make it three? Or does Diana have troubles I know nothing about?”

  “I’d love a back rub,” he said sleepily.

  “I can’t. You’re too far away.”

  “I can move closer.”

  “Good night, Patrick.”

  Margaret had advised sleep but couldn’t manage it herself. She no longer had fever dreams of ants and euphorbia trees, but she had wide-awake images of what Adhiambo had just gone through. She could picture the breaking of the glass, perhaps the beating down of a flimsy door. A drunken African—or had it been an Asian? a white?—had pleaded at first and then had stopped his pleading. As if he’d been refused a drink at the bar and now intended to swipe all the bottles from the shelf, he’d thrown Adhiambo to the floor. Would Adhiambo have screamed? Margaret thought not. Was she already ashamed? Would a scream be heard in the evening cacophony? Or worse, ignored?

  When Margaret woke in the morning, Adhiambo was sitting at the edge of the bed, her blouse-ball tucked under one arm. The bed had been perfectly made, and Margaret couldn’t tell if she had slept in it or not. For all Margaret knew, the woman had slept on the floor.

  “Good morning,” Margaret said, and Adhiambo nodded her head.

  “Are you okay?” Margaret asked.

  The woman didn’t respond, but neither did she try to hide her face. The egg over her eye had swollen and blackened. Her lip was cut but was no longer bleeding. Margaret wondered how many other bruises lay beneath the clothes. She tried not to think about the ultimate bruise.

  “Would you like some tea?” Margaret asked, and Adhiambo nodded.

  “Good. I’ll just use the bathroom a minute and put on my robe.”

  It occurred to Margaret that Adhiambo might be wondering about the unsightly red disks on her own arms and legs.

  Margaret slipped by Adhiambo to the bathroom and closed the door. Her own clean underpants were still neatly folded on the dresser. A flash of shame shot through Margaret for having even offered them to Adhiambo. To have presumed that level of intimacy would have offended the woman. Margaret recalled that African men wouldn’t touch women’s underwear. Maybe the same prohibition held for African women. And then Margaret noted that the hand towel, always on a ring by the sink, was missing. The bleeding must have been so bad that Adhiambo had needed a towel to stanch it. Margaret didn’t use sanitary napkins. Perhaps Patrick could get some at the duka as soon as it opened. Margaret searched the wastebasket and found three tiny shards of glass.

  Adhiambo would drink tea, but nothing else Margaret offered her seemed to have any appeal. Margaret tried bread and jam, then cereal, then eggs, then fruit. Adhiambo must still be in shock, Margaret thought. She wondered where James was, why he had not been sent to the cottage first thing in the morning. Margaret sat across from Adhiambo and tried to talk to her.

  Adhiambo took a great deal of sugar with her tea, and Margaret thought, Good. Something to allay the after-quakes of shock, something to keep her going. Margaret poured her another cup, into which Adhiambo added more sugar. Margaret glanced at the clock. Five to nine. Where the hell was James? He’d been up, as per his routine, since four thirty. Margaret heard Patrick, who had kept out of Adhiambo’s sight, shut the front door behind him. He was going for the pads now.

  “Adhiambo, I would really like to help you,” Margaret said.

  “I am just all right,” Adhiambo answered in a voice barely above a whisper.

  Was this, Margaret wondered, a translation of another phrase in Adhiambo’s tribal language? Margaret didn’t even know her tribe; she had never bothered to ask. Adhiambo had tucked her hair into the clean scarf Margaret had given her minutes ago. Her skin was dark brown, with hints of gray in the shadows. It wasn’t that she looked old; it was merely the shade of her skin, just as James’s was blue. Margaret wondered if the woman knew her own age or the month she was born. Many of the Africans Patrick had met at the hospital didn’t know their birth dates. They took the concept of “age-mate” seriously: a man or a woman who’d been born in the same year as oneself. But the actual date? “Is there a reason to know that?” they would ask, somewhat puzzled.

  “I am so sorry this happened to you,” Margaret said. Adhiambo’s face never moved, as if she hadn’t heard her.

  At nine thirty, when Margaret opened the door to James, she was angry. He apologized before she could say anything.

  “The memsahib is having me make the breakfast and do the washing up. Because Adhiambo is not there to help with the children, memsahib is in a calamity.”

  “Never mind,” Margaret said. “I’m glad you’re here. Adhiambo won’t talk to me. I think she’s ashamed.”

  “Oh yes,” James said, nodding. His pressed white shirt and French-blue cotton pants were impeccably clean, despite his chores. “She is very shamed.”

  Margaret didn’t know if he meant ashamed or shamed by others.

  “She’s in the kitchen. See if you can get her to eat something.”

  As James walked through to the kitchen, Margaret sat in a chair by the front door in order to give them privacy. It didn’t matter much anyway, since Margaret couldn’t understand a word they said to each other. Was Adhiambo a Luo as well?

  When James emerged from the kitchen, Margaret moved to the sofa and indicated a chair nearby. She was still in her robe; she hadn’t wanted to be dressing when James arrived, worried she might miss him altogether.

  “Adhiambo is saying that two men broke down her door and demanded pombe. She didn’t have the pombe. She tried to run away, but one of the men, he catches her. Both men are very drunk, and they rape her because they are angry.”

  “Both?”

  “Yes.” James shook his head, folded his hands, and let them hang between his legs.

  “Is she hurt? Internally?”

  James looked away, unwilling to discuss female matters. He knew, however, that Margaret wanted Adhiambo to see a doctor, so he was forced to answer her. “Not so much. She is just all right.”

  That maddening phrase again. Just all right.

  “How can she be? Two men?”

  James was silent for a long moment. “Adhiambo has two brothers in Kericho who will come and punish the two men. They will be well and truly beaten. They will be apologizing to her maybe this night.”

  “James, she can’t go back.”

  “Where else can she go? I will go with her and fix her door. I am borrowing some good tools from Mr. Arthur. Adhiambo says there are medicines….” He let his voice trail away.

  “Then I am going with you,” Margaret said. “I’m not letting her out of my house unless I can see for myself that she is just all right.”

  It was an empty threat, and James knew it. Both he and Adhiambo were perfectly capable of walking out the door without her.

  “No,” he said.

  “Then I will call the police and tell them she has been raped, and she will have to answer many questions and perhaps see a doctor. I will do this.”

  James looked quizzical. “Why would you do this? Punish her more than she is being punished?”

  Margaret thought about the Masai and the Kikuyu and bits of Patrick’s argument at the picnic in the Ngong Hills. She closed her eyes and shook her head, making it perfectly clear that she wouldn’t do what she had just threatened to do.

  James stood. “I am speaking to her,” he said.

  From the sofa, Margaret could hear a prolonged and heated argument in foreign syllables. When it was over, James came into the living room and nodded.

  “I’ll get dressed,” Margaret said.

  “First we will take a bus, and then we will walk. She is all right to walk, but it is a danger to you.”

  “Not in broad daylight,” Margaret said, heading for the bedroom.

  She heard Patrick return and speak to James for a few minutes. He came into the bedroom and put the box of sanitary napkins on the bed. He went to the doc
tor bag he kept under the bed and removed a tube of antibiotic cream and pills Margaret didn’t recognize. He poured the pills into packets. “Give her these,” he said. “The white ones are for fever, should she get one, and these yellow are for pain. One every six hours.”

  Margaret had on jeans and a long-sleeved blouse. She had wrapped another scarf over her head and under her chin, tossing the ends over her shoulders. She put on sneakers.

  “We have to walk,” Margaret explained. “I don’t want a parade of little boys running after us and shouting, ‘Mzungu, mzungu.’”

  “I’d rather we called a female doctor. You know Josie would come in an instant,” Patrick said. Josie was a colleague at the hospital.

  “I’d like to have her see a doctor, too,” Margaret acknowledged. “But she won’t. Patrick, she was raped by two men.”

  “Oh, Jesus Christ.”

  Margaret took the box of sanitary napkins and the medicines Patrick had given her and slipped them into her backpack. She added several hand towels.

  “It makes me hate African men,” Margaret said.

  “You can’t hate all African men,” Patrick pointed out.

  “I like James.”

  “There you go.”

  Patrick didn’t offer to accompany them or to escort Margaret back. He knew that negotiations had been completed. “Be careful,” he said.

  They took a bus and then walked single file, Adhiambo in front of Margaret, James and his toolbox behind. They followed a path that began at the end of a street and wound its way through bush and forest. Progress was slow because Adhiambo could not walk fast. Margaret searched the ground for ants and snakes and wished she’d worn her hiking boots instead.

  Climbing Mount Kenya. Only two days away. It seemed a remote and frivolous notion.

  They walked for twenty minutes. They stepped through a forest that separated one world from another. As they approached the edges of the shantytown, Adhiambo wrapped a second scarf Margaret had given her around her face to cover her mouth and chin, a gesture that caused Margaret to do the same. Margaret watched the ground, mimicking Adhiambo, who kept her eyes lowered. James quickly moved past them and took the lead.