下载掌阅APP，畅读海量书库
立即打开
A s we are driving out of Nairobi, through the Kikuyu reserves, we hear a rattle of gunfire and three African askari dart across the road in front of us.
“What is it?” I ask Nathaniel, who is pulling over on the side of the road. I can hear a woman screaming.
“A sweep maybe,” he says, bringing the jeep to a juddering halt. “The police have started making random searches.”
He switches off the ignition and we sit, listening. My heart is racing. “The reserves are a hotbed of discontent. They’ll be hoping to pick up any Mau Mau hiding here.”
The gunfire stops, and after a moment he opens his door, and I do the same.
“Aleela,” Kahiki says, putting out a hand to stop me.
“She’ll be OK,” Nathaniel says, slipping down onto the parched grass which grows on the side of the road. He has his camera in one hand. “We won’t go far.”
We walk toward the shouts, squinting into the glare of the sun. There is a market square up ahead, baskets overturned, vegetables rolling in the dust, and someone screaming, hysterical. Police jeeps are gathered on the verge. Five or six askari in khaki uniforms, with rifles, are herding men, women and children together. Nathaniel takes a few photographs, then walks over to a European officer and asks him some questions. My eyes fix on the girl who is shouting. She must be about my age, in a headscarf which has slipped back off her hair. Two African officers are blocking her from going forward and she is begging, screaming, trying to break through. “Give him to me!”
And then I see the baby sitting in the dust twenty feet from me, crying softly. He is small and brown, the same color as the earth, and too young to walk. It would take nothing for one of the askari to go back and pick him up, but they keep pushing the group back, and she is crying for the boy. I can see from the posture of the two Africans, from the way they let her bounce off them-between the butts of their rifles-that they find this a kind of spectacle. That they are enjoying the drama of it. Perhaps they are just baiting her, and will go back in a minute and pick up the boy. There is no reason to think that they won’t. Except I cannot watch what they are doing to her. There is something so awful, and so ugly, in their proving to this girl that she is unable to protect her child.
I walk into the square. The officer talking to Nathaniel is distracted-he hasn’t seen me. I pick up the baby-a bundle of warm, dry skin against mine-and for a moment he stops crying. I have barely walked two paces when the European officer shouts at me.
“Hey!” he calls out. “Put it down.”
“It’s her child,” I say, turning to face him. Nathaniel is standing next to him, watching.
“Put it down,” the officer says, swinging his gun at me, “or I’ll arrest you like the rest of them.”
“Lower your gun,” Nathaniel says in a sharp voice. I realize the officer is not much older than me, but he ignores Nathaniel and lifts his gun level with my stomach, and says very slowly, “Put-it-down.” And so I obey-just like that my courage fails me and I begin to place the child, crying, back on the ground.
Nathaniel closes a hand on the officer’s rifle, lifting the barrel so that it points to the sky. The officer shouts at him, backing up, but Nathaniel has his hand on the gun and the officer isn’t strong enough to wrest it away from him.
“Go on-” Nathaniel says to me, and I carry the child across the market square, under the eyes of the askari , my legs shaking underneath me. The boy sees his mother and begins crying for her, and she reaches out her hands for him, grabbing at his arms. “ Asante ,” she says, clutching the child to her, holding him away from the askari . “ Asante .”
Nathaniel lets go of the rifle and says to the officer, “The world is ugly enough without you pissing all over it.”
“YOU’VE GOT NERVE-” Nathaniel says, when we are back in the jeep and pulling out into the road, but I’m not sure it’s true. I would have put the child down if he hadn’t been there. I feel no satisfaction, only shame. I think we both feel it. Kahiki says nothing as we drive past, and I wonder what he is thinking. He is one of the few laborers on the farm who isn’t Kikuyu. He and his family aren’t directly affected by what we have witnessed here, but this surely touches him as well. I crane my head to see whether I can spot the woman with her child, but there are too many askari in the way.
“A goddamn circus,” Nathaniel says, almost to himself. He pulls a small silver flask from the side of the door, puts it between his legs and unscrews the lid. Then he tilts it to his lips and drinks.
“Do you think it will blow over?” I ask.
He laughs, softly. “I heard a Kikuyu once say that when a man steals your ox and kills it, you can forget. But when he steals your land-you never forget.”
“But the Europeans didn’t steal their land. There was no one at Kisima when my father came.”
He looks at me. That assessing glance again, that holds no blame, only a measuring of what I am. And caution-he does not want to say too much. “I said you shouldn’t get into politics with me.”
“I want to know what you think.”
“Your father might not want you to know what I think.” He takes another sip from the flask, sucking whiskey over his teeth. “Nor might Sara.”
“Who is Sara?” I ask.
He looks at me for a long moment, then turns his gaze back to the road and doesn’t say anything. I do not want to ask again. I do not want to seem more naive, more vulnerable than he already thinks I am. But the name stirs an unease inside me. It is the way he said it; the connection with my father.
We drive through the afternoon, through the small town of Nakuru, until the tarmac runs out and we are juddering along the rutted washboard of the track which will take us deep into the bush, to the very edge of the Rift Valley, though there is no indication yet of the plunging gorges on which the farm is precariously balanced.
Lush mountains rise up, punctured by flat plains where giraffe bend their patchwork heads to the tops of yellow-barked acacias. I spot a bull elephant, his body hidden in the undergrowth, his trunk looping up to pull down the branches of a tree, and a little later a troop of baboons fling themselves over the road in front of us, one huge male watching his troop go past before following behind them. We drive until the parched grasses turn green and the earth becomes soft. My heart soars. I begin to recognize the contours of the land, my mind feeling its way over an old blueprint. This is as familiar to me as breathing.
“The rains came two weeks ago,” Nathaniel says, swinging the steering wheel to avoid the ruts in the road, as we slip and slide over the track, splashing into deep puddles which spray our arms with brown spots.
The track deteriorates until, in the end, we get stuck in a slick of mud so implacable that we have to climb out. It sucks at my feet and I lose my plimsoll almost immediately and have to plunge my hand into the wet stickiness to retrieve it. Kahiki pulls two shovels from the boot of the jeep and he and Nathaniel begin to work at digging us out.
I climb up the track to higher ground. All around us is bush-as far as the eye can see. Thorny scrub, grass clearings and the occasional acacia tree casting its umbrella of shade. It would be hard for a stranger to distinguish this place from any other that we have driven through, but I have grown up here. I used to ride my pony down this track. It took the better half of the morning, and I know we are over an hour’s drive from the farm.
Everything is a luminescent green. In all the years I have been away, I have never seen anything as beautiful as the land that lies before me now. The sun beats down and I feel the mud shrink and dry against the skin on my calves until I can rub it off in flakes. There is not a sound, except for the liquid, dropping call of the doves. Between the trees I see the flickering white bob of a tail-a gazelle, and I breathe more easily: there are no lion lying here panting in the shade. Stillness settles over everything; the fears which have haunted me since leaving England-that my father might not want to see me, that home will be altered-slip away. I belong here; and this place is too wild, too remote for change.
I help Nathaniel and Kahiki roll stones under the wheels of the jeep, stamping them in close to the tires, then pull myself into the driver’s seat. They brace themselves to push but when I press the accelerator the engine roars, and I can feel the wheels spinning helplessly beneath me. We repeat the process over the next hour, but succeed only in digging the car deeper into the mud.
I climb down. Nathaniel leans against the back of the jeep, groaning, and lights a cigarette, holding out the pack to me. As we stand and smoke, a group of Kikuyu appear in the distance. Their bodies are slick and muscular, skin shining in the sun. “ Jambo ,” we call out, and they shout back, friendly and open. I do not know them-they are not from Kisima, but they push us rolling into motion, one of them running alongside as we speed away, to grab a packet of cigarettes from Nathaniel’s outstretched hand. We shout our thanks behind us and drive on, the can of soda pop I brought with me from Nairobi boiling in the heat, sticky against my legs.
We dip down a rutted track into a sea of green, lurching over stones. The jeep slips and slides until we are deep in the bush, branches scratching against the metal doors, releasing the sweet, dry fragrance of leleshwa . Antelope dart down the track in front of us. The road climbs, the ground falling away behind us to a view so vast and wide that the land appears endless. In the hazy distance I can see animals moving, the switch of a tail. Our windows are wound down, the road rattles on, and the soil, the damp taste of the earth, is in my mouth.
Then-just as the sun is sinking behind the trees in a pool of deep red light-I see the peeling white post that marks out my parents’ farm, shimmering in the dusk. The memories thicken, and my throat catches. Here is the track that I ran down so often to greet my father. The years drop away. It is just as it was in my dreams. Only the potholes in the track have taken on a different pattern. I lean out of the rolled-down window, the metal hot against my arm, and feel the warmth rising from the earth. Here is the old African olive tree I climbed as a child, its gnarled trunk thick and dark against the luminescent sky. I can see light glinting off water-the dam. Then-all of a sudden-we are here. The house-so long imagined-stands just as it did, the purple creeper is a little thicker perhaps, but otherwise the same. The two acacias which grow behind the house cast their long shadows over the ground, the evening light turning their branches to a deep yellow. How can something I have dreamed of for so long be so suddenly upon me? I realize I haven’t allowed myself to believe that I might ever come back, and only now am I giving in to the joy of it.
I step down from the jeep, the dusty, sun-baked earth warm beneath the soles of my feet. A jackal barks in the clear, cool evening light. I haven’t stood here since the moment I climbed into my parents’ car, onto my mother’s lap, so many years before. My throat is choked with emotion. She is so close to me now that I can almost hear her voice. I know from the hours spent staring at the handful of photographs my father sent me that the first few moments are when I will feel her presence the most; the house will soon lose its power to conjure the ghost of memory.
I see a tawny dog with black paws trotting toward us, head low, barking a warning.
“Juno?” I call, softly.
She stops for a moment, head cocked, then bounds forward, coiling herself between my legs, whining in excitement. She remembers me and I realize how much I have been hoping that she would. The door bursts open, and my father is walking toward me. “Look how tall you are,” he shouts, and I run to him and press my face-wet with tears-against his chest. I cannot meet his eye or look him in the face. There is too much emotion. But I am home, and he is here, beneath my hands, and all the absent bitterness of the last six years will be rolled away. And then-blinking through tears-I see a woman standing in the door behind him.