Adé: A Love Story (11 page)

ALMOST A THOUSAND
dollars and three calls home to both of my parents for more cash later, Mugo finally told us that Adé would get his passport. We could pick it up, he said, in six weeks. Relief flooded our bodies, and we ran almost immediately to the train station. We could get to the blue hills without a passport, and see the Great Rift Valley from beds that folded down from the sides of a deluxe passenger car. We could find the Ngorongoro Crater and see buffalo and giraffes. We could go to the Serengeti and look out at the arid plains. We could even get to Arusha and Zanzibar, the island of spices, without a passport. We could leave Mugo and the dead boy on the street.

But the sound of the shot followed me. It was freezing inside the crater, and we had no clothes to keep us warm inside the tent we rented on the rim. It was startlingly beautiful, but we had no words and no warmth to express the majesty of what we saw. The Maasai were there, too, standing in groups and perpetual timelessness, staring at us but speaking only when I began buying their beaded jewelry, and even then, we did not understand each other. I ended up with bags of their creations—necklaces, belts, and pendants for friends back home—only to find a few days after
we left the crater that none of it could be worn. The smell of cow dung permeated the beads and the wire on which they were strung. The reddish grease the Maasai smeared on their bodies stained everything it touched. By the time we crossed over into Tanzania, I had to let go of all the beautiful jewelry because I could no longer breathe with it in my bag or on my body. I did not want to throw it away, so I left pieces of it at bus stops and restaurants, a sack of earrings on the train.

In Arusha, we searched for hours to find a guide who would take us into the Serengeti for the least amount of money. We found a man named Daniel, who was keen to talk to anyone who might listen to his story. His father had died and made him chief, but he did not want to be chief. Of his village or town or tribe I did not know, but I couldn’t blame him. In his jeans and T-shirt and cowboy hat, he looked frightfully out of place. Adé and I whispered about his plight as we counted our shillings. Was Daniel mentally unstable, or telling the truth?

Later, Daniel told us he wanted to be a writer. He had written a novel and wanted me to read it. There were poems in his pocket, dozens of them. He read a few of them aloud as the safari jeep trucked alongside enormous giraffes, and crouched near lions who looked at us with so little interest I wondered if they even saw us sitting before them. Were lions able to see human beings, or did they have some form of human-blindness?

And then again: the shot. I was standing up in the jeep as we bounced alongside hundreds of flamingoes when I took another bullet, this time to the head. The steel plate that opened the roof of the jeep, the thing that gave it a giant eye, had not been secured properly. We hit a bump and up it flew, a square piece of solid
steel, knocking me to black. I lost some moments and then returned, the strong, sturdy American, insisting I was fine. Daniel was beside himself with worry. There was me, and there was also his lack of insurance and his not wanting to be chief and the potential failure of his attempt to be something other than chief. It was all very complex for him.

For us, it was less so. I was fine, but needed to lie down. We could not afford a room at the fancy lodge in the heart of the Serengeti, but Daniel’s uncle worked there so we drove up, the uncle was located, and he showed us to an empty room used by workers who sometimes stayed at the lodge for months at a time. I slept. When I woke, my jaw hurt. I asked for aspirin, the kind in packets that mix into water and juice like sugar, the only type I could find since I arrived in Kenya. Adé found them for sale at the gift shop. He asked how many I wanted. I said ten, a dozen, two dozen, a lot.

Adé decided that Daniel had “the same kind of trouble as Halima,” which meant he was unstable,
kabisa,
not just lonely. We wondered again if Daniel was ever named chief of anything. Did his father even die? Adé said that sometimes families “threw children with mental problems away.” Maybe Daniel was one of those. I could not be decisive, but Adé was clear. He stroked my arm tenderly as I massaged the side of my face and jawbone. I loved the animals, especially the giraffes, with their graceful but awkward lope, but it was time to move on. We needed to get back to the water, to the sound of the call to prayer. We needed to be in our
kangas
and
kikois,
where things were simple and known. We left for the coast, and another island. Zanzibar.

I called home a week after we arrived on the new but reassuringly familiar island, to hear concern in my father’s voice. Where
had I been and why hadn’t I called in such a long time? I told him everything and nothing. The passport was in the works, and we had seen lions. The man I was to marry, my fiancé, was eating chapatis and drinking a cup of steaming, clove-rich chai. We had found a house by the ocean to stay in until the passport was ready. The man who owned the house said if Adé helped him paint the exterior, we could live there for free as long as we wanted.

I loved everything about the Zanzibar house—its lack of electricity, and the roar of the ocean just outside our window at night. It was at the end of a long road, and stood alone. Mugo’s glare, the image of his hand palming the succession of twenty-dollar bills, began to fade. The pain in my jaw subsided. I still heard the shot, but more faintly. Adé heard nothing but the sound of moving forward. Rice and
mchicha
sustained us, and so did the sun. It was hot in the day, blinding, then breezy and warm at night. The air was thick. Women wrapped rich blue pieces of indigo around their waists, and the conch shells tumbled from the sea like watermelons: huge, smooth, heavy. I picked them up when I walked along the beach at low tide, and rubbed their smooth hardness against my cheeks. One night, his hand on my belly, his face in my neck, Adé said that he wanted children, lots of children, and I laughed and said that I did, too, but only with him, always with him. In that house I remembered again why I was going to marry Adé. He was my future.

And then our time was up; the passport must be ready, it was time to go. We fell asleep that last night in the double hammock outside our bedroom door. The next morning Adé woke up perfectly rested, but I was covered with huge mosquito bites so red they looked like targets.

The shot, this time, a bite.

MUGO DELIVERED ON
his promise, or we got what we paid for, I couldn’t tell which, but the little booklet emblazoned with Adé’s name and picture was now safely tucked inside our suitcase, its blank pages waiting to be filled with the stamps of other, more exotic, gatekeepers. We had done the impossible. We had vanquished all comers. In Nairobi, a travel agent told me about a flight from Mombasa to New York with only one stop in Frankfurt. The plan now was to go home to see Nuru and Amina and Mumin and Aliyah, and everyone else whom we knew were waiting on Lamu, breathlessly, no doubt, for our safe return. We would proclaim our victory before flying across two continents and at least one vast ocean.

We took the morning bus out of Nairobi. I remember that the seats were red, and the windows covered in dust. We sat with a bag of oranges and a few cold Fantas. As the bus pulled out of the crumbling bus station, I rested my head on Adé’s shoulder and fell asleep. When I opened my eyes, I sensed the bus was moving too fast. A dull ache at the back of my head made me squint. My right eye twitched. I began rubbing my jaw. Adé saw the signs and brought out a little packet of aspirin to mix with the Fanta,
but by the time we reached Malindi, my headache was so brutal, so relentless, so devastating that I could not stand up. I told Adé in a whisper that I could not walk off the bus. He helped me to the door, but when it came time to step down I fell, and the sea of people waiting for loved ones and friends all moved to the side so that Adé could catch me, hold me, anything to keep me from tumbling to the ground.

There was shouting. One of Adé’s relatives appeared from nowhere, a cousin of his cousin, and the two of them walked me, one arm around each shoulder, my feet dragging, to a small house that let clean, inexpensive rooms. The man at the desk looked at me without emotion, judged the factors and pointed us to a room on the same floor. I collapsed into a bed with a green blanket. I felt Adé’s hand on my forehead, and heard the worry in his voice. He went to find a doctor, and left me alone in the room. The faint glow of the fluorescent lights in the hallway shone through the translucent glass of the transom above the door. I heard footsteps and a man’s voice calling a few times, but that was all. I trusted Adé, but I was also beyond fear. My bones were too heavy to care.

He came back with news that a doctor was coming to the hotel. This was unusual, but Adé had arranged it. We were back in his realm. When he spoke, things happened. Another cold stethoscope, more talking that I couldn’t understand. Then a blood heat rose in my forearms and began creeping slowly to my neck. I tried to get up, but the dizziness got the better of me. Adé’s cousin said his mother could boil the herbs used to treat malaria. The doctor said I should go to the local
hospitali;
I was too sick for herbs. He said it could be malaria, or something worse. I felt the heat spread across my face: first my cheeks, then my ears. My
feet tingled. A pain was coming on in my lower back. I looked at Adé and he looked at me, and the cousin looked at Adé, and Adé looked at the doctor. Then Adé started moving quickly, faster than I had ever seen him move before. He opened our bags and pulled out my
kangas
and toothbrush. He took my passport, shillings, traveler’s checks, and my sole credit card, and put them in the pouch around his ankle.

“It’s time to go to the hospital,
mpenzi.
I am going to find someone who can drive us. It is only a few miles. Not far.”

I nodded, turned my head to the side, and threw up all over the floor.

I could not walk. The light of day was like a dagger to my eyes. As we negotiated passageways, I felt people staring, asking what was wrong with me. Was I sick, drugged? Were the men helping me decent or not? Adé spoke to them quickly in Swahili as we progressed through successive challenges: the narrow hall, the slick steps, the closed doors, the crowded sidewalk, the broken handle of the car door, the seemingly endless drive, the haggled fare to the hospital on the outskirts of town.

And then finally, it was over. We had arrived. The effort it took to get up the steps to the entrance of the small one-story cement building was monstrous. The one nurse we found, holding forth behind a giant slab of counter like a butcher, looked as if she might be related to Mugo. She wore a huge cross around her neck, and I thought that she, too, might have to be bribed. She glared at me with the same disdain and superiority that we’d grown accustomed to in Nairobi, and spoke in English, my language, not Adé’s or, for that matter, her own.

“What are you bringing her here for? You know we don’t
have rooms here for
mzungu.
” I was the foreigner. And she was a relative of someone in the government. Things would not go smoothly.

Adé responded bitingly, in Swahili, shaming her into doing the right thing. We weren’t in Nairobi, he said, reminding her that it was she, not him, who was the minority in this town. The nurse sucked her teeth and slapped down a clipboard with forms. When he shifted his hip just the slightest bit to try and pick it up, I slipped from his arms and onto the floor. My kneecaps absorbed the fall. Sweat dripped off my chest. There were flies.

“Malaria, something else maybe,” she said, peering over the counter. “So how you going to be covering this cost? You her sugar daddy or what?”

Adé reached for my wallet and pulled out the credit card.

“We don’t take that here, you know. You’re going to have to find cash money.” She rubbed her fingers together. “Paper.”

I felt Adé growing angry. He began demanding things of her, but I lost track of what he was saying. His words were becoming muffled, as if I were hearing them from the bottom of a bright, blue pool. I saw the white of the nurse’s uniform, and the green and yellow leaves on the bushes outside the window. And then I let go.

I did not grab hold again until two days later, when I opened my eyes to see a nurse walking toward me with a needle she had just used on a patient lying inert in the bed next to mine. The row of beds beyond looked to be at least ten patients deep. I was alone. I located my belongings—a black shirt, my little embroidered bag—resting on a chair next to the bed. I was no longer on fire with fever, but my neck felt as if it were in a cast. I could not
right it; I could not look at the ceiling. Even the soft light of dusk coming through the slatted window coverings hurt my eyes. The nurse caught me searching for Adé.

“He’s not here. He said to tell you if you woke up that he’d be coming right back with food. He’s been waiting here for hours and hours, but once he saw what you’d be eating, he ran back to his cousin’s house to get you a proper plate of mash.”

I nodded as best I could. Tried to move the tongue in my mouth that felt as thick as five garden slugs, and equally dumb.

“The needle,” I managed. “What’s in it, and you’ve used it once already. Can I have a new one?” I looked at her, hoping for kindness. “Please?”

She shot me a glare. “Americans always worried about the needles, but we clean them. Didn’t you see me run the saline solution through after I gave the last injection?”

I asked again, this time to see a new sealed package and the needle coming out of it.

The nurse laughed at me and then started talking to herself. “This girl is about to die, and she’s worried about the needle. Unbelievable. She thinks because she’s in Africa she’s going to get AIDS from one of our needles, isn’t it?” She stood over me and jabbed the many-times-used steel point into my shoulder. “Dr. Simba is coming in the morning. You can talk to him about the needles, if you don’t like how we are taking care of business.”