Ahmed's Revenge (27 page)

“Should I dig up your brothers and sisters?” I said aloud.

The sound of my voice in the room was startling. When last I'd spoken, it was in farewell to that stunned quartet, and ever since then, all during my marathon cleaning, the intrusion of words would not have been welcome. The moment after I spoke I felt as if something had moved in the house.

“Who's there?” I asked, but, of course, there was no one. I was alone on my farm, just as I was alone in the world at large, with others passing through my life to visit, but with no one staying long. This, I understood, was practise for the years to come.

I stood and carried the tusk along with me as I locked the windows I'd cleaned, but when I got to the front door, though my intention was to lock it too, I somehow opened it and stepped outside, reaching back in to turn the generator off. Now I was in a natural darkness as complete as any human being had ever known. The stars were out and there was a moon, which looked at me through a squinting eye, but there was no artificial light, nothing from Narok and nothing from the house, and there was no lit fire anymore, by which I could sit to stir the memories of what this day had brought me or of what my earlier life had been.

I walked out to the mid-point between the house and the pond, thinking of the false nature not of man-made light anymore but of humans in the natural world. Suddenly I took Jules's jumper off, and then the rest of my clothes. I was the same colour as the moonlight, milky on the dark path, and since I was still holding the tusk in my hand, I raised it up and turned it until its shape conformed to that of the moon. It seemed a perfect fit, as if this man-made tusk could fill the hole in the sky, and I thought that if only I were tall enough and could place it there, then artifice would triumph and everything would turn truly dark and I would die.

When I put my arm back down and came to my normal senses once again, I looked toward the pond and was astonished to see a female elephant there. She was on the pond's far side and must have been there all along, since I hadn't heard her come. I must have been an odd vision, unclothed and glowing in my moonlit skin, for when the elephant saw my eyes her pinned-back ears came forward again, like kites dancing out, and then her hind legs bent and she turned on them, lunging into the bush behind her, crashing through the underbrush like a runaway lorry off a road. She'd run as soon as I'd noticed her—wasn't that strange? Was this the fear of a grieving mother at the sight of a grieving wife?

The surprise of seeing the elephant made me drop the little tusk, so I fell to my knees as soon as she was gone, oddly worried that I mightn't be able to find it again. And once I felt the coolness of the ground I stayed there for a while. I had a vision of the elephant before me, her living tusks dancing in the distance like two white Maasai gourds or like the moon unblocked of its ivory plug. I found the tusk beside me and held it tight, and then I let all my muscles go, stretching out, staring up, and feeling the earth beneath me, heavy and solid and wide. I will stay the whole night through, I thought, with only this unsharp tusk to protect me should trouble come my way. I thought of my father for a minute but chased him from my mind. I thought of Jules in his coffin on the back of that lorry with Detective Mubia's burned body by his side. I listened for the leaving elephant, but her sound was long gone, and when I looked at the sky, a dark cloud had covered the little moon, as if to protect it from any more meddling by me.

I was alone on the surface of the planet, the masthead of my ship, pushing into unchartered space. Suddenly I seemed to know that this was how Jules had felt too. Superimposed on my body I could feel his own, complete with its shredded arm and its wide-open, bullet-torn wound. I could see the land around me and the pond and the house and the dormitory, and I felt my body move and I knew that this was the agonised way in which Jules had moved only ten short nights before. I was at the exact spot where Jules had fallen, I knew it now, and the moon was as dark now as it was then, and I was as free of pain as Jules had been and as ambivalent about whether or not to go on. I could see it all, whether in my mind's eye or from the elevated height at which my husband still hovered, I do not know, but I was Jules on the ground with the little elephant's tusk suddenly stuck between my legs to prove it, not burrowing in this time but standing up tall like the carved phallus on a primitive doll. I could see that my breasts were flattened and that the light from a re-emerging moon made the muscles of my arms and legs look wrong, moving me manward and back again like an optical illusion, a creature designed through cataracts on the eyes of God.

The moment was strong and I gave in to it, unafraid and sure that from all this misery I was finally learning a universal truth of some kind, when abruptly I was just as sure that Jules had fled and the devil had come. Where before the breeze had cleansed me, now it was thick with the choking smell of feces and urine and burning flesh. It was as if I'd been captured by the evil in the night because I had not been watching for it, as if a blanket of hot and rancid air had been thrown over me to keep me warm.

I grabbed the tusk from its resting place and leapt to my feet and shouted “No!” And when I thrust the tusk at the devil's horrid head I so startled him that he jumped away, fell on his haunches, and twisted around, as the elephant had, to run. This devil had thought I was dead and was there to retrieve my soul. This devil was a big hyena, alert and hungry, come to sniff me out.

I snatched up the clothes I had worn and hurried back to the house, since the hyena's retreat might only be momentary. I closed the door and locked it and put my back to it and then I turned and pulled the shade down too. From the front room window, where I crouched and peeked, I could see the hyena again, standing where I had been, smelling the ground and laughing like Mr Smith, and looking at the house.

While the hyena was out there I didn't want to move, and the hyena was out there for a good long time. My eyes were near the bottom of the window, peering over the top of the sill, and then they were down a little, surfacing occasionally periscope style, and then they were watching the ceiling, for I was lying down, safe this time, across my spotless wooden floor. When the hyena left, probably because he'd forgotten why he'd come, I didn't know it, and it wasn't until I heard a knocking on the shaded front door that I knew anything at all. It was morning and when I looked out, naked but rested in my immaculate home, I found Ralph standing there.

Whatever had happened the night before, whether I had encountered my husband or only hallucinated my way into a nearly deadly meeting with a hungry animal, it was all gone now. Only ordinary worries were reflected in Ralph's glassy face and harried eyes.

“I've been cleaning here,” I said. “Give us a moment and I'll let you in.”

Ralph didn't move away from the window, so I did, slipping quickly into the same clothing I had worn the night before. And when I opened the door I told him to take off his shoes.

There was no dirt on Ralph's feet but he did as I asked and while he was doing it I stepped briefly onto the verandah again, to make sure that the hyena wasn't still hiding nearby. He wasn't, but my knickers were there, folded neatly on the top of a chair. Ralph saw me see them and shrugged.

“I was worried about you,” he told me. “I walked over from the main Narok-Nakuru road. Those things came tumbling up to meet me when I entered your yard.”

Ralph said the Cooleys had urged him to come back, so he'd asked a friend, a Cottar's Camp man, to drive his van for him, taking them on the rest of their safari and then bringing them back to Nairobi when it was done. He also said he saw Detective Mubia's station wagon, still on the Narok-Nakuru road, but a hollowed-out shell, burned far worse than his legs had been.

Ralph wanted me to be glad he was there, he wanted me to see ordinary human concern in his presence, and in the insistence of Dorothea and Michael and John that he come. I saw it, but it couldn't make me glad, and strangely, instead of turning me friendly, Ralph's presence turned me inward again. It made me remember Mr Smith and it re-engaged me in the puzzle of defeating him, of evening the score one last time. There were murderers and grave robbers in my world, yet civilised human beings wanted me to tell them I was fine. I was not fine. And, in a word, Ralph's kindness and the kindness of strangers on whom I would never lay eyes again continued to make me mad.

I asked Ralph to go into the dormitory room where Jules's clothing was stored, and when he came back out he was dressed for work. I tried to tell him that there was a solitary aspect to what I was about to do, that I needed him and was glad he was there, but that I wanted, one final time, to do the actual digging alone. Don't ask me why I felt that way, but it seemed imperative, the only thing to do. Like Detective Mubia before him, Ralph said that he would assist me. He would pull the charred logs of the fire away and keep my workplace clear.

In Jules's office there was one more rifle standing behind the door. It was single-shot, not much good, but I feared that Mr Smith might have left men behind to watch me, to spirit his goods away once I dug them up, and as ghoulish as Mr Smith himself could be, I didn't relish facing any of those men without him there to temper their moods.

“If anyone comes, shoot him,” I told Ralph, and Ralph nodded, taking the rifle and filling his pockets with shells. He then walked to the end of the lane, drove my farm lorry back into the yard, and followed me in it, across the increasingly busy ground.

Parts of the fire were still warm, so Ralph set the rifle down against the lone peach tree that gave our orchard its name, and used a shovel to spread the fire out. As I watched him I thought of Detective Mubia's legs, his own charred logs. Would he be able to walk on them when Mr Smith let him go? Would Mr Smith let him go at all?

When the logs were gone I dug under the fire, moving big shovelfuls of soil and sand away. Compared with the work of digging Jules's grave, this was easy. In ten minutes I was a foot down, and in ten more the tip of my shovel hit something wooden, making the same dull sound that the poachers' shovels had made. I'd intended to do a disrespectful, careless job, smashing the box open and yanking the contraband out, but as soon as I hit its top I knew I couldn't do that, because the wood felt thick and the shovel's blade was small. And though Jules had been satisfied with burying the contraband in a shallow grave, the box was far longer than the one he was in, so once I got to it I had to expand my digging, to perform a careful excavation for another long time.

I didn't have my watch on, but as the sun reached its apex Ralph found a tarpaulin and belts in the storage shed, and by attaching the belts to the lorry's hydraulic hoisting arm we were finally able to pull this second coffin out from under the blanket of ground. It was a monstrous kind of stillbirth—a box four feet wide and ten feet long, and of superior material and better craftsmanship than the one my husband occupied. It surfaced like a whale, clean and grey, leaving the dirt behind as if it were water. Seeing it made me pause, wretched in my soiled clothes. I told Ralph I wanted to get washed before opening the box, and when I went in the house again he stayed where he was, rifle loaded, and looked around.

Nothing was changed inside my house, no dust had settled on the surfaces of my tables and chairs. Even in our bedroom, where I went to take Jules's now-filthy jumper off, everything was so clean that there was nowhere I thought I could put dirty clothing. I was a Kenyan farming woman, so what was this new penchant, this desire I recently had for keeping everything so spotlessly clean? I didn't know, but as I took my dirty clothes into the bathroom with me, put them on the floor of the shower stall, and kneaded them with my feet, watching the water turn brown, I found myself thinking of next scrubbing the Land Rover.

Once I was dressed again, this time in a flowered skirt and white jersey, favourites of Jules's, I took the sodden clothing from the shower floor and ran out of the house with it, and around the side to the line. And when I went back to the orchard I at first got worried, because Ralph was gone. He wasn't at his post at the edge of the hill, and he wasn't leaning against the peach tree. But just before I began to shout I heard Ralph's voice, calling to me from the other side of the bluff, from over the edge of the hill.

“Nora,” he said. “Come down here, please. My God.”

Ralph's voice was strained, but it didn't have the urgency that his words seemed to call for, so though I went to the edge of the bluff, I went slowly, with no sense of purpose in my stride.

“What is it, Ralph?” I called.

“Nora, come down here,” he said again.

Had he been standing, I would have been able to read his face, but Ralph was crouched behind a stubby bush, examining something on the ground.

“I've brought a better tool,” I shouted, holding up the crowbar I had taken from the shed. “I am ready to go on.”

Maybe I sounded a little short, but I didn't care. I had my own schedule to follow, a big enough job to do without getting involved in whatever Ralph was up to. Ralph, however, stood up just then, letting me see him over the squat tree. “You need to come down here now,” he told me. He was only about twenty feet away, so I could see that his face was gaunt, its patience and calmness gone.

“What is it?” I asked. “Was there a kill last night?” Ralph was more experienced than I in such things. I expected a dead animal—considering his gravity, perhaps a cat, our resident leopard, choked on a lion's heart. What he had found, however, was nothing of the kind. Rather it was something long and thin and barren and alone. It was Julius Grant's left hand and arm, devoid of its flesh but still together, and with its wedding ring on.

“What an evil man he is!” Ralph hissed. “He has opened the coffin and left this here for you to find. Something barbaric to remember him by.”