Dreams from My Father (40 page)

I tossed a stick into the fire. “Attitudes aren’t so different in America,” I told Francis.

“You are probably right,” he said. “But you see, a rich country like America can perhaps afford to be stupid.”

At that moment, two Masai approached the fire. Francis welcomed them, and as they sat down on one of the benches, he explained that they would provide security during the night. They were quiet, handsome men, their high cheekbones accentuated by the fire, their lean limbs jutting out of their blood-red
shukas,
their spears stuck into the ground before them, casting long shadows toward the trees. One of them, who said his name was Wilson, spoke Swahili, and he told us that he lived in a
boma
a few miles to the east. His silent companion began to pan the darkness with the beam of his flashlight, and Auma asked if the camp had ever been attacked by animals. Wilson grinned.

“Nothing serious,” he said. “But if you have to go to the bathroom at night, you should call one of us to go with you.”

Francis began to question the men about the movement of various animals, and I drifted away from the fire to glance up at the stars. It had been years since I’d seen them like this; away from the lights of the city, they were thick and round and bright as jewels. I noticed a patch of haze in the otherwise clear sky and stepped farther away from the fire, thinking perhaps it was the smoke, then deciding that it must be a cloud. I was wondering why the cloud hadn’t moved when I heard the sound of footsteps behind me.

“I believe that’s the Milky Way,” Mr. Wilkerson said, looking up at the sky.

“No kidding.”

He held up his hand and traced out the constellations for me, the points of the Southern Cross. He was a slight, soft-spoken man with round glasses and pasty blond hair. Initially I had guessed he spent his life indoors, an accountant or professor. I noticed, though, as the day had passed, that he possessed all sorts of practical knowledge, the kinds of things I had never got around to knowing but wished that I had. He could talk at length with Francis about Land Rover engines, had his tent up before I drove in my first stake, and seemed to know the name of every bird and every tree that we saw.

I wasn’t surprised, then, when he told me that he had spent his childhood in Kenya, on a tea plantation in the White Highlands. He seemed reluctant to talk about the past; he said only that his family had sold the land after independence and had moved back to England, to settle in a quiet suburb of London. He had gone to medical school, then practiced with the National Health Service in Liverpool, where he had met his wife, a psychiatrist. After a few years, he had convinced her to return with him to Africa. They had decided against living in Kenya, where there was a surplus of doctors relative to the rest of the continent, and instead settled on Malawi, where they both had worked under government contract for the past five years.

“I oversee eight doctors for a region with a population of half a million,” he told me now. “We never have enough supplies—at least half of what the government purchases ends up on the black market. So we can only focus on the basic, which in Africa is really what’s needed anyway. People die from all sorts of preventable disease. Dysentery. Chicken pox. And now AIDS—the infection rate in some villages has reached fifty percent. It can be quite maddening.”

The stories were grim, but as he continued to tell me the tasks of his life—digging wells, training outreach workers to inoculate children, distributing condoms—he seemed neither cynical nor sentimental. I asked him why he thought he had come back to Africa and he answered without a pause, as if he’d heard the question many times.

“It’s my home, I suppose. The people, the land …” He took off his glasses and wiped them with a handkerchief. “It’s funny, you know. Once you’ve lived here for a time, the life in England seems terribly cramped. The British have so much more, but seem to enjoy things less. I felt a foreigner there.”

He put his glasses back on and shrugged. “Of course, I know that in the long run I need to be replaced. That’s part of my job—making myself unnecessary. The Malawian doctors I work with are excellent, really. Competent. Dedicated. If we could just build a training hospital, some decent facilities, we could triple their number in no time. And then …”

“And then?”

He turned toward the campfire, and I thought his voice began to waver. “Perhaps I can never call this place home,” he said. “Sins of the father, you know. I’ve learned to accept that.” He paused for a moment, then looked at me.

“I do love this place, though,” he said before walking back to his tent.

Dawn. To the east, the sky lightens above a black grove of trees, deep blue, then orange, then creamy yellow. The clouds lose their purple tint slowly, then dissipate, leaving behind a single star. As we pull out of camp, we see a caravan of giraffe, their long necks at a common slant, seemingly black before the rising red sun, strange markings against an ancient sky.

It was like that for the rest of the day, as if I were seeing as a child once again, the world a pop-up book, a fable, a painting by Rousseau. A pride of lions, yawning in the broken grass. Buffalo in the marshes, their horns like cheap wigs, tick birds scavenging off their mudcrusted backs. Hippos in the shallow riverbeds, pink eyes and nostrils like marbles bobbing on the water’s surface. Elephants fanning their vegetable ears.

And most of all the stillness, a silence to match the elements. At twilight, not far from our camp, we came upon a tribe of hyenas feeding on the carcass of a wildebeest. In the dying orange light they looked like demon dogs, their eyes like clumps of black coal, their chins dripping with blood. Beside them, a row of vultures waited with stern, patient gazes, hopping away like hunchbacks whenever one of the hyenas got too close. It was a savage scene, and we stayed there for a long time, watching life feed on itself, the silence interrupted only by the crack of bone or the rush of wind, or the hard thump of a vulture’s wings as it strained to lift itself into the current, until it finally found the higher air and those long and graceful wings became motionless and still like the rest. And I thought to myself: This is what Creation looked like. The same stillness, the same crunching of bone. There in the dusk, over that hill, I imagined the first man stepping forward, naked and rough-skinned, grasping a chunk of flint in his clumsy hand, no words yet for the fear, the anticipation, the awe he feels at the sky, the glimmering knowledge of his own death. If only we could remember that first common step, that first common word—that time before Babel.

At night, after dinner, we spoke further with our Masai guardsmen. Wilson told us that both he and his friend had recently been
moran,
members of the bachelor class of young warriors who were at the center of the Masai legend. They had each killed a lion to prove their manhood, had participated in numerous cattle raids. But now there were no wars, and even cattle raids had become complicated—only last year, another friend had been shot by a Kikuyu rancher. Wilson had finally decided that being a
moran
was a waste of time. He had gone to Nairobi in search of work, but he had little schooling and had ended up as a security guard at a bank. The boredom drove him crazy, and eventually he had returned to the valley to marry and tend to his cattle. Recently one of the cattle had been killed by a lion, and although it was illegal now, he and four others had hunted the lion into the preserve.

“How do you kill a lion?” I asked.

“Five men surround it and throw their spears,” Wilson said. “The lion will choose one man to pounce. That man, he curls under his shield while the other four finish the job.”

“It sounds dangerous,” I said stupidly.

Wilson shrugged. “Usually there are only scratches. But sometimes only four will come back.”

The man didn’t sound like he was boasting—more like a mechanic trying to explain a difficult repair. Perhaps it was that nonchalance that caused Auma to ask him where the Masai thought a man went after he died. At first, Wilson didn’t seem to understand the question, but eventually he smiled and began shaking his head.

“This is not a Masai belief,” he said, almost laughing, “this life after you die. After you die, you are nothing. You return to the soil. That is all.”

“What do you say, Francis?” Mauro asked.

For some time Francis had been reading a small, red-bound Bible. He looked up now and smiled. “These Masai are brave men,” he said.

“Were you raised a Christian?” Auma asked Francis.

Francis nodded. “My parents converted before I was born.”

Mauro spoke, staring into the fire. “Me, I leave the Church. Too many rules. Don’t you think, Francis, that sometimes Christianity not so good? For Africa, the missionary changes everything, yes? He brings … how do you say?”

“Colonialism,” I offered.

“Yes—colonialism. White religion, no?”

Francis placed the Bible in his lap. “Such things troubled me when I was young. The missionaries were men, and they erred as men. Now that I am older, I understand that I also can fail. That is not God’s failure. I also remember that some missionaries fed people during drought. Some taught children to read. In this, I believe they were doing God’s work. All we can do is aspire to live like God, though we will always fall short.”

Mauro went to his tent and Francis returned to his Bible. Beside him, Auma began to read a story with Elizabeth. Dr. Wilkerson sat with his knees together, mending his pants while his wife stared at the fire beside him. I looked at the Masai, their faces silent and watchful, and wondered what they made of the rest of us. They might be amused, I decided. I knew that their courage, their hardness, made me question my own noisy spirit. And yet, as I looked around the fire, I thought I saw a courage no less admirable in Francis, and in Auma, and in the Wilkersons as well. Maybe it was that courage, I thought, that Africa most desperately needed. Honest, decent men and women with attainable ambitions, and the determination to see those ambitions through.

The fire began to die, and one by one the others made their way to bed, until only Francis and I and the Masai remained. As I stood up, Francis began to sing a deep-voiced hymn in Kikuyu, with a melody that I vaguely recognized. I listened a while, lost in my own thoughts. Walking back to my tent, I felt I understood Francis’s plaintive song, imagining it transmitting upward, through the clear black night, directly to God.

The day we got back from Mara, Auma and I received word that Roy had arrived, a week earlier than expected. He had suddenly appeared in Kariakor with a suitcase in hand, saying that he’d felt restless waiting around in D.C. and had managed to talk his way onto an earlier flight. The family was thrilled by his arrival and had held off on a big feast only until Auma and I returned. Bernard, who brought us the news, said that we were expected soon; he fidgeted as he spoke, as if every minute away from our eldest brother were a dereliction of duty. But Auma, still stiff from sleeping in tents for the past two days, insisted on taking the time for a bath.

“Don’t worry,” she said to Bernard. “Roy just likes to make everything seem so dramatic.”

Jane’s apartment was in a hubbub when we arrived. In the kitchen, the women were cleaning collards and yams, chopping chicken and stirring
ugali
. In the living room, younger children set the table or served sodas to the adults. And at the center of this rush sat Roy, his legs spread out in front of him, his arms flung along the back of the sofa, nodding with approval. He waved us over and offered us each a hug. Auma, who hadn’t seen Roy since he’d moved to the States, stepped back to get a better look.

“You’ve become so fat!” she said.

“Fat, eh?” Roy laughed. “A man needs a man-sized appetite.” He turned toward the kitchen. “Which reminds me … where’s that other beer?”

No sooner had the words fallen from his mouth than Kezia came up with a beer in hand, smiling happily. “Barry,” she said in English, “this is the eldest son. Head of the family.”

Another woman whom I had never seen before, plump and heavy-breasted, with bright red lipstick, sidled up beside Roy and put her arm around him. Kezia’s smile subsided, and she drifted back into the kitchen.

“Baby,” the woman said to Roy, “do you have the cigarettes?”

“Yeah, hold on ….” Roy patted his shirt pockets carefully. “Have you met my brother, Barack? Barack, this is Amy. And you remember Auma.” Roy found the cigarettes and lit one for Amy. Amy took a long drag and leaned forward toward Auma, exhaling round puffs of smoke as she spoke.

“
Of course
I remember Auma. How are you? Let me tell you, you look wonderful! And I like what you’ve done to your hair. Really, it’s so … natural!”

Amy reached for Roy’s bottle, and Roy went to the dinner table. He grabbed himself a plate and bent down to smell the steaming pots.
“Chapos!”
he exclaimed, dropping three chapatis onto his plate.
“Sukuma-wiki!”
he shouted at the collard greens before spooning a heap onto his plate.
“Ugali!”
he hollered, cutting off two big wedges of cornmeal cake. Bernard and the children followed his every step, repeating Roy’s words at a more tentative volume. Around the table, our aunts and Kezia beamed with satisfaction. It was the happiest I had seen any of them since my arrival.

After dinner, while Amy helped the aunts wash up, Roy sat between Auma and me and announced that he had come back with big plans. He was going to start an import-export company, he said, selling Kenyan curios in the States. “
Chondos.
Fabrics. Wood carvings. These things are
big
over there! You sell them at festivals, art shows, specialty stores. I already bought some samples to take back with me.”

“That’s a great idea,” Auma said. “Show me what you’ve got.”

Roy told Bernard to fetch several pink plastic bags from one of the bedrooms. Inside the bags were several wood carvings, the sort of slick, mass-produced pieces that were sold at quick turnover to the tourists downtown. Auma turned them around in her hands with a doubtful expression on her face.