Green City in the Sun (105 page)

     Abdi took Haile Selassie Avenue and followed it to Ngong Road, which carried them eventually out of the dense city and into increasingly less developed, more rural countryside. Soon they entered Karen, a district of green farms, woodland, and houses of the wealthy. As they sped along roads of cracked and potholed tarmac, Deborah gazed at the old colonial houses they passed, set back behind protective trees, with high fences and guards in uniform.

     Then there appeared the simple shambas, where women were bent over in toil. Once these vast acres had belonged to European farmers; now they were broken up into postage-stamp African holdings.

     When they came upon a group of tourist minibuses parked at what appeared to be an undistinguished shamba, Deborah asked Abdi what it was.

     He slowed the Peugeot and said, "Finch Hatton grave. You see
Out of Africa
, miss? You want to stop?"

     "No. Keep driving, please."

     She looked back at the tourists milling about with their cameras. The need for pilgrimages, Deborah thought, seemed to be a universal human trait.

     The road dipped, traveled through forest, came out upon acres and acres of puny farms, through dilapidated villages, and past roadside "taverns," boxy structures made of tin and cardboard, where men sat in idle clusters with bottles in their hands.

     Deborah questioned her inexplicable feelings of being in an alien land; it was as if she were in a country she had never visited before. Could she truly, in fifteen years, have forgotten the extent of Kenya's poverty, its brutally
defined classes, its massive base population of women and children living on bare subsistence? Had fifteen years' absence painted a deceptive patina over the uglier realities of East Africa, as the guidebooks did?

     She arrived at last at Ongata Rongai, a Masai village of ramshackle masonry and muddy paths. Facing the road was the "town center," typical of Kenya villages: crude cinder-block structures with tin roofs, painted in awful shades of turquoise and pink, one with a sign that read MATHARI SALOON &HOTEL, BUTCHER &ANIMAL FEEDS. Old men loitered around the dark doorways or sat in the dirt, their clothes little more than rags. The village itself was a haphazard cluster of rude structures, many without doors and windows, all oriented toward a stream bed, where cows stood in dung-filled water, which Masai women were drawing up into drinking gourds. Overall there was an atmosphere of defeat and despair.

     As Abdi maneuvered the Peugeot past stone huts and the rusting hulks of abandoned autos, naked children followed, their faces covered with flies, their arms and legs like sticks, bellies bloated with hunger. They stared at the white woman in the car with eyes too big for their heads.

     When Deborah found what she was looking for, she said, "Stop here, please."

     After turning off the motor, Abdi got out and came around to open her door. But she shook her head. Puzzled, he got back behind the wheel and waited.

     Deborah was staring at a plain stone building with a wooden cross on its iron roof. Parked in front was a Land-Rover with letters on its side that read WANGARI CLINIC. THE WORK OF THE LORD. Wangari, Sarah had told her, had been Christopher's wife's name.

     She decided that he must be inside the building because the crowd waiting outside was facing a closed door. Deborah watched that door. She was afraid to blink as if that would make it vanish.

     Finally the door opened. When she saw the man who came out, Deborah's heart jumped.

     He hadn't changed, not at all. Christopher walked with the same loping grace of his youth; his body was still slender, his movements hinting of concealed masculine power. He wore blue jeans and a shirt; a stethoscope hung
around his neck. When he turned, Deborah saw the glint of sunlight off the gold rim of his glasses.

     The crowd surged forward at the sight of him. It was then that Deborah saw that all the children were carrying something. A few held bowls in their little hands; many clutched empty bottles; some, she noticed in surprise, were holding what looked like hubcaps. She discovered the reason for this in the next instant, when massive cook pots were brought out from the building and set on a long wooden table outside. The children lined up in a strangely quiet, orderly fashion, their mothers, nearly all carrying babies, standing respectfully off to one side.

     And then, as a young African, who was sitting cross-legged in the dirt, struck up a chord on his guitar and started to sing, the feeding of the children began.

     It was an eerie scene. There was no pushing, no competition, no greed. Just the wordless doling out of what looked like maize porridge into whatever container a child might have brought. While this was going on, with the servers singing along with the guitar player—a Swahili hymn which Deborah recognized—Christopher and a nurse began examining patients.

     The nurse was African, young and pretty, and she, too, sang the hymn as she worked.

     Abdi glanced in the rearview mirror at his passenger. "You want to go now?" he asked.

     Deborah looked up. "I beg your pardon?"

     Abdi tapped his wristwatch. "We go to Nyeri now, please, miss?"

     She looked out the window again. She thought of getting out of the car, walking down to the clinic, and saying, "Hello, Christopher." But something held her back. She wasn't ready to face him just yet.

     "Yes," she said. "We'll go to Nyeri now."

     T
HE
T
HIKA ROAD
cut through a plain of piecemeal cultivation. Deborah glimpsed, at one point, a modest little mosque among acacia trees. Beyond lay homely factories: Kenya Breweries, Firestone Tires, paper mills, tanneries,
and canneries. Some, strangely, appeared to have been abandoned.

     Telephone and power lines followed the highway; there were Shell stations, and billboards saying, COKE IS IT! A sign advertising Embassy Kings cigarettes read SAFIRI KWA USALAMA, "Drive in peace." The highway was a river of cars—Audis, Mercedes, Peugeots. Many had I LOVE KENYA on the bumper.
Matatus
, nine-passenger vehicles crammed with perhaps twenty people or more, chugged by. Another roadside sign warned: BEWARE OF HOW YOU DRIVE: TWENTY-FIVE PEOPLE DIED HERE IN MAY 1985.

     When Abdi unexpectedly steered the car off the highway and pulled into the parking lot of the Blue Posts Hotel, Deborah said, "Why are we stopping here?"

     "Very historic place, miss. All tourists stop here."

     She looked out at the old, squat building that was hardly a shadow of its former colonial glory. The Blue Posts had once been a resort for white settlers. Now there were signs advertising grilled chicken necks and barbecued goat ribs.

     "I don't want to stop here," Deborah said. "Let's get on to Nyeri."

     Abdi gave her a quizzical look, then shrugged and guided the car back onto the road. Periodically he glanced at his passenger in the rearview mirror.

     He turned on the radio. There was a brief ad for Mona Lisa skin lightener, and then a Voice of Kenya newscaster was saying, "Our beloved president, the Honorable Daniel Arap Moi, today said that the government is striving to make health care available to all Kenyans by the year 2000."

     Deborah pictured the village of Ongata Rongai, the starved, diseased children, the filth, the flies, and Christopher, trying to bring some hope, some relief from misery into their squalid lives. She thought of Sarah, riding through the strife-torn streets of Nairobi in her chauffeured Mercedes, and of the beggars sitting in the shade of the ostentatious and ill-kept Conference Center. It was almost as if, Deborah realized, two completely separate worlds occupied the same space.

     She tapped Abdi on the shoulder and said, "If you don't mind," and pointed to the radio.

     "Oh, pardon, please, miss." He turned it off, pulled a
miraa
leaf stem from his shirt pocket, and popped it into his mouth. Although
miraa
was considered a stimulant, Deborah knew that it was really a mood lifter, chewed by Kenyans to help them shoulder their problems.

     The Peugeot sped past mile after mile of farmland. There were women in the fields and women walking along the roadside with enormous loads on their backs. Nearly all, Deborah noticed, were either pregnant or carried babies on their backs. Women stood at crossroads with children hanging on to their skirts; they trudged to and from local roadside vegetable stands. They were bent over in dirty ponds where cows stood, drawing up drinking water into their gourds, or they waited at bus stops for the already dangerously overcrowded
matatus.
Beyond the limits of Nairobi, Deborah realized, Kenya was a nation of women and children.

     "Rains coming soon," Abdi said, breaking into her thoughts.

     She looked at the blue sky. "How do you know?"

     "Mamas in the fields, digging."

     Deborah had forgotten. But now she remembered what reliable weathervanes the women on their shambas were. Even if there wasn't a cloud in the sky and the air didn't feel like rain, you still knew it was coming when the women got busy with the soil.

     
The rain is coming soon.
How could she have forgotten that? As a child she had been acclimated to the rhythm of wet and dry periods and had grown up sensing the change even as these African women did. But Deborah had lost that intuition in California, where she had experienced her first real summers followed by brown and gold autumns, wintry Januaries, and floral springs.

     
What else have I lost?
she wondered as she looked out at the fields of maize and tea.

     The scene began to change, and Deborah's heart grew increasingly more anxious. The straight, flat highway narrowed and started to wind up through hills which were carpeted with squares of lush farmland. Now, too, as she drew closer to Mount Kenya, Deborah saw the dark rain clouds that were starting to spread across the sky.

     "Be in Nyeri town soon, miss," Abdi said as he shifted gears to pass a Tusker beer truck.

     They were delayed by a highway accident. As the Peugeot inched past the chaotic scene, Deborah looked at the policemen and uninterested ambulance attendants, while an enormous crowd of women and children had gathered to look at the impossible wreckage of four cars. She thought of Uncle Geoffrey and Uncle Ralph.
The whole family killed...

     Suddenly Deborah was reminded of another accident, a year ago, in San Francisco.

     It was the opening night of the ballet. Baryshnikov was dancing, and the performance had been sold out for months. Jonathan, using his influence, had managed to obtain box seats and an invitation to the special banquet afterward. They had looked forward to it for weeks, and Deborah had bought an evening gown especially for it. Jonathan had picked her up at her apartment, and they had gotten as far as Mason and Powell when they saw the accident occur. A car went out of control on the rain-slicked road and crashed into a cable car.

     As calmly as if organizing a picnic, Jonathan had taken over, triaging the injured from the dead, giving orders to the first-aiders on the scene, reassuring the victims, getting his tuxedo dirty, using his white scarf as a bandage, sorting out the chaos and panic for the police and paramedics, going to the hospital in one of the ambulances. Deborah had worked with him; between the two of them they had saved lives and stemmed hysteria. They missed the ballet and the banquet that night, and Deborah's gown was ruined. But she felt she had been more than generously compensated, for she had fallen in love that night with Jonathan.

     On the outskirts of Nyeri they passed a girls' school. Deborah had attended it as a child. She wondered if Miss Tomlinson was still the stern headmistress and then remembered that the school must have been Africanized by now. A black woman would be in charge. Deborah strained to look as her car went by. The buildings and grounds looked neglected, and among the students out on the dusty playing fields, she saw not a single white face.

     Finally, a large, faded sign loomed up over a dirt road: AFRICAN COFFEE COOPERATIVE, NYERI DISTRICT.

     The old Treverton plantation.

     "Please drive down there," she said. The dirt track followed the Chania River, which was flowing down a familiar ravine on their left.

     When they came to the beginning of the farm, Deborah said, "Please stop here," and Abdi pulled the car over to the side. After the motor was turned off, an impressive silence engulfed them.

     Deborah stared out the window. The plantation was exactly as she remembered it. Neat rows of coffee bushes, heavy now with green berries, covered five thousand acres of gently undulating landscape. To her right, on the horizon, Mount Kenya lifted from flat earth to a perfect peak, "like a Chinaman's hat," Grace had written in her journal. To Deborah's left was Bellatu, looking restored and remarkably vital.

     Deborah got out of the car and walked a few paces over the red dirt. She turned her face away from the wind that portended rain and looked at the big house.