Three Weeks in December (9781609459024) (7 page)

In college she'd once met a woman who'd been born without a sense of smell. “Anosmia,” the woman had declared matter-of-factly, the way one might say, “Parking ticket.”

And Max jerked back from the word as fast as though she'd been slapped.

 

After three hours of driving, they parked in the lot of the Virunga National Park. Above them, the mountains loomed craggy and immense. Even here on the equator, two of the peaks had snow on them. Stepping out of the van, Max finally saw real jungle. Mile after mile of it swept up the steep sides of these mountains. No roads, no houses. Up there, the land would be empty of people except for a few researchers. Instead in every direction would be plants, massed thickly, rich and glossy. Waiting for her to study them.

Fifteen porters were in the parking lot waiting for them. They were not dressed as nicely as the people in the airport. These men wore the cast-off clothing of different countries and climates: a Manchester United T-shirt, a pair of ripped Brandeis sweatpants, a woman's cowl-neck sweater. All of the porters were barefoot except for one who wore ancient bowling shoes, the toes held together with duct tape. These men unloaded her bags out of the van and divvied them into approximately even allotments, then tied each pile up tightly in a sheet. Each man wove himself a padded crown of grass, hefted up his bundle and placed it on his head like some whimsical hat. Her Olympus microscope on top of two pieces of Samsonite luggage. Twenty boxes of tofu on her Plant Encyclopedia. Then, balancing these weights effortlessly, the men lit three cigarettes and passed them around, talking, while Mutara locked up the van. He pulled off his own clean and new-looking rubber boots to pack them away in his knapsack. Then standing in his bare feet, he neatly folded his pants up to his knees.

Max wondered how they would travel this last leg of the journey. From the map she'd looked at with her mom, she knew the research station was located high on the shoulder of these mountains, probably five miles and six thousand feet straight up. These mountains were supposed to be a major tourist destination, so she searched for a gondola or some all-terrain vehicles or at least a wide paved path. She could spot nothing along these lines.

Whatever language these men spoke, it wasn't French. Their words were all bounce and rounded vowels. When the last cigarette was smoked down to the filter, they turned and in a line, luggage swaying on their heads, walked into the jungle, heading up what she now saw was the narrowest of muddy trails.

Mutara followed.

Max stared. Roswell and Stevens hadn't mentioned this part of the itinerary. The slope was steep. The porters strode onward, making their ascent look easy. They began to disappear into the foliage, the bags waving good-bye from above the bushes. She glanced again up at the distant mountains peaks and then, having no choice, followed.

The mud on the path was slick. It felt as though it had been raining here continuously for weeks. Before she'd gone a hundred feet, she slipped and fell onto both knees and one hand. As with most aspies, physical agility was not one of her skills. At the best of times she walked flatfooted and unsteadiy. Right now, she hadn't slept in thirty-nine hours and the tranquilizers she'd taken on the airplanes seemed to have puddled in her feet. She stood back up, wiping the mud off her pants as best she could—mostly smearing it around—and then continued to climb.

Three times a week she jogged four miles, but only indoors on a track, an utterly flat surface. She enjoyed running round and round that perfect oval, keeping neatly between the lines. Years of this had helped her balance and stride appear slightly more natural.

But this path was definitely not flat.

Within the first half hour, she fell three more times and gave up trying to wipe herself off. Hoping her bare feet might get more traction, as it seemed to for the porters and Mutara, she pulled off her loafers and tied them to her knapsack.

With her toes, she could find a bit more purchase, but she was having difficulty now catching her breath, her ribs heaving. The van had climbed up the mountains a few thousand feet before it got to the parking lot. The air was getting thinner. The path went on and on.

Every half-mile or so Mutara waited for her, crouched on his heels at a turn in the path, smoking a cigarette. Perhaps he was embarrassed for her—huffing, smeared in mud, plodding up the path—for he looked at the jungle rather than her. She struggled on toward him, progress slow. Finally, the cigarette finished, he pressed it out in the mud, got to his feet and walked on. She was still 20 feet down the path. An awkward robot, her gears straining. She didn't complain or ask him to slow down.

Two hours into the climb, he waited at a turn in the path until she was close enough to hear his voice. Perhaps he'd gotten past his embarrassment for she could sense his head was pointed toward her, studying her.

“Do you wish the porters to carry you?” His voice puzzled.

She imagined the porters clustered tightly around her, carrying her in a litter, the occasional thoughtless hand laid on her arm or ankle. “No.”

He paused, his head still angled to regard her. Then he turned and continued, moving up the path as smoothly as though this were a staircase, never seeming to consider where to place his feet or what to grab. He didn't breathe hard, must have lived at this altitude for years.

By the next time she caught up with him, even her hair was full of mud. She'd slid at one point nearly thirty feet before she managed to catch hold of a trunk and stop herself. Now, she came around a corner to find Mutara leaning against a tree, eyes closed, maybe napping. His clothing didn't have a fleck of dirt on it. When he heard her wheezing, he pulled his head up.

After a long moment, he said, “Feel for the tree roots with your toes. Use them like steps. Always hold onto a branch.”

She followed the directions exactly, as she tended to do. They helped.

Throughout her life, she'd studied how neurotypicals reacted when faced with adversity. Some struggled valiantly, but the majority gave up once the situation got unpleasant. When it came to long swathes of her life, unpleasant wasn't a state she could discern. She'd been climbing for three hours. Her feet stumbled now from plain exhaustion. Each time she fell, she pushed herself back up and continued, working to step on the tree roots and hold onto branches.

Mutara began to climb again, but several times he paused to glance back.

At the next turn he waited until she reached him. It took her a long time. As she moved past him, her right foot slid out from under her.

He grabbed her elbow, caught her. That sharp electric flicker. Even now—on her meds, avoiding processed foods, no longer a confused child—that flicker cut at her. As soon as she got her balance, she pulled back from his touch.

“Please,” he said, “let me help.” No distance anymore in his voice.

She examined his feet. His toes were spread wide, the feet braced in a V. His balance certain. This was what her feet would have to master.

“Higher up where the gorillas live, it is sloped and muddy like this?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“Then don't help me. I need to learn how to do this.”

T
he railway reached the eastern bank of the river Tsavo
.
The tips of the steel tracks poked out over the edge of the riverbank, pointing to the other side a hundred feet away. From up the river, floated the distant bangs and shouts of the men assembling the camp in the wide shady clearing at the next bend. Jeremy figured they would reside here for at least three weeks, until the bridge was complete, then they could build the railroad across the river to continue on the other side. He had told the men they should take the time to set the camp up well because of the duration of their stay.

He stood now beside the tracks, examining the work site. In the shade of the lush trees along the bank, it felt ten degrees cooler than under the miserly thorn trees. Bending down to the river, he scooped water into his hat and clapped it purposefully onto his head. The water splashed down his neck and under his spine protector, shockingly cold. No more brackish drinking water imported from a hundred miles away. Also, for at least a month, the men would not have to hack through the razor-sharp nyika, clearing a path through the forest for the railway tracks. Instead, they could just build the bridge in this cooler shade, take dips in the river. Life would be easier on all of them.

Those first few days he had worked on the railroad, he had looked forward to the monsoons finally coming, believing they would cool things down, make the work easier on the men. In his mind he'd been imagining a temperate drizzle. Instead the sheets of solid rain made it hard to see and hear. Each shovelful of soggy mud was three times heavier than when it was dry. Even breathing in the downpour took some skill. Yesterday, he'd been called over to see, after an exceptional twelve-hour deluge, a brand-new embankment—previously as hard as baked clay—quivering with the consistency of pudding. Under the weight of a fully loaded train, it sprayed out ten-foot-long jets of mud, the train itself gently rocking from side to side like a boat on the sea. In the end, the engineer had been too fearful to come to a full stop for fear the embankment would cave in, so the train was unloaded while it chuffed slowly on.

Since the rains had commenced, the humidity had intensified. His clothes felt damp to the touch even before he pulled them on. His sweat never dried off; instead it dribbled slowly downward, gluing his underclothes to his skin, puddling along with the rain in his boots. Even without him performing any of the manual labor, he had started to develop heat rashes everywhere his body brushed against itself: under the arms, along the groin, even along the creases of his eyelids.

The rains had also brought out the insects: scorpions, ants, termites, and beetles. Did they need the humidity to hatch or had they been here the whole time and the waterlogged earth forced them out into view? Yesterday he had watched a glistening five-inch-long millipede undulate its furry borders straight up the path toward the cooking tent, as confident as though it were the camp's chef. The creature had weight and volume, its body thicker than his thumb. Eyeing its hard carapace, he was not certain he could crush it with his heel, even with all his weight behind it. Alan Thornton, the physician in camp, believed the bite of some millipedes poisonous. Jeremy let the insect go its own way.

He had bites of different kinds all over his skin, on the bottoms of his feet, between his fingers, and behind his ears. He knew the Indians, with their more bared flesh and lack of shoes, must be worse off.

Here, however, by the river, things would be different. Here they could bathe, clean their wounds, cool down. Everyone's spirits would be raised.

Glancing upriver, he saw, thirty yards away, a native sipping water from a cup made of a rolled leaf.

“Otombe,” he yelled impulsively, then immediately worried he might be mistaken.

The man looked behind himself as though considering disappearing into the undergrowth, paused and stepped forward instead.

Once Otombe was closer, Jeremy called, “Will you go hunting with me again sometime?” He did not ask because he thought the N'derobbo had demonstrated great facility at the task. How difficult could it be to spot a tall animal out there on the savannah? No, this was just the first African he had met who could speak English with some ease. Jeremy wanted to know more about that moment he had sensed, standing out on the plains, grass up to his shoulders, wondering about the lion. Otombe's expression was alert, his eyes sharp. He resided in a hut with a spear, the nyika everywhere outside, this terrible heat for most of the year followed by months of torrential rain. What was it like to be human, obviously intelligent, but living under the conditions of an animal?

With his long gangly legs and bony arms, Jeremy knew he would not have survived childhood here. Sometimes, even now, long past the age where he could claim the excuse of growing limbs, when he tried for a burst of speed up the stairs or a fancy dismount off Patsy, his limbs twisted in some awkward way and he fell. If he had grown up here, he would have slipped into a ravine or tripped in front of a hippo, accomplishing something ungraceful and immutable.

Otombe stood in front of him, thin and still, balanced in his dark body. “What do you search for?” he asked, his voice quiet.

For a moment, Jeremy thought he was being asked about the aims of his life and he opened his mouth fearful of what might emerge. Then recalling his original request, he played for time, glancing up and down the river as though searching for an animal right now. Actually, when he thought back to the hunt he felt a twinge of shame at the ease with which the eland had fallen and the paltry number of steaks they had cut from the giant body, leaving the rest for the two natives and the hyenas. He had given pounds of the meat away to each of his jemadars and still he was eating it, by now in stews and sun-dried as jerky. To Otombe, he had given only a large slab of steak as well as the single silver coin that Ungan Singh had said was more than enough.

At the time, taking the coin and the meat, Otombe's face had shown no emotion, neither gratitude nor disgust. Jeremy wondered what type of man Otombe saw before him. Someone spidery and pale, overdressed in the heat, heavy-footed. A creature so incapable he required a horse to carry him about, a servant to cook for him, a mechanical train to transport in the materials to meet all his needs. A fragile temperate-zone rose, transplanted and fussed around.

Jeremy rubbed his eyes. “What can be found here along the river?”

“Of the big game, you can find hippo, crocodile, elephant, and lion.”

“Have you killed all those?”

Otombe looked down at the butt of his spear, twisting it in the dirt of the riverbank. “My tribe, we are not whites. We have no guns. We kill duiker, gazelle and dik-dik. Small animals.”

There was a pause. The wind moved down the river, cool under the trees. Jeremy inhaled in pleasure. He had never realized before how much of his basic happiness depended on not being overheated, on not being thirsty or having sweat in his eyes. In this heat, how could you motivate yourself to go out and search for clean water, locate food? He found it hard to swing himself up onto Patsy, hard to pick up a spoonful of a meal already prepared and placed in front of him. He thought even Patsy felt this way. In Maine, she had always been frisky, kicking her heels up at the smallest excuse: a swaying branch, a flapping scarf. These last few days, she sighed instead when he mounted, picking her way forward only at a determined kick. In this heat, his hunger vanished. He was losing weight already and he did not have a lot to spare. Without the railroad shipping in his food and water, he did not believe he would have the will or skills to survive here more than a month.

As though he knew Jeremy would not be able to choose which animal to hunt, as though he knew his objective was primarily to converse, Otombe added, “This ford is where the slave caravans stop.”

“Used to stop,” Jeremy said, correcting his English.

“Excuse me?”

“This is where they used to stop. Slavery's now illegal.”

“No. There was a caravan three days ago. Over there.” He pointed across the river to an open spot under the trees. “Perhaps the Mohammedans will not bring them through while you camp here. They do not like the spot already because of the slaves that disappear.”

“The slaves that disappear?” He thought even though both of them spoke English, so many other things separated them: knowledge, assumptions and stations in life. Him, the Africans, the Indians and Persians, even if they all used the same language, wore the same clothes, ate the same food, there would still be misunderstandings, confusions, and fights.

Otombe watched him. “A few disappear every night the caravans are here. Perhaps they run away or animals kill them. I do not know. Our priest, she says the spirit of the river takes them.” He shrugged. “Tsavo, it's always been like that. The word means . . . ” He rubbed his thumb along the shaft of his spear, thinking. “Death? Murder? It is hard to translate. Also, in the morning any slaves who cannot walk at the caravan's pace, they are left for the animals.”

Jeremy looked across the river to the open spot under the trees. He tried to understand. “Left here? Isn't that good? Do they not escape then, head back to their villages?”

Otombe smiled—not that his lips moved, but his eyes, regarding Jeremy, seemed to hold slightly more warmth. “They are killed, as an example to the others. Their necks are cut. The animals here, the hyenas and lions, they are used to the taste of humans. They prefer it. The whites with guns, I have heard them say Tsavo lions are the best to hunt. The greatest challenge. They have no fear of people.”

“In two nights,” Otombe continued, “it will be the full moon. We can go hunting then, perhaps for hippo. After sunset, I will meet you at the path leading upriver from your camp.”

 

That first day, the shade of the trees along the riverbank was wonderful to work beneath. The Indians began to dig a canal that would serve as a temporary detour for the river. Digging it would take them at least a week. Once the water flowing down the river was rerouted to the canal and the river bottom had a chance to dry out, they could sink the bridge's stone feet quickly and deeply into the ground. When the bridge was completed, they would reroute the river back into its original bed and start laying the railroad tracks on toward Lake Victoria.

It was a delight, while working, to be drinking as much water as desired, for here, boiled from the river, the water was so clear and fresh. Jeremy had gotten used to even his tea tasting of brine, mud, and creosote. The brine and mud came from the overworked water filtration system back in Mombasa. The creosote came from the railway ties that the Indians handled all day, the preservative rubbing itself deep into their hands and arms and legs from constant contact, then—as soon as the train's daily water car arrived—the men would jump headlong into the water to slake their thirst and fill the jerry cans of others.

“Indian tea,” Alan Thornton called it.

That afternoon, after a full day of digging, the entire camp bathed in the cool river with riflemen posted along the shore, vigilant for crocodiles and hippos. In the water, the Indians sounded happy, calling out jokes, splashing water at each other, and scrubbing their laundry. During the workday, the simple act of watching a line of fifty or a hundred of these men swinging their shovels in the full sun exhausted Jeremy. He thought it possible, since they had never known life except in equatorial climes, that this work was easier for them than it would be for him. Still, he felt joy watching the Indians standing up to their chests in the river and dumping buckets of water over their heads. He hoped the bridge took months.

As the sun sank, the serenity of the moment vanished. The mosquitoes rose, creating a cloud so thick they nearly obscured the opposite bank of the river. Everyone quickly fled back into the tents, but even inside, the insects' buzzing was insistent enough to be heard clearly. Though Jeremy had worked to tie his tent flaps completely shut, a few mosquitoes managed to slip in. They flew frustrated outside the netting around his camp cot. As the night progressed, the buzzing became louder. He tried to lie in the exact center of his bed, keeping his limbs away from the netting.

Earlier that afternoon, drinking tea with Alan, watching the Indians hike back from the river carrying their tools, Jeremy had lightly sworn and got up to retrieve his grains of quinine. “Forgot this earlier.”

Alan looked over.

How is it, Jeremy wondered, these British managed to convey such disapproval through the raising of a single eyebrow? Around people like Alan, so confident in their understanding of the world and their place in it, Jeremy tended to keep his eyes turned just a few degrees off, worried that if someone looked into them too deeply, the person might sense some of the more shocking images his mind had conceived.

“As your physician,” Alan said, “I'd advise you not to make a practice of forgetting your quinine.” He took a sip of the tea, his face permanently reddened from exposure to the sun. Before Africa, he had served in India. A single drop of sweat trickled down toward the end of his nose. “For the railroad, I've been logging the mortality of us Caucasians. The biggest killer isn't construction accidents, heatstroke, or animals. It's the tiny mosquito: malaria. First year here, 30 percent die.” He raised his teacup and said, “Good luck.”

Jeremy froze there for a moment. “Are you sure? That percentage seems terribly high.”

Alan reached for another crumpet. The provisions for the railroad were shipped in from London: a preponderance of marmalade, tripe, and boiled beef. “Oh yes, quite. The figures are dreadful. I've checked them thoroughly.”

Jeremy let his eyes slowly wander the landscape as he tried to think this through. He wondered if it were possible his mother and Grandpapi had known of this statistic when they had agreed to his traveling here. At the thought, he blinked and forced himself to look at the workers instead, walking up the road. “What about them?”