Ahmed's Revenge (16 page)

“Do you remember me, Mr Minister?” asked Ralph. “It is nice to see you again.”

My father called the bakery girl, told me to pay his bill, and then asked Ralph to walk with him for a while. He grabbed Ralph's sleeve as he stood, and when Ralph turned to him he said, “What's new with you, Ralph? And how is your father getting along?”

“My father passed on,” Ralph said. “Three years now. As for me, I am still running Wildebeest Road—our small business has grown since my father's days.”

“Good for you,” said my dad. He turned to me and said, “The name of his company is Wildebeest Road.”

To be sure, I'd seen Wildebeest Road vans out in the Rift Valley, but I had never connected the company with Ralph. And since I couldn't think of anything to say, I asked stupidly, “Did you name it Wildebeest Road because we used to call you Ralph Bunche Road?”

It was an idiotic question but it made Ralph stop. “Maybe,” he said, “though I hadn't thought about it until now. I just imagined it was a comfortable-sounding name and since we had to call it something, I suggested it to my dad.”

“You would have done better to name it Rhinoceros Road or Leopard Road,” my father said. “These tourists want assurances that they'll see something grand. One of the big five. Wildebeests are a dime a dozen. They all want to see cats.”

Ralph smiled and I looked at him carefully, trying to find the boy I had known. I looked at his haircut, but though it was short, his ears didn't stick out. The more I looked at him the more I wasn't sure, though I clearly remembered the name, whether I remembered Ralph Bunche Road at all. Kenyan boys had been a long way from the forefront of my thoughts back then—was that what Mr N'chele had been trying to say?

We were at the car, and I unlocked my father's side. Ralph helped him climb in and then walked me to the driver's side.

“Do you have a family, Ralph? Do you have a wife, do you have children of your own?”

“Alas,” he said.

“Are you happy, then,” I asked, “without them?” It was an unexpected question, the kind of thing I would never have asked anyone before, and related, somehow, to what I had tried to tell my father back at the church. But I let it stand, keeping my look steady so that he might think I'd intended the question all along. What I really wanted to know, of course, had nothing to do with Ralph's life, but whether or not he knew of the recent events in my own, and while I waited for him to answer I began to cry. Tears ran from my eyes with a kind of consideration for the rest of me. That is, they rolled down freely, leaving my composure otherwise intact.

I expected Ralph to be embarrassed but he wasn't. He didn't touch me, but he also didn't look away. What he did do was reach into his pocket and bring out a pressed and folded handkerchief for me to hold.

“I heard about it, Nora,” he said. “It was in the newspaper the other day. Also, a few of us meet for drinks at the Norfolk on Friday afternoons and we talked of almost nothing else last time.”

“A few of you?”

“Oh, still the Hillcrest boys, and one or two others we've picked up along the way.”

What he meant, I understood, was that the African boys who had gone to Hillcrest School had kept in touch all these years. I knew they'd been close, but I hadn't given them any thought since my school days, and the idea that they had spent last Friday discussing me made me stop crying and stand up tall.

“If I come next Friday, will I know any of them?” I asked. Ralph shrugged as if irritated and said, “How should I know?”

I got into the Land Rover, pushing the window open.

“When you get home you will be able to read your letter in peace,” Ralph said. “No more interruptions from various winds.”

“I'm sorry, Ralph,” I said, but I was not sure why.

When I started the car my father jumped. “Say good-bye to Ralph, Dad,” I said. My father, however, was looking out the wrong side of the car and couldn't find him.

When we got home it was after four. My father went to his room to rest and I sat on our verandah alone. Seeing Ralph had been as strangely unsettling as seeing Mr N'chele had been, so I didn't turn to Jules's letter immediately but waited for a calm within me, a debris-free sea on which to sail my husbands paper boat. And while I waited I looked at the tiny tusk again. It really did look scarred, as if it had been a well-used tool during the entirety of an adult elephant's life, and it still seemed absolutely real. I knew nothing of acrylics, but if this was put together by a man, then it really was a perfect job. There was no seam, and the jagged edges of the tusk's hollow end were unsightly in places, I could see that now, as if living tissue had once been there and had dried.

Previously, when I tried to imagine what had attracted Jules to such an unlikely scheme, I'd come up with nothing, but with this tusk in my hand I was beginning to see the draw. Maybe there was a certain justice in selling phony tusks to the ivory hoarders of the world, a certain pleasure in making them think they were real. Maybe Jules really had understood it as an ironic joke. Wasn't that like him? I asked myself.

Indeed it was, so I took a breath and asked myself that other question one more time. Even if all that was true, why hadn't he told me about it? We had shared the work of our farm. We had shared our bed and our journeys to town and our films and our illnesses and our food. Jules and I had shared all of our lives, so why hadn't he shared this with me? Did Jules think I wouldn't understand?

I fell asleep on the verandah with this question lodged in my mind and when I awoke it was nearly dark. Jules's letter was still in my lap, the tiny tusk weighing it down. When I raised it up my eyes knew exactly where they had left off.

My God, Nora, the thing was heavy and it had the coloration and markings appropriate to age When I asked how he did it the man told me he had dyes that would vary the colors quite as much as nature did, and when I asked him how he got the thing so heavy he said it was a secret and he wouldn't tell.

We saw tusks of various sizes, the tiny to the huge, proof positive in the accompanying box I have sent, and when we got back to the front of the warehouse your father was in a state. Now he wanted to sit at the man's table and drink the man's beer.

“I will sell them in Europe,” he said. “Think what a joke it will be. I am the Minister of Wildlife, Retired! All those would-be hunters will be standing in line!”

I understood right then, Nora, that what your father was about to ask me to do could get us in trouble, but I liked the idea too, I have to admit it, and with the beer and the man's talk and your father's compelling joy, before I knew it I had agreed to ship these things to Europe for him, to smuggle them out of Kenya in our coffee bags. Your father's job was to be sales and distribution which, don't you see, was actually the most dangerous part. If I got caught smuggling the things I would only need to prove that they weren't real and it wouldn't be smuggling!

Ah, but why didn't I tell you about it, Nora, as soon as I got home? I guess it's because there was money in what we were doing, and by the end of that first night we had all agreed that no one else should know. So for all this time, Nora, since shortly after the evening I've described, whenever I went to town I would pick up some of these artificial tusks and arrange one way or another to get them out of the country, the smaller ones stuck down inside bags of coffee beans, the larger ones in boxes marked machinery and the like.

Oh, Nora, you married such a fool. The longer things went on, though no one at the airport ever looked inside our coffee bags, the more I began to understand what.

I turned the page, furious with Jules again, but hooked anyway. That was the end of page five, however, and page six was gone, the crux of the matter nowhere to be found. I read page seven, but it contained only the following lines:

So now you know the extent of my idiocy, the full damage that a truly stupid man can do. While you are reading this letter, who knows, I could very well be in jail. But at least I've done some serious harm to the man who has most harmed me, though if you know me at all you'll know that is small satisfaction at this late stage. After reading this letter you alone have the key to what I have done. Now promise me, Nora, that if I can't do it you will do it for me. No matter what people say, revenge is sweet, I know it is true.

Promise also that you will try to visit me wherever I am. Now that I have, at least, committed my secret to paper I feel better. Memorize my message, Nora, then use the match in the envelope. Burn what you have read and go on.

Your illegitimate husband,               

Jules                              

Beatrice came to the kitchen door and called me. The friendly quality of her voice seemed to retain nothing bad, no hint of the embarrassment I had caused her earlier in the day.

“Dinner, please!” she yelled.

When I got to the dining room my father was at the table, a big cloth napkin tucked into his shirt, second button down. Dr Zir, whom I had hoped was preparing a meal for my father at his house, was in the guest's chair, his own napkin precisely where my father's was. The doctor stood when I came in. “Nora, darling! Nora, dear!” he said.

“I've had a message from Julius,” I said, “a letter.”

Dr Zir cocked an eyebrow, looking quickly from me to my father, as if some flawed genetic imprint might be visible in the air.

“It's true,” said my dad. “When she opened the envelope there was a dove inside but it quickly flew away.”

“Page six,” I told the doctor, “that was the dove's name.”

Beatrice served us, putting platters of food on the table, and giving the doctor a moment to calm down. There was no music playing, so my father asked Beatrice to put the Mozart on.

Dinner was pork chops and boiled potatoes and gravy and rolls. My mangoes were there, and there were thick slices of the big tomatoes I had bought as well.

My father's disease, his condition, his progressive dementia or whatever it was, didn't seem to hinder his ability to play the game of chess. Since I hadn't gotten nearly enough information from what Jules's letter said, what with that missing page, I wanted to question my father again that night at dinner, but I didn't want to do so while the doctor was there. And because of chess, Dr Zir simply would not go home.

The chess-board was set up in the living room, and by the time I'd made coffee and brought it in to them, Dr Zir had already resigned the first game.

“Don't fool with me, Zir,” I heard my father say. “Play the game correctly or don't play at all.”

Because it seemed clear that Dr Zir had thrown the first game, they had to play a half dozen more, all but the last one to a draw. And once the doctor was gone it was midnight and my father was droop-mouthed again, too tired to begin to answer any of the questions that I had.

“Help me put away the chess set, Nora,” he said. “Help me get on to bed. We can talk tomorrow.”

My father's chess pieces, ironically, I suppose, were made of old ivory and had smoothed out nicely over time. They were lovely to hold. This was not the kind of chess set with a folding board that you could put away quickly, not the kind, in fact, that you could put away at all, but my father and I had formed a ritual years ago of wiping each piece with a chamois and placing it back in its original position on the board. We called what we did “putting the pieces away.” It had long been my privilege to put away the big pieces while my father put away the pawns, and I was holding one of his queens when I suddenly reached into the pocket of the apron I wore and brought out the tiny ivory tusk.

“Where did this come from, Dad?” I asked.

My father took the tusk from me, holding it up to the light. I could see him working at it, trying to say something clear about the mess he was in, but in the end all he said was “This isn't a chess piece. What are you talking about?”

“What do you suppose it is then?”

“It is the tusk from a little elephant, the smallest I have ever seen.”

“Where did I get it? Where did it come from, Dad?”

My father had a couple of pawns in his other hand, and I could hear the sound of them as they played against each other. Once when I was about eight I had somehow lost a pawn. After that day my father gave me the job of putting the important pieces away. For a number of years I thought he'd done so in order to let me know that my losing the pawn meant nothing to him, but he had really done it because the important pieces were larger and harder to lose.

“It is the raw material for a fine chess piece,” said my father. “But look how scarred it is. It has been very well used, as if the little elephant who owned it was old.”

“Can we burn it, Dad? Can we light this little tusk on fire? Can we do it right now?”

“We cannot,” he said. “Whatever gave you that idea?”

I pulled out Jules's letter then. There was only about a third of the envelope left, but I took out the stick-match Jules had so dramatically included. I held the match up so that my father could see it, and then I asked him to give me the little tusk back.

“You know, I've never actually done this,” I said. “I tried it once on an elephant-hair bracelet, but I've never actually tried to see if a tusk will burn.”

“It won't,” said my father, “unless the fire is very big and hot. A petrol fire might do it but a match will not.”

My father gave me the tusk, but when he put the pawns down he made sure that they were considerably away from me. “It won't burn, but it will discolour,” he said. “Wouldn't that be a pity. I'm not sure how easy it will be to get it clean again.”

I struck the match on the bottom of my shoe. I had never done that before either, but there was a small nail protruding there, and the match surged immediately into flame. “I'm going to burn the tip off,” I said. “I'm going to watch the easy deformity of it and then let you tell me how such a thing could be.”