“I was at — ”
“Cambridge,” he said. “I know.”
“What don’t you know?”
“Whether Oxford or — ”
“Cambridge for the sciences, I think. Are they scientific, your daughters?”
“Rather too early to tell, I’m afraid. Did you enjoy — ”
“Cambridge?”
“Science, maths, that sort of thing?”
“Since I was a child,” I said. “As I grew older, math specifically. Most girls don’t tend that way, or aren’t encouraged.”
“I shall encourage my girls in that direction, if they wish,” he said. “If you wish.”
“My parents did, actually. Sent me off to McGill, and then I went up to Cambridge.”
“You could be at Cambridge now.”
“When the war came I volunteered for the Royal Canadian Air Force.”
“You can say RCAF.”
“RCAF. My brother had already joined up.”
“It must be very difficult for you.”
“You needn’t say it like that. He’s missing is all. Missing flyers come back all the time. He’s an outdoorsman, tough as nails, and extremely adaptive. I wouldn’t be surprised if he is walking out of Burma as we speak.” Did I really believe this? It was what I told myself every night when my head hit the hard pillow at Allidina Visram School. If anyone could survive that kind of ordeal, it was David. But perhaps I told myself this because I was unsure I could survive my own ordeal if it were otherwise. “He rode a bicycle once from Calgary to Montreal to visit me. Took three months. twenty-two hundred miles.” I was truly embarrassed now. There was no comparing this to bailing out over Burma and walking out alive, if he could walk. It was a foolish thing to say, a foolish, girlish, hero-worshippingly hopeful thing to say. My face flushed.
Abraham reached across the table and took my hands in his. They were surprisingly soft — not like a woman’s but like a child’s. For a moment I was ill at ease. Mine were large and bony by comparison, the hands of a rancher’s daughter. And then, as though in preparation for some fate I could not know but suspected, my hands relaxed in his as he began to speak.
“You will no doubt think badly of me,” he said. “And if so, you must have all the facts. Better to know than to guess. Joan, I am a man who has made my choices and… I live with them. When I came out to Kenya in ’29 I can’t say I had nothing, but close. One-hundred-twenty pounds sterling, letters of introduction to persons in the Indian community in Nairobi and in Mombasa. My father had died the year before — ”
“I’m sorry.”
“That was thirteen years ago,” he said gently. “And father was 81. We’re long-lived, the Talals. He was a livestock dealer in Rajasthan, as his father had been, and his. Horses, cattle, sheep, goats. Even chickens sometimes. Never pigs, of course. And camel. Many, many camel. And elephant. In father’s time Rajasthan, the Rajput states then, was more or less cut off from the world. The maharajas retained their independence from the central government, an independence that would diminish over the years as the British, in their clever way, bought off the nobility. “Our specialty was the Marwari. We supplied the cavalry mounts for all of Rajasthan and the Northern Frontier, a desert country but a good business. When my father was a young man, the Maharaja of Jhaipur kept three thousand men under arms, most on horseback. These were the same cavalry, the same type of men, the same type of horse, that had turned back the Moghul invaders, man and horse leaving the field only victorious or dead. Our stud held hundreds of mares, dozens of stallions of the best type. Black and white, brown and white, silver, chestnut. All well-conformed to the Marwari standard, long ears meeting in an arch, aquiline nose, the large nostrils, the same body type you see here, thin coats like silk, big eyes, straight legs, unslanted shoulders, hooves like steel. You are seeing them now, but I am told today that in India there are few pure Marwari left.
“Joan, when this war is over, the British will find themselves with mountains of tanks, continents of warships, fields upon fields of decommissioned warplanes. They will be sold for scrap. No one needs armament when there is no war. So it was with the Marwari. The maharajas did not require horses beyond a few for ceremonies, and the British cavalry preferred larger animals, less hot-blooded, hunter-jumpers, fox-hunt horses, not racing horses, not war horses. They brought over Walers from Australia, capable of carrying heavier loads. Our Indian horsemen are lighter, and were lightly equipped. The Marwari are fast, meant for the desert — notice their legs are almost perpendicular to the ground, which makes them fast on sand, as you have seen. They can pull them out of soft earth more quickly than — am I boring you?”
I looked at him. “Never.”
“It’s not often I can talk of this.”
“How often?” I asked.
“Never,” he said.
“Then don’t be shy.”
A laugh exploded from his face, and he seemed as young and innocent as the hands that held mine. “I am not shy,” he said. “I am… unaccustomed. It is not my habit to — what is it you North Americans say? I was a great reader of Jack London as a boy — ‘spill my gut’?” He seemed to relax now. The servants, ever hovering, had gone to groom the horses they had tethered, unsaddled, in the coconut grove, the only sounds their movement, an occasional whinny, and the gentle surf. “Joan, we had the patent, as you might say, on the Marwari horse. For two hundred years we Talals of Jhaipur sold only mares and geldings. The stallions remained ours. And then, suddenly, the way battleships and fighter planes and submarines will be worthless after this war, our treasure was worthless — there were no more wars. The maharajas having been pacified, their cavalry was merely an expense. The Marwari had become a thing of the past. I selected the best stock, the rest…”
“You needn’t say it.”
“And with them came here.” His eyes wandered, as though to a past I could not share. “The Indian community in Kenya is a community of traders, merchants. Perhaps as an Indian and a Jew I may say I was as bred for this as the Marwari were bred for war. The people here welcomed me. They knew my family, my father, his father. Sikh, Jain, Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Jew — whatever it was that caused strife amongst us in India melted away here. There was enough for all. The Africans — even the Shirazi on the coast who have been traders for a thousand years — were no match. The whites rarely wished to dirty their hands. In time I became… what I am.”
“And married.”
“Perhaps I should have brought a Jewish wife from Calcutta, the custom of my family because we were the only Jews in Jhaipur, in all of Rajasthan. Or sought a Jewish bride from the European community in Nairobi. That way my daughters would be Jews, and I would not be the end of my line, like my horses. But in those days, even more than now, crossing the color barrier was not lightly done, and I did not feel I had to beg for anyone’s hand. Soon enough, as young men do, I fell in love.” He shrugged. “And that is the story of my life, Joan. Full of quirks, perhaps, but not unusual, not at base.” He paused. A wave broke, the wind picked up. “Until now.”
VI
That night I attended the weekly concert beneath the walls of Fort Jesus, the Portuguese outpost that had stood here since the 16th century. Attendance was hardly mandatory. The only ones constrained to listen were those within the walls: having kept its enemies out for four hundred years, Fort Jesus now kept them in. It had become a brig.