Mick jacked the truck up and set out the tools — generator, welding gear, steel boxes, basins of socket wrenches and spares, spare spring leaves. And as the sun descended towards the desert horizon, he and Abel took turns trying to dislodge the broken springs. As dusk fell, they had still made little headway.
Ben said to me, ‘Fancy spending a night in the desert?’
‘We must leave right now,’ the soldier said. ‘These people will take advantage of us.’
Yanking on a broken spring leaf with a crowbar, Ben said, unper-turbed, ‘Oh, aye.’
Counting the soldiers, there were twelve of us, and darkness would soon be upon us — hunger, too. Bored already with sitting, I said I would put myself in charge of the evening meal. There were chickens running around, there was rice in the shop. The friendliest woman in the village was a Kikuyu woman named Helen, who wore a green dress and said, ‘I am a missionary of the Full Gospel Church. I am bringing Jesus here.’
‘Are these your chickens?’
She said they were and that for 1700 shillings, about $20, she would kill three chickens and make potato stew and chapatis to feed the twelve of us and some of her family.
Darkness had fallen but Helen began to stoke three cooking fires, and over by the truck the welding had begun, Mick squinting through a small piece of smoked glass because his welding mask was broken. The bright sparks of the welding attracted people from huts at the edge of Serolevi, who sat and watched the action.
I helped Helen peel potatoes. I was impressed by her cooking skill and appalled by the disorder, for she squatted in a mass of chicken feathers and eviscerated birds and potato peels, hot coals and pots of sloshing water. But this was the Serolevi method: smoky fires, dented stew pots, scorched meat.
I sent a small boy to the shop for a bottle of beer and then sat on a log, peeling potatoes and swigging beer, and feeling an obscure sense of contentment.
‘Beer is bad,’ Helen said, giggling.
‘Beer is not mentioned in the Bible,’ I said. ‘Jesus drank wine. He also made wine. Preferred it to water. Changed water into wine at the wedding feast at Cana. His own mother requested it. Where does it say that alcohol is bad?’
‘In Galatians.’
‘Where Paul condemns drunkenness and reveling?’ I said, ‘Helen, I wouldn’t have thought a warm bottle of Tusker outside a mud hut in Samburu land constituted drunken reveling. What?’
She saw the joke, she was laughing, but she said, ‘You will not be saved.’
‘A man asked Jesus, “Good master, how shall I find the Kingdom of Heaven?” Jesus said, “Love thy neighbor. Obey the Commandments.” ’
‘Johns says you must be born again. You’re a good peeler,’ she said, hoisting the potatoes.
She was good-natured and quick, just thirty-two — the average life expectancy in Kenya was just over forty. She was not married.
‘You haven’t met Mister Right.’
‘Jesus is Mister Right.’ She was slapping dough now, clapping it between her hands, making chapattis.
Feeling fortunate, I laughed and drank another Tusker and thought: I love this place, I love sitting in the pink afterglow of the sunset, peeling spuds and talking about salvation. The heat of the day had gone, the air was mild, there were children everywhere, fooling, fussing, teasing each other, among the flaring fires and the aromatic steam of chicken and potatoes.
Darkness lay around us; the only points of light were the cooking fires and the blinding blue arc of the welding torch. Then the welding torch died: the generator was out of gasoline, and the welding could not be completed until more gasoline was brought from Archer’s Post. We might be stuck for a few more days. I did not care. Others found it appalling.
This dire news seemed to bring on Jade’s serious asthma attack. She said she could not breathe. She was made comfortable by the helpful backpackers and soon a Land-Rover full of robed Somalis arrived at the checkpoint. Jade begged them to take her. ‘I need to get to a hospital.’ They stuffed her in the back of their vehicle with Laura and sped south, into the darkness.
The rest of us had dinner. The local headman, a young man named Chief George, joined us, and so did some others who had been hanging around, looking hungry. There were fifteen of us altogether. I helped Helen dish up the food.
Scooping with a bent spoon, I said, ‘This may be one of the few occasions when you’ve been waited on by a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.’
Hearing ‘American,’ Chief George said, ‘I hear some American people are poor. We do not think of whites as poor. Also, that some cannot speak English. How can this be in America?’
He claimed that Samburu herdsmen could walk forty miles a day, and that women could walk faster and farther than men.
He said, ‘Women have a better rhythm. Men walk fast then have to rest. Women don’t rest.’
On a padded shelf of the open jacked-up truck that night I lay and drowsed. The dry air was dead still and odorless. No water meant no insects. Silence and darkness and no one stirring. The almost full moon, deep orange from the risen dust, appeared late, casting a glow upon the desert around us.
In the morning, the Canadian backpacker saw me and said, ‘This is a good day to die.’ He looked around Serolevi, the dead thorn trees, the scattered children, our damaged truck. ‘Yeah.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Do I get the prize for being the craziest guy on the truck?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Know where we are? Figawi. For where the fuck are we?’
‘The Figawi safari.’
‘Yeah. Looks like we’re stuck today, too. Want to smoke some herb?’
All he did was gabble. Meanwhile, Abel had hitched a ride to Archer’s Post to buy some more gasoline for the generator. The night had been benign but daylight was a reminder that there was no shade here, nowhere to sit except on the log in front of Helen’s hut. By mid-morning no vehicles has passed in either direction and the temperature was back in the nineties.
What I had taken to be an improvised squatter settlement near an army checkpoint was in fact a village of several hundred Samburus. It was the army checkpoint that was improvised. The schoolhouse was empty, unused — ‘no money for teachers’ — but there was a bar, a tin-roofed shack, where men drank beer throughout the day, starting at eight in the morning and fighting over space at the small pool table. On the side of the bar was a sign in Swahili and English: Ministry of Health, UNFPA — UN Population fund. Protect yourself and your friends. Use a condom (tumi mpira). Help yourself below. But the tin dispenser was empty.
Boys ornamented in the traditional limooli fashion — spears, skirts, beads — tended goats in nearby fields, and now and then children appeared with buckets of water. I borrowed a plastic basin from Helen and followed some of these water carriers down to the borehole, which was a standpipe past the abandoned schoolhouse. A trickle of water dribbled out of the pipe. I put down my basin and watched it slowly piddling and calculated that it would take the best part of an hour to fill a bucket.
When I had a few quarts I went into a field and washed my face and dumped the rest on my head, marveling at the heat of the sun beating on my wet hair. Then I found another log to sit on and went on reading. I felt only mildly inconvenienced, because I had no deadline to meet: no one was expecting me. Most of all I felt privileged that I was now in a Samburu village in the middle of the northern Kenyan desert, living in perfect safety, talking to local people, and observing a way of life that was not discernable from the road.
That day, few vehicles went past the checkpoint. The Bishop of Marsabit, a voluble Italian named Father Ravisi, sailed through, stopping briefly to hug the villagers and joke with them in Swahili.