It was a hopeless word. It didn’t work. But when she hugged me, I could tell from the way she held me, from the pressure of her body, that she was happy and that she probably did love me.
She was smiling the following morning.
“Do Americans always wear takkies with a suit?”
I stayed until Tuesday. We walked to a nearby hotel, the Izaak Walton. It was on a trout stream, whites came up from Nairobi to fish here. We had dinner and walked back to Umoja Girls School in the dark. We drove to Meru, to look at Mount Kenya. We inhaled the Jacaranda. Morning and evening we made love.
When in my life had I not looked forward to setting out in the morning and leaving, alone? But I hated the thought of leaving Jenny. I was consoled by the thought that she seemed sorry too.
She said, “Will you come back?”
“What do you think?”
Three weeks later I returned. And then she visited me, coming by plane and landing at Entebbe. We spent the weekend together — making love, talking, procrastinating, and finally hurrying to the airport so that she could catch her plane that Sunday night.
It was a winding country road and so full of people walking and riding bikes, and so crowded in places with children fooling around that it took all my concentration. It was not until after she had gone that I recalled her taking my hand and saying casually, “By the way, my period’s late. I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about.”
9
Popatlal Hirjee was a goldsmith. His eyes were yellowish under heavy lids. He was very fat, and his hands were so plump that the three or four rings he wore were buried by the flesh of his fingers. He sat crosslegged on cushions in his shop, like a pasha. When I picked up the gold wedding rings he had made he dropped them into a jangling set of scales and counterbalanced them, throwing weights into the opposing pan and sorting them. Then he dug a diamond out of a brooch and set it in Jenny’s ring.
He never moved from his seated position, and he did all this sorting and weighing without speaking. His breathing — the heavy man’s gasp — had the sound of something being scorched.
His assistant said, “We can write names in them — your name in her ring, her name in yours. And the date.”
I wrote this information on a scrap of paper. Popatlal Hirjee gouged the names and the date on the inner surface of the rings. Hers said Andre 4-Aug-68.
“Bariki,” the goldsmith said. Blessings on you.
I drove one last time to Umoja in Kenya, and picked up Jenny and her two suitcases. On our way back to Kampala we stopped at Eldoret for the night. Two days later we woke in each other’s arms.
“We’re getting married today,” I said. “I love you.”
To wake up and say that seemed reckless and wonderful.
We went together to the Kampala Registry Office. The contract was read to us by an African in a three-piece suit. Our witnesses were my Indian friends, Neogy and Desai, and their extravagant signatures appeared on our marriage certificate. We gave a party at the Staff Club and before it was over we drove towards Fort Portal, stopping for our first night at Mubende at the rest house near the witch tree, and the next day at The Mountains of the Moon Hotel, where we spent a happy week.
The night we arrived back in Kampala the bush-baby appeared at the window — not looking for food, not even restless, but simply watching. He returned on successive nights, and over the next few weeks, with his large eyes staring in, my life changed.
Jenny said that Hamid would have to go. We couldn’t have a parrot and a child in the same house — and how could I stand the damned bird gnawing my books and shitting on my furniture. And Jackson went too when Jenny discovered that he hid garbage in kitchen drawers; I hadn’t been able to break him of the habit. We hired Mwezi — her name meant moon — a bucktoothed woman who made scones and who longed for the baby to arrive. The house was cleaned, perhaps for the first time since I had moved in.
The bush-baby watched; it asked for nothing more. It came and went, and was no longer a portent. I had my own bush-baby now. I loved waking beside her, I eagerly left work and hurried home to her. My habits changed. I seldom went to the Staff Club. Jenny was the only person I needed. We went out together — eating, drinking; sometimes we went dancing. I bought presents for her — an ivory carving, a silver buckle from Zanzibar, some kitenge cloth. We took long trips to West Nile and Kitgum to visit my student listening groups. I became very calm.
And my novel came alive. It was about Yung Hok, the Chinese grocer — the only Chinese shopkeeper in the country, the ultimate minority, a single alien family. I had once seen him as vulnerable, but now that I was married I saw that he was strong and that he was part of a family — he had a wife and children I had not noticed before. He wasn’t a symbol of anything. He was himself, an unusual man. He was something new in my experience, and he made me see the country in a new way. This made him vivid, and so I was able to write about him. For my spirit and inspiration I silently thanked Jenny. I worked in the spare bedroom, delighted that Jenny was nearby. I had no reason to think about leaving Africa now. I was at last home.
At about this time I saw an item in the Uganda Argus entitled AMERICAN WRITER DIES. It was Jack Kerouac. He was forty-seven. Years ago he had seemed old to me. Now he seemed young — much too young to die. The item did not say how. I thought about him, and how I had read On the Road, and I could not remember whether I had liked it. I continued writing my own novel.
I always had lunch at home now. Mwezi usually cooked it, and after we had sent her away we made love in the afternoon and had a nap before I went back to work.
One of these afternoons, waking from the deep and sudden sleep produced by energetic sex, I looked across the pillow and saw Jenny turning away. She was murmuring, trying to stifle her sobs. The bush-baby appeared at the window — listening.
“What’s wrong?”
She said, “Everything!” and began to sob out loud.
“Please tell me,”
I said, horrified to see her so distraught.
“Isn’t it obvious?” It was not obvious to me.
She said, “I feel miserable.” Her crying was not dry breathless hysteria or panic; it was slow painful sobs like waves breaking.
What made this so awful was that I was so happy — until that moment. I had never been so happy: I had told her that many times. I told her again, and this time it made her scream.
“Of course you’re happy!” she said. Her face was wet, and the fact that she was naked made her crying seem worse. I could see misery in her whole body.
I got up and handed her my bathrobe, because I couldn’t bear to look.
She said, “You haven’t had to quit your job. You have work, you have money. I’ve given up everything — even my name. I never wanted this to happen. I have nothing to do.”
It surprised me. I never imagined that anyone would object to having nothing to do. Why would anyone want to work if they didn’t have to? What she said baffled me so completely I did not know how to argue against it.
I said, “We take trips, don’t we?”
“You do all the driving!”
“I know the roads,” I said. “I know the shortcuts.”
“I can learn. I’ve driven in Africa. I speak Swahili,” she said. “I’m not stupid. I have an Oxford degree — and you made me quit my job.”
She became quieter and that worried me more, because she had been sobbing in grief, and this seemed to turn to anger.
“Now I’m just like all these expatriate wives I used to pity and despise. I’m a memsahib — you made me a memsahib. I stay at home and wait for you.”