Green City in the Sun Page 11

  And it was not that she had the spare time for such industry. With so many shortages in the protectorate Grace had resorted, as other settler women had, to making her own household products. From Lucille Donald she had learned to make homemade butter in old chutney bottles, candles out of mutton fat with a bicycle pump, and potato yeast the Kikuyu way. She had even been shown by the enterprising Lucille how to save old tea leaves and use them as glass and wood polish. These tasks took time and were performed when she wasn't watering and weeding her vegetable garden, chasing antelope and hyenas off her land, keeping after Mario, her houseboy, and trying to instill in him a sense of British cleanliness and order, and finally, traipsing into the Kikuyu villages in the hope of earning the Africans' trust and friendship. Grace also tried to spare some moments for personal pursuits: writing in her journal, reading six-month-old issues of the Times, and sending off regular letters to friends in England, the Mission Society of Suffolk, the government. The most valuable lesson medical school had taught her, Grace had come to realize, was the skill of being able to do several things at once.

  The day was coming alive with bird sounds. Thrushes and robins filled the morning with their song, larks and warblers found reason to greet the sun, and the curious red-chested cuckoo sat on its branch saying, "Fish like hell," over and over. It was because of the birds that Grace had named her house Birdsong Cottage.

  She had chosen the site for her home with the same care with which she approached every endeavor. Knowing that low-lying ground held dangers of malaria and that high ground meant carting water uphill from the river, Grace had chosen, at the edge of her thirty acres, most of which were still dense forest, a spot where the wide, flat bank of the river lifted into a barely perceptible slope. It was solid ground with good drainage and easy access to the Chania. There she had built a bungalow that looked like a hybrid of African hut and Suffolk cottage. It was long and low, with a thatch roof and a veranda that went all around. To the front lay a small lawn bordered by daisies, poppies, and salvias. Inside were the few pieces of furniture she had brought with her from England: a handsome old dresser, a four-poster bed, a kitchen table, and two Morris chairs set before an enormous stone fireplace. The floor, which was hard-packed earth and was sprinkled with Jeyes's fluid to discourage white ants and jiggers, was covered with zebra and antelope skins. On the wall above the fireplace hung the pelt of a leopard Valentine had shot—the cat, he believed, that had been carrying off his foxhounds.

  The "chairs" around her dining table, where she now read a book of Kikuyu grammar while eating breakfast, were, in fact, packing crates. And behind her stood the medicine cupboard, its shelves lined with neatly labeled tins, bottles, and boxes, few of which she had yet had occasion to use.

  It was a quiet life—in some ways maddeningly so. Grace had not come to East Africa to spend her days making bread or putting up soap. She was here to heal, to teach, to light a lamp in the Stone Age darkness. But in order to heal, one needed patients; to teach, one had to have pupils; and to illuminate darkness, one required fuel for the lamp.

  Why were the natives staying away?

  "They are willing to work for my brother," she had said to Sir James. "Why won't they come to my clinic?"

  "Valentine is the bwana," James had explained. "That is a status they understand. He has also earned their respect by beating them. But to the Kikuyu, Grace, you are not a woman who has proven herself. You have no husband, no children. In their eyes, what good are you?"

  "They go to the missions in Nyeri."

  "In order to obtain new names. The African sees that the power in this country lies with men who have names like George and Joseph. They've discovered that they can receive such names by going to the Christians and being baptized. The natives are lining up for mzungu names in their eagerness to be made the equals of white men. But you, Grace, don't preach or baptize. You don't have a cross on your roof, and you don't give them new names. They see no reason to come to you.

  That was to have been Jeremy's side of the mission, the sermons and baptizing. He and Grace were to have been a team: doctor and preacher. Without Jeremy, Grace realized, she was lost.

  "I'll give you my best advice," James had said. "Win over Chief Mathenge. Once you do that, the rest will follow."

  Mathenge! A man barely one evolutionary rung above the wild beasts of the forest! A warrior who regarded the changing world with scorn while he sat in the shade and watched his women break their backs in the hot sun. "If I could win over Mathenge," Grace had said, "then I should be able to make the rain come!"

  James had laughed then, the sunburned skin around his eyes folding into creases. He had a beautiful voice, Grace thought. It was cultured and genteel, the sort one expected to hear on a Shakespearean stage.

  James...

  Sheba had been a gift from him. He had found the animal when he had gone hunting for a cheetah that had been killing his cattle. His bullet had made an orphan of the cub, and he had brought her to Grace as a pet.

  She blinked down at the page of Kikuyu grammar she was supposed to be studying and realized her mind had wandered again. Must all thoughts lead to James? she wondered. Was that how it was going to be? With Jeremy it had been so different. They had met in the operating theater of the hospital ship and had fallen in love almost on sight. Wartime did not allow for drawn-out romances or courtships. There had been no daydreaming over him. They were in love at once and within days had been making their lifetime plans together.

  But in the end, Grace asked herself now, just how well had she known Jeremy? On board the ship they had talked and talked, but what had they talked about?

  Grace frowned as she tried to remember. Even his features were growing vague in her memory. But with Sir James she recalled every word he uttered, could picture his attractive face clearly. And she knew much more about him than she ever had of Jeremy Manning.

  The first time Grace had visited Kilima Simba, the Donald ranch eight miles to the north, had been in May, when she had delivered Lucille's baby girl, Gretchen. Sir James had come for Grace in a cart drawn by a Somali pony, and the two boys, Ralph and Geoffrey, had come with him. Grace had discovered that morning that the Nyeri forest ended shortly beyond the Treverton Estate and gradually gave way to vast stretches of savanna that spread like a wheaten sea to the foothills of Mount Kenya. The endless lion-colored plains were dotted with broad-leafed trees and evergreen shrubs; the air was dust-dry, and the sky a darker, deeper blue. The dirt track passed small herds of native cattle being watched over by young men who leaned on long sticks and whose hair was greased into hundreds of tight braids. They wore shukas, blankets knotted over one shoulder, and their pierced earlobes were weighted down with wooden cylinder inserts. Overhead, hawks and vultures described circles; gunmetal clouds were stacked around the peaks of the greedy old mountain that refused to send the rain; and there was a silence overall....

  Grace had glanced frequently at the man riding by her side, his whip flicking the ears of the pony. James was cut of a rugged leanness that was very appealing; his skin was permanently tanned. He was stamped out of the pioneer mold one found in the Australian outback or American West, as African as the warriors leaning on their sticks, but with a gentleness not known to the warlike heart of the native.

  Kilima Simba, he had explained, meant "Lion Hill," simba meaning "lion" and kilima, "little hill." It was a Swahili place-name, and many such were found in East Africa, the most famous being that of the continent's tallest mountain, "Little Hill Njaro."

  The Donald ranch was even more isolated than Bella Two, which at least was near the small outpost town of Nyeri. It stood in the middle of yellow savanna, eight thousand acres of waterless ground and parched grass, with a large herd of crossbred Ayrshire and Boran cattle, three hundred imported Merino sheep, and a lonely farmhouse at the center.

  Lucille's hunger for the company of a white woman was evident the minute Grace stepped down from the cart. There was Lucille—actuall
y, Lady Donald since her husband's knighthood—holding the front door open while clutching her abdomen through a contraction.

  Sir James came in and out of the house all afternoon, overseeing the innumerable projects on the ranch, while Grace took care of Lucille. Ralph and Geoffrey, aged four and seven respectively, played in the garden with the dogs and later came in noisily to gulp a supper of tinned ham, cornbread, and jellied preserves. Then James came in, washed and changed, and stayed by his wife's bedside until little Gretchen made her appearance at midnight. The instant the baby came into her waiting hands, Grace had thought: She will be best friends with Mona.

  While Lucille slept with Gretchen in the crook of her arm, Grace and James had sat in the cozy living room, where a pine log fire staved off the cold night. They had talked of many things that night, of the late rains, the shaky economics of the protectorate, problems with the natives; he had asked her about medical school, about the war, about her future plans in British East Africa and in turn had talked about his boyhood in Mombasa, safaris with his father into unexplored regions, the shock of having to go to England when he was sixteen, and the awful yearning that had been like a sickness to return.

  Because of the intimacy of the fire and the cold night, with the African stillness beyond the shuttered windows, Grace had wanted to ask him about his limp, the wound received in the war, and about how he had saved her brother's life. But then Grace remembered the night her ship had gone down and the hours spent adrift hearing the drowning men calling out for help in the darkness, and she had realized that just as she could never speak of that episode to anyone, so must Sir James wish to keep that chapter of his life private.

  Nonetheless, she continued to wonder about it, about him and what terrible ordeal he and Valentine had suffered near the Tanganyika border.

  Grace stared down at her book as morning sunlight crept over it. Her breakfast scones had gone cold; her Kikuyu lesson unlearned. It was uncharacteristic of Grace Treverton to allow her mind to drift. Discipline was what got one through medical school, what made a woman succeed in a man's world. And now here she was in an untamed corner of Africa expecting to make friends with a warlike tribe that had only yesterday laid aside its spears, and instead of concentrating on the vital lesson at hand, she was daydreaming about a man who could never be anything more to her than a friend.

  She was working on Class II Kikuyu nouns. "The lion," the grammar book explained, "is in a class where it would not normally belong, the one just below humans but above other animals. The reason for this is the Kikuyu fear that if the lion overheard himself being spoken of in Class III, where he really belongs, he would take offense and kill the man who had dared to insinuate he was inferior."

  Grace sighed and flipped the pages. What a language of paradoxes this was! Complex in the extreme when it came to verb tenses, there being approximately five present tenses and several future, and a riddle of past tenses defying all English equivalent, Kikuyu was also a language surpassing all others in simplicity. There were only three words denoting color: light, dark, and red-brown. If one wished to say that something was blue, it was the "color of the sky." And the number system was so governed by magic and superstition that it was no wonder James's cattle boys could not count their cows. Since it was taboo for a Kikuyu to work longer than six days in a row, to work on the seventh, the traditional day of rest, would mean bringing a thahu upon himself. And since the seventh month of pregnancy was the one they believed most likely for miscarriage, the number seven was greatly feared by the Kikuyu. One never planted only seven seeds but six or eight, and one never stopped after the seventh step but went one farther. Even the word seven was never to be uttered. It was as James had told her: A good way to understand the psychology of the Kikuyu was to learn their language.

  James again.

  Grace closed the book and stood. Before leaving the cottage, she took a moment to inspect herself in the mirror.

  Her culotte skirt had caused comment in the protectorate. A woman wearing pants! But some had seen the practicality of the divided skirts and had ordered them for themselves. Grace looked at her face. She had even features and protected her complexion from the sun, and her hair was thick and nice. What, she wondered, did James think when he looked at her?

  Finally Grace pinned to her collar a turquoise brooch that had been a gift from an American doctor named Samantha Hargrave.

  Famous for her fight in America against patent medicines, Dr. Hargrave had been visiting war victims in a London military hospital when she had met Grace Treverton, who was still recovering from her ordeal at sea. The two had talked for a long time, the experienced practitioner fifty-seven years old and the brand-new physician only three years out of medical school. Before leaving, Dr. Hargrave had removed a pendant she was wearing, a turquoise stone the size of a lemon slice, and had given it to Grace. It was for luck, she had said. The stone was very blue; when the luck was used, the color would fade and the stone would have to be passed on to someone else.

  It had a curious veining down the center that resembled two snakes twining up a tree, the universal symbol of medicine, or a woman with her arms outstretched. The instant the stone had touched her palm Grace had seen a vision flash before her eyes; it had been as if she were looking through the eyes of another woman and she had seen the bow of a ship and a city of marble domes and columns in the distance. Grace wondered if she had somehow been touched briefly by the spirit of that long-ago woman.

  She stepped out onto the veranda and drank in the bracing dawn. Each morning she felt as if she woke up close to the sun. Closer to God, some would say. On this sharp October morning the air was clear and damp with the promise of rain. Directly ahead, through the camphor trees and tall cedars, Grace could see Mount Kenya, where the ancient god of the Kikuyu dwelt. Once again he was being miserly with the rain, hugging the black clouds to him. Every so often a cloud would break away, move across the sky; it would look as if it were about to rain, and then the cloud would dissolve, vanish. Each time hopes would rise; Africans and Europeans would turn expectant faces to the sky, united in one desperate thought: rain.

  The long rains, supposed to have begun last March, never appeared.

  Now the short rains, scheduled for next month, were being prayed for. Grace gazed at the craggy mountain as if it were indeed an irascible old man who was peevishly withholding his blessing. There stood her enemy. Mount Kenya. Symbol of all the disease and ignorance in the protectorate. The mountain held its people in superstitious thrall, and Grace knew that in order to save them, she was going to have to fight that mountain.

  While waiting for Mario to join her, Grace caressed her small shamba with loving eyes. Overhead weaverbirds chattered in the trees, perched on branches like fat lemons, and starlings the color of deep blue mother-of-pearl played with little waxbills that were mousy gray except for scarlet faces and bills. There was the sweet smell of wild jasmine in the air and smoke from African cook fires. Up on the hill above her, work on the big house was still in progress. She could hear hammers and chisels ringing in the silence.

  As Grace drew her cardigan close to her chest, her eye was caught by something amiss. The four chairs on the veranda—their cushions were missing, again! No doubt the work of Sheba's friends. In the night young cheetahs came and played mischievously, pulling clothes off the line, carrying away the veranda cushions. Her welcome mat had disappeared weeks ago and was later found up a tree.

  Life at Birdsong Cottage meant constant vigilance to keep one's standards. It would be so easy, Grace realized, to give in and relax the rules of civilization, to allow the animals to have the run of the house, to relinquish the thatch roof to white ants, to allow one's clothes to run to rags, to let one's hair go uncombed, to forgo the evening bath; and some isolated settlers had done just that. The Stone Age, Grace knew, could be just a broom or a fork away.

  Mario came out of the house. He carried a warm cooking pot, a bag of grain, and a string of onions fl
ung over one shoulder. He was a bright young Kikuyu who had been educated by the Italian fathers at the Catholic mission; there he had been converted to Christianity and had been given the name, following widespread practice, of the priest who had baptized him. When he had come of age and had gone through the circumcision ceremony of manhood, he had gone in search of employment with the white man, as so many African males were doing now that there was no warrior class for them to enter. The cattle ranches were always their first choice, for cattle herding was an ancient and honorable occupation for men; James never lacked for cowhands. They shirked farm work like planting and picking because that was woman's work and therefore demeaning. Mario had not been able to join Valentine's house-building gang because he was from another clan and therefore an outsider, so Grace had hired him. She couldn't pay much, only two rupees a month, but he ate well and slept in a rondavel behind the house.

  He spoke English with an Italian accent, this young Kikuyu with the name of a Roman priest, and he wore khaki shorts and shirt, just like the native levies of the King's African Rifles. "Ready, Memsaab Daktari," he said, and showed her the pot.

  It had simmered all night, a stew of stunted vegetables mixed with maize meal. There was no meat because the Kikuyu would not eat wild game and Grace could not spare one of her own goats, nor was there any chicken because the men would not touch it, chicken being eaten only by women. But what Grace had dropped into it the night before was a rusty horseshoe, a traditional preventative against anemia.