Paul Theroux - My Secret History

I could not call her. The phone lines to Kenya were always out of order, and when they worked you heard a faint deep-in-a-well whisper that made you feel lonelier, because you had to shout at the voice that was always saying Talk louder. I can’t hear you .

How could I shout the things I wanted to say? How could I stand to get a mouse-whisper in reply?

When Friday came I was restless. I went to sleep drunk and woke up at four o’clock in the morning on Saturday, wondering what to do. I saw I had no choice: there was only one thing. I dressed in the dark and got into my car and drove away, out of Kampala. The streets were empty. The forest outside town was black, but as dawn broke I saw Africans washing near their huts and waiting for buses and heading for the cane fields. I had breakfast at Tororo and then crossed the border. The immigration official on the Kenya side yawned at me — both a greeting and a growl — as he stamped my passport. At midmorning in Western Kenya five African boys with dust-whitened faces jumped out at me from the elephant grass at the shoulder of the dirt road. They had just been circumcized and become men: they showed it by howling at me and shaking painted shields. Farther along there were baboons sitting on the road grimacing at me with doglike teeth. The road went on and on, past tea and wheat and corn and cactuses and stony hills and mud huts. The mileposts told me I was nearing Nairobi. The sun was going down over Muthaiga as I turned north on a narrower road. Just before seven o’clock my headlights illuminated the sign UMOJA GIRLS SCHOOL. It had been a twelve-hour drive, but I wasn’t tired. I was excited — more than that, my nerves were electrified.

I turned into the driveway, between thick hedges, and went slowly. There were heavy red blossoms on the bushes and big brown petals flattened in the dark wheel tracks.

Two girls in green school uniforms stepped aside to let me pass. But I stopped.

“Where is Miss Bramley’s house, please?”

“That side,” one said, and the girl next to her muffled a giggle.

Only then, hearing that sound behind the girl’s hand, did I have doubts. They rose in my throat and made me queasy. What if this was all a huge mistake? I had not warned Jenny I was coming. She might be with a man — or out of town for the weekend. Maybe she had gone to the coast. I knew nothing about her life. Everything that had seemed right to me before, and for the whole of the long drive, now became uncertain. I felt awkward, even fearful, after I spoke to those African girls. I almost went away then, but I forced myself to go on.

Her house was behind another hedge. Every building here was hidden by foliage. Her lights were on. I did not go all the way. I switched the engine off and eased the door shut, and walked to her window.

She was with an African man. I watched. I could not hear anything. She stood facing him — he was simply staring, listening. She was smiling. Was he her lover? It didn’t matter, I told myself. It just showed me how little I knew her.

I wanted to leave. I was trembling. I couldn’t interrupt — didn’t want to. It wasn’t right. I was such a blunderer. Perhaps she had written me a letter, which had arrived that morning in Kampala; but I hadn’t received it because I was on the road. Perhaps the letter said, Dear Andy, I have been putting off writing this letter, but I can’t put it off any longer …

It was a twelve-hour trip back to Kampala, it was almost two to Nairobi. But how could I go back right now? I had to reject the idea; I was exhausted. But I would have to go, because now I understood the brief postcard, the long silence, the girl’s giggles. I was sad, but I had to knock and see her, so that I could say goodbye.

She could not speak when she answered the door. Her face seemed to swell with unspoken words. I took it to be the shock of acute embarrassment. I began to apologize.

“I couldn’t call you,” I said. “I thought I’d visit. Don’t worry — I’m not staying. I can see that you’re busy—”

I was still talking but she wasn’t listening.

She smiled and said, “You’re wearing takkies!”

I had dressed in a hurry. I wore a black suit, a T-shirt, dark glasses, and tennis sneakers— takkies . It was the Kenya word for them.

Behind her the African had become very still.

“I’m sorry to interrupt,” I said.

Now we both looked at him.

He said, “Mem, chakula kwisha? Wewe nataka kahawa?”

“He’s your cook!” I said, much too loudly.

“I’m afraid so,” she said, and she turned to the African, “Kwisha, asanti sana. Hapanataka kahawa. Kwaheri, John.”

“Why don’t you want a coffee?”

“Because I want to be alone with you,” she said.

When he left, Jenny said, “He makes fruit salad and dumps it into the bowl with yesterday’s leftover fruit salad. I eat a little and he adds a little every day. The bowl is always full. It’s a bottomless fruit salad. I’ve been eating it for more than three weeks. Surely that’s not healthy? I was just explaining — oh, Andy”—and threw her arms around me—“I’m so glad to see you. I’ve been missing you. I can hardly believe you’re here.”

We went directly to bed. We made love, then dozed and woke and made love again.

In the darkness of her bedroom I said, “I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

“I mean I really love you,” I said. “I’m in love with you.”

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.”

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.”