Leopard at the Door Read online

  “Rachel Fullsmith?”

  I nod.

  Juno is teasing his trousers, and he kicks her off irritably so that she slides across the floorboards, yelping. I scoop her off the steps, her back legs windmilling beneath her, her teeth gnawing at my hand.

  “My uncle’s at the factory,” I say, tilting my head back down the road, in the direction he has come. The engine of the car is ticking over in the heat, the air settling thick and dusty around us. I am standing in a patch of sunlight, the boards hot beneath the soles of my feet so that I have to keep shifting my weight, lifting one bare foot then the other. He gives a slight nod, which is disconcerting. Visitors usually mean news, and news is something reserved for adults, but he doesn’t look about to leave.

  “I’ve come from Nairobi,” he says, not really talking to me, but looking at me curiously, and suddenly—in a gulping moment of unease—I know that whatever he is here for is something to do with me. “Your father,” he says, stepping onto the porch, pulling a small yellow envelope from the pocket of his trousers. It is stuck to a packet of cigarettes and he unpeels it. “A telegram. I was hoping to find your uncle. You’ll give it to him? Best to wait until he’s home.” His gaze slips up my bare legs, and I smell his warm breath, faintly mentholated, as he hands it over. Then he walks back to his car and drives off in a rattle of dust.

  I slip the telegram into my pocket, slide on my plimsolls, shut the door on Juno who is scrambling at my feet and run up to the factory to find my uncle.

  I remember the strike again when I come up to the pigpens. I can see—looking under the barn roves—that the pens are full to bursting. Usually the pigs are content and placid for the time they are kept here, nosing and rolling in the dusty earth, strangely resigned to the sudden change in their circumstances, and I would lean over the rail, the metal bar hot against the thin cotton waist of my dress, and lay a hand on the coarse bristled skin of the nearest, soaking up the feel of the warm, rolling firmness of its back beneath my hand. But today they are jammed in so tight that heads are lifted onto the buttocks of the ones in front, pink, brown and black packed in so close you can’t tell one pig from another.

  There is a noise coming from the yard beyond the walls, an undercurrent of voices which rises up above the grunting of the pigs; a group of men protesting, their shouts lifting on a tide of anger. I think of the knives each man carries at the factory, the long blades used for cutting through muscle, fat and bone. What if they haven’t put them down after all?

  The whole place feels out of kilter, as if anything might happen. I stand beside the pigpens, under the hot sun, pushing my sweating palms against the cotton of my dress, wondering what to do. I know I shouldn’t be at the factory, but I don’t want to leave just yet—I need to see what is happening in the yard.

  I run through the barn, between the pens—hot with the smell of pigs, until I reach the factory wall. I am careful not to be seen—my uncle will be angry with me if he finds out. There is a door—usually left open for the managers in the engine room, along the corridor, to get a breath of air. It is heavy on its hinges, and swings open silently when I pull on it. I step inside a cool, dark corridor. It is quiet inside, and there are no lights on. At the end there is a square of sunlight on the cement floor: the stairwell.

  I pad up the concrete steps into the light, crouching down as I come out onto a balcony on the first floor, emerging into a swell of noise. I slide forward on my belly so that I can see through one of the round drain holes in the wall. It gives me a circular view of what is going on below, without the risk of being seen.

  I am overlooking the courtyard of the main factory. The workers aren’t carrying their knives—a relief—but some carry large stones in their hands. They sweat and shout in the heat, hemmed in like the pigs outside. They look stronger and less knowable without their brown tunics and white aprons. My heart thuds with a sudden fear. I have never seen so many men, so many Africans, brought together by anger. Their faces are taut, and a few of them cry out in defiance.

  An idea—absurd but compelling—grips me. What if the Africans rise up and in their anger herd us through the killing line, to be stunned, strung up and butchered? They far outnumber the group of European managers and their askari who stand in a cluster by the far wall. My uncle is standing with them, his posture rigid. I turn, hearing a noise behind me. Voices in the stairwell and the flat tread of feet coming up the stairs. A heart-racing terror—I don’t want to be found up here, on my own. There is an open door a few yards away. An office—empty. I dart inside and pull the door shut. All I can hear for a long moment is the milling of voices from the factory yard, but then—with a freezing of my spine—the door handle turns. I look round the room in desperation, my eyes still adjusting to the dark. Should I stand up and declare myself? There is a cupboard in the corner. I open the slatted door and before I know what I am doing I am folding myself inside, next to a bucket and a box of files, and I am pulling the door closed. The telegram folds stiffly in my pocket.

  A European officer walks in, dressed in a khaki shirt, followed by two askari in uniform, with rifles over their backs and revolvers in their belts. I can see them through the slats. They push an African into the room in front of them, so hard that he falls forward onto the metal desk. Its feet screech across the floor and I flinch. He is a slight man, wearing leather shoes, a ripped collared shirt and trousers; he looks like an African from Nairobi. The officer barks a command and the door swings shut. My heart thuds in my chest. It is too late to do anything other than stay quiet.

  The European officer isn’t tall but he is bulky, not quite fat but fleshy as a fruit might be when overripe, and his thin blond hair is combed down into a side parting. He is looking at the African in dismay, shaking his head from side to side in a demonstration of disappointment.

  “So, you’re the leader of this circus?” he asks in Swahili, sitting with half his weight on the desk. He speaks with a casualness that borders on disinterest.

  “Ndiyo,” the man says, yes, pushing himself upright and brushing his hands slowly on his trousers.

  The officer lights a cigarette, inhales, and says as he blows out, “And what the fuck are you kaffirs hoping to achieve here?”

  The African has a piece of paper crushed in his palm, and he straightens it and hands it to the officer. The officer doesn’t move, doesn’t take it, just keeps on staring at the striker and smoking his cigarette. I have the impression of certain teachers at school, who accelerated the will of my rebellion with their implacable refusal to acknowledge my point of view.

  The African steps forward, folds the piece of paper into a square and pushes it into the officer’s shirt pocket. Then he leans forward—so close that I imagine the wash of his warm breath on the officer’s mouth—and says, in perfect English, “Kenya is a black man’s country. You should go back to where you belong.”

  The officer doesn’t flinch. He takes one last, slow drag on his cigarette, gives the African a slight smile, drops the cigarette to the floor and grinds it out with the toe of his heavy black boot. Then he pulls the revolver out of his belt, walks around behind the man and slams him on the back of the neck with the gun so that he collapses onto the floor.

  When the striker tries to stand up the officer lifts his gun and smashes him in the face. Blood explodes. I shut my eyes. When I open them again the man is on the floor, curled up, sweeping his feet along the cement in an attempt to slide away. The officer pauses for a moment, takes a few dancing steps on the floor to line himself up, then swings his boot at the man’s head, under his chin, so that his neck snaps back. After that the man doesn’t move.

  I swallow heavily. A trickle of sweat runs down between my eyebrows. I have to make a conscious effort not to scream. The officer hands the gun to his askari, pulls a handkerchief from his pocket and carefully wipes down his hands, his face and his shirt. “Fucking kaffirs,” he says as he walks out
, slipping his gun back into his belt. Then—in Swahili—“Leave him here—we’ll go deal with the others. There won’t be any shauri now.”

  And they walk out of the room, closing the door behind them with a click.

  IV

  As we are driving out of Nairobi, through the Kikuyu reserves, we hear a rattle of gunfire and three African askari dart across the road in front of us.

  “What is it?” I ask Nathaniel, who is pulling over on the side of the road. I can hear a woman screaming.

  “A sweep maybe,” he says, bringing the jeep to a juddering halt. “The police have started making random searches.”

  He switches off the ignition and we sit, listening. My heart is racing. “The reserves are a hotbed of discontent. They’ll be hoping to pick up any Mau Mau hiding here.”

  The gunfire stops, and after a moment he opens his door, and I do the same.

  “Aleela,” Kahiki says, putting out a hand to stop me.

  “She’ll be OK,” Nathaniel says, slipping down onto the parched grass which grows on the side of the road. He has his camera in one hand. “We won’t go far.”

  We walk toward the shouts, squinting into the glare of the sun. There is a market square up ahead, baskets overturned, vegetables rolling in the dust, and someone screaming, hysterical. Police jeeps are gathered on the verge. Five or six askari in khaki uniforms, with rifles, are herding men, women and children together. Nathaniel takes a few photographs, then walks over to a European officer and asks him some questions. My eyes fix on the girl who is shouting. She must be about my age, in a headscarf which has slipped back off her hair. Two African officers are blocking her from going forward and she is begging, screaming, trying to break through. “Give him to me!”

  And then I see the baby sitting in the dust twenty feet from me, crying softly. He is small and brown, the same color as the earth, and too young to walk. It would take nothing for one of the askari to go back and pick him up, but they keep pushing the group back, and she is crying for the boy. I can see from the posture of the two Africans, from the way they let her bounce off them—between the butts of their rifles—that they find this a kind of spectacle. That they are enjoying the drama of it. Perhaps they are just baiting her, and will go back in a minute and pick up the boy. There is no reason to think that they won’t. Except I cannot watch what they are doing to her. There is something so awful, and so ugly, in their proving to this girl that she is unable to protect her child.

  I walk into the square. The officer talking to Nathaniel is distracted—he hasn’t seen me. I pick up the baby—a bundle of warm, dry skin against mine—and for a moment he stops crying. I have barely walked two paces when the European officer shouts at me.

  “Hey!” he calls out. “Put it down.”

  “It’s her child,” I say, turning to face him. Nathaniel is standing next to him, watching.

  “Put it down,” the officer says, swinging his gun at me, “or I’ll arrest you like the rest of them.”

  “Lower your gun,” Nathaniel says in a sharp voice. I realize the officer is not much older than me, but he ignores Nathaniel and lifts his gun level with my stomach, and says very slowly, “Put—it—down.” And so I obey—just like that my courage fails me and I begin to place the child, crying, back on the ground.

  Nathaniel closes a hand on the officer’s rifle, lifting the barrel so that it points to the sky. The officer shouts at him, backing up, but Nathaniel has his hand on the gun and the officer isn’t strong enough to wrest it away from him.

  “Go on—” Nathaniel says to me, and I carry the child across the market square, under the eyes of the askari, my legs shaking underneath me. The boy sees his mother and begins crying for her, and she reaches out her hands for him, grabbing at his arms. “Asante,” she says, clutching the child to her, holding him away from the askari. “Asante.”

  Nathaniel lets go of the rifle and says to the officer, “The world is ugly enough without you pissing all over it.”

  —

  “YOU’VE GOT NERVE—” Nathaniel says, when we are back in the jeep and pulling out into the road, but I’m not sure it’s true. I would have put the child down if he hadn’t been there. I feel no satisfaction, only shame. I think we both feel it. Kahiki says nothing as we drive past, and I wonder what he is thinking. He is one of the few laborers on the farm who isn’t Kikuyu. He and his family aren’t directly affected by what we have witnessed here, but this surely touches him as well. I crane my head to see whether I can spot the woman with her child, but there are too many askari in the way.

  “A goddamn circus,” Nathaniel says, almost to himself. He pulls a small silver flask from the side of the door, puts it between his legs and unscrews the lid. Then he tilts it to his lips and drinks.

  “Do you think it will blow over?” I ask.

  He laughs, softly. “I heard a Kikuyu once say that when a man steals your ox and kills it, you can forget. But when he steals your land—you never forget.”

  “But the Europeans didn’t steal their land. There was no one at Kisima when my father came.”

  He looks at me. That assessing glance again, that holds no blame, only a measuring of what I am. And caution—he does not want to say too much. “I said you shouldn’t get into politics with me.”

  “I want to know what you think.”

  “Your father might not want you to know what I think.” He takes another sip from the flask, sucking whiskey over his teeth. “Nor might Sara.”

  “Who is Sara?” I ask.

  He looks at me for a long moment, then turns his gaze back to the road and doesn’t say anything. I do not want to ask again. I do not want to seem more naive, more vulnerable than he already thinks I am. But the name stirs an unease inside me. It is the way he said it; the connection with my father.

  We drive through the afternoon, through the small town of Nakuru, until the tarmac runs out and we are juddering along the rutted washboard of the track which will take us deep into the bush, to the very edge of the Rift Valley, though there is no indication yet of the plunging gorges on which the farm is precariously balanced.

  Lush mountains rise up, punctured by flat plains where giraffe bend their patchwork heads to the tops of yellow-barked acacias. I spot a bull elephant, his body hidden in the undergrowth, his trunk looping up to pull down the branches of a tree, and a little later a troop of baboons fling themselves over the road in front of us, one huge male watching his troop go past before following behind them. We drive until the parched grasses turn green and the earth becomes soft. My heart soars. I begin to recognize the contours of the land, my mind feeling its way over an old blueprint. This is as familiar to me as breathing.

  “The rains came two weeks ago,” Nathaniel says, swinging the steering wheel to avoid the ruts in the road, as we slip and slide over the track, splashing into deep puddles which spray our arms with brown spots.

  The track deteriorates until, in the end, we get stuck in a slick of mud so implacable that we have to climb out. It sucks at my feet and I lose my plimsoll almost immediately and have to plunge my hand into the wet stickiness to retrieve it. Kahiki pulls two shovels from the boot of the jeep and he and Nathaniel begin to work at digging us out.

  I climb up the track to higher ground. All around us is bush—as far as the eye can see. Thorny scrub, grass clearings and the occasional acacia tree casting its umbrella of shade. It would be hard for a stranger to distinguish this place from any other that we have driven through, but I have grown up here. I used to ride my pony down this track. It took the better half of the morning, and I know we are over an hour’s drive from the farm.

  Everything is a luminescent green. In all the years I have been away, I have never seen anything as beautiful as the land that lies before me now. The sun beats down and I feel the mud shrink and dry against the skin on my calves until I can rub it off in flakes. There is not a
sound, except for the liquid, dropping call of the doves. Between the trees I see the flickering white bob of a tail—a gazelle, and I breathe more easily: there are no lion lying here panting in the shade. Stillness settles over everything; the fears which have haunted me since leaving England—that my father might not want to see me, that home will be altered—slip away. I belong here; and this place is too wild, too remote for change.

  I help Nathaniel and Kahiki roll stones under the wheels of the jeep, stamping them in close to the tires, then pull myself into the driver’s seat. They brace themselves to push but when I press the accelerator the engine roars, and I can feel the wheels spinning helplessly beneath me. We repeat the process over the next hour, but succeed only in digging the car deeper into the mud.

  I climb down. Nathaniel leans against the back of the jeep, groaning, and lights a cigarette, holding out the pack to me. As we stand and smoke, a group of Kikuyu appear in the distance. Their bodies are slick and muscular, skin shining in the sun. “Jambo,” we call out, and they shout back, friendly and open. I do not know them—they are not from Kisima, but they push us rolling into motion, one of them running alongside as we speed away, to grab a packet of cigarettes from Nathaniel’s outstretched hand. We shout our thanks behind us and drive on, the can of soda pop I brought with me from Nairobi boiling in the heat, sticky against my legs.

  We dip down a rutted track into a sea of green, lurching over stones. The jeep slips and slides until we are deep in the bush, branches scratching against the metal doors, releasing the sweet, dry fragrance of leleshwa. Antelope dart down the track in front of us. The road climbs, the ground falling away behind us to a view so vast and wide that the land appears endless. In the hazy distance I can see animals moving, the switch of a tail. Our windows are wound down, the road rattles on, and the soil, the damp taste of the earth, is in my mouth.