A Change in Altitude (16 page)

He resembled the Patrick she’d known before the climb: focused, but quick with a joke; searching for the problem, but not immune to a sudden hug; pulling a young woman who was crying to his shoulder. He palpated glands, looked down throats, felt for lumps that had been shyly pointed to. He gave orders to an attending nurse in a calm voice that clearly communicated urgency. He dispensed pills. He wrote notes the entire time in a shorthand only he could read. When the clinic was over, Margaret knew, he would meet with the top physician at the compound and review the records of the eighty patients he was following for his research. She watched him, his dark hair haloed by the bright midday light beyond the window, his face backlit.

“Patrick, Patrick, Patrick,” she said silently to herself.

*   *   *

Shortly after the day at Mathari Hospital, a colleague of Patrick’s named Munira and his wife, Naomi, invited Patrick and Margaret to visit Munira’s family shamba in Limuru, a village north of Nairobi in Kikuyu territory. Munira drove. While still in the car on the way to Limuru, Margaret was overtaken by a soporific lassitude, one brought on by the seemingly endless panoramas of red dirt and carved green terraces, of mango trees and banana plantations, of seas of red coffee beans. She thought it must be the saturated color, too many bright hues overwhelming the senses. Or perhaps it was the fact that Naomi and Munira spoke English with a musical and mesmerizing Kikuyu lilt.

When the four arrived in the town, Munira announced that he and Naomi first had to pay their respects to Naomi’s father, who was an advocate and had an office there. Patrick and Margaret took cups of tea they’d ordered at a tea shop to an outdoor terrace. Below them lay a maze of red and green, punctuated by grass huts.

“This is too beautiful,” Margaret said. “It makes me feel alive and yet dreamy at the same time. I just want to close my eyes.”

“It’s the altitude.”

“You don’t think it’s beautiful?”

“I do. But it’s the altitude.”

“Okay.”

“Did you know Munira’s grandfather fought during Mau Mau?” Patrick asked.

“Where?”

“Right here.”

“You mean right here, in this town?” Margaret asked, taking another sip of the sweet tea.

“And in the countryside. It’s like sitting at the site of a Civil War battle twenty years after it happened.” He paused and then asked, “Are you okay?”

Margaret met his eyes. “I’m trying,” she said.

Anger begets anger, she wanted to say. Distrust begets distrust.

They could hear their friends and Naomi’s father approaching.

“My father-in-law wants to give you a drink from the bar of his friend,” Munira said.

Margaret checked her watch. It was eleven in the morning.

“We’d love a drink,” Patrick answered. He smiled and shook hands with Naomi’s father.

They followed the man to a cement box of a bar, where they were greeted with much enthusiasm by Naomi’s father’s friends, all Kikuyu men of varying ages and builds, all with a distinct Bantu likeness. They were ushered into a back room, where Patrick was offered chang’aa. Not far from the bar was the actual grave site of Munira’s grandfather, which they visited. While Margaret snapped pictures of Munira, Naomi, the grave site, and the surrounding countryside, Munira spoke about his grandfather’s sacrifice.

“He was a very brave man,” he said. “He killed eight of the British troops with his panga alone.”

“How did he die?” Patrick asked.

“He was executed,” Munira said. “A bullet to the back of the head.”

Margaret tried to imagine the beautiful terraces as a bloody battleground. The prize had been freedom, as flawed and as difficult as that had turned out to be.

“I think it is time we are eating,” Munira said.

He drove Patrick and Margaret to his family’s shamba, a mud-and-wattle hut with a grass roof—Munira’s home when he was a boy. From that hut, he had gone to grammar school, high school, university in the UK, and then medical school in Nairobi. Now he worked as a physician at Nairobi Hospital. Naomi was a banker. She had on an electric-blue suit that hugged every curve of her body. From time to time, she settled her hands on her belly and sighed with contentment. Munira announced that Naomi was pregnant.

Was this the real Africa? Margaret wondered as she was beckoned into the darkened hut to sit awhile. She chatted with Munira’s female relatives in her best, if rudimentary, Swahili. There were many smiles on both sides. Margaret examined the pictures that hung on the walls. One was a portrait of Jomo Kenyatta. The others were pages that had been ripped out of magazines and taped to the wall: pictures of the countryside, one of Mombasa, and one of a particularly difficult hairstyle of complicated braids. Margaret admired a red-and-yellow handwoven rug in the center of the room. Munira’s sister said she had made it, and Margaret complimented her. The cooking was done in a separate hut, one of the women explained, the hut that had a hole cut into the roof.

Patrick and Margaret were plied with irio, a Kikuyu dish of mashed potatoes, maize, and peas, while outside, chickens ran in the dust. A goat was slaughtered in their honor, and Patrick and she were given the “delicacies” in a ceremonial manner. Margaret stared down at her tin plate. Biological forms she couldn’t identify sat in a pool of what she could only assume was blood. Patrick took a bite, which he swallowed nearly whole. Margaret summoned her courage and did the same, allowing only a hint of taste and texture as it went down. Refusing the delicacies would have been rude, a notion Margaret had intuited as soon as the plate had been put in her lap—the irony being that all of Munira’s family, at least a dozen siblings and cousins sitting at their feet, longed for the offal that had been given to Patrick and Margaret.

They were offered pombe, a milder beer, which helped with the organs. As they were leaving the shamba, there were many handshakes and pleas to return. Margaret invited the family to visit them in Karen, a suggestion that was greeted with mild enthusiasm. (Patrick and Margaret had Munira’s extended family over for a typical American meal on the Fourth of July. They served hamburgers, potato salad, coleslaw, and strawberry shortcake for dessert. The Africans barely touched their plates. They would not pick up the hamburgers despite the fact that Patrick and Margaret demonstrated how to do so. They poked at the coleslaw, ate the potato salad—though they said it had a sour taste—and had only a bite of the strawberry shortcake. Too sweet, they proclaimed.)

As Margaret and Patrick were about to climb back into Munira’s car to go home, Munira’s sister gave Margaret a basket of pawpaw and the rug Margaret had much admired when she’d entered the hut. Margaret was horrified by the gift of the family’s only rug and protested that she couldn’t possibly accept it, that their dirt floor would be bare without it. In the end, the rug was slipped through the back window and onto their laps. Though Margaret was embarrassed, she thanked them profusely for the generous gift. There would be other trips to other family shambas, but Margaret would never again make the mistake of admiring anything another woman owned.

Once, Margaret went on a trip without Patrick. Aarya and Karim, a Pakistani couple who worked with UNICEF and who lived next door to Margaret and Patrick in Karen, had been given permission to view a Masai ceremony, one that took place only once every twenty years. Aarya asked Margaret if she wanted to tag along. It might be possible for her to take a picture or two, which would help Aarya and Karim document the siku kuu.

They drove along a treacherous and winding route to the floor of the Rift Valley, where it was dusty and hot. It was easy to spot where the ceremony would take place: two hundred fifty manyattas formed a perfect circle a half mile across. Margaret felt as though they were journeying back in time to an ancient archaeological site. When they parked near the opening of the circle, they climbed atop the VW Kombi that Aarya had borrowed from UNICEF. A wind came up and stuck the dust to Margaret’s sweaty face. She had brought a hat and sunglasses, which were essential. Without them, she almost certainly would have gotten heatstroke.

The ceremony they were to witness that day atop the Kombi was for women. A separate ceremony for men had taken place just two days before. Then, a group of young men had made the transition from warriors to junior elders.

The purpose of this ceremony was to ensure fertility for each of the women who attended the ritual. Two thousand Masai participated, having come from as far as Kajiado. The event lasted the entire day.

Close to five hundred women gathered at the center of the circle and began to sing and dance. They were magnificent, each a queen in her brightly beaded maridadi and red blankets. Every woman’s head had been shaved, while heavy jewelry (sometimes film canisters) hung from large and drooping ear holes. Occasionally, several of the women would throw themselves to the ground, wailing and beating their breasts.

“These are the women who have not borne children,” Aarya, who was sitting with Margaret on the roof of the Kombi, explained.

The dancing culminated in a four-step ritual. One by one, each Masai woman stepped to a small bath of honey beer made in a trough of dung. She touched her hand to the liquid and rubbed it on the insides of her thighs. She then went to another pot of honey beer in an animal skin and knelt down to sip from the beer or to be lightly slapped by the men with a branch of leaves dipped in the liquid. Her own marital and family status determined her treatment. From there, she walked to a group of men who sat with shallow dishes of white paint. The woman was painted on her face, back, or between her breasts, according to her fertility status.

From there, the woman joined a growing semicircle of other women, who also began to sing and dance. A contingent of men, by now quite drunk, passed before each of them, spitting and spraying honey beer first onto the woman’s arm and then between her breasts, which she exposed. The woman was expected to stop singing and then to sit down once the men had blessed her in this way. Gradually all the music stopped. The symbolism was blatant.

Early in the ceremony, Margaret had taken out her camera and snapped a couple of shots. She and Aarya hadn’t asked permission to photograph the event, and Margaret was reluctant to reveal the camera. Still, she wanted to capture the essence of the ceremony, the interactions between the men and the women. After perhaps fifteen minutes of quick, nervous shooting, Margaret felt a tug at her sleeve. Aarya pointed to a dozen Masai elders surrounding the Kombi. Margaret set the camera down on the metal roof, as if the innocent mechanism were a weapon.

An elder who spoke rapid Swahili, which Aarya then translated to Margaret, asked for money. He pointed out that if he went into Nairobi to have a picture taken, it would cost him thirty shillings. “When you pay us this money,” he said, “that money can be gone in a day. It is so easy to spend. But if you have your photographs, they will be good for a hundred years.”

While Margaret was trying to listen to the translation, a boy climbed up the Kombi behind her and snatched the camera. She was frightened, and although she wanted her camera back, she could not imagine getting off the bus and confronting what had now become forty or fifty elders attending to the matter. Each carried a spear or a panga. Karim, who’d been watching the ceremony from within the enclosure, jogged to the Kombi and spoke to the elders at length. He then turned his head up to Margaret and explained that unless she surrendered the film, she was liable for a three-thousand-shilling fine. Margaret nodded and said yes, she would give them the film. She simply wanted the camera back. But after a quick consultation, the Masai elders informed Karim of another decision they had made. They would no longer discuss the matter with Margaret, an elder explained, because she was a woman. And as women can have no possessions, the camera, in the eyes of the elders, did not belong to Margaret but to her husband. Did she have a husband? Margaret said that she did. In that case, she was told, she must send her husband back the next day and the matter would be discussed with him.

“But it’s mine,” Margaret protested. “My husband had nothing to do with it. I own that camera.”

“You cannot tell that to these men,” Karim, who had climbed to the roof of the Kombi, said. “They won’t pay any attention to you.”

“Do what they say,” Aarya whispered beside Margaret.

*   *   *

The next morning, Patrick and Karim drove to the circle of manyattas. Patrick asked to speak to an elder. He apologized profusely for his wife’s behavior, paid a small fine, and was given the camera back.

When he returned to the house in Karen, camera in hand, he seemed slightly amused by the entire encounter, amused enough not to have minded the long ride to the Rift and back.

Margaret, however, was furious. “Can’t you see how demeaning this is to me? To women?”

“Of course it’s demeaning. That’s the point.”

“Doesn’t that bother you?” she asked as she stared at the tainted camera on the hall table.

“Not really,” he said.

“How can you say that?” she asked, her voice rising.

“You and I don’t live in that culture, Margaret. We don’t feel that way. The Masai have a separate culture with very different rules of behavior. The two cultures briefly intersected,
on their territory,
and a camera was confiscated. We got it back.”

“But at what cost?”

“What’s more important, your pride or the camera?”

Margaret couldn’t answer him, because she didn’t know the answer. She was glad to have the Nikon back, but she was seething at the thought of having been demoted to the status of a child. Or would a male child have had more authority than she? It was days before Margaret could bring herself to pick up the camera again.

Margaret was finding it increasingly difficult to fully absorb Africa when the very thing that had brought her to the country—her marriage to Patrick—was troubling her. In theory, the lingering tension between them seemed like such an easy thing to fix. In reality, it was not. Patrick handled it better, Margaret thought, because he was engaged by his work. She was fascinated with photography, but to what purpose? It had not been imperative for Margaret to have a job in Kenya—Patrick’s income supported them—but she had been feeling increasingly fraudulent. In June, Margaret determined to do something about that.