A Change in Altitude (8 page)

“Good night, Patrick.”

Margaret had advised sleep but couldn’t manage it herself. She no longer had fever dreams of ants and euphorbia trees, but she had wide-awake images of what Adhiambo had just gone through. She could picture the breaking of the glass, perhaps the beating down of a flimsy door. A drunken African—or had it been an Asian? a white?—had pleaded at first and then had stopped his pleading. As if he’d been refused a drink at the bar and now intended to swipe all the bottles from the shelf, he’d thrown Adhiambo to the floor. Would Adhiambo have screamed? Margaret thought not. Was she already ashamed? Would a scream be heard in the evening cacophony? Or worse, ignored?

When Margaret woke in the morning, Adhiambo was sitting at the edge of the bed, her blouse-ball tucked under one arm. The bed had been perfectly made, and Margaret couldn’t tell if she had slept in it or not. For all Margaret knew, the woman had slept on the floor.

“Good morning,” Margaret said, and Adhiambo nodded her head.

“Are you okay?” Margaret asked.

The woman didn’t respond, but neither did she try to hide her face. The egg over her eye had swollen and blackened. Her lip was cut but was no longer bleeding. Margaret wondered how many other bruises lay beneath the clothes. She tried not to think about the ultimate bruise.

“Would you like some tea?” Margaret asked, and Adhiambo nodded.

“Good. I’ll just use the bathroom a minute and put on my robe.”

It occurred to Margaret that Adhiambo might be wondering about the unsightly red disks on her own arms and legs.

Margaret slipped by Adhiambo to the bathroom and closed the door. Her own clean underpants were still neatly folded on the dresser. A flash of shame shot through Margaret for having even offered them to Adhiambo. To have presumed that level of intimacy would have offended the woman. Margaret recalled that African men wouldn’t touch women’s underwear. Maybe the same prohibition held for African women. And then Margaret noted that the hand towel, always on a ring by the sink, was missing. The bleeding must have been so bad that Adhiambo had needed a towel to stanch it. Margaret didn’t use sanitary napkins. Perhaps Patrick could get some at the duka as soon as it opened. Margaret searched the wastebasket and found three tiny shards of glass.

Adhiambo would drink tea, but nothing else Margaret offered her seemed to have any appeal. Margaret tried bread and jam, then cereal, then eggs, then fruit. Adhiambo must still be in shock, Margaret thought. She wondered where James was, why he had not been sent to the cottage first thing in the morning. Margaret sat across from Adhiambo and tried to talk to her.

Adhiambo took a great deal of sugar with her tea, and Margaret thought,
Good.
Something to allay the after-quakes of shock, something to keep her going. Margaret poured her another cup, into which Adhiambo added more sugar. Margaret glanced at the clock. Five to nine. Where the hell was James? He’d been up, as per his routine, since four thirty. Margaret heard Patrick, who had kept out of Adhiambo’s sight, shut the front door behind him. He was going for the pads now.

“Adhiambo, I would really like to help you,” Margaret said.

“I am just all right,” Adhiambo answered in a voice barely above a whisper.

Was this, Margaret wondered, a translation of another phrase in Adhiambo’s tribal language? Margaret didn’t even know her tribe; she had never bothered to ask. Adhiambo had tucked her hair into the clean scarf Margaret had given her minutes ago. Her skin was dark brown, with hints of gray in the shadows. It wasn’t that she looked old; it was merely the shade of her skin, just as James’s was blue. Margaret wondered if the woman knew her own age or the month she was born. Many of the Africans Patrick had met at the hospital didn’t know their birth dates. They took the concept of “age-mate” seriously: a man or a woman who’d been born in the same year as oneself. But the actual date? “Is there a reason to know that?” they would ask, somewhat puzzled.

“I am so sorry this happened to you,” Margaret said. Adhiambo’s face never moved, as if she hadn’t heard her.

At nine thirty, when Margaret opened the door to James, she was angry. He apologized before she could say anything.

“The memsahib is having me make the breakfast and do the washing up. Because Adhiambo is not there to help with the children, memsahib is in a calamity.”

“Never mind,” Margaret said. “I’m glad you’re here. Adhiambo won’t talk to me. I think she’s ashamed.”

“Oh yes,” James said, nodding. His pressed white shirt and French-blue cotton pants were impeccably clean, despite his chores. “She is very shamed.”

Margaret didn’t know if he meant
ashamed
or shamed by others.

“She’s in the kitchen. See if you can get her to eat something.”

As James walked through to the kitchen, Margaret sat in a chair by the front door in order to give them privacy. It didn’t matter much anyway, since Margaret couldn’t understand a word they said to each other. Was Adhiambo a Luo as well?

When James emerged from the kitchen, Margaret moved to the sofa and indicated a chair nearby. She was still in her robe; she hadn’t wanted to be dressing when James arrived, worried she might miss him altogether.

“Adhiambo is saying that two men broke down her door and demanded pombe. She didn’t have the pombe. She tried to run away, but one of the men, he catches her. Both men are very drunk, and they rape her because they are angry.”

“Both?”

“Yes.” James shook his head, folded his hands, and let them hang between his legs.

“Is she hurt? Internally?”

James looked away, unwilling to discuss female matters. He knew, however, that Margaret wanted Adhiambo to see a doctor, so he was forced to answer her. “Not so much. She is just all right.”

That maddening phrase again.
Just all right
.

“How can she be? Two men?”

James was silent for a long moment. “Adhiambo has two brothers in Kericho who will come and punish the two men. They will be well and truly beaten. They will be apologizing to her maybe this night.”

“James, she can’t go back.”

“Where else can she go? I will go with her and fix her door. I am borrowing some good tools from Mr. Arthur. Adhiambo says there are medicines….” He let his voice trail away.

“Then I am going with you,” Margaret said. “I’m not letting her out of my house unless I can see for myself that she is
just all right
.”

It was an empty threat, and James knew it. Both he and Adhiambo were perfectly capable of walking out the door without her.

“No,” he said.

“Then I will call the police and tell them she has been raped, and she will have to answer many questions and perhaps see a doctor. I will do this.”

James looked quizzical. “Why would you do this? Punish her more than she is being punished?”

Margaret thought about the Masai and the Kikuyu and bits of Patrick’s argument at the picnic in the Ngong Hills. She closed her eyes and shook her head, making it perfectly clear that she wouldn’t do what she had just threatened to do.

James stood. “I am speaking to her,” he said.

From the sofa, Margaret could hear a prolonged and heated argument in foreign syllables. When it was over, James came into the living room and nodded.

“I’ll get dressed,” Margaret said.

“First we will take a bus, and then we will walk. She is all right to walk, but it is a danger to you.”

“Not in broad daylight,” Margaret said, heading for the bedroom.

She heard Patrick return and speak to James for a few minutes. He came into the bedroom and put the box of sanitary napkins on the bed. He went to the doctor bag he kept under the bed and removed a tube of antibiotic cream and pills Margaret didn’t recognize. He poured the pills into packets. “Give her these,” he said. “The white ones are for fever, should she get one, and these yellow are for pain. One every six hours.”

Margaret had on jeans and a long-sleeved blouse. She had wrapped another scarf over her head and under her chin, tossing the ends over her shoulders. She put on sneakers.

“We have to walk,” Margaret explained. “I don’t want a parade of little boys running after us and shouting,
‘Mzungu, mzungu.’
”

“I’d rather we called a female doctor. You know Josie would come in an instant,” Patrick said. Josie was a colleague at the hospital.

“I’d like to have her see a doctor, too,” Margaret acknowledged. “But she won’t. Patrick, she was raped by two men.”

“Oh, Jesus Christ.”

Margaret took the box of sanitary napkins and the medicines Patrick had given her and slipped them into her backpack. She added several hand towels.

“It makes me hate African men,” Margaret said.

“You can’t hate all African men,” Patrick pointed out.

“I like James.”

“There you go.”

Patrick didn’t offer to accompany them or to escort Margaret back. He knew that negotiations had been completed. “Be careful,” he said.

They took a bus and then walked single file, Adhiambo in front of Margaret, James and his toolbox behind. They followed a path that began at the end of a street and wound its way through bush and forest. Progress was slow because Adhiambo could not walk fast. Margaret searched the ground for ants and snakes and wished she’d worn her hiking boots instead.

Climbing Mount Kenya. Only two days away. It seemed a remote and frivolous notion.

They walked for twenty minutes. They stepped through a forest that separated one world from another. As they approached the edges of the shantytown, Adhiambo wrapped a second scarf Margaret had given her around her face to cover her mouth and chin, a gesture that caused Margaret to do the same. Margaret watched the ground, mimicking Adhiambo, who kept her eyes lowered. James quickly moved past them and took the lead.

They entered a small slum of badly constructed rooms made from thin wooden boards, with roofs of tin or tires. Nearly every structure Margaret passed had boards through which she could see. The footpath was smoky with the scent of cooking meat. The smell was terrible, and Margaret wondered what the natives here would think of her smell, the mzungu smell. Perhaps it was just as noxious to them. Did James work every day in an environment he could barely tolerate? They passed dozens of children, all smiling, running after them. They were a parade, after all. Margaret had imagined that with her scarf and dark glasses, she would be barely recognizable as white. What had she been thinking? James picked up the pace considerably, and Adhiambo struggled to keep up. Margaret could only imagine how much it must have hurt to walk. But James seemed eager to get to where they were going.

There were no streets, only footpaths, here and there an alley big enough for a small automobile. Margaret had been told that occasionally there would be a Mercedes squeezed into a similar alley in a similar shantytown, Mathari or Gatina. A member of the cabinet might be visiting his relatives.

Eventually, James stopped and made a
tsk
sound. If this was Adhiambo’s home, it was in ruins. A broken door swung from one hinge. They entered the hut. A wooden flap that could be raised with a string from inside served as the only window. On the packed-mud floor was a mattress of pillow ticking. Adhiambo threw her scarf over it but not before Margaret had seen the stains. Glass shards were sprinkled over the marum. It looked as though they had come from a drinking glass. The room smelled of beer. On a wooden shelf was a sufuria exactly like the cooking pot Patrick and Margaret had at home, several mismatched plates, one other glass. Adhiambo’s clothes were on hooks or in a pink plastic basket. There was no rug, no sink, no bathroom, and only two chairs and one table. James indicated that Adhiambo should sit. She covered her face, ashamed again. She hadn’t wanted Margaret to come to her home, and now Margaret knew why.

James went next door and returned with a bowl of posho, which Adhiambo ate with her fingers. James closed the door as best he could and assessed the damage. He got to work at once, replacing hinges and a shattered board. Adhiambo waved flies away from her food. Margaret unzipped her backpack, unsure of where to put its contents.

“Adhiambo,” Margaret said. “This packet is to be taken only if you have a fever. This packet is for pain. With both packets, one pill every six hours.”

Adhiambo nodded. She knew what the box of pads was for, as well as the tube of antibiotic.

With the door closed, Margaret opened the wooden window to let in some light. She wanted to remove all the shards from the soil. She saw no obvious place for trash and so set them in a pile on the shelf. Where did Adhiambo get her water? Wash herself? Go to the bathroom? Margaret shifted her anger from African men to expats, who paid the most pitiful of wages. Who had probably never seen how their servants lived. To Arthur and Diana, who had felt it necessary to detain James through the breakfast hour and beyond.

James tested the door and seemed satisfied with his handiwork. He showed Adhiambo the new latch and how to work it. He told Margaret he would go outside, after which she was to close the latch. He would then try to get in. Margaret did as she was told, and James threw his body against the door. Though it seemed to give a little, it didn’t open. Margaret let James back in. Adhiambo had barely said a word or moved from her place at the table. Margaret sensed that she wanted to be alone, and perhaps James sensed it, too. He walked to where she was sitting and handed her a crumpled ten-shilling note. Margaret was furious with herself for not having thought to bring more cash than she’d needed for the bus fare. James turned and nodded to Margaret, then opened the door.

“If you need anything…,” Margaret said, and left it at that.

On the way home, James walked very fast. He would be late now for the noon meal.

On the morning before the climb, Margaret was taking in laundry that James had done and pinned to a clothesline. Mixed in with their own clothes were the ones that Diana had lent to Margaret. Margaret unpinned and folded them. She intended to give them to James, who would iron them to Diana’s exacting standards.