The White Masai (16 page)

T
he air outside is clammy and the exhaust fumes worse than I’ve ever noticed before. It’s four p.m., but all my paperwork is correct. I want to celebrate, but I’m too tired. We have to get back to the part of town where we can find somewhere to stay, but we’ve barely gone a few hundred yards when I feel faint and my legs threaten to fold beneath me. ‘Darling, help me,’ I call. ‘Corinne, what’s the problem?’ asks Lketinga. My head is spinning, I have to sit down, but there isn’t a restaurant nearby. I lean against a shop front and feel suddenly ill and incredibly thirsty. Lketinga gets cross because people are stopping to stare. He wants me to move but I can’t, not without help. They half carry me to the boarding house.

All of a sudden I get agoraphobia. The people coming towards me are blurred and everything stinks. On every corner somebody is cooking fish, corncobs or meat. I feel sick. If I don’t get out of the street immediately I’m going to throw up. There’s a beer bar close by and we go in, but I want to lie down. At first they say it’s impossible, but when Jomo tells them I can’t move any further they take me to a room upstairs.

It’s a typical let-by-the-hour hotel. The Kikuyu music is almost as loud in the room as it is downstairs in the bar. I collapse on the bed and suddenly feel dreadful. I make clear I’m about to be sick, and Lketinga lifts me and drags me to the toilet. But I don’t make it. We’re still in the corridor when the first geyser erupts out of my mouth, and when we reach the toilet it keeps coming until there’s nothing left to bring up but yellow bile. I stagger back to the bedroom on wobbly legs, embarrassed by my awfulness. I lie down on the bed feeling like I’m dying of thirst. Lketinga fetches me a Schweppes tonic water and I finish off the bottle in
one gulp, then another and another. All of a sudden I’m freezing. It’s as if I’m sitting in a fridge, and it gets worse and worse; my teeth are chattering so hard my jaw hurts but I can’t stop. ‘Lketinga,’ I say, ‘I feel so cold, please give me blankets.’ Lketinga gives me the blanket, but it doesn’t do any good. Jomo goes back to the boarding house and fetches two more blankets. But even draped in the blankets I pull my stiff, shivering body up from the bed and demand tea, steaming hot tea. It seems like hours before it arrives, and then I’m shivering so badly I can hardly drink it. After just two or three sips my stomach starts churning again, but I have no strength to get out of the bed. Lketinga fetches me one of the basins from the shower rooms and I throw up what little I’ve drunk.

Lketinga doesn’t know what to do. He keeps asking me what’s wrong, but I haven’t a clue either. I’m scared. The shivering stops and I collapse like a jelly on the pillows. My whole body aches, and I’m as exhausted as if I’ve been running for my life for hours on end. Then I start getting hot and, within minutes, my whole body’s dripping with sweat. My hair’s sticking to my head, and I feel as if I’m burning up. Now all I want is cold cola, and once again I knock back the whole bottle. Then I need the toilet. Lketinga takes me and immediately diarrhoea seizes me. Even though Lketinga doesn’t know what to do, I’m glad he’s there. Back in bed I try to sleep. I can’t speak and doze on and off with the voices of the two men in my ears even though the noise from the bar downstairs is much louder.

Then a new attack hits me. A chill runs through me, and within seconds I’m shivering again. I clutch the bed in panic and beg, ‘Darling, help me!’ Lketinga leans over me, covering me with his chest, but I keep shivering. Jomo, standing there, reckons I’ve got malaria and need to go into hospital. The word echoes in my head: malaria, malaria, malaria! In the space of a second I stop shivering and start sweating from every pore. The sheets are soaking. I’m thirsty, thirsty. I need something to drink. The boarding house landlady sticks her head in, and when she sees me I hear the words, ‘
Mzungu
, malaria, hospital!’ But I shake my head. I don’t want to go into a hospital here in Nairobi. I’ve heard such terrible stories, and then there’s Lketinga. He’s lost on his own in Nairobi.

The landlady disappears and comes back with anti-malaria powder, which she mixes with water. I drink it and fall asleep. When I wake again it’s dark, and my head’s buzzing. I call for Lketinga, but nobody’s there. A
few minutes later – or it might have been hours – Lketinga comes back into the room. He’d been downstairs in the bar. I smell the beer fumes, and once again my stomach turns. It’s one shivering fit after another the whole night long.

When I wake in the morning I hear the two of them talking about the festival back home. Jomo comes over to the bed and asks me how I feel. Bad, I tell him. Can we go back today? he asks. Not me. I’m going to the toilet. My legs are shaking, and I can hardly stand. I ought to eat, I tell myself.

Lketinga goes downstairs and comes back with a plate of lumps of meat. When I smell the food, however, my stomach, which has started to ache, goes into cramps. I throw up again almost immediately, but all that comes up is some yellow liquid, and the vomiting sets off the diarrhoea again. I’m sick as a dog and feel as if I’m on my last legs.

On the evening of the second day I start falling asleep whenever the sweating starts and lose all sense of time. The endless noise is driving me so mad that I start crying and covering my ears. It’s all too much for Jomo, who announces he’s off to see some relatives but will be back in three hours’ time. Lketinga gives him some of our cash which I resent but I don’t really care because it’s rapidly becoming clear that if I don’t do something I’ll never get out of Nairobi alive, and maybe not even out of this awful room.

Lketinga goes off to get some vitamins and the local malaria medicine. I force the tablets down and every time I throw up force myself to take another one. It’s midnight by now, and Jomo still isn’t back. We worry about him because this part of Nairobi isn’t safe. Lketinga hardly sleeps for taking care of me.

The medicine has done something to reduce my attacks, but I’m so weak I can barely raise an arm. Lketinga is in despair. He wants to find Jomo as quickly as possible, but it’s madness in this city that he doesn’t know. I plead with him to stay with me or I’ll be all alone. We have to get out of Nairobi as soon as possible. I’m swallowing vitamin tablets like sweets, and gradually my head’s clearing. If I don’t want to die here, I’ve got to summon the last reserves of my strength. I send my darling off to get fruit and bread for me, anything that doesn’t smell like cooked food, and force it down bit by bit. My cracked lips burn like mad when they touch the fruit but I need strength to get out of here. Jomo has left us in the lurch.

The fear that Lketinga could completely lose the plot gives me strength. I try to wash in order to feel better. My darling carries me to the shower, and with a lot of effort I manage to clean myself. Then I insist on changing the three-day-old bed linen. While they’re changing it all I try to take a few paces. Out on the street I feel faint again, but I want to do it. We go about fifty yards but to me it seems like five miles. I have to go back; the stink on the street is torturing my stomach. Even so I’m proud at what I’ve managed and promise Lketinga that tomorrow we’ll leave Nairobi. But when I’m lying back in bed, I wish I were at home with my mother in Switzerland.

The next day we take a taxi to the bus station. Lketinga is worried that we’re leaving Jomo behind, but after waiting two days we have every right to leave, not least because Lketinga’s festival is getting closer.

The journey to Isiolo takes forever. Lketinga has to support me to stop me falling out of my seat when we turn corners. When we get there Lketinga suggests we spend the night, but I want to get home. At least as far as Maralal where I might see Jutta or Sophia. I drag myself to the Mission and crawl into the car while Lketinga says goodbye to the missionaries for us. He wants to drive but I can’t let him; this is a small town with traffic police everywhere.

I set off but can hardly manage to press the clutch down. The first few miles are metalled road, but after that it’s a dirt track. We stop en route and pick up three Samburus who want to get to Wamba. I concentrate on driving and shut out everything else. I can see the potholes from miles away. I’m paying no attention to what’s going on in the car until someone lights a cigarette and I ask them to put it out or I’ll throw up. I can feel my stomach rebelling. But to stop now and start vomiting would rob me of what strength I have. The sweat is pouring off me, and I have to keep wiping my forehead with the back of my hand to stop it getting into my eyes; I just keep straight ahead and daren’t lift them from the road for a second.

It starts to get dark, and lights are coming on; we’ve got to Maralal. I can hardly believe it – I’d been driving with no sense of time. I park straight away in front of our boarding house, turn off the motor and turn to Lketinga. Then I notice how light my body feels and suddenly everything goes dark.

I
open my eyes and think I’m awakening from a nightmare. But a glance around me shows that the crying and moaning are real. I’m in hospital, in a huge room with beds packed together. On my left is an old, emaciated Samburu woman and on my right a pink child’s cot with a railing. Something inside it keeps hitting the woodwork and crying out. Everywhere I look there’s nothing but misery. What am I doing in hospital? I don’t know how I got here. Where is Lketinga? I start to panic. How long have I been here? Outside the sun is shining. My bed is made of iron with a thin mattress and a dirty grey sheet.

Two young doctors in white coats pass by. ‘Hello!’ I wave to them, but my voice isn’t loud enough to compete with the groaning, and I can’t sit up. My head is too heavy. Tears gather in my eyes. What’s going on? Where’s Lketinga?

The Samburu woman says something to me, but I don’t understand, and then at last I see Lketinga coming towards me. The sight of him calms me down and almost makes me happy. ‘Hello, Corinne, how you feel now?’ I try to smile and say ‘not bad’. He tells me that as soon as we arrived I fell unconscious. Our landlady called the ambulance immediately, and I’ve been here since yesterday evening. He was by my side all night, but I didn’t come to. I can hardly believe that I didn’t know what was going on. The doctor had given me a sedative.

After a while the two medics come over to the bed. I have acute malaria, but there’s not much they can do because they don’t have the drugs. All they can do is give me pills. I should eat and sleep as much as possible, but just the word ‘eat’ makes me feel ill, and I can hardly imagine
sleeping amidst all this crying and groaning. Lketinga sits on the edge of the bed and looks at me helplessly.

Suddenly I detect the strong smell of cabbage, and my stomach turns over. I need a container of some sort. In despair I grab the water jug and throw up into it. Lketinga holds the jug and supports me; I could hardly manage on my own. Immediately a dark nurse appears, grabs the jug and replaces it with a bucket. ‘Why you make this? This is for drinking water,’ she snaps at me. I feel miserable. The smell is coming from the food trolley. There are tin bowls on it filled with a mound of rice and cabbage; one is delivered to each bed.

Totally exhausted from the effort of vomiting, I lie on the bed and hold my arm in front of my nose. There’s no way I can eat. It’s an hour since I swallowed the first tablets, and my whole body is starting to itch. I start scratching like mad all over. Lketinga notices spots and pimples on my face. I lift up my skirt, and we find my legs are also covered with little lumps. He calls the doctor. It seems I have an allergic reaction to the medicine, but there’s nothing else he can give me because everything else has been used and they’ve been waiting for days for supplies from Nairobi.

In the evening Lketinga leaves: he wants to get something to eat and see if he can find someone from home to tell him when the big festival is due. I’m dead tired and just want to sleep. My whole body is bathed in sweat, and the thermometer says I have a temperature of 105.8. After drinking so much water I need the toilet, but how am I to get there? The toilet cubicles are some ninety feet from the ward entrance. How can I get that far? I slowly lower my feet to the floor and step into my plastic sandals. Then, holding on to the bed frame, I stand up, but my legs are trembling and I can hardly stand. I pull myself together. The last thing I want to do is collapse. Feeling my way from bed to bed, I get as far as the door. But the ninety feet seems an impossible distance, and I end up crawling the last few with nothing to hold on to for support. I grind my teeth together and with the last of my strength reach the toilet. But there’s nowhere to sit down: I have to squat. Holding on to the stone walls, I do the best I can.

Just how bad this malaria is comes home to me as I realize that, despite never having been really sick in my life, I am incredibly weak. There’s a heavily pregnant Masai woman outside the door, but when she notices that I can’t let go of it without falling backwards, she helps me silently
back to the ward entrance. I’m so thankful that I cry tears of gratitude. With enormous effort I drag myself back into bed and sob. The sister comes to ask if I’m in pain, but I shake my head and feel even more miserable. At some stage I fall asleep.

I wake up in the middle of the night. The child in the cot is screaming appallingly and banging its head against the railing. Nobody comes, and it’s driving me mad. I’ve been here for four days now and am feeling really sorry for myself. Lketinga comes often, but he doesn’t look well either; he wants to go home but not without me because he’s afraid I’ll die. The nurses curse me because every time I eat something I throw up. My stomach aches terribly. One time Lketinga brings me a whole leg of kid, already roasted, and pleads with me to eat it and it’ll make me better. But I can’t, and he leaves disappointed.

On the fifth day Jutta comes. She’d heard there is a white woman in the hospital. She’s horrified when she sees me. She says I have to get out of here straight away and get into the missionary hospital in Wamba. But I don’t understand why I should move to another hospital; they’re all the same. And in any case I wouldn’t survive a four-and-a-half-hour trip in a car. ‘If you could see yourself, you’d understand that you have to get out of here. Five days and they haven’t given you anything? You’re worth less than a goat out there. Maybe they don’t want to help you,’ she says. ‘Jutta,’ I say, ‘please take me to the boarding house. I don’t want to die here, and on these roads I wouldn’t make it to Wamba. I can’t even sit up!’ Jutta talks to the doctors. They don’t want to let me leave and only prepare my discharge papers when I sign a form absolving them of all responsibility.

In the meantime Jutta fetches Lketinga to help bring me to the boarding house. They take me between them, and we make it slowly into the village. Everywhere people stand and stare at us. I’m ashamed to have to be dragged so helplessly through the village.

But I want to fight and survive. So I ask the pair of them to take me to the Somali restaurant, where I’ll try to eat a piece of liver. The restaurant is at least two hundred yards away, and my legs are folding under me. I keep telling myself: ‘Corinne, you can do it! You have to get there!’ Exhausted but proud, I sit down at the table. The Somali is horrified too when he sees me. We order the liver. My stomach rebels as soon as I see the plate, and I summon up all my strength and slowly begin eating. By the end of two hours I’ve nearly cleaned my plate and convince myself I
feel fantastic. The three of us go to the boarding house where Jutta leaves us. She’ll drop by again tomorrow or the day after. I spend the rest of the afternoon sitting in front of the boarding house in the sun. It’s wonderful to feel the warmth.

That evening I lie in bed, slowly eating a carrot and proud of my achievements. My stomach has calmed down, and I can keep it all down. ‘Corinne, onwards and upwards,’ I think to myself as I fall asleep.

Early next morning Lketinga finds out that his ceremony has already begun. He’s very worked up and wants to go home immediately, or rather to the site of the ceremony. But there’s no way I can go that far, and if he goes on foot it’ll take him more than a day.

He’s worried about his Mama, who’ll be waiting there in despair, not knowing what’s going on. I promise him we’ll go tomorrow, my darling. That way I have a whole day to build up at least enough strength to hold on to the steering wheel. When we get out of Maralal Lketinga can drive, but it’s too dangerous here with the police.

We go back to the Somali’s, and I order the same thing. Today I managed to get halfway there without assistance and find eating easier. I’m slowly beginning to feel life returning to my body. My stomach is flat, no longer concave. In the boarding house I take a look at myself in the mirror for the first time: my face has changed enormously. My eyes seem enormous, and my cheekbones protrude. Before we set off Lketinga buys a few pounds of chewing tobacco and sugar, and I get some fruit and rice. The first few miles exhaust me because I have to keep changing from first to second gear and need strength to work the clutch. Lketinga, sitting next to me, helps by using his arm to reinforce mine. Once again I’m driving as if in a dream, but after several hours we reach the ceremony site.