The White Masai (34 page)

S
uddenly my husband appears with Napirai. I don’t understand what’s going on because I’ve got the car and our shop is several miles away. He looks at his watch and starts asking me where I’ve been all this time. I tell him, as relaxed as possible, that he can see that they’re only just finishing my hair. He dumps Napirai on my lap covered in sweat and with a full nappy. I ask him angrily what he’s doing here and what happened to the child minder. He’s sent her and William home and closed the shop. He’s not completely daft, he says: he knows that I’ve been seeing somebody or I’d have been back ages ago. Nothing I can say makes the slightest difference. Lketinga is sick with jealousy and convinced that I had a rendezvous with another warrior before I had my hair done.

I want to get away from the hotel as soon as possible and we drive straight home. I don’t feel like working anymore. I simply can’t believe that it’s not possible for me to spend three hours at the hairdresser’s without my husband going off his head. It can’t go on long like this. Angry and filled with hate, I tell my husband to go home and find himself a second wife. I’ll support him financially but he should get out of here and leave us all in peace. I don’t have another lover and don’t want one. I simply want to work and live in peace. He can come back in two or three months and we’ll see where we go from there.

But Lketinga isn’t having any of it. He doesn’t want another wife, he says, he loves only me. He wants things back the way they were before Napirai was born. He simply doesn’t understand that it’s his stupid jealousy that’s ruining everything. I can only breathe freely when he’s not here. We argue, and I end up in tears and can’t see any way out of all this.
I’m feeling so sorry for myself that I don’t even have the strength to console Napirai. I feel like a prisoner. I need to talk to somebody. Sophia will understand. Things can’t get any worse than they are so I climb into the car and leave my husband and child there. He tries to block my way, but I put my foot down and all I hear as I drive off is: ‘You are crazy, Corinne.’

Sophia is completely taken aback when she sees the state I’m in. She thought everything was going swimmingly and that’s why I hadn’t been round for such a long time. She’s shocked when I tell her how far things have gone. I tell her that I’m almost desperate enough to go back to Switzerland because I’m afraid something awful might happen. Sophia tells me I should pull myself together, now that I’ve got my work permit and the shop’s doing so well. Perhaps Lketinga will go back to Barsaloi, she says, because he obviously doesn’t feel at home in Mombasa. We go through all the possibilities but I feel burned up inside. I ask her if she has any marijuana, and it turns out her boyfriend can give me some. I feel a bit better and go home ready to face up to the next argument. But instead my husband’s lying on the ground playing with Napirai. He doesn’t even ask where I’ve been. This is unprecedented.

I go into our room and hastily roll a joint and smoke it. Suddenly everything seems better and easier to handle. I sit down outside in a good mood and watch with amusement as my daughter keeps trying to climb a tree. When my head gets a bit clearer I go and buy rice and potatoes for dinner. The joint has made me really hungry. Later I wash Napirai in the basin as usual before going off to the ‘bush shower’ myself. As always, I steep the nappies overnight so I can wash them in the morning before going to work. Then I go to bed. My husband is driving a group of warriors to a dance performance.

The next few days drag by, and I find myself looking forward to a joint every evening. Our sex life is back on track, not because I enjoy it but because I couldn’t care less. I go through the motions of opening the shop and serving with William, though he turns up less and less regularly. On the other hand, Lketinga spends nearly the whole day in the shop now, and tourists turn up with their cameras and camcorders. My husband continues to ask for money to be photographed, which annoys me. He says he doesn’t see why people want to take pictures of us: it’s not as if we’re monkeys, and I can see his point.

Tourists keep asking where our daughter is because they think Napirai belongs to the child minder. I have to explain to them that the child, who’s now sixteen-months old, is ours. The child minder laughs along with us at their confusion until eventually Lketinga starts to wonder why they all make the same mistake. I tell him it doesn’t matter in the slightest to us if they get things wrong. But he irritates our customers by going on at them about why they don’t realize I’m her mother, until a few of them stalk out of the shop. He starts looking at the child minder suspiciously too.

My sister has been back home for a month now. Edy turns up now and again to ask if there have been any letters from her, but Lketinga starts to see even that in a different light. He’s convinced Edy’s coming to see me and when one day he catches me buying marijuana from him he starts to go on at me like I’m a major criminal and threatens to report me to the police.

My own husband – threatening to have me thrown in jail, even though he knows how awful conditions are! The laws against drugs in Kenya are very strict, and Edy has to work hard to persuade him not to go to the police in Ukunda. I’m standing there speechless, not even able to cry: at the end of the day I need the drugs to put up with him. Instead he makes me promise never to smoke marijuana again, saying he doesn’t want to live with someone who breaks Kenyan law.
Miraa
, according to him, is legal so it’s not the same thing.

Then my husband goes through all my pockets and sniffs every cigarette I light up. Back home he tells the whole story to Priscilla and anyone else who’s listening. They all act shocked and make me feel rotten. Every time I go to the toilet Lketinga comes with me. He won’t even let me go to the shop in the village. All I do now is go to our shop, come home and sit on the bed. The only thing that matters to me is my baby. Napirai seems to sense that I’m not happy. She won’t leave my side and keeps saying ‘Mama, Mama’ and a few other words I can’t make out. Priscilla now keeps her distance from us; she doesn’t want any trouble.

I don’t even get any joy out of work anymore. Lketinga is there the whole time. He keeps an eye on me either in the shop or from the bar of the Chinese restaurant and empties my bag out up to three times a day. Once some Swiss tourists turn up, but I don’t feel much like talking to them and say I’m not feeling well and have a stomach ache. My husband turns up just as one of the Swiss women picks up Napirai and says how
much she looks like the child minder. Once again I’m telling her she’s made a mistake when Lketinga butts in and says: ‘Corinne, why all people know, this child is not yours?’ With that one sentence he wipes out my last hope and my final ounce of respect for him.

I stand up and, without answering any of the questions the others are putting to me, walk out as if in a trance and cross the road to the Chinese restaurant. I ask the owner if I can use his phone, ring the Swissair office in Nairobi and book the next available flight to Zürich for myself and my sixteen-month old child. It takes a while before they can tell me there are seats available in four days’ time. I know that they don’t take telephone bookings from individuals but I beg the woman to keep the seats for me, telling her I can only pay and pick up the tickets the day before departure, but it’s extremely important and I will definitely be there. My heart skips a beat when she says the word ‘okay’.

I walk back to the shop slowly and announce straight out that I’m going to Switzerland on holiday. At first Lketinga gives an uneasy laugh, then says I can go but without Napirai so he can be sure I’ll come back. I answer in a tired voice that my baby is coming with me. As always I’ll be back but after all the stress with the shop I need a break before the high season starts in December. Lketinga doesn’t agree and refuses to sign a piece of paper allowing me to leave. Nonetheless two days later I pack my bags. Priscilla and Sophia talk to him. They’re all convinced I’ll be back.

O
n our last day I leave everything behind. My husband insists that I pack just a few things for Napirai. I hand over all the bank account cards to him to prove that I’ll be back. Who would give away so much money, a car and a fully stocked shop?

Torn this way and that and not knowing whether to believe me, he comes with Napirai and me as far as Mombasa. Right up until we’re about to set off for Nairobi he still hasn’t signed the piece of paper. I ask him one last time and tell him I’m going anyway. I’m so burned out internally, so emptied of all emotion, that there are no more tears left.

The driver starts up the engine. Lketinga is standing next to us in the bus and once again has one of the other passengers translate the letter I’ve written out which says that I have the permission of my husband Lketinga Leparmorijo to leave Kenya with our daughter Napirai for three weeks’ holiday in Switzerland.

The bus driver parps his horn for the third time. Lketinga scribbles his mark on the piece of paper and says: ‘I don’t know if I see you and Napirai again!’ and then he jumps off the bus, and we set off. It’s only now that I burst into tears and I look through the window as we rush past the scenes I know and have loved and say goodbye to them.