I get confused. Why should anyone pick on Eleanor? I’m harmless.”
“It’s harmless people who always get it in the neck. Why can’t you learn to fight back?”
“I hate fighting. I’d rather go away.”
They talked, as expatriates did incessantly, about Africa, though Eleanor suspected this was the definition of being a stranger here. Real Africans, she supposed, never sat around at dinner talking about Africa.
“I should feel lucky,” said Calvin. “Not everyone gets to witness the destruction of an entire continent in his lifetime. Of course, if I had my way I would kick every sunburnt white boy off this continent. But not without putting mortality back where we found it, so these witless bastards don’t reproduce themselves into spontaneous cannibalism. Import a few tsetse fly, sprinkle the Ngongs with tubercle bacillus, unpack the smallpox virus the WHO keeps in cold storage in Geneva. Did you know that we preserve diseases? The eagles are endangered, but the germs are safe.”
“What about development?”
“Develop into what, mind you? Pizza Hut? No, what Africa could use is some good old-fashioned regression.”
“It’s seen plenty of that.” Her smoked trout starter was exquisite, and only made her ill.
“Not enough. I’d remove every felt-tip, digestive biscuit and gas-guzzling pick-up from Algiers to Cape Town.” Calvin disposed of his boar pâté in a few bites. “Go back to Homo sapiens as pack animals, huddled around fires, cowering in trees and getting shredded by lions to keep the numbers down. No campaigns for multiparty democracy, no crummy tabloids, no Norwegian water projects. Just life, birth and death in the raw, busy enough and awful enough that you never have a chance to think about it before a hyena bites off your leg.”
“Back to the garden,” Eleanor mused.
“You never saw it, Eleanor, but when I first came to Kenya in 1960 this country was paradise.” He gestured to the tarry horror that would not quite fit under her chair. “No watu with their hands out every time you tie your shoe.”
“Don’t you imagine any twenty-year-old here for the first time is just as knocked out?”
“What knocks them out is it’s grotty and crowded and nothing works. And all right, so the Africans should get their Walkmans like everyone else. So Africa isn’t special. But when I came here it was. So there’s nowhere to go, nowhere special. So it’s every man’s right to be garish, filthy and completely lacking in foresight. Terrific.”
Eleanor glanced warily at their waiter as he brought her main course; he spoke English. “You sound like a child who’s had his playground closed.”
“Don’t imagine I’m reminiscing about how smoothly the country ran under colonial rule. No, when there was no telephone system not to work, no electricity to go off, no water piping to over-extend—now, that is working smoothly.”
“Well,” ventured Eleanor cautiously, “Africans do have a right to telephones, electricity and running water—don’t they?”
Calvin withered her with a look of excruciating weariness.
“Then, you should be happy,” Eleanor backed off, relieved the waiter was no longer listening. “Most Africans have no such amenities, do they? Of which I’m painfully, and constantly, aware. In shops, I put a chocolate bar on the counter, next to a woman with two kilos of posho and a little fermented milk with which she has to feed the whole family for a week—I put the candy back. Everywhere I go on this continent I feel ashamed. I’m tired of it, Calvin. I am dying, dying of shame.”
“They like posho. Africans do not identify with your life at all. They see white people the way you look at oryx.”
“Hogwash. They want cars and I have one. Try and tell me they don’t resent that.”
“Give your flipping car away, then.”
“That won’t change anything.”
“That’s the first intelligent thing you’ve said. And at least—” he pointed to her hartebeest—“you now eat your dinner.”
In 1972 they had both attended a Population and Environment conference in Nairobi, when the KICC was brand-new and conferences had seemed better than junkets; at least to Eleanor, who was only twenty-one, an intern with the United Nations Fund for Population Activities and fresh from the Peace Corps. Calvin had just joined USAID himself, and asked her to dine at the Hilton. His fourteen-year seniority had daunted her then, and maybe that’s why she’d felt compelled to make a fool of herself: because he was so much older and more important and she had no idea why he would go out with her. She was only aware in later years, once her looks had begun to slip, that she had once been rather pretty.
Half-way through dinner at the luxury hotel, she had been overcome by nausea. Calvin had done most of the talking; she was sure he would pick up the bill and could not see how her company had earned so much as a hard roll. She was gripped by anxiety that she had no personality at all, and concluded that if she had failed to concoct it by twenty-one it was time to make one up.
“I can’t eat this,” she announced, fists on the cloth. “I’m sorry. The idea of our sitting here paying hundreds of shillings for shellfish while people right outside the door starve—it makes me sick.”
Calvin nimbly kept eating. “If you truly have ambitions to work in the Third World, young lady, you’ll have to develop a less delicate stomach.”
“How can you!” she exclaimed, exasperated as he started on another prawn. “After we’ve spent all day forecasting worldwide famine by the year 2000!”
“That’s just the kind of talk that whets my appetite.”
“Well, it kills mine.”
“If you feel so strongly about it,” he suggested, “go feed them your dinner.”
Eleanor had picked up her plate and left the restaurant. One of the waiters came running after her, since she’d marched off with their china. Eleanor looked left and right and had to walk a couple of blocks to find a beggar, and was promptly confronted with the logistical problem of delivering her food aid and returning the plate. So she stood dumbly by the cripple with elephantiasis, whose eyes were either uncomprehending or insulted. He rattled his tin, where she could hardly muck shrimp, now could she? It struck her, as saffron sauce dripped from the gilt-edged porcelain, that just because you could not walk did not mean you had no standards of behaviour, which parading about Nairobi with a half-eaten hotel entrée after dark clearly did not meet. She groped in her jeans for the coins she knew were not there; her notes were back in her purse. Shrugging, she turned under the stern, disparaging gaze of the dispossessed and shuffled back to the Hilton, where the waiter stood outside with hands on hips. Eleanor ducked around the corner and scraped the rest of her dinner into the gutter.
Back at the table, she couldn’t bring herself to tell him she’d thrown it away, but she didn’t regale him with tales of the grateful needy either. Instead she sulked, quieter and less entertaining than ever. At the end of the meal, Calvin inquired, with that delicate ironic smile he had refined even as a young man, whether her friends outside would like dessert. Eleanor glowered and asked for tea.
They had taken a walk and ended up in Calvin’s
