Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight_ An African Childhood - Alexandra Fuller [6]
“Good dinner, Tub,” says Dad.
Mum did not cook the dinner. Kelvin cooked the dinner. But Mum organized Kelvin.
Dad lights an after-dinner pipe and smokes quietly. He is leaning back in his chair so that there is room on his lap for his dog between his slim belly and the table. He stares out at the garden. The sun has set in a red ball, sinking behind the quiet, stretching black limbs of the msasa trees on Oribi Ridge, which is where my parents moved after I was married. The dining room has only three walls: it lies open to the bush, to the cries of the night insects, the shrieks of the small, hunted animals, the bats which flit in and out of the dining room, swooping above our heads to eat mosquitoes. Clinging to the rough whitewashed cement walls are assorted moths, lizards, and geckos, which occasionally let go with a high, sharp laugh: “He-he-he.”
Mum pours herself more wine, finishing the bottle, and then she says fiercely to our guest, “Thirteen thousand Kenyans and a hundred white settlers died in the struggle for Kenya’s independence.”
I can tell the visitor doesn’t know if he should look impressed or distressed. He settles for a look of vague surprise. “I had no idea.”
“Of course you bloody people had no idea,” says Mum. “A hundred . . . of us.”
“Cool it, Tub,” says Dad, stroking the dog and smoking.
“Nineteen forty-seven to nineteen sixty-three,” says Mum. “Nearly twenty bloody years we tried to hold on.” She makes her fist into a tight grip. The sinews on her neck stand taut and she bares her teeth. “All for what? And what a cock-up they’ve made of it now. Hey? Bloody, bloody cock-up.”
After independence, Kenya was run by Mzee, the Grand Old Man, Jomo Kenyatta. He had been born in 1894, the year before Britain declared Kenya one of its protectorates. He had come to power in 1963, an old man who had finally fulfilled the destiny of his life’s work: self-government for Africans in Africa.
Dad says, mildly, “Shall I ask Kelvin to clear the table?”
Mum says, “And Rhodesia. One thousand government troops dead.” She pauses. “Fourteen thousand terrorists. We should have won, if you look at it like that, except there were more of them.” Mum drinks, licks her top lip. “Of course, we couldn’t stay on in Kenya after Mau Mau.” She shakes her head.
Kelvin comes to clear the table. He is trying to save enough money, through the wages he earns as Mum and Dad’s housekeeper, to open his own electrical shop.
Mum says, “Thank you, Kelvin.”
Kelvin almost died today. Irritated to distraction by the flies in the kitchen, he had closed the two doors and the one little window in the room, into which he had then emptied an entire can of insect-killing Doom. Mum had found him convulsing on the kitchen floor just before afternoon tea.
“Bloody idiot.” She had dragged him onto the lawn, where he lay jerking and twitching for some minutes until Mum sloshed a bucket of cold water onto his face. “Idiot!” she shrieked. “You could have killed yourself.”
Now Kelvin looks as self-possessed and serene as ever. Jesus, he has told me, is his Savior. He has an infant son named Elvis, after the other King.
Dad says, “Bring more beers, Kelvin.”
“Yes, Bwana.”
We move to the picnic chairs around the wood fire on the veranda. Kelvin brings us more beers and clears the rest of the plates away. I light a cigarette and prop my feet up on the cold end of a burning log.
“I thought you quit,” says Dad.
“I did.” I throw my head back and watch the light-gray smoke I exhale against black sky, the bright cherry at the tip of my cigarette against deep forever. The stars are silver tubes of light going back endlessly, years and light-years into themselves. The wind shifts restlessly. Maybe it will rain in a week or