The Last Time They Met_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [43]
He woke with the birds and listened to sounds he’d never heard before: the trills of tiny weaver birds; the cat-like wail of peacocks; the screeching of ibises; and the rhythmic moaning of something he couldn’t name but that might simply be a dove. Once, he’d seen, through the bedroom window, a tree come shockingly into bloom. Its leaves had been bluish-gray, and on that day it had given birth to an explosion of small yellow puffy balls as big as marbles, thousands upon thousands of them all at once, so that almost instantly a lemon-colored haze had filled the room. It had been one of the small miracles he’d come to expect in Africa. One of God’s modest performances.
The performances were everywhere: a Masai warrior wearing only a red loincloth to cover his nakedness, leaning on his spear as he waited for the elevator at the Intercontinental, all the while fiddling with his calculator; a late-model Mercedes parked in front of a mud-and-wattle hut; a chemistry professor at the university who didn’t know his own birth date or even how old he was, and was always slightly amused that anyone should care. Even the landscape was contradictory. Waking in the rarefied air of Nairobi under his down sleeping bag (it was fucking freezing at night) and then driving thirty miles west, he would descend into a desert so oppressive and hot that only thorn trees could grow. The thorn trees were the best example of Darwinian selection Thomas had ever seen, self-protective in the extreme.
He added pawpaw and passion fruit to the mango in the straw basket and handed it to a slight Asian man behind a makeshift counter. Thomas wouldn’t bargain, though the man might expect it. Regina considered it a point of honor to bargain, part of the Kenyan cultural experience. Not bargaining, she argued, contributed to inflation. Plus, it made Americans look like easy marks. Well, they were, Thomas answered, so why pretend otherwise? And what was wrong with being an easy mark anyway? Wasn’t Jesus an easy mark if it came to that? Though Thomas, not very religious, was hard-pressed to continue this argument.
Kenya was nothing if not a country of contradictions — unnerving and sometimes harrowing. On a Sunday, not long ago, traveling with Regina for her research to the mental hospital at Gil Gil, he’d driven the Ford Escort down the hairpin turns of the escarpment and descended into the floor of the Rift Valley, the butt end of the car shimmying wildly on the corrugated dirt road. Regina had worn a dress he particularly liked: a thin, blouse-like dress of mulberry cotton that fit tightly across her breasts and hips. Regina was voluptuous, a fact she loathed about herself. A fact he had once adored. And might still had she not tainted the adoration with her own physical self-hatred.
She had thick black curly hair that resisted taming and was often wiry around her face. Her eyes were small, and deep vertical concentration lines separated her thick brows. But in the car, with her sunglasses on, she’d looked almost glamorous that day. She had worn lipstick, which she rarely did, an ice-pink frost that had distracted him no end.
The hospital had been a series of cement-and-tin buildings arranged like an army barracks, men lying or sitting on the tarred courtyard in tattered blue shirts and shorts, their only clothing. Cleanliness seemed next to impossible, and the stench had been nearly unbearable in the heat. The men had reached out to touch Thomas and Regina as they passed, hissing