The Last Time They Met_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [46]
—And how are you? Thomas asked when the girl had passed.
—Oh, I am just all right. I have no bad luck. Ndegwa shrugged, the smile fading, taxing belief in his pronouncement. Ndegwa was a brilliant teacher, able to excise the fat from Thomas’s lines of poetry with quick swipes of his pen, even as Thomas watched. Though my government is telling me I cannot write any more poems.
Thomas took a quick sip of beer, thought about the worm. Why?
Ndegwa rubbed his eyes. They are telling me that my poems mock our government and our leaders.
Which, of course, they did.
—And so I have been warned.
Thomas lightly jolted from complacency. Ndegwa was a better teacher than a writer, though his work was haunting and rhythmic and seeped into the bones the way music did. And even though the words themselves were often not memorable, the distinct cadences of Ndegwa’s verse drummed themselves inside the head.
—You’re not serious, Thomas said.
—I am afraid I am very serious.
Thomas was disoriented by Ndegwa’s calm demeanor. What if you stopped writing for a while? Thomas asked.
Ndegwa sighed, picked his teeth with his tongue. If you were told you could no longer publish your poems because your words revealed unpleasant truths about your government that the government did not want its people to know, would you stop?
A decision Thomas would never be forced to make. And one he’d never had to consider. Unpleasant words about his own country were practically a national pastime.
Ndegwa turned his massive body sideways to the table and gazed out at the crowd. The poet had a Bantu profile. Oddly, he wore a woman’s watch.
—In my country, they give you a warning so that you can settle your affairs. And then they arrest you. The warning is a prelude to the arrest.
Ndegwa coolly drank his beer. Following a detainment, Thomas wondered, what happened? Imprisonment? Death? Surely not.
—You know this? Thomas asked.
—I am knowing this.
—But what about your wife and baby?
—They are gone to my homeland.
—Jesus.
—Jesus is not helping me too much.
—You could flee. Thomas scrambled for a solution, thinking like an American: all problems could be solved if only one could imagine the solution.
—To where? To my homeland? They will find me. I cannot leave the country. They will confiscate my passport at the airport. And besides, my friend, if I go, they will arrest my wife and son and threaten to kill them if I do not return. This is standard.
On a Friday noon, near the end of term, Thomas had lingered in the classroom while Ndegwa had read — and edited — his last bit of work for the class. Then Ndegwa had glanced at his watch and had said he needed to catch a bus to Limuru. His wife had given birth to their firstborn son just the month previous, and he wanted to travel to the family shamba to be with them for the weekend. Thomas, wishing to postpone as long as possible the thin haze of tension that would obscure the landscape of his weekend with Regina, had volunteered to drive him — an offer Ndegwa happily accepted. Thomas and Ndegwa made their way into the Highlands, past the tea plantations and along a route that paralleled a dirt path. Men in pin-striped suits and old women bent under loads of firewood watched the passing car as if Thomas and Ndegwa were envoys on a diplomatic mission. Along the way, they discovered they were age mates, born on the same day in the same year. Had Thomas been a Kikuyu, Ndegwa explained, they’d have been circumcised together when they were twelve, would have been isolated from their families and community for a period of several weeks while they became men, and then would have been welcomed back into the fold with a great