The Last Time They Met_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [47]
Thomas and Ndegwa parked when the road ran out. They wound their way down a long murram path to a rectangular mud building with a rippled blue tin roof. Except for a small patch of hard-baked dirt in front of the house, all the other soil had been cultivated. The house stood on a rise in sun so bright Thomas had to squint his eyes nearly shut. An elderly woman emerged from the house wearing a kitenge cloth tied around her body and another cloth wound around her head. Ndegwa introduced Thomas to his mother. A wide gap in the bottom row of her teeth, Ndegwa had later explained, was the result of six teeth that had been deliberately pulled in adolescence to enhance her beauty. The woman came forward and shook hands and squinted as she listened to Thomas’s name. Behind her, Ndegwa’s several sisters shyly filed out, greeting Thomas just as their mother had done. A fire burned to one side of the front door, and a young goat lay on its back with its throat cut. Ndegwa began the skinning in his role as host. He hadn’t even taken off his suit coat. Thomas felt narcoleptic from the altitude, queasy about the goat. He watched Ndegwa’s knife make the first cut into the skin of the leg and peel back a bloody flap, and then turned to study the banana trees. One of the women, in a blue pantsuit and red platform shoes, stepped forward and introduced herself as Mary, Ndegwa’s wife. She was wearing a large rhinestone ring. Thomas wasn’t sure he’d ever seen such swollen breasts. Her platforms sank into the mud with her weight, but together, they negotiated the thin strip of grass that separated the banana trees from the maize fields.
The house was surrounded by a garden of moonflowers and frangipani, the scent so intoxicating Thomas wanted to lie down right there on the ground. The mildly hilly landscape was divided into intricate patterns of cultivation: just the shades of green alone made him dizzy. On the hills were other mud-and-tin huts, and overhead the sky was the deep cobalt he’d come to expect in the country. An ordinary day in Kenya, he reflected, would be cause for celebration in Hull.
Mary ordered a child to boil water on a charcoal burner, then invited Thomas to step inside the hut.
A red vinyl sofa and two matching chairs decorated the central room. In its center was a small plastic table, so that to sit down, Thomas had to climb over the table. The floor was dirt, and Thomas wondered what would happen to it in a heavy rain. Outside, through the doorway, the sun lit up a landscape of colors so garish they hurt the eye. He knew he’d never be able to describe them: it had something to do with the equatorial light and the quality of the air — very fine. If you couldn’t describe a country’s colors, what did you have?
On the walls were framed Coca-Cola ads and severely posed photographs of family groupings. From a battery-operated record player crooned, improbably, an American twang: Put your sweet lips a little closer to the phone. Thomas was offered a glass of warm beer that he drank straight down. Mary laughed and poured him another. He tried not to look too surprised when she told him that she, too, was a poet, and that she had a degree in forensic medicine from the university at Kampala. She’d retreated to the family shamba, she explained, for the birth of her first child, who was then a month old. She asked him why he was in the country. He was in the country, he said, because Regina was, and Regina was in the country because she had a grant to study the psychological effects of sub-Saharan diseases on Kenyan children under ten years old. The grant was with UNICEF. From time to time, Thomas noticed, Ndegwa retreated to the back of the house to speak with men who had come especially to see him, and Thomas vaguely understood