The Last Time They Met_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [70]
Just last Saturday, I sat at this very café with Ndegwa. (Not knowing you were in the country. How was that possible? Why were there no signs or portents in the sky, no audible vibrations I’d have recognized as your footsteps?) Today, I went to the American embassy on Ndegwa’s behalf and was rewarded with an appointment with an embassy official — officially what was never made clear. He looked — I hesitate to say it, because it is such a cliché — like an aging Marine, his crew cut so short, there was more scalp than hair. He was bluff and hearty, actually glad to see me, though he had no idea initially why I had come. I distrust an egalitarian welcome. He said — I kid you not — “Where you from, Tom?” I said, “Boston.” He said, “Heeey, Red Sox!” So we discussed the Red Sox, about which I knew less than I should have, and I felt it was a kind of test I didn’t pass. My official grew suspicious, and seemed only then to notice my excessively long hair (“Hippie,” I could hear him thinking), and said, finally, “So what can I do you for?” and “What’s on your mind, Tom?” Truthfully, it was you, as it always is now, but I told him of my mission, which was vague enough when I left my house, even more vague in the telling of it. I wanted to help Ndegwa get released, I said. Failing that, I wanted to put pressure on the Kenyan government to state the charges and to set a trial date. It seemed an absurd request and hopelessly naive, which is how he took it. He smiled and was indulgent. “Well, Tom,” he said, pushing his chair back from the desk and lacing his fingers in his lap, “this is a sensitive area,” and, “You know, Tom, the U.S. has a strategic base in Kenya,” and, “I’d like to help as much as you, Tom, but these things take time.” I felt like a kid who’d gone to his father for money.
Having cheerfully put me in my place, he asked me what I was doing in the country. I dissembled, mentioned Regina, and finally confessed to being a writer. “For whom?” he asked. Reasonable question. “For no one,” I said, and I could tell he didn’t believe me. After all, who would write for no one? Name-dropping, he mentioned that Ted Kennedy would be coming soon to the country and that he (my official) was in charge of putting together a party in the senator’s honor. Uttering the first political statement of my life — indeed having the first political thought of my life — I blurted, “I know Ted Kennedy.” And finally snagged the man’s attention. “Actually,” I said, “my father knows him. He was once at our house for dinner.”
Really, said my embassy official.
And so the “Ndegwa matter,” as he put it, may be looked into after all.
Write me. For God’s sake, keep writing. A day without you seems a day unlived, bearable only because I summon memory, mine subject to the merest oxidation, a faint rust blowing in the breezes.
Love me as you did on Sunday. Is that so much to ask?
Thomas
P.S. Today’s headline: WOMAN GRABBED IN BUSH BY HYENA
December 15
Dear Thomas,
I am writing to you from a hospital named Mary Magdalene (no, I am not making this up) where I have had to bring David, the boy who collapsed in a fit of coughing in my classroom. Brave boy. He refuses to be excluded. He has a mysterious disease the doctors cannot name — it gives him pneumonia and makes him so gaunt, I’m afraid he won’t be able to stand up. They have taken him in to be examined, and I am waiting for him, since his mother is ill as well and cannot leave her hut. A daughter cares for the smallest children. Oh, Thomas, we never knew the first thing about misery, did we?
The hospital, a small one, was built in the 1930s to house wayward girls of European extraction whose parents were too poor to send them back to Europe to have their babies. (Or who would not spend the money on such hopeless causes. Where did the babies go, I wonder?) Now, of course, no one cares about that anymore, and so the