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’s lover when she was living on her coffee farm, the book is also about Blixen’s own life and writings about Africa. (Perhaps you know the book already? In any event, I am sending it with this since you said you’d already read all the books in Njia.) The party was at the Karen Country Club — unremarkable anachronism. Virtually everyone at the gathering was white, with one notable exception. An old man wearing a dark suit and an ill-pressed overcoat, with his cane resting on his chair, sat in a corner and sipped tea as he chatted with two “little old ladies” (how women must hate to graduate to that distinction) in plum-colored suits and hats. At first glance, the tableau reminded me of maiden aunts gossiping with a bachelor uncle at a family reunion. But then I was informed that the old man was actually Out of Africa’s Kamante, Blixen’s faithful cook, the man whose story forms a large segment of her book. He’d been only a small boy when she discovered him fifty years ago, alienated and diseased, tending goats on her land; and now he was an old man who had, I assumed, personally witnessed the astonishing transformation of his country. He’d been hauled out for the occasion, I suspect, to lend a certain cachet to the proceedings, and he was something of a guest of honor. Though he seemed, I must say, largely indifferent to the fate that had contrived to position him there in that corner, reminiscing over tea about an Africa that no longer existed with women who, in Blixen’s day, would not have allowed him at their table.

I write to you from home now, having lost my scruples (jealousy having set them adrift). Our house sits amidst manicured gardens and acacias and eucalyptus trees that rise above the stone cottages of Karen, smoke curling from their chimneys, the four green humps of the Ngong Hills in the background. Imagining I am in England is not hard to do. The hedges create mini-fortresses, reaching twelve feet high, and are impenetrable, connected by gates with guards to watch them. Children play by appointment only. It is an odd thing, all this beauty, all this ordered loveliness, all this soft prettiness of landscape — for it is hard not to think of it as a malignant tumor that will one day have to be excised.

No, I don’t believe in your hospital and will have to come to see for myself. Write me and tell me I may come. Or meet me somewhere. I can’t stand not seeing you. When are you coming to Nairobi?

The U.S. has lodged a formal complaint about the Kenyan government’s detention of Ndegwa. I flatter myself if I think I had anything to do with it. And delude myself if I think it will help. I have written to Amnesty International, but will not receive a reply for several weeks. How agonizingly slow the mail is! Do you have a telephone? I forgot to ask. We do not. I resisted having one installed after the robbery (another long story), but Regina has been lobbying for one for some time. And I, faithless husband, would do it in an instant if I thought it would connect me to you.

I make light of this, but our situation is a painful one. We do not discuss the future. Do we have one?

There are rumors of a mass grave with fifty students in it. I find it hard to credit, but it may be true.

Christmas approaches. Weird in the heat, don’t you think? How I wish I could spend it with you.

Yours,

Thomas

P.S. Today’s headline: LEOPARD ATTACK IN KAREN.

January 4

Dear Thomas,

Peter and I have just returned from Turkana, where we went for Christmas week. We drove through rivers and were nearly defeated by the 100-degree temperatures. We passed through a landscape of such desolation one cannot imagine how the Turkana, walking from one deserted area to another, manage to survive. The lake, to our astonishment, resembled the seashore, with palm trees and miles of sandy beach lining it. We ignored the threat of parasites and crocodiles and body-surfed in the 80-degree water. In the morning, we woke to a blood-red sunrise — a swath, hundreds of miles long that, despite its awful beauty, promised blistering heat for the rest of the