• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

January 26

Dear Linda,

I am so sorry about David. I hope he didn’t suffer. In a strange way, I am glad the mother is not completely aware of what happened. That has always seemed the worst part of any child’s death: that the mother should suffer the intolerable loss. I wish you did not hate your God so passionately, since you might take comfort in the thought that David is with Him now.

Such extraordinary emotions in the space of paragraphs. I was delirious with the news that you might be able to meet me at the coast. Would Lamu be possible? I will send you the dates tomorrow, and I will find a place for us to meet. My God, Linda, this has to happen. Another man might be able to put scruples above want and need, but not I. Sometimes I tell myself we owe this to ourselves for all the days and nights that were lost to us, even though I know that makes no moral sense whatever. Another person (your nun perhaps) would simply say too bad, that we have made commitments to others and will have to honor them. But I wonder: did you and I not make a stronger commitment nine years ago in front of a blue cottage by the ocean? Am I to pay for the rest of my life for a careless moment on a slippery curve? Would I understand this if it were happening to Regina? God, I hope I would.

I have just finished writing my first article for the magazine I told you about. The siku kuu was an extraordinary event after all — a ceremony during which a thousand Masai men gathered to anoint their women with honey beer to ensure the continued fertility of the tribe, a spectacle that takes place every twenty years — and I hope I have done justice to it. I would rather have written a poem, but that’s hardly what the editor wants right now. I won’t bore you with a travelogue, but I’ll give you the highlights: Dawn coming up faintly as we reached the Magadi Road. Sleepy conversation with my photographer companion. Two hundred and fifty manyattas, two thousand Masai all in one place. The red-and-brown cloth of the women, their Maridadi, their earrings with perpendicular appendages, the film canisters in the ear holes. Hundreds of children — curious, touching, friendly, laughing. A biblical-looking man named Zachariah, who patiently explained the ceremony to us. The women, some resigned, some solemn, some half-crazy in catatonic states and epileptic-like fits. Deep, agonized groans. Wearing a kid’s hat to keep out the sun since I’d forgotten my own. Passing out cigarettes. Going off to take a leak and wondering if I was pissing on sacred ground. Handing out plums. The cruel faces of some of the younger men, like decadent Romans. The long negotiations for the women, who seemed frighteningly passive, considering their fate.

I can’t imagine what part love plays in this. It was impossible, from the outside, to tell.

It would be best if we could meet some time between the 28th and the 3rd. Perhaps the 1st? I am, literally, counting the hours until then.

Thomas

P.S. Today’s headline: BABOON SNATCHES BABY.

January 27

Dear Linda,

We delude ourselves. We delude ourselves. Meet me anyway. Please. In front of Petley’s Hotel, Lamu, twelve noon, the 1st. We will go for a walk.

T.

Below them lay plains of scrub trees that were already casting precise shadows on the barren ground. Grasses undulated like a familiar crop in an unfamiliar heartland, and vast papyrus swamps threatened to devour entire countries. The pilot — ultimate cool: feet on the console, smoking a cigarette (wasn’t that illegal?) — flew so low to the ground that Thomas could see individual elephants and wildebeests, a lone giraffe, its neck craning to the stuttering sound above it. A sky blue–cloaked moran with a spear walked from one seemingly empty place to another, and a woman in a red shawl carried an urn atop her head. Thomas saw all this — watched the rosy light turn the lakes turquoise, watched the light of dawn come up as theater — and thought, In six hours, I will see her.