The Last Time They Met_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [76]
If Thomas had understood the pilot correctly, they were flying without a generator, which Thomas had been assured could be done, provided they didn’t stall, necessitating a restart of the engine. The pilot, who had longish hair and a short-sleeved suit jacket that narrowed at the waist (like something the Beatles might have worn years ago), had seemed supremely indifferent to the trip and had given Thomas the choice of deciding whether or not to turn back when he’d discovered the errant generator. Thomas, thinking of Linda standing in front of Petley’s Hotel at twelve noon, had seen no alternative, and somewhere over Voi, he’d decided that the plane would not plummet from the sky as punishment for his intended infidelity. As if he’d not been unfaithful every moment since he’d first seen Linda in the market. Still, he could not stop himself from imagining a fiery death in a desolate place where no one would ever find him.
In the distance, he saw a village of huts with grass rooftops and nearby a pen of animals. Cattle, he imagined. And he thought, as he had often thought before — although this time with a finality that brought a kind of resolution — that Africa was, after all, impenetrable. It was ancient and it was dignified in a way no other continent could equal, its soul unblemished, even with all the Wabenzis and the Swiss accounts and the parking boys. And being unmarred was unknowable. He’d seen it on the faces of the women and their preternaturally calm eyes in the face of disaster, and in the shy smiles of the children, constantly tickled by some joke understood only by them. And he accepted — as Regina with her academic mission could not; or as Roland, who made pronouncements, could not — that he, Thomas, was no more significant in this country than a single member of the herd of wildebeests migrating west beneath him (less significant, actually). He was merely a visitor, destined to move on. So that Ndegwa could never be entirely known to him, nor Mary Ndegwa, nor even the woman who washed his shirts in the bathtub (particularly not the woman who washed his shirts in the bathtub). Although — and this was odd — he had a distinct sense that they knew him, that he was, as Regina had once said of him, as transparent as glass; his own soul, for all its current turmoil, as easy to read as a bowl of water.
—You’ll want that strap pulled tight, the pilot beside him said.
In preparation for landing, the pilot sat up and put both hands on the wheel, which was reassuring to Thomas. He himself could not be a pilot — he hadn’t the math — though the job seemed pleasant enough, even thrilling. The pilot pointed to the coast, a pale peach scallop against the liquid blue of the Indian Ocean, and as Thomas’s heart began to beat slightly faster with proximity to the place where he would see Linda once again, he thought how unlikely the entire venture was, how very nearly it had not happened at all. Rich, unhappily, had contracted a wild bout of malaria on safari and had had to return with Thomas and Regina to Nairobi. Causing Thomas, after Rich had been admitted to the hospital and then sent home with a battery of drugs, to have to invent a reason to fly to the coast, which they’d only just left, using the barely credible excuse that his new employer had mandated it. It would be a quick trip, he’d told Regina; he’d be back before Thursday. And she, weary from the dirt and boredom of safari, had not seemed to mind, or even, to be truthful, to notice.
The plane left the continent below, circled the Swahili archipelago of Lamu, and landed on a runway in a mangrove swamp on nearby Manda. Thomas thanked the pilot and said he hoped the generator got fixed soon. The pilot (Thomas was sure the liquor breath was from the night before) merely shrugged. Thomas made his way to the place where sailing dhows with wide lateen sails waited to ferry the passengers across to Lamu village. He placed his gear in an overcrowded boat that reminded him of refugees from Vietnam and gave its captain eighty shillings. He found a seat next to a woman