• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 672 0

copper and silver plates and large ceramic urns decorated the walls and niches. Still the stairs went up, and on the third level, open to the sky, Thomas discovered bedrooms with canopied beds and mosquito netting. There was a jasmine tree near one of the beds, and frangipani on a coral terrace. The perfume of the flowers filled the rooms and erased the smells of the streets. He looked at the roofless bedroom and thought to himself that it must never rain in Lamu, and he wondered how that could possibly be true. Exploring further, he found a bedroom with a basin of fresh water and washed his face and hands. Above the marble-topped dresser on which the basin rested, a hibiscus tree rose, bright blooms against the navy of the sky. As he left the room, he saw that someone (Mr. Salim?) had placed jasmine blossoms on the pillows.

The servant had prepared a meal of eggs and yogurt and cold tea, which Thomas accepted gratefully at a table in the courtyard. He wished the Arab man would linger, for he had questions — Who owned the house? Did people like himself often stay there? — but Mr. Salim had vanished into the kitchen. Thomas ate the eggs and yogurt and felt as though a benign spirit (or at least a mildly sympathetic one) had arranged his astonishing good luck; and it was hard not to take it for a sign that what he was about to do was, in a world that might run parallel to his own, accepted — perhaps even encouraged. But then, in the next instant, thinking of Regina at home nursing Rich back to health, Thomas put his hands over his eyes. It was pure delusion, he knew, to imagine that this trip was acceptable in any universe.

______

He saw her walking toward him, and he ground out his cigarette with his shoe. She wore a sundress of white linen that fell to midcalf, and she held a scarf around her shoulders to cover them. She had dressed respectfully, as women on Lamu were advised to do, and yet Thomas saw, as she approached, that every man raised his eyes to stare at the blond mzungu. She’d worn her hair up in a knot at the back of her head, but still the gold, in that village of dark skin and bui-bui, turned heads. Another bit of gold, the cross at her neck, seemed wildly out of place in the Muslim town, but he was glad she hadn’t thought — or hadn’t chosen — to hide it. A Swahili man, beside her, carried her suitcase and seemed particularly short next to the tall, willowy woman walking toward Thomas, who stood at the front of the hotel. For a moment, neither spoke nor moved, each supremely conscious of the porter beside them, of the men in the streets who watched her still.

—Linda, Thomas said.

They embraced. Chastely, as a couple might in public, with no kiss or prolonged touch. The skin of her arms cool under his fingers. Wordlessly, he turned and tipped the boy who waited with the suitcase. Thomas picked up her bag. I have a house, he said.

She only nodded, which he took as permission to lead her there. They walked in silence, Thomas having memorized the way, neither of them willing to break the spell that had enveloped them in front of Petley’s — one of anticipation within a framework of restraint. He watched her sandaled feet emerge from the hem of her dress, felt her elbow brush his arm from time to time. Above them, the muezzins again began their chanting from the minarets, and the world seemed suffused with both the religious and the sensual, qualities he’d always associated with the woman beside him. They weren’t precisely shy with each other, though Thomas was certain they shared a sense of moment; that each was, beneath the calm exterior of a couple moving slowly forward in the heat, supremely aware of bargains being made, lifelong contracts that might have to be honored.

He found the one door out of hundreds that would open to him, and he wondered, as he put the key into the lock, how precisely to deal with the matter of Mr. Salim, who would surely emerge and want to be introduced to the mzungu woman and would ask her if she would like a glass of cold tea. But, in the end, Mr. Salim did not appear, and it