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Yet I know I am not the one to write this portrait. Always, there was a barrier between us, a kind of inability to cross the border between our cultures, a demarcation that seemed studded with the barbed wire of misread symbols, separated by a wide gulf of differing experiences. Again and again we would lose our way. We would seem to make it to the very point of entry, when suddenly the ground would lurch beneath us, leaving us on separate sides of a fault, slipping past each other.

Write immediately. Tell me you will come, or that I may go to you.

I love you.

T.

P.S. Today’s headline: FOOD AND FUEL RUNNING OUT.

February 24

Dear Thomas,

I received your letter and the invitation to the embassy party in the same mail. And have thought of little else since. I know that I should not go anywhere near Nairobi on that weekend, that I should flee to Turkana or Tsavo instead, that I should try to be as far away as possible. But, as luck or fate would have it, Peter wants me in town then because an old friend from school is coming to the country, and he would like me to meet him. If I decided to go to the party, I would have to bring Peter with me; I couldn’t really go without him. Perhaps even his friend as well, depending on the circumstances. I assume that would not be a problem? I really would like to meet Mary Ndegwa and lend my support to the cause, though it will be you I come to see.

I can’t promise anything.

I write to you from Lake Baringo. Peter has long wanted to visit this godforsaken place, and I agreed to go with him for the weekend. We have been at each other’s throats lately — entirely my fault, and due to my distraction — and I hoped that this might ease tensions. (It does not: nothing seems to help, except the one thing I cannot do, which is to sleep with him. I would, I think, do it purely out of kindness at this point, though I’m afraid it would make me too sad. Why must love reduce one to sordid confessions?)

There is more to be frightened of at Lake Baringo than anywhere I have ever been. The land is unloving and unwelcoming. The dirt is hard and gray-brown with only thorn trees for vegetation. What little green exists is dust-colored as are the very black bodies of the tiny children, which makes them look ancient. The lake, with its island in the center, is brown and ripe with crocodiles. Last night, Peter swam while the sun sank, and this morning, I heard the sound of something large splashing in the water. A hippo, I suspect. Yet everywhere, even on this landscape where nothing young should flourish, there is life — noisy, cacophonous, teeming and quick. Just now, I am watching a lizard slither across the screen, eating mosquitoes. Cormorants, like old jesters, tread cumbersomely along the branches of the thorn trees outside our “cottage,” which more closely resembles a wooden tent with a screened-in porch than a true building, the mesh of the screens just large enough to let in all manner of flying insects. My table is piled with beer bottles and mosquito coils, my writing paper and my pens. Across the road, four women in faded red cloth are brushing knots from their hair. It is almost unbearably hot. Only the faintest swish of air moves dryly over the hairs on my skin. There seems enough air to breathe, but barely more than that. The heat enervates, the light stuns, the mosquitoes carry malaria. There is little relief.

A few minutes ago, a meat truck rumbled down the road and sent from its wheels an enormous cloud of dust. In this cloud, there seemed to be a small creature hopping, like a large bird in preflight. When the dust cleared, however, I saw that it was just a boy chasing the truck with his basket. The truck stopped, and the boy held out his basket and waited for it to be filled with scraps not good enough for the market, the quality of which doesn’t bear thinking about. I could have gone out onto the road to watch this scene more closely, but couldn’t summon the energy to do so. I’d rather catch a scene midflight, imagining