A Walking Guide Read online

  So I said to her:

  “Round the next corner are the people who are doing this and they won’t like an audience. They’ll rape you and kill you after they watch you shit yourself when they take me out. Don’t be stupid, Faria.”

  “You are just a sheet-chicken.”

  “You mean chicken-shit?”

  “I go without you.”

  “You stay with me you crazy French bitch.”

  “Sheet-chicken.”

  That was when I struck her, a hard open-handed blow across the cheek that almost floored her. I struck her. I struck her because I just couldn’t do this anymore, not her way. It was too far. She was on a different plane from me. I wanted to stay alive and I realized that she didn’t. I’m not proud of this. I have told no one. Until now.

  —

  From outside the netting, captured in the glow, they were the perfect couple, bronzed children of paradise. Imperceptibly, their fingers would advance across the white linen until they touched just enough for the signal to be transmitted. They would peer deeply, significantly into one another’s eyes and the spark would ignite the ready tinder. Eva Kimberly knew the gift was hers, to offer or withhold. She had belonged, for many years, to one man who right now, on his admission, was beyond contact in his tented camp with a temptress of uncertain intentions. But, to her surprise, she did not really care. Aquiline, aloof Jeremy Davenport had been her consort since postgraduate times when both had returned from overseas colleges in America and Britain to restart their African lives. She had studied languages—Italian and German—though her true tongue was more likely to be Swahili—and Oxford had been impressed enough with the colonial interloper to offer her a first-class degree in those subjects. And he had returned with an economics degree of a low, third-class order that he would stuff into some drawer or attic and forget. But they had completed the tribal rite—gone overseas, sampled its narrow horizons and failing light and frigid people and found it lacking, returning to the crazy dislocated world that they knew better. Someday—always soon—they would make the commitment to another marquee on the shores of Naivasha and a wedding party and children and home.

  Until now.

  Was this when we met, Joe? Was it?

  He was telling his stories—war stories, funny stories, indiscretions concerning big-name people she saw on the satellite television news. He was laying out his offering: look, see, I’m capable of tenderness, humor, care. I come fully equipped with a visa to the chanceries of Europe, to places where you do not fuse the claymore mines before retiring, where you do not watch every third or second acquaintance turn gray and die with AIDS or TB or malaria, where selfishness is licensed and greed is legitimate and you are not obliged to fret about your debt to an adoptive continent. Let me court you in St. Germain and the Piazza di Spagna and Unter den Linden. Let me take you to places where the dues have been paid, where you are warm and safe.

  He was reciting an old-timer’s story, about sending dispatches by carrier pigeon, in the era before wireless or telex or modem. He was describing how the pigeon handler holds the bird with its legs caught between index and middle finger, the thumb gently caressing the neck, holding the wings closed. How, before the bird is freed to soar and circle and find its true coordinates, the pigeon handler brushes the feathers of the bird’s head with the merest peck of a kiss for good fortune and true flight. As he told the story he went through those motions, an imaginary bird calmed and cooing in a strong, manly hand, his storyteller’s lips pursed in a kiss as he looked at her across the pool of light at the dining table. Then, with both hands he showed how the bird was freed and launched, the kiss of life breathing fire into its wings, free to spiral into the skies, to find its way home. And he looked straight at her, the virtual kiss lingering on real lips.

  DOW CRAG, ENGLAND. SEPTEMBER 2000

  Beyond a certain altitude you are in the dead zone. The body does not regenerate. The climbers say this is the place where you know your death has begun to unfold. Starved of oxygen, assailed by bitter cold, the systems slow to a halt. But before succumbing, you put one foot before the other, gain one small victory at a time, then steel yourself for the next challenge, the next step to gain one more iota of height, to progress further into the zone that is killing you. There is little or no sleep. Food does not nourish. Liquid provides respite but not sustenance. At some point, entropy will erode the desire for the incremental triumphs of putting one foot before another. You lose sight of your summit goal, your aim, the passion that brought you here. You have only a limited, ever-dwindling envelope of time before desire perishes and you will, too, your eyes blinded by the glare, your fingers blackened by frostbite. You will curl up against some barren rock and let the last vestiges of energy slip away. The dead zone takes its prisoners and casualties with supreme indifference. You are in the zone where the axons wither, the signals sent so valiantly do not arrive at the muscle tissue, where unintelligible quiverings replace premeditated movement. Like a huge, tangled city whose power supply is failing, whole areas are blacked out, progressively, the light vanishing, patches of darkness encroaching on the organism until it disappears from view, its every function stilled.

  Behind schedule, cursing the weight of his pack, Joe Shelby engineers one step at a time in the South Rake, alone in a world of mist and sudden chill that allows him to see only the scratch marks of previous toilers, but nothing beyond that, no sense of a point of departure or a point of arrival. At his back, he is aware of the huge, menacing buttresses, the narrow fissures, the swoop—somewhere—of scree and rock plunging down towards the still tarn. He locates a firm grounding with one of his walking poles, then swings the other with an awkward improvisation of his useless left arm. Once anchored in this manner, he raises his left leg using the thigh muscles only because the calf muscles are unresponsive. Then he orders the good right leg to follow, completing the process of making imperceptible headway. But moving nonetheless. And repeating the formula to ensure upward progression, careful since his fall, and ever more aware of the pain this adventure is causing to limbs that will not function according to their basic design. His thighs ache and his breathing is labored, heartbeat in overtime. He has not up until this point contemplated failure or lowering his sights, making do with one peak, one day, one retreat. But now he is telling himself that, in the dead zone, victory is relative. Victory is survival. There are ways down the mountain without shame. There are summits best left to others. And there is the knowledge that every upward step must be reversed. He is sweaty and breathless and cannot abide the thought that, if he fails now, the dead zone will enfold his soul.

  JADINI, KENYA. SEPTEMBER 1999

  He awoke confused by the absence of his usual coordinates—hotel furniture, whisky, cigarettes, bedside telephone, reading lamp. He was in a strange room, with the sound of the ocean surf pounding on a reef. The room was white with simple furnishings, blurred by mosquito netting. He had been sleeping fitfully, restless after the dinner, after sitting opposite her and trying to absorb her speech tones and laughter, the clean, perfect lines of her. He had thrown off the thin, cotton sheet and tossed and turned so that his feet protruded from the netting. His mind went back over their dinner, like after some interviews with nervous sources, when you have to exercise total recall because the source has refused a tape recorder or notebook. They had talked about being white in Africa, being an Englishman in New York, where people talked too fast and thought on their feet while he digested courses of action. He felt drowned by her voice, the unbroken lines of her body, the English accent that, in his youth, would have raised the banners of class struggle in his northern soul. He wanted to make her laugh and dusted off his best stories about pigeons and wars and adventures, censored to skirt around questions concerning his companions on those crazy drives across the desert, those wild races against rivals in the era before mobile phones, an era that almost merited its own initials: B.C., A.D., P.C.—pre-cell. Now, P.E.—pre-Eva. He wanted, somehow, to
suggest to her that her life should change and he should help navigate her exodus.

  “Do you ever feel you’d like to move on?”

  “As in?”

  “A new start. A break with the past?”

  “In my own good time.”

  “But doesn’t time march on?”

  “Not as quickly for me as it seems to do for you,” she said, but there was just the merest curl of a smile on her lips.

  Over coffee, with the surf beating a relentless backdrop, he was the good listener. She told him, slowly at first, then in a rush of words, of the fears and exhilaration of her tribe’s adoptive home, of the cruel juxtapositions of a life set half in the unquestioning luxury of Home Farm and half in the flyblown backwaters of the Rift Valley, where hope was always denied by AIDS, violence, rape. She laughed—and he laughed with her—at the old family stories, of how a great aunt had married a hunter who summoned early morning beverages from the servants by shotgun: one barrel for coffee, two for tea. She grew somber when she spoke of a particular young Masai man she had adopted only to discover that her generosity had made him a wastrel, trading pride for handouts and hand-me-downs. She grew, briefly, silent as she recited the statistics of infection that stripped the colleges of healthy students and left babies with grandparents and no generations between. In her conversations, B followed A and C followed B. Not what he had become used to from his crazy French bitch who thought in curves so that a Q might wing in after B and a Z could crop up at any time as her thoughts and responses flew like sparks from some hidden dynamo.

  “I don’t usually talk so much,” she said.

  “It’s my cunning interview technique.”

  “Or the wine.”

  He sat opposite her on the divan in the main salon, where ceiling fans turned the night wind off the ocean that stalked the house through the shutters and netting. Sometimes, across the covered verandah where some invisible person had mysteriously removed the detritus of their dinner, a phantom crossed the silhouette of the palm trees with a glint of steel.

  “Just the askari,” she said. “He obviously feels I need protection.”

  “From who? Not from me.”

  “Of course from you. They’ve known me since I was a baby. They are all very protective.”

  “And what would he do to protect you?”

  “You really wouldn’t want to know, but I fear your manhood would never recover.” Again the smile.

  “Sounds like it’s me who needs protection.”

  “Don’t you laugh in the face of danger?”

  “Of course. Always. That’s why I’m here.”

  He focused on her hazel eyes, willing a message from them that would encourage his desire to slip her shirt from her shoulders, loose the knot of the kikoyi from her waist. He noted that her eyebrows and lashes were naturally sandy, made even paler by the sun, that her skin was very lightly freckled and that her hair glowed. As she spoke, he focused his gaze to prevent it from straying to the intimate places where he was not sure he would ever be invited. She told him about assumed privilege and late-stirring guilt, about the sunlight that soaked through her life and pain that this same life was so much the product of decades of elitism, racially based at first, then economically based. Was it the same with him? (How could she know at that early stage that it was not?) Did his family fix every moment of its own past, as if creating a pageant across the decades to justify its behavior—from the first arrival to the disastrous foray into coffee, from the horrors of the Mau Mau on a remote homestead to the triumph of survival, from the plantations to the corridors of colonial administration to the arrangements and compromises with the new order. Of course outsiders thought it all very pat: white masters, black slaves. But it was her life, she was saying, she knew nothing else and he stopped her dead in her tracks by saying: I could show you another one. If you wanted. If you thought.

  —

  In the soft focus of the mosquito netting, she was standing in the doorway, wearing some kind of robe. She seemed to be watching him, like someone trying to decide whether to join a party at which she is not sure whether she is wanted or will enjoy herself. He feigned sleep, asking himself whether she could see through the netting that he was naked. She was walking across the rush matting of the guest room, moving the mosquito netting to protect his exposed feet. Her fingers brushed over his ankle and he sat upright, swinging open the netting with a gesture he hoped was chivalrous, then kneeling to face and receive her.

  And that was it, Joe. That was when we met.

  Chapter Five

  SERENGETI, TANZANIA. SEPTEMBER 1999

  In the almost innocent, earliest years of her career as a war photographer, Faria Duclos sometimes indulged the notion that, if she survived her newly found profession, she would end her days alone with rich memories of a turbulent life, a portfolio of fine and terrible images and, possibly, a cat. She would live in a tasteful apartment in St. Germain with high ceilings and a warren of corridors leading to darkened rooms, off limits to most of her guests. She would be one of those querulous, quirky ladies in broad-brimmed hats, sought out by old flames desperate to rekindle dead embers, and by young men with existential problems. She would, by then, have detoxified and her work would be shown in well-attended retrospectives. It did not occur to her to dwell on the slow, painful messy ends associated with death in battle. Death, she believed, was an alluring mystery to unravel, not a transition to be feared. Death was a solution, not a problem, a lover to be courted, not an unwelcome suitor to be rejected. And if its visit came earlier rather than later, then so be it: it would be as welcome as any other long-awaited guest.

  In those early days, a partner, a soul mate also seemed improbable. When she walked into a hotel lobby or an airport lounge, returning from assignment with the sweat and adrenaline still upon her, men looked upon her brooding black eyes and slender frame with attraction and fear. She was not the kind of girl who expected to be taken home for tea and parental introductions, not the type who would crave—or qualify for—the protection and companionship she saw other women extracting from men who seemed born to be tamed. She had learned her priorities from men whose rules were fluid and simple: whatever it was, the adventure came first. No commitment was binding. At the first hint of distant trouble, in Chechnya or Kandahar, she would simply lock her apartment, sling her camera bag over her shoulder and take a cab to the airport, calling her agent along the way to line up clients. She was free because she had never felt that anyone wanted to capture her. She was free because she never asked anyone to take her in, to set markers of safety. Joe Shelby alone had ring-fenced her demons without seeming to, spun an invisible web around her, without saying so or making a point of it. And now he had withdrawn the favor, just as she had begun to think he would not, showing himself, really, no different from other men in her life.

  Her father, a Tunisian professor of archaeology, had died of a heart attack on a dig in Egypt when she was in her early teens, and she had seen little of him before that. His death merely drew a line below years of separation, de facto divorce, from her mother. At school functions, she saw other children flanked by a mother and a father. Her mother always arrived alone, if she arrived at all, and drew attention by her too-young, too-tight clothes, her racy, tarty hats and helipad-sized sunglasses. In the empty hours, returning home to a silent apartment in Paris, she confided this to her schoolgirl diary: I have learned that no matter how hard you love somebody, you can never love them back to you; love is never strong enough to reverse destiny.

  Her memories of her father—rarely revisited—lay in warm, rosy, special places where he still played silly games with her on a silk rug, or told her magical, made-up stories as she hovered between wakefulness and sleep. But for the rest, for the presences her school friends simply took for granted from their fathers at school fetes and prize givings, birthday parties and outings to the zoo, he was absent. She clung to his memory with a fierce loyalty and, at the same time, could not b
ring herself to believe that her lackadaisical mother had been in any way at fault in whatever relationship her parents had ever had. Her father’s early death merely confirmed that the void and the pain would be her constant companions. And death itself became the central mystery, the single event that offered certainty. She learned its lyrics from Kurt Cobain. She laid flowers at the grave of Jim Morrison and mourned all those like her condemned to courtship with the dark angel. She thrived on the twilit, sinister poetry of Charles Baudelaire and Gerard de Nerval. Of all the music she played on headsets and hi-fis as a teenager, two songs defined her condition and she wept freely to them. They were “Knocking on Heaven’s Door” by Bob Dylan and “Tears in Heaven” by Eric Clapton—a song inspired by a father’s loss of a child that made her ask if her own father had ever felt that loss. Her tears were all the more bitter because heaven seemed an elusive, alien notion, not meant for her.

  Her mother, a delicate Frenchwoman of independent financial means, mourned her husband only briefly before setting out to find a successor. Her choices were never good. The young Faria, packed off to a Swiss boarding school, would return home at vacations to find the apartment in St. Germain populated in succession by a rote of raddled playboys and rogues attracted by the small fortune that had accrued to her mother from her father’s modest legacy and her distant ties to a prominent family of bankers. Some set out to seduce her and she allowed some to succeed. Some sought to expel her from her own home, regarding her as a willful, spoilt invader, a brat. None of them said simply that he liked her for herself, or took her to a movie without trying to paw her. Sex, she told her intermittent diary, could not be separated from treachery.