The Other Language(80)
“Do you ever miss your life here?” he asked.
“All the time,” she said, and felt herself blushing. It seemed inappropriate to admit such a thing in front of him. A betrayal to the new life she had chosen.
When, almost eight years earlier, Sonia had made up her mind to move to Europe, it had seemed like a final decision. At the time she could no longer bear the corruption, the frustration of living in a hopeless country constantly on the edge of disaster where—if she was ever to have children—they would grow up like wild things without a clue about what was going on in the rest of the world and never adjusting to it. She convinced herself that she needed to live in a place where one would be able to go to a museum on a whim, see a movie, get proper clothes, eat decent food and be surrounded by people who could talk about ideas rather than dams, engines, electric fencing, wells and cattle. When she’d met the man who was to become her husband—a director of photography who’d come into the country to shoot a documentary on the Ndorobos, a disappearing tribe—she hadn’t let him escape without her, holding on to him with the resilience of a castaway grasping a wide, steady plank of wood.
She had adjusted very quickly to her new life—after all it was much easier to go from bush to city than the other way around. The “how to” instructions were easy and written on every wall; the comfort of European life was strongly addictive, she discovered, and one immediately forgot how to live without it.
Now that she felt something of an exile returning to her homeland, she’d been assaulted by nostalgia, not only for the raw beauty of the country, but for her former self, a person happy to live with few clothes, who didn’t wear makeup and who didn’t think much of crossing a river in a four-wheel drive.
Sometimes, in the city where she lived now, glancing around the crowd in the bus, she would single out a couple of faces. She recognized their shy smiles, the way they moved their open hands around their faces, the familiar singsong in their voices—certain words that she’d catch in the distance. Usually they would be cleaning ladies, sometimes they’d be young nuns or street sellers just arrived—she could tell from the clothes they wore. She couldn’t restrain herself from moving closer and closer to them, elbowing other tired passengers until she’d find herself standing right next to them in order to catch the gist of their conversation. She’d wait for the right moment to barge in and they’d open their eyes wide, stunned to hear a mzungu lady in her nice coat address them in their language.
“I grew up there.”
They would laugh and slap their thighs.
“So you are an African too!”
“Oh yes, sana kabisa,” she’d say and join their laughter.
Often she would not get off at her stop, wanting to prolong the conversation; the sound of Swahili was like music to her.
He hadn’t been exactly present in her thoughts for all those years; she seemed to have almost forgotten him, to have lost track of his existence as if he hadn’t left such a big impression after all. But the memory of that encounter on the edge of a bathtub must have been lingering somewhere beneath the surface—invisible, yet bobbing about. All this became clear to Sonia only once she sat next to him in the car, so that coming across him in such an unlikely circumstance seemed the obvious segue to their encounter of nearly ten years earlier, when she was still single, hadn’t settled anywhere yet and still had a sense that the future was a sheet of white photographic paper on which her life was still waiting to emerge.
They passed clusters of zebras, antelopes and small cattle herds led by men wrapped in red cloth, covered in colorful beaded jewelry. Just before it got dark they saw a leopard appear and cross the track ahead of them, its golden shape cut against the white dust. He turned off the engine of the car and they watched the animal move slowly across—a tight bundle of muscles and tendons—and disappear into the thick again. They looked at each other and didn’t make a comment; they exchanged a smile, as though the leopard crossing their way had been a good omen, or a special signal sent just for them.
He glanced at his wristwatch.
“It’s a quarter to seven. Can you still make your flight to Nairobi?”
“Oh. Forget it, it left two hours ago. I’ll have to try to go tomorrow.”
She could almost hear them both think, Good, we have a little time.
Once they left the track the landscape changed, turned greener and the air cooler. They knew that now that the desert was behind them they’d reach town within an hour. They became aware that they’d have to come up with some sort of a plan in order to prolong the encounter. Neither was ready to let the other one go.
Behind a gas station, at the intersection of a small cluster of shacks selling wrinkled vegetables and Masai blankets, they saw a nyama choma sign painted on the side.
“They have good food here,” he said. “How about a snack and a drink?”
Sonia nodded, relieved that he’d taken the initiative.
The place was dimly lit by a string of red lightbulbs, empty except for a stocky man behind the counter, busy swatting flies away. He brought out what was left in the kitchen, cold chapatis, goat stew and sukumawiki, a meal that reminded Sonia of her childhood.
Suddenly a white woman with sandy hair walked briskly into the joint. She looked around and called his name.