Children Are Diamonds Read online

  Chapter 2

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  I AM A GUIDE, NE’ER-DO-WELL, AID WORKER, WHAT-HAVE-YOU, BUT A nice guy and I’d been supplanted at Beryl’s trophy house by a natty English newspaperman (I can’t blame her) who’d been brought in by the Aga Khan’s business organization to spruce up the daily tabloid it owns in Kenya. Apart from making a few design changes and feature additions, his job was really to hearten the idealistic employees who wanted the illusion of a free press in this country that’s so stuffed with corruption, as well as a Fleet Street veteran to witness and even help them stand up to the intimidation they are often subjected to. He was energetic, conscientious, supple, and when working-class Fleet Street met a San Francisco divorcée burning through her alimony, I didn’t stand a chance. Being packed, as I say, and having given Beryl in her chic Land Rover a tour of Tsavo Park she would always remember, with the hippos at Mzima Springs particularly effusive, and where we’d glimpsed rarities like African wild dogs, hartebeest, oryx, while camping by an elephant herd’s watering hole, with no schedule to follow—for both of us it was an idyll, and she’d ceased being ironic about making love for that half a week—I was content to go back to my hotel downtown. It’s a hole-in-the-wall, owned by an Arab but across the street from the New Stanley, a famous old hostelry with a swimming pool on the roof and bulletin boards tacked to a thorn tree in the café patio, where Euro-American travelers traditionally leave notes for each other. I’d registered at the New Stanley earlier because they give you a free safe deposit box when you do, then never check on whether you’ve actually left. Living cheaply just across the street in my Arab’s seedy brownstone (these are the tatty details of a roamer’s life), I was a frequent figure on the Thorn Tree’s patio, or at the glass tables beside the swimming pool, up twelve stories, where the black kites and vultures sail and scud, and where I’d met both the Norwegian and Beryl, for example—my valuables secure behind the New Stanley’s desk in the meantime.

  Even at the Arab’s, with less than ten guest rooms—and as in many Third World countries—the barman, like the doorman at the New Stanley, would let in local university students who had bribed him or maybe were related to him and trolling for adventure or a foreign sugar daddy. Though I had pals in various flats around the city, if I was otherwise unoccupied after a day of trolling for a new job myself, or temporarily filling in at an NGO’s office, I could wiggle a finger (by which I only mean to suggest how easy it was) and be joined by one of these anxious, rather pretty but thin young women, who’d sit down obediently at my table but scrutinize me carefully to size me up. I’d make it plain that I was not an ogre, only lonely, and offer to feed her if she was hungry, which she usually was. Even on a scholarship, some students need to skip a meal or two per day. Yes, she could have the chicken, instead of the measly bean dish (might not have tasted chicken for a month), and a soft drink; she was not required to get drunk. This was not a prelude, in other words. There would be no after-cost, so we could relax and ease our mutual solitude; then possibly a night or two later, as well. I’m not suggesting we were now on terms of equality—a man with hundreds in his wallet and thousands in the money belt he was wearing underneath his clothes, around his waist, with more in the hotel safety box across the street, facing a college girl fifteen or twenty years younger in threadbare clothing who lived on a dollar a day—but that I generally had the decency not to ask for a quid pro quo.

  What she wanted wasn’t really the meal so much as either a visa out or an employment opportunity right here in Kenya when she graduated; and the power of the white stranger from abroad was not just the beefsteak and green salad he could provide but the implication in his presence that he must know executives in the office buildings that cut the paltry skyline of Nairobi who could find a slot for a stenographer in a city where ten university graduates needed such a modest boon immediately. Although her chances of achieving that result with me were almost nil, our conversations would not be valueless; they would add fluency to her English, and insight into how to cultivate a European, her grip on reality, and how she fathomed the mentality of older men from northern continents, or perhaps become a sort of low-rent therapy if she poured her heart out. The classes she was enrolled in were huge, the professors aloof, the families the students came from often racked and shackled by grief and hardship, even over and above the threat of AIDS. Five extra dollars could pay for a doctor visit and medicines that were needed for a sister who was sick. But on the other hand, there would be girls who strode past my table, eschewing my relative sobriety and the proffered French fries and drumsticks for a drunken construction engineer from Rotterdam who wanted to haul her upstairs across one of his shoulders and fuck her in three ways in exchange for enough cash for her whole family to live on for three weeks, even after the bartender and elevator man grabbed their cut as she left, past midnight, in her brother-in-law’s heap.

  The city turns so risky after dark that, much as with the pickpocket, you need to take responsibility for her life if you keep one of these girls chatting with you over beer and pretzels till closing time. Hire a taxi, sure, but even the taxis become dangerous, or the drivers too frightened to leave the downtown area for the wildlands where the girl lives. She may not get safely home, so you tip a bellhop to allow her to sleep in his broom closet until dawn, or take her into your room under whatever terms you dictate, which in my case would be her call. These fastidious girls, with their four-year degree in hand but still underfed, delicate, fit for an office career, though no employment is in sight because of the stove-in economy—no husband either, because of the AIDS tragedy—they panic after a year of walking the streets, trying every agency, bureau, and store, cadging tea and a cookie perhaps at the interviews, as their good clothes wear out.

  I’m alone, hunched over rice and a goat kebab, the generous helping at supper that paying guests get, when a girl sits down at my table. Her aunt is a cleaning woman at my Arab’s establishment, so, while pretending to visit her, she spotted me over her shoulder.

  I crook my finger and scrape half of my dinner onto my butter plate, give her my spoon to eat it with, tear my roll in half, pour half of my Tusker beer into my glass and hand her that, drinking the rest out of the bottle. Having noticed that day that music is advertised in a club window down the block, I say we’re so close we could sprint back here at one A.M. without getting mugged. Okay? Tears glisten in her questioning eyes as she nods. So we go. There, I buy her a pizza to fill her small stomach some more, as she tells me that her mother died of appendicitis not long ago, as the cleaning woman, her aunt, already had told me. Her father is becoming disabled with arthritis. She has siblings with HIV. I change the subject to what she studied in school, to avoid hearing more unsettling details. Economics, history, art. She is of the Kalenjin, a tribe allied with the Kikuyu, who control the government at the moment and flaunt their power in public places by speaking Kikuyu instead of Swahili or English, which other people could understand. The music is Afro, on handmade instruments, so we dance and gradually feel a rapport. I ask her if this purple blouse, flattering in color but with a hole in it, is her best. She says no, her second best; she didn’t know she was going to score on this particular evening out. Her bra strap is also frayed, but I observe without comment and assure her that she smells good when, sweating, she confesses that her family has no running water. I say I do, and we laugh. I wouldn’t have come here without her presence at my table to save me from the assertive importunities of the muscular Kikuyu prostitutes.

  We ask the bouncer please to watch us from the door as we run back through a sudden rainstorm to the Arab’s building from the club—where I have my key ready to quickly get in. The girl must have had some bad experiences, however, because her face dissolves into a beseeching fear: Will I just mumble good night and leave her outside, at the mercies of the muggers? She opens her purse on an impulse, not like a prostitute asking for payment but like a girl showing that she has no money to go anywhere. Hugging h
er with one arm, I lead her upstairs, start the tub in the bathroom, and wave her in. I then sit on the bed, look for CNN on the tube, after hiding my wallet and money belts (yes, I have two, because my regular belt, the one that was holding up my pants, has a secret zippered section that you can also fold twenty hundred-dollar bills into), and watch a snatch of an Indian movie dubbed from Hindi into English instead. “Take your time,” I reassure her through the door. “Enjoy yourself. Please. No hurry.”

  I hear her fill the tub again to rinse, or perhaps to double-suds herself. Then I hear her at the sink, washing her jeans, blouse, and underclothes, I suppose. Finally she emerges, saronged in a towel.

  “I did my wash so you couldn’t kick me out,” she explains. I smile. Her face is pretty, winsome, and small; I wonder whether her breasts are, as well.

  “Can I see you sometime?”

  “You mean sometime tonight?” she asks.

  “Yes, sometime tonight.”

  “Are you an art student? I was an art student,” she says.

  “Yes, I’m an art student. I promise.”

  “Sit where you are,” she instructs me, then drops the towel, her arms upraised in a classic life-model pose, which she holds for my edification as if this were a class, while watching only to see whether I think she is exquisite.

  “Exquisite!” I exclaim. When I move one hand very slightly, she turns round very slowly to display the small of her back and her buttocks. Her color is different from mine, but that distinction has vanished.

  “Do you want to violate the code?” she asks.

  “Yes, whatever that means.”

  She lowers her arms and comes to me, kneels, and puts her hands on top of my thighs, as I sit on the edge of the bed. I cuddle her, fondle her, bury my hands in her hair, while figuring what we could possibly do with no risk of AIDS. I carry condoms, of course, but with an African woman, just thinking of the odds can distract and unman you, even if you theoretically have protection.

  She remains in that supplicant position, not playacting like a college student anymore. Her mind is not on sex.

  “I want you to take me to America. Sponsor me, please. I know I need somebody,” she elaborates bluntly, pleadingly, ignoring how my hands are cherishing her breasts. “I could be your maid. I’d work to repay you and go more to school.”

  Raising her up, shutting off the TV, I move to the little table, where we can look at each other. “In other words, go bail for you? I’m your friend, not your father,” I answer, masking my confusion with unjustified irritation. “Do you know what it costs to guarantee somebody for a visa? What they would make me sign as an indemnity?”

  Naked across from me, crossing her arms now, Leli, as she wants to be known (Nyawera is her African name), who just wants to escape from her country, nods. She has done her homework, been to the Western embassies, tried for student visas.

  “You hurt my feelings,” I complain again, a bit selfishly, as though the poor girl had picked me up more from calculation than straight, impromptu necessity. Waitresses in restaurants, who don’t know you, will ask to be your “maid” also, occasionally. But, glancing at Leli’s sadness, I have to soften and repeat that I am her new friend, and that in fact I am looking for work myself, and wave her close to me, to begin to cherish her again.

  In the morning, as she dresses, the contrast is so poignant between how pretty she is and her threadbare underwear and outerwear that I take her shopping for inexpensive clothes that aren’t incongruously ragged. Afterward, she surprises me by declining to go to a storefront I am temping at, where we feed street kids and treat them with skin ointments, antibiotics, inoculations, minerals, vitamins, whatever we happen to have. Powdered milk, powdered eggs, surplus soups or porridges that another nongovernmental organization may have given us.

  I say bye-bye. She gets on a bus.

  We have a basketball hoop up, and soccer balls, board games, playing cards, a tent fly hooked to the back wall in the courtyard with cots arranged underneath it, as a shelter where the children can feel some safety in numbers at least. What makes you burn out are the ones dying visibly of AIDS. Yet you don’t want to banish them again to the furnace of the streets or, on the other hand, specialize merely as a hospice, where salvageable kids aren’t going to want to come. Many of them wish to go to school but have no home to go to school from or money for the fees. So I’d scrounged a blackboard and taught addition, subtraction, geography, the English alphabet, when I had a break from refereeing a gritty soccer game or supervising the dishwashing or triaging kids with fevers or contusions who ought to go to the hospital (not that this Dickensian trip was often in their best interest). We had artful dodgers eating our fruits and sandwiches, between excursions into robbery, drugs, peddling, or the pederasty racket—knives, guns, money, fancy sneakers, or the other wicked chimeras that adults around the corner might be offering them—but also earnest tykes, plenty of them, who your heart absolutely went out to. Yet triage isn’t teaching, it’s frustrating, and I switch back and forth between such street work and the safaris and far-flung aid deliveries to conflict regions I’ve sometimes specialized in.

  The girls were housed in a church anteroom nearby, spending the daylight hours with us; but I’d been surprised that Leli had promptly shook her head, from an antiseptic distance, with her new panties and bras in a shopping bag, much as Beryl might have done, and said she’d maybe see me at the Arab’s another time. We were rather a rattled crew: a couple of dumbstruck interns from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, plus me, presently a little distracted by the red tape of renewing my Kenyan working papers, not to mention by Beryl’s recent summons to return, since her Oxbridge yet workingclass Fleet Street newshound had begun to be unfaithful to her with a fellow Brit with high cheekbones whose brown hair hung down to her coccyx, instead of promising to go home to the Bay Area land of milk and honey with Beryl.

  Our boss at the shelter, Vernon, was a kind of born-again hangdog with a tolerant wife who was admirably cool during berserk emergencies, and those hundred young souls wouldn’t have been fed without the two of them—would have been out purse snatching, jism swallowing, courier running, and pursuing other deathly gambits as dangerous as walking a parapet. I used to suffer dreams of doing that whenever one I’d had a chance to come to care about would vanish inexplicably. Our funding originated with an umbrella relief organization called Protestants Against Famine, financed by Baptists in the States and run by a friend of mine named Al, who was married to a Dinka woman from the southern Sudan, whom he had met during a stint of working in the war zone there.

  So, intermittently, I’d freelance on one-shot contracts with Al’s or another agency that found itself short of personnel to shepherd a fleet of trucks from Mombasa’s port to Kakuma camp, in northern Kenya, which hosted thirty thousand Sudanese and Somali refugees, or to deliver half a year’s food and supplies to some man-and-wife evangelical outpost spotted almost off the map in the outback. If you are genuinely feeding and medicating the locals, authorization for such missions will not be withheld. And that’s how I’d met Ruthie the year before.

  Chapter 3

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  RUTH’S STATION, AT AN ABANDONED CHURCH ON THE HAIRY periphery, had been temporarily vacated after somebody had a nervous breakdown or underwent a flameout and nobody else could fill the bill. But before the structure was pillaged inside out, a new communicant, Ruth, rather shaky but fervent, volunteered to reestablish it. Her intentions were of the best (who else would imaginably come?), though she was ordained as neither a doctor nor a preacher. The closest authorities, who were rebels of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, accepted her, and that was all that mattered, apart from Al’s say-so.

  You don’t have to be a doctor to help people who have no aspirin or disinfectant or malaria, tuberculosis, dysentery, or epilepsy pills, no splints or bandaging, and no other near facility to walk to in the bush. Kaopectate, cough suppressants, malnutrition supplements, antibiotics for
bilharzia or sleeping sickness or yaws: if you were a nurse, patients would be brought to you for these or with hepatitis or broken limbs. The old stone-and-concrete ruins of a Catholic chapel that had been forgotten since the colonial powers had left could be reoccupied, if you chased the leopards and the cobras out, because joy is what is partly needed, especially at first, and joy, I think, is, like photosynthesis for plants, an evidence of God. Whether it, like photosynthesis, provides evolutionary advantages is arguable. People may have sexual intercourse out of boredom or simple hormonal pressures or vaguely sadistic motives as often as in love and joy, and so human nature is reproduced in all of its continuing imperfections. But joy, like beauty, is a continuum, too, and in temperate climates it waxes with the sun, somewhat as plants do.

  What I’m explaining is that, even if I’m not of their exact denomination, directors of small missionary programs in a pinch for personnel may see fit to hire me for jack-of-all-trades assignments. I can do the basic mechanics if we break down on the road, and I know when to speed up or—equally important—slow down when figures with guns appear to block our passage. (If it’s soldiers, you never speed up, but the decision is not that easy, because every male can look like a soldier in a war zone, and the soldiers like civilians.) The big groups, such as Doctors Without Borders, CARE, Oxfam, and Save the Children, have salaried international staff they can fly in from Honduras, Bangkok, or New Delhi to plug a momentary defection or a flip-out—dedicated career people, like the U.N.’s ladies and gentlemen, with New York, Geneva, London, Paris, Rome behind them, who’ve been vetted: not much fooling around. But there are various smaller outfits, whose flyers you don’t receive in the mail back home, that will hire “the spiritual drifter,” as Al put it to me, to haul pallets of plywood, bags of cement, first-aid kits in bulk, and sacks of potatoes or bayou rice, cases of your basic tins, like corned beef, tuna fish, salmon, peas, what-have-you, and trunks of medicine to provision the solo picayune apostle out doing Christ’s appalling work in the hinterlands. (“Wouldn’t you get a little picky, picayune, washing dysentery doo-doo off of cholera asses, with toddlers with blowfish bellies staggering around? The marabou stork stalkin’ about, too,” he added, “waitin’ for his meal?”)