The land was wild, rough, torn, inhabited by people and their livestock who lived somehow. Eking, I thought at the time. What the word was made for: hungry little birds searching for grass seeds on the rocky soil. Michael and I had been meaning to come to this part of the country for months, but he had been trapped by his work, and me by mine, our many important commitments. And when we finally packed the car, it was as if we were eloping or playing truant from school. We laughed and opened a bottle of champagne when we reached the outer limits of Addis, and he made a triumphant show of turning off his cell phone.
For hours, shabby subsistence farms marred the landscape, there were people everywhere, walking in columns along the road. Unless you’ve been to Africa, it’s impossible to understand how many people there are, how many children—impossible to even begin to comprehend the scale of a billion people, six billion people, nine billion. Not dollars, not grains of sand, but individuals inhaling, exhaling, eating, shitting, hoping, eking.
Children defecated in the open, and everywhere was open. There were no trees except for the small groves of mercenary eucalyptus, all that was left, all that hadn’t been hacked down and burned on cookstoves. The eucalyptus survive because their roots are so deep and so aggressive that they suck up moisture for up to 50 yards in any direction. Eucalyptus trees make it impossible for anything else to grow. Eucalyptus trees are an indication that it’s already too late, the land is fucked.
Further out, five, six hours, the farms ceased, the land was too dry, too rocky even for the most optimistic or desperate farmer, and we had at last the feeling of space and sky—the Africa we were looking for. Arid, harsh, inviolable: where wild things lived by design and not default. We felt happy, then, the windows open, the dust and the heat, sipping from our bottles of water. We couldn’t chat because of the loud rumble of the car’s engine and the rough road. Michael looked at me, I smiled. We didn’t need to speak.
We drove until late afternoon, and turned off into the bush, several hundred yards. We had imagined camping quietly underneath the acacia trees. We had imagined cocktails and stars, still dawns, trembling with the call of a mourning dove. Cooking breakfast on our little camp stove. We had expectations of solitude and nature. But then, but then—the people arrived. Always. The children, in particular, appeared within moments of our stopping, and they could not be persuaded to leave. They stood staring and tittering. When I squatted behind a bush to pee, they followed. After cutting up kindling, Michael left his machete against the trunk of a tree; a moment later it was gone. At nightfall, the crowd dispersed, only to reform just after dawn—a curtain of black faces in ragged clothing that blocked us from any view. We had to retreat to our tent to eat. We had to lock our car, peevish that the Out of Africa fantasy to which we felt entitled was so rudely, thoroughly interrupted. And it was their fault, these ragged, TV-less people.
As we drove further south into the Omo River Valley, the land became even drier and more desolate. Now, with regularity, spindly goatherds threw pebbles at our car. This began to enrage Michael. We crossed a shallow river bed that must have run fiercely in the rains but was now a remnant trickle. A boy threw a stone that hit the windshield, making a small pit in the glass. Michael slammed on the brakes and bounded out, up the river. The boy ran, nimble with fear, and scrambled up the steep river bank. From his perch, he began to laugh at Michael. Michael stopped exactly where the boy had been standing. There was a large plastic container half-full of water that the boy had been filling. Michael took out his pocket-knife and stabbed it repeatedly. After he had rendered it useless, he came back to the car. “They have to learn,” he said.
I watched the boy in the rear-view mirror, emerging from the bush to examine his ruined container. It was most likely the only one his family had, the sole means of collecting water—it was an object of immeasurable value destroyed by a white man in a fit of pique.
Michael hadn’t murdered or tortured. But the act was brutal. It told me something about him that I didn’t want to know. The cruelty was so finely crafted.
For days I was distraught. We drove on, camping, hiking. But I could barely look at my husband, he disgusted me now; I slept with my back to him. Our marriage had been spur-of-the-moment, a lark, when we were on Lamu for New Year’s Eve, and less than four months later I was considering divorce.
“Over a kid’s bucket?” He was incredulous.
“Because that’s all you see it is.”
I left him.
But, but—I was pregnant, you see.
An accident, a broken condom. Michael sat with me for the ultrasound at the clinic in Nairobi. I assumed we’d agreed on abortion, and we saw the kidney bean inside my womb with its sprouting fetal pole, its tadpole heart. It meant nothing to me, that blurred echo from within. But Michael—Michael wept, he begged, so I leaned forward to love him, to agree to the pact of parenthood. Soon the baby who would be Freya made me vomit and abstain from hard liquor and soft cheese and war zones.
But—
What if I wasn’t pregnant?
Not for another year, and I’ve changed the dates, a white lie to make myself look more honorable, and what if I admit that I forgot all about the boy. And what happened was this: Michael and I drove on, I glanced back at the boy, he was soon erased by the dust, just another poor African child, a prop, an extra in a grand set of Africa. What if I felt merely a momentary disgust with Michael, a flash of concern that he wasn’t who he seemed, he was a selfish asshole. What if I didn’t care, really, that he was a selfish asshole, selfishness having value in our white lives; everything we did was selfish so who could call it selfishness, it was merely normal.
We drove on—didn’t we?—and the boy was erased by the dust, and in camp that night Michael and I made love, what love felt like then, burrowing into the other person, the exclusion of the entire world, and I never thought about the boy again.