From Mombasa Airport I can take a hotel bus as far as the Africa Sea Lodge, even though I haven’t booked a room. Priscilla and Lketinga ought to know when I’ll get there. I’m in a real tizzy. What if nobody turns up? But barely have I had time to think about it before I’m at the hotel, look around and see there’s nobody there to welcome me. All of a sudden, standing there with my heavy case all my excitement gives way to immense disappointment. Then out of nowhere I hear my name, and when I turn round to look up the path there’s Priscilla charging towards, me her enormous bosom wobbling. Tears of joy and relief flood into my eyes.
We embrace and of course I have to ask about Lketinga. A cloud passes over her face and she turns away from me to say: ‘Corinne, please! I don’t know where he is!’ She hasn’t seen him since shortly after I left, more than two months ago. She’s heard stories but doesn’t know what’s true and what isn’t. I want to hear everything, but Priscilla says we should go back to the village first. I pile my heavy case on top of her head, and with me carrying just my little piece of hand luggage off we go.
But my God, I’m thinking to myself, what happened to my dreams of great love and happiness? Where on earth is Lketinga? I can’t believe he’s simply forgotten everything. In the village I meet another woman, a Muslim. Priscilla introduces her as a friend and explains that for the moment at least the three of us have to share her accommodation because this woman doesn’t want to return to her husband. The little house is not very big but for now it will do.
We drink tea, but I’m awash with unanswered questions. I ask about my Masai, and Priscilla with no little hesitation tells me what she’s heard. One of his fellow warriors is supposed to have said he’d gone back home, sick and unhappy because he’d had no letter from me for such a long time. ‘What?’ I explode. ‘I wrote at least five times.’ Now even Priscilla looks surprised: ‘Really? Where to?’ she asks. I show her the P.O.Box address on the north bank. Ah, she says, no wonder Lketinga didn’t get any letters. This P.O. Box apparently belongs to all the Masai on the north bank, and any of them can take whatever they want out of it. Given that Lketinga can’t read, someone else has probably taken them.
I can hardly believe what Priscilla is telling me: ‘I thought all the Masai were friends, almost like brothers. Who’d do a thing like that?’ That’s when I find out for the first time about the jealousy among the warriors living here on the coast. When I left three months ago, some of the men who’d been on the coast a long time had teased and hassled Lketinga, saying things like: ‘A woman like her, young and pretty, with lots of money, isn’t going to come back to Kenya for a black man with nothing.’ According to Priscilla, because he hadn’t been living here long and hadn’t received any letters, he’d probably believed them.
I ask Priscilla curiously where, then, is home for Lketinga. She’s not certain, but somewhere in the Samburu District: a three-day journey away. I shouldn’t even think of it. Now that I’m here, she’ll find someone to go out there in the near future and get a message through. ‘Give it time, and we’ll find out what’s happened. Pole, pole,’ she says, which means something like ‘slowly, slowly’. ‘You’re in Kenya now, you need time and patience.’
The two women fuss over me like a child. We chat amongst ourselves a lot. Esther, the Muslim woman, tells me about the hard time she’s been having with her husband and warns me never to marry an African. She says they’re unfaithful and treat women badly. My Lketinga is different, I think to myself but say nothing.
After the first night we decide to buy a bed. I didn’t get a wink of sleep. Priscilla and I shared a narrow bed, while Esther slept on another but, given that there’s a lot of Priscilla, I had hardly any room and had to hang onto the edge of the bed to stop myself continuously rolling into her.
So it’s off to Ukunda where we trail from one dealer to another in temperatures of 40 degrees C in the shade. The first doesn’t have a double bed but could produce one in three days. But I want one now. At the next place we find a magnificent carved bed for eighty francs, and I want to buy it immediately, but Priscilla is indignant: ‘Too much!’ I can’t believe my ears. Such a superb double bed, handmade, for that price! But Priscilla has stormed off: ‘Come, Corinne, too much!’ That’s the way it goes half the afternoon until at last I’m allowed to buy one for sixty francs. The carpenter takes it to pieces, and we carry it all to the main road. Priscilla gets hold of a foam mattress and after an hour’s wait in the boiling heat on the dusty street we take a matatu back to the hotel, where we unload it all. So there we are standing with the pieces, all of which are made of solid wood and very heavy.
We look around us helplessly until three Masai appear from the beach. Priscilla has a word with them and immediately these normally work-shy warriors give us a hand to carry my new double bed to the village. I have to bend double with laughter for the whole thing looks hilarious. When we finally get to the village I want to set to work immediately, screwing the bits of bed together, but I don’t get the chance because each of the Masai insists on doing it for me. By now there are six men working on my bed.
It’s still late before we can all sit down tired out on the edge of the bed. There’s tea for everyone who helped, and the conversation lapses once again into the Masai language I don’t understand a word of. Every now and then one of the warriors gestures in my direction, and I hear the name ‘Lketinga’. After an hour they all leave us, and we women get ready for bed. That means washing outside the house, which is fine because it’s pitch black and no one can see us. Even a late-night pee has to be done in the open because it’s too dark to cope with the chicken ladder. I fall back onto my new bed exhausted, and this time I don’t come into contact with Priscilla because the bed’s wide enough. That said, there’s not much space left in the hut, and anyone who comes to visit now has to sit on the bed.
The days pass quickly, and Esther and Priscilla spoil me. One cooks while the other fetches water and even washes my clothes. When I protest they say only that it’s too hot for me to work. So I spend most of my time on the beach, waiting for some word from Lketinga. In the evenings Masai warriors often come round, and we play cards or try to tell stories. Gradually I notice that one or other of them is showing an interest in me, but I don’t reciprocate because there’s only one man for me. None of them is half as beautiful and elegant as the ‘demigod’ for whom I’ve given up everything. When the warriors realize I’m not interested, I hear a few more rumours about Lketinga. It seems everyone knows I’m here waiting for him.
On one occasion when I politely but firmly turn down the offer of a ‘friendship’– read ‘love affair’– he says: ‘Why are you waiting for this one Masai when everyone knows that he took the money you gave him to get a passport and went off to Watumu Malindi and drank it all with African girls?’ Then he gets up and says I should think again about his offer. I tell him angrily to get lost and not come back. Even so, I feel lonely and betrayed. What if it’s true? All sorts of thoughts run through my head, and in the end all I know is that I don’t want to believe it. I could go to the Indian in Mombasa, but I can’t summon up the courage because I wouldn’t be able to bear hearing what he might tell me. Every day I meet warriors on the beach, and I hear more stories. One even tells me that Lketinga is ‘crazy’ and had to be taken home where he married a young girl and won’t be coming back to Mombasa. And if I need comforting, this guy’ll always be there for me. My God, I think, will they ever leave me alone? I’m beginning to see myself as a deer lost along lions; they all want to eat me up.
In the evenings I tell Priscilla the latest rumours and calumnies, but she says it’s just normal. I’ve been here three weeks now without a man and these men’s experience is that white women never live for long on their own. Then Priscilla tells me about two white women who’ve been living in Kenya for years and run after almost every single Masai. On the one hand, I’m shocked – on the other, astounded – to hear that there are other white women here and that they even speak German. The news awakens my curiosity. Priscilla points to another hut in the village and tells me: ‘That belongs to Jutta, a German. She’s somewhere in the Samburu District working in a tourist camp at present but will come back for a short while some time in the next two or three weeks.’ I’m more than curious about this mysterious Jutta.
In the meantime the chat-up lines keep coming, and I’m really no longer comfortable. It seems that a woman on her own is considered fair game. Even Priscilla can’t – or won’t – do anything about it. When I say anything to her she laughs almost childishly, which I can’t understand.