Zahra maintained absolute silence while the quiet Russian driver employed by Boris led them to the border of Canada. Federico took her hand and began to babble some explanations but the woman stopped him with a movement of his hand.
"I do not blame you," She said in a distressed tone. "I know it's part of a plan that woman drew around you and you've been just an instrument of that plan. But I cannot hide the way I feel.”
Actually Zahra had mixed feelings. On the one hand rage because the man she had chosen with so much illusion had fathered a son in the womb of her rival, her enemy. But on the other hand there was a feeling of envy she had already experienced when she learned that Adhiambo was pregnant. Most African women see pregnancy and childbirth as an inescapable phase of life and long to have those experiences as soon as possible. It is perhaps a subject at once genetic and cultural.
To divert her mind from all those negative thoughts Zahra began to explain to her partner the last minute arrangements she had to make to leave her affairs in New York in order so as to be able to resume them later if the situation of insecurity in which they lived got solved even partially.
"So Imani and Kafil will leave New York and hide in the shelter offered by Boris?"
"Yes, they will be coming back every few days to the city to determine if it is possible to reopen the store with reasonable security.”
"And what did you commission Adhiambo?"
Zahra had never discussed with Federico her additional business related to the search of suitable husbands for the African girls who ended up abandoned in the city. She had not done so realizing that it was difficult to discern her activity from the trafficking and exploitation of women carried out by Shantaya. With many precautions and marginal explanations she made him aware of that facet of her business and her life.
"And you have asked Adhiambo to take care of those tasks."
"Yes, we have about ten women who are more or less established and I think Adhiambo knows in depth the problematic in which they are and I trust in her to handle the situations that can arise.”
––––––––
Jomo Kenyatta International Airport Nairobi-Kenya
The long flight from Toronto arrived fifteen minutes in advance. Federico helped Zahra load her hand luggage up to the conveyor belt in order to look of the rest of the suitcases. As they left the restricted passengers area they looked for someone waiting for them. Many drivers carried signs with names of passengers in different languages and alphabets. At last, at the end of the corridor, Zahra saw a tall, thin man dressed in traditional African clothing, which contrasted with the western dress of the rest of the people who wandered at the airport. She approached him and then recognized one of Chief Nkwame Obonyo's sons. She held out her hand to greet him and said.
“Duma. I barely recognize you. When I left Kenya you were but a child. As I remember you were no more than ten years old.”
Obviously flattered by the treatment of the elegant lady who had recognized him the young man stayed confused for a moment. Finally kissing her outstretched hand and whispered something in a dialect that was incomprehensible to the woman. Zahra introduced her companion.
“Duma. This is Federico, my boyfriend. Federico, this is Duma, my foster brother.”
Duma tried to repeat the boy's name but only managed to mumble something that sounded remotely similar. Then he carried the suitcases with a surprising display of physical vigor to a man so slender. The couple recently arrived looked astonished as they saw Duma approaching an old all-terrain Land Rover. Once there he opened it and placed the luggage in the trunk and on top of the roof.
"Do you have a vehicle of your own?" Asked admiringly the woman.
"Belongs to my ... our father. Now there are already several cars in the village.”
"Prepare for a long journey." Zahra said to her boyfriend. "Although I did it only once and in the other direction, I remember that the village is many miles away and I do not know what the road will be like in the last part, the one closest to the boma. It was awful at the time I left.”
––––––––
Nkwame Obonyo was delighted to receive his foster daughter and his joy was contagious. The man looked sturdy yet and his outfit was partially westernized. He had extended his family recently by marrying a girl of about fourteen, which brought Zahra not very happy memories. Another wife, a little older, had a very advanced pregnancy and carried by the hand a girl about three years old. There was no doubt that the man was sexually very active.
They installed Zahra and Federico in what had been the Anglican mission until just a few years before and whose original occupants Zahra had known. She remembered that the missionary was the first white man she had ever seen and that she had then decided to marry one of them. The woman also remembered his wife and a couple of blond children.
"Now we have a school run the government in the village and the missionaries have moved to another place." Explained Obonyo. "You'll be comfortable here until we build a house near mine for you. As you will see, we no longer build huts but houses of bricks and mortar with certain comforts.”
"Do not worry, Father, we'll be fine anywhere."
"Are you going to stay in the village?"
"For the moment, yes.”
“Are you in danger? Is anyone stalking you?
"There's some of that, Father. I'll tell you later.”
"You'll be safe here. However you must tell me of whom we must protect you. In the savannah a bird does not fly without us knowing it.”
The first days Zahra and Federico were establishing themselves in the temporary accommodation that had been awarded to them. Since they had left New York with a small baggage they had to travel a couple of times to Nairobi to activate a bank account to which they could transfer money from the Zahra´s bank in the United States and buy suitable clothes and implements to equip their house. Duma Obonyo took them to the city where they stayed in a hotel with the commitment to look for them in two days.
The young people strolled around the city, shopped and used the occasion to eat well in restaurants with European and African menus. One day Zahra used her notebook to communicate via Skype with Imani. The woman told her that they were permanently visiting the flower shop and its surroundings and there were no signs that they were being watched by hostile people.
"If within a week there is no news you can open the store and restart the activities." Said Zahra. "You know the business, you know where to buy and you have access to my account at the Bank. You can make the payments, collect your and Kafil's salaries and deposit the remainder. Here I can withdraw the money to live without having to depend economically on my father. You have my absolute confidence. I also ask you to communicate with Adhiambo every so often.”
That night Zahra and Federico made love in a fiery way among the soft sheets and king size bed of the hotel. The next day they only got up for lunch at three in the afternoon. The woman wondered how her boyfriend managed to extract so much energy from his slender body. Recalling the boy's confidences about the brutal methods with which Shantaya had trapped him; Zahra resorted to all the hard-sex arts she imagined. She rode the man's face, covering him with her fluids, biting his neck and shoulders to make them bleed, scratching with her long nails his back producing red furrows and beating his chest and face with her clenched fists. Zahra progressively noticed that as she performed these activities she came up with new ways of physically mistreating her man and that they brought her a pleasure whose origin she could not explain. When she produced wounds in his body the girl felt a burning in her intimate zone that the boy had to extinguish with all the resources of oral or normal sex as she indicated. The two days in Nairobi were of an amatory frenzy that set the pattern of their future relationships. Zahra did not notice it at the time but the relationship between them gradually acquired a sadomasochistic imprint that satisfied them to delirium and would not abandon the couple thereupon. The woman had discovered in herself a sadistic side previously unknown to her. The tortures and humiliations inflicted on her man, which had originally been just a method to retain him, gradually became a source of incomparable erotic pleasure.
"I cannot believe what I'm doing. You have blown my head." She said to Federico. "I will not accept losing you."
That afternoon Duma appeared and among the three loaded the items bought in the city to the roof of the truck. They had even purchased a double bed and its entire trousseau, since they wanted to reproduce in the village the days of ecstasy spent in Nairobi.
"I had never seen such a number of things to equip a house," Said Duma. "Neither my father nor his wives have so much...”