I did almost nothing on my first day as Idi Amin’s doctor. I had just come in from one of the western provinces, where I’d worked in a bush surgery. Kampala, the city, seemed like paradise after all that.
Back in my old neighborhood, I’d seen to Idi once. On his bullying visits to the gum-booted old chiefs out there, he would drive a red Maserati manically down the dirt tracks. Walking in the evenings, under the telegraph poles where the kestrels perched, you could tell where he’d been—the green fringe of grass down the middle of the track would be singed brown by the burning sump of the low-slung car.
On this occasion, he’d hit a cow—some poor smallholder had probably been fattening it up for slaughter—spun the vehicle and been thrown clear, spraining his wrist in the process. The soldiers, following him in their slow, camouflaged jeeps, had come to call for me. I had to go and attend to him by the roadside. Groaning in the grass, Idi was convinced the wrist was broken, and he cursed me in Swahili as I bound it up.
But I must have done something right because, a few months later, I received a letter from the Minister of Health, Jonah Wasswa, appointing me to the post of President Amin’s personal physician—Medical Doctor to His Excellency—at State House, one of his residences. That was Idi’s way, you see. Punish or reward. You couldn’t say no. Or I didn’t think, back then, that you could. Or I didn’t really think about it at all.
I explored the planes and corners of my gleaming office, which stood in the grounds of State House and came with a next-door bungalow thrown in. I felt rather pleased with its black couch and swivel chair, its green filing cabinets, its bookshelves stacked with medical reports and back issues of the Lancet, its chrome fittings and spring-loaded Anglepoise lamps. My immediate tools—stethoscope, a little canvas roll of surgical instruments, casebook and so on—were laid out tidily on the desk. The neatness and the general spotlessness of the place were the work of Cecilia, my nurse. She was a remnant from my predecessor, Taylor. After suffering my attentions at the roadside, Amin had summarily dismissed him. I knew I ought to feel guilty about this, but I didn’t, not really. Cecilia made it quite plain that she didn’t like or approve of me—I reckon that she must have been half in love with old Taylor—and that she soon would be going back herself, back to Ashford, Kent.
Let her go, I thought, pushing aside a paper on disorders of the inner ear: my private study, my little problem. I was just glad to be out of the bush and to be earning a bit more money. The sun was shining and I was happy, happier than I’d been for a good many months. I stared out of the window at a cultivated lawn which swept down a hill towards the lake, glittering in the distance. A breeze moved the leaves of the shrubbery: bougainvillea, flame tree, poinsettia. Through the slatted blinds I could see a group of prisoners in white cotton uniforms, mowing the grass with sickles. They were guarded by a sleepy soldier, leaning on his gun in the dusty haze. Swish, swish, the noise came quietly through to me. I watched the prisoner nearest, slightly hypnotized by the movement of his cutter and the articulation of his bony arm. I shouldn’t think they were fed too well: a bit of steamed green banana or maize meal, some boiled-up neck of chicken if they were lucky.
Turning away from the window, I resolved, since there didn’t seem any likelihood of a presidential consultation that afternoon, to get a bus into town. I used to wear just shorts and shirt in the bush and needed to get a linen suit run up for tonight. The street-side tailors—there were whole rows of them—with their push-pedal, cast-iron Singers, their bad teeth and worse English, were just the fellows for the job. They could sort you out a suit in a couple of hours, while you looked round the market or went to one of the astoundingly understocked grocers. Not quite Savile Row, but good enough for here, good enough for Idi, anyway. Though he himself did wear Savile Row tailoring, with its luscious, thick lapels and heavy hem drop. Zipped up in their polypropylene bags, the suits came in on the weekly flight from Stansted, hung on racks among crates of Scotch, golf clubs, radio-cassettes, cartons of cigarettes, bicycles tubed in cardboard, slim-line kettles, sleek toasted-sandwich makers with winking lights. And plain things, too: sugar and tea—products that might well have come from here in the first place, swapping their gunny sacks for cellophane packaging on the return trip.
I needed a suit quickly because this evening Idi was to host the Ambassadors’ Dinner, the annual bean feast at which he entertained Kampala’s diplomatic corps, assembled local dignitaries, senior civil servants, the wealthier concessionaires (Lonrho, Cooper Motors, Siemens), the top figures from the banks (Standard, Commercial, Grindlays) and tribal chiefs from all over the country. Wasswa, the Minister, had told me that His Excellency had given specific orders that I should attend. “As you know,” he had said (I had read Amin’s medical records, such as they were—chaos really, since His Excellency insisted on editing them himself), “President Amin occasionally suffers from a slight gastric difficulty.”
As I shut the door of the office behind me, the draught from the corridor set the blinds tinkling, like little cymbals. The noise reminded me of something I once saw on holiday in Malta—a set of tiny, shiny knives hung up like wind chimes outside a knife-grinder’s shop. “Aeolian sharps,” as a friend remarked at the time.
On my return from town, I took a shower in the concrete-lined cubicle in the bungalow. The big steel rose spurted out only a single stream of tepid liquid, under which I held up my hands, sending it spattering, planing down my back. Afterwards, as I went through the rough archway that separated the steamy bathroom from the sweltering bedroom, it was like going from one dimension to another. Fresh sweat mixed with the runnels of shower water.
I then found myself, irritatingly, needing to defecate, which I always hate doing just after a shower—it seems like a form of sacrilege. As usual, I contemplated what I had produced: it was the easiest way of determining at an early stage the presence of a parasite, which could take hold in that fetid climate in a matter of hours. This evening’s offering, I was worried to notice, was paler than usual, suggesting that bacteria had been absorbed into the bowel. I made a mental note to run some tests on myself in the morning.
The effort of expulsion had caused me to perspire even more, so when I put on my new suit I was already wearing what I used to call my African undertaker’s outfit: the envelope of moisture which covers the body day and night. This tropical monster, ghostly presage of a thousand sallow malarial deaths, squats on one’s shoulders and then, trickling down, concentrates its peculiar force in the hollows of the knees and ankles.
It was in this morbid state that I strolled across the lawn to State House itself—hair brushed and shining nonetheless, a blue, short-sleeved shirt and natty green tie under the cream suit. On my way, I saw that the sicklemen were being herded into the lorry that would take them back to the gaol on the outskirts of town. One by one, the mowers disappeared through the canvas flaps, throwing their cutters into a wooden box below the tow bar as they did so. Their guard lifted a short stick, acknowledging me as I passed.
A marabou stork was poking about nearby in a pile of rubbish, and I gave it a wide berth. These birds, the height of a small child, stood on spindly legs, their large beaks and heavy pinkish wattles making them look as if they might topple over. They were urban scavengers, gathering wherever there was pollution or decay. I hated them, yet I found them intriguing; they were almost professorial in the way they sorted through the heaps of rotting produce scattered all over the city, the organic mass mixed in with mud and ordure, scraps of plastic, bits of metal.
Going through a gate in the wall, I walked to where the big black cars of the ambassadors, the Mercedes of the richer merchants, and various white Toyotas and Peugeots with a smattering of dirt about the wings were beginning to pull up outside the main portico. An official in a red coat with brass buttons (it was too tight for him, the buttons strained to close the gap) ushered them into parking spaces, smiling and inclining his head.
Once inside, Wasswa, the Minister, beckoned me impatiently from the top of a wide staircase. He and various other ministers and senior army officers were waiting there to greet the guests and progress them through the great ebony-paneled door into the main hall, where the banquet was to take place.
He was definitely one of the solemn ones, Wasswa, his sharp young face (he couldn’t have been much older than me—under thirty, anyway) frowning with the burden of office.
“Ah, Garrigan, you have arrived. I was hoping that you would be here in good time. You must be on hand if any of the guests are becoming unwell.”
“Of course,” I said, obligingly.
He looked ridiculous, my boss—somehow he’d got hold of a dress suit, but the sleeves were too short, and his cuffs, fastened with twisted bits of fuse wire, stuck out like the broken wings of small birds.
Already a long queue had formed down the stairs as the dignitaries waited for a handshake from Idi. He was wearing a blue uniform today—air force, I supposed—with gold trim and lacy epaulettes. He looked splendid.
Wasswa propelled me into a knot of three in the straggly queue. One of them was Stone, the fair-haired official at the British Embassy who had logged me in his book when I first arrived in the country, before I went into the bush. The other couple, I guessed, were the Ambassador and his wife. She was small but sinewy, in a dress printed with flowers. Coming closer I studied her covertly from over Wasswa’s shoulder; then her eyes, long-lashed in a composed but unsmiling face, surrounded by a dark bob, were suddenly meeting mine, and I had to look away. Her mouth was pursed like a little fig, and her face had momentarily registered some expression as she looked at me. Not a totally unpleasant one, I thought.
She was a bit younger than her husband, who was standard Foreign Office issue: plastered-down hair, a large body shifting in its bristly suit, round glasses in a round face—a sponge of official easing-along, ready to soak up whatever discord the world threw at him.
Wasswa introduced us. “Ambassador Perkins, you have met our new doctor at State House, Nicholas Garrigan?”
“I haven’t, in fact, but Stone here has told me all about his good work out west. So you’ve come to keep things in order back up here? We’ve been a bit lost since Doctor Taylor went, I can tell you.”
He looked meaningfully at Wasswa.
“This is my wife, Marina. And Stone you already know.”
Stone lifted his nose up in the air. Even then, there was something in his manner that irked me.
“Hello, Mrs. Perkins,” I said.
She held out a hand to me, leaning her head to one side, her teeth showing slightly through her lips as she spoke.
“It’s good to have a doctor nearby again. One gets so terribly worried.”
When it was the turn of our little group to take its salutations from Idi, he clapped me on the shoulder with one great hand and waved the other in front of my face.
“So you see, Doctor Nicholas, I am fully recovered from my tumble. But although I am as strong as lion, I have some small wounds in my belly which you must fix for me.”
Greeting each of us in turn, relaxed and charming, he chuckled as we moved past, beneath the twinkling chandeliers. There were some loathsome tribal masks on the walls, and also a line of stiff, heavy portraits of governor-generals from the colonial era: several had mutton-chop whiskers, and one looked slightly like my father. We searched out our seats at the long mahogany table, which was already filling up with grim-faced army officers and assorted civilians. There were a couple of journalists dashing around with notebooks, and also a photographer, his camera hung round his neck on a broad canvas strap. Some of the guests were in dinner jackets and evening gowns, some were in linen suits, cotton dresses, safari suits, saris; some (though by no means all) of the chiefs were in traditional clothes, and several matrons wore wraparound frocks of colorful cloth. One young Ugandan woman—a princess, it was later pointed out to me—was wearing a trouser suit that seemed to be fabricated entirely from pink cashmere. But she didn’t, under those whirring hardwood fans, appear to be any hotter than the rest of us.
The company hovered, ill at ease, behind the tall chairs, waiting for the greetings to come to an end and the meal proper to begin. I discovered my own label. Name spelt wrong, in uneven type: Doctor GARGAN. Mrs. Perkins was next to me on one side, Wasswa on the other. Perkins and his American counterpart, Todd (“Nathan Theseus Todd,” if you please), faced us. Beyond—the Italian, Bosola, the East German, Lessing, the Portuguese, Dias. All were fat, or fattish, and full of savoir-faire; they must make them in the same place, these ambassadors.
I looked down the table, over the rows of silver and crystal, towards the opening of the kitchen, where processions of waiters were bustling in and out. A slight aroma of woodsmoke, a whiff of reality, drifted up the table, fanned by the doors. All this—the china, the doilies, the display of tropical flowers, the perfumed fingerbowls, most of all her, Marina Perkins, next to me—was a bit overwhelming after those long months in the west; it all promised, it all suggested too much.
Wine was poured. Conversation bubbled quietly as we waited for Idi to finish greeting the guests. Eventually he bowled in, smiling genially as he made his way to the top of the table, to the carver chair. Behind him on the wall was a large disc of golden metal, emblazoned with the country’s emblem, a Ugandan crested crane.
Our party was two or three down from Idi’s place at the head of the table. Perkins and Todd were the most significant emissaries, politically speaking, but as they had presented their credentials only relatively recently, ancient diplomatic practice decreed that they were not placed hard by the seat of local power. About which, I suspect, they were secretly ecstatic. It’s a lesson worth noting that apparently burdensome convention can sometimes work to individual advantage.
So there he stood, Idi, solid as a bronze bull, almost as if he, too, was waiting for something to happen. What did happen was that a greying official in tails, some sort of major-domo who had been scuttling up and down ever since we entered the hall, sounded a gong and then, straightening up, read from a paper:
“His Excellency President for Life Field Marshal Al Hadj Doctor Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular welcomes the Court of Kampala and assembled worthies of the city to this his annual banquet.”
I looked down at Marina Perkins’s hands resting in her lap. “I wonder how long this business is going to last,” I muttered.
“Mmm,” she said, turning towards me. “Longer than you think, probably …”
She raised her eyebrows mischievously. But at that moment, the toastmaster’s voice rose in a crescendo.
“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome. Field Marshal Amin has requested that you should begin eating only after he has made a few introductory remarks concerning domestic and international affairs.”
Amin drew himself up to his full, impressive height, the light of the chandeliers dancing on his shiny dome, his sharply angled cheeks. The girl in pink was seated next to him.
“My friends, I have to do this because if I do not speak now, you will become too drunk to hear my words. I have noticed there can be bad drunkenness in Uganda and indeed across the whole world, from beer and from spirits. This is true of the armed forces especially. For example, looking at the faces of the Entebbe Air Force Jazz Band, I know straightaway they are drunkards.”
The diners tittered, turning to look at the jazz band, seated on a podium in a shadowy corner, waiting for their turn. Having looked doleful at the outset, and then worried at Idi’s remark, the musicians were now laughing energetically.
“Yes, some people look as though they are painted with cosmetics just because of too much drinking of alcohol. And cosmetics too can be bad themselves, and wigs: I do not want Ugandans to wear the hair of dead imperialists or of Africans killed by imperialists.”
He patted the pink princess on the head. For a moment he paused, blinking as if confused, or unsure of what he was seeing—his eyesight, I knew from the files, was bad. Then he sniffed the air and continued.
“No member of my own family is to wear a wig, or she will cease to be my family member. Because we are all one happy family in Uganda, like it is we are gathered around this table in our single house. Myself, I started cleaning the house until I succeeded in placing indigenous Ugandans in all important posts. Can you remember that even cooks in hotels were whites? Except for me. I myself sold sweet biscuits on the roadside as a young boy and was a cookpot stirrer in my first army position, before I became General. Otherwise, insecurity prevailed before. Now, if you go into the countryside, you will see we have enough food. We are growing crops for export and we are getting foreign exchange. Also I have here a report from the Parastatal Food and Beverages Ltd: it says we are selling Blue Band, Cowboy, Kimbo Sugar, salt, rice, Colgate, Omo and shoe polish. So you see, you do not hear anywhere Uganda has debts, only from the British press campaign to tell lies.”
Perkins wiped his fork on his napkin, then lifted it up close to his face, examining the prongs. He looked slightly liverish.
“Because the World Bank is very happy with Uganda. In fact, I have decided to help the World Bank. I have decided to offer food relief to countries with food problems: millet, maize and beans shall be sent in sacks to all thin countries. And cassava also.”
I thought of the terraced plots back in the west. I used to watch the women set out to work as I ate my breakfast on the wooden veranda. They carried strange, broad-bladed hoes on their shoulders and had children strapped to their backs and bundles balanced on their heads, their chatter floating up to me as they walked by.
“Ambassadors who are here, please ensure that the food delivered in your countries is equitably distributed. Even you who are from superpowers. Remember this: I do not want to be controlled by any superpower. I myself consider myself the most powerful figure in the world and that is why I do not let any superpower control me. Remember this also: superpower leaders can fall. I once went for dinner with the Prime Minister of Britain, Mr. Edward Heath, at his official residence Number Ten Downing Street. But even he could fall from a great height, even though he is my good friend.”
“I don’t think we need give too much credence to that,” muttered Perkins. His wife fiddled with her spoons, putting the dessert spoon into the curve of the soup spoon. And then she changed the arrangement around.
“But the truth is, I would like to be friends with all of you. As I have repeatedly emphasized, there is no room in Uganda for hatred and enmity. I have stated I will not victimize or favor anybody. Our aim must be unity and love. And good manners. So guerrillas against the country will be met with countermeasures. You will forgive me for ending my speech here. I have said it before: I am not a politician but a professional soldier. I am therefore a man of few words and I have been very brief throughout my professional career. It only remains for me to draw your attention to one thing more: the good foods coming to the table before you. A human being is a human being, and like a car he needs refueling and fresh air after working for a long time. So: eat!”
With this last declamation, he threw up his arms and stood there motionless for a second, like a preacher or a celebrant at the Mass. Behind him, his raised arms were reflected dully in the great gold dish on the wall, altering the pattern of light as it fell on the tablecloth.
And then he sat down. The diners hardly stirred, staring at him still. Idi savored the sight of it, his own lips moving silently, as if he had carried on speaking. Only the rattle of the trolleys, bringing in the starters, broke the spell, and everyone began to applaud.
The hors d’œuvre were placed in front of us, a triple choice: fillets of Nile perch, thick gumbo soup made from okra and crayfish, or, most disturbingly for the Europeans (it was the kind of thing Idi would do on purpose), a variety platter of dudu—bee larvae, large green bush crickets, cicadas and flying ants, fried with a little oil and salt. They were actually quite delicious—crisp and brown, they tasted a bit like whitebait.
“I think I’ll stick to the gumbo,” said Todd, horrified, as Wasswa and I crunched up a few.
Wasswa pushed the dudu platter towards him. “But these are a local delicacy. You may not know, sir, that gumbo is an imported dish even in our own Uganda. It is from just over the fringe of our southwestern province, into Zaïre, where, as you may know also, many of the border peoples speak Swahili like our Ugandan soldiers here, and come to trade fish or to be treated medically by such fellows as Doctor Garrigan, who was in those parts before.”
“That’s right,” I added, lamely. “I was in the west before I came to Kampala.”
“I guess it must have been quite rough to live out there. I went down there on tour last year,” said Todd.
“But in Zaïre it is too bad more,” interjected Wasswa. “They are real washenzi, savages, in that place. In that country, sir, this gumbo, it is called nkombo, which means ‘runaway slave’ in the Nkongo language—it is how he, this dish here, came to your country America. I am sure you were not knowing this.”
“No, I can’t say I was aware of that, Minister Wasswa. Of course, American cuisine is nourished by all manner of national traditions: Dutch, German, English, but also Korean and, as you say, there’s the whole African-American thing. The melting pot, you know. It is fascinating, isn’t it, this gourmandizing business? Every plate tells a story.”
“I thought you chaps just ate hamburgers,” said Stone. It was hot in the banqueting room, and two damp strands of flaxen hair fell over his forehead like tendrils of seaweed.
“Now don’t you mock me,” the American replied, chuckling. “I had a Paris posting when I was young. They’d call you Monsieur Rosbif there, or John Bull.”
“But in Zaïre, too, those people eat monkey meat,” Wasswa said loudly, laying it on thick, piqued at no longer being the center of attention.
Suddenly Amin himself, overhearing, called down from the top of the table.
“And what is your fault with monkey meat, Minister of Health? I, your President, has eaten monkey meat.”
Wasswa, craven, toyed with his cutlery.
“And I have also eaten human meat.”
This His Excellency almost shouted. A shocked silence fell over the table—almost visible, as if some diaphanous fabric had come down from the ceiling and settled over the steaming tureens and salvers. We looked up at him, not sure how to react.
Amin finally rose to his feet. “It is very salty,” he said, “even more salty than leopard meat.”
We shifted in our chairs.
“In warfare, if you do not have food, and your fellow soldier is wounded, you may as well kill him and eat him to survive. It can give you his strength inside. His flesh can make you better, it can make you full in the battlefield.”
And then he sat down once again. The candles fluttered light onto the silver, which threw off distorted images of the faces round the table. Oddly, I found myself thinking of ants, clay mounds, the distribution of formic acid—I suppose it was having eaten the insects.
No one said a word until the waiters wheeled in the centerpiece of the main course. It was a whole roast kudu hind. Her little stumped-off, cauterized legs stuck up in the air like cathedral spires, and she was stuffed, so the menu told us, with avocado and sausage meat. The latter spilt out, crusty and crennellated, at one end, the Limpopo-colored fruit-vegetable at the other.
The display rolled up to Idi. We watched him rub knife against steel, rhythmically, the noise marking out still further the silence over the table. Then he slit the torso and, with a rough majesty, hacked off a ceremonial slice of meat for himself, flipping it onto the gold-rimmed plate. A drop of grease flew onto the princess’s cashmere, causing her to jump back in her seat and then, when Amin looked down, to smile at him obsequiously. Finally, he handed the knife to one of the waiters, who proceeded dextrously to layer slice after effortless slice—the meat falling away like waves on a beach—on the edge of the platter, while others shuffled them onto plates. Yet more waiters, moving swiftly behind the chairs in a complicated shuttle system, sliding along the parquet, brought them to each guest.
I prodded the kudu steak in front of me. A thin trickle of juice came out. I thought about how the beast must have been stalked and shot, dragged or perhaps carried home slung on a pole, flayed and gutted, the crouching hunters palming prize portions (heart, kidney, liver) into bloodied banana leaves to take home to their wives. And the carcass itself, too, might well have been wrapped for transport by lorry back to Kampala: as well as keeping off flies, the banana leaf is said to contain a tenderizing enzyme. Out in the bush, I’d often mused about analyzing and isolating it, selling the formula to make my fortune back home.
Nathan Theseus Todd attacked his steak with gusto. He cut off such a large piece that the dark meat, darker than beef, covered his mouth as he forked it in, making it seem—ever so briefly—like a gag. Or another mouth altogether. A second mouth.
Nauseated, I turned to Marina Perkins. “What’s really interesting about all this, is that none of the meat is chilled at any point; refrigeration breaks down the cell structure of the meat, you know. That’s why it tastes different from English meat.”
She looked at me slightly quizzically. “You’re lucky, being a man of science. I sometimes wish that I had a better idea of how things fit together.”
The accompanying dishes for the kudu began piling up: a little ramekin of chili relish; mounds of vegetables—sweet potato rissoles, yam chips, fried groundnuts, pigeon peas; and a chopped mess of green I called jungle salad: spinach, shu-shu and black-eyed-bean leaves.
“Watch out for this foods,” called out Idi, tapping a dish. “There is an old Swahili proverb: if you give pigeon peas to a donkey, he will fart. That is why I never eat this foods.”
I thought of the donkey I had as a child in Fossiemuir. It died from bloat, having eaten grass cuttings I’d left in a bin outside the paddock. They’d fermented in its stomach, blowing it up like a balloon. The only way to cure it was to stick the point of a knife between the beast’s ribs, cutting into the stomach wall where it pressed against them. I remember how the green liquor came out, when the vet did it, but the animal was too far gone—we couldn’t save it.
Nathan Theseus, excited by mouthfuls of meat, waved his fork in the air.
“We saw these wonderful cows when we went down to the Rwanda border. You know, the ones with the long horns and humped backs. Herds and herds of them, with white birds sitting on their backs.”
“They are called zebu,” said Wasswa. “The birds eat their ticks, and the hump is for storing fluid during drought.”
“Like a camel, I suppose,” said Perkins. “Don’t cows have two stomachs, Doctor Garrigan?”
“Three. Grass is very difficult to digest. Though I believe the digestive structure of zebu is even more complicated than that of the European cow—more like buffalo or wildebeest.”
“You have buffalo cheese in Italy, don’t you, Bosola?” asked Todd, leaning forward.
“Yes, mozzarella. But it is mostly made from ordinary cow’s milk these days.”
Amin cut him off, booming. “Only in Africa are there real buffalo, strong like me.”
“A nice display,” Marina Perkins whispered to me, touching the flowers in front of us. It was the first time I saw her smile. I lifted up my glass of wine and looked straight into her eyes over the rim.
The sweet, like the starter, was a choice of three: guava fool, pumpkin pie with cream, and, as the menu put it, “Delicious Pudding”—some kind of blancmange, each portion molded into a quaint little castle shape.
This last Idi himself had, scooping it up swiftly, closing the distance between mouth and plate with every spoonful. By the end, he was almost bent double.
“All gone,” he said then, pushing it aside like a little child.
As I finished my own Delicious Pudding, the waiters began to bring in the coffee and liqueurs, and the jazz band struck up for the dancing. I watched transfixed as, in one fluid, seamless movement, Nathan Theseus brushed a bead of sweat off his brow, reached into his jacket, pulled out a cigar from one pocket, a clipper lighter from the other, cut and lit the cigar and put the silver contraption away again. All in a matter of seconds. It was a quite astonishing piece of prestidigitation. I almost felt like asking him to do it again, to prove that it had happened at all. But it was final, this perfect execution: the tip of the cigar was already glowing fiercely.
Much later that evening, I took a walk down by the lake. The moon was high and the first birds had begun calling from the shrubs and marsh grass by the edge. As I looked out over the water, I supposed the crocs were moving in the dark shallows that stretched out towards the fires and lamps of Kenya on the other side. And I fancied, standing there, that I could see the circles of tilapia rising to the surface for crane flies, rising as if coming up for air; denizens of the lake, our scaly forebears: white eyes, blind mouths.