When I first arrived in the Cherangani Hills of northwestern Kenya as a young woman, the mountains had been green and tawny, cloaked in lush bush, dotted with the cultivated plots of the Pokot tribe that I had come to study. Now I could hardly recognize the place where I had lived my life between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-eight. The drought had turned the Great Rift Valley into blistered, lunarlike terrain; the hills reminded me of Ethiopia back in the eighties — steep mounds unintended for human habitation, withered, eroded, and above all, dry. Greg stopped the Land Rover and let me examine the scenery more carefully. But it was no use.
“I’m lost,” I said.
He brushed a cloud of flies away from his face, callused fingers rasping against a four-day growth of tough, white beard. “I believe it’s around the next promontory,” he said, his clipped British inflections making the statement unequivocal, though in truth he knew the region far less than I.
His confidence made me try one more time. “Yes. Yes, I think you’re right,” I said.
When we rounded the flank of the hills, we saw the remnants of a village. All that remained of the huts were the firepits, the packed-earth floors, and ruptured holes where the branches that formed the walls had been anchored. And, of course, the sitting stones — it was improper for a man of the Pokot to sit on naked ground. In their stead were three hovels constructed of piled dung and animal hides, not true dwellings at all, merely places to get out of the sun. I saw a dozen or more people, all lying or sitting listlessly in the shade.
We felt the impact of their eyes, but aside from the stares, most of them did not react to our arrival. A single boy stood and began to approach the Land Rover. He was suffering from the early stages of marasmus, his limbs painfully thin, stomach bloated, skin hanging slack from his bones so that his face resembled that of an old man and not, so I estimated, a boy well short of puberty. His only garment was a pair of threadbare, stained khaki shorts.
Greg pulled out the .45 as we stopped rolling, keeping it in obvious view. But the boy emitted not even a flicker of belligerence; he was past those emotions. He gazed at us blankly, like a retardate. Only the fact that he had risen of his own accord gave me hope of obtaining a response from him.
“Do you know KoCherop?” I asked. I used the Pokot dialect, though the words came haltingly, with a bittersweet tang. The boy, if he had been schooled, could speak English or Swahili, but use of his home tongue might ingratiate me. “Do you know where she is?”
He turned his prematurely old eyes toward me, and I saw, to my surprise, a mind still capable of activity and calculation. “You are Chemachugwo,” he said, using my Pokot name, his voice raspy but energetic.
“Yes.” I did not know him, but I was not surprised that he had guessed my identity. There were no other middle-aged white women alive who could speak his language.
“I will tell you where to find KoCherop if you give me a piece of paper,” he stated.
I hesitated a moment, then reached into a compartment under the seat and withdrew the bribe. I gave him a whole sheet. The boy ran his hands over it, apparently pleased with the rough, pulpy texture and sawdust-yellow color. He rolled it into a funnel, and with his empty hand pointed to a terrace plot far up the nearest mountain. “She is there.”
I could make out a tendril of smoke. I signalled Greg to drive on.
I could see the boy and his piece of paper in the side mirror for a full thirty seconds. Just before the dust and the turns in the track obscured him I saw him bite off the end of the funnel and begin to chew it. I wanted to weep, but the past few days had left me incapable of tears. It was the village, I told myself. It had been so much like the one in which I had built my hut, almost forty years back.
The road narrowed and grew more steep, until the Land Rover would go no further. We faced a dilemma, for we couldn’t leave the vehicle unattended.
“I’ll stay,” Greg said, handing me the .45. He pulled out one of the rifles for himself.
I hadn’t reckoned on this development. I needed his plucky humor and stiff upper lip. But I had gone alone into the wilderness of East Africa before. I buckled on my holster and started up the path.
Climbing these hills had been easier in younger days. I stopped often, until I could no longer bear to gaze out over the valley, where I had once watched the herdsmen and their cattle. The air became cooler, though not enough to compensate for my exertion. I estimated it would take me two hours to reach the terrace. I thought of KoCherop.
“Now we are like sisters,” she said, touching my belly. I jumped. The tattoo was still tender from the artist’s needle. She jerked back her hand. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right. I was just surprised.”
“It will only hurt for a little while,” she said encouragingly. “Then you will be happy because you have become more beautiful.” She pointed at the spectacular, star-shaped design carved around her navel. The blood still congealed around it. “All the other girls will be jealous of me,” she said firmly. “Now that I am a woman, I will add more all along here.” She brushed her fingers up and down her midriff.
I concealed my shiver. KoCherop — she still used her childhood name, Chesinen, at that point — had a sleek body and perfect, rich brown complexion. It needed no accentuation. Along with clitoridectomy, scarification was one of the practices that tempted me to drop my anthropologist’s reserve.
“Many of the girls nowadays are leaving their bellies smooth,” I said.
“Those girls must be looking for Kikuyu husbands,” she said with disdain. She smeared her face with red ocher and ghee, and offered to do the same for me. I accepted.
She lavished it over my nose and cheeks. “Trust me. One day a handsome man with much land will look at your belly and admire what you have had done.”
I chuckled, staring down at the tattoo. I had to admit it was pretty. It was a tiny butterfly, etched in six colors of ink, excellent artistry considering that it had been performed by a traveling craftsman. In my own way, I would enjoy owning it; otherwise I would never have done something so permanent to my body. But it most certainly had not been done to attract a husband. I had done it for my Pokot sister, because her father had become like my own, and because she, though ten years my junior, had made me feel instantly welcome in a sea of strange black faces.
“Oh, no one will marry me,” I said. “I always burn the porridge.”
I passed terrace after terrace of abandoned land. The farms extended far up the slope ahead of me, each family tilling parcels at not one but several elevations, the better to guard against crop failure. Some could be found as high as seven or eight thousand feet, among the peaks where, in former times, the mist would gather, moistening the land, dispelling the aridity of the Great Rift Valley. Now all I could see growing were gnarled hardwoods whose resins made them impossible to eat, or thorn thickets and brambles not worth the pain to molest. Dust crawled up my shoes and into the cuffs of my trousers.
Breathless, aching in my calves, I reached the terrace that the boy had indicated. Nothing was left of the fields but irrigation channels waiting for water that had not come. KoCherop was seated on a flat stone beside a firepit. An empty porridge kettle sat over dying coals. Beside her was a gourd of water and a small sack of maize or millet.
She stared at me with wide eyes, perhaps thinking that she had died and met a ghost. I spoke her name.
She bowed her head. “I am called only Ko, now.”
“Ko” means grandmother. Her full name meant Grandmother of Daughter of Rain, which she had adopted upon the birth of her first granddaughter. It was a declaration that Cherop was dead.
KoCherop, in her typically Pokot way, did not display overt grief. It was enough to have made the statement. In a culture in which the lives of the women of the tribe revolve so deeply around those of their children that they rename themselves each time a new generation is established, no loss could have been sharper.
“I’m sorry,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady. “Lokomol told me.”
“He sent you, didn’t he? I told him not to do that.” Her voice softened. “He is well? And the little ones?”
“There is food in the refugee camp, for the moment. He wouldn’t accept help. But he did beg me to come to you.”
“And you have come. What will you do now?”
“Greg and I plan to take you to back to Kampala,” I said. “We want you to live with us.”
“I live here,” she said, standing up. She had always been thin and spare; now the effect was more extreme, but the vigor — and determination — in her body was still obvious.
“What happens when that sack is empty?” I asked, pointing at her food supply. It was nearly depleted already.
She ground a toe into the dust, and dislodged a hidden stick. She tossed it in the firepit. “I am waiting for the government officials, coming to tell me that now I can eat dirt.”
I started to speak, lost my momentum, paused.
“What is there for me in Kampala, Chemachugwo?” she continued. “Do they have grindstones? Can you farm there?”
“Can you farm here?” I found my tongue. “Do you remember the time you had the fever? I started to leave the hut one night, but you begged me not to go. Do you remember what you said?”
She faced me for the first time. “You are not fair, Janet.”
“You said you didn’t want to die alone. Have you changed your mind after all these years?”
The flies were devils. KoCherop, with her African composure, paid them no mind, even when they sipped fluid from the rim of her eyelids. “Lokomol should not have sent you.”
“But he did.” I reached out and clasped her shoulder. She leaned into my hand. “We won’t have to stay in the city all the time. You can come with us when I do my field work in the Ituri forest. The pygmies will call you a giant.”
KoCherop, who was rather short, smiled faintly, then lost it. I could feel her tremble through my palm. “Yes. Yes, Janet, I will come. But give me one more night. I must say goodbye to Cherop.”
I am ashamed to say that, for an instant, I did not believe her. I envisioned her hiding from us when the time came to leave. But if she did, I would have to respect that choice, so I told her where the truck was and climbed down the mountain.
KoCherop was giving her two-year-old son Lokomol a bath Pokot style: squirting water out of her mouth in a pencil-thin stream and scrubbing him with her fingers. The baby wailed, watching forlornly as the mud he’d so diligently splattered over his skin was rinsed away. Not far away his slightly older sister laughed at his discomfiture, while KoCherop’s three other children clambered up and down the acacia tree under which we sat.
“You have been married half a year, Chemachugwo,” she said. “Why aren’t you pregnant?” I knew she was scolding me; she reserved use of my Pokot name for times when she wanted to lecture or argue.
I paused, keeping my glance on Lokomol, marveling at how much he had grown in the year and a half since I had last visited my tribal friends. “Greg and I don’t plan to have any children just yet.”
“You are over thirty years — well over. You could be a grandmother by now.”
I thought of the crow’s feet in the corners of my eyes and the strands of gray hair that I’d found a couple of months back. I didn’t need KoCherop’s reminder.
“What about you?” I asked. “Are you going to stop at five?”
“Oh, no!” she said emphatically, sending Lokomol off to his siblings with an affectionate pat on the butt. “Seven, eight, nine — whatever luck brings me. I am already behind. KamaChepkech already has six,” she said of her younger sister.
KoCherop was twenty-four years old.
Morning arrived with the suddenness of the tropics. I, lying awake on the bed of the Land Rover, watched the sun illuminate the tracks of the snakes that had crawled past the vehicle in the night. I heard footsteps scuffing the path and my heart began to pound.
KoCherop had come.
She had brought her sack and her gourd. She stood like a statue, her wide, Nilo-Hamitic features impassive. She was dressed in the traditional style: a skirt of thick brown muslin covering her from the base of her rib cage to her knees, huge hoop earrings, and a cornucopia of bright, multi-colored beads in the form of belts, anklets, bracelets, armbands, a headband, and row after row of necklaces draping her collar, shoulders, and upper chest, leaving her breasts bare. This was her best outfit, and a rare sight in days when most Pokot women had long since begun to mimic Western fashions.
“When we get to Kampala, they will know I am a Pokot,” she explained.
I pursed my lips. They would know, all right.
I saw her glance wistfully at the hills. “It will be temporary,” I said rapidly. “The rain will come. It has to come. Lokomol and his brothers will plant new crops. You can return then.”
“And maybe my granddaughter will be born again,” she replied.
I sighed. It was hard not to agree with her pessimism. The rain would come again — no doubt far more of it than the vegetationless soil could withstand — and some of the million Pokot refugees would reestablish their homes, but for vast numbers, the old way of life had ended forever.
Greg grumbled up out of his sleep, saw KoCherop, and gave me a questioning glance.
“Start her up,” I said. “There’s no reason to stay here.”
As I watched the first news broadcast concerning the Termite bacteria, I remembered Grape Nuts. In a flashback to my childhood Euell Gibbons appeared, white-haired, fatherly, pouring a bowlful of cereal. “Ever eat a pine tree?” he asked in his backwoods accent.
The geneticists explained how they had developed a strain of E. coli capable of converting cellulose into sugar. Doctors calculated that the effects, though disconcerting, would not be dangerous in the long term. Politicians justified its release into test populations in East Africa and Bangladesh on the grounds that it hailed the end of world hunger, a new chance for the stricken nations of the Third World.
I kept thinking of Marie Antoinette. Let them eat wood.
We made our way to the main road, a dirt track that would take us down the valley, past Mt. Elgon to Lake Victoria, and eventually across the border into Uganda. The grimy windshield showed us a view of bleak mountains and dust, broken by an occasional cactus or bit of scrub brush.
KoCherop sat between Greg and me, taking no note of the surroundings, a contagious gloom that kept my husband and I from saying more than ten words to each other all morning. It was as if each mile enervated her, until it was all she could do to simply sit.
We approached Sigor, the district’s marketing center, the only “big town” KoCherop had ever visited. It was little more than a collection of dung huts with tin sheet roofs. Nowhere on the wind-whipped ground was there a tree or a blade of grass, only dust, rusting oil drums, black requiem birds, a scent of human poverty. In temperate climates, poverty smells sour, but in hot regions it is sickeningly sweet. Small knots of people gathered at the periphery of the street as we rolled through: sad black faces, pleading eyes.
We kept our weapons visible, but here, as with the boy the day before, no one had the energy to threaten us. They simply stood with the passivity of the starving, hoping that perhaps we were famine relief workers. I did not look at their faces. Though we had an ample supply of food in the Land Rover, we didn’t dare stop and try to share it, or the spell holding them back would have been broken. Our food stayed hidden inside plastic, metal, and canvas, as inconspicuous as we could make it.
I couldn’t save them. There were too many. What mattered now was KoCherop. I could, God willing, rescue one person, if she would let me.
She paid no attention to the audience, though they stared at her beads and naked breasts, which in their minds marked her as more primitive, and therefore poorer, than they. Perhaps they were wondering why she, and not they, deserved to ride. We didn’t stop until long after the village had merged with the dust of the horizon.
“You don’t have to do that anymore,” I said.
KoCherop continued picking bits of stems and stalks out of the sorghum she was grinding. She looked at me with skepticism.
“You don’t have to separate the chaff,” I clarified. “Just grind it in. The bacteria will allow you to digest it, just like the grain.”
“It is meant for cattle, not people,” she said firmly. “You talk like the government advisors.”
“The crop’s been very poor this year. You don’t have much to waste.”
“Do they eat chaff in California?” she asked. She knew that I had just returned from a visit to my hometown in the San Joaquin Valley.
“No. North America hasn’t been infected yet. But it will be. There’s no way to stop E. coli. Eventually it’ll get everyone. We’ll all be Termites. I’m one already. So are you.”
“No, I am not.”
“Yes, you are. It’s even gotten into your cattle. That’s why the dung burns so poorly,” I said, pointing at the smoldering fire underneath the kettle of porridge. There wasn’t enough fiber left in the cow pies to serve as fuel. “Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed a big difference in how food passes through your system.”
Not being Caucasian, her blush didn’t show, but the expression was the same. I, too, had been embarrassed by the sudden, violent cycles of diarrhea and constipation, and most of all by the methane, though more recently my body had begun to adjust.
“I will keep doing it this way,” she insisted. “This is the way my mother taught me.”
We began to catch up with the refugee caravans by mid-afternoon. The first contained about fifty people, shuffling along at a pace of perhaps a kilometer an hour. It was much worse than in Sigor, for they made no effort to get out of the way of the Land Rover — many, I suspected, would not have cared if they had been run over — and it took a considerable length of time to weave our way through them, all the while aware of their eyes an arm-length outside the windows. Their lighter coloring and thinner features told me that they were Samburu. They had come even further than we, from the vicinity of Lake Turkana, where the normally bountiful supplies of fish had become exhausted from the excessive demand.
At least they were away from the water and its mosquitoes. Fewer would die from malaria.
In due course we came upon another, somewhat larger group, readily distinguishable because some of them still carried significant possessions, either in carts, on packs, or slung on poles. They even drove a pair of oxen and a few bony cows ahead of them. I noticed four men huddled around a bowl of milk and blood, a traditional meal of the pastoralists of the Rift Valley, while a knot of women and children watched, quiet with envy. My hands, lubed with perspiration, slid along the stock of my rifle. Greg gave me a glance, and I knew he saw what I did: these tribesmen had enough strength left to cause trouble should they wish.
Three young men, painfully lean but still muscular, were very slow to get out of our path. They glowered at us as we passed. I pretended to be distracted by the constant bouncing from the ruts and chuck holes, but I could feel their eyes riveted to us. It was like the sensation a woman gets when a man blatantly undresses her in his mind.
The last obstacle was a boy who strode behind one of the oxen with a thin whip. For a full two minutes, though it was obvious he knew we were behind him, he refused to move himself or his animal out of the way. Finally the track widened and Greg began to pull around. Suddenly the boy began lashing at us. The sound of leather on metal made me jump. The boy shouted — a guttural, wordless roar. The tip of his lash struck the steering wheel.
Greg stepped firmly on the throttle, shooting us into the clear, and didn’t let up until the irregularity of the road shook us more than our aging bones could tolerate. He eased off, put the .45 back into its holster on the dash, got out his handkerchief, and wiped his forehead. The boy, his image shrinking out of sight in the mirror, was laughing that his whip had spurred us so well. His poor ox could not have been so vigorous.
“Bloody little blighter,” Greg cursed.
My hands were shaking. I turned to share a sigh of relief with KoCherop, only to find her gazing ahead, lips pursed, as if nothing of importance had occurred. Greg noticed and, like mine, his eyebrows drew together.
Ahead in the distance, well away from the Samburu, an escarpment loomed. “We’ll pull over when we reach that,” Greg announced, pointing. “Time for a rest.”
We were walking down a trail between two plots of farmland, one belonging to KoCherop’s uncle, the other to her brother. For once, the rain had come in full vigor, and neither locusts nor the flocks of marauding queleas had come to steal the grain. Dozens of tribesmen worked the fields, the glistening brown backs of both men and women happily bending down to harvest a bumper crop.
“Why do you do what you do?” KoCherop asked suddenly.
The question had come from out of the blue. “You mean, why am I an anthropologist?”
She nodded. “See my people with their scythes? See this mountain? I am in my place. Why do you live so far from your parents? Why do you go to the forest to study the pygmies, instead of having children? You are too old now to start a family. How can you be happy?”
There were occasional times, as menopause approached and I wondered what would have happened if I had married my college sweetheart and stayed in the United States, that I wasn’t totally content with the alternative I’d chosen. But I was able to answer KoCherop honestly, “I do what I do because I want to. My work fulfills me.”
She shook her head, mystified. “I could never be like that. Take me from my clan and this dirt and I would die.”
We stopped in the shade of the escarpment, where we were relatively inconspicuous but nevertheless had an unobstructed view of the road. Greg got out quickly, looked toward the rear of the truck, and groaned.
“I thought that last mile was a mite rough,” he said. I walked around to his side, and saw that we had a flat tire.
“A gift from the Samburu?” I suggested.
“Could be. Most likely the frigging road.” He opened up the rear of the Land Rover. “Last spare,” he said, which we both knew already. I checked the map to measure the distance to Lake Victoria, and gnawed at my inner lip.
I began to help him, but he convinced me to relax, and in exchange I would drive the remaining short leg until sundown. KoCherop and I found a relatively comfortable spot in the talus a few yards away, where I spread out the last of our fresh fruit, as well as bread and, most important of all, a jug of water. The flies were overjoyed at the repast.
KoCherop ate a piece of fruit, a treat even in good seasons and a part of her diet of which she had surely been totally deprived lately, drank her fill, and turned to look at the plain.
“Have more,” I said.
She didn’t answer. Occasionally her glance would dart toward the north, where we had now left the last of the Pokot lands behind. She began taking apart her head-band, running the beads off the ends of their threads one by one and flicking them away.
I am ashamed to confess that my own appetite was ravenous, and when I was certain my friend was not going to touch another bite, I saw to it that the ants had nothing more than stems and gleaned rinds to attack. The sand at the edge of the talus was now vivid with specks of color, an inadvertent piece of artwork created by KoCherop’s cast-off beads, each one a particle of the life she knew, gone. I made sure not to disturb it as I walked back to check on Greg.
He was cinching the last nut. I handed him his canteen. He drained it. “Next time we bring a chauffeur,” he joked, slightly breathless.
“We’re losing her,” I told him. “She’s just waiting until the wind calls her name and takes her away.”
He stowed the tire iron. “Well,” he murmured, “the choice is hers now, isn’t it? You can’t make it for her.”
The words seemed callous, but I had no answer for them at the time. KoCherop was waiting for the world to conform to her desires, not unlike the scientists who had created the Termite bacteria. But the world has ways of turning the tables back around. Now it was mankind’s, and KoCherop’s, turn to adapt, and she was refusing.
Brooding, I assisted Greg in lifting the flat tire into the Land Rover. The winds of upper Kenya had arrived with their usual vigor, hurrying us toward the next leg of our journey.
We were walking along the bank of a river. The drought had been severe for three years, and now the watercourse contained only sand, pocked with pits where the tribespeople had dug to reach the watertable. Now even those holes were desiccated. Thirty years before, when I had still lived here, the river had been lined with grass and overhung by broad, leafy acacias. Now even the stumps were gone.
Ironically, it was the industrialized nations that had benefitted from the modified E. coli. The sugar industry no longer had to boil away ninety percent of the raw cane during refining. Grains no longer had to be as thoroughly processed. But in the Third World bureaucrats became dangerously lax in educating the people about the need for population control, and the added demand for wood exacerbated the already severe deforestation problem. The climate had rebelled.
Cherop, the granddaughter for whom my friend had been renamed, skipped along ahead of us, always alert for a sunning lizard or a pretty stone. We were solemn in spite of the child’s exuberance. KoCherop’s husband had died two months before. This was my first visit since that event, and our conversation had awakened some of KoCherop’s sense of loss. Now we just walked, thinking about the changes brought by time. It was young Cherop who broke the silence.
“Look!” she cried, pointing. Not far off the path, partially hidden in a thorn bramble, stood a termite mound.
Assured that we were watching, she ran over to it and began climbing. The mound was nearly three times as tall as she, rising into a dozen eroded towers. A hyena or aardwolf had dug a burrow at its base; birds had done the same, on a smaller scale, in its heights. The termites themselves had abandoned the site. Cherop explored the structure as much as the thorns would allow, no doubt hoping that one of the nests would still contain something interesting.
I smiled. The girl gave me a big, toothless grin, breaking off a small projection to demonstrate her strength, offering the dust to the wind.
I turned to KoCherop, and stage by stage my smile faded. I had never seen such a bitter look on her face.
“What’s wrong?”
“I wish that all the termites had died ten thousand years ago. Then maybe your people would never have thought of a way to make us like insects.”
It felt like I had been stung. The worst part of it was that she seemed unaware that she was hurting me. I could not avoid blurting out a response.
“Maybe if your people had stopped having so many babies, my people wouldn’t have tried to solve your problems.”
We reached an armed checkpoint shortly before dusk. An overweight minor officer, skin so oily it gleamed, examined our papers with a frown, peering repeatedly at our vehicle’s contents. He spared KoCherop a disinterested glance, mostly toward her breasts. Greg bribed him with two packs of American cigarettes and we were on our way. “Wish it could be that easy at the border,” said my husband. We camped not far down the road, reasoning that bandits might be discouraged by the proximity of the checkpoint.
It was crowded in the back of the Land Rover. I slept between Greg and KoCherop, listening to the wind moan and the crickets trill, unable to sleep. KoCherop’s scent evoked memories. It is strange that an entire tribe can have an identifiable essence. When I had lived with them year round I had become oblivious to it.
I thought about the city, trying to picture KoCherop walking to the supermarket, wearing a cotton smock, smelling the civilized odors of cement and auto exhaust. What kind of fool was I to think that, simply because I loved her, I could succeed in transferring a human being from her culture into mine?
Greg woke and crawled out of the vehicle. Soon I heard the muffled, rain-on-the-roof sound of urine splattering dust. I glanced at KoCherop. Even in the dim illumination I could see the determined, stubborn tension in her shoulders, and I became angry.
“Damn it,” I murmured. “What more do you want me to do? It’s not my fault.”
She didn’t stir, but something in the stillness of her breathing hinted that she was awake. But after Greg returned and began snoring, I convinced myself that I had imagined it.
In the distance, I was certain I heard a hyena laughing, like a ghost of Africa of old.
The refugee camp was a sea of humanity. Our guide was a young doctor who, judging from his haggard cheeks and the red in his eyes, had not slept in four days. Somehow he kept his humor as we threaded through the crowd from checkpoint to checkpoint, trying to find Lokomol and the rest of KoCherop’s family.
A little girl, bloated with kwashiorkor, stared at me as I passed. I turned away — from her and from all the faces, keeping my glance on the doctor. Here and there sat a lucky family with a tent or blanket to shade themselves; for the most part the refugees simply lay on the packed ground beneath an open sky, waiting until the next shipment of food arrived at the distribution point, or until the doctors received a fresh supply of basic medicines.
Some attempt had been made to funnel members of various tribal groups into specific areas of the camp. Otherwise we might never have found Lokomol.
He was sitting with his youngest daughter propped in his lap. I spotted him immediately; his lean features and long fingers closely resembled his mother. He was, much to my relief, apparently in good health.
“We came as soon as we got your message,” I said. “We’ve arranged for transportation to take you to the camp near Kampala. It’s much better supplied than this one.”
“You have always been good to us, Chemachugwo,” he answered pensively. “But it is for my mother that I sent for you.”
“Why isn’t she with you?”
He shrugged.
Knowing KoCherop, I understood completely. “You want me to try to bring her?”
He nodded. “I am ashamed to ask this of you, but you are the only person I have ever known who can make my mother listen.”
“Wake up, Janet.”
It was Greg’s voice, coming from the other end of a long tunnel. I peeled my eyes open. The morning light was unforgivably bright.
“Time for breakfast,” Greg said for the second time. “I want to get to the border well before dusk.”
I moaned, rubbed the grit from my lashes, and went about the meal like a zombie, hoping that my headache would soon go away. KoCherop sat nearby. I noticed that she ate a full share this time, but otherwise I avoided paying much attention to her. The border crossing was enough to think about, I told myself.
“You are sad, Janet,” KoCherop said during a moment when Greg was out of hearing range.
“That’s true,” I replied, and turned to clean my bowl.
“Janet?”
“Yes?”
“I am sorry.”
I looked at her, frowned, and climbed into the Land Rover. I was sorry, too, but what good was that? I didn’t answer her. She had nothing to add, and we didn’t speak for the rest of the morning.
By noon we began to see grass and brush. The air closed in, a sign of humidity. Greg spotted a flamingo in flight. Suddenly we crested a hill and saw Lake Victoria sprawling into the distance.
KoCherop’s eyes went wide. It was easy to understand why.
“Where is the other side?” she whispered.
The shore to which she referred was over two hundred miles away, lost over the horizon. The lake was so vast that it could generate its own climate, moistening the adjacent countryside that would otherwise have been as arid as the region from which we had emerged.
It was one more new thing to overwhelm her, I thought bitterly.
KoCherop stared at the lake for almost an hour, while I stayed locked in my own preoccupations. She startled me when she called for us to stop.
“I want to look at that,” she said.
We had reached a particularly good vantage point from which to view the lake. KoCherop got out of the vehicle and walked to the edge of the road. Just in front of her the land dropped off abruptly. I could see jagged rocks down below. My friend stood where one more step would send her tumbling over the edge. Suddenly my insides clenched.
“Greg!” I cried.
“Give her a moment,” he said in a voice that struck me as far too calm.
I held my breath, prepared at any time to shut my eyes and cover my ears. Again Greg, though observing carefully, seemed much too unruffled. Then, bit by bit, I began to see it as he did.
Her posture was no longer stiff. She stared at the lake not as if overwhelmed or contemplating suicide, but as I had the first time I had seen this, the second largest body of fresh water in the world — with awe and delight. I realized then that her demeanor had been different all day, but I, in my melancholy, had failed to notice.
She turned and walked toward me, her back straight, her eyes bright.
“Will I have my own room in Kampala?” she asked.
I felt a smile tugging at my lips. This was the KoCherop I had once known, someone with hope for the years to come. “Yes,” I replied. “A big one.”
“Good,” she said crisply, and climbed into the Land Rover. I thought back to the beads she had cast away the previous day. Not particles of life, thrown away in order to embrace Death, but bits of the past, dropped by the wayside to make room for the future. KoCherop was willing to adapt. The tightness in my throat melted away.
“Let’s go home,” I told Greg.