The Fall of Saints (15 page)

“Finally, she came and invited me into her office, apologizing for the commotion. ‘Some demons are very obstinate,’ she murmured. Then she asked if I had overheard anything. I lied, I don’t know why, but I lied. Not that I thought anything sinister was going on. I was sure Wangeci was being a nuisance. I believed in the reverend.

“ ‘Oh, to be a reverend is difficult sometimes,’ she said to me, and proceeded to offer a cup of coffee. I happily accepted. She picked up her phone and asked the person on the other end to look for my umbrella in the lost and found. She was so kind.

“ ‘Sorry about the mess in the office,’ she said, pointing to a stack of files on the desk. ‘It’s hard to get a God-fearing reliable person to work here.’ It was not messy. The files only needed to be put back on the shelves, but I did not question her definition of messy.

“ ‘Where do you work?’ she asked me. At the time I was jobless, having just undergone training with the GSU police force. But after the training was over, we were informed that the GSU was oversubscribed, so our services were not needed. All that training for nothing.

“Anyway, that’s how I came to work for Reverend Susan. At the time I thought it was God’s intervention.”

“Why did you leave?” I asked.

“After working a year or two in that office, I started wondering, you know, about stuff.”

“Like?” I nudged her.

“For one, I never saw her in prayer or meditation. But she was generous. I tried to turn my eyes, you know how you can look at something and tell yourself not to see, kind of— Don’t write this,” she said, turning to Wainaina, who promptly obeyed by putting his notebook and pen into his pocket.

“What was I saying? Yes, until I came across the baby files.”

“Baby files? What do you mean?” I asked, my body suddenly taut.

“It was good that she opened the adoption center. At first it looked genuine. She took some children from the street and gave them shelter and food. She was doing a better job than our government. Then the white people started coming, and soon some of the children started to disappear. Rather, we stopped seeing them around.

“One day, Reverend Susan gave me a brown folder similar to the one in which I file all the church receipts. I opened it. She left with another folder. I opened the file; I always glanced inside the folders I filed. It was just a habit, curiosity, no harm. There was a list of women’s names with X or Y marked next to them. Now, I would not have cared one way or another—Susan was all about business, really—except for the one woman whose name was in red. It occurred to me that the Wangeci I had seen when I first went to the reverend’s office could have been the same one.

“Before I could read further, I heard Reverend Susan by the door. I quickly closed the file and pretended I was doing something else. She came straight toward me and took the file and said she had meant to take it but had taken the wrong one, the devil be cursed, and then asked in a casual way if I had opened the file. I said no, mine was to file, not to open files. After a few days she called me to her office and said that things had changed tremendously; she mumbled things about the economy and fired me. Not fired me, just like that; she gave my pay for the next three months. I tried to say I could work for free till the economy improved, but she said it was not fair to me, and thereafter she wouldn’t even agree to see me.”

“This Wangeci. Was there any other information about her? Age or where she lived?”

“All the women seemed to be in Kambera, but I don’t know. There were no addresses, well, I guess there are no addresses in Kambera,” she said, and laughed. “That’s my story.”

We thanked Magda greatly and left.

“I withdraw my comments of last night,” Wainaina said as we walked back to the car. “Clearly, Susan does not profit by the light only. There is a lot more to Her Holiness than meets the eye.”

“We have to meet with Wangeci,” I told Wainaina.

“Yes, before we see the reverend. It makes sense.”

“But how to find Wangeci?”

“Leave it to me,” Wainaina said. “I’m a journalist. I have my sources.”

14

I
could do nothing about meeting Wangeci until Wainaina had found a contact. So the following morning, I called Zack. He did not answer, so I left a message telling him how we were enjoying South Africa.

Then Dr. Ciru called me from Cape Town. INTERPOL had been to her office. Police in in the States were looking for me, and they believed I was staying with her. Caught between the police interest and her loyalty to me, she opted for the space between truth and a lie: I had not yet arrived. Did she know where I was? they asked. No, she said, interpreting the question narrowly, and then added that she believed I was still on the way.

No sooner did I get off the phone than Sam called. Some detectives had interviewed Rosie about Zack’s and my circle of friends. Rosie told them that I was a good person in a circle of bad people; she had even warned me against them, she said. She talked negatively about a Mark who bragged about his wealth and employed illegals. She could not understand why Joe had tried to kill me. Sam said that after they left, Ben was back with threats. He had found that I was not in Cape Town. It puzzled him that I had disappeared at about the same time as Zack and Melinda and Mark. Please call Ben or at least answer his calls, Sam pleaded with me.

I thought I had left New York behind. There were many issues I didn’t understand—why, for instance, Mark would disappear and where he could be. Perhaps I should activate that hotline to Ben. I promised Sam I would and asked to talk with Rosie and Kobi. Rosie was bubbly about the interview and the fact that she had been able to pour her heart out. She was sure that Mark had gone into hiding to avoid answering questions about illegals. Sam was a great man. She and Sam loved Kobi. Sam’s father blamed himself for not insisting that I carry a gun.

Kobi, the joy of my heart, told me he loved Mom and Dad in every other sentence. He did not sound anxious. He told me proudly that he had learned to pray and would be praying to Jesus to bring Mom and Dad home safely. The “praying to Jesus” Kobi must be the work of Rosie, I thought, or Sam or Sam’s dad. Sam’s dad could talk guns, gold, and God in the same breath.

Talking to Kobi lifted my spirits. His words reminded me that I had not yet visited my mother’s place of rest. During the honeymoon, time had been taken up with seaside, sand, and glossy hotels. On the eve of our departure for Nairobi, we cut short the visit because Zack was needed in New York. My only memorial for my mother as the tears I had shed when I heard the news of her death. But they fell on the grounds of New York, not on her burial ground in Kenya.

I took a taxi to Kakuyu. Many thoughts whirled through my mind. It had startled me to hear Kobi talk of America as home, our home, so where was I? Why hadn’t I come here before? Was it simply because of my abrupt departure, or was it that I could not possibly think of Kenya as home without my mother?

I thought a lot about my mother; her loving care; her stories; her proverbs meant to inculcate a moral or two in my obstinate head. She was particularly concerned about my endless questioning and hunger to know. When she warned that curiosity killed the cat, and I asked her how, she simply looked at me and said, “Continue acting on your curiosity, and you’ll find out.” “I don’t want to die,” I protested. “Then curb that curiosity.” I promised. But when an Asian man walked into an elevator my mother and I were in, his hair looking so different than the kinky hair we had—his was like the mane of a horse—I suddenly felt rather than saw my arm dart out to the man’s head. A patch of hair fell down, revealing the shiniest bald head I had ever seen. I now wanted to touch the baldness. My mother yanked my hand away. Fortunately, the elevator door opened, and the not too pleased gentleman walked out, ignoring my mother’s apologies.

“You see, Mugure, curiosity seeks trouble, not knowledge. One does not have to act on the desire that killed a cat.”

“Mother, whose cat? Ours?”

“Mugure, that’s too many questions.”

A lot had changed since I left my place of birth. Apartments had gone up on either side of the road. I was getting a little apprehensive as we neared the place where the house used to be, afraid of what it had become. Would the grave be there? Was there even a grave? My father had not bothered to let me know of the burial, and I had never reached out to find out.

I felt relief and gratitude when I found the marble grave at the back of the house, right in the middle of her herb garden. I sat down next to the grave. Looking at the herbs she so loved, I could feel her presence. Instead of the hollowness I had feared, I felt a sense of calm. I took a deep breath and surveyed the compound.

The garden intrigued me. The herbs were in bloom. I smiled at the memory of the many times my mother had tried to get me to do some garden work and the excuses I had perfected over the years. Wait. How was it that the herbs were still growing after all these years? And with no weeds. I jumped to my feet and looked around. To my utter surprise, I realized that the whole compound was immaculately clean and tidy.

Although all the doors were locked and the curtains drawn, the house did not look as if it had been abandoned. The paint had been retouched. I walked around the house, trying to get a peep inside for a sign or clue as to who lived here. The whole place had the feel of a diligently kept memorial to my mother. As far as I knew, my mother had no other children. Was it her ghost? I supposed I could ask the neighbors. Or I could go to the registration office, find its status, and initiate the process of reclaiming ownership. Surely my father knew. I would be seeing him as soon as I had sorted out the Kobi and Kasla business. That is, if I did not cut short my visit to quell the storm in Ohio.

Just then Wainaina called. He had found a contact, a woman named Betty.

•  •  •

As Jane drove us to Kambera to meet Betty, I thought maybe I should quit trying to find a vanishing local partner to yet another vanishing reality in New York, or a father I had never truly missed.

I was not cut out for this, as Ben had told me, even I knew that. All my life I had excelled at avoiding sticky situations. Unlike Jane, I had never been involved in a brawl in the street or school yard. It wasn’t that I was afraid—unsure, yes, but not afraid. After all, my child’s life was dependent on not being afraid to try. But I had to find the right balance between curiosity and caution, and maybe this venture called for more caution. But I did not call off the journey.

A beautiful hedge of bougainvillea with purple flowers and carefully trimmed edges marked the boundary between Living Green Estate and Kambera, but it did not prepare us for the dramatic contrast between the two. Living Green Estate was a pattern of spacious manicured lawns around sprawling houses. And Kambera? Built mostly from wood with patches of metal, grass, and mud, or any material that could seal a hole and hold together two or more pieces of wood or pipe, the Kambera houses were lined up next to each other, behind each other, on top of each other, with hardly any breathing space between.

We left our car at the Kambera parking garage and walked the rest of the way to Betty’s. We sat on white plastic chairs covered with frayed cushions. The room was dark, hot, and humid. An unlit kerosene lamp sat in the corner of the mud floor. When a cool breeze blew in now and then, the curtain covering the small window flapped open, allowing more light into the room, momentarily supplementing the light that passed through the holes in the walls.

But for a musty smell, the room was spotlessly clean. A big cloth hanging in the middle separated the lounge-cum-kitchen from the bedroom. Incongruously, an uchumatt tote bag hung on the wall next to a family photo. On a table tucked at the far side of the room were bottles of Tylenol.

Our host, a young woman wearing a brown maternity dress whom I guessed to be around twenty, sat across from us. Her pregnant belly seemed to overpower her, making her appear even weaker. She shyly accepted the bag of food we brought. She kept her eyes trained on the floor, mostly, and when she did look up, it was never at us but at the objects around the room.

“How far along are you?” I asked to break the awkward silence.

“A little over seven months.” She saw me staring at the photograph on the wall. “That is my mother and my two siblings,” she said. “Before the accident . . . Now I look at the picture and draw courage from it. I know I will make it.”

We all murmured our condolences. The air, already tense, was now filled with sadness.

Wainaina gave her our names and then asked if she knew where and how we could find Wangeci; we were old friends who wanted to catch up with her. I could tell she was not convinced about the catching up, but she went along. “Wangeci doesn’t live here anymore; she moved back to her mother’s.”

“Why?” I asked.

She hesitated and looked even more uncomfortable. Suddenly, she raised her eyes and fixed them on me. It was my turn to squirm at finding myself the object of her gaze.

“We may be able to help her,” I said, the first words that came to my mouth.

The woman remained emotionless, not removing her eyes from mine. She must have noticed my uneasiness. “I’m sorry, but for a second I thought you were her,” she said.

“Me, Wangeci?”

“No, no, forget it. It was something, a look, the voice, this bad lighting, you know. These houses!”

The momentary tension, the suspension, subsided.

“So, you know Wangeci well?” I asked.

“We lived together in Kambera until she moved back home. I have not seen or talked to her since.”

“Why did she move out?”

“You know, because of the baby.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“Oh my goodness,” she said, her turn to be shocked. “You mean you have no idea? When you said you were going to help her, I assumed you knew. You surely couldn’t have heard of Wangeci’s woes without knowing about the work.”

“Betty, we have heard a little bit about her situation,” I said sincerely. “But whatever made us come to you, it does not matter anymore. Not after hearing your story, your loss, the weight you carry, and yet thinking more about your friend than yourself. Please tell us everything. The work you do. How did you start it?”