African Nights Read online

  I had never seen a bushbaby so close before. The nights at the coast are full of their raucous screams, as they jump from branch to branch on the baobabs. But during the day they are invisible, and only after sunset is it possible, with much patience, to discover their lithe bodies amongst the leaves.

  It was easy to catch them.

  The local people in those days hung from the baobab branches dishes of a strong sweet beer, made out of coconut and honey, and the bushbabies could not resist its heady aroma. Dead drunk in the green dawn, still in a stupefied sleep, they would lie scattered at the foot of the majestic trees, like the moths they had not managed to eat. The villagers would harvest them easily, and they would try to sell them, tied to a length of palm twine, to passing tourists at the ferry-boat jetties along the creeks.

  Koba had been captured by chance. He was still a baby, and had been grasping his dozy mother’s back when she had been caught. But she had managed to escape somehow, and the man, who was the swimming pool attendant at the hotel in Diani, had brought the baby to the pool store, where during the day he was kept amongst bath towels, deck chairs and rubber flippers. It was there that Emanuele had discovered him and, in dismay, had begged me to buy him and let him go.

  Now the young bushbaby stood trembling, uncertain and fragile like a bird who cannot yet fly. He looked strange, somehow alien.

  Overcoming an instinctive, inexplicable repugnance, I reached out to take him. His small black hands were damp and gluey, with the wrinkled knuckles and spatulate nails of an old child; they were cold in the great sun. He jumped to my shoulder and grabbed my neck, and against my hair I sensed the pulse of his small frightened life, seeking protection. I suddenly felt for him, and for a few shillings he became ours.

  We called him Koba, a contraction of the Swahili name Komba, and Emanuele and my young stepdaughters were deliriously happy of his gift. My condition was that in time we should let him go.

  We tried. We had learnt that initially his mother had come to look for him many times, piercing the starry night with shrieks of pain, leaping from the palm trees on to the flowering shrubs round his prison. Emanuele put him out on a branch at dusk, and waited several evenings for her to return: but she never did, nor did Koba dare to go off on his own either.

  Finally we decided to keep him with us.

  When the holiday came to an end, we had to leave the coast and return to Nairobi, but there were bushbabies there, and we hoped that one day we could let Koba go free.

  He was a delightful pet. He slept curled in a ball in some hidden recess, on a bookshelf or above a window, and woke up to eat the fruit or the insects which the children constantly caught for him. He often came to us hoping for a special morsel, a sip of the sweet warm tea that he loved, his head slightly tilted as if waiting, his round velvety eyes immense, attentive and oddly unblinking. He took our gifts with dainty fingers, and ate them slowly, holding them with both hands like biscuits.

  There was something curiously disquieting about him, and I could never fix my eyes on his without unease, as if he were the memory of a lost identity, lingering in the subconscious, like the faded image of an unknown prehistoric ancestor.

  Apart from the repellent habit of urinating on his hands and leaving a trail of humid scent which smelt strongly of liquorice and overripe papaya, Koba was quiet and gentle. But our dogs were unsettled by his presence, pricked their ears at him, and growled in warning – or was it perhaps jealousy at our attentions – whenever they saw him grasping a curtain and repairing to a high shelf inside the house. We realized that we could not leave him at large on his own and, much as I hated it, we had to build a vast cage for him, enclosing enough leafy branches so that he could jump about safely whenever we went out.

  One day I came back to find the cage door open. The leaves seemed disturbed and Koba was no longer there. The children called him that evening, and the evening after, and many more. Emanuele put out ripe mangoes, passion fruit, fat glow-worms and grasshoppers on the forks of branches to tempt him. But Koba never came back. To console Emanuele I told him that Koba was probably happy and had found a companion. Yet I knew that he could not possibly cope on his own.

  It was an afternoon a week or so later, and it had been raining. Leaves covered the grass below the forest trees in my garden at Gigiri. Termites on their nuptial flights filled the air with their rich, merry buzz, and I inhaled deeply the humid air which smelt of rich earth, humus, and growing new shoots, while I walked around my garden with a friend who had come for tea.

  It looked like a discarded peluche, a toy of a lost childhood forgotten out in the rain, a kitten drowned in a Venetian canal, its wet hair sticking pitifully to a miserable, minute body. It lay next to the tree which it had not managed to climb. My friend gasped in horror.

  Koba’s tail seemed made out of damp feathers, but what haunted me for nights were his eyes: open and glassy, totally white, with no more pupils, they were like winter mirrors that had been dulled, and reflected no more.

  We buried him quickly behind the staff quarters, so that Emanuele would not know.

  The children continued to call him in the evenings, from time to time, and on a few occasions they thought they saw him leaping in the treetops like a fairy. I never dared to tell them what had really happened. We all missed him. The memory remained of the faint smell of liquorice and overripe fruit which was his, and a sadness like a sense of guilt.

  And for a time I could not hug my large dogs, although I knew that they were not to blame, really.

  Years later, one afternoon in Laikipia, a plane landed at Kuti and a couple of friends strolled over to the house. Something seemed to move under the girl’s jacket. Round eyes, unblinking, peered at me from its folds and brought back the memories.

  ‘It is a young bushbaby,’ said Davina. ‘Could you please keep him: the others have rejected him; they wounded him in a fight.’

  Davina’s mother had a family of semi-tame bushbabies living in and around her house in Karen.

  ‘He is too young you know. They are territorial and they are going to kill him.’ She gazed up at my tall roof of makuti.

  ‘He will just love it here; please take him.’

  I looked at all my dogs. The image of Koba’s white eyes chilled me for a moment. The bushbaby grasped my hand with tiny sticky fingers.

  ‘Why not? Provided you accept that I shall never put him in a cage.’ I shivered at the thought. ‘Bushbabies should be free to escape. He may find a friend.’

  I knew we had bushbabies in Laikipia, particularly in the Enghelesha forest, although I had never seen one yet.

  I called him Charlie. He spent the days sleeping in the tiny wooden bird house the fundi built for him, and which I hung from the tallest post on my verandah. In the evenings, when the bats filled the air with their screeches, he woke up and went to feed from a bowl of fruit and cake crumbs and honey. Then he crept out to the windows, trying to catch the odd night-insect attracted by the spotlights reflected in the glass.

  He loved my ceiling. The poriti rafters made from mangrove poles, and the palms fronds of the makuti roof may have still smelt of the coast from which his ancestors came, and provided him with the most exceptional palaestra for his jumps, mad exercises and somersaults. Every night he performed there for us, pirouetting wildly above our heads in daring leaps like a circus acrobat.

  During dinner he used to approach the dining room table in expectation of some special gift of a choice tid-bit. He loved chocolate soufflé, at which Simon, my Turkana cook, excelled. And when he could smell hot vanilla, he waited for me to stand calling him softly, holding out to him a piece which he ate politely, looking at me intently, with his thoughtful round eyes.

  One should really never ever keep wild pets in a tame home. It is impossible to give them the constant care and attention they need. They develop habits that they should not have, and become dependent and over-trusting. Usually it all ends in tears.

  I went to Europe for
ten days, and when I came back Charlie was no longer there. In the evenings, during my absence, there had been none of the lights to which he was used, none of the animation, the activity, or the human life, unfolding below in front of his curious eyes.

  Bushbabies are gregarious and perhaps, as he had felt lonely, he had wandered off. An eagle owl, that eats kittens, squirrels and rats, had been seen often, flapping its heavy wings in the moonlit garden, its hooded eyes scanning the flowered bushes for a sudden stir. The first night I came back I spotted its large sinister shadow perched on the yellow fever tree in the middle of my lawn, and its raucous scream of hunger before the hunt sent a cold shiver down my spine.

  I felt sure that he had taken Charlie. I was sad, and so was Emanuele, then a teenager with long legs and wise eyes, and also Sveva, a chubby toddler who had adored watching Charlie’s antics, and giggled at his passion for vanilla and chocolate desserts.

  It was perhaps a year or so later that Rocky Francombe, the manager’s wife, whose house at Centre was about eight kilometres away from mine, told me with great excitement:

  ‘We saw a bushbaby last night. He came over to the house while we were having our pudding, and climbed onto the verandah beams as if waiting for us to notice him. He ate some of the passion fruit mousse from my hands. Today Andrew found him asleep in a bougainvillea bush, next to our bird bath. He had taken over an abandoned starling’s nest. I think he is Charlie.’

  She smiled at me.

  ‘He was not alone. There was another bushbaby asleep with him.’

  10

  The Pendulum

  Home is the sailor, home from the sea.

  Robert Louis Stevenson, Underwoods,

  I, XX, ‘Requiem’

  He was a pleasant man with old-fashioned manners, tall and still good-looking in his middle age. His greying hair, impeccably parted on one side, set off his tanned skin, regular features and dark, lively eyes.

  Like Dickie Mason, the father of Emanuele’s friend Charlie, he had been in the Royal Navy, and of the dashing young officer he still kept the upright bearing and chivalrous ways. He loved sailing and when we went to Kilifi he often spoke of long-gone adventures of the sea.

  He excelled at telling stories and had, in fact, a fascinating and seemingly unending repertoire of legends and tales of the coast. Most had to do with the magic beliefs, fetish baobabs, full-moon ceremonies, and the happy or unhappy ghosts for which Kilifi, like Takaungu, Vipingo, Mtwapa, Shimoni and the other Kenyan creeks, was renowned.

  In the not-too-distant past, Arabs still sailed to East Africa to fill their dhows with ivory and game skins, spices, coconuts and slaves. Before loading them at night with the high tide, they would chain them to the walls of the ocean caves along the fiords that abound along the Kenyan shores, safe mooring for sailing boats, out of the reach of the ocean’s swell.

  The spirits of the slaves linger around the many Muslim cemeteries for which the coast is well known, and amid the ancient, mouldy ruins of abandoned towns to be discovered in the forest, among the roots of giant bread-trees and baobabs, overgrown with luscious vegetation, liana and wild orchids. The local people, the Giriama, still kept alive their witchcraft and secret rituals.

  I liked all these legends, as they belonged to the atmosphere of mystery and exoticism of the coast, the strange ripe scents of wild jasmine and frangipani, cloves and cinnamon, vanilla and incense, sandalwood and musk; the unusual rich taste of caramelized pineapple, star-fruit, madafu and sharp lime; the prevalence of a thousand dangerous snakes and large iguanas, prehistoric monsters with eyes like glass beads, and flickering tongues; the innumerable coloured birds and monkeys, fruit-bats and bushbabies; the solemn baobabs, like columns of vanished temples, and the palms and casuarinas forever shivering with the salty breath of the monsoon.

  I had known him for as long as we had been going to Kilifi. Yet although in Paolo’s and Emanuele’s days we saw much of him whenever we went to the coast, he was really a social acquaintance who had always retained a certain aloofness, and I could not say that, although I liked him, I had known him well.

  I was therefore slightly surprised when, in the obscure days after the disappearance of Emanuele, a very sensitive letter of condolence was followed by the message that he would come and visit me in Laikipia for a week.

  Emanuele had been dead only three months or so, and the pain of his absence still lingered, shrouding me in waves of solitude and longing.

  I had been suffering from a sinus problem, created by the dust, and when he arrived I was still nursing a searing headache. He looked at me and, with half a smile, he dug into his pocket and produced a strange object which he swung in front of my eyes. It was a cone of brass, polished to a bright shine, that had been tied to a length of fishing line. I must have looked puzzled.

  ‘Do you know what this is?’ he asked. ‘A pendulum. It can be used for a variety of purposes. Particularly to heal, but also to find something that you have lost; to get an answer to a problem; and to discover water. I can try to help you. Then perhaps I shall teach you to dowse with it.’

  I was intrigued.

  He held his pendulum above my head with firm hands, and sure enough, in a few instants it began to swing, slowly at first, then faster and faster, almost disappearing in a rapid swirl. Just watching it I felt dizzy: then the pain in my forehead seemed to be lifting. In a few minutes I felt much better. I was genuinely amazed.

  He suggested that we should try it a few more times over the next day or two, and after that I was totally cured.

  ‘I wish I could do the same. It must be wonderful to be able to help people in such a natural way.’

  ‘You probably could,’ he told me seriously. ‘Most of us have this capacity, if we would only care to develop it. In the meantime let’s go and look for water. We shall see.’

  I was at that time trying to occupy myself with the works of the ranch and farm, and needed to locate some places at which to dig bore-holes. His unexpected help was most welcome. As a farmer, he was very knowledgeable about crops and cattle, and was extremely interested in our activities at Ol Ari Nyiro. There was a calm and a depth about him, and it was fascinating to go round the ranch with him, identifying the best locations for a bore-hole.

  We would leave the car and set off on foot until we reached a spot that seemed suitable. There we held the pendulum in front of us without moving, waiting for it to rotate or swing on its own. Often nothing happened, but sometimes the reaction was so strong that I was taken by surprise. In this case we double-tested the spot with a rod cut out from a shrub. The first time that it began to vibrate, almost jumping from my hands, and then to point forcefully towards the ground, I was caught completely unawares and was so elated that I almost dropped it. It felt like stepping into a different world, where the unknown forces of the earth that had guided past generations revealed themselves, in their uncanny natural strength and at the same time in all their simplicity.

  I was an enthusiastic pupil. Time flew, and I was sorry when the day came for my friend to leave. Just before getting into his car, he took the pendulum from his pocket.

  ‘I would like you to keep this,’ he said looking at me seriously. ‘But you must promise that you will use it. You have this power, and it is your duty to practise it.’

  I protested. I knew how much that pendulum meant to him and I could see that a sort of personal and intimate tie existed between the two of them, rather like that of a wizard and his magic wand, or a witch and her black cat. But he put it firmly into my hands, and, before I knew it, he was gone.

  I used the pendulum now and again as time went by, mostly on Sveva when she was sick, and once or twice on my mother and some of my friends. Many felt a certain relief, and I could never work out how large a part suggestion played in this exercise. Most people who knew him remarked how extraordinary it was that he had given me the pendulum, as it was well known how much he valued it. I felt proud to have been chosen.

  I did no
t see much of him over the next few years. I never went down to Kilifi again, as it held too many memories of happy days, and I knew he came to Nairobi only occasionally.

  One morning, I sat at my hairdresser in Muthaiga, and was reading a book I had just bought, because the title had triggered my curiosity: Mysteries, by Colin Wilson. The first chapter was called ‘Ghosts, Ghouls and Pendulums’. Inevitably, I thought of him, and wondered how he was. We had heard that he had remarried; it had been years since I had seen him.

  It was a sudden sensation of being watched, and I lifted my eyes. There, amongst the ladies in curlers and the bottles of shampoos, in the mirror in front of me, I saw him. At the same time he turned his head, our eyes met and he smiled in recognition. I was so astonished by what I could not call a coincidence, that for a moment I could not talk. Instead, I help up my open book towards him, so that he could read what I was reading. His smile simply widened but without a fraction of surprise, as if what had happened had been totally normal.

  ‘With you it was to be expected,’ he said calmly. ‘Are you well? How is the pendulum?’ I noticed he looked tired, almost breathless. It was a hot day.

  Only a few weeks later at a dinner party in the Belgian Embassy, someone mentioned casually: ‘How tragic, what happened in Kilifi.’

  And this is how I heard. He had left his house one morning, with his shotgun, and went off to Takaungu for a walk. He never came back. They had found his headless body in the afternoon, the gun close by, on the stretch of beach along the creek not far from Denys Finch-Hatton’s old house.

  Nobody could explain what really had happened.

  He had gone, this loyal friend of past days, with his mysteries and his stories, a secret pain never to be known. Another Kenyan drama, another ghost to join the ones of Kilifi under the baobab trees.