“What are you thinking?” he asked me.
“Just of how much you’ve changed me.” I felt his lips on my neck, his breath. “This is why there is poetry,” I said, so softly I wasn’t sure he could hear me. “For days like these.”
Though I knew full well to expect it, I felt my stomach twist and my knees go soft to see Karen’s lovely furniture on the lawn and her books in crates. She was selling nearly everything, or giving it away—and I wrestled with the deep physical memory of watching Green Hills go piece by piece, just like this, while I looked on helplessly. Now that her land would go to others, she was trying to find a protected parcel for the Kikuyu who had been squatting on her property, so that they would have something for themselves that wouldn’t be taken away later. I found her wringing her hands over them and smoking, pacing a circle around her things.
“Now you have come, too,” she said. “So many visits and farewells, I don’t have any tears left for them.” Her white dress was loose around her breasts and legs, her straw hat abandoned on a chair. She looked young to me, suddenly.
“I could cry for you,” I said. “It wouldn’t take much.”
“Did you hear they’re going to hold a ngoma in my honour?” She waved away blue smoke. “Won’t that be something? There won’t be a dinner, though, like the one we had when the princes were here. All my things are crated.”
“I’m sure it will be wonderful all the same. They mean to celebrate you. You’ve made such an impression, and no one will soon forget you.”
“I’ve been dreaming about Denmark lately, and of standing on the bow of a great hulking ship, watching Africa grow smaller and smaller.”
“I hope you can come back one day.”
“Who has the privilege of knowing what’s possible, or the burden, for that matter? I can tell you, though, that I never thought I could leave. I think that’s what the dreams mean. I’m not leaving Africa, but slowly, ever so slowly, Africa has begun to seep out of me.”
I felt my throat constrict and swallowed against the knot. Her millstone table had been pulled out to the edge of the veranda. I’d always thought of it as the heart of Mbogani. The old granite was freckled and pitted and had borne how many brandy snifters or cups of tea, all her finery, the Sèvres and Limoges, Denys’s large feet, and his books and his hands. It was where she’d sat a thousand times, lighting a cigarette, shaking the match, and looking off into a middle distance, collecting herself. Gathering her wool scarf around her shoulders, preparing to speak.
It felt strange to be here with Karen and her vanishing farm, after all that had happened, the things that had drawn us together and pushed us apart. But the truth was it would have been even stranger not to come.
We sat down in two low rattan chairs, looking up at the five knuckled hills of the Ngong. “They say you’re learning to fly,” Karen said.
“Yes, it’s been such an important thing—and it’s made me so happy.”
“You’re twenty-eight?”
I nodded.
“That’s the age I was when I sailed for Kenya to marry Bror. How our lives turn and turn. Things come that we never would have predicted for ourselves or even guessed at. And yet they change us for ever.” She trailed her fingers in the grass, back and forth lightly and soundlessly. “I always wanted wings myself, you know…perhaps more than anything else. When Denys took me up the first time, we skimmed down over my hills, and then on to Lake Nakuru where thousands of zebras scattered under the shadow we made.”
“It’s the clearest feeling of freedom, isn’t it?” I asked her.
“Yes, but real clarity, too. I thought, Now I see. Only now. From that great height all sorts of things that have been hidden show themselves. Even terrible things have a beauty and a shape.” She caught my gaze with her black, black irises and held it. “You know, Beryl, you’ll never truly have Denys. Not any more than I did. He can’t belong to anyone.”
My heart dropped then. “Oh, Karen…” I reached for words, but they weren’t anywhere to be found.
“I suppose I always knew you loved him, but kept it from myself for a long time. Perhaps you did, too.”
It felt so awful, hearing her strip the veil from years and years—and yet also necessary. We should be telling the truth to each other, I thought. We’ve earned that, if nothing else. “I didn’t mean to take anything from you,” I finally said.
“And you haven’t. No, it’s the gods who are punishing me for wanting too much.” She looked up at her hills again and then around at her things on the lawn. “Such happiness always comes with a price, and yet I would pay it all again and more. I wouldn’t take a single moment back, not even to save myself pain.”
“You’re the strongest woman I know,” I told her. “I’m going to miss you.” Then I leaned to kiss her on her cheek, just where her tears had come to blur the powder.