By Nairobi standards they’d spent a fortune, but Calvin paid for everything and assured her that there was plenty more where that came from. Eleanor had the fleeting impression of what it must feel like to be a Mafia princess. It seemed she had acquired a sugar daddy who was determined to make up for the fact not that he repulsed her but that she found him attractive. She was clearly in training for a new life, one which she could assume much more gracefully than old Eleanor, saver of tinfoil and hoarder of plastic bags, would ever have expected. Perhaps anyone is capable, she posited nervously, of becoming their opposite, since, in its abstract absolute, black was white.
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6
Recipes for Romantic Evenings
Wipe your muddy hands on his clean white towel. Don’t rinse your glass.
Leave the dirty pan in the sink. Advice teased over Eleanor’s shoulder as she went about her business in Calvin’s house. Sometimes she took it; with Nairobi’s red clay, that towel would never be the same.
Later, more pressing: Why do you ask so few questions? What are you afraid of? The snicker. Eleanor felt continually mocked.
Lord, what was she not afraid of? Tentatively, she did ask questions. ‘Calvin…Where’s this from?’
‘That’s Panga’s kukri.’
Eleanor hefted the knife up and down. She had not seen it on the table before; no, it had not been there before. The weapon was daunting. Its short handle wrapped in leather, the blade was broad and curved, weighted forward. Traditionally when a Gurkha lost a wager, he was obliged to lop off his own left hand. This would do the trick—wickedly sharp, with a nick at its base so the blood would drip from the knife and not down your arm.
‘How would a Kamba get hold of a kukri?’
‘Stole it,’ he said crisply. ‘She worked as household staff, you know, during those rare little lulls in African massacre. Swiped it from some ex-Army pillock who served in Burma, when she was employed to not-clean his kitchen. In my experience, even with the most trustworthy there’s one perfect temptation they can’t resist.
With Panga, it’s knives. Like the Masai and cattle, she thinks they all rightfully belong to her. All knives are therefore borrowed. In her book, she doesn’t steal; she takes them back.’ His present tense was unsettling.
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Over the weeks, more bevels carved Eleanor’s path: machetes, bowies, bayonets, a samurai scimitar with a sharkskin scabbard.
They were neither cast carelessly in a corner nor arched decoratively on the wall. The blades were placed, squarely, where Eleanor would find them, then removed, just as peremptorily as they appeared.
When she cajoled, ‘Are you trying to tempt me to domestic violence?’
Calvin acted perplexed.
There was one more photograph of Panga besides the one in the diving hood. Eleanor found it by accident—if indeed she was finding anything in this apparently innocent cottage by accident—scrabbling for a handkerchief in the drawer beside his bed: crinkled, out of focus, black and white. Leaning on a hijacked Red Cross van, its roof flame—cut off to mount a machine-gun, there was the same lanky black woman in tatty hair, jauntily cradling an AK—47 like its mother. She wore shabby khaki, sleeves and ankles rolled up, and no shoes.
‘Do you think she would be jealous?’ supposed Eleanor, studying the photo that morning. ‘Of me?’
‘I don’t imagine you bother Panga in the slightest,’ he said tersely.
‘Why not?’
‘She is only jealous of women the least bit like her,’ he said impatiently. ‘There’s no question that given half a chance Panga would make quick work of Bunny Morton; any day now I expect to find Bunny’s individually wrapped packets stacked in the freezer like steak. But I can’t think of two females with less in common than you and that hellcat.’
‘I don’t see how we’re different as all that.’
Calvin laughed. ‘Where do you chart the resemblance exactly?’
Eleanor glowered.
‘Are you jealous of her?’
‘Intensely,’ she confessed.
But Eleanor was being less than candid. She was also entranced.
She found the story, as she pulled its details from Calvin tooth by tooth, incredibly romantic. In fact, she wondered if she wasn’t more taken by the tale than by Calvin himself. And later she would need an explanation, though
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Calvin would no longer imagine there was anything to explain.
Panga had first arrived on Calvin’s doorstep, delivered by the extended family of his housegirl, who had married off to Machakos.
Sinewy arms akimbo, flounced in a floral print, she looked ‘for all the world’, he said, ‘like a Doberman pinscher got up in a dress’.
He spoke to her in his stiff pidgin, the weak, ungrammatical Swahili Eleanor deplored. While in time he would realize Panga’s English was better than she let on, she first feigned incomprehension, loitering to eavesdrop, trying to maintain a stupid look on her face, which for such a weasel of a woman must have required cunning concentration. Panga liked the advantage, Eleanor decided, knowing more than you thought. It was good military strategy.
When he showed the new housegirl the detergents, brooms and pots, she would have gazed at the ceiling, insolent. The job was beneath her, and Panga would not easily, like that askari the other night, watch spoiled, rich wazungu titter through his house without comment.
Eleanor, who compulsively swabbed the ring of her bath and swept up toast crumbs even in a house with servants, admired Panga’s atrocious housekeeping more than her employer had. In the heavy red clay that settled daily in the dry season, Calvin would find a few disdainful swipes on his bureau, with nothing moved; on the glass table in the nook he drew pictures all through breakfast, if he was not picking the hard crust of old dinners from his plate.
Panga’s idea of dish washing was drawn from quick decampments at dawn with the rebels on your trail, a swish in a stream and you legged it. Wonderful, thought Eleanor, rinsing, drying and returning her coffee cup to its cupboard, upside-down to keep out dust.
Barring Panga’s one specialty, she was a wretched cook as well.
The Kamba had contempt for vegetables, and left them on the stove to melt, run out of water, char. If she served sweets, they were commercial and stale, and she all but threw them at him with coffee; considering the quality of Nairobi
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cakes, they’d have made formidable weapons. It was only meat she had time for, and even her chicken ran red.
When on the verge of giving her notice, Calvin began to observe that there were a few things she did commendably, albeit not what she was told. She was fast and accurate with an axe, and splintered a cord in two hours. She could slit the throat of a sheep cleanly, skinning, gutting and butchering the animal in minutes. She could wring the neck of a hen with what looked suspiciously like pleasure, and while she might have made a hash of green beans and auber-gines, the thwack of her cleaver neatly jointed the fowl in a few strokes. And she was a fundi with vehicles, clever at cutting a fan belt out of an inner tube or improvising a new accelerator cable from fence wire. SWAPO could not always send off for parts in the middle of the Namibian desert.
‘I’ve tinkered with a few cars myself,’ said Eleanor.
‘Oh? My fuel pump’s packed up in the old Toyota. Want to give it a go?’
‘No, thank you,’ she said coldly. ‘I have a report to finish. I was just mentioning it, that’s all.’
Once he decided to keep her on a bit more, Panga approached her employer, stooping to English because this was important. Would it be possible, bwana, if she could come to work in something other than this dress. He remembered her air, not pleading but martial, as if requesting to stand at ease. He replied that she could work in a polar bear suit as long as she repaired his carburettor, and she refused to smile.
The next day she appeared, relaxed and cocky, in threadbare fatigues, the sleeves and trousers rolled up, her hard, bony feet bar
e.
Panga had a distinctive smell which still lingered in the cottage—strong and tangy, just shy of rancid; it was a classically African aroma of beef fat, smoke and dung. As Eleanor once more slavered on her stern morning deodorant, Calvin commented, ‘Panga was filthy.’
‘Oh, terrific,’ said Eleanor, tossing the roll-on in disgust. What a waste of imported perfumery, when what clearly got Calvin going was dirt. Trouncing into the living room, Eleanor could imagine the Kamba slinging out from under his Toyota and sauntering to the house, languishing into that armchair
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to smooth the grease into her skin like cold cream, relishing the sheen she could raise with the help of a leaky gasket. Blacks, thought Eleanor, really had much nicer skin.
‘When she admitted she was a mercenary, I laughed,’ Calvin related. ‘A mistake. Panga has a vicious sense of humour about everyone but herself.’
‘A familiar quality.’
‘I find myself quite a cracker,’ he defended.
‘Only when you’re telling the joke. You have to control everything,’ she ventured boldly. ‘Especially jokes.’
Panga had hit on one line of work in Africa where a woman could excel. Far from suffering discrimination, Panga rarely lacked for employment so long as governments had a shelf-life of unrefrigerated milk. Most troops were terrified of female soldiers, more so of Panga in particular. With one look at her protruding, two-jaw grin, the skin mummified to her skull, her AK-47 nursed at her breast like a suckling toto, seasoned rebel soldiers would drop their weapons and shriek down the hillside in the opposite direction. No one had ever run from Eleanor, except from sheer awkwardness.
Panga had no politics. ‘She didn’t have convictions,’ Calvin explained, ‘only attitudes.’
‘So she would fight for Idi Amin? Charles Taylor, Mengistu, Mobutu? What about South Africa?’
Calvin shrugged. ‘If they’d have her. Marxists, capitalists, governments or insurgents—as long as they could get their hands on a can of petrol and a round of ammunition or two.’
‘You admired that?’
‘Enormously.’
‘You stagger me.’
‘Panga acknowledged only one side of all conflicts: her own. And I respect anyone who can flight, never mind for what. I sometimes think the West is losing its capacity to act, to execute. I can’t count the colleagues I’ve suffered who, after assessing the likely demise of the human race in our lifetime, promptly schedule another conference.’
‘How did you know?’ Eleanor prodded. ‘It’s possible to be around someone for a long time before you realize you’re in love with them.
Isn’t it? They’re just sort of—there. Until one 84
day you realize that if they left town, or fell for someone else, your whole life would cave in.’
‘I suppose…’ Calvin drummed his fingers. ‘When she started poisoning my girlfriends.’
‘You had girlfriends?’
He frowned. ‘Too many. Whole evenings. Could have been working.’
‘And now you get more done,’ she said drily. ‘With no girlfriends.’
‘That’s right.’
The early mischief Panga passed off as careless: flies in pasta, fillets all fat. But the pranks got more rancorous, and when Calvin entertained a young lady in the sitting room, Panga clanged so in the kitchen they would have to shout. The night Najma came to dinner, his guest pushed her entrée reluctantly around the plate and only chewed at her salad, whose grit ground audibly like a hand-turned posho mill. At last she confessed she hadn’t a notion how to go about attacking this creature. Calvin poked at her meat and pried the wings out.
‘Bloody hell!’ he exclaimed appreciatively. ‘It’s a fried bat!’
He chortled, and that was the end of Najma.
Panga crossed a line, however, with Elaine Porter, whom Calvin
‘truly fancied for a time’, albeit in that ‘sensible way’—she would have been good-natured, engaging in conversation and interested in current events; in short, made a solid, reasonable choice for a life partner—that Calvin had ‘only since recognized as the mark of a relationship destined to go absolutely nowhere’.
The excess of garnishes might have alarmed him, for the chicken breasts arrived with a diagonal of courgette, a daisy of carrot, a flourish of parsley. He recalled, Elaine was on a rift about rangeland degradation, and between decrying the over-grazing of the Masai and the cultivation of marginal farmland by the Kikuyu she actually ate some. Half-way through, her jaw slowed; she stopped talking and turned the breast upside-down, and then she screamed.
Calvin claimed Elaine wasn’t a dainty woman, more the sort you could take to the bush who wouldn’t whine about having to wash her hair. Like Eleanor, you could bring her to 85
tribal ceremonies and she would taste the blood and milk and manage a smile and claim it was very good. She would not have been given to squealing over ordinary chicken, so Calvin leapt to her plate while Elaine stood trembling on the other side of the room, her hand over her mouth.
He saw her point. The underside of the chicken was writhing with maggots.
Calvin tore into the kitchen, where Panga was innocently trickling water over dirty dishes, though it was only by the fact that some of the bowls were in the drainer that you could tell which stack was washed. Panga had a spatial relationship to hygiene: if the dish was on the right side of the sink, it was clean.
‘If I were Kenyan,’ growled her employer, ‘I’d have you beaten.’
Panga stood erect with her small, sharp chin in the air—even sitting, though you could say she slouched, her body remained straight, her legs extended as if hoping you would trip on them. She was actually shorter than Eleanor, but seemed taller, because Panga didn’t bend. She was most certainly didn’t apologize. ‘Try.’
‘What’s the idea?’ He was angry, which may have been the idea at that.
‘You bring these malayas, stinking of powder so they make me gag. I serve them alcohol and they giggle. Then the meal. And sweet.
So you can take them to your room. In the morning, I wash the shahawa from your sheets.’
‘That is what you are paid to do.’
‘Not enough.’
‘Are you telling me you serve my guests food crawling with maggots because you want a raise in salary?’
She turned to the sink, washing her hands, as if of him. ‘I will go to Angola soon. Then you may take as many malayas as you like.’
He had to admit she was the strangest-looking beautiful woman he’d ever met. Eleanor pointed out that protruding teeth, because they were reminiscent of cows, were a mark of loveliness among Kambas, which would help explain Panga’s haughty bearing. They were not, however, ordinarily appealing to Calvin. And she was mercilessly thin, the chest at her
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collar striated; she hadn’t a curve on her, and the boomerang shoulders would be lethal in bed. All tendon and gristle, Panga was inedible. Skinned and roasted you wouldn’t get a bite off her, and the strings of her arms would stick in your teeth.
He had backed out of the kitchen to attend to his date, because Elaine was throwing up.
Calvin and Panga had barely spoken to one another for days. Panga sullenly soaked the parts of her AK in kerosene, or put an edge on her kukri, the scrape of that ghastly blade on carborundum grating Calvin’s nerves. He hid behind newspapers, scanning nervously for renewed hostilities near by. For once Calvin was a peacemonger. If Renamo resumed hostilities in Mozambique, he would lose his new servant and she was irreplaceable. Where would he ever again find such an appalling housekeeper?
He decided that inviting any more women to his cottage would be medically dangerous. That Friday night he went out and came back the next morning expecting to find his mattress slashed with a cavalry sabre—something extravagant. His bed was in perfect trim.
So Calvin announced boldly on the weekend that he was having
‘an important, intelligent woman to dine’
on Sunday, and she was
‘very pretty’, so he expected ‘an especially good meal’. A gauntlet.
Panga coolly dripped oil in her revolver, testing the trigger, snap-snap.
It seems that Lisa was a ninny. She was stunning all right, but in the early stages of Euro-gaga over Africa. Not over the people, of course—animals. Eleanor knew the type. She would expect him to spin exhilarating tales of life in the bush without telling a single decent yarn in return. These women never feel, as Eleanor had so dis-astrously at the Hilton, the need to redeem their company, for Lisa thought if she clapped her hands and hiked her dress, men were more than compensated for their efforts because she had nice legs.
Calvin had balked. He valued the collateral of shapely ankles as spare change, and if he were billing Lisa per story she was running a wickedly high tab by the third glass of wine. He was looking 87
forward to dinner and rose, rubbing his hands to suppose out loud,
‘I wonder what Panga’s cooked up this time!’
At table, Calvin kept eyeing Lisa’s trout for the naked mole rat stuffed up its belly but spotted only lump-meat crab. He fidgeted, and over salad— washed—began to despair. Calvin slipped into the kitchen and folded his arms.
‘This is the sneakiest trick yet,’ he accused her.
‘There was something wrong with the fish?’
‘Not a thing. Why?’
‘You said, special meal.’
‘That was an ordinary meal,’ he protested. ‘What’s wrong? You’re not leaving?’
‘I go to Angola, I told you. What do you care? You get another girl. It is easy. Look at you. Bwana Piper is very good at getting more girls.’
‘Don’t go. Or go if you have to. But come back.’
She smeared at a plate. ‘To this? I am a soldier.’
‘No. Forget the dishes. Work on the jeep,’ he proposed feebly.
‘And wash your sheets?’
‘No. Do what you’re good at.’ He touched the car grille at her collar. ‘Get them dirty.’
She eyed him; he had finally offered her a job worthy of a buck-toothed mercenary.