Submergence Read Free Page B

because of horses, but had ended up in the Parachute Regiment, not the Hussars. Still no matter how hard he tried, the memory of the touch and smell of horses eluded him. The possibility of getting up on a horse’s back in the stinking Somali dark and filling the room was more fabulous to him than if one of the golden angels had appeared and he were able to touch its wings and raiment.
    He was not suited to domesticity, to a narrow French apartment, a daybed to catch the afternoon sun, expensive ashtrays and tables piled with glossy magazines. He lived in a fine house in the Muthaiga district of Nairobi, but the garden was more his home. There were steps leading down to a swimming pool and a terrace with a long table where sunbirds rested and rose again to feed off the bells of hanging flowers above. The lawn sloped to a ravine. He had seeded the top part with wild grass so that it was loud with cicadas at night. The bottom part gave out into euphorbia and large spiderwebs and bare earth. It was shadowy. He hardly went down there. There was an electric fence that now and again sparked and on the other side was a stream along which the thugs of Nairobi waded at night with their fence-cutters, iron barsand guns. Coils of smoke rose from the forest on the other side of the stream during the day. There was the thrum of traffic on the Thika Road. The fumes of the numberless minibuses carrying Nairobians to and from work somehow clarified the flowers and gave them the scent of vulnerability: here was a garden that might be swept away in a day.
    In the rainy season he drove home late from Upper Hill past the last of the drenched commuters who were heading on foot out across the rubbish fields at the back of the central business district. He steered around the yellow spikes laid on the road at the police checkpoints. The police held umbrellas and cheap torches. The rain cascaded down, the torch shone in his face, and it was not possible to think that the policemen would drop their umbrellas to lift up their machine guns, and what of the torches?
    The rain was another kind of curtain separating the rich from the poor. No one moved in the slums of Nairobi during those intensely wet and cold nights. The mud and the refuse were swept in under the tin doors. The streams surged. The thugs were up to their necks in it. When he got home he found that his housekeeper had stayed late. He always ate alone and drank by the fire and worked at a laptop on a desk by the window, or lay on a sofa and listened to music.
    He liked to take a morning run after a storm down long avenues lined with jacaranda trees. He went past the Chilean residence, the Arab League, the Dutch residence, and continued on around the Muthaiga Golf Club. The greens were flooded, his trainers soaked, legs spattered, a cross-country run, hare and hounds, except there were no hounds. It was only by chance, on returning to his house after one such run, that he noticed the thugs had cut a hole in his hedge in the night. There were rags on the electric fence where they had held the wire down with sticks. For a few nights he locked the veranda. The guards closed the hole with branches and shone their torches on it. It felt like a portal.
    Another morning he stepped out and found a hyena dead in a ditch by the front gate. A car had not hit it. There were no marks on it. Only in Somalia, imprisoned, did he understand that the beast’s death mask told of limits and a searching for a way out or a way in. Nairobi had closed in on the hyena like the moving walls in one of those old adventure serials which crush the bit player to death.

    The Atlantic is the ocean most crossed and considered by man. It covers a fifth of the globe. The land bounding it is greater than the land bounding the Pacific. Even though the Amazon and the Congo and numerous lesser rivers pour freshwater into it, the Atlantic is saltier than the other oceans. Its average depth is 3926 metres. There are gouges in its