“As long as we want.”
He began to kiss her, for last time as well as this time, and he pressed his palm protectively on her belly and the round hardness of her pelvis in the tight, worn old jeans that didn’t become her. It was all understood, between them. He undressed her and took her to his bed in that bare, male room which he had never shared with a woman; at once a schoolboy’s room and a lonely old man’s room, the room left behind him and the room somewhere ahead of him in his life. But the narrow bed was full again, he was full again, and it was all there, the body that had run shaking into the water, the big legs shuddering, the breasts swaying. This time he saw every part of it, watched the nipples turn to dark marbles rolling in his fingers, found the thin, shining skin with a vein like an underground stream running beneath it, where the springy soft hair ended and the rise of the thigh began, had revealed to him the aureole of mauve — brown skin where the cheeks of the backside divided at the end of her spine. All this and more, before he hung above her on his knees and she said with her practical parenthesis, “It’s all right” (knowing how to look after herself, trusted not to make any trouble) and she reached up under his body and took the whole business, the heavy bunch of sex, in her hands, expressing the strangeness, the marvel of otherness, between the two bodies, and then he entered all that he had looked on, and burst the bounds of his body, in hers.
She was a woman full of sexual pride. She said, “You had a lot of semen.” His mouth and nose rested in her hair, smelling the dank, flat lake water. Beneath one instant and the next, he slept and woke again; his hand left her humid breasts and trailed, once, down the trough formed by the rise of her hip from her rib — cage, as the strings of a guitar are brushed over as it is laid aside.
They put out the light, now, and in the dark he began to talk. It was the old story; the unburdened body unburdens the mind. Hence the confidences betrayed, the secrets sprung, beans spilled, in beds. He was aware of this but talked to her just the same; about Shinza. “—I have this unreasonable idea that when I see him again — I will know.”
“That’s what I thought. About you and me. If—if—it should come to that — again — I thought, then I’ll know.”
“What?” he said, teasingly. His sex lifted its blunt head and gently butted her, a creature disturbed in its sleep.
“What we would do,” she said.
He drove to the Bashi that week. At the European — style house in Chief Mpana’s compound, the man in clean grey flannels and polished shoes was summoned by a child. He said that Shinza was sick. Bray said that he was sorry; could he go over and see him in his house, then?
“No, he’s sick.”
But surely, just to greet him? What was the illness?
He was asleep. He was asleep because he was sick.
“If I wait a while?” Bray said.
The man had eyes like the inside of a black mussel shell, opaque and with a membranous shine, as if they had been silvered over with mercury. Although his face was lean, the lids were plump and smooth. He said, “He’s sick.” It was the contemptuous obtuseness that had done so well for colonial times; the white man could be counted upon to turn away and leave you alone: dumb nigger.
“If he knew I was the one who was here, he would want to see me.”
“He’s sick.”
Bray went back to the car and smoked one of his cigars. There was a big box for Shinza on the seat. He should have left them for him, anyway; he was on his way back to the house with the cigars in his hand when he had an impulse to skirt it and go to the big hut where Shinza and the girl and the baby lived. Only children were about in the yard. The door was open, and before he knocked softly he saw, with a wave of familiarity, the deal table stacked with papers, the trunk with the coffee set displayed, the family group of leaders askew on the wall — then Shinza’s girl, Shinza’s wife appeared, carrying the baby, no longer pinkish yellow; it had taken on colour as a pale new leaf does. She greeted him shyly, formally. He apologized; and how was Shinza feeling?
She said, “Oh? Oh he is all right,” suddenly speaking in mission schoolgirl’s English. “But I thought he was ill in bed?” She stood and looked at him for a moment, deeply, startled, caught in his presence as in a strong light. Then she went over and closed the door behind him. It was dim and secure in the room; the thatch creaked, an alarm clock ticked. Hardly able to see her, he said, “What’s happened to Shinza?” His voice sounded very loud to him.
She leaned forward— “He’s away again. Don’t tell anybody.”
“Over the border?”
She grew afraid at what she had done. “I think so.”
He said, “Don’t worry. I’ll go quickly. If anybody sees me, I’ll say you wouldn’t let me see him. It’s all right.”
The baby’s arms and legs, where he lay on her lap, waved like the tentacles of some vigorous underwater creature. She said, “Must I tell him you came?”
“If you don’t think it will get you into trouble with him.”
“I’ll tell him.”
The baby gave a little shriek of joy. He whispered, “Your son’s a fine boy,” and took the cigars back with him, in case she decided to forget that he had come.
Chapter 12
The new chief of police had arrived; a man from the Central Province, but a Dendi, one of the Gala — speaking tribes. “Ex-middleweight,” Aleke said, “Once had a go for the title about ten years ago, they tell me.”
“Punch-drunk?”
“Oh no, no he’s all right up there.” Aleke laughed.
Rebecca told him, “The new police chief’s been in to ask for you.” “Really? What should he want me for?” The next time he was at the boma, she put her head around the door quickly— “He’s here again.” A few minutes later Aleke’s voice mingled with another in the corridor, and Aleke brought in a man as tall as Bray himself, with the flat — nostrilled but curved nose that the mingling of the blood of Arab slavers with the local populations had left behind. Evidently the nose had not been broken although the whole face had a boxer’s asymmetry. Aleke went off. “I’ll tell the boy to bring you tea.”
“I’m glad to know you are here in this district, Colonel, it’s an honour.”
“And you — are you pleased with your new posting?”
The exchange of genialities went on.
“Oh yes, well, you get accustomed to this moving about. We are still reorganizing, you know. The country is young, isn’t it so? Well, I’m just getting organized — there are always little things, when you take over. But I don’t think I’ll have trouble. There will be no irregularities from now on. From now on everything will be”—he spread his fingers and jerked his hands apart— “straight — right—” And he laughed, disposing of peccadilloes.
“I’ve heard of your reputation in the ring,” Bray said. “I’m going to have to ask you to come along and give us some tips at the centre. We’re going to have various recreation clubs there, as well.”
“Oh, a pleasure, a pleasure, if I can fit it in — this job of mine is really full time — you never know when you can count on being free for a few hours, just to take it easy—” The affability of a man making promises he knew he would not be asked to fulfil.
And the girl had said, perhaps Mweta did it to please you. There would be “no irregularities, now”; also to please me? There wasn’t anything else the policeman could have come to see him for. Bray sat in the worn chair at the desk that was not really his, and took off his glasses to rub his eyes. His hands pushed the skin back from the sides of his nose over the cheekbones, pressed up the slack of his neck, lifted the eyebrows out of shape. Shinza was over the border; with friends, there; again. The wife said that: again. Shinza goes back and forth over the border, and perhaps they know about it — he saw the pleasant, battered face of the policeman who replaced Lebaliso — perhaps they know, and perhaps they don’t. Mweta would be wounded because no letter came. It would be so simple to take a sheet of paper and write: you were right about Shinza not being at home, he goes and comes across the border, his wife says. You may have some ideas about who it is he sees over there.