She jumped out of bed and then stood stock-still as if she had suddenly discovered where she was; then busied herself, drawing the curtains, picking up discarded clothing.
He closed his eyes for the pleasure of hearing her moving about near him. He put out a hand where he thought she was passing, but it caught at air.
The wedding of Mrs Hillela Kgomani and Bradley Burns was delayed several times — not through her, one would never have suspected anything capricious about her. For family reasons. The death of Mr Burns’s brother; the absence of two of the sisters at summer school in Florence. She was always understanding about such things, not selfish the way most young women would have been. And his mother knew why. — She’s lived. She’s been through a lot in her young life. — The future husband accepted the family claims because Hillela did — Hillela had never known what it was to be at the centre of a family (future wife of the eldest son); the comfort and protection of its place in a homogeneous society. Anyway she was his wife already, they had made a home together in the brownstone that would never have been one without her. His only unease — not a fear, half-developed — was again that he might be changing her by the cherishing; whereas he wanted to be transformed by her. And so the one time the marriage was delayed for her reasons this was an opportunity for self-testing. She was going with Leonie to the country from which one of Leonie’s trophies, Reuel, was exiled, where the civil war had produced a terrible exodus of Southerners to refuge in the North. He knew it was dangerous although Leonie’s vocabulary turned bullets to water and blunted spears — they would ‘liaise’ with the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, the ‘logistics’ provided for military escorts and ‘safe conducts’. The cholera areas would be no go. The prophylactics were standard prescription. — We’ll most likely meet a lot of great people and have an inspirational time, Brad, the horror stories you keep hearing are months old, it’s always like that. I’d have spent my life on my front porch and never been any use to anyone if I’d listened to people’s disinformation.—
He delivered Hillela to the airport an hour after making love at five in the morning. He had said nothing, but the fear and anguish in the transparent control of his face had made her suddenly notice, and come back to the bed from folding something into her suitcase, smiling to blot out his wretchedness. He let her go. Greater than the reassurance in his body was the reassurance that he could pass the test. He would risk her, to keep her as she was.
She drank the water and ate the forbidden fruit. Of course she returned safely. These trips to misery under the sun grotesquely produced the sunburnished forehead and wind-scoured hair others brought back from Florida or the Bahamas. It was difficult to believe where she had been, what she had seen. Frightening; he embraced it all in her. It seemed the hair was a little longer, she had not cut it again, but he didn’t make any remark for fear of spoiling a slow surprise that was being prepared for him. She was working very hard at her reports and papers, consulting people here, hopping on local planes there (back to him by evening). In their bed, or drinking wine in deck-chairs under their yard elm, he shared it all. Everything was recounted. Over the forest the burned villages seen from a helicopter like black holes in a green blanket, and as the craft swooped low, the pink palms upturned from black arms, beckoning for help — And what could you do, for Christ’ sake? — Oh the surveyor with us pinpointed each place on a special map, supplies were dropped to them within the next few days. — Some would die before then. Some of the hands wouldn’t be there to take the food. — Yes, some would die. — Those steady black eyes held; turned away from nothing.
— It couldn’t simply have been a matter of what you grab first from all that must be left behind; not the things I saw. A woman with a mincer, one of those old-fashioned ones with a handle to turn, you know? She had nothing else — in rags; she must have abandoned or bartered for food everything else she’d managed to salvage. Those people had walked two hundred miles from their village. Another one had a heart-shaped mirror with a little wire stand at the back. And her baby. I saw her looking at herself. I saw a man almost kill another because that one wanted to kill the rabbit — no, must have been a hare, there aren’t any wild rabbits in Africa — he’d carried god knows how far in a cage made of twigs. They were both starving. There’re things people can’t live without.—
He stared and half-smiled.
But she had forgotten. Only he would measure the stature of his claim, diminished to nothing beside the kind of needs she knew.
There were women who had been raped by soldiers, and school-children abducted for military training. — By which side? — She wasn’t always clear. — And some lied. — She opened up under their feet the pit of wretchedness where what was true and what was not hardly had any meaning. How could she stand such ugly confusion? — But if they had been raped and mutilated? — Yes, but some were being fed and looked after by other soldiers. They gave them their own rations. We saw that, too. — It’s sickening. And what kind of decent regime can come out of people like that, even if they do win. From what you say, half the time they behave like the crowd they’re trying to get rid of. — Just as both sides have always done in every war. That crowd has to be fought with its own tactics — what else is war? You’re a victim, or you fight and make victims. There’s no other way. European countries are training that crowd, giving them planes and arms. The others can fight back only if the rural people support them — even if they have to force them sometimes.—
Frightening. She took sides in the general horror, she condoned means for ends; but at the same time she wasn’t looking on, no-one could say that of her, she was at home with polluted water and mined roads as well as in their brownstone. When he swelled with desire for her, he swelled also with admiration for her. Where is the line between lust and esteem? Hillela confused him, for ever.
She told him with true kindness, the impulse with which her guerrillas cared for some of the homeless and starving in their war. — Brad, I don’t think you should marry me. I’ve been with Reuel, on and off, when I was in Africa. I don’t think you’d be able to — well, to manage with that.—
He did not know where in the brownstone to go to get away from what he had heard, and he knew would never be unsaid, withdrawn by her. He blundered into the bathroom because there was a bolt on that door. Fixed to the tiles with plastic putty were the drawings of the stick-limbed, smiling symbols of Hillela, himself and the child, the happy family outside the house whose boldly smoking chimney signifies the security of the fireside.
A Face for a Postage Stamp
Reuel was the General — the General who had led an army coup in his country, returned it to civilian rule under his presidency, and then escaped when the former colonial power sent in paratroopers to restore the regime it favoured. Escaped with his life — the phrase goes; how manifest this was, in him. If he were in reach of a swimming pool, a river, the sea, he swam in all weathers in all countries, he could still run a mile (in his fifties, perhaps — he was discreet as an actress about his age), like all men who lead crowds and must be constantly visible, he needed only three or four hours’ sleep a night, and he ate and drank greedily or could manage as well without sustenance for days. His wide and fleshy chest under barathea or blue lounge suit moved grandly with deep breaths, as if always fresh from some exhilaration.
The General did not tell her he could not live without her. It was in his face, and hers — they recognized it in each other without ever having it stated: each could live as long as individual life lasted, independent of anyone, in the momentum of moving on.