He was listening without embarrassment or the simulated horror that invariably hid embarrassment when the subject came up; without the fatherly shelter of a Karel, the distraction of a Pavel, without even the perfect tender acceptance of the young man she was going to marry. He was looking at her, and he offered the cautery of desire for her: in her raw sorrow, far away, buried under the snow and the brownstone, she had felt that only a man could comfort for the loss of a man, only the smell of a man could make it impossible to disbelieve that a man actually came to an end on the kitchen floor.
When he spoke it was back on the level of conventional indiscretions that could be ignored in the light of day; he and she knew that when the bar closes and the music stops there are cockroaches and the sweat of cleaners. — And now? When did you marry the American fellow?—
— We’re not married.—
— He seems — okay. Nice house. Leonie and her crowd. Good people.—
They smiled — at his dismissal or approval.
— It’s been postponed a couple of times. Now until September.—
— What’d you actually mean by ‘get rid’?—
— The same as you mean — when you talk about power. But now it’s soup powder I’ve been doling out. Most of the time. Since Europe. When you see everything reduced to hunger, nothing, nothing but the terrible way eyes look at you, men, women, children, cattle, dogs — the eyes become the same — you can’t remember anything else. You only want to find something to stuff in those mouths. You lose all sense of what you wanted to do. And the same thing with pain. You just want to stop it, for them, for the hour you’re there with them. There’s no other purpose you can even think about.—
His nostrils widened and his big mouth creased down in emotional rebuttal. — It’s not for you. It’s not for you to spend your young life with those poor devils — and I can call them that because they’re my people, I’ve been one of them, I’m telling you, I’ve been without food or a place to go … That’s not getting rid. I’m going to tell you something — But he glanced up away from her rapidly as if at some sudden presence invisible to her, and returned with a change of mind and tone. — Come along with me to Mombasa tomorrow, you need a day off. All that misery, it gets on a person’s nerves.—
— Oh I can’t, we’re seeing Mzee in the morning.—
— Leonie will see the old Man. She’ll do all the talking, anyway, you won’t get a word in. You’re not really necessary.—
— Of course not! — She laughed at the airy offence. — But she expects me, and it might be useful for me to know him.—
— He’d see you any time, as soon as he recognized your name. Come for the ride.—
— I’ve never been to Mombasa.—
— Beautiful. I’ll drop you at the beach or the hotel — don’t you want to swim? Bring your things… I’ll be busy, you can do what you like. But we leave early, êh — five-thirty in the morning, can you get up?—
— I’ll be up!—
— Of course you’ll be up!—
— When would we get back?—
— Late tomorrow night. If it gets too late, we can find somewhere to sleep on the road. I have to be here by lunch-time, whichever way.—
— To see Mombasa! Why not?—
— But you better put on another dress …—
She amusedly presented herself, stretching her back upright against her chair, palms open. He gave her a quick, up-and-down military inspection. — Haven’t you got something else? It’s a five star, the hotel where we’ll have lunch.—
The General saw in her, that first evening, someone who could keep abreast of him; moving on.
Shoved, the sliding doors of the wardrobe in her hotel room rolled back, lighting the interior. There hung the few garments of those who wear the sackcloth rejection of the West’s plenty or the battledress of identification with an eternal guerrilla struggle of humans against the evil in themselves. She put on the garments every day, replacing dirty with clean. There was nothing that would please an exiled Third World general preparing his liberation army for reinvasion. She felt a sudden impatience with these jeans worn white at the knees and these baggy shifts. If the shops had been open — she had the impulse to buy that splashy African cotton and wrap herself in the fancy-dress ‘confections’ the beach girl had displayed on the camel-saddle chair at Archie’s Atrium. She put out a shift and found some sort of token adornment in a necklace made of red seeds and porcupine quills — a tourist thing she had in her suitcase to take back as a gift for one of the Burns sisters who was looking after the child. The traveller’s alarm clock beside her bed was set for five o’clock. This time, before she went off on a jaunt to the sea, she left a note. It was pushed under Leonie’s door at dawn.
A navy-blue blazer with gold buttons swayed on a hook provided between the front and back windows of the hired car. The General wore pale beige tropical trousers with a crease ruled exactly down each monumental thigh, hand-stitched Italian brogues on high-arched feet, and a batiste shirt whose placket and buttons strained to contain the rise of a punchbag-hard belly and the spread of pectoral muscles. His big head almost grazed the roof; his presence filled the car, giving off the pleasant scent of good soap and after-shave cologne. When he got out and went into the bush to have a pee, his passenger felt the weight of that presence emphasized by its absence. The moments scarcely interrupted their talk; within the landscape they were cleaving — villages, cyclists, roaming children, distorted crones with loads of wood or produce supported by a thong across the forehead — they were in the familiar territory of exile, that knows no hemispheres; a globe of blank spaces between those areas where one has been allowed in, whose climates are characterised not by rainfall and temperature but by whether one is tolerated only in inactivity or may seek alliances, support, and bases. There was no need to censor. Each knew the social and personal codes and morality of that territory, which those who had never been there could not, need not, know. — How can you ever explain? — He knew she was talking of the finger-supper questions, silences (of judgment), assumptions of understanding that understood nothing. — I don’t answer about Europe because no-one who hasn’t worked that way there can follow. It’s like when my little girl asks me where babies come from. I tell her. They grow in the mother’s tummy. That’s as far as she can go. Her innocence makes it unthinkable she could grasp how they get there — and more important, why. She doesn’t know enough to want to ask. The questions aren’t even ever the right questions — you know what I mean? In each society there’s a different way of putting things, a different way of interpreting what happens or what’s been said. What seems a lie to someone at Leonie’s wouldn’t be one somewhere where relations between people take place in completely different circumstances — politically, socially, oh, every way there is. Every way they can’t imagine.—