Her arrival also threw the defiance, anger and fear of the young man into confusion. All he had prepared for the confrontation with his father was become a set of cumbersome armour of which this feminine apparition was not worthy; for which his posture was useless. Whatever explanations she gave, he was sure he did not really know who she was and why she was there. She could not be from the CIA, because the CIA had helped oust his father. Was she from the KGB? Or from Castro?
She said his father had sent her to see if he was ‘all right’. They were figured-over, the two of them and his guards, like patterned cloth, by lozenges of orange and purple light that came through closed velvet curtains in a suburban villa. He would not speak to her. She told him that what he had been hearing in the capital for the past six months was the regime’s propaganda: the General was not routed and in retreat, the whole of the Northern region was liberated territory, he was now receiving massive material and other support from outside, village after village was welcoming his men. Within the year he would be in the capital. — Whatever happens to the government people, he can’t leave you to be among them. He wants you to know that is why you are here. I know you don’t believe it, yet, but he doesn’t want you to come to any harm.—
A servant interrupted with coffee and sweetmeats glazed with honey. The General’s son ate. He had the air of unreality of one taking the last meal before execution, unable to imagine the actuality of what he dreaded. She could not open her mouth to reassure him.
Back in her hotel room between visits to the villa, she lay following the screen of the television with the sound switched off; she did not know, so far removed now from the General’s presence, whether there was any reassurance to be given. How long had she known the General? Behind the shared territory of exile, the shared beds in safe houses and Intercontinental Hotels, there was a whole lifetime of which not even the testimony of souvenirs, as in a beautiful room in Eastern Europe, was open to her.
She bought jeans and T-shirts and took them to the villa. The heat hammered at the walls. It was a prison — the General’s prison — with marble-topped tables, thick hot carpets, and pictures, to be made out in the moted stuffiness, someone must have chosen. Furniture can be anonymous but someone has always chosen the pictures. The General’s son did not speak to her during those days but they experienced together, a drowsy gaze, over and over, on the Swiss alpine view and the Belle Epoque woman in a carriage at the Place de l’Opéra; the room buzzed with prayers being said in the adjoining one by the off-duty guards, who were not allowed to leave the house for the mosque. After a few days he still did not speak but appeared in the clean clothes looking like one of the black students, eager to demonstrate to free somebody, who came to hear her speak on American campuses. He was slim, with a bunched mouth and delicate pointed jaw; no resemblance to his father, his fingers were long and tentative in their movements. The favourite must have been a fragile child. Even though she had a child of her own, the abstract relations of her own childhood — Len the Other Man, Ruthie dancing, dancing in a nightclub — meant she had no understanding, was free of the patricidal and infanticidal loves between parents and children. It was another advantage her aunts had not intended.
In her hotel room, piped music instead of prayer came through the back of the bedhead from the room next door while she telephoned Reuel. There was no direct dialling to the safe house he was in, in another country. A chocolate had been placed on a paper doily inscribed: The Management Wishes You Goodnight. She was eating it by the time the connection was established, and he heard that her mouth was full, a signal of calm audacity that reassured and at the same time delighted him.
— Not a mark on him. But it’s an awful place.—
— How’s that? I arranged for a house, a nice house!—
— It’s hot and ugly, and the curtains are kept closed all the time.—
He was laughing thunder down in his deep chest. — If he’s got any sense, he’ll never be in a worse place, my God, if you call that awful …! You’ve been a lucky girl.—
She told his father he wouldn’t speak to her. But the day she was to leave and explained he would be following, separately, to his father’s bush headquarters, he stood up — for a moment she thought he was going to clutch at her physically, not wanting to be left. — Who are you?—
He knew her name; she had given it to him the first time she saw him, and seen disbelief in his face.
— I’m your father’s lover. My husband was assassinated seven years ago.—
He looked at her; appeared to be looking at her dark eyes, all shining pupil, her tight-skinned cheeks, mouth with the beginnings of the lines of her most habitual expression — generous, wary confidence — overprinting the relaxation at the corners of her lips, but he was following something else. Every feature of her — the breasts slung from the angle of bare collarbones, the dent of her navel visible under the thin cotton of her skirt, the ringless brown hands and dabs of red paint on her toenails — all these, of face and body, were markers and footholds showing the way. He had enough of his father in him to recognize this one not only knew the need to move on, but also what she would not reveal to his father: what it was necessary to do, to bring this about.
I see, he said.
He saw.
By the time the General was ready to eliminate the government’s border outposts and push his forces, at last sufficiently large, properly clothed and well-equipped, to attack the second largest town in his country, his son had a black beret and a beard that broadened his face. His breast was crossed from shoulder to waist, on either side, by a sash like an Order made of the pointed steel teeth of machine-gun bullets. It is true that Hillela worked beside him for four weeks, that dry season of the General’s advance. They were with the General in an abandoned farmhouse that had once belonged to a white settler before the first war there, the old war of independence. It was the supply depot closest to the fighting; the farthermost point of a road able to carry heavy transport vehicles. The General’s men unloaded their cargo and stored the boxes in the house. The son was the best of them, yes; he worked until dawn. Hillela had a kitchen table at which she sat typing the serial number of each gun before distribution so that the General would know exactly what weapons were being deployed where. The specifications were not unfamiliar to her; her trips with Arnold stood her in good stead, as the Manaka cuisine once had done in other circumstances.
The house with its curtainless windows was a creature who has witnessed so much that its eyes can never close. But everyone slept there during the day. It was stacked with grenades. If one were to have been faulty all would have gone off as a bundle of deadly firecrackers, blowing up the whole place. At midday the sun stripped the walls bare, ransacking yet again: bare boards, shelves of dead insects. At the same hour every day a bar of light rested on the eyelids of the General. He woke, and often made love to her and then would stroll with her in what must have been the settler’s farmhouse garden. Among the mud huts, like burned broken pottery, of the peasants who had moved in when there was redistribution of land and then, in turn, fled from the new war, there was still the remains of a swimming pool. In it were skeletons of frogs and a dead snake lying like a lost leather belt, stranded from the last rainy season. The General wished there were some way of filling the pool; he would have liked to do his twenty lengths a day.
The small airport was taken with the town. When the General sent her out during the mopping-up operations (which included the looting of bars and brothels by some of his long-deprived troops) it was from his stance on this strategic bit of liberated territory that he saw her off in one of his Libyan planes. The son, now with the rank of colonel, was alongside his father. Not customary, among these people, to kiss when not making love, and so she did not offer any dab on either cheek to the young man, but they clasped hands and the corner of his bearded mouth went up in a smile, slowly exchanged. It was as if, at last, they had turned to acknowledge together the view of the Swiss Alps and the lady in the carriage on the Place de l’Opéra.