Only two people knew about her collecting trips, her graduate director, who’d known about them for years, and Thomas, who worked on the top floor in environmental education. Sarafina had thought that Thomas would be sympathetic to saving species from drainages damaged by paved roads and clear-cuts, but…
We’ve mingled blood, Sarafina realized as she touched her fingertips to her own cuts. She hoped Gabonese customs agents got frequent AIDS exams.
The guards let her into the office. A Gabonese lieutenant with a nameplate in front of him sat behind a steel desk in the small cement block office, an air conditioner whining in a blocked-up window.
“I don’t speak French,” Sarafina said. His first name was Joseph, but the family name was African.
“Oh, but I can interrogate in English,” the lieutenant replied in crisp British English. He leaned across the steel desk to show her a fax. Thomas, the environmental educator, had faxed Sarafina’s photo and passport number to the Gabonese border guards.
Her heart pounded. Bruised from the beating she’d taken from the customs agents, Sarafina felt stupid, physically chastised, as though she were a child. The lieutenant said, “You speak bush French? But just enough to get children to bring you fish. I understand people who collect fish. I lived in England. What are they?”
“Oh go en say”—the syllables tripped over her tongue like a nonsense poem, Latinization of an African river name, Ogo. Sarafina wondered why the lieutenant had showed her the fax of the photograph sent under the museum’s letterhead? Why would Thomas have risked killing her by informing on her? In front of the lieutenant, her bloody nose and aching arms embarrassed her more than hurt her.
Old Olaf, the grand Swedish killie fancier, had spent two years in Mexican jails when the border guards found plastic bags of Megupsilon aporus taped to his body. He’d been warned not to take fish over the border that way. Border guards might not care about their endangered species, but they knew no one carried anything legal in plastic bags taped under the armpits. Olaf had stayed in jail until his friends found a Mexican official who’d believed that the fish hadn’t been loaded with some illegal drug. Sarafina hoped that this African border guard would understand.
She felt the silence that was stretched between the lieutenant and herself and said, “Why did Thomas send you that fax? These ogoense are just going to die out as subspecies unless I breed them at home.”
“You know the man who sent this fax?”
Sarafina said, “I never thought Thomas took his principles that seriously.” But surely Thomas had never expected Sarafina to be beaten, arrested, her fish confiscated. He must have hoped she’d be forbidden entrance at the airport, sent home before she could collect her fish. Or had he sent the fax after she’d arrived in Gabon, setting her up for this?
“A Green,” said the lieutenant, whose name Sarafina couldn’t remember. “I met Greens in Europe.” Sarafina realized that his accent wasn’t quite college-bred. She wondered how the lieutenant had gotten to England, what it had been like for him, why he’d left? Had he been an illegal?
Sarafina said, “I’m a Green. I do arking. I’m preserving as many varieties of Aphyosemion ogoense as I can.” No point in mentioning the rapid evolution.
The lieutenant had no specialized knowledge of fish. His face went blank, then he said, “A very European thing to do. Break up the world and keep the components in boxes.”
Sarafina almost said, but I’m not European, then she realized that to the lieutenant, Europe was a culture, not a tribe. “But the fish are being exterminated here. By logging operations, road pavings, oil drilling. Not that I’m opposed to your industrial development, but shouldn’t something be saved?” She wished all industrial humans could be moved out of the rainforests, so that it would be left to people who could live gently off what the forest could sustainably provide.
“It’s illegal to take fish without proper permits.”
Sarafina said, “The fish aren’t on the CITES list, and their habitats aren’t being protected in this country.”
The lieutenant looked back at her, catching her eyes. Sarafina noticed that his eyes were bloodshot. “Is this an adventure to you? You throw fists at my people when they find your plastic bags. You’ve been beaten. You don’t even seem frightened. Isn’t Africa real to you?”
Before she could think, Sarafina said, “I’m angry.”
“What right have you to be angry? You’re stealing my country’s fish! A poacher, not paying the proper fees.”
“I can’t believe Thomas would turn me in.”
“Ah, Thomas. You rejected this man?”
“We just don’t like each other. He says keeping fish in tanks is cruel, says we ought to work to save habitat, not fool ourselves about arking.” In this African room, what Thomas believed or what she believed seemed silly. Fish and bat evolutionary tricks couldn’t work as fast as human technological change, so now seemed accidents without intentions. Don’t go teleological on me, Sarafina’s advisor had warned her. The universe has no intentions.
The lieutenant’s eyes, his fleshy eyelids, the broad nostrils flared in perpetual astonishment and disdain, the tribal amulet hanging down over the pseudo-European uniform—all this made worry about cruelty to fish, even worry about saving fish, seem ridiculous. The rainforest was dying. Africans were dying. Sarafina said, “I’ve seen the dead in the villages.” She said that to prove she was compassionate.
“Yes, the dead in the villages. Was it just AIDS, or one of our exotic African viruses? I understand you have endemic Ebola in Reston, Virginia, but it only kills monkeys.” He looked down at her passport. “Could you tend your fish in your Chicago if people were dying all around you? I hope not.”
Sarafina felt ridiculous for a second, then she thought about it. “If my community was dying around me, I’d find comfort in my routines.” She had no funding for her research project on killie evolution.
“As I do,” the lieutenant said. He smiled slightly. “I arrest smugglers.” Sarafina hoped he would confiscate the fish and let her go on to America, perhaps with a fine. She smiled back at him. He said, “Why did you attack the customs agents? Are we missing something? A microdot? A computer virus on a small strip of metallic tape? Or a vial of Ebola?”
Sarafina expected more beatings. Or she’d disappear forever into an African prison. She had attacked like a cornered animal because she was, after all, in Africa. But now this lieutenant seemed civilized and suspicious along technological lines. She suspected he’d be more upset if she offered him a bribe than any African in her imagination. “I was afraid they’d kill my fish.”
“You stole the fish. We’re confiscating your reverse osmosis filter. My wife will be happy to have it. We’ll have clean water without burning fuel.”
Sarafina said, “I would be happy to ship some over to your men, too, if you like.” She saw the lieutenant’s face shift, the smile gone, semiotics of skin and muscle unreadable. But you lived in England, she wanted to tell him. You speak English, you must think like I do. But he said something in an African language, muttered thoughts sprung from a different cognitive thicket. She asked, “What do you want?”
“I have a wager with my men. They don’t believe that you’d fuck as well as fight for your fish. I said that they are your passion, and you will.” Sarafina asked, “Do you have any diseases?” She shocked herself. But she was responsible for keeping the fish alive once she’d netted them.