No. 4 Imperial Lane

by Jonathan Weisman

  Julian’s gone and gotten himself a real job, at a bank, of all things. I fear he is not long for our little club. His ambitions are considerably higher. But he’ll crawl back to my cooking from time to time, mark my words. He says hello and to tell you the obvious: You’ve gone round the twist.

  I’ve discovered my new favorite book, “Darkness At Noon,” by this little Hungarian Jew, Arthur Koestler. Not that a life of boredom in a Parisian flat is exactly like condemnation to a cell in a Stalinist prison, but I relate. The loss of ideals, the onset of ennui, guilt, suffering, torture. Quite a good read. It’s about a bloke named Rubashov, a revolutionary Soviet leader who’s fallen out of favor and condemned to a show trial and death.

  “We brought you truth, and in our mouth it sounded a lie. We brought you freedom, and it looks in our hands like a whip. We brought you the living life, and where our voice is heard the trees wither and there is a rustling of dry leaves. We brought you the promise of the future, but our tongue stammered and barked…”

  Beats Shakespeare.

  Seriously, Bet, whatever comes of this marriage of yours, and this foray into the Dark Continent, war, empire, Heart of Darkness and all that sort of thing, be proud of yourself. Think how successful your escape from Houndsheath has been and so fast. One leap, and you have cleared the gravitational field and found adventure on an epic scale. Here I was so smug that I had managed to cross the Channel.

  For what it’s worth, I’m behind you, though that’s not worth much at all. Don’t believe a word they tell you, the imperialists or the revolutionaries, however swarthy their skin may be. Stay in touch. This is fun.

  Much love,

  Hans

  Chapter Nine

  The Portuguese devotion to attics was a gift to the wildlife of West Africa, an inland artificial reef. Despite all experiences that told them otherwise, the colonial architects kept building them, on military bases, in medical outposts, schools, and agriculture stations. Within weeks, the bats would move in to their comfortable new caves. The large lizards would follow, their loud tou-ka calls waking the sleepers at all hours. The rats and swallows found nesting grounds. The attics of Portuguese Africa were teeming with life.

  João had been in Bissau only two months when the orders came to rotate out into one of the Portuguese medical outposts in the interior. Elizabeth did not need to go, he was told, but if she chose to, it would be perfectly safe. She might even enjoy it. He was to take up residence in the town of Contuboel, near the Senegalese border, on the rough road north from Bafatá. The kilometers that separated the agricultural station where he would live from Bafatá were crawling with guerrillas, but the town of Contuboel itself was safe, a few shops and a dense cluster of Fulani family compounds. They were Muslim. To say they were sympathetic to the Portuguese might be going a bit far, but it was close enough. They were implacably hostile to the Christian PAIGC, João was told. An enemy of an enemy is almost a friend.

  João walked slowly back toward the officers’ quarters, wondering whether he wanted Elizabeth with him. She would be a worry to him, another life to fret over as he considered his own safety. But she was proving to be a useful diversion to him, a talker when all was quiet at night, save the crickets and lizards. She chased away the sounds of screams and moans, the images of amputations, glazed stares, and gaping wounds from which protruded small intestines mingled with mine shrapnel. Though often, he wanted solitude, to think over the day’s carnage and ponder his future. She was making some friends, especially with the African woman, Angélica, who was a fabulous Portuguese teacher. And his wife’s eyes still lit up like a golden retriever’s when he returned to base. It brought him some shame truthfully, mainly because he didn’t feel the same elation. In fact, there were moments when she was beginning to annoy him. Time away might be good, he thought.

  When he caught sight of her, sitting under a shade tree with Angélica, his doubts dissipated. The assignment was clearly making him more nervous than he had allowed himself to accept. Of course he wanted her company. Besides, there was that flyer at the base, Colonel Brito, the air force man the wives all giggled over. He didn’t want Brito to decide his next conquest would have a posh English accent and creamy skin.

  “It could be a good change of scenery, a look at real Africa,” he told her after explaining the orders.

  “I’ll go, if Angélica can come too.”

  “I’ll make that happen.”

  Elizabeth turned to Angélica and smiled broadly. Angélica’s gaze in return, deep brown eyes over sunken cheeks, was not nearly as enthusiastic. Already, Angélica felt light-years from the life she had grown accustomed to in New Bedford, and quite a distance even from Praia, the capital of Cabo Verde, dusty and dry but lubricated with dollars from abroad. The capital of Guiné was backwater enough. Now she was headed for the backwater of this backwater country. To Angélica, there was nothing exotic in that. But Elizabeth needed a friend, and her friend would pay her. So she would go.

  Two days later, they set off in an armored convoy out of Bissau. Soldiers, dressed in freshly pressed fatigues and bush caps with bills in the front and back, piled into massive West German–built troop carriers with wheels the size of the men they carried. Unimogs, Elizabeth remembered João had called them. The three guests of honor traveled in a jeep flanked by the armored behemoths. Within a few kilometers, the pavement was gone. Children at dirt or mud junctions fanned charcoal fires and offered blackened corn on the cob or peanuts stirred in palm oil and garlic. At Jugudul, the village where a road headed north to Mansôa and Farim and, ultimately, to the Senegalese Casamance, the soldiers tensed visibly and clenched their Heckler & Koch G3A3s, thankful the West German arms market kept their nation supplied. There should have been a checkpoint there, some sign of military authority. But there wasn’t. This was rebel-held land. There was no real defense against an ambush. But none came and the men relaxed.

  Within two hours, the convoy had entered Bafatá and coasted down the hill to the Moorish market and the weathered Portuguese administrative buildings. Lines of tailors, each clad in a white robe and skullcap, worked foot-powered sewing machines, while colorfully wrapped women and girls carried produce to market stacked in Chinese-made plastic tubs, piled high on their heads. Bicycles plied the dirt streets, veering toward the ditches to make room for the Portuguese war machines. Men glared as they passed. Children abandoned broken swing sets and seesaws, dashed from what passed as a city park and shouted, “Tuga, Tuga,” running as fast as they could to catch the Unimogs, laughing at the clouds of dust that enveloped them.

  “There it is again, ‘Tuga,’” Elizabeth exclaimed. “Wherever I go, ‘Tuga.’ What does it mean?”

  “Portuguese, Tuguese, Tuga,” Angélica answered patiently. Sometimes Elizabeth amazed her. “Really, just white person. Portuguese, white people, they are the same thing here. The Guineans know of no other white people.”

  “I suppose my British passport is no defense then?”

  Angélica just smiled.

  As the road veered north along the Rio Geba, the land grew lusher. Women worked fields with small, handheld hoes, babies slung on their backs. Men clustered under cottonwood trees, drinking palm wine and playing mancala on boards cut from palm trunks, rounded pebbles filling hemispherical hollows. Elizabeth would watch the laughter cease as the convoy rumbled into their games. They’d stop, mid-move, to stare as the soldiers passed. A wide wooden bridge, laid crosswise with irregular, thick planks, boards running its length to ease the passage of trucks, marked the approach to Contuboel. The river was languid, thick with lilies and reeds but inviting in the heat. “Schisto creek,” João said, slightly patronizing. “Don’t even think about stepping into it.”

  It was lovely, thought Elizabeth with relief. Coconut and oil palms dotted the landscape, along with massive cottonwoods, banyans, and the occasional baobab. It was remarkably unpopulated. A man walked toward the small cluster of rough-hewn brick buildings with an emaciated cow n
ot much bigger than a Great Dane, his son pushing a rusty bicycle. Children walked hand in hand, some with distended bellies, filled with parasites or protruding with kwashiorkor from the lack of protein. But others looked pretty good. Adorable, really. Around each of their necks hung a leather juju, a good-luck charm carefully crafted by the local mullah or shaman, no difference. The houses were wide and cylindrical, topped by rounded, thatched roofs that built to a central peak. The walls were low, constructed of mud brick. Thick, rough tree trunks held up the lips of the roofs, providing outdoor shade.

  Just before reaching the few cement buildings, the trucks veered left and roared up a steep hill to a gate manned by a languid old man. He moved slowly to lift the barrier by hand, the troop carriers and jeep idling loudly. They pulled into a flat clearing of low-slung, whitewashed buildings, a miniature of the base in Bissau. Only when the engines stopped did Elizabeth realize what a din they had created over all those miles. For a few moments, there was silence.

  Aleixo Menges bypassed the troop carriers that preceded their jeep and walked straight to João and Elizabeth’s vehicle.

  “We have been waiting for you,” he said with a broad smile, jutting out a hand through the front passenger-side window to João and introducing himself as the director of the agricultural station. Like so many other colonial administrators, he was young, maybe twenty-seven or twenty-eight. Then again, so was João. Menges sported a little goatee, a worldly affectation for an agronomist in the middle of nowhere, and little round glasses to boot. But his greeting was generous and his welcome sincere. “Word is out that a real doctor is coming to our meager clinic. The lines began to form yesterday.”

  João looked at him wearily, then leaned into the door to open it, as if it were the equivalent of one of those new-model, early-seventies, two-door American sedans, not the flimsy canvas-topped door of a Portuguese jeep. Menges took notice.

  “But you are tired,” he said. “Let me show you and your lovely wife to your quarters. Such a treat to have a young couple here.”

  “Elizabeth Gonçalves,” she said in passable Portuguese, offering her hand. “My husband can be a bit careless with introductions.”

  Menges met Elizabeth’s eyes, lingered a little too long, then blushed, taking her hand. Elizabeth smiled in wonder. She still could not see herself as attractive, despite João, and when she felt anything like a spark, she was quick to dismiss it as her own overactive imagination.

  “This is my friend and Portuguese teacher, Angélica,” she said.

  Menges gave Angélica a beneficent smile, the kind colonial administrators used to please themselves with their own tolerance.

  “Cabo-Verdiana,” he noted with self-satisfaction. He did not take her hand.

  The quarters sat at the top of the hill, just where the military convoy had leveled off and swung left onto the clearing. A few other buildings rested on a terrace below, then palm trees, then Contuboel, not far below. The rise was not dramatic enough to mitigate the heat. Once again, João and Elizabeth would be in their own unadorned white room at the end of the hall, but this hall was much shorter, just two other rooms and a fairly spacious bathroom with cold running water. No one would want hot. A porch faced into the compound, and just off the porch, an old man in a dusty dishdasha and skullcap lay in a hammock beneath two coconut palms.

  He sprung up more spryly than Elizabeth would have thought possible and grabbed a thick walking stick, smoothed with use, beaming and bobbing his head obsequiously.

  “Bom dia, bom dia, bom dia,” he said, shaking Elizabeth’s hand first, then João’s, ignoring Angélica’s.

  “This is Guedado,” Menges said. “He is your night watchman and guard.”

  Guedado’s head bobbed again, his smile widening still further as he raised his stick and swung it through the air at some imaginary miscreant. This was the most suspect security force Elizabeth had ever laid eyes on, but she found that amusing. They were in a gated compound, in a safe part of Guiné. It was nice that the Portuguese were so generous with colonial employment.

  “There’s been a bit of a tragedy in town,” Menges said casually. “Just beyond the gate, by one of the experimental garden plots, a group of children stumbled into a black mamba nest yesterday. Two-and-a-half-step snakes, they call them here. You take two-and-a-half steps before you die. Beasts. Six children died in seconds.”

  “How awful,” Elizabeth gasped.

  “Such is life in a country where life expectancy is around forty. There are many dangers, more lethal than the PAIGC or even the Portuguese Air Force. But it’s still a shock. The funeral is tomorrow.”

  The convoy had parked in front of the mess hall. Around back, where livestock was slaughtered for supper, repulsively giant vultures hopped about looking for scraps. The halfhearted waves and shoo-shoos from the staff were comical next to the great, bald birds, which hopped back a step, as if to pay their respects to the gesture, then hopped forward to resume their scavenging. The building on the terrace below João’s quarters was the clinic, staffed by a pair of Portuguese nurses, and now, a doctor, at least for a few months. As Menges had said, a line of villagers was already awaiting João’s appearance. Below and through a trail were the vegetable beds and experimental millet fields. The director spoke volubly about efforts to grow vegetable strains that did not mold and rot during the wet season or could tolerate the parching sun of the dry season, the millet seeds being bred for protein, not just pure starch. “And we’re working on some insecticides and herbicides,” he added.

  Dinner that night was foul, some kind of starchy noodles cooked until they were waterlogged, then drenched with reddish-orange palm oil. A chicken had been rotated over an open fire to a jerky-like texture, then sliced with a meat cleaver without regard to parts or cuts. Bone and bone fragments prevented a good bite. But Elizabeth was new, so she smiled and ate, reaching into her mouth to pull out the parts that stuck in her teeth.

  There was a quiet to her new home that she felt she could truly love. Only eight were on hand to eat that evening around long picnic tables. The three Guineans who joined them in the corner laughed uproariously at everything and nothing. The nation seemed at peace, and so did Elizabeth. She leaned over to João.

  “I like it here.”

  João woke up the next morning to the sound of his wife’s screams. She burst into the room completely naked, dripping wet, panting and cringing and grabbing a sheet off the bed to cover herself. João held her by the shoulders and guided her to sit on the side of the bed, which sagged under the weight of the two of them. She gingerly lay on her back, catching her breath.

  “What? What? Did somebody hurt you? Did something bite you?”

  The urgency in his voice revealed a genuine concern, an anguish that pleased Elizabeth to no end. She leaned over and put her head against his chest, her body convulsing slightly as he rocked her, his arms pulling her close. Water dripped uncomfortably down his naked chest. His stomach dropped as adrenaline surged through his blood.

  Then he realized she was laughing. He pulled away to let her look up at him. Streaks of tears crossed her face, her eyes were watery and earnest, but her mouth was turned up mischievously.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I really am.” She waved her hand in front of her mouth as she giggled like a child.

  “What in God’s name happened?”

  Elizabeth paused to choke back the giggle, looking down and finding an empty spot on the worn linoleum to compose herself.

  “Well, you were sleeping so peacefully, so I got up to take a shower. The water was so cool. I was really enjoying it,” she began. “Then a giant cockroach scurried in with me, right into the swirl of water at my feet. It was huge! I jumped back from it and hit my head on the shower wall. That scared one of those giant lizards. I hadn’t seen it on the windowsill—you know, the tou-kas? It ran into a hole in the ceiling. Then there was this almighty clatter. A mouse fell onto the floor. Then about ten bats swooped down from the attic th
rough the same tiny little hole. One of them was in my hair, I swear.”

  They were both laughing now, loosely, happily, unselfconsciously, deep belly laughs. Elizabeth let out a few little snorts, which only made them laugh harder.

  “Leave it to the Brit,” João sighed, poking his wife in the ribs, “on West African safari.”

  “‘The kingdom of perpetual night,’” Elizabeth sighed.

  “Richard the Third.”

  Elizabeth turned on her side and propped her head up in her hand.

  “You do amaze me,” she said.

  “Then it’s working.”

  They lay back in bed, the sheet dropping from around her chest, and held each other to absorb some of the other’s glee. João’s hand traced the muscles that framed his wife’s spine, down to the little dimples at the base of her fine backside, up the curve of her rear. She rolled over and offered herself to him, and they made love tenderly.

  They dressed and walked outside their quarters to see if there was some breakfast at the mess hall. Guedado was gesticulating wildly from beside his hammock, beckoning them over.

  “I have protected you. I have protected you. I have protected you.” He grinned in delight, speaking in rapid-fire Portuguese patois as he brandished his stick in a mock threat and motioned toward the ground.

  At his feet was a rat the size of a small dog, beaten to death.