No. 4 Imperial Lane

by Jonathan Weisman

  Elizabeth would stay behind with Angélica, the tou-kas, the mambas, and a far more quiet attic, scrubbed of its bats.

  “I’ll be back in a week or two, Bet,” Gonçalves told his wife. “There is nothing to worry about. If you want, work in the clinic. You can do practically what I could. The nurses will be there, and Angélica can help with language. It’ll help the time go quickly.”

  He held her tightly for a long time, determined not to be the first to break the clench. She looked into his eyes.

  “That’s what my brother calls me, Bet.” She smiled.

  “You need to tell me more about him when I get back.”

  They sat together on the foam-mattress bed in their Spartan room. He reached out his hand to touch her cheek, and she held it to her face, leaning into it, feeling the warmth. Her eyes closed. A tear rolled onto his hand. The fluid was warm, then grew cold, and he looked at it before wiping it on his leg.

  “Really, Elizabeth, what are you afraid of? Nothing is going to happen to me. Nothing certainly is going to happen to you.”

  She nodded her head miserably. She knew this was an emotional time for her—for reasons João would not, could not, be considering. She wanted to tell him they were going to have a child together, but she wanted the moment to be right, to be romantic, to be resonant with meaning. In Contuboel, such a moment had never arisen.

  He stood up and changed into fatigues as she lingered, her eyes unfocused and gazing at the floor. He turned one more time, met her eyes, and forced a smile. But he left agitated; I’m the one going out there, he thought. What the fuck is she crying about?

  The little convoy rolled out just before noon, João in the passenger seat of the Unimog, a soldier driving, the medic in the canvas-covered back. The other soldiers piled haphazardly into the jeeps in front and behind, rifles—safeties on—in their laps.

  They rumbled through Contuboel, then slowed to a crawl as the road north deteriorated to a barely passable track, crisscrossed by streams and deep furrows. They had gone ten kilometers in a little less than an hour when they approached the first sizeable village, Cancosita. Villagers fled as they approached. João motioned to the driver to stop and kill the engine. For a moment, they sat in silence. Then João opened the truck’s rickety door and stepped onto the muddy road, walking deliberately to the back of the medical truck and slowly opening the zippered canvas flap.

  The children were the first to appear, peeking from behind the openings in the mud walls that surrounded the family compounds. A boy who looked eight but was probably eleven walked slowly toward João as the physician slipped on a white lab coat to cover his fatigues. The lab coat held no significance for the boy. The fatigues meant plenty. Barefoot, shirtless, in short pants of an indeterminate color, a castoff maybe of an American, years before, brought by the boatload to West Africa by missionaries, then cycled through the rag markets in Bafatá or Farim. The boy held out a hand, open-palmed. “Dàdiva?” he asked tentatively. “Cadeau?”—in case João was an errant Frenchman who had wandered south from the Senegalese border just a few kilometers up the road.

  “Médico,” João responded, hands tapping his own chest. “Pais?” he asked, gesturing for his parents.

  The boy giggled, then bolted away. Other children poured out of compounds. “Dàdiva, cadeau,” they chanted for about five minutes, gift, gift, gift, before the mothers began venturing out and hushing their offspring.

  Cancosita was well beyond the maw of the Portuguese. The farmers didn’t cultivate groundnuts for sale, didn’t pay taxes, didn’t work someone else’s land. They were relatively healthy, although a few kwashiorkor bellies spoke to the protein deficiencies. But this was West Africa. Guinea worms, botfly infections, diarrhea, malaria—there was plenty for João and the medic to attend to. The women patiently waited their turn.

  As shadows lengthened and evening approached, the first man of Cancosita approached the throng now gathered around the medical truck. Middle-aged and dignified in a long white robe, he asked in passable Portuguese for the officer in charge.

  “I suppose that would be me,” João answered. “But I don’t think of myself as an officer. Doctor João Gonçalves,” he said, holding out a hand.

  “Baboucar Sabally,” he said with a slight smile, nodding but not extending his hand. “We would like you and your men, doctor, to stay the night. You are our guests.”

  “It would be our pleasure,” he responded.

  This was how it was supposed to be, dispensing medicine to grateful natives, partaking of African hospitality. This was winning, thought Gonçalves, catching the triumphalism in his own thoughts but giving in to it anyway. He led his team as they walked behind Sabally and in turn were trailed by a swarm of children. A huge, steaming pot of stew was already boiling over a wood fire inside their host’s compound, bubbling in a vast, wok-like iron skillet, pounded by hand. The smell of chilis and chicken, manioc and rice mingled with the usual wood smoke, charcoal, and shit. João was used to filtering out the bad from the good. Frankly, the meal spreading before him beat most served up at the agriculture station.

  Each of João’s men was given a gourd, halved and hollowed into a well-worn bowl. As was custom, the men went first, ladling rice, manioc, and stew in large quantities, taking the best pieces of chicken. The women went next, then the children. João cringed at the logic. Children were prone to die. Men were bigger and stronger and needed the nourishment to hunt, climb the palms, and tend to the fermenting wine or grab the coconuts. Of course, children would be less prone to die, and men would be smaller and need less food, if the feeding priorities were reversed. But to the Fula, adults had proven their fortitude by the mere fact of surviving. The next generation would have to follow suit.

  “That Tuga woman at the funeral a few weeks back, your wife?” Sabally asked.

  “Yes,” said João.

  “Your only one, right? Your custom.”

  “Yes, just the one.” João chuckled.

  “She challenged the spirits, I heard. She called them orange men.”

  “Yes, well, she didn’t understand,” João said, flustered.

  They sat in silence for a while as they finished their meals, fingers sticky with palm oil and starch, their bellies groaning with guilt and satiation.

  “My men will sleep in their tents,” João said preemptively. Sabally was already motioning for the children to clear out their huts for the newcomers, but João insisted. He and the medic would stay in the compound. The eight soldiers would remain with the vehicles, to stand guard and to stay out of the way.

  The night sky was aflame with stars. A sliver of moon could not compete. A few lamps came out, glass jars with a small string wick, shedding hardly enough light to see their feet. The guests shuffled forward, trying to find their way to the hut and the woven straw mat that was to be their bed for the night. The noises of Contuboel—battery-powered transistor radios, drumming, inebriated chatter—were all gone. It was dark and hushed and warm, and at just past eight o’clock, João rolled over, an army-issued wool blanket pulled over his head to ward off the whine of the mosquitoes, and fell asleep.

  The roosters weren’t the only things stirring at dawn. Mangy dogs snuffled around for scraps. A few women were quietly talking to each other, blowing on the coals from the previous night’s cook fires. João was intent on paying his way without being an ugly guest. So he sprang to his feet, pulled on fatigues over his olive-drab shorts, and dashed out of the compound to the jeeps. The watchmen were all asleep as he hoisted a bag of rice from the truck, then a small bag of dried fish and a half-dozen hard-boiled eggs.

  “Breakfast,” he said with a generous smile as Sabally emerged from his hut to feed the chickens and stoke the charcoal embers of the cooking fire. One of his wives took the provisions with a smirk and set about making the meal.

  He had hated this breakfast at first: white rice, stir-fried with pungent, salty dried fish, maybe an egg, usually some okra or mushy tomatoes. Now
he found it wonderfully satisfying. He vowed he would eat it for the rest of his life, though he wasn’t sure the ingredients in Lisbon would create the right consistency, a mix of soft vegetable mush and crunchy, chewy rice. It was especially good on day two or three of the rice, scraped from the bottom of a spoiled iron pot.

  The soldiers were not savoring their meal. They had been in this village long enough, too long really, having left enough time to get word of their location all the way back to Cabral in his redoubt in Conakry on the Atlantic coast. They shifted uncomfortably on the ground, eyes motioning to the medic. It was time to go. João rose, and they rose too quickly for the Fulas’ sense of propriety. They wished their hosts good health and loaded into the jeeps and truck, heading northeast, toward Sare Bácar and the Senegalese frontier.

  João was feeling good about himself as he and his men climbed back into the truck. He was a reluctant soldier, but he had always hoped the army would toughen him up, help him discover the leader beneath all of that education. The military is a group activity, sure, but he had always pictured himself alone, a stalwart physician standing against the mayhem of war. Then Elizabeth had come along, and in a fit of weakness, he had married, and all that independence had receded under the weight of her need. But here he was standing on his own, a soldier, an officer, he thought.

  Lost in those thoughts, João didn’t notice when the first bullet pinged off the door of the cab, nor did the driver, who nearly slammed the truck into the back of the lead jeep, which had pulled to a halt when the second struck. As the soldiers dove out of the jeeps, a fusillade of automatic weapon fire poured out of the elephant grass. It was the perfect ambush spot, an intersection with an impassable dirt road that cradled the cluster of houses of Bambato. To call Bambato a village was being too generous. The guerrillas had come down from Cobeto, much farther east than any maps would put any PAIGC soldiers. The lines of demarcation were evidently more fluid than Spínola liked to admit.

  João fell out of the cab onto the muddy track. The noise was overwhelming and unworldly after the silences of the evening. One of the soldiers in the rear jeep dragged the radio behind the bumper and tried to reach headquarters in Bissau. The others scrambled behind the vehicles for cover. But it was over before they could get through half a clip. Maybe thirty guerrillas tumbled through the curtain of grass, AK-47s blazing. The firing was indiscriminate. One magazine would be spent, and another would be quickly pushed into place, fire resuming. They showed no need to conserve ammunition. They were obviously well supplied. Bodies were mangled, eviscerated, limbs severed by the volume of lead pumped into a shoulder or thigh. The Portuguese patrol was overrun before João could figure out how to take the safety off his sidearm. The fighters waded through the silence, breaking it with gunshots to the heads of even the most obviously dead soldier. Skull fragments and brain tissue thudded into the West African mud. Blood poured into the ruts of the road. Only the medic groaned, a bullet in the meat of his shoulder, his Red Cross insignia preserving his life.

  João sat in the mud, mouth open and silent, surrounded by guerrillas who were chuckling quietly at him. His handgun had fallen into a puddle, unused.

  Baboucar Sabally appeared from around the front of the truck, imperious as he was the night before. He said nothing, just met his recent guest with a neutral stare, eye to eye.

  The talking was left to another man, in well-worn camouflage fatigues and a floppy sun hat, who came up from behind Sabally. He was taller than the others, lean, with sinewy biceps exposed by torn fatigues. He had aquiline features, not West African, and was so black he almost looked blue to João. His head was shaved.

  “Doctor Gonçalves.” He smiled. “We were led to believe you would be coming for a visit.”

  He unslung his AK and placed it casually against the wheel, within easy reach of João. He ducked into a squat, at the doctor’s level, close but not threateningly close. His Portuguese was perfect and accentless.

  “Have you seen Doctor Zhivago, Doctor Gonçalves?”

  “Seen it, read it. Of course,” João replied.

  “Read it. Ah, very good. I wish I had time for Russian novels of such length. I’ve been a bit busy lately.

  “Remember Strelnikov, the shooter? He was nothing much as Pasha, Lara’s cuckolded fiancé, but as a revolutionary, well, then he was something.”

  “Feared,” João said.

  “Zhivago was kidnapped, or, I’d rather say, drafted. You’d know something of that, wouldn’t you? I know how Caetano is sweeping up all the doctors who won’t run. The Russian was drafted into the service of the revolution, you might remember. A doctor is always of great use, a medic too.” He gestured with his head to the wounded man behind him. “We are not as romantic as those Russians, Doctor Gonçalves, no soaring soundtrack or love interests here. But then again, West Africa is not so cold either. It has its advantages.”

  The guerrilla leader stood slowly and extended his hand to João. Gonçalves stared for a second or two and then took it and allowed this man to help him to his feet.

  “Welcome to the revolution, Doctor Gonçalves.”

  The guerrilla’s weapon still leaned against the great wheel of the Unimog, undisturbed. As Gonçalves stood, the fighters loaded the wounded medic onto a stretcher. The motley force receded back into the bush, leaving the stew of corpses for the vultures.

  Dear Hans,

  You can be dreadfully droll when you want to. It’s been some weeks since I received your letter, I must admit. So I write these words with some trepidation: How is Segolaine? What a splendid name, no doubt gorgeous, and probably cast aside already. Alas, what will I ever do with you? “But men are men; the best sometimes forget.”

  West Africa is so beastly hot, I can scarcely breathe. The movement of this pen is about all I can and should muster. On the other hand, I’ve probably never been so thin—Twiggy incarnate. They’ll be selling package tours to Portuguese Guine at tony West End travel agencies, a sanatorium for the overweight, the only place you can shed a stone in a week without moving a muscle. For an extra few quid, they’ll throw in amoebic dysentery to speed the process, two stone in a week with a lasting souvenir—a wrecked intestine—that the customs agents dare not challenge.

  I have some time on my hands right now. You’d never believe where I’m living, some strange colonial agricultural station above a tiny, impoverished town called Contuboel. A funny story about that: the Portuguese built the Contubelians their first decent latrines a few months before our arrival here, part of a hearts-and-minds campaign we are fully part of. Quite elaborate, really, the latrines are these closed shacks with deep holes, and a cement chimney of sorts to vent the stench, covered with wire screening. The idea is that the flies that do get into the hole and sully themselves on the contents at the bottom then fly to the light up the chimney. But they can’t escape because of the screen. Follow me?

  Anyway, the Tugas—that’s what the Africans call the Portuguese—told the natives the design would help stop the spread of fecal-borne diseases. This took some doing, apparently. It’s difficult to explain how bacteria or viruses can spread from bum to mouth when your audience doesn’t really understand the concept of microscopic organisms. Oh yes, they know that flies land on their shit, and they know that flies land on their food. But convincing them that yes, those are the same flies, and that they have little bits of shit on their feet, well, that wasn’t so easy. In the end, the Portuguese were satisfied that their message got through. But lo and behold, the villagers don’t use the latrines. They save them for the passing white people. When we asked them why, they said the white people have diseased shit. Funny, that, such misunderstandings abound. Remind me to tell you about my escape from the African menagerie that paid me a visit in the shower the other day.

  Joao was sent here on assignment. I must confess it was nice to escape from the capital city and the chattering wives on base. I’ve brought my dear friend and Portuguese teacher, Angélica, with me. She’s
lovely, Hansy, speaks perfect American English with a Bastan accent, a mocha-skinned Brahman. The good Doctor Goncalves is off on a mission of mercy. He, an armed medic, and a squadron of adorable Portuguese soldiers went off yesterday in this monstrous truck to administer medicinal assistance to the natives that need winning over. You know, it just might work.

  Hans, I am feeling good about my decisions now. Life is sometimes bewildering here, but it is exotic. Joao and I have loads of laughs, and I still melt at his touch. I miss him right now, miss gazing into his eyes, so brown they are almost black, miss leaning against his skinny little body. You will get to meet him soon enough. Meantime, say hello to Mum and Dad for me, and Segolaine, if the dear is still about. And write soon.

  Your loving sister,

  Elizabeth

  Chapter Ten

  “Mum, don’t you think you’re staying up a little late with David? You have exams coming.”

  Cristina had come in around twelve thirty, early for her. She wore patterned black tights and sleek high heels, not like Maggie’s flats, frankly not like any of the shoes on the feet of the girls I knew. They elongated her legs, which stretched down from a short black skirt. A white peasant shirt hung loosely over her shoulders, but a thin, patent-leather belt cinched it around her thin waist. She pulled off a black beret and sent me a smile that sent blood coursing in a rush through my body.

  “You’re talking to me about late nights, young lady?” Elizabeth responded playfully.

  “I’m young, Mum. I don’t need the beauty sleep.”

  She smiled and batted her eyelashes comically.

  “Hey, Cristina, I haven’t seen Kelvin around lately,” I ventured.

  “Oh, he vanished from the scene a while ago,” her mother jumped in. “They don’t last long.”