“It wasn’t my fault,” Cristina said defensively. “He went back to the States, something to do with basketball, more money there, and some club called the Pistols or the Pistons or something.”
“There’ll be others,” Elizabeth sighed. Her daughter gave her a sweet smile.
“What are you two talking about anyway?”
“Oh, you know, the old war stories.”
I was usually a little tongue-tied around Cristina, unless I had scripted out some sort of greeting, and this intrusion was a surprise. So I was maybe a bit proud of my question about her basketball-playing boyfriend and, I must admit, privately tickled by her answer.
“Which old war story now?” she continued.
Elizabeth waved a hand and dropped from her stool, starting toward the sink. Long ago I had figured out that she did not like to talk about Cristina’s father around her.
“C’mon, Mum. I don’t mind.”
“I was talking about your father’s capture, in Africa.”
“Your old premonitions about death and all?”
“Something like that.”
There was a beat of silence.
“David, tell us about your sister.”
Elizabeth turned her body abruptly to look at her daughter. She had an odd look of dread on her face, not reproachful but scared, as if some terrible taboo had been broken, as if something frightful had been released. I didn’t quite get it—even now, after so long in the UK, British reserve was sometimes inscrutable to me—but I wanted it gone.
“It’s OK, Elizabeth. Americans like to talk about such things. We like to talk.”
That was true, I guess, broadly speaking, but it wasn’t true about me and especially not about Rebecca. I didn’t like to talk about her at all, not even with Maggie. It filled me with guilt, about the way I was when I was a kid, about my teenage years spent more or less apart from my parents, and most of all about my distance from them now. I was angry and resentful, but I talked to wipe the panic off Elizabeth’s face.
Rebecca Heller, as far as I could remember, was the most responsible child that ever walked the planet. She had curly hair, something she must have gotten from our grandmother. The rest of the family’s was straight. And hers was a lighter brown than everyone else’s too. She loved telling me and my brother, Noah, what to do, but not in a bossy, lordly way. She was instructive, and we generally listened.
“If you stack the single Lincoln Logs like this, along the two edges of the walls, you can put the window in like this, see?”
“Don’t try to put the needle onto the record with your hands. You’ll scratch it no matter how careful you are. Use this little arm to lower the needle. See? On the edge of the turntable? It goes down nice and gently, and Dad hates it when you scratch his records.”
“With Pong, the little ball gets going faster and faster, so you have to anticipate it. You can’t just wait, then move your paddle. That’s the trick. As soon as it comes off my paddle, judge the angle and move to it.”
“Three’s Company really isn’t appropriate for a nine-year-old, David. You don’t get all these jokes, but someday you will and you’ll realize I’m right.”
I remember her tone during those little lectures—concerned, earnest, but not domineering. She would have made a great teacher.
She was studious, a voracious reader with only a few friends, and they were almost as smart as she was. As the neighborhood boys arranged ourselves in warlike configurations for a pine-cone fight or ducked out to Big Bend Road to throw dirt clots at cars, Rebecca and her friends played with Breyer horses or sat together and read books. She progressed from Nancy Drew to All Creatures Great and Small to Watership Down to The Lord of the Rings to To Kill a Mockingbird by fourth grade. As puberty stalked, she became obsessed with the southerners she wanted to claim for her own: Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, and finally, Faulkner. Her vision had begun to blur and headaches had come on as she read The Sound and the Fury.
“That’s to be expected,” my father had quipped when she pointed this out. “Try something easier, like Absalom.”
Rebecca was the kind of child parents loved. She relished conversation with adults. When my parents threw parties for their book club or their mixed doubles team, Rebecca enthusiastically offered to take the guests’ coats to the neat pile she made on the guest bed upstairs, or bring around plates of smoked salmon and cream cheese on cocktail bread. When she was a little older, she taught herself to mix drinks off the labels on the bottles crammed tight in my parents’ bar. There was a dwarf in the book club, an odd, scruffy midget who would pick up and eat the Hickory Farms cheese ball as if it were an apple. Mom always knew he’d come and ruin her cheese ball, the smoked cheddar kind encrusted in walnuts. She bought one anyway and laid it out like an offering to the dwarf. Only Rebecca knew how to talk to him. My brother and I used to spy on them as they chatted, fascinated and a little repulsed.
At her Bat Mitzvah, Rebecca read an essay on the Equal Rights Amendment and recited her Torah portion flawlessly.
“Only you, adults of Georgia, can ensure passage of this vital addition to our nation’s Constitution. Only you will have yourselves to blame for failure.”
The adults nodded earnestly, lauded her civic-minded liberalism, then ignored her imprecations and voted Republican.
There had been a little glitch on the prayer she led as the Torah ark was closed. The rabbi, she said, had pointed to the wrong spot on the prayer book, and to her regret, she hesitated, looked up at his bearded face, and said, out loud, “Wait a minute, where?” The microphone had picked it up. She was mortified. None of the kids at her party had gotten drunk. The dance floor was crammed with adults.
She had grown gangly by thirteen, a little bucktoothed, with a mouthful of braces to fix that. Truth be told, she was not the most beautiful girl in middle school, but if she minded, she surely didn’t confide in us. She religiously applied the prescribed wax to her braces, washed her face with Clearasil, and mixed and matched her V-necked sweaters with her broadcloth button-downs, covering what little breasts she had in cotton and knit wool. In her worst moods, she called us pests and forbade us to come into her room. But those didn’t come often, if I recall right. She helped me with math, even when my parents didn’t ask her to.
“We call it ‘math’ in the United States, not ‘maths.’”
“But it’s short for ‘mathematics,’” Cristina protested, “so ‘maths.’”
“Americans aren’t quite so literal,” I assured her. “‘Math’ is just shorter. Anyway, Rebecca would tell me, ‘David, don’t worry. I don’t like math either.’ That made me feel a lot better.”
The headaches came suddenly, then blackouts if she stood too quickly. My father, once he gave up on his Faulknerian diagnosis, figured at worst it was mono, but Rebecca was not a complainer, so her complaints held grave weight. I woke one night to her wailing. It was piteous and searching and begging for mercy. I crawled out of bed, terrified, to peek into her room, hoping to glean some of the comfort my mother was trying to dispense. She was lying with my sister in her single bed, holding her tight, stroking her flyaway hair and shushing her in a soft, soft voice as Rebecca’s body convulsed in sobs. I fell back to sleep in the hallway, to the sound of my mother whispering, “Try not to think about the pain, shh, try, try, try.”
The next day, my father took her to one of his oldest friends, who happened to be a neurologist. The man, who had gone to medical school with my dad, didn’t want to believe what he saw. He stared at the dilated veins in the back of my sister’s eyes. He tested and retested her reflexes, agonized over the X-rays. Before MRIs were commonplace, he gave Rebecca one. He stared at the results, trying to find alternate explanations. Then he did what he had to do. He told his best friend that his eldest child, his only daughter, would likely die of brain cancer, soon.
I was not party to much of her treatment. I know she had surgery because half her head was shaved, showin
g me the sutures binding the purple wound. I know she was pumped with a medication that swelled her head so much she was barely recognizable. Her eyes sunk in the folds of puffy flesh and peered out from deep, cushioned caverns. Her mouth was a tiny, useless tear between the obscene orbs that her cheeks had become. Her lips were two adjoining lines of raw, weeping sores. Her jawline was buried in rubbery jowls that folded downward like a cartoonish frown. The sight of her frightened me terribly. My parents never told us she was dying.
Rebecca loved art. She tried her hand at it, took drawing and tempera painting classes at a friend of a friend’s house after school, painted animals on canvas in thick, gloppy oil. She wasn’t very good at it, and she knew it, and she took that with good humor too, because she was good at plenty of other things. If her literature was precocious, her taste in the visual arts was pure thirteen-year-old girl—Renoir, Van Gogh, and Monet, lots of Monet—to go along with her music, Olivia Newton-John, “Afternoon Delight,” and “Seasons in the Sun.”
“We had joy, we had fun, we had seasons in the sun, but the stars we could reach were just starfish on the beach.”
We played the music in her hospital room on a portable record player—“Good-bye my friend, it’s hard to die”—and plastered her room with posters of the water lilies of Giverny, boating parties, and starry nights. She could no longer read, so my mother read to her—not the ending of The Sound and the Fury but The Runaway Bunny.
“‘If you become a rock on the mountain high above me,’ said his mother, ‘I will be a mountain climber, and I will climb to where you are.’”
We no longer knew whether Rebecca could hear or understand, but my mother kept reading. She was sure she could.
“‘If you become a crocus in a hidden garden,’ said his mother, ‘I will be a gardener. And I will find you.’”
She was reading the moment my sister slipped from this world—and took with her my mother and father, who could not bear to stay behind.
“‘If you become a little boy and run into a house,’ said the mother bunny, ‘I will become your mother and catch you in my arms and hug you.’”
My older brother, just twelve, took down all the posters of all those Impressionists who have made me sick ever since. They are in my closet, at home in Georgia, and my parents are asking me to come back. They think I want them. They say they will be there when I return, all of them.
“‘If you become a bird and fly away from me,’ said his mother, ‘I will be a tree that you come home to.’”
Elizabeth stood in silence, leaning against the kitchen counter and staring at the floor. I wiped my eyes, and sniffed, but the tears kept coming. Cristina’s hands gently reached for mine and held them. She was crying too. Finally, she leaned over and kissed my cheek, her lips lingering on a tear track.
Chapter Eleven
The world doesn’t change with the death of a child. Children die every day. The world changes with the changing minds of Great Men. António de Spínola’s mind had changed, and he began writing by candlelight the book that would change his nation forever. Electric power in Bissau had become intermittent, much to his shame. Saboteurs, guerrilla rockets, and the occasional lucky mortar round were taking their toll on the capital of Guiné. Caetano’s junta in Lisbon, and the decrepit president of the republic, Admiral Américo Thomaz, knew nothing of PAIGC shelling, or the Neto trail, named after the intellectual revolutionary hoping to lead a new nation, that burrowed deep into Angola from guerrilla training camps in Zambia, or rebel sabotage on the rails linking Beira in Mozambique to Rhodesia.
The old cavalry officer sighed through his pen—the age of heroics was coming to an end. He strained his eyes in the dim light as he authored Portugal e o Futuro, “Portugal and the Future.” He recalled the carnage of Leningrad, the triumph of Franco, his own rise through the ranks of the Portuguese armed forces, and then looked around at the dimly lit corners of his study, where mold grew on the ceiling and slime rose from the baseboards.
“We are exhausting ourselves in a war that cannot be won. We are defending the wrong foundations of the nation,” he wrote. “We cannot admit that many Portuguese lose their lives today with the only effect that still more will die tomorrow. In this war, we are fighting for ideals that neither are moral nor serve the people.”
The Portuguese expeditionary force in Guiné now totaled one soldier for every fifteen civilians. The future of Portugal lay in Europe, not in empire, he wrote, yet how could our little, isolated country of eight million souls join our continental brethren when half our national expenditures go to support the armed forces and their wars? Offer our African brethren true equality. Let them decide their future, as true citizens of Portugal or as autonomous states nominally under our flag. And let our boys return home.
The helicopters rumbled into earshot as Elizabeth Gonçalves was finishing her second Nescafé with Angélica and Luis, the bread man. She had let herself sleep in a bit that morning. She had been married five months and was nearing only her twenty-first birthday. But already it was strange sleeping alone, with the stirrings of a new life inside her, even stranger waking up alone in West Africa.
Luis had given her a big smile that morning. Responsible for the frequent forays by jeep into Senegal for baguettes from the town of Kolda, or the much bigger city of Ziguinchor if he was feeling profligate with the station’s money, Luis had taken a fancy to Elizabeth and had pressed her for a few English lessons. Unsteady in João’s presence, now he was jovial.
“Penis butter, ees good.” He laughed, holding up a giant tin of peanut butter the Portuguese had carted in from Bissau. A loud peel of laughter rose from the only other English speaker in the room, Angélica. Elizabeth looked at her, and they laughed together. Luis had no idea why, but he joined in.
The thumping of the rotors drew Elizabeth from her seat. The armada came into view, flying low on the horizon from the west. There were four Alouette IIIs, the kind of choppers Raquel Brito had told Elizabeth her husband coveted for his Páraquedistas Caçadores—“Hunter Paratroops”—and two American Hueys marked with large red crosses on white fields. As they roared by the agricultural station, Elizabeth could see the gunners clearly in their open doors, their weapons and eyes trained on the ground.
The radioman in João’s patrol had not had time to make contact with Bissau, but the distress signal was alarm enough. They had radioed in their position the night before and could not have gotten far on the roads of northern Guiné that early in the morning. The helicopters found what they were looking for quickly. Weapons, provisions, medical supplies, and medicines were all taken. But the jeeps and the medical truck were left behind, intact. The PAIGC moved by stealth, not by car. The vultures fled as the helicopters landed, and what was left of the soldiers was transported back to Bissau. There was no sign of the doctor or the medic.
Elizabeth knew the air patrol had something to do with her husband, and it set her fantasies spinning into dangerous territory. She sat down in the shade of the palaver hut, a wall-less, thatched-roof structure where the staff came to talk over assignments and catch the occasional Guinean breeze. João could be dead, she thought. If her husband was killed in action, surely the Portuguese military would see her safely back to Britain. It was a rash and guilt-inducing thought, and she scorned herself immediately for it, but it had come quickly, this fantasy of widowhood. This was war after all, she indulged. She could be back at her parents’ estate within days. Daddy would arrange for a good Tory abortion in London and a convalescence at Houndsheath. She would look for a way to London and a use for her strange education. This little adventure would be like a dream; it would linger in her mind, fading over time, but would have no real impact on the course of her life. How strange a chapter of her life: Such momentous happenings could end up having so little import, she thought, clinically, soberly.
It was not until the next day that she learned the details of her husband’s disappearance and presumed capture. Aleixo Menges asked if h
e might have a word with her. Her Portuguese was good enough to leave Angélica behind. If Menges ran into trouble, he could muster his own limited English.
“It has to do with the helicopters from yesterday, doesn’t it?” Elizabeth started in.
“Yes, Elizabeth. There was an ambush. They tried to call for help, but the helicopters were too late. When they arrived, João was not there. There were a lot of bodies, a lot of death. All of the soldiers, but João was not there.”
“Could he have escaped, run away? Could he have somehow been left behind?”
“Maybe, we’ll have to see. He had spent the previous night with villagers nearby. Perhaps they protected him. But this was a big force that attacked, very efficient. By the looks of the mess, it didn’t take long. A surprise assault in Fula country. The medic, Augusto, wasn’t found either. I believe he and João were probably captured. All of the medical supplies were taken from the truck. They would want the doctors as well.”
Elizabeth remembered books and movies where war widows fainted or wailed or beat the chest of the uniformed messenger at the door bearing the bad news. She wondered why she was not overwhelmed, but she was not. It was an embarrassing thought. She stared down at the dirty floor beneath Menges’s flimsy folding chair, noticing the scuffs on the floor around the legs, which scraped the ground with bare, rough metal. They sat in silence for a long while, Menges waiting for a response, some sign that would tell him to comfort her or to leave her alone. Nothing came.
So he spoke again. “Elizabeth, I am sorry, but you and Angélica must leave here. You will be better off in Bissau waiting for word of João. There is nothing for you here.”
“But I must wait for him. If he escaped, he’s nearby. I should be here if he finds his way back, or if he’s found.” She strained to enunciate the words, not just because she was translating from English to Portuguese but because she did not believe them. João was gone. This place seemed suddenly absurd. She didn’t want to be here, with the mambas and the dead bats and the big, empty bed. She wanted to be home, in England.
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