No. 4 Imperial Lane

by Jonathan Weisman

  “João, do you think I can really have this baby here?” she asked plaintively. “I have no obstetrician. The hospital is a wreck. I’m scared.”

  “You won’t be having the baby here,” João said softly.

  “What?” Elizabeth leaned forward, smiling at first. For a fleeting moment, she thought they would be going home, wherever that would be—Lisbon or London, Hampshire or the Algarve, anywhere far to the north of Guiné. But João’s eyes were downcast, as if he was not sure whether this news would be welcomed or cursed.

  “We’ll be leaving here. Soon. That’s what Renato says. I’ll probably be sent to Angola.”

  The next unknown washed over Elizabeth’s face, cleansed it of expression. She stared blankly.

  “This is good news, Elizabeth. Luanda, the capital, is a beautiful city, a real city with good hospitals, far from war. The highlands are cool and lush. We can get an apartment, have a real life. After Guiné, Angola will seem like the UK.”

  He smiled reassuringly.

  “Why am I only learning this now?” Elizabeth asked.

  “I just got the news from Renato myself. I’m still awaiting my orders.”

  “We’re never leaving this bloody continent, are we?”

  João reached across the table and took Elizabeth’s hands in his. It was the first time they had touched in a week.

  It would be more than a month before the orders came to leave. Elizabeth was into her seventh month. She was huge, hot, and tired. Brito called João into the officers’ mess. Renato Marsola Araujo was waiting. The air force officer poured a healthy helping of vinho tinto into a mason jar and pushed it to the doctor, then poured another for Araujo and another for himself.

  “To your next adventure,” Brito bellowed, self-satisfied. It was just past nine in the morning.

  They would stay in Luanda until the baby came, maybe a few weeks after that. Then it would be out of his hands. General Costa Gomes, commander in chief of Portuguese forces in Angola, would be handing out orders.

  “Quite a survivor, General Gomes,” Brito said. “I don’t trust him a bit. They call him the Cork because he’s always floating out of trouble.” Brito’s hands waved along an invisible ocean, his voice rising in mockery. “He lost his post in Lisbon—what was it, undersecretary of state for the army, I think—back in sixty-one after his name surfaced as a plotter against Doctor Salazar. But damn if he didn’t get back into it. A brigadier general three short years later.”

  Brito glanced at his own rank, festooned on his chest, then shrugged. “You won’t see much of him. Angola is not Guiné. It’s a big country—excuse me, a big province of our beloved country,” he said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “I envy you, though, Major Gonçalves. I’ll be the one to lower the flag here and fly it out myself, tucked between my legs.”

  “Before you head off to bed, David, I want you to tell me something,” Elizabeth was saying.

  I looked up from my cup. I was tired. Hans was still in the hospital, and much as I loved these listening sessions, I could have used a rest that night.

  “When you go to hospital to see Hans, what are you doing?”

  “We read letters.”

  “Letters?”

  “From your days in Africa. He has a pile of them in the chest by his bed. You didn’t know that?”

  “Well, I suppose I must have.”

  She took a moment to light a cigarette.

  “Well, then, how are they?”

  I thought for a moment.

  “Corroborative, mostly.”

  “Will you show me one?”

  I must have rolled my eyes. I wanted to go to sleep.

  “Oh, c’mon, David, just the one. Then I’ll leave you and Hans to your little game. I wrote the bloody things.”

  “He wrote half of them.”

  “Well, then show me one that I wrote, for fuck’s sake, David.”

  I couldn’t argue with that.

  Dearest Hans,

  I pick up this pen with terrible trepidation, so much to tell, so much of it horrible, a tale “whose lightest word would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood.”

  Harrowing things have happened since I last wrote. Joao was captured by the guerrillas while in his mobile clinic. He just disappeared from me. I came back to the capital, Bissau, and was close to abandoning him, to returning to Houndsheath. But I couldn’t be so cruel. You see, I am carrying his child. A shock, I know, you are soon to be an uncle, and a frightful uncle you will be, teaching my son or daughter all your vices and sloth. That will be a happy day. I do so miss you.

  Without Joao, the loneliness and uncertainty were unbearable. My friend Angélica was some comfort. I awaited word, tried to somehow press his case with the governor of this colony, and then suddenly, he was free. The prison or guerrilla base or whatever you want to call it was attacked by the Portuguese, and he just squirted free. But Hans, he is a changed man. It is as if whatever happened to him these past months, whatever he saw, whatever they did to him, whatever he did, has sucked the gentleman from his marrow. I realize he had been without a woman for a long time, but what he did to me our first night back together was unforgivable. I don’t know if I can look at him the same way again. I had so longed for his touch, his embrace, and his caress. Now, the thought of such things makes me shudder with revulsion. He took me, Hans. He took what he wanted and spit me out, like an animal, the savage bull.

  But it is still more complicated. The war in Guine is all but lost. We are to depart, to Angola. Have you heard of it? Joao tells me I will like it, that the capital of Luanda is a real city, with cafes and restaurants and theatres. My baby will be delivered in a modern hospital. I am so tired of it here, the stench, the rot, the hopelessness. But what of this lovely land I am promised if I can no longer trust the man I am to share it with? I fear for my child, Hans. I fear for myself sometimes, though I know I am being a silly cow. It is not as if Joao has beaten me. I know—he has been through a lot, and I must give him time.

  I am glad to hear you are still with Segolaine. You really must send me a photo. She sounds breathtaking. Watch out for those lasses at the bank, Hans, lest they lead you into temptation. Your Segolaine does not sound like a woman to be trifled with. I would ask you to pray for me or some such, but alas, neither of us was raised with such convenient outlets. So instead, I will say be happy for me. I am to bring a life into this world, such as it is. I will write from Angola.

  Yours truly,

  Elizabeth

  Chapter Fourteen

  “Guiné?” Francisco da Costa Gomes murmured. “You have seen a little war with big heroes: Senhor Cabral, with his speeches to the UN; our own brilliant, sad General Spínola. I hear he’s writing a book about it all. Well, I hope you look back at that valiant little conflict with some fondness, Doctor. Here, you will find a big war with no heroes at all, only villains. I’m afraid I count myself among them.”

  João sat in an uncomfortable plain wooden chair, watching the general across a vast desk of mahogany, carved from the forests of the Congo. He had to decipher Gomes’s introspective tone without the benefit of reading his eyes; the general wore dark glasses, even though the room’s thick wooden shutters were drawn tight against the southern sun. Costa Gomes’s boxy head was made more prominent by his receding hairline. The wiry, graying hair of his long sideburns framed prominent ears. He had a strangely thick lower lip that accentuated drooping eyes and a melancholy face. His bushy brows rose skyward. João understood why a military man like Brito wouldn’t trust him. He seemed saddened by his position.

  The original sin in Angola was Lisbon’s, no doubt, the commander conceded. In Baixa do Cassange, in 1961, forced laborers, fed up with sowing cotton for their Portuguese, German, and British overlords, burned their identification cards and roughed up a few white traders. Crowds of Africans had gathered along the streets of Nambuangongo, the main market town of the province, to laugh and cheer the protesters. Musicians beat drums and strumm
ed Portuguese guitars. Revolution, or at least change, was in the air, but it was a festive sort.

  To the west, a more serious rebellion was under way. Some two hundred fifty fighters for the MPLA, the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola—soft intellectuals, mestiços, with no fighting experience among them—had the temerity to attack the main prison in Luanda. To that point, the MPLA, under the command of a Lisbon-trained medical student named Agostinho Neto, existed only in smoky cafés, basement plotting sessions, and revolutionary-sounding posters plastered on Luanda’s walls in the dead of night. Now the professors and their students had guns. Seven policemen were killed. No prisoners were freed. The assailants were slaughtered with dispatch.

  For their troubles, hell was unleashed, armed with napalm and revolvers. Seven thousand Angolans were incinerated in the villages of Baixa do Cassange. Portuguese settlers mobbed Luanda’s slums—the musseques. To the north, in the fledgling nation of Zaire, Holden Roberto was ready for the next round of bloodletting. An ambitious mestiço with a rural army all his own, Roberto was not about to take orders from the city slickers of the MPLA, who were neither of his tribe, Bakongo, nor of his temperament. His UPA fighters, Union of the Peoples of Angola, maybe four or five thousand strong, armed with machetes and old shotguns, poured southward from the border, killing anybody or anything in their way. Women and children were strapped onto tree trunks and sent lengthwise through sawmills.

  “The do-gooders at the UN say fifty thousand Africans died in that first year of war,” Costa Gomes was saying a decade later, taking a deep drag from his African-rolled cigarette. “I don’t doubt the number, but I can’t corroborate it. We didn’t count.

  “I do know another number: two thousand. That’s the number of Portuguese who died, and let me tell you, that is not good for business when your business is settlement.

  “We made a deal with the devil then. The South Africans have been loyal allies ever since. Their air force patrols the border, even bombed Tanzania for us. That shut Nyerere up. Don’t get me wrong. We are doing our part. Last year, we secured twelve additional battalions—airborne, paratroopers, Marines, you name it, nearly twenty-thousand additional troops. Caetano’s not about to give Angola up. But our propeller planes are no match for South African jets. We need those bastards.”

  João didn’t understand his role, why he was here. The silences, he thought, were for effect, not engagement. So he waited.

  “How long do such deals last before you are dragged to hell to pay your dues?” the general continued. “God does not like deals with the devil. Tell me, Doctor Gonçalves, when does the reckoning come?”

  “Is that a rhetorical question?” João asked.

  “Only if you don’t have an answer, Major.”

  João owed this meeting with the commander of forces in Angola to his wife. There weren’t any stuffed teddy bears or pink balloons to greet her and their new daughter postpartum, but there was one unruly tropical bouquet.

  “Congratulations on your new arrival and may your recovery be a quick one,” it read in English, with perfect penmanship. “Your father sends his best and would like you to write sometime. Sincerely, General Francisco da Costa Gomes.”

  The note sent a strange shiver through Elizabeth.

  “‘I can call spirits from the vasty deep,’” she murmured in wonderment to her husband, smiling over the paper.

  She had felt so isolated for so long, so removed from home, it was as if she had found some kind of message in a bottle, a wayward, lucky break. She was too exhausted to contemplate its meaning or origin. But the general followed up two days later with a formal introductory letter, which arrived while she was still in the hospital.

  “I hope that my last note did not cause undue surprise,” it read. “Allow me to introduce myself. I am Francisco da Costa Gomes, commander of forces in Angola and an acquaintance of your father, Sir Gordon Bromwell, Member of Parliament. I met your father many years ago, when I was on NATO headquarters staff, in Norfolk, in your East Anglia. I realize that is quite a ways from your home in the south, but your father, in the House of Lords then, was and likely still is quite the military aficionado, as you no doubt know. And, I would add somewhat sheepishly, he was an admirer of our leader, Doctor Salazar, and our Iberian neighbor, Generalissimo Francisco Franco. This is an arena he and I did not see eye to eye on, but I try to avoid talking politics.

  “Regardless, he received word that you might be heading in my direction, and he has asked me to keep an eye out for his daughter. His kindnesses were many as a gracious host in England. I am obliged to ensure your safety, which I am in a position to do. As I noted before, Sir Gordon would like a letter from you every now and again. As a father myself, I am full of sympathy.

  “Truly yours,

  “General Costa Gomes”

  For an entire childhood and adolescence, Elizabeth had virtually no relationship with her father. That he had tracked her down, even through an intermediary, filled her with wonder and gratitude. Was this love? she thought. What would that feel like? She had never felt the warmth of affection; no kind words, no shared laughter, no compliments on her face or piano playing or singing voice, not even recriminations that reminded her that anything was expected of her. She wracked her memory, trying to conjure an instance when her father had told her he loved her, and it didn’t come. He surely knew he was a grandfather. Perhaps he was looking after her after all.

  She looked down at her baby daughter, Cristina, olive-skinned, already with lustrous black hair, latched on to her nipple. How could a creature so beautiful, so delicate, so tender emerge from troubles as deep as hers? Could this tiny baby be a solution, any solution? She delicately held that soft, dark skin with one pale, English hand, cradled that black crown with the other, and the very notions of troubles to be reckoned with, issues to be solved, they disappeared. And tears flowed.

  For João, the entire first four months in Angola had been an escape. He and Elizabeth had flown out of Bissau on a troop transport full of soldiers, reinforcements for the Angolan war, a charitable person might say, evacuees from a defeat more likely. The men were crestfallen. Like him, they had hoped the loss of Bissau would mean an end to their tours of Africa. Instead, they were merely relocated. It was a strange-looking plane, with a bulbous passenger section nestled between narrow twin fuselages that rattled loudly behind the propellers. The arrival had been nothing like the shock of those first impressions of Bissau. Luanda was hot, but cooled by the wide expanse of seaside. The city teemed with life, thousands of Portuguese civilians mixed with hundreds of thousands of southern Africans in bars and restaurants along the bay, graceful colonial buildings, weathered by Africa but not ruined by it.

  The army put them up in the Hotel Le Presidente, the oldest in a city founded in 1575 by the Portuguese explorer Paulo Dias de Novais. Slaves made Luanda prosper; palm and peanut oil, ivory, cotton, coffee, and cocoa made it legitimate. Now oil was making it rich. Luanda was oblivious to war and the draining coffers of the national bank in Lisbon. The oil discovery in Cabinda was fortuitously timed. The Six-Day War and its aftermath had plunged the West into a frantic search for its lifeblood anywhere but the Middle East. Luanda was a forest of construction cranes in the middle of a war of liberation, but the fighting was so far away that the residents chose not to believe in its existence.

  No one seemed much to notice the doctor and his wife. Their room in the hotel overlooked the bay, in the heart of the city. João took long walks on the seafront, sipped freshly picked and roasted coffee in the cafés on the ocean, checked in on his wife—huge and miserable—and then headed into the city again. At night, there were endless diversions. The thrum of Latinized African music mixed with the flouncy miniskirts of the era. It was a sensual cauldron.

  Elizabeth ached. She had wept as she said good-bye to Angélica, her only real friend in Africa. “‘May violets spring! I tell thee, churlish priest, a minist’ring angel shall my sister be,’” she whisp
ered in her ear as they held each other. Angélica smiled and patted her on the shoulder. “There you go again with that.”

  Their relationship had been strained to say the least, but the thaw between João and Elizabeth had defrosted the women’s friendship as well. Angélica came to understand Elizabeth’s hurt at João’s hands not as the self-indulgence of a pampered child but as a glimpse at her friend’s vulnerability, so far from home, so dependent on this man. Elizabeth forgave Angélica as the Cabo-Verdiana’s scorn softened and her ribbing turned good-natured again.

  Angélica came by her newfound empathy honestly, for her own sense of vulnerability had overwhelmed her. The loss of her white patron meant everything. She would be reduced to a charwoman at best, or thrown off the base to try to find her way in Bissau or find a way back to Cabo Verde. For Elizabeth, solitude meant finding her way back to her husband, if she could. And it meant starting over, in a new African country, even farther from home, with a baby due in weeks. Parting had been agony.

  Like João, she was cheered by her new, temporary home. But an ocean view could keep her occupied only so long. The endless cycle of hotel meals, fitful naps when she could not find a position to rest around her great abdomen, fifteen-minute walks, and lonely convalescence wore her down quickly. She badly wanted the baby to come, to free her from the grotesque body that she believed was sending her husband into the streets, and to break up the monotony. Those last weeks of pregnancy were God’s way of making childbirth an acceptable alternative, she thought.