“You must be thirsty,” she said. “Even the wind is hot.”
“When I do not have visits from good people like you, people from excellent and fine organizations, I am weeping,” said Bihlal, after they’d each had their fair share of lager. “I am crying like a child.”
“Why are you crying, mate? You have a good life, good wives,” said Patrick, hoarse by this late hour. “What about your clinic?”
“I do not own my land,” said Bihlal. “And without land here, you are nothing. Less than nothing. But you know this,” he said, smiling. “You’ve been listening to me each of these evenings, all of this time. Correct?”
“Correct.”
“Do you know that when nobody comes—do you know what I am doing? I am collecting wood. I am selling this wood. To buy rice! I tell you, I am crying.”
Hugh fought off his own requisite groundswell of sadness—good ol’ drunken sadness. The sadness for others was always so much more accessible, so much clearer. Here he could identify infinite pain and frank inequality and the face of every bloated-bellied child with yellowy eyes. Here were poverty and its twin, poor health. Here was the sadness of remembering those Nuer babies with smallpox, years ago now, those men and women and children under those pox-foul sheets, who still seemed far better off than those here in Dar. Bihlal was a king compared to all of them. And compared to Bihlal, Hugh was …? He was a sap, of course; a guilty white sap of a man, drinking his mushroom-y dirty-sock-smelling beer until it felt as if he were floating on the bitter pale foam of it, up up up, and steeling himself against his urges to give Bihlal everything in his pockets, against spewing promises to wire money the very next day into a personal account. And the more Bihlal talked, the more Hugh was fairly certain that there was no clinic fifty kilometers away, and, even if there was, Bihlal probably swept its floors and prepared its limited medicines. No, Bihlal was, most likely, a well-meaning con artist, and even if Hugh did empty his pockets right there, Bihlal would be right where he started in one or two months’ time.
And Bihlal—he was anything but stupid—he probably knew this, too.
By the time the stars were diamonds in the sky, Hugh agreed they could use his Land Rover (bought in ’65 from a bitter Brit, finally headed back to Surrey), which was parked across from the hotel. Aisha sat beside him, Patrick sat in the front seat, and Bihlal drove them all toward what was, according to Bihlal, premium lodging quite near—very near—to my clinic!
They sped through grassland, between trees whose branches reached every which way and looked, tonight, like broken parasols missing their shades. They sped over paved roads that turned quickly to unpaved roads that Hugh knew to be reddish and rutted, where one could only drive fast for fear of getting caught in the ruts. And when they arrived at the cement block without windows, at the choked weeds in cracked earth, he felt farther away from Dar es Salaam than he had ever been, even though he’d driven as far as Uganda many times throughout the year, and here he was smashed and exhausted and who knew precisely where?
A yellow light signified an entrance. Bihlal spoke to a man in a djellaba, who handed the three men three keys. Were they really going to see Bihlal’s clinic in the morning? From the way that Bihlal spoke to the man in the djellaba, from the way the man in the djellaba was grinning, Hugh did not believe so. Tobacco and bleach wafted through the vacant hall.
“Thank you, my friends.” Bihlal clapped the two men on the back. His room was evidently on the first floor.
“Good night.”
“Good night.”
“Good night.”
“God will bless you.”
“Don’t be so sure,” said Hugh.
Patrick laughed.
“Please, my friends,” Bihlal nodded toward Aisha, “have no doubt.”
“Good night,” said Hugh again. “Thank you,” he said, though he wasn’t sure why.
Patrick climbed the stairs with Hugh and Aisha. They climbed in silence, and when Patrick opened a door on the second floor, he entered without so much as an attempt to kiss Aisha’s hand. “I’m knackered,” he said, and went inside.
On the third floor the hall light was broken. Hugh felt his way along the walls; the rough concrete lightly scraped his palms. “I’m over here,” he said.
“Here?” she whispered.
“Closer.”
He felt her reaching for him, but when her hand brushed his hip she immediately pulled away.
He opened the door to the room, turned on the light, and instantly regretted doing so. The dark had suited him, but—then again—he really wanted to look at her.
When she closed the door, the world—magically and conveniently—disappeared.
“Hello,” he said.
“Hello,” she said. “You look very tired.”
“You don’t,” he said. “You never do.”
“May I have a drink of water first?”
“Aisha, please,” he said, not even concealing his irritation with her obsequiousness. “You know you never have to ask me something like that. I have told you and told you. You may do whatever you please.”
She took up the jar that sat on the metal table and poured water into two glasses.
“Tell me,” Hugh said, accepting his glass, though he made sure not to drink from it. “How is your father?”
“My father is the same,” she said. “The money for the treatment—we were all very grateful to have it.”
“I’m glad,” Hugh said, before glancing away. “And I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“I’m sorry he isn’t healed.”
“Yes,” she said, “of course.” She pursed her full lips and nodded.
“I am,” Hugh said.
“Yes, all right.”
She sat down on the bed, atop a pilled orange coverlet, under the weak lightbulb, and when she sighed (lightly—but still) he knew she wasn’t going to give him what he really wanted: the absolution for being unable to change not only her fate but the fate of her entire family, which he knew she viewed as one and the same. She grinned in the same way she had at the bar, when Bihlal had—unaware of their acquaintance—made his crass presentation. It was, then and now, as if she were not only a stranger but also a mother, and Hugh—slouching down in his chair—was a tiresome child, and she was going along with his tedious game of pretending only because that’s what was expected of women, all women, when faced with a tiresome child.
“Aisha,” he said.
He didn’t apologize for pretending she was a stranger in front of the men. And he wasn’t wholeheartedly sorry; Bihlal and Patrick—they’d needed something from him, too. They needed him to be the naïve one, the young one whose mistakes weren’t grave as yet. Hugh had been unable to meet her gaze, had been unable to even ask her for a beer, and now, after riding through the desert with her thigh and shoulder touching his throughout the journey, with her sweet onion sandalwood scent right there in the car, he still couldn’t look at her, not straight on. He glimpsed her in flashes—the brown skirt too warm for this temperature. The high, shining forehead. The otherworldly smooth skin. And he noticed, as he always did—before his overwhelming need erased the possibility for such sane observation—her stillness. Her stillness that brought forth his loneliness like an equal trade, and with the clarity of a runner gunning toward the finish, her stillness unnerved and undid him, until he came close to leaving the miserable room, thumbnail bitten to the quick.
But then she lay back on the bed and he came to her, and when she continued to say nothing and that nothing became silence—devoid of ethics or currency or the existence of before and after—when it was there, the blank silence, save the hum of the generator and the odd truck passing on the byroad, he touched the top of her tautly braided head and asked her to take off her clothes.
He clutched her from behind and didn’t last long. As usual, he had the fantasy of being invisible and watching her pleasure herself or even do a series of mundane activities (prepare t
ea, sweep the floor, scratch an itch) rather than his actually being there and taking any kind of charge. Afterward, as always, she insisted on washing him. She led him to where a showerhead sprayed into a small cement room. She took the bleach-rough cloth between her hands and stroked and scrubbed Hugh’s back. She didn’t seem to be in any kind of rush, spoke of one day studying in London. She marveled at the beauty of his chest hair, which never ceased to amuse him. He turned his face to the nozzle, and the pressure was just strong enough. She’d begun to hum, and the tepid water drowned out her meandering tune.
He left an envelope full of enough money for Bihlal and Patrick to hire a car, whenever it was that they eventually awoke, and, after dropping Aisha off at a safe distance from her family’s home, with a pocket full of money of her own (if my father sees your car, he will have you killed, she’d calmly informed him), Hugh continued on to Ocean Road. Night still clung to the sky. Hugh had trouble shedding Aisha’s touch, Aisha’s voice, and the haunted feeling to which he was already somewhat accustomed. He convinced himself that his sense of being both haunted and more alive—which had started when he’d arrived on this continent as a devotee of Charlie Case—was at least part of why he had never really left. Oh, he’d been back—a few weeks here and there to reinstate his visa, have a job interview in D.C., see a doctor about his stomach (which had never been the same since dysentery four years ago), and spend one summer vacation. But it was always for a distinct purpose and never more than a month, and it had always made him feel out of sorts and yearning to return.
Yes, he’d wanted to make a contribution to a postcolonial system; yes, he was deeply disgusted with the proliferation of poverty and disease in the world, and both were more than plentiful here. But he’d also found several bureaucratic avenues while on this continent that allowed him to avoid being drafted to Vietnam, plus he had no interest in being anywhere near his father, whose own disgust with Hugh had evidently not dimmed with age. I love Africa, Hugh had written years ago to Charlie Case. One reason for this may very well be that, here, there simply is no concept of time. And Charlie had written him back, from Harvard, where he had started his very own film department, despite continuing to insist that he was not an academic. Shipley, he wrote, you’re not an African, so African time hardly applies to you. Don’t get in the habit of justifying your own laziness. That’s a deadly one, especially in an expatriate.
After, when Aisha’s arms were around him and he was a safe distance from his own life—he didn’t give a good goddamn how pretentious it sounded; he wasn’t planning on saying it aloud, for Christ’s sake—he felt closer to the dead. He felt the burden of his own insignificance, and this specific bewildering weight gave him a simultaneously disconcerting and reassuring charge. And though he knew he had to stop these visits to Aisha (he wished he could convince himself that this last one didn’t count; he hadn’t sought her out, he really hadn’t), he wasn’t totally convinced he would ever stop, now that he’d begun it. He knew, too, that it wouldn’t always be Aisha. He couldn’t even allow himself that particular romantic delusion.
It had been more than a year since he’d met her at the clinic where she’d come with her father—a tubercular, pneumatic tyrant. Among Hugh’s various administrative duties was managing the line of miserable souls, often deciding who needed to see Dr. Shannon immediately. When Hugh met Aisha and her father, he knew her father did not qualify to cut in front of the others—due to the fact that his demise was already in full swing. This kind of judgment was precisely what Hugh was supposed to be able to handle, but Aisha had taken Hugh’s hand and asked him to move her father past three truly sick children—who Hugh knew were not only more critical but also had the potential to bounce back—and right to the front of the line. Her voice had been low, it was a voice that meant business, and Hugh decided the old man was as deserving as anyone else.
Who was he to judge, after all?
As he drove now, in the middle of this moonless night, he felt the intestinal twitch (a souvenir from his bout with dysentery), which meant he was soon going to need to relieve his bowels. He hoped—he even prayed—that he’d make it to his house. His intestinal disasters, his difficulties swallowing—he had not pictured any of that when he aborted a promising career as a photographer. He had made choices. This was all a choice; he knew this. He also knew he hadn’t sunk the bulk of his trust into renovating and restructuring and running a health clinic for Africans who couldn’t afford their local hospital in order to spend his life alternating between rushing to the bathroom and fawning over dark skin, leaving money on dressers and in shoes.
But there he was—exactly right there—in the middle of the night. He drove faster, passed through the mercantile neighborhood, with the closed-up shops of Indians, Bangladeshis, Pakistanis, and Sri Lankans, the signs in Hindi, the smells of a thousand spices and their vats of starchy rice, all wafting through Hugh’s open window. He recalled a time when the most exotic place he had ever driven through was Blue Hill Avenue—only miles from his childhood but a world away—when Ed probably had no idea that Hugh was having to refrain from acting too eager, too thrilled.
He crossed the bridge to the other side of the lagoon, and there the air underwent a drastic change. The wind still carried the faintest trace of burning garbage, but as that smell faded, as he heard the waves lapping against the seaweed-choked and salt-whorled cliffs, another smell—saline, floral—arrived in its place. Here was moonlight on purple bougainvillea, blue jacaranda, and flaming red hibiscus. Here were porches, gravel driveways, a wandering peacock; here was a parked Mercedes. Here it was—good fortune—contained and severed from the rest of the city. And as he drew closer to the street where they’d lived for more than three years now, his insides sprang into coils like the insides of the mattress he’d laid on with Aisha, the rusted metal poking now and again through cheap, hard foam. His stomach churned as he tried to remember whether he’d gone through all of the antacid in the medicine cabinet.
The house was dark, but the too-bright streetlight meant to deter bandits was illuminated, and it filtered through the curtains that his wife had so carefully (obsessively, he’d argued) considered—brightly colored batiks chosen from a stall on Uhuru Street, from the most convincing of vendors who’d shouted and whistled for his mzungu bride. There were crumbs along the countertop of the small kitchen; a cluster of red ants was arduously clearing them away. He wondered, briefly, what she’d eaten to leave such crumbs and if it had been her whole dinner. He imagined crystallized honey on crumbly bread—the swallowing again and yet again, waiting for the taste to improve.
He turned on the bathroom light and relieved himself, checked his stool as Shannon had taught him to—for irregularities, for darkness—smirking as he always did, because he remembered Raoul Merva telling him a story about how, as a young man in Hungary, he’d suffered terribly from insomnia, until one summer, when he’d been working on a dairy farm (I’d been using my hands, Raoul had solemnly explained), he’d begun to give some thought to feces, about why, as human beings, we are so afraid of our feces. Perhaps, he’d mused, these thoughts had blossomed because he’d grown so fond of the cows, who (he’d clarified) really knew how to take a shit. Raoul told Hugh with considerable pride how one evening he’d had enough of fear. “My friend,” he told Hugh, “I relieved myself in the shower. And I looked at it. And do you know what I did? I picked it up. I picked it up, and I held it in my hands.” Hugh nodded and nodded until he couldn’t hold back his laughter. He’d laughed until it became clear that Raoul had something more to say. “Since that day, I have slept like a baby. Since then,” said Raoul, “I am not afraid.”
Hugh smirked because he remembered what it felt like to be that young and laughing and because there was nothing funny about shit these days; nothing funny about shit at all. A few chalky antacid pills remained, and he took one with a tall glass of water, wincing, as he always did, when he felt the pill go down. He turned off the light and went into the
living room, sat for a moment on the green couch that looked comfortable and cheerful but was in fact punishingly hard. Hugh glanced around. He could be anywhere. The house looked the way he imagined an army barracks house might look, like the home of some poor drafted son of a bitch heading from Texas to Saigon, with the scared wife sleeping in the lumpy bed, praying for a safe return.
The draft, argued Ed, unifies a country. Certainly you’re not saying that anyone really deserves a special exemption?
It was a stupid argument, one of their many, as neither one of them thought the war was just, and frankly—for different reasons—neither one of them was going to fight in it (Hugh wrangled himself a job as a Peace Corps evaluator, while Ed remained in school as long as possible—there were somehow always more classes in which he apparently had to be enrolled—before finally enlisting in the reserves). But their conversations had become increasingly polarized during the few times they’d seen each other over the years, and the war, the draft—it was an obvious place to start. Ed believed in the draft but not the war, which Hugh argued meant that he couldn’t believe in the draft, because how could he support a draft for a war in which he did not believe?
It was like that.
It was—during the few times Hugh had been through New York—two quick drinks and one long lunch, over which they had their final blowout three years ago, over the goddamn Middle East.
All Hugh had done was bring up a New York Times editorial he’d read that morning in the gastrointestinal doc’s office, which had questioned the wisdom of Israel’s annexation of Jerusalem’s old city, and Ed—who’d seemed agitated upon sitting down, who frankly had not seemed remotely relaxed with Hugh since they’d said goodbye at the ferry dock in New London after that awful Fishers weekend at the Ordways’—became suddenly enraged. He’d broken down the history of the Jews: their expulsion from every country after committing the sin of success, their near extermination, the subsequent allowance (thank God) by the rest of the world for—finally—a Jewish state. When Hugh tried to maintain that, though he was not arguing with Ed’s position (he really wasn’t!), Ed had to admit that this allowance had not exactly been established with much concern for the existing indigenous Arab population, Ed grew silent and twitchy.
A Dual Inheritance Page 19
