Liberation

by Joanna Scott

  How long had he been asleep? He tried to piece together the sequence of events. First he’d lost his comrades shortly after disembarking in the marina, then he’d been shot at, then he’d run and run, then he’d met the spoiled princess named Adriana, then he’d run again, then he’d blinked and plunged into a fog so thick he hadn’t been able to see his hands.

  The wind had risen, dispersing the fog. Now the wind was murmuring from behind the door. “Ssss, Monsieur Amdu. Ssss. Silence. Ssss.” Amdu blinked, and the wind appeared in the form of the barefoot girl named Adriana, who’d sneaked inside the room and pressed herself against the wall to keep hidden from anyone passing by.

  “Monsieur Amdu, you stay well?” she asked in French.

  “I feel better,” he said. Watching her, he was struck by two possibilities: the girl had been present when he had been bathed, and she had saved his life.

  “Good,” she said, and after staring at him for a long moment, studying him in the way that she might have studied a sheet of music before she attempted to play, she slipped from the room again, leaving him alone in the place that seemed unaccountably strange and yet perfect.

  And then he woke again to a sound out in the yard that reminded him of watching a laobé in the market in Dakar whittling the end of a wooden stick. He pulled himself upright, stood on wobbly feet, and pushed open the shutter. Beside his window, a stout woman was sweeping the steps leading to the courtyard. He called a greeting to her, “Bonjour,” causing her to exclaim and clutch her hand to her throat. She looked as though she’d just swallowed a fly. “Pardon,” Amdu said, thinking that he’d lost track of time and mistaken evening for morning and this was why she was surprised. “Bonsoir,” he corrected himself. The woman said nothing in reply. She just stared up at Amdu as if she were watching him rise from his grave. Unable to assure her in her own language that he hadn’t yet been treated to the joy of resurrection and had merely woken from a long nap, he shrugged and retreated back into his room.

  Without the sound of the broom, the sound of humming could be heard coming from another corner of the villa. It was a girl’s voice, sweet like pomegranate juice, and it made Amdu want to pluck the string of a molo and dance across the room. Despite the disorienting effects of his fever and the apprehension of the woman in the courtyard, he felt carefree, just as he’d felt walking home from the last day of school holding his Certificat d’Études.

  God had been gracious. It was pleasant to acknowledge this and to take pride in having survived not just the dangers of war but the temptation of doubt as well. He had fought his way out of despair and caused no harm to anyone. He had lived before God in all good conscience up to this day. Feeling strengthened by his faith, he gulped the fresh water in the glass that had been left on the table beside his bed. But the deck began to tip again, and he vomited into the chamber pot.

  He blinked and saw his handsome face reflected in the eyes of the woman he’d seen sweeping the steps. Having offered the wrong greeting earlier, he kept his mouth closed and enjoyed the damp cloth she was pressing against his forehead.

  He could tell from her expression that she’d forgiven him for having startled her. Between then and now, she’d grown fond of him. Everyone who came to know Amdu grew fond of him. He couldn’t help it. He was like the beer his father made at home—the more you drank, the better it tasted.

  Sometimes Amdu worried that he was too handsome for his own good. He had to consider the examples of such devout beauties as Saint Angadrema, who, to avoid marriage, prayed to be made hideous and was bestowed with the gift of leprosy. Or Saint Angela, a pretty young girl who washed her hair with soot. Of course, feminine beauty was the more dangerous kind. Amdu’s sisters were too beautiful, and their beauty made them vain. Amdu, in contrast, did not suffer from an excess of vanity. If pressed to divulge his plans, he’d say he intended to use his advantages for the benefit of humanity.

  At some point, having nothing else to do, he sang softly to himself, Kyrie eleison kyrie eleison kyrie eleison et in terra pax . . .

  He blinked, expecting to be surrounded by the sea. But instead he was surprised to find himself in bed, alone in the room where he had gone to sleep, with the shutters open and the sun shining and voices raised in what he interpreted as happy excitement.

  He stood on weak legs and made his way out of his room and down a short hallway. Here the floor was a polished blond wood that gleamed beneath his feet. He came to a closed door. Telling himself that when there is happiness on the other side, a closed door deserves to be open, Amdu carefully unlatched and pushed open the door. Through a pantry he saw the hunched shoulders and back of the woman who earlier had been cooling his burning skin with a damp cloth, the same woman who’d been sweeping the steps. Now she was vigorously shaking salt over something laid out on the table—some kind of fish, Amdu guessed from the smell—and behind her the voices of men and other women in the kitchen expressed surprise and joy that the fish had been acquired.

  Amdu would have liked to propose that the family’s unexpected bounty and their kind treatment of a wounded soldier might have something to do with each other.

  “Monsieur Amdu.”

  He blinked.

  “Monsieur Amdu, bonjour. You to wake, please. I am prohibited here. My mother says to me it is not safe in a room with a stranger. But I tell her you are a nice stranger. How do I know this? my mother asks. I do not tell her I know you from the yesterday before the yesterday. Excuse me for not to speak very good French. I study French in school. I like to learn to be more good to speak French. Do you understand me?”

  “Oui, bien sur.”

  “Please you do not tell my mother you meet me yesterday before yesterday. If you tell her, she wants to know why not I say I meet you the first time yesterday. Do you understand me?”

  “Oui.”

  “We have a secret.”

  “D’accord.”

  “And maybe you tell me of you, yes? Good. But now, no. Later is possible. Now I must go. I am content you to be better. Au revoir, Monsieur Amdu.”

  “Au revoir, mademoiselle.”

  At some point over the course of the day he heard a man out in the courtyard exclaim, “Che bel’ mar’ oggi!” He wondered whether these words, whatever they meant, had something to do with the war.

  How long had he been drifting in and out of fever? Amdu had lost track of time. When had the girl named Adriana said they’d met? The yesterday before yesterday, which would make today the tomorrow after tomorrow. Something like that. And why was a bald man with a thick black mustache tipped with gray suddenly standing in his room and lifting his water glass, peering at it as if he didn’t believe that the liquid was just water? What was he telling Amdu when he said, “Scemo!”?

  “Bonjour, monsieur.”

  At the sound of Amdu’s voice, the man slammed the glass onto the table, splashing water over the rim. “Che cazzo —” he hissed, then whirled around and strode from the room.

  Apparently, he didn’t yet know Amdu well enough to like and trust him.

  “Monsieur Amdu?”

  “Oui? Bonjour, Adriana.”

  “Do you like pignoli? Ecco. I bring you good pignoli from our island. You are hungry, yes? Very well. Eat pignoli, and then I bring you more. Maybe the little fish we name acciughe also. We have acciughe now. It is war, you know, and we have not much to eat. But we have more good fortune than someone other. We are a house with good fortune. It is good fortune for you to find us. Someone other would not be good fortune. You be better, yes? My mother says to me you go back to your, how do you say, soldiers all together? Pow, pow. When you be better you go back. Do not be better very fast. The war is still a war, and the peace is not completely arrived. You be very happy here instead of in the war. You stay as much time as you want. Oh, someone comes.”

  “Wait!”

  “I go. Au revoir.”

  His head ached, and he was alone again. He remembered once overhearing his comrades report that
when Italians were sick, they drank as medicine a soup made from an eel found in the body of a drowned person. He remembered reading in a textbook about how Italians didn’t like to give up their dead, so they mummified bodies by brushing them with arsenic. Lying in the heavy darkness, feeling newly dazed by the unfamiliarity of his situation and temporarily uninterested in prayer, he wondered at the oddity of this country. And then he wondered what he would say if he ever had an audience with the pope.

  Yet however unlikely the circumstances in which he’d found himself, he had only to insist that it was true, and it would be true. It was true that a wounded Senegalese rifleman had sought refuge on the estate of a family who ate salted fish. It was true that a young man named Amdu Diop had interrupted his education in order to serve in the military under French command, following the example of his grandfather, who had attained the rank of general. And it was true that Amdu knew himself to be blessed with at least the potential ability to repair the world through the action of miracles.

  Put all these truths together and you got the absolute truth of what Amdu knew to be ongoing experience, which included, besides his own self in its present condition, an Elban princess named Adriana, a man with a graying mustache, and a stout woman who tied the laces of her apron in a bow beneath her bosom.

  “Excuse me, what is this?” he asked, holding his spoon poised above the bowl. Pale tentacles, yawning seashells, and green shoots like grass gone to seed floated in the broth. Amdu was reminded of what he might find if he’d overturned a rock on the bank of the Felu.

  “Cacciucco,” the woman said. This regal woman, who spoke French perfectly and wore her hair in a tight glossed bun, was new to him. The big-bosomed woman in the apron stood beside her.

  “The soup is made with eel?” he asked gently. He didn’t want to be rude, but he also felt a need to identify the ingredients in the soup that was being offered as nourishment.

  “You don’t like eel?”

  “Pardon me, please. Where did you find the eel for this soup?”

  “Where does anyone find an eel, my dear boy? At the top of a tree, of course.” Then the woman said something in Italian to the stout woman, who cupped her hand over her mouth and snorted with laughter.

  Based upon this knowledge, Amdu could only conclude that the people of Elba did not deserve to be blamed for their oddity. Rather, he would blame this island itself—a cursed place where toads grew as big as warthogs, princesses were poorly educated, and eels lived at the tops of trees, unless they lived inside corpses that didn’t rot because they’d been brushed with arsenic.

  As grateful as he was to be welcomed as a guest inside this grand palace, Amdu felt a private yearning to be back in familiar surroundings, in his own bed in his own room.

  “Eat, monsieur. Our soup will make you strong. Eat.”

  “Oui, madame. Merci.”

  “Eau. Acqua.”

  “Acqua.”

  “Homme. Uomo.”

  “Uomo.”

  “Ciao.”

  “Chow.”

  “Voi visitare la Villa Demidoff?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Niente. Rien.”

  “Niente.”

  “Tu parli bene, Amdu.”

  “Tooporlybenné, moi.”

  “Sì.”

  “Arrivederci.”

  “Arrivadarsee, signorina.”

  He could say that he was born in 1927 in Dakar, into a privileged métis family. His great-grandfather had been a French commissioner under Governor Louis Faidherbe. His grandfather had been an officer in the Tirailleurs. His father was a surgeon. His mother was an educated woman who had lived for three years in Paris. Amdu was the eldest child, with two younger sisters. A brother had died in infancy. Unlike most Senegalese, the family spoke French at home. Following the completion of his elementary education at a French Catholic school, Amdu had attended a three-year course of studies at the Lycée Van Vollenhover. He planned to continue his studies in medicine at the university in Cairo.

  Or he could say that on his thirteenth birthday, he went fishing with his uncle, who owned a fleet of dugout canoes. They fished for mullet in the shallow water south of the port of Dakar. Afterward, Amdu rode in the truck that was transporting the entire dugout catch to the wharves in Dakar. The truck broke down. Having been encouraged by his mother through his early childhood to fashion faith into a belief that had practical uses, Amdu prayed to God to preserve the fish. His prayer was heard. After sitting in the back of a truck in the hot sun for seven hours, the fish did not spoil. This was when Amdu first became aware of his potential holiness.

  Or he could cite his age, his height in centimeters, and his weight in kilos just to prove that he existed in a time and place.

  “You are feeling better, Monsieur Amdu?”

  It was the woman who had told him that the eels of Elba lived at the tops of trees. She sat in a chair beside his bed. He wondered how long she had been sitting there. Putting aside her embroidery, she poured fresh water into his glass.

  “Oui, madame. I feel better.”

  “You have a fever still. But it is much improved. The infection has been contained, we think.”

  “How long have I been here? A long time, I suppose. You have been very kind to me.”

  “You arrived yesterday and stayed through the night. And now today. We will make you strong again. And when you are strong we will take you to your post. We have made inquiries and understand that you serve with the French forces.”

  “They know I am here?”

  “Monsieur Amdu, don’t worry, they do not know yet that you are here with us. But why shouldn’t they know? Have you done something wrong? Are you in trouble?”

  “Pardon me for telling you this—they are not all heroes, my comrades.”

  “I understand. But you should not let them abandon you.”

  “They are leaving the island?”

  “Soon.”

  “The war is over?”

  “The Germans have been defeated.”

  “That is good.”

  “It is good. Now you must eat and drink to strengthen yourself. Luisa will bring you a bowl of her persata.”

  “What is it, persata? Is it another soup made with eels?”

  “No—there are no eels in persata, Monsieur Amdu. Are you afraid of eels?”

  “I am afraid of eels only when they live outside the sea, madame.”

  She smiled and picked up her needlework. In the silence that followed he heard the sound of the piano.

  “The girl—she is your daughter, yes? She plays the piano.” It was a fact meant to stand as appreciation. Even though she played the piano poorly, at least she played. That was better than Amdu could say about himself.

  “She plays the piano,” the woman agreed.

  As Amdu watched her thin hands working at the embroidery, he was reminded of watching his mother string beads onto a loom. It amused him to think that someday in the future he would be watching his mother string beads again, and he would be reminded of this Elban woman pressing a needle through cloth.

  His white shirt, bunched into his belted trousers, billowed like a sail. His hair smelled of pine, his skin of lavender. As inexplicably as it had peaked, his fever had abated; the wound on his arm was healing with unbelievable speed. Despite the unfamiliarity of his surroundings, he needed no assurances that everything was connected. He felt like a man who’d been shipwrecked on an island where each element, however strange in itself, was essential to the whole. See one, say one, know one, as the poet Shaykh Mahmud Shabistari sang centuries ago.

  “Viens,” the girl directed. “Come with me please, Monsieur Amdu.”

  “D’accord, madamoiselle.” Barefoot, he followed her across the room to the window. “Guarda,” she directed, pointing to the end of the sill. “Eccola.” Between the rainspout and the wooden ledge, brown doves had built a nest, and now the female roosted while the male looked on, perched on the top edge of the shutter.
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br />   “Oiseux.”

  “Uccelli.”

  She said something about how the birds had built their nest the night before Amdu had been brought to La Chiatta. She spoke with rising excitement and at one point touched his wrist to be certain that she had his attention, then she reached along the sill, shooing away the bird, and scooped one of the little cream eggs from the nest, displaying it in her palm like a valuable gem. “Regards,” she whispered.

  Amdu couldn’t contain his amusement at the girl’s wonder. All it took was a bird’s egg to delight her. Her future husband would find her easy to please. He laughed aloud at the thought, and the sound of his voice startled the girl, causing her to jerk and let the egg roll from her hand.

  Her gasp contained sorrow and innocence and anger and impatience and guilt. A dove’s egg was falling to the ground—an ordinary event to anyone else, but in this girl’s privileged life a dove’s egg had an exceptional value, which was about to be reduced to nothing. Amdu sensed the future in an instant. The girl would collapse in tears, blaming herself for the loss, then blaming him, demanding that Amdu match her unhappiness with his own.

  As Amdu blinked, he told himself that the egg must not crack. Unhappiness must be avoided. Closing his eyes to the egg plunging toward the cobble, he murmured a prayer for it to survive intact. With absolute faith, he requested the exchange of what would happen with what should happen—life instead of death—a request as sensible as it was impossible or, perhaps, as possible as it was ridiculous.