The Last Time They Met

by Anita Shreve

  —When it rains, the sound on the roof is so loud, we have to stop the class.

  —The kids must love that.

  —They don’t, actually. The children want to go to school. It’s not just this school. It’s the same everywhere.

  Some attempt had been made at cheer. Colorful drawings hung from the walls, one or two of them bold and very good. The children tugged at Thomas, and he happily went where they led him. He wished he had treats for them inside his jacket — lollipops or cookies or small toys. Something. There were no desks, except for Linda’s.

  —What do they write on? he asked her. She sat with a spindly boy on her lap. Disease appeared to have made bare patches on his scalp.

  —Their books.

  Behind her desk was a charcoal grill. She noticed him looking at it.

  —I feed them when I get here in the mornings. I make them eggs and give them milk. I get deliveries once a week from a farm, and I bring the food down to the school each morning. There’s no way to keep it refrigerated here.

  Which explained the muscles, he thought.

  The boy on her lap coughed, spit onto the floor. Linda thumped his back. The women sometimes besiege me for medical treatment, she said. They bring me their babies, and they cry, and, of course, I can’t do anything. I sometimes think this is a test from God. That I’m supposed to go to medical school and come back here and practice.

  —Would you consider it?

  —I don’t have what it takes.

  —I’m sure you’re doing a world of good as a teacher.

  —I’m hardly doing any good at all.

  She put the child down and took him by the hand to a taller girl against a wall. Linda and the girl spoke for a moment, and when Linda had returned to Thomas, she explained that the boy’s sister would take him home. Together Linda and Thomas left the classroom and walked along a short path up a hill to a church.

  —It’s a Catholic church, she said, opening the door for him. One of few in the area.

  The church was a revelation after the barren schoolroom — the cool interior lit with five stained-glass windows; the colors primary and rich with thick lines of lead between the glass, as if a Picasso or a Cézanne had painted them. A fresh smell, as of reeds or wheat, permeated the small building. It might have sat a hundred in a pinch.

  He watched her cross herself with holy water from a font adjacent to the front door, genuflect at a pew, and kneel for a moment before she sat. His chest felt seared, as though a hot wind had blown through it, the memories so keen he needed to put a hand to the back of a pew to steady himself. He stood at the rear of the church and waited until she had been sitting alone for a few moments before he joined her. Giving her time to offer prayers to the God she passionately hated.

  They sat in silence, her head and feet astonishingly bare. He remembered, years ago, the mantilla hastily put atop the hair for Saturday afternoon Confession, when she believed she could not enter a church without a hat. He wanted to take her hand, but some residual sense of propriety stopped him.

  —Do you recognize the woman in that one? she asked, slightly squinting and pointing to one of the colorful windows at the side of the church. It was a depiction of a woman who looked both sensuous and adoring, her eyes cast upward, as if to Heaven. She wore a garment of bright yellow, and her African hair was wild about her face. She, unlike the rest of the figures in the depiction, was black.

  —Magdalene.

  —You remembered.

  —Of course I remembered. It’s a wonderful painting. Very similar in concept to one by Titian I saw last year in Florence. In fact, I think it must be modeled after the Titian. The hair was amazing. Very, well, Titian-like. Magdalene is often depicted partially nude with long, flowing reddish-blond hair. Very beautiful.

  —You went last year?

  —On my way here. I saw two others in Italy. The Bernini in Siena. It’s a sculpture. Her breasts are exposed, and her hair flows over them. The Donatello is very different. Gaunt. Ascetic. More the penitent.

  —Interesting that she’s African. Yes, he said.

  —You’re squinting.

  —I think I need glasses.

  —She’s thought to be the embodiment of eros and femininity in Christianity, he said.

  —You’ve made a study of this, she said.

  —I have. For something that I’m working on. Have you read The Last Temptation of Christ by Nikos Kazantzakis?

  —How amazing. I’m reading Report to Greco.

  —Kazantzakis presents Magdalene as a local whore, someone Jesus had yearnings for since childhood. Someone with whom he had a lifelong sexual relationship. Some think she bore him children.

  —All the institutions for unwed mothers are called Magdalene.

  —I remember, he said.

  —Did you see Jesus Christ Superstar?

  —“I don’t know how to love Him.”

  —I’ve never stopped loving you, she said.

  His breath caught, and he closed his eyes. Behind them, the pure pain of time lost was a star exploding. He put his hands on his thighs, as if bracing himself against some great hurt.

  —I’d come to think of it like childhood, she said. Something I once had that I shouldn’t expect to have again.

  He looked up toward the ceiling, as a man does when he doesn’t want to admit to tears. Why didn’t you let me know? he asked, his voice husky.

  She crossed her legs and then had to bend them sideways in the narrow pew. For all the reasons I told you. I assumed you’d moved on, forgotten me.

  —Never.

  —I knew that you had married. My aunt couldn’t wait to tell me. I think she actually called me on the phone as soon as she heard.

  —Oh, Linda.

  —And that was that.

  He couldn’t touch her in the church. No matter how passionately she hated her God, he knew she would mind such an overture. Nor, when they left the church, could he touch her then, the children having waited for them patiently and followed them along the path. Not until they had left the village behind and were out of sight did he reach ahead and stop her. She turned — so willingly, he might have thanked God — and folded herself into him. The first kiss was not familiar, and yet he felt himself arrived, come home, safe to shore. And might have told her this, had she not stopped his mouth with a second kiss, her taste reminding him now of a thousand others. She laced strong fingers around the nape of his neck and bent his head helplessly toward hers. He stumbled and then knelt, not intentionally, his balance gone. She pulled him toward her so that he was drawn up against her bare midriff. The pleasure so great, he groaned with gratitude. She bent her head to his.

  —Linda, he said, relief lowering his voice.

  * * *

  He tried to take in the room and make it his, even as she lay upon the coverlet. The kanga unknotted now, the halter top untied, her breasts a white shock against the color of her skin. He could not then remember anything of how they had been before, and yet they moved together as if they hadn’t ever been apart. He had never felt himself so thoroughly at home in time. It was a revelation that this could be his, that she might give him this again and again and again, that discontent might ease. She rose above him and said his name, her hair a damp curtain at the sides of her face. She lowered her shoulders and offered her breasts, which he took into his hands and mouth, wanting all of her.

  Sweet recompense for all the days and nights unlived.

  November 27

  Dear Thomas,

  Today we had a visit from the MP for Nyeri. Unexpected, because he had come from Nairobi to negotiate a bride-price for a second wife, whom no one is supposed to know about; the first wife, to her grave misfortune, is infertile. He arrived in a Mercedes, and came in with such pomp, I expected to be blessed. He sat on a bench at the back of the room and listened to a lesson on multiplication, nodding from time to time, as if there were points about which one might agree or disagree, all the while picking his teeth wi
th a twig. The children were cowed and kept sneaking surreptitious looks at the big man who had come from the city. He wore a gold watch, and I don’t know much about men’s clothing, but the fabric of his suit looked expensive. He had a retinue of eight. He travels with a car in front of him and a car in back as a security measure against thieves and political opponents. Should he be stopped by a panga gang on the A104, his underlings are supposed to take the blows. I’m told he has a heated swimming pool in Lavington, a fleet of Mercedes, and a fat Swiss account. What did he make, I wonder, of the children’s bare feet?

  I am sitting at the back of the cottage under a thorn tree, which gives a twig-like illusion of shade. The wind rustles in from the chrysanthemum plains, and the fever trees are creaking. There is an enormous vulture in a branch above me, sitting patiently, so I know there must be a fresh kill nearby. I don’t want to think about what animal it might be, or about its specific killer. Superb starlings of iridescent turquoise twitter in the branches, but the vulture refuses to be annoyed. It seems scarcely credible that today is Thanksgiving. Very strange to celebrate a holiday when everyone else is at work.

  I feel stunned, as I do sometimes when I emerge from a darkened schoolroom or my cottage and am hit with the light of Africa at noon: blinded by it, made dizzy, as though I’d taken a blow to the side of my head. Disoriented, slightly nauseous even, unable to eat. I walk around the cottage, touching things because you touched them. A book of Rilke. A plate that once had jelly on it. A hairbrush from which I have not yet removed the chestnut hairs. It’s a kind of sickness, isn’t it? An illness that has invaded me. Or rather the return of a chronic illness. This bout fatal, as I know it must be.

  I think that words corrupt and oxidize love. That it is better not to write of it. Even memory, I think, is full of rust and decay.

  I have always been faithful to you. If faithful means the experience against which everything else has been measured.

  Yours always,

  Linda

  December 1

  Dear Linda,

  When I left you and arranged that we would write each other, I thought that you would not, that your overdeveloped sense of guilt would make you silent. Worse, I feared that if I got in the car and drove to Njia, you’d have vanished without a trace, like the veils of mist over the moors near your cottage. So that when I saw your letter in the box — lavender paper, delicate backward hand — I wept. There, in front of the mzees chewing twigs and the schoolboys throwing pebbles at a hyrax. No shame, none at all. Only joy and considerable relief.

  Magdalene. Beautiful Magdalene. Lost and then found again. I don’t think I ever before knew the meaning of happiness.

  About Regina. Should I write to you of the quiet fury with which I was greeted when I returned on Sunday night, all the more daunting for being so justly deserved? Or the equanimity — absent elsewhere in her life — with which she regards the most harrowing cases of childhood disease (Kenyan children being, despite their lot, the best-behaved in the world — some mysterious parenting secret I haven’t yet been able to discover); or her desire to bear a child of her own — all-consuming, constant, and crippling? No, I will not. I do love Regina. It is irrelevant, however. I assume you love your Peter as well — about whom you were justifiably silent on Sunday.

  I remember your body on the bed. For long moments at a time, that is all there is.

  You are so beautiful to me. (Do you have a mirror? I forgot to notice. We don’t. Regina does her makeup in the tea kettle.)

  Proof of my own constancy: All of my poems are about you, even when they appear not to be. More to the point, they are all about the accident, in case you doubted the sincerity of my own guilt. I assume these are not available in any form at the British Council library.

  I felt disloyal writing to you in my house — disloyal to you or Regina? both, I think — so I have driven in my battered and twice-stolen Escort to Nairobi, have taken a table at the Thorn Tree and have ordered a Tusker without the worm (long story). There is a strange white smoke emerging from what must be the kitchen, which I suppose I should ignore since everyone else is (though it looks as though it will poison us all). I have never had a message left for me at the message board, but, insanely, I checked it today on the off chance that you had written to me in code. (Leave one for me next time you are in Nairobi, just to humor me; though if you come to the city and don’t tell me, I will surely die of heartbreak.)

  Just last Saturday, I sat at this very café with Ndegwa. (Not knowing you were in the country. How was that possible? Why were there no signs or portents in the sky, no audible vibrations I’d have recognized as your footsteps?) Today, I went to the American embassy on Ndegwa’s behalf and was rewarded with an appointment with an embassy official — officially what was never made clear. He looked — I hesitate to say it, because it is such a cliché — like an aging Marine, his crew cut so short, there was more scalp than hair. He was bluff and hearty, actually glad to see me, though he had no idea initially why I had come. I distrust an egalitarian welcome. He said — I kid you not — “Where you from, Tom?” I said, “Boston.” He said, “Heeey, Red Sox!” So we discussed the Red Sox, about which I knew less than I should have, and I felt it was a kind of test I didn’t pass. My official grew suspicious, and seemed only then to notice my excessively long hair (“Hippie,” I could hear him thinking), and said, finally, “So what can I do you for?” and “What’s on your mind, Tom?” Truthfully, it was you, as it always is now, but I told him of my mission, which was vague enough when I left my house, even more vague in the telling of it. I wanted to help Ndegwa get released, I said. Failing that, I wanted to put pressure on the Kenyan government to state the charges and to set a trial date. It seemed an absurd request and hopelessly naive, which is how he took it. He smiled and was indulgent. “Well, Tom,” he said, pushing his chair back from the desk and lacing his fingers in his lap, “this is a sensitive area,” and, “You know, Tom, the U.S. has a strategic base in Kenya,” and, “I’d like to help as much as you, Tom, but these things take time.” I felt like a kid who’d gone to his father for money.

  Having cheerfully put me in my place, he asked me what I was doing in the country. I dissembled, mentioned Regina, and finally confessed to being a writer. “For whom?” he asked. Reasonable question. “For no one,” I said, and I could tell he didn’t believe me. After all, who would write for no one? Name-dropping, he mentioned that Ted Kennedy would be coming soon to the country and that he (my official) was in charge of putting together a party in the senator’s honor. Uttering the first political statement of my life — indeed having the first political thought of my life — I blurted, “I know Ted Kennedy.” And finally snagged the man’s attention. “Actually,” I said, “my father knows him. He was once at our house for dinner.”

  Really, said my embassy official.

  And so the “Ndegwa matter,” as he put it, may be looked into after all.

  Write me. For God’s sake, keep writing. A day without you seems a day unlived, bearable only because I summon memory, mine subject to the merest oxidation, a faint rust blowing in the breezes.

  Love me as you did on Sunday. Is that so much to ask?

  Thomas

  P.S. Today’s headline: WOMAN GRABBED IN BUSH BY HYENA

  December 15

  Dear Thomas,

  I am writing to you from a hospital named Mary Magdalene (no, I am not making this up) where I have had to bring David, the boy who collapsed in a fit of coughing in my classroom. Brave boy. He refuses to be excluded. He has a mysterious disease the doctors cannot name — it gives him pneumonia and makes him so gaunt, I’m afraid he won’t be able to stand up. They have taken him in to be examined, and I am waiting for him, since his mother is ill as well and cannot leave her hut. A daughter cares for the smallest children. Oh, Thomas, we never knew the first thing about misery, did we?

  The hospital, a small one, was built in the 1930s to house wayward girls of European extraction who
se parents were too poor to send them back to Europe to have their babies. (Or who would not spend the money on such hopeless causes. Where did the babies go, I wonder?) Now, of course, no one cares about that anymore, and so the hospital is a sort of emergency clinic for the region. There is a Belgian doctor here who is very good. He is young and funny and all the women fall in love with him. I don’t believe he sleeps at all; he is always here when I come. He is baffled by David’s case and has sent blood samples back to Brussels to be analyzed. How can a doctor treat an illness he can’t even identify?

  Sister Marie Francis, formidable and large, keeps passing by and regarding me with disapproval. As well she might, though I think it is only my kanga. Or perhaps she sees the wayward Catholic girl in me as I study the lurid cross on the wall opposite. The girl who used to ponder the subjects of joy and guilt and punishment. The nun walks silently by, and our eyes lock — I cannot help myself; possibly I am looking for a sign, a message from her? — and I feel exposed, more naked than even my casual dress implies.