Acts of faith (117 page)

He looks at the photograph of Diana and their children, taken a few months ago, on her fifty-ninth birthday. They were married not long after Douglas’s departure and were honeymooning in Fitzhugh’s birthplace, the Seychelles, when a war of another kind came to Kenya: the American Embassy in Nairobi was blown up by a terrorist group called Al Qaeda.

A year passed. They adopted two AIDS orphans, Robert and Rebecca. The kids tested negative for the disease, the Black Death of the modern age. They call Diana mama and Fitzhugh baba. Right now they are in the house in Karen, where he spends his weekends. He still thinks of that house as hers; it embarrasses him to live in a place with servants, it contradicts his idea of himself, but possibly that image never was an accurate reflection of who he is.

The responsibilities of marriage and the stresses of raising children who should be, chronologically, Diana’s grandchildren have dampened the strange fire ignited almost a decade ago between the middle-aged woman and the young man. Now he has entered middle age and she is on the frontiers of old age; yet there are nights when a look, a gesture, a thought fans the coals of their first passion, and they make love as if their flesh were touching anew. “She’s only eleven years younger than me,” Fitzhugh’s father said to him not long ago. “Are you happy?” Fitzhugh doesn’t believe happiness, as the world defines it, is possible in Africa. “I am content,” he answered.

They say the owl was a baker’s daughter . . .

There is one other woman in his life, Quinette Goraende, with whom he maintains a peculiar relationship. She regards him as her friend and confidant; he doesn’t consider himself to be either, actively disliking her; and yet he answers the letters she sends from the Nuba now and then—Fitzhugh’s pilots deliver them—and patiently listens to her talk and talk about herself when she visits Loki or Nairobi. Diana, who cannot suffer her for longer than fifteen minutes, has pegged her as an overgrown adolescent who thinks everyone finds her as interesting as she finds herself.

The odd relationship began shortly after Quinette’s first child, a son, died in infancy. She’d come down with malaria. Gerhard Manfred treated her with Fansidar, to no effect. Through Fitzhugh, her husband arranged for her evacuation to Nairobi General Hospital, where she was treated with a stronger drug; still, the disease racked her with chills, fever, and hallucinations. Her doctor, an Italian, was concerned about her chances. One day, in a delirium, she began to call out the name of Malachy Delaney. The doctor knew Malachy and, assuming his patient was a Roman Catholic, summoned the priest to come to her bedside, warning that he should be prepared to administer last rites. Fitzhugh was in Nairobi at the time, and his old friend asked if he would accompany him.

Quinette had rallied in the meantime. They found her sitting up in bed, in a lucid state. It was the lucidity granted by a confrontation with death. Like Douglas, she made a confession, which Fitzhugh did not think was pure coincidence. She and Douglas were alike in many ways; so American in their narcissism, in their self-righteousness, in their blindness to their inner natures, in their impulse to remake the world and reinvent themselves, never realizing that the world wishes to remain as it is and that oneself is not as malleable as one likes to think. Quinette told her visitors that in her fevered dreams she was haunted by three specters: Suleiman, Tara, and a woman called Yamila. Malachy and Fitzhugh listened to her unburden herself: She had condemned Suleiman by refusing to plead for his life, condemned Tara by remaining silent after her husband disclosed the plan he and Douglas had laid, condemned Yamila to slavery by uttering two words. She asked the priest if it was sometimes necessary to do evil in order to do good. He replied that it was done all the time, but the good never made the evil any the less evil. Though she was a Protestant, he called on her to repeat after him the words to the Act of Contrition, and she did: ” ‘O, my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended you . . . in all that I have done and failed to do . . .’ ” At the end Malachy absolved her: “Your sins are forgiven, in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.”

She wasn’t convinced they had been, as Fitzhugh discovered the following day. He’d gone to the hospital to visit her again, alone this time. He didn’t know why. Some vague notion that there was more to be said compelled him to see her. She had suffered a relapse, and he found her shivering and sweating through another delirious episode. “Yamila! Please!” she cried out several times, stark terror on her damp face. “Yamila! Please!”

Please what?
Fitzhugh asked himself.
Please leave me alone? Please forgive me?
Was that what she wanted, not divine forgiveness but the forgiveness of the Nuban woman? If it was, she would never get it. Quinette’s eyes widened, and she screamed loudly enough to bring an orderly into the room. Fitzhugh told him it was all right, the memsahib had had a bad dream. But he wondered what she had seen in her deranged vision to tear from her throat such a horrified cry. It could have been Yamila. Or it could have been someone else.

We know what we are, but know not what we may be.

But what we become, Fitzhugh thinks, is what we have been all along. To outward appearances, each of us is a half truth. The self we present to the world conceals a clandestine self that awaits its time to come out. Africa had not changed Quinette. It had merely provided the right circumstances and the right climate for her pretty chrysalis to pop open and reveal the creature within. To see the whole truth of oneself is also a redemption of sorts. Whether that was what Quinette had beheld, Fitzhugh would never know. Again, he knew only what he wanted to believe, and he wanted to believe redemption was possible.

Redeemed or no, Africa had a special fate in mind for her; a fate not necessarily deserved for all she had done and failed to do; Africa’s Supreme Being neither punishes sinners nor rewards saints but does as he pleases. And it pleased him to demand a payment from this young American woman who had presumed to wed one of his sons and to regard herself as an adopted daughter.

Quinette recovered and returned to the Nuba and her now less-than-happy marriage. Michael blamed her for the loss of their son. She had tempted him into violating a sacred ordinance of his people, and they had suffered the consequence. She felt that the only way to make it up to him would be to get pregnant again. A year later she presented him with their second son, whom they named Gabriel. A year and half after his birth, a third came along, Raphael. (Evidently Michael’s bitterness hadn’t affected their physical attraction.) During both pregnancies Quinette strictly adhered to custom, and the sexual abstinence had the effect she had feared. Michael took a second wife, nineteen years old.

He hadn’t done this solely for reasons of physical gratification. A Nuban man’s status is reflected in the number of his wives, and Michael’s status had changed. With the cessation of hostilities in the Nuba, his military career ended and he was appointed provisional governor of all the rebel-held areas in the region. He exchanged his camouflage for open-neck white shirts and dark slacks. The warrior had become a political figure, and politically Quinette was something of a liability; a good jet-black Nuban spouse, an asset. Former Lieutenant Colonel now Governor Goraende took part in negotiations that ended the fighting in the Nuba. Earlier the murahaleen warlord, Ibrahim Idris, had made good on his promise to extend the separate peace between him and Michael to all the Baggara Arab tribes. That unofficial armistice became the model for an official one signed by the SPLA forces in the Nuba and the Khartoum government. With the cease-fire in place and foreign troops sent to monitor it, Michael made frequent trips to the capital to discuss with his former enemies plans for making the Nuba a semiautonomous province. He continued to rely on Quinette for advice, but less so than in the past. She was the mother of his children, not a partner, and he made most of his decisions without confiding in her. Thus she discovered a truth about the world she had married into: It was essentially masculine; there was little room in it for a woman’s views.

Michael changed. The man of war had been tender and passionate, as if the brutalities of his calling had summoned up the gentleness in him; the man of politics was more remote and at times harsh and neglectful. He also got fat, the breathtaking soldier-wrestler’s body rounding out into the shape of the typical African “Big Man,” with his pot belly, walking stick, and imperious manner. He took a third wife, as young as the second. Now Quinette was forced to possess but a third of the man of whom she had wanted all. She was deferred to by her sister spouses, she tried to like them, but she often cried herself to sleep on the nights when he went to visit one or the other. The sounds of their lovemaking drove her into fits of violent jealousy. She once told Fitzhugh that if she didn’t have him to confide in and to use as a vent for what she called her “negative feelings,” she might well do something she would later regret.

Pearl and Kiki had meanwhile got married, depriving Quinette of hands to do the hard tasks that were a Nuban woman’s lot. The junior wives took up most of the burden, but even as the senior wife of the provisional governor, Quinette did her share of pounding sorghum in the hot sun, cooking over a wood fire, washing clothes in a riverbed. This in addition to teaching her English and Bible classes, labors she once had plunged into willingly and cheerfully. Now they had become a dull routine. Zeal was no longer in her voice when she gave her scripture lessons. Something was missing—the war. At times she was nostalgic for it. She missed its heightened emotions, the intensity it had brought to life, infusing each day with poignant meaning, charging ordinary moments with the electricity of the extraordinary. It had made the hardships of the African bush endurable. The dust and dirt, the ticks, mosquitoes and spiders, the dry season’s scorch, the wet season’s mire, the diseases and scarcity of water, and the absence of every comfort and amenity had been part of an enormous experience, a great and terrible ordeal. Robbed of drama, the hardships were merely hardships, wearisome, annoying, or debilitating instead of ennobling. After the cease-fire had gone into effect, it was as if a bloody but riveting film had ended and the house lights had gone on, killing the magic darkness, ushering Quinette up the aisle, past the discarded cups and crushed straws through which she’d slaked her thirst for the remarkable, and into a tedious reality. Compared with the high terrors and excitements of bombings and battles, caring for her children and doing the endless chores, no sooner completed than they had to be done again, were tame drudgery.

The armistice had another effect she hadn’t anticipated. The tree of a new society that had sprouted in New Tourom flourished so long as it was watered by the blood of war; in the drought of peace, it withered. Now that it was safe to return, the people who had found refuge in the town drifted back to their tribal homelands, drawn by a magnetism too powerful to resist. Michael’s and Quinette’s grand vision was not to be realized. Jesus still loved her, but her sense of serving a higher purpose had deserted her.

She needed to escape now and then, and her husband indulged her, providing her with an allowance from his governor’s salary. She fled to Loki or Nairobi whenever she could, persuading relief pilots to smuggle her into Kenya—her passport had expired some time ago. She afforded herself the pleasures of a proper bath and eating something other than doura gruel, in the delights of fresh company. By this time the century and the millennium had turned. There was a whole new generation of workers in Loki, and to them the tall American woman with the African braids and African clothes and African mate was a weird curiosity, an eccentric who belonged to what already seemed a bygone era. Quinette satisfied her need for conversation mostly with Fitzhugh, who learned about her more than he ever needed or wanted to know.

After malaria struck her again and little Raphael almost succumbed to relapsing fever, Quinette decided she’d had enough of Africa for a while. A different sort of nostalgia tugged her. She longed to see again the America she had once longed to escape forever, and to bring her family with her. The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center had occurred two months before, and arranging travel documents for her husband and children took weeks. A SkyTrain aircraft flew them out of the Nuba mountains. Four days and as many plane changes later, they landed in the town of Waterloo, Iowa, in the dead-level heartland of America.

Things went well for a while. Her mother and two sisters had gotten over their animosities and welcomed the prodigal girl home. Her brown children and six-foot-seven-inch black husband with tribal marks on his forehead drew stares on the streets of Cedar Falls, but the couple did not suffer the prejudice Quinette had feared. The visit began to turn sour when her mother caught her coming out of the shower one morning and saw the tribal stigmata covering her belly, back, and buttocks. “What in God’s name have you done to yourself?” she wailed. Then, on a drive to the countryside to see the farm where Quinette had grown up, Michael let slip that she was not his only wife. “You have
another wife
?” Quinette’s older sister asked, scarcely believing what she’d heard. Actually, Michael replied, he had two. Quinette’s family could accept her marriage to an African rebel; a polygamous marriage was another matter altogether. She was furious with Michael for opening his mouth but equally upset with her sister for her unwillingness to understand the customs of Quinette’s adopted land. She who had gone to such lengths to preserve a monogamous union ended up defending its opposite. She realized that she no longer belonged in America; she was an African.