Acts of faith (88 page)

That remark having sewn up the rents Ken had torn into her self-esteem, she feared that Kristen’s letter would reopen them. Returning to Mary’s tent, she switched on the lightbulb dangling from the ridgepole, sat down, and reluctantly opened the envelope. Inside were three pages, filled on both sides with Kristen’s backhanded script. The family brain had been designated to be the family scribe, responding to the letter Quinette had sent to Nicole more than two months ago. The first three pages crackled with scorn—“You said in your—can I call it wedding announcement?—that your news was going to come as ‘something of a shock.’ That was perceptive. Also a class A understatement. Mom wasn’t shocked, she was devastated!”—and with reproach—“You’ve never shown our mother much consideration, but with this, all you’re showing her is contempt”—and with rebukes— “Since Dad died, you’ve acted like you’ve got something against her, and me and Nicole too, and you’ve done everything possible to cause as much worry and pain as possible. Your marriage is your crowning achievement in that department.” The last three pages were an outpouring of distilled vitriol: “In case you think we’re a bunch of cornbelt racists, I’ll just say that our issue isn’t your husband’s skin color. It’s what he is. In your letter, you made him out to be some kind of African George Washington. Sorry. Since you went over there, we’ve kept up on events in that part of the world, and we know about the unspeakable things those African guerrilla leaders are doing over there. It’s beyond us how you could decide to spend the rest of your days with a man who has blood on his hands, how you could turn your backs on us and just throw your life away, like it’s an old dress.

“You said that no one can choose whom she falls in love with. That’s true. It’s also bullshit, and here’s the bullshit part—we don’t think you’re in love with this Michael Goraende. You’re in love with some image or idea of yourself. You’re the star in your movie, and your husband is the leading man.

“Guess what Ardele is telling her friends? That you’ve married an army officer and are living overseas on an extended assignment. That pisses me off sometimes, but what else can she say? She can no more comprehend what you’ve done than if you’d announced that you’re going to Mars. Meantime, she’s afraid that something awful will happen to you, that she’ll never see you again even if you aren’t killed or don’t come down with some awful disease. I can’t say the same is true of Nicole and me. It wouldn’t bother us a whole lot if we never see you again, because of what you’ve done to Mom.”

Quinette set the letter down, wondering how much of it had been a faithful representation of the family’s collective opinion and how much had been colored by Kristen’s own feelings. For sure, nasty little asides like “You’re the star in your own movie” were hers alone, and Quinette didn’t quite believe that Nicole never wanted to see her again, or that Ardele thought she was in love with an image of herself. That too was pure Kristen. She and her younger sister never had gotten along.

Mary pranced in, sassily swigging a Tusker from the can. “Bad news? You’re like this.” She squeezed the corners of her mouth and tugged it into a pout.

“Expected news. It’s just about unanimous. Now my family agrees with everyone around here, but maybe for different reasons.”

“Let me guess. Their little girl married a nigger.”

“I’ll bet that’s what they really think, but they won’t admit it.”

Mary sat beside her. “You’ve done something pretty extreme. You can’t expect applause.”

Quinette was silent for a moment. Ostracized here, rejected by her family, she grasped for her conviction that God had summoned her to the Nuba and Michael’s side for His own purposes, that He was leading her to something, step by step, and she clung to that belief tightly, lest it slip away. Without it, she could not carry on in the face of so much criticism.

“I don’t expect applause,” she said, “and you know, the disapproval isn’t the worst thing. The worst thing would be to be ignored. People ignore you only when you’re not doing anything worthwhile.”

T
HE DAY AFTER
her return to the Nuba, high among the rocks that exhaled the night’s coolness into the morning air, Quinette knelt naked before a kujur’s wife. The woman sat on a wooden stool, with her instruments at her feet: a flat, square blade resembling a miniature ax-head, a couple of long thorns, several twigs, a jar of groundnut oil, and another of sorghum flour mixed with powdered herbs and roots. She spoke.

“She is asking if you are ready,” said Pearl, who sat watching.

Quinette replied that she was. With one of the twigs, the kujur’s wife traced the chosen design on her oiled abdomen: a vertical band of marks, ten across, stretching from the bottom of her breasts to her navel, straddled by two curved bands that resembled bowed legs. Leaning forward, supporting her elbows on her parted knees, a thorn in one hand, the blade in another, she lifted skin with the thorn and made a swift cut. Quinette sucked in a breath and flinched. The woman admonished her: she must remain very still. At the next cut, Quinette gritted her teeth and looked toward the sun. Mary said she’d done something way out there, but changing her name wasn’t extreme enough; nor was the trial she’d undergone in this very same place. Something else was needed, a visible sign to mark forever the inner change.

The woman’s hands moved as swiftly as a skilled weaver’s. Quinette forced herself to concentrate on them so she would not think about the pain. In minutes the first two vertical rows were done. The kujur’s wife wiped off the blood with a twig and smeared on more oil, then a handful of the flour mixture. A prick with the thorn, a quick slash of the knife. The woman cleaned the blood again, and again smeared the cuts with the powder, until Quinette’s stomach looked as white as moonlight.

It went on for half an hour, the hands never pausing. Prick-slash-prick-slash. The marks began to stand out, each the size of an insect bite and stinging like one. After thirty minutes more the curved bands were formed. Another layer of powder was rubbed on and wiped off. It was done. Quinette looked down at a frieze of three-dimensional dots that could never be eradicated. There would be a second tattooing soon, and after she gave birth, a third. She wasn’t pregnant yet, but she’d chosen the pattern: a zig-zag line, representing the Nile of the heavens, would streak down her back to her hips, where a circle with four spokes would symbolize Achernar, the star at the river’s end.

Man of All Races

A
LOUD RUSTLING
in the trees woke Fitzhugh well before dawn. He rose from bed slowly, to avoid waking Diana, and felt his way through the
banda
’s black interior, opened the front flap, and stepped out to the veranda to investigate. As the noise could have been made only by a large animal, he wasn’t sure if this was a smart thing to do. At first, he saw only the inky, indistinct trees and saltbush masking the near side of the river, a fragment of the river itself, silvered by the quarter moon in the west, and the escarpment rising almost sheer on the far side. A few seconds later he detected movement in the vegetation, then made out the silhouette of an elephant, tearing off leaves and small branches with its trunk. It was probably the safari camp’s mascot, a well-mannered bull that treated the guests with benign indifference. He watched the elephant pruning the trees and heard in the distance the long, resonant moan of a lion. From behind him came the sound of Diana undoing the zipper.

“Fitz?”

“Yes.”

She came out in her nightgown, the satin clinging to her, and leaned over the back of the chair and clasped him around the chest. “What are you doing out here at four in the morning?”

“Our big friend woke me,” he said, pointing.”Did you hear the lion?”

“That’s what woke me.”

“The lions of Tsavo,” he said. “Man-eaters.”

“That’s right. Women aren’t the menu. He’ll go for you.” She moved to the railing and stood with her hands on it, looking toward the river and the escarpment beyond, its top faintly illuminated by the waning moon. “I’m rather glad we came here. I love Tsavo, the last really wild place left in Kenya. My father hunted here, my grandfather as well. He hunted with Finch-Hatton.”

“Ah yes, the mighty sahibs,” Fitzhugh remarked. He never could understand the white man’s fascination with wildlife, whether he shot it for sport or photographed it. For the African, wild animals were a nuisance or a menace.

Diana turned her head, gazing at him over her bare shoulder. “There’s another thing I’m glad of. That we both broke down.”

He would not have broken if she hadn’t first. She had sent him a letter a little more than a week ago, declaring an end to the “intermission” she’d imposed. She couldn’t bear another day without him, she didn’t care what happened in the future, she needed him now. He answered immediately, writing that the separation was unbearable for him as well and that he had to see her as soon as possible. The exchange coincided with Douglas’s decision to give the Knight Air staff a holiday—a long weekend on the coast, at company expense. He’d arranged a bird-watching safari in Tsavo for himself and invited Fitzhugh to join him to talk over some business matters. Fitzhugh accepted, provided Diana could come along.

“I’m glad, too,” he said.

“You sound a little ambivalent.”

“But I’m not,” he protested, though in fact he was. It seemed to him that the only thing in charge of their relationship was her mood of the moment. If she felt that they should be together, then they would be; if not, then they wouldn’t. He criticized himself for not taking command and holding her to her demand for a breathing spell till he could resolve the question of whether he was capable of committing to her, whatever the cost to himself. They were reunited, but they were adrift again, to wherever the currents of love and need might carry them.

“Don’t tell me you’re glad,” Diana demanded. “Show me.”

In the moonlight, she had the cool beauty of a statue, her pale hair flipped over a pale shoulder, her cream-colored nightgown almost indistinguishable from her skin. He came up behind her and, circling her waist, kissed her throat.

“We’ll just have to have faith that this will sort itself out, since we can’t,” she said, as if guessing his thoughts.

Her tummy bulged softly under his hands. He adored this mature, preserved body of hers, held between ripeness and decay, toughness and vulnerability. Yet the thought that there was something a little unnatural in this attraction, as if it manifested Oedipal longings, brought a modesty to his embrace. He held her loosely and with a discreet space between himself and her.

“I feel shameless,” she said, seized his wrists, and drew him to her, lewdly rubbing her hips against him as she tilted her head back and brushed her lips across the underside of his chin. “Utterly, completely shameless.” She pulled his hands below her waist, and he caressed her there, through the satin, arousing himself as much as he did her. “Oh yes, here, now, like this,” she whispered, turning to slide down his body, tugging his undershorts to his ankles as she fell in a mimic of a dancer’s swoon, drawing him to the veranda’s floor with her.

A river breeze slithered through the trees, carrying the smell of the gallery forest, a jungle smell, rank and sweet at the same time. Branches shook as the elephant foraged. They heard the lion again—the drawn-out, belly-deep moan, followed by a series of grunts. Fitzhugh lay under her, to spare her from the rough planks. Straddling him, she lifted her gown up over her waist and gave a low gasp as he penetrated her; and in the quaking instant that he poured himself into her, all things were resolved—but only for that instant.

She flung herself over his chest and kissed him. “I have lost all my self-respect, and I’m perfectly, perfectly happy.”

The lion groaned.

“He sounds closer,” Fitzhugh said. “Maybe we should go inside.”

“Oh, a lion won’t come in with a bull elephant in camp,” she said. “Do you think he heard us?”

“That depends on how well lions hear.”

“I meant next door. Doug.”

“He’s a sound sleeper,” Fitzhugh said. “He’s probably dreaming of birds.”

“Perhaps we could talk now? On the plane, you said you’d had some thoughts.”

He went inside for his cigarettes and sat down in the deck chair, she next to him. “I wonder if you’ve had the same thought. We could adopt.”

“It was the first thing I thought of, but I can’t imagine who would want to give a child to someone my age.”

“With all the orphans in this country, they can’t be particular. And there’s . . .” He hesitated, drawing on the cigarette. “This is awkward. There is your—your situation.”

“I’m rich,” she said.

“I would think they would be delighted to place a child in such comfortable circumstances.”

“And how would you feel?”

“I must face facts. You would be the one putting bread on the table.”

“I meant, how would you feel about raising a child who isn’t yours?”

“I believe I could do it.” He put an arm around her and stared toward the river, almost invisible, now the moon had set. “It could be a solution. We could be happy together, you, me, and a brood of adopted children.”

He wished he could have sounded more certain, had used
know
instead of
believe, will
instead of the more hypothetical
could.

“A lovely picture,” she said. “It terrifies me.”