Acts of faith (92 page)

“Tara has sent her regrets.”

“John mentioned that.”

“She saw fit to tell me why.” She lifted the letter with two fingers, then dropped it.

“Yes, he mentioned that, too.”

“She didn’t have to go into so much detail. She was venting. We’ve been friends ten years, so she’s entitled. Tara seems to think you were a part of what was done to her. At the very least, she says, you knew about it beforehand and did nothing to stop it. I need to know if she’s right. I need to hear about it from you.”

Fitzhugh took a sip of tea. It was cold. He lit a cigarette. “She came into the office in quite a state, and that was the first I’d heard of it.”

“I hope and pray, darling, that you are not lying to me.”

“No need to hope or pray because I’m not.”

She gave him an appraising look. “What was done to her was absolutely rotten. And it’s not only her. It’s everyone who worked for her. They’re all out of a job. Did you people ever give a thought to them?”

“Don’t include me in that ‘you people,’ ” he said, piping to his adolescent squeal, embarrassing himself. He wanted to sound manly and offended that she would think he’d been involved.

“And what about your boss?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Well, my friend is. And Tara wouldn’t say a thing like that if she weren’t.”

“She seemed to have no problem accusing me when she wasn’t sure. I wish you’d stop talking to me like I’m a bad pupil and you’re a headmistress.”

“I’m sorry, but I feel I have to. You have your suspicions about him?”

He gave her an abridgment of his conversation with Douglas. When he was finished, she stared at him, her head wreathed by the hibiscus blossoms behind her. Her beauty was poignant because he knew he was losing her, if he hadn’t lost her already.

“What you’re telling me,” she said, “is that you know he did exactly what Tara says he did, but that you’ve chosen to believe otherwise. It’s easier that way, I suppose.”

“Pardon me?”

“I don’t understand why you haven’t quit him. We have all misjudged him, but I don’t see how you can go on associating yourself with an unscrupulous bastard who thinks nothing of ruining my friend and disrupting, oh, perhaps a hundred other lives at the same time.”

“Why, to eat, Diana, that’s why. I associate myself with him to eat.”

“I am quite sure you could find other work,” she said, as if Kenya were an Eden of job opportunities. “And if you couldn’t, I could help you. I know plenty of people. In the meantime—”

“In the meantime, you have plenty of money.”

She said nothing, and he took her silence as assent.

“There are enough people who think I’m a fortune hunter. I can just hear what they’d say if I were out of work.”

“You’re imagining things. But whatever they think or don’t think,
I
think that in this instance you ought to swallow your pride and—”

“My pride?” he interrupted, half rising from his seat. “You think that’s all it is, my pride?” He looked around, taking in the rambling house, large enough for several African families, and the guest house, large enough for two or three more, and the garden and the stable and the grounds with acreage sufficient for a
shamba
yet supporting only grass and fruitless trees and inedible flowers, and his old resentment of wealth and privilege boiled up with a quickness and violence that told him it must have been simmering closer to the surface than he’d realized. “You have no idea what it’s like to be out of work, do you? No idea what it’s like to wonder how you shall manage for the next week, much less the rest of your life. How could you? You’ve been deprived of that experience, but you think I should quit based on a suspicion and live off you like a parasite?”

“I meant nothing of the kind.”

“I’m not surprised,” he went on, carried helplessly forward on the tide of his anger and hatred, yes, hatred of everything the house and the grounds and the useless trees and flowers represented. “This”—his arm swept out—“was built by parasites. And this whole town is a nest of parasites. Parasites on the skin of this country.”

She looked at him with wounded astonishment, mouthing the word
parasite.
Only then did he shake off the spell of rage and come back to himself. His mind clearing, he saw that his outburst had been fatal. He might as well have struck her. “Not you!” he said. “I didn’t mean you! I love you, and I am so sorry—”

“Please”—she raised a palm—“no need for apologies. Thanks for making your feelings ever so much clearer. I am a parasite among parasites. And thanks for making things ever so much easier for me, darling.” She uttered the term of endearment to make it sound like anything but, then said with a terrible resolve, “I can’t marry you.”

“You don’t know what you’re saying!” he pleaded. “Let’s calm ourselves and talk this through.”

“I am perfectly calm and know precisely what I’m saying. I can’t marry a man who thinks what you do of me. And I can’t marry a man who knows the right thing to do and doesn’t do it, because—oh, Christ . . . you seemed so strong that day in Tsavo, but I misjudged you.”

“You couldn’t be more wrong. I want to keep my job. It is as simple and basic as that.”

“No, it isn’t. Your American is who you’re in love with, or with something he stands for or pretends he stands for even though he stands only for himself. But be warned. I’ve seen Douglas’s sort before. He’s fucked Tara, and one day he’ll get around to fucking you.”

Fitzhugh stood, feeling sorrow, regret, and bitterness all at once. For the moment, bitterness had the greater share. “I’ll tell you what I think,” he said. “You had your mind made up before I came. A woman doesn’t call off a marriage because she doesn’t like who her man works for. It’s your terror of happiness. It got the better of you.”

“What nonsense, but if that idea helps you feel better, stick to it.” She put on her riding gloves and helmet. “Show yourself out. You know the way.”

H
E CHECKED INTO
a hotel that night and got spectacularly drunk. The next morning, as hung over as he’d ever been, he called her, not knowing what to say. The housekeeper asked him to wait. A minute later she told him the memsahib was out. He bashed the receiver on the nightstand and then wept. When his crying jag was over, he went to the lobby and called the office’s sat phone, telling Rachel that he had been held up in Nairobi and would not be returning for a couple of days. That night he got drunk again and picked up a skinny black girl in a disco, with whom he pretended that he was getting even with Diana. He woke up disgusted with himself and sent the girl on her way. Downstairs, he waited till the hotel bar was open and drank some more to numb his self-loathing and all other emotional aches. When he was half in the bag—a phrase he’d picked up from his Yankee associates—he made another call, informing the office that he was taking two weeks off. He didn’t wait for a reply, checked out, and flew to Mombasa, seeking the solace of home and the sea.

His mother and father gave him none. Now in their early sixties, they wanted grandchildren and rejoiced at the breakup of his engagement, assuring him that one day he would rejoice as well. What had he been thinking, to become so involved with a woman that age?

The sea would have to do double duty in the solace department, and he spent a lot of time swimming in it or just looking at it, the same sea whose monsoons, two centuries ago, had brought a Malay-Chinese trader to the shores of Africa, where he stayed and married a black woman and thus began the mixing of bloods that produced the man of all races.

Toward the end of his holiday—Fitzhugh thought of it as a convalescence—he picked up a newspaper in the hotel his father managed. A Reuters dispatch caught his attention:
EIGHT FOREIGN OIL WORKERS DIE IN SUDAN REBEL ATTACK
. He sat down in he lobby and read it. Killed, the story said, when a plane belonging to Amulet Energy was shot down by a missile during an SPLA assault on an oil facility near the Nuba mountains. . . . Five Canadians, including the pilot and copilot, and three Chinese petroleum engineers. . . . Rebel forces had also attacked two pumping stations and cut the pipeline in several places, as part of a general offensive. . . . Use of antiaircraft missiles unusual in the Sudanese civil war. . . . Khartoum government, in condemning the attack on what it termed “a civilian installation,” stated that guerrillas were being supplied with sophisticated weapons by neighboring Uganda. . . . An SPLA spokesman in Nairobi expressed regret for the deaths but pointed out that the facility’s airfield was used by the Sudan air force for air raids on civilian targets in the Nuba and southern Sudan. . . .

So Michael Goraende’s campaign had been a triumph, except for those unfortunate deaths, what military people called “collateral damage.” Fitzhugh set the newspaper down. It was impossible not to feel a remote complicity in the extinction of those innocent lives—if, that is, anyone was innocent anywhere. The oil the workers pumped made the money that bought the planes and the bombs that were dropped on schools and villages and mission churches. As to responsibility for their deaths, there was plenty to go around, from the munitions workers who had built the missile to the SPLA soldier who fired it, and everyone in between, a roster that included Fitzhugh Martin. In a war, every death was the result of a collaboration.

Sudanese died by thousands and barely rated a mention in the media, but eight dead foreigners were news. An instinct warned him that more was going to be heard about this incident, that someone somewhere was going to ask questions such as, If Uganda is supplying the SPLA with antiaircraft missiles, how do they get from Uganda to the landlocked Nuba mountains, a thousand kilometers away? He felt an overpowering, unhappy urge, like the one that pushes a deserter to rejoin his regiment regardless of the consequences, to return to Lokichokio. He packed his bag and was on a flight the next day. Diana was not forgotten—she never would be—but the hurt was not quite so acute, and he hoped it would soon diminish to the point that he could live with it, a chronic but manageable soreness of the heart.

The Baker’s Daughter

S
HE WORE A
constant coat of dust and sweat. She could not wash her clothes or hair or bathe properly, for as the dry season reached its scorching zenith, even the calabash shower became a rare indulgence. Her body threw off an acidic odor leavened by the smell of woodsmoke, which was how everyone smelled in New Tourom except for Ulrika, Fancher, and Handy, who had water, soap, and shampoo delivered on aid flights. Quinette could have borrowed these commodities from them but chose to live as the Nubans did, cleaning her teeth with twigs cut for that purpose and relieving herself in a pit toilet enclosed by a grass fence, where flies congregated and a smooth stone or a stick substituted for toilet paper. The only item of modern hygiene she could not do without was tampons. Ulrika kept her supplied. Her closet was her rucksack and straw carry-bag, stowed under the bed. The usual spiders dropped onto the mosquito net at night. She whisked them off in the morning and swatted them with her sandals. The monotony of her diet—doura porridge and groundnut paste—was occasionally relieved by a goat stew or scrawny chicken roasted over a wood fire. She was bitten by ticks and suffered bouts of diarrhea.

She had never been happier.

She had love and passion and important work to do, and they more than recompensed for the lack of material comforts.

All was fulfillment.

Her life had reached the culmination of a transformative journey begun when she’d first set foot in Africa. Its course had not been charted by her; nor had its destination been manifest, though she knew now in mind and marrow alike that she had arrived.

In the morning she helped Moses teach English. She’d become his full-time assistant and savored her rapport with the pupils, delighted in their progress in spelling and punctuation.

Afternoons, she was the student, taking instruction in missionary work from Fancher and Handy. There were lessons in everything from first aid—a fieldworker was expected to be competent in treating minor injuries and illnesses—to the arts of discipleship. They put her through intensive Bible study, but much of her training was practical, on the job. She preached to the women in New Tourom about the heroines of the Bible. On a few occasions she joined the two men on hazardous trips to neighboring towns, where they showed their videos and played their taped gospel messages while she ministered to the females, to be critiqued afterward by her tutors. Of the two, she liked Fancher more. He had a steadying, calming influence on the mercurial Handy, who could be full of enthusiasm one day, and the next, meeting with some frustration, be moved to despair. But they were equally courageous and dedicated, and she didn’t doubt they were prepared to suffer death for their God, their church, and their mission.

Or rather their missions, for in addition to their main tasks, restoring St. Andrew’s and supporting the Nuba’s Christian congregations, they were there to proselytize and were not shy about admitting it. “We’re the real thing, not skim-milk evangelicals,” Fancher said. Converting pagans was easier than converting Muslims, which required tact and delicacy, a kind of passive approach. You exposed them to the message of salvation and more or less waited to see what happened next. This Fancher and Handy did by inviting people of all faiths to their meetings, by showing the films and playing the recordings in public, by training local pastors to speak Christ’s word to their Muslim neighbors.