Green City in the Sun (60 page)

     He was Israel Halperin, the identity papers said in English and Hebrew, a refugee from Poland.

     "What is your profession?" David asked.

     The man smiled, spread his hands, and said something in a language David didn't understand. When David stood back and said, "You'll have to go to police headquarters," another man suddenly appeared, as if he had been standing behind the door, listening.

     He was taller than Mr. Halperin, wore a beard and a long black coat. He said his name was Epstein, a rabbi. "My friend does not speak English. Perhaps I can translate for you?"

     David studied the rabbi. He bore no resemblance to the photo on the wanted poster. After Ochieng searched the rabbi for a weapon, David asked him, "What does this man do?"

     "He is a lawyer. He is preparing for his examinations here in Palestine."

     David looked the smaller man up and down. He had a shy manner and a congenial smile. "How long have you been here in Palestine?" David asked him.

     Mr. Halperin replied, and the rabbi translated: "Four years." "David!" said Ochieng. He spoke in Swahili. "I saw a movement over by that door."

     David motioned for his friend to investigate. Ochieng led with his rifle and inched around the second doorway while the two Jews watched, seemingly unconcerned. A moment later a woman emerged, holding a small boy in her arms. Ochieng stood behind, his rifle trained on her, his stance edgy.

     "Who is she?" David asked.

     Mr. Halperin spoke, and the rabbi said, "She is his wife."

     David stared at the woman. She was familiar. His heart began to race. He looked again at Mr. Halperin, looked into eyes that met his calmly and with assurance. Could this unassuming little man be the fearsome Menachem Begin? David suddenly saw a resemblance to the picture in the wanted poster. The eyebrows, the set of the mouth ...

     Shouts echoed in the street, and the roar of truck motors. A few citizens protested, calling insults to the soldiers.

     David and Mr. Halperin looked at each other for a long time. Then David said, "You will come with me."

     "My friend," said the rabbi gently, "what has Mr. Halperin done?"

     David peered into the house. He looked for signs of others lurking there, for evidence of terrorist activity, but all he saw were stacks of books. "He is to be questioned by the police."

     Then Mr. Halperin spoke; it sounded like a question.

     Rabbi Epstein said, "Mr. Halperin wants to know, if you are a soldier, what are you fighting for?"

     David was slightly taken aback. "Into the truck, all of you! The woman and child as well!"

     But Mr. Halperin, calm and unperturbed, spoke again. While he spoke, the rabbi translated: "You are African, my friend, a member of an oppressed race. Why are you fighting for the British? Why do you fight for men who subjugate you?"

     David hesitated, and the diminutive man went on, in a quiet, compelling voice. "Do you know what is going on in the world? I will tell you. In my hometown in Poland we Jews numbered thirty thousand. Today there are but ten left. It was our home, yet we were driven from it. What is happening in
your
home, my young African?"

     Mr. Halperin's dark eyes were steady on David's face; they had a penetrating look, a persuasive power. "What have you been promised in return for fighting for the British, my friend? India has been promised independence in return for fighting in the war. Have you Africans been promised as much?"

     David blinked. He looked past Mr. Halperin at Ochieng, who, not understanding English, stood impatiently with his rifle aimed at the woman and child. David was drawn back to Mr. Halperin's penetrating eyes. "If you have been promised nothing," Mr. Halperin, through the rabbi, continued, "then you fight for nothing. You were colonized years ago because you had no weapons, no education to match the British. But now you have knowledge of weapons, you have education.
What are you waiting for?"

     David stared down at the man who barely came to his shoulders. Mr.
Halperin was pale, his hair receding, his voice soft. But there was a strange power about him from which David could not break away.

     "There are things more precious than life, my oppressed friend," the Polish Jew said. "And more horrible than death. If you love freedom, you must hate slavery. If you love your people, you cannot but hate those who oppress them. I ask you, if you love your mother, would you not hate the man who sought to kill her? And would you not fight him at the cost of your own life?"

     A memory flashed in David's mind. He was seventeen again, standing on the stump of a fig tree and crying out to Chief John Muchina, "The man who does not love his country does not love his mother.... And a man who does not love his mother... cannot love God!"

     David was shaken. It was for those very words that he had been arrested and tortured and driven into exile in Uganda.

     
How could he have forgotten?

     Suddenly he was acutely aware of the uniform he stood in, of the British tommy gun slung over his shoulder, and of the identity papers of "Mr. Israel Halperin" in his hand.

     "Go!" whispered the soft-spoken Jew. "Go back to your homeland in peace and let us do here what we must do!"

     "What have you got there, Private?" came a voice from behind.

     David turned. His commanding officer was standing up in the Jeep, his eyes hidden behind sunglasses. He carried a swagger stick; the buttons of his uniform were polished and gleamed in the sun. He was Geoffrey Donald, friend of the Trevertons.

     "Nothing, sir," David said abruptly, returning Mr. Halperin's papers to him. "Everything is in order here." He signaled to Ochieng, who came running out of the house. As the door closed behind him, David heard a quietly spoken
"Shalom."

E
VERYONE IN THE DISTRICT KNEW THAT THE GREENHOUSE WAS
haunted.

     Around their cook fires at night the Kikuyu spoke in hushed tones of the spirit that lived there; children in school talked of the ghost; women at the market murmured. It was not long before word of mouth had reached every African in the area so that soon no one, not even would-be thieves, ventured near the taboo greenhouse in the glade.

     Njeri had done her job well.

     Rose sang as she left the house on this beautiful December morning. Like every morning now, she had taken great pains with her hair, with her clothing. She tried different perfumes; she chose just the right jewelry. She was desperate to please Carlo, to win his smile. But that was exactly what General Carlo Nobili had done every day for three months—smile at Rose.

     Back in October the remains of a white man had been found in the forest near Meru. It was surmised that he was the third of the escaped Italian POWs and that he had met his fate in the jaws of wild animals. The remains
were sent to his ducal estate in Italy; the manhunt was dropped; the case was closed. No one—not Grace or Sir James, nor Mona and Tim Hopkins— knew of the mysterious occupant of the greenhouse or that Rose had ceased to work on her tapestry weeks ago and that she now went every day to the glade for a much different purpose.

     She paused at the edge of the drive and shielded her eyes from the sun.

     Mona was driving a truck loaded with sacks of coffee beans. Rose marveled at her daughter's obsession with the estate. It was like a madness. Mona was as fiercely possessive of Bellatu and its five thousand acres as Valentine was, and so Rose decided that Mona was definitely her father's daughter. But what about when the war was finally over, Rose wondered, and Valentine returned to resume control of the plantation?

     Rose felt a chill in her soul.

     Valentine.

     She hoped he would never return.

     The general was in the greenhouse, cutting delphinium seedlings with a knife. He had planted them in seed boxes two months ago, one of his first tasks after convalescence. Rose paused in the doorway to watch him. He stood in the refracted sunshine that came through the skylight; a soft, gauzy aura seemed to envelop him. Nothing was in sharp focus. The dark blue and lavender blossoms surrounding him appeared to blur; leaves of light green blended into those of emerald. The man himself was transformed: Rose thought he resembled a mythical figure—so tall and slender, his dark head bent—like an olive-complected god walking in some Olympian garden.

     He looked up. She hadn't made a sound, but he had sensed her standing there. "Rosa," he said softly.

     She came in and set down the basket that contained their breakfast. "Isn't it too soon to divide the seedlings?" she asked, coming to stand next to him and looking down at the box.

     "Not in Kenya! This country is fantastic, Rosa! Such a mild climate you have here, with no winters, no spring or fall. Nothing lies dormant; flowers bloom all year round!" He turned his radiant smile upon her. "It is a gardener's paradise."

     Carlo Nobili, Rose had discovered, was an expert on flowers. Back on
his ducal estate in northern Italy, he had spent years cultivating and experimenting, crossbreeding, producing new hybrids, and creating a vast flower garden that was the envy, he boasted, of the Vatican itself. When, during his rocky convalescence on the bed she and Njeri had made out of straw and blankets, the general had remarked upon the excellence of Rose's plants, speaking knowledgeably, they had discovered an interest in common. In the weeks since, as their chaste and gentle friendship had evolved, they had spent their hours sharing this interest, learning from each other, telling of experiences, of successes and failures. He had taught Rose how to cut back begonias so that they would have a longer flowering life; she had shown him how to cultivate the stunning opalescent blue delphinium that was native to Kenya and that she had found in the forest and transplanted in her glade.

     He looked at her now, at the way the diffuse sunlight haloed her pale hair, softened the colors of her dress. This greenhouse hidden in the heart of a wood seemed, to the duca d'Alessandro, to be enchanted. He knew he lived a bewitched existence beneath its glass roof and among its rich soil, its heady floral perfumes, its great, nodding leaves, visited daily by this beautiful, pure woman, whom he had yet to touch and who, he was certain, must have stepped down from a Botticelli canvas.

     "Did you sleep well, Rosa?" he asked, standing close to her.

     Her breath caught. "Yes. And you, signor?"

     "You have made a palace for me here." He swept his arm toward the corner, where a crude straw mattress, a rug, a folding chair, and a washstand with pitcher and basin made up his hideaway. "And you must call me Carlo."

     Rose blushed and reached for the basket.

     Her inability to call him by his first name was something she couldn't explain. Certainly, the duke believed, the intimacy of her having nursed him in his illness, of bathing his wounds, of feeding him like a child, and then of helping him take his first steps—surely, the duke thought, after days of this she could call him Carlo. And yet, incredibly, she could not!

     He had watched her change during his recovery, from the gentle but firm nurse who had taken over his life and had done everything for him to a shy, timid creature that seemed now on the verge of running from him. It was almost as if, he thought, the more he had regained his strength, the
more she had lost hers. The more his power grew, the more hers diminished. Now she could hardly meet his eyes.

     She unpacked the basket, spreading out a fresh tablecloth, and set out the hot scones, butter, jar of honey, and pot of Countess Treverton tea. While they ate, Carlo spoke quietly about his home, the estate where he lived alone, his wife having died five years ago in childbirth. He and Rose discussed gardening, paintings, music, and books, but neither brought up the subject of the war or of his terrible experiences in the POW camp. They never touched upon the very thing that had brought him to this place and that kept him here now.

     Every day Carlo saw the unspoken question in her eyes:
Why do you stay?
As if she feared that he would one day vanish. And every day he asked himself the same question, finding only no answers, just the sense that the longer he stayed, the more he had to stay.

     For now he lived for this stolen spell, a charmed piece of time cut from the nightmarish fabric of war, as if past and future did not exist. All too soon, he knew, he would somehow have to find his way back to his army, back to the ignominy of defeat.

     The morning was spent in fertilizing Rose's prize orchids, in soaking them and rotating them from sunlight to shade. Carlo asked questions as they worked. "Why do you keep them in such small pots, Rosa? I would think larger would be better for them."

     The first time he had asked her a question, weeks ago, Rose had not known what to say. She was so out of practice in answering questions—not even her African house staff came to her for orders—that she had first been at a loss. But in time, as she had gotten used to Carlo's queries and had realized that he
listened
when she spoke, she grew comfortable explaining things. "These are South African orchids—disa orchids. They like small pots because they like to crowd against the sides."