The Garden of Burning Sand (30 page)

Then came the email from Sylvia. Brief and blunt, her words triggered a seismic tremor of doubt that Zoe could still feel.

Zoe had attempted on multiple occasions to draft a reply, but in the end she sent nothing. She spent days in turmoil, harboring a wild hope that her father would reach out to her and make amends. Jack, however, left her in silence. At a low point, she considered withdrawing from the hearing, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She held tightly to one of her mother’s axioms:
“Speak the truth, consequences be damned.”
But the doubt persisted because Sylvia was partly right. When it came to her father, the past was implicit in everything she had said and done for twelve years. She didn’t know how to let go of the anger. In truth, she wasn’t sure she wanted to.

Joseph pulled to a stop outside the airport terminal. “Are you ready for this?” he asked, touching her hand.

“I don’t know,” she replied honestly. Over the weeks, they had discussed the hearing from every possible angle, but she hadn’t told him about Sylvia’s email.

“Nervous?”

“A little. Do you think I’m doing the right thing?”

He gave her a small smile. “Sometimes people have to be reminded why they should care. You have a voice. You must use it.”

His affirmation of purpose offered Zoe a lifeline. She brought her face close to his. “I love you, Joseph Kabuta,” she said, kissing him with all the passion and uncertainty in her heart. She left him there and walked into the terminal, her words replaying in her mind.

I love you, Joseph Kabuta
.

I love you
.

Washington, D.C
.
May, 2012

The flight from Johannesburg landed at Washington Dulles International Airport at six thirty in the morning. After passing through customs, Zoe met Trevor outside the baggage claim and gave him a long hug. He escorted her to his black BMW M5 and tossed her luggage in the trunk.

“You like the car?” he asked, opening the door for her. “I got it last month.”

“It’s nice,” she said, slipping into the plush leather seat.

They stuck to small talk on the drive into the District. Zoe asked about his wedding plans and he rolled his eyes and gave her a rundown of all the hilarity and hysteria. The wedding itself was scheduled for January 1 in Aruba. Jenna, too, came from wealth, and her parents had agreed to fly three hundred guests to the island for the event. Zoe did the calculations in her head but kept quiet with her reservations. In the world of her birth, nothing surprised her anymore.

Trevor found a spot on the street just off Dupont Circle and showed her to his flat. “Do you want to take a nap?” he asked. “We have five hours before we need to leave.”

“I slept on the plane,” she replied. “I wouldn’t mind a shower, though.”

He carried her suitcase to the guest room and excused himself, explaining that he had work to do. She threw her backpack on the bed and stood before the window overlooking Q Street. The upscale neighborhood was an oasis of calm in a city of indefatigable ambition. She pictured Joseph’s face and recalled the taste of his kiss.
What would you say about this place?
she wondered.
Would it make sense to you? Does it make sense to me anymore?

She left the window and took a shower. Afterward, she dressed in a gray pantsuit and sky blue shirt that complemented her eyes and took her MacBook to the bed. She had rewritten her speech four times, striving for a harmony between authority and poignancy that would reframe foreign aid as a philanthropic partnership between the American people and their leaders, not as a retirement plan for dictators or a diversion of resources from the domestic poor. Her heart quickened when she reached the addendum. She had almost deleted it numerous times, but whenever her finger hovered over the button, she had stopped herself. She didn’t know what she was going to do with it, but she wanted to keep her options open.

At noon, Trevor reappeared in the doorway. “Are you hungry? I’m making a sandwich.”

“I’ll help you,” she replied, leaving her computer on the bed.

She followed him downstairs to the kitchen—an urbane blend of dark marble and stainless steel—and fixed her own lunch. The air was charged with all that was unspoken between them.

At last, Trevor said, “Are you sure you want to do this? You may lose Dad for good.”

She sliced her sandwich in half and laid it on a plate. “I have to finish what I started. People like Ben Slaughter have grossly distorted my motives.”

“Don’t be naive. They don’t care about you. They care about controversy. Testifying today will only make things worse.”

“You don’t understand.”

“Then
make
me understand. Dad loves you. Do you really want to hurt him?”

Zoe looked away, unable to bear the pain in her brother’s eyes. “It’s complicated, Trevor. There are things you don’t know.”

“Then
tell
me. Don’t destroy the only family you have.”

His words cut her to the heart. She took her plate to the table and sat down, eating in stubborn silence. For the first time in her life, the gap between them seemed unbridgeable.

At a quarter past one, they left Trevor’s apartment and walked to the Dupont Circle Metro Station. The skies of late spring were clotted with cumulus, and the humid air carried more than a hint of the summer heat to come. Trevor bought her a day-pass and swiped his SmarTrip card, leading the way to the Red Line. They took their place beside the tracks just as the headlamp of the approaching train broke free of the tunnel.

Trevor nudged her shoulder. “You don’t get service like this in Zambia.”

Zoe laughed, grateful for the olive branch of affection.

The trip to Capitol South via Metro Center took fifteen minutes. They emerged on First Street and joined the stream of pedestrians hurrying in the direction of the Capitol. After passing the Library of Congress and the Supreme Court, they made their way toward Dirksen Senate Office Building, the home of the Foreign Relations Committee.

On the cusp of Constitution Avenue, Zoe saw a herd of reporters and cameramen milling outside Dirksen’s public entrance. She turned abruptly and faced the Capitol, the gravity of the moment settling on
her shoulders. Trevor put a protective arm around her, reverting to the role he had played since they were children.

“They’re here for Frieda Caraway, too,” he said. “Ignore them and they’ll let you pass.”

She nodded, warding off her doubts. “Let’s go.”

They crossed the barricaded tarmac and entered the throng of journalists. For a second or two the reporters didn’t recognize her, but then someone spoke her name—“That’s Zoe Fleming!”—and the sidewalk erupted with noise. Zoe allowed Trevor to take the lead and walked forward step by step until at last they found shelter inside the doors.

After clearing security, they took the elevator to the fourth floor and traversed the marble hallway to the hearing room. The crowd outside was dotted with journalists, but the atmosphere here was more sedate. One reporter—a man Zoe vaguely recognized—pressed close to her and asked, “Ms. Fleming, isn’t it true that your appearance today is a vote against your father’s campaign?”

She engaged him despite herself: “This isn’t about politics or the election. It’s about America’s relationship to a billion people around the world who live in conditions we would never tolerate for our own children.”

She slipped into the wood-paneled hearing room and kissed Trevor on the cheek, leaving him to find a seat in the gallery. She walked up the aisle and found her place at the head of the witness table. The card beside hers read: “Ms. F
RIEDA
C
ARAWAY.”
Zoe smiled apprehensively. That Senator Hartman had given her the pole position ahead of an Academy-Award-winning actress was either a reflection of admiration or the basest political opportunism.

She settled into her seat and surveyed the dais, focusing on her father’s nameplate three chairs down from Senator Hartman’s. “M
R.

F
LEMING,”
it read. She closed her eyes and allowed her mind to drift back in time to the day when all of this had begun.

She remembered the boyish face of Clay Randall, drawing her into the lonely dunes of East Beach on Chappaquiddick. The sand had blown with such fierceness that she had suggested turning back, but he had led her into a lee with a view of the Atlantic, and she had relented. Then the blanket came out, and the bags of red grapes and cheese. After that came the poetry and the kissing and the hands that had disregarded the boundaries of her bikini, causing her to squirm and protest, then to slap him in the face. She had nearly escaped. But nearly was not enough. Afterward, through a veil of tears, she had whispered:
“Why?”
Clay had looked her up and down and sneered: “
You know you wanted it.”
Ten days later she had summoned the courage to tell her father. She could still hear his words if she listened closely enough: “It
sounds like the two of you had a misunderstanding. I think it’s best that you forget about it and go on with your life
.”

The next forty minutes in the hearing room passed in a blur—the noisy admission of the media; the assembling of the photographers; the arrival of the other panelists, including Frieda Caraway, aglitter with diamonds; the dance of congressional aides and security officials; the entry of Senator Hartman, followed by a steady trickle of other members; the sudden appearance of Jack Fleming with his senior aides a few minutes after two o’clock; and, finally, Hartman’s long-winded introduction. Zoe endured all of it with a deliberate composure that belied her nervousness. Even the confident smile she gave her father was a fleeting thing.

As the chairman concluded his remarks, Zoe blinked away the glare of the lights and glanced at Frieda Caraway beside her. The actress was seated primly, her posture erect and her face impassive despite
the cameras trained on her. For a moment, Zoe imagined her mother sitting there, and asked the question again:
How would you handle this?

Suddenly, Zoe heard her name.

“Ms. Fleming,” Senator Hartman said, “the committee is grateful for your excellent article in the
New Yorker
and for your deep personal commitment to the poor and vulnerable around the world. We welcome your remarks.”

Zoe hesitated for a moment, her mind distracted by the cameras. Then the words came to her without thought. “Senator Hartman, members of the committee, I’m honored to be here with you today. My mother, Catherine Sorenson-Fleming—whom many of you knew—dedicated her life to the proposition on the seal behind you. ‘E
Pluribus Unum’
—’Out of many, one.’ She saw America and the globalizing world as a melting pot united by more than the sum of what divides us. But she was not a utopian. She understood the power—and to some extent the inevitability—of the age-old distinctions in human society. She didn’t believe that the world should become homogeneous, but she
did
believe passionately in two notions—justice and generosity.”

Zoe looked at the senators around the dais. “I could speak to you today about justice—economic justice between the rich world and the poor world, about the moral obligations created by centuries of slavery, colonialism, and avarice. But if I took that approach I would disparage my mother’s legacy. I would rather talk to you about generosity. Unlike justice, generosity isn’t hard to define. When confronted by the one who has not, the one who has either offers a helping hand or walks by. We all know the kindness of the Good Samaritan and the parsimony of the priest and the Levite who preceded him. The difference could not be starker.”

Zoe took a breath. “When I was six years old, my mother took me
to Africa for the first time. We stayed with a diplomat in Nairobi who lived in a bungalow built by the British. My first memories of the continent came from the lush gardens in his backyard. Then we went into Kibera, one of Africa’s largest slum communities, and I met children who had nothing. Actually, they had less than nothing—they had disease, dead parents, polluted water, nutrition-depleted food. I didn’t know what I could do to change their circumstances. But I knew one thing instinctively—the only thing separating me from them was the accident of birth.”

“My mother took me back to Africa seven times before she died,” Zoe went on. “She loved it as much as a person can love a place. She was on the vanguard of AIDS relief. She championed microfinance before it became a buzzword. She built water systems and bush clinics and funded medical trips into conflict zones. She worked with anyone who cared about genuine philanthropy—the love of human beings. She had only two enemies: cynicism and greed.

“If my mother were alive today, she would praise Africa’s economic growth and fledgling middle class. She would encourage the expansion of free enterprise and support efforts to make aid smarter and more efficient. She would hold high the banner of trade as a rising tide that lifts all boats. But she would
not
abandon our system of foreign assistance. Indeed, she would argue that generosity will always be necessary because the profit motive that drives trade has no mechanism for meeting the needs of the poor. The reason is simple: the poor cannot pay.”

Zoe’s voice took on a stronger cadence. “Today, around the world, the poorest people struggle to feed their children and keep them in school. They have no way to afford life-saving medicine, no way to fund an adequate justice system. Those of us who have the means must help them. We in America are not blind to this. Generosity is one of
the great legacies of our nation. But some among us are suggesting that we close our eyes.”

“We are in a position to all but
eliminate
the transmission of AIDS within a generation, but we’re scaling back PEPFAR. We’ve saved countless lives through the Malaria Initiative and the Global Fund, but we’re retrenching on our commitments. In Zambia where I work, hundreds of children are brutally raped each year, but their abusers get away with it because prosecutors don’t have access to DNA. These are problems that money
can
solve, but the market alone won’t solve them because there is little in it for the businessman. Generosity must deliver them.”

Zoe glanced around the panel. “Confronted with the crises of debt and deficit, we face an equally momentous crisis of conscience. On one side are our fears. On the other is our humanity. It is at moments like this that we prove our true character.”

She hesitated on the threshold of decision, her heart racing with adrenaline. She could conclude cleanly or toss a hand grenade at the dais. She fixed her eyes on her father and saw the stillness in his frame. The blankness of his expression pushed her toward the precipice.

“I know the inconvenience of humanity. I know what it feels like to be …”

Suddenly, her father winced and she saw pain in his eyes. She paused ever so slightly and softened her words.

“… to be alone in a vulnerable place. Today in Africa and all around the world there are people whose names will never make it into the history books—people living on the margins of society, amid war and famine, violence, and disease. We will never meet them, but we are no different from them. They do not need welfare or dependency. They need generosity and empowerment. We are in a position to offer that. If we do, history will judge us kindly. If we do not, God help us.”

When she spoke the last word, Zoe sat back in her chair and retreated inward to a place she could not define. She heard the speeches that followed and the questions and answers, but the rest of the proceeding carried the faded edges of a dream. Occasionally, she glanced at her father, expecting to see anger, but his eyes held only sadness. He declined to question the panel and left the hearing room as soon as the adjournment was announced.