Foreigners (10 page)

The officer was clearly disgusted by the sight that greeted him. He stared at me for a long moment before he finally bent over and held his hand close to my mouth to see if I was still breathing. He looked familiar, but I couldn't quite place him.

Possibly we had met in the lounge of the Excelsior. Satisfied that I was still alive, he retreated. He said something to Marlowe, then turned and kicked me repeatedly in the upper thigh. When I did not respond, he withdrew his revolver and placed the muzzle against my temple. I heard the click of the hammer being cocked. Marlowe moved forward then and grabbed him by the shoulder, at which the officer spun round on his heels and pressed the barrel against Marlowe's forehead. Then he laughed and re-holstered his weapon. He draped his arm across Marlowe's shoulder and led him outside. I did not see Marlowe again after that.

Yesterday I heard the sound of fighting. Mortar rounds and small-arms fire. It came from far off, somewhere down below the village. Espérance, I should expect. I could only suppose that officers from some other district on the island had decided it was their time to assume control of this terrible place. Or maybe it was the Marais junta, arisen from the ashes.

Fighting raged throughout the day and there was much commotion in the village. I could hear children crying, women too. The voices of the men were harsh and insistent. The corrugated-steel roofs were being removed from the surrounding huts and dragged across the hard-packed earth. They were placed against the outside walls of my hut, sheet after sheet, and I found the rusty, chiming sound of the panels of metal falling together comforting, as if I were being sealed up in an encrusted cocoon.

As night fell, and the noise of the battle grew closer, the villagers began to flee Ascension, seeking refuge in the jungle
higher up in the mountains. But before they left, a small group came into the hut and stripped me of my clothes, as has happened every night since Marlowe disappeared. In his absence they assumed my keeping. It is a responsibility shared among them, and in their hands I have felt a degree of security I could not have previously thought possible. Their kindness, though, is not a gesture of acceptance, for I do not belong here. And yet it is kindness nonetheless. It is no doubt born of pity, and that pity in turn born of compassion. I have seen it in their faces as they lean over me, their wet cloths sliding over my skin, cleansing my body. But there was something else in their eyes on this night, something they tried to keep hidden from me: sadness, regret.

As their faces passed back and forth across my field of vision, I saw among them the features of the thin man I had followed along the darkened path that led me to this place. He knelt on the floor beside me and put his mouth close to my ear. He whispered something in his singsong dialect that I did not understand and softly kissed the spot where the club had struck me. Then he took the wide-brimmed straw hat from his head and placed it gently over my face. The last sound I heard was that of his bare feet gently slapping against the earthen floor as he left my hut.

PAYNE'S FLIGHT

T
HE MAN WHO OCCUPIED THE WINDOW SEAT
insisted on climbing over him to gain the aisle, rather than allowing Payne to get up and let him pass. Twice already he'd made the assault, and he was preparing to do so again. When Payne noticed this he moved quickly, undoing his seat belt and grabbing hold of the headrest in front of him. A polite tap on his elbow stopped him from lifting himself any farther. There ensued a smiling pantomime, the silly dumb show of those who do not speak one another's language. The mummeries of his fellow traveller won out, and Payne settled back uncomfortably. He watched as the man went through his strange pre-clambering routine. In the impossibly narrow gap afforded by their coach-class berth, made only slightly more spacious by the vacancy of the middle seat in their row, the man executed several knee thrusts, like a sprinter warming in the blocks. Then, without a pause, he climbed, gracefully Payne had to admit, onto the empty seat. And after two more knee thrusts, possibly to
synchronize his rhythm, he passed over Payne and into the aisle.

A queer little fellow, Payne thought as he turned in his seat and watched the man make his way toward the toilets in the rear of the airplane. He was impeccably dressed in varying shades of charcoal, from his smart pullover down to the felt slippers covering his expensive socks. Japanese, Payne decided as he reached into the seat pocket in front of him and withdrew his spiral notebook. He unclipped his pen from the coils and flipped to the page he had been working on earlier. Before continuing, he reread what was already written:

Esteemed colleagues—for that is what I consider you, both professors and pupils alike. We are all, regardless of achievements, confederates, compatriots—compeers, if you will. Bound together in our quest, our thirst, by a love that is far deeper than simple admiration. It is a passion that embraces our souls, that settles in our bones, that stirs our loins.

Loins? Payne thought. Stirring? How asinine. To be sure, there had been occasions on which his loins had been stirred, but never by literature; at least not by proper literature. He glanced down to the bottom of the page, to where he had written her name—to where he'd written it, crossed it out, drawn a circle around it and then filled in the circle so all was hidden.

For good measure he put another thick line through the blot of ink, then tore the sheet from his notebook. But instead of crumpling it into a ball, as had been his intention, he folded
it neatly and slipped it into the inside pocket of his jacket. Then he stared at the blank page before him. The symposium was set to begin at one o'clock the following afternoon, with his address scheduled to close the first day, at a dinner being held in his honour. And all Payne had was the folded piece of paper in his pocket.

Three months earlier when the invitation had arrived, it was completely unexpected. It wasn't so much that Payne hadn't heard of Hoogeveen Polytechnic, which he hadn't, it was that someone at Hoogeveen Polytechnic had heard of Severn College—and Professor Harvard T. Payne of Severn College in particular. His first reaction was fear, sure as he was that it was just another cruel faculty joke. Only after a rather arduous overseas phone call were his anxieties quelled. “
Ja, Dokter Payne,”
Professor Willem Hefflin, the invitation's signatory, assured him, “we are very excited to have you speak. Your work on Gaynor is well regarded.” At that, Payne considered again the possibility of an elaborate jape.

His research on the slim canon of Noel Gaynor, whom Payne believed to be a significant figure in the birth of Canadian letters—at least as important, if not more so, than those uptight émigré sisters, Moodie and Traill—was considered by his fellow professors at Severn to be something of an embarrassment. After Payne's seminal work on the subject, a slim article entitled “Noel Gaynor: Lost in the Bush,” had been turned down by all the respectable academic journals, he'd finally had to subsidize its publication in an obscure periodical put out by a West Coast university even more
insignificant than Severn. Many within his own English department held the view that his tenure was the result of an administrative oversight. A clerical error, Payne had overheard one colleague say. Thus, the invite to the symposium was indeed a coup. One that Payne was more than prepared to flaunt. With it also came the promise of adventure. The thought of a stopover in Amsterdam with Kathryn made him tingle.

Payne called her after verifying the invitation's authenticity. He'd settled himself down behind his cluttered desk in his cramped little office, which was tucked away in the farthest reaches of the Victorian manor that housed the English department. He couldn't be sure, hadn't found any hard evidence, but was fairly certain that the room had once been part of the servants' quarters, situated, as it was, on the top floor of the old house. Wedged under the gable of the roof, its ceiling was crossed with beams that drooped so low at the edges he could stretch to his full height—just slightly under five foot eight—only in the middle of the room. Still, there was the consolation of the view afforded by the dormer window behind his desk, which looked out over the gravel-packed faculty parking lot to the thick copse of sugar maples beyond. The bush, he liked to call it, in deference to his woodsman scribe.

He sat there, his feet resting on the radiator, looking out at the autumnal colours, and dialled the number for Kathryn's cellphone. Payne experienced a slight twinge of desire as he waited for the call to go through. Kathryn, if he recalled her timetable, would be in Foden's classics at Wieschuck Hall on the main campus. She would most definitely have switched the ringer to vibrate, so as to avoid the embarrassment of
disturbing the lecture. Payne closed his eyes and listened to the tone, trying to picture the phone jiggling against her flesh—Kathryn kept it hooked on her belt loop—and leaning back in his chair, breathed deeply, imagining the sweet scent of the skin below her navel, and the fine downy fluff there that had tickled his nose just a few hours earlier.

“Hello?”

“Koochie-koo, sweetie?”

“Harvey? What are you doing? I'm in the middle of a class here.”

She sounded upset, and Payne thought for a moment that he'd made a mistake, that she wouldn't share his excitement.

“I've got some wonderful news,” he said, his voice a little too eager.

“Well, what is it?”

He paused. She was clearly in a sour mood.

“This isn't a good time, is it?”

“What do you think?”

“Later, then. Come to my place. I'll make you dinner and tell you then.” There was silence on the line. “It really is wonderful,” he added.

“Fine, Harvey. Fine. I've got to go. Professor Foden's staring at me.”

She hung up without saying goodbye. Payne looked at the telephone in his hand. Yes, a mistake. He should have waited. Kathryn was temperamental at the best of times, and drawing the ire of Gil Foden, who was a genuine tyrant, would set her off to no end. Still, candlelight, gnocchi and a sweet red might bring her back round. And if that didn't, Payne was sure Amsterdam would.

The drop-down dinner tray nudged against his belly. The passenger in the seat in front of him insisted on having his seat fully reclined, and Payne decided to suffer the discomfort rather than have to engage in any conversation, no matter how trivial. He looked down at his meal. He had chosen the beef over the fish, having never been partial to seafood. It was meant to be stroganoff, but the limp noodles and minuscule cuts of meat seemed to him insufficient. The dessert, an unidentifiable custard, both in colour and taste, was too airy. And the plastic wrap over his cheese had a hole in it, leaving the contents hard and stale. He enjoyed his wine, though, a nondescript Merlot in a small twist-top bottle. He considered asking the flight attendant for another, but stopped himself. There was no point, he concluded, in muddling his senses when he was going to have to navigate his way through the airport to find the connecting flight to Maastricht, and from there the train to Hoogeveen.