The American Ambassador (11 page)

Hartnett laughed. “Do that again, Paul?”

Carruthers sighed. “He wants something the worst way.”

“You want me to tell you about Africa,” North said.

“Yes. I want you to tell me about Africa, the day the Germans came to call.”

Hartnett groaned, looking at his watch.

North thought a moment. “Come by tomorrow morning, and I'll tell you about Africa.”

N
OTHING MOVED
, but he sensed restlessness in the hospital, a kind of fever. Restlessness everywhere in the city, the sound of whispering, marching feet, pressure. His own feet were motionless, sticking up at the end of the bed like two exclamation points.

 

!   !

 

Insomnia, memory's snake eyes, the reward for an uneasy conscience.
That which I should, have done I did not do.
Insomnia, and a numb left hand, medical tests, and now they wanted to know all about Africa. On the bureau opposite, Elinor had placed a selfportrait, what the Germans call a
Selbstbildnis.
It had been painted more than three years before, when they arrived in Africa the second time, his first ambassadorship. He had been worried about the reception, his role in the coup almost twenty years before; perhaps there would be a snub when he presented his credentials to the president. But there had been four changes of government since then, and the coup was referred to only as “the events.” Many of the participants were dead. The president had been cordial, and had held his lecture to two hours flat. His government had an urgent need for money, there were so many schemes begun: electrification, the railroad, an installation for the air force and its fleet of MiGs. The president was eloquent with a poet's command of image and metaphor. North listened politely, with his ambassador's grave expression, and tried to remember himself as he had been twenty years earlier, a callow second secretary, so eager to get into the game. His instructions as ambassador were different. The aid budget was down; and there would be no military hardware, period. Make friends, the under secretary had told him; enjoy the country, there's wonderful hunting and fishing. Watch the Russians. Be nice to the Chinese. Meet the leaders of the opposition if it's possible. Don't make any promises you can't keep, which meant: Don't make any promises. This country, the under secretary had said, is not on our leader board.

He had found himself lulled by the president's musical baritone and at the end had shaken hands and said how pleased he was to be there. You were here before, the president said. Yes, he had replied, as a very young man. At the time of the events, the president said. Yes, he said. Only yesterday, the president said. Nearly twenty years ago, he said. And so much has changed, he added. And the president had smiled, showing an enormous gold tooth. Welcome back.

Africa had a sexual effect on him. Elinor had never seemed more desirable. The
Selbstbildnis
showed her as she was then, thinner, less gray in her hair, her skin soft and tan. She had painted herself on the lawn, the little bouquet of a garden behind her, the white African sky overhead. She was leaning forward, her hands primly clasped in front of her, her expression one of the most open desire. He had titled it
A Woman Waiting for Her Lover.
She had dismissed it as kitsch, a sentimental view of their mornings together. It was a powerful mnemonic, for he had always regarded his tour as ambassador as an extended holiday, AWOL from the world; what fun they had had.

They were always up early, making love. Most mornings, the power was off, the house silent as a desert. He thought of them as Bedouin, austere before the world, loyal only to each other. They were a tribe of two. It was warm in the big bedroom, the sun already climbing, the glare fierce. Lying back stretching, he watched her do her hair. She refused to cut it short, despite the heat; it takes more than that, she said. Her hair was thick. She brushed it a hundred strokes each morning, concentrating, her tongue between her teeth. The whish-whish of the brush and the creak of the bed were the only sounds in the room. Her shoulders and back glistened with sweat; he was languid, loose as rubber, filled with energy. When he tried to help her with her hair, she said, softly, no. They sat cross-legged at the end of the bed, amid the tangled sheets, and always she turned to him and laughed, a womanly, throaty chuckle, tossing her head, her hair bouncing on her shoulders. He was randy as a teenager.
So proud of yourself
, she said.

In the dense heat of Africa they would remember things from their American childhoods, episodes that had lain buried, hidden all these years, now miraculously available. The stories enchanted them, one story leading to another, serving to remind them that they were people with individual histories, each with a life that predated the other's. The stories were presented with high good humor, so surprising; they were precious as antiques. Why, you never told me
that!

“I went with a boy, brief time, a year or so before we met,” she said, pausing tilting her head, smiling privately, listening to the whish-whish of the hairbrush. “He was a boy from Connecticut. He had the strangest family. No one worked. One night after dinner his mother and I were alone in the study. We began to talk and she asked me how her son was
in bed.
” Elinor looked up, grinning; she hadn't thought of the boy or his family in years. “What kind of lover he was,” she said. “Was he—was he
ardent
?”

Bill began to laugh.

“Well, you know, those days. We weren't sleeping together. We were making out a little, you know, in cars. We were kids, teenagers.”

“I remember,” he said.

“Remember the Chevrolet?”

“Of course I remember the Chevrolet.”

“You'd better,” she said.

“What did you say to her?”

“I—” And Elinor faltered, turning away, her hair covering her face, the brush motionless. She reached for his hand in the silence and heat, turning toward him, her eyes bright; she took his hand, squeezing it, her eyes beginning now to patrol the big bedroom, the family pictures on the bureau and on the walls, as if by sheer force of eyesight she could summon the teenager, not the long-forgotten boyfriend but her own son. Did he have a girl? Did they neck in the back set of a car? Well, he was no longer a teenager but that was how she remembered him, a boy, not yet formed, not prepared for the world. Was he
ardent?
She had no idea. Probably he was. He burned in other ways; why not that way. She looked down at the bed closing her eyes.

He said gently, “El.”

“I don't remember what I said to her, she was such a fool.” Elinor tried to nudge her memory back to that place, a large house on the Connecticut shore, the two of them alone in the study, the boy's mother anxiously leaning over the coffee table, her own stunned surprise—and then it was gone, vanished in the silence of the present moment. “I think I was too shocked to say anything. Let's forget it.”

He said, “All right.”

She gritted her teeth and looked at him helplessly. “Damn it.” Then, “Now you tell me about some episode. And make it funny, Bill.”

But memory did not work in that way, so those mornings when their son would arrive unbidden they would wait quietly together until he disappeared, as he always did; they knew he would disappear, as they knew he would return. They just didn't know when.

In the mornings when he lifted the window, they heard the sound of birds and the occasional cough of a motorcycle. For a while it would be cooler outside than in. The power always failed around midnight, and toward dawn the refrigerated air would grow stale and humid. They lay in bed, feeling the warm breeze. He rolled over on his stomach and turned on the radio, the BBC World Service. Ba Owen tapped at their door and withdrew, leaving coffee and fresh fruit, and a flower in a fingerbowl, and
The Boston Herald.
The
Herald
arrived in bunches and was kept in the kitchen. Each morning, Ba Owen would select one and place it on their breakfast tray. The newspaper was damp in his hands and the ink stained his fingers. It did not matter that the news was weeks old; in Africa, a month was the blink of an eyelid. And the
Herald
did not contain news. It was colorful Boston propaganda, a long whine of complaint directed at Cambridge academics, welfare cheats, the proprietors of local sports franchises, phony docs, killer dogs, gay nuns. And it was as easy to read as a comic. Later, Elinor took it to the pool, where she read it as she floated on a red rubber mattress as the vultures circled overhead.

That was the morning. Some days, he couldn't wait to get home from the office. A couple of times he faked headaches, it being unseemly for the ambassador to leave the office at three in the afternoon, setting a bad example for the junior officers. But he could not keep his mind on his work. He saw her sitting crosslegged on the bed, brushing her hair, watching him. He saw her delighted look, the half smile, the curve of her thigh. So he made an excuse, a headache, and went home at once, telling his driver to hurry it up, he was late for an appointment. He'd yell,
I have a headache
, and they'd tumble into bed. Then he realized that this embassy was not Moscow or Peking, or even Pretoria or Ottawa. This was a country at the nether end of Washington's list of serious missions. Any business that needed doing could be done before noon.

In the morning, and again in the evening, they would swim in the pool. After thirty minutes in the water he would go to work at the embassy and she would move upstairs to her studio, if the power had been restored and the air conditioning was working; otherwise she would stay outside, setting up her easel in the shade of the big tree, unless it was so hot that her oils melted. There was always a reception or dinner at night. Once or twice a month they would have house guests, visitors from Washington, or a traveling foreign correspondent, occasionally a colleague from a neighboring country. The visitors brought gossip from the outside world.

That morning—the morning in question, the morning the Germans were due at the office—they swam together as usual. Then on impulse he went back into the house for a second pot of coffee. It was very hot on the terrace. When Bill brought the coffee tray to poolside, Elinor was out of the water, drying her hair with a towel. They sat on the edge of the pool, watching Ba Owen move in the shade of the large tree near the guest wing of the house, the wing that sheltered their visitors. Odd-looking tree, he could never remember its name; it resembled a linden, and that reminded him of Berlin. He started thinking about the Germans.

At the sound of a car in the street, they both looked up. The guard moved his head out of the sentry box at the end of the driveway. It was a British embassy Land-Rover, the minister on his way to the office. Through the shrubbery they recognized the color and the long whip aerial on the rear bumper. The guard left the sentry box and suddenly began waving his arms.

She said, “What's he doing?”

He said, “I don't know. Get inside.” He was already helping her out of the water, keeping himself between her and the guard twenty yards away. A woman appeared in the street, and they heard a high keening, a kind of wail. She was one of the lepers. The guard moved to cut her off, and force her back the way she had come, out of sight. The guard shouted at her but she did not move. Her face was shrouded with a red bandanna. She commenced to yaw, rocking from side to side, her face to the sky. The guard had his carbine at port arms, moving her away from the driveway. Ba Owen had slipped out from under the tree and had joined the guard, standing a little behind him. They were both shouting at the woman, Go back! She came from out there, the district away from embassy ghetto, across the golf course and railway tracks. She did not appear to hear them, but continued wailing. Bill and Elinor put on shirts and walked down the lawn. Elinor told the guard to stop, but he and Ba Owen had advanced into the street, moving the woman back. She stumbled backward, her fists moving from side to side. Her face was concealed, but one enormous bangle hung from an ear. Her face seemed to be misshapen. Bill called to her and she gathered her skirts and in a moment was gone, as quickly as she had come. The guard and Ba Owen stood watching her go. They were talking in low tones and shaking their heads. Then, to the white people, the guard said it was all right. She was gone now, back to her place, back
there.

“What did she want?” Bill asked.

Ba Owen shook his head. He didn't know.

“Did she want money?”

Ba Owen said no, he didn't think so.

“Then what did she want?”

“She sometimes comes here. She evades the security.” He meant the police vans that patrolled embassy ghetto.

“Do you know her name?”

“She likes the flowers,” Ba Owen said. “She wanted to pick the flowers from the garden.” He solemnly pinched his nose between thumb and forefinger. The woman had been fetid, and surrounded with flies, huge bluebottles.

“Let her, then,” Elinor said.

Ba Owen shook his head firmly. “No, Mrs.” Then, to Bill, he spoke in rapid dialect, gesturing. He avoided looking at Elinor. He said finally, “The woman is a leper.” He and the guard turned and strolled up the street to assure themselves that the woman was gone. The odor of her was still around them, clinging to the street and the shrubbery. Bill and Elinor walked back to the pool.

Elinor said, “What did he say to you?”

“Ba Owen says she has bad juju.”

She said, “I can't get used to her wail. It's unearthly. I've heard it before, but this is the first time I've seen her.”

Bill said, “She shouldn't be here, in embassy ghetto.”

She looked at him archly. “Too exotic for our delicate sensibilities?”

He said, “No. This area is off-limits. Embassy ghetto is supposed to be secure.”