The Poisonwood Bible (54 page)

“At Camp Hardy,” I said.

“Le Camp Ebeya,”he corrected me. Of course. Camp Hardy has been renamed, for authenticite.

I knew not to be encouraged about the so-called “other possibilities.” Camp Hardy happens to be where Lumumba was held, and beaten to within an inch of his life, before his death flight to Katanga. I wonder what comfort my husband will get from this bit of shared history. We’ve known several other people, including a fellow teacher of Anatole’s, who’ve been detained more recently at Camp Hardy. It’s considered a prolonged execution, principally through starvation. Our friend said there were long periods when he was given one banana every two days. Most of the cells are solitary, with no light or plumbing or even a hole in the floor. The buckets are not removed.

I was told I couldn’t visit until Anatole was formally charged. After that, it would depend on the charges. I glared at the empty blue helmet sitting on the desk, and then at my commandant’s uinprotected head, wishing I might cause it to explode with the force of my rage. When he had no more to tell me, I thanked him in my politest French, and left. Forgive me, O Heavenly Father, according to the multitude of thy mercies. I have lusted in my heart to break a man’s skull and scatter the stench of his brains across several people’s back yards.

At least he isn’t shackled under the stadium floor, Elisabet keeps saying, and I suppose even my broken heart can accept that as good fortune.

I’ve never known such loneliness.The boys are sad, of course, but Pascal and Patrice at fifteen and thirteen are nearly men, with men’s ways of coping. And Martin is so confused and needs such comfort he has nothing to give me.

We did find a house right away, recently vacated by a teacher’s family who’ve left for Angola. Its a long way from the center, in o>ne of the last little settlements on the road out toward the interior, so we have at least the relief of flowering trees and a yard for growing vegetables. But we’re far from Elisabet and Christiane, who work long hours cleaning a police station and attached government warehouse. I don’t have the solace of daily conversation. And even Elisabet isn’t truly a kindred spirit. She loves me but finds me baffling and unfeminine, and probably a troublemaker. She may lose her job because of familial association with treason.

I never bothered to notice before how thoroughly I’ve relied on Anatole to justify and absolve me here. For so many years now I’ve had the luxury of nearly forgetting I was white in a land of brown and black. I was Madame Ngemba, someone to commiserate with in the market over the price of fruit, the mother of children who sought mischief with theirs. Cloaked in my pagne and Anatole, I seemed to belong. Now, husbandless in this new neighborhood, my skin glows like a bare bulb. My neighbors are deferential and reserved. Day after day, if I ask directions or try to chat about the weather, they attempt nervously to answer me in halting English or French. Did they not notice I initiated the conversation in Lingala? Do they not hear me hollering over the fence at my sons every day in the habitual, maternal accents of a native-born fishwife? The sight of my foreign skin seems to freeze their sensibilities. In the local market, a bubble of stopped conversation moves with me as I walk. Everyone in this neighborhood knows what happened to Anatole, and I know they’re sympathetic—they all hate Mobutu as much, and wish they were half as brave. But they also have to take into account his pale-skinned wife. They know just one thing about foreigners, and that is everything we’ve ever done to them. I can’t possibly improve Anatole’s standing in their eyes. I must be the weakness that brought him down.     

I can’t help thinking so myself. Where would he be now, if not for me? Dancing with disaster all the same, surely; he was a revolutionary before I met him. But maybe not caught. He wouldn’t have left the country twice, listening to my pleas of an aging mother and fantasies of beefsteak. Wouldn’t even have a passport, most likely. And that’s how they got him.

But then, where would his children be? This is what we mothers always come back to. How could he regret the marriage that brought Pascal, Patrice, and Martin-Lothaire onto the face of Africa? Our union has been difficult for both of us in the long run, but what union isn’t? Marriage is one long fit of compromise, deep and wide. There is always one agenda swallowing another, a squeaky wheel crying out. But hasn’t our life together meant more to the world than either of us could have meant alone?

These are the kinds of questions I use to drive myself to distraction, when the boys are out and I’m crazed with loneliness. I try to fill up the space with memories, try to recall his face when he first held Pascal. Remember making love in a thousand different darknesses, under a hundred different mosquito nets, remember his teeth on the flesh of my shoulder, gently, and his hand on my lips to quiet me when one of the boys was sleeping lightly next to us. I recall the muscles of his thighs and the scent of his hair. Eventually I haw to go outside and stare at my plump, checkered hens in the yard, trying to decide which one to kill for supper. In the end I can never take any of them, on account of the companionship I would lose.

One way of surviving heartache is to stay busy. Making something right in at least one tiny corner of the vast house of wrongs— I learned this from Anatole, or maybe from myself, the odd combination of my two parents. But now I’m afraid of running out of possibilities, with so many years left to go. I’ve already contacted all the people he advised me to find, to warn them, or for help. The backward address turned out after several mistakes to be the undersecretary to Etienne Tshisekedi, the one government minister who might help us, though his own position with Mobutu is now on the outs. And of course I’ve written to Mother’s friends. (At the “Damnistry International,” as Rachel probably still calls it.) I begged them to send telegrams on Anatole’s behalf, and they will, by the bushel. If Mobutu is capable of embarrassment at all, there’s a chance his sentence could be reduced from life to five years, or less. Meanwhile, Mother is raising money for a bribe that will get him some food, so five years and “life” won’t be the same sentence. I’ve gone down to the government offices to find out where the bribe should go when we have it ready. I’ve nagged about visitation and mail until they all know my face and don’t want to see it. I’ve done what I can, it seems, and now I have to do what I can’t. Wait.

By lamplight when the boys are asleep I write short letters to Anatole, reporting briefly on the boys and our health, and long letters to Adah about how I’m really faring. Neither of them will ever see my letters, probably, but it’s the writing I need, the pouring out. I tell Adah my sorrows. I get dramatic. It’s probably best that these words will end up suffocating in a pile, undelivered.

I might be envious of Adah now, with no attachments to tear her heart out. She doesn’t need children climbing up her legs or a husband kissing her forehead. Without all that, she’s safe. And Rachel, with the emotional complexities of a salt shaker. Now there’s a life. Sometimes I remember our hope chests and want to laugh, for how prophetic they were. Rachel fiercely putting in overtime, foreshadowing a marital track record distinguished for quantity if not quality. Ruth May exempt for all time. My own tablecloth, undertaken reluctantly but in the long run drawing out my most dedicated efforts. And Adah, crocheting black borders on napkins and tossing them to the wind.

But we’ve all ended up giving up body and soul to Africa, one way or another. Even Adah, who’s becoming an expert in tropical epidemiology and strange new viruses. Each of us got our heart buried in six feet of African dirt; we are all co-conspirators here. I mean, all of us, not just my family. So what do you do now? You get to find your own way to dig out a heart and shake it off and hold it up to the light again.

“Be kind to yourself,” he says softly in my ear, and I ask him, How is that possible? I rock back and forth on my chair like a baby, craving so many impossible things: justice, forgiveness, redemption. I crave to stop bearing all the wounds of this place on my own narrow body. But I also want to be a person who stays, who goes on feeling anguish where anguish is due. I want to belong somewhere, damn it. To scrub the hundred years’ war off this white skin till there’s nothing left and I can walk out among my neighbors wearing raw sinew and bone, like they do.

Most of all, my white skin craves to be touched and held by the one man on earth I know has forgiven me for it.   

Rachel Price

THE EQUATORIAL 1984

THIS WAS THE FIRST and the absolute last time I am going to participate within a reunion of my sisters. I’ve just returned from a rendezvous with Leah and Adah that was simply a sensational failure. Leah was the brainchild of the whole trip. She said the last month of waiting for her husband to get out of prison was going to kill her if she didn’t get out of there and do something. The last time he was getting let out, I guess they ended up making him stay another year at the last minute, which would be a disappointment, I’m sure. But really, if you commit a crime you have to pay the piper, what did she expect? Personally, I’ve had a few husbands that maybe weren’t the top of the line, but a criminal, I just can’t see. Well, each to his own, like they say. She’s extra lonely now since her two older boys are trying out school in Atlanta so they won’t get arrested, too, and the younger one is also staying there with Mother for the summer so Leah could be free to mastermind this trip. Which, to tell you the truth, she mostly just arranged for the sole purpose of getting a Land Rover from America to Kinshasa, where she and Anatole have the crackpot scheme of setting up a farm commune in the southern part and then going over to the Angola side as soon as it’s safe, which from what I hear is going to be no time this century. Besides, Angola is an extremely Communistic

nation if you ask me. But does Mother care about this? Her own daughter planning to move to a communistic nation where the roads are practically made of wall-to-wall land mines? Why no! She and her friends raised the money and bought a good Land Rover with a rebuilt engine in Atlanta. Which, by the way, Mother’s group has never raised one red cent for me, to help put in upstairs plumbing at the Equatorial, for example. But who’s complaining?

I only went because a friend of mine had recently died of his long illness and I was feeling at loose odds and ends. Geoffrey definitely was talking marriage, before he got so ill. He was just the nicest gentleman and very well to do. Geoffrey ran a touristic safari business in Kenya, which was how we met, in a very romantic way. But he caught something very bad over there in Nairobi, plus he was not all that young. Still, it shouldn’t have happened to a better man. Not to mention me turning forty last year, which was no picnic, but people always guess me not a day over thirty so who’s counting? Anyway I figured Leah and I could tell each other our troubles, since misery loves company, even though she has a husband that is still alive at least, which is more than I can say.

The game plan was for Adah to ride over on the boat to Spain with the Land Rover, and drive to West Africa. Adah driving, I just couldn’t picture. I still kept picturing her all crippled up, even though Mother had written me that no, Adah has truly had a miracle recovery. So we were all to meet up there in Senegal and travel around for a few weeks seeing the sights. Then Adah would fly home, and Leah and I would drive as far as Brazzaville together for safety’s sake, although if you ask me two women traveling alone are twice as much trouble as one. Especially my sister and me! We ended up not speaking through the whole entirety of Cameroon and most of Gabon. Anatole, fresh out of the hoosegow, met us in Brazzaville and they drove straight back home to Kinshasa. Boy, did she throw her arms around him at the ferry station, kissing right out in front of everybody, for a lot longer than you’d care to think. Then off they went holding hands like a pair of teenagers, yakety-yak, talking to each other in something Congolese.They did it expressly to exclude me from the conversation, I think. Which is not easy for someone who speaks three languages, as I do.

Good-bye and none too soon, is what I say. Leah was like a house on fire for the last hundred miles of the trip. She’d made a longdistance call from Libreville to make sure he was getting let out the next day for sure, and boy, did she make a beeline after that. She couldn’t even bother herself to come up and see the Equatorial— even though we were only half a day’s drive away! And me a bereaved widow, practically. I can’t forgive that in my own sister. She said she would only go if we went on down to Brazzaville first, and then brought Anatole with us. Well, I just couldn’t say yes or no to that right away, I had to think. It’s simply a far more delicate matter than she understands. We have a strict policy about who is allowed upstairs, and if you change it for one person then where does it end? I might have made an exception. But when I told her I had to think about it, Leah right away said, “Oh, no, don’t bother. You have your standards of white supremacy to uphold, don’t you?” and then climbed up on her high horse and stepped on the gas. So we just stopped talking, period. Believe me, we had a very long time to listen to the four-wheel-drive transmission and every bump in the road for the full length of two entire countries.

When it was finally over I was so happy to get back to my own home-sweet-home I had a double vodka tonic, kicked off my shoes, turned up the tape player and danced the Pony right in the middle of the restaurant. We had a whole group of cotton buyers from Paris, if I remember correctly. I declared to my guests: “Friends, there is nothing like your own family to make you appreciate strangers!”Then I kissed them all on their bald heads and gave them a round on the house.

The trouble with my family is that since we hardly ever see each other, we have plenty of time to forget how much personality conflict we all have when it comes right down to it. Leah and Adah and I started bickering practically the minute we met up in Senegal. We could never even agree on where to go or stay or what to eat. Whenever we found any place that was just the teeniest step above