Then Lew talked. It wasn’t true that he didn’t want to talk about what had happened, it was that he didn’t want to be questioned about it. He needed it to come out at its own pace, and with his editing. Ellen made scrambled eggs and toast, which they washed down with beer, and he told her some of what the State Research Bureau was like. She tried to maintain a blank alert expression, because she saw that every time she reacted, with horror or pity or revulsion, he backed away from telling her any more. But she was given enough to have a clear picture of the place.
As for his getting out, starting as an escape and ending as a kind of rescue, he seemed more reticent. It was clear that along the way he had injured, probably killed, one or more people, but he never made that part explicit, and when she asked him what the result of it would be, he dismissed it with quick contempt, saying, “Chase’ll deal with that. He’ll invent something. The truth doesn’t mean anything there.”
After a while they stopped talking and merely sat together at the kitchen table, Lew brooding, Ellen watching him. She had never in her life been so acutely aware of another person. She knew how much comfort he needed, and how unready he was to accept it, so she merely watched him and waited.
After a while, he said, “I’ll tell you one thing.”
“Yes?”
His expression was grim; his eyes gazed away at something she couldn’t see. “There’s more to it than coffee,” he said. “There has to be.”
PART TWO
16
Lew had experienced African rainy seasons before; but to have gone through them was not the same as getting used to them. You didn’t ever get used to them.
He was supposed to fly with Balim to Nairobi to meet some Kenyan coffeegrowers on some sort of business. The weather had not changed—water and mildew were spreading like a curse from God—but when Ellen phoned the airport control tower that morning, they told her takeoffs and landings were possible at both Kisumu and Nairobi, and that the cloud cover was so low they should be able to fly above it the whole way. So Lew phoned Balim with that information, and he said they would go ahead.
They drove from the house directly to the airport, where Balim had been delivered by his son. In the damp empty waiting room Balim looked eager but just a bit apprehensive. He was dressed for the weather in a hugely voluminous black raincoat, which made him look like a beach ball in mourning. “Well,” he said, “it isn’t pleasant to fly in such weather, but oh, you know, the highway would be much much worse. Very dangerous.”
“We’ll be careful,” Ellen promised.
“Bring back my father, Ellen,” Young Mr. Balim said. “He’s the only one who knows what we’re all doing.”
They got very wet crossing the field to the plane, which a sopping employee of Balim’s was untying from its mooring ropes. Because Balim was a bit too chubby to be comfortable in the rear seats, Lew went back there while Balim sat beside Ellen. The interior of the plane became steamy at once, smelling unpleasantly of wet clothing. To Lew, the little windshield wiper swiping back and forth against the glass in front of Ellen’s face was thoroughly inadequate for the job; it gave her a clear space the size and shape of a lady’s fan to look through, which in any event kept covering over again with streams of water as they taxied to the end of the runway.
Balim was the sort who chattered to distract himself from his nervousness. While they waited out at the end of the runway, he told them about his first flight ever, which had been from Kampala to London, by way of Cairo and Rome, a trip lasting more than two days. It had been 1938, just before the outbreak of war, and he had been fourteen years of age and on his way back to school.
Ellen asked, “What school?”
“Eton.”
“You went to Eton? I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it that way.”
But Balim was unfailingly gracious, even when struggling not to show that he was frightened. “I’m rather surprised at it myself,” he said. “I had hoped to go on to Cambridge, but the war changed things.”
Lew, intrigued, said, “What was your subject?”
“History. Asian history, primarily. Unfortunately, mostly from the English point of view.”
Ellen said, “You and Frank have something in common, then.”
“Oh, we have rare old arguments. History, after all, is nothing but interpretation.”
“I have clearance,” Ellen said, meaning the other conversation she was listening to, in her earphones.
While Balim several times patted his seat belt to be sure it was still in place, and started some rambling panicky sentence about having visited Cambridge once before the war and having been impressed by the trees, Ellen accelerated and the little twin-engine plane first rolled then scampered down the rain-slick runway, propellers chopping up the raindrops and throwing out behind them a wake of fine silver mist.
Then the plane lifted, as though it had taken a sudden quick ingulp of breath, and in the next second they were a flying thing, inches from the ground, then feet, then yards, then bearing no relationship to the earth at all.
The rain and their weight made the little plane fight hard for altitude, struggling up through the downpour, poking into the dirty clouds, then being engulfed in gray dimness, water streaming everywhere, the plane bucking in the weird air currents inside the clouds. Then all at once they burst through into sunlight so bright and clean and astonishing that all three of them cried out in wonder. “Ah!” said Ellen, and “Jesus!” said Lew, and “Oh, my Lord!” said Balim. The sun.
Seen from above, the clouds were clean, a great soft white comforter spread over the king-size bed of the world. The sky had the utter mile-after-mile clarity of a September blue. And the sun was a great golden round smiling king of creation, happy to see them.
“I’d forgotten,” Lew said, “what the son of a bitch looks like.”
The plane flitted on, between sky and cloud, a cheerful toy left to play on its own while the titans were elsewhere; at lunch, or taking their naps. Their clothing dried, and the air in the cabin became sweet. Balim stopped patting his seat belt. Ellen relaxed her grip on the stick and looked at her reflection in the mirror she’d mounted on the post between windshield and door. Lew sat back and grinned, stretching luxuriously. The sun shone, and all was right with the world.
The descent into Nairobi was like a self-inflicted wound. With obvious reluctance Ellen pointed the plane’s nose downward, picked fastidiously at the wispy top threads of the clouds, then all at once dropped down from sun through sunny translucence through eerie white through increasingly dirty gray, with water droplets running rearward along the side windows. Then they dropped out of the cloud layer, like a bedbug out of some grungy flophouse mattress, and there below lay Nairobi, sopping wet and feeling very sorry for itself.
Wilson Airport was just beyond the unfinished new airport. Ellen had to circle while a KLM flight landed and a small private plane took off; then she came down through the bead curtains of rain toward the runway, which looked as slippery and treacherous as glass. Balim started six or seven sentences on as many topics, finished none, patted his seat belt a lot, and they were on the ground, taxiing forward, losing speed, not fishtailing or somersaulting or nose-diving or doing any of the other things they’d all been more than half expecting.