Ezekiel was playing with the turn signals, with the light switches. ‘Mama, is this your car?’ As if she hadn’t been gone for three years. As if she had not for a moment receded from his mind or heart. He had never doubted her and there was nothing to forgive.
But Luke. Her big boy, her Myeusi.
‘Mama, are we going with you?’ he asked. His hands were raking her arm, his voice contained all the anger and despair at her abandonment, the wild conflict between this, of his undiminished need for her, his mother.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘We are together now.’
STREBEL
The weather had just turned so much colder and Strebel was in the mood for soup — potato and leek or a minestrone with adequate tenor. He walked out of the station into the bright, cool October air.
It was late for lunch and the café was almost empty. He sat at a small table by the window. The waitress offered him split pea: this would do. And a beer to go with it.
He took the postcard out of his pocket. It had come with the morning’s maiclass="underline" an old-fashioned photo of cows drinking from a river. African cows with huge horns and humps on their shoulders. Nothing, apart from Strebel’s address, was written on the back.
But he knew who it was from.
It was as if she didn’t know what to say, didn’t know how to describe her life. Only to let him know: I am beginning.
He closed his eyes. Imagined her. Somewhere in Africa, this dry place with cows. Her beauty would be fading. She would tidy it away. If he saw her again he would not recognize the plain, pared-down woman. He would not recognize her as she moved confidently and with certainty at the tasks she had set herself. She would have a small allocation of happiness — enough, not too much.
She was someone else now. Strebel felt a yearning of schoolboy intensity to find her after all. To love her. To hold her and kiss her face. He began to weep, silently, his back to the empty café. There was so much sadness locked inside him. He could weep forever and not be done.
At last he stood and wiped his face and paid the bill. He walked back to the precinct the long way, beside the river. A woman with a baby was feeding the ducks. He’d arrested her a few years ago for possession of cocaine. He watched her for a long time, the baby’s blonde hair in the sun, her squeals of glee. He moved on, quickly out of her sight. He met people on the worst days of their lives, and they never forgave him.
This thought made him seize up. All he did was make people sad, ruin their lives, tell them: your child has died, your husband is being held for questioning, nothing will be as it was. His efforts were merely mitigations. He didn’t really put anything right, make anything better.
He pulled out his phone, dialed. He could not speak right away.
‘Paul?’ Ingrid said. ‘Paul? Can you hear me?’
He opened his mouth, but still there were no words.
‘Paul,’ she said again with a touch of irritation. And that made him flinch. He almost hung up.
But then he said, ‘Ingrid.’ Her name like a handhold in the rock, so that he felt compelled to say it again to make sure it was real, that it held fast. ‘Ingrid.’
‘Yes?’
‘I’ll pass by the supermarket on the way home. Do we need anything?’
She did not answer right away, unsure what this unaccustomed offer meant. Never, even before they were married, had he spoken to her like this. The supermarket? He left the housekeeping to her, his socks on the floor, the bed unmade. She was almost afraid: things were as they were between them; she was not ready for change, but she had felt the shift for some time. Was he ill? Was there another woman?
‘Butter,’ she said with a sudden burst of courage and strange hope. ‘And a dozen eggs.’
MARTIN MARTINS
Fucking Franco had insisted. He’d surprised me by being interested in the crap that passed for cultural heritage in Congo. But then, who was I to judge culture? We have some nice nuclear power plants in Ukraine. He said, ‘Listen up, dickhead, there’s a war on and these people are still dancing.’
‘What people?’ I said. ‘There’s no one. It’s fucking creepy.’
That’s how it was: no people. Not an old man sitting under a tree, not a woman with a bucket on her head, not even a fucking goat. We drove through the forest. Massive, dark trees, total silence. Some Italian journalists had gone missing right there a couple of weeks before.
The forest, man, it was not a normal forest. Not even like a jungle with monkeys and colored birds. A jungle, you feel there’s life, creepy, crawly life that you definitely do not want to step on. But this forest was a bad dream; it was all wrong. There was a road, a good road, and yet no people, no one chopping down the trees. No sacks of charcoal for sale. I mean, maybe you don’t know how weird that is unless you’ve been around the Dark Incontinent long enough.
When I was a kid I had a dream and I woke up to find everyone was gone, my mum, my pops, Uncle Mink, the whole family. I ran outside, but everyone had gone, the whole village, the birds, the cows, even the mangy dogs. And then I saw that the houses were getting up and running away. The trees were running away, their roots like legs. And I knew that whatever was coming was so terrible that all these things knew they had to get the fuck out.
That’s what the forest was like.
After a dozen miles we came to a village. Again, no one.
‘Franco,’ I said. ‘This is a bad idea. Who the fuck told you there was dancing?’
‘The waiter,’ Franco said. He was trying to be cool, but his lip was starting to twitch. His lip hadn’t been the same, in fact Franco had not been the same, since that shit in Juba.
‘The waiter?’ I had to say, because I really was incredulous. We were here in the middle of a fucking war zone looking for a dance because of a waiter’s say-so. A waiter in the last hotel on earth. Amazing, really, he had this starched white uniform, blinding white with fancy red and gold epaulets and shiny brass buttons. It was beautifully laundered. And then he had shorts, these old ripped-up shorts and sandals made from car tires. He spoke perfect English. Franco said he’d been a teacher before the war came and the rebels burnt down the school and all the children in it, including his own two boys.
Franco stopped the car and we got out. There were some empty buildings, most without roofs or windows. I glanced inside and saw a big splotch of red and what looked like a dress in the middle of it. But no body. Nobody at all.
The rebels had drawn on the side of the buildings. Their names — indecipherable, except for a clever scribe called REMY J. Remy J had also assembled enough letters to write ‘Fuck’ and ‘Kill.’ Sometimes people spell ‘Fuck’ without the ‘c’ or ‘Kill’ with only one ‘l’ but Remy J could spell. Perhaps the waiter had been his teacher. I don’t know if Remy or one of his colleagues had drawn the guns, and what I supposed was a vagina.
Franco put up his hand, and then a finger to his lips. He was standing very still. I listened. There it was, the very faintest sound, so you could easily confuse it with your own heartbeat. Drums.
‘The natives are restless,’ Franco said.
We took the safeties off our Glocks and crept toward the drums. The culture we’d come for. The beating led us like a thread through the burnt-out village. I was pining for a chicken, just to see a stupid chicken run out of a hut puck-pucking. But, man, there wasn’t even a fly.