4

She unbuttoned her jacket in the front hall and dropped it on a rough wooden bench. It bothered him to see such a fine jacket treated that way, but he kept his mouth shut. Why should he care more for her clothes than she did?

She showed him the bathroom. He went in obediently and ran the water for a while, first warm and then hot, holding his hands under the flow, his whole body vibrating with pleasure.

Rather than wipe his hands on a towel, he dried them with toilet paper. He started squirreling some away for later, but it occurred to him that stealing toilet paper was no way to reward her hospitality. He tried to roll it back up, only to find that he’d ruined the sheets with his wet fingertips. He stuffed the ruined paper in the wicker trash basket, staring at it with regret.

He waited in the hallway, listening to the banging of pots, the rapid click of a gas igniter, until she called for him. Then he stood in the kitchen and watched her uncork a bottle of wine.

She filled two glasses, proposing a toast to better times, then set a plate of flatbread in front of him and encouraged him to eat. The bread was tough. He would have liked a bowl of warm milk to soften it, but she was very busy, so he dipped it in his wine instead. The flavors were bad together. When she saw the expression on his face, she laughed and took away the bread, saying there were better things to come.

He was still mourning the loss of the bread when she put out a plate of farmer’s cheese and crackers. There was still cheese left after he gobbled all the crackers. He held back for a while, quivering like a faithful dog, but in the end, he ate it all. It took all of his willpower not to lick the plate clean.

The main course was roast chicken and rice. They didn’t speak much during the meal. Every few minutes, she served him more rice. The rice was very salty; he washed it down with glass after glass of water. Drinking freely was as great a luxury as the rich food.

When she stood to pour him more wine, her napkin came untucked and fluttered to the floor. Dizziness overcame him as he reached down. His chair tilted forward. Someone seemed to dump him out of it.

He came to on the floor, his cheek resting on the napkin, which smelled of her lap. The scent of her body agitated and comforted him in equal measure.

He offered to do the dishes, but she helped him to the couch and covered him with a throw, saying there was plenty of time for that later.

Closing his eyes, he again thought of himself as a dog, peaceful in his soft-sided crate, his belly full, yet with a nagging sense that he ought to be throwing himself at his master’s feet.

The quality of the light changed from time to time. His arms fell asleep, requiring him to roll to different positions. His neck developed a crick.

Then it was morning and she was padding through the room in a thick dressing gown. She turned on all the lights and went to work in the kitchen. The radio came on. A few minutes later, she made it louder.

He sat up and rubbed his eyes. Nighttime twisting had torn open his fly. It hadn’t happened for a long time, but he’d woken with an erection. He waited for it to subside, but it was stubborn. When she came to tell him to get a move on, he covered himself with the throw.

She saw, but didn’t turn away. Instead, blushing deeply, she looked him in the eye and held her gaze there. The crimson highlighted her lovely skin.

“Wait here,” she said, appearing a few minutes later in a long plaid skirt and a blouse that strained a bit at the buttons. She made her hair into a loose bun, pinned it with a pencil, then stepped out.

She returned with an armful of clothes, which she laid out on the coffee table. She said her only neighbor with any spare men’s clothing was the widow of a marshman.

He ran his fingers across the handmade garments, which he recognized not only by region, but by tribe. He murmured the name of the tribe to himself and selected a finely woven tunic. It was a very beautiful example of the type. The matching leggings were unusually soft. He didn’t recognize the wool.

She took his interest in the leggings as a kind of criticism. “Well,” she said, “it’s the best I can do,” then left him to finish dressing.

It had been a long time since he’d worn marsh dress. He remembered watching elders wrap their leggings with little grunts of painful resignation. Now he grunted, too, as he wound the fragrant cloth.

The tunic fit perfectly. He’d forgotten how good he felt in a tunic and leggings, how free, how ready for action.

She came out of the bedroom fussing with a necklace, a hair clip dangling from her lips like a cigarette. She was surprised that he was already dressed. She studied him with a knowing look that frightened him. He moved away from the coffee table to have a clearer path to the door.

She asked for help with her necklace, and while he fastened it with trembling fingers, she told him he looked very dashing. The way she kept sneaking glances at him eventually melted his suspicion. She was merely pleased with how he looked. He was pleased, too.

They drank orange juice and had a few sips of scalding coffee. She said she didn’t really eat in the morning, the implication being that neither would he. He thanked her anyway and told her he was grateful.

She put the cups in the sink and herded him to the door. He didn’t really mind being rushed. It gave him energy. All of it was so normal to her and so alien to him, but the gap was closing a bit.

As she locked the door behind them he thanked her again, very quietly this time, using the marsh tongue in order to spare her any embarrassment.

She accepted his thanks with an old proverb: Hospitality is its own reward.

Her accent was flawless. He praised her for it, hoping for an explanation, but she acted as if nothing out of the ordinary had passed between them.

A cab was idling out front. “That’s for us,” she said, tapping his shoulder as if he were hard of hearing, “but don’t get used to it.”

*   *   *

There was already a long line of tourists at the museum’s main entrance, but she whisked him through a temporary door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY, then down a labyrinthine plywood tunnel.

They emerged in a new wing with a swooping glass roof. The morning was overcast, but even so, the glare from the polished floor was severe. He closed his eyes and let a soft wooden handrail be his guide.

The rail ended at a pair of enormous bronze doors with bas-relief panels the size of atlases. The designs were geometric and stylized, but there were certain motifs: reed huts; busy waterways; earthen levees. A sun cast brazen rays across the landscape. The center panel depicted a chief’s canoe, its high curving prow echoed by the graceful neck of a stalking ibis.

“I have a meeting,” she said. Passing through the doors seemed to make her forget all about him.

He didn’t know whether he was supposed to wait or follow her into the exhibition hall, which was even brighter than the hallway. The brightness forced the eyes down, just like in the marshes, and the cleverly painted walls erased any sense of enclosure. The vast scale of the hall—as large as a warehouse, perhaps even larger—was intimidating. There might be anything inside.

The sounds were what finally drew him in: the bellow of water buffalo; the staccato snap of a merganser trying to distract a predator from her ducklings; the dissonance of wind in the reeds.

Somewhere in the distance, a merchant called out his wares: sugar, coffee, steel sewing needles.

He could hear the faint plash of paddles, the gurgle of surface-feeding fish, even the whine of mosquitoes.

There was something else familiar, a quality of light and sound that was very precise: the feeling of a morning after a great windstorm. He remembered those fragile mornings. There was a rawness in the air, a wounded quiet. Earth and sky seemed childishly reluctant to heal.

The verisimilitude was uncanny. He wondered about the curator who’d perhaps said about the lighting, “I like how the shadows purple in the recesses of the buffalo stall, but the sunlight is too sharp for rainy season.”

The center of the exhibit was a floating island, the kind heaped up by succeeding generations of marshmen, a hillock of floating grass linked to shore by a swaying rope bridge; and on the island, a proper marsh village, each hut built of painstakingly baled reeds.

The encircling water was artificial, obviously. One couldn’t have museum-goers falling into water. But somehow they’d managed to make it just as shimmering and elusive as any waterway in the marshes, its surface bulging, from time to time, with the lips of simulated catfish.

He wanted to kneel down and touch the artificial water, to study its astonishing craftsmanship, but the construction of the grass mound was so authentic that the closer to the shining black shoreline he came, the swampier and less stable was the ground under his feet, until he couldn’t move forward for fear of being pitched against the nearly invisible glass guardrail.

He drew back from the edge and moved to higher ground, then crossed the rope bridge and wandered among the huts. In the distance, real or painted, was the distinctive cone of a village kiln, which towered over a yard stacked high with empty brick molds.

Between the reed island and the brickyard, there was a broad wetland, rutted with natural and man-made channels. A camouflaged walkway overhung it.

A meeting was taking place on the walkway. He recognized his friend by the long plaid skirt, so incongruous among the reeds. There were two others: a tall man in a business suit whose yellow hard hat was stenciled with the word DIRECTOR; and a carefully coiffed woman in a brilliant blue dress who knew how to use her body when arguing a point in front of a man.

The director’s hands were spread aggressively on his hips. The matter, whatever it was, seemed to have been long settled, but he was working hard to maintain the appearance of fairness.

The discussion reached a high pitch. The director signaled that he’d heard enough, then issued his verdict.

The woman in the blue dress had trouble containing her glee. This was clearly the culmination of a long campaign. The one with brighter plumage had been victorious. The loser stormed off.

The thought of being alone in the exhibit frightened him, so he went to find her. Somehow he knew the lay of the land. Every cut in the red clay, every berm, was oddly familiar.

He followed the river. They’d captured the peculiar sigh the sandy soil made as the river water ran along it, a very distinct sound like the tearing of kraft paper.

He came to a clearing with beached canoes. The canoes seemed authentic, with their curved prows and the bitter aura of bitumen. He got a splinter verifying that the wood was the right species, the pitch the same thick concoction one could smell bubbling in the vats by the water in the dry season, when boats were repaired.

There was a guesthouse nearby, a tiny cathedral executed in bundled reeds. How he’d wanted a guesthouse of his own! It took many years for him to understand that the reason he couldn’t get one built had nothing to do with a shortage of skilled workers, or even with the bad feelings toward the occupation, but rather with the transgressive nature of the desire itself. It was wrong to want a communal building for one’s own. No one had taught him that in his own country. That lesson had been left to marshmen.

She was inside the guesthouse by the long rectangular hearth, sobbing and cradling her purse. The rules of the marshes applied even here, in a museum in the capital. He didn’t know why, but they did. He was entitled to enter a guesthouse, no matter the emotional state of anyone else. If she’d truly wanted to be left alone, she could have chosen any of the reed huts that dotted the path.

Marshmen would often find their way to a guesthouse when they were suffering the throes of indecision or grief. There was comfort in numbers, even if some of the guests might, on the surface, be strangers. There was always coffee, always a bowl of rice, sometimes fresh, sometimes stale, but nourishment, nonetheless. He’d sought comfort there, too, during the long occupation, but never managed to shed the burden of his uniform.