MYRIAM DISPLAYED HER slender grace in my room. I’m free, which allows me to say what I think instead of scribbling my thoughts down on sheets of paper I’ll throw away the next day. I no longer fear rejection because I know where I’m going: I’m going to Bunia.
“Myriam, I don’t love you the way I think you love me.”
“You don’t know anything about love and even less about Africans. So you don’t know anything about the love I have for you.”
“I love your smile and I love making love with you more and more, but that’s not love.”
“What if I loved you because you’re respectful and gentle with me, and that’s good enough? Would you say that’s love the way you see it?”
“No. I’d say it’s affection, a sort of mutual trust.”
“What if, for me, mutual trust was all the happiness I could expect from a man? Would you agree that my feeling is as deep as what you call love?”
Myriam was slipping through the cracks in me opened up by Kabanga. If I was giving in to anger and rage, it meant there was room in me for other just as unreasonable feelings: affection, desire, and, who knows, love. But I’m not there yet, in that new world of emotions, where I am a mere apprentice, fearful and hesitant. I needed to find my bearings.
“So we could go away together.”
When you’re afraid of feelings and you finally let go, you don’t have the right words to express them. I just said the worst thing you could imagine. I went and got a whisky from the minibar.
Myriam smiled and opened her arms to me.
“That’s a nice image. Come to me, Claude.”
I lay down next to her, and like the teenager I once was, I looked, and desired.
“In your country, the roads people travel are short. In my country, they are long.”
We made love as if preparing a long journey, slowly and delicately. We found a shared rhythm based on her past pain and my shyness. It was as slow as the tide that moves toward the peacefully sleeping land, that is unaware of the great changes in store. We have changed. We looked each other in the eye, and didn’t hide in each other’s shoulders when the sharp thrust of pleasure came. We began to talk. Small words, ordinary sentences that were like poetry to me, “That’s good,” “Again,” “Go slow,” “Yes!” We shared conversation and laughter after sex. We were, I believe, in love in a friendly kind of way.
Myriam fell asleep with her head on my shoulder. I have a woman for the first time in my life. Her calm, smooth breathing and absolute trust as she slept next to me, a stranger, convinced me of that. When I say, “I have a woman,” I’m not talking about possession. It means that a woman is my companion, and she can say to herself, “I have a man,” too. But why the fear and anxiety, why the palpitations and shortness of breath, the sweaty palms and scalding forehead? I calmed down the way a tropical storm blows itself out. I knew the answer very well. At thirty-five, I was finally becoming a man and agreeing to enter life, real life that is, as a French doctor put it, “a fatal disease sexually transmitted by humans.” I want to be with Myriam, but I don’t love her.
She always disappeared before I woke up. This morning, she was here. She had gone to the dining room and brought back croissants and café au lait. We didn’t speak. This first breakfast together unfolded like a ritual, a ceremony, in absolute silence. She took a shower; the sound of the water delighted me because I knew which body the droplets were caressing. She dried her hair and turned to me with a shy smile. She got dressed. A woman getting dressed is often more desirable than one who is taking off her clothes.
“Claude, I’m going to quit too.”
“Will you come to Bunia with me?”
“That’s a long road that interests me.”
I don’t know why, but without thinking about it for a second, I asked her to come to Bunia with me. I admit I don’t understand, but it doesn’t really matter. If I asked, it’s because I wanted to. She left. I missed her already, and she hadn’t even reached the elevator. I must have spent about twelve thousand days building up my personality, consciously, over the last twelve years, deliberately. Feelings, emotion, and desire break down reason. I built my life as an adult on ideas, principles, and convictions. I couldn’t take much credit, though, since the uncontrollable impulses of the soul, the sweat breaking out on the skin for no apparent reason, the eyes delighted by the sight of a beautiful body—those things only ever led me to failure and incomprehension. Life didn’t terrorize me to the point that I withdrew. Women did.
Then everything changed because of Kabanga. Strange. I decided to accept my failure to understand.
I let myself go and discovered what it was like to live without a net, how fear can disappear. I’m not afraid to be that tightrope walker; I fear neither anger nor desire.
I said Bunia without thinking it over, without knowing what I would do there, and why exactly I wanted to go. But when I spoke the name, I knew I needed to be there to witness Kabanga’s return to the place he terrorized, to watch him be free.
My resignation was greeted with expressions of regret I refused to analyse. I turned in my magnetic ID card to security. The Dutch civil servant didn’t even look at me. The Dutch have this special talent for looking at you without seeing you.
I sat in the park in front of the Court, on my favourite bench, the one most favoured by the ducks and swans. They approach it sometimes when the young want to take a rest on the grass. I will miss my ducks, but not the Dutch. I have read plenty of Dutch novelists, the celebrated Hella Haase, the troublemaker, Jeroen Brouwers, and especially Harry Mulisch. I read, hoping to discover some virtues in this country. I am used to reading literature inspired by love of country, as is the case in Quebec and France. I was fed on idiotic national glorification, “the authentic Quebec nature,” “Quebec creativity,” “French genius,” as if the Chinese hadn’t invented gunpowder and the Arabs optometry and algebra. Those authors confirmed it: the Dutch smile does not exist; it is a grimace learned at business school. No more than Dutch hospitality exists, which can be summed up as the permission accorded the customer to sit down in a restaurant and wait for a menu, and if he asks a question about a certain dish, he deserves an accusing look and service at the speed of a snail. Holland is the most civilized of the barbaric countries. How had I managed to live here for three whole years? You have to be dead or Dutch to survive in this place. And the language, the constant spewing of guttural sounds, that way of shouting, emitting Gs gnawed on by the Rs that follow, it all sounds like belching that would insult any normal pair of ears. I hate this country. I took the full measure of my hatred sitting on the bench with my ducks that don’t quack like the Dutch; they are too timid and polite. I’d like to have an average Dutchman sitting here with me so I could tell him what I think of his country. I’ve been thinking it, and now I’d like to say it out loud.
And I’d like to tell him what I feel. That’s new. When I went back to the hotel, the concierge gave me a knowing smile. At the restaurant, Michael said, “Hello, sir,” and the lovely Edith pretended not to see me because she didn’t want to say no to an invitation I’d issued six months ago.
“Michael, do you like me?”
“What do you mean, sir?”
“Do you want to know more about who I am?”
“I don’t have time for human contact, I am working.”
Michael turned his back to me and concentrated on the handball game on TV.
Myriam. I love thinking of her. And I don’t believe I’ve fallen into a teenage emotional maelstrom. I’m calm and peaceful, stripped of excessive emotion. She told me she’d pack her things and be here at nine in the evening. I don’t look at my watch; I know she’ll be here. I glanced at the handball game. Michael picked his nose. A scent of jasmine. It was nine o’clock. Is happiness the peace that comes with certainty? Maybe. She’s there. Myriam has become Somali again. She was wearing traditional dress and a scarf that’s not Muslim, but Somali, it must be for protection against sandstorms, or maybe it was just embellishment, vanity. She was dragging two enormous suitcases in which all her tight-fitting jeans must be tucked away, since that was the only thing she wore during her stay at the Court. Strangely, she was not smiling, and she didn’t even look at me. Myriam kept her eyes on the carpet and stood unmoving, the very image of a respectful woman awaiting her husband’s orders.
“Is that an Islamic scarf?”
“For certain women it is, but for me it’s Somali. It keeps me warm when the darkness falls like a veil, and I think it’s pretty. It frames my face very well. I think I’m beautiful with the scarf. So you see, it’s not a scarf to hide behind. The prettier the scarf is, the better it frames the face, the more men desire you. That’s why when I came to the West, because I wanted nothing more of the desires of men, I dressed in the Western style.”
“You want to come upstairs?”
She smiled. “Yes, we will be better in our place.”
Our place. I wasn’t so sure, even if her words did give me pleasure.
Her two suitcases weren’t stuffed with jeans after all, but books, treatises on law, files, NGO, and UN reports. She glided through the room, tidied the books scattered here and there, picked up the ashtray, emptied it, washed it, and placed it on the night table. If I pictured angels, this would be how they moved, with absolute ease, and grace both delicate and self-assured. I lay down on the bed to watch her. She knew as much because, from time to time, she would lower her head and smile shyly. “You don’t mind?” And she went back to her work, arranging and putting away my things with meticulous care. “Your shirts are all wrinkled. I’ll see to that tomorrow.” She glanced around the room to make sure everything was in its place. “All that’s missing is flowers.”
Flowers? Wait, I’ll be right back. An extensive garden centre stood next to the hotel. I climbed onto the hotel kitchen’s trash bins pushed up against the centre’s fence. From there it was child’s play, even if three years of hotel living and file-reading, three years of a totally sedentary life had atrophied my once-athletic muscles. In the darkness, I chose randomly, a rosebush lit by the cold September moon that seemed to bear flowers as white as bed sheets. The Dutch are vulgar and have no taste, but they have invented the most beautiful flowers in the world, who knows how. They weren’t exactly white, but ecru with a green hue at the very tip and again at the heart of the petals, the flowers a harmonious echo of their stems. Myriam admired them. “You stole this.” No, I borrowed it and I’ll go back tomorrow and pay. She smiled.
“I’m tired,” she said.
“So am I.”
She turned off the light and sat on the bed. Slowly, she undressed. A moonbeam shone upon her. I looked with admiration. This would not be like a wedding night, it would be a time of trust and tranquility, that was what I hoped for. Could we fall asleep together, at the same time, breathing at the same rhythm as we slept, dreaming the same dream, moving in harmony without the body of one disturbing the body of the other? Could we be corpses in the same tomb, united in the repose of the soul and the body?
Yes, we could. I floated as if on the sea, in the half-sleep we always try and prolong. A warm arm lay across my shoulders. I took the hand at the end of that arm. A finger of that hand clasped one of my fingers. We were awake. Waking can be a process of discovery and apprehension of the world. Her slim legs wrapped around mine, and I understood she wasn’t just obeying some reflex as she slept. This was an invitation. I turned to her slightly. Myriam was looking at me, her eyes heavy with sleep. And even if I didn’t see all the depth, the pain, and at the same time all the sweetness of the world in them, I did see eyes that wanted me. We made love slowly and gently, without speaking, as if we were on a ship carried by calm seas and clement winds.
Myriam made the coffee.
“I’ll go pay for the flowers.”
At the gardening centre, I discovered a red-faced, heavy woman who looked at me with Dutch circumspection as I confessed to my larceny. She smelled of the earth she worked with, and her nails were black. I showed her a rosebush that looked like the one I borrowed. She grasped my elbow like a schoolmarm catching a pupil red-handed. I heard the black ducks quacking, and the cold wind rose and drove a penetrating drizzle into our faces. “You should have borrowed that one, sir.” Yellow, golden orange, and pink, the petals at the base opened like lace. In the centre, they formed a tight cone. Fragility of lace petals and the solid heart of a flower. I had never really looked at a flower. I had never looked at anything closely except the breasts in my childhood dictionary and the black ducks on my canal. I promised to return the borrowed rosebush, and now I had a new one, a luminous, splendid, luxurious rose, eight flowers and seven buds, the children of flowers that are like jewels, or sculptures.
Myriam went to get croissants, fruit, and cheese. She found a white cloth and set the table like in a proper house. I contemplated my room. Everything was in perfect order. I would have never done that, but I liked it and I also liked Myriam’s eagerness to serve me, and ask me what I want. I felt at home.
“Now what do we do?”