I wake at first light, the day already warm and muggy. At first I attribute my morning stiffness to sleeping on a too-short couch, but realize that my aching shoulders, tight jaw, and sore legs represent the hangover from the fear and tension of the previous night. Whether awake or dreaming, I had spent the night replaying the sound of bullets shattering the windshield, the sight of the burning huts and of Samuel wounded and in shock. Most of all I relive the moment when I held Nirina in my arms as we waited for the policeman to shoot us.
After breakfast Barrow and I clean the worst of the blood and glass from the car. Sweating pleasantly in the tropical sun as we work, the night’s terrors gradually release their hold, and I begin imaginging the outlines of the cable I’ll file when I get back to the embassy, still hoping it will impress the deep breathers back in the Department and resurrect, Lazarus-like, my moribund career. Yet, while I toss shards of glass into a tin can and wipe smears of blood from the car’s upholstery, premonitions of failure pass like a cloud before the sunshine of my hopes.
When it comes time to leave, Samuel walks to the car, wan with pain and the loss of blood, smiling at his unsteadiness but refusing any help. His malaria attack has passed and he says he feels much better despite his wound. He even thinks he’s going to drive until I make it clear he is to lie down in the back seat and stay there.
Nirina comes out from the house looking young and fresh in a flowered dress of Sarah’s. For the first time, I see the innocence behind her toughness, the good heart behind its fortification of wariness. Something of what’s passing through my mind must show in my face, for she gives me a dazzling, guileless smile that asks for nothing. When I smile back, hers disappears and I think of how hard a thing it must be to be a beautiful young woman.
When I offer to take her back to Antananarivo she tells me no. “I need to go back to my village.”
I offer to take her, and she nods.
In the back seat, Samuel is already drifting off to sleep.
We say our goodbyes to the Barrows and drive down the dirt road toward the highway in a silence that grows like the monsoon thunderheads, waiting to break.
When I can’t go any longer without speaking, I opt for the banal. “I see you decided to come back to your family. How’s your father?”
“He’s dying.”
She says it simply and I understand that she has already done whatever she needs to do to prepare herself.
“So, you decided to come home.”
We are both remembering how she stood outside the Continental that night, telling me she had no home.
“I cannot explain it to you,” she says now. “But I have lost my place and haven’t yet found a new one.”
The words sound oddly formal, perhaps a phrase she has worked out in her mind long ago.
“How did that happen—losing your place?”
This, too, she answers quickly. She has thought about these things for a long time. “Everyone in my family lives in the way of the ancestors. My older brother is a fisherman. He and my younger brother will one day have our father’s lands. But I—” She stops, fighting for the words now. “My father saw I was different and sent me to the convent school in Antananarivo. And there I learned too much to ever really go back, to ever again think that the world is entirely the one our ancestors have made for us. The nuns are mostly from France and Belgium and they taught us about their world, how superior it is to ours. For us, it is frightening, a world where anything could happen, where the ancestors are killed twice, once when they die and again when they are forgotten. One of the nuns was from America, Sister Deborah. She was forever telling us ‘change is good.’ Is that something Americans say?”
“We say a lot of things.”
“Madagascar is not about change. Telling us change is good is like telling us death is life.”
“But you’re saying you changed.”
“As frightening as it was, I was fascinated by this other world. I wanted to see it, wanted to go where everything can change every day. To others, I became like a tromba woman, except that I had not run away. It was they who cast me out. But I didn’t want to just leave my village and go live in the woods like other ,. I wanted to leave Madagascar, to see that other world.”
I keep my eyes on the road as I say, “So you meet Walt at the Continental or maybe some Marine party. He falls in love and tells you he’ll take you home with him.”
She doesn’t deny it.
I want to tell her it isn’t going to happen, that Walt is both married and broke. But I know that telling truths like that creates obligations, obligations I’m not ready to accept.
Nirina shakes her head. “Why am I telling you all this?”
“I thought you knew. I don’t.”
She frowns. “Why are you always the joker, Monsieur Knott? Maybe it is because you’re even more frightened than I am.”
How can a girl who hardly knows me read me like a book?
“Anyone can see it, Monsieur Knott. You’re frightened all the time—except for the one thing you should be frightened of.”
“Yeah? What’s that?”
“The Colonel.”
“Picard?”
“He is a dangerous man, Monsieur Knott.”
“That’s what he tells me.”
“You are in his debt, yes? You had a look in your eyes that night when you left the Continental. I’ve seen that look before.”
“You think you can tell from the look on someone’s face that—”
“There was a boy from Tamatave who liked to gamble at the Colonel’s tables. He soon owed the Colonel more than he could pay. The Colonel told him to get the money from his family. They owned a hotel in Tamatave. But he told the Colonel he wouldn’t. His family had influence, and he was sure the Colonel wouldn’t dare to do anything to him. We told him not to provoke the Colonel, not to make him look weak. But the boy only drank whiskey and laughed. A couple of us went to the Colonel to speak for him. He threw us out. I went back once more by myself to plead with him. But he wouldn’t listen.”
“You liked this boy?”
She says nothing. I glance at her, but she’s looking out the window as if watching the scenery.
“So you know Picard.”
“Yes. But I couldn’t help this boy, and I can’t help you.”
“I’m not asking for help.” I try to sound a lot tougher than I feel. “So what happened to this kid?”
“One weekend he came back home to Tamatave. He was driving along the coast road when a policeman stopped him and pointed him up a dirt track into some trees. Sometimes, when a policeman wants a bribe this is what he does. When the boy drove up there, the policeman shot him dead. Two men from our village were walking toward the rice paddies along a trail hidden in the trees and saw it happen. They came running back and told my father. He told them to say nothing to anyone.”
“And you’re going to tell me—”
“It was Captain Andriamana. The Colonel didn’t want to do anything to the boy in Antananarivo, where someone would suspect him. So he paid Andriamana to kill him in Tamatave.”
I want to tell her she can’t know that Picard was behind it. But, for once, I think before I open my mouth and I start to make the connection. The Captain’s sudden anger toward me, it wasn’t about the Zebu Room but about its owner. Andriamana must have wondered if I knew something regarding Picard and the boy’s death, had to be thinking maybe Picard told me about it, vazaha to vazaha.
Given the Captain’s suspicions, I’m suddenly aware of how tempting it must have been for him to go ahead and shoot me in the village the previous night. My chest goes fluttery for a moment.
“You’re sure about all this?”
Her silence is her vow.
“Well, thanks for the heads up,” I say with unconvincing lightness.
“That’s all?”
“What more do you want? What am I supposed to say?”
“After last night there is a bond between us, Monsieur Knott. The nearness of death has brought us closer than either of us wants.”
“Hey, lighten up already.” I take my eyes off the road to scowl at her. “Do you talk to Walt like this? I’m sure it does him wonders.”
But she’s right. There’s an unsought intimacy between us. And, yeah, it scares me.
A couple of kilometers short of Tamatave, Nirina directs me onto a dirt road that runs a few hundred yards up to a clutch of wooden houses ranged irregularly around an open space with a large tree at its center. Neatly-kept rice paddies surround the village.
The arrival of an automobile jolts the village from its late morning slumber. Children come running, pointing at my bullet-riddled car and jabbering excitedly. When I look in their direction they laugh in ecstatic terror and run behind the houses. Adults stand in their doorways, looking at the vazaha who has brought home their prodigal daughter.
Samuel stirs in the back seat. I tell him we’re only stopping for a moment.
No longer trusting what I might say to Nirina, I simply nod at her door handle.
She doesn’t move. “You can’t drop me here and leave without seeing my family. You might as well call me a whore in front of all my people.”
I hesitate, but finally let Nirina lead me to one of the wooden houses built, like the others, on posts that raise it a few feet off the ground. She mounts the steps and I follow, ducking my head in the low doorway.
The interior is nearly bare, but clean and pleasant, with wooden shutters open to the sun. A woman, her hair salted with gray, bows as I enter before backing shyly into a corner of the main room.
Squatting against a wall sits a young man I recognize as Nirina’s brother, the one I saw outside the bar of the Continental.
In the light spilling from one of the open windows I see a gray-haired man lying on a reed mat, his face deeply lined, his ribs pressing through his bony chest. His arms and legs are thin as sticks. Only his eyes are alive, bright as a hawk’s. The fearsome authority of the dying fills the room.
He waves at his son to bring a stool for me, then says something to me in Malagasy, his voice surprisingly strong.
I find myself nodding, though I have no idea what he has said. In this unfamiliar house, in the presence of the dying man, I feel profoundly unsettled. I mutter something, I’m not quite sure what, maybe trying to tell him how much I respect him for letting his daughter find her own path.
Something in the room has shifted, and I realize that in this little exchange I’ve done what I needed to do, that my words, whatever they are, have carried the proper weight, set the right balance, and I can leave now.
Nirina follows me to the open door.
When I get to the bottom of the steps, I’m gripped by an impulse to tell her to come with me. I can take her back to the city, take her home with me, do anything but leave her here. But I’m beginning to understand that to her every place is foreign country now and that she’ll do nothing that will put herself further in my debt.
Michelle Herr taps nervously at the arm of the sofa in her office and turns to Esmer, the security officer. “Paul?”
He takes a breath and raises his eyebrows, letting us see how much he’s been through today. “I’ve spoken to Mathurin, over at Interior. They’re madder’n hell that an embassy official was out spying on them, while—” He cuts me off with an upraised hand. “Yeah, okay, Robert, but that’s the way it looks to them.” He twitches his shoulders and speaks out of the corner of his mouth like he’s auditioning for Casablanca. “But, I think they’re willing to forget about it.”
I roll my eyes. “Of course they’re willing to forget about it. What I don’t understand is why we’re willing to forget about it. With all respect, Paul, every time one of us has a problem, you act like it’s our own fault.”
Esmer gives the Ambassador a sidelong glance, which is as close as he can politely get to pointing at his temple and making little circles with his finger.
“Robert, I told you to be discreet,” Ambassador Herr says, playing the despairing mother.
“Ma’am, I wasn’t the one who started shooting at people.”
Lost in regret, she shakes her head. “Now it will be all over the papers. I can just see it, ‘American Diplomat Runs Roadblock.’”
I throw my hands up in exasperation. “Or maybe, ‘Police Wave Diplomat Through Roadblock, Then Shoot at Him From Ten Feet Away—And Miss.’”
“Miss?” Lynn breaks in. “The car has a dozen bullet holes in it, a missing fender, and Samuel’s been shot.”
“If he’d kept his head down …” I mutter, but I understand this isn’t a tack that will gain me much sympathy. “Look, the papers are just a chronicle of who had lunch with the President. They’re not going to say a word about this.”
The rain-on-Knott party lasts a few more minutes, but there isn’t much more to say. When Lynn and the Ambassador reach the limit of how many times they can shake their heads in sorrow and displeasure, and Esmer has sputtered himself into silence, I make a last attempt to recover my standing. “I’ll get a cable off to Washington on the trip. I think it’ll create a lot of interest back there.”
But I know in my scalded heart that it’ll be nothing more than another dispatch from the far side of the moon.
I make my way back to my office where my secretary, Cheryl is smiling, holdingout two illegible phone messages.
“What are these?” I ask. “That first is from a Mr. Picard. He wants you to see him this evening. I asked him what it was concerning and he just said in this real deep voice, ‘He’ll know.’” She laughs at her own mimicry. “He seems like a funny man.”
I have to take a couple of breaths before I can manage to speak around the lump that fills my chest, “Yeah, barrel of laughs.”
Trying to look normal, I wander toward my desk.
“Robert, you forgot to ask about the second one. That one should be really good news.”
“Yeah?”
“Well,” she says, “your career management officer left a message. He says he may have your next post for you.” She cocks her head to one side. “Where’s Ouagadougou?” she asks, though she pronounces it “Wog-a-doo-doo,” which is actually pretty close.
“On the outskirts of hell.”
I spend the rest of the day writing my cable.