She was an outcast, I was, too—natural allies, lonely, sympathetic, needing consolation. I’d been excluded from Vita and Frank’s cozy relationship. Vita had now and then suggested that I was selfish and negligent, Frank said little but his elbows were active. Until then—falling for Tutwa—I’d been resolved to living my monastic life in the bush, my simple hut in the obscure village—simple and obscure because we needed to disguise the fact that we were pioneering the digging of high-grade emeralds, tunneling in an area that would eventually become someone else’s vast open-pit mine.
Back in Littleford on my spells of home leave I’d resented hearing how Frank had become essential to Vita’s life and work, told that I should be grateful for his assistance—his legal advice, his kindness, his friendship. And he’d become an attentive uncle to Gabe. I had to be thankful for that because I was so distant, my mining in Africa for those long periods made me seem selfish.
I wanted to shout at Vita, It’s my work! I had idle shameful glimpses of stuffing Frank into a gunny sack and cinching it with zip ties, and clubbing it repeatedly until it was silent and stopped moving. Instead, I went away and became as selfish as I was accused of being, no longer monastic, and not resentful—on the contrary, very happy. It was not travel at all, since I was at home in both places. In Tutwa, I had a lover, a housekeeper, and a cook—wifely roles—in the village adjacent to the mine. Hooking up with a mzungu was no disgrace for Tutwa, “the Dove.” As a young widow without children, she had no status in the village, she was just her nickname, merely a gatherer of firewood, smacking laundry on rocks in the Kafue River. As a mzungu, I had no status either in a village wary of white men. Johnson Moyo was my partner and protector, therefore I was allowed to live in the outskirts of the village and work in the mine. Some village men derived their income from the mine, though they had no idea that the lime-green hexagonal crystals, gleaming in the chunks of black rock, were worth a fortune.
I was a liar and a cheat, unfaithful to Vita, rationalizing my behavior by telling myself that her friendship with Frank was a form of infidelity. I couldn’t separate them, or criticize him. That was my lame excuse. I was doing what many industrial miners and geologists on contract did on foreign assignments—and most mining operations are far from urban centers—in the mountains, the desert, the bush, the outback; encampments, improvised villages, where visiting expat workers took local women as lovers, the women vying for their favors.
But for married men—for me—it was cheating. My position was indefensible; yet that, I came to see, was how life’s choices often are. It did not lessen my love for Vita, it made me more forgiving and indulgent. I was not guilt-ridden, I was at last supremely content in Africa.
Here was another irony. I was so smitten with Tutwa that I was as passionate about seeing her on my return trip as in finding emeralds. She was my crystal, gemmy and luminous. I was attracted to her because she was lovely and at first aloof. The more I knew about her, the greater my regard. She was kind, she was intelligent; stifled by tradition, she’d never had a chance to shine.
Hers was a life interrupted. Having passed her school certificate, she aimed to study nursing and had secured a place at Ndola Teaching Hospital. But her father died, and as the eldest she needed to support the family, her widowed mother and four siblings. She found work as a menial in an office in Luanshya, a one-hour bus ride away. When her salary proved inadequate, he mother arranged for her to marry a man from the same clan; he lived in a nearby village and worked in a copper mine. Obeying Bemba custom—matrilineal—he moved to her village and took on the responsibility of looking after Tutwa’s family. When he died (“fever” she said), the money ended. But there was an issue to resolve.
“My brother-in-law inherited me—it is our way,” she told me. “Also he inherited our hut and all my goods. I belonged to him now. But there was a more serious problem, a big badness.”
At first she refused to tell me, but finally she explained, covering her face, talking through her fingers.
“I needed to be cleansed—that is the expression. ‘Cleansing the widow.’”
“How does that happen?”
“By having sex with the brother.”
“What’s the point of that?”
“If I am not cleansed, my dead husband’s spirit cannot rest.”
“So what happened?”
“I refused them. They were very angry—they said I was not honoring my dead husband. Why are you smiling?”
“I’m thinking of my sister-in-law. If my brother died, I’d have to cleanse her and take her as my junior wife.”
The notion of sex with Frolic filled me with alarm and gave me some perspective on the Bemba custom, not sexy at all but a burden.
“They called me bad names. I lost everything.”
And so Tutwa was forced to gather firewood and do laundry in the river to make a living, and she remained an outcast—was still an outcast, living with the mzungu.
The good student, potential candidate for nursing, with a promising career, fluent in English, and still young—twenty-eight—was friendless, reduced to living alone, doing manual labor, rejected because she refused to be inherited and owned. She had nothing, less than nothing, no children, no family anymore, no status.
Maybe her aura of being singular and solitary was what attracted me when I’d seen her on the path with the basket of laundry on her head, dignified, silent, moving noiselessly through the twilight, from the river, the last of the light beautifying her face. As a village woman, she was invisible to Moyo, and it had seemed comical to him that I could be smitten. But I’d recognized her as someone like me, lonely, going through the motions of living and working, unappreciated, misunderstood.
Because the Bemba were matrilineal, Tutwa said, the daughter stayed close to the mother, yet daughters were guided by the mother’s brother. Tutwa had failed her mother by refusing to obey her uncle’s order to join her brother-in-law—the “cleansing”—and become part of his household, barely a wife, more a possession. This meant she was forced to live on her own, to make a living, such as it was, at the margin of the village.
It was easy for me to help her. She was nominally my housekeeper. But as we were lovers, I rationalized our arrangement by telling myself we were helping each other out. She’d escaped the wrath of the villagers, because she’d ceased to matter to them. What money I gave her she passed to her mother, to live on, and for the education of Tutwa’s brothers and sisters. Even so, her generosity didn’t restore her standing in the village; she was still seen as obstinate, the widow who’d defied her uncle and refused her brother-in-law: this refusal was tormenting the spirit of her dead husband.
Apart from all this, life was simple for us. Our small house had few furnishings—the table, the two chairs, the bed filling the bedroom, the kitchen outside—stove, sink—the bathroom at the back in a shed (upraised barrel serving as a shower), and the chimbusu-slit-trench latrine. Because the house was so bare it was easy to care for and clean, a minimalist’s dream, the opposite in every way of our house in the Winthrop Estates, or Mother’s Tower House on Gully Lane, repositories of cushions and knickknacks. I was glad for this simplicity—it soothed me—and I delighted on returning home from the mine in the late afternoon and seeing Tutwa on the veranda, sewing, or sifting flour, or feeding chickens, looking as though she belonged.
“Your arm—what did you do?” she asked with concern, one of those days.
“Scraped it on some thorns.”
“It will go septic. All cuts go septic here. Let me clean it.”
And when she did, heating a basin of water, scrubbing the dirt from the cut, patting it dry and dressing it, I said, “You’ll make a wonderful nurse.”
“That dream is finished.”
“I’d be happy to pay your tuition.”
But she shrugged, either didn’t believe me, or else was no longer interested. And maybe she had other plans.
She knew I was married. “Your family,” she said, meaning my wife. But we didn’t discuss that. What was there to discuss? She shrugged and one day said that a man with two wives was not unusual in Bemba society.
I reminded her that she’d rejected her brother-in-law.
“I wanted to choose for myself.” She held my head and kissed my ear. “I could be your junior wife.”
“But I’m not a Bemba guy.”
“I can show you how to be a Bemba guy,” she said, and plucked open her wraparound and, naked, buried her face in my lap, murmuring, “My man, my man.”
That was my life in Kafubu—unexpectedly complete, the secrecy of our emerald mine, the solitude of my home life with Tutwa. It was so simple and satisfying I avoided thinking about Littleford, and if anyone in Littleford—Vita or Frank, Victor or Gabe—thought about me in Kafubu, they would not have been able to imagine the reality of it. I was not a temporary expat, serving out a contract, or a traveler waiting for the next bus; I was that ideal alien, a contented man, living his life on an African riverbank, and loved.
Kafubu was not the Africa of the travel magazines and safari tourists; it had no big game, hardly any game at all, except for rats and mice and the occasional snake. It had no trees—they’d been cut for fuel; it was low bush, its grass was tussocky, the riverbank bristled with bamboo groves. The land was flat, with musclelike berms and embankments, the soil like fudge; it was so thick it was hard to plow or to break with a hoe and lay in clods in the fields, pierced by shoots of corn or beans. The creeks feeding the river were shallow and dark and buzzed with gnats. The Kafue River was muddy, streaked with scum that lay like green foam in the backwaters, visible stagnation, like froth on fizzy drinks.
The roots of the scrub that grew beside the maize fields were too spindly to hold the soil. Every slope was scarred with erosion, deep as ravines in places, rocks tumbled into them. Without mountains or hills the land was ill-defined; it bulked, shoulders of bare black soil that looked heavy and pitted.
Except for the creases of erosion, and the loose flesh of the muddy creek banks, and the bubbly mudflats by the river, the land was so featureless as to be impossible to photograph. You’d wonder what it was, and you’d never guess it was Africa. A snapshot would show something corpselike, a wasteland, and any visible huts that would be small and sorry.
As the opposite of Littleford, it suited my mood; it was unremarkable, crisscrossed by narrow trampled footpaths. Its plainness I found a relief, but though it was no more than an expanse of low mounds that I regarded as bosomy and bleak, its sunsets were its glory and it was singular for its bird life.
They glided, they nested in the bamboo thickets, they filled the sky, they sang, seasonal swarms of migratory birds from Europe and Siberia filled the riverbanks. Birds gave the place vitality. The year-rounders like the pied crow were fearless and strutted by my house, thieving the food of the pigeons we raised for their meat. Ten different sorts of doves, the sentry stance of the marabou storks that picked through the garbage piles, stabbing with their big beaks; egrets and herons at the river’s edge, buzzards and hawks high up in the sky, and at dusk owls and quail were active in the shadows.
I wanted to learn their names. Usually when I asked, Tutwa said, “Icuni”—it’s a bird. But one day I heard a familiar hiccupping note.
“What’s that?”
This time she said, “It is a cuckoo.”
And that mocking word reminded me of Frank’s intrusion into my marriage, Vita’s fondness for him, Gabe’s admiration, my sense that no matter how far away I traveled for my work as a geologist, Frank was inescapable, always somehow in my head, or else hovering. That seemed to be the characteristic of a sworn enemy, which is how I thought of Frank. As my rival, envious and greedy, the stay-at-home obsessed with the wanderer—appropriating my stories, befriending my wife, Frank’s intention was always to remain at the periphery of my consciousness. In a sinister coincidence, others provided me with reminders of Frank’s obsession—Vita, Gabe, and now Tutwa (though how was she to know?). Frank wanted to win; he’d win by displacing me, and in the meantime his intrusion was always on my mind, the word cuckoo jerking me to attention for its relation to cuckold.
How is a person displaced? By being destroyed, the destroyer taking over your spouse, your child, your household, your life, inserting himself into the space that was left by your destruction.
I woke up at night in my hut outside the little village of Kafubu, Tutwa lightly snoring beside me, her arm flung across my chest, warming me—and Frank was present, darkly glowing, lopsided face, teeth protruding to nibble, Vita just behind him in the shadows, awaiting his advice, unable to see Frank’s triumphant expression.
Nights like those provoked me to go home more often, though Vita seemed content with my being away.
“I’m happy with the way things are,” she said. “The agency is thriving. Frank’s gotten us a lot of funding.”
“How does he manage that?”
“It’s all about finding someone to write a proposal for a grant.”
“Who pays that person?”
“Frank structures the contract so that the guy who writes the proposal gets a cut of the grant.”
“Frank’s powers of persuasion. He gets the guy to work for no money up front.”
“It’s a smart move. It motivates the writer to do a good job, because he shares in the outcome. It’s how a lot of nonprofits are funded. We’d be underwater without Frank.”
“I’m thinking maybe Frank gets a cut.” Big Charity, Frank called it, reminding me that it was a business; and it was in the nature of big business to be plunderers and scammers.
“If he does, he deserves it. I don’t ask.”
Vita didn’t know, which meant he did get a cut. But I couldn’t argue. After all, I was far away when all this happened, and being far away was like not caring. And on any visit in Littleford I was conscious that Tutwa had moved in with me. I was in no position to object to Vita’s reliance on Frank.
“Frank is helping to save people’s lives—children in Africa, for example. It’s pretty ironic that you’re right there, oblivious of it all.”
“We don’t exploit children—we don’t hire them. They go to the local schools. They help at home.”
“Lots of them work in the mines.”
“Where do you get this information?”
“Like I told you, agencies, informed sources, missionaries, local hospitals. There’s a lot of literature.”
“I don’t see it. Mining equipment is sophisticated and very heavy. A kid wouldn’t be able to handle it.”
“But they do.”
Vita with a drink in her hand, in the overfurnished living room of our house in the exclusive Winthrop Estates in Littleford, described with utter certainty the lives of children in rural Africa, and how Frank was helping to save them.
“We’re following up reports that children are actively engaged in mining operations. Also child soldiers, underaged prostitutes, farm laborers.”
“When you get some more specific information,” I said, controlling my temper, “please put me in the picture.”
“Ask Frank.”
I’d found meeting him these days at the diner hard to bear, this man intruding on my life. But we had a routine. We met whenever I was home. It would have seemed odd if I snubbed him. Many people I’d known associated with those they despised; you mask your hostility, because aggression is exhausting. At the end of one particular home leave, I agreed to have lunch with Frank the day before I left for Africa.
He had a new mannerism for this lunch. Instead of saying my name, he referred to me in the third person, starting with, “So what’s he having?” And there were many more questions than usual, which might have accounted for his obliqueness, as though we were talking about someone we both knew but weren’t particularly fond of.
“I wonder how he spends his time down there. Any idea?”
Frank began spooning clam chowder into his mouth, bent over his bowl, not making eye contact with me.
“We don’t have a lot of downtime,” I said. “Work all day, have a few beers, go to bed early. Up at dawn. It’s life in the bush.”
“One in the bush is worth two in the hand.”
It was unusual for Frank to attempt a joke, probably because jokes are so revealing of a person’s attitude. I stared at the top of his inclined head and went on eating my lobster roll.
“Must be kind of lonely for him.”
“I’m too busy to be lonely.” Now I could see he was fishing. “We’re running a pretty complicated mining operation.”
“What sort of amazing ore is he digging?
“Oh, masses of piled-up fragments of conglomerate rock that, um, looks in a certain light like kitty litter.”
Still spooning his soup, Frank spoke out of the side of his mouth. “Guess he doesn’t want to tell us about his fabulous finds.”
This mannerism of his was so annoying to me I kept quiet and hoped he’d stop.
“I’d personally get a little lonely,” he said. “Must be all kinds of temptations for him down there.”
I stopped eating—put my lobster roll down, patted my mouth with my napkin, drummed my fingers on the table, saying nothing, staring at his head, the thinning whorl of hair at the back of his scalp. Soon my silence seemed to wake him. He sat back and met my unimpressed gaze.
His lopsided face looked futile and foolish, dabs of chowder on his lips. He’d intended his insinuation to insult and provoke me. He sniffed a little.
“Just saying.” He wagged his spoon over his chowder.
“But you’re entirely mistaken.”
“He’s getting shook up.” A crooked smile formed on his chowder-flecked mouth.
“You’re not me, Frank,” I said. “I have a great wife and a son I’m crazy about. I wouldn’t jeopardize my marriage by doing anything silly. I don’t think Vita would, either. She knows the consequences of that sort of thing.”
Frank slurped some more chowder and still chewing and swallowing, as though for drama, he said, “The new lover is anxious to please. She submits. She listens. She has hidden talents. She marvels at the guy’s stories—and this is so amazing for his ego. It’s his wet dream.”
As he spoke I realized he’d been prescient. I had been lonely. I had succumbed to temptation. I hated him for being right and was ashamed and wanted to hit him.
“I guess you know the consequences, too—didn’t Whitney dump you?”
This stung him. He said, “She was pressured. I sued the guy. Civil lawsuit. Very big deal.”
“What was the charge?”
“Alienation of affection,” he said. “I could have won.”
“Alienation of affection is a crime?”
“It’s actionable. In tort law it’s malicious interference in a marriage.”
This seemed to me precisely what he was doing in my marriage.
“So what happened?”
“I dropped the case when I met Frolic.”
Perhaps he knew he was on shaky ground. He pushed his bowl of chowder aside and began to work on his plate of food—cutting, spearing, chewing—his way of eating meant to impress me with his resolve, his hunger, his superiority, the way he’d devoured his opponents in court, piece by piece, because he responded by launching into a long story.
“Major contract,” he said.
He stabbed the lamb chop on his plate and sawed off an edge, then gestured with it by shaking it at me. He gnawed at it while holding it with his fork and chewed as he talked.
“Lots of foreplay, tons of paperwork, thirty pages of clauses and subsections. The other party had put a lot of hours into it—and that was a big help.” He swallowed and smacked his lips and went on. “Anyway, it comes time to sign the contract, the culmination of the big organ recital. I make them come to my office—my turf. They push the paper across the desk. I pick up my pen”—he shifted the knife in his hand and held it like a pen, as though poised to write—“and I glance at the signature page, then I say, ‘I’m not signing.’”
In what might have been an attempt at a smile, Frank’s cheek contracted, lifting one corner of his smeared lips upward—disconcerting to me, because only half his mouth was apparently smiling, the other half slack. As his expression had altered he pushed his knife blade into the lamb chop, carved away a fragment of flesh.
Chewing, he said, “They’re aghast, naturally,” and swallowed.
“‘This is what we agreed on,’ the other lawyer says.
“‘I changed my mind,’ I say, and put the pen down, and fold my hands.”
Frank placed the knife beside his plate and clasped his hands. He stared at me, but at an angle, always one eye higher than the other.
“They asked me what I wanted, so I said, ‘You’re confident of a great outcome—right? So instead of an up-front fee you get paid on the back end with the proceeds.’
“‘That means I’m working for nothing,’ the client says.
“‘Bull,’ I say. ‘You’re part of the team. When we get our money, you get yours.’
“‘How do I pay my bills?’
“‘You make it happen.’”
Frank picked up his knife, he lowered his head, he worked on his lamb chop, sawing at its rawness, the blood seeping onto the blade. He spoke to the meat, as though to something sacrificial.
“They conferred in a corner of my office. I loved the sounds of anguish. I heard, ‘We’ve come all this way,’ as a complaining moan. Then silence. They sat down and crossed out the payment schedule. At that point I signed.”
Frank looked pleased with himself, but it was not his usual look of satisfaction, more like the strange sourness and perplexity of a fat man who realizes he has eaten too much of something he likes, stuffing himself to nausea. I remembered the story Vita had told me about the man Frank had found to write the application and proposal for the grant to fund Vita’s project. As with many of Frank’s stories, the message was Don’t mess with me.
I said, “But you’d given your word. You’d agreed to a contract.”
Looking at me in a casual pitying way, he said, “A contract is not worth the paper it’s printed on.”
“Major contract?”
“Especially those.”
Frank lowered his head, cutting, forking, chewing more of his meat, and all I saw was his scalp. In Zambia, I’d heard the story of a cruel chief who punished a hated captive by tying him to a post and ordering one of his men to hammer a nail into his head. I had been shocked, but now I understood, and I imagined subduing Frank and hammering.
“That’s funny,” Frank said, pushing his plate aside, a bare lamb rib on it, “I’m not hungry anymore.” He patted his mouth with his soiled napkin, then took out a quarter and flipped it and smacked it to the back of his hand. “Toss you for the check. Tails! You lose.”
But I was still banging a nail into his skull.
After that visit I was glad to board a plane and fly back to Zambia, and my little house, and my sweet companion—junior wife—and my rocks, and the bush. The simple life.
But I was unable to rid myself of Frank. He appeared in my dreams, he gazed at me from the foot of my bed, while Tutwa snored beside me. He was often cutting meat, and the meat was me. A month of this—of digging, of simplicity, of Frank hovering—and I returned to Littleford, on an impulse.
“So soon,” Vita said, thrown by my sudden appearance, as though my showing up was inconvenient. She said she was glad to see me, but admitted that she had less time for me than when I’d arrived on schedule.
“You’re busy?”
“It’s those children I was telling you about,” she said. “Thanks to Frank we got the funding. We’ve done a lot of research. They’re in the Congo—like I told you, in Katanga—mining. These kids are being used to dig for minerals.”
“What minerals? Where in Katanga?”
“That’s for you to find out. You always tell me you’re proud of the work I do—that you want to help, like Frank does. Here’s your chance, Cal.”