Frank saw the worst in people. He searched for a crack in a person’s character and squinted into it. It was his only interest, his only satisfaction. At their worst, they’re naked—it’s who they really are. I took his cynicism to be his greatest fault. In implying I was tempted in Africa and probably unfaithful to Vita, he put me down as a creep. He yearned for me to be a hypocrite. I denied it with a sneer of indignation and hated him for saying so. Hated him especially because he was right, and because he was right I resolved to correct it, to prove him wrong.
Being face-to-face with Frank disturbed me, like gazing into a mirror, not seamless glass but the dark distorting mirror of family resemblance—versions of familiar features, many of them bordering on mockery. Brother looks at brother in a reflex of anxious discernment and wants to see differences, all of them his sibling’s flaws. It was not an antagonistic fantasy of mine that Frank’s face was palsied, that one squeezed side was at odds with the other, that his close-set eyes didn’t match. Other people mentioned it. He was glad that, as in mug-shot profiles, he was two people. One of them looked at you sideways. The day she first met him Vita had said, I feel bad about his face—and I insisted to her that he was proud of his face, it made him special, It’s his moneymaker.
My work helped me to understand the composition of Frank’s character in terms of geology. I saw him—I saw most people, I saw the world—as examples of undifferentiated, uncracked aggregate, an impure mass, a lump of mineral or rock particles. The emeralds we mined were not whole separate gems dug from stone; they were part of the stone, combinations of larger rocks, formed in pegmatite, hosted by metamorphic rock, the sort called protogenic inclusions, and when the emerald itself was released, it contained inclusions—impurities of a kind—that made the emerald’s interior a glittering and verdant garden.
I guessed that at the heart of Frank’s suspicions was his cynical certainty that most other men shared his weakness, were as mean as he was, as greedy, as insincere; that his low opinion of other people was a reflection of his own character, not strong or moral at all, but driven by instincts bordering on the criminal. One of his core beliefs was that no one told the truth; another was that in most of our behavior we are animals, just as grubby and dim-witted and skittish and predictable. “Fidge, admit it—we’re beasts!”
He shocked me once at the diner when a man passing a booth bumped into another man sliding out. The man who was bumped, crouched, his feet apart, knees bent, in an aggressive stance, his head lowered, his neck shortened, his jaw outthrust, his arms slightly lifted, flexing his fingers as though to grapple—threat posture.
“That’s pure monkey,” Frank said.
Of a man kissing his wife in a parking lot, Frank said, “Dogs do that. He’s humping her leg.”
A child eating an ice-cream cone, licking her fingers: “Feline grooming. Cat girl. She’d purr if she was stroked.”
Of a fat man entering the diner with his wife and children: “The grunting, snorting silverback gorilla, preceding his hairy knuckle-dragging family troop.”
I needed this. I needed his bad example to distance me in my own behavior. He was the necessary devil that forced me to examine my own beliefs and defy him. He made me want to see the best in people.
The lesson for me in that last lunch with Frank was that I had to be true. Kissing Vita goodbye, hugging Gabe, guiltily tearful, I flew back to Zambia vowing to end it with Tutwa.
Yet still I saw Frank’s face, every peculiar feature of it, the slant of his disapproving mouth, the two sides of his bifurcated face, the sort of happy-sad face you might see on a Greek mask or a stroke victim, one side taut, the other slack, even his eyes on separate planes, two contrasting colors, a peering inquisitive dark eye, a lazy indifferent gray eye, unfriendly and incoherent. All this was exaggerated by Frank’s tendency to tilt his head and look sideways when he was speaking to me, to show me the dome of his head, the scratchings of his bald spot, and that, too, was divided, a hairy side, a pale crusted-scalp side. The way he worked his jaw made him seem like an insect, with a pair of independent nibbling mandibles.
And why was his face so detailed in my memory? Because I wanted to hit it—the face you yearn to punch is the face you remember. As always his face followed me to Africa and it ghosted over me while I tried to put my life in order.
Johnson Moyo met me at the Ndola airport saying, “You look like you could use some kachasu, bwana.”
I didn’t, but it was his oblique way of saying that he wanted a stiff drink. He pulled into the forecourt of a roadhouse, where we sat outside on the veranda, our legs up, feet jammed against the rails, sundowner posture, sipping banana gin.
“What a world,” I said. “Twenty-four hours ago I was sitting on my porch in my hometown, and here I am, doing the same thing, half a world away.”
“That is two worlds,” Moyo said. “Myself, I also live in two worlds. My family is one, my business is the other.”
I’d expected him to say “the white world” and “the African world,” because all the gem dealers in Jo’burg were white, and all our miners were African. As tactfully as I could, I suggested this to him.
“No, my friend. The mzungu represents business, but the family is a parasite. You don’t know.”
“I know a little about families.”
“In Africa, if you have money, your family demands a share of it. Why else do you think progress is so slow here? It is our tradition that the person with an income is expected to look after the whole family.”
“You do that?”
“Not at all.” He laughed, he swigged. “My family has no idea of my income. And in my case they are far away south, near the Zambezi. If they knew, they would eat my money.” He studied me for a moment, sipping and smiling. “Your woman,” he said. “Her family has been troubling her while you were away, asking her when you are coming back.”
“Why? I don’t get it.”
“The supply of kwacha has dried up.” He laughed and made the money sign with his fingers.
“I’ll give her some then,” I said. “If that’s what they want.”
“She wants more than money.”
I prepared myself for him to say: She wants you, bwana.
But he said, “She wants to go away—far away from them.”
“How do you know all this?”
“I know these Bemba people. I know their customs. I know their habits—good ones and bad. My people, the Batoka, are quite similar, though we are Tonga speaking.”
“What about me, Johnson?”
“I trust you, bwana. That’s why we do good business together. We are partners, not brothers. If you were my brother, I would be worried. ‘Where is the money, brother?’ ‘Oh, sorry, I needed it to pay my son’s school fees’ and what and what.”
“You don’t trust your family?”
“They have different rules!” He shrugged and lifted his shirt and wiped his sweaty face. “Their customs are incompatible with good business. I love them. I try to help them, but I keep my business secret from them.”
“Johnson, why are you telling me this?”
“Because I hate to see this happen. I see that the woman Tutwa is under pressure from her family. When she was fetching firewood, they were despising her. When she moved into the mzungu’s house, they saw an opportunity to eat your money. You will go away, and she will suffer.”
“How do you know I’ll go away?”
“All azungu go away—when they are finished with us.” He poked my chest with a hard finger. “I put it to you, my friend. Are you residing long in Zambia?”
I had no answer. I could have said: I came back this time to end it with Tutwa, to be faithful to my wife. But what he said about Tutwa needing to be free simplified my decision.
“Tutwa wanted to be a nurse.”
“Maybe she is still wanting.”
“Where would she study?”
“Many places. There is a teaching hospital in Ndola. She could qualify,” he said.
“She told me she was accepted there.”
“I have heard that.”
“You know so much.”
“There are no secrets in Africa.”
“Johnson, our business is secret.”
“Our business does not exist, my friend.” He laughed loudly, then became self-conscious in his laughter and looked up and down the veranda to see whether anyone had heard. “We are two men, living humbly outside a small village, who spend their days in a muddy tunnel.”
We sat in silence after that, and finally I said, “I’ll send Tutwa to nursing school.”
“A wise decision, bwana.”
“Where will she work?”
“Where all Zambian nursing sisters work—South Africa, or in the UK. She will be far from her family. She will save her money. She will be free.”
“Let’s go, man. I don’t like these roads in the dark.”
“And myself, I am not liking.”
That night, in bed, after we’d made love, with Tutwa lying beside me, breathing softly, I said, “You should be a nurse.”
“It is not possible.”
“No. You can do it.”
“But the money,” she said, her voice trailing off, Mahnee . . .
“I’ll pay. I’ll give you the money.”
In the dim light, the lamp in the parlor illuminating the open doorway to the bedroom, I saw Tutwa turn away and clutch her head and bury her face in the pillow, her shoulders shaking, her moans muffled by the pillow.
“Don’t cry,” I said, panicked and made helpless by the sight of what looked like anguish.
What she said in reply was indistinct, and still she seemed to sob; but then she turned to me and hugged me laughing and said, “I am so happy.”
I’d steeled myself to end it with Tutwa, dismissing her, sending her back to her shabby hut outside the village, where she was a pariah, a rule breaker, unwelcome unless she had money for her mother. Moyo’s intervention was timely, giving Tutwa an incentive for us to part, so that she could apply for a place at the hospital in Ndola. She’d go, and I’d be able to tell myself that I was virtuous, not the typical expat with a local lover, the women here they called nyama, which meant meat and animal and slut.
Tutwa applied, she was diligent in filling out the forms, her school-taught handwriting was beautiful, upright, copperplate, with uniform loops. She sat at the kitchen table writing drafts of the required essay, “Why I Wish to Become a Nursing Sister.” I was touched by her exactitude, which was not confidence but rather a kind of desperation, a fear of failure, her frequent vows in her essay, “with the help of Almighty God.”
As she rested on her elbows, the lamplight gleamed on her earnest face, a whir of insects gathered around the globe of the lamp, the pale moths fluttering, the black beetles bumping the glass; and some of them squeezed beneath the lip of the rim and, toppling into the flame, burned with crisp snaps.
Motionless, except for when she brushed the nearer insects with the back of her hand, Tutwa seemed to me a gem, not to be compared with anyone I knew, all the finer for having emerged like a crystal from the mud and dust of Kafubu.
Tutwa’s concentration in the lamplit room, shadows on every wall, tapping at the white paper, hunched forward, her face bright with thought: I watched with admiration. Her spirit glowed, she who’d suffered rejection because she’d refused to allow herself to be inherited—like a cow, or a chair, or a bucket—by her brother-in-law, or to be “cleansed” through sex with him.
I had not known in my simple lust and loneliness that the pretty young woman in the green wraparound on the path was a whole vital person, intelligent, educated up to high school, with ambitions beyond the village, struggling in the snare of tribal customs. From chopping and splitting and carrying firewood, her hands were toughened; the bumps of her yellow calluses had at first startled me when she tried to caress me, as though she was poking me with a stick. And then I loved her for her hard grip. She could hold a hot pan in her fingers and not feel pain. She was capable and loving; she was kind. In her kindness, guided by her gentle soul, she was anything but a coquette. She could be forthright, she was agreeable, and strong—she could swing an ax and smash a mattock into weeds. All these qualities, some of them contradictory, imbued her with an unsurpassing sensuality—she was whole and human. Her willingness thrilled me. She’d given herself entirely to me, and if I mentioned something sexual that was new to her she smiled and said, “I can learn how” or “You can show me,” and was eager to be taught this secret.
Knowing that I was losing her, I nuzzled her, and she whispered, “My man,” into my ear, and licked it. Because I hated letting go, there was fury—the frenzy of finality—in our lovemaking, driving us both to exhaustion.
Afterward, she boiled buckets of water and filled the overhead barrel and scrubbed me, and when I was clean she stepped naked into the shower and I watched entranced, and returned the favor, the creamy bubbles of white soap cascading down her body.
I went to work in the dark with Moyo and returned at sunset, our usual routine, to remain inconspicuous. And these days, each evening, I saw Tutwa, the laughing dove, seated before a lamp at the kitchen table, the sauce bottles and condiments, the pickle jar, the toothpicks, in a round tray at the center. She would be writing on foolscap, making draft after draft, or else reading, her fingers tapping at the text, her lips pressed together in concentration.
I was so moved one evening I said, “Don’t stop,” and studied her, knowing she’d soon be leaving—her application had been accepted, her tuition was paid. I saw her as someone special, earnest—alone—reading the dusty pages, by the light of a lamp that was strafed by moths, intense in her concentration—less a lover than a valiant woman, plotting to escape the entanglements and demands of the village, to venture into the wider world of jostling strangers, to make a life for herself—brave, but also a waif, without the slightest idea of what was in store for her.
She turned to me and prepared to put her papers away.
“Go on,” I said. “Finish what you’re doing. I’ll sit here and have a beer.”
I sat in the corner, a little apart, thinking these thoughts, saddened, as though I was watching an orphan I’d briefly sheltered, someone I was sending once again into the world, praying she’d be safe. As always, Frank was watching me.
Tutwa sat back and stretched her arms and yawned. She gathered her papers and straightened them, then slid them into a file folder. She smoothed the yellow ribbon of her bookmark and tucked it between the pages she’d been reading and clapped the book shut. She’d fashioned a homemade cover with brown paper, to protect the book, Fundamentals of Nursing. The care in the folds of the paper cover moved me, the way it was carefully taped; her plastic pencil case moved me, her leaky ballpoint, her bruised eraser, these simple schoolgirl tools, kept with such care, all this tore at my heart.
When she was done, she brushed the moths from the lamp and joined me in the shadows, sat on the arm of my chair, stroked my hair with her fingers, her knuckles grazing my cheek, humming softly.
“Shalapo,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“It is goodbye.” Still she twirled my hair with her fingers, and then in a shocked voice, “What is this?” and lost all her lightness.
“Never mind,” I said. “It’s nothing.”
But she touched my face tenderly, as though at a wound, and in that same awestruck voice saying, “I have never seen a mzungu crying.”