A needle of light pierced the white blaze of African sun and flickered high in the cloudless sky over Zemu Island. Ras Lazaar stood at the edge of the airfield, in the shade of a jacaranda tree, watching the gleaming splinter of steel sprout wings. A fusion of excitement and sadness held him as he studied the plane’s gradual descent. He had traveled to the mainland by boat many times, but he had never flown. He never would now. The new African government did not allow Indians to leave the island.
He pushed away the wave of self-pity. Unchecked, it would engulf him in a deep sense of hopelessness.
Thirty passengers were on board the plane today—twenty-nine Germans on a tour of Africa, coming to spend the afternoon on Zemu Island, and one American woman traveling alone. Since Ras was the Director of Tourism, they were all his responsibility, especially the American. The decision to grant her entry had not been reached without argument and threat. Except for newspapermen whose requests the new government automatically denied, it was a year since an American had sought to come to Zemu Island.
“If she is not what she says she is—if she brings trouble to the New Republic of Zemu Island—you, Indian, will pay for it!” Prime Minister Masaka’s finger had pointed like a gun at Ras’s head, firing the abbreviated Swahili with the slur of ethnic superiority. Only Ras’s hatred of Masaka exceeded his fear.
When the plane touched the ground and streaked across the far runway, Ras stepped out of the shade of the tree. His stride showed only a bare trace of stiffness from the now year-old wound. He was taller than the average Indian, with the traditional olive skin and gleaming black hair. His frame was held together by pliant muscles developed by years of tennis and swimming. Since the political coup he had done neither, but at twenty-three his body did not show the year’s absence from exercise. His mind, too, had survived the trauma of the two-day revolution in which the Indian population of Zemu Island had been decimated.
He had stopped asking why he had lived when so many had died, what instinct had sent him to the ground at the unfamiliar sound of gunfire, by what lucky accident a bullet had struck his leg and not his heart. The Africans had not killed him afterward, when they found him wounded and unconscious; instead they had put him in the care of the Cuban doctors who had come with the revolutionary force. Later, when he was given the position of Director of Tourism, he began to understand. The Africans needed him—he could read and write both Swahili and English.
It seemed without reason that Masaka should see a threat in the visit of the young American schoolteacher. Yet the attitude was in keeping with the Prime Minister’s frequent rages and bursts of irrationality. The pressures of ruling a country were heavy on a man, even when he had the support of his people. Masaka had had that support for only a short time. Suspicion had quickly eaten at the edges of black unity when word spread that the revolution had been the organized effort of a foreign power that had chosen Masaka as its island leader, and not the spontaneous rebellion of Africans against a repressive Indian government.
Sober Africans began to ask questions. Some had begun to demand answers. Yukano was one of them.
Differences between Masaka and Yukano were evident even physically. Masaka was six feet tall, with a round head and enormous hands that were forever washing one another. Yukano was slight with a thin face and narrow shoulders, and he spoke softly.
At a meeting where Masaka had announced his opposition to the American teacher’s visit, Yukano had risen and talked convincingly of Zemu Island’s need to reinstate tourism as a source of revenue and prestige. Many were stirred by this argument, but others were unconvinced until Yukano spoke again. “The American June Hastings asks to come not just as a tourist, but as a scientist interested in Zemu Island’s marine life. Do you recall the prestige that came to Tanganyika when Dr. Louis Leakey made his excavations at Olduvai Gorge and found evidence of prehistoric man? How do we know what there is to be found in the waters of Zemu Island?”
Masaka had acceded to the majority, but Ras knew it was a defeat the Prime Minister was not likely to forget. Ras worried about the kind of action Masaka would take to soothe his wounded pride.
The plane came to a stop, and the airfield sprouted life. Africans in ragged shorts and bare feet appeared to unload baggage. Airport officials of the same skin color, wearing starched uniforms and hats decorated with gold braid, stood at attention to some unseen authority. The sun streamed down and the concrete airfield glistened with the running of dry rivers and shimmering pools.
The first person to disembark was the German tour leader, with whom Ras shook hands. “Lunch is waiting for your group at the Manga Hotel,” Ras said. “Afterward, the drivers will take you on a tour of the island.” The balding pink-cheeked man mopped his forehead and managed a smile, then went off to tend his flock.
Ras’s attention steadied on the young woman who appeared in the plane’s doorway. A border of embroidery fluttered at the hem of her dress, the saffron-pink color of a ripe pomalo. A graceful sweep of bronze hair fell across her cheek. He was struck by the expression of expectancy in her eyes as she scanned the horizon of palm trees, then started down the steps.
“June Hastings?” he asked when she reached him.
She hesitated. “Yes.”
“I am Rashid Lazaar. We have corresponded. I am with the Ministry of Tourism.”
“I’m glad to meet you, Mr. Lazaar.” She offered her hand. “Thank you for arranging for my entry permit.”
“My pleasure,” he said, a phrase he realized he had not used with any real meaning in a long time. “I think if we go directly to immigration we will save time.”
She fell in step beside him. “What about my luggage? Your customs people will want to check that.”
“That will be delivered to another place—we must go there after we have finished here.”
Though her eyes were veiled by sunglasses he could see that they were a pale brown, almost golden. There was a question in them. Her bronze head tossed. “Does someone from your office always meet a new arrival?”
“It is the policy of the new government.”
“But I must be someone special to be entitled to the Director of Tourism himself.”
The mischief in her voice was clear. It surprised him, and reminded him of his sisters and their playful jibes.
“You are special, Miss Hastings. You have not only chosen to visit Zemu Island, you have come for an unusual purpose. Zemu women and children have gathered shells for years and made necklaces of them, but no one has ever thought them of scientific interest.”
“Maybe it’s time someone did.”
“Some in the government are doubtful, others are puzzled. Others still have suggested that you will give Zemu Island prominence by discovering something as important as what Dr. Leakey found at Olduvai Gorge.”
She stopped and stared at him. “They don’t really think that?”
“It is what has been said.”
“By whom?”
Ras shrugged. “A man named Yukano.” The name would mean nothing to her—Yukano had become prominent in island politics only a short time ago. But Ras thought he saw a flicker of recognition move across her face. “Have you heard of him?”
“The name sounds familiar, but maybe it’s my Western ear. Even now many African names still sound alike to me.”
He nodded, assuming she was referring to the last two years she had been teaching school in Kenya. “It is a funny thing. I have the same difficulties with British names—like your own. But Indian names are hard for Westerners, I think.”
“Ignorance contributes to the confusion. People of one culture imagine those of another are all alike. Masaka and Yukano, for example. To a person unfamiliar with Africa, they simply are both Africans. No thought is given to the possibility of great differences between them, that they are of different tribes and different persuasions—totally different personalities.” Her voice lowered as they approached the Immigration Building, and fell silent when they reached the steps.
Ras did not speak either, but his mind was churning. She was well informed, typical of the emancipated American women he had read about. He must be careful not to be guilty of the very thing she had just described. She was more than simply an American. She was an individual who had chosen to visit Zemu Island for a special reason. What that reason was, he suspected he had yet to find out.
The immigration check was routine, even to the insolence of the African clerk who looked at Ras and yawned widely. In the past year, Ras had learned to ignore such petty insults, but with the young woman at his side, he found it difficult to hold back a rebuke. He was glad when they were outside again and he could lead her to the car he had left parked near the jacaranda tree. “Your luggage is being delivered to a building at the other end of the airport—it is just a minute’s drive.”
As he helped her into the front seat, he thought of warning her that this would be no ordinary customs check. Two of the Prime Minister’s own men would be in the banda, and their instructions were to go through her belongings with exactness. If they found something they did not like, she would be put on the next plane leaving Zemu Island.
Ras decided to say nothing. A warning would serve no purpose but to alarm her. He hoped her luggage cleared. He wanted her to stay. There was very little he had wanted so much in a long time.
Perhaps he would even take her to Pwani Pwani—he had not been back since the day the guns had fired. He had thought he could never return, to walk over those sands where his mother and his sisters and the girl he had loved had played ball and gathered shells. How pretty they had looked, strolling along the beach, their brilliantly colored saris catching the breeze, like butterflies in flight. Sunday after Sunday they had gone to picnic at Pwani Pwani. One Sunday all of them had died...
“Tell me about the Manga Hotel,” he heard June Hastings say. “Is it as nice as it used to be?”
He glanced at her quickly, torn from his reverie. “You know it?”
“I heard of it from someone who had been there years ago, when the Norberts owned it. They aren’t still here, are they?”
Ras smiled. Anyone who had stayed at the Manga would remember the Norberts. “They’re still here. They run the hotel for the government now.” He was certain she was aware that the new regime had confiscated all private lands and possessions. “They have kept things up. It is a handsome building, white stone and coral, built around a courtyard that is always in bloom.”
Purposely he did not mention the door. For some reason he wanted her to see it for herself, unprompted. He was tempted to add that a building, no matter how beautiful, did not make a hotel—only guests could give it life. There had been no guests for a year. The few boarders were foreign technicians who had come in the wake of the revolution, from Cuba and Russia and China. They had come to work, not to play. The lanterns that had always hung in the flame trees, lighting the terrace on Saturday nights, had not been lit in a year.
They had reached the end of the concrete runway where a wall of tropical forest faced them. Ras found the narrow dirt track that led to the banda and parked beside a car already there. It was Masaka’s car. His heartbeat quickened, but in a moment resumed its even beat. How else would the two men assigned to check her luggage get to the airport, if not by car? But it was not like Masaka to let anyone use his.
The shade of the trees was deep and blinding after the brightness of the sun. Inside the banda it seemed darker still.
Two Africans in army uniforms stood behind a table on which her luggage lay—a blue suitcase and one small metal trunk. Their black faces shone in the glow from a pressure lamp whose eerie light did not reach into the far corner to make distinguishable the figure standing there. But a familiar movement of hands washing one another told Ras who it was. A cold stillness touched his heart, and did not go away.
June Hastings unlocked the blue suitcase, and the two men began pawing through the layers of pastel-colored clothes, looking into pockets, peering into the toes of shoes. Before opening the metal trunk, she removed her sunglasses and put them in her purse. The glance with which she touched Ras was fleeting, but in the strange light her eyes looked to him like warm gold. Once before he had known someone with eyes of that color—in Dar es Salaam.
Several times he had gone there by dhow with his father, sailing first to Zanzibar and on to what was then Tanganyika. They would always stay two days—one to sell the copra they had brought from their plantation, another to visit a man named Benji, an old friend of his father. The two men would sit together in the shade of a mango tree, sipping tea, their voices hushed, their heads bent in serious talk. On the other side of the garden Ras would play with Benji’s youngest son, named after his father. They drank orange Fanta and stuffed themselves with sweet cakes and played marbles. Sometimes the girl who lived in the house on the other side of the garden wall would join them. Though she was the same age as they, rarely could she beat them in a marble game. Her hair was the color of dark honey, her eyes pale gold.
Each time they left Benji’s house, the packet of money his father had received from the sale of the copra would be smaller than when he had first received it, but the expression on his father’s face would say that things had gone as he had wished. Ras was always tempted to ask what business his father had with Benji that took so much money, but he did not, knowing that when his father wanted him to know, he would tell him.
Then that time came. “Someday things will not be good on Zemu Island, and you and your mother and your sisters will have to leave. Benji is sending money for me to a bank in Switzerland. It is in my name and in yours. Should something ever happen to me, you will know what to do.” Ras remembered how frightened those words had made him, and how little he had understood their full meaning.
Now he understood, but what good did it do? Those careful plans his father had made in Dar es Salaam, under the mango tree, while the sound of marbles clinked in the warm still air, had died on the beach at Pwani Pwani...
June Hastings turned the key in the lock and lifted the lid of the metal trunk. The two Army men looked up from the blue suitcase and turned to stare at the contents of the trunk, their eyes growing round and then narrow. They leaned closer and then straightened, muttering in Swahili to each other and to the man in the corner of the room.
Masaka left the shadowed security of the banda wall and moved to the table. She looked up, but made no sign that his presence was a surprise to her. Ras felt his breath catch as he wondered if she knew who Masaka was.
The lid of the trunk held a collection of tools: files, tweezers, knives, hooks, brushes, a small rake and shovel. In the bottom of the trunk was a roll of netting, a half dozen liter-sized bottles filled with liquids, and several dozen clear plastic boxes of assorted sizes, separated by layers of cotton wool.
She spoke in quiet, fluent Swahili that surprised them all. “I have come to Zemu Island to gather specimens of seashells. These are tools I need to find the shells and to clean them.” Her hand passed lightly over the contents of the lid and then moved to the items in the lower section. “The large bottles contain cleaning solutions—Clorox, alcohol, vinegar, formaldehyde. These plastic boxes are for the shells after they have been cleaned. Each will be wrapped in a piece of cotton, so it will not be crushed.”
She had turned in the course of her explanation so that her glance touched each of them—the two Army men, Ras, and Masaka. Ras found it difficult to hide the rush of admiration he felt for her intuition. She might have guessed Masaka would not understand a lengthy stream of English, but she could not have known how angry he would have become if his ignorance were revealed.
She withdrew a small blue-bound book from the trunk, with a colored photograph of shells on its cover. Ras read the title: Shells of the East African Coast. She opened to several pages. Each had some text accompanying the photograph of a shell.
“This book describes shells found along the coast of East Africa. I would like to do the same thing about shells in the waters of Zemu Island.”
One of Masaka’s large hands reached out for the book. He looked at its cover and turned to look inside. He snapped the book shut and thrust it at her. “You will make a book like this about Zemu Island?”
“I would like to.”
“Where did you learn to speak Swahili?”
“In Kenya. I taught English in a school north of Nairobi. My pupils knew their own tribal languages and Swahili. I learned Swahili so that I could teach them English.”
Masaka’s hands had begun moving one over the other. Ras saw something building in him, but he did not know what it was, or its cause. His concern stirred. When Masaka spoke again, it would not be with an even voice, but with the beginning of some irrational anger. How would the girl react?
“Kenya has declared Swahili its national language! Why do they still teach English?”
Something in Masaka’s expression had evidently prepared her for the attack. She only frowned thoughtfully. “English is just one of many subjects taught in Kenyan schools, like arithmetic and history and geography.”
Masaka stared at her and then his face closed over. He motioned to the two men standing mute behind the table. The three of them marched out the door.
Ras stared through the open doorway after them. He was not certain whether to feel relief or worry. It was not like Masaka to give way so easily.
“Can we leave now?” Her voice took him from his thoughts.
“Yes, we can go,” he said slowly, unable to free himself of the uneasiness he felt.
“Let’s hurry then.” She smiled at him, a mischievous smile. “I’m so hungry I could eat a horse!”
Her spirit was contagious. He grinned. “You will insult the Norberts with that kind of talk!” They were both suddenly laughing, and he felt strangely free. He had to remind himself that his position had not changed. He was still a prisoner on Zemu Island. But the gloom of that realization was not as great as it usually was.
They put her suitcase and trunk into the compartment of his car. When they were driving off, he turned to her and asked, “Did you know who he was?”
“Masaka? Not right away. It was so dark at first. After the revolution, there were lots of photographs of him in newspapers and magazines, standing on the veranda of the old Sultan’s palace with the new flag draped over the railing. I was scared stiff when I realized who he was.”
“You did not show it.”
“I felt it. I’ve never had a head of state come to the airport and check my luggage before.”
“I told you that you were someone special.”
“You didn’t say that special.” She leaned back, resting her head against the seat. “Ras, are we going to be seeing a lot of Masaka?”
The road from the airport to the Manga Hotel was narrow. He was behind a donkey cart laden with bananas, driving slowly. It was easy to turn and look at her. She had called him Ras, not Rashid. There were some things about her that were indeed puzzling—the easy comfort he felt, the strange sense of the familiar.
He shrugged. “I cannot speak for Masaka. He is not the most predictable of men.”
“Or the most stable. I heard that on the mainland, but I thought it was just gossip, wishful rumor. But it’s not. That man is cracking up. I’m not sure it’s anything to rejoice about. Zemu Island could be in for a lot of trouble with someone like him ruling.”
“That is very dangerous talk.”
“And I should know better. You might turn the car around and head straight back to the airport. Please don’t. I’d be so disappointed. I’ve wanted to visit Zemu Island for a long time. I never thought I’d get the chance. It’s a long way from Boston.”
“Is that where you come from?”
“It’s my mother’s home. We went there to live after my father died ten years ago. He was a British doctor. We traveled a lot when I was small.”
“You had been to Africa then—before the last two years teaching in Kenya?”
“Yes,” was all she said.
The last turn brought them into the center of Zemu town, with its narrow Arab alleys that twisted and cut back on each other. To a stranger they were a mysterious labyrinth, but to Ras they were home.
Some of the old pride stirred in him as he stopped the car in front of the hotel and waited for her reaction. The chalk-white walls appeared almost opalescent in the brilliance of the noonday sun. At intervals bougainvillea clung and tumbled in scarlet cascades. The stairway entrance ascended to a wide arch embracing a massive double door carved of ebony. Spikes of polished brass were embedded in the oiled wood and gleamed in the equatorial sunlight.
She was silent beside him, staring, her profile still. After a while she turned. Her eyes were shining. “It’s magnificent. I’ve never seen anything like it. And you were right—it would take an elephant to batter that door down.”
He stared at her. “An elephant—I—”
Her soft brown-gold eyes gleamed with mischief. “You don’t remember? How absolutely horrid of you!”
How absolutely horrid of you! Where had he heard those words?
Then he heard the clink of glass against glass. He saw the blue marble fly from his hand, hit the white one swirled with red, and split it in two. “How absolutely horrid of you!” she had cried, stamping her foot and running off, disappearing behind the garden wall.
The great double door swung open, splashing reflections of sun onto their faces. An eager young African in a starched white uniform and red velour fez came down the steps and opened the car door on her side. “Jambo, Memsab. Jambo, Bwana. Welcome to Manga Hotel.”
Winky Norbert was waiting for them at the desk inside. He shook Ras’s hand and smiled at the pretty girl with him. His wiry mustache twitched. “Good you didn’t get here a while ago. Sheer bedlam with that tour. Couldn’t please one of them, no less the lot. If they can’t give Zemu more than four hours, I’d rather they stayed away.”
“That’ll do with the complaining, Winky.” Margaret Norbert appeared. “You know very well you loved every minute of it. You haven’t been so chipper since the last tour. Twenty-nine lunches are twenty-nine lunches. Makes me feel we’re still running a hotel.”
She turned to June with a smile that deepened the wrinkles around her mouth and eyes. At fifty-five she was still an attractive woman. “Welcome to the Manga. I don’t have to guess who you are. You’re June Hastings, our first real guest in a long time.”
June smiled. “Thank you. It’s as lovely here as I heard it would be. Is there any chance you’ve given me a room overlooking the courtyard?”
“Take your pick. You can have one next to the Cubans or across from the Russians. The Chinese prefer the hotel down the street.”
Winky patted his wife’s arm. “Stop twigging the girl, Maggie.” Then looking at June, “We’ve given you a second-floor room that looks right out onto a forest of bougainvillea. I think you’ll like it.”
The road to Pwani Pwani wound along the edge of coconut plantations and through the ripening groves of clove trees. The warm humid air was heavy with the fragrance of an earlier crop, already harvested and drying in the sun. June had changed into a short blue dress that bared her suntanned arms. She was leaning back against the seat, her hair blowing in the breeze. It was the first time they had been alone since their arrival at the hotel.
“You’ve had time to remember,” she said.
“I’d never forgotten. But it was better to pretend. If I had allowed myself to think, I could not have let you come. This way it has happened without my really knowing.”
“It’s that bad here then?”
“Why have you come?”
“Benji sent me.”
“Benji? Benji died three years ago.”
“I’m talking about Benji the son.”
Ras thought of the small boy with the dark eyes with whom he had shot marbles and drunk orange Fanta and gorged himself on sweet cakes—he was a man now. The last time Ras had been to Dar es Salaam, young Benji had been at school in England.
“Where is Benji now?”
“I saw him in Nairobi, but he was leaving for New York.” Nairobi—New York—and he could not even go to Zanzibar. “Benji sent you. Why?”
“To find out what is happening on Zemu Island. No one on the outside really knows. Only a little has gotten out. I wasn’t honest with you when I said I’d not heard of Yukano— I have heard of him. Some people think he is the man who should be ruling Zemu Island instead of Masaka. He would allow the British to return. He would seek American aid, not only Communist.”
“What would he do for the Indians? Give them back their lives?” He’d spoken so bitterly that he knew she could make no reply. “Benji has a plan?” he asked softly.
“Not just Benji alone. There are others. But they need someone they can count on in Zemu. Benji wants to know if you will help.”
“In what way? To make Yukano head of Zemu Island?”
“You mean he is an African,” she said quietly.
He felt the bite of her words, the accusation in them and the challenge. She was no stranger to East African politics. She knew the deep animus that lay between African and Indian. She knew the tumult and bloodshed that had thrust the African into power. For those who had been born to the old way, it would never be easy to accept black authority; but to fight it, or pretend that was not the way the tide ran, would be stupid.
“I know the differences between men,” he said. “There is little likeness between Masaka and Yukano except for the color of their skin. Zemu will rot under the rule of a man like Masaka. I do not know that it will ever flourish as it once did, but with someone like Yukano there would at least be a chance.” He fell silent.
“But how?” he asked after a while. “It would not be enough merely to get rid of Masaka. They would only put someone else like him in his place. And it would be dangerous—more dangerous than you can imagine. Masaka may be stupid, but those behind him are not. I do not think it was his own intelligence that made him suspicious of your visit. He was warned.”
She smiled mischievously. “But after today, no one will be suspicious.”
“What makes you say so?”
“Today we are going shell gathering—and we’ll be watched. After they see all the trouble we go to to get a few shells they will be convinced that shells are the sole reason for my visit.”
“Then it is not a pretense?”
“It is, and it isn’t. Marine biology is my field. I will write a book about the shells I find on Zemu Island. It will be published, and copies will be sent to the government here. If any doubt over the purpose of my visit still lingers, it will disappear when copies of the book arrive. Yukano went a bit overboard when he talked of Olduvai Gorge—Africans are impressed by such things. They are impressed by books even when they can’t read them.
“But Masaka will be reassured—and so will the Cubans and the Russians. Tours from Western nations will begin to come to Zemu Island, and word will spread that Zemu Island is a lovely place. The government will become complacent and think that people have forgotten how Masaka came into power. It will assume there is no one interested enough in the welfare of this small piece of land floating in the Indian Ocean to plan a counterrevolution.”
“Those are large words,” he said. “The idea is larger still. You are talking about a long time—many months, perhaps years.”
“I don’t think Benji or the others involved with him have any illusions that it will be easy, that it will not take months of careful planning. They also know they cannot do it without help from someone here on the island—from you. Your position as Director of Tourism allows you to receive and send letters, a privilege others on Zemu are denied. It is a ready means of communication which cannot be duplicated with anyone else here.”
“But every letter I receive or write is censored. They are not as naive as you think.”
She shook her head. “I know. We would use a code.”
He listened to her unfold a plan that could not work without him. It was a mad plan that had greater chance of failure than of success—but it offered hope, some hope. Ras realized that until she had come, he’d had no hope, no hope at all.
They had almost reached the place where he should turn off onto a narrow track that would take them to Pwani Pwani. He had slowed down, looking for it. It would be grown over now—perhaps they would have to leave the car and walk in— it would be difficult with the metal trunk. Ah, there it was—the place marked by a dead tree. The growth was not so thick that he could not drive through part of the way.
“Close your window so you will not get scratched,” he said, rolling up his own. Branches strung with thorny vines and moss arched across the once open path. The perfume of ripening guavas had drifted into the car and touched his mind with memory—he had been picking guavas when the first shot came. Other shots followed, the bullets skipping like footsteps across the sand. Like dolls, his mother and the girls had fallen, brilliant piles of crumpled saris on the sand. Then his father, like a dervish, spinning, falling, coughing, dying on the sand. Ras was flattened in the underbrush of vines, the guavas he had picked and put in the front of his shirt squashed and wet and oozing against his chest, warm from the sun, warm like the blood in which his father lay. Pain exploded in his leg. Blackness passed over him, but in his unconsciousness he strained to remember the familiar face among the bearded strangers, the African whose gun had aimed and with lust had killed—Masaka...
His hands were clenched around the steering wheel, whitening his knuckles and making the muscles of his forearms bulge. He stared through the windshield at the beach, at water glimmering through the suddenly denser tangle of green. He stopped the car, got out, and reached under the seat for the panga he kept there. The scent of guavas filled his nostrils as he struck at the vines that choked the path. The broad blade sliced through the ropy lengths as if they were bits of string. Sap oozed and trickled over his hands and arms.
When the path was clear, his arms fell to his sides, the point of the panga stuck in the sand beside his foot. His chest heaving, he turned and saw her standing by the car, watching him with her soft golden eyes, questioning, but not asking.
“We always came here to Pwani Pwani—my family. It was our special place. They all died here that first day of the revolution. I was picking guavas. They were walking along the sand. I have not been back, not until today.” His dark eyes looked deep into hers. “It is time. I am ready.”
She smiled gently and held out her hand. “Let’s go then. There is lots to do.”
They each took a handle of the metal trunk and carried it onto the beach where they placed it in the shade of a palm tree. He left her to open it while he returned for the two buckets she had borrowed from the Norberts.
Along the way he glanced on both sides into the dense tropical growth for a sign of anyone hiding there. They would be watched, but they would never know by whom or by how many. Once before, the forest had camouflaged the presence of the enemy.
He started back toward the beach, carrying the buckets. He spied the tree where he had left her and saw the trunk as it had been, unopened. Then he saw her arm raised in the water, waving to him, splashing. He heard her voice and her laughter. He tore off his clothes and went racing into the waves. In a few moments, he was shoveling and she was using the rake.
“Here’s a beauty,” she cried. “Look at it.” She held a brown and white spiraled shell in the palm of her hand.
“There must be hundreds of them just like that all over the beach.”
“They’d be chipped or cracked. The shells I take back must be perfect.” She dropped it into the bucket of formaldehyde solution and reached for a notebook. “Speckled Turret Shell,” she said aloud, “otherwise known as Terebra oculata.”
“What about this one?” he said, extending his hand. She reached for it without looking.
“You don’t take me seriously at all!” He could almost see her foot stamp.
“Oh, but I do,” he said, tossing the small stone away and giving her a handful of shells he had been saving.
She grinned at him, and then set about recording the names in her notebook.
When the buckets were almost full, she rose. “I want to set some traps in the rocks close to shore. Some shells are nocturnal. It won’t take long. Then we can swim until the sun goes down, and come back tomorrow.”
She cut squares from the roll of netting that had been in the trunk and with some thin wire gathered them into makeshift baskets. A small piece of the meat from the Norberts’ kitchen served as bait. They laid the traps together, anchoring them with small stones. As they worked, their heads were close, almost touching. She spoke softly. “They’re watching, I know. But they are stupid—we could be setting mines and they wouldn’t know. Some day we will.”
She looked up and her eyes held his for a moment, the expression in them intent and serious. Then in the next instant her head tossed and she was running into the water.
The sun was low in the sky, a fiery orange ball that lit the surface of the transparent pale-green sea with strands of orange and gold. Between the breaking waves the water flowed like the soft folds of an iridescent sari. Ras raced after her and dove into the water, feeling the salt of it sting his eyes, blurring the memory that had begun of a girl he had once loved, a girl who had worn a sari of green threaded with bronze and gold on the last day of her life.
He swam alongside her. “Can you swim to those rocks out there? At the last one there is a deep pool and a cavern. If the light is right it is a wonderful sight.”
Drops of water clinging to her eyelashes sparkled and flew away when she nodded and began an easy stroke beside him.
It was a long time since he’d made the dive, and he wanted to be certain the passage was still clear, certain no rock had dislodged itself. He had warned her to let him lead the way. Her hand was in his as they swam underwater toward an archway of rock leading under a ledge in the rock ceiling.
It was the purple coral he wanted her to see, the sea anemones and the swaying ferns whose undulations were said to have teased love-starved sailors into thinking they were mermaids. It was a perfect time; the sun and tide were just right. There was a small space where they could rise to the surface and rest before they dove again.
“I’ve never seen purple coral before,” she said.
“It is purple only in the water. It turns brown when it is in the air.”
He was ready to dive again, anxious to show her more.
“Wait, Ras. The sun will set soon. This is a good place to talk. No one can hear us, no one can see. There are other things you must know—about Yukano and the money that is yours in Switzerland—and the code. It’s important that you know the code right away. Should anything happen to me, then you could still get in touch with Benji.”
“Nothing will happen to you.”
She grinned. “I could drown.”
He shook his head. “You swim too well.” He smiled to himself, measuring the differences between them. She thought of setting mines in the sea and he saw saris in the sea. He wanted to show her the mysteries of an underwater grotto he had explored as a child and she wanted to plan a revolution. “This is not the place. The opening in the rocks above us is like a horn, and our words would be carried across the island.”
She looked at him, her eyes doubtful, but he knew she could not take the chance. She needed him. Benji needed him. He would be their tool, as Masaka had been the tool of the Cubans. Was there a difference? Would the people of Zemu Island feel any more loyalty to the man whom counterrevolutionaries would put in the Sultan’s palace than they did to Masaka? How many people would die?—Africans this time.
Despite his questions, he knew he would do what Benji asked. Not because he wanted revenge, or because success of the counterrevolution would make him free, but because it gave him hope. And without hope, no man can live and stay whole.
He took her hand, wishing he could explain what her coming to Zemu Island meant to him. But even if he were able to say it, he was afraid she would think him sentimental and not ready for the task that lay ahead of him.
“We have time for one more dive, and then we must go while there is still light.”
They swam toward the shore in the sun’s last golden path. In minutes night would fall. They left the water and felt the evening air was cool. She began to run, her wet hair streaming, calling to him, laughing, “Catch me if you can!”
A breeze stirred and furled the water’s waves. Dark leaves fluttered and shadows moved at the forest’s edge. Bearded men who looked like trees advanced across the sand. As if in a nightmare, he stood immobile.
He heard shots, her one sharp cry, but he looked away, so as not to see her body lying crumpled on the sand.