At the Air Zaïre check-in counter at the airport in Brussels an African woman, her head a mound of drooping coils of spaghetti-thin braids, told the young American woman that the flight to Kinshasa had been canceled. “Until when? Tomorrow?” Sarah Laforge asked, shifting her red backpack. The woman shrugged her shoulders and, her elbows resting on the counter, curved her long, graceful hands into a broad cup as if a great question mark rested there. “Réquisitionné,” she said. She straightened up and reached for a pencil. “Réquisitionné,” she repeated, scratching her head thoughtfully with the pencil.
“Requisitioned,” a swarthy man behind Sarah said in a loud voice. He was wearing an embroidered tropical shirt like those Sarah had seen in small ads alongside the short stories in the New Yorker. “Commandeered by le Guide. Mobutu and his barons off on a toot. To Disneyland or Monaco or wherever. Better get yourself a seat on UTA to Brazzaville. If you’ve got a visa,” he said, eyeing her shiny black diplomatic passport. He slung his garment bag over his shoulder. “Buy you a drink?” he said.
By two o’clock Sarah had phoned the American embassy with her new travel information to be telexed to Kinshasa and had had her tickets rewritten for a flight on TWA to Nairobi where she would pick up an Air Zaïre flight to Kinshasa. She had not slept on the plane from Washington to Brussels, and now, pushing her carry-on bag forward with her foot as she waited in the line to clear passport and security checks, she felt grimy and fatigued. She tried to concentrate on the New York Times someone had abandoned during the night on the flight over, the news of Washington and New York already distant and curiously uninteresting.
The tall young man in front of her turned out to be African, not American as she had assumed. He passed over a green passport to the immigration officer, a pallid middle-aged woman with wisps of hair creeping down her neck, and stood speaking to her in English with an accent Sarah had never heard before. Abruptly, the woman began to yell at the tall young African in Flemish and in French, neither of which the young man appeared to understand. The line broke out in groans and complaints, until Sarah stepped forward and, using the young man’s passport, filled out an embarkation card for him.
TWA had given her a lunch voucher, and she had meant to find a quiet corner in the snack bar to read or doze before boarding, but the grateful young man picked up her cumbersome bags and followed her into the crowded restaurant.
They found a table smeared with catsup and littered with plastic plates and crumpled paper napkins. While Sarah remained with her bags, the young man, who called himself Thomas—though the name she had copied from his passport was quite different—collected sandwiches from the counter.
They tried to talk, but they had such difficulty understanding each other’s English that they soon subsided into mostly strenuous smiles and energetic nodding and more smiles. He had just finished six months in North Carolina, at least that was what she thought he said, where he had played basketball. Now he was on his way home to Tanzania. In Tanzania he was a student. He asked whether she was a student, too, and when she tried to explain that she was a diplomat of sorts, showing him her new diplomatic passport, he stared at it blankly as if he wondered what this might have to do with her being a student. And when she told him that she was going to Africa as a cultural attaché at the American Embassy, he smiled and nodded so ecstatically that she knew he had no idea what she was talking about.
Sarah’s head ached, and she felt dirty sitting in the cluttered, brightly lighted snack bar. Her first meeting with an African, and all she could think of was getting away to some quiet place so that she could think her own thoughts. Guilt made her irritable.
“I must go,” she said, finally, gathering up her bags.
“Let me help,” he said, “Thank you, for the card, for the writing. One day we meet in America, yes, in America.”
In the women’s lounge, overwhelmed with self-doubt, she brushed her teeth and washed her face, leaning under the faucet and letting the cold water pour over her face. Then, she dozed in a straight-backed chair near the door until the attendant came back and reclaimed it.
Sarah had just handed her boarding pass to the attendant at the gate when she heard a familiar voice calling “Mees! Mees!”
It was Thomas, all smiles and nods.
“Same plane,” he said. “Same, same!” He jiggled and smiled ecstatically at this miracle.
“Wonderful,” Sarah said, so sincerely that she surprised herself, feeling immediately uplifted by the thought that she had somehow been given a second chance, a chance to prove to herself that she was as patient, generous, and sympathetic to others, particularly people of the Third World, as she had always believed.
At twenty-eight she felt almost desperate to satisfy herself that she possessed the virtues and values that she prized most in others. She had already tried and failed. She had taken the fiasco of her abortive Peace Corps stint as a galling personal failure. On her way to her post in Sri Lanka, she had stopped over in India for a week of sightseeing with a friend and had come down with a case of dysentery so tenacious that she was shipped back home. She never got to Sri Lanka. The cards and letters of her friends ardently recounting their brave Peace Corps projects seemed to mock her own commitment to do something worthwhile.
Now Africa and Thomas were giving her a second chance. She was convinced that her assignment in Africa would be her personal proving ground, and she was elated.
Nonetheless, when Thomas, in the crowded plane, could not persuade the stewardess to change his seat so that they could sit together, Sarah was not disappointed. Exhausted, she fell asleep before the plane had finished its bumpy, creaking roll down the tarmac.
Hours later, she was awakened in the darkened cabin of the plane.
Thomas stood over her, pushing roughly against her shoulder. “Mees! Mees!” People around her stirred and shifted their pillows. He was not trying to keep his voice down. “Mees! Mees!”
Sarah stared uncomprehendingly up at him. She had been dreaming that she was sleeping on a train when suddenly the train hit a patch of rough track that banged her against the window.
“Come!” He pulled at her arm. Obediently, Sarah, stupefied with sleep, got to her feet and walked stiffly behind him toward the rear of the plane. The lights had been turned off, and most of the window shades had been drawn down for the movie. In a small halo of light three stewardesses in their stocking feet sat smoking and talking together.
Thomas led her to the window of an exit door. He leaned over and peered out. “Look!” he said. He watched her face intently as she stepped forward. At first she saw nothing, her eyes caught by a rim of saffron pink clouds, then she realized with surprise that it was daylight, that she had slept the hours of European darkness away.
Suddenly, she beheld, reaching up from down below, a pinnacle of pearly white snow tinged on one flank with the saffron pink of the clouds. “Mount Kilimanjaro,” Thomas said happily, “Look, Mees, look!”
The plane seemed to hover in place, the majestic peak staring back at her, glinting proudly in the morning sun. Sarah reached up and held on to the rim of the window and swung her face down closer to the pane. The pinkish glow on the mountain shifted a little, and a terrible dread suddenly overwhelmed her, like a monstrous wave, rising from the depths and pulling her under. The dread had something to do with Africa, but it was all the more frightening because she did not truly know its name. She thought for a moment that she would faint, or cry the quiet, deep-welling tears of endless mourning.
“Kilimanjaro!” Thomas said behind her. “The plane circles. For hour now. Just circles.”
Sarah drew back and turned away from the window. “Ahhh,” she heard Thomas say sadly as she walked back to her seat.
She found her seat and pulled up the blanket that a stewardess must have draped over her during the night. She closed her eyes but knew that she could not sleep. Sorrow enveloped her like a thick, choking fog. She flicked on her light. On the bottom of the tray table in front of her someone had scratched out the word vest so that the sentence read “Your life is under your seat.” She stared at the tray and repeated under her breath, “Your life is under your seat.” It was so absurd that she began to cry. She felt the way she had the one time Michael had talked her into trying a drug that his friend in the Chemistry Department had concocted for him. She had felt insubstantial, lost, and hopeless, and she had cried and cried until Michael, distraught but sober, had driven her to the beach where they walked until dawn. Afterwards, Michael wrote a poem about it. In the beginning, in the early years, Michael wrote poems for her and stuck them with magnets on the refrigerator door the way proud parents stick up photos and the childish drawings of their sons and daughters.
A steward came down the aisle. Sarah bent over and pretended to be looking for something in her carry-on bag.
Michael Lord. Her name was Sarah Elizabeth Laforge Lord. That was her real name, but her passport read Sarah Elizabeth Laforge. No one had ever called her Sarah Lord, and no one ever would now. At Yale, after they were married, she would have been embarrassed to change her name to Michael’s. Women didn’t do that anymore. Even Michael, when he wrote to her during the summer weeks she spent with her parents in Maine, addressed his letters to “Sarah Laforge.” Afterwards, her mother had said with the finality of her cultured New England accent, “You are too young to call yourself a widow, darling,” and Sarah’s father had agreed. In the New Haven papers, though, they had called her a widow. A widow baffled by her husband’s suicide. Graduate student’s widow finds suicide note pinned to bulletin board over husband’s desk. And a final poem stuck on the refrigerator door. The police hadn’t seen that. The grieving widow. Notice to all students: the top floor and stairways leading to the top floor of Sterling Memorial Library will be closed. No one would be allowed out on the tiny Gothic parapet terraces now. Only maintenance men. A student running past the library on his way to Wawa’s for junk food had slipped and fallen in a sticky puddle on the sidewalk, had found Michael’s body slumped over the fence, a bloody spike rising like a spear from his back. It was an image that came back unbidden at blank moments.
The plane creaked and bells chimed softly along the dimly lit aisles. Sarah blinked as the overhead lights were turned on. A streak of pale sunshine fell across her lap from a window across the aisle. The passengers around her still slept. As she had slept that crisp night in April when Michael plunged from the tower to the waiting black iron paling below. She had not stayed up for him that particular night. She had not looked at the note on the bulletin board or the poem on the refrigerator door. She had slept soundly until the policemen rang the doorbell at two o’clock in the morning.
“Michael was manic-depressive, darling. Everyone could see that,” Mother said. But Sarah hadn’t seen it at all. To her Michael was brilliant and intense, a published poet already.
Stewardesses, looking puffy and faded, were pushing breakfast carts through the aisles.
“I don’t know why you persist in wearing that wedding band,” Mother had said. “It gives an altogether false impression.”
“A false impression of what?” Sarah had asked.
“That you’re married. When people see that ring, they’ll say, she’s married, and that’s that.”
Sarah had kept the ring. It seemed such a small thing. Michael had left so few traces in her life. Had it not been for the ring and the sorrow, she could have persuaded herself that he had never existed at all.