By noon the next day Sarah’s face and body looked like raw meat. Fat blisters, puffy with fluid, spread over her back and chest and thighs. Phil Olmstead covered his face with his hands when he saw her and sent her off to the embassy doctor. That evening her lips were so blistered and sore that she cringed when Jacques kissed her.
At lunch and in the evening Jacques brought over meals prepared by Dieudonné. Only when he punched the button for the eighth floor in the rickety elevator of her building, did his life seem to take heart again, in those few hours, alone with her, on the balcony overlooking the river.
In the shadows of evening, as sugar bats swirled and chattered in the trees below, they sat close together and talked quietly, sometimes holding hands, sometimes searching each other’s faces in the half-light of the terrace. Sarah listened as Jacques unfolded the story of his childhood in the then Belgian Congo, his unhappy school years in Belgium, sent into “exile,” as he called it, by his father because of the tribal conflicts after independence, and about how he still felt like a foreigner in Europe. He spoke of his children, his little girls, but never of his marriage, never of his wife. In a rush of homely detail he recounted anecdotes about the little girls as if he had just tucked them into bed for the night before coming over to see her, and it was with a shock that Sarah learned, through an inadvertent question, that one of the girls was in fact dead, drowned in the swimming pool, her tiny foot caught behind the last rung of the poolside ladder.
One night a shooting star burst across the sooty skies trailing a spray of greenish gold and plunged into the darkness beyond Brazzaville. Jacques lifted Sarah’s hand and kissed it gently.
“Make a wish,” he said.
“I already have.”
With a stab of pain she remembered Gussie’s remark that all the terrific men in Kinshasa were married. A remark, like so many others, that she had dismissed at the time, smug, complacent, certain that it could never have anything to do with her or her life. And now it did. There was a steadiness about him, a goodness, a promise that he would protect her, though she could not imagine what she would ever have to fear in this sun-filled land. With Michael she had been the steady one, the responsible one, she who coaxed him out of his threatening moods, she who brought order and calm into their lives. She reached out and touched Jacques’ face. Make a wish. Make a wish. Yes. She would not walk away from this kind of happiness. Never. She would take him any way she could get him. Any way at all.
On Wednesday Rick Riveira’s girlfriend Sue, who worked for the Wall Street Journal, called him from Johannesburg to say that she had heard there was great surfing in Durban. Why not come down? she said. Riveira had slept late after a party at the Marine house of the American embassy and had spent the afternoon at the ivory market shopping for his mother and his aunt Tilly in Brooklyn. Several hundred words on Zaïre, that’s why I can’t come down, Riveira said. But before midnight Sue had faxed him everything on Zaïre that she could dig out of her database, and by six the next morning Rick Riveira had put together and faxed a long by-lined article that later appeared on page seven of the Sunday edition of the Times. He worked a long time trying to find a synonym for saying that Mobutu’s fortune “equals the national debt” and finally came up with “amounts to exactly the national debt,” but the copy editor thought that sounded clumsy, that it read better as “equals the national debt,” and changed the text accordingly. At ten o’clock Riveira was having his first beer of the day on the continuation of Sabena’s flight to Johannesburg, having paid a check-in clerk at the airport two hundred dollars to free up a seat by bumping someone.
Dieudonné had to come into the bedroom and shake Jacques awake. “Téléphone, patron, téléphone.”
It was Sarah, calling from an embassy radio phone in the Chevrolet station wagon.
“I’m flying to Lubumbashi,” she said breathlessly. She sounded distraught.
“What?”
“Lubumbashi. I’m on my way there. The flight leaves in thirty minutes.”
“What for?”
“I . . . it’s kind of complicated, but I have to accompany a group of musicians out there. Bluegrass musicians.”
“What’s that?”
“Bluegrass singers. It’s a kind of American music. They’re giving a concert there at the cultural center.”
“In Lubumbashi? Blue . . .”
“Bluegrass.”
“Bluegrass singers in Lubumbashi? What for?”
“It’s a cultural thing. I’ll explain later. Uh, Phil managed them through the concert at the ambassador’s residence on Wednesday, by himself, and now, well, he says he can’t. I was scheduled to go, anyway, but I thought with the sunburn and all. Phil has a bridge tournament or something like that. It’s very important, he says.”
She sounded disconsolate.
“How long will you be gone?”
“Until the plane comes back. Wednesday.”
Jacques rolled over onto his back and stared at the ceiling. “God, Sarah, Wednesday!” he said.