Jacques thought that he would never get used to sleeping with her. To begin with, Sarah was a sprawler: in the middle of sleep she would fling out an arm, swat, right across his chest or throat or face, or a long leg would suddenly swing over his hip as he stealthily prepared to roll over away from her. Her arms and legs seemed to anticipate his every move, and if he inched away from her as far as he could go without falling off the bed, she pursued, little by little, until finally arms and legs enfolded him in a loose, amorous embrace and her curly head burrowed into him. In the mornings she sprang out of sleep like a child, clear-eyed and happy, her breath when she kissed him as sweet and minty as a cold summer drink. Then, finally, after a month or so of waking up to stiff necks and unexpected sensitive spots on his face and body, of interrupted sleep and hours of lying still in the darkness, smoking a solitary cigarette, listening to the tranquil rhythm of her breathing, he found that he could no longer sleep without her and the tender, entangling warmth of her naked limbs.
In December when he had to make a trip to Brussels to meet with Janine’s lawyers and to celebrate Saint Nicholas Day with Suzanne, he thought the loneliness of the hotel bed would drive him mad. He paced the floor of the dimly lit room, smoked, had another whisky, worked out a dozen financial scenarios on his calculator, and finally sat morosely in front of the television and watched street vendors selling pieces of the Berlin Wall on CNN and protest riots in the capital of Romania.
In Kinshasa their domestic arrangements were haphazard. During the week, Jacques spent most nights at Sarah’s apartment, and on the weekends they were together in the house on the river. Malu, Sarah’s servant, developed a possessive streak, pointedly removing all evidence of Jacques’ presence from the bathroom, carefully stowing his toilet articles and shaving gear in a cabinet as soon as Jacques left the apartment in the morning, and rearranging Sarah’s things on the bathroom counter as they had been before—when Madame Sarah lived alone.
Under Sarah’s care the beauty of old Albert Delpech’s house on the river came alive again, the marble floors polished to a gleaming finish, the dramatic flowers of the tropics—birds of paradise, orchids, poinsettia, plumbago, Angel’s trumpets—in sparkling crystal vases, and the kitchen clean, orderly and well stocked with supplies. Sarah could not imagine a life filled with more tranquility and beauty. The house servants kept their white uniforms immaculate and stiffly starched, and Dieudonné gave up his hashish in favor of the Dunhill cigarettes in malachite cigarette boxes scattered around the house.
Dieudonné was happy again. A Madame in the house! In the mornings Sarah, wearing a long robe, fresh from her morning shower, her hair still wet and clinging to her head, would come out to join Jacques on the terrace overlooking the river, and Dieudonné would hold her chair back, beaming as she took her seat. For a moment, he would stand watching the two of them, a silly grin on his face as if he had just that moment stumbled upon a great secret. As a boy, before he left his village for the city, Dieudonné’s front teeth had been filed down to sharp points so that when he smiled, he looked like a euphoric vampire, eager to get on with his feeding. After serving them breakfast, he would excuse himself and let Alphonse take his place. Later, they would hear him in the far-off living room, playing his Simon and Garfunkel tape and humming and singing to 99 Miles from L.A. as he mopped the marble floors. The only word he could understand well enough to repeat was “L.A.,” which he sang out loudly at brisk intervals, like an ecstatic holy roller shouting “Amen!”
In October the rains had come back, and in the night Jacques would waken to the drumming on the roof and the roar of water in the rain ditches and the smell of wet earth, and his heart would lift as when he was a child. In the mornings the air would be pure and clean, expectant, waiting for the sun to release the heady fragrance of the garden.
Late one lazy Sunday afternoon, as Jacques and Sarah lay reading on lounge chairs on the terrace, the distended white clouds over the river swelled together and turned dark and the winds soughed despondently through the palm trees and tossed soft pink and white frangipani blossoms, like tiny Easter eggs, across the lawn. They closed their books and, with their toes, hunted under their chairs for their sandals. Down the river, near the rapids and the cliffs where Mobutu’s residence overlooked the river, they could see an opaque gray wall of rain moving over the waters.
“Not yet. Don’t go in,” Jacques said, reaching out and taking her hand.
The wall of rain kept coming closer, picking up speed; the reeds along the shore rattled and cowered under the wind. Silently, they waited. To Jacques, the loud, lashing sound of the approaching rain was exciting, like the roar and crash of the rapids on the river. The rain seemed to have spotted them on the terrace; it suddenly turned slightly and raced toward them. On it came, faster and faster. Then, abruptly, the rain stopped at the edge of the terrace and pounded away, like a jogger running in place. They could feel the cool spray on their faces. Behind the wall of rain they could see nothing—the river, the reeds, the garden, rained into nothingness.
They stood together, holding hands, watching, ready to scurry into the house, should the rain come forward. Instead, after a pause, as if its curiosity had been satisfied, the wall of rain seemed to shrug and turn its back on them, veering rapidly across the river toward Brazzaville.
Sarah laughed in delighted surprise, and he laughed because she had. Many times before, he had seen rains in Africa behave in peculiar ways, but something about the wall of rain troubled him, and he gazed after it long after the banks of Brazzaville had disappeared from sight.