Executive Assistant (Logistical and Security). It is not a glamorous position in the Foreign Service, and not a lucrative one either. Starting salaries range from $33,000 to $45,911, depending on qualifications and location of assignment. Miranda was right at the bottom of the scale.
The post in Tanzania entailed work as a security specialist in the areas of facility protection, investigation, information management, and retention and training of local staff. The core of the job was ensuring protection for embassy facilities and personnel from technical espionage, acts of terrorism and crime.
She hoped, before long, to move on to the DS training scheme for special agents, who pursued counter-intelligence, antiterrorist and other investigations from US embassies worldwide. In the meantime, she spent much of her time checking electronic and electromagnetic security systems, filling in forms and a daily security register (called the day book), making sure the local staff were performing their functions – and, in the evenings, going to parties, of which there were many.
With her long dark hair and green eyes, Miranda attracted much male attention at the round of diplomatic functions which substituted for a social life in a posting like Dar. The African diplomats, many of whom preferred the direct approach (‘Do you have a husband?’ – ‘Will you marry me?’), often just startled her. She found it troublesome coping with their physical frankness, but also faintly amusing. She felt a little guilty about this, but it couldn’t be helped. It was just one of the many ways in which the colour bar continued to operate subliminally.
Nobly, she allowed herself to feel a slight thrill, not sexual exactly, but something approaching it, about Abdi, the tall Somali deputy ambassador, who followed her across the room at parties like a long brown greyhound.
‘Never was anything better named,’ Ray had remarked drily, on first observing this now familiar scene, ‘than a cocktail party.’
At first she hadn’t understood what he meant, then flushed with embarrassment when he’d explained.
‘Cocks tailing tail. Not mine, I’m afraid. Larry Durrell.’
Miranda didn’t know who Larry Durrell was, but she had got to know Ray Delahoya pretty well in those first few months of her posting. Big, plaid-shirted Ray was the embassy comms man, the communications specialist who maintained the forest of satellite dishes and other aerials that covered the roof of the building. He had a little moustache and was excitably inquisitive, with a habit of asking personal questions. Ray wasn’t regarded as a team player by the more senior members of chancery. He encouraged her to take her training – especially the intelligence, ‘tradecraft’ side of it – with a pinch of salt.
‘You don’t want to get too overawed by the mystique of all that,’ he said one morning, when they happened to arrive together at the embassy car park.
They were walking across the lawn in front of the chancery, along a path scattered with chipped bark. Either side, rows of oleander and agapanthus broadcast their blossom, vivid pinks and blues.
‘If you do, you’ll end up seeing things. Threats in every corner. Truth is, most of our job here is just routine management.’
The path was sodden with sprinkler water. In the flower beds, she noticed, translucent droplets beaded the spear-like leaves of the agapanthus. Holding their position, as if they might never fall, they fixed hypnotically on the eye, making one want to stand and stare.
‘What do you mean?’ she asked. Feeling light-headed, she chided herself for not having had enough for breakfast.
‘We just have to keep the machine rolling. The great machine of state.’
She gathered herself, businesslike. ‘But there are dangers, Ray. That’s why I’m here, that’s the point of my job. America has only five per cent of the world’s population but is the subject of thirty-six per cent of terrorist attacks.’
Another bloom caught her eye. Red, long-stemmed and voluminous, it was one of a distinct variety of hibiscus planted in the embassy gardens. Again her mind dissolved – into Gauguin, South Pacific, the love flower in the hair of Polynesian girls – such totemic maidens, determined by men for their pleasure, as she knew she never could be.
‘Nifty numbers, baby. I don’t know. Sometimes I think the administration needs to have enemies in order to function.’
They had reached the entrance to the chancery. Forgetting about the red spray as suddenly as it had gripped her, Miranda found herself bristling at his cynicism.
‘We have to defend our way of life. That’s nothing to be ashamed of.’
She paused at the electronic turnstile. Both searched for their pass cards.
‘Really got to you in training, didn’t they?’ Ray chuckled, as they passed through.
They stopped on the other side. ‘Listen,’ he said. He pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket with a flourish and began cleaning his spectacles. ‘… you’ll be disappointed with a career in foreign service if you go about thinking you’re a mixture of George Washington and Mata Hari.’
‘I don’t think like that! I just want to take my job seriously.’
‘Hey, take it easy.’ Ray replaced his spectacles. ‘I didn’t mean to upset you. Sorry – guess I’m just getting my own anxieties off my chest. You know, I’ve wanted to work in foreign service ever since I could tell time. Now I am, and it doesn’t really live up to all I hoped. It doesn’t help my being …’
He dried up.
Miranda smiled and patted him on the arm. ‘Come on, let’s get some coffee.’
They began climbing the stairs, past windows which, cut like tombstones in the concrete, cast long, thin slices of light on the opposite wall.
*
Delahoya was funny, and most of the time she liked being round him. She enjoyed the way Ray would suddenly surf off on the wave of his own conversation. Like a conjuring trick – some sleight of hand with a tin tray and handkerchiefs – it would whisk the two of them out of the pious diplomatic environment. There was nobody else at the embassy with whom she could conceivably find herself talking Pocahontas action-figure dolls, Starbucks or the Olsen twins.
She and Ray often went shopping together at the PX, as the embassy store was called: it was a military acronym for ‘Post Exchange’, generally a store on a military base, which the embassy counted as, because of the presence of the Marines.
Ray was promiscuous in his cultural references. She couldn’t keep up. ‘The dons live well in the kawledge,’ he’d say, whenever their trolleys bumped in the aisles of the PX, between racks filled with everything from vacuum-packed steaks to track shoes and the latest CDs. It was a line of poetry, apparently, that he told her always came into his head when he saw all the products on the shelves.
If there was profusion inside the compound, the opposite was true outside. They were in one of the poorest countries in the world. She had seen the beggars on the streets: the aged ones a pile of rag and limb on the sidewalk, the children lifting filthy hand to filthy mouth as they ran beside her car. She had grown accustomed to carrying the thick wads of bills that signified gross inflation. She had seen (though never tasted) the bowls of white maize meal that was most people’s daily diet. Only a few were fortunate enough to supplement it with bits of meat, goat mostly, a horrid brown stew stirred up over charcoal fires in a ragged oil tin.
Sure, there was industry here – local products such as soap, paint, cigarettes – but only a tiny percentage of the population could afford them. Most were peasant farmers, eking out a fragile existence on their shambas, as these little farms were called in Swahili. A bad harvest or a natural disaster – flood one year, drought the next – could mean the difference between life and death.
Yes, Miranda knew all about it. It was a vicious circle. The worse things got, the more the farmers abandoned the production of cash crops – the coffee and sisal and groundnuts which represented Tanzania’s main chance to earn foreign exchange. The less foreign money there was, the slimmer the country’s chance of climbing out of poverty. For that, no conjuring trick, no poetry, nothing but an entire overhaul in the system of things, would suffice.
In spite of the rural poverty surrounding it, the city was still a city, a busy port connecting the interior to the trade routes of the world – as it had done since the bad old days of the slave trade, in which it played a central role. Dar-es-Salaam had its dives and traffic, its banks and hustle. But in the main it was laid-back, easy-going. Miranda liked to go to the Salamander Café for English-style fish and chips, and to eat ice cream at a place called the Sno-Cream Parlour. She had also become a member of something called the Yacht Club, which had a superb little private beach near her embassy-supplied house in Oyster Bay.
The house itself, a bungalow, stood among some old coconut groves on the fringes of the northern suburbs. It gave her a great deal of pleasure, although in the first few weeks she was burgled so often – nothing major, just a few things here and there – that she had to employ a nightwatchman. He only carried a staff, and to begin with she doubted whether such a simple weapon would deter any thieves. But the pilfering stopped, so his presence clearly had some effect. He also opened and closed the gate for her car.
Miranda soon found the small, interconnected world of expat life rather lonely, and the constant have/have-not interactions with the poverty-stricken Tanzanians difficult to handle with dignity. At first she threw herself into making her house nice, which meant cleaning out the remnants of the previous occupant – the person she had replaced at the embassy: spilt popcorn at the back of one of the kitchen cupboards, a packet of out-of-date condoms under the bed. Jerry Mintz clearly hadn’t been much of a cleaner, since many of the kitchen utensils were dusty and there was mildew in the bathroom. She took on a housegirl, Florence – who slapped round the teak floors in flip-flops, following her instructions to the letter, but very slowly – and began to make lists of things she needed: fabric for new curtains; sink and bath stoppers (none in the house whatsoever); bug spray; a high-powered flashlight for when there was a power outage. Another problem was the air conditioner, one of those old-fashioned, water-extraction types. She was sure it was bad for her health.
The air conditioner was replaced. Other things were purchased, installed, utilised. Nisha Ghai, an Asian lady who worked at the embassy, took her to a shop to buy a rug for the lounge parquet – showing her how, on the good ones, the design on the back was as complex as the design on the front. The shopkeeper, a wonderful old Parsee with a goatee beard, piled the carpets one upon the other, unrolling each with a showman-like flourish.
So a sort of life took shape. The months and days came and went, and she slipped easily into the routine of existence in what are called the tropics. Months and days, and hours and minutes and seconds. Slow, monsoon-country time, carrying her along in its stream like a leaf in a culvert.
She learned, quickly, that this time was measured not by clocks and calendars but by a change in the weather, by coursings of dry and damp air, by the endless renewals, the constant cycles of heat and fecundity that were governed by the coming and going of the rains. She’d caught the mid-March ones just after she arrived. The old hands at the embassy said they were coming but she had felt it in herself anyway, during those first, hot, dusty days – felt, as the plants seemed to in their trembling leaves and nodes, faint animations of the future, a feeling that some urgently needful release was on its way.
The first visible sign was the sky’s upturned blue platter turning rusty brown, and the few white clouds upon it gradually changing colour like a gathering bruise: pink, yellow, black. Then the first raindrops fell: heavy single drops, lookouts for the massed battalions to come, dashing and pocking the ground like bullets. Finally the full armour of the sky was loosed, as the pregnant, discoloured clouds delivered their long-held burdens.
When the turbid water curtain came down, it was as if the land itself were breached. The dropping green surge swept all before it, sending rats and twigs scurrying into holes, men and women into houses. The massive panel of water would begin gnawing at the laterite roads, which the grader’s tooth had so valiantly sharpened all through the dry season. Everywhere it fell it brought new life, but at the time it seemed like damage, this sopping of maize and cassava plantations, this felling of the very saplings last year’s rains had nourished. At river banks, on mountain sides, whole chunks of earth fell away as if bitten by some giant beast, dispersing in the torrent or tumbling down the escarpment.
Nature tried to revenge itself on man, it seemed to her – the storms battering the tin roof of her bungalow and beating brisk tattoos on the embassy’s satellite dishes – but inflicted the worst of its wild turmoil on itself. Yet it was afterwards, in the calm, that its true power was revealed, forcing green shoots and riotous blossoms upwards in a mass of vegetation – out of land that, just yesterday, had been scorched earth.
She loved to watch the charged, electric storms and listen to them drumming on the roof rat-tat-tat like that. But it was an uneasy wonder, one that gave her pause. To some, she knew, the spectacle was no spectacle, but something of great necessity. The coming of the rains was of far more importance to ordinary Tanzanians on their shambas than to Miranda or her colleagues. For them the rains were not just a show or a mere inconvenience. Many expatriates she’d met seemed, on the other hand, to regard the rains – the whole of Africa in fact – as a springboard for their own fantasies. Fantasies of fulfilment or annihilation, desire or death, each according to their particular suggestion.
Miranda prided herself on having resisted this decadent, illusory view of the continent. Work was the perfect remedy for that kind of thing. Application to the diurnal round, daily life and its chores. But her tasks at the embassy were not absorbing enough to support such an ethic. Lying on the beach at the Yacht Club in Oyster Bay, surrounded by aid workers and the diplomatic corps of various nations, she sometimes wondered if she were not letting her ambitions drain away. As the weeks passed, she no longer thought quite so much about building a grand, successful career, or even about finding a husband and raising a family. The twin poles of her hopes began to wilt slightly, like the candy bars she sometimes brought back from the PX for the kids who clamoured round her gates when she arrived home. She didn’t feel unhappy exactly, just a bit aimless. There was something about living on the edge of a warm ocean like this that undermined her ambition. It wasn’t surprising. Stretched out on the sand at the Yacht Club, looking out over the ocean at sunset, it took no effort to feel that you might, like the merchantmen of old, drift all the way to India.
Ray liked to play golf, and sometimes she accompanied him to another club, the Gymkhana, which had nine holes of ‘black’ greens – that is to say, oiled sand rather than grass at the holes, so they could be easily maintained during the dry season. The Gymkhana’s name went back to the days when English colonials used to run horse-racing and dressage competitions, but that was all gone now, like most vestiges of the British Empire in Tanzania, which had not been as anglicised as she’d heard Kenya to be. It did have tennis courts, however, made of the same red clay as the murram roads. But after one frustrating encounter it became clear Ray was so far below her in ability that it wasn’t worth them pursuing that sport together. Miranda missed Kirsteen. Not just for tennis; she needed a girlfriend to run her dreams by, or to let her down gently in the wake of disappointments.
As gently as she herself, at lunchtime that day, or any other, would step down to the refectory, her shadow interfering with the light of the tombstone windows as she took the concrete stairway down into the corridor … leading to her customary seat in full view of the gardens (oleander: beautiful, poisonous), where she’d eat rice salad (grains unburnished), fruit (a Zanzibar apple) and drink a polystyrene cup of cranberry juice (good for the urinary tract).
Always too, this lunchtime or any other, Miranda would push her dark hair behind her ear to stop it falling into her food, and she’d likely be wishing, as fork came to mouth, she could cope better with being alone. But being in a sunny place and near the ocean made one want to be with someone, just as much as it sapped one’s will to work.
Ray – she reflected, this lunchtime, seeing him come in – he was happy in his own company. He made much use of the embassy library, which was well stocked with everything from Shakespeare to science fiction.
She watched him walk over now, tray piled high with burger and fries and a carton of milk. He sat down, winking at her.
‘What –’ he asked forcefully, as he opened the carton, ‘are you doing tonight?’ He began jigging around. ‘Dancing? Glancing? Backing and advancing?’
‘Ray … you’ll spill it on me!’ She shook her head. ‘Not much.’
‘There’s a great-looking new Nintendo game in the PX. Yoshi’s Story. The character’s this friendly, lizard-like dinosaur who eats fruit. Bit like you.’
He eyed her apple core, and took a long draught of milk from the carton. ‘If I get it, I might let you have a go.’
‘Excuse me, just how old are you?’ she said.
He smiled wolfishly, milk on his moustache. ‘Look, it’s either dino capers with Yoshi or rowing with Virginia Woolf for me tonight, and I know which I prefer.’
He paused, then frowned, shaking his head. ‘Actually, I don’t think I do.’
Nourished by junk food and low culture as he was, Ray favoured more highbrow stuff so far as his borrowings from the library went. It was not unusual to find him sitting on a bench in the courtyard deep in something difficult. He ordered other books via Amazon.com, and when the cardboard boxes arrived at his desk, he would whoop with delight.
‘So whaddya say, my little fruit bat?’