No. 4 Imperial Lane

by Jonathan Weisman

  “I am sorry for this visit. I’m sure the time is inconvenient.”

  “No, no. Come on in.”

  Cristina had dashed toward the door to check out the commotion but had recoiled behind Elizabeth.

  “Good morning, Elizabeth,” Samuel said with a feeble smile, bowing his head slightly.

  “Samuel, it is so good to see you,” she said, hands on her daughter’s shoulders. “How is Greta? It’s been a while.”

  “I sent her home with the boys last week.” He sighed heavily. “All that trouble in Luanda. The word from the highlands is not good either.”

  There was an awkward silence as the three adults stared at one another, João feeling challenged and ashamed that he had not thought of the safety of his family, Elizabeth suddenly wondering, not for the first time but now acutely, if her trust was simply foolishness.

  “How is that university of yours holding up, João?”

  “Surprisingly well, thank you. I was just heading off—”

  “João, might I have a word with you, in private?” Samuel interrupted in a sotto voce, compounding the discomfort but seeing no choice. He nodded to Elizabeth as he led her husband off to their bedroom, with no regard for privacy, as if what they owned was his.

  He shut the door gently but gave it an extra push to make sure it was sealed, then walked to the far end of the small bedroom. African carvings adorned teak bedside tables and Elizabeth’s dresser. A swatch of brightly dyed cloth, pulled tight over a wooden frame, took up maybe a third of the far wall. Samuel pretended to be captivated by it as João gingerly crossed toward him.

  “João”—he spun around—“I need your help, your medical help.”

  “I, I, I haven’t been practicing much lately. What is it?”

  “I need absolute assurance that you will maintain discretion on this. You will stay silent, even to Elizabeth.”

  “If it is a medical matter, I have no choice. I would never divulge the medical condition of a patient without permission.”

  “Patients,” Samuel interjected forcefully.

  “Patients, yes,” João returned, quietly but quizzically.

  “This is all ending, João, at least for you, for Portugal. Angola will descend into chaos and communism. We cannot allow that to happen.”

  “We?” João said, puzzled. “You and me?”

  “No, no, no,” the older man said with an irritated smirk. “We South Africa, Rhodesia, what is left of civilized Africa. And we won’t.”

  “Samuel, but it seems you’ve failed already. The bombings, the defoliants. Hardly civilized, and they’ve done nothing.”

  “That was just an opening act, my friend. We don’t control when the finale begins. We must take our cues from our Cuban friends, who will be arriving soon. The Soviet subs are already patrolling the seas. We’re not sure what they are up to, but we know they’re there. When they show themselves, the real battle begins.”

  João began to think his friend had gone insane, that paranoia had finally gotten the best of him. He glanced at his watch, thinking about the first class of the day.

  “Samuel, is this all, because I really have to go?”

  “No, João, it is not all. When those cues come, we must be ready. We’re just offstage, but we’re not ready. Yellow fever. I know the Portuguese medical corps has dealt with it before, discreetly. We need a little of that expertise and a lot of that discretion right now.”

  Samuel was right. The Portuguese medical corps had quietly tended to outbreaks of yellow fever throughout Angola. In some cases, hundreds had died in hospitals and on bases, mostly Africans but some Portuguese as well. The scourges had been kept quiet, the bodies buried, as heroes if white, in unmarked graves if black. There was no need to cause panic or stoke still more questions in Lisbon. But the doctors had become more adept at containing the outbreaks. It was a point of pride, and Samuel Vanderbroek was encouraging it.

  “We need you.”

  “What about my family, my daughter? It’s a bit of a dodgy time to be flitting out on a secret mission.”

  “Don’t worry,” Vanderbroek growled. “We’ll take care of them.”

  The Alouette took off heading south, a lone chopper with no escorts. João wondered aloud how safe this was. He had no desire to tempt death on one final mission, certainly not for the South Africans. Samuel assured him there would be no combat involved.

  “We’re flying over UNITA territory,” he shouted into the brand-new headset, his voice ringing clearly in João’s ears. “Savimbi’s friendlies, as the Americans like to say.”

  “Where are the Americans in all this?”

  “Mainly on the sidelines, but they’ll come round.”

  The helicopter swept low over grasslands that grew more arid as they flew south. Every now and then, they’d fly directly over clusters of armed guerrillas, who merely raised one hand over their eyes to shield them from the sun and the other in a friendly wave. They were boys, mostly, in ragged short pants ripped from long trousers, and T-shirts discarded by American or British families. João had told Elizabeth next to nothing, only that he had a mission he had to accept, that he’d be back soon. She had pleaded with him, scolded him, accused him of abandonment. His own misgivings caught the retaliatory accusations in his throat. Just once, he thought, he would like his wife to support him, to say, “João, I know you have to do what you have to do. You’re a doctor, go.” Just once.

  He said that to his wife, not angrily, sadly really, shaking his head. “Just once, Elizabeth.”

  “Just once what?”

  He turned without saying another word and bolted from the flat.

  The pilot touched down in Evale to refuel. UNITA occupied the iron-mining outpost, but it was a fair-haired, muscular white man who brought the fuel in huge jerry cans. Samuel and he talked into each other’s ears at the top of their lungs, with serious expressions. To João, only a few feet away, their words were inaudible over the helicopter’s roar. A few scrubby trees dotted the arid, dusty landscape. Angolans wandered around huts of stick walls and thatched roofs, seemingly befuddled by the strange happenings around them. Topless Himba tribeswomen in bright cotton skirts and elaborate grass-and-stick jewelry encircling their bellies and necks looked sullenly at João.

  They stayed just long enough to top off, then took off south once more.

  Maybe forty minutes later, Samuel gestured down to what looked like nothing, an arid track beneath them.

  “South-West Africa.” He smiled. “It’s not much, but it’s ours.” Within minutes, they were in sight of Oshakati, a surprisingly bustling border town of ramshackle shops, tin structures like Quonset huts, jeeps, and dust. The chopper banked hard to the right, toward the Atlantic. In minutes, João caught sight of their destination.

  A blond officer dashed toward their chopper as it came to land. He was holding a large floppy hat onto his head and squinting against the swirling sand that blasted his face.

  “This is the doctor I was telling you about, Colonel Kuntz, Major João Gonçalves,” Samuel shouted at the top of his lungs as they jogged away from the Alouette, crouching in fear of the rotors, which were too high to pose a danger but seemed dangerous enough.

  “Good to meet you,” the South African said in English, British-inflected, not Afrikaans. “You speak English, I trust?”

  “My wife is from Hampshire,” João shouted back.

  “Good show,” the officer said in a feigned posh accent.

  They climbed into a jeep and headed straight for the hospital unit.

  “You’ll be needing this, I presume,” the officer said to João, pulling out a surgical mask as they approached the door to the large, tin structure, its primitive windows open to the desert breeze.

  “I’d rather have something to cover my arms,” João replied, looking at his dark forearms, exposed by his short-sleeved fatigues covered in dust. “Do you have a lab coat?”

  The man looked at him quizzically. “Well, I’m sure we c
an manage one. Come in.”

  By Portuguese standards, the field hospital wasn’t half bad. Neat rows of beds, trim, well-coiffed nurses, the occasional IV pole, and lots of sick men. João stopped in his tracks.

  “This is the yellow fever ward?”

  The officer looked over the scene with a puzzled, embarrassed expression, before admitting that yes, this was epidemic central.

  “Looks like it’s in pretty good shape to me, clean at least,” the officer said.

  “If you can’t close these windows, I want mosquito netting around each bed, tucked in tight. The vector is the mosquito, not the cough or the diarrhea or the blood. It’s the mosquito.”

  João said this incredulously. How such a mighty army did not have this knowledge was simply bizarre.

  “We don’t have yellow fever in South Africa,” the officer protested. “We’re a temperate climate.”

  “It’s your damned war,” João snapped. “You ought to know where you’re fighting it.”

  For nearly two weeks, João took charge of the ward, supervising mosquito control efforts, the spreading of netting, and the isolation of the most ill soldiers. Internal hemorrhaging can be severe and ugly; bleeding out in a crowded ward is no way to boost morale. João barked at nurses who gave their moaning patients aspirin to kill the pain.

  “Have you no sense? Don’t you know what acetylsalicylic acid does to internal bleeding?” he’d bark, thrusting a jar of paracetamol in their faces. He showed them how to measure the lost water content in the bedpans of puke and shit, how to rehydrate the right amount, which of the soldiers needed precious IV fluids, and which should be made to drink, protests or not.

  It was Samuel who ended it. He stood by the door of the yellow fever ward, watching in amazement as João made rounds, oblivious to greater meaning, or even to his wife and child.

  “João,” he finally said when the doctor had drifted within earshot. “The news from Nova Lisboa is not good.”

  João looked at his friend as if he had just woken him.

  “News? What news?”

  “Major Gonçalves, it’s time to go home.”

  “It’s alright, Cristina. It’s going to be alright. Just hold on to Mummy’s hand, love. Hold on tight.”

  Elizabeth tried to sound reassuring, to mask her panic and guilt. Out of weakness and indecision, she had made a terrible mistake. She had waited. Now her husband was gone, she knew not where, and her four-year-old daughter was suffering the consequences.

  Cristina, her cascade of ebony hair a tangled mess, whimpered softly. She held a soiled teddy bear in one hand, her mother’s sweaty hand in the other, as they picked their way through the human detritus littering the smooth, polished floors of Nova Lisboa’s modern train station, two more heartbreaks in a profusion of many, mostly women and children fleeing the Angolan highlands.

  The smells of shit and piss were overwhelming, the station’s toilets overwhelmed. The African street vendors joyfully sold jugs of water, fruit, gum, and cigarettes outside at outrageous prices, in Angolan escudos that would soon be worthless. But the inventive merchants could do nothing about the plumbing or the trains. The refugees had to make do in the darker corners of a building with too few dark corners; as for the trains, all the tickets were long gone.

  “Mummy, I don’t like it here. It smells,” Cristina pleaded in a strained but hushed voice. Her little nose, already aquiline and delicate, scrunched in self-defense. Her eyes squinted to filter out the sights she could not understand.

  “I know, love, I know. I know.”

  Elizabeth pushed forward toward mobbed ticket windows to try to find any space on a train for Benguela, on the coast. Luanda, where a flotilla of ships awaited, wasn’t on the rail line, which was built not to transport humans from population center to population center but to empty Angola’s interior of its resources and get them to the industrial port of Lobito Bay for the world beyond Africa’s shores. The occasional shout of protest greeted an errant footstep, but mainly the refugees watched in sad silence as another white woman set off to plead her case, child in tow.

  For five days, Elizabeth had been trying to get out of Nova Lisboa, out of Angola, out of Africa. The air bridge set up in early September 1975, first by the Portuguese, then joined by Britain, France, the United States, and even the Soviet Union, was winding down. Nearly a quarter-million Portuguese had fled, as the province they thought was their home disintegrated into anarchy. But in Nova Lisboa, the settlers kept coming, in long, ragged caravans from coffee, cotton, and sisal plantations, market towns, and iron and diamond mining outposts days away.

  The army was no longer offering protection. “We spent fourteen years fighting and dying for you lot,” the soldiers would say, “so you could live in your villas, oversee your laborers, and sell your crops and metals. That’s over. We don’t bleed for settlers anymore.”

  Now the settlers were bleeding, from bandit ambushes, accidents on the rutted African roads, and crossfire between rival guerrilla forces preparing for independence and the bloodbath that would surely follow. The convoys—heavily weighted toward women, their men still fighting—would limp into Nova Lisboa, overloaded with belongings that would soon be abandoned in the streets, left to the Angolans fending for themselves in a newly independent nation, stripped bare save for such hand-me-downs.

  Elizabeth could have left on one of the early airplanes. General Costa Gomes, still in touch with her father, personally sent an emissary from the Nova Lisboa base to escort her to the airport. But her husband was on “one last mission,” he had said. And so she waited for him. She waited against all logic for the man who had brought her to the highlands of southern Africa, only to sour on her. Deep down, she still had faith that the João Gonçalves of the billowing white shirt and ocean breeze would return. So Elizabeth waited.

  She used the lull of early morning, when the guerrillas were sleeping off their gin-soaked hangovers, to sneak out of her flat for food, braving gang rape for her daughter’s sustenance. She had plenty of money. But the stores were empty, only the motley assortment of errant fruit, gum, and cigarettes the vendors were pedaling at the train station. She had to walk to the African market two kilometers away. She’d tell her four-year-old to stay inside and be quiet, kissing her gently and waving a doll or stuffed bear in her face to elicit one last giggle that would stave off guilt for a few paces. It was the best she could do. The building was practically empty. She knew no one who could take care of Cristina in her absence. She dared not take her with her. The African markets were laden with fruits, vegetables, and starchy cassava. But the rice, imported from other parts of Africa or beyond, was gone. Bread was a memory. Elizabeth had stopped wondering how she was going to get out and had given herself to fate. Somehow something would happen, she kept telling herself. Every time she returned to her apartment to find her daughter alive, she thanked a God she had rarely thought to thank before.

  One day, desperate for adult conversation, she ventured to Fernando Osório’s apartment for a visit, Cristina tagging along. The professor, beyond middle-aged but still vital and proper, surely must be going as stir-crazy as she was, she thought. The stairwell of his building had been eerily quiet as they climbed the two flights to his flat. She knocked gingerly.

  “Fernando?” she called. “Fernando?”

  Foolishly, she opened the unlocked door to the abattoir. He had tried to run, obviously. His body was backed against a wall near the door to his bedroom, slumped in a deep puddle of congealed and stinking blood. His eyes were glassy but terrified. His throat was slashed so deep his head had nearly been severed. The apartment was ransacked, drunken fighters no doubt motivated more by greed than hate.

  She gasped—cried out really—and turned away, to shield Cristina from the sight and flee. She could never be sure her daughter had not seen the carnage. She never asked. And when they hurriedly returned to their own flat, she hunkered down and would not leave.

  The next day, she hailed a
gypsy cab to the airport. The mass of refugees sleeping on the floors and the tarmac were quick testament to her mistake. On that first foray, she found an army colonel she recognized, and anxiously produced a British passport. As Britons so often do, she assumed the embossed lion and unicorn—Dieu et mon droit, “God and My Right”—was her ticket out, her right.

  “I’m sorry, Madam. First priority is to citizens of Portugal. Please contact your embassy,” he said blandly.

  “My embassy? That’s in Luanda.”

  “I am sorry, but I cannot help you right now,” the harried officer said, turning to the rest of the throng clamoring for his attention.

  She heard that line over and over, before each night limping home with an exhausted little girl and her teddy bear. She would unlock the door in hope of finding João inside. But all that would greet her were the rapidly depleting shelves in the cupboard of a flat she had once loved.

  João jiggled the key in the balking lock of his apartment door. Outside, dusk was settling on the city, but in a hallway he never much noticed, darkness had fallen. The low ceilings felt dingy, the unadorned walls depressing. A hush of abandonment hung on the building. He stepped into a barely lit flat, tentatively asking, “Hello?”

  Everything seemed to be in order—a little untidy but, given the tumult outside, not bad. Drunken UNITA rebels, Savimbi’s child soldiers, were making forays from their bases outside of town down the wide avenues of Nova Lisboa, firing their guns in the air and catcalling anything in a skirt. The odd artillery shell or mortar randomly whizzed into a government building or thudded into a park. There didn’t seem to be any purpose to the explosions, just the revelry of heavily armed juvenile delinquents.

  “Hello?” João said again, this time a little louder.

  The door cracked open in the bedroom, then opened wider.

  “João?” a small, English voice asked.

  “It’s me,” he said, those two syllables catching in his throat.