No. 4 Imperial Lane

by Jonathan Weisman

  Elizabeth and Cristina crept out of the bedroom, into the semi-gloom of the apartment. Gonçalves had expected if not a hero’s welcome then a rush of gratitude. He had returned, safely. Instead, Elizabeth stared blankly at him, deciding whether to scream in rage or collapse with relief.

  Her voice emerged in a whisper, out of practice and tentative. “Do you have any idea what we have been through?” she asked, anger tinged with grief, the words choked by the urge to sob. “You left your family to die, João.” She paused. The silence hit violently. She waited another beat, composed herself. “I waited for you, and waited. We lost our last chance to get out.”

  She wanted to scream. Her husband not only gave her reason to rage, he offered her the protection to raise her voice beyond the whispers that she and Cristina had been using for days. But she couldn’t. Her eyes locked on his instead, wordlessly accusing. A defensive anger rose in João’s throat. He had been saving lives, practicing medicine, doing what he was trained to do and doing it damned well. This woman, supposed to be his wife, would never understand him, would never appreciate how good he could be.

  “Daddy?” A meek, miserable sound broke the tension. Cristina slid from behind her mother, careful not to let her head break contact with Elizabeth’s thigh. Her hair was greasy. Water pressure was gone. Bathing was a ritual that had been sacrificed to war. Her once-chubby cheeks were noticeably hollowed, such a rapid change that mirrored the sudden collapse of the city around them. Her hungry, vacant eyes looked up at her father, whom she adored. João saw in her something haunting and desolate. His heart sunk. He crouched down and held out his arms. She walked slowly toward him and lowered her head onto his chest. Her arms hung limply by her side. He wrapped his around her in silence. Then, after a long while, he looked up at Elizabeth. “We’ve got to go. Now.”

  They frantically packed the same three duffel bags they had come with. Elizabeth stuffed a few carvings she loved, a colorful etched gourd, and the weaving from the wall, ripped from its wooden frame, into her bag. She tossed out the flowered dress she was married in to make room. João looked at it on the floor for a moment, then zipped the bag.

  “What the hell took you so long, man?” Samuel demanded as they dashed by him in the building’s atrium. He had been waiting there the whole time, not wanting to intrude on the reunion but refusing to stay in the car on the street, his white face glowing in the light of the one streetlamp still working on the block. The helicopter that had ferried him and João back to Nova Lisboa was gone, heading south again to the border. His escape and the escape of this family were his responsibility now. João saw something in Samuel’s face he had not seen before: fear.

  They would sleep at his place that night—he had bought some armed protection—and leave at first light for the station. A train would be leaving for Benguela.

  “It’s no use,” Elizabeth said. “You can’t get on. They come in to Nova Lisboa packed already. There are mobs already waiting to take whatever crack of space they can find.”

  “Don’t worry, love.” Samuel forced a smiled. “We’ve got this worked out.”

  The next morning, a driver took the four of them to a small house alongside the main station, just up the track. Samuel told João and Elizabeth to wait inside with Cristina, and slipped back out. A few minutes later, he returned, furtively waving for them to hurry out the side door. A train sprawled out beyond the main platform, and beyond the last car, another car was being pushed down the track by maybe thirty UNITA soldiers, guns slung casually by their sides. They yelled at each other, alternatively angry and laughing as they latched the single car to the main train. They then circled it in an armed phalanx. Within minutes, the people inside the station noticed the commotion. Seconds later, a throng heaved toward the car. The soldiers brandished their weapons and, with the stocks, knocked back the odd train-station denizen still brave enough to beg them to open the door.

  Amid the desperation, Samuel was still able to grin at Elizabeth.

  “Your carriage, Madam,” he drawled, as he held out a hand to help her up.

  “What? How?” she said in disbelief.

  “You don’t think Gordon Bromwell would let his daughter rot in Huambo?”

  For weeks, Elizabeth’s father had been expecting some kind of confirmation that his daughter had escaped from Africa, a letter of thanks with a Lisbon postmark, maybe a phone call, or at least a communiqué from his friend Costa Gomes. His daughter’s ingratitude he had come to expect. It was his fault, really. Beneficence was something the Bromwells bestowed; it was not bestowed on them. His family did give thanks, of course, for its latest conquest, but not really to God, more to a vague metaphysical course of events. “We thank you for the success Gordon has found in lowering the top marginal tax rate,” or some sort. They did not thank other people, certainly not each other. But this was a matter of some seriousness. And he heard nothing.

  Phone calls were made, messages sent, and word reached Pretoria’s man in Nova Lisboa, Samuel Vanderbroek, who, incidentally, was scrambling for his own escape route even as he was delivering an experienced doctor to the ailing forces amassed on the South-West African border.

  “It’s a colonial government railcar,” Vanderbroek said to Elizabeth, looking around with satisfaction at his sumptuous if somewhat dusty surroundings. “They’ve kept it hidden in its own garage for years. Rarely used, as you can see. Once it was clear you hadn’t gotten out on the airlift, your father began inquiring about rail links or roads. Damnedest thing, I get a call from Pretoria. ‘You’ve got to find an Englishwoman named Elizabeth Bromwell.’ I just laughed. ‘I’m with her husband.’”

  And he did laugh, a long belly laugh, as he settled onto a plush, deep purple velvet bench.

  “I got in touch with some of the Portuguese administrators who had made their escape already in the airlift. This popped up—cost Mr. Bromwell a pretty penny, I’m sure.”

  Fifty or more stranded souls could have piled into the extra car. Elizabeth thought of those vacant stares and the beseeching looks that she had shared with the other refugees who had crammed into the train station. She felt ill. But as the train built up steam, leaving Nova Lisboa behind forever, she settled in and enjoyed the first-class remove. She was leaving Africa, she thought with some relief but more than a little sadness. This is where she learned to be married, to accept, where she had borne a child, the jewel of her life, where she had made her first home and a life truly free of Mother and Father, or so she had thought. Already, it was gaining the glow of retrospect, warmer still because she—like all the whites fleeing the highlands—knew full well it would never be the same.

  “I can’t believe I’m paying these punks,” Samuel murmured to himself.

  Cristina at first sat silently on the velvet, huddled closely against her father, who wrapped an arm around her in a tight, quiet hug. She fiddled with his fingers, scrunched and unscrunched his army cap—the bush variety, with sun visors on front and back, and glanced up at his face occasionally for reassurance. He would kiss the crown of her head; she’d smile to herself, then look back down at her busy little hands. As the train gained speed in its long, slow descent from the Bié plateau to Angola’s coastal plain, on its way to Lobito Bay, her four-year-old self burst forward. Soon, she was running to the front of the car, then the back, to one side then the other, giggling and showing off as the locomotive coasted from Nova Lisboa’s 5,581 feet of altitude, past the high slopes of the Lepi range, past sisal, coffee, and fruit-tree plantations at Alto Catumbela, already going to seed, over the dramatic Lengue Gorge, then down to sea level, along the salt pans, sugar plantations, lime kilns, and stone quarries outside Benguela. A few desultory workers could still be seen going through the motions of labor. But mainly, the fields and quarries were still, abandoned for the safety of the village or the encampments on the beach, where the Angolans had fled as independence approached.

  And now a British aristocrat and her Portuguese husband were making t
he journey created for copper, on the caboose end of a train filled this time with human cargo. Cristina flitted happily around the cabin, leaving João free to fall into silent self-doubt. He was being rescued by his wife. Just days ago, he was directing triage operations at a vast military encampment, dictating to the fair-haired South Africans. Now he felt again like a man incapable of controlling his destiny, regardless of his efforts, education, or competence.

  And there was something else. He never was an outward advocate of empire, throughout the long years in Africa. But as he and his countrymen made their ignoble escapes, he could not help but feel the sting of humiliation. He was being hustled out of a Portuguese province, the richest of the empire, with the help of the British and South Africans.

  When Elizabeth and he were in Guiné, before Cristina, before the fights, before defeat, Luis the bread man and a cluster of Guinean staff told the couple a joke. There was a bird in Guiné, the jambatutu, which flew in spurts of fifty feet, making its way languidly through the steamy fields of West Africa without grace but without care either. It was the national symbol of the nascent state that would become Guiné-Bissau. “Jambatutu woke up one morning feeling particularly lazy,” Luis had begun. “His mother said, ‘Hey, Jambatutu, get up. Go fetch some firewood for breakfast.’ ‘No, Ma, I’m not feeling so well.’ He stayed on his mat and watched his sisters and brothers go to work. ‘Hey, Jambatutu, go and sweep the house.’ ‘No, Ma, I’m not feeling so well this morning.’ ‘Hey, Jambatutu, come here and stir the pot. I’ve got to go feed the baby.’ ‘No, Ma, I think I really am sick.’

  “Well,” Luis said, his joy building, “this went on for a while. Jambatutu wouldn’t wash, wouldn’t help build the fire, wouldn’t pound the rice, until finally, his mother said, ‘Jambatutu, breakfast’s ready.’ ‘Alright,’ Jambatutu said, all excited, and he hopped out of bed, grabbed his bowl, and dug in.”

  At that, Luis and the Guineans broke out into uncontrollable laughter—knee-slapping, tear-inducing, snorting laughter. Elizabeth stared blankly, but perhaps, João had thought, she hadn’t understood the language. He had, every word of it, and at the time, he could not fathom why this story was funny. He heard the joke a few more times, each telling eliciting the same rip-roaring hilarity. He thought about the story often, until the joke became the emblem of his wider bafflement at the world around him. He could explain the Portuguese interest in Africa, the rivalries between Neto and Roberto and Savimbi, tribalism, a class structure imposed by his forefathers, but then he thought of Jambatutu and realized he understood nothing.

  Until now. He smiled to himself as he watched the highlands recede. A little chuckle slipped through his nose, a puff of recognition; he was Jambatutu. Like the bird, he was taking another short hop that would take him gracelessly, aimlessly elsewhere, hoping for a handout. He had failed to take flight.

  “‘The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned; the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.’”

  João murmured the words softly, but not to himself. He wanted Elizabeth to hear.

  “I don’t know that one,” she said in a hush. “Something violent. Troilus and Cressida?”

  His eyes met hers. They were filled with a sadness she had never seen in him, distant, pained.

  “It’s Yeats. What would your bard know of the end of days?”

  Elizabeth watched her husband intently. She felt his sadness, not at its depths but she felt it nonetheless. Her nation’s empire was long gone; that João was feeling such a loss would never have occurred to her. But she understood his sense of failure, an emotion she had felt often. She reached for his hand. For a moment, she felt it all rush back. Then he turned away to watch the scenery float by.

  Chapter Eighteen

  As I waited for Cristina, I decided to indulge Hans in his dissolute fantasies of my country, and catch up on a little of the history I might soon be returning to. I took him to see Mississippi Burning at the Duke of York’s, where we watched Gene Hackman confront the homicidal Klansmen Hans later told me he imagined lurking in every corner of my crack-besotted country.

  Hans was weakening. He lived in something of a twilight, never quite fully alert, never truly able to sleep—but stubbornly alive. I watched him out of the corner of my eye, his eyes seemingly glazed as he stared at the screen. In a flood of sympathy and premature nostalgia, I rested a warm, young hand on his skeletal claw. He gave me a slight smile, of gratitude, maybe even affection, but he couldn’t muster a full glance. I realized I was watching his face intently, trying to divine a response. I turned back to the screen.

  I was going through my own private torment. My brother, Noah, was planning a quick tour of Europe before his second year of law school. My parents were offering up a little money if I wanted to join him, then return home to Georgia. That would mean foreclosing on Cristina and abandoning Elizabeth nearly a month before Hans was due to ship out for Italy, not enough time to find a new volunteer but plenty to wreck her studies and leave her to care for Hans alone. In my impoverished state, I hadn’t crossed the English Channel since last summer, and Noah was pressuring me—not for his sake, but for my parents. Phone calls were tricky, but at a time prearranged by aerogram, he had called me at the Bromwells’ late one night. I picked up the phone in the upstairs study. I was trying to stay out of earshot of Hans, but I was regrettably very much in range of Cristina.

  “C’mon, David, your little sabbatical is over,” he said. “Time to smell the fucking coffee.”

  “What the hell do you know about my life, Noah? Don’t you think I have obligations here?”

  “Well, your little girlfriend dumped you, didn’t she?”

  “Charming, man. You have a really enticing way of getting me to join you on the Continent.”

  “The Continent? Is that how you talk over there now?”

  “Europe, OK? I was just trying to, you know, delineate one side of the Channel from the other.”

  “Oh yeah, the Channel,” he snorted. “David, look, this isn’t about me. Mom and Dad have gone through a lot since, you know, Rebecca and all. They’re ready. It’s…different here now.”

  I paused.

  “Did they tell you to tell me that?”

  “What’s it matter? I’m telling you, asshole. C’mon, David, we’ll have a little fun. You can show me some of your new favorite spots, I’ll drag you to some places you haven’t been to, we’ll get a little high, you can get me laid, maybe. That’ll be a challenge for you. Then we can head home together, see the ’rents. A blessing on your head, mazel tov, mazel tov.”

  (The highlight of my brother’s teenage years was his star turn in Fiddler on the Roof senior year of high school—cast as Tevye because he was big enough and looked Jewish. He wasn’t a bad singer, it turned out. My parents showed up for closing night but forgot to bring a camera.)

  “Let me think about it, Noah. You haven’t even asked about my quadriplegic, have you? He’s not gonna just pop up and say, ‘Hey, don’t worry about me. You just run along.’ I’ve got, you know, responsibilities, jerk.”

  The truth was, I wanted one last space cake in Amsterdam, another walk along the Seine, some European adventure. My brother had plans to go a few places I hadn’t been, touristy spots my snobbish pretentions or my wallet hadn’t allowed: Carcassonne, Nice and Cannes, Monaco, Cinque Terre. I reasoned that I had at least as much of an obligation to him as to Hans and Elizabeth. (I didn’t feel it, though.)

  It was a cool, pleasant evening when I pushed Hans out of the movie theater. Misty, cold March had relinquished Brighton to April. Days were warming, with tulips and irises in bloom around the Royal Pavilion, the ersatz Mughal pleasure dome built by the future King George IV for his assignations with the scandalously Catholic Maria Fitzherbert. The Victoria Gardens were an explosion of color. The Old Steine bustled with tourists. I had parked the ambulance some blocks away from the theater to feel the spring air, may
be wake Hans up a bit or at least offer a little cheer.

  “What do you say we go to a pub, Hans?” I asked. I was oddly buoyant considering I had just sat through a movie about the murder of young civil rights activists at the hands of vicious racists. But it had been nearly two years since I had touched American soil. The film seemed like an anthropological study, depressing in the same way a documentary on the dying Yonomami would be, or the Rape of Nanjing.

  “Why not?” Hans replied, more an exhale than an expression. “Nothing for me, though. You drink away.”

  The late-night lorries rumbled past on their way to the farmers market as I pushed Hans down the Viaduct Road. With each clattering truck, I wondered whether Hans still wanted to die, still fantasized about a timely push from me into the traffic. Really, though, as death approached he seemed to cling to life. There were no more dictations to the Voluntary Euthanasia Society, though a letter had recently arrived from them.

  “We have good news, dear members,” it read. “We have secured a quota from the British government allowing some terminally ill patients passage to the Netherlands for consultations with physicians licensed to administer lethal doses of morphine. We are accepting applications, which must include two physicians’ testimonials defining the nature of your condition, the pain entailed and the hopelessness of your situation, along with your own signature, certified by a notary public and a psychiatrist attesting to your sound mental functions.”

  I laughed as I read it aloud, expecting Hans to muster a chuckle. He didn’t. I tucked it away with the other junk mail and hustled out of the room.

  “Did you recognize any of your kin in the film, David?” Hans asked in the pub as I returned from the bar with a pint of bitter and a small glass of water.

  “I particularly identified with the burly Jewish Klansman,” I said. “I think I saw my father under one of the hoods, but one can never be sure with those things.”