A Man in Africa

by Lara Blunte

  I cursed myself as I saw a shadow falling over her face, but it was a matter of a moment.

  “I think if Kit were a farmer, he would probably divide up the land and give everything away…” She turned to smile at me. “It’s not as if he is some sort of communist, it’s something outside of any labels like that. From the time he could walk or talk, he was concerned for others. It was because of him that we adopted Ben, you know.”

  “Was it?”

  “Yes. Kit was only ten years old, Ben’s father was dead and his mother worked in the plantation. She fell ill, then died and no one would have taken Ben away from Kit by that time. It was very easy to love Ben, so we adopted him officially.”

  “He stayed behind, so that must be a great help to you…”

  “Oh, yes! I need my right hand less than I need Ben!” she said. “He is my son! But Kit…well, I suppose he had to go off and see the world and I always knew that he would do something…meaningful. Something for others. It didn’t surprise me when he said he was going to study medicine.”

  “What did his father think?” I asked.

  “His father was even less surprised. They were very close and he only wanted whatever Kit wanted. Paul was a very kind man, very positive. He thought things would always turn out fine. I was the one who wasn’t so happy about it.”

  “No?” I showed my surprise. “Normally mothers are over the moon when their sons study medicine.”

  She poured some more champagne for me and for her.

  “Yes, because it’s a high-paying profession. Otherwise it can be a very draining job, very lonely and full of tragedy. Kit didn’t need money, he would get it from the land here. We learned from our time in exile, so there is quite a bit now in the bank…”

  Oh, God, so Lord Bumbleworth was rich, or at least quite well-off.

  “He won’t touch his part unless it’s for the hospital,” Karen went on.

  “He told me he feels bad that he isn’t here, helping and that he feels the profit shouldn’t be his…”

  Karen looked at the red tiled floor for a moment, almost as if she were reading something there.

  “He won’t come back because of me,” she said, finally, and raised sad eyes to my face.

  I didn’t know what to say, though the awkwardness between mother and son had been palpable since we had arrived.

  She sighed. “He won’t tell you this story, I suppose, he must feel that it isn’t his to tell. But there was a time, a brief time, when I left Paul and the boys.”

  Now I was shocked. I didn’t know what I had expected, some difference in character or opinions, but not this.

  “I married Paul when I was very young. I was nineteen and Paul was thirty.”

  As a breeze moved the leaves around us, I suddenly saw her as a young girl: she must have been beautiful.

  “I loved my husband, you know. He was the best man in the world — so calm, so wise, so generous… Kit was born when I was twenty and of course I adored him from the first moment and so did Paul. He was one of these babies who never cries. I used to get up and go to his crib to make sure he was alive!”

  Karen took a deep breath. “We were happy here. It’s a wonderful place to live, we had our boys. Chris and I were almost like brother and sister, we used to do so much, swim, ride, read, talk, play pranks on each other. And then he went off to school in London, I hit forty and the question came to my mind in big, huge letters, ‘Is this all that will be, till the end?’”

  Though I had begun to imagine what was coming, I said, “A mid-life crisis is not unusual…So many people have them!”

  “Not my husband,” she said softly. “He was steady as a rock. But even that began to bother me. I woke up and as I brushed my teeth, my hair, as I had my shower and my breakfast, as Paul gave me a kiss and went off to work, I kept asking myself, ‘Is this it? Will there be nothing else, ever?’”

  Again there was a silence and this time she looked at the mountains in the distance. “I wasn’t too bad-looking yet, but I could tell it was all about to be over — that last little bit of youth, you know. So I was an easy victim to one of the men who are always around in a place like this. They go round the dinners and parties, the times when neighbors get together and they watch out for women in a crisis and there I was…” She scoffed. “I must have had an arrow pointing at me.”

  I tried not to fidget in my chair, because I could tell that it wasn’t easy for her to tell this story. Yet she had only just met me and she was telling it. She had, perhaps, kept it inside for a while, because the words didn’t come easily to her.

  “And, you know, it wasn’t Paul who noticed what was happening. Not because he neglected me, but because he was so good. He was so good he didn’t imagine anything like it.” She looked at me again. “It was Kit who realized it. He was nineteen years old and on vacation from university. Imagine, he hadn’t seen us in months and he came home and realized it right away. I can still see his face, looking at me.”

  Again she stopped speaking and her regret was like a solid thing in the air between us.

  “At first it wasn’t with anger, or blame,” she said, “it was as if he couldn’t understand. Then I saw that it was with pain for his father and fear for Ben, who was only fourteen. And I just refused to do anything about it, because I thought that I was in love. I thought that I was madly in love.

  “So one day my son sat me down and said to me, ‘If you are going to keep seeing that man, then you have to tell Dad, and you have to go away.’ Can you imagine? To have your son say such a thing to you, not your husband — your child…

  “I did tell Paul and something terribly stupid happened: he nodded and accepted it and that infuriated me. It made me think that I was not a woman, you know? Just ‘the wife’. He was going to forgive me, he wasn’t going to mind! And on the other side there was a man who was all fire, calling me, begging me to go away with him and so…”

  She took another very deep breath. “And so I went. Paul accepted it, Ben cried and Kit didn’t utter a word.”

  I was desperately looking for something to say, even while knowing that the pain that Chris had felt was the pain I felt now, when I thought of Clive. I still had the capacity to empathize with a woman who was baring her soul to me, a woman who bitterly regretted something she had done, but would I have felt the same generosity if this were a man telling me about many affairs that he couldn’t help?

  “Of course I saw within two months that my… lover meant nothing to me and I longed for my children, for my husband, for our home,” Karen said. “I had made such a terrible mistake. I had been so stupid and selfish!”

  She told me that she had called Paul and that he had instantly gone to get her; that Ben had been relieved and had clung to her for weeks afterwards, as if afraid that she might leave again; and that Chris had already gone back to school, and when he returned, it had never been the same between them.

  “You see, he suffered for his father, for his brother,” Karen said. “Not for himself. He saw what my absence did, he saw what Paul never let me see. Paul forgave me immediately, he never spoke of it except to say that it didn’t matter, that what mattered was that I was back. But Kit…Kit just became very broody, as if he would never believe anything anymore…”

  “I’m sure it’s not that bad,” I said. “He is a very good person!”

  “He is,” she agreed, nodding. “But he hasn’t been the same. He saw that there might not be the kind of love that there ought to be in the world, he saw that people doubt and become dissatisfied and long for something else. Even a mother, who should love her children above all things, can long for something else. He saw how complicated and contradictory we all are.”

  It was my turn to sigh. “We learn these things, sooner or later, I guess.”

  “Ah, but I will tell you what you never want to see,” she replied, “You never want to see the light go out in your child’s eyes and know that it was you who put it out.”

&nb
sp; I felt deeply sorry for Karen, though she was the betrayer. Yes, you could do something selfish, something desperate, and then you would have seconds, minutes, hours and days that made up a lifetime to regret it.

  “That’s why he won’t come back,” Karen added. “When he started studying medicine it was to build a clinic here, on his land! That was the whole point. Then I suppose he couldn’t be around me after his father was gone. He ended up going to the farthest side of the country, to study apes!”

  "Karen, it might not be exactly like that. He was interested in the apes, but now he is helping people again. He started at the hospital little by little, I don’t think it was a plan to stay away from you. He believes very deeply in what he is doing."

  “I want him to do what is in his heart,” she said, “but in Africa that can leave you stripped of everything if you don’t have a support system in place. He's no fool and it wouldn't be the people who came with false intentions that would get him. It would be his solidarity. I know he loves this land, you only have to see him here to understand it. People here need as much help as people there and he would have his brother, Lillian, even I, people who can help him overcome the sadness of all the deaths.” She stopped and then she asked, “He might even have you?”

  I think I flushed to the roots of my hair. “No, I…”

  “You’re the first girl he brings home in eighteen years. I know you must mean something to him.”

  She patted my hand and held it for a moment, almost as if she were enlisting my help. I wanted to say: no, my life is not here. But I didn't say anything, because we heard Chris talking to Ben and saw them walking toward us.

  That was the first night we didn’t make love, in spite of all the chemicals raging. Karen was right, Chris could feel what other people felt and he knew that his mother had told me her story.

  “I’m sorry if it sounds as if I were hiding something,” he said, as we lay in bed.

  “She told me you might think it’s not your story to tell.”

  He caressed my back. “Well, you came with a similar problem and I hid mine.”

  “Do you feel…Do you feel you can never forgive her?”

  He was quiet for so long that I thought he wouldn’t answer, then he said, “My father never showed what it did to him, but I think it broke his heart. He thought that he had a wonderful marriage and then discovered that he wasn’t enough for his wife. You can’t unknow such a thing.”

  Oh, I could understand that only too well…

  Still, I said, “But, as you’ve said, she was young, and she made a mistake. She has been suffering since! She thinks she ruined your view of life, that you won’t come home while she is alive.”

  He made an involuntary movement, as if to deny that what Karen thought was real. “It’s not like that. I haven’t come back because I couldn’t leave until the hospital had funds for a while and it does now.”

  “So you’ll come back?”

  “Soon, I suppose.”

  “And you don’t hold a grudge?”

  “Grudge? No, of course not. I love my mother,” he said. “What she did is not the worst thing that a person can do. I know that it was confusion, fear, that she really regretted it. But I was angry when I went away to study and then it was never as natural as it used to be between us. It used to be so easy, and then it became…awkward, I suppose.”

  “Perhaps you need to break through that. It will feel odd at first, then little by little the ease will come back.”

  We said nothing else; it wasn’t my place to insist that he forgive his mother when I hadn’t forgiven Clive, when I thought I would never be able to, when I was angry that a person’s lies could change another person’s life so inexorably.

  Like me, Chris had stopped believing that there could be a love stronger than any selfish desires. He had stopped believing in people, as I had.

  The next morning I was reading in the garden, having been told by Karen that I couldn’t leave without trying the hammock. It was amazing to lie there, surrounded by butterflies of all colors. It was so beautiful I couldn’t even read, I just lay looking at everything, smelling the clear air, feeling the soft movement of the hammock.

  Then I heard Lillian calling us for lunch; I had completely lost track of time.

  I crossed the garden toward the house to find Chris and when I turned the corner he was there, with another woman in his arms.

  And it was the woman who should be there, even before me. Karen stood in her son’s embrace and she was strong, she wasn’t crying. She stood in her son’s arms with eyes closed, smiling.

  She told me later that he had said he was coming home and that she knew I had made it possible, though I swore I had nothing to do with it. Chris was only doing what he had wanted to do for a while.

  The next morning was our last morning and right after dawn I awoke to see that Chris wasn't in bed again, but I could hear the strains of an opera coming from outside.

  I got up, washed my face and teeth and, wrapped in one of the red Maasai blankets, I opened the door. The view was even more beautiful than the previous mornings, with a pink mist rolling softly over the hills and a flock of colorful birds flying in front of the house.

  Chris was leaning against a column, a cup of steaming coffee in his hand. He turned to smile and stretched his arm toward me. I walked into it and he folded me against his chest. We stood looking at the land without saying anything. I heard the words coming out of an old fashioned record player he had set on a chair:

  O malheureuse Iphigénie,

  ta famille est anéantie!

  Vous n'avez plus de rois;

  je n'ai plus de parents.

  Unhappy Iphigenia, you no longer have kings, I no longer have parents...

  What must it have been to be African and not of Africa? All those European people in the photos I had seen, running from war, wanting a life, never going back — but never quite belonging to a place that belonged to too many tribes already. You no longer have kings...

  I no longer had parents... My mother and father were dead and my sister in Australia; the man I had loved for years was not who I thought he was. I had no roots, I had no land, I had no home.

  I looked at Chris and I knew that he didn't care where his people had come from, a hundred years ago; he felt Ugandan. He wanted to live and die here. The east was the promised land and his heart, like every heart, might be a complicated mechanism, but it had made a movement and he was returning where he belonged. He would never leave Uganda.

  And I couldn't stay.

  The Biggest Bully

  We flew back, all the way to our starting point.

  Chris had held his mother and kissed her goodbye, though it would take time for them to get used to each other again, for things to feel natural, as he had said. Karen and Ben had waved us off, asking us to come back soon

  When we landed in the town by Lake Bunyonyi, it was still day and we wanted to go to the hospital and nursery as soon as possible. We had more presents and Chris felt that he had been away from his patients for too long.

  He had texted Gideon and when we arrived he was in the parking lot, waiting for us and his face wasn't good. Someone has died, I thought. I saw that Chris had taken a deep breath, before we both got out of the car.

  Gideon came forward. “I didn't even have time to call, it started happening so fast..."

  Chris was quicker than me to understand what Gideon meant and began running towards the building, I followed more slowly, as Gideon took my hand.

  "Maybe you shouldn't go in right now," he said.

  I looked at him and his concern was beyond what it would be, if he had wanted to keep me from seeing a patient suffering — especially because I had already seen many — unless the patient were very special to me.

  "No!" I cried.

  "Roberta!" he said, but I had freed myself and started running as well.

  Inside I tried to slow down, I tried to smile at the patients, but they all looked
at me with pity. Chris was at the door of the ICU where Eva had died and I could see his face. I felt as if all my blood were frozen, but I managed to keep walking, to see that there was a little boy on the bed, so covered by a mask, machines and cables that one could hardly see him; but I knew that it was Adroa.

  "He developed a fever very quickly, then started having difficulty breathing," Gideon, who had overtaken me, told Chris.

  I saw then how swift and murderous the disease was, especially for a child. I saw it with horror, not being able to do anything.

  We didn't leave the hospital that day, but I had to let Chris and Gideon take care of Adroa. I longed to stay in the room, so that the poor boy would not be afraid, but Chris kept bending over him and talking in a low voice and I knew Adroa had what he needed for the moment.

  By the end of the day, when Chris came to talk to me, there was despair on his face. "I don't know how that could have happened," he kept repeating, "How could it happen? I should have monitored him."

  "There was nothing wrong with him four days ago!" I cried

  "No, no," Chris was shaking his head. "It was there already and I didn't see it."

  His pain was the intolerable pain of a father. He should not have been the doctor treating Adroa; in Europe he would never have been, but here there were such few doctors and I knew that much as he trusted his colleagues, he would never leave Adroa in anyone's hands. His despair was like a moving contraption and he would not let anyone else drive.

  But there had been Eva, whom he could not save, much as he had fought. There was the ghost of the gentle girl in the room and though she would never have reproached him, he reproached himself.

  He did everything that was in his power, through science and tenderness, for Adroa and three days later he shook his head as he sat next to the bed.

  Adroa was sleeping; there were many needles in him and the respirator was attached to his throat, where Gideon had performed a tracheotomy. He wheezed every time the air went out of him. Chris stroked his hand. "We can only make him comfortable now."