by Lara Blunte
“And you think there would be a woman like you?”
I shrugged. “Many, probably. I mean, let’s face it, men are not very discerning…”
He laughed and I loved him for it.
"Do you really think I could lie to you?" he asked. “When I saw what it did to my parents?”
"We may all have good intentions, until things get irresistible. And if I were absent, then I suppose anyone would say, 'Well, he had his needs and you weren't there...'"
"He had his needs..." he repeated, raising his eyebrows. "Well, I guess I deserve that for claiming that we are a bunch of animals."
"You wrote about the illusion of fidelity!" I said. "You know it's an illusion."
"That's not what I meant when I wrote that. I meant that a lot of human wishes are based on an aspiration rather than a reality. I meant that we can't suppose that it isn't hard work to be faithful, or kind, or generous, or anything worth being."
"There you go, then. You already know that it will be hard work."
"I don't know that," he said. “My father didn’t seem to find it difficult.”
So maybe Chris doesn't have that cheating gene, I thought.
"You see, I might tell myself that Clive had so many women that he didn't really like any of them,” I said. “But if you ever did something, you would mean it. It would be because you liked her. She would mean something to you."
"Who is this SHE that appeared all of a sudden?" he asked, shaking his head.
I kept going, "Maybe you don't think of another she now, because of the dopamine, but later...Later, when it's oxytocin, or when I look old and bloated by champagne..."
He ran a hand over his face. "Listen to the things you are coming up with!"
"Isn't it true? I will be your oxytocin," I said.
He shook his head, "No, Roberta, that's where you are wrong. Why do I want you and not someone else? If it's just a chemical reaction, don't you think it would have happened before now? Why you?"
"Pheromones," I said stubbornly.
He looked exasperated. "All right, you are out of your depth there. You don’t understand the science around all this very well — in fact even scientists don’t fully understand it. I want you to tell me, why do I want you and not someone else?"
"You're too busy to meet more women,” I said stubbornly.
"Christ! Do you really think you're the only woman around, even here?”
I laughed and then the tears started to flow, because I understood that I could not be convinced. The screen where our lives were being projected had ripped and I had gone behind it to find the illusion. The curtain had been opened to reveal the Wizard of Oz, with his wheels and dials.
If I were in the movie I’d be the lion, lacking courage. As it was, I couldn’t take the leap from doubt into his arms.
Chris moved the hair away from my face. "How do you think Adroa was saved, my crazy one? It was your love that saved him. Medically he should be dead, and instead he is flourishing. You called him back and he came."
"It's a different love..."
"It's loving someone and being able to do anything for them, even giving up all other people."
I shook my head. "How can you know that you will be able to give up all other women for me? You've just met me."
“I have had relationships before, you know?” he said. “But this time I feel all kinds of miserable thinking you might go away and not come back. I might not get over it, or it might take me a very long time of working twenty-four hours a day…”
My organ for pumping blood and oxygen soared and then plummeted. I knew he wasn’t capable of saying such things lightly, but I didn’t want him to be miserable — it made me miserable.
Isn’t that love, Roberta — you idiot?
He was still considering me.
“What are you thinking? I wondered.
“WLBWD,” he said.
What Lord Bumbleworth would do… I started to giggle, though it was one of the most painful moments of my life. I didn’t really want to be a stone’s throw away from him, much less a continent or two.
He continued, “Am getting the ancestral message that I ought to lock you up and tell you that you aren’t going anywhere. Then I should make love to you till you can’t walk out.” He sighed. “Too bad that kind of thing tends to end in a restraining order nowadays.”
“Do they have restraining orders in Uganda?
Chris shook his head, “Good place to live.” He bent to kiss me deeply for a while. Then he smirked. “You’ll miss the werepig."
I started to laugh again, but five minutes later I was crying quite a bit and sniffling. “The werepig!"
He took a Kleenex and placed it on my nose.
"Blow."
"Fffffffffffffffff..."
"I said blow!"
I looked up at him. "I can't blow, I never could!"
"I suppose you'll drown in all that mucus then."
"Mucus! You are a doctor! Normally it's just snot."
He looked at me some more, and after a few moments he asked, "Will you not even try?"
I shook my head. Talking had only convinced me further that I should go, that I should try to put him behind me now, before it hurt too much. But it already hurt too much, so nothing made sense.
"You’ve made a decision and I will respect it."
It hurt like a lance through my body to hear him saying that; I suppose my primitive self did want him to silence my doubt with a caveman or ape move, but he would not do that, and I would probably not accept it.
He took me to bed and made love to me, and if he had decided to show me what I would be missing, he couldn't have done a better job. In the morning I got up thinking that I was Lara and he was Zhivago; I was Anna Karenina and he was Vronsky; I was Guinevere and he was Lancelot.
I walked to the bathroom pondering on these impossible loves and then I shrieked when I saw my face. I looked way more like Linda Blair when she turns demon in The Exorcist than like any of those romantic leads.
He came to the door of the bathroom and I exclaimed, pointing at my face, "Have you been making love to THIS?"
Chris laughed and kissed my bloated demon face.
"There you go, aren't you enough to frighten anyone away? And I still want to marry you."
"You're sick," I said. "Get the Russian bride catalogue!"
He laughed some more. "I'm sick with love, you idiot. And if you say it's dopamine I swear I'll spank you."
My swollen eyes shot up to his. “Really?"
We ended up helpless with laughter on the floor of the bathroom. It was so good, my friends, it was so good to be with him. Why couldn't I accidentally hit my head in the shower and forget about what had happened before?
He went to the hospital and I talked to Pete on Skype.
"What's with the mad sunglasses?" Pete laughed. "Your face looks like a melon!"
"Don't laugh," I said and began to sniffle.
"Gad, Roberta! Are you sure you want to leave? You look like hell!"
I nodded. "Yes."
"All right, darling, I'm getting you a flight. Why on earth did you get out of a love crisis to go into another one?"
I put the palms of my hands up in a helpless gesture, as I was crying again and couldn't speak.
Why do we love a person?
"Go blow your nose, sweetheart," Pete said and his affection only made me bawl more.
Ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff...
The High Place of Sacrifice
I was off to Jordan, to report on the Syrian refugees. I had always wanted to go to Jordan.
In the past, when given my assignment, I would begin thinking about it and would be impatient to go. I would think of myself already on the plane, because I loved the feeling of going through the clouds that were always over England to find the sun. I could look at the formations for hours during the trip, remembering how they had been my idea of heaven as a child. So many of them looked like fluffy little fi
efdoms, where one would just sit, in the white and blue, forever.
I would think of arriving, of the adrenaline surge of being in a new place and having to figure everything out: money, language, city map, hotel, room, room service menu, driver, itinerary. I would think of what it would be like to go out to eat the first night, what food I would find, what the city would be like and how people would act. I would be making notes of the best ways to go round and fulfill my assignment.
This time I didn't think any of these things. My meager suitcase was packed. I had said goodbye to everyone at the hospital and nursery. The children had made me drawings, necklaces, bracelets. I had cried over little Musiga, because Nassuna was quietly dying and the little girl would soon be an orphan. She had only smiled at me.
Miriam had told me to be very, very sure of what I was doing, because there were few people in the world like Chris.
As if I, who had gone around the world, didn't know it.
Adroa had finally been discharged and was at home with us. We had explained to him as best as possible that I was leaving for work and we were vague about whether I would return, though he kept asking, "When will you come back?"
"One day," I said.
"When will you come back?"
"One day!"
He frowned. "What day? Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday?"
Yes, it was a blow falling on a bruise, a knife twisting in a wound. I felt like I was a piece of steak that had been pummeled by a kitchen hammer by the time Gideon, who had to go to Entebbe, arrived.
There was no time for elaborate goodbyes. I think we had wanted it this way.
I hugged Adroa. "Bye, bye!"
"You said soon!" he reminded me. "I’ll miss you!"
I nodded without saying anything. Chris told him to stay by the door and walked with me to the driveway.
He had told me to go and find out what I wanted. So we said nothing else, we just kissed until a voice said, with awe in it, "You're kissing!"
Of course Adroa hadn't stayed by the door. His hands were on his hips and he looked like a mini-Yul Brynner. "Does that mean you'll get married?"
I had to laugh, even through my mucus.
Chris smiled. "We’ll see," he said.
He let me go and picked up Adroa. I walked quickly to the car, opened the wrong door in my need to not be seen crying, so that I had to climb over to the other side like an idiot. I buckled my seatbelt and Gideon got in next to me, turning on the ignition.
If this had been a film I would have been throwing popcorn and screaming, "Staaaay, you idiot, staaaay! Look how hot and fantastic he is! Look at that little booooyyy!"
I didn't want to look, because I knew what I would see, but I looked. There was Chris, holding Adroa in his arms. Adroa was waving his little hand, his crazy teeth showing. I saw Chris smiling, his beautiful hair falling over one eye. I felt terrible love then. It was terrible, because it was so enormous and yet it seemed impossible.
"Let's go," I told Gideon.
He started driving and I didn't look anymore, I put my head down on my knees and sobbed.
I felt Gideon touch my shoulder. "Are you all right?"
I raised my hand and wriggled it, because I couldn't speak and he patted my back with that sweetness that Ugandans have, with the distress they feel at our distress.
I cried when I said goodbye to him, thinking that he was one of the kindest people I had ever met.
Then I checked in at the airport, I got my boarding card, I went through passport control and the metal detector, I sat waiting for the flight, then I sat in Cairo waiting for another flight. I got to Amman, went through immigration, where a Jordanian policeman asked me why I was alone and no, I didn't start crying, I said I was a writer on assignment. Travel writing, I told him. I got my small suitcase, I got a taxi, I got to the hotel. I did everything efficiently, as I had done so many times.
On Monday I went to the very border with Syria with a driver called Ali, to research my article. I walked through the refugee camps, seeing the numbness of the families who had been displaced and were in limbo, not knowing if they would return to their country, if the war would end, if Jordan would take them in, or if they would have to go somewhere else. There were men who were angry, too, some who were fighting against others from a different ethnic group.
I had begun to hate the word ethnic and the word group. They started a lot of the worst trouble I saw and these words survived even in a no-man’s land such as that border. The refugees ought to feel united by their plight and instead some of them wanted to kill others for belonging to a different sect, or tribe, or clan.
I’m sure Dr. Burton could have explained it to me: the foraging and hunting groups in our distant past had been wired to hate other groups, because there weren’t enough resources for everyone, no matter what the fat ads of junk food everywhere promised in the 21st century.
We still answered to an ancient imperative to get all possible resources for us and those like us. I saw the faces of the Jordanian guards watching over the refugees: their human side felt compassion — the old lady fetching water might be their mother, the children running barefoot might be theirs — but their animal side told them these were strangers come to take things away from them, to change their life.
When I returned to the hotel, exhausted, there were emails for me and my heart did all sorts of aerobic exercises when I saw Christopher Burton written in my Inbox. What a few letters can do, arranged in a certain pattern…
I opened it and it said: Oinc, Oinc.
Outside there was a bright, full moon and I wasn’t with the werepig. Of course I cried — haven’t I told you I had become a weeper?
I cried, then I stopped crying and went around Amman, a city that I enjoyed, as it was easy to navigate and had a cute central district tidily built in sandstone around Rainbow Street. I sat at a café far enough from a mosque so I could order wine and asked for a shisha, though I wasn’t a smoker. They brought me one and prepared it with apple-flavored tobacco and a clean mouthpiece. It felt nice to pull on the fragrant smoke and my thoughts ran away with me.
I thought that life would just keep happening to Chris and to me, in different places, with different things in it. I would dream of him and of Adroa, of everyone at the hospital. I would look at the photographs I had taken over and over again, for months.
And then I would think of them less and less, until they became a memory of the time I had once spent in Uganda: the beautiful man, the little boy that must now be grown up, the things I had learned — such as not to give myself too much importance, such as to forgive, such as to be as kind as I could possibly be.
Neither Chris nor I would ever have social media, so I would not see images of him anymore, except the ones stored in my computer; or maybe a Google search one day might yield the image of an older Chris, still handsome, appearing modestly way after the dentist in Florida.
I would wonder what he might be doing, if he had married, if Adroa had become an artist and what had happened to Musiga — and to Gideon, Miriam and to Bwindi Impenetrable Forest and the gorillas.
I would wonder all that but suffer less and less every year, and every year I would remember less and less to think of them. I sat and smoked a shisha and thought these things, but when Adele suddenly began to sing Someone Like You over the speakers, I almost started bawling. I paid for the drink and the shisha and left, knowing I would never meet a man like Chris, which might just have been the point of the song in the first place.
I got to the hotel wearing my ridiculous glasses, though it was evening. In my room I called Ali to say that I was leaving that weekend. He told me no, that I had to stay the next day and see Petra!
“I pick you up at five o’clock, we go on the Dead Sea road, in three hours we are there, halas. Ah, no, Miss Roberta, you have to see it!”
I agreed that I couldn’t leave Jordan without seeing the most famous thing in it, so I said yes, he should pick me up.
He came to
get me a bit after the first prayer the next morning, we drove past the Dead Sea and reached Wadi Musa and Petra by nine, having stopped for a breakfast of tea with sage and date cakes on the way.
We went in together, after paying the fees and walked among tourists through the siq, a narrow canyon formed by swirling pink rocks rising on either side of a narrow path. It had kept the entrance to Petra hidden for a long time.
We walked until the end of the siq revealed part of the Treasury, the building which is the symbol of Petra. It was stunning and I stood appreciating the neat geometrical carving on pink stone that was unique to the people who had founded the city, the Nabateans. Boys with donkeys and camels pestered us and Ali told them to fuck off in Arabic. I hadn’t brought my camera, too many people had great photos of Petra; once again, I just wanted to enjoy it.
There were a Roman theater and tombs to the right, or one could undertake a long climb to the Sanctuary. Eight hundred steps, I was told. I said I would go up and Ali told me that he would stay below. I could call him on the mobile when I wanted to leave.
"There is good cell coverage here. Take your time, Miss Roberta," he said.
I started to climb, alone amidst other tourists. I climbed and climbed, as if I were expiating some sin: the sin of disbelief. The fool says in her heart there is no love...
The sun was hot, though it was going to be winter soon, yet I climbed all the steps. Once at the Sanctuary, I found that I wanted to keep going up to the High Place of Sacrifice and I did.
And then the whole of Petra was below me. Beyond it there were valleys, huge rocks and mountains. It looked almost as if we were on another planet. There was so much space and I was so small, compared to it.
The air was crisp and the sky so blue it seemed fake. The breeze stirred my hair and I felt free and strong. I knew I could go on alone, seeing beautiful things and ugly ones too. I could go on forever.
Yet, as I stood way up high and looked at the immense space, all I could see was an African man.
Apes and Angels