by Неизвестный
She looks out to the yellow-painted wood shack nearby, a food stand. Men are standing around it eating and laughing. A woman with a metal bowl on her head passes through the middle of the wide road, weaving around the cars. She stops the woman and buys one of the small plastic bags of water from her bowl.
As she is struggling to rip open a corner of the bag with her teeth, Marie sees the first of the cows. A herd of white cattle stream past the car on both sides, a white river pouring through the red dirt road, beautiful. She puts her hand out the window and pats one on its hump. A Fulani herdsman races to the front of the herd on his speckled horse – she watches through the back window as he drives them around the corner, a bend in the river, and out of sight. Once the herd is gone, traffic begins to move again. The driver starts the car. Jean takes out a pack of Gauloises and starts speaking sharply to him, telling him in Mòoré that he’s a fool for taking this road.
When they arrive at her home Youssouf pulls open the tall gate and lets them into the property.
In her living room, they talk idly about the national football team and then she goes to her room and returns with the sum of money they’d agreed upon. She considers Jean her most valuable informant. He looks pleased as he tucks the envelope into his suit jacket.
‘What have you heard?’ Marie says.
‘The French, the DGSE, are funnelling money to Blaise. There’s going to be a coup within the next six months.’
‘That’s it?’ She is annoyed. This rumour has been floating around Ouaga for months; anyone with any sense at all knows what Blaise is up to.
He shakes his head no and, smiling, takes her hand again and kisses it. Perhaps he is feeling excited by the information, or maybe unburdened by revealing it; he moves closer and kisses her on the mouth. She lets him, staring at the wall behind his head until it is over. Then, going to her door, she calls to Youssouf who’s standing in the yard. ‘Open the gate,’ she says. ‘Jean is leaving now.’
Two weeks later, she is relieved when she gets her order from Johnson: Let the French do what they’ve already set in motion. No need to get involved.
Thomas spends one last night with her before she leaves Ouaga. When she wakes up he is already half dressed. When he notices she’s awake, he sits on the edge of the bed beside her. He kisses her and puts his hand on her cheek.
‘You know you can’t trust the people around you,’ she says. ‘Not any more.’
He nods. ‘My circle of friends is getting smaller.’
‘Blaise should be in jail.’
He shakes his head. ‘Blaise is my oldest friend.’
She considers telling him to go into exile and to save himself, but there would be no point in saying that. He would never desert Burkina Faso.
‘Take care,’ he says and kisses her again, bisous, goodbye.
She leaves Burkina Faso, not for New York but for Martinique. Her mother lives with her great-uncle, her tonton Alexandre, on a steer farm in the country. Tonton Alexandre is an odd, quiet man who always seems to be fiddling with something. She can understand why he’s never been married.
She formally resigns from the FBI and is paid the rest of the money she is owed from Johnson.
She is on the farm a month before she is able to work up the courage to call her father. She’s still as afraid to disappoint him as when she was a child. She suspects that, by now, Al Taylor has told him about her resignation.
She stands at the yellow phone on the kitchen wall, while her mother sits at the table for moral support. When William gets on the line she starts talking fast: she tells him where she is and that she won’t be coming back for a while, then hangs up before he can respond. She sits at the table.
There is silence for a long time. Then Marlène says, ‘I know he can be hard to talk to.’
Marie is angry with herself for being a coward. Taking it out on her mother, she answers, her voice full of spite, ‘So that’s why you left? I finally get an answer after all this time. ’Cause he was hard to talk to?’
Marlène stays quiet.
‘I want to know,’ Marie presses. ‘I mean it. Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it takes to be a mother. I want you to make me understand how you could just leave us.’
‘There was just something that was, like, thick in the air,’ her mother begins in her languid, spaced-out English. ‘All his cronies were cops or spies. It was this feeling like –’ Her hands start creeping up to her neck. ‘And so, like, the whole scene with your father was just too heavy.’
The pure incomprehensibility of her mother’s answer, and the fact that she has waited so long to hear what amounts to nonsense, makes Marie wildly, disproportionately angry.
She goes to the kitchen door, off the porch, and follows the pale dirt path to the end of property. There is feral sugar cane growing on the other side of the main road and she goes blindly into the green stalks, knowing she’ll probably get lost.
She walks for a long while. The shushing of the cane as she moves through it pleases her, calms her down. When she stops walking it is suddenly very quiet. She likes the intensity of the silence, being alone in sugar cane is quiet like being alone in snow is quiet.
She starts again and walks until the air begins to stink, which makes her realize that she must be near Chamoiseau’s chicken farm. The smell is so overpowering that she has to turn back.
At six months pregnant she’s so large she considers the possibility of giving birth to another species altogether – a giraffe baby perhaps, or some kind of bison. The babies ride low, so low that it seems they’re going to tumble out of her at any second. She is scared and wishes she had someone to help her. Hélène. She thinks about how Hélène would’ve spoiled her children rotten.
The twins are born at the hospital just outside Fort-de-France. Later they are brought out into the sunny courtyard because they have jaundice. Sleeping in their hospital bassinets in the courtyard, right from day one, they look just like Thomas to her.
She helps her tonton Alexandre care for the cows. She finds breaking up bales meditative; even mucking out the stalls doesn’t bother her. On the day she hears that he is dead, that Blaise Compaoré has murdered Thomas Sankara and is the new president, she finds a steer dead behind the barn. She squats beside it and cries, wiping her tears away with the back of her arm and swatting away the flies dancing around the animal’s huge and cloudy eyeball.
When the boys are three, she reads an interesting story in the newspaper. Someone has blown the whistle on a CIA deputy director named George Clark, who was running a secret assassination programme. The last lines of the article are:
LIONEL ROSS, THE CIA’S DIRECTOR, HAS INFORMED CONGRESS OF THE PROGRAMME AND CALLED FOR ITS IMMEDIATE SUSPENSION. CLARK IS BEING INDICTED FOR VIOLATING THE PROHIBITION ON NON-WARTIME ASSASSINATIONS.
There is an official head shot of Clark alongside the article; he is wearing a suit and there’s an American flag in the background. George Clark is the man Marie recognizes as Alan Johnson.
3
Now she lives in a Connecticut suburb with her seven-year-old twins. Their tiny single-storey house is white and has an attached garage. So far she’s only told her boys that their daddy died before they were born, that his name was Thomas and that she loved him.
Her twins are close with their grandfather. Lately, William has been talking about taking them out to teach them how to hunt. Sooner rather than later, he says, ‘because I won’t live forever’.
She doesn’t want them to go out with him. She likes Connecticut and feels safe there. Without knowing how, she’s stumbled into a life she wants and she doesn’t want her boys out with her father, learning to shoot. She feels like that might somehow ruin things.
Mostly she works at home, translating for several small companies in the city. She works at a desk in her bedroom. The bottom drawer is filled with mementos: her sister’s old photo album, a letter from her mother, a newspaper clipping about Thomas on the fifth anniversary
of his death.
Her most vivid memory is of the last time she saw him speak at a public assembly.
She’d been late and so was sitting impossibly far back from the front of the room, beside a man in a suit who was either asleep or dead from heat exhaustion. Thomas was at the far left of a long table of seated government officials and during the question-and-answer period he was asked to comment on his future plans for Burkina Faso.
She remembers him leaning slowly towards the silver table mic and remaining quiet for a moment as he looked out at the crowded convention hall. Then he looked to his left, to where Blaise was sitting and although she couldn’t see it, she is sure that he was looking Blaise directly in the eye as he said, En tant qu’individus les révolutionnaires peuvent être tués, mais vous ne pouvez pas tuer les idées: While individual revolutionaries can be killed, you can’t kill ideas.
He leaned back in the chair and didn’t say anything else.
Blaise made no acknowledgement that he understood the message. Instead, he stood and began the applause for Thomas’s answer, banging his hands together for longer and louder than anyone else in the room.
She isn’t new to her neighbourhood but is only on friendly terms with the woman who lives right next door, Shirley Ferris.
‘Marie,’ Shirley starts in on her one day over coffee, ‘there’s no point in keeping yourself up on the shelf like the goddamn good china.’
Shirley’s kitchen looks like it was at the height of modernity during the 1960s. She dyes her thinning hair blonde and talks freely about the hatchet-job abortion she had in the forties, an operation that made it impossible for her to have children. Shirley mentions a guard at the museum in the city where she volunteers. ‘He wants to meet you. He said, “Marie was my great-aunt’s name. I’d love to meet her.”’
At home that evening she’s boiling water in a saucepan. Billy’s sitting dainty and cross-legged on the floor, drawing something that might be a cow or maybe a gingerbread man. Poochini, who’s part German shepherd, is pacing from her to Billy to Thomas and back again. Thomas is leaning against the threshold to the hallway, fastidiously piling X-Men cards in some sort of order that will never make any sense to her. Her boys are identical but Billy is effeminate and it gets him picked on at school.
‘Would you two sit at the table?’
‘I like the floor,’ Billy says.
She asks him to go out to the garage to get some juice boxes for them but he doesn’t want go alone because he’s afraid of the freezer. He thinks it looks like a coffin.
‘It’s just a fridge,’ she says, breaking uncooked spaghetti in half and putting it in the water. She calls over to Thomas, ‘You go with him.’
He pretends not to have heard.
‘Thomas, you go too or I won’t take you to that Magic Dungeon place this weekend. Or whatever it’s called.’
That gets him moving. He’s been begging to go to this store in Bridgeport for far longer than she’d suspected he could manage to maintain interest in a hobby. She wonders about this special card he wants to buy, convinced that there will either be an enormous gun or an enormous set of breasts on it.
All week she’s been using the trip as a way to extort good behaviour from him. She worries that a better mother would feel guilty for doing this. For being a little cruel. But on the other hand, he’s never been so well behaved in his life. ‘I think they’re a waste of money, those cards,’ she says as he climbs to his feet.
After dinner and some television with the boys, she gets in the shower. As she’s towelling off, there’s a small rap on the door. She says, ‘Billy, I’m in here.’
‘How’d you know it was me?’ his lispy, husky voice asks.
‘Billy, I’m in here. Tell me what you want.’
‘Tell Thomas you got them juice boxes for me too. He got some more out of the garage and is drinking all the juice boxes.’
‘I bought them for the both of you. You go tell Thomas yourself.’
She hears Billy’s muffled voice shouting at his brother, then something clatters to the floor in the living room. There’s another thump and more yelling, then heavy pounding on the bathroom door.
‘Thomas, I’m in here.’
‘Billy bit me!’
She buttons up her jeans, pulls her shirt on and opens the door. ‘What is it with you guys? Can’t I just have one second to myself in here?’
Thomas holds out his arm to reveal the dotted circle of Billy’s bite-mark on his forearm.
‘You tell Billy I’m going to be out there to talk to him in a second.’
‘She says you’re in big trouble!’ he shouts across the hall into the living room. And just behind him, because of Thomas’s raised voice, Poochini has his snout in the air and is dancing in excited circles.
At the A&P she takes boxes of sugar cereal off the shelf for herself and for Thomas to share and gets Billy his favourite, Raisin Bran of all things, because he loves the ad with the California Raisins.
She turns and notices a good-looking white guy, about her age, in the aisle just behind her. She watches as he takes a box from the shelf. As she pushes her cart down the aisle, a ridiculous image of a different life, of a man like him playing catch with her sons, floats up into her head. Or inviting him over to dinner for pepperoni pizza with her and her boys.
But in reality that’d be a disaster. She’s only had a date or two since they moved to Connecticut and each time she was out the boys were awful to the sitter. Last time one of them, or maybe it was both, shaved long strips of fur from Poochini’s back.
As she’s deciding on a brand of potato chips, a young redhead stocks cookies on a nearby shelf. A man with a smoker’s voice approaches and in a stage whisper tells him that a woman in the next aisle is shoplifting frozen dinners. ‘She’s sort of old and wearing big, big glasses.’
Instead of waiting for the redhead to respond he continues down the aisle. Then calls back, ‘I just thought you should know.’
The redhead shrugs, continues stocking the cookies, and as Marie passes he says to her, ‘What does he want me to do about it? I don’t even work here. I work for Keebler.’
In the cosmetics aisle Marie picks out some eyeliner. She opens a lipstick and tests the colour on the back of her hand, something she’s done a million times before. She’s not sure the colour suits her. But then suddenly, inexplicably, she feels so guilty for having used it without paying that she puts it into the cart.
She packs her groceries in the trunk, uses her vanity mirror to put on the lipstick then drives to the school. The boys usually take the bus, but she thought it’d be a nice Friday-afternoon surprise to give them a ride home. She honks when she sees Billy and he gallops to the car. It looks like he’s pretending to be a dog. Poochini maybe.
‘Hi, puppy.’
He whines and pants.
‘Where’s your brother?’
‘Ah-ru-roh,’ he says and pants some more.
When Thomas exits the school he’s the nucleus of a small pack of boys trading X-Men cards. She calls his name out of the open window and waves. Billy calls him too and when he gets in the back of the jeep, Billy pretends to lick his brother. Thomas pretends to hate it. She turns to them. ‘We ready to go? Everyone wearing seat belts?’
‘Your lipstick’s pretty,’ Billy says, clicking his belt into place. She smiles up at him in the rear-view mirror. He’s the only seven-year-old whose opinion she’d ever trust about make-up. She sees that Thomas has his finger in his nose.
‘Don’t do that,’ she tells him and he laughs at being caught.
Shirley Ferris is on their porch as Marie pulls up to the house. She cuts the engine and the boys tumble out of the car.
‘I was just leaving you a note,’ Shirley calls. ‘When are you free to come over for coffee?’
‘Is tomorrow OK with you?’ she says as she struggles with getting the grocery bags out of the car. Then she shouts across the lawn to the boys, ‘I need some help with these.�
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Billy is still being a dog and running in tight circles on the grass, and Thomas is heading behind the house to the giant hole he’s digging back there. To China, he says. She’s hoping he’ll get bored with it soon.
‘How’s noon?’ Shirley says, and she says that sounds fine.
When the bell rings at a little before noon the next day, Poochini, as he always does, goes nuts barking. She goes to the door thinking she was sure they’d agreed to meet over at Shirley’s house. She pulls Poochini back by the collar so she can open the door and is surprised to find, standing on the porch on the other side of the screen, the handsome man from the grocery store.
He’s got black stubble on his chin and blue eyes and he’s taller then she remembers. Up close she realizes how muscular he is. He’s wearing a dark-blue cap with two wavy light-blue lines, like water, next to the initials C.T.W. Poochini settles down. Then barks once more, like he’s asking a question.
‘Hello?’ she says.
‘Ms Mitchell?’ he asks and he sounds like he’s from down South. ‘I’m from the water company. How are you doing today?’
She nods to mean she’s doing fine.
‘I’m reading everyone’s meters this afternoon. Yours looks like it’s inside? Maybe in the basement? I didn’t see it at the side of the house. Mind if I come in and take a look?’
She steps out onto the porch, still holding Poochini by the collar, and clicks the door shut behind her.