Children Are Diamonds

by Edward Hoagland

  Like me, each stewardess was a sizer-up, yet quite often lonely travelers themselves, maybe wanting a human touch, someone else’s hand to rub the sun cream on, before they went down in the elevator alone again. That sun cream—that creamy internationalism, to Paris tomorrow. I was asking a petitely energetic Italian in the deck chair next to mine if she couldn’t smuggle my Ya-Ya through passport control in Milan, describing the reasons why.

  “Half the continent!” she replied. “But how cute. I wish.” She laughed and touched my arm, presuming my appeal to have been a fruitless form of flirtation. Yet I realized after her departure that it really wasn’t: rather, more like a preoccupation. Back at the Arab’s, not having expected to see Beryl again, I couldn’t find her number in the duffel bag of miscellany I’d stored in the closet behind the bar. I thought she would have found a jodhpured gent with a sufficient checkbook for her to carry on the Out of Africa game, but when I called a Westlands linens store the next day, where I knew she liked to schmooze and shop, and they had her contact me, her voice did make me want to reconnect.

  “Still truckin’? Sure, come over if you want.” She told me that financial considerations had tied her up. I didn’t mention Ya-Ya, who should be scrubbed, pigtailed, and outfitted appealingly in a Dallas dress by the Swarthmore interns from our churchy piles. Meanwhile, I obliged Al by sharing soup and sandwiches at the Thorn Tree Café with him and the Maryknolls’ regional supervisor for a debriefing. She was a plain-mannered, beige-faced, self-contained woman in civilian clothes, unbending yet somehow limber, wanting to hear about the particularities of the station Nancy and Elizabeth were serving at. The risk and nutritional situation, the personalities of the SPLA commanders who were in charge, and of the Norwegians, the danger posed by other militias and figures, the reliability of certain truckers and suppliers. I could vouch for how well-grounded every body thought the nuns were, with Father Leo an ideal adviser and backup on the scene.

  She picked my brain as to conditions in Aswa, Amei, Loa, Opari, Juba and jotted down my number in case she needed to use me later for a transport, though I doubted from her demeanor that I would be her first choice. On the other hand, she smothered an abrupt, playful, startling smile as she collected her floppy briefcase before half an hour was up, to move on to another appointment: emergencies in Somalia, Ethiopia, Rwanda, and other countries were within her responsibility; you talked to her as to someone at a different level of commitment and expertise.

  “When are you going back to Ruth?” she asked, winking at Al. And yes, she agreed, Leo was a wonder—his bravery, his experiences, and how he could communicate information over the radio by implications that eavesdroppers couldn’t pick up on. Her attentiveness seemed momentarily encompassing in the way that can render confession a plausible ritual: this sallow fifty-year-old I might have been able to tell about my embezzlement in Alexandria, or silly quarrels with school boards in America that had been self-defeating and my marriage’s breakup. “Thank you.” When she waved a finger goodbye at Al and me, he murmured that she had been in the furnace of Central America when the CIA and the Maryknolls had been operating at cross-purposes and four of them had been murdered.

  Later that afternoon, when Ya-Ya and I presented ourselves at Beryl’s place, she was effusive, kind, and welcoming, despite being unprepared for the girl tagging along. She led us upstairs to her dressing room so Ya-Ya could pick through a tray of costume jewelry and choose what she wanted to wear. Watching her examine a coral necklace, then another of gold-framed, pink-tinted blue beads, “Never had a daughter!” Beryl exclaimed. She pretended to ignore the awry tilt at which Ya-Ya was required to hold her head in order to see. The news of her own son at prep school in Massachusetts was cheery.

  “Lovely hair. Do you like ponies more than pigs? Sit you down at the mirror. Why not let’s us do you a ponytail?” And she proceeded to convert the little-girl pigtails into a more grown-up style. “Lovely. You should be proud. Oh, I ought to have a girl!” she repeated, primping delightedly.

  Beryl was having periodontal problems—“Not advisable here in Africa”—and papers needed signing. “Too much capital tied up.” Which explained her delay in leaving. Her phone bill to California was becoming astronomical, and she was staying overnight at the Jacaranda Hotel in Westlands frequently. I glimpsed no traces of a man in residence, but a maid, well-trained, whose previous employer, Beryl said, had “scrammed,” fixed us vichyssoise and aspic salad with anchovies and cups of sorbet. She asked where Ya-Ya and I had met—“Obviously not in Nairobi”—since we could not communicate except wordlessly. “Her hearing’s good.”

  I went to an antique map displayed on the parlor wall. “On the Nile.” I pointed to Fashoda, the site, now abandoned, of a famous British-French confrontation in 1898, during their competitive scramble for territory to rule in Africa. “Her village is close to there.”

  Although Ya-Ya had never seen a proper map before, she recognized the general shape of the continent from the outline I’d chalked at Ruth’s and traced the river’s wiggles with her finger. Then we moved to Beryl’s globe to show her where we lived, on North America’s coasts, with oceans about—oceans amazingly bigger than the quantities of land. Clearly, she’d heard of their existence (whatever the Arabic word was) but not their extent, and that the water tasted funny, so you didn’t drink it. Beryl shook some salt into a glass for her to taste the difference, and because not only Khartoum but Juba and Kampala were marked on the globe, I could show her how minuscule our long car trip to Nairobi appeared, compared with the dimensions of the earth. England’s location interested her, too, because everybody on the White Nile knew about those British Airways flights. And “Russia” she’d heard of, and China, Tanzania, Israel, Addis Ababa, Egypt.

  The roundness of the planet fascinated Ya-Ya—though it was hard to fathom whether she knew about planets, or if the sun went around us, or vice versa, to produce night and day, or the nature and role of the moon. Was she aware men had already walked on it? Had she even been told before that the world was round? Or was her amusement, excitement, simply aroused by how graphic and curious this representation was, with all its graceful scribbles, complexities, and coloring? We burst into giggles, including the Kikuyu maid, at the difficulty of conveying important information, interrupting each other, rotating our hands. How much easier to have Ya-Ya think the sun revolved around the earth, as it seemed to do, just like the moon (if she did), so long as she knew that day, in Beryl’s California, was night here. Knowledge of that preempted all of the other stuff we wanted to say—about the stars, about South America, Antarctica, ships, whales. Elephants were not as big as whales, but the Nile exceeded the Amazon in length. I pointed to the Mississippi, the Yangtze, the Amazon, which “is wider,” I insisted on saying.

  We did several tours of the house, up, down: the sofas, the rugs, wall hangings woven symmetrically of brown and white Ethiopian wool, and massive shields fabricated for war from buffalo hide by the Masai—who “could beat the Dinkas,” we agreed—plus the icy white fridge, the French kitchen range, chests of silverware, cupboards of china in the pantry for the formal dinner table. In the bathrooms, the medicine cabinets, and mysterious bidet, versus the toilet, and faucets that turned on and off, hot or cold—not to mention the Jacuzzi, of all things, terry-cloth towels as tall as Ya-Ya herself, and closets ranked with extraordinary, unimaginable clothing; and bureaus the same. An architect earlier had inserted stained-glass windows along the elbowed, spacious staircase, with a wide banister, and these colors darkened yet enriched the damask-covered walls, the wide-boarded floor. Then there was the dishwasher, clothes washer and dryer, a tumult of ornamentation and revelation. We were astonished ourselves, and Beryl canceled a yoga appointment to enjoy the experience—held Ya-Ya’s hand, hugged her, showed her agate gewgaws and ivory treasures but never mentioned the outlandish contortions of her head Ya-Ya needed to engage in to peer at everything we pointed out. Leaning like a pool player calculating a giv
en shot, she employed either her left eye or else the errant other.

  “What intriguing work you do,” Beryl told me, making no reference to our leaving, so we didn’t. “Not just wars.” With a swelling, gleeful confidence, Ya-Ya began exploring on her own, leading us, decked out in scarves and lace and rings. “I’d like to keep her forever.”

  The fax machine slowly spat out a three-page document, but not the one Beryl wanted. “What I’ve been doing since you left is paint that screen.” She indicated a divider, freshly floraled, that separated the living from the dining area. “You’d be surprised how long it takes. And you can probably guess where I was sober and where I wasn’t. Just being creative till I leave. How much do you pay the maid for severance, by the way?” The house not being rented or sold, it would be crazy to leave it vacant. Meanwhile, the candy bowl was full, the liquor cabinet needed emptying. I had a feeling we could move in for a week or whatever, till her paperwork had gotten untangled. She was having panic attacks—“maybe not clinically, but it’s like Cinderella at midnight. You know, here I’ve been, for months, and I’ve never slept with an African!” she mused. “Is that me?”Then she reminded herself that Ya-Ya couldn’t understand what she said. At the dressing table, Beryl was letting Ya-Ya style her hair, examine the tools of the beautician’s trade, and mug in the trio of mirrors. “My father wouldn’t have wanted all this for me,” she added, laughing mournfully. “He was so protective. Always the best in tennis lessons, dancing lessons. Mills College.”

  To be helpful, I suggested that her real estate agency could hire guards to protect the property as a stopgap. She was glancing across the bookshelves for anything she wanted to ship. And she owned Lobi and Bambara figurines and Congolese masks, like those I had trucked in wholesale sometimes for the tourist shops. I smelled them for authenticity for her, although dealers will often smoke replicas in burning palm oil to make you think a fake has spent a lifetime scented of jungle cooking fires. Upstairs, we could hear faucets tested, squeaky drawers, creaky beds.

  “The Three Bears,” I said. “Or the Magic Kingdom. But I have six eyes to fix. Not only hers. Two other girls.”

  “I shoulda hadda daughter,” she repeated, after taking us to the Jacaranda club and explaining to the bartender what a Shirley Temple was. Having enjoyed watching her trying on earrings, plus jewelry to decorate her neck and wrists, luscious scarves, shawls, and turbans, in a paroxysm of dressing up the way white women liked to, and getting Beryl to paint her fingernails, we’d inevitably wanted to show off Ya-Ya, at thirteen going on seventeen, to the general public, “like a Bollywood star in an Indian motion picture,” Beryl chuckled throatily. “You know, if you’re driving anywhere in the city, you’ll glimpse these homeless children by the dozens, and you’ll wish, for a moment, you could stop and collect a particular one and improve her life forever and ever. But you don’t know which it would work with, and, like going to the Casino Club, it could be very, very expensive, either way. Do you pre-select, at your center? How do you do it? If they have TB, you segregate them, but in a different room from the AIDS kids, because TB would kill the AIDS kids?”

  I agreed we should have separate rooms, yet we didn’t. “But Ya-Ya has parents who love her. She’s not up for adoption, at least if they survive.”

  Beryl, complaining about the lack of liquidity in her checkbook, seemed relieved, and decided, on the strength of my company and a newly acquired pistol she showed me, not to sleep in the hotel tonight. So we watched Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire in her rumpus room and tucked Ya-Ya into a four-poster bed, with canopy. Sharing Beryl’s, I shared, as well, her jitters when the garbage lid clattered. Was it just the leopard again or, finally, bandits?

  Next morning, we discovered Ya-Ya long since up and practicing frying eggs for us on the Lacanche stove, while the maid, Wacuba, hovered diplomatically in the background. (Wacuba had worked for diplomats, she wanted us to know, sensing a bout of unemployment in the offing.) Then we went to the National Museum to observe Ya-Ya’s pride and surprise at certain ethnographic “Nilo-Saharan” displays that held reverberations for her, and various beasts, from the hippo to some frogs, and the sunbirds, whose taped songs we heard. We also swung by a small upscale shopping center where Beryl’s real estate broker, a New Zealander, had his “one-girl” office, with a decor in antelope hues that complemented the sunlight falling through slatted awnings to create zebra striping on the flagstones outside, as you approached.

  While he showed Beryl an ad he’d written to circulate throughout the NGO community, his Kikuyu in the anteroom spoke rapidly to a couple of phone numbers in her own language and in Swahili about Ya-Ya’s infirmity, until, shifting to BBC English, she informed me that the wait for an operation would be two or three months at a minimum, and the fee a thousand British pounds, negotiable down to possibly the same number of dollars. “If it was my daughter,” said the Kiwi, overhearing us. “I’d take her to Europe.”

  Next door, an optometrist in a white coat sidled away as if we were street people when our little girl first presented herself. He turned unctuous in the face of Beryl’s Bay Area élan, which pretended that there would be no smirking plainclothes immigration officer barring the head of the debarkation ramp at San Francisco’s airport to prevent Ya-Ya from swimming in Beryl’s lap pool every morning, before the school bus arrived. Did we want glasses?

  Wacuba fed us a lunch of pink chunks of melon and roast beef, with lemony iced tea, and I napped on the divan while Beryl fingered communications she didn’t want to read. Her ex had been a developer—his, a mentality she’d hoped to evade but now was mired in. My money belts, “under and over” my underwear, amused her, when she got a gander at them. “Maybe I should go that route!” she wailed.

  I was so poleaxed, now that those weeks in the Sudan had caught up with me, that I loafed passively while she fielded phone calls from the pal in Sausalito who paid her credit-card bills and other Statesside stuff, from appraisers, a bank officer, a California real estate guy, and a therapist there returning her calls to check that she was staying off the sauce. She had a brother in Dallas, too, eager for this phase in her life to end.

  Click-click Ya-Ya’s spike heels sounded overhead, till she appeared downstairs in rakish headgear in this castle of wonders, her fantasies mushrooming, and propped a rug into a tent. In shirtsleeve heat, we were cool indoors because the eccentric placement of the small windows cleverly ventilated yet wittily lit the darkened rooms. Beryl was describing, across eleven time zones, how “at the roundabouts, where you have to slow down, a car full of thugs will circle with you, if they see a white face in the window, right alongside, to try to herd you off at their exit instead of yours.”

  “Beryl, come home! Come home, Beryl!” I’d hear the hollers from the phone. She wanted that, encouraged it, and what she said was true: could happen to anyone. Al dealt with similar dangers, first, by having married somebody he wanted to stay at home with and, second, by buying a house next to a police station. Her wee-hour dreams had become so vivid, however, that I was sorry she’d bought the pistol. On the other hand, if she dreamt about her husband, not a robber, it stained her attitude toward any man she was in bed with, even a man “off the books,” like myself, whose income was mostly cash. And she didn’t dignify me with a name on the phone; just said she had “somebody” staying with her “for protection.” I’d catch her glancing covertly at me when we ate as if I might be chewing with my mouth open or my dentistry was not shipshape. How far below her echelon was I—the schoolteacher you wouldn’t quite ask to the house but paid attention to in his limited sphere?

  “We’ve got to fix those eyes!” I whispered to her as we watched Ya-Ya, with Wacuba, who was holding her hand, imitate the spinning cycle of the washing machine by moving her head round and round. Wacuba had five or six children of her own, whom she walked a bunch of miles one day a week to see. But Beryl glanced quizzically at me, as if to ask whether by taking us in she had committed herself to fulfill
ing my responsibilities.

  “On Nob Hill there’s a doctor who might do it for free,” she mentioned, leaving the matter at that. I told her about a loony millionaire from Long Island I’d done a little work for, a trust funder who flew his own Beechcraft to Africa to do good works—the happiest weeks of his life, he used to say—lifting crateloads of condoms to cities that needed them, or wildlife biologists to potent locations off the regular map. I’d been his low-rent fixer in Nairobi occasionally, and he might have smuggled Ya-Ya to America on a return flight sometime, if he hadn’t had a heart attack during a takeoff, back on Long Island, at fifty-something, and crashed and burned. She smiled with the wince of somebody who knew trust funders.

  I was as jumpy as she when the phone rang, because it might be Al. “I mean, I would want to go back,” I explained when she expressed a certain startlement, her vanity perhaps miffed. “You’ve got a hundred thousand starving, just where I was. But I also wouldn’t.” However, it wasn’t Al at first. An importer called me because a hundred gross of batik cloth had been misappropriated in a bankruptcy and fire-sale proceeding. I helped find it in the maze of ware-housing near Kibera’s slums. Even Nairobi’s Nation newspaper would have headlined a start to Khartoum’s offensive against the southern Sudanese, so I knew Al must be receiving no news from Ruthie except for the worsening starvation. Beryl said, “having burned my tongue,” she would never come back to Africa, whereas I’d “keep sipping the soup.”

  With Ya-Ya, we swung by the melee at Nairobi’s general hospital’s waiting room, to be finally told “all surgeons are fully booked.” Her bad eye scrabbled crabwise at the nurse’s shake of the head, while Beryl’s grim frown indicated that the magnitude of poignancy at the hospital was distancing her from it. We stopped at the street shelter, too (Ya-Ya suddenly afraid we might “trade” her for another girl), and the smaller orphans housed there lifted both arms to be picked up, having been told somewhere that this was the way to get adopted and taken to somebody’s home. STREETWISE, ADVOCATES FOR CHILDREN IN EAST APRICA, announced a new sign over the door.