“You’re right, I can’t. Frankly, I think you’re all a little spoiled.”
I thought of my life back in Makokou, 7000 miles from home, the loneliness, discouragement and fear. I felt like I was six years old again and my father had just yelled at me. I dug my fingernails into my palms to keep from crying.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Let’s start again.” He drew in a deep breath. When he spoke again, it was in his hearty trainer voice. “Tell me how your classes are going.”
“Why?” I turned on him in a fury. “Because you want to know how I’ve screwed up? How I’ve got discipline problems and it’s all because I didn’t follow your advice? Fine, you were absolutely right and I was absolutely wrong. I suppose that’s why you offered to drive me back today. To gloat in your victory.”
“No. That’s not what I had in mind.”
“It’s not going well. So you won.”
When he didn’t reply, I glanced over at him. He’d managed to look wounded. “No, Fiona. I wanted to drive you back so we could spend time together. I’ve missed your company.”
I tucked the comment away to replay over and over later. “You sure had a funny way of showing me that the other day, when you stopped by the case de passage.”
He rubbed his temples ruefully. “You have to admit, I was facing the firing squad that afternoon.”
“You deserved it.”
“I realize that. I’m sorry if any of my actions have hurt you.”
The apology and his genuine attitude disarmed me. Soon I found myself blurting out the truth about my situation. With the admissions came the warmth of our old companionship. I brought up the break-ins. “They’re awful. They make me feel so vulnerable. But everyone’s telling me they’re no big deal.”
“It does seem to be an unfortunate facet of life here for Americans.”
“The last one hurt. They took a ballet shoe.” My voice cracked.
“Oh, baby.” His tone was soft. Of course he understood.
“But it gets more complicated,” I said, and hesitated.
Christophe frowned. “What? Speak,” he commanded.
“Someone broke in one night. They were in the living room while I was in the bedroom, sleeping. They stole nothing. It almost seemed to be a gesture, to prove that I was unsafe there.”
Christophe had grown very still. Nervously I continued.
“I suspect a problem student, a redoublant I initially took for an adult, back in September, when he came by my house. Which he now uses to his advantage. He’s got a game of intimidation going with me. He’s making me nervous, and he likes my reaction.”
The furrows over his brows deepened. “Tell me more about this student.”
“In the classroom, even when he’s not the one making the disruption, he always seems to be behind it, watching how I react. If he’s not the one who’s been breaking in, I still get a sense he’s involved somehow. He knows my house. A little too well.”
“Has this student threatened you in any other way?”
“Nothing I could report to my proviseur. He’s clever about it.”
“Has he ever laid a hand on you?”
“No. Except…” I found it hard to continue.
“Tell me.” His voice sounded harsh.
I focused on a clump of sand that had made its way into the otherwise spotless car. “It’s just that when he shook my hand farewell, just before I left Makokou to come here, he let his middle finger… stray or something.”
“Are you telling me he brushed it against your palm? Like this?” He took my hand and did it, holding my gaze. Coming from Christophe, the warm, firm pressure of his finger against the tender vulnerability of my inner palm became undeniably erotic, like lips against a neck. It sent a bolt of sexual electricity ripping through me.
I managed to find my voice. “That’s it exactly.”
Calixte was trying to hit on me. The gesture had been a threat. A promise.
Christophe seemed to come to this conclusion at the same time. Rage built in his eyes as he took my hands and squeezed. “We’re getting you out of that house.”
Tears rose up from nowhere and settled in the back of my throat. My next words sounded thick and muffled. “That would make me feel better.”
We drove to the Ministry of Education offices, housed in an anonymous, three-story building painted an industrial grey. Inside his office, he asked me specific questions and jotted down the replies on a pad of paper. I warned him what my administration kept telling me: there were no available houses, no vacancies for teachers at the hotel, no money in the Ministry budget for security bars on the windows. Christophe made a few phone calls and stepped out to talk with someone in a nearby office. I spied an oversized upholstered armchair in the corner of the room and went to sit in it. The chair was the perfect size to curl up in, with its two cushioned arms cradling me. It made me sleepy, more so when rain began to patter against the windowpane. How odd it was, I reflected, being here, so relaxed, in Christophe’s office. This guy I’d thought was out of my life was very much back in it. I rose and went to the chair behind his desk and took his suit jacket to warm my bare skin against the air-conditioning. Tucking myself back in the armchair, I listened to the rain drum, inhaled the citrus of his cologne from within the folds of his jacket, and let my increasingly heavy eyelids droop shut.
A while later I heard a rustle. I opened one eye to see him standing there, hands on his hips, his head cocked to one side, smiling at me. “I borrowed your jacket,” I mumbled.
“So I see. No, don’t get up. I’ll be another twenty minutes, at least.”
I settled deeper into the comfortable chair. “Okay. I’ll just keep your jacket company.”
“You do that.” His voice was soft, warm with affection. A giddy feeling of happiness welled up in me. It was as if every awful thing leading up to this moment had been worth it, to see him standing there, regarding me with such tenderness. I smiled back at him and shut my eyes again.
“Stop staring,” I murmured a few seconds later. He laughed. A swish-swish of his trousers signified his departure and a moment later I heard his footsteps recede down the hall.
On the way back to the case de passage, we stopped for drinks at a café, where we chatted and swapped stories like old friends. His behavior was exemplary—solicitous and caring but not flirtatious in the least. Afterward he drove me back to the case. When he parked, I waited an extra beat to see if his hand would fall onto my knee or behind my neck. It didn’t. Reluctantly, I slid out of the car. He came around to my side.
“Feel any better?” he asked.
“Yes. Thank you.”
His arms slid around me for a hug. I sagged against him and realized how tired I was, how desperately lonely for contact. He released me all too soon and brushed an errant strand of hair from my face. I could feel him studying me, maybe debating whether or not to kiss me.
“You don’t look good,” he said. “You need more rest.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. The seducer had turned into the big brother. Nonetheless, it was an improvement over the cool stranger of a few days earlier. “A safer home will help,” he said, and I nodded. “I’ll try to have some answers for you before you fly out. Be sure and check at the Peace Corps office for messages tomorrow morning.”
“Okay. Thank you. For everything.”
“It was my pleasure,” he said. He planted a light kiss on my forehead and gave my shoulders one last squeeze. “Off you go,” he said. “Tell the firing squad inside that I said hello.” He returned to his car and departed with a wave.
I flew back to Makokou the following afternoon. As Christophe had promised in his message, a representative of the hotel was waiting for me at the Makokou airport. He drove me to the hotel where I met the manager, a fussy, well-dressed Gabonese man, who showed me to one of their adjacent bungalows. It was a two-room unit, neat and clean, with a kitchenette, freshly painted walls, screens and bars on the windows and crisp cott
on sheets on the bed. The bungalows, the manager informed me primly, were normally reserved for visiting officials. However, thanks to Christophe’s influence, this one was mine to use until the end of the term. I moved in an hour later.
Sleeping well in a secure home with double locks and security bars on the windows did wonders. It got me through the first day back in the classroom; it protected me from the flotsam and jetsam of the students’ restlessness, and it held strong before Calixte. I gauged his menace for a few days, knowing that the power lay in my hands. Christophe had wanted to make a phone call to the proviseur about Calixte, along with a strong suggestion to send him back to his village should he act up one more time. I’d said no, but promised him I’d start using administration as backup. When Calixte finally struck, a week later, by hurling a piece of chalk at me while I was facing the blackboard, writing, I felt no fear, no uncertainty. Once I confirmed it was him, I walked out of the classroom.
The ensuing cheers and laughter from my students abruptly halted when I returned a few seconds later with the surveillant. How absurd, I realized, to have had this resource at my fingertips and have been too stubborn, too idealistic to use it. Silly first-year Peace Corps volunteer.
“Ondo Calixte,” the surveillant shouted, “come with me, this instant.”
Calixte strode to the front and paused beside me, his eyes pouring out rage. This was my cue to shrink. I didn’t. I had friends now. I had someone who could kick his ass. His eyes flickered with insecurity. A fatal mistake and we both knew it.
Game over. The teacher had won. The surveillant grabbed his arm and shoved him out the door.
I turned to the other students. “I will not hesitate to throw out any other student who disrupts my class.” My words, spoken in precise, correct French, sliced through the silence. “I do not want this. But do not provoke me. I will spend the rest of the year lecturing you from your textbooks unless you can prove to me you are capable of a more lively class.”
I hated the threat-method of teaching. But it worked, that day and the rest of the week. Calixte came back and promptly got kicked out again the following week. Whatever it takes, my eyes told him, and although he glowered, he could do nothing.
Next year, I vowed, it wouldn’t be like this.
Next year.
I realized, with a growing sense of relief that stayed with me through the week, the month, that I was going to make it. Not gracefully. Nothing much to be proud of.
Except I’d done it. And that was enough.
Part Three
Second Year
Chapter 14
At the Lomé International Airport in Togo, a crowd of over a hundred shouting Africans surrounded a lone ticket agent behind the Air Gabon desk. It was chaos, like some incomprehensible contact sport. I pushed in and got a smelly armpit in my face and trod on another person’s toe. It hardly registered. Like everyone else, I focused on wading through the sea of irritated people to reach my goal: ten seconds of the ticket agent’s time. I made it to the desk and waved my plane ticket to Libreville in her face. The Togolese agent, trim and immaculate in her Air Gabon uniform, glanced at it and sniffed. “There are no seats,” she told me.
“No seats? What does that mean?”
“You are not confirmed on this flight.”
I looked at the ticket and pushed it back at her. “What does this big ‘C’ mean, then?”
She scrutinized the ticket again and shrugged. “All right, you are confirmed. But there are no seats available.”
I tried to protest more, but the angry horde swallowed me. A heavy man and his two portly wives pushed in front of me to plead their case next, also to no avail. I stood in the heaving, jostling crowd, anxiety coursing through me like a fever. I’d spent almost all my money, keeping just enough for a taxi ride back to the case de passage in Libreville. The next flight to Libreville was twenty-four hours later.
Up to then, my trip had been a great success. Togo struck me as intensely African, crowded with industrious people, vivid colors, cheap food and tangy millet beer drunk out of gourds. Transformed into an extravert by necessity, I’d gone out and met people, spent time in their villages, sleeping in funky cylindrical mud huts with peaked thatch roofs, digging fingers into fufu and sauce with local families for meals. Two weeks of this, however, had proved exhausting, especially since the plan had been for Carmen, Daniel and me to go together. But Daniel’s med-evac in May had changed that. Months of persistent low-grade fever and joint inflammation had worried Rachel enough to send him to Washington DC for observation. Forty-five days into treatment, the Peace Corps doctors there, having found no answers, refused to clear him for return. Which, according to regulation, meant medical separation from the Peace Corps. Like that, Daniel was out. Carmen and I had been working as teacher trainers at the Lambaréné training when Rachel arrived with the bad news. I’d never before seen Carmen break down and cry. When her parents wired her a round-trip ticket for her to spend two weeks stateside with Daniel and them both, she dropped the Togo plans. I couldn’t blame her.
Back at the Togolese airport, I swayed with the mob several minutes more, stunned into inaction, until a Frenchman grabbed my arm and pulled me to the sidelines. My gender and white skin had aroused his sympathy. Fair or not, within five minutes, I held a seat assignment card in my hand. That was how it worked here. The crowd howled in protest. Soon, however, they were distracted by a richly attired Togolese man who also seemed to be receiving preferential treatment. As their glares and cries descended on him, I slipped out, leaving the bedlam behind. In relative calm, I boarded my plane to Libreville and two hours later found myself back on familiar land.
That evening, back in Libreville, I stepped into the case de passage and stopped short. I didn’t recognize any of the people splayed on the couches. It was late, my head was pounding and I wanted nothing more than to collapse into one of the bunk beds. But a familiar face would have been nice, too.
“Hey there,” a guy with shaggy hair and a half-grown beard called out. “Come join the party.” His accent defined him as American, his worn, faded clothing the reassuring attire of a Peace Corps volunteer.
“So, this is the Peace Corps house?” I asked hesitantly.
He laughed. “Course it is. Don’t mind us.” He introduced himself and the others as I stood, listing with fatigue. The strangers were, for the most part, second-year construction volunteers. It seemed like an entirely different Peace Corps Gabon from the one I knew. I nodded after each new name and tried to keep a polite, engaged smile on my face.
“Have a seat and join us for a beer,” the shaggy-haired guy—Ned? Ted? Fred?—said.
“I’d love that,” I lied. “Maybe in a little bit.”
Their loud voices followed me down the hallway as I went to claim a bunk in the farthest bedroom. To my relief, I found Joshua, my fellow English teacher, on the floor between the two sets of bunk beds. He was sitting cross-legged in meditation. He opened one eye and peered at me. “Hi there, Fiona.”
“Whoops, sorry, I’m interrupting you.”
“No, that’s fine.” He unfolded his pretzeled legs. “I’m done here.”
“How on earth do you manage to meditate with all that noise going on?”
“It’s because of the noise that I’m meditating.”
I set down my bag, perched on a vacant bunk and we chatted about what was new. Two of the new trainees had already quit and gone home. Daniel was still in Washington DC, resigned to his fate, but happier with Carmen there, visiting him.
“Any idea when she’ll be back?” I asked.
“Sounds like she extended her stay for one more week.”
I shook my head. “Terrible luck for Daniel, huh? He was really enjoying his post.”
“Yeah. Wonder if someone put a curse on him?”
I glanced over at him to see if he was joking. He looked serious, lost in contemplation.
“So, hey,” I said. “Been to any bwiti ceremonies lately?�
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That got his attention. He stared at me. “Why do you ask?”
Bemused by his reaction, I fumbled for words. “I don’t know… it’s just that it was about a year ago that we went on that site visit together and watched the ceremony.”
“Oh. Well, it’s interesting that you should ask, because I’m leaving to go to one tomorrow.”
“What a crazy coincidence.”
“Not really. I’ve gone to six or seven of them in the past year.”
Joshua had one of the most isolated posts of the education volunteers: far from Libreville; no electricity; more a village than a town. “Boy, sounds like you’ve really gotten into it,” I said.
He glanced over at the door and lowered his voice. “I have, but it’s not something Peace Corps Gabon wants us to get involved in, so we’ll leave it at that. And let’s keep this conversation between us.”
“Sure. Of course.”
“What about you? I hear you might be changing posts.”
I stretched out on the bunk and clasped my hands behind my neck. “Yeah, Carmen was pushing to get me Daniel’s post.”
She and I had discussed it in Lambaréné with Chuck, who’d visited the training site after the bad news about Daniel. Chuck had been fretting over the fact that he’d have to tell Daniel’s administration they’d lost their second-year volunteer, for the second time in a row. Carmen suggested I take his place. “That way they’ll get their second-year volunteer and Fiona will have a safer place to live. Everyone’s always saying a male volunteer’s a better fit for that Makokou post, anyway.” Chuck had eyed the two of us thoughtfully and told Carmen he’d think about it.
“Chuck said he’d have an answer for me this week,” I told Joshua now.
“For what it’s worth, I think it’s settled,” he said. “I overheard Chuck’s phone call yesterday when I was in the Peace Corps office. He was talking to someone there at the Bitam mission school, and he mentioned your name.”
A Dancer's Guide to Africa Page 13