The Uttermost Parts of the Earth

by Frederic Hunter

  Odejimi invited them in. “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “Marike’s teaching Moulaert’s older son what his father taught her,” Kwame explained. “She intended us to catch them.”

  “She’s very naughty,” observed Kalima.

  Shaking their heads at her behavior, the trio had some whiskey and retired for the night, all three in the same bed.

  THE NEXT morning Odejimi and his guests listened to the news on his shortwave radio. The news reader announced that tens of thousands of Hutu refugees were still thought to be pushing west through the jungles of eastern Zaire. Aid workers were trying to locate them and get them repatriated to Rwanda. Tutsi troops were pursuing them.

  “How do they eat?” asked Kalima. “How do they stay dry at night?”

  MARIKE CONTINUED to lodge in the room Tombolo had arranged for her. She stopped appearing naked on the balcony in the mornings. She also succeeded not only in sleeping with both Moulaert and Adriaan, but in convincing each that he alone enjoyed her favors. Moulaert had to use great care to arrange rendezvous with Marike; his wife now dominated his existence. Adriaan had to be equally watchful; his mother did not want him tainted by Africa. Each man was so busy deceiving Mme Moulaert that it was not hard for Marike to deceive both of them. Nor for Tombolo to collect an occasional commission.

  MOULAERT SEEMED such a buffoon with Marike that Kwame and Odejimi often laughed at him when they were together in the late afternoons

  But when Kwame was alone—especially alone with Kalima—he would perplexedly reconsider their laughter. He himself felt an ever-greater attachment to an African woman. He had always responded to Kalima’s beauty. Her mystery fascinated him. He enjoyed her body. Their lovemaking involved an exploration of the unknown; it brought Kwame satisfactions beyond the merely physical.

  As the weeks passed, their enjoyment of being together had less and less to do with lovemaking. They spent hours together talking. Kalima was full of questions about Kwame’s childhood in Massachusetts, about his schooling, the subjects he loved and those he hated, about his closest companions and especially about his girlfriends, about what it was like to be in Europe and West Africa. And what was it like to live in South Africa?

  To help her understand his answers Kwame brought maps and magazines and picture books. She would pore over them as they lay side by side on their bed. She would study the photographs, asking questions about them: What was snow like? How could buildings rise forty or fifty stories? Why did people want them that way? Why did they not fall down? How did people find the rooms they were looking for in such buildings? An elevator? What was that? Was it not inconvenient, even dangerous, to have so many cars blocking the streets? What about the trash on the streets: how did it get there? What happened to it?

  Kwame watched her examining the photos, asking questions. Weighing his answers, he could not suppress the emotion that flowed out from him.

  He would also ask questions about her village and the people in it. She would delight in his amazement about things so simple she had never thought to question them. How could she keep track of all her relatives? What was it like to live in a family where a child had several mothers but only one father? Did she not ever want to flee the village community and be alone, by herself? Such questions made her smile. She tried not to let laughter show how preposterous they were. She would cover her mouth with her hand; sometimes she would cover his eyes. He would take her hand that covered them and kiss it.

  There were other questions. Did she want to see the world he came from? Perhaps, but how could she? Did he want to see the world she came from? Of course! He had already seen some of it and wanted to see more.

  In the enormous stillness that sometimes lay over the town, in the lassitude that allowed nothing to stir—not insects, not the air—in those moments when even the river seemed to slow its pace, Kwame would wait for this time alone with Kalima. It became the focus of his days.

  One evening they talked until after midnight, then, feeling amorous, made love. Soon Kwame slept. After a time Kalima woke him. She whispered, “A spinning star visited me.” Her expression was so luminous that she lit up the darkness. Immediately Kwame understood what she meant. She had conceived. Was it possible for her to know? Was she really so in touch with her body that she knew? Perhaps she did. He smiled, kissed her lightly, and put his arm around her. “The star was waiting for us to finish talking,” she said.

  He woke before dawn and lay in bed, trying to remember what had happened in the night. Kalima had wakened him. She had made an announcement: They had reached the necessary level of trust for permissions to be given. But, of course, she did not phrase it in that way. Could it possibly be true? Amazing! But was this really what he wanted, to father a child with a woman for whom he felt deep affection, but whom he hardly knew? He would not allow himself to think too deeply in terms of loving her. Still he wanted her happy. Now she would be. He thought of what Moulaert had done. But how could he possibly marry her? He decided to have confidence in what trust and the Bon Dieu had brought about. What else could he do?

  AT BREAKFAST Kalima chattered about how to announce the good news to her friends. Kwame pleaded with her first to let the two of them absorb the news. “But I am a woman now. I want everyone to know.”

  “Wait a month. Please. Then you will know for sure.”

  “I know now. I want everyone—”

  “Please wait.”

  “I will write to my parents. They will be so pleased!”

  A couple of days later, Odejimi stopped by the center. Kwame invited him into his office and offered him a splash of whiskey. “You’ll soon need another bottle,” said the doctor.

  “I may give it up entirely.”

  “I came to congratulate you.”

  Kwame was surprised to hear this.

  “Your ‘Kalima’ tells me she’s preggers.” Kwame did not respond. He supposed she had to tell someone. “She’s told you?” said the doctor.

  Kwame grinned.

  “That’s your doing, I suppose.”

  “The Bon Dieus doing, I believe.”

  “With an assist from you.”

  Kwame shrugged.

  The doctor glanced in the direction of Kwame’s groin. “Impressive equipment you’ve got there.”

  “One doesn’t like to boast.”

  “I should think not. Or every barren woman within a hundred miles will be calling for an appointment.” Odejimi finished off his whiskey. “A lot of men gave it a try and weren’t up to the job.”

  Kwame shrugged again.

  “And when you leave?”

  “Am I leaving?” Kwame laughed. “I guess the Bon Dieu will take care of that as well.”

  ONE MORNING Kwame was alone on the hotel terrace. Kalima had stayed in the room. Lingering over coffee and rolls, Kwame thumbed through the book he would present that day to his class at Bomboko Congo. He glanced up as Moulaert and his wife appeared on the terrace. Moulaert nodded a greeting, but the wife ignored him, the whoremaster. After they were settled at their table, Tombolo approached and handed them an envelope.

  Kwame looked back at his book. He heard Madame speaking to Moulaert as she opened the envelope. She fell silent. Kwame glanced over at her. She stared at the letter, her face contorted with disbelief. A muted cry escaped her throat. She threw down the letter. For a moment she seemed poised between control and hysteria. Then she screamed. She pounded the table. Moulaert tried to calm her. She pushed him away.

  She rose and marched toward Kwame. She hurled curses at him in Flemish. Kwame rose and moved off. Madame grabbed a chair and came after him. Kwame retreated across the terrace. Tombolo and two waiters raced to Mme Moulaert. They wrestled the chair from her. She collapsed on the terrace, weeping hysterically. Moulaert hurried to her. He crouched beside her, reading the letter. A look of silent anguish crossed his face. He waved the letter at Kwame at the same time comforting his wife. Madame sobbed uncontrollably.

  Kw
ame moved carefully toward Moulaert, his expression asking if he could help. Moulaert shook his head and handed him the letter. It was in a schoolboy script in Flemish, which he could not read. It was signed Adriaan.

  Mme Moulaert began to collect herself. “Married that whore!” she wailed, speaking her heavily accented French. “There is nothing in Zaire but chaos! Ruination! Oh, my son! My son!”

  Kwame handed the letter back to Moulaert and left the terrace.

  As he was leaving the hotel, Kwame learned that Tombolo was equally upset. A thief had stolen a sizable sum of money from his bedroom.

  THAT AFTERNOON Moulaert appeared at the center. “I cannot believe this,” he confided to Kwame. “I loved that girl. I know she loved me. Can a mere teenager take care of her the way I could?”

  Kwame got Moulaert a drink and asked what exactly had happened. “I can hardly believe this,” Moulaert repeated. “Yesterday afternoon Adriaan took my Marike to the Catholic fathers. They married them. But she was already a wife!”

  “Have you talked with them?” Kwame asked.

  “I talked to the priest who married them,” Moulaert said. “I would not let my wife come with me. He said, ‘They were so in love.’ Idiot graybeard! My wife would have pummeled him.” Moulaert shook his head in disbelief. “I had to walk over there. Adriaan took my vehicle. I walked here too.”

  “Where have they gone?” Kwame asked.

  “God only knows.” Moulaert removed Adriaan’s letter from his shirt pocket. He slowly unfolded and reread it. “Adriaan says Marike has money. But how? From where? Enough to tide them over until they get established.” He looked abjectly at Kwame. “Where would she get money?”

  Kwame shook his head.

  Moulaert stared at the letter. “I know there is opportunity here—” He stumbled, translating from the letter. “Opportunity? What can he mean?” He looked back at the letter, “Opportunity here for a man who will work,” he translated. His voice broke. He bit his lower lip. “I love Marike,” he read. “I will work for her as no man has ever worked.”

  Moulaert stared at the letter, his eyes glistening, and refolded it. “My heart cries out for my son! What will happen to him?” He gasped for air, his voice breaking with emotion. “My heart is breaking for my little wife.”

  Kwame sat beside him and put an arm around his shoulder.

  Moulaert wiped his eyes. “I know it’s improbable for a man of forty-five to love a girl of fifteen,” he said. “But that’s what happened. She made me realize that I never loved my wife. Oh, that witch! So ugly. So loud. So opinionated!” He laughed piteously. “While I was talking to the priest, she was writing a letter to the Pope.” He cried out with disbelief. “That woman! I’ve never really known her.”

  He stared at the floor. “My little Marike! She made me so happy. I know she loved me.”

  Finally Kwame said, “What now? Can you find them?”

  Moulaert shook his head. “Impossible to make any plans.” He proceeded to lay out a provisional course of action. The younger son would return to Belgium. Mme Moulaert would stay in Mbandaka, living at the hotel, comforting her husband. She could trace Adriaan; she was sure of that! It would not be difficult to locate two teenagers, a European boy with blondred hair and pale skin and a young Congolaise. After all, the jungle was not impenetrable. Once she had traced her son, Mme Moulaert would kidnap him if she had to. She would take him back to Belgium and get the marriage annulled.

  “The names she calls Marike!” Moulaert moaned. “Always putain. I don’t think I can stand it!”

  “She’ll calm down in a few days,” Kwame assured him.

  “I keep wanting to tell my wife that I know why Adriaan loves her,” Moulaert whimpered. “I know the sweetness of her kisses.” Moulaert finished off his drink. Kwame poured him another.

  “She says she will kill Marike,” Moulaert sniffled.

  “She won’t kill anyone,” Kwame assured his friend.

  “I wish she would kill me,” Moulaert lamented. “I really cannot stand it.”

  IN THEIR evenings together Kwame and Kalima began to build a bridge across the chasm of cultural differences that separated them. Repeatedly Kwame told Kalima how beautiful she was, especially now that she was expecting their child. But what he felt on his tongue was the urge to say, “I love you.” But he would not say those words. They were the impositions on him of a culture that was a world away. He wanted to declare them to Kalima, he knew, because his culture glorified romantic love, because it laid on those it influenced a hunger to seek romance, because he had seen too many movies, too many TV shows, where one person said those words to another and suddenly the light changed, soft, sweet music swelled, kisses were exchanged, and the world seemingly became a better place.

  But Kalima did not come from that culture. She did not know what those words meant even if she might haltingly say them in an approximation of English. If he said them, she might cover her mouth to hide her laughter; she might cover his eyes so that he could not see how preposterous he seemed. What did “I love you” mean? Was he not going to be leaving her one day? Had he not acquiesced in her sleeping with another man?

  So instead of saying the words, he waited through each day’s stillness and watched her in the close darkness of his hotel room. They laughed together and let their emotion unite them in its embrace.

  FOURTEEN

  As the weeks passed, Kwame and Odejimi continued to drink together in the late afternoons. Kalima often sat with them, her chair drawn close to Kwame’s. He would rest his hand lightly on her arm. Seeing such signs of affection, Odejimi teased them about being in love. They shrugged. He would ask Kalima when she would bring him the new girl Kwame had said she would find for him. Although he would tease about fixing assignations with her, he made no serious attempt to undermine their relationship.

  Sometimes Moulaert would join them on the terrace. And sometimes even his wife, so worried was she now about Zaire’s disintegration and so hungry for human contact. They would listen to the news. Madame Moulaert would worry that Adriaan and “sa petite putain” had headed in the direction of the rebellion. Tens of thousands of refugees were still said to be in the jungles. The rebels were advancing toward Kisangani. Zairean planes had bombed Bukavu on the eastern border. Mobutu remained in France. Would he return to mobilize a defense of Kisangani? If not him, who? Kisangani was the gateway to Mobutu’s home territory. His support was strong there; he had Ngbandi ethnic allies. And surely he and his people would fight for Kinshasa, would they not?

  Radio reports came that foreign aid workers had evacuated Kisangani. “The rebels will take it now without a fight,” Mou laert predicted, partly to reassure his worried wife that their son would not be hurt. “Mobutu’s troops won’t hold Kisangani; they loot, but they do not fight.”

  “Adriaan cannot have been so stupid as to go there,” his wife mewed. “But he got involved with that girl,” she added. “So what kind of judgment can he have?”

  “I suspect she is not as bad as you think,” Moulaert mumbled.

  “She’s worse,” said his wife.

  The others kept their silence.

  SOMETIMES IN the night Kwame and Kalima would hold each other or lie side by side, their fingers lightly entwined. Kalima would repeat the stories the ancients of her village told around night fires. About the evils and uncertainties of the impenetrable jungle. About creatures who lived there, some trapped in Nkundo’s snares, spirits of the dead, ghosts of creatures who had never lived like people do. About fearsome creatures, large as hippos, strong as elephants, with beaks like birds and scales like lizards, creatures who ran fast and swam. They ate people, but never stopped being hungry. She would talk of people tall as trees. Others whose skin and hair and eyes were green or red or blue, some who were speckled or striped like zebras. Listening to her, Kwame would think how mysterious Kalima was, how lovable in her naïveté, in the beliefs natural to a prescientific mind. Kwame could almost feel the presence
of ghosts and goblins in the room.

  His old academic training would click in. He would think about Red Riding Hood and the wolf dressed up as the grandmother, lying apparently sick in bed, a story that had never before seemed credible to him. It had always been told to him as a send-up. “People used to tell children these stories,” his mother would say because they were people of the mind and knew better. He thought about how science and rationality had stolen from people their imaginations and at the same time had given them reassurance about irrational fears.

  Sometimes he wondered if he would ever know Kalima. Then, as if sensing his thought, she would confess that these were only stories. Her teachers in school assured her that they were not true. And yet, she would say, she noticed that none of those teachers would venture into the jungle.

  A LETTER arrived from Livie, the first in more than a month. It was written in her characteristic style, in a single paragraph flavored with dashes. It read:

  “Swami—I so want to e-mail you!—How’ve you been? Seems like forever since we talked. Since we touched. Since we—Just tried to call you. It’s two A.M. here—God knows what time there and the phone just rang on and on and on—and I didn’t know if it was ringing at your cultural center or at some operator station God only knows where or even if it was ringing in Africa—I miss you so much. Law school is such a grind—and I get so lonely!!!!! I wish you were around—wish we could talk—wish we could take out our frustrations—anyway my frustrations—with some good healthy fucking that would leave me breathless and exhausted and refreshed and renewed. Where are you? Why don’t I hear from you? I’m so alone here. There’s a guy here who wants me to live with him—he’s the kind you always said I’d marry. But I want to marry you!!! I’m thinking of living with him only to stop the loneliness—but couldn’t consider it unless I talked to you about it first. I keep thinking that I will just come out to see you and maybe that will make it all better. Sorry I haven’t written more—Have zillions of cases about disputes you wouldn’t believe and I suppose it’s good for me and all that—but I would sure like to see you, touch you, hear from you, feel you inside me, hold you all night, and know what’s going on in your life. Liv.”