Caravan

by Dorothy Gilman

  My naïveté and perhaps my feelings about Jared appeared to amuse Sir Linton for he continued to seek me out. "Why?" I asked him one day after we had visited Old Cairo and the bazaars and were again having tea on the terrace of Shepheard's Hotel.

  "I cherish oddities," he told me with his ironic smile. "Being a mere spectator of life, I find philosophy a vast comfort; I enjoy speculating about life, having been denied it in the sense that you've lived it. And we have become friends, have we not?"

  "You've been very kind to me," I said. "Yes."

  That was August 2,1 remember, and when I woke up the next morning my only concern was that it was August 3, and nine weeks now since Jared had left for Abyssinia; he had promised to be in Cairo in two months and he was a week overdue.

  That was early morning; by noon I learned that Germany had declared war on Russia, and when I woke up on the following day England had declared war on Germany and I was stunned to hear that suddenly Africa was at war now, too. Feverishly I went to my maps again, pinpointing Abyssinia, which was next to British East Africa, which in turn was next to German East Africa, suddenly enemies now—I had not understood this—and coinciding with this terrible news came the realization that I could no longer overlook my queasiness each morning or my growing suspicion that I might be pregnant: I was pregnant, and had been so for more than three months, and where was Jared?

  In Cairo, Germans and Austrians were interned or mysteriously vanished, and martial law was declared. In Berlin it was announced the Turks were going to attack and reoccupy Egypt and gain the Suez Canal, and I began to devour the newspapers: in the Uganda and British East Africa Protectorates—and, oh God, both countries bordered on Abyssinia—appeals were going out for volunteers to fight with the King's African Rifles.... Horses were desperately needed and were being rushed from Abyssinia to Nairobi for service against the enemy in German East Africa.... The Emperor of Abyssinia, it was reported, was cooperating in every way. Had Jared reached Abyssinia safely, and had he left it safely? Had he met with delays and been swept up by the war? He was a British citizen, after all; had he been commandeered to deliver some of those horses to Nairobi? Where was he now, and why was there no message from him if he was still alive?

  I find I have little interest in recording the days that followed. I moved through them, I breathed, I smiled, I arranged the expression on my face carefully, like a mannequin; I wept frequently in dark corners and cried passionately and bitterly when alone at night. By mid-August the British had opened hostilities in German East Africa by bombarding the coasts towns of Bagamoyo and Dar es Salaam, and an armored train was patrolling the three hundred miles of track between Nairobi and Mombassa. In late August in Europe, the Germans entered Brussels and three days later the Battle of Mons was fought between the English and the Germans until the English were forced to fall back to the Mame....

  September came and I tried to think of ways to leave Isabelle and sustain myself on the streets of Cairo while I waited for Jared. Lacking so much as a sixpence for flight I considered a juggling act, or picking pockets again, until I realized 1 was too well-known by now, I would be conspicuous, and the Consulate upon which I depended for news of Jared would take steps to stop me; worse, I might even be deported ignominiously to America where Jared could never find me.

  In desperation I turned to Sir Linton. "How can I find Jared?" I pleaded. "I can't stay in Cairo any longer. Before the war moves closer I've got to go south and look for him, I must. Can you help me? Have you influence?"

  "My dear Caressa," he said, "there's a war being fought. The railroads are under guard and soldiers given top priority, and in this country women never travel alone, it's unheard of."

  "There might be people I could travel south with," I pointed out.

  "You would need permission," he said, "and I can only assure you, my dear child, that at the Consulate no one would give you permission. They would be appalled at even the thought of it and you wouldn't know where to look now in any case. May I ask what's behind this sudden panic? Docs Cairo bore you so much?"

  "I'm pregnant," I blurted out, "I'm going to have a baby."

  "Ah—I see," he said, his eyes widening at this. "Yes— yes I see...." There was an odd expression on his face; I waited for him to tell me how shocked he was but instead he leaned back in his chair and said conversationally, "Tell me, Caressa, what do you think your life would have been if, having met Jacob, you had said no to his proposal of marriage?"

  I thought about this and shrugged. "A typewritist, I suppose, or typist as they're called now."

  He nodded. "And married a clerk, no doubt, and lived a small life with him and had half a dozen children. What, then, do you suppose your life would have been like if your mother had not had such lofty ambitions for you at this Whistle—"

  "Thistle."

  "All right, Thistlethwaite School and you had remained in the carnival?"

  I said impatiently, "What does it matter? A magician, probably."

  "You were already that," he reminded me, and his words were so like what Grams had told me that I gave him a quick startled glance.

  "Instead—" he began.

  "Instead," I said angrily, "I am penniless and pregnant. Are you about to draw some bookish conclusion from all this that makes me a metaphor of something?"

  He smiled. "No, I was about to ask you if you would marry me. You have survived so much already at such a tender age that you just might survive marriage to me. And your child will need a name."

  Now it was my turn to be shocked. Not very tactfully I said, "But I'm waiting for Jared! I'm going to have his child."

  "Quite so, but he's already a month overdue, is he not? If I may ask so delicate a question, how far along is your pregnancy?"

  "Four months or more," I admitted.

  He nodded. 'To have a child, to be ostracized by society because you're not married, would be calamitous for you, Caressa. The Victorian era still throws its shadow, even though the Queen, bless her, is long since dead. My dear girl, I am offering you the protection you will very much need soon."

  I said grudgingly, "I don't understand. You surely have to be mad to suggest such a thing. I don't love you, and you've already pointed out the circumstances of my life, whereas you—"

  "Ah, but I also know what you have become," he said. "I told you I am a collector. Your beauty is returning and is quite breathtaking and there is nothing insipid about you; life has accomplished that for you—and you have lived. I envy that. It would be interesting to see if my humdrum life would kill the life in you or whether some of it would infect me and give meaning to what has become a rather dull existence. I might also—"

  I said again, doggedly, "We have become friends, it's true, but I have to point out again that I don't love you, Sir Linton."

  He nodded. "And I was going to point out that you have waited in Cairo for nearly four months now, and for how long can you wait? Women in this world don't even walk on the street unaccompanied."

  "You're telling me I have no choice?"

  He lifted an eyebrow. "Have you?"

  "Like Jacob," I said bitterly.

  "Oh no," he said, smiling, "not like Jacob, for 1 take very good care of my collections. You will do me credit and honor. Caressa, for you have grace, beauty and above all experience. You're the only woman I've met whom I'd like—"

  'To own?"

  "No," he said simply, "to cherish."

  Oh God, I thought, where are you Jared? For here was Sir Linton Teal determined to make an honest woman of me .., except there was nothing honest about Linton, as I would discover.

  20

  It was 1914 and women wore long skirts and were divided into good women and Bad Women, and good women did not have children out of wedlock; in America they didn't even have the vote yet, and in Cairo women wore veils and rarely left their homes. At the Consulate they had grown increasingly skeptical about Jared's return so that I feared deportation, and certainly I had overstayed my
welcome at Isabelle's. I was penniless, but without a proper visa from the Egyptian authorities there were no jobs for which I could apply, and Cairo's streets were already full of pickpockets and jugglers. If Jared was unable to send even a message to me the implications of this were terrifying: I had to confront the fact that if he had met with some accident the child I carried might be all that I would ever have of him, and it was the child I must think of now. My situation had become desperate.

  And so, after three more weeks of fruitless waiting—for want of choice and to give my child a name—I became Caressa, Lady Teal, wife of Sir Linton. We were married in a private ceremony in Cairo, after which I was tactfully whisked away to England before the war made travel more difficult and before my pregnancy became conspicuous. I left behind Jared and the desert and three years of my life, and with the abandonment of so many dreams I was left with only hope to nurture me; there was panic in me, too, as I went into exile, and certainly once in London there was nothing to make me feel less a captive.

  The life that Linton inserted me into, like a letter into an envelope, was rigid and sunless and full of rules. If in Cairo he had been kind in his attentions and understanding, it was pride of possession that triumphed now; with the stroke of a pen I had become his, an object to mold and to change, and he was a stern teacher, so relentless that sometimes I wondered if he thought that by changing my clothes, manners, accent, posture and simple tastes he could change my heart as well and never lose me to Jared. Wealth, after all, can be another form of seduction. Or perhaps he knew that every day I waited for the mails to arrive, hoping always for news of Jared from the Consulate in Cairo.

  But there came no news of him and so, still lacking choice, I resigned myself to the chic gowns and the diamonds that Linton saw to it I wore, and learned from him to discuss graciously and intelligently the various crises of the political world, to speak Impeccable English and to live in a pale brick Georgian house.

  And none of it felt real; the stars in the English sky were dim and the sky at noon a lackluster blue. I lived with sticks of elegant furniture surrounding and stifling me and there were no campfires, no space to rest the eyes but walls everywhere I looked, confining me.

  / sleep where night overtakes me .. , my house will not crumble. . ..

  Oh God yes.

  One small encounter was real: shopping in the West End one day I saw an old man, a black man and a beggar standing helplessly and patiently in the shadow of a wall. I might have passed him by but for the tribal scars on his face and the pattern of the shawl he wore under his ragged coat; I stopped to stare at him and blurted out in Bakuli's Bemba, "Mwapolêni! "

  He was as astonished as I. "Thou sosa Bemba? Mwapo leni!" he cried, his face coming to life.

  "You are far from home," I said, "Cifulo?"

  "A a a, " he moaned, "1 am mfwila."

  Well, I thought, I too am mfwila—a person in mourning, but I only nodded.

  He said sadly, gesturing toward the sky, "There be no Cipinda bushiku—Milky Way, no Mulanga—Morning Star—in this place."

  "Or Southern Cross," I added, but he didn't know such English words. I gave him all the money I had with me, I asked his name and wrote on a slip of paper where he might go for help: to a shelter—a nsaka, I explained, where he would be fed. I knew the shelter, for I gave as much time to it as I could. He would be safe there and when I had more money I would sec to it that he was given passage home. This I told him, and he said with dignity, "Thou be cisungusho."

  "A miracle I am not," I told him gravely, "but I have known a few, ee."

  Watching him pull his ragged coat more closely about him and walk away I turned to find that one of Linton's friends had been passing and had stopped. "Lady Teal," he said in a startled voice, "you were speaking to that beggar in another language!"

  The mask I was learning to wear slipped easily back into place. "Nonsense, he's African," I said, laughing at him. "How on earth would I have learned his language?"

  How indeed.

  Deborah was born and she was Jared's child and mine, but there were moments when I would think—and I confess this—that if not for her 1 might somehow have remained in Cairo where Jared could find me. In horror I would push these thoughts deep, stricken with guilt, but once Deborah was old enough to talk it no longer mattered very much, because Linton took a great interest in her; increasingly she became his child, and perhaps rightly, because he had lost me. Irrevocably.

  He lost me on a day when Deborah was four years old and when the Great War had been ended for a year and was a slowly dimming nightmare, its victories already illusory.

  The day and the moment are engraved in me forever: it was the season of Canni Wazuwirn, which the Tuareg call the autumn moon, but it was morning and there was a fog. Surprisingly there are days in London that would remind me of the desert, and if this seems impossible then you've never seen the dust carried along by the harmattan—or the gibleh, as it was called in Tripoli—until it forms a curtain of haze of the same texture as a London fog. I was gazing at this from the window of the library and perhaps there was sadness in my face when I heard Linton's step and turned, for his voice was curt. "I see you've gone through the mail already—as usual," he said.

  I nodded. "Yes," and then, "I wonder, Linton, now that the war's over and Deborah older, would it be possible for me to go away for a few weeks?"

  "It's not impossible. Where did you think of going?"

  I shrugged. "Somewhere warm. Cairo, perhaps."

  His eyes glittered like pale gray marbles. "So you can look for Jared?"

  I didn't deny this. "Make inquiries, perhaps. After all, he's Deborah's father."

  His voice matched the coldness in his eyes. "There's no need to make inquiries, I took care of that years ago." He said flatly, "He's not coming back."

  Puzzled I said, "You sound so sure, how can you possibly be that certain?"

  "Because," he said evenly, meeting my glance, "I have seen to it that he'll never come back."

  I felt suddenly chilled and struck with foreboding. For a second I had trouble breathing but I said politely, "Oh? Just how could you manage that?"

  "With money," he said. "A great deal of money and a pair of Arabs named Eyoub and Hammed, to whom I gave orders to find him and kill."

  Kill... The word had vibrations and reverberations alien to this civilized and formal room. He had said it so calmly, too, not kill him, just kill, like an animal, except he couldn't mean Jared—Oh please, God, not Jared, I thought— because to kill Jared was to kill me, too. I stared in shock at this man with whom I'd lived for nearly five years, and I saw that he knew this, I saw the triumph in his eyes as he exacted revenge on me for loving Jared, but although the chill inside of me met with a terrible rage, I allowed no emotion to show, and this struck me as so familiar a reaction that I hesitated before I spoke, wondering at it, until 1 remembered a young Caressa who sat and waited in the desert with the dead all around her, steeling herself to show no terror; my terror now had the same taste to it. I said carefully, "That scarcely seems a way to encourage love."

  He smiled then, and it was a cruel smile. "No, but it can encourage hate, which is more bearable than indifference."

  I scarcely heard him, I was only waiting to ask, "And did they find and kill him?"

  "Of course."

  "How do you know that, how can you be sure?" I asked this almost idly but my hands had curled into fists.

  Linton walked across the room to his desk, drew open a drawer and brought out a small object, handing it to me.

  It was a worn pewter compass, the initials on it almost ground away by sand but still decipherable: JLB. It was the compass I'd given to Jared long ago in Esna.

  I stood there, cold and still while I died inside, silently screaming at the pain of it. "When? When?"

  "Not long after meeting you in Cairo," he said. "When 1 learned that I had a rival. After I learned his name and where he was going and that you waited for him."<
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  "That long ago—that soon?" I gasped. "When all the time you knew— But how reckless of you to tell me," I said. "Don't you realize I could put a spell on you, a sorcerer's spell?"

  He only laughed at this and went out.

  I stood by the window for a long time staring blindly into the fog, and then I went upstairs and from the recesses of my closet I drew out a cardboard clothes box. From it I removed the ragged barracan I'd worn for so many desert years, and from its pockets I brought out a crimson headscarf, a worn finger puppet with the face of a clown, the green glass stone, the carved muffin man and the handful of red poison seeds.

  I counted the seeds: there were twelve.

  I too could kill.

  Bakuli had said, "Swallow like that, no harm. Crush and—Kail die fast and nobody know. Nobody."

  Crushed into powder these could be dropped into Linton's glass of afterdinner port; if too coarse they could be mixed into a pudding with raisins or nuts. It could be done, and I had the means.

  I smiled and I'm sure it was not a pretty smile, but we all wear masks, don't we? Linton had worn one; how smooth and charming he'd been, and during all those weeks in Cairo when I'd counted him as a friend he had been cold-bloodedly arranging the murder of Jared.

  Swallow like that, no harm. Crush and—Kai! die fast and nobody know. Nobody.

  Dear Bakuli, with his loving and generous heart, so steadfast as a companion. My ndume, I remembered, and my smile softened, but against the memory of him I placed the thought of how often in my life I'd been swept along without choice as I obediently followed Mum's dreams, married Jacob, married Linton.

  I had choice now.

  It's when we're given choice that we sit with the gods and design ourselves: this was the moment to learn who I was and what I'd become; I closed my eyes and became very still, seeing Bakuli and his radiant smile, seeing the great cliffs of the Tibesti and the desert stretching before me to a distant blue horizon; I saw the five stars of the Southern Cross in the night sky and a certain tent in Seguedine and the miracle of knowing Jared; I thought too of Amina and the sacred Hausa shrine and of the iko I'd first experienced there, and I pictured Isa and Shehu and the face of Mohammed when he gave me the Hand of Fatima. As my mind emptied itself of hate the gods in me answered, and I understood who and what I was and the gifts I'd been given in this life, and although I counted the red poison seeds again I knew that I couldn't kill Linton. It was unfortunate but I would have to pity him instead.