very happy you were first.”
“She’s a beautiful woman, I have to say that for her.”
“If that is your way of begging a compliment, I’ll give you one. You’re beautiful, too. Haven’t I told you so many times?” His hand moved to her belly, tracing the cicatrix. “As beautiful as any Yamila, as any Nuban woman.”
“I am going to be the mother of your son. I am going to give you back what you lost.”
“Yes, you have said so,” he said, with the melancholy of someone wishing for the unattainable. He moved his hand from her stomach, and she sensed with its withdrawal a withdrawal of himself, a sudden distancing.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, feeling a panic. “Is it her? I am not going to share you, Michael.”
“Stop, please! It isn’t her, it isn’t that. There are times I ask myself if we in this country should allow ourselves children until the war is over. It’s like giving birth when you have AIDS. The child is doomed as it’s born.”
“You can’t let yourself think that way,” she counseled.”It’s giving up hope. You have to think of what life will be like when it is over.”
“It’s hard to imagine.”
“You have to imagine it before you can have it. You have to imagine children in it.”
“Imagine it, imagine it,” he said in an undertone, lying on his back, hands clasped behind his neck. “And what would I be in a new Sudan? A minister of parliament? Then I would dress in a suit instead of camouflage and we would live in a fine house with servants instead of this tukul in the bush. Would you like that, my darling Quinette?”
She answered that the tukul was fine and so was the camouflage and that she could not picture herself with servants.
“Or I could be an officer in the new army of the new Sudan. You would see me in a fine dress uniform, like the kind I wore when I first joined the army. I was a ceremonial guard at the Presidential Palace in Khartoum, in a dark blue tunic and white gloves and a white topee. The government used to take Dinka and Nubans for that duty because we looked impressive in those uniforms.”
“I’ll bet you did,” she said.
“I must admit, I did.” In the darkness, she made out his grin. She had stopped him from slipping into morbid thoughts, brought him back to her. “And I’ll wear one like it in the new army of the new Sudan, but not with a corporal’s stripes, no, with the pips of a general. Brigadier General Michael Goraende. Or would you prefer a husband with a higher rank? Major general?”
“I like brigadier. I like the sound of it. Brigadier and Mrs. Michael Goraende.”
“We will be invited to diplomatic receptions and military balls. There I will be in my splendid blue uniform with the pips of a brigadier, and there you will be at my side in a gown, a Nuban gown, but finer than the one I bought for you. And who will know that we once lived in a tukul in the bush? Who will know that this beautiful American woman in her fine gown”—his finger played around her breasts—“once danced naked in the Nuba mountains before a thousand eyes.”
“No one,” she whispered. “It’ll be our secret. We’ll laugh about it when we’re alone, and how I said yes to you like a Nuban girl.”
“This is a fine future we are imagining for ourselves when the war is over.”
“With children, with a son,” she said, and rolled over and straddled him.
“My God, you are mad tonight. You are shameless.”
Mine, she thought, working him into arousal. Now and forever, mine.
The confidence with which she spoke those words to herself didn’t last. It was a brief remission in a fever of jealousy that flared each time she saw Yamila, and in so small a place as New Tourom, it was impossible not to see her almost every day. As the disease progressed, she began to suspect Michael of secretly desiring the girl, and the suspicions fostered images of Yamila swollen with his child, presenting him with a son, beating Quinette to the punch.
A week after the dance her period arrived on schedule. She cursed her body, then prayed, then, a cramp binding her abdomen, cursed again. A new fear arose that she would not be forced to share Michael but that he would divorce her because she was unable to conceive. One fear spawned another. She became