to him, shredded the costumes he wore, held a mirror to his naked self, and said, “Behold! This is what you are!” The image appalled him, and he’d acknowledged his crime; and in that lay a redemption of sorts.
Dismissal
THE BULB GLOWS undimmed by the cloak of insects—the katydids have fled the dawn. Like belief, Fitzhugh thinks. Conviction will blind you if it is not shaded by doubt.
He feels surprisingly alert for someone who hasn’t slept all night. That good-looking writer was responsible for his insomnia, asking questions that prodded his memories. Two years ago Adid hired him to be managing director of SkyTrain Relief Services; in half an hour he will fly to Natinga to see what can be done about his crippled aircraft. It’s part of his job as an entrepreneur of aid. For how much longer he will remain one is open to question. His comment to the writer—that the war promised to go on forever, had not been entirely accurate. There are rumors that the cease-fire that has prevailed in the Nuba for some time will be extended to southern Sudan. An American diplomat is now in the country, attempting to broker a peace. The unthinkable, the unimaginable, is on the horizon of possibility: the war could end.
He looks at the photograph of Diana and their children, taken a few months ago, on her fifty-ninth birthday. They were married not long after Douglas’s departure and were honeymooning in Fitzhugh’s birthplace, the Seychelles, when a war of another kind came to Kenya: the American Embassy in Nairobi was blown up by a terrorist group called Al Qaeda.
A year passed. They adopted two AIDS orphans, Robert and Rebecca. The kids tested negative for the disease, the Black Death of the modern age. They call Diana mama and Fitzhugh baba. Right now they are in the house in Karen, where he spends his weekends. He still thinks of that house as hers; it embarrasses him to live in a place with servants, it contradicts his idea of himself, but possibly that image never was an accurate reflection of who he is.
The responsibilities of marriage and the stresses of raising children who should be, chronologically, Diana’s grandchildren have dampened the strange fire ignited almost a decade ago between the middle-aged woman and the young man. Now he has entered middle age and she is on the frontiers of old age; yet there are nights when a look, a gesture, a thought fans the coals of their first passion, and they make love as if their flesh were touching anew. “She’s only eleven years younger than me,” Fitzhugh’s father said to him not long ago. “Are you happy?” Fitzhugh doesn’t believe happiness, as the world defines it, is possible in Africa. “I am content,” he answered.
They say the owl was a baker’s daughter . . .
There is one other woman in his life, Quinette Goraende, with whom he maintains a peculiar relationship. She regards him as her friend and confidant; he doesn’t consider himself to be either, actively disliking her; and yet he answers the letters she sends from the Nuba now and then—Fitzhugh’s pilots deliver them—and patiently listens to her talk and talk about herself when she visits Loki or Nairobi. Diana, who cannot suffer her for longer than fifteen minutes, has pegged her as an overgrown adolescent who thinks everyone finds her as interesting as she finds herself.
The odd relationship began shortly after Quinette’s first child, a son, died in infancy. She’d come down with malaria. Gerhard Manfred treated her with Fansidar, to no effect. Through Fitzhugh, her husband arranged for her evacuation to Nairobi General Hospital, where she was treated with a stronger drug; still, the disease racked her with chills, fever, and hallucinations. Her doctor, an Italian, was concerned about her chances. One day, in a delirium, she began to call out the name of Malachy Delaney. The doctor knew Malachy and, assuming his patient was a Roman Catholic, summoned the priest to come to her bedside, warning that he should be prepared to administer last rites. Fitzhugh was in Nairobi at the time, and his old friend asked if he would accompany him.
Quinette had rallied in the meantime. They found her sitting up in bed, in a lucid state. It was the lucidity granted by a confrontation with death. Like Douglas, she made a confession, which Fitzhugh did not think was pure coincidence. She and Douglas were alike in many ways; so American in their narcissism, in