now and then, and her husband indulged her, providing her with an allowance from his governor’s salary. She fled to Loki or Nairobi whenever she could, persuading relief pilots to smuggle her into Kenya—her passport had expired some time ago. She afforded herself the pleasures of a proper bath and eating something other than doura gruel, in the delights of fresh company. By this time the century and the millennium had turned. There was a whole new generation of workers in Loki, and to them the tall American woman with the African braids and African clothes and African mate was a weird curiosity, an eccentric who belonged to what already seemed a bygone era. Quinette satisfied her need for conversation mostly with Fitzhugh, who learned about her more than he ever needed or wanted to know.
After malaria struck her again and little Raphael almost succumbed to relapsing fever, Quinette decided she’d had enough of Africa for a while. A different sort of nostalgia tugged her. She longed to see again the America she had once longed to escape forever, and to bring her family with her. The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center had occurred two months before, and arranging travel documents for her husband and children took weeks. A SkyTrain aircraft flew them out of the Nuba mountains. Four days and as many plane changes later, they landed in the town of Waterloo, Iowa, in the dead-level heartland of America.
Things went well for a while. Her mother and two sisters had gotten over their animosities and welcomed the prodigal girl home. Her brown children and six-foot-seven-inch black husband with tribal marks on his forehead drew stares on the streets of Cedar Falls, but the couple did not suffer the prejudice Quinette had feared. The visit began to turn sour when her mother caught her coming out of the shower one morning and saw the tribal stigmata covering her belly, back, and buttocks. “What in God’s name have you done to yourself?” she wailed. Then, on a drive to the countryside to see the farm where Quinette had grown up, Michael let slip that she was not his only wife. “You have another wife?” Quinette’s older sister asked, scarcely believing what she’d heard. Actually, Michael replied, he had two. Quinette’s family could accept her marriage to an African rebel; a polygamous marriage was another matter altogether. She was furious with Michael for opening his mouth but equally upset with her sister for her unwillingness to understand the customs of Quinette’s adopted land. She who had gone to such lengths to preserve a monogamous union ended up defending its opposite. She realized that she no longer belonged in America; she was an African.
And yet she wasn’t, but rather a woman caught in the cleft between two worlds. She returned to the Nuba mountains to discover that one of her sister spouses was pregnant. Not long afterward Quinette was, too. The last time Fitzhugh saw her was when he flew to New Tourom to discuss aid deliveries with her husband. His relations with Michael were distant. He didn’t condemn him as severely as he did Douglas; the man had been at war most of his life, he’d been fighting for the survival of his people. Those were circumstances in extenuation and mitigation, but a long way from exoneration.
Returning to the airstrip, Fitzhugh came upon Quinette at the town well, scrubbing clothes with other village women, fully one of them now, their sister in toil. Seeing him, she stood up, pressing the small of her back. She was wearing a dark blue kanga, bulging slightly in the middle. He noticed that the African sun was beginning to tell on her skin, which after all wasn’t meant for it. At thirty-two she looked leathery, the signs of middle age already upon her; and if her life followed the course of most African women, her middle age would last but a few years, and she would be old by forty-five. She glanced briefly at the man’s shirt spread out to dry on a rock at her feet, then at Fitzhugh, and with a hand on her swollen midriff, rolled her head back, her eyes shut. There was everything in that brief movement, everything of weariness, of regret, of resignation, and of a bitter knowledge: she had asked Africa to redeem her from the bonds of the commonplace and give her an extraordinary life. It had, but now it was extracting the price. It was keeping her.
PERMISSIONS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material.
After serving with the Marines in Vietnam, Philip Caputo spent six years as a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune and shared the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for reporting on election fraud in Chicago. In 1975 he was wounded in Beirut and during his convalescence completed the manuscript for A Rumor of War, a Vietnam memoir that was published while he was living in Moscow, back on assignment for the Tribune. In 1977 he left the paper and turned to novels, of which he has written four, plus another memoir. He lives in Connecticut with his wife, Leslie Ware.
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Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.