Possessing the Secret of Joy Part 4

IT WAS SUMMER, and we sat on chaises longues under the linden trees in the garden behind Lisette's house. Lisette was knitting gossamer blue wool in the heat, and I made the comment that changed my life forever.

It is so hot, I said, to be knitting wool. Unless, I added, smiling at her, you are expecting to have very cold feet this winter.

Very cold pet.i.ts feet, she said, without looking up.

And that is how I learned of pet.i.t Pierre.

I had always been careful with Lisette. More often than not, when we were making love, I did not penetrate her. Ours was a friendship of shared sadness as well as pa.s.sion, but a friendship first of all, and I spent many nights in her fluffy white bed, holding her in my arms, but so distraught about my own life with Evelyn, all I could yearn for was sleep.

On the other hand, there had been an occasional weak moment, which is, after all, all one needs.

You won't have it, of course, I said.

Lisette's neck, which I referred to sometimes in jest as her thick French neck, grew visibly enlarged. It was the clearest sign of her rage, which she went to great intellectual pains to disguise. It was a stubborn neck, the kind Joan of Arc must have had, and now, looking at me but at the same time rather to one side of me, I saw it and her whole upper body, beneath the sheerness of her white summer dress, flush crimson.

It is not your affair, she said, knitting furiously, a bead of sweat running toward the corner of her limpid brown eye. In her anger, she looked a bit as I imagined Madame Defarge would have, had someone sat in front of her and blocked her view of the guillotine.

Not my... I couldn't finish. I looked at her, speechless.

Perhaps it isn't even yours, she said. Perhaps I have a lover, or several, during the months we are apart and you are with your crazy wife in America.

This was not her usual way of referring to Evelyn. I was hurt by it.

The silence that fell between us was rendered somehow ridiculous by the energetic droning of her neighbor's bees, pa.s.sing in and out of their wooden hives; they made the honey that sweetened our coffee and tea; our empty cups exuded the odor of their work. It was a sound that said so clearly: Life goes on. The pain of it so sure. The sweetness of it so mysterious. It is irrelevant to us that you fight. You might both turn to stone there, and it would only mean our liberation into your garden as well as into our own.

It is mine, I said at last.

Yes, she said, putting down her knitting. But it is more mine than yours.

When? I asked. Unfortunately I remembered no moment between us of special tenderness. On the other hand, generally speaking, tenderness permeated our friendship.

She shrugged.

When you were here before, of course. In April. When you came to tell me Tashi had run away from you. Even from your kisses.

LISETTE.

I HAD PEt.i.t PIERRE at home in my grandmother's bed. My grandmother, Beatrice, who spent her life fighting for the right of French women to vote. The low wooden bed that was built for the house in the century before the last and has never left it. The bed in which my mother was conceived and into which I myself was born. I ate well throughout my pregnancy, and went on long walks all over Paris nearly every day. My father and mother, after overcoming, to a remarkable degree, their normal outrage, racism and shock, showered me with advice and affection. It was recognized, in almost a formal way-"Alors, nothing can be done!" said my mother, shrugging at last after a bitter bout of tears-that I had inherited the genes of my mother's mother, who had had affairs, but no children, with Gypsies and Turks and the occasional Palestinian Jew, and, even worse, with penniless artists who could be found living in the literal garret of her tiny house and subsisting, again literally, on jars of jam and crusts of bread.

I had the most sought-after midwife in France-my competent and funny aunt Marie-Therese, whose radical idea it was that childbirth above all should feel s.e.xy. I listened to nothing but gospel music during my pregnancy, a music quite new to me, and to France, and "It's a High Way to Heaven" ("...nothing can walk up there, but the pure in heart...") was playing on the stereo during the birth; the warmth of the singers' voices a perfect accompaniment to the lively fire in the fireplace. My v.u.l.v.a oiled and ma.s.saged to keep my hips open and my v.a.g.i.n.a fluid, I was o.r.g.a.s.mic at the end. Pet.i.t Pierre practically slid into the world at the height of my amazement, smiling serenely even before he opened his eyes.

My aunt placed him on my stomach the moment she lifted him from between my legs, waiting to sever the umbilical cord until he could breathe on his own; and so, our heartbeats continued together as they had while he was in my womb. Seeing his sleek tan body and wet curly hair, I missed Adam. But, sighing with completion, I soon sank into the pleasure of the miracle I felt I and the universe alone had made.

He felt shut out, he said, when he was finally free to come to us. Because he was not there.

But why? I asked. You knew when he was to be born.

So did Evelyn, he said.

PART SIX.

TASHI-EVELYN.

IT IS HOT INSIDE THE COURTROOM. The ceiling fans, as they turn, sound like hoa.r.s.e throats trying to clear themselves. The louvered windows are open fully to admit any semblance of breeze. I am dressed in cool white cotton from head to foot; Olivia shops for me in the tourist boutiques. Still, I feel perspiration beading at the center of my back, then slipping down in quicksilver rivulets to rest in an already sodden waistband.

It has been a morning spent listening to the words of those who saw me on my journey. The man who sold me the razors, a squat, rheumy-eyed fellow who admits he overcharged me because I was a foreigner. Although I spoke Olinka he could tell I was American by my dress, he said. Next, a woman who sold me an orange, as I was getting into the bus at Ombere station. She was old and toothless. Her rags obviously smelled, for both attorneys kept their distance as she sweated and drooled a bit there in the witness stand. It was a young woman, however, whose words appeared to nail me. She was thin and dark, with curious light pink, almost white lipsticked lips and painted nails. She explained, in English, with a word or two of Olinka sprinkled through it, that she was proprietress of the paper shop, hard by the square where one caught the bus. She remembered me because I had come into the shop looking for and then asking her to find for me sheets of thick white paper on which to print signs.

However, I'd changed my mind about wanting the white paper, she said, as soon as she brought some out to me.

No, she said I had said. White is not the culprit this time. Bring me out paper of the colors of our flag.

There was a sort of collective gasp in the courtroom when she said this. I felt even more eyes boring holes in the back of my neck. The judges surrept.i.tiously scratched the natural kinky hair at the edges of their straight brush wigs.

And is this the paper, miss, that the defendant bought?

The prosecuting attorney stands before the young woman in the dock, the vivid red, yellow and blue paper held out in front of him.

There was a time the colors alone made me weep with pride. Now I look at them as dispa.s.sionately as if they were Crayolas in a child's coloring box.

Surprisingly, there are a few older people near the back of the courtroom who, on seeing the colors-for which they, as young bush revolutionaries, fought-stand, their hands over their hearts. (Of course I can not see them; I only hear, faintly, their movement. The creaking of joints, the shifting of feet. I don't even wonder about it at the time. Later Adam and Olivia will tell me. I think instead of the flag of my new home, America. I see, with my mind's eye, that red and blue and white flag. The meaning of whose colors is unknown to me. A flag a woman sewed.) Reluctantly, I refocus on the young woman giving testimony. I think of the meaning of the word "testimony." Originally it named the custom of two men holding each other's t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es in a gesture of trust, later to metamorphose into the handshake. I imagine the woman's soft black hand cupping the young attorney's b.a.l.l.s, her sh.e.l.l-pink nails deep in the tangles of his pubic hair. What are we doing in this sweltering courtroom, she is saying, brushing the ebony tips of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s against his smooth, hairless chest, it's actually a beautiful day outside. The attorney's face has that curious look of concentration s.e.xually aroused men have; he...But I must pay attention, I think, rotating my head slowly on my neck; if I am not careful, I will have a torrid romance going, and miss, as Olivia says, my own trial.

The woman says I bought the paper and a Magic Marker pen and sat down immediately to draw my signs.

What signs did you see the defendant draw? asks the prosecutor.

Only one, says she.

Would you be good enough to tell the court how you happened to read this sign, and also what was written on it?

She showed it to me, said the young woman.

She showed it to you?

Yes. She said to me: You are a young woman and your life is still before you. I am an old woman and my life is already over. All I am good for now is alerting you to disaster.

Here the young woman paused, as if the emotion of this experience had momentarily pierced her. She raised a palely painted nail to the corner of her eye.

Of course I didn't understand, she said, as if to clear herself of any hint of collaboration.

Of course you did not, said the attorney. Please continue.

Well, said the young woman, she put down her bag, her suitcase, that is, and sat on it, over in a corner of the shop out of the way of traffic. Because it was rather early in the day, she was the only customer. She simply sat there and proceeded to make these signs.

And the one you saw? prompted the attorney.

The first one she drew, said the young woman. She held it out in front of her, gravely, and scanned it, then turned it toward me.

There was a silence.

I was surprised to read what it said. And of course I couldn't understand what it meant.

Right, said the attorney, waiting.

"If you lie to yourself about your own pain, you will be killed by those who will claim you enjoyed it." That is what the sign said; in big black letters. Said the young woman.

If you lie about your pain you will be killed, repeated the attorney.

To yourself, said the young woman. If you lie to yourself. This was obviously the part of the message that gripped her.

Yes, yes, said the attorney. And after she showed the sign to you, what did she do?

I believe she made several more. She explained to me that where she lived, in America, people make signs and b.u.t.tons for everything they want to say, and no one ever arrests them for it. I warned her to be careful, said the young woman.

Why did you do that? asked the attorney, sharply. The young woman gave him a frightened look. Her voice dropped to a whisper as she replied. I don't know, she said.

But of course she knew. Everyone in the room knew. Half the people in prison in Olinka were there for expressing their discontent with the present government. An audible groan escaped me. The judges glared.

I had felt happy sitting on my red Chinese pigskin suitcase in the corner of the shop. Scribbling my big letters as if I were a child. It had occurred to me on the plane that never would I be able to write a book about my life, nor even a pamphlet, but that write something I could and would. And when the plane touched down all I saw were the billboards shouting out to the people that they must buy Fanta and Coca-Cola and Datsuns and Fords and chocolate and whiskey and sugar and more sugar and coffee and more coffee and tea and more tea. And I thought: Of course! This excrement is the reading matter of the ma.s.ses. I am only one old and crazy woman, but I will fling myself against the billboards. I will compete. And the next day, before leaving the city, I went bustling into the paper shop.

Why the colors of our flag? the attorney now asked.

But the young woman's blank expression was answer enough.

Why the colors of our flag indeed?

Red for the blood of the people spilled in resistance to the white supremacist regime. Yellow for the gold and minerals in which our land is still rich, even though the whites have carted mountains of it away. Blue for the sea that laps our sh.o.r.es, filled with riches and the wonders of the deep; blue also for the sky, symbol of our people's faith in the forces of the unseen and their optimism for the future.

There had been much debate about the colors of this flag; debate that included everyone. Then the colors were decided by the leaders and the flag sent off to Germany to be designed, ma.s.s produced and sold back to us.

I can feel my mind trying to kick off into an alternative flag story to replace the one that happened, in fact, to the people. But surprisingly, nothing happens. My head, like the rest of my body, remains solid in my chair. My refusing-to-leap imagination never makes it even as far as the open windows of the room. I have the uncanny feeling that, just at the end of my life, I am beginning to reinhabit completely the body I long ago left.

Olivia has crept up behind me as we all stand to be dismissed. She pushes a small paper bag into my hand. When I am in my cell again I open the bag and extract a small doll made of clay. It has been years since I saw another like it, quite by accident one morning in M'Lissa's hut. She found me playing with it, and boxed my ears, claiming the thing I held-a small figure playing with her genitals-was indecent. I was too young to ask why, therefore, she had it in her hut. A note from Olivia read: This is a replica. There are women potters here who make them. Can you imagine!

Frankly, I couldn't.

PART SEVEN.

EVELYN.

THE SHRINK THE OLD MAN sent me to after his death was a middle-aged African-American woman named Raye. He had met her at a conference for psychologists in London when she was just starting out. They'd liked each other and kept in touch ever since. I resented her. Because she wasn't Mzee. Because she was black. Because she was a woman. Because she was whole. She radiated a calm, cheerful competence that irritated me.

It was to her, however, that I found myself speaking, one day, about Our Leader. Our Leader, like Nelson Mandela and Jomo Kenyatta and others before them, had been forced into exile and eventually captured and jailed by the white regime. Still, miraculously, by word of mouth and the occasional clandestinely made audioca.s.sette, we were able to get his surprisingly frequent "Messages to the People." Unlike Nelson Mandela or Jomo Kenyatta, Our Leader never made it to freedom himself; he was a.s.sa.s.sinated on the eve of Independence as he left the high-security prison in which he'd been incarcerated, under heavy guard. It was believed, in fact, that the guards a.s.sa.s.sinated him, though this was never proved. His murderers, in any case, were never brought to justice, or even identified; and so, even as Olinkans celebrated what we thought was our freedom, there was already an internal backlash of hurt and rage that only swift justice administered to his killers might have a.s.suaged, and the desperate need to show our remembrance and love of Our Leader in everything we did.

But you had already left Africa by then? said Raye, as I explained this to her.

Yes, I said. My body had left. My soul had not. I paused. It seemed impossible that anyone should ever understand. Especially not this smoothly dressed woman who walked with a spring in her step and whose brown skin, the color of cinnamon, was flawless.

There was a jaunty tone she sometimes took, at the most unlikely points. She used it now.

You can tell me, she said, with the look of a conspirator.

But I was stuck. Our Leader had died for us. For our independence. For our freedom. What could I possibly say about my insignificant life in the face of that reality? I could feel a boulder, twin to the one that suppressed the truth of Dura's murder, begin closing my throat. I felt a lie beginning to form. A lie that said the boulder was not a rock but rock candy. Then I remembered Mzee. You yourselves are your last hope, he'd said. Did I believe this, or not?

I cleared my throat, and began.

He was Jesus Christ to us, you know? I said, after the lengthy silence.

Raye looked at me expectantly.

If Jesus Christ has died for you, how can you find fault with anything else he did?

Some people fault him for claiming to die for them, said Raye. But we'll let that pa.s.s. Better to declare him perfect and be done, she added.

But what if he'd told you to do something that destroyed you? Something that was wrong?

Impossible, said Raye. He was perfect, remember.

But then she smiled impishly, and I saw the trap of such reasoning and also the joke in what she said. However, my jaws were too tight to smile.

I began again. Even from prison we received our instructions, I said. Good instructions. Sensible; correct. From Our Leader. That we must remember who we were. That we must fight the white oppressors without ceasing; without, even, the contemplation of ceasing; for they would surely still be around during our children's and our children's children's time. That we must take back our land. That we must reclaim the descendants of those of our people sold into slavery throughout the world (Our Leader was particularly strong on this issue, almost alone among African leaders); that we must return to the purity of our own culture and traditions. That we must not neglect our ancient customs.

There was another silence, as I played with the black plastic-looking elephant hair bracelets I wore on my wrist.

We thought him a G.o.d, really, I said finally, sighing. To have suffered so much...We knew they had tortured him, we could even imagine how, based on the mutilated bodies sometimes returned to relatives from the prison. We knew he'd spent years in solitary and been driven nearly out of his mind. But he had not broken. Nor had he forgotten us.

In every hut, even when I was a little girl, there was a small picture of him wrapped in plastic and carefully hidden in a special place among the rafters. His eyes were laughing! Such wise, gay eyes. They seemed to speak. Whenever we received a message we took down the picture, and while going over the message and learning it by heart we would gaze at it. We loved him. We believed everything he said. We thought he knew best... about everything.

The missionaries had made a big campaign against what they called the scarring of our faces with the Olinka tribal markings. But Our Leader had these same markings, and was obviously proud of them; and so it was difficult to hear the missionaries' objections, or to care about the missionaries themselves. Though we gave them our mumbled prayers and conversions, with which they seemed so easily, like mothers of docile children, satisfied.

Raye was leaning forward in her chair. As I spoke, I became aware I had covered both my cheeks with my fingers. I had also crossed my legs. I took my hands down and placed them in the folds of my dress. A light blue dress with aquamarine dots, it reminded me of the sea, and of tears.

As for the thing that was done to me... or for me, I said. And stopped. Because Raye had raised her eyebrows, quizzically.