Temple of My Familiar (44 page)

“For this was one of many parting ploys used by the vanquished white regime. The use of the white woman’s body. The white woman’s body, so long off limits, was suddenly everywhere. Her very private parts splayed out for all to see. The young boys carried the rolled-up magazines in their back pockets. This became a status symbol, like T-shirts and blue jeans. Part of their style. Their fathers and uncles kept stacks of the magazines under lock and key at home under their beds, or in the office. There was a lively black-market trade in these magazines. Our women were being encouraged to lighten their faces with bleach, to go blond. Suddenly it was understood that nudity did not denote barbarity. The very women who’d been stoned, practically, for going without their blouses were now told they must take them off in order to be modern.

“At the same time, the government, after throwing out a majority of the white man’s laws, because they oppressed the native population, decided that the one law they would assuredly keep was the one forbidding interracial marriage. This proved they had as much race pride as the white man, you see. On the other hand, they had reinstated polygamy, which I was against, and which women were against. After all, polygamy is a clear forerunner of the plantation system, with the husband as ‘master’ and the wives as ‘slaves.’ Well, it wasn’t a government that listened to women. Everyone knew that by then.

“If I married Mary Jane, I could harass the lawmakers twice.

“They disapproved of interracial marriage but approved of and encouraged polygamy. I would take a second wife, but she’d be white.

“The more down-to-earth reason for marrying, though, was to make Mary Jane a citizen of the country and therefore ineligible for deportation, and to keep her and her school in Olinka.

“The government was distressed by my decision. I didn’t care. They needed the plays I was writing. They needed my popularity with the masses. It was only through my plays that the government could speak to the people about a way of life our country was struggling to achieve, and not frighten them to death.

“Mary Jane got to stay on in Olinka; her school grew. The people made allowances for my behavior and essentially forgave me, as they are wont to do. Besides, they came to appreciate Mary Jane’s contribution to their children’s and their country’s future. But the government, really just the idiot head of the Ministry of Home Affairs, visited the M’Sukta School and demanded that the buildings be constructed of ‘modern ingredients.’ Tin and plywood. This was his perverted response to our successful maneuvers. All the children’s murals were smashed, and with them the traditional character of the school. But Mary Jane and her staff were undaunted. Oh, they cried, we all cried, for weeks. But they had a vision of what the future they were working toward must be. It looked an awful lot like what they already had together every day. This was a hard spirit to smash. I was delighted to be a small part of it.

“And,” said Ola finally, with a deep sigh, getting to his feet, as Fanny, coming out of the eagle pose, stood solidly once more on hers, “there I was married to a white woman I barely knew, who rapidly became less white to me. We became staunch friends and allies, and so we remain to this day.”

“And you never ... tried anything?” asked Fanny, smiling, but with an insatiable curiosity about her father’s life.

“Tried anything!” said Ola. “I wouldn’t have dared. Mary Jane—wait till you meet her—she’s got a glance that could chop one off at the knees.”

M
ARY
J
ANE
B
RIDEN
—M
ISS
B to all—was a dead ringer for Joanne Woodward as she’d appeared in the last movie of hers Fanny had seen—something about a husband falling in love with a younger woman, and sharing a secret life with her, and a child, and dying, and leaving his wife with this betrayal on her hands. She had that same wide mouth, flat teeth, and level, controlled voice. Under which, though, the hearer could suspect a layer or two of hysteria. She had cool gray eyes, and her white hair was cut in a bob that looked a great deal like a wig, slightly askew, and dyed an almost gentian blue.

“I didn’t go to Ola’s funeral,” Miss B was saying. “I couldn’t bear to sit there while all the people who hated his guts went on about how much they’d valued him and how much he’s going to be missed! Like hell he’s going to be missed,” she said, taking a drink of whiskey from the water tumbler she held in her hand. “He’s going to be missed, all right. There’s no one left to speak up to the government now. Nobody with any power, anyhow; the women will always rouse themselves to tell the boys what time of day it is... . I didn’t need to go to the funeral; Ola and I had already said our good-byes. He died here, at my house. You didn’t know?”

“No,” said Fanny, “I didn’t.”

“He was in the middle of rehearsals for his new play, the one about the Olinka, black and white, middle class. About how these people, with the government’s blessing, are permitting the country to grow as divided along class lines as it was under the whites along color lines. It was to be the first of his outright satires, he said.” She laughed. “He always claimed the middle class wasn’t suitable material for drama; only comedy, or, not even comedy but satire and farce.

“That’s what he was saying when he had the heart attack. A pretty innocuous comment, but I suppose it called into question his own life.

“Later, when we brought him up here to the house—rehearsals take place in the school gym—and placed him on the couch—yes, where you’re sitting—he was still trying to talk, to joke. But at the very end he said a very sober thing to me, and to the actors who’d gathered around. He said that at the moment he was speaking he had a sudden realization of how endless struggle is. That it is like the layers of an onion, and smelly, too, he said, and made one cry, and that each time he sat down to write a play he was surprised, and a bit disheartened, to see he’d simply arrived at a new layer of stinking suffering that the people were enduring. They’d had such dreams, he said, when he and his friends went off to join the Mbeles. They thought that removing the whites from power would be the last of their work to insure a prosperous future for their country. Instead, it had proved only a beginning. Not, however, a small one; for that he was grateful. But still, only a start.

“Now, he saw, it was not racism alone that must be combatted, but also stupidity and greed, qualities which, unfortunately, had a much longer human history.” Miss B paused.

“He’d been particularly upset,” she said, and then pressed her lips together as if she’d rather not continue, but did, “in the weeks just before he died, by a rumor going around that Western Europe and the Soviet Union were clandestinely selling, for burial in Africa, millions of tons of radioactive waste to dozens of poor countries, Olinka included.” She drew in a long breath, expelled it. She glanced at Fanny to see how she would take the blow.

Fanny groaned, and tears of hurt and rage leaped to her eyes. It had never occurred to her that this news might be only a rumor. As soon as she’d heard it, she knew it was true, just as Ola would have known.

“Ola was incensed that Africans could be collaborators in this long-term—forever, really—destruction of their continent and their children,” Miss B said. “If true, he considered the buying and burying of this material a worse crime against Africa than even the selling of Africans by Africans during the slave trade.” Miss B looked at Fanny, then looked quickly out the window toward the mountains. “And of course,” she added, “the motives of the white governments involved are, as always, unspeakable.”

Fanny spread her fingers over the edge of the cushion on which she sat. It was a tawny velvet sofa, like the hide of a lion. She thought of Ola, stretched out there, talking. Perhaps struggling for breath.

“In which direction was he facing?” she asked.

“Toward the window,” said Miss B. “He was a frequent visitor here and had favorite views. He was my husband, legally; did you know that?”

Fanny nodded that she did.

“From the couch you can easily see the Dgoro mountains. He loved to lie here, look out at them, and think of his plays. I would make tea, and we’d sit and sip, in silence.”

Fanny wiped a tear from her cheek.

“Your hair,” she said, for something to say, “is the most startling shade of blue.”

“I know it,” said Miss B, laughing. “I assure you it isn’t at all natural. Not at all. It’s a color I’ve always loved and, as a painter, I learned to mix it myself. The one thing I liked about my old life in America was the deep blue of the delphiniums in our garden. Well, delphiniums won’t grow here, but the color seems to do quite well on my head. It gives me something of the feeling of
being
a delphinium.” She laughed again. “And my students, especially the little new, scared ones, who’ve never been anywhere but in the alleys or the bush, tend to like it. They like the strangeness of it. It’s a kind of human zebra to them. I believe if there’s one thing given us as human beings strictly as a play toy, it’s hair,” she said.

“Thank you for all that you’ve meant to my father,” said Fanny. “I’d no idea a white person, especially a white woman, would touch upon my own life so—meaningfully.”

Miss B returned Fanny’s scrutinizing look with a searching look of her own. Perhaps she could see, Fanny thought, what stuntedness of perception North America had taught her in regard to other human beings, who might be white.

“We all touch upon each other’s lives in ways we can’t begin to imagine,” Miss B said dryly.

“Yes,” said Fanny, rising from the tawny sofa, preparing to go. In the back of her knees she suddenly felt the spring of her father’s scrawny legs. She looked out at the mountains he’d loved, and worshiped them with his eyes.

As if she suddenly saw Ola himself standing before her, Miss B embraced her. Fanny was both startled and pleased.

“How long will you be in Africa?” she asked.

“I must leave soon,” said Fanny. “There is a man back in California with whom I share a bond. But I will be back. Perhaps he will come with me. My sister, Nzingha, will want to mount productions of Ola’s plays, and write her own, I suspect. She says I must come back to help her. Two Nzinghas, you see, being better than one. She swears she expects to have to fight this government for forty years, just as our namesake fought the Portuguese.”

“She knows whereof she speaks,” said Miss B.

“Do you think they’ll harm her if she produces Ola’s plays?” asked Fanny, frowning, and turning back at the door.

Miss B considered this. “Maybe not,” she said, in her flat North American voice. “After all, Ola himself is dead; the plays already written will benefit, as far as the government is concerned, from his absence. To expose the authenticity of their grief over his demise, and to impress the world community that loved him, they will probably beg Nzingha to mount some of Ola’s plays in his memory. Some of those
not
about taxation without representation,
not
about the oppression of women,
not
about violence by the government against the people,
not
about the smug middle class,
not
about the brutalization of the poor,
not
about the barbarity of the military,
not
about the nuclear-waste dumpings ...” she said, “it’ll be interesting to see what they do want produced.”

Fanny laughed. She could just imagine Ola running down this list and making the same observation.

“The plays that are likely to enrage the censors—none of whom, no doubt, will ever have read a play—will probably be Nzingha’s own. Or yours, if you decide to come back and write some. Nothing is harder for the men in power than to contemplate what the African woman knows. And to have
two
African women tell them!” She laughed.

“Well,” said Fanny. “I guess that’s that! The only question remaining is this one: If and when Nzingha and I do write the sons and daughters of our father’s loathsome plays, can we perform them in your gymnasium?”

“Surely,” said Miss B, smiling and waving good-bye to Fanny as she drove away in one of the government’s little gray cars. She was thinking that perhaps she would also, when Nzingha and Fanny were producing their works, write a play. For her own amusement. Just for her students and herself. Just to surprise Nzingha and Fanny. She would name it something like “Recuerdo,” or perhaps “The Coming Age,” or perhaps “Eleandra and Eleanora,” or maybe “M’Sukta,” or “The Savage in the Stacks,” or maybe “Zedé and Carlotta.” Or perhaps—just “Carlotta.”

“Hello, son.”

I
T WAS
M
ISS
L
ISSIE’S
voice, yet deeper, and weaker,
older
, than Suwelo remembered it. He adjusted the volume on the cassette player and sat down on the couch in front of it. On the left side of the sofa he’d set up his projector and filled it with the slides of Miss Lissie’s work that Mr. Hal had sent him. After listening to her speak, he would have a look.

“By the time you get this,” Miss Lissie’s deep voice continued, “I will be somewhere and someone else. I have asked Hal to send it to you only upon my death, to which I almost look forward, knowing as I do that it is not the end, and being someone who enjoys hanging around, in spite of myselves. I regret leaving Hal, and am anxious as to our chances of coming together again; but that is all I do regret, and I have every faith we will meet again, and no doubt soon. For Hal and I have a lot more stuff to work out, and though we have been at it for so many years, and it’s been hard labor, I can tell you, we’ve only just begun.

“Remember that song? I’ve come to believe that people’s songs are their most truthful creations, when they’re real songs, not pap. Or sometimes, even when they’re pap, they tell the truth, but it isn’t the truth the singers think they are telling. But before I talk about me and Hal, let me make a few observations about you.

“After you left us last summer and went back to California, I kept thinking about you, and looking at the painting of you that I’d done—Hal did one almost identical to it—that showed you surrounded by all the beauties of this life, the flowers, the corn, the ivy, the trees, the welcoming and sheltering house of your two old friends, you, asleep. Well, you
were
asleep; so there’s truth, fidelity to reality in our pictures. But as I thought more about you and your time in Rafe’s house and your time spent with us, I began to think about the ways in which both Hal and I feel you really are asleep.