Читать книгу Closer to God - John Moehl - Страница 11

Wednesday arrived at its own speed and Brother Mike prepared for poker. He left early to get a few sacks of cement at the market, thereby justifying his taking the Toyota. He then found Philip’s house with little difficulty. Typical of this expat neighborhood, his bungalow was set back in a small but well-kept garden, set off by a small garage and a large apron with parking for several vehicles including Brother Mike’s pickup. The entryway was through sliding glass doors, directly into a modest living room with an adjacent dining area. The living area was appointed with locally made armchairs with foam rubber cushions covered in bright African prints surrounding a large glass-topped coffee table.

Philip met him as he approached the sliding door, guiding him to one of the chairs; the others were occupied by two gentlemen he assumed to be Karl and Antonio. His suspicions proved correct as Philip made the introductions, thereafter offering beer and cigarettes all around. Brother Mike did not smoke, but he was a minority of one and the room was soon redolent with tobacco smoke.

They chatted while Philip’s houseboy adjusted the dining area to make room for a folding card table under the central hanging light, placing a similar folding chair on each side. As Brother Mike was not only new to the game, but also to the group, the preliminary conversation was more biographic. Brother Mike by now knew Philip well, knowing he was starting his second decade in Central Africa after lengthy schooling in ophthalmology, specializing in tropical eye diseases.

Brother Mike now learned by current standards Philip was still wet behind the ears in terms of experience living abroad. In fact, for the others, living abroad was really the wrong term, applied only because both Karl and Antonio were from European stock, but neither had ever really lived in Europe. Karl had been born in Central Africa where his father had been a doctor in the colonial service. Antonio’s equatorial roots were even deeper. His family had migrated to German East Africa in 1888, and started a bodega in Bagamoyo in what is now Tanzania. His family had considerably expanded their business interests from those early days, but in 1962, when Nyerere was elected president, it became hard for the family to hold onto its investments in an environment of African Socialism. They had moved further into the hinterland, into the Great Lakes Region. Today, after two decades of rebuilding, Antonio and his family had a thriving supermarket as well as commercial and residential property and a profitable poultry farm.

Brother Mike wondered how it was that he had never met these gentlemen before. After all, the provincial capital had a population of less than 70,000 inhabitants; it was not a big city—the expats of all varieties, including the religious orders, accounted for less than three percent of the census. It would seem logical that everyone knew everyone else, but this was obviously not the case. Everyone may well know the rumors and tall tales of everyone else, but they certainly did not know everyone else in the flesh and blood. Karl and Antonio definitely had stories to tell. They were people from whom lessons could be learned.

But this was not the time for introspection. The card table was set with a fresh deck of cards impatiently waiting to be shuffled, not to mention Vespers getting all the closer with each passing minute. Everyone picked up their sweating amber beer bottles and moved to the square field of battle.

The cards were shuffled and dealt and then reshuffled. The conversation was mainly monosyllabic. At one critical point when Brother Mike was considering his wager, there was a loud call of “Bullshit!” When Brother Mike looked up from his hand, he could not tell which of his adversaries had made such a pronouncement. As he stared at his opponents, a resounding “Bullshit!” was again uttered, but by none of the players. His consternation was clear on his face.

Philip saw Brother Mike’s predicament and laughingly pointed to the corner of the room. There, for the first time, Brother Mike noticed a tall cylindrical cage with a domed top. He placed his cards face down on the table and got up to see, more closely, the creature that had so rudely interrupted his concentration.

As he approached the cage, he saw it was occupied by a most impressive African grey parrot. As he got nearer, the parrot scooted across his perch and bowed his head, almost as if to seek Brother Mike’s blessing. Brother Mike extended a finger to try and scratch the proffered head.

“Don’t do that,” said Philip in a stern voice. “You get your finger in there and he’ll flay it. He doesn’t like men.

“That’s Kasuku, Angela’s naughty bird. They say the female parrots bond with men and the males with women. We don’t know which sort this one is, but by its behavior we assume it’s a male and it sure is tight with Angela and enjoys inflicting great pain on us boys.”

Brother Mike withdrew his finger and was turning to regain his chair when, as if understanding the full conversation, Kasuku bid him goodbye with a loud “Asshole!”

Time passed quickly with no big winner nor loser. Soon the shadows lengthened and Brother Mike knew he would have to race the sun to its setting, the hour of Vespers corresponding to sundown at these latitudes.

The next Saturday, as the veranda at the Crane began to simmer with weekend energy, Philip confirmed to Brother Mike that their Wednesday game would be on and would be on for the foreseeable future, as all the players were now committed to the new schedule, which they found to be the most agreeable way to pass a midweek afternoon.

With due precision, the group assembled at Philip’s on the next appointed date. As the introductions and biographies had been taken care of, they were able to plunge directly into their cards. Each was engrossed in evaluating what the Fates had given them when they heard the door slide open. With a quick glance, Philip said, “Do you all know my wife, Angela?”

Karl and Antonio looked up from their cards and offered a familiar greeting to Philip’s spouse who they obviously knew well. When Brother Mike looked up, she had her back turned, as she was removing her scarf. He mumbled a brief salutation and was just about to look back to his cards when she did an about-face and, to his shock, he realized that Mrs. Philip was the lady with whom he had exchanged words at the hardware shop all those weeks ago.

There was a twinkle in her eyes as she came over to the card table and offered her hand to Brother Mike. He politely stood and took her hand, noticing the firm return pressure and the dry palm. She then softly intoned, “My pleasure Brother Mike, Philip has told me so much about you. And, as I see you now before me, I wonder, have we met before?”

“Indeed,” replied Brother Mike. “You may have long forgotten a modest monk who exchanged a few words with you in a hardware store some time back.”

“Hmmm,” she followed through. “I have no idea of the modesty, but I do recall the conversation. I also recall our discourse being a bit one-sided. I hope your cards treat you better than did my dialogue.”

With this she excused herself and went into the interior of the house.

Brother Mike felt obliged to add some background to their somewhat cryptic exchange, explaining to his fellow players that he had met a charming lady at a hardware store when seeking supplies for the Abbey, having no idea this lady was Mrs. Philip.

Philip seemed to want to fill in the blanks and added, “I tell Angela she’s the slum lord of the town. She has lots of small rentals scattered hither and yon. Although these don’t seem to put much meat on the table, or money in the pot, the oversight and upkeep do seem to fully occupy her time. Therefore, if you ever have to move out of the Abbey, she has a place for you. You would probably not find her accommodation that different from the monastery’s cells.”

At this, all had a good laugh followed by a good swallow of beer before they got back to the serious business of poker. Again, time dictated their play and soon Brother Mike was bumping along the road to the Abbey, unsure if it was the stiff springs of the pickup or the potholes of the laterite road that were most answerable for the jostling he was receiving as he headed toward Vespers with his pockets full of considerably more francs than he had had when he had departed early in the morning in search of a valve for one of the clinic’s toilets.

The next day after Lauds, Brother Mike snuck away to his refuge on the pond bank. After he had impaled a worm on the hook of the cane pole he secreted in a nearby banana grove, he leaned back against the acacia tree that had pierced the dike and took score, not of his poker hands, but of his life.

Things seemed to be as well as they could, with the knowledge that the unknown always offered both greater riches and a shortcut to Purgatory. His management of the Abbey’s affairs continued to be impeccable, if slightly embellished for the benefit of his good self and a few other selected entrepreneurs in the nearly area. He had managed to get Jean-Baptiste set up in a secluded room where few would know he was there and even fewer would care. He had successfully ended the friendship with Sister Alice and, for the moment, was relishing his monastic solitude. He felt comfortable he was living up to his vows and his expectations, with only two sorties a week: Saturday and Wednesday afternoons.

Brother Mike pulled in his line, reached into his ever-present holdall, extracted his bottle of Courvoisier and a small glass; things were good. The breeze picked up, rustling the fronds on the nearby banana trees. The gust startled a hamerkop that scolded all as it flew from its hiding place along the shore where it had been hunting small fishes. Children laughed and played at the school on the hill on the far side of the swale, their melody vibrating off the rich lowlands where cabbage, carrots, and tomatoes sprouted like buds on a rose. Life was good.

❦❦❦

Brother Mike’s routine now seemed fixed and his situation stable. He approached new friendships with caution after a lengthy break following Sister Alice. He managed short, almost ephemeral, friendships with a sister visiting from a northern order and a public health specialist from the Ministry who was touring centers in the area.

He enjoyed the challenges of keeping things moving—the logistics of intertwining the Abbey’s supply chain and his own substantive network. But his real pleasures were still to be found crowd watching from the Crane’s veranda and placing his bets at Philip’s.

The seasonal changes were very nuanced in these hills, and Brother Mike was scarcely aware of the passing of time. The arrival of a new container was the main milestone, and this, too, was routine enough as to not create any feeling of exceptionalism. The Christmas season was always a joy, but the abstemious spirit of the Abbey made this a modest festivity, with the exception of a splendid and ornate Christmas Eve Mass.

The ascetic lifestyle notwithstanding, the monastery was not to forego opportunities. The Christmas season was a time when the bakery and butcher shop produced baskets of seasonal favorites to entice their customers: special breads, exotic sausages, and heavily scented cakes and cookies. There was a cornucopia of holiday gastronomy that required a whole new stock of supplies. It was, thus, that at this time there were no less than two containers a month to ensure the brothers had all the fixings to satisfactorily serve their clientele, some coming from as far away as the national capital.

After the holidays, there was a respite—a deep communal sigh of relief that yet another season had successfully passed. This lull was generally filled with a quite good cheer such as one has after consuming a well-prepared feast. In fact, the comparison was very apt as the brothers themselves also tended to up consumption of all sorts during the festive season.

Brother Mike was enjoying the seasonal afterglow during his first go at the cards for the New Year. They had just dealt the first hand when there was a raucous pounding on the sliding glass door. All looked up, but only Karl recognizing Etienne frantically knocking on the door.

As Karl escorted Etienne into the room, he announced to all that Etienne was the houseboy of Mr. Goldfarb, the math teacher at the Catholic High School. While none of the other players knew Mr. Goldfarb, they had heard of him, as he had been here for ages. Now in his advanced years, he still walked to school every day, wearing the same old charcoal gray three-piece tweed suit with a red fraternity tie. No one knew if he had but one set of clothes, but he was only seen wearing the same somber attire when he marched to and from school, through the years with the same strong gate.

Like Karl, Mr. Goldfarb had sent his wife to back Europe, or she had opted to return. In any event, as with many expats in town, they lived separate lives. Since La Coopération—the international assistance agency that employed most of the expatriates ostensibly assisting the country in various capacities—paid travel for the whole family, a spouse living in Europe could come to Africa on holiday while one working here could return at regular intervals to reacquaint him- or herself with the homeland.

These somewhat fluid spousal arrangements led to a variety of accords. While Karl found in this detached connection a new freedom to sow the wild oats he had forgone as a youth, when he was consumed by his academics, Mr. Goldfarb had preferred a more staid arrangement—setting up house with a young girl for whom he could more likely have been a grandfather than a lover.

This relationship, so scorching at the onset, had cooled and assumed another form of detachment as Mr. Goldfarb’s years continued to climb. While the flame may not have been fully extinguished, the young and striking (and for all intents and purposes, the second Mrs. Goldfarb) frequently sought the attention of younger men—often on the veranda of the Crane. Many an evening, the still comely but aging second Mrs. Goldfarb could be seen on the portico encircled by a gaggle of would-be suitors. After leaving the Crane Hotel, whatever, however, and wherever things happened was only the object of the community’s active rumor mill, as the second Mrs. Goldfarb, to her credit, masked her extracurricular flings in nearly complete secrecy. The onlookers could only, as they did so well, wonder with whom and how.

While his spouse was assessing the evening’s crop of young admirers strutting their virility at the Crane, Mr. Goldfarb could be seen in his study through the rarely drawn drapes, pacing back and forth in his shirt sleeves, a whisky glass in his hand, a well-used bottle on the coffee table, listening to cassettes of François-Joseph Gossec and seemingly talking to himself between sips.

But now the delicate spousal equilibrium had shifted, as a frantic Etienne was anxiously trying to explain to any who would listen. The second Mrs. Goldfarb had locked Mr. Goldfarb out of the house. When he had returned from his day at school, perspiration drenching his face as it was now the hot season, he found no way to enter his home. Madame had barricaded the doors and was deaf to his calls. Etienne had been returning from the market when he saw the sight. He was now concerned his patron could succumb to heat exhaustion, as he was hammering and hammering on each and every door and window, all to no avail, but with the sweat now soaking his three-piece suit.

The players decided they had to intervene. If they could not penetrate the ramparts on Mr. Goldfarb’s behalf, they could at least bring him back here where he could have a cold beer and a sympathetic ear.

Antonio had driven the minivan from the store, so there was room for everyone as they drove the few blocks to the colonial style house that had been occupied by Goldfarb for years and years and years. Pulling into the drive, they spied their prey sitting in a heap on the stoop; his coat still on but his tie loosened around a sweat-soaked collar. He was so still they were worried he may have expired, but when they shook his shoulder, he revived and meekly accepted a ride to Philip’s, apparently having lost all will to access the habitation now apparently overseen by the second Mrs. Goldfarb.

When finally seated in one of Philip’s armchairs, Mr. Goldfarb resembled a blow-up Saint Nicholas that had suddenly lost all its air. In fact, like air hissing from a leak, his lungs seemed to be voiding their very essence. Nonetheless, when a frothy pint of beer was passed before him, he eagerly took it, instantaneously consuming the entire contents. After a third pint, Mr. Goldfarb’s hooded eyes fluttered and he looked as though he could speak. With the four men perched over him like a kingfisher at the fishpond, and Etienne shadowing them in the corner, unwilling to leave his long-time patron, Mr. Goldfarb uttered but a word, “Damn!”

It took yet a fourth pint before the tale could be spun.

Goldfarb knew it was in the offing. She was still a prime specimen and he offered little to keep her close to home and hearth. Heretofore, the long parade of young men had been able to assuage the urges, while she still found safety and security in remaining the second Mrs. Goldfarb. However, as was bound to happen, she finally met a man who was not just there to satiate her but who said he really loved her; he wanted to marry her and build a house for her. This seemed so little to ask. A normal life was now so attainable—no more galavanting, no more evenings on the terrace. The opportunity for a real home with someone to whom she could relate and with whom she could communicate. Was it too much to ask? She certainly did not think so and had said as much to Goldfarb that morning. She only wanted her freedom and a stipend that could help with building the new house. She was not greedy and she bore Goldfarb no ill feeling. But it was time for change.

Yet, upon hearing the early morning news, Goldfarb, as usual a bit hung over from his nightly concert with his whiskey, had reacted violently and negatively. No! Never! Never, never, never! She was his. She had come to him as almost a child. All she had, all she knew, all she had learned was thanks to him. She was not only his wife, she was his product. She owed him. She could not abandon him—absolutely not.

However, now among his own, he saw the futility of his actions. He could not control her. He could not refuse her. He had no choice, he had to acquiesce. Maybe his first wife would come back. Then another “Damn!” He remembered his first wife was now living with a young tennis pro. What would he do? He was too old to think of a third Mrs. Goldfarb.

Even though Goldfarb was not close to the group, he was a member of their wider expat community. They wanted to help him as they wanted to believe he would help them if the tables were turned.

They called Etienne to a group huddle and then approached Goldfarb before he could down his sixth pint. Etienne, who has been living at his farm outside town and coming to work every day by bicycle, offered to move into the boy’s quarters at the Goldfarb house if le patron agreed. Etienne’s oldest son wanted to marry but could not as he had no house of his own. This son already did most of the farming, so Etienne could give his country house to the boy, who could then marry while Etienne and his wife moved into town, albeit into accommodations that were not their own. His other children were nearly grown and could live on the farm as they had been doing, their older sibling now the head of the household.

They had to repeat this proposal three times before Goldfarb grasped what was being suggested. Yet, once he did seize the idea, he accepted immediately, offering to spruce up the quarters before Etienne moved in.

In this way, another in the continuing dramas had been contained, but at the cost of a game of poker.

❦❦❦

Brother Mike had little contact with Goldfarb and could only assume the arrangements with Etienne had taken place as planned: the second Mrs. Goldfarb was now missus somebody else and Goldfarb’s suit had finally dried after the ordeal of restructuring his household.

Brother Mike understood, moreover, that situations like Goldfarb’s arose more often than most knew. Men often entered the Foreign Service fresh out of their tertiary studies. Many—married and even fathers at this time—had had little opportunity to, as they liked to say in this part of the world, “play life.” While they may have been long on education, they were very short on life experiences. When they came here, they found a lot of their traditional social barriers absent or replaced by new and often more liberal codes of conduct, certainly a concept well appreciated by Brother Mike.

Here there were frequently totally different value systems and protocols. Marriage, age, sex, friendship, respect—all were subject to new interpretations. Brother Mike had seen his European brothers completely burn out on the excesses of a less encumbering and more open life, even though the social liberties here in the central part of the continent were said to be stringent by comparison to those further to the west.

Brother Mike often wondered about these social norms, thinking frequently of the time he was driving to the country’s capital and was overtaken by the shiny black Mercedes of the Archbishop, with his Holiness seated regally in the back, his wife next to him, her headscarf piled high in the rear window.