The Man Who Cried I Am (48 page)

“Lunda, Montante said.”

“He was a good man, Montante.”

“Do you know what's happened to him?”

“The Portuguese have him. He's alive for now. They'll make an example of him. Sixty-five men then, at the minimum,” Pugh said. He wasn't writing anything down. Probably has a computer where his brain should be, Max thought. “Assis is running into trouble,” Pugh said.

“Yeah. Too bad I didn't see some of the weapons the Portuguese had.”

“You didn't though, did you?”

“No.”

“Take pictures?”

“Only the men in my squad.”

“Nothing more, Mr. Reddick?”

It seemed to Max that Pugh's tone was insinuating and he said, wearily, “Screw you, Pugh.”

Pugh looked down into his lap.

“Did you get wet?” he finally asked.

“Rain, no.”

Pugh was rising. “I meant river crossings.”

“Yes, yes,” Max said impatiently, “one stream, but I don't know the name of it—”

“We know the name. I only wanted to tell you to have a complete physical and blood count as soon as you can. The streams in this area are loaded with bilharzia.”

Max nodded and turned back to his typewriter. Bilharzia, he thought when Pugh had closed the door behind him, what in the hell is
that?

“It looks very much like bilharzia,” the doctor said cheerfully, waving Max to a seat.

Through the windows Max could see Jimmy, his driver, polishing the car with a cloth. Awolowo Street, Lagos. Leo was three weeks behind. “You'll have to explain to me just exactly what that is,” Max said.

“Comes from blood flukes,” the doctor said. He was English. “They enter the body where they can, hook into the blood stream and start working from the inside back out. Your count seems to be holding, but the flukes are there and if you don't get rid of them, they'll get rid of you, right ho!”

Jimmy was shaking out his cloth. He put it away, then pulled out a comb and moved to the sideview mirror. He crouched down and pulled the comb laboriously through his thick hair.

“Where would you like to go for treatment?” the doctor asked.

It was a foregone conclusion then that treatment was necessary.

“London or Amsterdam? The best specialists are there. There is also a good clinic in Paris. Time is important—”

“Amsterdam,” Max said with a wave of his hand and he knew that it signaled the end of the battle against Margrit. If he went to London, he'd be breaking his neck to get to Amsterdam; if he went to Paris, it would be the same goddamn thing.

The doctor was dictating a letter to his nurse for Max. “And I'll cable this doctor tonight as well. When can you leave, Mr. Reddick?”

Max thought. “Two days.”

“In the meantime, you'd better get this prescription filled and take the medicine as ordered until you're under the care of Dr. van Gelder.” The doctor paused and then said, “By the way, have another complete checkup once you're there, won't you? Just to make sure everything's shipshape.”

But Max's mind was already turning forward.

He was hardly aware of Lagos, ripe-smelling Lagos with its open sewers, in frenzied movement all around him. He sent the cables to Devoe and Shea, gave orders lucidly and not without humor to Charity, Jimmy and Johnson; he did not know just how long the treatments would take. This done, he faced the packing and the next day took the deadening ride to the airport, climbed the ramp with trembling legs and a tiny whirlpool in his gut, and his mind moved ahead to Margrit, to whom he'd also sent a cable.

He would marry her. He could fight it no longer; the accidents kept recurring that sent him rushing back to her. Bam, the towel was in. I quit. Enough. Oh, he would go through the formality of asking her to marry him, but he knew her answer. The signals had always been strong and steady. And she wasn't American. There was a difference. She had to break with none of her family, trek to no desert to think about it in solitude. No,
he
had done that. They would return to Africa. He could see her already, topping the foaming, hissing surf at Tarkwa Bay, vanishing for an instant beneath the monstrous blue waves and then emerging with a steady pink stroke, coming on toward the ivory-colored beach. Later, of course, there would be America.

A certain sense of relief had settled over him when he decided that he would marry Margrit, the kind of relief that comes with commitment, good or bad. Don't stand there,
do
something! Now he was going to do it; he would become
recreated
as a Negro in the process. The black anonymity would be gone. The old myths goaded by old hatreds would make him highly visible, more dangerous. His possible vulnerability, with Margrit at his side, would be publicized, his manhood put on the line as never before, for now it would always be challenged. The
boyhood
that came with being Negro was over. It would not matter that Margrit was not American, bred up in the horrors or perverted joys of marriage to a black man. She was white, that was enough; it was what you saw first, right away, at once.

He supposed that what he felt was love. He wished there were another word for it, one that could be used by people like himself, and Margrit too, he guessed, who had touched what they called love so often that it no longer possessed a name.

If there had been no Lillian would there be a Margrit?

Thirty-five thousand feet up, moving close to six hundred mph, Max could now clearly see Margrit standing in the doorway of a New England cabin the first thing on a cool morning, the dew still on the ground, the trout breaking from the shadows in search of food; stretching in the doorway, her hair trapping the gold of the sun; her gold and pink body soft against an August green. He thought of them together, skin against skin, mind to mind, of her whispered words of barely muted awe (for there
was
all of history and distance, the displacement of old values that had been overcome), “How lovely we are together.”

But the realities.

To Max it had always been all right, what other black men and white women wished to do with their lives. Then, he was having none of it, not for real; for a night or two or three perhaps, on occasions, but not on paper, not to have and to hold; he had been too wise for that, too aware. You survived by avoiding
that
kind of marriage. That was past. He was going to marry Margrit. They could kiss his ass, the blacks and the whites both. Blacks, suddenly steeped in the nigrescent nationalism that was boiling across the land, were as opposed to mixed marriages as whites, and black women were especially vociferous. Max trusted their emotions more than the men. Too many times, out with a white date, he had been approached by black men, his sleeve tugged and the question asked: “That chick got a
friend?
” Or: “Max, now you know I like ice cream
too.
” Or the crude passes were made, the ones that revealed that many black men, whatever they said to the contrary, had not yet jettisoned what the white man had said about them and the white woman.

Somewhere it was all a lie, what the white man said black men should not do, and what black men deep within their own hearts came to believe themselves. It was a lie because no black man anywhere in the world where newspapers, magazines, television and film existed could do anything
but
move unconsciously throughout his life toward whitey Aphrodite, the love-and-sex object, raping it when he could, loving it when he was allowed to and marrying it when he dared to.

You dared to if you knew the truth and the truth was proximity. The fleeting relationships, the tasting of Aphrodite's fruits in the small hours of an American morning or a European afternoon were lies and that was the way they wanted it. That was the way they taught you to live it. Better that than rubbing elbows at lunch counters or in classrooms. Most white people fell in love (?) and married each other because of proximity. Most black people fell in love (?) and married each other because of proximity. What happened to the black man and white woman (or vice versa) in close proximity to each other or wanting to be in close proximity to each other?

He had lived in the gray, on the margin, for a very long time now. But that was over. From here on in, there would be attacks from both; he and Margrit would be everybody's business. There would be exceptions; there always were, but those could not be taken for granted. How times had changed. Once the colored communities were the only places of refuge for the mixed couple. Now there was only, for pure refuge, isolation.

Why
, Max continued thinking, gazing out at the wingtip shuddering slightly, its skin rippling rhythmically from speed and pressure,
does it take so long, so
fucking
long to grow up! So long to know that what is important in any given time, to any given person, nay, urgent, cannot be avoided no matter how skillful the evasions of the involved?

“That's it!” Roger said, watching the plane make its approach over Schiphol Airport.

Margrit Westoever, who had told Roger of Max's coming, followed the passage of the aircraft, hoping dully that this time Max would have something else on his mind beside
Pace
and writing. She hoped this time, despite his illness, he would talk about
them
. She had arranged everything for him with the doctor who had explained to her what his illness was. It sounded horrible. But all the same she was glad he was back in Amsterdam. Now she knew she would take him almost any way she could, any way he wanted it, but
Godverdomme
, she was sick of dead ends, so sick of them that she thought that was just why she was always involved in them. If dead ends truly were her fate, then she chose the one with Max. She could say nothing until he did; that was the way she was. But she was tired of being hurt; she did not like it. It eroded the dignity. During his last visit they had avoided talking about anything important. He never mentioned love. There was nothing wrong with mentioning it, even if trillions and trillions of people had already used it. She surmised that his being a writer had something to do with his refusal to use the word, that and perhaps a kind of honesty that compelled him to use such a word only if he meant it. Margrit smiled as she recalled first thinking about this in the side room of the gallery which at that time had a quite good collection of collages by an American Negro painter who was trying to get to her. He used
all
the words; but then the painter had that kind of reputation in town. Still, like so many Negroes, he held forth loudly and at length about the horrible race relations in America, and how he
hated
white people. What was he doing in Amsterdam then, chasing every white girl he saw? And when they went with or married these girls, the black Americans, the girls always seemed to be doing penance. They were quiet beneath the voices of their men, and seemed as mere extensions of them, as if they had in the black contact lost all perspective of themselves. They seemed so utterly and completely crushed. But why was she thinking like this? She and Max were never like that. They could never be like that.

She watched the plane, a mere speck at the end of the runway, trailing faint streams of smoke, land. She saw herself taking off in one, going to America, Max at her side. Enough of Europe with its flowers and grasses fertilized by blood, its breezes echoing the distant passing of bullets and bombs, the stutter of tanks. Europeans never learned. Enough of Europe with its people who said they were Jews when she knew they were not. There was something about wanting to belong to and be a survivor of the worst of the Continent's history. These people disgusted her, but she met them all the time. She recalled Max's reaction to the Anna Frank house and to the sections where the Jews once had lived. She remembered how during the war the Germans had killed people on their way to work, just to set examples, shot them down mornings on the Leidseplein without warning. “You, you, you and you.” Bang, bang, bang and bang. We have suffered, yes, she thought, but the learning comes slowly. America might be better, no matter what she had heard about it; it had produced Max. But again, as the plane rolled slowly toward the airport terminal, she asked herself, Why am I thinking all this?

He had just returned from his first visit to the doctor. He was taking an arsenic medicine for the bilharzia. Dinner was on the stove, probably burning and she had forgotten to chill the wine. Maybe he wasn't even supposed to have wine. Did I hear him say it? Why doesn't he say it again?

“I'm not such a bad guy; I wouldn't beat you or starve you, and I always work hard,” he was saying.

Margrit's hands came up before her as if to ward off a flurry of caresses that had taken her by surprise. She felt water in her eyes. Then her hands were together, wringing each other's fingers and she had to take a tissue and wipe her nose and she was thanking God silently and being overwhelmed by his words, the meaning of them.

She did not want him to look at her like this, but, as she got up to run to the bedroom, she saw, quite suddenly, a look of alarm in his eyes. Did he think, foolish boy, that she was saying no? She ran back to him and crumpled to her knees and cried in his lap while he tried to pull her face up so he could look in it and understand what was going on. She shook her head so vigorously up and down that the tears flew and she said several times, very softly, “
Ja, ja, ja, Mox, Ik hou van je
, yes, yes, I love you, of course, yes. What else but yes?”

“Get up,” he said. “Please get up. Don't kneel, don't ever kneel to anyone for anything.” He was strangely and deeply moved but a slight, stinging anger came and went. He lifted her around so she was sitting and not kneeling. Not even niggers are kneeling these days, Max thought.

“I will make you a good wife,” she said.

“I know that,” he said. “And I will make you a good husband.”

“We will be so strong together. Even alone you are strong.”