Discretion (17 page)

I was punished for my ingratitude. And for my hubris. It was a punishment so severe that had I not considered it in the light of this justice, I would not have been able to go forward with my life. I would not have been able to commit myself to the service of my country. I would not have been granted the privileges I now have that give me power and bring me wealth.

Five days after I saw Marguerite, my wife went shopping with my son. They were crossing the street. My son’s hand was in my wife’s hand. The crosswalk sign in front of them was green. It gave them permission to walk. They had just stepped off the curb when
a car careened toward them. It was a drunken driver, the police told me. A young man of nineteen full of beer and cheap wine from a fraternity party that had begun at noon.

It was five o’clock when his car struck my wife and my son. My son died on the spot. My wife remained in the intensive care unit of the hospital for a week. Our daughter was born dead.

M
y president recalled us to Africa. He thought I would not be able to breathe air in the country where my son had lost his life, where my daughter never had a chance to begin hers. I left without saying good-bye to Marguerite. I did not answer her letter, I did not call her, I did not try to see her again. I left directly from Washington when my wife regained consciousness. She went with me on a stretcher to Africa, needles feeding liquids into her veins to keep her alive. She wanted to be in Africa when I buried our son, when we said good-bye to a daughter we had never heard cry or ever seen in her eyes the faintest flicker of life.

There are no words that come close to conveying the grief a parent feels at the loss of a child, much less the loss of two children. Nerida and I bore our grief in different ways. She wanted no reminders of their physical existence. She left all our son’s clothes, all his toys, in the apartment in Washington, the baby things, too, she had bought for the child we were expecting. Her babies had gone to the ancestors, she said. They were spirits now. She would keep them in her spirit. She did not return to their graves after the funeral. That was not where they were, she said. They were everywhere. They were in her heart.

Nerida is a Christian as I am, but she became a Christian for me. When I insisted on marrying in the Church. To please her, I had allowed the priest from her clan to bless us and the drums to beat nine days for us. I presented her with a dowry of wood carvings and gold, and I had ten cows slaughtered and a feast prepared for the people in her village. But I did those things so her father would allow her to marry me in a church and so that the missionaries from Canada, who had paid for my education, would officiate at the ceremony.

Nerida indulged me because she loved me, but she did not believe as I said I believed. She did not believe in a Resurrection of the flesh. She did not believe that one day our spirits would return to our dead bodies and we would rise again inside our physical selves, the selves we had on earth, to await God’s judgment. She believed that when we died, we joined our ancestors. That the body that carried our spirit no longer had value. It returned to the earth from whence it came.

My wife recovered fully from the accident that took our children’s lives. Today she bears no physical scars, but still she rarely speaks about our dead son and our stillborn daughter. In the early days she refused to talk to me about them at all, so profound and lasting was her grief. She did not intend to cause me pain, though talking to her would have relieved my pain. Only two people really know the intensity of the suffering the death of children bring—the child’s father and the child’s mother. I could have talked to others, but no one but Nerida could have begun to comprehend my anguish. But Nerida did not want to talk to me. She said I was a mirror in which she saw the reflection of her pain. Talking to me about our dead children only caused her suffering to be twice as excruciating.

I went alone to the gravesites of my children and there were days, I confess, when I longed to weep like a child. When I wanted to bury my head in the bosom of a woman who loved me, a woman who would comfort me with her affection for me. But my mother was dead, and Nerida did not want to weep with me. Those were the times I ached for Marguerite—for the softness of her skin
against mine, for the solace of her courage that had forced me to tell her the truth. To tell her about Nerida.

Marguerite would not have wanted me to pretend. She would not have wanted me to act strong when I felt weak, to smile when I wanted to cry. She would have let me soak her hair with my tears. She would have known that though my Christian beliefs had assured me that my children were in Heaven, I was not consoled. I wanted my son in the flesh. I wanted to touch him, to hear his voice, to see his face. I wanted to kiss the cheeks of my stillborn child. I wanted to open her eyes. I wanted to loosen her tongue. I wanted to hear her call my name, Baba, Baba. I wanted to see her take her first step. No religious belief could take away those longings from my heart, diminish those feelings. I wanted my children back. I wanted them alive.

On those days when I was desperate for Marguerite’s understanding, I told myself that a good God would not have been so cruel as to punish me this way for loving her. Then, I refused to make any connection between her and the death of my children. Then, I did not think my pain was due to retribution for my ingratitude to the missionaries for saving me from the darkness of the spirit world of my ancestors. From illiteracy. I did not think it was hubris that caused me to look into the fires of the Christian Hell and still reach back, grasp on to the beliefs of my ancestors for affirmation, for validation that would let me keep Nerida, and Marguerite, too.

I would have called Marguerite again. I wanted to call her. Only the memory of seeing her from the window of the coffee shop stopped me, only the image indelibly imprinted on my mind of her unyielding eyes, of her laughter in the arms of her lover, arrested me. I knew which words she whispered in his ear. I knew why she had crossed the street to return to her apartment. I knew she had lain naked with him on the bed where she had lain naked with me. I could not bear those images. I could not bear the possibility that even now she was making love to another man.

I had brought her portrait and the books she had given me to Africa. I did not unpack them. I left them in the boxes that had
been shipped to my home. I did not want reminders of her. I wanted to forget her.

It was shortly after I returned to Africa that my president named me his ambassador to Ghana. I was thirty-two. Those who envied me when the president made me his trusted confidant, gave me his daughter’s hand in marriage and sent me to Geneva and then to Washington, hated me now and wished me misfortune. But I did not have misfortune in Ghana. God smiled on me in Ghana. A month after I arrived there, my wife was pregnant again. We had a son and, after him, two daughters, twins born the following year. In the four years I spent in Ghana, my life was restored. My three children eased the pain of the two I had lost. I believed I had wiped Marguerite out of my memory. I embraced Nerida and my love for her grew stronger. I believed she was all I needed, that Marguerite no longer mattered, that Nerida could fill the spaces Marguerite had left yawning in me. I believed I was happy, that my wife and my children were all I desired.

My work was absorbing. It brought me happiness and satisfaction. I became involved not only in the concerns of my country but in the concerns of other nations in Africa. Often I was asked to resolve disputes between nations or to be the voice of African countries in their negotiations with the Europeans. As more and more gold, oil, and uranium were discovered in Africa, particularly in countries around the equator, I was the one most entrusted by governments to represent their interests. I was considered fair and honest. An impartial judge who did not take sides in quarrels between Africans but who fought steadfastly for Africa when African countries, not only mine, were involved. I was considered a man of principle and integrity. A man who could be relied on to say the truth, even to those who did not want the truth.

I would often think that Marguerite would have found it ironic that I should have gained this reputation. Indeed, if it was true that I was a man who told the truth, it was because Marguerite had taught me the painful consequences of not telling the truth. And yet there were many occasions when I found it prudent not to reveal all I knew. There were times when I knew the truth could hurt
my country, could harm Africa. In these instances, I did not tell the truth. Was I a liar? I do not call these untruths lies when I withheld such knowledge from the Europeans or even from another African, but I sometimes wondered about the position Marguerite would have taken. Would she make a distinction between discretion and lies? Would she say, as the missionaries had taught me, that a lie of commission and a lie of omission were both sins against God? Would she repeat to me that lies always hurt the one they are intended to deceive, if not at the time they are told, then later?

What if the person who was deceived deserved to be harmed? What if it was my intention to cause retribution to the one who devastated my people? Would she still say no and tell me that the truth sets you free? What if the truth caused the imprisonment or death of a good man?

I have been in situations where I lied for my brothers in South Africa, where I used my contacts within the diplomatic world to raise money for the outlawed MK—Umkhonto we Sizwe, The Spear of the Nation—the military force that was once headed by Nelson Mandela and was intensely feared and hated by White South Africa. MK was held responsible for the sporadic uprisings in Johannesburg. It was said that it was MK that supplied the guns and the explosives for these uprisings. That it was MK that trained young children and women in the tactics of guerilla warfare. The founders and leaders of MK were in jail, but there were thousands willing to risk their lives and their livelihood, willing to die for their freedom.

Publicly I decried their acts of violence. I told my sponsors I was raising money for support of a peaceful resolution to the crime of apartheid. Privately I had long since ceased to believe that such a solution was possible. I had learned my lesson from America. It was Malcolm X’s threat of “by any means necessary” that stemmed the bloodtide of America’s vicious racist policies. Not Martin Luther King’s dream. But no one knew I thought this way. Not even Nerida. If these kinds of lies made me a good diplomat, then I was proud to be a diplomat. I was proud to be a man of discretion.

But Marguerite had meant another kind of lie, the lie I told her. And try as I did, I could not convince myself that I had withheld
the truth from her to protect her from the hurt of a broken heart, or that I had deceived Nerida to save her from the pain of betrayal. No, I knew too well I had lied to them both because of my selfish desires: I loved them both. I wanted them both.

Still, there were many who did not think me a selfish man. Those I served found me altruistic, my motives untainted by greed for personal gain, and though this was true, I also profited. When I was posted to Nigeria, I lived in a house as large as the president’s, his gift to me for negotiating an oil deal from which he became rich and our country’s citizens not as poor as they once were. When I went to Ethiopia, money was deposited in Swiss banks for me for persuading the Americans to dig water wells in areas suffering from drought. In Mali I was given gold bars for uncovering hidden clauses in a contract between a European mining company and the government that would have robbed the country of millions of dollars. More money was deposited in my name by other African countries, including my own, for trade agreements I had obtained for them with the larger developed countries. I never requested the vast sums I received in excess of my fees, but I never refused payment either. Most of the time the money was given to me without my knowledge.

Before I was forty I was a rich man. I was able to provide my family with more opportunities than I had imagined would have been possible. My children traveled all over the world, they went to the best schools, and met the most important people. Before they left home to go to university, they spoke not only two African languages but also three European languages—French, German, and English—two more that I did.

Nerida, too, enjoyed our wealth but she was never extravagant. She never bought more clothes or jewelry than were necessary for the social functions we attended. Though she no longer had the need to create reminders of Africa for me in our home since we now lived in Africa, our furnishings remained conservative. The colors in our home were muted; wood carvings were placed everywhere, as were woven baskets and potted plants. It did not take me long to realize that this style was actually a reflection of Nerida’s
own taste, not merely her attempt to please me, as I once believed. When we entertained heads of state from other countries, I was always proud of the way she had decorated our home and the elegance with which she had meals prepared and served.