Prayers for the Living (55 page)

Still, reading about something is one thing and living it is another. As far as the jungle went, my Manny was very surprised. On paper, he could clutch his holdings in one hand, and in his mind imagine the miles after miles of trees bearing the fruit of the wise, the workers' housing, the port facilities, the shape, even, of the
country on the map. But once that airplane hatch opened and he stepped out into the special atmosphere of this country he spent a lot of time adjusting between the figures and knowledge in his head and the smell and feel of the land and, in particular, the jungle around him.

What did my Manny know, after all, about jungles? He was a city boy—and in these countries that Americans buy even the people they hire to run things for them, the local people, they're city boys, mostly, themselves. City is city, jungle is jungle. And if sometimes you hear that our city, as people say, that it's a jungle, let me tell you that they don't know what they're talking about. The jungle, my Manny discovered, is very hot and very wet and very noisy and very smelly and very stuffy and very strange—and if it's dangerous it's not the kind of worry that you have in the city at all. In the city do you worry about the bite of the snake called the pit viper? Do you look at the trees as you travel along in a Land Rover, worried that a snake will slip from an overhanging branch and strike at your face? Do you, in the city, turn around at the scowl of a cat as big as yourself and wonder if it's stalking midget deer or fat ratlike creatures who grow to the size of ponies or yourself? In the city do you notice that by day the light turns greenish dark, as if you're staring at the sun from miles underwater? All of this you may do, in a way, but none of it you do really—it's a dream of a jungle, and the jungle a nightmare of a city, and for my Manny, and my granddaughter, and I suppose for the others in their group, the brother-in-law, some managers in shirtsleeves who met them at the airport, and the several officers and boyish little soldiers who accompanied them as well, the jungle was, is, a thing apart from any other kind of life. A desert might have its own pains and pleasures—and life too beneath the city or on a mountaintop. But to call a city a jungle, I don't after hearing all what my Manny told me believe it for a minute. A jungle is a jungle is a jungle.

So here they are, rolling along in Land Rovers on the way to the railhead that will carry them deeper into the territory, deepest, deep where the fruit of the wise grows best. If I had my sight, if I still had
my lipstick, and a piece of paper, I could draw you a map. Here, the road from the airport in the capital which they left at once, and into the suburbs and then east through the scraggly jungle, and then the only road through deeper growth, toward the western end of the railhead built by the company nearly a hundred years before when it slashed the country in two in order to roll fruit both east toward the port and west toward the capital. If I could still draw I would make arrows for directions, north, south, west, east, but I can't do it no more.

She wanted to remember the route, Sadie did. She marked it all down in a book. “Take good notes,” the Jews for Justice boy—Alan, Mitch, James, whoever—had said to her the night before she flew down with her father, my Manny.

“Take notes, notes upon notes, note everything, and if you can, take pictures.”

“I don't know how,” she said.

“Get a Brownie, you don't have to be a genius.”

“I can ask him for pictures, for Christ's sake.”

“Oh right. If you can, do it that way.”

“Of course I can. He'll give me pictures. He'll give me anything I want.”

“Is that it?” the boy had asked. “Is that the problem?”

“What problem?”

“That he always gave you everything? And so you never had to prove . . .”

“Fuck you, asshole,” she said, getting up to leave.

New Brunswick, an old dilapidated apartment, something that had gone from Hungarian mill workers to undergraduates, time immemorial. Roaches, stink of stale food. Our apartment on Second Street all over again—you'd think she wouldn't want to spend a minute there. But to a girl who has everything—except dirt—maybe it was somehow appealing.

“Take it easy,” the boy said. This Rutgers boy. This Rutgers Jewish boy for Justice—Norman, Alan, Mitch, James—he believes what he believes, though ten years from now he'll be lucky to
remember what he believed back then—and he's like the taxi or the horse towing the milk truck, a part of the scheme, and he doesn't know, he doesn't know. What could he know? You could tell him a life and a lifetime was depending on him shutting up, and he would go on talking. And it's not just today's children—thinking about all this, watching Sadie selling out her father, and the family, so that she could feel a little better for a few minutes in a run-down apartment in New Brunswick, you begin to see that it's not just today, it's yesterday, it's a long line of children going back to the first children, the little stinkers of Adam and Eve. They disobeyed—one of them, anyway, yes? And what kind of an example did they get from their parents? They, too, disobeyed their Father—and did God Himself have a Father against whom He rebelled? And His Father, did He have a Father He fought with? I don't know where it all began—but I'm afraid I have a good idea how it ends.

“So what do you think so far, darling?” Manny asked her, meaning all of the land through which they had passed, these endless trees, the fruit, fruit, fruit, the barracks where the workers lived, the rail lines, the hospital—they took a tour—the mess halls, which were not such a mess, which were in fact very clean and the food very tasty, they were eating when he asked, “What do you think?” freshly fried fish from the nearby sea, fruit cocktail of mango and papaya and pineapple and, of course, the famous banana.

“I can't believe that you own all this,” Sarah said, touching a spoonful of pulpy fruit to her lips.

“Own?” Manny said. “Nobody in this world owns, darling. But I have a good lease, a very good lease.” He touched a hand to the back of his neck where the sweat was dripping from the roots of his silver hair. “Are you hot? We can go to the guesthouse and turn on the air-conditioning.”

“Do the workers have that too, Father?”

He shook his silver head.

“They are used to this, visitors are not.”

“They could get used to it, couldn't they?”

He squinted at her, salt sweat biting at his eyes.

“I'll look into it. It seems to be quite an exorbitant idea, but we'll look into it. How would you put it? Air-conditioning for all the people?”

“Thank you, Father.”

“But the food is delicious, don't you think? Fresh fish? Fruit?”

“Do they get fresh milk here, Father?”

“What makes you ask about that? I'm not sure. I'll inquire.”

“Inquire,” she said. “Fresh milk.”

“Could a cow survive here without air-conditioning?” he said, hoping to make her laugh.

But she pretended not to hear.

“Have you looked at the infant mortality figures for the company hospital?” she asked.

Right then and there he should have taken her by the shoulders and said, where did you get that question? What made you think of that question? Are you my daughter or an investigating committee? Are you my daughter or some avenging angel? Where, where? If I had been there I would have said, ask her that, Manny. Ask her where she thought of it. Ask her, who prompts you? Some critic? Some reporter? Who? Who? And I would have taken my Manny by the shoulders and given
him
a shake—do you think you're dreaming all this? Are you standing in front of your congregation lost in some daydream of a jungle company? Are you making all this up? Don't you feel the heat, you're sweating like a tapir, the jungle pig, the one with the dark brown body, the broad white stripes, there goes one, off into the brush, two small barefoot boys chasing after . . . Manny, my Manny, I would have said, if I had been there, if I had known, I would have said, take off your white shirt, your dark trousers—he had already removed his dark coat, a big concession to the skin of heat that clung to everyone, everything in this jungle world—and strip off your underdrawers, and chase into the bush after those boys, that beast, and never return and you will be safe, alive and well and happy, too, probably, if a bit dirty and maybe even on some nights hungry too, unless you learn to eat the meat and fruit of these parts exclusively and like it—because he was lying about liking the food,
he had become a snob about food, I'll admit that much negative about him, he had become a fiend for French cooking and merely tolerated all of the good things I put on the table before him—strip off, Manny, and run and hide and you'll be safe from all that otherwise will follow!

But, oh, he turned and looked again at her, his daughter, his—he was convinced—dutiful daughter, whose antagonism toward him—he was convinced—had burned away like the light morning fog that had dogged their heels on the train ride through the jungle, where palm fronds brushed against the windows of the plush car in which they rode sipping
limonada
from colorful pottery. He was convinced that she was learning about him, his new life, and that she could only but admire him for his vision and his values. Who did she know who had changed his life in this way? who had leaped from the mundane round of suburban Jersey to a deep-green jungle empire—yes, well, that was how he was thinking of it—who did she know like him? And could she be anything but worshipful? Couldn't she see what he had wrought? Only her opinion he cared about now. Mine, he knew he had in the palm of his hand. Maby's? She had none—she was lost in the world of her wayward mind. And yours? What did you know except that you wanted him for comfort in those hours when you were not painting? In those dark nightmare times when you awoke screaming of the awful past in the old country and needed someone to help fend off the ghosts. Whether he ruled a congregation or an empire, you didn't care. But as for Sarah-Sadie, he wanted her attention and her mind and her devotion and her admiration—and he was wooing her in a way he had never felt he needed to before.

“I want you to know,” he said, “that I have never put aside the values that I carried with me to my first meeting with the congregation.”

“Uh-huh,” she said with a grunt, picking up a glass of iced tea and stirring endless spoonfuls of sugar into its swirling dark whorl of liquid and mint.

“Never.”

“Never?”

“Never. And furthermore,” he said, “I am showing all of these businesspeople the way.”

“Is that right?”

“Don't doubt your own father. That is correct, I have the knack, and I do things well, but beyond that I show them how to impart certain values into their dealings. I show them how to make their operations humane and decent.”

“And you bring potassium to breakfast tables all over America.”

“That, too.”

“You ship the fruit of the wise on the Great Seabird Fleet.”

“That I do. From your grandfather's barges to the Great Seabird Fleet—that is quite a distance I have come.”

She stopped stirring her drink and looked him in the eye.

“And what next?”

She really wants to know, he was thinking to himself. She cares, this offspring of mine, my only issue, and she cares about my plans.

“I was thinking perhaps politics.”

“Politics?” She raised the glass to her lips and sipped the cool sweet mint-tinted liquid. “Ahhh . . .”

“Politics. But before that, or possibly instead, maybe diplomacy.”

“Diplomacy?”

“An ambassadorship somewhere. After this, after I make clear how well I am going to handle this arrangement here . . . who knows?”

“Father,” she said. In her heart she felt a bit stunned by this confession of his. She hadn't been aware . . . she had never imagined . . . that he could think so big, so far, so high up, far ahead, so . . . grandly. Here she was just a college girl, trying to spy on him, taking notes and more notes. And at this moment she almost faltered in her loyalty to her plan, because she was sure as he said this last thing that there was a good possibility that he was not evil, but merely crazy. And yet, she thought, he had come this far, and you don't come this far if you are crazy, but only if you have trampled on the hearts of others, kicked and flailed them and left them lying bloody and crushed in the dust of your passage—first your family and then the world.

“Father.”

Or perhaps she had not spoken until now but only imagined that she had.

“Yes?”

“Nothing.”

“What, my darling?”

“Nothing.”

“You had something on your mind. Tell me.”

“Nothing. It was nothing.”

“So, nothing. But now I'll tell
you
something.”

“What's that?”

He got up from the table and motioned for her to follow. Several young men in white shirts and khaki trousers trailed after as they left the building for the thick world of heat and light as green as that beneath the ocean. A Land Rover stood waiting, the brother-in-law in the back seat, the driver alert and attentive.