The Girl of the Lake Read online

  The sudden emotion surprised the girls.

  “What are you saying, Boom-Boom?” Shelagh said.

  “Every piece, stolen! Whom, for example, did this Unnatural Museum in New York City pay for this boat?” He grew more agitated yet, pointed around the sumptuous galleries, including in his indictment all the museum goers, all the catering staff, the very columns and lintels of the fine old building, fumbled his English uncharacteristically: “Who was remunerated for totems there? Those weavings? That group of figurines, so beautiful? Whose ancestors are without their history and on which island so richly and unknowingly represented here? Why is the curator having the name Fitzherbert and not something more like, yes, Taramanini? This is no exhibit of art, it is exhibit of the booty of conquest!” He had begun to shout. Shelagh put a hand on his arm, not a little proud. The crowd around us moved back, stared, champagne flutes aimed delicately at us. Baby stood with her mouth agape: sweet Sileshi! Two guards came into the room, approached warily. Sileshi addressed them, commanded them, paralyzed them in their marble tracks, and we all of us stood frozen with guilt, if that’s the right word, frozen anyway by the enormous, rippling force of his emotion. Flinging his arms, pointing at one wonderful object and then the next, he roared, “Where are represented the people who made these things?”

  A FEW NIGHTS LATER—A school night, but Baby’s birthday—we got Sileshi to the Pig and Prudence one last time. Having figured out how to get his nose past the foam, Sileshi ordered ales with the rest of us. We spoke in excitement about his new dream for his people: a museum of the culture, where there was none. A museum that would bring back the stolen and collect the forgotten, return the soul of the tribes to the land such that a museum was no longer needed.

  Outside afterward, we shouted with laughter and linked arms four across, marched down the middle of narrow streets toward home. Baby pointed to a statue atop a fountain, four sprites holding up a nymph, shouted: “Where are represented the people who made this!” We chanted that for a mile or more, pointing at this cornice and that hitching post—solidarity, not irony—and then we sang the dung beetle song, something our prince had taught us in his natal language, the theme of his people as they’d risen up against the colonial power: the dung beetle keeps on trying, rolls his ball of shit, obstacles or no, unto death.

  “Dung beetle!” we cried out in tongue-popping dialect. “Dung beetle! Roll your ball of shit past thorn and promontory!”

  At the head of our street, two large men stepped out from the hedges and into the road ahead of us. The smaller of them was the violent fellow I’d already met. We froze.

  He said, “You are seen.”

  I made fists.

  Sileshi claimed us boldly, said, “These are but my friends.”

  Baby spat on the sidewalk at their feet. “Get moving, you,” she said. “We’re not afraid of the likes of you!”

  The men looked at one another and, miraculously, turned, walked away, made the corner by a pharmacy, and disappeared.

  Sileshi was defiant, put on a show for those Irish girls, who were on fire with indignation. He called the men “agents of the Crown.” He said, “I’ll show those blokes if they dare come back!” We all continued on to the flat, covering our fear with a hard-marching Gaelic football song Shelagh knew, “Stomp the Fairies.”

  In the morning, though, Sileshi was clearly depressed, subdued, nervous, even scared. Over breakfast, I confessed I’d encountered the secret agent before, and his face grew taut. He went out twice to make phone calls. Later, after we’d eaten, he drew Shelagh into his room, and we heard her protesting, heard his even tones, heard the stairway door locks snap open, heard the door, heard Sileshi leave. Shelagh came to Baby and me in tears.

  “I’m not to come back,” she said, and then, imitating him exactly: “I’ve played a useful role in his life that here and henceforth is finished.”

  Sileshi went missing, day by day till it was a week. I couldn’t go to the police—what if Interpol were looking for him? I began to check the street before leaving the flat, as Sileshi had always done. The summer session was over but for exams. Sileshi’s absence was devastating, terrifying. Baby was furious with him, Shelagh distraught. And now Baby was furious with me, too, in frequent tears, as perhaps I should have been, but as frequently loving: my flight home was six days off, then five, then only four. We made promises. We wrapped ourselves in one another. I jeopardized my grades, even missed an exam by oversleeping beneath her. She jeopardized her job, calling in sick evening after evening. I cared for nothing in the world but her; even my missing flatmate slipped my mind, long guilty stretches. Baby and I arrived back at the flat on our very last afternoon in a state of concupiscent confusion and sorrow—I was to fly the next morning—burst from the stairwell into Sileshi’s room ready for some valedictory ravishment, likely tears.

  But on my flatmate’s bed two round women lounged in ornate gowns, their arms covered in bracelets. They looked our way, absolutely aloof, unsurprised. Only slowly I noticed a pair of teenage boys, gangly and embarrassed in formal gowns and headgear sparkling with metal and cut glass, both trying to see Baby whole while looking at the floor. Sileshi heard Baby’s cry of frustration, leapt into the room. “My aunts,” he said, and gave names I couldn’t retain. The women on his bed nodded unsmiling. “My nephews.” The boys looked up, tilted their heads, looked away. A grand, serious couple glided stately into the little room from the even smaller kitchen: Sileshi’s parents. He introduced Baby and me as flatmate and tutor, I noticed. The apartment was broiling, a closet full of ceremonial clothes in motion, strong scents.

  A fat man in a blue gown squeezed into the room, Sileshi’s younger brother, whom I knew to be Siltii, nodding and grinning. The children who followed were his, three little girls in jewels and aqua gowns, hair woven with dyed ribbons of coarse cloth and ceramic beads, very beautiful. They pressed up against Baby, who was only reluctantly charmed. There were more people in the kitchen, and yet more back in my room. Sileshi tilted his head at me, drew me in, kissed me. “My family,” he said formally, proudly, no acknowledgment that he’d been missing nearly a week. He said, “My departmental ceremony is this evening.” Then he leaned to me and hissed, “Send Baby away.”

  I whispered to her and she whispered back, and it must have been clear she wasn’t my tutor. She gave a great false smile to all the company, pulled at my arm to get me into the stairwell. Still angry over Sileshi’s treatment of Shelagh, she was little inclined to come to his aid.

  “Ten minutes,” I said. “I mayn’t see him ever again.”

  “You mayn’t ever see me again,” she said, and leapt down the stairs three at a time. Later it would take an agonized hour to find her, another hour to make up, but we would.

  “So kind of your tutor to walk you home,” Sileshi said loudly as I came back in.

  I made my way to my room (the condoms I needed were in there), relative by relative, only to come face-to-face with the grim-faced white man who’d assaulted me. He was in an inferior position, kneeling among rolls of brown shipping tape, caught in the servile act of placing Sileshi’s books in boxes. So my cop was merely the employee of overprotective parents. A withered factotum stood over him and wrote each title in an account book, a slow process. I changed into my pubbing clothes as if the two of them weren’t there, deliberately stepped on my assailant’s ankle without apology—satisfying crunch—dropped my dirty clothes over his head.

  In the kitchen, Sileshi introduced me to the king of their ancient family nation, his father. The ethereal man tilted his head, smiled briefly, waves of power like I’d never felt before. I couldn’t speak, impossible to think in his presence. He made a throne room of our little kitchen, a palace of our flat. I found myself bowing and scraping, kissed his hand. The mother was slightly more mortal, took both my hands in hers, kissed me the way Sileshi always did: cheek, cheek, forehead. She tilted her head, said, “So you are the bad influence.”

  “No, it�
��s your son,” I said, jocular.

  But she frowned and that was the end of my audience with her.

  “Never mind the puritans,” Sileshi’s brother said jovially. He pulled me to him, gave me kisses. “Today we celebrate our educated men.”

  “Dung beetle!” cried the little girls in their language, and the song rose up.

  LATER IN LIFE I took up with the Senate campaign of a former Black Panther who garnered three percent of the vote across Missouri, hard to cast as victory. He continued to be a fixture in Kansas City politics, however, and tapped me to run his ingenious inner-city arts program, a plum. During one of our long campaign bus rides, I’d briefly expressed an interest in art, and so the world had turned. The pay was modest, the job frustrating, but it was a life in government. I wore a suit, called meetings, wrote grants, negotiated resource and faculty exchanges with well-heeled suburban schools, curried favor frankly.

  I thought of my time in England fondly all those years, thought of Baby too often, less so after I was married, but yes, still. She’d gotten work at the Tate after graduation, brilliant young woman. The two of us had written feverishly back and forth across prairie and ocean for more than a year, but my Irish lass was too poor to travel, and I too foolish to pay her way, too foolish to go to her.

  After the letters stopped—an Australian curator named Buddy—I pined and moped but carried on, finished school, took a master’s degree in government, volunteered in the soup kitchens, met the leaders of the community, met the Black Panther, met Nancy Darling, fellow volunteer and idealist. Nancy was a tall, troubled woman with deep eyes and excellent hygiene. And it was she who introduced me to the senator who got me the position at the Kansas City Museum of Fine Art, which led via lucky breaks to my taking the directorship in 1990.

  Politicos without end, unhappily childless, Nancy and I read ten newspapers closely each day and watched the news on TV each night, consecutive cable shows till bedtime—we missed little—so it was no surprise in the early eighties that I happened to see a half-minute story about the upheaval in a certain freehold somewhere deep in central Africa, a skirmish in a destroyed capital city, dozens of members of a new parliament assassinated along with a new prime minister. There was dramatic footage (visual drama the reason such an obscure story had made the news at all); the scene was a state occasion, long outdoor dais festooned with flowers and banners, politicians waving to a large, happy crowd, a limo pulling up, the prime minister climbing out, the prime minister helping his wife out, the two of them turning to the camera beaming. With a shock I realized who the couple was: Sileshi’s parents. Just then shots were heard off-camera and the once-royal couple crumpled to the ground like exhausted marionettes. Their driver pulled a large handgun out from under his jacket but was shot, too, fell back over them. The cameraman, bless his departed soul, turned in the direction of the fire, still shooting video, and into the frame came masked men peppering the parliamentary dais with submachine guns, people diving in all directions, people falling, shouting, crying out—pandemonium—and then the camera’s view spun and fell, too, and all went black, famous footage.

  The New York Times ran a short article the next day—not much information. Time and Newsweek both had very small articles the following week, mostly because a dramatic photo was available. The insurgents, it seemed, had retreated to a suburb. The trusted general who’d taken over for the dead prime minister promised they would meet their fates “like so many snakes under forked sticks.” That was it, all three articles illustrated with the same image: masked men firing their weapons into the dais. I stuck the Newsweek photo on my fridge. And only after weeks of seeing it there did I notice the deformed left hand of one of the shooters—just a pinky finger and empty knuckles, abandoned thumb gripping the weapon’s steel stock: Sileshi.

  I THOUGHT OF HIM often during the decade after, a decade in which I rose in importance in the art world, joining the boards of over a dozen museums and foundations—constant travel, inveterate schmoozing, friend to artist and congressperson alike, confidant of businessman and philanthropist, conduit to gallery owner, agent, collector. And, face it, thugs—the kind of money that makes that world spin is not always perfectly clean and might on occasion need a reputable museum to wash it off. You played one person off against another, surfed shifting loyalties, symbolically killed your countrymen, killed them over and over, even assassinated your parents. I thought of Sileshi, all right, but had no way of finding him, no wish to find him, really, only a wish to go back to pub days, pathetic. Likely he was dead, or hiding in the deep rain forest, a miserable life for the once-great man.

  Nancy left me on the grounds of incompatibility—we called it all amicable in public. But the real grounds were what she saw as my degraded character, that I skulked in high places, the very places she’d introduced me to, that I’d damaged her reputation by my dealings, humiliated her among her friends. Something about Sileshi’s story had infected me, was her theory, which in my distress I came to believe. I’d become an insurgent like him, the thinking went, hiding out in a jungle of my own making. Or, anyway, she divorced me, a long, expensive story, better left untold. After, I fell into an extended depression.

  During the course of which I received a handwritten letter on official stationery: Office of the Prime Minister (country not to be named, not here). Just a note to ask after my days. A note to say hello. And give good news: The People had prevailed. Really, it was pretty impersonal, but it woke me up. Suddenly I could see the world again, hear music, taste food. I vowed to clean up my own act, to prevail in my own war, to live up to my ideals, or at least remember them.

  Prime Minister! How Sileshi had railed against such titles! And not the first time in history a patricidal radical had taken his father’s place, become the thing he hated. I kept my reply reserved, simply congratulating him, a little of my news, sad as it was, all on my museum letterhead and using my title, keeping it all very formal in case there was a trick—perhaps his enemies fishing for information, perhaps he himself talking in code toward an undisclosed purpose—anyway, quite insecure about addressing such a great personage and thinking the vellum envelope would get the missive past his screeners, who were no doubt vigorous in such a place. In the morning I opened the envelope back up, read what I’d written, added a PS: I was planning a trip to Ireland to see Baby on her birthday, upcoming. But this was a fantasy. In fact, I hadn’t even so much as written or called her since our brief communication by phone in the month after we’d parted, all those years before. I didn’t mention Shelagh, who had moved to Texas last I’d heard, and was no longer the woman we’d known.

  Months later, after a week of mere domestic travel, I found amid my office mail a fibrous, bright orange envelope, blocky handwriting: Sileshi, of course, writing privately, a pleasant little note of thanks on a card of hard handmade paper, fulsome congratulations on my position, and the proposal that we meet in Ireland “on or proximate 19 August,” which he remembered (with perfect accuracy) as Baby’s birthday. “Our unruly lion,” he called her, referring to astrology. He wasn’t allowed in the States and that might be our only opportunity “to breathe each other’s air.” The coda seemed surreptitious: “In truth, cousin, I regard such a meeting with utmost urgency.”

  And so Colleen and I came together on August 17, ages almost forty-four and still forty-three, planets colliding, or suns, such was the heat. Our simple kiss hello at the Belfast airport—neither of us expecting it—unleashed every repressed emotional anything and streams of tears, simultaneous professions of undying love, this in front of her glowering, rightly embarrassed daughter, Gail-Lynn, age sixteen, who’d just arrived from Australia, where she’d lived with her father growing up. After some trouble with an older boy, and prescription drugs, she was now to live with Colleen.

  I had honestly forgotten about real love-powered sex, but in their pleasant tiny house near Rosemary Street (Gail-Lynn off at a cousin sleepover, hastily arranged), I was made to remember
quite a great deal. We soaked the sheets, quite so, even spilling our wine, like time had resumed, and my observation to that effect rocked us with laughter that echoed down the years. Her body had changed, as mine had, but thickened and somewhat padded, we were only more enticing to one another. Her calves had retained their perfection, the slope of her back its allure, and what was new was beautiful, too.

  At our first breakfast, however—which we cooked together side by side—we had a moody half hour, something awkward passing between us, perhaps guilt uncommunicated (where to start the lists?), certainly regret, but all that was quickly waved away in favor of more lovemaking, rather on the rough side, violence dispelling anger. I left reluctantly (Gail-Lynn due home), floated through the old streets to finally check into my hotel for an afternoon nap before dinner with Prime Minister Sileshi Silesh Silboumi Silboumi.

  He came into Belfast by train from London, alone and wearing a plain suit, hiding himself under a large English hat. He had changed little, no additional fat, just a brushing of close-cropped gray at his temples. But his eyes were more wary, and he was slower to tilt his head, took my hands emotionally, kissed my cheeks, my forehead, did it all again by way of emphasis. We walked in a misty rain to his hotel, which he said was close. No one stared at us, though I, for one, felt conspicuous.

  “Well, old man,” he said.

  “Your Excellency,” I said wryly.

  “My people call me simply Father,” he said with surprising heat.

  The anger gave me pause and I fumbled for words, finally muttering, then repeating myself: “I’d expected bodyguards.”

  At last, he grinned a little. “The coffers are empty.”

  “Do countries still have coffers?”

  “Not mine. Certainly not mine.”

  We walked in silence several blocks. I cast about in my head for conversation, feeling timid, losing the ease of our old friendship. My normal gambit, to ask questions, wasn’t working either. What does one ask a head of state? A man who has assassinated his own parents? Lamely, gamely, I said, “How are things going for your administration?”