The Drifters by James A. Michener
The president smiled and Monica looked as if she might jump out the window. She was about to prod her father again, when he resumed his argument: ‘So this is my home. It’s my country, too. What can I do if I’m suddenly told, “Your work is ended?” I’m not an old man.’
‘It was with that in mind, Sir Charles—and also, I may say frankly, because of your long and devoted service to Vwarda, not forgetting your father, who laid the foundations of this nation in his arguments at Versailles …’ The president found himself ensnared in a sentence that covered too many points, so he threw up his hands and laughed at himself. ‘I talk like a lawyer,’ he said, and I thought how lucky Vwarda was to have such a sensible man as its head during these critical years. ‘What I was trying to tell you, Sir Charles, was that the cabinet has proposed that you receive pension and a half for the remainder of your life. You’ll not be destitute, Sir Charles.’
‘It’s not money that worries me, Your Excellency. It’s Vwarda. The nation itself. You need me.’ His voice trembled, and when he had brought it under control he asked, ‘What would I do retired in England?’
President M’Bele was growing impatient. Having anticipated Braham’s unhappiness at being fired, he had personally insisted upon pension and a half, and now to have it rejected as irrelevant was irritating. ‘We must have your job,’ he said firmly. ‘I am announcing at noon today that Thomas Watallah is assuming your duties.’ He rose to indicate the interview was over, but Sir Charles had numerous other arguments which he had not yet pressed and which he was sure would sway any thinking man.
‘Your Excellency! Just a moment! Have you considered the cotton barter with Egypt? Thomas Watallah simply cannot … And the leases on the sulphur drilling … There’s still that business at the dam …’
‘Father!’ Monica cried with brutal disgust. ‘Shut up and make believe you’re a man.’
President M’Bele turned back on his way to the door, his dark eyes flashing as he said, sternly, ‘You should be ashamed of yourself. He’s your father.’
‘It’s him I’m ashamed of,’ she snapped.
Take him back to England. And be sure you go too. You have both used up your days in Vwarda.’ He strode toward the door, but before he could exit, Sir Charles asked pitifully, ‘Couldn’t I stay on … I could work for Thomas and help him over the … There are many things I could do …’
‘It would not be dignified,’ M’Bele said, and with the innate dignity of a man who had inched his way from the jungle to Oxford, he left the room.
‘You damned fool!’ Monica cried, grabbing at her father’s arm. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
‘Where will we go?’ Sir Charles asked in pitiful confusion, sweat showing along the collar of his shirt.
‘Into exile,’ Monica said quietly as she led him from the Salle des Audiences. At that moment, though she was only seventeen, she seemed extraordinarily mature, as if she alone among the four who had participated in the interview appreciated what had happened. An old order was passing, new forces with new faces were intruding upon the scene and it was appropriate that there be entrances and exits. What galled her was that her father was playing his role so poorly.
As we left the presidential palace and walked to the Rolls-Royce, Monica said nothing, but I could see that she was evaluating her father coldly, with the innocence of youth. Later, in their home, she told me of that moment: ‘Remember what happened after the president walked out on us? We were left standing in that preposterous Salle des Audiences and I stared up at the ridiculous ceiling with its plaster-of-Paris cherubs, and when I looked back at my father he seemed like one of them—a bare-ass little cherub, devoid of self-respect. I could have wept.’ When I asked what Sir Charles had done to earn her contempt, she said, ‘He backed the wrong horse … empire … grandeur of the Queen … England expects every man … all that immortal claptrap. And when it blew up in his face … You know, to tell the truth, I don’t blame him getting angry over surrendering his position to Thomas Watallah. Did you ever do business with Thomas? Really, a colossal fart.’ She shook her head wearily at her recollection of the man, a conniving, almost illiterate fool who ruined everything he touched and then stole the pieces; Africa was not well served by the smart-alecky young black men who replaced the English, the French and the Belgians.
‘It must be deflating for poor Father,’ she reflected as we drank beer. ‘You persuade yourself you’re doing work of humanity … indispensable, really … whole Congo basin fall into chaos if I leave. And when they kick you out they hand your job to some clown like Thomas Watallah, and things go on about as well as they did when you were in charge.’
She shook her head, recalling the disasters of that interview. ‘What really finished me was Father’s lack of dignity. That’s what gnaws—that a man should waste his life on baubles and at the end cry out, “I’ve been defrauded.” Believe me, at my end I’ll not complain.’
‘Are you confessing that you’ve already made wrong choices?’
‘We all do. The trick is to accept the consequences when they fall due. I’ve no respect for your generation, Uncle George, because at the end you chicken out.’
I judged that Monica intended to react differently.
The next three weeks were as difficult as any I had known since that summer of 1948 when my son had stormed out of our home, for then I was shown what the gap between the generations meant, and now it was a headstrong young girl who was repeating the instruction. After the announcement of his dismissal Sir Charles begged me to stay on as a guest while he went about the doleful business of winding up his affairs in Vwarda and deciding what to do with the remainder of his life. He was, as you might guess, disoriented and poorly equipped to deal with Monica’s various rebellions and he wanted me to give the girl some guidance.
He chose poorly. I had always been fond of Monica and unable to discipline her. In the years when the great dam was under construction I had often stayed with the Brahams and had pampered her, bringing her whatever gramophone records she wanted and occasional dresses or adornments from London, so it was impossible for me suddenly to turn dictator, not only because I was not inclined that way but also because she would have ignored me had I tried.
What was she like that African autumn of 1969? She was seventeen years old, motherless, with no brothers or sisters to cushion her extravagances and with a father whom she held in contempt. Intellectually she had done well in school, both in Rhodesia, where her father had sent her at the age of nine, and in England, where I had taken her. Morally she had not done so well. She had been kicked out of the Rhodesian school for cursing the mathematics teacher and, as I have told you, she was expelled from the English school for having sexual relations with the music instructor. In each school there had also been instances of shying books off the heads of other students.
She seemed to grow more beautiful each day, her fine English complexion showing white with natural touches of rouge in the cheeks. She had started wearing her jet-black hair in a coil on top of her head. When I asked her why, she said frankly, ‘Older men don’t like to go with girls who wear their hair schoolgirl style.’ And when I asked her why she felt she had to go with older men, she said, ‘Because they know what’s what and they don’t waste time.’
Her beauty lay principally in her dark eyes, which were keenly expressive, almost penetrating, and I could appreciate the complaint of the English headmistress who had told me, on the afternoon of Monica’s dismissal, ‘I’m afraid none of our teachers, fine girls from average backgrounds, is a match for Miss Monica.’ Having met some of the instructors, my guess was that Monica was much keener than any of them. Her thin face, so exquisite when she looked up at you suddenly, peering directly into your eyes, as if she could cope with whatever you wished to say, was often marked by a half-smile that clung to the corner of her mouth; she seemed to be reserving judgment as to whether or not to laugh outright. She weighed less than a hundred pounds and would have given the imp
The one new thing about Monica that I noticed in these three weeks when I was trying to tame her was that sometimes she spoke in a deep, husky voice which I had not heard before; it was as if she were a boy entering adolescence, for at other times she would forget the new voice and speak like a girl of seventeen, but when she caught herself doing this she would quickly speak the next sentence in her deep voice. When I asked about this, she said, ‘I’m practicing my bedroom voice.’
Like other prematurely developing young girls in the various parts of the world I have worked in, she had discovered, either through experiment or through discussions with older women that there were several ways in which a girl could with seeming innocence touch a man and get him started thinking. For example, one morning when I was standing at the window, looking out at the statue of Lord Carrington Braham and recalling Monica’s prediction that in the next riots the young hotheads would tear the old man down, she came up behind me and ran two fingers down my spine. It produced quite an electric shock, which I am certain she intended, for when I turned to look at her, she was smiling that mischievous half-smile, but it showed not the open joy of a child who has played a clever trick but the calculating wit of a woman who has said to herself, ‘Let’s see if he’s a man or not.’
She also took my arm a good deal, pressing her fingers into the inner turn of my elbow, and when we were seated she was apt to grasp me by the knees. I affected not to know what she was doing, but she would not let me get away with that, for once when I had been lecturing her about the necessity for her focusing upon some one thing she wished to do when she got back to London, she drew back, looked at me provocatively and said, ‘Do? I’m going to become the mistress of the first millionaire I meet.’ Then, to break the spell, she gave me a brushing kiss, ending up with her lips close to my ear and whispering, ‘Sometime it would be fun to give you a real kiss, Uncle George.’
Her father was absent during most of this time, gone into the jungle on his final inspection tour, carrying on as if he were still in charge of Vwarda’s economic development. He knew that both President M’Bele and the new Minister of Economics, young Thomas Watallah, would prefer to have him leave, but he felt that it was his duty to inspect each ramification, so he spent the last hot days of March slogging his way into remote areas, perspiring constantly, giving the local chieftains his old brand of encouragement: ‘We don’t want the new man to find things sloppy, do we?’
At one interval, when he returned home, he asked me suddenly, ‘I smelt a strange odor near Monica’s room. Tell me, Fairbanks, is she smoking marijuana?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is it serious? Like heroin?’
‘I don’t know too much about it. I wouldn’t touch it myself, but from what I hear, it’s a phase young people go through.’
‘Would you speak to her about it? Please? We don’t want a drug addict on our hands, do we?’
I asked him why he didn’t speak to her, and he said, ‘She’d never listen to me in serious affairs. Mettra fect, she doesn’t listen to me at all, does she?’ And he was off again, this time to the far northeast where the primitive tribes concentrated and where he was held in much affection, for he was the only government official who had ever appeared in their kraals; there was not much likelihood that young Thomas Watallah would ever bother with that part of Vwarda. The new officials being appointed across Africa preferred cities like Paris and New York; it required an Englishman trained in the hard school of colonial service to appreciate that the farthest corner of a realm was still part of that realm.
As Sir Charles had requested, I spoke to Monica about her use of marijuana, and she laughed at me. ‘Mary Jane? It’s nothing but a pleasant way to relax. Like I said, an evening cocktail but less dangerous to your health.’ She was most eager that I try the weed for myself, but this I did not care to do, for the sickly smell that emanated from her room did not attract me. Furthermore, my attention was diverted from marijuana by an extraordinary development which I could not have foreseen. At six o’clock one evening Monica told me hurriedly, ‘Dress, Uncle George. We have a guest for dinner.’ She would not tell me who it was, but at eight a young, handsome, well-dressed Negro man knocked at our door, and Monica announced, ‘Mr. Thomas Watallah, come to dine with the Brahams.’ With elaborate courtesy she showed him into the living room, handed him a whiskey, and plied him with questions, whose answers she attended to with a sincerity that obviously pleased the new administrator.
At dinner she directed the conversation so that Watallah could appear at good advantage, and afterward, as he and I stood smoking, she came up quietly behind him and ran her hand down his spine, saying, ‘Mr. Watallah, if you have any intelligence, which I know you have, you’ll refuse to take this house if the government wants to give it to you. Insist on a new one.’ She then led him about, showing him the various things that were wrong, and when they returned from the upstairs it was obvious that they had been kissing.
She told me, ‘Uncle George, Mr. Watallah is going to take me to the discotheque. ‘I’ll see you later, but don’t wait up.’
Six days later President M’Bele summoned me to the presidential residence; I supposed that he wanted to talk about the extension of electricity services to the northeast, a project that Sir Charles had been pressing upon the government and which our company had agreed to finance, but his concern was quite different. ‘We’ve been friends for ten years now,’ he said bluntly, ‘and you’ve done many things to help us. Now you must do another. I want you to put Monica Braham on a plane to London. Immediately.’
‘Sir Charles is with the tribes in the northeast. I couldn’t get in touch …’
‘Don’t get in touch with anyone. Get that girl out of Vwarda. Immediately.’
‘Why?’
‘Don’t you know?’
‘Marijuana?’
‘No Watallah.’
‘Thomas?’
‘Yes. She’s been carrying on a flagrant affair with him. Night clubs. Kissing in the cinemas. They’ve been sleeping together in a little house on Esplanade, and you know he has a wife and two children.’
‘I didn’t know, Your Excellency.’ It has always seemed strange to me how easily one accepts the custom of referring to the head of state as Your Excellency, not because it flatters the recipient, but rather because the governing of any large unit of mankind is a most difficult job deserving of respect. I remember reading about how John F. Kennedy’s close cronies were celebrating with him on election night, and it was ‘Jack this’ and ‘Jack that,’ but next morning when the results were known, everyone instinctively drew back and spoke to him as ‘Mr. President.’ It was with no sense of condescension that I referred to this hard-working Negro lawyer as Your Excellency, for he was facing a difficult problem and needed help.
‘You know why she’s doing it,’ he said with some bitterness. ‘She’s angry that Sir Charles is being sent home. She’s even more angry that his place is being taken by young Watallah, who of course is not fitted for the job but who’s the best we have at the moment. And she wants to show us up—petty, petty motivation—to show up the government of a supplanting state.’ He rose offered me his hand and said, ‘I’ll send Thomas to a meeting of economics officials at Addis Ababa. If the truth were known, most of these young men want cabinet positions only so they can travel. I’m told it’s the same in Latin America.’
He walked me to the door, his arm in mine, then stopped and held onto me as he said, ‘You musn’t come to wrong conclusions about us, Mr. Fairbanks. I doubt that Vwarda or Congo or Zambia or Tanzania—they’re the new republics I know best—are any worse off than Angola and Moçambique, which are still ruled by Portuguese white men, or Rhodesia, which is ru
As if he wished to reassure me of his constructive intentions, he walked with me all the way to my car, concluding: ‘But I want Miss Braham out of here at once. For her safety, not mine. You see, Thomas Watallah’s wife comes from a tribe which kills women who steal other women’s husbands, and she has many relatives in this city, That’s why I had to appoint him to the cabinet. The tribesmen would not understand that she’s sleeping with Thomas just for the fun of it. They might think she intends stealing him, and this they would not permit.’ When I returned to the Braham bungalow I found two men I had not seen before standing on the opposite side of the street … not doing anything … not going anywhere … just standing.
It was a lot easier for President M’Bele to order Monica out of his country than for me to get her out. For one thing, her father was well lost in the eastern jungle and would remain incommunicado for a week, by which time Monica had to be back in England. Naturally I tried to send him messages, but they piled up in the eastern capital, awaiting his return from the frontiers. I tried also to communicate with Sir Charles’s relatives in England, and although I got back some disheartening cables, for none of them wanted Monica, the real veto came not from England but from Vwarda, when Monica said flatly, ‘I will not go live with those old farts.’
At this I grew angry and said, ‘Young lady, do you realize that this marks a turning point in your life? What you and I decide these next two days will determine the kind of person you’ll be.’
‘You decide?’ she asked in disgust. ‘Who in hell are you to decide anything?’