The Drifters by James A. Michener
‘I’m not your father,’ I said. ‘But I’m an older person who loves you very much … who wants to get you safely out of here … before they do the job.’ I pointed to the two watchers, two very black men from a jungle tribe. ‘I suppose you know about them?’
‘Thomas told me they might show up. I’m not worried.’
‘I am. And on Thursday you board that plane for London and …’
‘I will not go to London. I will not go to London.’
‘Where do you propose going?’
‘Where I’d like to go is California.’
‘What would you do there?’
‘But I haven’t the money right now. I may have it later.’
‘Why California?’
‘There’s a place out there you probably never heard of. Haight-Ashbury. The kids say it’s sensational.’
‘That was a few years ago, Monica. Today it’s a savage dump for broken young people. In Haight-Ashbury you’d last a week.’ I sat her down and summarized a crop of recent articles I’d read on the collapse of this particular dream, but she refused to listen, saying, ‘Mallorca’s also good. Or I might try Berlin. They say it swings.’
‘Monica! You’re seventeen. You’re going back to school.’
Rising and taking a position from which she could stare down at me, she said, ‘Get it in your noodle, I’m not going back to school.’
She was firm in her refusal that I had to drop the subject. Pulling her down into a chair beside me, I asked, ‘Why the rebellion?’ and she said simply. ‘Because I despise everything my father stands for. If school and family in England produced him, I want no part of either.’
I started to protest, but she cut me off: ‘Did you see the contempt President M’Bele had for him the other morning? Father ought to be the one sent home, not me.’
‘Why are you so savage?’
‘Because it breaks my heart to see a man who could have been quite fine … he could have been, you know. He’s wasted his life on such false values.’
‘He helped a nation evolve.’
‘For all the wrong reasons. Do you know why he’s hanging on … in spite of the indignities heaped upon him by these Negroes? Because he thinks in the back of his trivial little mind that one of these days the Negroes will have to call England back to govern. And he’ll be the governor general, and live in the big house the way his father did.’
That was the first indication I had that the real cause of her irritation was the manner in which the Negroes had treated her father. Her resentment ran deeper than she allowed herself to show, and her curious affair with Thomas Watallah made sense only if seen in this light. When the Negroes struck at her father, they struck at her, and she was prepared to fight back.
The longer we talked in those final days, when I tried to keep her under house arrest pending the arrival of her plane, the more convinced I became that it was the values of her father’s wasted life that she was rejecting and not her father himself. ‘I love him,’ she confessed one night, ‘in spite of his fuddy-duddy ways and his little-boy petulance. I’m much more a man than he is.’
She was also much more a woman, for although I tried to keep her safely in the house, which was now guarded by a federal policeman, she managed to slip past each of us—and for what purpose do you suppose? To have dates with Thomas Watallah prior to his departure for Addis Ababa. She went boldly to his office, made him take her to dinner at a public restaurant, accompanied him to the home of a friend and spent the night with him. When he smuggled her back to our place he took me aside and spoke like any man who has grown tired of an affair with an importuning woman: ‘Please, convince her to leave me alone. It could be very damaging for both of us.’ He was a good-looking young chap, apparently not too bright, but with an ambitious wife who was determined to make him president after M’Bele was shot. He had been gratified, no doubt, that a beautiful granddaughter of Lord Carrington Braham had wanted to sleep with him, but now he found her tedious. ‘You will help me, won’t you?’ he asked as he slipped out a side door.
That was the end of the Thomas Watallah affair, for Monica sensed that he would be relieved to see her board the plane. ‘He’s as dumb as everyone said,’ she told me at breakfast.
‘He’s smart enough to disengage from you,’ I said, hoping to jolt her into facing the facts.
‘If they ever make him president, Vwarda is doomed.’ She was quite content to see no more of him, but this decision projected us both into a new set of problems. One of the airlines that flew into the capital was Lufthansa, the well-run German outfit, and its crews were popular, for the young men were handsome and well groomed and the stewardesses were trim. They spoke English well and had a historic sense of mission in southern Africa. They were especially well received in centers like Johannesburg and Salisbury, where many white men felt that except for certain regrettable excesses, Adolf Hitler had understood world problems rather more clearly than his contemporaries. In Vwarda the young Germans were, in a sense, idolized by Englishmen who, through following the liberal principles of men like Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee, had lost an empire. Monica, for example, often wore an iron cross suspended from a silver chain, and boys of her group were prone to display swastikas, not because they had Nazi tendencies but because they knew if infuriated their parents, many of whom, like Sir Charles, had fought against the Germans in World War II. When some outrageous idiocy was promulgated by the new Negro republics, and Vwarda produced more than its share, these young Europeans were apt to say among themselves, ‘Hitler died before his time.’
Among the German airmen who flew regularly to Vwarda was an assistant pilot named Dietrich, but whether this was his first name or second, I never found out. He was a tall fellow, blond, handsome in bearing, witty in conversation. I had met him at various cocktail parties and identified him as the best of the Germans; he was married and had two little girls, as blond as he and, judging from their photographs, as intelligent. On the afternoon of the day Thomas Watallah brought Monica home at dawn and asked me to tell her that their affair was finished, she slipped out of the house, past the policeman, and into town. At five o’clock she brought Dietrich home with her and we had tea together.
He was most amiable, and we talked of the various countries into which he had flown. He liked Asia and knew the cities in which I had worked, but his principal affection was reserved for Spain: ‘It was just about a year ago, I was flying charter from Frankfurt to Málaga. We packed a couple of hundred tourists into the plane and whipped them down to Málaga, and God must have been looking after me, because when time came for take-off our engineer reported a leak in the hydraulic system—couldn’t get the wheels up, had to lay over for two days. So I left Málaga and went to a little town where the tourists were going, and I found a paradise. Such a wonderful place!’
He spoke of the beaches and the sun with such enthusiasm that both Monica and I encouraged him to continue; I knew the area he was talking about, for I had visited Torremolinos and was delighted to hear news of old friends whom he had met. But for Monica his description of the crowded, music-filled village provided a kind of enchantment, and from her questions I knew that she had begun to think that perhaps Torremolinos might be the answer.
Although I did my best to keep her in the house that night, she slipped away to meet Dietrich at a bar, spending the night with him somewhere, and when I upbraided her for such wanton and dangerous behavior, she told me, ‘Uncle George, you don’t seem to realize that for me my father is dead, the old ideas are dead, England is dead, and you’re beginning to sound more and more like a ghost.’ She elbowed her way past me and went up to her room, where she fell on the bed and slept all day.
Or rather, I supposed that she was sleeping all day. Actually, at about four in the afternoon she slipped out of the house, caught a taxi to the airport and with only a small handbag, boarded the Lufthansa plane for its flight to Germany, from where she and Dietrich dropped down to Torremol
When I found that Monica had, in the words of President M’Bele, flown the coop and saved us all a lot of trouble,’ I naturally tried to communicate with Sir Charles, and this time I was successful. From a small town deep within the eastern jungle he spoke to me on the telephone: ‘What’s to do? We can’t let her go knocking about Europe, can we?’ He had no substantial ideas of his own, but he did ask me. ‘Fairbanks, dear fellow, could you pop along to Europe to check up on what’s what?’
‘Sorry. I’ve already stayed here too long. I’m due in Afghanistan the beginning of next week.’
Whenever I recite these events to older people who have no children—or whose daughters are safely married and in their forties—they ask indignantly, ‘Why didn’t you stop her?’
I respond, ‘How could I have stopped a headstrong girl of seventeen who had decided to rebel? When I realized that my power to reason with her was futile, what public agencies could I have called upon for support? And when society applauds the child and condemns the parent, what could an outsider have done?’
My counterquestioning produces bitter argument; the recommendations I receive most frequently are:
‘You could have horsewhipped her.’
‘You could have locked her in her room.’
‘You could have seen she had no money.’
‘You could have asked help from the police.’
‘You could have thrown her into jail for smoking marijuana.’
‘You could have thrown her out of the house.’ (This proposal leaves me baffled, for it looks to me as if this was precisely what Monica had accomplished on her own. That’s what the argument was about, but apparently a family earns points if it throws a daughter out one day before she decides to leave of her own accord.)
‘You could have sat her down and told her what’s what.’
‘You could have disciplined her.’
‘You could have asked some agency to step in and help.’ (When I ask, ‘What agency in Vwarda did you have in mind? Or London, thousands of miles away?’ the response is feeble: ‘There must have been someone in authority.’ There was, but Monica was not listening to them.)
‘You should have persuaded her that her behavior was criminal.’
When younger couples are in the group, they listen to the suggestions from the older people, say nothing, but imperceptibly shake their heads no, rejecting as impractical each of the proposals, and I suspect that such parents have children of their own whom they are trying to guide through these especially difficult times, and have learned that the suggestions so glibly offered do not work … not in late March 1969.
I remember one such group in which a man of stern opinion said, ‘Simple, I’d cut her off without a penny and throw her out of our home,’ and a younger father replied, ‘So would I. But what happens three weeks later when she comes back? Broke? Stands on your porch and knocks to be let in? What then?’
‘I’d …’
‘It’s your daughter. Seventeen years old. At the door. What in hell would you do?’
‘I’d …’ The self-opinionated older man began to fumble.
‘So would I,’ the younger father agreed. ‘I’d swear at her, and I’d make a whole chain of threats, and I’d tell her she’d not get another penny of spending money from me, and she could damned well get a job, and then do you know what I’d do?’
‘You’d open the door,’ another young father said.
‘You’re damned right I would and so would you,’ he told the older man.
But the wife of one of the young men said, ‘I suppose the best thing a parent can do these days when society refuses to give us any help and when even the schools and churches are powerless, is to start when the child is in the cradle and try in our own way to give her a sense of values … I’m saying it wrong. I don’t mean give. I mean help her develop her own sense of right and wrong … something she’ll want to hold onto because she worked it out … I mean, you should have shown your concern way, way back …’
When Dietrich and Monica reached Torremolinos they checked into the Brandenburger, an imposing German hotel facing the Mediterranean, and for six happy days they lived in a warm atmosphere of bierstubes, black bread and schnitzels. The record player in the Black Forest, as the hotel’s night club was called, played principally German music, but the chief attraction of the place was conviviality and a lack of pompousness. Only German was spoken at the scrubbed-wood tables, but when Dietrich explained that Monica did not know that language, well over half the tourists were able to talk with her in English, and they told her many interesting stories about Torremolinos. And always there was someone who in the years before World War I had had a relative who had lived for a while in the old German colony of Sudwest Afrika, a land primarily of deserts and uncomfortable little towns lined with corrugated-iron huts, but captivating in memory. ‘Uncle Peter always said those were the best years of his life,’ one elderly woman told Monica. ‘You were lucky to have known Africa.’
It was March and the sea was much too cold for swimming, even though Dietrich tried it once when the sun was bright. ‘Too much ice,’ he reported, and they spent the rest of their time close to the hotel, making love two or three times a day and satiating themselves with the joy they found in each other. It was like a violent honeymoon made more exciting by the fact that when it was over they would probably never meet again. One lazy afternoon Monica lay in bed, exhausted, and traced her lover’s nose with her forefinger. ‘At last I know what a man is,’ she told him. ‘I think I know all there is to know, thanks to you, and from here on I can pick and choose without being too excited by the manliness.’
He said, ‘There’s a lot still to learn. For example,’ and he put his powerful hands about her neck, ‘can you imagine the circumstances which might drive me to murder you?’
‘Of course!’ she said, and she told him of her escapade with the music teacher at the school in England. ‘When he didn’t know exactly what to do, I started to laugh at him and I said something really horrid. No, I won’t repeat it. And he grew terribly red in the face and I can understand how at such a time he might want to kill somebody. I wasn’t exactly scared. More like I was sorry I’d hurt him. So I wrapped my legs around him and pulled him down and showed him what to do and all the bitterness ran out of his body.’
‘But can you imagine the other part?’ Dietrich asked. ‘Like when I come back from a long flight to Johannesburg … I’m exhausted … my nerves are exposed … like needle points. And you haven’t had any sex for nine days and you’re waiting for me and I get into bed and I’m quite incompetent.’ He pulled down the sheet and touched the various parts of her body, dispassionately, and said, ‘You know you’re as beautiful as ever … several men have tried to make love to you while I was gone … and I’m able to show no interest at all … the only thing I want is to go to sleep. Do you understand that too?’
‘The way you’ve been these past five days, it’s hard to believe,’ she said.
‘But it happens,’ he assured her, and she added this bit of knowledge to her repertoire.
When the time came for him to leave, she rode to the airport with him, watched him board the plane for Germany, then left the field undisturbed by the fact that she would not see him again. Twice they had spoken of his wife and two children and he had confessed that he loved them very much; also, she knew that he did not fly the Lufthansa planes into Spain and that only some unforeseen development would bring him her way again. She smiled, recalling his tall, manly body as the German plane flew overhead, and then she prepared to banish him from her mind; he had taught her all she required to know and for his gentle, laughing instruction she would remain grateful. Waving farewell to the plane as it sped out across the Mediterranean, she thought: After a chocolate salesman and a music teacher and a frightened goverment official, I needed him. But what now?
She had in her possession at this time one hundred and forty British
The bus dropped her off at the newspaper kiosk, from which she wandered naturally to the bar with the sunken patio, and there she found a table which commanded a good view of the passing tourists. It was a sunny afternoon and for the first time she realized what a delightful amalgam of young people inhabited this village. In the first few minutes she saw a score of handsome Swedes, a whole covey of attractive young Frenchmen. Tall Americans shuffled by, and she wondered how such disorganized people could presume to take the place of Britain in the matter of empire; she was not at all impressed with the American girls, most of whom seemed unwashed.
‘You English?’ a boy asked as he stopped to lean on her table.
‘No,’ she lied. At this moment she had no desire to talk with her countrymen, so the young fellow passed along to another table.
‘Can we join you?’ a strange voice inquired, and she looked up to see two Japanese students, extremely neat and well presented. Without preamble, both boys said they had been at school in the United States and were touring Europe before returning home. ‘Where are you from?’ they asked.
‘Vwarda,’ she said, confident that this would end the conversation, but she was unacquainted with Japanese.
‘Ah, so!’ one of the students cried. ‘Formerly British Congo. Diamonds, sulphur, tin. How is President M’Bele doing? Will they unite one day with Zambia?’
‘How in hell do you know about President M’Bele?’ Monica asked, both pleased and surprised.
‘My father’s firm does much business with Vwarda … Tanzania … both Congos.’