no man's land, a war zone no longer under embassy protection.
I'll find a way to meet her, he said to Missy.
I'm sure you will, Missy said.
And in the shadows, the Bangui Armands standing in front of a filthy gray Land Rover, lush jungle all around. Felix wore a djellaba, his wife a long flowered dress. Two small children peeked out from behind her skirts, the children round-faced and the color of café au lait. Their mother was black as oil, a kind of luminous silky blue-black. Felix looked unnaturally white beside her, his pale skin suggesting exhaustion or illness. Her hand rested heavily on his shoulder. She was the one with the authority, or perhaps it was only local knowledge. Sydney stared at the photograph a long time, wondering at the story behind their courtship and marriage, and how Felix had adapted to an unfamiliar continent. He wondered what urge had sent Felix to Africa and into the bed of a native woman, and how that had changed his life. Perhaps it hadn't. He would be an outsider in Bangui regardless of his living arrangements. Sydney had forgotten now what it was that Felix did. It was either mining or farming. But he did not look like a miner or farmer. He looked like a drifter, a nomad despite the Land Rover. Bangui seemed a very long way from this village in the Pyrenees, farther even than Abidjan or Xuan Loc.
Sydney shivered in the sudden chill. He wondered if a spring snow was on the way and looked out the window, to the Roman wall and the high hills beyond it. The wall was bathed in pale moonlight, its contours crisp and indomitable. Sydney turned to say something about it to Missy but the kitchen was empty. She had gone upstairs without another word, leaving him to find his own way.
Dacy
D USK AT PARIS-ORLY . Someone had given him Malraux's early Cambodian novel for the long flight east but he could not read it, and he set it aside somewhere over Switzerland. The references escaped him, the sentences too zealous in the antiseptic atmosphere of the Boeing, its dull-blue cabin a world apart from the earth below. The plane was half empty. Sydney dozed between fitful passes at
Fortune
and
Time
and an unsuccessful attempt at conversation with the businessman across the aisle, a Lebanese en route to Singapore via Bangkok. The Lebanese was either buying a ship or selling one, it was hard to tell which. His language was as dense as Malraux's, and when he learned that Sydney was going on to Saigon, he lost interest.
Dawn in Delhi, where they were brusquely offloaded to wait for hours in the damp heat while a labor dispute was adjudicated. Families lay sleeping in every corner of the terminal shed while a clamor rose in waves; all flights were delayed. Aloft again, mountains were visible in the far distance, and then Sydney realized they were the foothills of the Himalayas. The time was early morning when they arrived in Bangkok, but the relief crew was still at the hotel downtown, so the plane was delayed hours more. Lifting off on the final leg, leveling at fifteen thousand feet, Sydney looked out the window to observe Cambodia below. The land of a thousand elephants had every aspect of the Mississippi Delta, just as Rostok had said.
The Boeing was noisy now with Americans returning from a holiday in Bangkok. Only a few of the Paris passengers remained. Stewardesses hurried up the aisle with trays of bloody marys; drink fast, boys, the flight's short. But the Americans knew that. Sydney, glass in hand, looked down to South Vietnam, villages here and there, narrow rivers, roads with traffic. Beneath the green fields, water glittered like a spray of diamonds. He thought of veins under the skin. When the plane banked, he was momentarily blinded by the sun and moved to shade his eyes with Malraux's novel. Probably the Frenchman was lucky to have discovered Indochina in the 1920s when it was not far removed from Conrad's day, time measured by the thrust of a prow, Saigon sleepier even than Singapore, the
I'll find a way to meet her, he said to Missy.
I'm sure you will, Missy said.
And in the shadows, the Bangui Armands standing in front of a filthy gray Land Rover, lush jungle all around. Felix wore a djellaba, his wife a long flowered dress. Two small children peeked out from behind her skirts, the children round-faced and the color of café au lait. Their mother was black as oil, a kind of luminous silky blue-black. Felix looked unnaturally white beside her, his pale skin suggesting exhaustion or illness. Her hand rested heavily on his shoulder. She was the one with the authority, or perhaps it was only local knowledge. Sydney stared at the photograph a long time, wondering at the story behind their courtship and marriage, and how Felix had adapted to an unfamiliar continent. He wondered what urge had sent Felix to Africa and into the bed of a native woman, and how that had changed his life. Perhaps it hadn't. He would be an outsider in Bangui regardless of his living arrangements. Sydney had forgotten now what it was that Felix did. It was either mining or farming. But he did not look like a miner or farmer. He looked like a drifter, a nomad despite the Land Rover. Bangui seemed a very long way from this village in the Pyrenees, farther even than Abidjan or Xuan Loc.
Sydney shivered in the sudden chill. He wondered if a spring snow was on the way and looked out the window, to the Roman wall and the high hills beyond it. The wall was bathed in pale moonlight, its contours crisp and indomitable. Sydney turned to say something about it to Missy but the kitchen was empty. She had gone upstairs without another word, leaving him to find his own way.
Dacy
D USK AT PARIS-ORLY . Someone had given him Malraux's early Cambodian novel for the long flight east but he could not read it, and he set it aside somewhere over Switzerland. The references escaped him, the sentences too zealous in the antiseptic atmosphere of the Boeing, its dull-blue cabin a world apart from the earth below. The plane was half empty. Sydney dozed between fitful passes at
Fortune
and
Time
and an unsuccessful attempt at conversation with the businessman across the aisle, a Lebanese en route to Singapore via Bangkok. The Lebanese was either buying a ship or selling one, it was hard to tell which. His language was as dense as Malraux's, and when he learned that Sydney was going on to Saigon, he lost interest.
Dawn in Delhi, where they were brusquely offloaded to wait for hours in the damp heat while a labor dispute was adjudicated. Families lay sleeping in every corner of the terminal shed while a clamor rose in waves; all flights were delayed. Aloft again, mountains were visible in the far distance, and then Sydney realized they were the foothills of the Himalayas. The time was early morning when they arrived in Bangkok, but the relief crew was still at the hotel downtown, so the plane was delayed hours more. Lifting off on the final leg, leveling at fifteen thousand feet, Sydney looked out the window to observe Cambodia below. The land of a thousand elephants had every aspect of the Mississippi Delta, just as Rostok had said.
The Boeing was noisy now with Americans returning from a holiday in Bangkok. Only a few of the Paris passengers remained. Stewardesses hurried up the aisle with trays of bloody marys; drink fast, boys, the flight's short. But the Americans knew that. Sydney, glass in hand, looked down to South Vietnam, villages here and there, narrow rivers, roads with traffic. Beneath the green fields, water glittered like a spray of diamonds. He thought of veins under the skin. When the plane banked, he was momentarily blinded by the sun and moved to shade his eyes with Malraux's novel. Probably the Frenchman was lucky to have discovered Indochina in the 1920s when it was not far removed from Conrad's day, time measured by the thrust of a prow, Saigon sleepier even than Singapore, the
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