Sometimes, despite a breath of breeze across the inky river, the night air seemed almost liquid with the lingering heat ....

Sometimes, despite a breath of breeze across the inky river, the night air seemed almost liquid with the lingering heat, so that the swaying string of colored lights above the quay seemed to be smeared, indefinite, against the sky and the unattended words of conversation all around became just murmured, mild music. I suppose that's what I remember best about those days: the unrelenting fire of days, the liquid heat of nights all out of focus.

The city came alive at night -- young women, carefully paired, promenading along the quayside, each girl's head bent to the other with a whispered message; the splashing of the boatmen's oars, making their way against the current towards home. There'd be a street magician making his cards dance between his hands beneath in the sharp glare of one of the few street lights that worked still and here, on the patio-bar by the water, the tired men from the ministries and empty-eyed officers in from the sticks trying to come back to life with a sip, or two, or three, of smuggled whiskey. As I tried.

We drank together on the hotel patio by the quay. Watching the women pass, wrapped in their mysteries as tightly as they wrapped themselves in their long, bright silken dresses; watching the magician, the random child or a pickpocket dodging through the crowd. Watching the flash on the horizon, like heat lightening on the prairie, listening to the rumble, deep as the thunder back home, like the thunder from a storm drenching the next county over.
Except that this was far from home. And now, it was the dry season.
They moved, the Others, mainly after the rains, mainly at night, unseen. The countryside, the thick strange trees, the tiny farms carved out over the centuries, came alive at night as well. Invisible men moving: platoons, battalions, maybe even the brigade that some of us in the city feared was out there.

Daytime, sometimes, I'd talk myself into coming along as the advisors from the Mission ventured out to see how the government troops had progressed; bouncing an aging Jeep down a red clay lane towards the trees, the brilliant emerald green wall that framed our world and marked the terrain that the others controlled. We’d drive along the washboard track, one hand clamping a hat or sometimes an unfastened borrowed helmet to our heads. We'd end up where a squad of too-young soldiers paused on a slight rise, a tight circle on the hard-packed clay, the officer's face a mask as unreadable to me as were the young women parading past me in the nights, down by the quayside, after I'd telexed my dispatch in.

Sitting ducks, of course. But those of us who thought of other places like this one knew that these were early days. The Others were only just beginning to learn what they were supposed to do, as well.

Those of us who knew loved daring to be sitting ducks.

The heat, out in the open there, the sun beating down, was like a blow, a swinging leaden weight with power enough to make you stagger, a stunning that would make you slow and stupid. The heat, out there, was more than just the sun -- for They were out there beyond the edges of the fields, crouching deep in the shadows of the trees, the looming green mass that touched the earth around us like a storm cloud, narrowing our horizons until they were as tight as just that hamlet of small hatched houses there, this small field here right before us. The Others, we knew, were hunkered down in the shadows, as if holding breath, watching us. Watching.

Early days, the dry season just started, the green still bright, leaves and reed-heads uncovered by the dulling dust of sun-baking earth. In those early days, They watched and tried to see the pattern of things, the way the government troops patrolled, the high ground that they favored, the whens and hows of calling in the Mission's helicopters.
Sometimes, opening their circles at the end of a red clay lane, the government soldiers might show us one of the Others, a body from the night, a uniform of a slightly different shade, an injury perhaps visible, perhaps not.

And like the mask-faced soldiers, standing in their tight circle like sitting ducks, I wasn't seeing: my telexes talked of a calm province, a division well deployed and in control, a turning of the tide.

And then, after I'd feed the punched tape through the telex, I'd head down to the quayside to watch, myself.

Watch: Trying the read behind the masks. It was a country -- not the one you're likely thinking of -- famous for the masks the people used to carve, though those were masks we never saw those days. They'd been hidden away, I guess. Maybe lost, or broken, their replacements uncarved, for now.

Still, I watched, wanting to read deeper, still deeper, behind the masks of closed-off faces of the strangers on the street, beneath the masks spun by swirling clouds of whispered words in a language I barely spoke, the words becoming music in the dark. I wanted to see beyond a fantasy I knew made because the bright silk dresses of the women, so exotic, insisted to me that I was in a strange place.

For I knew how I loved the strange.

Felt it wash over me, like the liquid air of night, like the silver of the women's quickly-stifled laughter. And so I spent the evenings watching, not quite mesmerized by the dancing colored lights, the soft skin of bared shoulders above bright silk; listening, lulled by the sussuration of whispered, uncomprehended conversation.

"You know what they are saying?" his voice, raspy from one too many cigarettes, my friend from the ministry.

I shrugged.

"You think perhaps because you miss most of the words, that they say something important?" he grinned.

I let him tease, for it was he who had sought me out in his need to talk, alone among the men who worked in his so-vital Ministry. I let him tease because I saw the worries that had deepened the lines around his eyes, saw that those worries had become unbearable, demanding to be shared, even with a stranger. And knew that though he needed to tell me what no one would say, doing so pained him, It mattered to him that he could poke at me, probing like a fencer, it mattered to to imagine it was I who carved a truth out from him with my parried thrust, instead of seeing that it was himself wrenching it free from deep inside. It was a country full of secrets. So I let him tease.

"You think," he grinned again, "You think: 'Perhaps if I ask, perhaps if I get you to ask for me, I'll learn something I can send in tomorrow's telex?'"

"Mood of the people," I said, trying to sound as cynical as he needed me to be,

"Ha! Mood of the people," he snorted. And with that gesture I could never mimic, that snap of his wrist, dismissive wave of hand:

"What do you imagine those girls are saying?"

He nodded at the two walking past us just then: one in her bright print of perhaps bougainvillea flowers on dark silk, the other's long lavender scarf floating behind the soft curves of her back, wrapped so smoothly, tightly in shimmering silk.

As if aware of what he said, they bowed heads, hiding themselves from our glance. Their whispers stopped.

"You know," he shook his head, started again. "I know, people like you, you come, you see how we bow, how we shy away from your glance. You see our hands, one clasping the other just the way that your little kiddies do when they pray -- you think I do not understand the message that you get?"

I waited.

"Ha!" snorting again. It had been a bad day, I knew, an ambush by the highway leading on towards the border, where the European settlers once tried their plantations. The Others had had heavier mortars then we had thought they would, the first light of the dawn had not dispersed them as we'd expected and they traded fire with the government platoon well into the morning.

"Ha!" quieter now. "You see a gesture, think, what: wisdom, there. Acceptance. Like a monk, maybe, submission to a greater power. Your power?"

I let him.

"Or maybe, you'll listen, learn how we feel about those flashes there, beyond the trees. The roar of mortars. Will we fall? Do we believe in your side or in theirs?"

"Not mine, not necessarily," I said. "I am just ... "

"Watching," an impatient wave of hand. "Watching, yes, I know. Watching, not seeing."

"Watching."

"And what do you suppose they say?"

"Tell me."

"They're talking of the new silk that a trader in the marketplace put out tonight, whether the color suits the one, the other. They're saying that the fish seemed off at one stall, that the boy the one's parents want for her is rather dull."

"Ah."

"Ah , yes. The ordinary. The things that matter, that really matter."

I watched them, bending like willows, their heads almost touching, slip back into the shadows of the night.

"Or maybe not," he grinned.

"No?"

"Maybe that's just a story that I tell you, to make a point."

"And the point?"

A gentle smile lit his face, just like the ones the girls would do, hands clasped prayer-like, had I greeted them; a gentle smile for me to glimpse before eyes dipped again into a mystery.

"The point?" he shook his head. "No point, really, I suppose. Perhaps these aren't the days for making points. Perhaps there are too many points being made these days."

A flash, the not-heat-lightening of the night, caught our eyes.

"Too many points," he muttered. "But, consider: if no one cared, who'd bother making points?"

He kept staring out, across the black waters, the bright dots of color of the quayside lights, the magician's tawdry robe, the dresses of the women walking by, bright colors of the day somehow more intense in the obscurity of night. But, unseeing, he kept staring where the mortar flash had already faded, unremarked by anyone else, it seemed.

"Think of those girls," he said, still staring. "Chattering about the colors of the silk, the taste of fish. Ha! Trivial, unimportant, yes?"

Something about the way he wouldn't meet my eyes, told me to hold my tongue. Something about the way he stared into the darkness, leaning intently, as if the tensing muscles of his neck might help him see more deeply.

"Sometimes, I envy them not knowing," he said, at last. "Don't you?"

I would not answer.

"Sometimes, I envy them, knowing that something pretty is a joy, that the smile you get, straightening from bow, when he takes the bowl from your hands and says how good your cooking smells tonight -- ah, you've never yet been to my place and seen, have you?"

And no, I hadn't: my meals were hotel food, or something grabbed from a market stall, or surplus combat rations eaten, squatting on the hard clay of a narrow lane with silent soldiers, wondering if they were as afraid as I.

He sighed.

"Perhaps I told you what they said, perhaps only something that I wished they said: the story that I told you is the point," he murmured. "The story that I told you makes the world around us... " his hand making a circle, fingers fluttering "... makes the world around us take a certain shape. If they don't see the mortar flash, and hear the thunder, how real can it be?"

"Real," I said, as gently as I could. "I've seen the bodies."

"Ah, yes. I've seen your telexes, too."

"You know it's real."

"The Others, they've seen the telexes, too, you know. Someone in the hotel, likely. They know who reads them too, back in your home."

"And?"

"Perhaps the flash of the mortar, the body by the road, perhaps that is the story. Or perhaps: the flash of mortar, the indifference of the women walking on -- perhaps that is?"

He turned, and faced me now. Grinned.

"Forget tonight's telex, let's say. How big a difference, if it waits. Let's say, for us, tonight, the story's not out there, out there where we've not actually seen the mortar land, or heard a cry of fear or pain. Let's say, the story that we'd tell, if anyone would listen, is here. An ordinary story, one that doesn't matter much to those whom we tell stories to, since it's not about the scream of metal racing through the night, the shaking of the ground, and of the frightened soldiers' spines, when it explodes against the ground."

"And?"

"Well, if we hurry that way," a hand flick to his left, "We might catch up with those girls."

"And I can ask them for myself what they are talking of," I smiled

"Or try," he said.

"And?"

"And I can, once again, make it impossible to bring you home, where my wife thinks it's you who is the evil influence, making me chase the pretty girls by the market."

He flashed his particularly wicked grin.

And I, as ever, laughed.

"Then," he continued, in a whisper that I only later think that I recalled. "We'll see what they do."

****

I awoke, later than usual, roused by the strong bright light of day rather than by the distant rumbling of a predawn barrage, whether heard or dreamed. I was in a stranger's room, farther from the river than my hotel, so perhaps that was why I'd had peace enough to sleep in.

The room was spare, and empty. Through the open, unglassed window, I could see the rooftops of the crowded streets behind the market, the brilliant cloudless sky, the deep green line of the horizon, miles away. I heard the random clang of metal trays clopped down on market-stall tables, a hoo-hah siren of a police car or an ambulance from off towards the airport. I didn't really know quite where I was.

Someone had left one of the long shirts that men here wear out in the country. Practical for the heat, falling to your knees, so you could put on, or not, a pair of trousers, pair of shorts, as you chose. I saw the sodden pile of the khaki shirt and jeans I had been wearing shoved in a corner, smelt the stale sweet grainy smell of spilled beer just as the first stab of headache lanced me between my eyes.

I put the shirt on -- I'd never tried one on before -- stepped through the window to a tiny balcony beyond, squinting into the light.

Immersed myself in that light. In the morning sounds, sounds of a strange place, sounds of action unseen, not understood, and yet so ordinary. I felt the new day slowly expand, as if washing over me, taking me with it.

Idly, I tried to think of where I'd been and how I found myself here, on the balcony, breathing the slowly warming morning air. Recalled that we, in fact, had found the girls the night before, farther along the quay, where the shadow-puppeteer set up and staged his little plays for the evening promenade.

They'd stifled giggles when he told them he had met a bet with me: Did they speak the colonial tongue? he asked, and they shook their heads.

And what had they been talking of, sauntering along in the evening? Surely, their lovers, no?

They must have plenty? Another stifled laugh as he translated his question for me -- though I had guessed, as I had most of the words, and his raised eyebrows and half-grin were clear enough.

No, No, the girl in the bougainvillea print whispered, her hand cupped over her mouth. They spoke only of this and that, silly things, barely worth repeating, she said -- or just to be precise, he said she said.

Nudging me: My friend, he said, or said later he said, he is from far away. He wants to learn our language here; don't ask me why.

They stared as he, again, translated. Or said he did. For all I knew, back then, he might have told them I was a crazy man, told them I was the president, or simply rich and looking for a good time for the night: I can't remember now the exact words he spoke, now that I might be able to understand.

Tell him a word you said as you've been walking, help him learn, he grinned, first in their language, then in the one we shared.

"Stars," the girl said, mispronouncing the foreign-to-her word and pointing skywards. A flurry of words too sibilant, too fast for me to follow.

“Ah,“ he nodded to her, translated for me: She said to her friend: the stars were very pretty. The lights along the river very nice. Repeated it in the girls' own language.

And then, another flurry of unknown words. A pause another giggle, quickly cut off by a nod.

"And yes," he muttered to me. "They had seen the new silk at Amador's stall. The one had said the other should buy a meter or two, for it suited her, and she would help her sew a new dress. See? Like I told you."

Somehow, we started walking, the four of us.

We turned our backs to the river, though. To the people parading along the quay, the looming darkness on the other side. We plunged into the city, through the narrow, random streets that ran as crazily as the cracks on window-glass between once grand now dusty boulevards the colonial government engineers had built. Quickly, I was lost. But didn't care.

Somewhere, deep in the maze, a place to dance. A small building, garish bright light spilling from windows to half light a walled-in, outdoor garden. A string or two of tiny lights above, our own stars, the faintest bit more yellow, pink that the cold blue white stars glinted far above against a black velvet sky. Inside, a crowd jammed up against the bar, prostitutes in their short, pastel skirts, leaning against a dirty stucco wall: we four stayed in the garden, alone.

There is a time when fear, maybe exhaustion, change things. A grenade’s blast that shuts a highway means (in a steely calculus of not-quite-war) that another girl is leaning against the stucco wall, another village burns, another middle-aged bureaucrat staggers into a bar next to the shantytown, testing to see if others tremble on the edge of desperation that he feels.

Or maybe, that a different kind of demonstration is what's needed, a different understanding than a stranger might read in the bureaucrat's own reports or on the numbers dancing on overhead projector of the Mission's briefing room.

And so, we chatted, just we four. The more desperate men, the more hungry girls from the refugee families all stayed inside, in that harsh and garish light, brightness shutting out the night, a light brighter than the flash on the horizon. Inside, where the scratching blast of music from Radio France-Inter was more than enough to drown the sound of the distant rumble of the mortars.

We talked about the market, yes. About the temple they had visited just as the sun set, the offerings of small dead things they left, the incense lit. We talked until I felt that I could see the courtyards where they, just at dawn, would wake the men as they made the ancient pump groan and grumble, made cool water splash in their water-jugs; until I heard how the yellow sunbirds nesting in the jacaranda had awoken them, moments before. We talked about how violet-tinted sorghum porridge bubbles on the fire, how peppers ought to burn the tongue, the red ones most of all; we talked about dozing in the afternoon, the way things were intended, we talked about how hard it was to manage, how the money seemed to go so quickly, how they couldn't get the men to pay attention.

Perhaps it isn't necessary to say, although I will, how the downcast eyes -- the women's and the men's -- that always greet a stranger here can seduce you, just as does the way you're supposed to breathe and swallow consonants in their language, inhaling words that we elsewhere expel.

Perhaps it isn't necessary to say how, too, those downcast eyes and half-heard words might lead you to misapprehend. To see, yes, that gentleness that invites your reach. But in that softness to see merely a chance to take, rather than to receive. To see only a what you think's a kind of charm, instead of seeing her, seeing the depths of her. To miss seeing that it takes a kind of strength, a kind of wisdom to be the one who offers.

But, on reflection, consider: here, as in so many places on this continent (perhaps it's not the one you think) it is the women, not the men, you will find running the market stalls, the smaller shops. It is the men who stamp the papers, true; it is the men with whom the Mission talks of arms and foreign aid and what is to be done in the far villages -- but even there, when the men have lead the oxen out to plow, or gather to sit, smoking, in the shade of the men's hut, it can seem as if it is the women whose murmurings about what he has done or him and why that happened end up being the words that settle things.

Or maybe so. We talked -- or I should say, they talked, the two girls, about a world of things I barely knew. The singsong of their voices, my friend's whispering translation, the lights dancing in the gentle breeze, the faint fragrance of night-blooming flowers: these I remember, not so much the words. Not so much.

It was as if I felt their fingers, stronger than you might expect, just where my neck and shoulders meet, kneading a knotted, inner fabric loose. Just there, where the tension of holding myself erect through the long day, fighting to stand against the implacable light and heat of sun, had found a focus. Listening, gazing at the light, it was as if I felt their fingers on my upper arm, where muscles bunched the way a boxer's might, as if it had been me who'd felt my heart begin to race, the acid of my stomach rise, lifting the carbine to the ready, taking that first step down the red clay lane.

They talked, and it was as if the irises of my eyes had so dilated, as if the gentle music of their unknown words had so relaxed me that I could let a world I'd never know come flooding in. It was as if faintest scent from the flowers trailing over the wall eased me into paying a deeper attention, as if breathy words were spoken directly to my ear, the way a child's warm breath whispers a secret you will always remember.

I thought, standing there on that tiny balcony, feeling a warm breeze on my lower legs, the shirt hem brushing the back of my knees, that I'd never forget. And might someday come to understand.

It was my friend's oldest daughter -- only a year or two younger than the girls we'd chatted to so late into the night -- who brought the coffee to me, there on the balcony, her eyes modestly glancing to one side, a smile meant for prayer-clasped hands barely to be seen; it was my friend, coming in behind her as she stepped into the room, whose laughter helped me coalesce again.

It had been a quiet night, he said, lifting his flimsy carbon-copy of the Ministry's morning report. Odd, really.

You never know, I likely muttered, grumbling that I'd be late for checking in at the Mission.

"Saturday," he grinned. "It's Saturday. You'd have to bang and wake the guard, and all you'd find is a crabby junior clerk upset and jealous that you're not stuck on the weekend duty roster as he is. Nothing's happened. Take the day for yourself."

He clapped hands, called his daughter's name.

"Needs to be washed," he said (I think he said that language that I didn't really understand), nodding at my crumpled jeans and shirt.

"No, no," I said, too loudly, waving my hand. "I can't ask you to -- let me, I'll take care of it."

She stood, my shirt spilling down from her hand, the cloth of her long skirt tight against a cocked hip, unreadable eyes gazing at mine; as his were. I dipped my chin to break their gaze.

"You are our guest," she said, after a moment.

"Please," I muttered. "I feel-- I don't feel right to have you do this."

"No trouble," she said. She spoke my language, slowly, precisely, like a schoolgirl reciting to her teacher. "Today, we do our washing anyway. It is no trouble."

Lifting my eyes, reaching for my shirt, just out of reach, I saw her half turn on her heel, as if to snatch it free.

"A compromise!" her father laughed. "I believe in compromise, don't you?"

She turned again to face us.

"A compromise, a holiday," he said. He spoke her name, and smiled. "We shall all go. You and the girls will bring the wash and we will help you carry. We will bring tea and sweets and will sit together in the shade to chat while everything dries out in the sun."

He laughed.

"And you," he said, clapping his hand on my shoulder. "You shall have to wear my dhobi here, and wear one of my big straw hats against the sun. Disguised! Just as if you were one of us."

I should, of course, have simply gone back to my hotel, I should have stopped by the Mission, should have done what I was supposed to do.

But I didn't. He might well have been right, it might quite well have been a quiet night, there was nothing for me to ask about. If the patrols were out, the Mission's advisers had long since left to check on them. And if I didn't hear and didn't tell, well, who would know? Or care?

Instead, we walked, he and I, his two daughters, down to the river, down to the deep blue still pools between the rocks, where the women of this quarter dipped their bright silks and men's plainer cotton in the water, pounded and wrung and stretched what seemed so delicate and was so sturdy, before laying the cloth, like bright chips of mosaic on the pale round sun-soaked rocks to dry. I insisted on trying to wash my own shirt and jeans, surrounded by a circle of laughing women and girls as I splashed, until one, unable to bear watching my ineffective effort, snatched them from me, plunged them into the water, swirled and squeezed and (laughing still), splashed out to lay them at the very top of the nearest rock to dry.

I leaned against the gnarled and twisted trunk of a small tree on the river bank and watched the women finish; my friend, crosslegged on coffee-colored earth packed hard by generations of washing women's feet, beside me, silent. Behind us, it seemed as if the whole town slumbered in the heat; before us, beyond the river, the bright green line of trees beyond the farmers' fields loomed, like a threat.

There are moments, aren't there, when nothing beyond the moment matters: the smell of dust, like a faint spice, the bright sun painting ripples on the river gold and silver, the women laughing, happy cries in a language you don't understand, the bright blue cloudless sky. Moments you feel yourself sinking into, the way drops from a wet, just-washed dress seep into the dry earth and seem to disappear. They're there, of course, for you can still see the darker spots where they had fallen. But different, now, changed. A new relation to a greater whole. Perhaps it is our desire for that kind of moment that leads us to run, as my friend and I had, after the two women the night before; our need for this, our fear of what the change might mean that gives that certain tension to the dance of words that must precede the question: will we? won't we?

It was my need for these moments that brought me to this place, my conscious thought that I needed the sting of fear the bullets' brief song can teach, my less conscious sense that to be immersed among the others, dullness lost in bright colors of the crowds women pressing close, a hope that gentle hands reaching towards me might carry me away to insight.

I thought my telexed messages home a small enough price for this.

"Peace," he said, voice less raspy now; propped on an elbow, stretched on his side along the hard-packed ground, watching his daughters, watching his neighbors perched on the river rocks. The clear water swirled and sparkled in the bright light of day, the buildings of the city were behind us, the farmers' tiny fields of grain, like tiny chips of emerald or of citrine, stretched quilt-like towards the sky; the darker line of trees so far off here that it was as if they weren't there at all.

Sitting there, in my friend's spare shirt, his wide straw hat still on my head, the warm air on my shins, I could almost imagine what it might be like to be plunged into a life here; to wake with the cool -- the relative -- cool of dawn, to glimpse the pink and lavender streaks of fading clouds against the pale barely-blue of sky above the tiny courtyard by the pump. To hear, maybe not the clatter of a bicycle over the cobblestones but let's say the lowing of the cows penned by the pond, the growing chorus of the sunbirds. To know the delicate sweet scent of that spill of violet flowers down the far wall, how steps that stir those tiny clouds of dust can make you smell the very heat of sun as that faint tang floats upwards. To smile, and bow, as that wide, shallow wooden bowl is passed from hand to hand, the sweet, pale violet porridge barely steaming, a brief glance into your eyes, your brief glance back.

Imagining: the women by the river, laughing as the swoop of water-heavy silk makes silver arcs of water rise above them, arcs we'll let catch the sun and make some tiny rainbows as we laugh and chatter -- they'll say it's merely chatter -- about the warp and weft of we weave of our daily life. Imagining: striding down the path, the sun-soaked dust puffing up between toes, swept aside by the white shirt-hem dancing around shins. Imagining: watching him stopping on the path as the wet silk arcing above our heads is left to splash into the pools between the rocks and the circle tightens, heads bend to heads, in a little theatre of desire and of deferral; imagining him looking at her, a her who as I'd been a minute before, stood at the center of the circle of women, of laughing women, playing in the water, in sun, at work that isn't work because it's life, a different life, maybe a better.

Dissolving, like the powdering of cinnamon that they sprinkle on their bittersweet coffee here melts into the brown-black drink, you become something new.

The warm air, like the thin fingers of a woman kneading your shoulders, seemed almost to carry us away.

It took a moment, maybe two or three, to realize what my friend's daughter asked: Since it was Saturday, and it was quiet, surely a trip into the countryside, to the old village, surely we could do that, no?

He shook his head.

It was too late, it'd be too much to arrange a car, it's been a long week.

Quiet enough, though? she asked.

He darted a glance my way: a look too sharp for the sleepy ease of the heat, the flowing river, the wet clothes drying in the sun

"That's what the telexes report," he said.

Please, she said -- or I think she said -- it's been so long.

"Yes, it has been quite, quite long," he nodded.

Then let's, let's, I think she said.

Let's, let's, I repeated her words, only guessing at what they were.

Another darting glance: what was he hiding now, behind his mask, deep within those dark eyes -- I couldn't tell. Worry, perhaps, that the reassuring words he told his wife and daughters every day might now mislead the girl, that she did not understand that there was danger where she wished to go. Or worry, maybe, the danger was less Them, was less the Others hiding in the trees, but rather something within her, the daughter's deep still pools of feeling a father never knows, the dark mysteries behind a woman's downcast eyes that men's clearest, most focused gaze can never pierce. Suspended in this quiet moment by the river, in the warmth and light of day, we had seemed almost meld, to ease in a rare comfort with one another -- father and daughter, foreigner and family -- but perhaps he knew it was merely illusion.

Or perhaps he feared it was a truth.

Perhaps it was just that he was afraid of what came next. Afraid that I might say:

"I have a car."

Unspoken worries, unspoken knowledge. I watched him weigh them, balance them as my offer hung there in the heavy, heat-thickened air. And I felt, as he shifted his eyes from her to me, and me to her, and then back again to me, I knew that as I felt his eyes hold me, focus on me, see deep within me that he discovered something somehow that told him I was safe, that it was alright to shrug and say:

"Alright then."

We cleared the checkpoint on the edge of town later than I liked. He, with his magic red-bordered card from the Ministry, had decided not to come; his wife had required an hour that I hadn't counted on to be convinced to ride with us instead, in order that proprieties remained unflouted. In the final flurry of departure, as the children in the alley swarmed and shouted at the foreigner's car filling the narrow alley, she had forgotten to bring her I.D. card. It took a half an hour of frowning, deliberate worry at the checkpoint before agreeing that a tightly-folded 100-franc note might be a fair fee for the invisible special permit that the corporal issued. I tried not to be impatient, worrying about filing my evening telex in good time.

Nor was the village quite as close as I thought. Long miles down the narrow highway, long miles down a dirt track, and when I saw the small circle of houses huddled by the curving river, the light was already slanting low and golden across the fields around it, the still-green grain swaying slowly as the evening breeze emerged.

The loud snap made me jump: I hadn't realized just how tensely I'd been looking for a muzzle's flash, the report of a carbine. I ducked behind the steering wheel, trying to scan the trees beyond the fields and didn't realize until she, laughing in the back seat, told me that I'd blown a tire on the pothole I'd just hit, the one that made her bump against the ceiling.

It meant there was no hope to make it make to the checkpoint by the nightfall.

Trying not to curse, I fetched the jack and spare, while daughter and mother walked the final hundred yards to the village, just ahead. Trying to tell myself it wouldn't matter if I again missed sending my telex, trying to tell myself that my adventure into the exotic hadn't one again devolved into a mundane chore of machinery and manners, where because of who I was and where I came from, that I was left behind to sweat and fuss as what I yearned for flowed on beyond my grasp, beyond my sight.

Yanking too hard on a lug-nut I wasn't strong enough to loosen, I lost balance and stumbled just as the young man from the village came. I hadn't seen him, slowly walking up the lane, hunched over the tire as I was.

Without a word, he took the wrench and set to work. Steadily, slowly pulling, til the nuts came loose; slowly lifting one tire, easing the spare on; unhurried and despite the heat, not sweating. I sat and watched the play of muscles under sun-dark skin of arms and back, as he squatted there calmly doing what I ought to have done.

And when he was finished, he stood, turned to me and took my hand.

As men do here.

Together, we walked into the village. My friend's daughter, surrounded by her cousins, made a circle of bright colors, glowing in the long low light, the dust their steps had made still hanging, golden, in the still air. Mothers and aunts arrayed themselves along the giant, buttress-like roots and ribs of a single tree that seemed as ancient as the pale white moon floating in the still-blue eastern sky. I saw the low thatched roofs of hamlet, a half circle behind the tree, the endless sky, beginning to deepen into a steel-blue, into violet to the west, and in the distance, almost too far to see, the dark green fringe of the forest beyond the fields. As we approached, the young man turned his wrist, let my hand slip free and gently pushed me towards the girls.

In an instant, I was surrounded. Words I didn't understand, like the soft "S" sounds of wind in reeds, like the soprano's trill in a strange song you've never heard before but guess that maybe angels sing, the lightest touch, like down caught in the wind, of brushing fingers leading me on into the very center of their circle, leading me on.

A step or two or ten and we were by the tree. Flute-like laughter, gentle fingers led me to where one giant root rose up from hard-packed earth, a curve as urgent as an ocean wave breaking on a beach, as if beneath the smooth gray bark the heavy wood could barely contain the life, the energy flowing from earth to tree to sky above.

We watched the cattle, red and glistening emerge from where the river bend around the hamlet, lowing and slowly clanking their copper bells as they paraded, stately as a president, towards the corral where they'd spend the night.

For evening had come. A momentary panic: it was late, the road was dark, we should have left -- but surrounded by the women, feeling the light touch of a hand, seeing a calming, palm-down patting of air, listening to a snatch of song, notes high and round and silver as water sparkling over river rocks, and I knew I would stay.

And knew that messages of trouble I thought that I was born to carry need not be carried now. Not for this night.

****

The quiet had unsettled both the Mission and the Ministry. It was a week of calm, without even the tension of the waiting anymore. I'd sit each evening by the quayside beneath the soft black sky, as deep and clear as if a thunderstorm had passed, watching the ever-untroubled parade pass by, young women in their bright dresses, the street magician by the street light, the ragged kids darting through the crowd. I'd listen for the faint drum roll of fighting and hear only the splash of oars slowly pushing the boats home at the end of day. With nothing for my telexes, I'd sent nothing for the week.

"Ah," his familiar rasping voice. "It is nice to get free early."

He eased into the chair across from me.

"Thank you again for taking them to the village."

I told him I was happy to, that it had been quite fascinating: I said quite, too. As if I were a professor of anthropology, as if I were merely a visitor, polite and distant as the pale proper men who used to run this place. I knew, seeing his nervous eyes, that he fought not to ask me if anything untoward happened, that he was asking me for reassurance that his daughter had been safe with me, that his wife, smiling so happily on our return, was neither lying nor had been tricked when she told him that everything was fine.

I knew he would not understand if I said that what had happened there, happened to me.
And what had happened, after all?

An evening like a thousand others, like a million others: the cattle coming back in the evening, the breeze riffling the new heads of grain in the fields around, the moon, glowing and heavy as a pregnant women hanging above us in the evening sky, stars too numerous to name flung like handfuls of silver sand across the void. The women gathered, a murmured sea of words, an ancient song, a circle gathering, growing closer around me. The tree, buttressed like a cathedral, knee-high roots stretching for yards, seeming to grow into the night, a sheltering umbrella overhead.

The bend of river shimmering in moonlight, the colors of the women's dresses seeming to deepen, enriched. Because I couldn't understand their words, their almost-whispered words, words stopped seeming to matter; the world remade not by the words someone told me nor by my own but instead by the scent of night-blooming flowers, the rustle of wind in reeds, the deep-red cup-shaped flowers of the lily-pads floating in the shallow water of the river's edge, the air, almost liquid with the retained heat of day, as if saturated with meaning.

I can't, still can't, remember how or where I slept. I can't remember awakening, but still can see the red sun in the mist above the river, the fields glowing in the fresh light of a new day, the women gathered by the standpipe with the narrow, waist high water-jugs, curved like their hips.

And I. In the middle.

There is a sense you get sometimes, I nearly told him, answering his unasked question. A sense as if your heart is racing, as if there is an inner trembling that you can't control. A sense that you are racing to an edge, a boundary line, but that somehow it is something that you merely watch. Perhaps you sense you ought to ease back, slow down. But can't. Or, to be more precise: won't. It's not unpleasant, not at all, this inner shiver, like a rope being drawn taut, beginning to hum. Not unpleasant, even if you feel the tension as the pulling strengthens.

A sense of anticipation.

But both he and I thought what we felt then was apprehension. Three days of calm. Four.

"You'll have to keep up with not sending telexes," he said, the next night, as we met.

I smiled.

"Another day. They're out there, I know. But -- I don't understand."

"Worried?"

"Worried, yes. Are they regrouping? Are they moving? East? West?"

"No indications?" Thinking that perhaps I might hear something worth reporting back.

Perhaps he saw it in my eyes. In the way I leaned towards him, across the small round table under the colored lights.

He broke my gaze, turned to look across the quayside, at the women promenading, the juggler and the street magician, the dark river, dark fields beyond. The looming trees edging the horizon.

We sat like that for quite a while.

"I don't think you should send anything," he said, at last. "I think you should sit quiet for a while."

A half-smile.

"Sometimes, I swear it is as if you and they feed off of one another." He shook his head. "I know that makes no sense."

"I need to tell them something, sometime."

He shook his head.

"It is a feeling. Just a feeling. But I think I can feel that they are changing somehow. Maybe just massing, like a muscle bunching, ready to lash out. Maybe something else. Just a feeling. Odd feeling."

"You really think ... "

He barked a laugh, as if embarrassed, as if angry, as if he had shown me a kind of failing, as if we had been drinking down by shantytown and I'd seen his eyes linger too long on a bargirl, as if I'd seen his hand pause too long on the hand of the young man sitting on his
other side.

"I really ought to send them something," I started.

"No," he said, turning to me now. "No. Indulge my superstition. Please. It's my country."

"There's no way there could be any link."

"No way?"

"Ridiculous."

"You destroy the telex tape when you are done?"

"I throw it out. But there are no secrets."

"They know what you are sending. I know. I'm sure. There is a clerk. A cleaner. Someone. You send, and they react. I see it, I am sure. We talk, I tell you things, you tell me what you understand. I know what you are sending. And I can see, knowing what I know, looking at the map the next day, moving my pins, reading my carbons -- it is like a dance that you and they are doing. I feel this, certain. I know this."

I stared.

"You haven't sent a telex in four days. Five. There's not been one attack. Not one. Not in five days. Not a mortar. Not one shot fired. Nothing. Nothing."

"I have a obligation," I said. "I am supposed to tell what I know. That's what I do."

"And you know?"

"I know that something's on the edge of happening. It has to be."

"And what?"

"You tell me."

"I won't. I can't."

"Because?"

"Because I can't tell you anything but a feeling. Because I'm here, peering at maps and at reports and -- feeling, that's all. Just feeling."

"And to know?"

"And to know, I'd need to go back out. Back to the country, nearer to where they sit. Where they would have to go next."

"The village?"

"Yes. Yes, there."

"Will you come, if I go?"

Now he leaned forward. Our eyes locked.

"No," he said. "That is a journey you must make yourself."

****

After a week, or maybe two, you forget.

The day. The date. The time you'd fixed to meet: he'd come when he would come.
But now, this day, whatever this day is, the fat red sun rises over a misty pool where the river has turned and paused to make a wide and shallow pool. Rises as it did the day before, the day before. The water, riffled by an early breeze so that it seems to flow first this way, then that, so that you cannot tell by looking where it will move, so that your knowledge that it will, that there is where a current coalesces, ready to plunge lower and begin to race down towards the city, towards the sea. There between the low gray rocks, smooth and rounded as the backs of the cattle slowly submerging into the cool of water, glowing reddish in the early sunlight.

To see isn't always to know.

To see the women gather by the standpipe with the waist-high curving jugs, isn't to know them. To see them bend heads close, see hands rise to mouths to shield soft-spoken words isn't to know that they've a secret, isn't to know what it might be. You can see how they gather, every morning, as the first edge of the sun lifts about the misty pool, but never know.

It is when the first of the women lifts and plunges the pump's faintly-creaking iron arm, it is with the first splash of water in the jug that the rest begin to stir, I've seen after a week or two. There might then be a daughter's bell-like word, a laugh, the hiss of fires banked late in the evening now flaming yellow under a breath. Coals glow red, perhaps a child's hands are clapped. After a week, or maybe two, I've seen this, just as I've seen the women gather by the standpipe, as the sun begins to rise, just as somehow -- perhaps it is the faintest wash of blue on the eastern horizon, the thrice-repeated whistle of a sunbird in flowers -- I know when they awaken and have awakened, too.

I have no jug to fill myself, but I can lift and plunge the iron arm of the pump. And so. After a week or maybe two, when they stir just before the dawn and I do too, I rise with them, just as the red sun rises above the pool. Like them, I'll pause a moment in the door, fling a cloth around my shoulders, for it will feel just a little cool to all of us now, before the sun is lifted full above the line of distant trees on the horizon. We'll feel the sun as warmth to savor, not the leaden heat of day that later will lead us to the shade of the small trees by pool, to drift a a bit as one murmurs a fable from the distant past, a story from a week ago, or maybe two.

In the mornings, I am in the center of the circle of the village women, lifting and plunging the pump, so that the water splashes in the jugs, the way that sometimes, when their daughters have breathed banked fires into new life, they'll come into the circle, make the cool water dance in the brightening sunlight. Like them, once every jug is filled, I'll pause until each woman lifts the water-jug to her head, her shoulders. Perhaps I'll follow the line of swaying women a step or two across the hard-packed dirt, turned solid as the gray rocks around the pool by generations, centuries of women's feet. As each turns towards her home, where now she will watch as the sorghum porridge heats, where she will slice fruit picked the evening before, and lay out a tray of a steaming bowl, a fan of the pink or golden half-moons she has just cut, pour cool water into a carved wood cups, and carry it in to all the others.

Sometimes, if daughters have breathed fires to life, and the women are still gathered by pump waiting to fill the jugs, the girls will skip out with a second water jug, a third. They'll carry, or they'll try to carry them once I have filled them -- but it is harder than it seems, I see, one day when after a week or maybe two, I ease one from a struggling too-small girl and lift it to my head. One hand holding it there, the other tugs the bright cloth around my shoulders tighter, as if that gesture starts a necessary sway of hips to keep everything balanced.

After two weeks, or maybe three, I notice (as I bow to present a morning tray of porridge and of fruit) that more of the village men are back. I bow, am bowed to; he leans on one arm, reaches to the tray that I set on the mat. I kneel across from him, lower eyes so that his gaze can't pin; but still with my glance I see the same smooth slide of shoulder and or arm that I'd seen when he changed my tire -- I see, too, like a flashing of heat lightning in his eye that he is intrigued. Or maybe that he wonders. Or maybe that he knows.

After a moment, I tug my scarf and start to rise.

"No," he says. "No. Stay."

I am caught, wanting to say that I cannot. Unable to say what I want.

"So silent," he smiles. "We hadn't heard a word from you. But now I have a word for you."

He reaches now for my wrist, a gentle pull has me kneeling again.

"It is over," he says. "In the quiet, in calm, once we were left alone, we managed -- you didn't hear?"

I didn't.

"No. No radio. Of course." Leaning again, he pulls the shoulder bag he had tossed in a corner the night, the day before. Slowly unties the flap, pulls out the folded-many-times newspaper and smooths it out before me, on the mat next to his tray.

"Read," he says.

The details don't matter so very much, but in this country (not the one you likely think) a remote president, perhaps a prince, had named a new prime minister. It maybe was a paragraph in The Times, don't feel bad if you don't recall. Because the paper was the government's, the photo of the handshake was quite large, and I could see in the circling crowd of men pressed close behind them -- yes, my own friend from the Ministry, for it was his man who had moved up; and, yes, the young man leaning on his arm across from me, reaching with his other hand for the porridge I'd made, the papaya I'd sliced. I saw the tight smile of one or two of the men I knew from the Mission.

"You could go back now," he says. "Of course, you always could have anyway."

"Yes," I reply.

"But there is something about this place, no?"

"Yes."

"After a day, or two, the peace. A sense that things are as they should be."

I nod.

"After a week, maybe two, you could forget. The day. The date."

Again, I nod.

"That need to pin things down, that truth one thinks one sees. Missing a deeper truth, I think."

"A deeper truth?"

"Surely," he says. "Deeper than the truth, the facts, you think is there behind the flash of lightning, rumbling of thunder on a horizon, deeper than a dance of actors in the distance who moves you think you plot, whose changes of position are the change you see as possible. Deeper than that, the changes you can make within, no?"

"Within?"

"Oh yes, within. Haven't you seen?"

Now, his two hands have captured mine.

"Haven't you felt?"

Now: I stare into his eyes. And see.

"Haven't you wanted?"

Between my hips, rising towards my chest, unease, boiling up, acidic. A slow welling, a falling back, sharp as bitter gall, carving liquid pathways down, and down, and down. I sway, queasy; I feel his hands on mine. I feel a thick, slow flow, warm on my inner thigh.

Something has broken, something is to be purged.

Then: blackness.

In a hut, on the edge of the village, since that is what tradition demands for this time of month,, a woman watching me, me watching a golden moon, glowing like a lamp against a back-blue sky soft enough to stroke.

After three weeks, a month, you could perhaps begin the bleeding.

The renewal.

In a country, far away -- but not maybe the one you're thinking of -- a different kind of story could be written. In dark forests where the Others wait, columns of men moving beneath the trees like fingers merging into a fist might just as well disperse, were they to think of it. In the cities where we wait, poised with beating hearts, tensely awaiting the moment, we might not need to do what we think we must were we to shift our eyes just for a second, maybe two. The way women here dip their gaze, and flash a quick glance your way before with lowered eyes they modestly walk on.

Perhaps, like in an exercise for school, if one small letter in an equation might be changed -- it is a long one, stretching across the page, and such a little letter, really -- perhaps if that small and changed letter might move from one side to another; perhaps a different answer when the final crumbs of the eraser are brushed away?

In the mornings, just as the red sun first rises above mist, I rise, too. With two fingers, a small flick of a wrist, the bright shawl floats around my shoulders, I take the waist-high jug, curved elegantly as courtesan, and join the others by the village pump.

In a bit -- you will not have to wait too long -- the almost sweet lavender sorghum will steam in its wooden bowl, a slice of mango will glow beside it on the mat.

I will lift eyes modestly downcast, and see. And see, at last.