Yet, upon hearing the early morning news, Goldfarb, as usual a bit hung over from his nightly concert with his whiskey, had reacted violently and negatively. No! Never! Never, never, never! She was his. She had come to him as almost a child. All she had, all she knew, all she had learned was thanks to him. She was not only his wife, she was his product. She owed him. She could not abandon him—absolutely not.
However, now among his own, he saw the futility of his actions. He could not control her. He could not refuse her. He had no choice, he had to acquiesce. Maybe his first wife would come back. Then another “Damn!” He remembered his first wife was now living with a young tennis pro. What would he do? He was too old to think of a third Mrs. Goldfarb.
Even though Goldfarb was not close to the group, he was a member of their wider expat community. They wanted to help him as they wanted to believe he would help them if the tables were turned.
They called Etienne to a group huddle and then approached Goldfarb before he could down his sixth pint. Etienne, who has been living at his farm outside town and coming to work every day by bicycle, offered to move into the boy’s quarters at the Goldfarb house if le patron agreed. Etienne’s oldest son wanted to marry but could not as he had no house of his own. This son already did most of the farming, so Etienne could give his country house to the boy, who could then marry while Etienne and his wife moved into town, albeit into accommodations that were not their own. His other children were nearly grown and could live on the farm as they had been doing, their older sibling now the head of the household.
They had to repeat this proposal three times before Goldfarb grasped what was being suggested. Yet, once he did seize the idea, he accepted immediately, offering to spruce up the quarters before Etienne moved in.
In this way, another in the continuing dramas had been contained, but at the cost of a game of poker.
❦❦❦
Brother Mike had little contact with Goldfarb and could only assume the arrangements with Etienne had taken place as planned: the second Mrs. Goldfarb was now missus somebody else and Goldfarb’s suit had finally dried after the ordeal of restructuring his household.
Brother Mike understood, moreover, that situations like Goldfarb’s arose more often than most knew. Men often entered the Foreign Service fresh out of their tertiary studies. Many—married and even fathers at this time—had had little opportunity to, as they liked to say in this part of the world, “play life.” While they may have been long on education, they were very short on life experiences. When they came here, they found a lot of their traditional social barriers absent or replaced by new and often more liberal codes of conduct, certainly a concept well appreciated by Brother Mike.
Here there were frequently totally different value systems and protocols. Marriage, age, sex, friendship, respect—all were subject to new interpretations. Brother Mike had seen his European brothers completely burn out on the excesses of a less encumbering and more open life, even though the social liberties here in the central part of the continent were said to be stringent by comparison to those further to the west.
Brother Mike often wondered about these social norms, thinking frequently of the time he was driving to the country’s capital and was overtaken by the shiny black Mercedes of the Archbishop, with his Holiness seated regally in the back, his wife next to him, her headscarf piled high in the rear window.
4
Slowly Brother Mike became more acquainted with Philip and his family. With only two windows a week, the process was at times almost imperceptible, but somehow enjoyable, like peeping through a keyhole at the lives of others. He wondered if Father Alphonse from his church back home had felt this way when he had heard his confessional?
Philip had come “out” to the real world, as he liked to say, as soon as he finished his internship in a prestigious hospital in Bruges. His story was very similar to Brother Mike’s own. Philip’s father had been a common laborer, working for the city, basically filling potholes and cleaning ditches. To make ends meet, his mother worked part-time as a cleaning lady, leaving their small, nearly bare home for the extravagant and rambling estates of the rich. He had one older sister who worked in a yardage shop after finishing secondary school. He was the star of the family. They had all pooled their resources for him to be able to attend the best schools and achieve the finest education. They were, thus, shocked and even wounded when, upon receiving his medical degree, he announced he wanted to go to work and live in Africa. He left with his family ties frayed, some to the breaking point.
But Belgium and his Belgian life faded as he immersed himself in his new career and his new environment. He found he had a great, nearly unquenchable appetite for two things: his work and beer; a close third was the ladies. As the first ophthalmologist in the country, Philip, or Doctor Bwana Phil as many of his patients called him, had many waiting at his doorstep. With great pride, he treated each equally and was as thrilled today to help someone see better as he had been when he helped his first patient (an 80-year-old man from a far-off village in the mountains of the North) all those years ago. He could and did spend countless hours in his clinic.
Early on, as a bachelor, he would stay in the clinic at night until the last patient was seen and then head to his favorite bar, a small off-license called Chez Martin, situated in a working-class neighborhood with few expatriates. This reminded him of the bars his father used to frequent in Belgium. He relished the frosty beer and took pleasure in trying to pick up the local dialect as he chatted with fellow customers who, once they grew used to a white man in their midst, treated him just like any other drinking buddy.
Philip avoided the expat watering holes and the expat social events. He had not come all this way to live as a Belgian in Belgium. That was the life he had forsaken to the great chagrin of his family, a family that had indeed sacrificed greatly to get him to where he was.
As he began sinking African roots, Philip moved into the small bungalow he occupied to today. He hired Joseph as his cook, launderer, cleaner, and live-in caretaker. The same Joseph who still cooked his frites just so, and kept the fridge stocked with ice cold beer.
For several years his life seemed like a record on a Victrola—when the needle got to the last groove, the arm lifted up automatically and gently placed the needle on the first groove and it all started over again. Up—coffee, cigarette, and baguette for a starter—to the clinic, closing when the last person had been seen—to Chez Martin (he used to keep the bottle caps in his pocket to know how many beers he had drunk, but this disgusted him so he abandoned the practice)—home at some point finding dinner prepared by Joseph and warming in the oven, to bed—either alone or accompanied. The next day it all started over again.
Then one day his routine changed forever. As usual, he went into his exam room to see a patient the nurses had prepped. As he glanced into the chair, he felt a lump in his throat—a sensation with which he was completely unfamiliar. Here in his chair was a rather diminutive youngish lady but who had the most mischievous eyes and enigmatic smile. He was truly taken aback. Aware of his reaction, he felt compelled to at least try and find out more about his patient than her vision problems. In fact, it turned out her eyesight was 20/20. She had been working in a garden, pruning a large Euphorbia plant, when her machete splashed the milky sap into her eyes and she felt she was blinded. Once Philip washed the eyes thoroughly and let them rest with some comforting ointment, her sight returned—uninjured and perfect. He sensed that her relief at his findings made her let her guard down and she did at least impart enough of her story for him to ascertain that she was single, the daughter of a rather prosperous businessman who had three sons and was disappointed that his last born was not also a male.
She seemed disinclined to give much more information. However, what she had provided—or more correctly, the cheeky fashion with which she had provided it—was enough to tweak Philip’s soul and he knew he would go to the records to get her address so that he could call upon her later.
This was Angela. Philip had courted her with ardor and all the energy his compact but muscular body could muster. He had abandoned all the casual girlfriends he had lined up, focusing totally on this one indecipherable female