you. And, as I see you now before me, I wonder, have we met before?”
“Indeed,” replied Brother Mike. “You may have long forgotten a modest monk who exchanged a few words with you in a hardware store some time back.”
“Hmmm,” she followed through. “I have no idea of the modesty, but I do recall the conversation. I also recall our discourse being a bit one-sided. I hope your cards treat you better than did my dialogue.”
With this she excused herself and went into the interior of the house.
Brother Mike felt obliged to add some background to their somewhat cryptic exchange, explaining to his fellow players that he had met a charming lady at a hardware store when seeking supplies for the Abbey, having no idea this lady was Mrs. Philip.
Philip seemed to want to fill in the blanks and added, “I tell Angela she’s the slum lord of the town. She has lots of small rentals scattered hither and yon. Although these don’t seem to put much meat on the table, or money in the pot, the oversight and upkeep do seem to fully occupy her time. Therefore, if you ever have to move out of the Abbey, she has a place for you. You would probably not find her accommodation that different from the monastery’s cells.”
At this, all had a good laugh followed by a good swallow of beer before they got back to the serious business of poker. Again, time dictated their play and soon Brother Mike was bumping along the road to the Abbey, unsure if it was the stiff springs of the pickup or the potholes of the laterite road that were most answerable for the jostling he was receiving as he headed toward Vespers with his pockets full of considerably more francs than he had had when he had departed early in the morning in search of a valve for one of the clinic’s toilets.
The next day after Lauds, Brother Mike snuck away to his refuge on the pond bank. After he had impaled a worm on the hook of the cane pole he secreted in a nearby banana grove, he leaned back against the acacia tree that had pierced the dike and took score, not of his poker hands, but of his life.
Things seemed to be as well as they could, with the knowledge that the unknown always offered both greater riches and a shortcut to Purgatory. His management of the Abbey’s affairs continued to be impeccable, if slightly embellished for the benefit of his good self and a few other selected entrepreneurs in the nearly area. He had managed to get Jean-Baptiste set up in a secluded room where few would know he was there and even fewer would care. He had successfully ended the friendship with Sister Alice and, for the moment, was relishing his monastic solitude. He felt comfortable he was living up to his vows and his expectations, with only two sorties a week: Saturday and Wednesday afternoons.
Brother Mike pulled in his line, reached into his ever-present holdall, extracted his bottle of Courvoisier and a small glass; things were good. The breeze picked up, rustling the fronds on the nearby banana trees. The gust startled a hamerkop that scolded all as it flew from its hiding place along the shore where it had been hunting small fishes. Children laughed and played at the school on the hill on the far side of the swale, their melody vibrating off the rich lowlands where cabbage, carrots, and tomatoes sprouted like buds on a rose. Life was good.
❦❦❦
Brother Mike’s routine now seemed fixed and his situation stable. He approached new friendships with caution after a lengthy break following Sister Alice. He managed short, almost ephemeral, friendships with a sister visiting from a northern order and a public health specialist from the Ministry who was touring centers in the area.
He enjoyed the challenges of keeping things moving—the logistics of intertwining the Abbey’s supply chain and his own substantive network. But his real pleasures were still to be found crowd watching from the Crane’s veranda and placing his bets at Philip’s.
The seasonal changes were very nuanced in these hills, and Brother Mike was scarcely aware of the passing of time. The arrival of a new container was the main milestone, and this, too, was routine enough as to not create any feeling of exceptionalism. The Christmas season was always a joy, but the abstemious spirit of the Abbey made this a modest festivity, with the exception of a splendid and ornate Christmas Eve Mass.
The ascetic lifestyle notwithstanding, the monastery was not to forego opportunities. The Christmas season was a time when the bakery and butcher shop produced baskets of seasonal favorites to entice their customers: special breads, exotic sausages, and heavily scented cakes and cookies. There was a cornucopia of holiday gastronomy that required a whole new stock of supplies. It was, thus, that at this time there were no less than two containers a month to ensure the brothers had all the fixings to satisfactorily serve their clientele, some coming from as far away as the national capital.
After the holidays, there was a respite—a deep communal sigh of relief that yet another season had successfully passed. This lull was generally filled with a quite good cheer such as one has after consuming a well-prepared feast. In fact, the comparison was very apt as the brothers themselves also tended to up consumption of all sorts during the festive season.
Brother Mike was enjoying the seasonal afterglow during his first go at the cards for the New Year. They had just dealt the first hand when there was a raucous pounding on the sliding glass door. All looked up, but only Karl recognizing Etienne frantically knocking on the door.
As Karl escorted Etienne into the room, he announced to all that Etienne was the houseboy of Mr. Goldfarb, the math teacher at the Catholic High School. While none of the other players knew Mr. Goldfarb, they had heard of him, as he had been here for ages. Now in his advanced years, he still walked to school every day, wearing the same old charcoal gray three-piece tweed suit with a red fraternity tie. No one knew if he had but one set of clothes, but he was only seen wearing the same somber attire when he marched to and from school, through the years with the same strong gate.
Like Karl, Mr. Goldfarb had sent his wife to back Europe, or she had opted to return. In any event, as with many expats in town, they lived separate lives. Since La Coopération—the international assistance agency that employed most of the expatriates ostensibly assisting the country in various capacities—paid travel for the whole family, a spouse living in Europe could come to Africa on holiday while one working here could return at regular intervals to reacquaint him- or herself with the homeland.
These somewhat fluid spousal arrangements led to a variety of accords. While Karl found in this detached connection a new freedom to sow the wild oats he had forgone as a youth, when he was consumed by his academics, Mr. Goldfarb had preferred a more staid arrangement—setting up house with a young girl for whom he could more likely have been a grandfather than a lover.
This relationship, so scorching at the onset, had cooled and assumed another form of detachment as Mr. Goldfarb’s years continued to climb. While the flame may not have been fully extinguished, the young and striking (and for all intents and purposes, the second Mrs. Goldfarb) frequently sought the attention of younger men—often on the veranda of the Crane. Many an evening, the still comely but aging second Mrs. Goldfarb could be seen on the portico encircled by a gaggle of would-be suitors. After leaving the Crane Hotel, whatever, however, and wherever things happened was only the object of the community’s active rumor mill, as the second Mrs. Goldfarb, to her credit, masked her extracurricular flings in nearly complete secrecy. The onlookers could only, as they did so well, wonder with whom and how.
While his spouse was assessing the evening’s crop of young admirers strutting their virility at the Crane, Mr. Goldfarb could be seen in his study through the rarely drawn drapes, pacing back and forth in his shirt sleeves, a whisky glass in his hand, a well-used bottle on the coffee table, listening to cassettes of François-Joseph Gossec and seemingly talking to himself between sips.
But now the delicate spousal equilibrium had shifted, as a
