“After the Dance”: Malagasy Style

I’m not sure who said it first, but fiction tells truths that the facts can’t reach. Many people have ask me how much of my stories are true. I’m tempted to say everything, especially the parts that I invented.

But I know that’s not what they mean. They’re really asking which parts of my stories are based on actual occurrences. That’s not as easy a question to answer. It varies from book to book, and the actual events have often been stretched beyond recognition.

Let me give an example.

The biggest social event of the year in most embassies is the Marine Ball, hosted by the embassy’s marine contingent and held in November, near the anniversary of the Marine Corp’s establishment in 1775. Our diplomatic community dresses up in their finest and invites high-ranking local contacts for dinner and dancing.

During our time in Madagascar, my wife, Felicia, was unexpectedly called back home to Oregon in November because of a death in the family. I was very sorry for the loss to her family, but I have to admit to feeling a bit relieved that, without my wife, I could hardly be required to attend the ball. My sense of liberation proved short lived. Before leaving, Felicia set me up for the ball with Joy, the seventeen year-old daughter of a missionary couple we were close to. She had long wanted to attend a dance, but her parents frowned on it. They decided, though, that I could be trusted with their daughter. Joy ended up having a wonderful time and I was glad that I’d made it possible for her to attend.

These events always go late, and I suppose it must have been about one in the morning when we got in the car to go home. The route home—she and her parents lived in the same suburb as Felicia and our son and I did—led along a deserted mile-long stretch of unlighted two-lane blacktop.

We were perhaps halfway down this road when my headlights picked up a roadblock formed of metal gates about a hundred yards in front of us. Social unrest and rising crime had plagued the island over the previous year. Fearing that the roadblock had been set up by robbers, which had happened more than once, I stopped for a long moment, trying to decide if the roadblock was set up by criminals or the army. This was a narrow distinction, as soldiers were also perfectly capable of robbing us.

I decided they looked like soldiers and, with our only alternative consisting of going back into the city and taking a miles-long circuitous route home, I decided to roll forward.

As we slowly approached the roadblock, the sergeant in charge, standing on the driver’s side of the car, noticed my diplomatic license plate and waved me through.

To this day, I have no idea what was going through the head of one of the soldiers on the other side of the car. Perhaps he hadn’t noticed his sergeant waving us through. Perhaps something made him suddenly suspicious. Whichever the case, he pulled back the bolt on his AK-47 and braced to fire. Joy made a little cry and fainted. I decided to keep going.

I told myself to do nothing sudden, neither slam on the brakes nor speed up. Though part of me—perhaps the part given to denial—thought the soldier wouldn’t fire, another part waited for bullets to come at us through the back window as I crawled through the roadblock.

Did the sergeant tell him not to fire? Or maybe he just wanted to scare us and never intended to pull the trigger. In any case, we got through safely, Joy revived and we were home a moment later with a tale to tell.

So, how does this turn into fiction? Most of all, in my novel, “Madagascar,” Joy and I have been replaced by a diplomat named Robert Knox and his chauffeur, Samuel, who have gotten lost and inadvertently driven into an unknown village in the middle of a riot. Samuel is ill with malaria, so Knott is driving.

This passage describes things quite different from what actually happened to us, but you can see how the event described above informed the writing.

“Is that the way to Tamatave?” I ask.

Samuel shakes his head. He looks very uneasy. “I don’t know, patron, but I think we should leave this town.”

From somewhere in front of us comes the crash of shattering glass and a loud “whoof!”

I look up to see blue flames burst against a row of shacks, the fire flowing like a waterfall down the wooden walls.

Silhouetted against the flames, a group of young men run down the street toward our car.

“Turn around, Mr. Knott. We need to leave this place.”

I try to make a quick u-turn, but the dirt lane is too narrow for the Peugeot and I hit a wooden post I hadn't seen. I back up, the steering wheel shuddering in my hands. The right front wheel whirs loudly against its crumpled fender. Another store bursts into flames in front of me. Half a dozen young men throw their hands in the air, shouting in glee.

Out of the darkness comes a flat pop-pop-pop. The young men scatter.

“That is gunfire, sir,” Samuel says from the back seat, his voice tight. “Get out of this town, Monsieur Knott.”

“I’m doing the best I can,” I mutter. Fighting the balky steering wheel, I manage to back the car around and point it down the street.

I realize later that the police must have been waiting in the shadows for the fire bombs to explode, ready to crack down against the violence they knew was coming, and had probably provoked. Now they run into the unpaved street, dragging two metal barriers after them, and set up a roadblock. One of the policemen lights a couple of flares and throws them into the road, illuminating the scene in an intense red light that give the policeman the lurid appearance of apprentice fiends.

I drive slowly toward the barriers and hope I appear to be exactly what I am, a befuddled foreigner who has taken a disastrously wrong turn.

Two policemen, one with sergeant’s stripes on his arm, stand at the barricade. As I drive toward them the one who isn't a sergeant fires a burst into the air from his AK-47, orange flame flaring from the muzzle.

I involuntarily duck my head but continue to creep forward. My hands are slippery with sweat. My foot hovers over the accelerator then the brake and back to the accelerator. I'm afraid that if I stop the car they won't let me through. I'm equally afraid that if I don't stop they'll shoot me.

As we approach the roadblock, the sergeant spots the car’s diplomatic plates and, after a moment of hesitation, waves me through.

I roll into the narrow gap between the metal barriers. As I do, a movement in the rear-view mirror catches my eye.

Two policemen are running toward us in the dark, shouting and waving their guns. One of them stops, pulls back the bolt on his assault rifle and braces to fire.

With car blocking their view of the barricade, these two apparently haven't seen the sergeant wave me through. They think I'm running the barricade.

From the back seat Samuel lets out a cry. “Patron, they’re going to shoot!”

The chatter of the rifle, the crash of the breaking glass and the whir of the bullets passing through the car come in one single, terrifying roar.

I stand on the accelerator and the car jumps through the barricades, scattering the policemen in front of us.

They jump out of the way and bring their weapons up to fire.

I turn sharply down a narrow dirt lane. The rattle of automatic rifles breaks through the chaos of burning builds and running men.

I curse as the unpaved lane quickly ends in a T formed by an intersecting footpath. My foot falls off the clutch as I slam on the brakes and the car dies. That's when I hear Samuel groan.

Shouts and the thud of pounding boots come from the direction of the roadblock. I doubt they're running up to apologize.

I jump out of the car, throw open the back door, put my hands under Samuel's arms and drag him out of the car. “Are you hit, Samuel? Samuel?” I feel something warm and sticky on my hands and hear him groan again.

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When Sandra Day O’Connor Visited the Island of Ghosts

Yes, that’s my wife Felicia and me with Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman named to the United States Supreme Court. You might reasonably assume this comes from a little cocktail party in Washington, DC. In fact, the photo shows us in Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar, often referred to by the Malagasy themselves as The Island of Ghosts. And I’m the host.

You might well ask what in the world she was doing there. In fact, she was a good friend of our ambassador, Patricia Gates Lynch, who invited her to come visit in order to establish ties with members of Madagascar’s Supreme Court. This would greatly improve the image of the United States in a country where the government had tended to keep us at arm’s length, but was becoming more approachable. Probably, it had begun to occur to them that having the Soviet Union and North Korea as their closest allies put them on the wrong side of history.

The visit came on relatively short notice and I was teamed with my good friend Liam Humphreys, head of the embassy’s political section to arrange the schedule. It proved a lot harder than we had anticipated. While we needed to give the Justice’s a full slate of events, and we were getting all kinds of positive noises from the Malagasy government, no one wanted to commit to doing a particular thing in a particular place at a particular time.

Soon, Justice O’Connor was due any day and Ambassador Lynch was politely breathing down our collective neck, while we were getting nowhere. The Ambassador was a very good sort, but this was important to her and we knew we had to get it right. I mean, we couldn’t very well meet Justice O’Connor at the airport and say, “So, what would you like to do?” (A news story from Washington had recently recounted how, at a formal dinner, a famous football player, who had been drinking way too much, shouted across the table to Justice O’Connor, “C’mon, Sandy baby, loosen up a little!” Liam and I were daring each other to hold up a hand-painted sign to that effect when she arrived. The Ambassador would have executed us on the spot, but it might almost have been worth it.)

By the end, we were nervous wrecks, but it had all turned out well. Everything fell into place at the last moment and Justice O’Connor proved a great trouper. She must have been reeling with jetlag after two very long flights, but she never showed it and was a delight to work with. On her last night in-country, I hosted a party for the embassy staff, giving us all a chance to chat and have our pictures taken with her.

While the party was going strong, Felicia took out a camera and asked Liam and me to pose for a picture. While we sat with appropriate diplomatic dignity, she said, “No, show me how you really feel.” The photo below is the result.

By the way, if I look a touch thin in the top photo, it’s because, after a bout of stomach amoebas, my six-foot-three frame was down to 145 pounds. And if Felicia appears more slim than usual, she had just recovered from a near-fatal case of malaria. Don’t let anyone tell you life in the Foreign Service is easy – especially on the Island of Ghosts.

As I say above, the Malagasy themselves sometimes refer to their home with these words. It is difficult to describe how different their world is from ours, how mutually incomprehensible our customs and culture.

I’ve tried to capture something of this in my suspense/thriller “Madagascar,” telling readers that the main character may not be Robert Knox, an American diplomat who has driven his life, his career and his soul into a hole so deep that he has drilled right through the center of the earth and emerged in Madagascar.

Here’s a slightly edited sample from the second chapter in which I try to catch something of the feel of this enigmatic place, and a hint of why it’s called the Island of Ghosts. Knox, head of the embassy’s political section, has been threatened with disclosure to the embassy of his mounting gambling debts, which would end his career, such as it is.

 Excerpt from Madagascar

In the unlighted parking lot of the Hotel Continental, I steady my shaking hands and mutter to myself. “The bastard. Let him write his goddamn letter.” But my chest feels tight and it takes a couple of tries to draw a good breath.

The night air tastes of exotic flowers blossoming in the dark and carries a promise of rain. In a couple of months the jacaranda petals will fall like lavender snow.

I put the car in gear and drive along the small lake bordering the hotel. The boulevard leads through a tunnel that separates the upper town from the lower, and comes out along the sad and faded Avenue de l’Independence, the city’s main boulevard, its shops shuttered and dark, the marketplace and its sea of white umbrellas folded up. The street is empty, deserted even by the children who crawl up to the cars at stop signs, begging for change, their faces eaten by leprosy or their spines deformed by congenital disease.

On the overbuilt slopes that rise above the rows of dilapidated colonial facades, dim lights glow in the tall mud-brick houses. I think of their lamplit rooms, crowded with the ghosts. For most Malagasy, the spirits of their ancestors hover forever just over their shoulders, squeezing into every corner, tapping at the windows, haunting the doorways until there's not enough room for the living.

It only takes a few minutes to drive home. I turn up the short drive in front of my place and flash the headlights. The night guard, Monsieur Razafy—like many Malagasy, he has only one name—swings the gate open, touches the brim of his cap and gives me a chin-up nod to welcome me home. I pull into the carport of the large two-story house I merit as head of the political section. Costs the taxpayer all of a couple hundred a month.

When I get out of the car I don't go inside right away but wander into the back yard, dark and quiet at this hour, and take a deep lungful of the clean, thin air—the French describe the climate up here on the central plateau as pleasantly unhealthful—and try to exhale the tension from my meeting with Picard.

On the quiet night air I hear the snick-snick-snick of Monsieur Razafy cutting the grass with hand clippers. I once bought him a gas-powered mower, but Razafy, a serious, solidly-built man, refused it, saying, “I have always done it this way.” I tried to tell him the mower would save him a lot of time. Razafy looked at me with an expression that asked, “What is time—your kind of time—to me?”

A gust of wind rustles the trees and I look into the sky. Flashes of lightning light up the great thunderheads stacked up to the east, the lightning bolts not striking the ground but leaping from cloud to cloud, blinking like some kind of celestial pinball machine. It's all silent, the thunder swallowed by the miles, the storm like a distant battle, weighted with unreadable portent. When I start thinking like this it's time to go inside.

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