C5 I'm dying

He found her in the garden, leaning over some plants.

Her passion for gardening began after Roland’s death. She spent the entire afternoon in the sun. It kept her free from the shadows of her thoughts, at least for a time. She once had friends who came in the afternoon and sat on the veranda over lunch.

The rest of her time had been spent painting in the studio on the third floor, looking out on the lake.

He stood behind her. She never heard him approach.

As much as the big straw hat covered her face, with the black silk veil hanging down on her eyes, he could still see the burnished apricot of her skin on the back of her neck.

Burnished apricot is hidden in shadow.

The hair tumbling down her back was black as a crow’s. She was called Crow Maiden on the reservation. She was Apache.

She was a fierce warrior, so often with Yeo as the enemy. He was the capitalist. She was a woman of the people. She hated and feared him. He hated and feared her.

It was their opposition that brought them so close.

She hated the white devil.

She hated the white devil for all he had done to her people and their sacred lands, and what he had done across the world to violate other people’s lands.

Yeo was Chinese to her, in spite of the fact that his mother was a white devil heiress. She never mentioned that she knew.

Her father had struck oil on some land he owned. He lavished it on his youngest daughter, making sure she got all the education she wanted.

She had traveled to Tehran before the Shah fell, and returned several times to continue her studies in the Moslem religion, the roots of which fascinated her at the time.

She fled the city several weeks before the Revolution.

She was actually a student in Paris then, studying Marx when Yeo met her.

She was ten years younger than him then. She was ten years younger than him now.

He had watched her grow from a bright young girl to a profound aging woman.

After her parents died, she sold her interest in the oil fields and moved to Italy. She felt her hands were stained. She knew the oil she had sold would be used to destroy the earth, whether she sold it or not.

The white devil’s cars and factories would heat up the sky and choke all life to death.

Perhaps it was because his mother was white that she only half-loved him. Is that what separated them? That half of him that appalled her?

But it always went much deeper as such passions do.

She was all the beautiful glass that Mother had been. The same cool beauty drew him toward her.

Or was it her distance that actually set him free?

With the distance, he could pursue his empire with no guilt about someone left behind because of his ambitions.

In the end, she had always left him behind and never looked back to see if he was following her.

She knew he’d always be there.

They were always opposed to each other. Although he had witnessed the Sixties while a student at Harvard and sympathized with its movements for change, he was far too programmed by his father’s expectations to do anything differently.

Ilina continued to prod at the soil with the small shovel, the water can at her side, as he studied her consummate meditation, her perfect concentration.

He thought of her as Cubist in nature, her personality like the shards of a shattered mirror. She would make the perfect Picasso painting.

“Ilina,” he said tenderly.

She never invited him. He always came unannounced. She might never invite him if he waited.

Yet, she was always warm when he arrived.

She turned from her work.

“Yeo,” she said and looked up at him.

She studied his face just as intensely as she studied the leaves of the plants.

“I have bad news,” he told her.

“You look pale.”

“I’m dying.”

She set down her tools and stood up.

“Come to the kitchen. I will make you something.”

It had never changed since that first day he followed her back to the hotel.

She dictated what they did, but always in a gentle manner. She was always the mother.

He was glad to follow.