We sat on my couch drinking a Yugoslav white wine, which, though not particularly good, is not particularly bad either, and which is extremely cheap; the recent devaluation of the dinar had brought the price down to around 79¢ a bottle. We finished one bottle and got most of the way through a second, by which time we were assuring each other that the wine was really very good after all, wasn’t it, and that it seemed to improve with each glass.

And then Tuppence said, “You dig this li’l pickaninny, Bwana Evan? Do you now?”

“Ah, the natives are restless.”

“They are indeed. Do you think you might extinguish that barbaric cacophony” – we had been listening to a Miles Davis record – “and put on something tribal?”

I made sure Minna’s door was closed. Minna was a seven-year-old Lithuanian girl who had moved into my apartment several months previously, and who seemed likely to stay forever. She was sleeping soundly, and I closed her door and changed the jazz record for a Folkways recording of Kenyan and Ugandan chants, dances, and work songs. I turned the volume down low, and Tuppence bounced off the couch and turned the volume up high, and laughed gaily and kicked off her shoes and began to dance.

“Native girl dance for you, Bwana Evan.” Her white eyes rolled in her dark face. “Native girl make you hot with passion, wild with lust. Native girl turn you on, baby. You better believe it.”

I don’t know whether or not her dance was an authentic example of Kenyan tribal folk-dancing. I rather think not. It seemed a combination of African dance and current American styles, with the limbs loose, the hips shaking, the buttocks twitching, and the whole body transfigured by an endless chaotic rhythm. And through it all Tuppence’s lips showed a smile of eternal female knowledge, and her huge eyes twinkled in calculated abandon.

She was a striking girl. She was the wrong color to win a Miss America contest, the shade of good, well-rubbed walnut. She was tall and long-legged, with a high, protruding bottom and a flat stomach and full breasts. Her face was long, oval in shape, with a high, broad forehead and a cap of tight, kinky black curls.