by Maggie Gee
The boy himself was lucky: too young to kill. The boy was unlucky, he was cursed, he was doomed, for soon he was so thirsty he was drinking his own urine, soon (how long? was it days, weeks, hours?), soon he was so desperate he was helping other children to kill a girl sergeant who tried to escape. If you wanted to live, you obeyed orders. One blow each, hammering with great bloodied stones, grunting as they struck, just wanting it over, battering her face so her lids would close. She was looking at them, and her lips were moving. Ten of them surrounded her, hating her. Then another great blow made a smashed red rose in which two small white teeth were slowly sinking. Turn by turn until the thing was not human. Turn by turn, until just a dark bladder of blood was lying in the heat, quivering. Two of the older girls held each other, laughing, and then he saw that one was sobbing, but they had hit her as hard as the rest, and then it was over, they all marched on. And all of them knew they could never be forgiven. And all of them knew they would do it again.
He beats at his scalp, which has something eating it. Soon it is quiet. He slips down from his tree and pads as lightly and carefully as his pained toes allow down the path towards the old woman’s tent. First he’ll pick up her money and her mobile phone, then he’ll take someone’s boots, and then he’ll move on.
Now fate favours him. He turns the handle, gently: the door is not locked, he slips inside. But his stomach distracts him. There are packets of nuts on her bedside table and two whole bananas, though a third she has started is covered with ants, shimmering and heaving, glistening, quivering, because the stupid old woman knows nothing. He stuffs the rest in the pockets of his trousers. Now he feels in the bed for the place where she hid the money. His arm is deep under the cold, wet duvet and his fingers have just touched the edge of something when he hears footsteps approach down the path, and he dives through the door behind him to crouch, shivering, in the bathroom.
When Gregory, the room servant, switches off the vacuum he hears a strange noise the other side of the wall. A red-tailed monkey has got in again! He picks up a broom and goes in to do battle, but what he sees is two skinny human legs in boots disappearing through the open roof of the bathroom, and someone is pulling himself up into the tree, and he shouts and beats at the intruder’s boots, then runs round through the door and calls for help. It is gone midday when they give up the pursuit. ‘One of those thieving Batwa,’ says Gregory. ‘I am sure it was. His legs were small.’
Now giant wheels are being put into motion to ratchet Uganda back from the edge of war. How can gold and oil be extracted from a war-zone? Many powerful nations have an interest in this. America, Canada, Britain, for a start. What can the donors offer to prevent a war? Money. ‘Aid.’ Oh, and weapons. You need new weapons to prevent new wars. The soldiers sit at the border, bored. The rich countries wrangle about money.
But in an isolated stretch of forest near Kisoro, two opposing border patrols spot each other. They pause. One Ugandan soldier lifts his rifle to his shoulder. A man from the Congo raped his sister, or that is what she told their mother. Through his rifle sight, the enemy’s impossibly tiny.
40
Mary Tendo is in church. It was not easy to return, after half a year of not showing her face.
She had nearly gone to the morning service. Charles looked at her dressed in her best at breakfast and smiled. ‘I will escort you, my sweet,’ he said. He has never been a churchgoer, for which she forgives him, since she says he is a Christian man in his heart, and a better man than many churchgoers; but not going to church has not made her happy. Yet when he offered to escort her, she only said, ‘As yet, I have not decided.’ The hour of the morning service came and went, and Charles looked at her with his head on one side and said nothing. At last, at 5 PM, when the heat had lessened, when far-flung families of storks began drifting down from their high thermals, circling each other, now coming closer, something shifted and melted in Mary’s heart, and she put on her hat, and took his arm.
Mary walked in swiftly, with her head held high, in her best blue dress which matched the hat. She has stayed away for nearly six months, partly because her prayers were not answered, partly because they ask for too much money. But when she was in the village, she had gone to church with her brother, her uncle, her aunt. They walked two miles to church and back, and when her brother said how lucky Mary was to have churches in Kampala on every street corner, she thought, I have not been using this luck.
But as she came in, there was Sarah Tindyebwa, the last person in the world she wanted to see, who used to be Mary’s superior, the Assistant Housekeeper, long ago, at the Nile Imperial Hotel, when Mary ran the Linen Room. Sarah Tindyebwa has never accepted the fact that Mary has done better in life than her, with her splendid job at the Sheraton. When she saw Mary, her eyes sharpened.
‘Is it really you, Mary Tendo? Have you been ill? We were worried about you. We have not seen you for so long.’
It was easy for Mary to translate this. ‘Where have you been? You have not paid your tithes. I expect you were busy with satanism, or have you become a prostitute?’
Mary certainly got the better of her. ‘Sarah, it is nice to see you. Is that a new hat, or is it your mother’s? I have been with my family in the village.’
Yet none of this was very Christian.
Now she kneels on the hassock on the hard cold floor and prays, looking between her fingers at the wood of the pew, the red of her Bible. She no longer knows where to look for God. Once she thought that God was everywhere, but now she is no longer sure, because he did not find Jamil for her. Perhaps she has driven Him away. And she asks Him, humbly, to come back. What I have lost, may I find again. Help me believe in You again.
But the red, real, cover of the Bible distracts her.
She is grateful, at least, to be here, to be still, despite the singing, despite the people, as they wait for the minister to arrive. She is here alone. She is not working, or caring for the baby, the daughter she cannot bear to talk to, or giving orders to the maid. She can think about her life, and the visit to the village. And the thing like a stone, the loss of her son.
I have not been grateful for what He has given. I am too angry with everyone. Perhaps I have been trying to punish God by not coming to church, because of what happened. But He gave the village water. The water of life. He made Trevor able to mend the well. And yet I tried to punish Trevor, also, for being an ignorant muzungu in Uganda ... I could not stop being angry with him.
Still it was good for Trevor to feel like me, when I was in my twenties, and first came to London, and cleaned their toilets and their offices. The English made me feel like an ignorant Ugandan. They thought I knew nothing, and understood nothing. No-one saw me, or valued me. The English did not value me, just because I was not born in their country. But I cannot blame Trevor. He is a good man.
When we used to go out and smoke in the garden (which Vanessa did not know, or she would have been angry, and when she discovered it, she screamed like a mad thing), Trevor listened to me when I talked about Jamil. He did not say very much, but he listened. He made me feel my sorrow was something. And then, for a while, I could be happy again. And often, the sorrow almost disappears, like a cloud no bigger than a tiny bush sparrow, hopping in the yard towards Theodora ...
And as she thinks that, it comes back again. So sharp, so heavy, the loss of a son.
‘Are you OK?’ Her reverie is broken by her neighbour in the pew, who pats her shoulder, and she realises everyone else is standing and singing: they are nearly in the middle of the first hymn, while she is still on her knees in pain, still thinking of Jamil, and she pulls herself upright, but the hymn is ending, and she sinks back down. ‘I am well, thank you.’
Soon the priest, a new one she has never seen, which shows how long she has been away, is doing the first reading.
‘There was a man who had two sons. The younger one said to his father, “Father, give me my share of the estate.” So he divided his property between them. N
ot long after that, the younger son got together all he had, set off for a distant country and there squandered his wealth in wild living. After he had spent everything, there was a severe famine in that whole country, and he began to be in need ...’
She thinks, Jamil set off for a far distant country. If he still lives, is he in need? Is he cold, or hungry? Does he think of me? The sunlight behind the stained glass windows makes the green panes glow like grass and leaves, and the reds like the blood that Jesus shed, the blood that taught his children forgiveness. Now its brightness fades with the end of day. Maybe one day her pain will lessen. She closes her eyes and listens, listens, drinks in the psalm as she sits and rests.
‘It is good to make music to the Lord, to proclaim his love in the evening. A new heart have I given you, and a new spirit have I put within you. I will take from your breast the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh ...’
In Bwindi Impenetrable Rainforest, the trekkers have finally turned back, and at last the gorillas can have some rest. Their cortisol levels start to settle, their heartbeats under their thick pelts steady. But identical chemicals still flood through the humans, driving their bruised, strained tendons onward, for they know they are in danger: night is coming. They are in the wrong place, at the wrong time. Vanessa thinks, I never should have come to Bwindi. Or even Uganda. I should have stayed at home. It’s all been a failure: I haven’t met Mary. What if I never see Justin again? Abdy, Abdy. My darling boy. And I didn’t say goodbye to Trevor ...
How will her loved ones manage without her?
The rain has stopped, but they are sliding through mud, and the branches they clutch at drench them with water. The guides and porters have changed their nature. They are dark, focused, muscled, efficient, they no longer chat or laugh or take breaks, they have become a wave or a river, combining with each other and the land they know in one sole intent, to get the bazungu out of Bwindi. They have gone too far, stayed too late.
The dark comes up suddenly like a tsunami, overwhelming each tree, from the roots to the tip, as the sun slips precipitously down behind the hilltops. Two of them happen to have torches: too few, and now the bazungu deliver a judgement. ‘Why didn’t you guys come equipped with torches?’ The porters look grim. They have no money for torches. Now they slow to a halt, for at every step, they stumble.
‘We aren’t going to make it,’ smart Cyrus says. ‘Without any light, we’ll never make it.’
‘Put a lid on that,’ says the fattest woman, her voice all of a sudden surprisingly sturdy. ‘None of that kind of talk. I got grandkids.’
And they shuffle onwards, cursing the darkness, dreading sharp branches coming at their faces, the sudden fall, the sharp edge of bone. And each of them starts to think someone is behind them; dogging their heels, a quiet, dark figure. The fat women’s hearts are beating too fast. Step by step they go, like old, blind people. They are being hunted; they are being harrowed.
It leaves them, the last of the afterglow. Now they have found it, the heart of darkness. Now their feet will no longer carry them. Whatever follows them, overtakes them.
Kabila’s envoy has come to Kampala. He has been received in Museveni’s home. He felt he was entering a dream, or a film, a Hollywood film with a wedding cake: there are rows of white pillars along the front, white as icing in the blaze of lights; the steps are wide and slippy as glass; gallons of white water spring out from a fountain like the skirt of a European wedding-dress. There is marble everywhere, like hardened clouds, clouds that are trapped under more glass, more polish. The Congolese feels ill-at-ease in State House; every inch of every room shows his adversary’s power, the blood-red carpets on the floor, the blood-red curtains in the windows, the plasma televisions in great dark cabinets, the strange gold and cream chairs which must be European, with legs like severed haunches of cattle. Museveni sits in the biggest chair, but this, reflects the man from DRC, is perhaps a mistake, for its size makes the President look smaller and older.
The room is full of people, assiduous, muttering, bringing statistics, making interventions: Museveni’s people, Kabila’s people. They are ready to sit far into the night. They are trying to make this ‘an African solution’: which means American, Canadian, British, Chinese. They are thinking numbers: enormous numbers. They are thinking economic co-operation. They are thinking, principally, of joint exploitation of the oil reserves under Lake Albert, whose shores are divided between the two countries. It’s where war will break out, unless they can contain it. They are thinking, too, about the National Parks, how some of them are sitting on a gold mine, literally, and others are blocking the path to oil. Bwindi, Virunga, Queen Elizabeth Park, the syllables are uttered with greed and anger, and irritation about the ‘donors’ who are sentimental about gorillas, these stupid bazungu who like trees and animals and don’t want Africans to have electricity.
‘And yet there is money in gorillas,’ says the Minister of Tourism, softly, smiling. He has to defend his own department.
They nod, slowly, these opposing statesmen.
But the trouble is, there is not enough money. Too much of it has to be divided with the people, these greedy local people who clamour for it, whining and complaining they have lost their livelihood. And now even the Batwa dare to ask for some! Those tiny people who are less than nothing!
The Minister of Tourism makes suggestions. He links his suggestions to Museveni’s ideas. Museveni smiles: he approves of enterprise, particularly when he gets the credit. A new Eco-tourism initiative? He likes the sound of it. Yes, why not. He will launch a new Eco-tourism initiative. Divide the money in a new way! It will be all good news: he has learned from the British. Nothing will be lost, and much will be gained. And some things will remain as they have always been, since laws were passed ‘protecting’ the forest. The Batwa, the children of the forest, who lack addresses, and bank accounts, will get what they have always got: they are too small, too light, too mobile: no-one can see them; they will get nothing; they are light as midges or stars, dancing upwards, though sometimes they irritate, like a mosquito. In the end, where can the Batwa go?
And as for the gold, and the oil reserves: for now there is plenty outside the Parks. There must be joint exploitation, co-operation, and the international donors must help them to co-operate. And then, of course, they will take their cut. It will all work out, except when it doesn’t. But the LRA ( and M7 bangs the table) – the LRA must be brought to its knees. And for this, they need DRC’s co-operation, to flush out the LRA from their borders; and more encouragement; and more donors.
A minion sees, and swats, a mosquito, about to alight on the presidential arm. The President must be protected. Even great men can be vulnerable. Museveni smiles and speaks again. Perhaps this will last for several hours. Kabila’s envoy must stay awake. But he grasps the essential before he dozes: there will be new peace talks, in Tanzania. Kabila and Museveni will meet in person. An African solution. A global solution. Unseen, a mosquito, moving fast and low, a tiny creature with arcane knowledge, lands lightly on Museveni’s foot.
‘I’m being crucified by mosquitoes,’ says Cyrus. Vanessa is too, but she won’t complain. Exhaustion has turned her into a stoic. They huddle together, most of them silent, saving their torches. They can’t find their insect cream. All of them are bitten. They accept it.
And then light appears, bobbing in the distance, one light, then another, then a spread net of lights, moving up through the forest, coming dancing towards them, little stars of orange and gold on the darkness, and the guides and the porters start talking excitedly and giving little yelps and shouts of glee.
‘What’s going on, feller?’ An American voice, rough with hope, from the rear of the column.
‘Now we will wait. We will all wait here, because help is coming. The people of Buhoma are bringing lanterns. The people of Buhoma are coming to save us. The people of Buhoma will take us back home.’
41
The restaurant of the Goril
la Forest Camp is kindly lit, with candles and oil-lamps, but the older faces who look at each other across the long table at 10 PM are haggard, exhausted, ten years more ancient than when they set off on the trek this morning. Several of them were too tired to wash, so they’ve come in to dinner just as they are. In the flickering flames, the younger ones carry it off like a festival, a wild, sylvan style, rather charming, mud dappling and stippling fine urban features, fragments of bark and leaf in their hair. When you look more carefully, though, they are just exhausted: their eyes have a blank, thousand-mile stare. But yes, the forest has played with them. It has picked them up, and shaken them, and printed them all over with its feral footsteps; it has stolen their hats, one shoe (as its owner was carried, helpless, one leg swinging free, dangling laces), two pairs of sunglasses, a teeny-weeny camera which was ‘so costly’, its owner laments, a mobile phone, a GPS – young Cyrus moans, ‘See, I don’t know where I am!’ It has taken their things away from them.
‘I started to think, I had stayed too long,’ says Vanessa, gazing at the menu for tonight. ‘If I’d left yesterday, I’d have got away with it.’ One or two people nod at her. In their present state, they can’t make sense of what’s on offer. Potted Shrimps, Choice of Plaice with Lemon Butter or Grilled Lamb Cutlets with Mint Sauce, Choice of Apple Crumble or Treacle Pudding with Custard. Pure 1950s England: in the middle of the night, in the middle of a rainforest, in the middle of sub-Saharan Africa. They eat, tonight, hastily and quietly, as if they are afraid they have been caught out, as if the illusion won’t hold much longer, as if ’50s England is falling apart. The two enormously fat women who had to be carried by the porters sit stolidly, mutely drinking whisky. In the end, one of them looks up, and speaks: ‘I thought we were stuck in the forest for the night.’
