by Simon Ings
‘Weren’t you invited?’
‘No,’ replies the Soviet purseholder, sulking already.
‘The Chinese ambassador congratulated FRELIMO on its self-reliant approach.’
Guarded: ‘Yes?’
‘He praised our belief in the people’s capacity for autonomous change.’
Big eyes now: ‘Really?’
Katalayo smiles his trademark smile.
Sweating now: have his paymasters been gazumped? ‘What did you tell him?’
‘I told him where to stick it. Much as I keep telling you.’
We laughed.
No one took him seriously.
Miriam’s sales had by now taken on a life of their own. No room was spared, no cupboard, no shelf. The atmosphere – the desire to shrive – achieved a Lutheran intensity. Chandeliers vanished from under dusty ceiling roses. The cork message board disappeared from the entrance hall, leaving a bright magnolia square on the tobacco-stained wall. At last, Miriam’s Lenten ritual drew near to the Society’s holy-of-holies – its library.
Towards the end of every afternoon, Miriam and a couple of elderly regulars combed the shelves of the library for volumes to discard. They were like people eating mussels, who start by picking out the choicest shells and end up consuming the lot. The philosophy behind the Society was itself so smudged by the passage of years that even these old hands had trouble deciding which volumes were necessary to the collection and which were not. If Winged Love and Wellington Wendy had no place here, what case was there for retaining an incomplete set of John Lehmann’s New Writing? What did the poetry of Keith Douglas have that the short stories of James Hanley did not? If illustrated catalogues of Henry Moore deserved shelf space, who was Graham Sutherland that he should be excluded? And what kind of philosophical society was it that gave shelf space to Arthur Koestler, while expelling J. B. Priestley and J. D. Arven?
I stopped what I was doing. I took the volumes out of the box again and laid them side by side on the table.
‘A to K’ and ‘L to Z’.
A dictionary of philosophy, in two parts.
By then, Jorge Katalayo had left London for Tanzania. He had given me a forwarding address. I wrote to him on the flyleaf of the first volume: ‘You actually learned English from this tosh?’
I posted the dictionary off the same day, and forgot all about it.
Jorge Chivambo Katalayo: former goatherd, former UN researcher, freedom fighter, doctor of anthropology. I never saw him again.
My abiding memory is of the afternoon before his speech at the Women’s Institute. We spent it in a greasy spoon on the Roman Road, cramming doughnuts into our faces, hoping that the sugar might substitute for inspiration.
‘Before we do anything,’ Jorge declaims, ‘we have to get our own people working with us.’ Ring, jam, chocolate icing: it’s all one to him. ‘Fragmentation is our biggest problem,’ he says. ‘At the moment, one village barely knows another.’
I say to him, ‘Your audience won’t understand that. That won’t mean anything to them. How can neighbours not be aware of each other? Roads are like trees to us. Like grass. The idea you have to build a road before you know what’s at the end of it – it’s not in the Home Counties vocabulary.’
‘Home Counties?’
‘I mean it won’t play to the women of the W.I.’
He makes a note.
‘We cannot begin to build’ – he tries again – ‘while our men and women live in hate and fear of each other.’
‘Meaning what?’
‘Meaning, on any ordinary day under the Portuguese system, two cattle trucks might pull up in the middle of a work village – an aldeamento. The men are told to board one truck, the women are told board the other. The men are driven off to work the fields. The women are going to mend the roads. These men and women, from the same village, married, some of them, sweethearts, brother and sister – they may never see each other again. It’s not a deliberate policy, exactly. It’s just the soldiers lose track of where they’ve been. It’s a big country. Everybody looks alike. The soldiers don’t speak Chichewa and the authorities have made damned certain the locals don’t learn Portuguese. So the soldiers can’t keep track. In the evening, they drive you to the nearest aldeamento and dump you there. Where’s your wife? Where’s your girlfriend? No one knows. No one cares.’
He looks at me.
‘Well?’
I nod.
‘What does that mean?’
‘Yes.’
He lifts his gaze to the ceiling. ‘Help me with this, Saul.’
‘I just don’t think they’re going to believe you,’ I tell him. ‘They grew up with Kipling. They think law and order is a European invention. Whatever else the Portuguese visited on the black man, they’ve surely been making the trains run on time.’
Sometimes, when Jorge Katalayo is out of inspiration, when he has drunk too much coffee, and eaten too much sugar, and especially when he is nervous, all you can do is make him angry; see if a spark will catch.
He shouts at me: ‘You think we have some sort of enlightened master–servant bond? Mozambique isn’t the Raj. Even the Raj wasn’t the Raj, but let that go…’
He has an idea: ‘In the forties there were only about three thousand whites in Mozambique. Now there’s two hundred thousand of these idiots dragging their knuckles across our country, thinking they’re better than we are because of the colour of their skin. Which, I might add, is like diarrhoea.’
‘Jesus, don’t say that.’
‘The point is, the junta’s bankrupted a generation and robbed them of an education. If it leaves them at home, they will topple the government. So it exports them. It sends them to lord it over us.’
He drains his coffee. He looks pleased.
‘I thought this speech was supposed to be about the role of women?’
He shoots me a sour look. Silence while he sluices the dregs of his coffee round his cup. ‘Better the devil you know, I suppose,’ he sighs. ‘When my father died, my mother said to me—’
‘That’s not about women. That’s about you.’
I have pushed him about as far as he will be pushed. ‘No,’ he says, ‘it isn’t. Listen. Our educated men do not know what women are. They barely know their own mothers. Like me, they had to leave home to go to school – and I really mean leave, journeying for miles, departing for other countries even, just to get some schooling.’
‘Meaning what? For the women?’
Katalayo holds my gaze. In a soft voice: ‘Meaning we hate them.’
‘God, you’re not going to say that, are you? They’ll tear out your liver with their teeth. Those that still have them.’
‘Why shouldn’t I say it? It’s true. We hate our women. We blame them. They are our scapegoat. They represent what we would have become, had we not got away. Do you know I have a girlfriend, Saul? A white American girlfriend? Why do you think I have a white American girlfriend, Saul? I know. She knows. We’re not stupid. We know what this is.’
‘So do I – and it’s still about you.’
‘For the ones who don’t get away,’ he goes on, ignoring my interruption, ‘what of them? What’s the point of falling in love, in trying to start a family, in making any real human connection across the sexual divide, if any given day the trucks can pull up and make your mother, your wife, your daughter, disappear? It’s the same for the women, too. Men and women are learning to have nothing to do with each other. We are being taught this. Our children are growing up with this. This is what slavery does. This is what slavery is.’
Finally, we are getting somewhere.
It is not the greatest speech of his career, but from the back of the meeting hall I can feel the audience responding to him.
‘The future of our country rests with its women,’ he says. The girls of Lourenço Marques, for instance. They have a reputation that runs up and down the entire eastern seaboard of the continent. Now, though, they are running away. Every d
ay, another woman flees into the liberated provinces, through minefields, every once in a while a pretty foot blown off at the ankle. ‘We’re building them their own barracks,’ he says. ‘We’re putting them to work in the fields. We are teaching them to read.’
I am so proud of him.
The day after his speech at the W.I., very early in the morning, Jorge Katalayo hammers on the door of this little flat I have got for myself over a chip shop near Regent’s Canal.
He says the walls of his guest-house in Bloomsbury are so thin you can hear everything that goes on in the neighbouring rooms, every whisper, the sweet and the not-so-sweet, every tear of foil, every condom snap. ‘I just need a sit-down,’ he says, having walked all the way through Fitzrovia, past King’s Cross. ‘Can I have a cup of tea?’
I know there is more to this visit than meets the eye, and when he mentions the letter he has received from FRELIMO’s Paris office, I figure this is it. Katalayo hands me the letter over the crumb-littered breakfast table. I am teaching myself Portuguese. I have a knack for languages.
Portuguese soldiers have ransacked a mission near Beira which they suspected of harbouring FRELIMO soldiers. They stumbled into an arithmetics class. The pupils were teenagers and young men. The soldiers marched them down the beach and into the sea. They ordered the students to clap their hands. When the students clapped their hands, the soldiers shot them.
Katalayo reminds me that atrocities like these are the last acts of a dying regime. Young conscript officers are returning home to Portugal, broken by what they have seen. You find them in the bars of Lisbon and Porto fomenting revolution under the very noses of the PIDE. The Portuguese army wants out of Africa. The generals saw the writing on the wall back in 1961 when India seized Goa. Dr Salazar didn’t listen to them then, and now their poor bloody infantry are paying the price in costly colonial wars in Mozambique and Angola.
Katalayo refuses to be intimidated by force of Portuguese arms. The scourge of colonial might is a theme he leaves to others. He has learned how to turn the brute material of his harassment, imprisonment, and even his torture, upon itself. Each arrest, beating and midnight visitation adds one more blackly hilarious episode to his repertoire of amusing autobiographical tales. He is the David Niven of black power.
This morning, for instance, he tells me about the time a protest by Swedish missionaries got him out of a PIDE gaol in Nampula. By the time he got to South Africa, he tells me, the security forces were waiting for him. The men parked outside his apartment building got so sick of him coming over to bum cigarettes from them, they started dropping full packets into his mail slot each evening.
It was during this strange moment of unlicensed rapprochement that a bunch of drunken PIDE men in black-face had burst into his home, gang-raped his wife, surprised his ten-year-old daughter as she returned home and pressed a loaded pistol into her hands.
‘“You don’t have to kill her,” they said, “just aim at her knees.”’
I am making toast under the grill when he tells me this. I have my back to him. I am afraid to turn round. ‘What happened?’
‘After an hour or two of that sort of thing, they persuaded her to put a bullet through Memory’s head.’
Memory was his wife.
‘My daughter’s in Tanzania. She must be nineteen now. Twenty.’
I turn to look at him. He is wearing an expression I have never seen before. He looks utterly helpless.
‘She disappeared,’ he says. ‘She ran away. Now she has come back. She says she wants to see me.’ There are tears in his eyes and I know, in that moment, that I am not, and never can be, what I most want to be: Jorge Katalayo’s son.
I come to the airport to see him off. ‘It will not be long,’ he tells me. He means the war of liberation. He wants me to join him, when the time is right. FRELIMO needs educated men. The party has such ambitious plans.
All summer long over plates of doughnuts, over pots of tea, over mugs of instant coffee, Jorge Katalayo, FRELIMO’s first president, has been sketching out for me his plans for the future of Mozambique – a colour-blind, gender-blind, ideologically fluid Utopia. A land without hate. A land of total literacy and high levels of general education.
It has not escaped my notice that he has been describing Sweden.
‘I’ll see you in Maputo!’ he says, at the gate.
Maputo is the local name for the capital, Lourenço Marques. In 1968 it is still a Portuguese stronghold.
‘Write to me,’ he says, and I promise I will. He has given me his daughter’s address in Dar es Salaam—
*
‘His daughter’s address?’
They sat up. They looked at each other. Suddenly the polite, buttoned-down young men of the Mozambican consulate were taking notice of me.
The one nearest me put down his tea mug. ‘His daughter, did you say?’
On 21 July 1969, details of Apollo Eleven’s successful moon landing pushed Jorge Katalayo’s assassination deep into the bowels of The Times. The half-page article devoted to his killing was short on political analysis, but rich in forensic detail. The explosives used were ‘characteristically Japanese’, whatever that means. The brown paper wrapper in which the bomb arrived had originated in London. The bomb itself was secreted in a hollow cut into a large reference work.
Someone had intercepted my gift of encyclopaedias.
A to K and L to Z.
Someone had knifed out the knowledge and laid death in its place.
ANNIHILATION THERAPY
1
It is 10.30 a.m. local time in Lourenço Marques, the capital city of colonial Mozambique, and so far this is a morning like any other. The street-sellers are setting out their wares: pyramids of peppers and potatoes, expired medicines and Chinese prints. It is Sunday, 20 July 1969. Today, a man prepares to set foot on the moon, another will have his head blown off by a bomb.
Three floors above the street, in the tiny offices of a cash-strapped educational charity, project director Gregor Dimitryvich is startled by the arrival of his sole remaining employee.
Indeed, Anthony Burden’s arrival has so surprised him, Gregor Dimitryvich jumps up from behind the table. Now there is a cloth spread over this table – a fancy, frilly Portuguese lace tablecloth – and on it are arranged a bizarre and evocative assortment of batteries, wires, clock parts and scribbled notes. Gregor has tucked an end of the tablecloth into his trousers, presumably to catch stray parts of the watch mechanism he’s dissecting. When he jumps, a spool of wire falls to the floor; a clock, and a pencil. A hand magnifying glass follows, shattering on the bare boards of the room. A notebook slides after; a soldering iron; a spool of solder. Another pencil.
Had he burst into the office brandishing a gun, Anthony Burden could not have made a stronger impression.
‘Get in!’ Gregor barks.
Anthony closes the door, deposits his walking stick in the antique umbrella bucket and lowers himself gingerly into his customary seat, opposite his employer.
Gregor remains standing with the tablecloth spilling from his trousers like a long, white tongue. ‘I am expecting a package. A man will deliver this package. A sailor. When the sailor arrives you can wait in the next room.’
This is the name Gregor gives the toilet. The Institute has no other rooms.
‘Or I could simply go,’ Anthony offers. ‘If it’s inconvenient—’
‘This would not be best.’
‘Oh?’
‘Please. Sit down.’
Anthony shrugs – he is already seated. The gesture makes him wince: his back is bad today.
‘I mean stay seating. I mean…’ Sighing, Gregor gives up his attempt to correct his mangled English, and releases himself from the tablecloth.
All of which is disturbing enough, but not at all surprising.
The moment he hobbled off the plane in Lourenço Marques, Anthony Burden guessed that this ‘institute’ he was supposed to be working for was nothing more than the cover for
yet another moribund KGB field station. There should have been a driver waiting for him at the gate, holding up a cardboard sign with his name on it. But the teenage factotum sent to collect him felt so under-used, he instead approached Burden, sotto voce, by the newspaper kiosk, slipping a hand under his arm as he did so.
When, rather angrily, Anthony Burden shook him off, the boy responded as if electrocuted, every muscle tensed for action, his hand already inside his coat. ‘You are the teacher, yes? You teach the little nigger kiddies?’
Lubyanka’s finest.
Pathetic.
Since 1951, when he left the Migdal Tikvah kibbutz, mathematician and communications expert Anthony Burden has been working within the nascent aid industry. With a CV like his, and omitting mention of his treatments for manic depression, a fifty-two-year-old ex-academic of Anthony’s stripe should have been able to carve out for himself a small but profitable niche in a top-flight Western NGO. Instead, Anthony has trodden a steeper, stonier path. In reaction to his unhappy years in Israel – the gulf that opened up between his own socialism and his wife’s Zionism; their eventual separation; the company he kept in Haifa; the trouble it got him into; finally, his ignominious expulsion – Anthony’s political leanings have slid ever leftwards, condemning him, since the Cold War became truly global, to a life of straitened living and unsatisfying piece-work. The latest of the many half-hearted, left-leaning ‘friendly institutions’ to have employed Anthony Burden is this Soviet-sponsored and practically penniless ‘Institute of Field and Distance Learning’. No doubt his old friend John ‘Sage’ Arven – wartime scientific guru to Whitehall and a lifelong communist – would appreciate the irony of his situation.
He does not expect to be stuck here much longer. Given the wobbly state of the junta in Lisbon, it is a wonder the police have not closed them down already.
