The Weight of Numbers

by Simon Ings

  Had I known nothing of this, the way Sam first approached me would still have got my back up: all glad-hands and pat-heads for the kids I was in the middle of teaching, and a patter of twisted subordinate clauses and long loan-words for me.

  ‘Tell me, sir, what is your specialism?’

  It was a slick performance, and the level of polish probably counted for a lot in this land without books, where oratory is everything. It had exactly the opposite effect on me. I replied in my dreadful Chichewa, keeping my distance, letting him know my dislike.

  ‘Why don’t you come eat with us tonight?’ he asked me, coming straight down to business. No prizes for guessing who ‘we’ were. RENAMO contras still controlled much of the surrounding countryside. Yet he had delivered his invitation in elegant Portuguese as though offering me supper at the Ritz.

  I thought about Goliata’s spacious new cemetery, and declined Sam’s invitation with a shudder. Sam shrugged. It was all one to him. He had felt the wheel turn beneath him. He knew it was only a matter of time before he wore cotton again.

  Sam was not the lean, hungry creature I had been expecting. Though they shared a mother only, the family resemblance between Sam and Naphiri was striking. Sam’s face was a more evolved version of Naphiri’s; his frame lankier and less clumsy. His eyes, far from burning with a wicked flame, crinkled charmingly with every smile. Should he ever be handed back his old mantle as head-man of the town, I could imagine his response: the modest amusement with which he would rehearse all the twists and turns that had brought him back to power: ‘Well I never!’

  He lingered on the steps of the veranda, listening to me teach. I made a point of ignoring him, so every couple of minutes he grunted his approval, making sure I knew he was there, a sympathetic presence. How long did he intend to keep this up?

  Just then, the earth-mover rounded a corner into the main street. It rattled towards us, wreathed in eddies of smoke. The children leapt up cheering and rushed to the balustrade.

  Any minute now they would jump into the street and mob the vehicle and tease the driver – Redson, a man who’d driven machines bigger than this in the mines of South Africa. And Redson, obedient to the rules of their cheerful game, would brake sharply, start off again with a jolt, throw gears, brake, start forward and brake again, shaking kids from the scoop as fast as they could clamber on.

  Sam Calange just laughed.

  ‘Have you ever seen such a ridiculous contraption?’ he said, appealing to me, tears of mirth in his eyes. He was using Chichewa now, so the children would understand. ‘Listen to it! The old rust-bucket! I give it another week.’

  The children, mortified, turned to me, awaiting their teacher’s spirited defence of the village’s earth-mover.

  Sam pressed home his attack: ‘Still, my sister, she is only a woman. How can we expect her to know what engine oil is for?’

  I stared at the vehicle, lumbering smokily up the road, and hunted furiously for an adequate retort. True enough, it was not the most impressive machine of its sort: a tractor with a detachable scoop bolted onto the front, and the scoop was already badly buckled – but I had been here long enough that it had begun to make an impression on me: a valuable mascot of the party.

  ‘Listen to that engine! It’s tearing its guts out! Look!’ Sam pointed. ‘If someone doesn’t align that wheel soon…’ Gripping an imaginary steering wheel, he mimed the earth-mover’s drunken progress. The kids whooped and applauded as Sam wove across the veranda, his face twisted in comical terror: man on runaway machine. When it came to working an audience, there was no competing with Sam Calange. He leapt from the balcony and capered about in the street, running up to the earth-mover; shying away. Redson had to swerve to avoid him, which only made Sam caper the more.

  How the children laughed. Even the ones without noses.

  The worst thing was, I couldn’t stop him. Sam had succeeded in wrenching me back to a place behind my eyes where I could see the earth-mover for what it was: a dinky little plaything with a life of approximately one more month – if we were lucky – before it seized up for good. That, in its turn, was what made Sam’s performance so purely cruel. He wasn’t saying, ‘I will oil your tractor.’ He wasn’t saying, ‘My friends in the bush can get you spares for that buckled axle.’ He wasn’t offering us anything. He was simply belittling what he didn’t control.

  ‘Redson!’

  Redson looked up, harried and red-faced, from the wheel of the earth-mover. Sam’s ridiculous ballet had brought his vehicle to a stand-still.

  ‘Redson,’ I shouted, at the top of my lungs, seized by a sudden inspiration, ‘run him over!’

  The children gasped.

  Redson frowned.

  ‘Run him over!’ I yelled, scenting an advantage. ‘Come on!’ I rallied my students. ‘Man versus machine: let’s see who wins!’

  Redson was a serious man. Clowning was not his style. Scowling, he climbed down from the tractor and tried to remonstrate with Sam. Naturally, it only took a few seconds before Sam had managed to charm him. What could I do but stand there, powerless, while Redson, arm in arm with Sam, the Old Boss, laughed along with his jokes?

  The kids, disappointed and uneasy, sat back down. I did my best to smother the seeds of their doubt. Amo amas ama; c is ‘kuh’ before a, o, u; ‘sss’ before e or i. Eu nasci em mil e novecentos e cinquenta e cinco. Pay attention in the corner.

  And all the while I could feel Samuel’s smile boring into the back of my neck.

  No one was meant to win this war. It existed for one purpose only: to turn a sovereign nation into a no man’s land of burnt schoolhouses and decapitated nurses, mine-littered roads and unharvested crops. In line with the Total Strategy coming out of RENAMO’s paymasters in the Transvaal, nothing was to replace what had been destroyed. And just as South Africa had no real intention of letting RENAMO take over Mozambique, so RENAMO’s bandits had no intention of handing Goliata over to Samuel Calange.

  A couple of weeks before a regrouped RENAMO launched their second big offensive in the region, it dawned on Sam – much, much too late – just who he had been breaking bread with.

  ‘Please come with me to the feast,’ he said to me, not for the first time. This time, however, his invitation was not a piece of public show. He had knocked on my door in private, and after dark. ‘Please.’

  I had been issued a freshly thatched brick blockhouse, more or less intact after hurried repairs, right on the border between the cane town and the cement town. It was a prime location, so Naphiri had given me an AK-47 for protection. The rifle hung off one arm, my lantern swung from the other, as I swaggered back into the living room, leading Sam inside. If he could play-act, so could I.

  I was surprised that Sam was moving around the village after sundown. Apart from the obvious risk of attack or a mugging, it was too easy to trip and break your neck on an overcast night like this. Though we were in the middle of the village, no light showed. Even the household fires you’d normally expect to burn on after supper-time were snuffed out early, in case the unwelcome dinner guests hiding out in the bush got ideas. Myself, I kept the windows shuttered tight. To be walking around at night, Sam had to be feeling very desperate.

  ‘Please,’ he said.

  It was the usual deal. You turn up to the meal with a contribution of food, clothing, money: tribute, in other words.

  ‘No,’ I told him. I knew I had him over a barrel. The rebels were relying on him and his friends to bring influential villagers over to their side. The price of failure was likely to be high. I set the lantern down in the middle of the floor and sat myself down in the room’s only cane chair – I had been over the Malawi border and bought it for myself – with my AK-47 across my knees.

  There was a lot of bluster to begin with. Sam’s appeal to nostalgia – to the imaginary ‘good old days’ before FRELIMO’s uppity socialists took over – had served him in good stead in the past, and old habits die hard.

  ‘I think it is impo
rtant – and I feel sure that an educated man like yourself will agree with me – that we should have the ear of the rebels, if only to barter for our own safety.’ All week, stories had been flying around town: how the bandits were increasing in numbers; how they had hammered their way into Yelena Mlokote’s house, brazenly, without fear of resistance; that they had taken everything of value away with them: goats, clothes, batteries, even a mirror in a metal frame.

  ‘Stop,’ I said. He had become almost painful to watch. ‘Whose house, did you say?’

  ‘What?’

  I couldn’t conceal my irritation. ‘The goats and the mirror. Whose house?’

  Sam blinked. ‘Yelena Mlokote’s. What? Do you know her?’

  ‘I thought you said someone else,’ I said, waving the matter away. I strung him on a while longer – Tomorrow night, did you say? What should I bring? What should I wear? – before kicking him out of my house.

  3

  The next day I borrowed Naphiri’s bicycle and cycled out past parched fields of cassava and pineapples and neglected, overgrown shacks to Yelena Mlokote’s house.

  By local standards, it was a mansion: a brick house surrounded by cashew trees and mangoes; a paved path lined with herbs. It was isolated, though; much further from town than I had expected. There were other houses nearby, sprawled under the shade of the jacaranda trees, but most had been boarded up. Her neighbours had left, she told me, afraid of what RENAMO might do to them if they stayed. They were sleeping rough now, under the few surviving porticoes of Goliata’s cement town.

  ‘And you?’

  Yelena shrugged.

  We were sitting in her kitchen. Walls of wood and iron sheeting; a cement sink for washing clothes – ‘only that I still go to the bathing pool to wash my clothes, so that I meet people.’ The weird, finicky rhythms of her Chichewa disguised, for a moment, the fact that she had not answered my question.

  She didn’t bear much resemblance to her father. Until we got talking, I couldn’t be sure it was her. She was attractive, in an ironed-out sort of way. She was pushing forty by then, and the recent famine had taken its toll.

  She was damned if she was going to be kicked out of her home.

  ‘They took my radio,’ she said. ‘I had three goats, they took the goats.’

  ‘For God’s sake,’ I said.

  ‘They went away,’ she shrugged.

  ‘They’ll be back.’

  ‘Samuel Calange is talking to them. The curandeiros are with them now, treating their injured. They are hungry, out in the bush.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  She was doing the only thing she could do. She was trying to come to terms.

  ‘Look,’ I said. ‘There’s room in my house for you. There’s room with me.’

  The clumsy fixes of white men: she shook her head and smiled.

  It was wash-day, so we walked together to the stream that had once fed Goliata’s municipal bathing pool.

  While Yelena slapped the screwed whip of a capulana against a rock, to agitate it clean, and her baby boy Mateu, indifferent to us both, lay on his rush mat, waving his arms about as though conducting something difficult and modern, I sat dangling my legs over the edge of the old bathing pool, thinking through the chances that had led me to this place and moment. This opportunity.

  The pool was dry. The pipe supplying it with stream-water had been smashed, and the pool’s every decorative blue tile – fish, shellfish, seaweed, sailing boats, windmills – had been cracked. The bandits had demolished the changing blocks, too, which had once preserved the modesty of the planter and his children, the hairdresser and his family, the driving instructor and his wife: the petty white elite of a bygone Goliata. So that now, sitting here, we had a clear view down the hill, past the stubs of the changing blocks, right across Goliata, to the brown scar of the airstrip – and further yet, the air was so clean and clear today, over the Malawian border to the Mulanje plateau.

  I watched Yelena wrap up her son in the capulana, which was quite dry now, from the fierce sun of that morning, and seeing her tie her son to her, I noticed the trembling of her hands. She gave Mateu a look of hopeless yearning.

  ‘What is it?’

  She shrugged. ‘I am remembering a friend of mine,’ she said.

  I waited for more.

  ‘Come with me,’ she said. ‘We will visit her grave. I like to visit her, to talk to her.’

  She led me down the hill to the cemetery. By day there was nothing to fear. In one part of the cemetery there were stones raised for those whose manner of dying left no body to be buried. Yelena had raised such a stone for her husband:

  JOSEPH ALEXANDER MLOKOTE

  1951–1983

  His dates saddened me. ‘He was so young.’ He must still have been a teenager when Yelena married him.

  ‘He died driving a truck along the corridor,’ she said.

  Behind his stone lay a plot full of tiny graves, which I assumed at first must be the graves of stillbirths. Yelena corrected me: ‘They’re for limbs,’ she said.

  The graves contained legs. Bits of feet. Knuckles of bone and sinew. There were so many little graves, so many piecemeal burials, I wondered where the cripples were. I had not see them on the streets.

  ‘They work their fields,’ Yelena told me, leading me to a larger mound of earth: an adult burial. ‘What else can they do?’

  ‘What about the mines?’

  ‘What about them?’

  I wondered if any cripples visited their own graves.

  Then Yelena led me to the grave of her friend. There was no headstone. ‘Kesi,’ she said, to the mound, ‘this is Saul. He was a friend of my father.’

  I looked at Yelena. She smiled at me. ‘I do not know why he has come to visit us, but I can guess.’

  I had expected to find her unprepared for our meeting; to have the advantage over her.

  ‘Your friend,’ I said, so as not to show the hit, ‘who was she?’

  ‘A nurse,’ she said. ‘A citizen. According to her husband, she was six months pregnant when the matsangas attacked.’

  I steeled myself. I was becoming familiar with the nature of these stories.

  ‘They tore it out of her womb and threw it into her hearth-fire. Saul.’

  She took my hand.

  From the swaddled shadows of her capulana, Yelena’s son blinked at me.

  ‘You know,’ she said, ‘I received your postcard. I know what brought you here. I know what it is you think I did.’

  She walked me out of the cemetery and back up the hill to her house, and, as we climbed, she told me the tale of her brief, fatal involvement in world affairs.

  ‘It was never supposed to go off,’ she told me.

  A devil’s alliance of PIDE men and tribalists opposed to RENAMO were already planning Katalayo’s assassination. When news of the attempt filtered through to FRELIMO, Yelena, Jorge’s alienated daughter, saw an opportunity to play agent provocateur and make a name for herself within the movement. Playing up her alienation from her father, she sent the cabal the encyclopaedias I had sent her, and gave them the idea for the book bomb.

  ‘You did this alone, of course.’

  Yelena sighed. Apparently I was being boorish. ‘FRELIMO is a big organization. There are factions. Groups.’

  This faction of hers figured it would be an easy matter to follow the British seaman entrusted with the device; easy to lift it from him in Lourenço Marques; easy to arrange its disarmament at the hands of an old KGB operative, who for long months now had been twiddling his thumbs in some redundant field station in Lourenço Marques.

  ‘So you were working for the Russians?’

  Easy, once the bomb had been disarmed, to deliver it to her father: a present as harmless as it was terrifying.

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. ‘Why on earth would you attempt anything so stupid?’

  Why? Because, once Jorge Katalayo had survived his assassination, FRELIMO’s leadership –
this was the theory – would have been shaken into a more radical agenda and a more positive alignment with the Soviet Union.

  Katalayo’s daughter spoke with the melancholy of someone who, after years of interior struggle, has made peace with herself.

  The bomb should have been intercepted, she told me. It should have been re-routed and defused, before ever being delivered. Only that, in her haste to get away while her mark was sleeping, the woman they’d hired to steal the bomb from the British sailor forgot where she’d written down the KGB man’s address. After an hour’s fruitless wandering, in a panic, she abandoned the parcel on a park bench –

  – where, seeing the package, an elderly Portuguese man (this is what Yelena wanted me to believe) picked it up. He recognized the address, he lived out that way himself, and that evening he stopped by to deliver it. He must have been taken aback when the addressee turned out to be a black man. Perhaps he thought Jorge was a servant…

  I could stand no more. I shut her up: ‘You can’t possibly know any of this.’

  ‘Not the last part, no. We can’t know how the bomb left the bench and ended up in my father’s hands. The rest we know.’

  ‘The woman who stole the parcel—’

  ‘She was telling the truth.’

  ‘You don’t know that.’

  Yelena threw up her hands. ‘What is the point of this?’

  ‘What was Jorge’s address doing on the package in the first fucking place? It wasn’t going in the mail.’

  ‘What is the point?’

  The point, as far as Yelena was concerned, was that the bomb was meant to fail. It was supposed to manipulate and to frighten. It was not meant to kill. She touched my hand. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘if I could turn back time, I would.’