The Mission Song

by John le Carré

  I will however add that her eyes had not for one second left mine. There was nothing of accusation or hostility in them. It was more a prolonged study-visit they were paying, which made me wonder how much she saw of the turmoil buried in them, because this was a woman who spent her days tending men in dire straits, and therefore knew her way round our faces. Her inspection of me complete, she took my hand and led me on a tour of the room, the apparent purpose of which was to link me to my possessions: Aunt Imelda's locket, my father's missal, et cetera and — because a degree nurse doesn't miss a trick where her patient is concerned — the vacant nearly-white mark on the third finger of my left hand. After which, by osmosis as it seemed to me, she picked up one of my four notepads — number three, as it happened, devoted to Maxie's war plan — and, much as Philip had done only sixteen hours earlier, demanded explanations which I was hesitant to supply, given that my strategy for her indoctrination required sophisticated preparation, in accordance with the best principles of tradecraft.

  “And this!” she insisted, pointing unerringly at one of my more intricate hieroglyphics.

  “Kivu.”

  “You have been talking about Kivu?”

  “All weekend. Well, my clients have, put it that way.”

  “Positively?”

  “Well, creatively, put it that way.”

  I had planted the seeds, if ineptly. After a silence, she gave a sad smile. “Who can be creative about Kivu these days? Maybe nobody. But according to Baptiste, wounds are beginning to heal. If we can keep going that way, perhaps Congo will one day have children who don't know war. Kinshasa is even talking seriously about holding elections, at last.”

  “Baptiste?”

  She seemed at first not to hear me, so absorbed was she in my cuneiform. “Baptiste is the Mwangaza's unofficial representative in London,” she replied, handing me back my notepad.

  I was still pondering the existence of a Baptiste in her life when she let out a cry of alarm, the first and last I ever heard from her. She was holding up Maxie's envelope containing the six thousand dollars in bills that I had not yet changed into sterling, and the accusation in her face was clear to read.

  “Hannah, it's not stolen. It's earned. By me. Honestly.”

  “Honestly?”

  “Well, legally, anyway. It's money given me by” — I was about to say “the British Government” but for the sake of Mr Anderson changed my mind — “the clients I've been working for over the weekend.” If I had allayed her suspicions, they were reignited by the sight of Brian Sinclair's visiting cards which I had left lying on the mantelpiece. “Brian's a friend of mine,” I assured her with mistaken guile. “Somebody we both know, actually. I'll tell you all about him later.”

  I saw at a glance that I was failing to persuade her and was half deciding to pour out the whole story to her then and there — Mr Anderson, the island, Philip, Maxie, Haj, Anton, Benny, Spider, and ten times Haj — but a pensive fatigue had overtaken her, as if she had heard all she could take of me for one session. So instead of plying me with questions, the weary night nurse stretched herself fully dressed along one side of the bed, and fell into a catnap which was the more surprising for the smile that refused to leave her face. Keen to follow her example, I too closed my eyes, wondering how on earth it was ever going to be possible to explain to her that I was the unwilling accomplice in an armed coup against her country. Baptiste, I repeated to myself. It had not occurred to me that her admiration for the Mwangaza might extend to members of his organisation. Yet despite my fraught condition Nature must have come to my aid, for when I woke, I was still wearing my jeans and shirt, and Hannah was lying naked in my arms.

  • • •

  I am not a friend of explicit, neither in that regard was Brother Michael. Acts of love, in his opinion, were as private as acts of prayer, and should remain so. Therefore I shall not dwell on the ecstasy of our physical rejoining, which took place in all the frankness of the morning sunlight streaming through the bay window onto the many-coloured counterpane of Mrs Hakim's bed. Hannah listens to you. I was not accustomed to people who did that. In my overwrought anticipation I had feared she would be caustic or even incredulous. But that was Penelope, not Hannah. Now and then, it's true — for instance when I was forced to disillusion her about the Mwangaza — a few tears rolled down her cheeks and made blobs on Mrs Hakim's sky-blue pillowcase, but not once did her sympathy or her concern for my predicament desert her. Two days ago, I had marvelled at the delicacy with which she had informed a man that he was dying, and I was determined to emulate it, but I lacked both the skill and the reserve. Once started I gave way to my need to tell her everything at once. The revelation that, albeit in a part-time capacity, I was an indoctrinated employee of the all-powerful British Secret Service took her breath away. “And you are truly faithful to these people, Salvo?” I was speaking English, so she was too. “Hannah, I have always tried to be. And shall do my best to continue so,” I replied, and even this she seemed to understand.

  Curled round me like a sleepy child, she thrilled to my magic journey from attic flat in South Audley Street to gilded palace in Berkeley Square, the helicopter ride and mystery flight to a no-name island in the north. Introducing her to our warlords, I watched her face pass through three seasons in as many minutes: dark anger at the rascally Franco with his lame leg and love of battle, followed by knowing sadness for the Aids-stricken Dieudonne. It was only when I presented my preliminary sketch of the outrageous Haj, our French-trained Bukavu wide-boy and nightclub owner, that I encountered Pentecostal Mission girl, and was suitably redressed.

  “Nightclub owners are crooks, Salvo. Haj will be no different. He sells beer and minerals, so probably he sells drugs and women also. That is how the young elite of Kivu behave today. They wear dark glasses and drive flashy four-tracks and watch pornographic movies with their friends. His father Luc has quite a bad name in Goma, I don't mind telling you. A big man who plays politics for personal gain, not at all for the People.” But then her brow puckered as she reluctantly modified her verdict. “However, one must also accept that today in Congo it is not possible to make money without being a crook. One must admire his acumen at least.”

  Observing my expression, she broke off, and again studied me thoughtfully. And when Hannah does that, it is not easy to preserve one's Personal Security. “You have a special voice for this Haj. Do you also have special feelings for him?”

  “I had special feelings for them all,” I replied evasively.

  “Then why is Haj different? Because he is Westernised?”

  “I let him down.”

  “How, Salvo? I don't believe you. Maybe you let yourself down. That's not the same.”

  “They tortured him.”

  “Haj?”

  “With an electric prod. He screamed. Then he told them everything they wanted to know. Then he sold himself.”

  She closed her eyes and opened them. “And you listened?”

  “I wasn't meant to. I just did.”

  “And you recorded him?”

  “They did.”

  “While he was being tortured?”

  “It was archive tape. Archival, not operational.”

  “And we have it?” She jumped from the bed and marched to the table in the window bay. “This one?”

  “No.”

  “This one?” Seeing my face, she quietly laid the tape back on the table, returned to the bed and sat beside me. “We need food. When we have eaten, we'll play the tape. Okay?”

  Okay, I said.

  But before food, she needed normal day clothes, which she would have to fetch from the hostel, so I lay alone with my thoughts for an hour. She'll never come back. She's decided I'm mad and she's right. She's gone to Baptiste. Those footsteps tripping up the stairs aren't Hannah's, they're Mrs Hakim's.

  But Mrs Hakim weighs a good thirteen stone, while Hannah is a sylph.

  • • •

  She is telling me about her son N
oah. She is eating pizza with one hand and holding mine with the other while she talks to me in Swahili about Noah. The first time we were together she had spoken shyly of him. Now she must tell me everything, how he happened, what he means to her. Noah is her love-child except, Salvo, believe me, there was no love, none at all.

  “When my father sent me from Kivu to Uganda to be trained as a nurse, I fell for a medical student. When I became pregnant by him, he told me he was married. He told another girl he slept with that he was gay.”

  She was sixteen years old and instead of her belly filling up with baby she lost a stone before she found the courage to take an HIV test. She tested negative. Today if she needs to do something unpleasant, she does it immediately in order to reduce the waiting time. She bore the baby and her aunt helped her look after it while she completed her training. All the medical students and young doctors wanted to sleep with her but she never slept with another man until me.

  She breaks out laughing. “And look at you, Salvo! You are married too!”

  No longer, I say.

  She laughs and shakes her head and takes a sip of the house red wine that, we have already agreed, is the lousiest wine we ever drank in our lives — worse than the stuff they force on us at the hospital's annual dance, she says, which is saying something, believe me, Salvo. But not as bad as Giancarlo's weapons-grade Chianti, I counter, and take time out to tell her about the brave little gentleman at the Trattoria Bella Vista in Battersea Park Road.

  Two years after Noah's birth, Hannah completed her training. She rose to senior nurse, taught herself English and went to church three times a week. Do you still do that, Hannah? A little bit. The young doctors say God is not compatible with science, and in the wards, if she is frank, she sees little sign of Him. But this doesn't stop her praying for Noah, for her family and for Kivu, or helping out with her Sunday School kids, as she calls them, at the church in North London where, with the little faith remaining to her, she goes to worship.

  Hannah is proud of being a Nande, and she has every right to be, since the Nande are celebrated for their enterprise. She came to England through an agency when she was twenty-three, she tells me over the coffee and another glass of the terrible red wine. She has told me this before, but in the game we are playing if you drop out you go back to the beginning. The English weren't bad but the agency treated her like shit, which was the first time I heard her use an obscenity. She had left Noah in Uganda with her aunt, which broke her heart, but with the help of a fortune-teller in Entebbe she had identified her life's destiny, which was to expand her knowledge of Western medical practices and technologies and send money home for Noah. When she has learned enough and saved enough, she will return with him to Kivu.

  At first in England she dreamed every night of Noah. Telephoning him upset her until she rationed herself to once a week at cheap rates. The agency never told her she would have to attend adaptation school which took up all her savings, or that she would have to climb the nursing ladder all over again from the bottom up. The Nigerians with whom she was billeted failed to pay the rent, until one day the landlord threw the whole lot of them onto the street, Hannah included. To gain promotion in the hospital she had to be twice as good as her white competitors, and work twice as hard. But with God's help, or, as I preferred it, by dint of her own heroic efforts, she had prevailed. Twice a week she attends a course on simple surgical procedures in poor countries. She should be there tonight but she will make it up. It is a qualification she has promised herself she will acquire before reclaiming Noah.

  She has left the most important bit till last. She has persuaded Matron to let her take an extra unpaid week of leave, which would also allow her to accompany her Sunday School kids on their two-day outing to the seaside.

  “Was it only on account of the Sunday School children that you asked for leave?” I enquire hopefully.

  She pooh-poohs the very idea. Take a week's leave on the off-chance that some fly-by-night interpreter will keep his promises? Ridiculous.

  We've done coffee and paid the bill out of Maxie's converted dollars. In a minute it will be time to go home to Mr Hakim's. Hannah has helped herself to one of my hands and is examining the palm, thoughtfully tracing its lines with her fingernail.

  “Am I going to live forever?” I ask.

  She shakes her head dismissively and goes on examining my captive palm. There were five of them, she murmurs in Swahili. Not nieces really. Cousins. But she thinks of them as her nieces even now. Born to the same aunt who looked after her in Uganda and is currently looking after Noah. They were all the children the aunt had. No sons. They were aged six to sixteen. She recites their names, all Biblical. Her eyes are lowered and she is still talking to my hand and her voice has flattened to a single note. They were walking home along the road. My uncle and the girls, in their best clothes. They had been to church and their heads were full of prayer. My aunt was not well, she had stayed in bed. Some boys came up to them. Interahamwe from across the border in Rwanda, doped out of their minds and looking for entertainment. They accused my uncle of being a Tutsi spy, cut the girls' tendons, raped them, and tossed them into the river, chanting butter! butter! while they drowned. It was their way of saying they would make butter out of all Tutsis.

  “What did they do to your uncle?” I ask of her averted head. Tied him to a tree. Made him watch. Left him alive to tell the village. In some kind of reciprocity, I tell her about my father and the whipping post. I have never told anybody but Brother Michael until now. We walk home and listen to Haj being tortured.

  • • •

  She sits upright across the room, as far away from me as she can be. She has put on her nurse's official face. Its expression is locked. Haj may scream, Tabizi may rant and taunt him, Benny and Anton do their worst with whatever Spider obligingly ran up for them from his toolbox, but Hannah remains as impassive as a judge with eyes for nobody, least of all for me. When Haj pleads for mercy, her expression is stoical. When he pours scorn on Tabizi and the Mwangaza for cutting their dirty deal with Kinshasa, it barely falters. When Anton and Benny wash him under the shower she emits a muted exclamation of disgust, but this in no way transmits itself to her face. When Philip appears on the scene and starts to talk Haj round with sweet reason, I realise she has been sharing every living second of Haj's agony, just as if she were ministering to him at his bedside. And when Haj demands three million dollars for selling out his country, I expect her to be at the very least indignant, but she merely lowers her eyes and shakes her head in sympathy.

  “That poor show-off boy,” she murmurs. “They killed his spirit.”

  At which point, wishing to spare her the final mockery, I am about to switch off the tape, but she stays my hand. “It's just singing from now on. Haj tries to make it better for himself. He can't,” I explain tenderly.

  Nevertheless on her insistence I play the tape to the end, starting with Haj's tour of the Mwangaza's drawing room, and ending with the slap of crocs as he stomps defiantly along the covered way to the guest suite.

  “Again,” she orders.

  So I play it again, after which for a long time she sits motionless. “He's dragging one foot, you heard that? Maybe they damaged his heart.” No, Hannah, I hadn't noticed him dragging his foot. I switch off the tape but she doesn't stir.

  “Do you know that song?” she demands.

  “It's like all the songs we sang.”

  “So why did he sing it?”

  “To cheer himself up, I suppose.”

  “Maybe it's you he's cheering up.”

  “Maybe it is,” I concede.

  • • •

  Hannah is practical. When she has a problem to solve she makes for the root of it and works her way from there. I have Brother Michael, she has her Sister Imogene. At her Mission school Imogene taught her everything she knew. When she was pregnant in Uganda, Imogene sent her letters of comfort. Imogene's Law, never to be forgotten in Hannah's view, argues that since no
problem exists in isolation, we must first reduce it to its basic components, then tackle each component in turn. Only when we have truly done this — and not until — will God point us the right way. Given that this was Hannah's modus operandi, both in her work and in her life at large, I could not object to the somewhat bald interrogation to which, with all due gentleness and occasional reassuring caresses, she now subjected me, using French as our language of clarity.

  “How and when did you steal the tapes and notepads, Salvo?”

  I describe my final descent to the boiler room, Philip's surprise appearance, and my narrow escape.

  “During the flight back to Luton, did anybody look at you suspiciously or ask you what was in your night-bag?”

  Nobody.

  “You are sure?”

  As sure as I can be.

  “Who knows by now that you have stolen the tapes?”

  I hesitate. If Philip decided to return to the boiler room after the team's departure and take a second look inside the burn-bag, they know. If Spider, on his arrival in England, checked his tapes before handing them over for archival purposes, they know. Or if whoever he handed them over to decided to check them for themselves, they know. I'm not sure why I adopted a patronising tone at this point, but it was probably in self-defence.

  “However,” I insist, resorting to the style of the long-winded barristers I am occasionally obliged to render, “whether or not they know, there is little doubt that technically I am in serious breach of the Official Secrets Act. Or am I? I mean how official are these secrets? If I myself am deniable, then so presumably are the secrets. How can an interpreter who doesn't exist be accused of stealing secrets that don't exist when he's acting on behalf of a no-name Syndicate which, by its own insistence, doesn't exist either?”