‘But I am not an albino,’ Jimfish said. ‘I am from South Africa.’
‘Better not say so,’ Benjamin advised. ‘Foreign albinos fetch even more than the homegrown variety.’
The room was filling with buyers now. The auctioneer opened the bidding and it soon became clear that, as his fellow captive had warned, they were being sold off, piece by piece: an eye here, an ear there, toes and fingers; a whole or half a leg. The bidding was lively and every so often the auctioneer’s assistants, armed with poles, would carefully poke each net and set it spinning, to allow the bidders to get a good look at the lots on offer.
It was agony for Jimfish. True rage was welling up in him at long last, yet he was helpless, a fish caught in a net, unable to move a muscle, forced to listen as various bits of his body – from his teeth to his testicles – were briskly sold off.
It was then that a man at the back of the room joined the bidding and, to his astonished relief, Jimfish recognized Zoran the Serb. He quickly outbid all competitors, first for Jimfish, then for Benjamin. Zoran had been bidding backed by the enormous funds open to him when he exchanged a handful of the diamonds he carried, courtesy of Jimfish’s late future brother-in-law. The two prize lots in the rafters were knocked down to him and the auction room rang with the hubbub that greets record sale prices.
‘Does sir want them dismembered?’ the auctioneer asked Zoran.
‘I’ll take them as they are, thank you,’ Zoran told him.
‘I can hear from your accent that you come from Europe,’ said the auctioneer to Zoran. ‘You’ve been very lucky to buy a pair of prime specimens – Africa’s answer to the unicorn. Albinos have proven to be infallible cures for rabies, scabies, infertility, cancer, impotence, dropsy and so much more. And they’re really so economical: a fingernail, an ear lobe, a single eye can work miracles. No part is wasted. Even the hair can be woven into fishing nets and guarantees a wonderful catch. Though, if you don’t mind my saying so, Europeans are often sceptical of albino magic.’
‘I’m from ex-Yugoslavia and, given the incredible things people in my part of the world already believe about each other, they’ll be perfectly ready to buy miracle cures made from Africa’s unicorn,’ said Zoran.
He paid the auctioneer, called a taxi and ferried his two purchases back to the harbour. Once aboard their boat, he cut Jimfish and Benjamin free of the enfolding nets and told them how he had happened to save them.
‘I was on my way to buy our airline tickets when a tout offered me the sale of a lifetime: two milky-white African unicorns. We Serbs are more used to massacres than magic and I thought “What the hell?” and followed him to the auction room. You can imagine my surprise to find you and Benjamin, each strung from the ceiling in great nets, like a catch of herring.’
Zoran was all for setting off into town once again to buy air tickets, but Benjamin warned against this: ‘Jimfish is now seen as one of us and word will be out. You’ll be recognized before you ever get to the airport. Once an albino, always an albino. You’re worth far more dead than alive and next time you won’t be so lucky. Cut up into pieces and sold.’
‘Why do they kill albinos?’ Jimfish asked.
‘It’s not seen as murder,’ Benjamin told him soberly. ‘They say we’re ghosts already. Or our mothers slept with white men. Or we have no souls. The sooner you get away the better.’
‘Why don’t you escape with us?’ Jimfish urged. ‘We’ll take our boat and sail to South Africa.’
Benjamin shook his head ‘From what I hear about your country, it is full of crazy people. Racists and xenophobes. And colossal ignorance about Africa. How long would a Tanzanian albino last? I’d rather stay in my own country, even if it’s no home for people like me.’
‘Well, at least let me help you.’ Jimfish handed him a fistful of diamonds.
Benjamin was grateful. ‘I can buy some protection for a while.’
‘Why not buy guns instead?’ asked Zoran the Serb. ‘Take the Yugoslav option: announce you can’t abide anyone who doesn’t belong in your ethnic group, start a war of independence and throw out anyone who isn’t of your family, tribe or faith.’
‘But I’m not an ethnic group,’ said Benjamin. ‘I just have a skin condition, resulting from the way my genes work.’
‘Doesn’t everyone have just skin conditions, when you get down to it?’ Zoran asked. ‘So set up your own Albinostan and cleanse it of anyone who doesn’t belong.’
Benjamin considered this idea. ‘But that would mean anyone who wasn’t as palely pigmented as I am. And that wouldn’t help. Because under this white skin I’m actually a real black African.’
CHAPTER 27
Comoros Islands, 1993–94
The run of luck that had been with Jimfish and Zoran promptly deserted them soon after they set sail from Dar es Salaam. Their idea had been to cruise in easy stages down the east African coast to Cape Town, but wild storms pushed their small craft much further east. When they ran out of fuel, they drifted helplessly for many days, their water almost gone.
So it was with enormous relief, early one morning, that they spotted, rising from the water, the lush forests and sugary sands of an island.
Evidently, their boat had been spotted, perhaps even expected, because a flotilla of dugout canoes paddled out to greet them and took them in tow. When their craft was brought safely through the breakers and on to the beach, crowds of islanders were waiting and broke into applause.
A man stepped forward. He identified himself as the Mayor and read a prepared speech.
‘Welcome, friends, to the Comoros, our constellation of islands. We are thrilled to have American soldiers amongst us. Even if there are just two of you for now – no doubt whole brigades will follow soon.’
The crowd broke into song and welcomed them with several verses of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’.
Zoran the Serb whispered to Jimfish: ‘They have seen the Stars and Stripes painted on our boat.’
‘We must correct the impression,’ said Jimfish.
‘I don’t think it will help,’ said Zoran the Serb.
But Jimfish felt duty-bound to clear up the misunderstanding.
‘I am sorry to say, friends, that we are not Americans.’
‘I am devastated,’ said the Mayor. ‘Everyone was happy to know that the legendary US marines were invading us. We’ve heard that they stormed ashore on the beaches of Somalia to give hope back to the Somali people and we prayed that we were next on their list, for the restoration of that precious quality. But with your help, all is not lost. The markings on your landing craft mean you must be in close touch with American fighting forces and we beg you to put in a good word for us.’
‘But why would you want the Americans to invade?’ Zoran asked. ‘Their intervention in Somalia was a disaster. The United States lost more men in a single firefight in the streets of Mogadishu than at any time since their invasion of Vietnam. Their helicopters were shot out of the sky and the naked bodies of their soldiers were dragged through the streets by jeering mobs.’
‘Look at it from our point of view,’ said the Mayor. ‘Over the centuries these Comoros Islands have been invaded by Arab slavers, Dutch privateers, German adventurers, Portuguese explorers and French imperialists – not to mention any number of pirates, from Davy Jones to Edward England – and I can’t imagine why the Americans would be worse than any of the others. Ours are very lovely islands, where you will find dhows and dugongs, vanilla trees and volcanoes, spices and a rich array of marine life. But what we’re really famous for are military coups. In the last decade or so, since independence from France, we have averaged one army rebellion every year. The ruling regime is overthrown, only for the next one to go the same way itself a short while later. And this trend shows no signs of stopping. On the map the official name for our scattering of islands may be the Comoros, but to lots of people we are simply the “Coup-Coup” Islands. How can an American invasion be any worse than all the other
s?
‘Right now we are just recovering from our latest coup attempt. A group of morris dancers arrived on a regular commercial flight from South Africa, come to share with Comorans the delights of English country pursuits. But when a customs official asked one of the dancers to open his case, we found, not the usual flummery-mummery of morris dancers – bell pads, handkerchiefs, sticks and swords – but automatic weapons, grenade launchers and mortars. These so-called morris dancers packed more firepower in their rucksacks than our entire defence force. We tried to arrest them, there was a firefight, they hijacked their passenger plane, still on the tarmac, and flew back to South Africa, where, no doubt, they will be welcomed as heroes. Happily for us, we captured two of the mercenary morris men and we were about to shoot them this very morning when your craft was spotted and we postponed their execution, which we will return to right now. You are very welcome to come along and watch the proceedings.’
Jimfish and Zoran had no great wish to watch an execution, but, having disappointed the Comorans once already, it seemed impolite to refuse the invitation.
The two captured mercenaries were being held in the small jail in the middle of town, and when the condemned men were led out into the yard to be shot, Jimfish could not believe his eyes, for there – thinner, older, but still with a fierce glint in his eye – was none other than his old teacher Soviet Malala, whom he knew to have been shot in faraway Ukraine. And, manacled to him, his beard now regrown to its old bushy bulk, was Deon Arlow, brother to Lunamiel and Commandant of Superior Solutions, whom Jimfish himself had shot through the heart. Two men he had known to be dead were being led before a firing squad to be killed all over again.
‘Stop! Stop!’ Jimfish cried, pulling out his bag of rough diamonds just as the Mayor was about to give the order to fire. ‘I will pay you whatever ransom you name for these prisoners!’ and he poured a heap of jewels into the outstretched palm of the Mayor, who was only too happy to accept his offer, the Comoros Islanders being amongst the poorest people in the world.
Jimfish rushed over to the prisoners, released them and hugged his old teacher Soviet Malala.
‘How can this be? You died at Chernobyl. I saw it with my own eyes when you fell to the firing squad in distant Pripyat.’
‘That is what happened, yes,’ said Soviet Malala, ‘but the soldiers in the firing squad, you’ll remember, were very drunk and made several botched attempts before they even hit me. Then I was taken to the city morgue, where a local doctor found me and – never having seen a black man before in the Ukraine, and thinking, as many people in the Soviet Union did, that you should never pass up a windfall that might be saleable to someone, some day, somehow – he decided he would take me to a taxidermist, have me stuffed and put on display at travelling shows; or, otherwise, he might perhaps save my hide and sell it as shoe leather, which, like soap, toilet paper, oranges, grain and bath plugs, was in very short supply across the Soviet Union. Imagine his surprise as he was examining me to see what damage the bullets of the firing squad had done, when he found I was still breathing. He was very happy, knowing I was almost certainly worth more alive than dead, and so he tended my wounds and nursed me back to health.
‘I lived with this good man when the Soviet Union was in a terrible state, after the Chernobyl disaster. The Communist Party was looking desperately for ways to salvage its reputation and, since I was a more committed believer than anyone else, I found myself a speaker at Party rallies to celebrate the Marxist cause, the Bolshevik Revolution, the triumph of the masses and the victory of the lumpenproletariat. But my efforts were doomed. The Communist Party collapsed and was officially dissolved by Gorbachev, and the Soviet Union ceased to exist.
‘I found myself a solitary African in the new Russia, where skinheads assaulted me for being black, and pusillanimous politicians were too embarrassed to even mention the names of Marx and Lenin and Stalin, the heroes of the lumpenproletariat. Luckily, I knew that one of the few places left on earth where original Communist beliefs had not altered since Stalin’s time, and where the Party had taken a decision to ignore the collapse of Communism around the world, was my own country of South Africa, and I decided to go home. I won’t bore you with the story of my travels across Eastern Europe, but I had got as far as Sierra Leone when I met this man here’ – he pointed at the Commandant – ‘who was recruiting strategic contractors for Superior Solutions.’
Jimfish, though moved by the story of his teacher’s plight in Russia, was dismayed by his unseemly liaison with Deon Arlow: ‘But by joining his morris-dancer coup, you collaborated in an invasion of another African state, the islands of the Comoros. And that, surely, was completely counter to your socialist faith?’
‘Not at all,’ said Soviet Malala. ‘Are you familiar with Marx’s Sixth Thesis on Feuerbach?’
Jimfish was sorry to admit he had never heard of it.
‘It concludes that all individuals are elements of the social collective, and since all freedom is determined by history, this means I was predestined to join Superior Solutions and thus to invade the Comoros Islands.’
‘But you were free to refuse to do so, surely?’ Jimfish cried.
‘In Marxist terms, freedom means facing the fact that we are historically determined,’ said Soviet Malala, ‘and in any event, it was of the first importance that I return to South Africa by any means possible, so as to speed the coming revolution and energize the masses.’
‘And what about you?’ Jimfish turned to Deon Arlow. ‘When I last saw you, you were undisputably dead – and I should know, because I was the one who shot you through the heart.’
‘Certainly you shot me though the heart and, in other circumstances, that would have been fatal. But remember, Superior Solutions is a proudly South African enterprise and heart transplants were pioneered by South Africans, and the procedures are well tried and tested. We had in our medical team some of the best surgeons in the world. What slows down the number of transplants is the lack of heart donors, but luckily the carnage of Sierra Leone’s civil war meant there was never a problem in finding me a good young heart. Better by far than the one I lost to you.’
‘Are you telling me that your transplant involved an African heart?’ asked Jimfish.
‘Exactly so,’ said Deon Arlow. ‘I leased my sister Lunamiel to the Zairean Minister of Mines to show that white South Africans are open to constructive business across the Mother Continent. And what better proof that old prejudices are over than the fact that, inside here’ – he touched his chest – ‘beats a true, new African heart.’
CHAPTER 28
Pretoria, South Africa, 1994
After the coup attempt by Deon Arlow’s troupe of fake morris dancers, air travel from the Comoros, always intermittent, was even more irregular than usual, and Jimfish and his party were forced to wait weeks before a flight would be available to take them back to South Africa.
It was during this time that Jimfish made a discovery. Besides vanilla, spices and military coups, for most Comorians fishing was the only way to earn a scant living. Anglers paddled their dugout canoes close to the shore and used long hand-lines of plaited cotton, cunningly baited and dropped deep. It was an uncertain, risky livelihood and earned fishermen barely enough to feed their families.
However, they told him of a particular catch so valuable that to hook one was like winning the lottery. They called this fish the ‘gombessa’. It was coloured a beautiful steely blue, shading into mauve, with dabs of white, sported four little legs and lived hidden in deep sea caves. The gombessa grew as tall as a man of average height, weighed about the same and had wonderful powers: it could stand on its head and swim upside down or backwards, using its four little legs.
Jimfish knew instantly what this fish was. His mind went back to Port Pallid, where the old skipper had found him on the harbour wall, and to those blissful moments he had spent with Lunamiel in the orchard of Sergeant Arlow, only to be violently driven from the policeman’s garden
to wander the world for ten whole years, never managing to land on the right side of history. How strange to come so far, to these islands, in the Mozambique channel between Tanzania and Madagascar, only to find himself hearing of the same fish as the old trawler skipper had once caught off the Chalumna river mouth. A fossil that everyone believed dead for millions of years turned out to be alive and swimming. Here it was again, close beside him, in the waters of the Comoros, and it meant things couldn’t be too bad.
‘A fish out of water, like me,’ Jimfish repeated to himself.
The islanders suggested to Jimfish that with limitless wealth in his bag of rough diamonds he could invest in a flotilla of dugouts to comb the known coelacanth fishing grounds. They were sure to strike lucky. At present just two or three coelacanths were hooked each year, the price was steadily rising and a fisherman could earn as much as three years’ income with a single sale. International aquaria, trophy hunters and marine museums vied to own a coelacanth. In Asia a market was opening up for the golden fluid from its spinal cord, which was was rumoured to add years to life.
Jimfish listened politely, but declined. For a man who had been tortured in a shipping container in Matabeleland, confined in a Soviet penal colony, locked up in East Berlin, captured by Somali kidnappers and netted and nearly sliced to pieces in an albino auction room in Tanzania the very idea of hunting down another living creature to supply demented hypochondriacs in the Asian market with the spinal fluid of a fish said to be the elixir of life, was more than he could bear.
Besides, he had other things on his mind. From Deon Arlow he had heard alarming news of Lunamiel, who he had left to fend for herself in the terrible civil war in Liberia. Deon Arlow reported that just before he had set off to topple the government of the Comoros he had seen his sister, and it was a sad tale he had to tell.
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