by W. T. Tyler
At the university in Belgium, abstract notions of property and capital had no more meaning for him than the oppression of an industrial revolution long over—the smoke of Birmingham or Düsseldorf, the cotton mills of Lancashire, workers moving home by gaslight, up frozen lanes and canals, filing into lifts on bitter winter mornings, cold and hungry, despising their condition.
As an African, he’d found it impossible to understand what his socialist or Marxist colleagues were saying when they talked of the socialist embryo in the bourgeois womb or the socialization of the productive process that would shape a new social character. Imperialism, like hatred or exploitation, was easier to understand. As an African, he could explain the misery of his own country as the product of Western wealth, artificially created by the division of labor forced upon colonized Africans by the industrial metropoles that denied them the rewards of their own resources and labor, but his knowledge was incomplete.
He’d sought work in heavy industry to bring those abstract ideas to life, to feel on his own shoulders the crushing burdens of capital, to know himself the socialization process that followed.
“Fancy words,” Reddish muttered in irritation.
“Of course—just words.”
“So what happened? Did you find out what Marx was talking about?”
Masakita was slow to respond. “Many things,” he said finally. “I worked in the foundry for two years. After the rebellions here, I went back there for a few months—the factory, the room in Montmartre, the small socialist library. The Algerians were gone by then; their work was finished.” He shrugged. “I was naive in those days, believing that change was simply doctrinaire, as finite or as manageable as the linings we cast at the foundry.”
Late one February evening he happened to catch sight of himself as he passed a bakery window. He saw a wretched figure wrapped in a woolen coat, scarf hiding the African mouth, the dark face above as gray as a corpse’s, mantled with the dust of the annealing rooms at the foundry, the boots on his feet shapeless lumps of leather warped by rain and snow and sucked dry again by the heat of the catwalks above the furnaces. Was that the man he’d hoped to become—miserable, deprived, oppressed? To anyone passing him in the streets at that moment, probably; but what did he feel? He felt fortunate merely to be there, a man like any other, suffering through that winter cold as generations of Europeans had before him in the same frozen streets and alleyways.
But the foundry closed. Two weeks later he abandoned France and his life there to go to Cairo to take a position on the newly created Afro-Asian Secretariat.
“This was the first time?” Reddish asked.
“Yes, the first time.”
“So what had you learned for all those years?”
“Simple things,” Masakita answered.
He’d gone to Europe to study engineering but had discovered Marx and trade unionism. He’d gone to escape those Jesuits who’d taught him at the mission school at Benongo, convinced, as the village elders were, that certain books of the Bible had been carefully edited or eliminated to deny to Africans those secrets to wisdom and self-respect which enabled the white man to rule, and he had discovered Montaigne and Pascal.
Before he’d left the mission school, an old chief had sent him an elaborately carved box, a receptacle for those secret books Masakita would discover in Belgium and return with to his village.
What should he have put in the box? he now asked Reddish. Marx? Montaigne? Pascal? Perhaps the latter two, since their message was simpler than that of Marx, simple enough even for the chief at Funzi to understand: this European civilization that Africans looked upon with such awe and respect was as fragile as their own.
Tired and disappointed, indifferent to riddles, Reddish lifted himself from his chair to stalk the room. “You say you knew a few communists in Paris. Did anyone ever try to recruit you?”
“Of course not.”
“What about during your trips to the Soviet Union? You haven’t talked about those.”
“No.”
“China?”
Masakita didn’t answer.
Reddish turned to see the look of silent scorn. “Tell me something about China—what you saw, the facilities you visited, the dog and pony show they put on,” he continued stubbornly. “They didn’t take you to their nuclear testing facility, did they? I think it’s in Sinkiang.” He looked again at Masakita’s immobile figure. “For Christ’s sake, make it interesting this time!” he shouted, suddenly angry. “Something I can get my teeth into for a change.”
It was late autumn when Masakita reached Peking, traveling under the auspices of the Afro-Asian Secretariat, which had sent dozens of Africans and Arabs to Chinese guerrilla camps. In Peking he was received by officials from the African Solidarity Committee and the Peking Institute of Foreign Affairs. He was given a week’s familiarization course at a guerrilla training center at Da Kien, near Linchow. The techniques taught weren’t original or even useful for Africans. The evening hours were spent repriming old cartridges and melting down old lead for new bullets for the firing range. He visited Nanking and was given ten days of medical training. With a group of workers from Canton, he was taken to Mao’s birthplace and then flown to Manchuria, where his army hosts drove him to the Korean border near Pusan on the Yalu, where the Americans had been defeated during the Korean war.
The mountains were covered with snow, the wind savage, the landscape forbidding, as silent and empty as the thirteenth-century landscape the Mongols had crossed on their great drive toward the Danube in 1241. Listening to his Chinese guides explaining the tactics which had led to the American defeat, he’d felt nothing but the cold, a cold so numbing that the mind was annihilated, the body a burden to be escaped at any cost, even death, which came like a warm breath. Standing inside his thick quilted Chinese jacket with the fur parka, the Asian snow in his face, ice in his nostrils, gazing out across those frozen mountains and river, he found himself incapable of mental or physical response. How had they done it? His guides continued to congratulate themselves, like schoolboys, as if their victory had occurred that morning.
Returning to the Chinese army post in the closed jeep, their elation was gone, their faces blank again, Masakita again a stranger; and he saw in their expressions the same neuter self-absorption he’d seen in the guerrilla instructors at Da Kien as they retreated from the blackboard, the tactical lesson over: a lump of racial indifference no ideology could thaw.
At the end of his visit to China he decided that the soldiers he’d seen that day on the Yalu were no different from those of any other army, moved as much by boredom, apathy, fear, and blind obedience as anything else, their condition no more measured by the slogans of the cultural revolution that festooned the walls and rattled in the wind outside his Peking hotel room than Russian success could be judged by Soviet mathematics or the corridors of the Moscow subway.
High over China, with the sunlight flooding the nearly deserted cabin of the Pakistani jet returning him to Cairo, he’d tried to understand the Chinese, wise when his own ancestors were still puzzling over iron smelting or the phases of the moon. His hosts had been considerate, always gracious; yet even at the airport their formality and politeness seemed exaggerated—an ancient people on a vast land mass welcoming a black stranger still grappling with the first pangs of political birth.
What best summed up the Chinese were a few lines scrawled on the blackboard of a classroom in Peking, written by the Chinese instructor who taught English. Masakita knew a few words of English, but the lines didn’t make sense, not even after his guide had translated them, and it wasn’t until a few minutes later that he understood them. They were simple lines, almost an ideograph, but what they expressed about the Chinese was expressed in no other way. The lines, English in origin, read:
When Yenan was a market town
London was Derry Down.
“So they didn’t take you to Sinkiang,” Reddish summarized wearily, anxious to bring the talk to
an end. “You didn’t see anything very interesting except a nursery rhyme on a classroom blackboard, and the ice and snow, which just about wiped you out. I was in Korea too and got clobbered one night by a bunch of Chinese firemen blowing bugles. I’ll tell you about it sometime. It wasn’t snowing.”
Nothing Masakita had told him would be of the slightest interest to his headquarters, not even enough to qualify him for a free plane ride to Frankfurt.
Masakita was silent.
“So you worked as a foundry laborer, read Marx and Montaigne, did a few jobs for the FLN, knew some French communists, but got fed up and hired on with the Afro-Asian club in Cairo, a Third World neutralist drafting agenda papers that wouldn’t hurt anyone.” He looked over his glasses at Masakita. “Right. Then you came back here to teach school in the Kwilu after independence, led a guerrilla war against the central government, but broke with the rebels and went into exile.” He hesitated again, but Masakita made no comment. “Then the President offers you a sub-cabinet job at the same time the rebels-in-exile wanted you to head up their own government abroad, but you came back here—not as a Marxist, not as a revolutionary, not as anything else I can understand.
“What the hell are you? No one recruited you or even tried. Did they know you were there? You’ve been to Moscow, Leningrad, Frunze, Peking, Da Kien, and a few other places, all of them interesting to you, but nothing you can make very interesting to anyone else. All right. That happens too. People carry things around in their head so long they don’t even know they’re there, not until someone pries them loose. Others know they’re there, but don’t want you to find them.” He lifted his eyes from his notebook. “What are you hiding?”
Masakita sat in silence.
“You’re holding something back. What is it? You’ve got to come clean sooner or later. You can’t hold out like this. Why’d you accept that cabinet post and return here after your radical friends offered you the leadership? That never made any sense to me. What was behind it? Did the Soviets recruit you? Someone else? Come on, God damn it, open up! Make it easy for me to understand. I’m trying to help.”
“It was nothing like that,” Masakita replied. “I’ve told you all I can.”
No wonder the army couldn’t get its hands on him during the rebellions, Reddish thought, descending alone in the elevator to the basement. Who could? A Marxist riddle in 130 pounds of pure Cartesian ectoplasm.
Chapter Five
The dawn light was still gray in the kitchen when Reddish took the telephone call. He had come downstairs to put the coffeepot on, dressed only in his pajama bottoms. He’d sat up until after midnight in the study trying to patch together a cable to Langley, but the cable wouldn’t write and he’d given up. A vascular flush dulled the whites of his eyes, as if he’d just awakened from a drinking weekend in the saltwater sun. The call was from his ex-wife, telephoning from her house in the Washington suburbs.
“Who’d you think it was, anyway,” she demanded suspiciously, “that Vietnamese tramp who used to send you pictures of her kids?”
“I wasn’t sure,” he answered guiltily. Her voice scraped across his scalp like fresh pain from an old wound.
“Yeah, I’ll bet. All right, Papa-San, where’s her tuition check? That school you put her in has been pestering me to death, and I’m sick of it. What do you expect me to do, pay it myself?”
It was midnight in Washington and the connection was poor. He knew she’d been drinking. She only called when anger and alcohol dulled her judgment enough to make her forget the transatlantic toll charges. In the morning she would remember and send him the bills.
“Listen, are you still there? If you hang up on me like you did last time, I’ll jerk her out of that school so fast it’ll make your head swim.”
He thought sometimes that she was only what he’d made her—the anger, the drinking, even the language. She’d been a secretary at Aberdeen Proving Grounds when they’d first met, a happy, outgoing blond girl from rural Maryland with two years of college in a small denominational school in the Maryland mountains. She liked to bowl, play hearts for a penny a point with her brothers and father, and attend the local football and basketball games in the autumn and winter. Her father was the manager of a Western Auto store. The family lived on five acres outside of town, had a chicken dinner every Sunday after church, and a stocked pond where they jigged for bass and crappies on Sunday afternoons after the horseshoe and croquet games. He was working on a special weapons project at Aberdeen when he met her.
She’d adjusted to living in the Virginia suburbs but, after he’d joined the clandestine services, not to the life overseas. She’d never been abroad before. The first year had been interesting for her, but the years that followed a nightmare. She was frightened by the foreign environment, often a hostile one, by Reddish’s absences, the smell of the suqs, the servants, cocktail-party decorum, and his colleagues’ wives. Insecurity and self-consciousness made learning a foreign language impossible. She had a nervous breakdown in Syria and was evacuated to a US military hospital in Germany. While Reddish was in Vietnam, she stayed in Bangkok, where she fell in with a group of NCO wives from the US military mission. They gave each other permanents, played canasta, bowled, shopped in the commissary, and taught her to dye her hair. Reddish flew to Bangkok as often as he could, but not often enough. She met a Voice of America stringer as mixed up as she was, and the marriage fell apart after that. She’d returned to Washington alone.
Reddish said, “I mailed the check last week.”
“You’d better have. Have you sold the house yet? I need the money. Living in Washington isn’t cheap these days. Starting a business isn’t either.”
They’d bought a house on the Atlantic shore near Rehoboth, Delaware, twelve years earlier, the only permanent home their daughter had known. The VOA man she’d met in Bangkok had resigned to start his own public relations firm in Washington.
“I’ll buy you out. It’ll take me a little time to get the money together.”
“You told me that last winter. What’s wrong, aren’t you making it big these days? What about that hardship post you’re in? Don’t they pay you big bucks for that these days? What are you spending it on—booze, women, or what?”
“I’ll get the money together.”
“Yeah, you said that before too.” She turned away from the phone. “Hey, would you turn that goddamned TV down!”
He saw them sitting in the small ugly overheated living room of the red brick bungalow in the Washington suburbs, the dinner burned and cold on the stove, both of them drinking and worried about money, both getting uglier, drunker, and more frightened, talking about money.
“… we can’t all be on the government dole, you know. I mean, some people have to work for a living. You could save us both a lot of grief if you took Becky out of that rich man’s school. She could live here, with me—”
“She’s happy where she is. We’ve been all through that.”
“She’ll never be happy with you putting all those fancy ideas in her head. She’ll end up the way you did. She could live out in Aberdeen with Mom and Dad.”
“Look, I’ll be back there in a couple of weeks. I’ll talk to you then.”
“You’re coming back? I heard on TV that the government fell apart over there. God, you must have screwed it up royally again, just like Damascus.”
“I’ve got to go. I’ll see you in a couple of weeks. In the meantime, try to get yourself together.”
He went back upstairs to shave. In the kitchen again, he made breakfast and listened to the seven o’clock bulletin over the national radio announcing the names of the new Revolutionary Military Council. Colonel N’Sika was the chairman, his deputies Majors Fumbe and Lutete.
Lutete? He paused as he scribbled the names. Which Lutete? Ten men formed the new council, all of them military officers, none above the rank of colonel.
The sun was still pale in the courtyard as Reddish climbed the embassy steps. His seers
ucker jacket was wrinkled, his thin hair untidy. A few strands fell forward over the high tanned forehead. The Marine who opened the door thought he smelled whiskey beneath the pungence of the cigar that smoldered in his fingers. Taggert, freshly groomed in South Africa suntans, trailed Reddish across the reception hall reeking of the spice of an aftershave lotion once popular in the PX’s of the Far East, as deeply embedded in Reddish’s memory as the stinking rice paddies and the snow-swept mountains of the Korean war. It came in blue bottles and looked like embalming fluid. He despised it. It reminded him of a terrible drunken weekend he’d once spent in a Seoul bordello where the Korean girls wore it like perfume.
“They say you were once a weapons man,” Taggert said in a bright whisper as he followed Reddish up the stairs. “Small bore, handguns, cold guns, what have you.”
Reddish paused on the landing to twist the cigar butt into the urn. “Who told you that?” he asked softly.
“The commo people,” Taggert told him uneasily. “The reason I’m asking is that I’ve got a problem with mine—a Beretta .38. I was wondering if you’d look at it.”
Reddish stood searching his pockets. His daughter’s letter was there, together with a half-dozen telephone call slips, some scribbled messages from Sarah, and others he’d scrawled to himself. He pulled his steel-rimmed spectacles from his pocket, scrutinizing a slip of paper he’d almost forgotten, hardly conscious of Taggert. He looked at that moment less like a diplomat or an intelligence officer than a broker on small margins, a man without expectations.
