by W. T. Tyler
“Colonel Selvey? He’s all right, but he isn’t very smart. Diplomatic, I mean.”
“He seems quite pleasant. My wife is quite fond of him, fancies that most Americans should speak that way. He’s from the South, isn’t he? What about Reddish? Curious man, don’t you think? Actually, I’ve never had much of a conversation with him. Never seems to have much to say.” He cut a slice of Camembert to decorate a biscuit. “Tell me, is it Reddish or Haversham. Or Becker?”
“What?”
“The CIA majordomo. The man in charge.”
“We really shouldn’t talk about these things.”
“Really? Not talk about them? Don’t be silly. Of course we should talk about them. We have no secrets now, do we? How does Walt get on with him?”
“With who?”
“Reddish. Weren’t we talking about Reddish?”
“I don’t know.”
“Sees quite a lot of him, does he?”
“No, not at all. Almost never.”
“Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure.”
Cecil brushed the crumbs from his fingers and moved the tray aside. “Really. Then it must be Haversham or Becker.”
“Do we have to talk about these things.” She sighed impatiently and let the robe slip from her shoulders.
Cecil looked the other way. “The Camembert is a little dry, don’t you think?”
She leaned forward and turned off the bed lamp. Cecil immediately reached down to switch on the radio on the lower shelf of the bedside table.
Her shadow loomed over him. “Why do you always want the radio on?” she demanded from the darkness.
“But I thought you liked it.”
“You’re trying to shut me out!”
“Oh, but I’m not at all. It’s soothing. Don’t you think it soothing?”
“It’s awful. It’s like a dentist’s office.”
“Really? A dentist’s office?” His head lifted. Another scrap of Americana. “American dentists have music in their surgery? How extraordinary? You mean to lull one to sleep. Is that how they do it?”
“You want me to go.” Her voice had an edge to it.
“Not at all. Besides, you couldn’t possibly go. The curfew has begun. No, on the contrary, I quite enjoy having you here.”
“But not physically. You just want to gossip.”
“My dear, in the physical sense, as you put it, we’ve been sharing this bed since the nine o’clock BBC. I’m fifteen years older. You must make allowances.”
Furiously, she ripped off the spread.
“I wonder what poor Federov is doing,” he muttered, trying to ignore her as he groped in the darkness for the spread, sitting up. “He was always out of it, you know.” His fingers touched her naked midriff, as soft as velvet. “Sorry. It must have been quite humiliating for him, posted here with absolutely nothing to do.”
“Don’t you ever stop talking shop?” He heard her angry breathing.
“Is that what you think? Oh, but you mustn’t. I’m not at all as serious as some make me out to be.” Her naiveté, deliberately cultivated, seemed to him not so much innocence as a grosser form of stupidity. He imagined that she was in love with him and he found that touching. He was moved not to dalliance so much as gallantry, treating her with a tenderness which might awaken a spoiled sensual child to finer things. “Do you hear that?” he now asked.
“What?” The phone had rung three times since they’d climbed the dark stairs for the guest bedroom. They’d let it ring without answering.
“The radio. It’s Brahms, isn’t it? The variation on Haydn?” He lay back. The music filled him with peace.
She leaned across him, her soft, fragrant body crushing his, and snapped off the radio.
The room was dark and silent. Still she lay across him, obliterating all else with her sheer physical presence. He didn’t want to offend her, but he was physically exhausted. He didn’t have the strength to begin. At last she moved and touched him where he wasn’t accustomed to being touched; he waited, like a passer-by on a beach watching a drowned man being revived. Then, from deep in the ashes, that old flicker of heroism lifted once again. As she moved to position herself, the blood throbbed in his ears, the tide lifted, and he knew that one simply couldn’t help loving a woman like that, stupid or not, just as some old soldiers loved war, a gross, sensual, fickle, brutal woman too for all the heroism she occasionally inspired.
Ambassador Federov, like Reddish, had been awakened with the news of the executions. An old cardigan pulled over his pajama top, he sat at this desk on the fourth floor of the Soviet mission, his short fingers tracing out the lines of the teletyped message in front of him, just brought from the rezidentura teletype, his hair still tousled from sleep.
“Shot. Shot! Still more? How many? Six? Fourteen? By whose authority?”
Klimov sat fully dressed in the deskside chair. Slightly behind him stood Ryabkin, the Tass correspondent, wearing trousers and a pajama top.
“The Revolutionary Court,” said Klimov. His blond hair was combed back over his skull, his blue eyes pale, the jaw muscles standing out as powerfully as biceps. Federov looked up quickly to catch the irony in his face, but it was the Tass man’s tired face that drew his attention.
“All right. Yes, go back to bed—go on. Button your trousers too, or your wife will think something else of these midnight messages. We’ve had enough scandal here. Thank you, yes. We can manage now. Go back to bed.”
Ryabkin nodded gratefully and backed out, shutting the door behind him.
“You know them, the six?” Federov asked, still astonished.
“The worst, the most corrupt—like the President.”
“So they did it, just as he told you they would,” Federov marveled, “just as he predicted.” His eyes were still fastened to the press report as his right hand fumbled with the middle drawer of the desk. He paused, hand groping inside the drawer, then brought out a bottle of brandy, which he passed to Klimov. “Shot them—just like that? Something called the Revolutionary Court? Did he predict that too?”
“He simply said it would be done.” Klimov rose to fetch the tumblers from the glass-fronted cabinet against the opposite wall. “He said six would be executed with the President.”
“Six? Why six? Because they were the most corrupt?”
“He said there would be six. But the numbers don’t matter. He told us it would be done, and so it was. ‘Properly,’ he said. ‘In ways Moscow would understand.’”
Federov’s skepticism returned. “So just like that, a revolutionary court materializes out of thin air, like this magician himself, and shoots the worst of them. In the worst of prisons. Materializes like this mysterious Revolutionary Military Council, like this phantom Colonel N’Sika, of whom nothing is known! No, no, Aleksandr, he’s a charlatan, this man of yours—a circus performer. Just tricks, nothing else. So he pretends Colonel N’Sika and these others are his revolutionaries. All right. So let him pretend. But nothing will come of it—nothing at all. So six men are shot, six ministers. The President was executed too. So what does it mean? What does he want now? Money?”
“Patience, that’s all he asks. To be patient, not to be concerned about the guns, they will show tomorrow. He said that it will be managed, managed in ways we will support.”
“And what does that mean?”
“After the executions, there will be no turning back. N’Sika will make that clear tomorrow. Disengagement with the Belgians and the others will take time. Patience is what he is asking.”
“Patience?” Federov leaned forward scornfully. “Patience? What does he know of patience? To shoot six or seven corrupt politicians is nothing at all! He’s playing with words, this man of yours. And what is it that N’Sika will say tomorrow? What can he say? Nothing at all!”
“N’Sika will nationalize the economy, the extractive industries first, then the waterways and railroads.”
Federov laughed. “And did he
tell you who will manage this new revolutionary economy? The Bulgarians? The North Koreans? Are trained cadres going to materialize out of thin air too, like this phantom Revolutionary Court? The man is a charlatan, admit it! Disengage? Disengage from what? Who’ll buy the copper, eh? He’s a fool!”
“He says they’ll need help, managing the economy. N’Sika will send for you.”
“N’Sika will send for me and then it will all come easily, eh, this new revolution.”
“He said there will be a few problems,” Klimov admitted. “‘African problems,’ he said. But after these problems are disposed of, the revolution will follow its own course.”
“What African problems?”
“Some council members are weak. There’s the Belgian, de Vaux, but N’Sika will handle them in his own way.”
“So he speaks for N’Sika?”
“N’Sika knows he’s been in contact with us,” Klimov said.
Federov smiled. “So you’re tempted, is that it? You’re tempted to believe this liar and hypocrite?” He left his desk to open the shades at the rear window, where dawn had begun to show in the eastern sky. “So he tempts you, does he? You need more activity, that’s all—more to do, like all of us. Shut up like this, day after day, boredom makes us stupid, tempts us with imaginary excitement. It’s the tedium. Like the code clerks upstairs. Shut up all day with their machines, they’re like monks cloistered inside, pretending they talk only to Moscow or to God. No wonder the prophets’ imaginations were so lively. Men in prison show the same disorders. When I was in the Urals, it was that way too—cut off from everything else. So what shall we do?” He smiled ambiguously. “Shall we pave the tennis courts, put a duckpin court in the basement, or give this little charlatan a few rubles, pretending that the hour of our deliverance is at hand?”
Within the confines of the small Soviet mission—his cramped office, and the shabby living quarters where he dined alone not because he despised the comforts the Western envoys enjoyed but because he couldn’t reciprocate their invitations in a style that would do credit to Moscow—Federov’s tone was often one of self-mockery. Admitted to his tiny little flat, smelling of cabbage and garlic from the Armenian’s rooms across the hall, how could one take seriously either his ministry or that of Moscow’s imperial city.
In his self-effacement, Federov would never substitute his ambitions for Moscow’s, but Moscow was far away on that gray African morning. Watching him as he plodded back and forth across the worn carpet, Klimov suspected he was also tempted.
Chapter Nine
The African youth sat sleepily at the dirty wooden table, his dry mouth foul with sleep, his long black arms folded across its grimy surface, warm with morning sunshine. The closed courtyard was bright beyond the open window. He could smell the cooking charcoal from the morning fires, hear the chattering women in the compound yard and the sound of the faucet filling the pots and jugs from the pipe in the center of the lot. His room was small and dark, with unplastered concrete-block walls and a hinged wooden window opposite the door to the passageway. A wooden cot covered by a straw-filled pallet lay in one corner. Two folding wooden chairs stolen from an open-air bar leaned against the wall. A tin lantern stood on the wooden stool next to the bed. The concrete floor was littered with flattened cigarette butts; more filled the sardine can on the table next to the enamel bowl crusted with manioc from yesterday’s meal.
He tried to forget his hunger and concentrate on the dog-eared paperback pressed open by his folded arms. On the wooden shelf above the window were a dozen more paperbacks. On the wall over the cot were a few yellowing newspaper clippings torn from the Sunday soccer supplement, one of which showed him standing with his cité teammates at the stadium after they’d won the President’s trophy. Next to the clippings were pictures of Pelé, Che, Nkrumah, Mao, and Patrice Lumumba. Bright light filtered through the incomplete construction at the top of the wall, where the tin roof and wooden beams atop the concrete block shell were without a fascia.
In the courtyard outside the window four small boys were kicking a loose cotton wad back and forth against the wall. The sunlight touched the yellowing thumb-worn pages of the old Gallimard paperback edition of Camus, and he pushed it forward into the shadows. Two pages were missing, like the front cover, and he’d lost the narrative thread. He frowned and dropped his chin closer to the text. In the dark eyebrow above his right lid was a sickle-shaped scar which curled to the hairline, the result of a soccer match on a stone and glass-filled clay lot.
The cloth ball had flopped into a mud puddle, no longer usable, and the small boys were now flinging it against the building, shrieking from just below the window. Crispin lifted himself out of his chair, seized the sill, and pulled himself forward. “Get out of here! Go on! Get out—out!”
The boys fled across the clay yard and he sat down again, picking at the crust of manioc in the bottom of the bowl, but he’d again lost the thread. He pushed the book and bowl away abruptly, took his dirty towel from the foot of the bed, and went down the passageway and into the sunlit courtyard.
He shoved his way through the gaggle of women gathering at the faucet with their pails, bottles, and pans, gossiping idly as they waited in line. Two younger women with black babies hanging from their shoulders like marmosets were at the faucet. Crispin pushed through them, bent over, and rubbed his face and hair with cold water, then splashed his chest and arms.
A middle-aged woman in a dark, filthy cotton wax watched him cunningly, head cocked, picking her teeth with a straw, her plastic pail at her feet.
“What are you looking at, old grandmother?”
She clucked to herself, removed the straw, and told the other women he’d been hiding in his room for days, like Kimbi the basket maker, except for a different reason. The wife of his cousin Kalemba, the postal clerk, fed him each day like one of her five children. The woman leaned forward, sucking rapidly with her lips, eyes closed like a suckling child, as she told Crispin to climb onto her shoulders and hang there like one of her infant grandchildren.
“Green mamba.” A young woman laughed, holding a naked child on her cocked hip.
“Listen, mama,” Crispin cried, pointing to the older woman. “I saw you burning your son’s green uniform. I saw you!”
She laughed. “They’re coming to get you,” she told him, pointing across the compound toward the wooden door opening into a back alley of Malunga. “N’Sika’s soldiers. Coming through the wall. Mamba.” She clucked contemptuously. “Mamba. Ntoka. Green serpent.”
Crispin hadn’t left the compound for days, hiding in his room since that evening he’d returned from the soccer game to find the party headquarters in flames.
“Mamba! Ntoka! Green mamba!” two small boys shrieked as they followed him back across the yard, lifting their knees like soldiers, voices raised in those cries of derision that followed the jeunesse through the lanes of Malunga, but only after they were out of sight: “Ntoka! Green serpent!”
He turned savagely, but they bolted and fled in opposite directions like frightened pullets.
Inside his room he pulled the green twill uniform of the jeunesse from beneath the pallet, searched the flap pockets for cigarettes, found none, and flung it under the bed. He sank down at the table again, swept the paperback aside, and took a ten-franc copybook from the table drawer. His name was carefully printed on the cover: CRISPIN MONGOY. On each inside page he had entered chapter headings, usually in the form of questions that had occurred to him while reading Franz Fanon, Nkrumah, or Lenin: “What is the Revolution?” “How is it Won?” “What is Discipline?” “What is the Bantu Proletariat?” “What is the Bantu Bourgeoisie?”
Under the chapter headings he had entered those thoughts that had occurred to him as he was walking the lanes of Malunga, as he sat selling Kimbi’s baskets in the grand marché and the Ivory Market, or as he sat here at this table night after night long after the lamps were extinguished. “You are the Revolution,” he had written under
the first entry. A dozen or so lines preceding it had been scratched out; only this sentence had satisfied him. He had added to it as the months passed: “You are the Revolution—your skin, your hopelessness, your anger, your pride, your humiliation!”
The words had excited him when he’d first discovered them. They excited him now.
The notebook had been his conscience and mentor, born of necessity. The party meetings and debates left him confused and tongue-tied, humiliated by his lack of education. His lack of education hadn’t been an embarrassment when he’d been a well-known player with the local soccer team, a sure candidate for the national team if a torn Achilles tendon hadn’t ended his career. He was recruited to the party jeunesse at a time when his life seemed over, assigned to the disciplinary brigades not for his scholarship or mental ability but for his popularity and leadership. He’d transferred to the party the hunger for recognition that once nourished his soccer ambitions. Daydreaming about his success and that of the party, his fantasies continued to define themselves in the regalia of his old soccer days—the party triumphant; Crispin and his colleagues ascending the victor’s box at the stadium to be acclaimed by a wildly grateful nation; Crispin in cleated shoes, leg stockings, and shorts, holding a soccer ball.
He knew how immature were these fantasies which one day would expose him to ridicule before those far better educated than he, clever in ways he wasn’t. As he succeeded in the party, he would be expected to make speeches, chair meetings with members far more agile than he, and prepare programs for younger members with secondary school degrees. The notebook had been his tutor.
His first speech had come a month earlier, after he was chosen deputy chief of the disciplinary brigade. He spoke to an incoming group on party discipline and social responsibility. He’d drawn upon his notebook for his remarks, but his delivery had been faltering, his phrase-making lacking any larger intellectual context, his embarrassment evident.
After the larger meeting, a private critique was held in the party committee room. Dr. Bizenga, the party ideologue and deputy, chaired the critique, flanked by the jeunesse executive secretariat, most of them university undergraduates who disdained the green twill of the disciplinary cadres.
