by W. T. Tyler
“Not bridge you were talking about, was it?”
“Bridge? No. I don’t play. Do you?” She brought glasses and a crystal decanter from the antique cabinet. The rain rushed through the trees outside and flooded the spouts beyond the windows, pouring from the gutters. She stopped, listening. “Have you ever been to Entebbe in the rain, hours and hours of it, just like this? Just gray skies and rain.” She shivered in recollection, the chill touching her. “Like prison, destroying the will that way. It had that effect on me. Africa, I thought. I don’t want to remember it that way. Did it affect you the same way at first?”
“Asia did, during the monsoon. Not here so much. It goes pretty fast.”
“The wind on Santorini affected me that way too. My hotel was high on the mountain and the wind blew all night long. I had to fight against it. It was dreadful, terrible at first. It took away my courage.” She removed a folded map from the cabinet drawer.
“So it wasn’t all vacation, the Greek islands.”
“No,” she admitted. “There were many nights like that, mornings too.” She turned toward the front windows.
He guessed that she wasn’t planning to catch Houlet’s plane after all, but was thinking about a trip to the bush and wanted his advice.
“It’s a car,” he said.
She put the map away. The Houlets entered a few minutes later, voices unnaturally loud, still amplified by the din of the crowded reception they’d just left. They were accompanied by Armand and a young brunette from the French cultural center. Houlet was short, plump, and bald with a cherub’s wet mouth; Madame Houlet was more stately but also plump, her brown eyes warmer, with a curiosity her husband’s lacked. Her perfume filled the room, which suddenly seemed very alien to Reddish, very French, very uxorial.
“Back so soon, Gabrielle? No more adventures? Ah, Reddish. A very great pleasure. You know my wife, I believe, and Mr. Armand. And Miss Foucart, to be sure.” His voice was still very loud, even aggressive. A late supper was waiting, but Houlet decided to have drinks first. He energetically searched for glasses and whiskey. Gabrielle had withdrawn silently to the sofa near the fireplace.
“I didn’t see you there,” Armand recalled, speaking of the reception. “You were right not to go. The usual crowd. Wretched food. And no one from the new Revolutionary Council was there, not a soul.”
“Does that surprise you?” Houlet asked.
“No, not much,” Reddish said. “Still feeling their way, I suppose.”
“Of course. Precisely. But of course, Gabrielle wasn’t there to enlighten us.” Houlet called across the room to Gabrielle. “I was just saying to Reddish that we had no one at the reception to enlighten us.”
“Shhh,” Madame Houlet said, hand lifted to her silver-gray coiffure. Fixing her eyes suddenly on Reddish, she smiled.
“But of course you and Gabrielle had much to talk about, I’m sure,” Houlet continued loudly.
“Extraordinary, isn’t it,” Armand murmured with a vague smile, “that you could have been in Malunga while the assault was under way and then drive out quite calmly, past the bodies in the road, guns going off in all directions. Gabrielle has told us.”
Houlet winked at Reddish. “And to see everything so clearly,” he added. “Was she really so composed as all that, even to describe the number of bullets fired—”
“Shhh,” Madame Houlet urged, setting out coasters. “Do you play bridge, Mr. Reddish?”
“Not very well, I’m afraid.”
“I’m sure Gabrielle was very heroic,” Armand said.
“But of course,” Houlet announced, clumsily pouring out drinks. “But of course she was heroic. Le livre du moi est toujours héroïque.”
Thunder roared in the distance and pealed across the rooftops. Houlet flinched in mock fright. The rain came harder. “What was that?” he asked as he restoppered the decanter. “Gabrielle’s guns again?”
“Shhh,” Madame Houlet insisted from the sofa, where she’d gone to join Gabrielle. “Shall we light the fire.”
“But why all this shhh?” Houlet continued. “Why all this silence.” Madame Houlet studiously ignored him. “My wife is a romantic,” Houlet volunteered to Reddish, lowering his voice. “Like Gabrielle. But Africa’s no place for romantics. God, no. Writers either.” His voice dropped even further. “God save us from those who’ve come to Africa to discover themselves, eh? From writers who’ve come to discover Africa for us. Do they think Africa exists just for their own salvation? But what is that you’re drinking?”
Identifying the brandy in Reddish’s glass, he was apologetic. “The thieves’ brandy, of course. The houseboys’,” he whispered. “The best is kept hidden away.” He unlocked the bottom of the cabinet and brought forth an old bottle. “Try this. This is much better.”
“No, thanks. This is fine. I’ll be on my way in a minute.”
“Gabrielle?” Houlet lifted the bottle in her direction.
But she had overheard his whispered remark and was looking silently at Reddish, her eyes lost to him again, as they’d been that night in the elevator, and she didn’t answer Houlet at all.
Chapter Eleven
As de Vaux left the rear porch of his cottage early that morning, the old sentinel was stooping near a palm tree where something lay hidden in the grass. De Vaux’s two small children played during the day in the swing and sandbox nearby, but at this hour they were still in the house with their nurse, who was scolding them through breakfast. The old sentinel moved to a squat, knees against his chest as he cautiously reached for something hidden to de Vaux, fingers extended, as if stalking a lizard or toad.
De Vaux joined him and saw it wasn’t a lizard at all, just a wooden figure as mute as the one they had discovered a day earlier, no more than two meters in length, a wooden creature with a coat of beaten bark daubed with dried mud, a blunt snout and four stubby reptilian legs, evilly carved to resemble those of a pig or crocodile. A child might pick it up impulsively; a European would be curious but cautious; a wary African wouldn’t touch it at all.
De Vaux believed it was meant for the children. He crouched down beside the old guard and with the barrel of his revolver prodded it to its side. Hidden beneath the bark fiber were the poisonous metal barbs, tiny fishhooks whose shanks were embedded in the wooden core, their snelled tips exposed but bent downward in the bark, unfelt by the grasping hand but immediately alive as the creature was lifted, the snelled teeth biting deeply into fingers and palm. He wrapped his handkerchief about the snout and lifted it into the sunlight, belly up. The hooks were smeared with a viscous substance. It was an old fetish, as old as the iron fishhooks, but the toxin was as fresh as that found on a similar fetish a day earlier.
“Green mamba?” the old sentinel ventured aloud as he identified the venom-barbed hooks, parroting what he’d heard on the national radio: the jeunesse were everyone’s enemies.
De Vaux told him to search the grounds again, and he carried the fetish back to the cottage and down the hallway to the far wing and his father-in-law’s room. Behind the closed door, the darkness stank of his sickness. He lay on the thin pallet, ill and feverish, head back, his eyes closed and his mouth open, like the cleft beak of an old tortoise. His black skin hung in loose seams from his ancient face, arms, and thighs. About his waist was a dusty crimson sash; a stuffed snakeskin wrapped his right ankle, a bracelet of yellow leopard teeth the other. The long thin reed pipe with the fire-blackened clay bowl no larger than a thimble lay on the bedside table among the medicine bottles. A week had passed since he had last smoked it. For three nights that same week he’d been driven through the dark streets searching for Pierre Masakita’s whereabouts. The last night, he had spat blood.
It was all de Vaux could do to look at him in this condition. Once the strength and power of his people to the north, he was now dying.
The old cousin who attended him sat on the stool at the foot of the cot, his head against the wall, his ash-caked hands hanging loosely over
his bony knees. Once a minor fetisheer, whose power had failed, he was trying to recover it on the old man’s behalf. Gathered about him on the dark floor were clay pots, vessels, and fetishes, some with antelope horns projecting from their wooden heads, others with dried viscera, fingernails, scraps of body hair, teeth, shriveled cauls, or embryonic bones in their concealed body cavities.
“He must go home to his village,” the old cousin told de Vaux listlessly, opening his eyes. “He must go, all of us—”
“In time,” de Vaux answered, bending over his father-in-law, his ear at the old man’s lips. The breathing was weak and irregular.
The old cousin sat forward, identifying the object de Vaux carried, straining his neck but not leaving his stool. “What is it?”
“We found it in the garden. Do you know it?”
De Vaux took it to him, but he shrank away, lifting his forearm. “No! No! Is it theirs?”
Like de Vaux, the old cousin knew that the fetish found in the garden was a sign and a portent, proof that someone knew the old man was dying, and his power with him, the power that had once protected this household, this daughter and her children, de Vaux himself, and his nephew Colonel N’Sika. Power being challenged was power no longer feared; illness or death in this family was proof that the power was broken and the magic of someone stronger had prevailed. A challenge must be answered by even stronger magic, but de Vaux’s father-in-law had no strength left.
Colonel N’Sika had begun to suspect the truth. He’d visited the cottage twice in three days, both times late at night and both times alone, seeking his uncle’s counsel. The colonel hadn’t slept well; he’d lost his appetite; Pierre Masakita had eluded his uncle and his troops; and his tongue had been paralyzed for a few minutes during an all-night session of the council, humiliating him in front of majors Fumbe and Lutete and others he mistrusted. “Which among them are my enemies?” he’d asked his uncle.
De Vaux knew better than his dying father-in-law what N’Sika’s problems were—twenty-two-hour days, all-night working sessions, no sure sense of where their revolution was taking them, and an inept, divided council afraid for their lives and frightened by N’Sika’s uncompromising leadership. But the old man had had little counsel to offer. He’d taken back the small ivory amulet N’Sika wore about his neck, studied it silently for a few minutes, and retired alone to his room. When he returned, the ivory amulet had a deeper, richer luster to it, and the old man wore an identical one around his wrinkled neck.
Yesterday, de Vaux had seen the amulet discarded on N’Sika’s desk in a container of paper clips and pens.
N’Sika had arrived unannounced for his second visit, and de Vaux hadn’t been present. N’Sika had discovered the old man lying in the darkness behind the door, attended by the old cousin and his primitive fetishes. He’d left troubled and uneasy, complaining bitterly to de Vaux on the following morning that the old cousin and his filth were corrupting his uncle’s strength and that the cousin should be sent home to his village in the north.
But de Vaux hadn’t sent the old cousin away. There was no place for him to go, just as there was no place for his father-in-law to go. If the relics the old cousin had assembled on his father-in-law’s behalf seemed primitive and obscene to N’Sika, they were still the articles of the old cousin’s faith, and de Vaux had been taught by his years in Africa to take nothing for granted in such matters.
Years ago he’d been victimized by relics as barbarous as these.
He was driving a truck up near Bunia at the time and had broken an axle on the track a hundred kilometers to the west, returning from Stanleyville. Darkness had already fallen and he was too exhausted to pull the bearing and replace the axle with the spare; so he lit his lantern and he and his African helper returned to the isolated village whose cooking fires they’d passed eight kilometers back.
The village was dark when they entered, the Africans vanished into their huts. The few who finally came forward into de Vaux’s lantern light were sullen and suspicious. They offered them nothing to eat, but all de Vaux wanted was charcoal for his kettle and a spot to lay out his bedroll. He was willing to pay for it. They wouldn’t accept his money, and an old man pointed through the darkness to a hut at the end of the village and said they could sleep there. But they had no charcoal.
When they reached the hut, the African helper refused to enter, claiming that the villagers didn’t want them in the settlement and had sent them to the deserted hut to get rid of them, since it was still possessed by the dead man who once lived there.
De Vaux was too tired to argue and suspected his helper was lying to him. How did he know who had lived there? He gave the helper his torch and told him to go back to the truck if he was frightened. After the helper left, de Vaux spread his bedroll inside, ate a cold sandwich, drank his cold tea in the light of the lantern, and went to sleep.
He didn’t talk about it afterward, not to anyone, not even his Congolese wife, years later, whom he told everything. It was the most terrifying night he’d ever spent in his life, but it was nothing anyone could ever describe, nothing you could either believe in or not believe, as the Europeans were always asking: “What about this witch doctor or fetisheer business? What do you think? Is there anything to it?”
That was the wrong way to put it. It wasn’t anything you could think about at all, no more than you could a raging fever. What was that—mental, something your mind was seized with? He could define it no better. It was just an experience, a condition that drove your terrified little mammalian mind from whatever crypt or fissure where civilization had hidden it away all those centuries and stalked it, right out there on the jungle floor. That was why the Europeans would never understand.
He’d been awakened in the middle of the night to find something in the hut with him. A rat? A reptile? Maybe a snake? Probably. It had happened to him before. He reached for his lantern. It was as cold as ice. And just as suddenly the cold clutched at him too, blowing across his face like Antwerp fog from the winter streets, a sinister breath that filled the thatched hut and condensed like hoarfrost on the cold metal of the lantern, which from that moment on would be useless to him no matter how many times he replaced the wick or the candle.
So he was sleeping, he convinced himself, just sleeping, just an exhausted victim of one of the uglier tricks of sleep after a brutal day on the track. In an act of will he woke himself, but consciousness was much worse; the icy lantern was there, just as this paralyzing coldness was there, trapped outside himself—an evil stalking presence that rose wrathfully from the darkness and struck at him, something foul, cold, and unspeakable.
He scrambled away against the thatched wall of the hut, where he braced himself, eyes straining in the darkness to know his captor. He didn’t know what it was. It was without shape—no face, no body, nothing tangible except its coldness—yet it was there, its icy presence licking at his bare ankles, then his arms, and neck, but retreating each time he struck out at it. He flung his cigarettes at it, his wallet, his wristwatch, kicking at it finally with his feet, trying to push himself through the wall thatching to escape into the warm darkness outside the hut, still holding the lantern up to shield his face. But the vines and raffia rope held the thatched wall in place and he was its prisoner.
Caught momentarily in the tangle of fiber rope, he felt its coldness reach his neck and jaw. He cried out, freed himself, and rolled to his side, kicking as it retreated, cold, gray, as palpable as sea fog; and in that moment, in the terror of his condition, in an instant of clairvoyant insanity de Vaux understood the terror of its own. It was a dead thing—his helper had been right—but no longer in the physical shape, the blood and bones his Creator had given him, but in this other, set loose in this unspeakable condition and now trying to hide its formlessness away in de Vaux’s warm flesh and bone, to escape that very nullity de Vaux was recoiling from in terror.
“You bugger! You won’t do it! Not me, you bastard!”
His disco
very seemed to him so clear, so remarkable, and so terrifying in its simplicity that in that instant it seemed to him that through raw fear he’d divined what philosophers and theologians searched a lifetime for through their dusty texts without discovering. There would be a ton of gold in that philosopher’s stone—death was even more unspeakable, more terrified of its nullity than life—and if later he was to feel cheated of that discovery, at the time it gave him the courage to continue battle. He had no idea how long he fought off his assailant. Only when the first dawn light showed through the trees and he could see the outline of the door did the oppression lift, the cold withdraw. As he crawled through the door exhausted, the mist had begun to stir from the black river that thrashed through the sunless jungle behind the village.
He gathered together his kitbag, his bedroll, and lantern, and retrieved his pocket articles from the earth floor of the hut. In the dawn light he saw, hanging from the roofpoles outside, the gnawed gray sticks tied and knotted with viscera. Some were old, weathered by the sun and rain, but at the side of the hut he found a pendulous goat horn sealed with a wad of fresh entrails.
The villagers stirred from their huts to watch as he struggled down the path to the road, more exhausted now than he’d been the night before. He made a good show of it, trying to walk a straight line, shoulders back. He didn’t look over his shoulder at those mute savages who watched him go, didn’t care who had lived and died in the abandoned hut; and if the poor buggers he’d left behind continued to be oppressed by something dead trying to crawl its way back to life, more terrified of its condition than they were of theirs, maybe they deserved that too.
By the time he reached the truck eight kilometers away, his discovery no longer seemed so remarkable. His pounding feet and aching head had driven everything else from his mind. Maybe it was only his own exhaustion after all; maybe bad pork or contaminated tea. In the hellish heat of the day, his philosopher’s stone of the previous night dissolved, fled like quicksilver in a memory of acute delirium.
