Rogue's March

by W. T. Tyler

  “I wasn’t successful and others paid it,” Reddish said. “All of us.”

  “Your mistake or hers?”

  “Mine.”

  “Then there’s still a chance, isn’t there?”

  “No, no chance.”

  Madame Houlet came into the garden with her rose shears, a limp straw hat on her head, a basket over her arm. Reddish stood up. She paused to talk for a few minutes and then continued on, disappearing behind the screen of flame trees in the rear.

  “The places we went were pretty far off the beaten track,” he continued, looking at the sky, “not what she was used to. She would have been happier in Europe. She couldn’t have been happy here, never.”

  “I know how she feels,” Gabrielle said. “I think I’m beginning to despise it too.”

  “No, you aren’t,” Reddish said, putting down his glass. “Give yourself a chance. It’s a big country. Put the pieces back together.”

  “In what way? Write about it, you mean?”

  “Why not? No one else has.”

  “Are you talking about the coup or the country?”

  “Both,” he continued. “They’re one and the same. I may be going away for a few days, maybe a week. You ought to get away too. It would do you some good. Here everyone is saying the same thing, journalists and diplomats both. It’s different in the bush. If you don’t know the interior, you don’t know this country. If you don’t know the country, what happens here in the capital won’t make any sense either.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “The interior.”

  “For what reason?”

  “To see what’s happening, how they’re reacting to the new regime.” At the country team meeting the day before, the AID mission director had presented a report from the public safety adviser that a police post at Funzi had been raided for weapons by a group of rebels. The report raised questions in Bondurant’s mind as to whether the dormant rebel regions might again become active in opposition to the new military regime. He’d suggested that someone visit those regions, someone from the political section; Lowenthal, not anxious to leave center stage, had proposed that Reddish go.

  “Where would you suggest?” Gabrielle asked.

  “The Kwilu maybe,” Reddish said. “Let me think about it. I’ll give you a call tomorrow. You’ll still be here?” “I’ll still be here. Are you serious?” “Why not?” he said.

  “I thought you weren’t going to take any more trips,” Sarah reminded him after he’d returned from the ambassador’s office.

  “Just this last one,” Reddish said. “Is anything in from Langley yet on our cables?” The day following their meeting with N’Sika, Bondurant had instructed Reddish to report to CIA headquarters the coup details as he knew them—the hijacked MPLA guns, the assault on the party compound, and the seizure of the présidence.

  “Nothing, not a word. I still don’t understand about this trip.”

  “Some of the old guerrilla trails may be coming to life again—at least that’s what some people think.”

  In the niche between the glass-topped desk and the typewriter table was a cork mat to which were thumbtacked the sun-faded ethnological maps of the interior, the various tribal atolls, islands, and archipelagos marked in different colors. He stood scratching his temple with the steel letter opener, following the thin blue vein of river to the north and the great lake at the edge of the rain forest, the equatorial wilderness which had once been Masakita’s foraging ground. Funzi, where the police post had been raided, was just north of Benongo, where Masakita had attended the Jesuit mission school. Near Funzi was an AID-funded fishing cooperative. Reddish wondered if anyone had visited it recently.

  “What the hell’s wrong with Langley?” he asked suddenly. “It’s been almost a week now.”

  “I’m sure I don’t know. Why does it have to be you going on this trip? Haversham is coming back on Thursday. He’ll want you here.”

  “Because I’m tired of this place. There’s nothing going on here, nothing the others couldn’t handle.”

  “Why doesn’t Selvey go?”

  “Because he doesn’t know the area. What’s wrong with you anyway? What difference does it make.”

  “Wednesday is my birthday,” she said coolly, turning back to the door, lips drawn thin. “I was planning something. I’m sorry I ever asked.”

  He telephoned the AID project officer and asked him about the fishing cooperative near Funzi. The young officer was uncertain, a little vague, and finally apologetic. No, no one had visited the project in over a year. It wasn’t a very high-priority project anyway. The economic rationale was somewhat dubious, the venture pushed by the ex-minister of finance, who’d been shot. For that very reason, it would probably die on the vine now. In the meantime, the AID country plan had shifted emphasis—new target goals, a new emphasis. But the project was still on the books. If Reddish was planning a trip in the area, he might look in. But don’t encourage any additional funding, no, quite impossible now.

  “Do you people over there ever finish anything you started?” Reddish demanded.

  “Oh yes. As a matter of fact, we recently completed—”

  He hung up.

  “And who did he say is the ideologue these days? Who is pulling these rabbits out of the hat?” Federov asked, turning to Klimov as his car sped toward the para camp through the midnight streets. “Whose ideas are these we read about every day in the newspapers?”

  “N’Sika’s,” Klimov admitted.

  “So your charlatan is no longer the maestro, eh, no longer pulling these strings that are all tangled in confusion.” He was in an expansive mood after a small party at the embassy celebrating Navakian’s fifty-fifth birthday. The wine Federov had drunk—and he’d drunk too much—had even persuaded him to extemporize on Navakian’s concertina.

  “So what socialist text has he borrowed, this colonel, for his first five-year plan?” he continued, determined not to let this night be ruined by another bullying lecture at the para camp. He’d been abruptly summoned three hours before. Klimov, contacting his informant on the Revolutionary Council, had learned that Federov would be told that Russian support for the MPLA guerrilla forces must be reduced, if not eliminated; the same guns were finding their way into the hands of those in the interior opposed to the new regime. Another imbecilic protest at another imbecilic hour.

  “N’Sika has no text. He admits that.”

  “And so where has N’Sika studied? If N’Sika is the ideologue, not this hired charlatan of yours, where does his mind hide—in the jungle where he learned his brutal ways? Is that where he studied? Who taught him the French he uses to terrify us or have Fumbe terrify us—ten verbs and twenty nouns, always the same. What kind of book can you write with ten verbs and twenty nouns? A very primitive book. No, don’t look for bones in this nasty egg they call a revolution—never.”

  “He’s willing to learn,” Klimov suggested. “He must learn. It’s a vacuum. He has no time to think, not with all these decisions to be made.”

  “A vacuum?” Federov turned. “Whose words are those?”

  “My words.”

  “So you’d hatch this egg, would you? A vacuum. But it’s not a vacuum. There is something there—a bullying impulse to humiliate the Belgians and Westerners. More than just an impulse. To turn on his tormentors, to electrify his audience every time he opens his mouth. What happens when he runs out of words, when he grows tired of shouting? I’ll tell you what will happen. He’ll go creeping off to Brussels and ask for mercy, ask for the technicians and monopolists to run his copper mines. Of course. And he’s a racist too. So being Belgian-trained, he’ll know the proper kind of servility when he stands on his hind legs in Brussels and begs for their understanding. A racist, that’s what this man is, and if you don’t see that in his eyes, you don’t see anything.”

  “I see a man willing to listen,” Klimov answered.

  Federov studied the armed guards at the para camp g
ate through the sedan window. Their bullying disgusted him; so did their brutal self-conceit. They insisted the driver leave the car over Klimov’s protests. Oh, there are no bones in this egg at all, Federov’s mind sang, suddenly detached from this macabre comedy, this circus of zombies which frightened even the moon peeping through the fringe of ragged palm trees, guns everywhere, black blood still warm against stone walls less than a mile away.

  In the salon with its vulgar chairs and weak, gelid light—like that of a bath house, Federov thought—Colonel N’Sika’s purple-black face seemed wearier, the eyes lackluster. Federov was cheerful, almost lighthearted, his gray eyes shining behind the iron-rimmed spectacles. N’Sika had just completed a six-hour session with the Belgians, whose wooden stubbornness had blocked any movement on the copper mine negotiations. He had intended to cancel his meeting with the Russian, but Major Fumbe had been unable to reach Federov prior to his departure for the para camp.

  Major Lutete began by describing several recent raids on police posts in the interior by rebels carrying Russian weapons. One occurred within a hundred kilometers of the capital, another at Funzi, to the north. The council had reason to believe that the rebels had been armed from Brazzaville and supplied with Soviet-made weapons intended for the MPLA.

  Federov dismissed the reports with a wave of his hand. “I will make it perfectly clear to you now, as I have before, that neither Moscow nor Brazzaville, whose authorities our ambassador across the river has consulted, has any intention of arming these confused, frightened rabble in the bush, whoever they are. We fully respect your government’s policy of positive neutralism announced last week. We are motivated solely by the wish for coexistence, so we don’t regard ideological differences or differences in social systems as in any way a barrier to this new era of cordiality. We arm no rebels. We regard this country as one which plays a most important role in Africa.”

  “So you do not agree that these are guns supplied from across the river?” Fumbe asked.

  “There are those who pretend to see Moscow’s puppeteering strings everywhere,” Federov replied, turning to N’Sika. “Of course. Do they also give us credit for the moon hanging in the trees outside? Perhaps. But I can assure you, Mr. Chairman, that we don’t hang cardboard moons in a cardboard sky for these rabble at Funzi or wherever to bay at. Of course not.” Amused at his own metaphor, he smiled. “We didn’t create your revolution, either, did we? No. You created it, you and your men here. Did we create those objective internal conditions that brought about the downfall of the old regime? Not at all, no more than the moon I spoke of. The moon is out there in the trees because its time has come. So it is with your revolution.”

  Encouraged by N’Sika’s childlike attention, he continued: “So it is too with progress and social justice, to which you say you are committed. Revolutions succeed not because they are announced over national radio but because their time has come, because internal conditions have ripened and created them, created the will for men to understand their condition and change it.” At his side, Klimov stirred restlessly. Federov ignored him. “Are two hundred million Africans waiting for Moscow to tell them to waken, to rouse themselves, and stand up? Of course not. Only people who are ignorant of history can say such things. So examine the situation objectively, as you have your own revolution, and you will see that we have no reason to give arms to these rabble.”

  N’Sika studied the Russian’s lively face, the quick gray eyes, and the hairy eyebrows. His tie was askew, a white collar button showing. A claret-colored spot, like berry juice, stained his shirt-front. His shoes were dusty.

  “People accuse you,” he said.

  “Of course they accuse us, as they will continue to accuse us. They accuse us out of weakness, not out of strength. But we know what these imperialists want. It is very clear. They want the best of all worlds, past, present, and future, yours as well as mine. When a repressive, corrupt regime is maintained, social and economic justice denied, the masses deprived, hungry, and sick, that’s a triumph for peace and stability. When anti-popular criminal regimes are overturned, that’s a threat to peace and stability, and Moscow is accused of sowing sedition and revolution abroad.

  “So what is stability? It’s doing nothing—nothing, you see! So we know what these imperialists want—they want the same world tomorrow as they have today or they had last year, but what does that deny? It denies progress, it denies history. So of course they won’t have what they want. Why? Because you can’t deny progress. You can’t artificially trifle with the objective processes of historical development, not in the name of stability or anything else. History will turn these charlatans out.”

  N’Sika listened silently, puzzled by the twists to this strange little man’s imagination. “Objective processes of historical development”? What was he talking about? Did he mean that the forces which overthrew the old President were the same as those which hung the moon in the sky? If progress was inevitable, why was it that the dead President had ruled as oppressively as the Belgians, that the people in his own village in the north were worse off now than fifteen years earlier? The Western envoys feared this man, as the old President had feared him, but why? Not the man, certainly. He had no strength in his arms or neck. Did they fear his secrets? Did they fear what was hidden away in his books, the way the old fetisheers feared the missionaries’ Bible?

  “Objective processes?” he asked. “A leader must be objective. What we did was done for the nation, not for ourselves. So that is objective. I understand ‘objective’ in that way.” He hesitated, reluctant to bare his clumsiness in front of Fumbe and Lutete, who talked easily and quickly of such things. “But what else did you mean?”

  “Objective in the sense of understanding those laws by which societies revolutionize themselves,” Federov replied. “But first you must understand why these things happen …”

  N’Sika listened as Federov explained. His words were difficult. He had little time. Tomorrow the Belgians would come again, followed by the French, the Americans, the Germans, and the Israelis, then the Arabs, each with their own interests, their own problems of investment or trade, their own veiled warnings. In the meantime the ministries were in chaos, like their balance sheets and deposits. The council was more frightened and divided than ever, as terrified of de Vaux as they were of Masakita and the old rebels in the bush, whom they claimed Masakita was now organizing, perhaps to be joined by a few mutinous army commands. De Vaux was no longer of use to him. He’d betrayed him by concealing his uncle’s illness and could no longer be trusted. So he trusted no one on this hilltop, no one at all. He needed to be ten men to do what needed to be done, but he was alone; what strength he had was being leeched from him each day in a hundred trivial decisions. The powers of his ancestors were forsaking him as his old uncle wasted away; his education had been that of a soldier, not a politician.

  So something was missing. He searched for quick and simple solutions to these problems which a month earlier he hadn’t dreamed existed. Bullets had been quick, but the burden they brought was crushing. What could he invoke in his search for simplicity? Bullets? No. God? Which god? Mammon had been the old President’s god, the key that unlocked all doors, bought allegiance and loyalty, silenced dissension, and fueled the engines of government. What else was left? The Belgian colonialists had thrown the other on the rubbish heap of history during their long period of plunder and exploitation, like the old fetishes burned by the Catholic priests in his village. After he’d executed the old President and his cabinet ministers, he’d felt no remorse and seen none in the faces of the civil servants and the people in the streets. He knew it was true—that the body of the Belgian Christ could be as easily forgotten on the rubbish heap as the old fetishes.

  But what Federov was telling him was something else, something new entirely, as simple in its design as those laws which kept the planets in motion overhead. Exploitation was something he could understand even better, and now Federov was describing We
stern exploitation of Africa in Marxist terms.

  N’Sika listened, not understanding everything he was being told, but impatient to be told more.

  “What did you do before you became a diplomat?” N’Sika interrupted suddenly, as interested in Federov as the lessons he was teaching.

  The Russian said he’d been a schoolteacher in the Urals.

  “What did your schoolhouse look like? Was the roof tile or was it thatched?”

  Federov described the schoolhouse.

  “And the children, did they have enough to eat? Did they wear shoes? Did they sit out in the sun and rain or did the government put a roof over their head, give them food to eat?”

  N’Sika’s aide interrupted to say the Pakistani Ambassador was waiting to discuss the cancellation of a contract for textile machinery, but N’Sika sent Lutete to meet him and continued to talk to Federov.

  Lutete didn’t mind the interruption. It seemed to him that they weren’t talking politics at all; more importantly, he knew that the Pakistani would pay to have the contract restored and the foreign exchange released. He intended to get his share of it.

  Crispin was at his table in the afternoon sun, bent over his copybook, when he heard the knock at his door. He turned quickly, crammed the book back into the drawer, and heard the voice of his cousin’s wife: “Crispin! Crispin! Are you asleep?”

  He opened the door and saw a stranger standing next to her, a black oilskin bag over his shoulder. He wore a wrinkled white shirt, a black tie, and a black serge suit that smelled of diesel fumes. He was a traveler, maybe an evangelist. Pinned to his lapel was a fiber cross, still green from the interior.

  “Crispin Mongoy?”

  “Ehhh.” The African took a letter from his oilskin bag and gave it to him.

  “Give him some money,” Crispin told Kalemba’s wife, who gathered her skirts about her and shuffled barefooted back along the corridor.

  The pastor continued to eye Crispin disapprovingly. “Are you a Protestant?”