by W. T. Tyler
The chief led them to a single hut at the far end of the village behind a thicket of decaying banana trees. Beyond the hut a twisting path climbed higher, and farther up the slope they could see the blowing grasses of a small meadow open to the sky. The chief held aside the raffia curtain, but didn’t enter. He said his brother would come later. Then he spoke a few quick words in his own tribal dialect, not Lingala, his eyes searching Reddish’s, and when he saw no recognition there, shook his head and went back to the village. The hut was already touched with evening shadow, the clay floor recently swept, as dry as a bone. In the corner was a single raffia mat, on the crude table a new candle in a carved wooden holder and a box of matches.
“I don’t understand,” Gabrielle said, wiping her damp face with her handkerchief, when they were alone. “Are you staying here—in this hut?”
“It looks like it.”
“But this isn’t what I expected.”
“It never is,” Reddish said, unpacking the battery lantern from his kit, “but I hadn’t planned on you coming.”
“Please don’t be angry.”
“I’m not angry, but it won’t make things any easier.”
A dark hand brushed away the raffia curtain and a young boy entered carrying a wooden tray with two bottles of warm beer, their labels stained with rust. He put them on the table without looking at Gabrielle and Reddish, trying not to smile, like the walk-on in a grade school play, and went out. A minute later they heard the sound of shattering wood and saw two other youths building a fire in a circle of ash-covered stones in the yard. Gabrielle watched them silently, lifting the raffia curtain aside, and finally raised her eyes toward the golden meadow.
“Do you think we could walk up there—now, before the light is gone?”
They left the village and ascended through a patch of yams and manioc. She moved ahead of him carrying her camera. As he followed her up the path toward the crown of hill, leaving the shadows of the village far below, he saw a few brickbats and seams of crystallized mortar almost hidden in the grass at the edge of the path. He kicked at the brickbats curiously and heard Gabrielle call to him from the top of the hill: “Come! It’s splendid!”
He climbed slowly after her into the dying sunlight through deep, bending grass as thick as buckwheat. They climbed higher toward a farther knoll crowned by a few flame and citrus trees whose waving leaves still held the fading sunlight from the west, the sun gone now, far out to sea, beyond the coast, and the old Portuguese forts. The western sky was crimson.
She waited for him on the path, looking out toward the vast silver dish of lake. “It’s magnificent,” she cried, the color showing in her cheeks again, the sullen heat of the village and river below blown away by the evening breeze. Reddish gazed out over the basin of lake, the circling forests and swamps, the fading crimson of evening sky.
At their feet nearby, moving slightly with the breeze, a single yellow rose lifted its head from the tangle of thorn and weed. Gabrielle saw it immediately, calling to him as she dropped to her knees, “But look, look what it is—a rose.”
He turned, saw it, and was climbing higher as she reached forward to take it, still kneeling in the grass as she brought it to her face. He was standing in the weed-grown courtyard when she joined him, looking into the gnarled, fire-stunted lime trees, into the vine-grown shell of brick and mortar of what had once been a small cottage dominating the surrounding countryside. Only the outline remained—a low brick foundation overgrown with vines, weeds, and wild creepers. A few ancient fire-blackened joists still lay like charred bones within the obliterated rooms. At the front of the cottage had once been a flagstone terrace enclosed by a low stone wall. A few stone pilasters remained, like broken teeth in a bleached jawbone.
“Oh, André,” she murmured, gazing about her at the devastation as she sank down on the step, the rose still in her hand, “so petite, so tiny, so cruel—” Reddish circled to the rear, looking down the slope toward an abandoned track that disappeared into the green forest beyond where the trees grew in parallel rows as far as the eye could see, like the sentinels of some abandoned empire. He knew the bark would be scored and mutilated, hacked like the breastplates of those other old warriors of empire; these windrows would be empty of life too, as empty as the vaults of Petra or the broken columns of Palmyra under the Syrian sun, looking out over a frontier the wilderness had reclaimed. He walked back to where she sat slumped on the step looking up at him sorrowfully.
“Rubber,” he said, “miles and miles of it.”
“Rubber?” From the village below, the smoke from the evening cooking fires threaded slowly through the trees. “And the people?” she asked. “The woman who made this garden, who planted this rose?” She gazed about her at the desolation of the courtyard, where crimson and blue anemone grew in the cracks. Leaning down, he picked one and gave it to her, and they sat together on the broken step, listening to the wind. A few kites and fish hawks sailed high on the warm currents of evening air.
“I despise this country,” she said finally, without bitterness, breaking the silence. “I do. At moments like this, I do, and I’m sorry, but I do.”
“The house was built for the rubber, probably during the war. Now it doesn’t pay.”
“This house was deliberately, cruelly burned.”
“It could have been lightning. That’s why the village is down there, not up here. This is storm country.”
“Just rubber? That’s the only reason? Sometimes what I hear from you is so terribly matter-of-fact it’s cruel. It is.”
“So was this house.”
Impulsively she held the rose toward him. “And this?”
He looked at the rose and then at her lifted eyes. “And the village down there? Roses on the lawn—and hookworm, yaws, and malaria in the work camp? What did the people who owned this cottage leave here? What’d they leave—Roman law for the bedouins, a few French irregular verbs for the overseers, the twenty-lash law for everyone else? They tapped the rubber trees and left.”
“She left this—this rose.”
“What’s that mean?”
“A woman lived here, André. I know. A woman who sat here in her garden, who loved this hilltop. I can feel her, the way she sat here—”
“But not an African woman, is that it? This afternoon the girls at Funzi gave you flowers. They were as black as Erebus—”
“You’re not fair.”
“Maybe she was a métisse. Half black.”
“I don’t understand you,” she cried. “I don’t. I’ve tried, but I don’t! I don’t understand why you would come to a place like this, or to that ugly village down there. I don’t even understand why you are in Africa—with men like Armand and Houlet. I don’t understand anything, anything at all; but when I try to understand—when I see a devastated house like this, so small, so fragile, in a country so dark, so ominous, so murderous—when I try to understand and try to feel what someone who once lived here must have felt, like the woman who planted this garden, you deny it! You do! You deny it! It’s in your face, your words! Why do you punish me? Why do you punish yourself? When I see a house like this, burned and ruined, I’m moved by that, but you say, ‘No, no, you mustn’t be moved, you mustn’t feel anything. Just commerce, just greed, just ugliness again, and it’s your civilization that has done all of these cruel things.’ But I can’t help it! That’s not the answer, not the full answer. I feel what is here.”
He saw the brightness come suddenly to her eyes, but just as quickly she turned her head away. Looking at her averted shoulders, he remembered again that night in the Houlets’ salon when she had looked at him silently from the sofa following Houlet’s thoughtless remark. In that European salon among complacent white faces whose arrogance he’d come to despise, her solitary gaze had made him aware more painfully than ever before of how deeply he’d shut himself away.
“I’m sorry. That’s not what I meant,” he said.
“But it’s what you said.”<
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“It’s what I said.” The twilight was thicker now. “Maybe it’s because I sometimes think we’re a little extinct too, like those rubber trees,” he began again. “That’s what hurts, knowing there’s so little you can do. We’ve helped destroy their past. Now we’re destroying our own too, maybe the future as well. Neither seems to exist as an idea any more. Stupidly too, that’s all. Just doing stupid things.”
They sat in silence for a long time watching the western sky grow dark. She stirred suddenly, her head back, breathing in slowly. “Do you smell that?” Eyes closed, she breathed the fragrance of the stunted old lime trees within the courtyard, still in partial blossom after all these years.
Chapter Two
Reddish had expected to be taken to Masakita someplace nearby, but he arrived at the hut the same evening. Gabrielle was kneeling over a tin basin sponging away the dust from her neck and face when the raffia curtain was jerked aside and a man came into the hut, glanced about, looked at Gabrielle and Reddish, and called to someone outside. He wore a webbed cartridge belt with an empty holster. He turned abruptly and went out.
Masakita entered alone a few minutes later, wearing a dirty white soutane, his right arm in a sling. He pulled the soutane off immediately and folded it over the chair. He was dressed in a tattered gray shirt and shorts. His thin legs were gray with wood ash.
“Welcome,” he said with an apologetic smile. “Welcome, both of you.”
Reddish told him in Lingala that Gabrielle didn’t know who he was, but he merely shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. She was in the car that night, wasn’t she?”
The man with the webbed belt brought in a tray with three bottles of beer and three plastic glasses.
“My cousins told me it would be a trick, your coming to Benongo and then Funzi, that you were conspiring with the commissioner for the million-franc reward. My colleagues in the bush were also suspicious. They said, ‘He’ll come but he’ll bring the army.’ So I told them to watch for themselves. So they watched the pirogue come and were still watching until ten minutes ago. But if the army doesn’t come by sundown, they can’t come at all. This is my uncle’s village. My father’s too, but he was dead. When I went to the mission school at Benongo, I claimed my mother’s village, near Funzi. No one from this village had ever gone to the Jesuit school. It was a hunting tribe, smaller people too, you noticed. Bena singe, say the tribes up the lake—the monkey people. So my papers, my records say I’m Bolia from up the lake, but it isn’t true. This is my village, my people.”
“But you’re not living here now?” Reddish asked.
“No, deeper in bush to the east, an old rebel camp abandoned for years now. You enter by pirogue, like here, only much more difficult. The missionaries avoided it, like this village.”
“So they’re searching for you among the Bolia.”
“Yes, but not searching very well.”
“I thought you’d left,” Reddish said, “to Brazza or someplace else.”
“I’ve been in exile. There is no place to go now. For others, yes, but not for me. I’ve been in exile, in Cairo, Prague, Brussels; in Peking and Moscow; in Algiers. In Paris four years. But now there is no place to go. To go outside, to go into exile once is necessary, I think. To go twice is more difficult. But to go a third time and a fourth is death, alive in the body, yes, but death in everything else. No, there is no place for me to go now. My place is here, with my own people.”
The tree frogs thumped in the distance. The candle smoked in a sudden draft and Masakita leaned forward to extinguish it, then trimmed the wick. After he relit it, he moved the raffia curtain aside to let in the night air. “I won’t go again.”
“What’s the alternative?” Reddish asked.
“There’s only one—to reach an accommodation with this new government. We’ve had our insurrections, our guerrilla wars. They’ve failed.”
“You think they’d fail now?”
“You know that as well as I do. Of course they’d fail. This country is exhausted, worn out. Who would lead a rebellion? Those few tribesmen of mine out there in the dust? Who would follow them? A few of their tribal cousins, no more. And what would guide them—nationhood? What nation? Where is our nation today? An abstract idea, nothing more. But there are always a few tribal malcontents ready to fight. They’re ready to take to the bush again—to burn, pillage, and terrorize. But who will they fight? The government? But where is the government? A few pitiful soldiers, policemen, administrators, and commissioners, like those you dined with last night, who are as frightened, confused, and miserable as they are?
“No, the government doesn’t exist out here. You know that as well as I! It exists only in the capital, where Colonel N’Sika and his council sit on the para hilltop. How can a government exist in a country this size when you can walk ten kilometers into the bush and no one will ever bother you or know you exist, like these people here. But of course they don’t believe you when you tell them that, these rebellious malcontents.
“So they begin their rebellion right here, fighting a government three hundred kilometers away, and end by destroying this village and those suffering people out there. That’s all they would accomplish. Yes, they could recruit a few tribal outcasts from other villages, thieves and braggarts from this one, murderers from another; and if together they declared themselves revolutionaries, maybe Moscow or Peking would give them guns, but it would be a fictitious war, a war to declare their revolutionary spirit at any cost, to punish those who lack it, and to force their will on those who simply want to be left alone. But the rebellion would spread no further than the banks of that river there”—his lifted arm pointed off into the darkness—“and the road behind us, because the Bolia are in that direction, the Tumba below that, and they all despise this tribe, just as the hungry worker in Malunga grew to despise the jeunesse. So that’s the sort of exhaustion I’m talking about, an army and three hundred tribes, not a nation at all. So insurgency isn’t the answer, not now.”
“Then you’re talking about exile,” Reddish said.
“This is my country,” Masakita began again, “the only country I want. The government is my own, a black government. This isn’t Angola or Namibia. The Portuguese and the South Africans aren’t my colonizers. This is my country and these are my people. I can understand why an Angolan is in exile, a Namibian, a South African black, certainly. To go home there is to agree to your own degradation, to acquiesce in it. I know why dos Santos fights his battles, why he claims Marx as his father—what other father do the Portuguese permit him?—but I am not dos Santos and the Portuguese are not here.”
“You could go back to Cairo and take up your work there—Africa and the Third World.”
Masakita sat back contemptuously. “Yes, Cairo. Cairo or Algiers, take your choice. To do what?” he asked, his voice rising. “To ask them for sanctuary? For asylum—to tell them I’m not a free man in my country and ask for permission to be free in theirs? But what sort of freedom is that? The Egyptians and Algerians are my brothers, but do you know what it is to be a black man in the slums of Cairo or Algiers, in Jidda or Oman? Do you?”
“I know it’s not easy.”
“You’ve been to Cairo. You know the expression ‘If you want a brother in arms, buy a Nubian; if you want to be rich, an Abyssinian; and if you require as ass, a Swahili’—a Bantu, like myself. Yes, go to Cairo. Go to Cairo and help liberate the continent. What continent—the Sinai? Where are the troops Ben Bella promised black men like me in 1963—ten thousand Maghreb soldiers to liberate southern Africa. Where are they? Where have they gone? I helped the Algerians. Have they come here to help me? No. And what’s the purpose of Nasser’s Afro-Asian Secretariat? To fight Africa’s liberation wars? No, to make us blood brothers against Zionist imperialism! So go there, you say—go back to Cairo. And how long am I to stay? Five years, ten years, a lifetime, like others before me? To stay as they’ve stayed, in the suqs of Jidda and Aden, the black men you find in the fi
lth of the alleys selling peanuts in cones of Arabic newsprint, the Arabized Swahili or Bantu whose tongue is split with the speech of the Hijaz, his eyes still dusted over with the sand of the slave caravans—the captive of Islam and the brothels of the Middle East who now believes Mecca is his spiritual home. Is that what I’m to do—become an Arab or European’s eunuch again? No. Never. And in exile, that’s what I would be!”
He leaned back in his chair, wiping his face on the front of the lifted soutane. Gabrielle watched him in bewilderment.
“No, I’ve been in exile. For years, for decades. I won’t go again.”
“They’ll find you,” Reddish said uneasily. In front of him he saw a different man. “Sooner or later they’ll find you and shoot you.”
“And you can do nothing?”
“Not here. I’ve got a Haitian passport and a UN laissez-passer with me. It’ll get you out of the country.”
“So you’ve brought me no news.”
“This is the best I can do.”
“So what does this mean—that your embassy is now willing to fully acquiesce in this plot?”
“It means there’s nothing I can do.”
“I’m grateful for what you’ve done already. You know what happened in Malunga; and if you know, so does your government.”
“N’Sika would never trust you, never. You know that.”
“But your government has influence. You have power. N’Sika isn’t a stupid man like those around him. He’s clever and he’s intelligent. He knows where his interests lie. The other men on the council are weak. But you can reason with N’Sika—”
“To tell him what? That you somehow matter to us, that this charade has gone far enough? We asked him to stop the killings. He said they were necessary. You’re the one that matters most. They’re frightened of you, all of them.”
“The others are weak! N’Sika isn’t!”
“I’m telling you to save your own skin.”
“You came here to tell me that! All this way, just for that! Just to tell me that! That you accept no more responsibility?”
