by W. T. Tyler
“What the hell do you expect of me? Am I your goddamn keeper? Hell, no—not any more than I was the old President’s.”
“My keeper?” Masakita stood up. “My keeper! I’m not asking for charity. I’m asking for justice.”
“You won’t get it, not from N’Sika, not from us, not from anyone else. It’s up to you. Get out while you can.”
Masakita hesitated, but he turned, picked up his soutane, and went out without a word. A moment later the man with the pistol entered, glared about angrily, and hurried after Masakita.
Gabrielle sat motionless on the stool watching Reddish, who still crouched over the table, beer glass in front of him, a cigarette between his fingers.
“You came all this way to tell him that?” she asked in disbelief. “To shame him into exile?”
“I want to save his neck.”
“But such a terrible way—so cruelly.”
Reddish got up impatiently. “You don’t belong here. You shouldn’t even be here. The whole thing is a goddamned mess. I was crazy to even come. I don’t know what the hell I thought I was doing, who I thought I was. Another fuck-up, like going to see de Vaux that Sunday afternoon—”
He was speaking in English now, ignoring Gabrielle. He shoved brusquely through the raffia curtain and went out into the warm night.
“When in Christ’s name is someone going to get something right for a change!” he shouted into the darkness—“when, for God’s sake!”
But no one was there.
He awoke in the thin morning light and sat up, sore from the hard clay floor. The raffia mat in the far corner was empty, Gabrielle gone. The hut had been brutally hot during the night, sleep intermittent, touching his consciousness only lightly, never fully releasing it. He found her outside kneeling near the ashes of last night’s fire, trying to roast plantains in their skins. They’d hardly exchanged a word since Masakita’s angry departure. Her face was as tired as his, her limbs as stiff. The sun was on the meadow above them, but the village was suspended in aquamarine light under the canopy of trees, the smoke from the morning fires hanging in unbroken parallel planes.
She burned her fingers on the hot plantains, jerked her arm back, and they slid into the fire. He gave her raisins and dried fruit, and she heated the mineral water in a tin cup for the Nescafé. As they sat silently on the log near the coals, faces gritty, limbs sore, a young village girl brought them limes and mangoes in a fiber basket, dropping the basket ten feet away and running off frightened. A few old women moved out of the forests, bundles of faggots on their backs.
“A real tropical paradise,” Reddish said. “Maybe the Club Mediterranée could open a Tahiti tourist village here. You could write the brochure.”
She didn’t answer.
“You shouldn’t have come,” he continued. “It was my mistake.”
“You said that last night.”
“Maybe I’d better say it again. If word gets out about my coming here, there’s going to be trouble. For him and me both.”
“I know that.”
“Just so we understand each other.”
“You are beginning to sound like Houlet,” she said coolly.
They repacked the bags in silence. Masakita appeared an hour later, alone. The sun had penetrated the screen of banana trees. Masakita took a dirty white envelope from his pocket and handed it to Reddish. It was addressed to N’Sika. They went inside the hut.
“I’ve been thinking about our talk last night,” he began quietly, his anger gone. “You came here, you told me what you believed you had to say, and it was freely done. I understand that—”
“He was trying to help you,” Gabrielle interrupted.
“Yes, I understand that too. He was saying that whatever his own preference, he can do very little. He has no faith in his own government, no hope in mine. So I understand that too. So it’s not what he wants or what I want, what the people of this village want, but others. All right. But that mustn’t prevent us from trying. I’ve written a letter to N’Sika, explaining that I want to live here, live here in peace. He can confine me here if he wishes—to this village, to Funzi, to Benongo—but someplace where I can work in my own country, with my own people. He would recognize that I’m less of a problem here than elsewhere.
“I’ve told him that I’ve no intention of going abroad, none whatsoever. That time has passed. Others can go, younger men, men who haven’t lived as I have with the revolutionaries in exile, with their empty talk and their parasitic life, their appetite for publicity, food and drink, cars, women, and God knows what else. Because unless you have some special sainthood or genius, like Lenin or St. Paul, what happens to revolutionaries in exile is what happens to monkeys in a zoo, their lives more and more dominated by boredom, paranoia, and exhibitionism, by inner emptiness and public masturbation; but I’m not a saint and I have no genius. So either I work here or I’ll die.”
“Doing what?” Reddish asked.
“Whatever is needed. Whatever is required to bring about those things N’Sika talked about in his speech at Martyr’s Square. What has happened has happened. N’Sika has made a new beginning. The past is finished. But if he is serious about justice, now is the time to begin. My goal has always been the same—social action—”
“And you’d work with N’Sika to achieve that?”
“Yes. I would live here, in this village. In Benongo, in the capital, wherever. Education, administration, I don’t care. But the anarchy must end. The first thing anarchy strikes is education. If killing a neo-colonial politician closes a classroom for a year, then spare him. It’s the child in the classroom who matters, and when the classroom is destroyed, it’s the demagogue who stands in the rubble, everyone else blinded by his dust. It’s the future I’m talking about—”
“And how in God’s name do you think you can convince others that you’re serious,” Reddish asked, “that you’ll work here in peace? Do you think N’Sika is going to believe that? He’s as primitive as those bastards that put those guns in the compound.”
“Primitive, yes, but he’s learning. He’s not like the others. Whatever else he is, he’s also a serious man. By now he must be beginning to realize how vast his problems are and how few the people he can rely on. But you’re right. It is difficult. It’s very difficult to convince frightened men that your way is better than their way. But we must try. What else is there? It’s never easy, not here, not anyplace else. But what do you expect? As a Christian, what else can you expect? Nothing is less Christian than to promise suffering people an end to their pain and a lasting reign tomorrow for their own decency and goodness today. We can make no promises, just as you could make no promises last night.
“So it is difficult. It is difficult to convince hungry, angry men that patience is wise. Your country knows that very well. Yours is a conservative country now, which only means that your workers aren’t starving. Because of this, your government regards this as proof of its own virtue, and your politicians demand that starving or oppressed men be patient. But patience takes time. A starving man who follows this advice will soon be dead. Time and suffering sometimes make a man wise, but in a hungry, angry world, the world I live in, there is no time for wisdom, just ignorance and desperation. I know that. You asked me that night in the flat what I was hiding from. I was years in exile, a desperate, violent man. And out of those years of exile perhaps my own anger died. Perhaps I died with it, in ways people do die before they’re even aware of it.
“Can I now deny that with nothing left to me, in those most terrible years of homesickness, confusion, and loss, a Catholic-trained African living in Paris those years, sitting in my library chair those frozen winter nights when I had no place to go, sitting there like a tongue-tied Pascal, can I deny that I wasn’t tempted, that I didn’t feel in the darkness around me the agony of Christ for all men, black and white alike? And can I tell you how terrifying this is for a black man like me, how terrifying that knowledge that puts an end to acti
on and buries him in the silence of mortification, with a white man’s words on his gravestone? So you understand now why I won’t go into exile, no further into exile—that for me there could be no return.”
Gabrielle turned to look at Reddish silently, her face so full of pain that he knew there was nothing he could say to her, to Masakita either; and he turned and left the hut and went out into the hot sunshine, looking blindly at a village so bleak, so naked, so brutal in its poverty, that he knew he’d never seen it before.
He was still standing there when Gabrielle touched his arm and shoulder: “Please,” she asked softly, still stricken, “come talk to him.”
Chapter Three
It was midafternoon as Reddish drove the Italian jeep into the mission yard at Benongo. The sun scalded the white dust of the road and flashed in lonely semaphore across the glinting surface of the lake. Nothing moved in the metallic heat—no gulls, no kites, no pirogues, no women in the road.
Gabrielle showered and fell exhausted into bed. Reddish showered, tried to sleep, but couldn’t, and instead prowled restlessly back and forth on the gallery, smoking. At five, Gabrielle still hadn’t wakened, and he left the mission house for the police station.
Despite the heat, the police captain was sitting in his dusty office reading a month-old edition of Le Matin from the capital. His gray khaki shirt was damp, his pop-eyed face beaded with water. In the sunny compound outside, three Landrovers sat in rusty dismemberment, axles, wheels, or engines gone. A fourth vehicle sat in the driveway under the trees, its metallic gray paint and yellow wheels still bright and new, its hood wrinkled with the pleats of compression following an accident, full tilt against some immovable roadside barrier. The new windshield still held the twin stars of compression where the two unlucky policemen had vaulted the dashboard.
The police captain had been a guest at the commissioner’s dinner. He apologized for his lack of refreshment, but brought a sack of groundnuts from his drawer, spread them across the corner of his desk, and invited Reddish to help himself. He couldn’t answer Reddish’s question—whether the arrival of the internal airline’s small Cessna could be confirmed for the following morning—but sent his radio operator to contact Lutu at the head of the lake and report back.
While they waited, Reddish asked him about the reported attack on the Funzi police post. He shrugged it off, repeating what Frère Albert had reported two days earlier. The assailants were first thought to be rebels, but the captain had gone to Funzi to investigate firsthand. They were local villagers, angered by the police post’s confiscation of a truck of smoked fish. The villagers had been placated, the guns returned, the incident closed, except for the final report, which would be forwarded within two weeks to the provincial capital. The captain hadn’t yet corrected the original teletyped message claiming that rebels were responsible. Landrovers were in short supply; patrolling the old guerrilla trails still required Land-rovers; and he had only one in operating condition. The urgency of the original message might convince the ministry that his own vehicle needs were more compelling than those of other districts in the region.
The radio operator returned with the news that the plane’s scheduled arrival couldn’t be confirmed. A storm was moving from the west toward the far shore of the lake. But the packetboat would come as scheduled the following morning, returning to Lutu at nine o’clock.
Gabrielle was still sleeping when Reddish crossed the gallery in the gathering dusk and knocked at her door. Frère Albert invited him to join him for dinner in the refectory, where they sat together at the plain wooden table long after the other priests and fathers had departed. The overhead lights had been extinguished; the shadows of the table candles were long on the brick walls, the high arched roof lost in shadow as they finally left and went out into the warm night air.
Frère Albert had been describing the history of the mission and the mission school. He’d told of the African students, where they’d gone and how they’d distinguished themselves. One was studying at the Vatican; another was a bishop in Luluabourg.
But one name was missing; and as they went out into the dark courtyard, Reddish asked him about Pierre Masakita. “I understand he was a student here once. Do you remember him?”
Frère Albert stopped to light his pipe. “Oh yes, I remember him. Everyone remembers him.” The gray face flared in the light of the match and was hidden again. He waved the dying match, still standing on the path, looking up at the night sky.
“You didn’t mention him.”
“No. He was different, very different. In some ways, he was the most extraordinary student who was ever here. The fathers will tell you that, those of us who remember. Then he went off to Belgium, got into trouble—anarchists, communists, I don’t know what. They don’t talk about him. He came back once, I remember, and they don’t talk about that either. He came back once, that was all. He brought a small wooden box for Father Joseph, who was the prefect then—a wooden box carved by the Bolia up the lake. It seemed that the chief there had asked Pierre to bring back certain texts from the Holy Scriptures, those they thought had been deliberately withheld from them. You probably know the superstition. So after his return from Europe that first time, he gave the box to Father Joseph. In it was a copy of Montaigne. Yes, Montaigne. Two other books too, but I’ve forgotten their titles—books on science, on skepticism, I believe. Yes, he was remarkable, the most remarkable of all.”
“But they don’t talk about him.”
“No, hardly at all.”
“What do you remember best about him?”
They stood at the foot of the gallery steps. Frère Albert considered the question silently before he removed his pipe. “I remember the boy in him, not the scholar. The boy in the machine shop and the sawmill, curious about everything. Just the boy, but that was unique too. You knew that when he left these lakes and forests they would take that away from him too, the way they take everything else, and so they did.”
Standing in the African darkness, Reddish saw Masakita’s face, half hidden by a scarf, gray with annealing dust, looking out into the winter night from a bakery shopwindow in Paris near the Rue Cadet.
He didn’t sleep well. He finally drifted off to awake again long after midnight, hearing the crash of surf against the beach, and he saw the ghostly white curtains standing away from the window. Rain swept across the wooden gallery and against the screen. He sat up. Across the wet planks of the gallery floor he saw the oblong of yellow light from Gabrielle’s room next door and knew she’d finally awakened. He got up, pulled on his trousers, and slipped out the door. Outside the window he heard the intermittent click of her portable typewriter. She was wearing a cotton shift, sitting in a chair with the typewriter on a second chair pulled near, the kerosene lamp on the table to her right.
He called to her, and she sat up startled. “It’s me,” he said, opening the door. “How long have you been up?”
“Just a few minutes. I couldn’t sleep.”
“I tried to wake you three times yesterday evening. Are you hungry?”
“No. Please.”
As he came closer, she quickly rolled the page from the carriage and got up; but she knocked her leather writing portfolio from the chair, spilling the typewritten pages across the rug.
“What’s the trouble?”
“Nothing. Please—it’s all right.” She kneeled to snatch up the typewritten pages from the floor near his feet.
“You type fast. Did you type all of that—”
“Yes. Yes, I did. Please, I’m very tired.” She lifted her face, still frightened; her cheeks and forehead, saddled with fresh sunburn, exaggerated the hollows of her eyes.
“You’ve been up a long time, haven’t you?” She couldn’t answer, and Reddish understood why. “You were writing about the trip, weren’t you? About our talk with Masakita.”
“Yes—no! Don’t ask, please. It’s personal, just personal.”
“You said you wouldn’t write it. You
told me that.”
“I knew you would think that!” she cried. “But it’s only for me—no one else!”
He turned and went out.
By morning the storm had moved to the east, but the clouds were low over the trees and a fine drizzle was falling. As she left the room, she saw that the wicker table on the gallery contained only a single cup, napkin, and plate. Looking in through Reddish’s doorway, she saw that the bed was made, the mosquito netting neatly folded over the canopy, his bags gone.
The serving boy who brought hot water, Nescafé, and a croissant from the refectory told her that Reddish had eaten breakfast very early in the dining hall and had gone off in the Italian jeep.
She sat alone at the wicker table, looking out over the desolation of the road and lake, able to eat but barely able to swallow, unable to separate herself from the gray overcast and the sodden trees and road. Benongo was ugly in the rain, now another of the desolate, futile places she’d sought out and then fled from, alone again. The memory of the past two days had become a nightmare for her, the small wretched village under the trees even more wretched on a morning such as this, the ruined cottage just a meaningless rubble of mortar and weeds.
She heard the sound of a vehicle on the beach road. Turning mechanically, she saw the Italian jeep splash through the puddles at the gate as it turned into the mission compound and stopped at the gallery steps, only the roof visible. She sat paralyzed as Reddish climbed the stairs, a wet slicker over his shoulders, his head bare. She thought he’d forgotten something. He would pass the wicker table on his way to his room, and she knew she hadn’t the courage to speak to him. She sat forward and emptied her cup quickly, then rose from her chair to return to her room.
“It’s all right,” he called out as she turned away. “Take your time. We’ve got a few minutes yet. Are you packed?”
“Packed? Not really.” Her voice faltered.
“We’ll be going by boat. The plane’s not coming.”
