by W. T. Tyler
He’d gone to check on the plane’s arrival. The flight had been canceled, and he’d booked passage on the boat to Lutu at the head of the lake. She ran to her room to pack her luggage.
“Have you ever been on a paddlewheel before?” he asked as they went down the gallery steps for the last time. “It’s an all-day trip, not too bad. Worse at night.”
She didn’t know what to say.
The gangway was greasy, like the decks. A fine rain was still falling as the old paddlewheeler churned away from the dock. They stood at the rail outside the cabin watching Benongo until all they could see were the palm trees that hid the Catholic mission house and the commissioner’s lakeside villa.
“I thought you’d gone,” she managed to tell him finally, when there was nothing left to say. “This morning I saw your empty room and I thought you’d gone.”
“Gone? Gone where?”
“After last night.”
“Last night you said it was personal. I hadn’t slept well. I shouldn’t have come in like that.”
“No, I understand why you did. It was rude of me.”
The shore retreated in the distance, pressed down by the overcast, a single sedimentary stratum.
“What did you learn last night,” he asked, “writing it all down?”
She was slow in responding. “I’m afraid I simply confused myself. With some things it takes me a long time to understand. I think I’m very slow that way, my mind late in catching up.”
“Which way?” They were alone at the rail below the wheelhouse, shrouded in mist.
“Understanding why I feel certain things the way I do, understanding what my emotions mean. Sometimes I’m not very clever that way.”
“Maybe you’ll catch up at fifty, like your friend Stendhal.” They stood at the railing looking out through the mist, thicker now, fully obscuring the coastline. Patches of fog hid the lake ahead of them. “What was it he said—that at fifty it was high time he got to know himself?”
“You remembered. Yes, I suppose he was trying to catch up too.”
“What did he say when he finally did?”
She considered the question silently, looking out toward the shore, but there was nothing there. “The last page was sad”—she remembered at last—“as if he were finishing a long overdue letter to an old friend and suddenly realized that it was too late, that he had nothing to say, that his friend was dead.” Reddish turned to look at her. “‘I’m very old today,’ he wrote, ‘the sky is gray, I’m not very well.’”
He waited for her to continue, still watching her face, but she said no more. The fog had enveloped them now, obscuring the wheelhouse, the bow and stern, the paddlewheel, which had stopped suddenly as the boat glided forward. The mist hung suspended in a fine feathery vapor, chilling their faces and bringing each surface nearer: the beaded railing, the curve of her upper lip, the drops in her dark hair.
“That was all?”
She hesitated as he waited, as if he might misunderstand. “No, one thing more. He said, ‘Nothing can prevent madness.’ Those were his final words.” She seemed to smile. “But I don’t think that’s what he meant at all, not madness.” She lifted her eyes to his calmly, her self-consciousness gone. “What he meant was that you can’t live your life over. That was what he had discovered.”
The day ended as strangely as it had begun. The night was dark as they disembarked, the steamer late, the fog far away, but the rain that had prevented the plane’s arrival still drifted down across the muddy lanes and eroded banks of the village at the head of the lake, puddling the compound at the water’s edge where the shipping line maintained a few primitive guest accommodations for lakebound travelers. The double cottage to which Gabrielle and Reddish were led was bare, the beds hard, the linen musty. There was no restaurant nearby, no hotel, no meals to be found except at the Italian atelier and depot which served as a kind of caravansary at the terminus of the overland and water routes.
They found their way through the dark lanes along the hillside to the atelier and its enclosing compound, but no lights showed and Reddish guessed that, like everything else, it was closed for the night. They entered nevertheless, like refugees, through a muddy passageway where goats and cats foraged, and found themselves suddenly surrounded by live shadows, shoulders and heads turned away, watching through the mizzle a wide window of light against the far wall which opened miraculously to Saharan dunes, soldiers in kepis, and isolated Moroccan forts, scarred by the cracks and imperfections of the ancient film and the stuttering lens frame of the battered projector itself, which stood near the center of the compound, draped over by an improvised tarpaulin suspended from a truck bed. Several dozen spectators crouched, stood, or sat there—truck drivers, mechanics, warehousemen, Italian fathers, stranded visitors, and rural officials, all immobilized, despite the rain, by the thirty-year-old film.
To the side, off a narrow verandah, was a plain common mess with wooden tables and benches. The meal was over; yet the plump African cook, still in the kitchen, recognized what had brought Gabrielle and Reddish there and silently fetched soup bowls filled from the simmering pot-au-feu which served all guests, drivers, mechanics, and laborers alike. At the far end of the plank table where they sat, a dark-skinned Indian or Pakistani sat hunched over his bowl, an ancient copy of Time magazine lifted in front of his devouring eyes. The soup was hot and filling; the bread, left from the earlier servings in the small woven baskets on the table, was dry and hard. They ate in silence; a pair of tabby cats prowled the table legs, brushing their ankles. Outside, the mist drifted, the rectangle flashed with shifting images, the laughter lifted and fell.
As they finished and stood up, Gabrielle searched the room silently for some evidence of their host. The African woman was in the kitchen rattling her kettles, humming to herself. The dark-haired Asian read his magazine. She looked at him silently: I have no idea where I am or what I’m doing here, her look seemed to say. Do any of us? He left franc notes on the table.
As they recrossed the courtyard, she paused in the lee of a truck cab, sheltered from the drizzle, to look at the film, her curiosity aroused by the laughter. It was an old French comedy, one she’d seen in her youth. She turned away at last, still scanning the silent silhouettes over her shoulder as they entered the narrow passageway, Reddish’s flashlight probing the path ahead of them. It was as if no one had seen them enter, no one seen them leave.
The generators at the guest compound had been shut down by the time they returned. He left her there and went down the hill in the darkness to the police post to check on the plane.
Her room was strange at first, as those others had been, growing no more familiar as the candles burned down. She waited uneasily for his return, standing near the window, holding the last of the brandy from the flask. She saw his flashlight on the path and ran to unlock the door.
“The plane will be here,” he told her, shaking out his slicker, “the weather’s clearing to the east.” She held out the paper cup. “That’s for you,” he said. “Mine’s finished.”
“No, please. You look chilly.”
His bag was on the floor near the door, his room waiting across the porch, but he took the cup. “It’s a little silly,” he said, looking back at her, “putting you to bed again like a maiden aunt.”
“Was it deliberate?”
“Maybe at first.”
“Then your style is like mine, a little old-fashioned.” She was smiling. “We never seemed to have much time for ourselves, did we.”
“Not before, no.”
They stood in silence and then he put aside the cup and brought her to him. Her mouth tasted of brandy. His face was cold with the rain, and he felt her shiver as she withdrew, her face still lifted.
“You’re cold too,” he said. “Finish the brandy.”
“Not now.”
There was nothing more to say. The candles burned down. They were lovers that night in the chilly cottage at the head of the lake. I
n the darkness the mist at the windows brought the sounds of the water nearer, brought the fragrance of smoke from the village fires, as at Benongo or the village above the swamp, but by then they both knew where they were.
Chapter Four
The old man was dead now, and except for de Vaux the cottage was empty. He’d sent them away, first his wife and two children, then the old cousin and his wife, and finally the old man himself, whom he’d smuggled out the front gate, the dead body wrapped in a wad of laundry. His wife and children had flown to Kisangani and would go north from there, into the bush to wait for him in the village near the Sudan frontier where they’d waited out the mercenary rebellions.
The old cousin had left the previous day to go to Kisangani by boat to await the old man’s body, but it was only a device to get the old cousin safely away. De Vaux had no intention of having the body embalmed and shipped by plane or boat to the north. If another fetisheer had won N’Sika’s confidence by claiming responsibility for the old man’s death, he’d want the bones and vital organs too. De Vaux meant to deny them to him.
After he’d got the old cousin away, de Vaux had smuggled the corpse out the gate in a laundry bag. In the cité, he’d rented an old deux-chevaux from a Belgian mechanic, changed into blue overalls, and driven east into the savannahs, where he’d buried the body after dark along the Black River.
De Vaux hadn’t talked to N’Sika for over a week, but that evening he’d received a note from N’Sika’s headquarters summoning him to an eleven o’clock meeting.
He sat under the reading light on the sun porch, the appointment an hour away, reading a book about upland sheep raising. Sheep were impractical in Africa, but except for Robinson Crusoe, the book was the only one he had. Like the Defoe novel, it had been left from the UN peacekeeping contingent’s reading room, borrowed, like the other, from an English lending library and never returned. A circulation slip was glued to the endleaf. Whoever had borrowed it owed a king’s ransom, maybe five hundred pounds sterling. N’Sika was King Croesus by then, but he was no better off than the poor sod who’d borrowed this book.
He sat quietly in the chair, the automatic rifle at his feet, a pistol on his hip, a quart of beer on the nearby table, his mind engaged by the mysteries of upland sheep raising. Perhaps he could begin again in New Zealand or Australia, but then he remembered the immigration laws that excluded Africans—his wife, and two children—hesitated, ripped off the cover, and threw the book aside.
At ten-thirty he left the cottage, crossed to the headquarters compound, and for the first time in two weeks joined those who sat on the chairs under the palm trees awaiting N’Sika’s summons. The electric lights were as dim as ever, the mood still sinister, despite the general amnesty which had been announced the same week.
The number of foreign visitors had grown—European businessmen, board members from the great banking houses of the Continent, envoys from the smoke-encrusted foreign ministries of the metropoles or the communist East, international civil servants from the World Bank, the IMF, and the UN.
On this night, de Vaux was surprised to see two Chinese in dark blue uniforms sitting with Dr. Bizenga in armchairs along the strip of red carpet. They weren’t from Taiwan, but from Peking’s embassy across the river in Brazzaville, come to discuss purchasing the regime’s copper. Dr. Bizenga led the two Chinese into the salon and returned alone to join Major Lutete and Major Fumbe, who were talking about the deadlocked negotiations with the Belgians. Of all the civil servants and advisers summoned by N’Sika to the para hilltop, de Vaux considered Dr. Bizenga the most obsequious—laughing at the council members’ jokes, flattering their dull grunts into philosophic profundities, and embellishing their banalities like an alchemist filling decayed cavities with carious gold.
De Vaux turned away from Bizenga’s voice and listened instead to two captains talking about the recent amnesty. They claimed that two hundred insurgents and outlaws had registered at police and military posts in the interior seeking amnesty. Four hundred jeunesse had registered with the police in the capital itself. All day long, mothers, grandmothers, sisters, wives, and fathers had queued up along the road outside the para hilltop waving palm fronds and chanting rhythmically each time a military vehicle sped through, hoping to catch a glimpse of Colonel N’Sika to show their appreciation. In the late afternoon, N’Sika had agreed to receive a delegation of old women brought from the front gate. Moved by their words of appreciation, their tears and flowers, he’d accompanied them back to the front gate to speak to the crowd gathered there.
But he was furious when he returned to his office, and he immediately sent for Majors Fumbe and Lutete and the new minister of interior. He’d supposed that the outpouring of emotion had been spontaneous; but as he stood in the rear of his jeep addressing the throng, he’d seen the municipal buses that had brought them there from the communes.
De Vaux thought he knew what N’Sika wanted. You steal what you’ve got, and after a few weeks you believe it was brought to you on a golden calf, carried on a golden throne. But it wasn’t gold at all, and when they took it away from you, you’d be hauled away by the heels, like a dead cat by the collector of dead cats.
The two captains rose and went back to the refreshment room; de Vaux sat alone, unable to escape Dr. Bizenga’s voice as he described the Belgian negotiating team. Everyone on the national side had been willing to give into the Belgian demands—everyone except N’Sika. In the end, Bizenga predicted, he would be forced to give in too:
“You can’t change these men,” he explained. “They are just burghers, narrow-minded, rigid, dogmatic. They have a certain density, an opacity you can’t avoid. When you meet them on the street in Brussels, it’s like walking into a lamppost. And everything they say is said with the sort of hollow iron ring a lamppost makes when you walk into it.”
Major Lutete laughed in amusement, as he would at a dog in a circus who walked on his hind legs.
“… ‘It is cold,’ he might say, the European way, looking at you very seriously. Are there icicles in your beard too? Frost in your nose? You feel to see. They expect it, these Europeans. The world exists only to verify their own existence—meat, drink, and hard fact. Or, ‘I lost ten thousand francs at backgammon at my cousin’s last week,’ or, ‘My mistress locked me out.’ Whatever. Things happen to them, you see, these burghers I’m talking about—absolute things. And as a result over the years they’ve finally succeeded in creating themselves as a series of palpable iron objects. It’s true, Major. He finds something admirable in his corporeality, his bulk. His thoughts may be timid and hare-brained, but they belong to him, no other. When he gets wet, he reminds you of something in the rain—a tree or a fireplug. Most men of intelligence would far prefer to see themselves in this way—as an object, a palpable object. Not a subject at all, no. But that’s the intellectual’s weakness and why it’s so easy to deceive him.
“What did Marx say?… Well, I can quote Marx in this company, can’t I, since we must borrow from both worlds, East and West? Well, Marx said that the only antidote to mental suffering is physical pain. So the truth is that Marx didn’t want to be an intellectual either. Secretly, he hungered to be a burgher—an iron-ringing object, a collection of iron-ringing molecules that can’t be altered one iota by dreams, by sight, by touch. He wanted to get all of these phantoms out of his head.
“What can you do to dreamers? You can smash them but you smash nothing. Dreams, vapors! But with this other man, this European burgher, the physical object remains—like the fireplug in the rain. If you walk into it, too bad! The physical object is what you feel, simple corporeality. Compare this to the man of feeling, the man of intelligence, of noble thoughts. He can’t breathe, but he dissolves a little of his substance in your face, the tiny atoms of which he’s composed. So deadly serious, yet, but a stench really. The breath of Marx or Lenin, fifty years dead now. But the European intellectual is no different, is he? He dissolves himself and his world in your face, th
is literary gentleman, like a ripe carcass sending up clouds of blowflies. I’d rather walk into a Belgian lamppost, like the delegation that was just there. He tells me that I exist, just as the intellectual and his blowflies tell me it’s completely his world.”
He laughed again. A few laughed with him.
“Who leads the Belgian delegation?” Major Fumbe asked.
Dr. Bizenga mentioned a name. “A terrible invention, this man. He’s walking proof of everything I’ve said. His grandfather was a count. His mother ran off with a French perfume salesman. An iron-ringing lamppost right there.”
De Vaux finished his glass of beer, seeing the Chinese leave silently. He believed he would be the next summoned. Twenty minutes later, N’Sika’s secretary slipped from the rear steps and de Vaux went to meet him. The secretary said that de Vaux was mistaken: the meeting wasn’t for this night, but for eight o’clock the following morning.
De Vaux returned to his cottage at the edge of the hill. The porch light and the lamp on the sun porch were still lit; his sentinel crouched on his stool under the palm tree. He unlocked the front door, still annoyed at whoever had deceived him.
Inside, he immediately detected a strange scent in the air and stopped, unslinging his rifle. Then on the bare floor at his feet he saw a few light smudges of wood ash mixed with something more mealy, perhaps kaolin. The track led across the salon, through the dining room, and down the hall toward the small dark room where the old man had died. De Vaux followed it, gun raised, seeing where it daubed each door in passing, touched each window and sill, and lay in a thick white crust, already beginning to dry, across the threshold of the old man’s bedroom. The room was in darkness. He felt for the light switch and turned it on, but the light was out. Already he could detect a figure lying on the bed—small, dark, shriveled, as his father-in-law had been those last days; and in the horror of the recollection, he knew this body was his father-in-law; something had brought him back, the same power that had plagued his house and children this past month, that had broken his bond with N’Sika, and that lay as sinister and oppressive over the sand roads and palm trees of the para camp as it had once lain within that small hostile hut on the track to Bunia and which, condensed to its essence, had stood in a small evil pool on the hood of the old truck.
