by W. T. Tyler
“Oh, no, it’s not disloyalty,” the car’s owner once explained to him, “not at all. It’s just a car—a matter of utility, that’s all. But let’s not argue about it.”
“But I’m not arguing,” Masakita had said.
“Criticizing then. But you own a Mercedes as well.”
“The government owns it. It belongs to the ministry—”
“Ah ha! So you see. A matter of utility again.”
So there it was—the heart of their differences. To Masakita, his alliance with the old President in the government of national reconciliation had been contrary to his conscience but necessary for the country. To the Mercedes owner, these were personal matters, unmortgaged by moral claims.
“If you’re going to pose theological arguments in terms of owning a Mercedes and advancing the revolution, between moral chastity and utility, Christ and the devil, then I’m not going to argue with you, Pierre—never. No, no. My wife’s brother sold me this car. He needed the money for his cottonseed plant.”
So Masakita, even blindfolded, knew the car, knew it before someone sat forward from the seat behind him and wiped away the odor of the upholstery with a crude burlap bag pulled roughly over his head and tied around his neck with a sisal cord. The dust filled his nostrils and punished his mouth and throat with the dry, acrid powder of old palm husks.
The Mercedes belonged to Dr. Bizenga.
Dawn had come as the Mercedes raced through the front gate of the para camp and sped back under the palm trees, the hooded figure on the front seat. The jeep and one sedan turned aside at Colonel N’Sika’s headquarters, but the Mercedes continued down the sand road toward the maximum security prison, which had been emptied this past week, the felons transferred to the old jail at the edge of the cité.
Masakita was led from the car and down through the wire dogtrot, through the heavy door, and to the right along a stone corridor to a heavy iron grating covered over with steel mesh where the public cell block lay, its ceiling two stories high, like the prison itself, a square smoke hole in the center of the roof—a vestige of colonial days, when the prisoners prepared their own meals.
Only two prisoners lay in the enormous cell, backs against the stone wall, knees lifted, legs chained by ankle irons to an iron ring sunk in the center of the floor.
De Vaux watched as the burlap bag was lifted from Masakita’s face, leaving the wet cheeks and forehead powdered with palm grit, the short woolly hair sprigged with husks. The two turnkeys shackled irons to his ankles and led him forward to padlock the last link to the iron ring in the floor. They replaced the cord on his wrists with handcuffs and went out, locking the iron door behind them.
Masakita stood looking about him, eyes moving along the stone walls, the wall of steel bars faced with mesh, and high into the shadows of the trussed roof where a patch of blue sky showed through the smoke hole.
“Masakita,” de Vaux muttered finally through his broken teeth, his head cocked upward, one eye closed. “Am I right?”
“That’s right,” Masakita said, studying de Vaux’s cruelly punished face. One eye was swollen closed, the face bruised and cut; dried blood crusted his nostrils and stiffened the front of his khaki shirt.
“Who?” Nogueira asked.
“The bloke they’re looking for,” de Vaux said, still squinting up. “De Vaux here. This is Lieutenant Nogueira, late chief of the MPLA cadres for the southwest sector, Cabinda front, now retired.”
“Who did that to you?”
“Someone who wanted to find out something, where I’d hidden it. Didn’t see his face, though.”
“Hidden what?”
De Vaux shrugged. “The past, where I’d buried it. ‘Rest in peace,’ I told them. Who wants to dig up the past. Hyenas, that’s all. That’s what they were.”
“What about this man Nogueira?”
“Scared of him, that’s all I know. Found him here and didn’t know why. That scared them. Do you have a cigarette?”
“No.” Masakita slumped down against the wall.
“Books maybe. Newspapers. L’Express? Paris Match?”
“Nothing.”
“Shit. Same as us.” His eye fell for a moment on the burlap that Masakita’s captors had dropped to the floor and which now lay on the stone floor near the door. A hood or just a blindfold? He stared at it silently, sighed, and sank back again, looking at Masakita, examining the small nose, the beard, the brown eyes, and finally the patch over his pocket. “You ever hear of Robinson Crusoe?” he asked.
“The book? Yes.”
“The book, that’s it. A bloke shipwrecked on a desert island. You heard of it?”
“I’ve heard of it.”
“I told you,” de Vaux said to Nogueira. “You think my head’s full of shit. So is his then. I was telling him about it,” he said to Masakita. “I just got to the part about the goats.”
It was late afternoon when they heard a car on the road above and stopped talking, eyes lifted silently toward the high window. Car doors slammed and footsteps came down the clay path into the wire cage, the iron hinges creaked open, and two figures emerged into the shadows of the corridor. The light was dimming and Masakita got to his feet, followed by de Vaux and Nogueira. They moved as far across the stone floor as their leg chains permitted, standing some six meters short of the bars. Masakita saw a tall figure in a white robe, but couldn’t identify his black face or the face of the second man, which was only a broken mosaic through the heavy mesh. But then he saw the glint of the steel-rimmed spectacles and the small white pebbles of the familiar bifocals.
“Bizenga. I knew it was your car.”
De Vaux knew too, suddenly coming alive: “Bizenga! You bloody, filthy bastard!” He tried to pull free of his leg chains, tried to tear his wrists from the steel manacles, but his feet twisted and he fell against the floor, but still crawled forward, pulling himself on his elbows. “I’ll kill you, both of you!”
Dr. Bizenga gazed down sympathetically. “But I’m sorry, Major. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“You liar! You goddamn liar! Where’d he come from—that zombie with you! Where’d you dig him up!”
Dr. Bizenga glanced at the tall Senegalese at his side. “I don’t know who you’re talking about, but this is Dr. Ba. Dr. Ba is a surgeon and pathologist, brought by Major Fumbe from Dakar to be his adviser. As you know, Major Fumbe now has all security responsibilities and he’s a firm believer in fighting fire with fire, as they say. From Dakar, yes, where they maintain the best traditions of pathology—and of African folklore too, I should say. But what did you think he was? What’s come over you, Jean-Bernard? What sort of seizure have you suffered here, eh? Jumping at shadows again?”
De Vaux lunged hopelessly toward the bars.
“Try to show a little hospitality for Major Fumbe’s surgeon, Major. All Dr. Ba desires is your cooperation. He simply wants to know what happened to Colonel N’Sika’s poor uncle. Is he dead or have you hidden him away somewhere? And if he is dead, as some of us suspect, what was the nature of his influence? Or his illness? Was it something Fumbe can cope with? A very superstitious fellow, this Fumbe. A simple exercise in pathology would tell Dr. Ba immediately whether Major Fumbe had anything to fear or not. So why not cooperate with him?”
“Never! Surgery? Never! That hyena wants his bones, that’s what he wants—bones and everything else. He’ll never get them, not from me. The old man’s in peace, wherever he is. You’ll never get your filthy, butchering hands on him.”
“What’s this about?” Masakita broke in. “Why is de Vaux being held here?”
“He hasn’t told you? That surprises me,” Bizenga said. “But I’m sure he will in time. Such men always do. Ask him about his past. He’ll tell you—his vulgar little triumphs, his sadistic little conquests. Like a lamppost in the rain, eh Jean-Bernard? All scratched and nicked. Did someone walk into you? All iron-ringing, those molecules of yours, but hollow. Who can change you? What can change y
ou? Nothing, fortunately.”
“The amnesty was announced days ago,” Masakita said, “but we’re kept here. Why?”
“Oh but there’s no amnesty for you,” Bizenga said, surprised. “Oh, no. Not for you. You haven’t discovered that?”
“A general amnesty was announced. I saw the circular myself.”
“Oh yes, you saw the circular yourself. There is a general amnesty and quite a successful one. Very successful. You see how it came about, don’t you? The council was quite worried about you, Pierre, on the loose again, on the prowl—Moscow this week, Peking the next. What were you planning back there in the bush, another guerrilla war against the central government like the one you led in sixty-four and sixty-five. So you see why an amnesty was inevitable, don’t you, why it was necessary to liberate that rag-tag army back there in the interior from your ranks, to let them live in the peace you would deny them—”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh no, perhaps not. But the council was worried, very worried. Crispin Mongoy received a letter. You remember Crispin, don’t you, the ex-soccer player. You sent him a letter asking him to contact the other members of the political bureau. That sounded suspiciously like sedition to the council. What your intentions were—well, that doesn’t matter. The council doesn’t trust you, Pierre, that’s the sum of it. They’ll never trust you, you see. Never. You’re far too clever for them. Too clever for all of us. So we have our amnesty now, but it’s not for you. No, no. Here in prison the law of lex loci rules. Hasn’t Major de Vaux explained all this to you—lex loci? lex talionis? Come, come, Major, I’m surprised at you. What have you been prattling about these past few hours—your picaresque redemptive adventures in darkest Africa, ten thousand black savages starved, lashed, and crucified to stir again that liberal heroic soul that bourgeois Europe starved to extinction? Come, Major—”
“What does the council fear?” Masakita interrupted.
“What do they fear? They fear you, quite obviously. Why? Well, because of what I’ve already told you. Apart from that, I wouldn’t presume to know what Major Fumbe’s beliefs are, or even Colonel N’Sika’s. No, no, once a belief has taken root, who am I to deny it? Would I cut down every tree in the forest because it’s not mimosa, which my wife prefers? No, let’s be reasonable, Pierre. Once a man believes what he believes, who am I to take it from him? Isn’t that what you once told me—that I judged in you what wasn’t mine to judge? It’s the same case here. You and I were educated in Europe, so it’s different for us. Some of these esteemed members of the council had no such advantage. Take Colonel N’Sika, for example. What Colonel N’Sika believes is his own business. As it happens, that’s a mystery to the council too. Ask Major de Vaux what the colonel believes—Major de Vaux who helped nourish the root once he planted the seed. Didn’t he once convince N’Sika that his power could do anything—blow up a petit porteur in a rainstorm in Mbandaka, whether by dynamite or demonology no one ever knew. Perhaps de Vaux can tell you. Certainly it’s something N’Sika never talks about—not with any of us. That worries the council too. Tell us, Major, tell us le secret de l’Afrique noire, which you may have so cunningly planted in Colonel N’Sika’s skull. Or did you? Tell us now. All of us would rest easier if we knew what you know—”
“You’re a bloody liar!” de Vaux shouted.
“So there you are,” Dr. Bizenga said with a sigh. “You grope for these things as best you can. I’m sorry, Pierre. A man believes what he wants to believe these days. God knows things are bad enough out here with what modernity has brought us—evangelists, proselytizers, Baptist pagans who have no place in their countries but rural kingdoms in ours, mullahs, Peace Corps anarchists, socialist savants, and UN macroeconomists, thousands of them, all running amok through the bush waving a new set of scriptures at every starving black man they meet. Add to that the neo-colonialists, the neo-imperialists, east and west, the neo-fascists, the Cassandras, futurologists, poets, and seers, all nightmares inherited from the Western mind, concentrations of spiritual capital that can’t be rooted out, and what have you got? No, Pierre, if each of us were to try to discipline the rubbish in another’s skull with the sanctimonious nonsense in our own, where would it end? Turmoil, you see. Absolute chaos. And you were always against that, weren’t you? So you see how the law of lex loci has come to apply.”
Dr. Bizenga took off his glasses and wiped them carefully with his handkerchief.
“You haven’t changed,” Masakita said.
“You either,” Bizenga replied regretfully. “It’s a pity. At a time when weak men are becoming stronger because of their presumption, their arrogance—like Major de Vaux there—stronger men such as yourself are becoming weaker because of their silence, their virtue, their righteous scrupulosity. In times like these, that’s self-indulgence, Pierre, not social action at all. Autoeroticism. Onanism, pure and simple. But what can one do? Paris would have been better for you, Brussels even. There that raw talent might have been civilized for social use. You could have opened a bookshop, written epistles to Pascal—”
“You chase after words. You always have.”
But Dr. Bizenga only shrugged, already beginning to show his boredom. “What else is there these days? What have they taught us, East or West? To use their words while they steal our country.”
He turned to his Senegalese companion, nodded, and they went out.
The three prisoners returned in silence to the stone wall, dragging their chains behind them, de Vaux carrying the burlap that had wrapped Masakita’s face. He sat looking at it silently, knowing then what Bizenga had been talking about, what it was in this man Masakita the council feared—not N’Sika, perhaps, but the others, who feared N’Sika too but Masakita more. How would men like Fumbe or Kimbu explain Masakita’s elusiveness all those years—gliding through the green shadows of the Kwilu, claimed dead at Kindu, but alive again the following morning in Idiofa, in Peking one week, in Moscow the next, and now disappearing without a trace from the gutted workers party compound in Malunga.
The answer lay in his hands, in the burlap hood he’d picked up from the floor. During the days of the rebellions, a few of the rebels had presented de Vaux’s mercenaries with special problems. Their power was real enough to send a village into frenzy, so he’d covered their heads with rice sacking or old burlap bags, as he had his father-in-law’s once, the sight denied those fierce manic eyes, recognition denied their crazy tattered heads, sprigged out with all sorts of weird magical filth. He’d cloaked the heads of those witch doctors the same way Pierre Masakita’s head had been hooded as he was brought into the old prison that morning.
Chapter Seven
Bondurant listened silently as Reddish finished his story, the entire story, no details suppressed this time, the letter Masakita had given him lying on the desk blotter in front of him. His eyes were sometimes drawn away from the worried, stubborn face to the scarred hand holding the cigarettes and stubbing them away, one by one, in the deskside ashtray, two fingers broken and twisted in a way Bondurant had never noticed before.
Reddish had made a few mistakes, a few errors of judgment or perception, but now he was under no illusions. N’Sika would get the letter only if the ambassador delivered it himself.
He’d thought he could scare off the coup plotters, but that hadn’t worked: he was wrong, just as he’d been wrong in his suspicions that the defense attaché’s office or even the station might have been involved, perhaps even his headquarters itself. After he’d sent in his cables reporting the details, he’d gotten no reply for almost ten days. Washington’s silence had made him uneasy, as if he’d dug up the bodies, bodies that were supposed to stay buried. But that wasn’t it either. He’d been wrong again.
“You think you’re at the center of their universe back there,” he concluded, moisture glistening on his high forehead, his gaze moving to the side window of Bondurant’s office and the lilac-colored clouds blooming high over the river
in the setting sun, “every cable on the director’s desk or in the evening brief for the White House before the circuits are even cold, but that’s not the way it happens. It’s the way you get after a while, being so far away. You know so much one day, and the next you’re bankrupted, wiped out. You think it’s deliberate, calculated, another conspiracy, that you’ve been conned, used, forgotten, tossed away. But that’s not it either. You forget how much there is back there every day—how many cables, how many crises, how many people, how much confusion, how short the Washington memory is. Washington didn’t know any more than I did. There was too much going on—the Khartoum kidnapping, the SALT openings, the Chinese business, everything else that no one could get a handle on. It was a bloody vacuum all that time, just a couple of us sitting here. They just didn’t bloody well care.”
He’d been alone all that time. He shook his head hopelessly, still in despair.
“It’s often that way,” Bondurant said quietly, “but sometimes for the better too. The bureaucracy wouldn’t understand all these things any more than they would understand a letter like this one.”
He lifted the letter from the blotter, looking again at the fine dark handwriting. He had read enough to feel depressed—the letter of an intellectual, too gnomic, too convoluted for N’Sika’s direct, brutal mind; but he would deliver it nevertheless, perhaps his endorsement making it simpler. It was Reddish’s plight he was drawn to.
“I think it was Macaulay who once said that historians are seduced not by their imaginations but by reason,” he offered reflectively, rising at last from behind the desk. “Diplomats are very much the same way—diplomats, civil servants, bureaucrats, whatever name they go by. The ablest bureaucrat, the cleverest, would never knowingly fight a battle he couldn’t win, and that’s why he’s successful. But truth by consensus isn’t a real world at all. It’s an artificial one, a shadow world that reflects nothing of ourselves.” He looked at Reddish for some flicker of response but saw nothing. “The life outside is much more substantial. So you were right, I suppose, not to trust the bureaucracy. Their strength is collective, not individual, which means simply that they’re weaker than you. They’ll betray you. Call it Bondurant’s law. I learned it years ago.”
