Rogue's March

by W. T. Tyler

  He peered at Reddish sympathetically, his despondency releasing certain axioms long contemplated but rarely confessed. Still he waited, a huge hulking wintry man, thawing suddenly, like an old glacier giving up its bones.

  “A bureaucrat’s logic is something like a bookkeeper’s,” he resumed, “or an accountant’s. A matter of keeping the ledgers and totaling up the balance sheet. It doesn’t require brilliance, just that one not be abysmally stupid. No imagination at all. They never need lift their heads. What is it, Miss Browning?”

  He looked impatiently toward his substitute secretary, who stood just inside the door with that innocent calf-eyed look he’d come to recognize.

  “I thought you buzzed me,” she whispered soulfully.

  “I did. Call Colonel N’Sika’s protocol chief and tell him I want to see the colonel immediately. Better still, have Becker do it. His French is more reliable.

  “It’s a pity,” Bondurant continued ruefully. “Imagination is what we most need, imagination is what we don’t get. We don’t think of international politics that way at all. We leave foreign policy to drab little bureaucrats, geopolitical lunatics, or professional theorists, most of them behaviorists, none of whom are imaginative in the least. They have no idea of how vast the theater is in which they’re working, how imaginative its demands are, or how infinitely cunning the historical process they’re all trying to outwit, East and West alike. Did you ever think of international politics that way—as one giant theater?”

  “I don’t think I have.”

  “You should. My daughter is in Off Broadway theater. I tried to tell her once. Nothing touches more lives—not subscription concerts, chamber music societies, or anything else. There’s nothing else that compares with it. Half the world is strutting around its stage, declaiming from a primitive nineteenth-century text, utterly discredited, utterly bowdlerized, while the other half—our half—simply doesn’t know whether they’re part of the audience or part of the company. The truth is that neither seems to know what it’s doing. Those that do are selling programs in the aisles.”

  He lifted himself again from his chair. “The only consolation I can find in all this is that the Russians are in far worse shape, their own bureaucracy even more incoherent, continuing to rationalize their insolvency year after year in ways we seem to be imitating. Whatever our moral claims—and I believe they’re legitimate ones—I suspect that in the political realm at least we’re institutionally incapable of acting in any way other than the way we do—as a vast conservative third-rate mediocrity. We should let the Israelis or the Cubans manage our foreign policy for us. Neither can risk failure, which means they must be imaginative. What is it, Miss Browning?”

  “Is Mr. Becker to go with you.”

  “No, I’ll go alone, and I would hope that Colonel N’Sika will see me alone.”

  Looking at the closing door, Bondurant was suddenly aware of a more familiar ghost prowling these chilly pedagogic fogs he’d conjured up: an old man sitting at hearthside in the house on Library Place, cruelly editing his old journals, once vivid and fresh, in the morosity of old age.

  “I should tell you,” he said finally to Reddish, coming directly to the point, “that I haven’t the slightest hope that we’ll be successful in all this.”

  Sarah Ogilvy was waiting for Reddish as he returned to his office. The suite was deserted. He’d been with Bondurant for two hours.

  “What are you trying to do, set some kind of longevity record?” she asked, slamming her safe drawer closed. “Haversham went home. He wants you to call him, maybe stop by for a drink so he can find out what the h is going on.”

  Reddish searched his jacket pockets, making sure he’d left the envelope with Bondurant.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “I thought I forgot something. Did you pick up my airline ticket?”

  “It’s on your desk. I’ll tell you something you did forget—Taggert. He waited here for an hour, something about a special lock. What was that about?”

  “For Carol Browning—a combination lock. There have been a few break-ins at her apartment house and she’s worried.”

  “I’ll bet she’s worried.” She followed Reddish to his office.

  It was late and Gabrielle was waiting for him at the Houlets’. He grabbed his briefcase and headed for the door. “Lock me up, will you? Thanks for the ticket.”

  “I’ll bet she’s worried,” she persisted, trailing him to the door. “The only trouble with her lock is she forgot who she gave the key to. Do you know who was banging on her door at two o’clock last night? The British Ambassador! Cecil!”

  Reddish glanced at her as he went out the door. He’d barely heard a word. “The poor bastard,” he said.

  Chapter Eight

  “What does this man Masakita mean to you?” N’Sika demanded harshly. “Why do you come here to speak for him? You didn’t speak for the others.”

  “Because I want to see justice done,” Bondurant replied uneasily, the protocol dispensed with.

  “He will have a trial by the Revolutionary Court. You saw the dossier. Lutete offered to show it to you, but you said it didn’t interest you.” N’Sika pointed at the empty chair where Lutete had sat that night, shoulders thrust forward.

  “The letter is written to you, not the court,” Bondurant persisted. “It is a personal letter to you.” He hadn’t worn a coat and tie, as Reddish had suggested, and now he felt silly for it.

  N’Sika studied Bondurant’s face sullenly, his gaze finally returning to the letter on the table in front of him. “I receive hundreds of letters every day, but not like this.” The letter was three pages long, written in longhand. He lifted the first page contemptuously. “He tells me that he will live in peace, that he will work and live in peace. What are the rest of these words he writes? If I am to explain to the people and the council why I am to trust him now, what words can I use? My words? My words about Masakita are finished, eaten up. Nothing is left. His words? Are his words stronger? What words—French words? How can I feed the people his words when in three pages he tells me he isn’t even sure himself? Is that his conscience? If that is his conscience, let him keep it. Only he will understand it, not the people. If you have something to tell the people, make it easy for them to hear you, not in letters like this one, foreigners’ letters, which begin at a and go on to b and every other letter of the alphabet but always end not at zed but back at a again. The Belgians send me such letters every day, only about copper and diamonds and foreign exchange, technical matters. Is his conscience a technical matter? Let him hire a board of Belgian directors to administer it then, not me.”

  He got up rudely, turning his back on Bondurant, and walked to the door, calling out into the darkness in Lingala. Two bodyguards entered quickly, carrying rifles. He gave them an order and returned to the chair, his face even more bellicose than before.

  “The council fears Masakita,” he resumed bluntly, “not only because of this rebellion in Malunga but for other reasons which are none of your business.”

  His French is like a schoolboy’s, Bondurant thought, his impotence rising like an echo now, a bullying schoolboy who never yields the advantage.

  “They believe Masakita has nine lives,” N’Sika continued, “they only one, so that is their fear.” He leaned forward over the table, his voice dropping conspiratorially; and Bondurant sat forward too. “They are nine men, Masakita only one. What can I do? The council is more important to the country than Masakita, more important than me, because if the Revolutionary Council is weak, then the country will be weaker. This is important to your country too. You have not given us guns and money to see us grow weaker.”

  The eyes drilling Bondurant’s pale Saxon face seemed so dark as to have no irises at all. He searched in vain for some focus of understanding or compassion, his neck and armpits prickly with heat. He saw nothing.

  “Yes, I understand that.”

  “And your government, do they unde
rstand that?”

  “I wanted you to see the letter. I came on my own, not because my government asked me to come. It is, as I said, a personal matter.” This was a concession he would have preferred not to make and now he regretted it.

  N’Sika sat back. “So that is why you wanted no one else here. You came to whisper in my ear.”

  “As a friend,” Bondurant conceded uncomfortably.

  “So we could speak plainly with no one listening. All right. I understand.”

  The two bodyguards returned with two quart bottles of beer and a pair of glasses, attempting ineptly to pour out the beer themselves, one with bottles, the other with the glasses, hands trembling, glasses and bottles rattling; and N’Sika brutally sent them away, pouring the glasses himself. “You see how they are,” he declared, “these men who are so eager to say yes, who can say nothing but yes. Your breath blows them away.” With calm hands, he set the glass in front of Bondurant and returned to his chair.

  “About this letter then. What is it? Is he afraid to die, this man Masakita? It is nothing to die now. It is harder to live, harder every day. Everyone is afraid. If my mother saw these men on the council, she would be ashamed. Masakita’s mother would be ashamed too, a man writing a letter like that. Bullets are easy, but they don’t bring change. The hunter shoots the elephant, but the women dress the meat. Their work is harder, like our work. We must do everything ourselves here, stalk, hunt, dress, feed—everything.

  “Now about the Revolutionary Council and this letter. How many are we, nine or ten? No, less than that. This one wants to go to Paris as ambassador, this one to Brussels, another to Italy—all want to go somewhere, to go outside, like soldiers after their fighting is done. Why? Because it is hard for them, too hard, and they are only soldiers. Being here is different from being in a barracks. As a soldier, you may be afraid before a fight, a battle, but after the fighting is finished, it is done, over with. A soldier may be frightened once or twice in his life. Here you can be frightened every day. So it is easier to be outside, to let other people do these things, the politicians or the civil servants who did these things in the past. So I tell the council, ‘If we don’t do these things, who will?’ We must be objective, we must examine the situation objectively, as Africans. As a revolutionary council, we must not only make decisions but raise the political consciousness of the masses …”

  Bondurant heard the undigested fragments of a familiar political theology in N’Sika’s demotic French.

  “… but we must also raise our own, our own consciousness, here on this hilltop. The council’s responsibilities are not only to the people but to itself. Do you know Federov, the Russian? I used to talk to him the way I’m talking to you, just the two of us. He sent me books, many books—books to speak for him when he wasn’t here—too many books. How could I read them? He talked to me about objective conditions, about history, about the class struggle—all these things that never interested me. Who has time for it now? But because Peking’s diplomats are coming here, now we don’t talk at all. A Russian delegation was to come here to see our conditions, but the visit was canceled. Moscow canceled the visit. I didn’t understand. I told Major Lutete to call Federov and tell him, ‘You must be objective about this,’ but he couldn’t be objective …”

  The ambassador allowed himself the briefest of smiles, but N’Sika lumbered on:

  “… because Peking is his enemy. So Moscow is his master, this Russian, and it would be better if he were to go back again and send someone who can talk the way we’re talking. So in the same way the Revolutionary Council would never be objective about this letter, because Masakita is their enemy, fear their master. Am I to tell them that Masakita matters more to the country than they do? He is only one man.”

  “It is difficult,” Bondurant answered hesitantly, “but at the same time …”

  N’Sika ignored him, his face more animated but the eyes moving away, lifted to the window, to those sounds outside where the palm trees continued to whisper in the night wind. Bondurant paused, hearing nothing except the trees. N’Sika spoke first again.

  “Your government is strong,” he said, eyes searching again the tabletop as they had during that first visit. “You don’t understand governments that are weak. I know why the old President was corrupt, why he ruled with francs and dollars—of course I know. It is easier that way. Nothing is simpler. I know why he created this imaginary government of national reconciliation with a parliament and all those tribal political parties—of course I know. So he could hide under it like a cat under the fisherman’s table. All these things I know in the same way I know why soldiers who leave the barracks to rule a country are confused and afraid, whispering together, asking each other, Where is the enemy they can see? Where are the soldiers they would fight? It is nothing to overthrow a government, nothing at all. An imbecile could do it, yes, and we were imbeciles too—we made many mistakes, but we are here now, the Revolutionary Council is out there waiting for me, and there is no one else to govern except us. No one. So you understand my situation.

  “I would send myself away if I could—as military attaché to London or America, where I could learn English and read the books that Masakita, Dr. Bizenga, and Federov talk about—wise men’s books, scholars and historians—but who would stay? Fumbe, who’s afraid of his own shadow? Lutete, who’s an old woman, now growing older? Who would watch the ministries? The same thieves who did these things before? Never! Do I know what is happening in Finance today, how much foreign exchange was issued, how many import licences approved? No. I asked the World Bank to send me two financial advisers to help me, but who do they send? Two Belgians who once worked for the copper syndicate whose mines I nationalized—the same thieves! The UN sends a new representative, a Pakistani, and he immediately comes to see me. So what does he want to talk about during his first visit. More food and medicine for the peoples in the drought area to the south? No. He wants to talk about nationality for the Pakistani shopkeepers in the north whose English passports have been taken away, the same people who have been cheating the village women for years! And now you come bringing this letter, a letter from one man! Just one man, not a village, a district or province …”

  N’Sika looked up morosely, glancing toward the side door, where his secretary had been hovering, a slim, frightened young man holding a thick folder. N’Sika beckoned and the secretary quickly brought him the file folder, holding it open on the table as N’Sika signed a folio of documents. Seeing the secretary’s success, Major Lutete followed on his heels clutching a pale green binder holding a few telegrams. N’Sika glanced at them with perfunctory interest, took the pen Lutete offered, and scrawled his initials on the cables. Major Fumbe, plump and frog-faced, waited anxiously in the doorway, a carbine over his shoulder.

  “I have a visitor,” N’Sika told him coldly. “Leave your gun outside.” Fumbe obeyed eagerly, returning an instant later to confer with N’Sika in a fawning whisper, his departure as servile as the others’.

  Alone again with Bondurant, N’Sika sat hunched forward over the table, gold watch dangling from one wrist like a bracelet as he reached for the ever-present package of cigarettes. He lit a cigarette mechanically. “They are not all like this,” he resumed, troubled, as if conscious of Bondurant’s unspoken judgment, “not all the council. Probably you think you know this nation, this country, these peoples—from the books you have read, from the gossip of the Belgians or Europeans, from listening to the civil servants in the foreign ministry or the vin rouge intellectuals the Belgians left behind, like the old President and his cabinet, those crippled old men wearing the patron’s coat and trousers.

  “I will tell you a story about someone who could read no books or even write her own name, a woman from my village in the north who never learned what these people in the capital learned or would have taught her. She was given away by her father to an old Belgian who had a coffee farm. This Belgian gave her a cottage to live in near his own house, but sh
e never accepted him, not in her heart, even though she was forced to obey her father. She never accepted him, even though she could do nothing when he would come to her at night, the way such men do. She lived there for eight years, denying the Belgian in her heart, never speaking to him, not one word, even after eight years when his sickness for her had become a fever, ruining his life and the life of his family, who left him and went back to Belgium. A fever, you see, rotting his life. She never spoke to him, this woman—never, not a word in all those years. When he was dying he ordered his two servants to carry his bed to her cottage, so they did—two frightened servants carrying the patron’s bed like a chief’s tipoy to her cottage where he lived those last months, wasting away. She fed him, washed him, and clothed him. After he died, she washed the corpse and dressed it in coat and trousers and then, because he was a fat man and she was small, she dragged the dead man by the heels up the path to the house, where the two servants were waiting to say yes to her, whatever she wanted—the house was hers then, the house, the coffee trees, the farm—but she left the corpse there on the porch, at the feet of the two servants waiting to say yes, and went away without a word, down the road and across the river to the village she hadn’t visited in eight years.”

  N’Sika paused, the cigarette smoking in his strong fingers, brooding along the tabletop.

  “But in the village they rejected her too. They thought she was mad, living in silence all those years; dragging a white man’s body through the dust was an insult, something only a madwoman would do. The Belgians and their priests had been to the village, you see. So the elders sent her away. She became a midwife, a healer, and a seller of herbs; but in time she found a husband, an African from the same tribe who worked on the river and gave her children of her own. She was a woman these people here would say was ignorant and primitive, even mad, but she was stronger than all of them, a woman who could say no. There are many like her, but not in the books you read. It is only when this council finds its strength in the same way that they will know who they are. Then the country will become strong. But as strong as she was, this woman I told you about wasted her strength because no one came after her, no one joined with her, the people weren’t ready for her, and she died alone at the edge of the river near a trading village where the Arabs owned the shops.”