by W. T. Tyler
“So you knew him, even then,” Masakita said.
“Swindled me three times, he did,” de Vaux admitted with a cunning smile. “The last time, the worst of all.”
A few soldiers were coming in the door. They got slowly to their feet, Masakita leading the way.
The old prison was silent.
“Fumbe! Fumbe, you cowardly bastard! Show us your face!” De Vaux’s hectoring voice rattled under the high roof and along the stone walls.
But the shadow didn’t move, standing just behind the iron mesh, the face hidden in the darkness behind the three kneeling marksmen who waited at their firing holes, heads turned.
It was N’Sika, standing alone.
His mother’s memory had brought him here, invoking her strength to understand theirs. As a soldier, he’d rejected those memories because he loved them too much, the memories of her and their life along the river near the Arab settlement where she’d settled, an itinerant midwife and seller of herbs, abandoned first by her father, then her villagers, and finally the indolent, weak husband who worked on the foreigners’ boats. They lived in a mud hut at the river’s edge, her will unbroken, her strength wasted in poverty, where she died like a derelict, her conscience her own.
Her beliefs were his too by then. He didn’t understand them. Some were drawn from the stories her father had told her, others from the gossip of the street, or the admonitions of the soothsayers in the marketplace. Still others were the images or premonitions inspired by the Western or Arab picture magazines that came to her second- and thirdhand from the coffee shop, the brightest of which she cut out to decorate the walls of the mud hut, pasted up with a mucilage of flour and honey. There were photographs of a chief in a tipoy, a European coronation, a woman in ermine leaving a horse drawn coach, the mute stone sentinels of Luxor, the black hull of a freighter capsizing, bow-lifted, in the stormy North Atlantic. She had never seen the ocean, never seen the storms that battered the winter coasts, but she knew it was a vessel, a derelict, and it was something terrible to her, summoning from memory the recollection of some dream or nightmare she understood even without knowing its language.
She’d had nothing to share with him those last days, her voice taken away by sickness. The last night he sat with her alone. The tea and barley broth he’d brought from the charcoal fire cooled on the box near her pallet. The bowl of oil glimmered on the mud floor. In the light of the candle stub on the box were her two-franc mirror with the red plastic handle, the bottle of rosewater, and the tortoise-shell comb with a few strands of wiry hair still caught in its teeth from her last toilet. A red shawl lay over her shoulders. Outside, the evening idlers drifted by. The old gramophone lifted its tinny music from the coffeehouse. Two drunken boat workers argued as they urinated in the passageway. Slowly the lanes grew quiet. It was after midnight when he heard the struggle in her throat and saw some brutal force lift the small head and shrunken shoulders from the pillow. Her face was calm, her head thrown back proudly, but it was outside her then, shaking her body the way a dog shakes a bundle of limp rags. Crueler still, it flailed the small wasted body convulsively, and he flung himself over the pallet, a thirteen-year-old boy shielding her with his arms and shoulders as he struck out at the shadows that grappled for her. Her mouth stiffened and yawned open; he heard the sound of dry leaves rattling in the wind rush by his ear as she lay still. He crouched at her side until the candle dimmed out and he slept on the mud floor alongside the pallet. He awoke to the morning sun and the whistle of a boat on the river waiting to unload its cargo.
He had invoked his mother’s memory and now it released him, the cloak of compassion banished as he looked through the mesh from the shadows at the men in the cell block. They were derelicts too, too strong for this weak nation, their strength and consciences their own, wasted like hers in a mud hut at the water’s edge. Who could follow them?
He nodded to the three marksmen and turned away, back to the corridor, head lowered, as if his own burden had grown heavier, not lighter, as his council members had assumed.
Chapter Eleven
It was one o’clock as the tired travelers were led from the departure lounge, down the outside staircase, and across the tarmac to the waiting jet. Behind them on the esplanade a group of boisterous beery Brits were singing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” serenading a departing Yorkshireman from the British Embassy bag room. Reddish saw their waving hands and dim white faces as he turned back at the top of the boarding steps. The sound was still ringing in his ears as he sat in the rear of the cabin and the jet began its screaming sprint down the runway, his mind numbed mute by the stinging blizzard of speed and sound. He heard it again as the silver cylinder lifted its freight of gravity-heavy bodies into lightness once again, rediscovering speech, limbs, and appetites.
He sat alone at the rear of the jet, staring down the wing at the scattered lights of the capital, watching it fragment in detonations of black smoke as they climbed into the clouds and the city was lost in darkness. They climbed higher still, beyond the great river, the jungles and villages with their campfires and the smoke of the savannahs. Lights were consumed in darkness, but still he looked down, oblivious to the neon-lit cocktail lounge the cabin had become—passengers moving, rubber-wheeled carts whispering by, cigarettes, whiskey, and shared intimacies suddenly bountiful.
He was a stranger again, even to himself, but he was accustomed to it. He’d lived a dozen lives in twenty years, like Masakita; and now, at this moment, none of them mattered. The darkness had taken them away—friends, rooms, offices, villages, and faces. They served their tours, burned their private files, received their orders, made their departures, and then vanished themselves—anonymous deracinated men in the vacuum of transit, clutching briefcases on a night flight to yet another continent, frightened by the swiftness of their inconsequentiality, their stomachs churning with the loathing of a new beginning. Countries they had known better than their own slipped behind them silently, like barren headlands passed in the night.
He’d left a lifetime behind him. How many did he have left? None, like Masakita? Maybe he was slyer than that—loth to become, like diplomacy and everything else these days, just another fatuous, foolish profession until there was nothing left of that either.
Tired, he ordered a drink and picked up a newspaper from the seat pouch in front of him, but it was a Capetown paper and he cast it aside. He pulled his briefcase from beneath the seat and removed Gabrielle’s envelope.
“Excuse me, but I noticed that you’d boarded in Kinshasa,” an English voice called from across the aisle. “Do you speak English by any chance?” A South African businessman holding a drink leaned toward him from across the aisle, blue eyes eager, curious about murder and mayhem in the streets Reddish had just left.
Reddish resisted his first impulse and nodded. “Yes, I speak English.”
“Were you there long or just passing through?”
“A few weeks.”
“Bloody awful, I gather—the riots. You were there? You don’t mind my asking, do you?”
“No, I don’t mind.”
He fell asleep high over the Tibesti and awoke at dawn, stiff and cramped, Africa behind him, the Mediterranean a wrinkled silver mirror far below as they veered toward the French coast. His companions were sleeping. The morning sun was bright through those few cabin windows where the shades weren’t drawn.
He had had an ugly dream and was looking forward to a whiskey, but it was early morning, the other passengers weren’t awake, and he doubted that the sleepy young German stewardess brought by his seat light would understand that.
Gabrielle would.
He ordered coffee instead, recovering Gabrielle’s envelope from the seat beside him as he looked down at the fertile fields of France swimming into view, crosshatched in the ancient husbandry of a long-settled economy, totally alien, totally strange, not at all the corrugated green vastness his eyes had so long been accustomed to. He tried to accustom hi
mself to the change, trying to forget those he’d left behind, to think of himself as an American again, a Midwesterner whose corridors of destruction were carved by flood, drought, or winter storms, nature’s carnage, nothing more; an American again, here among strangers, encouraged by the day’s possibilities, beyond the reach of the past.
He opened the envelope and looked at the bound book. It was bulky—too bulky. He looked at the front pages and the engraving of a man a century dead, Gabrielle’s old friend and correspondent, the Frenchman who’d discovered himself too late in a letter to a dead friend:
I am very old today, the sky is gray, I am not very well.
Nothing can prevent madness.
The book on his knee opened easily to those last pages, and as it did the fold of waxed paper Gabrielle had pressed there slipped down the spine, the petals within faded, the stem dry, but the fragrance still there, as fresh as it had been that afternoon when she’d first lifted the rose toward him on the ruined hillside above the lake, as if she’d known then what he now was just beginning to understand.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
Copyright © 1982 by W. T. Tyler
ISBN: 978-1-4976-9701-0
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