Night of Fire

by Colin Thubron

  ‘You too?’

  ‘I will leave here when my mother stronger. But we have no money.’

  There was no hint of pleading – it did not occur to her. But a momentary dream unfolded in my head. How much would it cost to change her life? Three or four hundred pounds, at most. The sun was hard and near-vertical overhead. She stepped back until her face was shadowed by the fence. She said: ‘It is hard for you to understand this place. People hide themselves here. They hide what they know. They hide stolen goods. They even hide their crippled children in case they bring bad luck.’ She made as if to go, then stopped in the sun’s glare. Her mushanana left one shoulder bare, with the lift of one breast. Its skin was caramel-smooth, a little paler than her face. She said: ‘They hide weapons too.’

  ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘Papa Olivier will not have told you. You don’t see them, but this camp is full of guns. Our young men are not patient. Did you hear of the inyenzi, the cockroaches? They called that because they go by night. They are our Tutsi, fighting to return. In the camp they still talk of going back, although I think it is hopeless. But they are everywhere . . .’

  As she spoke, I lost track of these important things and became conscious only of her eyes’ strangeness and the beauty of her rising breast. Her stare gave no hint of whatever it was seeing, so that I could read nothing into it. Sometimes I imagined her becalmed, disappasionate, at others the eyes seemed stricken. They might even have been merciless.

  Nothing grew easier. The twelve-hour nights were interminable, and the dry heat turned us dazed and lethargic. Sometimes Vincent and I bolstered our diet with an egg or some river sprats, fried on the paraffin stove. But when I peered into my shaving mirror I saw the febrile glitter of tired eyes, and my hair pink with dust.

  This physical depletion, and the hours of idle darkness, had shrunk me into dreaming. My head filled with Chantal. I fantasised about her thoughts, her body. The most beautiful of colours was black: her caramel darkness. I kissed her full lips in my half-sleep. We made love in an imagined night, and I woke to her moist absence on my quilt. Then I dreamt of taking her away. Several times a day I would make a detour from our hut to pass by hers – a hovel like the others, numbered 147c. Usually it was silent, its door shut; but once her mother emerged – a tiny, wizened woman, who greeted me without warmth – and once Chantal herself, immaculate in her crimson mushanana; but they did not ask me in. Later I would ruminate over her simplest remarks, hunting for some hidden intimacy. What lay behind her ‘Where are you always going?’ or ‘Please define what is “renunciation”?’

  Vincent was oblivious to my moods. He was furious at the work he’d been assigned: dealing with Tanzanian legal requirements for the church’s incorporation. That was not what he had come here for, and only the work’s approaching end delayed his outright refusal. His cheeks had hollowed under their bones, and his walking, even his eating, had turned jaded and fretful.

  One evening, as we finished supper, he said: ‘I saw a vile place today’, and I knew he had come upon the ancestral shrine. ‘There was a woman there offering a bottle of baobab juice to dead spirits, and mumbling things.’ We were running low on paraffin, and I could barely see his face in the lamplight, but I could picture its stony glower. ‘A place like that should not exist in a Christian community. But when I told that witch doctor Olivier he just said his people were like that. He said they prayed to Christian relatives.’

  ‘I only saw some cassava roots there,’ I said, ‘and a bowl of water.’

  ‘So you know that place. You didn’t tell me. Didn’t it disgust you?’

  But my reactions to the shrine were incoherent, mystified. And when I asked myself the long-taught question – What would Our Lord have said? – I heard no sure answer. ‘A few centuries ago we prayed to the dead too,’ I said. ‘Remember the monks of Athos . . .’ I was thinking of their inscribed and waiting skulls.

  ‘That shrine was not loving towards the dead, Stephen, it was propitiating the ancestors. I hear their spirits get angry; they get fed up unless you give them something.’

  ‘Maybe the people here are missing them,’ I said. ‘The ancestors are believed to live in their homes, like part of the family.’ Chantal had told me that. ‘But their homes have been burnt down. Perhaps people don’t know where the dead are any more.’

  Vincent went silent, then answered: ‘They still worship an African God. The Trinity has to be taught them. Today somebody asked me: ‘Why was God’s son a Jew?’ How do you answer such a thing? What is happening in a head like that?’

  The African God. When I read the students Old Testament narratives or Christ’s miracles, they surged with understanding and delight. They wanted joy and hope. They were like the Children of Israel, longing to return. But when I tried to expound the doctrine of atonement, I heard myself talking into silence about an alien and complicated God. I was starting to hate this. Perhaps they were listening to me, I thought, only because I was white. My God was a white, post-colonial God, whose character had been decided far to their north. Their dead were not in heaven, but were gathered round the family hearth, listening. Sometimes they cried for water. But Vincent was getting irritated. He scented heresy. Back in the seminary he had sometimes guided my thinking with an almost pastoral affection, and I had thought of him as a benchmark of probity. But now I felt refractory and irritable. Perhaps this arose from our isolation here, or from some inner distress, or my obsession with Chantal. But I heard myself say: ‘Shouldn’t theirs be an African God? Can’t faith include the monks of Athos, and us, and these people?’ I checked myself. ‘That’s a beauty of Christianity, isn’t it, Vincent, that it can mould itself to different cultures . . .’ But even as I said this, I was starting to recognise a kind of despair.

  Vincent said curtly: ‘Athos was different. The Orthodox have a creed. They study.’ He seemed to have forgotten his exasperation there. ‘Each of those monks had a mentor, you know, a personal confessor. Ross discovered that’ – he touched the name with warmth. ‘But the people here have no concept of repentance or salvation through Christ. Their faith is a narcotic.’

  ‘Maybe they’ve suffered too much,’ I said. ‘Perhaps they feel they’ve already expiated everything.’

  ‘The only expiation is through Christ. You know that. Besides, this place is rife with crime. The witch doctor is always denouncing adultery and rape. The victims come to the church office sometimes. They turn up at the United Nations clinic. Some have committed murder. You mustn’t go soft on these people, Stephen. You’re betraying them if you do.’

  He turned off the lamp as if to silence me. I heard him wrenching off his shirt and trousers a yard away, his legs rasping against the mosquito net. I hoped he had finished, but after a minute he went on: ‘We have a duty to save them, Stephen. A loving duty. That’s why Alan came here.’

  He hadn’t mentioned Alan for days, but now this promised figure was touching our conscience: Alan lying with malaria somewhere to the east in a town we couldn’t pronounce; Alan, who might have had plans for us here, which we’d never received. For the first few days we were always saying: Alan will explain this when he comes. But we’d been here over four weeks now, and he had not come.

  Vincent said: ‘Alan knows these people’s language. He speaks Kinyarwanda. When he comes we’ll know better how they define the key doctrines. Who knows how things are being interpreted? Your Bible classes, for instance?’

  I said: ‘The woman interprets well.’

  ‘How do you know?’ She had asked that too.

  ‘They listen to her.’

  Vincent’s teacherly voice had returned. ‘But I wonder how she understands the remission of sins or the Passion. These people . . .’

  ‘She’s not “these people”! She understands suffering better than you or I do. Her father was butchered before her eyes.’

  Then came one of those soft retractions which sometimes endeared Vincent to me. ‘I’m sorry.’ My chagrin
must have glared out. ‘It’s terrible . . .’ He fumbled to redeem his condescension. ‘The number of lost parents is shocking here . . .’ I heard him turn away from me in the dark.

  I remembered then what Julian had told me: that Vincent lived in his father’s shadow. Once, I recalled, standing with Vincent beneath the dome of a monastery church on Athos, I saw a boyish awe transform his upturned face, as the frescoed Christ Pantocrator gazed down at us from the ceiling: the patriarchal God of all Power, who cradled the Gospel in one hand and raised the other in a stern, conditional blessing. Soon afterwards, as my Bible classes were assembling, the male interpreter told me: ‘Chantal is ill’, and all through the lesson a guilty excitement distracted me: the possibility of her need, of something changing.

  It was foolish to be taken aback by the poverty of her rooms. They were no different from others. She and her mother slept opposite one another on low brick platforms spread with soiled blankets, and they kept their possessions in two wooden boxes. A few pots and a jar of manioc stood in the kitchen alcove, with a broken stool.

  Her mother closed the door behind me. She spoke in a staccato mutter, which I only later realised was French. Her eyes were fixed on the floor. ‘Le Papa Anglais est ici.’

  At first I thought that Chantal wasn’t there. The light seeped through a side window edged with broken glass. The old woman sat on the stool, saying nothing. Then I saw the blankets stirring, and Chantal turned suddenly to face me, levering her back against the whitewashed brick. She was shivering. She said: ‘Why are you here?’

  ‘I heard you were ill.’

  She pushed the hair back from her face and pulled her slip against her chin. She seemed confused. ‘We have nothing to offer you.’

  ‘I don’t want anything. I came to help.’

  She let out a long, wavering sigh. ‘You are very good.’ Her eyes rested on me at last. ‘But there is nothing to do. This comes and goes.’

  ‘Is it malaria?’

  ‘Yes.’ Under the thin coverlet I saw that her whole body was faintly, continuously shaking.

  But the rainy season was over, the mosquitoes almost gone. ‘When did you get it?’

  ‘Last year. Malaria come back. I feel cold now. But in a while I will be hot. Then it fade.’

  I said: ‘Do you want more blankets? Can I get something from the clinic?’

  A spasm of cold shook her shoulders, trembled through her sheeted body, subsided. She murmured: ‘The clinic has nothing for this.’

  I took out a packet of aspirin I had brought – better than nothing, I thought – then pulled another blanket from the old woman’s bed and laid it over Chantal’s trembling.

  ‘The cold don’t mean anything,’ she said. ‘It’s just a feeling.’

  I found a bottle of water on the kitchen shelf. ‘Aspirin will dull the pain. Are you in pain?’

  ‘My head.’ She closed her eyes. ‘And my back aches . . . like my mother’s.’ A slight smile. ‘And my shoulders.’ She eased herself flat again.

  I knelt and cupped my hand behind her head and touched the water to her lips. The sudden intimacy of this – I realised I had never touched her – surged through my body with a hot tenderness, mixed with an irrational fear that she was slipping away. Her hair was rough and crisp against the palm of my hand. I cradled the weight of her head. I laid the aspirin between those full lips, yearning to kiss them, and tilted the bottle until her tongue’s tip took the pills in.

  I waited until the blanket’s flicker showed she had swallowed them. Her eyes stayed shut. She remained rigid on the bed, then another spasm seized her. I whispered: ‘What can I do?’

  ‘You are very kind, Papa.’

  ‘I’m not a Papa. I’m not ordained, Chantal. I’m Stephen.’

  She repeated: ‘Stephen.’ It sounded wondering, husky, like somebody else.

  Then her mother intruded with a flood of incomprehensible words. I had forgotten she was there. She creaked up from her stool and stood above Chantal. She nudged her. Chantal opened her eyes. ‘My mother thinks I have a brain disorder,’ she said. ‘She says an uncle of mine is causing it . . . She doesn’t know anything.’

  ‘How does he cause it?’

  ‘He doesn’t. He’s dead. She thinks his spirit is evil.’

  I wondered if the old woman was demented. Her upper back was so hunched that it thrust her head forward until her face was near-invisible, and her hands – oddly small and delicate – clutched at her breast. Chantal said: ‘She says the brain is a journey. It is coiled up like a life, then it uncoils . . .’ Meanwhile her mother went on talking above Chantal’s bed. Her voice sounded from deep inside her crippled frame. Chantal said: ‘She says that some lengths of the brain are dark, others are light. This is what causes sorrow, or relief. The brain uncoils to a destiny. That is a life.’

  In the claustrophobia of that room, resounding with the oracular depth of the old woman’s voice, I had the apprehension that she might possess some secret knowledge. After all, she had seen her husband’s brain threaded across their shop floor, uncoiled from her daughter’s hands.

  ‘I will go now,’ I said.

  To my surprise Chantal said: ‘I like you here.’

  The old woman wrenched up her face to look at me. She had clouded, kindly eyes. She said: ‘L’âme de Nishyimimana va dans un voyage sombre . . .’

  I asked Chantal; ‘What does your mother call you?’

  ‘She calls me Nishyimimana. That is Kinyarwanda name.’

  That was hard to pronounce, I said, but she asked me to try. Her father had called her Chantal because as a child she liked to sing, but the name hurt her now. Perhaps I would call her Nishyimimana: it meant ‘Glory to God’. This intimacy over her name elated me. I imagined it private to myself. As we spoke, her trembling began to subside. She had heard from someone else, she said – the faint smile returned – that Chantal meant ‘a stone’. Her mother shuffled back to her stool where she started, wordlessly, to sing.

  I sat by Chantal for what seemed a long time. She appeared to sleep. Her mother’s singing tailed away. One of Chantal’s hands lay beside mine where I sat on her bed’s edge. The hand was fine and narrow, its tendons like lyre strings. Its fingers wore no ring. I imagined clasping it, but did not move. Sitting in the unlit room became very restful. Her crimson mushanama hung on the wall above us. Perhaps it was the only dress she had. Outside in the alley the noises seemed far away. I might have got up and left, but instead I remained in this static euphoria, sitting beside her on the rough bricks.

  After an hour, perhaps, Chantal became restless, and her breathing quickened. Her eyes flickered open. I imagined shadows moving under her face’s skin. Her eyes had the lustrous, swimming darkness of fever. She said: ‘This is what happens.’

  When I touched her forehead, it felt rough, hot. I poured out the cool water on my loosened sleeve and dabbed it over her face. I didn’t know what else to do. Her skin was burning. I read pain in her eyes: a contained, private pain. I heard my own breathing become sharp and fast alongside hers. People could die from this. She began softly to groan. ‘You can’t stay here.’ The words were my own. ‘I want to take you away.’

  Then the stare of those eyes passed over me. They had lost their ethereal calm, and were vivid and glittering with fear. They filled me with panic when I imagined their extinction. I touched her hand, held it. The hand too was hot, dry. Its fingers curled on mine.

  She said: ‘How can I go away?’

  ‘I don’t know. But you can’t stay here.’ I looked round at the walls of pocked whitewash, the broken window (who had tried to get in?), the corrugated roof edged with rust, the mud floor. ‘I will find somewhere else for you.’

  ‘There is nowhere else.’

  ‘I can’t leave you here.’ I was imagining reciprocity in her hand, its furling round mine. ‘I’ll take care of you.’

  I am ashamed of these words now, their callow passion, their ignorance. I was caught in the swimming flux of her
gaze, and in my panic at her momentary delirium. I had the idea that she was too delicate to survive the camp. I touched the moistened sleeve over her cheeks, her neck. She seemed not to notice. Her eyes were clenched shut now. She had eased the blankets off her chest. Her shoulders shone black against her white slip. Her body poured out heat. But even then I could not take my eyes from the lift of her breasts under the camisole.

  Then I became aware that her mother was squatting beside me. She was stroking Chantal’s feet. A little later the paroxysm of fever subsided – it went in waves – and Chantal detached her hand from mine.

  ‘Stephen, you go now. Soon I be sweating. It is ugly. I be ashamed.’

  ‘I don’t mind.’

  ‘Go now. It’s all right.’ The faint smile. ‘I not dying.’

  As I emerged outside her door, which her mother closed behind me, everything was bewilderingly the same: the same sunlight on the rubbish-strewn alley, the same boarded windows, the same washing hung from the thatches. It was as if within ordinary time nothing had occurred at all, and that the door of 147c was the entrance into my imagination, where I had reached out and taken Chantal’s hand.

  I did not understand all of Olivier’s business. He lived a little better than his flock, but still poorly, and shared the same maize diet. I think he was at once self-serving and benign. His church compound included a sty with seven pigs, but I never discovered precisely who owned them. The orphan whom he had adopted seemed little more than a servant. But he had started a sewing school for traumatised girls, who sat at their Singers in a room behind his office, and you sometimes heard their laughter.

  He barely knew Chantal. He employed her sometimes, where her English was useful, but his colleagues were all men, and she was a little resented. Even to her own people she was perhaps an enigma. He defined her as a childless widow, as though her life were over.