by Peter Rimmer
“Are you telling me how to bring up my daughter? Penny, you will come to your senses and put that bag back in your bedroom where it belongs.”
“Daddy, I’m nineteen. I am not a missionary and never will be. The British High Commission will be obliged to repatriate a destitute British national and in England they have a welfare system designed to set me on my feet. If Hymie will give me a lift to Lusaka, I will fend for myself.”
“Mr Goldblatt, I forbid you to offer my daughter a lift. It’s abduction.”
“I don’t think so, Reverend. I may be a smous by practice but I am a lawyer by trade. Under British law, Penny has every right to make her own decisions. Will is her de facto uncle. A lawful chaperone. But what I will do is delay my journey by a day and excuse myself while your family find a solution to your problem. Will, I think you would like to visit your old base camp, or what is left of it. Let us leave this family for the day to come to terms with itself… And may God be with you. A house united shall stand, a house divided shall fall, Reverend, Mary, Penny. Thank you for my breakfast… I know the pain of losing family,” he said, turning back from the door. “Until apartheid falls, and that may be longer than my lifetime, I cannot go home for fear of my life. Penny can always fly here and you can always fly to England. Maybe in this life we should all think on the bright side.”
The following day in the early dawn, the three of them set off in the five-ton truck, an old Bedford that had come down Africa with overland tourists and broken down beyond the skills of the tour operator. Hymie had bought the vehicle with money lent him by the ANC for the price of the recyclable spare parts: all the profits from his trading went to the ANC to fight apartheid. In the woven reed bag behind the front seat of the truck was a letter from the Reverend Hilary Bains giving his nineteen-year-old daughter permission to apply for a British passport. None of them were sure, not even Advocate Goldblatt, whether parental consent was required after turning eighteen or twenty-one years of age. Having fought through the worst family day since Malcolm died from malaria, Hilary had no wish for the united decision to flounder in the hands of bureaucracy: it would be one thing to find a lift to Lusaka and another to find one back.
Penny was dressed in well-washed and darned shorts that once had been khaki, a top of indeterminate colour and a pair of rough sandals. Her hair, thick and healthy, that had never been washed in anything but cheap soap, reminded Will of a badly made rat’s nest. The hair was tied up in a red scarf at the back. Vaguely Will wondered what the girl would look like in the latest London clothes with her hair washed out in shampoo. He was then forty-eight years old and even the family connection didn’t stop him from speculating. Uncomfortably, he decided the girl probably had a very good figure and as she was seated in the middle of the bench seat, he carefully ensured that his bare knee kept away from the bare flesh that was twenty-five years younger than himself.
As if to compound his problem, less than an hour out of the mission, Penny turned to him sweetly. “How old are you, Will? Or should I say, Uncle Will?”
“Just Will is fine… Very old, Penny, very old.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I. Now, if you ask Hymie his age I’m sure he will have no problem telling the truth… Out of interest, Hymie, did this vehicle ever have a suspension?” In all the jolting and bouncing around it was impossible for Will to keep his knee out of contact with young Penny and he was conscious of the girl enjoying his discomfort.
“She’s better fully loaded. They bring them overland down Africa with anything up to fifteen passengers and all the camping gear. There’s the three of us and very little stock left over from my trip… Sorry. I’m not sure whether it’s better when we detour off the road or hit the potholes. I never average more than fifteen kilometres an hour or the tyres would be blown off their rims. And yes, I do carry spares. Four of them and ten inner tubes. The big acacia thorns are as much of a problem as the potholes.”
“Doesn’t anyone try and fix the holes?” asked Penny.
“Not since the British left,” said Hymie.
“And you support the system?” said Will, innocently.
“I can’t argue politics when my kidneys are being punched every fifty metres. Save that question for the campfire and I’ll try to give you an answer. Nothing’s ever simple in Africa.”
There was no air conditioning in the truck and Hymie was forced to lower the windows when the sun came over the trees and pierced the cab. Shortly after, they were forced off what was left of the metalled road onto a long detour that wound through the mopani forest. The next track went round trees pushed over by elephants, and anthills the size of small hills, where the nitrogen-enriched soil had fertilised small thickets. Penny took the red scarf from the back of her hair and put it across her nose and mouth to keep out the dust.
“We used to have an old Land Rover on the mission before it bust,” she explained. “I went out with Daddy to the villages. In those days he called on the very sick. Now they have to be brought to him and that usually means they die.”
“Can’t your Missionary Society send you a replacement vehicle?” asked Hymie.
“Daddy talks about priorities. Fact is, Daddy has a fixation about priorities. Felt it was not right for him to be seen driving around when all the children have pot bellies from lack of nutrition. Will, if you’re going to send in medicine to Daddy you should bring in protein-enriched biscuits for the children. I read about the biscuits in Newsweek.”
“You read Newsweek out here?” asked Hymie as he wound the old diesel truck around the big mopani trees following an old track he had probably made himself: unless occasional military traffic passed through the rural areas.
“Every week,” answered Penny. “They are six months old but so what? Daddy has a friend from theological college who’s now a bishop and sends Daddy all the newspapers and any books he thinks Daddy would like to read.”
“Does Hilary know you read Newsweek?” asked Will, his curiosity piqued by a girl who had never been to school reading international news magazines.
“Oh, I think so. We don’t have TV or even radio anymore. No electricity. All I have are the papers and the books after dark. One paraffin lamp is enough if you clean the soot off the glass every now and again. I read everything cover to cover including the letters to the press. Some of the books I don’t understand but that makes it more interesting.”
“How long have you been reading Newsweek cover to cover?”
“Since I was eleven, I think it was.”
“Good God,” said Hymie as they drove on through the heat and dust of the African bush, followed by a cloud of tsetse fly they could even hear above the drone of the diesel engine. The cloud of flies was fooled by the moving truck into thinking it was animal and blood and their only source of reproduction. Some of the flies flew into the cab and were swatted by Will against the windscreen. The chances of contracting sleeping sickness were small but the bite of a tsetse fly was similar to being pierced by a red-hot needle.
They had seen one warthog since leaving the mission and Will was wondering what had happened to the game. The bush was tinder-dry from the poor rain season and the next rains were six months away. For six months, not a drop of rain would fall on the bush. At first, he had felt naked in the bush without his rifle.
“Leave your gun behind, Will,” Hymie had told him. “In Africa north of the Limpopo a white man with a gun is suspect. Nkomo’s army may have gone home to Zimbabwe but I’m sure it’s no secret the ANC and SWAPO are training freedom fighters in Zambia to launch attacks on South West Africa and South Africa. Leave your gun behind. There are more dangerous things in the bush for a white man than wild animals and malaria. Some of the cadres are aggressive having lost friends and relatives to apartheid.”
Will surveyed the surrounding bush. A great deal more than a looming drought had come to Zambia since Will had left after independence. There was menace emanating from the bush. The trackers, yester
day at base camp, had probably been right, he thought, when they told him to stay out of the way. ‘In Africa,’ Fourpence had said, quoting a long-standing African truth, ‘you either follow or lead or get the hell out of the way. We stay out the way, baas. You best join us here and stay out the way.’ Fourpence had spoken in Lozi, Will suspected intentionally so that Hymie would be unable to understand. Even the new white men could be friends of the Party. ‘I have a job to do, Fourpence. To give back something to Africa.’ ‘Be careful, baas. This Africa is not so good anymore.’
The grinding, low gear fight through the bush went on all day, with Will spelling Hymie as the driver. For the first time in his life, Will Langton was not enjoying a journey through Africa. When they camped at dusk, he gathered a pile of wood for the night’s fire which in the old days would have lasted a week. Again, for the first time in Africa, Will was nervous, and he didn’t have a gun.
They had driven well off the track to make camp, deep in the mopani forest where their fire would not attract attention. There was no early moon, and the night was black. Before the light had gone, Will had gathered a heap of thick worms with hairy bodies that grew on the boughs of the mopani trees. They were still a day’s drive from the Kafue National Park. Will put the worms he had collected in his leather hat on the seat of the truck before making the fire that would burn all night. As darkness fell and Africa contracted to two men and a girl round the campfire, Will felt at ease for the first time that day. When a lion roared deep in the forest, five, ten miles away – it was difficult to judge from so far away – Will relaxed. The small furrow disc he had seen in the back of the truck was now next to the fire, put there by Hymie Goldblatt. First, they made tea and drank it in silence, listening to the cicadas and night birds, Will putting a name to each of their calls. A tin of beans and a tin of sausages sat next to the furrow disc and Hymie was preparing sudza from maize meal in a three-legged iron pot under which he made a separate fire. They sat on low camp chairs. There were no mosquitoes as there was no water for fifty miles. The heat of the day went quickly and left them cool at the start of the night.
“Do you know what you are going to do in England?” Hymie asked Penny wistfully. For the first time, Will realised the loneliness of the man.
“Oh yes. Whether I will find it possible remains to be seen. From what I’ve read, you always seem to have to know someone and the only people I know in the world are Mummy and Daddy and the two of you around this fire, which rather limits the chances.”
“Did you take any examinations through your correspondence courses?” asked Will.
“Not one. How could I? Where was I going to go to write Oxford and Cambridge O levels, let alone A levels? The nearest adjudicator was over three hundred miles away and we didn’t even have a car. Doesn’t mean I wouldn’t pass. On the dummy papers I sent back, all the results were good. You know, I read somewhere that all the knowledge of man is in between the covers of books so all you need is to read. I’ve had the books. Lots of them. The bishop has a weird catholic taste in books that he sends Daddy and I’ve read everything from an abridged Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to James Bond. I rather liked James Bond, but I also liked Plato.”
“You’ve read Plato’s dialogues?” asked Hymie.
“All of them.”
“Did you understand them?”
“Not the first time, silly. Round about the sixth read of the Republic it began to make sense.”
“You’ve read Plato’s Republic six times?”
“More like ten. I told you, there was nothing else to do on the mission except work during the day, read at night and think most of the time. I did a lot of thinking.”
“I’ll bet you did,” said Hymie, stirring the white maize porridge. He had only read the Republic once himself, Karl Marx three times, as well as the abridged form of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
Will, watching Hymie stir the sudza pot, felt decidedly uneducated, despite all the family money spent on sending him to school at Stanmore.
“You know the big laugh?” said Penny. “When Socrates was talking to his friends hundreds of years before the birth of Christ he didn’t even think much of democracy, let alone a tyranny like communism. A philosopher king was what he wanted. A man who would always do that which was right however politically inconvenient the decision. Of course no such man or woman has ever existed, as far as we know, as anyone with that amount of intelligence would not have taken the job. Maybe Christ tried to be the philosopher king. Who knows? I’m not even sure if I believe in God. Do you believe in God, Hymie?”
“Of course.”
“And yet you are a self-confessed, or should I say proclaimed, communist. Isn’t that a contradiction? Communism is the farthest end of the spectrum from religion.”
“Sometimes the end justifies the means. We have to defeat apartheid. Communism can defeat apartheid. Capitalism is too concerned with profit from the white-managed South Africa.”
“My goodness,” said Penny, getting up to throw more wood on the fire. “I’m just a little mission girl stuck in the bush but even I can see that white South Africa manages their country better than we do. I’ll bet they don’t have potholes every fifty metres and pot bellies every child, black or white, in South Africa. Hymie, don’t you think these people might just be using you and communism to gain power? It’s all about power, Hymie, not right and wrong. They made Socrates drink the poison, remember? In many ways we’ve retrogressed since those days. Look at mass slaughter in the trenches. Atom bombs on people. The Holocaust.”
“And apartheid,” said Hymie.
“And we call ourselves civilised,” smiled Penny, nineteen years old.
“Indeed we do.”
The new wood burst into flame and sent dancing sparks into the trees, their world briefly deepening into the surrounding forest. Will put the furrow disc in the fire and Penny leant to open the two tins of food. For ten minutes they listened to Africa and kept to their thoughts. When the disc was red-hot, Will walked across to the truck and brought the hat full of cleaned mopani worms to the fire and threw them onto the disc where they jumped, sizzling the outside fur away from the worms. Will pushed the gutted worms around the disc with a stick until they were ready and scooped them onto a tin plate.
“Better than shrimps,” he said, offering the plate.
“Much better,” said Penny, who had never eaten a shrimp in her life.
The tinned beans and sausages were poured into the cooked sudza and stirred. They could see each other’s faces by the light of the flickering fire. When the food was dished out onto the plates, they ate in silence.
“What is it you want to do in England, Penny?” asked Hymie, when he had finished his plate of food.
“I’m going to be a writer,” she said with total confidence.
“What kind of writer?” asked Will, wondering if Hilary or Mary had ever seen this side of their daughter.
“Articles, books, novels. That sort of thing. Do you think I can be a writer in England? The weather’s very cold, isn’t it?”
“I may be able to help,” said Will, envious of the girl who knew what she wanted to do with the rest of her life. “I have a friend by the name of Heathcliff Mortimer. He must be nearly eighty by now though he never lets anyone know his age. I rather think he will tell you quite quickly whether you can write. Didn’t Hilary tell you my brother owns a string of newspapers?”
“He mentioned your mother and father. They were very kind to him.”
“Hymie, do you mind if I sleep in the back of the truck? I’m not used to sleeping on the ground anymore. Old age is creeping up.”
“Nonsense,” said Penny. “You can’t be over thirty-five?”
“I shall wish,” said Will. “You know, Hymie, I rather think it’s going to be easier to introduce Penny to the world of writing than bring medicine to the mission.”
As he got up to go to the truck and the mattresses he had seen inside
, he wondered what the rear gunner would have thought of his granddaughter if he had not been shot dead in the back of Red Langton’s Lancaster bomber. The twist of fate. Maybe the girl would have not read a book in her life. If he had done his national service all those years ago, would he be climbing into the back of someone else’s truck in the middle of Africa? If the girl had not been lost to his life? Maybe there was never any permanence or future. Just the present, changing.
He could hear Hymie and the girl still talking as he fell asleep. When he dreamed, he dreamed of Dancing Ledge, looking into the girl-less, empty pool. Opposite, a small boy was crying in the cave.
2
Byron Langton met Penny Bains when she was nineteen years old. It was the year of the great drought in Barotseland, the one Will thought so incorrectly would never grow worse. She was quite a girl.
Africa at the end of 1985 was a basket case. Whoever was in power favoured Moscow rather than Washington, or the other way round. For every government in power there was a government in exile backed by the superpower whose puppet was not in power. When the rebels won, the government went back into the bush and the process started again. The pickings for the winners were the control of the countries’ minerals. From Ethiopia in the east to Nigeria in the west, governments came and went at the point of a gun barrel. Byron Langton grew richer by the day, the eternal go-between, the man who could turn the military victory into hard currency so when the new government fell, there were newly rich men who cared little for the suffering of their people. More importantly, they had money to buy more guns. It was callous exploitation and the powers of communism and capitalism fought their surrogate wars with every dirty trick known to man. Byron Langton was a big player in a cast of millions, his real power not the ability to launder money through Switzerland but the files he kept in the walk-in safe that led from his office, the files on Africa’s despots and power-seekers started by Heathcliff Mortimer. He was the unjust side of press freedom, the man people feared in democracies: Byron had worked on the principle that any man who reached for power had something to hide. An honest man in Byron’s world of 1985 was as difficult to find as a needle in a haystack.
