Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes

by Highsmith, Patricia

  A few white construction workers arrived by invitation to get some projects started: Bomo’s Government House for one, and his private dwelling, the Small Palace, for another, a few high-rise apartment buildings to house workers in the capital Goka, and also a bigger airport terminus and longer runways, because Bomo had tourism in mind. Wages for manual labor were at first good, attracting people from the farms to the cities. Then the inevitable happened: basic foods ran short, and Nabuti had to start importing food, not a terrible burden because rice, wheat and dried milk were fairly given away by an arrangement with a United Nations agency. Worst was the copper mines’ condition. The miners had grown ever more undisciplined, absenteeism could not be controlled, there was drunkenness on beer mainly, and a constant demand for higher wages resulting in half-strikes or disorganized strikes which within two or three years had slowed production down to twenty percent of normal. If a piece of machinery broke down, an angry worker would profess not to know how to repair it, and maybe he didn’t.

  Nabuti appealed for more financial aid and got it. Bomo realized full well that his people wanted refrigerators, TV sets, private cars and flush toilets in just about that order. He got the TV sets, millions of them, at remarkably low cost, a tiny sum to be added to the national debt. The TV kept the population quieter as to labor unrest, though more and more people simply did not come to work, but stayed home watching TV. Those whose sets had broken down went to the houses of friends whose sets hadn’t broken down. Life had turned into one big TV and beer party in the capital because, thanks to satellite pick-up, the TV sets were showing something twenty-four hours a day, and the Nabutians didn’t much care what language it was in, as long as there was a picture on the screen.

  Other problems existed: traffic jams, for instance. People paid no attention to red and green lights, first with the excuse that nobody else paid attention, then on the fact (it was a fact) that most of the lights were not working anyway. The main avenues of Goka bore stagnant streams of private cars, trucks, and an occasional farm tractor, a popular means of transport, because a tractor could push anything else out of its path, and could glide over potholes and manholes without covers. Lots of cars broke down due to overheating in these traffic snarls, and cars were often abandoned and became cannibalized hulks a couple of hours later. There was no service for removal of these ruined cars, so they stayed a long while. A shantytown of unemployed and houseless people had built up a ring around Goka and around two or three other large towns too. Smoke from garbage burning and a stench from open gutter sewage wafted at all times over Goka no matter which way the wind was blowing. When no wind blew, a smog hung, almost obscuring the national flag atop Government House, which was six storys high. The telephone system worked just enough for some people to keep trying to use it, though usually their dialing, despite a dial tone sometimes, got them nowhere. Consequently footrunners were in demand. Young boys and a few young girls would deliver letters or more often verbal messages, packages, and groceries and black market goods to people who lived in the high-rises and stayed there for safety reasons and because the elevators did not work. A handful of people had plenty of money, but the majority were hungry. The people with money were in or connected with the army, the black market, prostitution or drugs.

  Business and commerce had almost ceased to exist, and Bomo had given up, though he had never told himself this consciously and directly. His job, he told himself, was to hold his country together, to be in touch with regional groups, the strong men (on his side) who could quell disorder, and stamp out the roving bands of adolescents who robbed people and looted stores, to make a twice-yearly report to the United Nations on health progress, and blame lack of agricultural and industrial progress on drought, strikes and disruptions caused by adjacent countries’ belching their own hungry and unemployed into Nabuti, right over the borders, despite machinegun fire from Nabuti’s soldiers against them. These intruders took to the bush, then insinuated themselves among the squatters that ringed the big cities. It was disgusting. But the United Nations people seemed to believe Bomo when he said he was doing his best. At any rate, the money kept coming.

  Bomo, six foot four in his youth, had grown heavier with the years. Now at nearly fifty-two he had a two-meter girth, and ordered extra long Sam Browne belts so that four or more empty holes remained for the tongue of his belt buckle to slide into, in case he ever needed them. Such attention to detail made a man look good, he thought. He had two dozen medals which he wore when making speeches, several caps with abundant gold braid, and a high-necked, gold-braided tunic uniform for the most important occasions such as military reviews. He seldom wore full uniforms, because they were uncomfortable in the heat. But he always wore khaki trousers, not shorts, and on most days an open-necked army shirt with sleeves rolled up, and sandals without socks. In this gear he was driven every morning in a jeep on a zigzagging tour of inspection of Goka and its surrounds. This took from about 10 a.m. until 1 p.m., when it was time to go back to his Small Palace for lunch and an afternoon rest. Three soldiers with rifles in hand rode standing in the jeep, on the lookout for trouble and also to give a show of armed power, though it had been years since they had had to fire a shot. The populace now stood on street corners talking, and sat on curbs drinking coffee or beer. Bomo’s morning round had another purpose, to drop in for half an hour on two or three mistresses, or wives as he had to call them when speaking to foreign diplomats. Bomo couldn’t count his sons, maybe seventy-five, maybe a hundred. The number of his daughters didn’t matter, though the country was full of girls who claimed that he was their father, so many that the claim was now worthless.

  Bomo’s favorite sons were two, by different mothers, one named Kuo, about eighteen, the other Paulo, the same age give or take a couple of months. Both were keen to be their father’s successor, and they lived in the Small Palace with their wives, who numbered three or four each. Bomo played them off against each other, urging them to vie for severity against insurrection, and to shoot first, which was what it took to rule Nabuti. One of them would kill the other one day, then Bomo would know that his country would fall into the right hands, those of the stronger man.

  One day a runner brought Bomo a sealed envelope, much smudged, with the United Nations’ insignia on its back. The letter was a month old, Bomo’s old translator informed him, and the substance of it was that fifteen members of the UN African Aid Committee and five aides would like to pay a visit to Nabuti on such and such a date which was now only nine days off. The letter said that the Committee had been unable to reach Government House or the Small Palace by telephone, and that this letter was the second dispatched, and the writer hoped that it would reach its destination, and requested confirmation, if possible, at Hotel Green Heaven in Gibbu, which was the capital of Gibbi, a country adjacent to Nabuti on its eastern border, and with which Nabuti had such bad relations that Bomo doubted that any message from his country would be delivered.

  There was no way of avoiding this visit, Bomo realized. The Committee was visiting several countries in the area on this same tour, their first in five years. To create a civil war—easily done—would make his government look worse, even though it might prevent the visit for security reasons.

  Bomo summoned his two sons.

  “Clean everything up!” Bomo said in his native language, and used a few French and English words as he went on. “Garbage, beer cans, merde, bidonvilles, beggars and thieves! Shoot them and burn the corpses! After that, the streets must be cleaned, the windows washed! And the airport! Clear those runways!”

  Kuo and Paulo spoke to their strongmen in the army, and these sent out squads to enforce faster garbage burning, street clearing and sweeping, the rinsing of sewers and the digging of gutters for that, the shooting of recalcitrant citizenry and those too leprous or otherwise too awful-looking to be beheld. All hands in the nation turned to this formidable task which had to be done in nine days. Laggards would be shot by firing squad. Within hours
, the air of Goka and of the other three large towns of the country was full of rifle fire, shouts, smoke and the rasp of metal as car bodies were dragged by manpower from the streets.

  Bomo gave his personal attention to the Hotel Bomo and to Government House, whither he had decided the Committee should be taken in that order after arrival at Bomo Airport. There would be a banquet in the largest salon of Government House’s ground floor, so the big kitchens in the back of the building had to be readied for this. Government House had been constructed in the style of the Parthenon as to its façade, because of a remark in a speech a white man had made on departing from Nabuti, that there would be a “future house of government noble as the Parthenon.” Bomo had charged a French architect with this, and the architect had been exasperated, Bomo remembered, because Bomo had wanted a six-story edifice, including the two-story-high pillars and the even higher pediment in which Bomo wanted a balcony also. The balcony in the pediment existed, and from it Bomo had made many speeches in the past, but now Government House was out of use except as an unofficial recreation center. This had begun with the sentries playing cards, finally snooker, then had come jukeboxes and drink dispensers, more and more cots for sleeping, and a well-patronized brothel. A couple of rooms on the first floor still held the papers and files with which the country had begun its independence but, as no one paid taxes even under pressure and receipts were impossible to get for incoming machinery and shipments of anything, employees had long ago drifted off and disappeared, after drinking the vast cellars out of whisky and wine. Most windows in Government House were broken, the electrical system was “out” or “down,” and the elevators did not work even when the electricity was on. Bomo called for his best electricians.

  “I want these lights on and the air-conditioning on in twenty-four hours!” he yelled at the six frightened men on the steps of Government House.

  Women were already sweeping and mopping and washing the walls inside, while soldiers prodded out idlers and squealing prostitutes at bayonet point.

  Lulu-Fey, one of Bomo’s wives and current favorite, was practicing her belly dance, which she had learned on a trip to Tunisia with Bomo. It was not a native dance of Nabuti, but Bomo had told her that Western men enjoyed watching it, and that she should dance as a surprise for their honored guests after the banquet, and Lulu-Fey was happy to oblige. She had already been helpful in planning the menu which was to center around roast pig and piglet.

  The telephone technicians after two days managed to reconnect the line between Government House and the Small Palace, and the first call Bomo got was from the UN Committee, saying that they had been trying to get through for weeks, and was their proposed date agreeable? Bomo assured them that it was.

  Tom-toms beat day and night to inspire and keep the populace at work, and these plus the usual transistor pop music that blared day and night meant that people could not sleep unless they collapsed from exhaustion.

  More good news on the evening of Day Two was that the electricity in Government House was back on and that two out of the four elevators were working. Two would suffice for the Committee to go up and have a view from the roof terrace, as each elevator held twelve people. At Bomo Airport beer cans by the thousand had been swept away, tin and cardboard shacks razed, and the Control Building swept out, its windows either washed or remaining broken glass knocked out completely. The electricity in the Control Building did not work, and no plane had landed since the Committee’s last visit years ago, except Bomo’s private prop-driven plane which at the moment was out of order due to a missing part. His mechanics did not know what part it needed, so Bomo had ordered from America another prop plane which had not yet arrived.

  Then during the night of Day Two one of the elevators got stuck with at least twenty men in it. The cleanup men and some soldiers had been celebrating the return of electricity with the ever abundant six-packs of beer, too many men had got into one elevator to take a ride, and the elevator had stopped between the third and fourth floors. Crowds of men and boys laughed and shouted advice all night:

  “Keep pressing the buttons! Ha-ha!”

  “Kick the door!”

  “All of you push against one side!”

  The men inside yelled that there wasn’t enough air, and screamed for the elevator shaft to be shot open. There were sounds of anger and fighting within the elevator.

  Boys banged the up and down buttons on all the floors until the buttons were smashed into the shaft panel or fell off it.

  By dawn, the voices of the imprisoned men were hoarse. They were sweating to death, they said. Three of them, they said, were dead, and five others had fainted.

  Bomo was awakened as soon as anybody dared to awaken him. What was to be done? Bomo dressed and walked to Government House scowling but looking very much in command. The mob in front and in the downstairs hall made way for him. On the ground floor, the elevator shaft with its closed door reminded him of some of the closed bank vaults he had seen in bank advertisements in Western magazines. He certainly did not want any damage done to the front of that elevator shaft before the Committee arrived. Bomo mounted the stairs in his sandals, khaki trousers and shirt and a gold-braided cap for this emergency situation. At the height of the moans within the shaft, he paused and regarded the gold-colored metal that surrounded the trapped elevator. How could anyone break that open, short of firing a cannon at it? Two hundred or more of his people on the stairway up and down stared at him expectantly, blankly, or sleepily. Wasting not a second in apparent hesitation, Bomo descended and the crowd parted to let him through.

  “Electricians!” Bomo shouted.

  Only one was pushed forth, a middle-aged man looking very scared. “We think a safety device has stopped the elevator, because it was overcrowded, Your Excellency.”

  Bomo lifted his cap and wiped a flood of sweat from his forehead.

  “Is the electricity on? Is the air-conditioning working?”

  “Yes, Your Excellency, but there is almost no ventilation in the elevator. The power is also weak.”

  “Then close the goddam windows if the air-conditioning is on!” Bomo yelled. “Goddammit, it’s hotter than outside!—You’ve got the goddam heat on!”

  It was true. In trying all the switches to get the elevator down, the cool air had been switched off and the heating on. When Bomo walked out on to Government House’s front steps, the air was indeed cooler but also smoky. A chance wind blew a dark grey cloud of smoke straight across the façade of Government House and staggered Bomo, who turned and plunged into the building again with his hands over his face. Here he gave further orders as soon as he could breathe.

  “Officers! Soldiers! Hurry up that garbage burning! All the burning! Burning got to finish by tomorrow night and the fires out!”

  “Yes, Your Excellency!” said the nearest officer, and saluted before rallying his colleagues and plunging out of the door.

  The electrician, a small man, was back at Bomo’s elbow. “Your Excellency, if we cannot lower the elevator by electrical power may we break in the outer structure in order to—”

  “No!” Bomo yelled over the din of the yelping people in the foyer, more than half of whom were laughing. “That elevator front is not to be broken!”

  Bomo plunged down the steps again, yelling for a wet towel, wet with clean water. A couple of boys dashed through the haze to do his bidding. The street beyond was empty of cars that crept and cars that stood, and now only a few bicycles rolled along, and hand-drawn little wagons laden with trash, goods, buckets and jugs. From one of these, two wet cloths were obtained and brought back to Bomo who at once put one over his sweating head and face. The towel was someone’s shirt, but no matter. People yelled and reeled, dodging the great wafts of smoke that cut the visibility to two meters at times. And the stench was awful, suggesting burnt meat, excrement and singed chicken feathers.

  The next problem of the day was fire-fighting in a dozen or more places in the city. This meant water brig
ades, runners with buckets. Soldiers routed out all the idlers for this, and especially in demand were fleet-footed children. When Bomo got home to the Small Palace at nearly 2 p.m., exhausted, Lulu-Fey was practicing her belly dance in the big living-room, and she complained about the smoke. Bomo told her that it couldn’t be helped until they got all the cleaning up done.

  The afternoon brought a cacophony of screams and rifle fire. Soldiers had been ordered to demolish the black markets which had openly displayed their Sony goods, porno items, tins of caviar and foie gras, and Jack Daniel’s and Chivas Regal bottles, and the soldiers had met with armed resistance. Minor battles had started up, army machineguns had been brought into play, bottles confiscated and drunk.

  And the evening brought further difficulties: more than half of the presumed twenty men in the trapped elevator had died or been killed in fistfights by the others. Their women were now clustered around the elevator shaft, attempting to break it open with hatchets. Bomo ordered the women removed or shot, both if necessary. Only a feeble moan or two came now from the elevator.

  Bomo cursed the electricians. “Let ’em die!” he yelled, not sure if anyone heard him.

  They did die. By the end of the fifth day, no sound came from the elevator, but a smell did, a horrible smell of putrefaction, of something dead, not an unusual smell to Nabutians, but unusual coming from within the finest building of the land, Government House. Bomo asked for incense to be burnt, which unfortunately contributed a little to the infernal smoke which penetrated the building despite the fact that the windows were all supposed to be closed, and the air-conditioning running.