On the kerb opposite, a young boy in shorts and a crisply ironed shirt was watching them. Laurencie gestured to him to stay where he was.
‘He’s yours?’ asked Clem.
She said he was.
‘He’s grown up here?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’d like to talk to you,’ said Clem.
‘You have already talked to me.’
‘To talk to you again.’
‘Why?’
‘Because you’re the only one I trust.’
‘I should be grateful for that?’
‘Can we meet tomorrow?’
‘I have to work.’
‘After work.’
‘I am taking him swimming.’
‘The boy?’
‘Yes.’
‘What’s his name?’
‘Emile.’
‘I’ll meet you at the pool.’
‘That’s impossible.’
‘It’s not impossible. It’s very simple.’
‘If I am seen with you...’
‘Do they control you? Does Ruzindana control you?’
‘I have done what you asked,’ she said.
‘You’re afraid of him.’
‘I’m afraid of no one.’
‘Then talk to me again. Let me meet you. Even for half an hour.’
‘And then?’
‘Then I’ll leave you in peace.’
‘Why should I believe you?’
‘Laurencie, please. Where is the pool?’
For the first time in their conversation she turned to look directly at him, weighing him, this wilful foreigner. He saw that her eyes, though brown, had hints of green in them, like the green of glass under river water.
‘Twenty minutes,’ he said. ‘That’s all I’m asking for. Fifteen minutes.’
‘Fifteen?’
‘Ten minutes.’
‘And I won’t have to see you again?’
‘Not if you choose not to.’
She shrugged, as though in fact the whole affair was a matter of the greatest indifference to her. ‘The rue de la Perche,’ she said, tossing her half-smoked cigarette into the gutter. He thanked her. She crossed the road and took her son’s hand, leading him away towards Matongé. The boy looked back at Clem over his shoulder. Clem raised a hand and smiled.
That night, Clem dreamed he was having sex in the garden at Colcombe with one of the young mothers he used to see at the health centre, and that from the tunnel below them there came a muted crying for help that they, in their thrashings, ignored; a piteous chorus, among which Clem thought he detected certain familiar voices, and certain others that he had only imagined, like that of the quarryman, who—so the young mother explained in gasps into his ear—had been condemned to wander through the underworld of the mines for ever, sentenced to it by his own folly in running firewards when the klaxon sounded. ‘Can’t his wife save him, then?’ Clem had asked (some muddled idea in his head of Orpheus and Eurydice, Silverman and Shelley-Anne), but to this large question he received no answer, or none he remembered on waking.
He breakfasted in the basement dining room—more grey paint, more Magrittes—then asked the woman at Reception where he could have some prints made. She gave him the name of a street in the Lower Town and marked it for him on his map. He found the street by ten o’clock. There were at least four places there equipped to give him what he wanted, but one, its window shelves lined with old Leicas, Leitz lenses, Hasselblads, each with its neatly inked price-tag, had a character of seriousness and old-world professionalism that drew him inside. From his wallet he took the transparency of the classroom wall at N— and passed it to the man at the counter. ‘How soon can you make fifty postcard-sized prints of this?’
The man held up the picture and frowned. ‘Matt or gloss?’
‘Matt.’
‘Tomorrow morning?’
‘I need them today.’
‘Wait here.’ The man went to the rear of the shop and spoke to someone Clem couldn’t see. When he came back he nodded. ‘OK. He’ll do them for you now. Give him a couple of hours.’
Clem filled the time by walking to the canal, the Porte de Flandre, then circling slowly back. At the shop the prints were waiting for him in a white envelope.
‘It’s quite a picture,’ said the man. ‘Nice contrasts.’
Clem checked the prints, paid, and carried the envelope to the nearest café. He ordered an espresso, took out his pen and began to write on the back of the prints. On each, in English and French, he wrote the same question.
WHERE IS THE MAN RESPONSIBLE FOR THE MASSACRE AT N—?
He would have preferred a hundred, or two hundred, but fifty would be a start. He left the first of them in the café, tucked inside the menu. The next ten he left in shops and bars across the city centre. One he slipped between the pages of a fashion magazine, another among the brochures at the American Express office. He went into the Métro and found his way to the EU district. Here he targeted the sandwich bars and spaghetti houses where the fonctionnaires were having their lunch. From every street-comer he saw the brightly painted heads of cranes rearing up, a city-within-a-city on the brick dust and bulldozed squares of the old quarter. He left cards behind the windscreen wipers of luxury cars, was shooed away by someone’s chauffeur. The last of the cards he took back to Matongé, hid half along the rue de Longue Vie, the rest in shops on the chaussée d’Ixelles.
At the hotel he sat on the bed watching satellite TV. At five o’clock he showered, changed his shirt and checked the map. He reached the pool on the rue de la Perche at twenty to six. There was no sign of Laurencie Karamera. He went up to the viewing area, a balcony with rows of tiered seating above the pool’s deep-end. A dozen others were there, parents presumably, keeping watch over their charges. After ten minutes he saw Emile climbing confidently down into the lime-green water. A minute later, the boy’s mother came through the door at the back of the area. Clem gestured to her. She looked quickly at the scattered others, noted faces, then came and sat beside him.
‘He’s already a good swimmer,’ said Clem.
‘We come every week,’ she said.
‘Sometimes his father comes?’
‘He would have to come a long way.’
‘You’re not together?’
‘You ask too many questions.’
‘You don’t ask any.’
‘Are you married?’
‘No.’
‘I didn’t think so.’
‘It shows?’
‘Of course.’
‘How?’
He waited, genuinely curious to hear her answer, but none came. ‘I didn’t come here to make things difficult for you,’ he said.
‘But you have done it anyway.’
‘How close are you to Ruzindana?’
‘I hardly know him.’
‘You’re not a relative?’
‘I said I hardly know him.’
‘How long have you lived here?’
‘Fifteen years.’
‘You like it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why wouldn’t you look at the pictures yesterday?’
‘I don’t need to look at them.’
‘Perhaps you do.’
‘Because you took them? Because you want me to feel the same as you?’ She shook her head. ‘I know people like you,’ she said. ‘I’ve seen people like you before.’
‘Really?’
‘You go to Africa. You see something, something bad. Then you believe what was in your heart all the time. These blacks are savages. You go there ignorant You come back ignorant.’
‘This is not a racial matter,’ said Clem. ‘It’s not about black and white.’
She smiled sourly.
‘It’s not a racial matter,’ he repeated, though even to his own ears his voice seemed marked by some uncertainty.
They watched the boy swimming. The noise of the swimmers, most of them children, echoed under the roof, a sou
nd not entirely human, more like a colony of sea birds.
‘He goes to a good school,’ she said, after some minutes of silence between them. ‘He is never in trouble. His heroes are football players and cyclists. His favourite food is pizza. His best friend is a little boy with a Turkish father and a Polish mother. At school the children raise money to provide clean drinking water for villages in India. Do you understand?’
‘He’s in a new world.’
‘He has never been taught to hate, or to look down on people.’
‘People need to be taught to hate?’
‘Of course.’
‘And what does he want to be in this new world?’
She shrugged. ‘A lawyer. A lawyer or perhaps a professional cyclist.’
Clem nodded. ‘Can we smoke up here?’
‘No.’
‘If it was Ruzindana,’ he said, ‘if Ruzindana is responsible...’
She sighed. ‘If it was him, he must go back.’
‘And stand trial?’
‘Yes.’
‘And if they find him guilty?’
‘They can send for you to hang him.’
‘Or send for you?’
‘Why me?’
‘Wouldn’t you want to hang a man who had slaughtered three thousand people? Who had murdered hundreds of children? Schoolchildren like Emile?’
‘He is always kind to Emile. He buys him presents.’
‘Hitler was fond of children. He used to have parties for them at his house in Berchtesgaden.’
‘Hider? What are you talking about Hider for?’
‘Where is Ruzindana staying?’ asked Clem. ‘Who has he been living with here?’
‘Enough of this!’
He should, he knew, leave her be. It was strange to him that he didn’t, for clearly she had not the slightest connection with the events at the church of N—, and her relationship with Ruzindana, whatever its exact nature, was, he decided, an irrelevance, some accident of blood or marriage, a source of temporary grave embarrassment that his prying made much worse for her. What question could she answer, what answers could she possibly give that would satisfy him? Had she heard Ruzindana confess? Did she have stories of his sadism? Did she know of some plan to get him to safety? No. She was what she seemed to be: a single mother, hard-working, determined to make her life her own and not be sucked down by the undertow of this miserable affair.
‘I was thinking,’ he said, ‘that when Emile finishes his swim I could take you both for something to eat’
‘As payment?’
‘No.’
‘Then why?’
‘Why not?’
‘You want us to be friends?’
‘We don’t have to be enemies.’
‘Perhaps we do.’
‘I hope not.’
‘You like me?’ she asked.
‘Yes.’
She laughed. ‘You think I like you?’
They stared at each other—a second full of fierce enquiry—then turned their faces back to the pool. Emile, clinging at the shallow end, waved up at his mother. She lifted her arm and tapped her watch.
‘I don’t want to eat with you,’ she said, ‘but I will do one thing for you. A last thing. I will show you something.’
‘Show me?’
‘Do you know where Tervuren is?’
‘I think I’ve seen it on the map.’
‘You take a tram. A number forty-four tram from Montgomery station. Tervuren is the last stop. Meet me outside the station there at two o’clock tomorrow afternoon.’
‘You’re not going to the office?’
‘Not until Monday.’
‘And what’s at Tervuren?’
‘Something for your arrogance,’ she said. ‘Something to make you silent.’
‘You want to open my eyes,’ he said.
‘Yes.’ She stood up and straightened her jacket. ‘I’m going to open your eyes.’
23
The 44 tram began its journey like a yellow grub in the twilight of Montgomery station, but soon it swung into the light, accelerating through the suburban lunch-hour along an avenue of young chestnut trees until the city abruptly ended and they were hastening under the boughs of true, broadleaf woodland. Autumn here was further on than it had been at home, though the latitude could not have been very different from Colcombe’s or London’s. Many trees were already bare, the ground below them vivid with the reds and various golds of their leaf-fall.
He knew now—his informant at the hotel reception again—that the African museum, the Musée Royal de I’Afrique Central, was in Tervuren, and this, he assumed, was where Laurencie Karamera would take him. He arrived early and sat on the grass behind the terminus shelter. When she came, he stood up. He had only seen her in her work clothes before, her office uniform. Now she was wearing a cream-coloured, loose-fitting dress, sleeveless, and on her arms, bangles of silver and old ivory. He held out his hand to her. Briefly, she took it. ‘No Emile this afternoon?’ he asked.
‘Emile has his piano lesson.’
‘And me? What sort of lesson do I have?’ He felt suddenly in high spirits out here in the semi-countryside with this interesting woman, but she, remembering their parts more accurately perhaps, neither smiled nor replied.
They crossed the road and passed between tall gates into the grounds of the museum, a spread of formal gardens with box hedges, gravelled walks, a large pond where exotic-looking ducks paddled across cloudscapes. The museum, a neo-classical juggernaut, was ranged at the top of a flight of broad, shallow steps. Clem purchased tickets from a woman in the marble foyer, then followed Laurencie, the heels of her sandals slapping on the wooden floors, through camphor-scented halls of headdresses, mealie pots, tree-trunk canoes, spirit masks. There were exhibits of natural rubber, timber from the equatorial forests, a termite’s nest, cross-sectioned. In a glass case a pair of dowdy zebras, like articles left behind in some repository of belle-epoque furniture, grazed on painted grass before a painted sky, while in the neighbouring box a varnished crocodile strained its jaws in an endless yawn. There were not many visitors that afternoon. An elderly gent, dark suit and walking cane, stood before a show of illustrative skulls; a boy listened to his father gloss on a display of hunting spears; three nuns rested on a bench. The place was august, crammed, sepia-tinted; a museum that was itself its own principal exhibit, but which looked now as though it were learning to be ashamed and might prefer to drag its great stone hide into the woods and be seen no more.
Laurencie, standing at the side of a cabinet that ran at waist height along the wall of one of the smaller halls, beckoned to Clem. He went, and leaning beside her saw at first only the image of their faces in the glass, then saw below, pinned to the papered wooden base of the cabinet as though it were the remaining wing of some giant African moth, a photograph of two uniformed white men presiding over the public whipping of a black man. Next to the photograph, curled and dirty grey, was an example of the whip itself, an item known as a chicotte, and made, so the caption explained, from a strip of hippopotamus hide dried in the sun.
Clem looked from the whip to the photograph, back to the whip, and again to the photograph. The uniformed men, members of the colonial service or representatives of some industrial concern, did not appear to be taking any sinister pleasure from the sight of a man being whipped, but neither were they shirking what they must have called to each other their ‘duty’. They stood ten feet or so from where their prisoner was stretched on the ground, their poses characterised by a kind of double awkwardness—white men among natives; also, the subjects of a photograph they might not have much wanted taken. The younger man, clean-shaven, expressionless, was standing with feet apart and arms akimbo, while his older colleague (moustache) jotted something in a notebook—how die Negro bears up to a thorough flogging, or something for the company records, even, conceivably, something (a sketch or data of a loosely scientific type) for the celebrated collection at Tervuren.
&nbs
p; ‘Here,’ said Laurencie, ‘is an exact record of our history.’
‘Our history?’
‘The history of your people and mine.’
‘In one photograph?’
‘Why not? You believe in photographs, don’t you?’ She tapped the glass with a fingernail. ‘This picture is not as old as you think. These men may still be alive, enjoying their retirements, playing with their greatgrandchildren. Who will look for them now? Will you? And what about those who gave them their orders? The businesses that grew fat on blood and theft? Half of Brussels is built on what they stole from us. You want to find savages? Then here they are. They have Belgian names and white faces. English names too, and French names and German names and Portuguese. You tell me Ruzindana killed three thousand. I tell you these pigs killed millions!’
The elderly gentleman Clem had seen earlier studying the skulls, the Descent of Man, paused at the entrance to the hall, observed them both—this excitable couple—and turned back.
‘What was done then,’ said Clem, searching his stock of borrowed language for words of an adequate weight, ‘is beyond any defending.’
‘You admit that much.’
‘Of course! But none of this can excuse Ruzindana.’
‘You would like to use the chicotte on him,’ she said. ‘You would like to have him tied to a post.’
‘The people who died at N— were not colonial officials, Laurencie. Not the police or someone’s army. They were farmers and teachers and shopkeepers and schoolchildren. Are you saying the massacre was caused by a colonialism that ended a generation ago? The whip is in a museum now. It’s not in anybody’s hand or on anyone’s back.’
‘So we should forget about it?’
‘I’m not saying that—’
‘That’s exactly what you’re saying! The humiliation and murder of millions of Africans belongs in the past. We should forgive and forget. We should move on.’
‘These are two separate issues. Two separate disasters. We can’t—’
‘You just don’t get it at all,’ she said, sighing and turning again to the photograph as though she might still find some detail there to make him see the utter rightness of what she said.
The Optimists Page 21
