“In this moment another man comes from his line. He wears glasses and is very weak, but he takes off his cap and presents himself before the officers. ‘What does this Polish pig want?’ one of the officers says. Maximilian Kolbe answers him: ‘I am a Catholic priest. Take me in that man’s place. I will die for him.’”
Fra Pietro released his breath in an expressive shrug. “If the number is right, the officers don’t care if this man or the other man will die. Maximilian has offered himself. He gives himself as proxy, yes? For them better a weak man dies than one who is strong to work. So Maximilian and the other condannati are taken away to a dark place, under the ground, made of concrete. Like a cellar.”
“A bunker.”
“A bunker, yes. They have no clothings when they go in there. They will have no food to eat. When they go into that place they are already dead men. There is only the dying remains to do.” He glanced across at me again. “In Africa we have seen such death, you and I. We know how it is slow, how it is full of pain. We have seen that such death has no dignity. But there is one thing that these men have. They have with them a priest. Apriest who will pray with them and comfort them. A priest who has chosen to suffer with them, who gives his life so that another man might live, and who will be with them in the hour of their death. One by one they die, until only Maximilian is left alive. In the end they inject acid into him and Maximilian Kolbe dies on the fourteenth day of August in 1941. But I think, my friend, by the free choice he has made to die in the place of another man, Maximilian has already defeated all the powers of death.”
For a few moments Fra Pietro sat in silence with his eyes closed and his palms together at his lips as though in silent prayer. Then he drew in his breath, lowered his hands and looked across at me where I lay on the bed.
“I think this is the story that Adam wished for you to hear. It is a noble story, yes? A story that answers the question some have asked about where was God in Auschwitz. He was there in the cell with Maximilian and his brothers. He was there because – just as Maximilian has said – God is everywhere.”
“But as you’ve said yourself,” I retorted, “people are still dying everywhere too – dying in terrible ways, in circumstances of extreme cruelty.”
“This is true,” Fra Pietro agreed, nodding his head. “But has not Maximilian shown us what we must do in the face of such evil? He has shown us once more how it is to love. He has shown us that we cannot rise over the evil in the world or stand aside from it as if it was not also ours. Rather we must go under it – is that how you say?”
“You mean undergo it.”
“Yes, undergo. We must undergo it in the deep places of our heart and our imagination. We must undergo it as Maximilian has done, knowing that this evil also is human. We must try to pass through the inferno without falling asleep down there, or into despair. And we must trust that life will open once more into love on the other side.” He looked at me as if for confirmation. “Is not this the only good way to live with what we have seen, you and I?”
Not long after that, having made sure that I had everything I needed, Fra Pietro left to go about the customary ritual of his day. I lay with my eyes closed in the silence of the bare cell under the mild gaze of the crucified Christ, conscious of many things, but the presence of God was not among them.
Fra Pietro had promised that a stay in his convento would bring peace to my soul, but I could see no chance of that. On the contrary, everything he had said had left my heart heavy and my head agitated by further questions. So, as Adam must have done before me, I juxtaposed the story of Dog Fox with that of Maximilian Kolbe and tried to balance the equation.
I couldn’t make it work. Hours went by, hours in which I wallowed between spurts of wakefulness and longer bouts of sleep. I remember the tinny clang of a bell ringing somewhere. Two or three times I vaguely registered the noise of traffic outside, of cars changing gear as they negotiated the bend round the convento and sped off downhill. On one occasion – it might have been around noon, it was very hot – I got up to drink some water and saw a limousine with shaded windows making that descent. Mystai, I remember thinking, travelling in style.
Not long afterwards I fell asleep again. Disturbed by what I took for the syncopated thud of a helicopter’s rotor beating the air outside, I looked at my watch and was astonished at how much time had passed. Yet the surprise was quickly folded back into sleep, for my dreams had claims on me, and their prolonged phantasmagoria seemed at pains to prove that, even with its senses shuttered and its circuits of consciousness closed down, the mind remains a restless, self-tormenting thing.
Around ten o’clock at night, I came fully awake, got up, drank some water, went to the lavatory, drank another two glasses of water, and knew that I wouldn’t sleep.
Quietly, so as not to disturb any of the sleeping brothers, I went back out into the corridor and climbed up to the roof terrace. Beyond a streak of cirrus under an almost full moon, stretched the whole range of summer stars. The night was sweet and warm, less vast than I’d seen in Africa. Yet, standing alone beneath its dizzy reaches, I was struck by the mystery that finds us treading space between wonder that consciousness should exist at all and incredulity that it can be of any consequence when measured against such immensities. For the briefest of moments, my mind stood still. The boundary between exterior and interior space dissolved, and then the stars were neither lifeless globes of burning gas nor evidence for some celestial ministry of light: they were simply, and mysteriously, stars.
When I went back down to the cell, I sat at the desk and took some sheets of paper from a drawer. My senses were so heightened by hunger that I could smell the ink in its china well. So rather than reaching for the finely pointed fibre tip in my jacket pocket, I lifted the old-school pen from its slot in the desk, dipped its nib and began to write.
Not ready for the thoroughgoing effort of self-analysis that Adam had advised, I decided to sketch out a few notes about the events since my arrival in Italy – the cottage in Fontanalba, Captain Midnight, the Villa, my early conversations with Gabriella, Larry and Allegra. They were no more than thumbnail jottings, the sort of memoranda I used as a journalist to capture first impressions. Then opening lines of a poem emerged – a poem about the dream of my father.
Long after I had thought you safely dead
you came to me in sleep, where we two
walked together, side by side,
trying the beer in certain pubs you knew.
What followed was lame at best, but charged with feeling. I felt confident only of what I thought might turn out to be the four last lines:
I jumped awake at that, appalled to know
You dead again with no one standing by
To help or carry you away, and I
Still shaking in my sweat, unable still to let you go.
For some time I struggled to pull the rest of the poem together, but it resisted all my efforts, so I gave up in frustration. Then I lay, thinking about Marina, wondering what she was doing now, and feeling almost as cut off from her as if she had been swept out of my life once again, abducted by circumstance, or by powers stronger than mine, into some underworld region beyond my reach.
From my bed I watched the first light break. Eventually I must have fallen asleep to the plainsong Latin of the brothers chanting somewhere below, invoking hosts of angels along with sun and moon and stars to join them in their praise.
Hours later I woke up, famished and alert.
17
Emmanuel
When I came to discuss with Hal what had happened in Equatoria, he told me he had remained certain of Emmanuel’s ability to hold the country together until the attempt on his life at Fontonfarom. Difficulties were mounting, of course. Factional struggles had broken out inside the PLP. The judiciary were growing restive, and the country’s sterling reserves were depleting rapidly as much needed public spending on roads, health and education coincided with a fall in export commodity pric
es. All these problems caused Hal restless nights and loaded the opposition press with ammunition, yet Emmanuel’s popularity was undiminished. Long after the initial euphoria of independence had faded, his status among the people remained more messianic than political – a benign, regal presence gazing down with care and compassion on the failings of lesser men.
Hal knew and loved his friend too well to share these illusions. He admired his strengths, which were many, while worrying over his weaknesses – the fits of depression that could undermine his customary geniality and exuberance, an irrepressible personal vanity which sometimes belied the humility with which he dedicated himself to the grand vision of a united Africa, and a tendency to dither over unpopular decisions. Being prey to all of these frailties himself, Hal was able to understand them, and stood in the shadows at Emmanuel’s back like a corrective daemon, at pains to make sure they remained hidden from public view.
In this respect he had been largely successful. Though his opponents were shrewd enough to see beyond the mask, the majority of Equatoria’s seven million people were still spellbound by their president’s eloquence and glamour. But now an attempt had been made to kill him, and it had been done on his home terrain, where his support was strongest. Emmanuel had survived the attack, but five utterly innocent people had died around him, with many more badly injured. Everything was changed.
Yetthefirstreportstocomeoutof Fontonfaromwerereassuring. An immediate arrest had been made – that of amentally disturbed man who had served with the British army during the war and had convinced himself that Emmanuel Adjouna was a traitor to the Empire. But then disturbing rumours began to spread. It was claimed that the poor devil had been talked into committing the crime by the local Police Commissioner, who was in league with Kanza Kutu. According to this version of events, the ambitious Minister of the Interior had planned to take control of the government when Emmanuel was dead.
Kutu vehemently denied the charge, and announced that his agents had uncovered evidence that the true mastermind of the plot was Hanson Osari, the Minister of Finance. Osari was conspiring to take over the government, privatize the various state enterprises which had been founded by the Adjouna regime, and realign the country’s position on the international stage. All of this, Kutu claimed, was to be achieved with the covert backing of the CIA, whose agents had been active in Equatoria since the declaration of independence.
For a time Hal sat in the midst of this confusion somewhere close to despair. The only good news was that Emmanuel was still alive and under the protection of an army detachment in the hospital at Fontonfarom. But the party they had founded together was splitting apart along fault lines that were both tribal and ideological. Kutu was a tough-minded political leader of the Tenkora who had been given the Interior Ministry as a reward for his successful efforts to mobilize popular support for the PLP. By contrast, Hanson Osari was a sophisticated Nau businessman with a Harvard degree in Economics who had maintained strong international contacts on both sides of the Atlantic. Originally a supporter of Ambrose Fouda’s National Congress Party, his political instincts had led him to switch allegiance to the PLP shortly before it became obvious that Emmanuel would lead the country to independence. In return he had been entrusted with the management of the Ministry of Finance, under close observation from Hal. But theirs had never been an easy relationship, and not only because of their ideological disagreements.
Osari resented Hal’s strict supervision of his ministry. The two men had argued ferociously over the stringent provisions of the country’s Exchange Control Regulations. As the economic situation deteriorated, their collaboration was increasingly soured by mutual mistrust. Now, in the confused hours following the failed assassination attempt, Hal was ready to be persuaded that Osari’s shrewd, ambitious intelligence lay behind the coup.
With the government about to implode and Emmanuel still incapacitated by his wounds, Hal took matters into his own hands. A tense interview with Kanza Kutu confirmed his suspicions. The Minister of the Interior produced evidence of links between Hanson Osari’s principal aides and known subversives who had almost certainly been suborned by the CIA. A state of emergency was declared. Restrictions were placed on the press, and three American diplomats were expelled. At the same time, the head of the CID was ordered to detain Hanson Osari and two of his close advisors. To Hal’s relief the loyalty of the army seemed assured when the detachment stationed in Fontonfarom obeyed the order to arrest the Regional Commissioner of Police.
For the moment, therefore, everything was under control. But Hal understood that nothing could ever be the same again.
*
In a letter he wrote to me around that time, Adam tried to explain how the sight of three of his students and one of his colleagues lying in their blood while his friend Emmanuel was driven off at speed to the local hospital had convinced him that all political activity is a more or less explicit form of violence. “However deeply in history they may be buried,” he insisted, “the roots of political authority always spring from acts of violence – the violence of one people against another, the violence of one class or caste against another. And violence always remains the final sanction. Some radical thinkers may glorify violence as a transformative rite in the struggle for liberation, as the means by which a subject people restores its pride – but not me, not after what I saw in Fontonfarom. And not because I’m squeamish, but out of revulsion at all the implications of what I saw that day. I feel certain now that we must look beyond politics for meaning and value in our lives.”
Efwa’s response was more pragmatic. The atrocity convinced her that she could live no longer in what she had always considered to be a mere bush town. She had never fully understood why Adam wished to live in Equatoria at all, and had been dismayed by his decision to take a post in Fontonfarom when his father could have secured him a job in one of the best schools in the capital. She would certainly have been happier there among her friends, enjoying the distractions of city life rather than enduring long days in a dusty town surrounded by dense rainforest. She had never felt quite safe there. The electricity supply seemed to break down with every storm. The noises screeching out of the trees at night wore on her nerves. She was disturbed too by the fetish priests of the area, who clung to customs of blood sacrifice that had long been disdained by her own people on the coast. And now the tedium of living among such people had been broken by a thing more terrible than any she had witnessed before. Who was to say that more horrors would not follow?
Efwa was adamant that she could not remain in Fontonfarom. She was going to return to Port Rokesby at once. Adam could join her at the end of the school year, which was only weeks away. They must talk seriously about their future then, a future which would unfold, if she had her way, not in Equatoria, but in the safety and comfort of the UK.
And Efwa did have her way. Worried about how well he would cope there, Adam took her to England that summer. A brief visit to his parents in Port Rokesby had ended in an acrimonious dispute between Adam and Hal, which left both of them bruised and regretful. Because neither would acknowledge it to the other, Grace was more deeply wounded by the row than either of the two men. Later, alone at the airport, she watched her son and his wife fly out of Africa in a jet plane painted with the scarlet-and-green insignia of the country’s new airline.
Meanwhile, the arrest of Hanson Osari had left the Ministry of Finance in a state of chaos. The man appointed to replace him lacked both his experience and his contacts abroad; so Hal was required to spend most of his time worrying over the accelerating decline of the country’s finances. He would return home late, gloomy and taciturn, only to fall into troubled sleep. On waking again, his temperament, always argumentative, turned ever more irascible, particularly in response to the emotional claims that Grace tried to make on him.
“As I watch events slip out of your father’s control,” Grace wrote in a letter to Adam some time after his return to England, “I keep recalling the day
when we went sledging on the tops above High Sugden. Do you remember how a runner came loose and Hal and Emmanuel ended up in a snowdrift? At the time I joked that they should be careful their attempt to build Utopia in Africa didn’t also end in farce. Now I’m worried that it will end in tragedy – and tragedy on a grand scale. Sometimes I wonder whether the world is incorrigible after all, and has always been so. Though I found it painful, I think you made the right decision in leaving Equatoria when you did. It gets harder each day watching Emmanuel and your father estrange themselves from values that the three of us once cherished. Perhaps there are other, less compromised and more durable values for which one might strive? But the truth is – and this is a dreadful admission for a mother to make to her son – the truth is that in these darkening days – war in the Congo, war in Vietnam, not to mention the ever-present threat of an all-consuming nuclear holocaust – I find it difficult to believe in anything very much – except, of course, ‘the holiness of the heart’s affections’. That at least we must hold dear.”
Emmanuel recovered from his injuries, but his confidence was shaken. The days of open government were gone. Now he preferred to concentrate his efforts on the international scene, travelling across Africa and further afield, championing the non-aligned status of the newly developing nations rather than embroiling himself with intractable domestic issues. By the time he returned to Equatoria, shortly before the start of the treason trials, a newly formed Presidential Guard had tightened security around Government House. As far as the people who had brought him to power were concerned, Emmanuel Adjouna was becoming an ever more remote and reclusive figure.
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