Brazzaville Beach (29 page)
Authors: William Boyd
I climbed into the Land-Rover beside Ian. The two boys were already in the back. He looked puzzled and concerned.
“Listen, Hope are you sureâ”
“I'll tell you everything. Just give me a little while.”
He started the engine and we moved off.
“Stop,” I said. I thought. “Five more minutes.”
I jumped out and ran to Mallabar's bungalow. I entered and called for Ginga. There was no reply. I sat at Mallabar's desk and wrote him a brief note:
Eugene,
You should know that I have written an article on the cases of infanticide, cannibalism and deliberate killing that I have witnessed at Grosso Arvore. I have submitted it to a journal for publication. I am going into town with Ian Vail. I will be in touch in a few days.
Hope
I sealed this in an envelope, marked it confidential, propped it on his desk and went to rejoin Ian Vail in the Land-Rover.
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“Good Christ,” Ian said, with a tone of shocked awe in his voice. “Good God Almighty.”
He looked stunned, sandbagged. I had just finished telling him everything that had happened. We had been driving for over two hours. I had sat silent for the first hour and a half, collecting myself.
Ian exhaled. “Ooh God,” he said, worriedly. “Ooooh God.”
He was beginning to irritate me. I supposed this was a good sign.
“Come on Ian, I haven't killed him. Get things in perspective.”
“No. But it's all tooâ¦there's too much to take in. I keep thinking of other things. Jesus. I mean, quite apart from Eugene, hitting you like that.” He glanced at me. “The chimps. Pretty earth-shattering.”
“You're not excusing him!”
“No, no. He's obviously gone mad, or something. I mean, I think you're absolutely right to get away for a while. He's got to get a grip on himself. Still”âhe shook his headâ“what those chimps did⦔
“Look, no one was more amazed than me.”
“Darius, Pulul, Americo, the others?”
I had forgotten that Ian would think of them as
his
chimps.
“Yes,” I said. “All of them.”
“Bloody hell. You know what this means?”
“Yes.”
“Set the cat among the pigeons. No two ways about it.”
I looked out at the road and felt fatigue flow heavily through me, weighing me down, making me drowsy. My shoulder still ached and throbbed, and there was a hot weal across my back where Mallabar had caught me with the stick. I arched my spine and massaged my shoulder.
The road in front was straight and gently undulating, cut through a landscape of open scrubby savannah with the occasional acacia here and there. The sun hammered down on the black tarmac, causing the road ahead to vanish in a wobbling liquid horizon. Over to the east, some miles away, a tall thin column of smoke slanted upwardâa bush fire perhaps. I peered ahead. Out of the shimmering horizon appeared a few deliquescent black dotsâfour. Like two colons set side by side. They shivered and joined silkily, making an eleven. As we approached they turned
into two soldiers standing by an oil drum with a plank inclined across the road from it. Our first roadblock.
I pointed it out to Ian, who was still clearly thinking about his chimpanzees, and we began to reduce speed.
When we were about a hundred yards off I saw one of the men begin to flag us down. Ian changed gears noisily and slowed further. At the side of the road I saw other figures standing.
“Ian,” I said. “Stop and turn back.”
“Hope, don't be stupid.”
“No, you've got time, stopâ¦all right, speed up. Drive through.”
“Are you crazy? Just a bloody roadblock.”
We slowed to a crawl and stopped a few yards short of the oil drum and plank. Two very young, tall soldiers with Kalashnikov rifles walked toward us. I felt a draining in me, as if my blood were being sucked to my ankles. One of the soldiersâno more than boys, reallyâwas wearing shorts and heavy boots that made his legs look ridiculously thin. The other wore camouflage trousers. Both had identical gray track-suit tops with hoods on the back.
“Morning,” Ian said, with a relaxed smile. “Sorry. Afternoon.”
“Please to get out.”
I climbed out slowly. After the thrum and noise of the engine, the landscape now seemed eerily quiet. I could hear the tick and ping of the cooling metal and the soft alarmed mutters of Billy and Fernando, the two kitchen staff who had been traveling in the rear. I glanced at them: they knew something was not quite right as well. But Ian was still smiling and at ease. I looked across the road. Under a thorn tree was a lean-to: four poles with a palm-frond roof. The other men stood there, peering at something on the ground.
One of the boy-soldiers with us turned and beckoned to the group beneath the tree. On the back of his track-suit top I saw printed in red letters the words
ATOMIQUE BOUM
. I took a few steps to the side and glanced at the other soldier. His had the same message.
The other men wandered over to inspect us. I saw that they were all young, teenagers, in an odd mixture of military and civilian clothes. They were, apart from one, unusually tall, all over six
feet. They were led over by the short man, who, I saw, as they approached, was older as well. Apart from him all the others sported the same track-suit top.
The short man was wearing pale blue jeans with the cuffs turned up and a camouflage jerkin that was too large for him. He had a beard, a patchy goatee, and much-repaired old-fashioned spectacles, the sort with dark frames at the top that shade into transparency around the lower half of the lens. One of the arms of his spectacles was neatly bound to the hinge on the frame with fuse wire. The other arm appeared homemade, carved from wood.
He walked around the Land-Rover, inspecting it, and stopped in front of me. I was a good two inches taller than he. He had a pleasant face, made more studious by his spectacles, a broad nose and full, shapely lips. His skin was dark, very black with a hint of purple beneath the surface, it seemed. He had a mottled pink-and-brown patch on his neck and cheek below his left ear. A scar perhaps, or a burn.
He took hold of my elbow and steered me gently round the Land-Rover to stand beside Ian. Ian was still smiling, but I could sense his unease beginning to uncoil within him. This was not a normal roadblock, he now realized. This
politesse
, this scrutinyâ¦these tall, silent boys with their track-suit tops.
“One moment, please,” the bearded man said, and went over to Billy and Fernando. They stooped quickly and touched the ground with one hand. A brief conversation ensued, which I couldn't hear, then I saw the bearded man clap his hands and make a shooing gesture. He did it again, and slowly Billy and Fernando backed off, their faces alternating expressions of apprehension and incredulous relief. Then they turned and ran. I heard the noise of their bare feet slapping on the hot tarmac for a while. We all watched them go, running back up the road to Grosso Arvore.
The small man turned to us and extended his hand, which we duly shook, first Ian, then me. It was dry and very calloused, hard like an old lemon.
“My name is Dr. Amilcar,” he said. “Where are you going?”
I told him.
“I'm so sorry,” he said, looking at us both, “but I have to take your Land-Rover.” His English was good, his accent educated.
“You can't leave us here,” Ian said, boldly, stupidly.
“No, no, of course not. You will be coming with me.”
“Who are you?” I said, blurting out my question.
Dr. Amilcar removed his spectacles and rubbed his eyes, as if considering the wisdom of a response.
“We are⦔ He paused. “We are UNAMO.”
DEATH OF A PROPHET
A friend of Usmanâone of the other pilots (Hope has forgotten his name)âtold her a story about the civil war in Nigeria, the Biafran war of 1966-70
.
By 1970, the war had reached a state of near stasis, a conflict of mere attrition. The rebel heartland had shrunk, but further progress was agonizingly slow. The war had developed into a siege. It was a stalemate. But then, suddenlyâthis man saidâit was all over in days, with a speed that no one could ever have predicted
.
After the war the explanation emerged for this collapse of the rebel forces. The Biafran army, outgunned and outnumbered, fought with tenacity and desperation, even for men who know their cause is lost. This zeal and effort was the result of superstition. The majority of the officers were under the sway of spiritualist priests. These priests, or “prophets,” were so integrated into the structure of the army that many of them were officially attached to military units. By 1970 their influence was so powerful that officers refused to order attacks or lead their men in battle unless the prophets deemed it opportune. Officers regularly left their units at the front line to attend prayer meetings organized by the most influential prophets in the rear
.
General Ojukwu, leader of the Biafran regime, realized he was on the verge of losing complete control of his army and tried to curtail the spiritualists' influence. His first move was to arrest one of the most charismatic and popular prophets, a Mr. Ezenweta, and accuse him of “vicarious murder.” At a military tribunal he was found guilty and swiftly executed
.
The morale of the Biafran army collapsed totally and immediately. Soldiers simply refused to fight and either ran away or stood aside as the bemused Nigerian army advanced unopposed, occupying town after town without firing a shot, rifles slung, singing loudly with relief. The execution of a fetish priest for vicarious murder lost the war for the Biafrans. The death of Mr. Ezenweta foreshadowed the death of his country
.
In mechanics, systems that lose energy to friction are known as dissipative. In most systems that loss is gradual, measurable and predictable. But there are other dissipative systems that are ragged and untidy. The friction grips, and then suddenly eases, only to grip again. If you consider life as a dissipative system, you will understand what is meant. The most dissipative system anyone will ever encounter is war. It is violently uneven and completely unpredictable
.
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The morning after Bodgan Lewkovitch had telephoned her, Hope received a letter from John. At once she saw that his handwriting was different, slanting acutely forward, hard to read.
Darling Hope,
Forgive this flood of letters but it helps it really does to pen things down. Rather than endlessly garble on and on garbling thoughts into half thought out words. It really does help.
I'm well here, and for the first time the docs are doing something for me. It's not much fun, but it's working and that surely is the main thing. Getting better from an illness, after all, is not meant to be “fun.” The fun can come along when you're “better,” not during the “getting.” And we did have fun, didn't we, darling girl. Remember Scotland? Remember that funny little chap who used to pelt us with stones as we cycled past and you shouted that if he did that again you'd cut his balls off? That fixed him.
But in the end “fun” is not enough. There is play and there is work. And I see nowâor at least the docs are helping me to seeâthat the problem with me over the last few months is that I've been screened from my work.
There's been a sort of screen, like a gauze screen, between me and what I'm trying to achieve in my field. It stopped me from seeing clearly. I'm sorry to say, my darling, that you were that screen. You were the shadow between me and the light. That's why I went with Jenny L., you see, I didn't know it but I was trying to push you out of the way. Trying to break the screen. I didn't know it was there at the time, of course. The docs are helping me see these things now. Helping me see why I acted in the way I did.
Anyway, that is why we had to part, so that my way ahead was no longer obscured. I could see where I was meant to go, but not clearly, and that was what was frustrating me and making me ill. Clarity of vision is vital in my field. You can't do mathematics in a mist. (What kind of landscape am I in with my misty fields? You know what I mean!)
What I hope will happen here is that clarity will returnâand it is returning, I am beginning to do good work again. When it comes back, the docs say that it will be different and that you won't screen or obscure the way ahead anymore. Then we can be together. And after this treatment, the docs say they have this great drug which will keep my eyes bright and beady.
Come and see me. I'm fine. I'm getting better. I'm at Hamilton Clare's neuropsychiatric hospital in Wimbledon. Ring up my doc, Doc Phene, and he'll tell you when to come.
Con amore,
John
The gates to Hamilton Clare reminded Hope at first of the approach to a municipal crematorium. But beyond the low, cream-colored walls, with their neat borders of geraniums, were rolling lawns and grouped poplars that looked more like the campus of a teacher-training college, she thought, or a model secondary school.
The buildings of the hospital had been constructed in the fifties from a pale gray brick and were uniformly and unattractively
boxy, every window the same size. They could have been a barracks or civil service offices. Closer, too, she saw that they were already looking shoddy, and the wet weather had marred their sides with darker swags and streaks of moisture, like camouflage on a battleship.
Inside there were brighter colors and framed prints of sketchy London views on the walls, but the uniform right angles everywhere, and the low ceilings, kept the mood of the place fixed at institutional rectilinearity. Hope's own spirits had been low on the journey up; Hamilton Clare sank them still further. As she sat on a hard chair outside Dr. Phene's office, waiting, she began to wishâselfishlyâthat she hadn't come.
When Bogdan Lewkovitch had phoned he told her that John had not come into college for three days. He didn't answer his phone and, when a member of the department had gone round to knock on his door, John had screamed obscenities at her.
