Brazzaville Beach (42 page)

Authors: William Boyd

BOOK: Brazzaville Beach

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Two others crossed the stream. Pulul rushed a few paces at me, stopped and retreated. Darius screamed, frenziedly tearing branches of the mesquinho bushes. I saw Americo lift a stone from the streambed and lob it clumsily in my direction. Pulul was leaping up and down, thumping the ground with his hands about twelve feet to my left. Gaspar was inching forward on my right. My eyes flicked to the mesquinho bushes, wondering if there was any sign of Conrad.

Then Pulul charged me.

My first shot caught him in the chest, high on one side, and knocked him spinning off his feet. Then Darius leapt across the stream and galloped toward me. I shot him full in the face when he was about six feet away. I saw shards of his disintegrating skull fly up into the air like spun coins. I turned and fired at Sebastian and Gaspar as they fled, but I missed. Then they were all gone, bounding away out of the valley, screaming in panic.

Then it was silent again. There were no bird calls, just the sound of water pattering off the rock.

Pulul was still alive. I walked carefully over to him, watching a leg twitch and move irregularly. He was turned away from me and I could see that the exit wound had left a hole in his back the size of my fist. I fired into his head from a range of two feet.

Darius lay on his back, his arms spread like a sunbather. The top of his head, from his eye sockets upward, had either disappeared or had been reduced to a long clotted fringe of expressed flesh and bone.

I waded across the stream to look for Conrad. I found him twisted and bloody under the mesquinho bushes. His right hand had been torn off at the wrist, and he waved the stump at me in parody aggression. His face was red and pulpy, minced by Darius's fists and nails. But his brown eyes looked at me as directly as ever. Accusing? Pleading? Hostile? Baffled?

I crouched round behind him, so he couldn't see me, and fired once into the top of his head from six inches away.

I sat down on a rock for a while. When I stopped shivering I wet my face in the stream. Then I filled a pocket with mesquinho nuts, skirted the bodies of Darius and Pulul and walked back to the village where JoÃ£o was waiting patiently for me.

I felt much better. I was glad I had killed Darius and Pulul. I was glad I had been there to end Conrad's suffering. I recovered my nerve and calm quickly. I knew my conscience would never be troubled, because I had done the right thing, for once.

The chimpanzee wars were over.

EPILOGUE

I look out on the beach. A heavy shower of rain has just passed over. In the sun the warm teak planks of my deck steam visibly, as if a vat were bubbling beneath them. Out at sea the sky is filled with the soft baggy furniture of cloudsâthe dented beanbags and winded sofas, the exploding kapok cushions. The wind hurries them away, and leaves the beach to everyone and me, washed and smooth.

My house, you will have guessed a while ago, was Usman's. His legacy to me. I spent most of my severance pay from Grosso Arvore renovating it and moved in as soon as the roof was on. I had his fine drawings of his horsefly airplanes framed and they hang now on my sitting room wall above my bookcases. Usman with his vivid dreams of flightâ¦

And they were dreams. I bought a book (I don't know whyâbecause I missed him, I suppose), a history of the exploration of outer space. On reflection, I should not have been that surprised, but I have to tell you it came as something of a shock to learn that there were no Egyptian astronauts. Not one. There were Vietnamese, Indian, Syrian, Mexican and Saudi Arabian, but not a single Egyptian. But Usman's lie does not really bother me: the dream enchanted for a moment, which gives it a kind of validity, I would have thought.

Usman has been much in my mind, recently. A week ago, the newspapers were full of a bizarre story. In a Latin American country an insurance claim was filed for a Mig 15 Fagot that had
crashed on takeoff. When the loss adjustors examined the wreckage it was discoveredâfrom serial numbers on certain componentsâthat this very jet had crashed before, here, in this country, a year previously, victim of a navaid failure while returning from a raid on FIDE positions in the central highlands. The plane had been lost without trace.

It has since transpired that, of the eight Migs lost to navaid failures, the wreckages of only three were ever located. There has been a hum of scandal in the air; the noise is all sour accusation. A former minister of defense has been forced to resign over his business connections with a Middle Eastern arms dealer. Nothing can be proved, but there is a powerful suspicion that, while the war was at its height, these jets were being systematically stolen by their pilots, flown to a foreign country, repainted and covertly sold.

Of course, I realize there were some genuine navaid failures, some genuine crashes, so who can say? Who can be sure of anything? But I have my own strong intuitions, and a curious feeling that the former owner of this beach house may pass by to check on the renovations.

And, strangely enough, everywhere I go now, I think I see him. There are many Syrians and Lebanese here, and my glance is always lighting on bearded or mustachioed men (somehow I imagine he would grow a beardâ¦).

It reminds me of that time before I met John Clearwater, when my life was gravid with the anticipation of our encounter; the air thickened with the imminence of that meeting.

I step out onto the deck and squint out to sea, over the refulgent ocean, the sun warm on my face.

John Clearwater.

I had hoped there would be a message in the notebook he left on that stone bench, but there was nothing, apart from some scrawled, runic equations. So I am left with my imagination, and I imagine that he did everything spontaneously, in a matter of seconds. He started to dig and suddenly, could not tolerate what the future held for him and walked to the pond. It is the future that bears down on the suicideâall that time, waiting.

John selected his slab of stone, eased it out of its mossy socket, buttoned it into his jacket, hugged it to him and waded out to the center of the pond and fell forward. One deep, open-mouthed breath would be enough. What cannot be avoided must be welcomed, as Amilcar had told me.

I look at my watch. I have an appointment with Ginga in an hour. I still work for the project, you might be surprised to learn. I meet people off planes, organize transport and supplies in town for the two research stations. It was Ginga's idea: now they are twice as large, the project needed a contact here, an administrator. They pay me generously; there is no shortage of funds since the book was published.
Primate: The Society of a Great Ape
. Look it up, check it out. Read the large footnote on page 74. “We acknowledge here the invaluable work of Dr. Hope Clearwaterâ¦.”

I have not been back to Grosso ArvoreâGinga thinks it prudent to stay awayâbut I have seen Eugene Mallabar three times, briefly. He greets me fondly, but with a distant pomposityâa false avuncular charm. “My dear Hopeâ¦” “Ah, Hope, bless youâ¦” He spends more time in America these days, lecturing. Ginga and Hauser run the research stations on a day-to-day basis. Nothing has ever been said about that time in the forest. And no one, as far as I know, ever found the bodies of Pulul, Darius and Conrad.

I walk down the steps onto the beach. The heavy rain has leveled the ridges and obliterated the footprints. The sand is dimpled like a golf ball, firm and damp.

What now? What next? All these questions. All these doubts. So few certainties. But then I have taken new comfort and refuge in the doctrine that advises one not to seek tranquility in certainty, but in permanently suspended judgment.

I walk along the beach enjoying my indecision, my moral limbo. But it never lasts for long. The beach endures, the waves roll in.

Two dogs appear from the trees and sniff at the tideline. My beefy Syrian neighbor jogs down from his beach house in a pair of indigo swimming trunks. He waves cheerfully at me. “The sea is
always fresher after rain,” he shouts, and sashays confidently into the surf. I wave back. A boy watches three goats graze in the palm groves. A crab sidles into its hole. Someone laughs raucously in the village. The webbed shadow of the volleyball net is sharp on the smooth sand. I examine these documents of the real carefully, these days. The unexamined life is not worth living.

Praise
“
INTENSE AND INTRIGUINGâ¦
BRAZZAVILLE BEACH
IS DIFFERENT. IT LEAVES ITS MARK
.”

â
The Philadelphia Inquirer

In the heart of a civil war-torn African nation,
primate researcher Hope Clearwater made
a shocking discovery about apes and man
â¦

Young, alone, and far from her family in Britain, Hope Clearwater contemplates the extraordinary events that left her washed up like driftwood on Brazzaville Beach. It is here, on the distant, lonely outskirts of Africa, where she must come to terms with the perplexing and troubling circumstances of her recent past. For Hope is a survivor of the devastating cruelties of apes and humans alike. And to move forward, she must first grasp some hard and elusive truths: about marriage and madness, about the greed and savagery of charlatan scienceâ¦and about what compels seemingly benign creatures to kill for pleasure alone.

“Breathtakingâ¦
rich in action and thoughtâ¦a master storytellerâ¦[Boyd is] a daring craftsman, a writer who allows the scope of his work to expand to the point of bursting.”

â
Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Dazzlingâ¦flawlessâ¦extraordinaryâ¦a novel of runaway ambition and what happens when it is thwartedâ¦Boyd has deftly woven everything from science to revolution into his story.”

â
Detroit Free Press

“What an engaging yet intellectually challenging novel this isâ¦a bang-up adventure novel with substantial phrenic heft.”

â
People

“A novel of ideas, of big themesâ¦utterly engagingâ¦at once mythic and provocativeâ¦William Boyd is a champion storyteller. His prose style is intelligent, vigorous and pleasant.”

â
The New York Times Book Review

“A superb novel of power, intelligence and imagination.”

â
Dallas Morning News

“Superbly toldâ¦Scientists are only human, and the same goes for chimpanzeesâthis is the theme of William Boyd's brilliant novel, which mixes an offhand pessimism of the Graham Greene variety with a plucky heroine who would do pretty well in a thick, bawdy Fielding or Thackeray novel.”

â
Entertainment Weekly

“A fine workâ¦[of] visual and emotional powerâ¦William Boyd keeps writing better and more ambitious booksâ¦[He] combines a powerful narrative pull with an intricate structure and a deep seriousness of purpose.”

â
USA Today

“Beautifully written and, often, just plain funâ¦a serious provocative book about man's search for knowledgeâ¦immensely readable and absorbing and full of surprises, and yet it deals with some of the underlying concepts that shape our view of the worldâ¦Boyd succeeds in making his narrator not only a believable scientist but a fully credible, intelligent, independent woman.”

â
St. Louis Post Dispatch

“Dazzlingâ¦highly entertainingâ¦a fast-moving, intricately plotted novel that further demonstrates his great storytelling talentâ¦Boyd writes with charm, clarity and energy, propelling his story through thickets of symbolism that would hopelessly snag a less-skilled novelist.”

â
Wall Street Journal

“Rivetingâ¦taut, daringâ¦a tour de forceâ¦Boyd gives vivid life to incidents and characters alikeâ¦An altogether splendid entertainment.”

â
Cleveland Plain Dealer

“Remarkableâ¦poignantly disquietingâ¦nimbly plotted, gracefully writtenâ¦a gripping story told with a calm, austere beauty, as though in the aftermath of a tropical stormâ¦a substantial achievement.”

â
Newsday

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Copyright

BRAZZAVILLE BEACH
. Copyright Â© 1990 by William Boyd. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

EPub Edition Â© JANUARY 2007 ISBN: 9780061865770

Version 03142014

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