The Last King of Scotland (1998) (36 page)

∗

I don’t remember much about the next – as a matter of fact, I don’t know how long the period of time was. My next memory was of something prodding me in the side and blue fragments of sky coming down to me through the forest canopy. Except that I couldn’t see them properly, as my eyelids had swollen up. All of me, in fact, had swollen up. My head was pounding like a steam-hammer and my shaking limbs were pouring with sweat.

I felt an unseen hand hold something to my lips. The rough nozzle of a skin bottle. The hair of it – goat’s hair? I thought, dumbly,
monkey
hair? – tickled, and then the cool water was coming down, splashing over my lips and chin and going up my nose. Then the hands were turning my body over, gently going over it. I winced as they touched the swollen calf. I heard a grunt and the sound of someone rootling around. I felt the fabric of my trouser leg being pulled up and then I heard the noise of a blade cutting through the material.

I yelped as the point of the knife searched the flesh where the snake had bit and then I felt a pair of lips close about the wound and suck. And then a spit, the gob of it tapping sharply as it hit a leaf. Another suck, another spit. And then, as my mind wandered off, my consciousness struggling like someone scrabbling to hold on to a cliff, I heard a series of piercing whistles.

The next thing I recall was being in the womb. At least, it felt how a womb might. I was moving – moving rhythmically – forwards and side to side. I realized I was going along a forest path. The dappled sky was still above and the broad-flanked leaves paddled my face as I passed by them in my cocoon. I was wrapped up, swathed in rank-smelling skins. I could hear, as I rocked from side to side, the sound of men talking and I could see the soles of their feet flashing up from the forest floor as they ran with me.

Every now and then I felt the weight of the ground on my back, and I saw the shapes of the tribesmen above me. And then they would lift up the poles again and we would continue our journey. When we got to the village, the hunters gave me more water and put me in a low hut. It was like an igloo, only it was made from branches and leaves that had been bent round and stuck into the ground. With the skins still about me, between me and the hard earth floor, I fell asleep once more.

On waking, I was able to gauge more about my rescuers through the oval gap in the hutment. They were a band of about nine – three women, three men (one old and bearded) and the rest children. They didn’t seem to have much with them, if you didn’t count hunting equipment, which included one high-powered-looking rifle, several bows and arrows (the heads of the latter bound tightly with string and coated in what looked like tar), and a couple of large nets. All were more or less naked, though two of the women wore skirts made from dried banana leaves and one of the men was wearing what looked very much like a Woolworths anorak: blue terylene, with a fur trim. Unfastened and almost in shreds, it hung about him like a greatcoat.

At one point a woman came into my hut with a lump of indistinguishable, half-cooked flesh, at which I gnawed hungrily. She squatted in front of me at the oval opening. With her long, dried-out breasts hanging down almost to her waist, she looked to me – in my hallucinatory, venomized state – like an athlete with a towel over his shouders.

Then she handed me a tin can full of a sour-smelling liquid, motioning me to drink it. I sipped the bitter, herby draught gratefully. I felt dozy then and hardly noticed as she turned me over and began massaging the swollen flesh around the punctures. I had a vague sensation of something sticky and warm being plastered over the place, and then I fell asleep again.

When I woke up, the taste of the herb potation was strongly present in my mouth – as if it had been reduced, like the mysterious caramelized sauces my mother used to make over the stove in Fossiemuir. I thought of her in her rose-printed apron in that cold stone house, and then I thought of him, as impregnable as a strong-room door behind his newspaper in the lounge. I couldn’t blame them for this situation, I knew that; nor, in truth, for the closed-in, oblivious temperament that had got me into it. I knew it was simply myself, this casket of emotional defects and diffident, inward-turning passions…Not once, I thought, as I lay there in that stinking hut, have you snatched anything glorious or courageous from the world as it passed you by.

I had an odd vision, then, of Amin in the driver’s compartment of an old-fashioned steam train, dressed in uniform and cap, and grinning manically as he whipped past in a cloud of steam and dust. Strapped to the cowcatcher was Winston Churchill, my father, me…I didn’t know, the faces kept changing.

As this surreal picture passed out of my feverish head, I felt – in that dark, stale space with its oval gap of light – something crawl over my ankle. I reached down and, pinching where it was, felt an ant crumble between my thumb and forefinger. I remembered another insect then, the moth – its dusty wings the colour of dried blood – that had alighted near us in the beer garden when I had had my last talk with my father. Well, not quite a talk: we had just sat there over our pint glasses and squares of cheese, the day before I left, and we had hardly said a word. A smile had broken across his tight face when the moth settled on the wooden table, and he had taken off his spectacles – I can see them now, clenched in the papery skin of his hand – and spoke, something close to fierce emotion in his eyes. “The most important thing,” he’d whispered, as if imparting heretical information, “is to minimize the harm you do to those around you.”

As the thick tiredness crept over me again, I tried to retain the image of his face in my mind – the eyes with their grey mist of something half-said, the high forehead that turned into a bald patch between two clamps of white hair, the mouth that tended naturally downwards – but I couldn’t hold it for long. I cursed myself for not having gone back for his funeral; perhaps she would have..
. I did no harm
, I mumbled aloud, as if he was beside me in the furry semi-darkness of the hut, I
did no harm
. 0 my father –

The irresistible force of sleep pushed down my eyelids, closing off him, closing off Amin in that runaway train, closing off my cloistered view of the hunter’s camp, closing off light.

∗

After another day, and more food and herb soup, I was strong enough to get up and wander round the encampment. The whole place smelt strongly of woodsmoke and roasted flesh. Busy mending their nets and skinning a baby antelope (its small, button-like horns covered in felt), they didn’t take much notice of me once I ventured out. In spite of pot bellies, and faces, even those of the children, that seemed creased like ancient parchment, they seemed in the rudest health – and totally contented. I felt like a strange animal that had been captured and was being allowed to domesticate itself. I wondered whether they were the pygmies Waziri had mentioned (but they seemed too tall), or even some long-lost strand of the Bacwezi.

That night, however, as I lay in the dome of leaves and branches, a furious argument took place. In the firelight I caught occasional glimpses of the faces of the participants. From time to time one of them – most often the old man with the beard – gestured towards me. I couldn’t, of course, understand a word they were saying.

The following morning the man in the anorak shook me out of a deep sleep and gestured that I should follow him. We went for about two hours down one of the forest paths. He kept having to stop to let me catch up with him: I was still quite weak but wouldn’t have been able to keep up in any case, such was the speed with which he moved through the vegetation. He picked out the path with ease, at moments when I thought it had simply vanished into a sombre fence of green. More green than one can describe – except that everywhere there were clouds of white butterflies, so many it was almost unnerving. Not the big, mountain type, but small forest ones, floating around without purpose. Or so it appeared. There are no flowers, I thought dumbly, as I stumbled on.

On one of the rest stops, in a clearing much like the one where the soldiers had taken my van, the man suddenly looked at me and held his nose. I realized that there was a smell of decay about the place. The man pointed where the path in front of us bisected another: it was much wider, wide enough to take a vehicle and I noticed that there were indeed deep tyre tracks there, pressing flattened leaves into the soil.

He began to walk down the wide path, much more slowly than he had been going before. As I followed him, the smell got stronger. We soon came upon a sight which made me quail with horror. In front of us was a large pile of bodies, nearly twenty feet high. They hadn’t been laid neatly but they had the appearance of repose, none the less, as they lay breast upon breast of each other. Heads, some still in helmets, lolled on the shoulders of their neighbours; feet were put up, as if comfortably, on the stomachs of the same; arms and legs were intertwined like the lianas of the forest.

The whole thing was covered by a pullulating swarm of mottled blue insects, which rose and fell as if the mound itself were the gently breathing body of a sleeping giant. At the bottom, apart from shreds of camouflage, the gleaming bones of the oldest corpses were the only way of distinguishing where flesh met plant in the sweltering mush of organic material. At the top, the faces of the recently dead retained their dreadful expressions of fear or surprise or abject entreaty.

You could, in some cases, still see their wounds: here and there the simple dark hole of a bullet, elsewhere more disturbing signs of pain and torture – burns (one man’s arm simply a charred stump), gougings and twisted limbs. The forehead of one had deep cuts in it like those on the top of a loaf of home-made bread, another’s was simply caved in, as if some essential element had been removed. In front of the bodies – nearly all of which were male – were odd bits of clothing and military equipment: a forage cap, a brass buckle, a yellow plastic shoe. Beer bottles were scattered about the clearing too, and at my own feet I could see where cigarette butts had been stamped into the earth. My calf began to throb again and I felt unsteady: it was the sight of the butts and bottles, I think, that did it, more than the mound itself, or even the smell. The image of men standing here, smoking and drinking as they dispatched or disposed of their victims – that was what made me, finally, begin to vomit.

It was only when I had finished – by which stage I was on my hands and knees in front of that awful altar – that I realized that the man in the anorak had gone. I was suddenly struck by a fear of the trees again. I ran back up the wide path, crossed over the point where we had joined and carried on. I had only run for another hundred yards or so when I heard the loud blare of pop music, and rounding a corner I crossed the threshold of the forest.

As the unobstructed blue light poured down over me, my calf gave a valedictory throb. I crouched down and pulled aside the ragged flaps of my filthy trousers. The poultice the hunter woman had put on the snake-bite was itching. Black, and criss-crossed with fibrous matter, it looked like a badge. I got under one of the edges with my finger-nail and pulled at it slightly. It came away to reveal a medallion of white flesh, stark amid the grime. In the middle of the circle were the two eyes of the puncture, the skin around them dead: whiter than white.

T
he path out of the forest led into a meadow-like area. Beyond it, a road wound down into a town, nestling in a valley. With a surge of joy and astonishment, I recognized the valley as the Bacwezi, and the outline of the town as that of Mbarara. I walked on a bit farther through the tall, brown-and-yellow grass, weary and still faint from my venomous episode, but grateful to be back within the confines of civilized society. As I saw it – and that is how I saw it.

I stood in the grass, the stalks as high as my knees. In front of me, in a bare space under an acacia tree, two boys – one with a transistor radio under his arm, which explained the pop music – were driving a couple of longhorn zebu cattle to and fro over a pile of millet stalks. Threshing on the hoof. I watched as the thick, horny material, its tracks of brown and blue full of secret biological history, trampled the tiny seeds off the bulrush-like stalks. Out of calcium and gelatine shall come forth carbohydrate, saith the Lord. And out of the jungle, NG MD.

Flicked at with a little stick, the cows went round in a circle. One lad, smaller than the other, hung for dear life on to several skeins of leather in the middle. His job it was to keep the cows roughly in the area of the millet pile, while the other kept them moving. The pile itself was moving too, the seeds jumping up and down in apparent confusion. Like Brownian motion, I thought. Around me the pop music weaved amid the dappled grasses, and the meadow seemed to answer with its sweet breath, and I had this strange sensation of seeing deep into time. I thought of the Bacwezi again, their rites of cow and fig, and of the Batembuzi’s King Isuza, the one who couldn’t find his way back from the underworld. As I did so, one of the beasts (its anus opening and closing quick as a camera shutter) was moved to defecate. The dollop of dung fell on to the millet pile, sending it scattering.

I walked past the cowherds – they looked at me amazed; I suppose I must have been quite a sight, a muzungu with his hair matted, his clothes the filthiest rags – and down the road into town. My old town.

A lorry passed me on the way, its dusty double wheels rolling their thick treads over the warm tarmac: so warm I could feel it softening beneath my shoes. Mounted on the lorry’s flatbed, strangely, was its own trailer, so you had one set of double wheels right on top of another. A man stood on the mounted trailer. He had a white cloth wrapped round his head, half obscuring his face. I looked up at him as he went by (the flatbed-trailer arrangement meant that he was quite high up) and he moved his arm as if to cover his face further still. I thought of Waziri suddenly, his surgical mask at his throat, and feelings of guilt, but more of fear, sent a shiver through me. I hurried on, uncertain what to do.