A Single Swallow (12 page)

AIDS was everywhere, according to the signs. A hundred variations of the message adorned a hundred boards. The bowed red ribbon, the pictures of condoms and the slogans were both ubiquitous and charmingly various, according to different painters' hands, but if the advice was pretty standard – get tested, use protection, be faithful to your lover – the strategy was remarkable. The scourge was made an unimpeachable force for National Unity:

The Pimp and I had our own encounter with national health policy. At first, the queue of vehicles and the roadblock which extended beyond the road into the undergrowth and the armed men milling around made me fear it was something else. But it turned out that the line of Zambian disease control was just a little more thorough than the Namibian version. The Pimp had its tyres sprayed and I was encouraged to submit my hands to a nameless chemical, then allowed to rinse them under running water.

There is a long, long descent to Lusaka. The day was beginning to end when we arrived at the top. Lots of road signs had warned that we were coming to a serious hill, then the road tilted and we were on our way down. Cars and bakkies weaved through a rolling diagonal of
trucks. Some were battering their way up, fighting the weight of their loads with all their might. Others were bumbling down, rocking and rattling. Some, on the ascent, were barely moving, grinding out clouds of black smoke. Others had stopped; one or two seemed to have died; bits were missing and their bodies were abandoned. Not long afterwards strange shapes appeared on the plain. They looked like weird beasts, monopods with odd-shaped heads. They resolved themselves into the concrete towers of Lusaka's main street: Cairo Road. The next morning I walked it.

Cairo Road at dawn is deserted. The trees down the middle keep the silence of night, while the pure plateau skies stream silver and rose. In an alcove, by a bank, a man wearing a hard hat returns the front legs of his chair to the ground and bids ‘Good morning!' On the step beside him a green cicada twitches. In a gum tree on Cha cha cha Road pied crows quarrel and throw down twigs on parked cars. Lusaka's mosquitoes rest, fat with blood. The females are famous for their cerebral malaria: at the bar last night we slapped and splatted them, passed around sprays, lit endless cigarettes and called for more tonic to go with the gin.

The commute begins; hundreds come on foot across the railway lines, some wait for slow trains; all the rest jam Cairo Road. Yesterday evening a gang of road-builders came in, clinging to a bakkie, hanging off its sides and hooting with excitement as their driver skimmed them into the heart of the traffic. A policeman raised his baton like a sigh.

Breakfast is served in the Lusaka Hotel. Chinese businessmen scan the papers. Something is happening to the copper again: Chinese companies hold Zambia's wealth, ransomed to contracts, and Zambia has been protesting. Now Chinese spokesmen are offering cash back and undertaking to build clinics and schools. Zambia has seen all this before. The flags outside the Bank of Zambia are motionless. One is pinned above the bar of another hotel: the green is the green of Zambia; the red is the red of the blood of our fight. The black stripe is us, our people, the gold stripe is the copper, our wealth. And the eagle is our freedom.

The man beside me is hurrying his breakfast; he does not have much time; his contact will be here soon. Behind him a group of young Canadians are being given presentations on what to expect when they reach their postings. Often, they are told, impossible promises will be made. They are confused.

‘But what do you do then?'

‘Well, what do you do?' returns their trainer. ‘That's kinda what we're here to figure out.'

On the tables out of the shade the scrambled eggs are brighter than sunlight and the tomatoes are flame. The hurried man accepts some of my toast. A conversation starts. He is a miner, and a mineral trader. He is carrying stones. ‘May I see?' I ask, eagerly. Hesitantly, he displays his cargo. He keeps some of it in his sponge-bag which is never far from his hands. His fingers are cracked and flattened, the brown skin lined red. They have spent years digging Zambia's red earth.

‘These are amethysts,' he says quietly. There is an opportunity here, suddenly. He produces his identity card, the plastic bent by the curve of his buttock.

‘I am the trusted man,' he says. ‘I am going to Livingstone to meet three South Africans. They will give me $2,000 for everything.'

Not just for the amethyst. The precious tissue paper is compacted in his pocket, but it unfolds artfully to reveal a shining little city of green stones. Now I have become a buyer. I choose instantly and offer. The trusted man pleads. I double the offer; two pieces of paper for one small stone with light green fire in its cloudy eye. We squeeze hands. I return to my room and stare at my stone. It is either beryl, which is pretty – and this stone certainly is pretty – but relatively worthless, and I have just encouraged the trusted man to rip me off, or it is emerald, in which case I have just got the most amazing deal, and a treasure. I feel like a gem smuggler, as I wrap it carefully and hide it in my rucksack. For all I know, I am.

Rain comes that night, with sheet lightning. It thrashes the corrugated roofs of Lusaka; even the dead tired and the dead drunk are shaken awake by detonations of thunder which seem to erupt from
the ground. In a dark dawn that is half rain, half mist, we set out to drive the Great East Road. It is easy to find but hard to see. Only 20 kilometres along it we stop for something, and the Pimp will not start again, will barely blink a dashboard light: after half an hour we discover one of the leads to the battery has worked loose. Kristoffer grins at his sister; she laughs at another one of his amazing collection of younger-brother smiles. They were supposed to be taking the bus. Kris is working for a German NGO and Katherina is on holiday from her studies and her job with the State Prosecutor in Berlin. She has been going back to their childhood: they lived in Lusaka when they were small and she remembers it. Last night he went to bed in good time while she stayed at the bar. He got up to find they were now not taking the bus: Katy has met some Welsh (?) guy, he has a car, and has volunteered to drive them to Chipata, where they plan to attend the Ncwala, a tribal festival in the far east of the country.

Kris cannot decide if the guy is crazy or what; it was all rather confused, leaving the hotel in the rain and darkness; at first he thought the lift was just as far as the bus station. But now they are on the Great East Road. So he questions the driver gently, chats with his sister in German, decides that the situation is quite acceptable, and after a while, falls asleep.

We stop in a village.

‘African Fanta is the best,' Katy declares. Their mother is English, their father German, and Berlin is home. So though they are both German they can be quite English as well. The sky has turned to a hot grey-white and the sun is directly overhead. I look up at a group of swallows. The light is peculiar, melted pewter and there is a penumbra around the sun. The road unravels in dark green coils down to the bridge, and the river.

The Luangwa is inadequately described by its designation a tributary of the Zambezi. The river is huge, a great splay of silvered-brown deep below us, and there is a checkpoint on the bridge. The guards smile and wave us through. There is a lot of traffic on the
bridge today, several cars like ours every hour, as well as the usual trucks: it is the Ncwala weekend. Downstream, tiny on the great waters, a single canoe carries a fisherman. We seem very far from everything, as if the great river has carried perspective out of the forest and away. We do not know how many hours we have before us. The bus takes most of the day.

Broken into sections the Great East Road is not so hard. You climb out of the Luangwa valley and soon come to the land of the humpy-tumps, where the road switches and snakes, rises and falls, through round green hills, covered with forest. Zambia sits on the Central African Plateau. Most of the country is High Plateau (over 1,000 metres) and on the Great East Road you do feel up in the air: it is like piloting a small plane around bubbles of cloud. Then you are brought down by the pot-holes. There are so many different kinds you soon think of nothing else. The worst are the solitary ambushers, a sudden trap in a piece of good tarmac. Depending on the slope of the road they can be invisible until you are upon them. The most common are those which have allies strung right across the road. You have a choice between veering right, sticking left and zig-zagging furiously or hauling the vehicle clean off the carriageway and rattling along one of the dirt side-tracks, hard up against the bush. In some places, where the forests press in, in river valleys, the whole road has been washed away. Here there are diversions, and you bump over raw earth, around men and bulldozers. When you misjudge things you cry, ‘Pot-hole!' or ‘Hold on!' and your passengers brace for the crunch.

‘Sorry . . .'

Katy and Kris became accustomed to the sudden decelerations and side-to-side swinging, and able to doze peacefully. They took turns at keeping me company, feeding me drinks and quiet conversation.

Children who live beside pot-holed stretches have developed a relationship with the little pits. In some places they work at filling them in with earth; in others they mark them with fronds. They operate a tax system for this service, smiling and extending hands for tips. Away from a village, twigs or leaves on the road mean hazard ahead: normally a broken-down truck.

‘Swallows!' I say, again, pointing.

‘Ah yes,' Kris nods, loyally.

They were going north; I saw a hundred that day, all heading in the same direction. The migration was underway.

The road climbed up to a plateau. The country looked like ranch-land; there were many goats and cattle here and there. We stopped for lunch at a lodge where they have a puff-adder problem. I slept for a few minutes and then we moved off again, down a wonderfully bad stretch where water and trucks had almost rubbed out the tarmac. There was an hour of bad road, then an hour of good, and then the country changed again. Suddenly there were wide gold-green valleys and proud hills. It looked like the dreaming background Renaissance painters made of Italy. And now there were people, people everywhere. We had found the Ncwala.

There were trucks full of people and lines of pedestrians. Many of the men carried sticks, and wore leopard-print hats or girdles. A drunk riding a bicycle and waving a stick came towards us, veered away and toppled over, grinning confusedly as the bushes came up to catch him.

We rolled into the little town of Chipata; there were high eucalyptus trees and low buildings, side roads made of rain-ploughed earth and a man with a huge burning cone of marijuana was passed out in the car park of the police station. Outside the supermarket we met our connection: she was small, auburn-haired, had bright dark eyes, and dynamism seemed to spark off her. In my mind she became the Red Torpedo because there was no problem she could not sink. She was American and she was with the Peace Corps. Through her, and the Peace Corps, we whirled into the spirit of Chipata's biggest weekend.

‘So, Kate, when you contacted me I thought it was going to be impossible but I have got you a room. It's quite a good place. There are three of you now? Oh, no problem, I'm sure they can put another mattress in. OK, so they have Ncwala every year. It's three days of dancing basically, and so so much drinking, and then they kill a bull and the chief drinks its blood. The President of Zambia is coming and
everyone's really excited because there's a rumour going around that Prince Charles is going to show too – like Yeah, right! I'm not so into the big bull killing because I've seen it before and there are so so many drunk people. I thought tomorrow if you'd like we could go and see my friend in his village; it's about 20 kilometres or something and the road isn't good but it's incredibly beautiful, you can see Malawi and Mozambique. Ncwala's actually not a very old festival; it's supposed to celebrate the harvest but the story is that the people here came from South Africa escaping from Chaka and this is where they stopped.'

‘Where do you live?'

‘In my village – it's 30 kilometres away. Huh? I ride my bike. If I have to go to Lusaka I hitch. Huh? No, it's fine, I speak Chewa – my people are Chewa. Is your room all right? Sorry sorry sorry, one of you is on the floor.'

‘Sorry sorry sorry?'

‘Yeah, you've heard people saying that, right? It's beautiful actually, like if you hurt yourself I say Sorry sorry sorry to you, to make it better. Look are you guys OK? Do you want to come to the Peace Corps house later? We'll start there and then go out. Mumpy's playing – you don't know Mumpy? Oh God, everyone loves Mumpy. She had a big hit . . .'

In the Peace Corps house I understood the lump of fresh turd on the loo seat in our hotel. There was a sign on the wall, showing a man squatting with his feet on the seat, with a cross through it, and another showing him sitting, with a big tick. ‘If it's yellow let it mellow, if it's brown flush it down,' it admonished.

The Peace Corps house was like a self-regulating university with anyone's guests free to come and go, and an invisible, absent authority who was said to be principally concerned that we did not upset the neighbours. The Peace Corps included a man who had given up his job in a Washington think-tank; Mark, who was worried by his lack of qualifications – his elders counselled him, over cane spirit and a violent orange concentrate – and J, who was not worried by anything at all. He had long dreds and a slow, wide smile.

The Red Torpedo talked of his doings with something like awe.

‘J is amazing; the things he is doing in his village are wonderful. He's made a field and he's farming. The people think he's incredible. He is so young, though. Like, he kinda disapproves of anyone who does not smoke dope.'

‘What are you going to do, J?'