A Single Swallow (16 page)

‘That is the car wash,' said Aimé.

Lorries, vans and cars were parked on a beach at the water's edge. Men and boys sluiced them with buckets of water: it reminded me of pictures I had seen of mahouts bathing their elephants. Having parked the taxi in shade we walked down to a wide beach. The sand was deep and soft; pulling your feet out of it was hard going under the Congo sun. In the middle distance were the cataracts, separated from us by the Mambili, a high sandbank and the elbow of rocks between the two rivers in which there might be pythons.

Aimé hailed a ferryman; after a brief negotiation we climbed into his pirogue. I had seen them in the distance from Brazzaville beach: hollowed-out tree trunks up to 30 feet long, gunwales a few inches from the water. The Mambili was deep and fast-flowing at this point: controlling the craft was a methodical, rhythmic miracle of precision. We stuck to the steep-shelving shore, no more than a foot into the flow. The ferryman guided us between rocks and stuck branches, leaving barely an inch between the craft and the obstructions. Standing at the back he paddled with his whole body: a forward bend against the paddle driving us on, minute shifts of weight from one foot to the other moving us fractionally from side to side. I fell into a reverie as we cruised, but then Aimé cried out. He was pointing upwards.

‘
Hirondelle!
' he said.

There were three of them, moving fast up the Mambili, heading
north-west. They had changed! They were bigger, stronger and moving quickly. Their backs were gun-blue and their tail streamers were longer. Their little red masks stood out, bright in the sun. Their flight was direct. As I watched, one swerved, perhaps taking an insect, but they did not pause in their rush. More came, all heading up the Mambili.

The canoe grounded softly in sand below the python rocks. We began a kind of giant's hopscotch, jumping from rock to rock towards the thundering sound. The rocks rose up to a spine beyond which they curved downstream to form a promontory. Three fishermen were working there, laying out nets, tiny figures, compared to the monsters behind them.

Every second almost a million and a half cubic feet of water gush out of the Congo into the Atlantic, scouring a 100-mile canyon 4,000 feet deep into the ocean bed. Behind the fishermen the other bank seemed about a kilometre away, but now instead of a river the division was a storming sea. Pressure waves 40 feet high erupted in no discernible pattern, their tops a lather of foam. The waters raced like collapsing brown ski-slopes, sliding down in steep falls and then up in explosions of spray. Rearing much higher than the rocks where we stood, the shattered and toppling horizon of the waves seemed sometimes to charge upstream. Between them were broken valleys of air. Through these, through it all, incredibly, the swallows came. They were flying below the level of the spray-bursts, between the cataracts themselves, shooting across the river from the DRC.

I held my breath when I saw the first – surely the bird could not make it through? It did though, slipping easily sideways as the water seemed to plunge around it, climbing slightly and side-stepping the cataracts nearest us. I shook my head and shouted to Aimé who could not hear me above the noise. Then another came, then another; I saw dozens in the half-hour we were there. It was awful to watch to begin with because I was certain one would be caught, but none was; they came towards us, jinked away and followed their forerunners, up the quiet Mambili.

I still do not understand why they did not fly a few feet higher, out
of the range of the waters. Perhaps from their perspective the cataracts were legible, their positions possible to fix: the retina of a swallow's eye has two sensitive areas, fovea, which enhance its all-round vision and provide binocular forward vision; birds of prey and hummingbirds share this trait, which greatly improves their judgement of distance. But although there were places where the waves were fixed, the gaps between them were not predictable: a smooth patch one second would in the next be an explosive upthrust. Even given that a swallow's understanding of speed, depth of field and time must be vastly different and more subtle than ours is, it still seems an extraordinary choice. There cannot have been many insects to eat amid that chaos: I watched closely through the binoculars and never saw one strike. The only conclusion I came to seems insufficient and certainly unscientific. They seemed to do it merely because they could – as if, moreover, in some wild way, they actually found it fun.

Aimé and I retreated to a coffee bar in Bacongo where we watched building materials being delivered to a Chinese compound.

‘They are building everywhere,' said Aimé, with an admiring nod. He was reluctant to talk about himself but keen to point out sights of the city. All he would say of his own circumstances was that he had a wife and children, welcomed the current security situation and needed as much money as I could spare. This evening, we agreed, he would take me to the bus station, Océan du Nord, where I would book a ticket to the north, and the frontier with Cameroon.

Somewhere called the ‘Northern Ocean' seemed an appropriate if ominous point of departure for an uncertain journey. When I said I intended to go north overland Philippe, the owner of my hotel and one of the most travelled men I had ever met, shook his head at the timescale.

‘There were some bikers who tried to come down that road.'

‘How long did it take them?'

‘Two months.'

One of Philippe's waiters shook his head too. He was from Sangha
province, my destination. It was possible, he said, but not recommended. It could take a long time. There had been more than sufficient rain to close the road.

‘You must extend your visa,' he said.

The office granting extensions was guarded by hustlers. When I finally broke through them it emerged that the minimum extension was three months, and the price was prohibitive. Mulling this over, I went out for lunch with Christine, the Frenchwoman who had laughed when I accused her of being a spy.

From 1940 to 1943 Brazzaville was the capital of Free France. De Gaulle gave a speech here in 1944, in which he said moral and material progress was dependent on the fortunes of people ‘living on the earth where they were born' and the stake they held in managing their own affairs. This made him popular in Congo. And it was easy to see why Congo was popular with the French. Sitting under the pavement cloister of another Lebanese restaurant with Christine, watching her order from the waiter with truly Parisian specification, then lunching on steak frites with green beans, a glass of red and a little coffee to follow, you could understand why de Gaulle and France hung on to Brazzaville for another decade and a half after that speech, refusing to relinquish it until 1960, the year independence movements swept half of Africa and put Africans, nominally at least, in charge of their own lands.

‘Did you see Sarkozy's speech?' I asked her. The president, notwithstanding rafts of headlines in the Paris press along the lines of ‘Sarko's year of madness' (it was claimed he promised much and delivered little) had made a speech to the South African parliament in which he promised a new transparency in France's dealings with Africa.

Christine blew cigarette smoke. I asked about the current state of Congo.

‘They do not have water, and yet that is the Congo River down there! There is one factory that still works in the whole country. One!'

‘So what is going to change?'

‘Well, have you seen the Chinese?'

‘Yes.'

‘Do you know what is the difference between the Chinese and all the other countries who have people here?'

‘What?'

‘Everyone else drives Land Cruisers. The Chinese walk.'

The implication was that the Chinese were unafraid, or felt no need to distance themselves from the population, that they were tough and streetwise to the Congo. The difference between those who walk and those who drive seemed one way of distinguishing between those who were there to stay and those who were passing through.

On my last night in Brazzaville Dino and I went to our favourite bar again, where we sat at the counter drinking beer. I had just refused to buy a bottle for a young woman when there was a tap on my left shoulder. The raucous old lady who sat at the next bar stool grinned at me, her face wrinkling into dozens of smiling lines. Her hair was either cut to nothing or she was bald. Her eyes were bright sparks in the dim of the bar.

‘May I have a beer?' she said.

‘Of course, Madame,' I answered, without thinking.

She did not exactly fall off her stool, but she was pleasantly surprised. The bottle appeared, the top was whipped off and the old lady sank a deep draught. She set the bottle down, put her hand back on my shoulder.

‘I give you the protection of God,' she said. ‘I give you the protection of God for all your travels in Africa.'

I thought of her later that night, in the upmarket hotel room (Philippe's being full), with all my stuff emptied out of the rucksack and the table covered in maps. I decided she was my witch.

The ticket was booked: Océan du Nord was a rough mud compound on the edge of town, but the buses had been reassuringly formidable; they had tyres like giant Land Rovers. As far as I could establish, the route involved a day-long bus ride, a night stop, a taxi of some sort, a walk which was supposed to be 30 kilometres through the
forest, a canoe and another taxi to the frontier at Ouesso. A motor pirogue up another river would complete the journey to Cameroon. What happened then was not clear.

The problem was the swallows. On the bearing the birds had been flying, their route would take them well to the west of mine, across the Pool region and Nibolek province into Gabon.

Enquiries about Gabon were met with derisive laughter. The Gabonese had taken the French too seriously, the Congolese said; bureaucracy was a religion with them.

‘If you have not got a visa and a letter of invitation forget it,' my sources said. The Africa guide concurred. I thought about it for a long time. Head for Gabon and hope, or curve up-country, and trust?

An aeroplane took off from the airport. I went to the window to watch it go. The plane was huge, Russian, I thought. I wondered what they were carrying. Coltan, the diamonds of the mobile phone age? Technicians, advisers, spies?

‘We hate the Russians,' Christelle had said, on behalf of her friends. Christelle was in her mid-twenties, from Ivory Coast. She seemed to live for music: when there was none playing, in a pause, Christelle would dance anyway, to tunes only she could hear. She partied at night and slept in the day, rising in the evening to eat. We had danced together, drunk together and been lovers. We had met on the dance floor of the night club. Ivory Coast had nothing for her, Christelle said. She liked Brazzaville because it was peaceful. She said she planned to go to college – or get training – or work – at some point. She was vague about her future but apparently unworried by it. I do not know if our liaison was any different from a million holiday romances which take place all over the world, all the time: it was impossible to tell whether I was desirable to her because I was white and rich or simply for myself, but in the three days we spent together Christelle asked for nothing. I think she would have been surprised if I had asked her to pay for her own dinner, but I would not have done, anyway. The innocence of our relationship, notwithstanding its limited lifespan and therefore casual nature, had not made us any less self-conscious, when we had been out to cafés and restaurants. I
imagined that women looked at Christelle and men at me with the same assumptions. She must be in it for the money, me for the sex. Christelle assumed a dignified hauteur, when heads turned, and rolled her eyes at me.

Buying condoms in Poto Poto was hilarious: the chemist presented a packet and tried not to laugh. I deciphered it.

‘Are these – luminous?'

‘Yes!'

‘Thank you – do you have – anything – normal? I hope I will be able to find it without glowing in the dark . . .'

‘What's wrong with the Russians?' I had asked Christelle.

It turned out that there was one among the aircrew of the regular Brazzaville–Moscow run who was ‘a pig'. One night he and his friends had taken some of Christelle's friends back to a hotel room, got drunk, the pig had lost his temper and beaten a girl up. Brazzaville would not forget.

Christelle was asleep in my bed now; she had turned up, eaten room-service sandwiches and crashed out. She did not stir in her sleep. In Europe we would count as a four-night stand, spread over a week; here, as far as the hotel staff were concerned, she was a prostitute and I, if not a pig, was otherwise in the same bracket as the infamous Russian. Outside there was a roll of thunder. Lightning flashed and the thunder came again, louder now.

‘Kinshasa always sends us their rain,' Aimé had said. I enquired about going there too, but Anna had forbidden me.

‘You cannot go there because I cannot take time off to take you and Dino.'

‘Why can't I go anyway? There are lots of westerners there, aren't there?'

‘Yes but they are all with organisations. On your own you will be eaten alive. Kinshasa is mad, do you understand? We come to Brazzaville for a rest!'

Christelle slept soundly as the storm came on. Soon there was a
hissing, then wild smashing torrents of rain. Philippe had said he spent most of his time repairing and repainting: now I could see why. The palm trees bent over and whipped furiously in the wind as water battered the window in jets like a pressure hose. It was exhilarating and ferocious and I knew I would not sleep; there were only a couple of hours left before Aimé came to take me to the bus. I wondered what the rain was doing to the roads and considered the promised walk. It was not clear how long it was – some said 30 kilometres, some said 50.

I woke Christelle at quarter to five, briefly, to say goodbye. Half of my rucksack had been transferred to the chair: shirts, a lightweight jumper, a pair of shorts, maps of the Congo and Zambia, books I had acquired but could not carry, socks, boxer shorts, T-shirts. I asked her if she could use it all and Christelle nodded. She took my hand and squeezed it, looking hard into my eyes. I promised to tell reception to let her sleep and she nodded. I told her, in a pathetic way, to take care, and she nodded again.