A Single Swallow (17 page)

The sky greyed as Aimé drove me through the rush hour, which started with the light. Océan du Nord was a scrum of people and bags. Aimé bade me good luck and drove away. I sought the Ouesso bus. Beside the two luxurious all-terrain charabancs which I had seen the day before was a beaten-up, lopsided Toyota minibus. The charabancs were going only as far as Oyo, on the notoriously good roads which led to the president's town. The little scrap-heap was going as far as Makoua where the Ouesso road ran out.

The sun may have risen behind the clouds but it was as dull and hot and close as fever. I stood swaying, dozing on my feet, retaining consciousness principally through curiosity as to how all the travellers and our bags could possibly be crammed in. It took an hour. In the end the front row of seats were full and there was an amazing overhang of cargo suspended above the second row, including two satellite dishes, sacks of rice and heavy-duty electric cable. We would be travelling ‘cinq par cinq': five abreast in five rows of seats. I was placed by a window. My neighbour was a patient lady with a comfortably
well-covered flank. We were each issued with a roll and a carton of juice, and then we were off.

It was not a pretty journey. The land north of Brazzaville had been cleared to nothing, to yellowish grass, dull under heavy skies. Among ridges and shallow valleys villages put up smears of smoke. Further north again there were clumps of trees, and many hundreds of stumps. I fell in and out of sleep and woke to a clamour: passengers howling at the driver who could not hear them through the densely packed luggage. Eventually a message reached him and we stopped. The aspect of the day had changed: now there were higher trees, taller grasses, and the sun had come out. I extracted myself through the window, smoked half a cigarette and looked for swallows. There were none.

Travelling five by five was an endurance test, I learned. With a skinny European ass your only defence was to keep shifting your weight from buttock to buttock; with something more substantial, I brooded, enviously, you would be cushioned like my neighbour. More significant movements, leaning forward or back, affected her and therefore the person squeezed onto her other side, so these you kept to a minimum. Slight shifts of a leg would make fifteen minutes' worth of difference to the numbness of your side or the pain in your lower back. Sleep, if you could catch it, was a saviour.

We came to Makoua at the most lovely time of the evening, about an hour before sunset. The bus pulled up under a tree. We had been skidding and rattling over sand for the last hour through ever more wooded plains. We hauled ourselves out and stood on soft sand as the bags were freed from their restraints. Makoua appeared to be a collection of small bars made of wood and corrugated iron, a little roundabout, a road running on ahead and not much else at all. There was a peace in the air like a protracted siesta. Children looked at us and a man in a bar raised a bottle.

‘Is there a hotel or anything?' I asked.

‘Yes!'

A smiling young man, darker-skinned than anyone else, came forward.

‘There is a place . . .'

We fell into conversation.

‘I am PJ,' he said. ‘Everyone in town knows me.'

‘Are you from Makoua then?'

‘No, I am from Cameroon.'

‘Cameroon! What are you doing here?'

‘I am travelling to Gabon and Sao Tome.'

‘Really? Why are you going there?'

‘Because I know it is beautiful. There are beautiful people in Sao Tome.'

Sao Tome and Principe are two islands off the coast of Gabon. They were discovered by the Portuguese in the fifteenth century. The guidebook showed a Caribbean-type island. I do not know what inspired PJ's enthusiasm for the place, one of the smallest countries in the world, but as we talked it became clear that for him it was a promised land, a dreamscape.

We turned off the road, up a track, and passed a football pitch where dozens of children were engrossed. The hotel was half-finished, clean and comfortable. I was issued with a bucket and a hurricane lamp. On my way back to the centre to meet PJ for dinner another man stopped me.

‘I am a teacher,' he said, ‘but there is no job for me.'

‘How do you live?'

‘Ah,' he said, with a grimace, ‘I am working on the roads.'

There was no electricity in Makoua except from individual generators. PJ and I sat in a hot darkness; he was invisible but for the whites of his eyes.

‘I journeyed down here through the forest,' he said. ‘At the border they took my passport and all of my money. I was a Rasta then.'

‘What happened to your dreds?'

‘I cut them off because of the hassle! But I am still the only Rasta in Makoua. People are very kind to me. I have many friends here because
I am a friend to everyone.'

‘How will you get to Gabon and Sao Tome?'

‘I am working, building a school. I save a little money.'

Inside a shack, by the light of a hurricane lamp we ate bread and scrambled eggs. The chef was from Mauritania and limped from a recent injury involving boiling coffee. I promised to return the next day with burn cream. The stars came out and fireflies winked above our table.

‘Ha!' said PJ, when I exclaimed at them. ‘In Cameroon they call people from the north fire-flies, because we are darker than everyone else.'

The night of Makoua was utterly unfamiliar, a blackness which gathered around, pressing in on the oil lamps and squeezing the fireflies so that their flashings were like the blinks of buoys far out to sea. The fatigue of the road, the peace of Makoua and the smiling chatter of PJ made me languid with relaxation. I would like to live here, I thought. I could imagine setting myself up in a low house on the edge of the forest, with hurricane lamps and books, living a slow life.

PJ talked about Sao Tome, and we discussed travel and our lives. All we wanted, we agreed, was to live somewhere beautiful, with someone to love, and friends to visit.

We met for breakfast in the morning, cooked by the Mauritanian chef, who accepted burn cream and antiseptic for his leg. PJ introduced me to Judicael, a young man who was going to be a radio journalist when the radio station was working. He and PJ were great friends: they did the full handshake, shoulder-bump and salute, then taught it to me. By the time it was completed we were all laughing like old friends. At the moment the radio station was a single computer and a large stereo but Judicael said he hoped it would not be long before they were able to start work. For now he was playing around with the computer: fifteen years after email first appeared in Britain it was strange to witness its arrival in Makoua, as he and PJ signed up and
obtained their first addresses.

We walked slowly down to the river and the bridge. The water was a silted, sludgy green, the bridge was an substantial span in iron and concrete and the air all around it was full of swifts, and no swallows. That was my road, PJ said, the road north, the way he had come.

‘You will see Pygmies!' he said. ‘You will see the forest. You will have a truly wonderful journey.'

Standing guard in front of the bridge was a sign in English and French.

DANGER – EBOLA

DO NOT TOUCH ANY

DEAD ANIMAL IN

THIS FOREST

I studied the sign with a kind of horrified thrill. Even by the standards of African fates, Ebola, named after the Congolese river where it was first identified, is a horrible way to go. Vomiting, difficulty breathing, pain, bloody diarrhoea and bleeding from the nose, mouth and anus is followed in ninety per cent of cases by death. There is no vaccine or cure. No dead animals then, I told myself. I will have nothing to do with them, whatever happens.

It was already hot and we made our way back more slowly. PJ took me via the school he was building, a skeleton with a partial roof, standing in red mud and yellow sand.

‘That is where I work,' he said.

‘When is it going to be finished?'

‘We do not know. The materials have not arrived.'

‘So what do you do?'

‘We wait. But I am proud that one day children will go to school there.'

PJ told me his story in several different ways, in a different order each time, rearranging the facts so that the emphasis fell equally heavily on each of them.

‘I came down from Cameroon because I want to go to Sao Tome. I
hope if it is God's will to find someone to marry there, to live there, because it is beautiful and the people are very good – they are a great mixture of different kinds of people. But I have lost everything – everything. The police at the border took my money, they took my passport, and so I am trapped in Makoua. I do not even have shoes.'

PJ hailed a tall, spare man who left a crowd of milling workmen, and introduced us.

‘Jean is from Senegal!' PJ said.

‘What brings you here?' I asked.

‘I came down from Senegal looking for work,' Jean said. ‘I am an English teacher. But there is no work for teachers – there is no school. At the border they took everything from me – my money, my passport, everything. All I want to do now is get back to Senegal.'

‘How do you survive?'

‘I work on the roads,' Jean said. He looked at the hot ground, his expression dim. Then he raised his chin to me.

‘Beware the Ides of March,' he said, and did not smile.

On the way back to the middle of the village we walked along a stretch where one of the labour gangs was working. There were two or three large machines, bulldozers and lorries and perhaps sixty men spaced out, a couple of metres between them, in a ditch of earth and broken stones at the side of the road. With picks and shovels they were deepening and carving this ditch into a rectangular channel which was then being concreted. The labour of their task, under the ten o'clock sun, was all too easy to see. The earth and stones did not break easily. Each shovel-load cost a grunt and a heave. The men sweated and did not pause. Fifty yards away there were two Chinese overseers in cotton shirts and sun hats. One of the workers looked up and cried out: the teacher I met last night. His face broke into a wide smile through the sweat and he leaned briefly on his shovel as we shook hands.

‘How are you?' he cried.

‘I am very well – how are you?'

‘Hot!' he said.

As we talked I looked down the road and saw all the labourers for what they might well have been. Teachers, students, journalists, travellers, writers, artists, thinkers, doctors, accountants, businessmen – all without papers, all without money, from a dozen different countries and all with picks and shovels under the sun, working with who-knew-what hope of change: the Congo's new slave labour.

PJ accompanied me back to the hotel, where I packed. His eyes fastened on my unused shoes. They were lightweight and waterproof with wonderful treads, like a network of little suckers. They had ridden in my rucksack in anticipation of today: I had bought them in Cape Town with the intention of blooding them in Congo.

‘They are beautiful, your shoes,' PJ said.

I was embarrassed by my freedom, by the wealth of my equipment, by the stamps in my passport, the cash in my wallet and the power in my plastic cards. PJ had not expressed envy for any of these things but in a minute he would walk me to where the taxi was loading and watch me go. Clearly I must give him something for his kindness and hospitality.

‘You have them,' I said.

‘You are sure?'

‘Yes!' I said, convincing myself.

PJ put them on and we walked back to the roundabout. In front of a little bar was parked a Land Cruiser in an advanced state of dilapidation. Around it were faces I recognised from yesterday's minibus: a young husband and wife and their small boy; a laughing woman with several sacks; an old lady with a tubular basket; a gentleman, who sweated under more weight than the rest of us; and a young man. We all said hello and I paid for a seat. As a white, therefore rich, it was assumed I would travel in the cab with the driver, for a small supplementary fee. The sweating gentleman did not look happy: there would now be a crush in the cab. The driver was a big rangy man in very tattered clothing. He looked as battered as his vehicle.

When I first saw it, I assumed nothing but the worst treatment and the poorest maintenance could have caused the Land Cruiser such
damage. The driver was not happy with it either: there was a jagged diagonal scar across the eye of the left rear wheel where a bolt should have been. The driver had a bolt of approximately the right size: he held it to the scar, demonstrating to his motorboy how it might fit, holding it to the wound in a rather unlikely way. The motorboy nodded gravely. Every truck and taxi has a motorboy, a driver's apprentice. Some drivers, commensurate with their status, have two.

An hour after the announced departure time, we set off. There is a strange temporal alchemy of central African travel, which means that everything leaves at least an hour late, but nevertheless always arrives on time.

PJ waved goodbye and wished me Godspeed for the road. I wished him the same. ‘
Mettez vos chaussures sur les bonnes routes!
' I cried. Put your shoes on good roads. We held up our hands in a long salute.

The Land Cruiser ground and bounced out of town, taking two fairly rough diversions to avoid the roads under construction by the gangs. I was squeezed between the driver and the gentleman, who revealed that he worked for the council in Ouesso. When I asked him what that entailed, ‘Development' was all he would say.

We passed the Ebola warning and crossed the bridge. The gentleman nodded at the thickening trees.

‘Today you will see true equatorial rainforest,' he said.

No more than twenty minutes out of town the rainforest began. It was not unbroken: here and there were clearings of long grass. There were people on the road pushing bicycles, dwarfed, away from the clearings, by the immense height of the trees. The forest formed a thick and battered wall on either side of the track. Its fringes were ravaged by tyre-tracks and piles of logs, slashed bushes and smeared heaps of ash. Very quickly the road became a track, which in turn became something else: I began to understand. It was not its handling nor its maintenance that had almost destroyed the Land Cruiser: the driver was wonderfully adept, sensitive, skilful and quick. The problem was the track, which was a killer.