A Single Swallow (19 page)

‘It's four hours,' said the motorboy. ‘You're sure?'

‘Yes he's sure!' cried Bertrand, who had topped up with
tabac congolais
. ‘Chef is just having some
tabac
too,' Bertrand said, twinkling, ‘to give him force.'

‘Well, better stoned than drunk,' I said uneasily, looking at the Land Cruiser and judging it capable of lethal speed.

‘Chef is the best driver,' Bertrand said, seriously, having met the man only twenty minutes before.

‘We will confirm that when we arrive,' I replied.

‘Is the White scared?' asked the laughing lady, whose name was Mariam. She had a great sack of fruit of which she was even more protective than was the young wife of her son. Before I could think of an adequate riposte, knowing that yes or no would provoke a gust of Mariam's particularly powerful laugh, the motorboy appeared and swung the charred spine, ribs and belly of a pig onto my feet, followed by two sacks of some sort of bean. He climbed into the cab and drove us to the other end of the village where, exuding immense authority, Chef appeared, shooed the motorboy out of his seat, and we set off, with blasts of our horn and salutes to the waving Pygmies.

We raced down a red earth track at about 90 km/h. Bertrand whooped and banged down on the roof of the cab. I grimaced, at which he laughed and banged again. Three or four miles outside the village we stopped. Chef dismounted and came around to the back. We all fell silent as he fixed his gaze on me.

‘So, are you going to give me a present?' he enquired.

‘A present?'

‘Yes. Are you going to give me your hat?'

There were titters from the travellers. This was theatre, I realised: the point was to entertain.

‘Right,' I said, casually. ‘You're the driver of this thing, are you?'

‘
Eh, OUI
– !' said Chef, to the gallery: this was the most stupid question on earth.

‘Good.
Alors
, if you drive well, incredibly well, perfectly, in fact, and if you get us to Ouesso very safely and very comfortably, and if we
have enjoyed our journey and never felt that we might die, and if I am in a good mood when we get there – a truly superb mood – then it is just possible that I might give you a present but I can absolutely promise you it WILL NOT BE MY HAT! This is MY HAT, CHEF!'

The travellers cheered. Laughing, in a concessionary way, Chef climbed back into the cab. It was satisfying but also vaguely unsettling; clearly, and somehow on behalf of the travellers, I had won round one; equally clearly there were more rounds to come. We raced on. Bird-watching Congolese style meant standing at the back of the cage alongside the young husband: the two motorboys and Bertrand took the front, near the cab, leaving what space there was among the cargo in the well of the cage free for the women and children. We ducked and swayed as branches and chicottes whipped towards us at 100 km/h: the chicottes are long feathered grasses like shoots of bamboo.

‘Swift!' I announced, or ‘Swallow!', though I did not see many of them.

‘Toucan!' shouted the young husband, pointing at a hornbill.

‘
Chauffe! Chauffe!
Chef!' howled Bertrand, hammering on the roof of the cab – Hot! Hot! – as he urged ever greater speeds, grinning hugely at my discomfort.

‘I'm bloody serious!' I shouted at him. ‘I want to see these birds!'

The travellers burst into loud comment and I blushed with realisation – for the first time in days I had spoken in English. They laughed. It was as though in speaking my own language by mistake I had fully revealed myself, and they approved. We stopped again. The motorboys jumped down and Chef appeared, hands on hips, directing them to a particular bush, from which they withdrew the body of a fat black pig with maggots oozing out of its head. This they dragged to the back of the cage. The cooked portions of the other animal were shifted and the corpse was heaved up over the tailgate and onto my feet. We all edged away from it as much as possible. It was difficult not to imagine Ebola, like an evil smell, penetrating my shoe, sniffing around my blister and worming its way into the flesh.

Chef stopped again, another 10 kilometres on, in a village on a
hillside. The light was going now; the last swifts and swallows hawked overhead and then vanished as first stars, then fireflies, appeared. Somewhere in the village, Chef was in protracted negotiation, eating, and no doubt drinking and smoking. Bertrand and the motorboys gossiped in Lingala, the young wife fed her boy and Mariam passed around bananas. When it was quite dark, the night thick and pressing on the forest floor, paling only among the stars, Chef reappeared, still wearing his shades and now carrying a powerful torch. With him were a man with a machete and a very small boy. At a command from Chef the motorboys seized the dead pig and laid it down on the track. The man with the machete approached it with great caution.

‘Ebola?' he said.

‘No, this is not Ebola,' Chef asserted. He stretched the animal's legs and tilted them this way and that, bathing its armpits and stomach in the light of the torch. As his father talked doubtfully with Chef the little boy rushed forward, gurgling with delight, grabbed the pig's front trotters and braced his feet against its shoulders. For a moment we all fell silent and stared. The little boy babbled, urging his father on. I believe we all had the same thought: if the pig had Ebola then the beautiful little boy now surely had it too. If he has it, I thought, I do not care if I get it. I do not care about anything any more, if that lovely little boy has been infected; we might as well all die together.

The father relented and bent forward. He stroked the blade of the machete down the centre of the pig's chest and the skin split under it. The butchery was completed with wonderful speed and skill and the pig was soon returned to the cage, now in hams, securely tied in sacks. A sack of mangoes was heaved up to join us and we set off again, Chef 's mobile trading post hurtling like a single bright spark between the toes of the forest.

We huddled down as it grew colder, into whatever space we could find. We took turns singing, as the floor of the cage bashed up and down, then we fell silent. A long time passed slowly, then there was a commotion and something was thrust at me. The old woman held something flapping in her hands. I switched on my torch. Brown- and
cream-barred feathers, long wings and the stunned dark eyes: it was a nightjar, a beautiful bird, the first I had ever seen. I was reaching out for it when the old woman lost patience and flung it over her shoulder, out of the cage. Bird-watching Congolese style . . .

The forest did not fall back as we descended towards Ouesso, but the darkness did. Villages which had been dark now had oil lights. Then a generator, and electricity, then the blue firelight-flicker of television. Low dark buildings came up around us and side roads, other vehicles and motor scooters, and at last we stopped beside a mass of people milling around a bar. Euphoric to have arrived at last I jumped down, into the hands of the police.

They demanded my passport with a drunken belligerence. Halfway through an argument about the cost of not having a non-existent tourist permit Chef drove away, taking all the travellers except Bertrand, and, I realised too late, my notebook. In a foul mood and many thousand CFAs poorer I placed myself with very bad grace in the hands of a man who said Bertrand and I were lucky to have found him because he ran Ouesso's only good hotel. Bertrand confessed that his father did not actually live in Ouesso, exactly, but rather a little way downriver, and wondered if there might be sufficient CFA to get him a bed in a hostel.

The rain came again that night, with a lightning storm. In the morning Ouesso resembled a film set of small buildings sinking into fields of reddish mud. Car wheels spun and skidded and people picked their ways between mires with the concentration of hopscotch players. The kind hotelier showed me a stationery shop where the proprietor changed euros into CFAs, and a man in a splattered red car pulled up alongside us, and grinned. We shook hands and exchanged pleasantries. He drove off.

‘Who was that?'

‘That was the man who owns the hotel,' the hotelier said. ‘He is a very important person in Ouesso; he is in the customs. But now he knows who you are, you will be fine.'

‘He has made a lot of money in customs?'

‘Yes, a lot of money.'

There was a very strange atmosphere in the town. People went to work, or out into the day, at any rate, in a rather unconvinced way, as if this was what normality demanded of them: the unconvincing thing was the normality itself. As far as I could tell, the only way of life in a place like Ouesso was to attach yourself to something or someone with access to money and then wait, hoping some portion of it would trickle to you. Apart from the few shops and bars there was no obvious income available to the townspeople but service in the police or the army: a great many men were in uniform. Everybody else seemed to congregate around the port.

Ouesso stands on the banks of the Sangha River, which flows eventually into the Congo. Ouesso's port principally serves motorised pirogues, canoes with outboard engines, but the Sangha here is a busy waterway and the riverside was crowded with people. Among them were the old woman, the young husband, wife and child, and Mariam, holding my notebook aloft.

It was a joyful reunion. Mariam had found my emergency €50 note, concealed between the notebook's binding and cover, but she could not read the English notice I had printed in the front, promising €50 for its safe return. While I went to deal with the police, the customs, the health authorities and the pirogue captains, she changed her prize into CFAs. The fake yellow fever certificate did not fool the man in the white coat but he was impressed by the real thing, and the crowded vaccination certificate. It took two hours and an altercation with a man I thought was running off with my passport (it turned out that he was an assistant to the chef du port) to be stamped out of Congo and secure passage upriver: I traded small bribes, cigarettes, submission, conversation, fees and taxes in return for my seat at the back of the motor pirogue. My travelling companions waved from the bank, Bertrand with his arms clasped above his head, as if sending the spirit of victory after me, and the canoe turned into the current. I looked away from everyone, afraid, in a ludicrous way, that I would cry. It was strange and miserable to become companions, to join a group and earn its kindness and feel its protection, and then to snatch myself away, to go on, always, always on. It was like leaving old friends
for the last time.

A warm heavy mist lifted off the river, trailing soaking fingers through the trees. The captain was about nineteen but seemed much older as he read and reread the river, slaloming between up- and down-currents, tacking up long straits, stitching sandbanks together. It was a far, far-away place, between worlds, between sense. The jungle on our port side was Congo but would become Cameroon. Up ahead of us and to the right what was now Cameroon would become the Central African Republic. Overhead the sky was thick grey vapour and around us the world was water, sand and ooze, squeezed between the roots of bent and fallen trees. An eagle flapped heavily across the river; I could not make out its species. Ahead the waterway divided as another river flowed into the Sangha from the west. Down this, at disproportionate speed, came a blistering white motor boat carrying eight or so passengers, three of them white men, and all wearing bright yellow full-body protective suits – not rubberised, like dry-suits, but light and bulky like chemical warfare gear. The white men and I stared at each other. One of them nodded, then they were gone.

‘Those suits,' I asked the captain, ‘– Ebola?'

‘No,' he smiled, ‘they are loggers.'

‘You're sure?'

‘Yes,' he said, his smile fading. We nodded through the wash they had left as if overcoming a bad taste in the mouth. I felt I had not seen any of my tribe for a year, and then there they were, so insulated from the river's morning that they made this distant world seem diseased.

 

IN NAMIBIA I
had feared Zambia, imagining it a poor and desperate place. In Zambia I had feared Congo: the mere word conjured images of slaughter and anarchy, child soldiers and casual death. I knew very little of Cameroon. The police, I believed, would be grasping, and the political situation was unstable: in the last week there had been news of mass demonstrations and riots in Cameroon, sparked by a rise in the price of fuel but swollen by President Paul Biya's suggestion that he might change the constitution to extend his twenty-five years in power. In the last week people had been dying in Yaoundé and Douala, shot down by the army. The guidebook said very little of the world that awaited upriver: ‘Cameroon's wild east . . . logging, truckers, prostitutes . . .' was all it made of Yokadouma, a town a day north, through which I would have to pass. Of our destination, Socampo, a frontier village on the river bank, it made no mention. Neither the village nor any road to it appeared on the maps I carried.