Brazzaville Beach (32 page)

It was about an hour after sunrise. We had been traveling for three days now and a pattern to our day had established itself. We were wakened before dawn, a fire was lit and breakfast cooked—invariably a porridge of various textures, ingredients and flavors. With the first glimmerings of light we were on the road and we would drive without stopping for three to four hours. Then, in the heat of the day, we lay up, the Land-Rover parked under a dense tree or else camouflaged with brushwood and branches. During these rest periods some of the boys would go off foraging for food. Amilcar seemed quite happy to let them go to nearby villages. “They all like UNAMO here,” he would say. Our diet was occasionally improved, as a result, by the addition of chicken or goat, sweet potato or plantain. We ate only twice a day, at dawn and sunset, and the portions were always fairly meager.

During our protracted midday halts the time would crawl by. The farther north we progressed, the closer we approached to
the great river delta, so it grew more humid. We would lie or sit in the shade for hours, sweaty and uncomfortable, waving vainly at the flies that swarmed round our salty bodies, occasionally stirring to drink some water or relieve ourselves. Beyond the circle of shade we lay in, the sun smashed down on the baking earth, and in the sky great boiling ranges of cumulus massed inexorably only to disperse—like a miracle—at the end of the afternoon.

In the hours before and after noon while we rested, there were many planes in the sky, jet fighters and transports. It was the aircraft that made us hide in the day. We were too far from the base, Amilcar said, and the pilots refused to fly in darkness; consequently they concentrated their activities around the middle of the day. I told him that the pilots were experienced. Of course, Amilcar said, but they can't trust their instruments. If they can't see, they won't fly. So we drove at the day's beginning and at its end.

Amilcar let Ian and me sit in front now. Most of the time he himself drove, occasionally squeezing a fourth in on the bench seat when one boy or another had local knowledge of the way. The countryside was unchangingly scrubby, with clumps of trees and the odd small rocky hill, and threading through it the faint dusty tracks and rutted lanes we followed. There were no signposts on these makeshift roadways and in our three days of driving we had never seen or heard a hint of another vehicle. Occasionally we would reach a fork or a junction and Amilcar would stop, descend, talk to the boys, make a choice and drive on. At this stage of the journey he used no map or compass. I asked him how he knew the way, and he replied simply that it was UNAMO country we were driving through, as if it were sufficient explanation.

In the days of our traveling Ian's mood had not improved. He remained taciturn and cast down and often seemed close to tears. I tried initially to rally his spirits, but talk of the camp, of what the others would be doing, of official search parties and so on, only seemed to depress him further. He was losing weight rapidly, also. We all were, but Ian seemed unable to keep any food in his system for more than an hour or so. I suspected that he was still
in some form of delayed shock; I hoped he would come out of it in due course before his health gave way completely.

One factor he could be sure of was that Amilcar and his Atomique Boum team posed no physical threat. Amilcar was garrulous and charming; the boys were gentle and lugubrious. Privately, Amilcar told me that they still had not recovered from the deaths of their teammates.

My own mood was more complex and bizarre. Sometimes, I felt jaunty and spry, as if I were privileged to be taking part in this extraordinary adventure, especially so now that I knew Amilcar planned to release us. At other times a resigned, stoical lassitude infused me. Then I felt that this interminable journey through this dry and scrubby landscape was some kind of curious dream, a heady reverie of capture, a fantastic, benign kidnapping in which I felt part victim, part accomplice.

On our third evening, Amilcar called a halt a little earlier than usual. The Land-Rover was parked beneath a thin acacia and covered in brushwood. A small fire was lit and a pot of maize porridge, with some fish heads in it, was set to stew.

Then the boys hammered two stakes into the ground and tied some rope between them. The perimeter of the court was scratched out with the point of a machete. They divided into two teams of four. Before they occupied their respective courts and the game began, they lined up. Amilcar led them in their team chant.

“Atomique?”

“BOUM!” they shouted.

“Atomique?”

“BOUM!”

“Atomique?”

“BOUM! BOUM! BOUM!”

Then a ball was produced from someone's pack, and they played while the light lasted. I watched them dive and set, smash and dig, saw their repertoire of shots, their jump sets and lob balls, their floaters, dumps and dummy spikes. For the first time the boys' reserve left them, and they shouted and cajoled, argued and exulted in the soft evening light, their thin lanky bodies casting thinner and lankier shadows.

At one stage, Amilcar joined in and flung himself about heedlessly, hurling himself after ungettable balls, leaping as high as he could in the air to make a spike, constantly calling out advice and criticism, exposing flaws in their tactics.

Ian and I sat on the ground and watched, bemused at first, but eventually applauding loudly whenever some particular act of agility or stylish bravado merited it. It was only later when it grew too dark to really see, and the game broke up, that I realized we had been sitting six feet away from the small stack of set-aside Kalashnikovs. The boys trooped off the court, laughing and breathless, their faces glossy with sweat and picked up their guns as idly as if they had been towels or kit bags.

“I'm glad we played,” Amilcar said. “Tomorrow is going to be difficult.”

 

From where we parked the Land-Rover, just off the dirt track, I could make out—through the intervening screen of trees and bushes—the pale gray stripe of a tarmac road. I sat in the front of the cab with Ian. The boys all stood outside, edgy and cautious, their guns held ready. Amilcar had advanced eighty yards through the bush to the road. We were all waiting for him to return. We waited an hour, then a bit longer. Eventually he came back, stepping briskly through the undergrowth.

“They're coming,” he said.

He ordered everyone into the Land-Rover and we sat and waited again. Soon I heard the noise of the engines and the slap and clatter of tracked vehicles on the tarmac. Then, through the trees I saw a half-track, moving quite slowly. It was leading a convoy of about a dozen lorries. The first four were open-topped and I could see they were filled with soldiers. At the rear came two civilian lorries and I could hear, distinctly, across the patch of bush, the clinking shudder of thousands of bottles.

“What is it?” I said, baffled.

“Beer,” Amilcar said, dolefully. He was suddenly depressed. “There will be an offensive soon.”

The convoy passed and soon too did its noise. We sat on for a while, then Amilcar sent a boy up to the road to check that all was
clear. I asked Amilcar to explain the connection between beer and a new offensive.

The federal army, he said, was a conscript army, made up of reluctant young men who had no real desire to fight, and who were governed by a powerful urge toward self-protection.

“Nobody wants to get hurt or killed,” he added. “Which is normal.” These young men only stayed in the army to earn some money and eat well. In combat zones there was a further incentive: free beer and cigarettes. The federal army would not advance one foot without copious supplies of beer. The chiming glass on board that convoy signaled one thing alone: they were planning an assault on the UNAMO front.

Amilcar gripped the steering wheel with both hands. “They will be advancing,” he said darkly. His mood had changed. “Two, maybe three days.” He started the engine.

“But what about FIDE?” I said aimlessly, like someone trying to make conversation at a cocktail party.

“Oh, FIDE…FIDE isn't here,” he said. “It's just that they have stopped fighting the federals so that they can move more troops up to the River Territories.”

I thought it was a curious war when two lorries full of beer presented more threat than any number of heavily armed men.

One of the boys stood in the middle of the road and waved us onto it. With a lurch and a bump we left the track and moved onto the paved surface. I felt old sensations: it was like that moment when you left Sangui and hit the main highway south.

We drove up the road in the same direction as the convoy. It was a good road, with wide, mown verges and deep drainage ditches on either side. It ran straight and true through the thickening forest. We were driving at some speed and for a moment or two I thought we might catch up with the beer lorries.

“Careful,” I said to Amilcar. “Unless you're thirsty.”

“You realize,” he said evenly, “that if I could destroy that beer, UNAMO would be safe for weeks.”

All the same, he slowed down.

After another two minutes, he braked suddenly. Ahead, about four hundred yards away, we could see a vehicle, apparently stuck in the ditch. As we drew closer we saw it was a wrecked
lorry, partially burned, with the remains of whatever cargo it had been carrying strewn along the verge: sacks of groundnuts, baskets, kettles, pots and pans.

We halted by the wreck. From my seat I could see a corpse in the driver's seat. A glimpse of teeth, top and bottom rows, empty eye sockets and a curious rippled, foillike texture to the skin. I looked down at once and saw the other body on the ground, bloated and impossibly tight, and somehow incomplete.

I clamped my lips together with my fingers.

Amilcar's expression was enraged.

“It's disgusting,” he said quietly and emphatically. “It's disgusting how they do this.”

He left the Land-Rover, went round to the back and was passed a jerrycan of petrol. He took a deep breath, like a man about to dive underwater, and, averting his face, sloshed petrol generously over the corpse in the cab of the lorry and then the corpse on the verge.

He retreated a few paces, turned and exhaled with a whoosh of expelled air. Then he darted forward and set the two bodies ablaze.

They burned immediately, the long flames pale and almost transparent in the sunshine.

Amilcar climbed back into the Land-Rover.

“There's no need for that,” he said, his face calm again. “Nobody should be left like that. Nobody.”

We turned off the road soon after that onto another dirt track and bumped on, still heading north. I could see that the land around us was lusher and wetter. We were now in thickish forest and we drove over or forded many small streams, reduced to trickles in this dry season. When the rains came I saw that these tracks would be impassable.

Around midafternoon we reached our destination. The track entered a large clearing, and before us was a low, single-story building with a corrugated asbestos roof. It was made of mud, but the walls had been painted with white distemper. At the main door was a crude portico with a cross above it and on the entablature was inscribed:
S. JUDE
.

Behind the building was a small compound with a patchy mat
ting fence and a few mud storerooms or servants quarters. There was also what had at one time been a sizable vegetable garden, now largely overgrown with weeds except for a few young pawpaw trees and some spindly stands of maize and cassava.

Ian pointed to the name on the building.

“Patron saint of—”

“I know,” I said. “Don't remind me.”

“It was a mission school,” Amilcar said, misunderstanding our exchange. “We can stay here, we'll be quite safe.”

The first thing they did was to move the Land-Rover undercover. They demolished the gable end of a mud hut and the Land-Rover was backed carefully into the shell. Ian and I were taken into the mission school and shown our room.

It smelled moldy and abandoned. At one end was a row of built-in cupboards and a blackboard. The cupboards were veined with the small raised-earth tunnels of termites. The wood was dry and rotten. The cupboard doors broke as easily as toast.

Ian's mood seemed to improve immediately, now that we had stopped traveling and were finally housed. He went through the cupboards busily—and pointlessly, I thought—looking “for anything that might be useful.” Two days previously he had been badly bitten on the cheek by some insect, and he had scratched the bite into a scab. His beard had grown also, a golden fuzz on his jaws and cheeks. The sore and his beard and his considerable weight loss made him look quite different, less soft and nice. I saw the emergence of an alternative Ian Vail, nastier and leaner, tougher and more capable, not entirely to be trusted.

On the other hand, by contrast, my own strange insouciance of the last few days began to evaporate. It was replaced by a dull, unshiftable depression. For me, because we were no longer on the move, and living in a building, the brute fact of our kidnapping was brought home emphatically. Our curious journey, the games of volleyball, our polite and tolerant traveling companions were now all behind us. We were now being held in a house in the middle of a shrinking rebel enclave surrounded—I imagined—by an advancing, beer-fueled army. Coming to a halt had brought me to my senses: no wistful fantasy could be constructed around our present circumstances.

I still had no fear of Amilcar or the Atomique Bourn team, but for the first time since our capture I became very conscious of just how filthy I was. Sleeping out in the open, eating vile food cooked on fires, being continually on the move, had distracted me. A bit of dirt was unexceptionable. But now, in this abandoned school, I felt rank and stinking. My skin had a layer of dust on it. My clothes were grubby and sweat-infused. My hair hung in thick greasy ropes. My teeth and gums felt furred and clogged as if lichen were growing in my mouth. I went straight to Amilcar and demanded some sort of washing facilities.

There was a well behind the school in the compound, and two buckets of water and a hunk of pink soap were provided. I washed my hair and immediately felt better. One of the boys gave me a chewing stick and I cleaned my teeth with it. Ian stripped to his underpants and tried to wash himself down. Now I was marginally cleaner, I found my clothes unsupportably dirty. I was wearing a khaki shirt, a pair of jeans and some lace-up suede ankle boots. I had nothing else with me apart from the shoulder bag I had packed the day we left Grosso Arvore. Ian was worse off. When Amilcar had ordered the two kitchen boys out of the Land-Rover, Billy had unreflectingly picked up Ian's overnight bag, which had been stowed in the back. He had had it in his hand, we had remembered later, as he had run off up the road to safety.

Our buckets were refilled and I washed my shirt and jeans. When Ian took them out to lay them in the sun to dry, I quickly washed my pants and brassiere, wringing the water from them as best I could, and putting them back on just before he returned.

We sat in our room waiting for our clothes to dry. I felt self-conscious in my underwear and sat stiffly by the wall with my legs drawn up. The bruise from Mallabar's punch discolored my shoulder like a tattoo, a lead-gray and sludge-brown flower with four purple dots. It was very tender to the touch.

As I sat there I was aware of Ian's flicking gaze from across the room. His eyes kept returning to me, making me more ill at ease. I felt annoyed with him for this little susurrus of prurience. He was fine: his pale blue boxer shorts were as revealing or as unrevealing as swimming trunks. Irritated by my own modesty I de
liberately stood up and walked to the window to look out over the sunbaked, grassless patch of earth in front of the building.

“Should be dry soon,” I said nonchalantly.

“Give them half an hour.”

But as I stood there I found myself wondering whether the dampness of my pants would make them cling more tightly to my buttocks, and, if I turned around, would the thick triangle of my pubic hair be pressing, bluey, through the moist gusset….

I turned and walked quickly back to my blanket and sat down, my legs crossed, my interlocked hands resting modestly in my lap.

There was nothing either of us could think to say. It was hot in the room. Our mutual embarrassment seemed to make it hotter. I felt the sweat begin to seep from my pores. My hair began to cling wetly to my shoulders.

Ian stood up, trying to think of something to do. He went to rummage needlessly again in the cupboards. He found half a ruler.

“Not much use,” he said, holding it up.

“Not unless you want to measure something short,” I said, without thinking.

For a second or two we tried to ignore the double entendre.

“Well, we won't go into that,” Ian said, and laughed. So did I, sort of. At least it eased the tension. We began to talk again: about our plight, about the options open to us, about whether we should try to escape. Outside our clothes dried quickly in the sun.

That night we were given a meaty stew and a big mound of doughy pudding to eat. When I asked what the meat was I was told bushpig. It was stringy and lean with a strong gamey taste. Whatever it was it acted as a powerful aperient on my crammed, immobile gut. I went outside and shat copiously behind one of the sheds.

I felt purged and unsteady, and for a moment or two stood quietly in the dusk, the air full of the smell of woodsmoke from the fire our supper had been cooked on. Something about the light and the smell and my moment of weakness brought back strong memories of Knap and John Clearwater, and, for the first time
since our capture, I felt my emotions begin to overwhelm me and I sensed the salt of tears, tart at the corners of my eyes.

When I went back inside Amilcar was in our room talking to Ian.

“I have to go tonight,” he said. “To headquarters.”

“What about us?” Ian said. “When are you going to let us go?”

“I have to talk to General Delgado about you. What to do. What's safest.” He shrugged. “Maybe we can fly you to Kinshasa or Togo. It depends.”

“Fly?” I said.

“We have one airstrip, beyond the marshes. The planes come in at night.”

“But I thought—”

Amilcar interrupted him politely. “I'll be back in two days. Everything will be settled then, and you can go home.” He shook hands formally with us. “I'm leaving six of the team here. Please don't worry. You're quite safe.”

 

I slept badly that night. I had finished my cigarettes days before, and from time to time a tobacco craving would overwhelm me. I lay wrapped in my blanket, my head on my shoulder bag, dreaming of a pack of Tuskers. I could hear mosquitoes whining and lizards and rodents scurrying about somewhere, and also the deep and rhythmic surge of Ian's breathing. Like a tide, I thought, like the wash of wavelets on a pebble beach….

I threw off the blanket and quietly left the room. I went outside to the back veranda that overlooked the compound and the kitchen garden. A lantern hung from a rafter and three of the boys were sleeping beneath it in a row. A fourth leaned against a pillar, his gun slung over one shoulder.

“Evenin', Mam,” he said.

“Isn't that light dangerous?”

“There are no planes for night.”

I saw I was talking to the young boy with scars under his eyes. He called himself October-Five, he had told me, out of respect for the day General Aniceto Delgado had declared the Musave River Territories independent in 1963, and had unilaterally seceded from the republic.

“What's your real name, October-Five?”

“That's my name.”

“What was your name before?”

He paused. “Jeremeo.”

“Have you got a cigarette?”

“We don't smoke. Only Ilideo.”

“Where's he?”

“I'll go and look for him.”

October-Five came back with half a cigarette. He found a match and I lit up. I drew in the sour, strong smoke avidly, feeling my head spin, and exhaled. Whatever brand this was it put Tuskers to shame.

The night was warm. I sat down on the steps and stared out into the blackness. From somewhere in the compound a cock gave an untimely half crow.

“What time is it?” I asked.

“I think about three.”

Despite the nicotine I began to feel tired. A few more minutes and I would sleep. I asked October-Five what was tomorrow's program. He said they would have to wait to receive orders from Dr. Amilcar. The one event that was scheduled was a meeting with the comrades from the village committees in this district. We talked vaguely about UNAMO and General Delgado. October-Five had taken part in the fighting at Luso.

“We would have won,” he said confidently, then reflected. “I think. Except for the planes and the gasoline bombs. We shoot at them but we have no…” he searched for the word.

“Missiles?”

“Yes. But General Delgado is buying us some. Some good missiles.”

“Atomique Boum,” I said. He smiled.

I went back to our room. Ian slept on undisturbed.

 

The next morning we watched from a distance as the comrades from the village committees met. Ilideo presided. He was a lighter-skinned, thickset boy who was trying without much success to grow a small mustache. They talked for a while, the Land-Rover was inspected, and then we were led out. The comrades of
the village committees were both men and women, all middle-aged, I noticed, and all thin and raggedly dressed. They looked at us with resentful curiosity. Some questions were put to Ilideo.

“They want to know if you are Cubanos, South African or Tugas,” Ilideo said.

“We're English,” Ian said proudly.

“Tell them we're doctors,” I said.

This news brought some smiles and a few well-wishes. Then Ilideo declared the meeting closed, and the comrades of the village committees drifted off in various directions up the forest paths that led away from the mission-school clearing.

 

In the afternoon, the Migs came. It was a hot, still day and we were sitting out on the veranda at the back of the school waiting for the sun to go down and the evening breezes to pick up. We never heard them coming; they seemed to arrive simultaneously with their noise. They came in low, three of them, at about a hundred feet. The rip and battering noise of their jets was shocking, palpable. We saw them for a split second, then they were gone, out of sight, somewhere over the forest, the dispersed rumbling echo of their engines all about us. Ilideo ordered us inside.

The planes came over again, higher and more slowly. I saw them clearly this time, silver Migs with teardrop pods under their wings. They banked and circled once over us and then flew away.

Ilideo said they deliberately came in low like that. It made people—children mainly—run instictively out of their houses. There were so many deserted villages in this region, he said, and the planes did not want to waste their bombs or cannons on empty houses.

We did not venture outside for the rest of the day. If the planes had come in from the opposite direction they would have seen us, lined up on the veranda waiting for dusk.

I thought of Usman, and wondered if he had been flying. What if I had run out, waving? I felt chilled and unhappy: for the first time the grimmer reality of Usman's “job” was apparent to me.

Ian came into the room. Daily, he was more chipper and buoy
ant. He said that he had been talking to Ilideo and the others and it was clear to him that they were fighting some kind of fantasy war. They spoke, he said, as if the UNAMO heartland were impregnable, uninvadable.

“They've got no idea what's going on,” he said, in almost outraged tones. “They talk about ‘the front' but there is no front. There's several hundred men marching up a road toward a town wondering if anyone'll try to stop them. Tragic.”

He lowered his voice. “I think we've got to get out of here ourselves, Hope.”

“No, I don't think so.”

“Listen, everything Amilcar's talked about—you know, handing us over when we're through the lines, flying us to Togo—it's fantasy. We could just walk out of here tonight. The federal army's on the doorstep…. We just have to walk down that road, heading south. We're bound to find them.”

“I'm not walking down any road.”

“What's going to happen then, for God's sake?”

“We'll wait till Amilcar gets back.”

He looked around the room, hands on his hips, an exasperated smile on his face.

“You don't really, seriously, think he's coming back, do you?” Ian looked at me, parodying incredulity, his eyebrows raised, his mouth open. The sore on his face had scabbed over and his pale beard was softening.

“Of course he'll be back. This is his team.”

“You're as bad as them. Jesus Christ.” He shook his head and chuckled. He looked at me intently. “Incorrigible Hope. I'd forgotten what you were like.”

I leaned back against the wall, closed my eyes and fanned my face with the lid from a cardboard box.

 

It was very hot that day in the mission school; the sun seemed to press down fiercely on the asbestos roof, cooking up the air inside. I thought of cutting my jeans off at the thigh to make some shorts, but I knew I would regret it: their protection was better than an hour or two's comfort.

I walked slowly through the musty rooms of the mission school,
waiting for dark. I tried to find a pace that required a minimum of exertion, but that at the same time might generate the sensation of a breeze, imparted by my motion through the air. The air in those rooms seemed to congeal around me, almost as something semi-solid, as if I were wading through a tank filled with a transparent jelly that yielded easily but was everywhere in clammy contact with my skin.