Brazzaville Beach (34 page)

My nose touched the earth, my nostrils filled with its musty, moldy smell. I sank my fingers into it as if I were on a cliff face, clinging on. I kept my head down and stayed absolutely still.

In seconds I heard them all around me, running and tramping, calling out to each other as they chased after Ian. I heard them
firing and shouting, the noise gradually dying away. It was quiet, and soon my ears were filled with the sounds in the leaves themselves, the tiny rustlings and crepitations. I felt ants and grubs on my face, and something small and four-footed scampered by me. I started to count and had reached over two thousand before I heard them returning. But they were some way off and came nowhere near me. They were still shouting and calling to each other angrily. Did that mean they had caught Ian or that they had missed him? And if they had caught him, I wondered what they would do with him….

Long minutes after they had gone, and there was no more noise, I sat up. Only now I felt the pulse and ache of my ankle. Still sitting, I pushed myself backward until I hit a tree trunk. I leaned back against it and rubbed the crown of my head against its rough bark. I settled down in the forest, in the blackness, and waited for dawn.

THE NEURAL CLOCK

Lying alone in the dark in her house on the beach, Hope often remembers that night. When the memories become too vivid she leaves her bed and goes through to her tiny kitchen for a drink. She switches all the lights on in the house and tunes her radio to the BBC world service, or to some local “batuque” music station
.

That night, in the grove of trees, seemed to her sense of subjective time—her private time—to crawl by with intolerable slowness. The refusal of the earth to turn faster, to bring the light round to this corner of Africa, to initiate civil time once more, seemed to her almost a personal insult
.

And in the dense blackness of that interminable night, she was highly conscious of the clocklike systems in her own body. The beat of her heart, the inflation and deflation of her lungs. But she knows now that our sense
of private time is not formed by the pulsing heart or the breathing lungs but by the neural impulses of our brain
.

A neuron transmits a pulse about fifty times a second, and the impulse travels down the branching tree of the nervous system at a speed of approximately fifty meters a second. This neural timekeeper is never at rest for one instant; throughout our entire life the neural race never quickens or slows. Its regularity and constancy fulfill all the requirements for the definition of a clock
.

If this is indeed how our sense of personal time originates—by the ticking of the neural clock at fifty times a second—then one intriguing consequence of the theory is that other primates, whose neural impulses function identically to ours, should have a similar sensation of personal time also
.

Hope sits in her bright, loud house and looks out into the darkness toward the sound of the waves. It seems strange, but not inconceivable, that Clovis should have bad a sense of his life passing by—a finite sequence of present moments—just as she does
.

 

As the blackness of night slowly cleared I saw that we had been running through a large plantation of teak trees. They were about thirty feet high and their big, flat, wrinkled leaves, the size of tennis rackets, hung motionless in the cool, still air of early morning. There was no undergrowth beneath the trees. The carpet of dead leaves was six inches thick—nothing grew here. I stood up and leaned back heavily against the tree, causing the dry leaves above me to rattle. I was facing the way I had been running. All around me I could see the damage done to the level leaf floor by the running boots of the soldiers. None had come very close to me.

I tested my ankle cautiously. It was slightly swollen, but could just about take my weight. A sprain, then. I dusted myself down, shook the twigs and leaf fragments and other living creatures from my hair and clothes, and limped off to see what lay beyond the teak plantation.

It took me five minutes to reach the edge. All the way I followed the tracks left by the soldiers through the fallen leaves. Beyond the plantation edge was thick bush. Had Ian escaped, or
had they caught him at the boundary? If he had reached the bush they would never have found him.

The sun was rising on my right-hand side. I turned to face it and walked along the edge of the plantation. After about three or four hundred yards I came to a firebreak in the trees. From the firebreak, running out into the bush, was an overgrown track. I set off up it, noticing that nothing had driven down here since last year's rains. Creepers grew across the twin wheel ruts and the central stripe of turf was thick with weeds and knee-high grass. Every now and then I stopped and listened, but I heard nothing, only the calls of birds, loud and fresh—orioles, hornbills, doves.

A forest path crossed the track, well trodden and dusty, like the one we had been running on the night before. I decided to follow it, still heading east into the rising sun.

The tree cover began to thin after half a mile or so. I passed one or two brackish pools stuffed with reeds. I was thirsty by now, but was not about to risk drinking out of these slime-fringed swamps. I limped on, scratching at my bites, trying to ignore the questions that yammered in my head, trying not to recall the expression on Ian Vail's face in my last glimpse of him before he ran away and left me.

The landscape was changing around me. It was markedly greener and lusher. There were patches of tall, sedgy grasses, thick clumps of rushes and bamboo. One had the sense of a brimming water table inches below the surface. On either side of the path were groves of palms and palmettos and curious, jagged-looking trees with tortured pale bark and tough viridian leaves that looked as if they had been cut from polished linoleum. We were in the Musave River Territories.

At about midday, very tired, my throat raw and cracked, I heard a curious clucking in the undergrowth. I crouched down and lifted a trailing branch. It was a scrawny startled hen with three chicks. A hen. I let the branch fall. There must be a village nearby. I continued down the path.

I saw the sagging thatched roofs some two hundred yards off, but it was suspiciously quiet, even though a few wisps of smoke appeared to be rising from cooking fires. I advanced cautiously. The path merged into the beaten grassless earth of the compound.

The place hardly merited the description of village, really; it
was just a cluster of huts around an old shade tree. There were no animals, I saw, so I assumed it was deserted, but there was a smell of smoke about, and underlying that a sour nutty reek that I had smelled before.

I passed the first hut and peered round the corner into the open space around the shade tree.

Three dead bodies blazed there, tall, pale yellow flames wobbling along their length. The corpses were swollen but already charred sufficiently to make sex or age or manner of death impossible to determine. The smell coming off them seemed to pour down my throat—porky, nutty, sour and mineral all at once—like a foul medicine. I dry-heaved convulsively, three or four times, in an involuntary spasm. I spat copious saliva. Somewhere in my dehydrated body a little fluid remained, clearly. My cracked throat eased, my tongue was slick and moist.

“Amilcar!” I shouted. “It's me, Hope!”

A man came out of a hut. At first I did not recognize him and I felt my body lurch with alarm. But then three of the Atomique Boum team appeared behind him and I gave a little whimper of relief. I limped toward them. I felt like crying; I felt I ought to cry, in a way, but I was too tired.

“Hope?…” Amilcar said. I could see he was utterly and completely surprised to see me. He smiled and moved his head and the sun flashed off the new silver frames of his spectacles. Everything he wore was new. He looked incredibly smart in a new camouflage uniform, all green, brown and black lozenges, creaking with starch. He wore a funny little kepi-style hat, with a protective sun flap at the rear, also camouflaged, matching his tunic and trousers.

“My God,” I said. “What an outfit. Amazing.”

“I've been promoted,” he said, pointing at the pips on his epaulettes. “I'm a colonel now. And this”—he pointed at the three boys—“is my battalion.”

We laughed.

 

We left the village with its still smoking corpses toward the end of the afternoon. We had caught the scrawny hen, cooked her and eaten her along with an old tough yam and some unripe plantain. The three boys were October-Five, Bengue and Simon. They
were silent and subdued, their faces solemn and watchful. These were the three we had seen making their escape across the kitchen garden. Nobody knew what had happened to Ilideo and the others. “I'm sure they got away,” Amilcar said with breezy confidence. “They'll be moving back, like us. We'll meet up, don't worry.”

I told him of my own experiences, of the attack and then the chase. Amilcar used my story to bolster the boys' morale. Look, he told them, twenty men, armed men, were chasing Hope and she got away. The implication being that if I could do it anyone could. The boys said nothing; they looked searchingly at Amilcar as he spoke, as if keen to trap him in any equivocation, but his sincerity and his confidence were manifest. Later, I caught the boys glancing at me covertly, as if my presence guaranteed the safety of the other members of the team.

I walked beside Amilcar as he led us out of the village. The boys trailed behind us, gunless, hands in pockets, sometimes talking softly among themselves.

“How did those people in the village die?” I asked.

He said he didn't know. Perhaps a patrol. As far as he knew—as far as General Delgado's intelligence was aware—units of the federal army were massing at two roads that led into the UNAMO heartland, but they were miles away.

“So, it must have been a patrol,” he conceded, with a frown. “But I still don't understand how they attacked the school. And at night. It's not like them. Did you see any whites among the soldiers?”

I said I hadn't.

“There are more mercenaries now in the army. Maybe it's them. From Rhodesia and the Congo.”

He went on speculating. Once all the UNAMO forces had withdrawn behind the huge marshes that fringed the River Territories there would be a stalemate. The federals could not advance. UNAMO could regroup and rebuild. In any event, he said, looking at the sky, when the rains came all fighting would necessarily stop. And then in the south EMLA would launch their offensive: in the south you could fight during the rains. So the federals would have to withdraw and the UNAMO columns could move out into the field again.

I looked at him, smart in his new uniform, as he talked with tranquil confidence about this chain of events as if they were inevitable and preordained. I glanced back at his “troops,” the remains of his personal UNAMO column, three frightened and confused teenage members of a volleyball team, and wondered if all zealots saw the world in this simple way, devoid of any connection to the evidence on hand. Or perhaps he had gone mad.

Before dusk we came to another deserted village, one without any corpses to burn. We searched the huts for food but found nothing.

Just beyond the village was a road, tarmac, in bad repair. We climbed up onto it and looked up and down its deserted length. The light was soft and dusky and the first bats were out, ducking and jinking over our heads. Amilcar told me the lie of the land.

To turn left, north, would take us to the causeway that crossed the great marsh. There we would rejoin the regrouping UNAMO forces. To turn right, south, would lead us to one of the two federal army units that were preparing to advance up this road sometime in the next two or three days.

“And I assume that last bit of information is for my benefit,” I said.

He shrugged and turned away. “If you want to go you can go,” he said, suddenly surly. “I don't care.”

I put my hands on my hips and looked around me. We could be almost anywhere in Africa, I recognized. The scene was at once typical and banal. A pot-holed road running straight through low scrubby forest, a scatter of decrepit huts, a strange dry smell in the air of dust and vegetation, a big red sun about to dip below the treeline, the plaintive chirrup of crickets.

“I'll stay with you a little longer,” I said, not wanting to walk alone down that road to meet the federal army. I punched my fist tiredly in the air. “Atomique Boum!”

The boys smiled.

 

We reached the causeway a mile farther up the road, in the last of the fading light. It was about three quarters of a mile long and ran straight across a wide expanse of marsh. The causeway looked solid and well constructed. The road surface was intact and the
gradient of the banks was precise and maintained for its entire length. Here and there beneath it were large concrete culverts to permit the flow of water in times of flood.

We walked across it briskly. A big white heron took off and shrugged itself effortfully into the evening sky. It was liberating to be in open space again, to have a large sky above and a sense of horizons receding. I began to realize, also, why Amilcar was so confident. It would not be difficult to defend this road.

Amilcar was preoccupied. “These boys,” he said discreetly, disappointedly, “they are not true soldiers.”

As we approached the end of the causeway our pace faltered. It was almost dark now. Amilcar told us to wait and walked forward into the gloom. Then we heard him shouting—a password, I assumed. After five minutes he came back, mystified. There was no one there, he said.

We proceeded onward.

At the end of the causeway was a small village—the usual huddle of mud huts on either side of the road. One hut had been demolished and its remaining thatch appeared burned. There was no evidence of other damage.

On either side of the road were abandoned trenches, and in one sandbagged emplacement an antitank gun. It had a very long, slim barrel and it smelled new, of milled, turned metal and fresh rubber from its tires. Its breech mechanism glistened with oil. To one side was a tidy stack of flat wooden boxes. As we explored we found more boxes and crates of abandoned equipment and ammunition. In a hut we discovered a hundred Warsaw Pact Kalashnikovs, tied up in bundles of ten like awkward fagots of wood.