My Chocolate Redeemer (31 page)

Waq is full of signs, you find them at bus stops and hanging from hedges: ‘Zanj is the Tomb of Imperialism' and another popular one is ‘Self-sufficiency above all'. Kiosks by the roadsides sell eggs, fruit and vegetables and even these carry slogans urging people to eat Zanjian food only: ‘Get your frozen Zanjian rabbit here – 21% more protein'. For a while I feared that they ate worse things still. I studied the meat on the butchers' tables and was convinced it was provided by the rats that I saw outside my hotel. The meat is not red, but black with congealed blood, and the flies are awful. But this is not rat meat, it's bushmeat. It comes from a rodent called the grasscutter, Kwatch tells me, which is not a member of the rat family but is related to the porcupine and the chinchilla. It's much prized and is twice the price of beef or pork, but I'm glad that I'm managing to survive on toast and tea, Egyptian peanuts and beer. Strange thing is, I seldom think of my chocolate days; I think instead of the Redeemer and this gives me strength. Another thing that gives me strength is Kwatch's determination to persuade me that I won't find him.

‘For one thing,' says Kwatch, ‘if you've got this God, then remember you've got to split him three ways. To the Ite, he is the Lord, right? Because they're Christians. To the Kanga he's an Imam, or something that the Moslems go for. And to the Wouff he's a bloody rock! So what you've got is not a redeemer, you've got an entire holy trinity!'

‘I know he's here.'

‘I admire your faith,' says Kwatch, ‘but can you prove it?'

Kwatch claims to be Lebanese though he speaks English with a German accent. The large lobes of his ears are covered in soft down. ‘I mean, do you really think that there exists a cannibal king in Zanj, one that everybody knows about but won't tell you? Do you really think, delightful young lady, with eyes the colour of smoke, and hair – my god, little lady, what hair! The colour of firelight – do you think that you will find your lost cannibal king here? Whoever filled your head with these stories deserves to be flogged. We couldn't afford such a luxury. The country of Zanj is little, land-locked and backward. We grow some coffee, but we don't have enough insecticides, our roads are impassable, we have some diamonds, they say, somewhere in the mountains, but we have no railway system, all our goods must flow down the river through three countries on their way to the sea, when the rivers flow at all. Our population growth is frightening. We have already three million. Maybe to a smart French miss that doesn't seem a lot. But let me tell you that when the World Bank visited us ten years ago, we had only half that number. The World Bank doesn't come here any more. That's why we're so pleased to see you. Maybe you're the start of the tourist trade!'

I sit in his bar and sip my beer. For a week now I have been the only customer. According to Kwatch, trade fluctuates and the hotel fills up unexpectedly, depending on developments. What sort of developments? ‘Political developments,' says Kwatch heavily. ‘That's the only development we have.' My days are divided into roughly three periods, of which sitting in the bar after curfew is the third. In the mornings I dress slowly and eat in the dining room where bread and coffee is provided for the Albanian delegation and myself. Sometimes there is no sugar for the coffee, sometimes no milk. The manager, a portly little Roumanian, comes into the dining room and apologises for the late arrival of whatever is not there and craves our indulgence. We know then that whatever has not been forthcoming won't be, and go forward into our day; the Albanian delegation to the marketplace with their pamphlets, I to walk about town, pretending to be looking, pretending to be sightseeing, when I know that like the missing sugar or bread at breakfast, the sights I wish to see will not be forthcoming. But then looking is a good disguise, I find. If you do it well enough no one dreams that what you are really doing is waiting. Mr Adelescu, the hotel manager, was not always a hotel manager, as he tells me mournfully, but he was ‘sacrificed'.

‘I came out here to rebuild the capital of Waq, sent by my president, President Ceausescu. I was gift of the president. I came out here soon after most of the Western diplomatic missions closed, when Comrade Atkins broke off relations with France. I came to spread the Roumanian gospel of socialist architecture based upon the Roumanian plan. Knock down the slums and hovels of Waq. Replace with people's city, spacious streets and serviceable quarters. But the bulldozers we were promised by Hungary never arrived. And I was sacrificed!' He spreads his hands and shrugs apologetically. ‘This morning we have no milk. The ferry has broken down twenty kilometres up-river.'

Kwatch gives me reasons why Monsieur Brown can't be here; he speaks in the language of scepticism, of science, of observation: ‘If there's no sign of him, he can't be here.' His urgent attempts to convince me of his non-existence, his kindly, laboratory approach, give me quite another idea, because if you listen carefully to the language of persuasion you can hear that through the deep subterranean caves of his grammar runs the river of fear. In fact, the denials he offers me continually provide clues and pointers to the presence somewhere of the Redeemer.

And so this talk of his absence excites me. And I'm getting ready for something, I can feel it, it comes to me that if he is to appear then I must be ready for him and that's why after one of these disinformation sessions with Kwatch I go upstairs to my bedroom and stretch out on my bed. I may be wearing my leopard print bodysuit and leopard print leggings, the thick black belt with the dragon clasp and a pair of purple leather gloves. Or I may be wearing my black lycra mini-skirt and black opaque tights. It doesn't matter. From my bed I am afforded a view of myself in the freckled mirror of my brown wooden cupboard with the wonky left leg (I have propped that leg with a copy of
The Life of Mussolini
, one of those salvaged from among the poor burnt books after the fire at the Priory Hotel) and I watch myself lying on the bed. It's my spiritual exercise. And even without my walkman I hear the music in my head as I remove whatever I am wearing and stretch out on the bed and lie there naked, hearing the sounds of something appropriate, say an electronic ‘Four Seasons', or early Presley, the only acceptable sort, say ‘Milk Cow Blues Boogie', or Gregorian plainchant done reggae-style. Sometimes I think my musical education has not been very complete; maybe more attention should have been paid to the lyrics we love and learn, especially since for so many of us they are the only form of religion available.

It's vital that I lie in the middle of my bed and then spread my legs in a V, checking on my central position in the mirror so that its freckled eye bisects me: I did not arrive at this position without experiment. In fact, if I were as scientific as my Uncle Claude, I would say that I have achieved what I call this ideal position by a series of experiments, ceaselessly manoeuvring myself on the bed so as to achieve precisely the right position, just as a radio antenna is adjusted until the signal is received, or as the emulsion is laid on the photographic plate to record the flight of elementary particles, or as the gas in the bubble chamber is made ready to allow us to see the passage of invisible neutral pions and the dance of charmed particles. Of course we do not ‘see' them at all, but only their passage through the universe we have prepared for them. We record their tracks and then fall over and adore the obvious. The will to power has disguised itself as the search for knowledge, and the love of the obvious is what has eaten at Uncle Claude, his weakness for props spun into a dramatic theory and narrated in the self-satisfied tones of a man sick from his own certainty. I prefer to remember that there are particles which reveal themselves only when they have changed into others. Before then they are invisible, their presence is only detected when they decay into visible tracks, which are the tracks of new particles entirely. In other words, it is only after their death that they come to life, it is only after they have disappeared that we can see them. I have learnt something after all from Uncle Claude. The bastard!

And what am I positioning myself for? Well, I'm not entirely sure except, in some way, for
him
! Though I do not join my uncle's church of cause and effect, his cult of erectile tissue, his temple of psychological delusions. I sail by internal tides, the salty, bloody ocean within me. When the time and the position are right, he will come!

There have been signs. There have been times when I have been pretty depressed having to endure the impenetrable bonhomie of the Albanian political hucksters, the lies of the manager about breakfast, the heat, the loneliness, and the smooth evasions of the barman Kwatch. But there
have
been signs. The first came one afternoon as I wandered around the perimeter of the hotel, and found that the River Zan, which floods the mud flats at the far end of town in what is laughingly called the harbour, where the stilt houses cluster, in fact runs past the back of the Kingdom Towers, runs silently and almost guiltily, like so much in this country, as if it did not want to be observed, or as if it carried on its thick muscular current a cargo of dead babies or human limbs, a hateful, hidden contraband. Behind the hotel it flows through a narrow pass that it has cut for itself over the centuries and which can only be reached by scrambling down a steep bank thick with thorn bushes and grass as tough as rusted wire. Into the side of this bank there has been scooped out, perhaps some years ago, to judge by the secondary growth of grass and shrubs, a shallow pit, and into the pit there have been thrown hundreds and hundreds of used sanitary towels. Once they must have been covered over but the occasional rains and scouring winds have revealed the tangled mass of blood-stained bandages. The pit gapes, it's grievous, the blood on the bandages has turned brown where it is not black and some towels have been almost washed clean of it and show only the faintest pink tinge.

I can't tell you what this discovery did to me. (Well, even though you can be told nothing, I am going to do so anyway. You whom nothing can surprise since presumably such discoveries are arranged by you, like everyone else, long in advance. At least allow your creatures to bore you dreadfully by telling you what you have known all along, and they have not.) The pit of towels spoke to me of time and women. They told me that there had been a time when things were ordered differently in the country of Zanj, certainly among those lucky enough to live in the city of Waq, a time when the elementary comforts of the outside world were available to the women I see here today in the marketplace with their thin faces and their skinny children, their bushmeat and their monkey meat reddening the advertising brochures of the Albanian Revolution. I knew then that the oppressive insistence of everyone and all I saw in the country of Zanj, that this place was sunk in poverty and torpor from which nothing could arouse it, that things had always been this way and always would be, that its people were wretches who might bleed where they stood – all this was a lie and it vanished at the sight of the secret of the river bank.

Let me tell you right now that I wasn't dressed to be exploring the river bank, not in a white silk organza blouse, more suitable for evening wear, and navy gaberdine jodhpurs and, as you can imagine, my pants were soon covered in a mass of spiny black thorns that gave the material a bearded look, but I went on down to the water's edge anyway, after I had discovered the pit, and there I found a little boy fishing. He wore a shirt only and the curve of his buttocks was like marble. He caught a fish while I watched and held it up, small, dark and very ugly with an aged whiskery face. I felt he was going to throw it back into the river which curdled past his feet, its little rugged waves capped with dirty, creamy foam. But he suddenly bent down and smashed its head on a rock. I called out but he didn't turn. Perhaps he didn't see me. I think sometimes that people have no idea I'm here. As I watched he pulled from the fish's whiskery mouth a wicked three-barbed hook and cast his line back into the river. I went away again, scrabbling my way up the bank, using my hands to pull me up quickly, breaking a nail, which made me curse. As I passed the pit of towels I reached out and touched one; it was stiff, like a dead person, but warm.

I knew then, without thinking, what I had to do and that's when I went upstairs to my room and locked the door. I lay down on the bed and took off my clothes, kicking and throwing them into the corner as I dragged them off. As soon as I had got my clothes off and lay there sweating slightly, listening to the sound of my breathing, I reached for my bedside mirror and looked at myself. The breeze that you will often get in Waq in the early afternoon was cool across my body and I stroked the inside of my knee. The mirror showed me in pieces and I put them together by moving it across my body, adding a breast to a shoulder, joining a body from navel to collarbone and a face somewhat pale and white around the lips, adding an eyebrow seen from above, bristling over the eye socket. Some bits are more difficult to connect – my pubic mound, an atoll surrounded by a fleshy sea, and a chin more pointed than I had suspected. This was all experimental stuff, but of three things I was sure: I should wait, I should be ready, and he was close to me.

Naturally they follow me, crazy little white girl strolling around town. The job's down to the sad little tyke in the dark woollen suit who watches my window from the ruined villa over the road. They suffer for security's sake here. He's my first glimpse of the Public Audit Bureau in action. The classes in Zanj are two: the poor and the armed. The armed take it in turns to wear each others' clothes. It's my first introduction to the knowledge that tyranny likes to dress. Today there are soldiers riding around before curfew; yesterday these soldiers were accountants in suits and glasses, carrying briefcases, and from whom even the children run in fear.