My Chocolate Redeemer (32 page)

‘Who called them by that name?'

Kwatch shrugs. ‘Somebody liked the sound. Sound is everything here. They do the books – understand? Settle accounts.'

‘Who was the somebody?'

Kwatch raises his eyes to heaven and sighs heavily. ‘Give it up, Bella. He's not here.'

But there are great gaps in his pretence which I can expose when I wish. He can be trapped pretty easily.

‘Who are those guards they have patrolling the Presidential Palace? They're not Zanjians.'

‘No, they're Moroccans.'

‘What happened to the Palestinians? You used to have Palestinians, didn't you? They're the best.'

‘Who told you about the Palestinians?'

‘Somebody.'

He swallows hard.

See what I mean?

The glacial melt of time, seeming slow only at first, suddenly sweeps us away. My first weeks in Waq are when time waits, while I pray for signs and wonders. Prayers have an odd way of turning into theories. I have a theory and it runs as follows. Having explored over several weeks the city of Waq, I have come to the conclusion that all is not what it seems. I am sure, on the basis of my observations, that there is simply not enough here to explain the mystery of Zanj, there is not enough visible matter to explain the totality which Waq claims to be. Note,
claims to be
, because there is something very odd about the city of Waq. Number one mystery is the whereabouts of the Number One Peasant, Comrade Atkins. Visit the Presidential Palace at the top of town and you will see there a squat, concrete bunker that looks to the innocent eye of your reporter like a gaol, stuck away at the end of Patrice Lumumba Drive, with all the foreign legations crouching around it like village houses around a grand château, the embassies of the Yemen, Albania, the People's Republic of the Congo, and there is obviously a swift trade in these places because the Yemeni Embassy was once occupied by the Belgians and before that by the Dutch and the coats of arms of these countries remain there still, and if you look closely at the pock-marked brick gateposts of its entrance, an Austrian eagle is to be discerned, wounded in one eye by a stray bullet which still protrudes from the stone.

The President is said to be in residence, bored soldiers patrol the entrance, notices appear written by hand, and stuck to the security fence: ‘
Number One Peasant, Comrade Atkins, today welcomes the Ambassador of Libya …', ‘Three Bandits were executed at dawn! Long live the People's Republic of Zanj!'

Now this sort of thing is all very well, but it's simply not enough, is it? So I say again, there is not enough visible matter to hold the so-called universe of Zanj together. The observable material amounts, in my estimation, to no more than about twenty per cent of the total. So where is the missing matter and why can't we see it? Well, I believe that it exists beyond the confines of Waq itself and that we can't see it because it is dark matter. This then is my theory. It may sound a little unlikely, but my position is that we can show that my theoretical extrapolations point to a hidden universe, much larger than ours, an invisible neighbour. How can I know this? Well, you will understand that the universe has a propensity for arranging itself in patterns and sequences which have the mysterious power to conform to whatever the observer expects to find. To the anthropic principle that things are the way they are because we are, I add the fairy-tale principle: that things will look just as you wish them to look, so long as we provide ourselves with a special way of seeing. God does not play dice with the universe, someone insisted. My Uncle Claude replied that, on the contrary, the universe plays poker with God, and it's about to call his bluff. I don't think either of these things is true, God may not play dice, but I believe he does play hide-and-seek. I don't expect you to take all this on trust, you will want some scientific proof, a clue, a sign that this hidden universe which I am investigating exists at all.

My sign comes to me one evening about a month after arriving in Zanj. I am sitting having a drink in Kwatch's bar. It is his habit to give me change in local currency, converting my American dollars into Zanjian money. Among the notes he hands me is one rather older than the rest, leaf-brown, wrinkled and rather frail, and this leads me to single it out before putting the change in my purse, smoothing it on the bar counter. Staring back at me, without his glasses admittedly, without his cap and without his field marshal's baton, now with his head crowned, or haloed in a wreath, perhaps of laurel leaves, which gives him a rather Roman look, is Monsieur Brown. Now I know that my Redeemer liveth! And this is no trick, watch my hands carefully, check that I have nothing up my sleeves. The fact is that my friend has sent me a note from the other side. A window opens on the world next door and I am on my way, I am going through that window. Glass and all.

The question is where to start? Actually that's not very difficult to decide because, as we know, the universe looks much the same in every direction. I use the astronomical ‘we' so that it should be understood that mine is a real scientific investigation and to alert the careful observer that my voyage is based upon the firmest scientific principles, for it is clear to anyone but the blind that there is something outside the city of Waq which draws things to it, something or someone, and this gravitational force must have an explanation even if we can't yet say with any clarity what it is. Or who it is. I pack immediately.

I've not told Kwatch of my plans but I think he knows. He's taken to following me around the place with a hang-dog expression, the look of someone who hasn't quite come to terms with himself. I can't decide whether he gave me the banknote by accident, or was it a Freudian slip? Or did he want me to know? There's something strange and apologetic about his manner and, although he doesn't actually apologise, this sorrowing attitude of his worries me and so I make my departure arrangements quietly. Out of the mouths of barmen!

In a little bag I pack a few changes of clothing, among them a little black cotton tulip-skirted dress with pink spots, a green silk jacket and trousers, a pink crepe button-through dress and rather pretty, dark-blue lycra stockings. I hide my bag of clothes at the back of the hotel on the river bank. On one of these sorties I see soldiers repairing and painting, sweeping and washing the main road that runs from the Presidential Palace to the hotel.

I'm not exactly bowled over when I see from my window these guys marching up the main steps. They're soldiers from the Presidential Palace, except they are soldiers no longer now. They've taken off their metal helmets and their boots and they wear dark-grey safari suits and carry briefcases. The Public Audit Bureau is on the march. Times change fast in Africa, it's a matter of hats. I hear the little Roumanian manager shrieking at the auditors.

‘But the presidential suite is unfit to receive His Excellency. Please convey my joy at the suggestion, my grief at the unreadiness of the rooms. If only you'd given me some warning!'

I slip out the back, claim my little travel bag and head for the marketplace. With an hour to run before curfew, I get on the yellow bus called
Sweet Little Me
, its roof piled at least two metres high with bags, pots, boxes, bicycles and blankets, which gives the bus a distinct list to the left. Climbing aboard with me are about thirty other people all carrying their goods and chattels, hens in baskets, snakes in basins, supplies of bushmeat, manioc and cooked maize. I am dressed for the road in crisp, classic tailoring, a long lean jacket, tapering trousers and fitted blouse; my scarf is covered with turquoise butterflies on a creamy ground and I wear a black straw hat. The beggars who haunt the marketplace give us a rousing send-off. They possess an incredible variety of disabilities, goitres, stumps, ganglions. There are blind old men led by boys, there are limbless babies carried by girls, there are here the champions of the thousand ills to which the flesh is heir, the marketplace is a terrible trading fair of infirmities and deformities. Yet the beggars are surprisingly cheerful, determined and imaginative. One plays tunes from ‘Orpheus in the Underworld' on a nose flute; another with no eyes but round, milky sockets carries a tape-recorder and has gone high-tech, slipping a tape into his ghetto-blaster and broadcasting at tremendous volume his appeal for alms for the love of Allah. Before boarding the bus I scatter small change like the sower with his seed.

‘You're generous,' says the driver, who introduces himself as Sessou. ‘You give for the love of Allah.'

‘No, just because I feel sorry for them.'

We take off in a storm of dust into which the beggars dissolve. I can hear the luggage on the roof, tied down with rope and wire, creaking protestingly; our list to the left is even worse.

I ask the driver what I should pay.

‘First stop is Bamba. Where are you going?'

‘Wherever you're going. I want to explore the country. How much, please?'

‘It doesn't matter. When you know where you're going, you'll know what to pay. You will recognise the place when you get there?'

‘Certainly.'

Perhaps I haven't dressed very wisely because the bus is twice as full as it should be and smells to high heaven. It's not only the crush of people and goods, the stale sweat and dust, but one of the anteaters has diarrhoea and the packets of bushmeat give off a strong gamey aroma of blood and skin that make me feel pretty queasy. Mr Sessou speaks English, French and a number of the vernaculars. The people on the bus are a tribal mix: there are Wouff, tall, dark and silent, semi-naked but for little leather skirts, wearing round their necks a small stone with a hole bored through the centre strung on a leather thong. There are Ite, mostly in Western clothes, the women with their heads swathed in bright turbans. And there are the Moslem Kanga in flowing white. I sit beside a lady as wide as she is tall, her feet on a can of paraffin which reeks with that boringly chemical brazenness, so much at odds with the smell of fruit, of cured hide and the excretions of the captive animals around me. My companion carries on her lap a caged monkey, a tiny, beautiful creature which grips the bars of its cage with exquisite hands and stares at me with passionate, bewildered eyes. Because of the pronounced list of
Sweet Little Me
I tend to lean rather heavily on my companion as we race along the dusty roads, as if I were a small white moon captured by her superior gravity, but she's soft and warm as a bread oven and pays me the compliment of appearing not to notice by keeping her eyes closed. Thirty kilometres or so outside Waq, just as the sun is setting, a golden performance in an utterly empty huge blue sky, we stop.

‘Customs post.' Sessou's announcement is met with groans and hisses of disapproval from the passengers.

I walk up to the front. ‘A customs post? So soon? But we've only been travelling about twenty minutes. Surely we haven't reached the border yet?'

‘In Zanj,' Sessou explains, ‘we've got customs posts inside the country. They're all over the place. All over! It's the way the soldiers and the official cadres gather income. The story says that one day a soldier saw a customs post at the border. He saw them collecting money. And he said to himself, because he was a clever soldier, let me start one! And he did! Now they all go off somewhere and start their own – it's the soldiers' industry.'

A soldier with a rifle climbs aboard and mutters something at Sessou, who commands us to produce our
pièces d'identité
– travel permits, passports, our papers, our permissions.

No one stirs. They all regard the soldier warily and he studiously does not return the sullen looks of the bus passengers. The anteater's diarrhoea continues noisily. The soldier mutters again and stomps off the bus, his steel boots noisy on the stairs. Sessou leaves his seat with a rueful shake of his head. ‘He say all luggage must be unloaded. Taken off the roof. Examined for contraband. All. Everything. On the other hand we must pay him one thousand dollars Zanj in travellers' levy.'

It's clear that ‘on the other hand' means that this is the hand to be greased.

‘Offer him twenty American dollars.'

I'm surprised by the strength of my voice and its impatience.

Sessou is swift off the mark. He confers with the soldier, money changes hands, the soldier salutes and we rattle away into the sunset. My fellow passengers are so stunned for a moment that we've come through it quickly and painlessly that they gaze at me quite boggle-eyed and then they break into applause. I seize my moment. You see, we live and learn. The alternative is that we die and nature learns. I speak in evolutionary terms, of course. But I really haven't time for evolution. I'm not a cathedral of bacteria, a cloud of particles, some sort of special plastic material on which nature plays and builds simply to keep itself going. I am me, Bella, now – or never.

I take out the banknote, the sign from the other world, and show it to my companion and her reaction is a religious spectacle, a
missa solemnis
of enthusiasm. She throws her hands up to her mouth, then to her ears; she closes her eyes and then opens them again and, seeing that the picture doesn't change, throws her hands into the air once more and jiggles them in excitement and ecstasy. I get the feeling that if she could she'd go down on her knees but the paraffin can and the monkey prevent that. Her excitement spreads to the other customers who leave their seats and crowd around us, chattering and pointing and touching their hands together in gestures of reverence. The driver Sessou shouts from the top of the bus that the movement of people is adding to the list and making driving dangerous.

‘All passengers return to seats. Movement will unroad us!' When he is ignored he pulls over to the side of the road and comes back to investigate the cause of all the excitement. The passengers are reaching out to touch the frail banknote from whose centre, beneath a circle of laurel leaves, a Caesarian image, my Redeemer glowers deeply at the world. How wonderful to see him so regally displayed. People kiss their fingers and reach out to touch his face and I remember then the stories that he told me about the belief in the healing powers of his person.