The Book of the Heathen (11 page)

Cornelius left me and returned to his work.

I went to where Abbot stood and asked him what he wanted of me.

‘With you?' he said. ‘Nothing. Why?'

‘You were in my room.'

‘I was in a room owned by the Company, filled with Company maps. I wanted to ascertain how far behind you were in your work.' He carried several ledgers and folded his arms across these as he spoke. ‘He makes quite a spectacle of himself, wouldn't you say,' he said, indicating Frere and the men around him. ‘A great pity that neither you nor Cornelius could not have arranged to have him returned a little more discreetly.'

‘We had nothing to do with it,' I said. ‘It was beyond our control.'

He smiled at this. ‘Of course.' He turned away from me. ‘Forgive me, I have a great deal to do.'

I stood in my doorway, waiting until I saw Proctor and his men march back to their boat. Once out on the water, all four men fired their rifles into the air and were answered by shots from the distant shore.

8

I had hoped to visit Frere the following day, but circumstances worked against me. On that morning a vessel arrived at the centre of the river flying a yellow flag. The waterways on either side of it emptied immediately, and I could not understand why the small steamer had dropped anchor there rather than continuing downriver. An hour later, a second vessel arrived, also showing a fever flag. These two joined themselves stern to prow and continued on their way together.

The rest of the day was filled with speculation. It was Cornelius's opinion that they had come from the mission at Mohta, but we were at a loss as to what contagion they might have carried. There had been men working on the decks of both vessels while they waited.

Several hours passed before anyone crossed the river, almost as though something of the boats' sickness might remain diluted in the water. There was some complaint from our consignment traders that the vessels they were expecting had been kept away by the flags. Later, we received word that a cargo of palm oil and block attar had been diverted to Biembo at word of the flags.

The incident left us unsettled; these things seldom occurred in isolation. An order was given to all the independent traders due to leave over the following days to conclude their work more quickly and to leave before nightfall. When they complained at being hurried like this, Fletcher told them either to leave or to take back on board all their recently unloaded supplies. Few persisted in their complaints.

‘If it is an outbreak of something at Mohta,' Cornelius said, ‘then the boats will be back and forth.'

Seven hundred women and children lived at the mission. Cross-river traffic ceased for two days afterwards. Abbot complained that everyone was overreacting, and that our business had been delayed and disrupted enough over the previous months without this.

Cornelius waited for him to leave us before saying to me, ‘I read Proctor's papers last night. The Company was informed within an hour of Frere's return. They'll know already down in Boma.'

Boma remained our administrative centre in preference to Stanleyville, where the Belgian presence was too great. Sea-breeze Boma we called it, where life was easy, and departure forever on the minds of the men who worked there.

‘Someone will be sent to examine the facts of the matter. Frere might even be returned with whoever is sent.'

‘Is there no chance that we might be left to sort it out for ourselves?' I asked him.

‘Those days are over,' he said. ‘It seems we can no longer be trusted. Besides, there are other considerations.'

I regretted having asked. He told me nothing I had not considered a hundred times over through the previous night.

He went on: ‘All I'm saying is that it is in all our interests – especially Frere's – to be aware that these things are about to happen to us, for us to be ready for them to happen, and then for us to act accordingly.'

‘Which, you believe, involves us keeping our distance from the man.'

‘Whatever.'

‘Are we going to sacrifice him so readily?'

He shook his head at this remark. ‘I am as powerless as you,' he said.

I asked if anyone had been to see Frere since his return.

‘Bone is under orders to keep everyone away for the first few days.'

‘Why?'

‘Perhaps to give Frere time to prepare himself.'

‘And to imagine that we here, his friends, have all abandoned him.'

‘I doubt he will believe that.'

‘Has Bone set a guard on him?'

‘Bone himself, honest, decent, conscientious little man that he is.'

‘Hardly our greatest conversationalist.'

‘And perhaps that is the last thing Frere needs of us for the time being.'

‘And after this embargo?'

‘Then presumably whoever wishes to see him will be free to do so.' I heard the note of caution sounded in the remark.

It was as we discussed the other matters of the day – primarily the anticipated arrival of our monthly consignment of rubber and indigo – that Fletcher arrived with news of an accident at the quarry, a landslide beneath which four workers had been buried, believed killed. I took out our ledger of employees from my desk and asked him if he knew the men's names.

‘Who among us knows
any
of their names? Abbot's up there now, flapping around like the headless chicken that he is.'

‘Will it hold up the digging?' Cornelius said.

‘Apparently not. The fall was on an old face.'

It was unlikely that the diggers' bodies would be retrieved unless they were either visible or easily accessible. In the past, men had been killed in the quarry and abandoned beneath the rock and earth which had crushed them. Their families were afterwards sought and compensated depending on how loyal the workers were deemed to have been – another division of Abbot's authority – and how long they had worked for the Company.

At the news of a single death, ten families would immediately petition Abbot, and then sit for days on the quarry floor until they were either driven out or they abandoned their useless appeals. We were regularly sent directives on how every type of payment and compensation was to be calculated.

I went with Fletcher and Cornelius to the quarry, where we were joined by Abbot. It was clear where the wall had collapsed: a slope of bright red earth and soft rock, fifty feet high, near-liquid in appearance and spreading outwards over the quarry floor. There was some effort still being made to search the surface of this by men probing with long canes, but little hope remained for the buried diggers.

It was Abbot's opinion that only three, not four, men had been lost, and that this ought to be remembered when the wailing women arrived. He made no attempt to supervise the search for the men, leaving this to those who had been working alongside them when the fall occurred, and those who knew how much easier it was to search than to continue working elsewhere. Abbot calculated that the work of twenty men would be lost for half a day. Fletcher asked him if that included the three dead men, and Abbot said it did.

I went with Cornelius to the quarry floor, to the outermost edge of the debris.

‘They cut it too sharp,' he said. He indicated the high, sheer faces all around us.

‘That's because there's less and less to recover,' I told him, knowing that within a year the place would be abandoned. We watched the naked men on the slope above us. There was little apparent order to their searching, but even they must have by then understood that they were digging for corpses.

A man higher up the slope began suddenly to scream. He scrabbled in the earth at his feet, and a moment later he pulled free the lower part of a man's leg and foot. Others scrambled up the slope to help him. Letting go of the corpse, the rescuer then cupped his hands to his mouth and let out a cry which reverberated around the enclosed space.

‘Now Abbot will have to go to the bother of a burial,' Cornelius said. He started forward up the slope and I followed him.

By the time we arrived at the top, the body had been fully retrieved. It looked flattened, tan from head to foot, both arms and both legs either dislocated or broken, or both. The man's eyes were cleared of the red clay and it was scooped from his mouth. At our approach, the diggers stood aside and fell silent, acknowledging our greater responsibility in the matter. Both Cornelius and I were covered from head to foot in the same red mess. Cornelius told two of the men to drag the body to the quarry floor, and we waited where we stood while this was done.

9

It was raining as I approached the gaol, and water poured from its corrugated roof in a succession of spouts. Bone's own quarters stood to one side of the building, and a third, equally dilapidated structure housed his small garrison. All this was at some distance from the compound, reached by a path through the scrub. In the dry season, when the vegetation died back, the foundations of other, lost buildings could be seen rising to knee height. There was some speculation as to what these had once been used for, and it was generally agreed that, like so many of the buildings across the river, they had been holding quarters for slaves, gathered here awaiting shipment to the coast, or east cross-country, wherever the demand was greatest, and I seldom failed to feel some faint, sour echo of the place and its ghosts each time I passed through it.

Arriving at the gaol, I encountered Bone and Clayton on the building's narrow veranda. Looking at them through the streaming water was like looking at men sitting behind a waterfall. I was by then soaked, and steam rose from my shoulders and chest. They were playing cards and made a show of stopping their game to watch me approach. Bone called out for me to identify myself, saying that he couldn't make me out through the water. Both of them laughed at this. I passed through the water and stood beside them, squeezing the wet from my arms and waiting as it drained into a pool at my feet.

‘Rain,' Bone said. ‘Only an idiot would be out in it.'

The wet season was by then well established and parts of the compound flooded daily. The river was high, and most of the traders had left our jetties and wharves for the calmer, more reliable pools downriver until the water fell. Everything that might spoil among our dry goods was taken inside under the supervision of Cornelius and the rest was left to sit out the daily downpours.

Bone put down his cards and stood up. Clayton insisted that they continue playing, but Bone took this to mean that the man had a winning hand and told him to go. Clayton protested, and so Bone put his foot against the packing case on which their cards and coins were spread and kicked it over, sending most of the cards and money out into the rain.

‘I said go,' he said again; I knew that this small show had been for my benefit alone. Clayton went, cursing loudly as he stepped out into the rain, and we watched him run to the shelter of the garrison.

‘I've come to see Frere,' I said.

‘You do surprise me.'

‘I have every right.'

‘Never said you didn't.'

‘Can I go in?'

‘Not like that.' He indicated the water still flowing from my clothes.

‘Is he well?' I asked him.

‘How well does he need to be? Don't worry, he'll still be here when they come to get him.'

‘Has anyone else been to see him?'

‘The Old Man.' He meant Cornelius.

‘Recently?'

‘The day he came back.'

This surprised me, and he saw this. ‘Thought you had him all to yourself, did you, your own little lost cause?'

‘Not at all.'

‘Yes, you did. You going to save him, are you? The Old Man came, stayed ten minutes and then went. Probably just here to tell him to keep his mouth shut and take what he's got coming to him.'

I refused to rise to the remark.

‘Perhaps you're right,' I said.

‘And perhaps I'm not. But, either way, it won't make any difference to him, will it?'

Unwilling to delay any longer, I left him.

‘Door's open,' he called after me.

The outer room was filled with old furniture, possibly gathered up long ago from those other abandoned buildings, and most of these pieces had been eaten by termites, leaving mounds of dust beneath them. The heat in the room was unbearable beneath its tin roof.

The door to Frere's cell was open. Someone had lined chairs along the wall, and upon several of these stood mounds of books.

Frere sat at a desk beneath a barred window. He was writing as I entered; other books lay open all around him.

‘Am I interrupting you?' I said, expecting him to look up at me and smile at the remark.

Instead, he motioned impatiently for me to enter and wait. He then finished what he was writing, read it through and blotted the ink, all as calmly and as precisely as though he were a conscientious clerk interrupted at his labours. I half expected him to ask me what he could do for me.

‘I heard you,' he said. He indicated the small window, through which Bone remained a third presence. He touched a finger to his lips, and then said loudly, ‘I have a plan to kill Bone in his sleep and escape.'

The top of Bone's head appeared at the window. He called in to us that he'd like to see Frere try, and then we heard as he left the veranda and ran splashing through the downpour to his own quarters.

‘He's a Philistine,' I said.

‘He needs to be. And perhaps if the rest of us were, then all this might at least be tolerable.' He rose and moved stiffly, flinching at a succession of small pains. There was still a bruise across his forehead from the beating he had been given on his return.

‘I tried to stop it,' I said.

‘Cornelius brought me some sulphur powder and bandages.' He raised his shirt to show me his strapped chest.

‘I should have thought to bring you some more,' I said.