The Book of the Heathen (2 page)

Late in the afternoon, I went to find Abbot. At his insistence, our meetings now took place daily. He falsely imagined the two of us to be allies because of the complementary nature of our work here. In addition to being the appointed map-maker, I am also employed as a ‘technical overseer' to the Company's various concessionary enterprises. Upon long ago enquiring what this entailed, I was reassured that my work would become obvious to me upon my arrival. I was told this by a senior Company official who laughed softly at everything I asked him and then laughed again at his own indulgent and dismissive answers. This secondary role, I soon discovered, was merely to inhabit the spaces left by those already here. Accordingly, I had some relation with all the senior officers, but Abbot was the only one among these keen to establish our shared functions and responsibilities in any formal or official – for which, understand officious – manner.

He was a man much given to facts and figures, a man who did not believe he had fully mastered or understood the nature of a situation unless he had reduced it to his meticulously kept columns and pages. Needless to say, his understanding of a great deal was, of necessity, incomplete and superficial. He had come to the Company straight from the Merchant Taylor's School, had worked in the Tilbury office for two years as an excise collector, and had then, I imagine, pleaded to be sent here.

Upon meeting Abbot, I had guessed his age to be twenty-two or -three and was surprised when he angrily declared himself to be nine years older.

He was not in his office, where I expected to find him, surrounded by the ledgers and files with which he clothed himself, and I was told by Bone that he had been seen earlier at the quarry. ‘Sticking his nose in,' was what Bone said. I debated abandoning my search for the man, but had I not sought him out he would in all likelihood have come looking for me later and then filled the evening with the talk he considered to be conversation.

The quarry stood almost a mile from the Station and its river anchorage. It was the first of the Company's endeavours in the region, inherited from its previous owners in a distant and increasingly profitless transfer of shares. Its original purpose had been to provide ballast for a proposed railway east along the line of the Lulindi towards Lake Albert; and following that the stone and foundations for a new town. Like a great deal else, neither of these projects progressed much beyond the impressive-looking maps upon which they were first planned. The railway started its journey, the town was staked out, the forest felled and foundations laid, but there everything ended. Now the quarry sent its stone elsewhere. Some thin veins of iron and gold had been struck and a smelter built. Labour was unending and cheap. Twenty years ago, a bed of cloudy emeralds had also been discovered, and this was enough for the operation to be expanded in limitless expectation.

I exhausted myself on the climb to the ridge overlooking the workings. I saw Abbot ahead of me, gesticulating to a group of men sitting around him. As I approached he lowered his voice, and one by one the men rose and walked away from him. Some wore cloths around their loins, but most were naked, though with the appearance of being clothed by virtue of the clay which coated them.

Abbot saw me approaching and immediately stopped shouting. He took out his watch and studied it, perhaps hoping to suggest to me that he had been betrayed by it into missing our rendezvous.

He was standing alone by the time I reached him.

I waited for him to speak.

‘They work for an hour and rest for an hour,' he said. ‘They have no idea.'

I looked down the steep slope beneath us and saw the line of men follow a narrow path to the floor of the hole. Several hundred others worked elsewhere, most visible only by their motions, unseen when they stopped moving against the shovelled earth.

‘Take their names,' I suggested.

‘I did.'

‘They will have lied to you.'

‘I know. But I took down their lies all the same.' He tapped the ledger he held beneath his arm.

‘Is it progressing?'

‘It always progresses.' It was a common enquiry and answer, as all-encompassing and as meaningless as the collision of two clouds. He began to point out to me where rock had recently been excavated, to where a band of one per cent ore was being followed. Within the greater scheme of things – and we were forever being made aware of this greater scheme of things, the excuse of the receding future – it was decided that when the work in the quarry was completed the excavated hole would be filled with diverted river water and afterwards be employed as a reliable source of power to drive the turbines of either a larger smelter or whatever industry arose within the proposed town. I knew from a cursory study of the geology of the place that none of this was going to happen. Abbot alone professed faith in these impossibilities.

‘You needn't have come,' he said, as though I were his subordinate and he my beneficent superior. He looked away to the far side of the quarry. ‘Will you survey the new work for your charts?'

‘Of course.' It was clear to me that he wanted to ask me about Frere.

‘You heard the gun,' I said, unwilling to indulge him beyond the few facts of the matter. It was by then common knowledge that Frere sat in the Belgian gaol.

‘Can we be certain it's him?' he said.

‘I think so.'

Abbot had been the source of a great deal of amusement to Frere, and though seldom openly hostile towards each other, there was a degree of antagonism between the two men, nurtured and shaped mostly by Abbot, which, prior to Frere's disappearance, had grown increasingly uncontainable. Upon Frere's disappearance, and then again upon the tales of his actions reaching us, Abbot had become brave and had openly condemned him. Now, with Frere's return, he was again less certain of himself and his accusations. He understood my own attachment to Frere, but never doubted that this was misplaced, and that he, Abbot, might provide a more suitable companion and confidant. ‘Suitable' was the word he used.

‘What will happen to him?' he said.

‘I don't know.'

‘He surely won't be allowed to stay here.'

‘I don't know.'

He paused. ‘What will
you
do?'

Like Cornelius, he harboured some notion of Frere's contagion; unlike Cornelius, he did not understand the true nature of that contamination.

‘Someone ought to keep a full record of events,' he said, looking away from me as he spoke, almost as though the suggestion had not been his, merely something he was repeating. And meaning that he had already started to keep that record.

I looked pointedly at the satchel at his feet.

‘It's the proper thing to do,' he insisted.

‘I know.'

My insincere concession exasperated him further. ‘He killed a child, for God's sake,' he said.

‘We don't know that.' I kept my voice low and even.

‘Everyone says so. And worse.'

‘Is that what you've already written?'

He picked up the satchel and held it to his chest.

‘Even
you
can't close your eyes to what's happened. Why do you insist on defending him?'

‘He may not require defending,' I said, knowing this was untrue, but not in the way he had meant it.

‘I have to go,' he said. He was a man of hourly appointments, again at his own contrivance. Hourly appointments in a place where others counted month to month on their fingers.

‘Of course,' I said, relieved to see him go.

I waited until he was out of sight before following the same curving path back down the hillside.

*   *   *

It rained heavily through the night. I set out my containers and watched the water pour in. I checked that my charts and books were safe from this assault, and then waited to ascertain where new inroads had been made. Old leaks dried up and new ones appeared. It was Cornelius's task, as our Senior Quartermaster, to ensure that our dwellings and the Company offices remained habitable, but where these downpours were concerned there had long existed a policy of partial defeat and compromise.

Earlier, I spent the afternoon with Cornelius and his warehousemen. We played cards, and they drank the liquor they either distilled themselves or bought from the Manyema traders who delivered it in pails, the variable potency of which could never be truly ascertained until long after it had been consumed.

The warehouse in which we sat and waited out the rain was better protected than most, containing as it did the more profitable of the Company's dry goods, our own provisions included. Periodically, Cornelius and I rose from the game and made a brief tour of inspection, pausing to listen for the noise of the water where it could not be seen. Small birds flew back and forth in the high roof above us. Water ran in sheets over the unglazed openings along the lower walls and gathered in puddles on the floor.

Outside, men came and went through the downpour as though it were not happening.

Upon our arrival here together, I had helped Frere set out his rain gauges and had accompanied him on his rounds to record their findings. On one such outing, after a particularly heavy downpour, we came to each of the delicate instruments to find them smashed and useless. I expected him to be distraught at the discovery, but he merely remarked on his own stupidity at not having better protected the glass phials and funnels. It occurred to me then that some agent other than the rain had caused the damage, that the instruments had perhaps been regarded as unwelcome totems or fetishes and had been accordingly destroyed.

Less than a month later, Frere called on me to help him set out his new gauges. These were made of tin and wood and were considerably larger than the original instruments. He showed me the plans he had drawn up in designing and constructing the boxes. Each was as precisely drawn and measured as the vital parts of an engine might be drawn, and as accurately sketched as any of the countless thousands of beetles or butterflies he had drawn since.

It was clear to me that Cornelius had taken me away from the card-players to discuss Frere. I knew that of all the others, he alone came closest to sharing my concern for the man. He and Frere had shared a great many interests, and both had formed an attachment to the place beyond that demanded by the terms of their employment. Regardless of his own doubts, I knew that Cornelius alone might be my only ally in attempting to achieve something on Frere's behalf, even if neither he nor I yet understood what that might be, and how little, in reality, it might amount to.

‘About Frere…' he said, prompting me.

‘Whatever happens, the facts of the matter will need to be separated from all the wild tales and speculation,' I told him, forcing conviction into my voice.

‘And you believe that is possible, you truly believe that the two can be separated, one from the other, like so much chaff from grain?'

‘Perhaps not, but it will be our responsibility to try.'

He remained unconvinced.

Upon first being introduced to Cornelius van Klees, he looked to me – perhaps because of his age and his meticulously kept beard and moustache – like someone who might once have been painted by van Eyck or Holbein, a courtier perhaps, a wealthy merchant or ship-owner. Despite the length of time he had lived there, his face bore none of the more usual signs of the place. He was a quietly efficient and courteous man, who treated his workers well, who knew when to indulge them, and how afterwards to recoup that indulgence.

‘Ought we not to expedite matters by sending him directly to the coast?' he said.

‘And let them deal with him there?'

‘It might be the correct thing to do.' The more agitated he became, so the more pronounced his accent became, along with the formality of his language. He must have known that the Company directors would not countenance the removal of Frere from the Station.

It occurred to me then what he was having such difficulty in saying to me.

‘You think
I
should question him, draw up a report?'

He stopped pacing. ‘You are his closest friend here.'

Neither of us spoke for a moment. Everything that needed to be said had been said.

‘I'll go and see him, of course,' I said. ‘And, hopefully, return with him.' We had our own gaol, for the exclusive use of Company employees, and our own gaoler in Sergeant Bone.

‘You think that wise?' he said.

‘It will at least remove him from the scrutiny and condemnation of others.'

The gaol across the river, built originally by Hammad to house his slaves, was little more than an underground warren in which more men died than lived, and in which dead men had remained manacled to the walls for days after they had died.

‘Which of the tales do you believe?' I asked him.

He shook his head. ‘I merely wonder at their details, at the way they are so consistently and insistently repeated.' There was a warning in his words and I heeded it. ‘We live too close to the new era,' he said, slapping his palm against the tin wall and causing it to shake.

The remark, and the violence of his gesture, surprised me.

‘What new era?'

‘This, all this, Africa. Once it was all a game, a board upon which to play, but all that has gone.'

I regretted this sudden turn in his pleading. I told him I didn't understand him, but in truth I understood half of what he was telling me.

‘I mean that once we did all this unnoticed, unwatched, forgotten.'

‘And now the eyes of the world are on us?'

‘The greedy eyes of the world. Everything we do is examined, sifted and sorted for its countless other meanings and significances.'

He had lived in the country for forty years, arriving as a nineteen-year-old. It was said that he had returned home to Belgium only once in all that time, three years after his first sight of the place. It was rumoured that when Cornelius finally went or died, then the Belgians would close their fist on the last of our concessions here.