The Book of the Heathen (20 page)

I remember visiting one of the landing stages where seventy or eighty of these women were being guarded while they waited for a boat. They all froze as I went close to them, and some closed their eyes to deny my presence completely. Most of them were naked except for cloths fastened between their legs, and this, I imagined, was done more for our sakes than their own. They might have been so many boulders resting there in the night for all the noise they made. Occasionally, one of the women would be untied and taken elsewhere by the men who traded and escorted them. We knew better than to intervene when we saw this happening, or when a woman or a child was beaten for some transgression.

Cornelius in particular had complained to the Company Secretary that our involvement in the trade, whatever the women were called, and even if only by this association, was detrimental to us. The Company had always replied that they were assessing the situation and that wider considerations further complicated our own apparently simplistic understanding of the matter. Cornelius tore up these answers as soon as they were received. I had not known then about his own lost ‘wife' and dead daughter, but I understood afterwards what a large part their memory played in his frustration.

‘So?' Proctor said loudly, invading my thoughts.

‘And everyone here condones this activity,' I said absently.

‘What's it got to do with condoning? Never been made illegal here – not the way these men do it. You have to admire them for that. Highly respected men, some of them, and none more so than our friend Hammad.'

‘Highly respected by whom, though?' I said.

‘There you go again. You still think it matters to make that distinction. Wait until he's king and ask me again.'

‘And whatever I think of him, I'm not going to get to see him.'

‘You were never going to get to see him. Who do you think sees him by knocking on his door and shouting in that that's what they want? The old Queen herself could come and this bastard would keep her waiting just long enough to let her know how far from home she was.'

Hammad, who was reputed to have once lined up a dozen slaves, one behind the other, and fired through them with a newly bought rifle to see how effective it was, disappointed and angry when only the first three fell, then leaving the others standing for a day and a night while he decided whether or not to repeat the experiment at closer range.

Hammad, who substituted dynamite for gunpowder to teach a team of idle stump-clearers a lesson they were able to remember only for the final agonizing seconds of their lives.

Hammad, who once lost a canoe of twenty bound men over the vicious Ngula Falls, and afterwards telling the story and saying, ‘What a pity, it was such a well-built canoe.'

‘Then I've come on a fool's errand,' I said eventually, more to myself than to Proctor.

He surprised me then by asking me how Frere was.

I told him, detailing the preparations Bone had made and what new airs and graces he gave himself. Proctor smiled at the predictability of it all. He opened up and refolded the newspaper. He said he would sell it to me, but that he could get a better price for it among the Belgians for the European news it contained. I asked him if there was anything of any great significance I ought to be aware of, but when he pushed the paper towards me, I found myself reluctant to pick it up and search it, only too aware of the pleasures and pains it might simultaneously inflict on me. I declined his offer, and because he understood why I had declined, he took it back immediately and put it in a drawer.

‘I could get word to Hammad that you wanted to see him. What is it – that you humbly beseech an audience with him?'

‘Then he'll know I've been and he'll know what's happening here.'

‘Too clever for me,' Proctor said, though he understood me perfectly. ‘Besides which, he'll already know that you're here and that I'm filling you in on everything.'

‘Paid informants?'

‘Paid favours, it's all the same.'

‘Then do you know about the men coming to investigate Frere?'

‘The men coming to solve all your problems.'

‘Meaning what?'

‘Meaning you haven't been able to wash your hands of him without someone else telling you what to do.'

‘Is that what you thought would happen?'

He considered this for a moment and then nodded. ‘They were at the Black River outflow two days ago.'

That meant they were less than five days away from us.

‘Why did no-one tell
us?
'

He spread his hands.

I rose to leave him, conscious of the coming rain. He held out his hand to me, and I could not help but think that I had misjudged the man, equating him with Bone when they were in fact two completely different creatures.

As though reading my thoughts, he said, ‘Send my regards to poor old Bone.'

I smiled at this and told him I would. Then he offered me the newspaper for nothing and again I declined.

‘I know,' he said. ‘It's full of everything elsewhere. Bring tears to your eyes reading about a cold spring morning.' Then he grabbed my arm and said, ‘Don't get slack with Frere. You aren't going to be able to hold his hand and walk him through this one.'

I asked him what he meant by the outburst.

‘What I said,' he said. ‘Man from Stanleyville said they spoke to next to no-one all the time they were there.' He released his grip on me.

I acknowledged this warning and left him.

My return journey was as prolonged as my earlier one, and again neither the man nor the boy made any effort to speak to me. Still angry at having achieved nothing by the crossing, I resented this behaviour, and when the time came to pay I deliberately tossed my coins towards the boy knowing that he would not be able to turn smoothly enough to catch them and that he would then have to search for them in the silt at the bottom of the boat.

18

The next day I went to see Frere to tell him what I had attempted.

‘Stay away from Hammad,' he said angrily.

‘It seems I have no choice.'

‘No-one has any choice around that man.'

‘Meaning you give credence to Proctor's story that Hammad may one day play some part in governing the place?'

He laid down his pen. ‘Do you still harbour doubts?'

More of his journals were scattered around the room. Others must have taken them to him. I saw, too, that a Bible sat solidly at the centre of his desk. I looked surreptitiously to see if he had any of his precious photographs with him – of his parents, of Caroline, perhaps – but saw nothing.

He saw my surprise at seeing all this.

‘Cornelius came. I asked him. And when no-one comes, I ask the boy.'

‘I can do all this for you,' I told him.

‘I know you can, but—' He stopped abruptly.

‘What?'

‘I was going to say that you already have your suspicions concerning me, and that soon, if these are confirmed, you may want to – you may
need
to – sever yourself from me completely.'

‘Babire,' I said, marking the centre around which we were both circling.

‘Do you imagine I went back there when I left you?'

‘No, not there. But I imagine you went in search of something similar. I imagine it formed part of your purpose in leaving us.' He said nothing to stop me. ‘You asked me for the journal because it was beyond you to offer the clue to any of the others, even Cornelius. In here you can hide it amid all these others, bury it deep. But I was there with you. I know what you were truly searching for. I know what others can only guess at.'

He held up his hand to me.

‘And
did
you find what you were searching for on your wanderings?'

‘Before I fell ill and into the hands of those men and then Hammad? Yes, I found it.'

‘And you detailed all this in the pages Hammad holds?'

‘That was the purpose of my journey, of my deserting you. What more do you need to know? Because whatever I tell you, I will only sink further in your estimation.'

‘And you went without telling any of us – without telling
me
– so that none of us would be implicated in what happened. You detached yourself completely.'

He nodded once.

I was about to suggest that he had done nothing else but abuse our friendship, when someone shouted outside and I recognized the voice of Klein commanding his singers into position.

‘They come most days,' Frere said, resigned to what he must now endure.

The singing began, the same few hymns I had heard when sitting with Bone.

‘Is there nothing anyone can do to stop the man?' I said.

‘I imagine he believes he serves his purpose. My redemption, salvation – call it what you will – may not be so impossibly out of reach as most imagine.'

‘But it is not something you yourself believe in?'

‘I need neither to believe in it nor to insist on others believing in it.'

‘Which is a polite way of telling me to stop quizzing you on it. Do you know about Klein and Cornelius, about his dead daughter and the child's lost mother?'

‘He told me. He wanted to apologize to me for Klein being here and punishing me instead of him. He offered to try and rid me of the man and his sheep, but I told him not to get involved again, that he'd be gone soon enough. Besides which, I imagine Klein has his own good reasons for being here.'

‘Meaning?'

‘Meaning he'll be trying to work out where he and his new mission best fit into the coming scheme of things.'

‘What possible part will he have in anything?'

‘The man's a puppet. He may be of great value to someone who needs to take advantage of whatever influence he has, of what he still represents here, of
who
he represents.'

It did not surprise me to see how swiftly we had come from one path onto another, from mine to his, where something unexpected – something I had not even begun to consider – lay around each bend.

I had been with Cornelius on several occasions recently when we had encountered Klein, and when Cornelius had made a point of ignoring the priest completely, to the extent now of refusing even to return his greeting. On each of these occasions, Klein had been accompanied by Perpetua and Felicity, and the women had remained silent, as instructed by him. Klein spoke to me openly about Cornelius, and within Cornelius's hearing. He made remarks which might have provoked another man – Fletcher, say – into attacking him, but which Cornelius, though clearly angered by the remarks, affected to ignore.

I told Klein that he was mistaken if he believed I would act as an intermediary and that my allegiance and sympathies lay wholly with Cornelius. At one point, when he accused me of being as blind as all the others, when he accused me of clinging to a power I no longer possessed, I told him I despised him as I had despised no-one before. I was trembling as I said this. Cornelius told me not to rise to the priest's bait and led me away from him. Klein stood with a smile on his face and watched us go. I saw how distressing this was for Perpetua and Felicity.

When we were beyond his hearing, Cornelius told me that Klein regularly beat the two women, that all three of them considered it part of their religious instruction, and that this was one of the reasons he dressed them in their heavy outfits. I looked back to where the two women stood in the distance, their heads bowed in supplication as Klein berated them.

‘So you think Klein will make himself useful to whoever comes to power?' I said to Frere as the hymn-singing rose around us.

‘Oh, indispensable, I'd say. The Lord's mouthpiece.'

‘Is there nothing to be gained – by you, I mean – in submitting to any efforts he might be persuaded or bribed to make on your behalf?'

He laughed at this – whether at the suggestion itself or at my naÔvety in making it, I could not tell.

‘Will what Hammad possesses condemn you so completely?' I said.

‘Way beyond any notion of salvation or redemption our friend out there might have.'

The singers paused briefly, rested in the emptiness of their own dying echo, and then resumed even more loudly.

‘And doubtless it will not be so straightforward,' he said.

‘You're saying they'll make an example of you, that your punishment will be an expedience, done for the wrong reasons.'

‘They'll flex their new muscle for the first time. After all, I did what I am accused of doing.'

‘You did nothing thousands of others haven't done before you, aren't doing still.'

‘Stop,' he said. ‘You're making yourself sound ridiculous.
I
did it,
me. Me.
That's the difference. That's what you – and you alone, I'm afraid, James – have not yet fully grasped.'

Neither of us spoke after that. Close enough to him to embrace him, and yet I could not even bring myself to look in the same direction he looked.

I had gone to him wanting to talk of Caroline – as much, if not more, for my own sake as for his – and of my parents and other sisters and the times we had spent together with them. But I saw now what a false and contrived note this would sound and said nothing. I saw too what reward and punishment such shared fond remembrance might simultaneously be in the minds of two men – something sweet to one man and yet bitter to the other for precisely the same reasons.

The noise from outside grew louder yet, and ever more discordant in its rising volume, and I went to the small window, showed my face there and shouted for them all to shut up. My words had not the slightest effect whatsoever, and few even glanced up from making their racket to acknowledge my presence. But Klein saw me, and knowing that I was with Frere doubtless added to his pleasure at this pious assault upon the man.

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