Brazzaville Beach

  He decided not to provoke me this time. “I’d say: prove it.”

  “I’ve seen it happen.”

  I told him about Rita-Mae and Bobo. I told him the way in which his northern chimps had attacked and killed Mr. Jeb. The detail I employed in my accounts unsettled him. These were clearly not the spontaneous ravings of a deranged mind.

  “My God,” he said, worriedly, when I finished. “I can hardly…. Have you told Mallabar?”

  “I tried. He doesn’t want to know.”

  “I can sort of understand that….” Ian pursed his lips, thinking hard. “Yeah, I can see why. Jesus.”

  “Look, I don’t know what’s happening here—in Grosso Arvore—but something very strange is going on with these chimps.”

  “You’re not kidding.”

  “I mean, I’m seeing things that, theoretically—if the whole Mallabar line is correct—could never happen.”

  We were walking back down the path. Ian was very thoughtful. I decided to embroil him further.

  “I think your article is some kind of clue,” I said. “At least it’s the only hypothesis that has any kind of plausibility. I think it’s all to do with the split, with Rita-Mae leaving with Clovis. I think,” I had to smile, almost in panic, at the boldness of my idea, “I think your northern chimps want her back, and, in order to get her they’re prepared to kill all the southern males.”

  “Jesus, Hope.” He looked anguished. “This is crazy. We’re primatologists, for God’s sake. What you’re talking about sounds like…like the Trojan Wars.”

  “I don’t know anything,” I admitted. “But I’m seeing things. I’m witnessing things that are completely extraordinary. Your northern males are patrolling in southern territory. They attacked two chimps, quite deliberately, completely unprovoked.” I paused. “They got one and they killed him, trying to cause him as much pain as possible. It was horrible.” I thought again. “Actually, I almost said inhuman. In fact it was all horribly human, what they did. They wanted him dead and they wanted to hurt.”

  We walked along the path, not really thinking where we were going, Dias following a few discreet paces behind, just out of earshot.

  “You realize,” Ian said, “exactly what this does to Mallabar. Everything he’s worked for.”

  “Look, I’ve not just invented all this simply to embarrass him, for God’s sake.”

  “I know…but it’s so odd. So out of the blue.”

  “It happens sometimes, you know.”

  “But it doesn’t fit the data.”

  “Isn’t that what they said to Galileo? How do we know what’s ‘odd’? What’s ‘out of the blue’? We don’t.”

  He rubbed his face with his hands. He seemed suddenly exasperated. “You’ve got to tell him.”

  “Oh, sure…look what happened when I found the dead baby. Face it, Ian, if I tell him he’s been wrong for the last twenty years what do you think he’ll do?”

  “I suppose you’re right…. Too much is riding on it.”

  “Exactly. He’d discredit me. Cover it up. Call me a fraud, or something.”

  “He’d have to delay the book.”

  “At least. Please.”

  “What’re you going to do?”

  “I’ll have to prove it to him. Somehow.”

  We had reached the place where the Land-Rovers were parked. I hadn’t quite finished.

  “Don’t tell anybody about this, Ian,” I said. “Nobody…and that means Roberta.”

  “Of course not. Don’t worry.”

  But I did worry. “Don’t get me wrong, Ian. You mustn’t even hint.” I looked at him squarely. “I would know at once, you see, if you did. And if you did…”

  I left the threat unspoken. It was a calculated risk, this threat, even left implicit, but necessary, I was convinced. I could see at once from his face that he knew what it was. But I also registered in his abrupt shock and surprise that I had, for an instant, held a mirror up to him, and afforded him a glimpse of how the world saw Ian Vail, and it had hurt him.

  I knew what would come next.

  “Bitch,” he said. “Don’t worry, bitch.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. He had every right to be upset. “I just have to be sure.”

  I climbed into the Land-Rover and started the engine and drove away from him. As I bumped down the track to Grosso Arvore, I wondered if I had made a mistake. On balance, I thought, probably not.

  The next day, at sunset, I stood at the perimeter fence of the airport and waited for Usman to fly in. The air force officer at the main gate said he was due back from a mission shortly. I thought about returning to the hotel to wait for him there, but decided to stay. It was cooling down nicely and the sky was shading from an ice blue into a washed-out lemon. Unusually, there was no orange or pink in the light. It looked like a sunset better suited to Antarctica or some frozen tundra.

  I had stopped my car not far from the military entrance to the airport. As at any site where there was a flow of traffic and the coming and going of people, a small community had established itself. Opposite the gate on the other side of the road were a few stalls selling food, and beyond the ditch some shacks had been erected. In a year or two it would have grown, piecemeal, into a village. In front of one of the shacks an old mammy was cooking something on a brazier, and the smell of the charcoal smoke, seasoned with a peppery spice, was carried to me by the breeze that blew off the ocean. I climbed out of the Land-Rover, assured the stallholders I was not there to buy anything, and sat on the bonnet and smoked a cigarette.

  When I saw the three black specks flying in from the east, I jumped off the bonnet, stepped over the ditch and stood by the perimeter fence, my fingers hooked into the diamond-shaped mesh, waiting for my aviator to land.

  There were three Migs, two silver, one olive drab. They flew over the airport and then banked round to make their approach. With an uneven, jerky movement their wheels came down and at surprising speed and almost carelessness they landed, one after the other. They taxied to their allotted spaces on the apron. I waved, and then felt a little foolish. These men were not returning from a vacation.

  I drove the Land-Rover up to the gate and waited for Usman. After about twenty minutes I saw his car—a beige Peugeot—emerge from behind some quonset huts and drive out of the entrance. I tooted the horn and when he stopped, I left the Land-Rover and walked up the verge to his car. You might at least get out to welcome me, I thought, but he made no move.

  “Hello,” he said, looking at me. “My God. My lucky day.”

  I did not bend to kiss him. “Just passing by,” I said.

  He still had pressure marks on his cheeks from what I assumed was his oxygen mask—symmetrical, ogival scars. He looked tired and his eyes were restless.

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  “Yes, I’m fine. But we lost one man today. Dawie. You know, the South African.”

  I remembered him vaguely: small and alert, with fine thinning blond hair. “What happened?”

  He rotated a hand carelessly. “We were flying back, four of us. We flew into some cloud and only three came out…. Navaid failure, I suppose.”

  “Like Glenn Miller.”

  “Who?”

  “Doesn’t matter. I’m sorry…. Anyway, I’m here for two nights.”

  “Have you been to my room?”

  “No. Why?”

  “Good.” Some animation returned to his features. “I’ve got something special to show you.”

  I followed him back to the hotel. Then he made me wait outside his door for five minutes. I paced up and down watching the bluey darkness creep over the hotel gardens and hummed along to the tune of “The Girl from Ipanema,” which I could hear faintly from the lobby. Then I heard Usman call my name.

  “Can I come in?”

  “Yes, yes.”

  I opened the door. Usman stood in the middle of the room. All the chairs had been pushed to the walls to make space. At first glance I thought thr
ee large, white moths were flying around him. I closed the door behind me quickly. But looking closer I saw that they weren’t moths at all. They didn’t bob and flutter; their circuits were too fixed. They moved slowly in wide and narrow circles, like flies patrolling a room, and there was a distinct buzzing noise emanating from them. I stared at them: they had wings and a tail plane, and what looked like an undercarriage. They looked like miniature flying machines, culled from a Victorian inventor’s notebook.

  “What the hell are they?” I asked.

  “The smallest powered airplanes in the world.”

  He reached out and, carefully picking one from the air with a delicate plucking motion, held it out to me. It was like a tiny precise glider, fragile, rather beautiful, made from doped tissue paper and slivers of matchwood. The wingspan was about two inches. Beneath the wing, in a meticulous harness of glue-stiffened threads, was a horsefly, its wings a hazy blur of movement.

  “Watch,” Usman said and held the minute aircraft at arm’s length. He let go and it dropped four or five inches before resuming its normal flight pattern, meandering, weaving round the room.

  “I need you as a witness,” he said with a grin. “I’m going to send it off to that book. You know, that book of world records. Stand here.” He positioned me in the center of the room. “I need a photograph.”

  He went into the bedroom to fetch his camera. I stood still and watched the tiny aircraft circle me, hearing the angry constant hum of their insect power plants.

  Their fly instinct, I guessed, controlled their movements; they seemed to avoid each other easily, and they altered course whenever they flew too close to a wall. They never attempted to land or settle on anything. The contraption on their backs, I supposed, precluded that sort of maneuver and somehow, I supposed again, they must have been aware of that. So they would cruise on endlessly until fatigue—fly fatigue—set in and they would spiral to the carpet.

  I stood there while Usman took several flash photographs. I held my hand as close to the planes as possible to convey the scale.

  “Can you set them free?” I asked.

  “No. They’re glued in place.” He smiled. “They’re pilots for the rest of their lives.”

  “They’re rather beautiful. To look at,” I said.

  He took one more photograph.

  “What now?”

  “They die in combat,” he said. He picked up a can of fly spray. PifPaf it was called, a yellow can with crude red lettering. He pointed it at one of his airplanes and enveloped it in a cloud of spray.

  “Like poor Dawie,” he said.

  For a while the plane flew on as normal, but then it began to judder and sideslip and in a second or two it fell fluttering to the floor like a leaf. He aimed at the other two.

  “No, no, Usman,” I said quickly. “Don’t do that.” I opened the door. “Give them a last flight to remember.”

  I picked one out of the air and Usman captured the other. We stood at the threshold of the bungalow and launched the little aircraft into the night. At first, away from the inhibiting cube of the room, they seemed perplexed and flew to and fro in tight trajectories of three and four feet. But then one of them very suddenly climbed up and away and we soon lost sight of it as it flew beyond the glow from the bulb above the front door. The other continued to zigzag for a while longer and then it too, perhaps caught by a gust of wind, seemed to bank off and up, and soared away into the huge expanse of the night.

  We went back inside and Usman showed me his drawings and preliminary models. In a cupboard he had a jam jar buzzing with horseflies which he had collected with a butterfly net on the beach. He put them into a killing jar for a second or two, to drug them into immobility before gluing them into the harness. It was the precise angle at which they had to be fixed in this that had taken him so long to calculate. It had been a matter of trial and error, he told me, and it had taken many days to find the exact position where the forward motion of the horsefly’s wings, properly directed, did not work against, or cancel out, the natural aerodynamics of the carefully cut and molded paper wings.

  He showed me a flyless flying machine. Unbelievably light, it lay in my palm like a husk, the ghost of a dragonfly. The wings were beautifully worked, curved in section to provide lift, and the tips were folded up. The tail plane was disproportionately large, an unusual V-shape. It was this feature that made the plane fly straight, he said. It took a lot of effort for the fly to turn the machine. That was why the movements seemed so studied, their turns so deliberate and slow.

  So the horsefly was sedated, fitted into harness with its wings free to move, and then glued in place, tilted back slightly. Usman showed me his drawings, immaculate as an architect’s plans. I signed and dated the statement that I had witnessed these machines in powered, sustained flight. I was surprised and impressed: the drawings were not to scale, larger than life. They had a curious, surreal beauty.

  “You’ve obviously had a lot of time on your hands,” I said. “I thought there was a war on?”

  “I thought it was finished. Then we flew three missions in three days after nearly a month off.”

  “What’s happening?”

  “I don’t know. UNAMO has broken out of its enclave.” He shrugged. “All I know is that it’s UNAMO now. Not FIDE or EMLA.” He smiled. “But we can’t find them anywhere. Come on, let’s go and have dinner.”

  I lay in Usman’s bed, waiting for him, naked. I felt calm and in control. The chimpanzees, the northerners’ patrolling, Mallabar and his book were not forgotten, but safe in their context, and therefore easier to cope with.

  “Have you washed?” Usman called.

  “Yes,” I said.

  He was scrupulous about this: he liked us both to wash our genitals before we made love. He said it was polite.

  I slipped out of bed and went to the bathroom door. Usman stood in the bath sluicing soap off his groin with water from a jug. He stepped out and dried himself. His penis and scrotum were oddly dark, almost charcoal gray against the caramel of his belly and thighs.

  “What’re you looking at?” he said.

  “Your fat stomach.”

  He sucked it in and slapped it. “Muscle,” he said, trying not to smile. “Solid muscle.”

  As he toweled himself dry, I could see he was growing aroused. I think he liked me to be forthright and uninhibited. Once, when he had been showering, I had come into the bathroom and had a shit. I hadn’t given it any thought but Usman told me after he had been shocked and exhilarated.

  “See you later, Fatso,” I said. I went back to bed and waited for him.

  The next morning I was up early. I typed a long postscript to my article (on a typewriter borrowed from reception) about the killing of Mr. Jeb. Usman took this and all of João’s field reports to an office at the airport and had them photocopied. I made a bundle of these copies and left them with Usman for safekeeping. Not all the material from Grosso Arvore would be stored in the Mallabar archive.

  Then I met up with Martim and Tunde, the kitchen staff who had traveled down with me. We did our chores and shopping and I ran the various small errands that the others required. I went to the central post office, just down the hill from the cathedral, and posted my afterthoughts to my friend at the magazine. I waited for forty minutes in a hot glass cabin as the operator tried to connect me with London. Eventually the light flashed above the telephone informing me that the connection had been made. I shouted hello into the receiver for a while but all I heard was the fizz and crackle of the ether.

  Back at the hotel I found the copied field notes and a message from Usman to meet him at a refurbished beach house for a late lunch.

  Offshore, I could see—miles away—a big storm system lurking, a great toppling continent of cloud with mountains and plateaus, cliffs and chasms. We sat on a wide wooden deck, eight feet above the sand, looking out at the view. The sun was shining, but the presence of the offshore clouds made the day and the beach and the creaming bre
akers seem threatened and impermanent.

  Usman had borrowed this beach house from a Syrian merchant he knew. It was freshly painted but only half repaired. The jutting deck was strong, with new timber and supports, but when you opened the door to go into the house you discovered that the roof had collapsed. But it was fine on the deck. It caught whatever breeze there was and we were high enough from the ground to escape the sand flies.

  Usman had prepared an odd lunch of garlic sausage and a sweet potato and onion salad. There was some bread and processed American cheese and a pineapple. We drank beer from a coolbox.

  We sat on aluminum chairs—an aluminum table with the lunch on it was between us—and rested our feet in the balustrade, watching the waves tumble in. Usman told me that the Syrian had offered to sell him the beach house.

  “What’s the point?” I said. “You won’t be here much longer.”

  “But it’s very cheap. And anyway I’ve got nothing to spend my money on.”

  “Don’t you send it home?” I had never really questioned Usman about his domestic arrangements.

  “I send some to my brother and sisters, of course.”

  “What about your wife and children?”

  He looked at me, then laughed. “Ah, Hope. I’m not married.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  He took a long pull on his beer, still smiling, amused at me.

  “I was too dedicated to get married,” he said.

  “Dedicated to what?”

  “To outer space.”

  He told me he had trained for many years to be an astronaut. When the Russians opened their space program to certain Third World countries—notably India, Vietnam and Egypt—Usman had been one of the six Egyptian air force pilots selected for initial training. He had spent four years at Baikonur itself, he said, waiting for the day. Then the six had been reduced to two, Usman and one other. There was always a backup, he said: two Indians, two Vietnamese, two Egyptians. No one knew who would be chosen.

  “I knew it would be me,” he said matter-of-factly. “You see, it was my dream to go in space. I talked to the others who had been, who had looked down on the world. I saw the photographs….” He smiled sadly. “I think that was my mistake. The photographs were so beautiful, you see.” He screwed up his face, wincing at the memory of their beauty. “I stopped being the perfect technician. I even began to write poems about the earth, seen from outer space. I think that was my mistake.”