Brazzaville Beach

  Then the boys hammered two stakes into the ground and tied some rope between them. The perimeter of the court was scratched out with the point of a machete. They divided into two teams of four. Before they occupied their respective courts and the game began, they lined up. Amilcar led them in their team chant.

  “Atomique?”

  “BOUM!” they shouted.

  “Atomique?”

  “BOUM!”

  “Atomique?”

  “BOUM! BOUM! BOUM!”

  Then a ball was produced from someone’s pack, and they played while the light lasted. I watched them dive and set, smash and dig, saw their repertoire of shots, their jump sets and lob balls, their floaters, dumps and dummy spikes. For the first time the boys’ reserve left them, and they shouted and cajoled, argued and exulted in the soft evening light, their thin lanky bodies casting thinner and lankier shadows.

  At one stage, Amilcar joined in and flung himself about heedlessly, hurling himself after ungettable balls, leaping as high as he could in the air to make a spike, constantly calling out advice and criticism, exposing flaws in their tactics.

  Ian and I sat on the ground and watched, bemused at first, but eventually applauding loudly whenever some particular act of agility or stylish bravado merited it. It was only later when it grew too dark to really see, and the game broke up, that I realized we had been sitting six feet away from the small stack of set-aside Kalashnikovs. The boys trooped off the court, laughing and breathless, their faces glossy with sweat and picked up their guns as idly as if they had been towels or kit bags.

  “I’m glad we played,” Amilcar said. “Tomorrow is going to be difficult.”

  From where we parked the Land-Rover, just off the dirt track, I could make out—through the intervening screen of trees and bushes—the pale gray stripe of a tarmac road. I sat in the front of the cab with Ian. The boys all stood outside, edgy and cautious, their guns held ready. Amilcar had advanced eighty yards through the bush to the road. We were all waiting for him to return. We waited an hour, then a bit longer. Eventually he came back, stepping briskly through the undergrowth.

  “They’re coming,” he said.

  He ordered everyone into the Land-Rover and we sat and waited again. Soon I heard the noise of the engines and the slap and clatter of tracked vehicles on the tarmac. Then, through the trees I saw a half-track, moving quite slowly. It was leading a convoy of about a dozen lorries. The first four were open-topped and I could see they were filled with soldiers. At the rear came two civilian lorries and I could hear, distinctly, across the patch of bush, the clinking shudder of thousands of bottles.

  “What is it?” I said, baffled.

  “Beer,” Amilcar said, dolefully. He was suddenly depressed. “There will be an offensive soon.”

  The convoy passed and soon too did its noise. We sat on for a while, then Amilcar sent a boy up to the road to check that all was clear. I asked Amilcar to explain the connection between beer and a new offensive.

  The federal army, he said, was a conscript army, made up of reluctant young men who had no real desire to fight, and who were governed by a powerful urge toward self-protection.

  “Nobody wants to get hurt or killed,” he added. “Which is normal.” These young men only stayed in the army to earn some money and eat well. In combat zones there was a further incentive: free beer and cigarettes. The federal army would not advance one foot without copious supplies of beer. The chiming glass on board that convoy signaled one thing alone: they were planning an assault on the UNAMO front.

  Amilcar gripped the steering wheel with both hands. “They will be advancing,” he said darkly. His mood had changed. “Two, maybe three days.” He started the engine.

  “But what about FIDE?” I said aimlessly, like someone trying to make conversation at a cocktail party.

  “Oh, FIDE…FIDE isn’t here,” he said. “It’s just that they have stopped fighting the federals so that they can move more troops up to the River Territories.”

  I thought it was a curious war when two lorries full of beer presented more threat than any number of heavily armed men.

  One of the boys stood in the middle of the road and waved us onto it. With a lurch and a bump we left the track and moved onto the paved surface. I felt old sensations: it was like that moment when you left Sangui and hit the main highway south.

  We drove up the road in the same direction as the convoy. It was a good road, with wide, mown verges and deep drainage ditches on either side. It ran straight and true through the thickening forest. We were driving at some speed and for a moment or two I thought we might catch up with the beer lorries.

  “Careful,” I said to Amilcar. “Unless you’re thirsty.”

  “You realize,” he said evenly, “that if I could destroy that beer, UNAMO would be safe for weeks.”

  All the same, he slowed down.

  After another two minutes, he braked suddenly. Ahead, about four hundred yards away, we could see a vehicle, apparently stuck in the ditch. As we drew closer we saw it was a wrecked lorry, partially burned, with the remains of whatever cargo it had been carrying strewn along the verge: sacks of groundnuts, baskets, kettles, pots and pans.

  We halted by the wreck. From my seat I could see a corpse in the driver’s seat. A glimpse of teeth, top and bottom rows, empty eye sockets and a curious rippled, foillike texture to the skin. I looked down at once and saw the other body on the ground, bloated and impossibly tight, and somehow incomplete.

  I clamped my lips together with my fingers.

  Amilcar’s expression was enraged.

  “It’s disgusting,” he said quietly and emphatically. “It’s disgusting how they do this.”

  He left the Land-Rover, went round to the back and was passed a jerrycan of petrol. He took a deep breath, like a man about to dive underwater, and, averting his face, sloshed petrol generously over the corpse in the cab of the lorry and then the corpse on the verge.

  He retreated a few paces, turned and exhaled with a whoosh of expelled air. Then he darted forward and set the two bodies ablaze.

  They burned immediately, the long flames pale and almost transparent in the sunshine.

  Amilcar climbed back into the Land-Rover.

  “There’s no need for that,” he said, his face calm again. “Nobody should be left like that. Nobody.”

  We turned off the road soon after that onto another dirt track and bumped on, still heading north. I could see that the land around us was lusher and wetter. We were now in thickish forest and we drove over or forded many small streams, reduced to trickles in this dry season. When the rains came I saw that these tracks would be impassable.

  Around midafternoon we reached our destination. The track entered a large clearing, and before us was a low, single-story building with a corrugated asbestos roof. It was made of mud, but the walls had been painted with white distemper. At the main door was a crude portico with a cross above it and on the entablature was inscribed: S. JUDE.

  Behind the building was a small compound with a patchy matting fence and a few mud storerooms or servants quarters. There was also what had at one time been a sizable vegetable garden, now largely overgrown with weeds except for a few young pawpaw trees and some spindly stands of maize and cassava.

  Ian pointed to the name on the building.

  “Patron saint of—”

  “I know,” I said. “Don’t remind me.”

  “It was a mission school,” Amilcar said, misunderstanding our exchange. “We can stay here, we’ll be quite safe.”

  The first thing they did was to move the Land-Rover undercover. They demolished the gable end of a mud hut and the Land-Rover was backed carefully into the shell. Ian and I were taken into the mission school and shown our room.

  It smelled moldy and abandoned. At one end was a row of built-in cupboards and a blackboard. The cupboards were veined with the small raised-earth tunnels of termites. The wood was dry and rotten. The cupboard doors broke as easily
as toast.

  Ian’s mood seemed to improve immediately, now that we had stopped traveling and were finally housed. He went through the cupboards busily—and pointlessly, I thought—looking “for anything that might be useful.” Two days previously he had been badly bitten on the cheek by some insect, and he had scratched the bite into a scab. His beard had grown also, a golden fuzz on his jaws and cheeks. The sore and his beard and his considerable weight loss made him look quite different, less soft and nice. I saw the emergence of an alternative Ian Vail, nastier and leaner, tougher and more capable, not entirely to be trusted.

  On the other hand, by contrast, my own strange insouciance of the last few days began to evaporate. It was replaced by a dull, unshiftable depression. For me, because we were no longer on the move, and living in a building, the brute fact of our kidnapping was brought home emphatically. Our curious journey, the games of volleyball, our polite and tolerant traveling companions were now all behind us. We were now being held in a house in the middle of a shrinking rebel enclave surrounded—I imagined—by an advancing, beer-fueled army. Coming to a halt had brought me to my senses: no wistful fantasy could be constructed around our present circumstances.

  I still had no fear of Amilcar or the Atomique Bourn team, but for the first time since our capture I became very conscious of just how filthy I was. Sleeping out in the open, eating vile food cooked on fires, being continually on the move, had distracted me. A bit of dirt was unexceptionable. But now, in this abandoned school, I felt rank and stinking. My skin had a layer of dust on it. My clothes were grubby and sweat-infused. My hair hung in thick greasy ropes. My teeth and gums felt furred and clogged as if lichen were growing in my mouth. I went straight to Amilcar and demanded some sort of washing facilities.

  There was a well behind the school in the compound, and two buckets of water and a hunk of pink soap were provided. I washed my hair and immediately felt better. One of the boys gave me a chewing stick and I cleaned my teeth with it. Ian stripped to his underpants and tried to wash himself down. Now I was marginally cleaner, I found my clothes unsupportably dirty. I was wearing a khaki shirt, a pair of jeans and some lace-up suede ankle boots. I had nothing else with me apart from the shoulder bag I had packed the day we left Grosso Arvore. Ian was worse off. When Amilcar had ordered the two kitchen boys out of the Land-Rover, Billy had unreflectingly picked up Ian’s overnight bag, which had been stowed in the back. He had had it in his hand, we had remembered later, as he had run off up the road to safety.

  Our buckets were refilled and I washed my shirt and jeans. When Ian took them out to lay them in the sun to dry, I quickly washed my pants and brassiere, wringing the water from them as best I could, and putting them back on just before he returned.

  We sat in our room waiting for our clothes to dry. I felt self-conscious in my underwear and sat stiffly by the wall with my legs drawn up. The bruise from Mallabar’s punch discolored my shoulder like a tattoo, a lead-gray and sludge-brown flower with four purple dots. It was very tender to the touch.

  As I sat there I was aware of Ian’s flicking gaze from across the room. His eyes kept returning to me, making me more ill at ease. I felt annoyed with him for this little susurrus of prurience. He was fine: his pale blue boxer shorts were as revealing or as unrevealing as swimming trunks. Irritated by my own modesty I deliberately stood up and walked to the window to look out over the sunbaked, grassless patch of earth in front of the building.

  “Should be dry soon,” I said nonchalantly.

  “Give them half an hour.”

  But as I stood there I found myself wondering whether the dampness of my pants would make them cling more tightly to my buttocks, and, if I turned around, would the thick triangle of my pubic hair be pressing, bluey, through the moist gusset….

  I turned and walked quickly back to my blanket and sat down, my legs crossed, my interlocked hands resting modestly in my lap.

  There was nothing either of us could think to say. It was hot in the room. Our mutual embarrassment seemed to make it hotter. I felt the sweat begin to seep from my pores. My hair began to cling wetly to my shoulders.

  Ian stood up, trying to think of something to do. He went to rummage needlessly again in the cupboards. He found half a ruler.

  “Not much use,” he said, holding it up.

  “Not unless you want to measure something short,” I said, without thinking.

  For a second or two we tried to ignore the double entendre.

  “Well, we won’t go into that,” Ian said, and laughed. So did I, sort of. At least it eased the tension. We began to talk again: about our plight, about the options open to us, about whether we should try to escape. Outside our clothes dried quickly in the sun.

  That night we were given a meaty stew and a big mound of doughy pudding to eat. When I asked what the meat was I was told bushpig. It was stringy and lean with a strong gamey taste. Whatever it was it acted as a powerful aperient on my crammed, immobile gut. I went outside and shat copiously behind one of the sheds.

  I felt purged and unsteady, and for a moment or two stood quietly in the dusk, the air full of the smell of woodsmoke from the fire our supper had been cooked on. Something about the light and the smell and my moment of weakness brought back strong memories of Knap and John Clearwater, and, for the first time since our capture, I felt my emotions begin to overwhelm me and I sensed the salt of tears, tart at the corners of my eyes.

  When I went back inside Amilcar was in our room talking to Ian.

  “I have to go tonight,” he said. “To headquarters.”

  “What about us?” Ian said. “When are you going to let us go?”

  “I have to talk to General Delgado about you. What to do. What’s safest.” He shrugged. “Maybe we can fly you to Kinshasa or Togo. It depends.”

  “Fly?” I said.

  “We have one airstrip, beyond the marshes. The planes come in at night.”

  “But I thought—”

  Amilcar interrupted him politely. “I’ll be back in two days. Everything will be settled then, and you can go home.” He shook hands formally with us. “I’m leaving six of the team here. Please don’t worry. You’re quite safe.”

  I slept badly that night. I had finished my cigarettes days before, and from time to time a tobacco craving would overwhelm me. I lay wrapped in my blanket, my head on my shoulder bag, dreaming of a pack of Tuskers. I could hear mosquitoes whining and lizards and rodents scurrying about somewhere, and also the deep and rhythmic surge of Ian’s breathing. Like a tide, I thought, like the wash of wavelets on a pebble beach….

  I threw off the blanket and quietly left the room. I went outside to the back veranda that overlooked the compound and the kitchen garden. A lantern hung from a rafter and three of the boys were sleeping beneath it in a row. A fourth leaned against a pillar, his gun slung over one shoulder.

  “Evenin’, Mam,” he said.

  “Isn’t that light dangerous?”

  “There are no planes for night.”

  I saw I was talking to the young boy with scars under his eyes. He called himself October-Five, he had told me, out of respect for the day General Aniceto Delgado had declared the Musave River Territories independent in 1963, and had unilaterally seceded from the republic.

  “What’s your real name, October-Five?”

  “That’s my name.”

  “What was your name before?”

  He paused. “Jeremeo.”

  “Have you got a cigarette?”

  “We don’t smoke. Only Ilideo.”

  “Where’s he?”

  “I’ll go and look for him.”

  October-Five came back with half a cigarette. He found a match and I lit up. I drew in the sour, strong smoke avidly, feeling my head spin, and exhaled. Whatever brand this was it put Tuskers to shame.

  The night was warm. I sat down on the steps and stared out into the blackness. From somewhere in the compound a cock gave an untimely half crow.

  “What t
ime is it?” I asked.

  “I think about three.”

  Despite the nicotine I began to feel tired. A few more minutes and I would sleep. I asked October-Five what was tomorrow’s program. He said they would have to wait to receive orders from Dr. Amilcar. The one event that was scheduled was a meeting with the comrades from the village committees in this district. We talked vaguely about UNAMO and General Delgado. October-Five had taken part in the fighting at Luso.

  “We would have won,” he said confidently, then reflected. “I think. Except for the planes and the gasoline bombs. We shoot at them but we have no…” he searched for the word.

  “Missiles?”

  “Yes. But General Delgado is buying us some. Some good missiles.”

  “Atomique Boum,” I said. He smiled.

  I went back to our room. Ian slept on undisturbed.

  The next morning we watched from a distance as the comrades from the village committees met. Ilideo presided. He was a lighter-skinned, thickset boy who was trying without much success to grow a small mustache. They talked for a while, the Land-Rover was inspected, and then we were led out. The comrades of the village committees were both men and women, all middle-aged, I noticed, and all thin and raggedly dressed. They looked at us with resentful curiosity. Some questions were put to Ilideo.

  “They want to know if you are Cubanos, South African or Tugas,” Ilideo said.

  “We’re English,” Ian said proudly.

  “Tell them we’re doctors,” I said.

  This news brought some smiles and a few well-wishes. Then Ilideo declared the meeting closed, and the comrades of the village committees drifted off in various directions up the forest paths that led away from the mission-school clearing.

  In the afternoon, the Migs came. It was a hot, still day and we were sitting out on the veranda at the back of the school waiting for the sun to go down and the evening breezes to pick up. We never heard them coming; they seemed to arrive simultaneously with their noise. They came in low, three of them, at about a hundred feet. The rip and battering noise of their jets was shocking, palpable. We saw them for a split second, then they were gone, out of sight, somewhere over the forest, the dispersed rumbling echo of their engines all about us. Ilideo ordered us inside.