"Monumental in scope, brilliantly organized in detail and fascinating in its array of characters. . . . Reading it one is so haunted by the Congo and Algeria that it becomes almost impossible to believe that Coppernica doesn't actually exist."
—The Listener
"An important and imposing novel . . . the author's task, an enormous one, has been impressively completed."
—The New York Times Book Review
"As fascinatingly authentic as a true history of the Congo wars would be. . . . There can be no more horrifyingly credible fascist torturer in modern fiction than Andre Laval, the Frenchman who first learned his techniques from his own Gestapo torturers. . . . Even readers who disagree with Mr. Caute's viewpoint will be unable to put this novel down; the story itself takes over."
—The Spectator
". . . The mercenaries march through the jungle seeking out the revolutionaries, but in reality hunting for their lost destiny, the destiny of the West. The Decline of the West is a novel of ideas, but more important, it is also a work of dramatic thrust . . , a brilliant performance."
—The Nation
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BALLANTINE BOOKS • NEW YORK
The author has drawn on documentary and recorded evidence in order to authenticate the historical basis of certain episodes in this novel. He is grateful to Messrs. John Calder (Publishers) Ltd., and to Amnesty International, for kind permission to use in this way material contained in the book Gangrene (1959).
Copyright © 1966, by David Caute
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 66-24430
This edition published by arrangement with the Macmillan Company.
First Printing: December, 1967 Manufactured in the United States of America
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To Catherine
Prologue ...................................... 1
Part 1 The Year One.......................... 33
Part 2 The Contract .........................181
Part 3 The Mercenaries.......................377
Part 4 A Man and His Memory................537
Part 5 The Last Supper.......................595
Here I lay it down that Imperialism, of 'which petri-facts such as the Egyptian, Chinese and Roman empires, the Indian world and the world of Islam may remain in existence for hundreds of thousands of years, and out of conquering zeal invade one another—dead bodies, amorphous, lifeless masses of men, the spent material of a great history—is to be taken as the typical symbol of the end. Imperialism is pure civilization. In this outward form the destiny of the West is now irrevocably set. The energy of culture-man is directed inwards, that of civilization-man outwards. For this reason I see in Cecil Rhodes the first man of the new epoch. He represents the political style of a Western, Teutonic, particularly German future. His phrase "expansion is everything" contains in its Napoleonic form the most real tendency of every mature civilization. This applies to the Roman, the Arab, the Chinese. It is not a matter of choice. It is not the conscious will of individuals or of whole classes of peoples that decides. The expansive tendency is a fate, something daemonic and huge which grips, forces into service, and consumes the late mankind of the world-city stage, whether it wills it or not, whether it knows it or not.
Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes —The Decline of the West
the first frenchmen to penetrate the forests of Upper Varva were missionaries. It was they who blazed a trail— for more missionaries. After a period of initial adjustment and small dislocations, the natives more or less accepted the situation. They had no choice. Some of them, having a nose for prevailing winds, became Christians. One of these was the peasant Lunda Tukhomada.
When his first son was born, Lunda unhesitatingly turned to the white priest for a suitable name. But knowing how Father Leblanc hankered after the old pre-Dreyfus, pre-Ralliement days (Lunda Tukhomada knew all about the Jews Dreyfus and Ralliement,) he insisted on something with a modern flavour. Why not, for instance, Clemenceau Tukhomada, in honour of the man-tiger who had, evidently, consumed Luther and the Prussian hordes?
Leblanc savoured the idea. Then shook his head.
"A great patriot, but not a devoted son of the Church."
The peasant looked disappointed. The possibility of such a contradiction was quite new to him. Meanwhile the priest groped for guidance.
"I have it!"
"Yes, Father, yes?"
"Poincare."
"Eh?"
"A great Frenchman, President of the Republic, leader of the Union sacree, a devout Catholic."
Tukhomada tasted the name, as if weighing the metal content of a coin.
"Poincare Tukhomada then."
"Ah." Leblanc raised a warning finger.
"Eh?"
"No."
"No?"
"Raymond Tukhomada."
"But-"
"Raymond Poincare."
The peasant wore the expression of a man being offeree short change.
"More French that way," Leblanc added, to clinch the matter.
A week later the boy was baptized amidst pink frocks, crinolines and iced cake. The father could afford it.
The day—April 18, 1923.
Behind his stern, ascetic countenance, Roger Leblanc permitted himself on such occasions a small sigh of satisfaction (thankfulness). When he had first come to Twibi, seven years previously, it was still a small and backward village buried in dense jungle ninety miles southwest of Potonou, the capital of the province of Upper Varva. The natives, entirely at the mercy of witch doctors, juju peddlers and the crudest superstitions, knew little or nothing about the outside world. In the spring, and again in August-September, the road linking Twibi with Potonou was liable to be severed by floodwaters which destroyed maize fields, swept away livestock and periodically exacted a heavy toll in human life.
If Leblanc faced an uphill struggle, he soon made it clear that both he and Jehovah were well equipped for it. He gave Twibi its first church and its first school. Certain lessons began to sink in.
Most important of these was that once Jehovah felt at home in a village, new roads, modern drainage systems, engines and a written language quickly followed in His wake. Two words described these benefits in their totality: la France. Naturally, those peasant farmers, like Lunda Tukhomada, who made haste to embrace the new religion soon became conspicuous for their rising prosperity; it was this coincidence between spiritual endeavour and economic advancement, more than any other factor, which turned the tide of local opinion in Roger Leblanc's favour, routing the witchcraft interests and investing the tough priest with an informal plebiscitary dictatorship over every aspect of life in Twibi.
At a pinch, as a favour, he would surrender male infants to the Republic; for girls, however, anything more recent than the Second Empire was an impiety not to be countenanced. Raymond's younger sister was the forty-ninth girl in Twibi to have been christened Eugenie within eight years.
Many years later, when Bishop of Upper Varva and quite an old man, Roger Leblanc would take delight in reminding the Jeunesse chretienne how an infant whom he had baptized, tutored and loved had secretly harboured the venom of a viper and the cunning of the Devil. At such times the saucer eyes of the Jeunesse widened a little; the complications of the human soul were unbearably devious.
He meant, of course, Raymond Tukhomada.
The boy sprang up tall and thin, like his father, with a long neck and a soft, vulnerable face dominated by huge eyes. Serious and short-tempered, he preferred on the whole his own company to that of others. Eugenie was quite different. Gay and flirtatious from her youngest years, fond of white lace and pink ribbon, she would run laughing between his high legs.
"Monsieur Giraffe!"
"Ha."
But he liked her. Perhaps his mouth trembled.
Under a broiling sun Raymond laboured in his father's fields, a grinding, backbreaking drudgery which deformed his body and outraged his soul. More than ever did he become determined to fight his way into the upper of the two echelons into which black humanity was divided: those who worked with their "heads" and those who toiled with their "hands."
But Father Leblanc alone held the reins of knowledge. To the priest, Twibi had never ceased to smell of salt, tar and vegetable fats, of some distant, stagnant sea.
Raymond's brilliance could not be denied.
"The first African bishop," Leblanc predicted to Lunda Tukhomada.
Eugenie heard about this and informed her friends. Gaggles of shrieking girls would chase him through the village dust, beneath the palm trees, crossing themselves and begging him to hear their confessions. Raymond affected not to notice.
His fellow' pupils observed his progress with awe and a vague, residual resentment. He adopted the French language effortlessly, as if it were his own; he rapidly mastered elementary Latin; he committed the New Testament to memory, likewise the great sin of the Jews; the rivers of France were engraved on his heart in spidery veins, while the departments cushioned his dreams like a patchwork quilt. From Leblanc he learned many times over how the Gallican Church and its missionary societies had not only freed his people from the burden of Arab slavery, but also waged war on disease, starvation and ignorance.
By the time that Raymond was fourteen he had learned from Leblanc almost everything that the priest himself knew; and the Frenchman was forgetting things at an alarming rate under the brutal exorcism of the tropical sun. His solution was typically draconian: henceforth the boy would cease his studies and would devote himself to prayer, the priesthood and charitable works. There arrived a point in the realm of knowledge where virtue ceased and vice began; this point, he had no doubt, corresponded closely to the boundaries of his own learning. Raymond took the news badly. He wanted more, more mathematics, more of the authors whose names he had encountered by chance but whose works were proscribed by the Bishop or, more remotely, by the Holy See. He would have liked, in addition, to learn something about the physical forces governing the universe and the principles on which men constructed machines.
"In the wrong hands, my son, science becomes heresy," Leblanc assured him.
"But, Father, my hands are clean."
"You speak with pride. A man must be what he is. God wills it. The physical development of this colony will remain a matter for the French. You have been called to cure souls."
Raymond kicked stubbornly.
"The Devil of pride ..." Leblanc complained.
Lunda Tukhomada screwed his leathery face against the
Hi
"Gone to his head, all those books."
Together they determined to break his spirit. Abruptly banished from the precincts of the school and the small library, soundly thrashed by his father if found in possession of any books, the thin, nervous boy was thrown back into the fields and condemned to three years of blistering loneliness. The work began at first light and continued until noon; began again at four in the afternoon and continued until dusk. Very tall now, with a small, dinosaur's head and soft features whose babyish contours a carefully nurtured moustache did little to offset, he was compelled to bend his back in the maize fields for hour after hour, to gather yams and pawpaw, to hew and carry wood, to dig trenches and tend the slow, stupid cattle. In his burgeoning despair, he struggled to close his consciousness like the shutter of a camera, to draw strength from poems, hymns and parables, to dream of the Place de la Concorde, the high peaks of Savoy, the chateaux of the Loire Valley and the spire of Chartres.
Yet by nine in the morning only the parched, grudging earth beneath his feet commanded the vistas of reality.
His father and the priest watched him.
"Stubborn, eh?"
"Humility, my son, is the gateway ..."
Eugenie brought him cups of water and a growing girl's sighing comfort. For her he felt a peculiar affection which his age and sex did not permit him to express; occasionally he would mutter, "Merci."
But always looking away.
The village grew steadily. White families arrived, bringing with them stone houses, cars, radios, refrigerators and books. Leblanc complained that Twibi was no longer a "spiritual entity" and fulminated from his bamboo pulpit against some strange force called "la laicite republicaine." At first Raymond and the handful of young evolues who shared his aspirations and resentments failed to grasp the over-all significance of this steady invasion. Only years later, when on the verge of greatness, did he recall that "la barriere, des lors, etait rompue."
Leblanc's plebiscitary empire did not collapse like that of Louis Bonaparte; it simply withered away.
At the France-Empire shack-cafe, the young evolues gathered in the evenings to discover who in fact they were. Contemptuous of the ignorant masses, they rejected beer and orange juice for wine, argued fiercely in French and listenec avidly to radio programmes broadcast from Coppernica's na tional capital, Thiersville, and even from Paris.
At first Raymond was shy. He hardly spoke. When Claude the most vehemently outspoken young nationalist, denounce( the French as a bunch of thieving criminals, Raymond lacked the courage to proclaim his profound faith in the French mission to Africa.
But later, as the inhibiting legacy of the solitary years in the maize fields ebbed, he did.
"La mission civilisatrice," Claude called him, laughing bitterly.
"But you prefer French to your own language," Raymond protested. "You send to Thiersville and Paris for French books, you derive your ideas from Diderot, Voltaire, Rousseau, Hugo, Zola, Anatole France and Gide—in short, from France."
In the France-Empire, the evolues smoked heavily. When they argued they hunched their shoulders expressively and used their hands in eloquent, Italianate gestures.
"If I get these books," replied Claude, "it's no thanks to the minions of the Governor and the Archbishop, who do their best to keep us in eternal ignorance."
"But you get them all the same."
Claude shrugged derisively, contriving to suggest that his own cunning, rather than the liberalism of the authorities, accounted for his success. The sly determination of other evolues to cheat and defraud the whites at every opportunity, while accepting their patronage with apparent gratitude, never recommended itself to Raymond.
"A man is what he is. Every Frenchman is not a Leblanc. Each case has to be judged on its merits," he insisted.
"How naive can you be!"
"If a man is white," declared Claude, thumping the table, "he is our enemy. We are driven to that degree of subjectivism by the systematic racism of the society in which we are imprisoned. It's the only attitude with a sound dialectical foundation."
Raymond had not yet read Hegel or Marx; they didn't appeal to him.
"Listen," he protested. "Leblanc said to all of us: so far, but no farther. But someone like Henri Faure encourages us to read, to learn, to raise ourselves to the level of Europeans. How can I condemn these two men in the same breath?"
"Ah, le petit Faure."
The evolues laughed; Claude, rather than Raymond, was still their leader.
In Raymond's view, jealousy prompted this vindictive sniping.
The engineer Henri Faure and his wife, Lise, were Radicals of the Alain school; they distrusted the claims of the centralized State as heartily as they opposed the Church's pretensions to a monopoly of virtue and truth. Openly proclaiming himself the foe of Leblanc, Faure prophesied the imminent victory of science and technology over "superstition." Taking up the challenge, Leblanc preached furious sermons in his new, larger church against the narrow self-love and pride of those who worshiped the work of their own hands and so misunderstood the whole meaning of human life.
"The equality of people, of races," Faure told Raymond, "is proven beyond doubt. Scientifically."
"Of course, yes."
"It follows that all men living in the French Empire are entitled to the status of citizen of France."
"Only men?" said Lise Faure.
The engineer shrugged and drew on his pipe. "Behind every skirt, there lurks a priest."
At the France-Empire, the evolues interrogated Raymond.
"This Faure—what has he to say about independence and self-determination?" demanded Claude.
"He regards such notions," replied Raymond proudly, "as infantile disorders."
The Faures were childless; Lise was several years older than her husband. In the warm, scented evenings, sitting on the veranda of their comfortable bungalow, with its refrigerator, electric lights and its small Citroen parked in the driveway amidst a profusion of magnolias and flame trees, they discussed sexual matters with a slightly forced lack of reticence, while the tall, high-strung youth studied them intently through large, saucer-white eyes.
In Upper Varva the river of time ran sluggishly. Things changed so slowly that one barely noticed. Eugenie progressed toward womanhood and Raymond continued to break his back in his father's fields.
Henri Faure made his overture one evening after dinner, while his wife was in the kitchen warming the coffee.
"Raymond."
"Henri?"
"You know that I employ a clerical assistant, an African, to cope with correspondence and paper work."
"Marcel Solyanka."
"He'll be leaving me next month. He got a better job in Potonou, on my recommendation. A loss to me, of course, but I owed it to him."
Raymond's eyes glowed in the half-light. The cicadas sang steadily in the trees and the long grass. Henri was once again impressed by the intense stillness of which the young African was capable.
"Frankly, would you like to replace him?"
Raymond sprang to his feet, bowed stiffly and stood trembling.
"I should be deeply honoured, Monsieur."
"You'll be able to escape from your father's fields at last."
"I am, I assure you, truly grateful."
"Do sit down, Raymond," Henri said lightly. "Your salary will not be much. I don't fix it, unfortunately. But you'll be better off than before. You can buy more books, eh?"
Again Raymond inclined his long, taut neck in gratitude; but his hands remained poised and still. Lise Faure returnee with the coffee.
"Raymond has consented to work with me," Henri said in his democratic manner.
"Then you are very lucky," she said to Henri, throwing him a shrewd glance which Raymond could not penetrate.
Raymond took over his new duties six weeks later and proved to be as intelligent, conscientious and helpful as Henri could have hoped. As the intimacy between the two men deepened, Raymond became less tolerant than ever of the cynical sneers of his fellow evolues. At noon, in the heat of the day, he and Henri would withdraw from the work at hand to find themselves a secluded spot in which to eat their lunch. The African labourers accepted this coupling; an unbridgeable gulf lay between them and the aloof Raymond.
Henri was always very generous with the wine.
"Raymond," he began one day when they had settled their backs against a broad tree, "you are a man of the world."
"A very narrow world."
"But you are deep, mon ami. Lise and I both think so. We are usually in agreement. Ours is a very happy marriage, as you know."
"A true marriage," Raymond said.
"Lise, of course, is older than I am. It makes for a rich and complex relationship. We respect one another."
"What a pity that so few Africans approach marriage in the same spirit."
"It comes with maturity. A marriage attains its own rationality. It is unique. It grows. It sheds prejudice and wild passion. A man and a woman finally achieve the greatest of gifts—friendship. The real pearl. You follow me?"
Henri shot him a sharp, anxious glance.
"Of course, of course."
"Lise and I are utterly happy. She particularly. She runs deep, you know, her father was a professor. Even here in the bush she maintains her own life and interests. She needs me, of course, but she is not the clinging-vine type of woman who strangles a man with her needs. Things are as they should be."
"A true marriage," Raymond murmured, feeling increasingly the unease which overcomes the sensitive when their "elders and betters" shed the mask of self-sufficiency and let their hair down. Henri, too, was uncomfortable. He was drinking more vin ordinaire than was good for him in the midday heat.
"I am, as you know, much younger than she. It's a problem, but we both confront it rationally. As scientists, we face up to physical forces for what they are. Still, a certain problem remains, in human terms. The human soul may not be what Leblanc claims it to be, yet it is not a machine either."
Again he glanced at Raymond, who was staring fixedly toward the construction area, with its discarded picks and shovels, its cement machines, piles of rock, its drills and trucks—the whole bathed in a harsh sunlight. But Henri knew that he commanded Raymond's full attention; it was an endearing quality in a friend, this power of concentration, this willingness to listen.
"I will not conceal the fact from you, Raymond: there are times when I am frustrated in a strictly limited and unimportant sense. As vir, not as homo. My nature demands a rational and comprehensive solution. Why? Because otherwise my work may suffer and my social utility decline. I am a Benthamite at heart. I have decided, therefore—and can words have ever been uttered in greater confidence?—to find a little place where I may install someone suitable—une menagere, n'est ce pas?"
Raymond's mind raced. It was so easy, he knew, for an African who believed himself to have assimilated the European mental process suddenly to find himself left behind, rigid and conservative.
"I have decided not to tell Lise for the time being," Henri added.
Raymond nodded energetically. "Of course," he said, "that would be best." But he felt a bit guilty. Lise also had been generous. It was she, rather than Henri, who listened to his troubles; and it was she who had found time to advance his knowledge of mathematics and elementary algebra. She was an ugly woman, awkward in her movements and abrupt in her manner, but there was a brave, defined quality about her which touched him, he now had to admit, more deeply than did Henri's easy charm.
"I'll be perfectly frank with you, Raymond," Henri was saying. "I have hopes that you may be able to find a girl for me, someone suitable who would welcome the opportunity to be maintained in a place of her own, without forfeiting her independence."
Raymond shrugged. "There is no shortage of girls," he said, and then relapsed into silence.
"What do you suggest?" Henri said anxiously.
"Do you have some particular person in mind, perhaps?"
Henri offered him a Gitane, and the small coils of white smoke from their cigarettes drifted lethargically in the hot, still air. At the far end of the copse, the labourers were drinking their passage into the heavy, head-splitting sleep which would possess them until late in the afternoon.
"I have always admired Eugenie," Henri said.
And he saw, out of the corner of his eye, the African vibrate.
Eugenie was now a ripe, sophisticated and highly popular girl of seventeen. She was one of the village beauties, and she liked men. Recently Leblanc had refused to hear her confession, swearing that her admissions were either too lurid or too spotless to be seriously entertained.
"What do you think?" Henri pressed him, his face consumed with desire now that he had reached the point of mentioning Eugenie's name.
Raymond continued to tremble. He was so upset and confused that he hardly knew what he was saying.
"Yes, why not? She is of course getting on. I mean, yes, she ought to be married soon, she ought to make a sound marriage."
"I am a bourgeois, but I don't claim exclusive rights in a mistress."
The African found it hard to digest Henri's quick breathing, his leap from rationality into blind hunger, his open betrayal of Lise, his rapid descent from dignity. He promised that he would speak to his sister on Henri's behalf; and during the next few days he wrestled with his own shadow and Eugenie's elusive innocence in an attempt to unravel his rival obligations and the conflicting claims within his own Personality of "conscience" and "maturity." Henri held the ladder to his future. Finally he took his sister by the hand one evening and led her underneath the almond trees of Lunda Tukhomada's garden.
"My friend Henri Faure admires you," he said.
She laughed loudly, with a vulgarity born of distress.
"So you agreed to carry his message, Monsieur le clerc."
Raymond trembled. He had not anticipated that thing" would come to a head so rapidly, or with such unpleasant ness.
"I'm only telling you," he said, stiff with shame.
"Don't apologize, Raymond, it doesn't fit your character As it happens, your message is superfluous. A man does not stare at one as M. Faure stares at me without things sinking in, you know."
"It's up to you," he said, miserable.
"Tell me, in France do men sell their sisters?"
"Sell! Who said sell? How dare you speak as if I were getting something out of this! How monstrous a woman you are! Your mind is utterly posioned."
He glared at her furiously.
She wandered away through the grove of almonds, leaving him rooted and quivering. Finally she rested against a tree and spoke softly, without turning around.
"What will happen to you if I refuse?"
"Nothing," he said, and stalked away.
The next day, at noon, he approached Henri, who had for some while been watching him in a state of intense, itching impatience. They sat down together for lunch.
"I spoke to Eugenie," Raymond said quietly, barely above a whisper. He dared not look at his friend.
"Well?" Henri said.
"She was very grateful for your proposal. Extremely honoured. She admires you greatly, of course. However, she insists that she is presently thinking of marrying ..." His voice trailed away.
"But damn it," Henri broke out, "I told you that I am not possessive! Didn't you tell her that?"
"Yes, yes, I did. She very much appreciated your kindness in this. She admires you no end. Unfortunately, she is afraid that her future husband might be jealous."
"But he need not know! Who is he, anyway?"
"She didn't tell me, Monsieur."
"I've told you a hundred times, don't call me Monsieur.
We are friends and equals. Or perhaps you had forgotten, eh?"
"Eugenie is very stubborn," Raymond said. "She believes that she ought to be faithful to her future husband."
"An African girl, a simple creature from the bush, is in no position to entertain such high and mighty nonsense. Leblanc is responsible for this."
"I know."
Henri bit savagely at his croissant and cheese and drank the red wine by the glass. Raymond hadn't suspected the depth of his friend's passion for his sister and was quite overcome when Henri muttered furiously, "After all that Lise and I have done for you."
That evening Raymond wrote a poem packed with emotional fervour in tribute to the great empire builder, Marshal Lyautey. It made him feel a little better. In the morning he put it away with his other poems in a wooden chest; his fellow evolues had left him in no doubt that he would never be a real poet. The flow of invitations to the Faures now dried up, and it was not long before Henri's attitude to him as an employer underwent a marked change. "Why are you sitting around when there is work to be done; you people are all the same . . ." This metamorphosis bewildered Raymond; Henri seemed hardly the same man at all. "Look at this sheet of accounts," he would say in a dark rage, "more errors than I could count . . . When I dictate a letter to my clerk, I expect him to be able to spell, at least. The word is 'additionner,' not 'additioner.' And look here—your lines are almost running into one another . . ." Henri's mood made Raymond worried and nervous, which in turn provoked him to make the very mistakes which infuriated the Frenchman. A month after Raymond approached Eugenie, Henri dismissed him.
It was 1943 and the notices everywhere read: "Apana Kazi"—"No Work." His marriage to Sofie, the daughter of a village shopkeeper and a friend of Eugenie, had to be Postponed. Raymond's savings dwindled so rapidly that he Was forced to return to his father's fields in order to keep himself alive.
He grew bitter. At the France-Empire he no longer defended the liberal whites against their African detractors.
"They tell us we smell bad, that's why the churches anc public buildings have to be segregated! Well, I tell you, a white man smells rotten to me. He stinks like a corpse!"
The evolues were stunned by his strength of feeling, his eloquence, his coherence. Dimly they perceived the emergence of a force they would be compelled to follow.
Then he had a stroke of luck. The African clerk in the local branch of the post office (which had been set up soon after the war began) contracted malaria and died. Despite fierce competition from his friends at the France-Empire, Raymond got the job. Although the pay was less than half of what a white would have received for the same work, it gave him a financial basis for a respectable marriage. He hurried to celebrate in Sofie's arms.
Toward midnight he left her father's house in a mood of euphoric optimism. He said aloud, "la, la, la," and mounted his bicycle. The night was warm and still; it caressed him like soft satin. But no sooner had he begun to wobble down the road than he ran into a stationary vehicle standing without lights in the shadows. Suffering more from wounded dignity than from physical hurt, he picked himself off the ground and peered into the car.
Henri was sitting behind the wheel with blank, sunken eyes and flabby jowls.
"What are you doing here?" Raymond cried, rubbing his leg.
"Don't be insolent," Henri said drily.
"You've got your eye on my fiancee, isn't that it?"
"Mind your own business."
"What do you mean, you lecherous devil? We're to be married within a week. Whatever concerns Sofie is my business. Are you looking for a broken nose or something?"
Henri didn't move, except to light a cigarette. The incident made a deep impression on Raymond. Could there be more painful proof of social inferiority—you spoke threateningly to a man in the night, and he lit a cigarette.
"I suspect," Henri said laconically, "that you've damaged my front bumper. That could cost you a few weeks' pay and| a few weeks of the pleasure of marriage. Or do you enjoy those already?"
"You-"
"Tais-toi. I'm not a vindictive type, Raymond, and I'm genuinely saddened that you let me down and turned against me. I expected too much of you, that's all. Lise and I have agreed that we should not regard you as typical: we intend to persevere."
Raymond had to ride away, leaving the Frenchman entrenched outside his girl's house.
For a while, his marriage was a tempestuous one. Concealed beneath his sober, even scholarly exterior, lay a strong vein of sensuality which Sofie took pleasure in quarrying. At night the sedate post-office clerk yielded to his wife's pagan rites, clasping her with pure joy and frenzied words, working himself out on her in an almost hysterical way, often getting up in the morning in a state of near-exhaustion. She, for her part, found him bewildering. At one minute insisting on his admiration for France and his desire to work patiently within the system, at the next he would be addressing her like a public meeting, denouncing the imperialists and swearing to chase every white man from the country within a week. Impatient with her ignorance and frivolity, Raymond could not regard her as an equal. At one time he chided and lectured her so insistently that she withdrew to the storekeeper's house until he promised to curb his temper.
When the war ended Raymond was prospering. He frequented the France-Empire less and generally steered clear of Claude and the more vocally critical evolues. The political situation had apparently tightened, and the authorities, alerted by outbreaks elsewhere in the French Union, had begun to file reports on potential rebels. Raymond saw no point in making trouble for himself; a constantly expanding horizon of advancement now extended before him.
Three years after joining the post office, he was offered the opportunity for special executive training in Thiersville. It meant leaving Sofie and their two-year-old son, Maurice, for a period, but he accepted without hesitation. Sofie protested furiously until, enticed by promises of a future flowing with milk and honey, she reluctantly gave way.
For two days and two nights he travelled through his own country—through jungle, scrubland, cultivated fields, copper mines and stony desert. He arrived exhausted and dirty, yet fiercely elated to be visiting for the first time in his twenty-five years the capital city of which he had read and heard so much. So precisely could he locate the avenues, boulevards and public buildings that he felt a little like a traveller returning home after a long absence abroad. Even so, the power and self-possession of Thiersville at first overwhelmed him; he gaped, like a boy.
He found inexpensive lodgings in the native quarter, the cite. Convinced that he would soon lift himself out of the mire and purchase a tidy house on the fringes of the European ville, he found it easy to divert his eyes from the squalor in which he lived—the overflowing refuse bins, the hungry pie dogs scrabbling in monsoon ditches swirling with garbage and filth, the walls flecked with urine and excrement, the pitiful beggars, the stench of blocked drains.
He walked, on this his first day in the metropolis of French culture in central Africa, through the broad, tree-lined avenues and boulevards of European Thiersville—past the governor's residence, the Palais de Justice, the museum and the main barracks of the Garde Nationale. Seeing heavy military convoys rumbling toward the Avenue Foch and Camp Mac-Mahon, he felt for the first time, in tactile, sensuous terms, the physical power of the State. As a public servant of France, a little of its grandeur rubbed off on him; he glanced down at his suit and shoes; soon he would be able to afford better ones, cut in Paris. The scent of mimosa enveloped him; he smiled—and knocked, in passing, a white woman.
He hurried to apologize but she cut him short.
"Tu ne peux pas faire attention, sale macaque?"
His heart raced. She was a heavy, pallid creature, poorly dressed and somehow incongruous in any environment except one of the distant, windswept Atlantic seaports about which he had read. A throbbing started up inside Raymond's head, and a peculiar aroma hung in his nostrils. Only later did he realize how afraid he had been, and how angry.
"So what do you say?" she said, still using the form "tu."
He bowed stiffly. "My apologies, Madame."
"Insolent as well?"
He saw that the roots of her tremulous indignation reached far beyond the incident itself; a mountain of damp, heaving flesh, she found herself involved in a cycle of passion which she could not comprehend. A white-helmeted policeman, a Frenchman, had sauntered across the boulevard, clasping his white-gloved hands behind his back. Raymond's head tilted up; people had stopped to watch.
"Well?" the gendarme said.
"This black knocks into me, almost throws me to the ground, and then is insolent into the bargain."
The gendarme turned slowly to the native.
"Can you speak?"
"It is true that I knocked into the lady by mistake. I hurried to apologize, but instead she insulted me."
The gendarme raised his eyebrows. "Insulted you? Is it possible?"
Raymond stood quivering. "I am a public servant of France," he said. "The lady would not have spoken to a European in the same way."
"A European!" the woman shrieked, incorporating within the orbit of her indignation the whole street and, it seemed, the sky.
"You should apologize," the gendarme said, smiling slightly.
"I have."
"Again."
A crowd had gathered around them, mainly whites, but its overt hostility to him had the effect of bringing to the surface a vein of stubbornness. He realized now, with mild surprise, that he did not know himself at all; and he sensed vaguely that he was about to discover and almost create himself in this new, more demanding climate. Previously his reactions to any familiar situation had carried a dull, almost metallic ring of inevitability. But now he observed himself with a surprise verging on detachment.
"I am prepared to repeat my apology," he said stiffly, "if the lady will withdraw the term 'macaque' and will revert to the normal 'vous.'
"They're getting unbearably cocky," someone said in the
"Don't impose conditions," the gendarme said. "Just apolo-
Q17P "
The fat woman turned to the crowd. "He insulted me, the bloody macaque."
The gendarme was growing irritated; the bellowing woman, the stubborn black and his own failure to impose his authority had wiped the resigned smile from his face.
"I shall not warn you again," he told Raymond, bringing out his handcuffs.
Raymond said, "I know the law. The law abhors racism. I am a public servant of France and I understand the situation perfectly. I have no intention of altering my position."
Even as he heard these words, he thought: foolish bravado. He knew nothing about the law, and as for his job with the post office, it was as good as lost. He would go back to zero.
The gendarme handcuffed him and led him across the boulevard. The crowd dispersed happily and the fat woman went her way, avenged. Raymond was trembling violently. A few minutes later the gendarme released him.
"Go away," he said wearily.
The following morning Raymond began his training for the position of cashier and senior clerk in the post office—jobs previously confined to Europeans but now offered to selected Africans. The Director accorded him an interview lasting two minutes, during which he contrived, with short, precise sentences, to remind him of the honour of serving France and of the burden of guilt and original sin borne by every African until he had totally proven himself.
"You are on trial," the Director said.
"Thank you, Monsieur le Directeur." He bowed.
"You can go, then."
He worked hard and lived a conscientious, abstemious life, eschewing actions and attitudes which might discredit him in the eyes of the authorities and avoiding, to begin with, contacts with other evolues, aspiring politicians and literary pundits—the "black intelligentsia." Beyond an orthodox, respectable life and a conventionally successful career, he acknowledged few aspirations; yet from time to time an unaccountable inner force or "temperament" within him took control and endowed his actions with a vibrant, almost epileptic stillness. Some months after coming to Thiersville, a perfectly normal incident suddenly conjured up the Mr. Hyde in him.
On leaving work, he was in the habit of purchasing twenty cigarettes in a "Tabac" situated in a side street near the Place Clemenceau. Normally he went in, put down his money and walked out at once with his cigarettes, but on this occasion a customer was detaining the proprietor by examining every pipe in the shop, with the result that while Raymond was waiting several whites came in and stood tapping their heels. When the customer had finally been satisfied, the proprietor turned not to Raymond but to the first white standing behind him.
"Excuse me, Monsieur, I was next," Raymond said.
The words came out almost involuntarily.
The proprietor said, without passion, "Natives customarily wait until the end." He began drumming his fingers on the counter, as if rebellious blacks had deprived him of the best years of his life, turning his hair grey and his stomach to ulcers. Raymond knew how delicate an operation it is for a member of a subject race to strike the right tone in voicing a complaint. The complaint itself is regarded as an insolence bordering on a crime; elaborate politeness incurs the charge of sycophancy or of disguised mockery; plain self-assertion results in blows and arrests. So heavy is the guilt of the rulers.
"As a matter of fact," Raymond said, in a tone of polite neutrality, "this system of preference is contrary to the law. We are starting a movement which will bring legal actions on test cases."
The proprietor sighed, pulled down the corners of his mouth and shrugged at the whites waiting to be served. One of them, an American businessman in a Panama hat, loudly advised in English, "Give the guy his cigarettes, huh."
A quiet, unobtrusive Frenchman, with a long, oval face, fine brown hair and a tight mouth, reacted with unforeseen passion.
"It's a trick, a trick. I can spot them a kilometre away, these politiques. We have a duty to stand firm."
"Oh Christ alive," bellowed the American, "give the black-ie his fags and let's all get out of here."
The Frenchman turned to him with a twisted smile.
"The Communist archangel and the collectivist virgin go under many strange disguises."
The American stood flabbergasted. "How do you ever get any goddam business done in this crazy setup?"
The "Tabac" was filling up. The proprietor sighed and slipped Raymond his cigarettes. As he went out the Frenchman grasped his arm convulsively.
"Give me your name," he said intensely.
Raymond pulled his arm free. "You give me yours, Monsieur. It is your attitude which is illegal." He walked out into the sunlight of the street, followed by the American, who laid a sympathetic hand on his shoulder.
"These French are crazy," he said.
Raymond drew himself up stiffly, and his small, dinosaur's head swayed.
"France, Monsieur, is the most civilized country in the world."
In Thiersville he lived an outwardly calm and uneventful life. Having passed his examinations, he was given a position in the post office worth 40,000 Coppernican francs a month, half the European rate for the same work, but enough to enable him to purchase a modest bungalow on the outskirts of the European quarter and to bring Sofie and Maurice from Upper Varva.
The Tukhomada family lived, dressed and ate like bourgeois.
But the latent internal schism, or wound, had not healed. A model of reformist caution and gradualist discretion when discussing politics with the Thiersville evolues, Raymond became garrulous, boastful and revolutionary in the company of prostitutes—particularly after love-making when some girl was massaging the muscles of his neck and shoulders.
With his wife, Sofie, he remained unpredictable.
He founded an interracial cultural union. When the young poets, intellectuals and lawyers whom he met in cafes and bars made jibes at his expense, he lifted his chin. A few weeks later be proposed to set up an Association of Native Public Servants—a white-collar union, as he put it, for those with black necks. The Government was this time more suspicious; it took nine months for the final authorization to arrive from Paris. The Association flourished, however; Raymond's prestige among the native evolues increased and, when the President of the Republic visited Thiersville, he and Sofie were among the Africans invited to the reception. More than ever convinced that real progress could be made if only one could get past the local officials and through to Paris, he wrote a long article setting out his ideas, sent it to a well-known Paris periodical and was delighted to receive a letter of acceptance by return of post. Two months later it was printed.
The Director of the post office summoned him to his office.
"Raymond," he said patiently, waving a copy of the paper.
"Monsieur le Directeur." Raymond stood with stiff, unflinching dignity.
"You really wrote all this?"
"Yes, Monsieur."
"You—a public servant of France—felt it your duty to write sharply criticizing your superiors?"
"But-"
The Director shook his head slowly. "This is not the way, I assure you. They won't forgive you a second time."
Raymond was indignant. He regarded his article as a model of moderation and restraint. Far from advocating immediate independence, he had asked only for progressive Africanization, arguing that the professions, the law, the public services, the army officer corps and, indeed, the political sphere as well would benefit from the introduction of new, African blood. A Jacobin at heart, an admirer of Rousseau, Robespierre and the "general will," he had little sympathy for the enfranchisement of the illiterate peasant masses, still less for class war. Only general education would make universal suffrage both feasible and desirable. His article had concluded with a passionate avowal of loyalty to France and gratitude for her civilizing mission; as proof of his sincerity, he cited his intention of sending his eldest son to a lycee in France.
This statement, more than any other, had aroused the curiosity of the Director of the post office, who had not been aware that Raymond enjoyed any income other than what he earned in the post office.
In the cafes and bars Raymond waxed indignant. The young intellectuals smiled.
"What did we tell you?"
"Ha!"
"Why do you scoff, Raymond?"
"Because you people talk a lot and write poems, and change nothing."
Despite his annoyance at the Director's rebuke, he enjoyed the sensation of being a practical man of affairs, a man who understood the realm of the possible, a man who got things done. His native association quickly doubled its membership; its activities proliferated; Raymond's name became widely known in official quarters as well as among the more conservative-minded African bourgeoisie. Acting on the maxim that to stand still is tantamount to falling backwards, he decided to make a lunge for the top rung of the social ladder and to apply for a carte d'immatriculation.
If he was going to assume the over-all leadership of the Africanization movement, he felt bound to prove himself in every way the equal of an educated European.
The law provided that any African who passed the imma-triculation test would be entitled to absolute parity of treatment with white Frenchmen. Hence it could be argued that the hierarchical and undemocratic aspects of the State were founded on differences of education and maturity, not of race and colour. But the cartes were notoriously difficult to come by; only ninety-three had been granted in seven years; for every fifty applicants, forty-nine failed.
Six months after submitting his application, he was summoned to appear before the Thiersville tribunal—a panel of three French adjudicators assisted by a formidable army of clerks who marshalled and sorted the voluminous collection
of letters, documents and reports which the tribunal's investigators had gathered.
"You lost your job as clerk to M. Faure, an engineer in Upper Varva. Why was that, Monsieur Tukhomada?"
"It was thirteen years ago, Monsieur."
"I am aware of that. If I had thought that the date rendered the incident irrelevant, I would not have bothered to raise the matter. It will be a healthy precedent if you will answer the questions as they are put to you."
"M. Faure took against me."
"Because you were inefficient at your work?"
"That was not the truth of the matter, Monsieur le Juge."
"Very well. Tell me, is it the case that you developed a strong hostility to the Christian religion when you were thirteen or fourteen years old?"
"Not true."
"We have it here on the evidence of Bishop Leblanc
"He wanted me to terminate my education and take Holy Orders. I refused. He has never forgiven me."
The judge smiled, then, as if to say, "Good for you."
"We notice that you have adopted European habits of dress and so forth. Is it true that you and your wife have acquired the custom of eating European food only since coming to live in Thiersville?"
"It was not always possible to obtain European food on a low salary in Upper Varva. I did, however, frequently dine With local French people at that time."
"With M. and Mme. Henri Faure, for example?"
"Yes, Monsieur."
"They befriended you, welcomed you at their table and lent
you books. M. Faure even gave you a job."
"Yes."
"Is it true that you made a certain proposition to M. Faure?"
"Proposition?"
"If you would like to admit to the accusation, I need not state it aloud in open session of the tribunal. Admission need not necessarily prove fatal to your case." "Monsieur, I admit nothing!"
"Very well," said the judge resignedly, adjusting his spectacles. "You are said to have suggested to M. Faure that your own sister should become his mistress of menagere, as the saying is, and that you in turn should receive an upgrading as clerk."
"Monsieur Faure is now divorced! His wife divorced him on account of his persistent immorality with native girls!"
The judge nodded patiently. "Precisely. But it is not he, Monsieur, who is applying for a carte d'immatriculation."
"He doesn't have to. He is white!"
The judge leaned back in his chair. "Monsieur, one of the qualities we are looking for is self-control and moderation of language and disposition." He smiled like a fox. "French qualities."
"I beg your pardon," Raymond said, "I was carried away by these slanders against my name."
"Of course."
"It was M. Faure who suggested to me-■**
"Ah." The three judges smiled at one another. Bored with judging men, they liked best to investigate them; an enigma was more intriguing than a sin. "So what did you do when M. Faure approached you?"
"I told him that he had come to the wrong man."
"Really? Did you tell him this before or after speaking to your sister?"
"I—M. Faure had great power over me, Monsieur. He was my employer and in a wider sense my patron."
"So you did speak to your sister?"
"I mentioned what he had said."
"And what was her reaction?"
"She told me what I afterwards told M. Faure."
"What—that he had come to the wrong man?"
The three judges laughed. Raymond blushed furiously and clenched his fists, struggling for self-control.
The judge asked: "Did your sister not rebuke you for bringing the proposal to her?"
"No, Monsieur."
"Truthfulness is another French virtue."
"It was a long time ago, she-" "Did. Let us pass to another point, concerning your wife, M. Tukhomada. Did she to your knowledge ever have any dealings with M. Faure?"
"None, Monsieur le Juge, although I had to warn him away from her myself."
"I believe that you were for some time living alone here in Thiersville while your wife was still at Twibi."
"I trust my wife absolutely."
"An admirable sentiment," said the judge. "Call Mme. Tukhomada for a question." Sofie came from the gallery and mounted the witness-box wearing her best French clothes and a furious blush.
"Madame, I must ask you this. Did you have any dealings with M. Faure while your husband was away?"
"No!"
The judge scrutinized Sofie, who turned in confusion to Raymond, only to find that he was staring at her with a suspicion bordering on accusation. Man and wife, joined in perpetual intimate union, a unity against the world, they stood together in the tiny witness-box, divided and confused under public exposure. Already Sofie was dabbing at her eyes.
"Madame, don't distress yourself. In our opinion, your adultery with M. Faure was a matter of little consequence, a mere episode."
Sofie nodded vigorously.
"Good. Perhaps you deserve a small spanking, eh? I imagine your husband is not the sort of man to beat his wife very often?"
"Oh, very rarely, Monsieur."
"You may step down."
In the spectators' gallery a group of French journalists Were laughing. Raymond glared at them furiously. One of them surreptitiously blew him a kiss.
"Monsieur Tukhomada," the third judge began, "when you had settled down in Thiersville, what sort of entertainments attracted you?"
"I spent much of my time studying, Monsieur le Juge."
"You are fond of music and jazz?"
"In moderation only."
"To be frank: did you frequent nightclubs from time to time and pick up prostitutes?"
Raymond said angrily: "Naturally I wished to emulate European habits." But the judge refused to be provoked.
"Do you still go with prostitutes from time to time?"
"I make no secret of it."
"How much money do you earn?" the judge shot at him quickly.
Raymond stood upright and characteristically still in the witness-box. His long arms hung by his sides and his shoulders were held square.
"Fifty-five thousand francs a month, Monsieur."
"That is your salary as a cashier in the Department of Posts?"
"Yes, Monsieur."
"You have no other source of income?"
"My father occasionally sends me small amounts."
"Does he?" The judge raised his eyebrows. "When we questioned him he did not mention the fact. Generosity is hardly a quality of which he would feel ashamed."
"In recent years these gifts have become less frequent."
"Suppose we analyze your expenditure per month, Monsieur Tukhomada. Please stop me if you radically disagree with our estimates. 20,000 francs on food; 9,000 in premiums and interest with respect to the mortgage on your house; 4,000 on clothing for you, your wife and children; 4,000 on the various insurance schemes which you have undertaken. That amounts to a total of 41,000. Taxation reduces your salary to 49,000, leaving a margin of only 8,000 francs, out of which you must pay for cigarettes, entertainments, gifts, travel expenses and general purchases. Can you explain, Monsieur, how you have contrived to purchase the following: one radio, 15,000 francs; one record player, 26,000 francs; one typewriter, 24,000 francs; records to the value of 40,000 francs; books to the approximate value of 100,000 francs; and furniture to the approximate value of 600,000 francs? And how you propose, over and above all this, to send your eldest son, Maurice, to a lycee in France?"
Raymond was rubbing the palms of his long hands against his trousers. Already a stain had appeared.
"Monsieur le Juge, you must appreciate that in order to achieve the French way of life, a certain initial outlay is necessary."
"Naturally. What we want to know is how have you managed to get the money."
"I—I have done some writing."
"How much have you earned from your writing?"
"I cannot say entirely. I have been careless about keeping accounts."
"What else, then?"
"I have been compelled to borrow money."
"There is nothing shameful in that. From whom?"
"There are certain Frenchmen, Monsieur le Juge, who are anxious to advance the cause of the native evolues and so generously reach into their own pockets. It would be a gross and un-French breach of confidence for me to disclose their names."
"But why? They are entitled to lend you money. They are not going to be persecuted for it, are they?"
"I must consult them first, Monsieur." Raymond looked dejected and temporarily overwhelmed by his ordeal. When the judge gave him permission to step down he almost collapsed on to the wooden bench, so intense was his desire to be finished and done with the whole business. Meanwhile Sofie, pretty and demure in a blue hat and veil, had once again been called into the box to be cross-examined about her domestic life. Raymond listened sullenly, casting his resentment equally at the wife who had betrayed him and at the anaemic whites who were gloating over his misfortunes. Everything Sofie said infuriated him.
"Madame, does your husband consult you on matters relating to the education of your children?"
"Oh no, Monsieur, I'm very ignorant about such matters."
"Are there any native foods and dishes which you still cook at home?"
"I am very fond of kra-kra."
"Which consists basically of maize and onions?"
"There is more to it than that, a properly-"
"Thank you. For how long in your life have you been living in a house with an inside lavatory?"
"Two years, Monsieur."
"When you and your husband are alone, in what language do you normally converse?"
"My husband always speaks French to the children."
"But with you?"
"I sometimes prefer to speak my own language, Monsieur."
"So you don't regard French as your own language?"
As soon as they were alone together Sofie knew that she was in disgrace. On the way home he sat tight-lipped, pouring with sweat, clenching and unclenching his hands and occasionally groaning. When she suggested that he kiss the children good-night, he replied, "Ha! And how do I know that they're mine?"
For two hours he sulked; then suddenly became violent.
"So you slept with that swine Faure, did you? What are you going to tell me? That I shouldn't have ever left you? That you ran short of money, that you only did it for the sake of the children?"
He advanced towards her, shaking.
"So you eat kra-kra and converse in your native tongue, do you? Never mind all that I've done for you, turning you from an ignorant provincial slut into a sophisticated urban woman, never mind the fine clothes and the house I've bought you—you had to let me down, you had to tell them that I don't beat you often. Often! You fool!"
He seized her by the shoulders and gave her one stinging slap across the cheek. She gasped and her head jerked back; in the next room a child cried. In the alcoholic cataract of his rage, a simple stone of reason shone through, and it was this glimmered perspective, this appreciation of his own mistakes—the prostitutes, the money—which diverted his flailing fists from the woman to the house itself, the contemptible four-room stone box which had provided the white men with ammunition and amusement. He struck the wall until the plaster began to peel; he kicked in a whole panel of the front door and wrenched the curtains from their hooks and rods. He knew now that he hated the French, the whites, and that he had always hated them. "Just let them try and present me with their carte d'immatriculation," he cried, "and see what I don't do with it!" He took Sofie into his arms and hugged her; bewildered but relieved, she returned his embrace. "We'll crush them, crush them," he swore, "throw them out, crush them." Man and wife subsided to the floor, overwhelmed by the tide of their grief and by the totality of their nemesis; and once again Raymond worked out the complexity of his tensions and ambitions on the woman whose straps, stretches of nylon, elastic girdles and supports testified to her gallant and loyal attempt to travel with him into the formida-ble quicksands of the modern world.
In the few weeks following his appearance before the tribunal, two events served to crystallize his new, unqualified antagonism towards the whites. He was notified in a curt, printed circular that he had failed the immatriculation. He had not expected otherwise; even so, the actuality of the rebuff came to him like a blow in the face. Not long afterwards—and he never discovered whether the two events were in any way connected—a small Frenchman with the cultivated manner of a mouse called to notify him that: "Monsieur, I must live. Did I not have a wife and seven children— we are Catholics—I would rather beg in the gutter than undertake such a job as mine. If you wish to know what my poor life amounts to, imagine, Monsieur, all the rent collectors, rat catchers, suicide pilots, lion tamers, garbage collectors and deep-sea divers in the world rolled into one, soaked in kerosene, hurled into a furnace alive with radioactive scorpions, sharks and hungry pythons. That is me."
It transpired (after he had digressed on the subject of his native Brittany, where, evidently, it was less hot) that a new plan for the extension of the European ville entailed the demolition of several blocks of African-owned dwellings, including Raymond's; that Africans were not protected by any guarantee on their land; that although the City would Pay off the remainder of the mortgage debt (so that the financiers should not suffer), Raymond would receive no compensation for the premiums which he had already paid to the company. And there was no right of appeal.
These events left no doubt in his mind that a third, more devastating, blow was in the offing.
He was a changed man. He no longer had time for heroic monologues on the breasts of prostitutes. His quarrels with the progressive evolues ceased abruptly; henceforth, he accepted the definition of himself on which the French had insisted. Gone was the bourgeois, the man of moderation. In the cafes the intellectuals listened stupefied to his tirades Whenever he spoke in public, he unleashed a strange emotion men applauded and women wept. His Association of Native Public Servants followed up its wage demands with an illega strike; the authorities, as expected, responded by arresting him.
The Government was pleased with itself; Raymond was charged, not with actions prejudicial to the State, but with fraud and embezzlement. The French congratulated themselves on the coup: the most dangerous troublemaker in Thiersville would be totally discredited. Only later did they see how brilliantly Tukhomada had lured them into a trap.
Raymond conducted his own defence. Virtually ignoring the specific charges brought against him—embezzling money orders, postal orders and notes to the value of 900,000 francs over a period of six years—he transformed the witness-box into an oratorical platform for the indictment of the regime of the entire colonial system. The African population, he made it plain, would not be fooled. They knew very well that the whites had given him a Frenchman's work because they needed his skills, but at only half a Frenchman's rate of pay The whites had robbed him of the other half and pocketec the difference. And when he seemed to be proving that an African is in every way a Frenchman's equal, given equal material opportunities, the authorities grew desperate, determined to crush him, to deny him his immatriculation, to expropriate his house without compensation, to kick him out of his job, to arrest him on the most absurd trumped-up charges.
The Government had hoped to discredit him. Consequently the trial was held in open court. The authorities were bewildered; unable to refute their charges, the prisoner nevertheless seemed to be carrying all before him. His speeches—the changing rhythm, the subtle cadences, the biting innuendos, the explosive climaxes—had set the cite on fire. Not only among the evolues in the schools, colleges, offices and cafes, but equally among the labourers, taxi drivers, porters, printers and building workers, the name of Tukhomada rose like a black star in a white sky. Reports of his latest speech in court brought people running from workshops, stores and bars. Thousands responded with small contributions to an appeal on behalf of his family; the African cite had decided that so long he was in prison Sofie and her children should live in a style befitting immatricules.
Along the wide boulevards stretching from the Palais de Justice to the old stone fortress of Petit-Fresnes, on the east bank of the Varva River, huge crowds gathered to witness the captive passage of their hero, to receive a blessing from his thin, outstretched arms, to harvest hope and faith from the living truth in his wild, saucer-white eyes. Poker-faced detectives, tired, phlegmatic custodians of tradition, enemies of enthusiasm, hemmed him in. But the small dinosaur's head transcended their own; old-world cynicism had shortened their legs.
Tales of Raymond's captivity ran like wildfire through the town. Placed in a small, filthy cell alongside two bigamists and a murderer, deprived of his vest and shoes, his head shaved, prodded like a mule by the warder whenever given a directive, forced to sleep on a bare board, fed a plate of groundnuts in the morning, dry chikwang which he could hardly chew at midday and rice in dirty casks, with unwashed salty fish, at four in the afternoon ... all this was true. But speculation and rumour soon embroidered truth; the riots, the spasmodic violence, far from abating, gathered both momentum and cohesion. An illegal party, the National Liberation Movement, was founded with Raymond as its honorary president. Hesitating between repression and concession, between those French voices which attributed the whole emeute to the shameless demagogy of a few adventurers, Polluters of the public wells, and those voices which warned that a population with nothing to lose could not be contained indefinitely, the Government finally resolved on repression.
Salus populi suprema lex, as the Governor put it.
Within a few days of the new arrests, a group of terrorists wrecked the Plaissie Gendarmerie with a bomb. The revolution had begun.
PART I
The Year One
in a largE VIlla situated in the most exclusive enclave of European Thiersville, three families had gathered for lunch. The guests drank Martinis on a veranda overlooking spacious and exotic gardens while their host held forth on the essence of what he called the Apollonian style. Then the telephone rang.
"It's for you, father, " Sara Tufton said from the veranda doorway.
"Tell him it's Sunday, darling."
"He said it couldn't wait."
The Hon. Soames Tufton apologized to his guests, rose rather heavily from the wicker chair and stepped inside. His daughter watched him with a hint of anxiety, sensing that her lunch party was now in jeopardy. The Englishman took up the receiver.
"Tufton," he said, lighting a cigarette.
"Can you come round at once?" the voice at the far end inquired.
"Fernand, we Lutherans take our Sundays seriously."
"Things are coming to a head."
"I have guests."
"Who?" the voice asked bluntly.
Soames Tufton straightened his back and glanced towards the veranda. The abiding scent of gardenias and mimosas reached him, like a woman's shattered smile.
"You know my brother-in-law Chester Silk, of course . . ."
"Please bring the Ambassador with you," the voice said. "I've been trying to reach him all morning."
"We are also honoured by the presence of the Ambassador's Special Assistant."
"Powell Bailey?" the voice said sharply.
"The same."
After a pause, the voice said, "Can you come without Bailey?"
"I'd bury him in quicklime if I could. Unfortunately, his influence over Chester Silk grows day by day."
"But Mr. Silk is the boss," the voice said indignantly.
"He has a bad conscience, Fernand."
"Silk has a bad conscience?"
"Bad."
"Why?"
"Bailey has almost convinced him that being Ambassador of the US and being president of Amcol are incompatible functions."
"America is a business society," the voice suggested.
"I won't argue."
"Who else is with you?" the voice inquired suspiciously.
"Apart from Raymond Tukhomada-"
"What!"
Soames held the receiver away from his ear and grimaced at his daughter.
"Apart from my trusted friend Tukhomada," he resumed, "just women and boys, some of them delicious, some lamentable."
"You're joking, Tufton."
"Yes."
"Come as soon as you can."
"A bientdt."
He put down the receiver and flicked ash on the polished floor—a large, florid man with fleshy features and thick, corn-coloured hair brushed back straight from his forehead. The girl watched him anxiously.
"Who was it?"
"Fernand Ybele, no less."
"What did he want?"
Soames put an arm around her shoulders and kissed her lightly. His voice was quiet and assured.
"To overthrow the Government, naturally."
"I suppose that means you'll be away for lunch."
He followed her out to the veranda and took his seat among his guests. Sara chose a place beside a tall young man with fair hair, square shoulders and an expression of intense seriousness. She took his hand.
His name was James Caffrey.
"You were saying about the Apollonian style," she prompted Soames, faintly hoping to avert the break-up of her lunch party.
Soames looked about him. Chester Silk, dragging on an unlit cigar, was half asleep^ drugged by the sun and his second Martini. He couldn't have cared less about the Apollonian or any other style. His wife, Amanda, Soames' sister, sat thin and stiff, scrutinzing her daughter, Zoe, with enduring disapproval. The Baileys—the American Negroes—had said very little all morning; Powell Bailey was naturally a shy, reflective person, and his wife, Lucille, although garrulous and ebullient when at her ease, was liable to be overawed by what she called "intellectual talk." As for their son, Jason— he crouched against a stone pillar, staring longingly at Zoe Silk.
"Apollo," Zoe further prompted Soames.
Even James Caffrey could not, in that instant, take his eyes from her. The pedestal of his prowess rocked. Soames glanced at Sara; and witnessed, as he had known he must, her long despair at the injustice of the years.
"My point is simply this," Soames said. "Certain Italians of the Renaissance possessed the Apollonian style to a high degree. In other words, their life and art, their thought and action, their pleasures and necessities were approached within the framework of a single, coherent, all-embracing philosophy. They revealed themselves to be whole men, unified and balanced, not torn apart, schizophrenic and confused."
"That's the sickness of modern man," Jason Bailey inter-Posed, suddenly roused. "Schizophrenia and confusion."
A shadow of annoyance passed across Soames' face. Lucille Bailey nodded vigorously and proudly in support of her s°n, but Powell Bailey merely inched farther into his shell, his inscrutable mask. Chester Silk's eyes remained closed
Amanda, like Sara, registered faint contempt; only James Caffrey showed signs of genuine interest.
Jason threw Zoe Silk a brief, anguished plea. But she; cocooned in her private mystery, would not acknowledge the young Negro's existence.
"Presumably," James Caffrey said, "the same quality was evident in fifth-century Athens."
"Yes, but where else?" Soames said.
"And do we take it that you yourself, and your proteges, aspire to this elevated condition?" Soames' sistei asked.
"My dear Amanda, I'm forever on my guard against the folly of blatant imitation. But I have to confess that I have hopes of reviving the form, the style, while infusing it with a content relevant to and consistent with what one might call the realities of the modern world."
"Aren't you getting a bit old for all that?" she said.
Soames strove to keep his voice level.
"Since you mention proteges, I'll admit that my hopes are pinned on James here."
James Caffrey blushed. Sara Tufton squeezed his hand.
"Well, this discussion is very unequal," Powell Bailey saidl politely. "Only a few of those present can compete."
"It's all above my head," Lucille Bailey said, taking cour-| age.
"Oh, it seems to me perfectly intelligible;' said Amanda Silk, "but merely unconvincing."
But James Caffrey was deeply engaged by the train of] argument.
"You might almost argue," he said, addressing himself mainly to Soames, but occasionally glancing towards Zoe Silk, "that in the nineteenth century a renaissance of the type Soames is seeking was impossible."
In moments of nervousness he liked to pull his straight, fair hair back from his forehead, away from his eyes.
"Why so?" said Zoe, in whose accent the American half only marginally predominated.
"Because the evolutionary struggle was too intense, too consuming. The desperate, competitive search for knowledge through gain and gain through knowledge, the great striving not only with the whole phenomenon of the physical universe but with the totality of man's history as well-"
"Are you an historian, Mr. Caffrey?" Lucille Bailey
asked.
James Caffrey cleared his throat. "-but with the totality of man's history as well, exhausted the energies of an age of factory chimneys, black coal dust, of medicine racing to keep pace with man-inflicted diseases, an age of ugly dialectical systems of thought designed to prevent man from feeling inferior to the artificial world he was in the process of creating. It's only now that we can relax a little, allow once again to a man a soul and a vision as well as a body and a brain . ..
Jason Bailey nodded unhappily. "I guess that just about fits," he said.
"Mr. Caffrey is very intelligent," Lucille Bailey said.
Soames smiled inwardly. It had been a pretty speech—and James' own. Even so, he did not flatter himself in detecting his own influence behind James' words. Gone was the dry, empirical scepticism with which the young man had originally greeted his ideas in England. Soames recalled the summer weekends at Tufton Manor, in Buckinghamshire, the long conversations in the old library, with its aroma of musk, faded leather and ancient cigars. He had fought to rescue James from the brink of nihilism and despair; and fought, also, to maintain his hold on the one person he loved, his daughter, Sara. He had won, it seemed, a double victory.
Even so, a problem remained. Earlier that morning, before the guests had arrived, James had taken him aside and told him bluntly that his patience was wearing thin. Strolling together in the garden, Soames had taken his arm.
"Why dissatisfied?"
"This place,"—James had gestured to encompass the villa and its grounds—"is a colfin. A glittering coffin."
"Patience."
"We've been here six weeks. You have been busy, no doubt, but I've done nothing to justify my existence. It doesn't take long, you know, to see the town and send home the relevant snapshots."
"Things will begin to move soon," Soames had promised.
"But will I move with them? I doubt it."
"I can't see why you should complain. You pass the days and nights here with Sara. She loves you. You lack nothing. You can swim, eat and make love, and you get paid for it."
James shook his arm free of Soames' grip. He spoke, now, with anger.
"Do I need to remind you that I threw over not only a thesis but also a career to come out here? Must I recall the words you employed to persuade me to follow you to Africa? Do such phrases as 'tragic humanism,' the 'frontiers of destiny' and the 're-creation of man' ring a bell with you? You promised me a life of real activity, not the idle existence of a paid parasite."
Soames nodded soberly.
"It's true," he said. "I have not done well."
"You've contrived to keep Sara with yau."
Soames smiled quickly. "James, I'm not a man to break my promise. When I say that the real drama is only just beginning, I mean it. These last weeks have been devoted to petty financial bargaining—a squalid business for which you are quite unsuited. I can promise you action within a matter of days."
"Days?"
"Yes, days, I promise you."
"Soames, I'm going to be firm with you. If something interesting doesn't happen within a week, I'm packing my bags and catching the first plane home."
Soames checked his stride. The amiability had gone from his face.
"Have you discussed this with Sara?"
"Yes."
"What is her reaction?"
"She sees my point."
"Yes, yes, but what does she intend herself?"
"To come with me."
Soames nodded and turned away. The harsh reflection of sunlight off the pond blinded him. The damp heat closed around his skull like a clamp.
Now, two hours later, he sat on the veranda with his guests. He glanced towards his brother-in-law, the American Ambassador.
"Chester," he said.
Zoe Silk tapped her father on the knee. He came out of a light sleep grunting.
"Yes, yes, hullo then."
"Chester."
"Must of slept," Chester Silk said.
"You did," Amanda said reprovingly.
"Chester, you and I have work to do," Soames said.
"Jesus, it's Sunday!"
"History will not wait."
"Goddam history. What's on?"
"No less a person than Fernand Ybele requires our immediate presence."
"He does?"
"I do hope you'll be back for lunch," Sara said.
"Okay, let's go," Chester said, heaving up.
"Will you require me, sir?" Powell Bailey asked.
"Oh sure, sure, come along, then, Powell," Chester Silk said easily.
"Ybele didn't suggest it," Soames said.
He and the Negro stared at one another through a painful silence—which Chester Silk broke, heaving, yawning and stretching himself.
"Aw come on, you know I can't even think without having Powell on tap."
"I think Powell should go," Lucille Bailey said. "After all, if there's work to do ..."
Soames bit back a cutting remark. Neither as a boy nor as a man, neither as the late Earl of Wycombe's son nor as the present Earl of Wycombe's brother, had he shown any inclination to "take his medicine."
The party on the veranda was breaking up now.
Zoe Silk took hold of Soames' arm and led him aside, into the shade of a jacaranda. Seeing this, Jason Bailey picked himself up and wandered away into the distant reaches of the garden, towards an old almond tree whose branches bent to caress the hard, dry earth—a quiet young man, twenty years °ld, closely resembling his father both in his cautious dignified bearing and in his delicately well-groomed appearance. He wore his father's moustache, a fine line of black haii meticulously aloof from the nostrils and the upper lip.
"Zoe darling," Soames said, "what does this black fellow mean to you?"
"Jason?"
"The black fellow."
"He means certain things."
"About which your uncle is tob old to know?"
She hung on his arm and sighed. Soames had first met th< Baileys in the spring while staying with the Silks in New York. He now saw more clearly than ever how little the two families had in common. Whereas Lucille was inclined to be gay and flamboyant, Amanda was severe and reserved. Ches-j ter Silk drank, Powell Bailey did not. Chester liked to slap aj man on the back and to venture the occasional dubious joke| Bailey lived by the tenets of the National Baptist Convention. Chester couldn't abide prigs; Bailey's high moral purpose in life was writ large in every word he uttered.
Since returning to Thiersville, Soames had observed i sharp deterioration in the relationship. Between the mild harmless jibes of the spring in New York and their coming tc Africa in midsummer, something had evidently occurred. Th< sight of Jason Bailey seemed to make Amanda's eyes bleed Chester treated him like a dog who had fouled the porch and Jason himself stared at Zoe with the pathetic gratitude oi a shipwrecked sailor offered briny water. Even so, a spark o dry hope fingered.
"Jason is out here for the Harvard vacation?" Soame! probed.
"And I, Soames, and I," she said wearily, "still a Radcliff( girl."
Hardly, he felt, a girl any longer. The fresh porcelain brightness was blurred, opaque now; her skin had taken on the grief of Bengal ivory, and shadows had entrenched themselves beneath her eyes, suggesting the sadness of years, of nights. Blue like his own, they no longer danced. And why had he seen so little of her, why were the Silks entombing her like a seashell in the glass wastes of the Embassy?
"So long since we talked," he said, squeezing her shoulders. His voice was full, like Madeira.
"Soames," she said sadly, "you're rich. I don't know how rich, but almost as rich as Pa, I expect. And you understand Africa so much better than he does."
"Thank God for that."
"Ma tells me that your business connections are very close now. In the copper mines."
"So?" He looked down at her with an actor's gravity.
"So don't lead him into bad ways. We ought not to hurt them, the black people, either here or at home. It's their turn to punish us. I know that to be true."
"But why should Chester or I wish to harm them?"
She turned away from him with a sharp intake of breath and leaned heavily against a stoaApillar. He noticed again her heaviness.
"I don't mind Pa makii^^Hl that money back home; he even spends some of it on paintings nowadays. If it's bad, as some people say, then nearly everyone is bad. But I don't want him to do it here. He ought to be Ambassador Silk here, and to think only of how America can help these people. Most of him wants to be like that."
Glancing back towards the house, he saw Sara standing in the shadows, watching them with an intent, inflexible jealousy. A pang of remorse stabbed him. Born within a few weeks of one another, the two cousins had lived their lives on different sides of the Atlantic. When thirteen, Zoe had first visited Tufton Manor with her mother; Sara had at once showed resentment of Zoe's superior, indeed, sublime, beauty. On each subsequent visit, as Sara's body took on its square, stocky set, and as Zoe's flowed into the perfect concaves of a sandglass, so the English girl hurled more and more barbs jnto the lazy, generous flesh of her cousin. Zoe remained impervious, wiling away her secret attic hours with books, music and dreams, and in combing the long tresses of her golden hair.
"You'll be late, father," Sara called, "for lunch."
The ambassadorial Cadillac swept silently down the straight tarmac ribbon of the Avenue Foch.
"You know something?" Chester Silk ventured. "It's never been clear to me why this goddam country is called Copper-nica. That really doesn't sound to me like a French name." ]
"I'm sure Mr. Bailey knows," Soames said, pulling on a cigar. Generally he only referred to butlers and gamekeepers as "mister."
The Negro waited to be called. His jaw was set.
"So go on, Powell," Chester Silk commanded.
"The country—I should say the area—was first explored seventy-eight years ago by the Scottish prospector Sir Andrew Maxwell. He found a lucrative copper belt, which the British Government leased to his company for exploitation."
"That's a word I never cared for, with regard to business," said Chester Silk. " 'Exploitation.' "
"Maxwell called the area Coppernica," Bailey concluded, folding his hands.
"He was an amateur astronomer," Soames said.
"But when the French got hold of the place," said Chestei Silk, "why didn't they Gallicize the name?"
"They forgot. An uncharacteristic lapse," Soames said.
In the shade of the jacaranda trees, a shaven-headed child stood openmouthed as the big car swept past, black and: silent. The boy was clutching a begging bowl.
Judged as a feat of engineering, as a mode of conveyance from a capital city to a residential area and, beyond, to a vast military encampment, the Avenue Foch could not be faulted. Yet the brutal rationalism of the whole grid system on which the European ville had been designed offended a region of Soames' sensibilities. He would have preferred, even at the cost of diminished efficiency, rather more concession to human confusion and the follies of spontaneity. He accounted it a blemish on the French mentality, this urge to schematize, to mould the world into the severe cast of universality.
"Well," said Soames, "we are today entering the seventh week."
Chester Silk was momentarily at a loss.
"Of the famous Year One," Soames reminded him.
"Oh Jesus, that," Chester said.
"I daresay each passing week fills Mr. Bailey with deep
satisfaction."
"I'm certainly pleased to see Africans standing on their own feet, sir."
"Standing on our necks, you mean. Personally, I have never fully adjusted to the idea of France's wealthiest colony becoming overnight France's wealthiest ex-colony. If, as now seems certain, a huge area of central Africa rich in copper, cobalt, zinc, germanium and uranium-radium ore has fallen into the clutches of the enemies of Western civilization, then I, for one, judge it a catastrophe."
"The enemies of the Amcol Mining Consortium, sir, need not necessarily be the enemies of Western civilization."
Chester Silk grunted uncomfortably.
Soames glanced through the rear window. At a distance of fifty yards two motorcycle policeman were following the car down the Avenue Foch.
"I daresay they have the right," Chester said, anticipating the complaint.
"To follow us, my dear Chester? Of course they have. Mr. Bailey here will tell us it's called self-determination. Never mind that their would-be Robespierre, the insane Tukhomada, is a convicted thief, a common criminal; never mind the fact that Amah Odouma, whose creatures these motorized morons are, is known to have murdered a respected French lady with his own hands. No wonder he is known as Saint-Just."
"They're not all that bad," Chester said doubtfully. "No?"
"Maya, for instance. He can be trusted."
"Ah yes, the staunch General Maya, the peasant warrior, commander of the Army of Liberation. Of course he's not so bad—he's just impotent. He bestrides the empty office of Minister of National Defence like a tin colossus. Tukhomada and Odouma outwit him at every turn. Maya is a Carnot •narked down for the fate of a Danton."
"I wouldn't know about that," Chester Silk said. And then added, without conviction, "Things can still improve."
"Only if the Year One, this hideous abortion, is brought to a speedy conclusion."
"I daresay the people of Coppernica will have to be thel judges of that," Powell Bailey said.
"Goddam it, must you always sound like a preacher or something?" Chester exploded, thrashing about in the tangled web of his frustrations.
The Negro diplomat withdrew into his shell.
From behind their specially constructed sunglasses,! Soames' blue eyes, pinkish and moist at the rims, examined! the beads of sweat, large and opaque like Rand diamonds,' which stood out on the back of the chauffeur's neck, damp, ening the tips of his close, wiry hair. Less humid and enervating than the heat which he had once encountered on the west coast, this dry, relentless subequatorial furnacdj suited his health not much better. Having reached the age when a man, proceeding from the particular to the universal, from his own experience to all mankind's, is tempted to explain human behaviour in terms of food, climate, viruses and drink, Soames now believed himself to be in danger oi imminent physical and moral disintegration unless he could get away from the southern hemisphere.
Yet blended with this pessimistic emphasis on environment, there remained a vein of youthful hope—the faith tha men are what they make of themselves. It was undoubtedly this quality which so strongly recommended him to younj people, to Sara, to Zoe, to James Caffrey.
James and Sara. The problem flew at him off the hoi tarmac like a spitting cobra. James had given him an ultima-1 turn. The presumption stung his pride to the quick. Yet he remained without a means of retaliation. Sara's hopeless love for James had merely deepened since their arrival in Africa James was no doubt right; she would follow him home follow him anywhere. Without her—nothing, the abyss Soames reflected on the qualities in James which he had sc often extolled: physical strength and mental resilience, athlet icism and curiosity, courage and a sense of history, militar experience and a tender yearning for the embrace of destiny Destiny! Soames smiled inwardly. Surely such qualities coul< be employed; surely there had been some real foundation to his own propaganda, the long orations which had finally persuaded the boy to break with the academic life and to commit his future to Soames and the new renaissance. Surely such a fellow could prove worth his weight in copper, zinc, tin and uranium.
His thoughts returned to Sara. For her treason, her apostasy, her implicit renunciation of his total love, there could be no forgiveness. Yet to forgiveness there was no alternative. He would have liked a son, no doubt of it. Ten years had passed since Jane died, and he had remained single, solitary, committed to his daughter and to his pictures, to the ethos, the style of life which he liked to describe as the Apollonian style.
Sara—James—Sara. He had to do something, find a way. The boy had given him a week. Fury welled up inside him.
In the heat of the car, as he was swept along the Avenue Foch, Chester Silk's mind roamed. Small gusts of warm air wafted through the open window the fragnance of mimosas, gardenias and yellow honeydews. Sentiment and nostalgia jostled with reason in the shallower plains of his consciousness. He thought about Zoe, and about Powell Bailey's son.
"You know something?" he ventured suddenly.
Soames raised his eyebrows.
"Don't set this down on record, mind, but sometimes I get the feeling that things can be done out here. After all, Africa's no different from America in this respect: the bridge between black and white has got to be green, the colour of dollar bills. Then other times I think they're all just a bunch of goddam idlers. No offence to you there, Powell. I'm talking strictly off the record."
Powell Bailey stared straight ahead and held himself very still. Drops of perspiration glistened on his pencil-slim moustache.
The three men relapsed into silence. But soon new problems galvanized the Ambassador's tongue.
"Is Plon going to be at this do of Ybele's?"
"I imagine so. He and Ybele are hand in glove. Or rather Ybele sits in Plon's hand."
"Can't say I share your opinion of Plon, Soames. He comes over to me absolutely straight. French—but straight. I meet guys like him every day of my working life. His word is his word."
"Only when he speaks English."
"I don't happen to read him that way."
Located in the right environment, Soames reflected, Chester's acumen and judgment had to be admired. The environment in question could be defined with exactitude: the business sphere extending from Alaska to Chile. About Africa he understood next to nothing. He couldn't rid himself of the preconceived assumption that Fernand Ybele's Alliance Party was simply a conservative group representing commercial and financial interests. When Soames pointed out that the tribal chiefs, with their federal aspirations, held the key to an effective opposition to Tukhomada,1 Chester merely grunted in disbelief. Soames had urged him to set up consulates throughout the provinces, fully prepared when the time came to give assistance and arms where they would do most good—to the chiefs. But so far nothing had been done.
"Well, Powell," Chester said nervously, "I don't suppose you're likely to approve of this gathering, huh?"
"I expect not."
The Ambassador laughed uneasily.
In the Avenue Foch a military convoy rumbled past, heading for Camp MacMahon. Soames wiped his face and neck with a handkerchief of blue Lyonnais silk, lit another cigar and noticed that his hand was less than steady. The sight of army vehicles, of weapons of war, had always jarred his nerves. The distaste had prompted him to pass the years 1940—45 in the United States, where he had devoted himself to the business interests of his family. But aversion had not blunted the shafts of perception. Soames was the last man to underestimate the significance in the coming struggles of Camp MacMahon, the two square kilometres of barracks, garages, armouries, ammunition dumps and weapon ranges which had previously been the pride of the French Army and which now served as the headquarters of the Coppernican National Army. MacMahon was undoubtedly the ace of spades in Plon's pack.
The Cadillac turned into Ybele's driveway, past an unusually heavy concentration of motorcycle policemen. The thought flashed in Soames' mind: "a trap."
Hot, uncomfortable and heavy bladdered, he stood for a moment among the parked Peugeots, Citroens and Simcas, admiring the magnificent design of Ybele's new villa, the work, as was the American Embassy, of the Swedish-American architect Sven Lundquist.
Heavy-featured, ruddy, once handsome, Soames followed Chester Silk up a short flight of Sienna marble steps at the head of which, congenial and smiling, vigorously pumping the hands of his Anglo-Saxon guests and discreetly embracing his French ones, stood Fernand Ybele. The African's fingers sparkled with rings. Although well into his fifties, his gurgling, infectious laugh gave an initial impression of boyish frivolity and ultimate detachment.
"Well?" Soames murmured.
Ybele flashed him a metallic smile.
"Later," he said.
As Soames stepped past his host into a long, air-conditioned reception room, a servant hurried forward with a tray of drinks and imported delicacies. The sweep oft theroom commanded Soames' admiration. Here ebony carvings purchased in Nigeria, Ashanti stools designed for an Asantehene and discovered in the deep, religious recesses of Kumasi workshops, ivory figureheads from the Ivory Coast, a rare bust of a slim Fulani girl picked up among the itinerant herdsmen of the southern fringes of the Sahara, besides the best work in copper and silver of native Coppernican craftsmen, merged naturally with the products of years of selective buying in the auction rooms of London, Paris and Florence.
Almost at once Ambassador Silk had drifted, inevitably, into trouble. Downing Martinis steadily, he allowed himself to be encircled by Ybele's entourage and to be provoked into statements of principle by the notoriously combative and unstable Jean Liwele. Like Ybele himself, Liwele had graduated from a seminary, through law, to the world of politics— the bridge, as Ybele liked to put it, between this world and the next. Liwele was rumoured not yet to have spotted the metaphor's cutting edge.
"Well, I guess the composition of your National Assembly
does entitle Tukhomada to his office," Chester Silk was saying loudly.
Liwele stepped back, outraged. The Ambassador hastenec to explain himself.
"I mean, the letter of the constitution-"
"The letter killeth, Monsieur, the spirit alone giveth life."
Soames took the situation in.
At the far end of the room the French had grouped themselves in force, a tightly knit, coherent contingent observing its "freres ennemis" without shame or concealment. Soames knew four of them well: the tall, willowy Comte de Lacassagne, figurehead president of the giant mining combine the Union de Coppernica; Aristide Plon, small, neat and birdlike, vice-president in name but the guiding genius in reality; Cartier, the white-haired and slightly ineffectual general who, although defeated in the war of independence by Maya's Army of Liberation, had latterly consented to assume command of it under the new, healing auspices of the Year One; and the disreputable, saturnine politician Armand Keller. Standing next to him, tall, dark and muscular, was another officer whom Soames had not seen before. But once observed, his face was not easily forgotten. Taut and unyielding, it rent the shadows like a scar.
Momentarily alone, Soames had time to reflect on the strength of the forces arrayed against him. As he turned away towards the garden, the French officer's scowl pursued him, lodged in his retinas like grit in an oyster. Aristide Plon held most of the cards. The rapid fragmentation of Copperni-can politics, the emergence of a situation analogous to Chicago in the 1920s, suited Plon perfectly. Plon had the armed forces—the French officers who had stayed on after independence—at his beck and call. In this vital sphere his superiority was crushing. Soames had so far failed to evolve an effective response. Having assessed the situation on his return to Coppernica, he had decided to form on his own behalf a small corps of armed retainers. It was easy to hire Africans, but he needed someone to train them. When offered the job, James had replied that he hadn't come to Africa to be a drill-square sergeant major. Taking the rebuff lightly, Soames
had at once cabled to England for a suitable army veteran with some experience of African conditions. The result, Malcolm Deedes, was rather more of a veteran than he had bargained for. Furious, Soames had cabled the employment agent, promising to ruin him. To begin with, Deedes had put a bunch of ragged African youths through a desultory drill routine in the garden. Then Deedes had succumbed to heatstroke and taken to his bed. Soames would have thrown him into the street had not Sara and James intervened to prevent it. Forced to abandon the plan of forming his own private army, he reflected sourly that he was paying more and more people to do nothing.
Stationed by the window overlooking the garden, he overheard a fragment of conversation. It jarred his nerves. Powell Bailey was talking to Ybele.
"But what of America?" Ybele was saying.
"Naturally I can't answer for my government-"
"No, no, but between friends, quite informally."
"Monsieur Ybele, it is my earnest conviction that Washington would in all circumstances feel bound to support the claims of the legally elected government of your country."
"Even though Tukhomada is at this moment delivering Coppernica into the hands of your enemies?"
"That, sir, I cannot comment upon."
Soames turned back towards the centre of the room, determined to broach the question of discipline with Chester Silk. But before he could reach his brother-in-law, a hand tapped him lightly on the shoulder.
It was General Cartier, an urbane, listless man with greying hair, a paunch and the melancholic eyes of a St. Bernard. Soames bowed.
"I'm honoured, mon General."
Cartier smiled gravely, like a gentleman. He smelled of nicotine.
"Something has irritated you," he said.
Soames calculated rapidly what Plon's motives might be in launching this old hulk into enemy waters; only gradually did he perceive that Cartier was merely lonely and feeling out of things. His ostentatious conversation with Tufton was a pathetic gesture designed to demonstrate his independence.
"Mr. Bailey's opinions are his own," Soames said ob-scurely.
The General almost winked out of complicity.
"These political appointments, I must confess, are often unintelligible to a simpleminded soldier."
Soames shrugged. "The principles are not complicated. My brother-in-law owes his appointment to his generous contributions to the party funds of the present administration in Washington. Not forgetting, of course, his business interests in Coppernica. Mr. Bailey, on the other hand, is black, a professional diplomat and a man well versed in African affairs. The Americans have a passion for symmetry."
"Bailey has no business interests?" Cartier inquired innocently.
Soames' eyes veiled over; he tilted his head apologetically,' to indicate his recurrent deafness.
"How are things at MacMahon?" he asked quickly.
Cartier shrugged. "You mean how does a soldier serve with honour his former enemies? I cannot answer that. Paris urged me to serve, I served. I find myself less and less at the center of things. Younger men pass me by with a brief salute. One becomes a trifle resentful, a trifle piqued."
"I'm sure M. Plon takes you fully into his confidence."
"Plon! Not at all."
"But-"
"Tell me something," Cartier said, moving closer.
"Of course."
"You have a quarrel with Plon. Everyone hears about it. Yet Plon's Union is so many times larger than your Amcol.| It's a mystery to many of us how you have survived so long. Plon is a man-eater. He consumes everything which gets in] his way."
"I don't need to be told that," Soames said drily.
"Yet here you still are, every bit alive!"
Soames smiled modestly.
"Many months ago, when you, mon General, were en-gaged in your heroic struggle against the enemies of our civilization, Plon turned up in England and made me a proposition. He offered thirty-six shillings for each Amcol!
ordinary share—four shillings above the peak market price." "Four shillings?" "Almost three francs."
Cartier raised his eyebrows. "And you didn't accept?" "My friend Chester Silk urged me to do so. But I saw the
folly."
"I should have thought the folly was Plon's." "At that time Coppernican copper production had already soared to 300,000 tons a year. Of this, the Union accounted for 250,000 tons and Amcol for 40,000. Despite heavy taxation and export duties, our profit margins were as high as 15 per cent. The world market showed every sign of expanding indefinitely."
"On the other hand, the war here was not going well." "As Plon insistently pointed out to me. The glorious Army of France, we all knew, had been betrayed by the politicians more than once. But to my mind the answers to financial problems are no more complicated than the questions. The fact that Plon wanted our shares was strong evidence that they were worth keeping." "So he departed empty handed?" "I gave him a miniature of my grandmother." Cartier's eyes flickered; something swelled in his throat "But neither of you anticipated how quickly the war here would be over?" "That's certainly true. Neither of us did." Soames and the General both shifted their feet and coughed; an uneasy silence settled between them. At the far end of the room, immobile, intransigent, framed against the savage sweep of a Nigerian mask, the unknown French officer again caught Soames' attention and held it like a thumb thrust against his windpipe.
"That officer," he asked Cartier barely above a whisper, "who is he?" "Standing beside Armand Keller?" "Yes."
"Not a man you should approach lightly."
"Not a man I'd approach at all, if given the choice."
"Laval. Commandant Laval."
"What does he do?"
Cartier glanced around hurriedly, furtively. "Strictly, I ought not to tell you. However, in absolute confidence, be-tween friends, Laval commands the Special Force Camp near MacMahon."
"The training centre for mercenaries?"
"To call a cat a cat—yes."
"He has some connection with Keller?"
"As you know, Keller was imprisoned in Paris for his part in the coup of February 21, the last attempt to prevent by force the opening of negotiations with Maya. Myself, I never approved. Certain people here still hold it against me. I am not a putschist. I took an oath which I mean to keep."
"Yes, of course. But Keller-"
"He didn't stay in prison long. He has friends. He entered Coppernica with false papers. One expects his arrest any day." \
"You were about to explain his relationship to Comman-dant Laval."
"A few years ago, when the insurrection broke out here, Keller's views gained considerable influence among the young-er French officers, particularly in the Blue Berets. Quite a few joined his party. They were what the leftist press calls the diehards. If the coup of February 21 had succeeded and Keller had come to power in Paris, these men would have risen to the top of the Army overnight. And I, for one, would have been granted an early retirement. Or worse."
"Laval was one of these officers?"
"The most important, and now the most powerful."
"Are there many of them still about?"
"That is what the government of M. Tukhomada would most like to know."
Soames laughed uneasily; a thick vein began to throb in his forehead.
"Presumably Plon employs Keller to retain these officers here on the basis of their ideological commitment."
"Presumably," Cartier said stiffly. Evidently he now re-gretted the extent of his indiscretion; something in Soames' face had reminded him that Albion would remain staunchly perfide.
"What binds Keller to a man like Plon?" Soames pressed
him.
"Money."
"The universal language."
Cartier was on his dignity now. He felt he'd made a fool of himself.
"There are some of us, thank God, for whom Mammon isn't the primary consideration in life."
"Is Laval one of those?" Soames asked, brazening it out against the General's worsening temper.
The name of his subordinate caused Cartier to palpitate. Snatching a Martini from a passing servant, he downed it in one swallow, shook himself like a shaggy dog and became once more obligingly uninhibited.
"Strictly between friends," he said.
"Strictly."
"Laval is a ruthless fanatic. He will stop at nothing. Literally nothing."
"And what might 'nothing' mean in the present context?"
Cartier took yet another Martini. His eyes were watering and his long moustache drooped more than ever.
"No one tells me anything."
"But, mon General-"
"I'm no longer consulted. However, they can't fool me. I'm not the complete ass they seem to imagine. I have eyes in my head, and ears too."
"They're planning something?"
"A coup."
"Soon?"
"Soon."
At this juncture a hand descended firmly on Soames' shoulder. It was black. Cartier stepped back with an expression of affronted dignity, staggered slightly, attempted to bow and Was lost in the crowd.
"My dear Tufton."
Ybele stood beaming, as if an encounter with Soames were the greatest pleasure in his life. But Soames knew the man beneath the mask, the man whose father, a tribal chief in
Eastern Province, was reputed to have consumed a three year-old child in an attempt to restore his waning virility. j "Come and inspect my jacarandas," Ybele said, guiding him towards the garden. "Their tone is unique."
His broad features relapsed into their naturally frowning contours, gradually bending under the weight of man's original sin—his failure to be other men. "We must talk," he said. "Time is short."
TWO
Raymond tukhomada dabbed at his brow. Three vital decisions had to be reached, of which so far only one had been made. On the panelled wall above the Prime Minister's head the hands of the large electric clock pointed at noon. The door opened, and a janitor, a disabled veteran of the war of liberation, entered the cabinet room unceremoniously, bringing a jug of fresh drinking water for the ten ministers.
"It's been a long morning," he said to Maya.
He went out, banging the door. He always spoke to Maya. The old peasant grunted; sweat ran in rivulets down his lion's jowl. The clock said one minute past noon, and Tukhomada's. small, soft featured head adjusted itself to the renewed pressure of life in the stratosphere of history.
The youngest of those present, Amah Odouma, stirred restlessly, remembering the long, tapering memorial to his sister Camille which pierced the sky above her native Thiers* ville—the tribute of a people to its Joan. He had written poem, once, about the uncut hair of graves.
He knew at last who had murdered her.
In the long silence of indecision, the man sitting beside Amah ventured to bend his eye to the blotter on which the Minister of the Interior had doodled all morning. And was surprised to find only one word—a name, evidently— repeated many hundreds of times over.
Laval.
Against the reticent pine walls, Odouma's head stood out from that of his older colleagues, a lighter mahogany, grained with lines of muscular promise. A beam of sunlight caught in repose one half of a face whose finely balanced contours concealed the inner tension between the pragma-tist and the poet, the rifle and its song. The sunlight, which fell from a high window overlooking the Varva River, intruded on their paralysis of mind, gracing a privileged column of dust particles with the dignity of dancers. It soothed the men and mocked its own oracular promise. Odouma's neighbour observed on the cluttered blotter the tormented birth of yet another "Laval"; the word had been etched with savage force. The clock stood at two minutes past noon; Maya's breathing came with the labour of age. Amah stirred; Camille had no grave, her body had never been found.
Tukhomada's despair met his own, and mutual trust passed like a gift between them. Now, and perhaps too late, Robespierre and Saint-Just observed their despised Girondin enemies emerging in the menacing garments of the Directorate. On the wall, the clock swore its mechanical allegiance to the regime which might follow, and promised to bring Fernand Ybele on time to the head chopping of Thermidor, to record precisely the moment of the rasoir national's vengeance on those who had neglected to employ it. Between Amah and his beloved leader, the beautiful thing, the agency of understanding, had been the labour. The labour of a birth had been the catalyst in all their lives; then truly had men wrung lilies from acorns.
"Expel them," Maya said again.
"Expel them," said Amah Odouma, braving the glimmer of reproach in the soft oyster of Tukhomada's eyes. But the General's eyes darted with the force of red marbles, and on his massive shoulders the world had already erected a Parthenon of fame.
Maya had never accepted the French officers. "They'll stab you in the back," he had warned again and again. "Do you imagine that they have accepted their defeat? If I overpower a thief in my house, I'm a fool to thrust my gun into his hand." In these sentiments Maya was not alone. But Copper-nica needed French aid and French technicians; by retaining a number of French officers Tukhomada had hoped to reconcile Paris to his government and to begin the Year One on a note of conciliation. The great bulk of Maya's army, moreover, had already returned to fields, workshops, mines and offices; its best officers were needed in the constructive spheres of administration, health, education, technology and building. In the event, only Maya, Odouma and one other minister considered the risks too great and had voted against; the Cabinet divided between the three who had fought in Maya's army and the seven who had not. Now, at high noon on the seventh Sunday of the Year One, in the context of a general national crisis, the issue had reopened like a gaping wound in the most vulnerable flank of the body politic.
On the day they had bundled Amah Odouma aboard a plane at Orly, his body burned and lacerated beneath his shabby clothes, the rain had sheeted down, painting the light asphalt of the runway almost black; and the maintenance men, he remembered, had worn bright yellow plastic hoods. Two years later he had returned to Paris with the leader of the National Liberation Movement, Raymond Tukhomada, to negotiate; and again the rain, mist over the Eiffel Tower and the yellow hoods at the airport. Tukhomada's demands at the conference table had been so modest as to excite suspicion: he asked only that the government of an independent Coppernica be granted the same economic powers as the government of French Coppernica—principally, the right to appoint 55 per cent of the members of the boards of the Union de Coppernica and its subsidiary companies. Amah recalled that Ybele, the leader of the new, French-inspired Alliance Party, had termed this demand "excessive" and had; promised in the corridors, salons and lavatories of Paris a new Coppernica resembling in every way the old—only more so.
Tukhomada and Odouma had returned to Thiersville without the concessions they had demanded; Aristide Plon and the Comte de Lacassagne had made sure of that. Paris had refused to commit itself. In Coppernica itself, civilian and military authorities alike worked day and night to produce a victory for Ybele at the forthcoming elections. In the elections, Tukhomada's National Liberation Movement won 153 seats and Ybele's Alliance only 38. But the Year One still lay three and a half weeks away.
The French acted quickly. The semipublic, semiprivate charter companies which traditionally granted land and mining concessions in the provinces were dissolved. At a stroke of the pen the future Tukhomada government had been deprived of its predecessor's main method of controlling the activities of the Union and its subsidiaries. The mines of Coppernica, which accounted for 72 per cent of the total national revenue, were thus removed completely from any vestige of popular or governmental control.
The first day of the Year One had been devoted to speeches and festivities.
On the second day—the same on which the Prime Minister received a note from General Cartier beginning "Mon cher Tukhomada"—Amah Odouma took over the Ministries of the Interior and of National Economy and initiated an overall survey of the economy with a view to putting before the National Assembly proposals for a new taxation system. The Ministry's chief accountant and four assistants called on the Comte de Lacassagne at the Union's head office in the Place Casimir-Perier and requested that they be allowed to examine and audit the company's accounts. The Count replied that he could not permit this before his shareholders had been consulted, and complained that the demand was contrary to accepted business ethics. Odouma pointed out that his request had the backing of a vote in the Assembly—the voice of the sovereign people. The Count apologized for his ignorance of political theory.
Plon did not wait for the Government to seize the Union's books. Instead, he issued an ultimatum calling upon the Government to call off its audit and to guarantee that the Present tax structure would not be tampered with. Odouma called a press conference and denounced Plon's statement as a violation of Coppernican national sovereignty and independ-ence. Plon responded by freezing all tax payments. Amcol, the smaller Tufton-Silk combine, followed suit. The grain harvest had been a bad one and within ten days the Treasury was almost empty. At Camp MacMahon there was no paya for a fortnight Maya's personality and prestige proved suffiS cient to quell unrest among the soldiers, but on the third occasion that he visited the camp empty handed a flying brick caught him in the face. The rumour got about—and it was not one which the French officers made any attempt to dispel—that Tukhomada planned to disband the Army altogether in the near future.
The Cabinet met every morning at seven thirty. And every morning Amah Odouma pressed for an immediate seizure of the mines. Maya supported him. Tukhomada, burdened by the ultimate responsibility, was convinced that any such move would lead the European technicians, without whom it was impossible to run the mines, to pack their bags and catch the first plane home.
"Then we must turn elsewhere."
"And set the West irrevocably against us?"
Amah shrugged. "Twenty million Coppernicans require food and education. Whoever is offended by that need, then let him be my enemy."
In large areas of the country the Government's writ had already ceased to run. Ybele's attitude encouraged one tribal chief after another to proclaim breakaway, separatist governments in the provinces. Equally ominous were the unidentified aircraft which were now landing unimpeded on a newly constructed airstrip near Camp MacMahon and systematically disgorging squads of white mercenaries whose terms ol contract, it became known, were settled with the Alliance Party.
Swallowing his pride, Tukhomada had sought a meeting with Plon. Plon agreed. His terms were not complicated: the dismissal of Odouma, Maya and three named Cabinet ministers; and the appointment of Ybele as Vice-Premier anc Minister of National Economy. If this were done, and the guarantees demanded earlier conceded, he, Plon, promised that all arrears of taxes would be paid to the Government within two hours.
"My government would not survive such changes," Tukhomada told him.
"Your government will not survive without such changes," Plon replied.
At dawn on the following morning government security forces seized the mines. On the same day the National Assembly passed a resolution approving the action and requisitioning the mines until such time as the two companies concerned—the Union and Amcol—should comply with its orders. The resolution made no mention of nationalization or a change in ownership.
The European technicians, as expected, refused to work under such conditions and withdrew to their villas, gardens and swimming pools.
By the time that the Cabinet met two days later, on the Sunday, Odouma had concluded negotiations for the immediate dispatch of qualified technicians and engineers from three friendly states. It remained only for the Cabinet to endorse the new policy, which, at ten thirty-five, it unanimously did.
In the opinion of one group within the Cabinet, enough was enough. To go further now, to issue an order expelling the French officers from the country, would be an unstates-manlike gesture cutting the ground away from under the feet of any future accommodation with Paris. Furthermore, the effect on the discipline of an already disgruntled soldiery of the abrupt departure of more than half their officers did not bear thinking about.
Against this case, Maya and Odouma argued strongly and with a passionate conviction born of past struggles and of lessons learned in blood. To continue to cling to the hope of an accommodation with the French, they insisted, was to Play the naive ostrich in full view of a pack of hungry tigers. Paris did not want an agreement; it wanted Ybele. The dispute over the auditing of the Union's books had been for Plon and his friends a means and not an end. Each new Planeload of incoming foreign mercenaries represented the burning fuse of a time bomb placed under the Coppernican national independence. But, deprived swiftly of the leadership of the veteran French officers, these strangers would lose heart and go home. As for the morale of the troops at MacMahon, it was ludicrous to believe that the French
officers were in any sense endeavouring to maintain it in the -interests of the Government. The thief was, as Maya explained, now pointing the gun back at his captor. The answer was to call up the A Class of African reserve officers and so restore to the National Army something of its old cohesion and sense of purpose.
The clock pointed to twelve fifteen. The jug of fresh drinking water was almost empty. In the furious ruby glare of Maya's eyes was reflected the labour of ten million bent peasants, and their passion. The searchlight of sun had now shifted its accusing finger to the almost childlike features of Tukhomada himself.
He turned to Amah.
At the base of Camille Odouma's memorial, he had stooped to read a brother's fines. "We must not let her down," he had said then, and the long rows of white stones raised to the martyrs of the struggle had stirred like the If pages of an open book.
"Amah, what in your opinion will be the outcome if we J decide not to expel the French officers here and now?"
"This will be the last Sunday of the Year One."
A new bunch of "Lavals" flowered on his blotter. In his twenty-nine years Amah had learned to recognize himselfM through his familiar responses to familiar situations. Proust's lesson, that we don't profit by experience and that to a given stimulus we will react in a predictable way, had brushed himl with the gentle wing of its truth in so many un-Proustian J situations that he had been moved to abandon the distrust of that writer instilled into him in Paris by the teachers whom | he most respected. Of all the situations in his life, he found the most poignant to be that of waiting, of waiting, nine times out of ten, for a violent collision. The tension now | seized him with its familiar symptoms: a sense of isolation; ! an inability to focus or concentrate; a ringing in his head, a pressure on his temples and a mild giddiness, as if he were | suspended deep under the sea.
"Laval." With the help of the vacillating General Cartier, it had taken his Ministry's Investigation Section B six weeks 1 to piece together that five-letter word. And this morning, for J the first time, the scalding breath of his indignation had |
touched the Frenchman. From now on the Commandant, like Orestes, would live with the Furies.
Around him his colleagues debated. But he could no longer listen. The sea of Proust sang in his ears.
t
THREE
watching the cadillac turn into the Avenue Foch towards Thiersville, Sara Tufton reflected how important it was not to say "Tearsville," as Lucille Bailey insisted on doing. It sounded like American slang for the undertakers' business, or something. Even Zoe's normally impeccable accent was tarnished by the salty stain of this "tear."
The Negro lady really could not, it seemed, be silenced. Just how she had contrived to plunge her bejewelled hand deep into the breast of the Silk family was beyond Sara's comprehension; certainly the situation didn't reflect creditably on Amanda's good sense or Zoe's willpower. Why had Amanda insisted that the whole Bailey family be invited to luncl when it was obvious that she didn't like them one bit? It wa suspicious. And humiliating, too, to have that Lucille sittir there with those purple orchids climbing all over her, loo) ing at Zoe like a buyer at a cattle market. Sara rememberer the humble and appreciative gleam which came into Soames' eye at country-house sales or at Sotheby's.
She wondered how long he would be with Ybele and whether the lunch would keep.
"Do you smoke, honey?" Lucille asked, patting her hair and lighting a king-size cigarette with a tiny golden lighter shaped in the form of a Buddha.
"No, never."
The women had been left alone.
"I simply close my eyes to the consequences," Lucille said, talking very rapidly, "and cling to cork tips. Powell tells me I'm an ostrich and Jason tells me I'm the only momma he's got and I say 'Well, I've brought you boys up'—we have twos Jason is the younger—'and so blank-blank the consequences.^ I certainly hope that call from Mr. Ybele isn't as urgent as it sounded."
"In Africa," Amanda Silk said, "everything is urgent and completely unimportant."
Lucille laughed throatily.
"That's it," she said. Her eyes began once more to roam over Zoe Silk, in a special sort of way.
"More drinks, anybody?" Sara said, remembering for some reason her mother and what Amanda was known to have told people about her death. It was the one thing which Soames couldn't forgive his sister. It afforded Sara a small, hot pleasure to share her father's unforgiveness.
Lucille held out her glass. "It's fattening," she said, "but what the blank? Jason tells me my figure isn't bad for a girl of ninety-eight."
Her laugh had no friends.
"Zoe?" Sara stood over her cousin.
For ten minutes the girl had not turned from the Leger, the one masterpiece which Soames had felt it worthwhile to bring from England to this his temporary, rented "command post." Valuable though she knew it was, the painting, to Sara's secret mind, represented nothing more than two improbably robotlike men (workmen, presumably) sitting on a kind of erection of steel girders painted, for some reason, orange. Zoe's passion for such things aroused in her precisely the same resentment and scepticism as her father's did in Amanda (although she, Sara, was quite capable of referring to "the Gauguin" or "The Blue Girl" with the same familiarity with which her young men friends referred to Cabinet ministers by their Christian names). Zoe was bogus. If she had inspired the transference of large sums from Chester Silk's bank account into the hands of art dealers, this merely proved that she was a shrewd investor and not the unworldly saint some people made her out to be. And if some of the paintings bought had later been presented to municipal art galleries, that was just "show" and good public relations for Chester. Sara understood these things. Both she and her aunt detested the great display of mutual love and aesthetic joy sharing
which Zoe and Soames put on whenever they met; it caused Amanda's cheek to twitch nowadays and Sara's lips to narrow and whiten until they were lost entirely in the hard line of her chin.
"Zoe." Sara's voice carried an insistent quality. "Drink?"
"Oh sure."
Lucille said, to Zoe, "Where's Jason gone?"
"Why should she know?" Amanda said.
"With Leger," Zoe murmured, "the eye is an isosceles triangle."
"It's thought to be worth several thousand," Sara said.
"Dollars?" Lucille asked, noticing that the girl's legs were even shorter than she had suspected.
"Pounds."
"I didn't see Jason go out," Lucille said. Her energy became, now, as tangible as candy.
"One is not," Amanda reflected, "a detective."
"Maybe he's in the john," Lucille suggested.
"He's probably with James," Sara said, glad to have brought that beloved person to life.
"You must tell us more about James," Amanda said, dimly appalled by the notion of a future and of people young enough to occupy it gladly; and by the ritual dance 'wading from the first handshake, the first invitation to s tad a weekend on Rhode Island, to the moment of chilled g jty at the church door. "He's at Oxford, I understand."
"He was. He works for Daddy now."
"For Soames? But in what capacity?"
"Working for Daddy means becoming an extension of Daddy. Another limb, almost." The image, borrowed from James himself, brought a twisting of her neat bowels; until the cruelty of both men numbed them.
"I only hope," Amanda said, "that Soames doesn't damage the boy's career."
Zoe said, "He's got big muscles, your James," then took care to drift, framed in sunlight, towards the garden window.
"I would not take him," Lucille said, "for handsome."
"It's silly to speak of him as if he were Sara's possession,"
Amanda said. "It's quite silly to speak like that, as if every, thing were already settled."
"They're angry with you, Zoe," Sara said, close, now, to hot tears. But the cousin had gone, somehow, into the gar. den. The garden terrified Sara. Its violent life plagued her dreams and violated the cool sanctuary of her mornings. And whenever she saw James and her father disappear togethe towards the pond, she was seized by an acute, unreasoning anxiety.
"I expect Zoe will be getting married soon," she said, striking back at her ghosts.
"You must ask Mrs. Silk about that," Lucille said, before Mrs. Silk had time to answer.
"Zoe does not confide in us," Amanda did say, finally.
"She always was," Sara said, "unconventional."
"It's lucky that there are some people prepared to stanc by her, through thick and thin," Lucille said, stubbing out her cork-tipped king size and lighting another. Then she added, "And in the face of provocations, I should say."
"There are always people to be found," Amanda said, "with ulterior motives."
Zoe came upon him where the lower branches of the almonc tree swung drowsily to stroke the dry earth. In a garden large enough to be lost in, the African smells touched her separately, discreetly, and she remembered the house on Rhode Island and the long singing drag of the sea and the smell, peculiar and good, of the Greek boatman at Tolon, the flavour he shared with Count Volpe, across the galloping years. Jason sat under the almond tree like an Alabama slave. Almost carelessly, her hand drifted across herself) probed, with love. Just an Alabama slave, now. Her hand searched, and his eye followed her hand.
He said, "Hi."
"Hullo," she said, stopping short of his tree. "It's you."
"I'm sorry," Jason said.
"That's false," Zoe said. "Don't be falser than you call help."
"Sorry again."
His hands were spread out, a gesture of submission, on the brown carpet of the fallen almonds; but she refused to share jjjs camouflage. It was the supplication in his long stare which bad bent her, briefly, and diverted her from the pond to where he sat. But her mercy had long since been charred by suffering, reduced to the dull reflex of a charity. It smouldered, now, from his dry hope and from the distant heat of the furnace which threatened to spring to life should one drop of compassion oil the spark.
"I guess hope springs eternal," Jason said, as she had known he would.
"It'd better not," Zoe Silk said.
"There are forces a man cannot govern." His small, finely chiselled head seemed to derive its balance, its poise, from shock and surprise. He sat among the almonds with his knees drawn up and his arms clasped around them, and his body swayed slightly, with grief. She rested her weight on one leg then on the other, as if in anticipation of her burden, and she looked away from him, towards the pond. He hoped that she would stay.
"You know something, Zoe? We haven't really talked since we came hei;e. That's six weeks and three days." Beside him, an almond fell. Her chin, perhaps, moved, and his voice tumbled in the dust. "I don't really mind what you say to me so long as you say something. If only you'd acknowledge my existence! It's this awful turning away that I can't take, this refusal to see me."
"You ought," she said, staring at the pond, "to go bask to the States."
Misery struck him, like an Atlantic breaker.
"Zoe." He held out his hand.
She would not budge.
"For God's sake," he said, "I beg you." The dry dust of almonds reached his throat. "I beg you, Zoe. Don't you Understand what that means, when another human being has to beg you?" His hand fell away and he began to cry. She stayed a moment or two longer, then left him.
The Negro, James Caffrey calculated, was not a sprinter. His body lacked the power.
He could see, from his side of the pond, the condensed and broken form of the man beneath the almond tree, at j distance, he reckoned, of sixty yards. Yards, feet, metres-1 muscular entities evoking the central passion of his growin years. Even now, at twenty-seven and many reformation since, he still liked to conjure in his mind's eye the great Jess Owens leaping from the blocks with his head lowered like bullet, his perfectly angled arms thrusting him forward and his high-kicking knees flashing black before the Fiihrei' glazed and neo-Aryan optic. It had been, for a month or two the largest tree in the forest of his young mind that Negroe ran the fastest over the shorter distances; at the time of th London Olympics he had embalmed the photo-frozen start and finish of the hundred-metres sprint in an emerald-green scrapbook which his sister, Elaine, perhaps not altogethe innocently, had later used for pressing butterflies and flowers He could no longer recapture her face; her real face had become confused with the faceless face he had tried to imagine a week after she was buried, the decaying face which dredged his nights of sleep for almost a month. But he remembered her at the far end of the garden, bending, and the pink stuff stretched tight over her bottom, her "bum"; he remembered this because he remembered watching and the shame of it.
He looked at his watch, shielding its dial with typical thoroughness from the sun. Noon: Soames had been gone more than an hour. The book James had been reading (in fact rereading after an interval of years) lay on the burned grass beside him, its terrible drama of discriminate bloodletting and soul-rending idealism chastely wrapped in a plain cover. One of its characters, although Chinese, had set him thinking about the central problem of his own life and abou his brother, Alec. It tormented him that he had witnessed neither Alec's death nor their sister Elaine's—a betrayal not only of their comradeship in life but also of his own anxiety to confront squarely the worst moments of the human experience. These morbid thoughts now overwhelmed him fof the first time since his arrival in Africa. His melancholy was directed primarily towards Soames, who had promised him action, and therapy through action, and not merely a long, highly paid vacation in the company of Sara.
So soft was he growing that he hardly dared take up the book and immerse himself again in the central dilemma of ys epoch—the problem of belief, of moulding a life to conform with a belief and of fusing courage with conviction in the service of that life—the problem of a world where every man is his own Adam.
Sixty yards away the girl was standing close to the almond tree but not beneath it. She stood away from the Negro and the Negro's form was condensed and broken beneath the tree. When the girl drifted away he began to vibrate. The quality of his pain communicated itself to James.
He would, of course, have liked to win Jason's friendship and trust, as Alec would effortlessly have done. It worried him, this withdrawal he provoked, this arching of the back, in people who were not supremely self-confident. "The worst form of arrogance," he remembered Alec saying, "is the oblivious sort. You have it." After each of his attempts to approach Jason, as after each of his efforts to befriend Deedes, he was reminded of the bright clarity of himself, the burnished bronze of his surface, which induced men to curl up defensive and bristling, like hedgehogs.
"You out here for the vacation, Bailey?"
"Yeah, that's it."
"And what are you reading at Harvard? Studying, I mean."
"Government."
"Doesn't that turn out to be a rather narrow course? I suppose the nearest equivalent we have at Oxford is PPE, Which is admittedly on the broad side."
"Yeah, I guess."
"I read history myself. I've been doing graduate work, actually. A thesis."
"You have?"
"Of course it must be an immense help to you having your father in the diplomatic service. One might say almost an !deal fusion of the theoretical and practical."
"It could be," Jason had said.
And James, annoyed at what he wrongly assumed to be a Posture or, if not a posture, an unwarranted gaucheness in an educated man, had been provoked to say: "Zoe Silk is uncommonly beautiful.".
"Yeah, uncommonly," Jason had said, the enunciation o the second word leaving James in no doubt that he was being mocked. But his original shaft had penetrated; Jason's pain followed his riposte as sound follows light. The American's dog-sad eyes rested on James reproachfully, causing him to feel inhuman in the way that Englishmen are sometimes prepared to feel.
The water of the pond was etched with scales as formal as the scales on a fish. After a while the man whom Zoe saw was old removed one hand from his fishing rod and began to refill his pipe, a laborious process involving a yellow oilskin pouch, a rough, orange tobacco, a matchbox, short intakes of breath and a horny thumb. When the man pushed down the flaming strands of tobacco with his thumb so that the whole cake of tobacco would catch alight evenly, Zoe shuddered on his behalf. Smoke billowed into the hot day. Presently the friendly curve of the rod was again sustained by two hands.
The girl was wearing a white cotton dress with small blue polka dots. But the man kept his eye fixed to the spot where his line plunged hopefully into the still water. She could see that the scythe of time had cut right through him and that he had courage. His hand had shaken terribly when lighting the pipe.
Suddenly the line tautened, the water bobbled and the reel began to wind with a crisp whirring sound.
"Oh," the girl cried, delighted by the bright red and yellow scales of the fish which thrashed epileptically at the man's feet. "Will you eat it?"
They had not previously spoken. Or met. Malcolm Deedes threw the fish back, while still alive. It was about five inches long. He was breathing heavily.
He shook his head. "In the Tay I've caught salmon and trout that long." He held his hands apart, experimentally, then settled for what she thought to be an amazing length. His accent intrigued her; he said "sahman and troot" and the "r" rolled wonderfully.
"You have?" Zoe exclaimed. "To eat or to sell?"
"Aye," he nodded, turning back to the water and recasting his line. "That long." Something had driven the lines deep into his face. "I was in Kenya," he said. "Sixteen years."
"Did you meet Mr. Tufton there?" she asked gravely, wondering whether this man was invited for lunch.
"Ye'll be an American, then," Deedes said, after a while.
She had positioned herself respectfully some feet away from him, and a little behind, as if the very water's edge belonged to him alone. She noticed in the azure sky a single cloud, borne across the heavens swiftly by a light breeze. The man watched it go, shielding his eyes from the sun and readjusting the angle of his canvas hat.
"Sixteen years," he said.
"Were you in the fighting?" she persevered.
"Aye, in the hills, on the farms, aye." His memory seemed to drift with the cloud. His back was broad and his shoulders, she guessed, strong. But the gray hair was shaggy and uncut where it met his neck.
"That'll be your young mun, then," he said quietly. After a while he sighed deeply and his pipe billowed more richly. The waters were almost still and his line hung.
The seizure took him without warning. He groaned and spat, then staggered up on one knee as the phlegm rose in long yellowish-green strands. Like spaghetti, it would not break cleanly, and it was flecked with blood. His face was like a gargoyle of woe, and his dignity, too, seemed irrelevant. He bent low over the water, pulling the phlegm from his mouth and wincing at the thrust of some dagger in his guts. The rod floated.
She stooped to retrieve it.
A short strand of yellowish mucus hung from his chin. He subsided in stages to the ground but did not reclaim the rod; his head, she saw, was on fire.
"You should have treatment," Zoe said, touching herself. She felt, perhaps, offended.
He clamped finger and thumb over his nostrils, then spat. This time the stuff came cleanly, a green oyster of saliva Which the ripples of the pond carried, like Crusoe, ashore. He nodded slowly.
"For what?" The anger in his voice sent her heart racing. She flushed.
"For your throat. Your chest."
"There's noot wrong. Just a wee boot of catarrh." He took back his rod, almost snatched it, cast the line again, vaguely, and suddenly all the servants she had known in childhood paraded before her, as in a gallery of waxworks.
"You'll be speakin' to Tufton, no doot," Deedes suggested to the waters.
"Speaking?"
"Aye, speakin', wumman, speakin'. Aboot meself."
"Nothing," she promised quickly. But she suspected that her allegiance to Soames might outweigh her frail pledge to this stranger. And the stolid curve of his back under its faded khaki shirt reflected her doubts.
"I'm reliable," Deedes told the pond, when the girl had gone.
She followed the curve of the pond, but not as Narcissus. On the water, dragonflies and buzzing, carnivorous creatures she had not seen before darted in a dance of death blessed by the sun. One day Soames had told her, kissing her on the mouth, about an old crocodile who lived in the pond and who lay on the bank at dusk, weeping for someone he had lost. Now a sense of wonder, as delicate as a priest's conscience, but purer, floated across the tissue of her memory. And it was apparent, at that one moment, that the man beneath the almond tree was not Jason any longer, but the man she loved. She halted and the vision of happiness evaporated. She thought, I'm getting very unhappy again, like before. The sky, now, was cloudless, and not so far away the Englishman sat by the water's edge, reading a book. Earlier, she had induced and witnessed his capitulation, had seen his strongroom of certainties collapse like a punctured lung, at the moment she entered the room. And in examining Sara's distress, she had been able to take her time. As she watched him, James Caffrey pulled the fair hair from his forehead with his left hand, solemnly, and adjusted the angle of his book, so that its title became visible to her. She moved away at once, impressed by the profanity of disturbing a man engaged in the study of the human condition.
FOUR
"you'll agree," said ybele, cupping his hand under Soames' elbow, "that my jacarandas possess a unique timbre. But listen! You see—they solicit the ear as keenly as the
eye."
They walked alone in Ybele's magnificent garden, with its stables, swimming pool, Greek satyrs, imported roses and ferocious Chinese dragons, the choices of a vision which Soames had long since recognized as uncompromising and primitive. He had once commented to Ybele that the bark of Chinese art had tended at certain periods to be louder than the bite of Chinese life. Ybele had replied quickly, "Yes, I'm a Japanese at heart too," pulling back the skin at the corners of his eyes and baring his teeth in a vivid representation of the yellow peril charging up a Pacific shore.
"My dear sir," Soames said, "your garden delights me. But what led you to summon me on this day of rest?"
"A coup d'etat is always expensive. Staying in power even more so."
"Is Plon bankrupt, then?"
Ybele shrugged. "It's the political aspect which concerns me, particularly your brother-in-law's attitude. I don't need your money."
"Tell me about Commandant Laval," Soames said evenly.
Ybele checked his stride. His eyes were no longer jovial.
"Laval?"
Soames nodded.
Then Ybele smiled, revealing a perfect row of false teeth, held in place by two bands of slender gold wire.
"But what can you promise me in return?"
"One Coppernica."
"Plon also offers me that."
"But his sister isn't married to the USA."
Ybele sighed. "The American attitude, I confess, saddens me. I was talking to Bailey-" 9
"Bailey's a meddling fool, a nobody. Forget everything he told you."
"I would like to. But why have I had not one jot of encouragement from Mr. Silk?"
"Because Washington is at present concerned with balking the French."
"But surely not to the point of supporting a Commu regime here!"
"Tukhomada and Odouma aren't Communists."
"But they have seized the mines! Your own mines! You're about to lose everything, everything! Only this morning it was announced that foreign technicians are to be brought in to run them. For you, that's the end. Are you blind?"
"We drove them to it. Powerful forces in Washington already regret this."
"How powerful?"
"Powerful enough to push through a long-term credit and technical assistance to Tukhomada, with the small, unpubli-cized proviso that Amcol be compensated for Odouma's new taxation system."
"All hypothesis, of course," Ybele said lightly.
"All quite imminent."
Ybele threw one hard, searching glance at Soames, then scooped up a handful of dry, powdery earth and let it filter through his fingers. He dusted away the remaining grains fastidiously.
"Could you prevent this development, Tufton?"
"Almost certainly."
"What is your price?"
"Tell me first about Commandant Laval."
A wand of strain passed across Ybele's face, like a shadow. When he spoke his voice was on a lower pitch.
"Laval is no joke."
"Quite. But what is he?"
Ybele dabbed at his face and neck with a monogrammed handkerchief of blue cotton.
"Laval is a phenomenon. The most fanatical of Keller's disciples. A brilliant soldier." "And commanding officer of the incoming mercenaries?"
"You're well informed. Cartier is a garrulous fool."
"Presumably it is on these props—Keller, Laval, the mercenaries—that your regime will rest. Or should I say Plon's regime?"
"My dear Tufton-"
"You concede that you've already offered Plon terms of taxation similar to those which prevailed before independence? And that no such offer has been made to Amcol?"
"But I assure you that I have every intention of treating all foreign companies on terms of absolute parity. It was merely that the urgency of reaching an agreement with the Union was so-"
"So you here and now guaranatee us absolute parity with the Union?"
Ybele's eyes flickered.
"Of course."
"And you'll sign a statement to that effect which we can communicate to Washington and London?"
"My dear sir, no one but a fool-■"
"The truth is that Plon has given you cut and dried instructions to squeeze- Amcol until the pips squeak. And why? Because Plon has never abandoned his ambition of buying us out, of establishing a monopoly over the Copperni-can mines. Originally he put his faith in the French Army in the field; then he backed the Keller group in Paris and pushed through the coup of February 21 in an attempt to sabotage the independence negotiations. Meanwhile he hedged his bets, just in case, and very wisely, by building up the Alliance Party, led by a certain Fernand Ybele, to represent his interests in Coppernica."
"The interests I represent," Ybele said stiffly, "are firstly those of Africa, and secondly those of Christian civilization."
"Quite."
Ybele sighed and again dabbed at his face. "Why not sell out to Plon? You know he'd give you an excellent price now. I'm sure Chester Silk would welcome the idea."
"Never."
"But how can I give you a written guarantee? If I get stranded between Tukhomada's enmity and Plon's fury, I am, as you say, a dead duck. Si on echoue, je suis zigouille.'" Ybele enacted the slitting of his own throat with a macabre gusto reminiscent of his yellow peril and of his father's lusty cannibalism.
"It strikes me," Soames said, "that you grossly exaggerate Plon's power. If you give us the guarantee we demand, Washington will drop the idea of granting Tukhomada credits and will back you to the hilt. Once the reins of power are in your hands, what can Plon do? You'll explain to him that it would be unstatesmanlike to arouse Anglo-American animosity by squeezing the lemon of Amcol into the teacup of the Union. He'll have no alternative but to be content with his huge profits."
"I fear Plon. I've never known him to waver or retract."
"He'll bend, believe me. He has his shareholders to whom he must account. For them a fat bird in the hand is always worth a bird and a bluebottle in the bush. In any case, to whom else could Plon turn? You are the Alliance Party! Between you and Tukhomada no third alternative exists."
"Maya," said Ybele doubtfully.
"Nonsense."
"There's always Jean Liwele . .."
"Liwele is a figure of fun, a mere rhyming convenience for the national poet who will celebrate the triumph of your party in heroic couplets."
Ybele's assessing antennae fastened on the garden, the carefully contrived microcosm of his secular ambitions. His expression suggested a nature in which greed, pride and power-lust were capable of merging into a detached and faintly comic fatalism.
"With Plon," he said weakly, "it's better to be a little superstitious."
"You'll let me have the guarantee by this afternoon?"
Ybele looked surprised.
"Have I given in to you, then?"
"To reason."
"You realize that fiasco ensues if Plon gets to hear of it? He must on no account glean a word of this before the coup."
"Of course."
"But what can you promise me? How can I be sure that Washington will react along the lines you predict? A word of confirmation from Ambassador Silk himself would certainly be welcome. Particularly after my conversation with Bailey."
Soames looked annoyed.
"The Ambassador is technically unable to commit himself formally to such a scheme. Be thankful that you can achieve your ends through me. If your guarantee is kept secret, you will be working on your behalf—that henceforth your interests and Amcol's are identical."
Ybele shrugged. "So be it."
They walked back across the smooth lawns towards the veranda.
"Things are coming to a head, then?" Soames said casually, oppressed by his own powerlessness in the sphere which really mattered—the two square kilometres of Camp MacMahon.
"Any day now," Ybele said.
"Is that all you're prepared to tell me?"
They walked a few paces in silence.
"I'm afraid so."
Soames stopped. "Do me one favour."
"You want to marry my daughter?"
"Introduce me to Commandant Laval."
Ybele, perhaps, flinched. His lips parted, as if to frame words of denial, then came together indeterminantly.
"What can you possibly want with such a man?" he protested. "Some other time, perhaps, when things are less tense." He turned again for the veranda, but Soames lightly plucked his sleeve.
"I insist. Introduce me to him as someone enjoying your closest confidence, as someone for whom he should be prepared to do a small favour."
"What sort of favour?" said Ybele sharply. He looked very unhappy.
Soames raised his eyebrows and reached for his cigar case.
"I'm adamant, Fernand."
Ybele sighed. "Very well, my arm is badly twisted today But let me offer you one piece of warning, out of friendship."
"Please do."
"If Laval reaches for your neck, it won't be to straighten your tie."
FIVE
the two men shook hands.
"I'm honoured, mon Commandant." Soames bowed.
"Monsieur." Andre Laval stood like a ramrod. His heels came together swiftly but silently, a compromise, Soames judged, between the heart and the head.
"I've long wanted to make your acquaintance," Soames said.
Laval, who wore tropical khaki and a revolver in his belt, made no response. His long face was dark and sallow, almost Arabic, and his nose jutted like the blade of a knife.
"We have mutual friends," Soames said.
"Who?"
"General Cartier is a close friend of mine. Over many years. A fine soldier, a true son of France."
"Cartier," said LaVal without attempting to lower his rasping voice, "is a ridiculous and cowardly nonentity. Who else would accept command of the army which had defeatec him?"
"And I'm a great admirer," Soames said hastily, as the blood rushed to his face, "of M. Keller."
"England could do with such men."
"England?"
"I learned English at school. Up to the level of the bac-calaurSat. The English temperament and philosophy have always filled me with a profound contempt. Almost a physical aversion." "What is our crime?" Soames asked, as if genuinely anxious to mend the ways of his countrymen.
"Your liberalism must bear the responsibility for the succession of calamities which we in the West have suffered in recent years."
Soames nodded. "I'm afraid that's true, mon Commandant."
"You may recall the celebrated passage in Sorel's Reflexions sur la Violence in which the author exposes the flabby, hypocritical, compromising bourgeois cowardice of English liberalism."
Soames tried to laugh. "As a bourgeois myself-
"Quite."
"Mon Commandant, I'm a close friend, a trusted colleague of M. Ybele-"
"Yes, he said so."
"He was kind enough to ask you to do me a favour."
"Cocktail parties, chatter, intrigue have never been to my taste. In the old days we used to carry knives and grenades to Carrier's receptions. Those were the days when French Africa was still French."
"I'm told," Soames said, "that you once ground a glass to powder in your hand when talking with the wife of a high official."
Laval shrugged. "That may have been."
"Remarkable."
"What is it you want from me, Monsieur?"
"To be frank—a basis of cooperation. My interest and M. Ybele's, as I'm sure he would confirm, are identical. And intimately interrelated. Your role—command, I should say— of the Special Forces is naturally regarded by the Ambassador and myself-"
"What is it you want?"
Soames did, then, tell him. Laval listened, convinced that in a festering epoch a true man could salvage his soul only by existing on two levels as sharply dichotomic as the black and white of a jester's blouse. He lent Soames one barren sector of his mind, which dictated obligatory responses, while the other sustained itself on dreams, on the promised return to Thiersville, the city of French streets and French smells, the day when the blown-up portraits of Tukhomada would be torn from the public buildings and the hysterical agent of the universal conspiracy put down like a mad dog. And Odouma —that liquidation stirred in his guts a deeper music, the itching burden of an unspilled load.
They had been twins, this Saint-Just and that Saint Joan.
Thiersville—the living flesh of stone, concrete and glass which the Blue Berets had once subdued and moulded to the whims of their dynamite lusts.
Three weeks after the outbreak of the revolution Armand Keller had arrived from Paris. He had taken Andre Laval and Jean Martignac—also a veteran of the war in Indo-China—to dine at the exclusive Club Auric, "at the party's expense."
"I hope you're both satisfied with your promotions," Keller had said. "I had to work hard for them."
At that moment an explosion sent the plates and spoons cavorting on the table. Keller jumped and began to tremble. At the far end of the restaurant a square, obese person with a galaxy of chins rose from the head of a table of ten or twelve and strode to the window, where he stood indignantly observing the glow in the night sky. Two detectives hovered nervously behind. Presently the Governor returned to his roast duck.
"Jeannot is a nobody," Keller said, with biting contempt. "He makes perpetual motion a substitute for action."
"The colons like him," Laval said.
"He's a windbag. What can you expect of a petit bourgeois Socialist? He struts about like an overweight Christmas turkey."
Later they took Keller to inspect a training centre for the thousands of conscripts being flown in from France.
"These boys were very cocky, very politique, when they arrived," Laval told him. "We knocked it out of them within two weeks. First, we ran them to a standstill. Then we told them about the real French Army, not the one for display, with its fanfares, gold-braided staff officers and doddering generals, but the one of which they were now members. An army of young and ardent fighters, cunning, resolute, deeply popular. Loudspeakers banged it into their heads all day long that we intended to create a new order, that we belonged to the future and not the past."
Keller had been impressed.
"Aim at the younger officers," he urged. "Join the Cite Catholique. Remember that Christianity remains the most effective antidote to materialism and liberalism. We must learn to percolate our ideas through the broad sieve of organized religion."
Keller had wanted to hear more about the terrorist Bwon-po Chagala, whom the Blue Berets had cornered in the cite a few days before. At first Laval was reluctant to discuss the incident, but Keller was insistent.
"With the lesser fry," Laval explained, "we have a sound system of detection. These men have to work by day. At dawn we stand hooded informers at the street corners of the cite and we just pluck the terrorists out of the stream of blacks hurrying to work. But a type like Bwonpo Chagala, with ten bomb outrages to his credit, operates as a full-time professional."
"Still, you got a tip-off?"
"We pinned him in a three-story warehouse in the Rue Katalanga, near the river. He had twenty men with him and enough dynamite to blow up the Bastille."
"The warehouse was loaded with drums of cooking gas," Jean Martignac added.
"My God!" said Keller.
"I tried to storm the place and lost three men," Laval said. "So I used mortars."
"What happened?"
"An old fellow appeared, some sort of elder, and suggested that the women and children be evacuated from the street. I asked him why the local people had been sheltering the terrorists. He said people were afraid. I told him it was time they learned whom to fear most. With the first volley of bombs, the warehouse began to burn."
"Even the paving stones seemed to catch fire," said Martignac.
"How many perished?" asked Keller.
"In real life people don't perish," Laval said. "We have invented a whole galaxy of words which distort reality by endowing an event with the quality of its largely incident outcome."
"I don't follow," said Keller.
"You don't? I see a child sitting dry-eyed in the gutter, staring at a bleeding stump where normally there was an arm. Near enough for the stench of burning flesh and cotton to overwhelm me, a fat woman rolls shrieking on the ground with her clothes ablaze. In the event, these people 'perished,' as the newspapers say, but the reality was quite different. Only we soldiers can touch the garments of destiny."
"What were the dry statistics?" Keller said gloomily.
Laval shrugged. "I forget."
"Twenty-six killed, twelve of them women, and seven children," Martignac said.
Keller grimaced. "The press didn't report that aspect of the affair."
"War isn't a debate," Laval said.
Keller nodded. In Paris it was they who had attentively listened to him, absorbing his ideas, accepting his political guidance, expressing gratitude for his patronage. The arrogance and contempt with which his proteges treated him in Coppernica stung his pride. But there were things he needed to know; and there was no choice but to ask.
"The question of interrogations, Andre ..."
"Yes?"
"You take an active part in these, of course?"
"Chastenet, our Colonel, had his prejudices, to begin with. Not a bad type really, but old fashioned. I told him that he had to think in terms of results. If you torture, you get results. If you don't, you don't."
Keller lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. "Torture is necessary."
"You may know of a type called Victor Manoury," Laval said.
"The lawyer and writer? He's a Red."
"He's here in T'ville making trouble. Even now we continue to be plagued by our own fifth column. A young black, aa obvious terrorist, whom Manoury adopted in Paris, has brought him out here to start investigations about his sister."
"What about his sister?"
"The black thinks she was tortured."
"Impossible."
"Of course. All the same, it would be a move in the right direction if you could arrange for Manoury's visa to be cancelled at once. You have the influence."
Keller made a note in his diary. "Of course. And the man's name, this black?"
"Odouma. Amah Odouma. His sister was called Camille."
"Was?"
Andre Laval shrugged. "She's dead now."
From the moment that he set eyes on her in the ill-lit basement cell of the women's section of Octave—the military detention centre, Green District—Andre Laval realized that the young Negress was in the grip of the universal conspiracy, that she was possessed. At once he braced his loins for a trial of strength whose outward manifestations would merely serve as indices of the gigantic struggle between two morally and intellectually opposed systems.
She was, a brief examination made it clear, still a virgin.
In the basement of Octave the Commandant strode round Camille Odouma, searching like a Geiger counter for the field of maximum contamination. Among the Viets, he could vouch, the poisonous growth was located in the forehead itself, nurtured by remorseless indoctrination. The African physiognomy, on the other hand, as he scrupulously explained to the boxer Petit and the butcher Parmelin, differed from the Asiatic in that its most highly developed regions were corporal rather than cranial. Hence the womb or breast organ, Western scientists now suspected, constituted areas suitable for profitable exploitation by the master contamina-tors employed by the universal conspiracy. Not only the girl's full bosom but also her mellow eyes excited in the trained investigator, Petit and Parmelin were surprised to learn, suspicion—as did her handsome features and the aura of saintly resignation with which, like Joan, she confronted her inquisitors. For it was the jealously guarded life-knot of the conspiracy to endow everything with the appearance of its opposite.
"That," Laval explained, "is what is meant by 'dialectics materialism.'"
Which complicated but did not entirely eradicate an ele ment of crude desire joining the beam in Petit's eye to the moat in Parmelin's; such lusts jarred the surgeon's taut nerves the more so as they momentarily imposed on him a glimpse of Madame's bogusly decorated room in the Rue Chan-sonniere. Laval kicked the girl, casually, and asked whether she was a virgin; at which her eyes fell.
"Modesty," he announced, "is a quality reserved for human beings." He motioned to the huge Petit, who unbuttonet and at once burst forth, obligingly erect, like a sapling thrusting through the spring soil towards the black sun. "It would be your pleasure, slut," Laval informed the girl. "Now, answer my questions or I shall let loose this mad bull on you." Petit bellowed, slapped his haunches and, it seemed, grew an inch or two; Parmelin did not care for this sort of palaver, really, but found the extra pay handy, and so endured.
But the girl was stubborn.
"Obdurate" was the word hovering about Parmelin as the monotonous crunch of the girl's head against the wall prompted the Commandant to reflect that "They select such a vessel because they know us to harbour fine feelings entirely alien to their dispositions." Parmelin thought about this and almost shared the Negress' pain as her head cracked down on the stone floor, propelled by Petit's two hundred and ten animated pounds of bone and muscle.
She thrashed. "Please, please, I know nothing!"
"She speaks French," Parmelin murmured. Laval's scowl scalded his tongue.
"She thinks you feeble," the Commandant informed the boxer, unable, cool surgeon though he was, to forget Hermann Strauss' triumphant bellow. Well, Laval had hardened since coming to Coppernica; his mettle had been proved beyond doubt at the time of the affair in the Rue Katalanga; next time he would humble the German, by reducing the distance to an incredible two centimetres. Predictably enraged, the boxer again went for the girl, who lay with her dress rucked up around her waist and her strong thighs gleaming with the integrity of polished ebony. Petit would, the butcher realized, have foundered his own ship on the siren rocks of her virginity had not Laval, in the most scientific and disinterested spirit, intervened to prevent the premature liquidation of this valuable asset. His nose was a scalpel, Parmelin suddenly saw, overwhelmed to the point of nausea by the dank, fetid stench of the cell, by the heat and preying flies, by the girl's pitiful moans and Petit's grunts. He grasped desperately at the hem of memory; and caught for a moment the warmth of the carcasses hanging in the cool of his butcher shop in Montreuil. No flies, except in summer, and profitable: behind the elegant facades erected by an eighteenth-century officer corps of unusual culture, the raw northern people still needed cooked meat. The Commandant was lighting a cigarette, a human gesture, compassionate by its very universality, Parmelin thought; until the girl's scream, piercing and direct as the cry of the deer struck down at dusk, and the smell of the flesh charred by the cigarette's brazier tip dislocated the dovetailed jigsaw of his contentment.
And the door crashed shut, encasing the girl like a broken
wasp.
With the bright hope of the dawn's children, Parmelin and Petit affixed, on the Commandant's instructions, terminals to the girl's nipples—in whose honour Petit masked his embarrassment with a vulgarity as brief as a cough. Laval, when the two corporals (men) stood back, bewildered by the almost human dimensions and strange, subversive dignity of this girl whose first name, Camille, was French, operated the magneto with the distant precision of a man wary of contamination. A global contest of surgeons; Western power scorched the inner cells of the poisoned hive, flushing out the cancerous growth.
Camille Odouma shrieked, like a woman.
Parmelin sponged her down. He would have liked to have said: I'm different, I don't like this one bit, if you only knew. That her desperate fear and pain should insist on embracing him in its condemnatory sweep annoyed him; and he struck her himself, for the first time. The girl's stoical bravery, her refusal to jabber in some native lingo, her insistent reproaches—"You are a swine, Monsieur, to beat up a wom an"—in impeccable French, all this amounted, as the morn-ing sun climbed higher in the sky, to an aspersion againsi their integrity. Parmelin could not understand why the Commandant had not devoted more time to explaining to the gir that France meant well by the black people, that helping vicious terrorists and trying to push the French about by force weren't going to get you anywhere. Some people were too ignorant to know when you were helping them along, he had always said, or his mother had, in Montreuil, and now he did. But Laval, there could be no doubt, would be satisfied only by the girl's surrender under the strain of physical pressure; the means already eclipsed the end.
By the end of the third day (at the beginning of which Laval had angrily ordered Pierre Petit to clear away the girl's excrement and urine and to have the cell Aerosoled while work was in progress), the Commandant was able to pronounce Camille Odouma's poison cells beyond the reach of exorcism by electricity.
"She is a witch," Petit grunted, maddened, and beat her about the head.
The application of the sophisticated tire-boulette, a V-shaped device with wires running to each point and the whole apparatus plugged into the mains—rather like a pair of compasses—had proved the point. Although burned horribly, covered in festering sores in which flies wallowed as they pleased, rotting away in her own pus, and frequently promising, in her delirium, to tell everything, Camille Odouma's lips remained sealed. This refusal to respond in a civilized way to a civilized torture merely confirmed, as Laval pointed out to his two weary assistants, the rough, primeval character of the human clay which the fomentors of the universal conspiracy were moulding to their purpose.
It was the fourth morning, and Petit had to slap her into consciousness and try and force a little food down her. Laval's mood was blacker than ever; it frightened Parmelin to watch the officer's expression achieve so clinical a hatred as when he thrust the water pipe into the girl's mouth and turned on the tap. He adjusted the flow then bent close over her to watch her fill up, to catch the butterfly of submission fluttering in the empty wells of her eyes should the chrysalis of her terror hatch. Petit held her down, with his usual silent dignity- She began to swell; Parmelin found it amazingly simple: you filled her with water and she swelled. When Laval removed the hose and poured a detergent mixture down her throat she writhed so desperately as almost to break her back, but Petit held her. Her belly ballooned, a nine-minute pregnancy; this virgin, she was bearing a baby elephant in there. He wanted to beg the Commandant to stop the flow, to warn him that the girl would burst; he understood bodies, he was a butcher by trade; he began to flinch in expectation of the explosion, the flying innards, the gory guts tangled in his hair. Laval turned off the tap; the girl was blue in her blackness, clearly drowned, her once-tender face blotched and swollen—the face of an accident. When, at last, Laval leaned on her stomach, water sprang in spouting, hissing columns from her mouth, her nose, her ears. Her ears, Holy Mother! Something to write to Montreuil about, that!
"You bloody bitch, talk, talk, talk!"
They went out, for coffee. The Commandant, who normally held himself rigidly aloof, today deigned to have coffee with them. He seemed dispirited.
"She is tough, mon Commandant," Petit grunted.
A muscle sprang to life and ticked furiously in the hollow of Laval's sunken cheek. "She is the Devil," he said. "Do you imagine that her lips are sealed by courage? Do you?"
Petit stared at his heavy, boxer's hands, which suddenly appeared to him inept and useless. "No, mon Commandant," he said, confused and hurt, a strong man undermined by black magic. "They are not a courageous people."
"They are stubborn," Jacques Parmelin added, anxious to earn a share of Laval's grudging favour, "like the Germans."
"Why the Germans, Parmelin?"
Parmelin bit his tongue.
"I don't know, mon Commandant, it was foolish. I was never in the war."
"You were a boy only."
"Yes, a mere child. A child."
Petit watched, fascinated. He also had been a child. He remembered the feet of the Germans, and the tires of their trucks. But not the faces.
"I, on the other hand, was captured and tortured by the Gestapo," Laval said.
Parmelin's head re-emerged. He would not have spoken, had not life been a series of obligations. "Tortured by the Gestapo. What a thing, eh?"
Petit nodded gravely, and remembered the tires moving slowly in the muddy streets of a small town, his own.
"We had derailed a train," Laval said. "For me that was only a beginning. I became a man. I learned about the human body." At this, Petit again became solemn. Parmelin would have liked to know where to look. "One cannot always achieve the correct solution at once," Laval went on. "We must probe this girl's soul more deeply. You understand? We have to get to the root of her."
Petit understood. "These native girls hold their virtue very cheaply, mon Commandant. They do not have our ideas of religion and decency."
"Perhaps. But they have a superficial virtue, a protective skin, a camouflage, like a reptile. We have to peel it off, carefully. Then she will talk."
He gave orders that for three days she be fed properly and restored to at least partial health and sanity. Meanwhile he neglected his routine duties, avoided all human contacts except the absolutely unavoidable and immersed himself in a cinematic game of dreams, tying together the raw ends of his long and patient self-creation again and again, but always into the same visionary knot. Parmelin, as instructed, produced an empty Alsatian wine bottle, whose tapering glass neck he had tested and sterilized, together with antiseptic, cotton wool and a discoloured liquid designed, he imagined, to check haemorrhage.
Petit held her down. The morning had begun strangely with everyone, the girl and the Frenchmen alike, fresh from sleep, food and clean clothes. She hadn't, Parmelin saw, been expecting them; she had believed her ordeal to be over. He himself couldn't help thinking of Sunday Mass, of everyone dressed for church, of the scrubbed hush and dignity of the townspeople entering l'Eglise de Saint Paul. His mind travelled no further; the girl was, after all, a black. He found her heavy negroid features, especially in their present swollen and contorted condition, depressing, and the smell of her, when she suffered, alienated him. (And were the contortions not in fact extensions of the natural barbarity of these features?) As for her refusal to grasp the hand of friendship which the Commandant most obligingly held out to her, her insolent imperviousness to all that he said about the philosophy of the new French Army—its roads, irrigation schemes and Spartan socialism—her stubborn rejection of Laval's very generous overtures, all this cast Parmelin into a trembling rage, that he should have to endure a whole new cycle of pain and doubt, rending his soul and his certainties. He threw himself upon the girl. Surprised, she fell under his weight, gasping, as a person suddenly immersed in ice-cold water; and this shock of hers, and her single entreaty for mercy, recommunicated itself to him, so that when Pierre Petit lifted him off the girl he was rigid and weeping.
"There, there, Parma," the boxer comforted him, cuffing him gently. He seized the girl's legs and hitched them up. "See, black bitch, you drive an honest, decent fellow to despair!"
She seemed infected by this mood of hysteria and herself began to kick and scream and beat on the walls of her cell. Parmelin covered his ears against the noise and Petit slapped her mouth, while the Commandant stood near the door watching silently, the wine bottle hanging lightly from his fingers.
When Camille Odouma saw the bottle, she froze.
"Which way, Petit, do you advise?" Laval said slowly, as one veteran of Indochina to another.
Petit rubbed the stubble of his closely cropped hair. "The back way can kill, of course. Very messy too."
"Do you want to die today?" Laval asked the girl.
Something, Parmelin saw, moved in the chamber of her throat. Three days ago she would have welcomed the release of death; now she was not so sure. The butcher saw how cunning the Commandant had been.
Laval approached the girl. The bottle would be a personal deprivation, an agonizing sublimation as poignant as the one devised by Annette in the Rue Chansonniere, and soon he would return to France, as hard as a man could be, anc settle accounts with Strauss and Jacques Pineau ...
"We are going to the heart of you and you will never be the same again. No secret, however precious, survives this experience. Your plight is pitiful only because you are the creature of a universal force which you cannot understand we pity you because we understand, because we are rational, because we recognize the necessity behind our actions." She cringed against the wall, her face had collapsed, she was a mere girl and he was not going to allow her to endure, to triumph where he himself ... Blue lightning rent jagged lines across his eyes, the muscle was racing in his cheek, he could no longer remember what it was that the girl had to tell—her secret had become irrelevant, her eyes reminded him oi: Pineau's, they were of the same breed ... A stain spread across her frock. "Dirty thing," he heard Petit say, then he saw the boxer, well trained as he was, undressing the girl, and Petit's own raging lust only sharpened his own; it was a perennial humiliation to share this crude plebeian's animality, just as Annette's accent cut right through to him to the day in June '38 when he had joined the strikers outside the Lacassagne works in Saint-fitienne and the blacklegs ..3 Petit had her pinned now, he bent over her and examined her, it nauseated him, he pressed the rim of the bottle against her flesh, menacingly, he searched her eyes for the butterflies but the wells were empty, her breath billowed up at him strangled and bad, her sounds reminded him of his daughter Marie in her cot, a week old and struggling with life, the memory angered him, his arm pressed forward. Her scream, delayed as it was by a fraction of a second, upset his balance and caused his hand to waver; it was a bad empty aeon, devoid of meaning, before feeling returned, bringing in its train the crescendo of his own excitement, the flooding in oJ: his life, the twirling of the kaleidoscope, the orgasm which had been his burden ever since Strauss had ... she screamed again, he knew himself to be the master, to have entered the fraternity of master practitioners and of rational authoritarians, to have buried for ever the false boundary which had separated him cruelly and senselessly from the Gestapo man .. to have merged his own identity at last with that of his conquerors ... he heard Petit grunt and swear, his hand thrust forward again, there was a light noise as if of wind and he saw that Parmelin had fainted. His deft butcher's hand still clutched the antiseptic, Petit tugged at it, the cotton wool had spilled on the floor, Petit's eye caught his own, he looked down and was astonished to discover how seriously his touch had erred and even then his head swam and he could only feel the warmth, the dampness in his own clothes and when Petit began shaking him and repeating, "Hospital, mon Commandant, hospital, quickly," he could feel only the grief and spent pity of it all that he had been cheated again and that life had been arranged to frustrate at every turn those who followed the arduous path of honour and duty.
In Fernand Ybele's exotic reception room, Soames Tufton was talking to Andre Laval. The Commandant, whose mind had been far away in another era, realized that the Englishman was still asking of him a favour. Laval's dark, impassive face remained suspended in a void, like a mask, ominous and remote. Tufton, it seemed, had a couple of Englishmen whom he wanted to get off his hands. Laval nursed certain suspicions. The English, he knew, were a nation of spies.
"You want them to spy on me?" he asked bluntly.
Dabbing at his face with a silk handkerchief, Soames looked around desperately for a glass of wine.
"Of course they won't spy on you, mon Commandant. As I have already told you, the younger one is excellent material, strong, intelligent—an officer. He's growing bored and restless. He'll serve you well if you give him plenty to do. He's disgustingly full of courage and initiative."
"And he wants your daughter?"
"And he wants my daughter. I'm glad that you have taken that point. I'd be glad to have him out of the way."
Laval raised his eyebrows. "Out of the way?"
Soames stared at him. "I-"
"How far out of the way?"
"Out of my daughter's way. I don't want to see him back '1 Thiersville. Please prevent that at all costs."
"I see. And the older one: does he love your daughter also?"
"Mon Commandant, this man is a veteran NCO. He spent years in Kenya, I believe. His great experience can only be an asset to your Anglo-Saxon contingent."
Laval nodded. "And you will pay for these men?"
"Of course."
"And they will act under my orders alone. No divided allegiances?"
"Your orders alone, mon Commandant."
Laval ran a finger across his mouth.
"One further thing, Monsieur. Why should I do you a favour?"
Soames tried to smile. "But M. Ybele assured you that I am close in his confidence-"
"Ybele is a nigger," Laval snapped.
Soames laughed. "Coppernica is full of niggers."
Laval nodded sombrely. "I need more men," he said. "Tell them to be ready by three. I will pick them up myself."
Soames thrust out his hand.
"Mon Commandant, how can I-"
But Andre Laval had already turned away.
SIX
in the ministry of the Interior, the Tukhomada cabinet was still in session. The accusing beam of sunlight constantly shifted its focus, its finger of condemnation, while above their heads the electric clock continued to orchestrate the march of time. Amah Odouma braced himself for a new intervention.
Earlier in the morning an important decision had been reached after a heated and tortuous discussion—to bring in technicians from friendly states in order to restore the Union and Amcol mines to working order. Now the second major decision of the day had been reached after more than three hours' debate: all French officers and foreign military personnel were dismissed and instructed to leave the country within thirty-six hours. An immediate press release was issued and an administrative procedure set in motion.
It was now lunchtime, and it was Sunday. Chairs and feet shifted with the collective, self-congratulatory voice of a congregation resuming its seat after kneeling in long and devout prayer.
Tukhomada's eyes flickered with uncertainty.
Amah passed a note across the table to the Prime Minster. It read: "We must not allow our stomachs and rheumatic pains to dictate to our heads. The job is only half completed."
Tukhomada raised his voice above the general conversation.
"Amah has something important to say."
The older men glowered at Amah resentfully. His rash and youthful intervention, his immature refusal to recognize that enough is enough, froze them in unexpected postures like the victims of Pompeii—a man rising from his chair, another reaching for the iced water, a third with his hand already on the door handle. Even Maya rebelled against the discomfort of his chair; Amah saw at once that he could no longer count on his closest ally.
"One moment more," he pleaded, "before you disperse. YouH no doubt recall Maya's apposite metaphor of the thief and the gun. If you catch a thief, don't thrust a gun into his hand. That was our initial mistake. Now we've decided to retrieve the gun; but we haven't yet done so. The intention is not tantamount to the act. If the French are really as desperate as we believe, are they likely to succumb meekly to our proclamation? Will les affreux be cowed by a press release?"
Their silence was a sigh. Maya turned towards Amah with an old man's slow, sceptical turning, moving the whole of his trunk and not merely the head. Confronted by so many blank, impatient eyes, Amah was compelled to see himself as they saw him, young, intemperate, lacking in maturity and moderation.
"Amah is certainly foolish to believe that we can proceed now to the arrest of fifty French officers and perhaps two hundred foreign mercenaries," Maya said.
"Particularly with morale at MacMahon what it now is," said Kwandu, the Minister of Education.
"We lack the resources, Amah," Raymond Tukhomada explained gently.
"In other words," said Amah, "we lack the power to enforce the order we've only this minute issued. In that case, consider it a dead letter."
An uneasy silence settled around the room.
"To bolster the power of the police at this moment might be to invite trouble from unexpected quarters," said Mouni-er, Minister of Communications.
"A police state is precisely what we wish to avoid," said Kwandu.
"Who mentioned a police state?" protested Amah.
"If you intend to arrest fifty French officers and-■"
"I don't," he snapped. . 1
"I suggest that we adjourn for the day," Kwandu said.
"I second that," Mounier said.
Amah glanced at Maya, but the old warrior's ruby eyes met his own not with the tolerance of comradeship but through the raw juice of impatience. Maya hated discussions, offices, desks, paper. He longed to return to his farm.
"Allow Amah to finish," Tukhomada said. His authority was absolute.
"If these officers are dangerous," Amah said, "then it's only because they benefit from positive leadership and solid financial backing. Deprived of this, they will degenerate into a rabble. They'll stampede to the airport like lemmings."
"So?" Kwandu drummed his fingers on the table impatiently.
"The men we need to curb today can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Ybele; without him the Alliance is a tribal dance. Plon; he controls the purse strings, in other words, everything. Tufton; undoubtedly working for Ybele and against us. Keller-"
"Keller!" roared Maya.
"Yes, Armand is happily with us again." "Arrest him."
"I've found it more useful to have him followed. One other arrest, and I guarantee that the guts will have been knocked oUt of the opposition."
"Who, then?"
Amah kept his voice level. "Commandant Laval."
"Never heard of him," growled Maya, as if to imply that the man couldn't, therefore, exist.
"He commands the mercenaries," Amah said patiently. "The mercenaries are obviously the most dangerous element in the entire situation. A dagger has been aimed at our heart for weeks, and we've done nothing. All I ask is that we arrest these men immediately and hold them until every French officer and foreign mercenary has left our soil."
"To arrest Ybele," Tukhomada said, "would be to put ourselves in a dictatorial light."
Amah shrugged. "Ybele might be excepted. A puppet is nothing until someone pulls the strings."
The members of the Cabinet shifted uncomfortably, nagged by heat, thirst and hunger, by their waiting families.
"And these five villains of yours are waiting outside the door to be arrested," Maya said with heavy sarcasm, beaming around in gratitude for the trickle of answering laughter.
"At the present moment they're all gathered in Ybele's villa on the Avenue Foch. The house is surrounded. None of them can leave."
"Very convenient," Maya muttered.
Amah lost his temper.
"Very! And why? Because these gentlemen have grown over confident. Need I remind you that they've ceased to pay taxes, demanded that we recompose our government and reduced our army to a mutinous rabble. And all in six weeks. Not to mention the mercenaries they've been importing by the planeload under our noses. No wonder they feel confident enough to gather in one house. You shrink from force. But What is the arrest of five men when set beside the force we employed, the blood we shed, in two years of desperate jungle war? Will you throw the labours of our people to the winds for a scruple? If I tell you that one of those whom 1 urge you to detain is the man who tortured and murdered my sister, it may remind you of the sort of criminal we're dealing with. Frankly, I have no time for windbags who hack moralities out of empty spaces, those armchair humanitarians who trot along behind the horse of history salvaging its excrement and burning it for incense. I have been jibed at as a Saint-Just. I account it an honour. But I don't recommend his slogan, 'No liberty for the enemies of liberty.' All I ask is that when a brigand holds a dagger to my throat, I be allowed to catch his wrist and break it."
Already Amah sensed that he'd made a fatal mistake. His suspicion was at once confirmed when Tukhomada promised him that the officer who had murdered Camille should not go free.
"You shall have your man, Amah," Maya said magnanimously, looking, the younger man felt, like Father Christmas on Boxing Day.
A general murmur of approval greeted these words. Once more, feet shuffled restlessly.
"I didn't make myself clear," Amah tried to explain. "It's not a matter of personal feelings, it's not a vendetta."
The man at his side glanced again at the blotter, now entirely taken up with "Lavals."
"I move the adjournment," Kwandu repeated, half rising.
"Whoever leaves his chair now," Tukhomada snapped, "leaves my government."
The debate continued. Here and there a cautious voice rose to support Amah. So vibrant became his own inner tension that he lost all sense of place and time; the familiar isolation, the inability to focus, the ringing in his head, the pressure on his temples, the mild giddiness, the impression of being suspended deep under the sea—these symptoms of anxiety laid their wreaths at the feet of Proust.
There is a tide ... He judged it to be an incongruity, this affection of his for the one play which, apart from CoriO' lanus, was generally regarded by his friends in Paris as proof of the dramatist's cryptofascism—a slanted, gimmicky verdict, perhaps, adopted by those fashion-followers for whod (j,e doors of perception are forever locked by tribal fervour.
Xhe debate was now almost evenly balanced. His own opinions were being canvassed by the very men who had a few moments ago derided them. Even so, the battle was far from won. Amah knew his colleagues to be men anxious above all to prove to the world their genuine respect for democracy. If Tukhomada himself came out strongly on his side, the scales would undoubtedly tip. But would he? In Amah's view, there must always exist a gulf, a missing dimension of experience, between those who had served in Maya's army and witnessed the slow offering of a people's blood to its earth, and those who had not. No bond of friendship or ideology could bridge this gulf. It was something you had to feel, like the red dust in your wounds and the nights without sleep, this awareness that when the rifle sings all other birds are stilled.
Hence Amah's bitterness at Maya's lazy blindness. Maya of all people should have known that all roads now led to Camp MacMahon.
"A matter for delicate handling . . ." someone was saying.
It struck Amah, while waiting for the fate of his country to be decided—and he was convinced that nothing less was now at stake—that men's choices are the mirrors of their lives. Strangely, despite his youthfulness he outstripped all these men in the depth and variety of his experience. Tukhomada knew of the peasant war only at secondhand; for Maya, those who had fought in the first, abortive insurrection in Thiersville were "town scum"; Amah alone of those Present had known what it was to be a Negro in Paris in the early days of the rebellion in Coppernica. Death had scythed through the close-packed generations; to be an ear of spring corn still swaying in the wind was to lack illusions.
And the scars, too, remained—grooves to guide the sly love of a mistress' finger.
amah was arrested at five in the morning and bundled into a Peugeot 403. The sharp breeze of the boulevards stung his skin.
A light mist hung over Paris.
The two detectives were both dark and of medium height The elder one, who was nearly bald, obviously had Arab blood. The younger one had thick, curly hair, a moustache and broad, sensual features which reminded Amah of Napoleon's.
From the beginning he thought of them as Arab and Bonaparte.
They sat on either side of him in the rear seat of the Peugeot, and for a while neither spoke. Amah's stomach was cold and empty as a stone vault; he was afraid. The car sped through the Concorde and over the Seine. Evidently sparked off by the sight of the National Assembly, Arab suddenly dug him in the ribs. At once a stream of abuse began to flow from the detectives.
"C'est le regne des flics qui commence, macaque."
"You like to write about tortures," Bonaparte said. His breath smelled of stale wine and garlic. "Nothing like experiencing them first."
"I experienced torture under the Nazis," Arab confided. "Now I carry it out. I'm a brute."
He laughed heartily. His teeth were neat and white.
The mists descended to stroke the gray sleep of the Seine.
"We've been eaten up by Jews, lawyers and Communists," Bonaparte said. "For them, France was always wrong. Now France'll always be right."
"Complain to the Commission of Safeguard if you like," Arab said, as if Amah had already threatened to do so. "We
don't give a bugger for it. Every time there's an action against us, the boss gives us a promotion."
"We give orders to everyone, including the judge," Bonaparte added.
"We'll make you piss blood, salaud."
"If you're damaged too much, if we get carried away, we'll throw you in the river."
Amah thought vaguely about the Seine—panic had brought on an answering drowsiness. This ribbon of gray water to their left—for centuries it had been a symbol, a witness to a nation's fortunes. Yet those waters had long since flowed past; today's Seine was not yesterday's, nor tomorrow's. He wondered dully where now flowed the actual waters which would receive his battered body.
The Peugeot turned into the Rue des Saussaies, as he had feared, and screeched to halt in front of the police station.
Amah was reminded of a railway station during the holiday season. The hallway, which smelled of carbolic was thronged by at least a hundred detectives talking in excited groups. Handcuffed Negroes with blank, neutral faces were being pushed about like cattle. He was taken up several flights of stairs to a bare room with whitewashed walls where a dozen Negroes and one or two Arabs were crouching on the floor. He was flung onto the stone floor, headfirst. An electric slash of fire ran across his skull as a steel-tipped shoe caught him behind the ear.
The two detectives went out without a word, lighting cigarettes.
For almost a month he had prepared himself for this test of courage and endurance. Ever since news reached Paris of the disturbances connected with the arrest and imprisonment of the hitherto unknown Raymond Tukhomada, the Negroes living in the capital had gone in fear of arrest and torture. In the streets Amah had met insults, sometimes blows; the police now appeared as the most ruthlessly efficient section of an almost uniformly hostile population. Before his eyes, two decades of remorse dissolved; the epoch's twisted psyche heaved over to reveal its ugly grimace. For the first time in his life Amah had fully understood what the philosophers meant by "absurdity."
Three years had elapsed since Camille took his arm at Thiers, ville airport. Her head came almost level with his own. Jn the sleek modern airport building of chromium and glass, they walked together among faces tanned by an artificial, cosmopolitan indifference.
"So you're leaving us, Amah."
He saw that she had grown into a large-boned goddess of unshakable convictions, a stern moralist. At twenty-one she had voluntarily assumed the responsibilities of middle age.
"I shall not forget you."
"You have talent. Don't let the French take it from you."
"You know that I've always thought of myself as French."
"Amah, what joins a slave to his masters is more tragic than what separates him."
Through discreetly tuned loudspeakers, a soft voice adumbrated the capitals and pleasure resorts of four continents. But Camille scarcely saw the people around her.
"You're only flesh," she warned.
"Well?"
"A man's flesh isn't by nature solitary. Whether it's natural or not, you'll have to deny and suffocate that flesh in order to keep your spirit free."
He felt irritated. It wasn't a sister's business to speak in this way. Sensing his displeasure, she fell silent, abashed, and abruptly the short time separating them from his departure became an eternity to be endured. Bewildered by their freedom, brother and sister searched the sleek airport in vain for the outlines of necessity.
In Paris Amah at once threw himself into his studies, reading avidly and attending every lecture with any possible relevance to his field. It was during a lecture on phenomenology in the Salle Richelieu that he met Dominique.
The lecture hall was cruelly overcrowded. Gradually the heat, the lack of air and the lecturer's congenital inaudibility sapped the foundations of his concentration, his good intentions and his ambition; he became aware of the small, dark girl sitting beside him and scribbling furiously in a notebook So brazen did his attempts to study her notes become tha
she finally awarded him a frank, exploratory scrutiny. He blushed.
"I missed that," he whispered to the girl, as if concerned to follow the lecturer's argument.
She examined him squarely, a woman in the act of disposing.
Afterwards they went to a cafe near the Odeon metro.
She drank tea, like a tourist. Her name was Dominique Martin. She came from Caen, in Normandy, and her mouth reminded him of Camille's. ,
"You new here?" she asked.
"Three weeks," he said, slitting the packet and letting the sugar run into his coffee.
They watched the traffic flow past, and the people.
"Homesick?" she asked.
"Sometimes."
"I'm always homesick," she said.
"You!" He laughed, like an African.
"That's why I live in the Rue Terminot, near the Gare du Nord. So that I can run home if things get too much for me."
"How often do things get too much for you?"
"Every day."
"You go back to Caen every day?"
"I never have the fare."
They laughed. Her dark eyes tended to flare, as if she were angry, but he couldn't look at her directly, with detachment.
"What number in the Rue Terminot?" he demanded.
"Sixteen. Do you want the telephone number as well?"
"You have a phone! No wonder you can't afford train fares."
He was a student, he understood these things already.
"The concierge." She looked stern. He saw that Dominique, like Camille, would be a mother of five, a schoolteacher ... Already he had fathered the five children. Some were blacker than others.
She opened her bag and brought out her purse. An eddy of panic ran through him. In a moment it would all be over, the girl would be swept away into the crowd, proud, self-
contained, sure of her destiny, and he would be left to drffl like a black leaf across the alien city.
He pushed away her purse. "This is on me," he insisted, t
"On the contrary, I will pay my way."
"I shall be offended, Mademoiselle."
"I am a Communist, Monsieur. I believe in equality."
"I am a Negro, Mademoiselle. As a consequence I realize that there is no equality."
Her chin was formidable. She stood up now, and for the first time he dared to take in the whole of her, from the engaging crown of dark, curly hair to her small, delicate feet, encased in white moccasins.
He said, "It's terrible. My sister, who is an important person in my life, ordered me not to fall in love with a white woman."
They walked toward the metro, through the dense crowds.
Too crude, he regretted. His cheeks were burning. One was destined, it seemed, to make the same mistakes every time, as if some permanent essence, some inherent "nature," had been injected and then solidified in late puberty. When did a man become what he was? I
"Why is she so important?" Dominique Martin eventually asked, as he had hoped she would.
"She is my twin. And very strong."
"And you?"
"I'm merely a poet."
"A poet? I would like to read your poems. Are they full of nigritude?"
He felt piqued. "I try not to be imitative."
"Of course."
They had reached the metro. She stopped and turned to face him. A lump rose in his throat, words would not come. They looked into each other's faces. He dreaded the moment when she would extend her hand; then it would be too late.
"Woman disposes," he said softly, with a hint of desperation.
"You also have a small frog in the throat," she said gently.
He nodded.
"Why is that?"
He was dimly aware of the floodtide of people milling about them, of the pressure of the crowd forcing their bodies together. He hung suspended in a glowing cauldron of silence whose flaming rim reminded him of the Arabian nights. He knew that, just as philosophers often fell into the trap of fitting their concepts to their vocabulary, so real life also cringed under the tyranny of words spoken, words mispoken and words unspoken.
She said, "Have you seen the new Ionesco?"
"Let me take you."
"We will go dutch, Amah."
"If that is your condition. But I shall protest."
"I shall be impervious."
Before she disappeared into the metro—a voluntary surrender of identity which seemed only to reinforce her intense individuality—she surprised him by leaning forward and kissing him lightly on the mouth. The aura of her shrouded him in happiness; and the smell of her skin, its cool, soft promise remained with him long after she had gone.
It was through Dominique that Amah met Paulenc.
A dry, shrivelled man in middle age who wore a jacket of pastel blue tweed and baggy, unpressed flannel trousers and whose fingers were stained with nicotine, fimile Paulenc was well known both as a doctrinaire professor of philosophy and as a member of the Communist party's central committee. Paulenc had a reputation as an authority on African affairs; Amah took care to turn up punctually for his appointment.
The professor shook his hand without warmth and curtly motioned him to a chair. The office was small and dingy, with brown walls and very few books. Periodicals, layered in dust, rose in heavy piles from the floor.
"So you wish to study philosophy, Odouma?"
"Certainly, Monsieur."
The question surprised Amah; he had already embarked on his studies.
"What need has Coppernica of philosophers, I wonder?"
"Monsieur, it has always been my ambition to study philosophy in Paris. My father is a schoolteacher and I-"
"Please answer my question."
"Monsier le Professeur, a people, a nation cannot do without philosophy." i
"What nation?" Paulenc stared at him, twiddling a pencil on his desk. "Coppernica is part of France, surely?"
Amah was stunned.
"Yes. I mean no. Besides-"
"Besides, philosophy is virtually dead. Marx killed it. Read it, by all means, but study something else. Become qualified in something useful. Agriculture, for example."
"You colonial bourgeois are all the same. A lot of leftist talk, but you consider yourselves first and your people second. You all want to be philosophers, lawyers and writers. Parasites, in fact. What your people need are experts in agriculture, engineers, men who can plan an economy on rational lines and help to lift the peasantry out of their technological backwardness."
Amah didn't get the impression that Paulenc harboured any great love for the Coppernican peasantry. His words were flat, toneless and mechanical. But Amah had to admit to himself that he knew very little about the peasantry of his own country; they were not a factor which he, his family and friends ever considered.
"Monsier, I've no qualifications-"
"You have your bachot, you have maths and some science. That's enough."
He rose to leave. "I must think it over," he said weakly.
"Do."
Paulenc had bent to the papers on his desk before Amah was out of the room.
He turned up the Rue d'Ulm and stared through the gates of the ficole Normale, a legendary institution among the black intelligentsia of Thiersville, a reticent building whose photograph he had often scrutinized in books. This was where he wanted to go, not to an agricultural college!
He had now left his lodgings in Montmartre and moved into Dominique's small apartment in the Rue Terminot.
"What did Paulenc want?" she asked.
"Don't you know?" he said suspiciously. -,<
"I wouldn't ask if I did."
"He wants me to dig ditches, to be an agricultural expert."
"Perhaps that's the unselfish thing to do."
Amah flew into a rage and went to see Victor Manoury, a tall, elegant lawyer-journalist who lived in a flat near the Louvre. Manoury edited a magazine, Le Rouge et le Noir, which printed poems, articles and stories by French-speaking Africans and which pressed relentlessly for an immediate end to the colonial era.
Amah told him about Paulenc.
"Of course your country needs agricultural .experts," Manoury said, pouring him a double scotch.
Amah looked around the big room, with its high ceiling, large gilt mirrors and leather-covered chairs.
"I'm not the type," he said weakly.
"Precisely. Besides, one has to take into account Paulenc's motives. He and his party regard philosophy as a dangerous and deviation-fostering subject for young Africans who might otherwise be persuaded to follow the party line blindly."
Amah stared at Manoury with suspicion. The man was too debonair, too detached—too rich to be trusted.
"I know what you're thinking, Amah. You're thinking that it's all very well to run down the Communists if you can afford to live within spitting distance of the Louvre; that Paulenc, for all his dryness and austerity of manner, is at least a sincere and dedicated friend of Africa."
"The Communists alone opposed the war in Indochina," Amah said.
"True. Something which every colonial subject will do well to remember. However, you must judge for yourself. Time alone can reveal."
After his fourth double scotch Amah descended into the sunlit boulevards and walked home. He was too drunk to catch a bus or train. He continued to publish poems in Manoury's magazine, but his true life increasingly lay with Dominique and the Communist students to whom she introduced him.
Their love grew.
She wasn't a beautiful girl; her limbs were square and powerful, not delicate and tapered. It was easy to imagine her working methodically in her father's fields during the summer vacation. She wore very little makeup, preferred flat-heeled shoes, heavy sweaters and an old suede jacket or raincoat. She cooked well when she chose to, but she didn't have much time for it, and they ate mostly in restaurants and bistros.
"I'm not your first man, Dominique?"
"No."
Her mouth was definitely Camille's.
"Have you been promiscuous?"
"That's very insulting. I gave in to you too easily."
"I'm sorry."
"It depends what you mean by promiscuity," she said.
He laughed. "Having more than one man at a time."
Camille wrote from Thiersville frequently. She wanted to know why he'd quit his first lodgings and whether he was now living alone. His sister's aversion to white people began to bore him; he thought of it as immature.
"It's time she saw the world," he told Dominique.
"She's against all whites, then?" Dominique inquired one morning at breakfast, after reading through Camille's latest letter. "Isn't that rather bigoted?"
Amah shrugged. The moment his own race came under criticism, he shed his impartiality.
"It's a matter of perspective, of what you know and what you experience."
"You change your tune," she said. "At least your sister is consistent."
She ran a hand through her uncombed hair and he watched the swell of her breasts under her sweater as her arm went back. In the morning, desire often swept him. The aroma of coffee and hot rolls was soothing. He felt rested and virile.
"Let's make love," he suggested.
They took one another, and their affair, with extreme seriousness. Increasingly their lives had become integrated in a single, ardent response to politics, philosophy and literature. They knew themselves to be attempting something difficult to achieve, and they never forgot what separa
them.
"Amah."
"Yes."
"You speak of making love, old hypocrite, but look here." She held up the latest copy of Le Rouge et le Noir. "Perhaps you didn't know that I even read the poems which you don't choose to show me. Now who wrote this line: 'Her false-bottomed white smile'? Or this: 'His back, black as night, only the lashes white'?"
"I did."
"Either you think of me as 'false-bottomed' or else these lines were written for effect, as a pose, to associate yourself with the fashionable negritude."
"You want a row."
She lit a cigarette. "Don't equivocate. This poem strikes at the roots of our relationship."
Her full features glowed now.
"In your present mood, you don't wish to understand." Amah nibbled at some bread. He felt easy, relaxed. He folded Camille's letter neatly and put it into the breast pocket of his shirt. "When I write about 'white lash marks,' I'm referring to my country. If you lived in Coppernica, you'd be a different woman."
"No."
"You can't know because you haven't been there. Your horizon is limited. I'm writing for my brothers who are suffering. When Camille writes as she does, she's surrounded by suffering and humiliation. It's no \ we who hate, but you." y
They sat for a while in silence. Time passed; it was theirs to squander.
"Of course you're right," she did, finally, say.
He took her hand across the table.
"I love you," he said.
"I don't deserve it. You're quite right: we don't have the imagination, we can't make the leap."
She brewed fresh coffee. They both smoked heavily. Dominique, like Camille, had the capacity to feel and suffer deeply, spontaneously, without self-consciousness. She came to sit on his knee, to lay her head on his shoulder.
"Black man," she said.
"We live in two worlds, those of us who come to Paris," he said gently. "You and your friends are one thing, the whites at home quite another. We suffer from a constant crisis 0( identity. Treason, the spectre of betrayal, haunts us. Before I left Thiersville, Camille said to me, 'What joins a slave to his masters is more tragic than what separates him.'"
"Slave," said Dominique.
Presently they made love.
As yet the pattern of dominance was fluid, unstable. They chose reciprocity, but uneasily, unsure whether it was a choice or a compromise. It needed only a gesture, a certain kiss, a touch, to light the spark, to bring warmth and love flooding, the harmony and purpose which convince two humans that they truly belong to the same species. She was direct, aggressive, demanding; her every action in love gave proof of emancipation. What came hard at first, until intimacy had buried every trace of reticence and doubt, was the pause while she withdrew to the bathroom, the medicated interval in which passion underwent arrest and detention. But with time they found the confidence to stand outside themselves and to rejoice in the act like frenzied witnesses, f
When she returned, he was already in bed. He watched her undress, and the smile which played around her mouth delighted him. She stood where he could see her and no longer turned her back, as earlier she had turned when the straight beam of his gaze had scorched her white skin. In those days she could not adjust to the rapid stripping down, the forthright leap into nakedness which he took for granted. Although a victim of the cold, of the intense, damp ice-fire which cripples the flesh of students, he did not lose the habit of throwing off his clothes at the first onset of desire. For a moment he would stand before her, naked and erect, a small slender brown man with finely modelled features and tight neat muscles. Then with a howl he would leap under the bedclothes and huddle there moaning about his pain and his need.
But now he watched her undress and she undressed to please him.
When she was three, the Germans had come to Caen when seven, the British, and the long night of the guns. -A edition and a kind of book had been layered in the fine soil f conflict; one day the little girl would widen her horizons in Paris, but stark memories and the image of endeavour would drive her to a calm, methodical rebellion and to the organization of protest. Now she found a liberating contact with the southernmost promontory of the culture to which she belonged; this delicate, ebony Frenchman prized open the tight core of her womanhood. He had piled rugs, dressing gowns and overcoats on the ied; here she found him, and a pit became a furnace. At first she had seemed to welcome concealment, the close, tactile world of the inner bed where blind bodies sought reassurance without the pain of visual assessment. She bored in on him, the secretary of the party cell, purposeful and abashed, attacked him, thrust her small, aggressive body against his like a woman who must shout for fear of the silence. He was perplexed, suffocated: he drooped and died, something which had never happened before. The possibility of entirely separate racial habits, which their mutual culture denied, dawned darkly, bringing apologies, excuses, talk—anything to avoid recrimination.
It had never died on him before. In Africa, he was accustomed to the teasing eroticism of separateness, to building up to the precise point at which the social conventions break down, the point at which the rods keeping a man's body from a woman's are snapped. He liked selected contact, provocate, deliberate titillation, a battle of sophisticated thrusts and counterthrusts, and the excitement which the sight of his Distress' body brought him. Even as he entered an African 6rl he would hold himself away from her, with his back arched, and he would watch himself having the girl whom, When he had seen her a few moments before in her clothes, 'n her full social regalia, he had chosen to possess. He fnJoyed the sensation of control, of guiding a woman's feel-lngs according to his own rhythm, of navigating her; and ^hen he had first encountered Dominique's close strength and found himself stifled and bound by her limbs, he had Panicked at the loss of the male's share of government. And Wllen> on the third occasion, he did not droop, but merely Succumbed quickly without working any miracle in her, he was ashamed. Dominique, he feared, would conclude that in Africa the male alone was expected to derive satisfaction, but there was nothing he could say, his words would merely have thrown his failure into starker relief. With locked jaws and frozen eyes they tried again and again until their breath laboured with the sadness of it and their sweat lay stale on the sheets.
At the end of November a mist had blanketed Paris and with it a column of warm air. Dominique had withdrawn to the bathroom and Amah found himself rigid with anxiety; they could not afford another failure. The warmth struck him; he reached out of the bed and switched on both bars of the electric fire. When she came in he had pulled back the bedclothes and was lying naked on the sheet.
He caught her by the shoulders and pinned her on her back. Against the doubt in her eyes he called on faith and courage; he made her look at him as he held himself away from her, and gradually he began to work on her, employing his strength to mould her nature to this own, to check every initiative she attempted, to dominate her utterly. The intensity of his purpose closed his mind to all thought of his own pleasure; he deadened his body by turning his mind in a certain way as he worked on her, bringing her on and through the tunnel. She didn't smile back but her reticence had given way to passive abandonment; she was like a woman confronted with a rare work of art for the first time, grave and awed. He looked down on her from a great height as she lay tossing, white and damp, her head flung back, her mouth open, sound running free like water from her broad, open throat and her hands stretched out on the sheet, their fingers relaxed and trembling. Then Caen fell.
The words came later. With them, danger. Gradually, when Caen had fallen many times, the slave relaxed his strict gubernatorial rule over the mistress, coaxing her back towards herself, encouraging her to discover and define herself through his revolt. She watched now as brown fingers closed over the blue-veined white of her breast, and as she watched, her nipples stiffened between the joints of his knuckles. His colour became for her an aphrodisiac; she learned that passion must be acted as well as lived. Hi mouth closed over hers for minutes at a time, but the words still came, the words destined to destroy inevitably the bond which the shadows of silence had built.
"Why do you hate me, Amah? Am I 'false-bottomed'?"
"One cannot hate what is one's own."
"I'm a free woman. My love for you makes me freer."
"A lock belongs to its key."
"No, the lock is the measure of the key. It is you who are condemned to become like me."
"That's the illusion of all slave-owning classes."
She sat up, pulling the sheet around her breasts and shoulders. Her dark hair was tousled and her small face was crumpled with happiness and nascent sleep.
"I'm a Communist, Amah."
"In Coppernica you would be a colon's wife. And if I were found in your bed I'd be whipped."
They lit cigarettes. She turned on the radio. He put one hand on her breast and thought of Camille; his hand tightened imperceptibly and she said, "I'm a fool to love you. In the end I'll be the one to suffer."
"You can never suffer enough."
Three days later a bomb was thrown into the Thiersville gendarmerie. Four policemen, all of them white, were killed and seven injured.
Amah and Dominique went together to a cell meeting in the Cite Universitaire. For some months past Amah's relationship with the Communist students and with Paulenc had lacked complete cordiality. Paulenc had recently brewed up a row over Amah's contributions to Le Rouge et le Noir, and particularly over his more stringently didactic poems.
"You know who sponsors this magazine?" Paulenc had said coldly.
"Victor Manoury."
Paulenc smiled and looked around his office, where a dozen Communist students had gathered. His teeth were yellow. "Manoury is merely the window dressing. It's a pity that your decision to continue studying philosophy has not sharpened your dialectical insight, your penetration of the apparent contradictions in a situation. Who do you imagine is behind Manoury?"
Amah shrugged. Paulenc lit a new cigarette from the burning butt of the old one. He nodded like a vulture.
"Consider," he began in his best lecturing style, "the real orientation of Manoury's line. Let us look below surfaces, comrades. Le Rouge et le Noir ceaselessly demands independence, immediate independence, for all of France's colonies, regardless of the consequences. At the same time its pages are full of work inciting the black peoples to hatred of the whites. Now who will benefit if France abandons her responsibilities in Africa tomorrow? Certainly not the people of Africa. American neo-imperialism will immediately reap the benefit and fill the vacuum ..."
"As has happened in South Vietnam," someone added.
"Precisely. And in Morocco. Is it not then perfectly clear who is behind Manoury's paper?"
Paulenc turned to Amah, who felt a dozen pairs of critical eyes resting on him. He avoided looking at Dominique. Only through an immense effort of the will was he able to keep his voice level. . 1
"Yes, we Africans lack dialectical subtlety at the moment. We are sorry if we disappoint you in that respect. If I may paraphrase Brecht, you should dissolve the present African people and elect another. As for Manoury, all I know is that he supports our desire to be free."
"An honest man, no doubt," snapped Paulenc. "But individualistic, sentimental, petit bourgeois, lacking contact with the working class."
"The future," added a student, "lies in the union of the African people and the French proletariat. Only on the basis of such a cooperation can the problem of French Africa be solved in a progressive manner."
Amah was surprised by his own response—a distorted laugh, sneering and unpleasant, reflecting, evidently, a fiercer tension than he had suspected.
"This sophistry disgusts me. There are twelve million Africans in Coppernica and half a million whites. That is all there is to know. As for the French proletariat, they mean nothing to the people of my country. To them a white is a white, and when he comes to Coppernica he does not forget it."
There was a silence—almost of shock. Dominique, he saw, had reddened.
Paulenc sighed. "My friend, the USSR cannot extend its commitments in Africa for the time being. You must wait, be patient."
"What the hell has it to do with the USSR?"
"Independence is not an end in itself-"
"It is!"
"Wait. Who, after independence, will rule in your country, which class? In a world where all economies are interdependent, much will depend on the actions of outside forces."
Amah stood up. He took his raincoat from the back of his chair and folded it over his arm. He felt the anger but also the despair which had so often clouded his youth flooding in on him, tearing aside the veil of illusions which he had built up since coming to Paris, since living with Dominique. Camille possessed him totally now.
"We cannot understand each other," he said softly. "What you take to be an exercise of the mind, of the intellect, is in reality a problem of the psyche, of the collective consciousness. You think that it is enough to be against racism and imperialism doctrinally, that once you have taken up a "progressive" stand your task is completed. You would do well to heed the dark gods, comrades, the creatures of blind passion which move inside us, brought into existence by history and by suffering."
He left the room, and almost immediately he began to weep. He walked blindly among the crowds and tears coursed down his cheeks. He stared at his reflection in a bookshop window, wiped his eyes, then headed down the Rue Bonaparte towards the river. He walked for an hour, until he reached the Boulevard des Italiens. Finally he fell exhausted into a movie-theatre seat and slept.
At Dominique's insistence, he attended one further cell meeting. On this occasion there were a number of Africans present, hastily summoned by Paulenc, and the atmosphere Was fraught with urgency and suspicion. Paulenc opened the meeting with a statement which, as usual, cunningly blended persuasion with blackmail. The "war in Coppernica," as he called it, was a disaster for the French and African peoples alike. The French working class led by the Communist party was determined to end the war as soon as possible. The party condemned the Government's policy and called for negotiations. Nothing must be said or written to inflame passions; in this respect, the quasi-racist attitude adopted by several African friends in certain leftist journals was considered erroneous by the party.
When Paulenc had finished, Amah asked at once whether or not the party supported Coppernica's claim to independence. And if it did, and if it recognized that this claim had been made without effect for ten years, how could it fail to support the rebellion?
He glanced at Dominique. This woman whom he had grown, in a sense, to love, whose body and soul he had explored until virtually no secret remained unrevealed—this white woman—now sat apart from him, watching him critically, impatient with what she regarded as his immature anc vain posturing, his refusal to submit himself to a proper discipline.
"And what about the Army?" he asked. "Are comrades to obey the call to arms and to drive tanks over my people?"
This thrust went home. Paulenc, he saw, was angry "We're not anarchists, " he snapped. "We do not believe in petit bourgeois individualism. A Communist worker canno separate himself from other members of his class. He shares the same burdens and risks. If France is at war, if the workers are conscripted, then Communists will obey the call The war must be opposed on a planned, centralized anc political basis, not through Gandhi-like gestures of civil disobedience which would prove ruinous to our position as the guide and conscience of the proletariat."
Amah felt calm now; he knew the breaking point had come.
"My friends, let me remind you that Marxism exists for the service of the underprivileged, and not the underprivileged for the service of Marxism. You are pedants and hypocrites, decking your prejudices out in the garments of a phony dialectic. What you mean, but dare not say, is that the French workers hate the blacks just as all the other whites do."
One or two of the Negroes present followed him out; the others remained with long, doleful faces, committed to being uncommitted. Amah walked out into the hostile city, the richly inviting heritage which had turned suddenly sour.
When he arrived home it was late, and Dominique was already in bed. He climbed in beside her and fell asleep.
In the morning she gave him his coffee and bread as usual. They fell back on a frigid politeness and watched one another silently like hostile cats. At nine-thirty she left for a lecture; he did not see her again until evening.
"Well?" he said.
"Well, Amah?" She took off her raincoat, ran a hand through her dark hair and put a saucepan of water on the gas ring. She avoided looking at him. He went to stand close beside her.
"Dominique," he said softly, "I want to continue living with you."
She watched the first bubbles appear on the surface of the water, peeled three potatoes (two, as usual, for him and one for herself) and threw them into the water. They bobbed.
He said: "I don't suppose Paulenc is very keen on your living with me."
"I wouldn't know."
He glanced at her quickly. He knew she was telling the truth. He turned away, numbed by her indifference, and threw himself on the bed. Already he had a premonition of the agony ahead. Later they went to sleep back to back, without exchanging a word of affection. And when, in the depths of the night, their limbs briefly touched, they apologized almost simultaneously, then lay awake, shaken and trembling, each longing for the other to make the first gesture of reconciliation, each finding it impossible to make it themselves.
In the morning she looked tired.
There was a letter from Camille. Domip'que watched him read it, and her copy of I'Humanite lay on the plastic cover °f the kitchen table, unopened. When he had read the letter twice, he offered it to her but she pushed it away.
"I don't want to know," she said.
"One of her friends was raped," Amah said.
"I'm sorry."
He went out, putting the letter in his jacket pocket, and headed for the metro. When he reached the single room on the Rue Racine where Le Rouge et le Noir was edited, he found Victor Manoury in conference with a group of writers, most of whom Amah recognized. They greeted him warmly, and he wondered when this bridge, too, would crumble into the burning dust of racial hatred. The elegant lawyer read Camille's letter, bringing a gold cigarette case from his waistcoat pocket and fitting a Balkan Sobranie into a jade holder with a silver tip. A delicious aroma filled the room.
"We'll print this in toto," Manoury said. He held it out for general inspection; his manner was laconic, almost disinterested, and Amah noticed his finely laundered cuffs, the gold links, the carefully manicured hands. The impulse to snatch back the letter, Camille's passionate testimony of faith, was almost irresistible; for a moment the pale pink hands almost made him vomit.
Once again he had to escape, to break free. Yet the streets no longer provided a concrete sanctuary: from the newsstands headlines screamed hatred at him, from the billboards garish posters announced films of violence and depicted, by way of promise, snarling black faces, contorted with venom. In Montmartre a film was showing in which the villains were Parisian blacks, lay-abouts with nothing better to do than live off the French taxpayer while seducing and assaulting his daughters, keeping his sons out of the university and urinating in the street. Insults and threats came to Amah unexpectedly, at a street corner, in the metro, in a shop. "Sale noir" ... He would turn sharply only to find a blank, impassive face, or nothing ... More than once he felt he must have been dreaming.
They lived together out of habit. She ignored his poems, and they no longer made love. From time to time they inquired politely about one another's work, but they never discussed politics. Pride and anguish worked in them both the same appalling miracle of alienation. Communication was no longer possible, destiny was once again its own master.
Then, one evening, they did go out together.
They didn't go far—only to the bistro at the corner of the
Rue Terminot and the Place Laforgue where one could get a steak and a glass of rose for a couple of hundred francs. Under a light drizzle of rain they walked along the wet pavement like strangers, their hands thrust into their raincoat pockets (Dominique regarded handbags as "bourgeois") and their shadows marching ahead of them, like ghosts. A cosmic depression had coated Amah's soul like a slime. Every time they passed a knot of young men his spine tautened with apprehension. It had been almost a month since he had heard from Camille; normally she wrote twice a week. He had no doubt that she had thrown herself into the rebellion. He longed to confide his fears to Dominique, but it was now out of the question. In a way, he wished she'd kick him out into the street; he watched her protracted dialogue with her own conscience and reacted with helpless anger. He still loved her.
Instinctively, they chose a corner table. On the surface of the large, plate-glass window, black as the night beyond, the street lights and rivulets of rainwater played a ballad of tribulation. Amah and Dominique sat facing each other; their knees touched, briefly. Their steaks came quickly, and the rose, but the food seemed tough and dry. Amah had difficulty in forcing it down the narrowed, aching channel of his throat. On the wall above his head a three-tone poster depicted a smiling model climbing into a familiar, state-owned make of car, while vaguely contriving to identify herself with the triple slogan: "Speed! Safety! Economy!" They hurried through their food without speaking. Amah sensed hostile eyes fixed upon them; breathing itself could no longer be taken for granted. The univers concentrationnaire, about Which he, Dominique and a whole generation had read with stupefaction bordering on disbelief, had again begun to manifest itself, imperceptibly, like a transparent poison gas. The group of young men who had been drinking at a neighbouring table—two of them wore the uniform of the Blue Serets—had now fallen sile-r* and were staring at them ■ntently, their faces pallid with uncertainty. Amah paid the bill. He dared not move: the searchlights had him trapped, frozen, and from the high perimeter turrets the guards Srinned down at him behind their machine guns. He did not look directly at Dominique but her stillness had a potency 0f its own, a white woman's composure and certainty which rendered his manhood, his nominal duty to protect her irrelevant, meaningless. The black, like the Jew before him had become the quintessential woman of a Europe in which even the magistrates were rapists. The poison gas thickened; the bistro had fallen quiet; one of the soldiers cleared his throat; a chair, pushed back sharply, screeched. It was not the fear of violence and pain which now set Amah's whole frame vibrating, but rather the despair of one condemned, like Calvin's unregenerate, in advance and without trial. When, finally, Dominique spoke sharply to the soldier who had risen to his feet, Amah was so weak that he could barely take in the reprieve she had earned him.
"We will win the war, Monsieur, by being brave in Cop-pernica, not cowardly here in France."
It was enough. He followed her into the street, head down. They walked home in silence; and they lay shivering between damp, chill sheets, unable to offer one another comfort or security.
The thing had ended. It remained only to discover a pretext.
Then, in the marsh-mist of a winter morning, the sentence itself slithered under the apartment door—a folded newspaper, a mutilated woman prostrate in a ditch, creased across the legs by the vendor. In the shadows of the small hallway Dominique stooped and began to read. In the kitchen Amah was drinking coffee. A thin slice of toast, stiffening like a corpse and coated with butter of a deathly pallor, lay half chewed on his plate, abandoned for a cigarette.
Every morning he hoped for a letter from Camille. But he knew now that none would come.
Dominique offered him the paper. Headlines rushed at hi® like hungry rats. Fifty miles southwest of Thiersville, at Belonga—at a road junction (he did not know the place, but he visualized the red, laterite dust, the crimson horizon, the vulture-laden trees). An ambush: ten French civilians, four of them women, one a priest, one a doctor ... none of the® engaged in the "pacification" . . . rape, mutilation, eyes gouged ...
On the surface of his rapidly cooling coffee, the boiled polk had formed a skin. Dominique had one foot on the bed; ier skirt was pulled back to the hip as she fastened a black woollen stocking to her suspender. Above the stocking the flesh of her thigh swelled, soft and challenging. A rage of desire burned through his loins.
"You'll be late for your lecture," Dominique said evenly.
The thigh was gone.
She glanced at him critically, while clearing away the breakfast plates into the sink. Like Camille, and like his mother, Dominique resolved the moments of uncontainable emotion by feverish activity. In the sink, the plates and cups shrieked like frightened pigs.
"You'll be late, Amah," Dominique insisted.
"So?"
"You have your exams coming up."
"Do you want to get rid of me? Does my presence here disgust you?"
She nodded soberly. Her yellow rubber gloves were dripping into the sink.
"Yes, Amah."
He went to the wardrobe and pulled out the two small drawers which contained his clothes and linen. The familiarity of the contents soothed him a little as he began to stuff them into his suitcases. Dominique turned away and the Plates resumed their shrieking.
"You'll be glad to see the savage go," Amah said. His eyes bad begun to sting.
"There are limits," Dominique said.
"Ah. For whom?"
"For those who wish to be considered within the pale of civilization."
"The Blue Berets, for instance?"
She took a step towards him, and for a moment he thought that she might strike him.
"Listen, Amah, the Germans occupied France during the War, but we never did that to them."
A faint, uneasy smile hovered around his lips.
"Too bad." "These people," she said slowly, "these women, this doctor, this priest, had nothing to do with the war."
He wore his smile like a mask.
"You can only visualize a country under military occupa-tion. But a colony is different. In a colony every white is a soldier in disguise, an element in the totality of oppression. The oppression is total and the confrontation is total."
"You'd better hurry home to see how many women you can rape while the going's still good."
Dominique stood trembling. He packed his things hurriedly and offered her money for the rent.
"Just go," she whispered.
He nodded and put the money on the kitchen table. He stood by the door clutching his cases, stunned to realize that they had not after all managed to rescue themselves from the abyss. He felt totally exhausted, drained. The day had only just begun.
"Where will you go?" she said.
"Wherever my fellow cannibals are gathering. We'll need one another now."
Idly he picked up the dishcloth and began to dry the cutlery. The element of feeling in her voice had, absurdly, kindled his hope.
"Don't bother," she said.
"Dominique ..."
She dried her hands, tidied her hair, put on her raincoat and gathered her notes and books. She moved towards the door.
"I wish you well, Amah." Her voice, like her white moccasins, was flat.
She went out quickly. The door closed on its familiar note producing its familiar echo in the corridor outside and intensifying the silence in the apartment in which Amah now stood alone, holding a damp dishcloth.
In the prison cell none of the arrested Negroes spoke.
A housefly settled on Amah's nose. Handcuffed, he blew a< it, but without effect. He said, softly, reproachfully, "Colo nialist, eh?," and noticed a smile or two among the blacks whose dejection and low morale worried him. They were, be (.new, about to be tortured; and it was important that certain information regarding the Free Coppernica organization in Paris be kept from the police for the time being. He began to remonstrate with the fly. "You can do as you like with me now, but who knows what will happen when I break free?" The fly flew off, buzzed around his head, then settled lightly on his hand. The Negroes were watching, intrigued by Amah's self-assurance. "A change of tactic now? I am not deceived. That hand is mine as well; the rebellion continues." The fly hovered in front of his face as if probing for a safe and exploitable area. "You must make up your mind," Amah told it. "I am ready to negotiate only if you honestly intend to clear off. Otherwise, I shall continue to foster and organize hatred for all flies among my brethren. You leave me with no alternative." The fly settled on his nose again and he had to squint to bring it into focus. "Now you are torturing me, I see, because you understand that I am resolved never to betray my people. You have perhaps forgotten that during the war with the spiders you were for a time caught in a giant web and were lucky to escape with your life. Why revenge yourself on me for what the spider did to you? Is that justice? Anyway, I shall not talk in any event."
Suddenly the door burst open and Arab rushed in followed by Bonaparte. They dragged him to his feet and pushed him roughly into the corridor, where the general activity and high level of noise again reminded him of a railway station. The room into which he was now propelled was small, not more than seven feet by ten, and, at first sight, seemed completely bare. Only later did certain objects begin to command his attention. The two detectives at once stripped off their jackets and began to beat him up. Arab pushed him against the Wall, took his chin from underneath and began to smash his head against the stone. Before the colossal noise—he thought for a moment that the building was collapsing—reached him, Amah had time to notice the thick mat of hair on the back of Arab's hand and to think, "Here we go; I didn't mind that fly so much!" As soon as the first instant of shock had given Way to consciousness of pain and what they were doing to him his resistance and courage evaporated and he begged for mercy. Arab did, then, step back, but only to make room for
Bonaparte, who rushed at him and pounded him in the ches and stomach. Amah underwent a hideous sensation o suffocation and impending death which reminded him of the time when as a child he had floundered out of his depth in the Varva River, with the muddy waters filling his lungs anc the panic of his parents on the bank provoking him to frenzy of fear and thrashing limbs. Eventually Arab called his tormentor off, and then Amah became aware of someone sandpapering wood, in the corridor perhaps, or on the scaffolding outside the frosted-glass window. Some moments elapsed before he identified his own throat as the source ol the noise.
The two detectives went out, like clockwork toys, leaving their coats hanging on the door. Blood ran from his nose. He could think of nothing except relief that they had stopped beating him. He was so grateful for this touch of humanity that he almost became sentimental about his tormentors.
The door opened and a middle-aged man whom he had not seen before came in. He wore a brown suit, rimless spectacles and a friendly smile. For a moment Amah felt apologetic about his own condition, as he had sometimes felt in the presence of a doctor, but the gentleman made no comment about his appearance and adopted a warm and sympathetic tone.
"Amah Odouma. I know Thiersville well, I understand your country and its legitimate aspirations. I have no doubt at all that your movement will soon triumph and that you will be granted complete independence. History, after all, is going your way. It is only a question of the Government here finding a suitable moment. Everyone is agreed on that. However, one has to be sophisticated about political affairs, don: you agree? First we have to appease certain interests anc public opinion; we need a small victory or two, to satisfy honour. Naturally we are obliged to arrest and deport aU members of your organization now that young Frenchmen are fighting and dying in Coppernica. It is a formality. Why make it a painful one? Nothing you or I can do will affec the general march of history, of that you can be quite sure. 1 know certain facts about you, but not your code name in the MLN. You are secretary of the student branch, of course but I have reason to suspect that you are also director of one 0f the seven districts into which the MLN has divided Paris for administrative purposes. It's the same in all rebellions, you know: in the end the police and the rebels find themselves working hand in hand; the rebels achieve their objective and the police preserve their honour and their jobs. What exactly is your sphere of command in Paris, and what are its precise boundaries and functions? Tell me also whom you deal with mainly in the central committee of the MLN in Thiersville and what channels of communication you employ. If you don't speak now you will later, and then all the pain and the damage to your health will have been for nothing."
"Would you consider undoing my handcuffs?" Amah liked this man and wanted to retain his company for as long as possible.
"No, no, just answer the questions quickly and truthfully."
"My wrists are very sore, Monsieur. And my head and chest ache as if they had been broken open."
"Come now, I'm in a hurry. First, your code name. If you are sensible, you can be out of here in half an hour. Better than the dentist, eh? There the pain is obligatory." He smiled again, revealing a ragged row of forward-jutting teeth held back by two slender gold bands. "Your code name, Odouma." >
"Monsieur, I will help you as soon as I can, but for the moment pain and confusion have me in a kind of dark fog, I--»
"Speak, macaque, or we'll have your guts!"
Amah had been expecting this; even so, when it came, the abrupt and total transformation of the inspector's voice and appearance took him aback. He braced himself for more Violence.
Whereupon the inspector left him without another word.
Almost at once feet sounded in the corridor and Arab came in looking extremely indignant and worked up. "This can exhaust a family man," he said, undoing his fly and Urinating in Amah's face. "Sometimes I wonder how I keep going." Amah retched; his stomach heaved as much at the idea as at the smell. While Arab was methodically buttoning himself up again, Bonaparte, who had returned carrying a folding table and a wooden ruler, hauled him to his feet and pulled down his trousers and underpants. Amah shuddered suddenly, as the ruler struck him, and screamed.
"You'll beg us to pull them off before we've finished," Arab said.
Bonaparte was working on him from close quarters now, breathing garlic at him and using the ruler like a willow, at a rate of ten or fifteen blows per minute. Amah thought, "They'll go numb soon, paralysis will set in, or I shall faint, perhaps." Something about the angle of his head must have betrayed this thought to the detectives, for almost at once Arab slapped him and said, "Don't worry, we'll keep you awake."
When they released him he fell sobbing to the floor, doubling himself up as if to distribute the pain more evenly throughout his body. His genitals were so swollen and inflamed that he dared not touch them; the sight of them deepened his distress. He felt certain that they were as good as lost.
Arab said: "Well, what's your code name?"
But the worst was to come. His resolve—his stubbornness— had become in less than half an hour a force and a factor outside himself, a satellite of silence launched and initially guided by the political department of his mind, but now orbiting independently and beyond his control. Now, as they strapped him to a table beneath a light socket into which Arab had plugged certain electrical equipment, he attempted to speak, to make a clean breast of his confession; but his jaws were soldered. He was history's child, and history's sacrifice.
He screamed.
Bonaparte manipulated the magneto while Arab moved the electrodes over his body, lingering constantly on his face and sexual organs.
Amah screamed. But no words came—words, the essential bridge between the real and the ideal. Now reality played the tyrant, pitching its tent in the Electric Age. From time to time Arab sprinkled him with water, but his flesh continued to smoulder and burn and his limbs began ta fall away like broken branches from the charred trunk of his body. A carrion crow forced its way up his throat, clawing viciously at his soft-wet inner skin until finally its prolonged screech, inhuman and demented, dominated utterly tormentors and victim alike.
The two detectives stood back, sweating. Arab doused him with water.
"That's very humane of you, Monsieur," Amah gasped, "it does help a lot, that water."
"Talk then, and hurry." The two detectives stood over the operating table, thoughtful and modest about their craftsmanship, their faces fleshy and greedy, like those of grappling wrestlers. Granted a temporary respite, Amah was at once submerged by fantasies, believing himself to have been reprieved, to have broken the willpower of his torturers, to have converted them to his cause, to have humanized them by the sheer power of his personality ... The delusions of an intellectual pushed their way upwards through the bruised soil of his consciousness with the pathetic transience of daffodils in the spring. Art alone was real; and if he suffered, it was for a higher purpose, to enrich his art, his understanding. The present was a delusion; only the future was logical. As for those brutes into whose faces he now stared, they were to be regarded as objects of compassion and tolerance; indeed, was he not here to study them, to examine at first hand what motivated their actions? . . . thus the spiral of delirium endowed in rapid succession Amah the saint, Amah the mandarin and Amah the artist with a life as bright and brief as a daffodil's.
Arab was talking. "You are close to the Communists, eh? Perhaps you have a party card yourself? We want to know all that quickly. Hurry."
Amah would have smiled had not the skin on his face yelled a warning protest.
"No, I have broken with the Communists."
They glanced at one another in disbelief.
"You want us to start again, macaque?"
He experienced the drunk's melancholy and self-pity. The mutilation of his body was working upon him like an excess of alcohol; he couldn't understand why the honesty of his avowal was not evident to them in his eyes.
"The Communists," he whispered, "have not come out in favour of independence. After the massacre at Belonga they demanded that we disavow it."
Someone laughed—he could not tell who because almost at the same moment his head was yanked up and then thumped back against the table, causing black lights to prance before his eyes. They were at work on him again; he began to cry from the injustice of it, not that they were torturing him, but because they were blind to the truth. The urine on his face had long since been dried by the electrodes, and now they began to work on his tongue too, everything was dry and cracked and swollen, he became more thirsty than ever before in his life.
"Your code name, Odouma?"
"I forget, you have confused me, give me time to think, give me time, gentlemen, please, please."
"The name of your MLN district, Odouma, what are its boundaries, hurry."
"Give me time! Have some humanity!"
"Pas d'humanite pour les tiegres." The two detectives were really angry now; their meagre fund of warped humour had abruptly dried up. Arab took Amah by the throat, banging his head on the table in rhythm with his sentences. "Listen macaque, savage, nigger, louse. We've got jobs to do, the boss wants to know certain things, it's bad for us if we don't give him the answers. You exhaust a man's patience. You can be sure we haven't even begun on you yet, and when we get fed up or hungry there are others waiting to take over. They're asleep now and they'll have plenty of energy. We chase blacks here until they get up and throw themselves out of the window, but we catch them in a net at the bottom and bring them back up. We even bring corpses back to life here, we teach you that the best thing in life is death. But everyone talks in the end."
Amah had not noticed the radiator; when one thinks of a room as totally bare, one forgets certain things which the eye takes for granted. It was a long, low radiator and red hot they laid him across it and then strapped him down.
"He should be ready to eat in ten minutes," Arab observed loudly, as the two men sauntered about the room, their feet heavy and precise on the bare wooden floor boards, pulling their wet collars away from their necks and mopping then-brows. "Feed him to the dogs in the backyard," added Bonaparte.
Arab came and stood over Amah. "No one will be able to identify you. Not even the white girl you screwed until she nearly split."
"Who?" Through the searing pain, the brutal, scorching heat, a sudden fear for Dominique asserted itself. In an instant of lucidity he saw that he still loved her, and that he regarded her as totally innocent.
"How should I know who? Do you imagine I've followed your affairs or something? You're a fool and a dirty swine of a black. All your talk of humanity! We know what happens when you animals get a white woman into your clutches. Slit their throats, their bellies, pull out their guts and their wombs, et cetera. That's what your friends did at Belonga, isn't it? Humanity!"
"But-"
"You're looking warmer. Our fuel bill is big here, the Government pays. Listen, macaque: France has been pushed about by every yellow and black thing on two legs which our Jews and Reds have taken a fancy to. Well, that's all over. From now on, France is on top."
Amah's sobbing was by now almost continuous. Sweat ran from him like water from a mountain spring. His head was no more than a burned-out garbage can, an incinerator, hot, swollen, cracked, empty—yet still perversely the centre of a recording nerve complex, still registering pain. The needle could go no further, yet it refused to break, to release him into the cherished oblivion of unconsciousness, of even death. Through an almost impenetrable jungle of pain, the thought briefly showed its face, like a grinning tiger: I want to die. Then was gone. He tried to remember Camille, the strong, balanced contours of her face, her dedicated, evangelist's manner of talking, her lithe power in movement—but nothing focused except her name. Why had she not written?
She too must be in hell, strapped to a radiator. He cried out, terrified; the world was in flames, soon they would all cease to exist. A panic compounded partly of his growing physical torment and partly of the buried but active psychoses of science fiction and horror films swirled around the dust bowl of his head like snarling leaves in a cyclone. The long hours spent reading about torture, writing about it, preparing for it ... all ashes, all vanity ... something exploded; he lost consciousness.
A gray curtain parted; hostile light bombarded his bruised retinas like a harrowing, unwanted dawn. He flinched. He recognized the corridor, but the pattern of time eluded him and his entire life in Paris fell away through the trapdoor of his memory. Africa, then. Someone pulled impatiently at his arm and his flesh screamed. He observed with vague interest that his legs were not sustaining him; he repudiated them without difficulty. From the far end of the long dark-green corridor three men were approaching, two of them, who stirred in him a dull chord of recognition, supporting the third. As they drew closer the appearance of this last man roused in him both anguish and pity: his face was one vast wound, and only his protruding and haggard eyes confirmed that it was made of human flesh. Where his lips should have been there hung two slabs of cracked, reddish blubber; the nose was so distorted as to be almost unrecognizable. When he was almost upon the man, Amah found in his closed-up eyes an anguish and pity identical with his own.
They turned sharp right, past the mirror, and Arab laughed.
The hallway again, the "railway station." They stopped by the brown-suited gentleman who had earlier interrogated him; Arab grunted negatively and the inspector registered resignation and boredom. "What would be courage in a European is in them mere animal stubbornness," he said. He turned back to his companion and sighed deferentially. The two detectives yanked Amah forward again, but not before he had recognized this man to be the Minister of the Interior.
He was laid on a stretcher and carried out of a side-entrance into an ambulance. The jolting of the vehicle caused him excruciating pain. Some time later (he had, perhaps, dozed a little) he was carried into the Hotel-Dieu, Cusco Ward, where Arab and Bonaparte finally took leave of him. "We'll be back," Arab told him, "when you're mended." The atmosphere of the hospital and the calm, detached way in which the doctors and nurses surveyed him as they passed excited a new galaxy of fears, a renewed struggle with his subconscious and with the intoxicating prospect of surrender. He knew that if they administered some kind of "truth drug," he would have no choice but to talk and that the dialectic of deception would take on a new form. When at last the needle plunged into his arm, his mind barely had time to sound the alert before he fell into complete oblivion.
Ten days later, he was taken before an examining magistrate in Paris. He had not been permitted to see a lawyer. He stood in the courtroom, flanked by gendarmes, while the magistrate stared impassively and without comment at his facial swellings, cuts and scabs.
"You are indicted for an attack on the security of the state," the magistrate said, removing his spectacles. "You will be committed to Fresnes."
"Monsieur, I have been tortured."
The magistrate raised one eyebrow, effected a slight movement of his head and then bent to the pile of papers on his desk, replacing his spectacles as he did so. Amah felt the by-now-habitual jerk on his arm, the stab of pain and anger, then found himself again in the police van. Although the cops who accompanied him looked to be decent-enough types, family men, and although they glanced nervously at his face from time to time, neither of them spoke to him until they reached Fresnes. He stepped out of the van and shivered in the face of this prison—so bleak, dour and northern. He walked across the prison yard overwhelmed by the absurdity of human life.
Four days later he was driven to Orly and put aboard an Air France jet bound for Thiersville.
james caffrey sat by the pond, reading. The book absorbed him totally.
"The most ancient of the Chinese legends came into his mind: men were but vermin on the earth. Terrorism must be made a mystic faith. Solitude before the event: let the terrorist first take his resolve alone, and act alone ..."
"James!"
From the outer ether beyond the crust of an intensely captivating dramatic illusion, the name harried the fringes of his consciousness, remotely, like a fly's light feet. His soul remained precariously in the Shanghai suburb.
"He had not felt or heard the shattering of bone that he had expected; but had gone under in a sheer flash of light . . His right hand held a fragment of the car bonnet..."
"James darling!"
The long, innocent shaft of Sara Tufton's summons cleaved the silence of the sleeping garden and struck him, paralyzing his printed dream. As his eyes relinquished their focus, the words shimmered, white light beat back at him from the page, his muscular prayer fell apart.
He could see her on the veranda steps, shielding her eyes; a short, square person.
"Telephone, James!"
He came, long-legged and cross, from the pond, his thumb wedged angrily into Chiang Kai-shek's narrow escape. His forehead and cheeks, which bore the flush of concentration, stirred her dull, menstrual pains. She said: "Are you sure you're not getting burned, darling?" and stepped back a pace, to let him pass. "It's Daddy," she had to add, a coin flung without hope into the fountain of his indifference.
He took up the yellow receiver. "Yes?" His head throbbed, but not from sunburn alone. Interrupted, he had felt the frail
130
bond between the dreams of one generation and the realities 0f the next snap; the resentment lingered, like Deedes' occasional sores.
"Soames," said Soames.
"Yes, hullo."
"My dear fellow, one thing I forgot. There's an auction tomorrow at Sotheby's in which an early Utrillo may, my spies tell me, be going for a song. Barnaby promised to ring me from London today about the price. If he does, tell Sara to take a message and I'll ring him back. Understood?"
"Poor Utrillo."
"What?"
"I understood."
"James," Soames began after a reflective pause, "I've been talking to Ybele. Time is running out for the regime. The West, thank God, is about to recapture lost territory—with your help."
"I'm flattered."
"Dangerous boy that you are. Now listen. I've also had words of some moment with an ugly but powerful customer from Outre-Manche. Name of Laval, Commandant Laval. Doesn't appreciably add to the beauty of his surroundings and revives one's sympathy for Caesar's aversion to the lean and hungry, but holds in my opinion the key to Coppernica in the palm of his hand. Is Plon's man—at the moment. Now Plon, as you know, although in a sense a part of our civilization, certainly does not typify its most cultured and ennobling aspects. Nor need I remind you of the formidable advantages enjoyed and ruthlessly exploited by little Aristide in this, a French country. Comprends?"
"I am not clear as to the source of Laval's extraordinary power."
"Laval calls the tune at a Special Forces Camp which is located somewhere in the region of MacMahon. This camp is run by Ybele and the Alliance Party and financed by Plon. The Government knows of its existence but so far hasn't decided what to do about it Ten minutes with Laval were sufficient to convince me of the cardinal importance of this setup, particularly in view of the rapid disintegration of the National Army. But Laval's personal writ also runs strongly among a group of French veterans at MacMahon whose ideology and sympathies lie close to those of Armand Keller and for whom the events leading up to the Year One consti. tuted a long day's journey into night."
"Le coup d'etat, c'est Laval?"
"Good boy."
"But not before Baron Tufton's hired retainer Sir James Caffrey, impoverished gent, infiltrates Count Plon's fortified camp?"
"I love you, James, truly."
"It used to be called bastard feudalism."
"On the contrary. The essence of that abortion was the substitution of a purely monetary relationship for rational loyalties and mutual obligations. I don't imagine that to be the case between you and me. I thought that we were agreed that fifteenth-century Italy provided the true analogy for our committed lives. It has been the fate of more than one Oxford scholar torn from the Bodleian to become maudlin about John of Gaunt and all those detestable thugs."
"I stand corrected."
"Good boy. Be packed and ready by three. Laval will call for you."
"He has agreed to it?"
"Ybele put in the right word for me."
"And then?"
"James, you told me this morning that I had let you down. And I promised you that I would be as good as my word. I am offering you one of the most delicate and audacious roles ever undertaken in modern Africa. You will need every resource of intellect and judgment you command. Your excellent French will be indispensable. No one else could do this job. In fact, without you I would be doomed to failure, perhaps to extinction."
"Don't overdo it," James said.
A pause.
"Do you imagine that I am not deadly serious, James?"
James cleared his throat. "All right, then, I'm most grateful. I'll do my best. But what, exactly, should I do?"
"Be yourself—in other words, convince Laval that you are the most resourceful young officer he will ever find. I want to see you high in the Commandant's confidence. If I don't have you close to Laval, Plon will win every trick."
"You'll be in touch with me, I take it."
"Of course."
"How? Am I to report back here from time to time?"
"On no account," Soames said sharply. "I will contact you. And remember what is at stake. A whole nation—a new nation."
"I'll remember."
"One other thing," Soames said quickly. "You may as well take Deedes."
"Deedes! But he's sick."
"Not really. He's a fish out of water with me. He needs the company of soldiers to restore him."
James had begun to watch a fly wrestling with the age-old Galilean dilemma of its species—when is an open space not an open space? He still held the book, a source, he realized with a tinge of guilt, of his irritability.
"I wouldn't send Deedes, if I were you," James said. "He's not strong, and he's not stable either. He seems to have a persecution complex. At night he sometimes wakes up shouting about a chap called Murdoch."
"Murdoch? The only Murdoch I know is a former Commissioner of Prisons in Kenya. Got the MBE recently. Mild as a mouse."
"Well, Deedes was in Kenya. It might fit."
"Go to Deedes now, and speak to him on my behalf. Tell him that he's of no further use to me, but that, as a special favour, I am prepared to pay his way into Laval's Special Forces. Otherwise I'll have to throw him out into the street."
"You could pay his fare back to England."
"I could—but I won't."
"Very well. I'll tell him."
"A word of warning, James, about Laval. To understand such a man in the light of two decades of French national humiliation is not to explain him away. He exists. Take care. I only hope that our long conversations together will stand you in good stead among the bayonets and bandoliers. Remember: tragic humanism, that is the fate, the destiny of
Western man. We must re-create man constantly, we must renew him. The soldier's art is an art like any other; and art is the rectification of life."
"I'll remember," James said. He looked about him. The fly had not yet solved its problem; and if it did, it would be able neither to generalize from nor to communicate its experience. Soames' question, when it reached him, shattered the arch of a perpendicular illusion.
"That black boy, Jason Bailey—how would you fancy him in uniform?"
"Good God!"
"Forget it. Just a hunch, a long shot. Bless you, and good luck."
"Sara wants to know whether you, the Ambassador and Mr. Bailey will be home for lunch."
"Bless her, but alas, no. Be kind to her, James, she will miss you."
James put down the receiver. Sara was watching him.
"They can't make it," he said. "Your father sends his apologies."
"He would," she said, suddenly close to tears. He tried to take her hand, but she turned away abruptly and fled into the kitchen. He could hear her giving instructions to the cook and houseboys. Her voice was strident and angry.
The bell rang. The guests drifted in from the garden: Amanda Silk and Lucille Bailey; Zoe Silk, pale and tired; Jason Bailey, silent and defensive.
They sat down to lunch, four women and two young men.
"What about Deedes?" James said quietly to Sara.
"Oh God yes," Sara said. "What shall we do about him?"
"What do you usually do?" Amanda asked. "He lives here, doesn't he?"
"He generally eats in the pantry," Sara said.
"With the servants?"
"The servants don't eat here at all."
"Why does he eat in the pantry?" Zoe said slowly. "He seems quite civilized to me."
Sara flushed.
"Because we don't want to embarrass him. He's much happier on his own."
"Why?"
"I should have thought that was obvious."
"I'd better go and fetch him," James said.
"No," Sara said. "You'll have to take Daddy's place. Perhaps Jason wouldn't mind going."
"Sure," Jason said. He went out, soft-footed, glad to have escaped.
"Poor Jason," Lucille said.
White-coated servants brought in a steaming curry with piles of white rice.
Jason walked across the garden. His head felt as empty as his stomach. He wanted, really, to go to sleep.
Deedes was sitting at the water's edge.
"Hi," Jason said. His voice was friendly.
The old Scotsman turned and blinked at the Negro. Then he nodded and spat phlegm in the pond.
"Lunch," Jason said.
"You'll be the American," Deedes said obscurely, rising. He began to fuss with his pipe and his fishing tackle. Finally he consented to walk back to the house. He walked some way apart from Jason, and a little behind.
"You mind if I ask you a question?" Jason said. He had never seen such ravaged features, a face so consumed by life.
"Aye."
"What exactly are you engaged in? I mean, what is your mission, sir?"
Bleak, watering eyes regarded him with an animosity amounting almost to hatred. Deedes walked with bent shoulders; yet a residual military rhythm lingered in his gait.
"Tufton," Deedes said.
"You work for Tufton?"
Deedes might have nodded.
They had almost reached the veranda. The older man Walked slowly.
"Do you like to eat your lunch alone?" Jason asked. He remembered that he was an American, a democrat. He might even make a scene.
Deedes laughed, but not happily.
"The food's guid," he said.
He walked ahead of Jason through the veranda door and made directly for the pantry.
Resuming his place beside his mother, Jason glanced at Zoe Silk, who refused to see him. Immediately his heart resumed its incessant ache; the moment alone with Deedes, with a fellow underdog, appeared now as a sweet interlude, a surprise holiday in which he had been led, briefly, to forget himself. There had been a time, in America, when he'd thought that a pain so intense as this was bound to abate, that the human metabolism would reject it just as antibodies overwhelm germs. But it didn't abate. It was incessant.
Lucille was talking about her sons.
"Jason was always the quiet one. Very studious. There was a time when we thought he'd never make Harvard, standards are so high, but Powell went to see his friend Dr. Elliot— they were colleagues during the war in the State Department. My, when I think what we've spent on these two boys. The cost of education!"
"I hope the curry is all right," Sara said bleakly.
James Caffrey left the room, holding a beer bottle, and went into the pantry.
"Hullo," he said.
Deedes nodded. He was eating.
"Beer?" James suggested.
Deedes pushed forward his glass. His mouth was full. A magazine with a girl on the cover lay unopened beside him. James had never seen him read. When he was eating he just stared at the wall in front of him.
"I've got a message for you," James said uneasily, "from Tufton."
"Wha'?" Deedes regarded him suspiciously, immediately linking James with Soames in the perpetual conspiracy of the rich and powerful.
"Tufton has suggested that I join the Special Forces Camp out at MacMahon. He thinks you might like it there too."
Deedes' mouth, half full of curry, fell open.
"Wha!?" "It's a military camp near MacMahon. Special Forces. Interesting work. Tufton will pay you, handsomely I expect."
Deedes shook his head. "I'm past all tha'."
James straightened his back and withdrew a pace. Why didn't Soames do his own dirty work?
"Look, I'm sorry, really, but Tufton made it plain that either you come with me to the camp or you'll be out of a job. I'm sorry, really. He told me to tell you."
"But-" Deedes' anxiety billowed from his mouth like
gas. He let go his knife and fork; his very soul sagged. Then he nodded slowly, with resignation.
"Aye."
"Could you possibly get your bags packed by three? The Commandant's coming to pick us up." James walked to the door. Deedes seemed no longer interested in his food. "I'm sure there's no cause to worry," James said.
He left the kitchen.
Lucille was still talking about her sons. The atmosphere was rapidly deteriorating.
"I think that maybe the climate doesn't suit Jason," Lucille said. "He's never been very strong. More the sensitive type. People often assume that Negro people can take any amount of sun but that's just not so. Haydon, my eldest, can sit in the sun all day long, he's always been a tower of strength it's a pity he-"
Zoe Silk had dissolved into tears. She ran from the room. Amanda wiped her thin mouth with a napkin and followed her into the hallway. For a moment everyone listened, testing the self-control of the Englishwoman and her half-English daughter.
"Well," said Lucille, "I can't imagine what's gotten into her."
"Ma," Jason said.
"Yes, honey."
"Just shut up, will you?"
James stared at him in amazement. Jasori was trembling; his lips were dry and cracked, flecked with white; for a foment it almost seemed as if he might strike his mother.
After lunch James took Sara aside. He felt guilty—and elated.
"Sara, your father wants me-"
"I know. I was listening."
His arm went around her small shoulders, as it had so often done before, in Thiersville, at Tufton Manor, in Oxford.
"Will you come to my room, James?"
"Of course."
They went upstairs in silence. She locked the bedroonjt door behind them and stood before him, short and square. Her face was pretty, but constricted.
"Our last day together," she said.
"I don't suppose I'll be gone long."
She said: "Father wants to kill you."
"That's not so," he said gently.
"Yes he does. I know he does. Perhaps he only half realizes it. He wants me, you see."
"You're upset."
"You don't sound very upset. You sound as if you can't wait to be gone."
"No man wants to sit about forever."
"And me?"
He was at a loss. The required words wouldn't generate themselves. He wasn't sure that he even cared. His indifference mildly surprised him.
"You don't love me, do you, James?"
"Yes, I love you."
His words were flat and unconvincing.
"We could make love," she suggested, moving into his arms and clasping him around the waist. She thrust her face into his chest but there was no longer any sign of tears. He tried to kiss some part of her.
"My period's due," she said. "I can feel it coming." Then she added, apologetically, "That's why I'm so irritable."
He was looking out of the window at the upper branches of the almond tree. He had nothing to say.
"We could risk it," she said. Then stepped back from him and collected herself. She tried to smile.
"I must help you pack. It hasn't been a very happy day has it?"
For a moment he almost loved hen
NINE
fifteen hours after being put aboard a plane at Orly, Amah arrived at Thiersville.
Only when all the whites had disembarked was he permitted to leave the plane. The light blinded him at first, and the fierce heat glare brought the blisters on his face painfully to life. He walked alone across the tarmac, a solitary black ant observed from the flat airport roof by a crowd of whites in sunglasses and straw hats. Among the humming red gasoline tankers, gathered under the big planes like piglets around a sow, lurked police and army vehicles in which helmeted security men sat with stony, impassive faces. This, then, was home.
Amah was at once separated from the other passengers and cross-examined for more than an hour.
"You were tortured, eh?" a blond captain asked with the remote, lethargic interest of a European unable to adjust to a climate too hot and too consistent. "Where did they fix you up?"
"At the Rue des Saussaies."
"That wasn't torture, then, macaque. They're only learning there."
Finally the captain let him go. As he passed the door a big fellow, a sergeant, caught him by the arm.
"The rebellion is over, macaque. Crushed." Amah looked into a face, a desert, he already knew by heart. Waiting for a taxi, the shadow of Fresnes, the shadow of absurdity, clung to him like a smell.
He barely recognized it, this Thiersville. The crowds, the noisy, vigorous Negro crowds seemed to have been washed off the streets by some giant hose. Under the jacarandas, magnolias and flame trees, the seats and benches were empty. Helmeted gendarmes patrolled the pavements in pairs
while army trucks, heavy with menace, rumbled along the wide avenues under the familiar sky of burning blue. Only the -sky was the same.
In the front seat the taxi driver showed, between his cloth cap and shirt, a black neck—the neck of fraternity.
"Been away?" he asked casually, having taken stock of Amah's facial scars in his mirror.
For Amah the silence and the solitude were thus ended by a stranger. Abruptly, as if by a miracle, the notion of destiny forced its way back to the forefront of his mind, and absurdity fled. Having defied servitude alone, surely he could achieve freedom through his brethren, his people.
"Yes, in Paris. For three years."
The driver nodded somberly. "Beat you up, did they?"
"It was the massacre at Belonga. They went berserk."
The driver turned a corner with vicious abandon and snorted. "That massacre, eh?" He laughed unpleasantly. "What do you know about it?"
"Nothing. Tell me."
"Two days before, the Blue Berets had cornered Bwonpo Chagala in the cite. They got him in a warehouse with his boys and they wouldn't let the people evacuate the street." He applied his brakes abruptly as a white-helmeted policeman waved him down to allow a convoy of army trucks to cross; while they were stationary the driver kept silent, resting his left elbow on the window frame and chewing steadily on a wad of tobacco. Then he lurched forward again. "Well, they killed twenty-eight in that street, seven of them kids and twelve women. After that we had to do something, eh?"
"The French papers didn't report it."
"You surprise me."
The Citroen ran on through the smooth, broad, French streets.
"What's the position now?" Amah asked.
"Bad. We'll win in the end, of course, but when is the end? What group do you belong to?"
"The MLN."
"You're a fool to tell me. Every other taxi man in T'ville is a police informer nowadays. People have no guts or decency if you ask me."
They pulled up in front of his parents' house, the comfortable but modest villa in which Amah had passed his entire childhood. Here at least nothing had changed; the universe was stable, its laws orderly and comforting like the trees across the street under which he had played ball as a child. He rapped on the front door and then peered through the ribbed-glass panel into a hallway whose outlines and dark shapes had not altered. The door opened slightly, suspiciously; two frightened eyes stared at him in a moment of confusion; they belonged to his mother.
Even as he embraced her he saw how rapidly she had aged. The flesh of her neck hung loose and her hands had swollen. He stroked her head when she began to cry; they hugged each other, afraid to step back and survey the damage which time and conflict had wreaked on one another; she was thinner, hollowed out, frail, almost bent. When she finally took in his scars, her mouth fell open; she tried to smile, as if they were a conjurer's joke, plasticine fakes which he could tear off at will.
"I'm all right," he told her, "they'll heal soon."
She sighed, perhaps. "Heal? Yes." Her hands could not rest.
"Where is papa?" The emptiness of the house oppressed him, and the silence, the void which threatened him once again with total solitude—even here, where he belonged, where every object could be defined in terms of his vigorous thrusting into the world.
"At the school, of course." Her voice was erect and thin. Evidently he had asked a foolish question; already she had forgotten that he had ever been away.
"And Camille?"
She sat down. Her hands would not rest. They gathered up and twisted the folds of her long skirt while her mouth wrestled with the onset of some deep, overwhelming torment. The tears flooded, she shrivelled, a small island of tormented flesh in an ocean of clean, elegant furniture. Amah could no longer feel part of it; suddenly his eyes were a stranger's eyes, detached and critical; in the depths of his disappointment irritation sparked; the one bond of which he could be sure had rotted. If he were to find a way of escape from his solitude, it would not be here.
"Where is Camille, mama?" His tone was sharp.
"She would do it, I warned her," his mother sobbed bitterly. "Stubborn, stubborn, that girl."
"Where is she?"
"In prison, Amah. Your own sister, in prison."
The blood, for so long held back and congealed by doubt, rushed to his head, bringing in its wake an intense, almost indiscriminate fury. He wrung the lawyer's name out of his mother and then abruptly left her. He hurried to the Avenue Clemenceau, ran up three flights of stairs, pushed open a door on which the words "Maitre Fernand Ybele, avocat" were inscribed in gold and announced himself impatiently to a secretary. He was kept waiting for almost an hour.
Finally Ybele emerged from his office with a broad grin and pumped his hand vigorously. Amah had no knowledge of the man at all. The lawyer led him into a small room lined from floor to ceiling with leather-bound law manuals and numbered files. The desk, however, was bare except for two telephones. Amah had the initial impression that the manuals were for show alone.
"What can I do for you?" Ybele asked brightly, offering a cigarette. Gold rings glinted on his broad, carefully manicured fingers. His round, toneless eyes took in Amah's facial scars, but betrayed no reaction.
"I'm Camille Odouma's brother, Maitre. I have arrived from Paris only this morning."
"Ah." Ybele nodded sympathetically. When he realized that the lawyer was in no hurry to talk, Amah pressed him to explain Camille's arrest.
Ybele shrugged. "Camille is held responsible for a bomb outrage in a cafe." He looked steadily at Amah as if to say, "There you are, bad luck."
"A bomb! Camille?"
Ybele raised his eyebrows a fraction. "They tell me she has confessed."
" 'They'? Haven't you seen her yourself?"
"Impossible. You have been away, Monsieur Odouma. You will have to adjust."
"But the law?"
Ybele sighed eloquently.
"Where is she now?" Amah pressed.
One of the telephones rang discreetly. With the hand which held a freshly lit Turkish cigarette, the lawyer gestured his apologies. The gesture struck Amah as being both too casual and too familiar. Ybele listened to his caller, slowly revolving his chair and gazing placidly out of the window, which overlooked the Avenue Clemenceau. Then he intervened, "Listen, Jacques, the consignment will be cleared with the customs, of that I can assure you. I have spoken to Lapou-jade personally ... of course I'm sure ... the tax authorities are satisfied, Albert assured me of that ... yes it has cost something, what do you expect . . . listen, I have a visitor, a friend, I'll ring you back."
He replaced the receiver.
"In Petit-Fresnes," he told Amah abruptly, as if to terminate the conversation. "Camille is in Petit-Fresnes."
"But what is to happen? Something must be done-
"Your sister will be tried soon. I shall plead for clemency."
Resignedly Ybele unlocked a steel cabinet and brought out a file marked "C. Odouma-—guilty." He handed Amah a copy of a detailed and circumstantial avowal of guilt signed by Camille herself. While he was reading it through for the third time, the phone again rang. Ybele reached lethargically for the receiver.
"Yes, Ybele ... ah, good morning, Monsieur le Batonnier ... yes, of course ... three cases on Friday, yes, all very simple, a plea for clemency ... yes, I realize that the Army is sensitive, in the circumstances very understandable ... you
are most kind, I shall remember___au revoir, Monsieur le
Batonnier."
Amah silently returned the document and pointed to a short statement scrawled beneath his sister's signature. It read: "I insist on being examined by a doctor. I have been tortured. [Signed] Camille Odouma."
Fernand Ybele sighed and mopped his brow. He reached for a switch and the fan on his desk gathered speed.
"I understand your feelings, believe me I do. I can assure
you that the lot of an African lawyer at the present time is not a happy one. Misery and anguish flow through his office like an unending river. I can only do my best."
"But if she has been tortured, the confession-"
"Means nothing. I know, I know. I have spoken to the prison doctor. He accorded me an interview, which he need not have done. He was very decent about it, most accommodating. One only gets that kind of treatment if one approaches the authorities circumspectly."
"What did he say about Camille, Monsieur?"
"He said, well, he said it was difficult to say . . ." Ybele shrugged and rose from his chair. The interview was terminated. "I'll keep you informed," he said, offering his hand and opening the door simultaneously.
Amah said coldly, "How can I get to see Camille?"
"Absolutely impossible."
Amah stepped back a pace and Ybele's proffered hand fell to his side.
"Maitre, with whom are you? With us—or with them?"
Ybele looked pained. "The dichotomy, Monsieur, is unreal to a lawyer. It is like asking a doctor: with whom are you, the surgeons or the patient?"
"I see. You would, I take it, have no objection if my sister's case were transferred to other hands?"
"Your father committed the case to me," Ybele said sharply, his affability gone. "Whom do you have in mind?"
Realizing his mistake, Amah dropped his militant tone and said, with as much conviction as he could, "No one. I apologize for my rudeness, but this business has upset me more than I can say."
He took the lawyer's heavy, damp hand and hurried to the post office, where he sent off a telegram and an airmail letter to Paris, both addressed to Maitre Victor Manoury. The telegram read, simply: "Await my letter. Urgent. Amah." He dared not say more.
Manoury arrived a week later, elegant and urbane in a new tropical suit and carrying a cluster of expensive leather suitcases. Amah met him in the airport lounge. They embraced, lightly.
"My dear Amah, I thought I'd never penetrate the positively anal suspicions of ten customs men and twenty policemen who latched on to the fact that whoever restricted me to a five-day visa loved me less than somewhat. How about some beer? Filthy stuff, of course, fit only for Englishmen, Germans and Alsatians, but tolerable when one is thirsty."
They sat down and he took in Amah's scars with a quick, nervous glance whose reflected pain and grief deeply affected the young African. Yet Manoury's manner of talking at once revived the ambivalent feelings which this rich and slightly effete lawyer-writer had touched off in him and his African friends in Paris. With Manoury, one had the vaguely disconcerting sense of a charade, a play which might at any moment be terminated by the dropping of a silk curtain inscribed with the words "enough is enough." Yet he alone of the whites had not waxed indignant, spoken of betrayal and made demands after the news of the Belonga massacre reached Paris. While the austere and nicotine-stained Paulenc was angrily fulminating about French working-class boys who were dying in Coppernica and insisting on a complete disownment of the massacre, Manoury had merely sighed that France's recent experiences had taught her nothing.
"Victor, you are here," Amah said gravely. "I am truly grateful."
"At one time I thought I'd never make it. Just as I thought I'd never get you out of Fresnes." A nobler man, they both appreciated, might not have mentioned this.
Amah sipped at his beer, conscious that Manoury wanted to be told about his arrest and torture, wanted to be told, above all, whether or not he had succumbed, yet could not ask.
"I'm grateful to you," Amah said slowly. "I'd rather not say more."
"On the contrary, my dear Amah, it is we who are indebted to you. The fact is, your existence is our essence; without you, humanism would be impossible. We would cease to exist."
Manoury talked of developments in Paris and of the seizure by the police of Le Rouge et le Noir, in which there had appeared, for the first time, an appeal to young Frenchmen to resist conscription for the war in Coppernica. He believed that his own arrest was imminent; already one of his colleagues had been threatened with a plastic-bomb attack. When Amah told him that he had seen the Minister of the Interior himself at the Rue des Saussaies, Manoury showed no surprise.
"The body politic is rotten right through," he said. "Everyone at the bar knows what is going on both in Thiersville and in Paris. Ministry officials, police officers and the lawyers themselves all justify torture in the abstract while fervently and indignantly denying its use in any particular case. The other day I was talking with a barrister I have known for many years and whose opinions I normally respect. He told me that in view of the crisis, torture was inevitable; without it, little progress could be made against the rebels. It was, he agreed, inhumane, but then so were the rebels. I then told him that I had a client, a young African student like yourself, who complained of having been beaten and tortured by the Paris police. My friend looked at me aghast. 'Tortured?' he said, 'impossible! They are all liars, these students.'"
They drove to Manoury's hotel, deposited his bags and made a number of phone calls. The Governor of Petit-Fresnes agreed to see them. They arrived at the prison late in the afternoon. The Governor, a short, upright person with thin gray hair brushed straight across a balding head, turned out to be polite, formal and unforthcoming.
Manoury asked him whether or not he believed Camille to have been tortured.
"Not here," the Governor replied.
"Somewhere else, then?"
"I cannot say. She was handed over to us by the military. She had been in their hands previously."
"Which Army unit in particular?"
"Unfortunately I am not permitted to disclose such information."
"May I see her dossier?"
"No, it's confidential. I am sorry."
"But the prison doctor has examined her, I presume?"
"That is the case, yes. He found bruises on various parts of her body, but could not ascertain for certain their cause. It is also true that she was no longer a virgin, but the instrument
of penetration cannot be determined either. It could well have been the male organ. Therefore no conclusion could be reached, from a medical point of view, about her charges."
Amah was impressed by Victor Manoury's calculated restraint in the face of such provocation; now that Camille's life was in danger, these officials assumed the titanic proportions of god-demons. Yet the formality and hypocrisy of the professional code sickened him.
Manoury now requested an interview with Camille. The Governor's face was a mask. He appeared to make a quick calculation.
"For half an hour only," he said.
Amah was flooded with happiness and hope; his companion, however, betrayed no emotion beyond his normal laconic pessimism. While they were waiting for Camille to be summoned, Manoury telephoned through to the Batonnier of the Thiersville bar. Amah could hear his high-pitched voice at the other end of the line.
"Monsieur le Batonnier, I have an urgent request. I have been granted a visa for five days only. Five days!"
"Five days, eh?"
"How can I conduct a case in such a time?"
"It is not long, certainly."
"My client may not come up for trial for several weeks. I must ask you to secure an extension for me."
"Your client, Manoury?"
"The girl Camille Odouma."
"I thought Ybele was handling that." The Batonnier's voice indicated an undercurrent of irritation. "It's surely a job for local counsel."
"The girl's brother has now transferred the case to my hands."
"I have power only to recommend extensions of up to forty-eight hours."
"Monsieur le Batonnier, it is a basic principle of law in all civilized countries that the accused shall choose his or her own defence counsel."
"There's a war on, Manoury. Civilization and war are incompatible."
"Is this not a war to defend civilization?"
"I'm not a theologian. I'm only a lawyer. You must see the proper authorities."
"It is precisely they who have decided to limit my stay to five days."
"No doubt they have their reasons. Always at your service, Maitre."
The receiver clicked at the other end.
They were taken downstairs and conducted into an open courtyard formed by the quandrangular prison building itself. The late afternoon sunlight cut across the courtyard at an angle, illuminating and bathing in mellow warmth one sector of it in which stood a tree, a neat, symmetrical bed of flowers and one or two wooden benches. From behind the iron grilles which covered the many small windows overlooking the courtyard, shrill feminine voices and occasional snatches of laughter drifted out into the pink, scented evening. To Amah the laughter almost suggested coquetry, the presence of men; it did not occur to him then that where there are no men, women will create their own. He relaxed, his heart beat gently, a myopic well-being crept through him like a pain-killing drug, washing away the anxieties of the past week, when he had been compelled to sit impotently at home with his utterly cowed parents. Victor had come; he would move mountains. Here and there a girl's face stared down at them; light-headed, Amah smiled and waved; it was true, he thought, it was time he got himself a girl. A black girl, this time. He sat down on a bench and stared at his shoes; Dominique had already folded flat into a gray, one-dimensional shadow. As for philosophy ...
For a moment, the uniform deceived him. But he would have recognized that gliding walk anywhere, a serene, royal progress like that of the visible masthead of a boat moving across an inland lake. Amah leaped up, blinded, his planned gestures and considered overtures to her subsumed by the electric contact of two live currents, spirits in space. Their embrace was a dark explosion. She was a sanctuary, and her black flesh smelled of prison soap. He pulled her to him, his eyes clenched against the day and against the possibility of her scars, her woman's agony, against the inadequacy of one human being's sympathy for another's sufferings, against fortune's brutal inequality. Her silence oppressed him now; it was the silence of the victim, of a woman reduced, cut off from humanity, from hope. He knew that vault. Camille's plight gained poignancy when set beside his own reprieve; he loved her as part of himself, as a truth, as a girl-child of flesh and character who had held a mirror to him through the long, blazing years of growth. He held her now, blindly; he was not her, could not be her, and with Dominique he had failed in his attempt to possess and transform his sister into an instrument of his will suited to his adult years. Now, as he felt Camille gently disengage herself, felt the force of her eternal common sense, his failure and his betrayal brought the blood of shame rushing to his face.
She was the same; without scars.
Camille stood examining him, half in sunlight, half in shadow. His affinity to her then acquired almost erotic dimensions; her eyes caressed his scars, searched him for knowledge, for some sign of what he had become.
She said, "Amah, they must be crushed."
In the shadows Manoury stirred; Camille turned sharply, on her guard, and in turning confirmed what Amah had suspected before departing for Paris—that she was possessed by racist passion.
"Maitre Manoury is a friend," Amah said. "He has come from Paris especially to help you."
In the shadows an African wardress stood watching them. Noticing Manoury's irritation at her presence, Camille said loudly, "She has to stay, it's a rule. I might leap over the building otherwise. She's all right but shouldn't be trusted. She was a prisoner too, a political, but she spilled the beans and they rewarded her. She's happier now."
The wardress grinned shyly.
And the two men took note of what Camille was.
Amah sat beside her on the bench and placed her hand in his own while Manoury, tall and stooping, paced about them.
"I'm sorry, Mademoiselle," he said with an intent frown, "but we haven't been granted much time, and if I am to be of any help I must begin to question you at once."
Camille stared straight ahead. Her hand lay cool and limp in Amah's.
"I have read your avowal of guilt," Manoury said. "Is it true?"
"No, Maitre Manoury."
"You signed it under pressure?"
She laughed coldly. "Oui."
"You were tortured?"
"Yes."
Amah was forced to swallow, and tears forced their way into his eyes. His happy mood had vanished; Manoury's calm and impartial manner now infuriated him. At bottom, they were all the same; Camille's instincts had been right from the outset; to distinguish between them was a bad mistake.
"Who by?" Manoury asked.
"The Army. Soldiers."
"Could you identify them?"
"Eyen in the dark, Monsieur."
"I mean: do you know their names?"
"They did not confide in me," she said dryly.
"Their unit, their rank, any clues?"
"I do not know the unit. They wore khaki shirts and blue berets. One of them was a commandant. The other two were conscript soldiers, I think."
"Why were you arrested, do you suppose?"
"I had been carrying messages for the MLN. I must have been careless in some way—or betrayed. It doesn't really matter."
Victor Manoury said quickly, almost casually, "Did you tell them what they wanted to know?"
Amah's heart and grief blasted into hers; they were joined, married by this question, this long probe into the value of a soul. Manoury stood over them, God's Torquemada.
Her head may have moved.
Manoury glanced at Amah; and his eyes also said "no."
"Why then did you sign a spurious confession to having thrown a bomb into a cafe?"
Camille stood up and turned to Amah. "He doesn't believe me, this friend of yours. He thinks I talked. They're all the same, they don't believe we're capable of resistance, of strength. The questioners, and the questioners about the questioners—they're no different!"
Amah pulled her gently down beside him. But the intensity of her feeling struck dead the words of reason which had begun to form within him. The sunlight crept away from them; limb by limb they succumbed to shadow. The world about them was very still and the tall prison buildings observed their agony with detachment.
"I believe you," Manoury said eventually. "But why did you sign the confession?"
She shrugged irritably. Her shoulders were broad and powerful. "It did not seem to matter."
"But the sentence for this-"
"Is death. I know. They are in complete control, they run everything. If they want to kill me they will, one way or another. If not, not. Forms no longer count for anything."
"Mademoiselle, forgive me, but I must ask you again about what they did to you."
"Go ahead."
"Does your body still bear clear evidence of your sufferings?"
"Forever."
"I don't understand."
"A pity. It was a bottle he used."
She sat trembling. But her back was long and straight as she trembled.
"You won't mind being examined?"
"People do what they like with me nowadays."
"A woman doctor, perhaps-"
Amah caught her as she heeled over. She clutched at him as the pent-up dam of her torment broke, and he cradled her head against his chest. Betrayed by the fifth column of a single obsession, she was struck by earthquake spasms which sucked away her breath and convulsed her abdomen like the kick of a mule. Sobbing into his chest, she at last voiced this obsessive fear—that no decent man would now take her for a Wife.
Camille, who as a girl would never have confessed to the remotest personal interest in a man ...
The wardress stepped forward from the shadows. A flurry of words, promises, questions, assurances, of awkward, half, formed gestures ... a veil of tears, opaque and obscure Amah ran, stumbled ... tomorrow, soon ... She went, with head bowed, was swallowed up . . . broken, he saw. Amah turned, then, and himself clutched at the white man. \ curtain crashed to the concrete soil.
Manoury applied for interviews with the commander in chief, General Lecoeur, and with the Minister of War. At the same time he pressed for an extension of his visa. He had no luck. At General Headquarters a polite young captain from Saint-Cyr agreed with him that if the girl had in fact been tortured it was a disgrace to the Army and that the culprits should be brought to justice. Manoury asked for photographs of all military personnel operating in the district where Camille had been arrested. The young captain smiled. If Maitre Manoury could provide names, then he personally would be glad to trace the men in question. Manoury modified his request: he wished to see photographs of all the Blue Berets serving in the area.
The young captain's smile fell away.
"I cannot accept a smear on an honourable regiment."
"But the girl is certain that she was arrested and tortured by men wearing blue berets."
"She may be mistaken."
"In which case she will not be able to identify the men concerned from the photographs you provide."
"If she's anxious to confirm her story, she'll choose a photograph at random. I know these people."
"There was an officer involved, a commandant. It would be a remarkable coincidence, don't you agree, if the picture she selected at random turned out to be that of the commandant?"
The captain clasped his slender hands behind his back and drew in his chin. His chin looked fragile, but his eyes were calm.
"Maitre, the morale of the Army must be our first consideration. You yourself have recently been associated with an appeal calling on conscripts to resist military service. How
our troops feel if people like yourself cast aspersions on Ijeir integrity and honour with our connivance?"
Manoury was arrested two days later. Detained in his hotel bedroom before dawn, he was rushed to the airport and ,ut aboard a Paris-bound plane.
On the previous afternoon, at Camp MacMahon, Commandant Andre Laval had been talking to a visitor from France, Armand Keller.
"It would be a move in the right direction," Laval said, "if you could arrange for Manoury's visa to be cancelled at once. You have the influence."
Keller made a note in his diary. "Of course. And the man's name, this black?"
"Odouma, Amah Odouma. His sister was called Camille."
"Was?"
Andre Laval shrugged. "She's dead now."
Amah fled from Thiersville. The rebellion there was virtually crushed. Nine leaders out of ten had been arrested or, like Bwonpo Chagala, killed. The population was cowed. The bourgeoisie had quickly caved in; it had too much to lose. The urban proletariat lacked weight of numbers. The students, intellectuals and revolutionary militants felt utterly stricken and bewildered; where, now, could they turn?
The rumours reaching the capital from the south were at first confused and contradictory. But within a few weeks the iron cable of reality had emerged clearly from the mists of scepticism and speculation. A new revolution was rising from the ashes of the old. A hundred kilometres south of Thiersville, in Eastern Province, the peasants were taking up arms against the French under the leadership of a prosperous Peasant farmer called Kundula Maya. Both in dense jungle and in lands made fertile by the Varva's generous passage, among cocoa trees, maize fields, plantains and exportable fruits, in an area where French colons and native farmers lived side by side in a restless peace, the tang of cordite, the sombre language of artillery and the cries of the victims of a Vicious war now mocked the harmony and beauty achieved by nature.
One unit after another of the French Army was drawn into Eastern Province. At first the generals dismissed the uprising as a "brush fire." But the fire became an inferno and the brush a forest. From Thiersville and the larger towns the revolutionary refugees arrived in ones and twos. Maya called them "town scum" and "gutter rats" and "black Frenchmen," but he gave them rifles.
By the time Amah arrived at an outpost of this "army" and was roughly searched and questioned, he was virtually without hope. Camille had disappeared, and in all probability was dead. From his friends in Paris he was completely cut off, and from his brethren in Thiersville separated by fear, prison walls and death. His parents were people broken by loss and by incomprehension of the forces which had shattered the tidy fabric of their society, their world. He had nothing to hope for and, more important, nothing to lose.
Amah shared no common language with the local tribesmen; they found a man who spoke French. He was a humorous fellow, with a face of stained leather and a casual, sardonic smile. He liked to chew a pink root which grew wild in the forests and he spat the juice out from time to time as evidence of feeling. His name was Moise and he did not, at first, regard Amah as being anything but the town scum and gutter rat that the General's dogma proclaimed him to be. "Come to give us a little leadership, eh? Been to Paris, have you? A spy, perhaps? No? Quite sure? Tortured were you? What with—a notebook and pencil? Let's see your scars, then."
The scars were real enough. The red juice spurted out from Moise's wide mouth.
The scars were real but they continued to call him the Frenchman and to address him obliquely, "Would his Excellency the Frenchman care for another glass of palm wine?" This went on until he proved himself in combat. "You will cease to be a Frenchman," Moise told him, "when you have killed one." On his first operation, an ambush, he failed Utterly. During the long, hot hours of waiting, his habitual sense of isolation, the singing of the sea in his ears, produced, when the moment came, total paralysis. He seized up and forgot even to squeeze his trigger. "Wanting to win," Moise reminded Mm on the march back to base camp, "is not the same as wanting to kill."
The ambush, directed against a French supply convoy, formed part of Maya's strategy of encircling the important village of Ga, Lecoeur's leading outpost in the territory held by the rebels. The French general had overreached himself; his bombers pounded the dense jungle by day and the rebel militia tightened its grip on the windpipe of Ga by night. The fall of Ga, and of its garrison of two thousand men, was the first major French setback of the war and also the graveyard of Lecoeur's career. And his successor, Cartier, walked blindfold into a new calamity.
Amah acclimatized himself to certain aspects of guerrilla warfare more rapidly than to others. He soon learned that a weapon of death is neither a toy nor a red-hot poker but a friend to be maintained with love and scrupulous care. The metal ceased to alienate his skin. He ceased, also, to regard as anything but natural the guerrillas' passionate discussions on the merits of one weapon and the defects of another. Single-shot rifles, Garands, Browning automatics, FAL and American M-14, some dropped from the sky, some infiltrated across friendly frontiers and some captured from the enemy, took on characters as distinctive and controversial as those of Greeks, Chinamen and Eskimos.
He quickly grasped the strategy and logic of guerrilla warfare. He watched Maya's base area—the region under his permanent control—spread like a red stain on the map, its frontiers constantly extended by unexpected and forceful tactics in the forward guerrillas' areas where French supremacy was disputed only during brief, operational sorties. As for the physical hardships—exhausting marches, disturbed nights spent in improvised hammocks slung between trees, the constant harrying of insects large and small, thirst, strange food and a lack of proteins—Amah discovered in his short and stocky body sufficient resources of strength and stamina to measure up to the exertions expected of him. He had, he felt, a little to spare. For this unearned gift he "thanked god" and reflected, during the long passive hours ol attrition, that physiologists would never be existentialists.
His complete isolation he found harder to adjust to. He never saw another evolue, another educated African. It was Maya's policy to keep them apart, to scatter them like "grated cheese." In the rebel army Amah came face to face with the ugliest (yet most easily concealed) of all social realities: the immense gulf, amounting almost to a difference in species, between the men of the higher social classes and the men of the lowest of all. An educated African, he sometimes felt, revolving slowly in the vacuum of silence which cocooned him, is the world's turd. In Paris he had learned that a black is not a white; that a white woman is not a black woman. To prove it, he had his scars. "Your victims know you by their wounds." Now, in harrowing conditions, he learned for the first time that a black is not a black. The world, after all, was flat.
And it was true that the waiting alone had not accounted for his paralysis when the food convoy came. At first he heard the phantom sigh, as of a man sleeping lightly; now a distant train; now a horde of humming bees. Beside him, Moise's thumb caressed the safety catch of his Garand and his jaws worked silently, intently, on the red root. Then silence, throwing into the arena his own, jerky breathing. And now, suddenly, the advance guard of sound revived much closer, louder, its component elements distinguished one from another. The grumble of a truck in low gear, the high boast of a motorcycle. He trembled. He waited, then, for the faces of the first trucks, familiar and innocent, like lowing cattle jostling one another's flanks on the way to the slaughter house. He could put a name to these vehicles; he had lived in Paris. Hemmed in now by the tall, giraffe pines, silent sentinels of death, the heavy trucks bellowed their innocence like drunken revellers set loose among kettledrums. The first one passed him. He saw, with an electric shock, two faces—white! The muffled boom of the land mine, when it came, was almost comforting in its expected-ness, its grandfatherly good taste. The convoy did, then, stop-The two white faces he had seen would now be dead faces. A moment of stillness, of hushed disbelief, descended like a evil—the moment which, in any violent physical collision, separates the past from the present. Then Moise's Garand began to talk, close to his ear. He would never in his life forget the brutality of that shout, that curse, of flying bullets, yet he might still have recovered his equilibrium, thrown off his paralysis, had not two French soldiers jumped down from the truck standing opposite him, only a few metres away. They were young and their panic communicated itself to him like a bad smell. They knew not which way to turn; as it happened, there was no way to turn, except to the earth itself. They ran—-and then saw, too late, one hundred years of Imperial adventure too late, Moise and Amah waiting for them in the undergrowth. One stopped and sobbed like a drowning man on his last upward journey for air; there was time, almost, to shake hands before Moise's gun spoke again. The face which it blasted away had been in that instant all ihe young faces Amah had ever known in Paris, at the Sorbonne, in the party cells, in the cafes and museums. It was himself and it was white.
It was not the jibes and displeasure of his own comrades, but the French themselves who worked on Amah the miracle of surgery which amputates a man's aversion to shedding human blood. The operating theatre turned out to be a village of nearly one thousand inhabitants called Zolanga, a name which would have acquired a symbolism in the Copper-nican national consciousness comparable to that of Oradour-sur-Glane in the French—had there not been so many "Zo-langas."
General Lecoeur, before encountering his Waterloo at Ga, had launched a radical scheme with no less an objective than the removal of the whole population of Eastern Province from contact with Maya's guerrillas. The solution arrived upon by veterans of the war in Indochina was the construction of vast new "habitation camps" into which the population of the surrounding countryside might be progressively deported. This interesting variation of the scorched-earth strategy was expected to cut Maya off from his one and only supply of manpower, the peasant population itself, and so to prevent him from bringing the southernmost copper mines within the area under his control.
Maya chose the moment of Lecoeur's dismissal and of Cartier's arrival to throw a spanner into the works. An area of some eight hundred square kilometres, of which Zolanga was the economic and geographical nexus, had been scheduled by the French for imminent and total depopulation Maya now sent forward a patrol of one hundred and fifty men on a ten-day march through dense jungle and swampland into the environs of Zolanga, which had for some time past been the scene of spasmodic guerrilla operations. Working by night, and withdrawing to the surrounding jungle by day, Maya's men infiltrated the village on the basis of a systematic plan, working intensively to persuade the population to resist the deportation and to accept Maya's offer of armed assistance against the French. Maya, in fact, wanted the whole area to burn its boats, and he had a shrewd notion that Carrier's reaction would be the very one he hoped for.
On the night of July 27, four weeks after the arrival of the patrol in the area and a fortnight before the deportation order was due to come into effect, Maya's guerrillas took over Zolanga and distributed what additional arms they had among the villagers. At dawn a French reconnaissance plane reported to Divisional Headquarters that four red-and-white rebel flags were flying over the village; and at noon a French patrol sent to investigate came under heavy fire and was forced to retreat. The people of Zolanga settled down to wait in a mood of calm despair; and among those waiting was Amah Odouma.
The Blue Berets moved into Eastern Province shortly before the fall of Ga. Among the more modern-minded officers, the victory they had won in Thiersville was regarded not as a cause for personal pride but as verification of a scientific hypothesis. The Blue Berets had proven that nationalism is a virus, an imported alien growth without natural organic roots in the native population. Like the plague itself, the Black Death, it could be destroyed only by ruthless retaliatory measures based on scientific analysis of the contagion and its carriers.
The fall of Ga was a shock. And the arrival of Cartier did not inspire optimism. Armand Keller wrote disparagingly of him to Andre Laval, who replied at once, "We need modern generals. Where are they? I do not see them. I do not see them among the colonels. It will be necessary to search lower down the hierarchy in order to bring the true leaders to light." He would have signed his name there and then had he not felt, in his mood of depression brought on by the fiasco of Ga, that his point might not be absolutely clear to Keller. So he added: "Monsieur, I belong to a race without doubt disappearing in our time, that of the 'fanatical' soldier who loves only the Army and whose religion is the cult of the Fatherland."
He threw himself with enthusiasm into the life of the Habitation Camp at Kwibi. Within a few months its population had grown to 25,000. "We are creative," Laval reminded his friend Jean Martignac more than once. "We build." The accommodation, the officers were able to point out, was superior in every way to the huts and hovels which the "resettled" natives had been forced to leave behind. When some African women betrayed signs of homesickness, Laval reminded Martignac that "Le Corbusier has demonstrated that in architecture sentimentality goes hand in hand with squalor." Martignac was impressed; later he threw the remark out as his own; like most thieves, it did not occur to him that he might be dealing in stolen goods. Every effort was made to ensure that the contractors installed the specified drainage and sanitation systems. Three primary schools were set up, providing the vast majority of the native children with their first steps in literacy. As requested, the Archbishop of Thiersville sent nuns to staff the schools; the officers received these ladies solemnly. As for propaganda, conditions were ideal. "This," Laval told Martignac one evening, "is the real work." He became, almost, happy.
The deportation system impelled fresh thinking on methods of farming. While some peasants were able to work their own plots outside the camp boundaries in the daytime, others, from farther afield, were not. In searching for the most rational method of compensation, the officers—at least the young officers, and they almost invariably carried the day in such questions—settled almost unanimously for a cooperative system.
"We are pragmatic socialists," Laval often said. "Spartan socialism."
"The cooperative," Martignac announced to those attentive listeners who, now wrenched from the city, found charm in his satin complexion and tight, crisp curls of flax, "is the future."
"I am not a Jew," Laval explained in the officers' mess, "and I would not have France full of Jews. But the Jew in Israel is different. There he is a man. The kibbutz is an idea you have to watch."
The officers drank heavily in the evenings and talked about parallel hierarchies. Flushed with their success in Thiersville, they were more than ever convinced that they had only to outbid Maya in applying Mao Tse-tung's precepts in order to win the war. At the same time they unearthed in themselves an unsuspected antipathy to capitalists, bankers, big colons and the trusts. Next to politicians and journalists, these groups were most honoured with invective. On clear, hot nights the conscript soldiers would be entertained by slogan after chorused slogan, toast after toast, rising from the officers' mess with the abandoned weightlessness of balloons over a fairground. "To a pragmatic socialism!" "A bas le racisme!" "Vive I'Armee populaire!" "Vive I'Armee mod-erne!" "Vive la France!"
They were not, they made abundantly clear to themselves, to each other and to the natives, racists. The quixotic Martig-nac set a fashion when he adopted a little girl who had been orphaned in the fighting. He sent her away to Paris. Andre regarded the gesture as tending to the frivolous; in any case, he was divorced now and he had never had Jean's way with the kiddies. The sight of him made them cry. Instead, he took the initiative in recruiting, training and indoctrinating a platoon of native troops and in integrating them into the framework of his own company. These Negro soldiers became his pride and joy—an obsession in the opinion of those who, like his immediate superior, Colonel Chastenet, regarded the whole exercise as futile and dangerous. But, Laval insisted, the black soldiers knew the terrain as whites never could; disguised, they were excellent spies; they knew the language; through their eyes and ears one had a link with the population and, through the population, with the mind of the enemy. For some weeks the Commandos Noirs went from success to success; hostility became neutrality, and neutrality cautious approval. One rebel band after another was flushed out of its jungle retreat. Andre Laval's prestige rode high; he bombarded Keller with letters describing his achievements, fearing (rightly) that his superiors would not tumble over themselves to recommend his elevation over their heads; and he waited impatiently for news of his promotion. Then disaster struck. Three native NCOs deliberately misled a large French patrol into a rebel ambush. Blood flowed and the Commandant himself was lucky to escape with his life. On orders from General Cartier, the Commandos Noirs were disbanded. In desperation, Laval sought an interview with the General. A friendly young aide, a Captain from Saint-Cyr, conveyed to him the General's regrets.
"Every black is a rebel at heart," the aide assured him.
When the report reached Divisional Headquarters that the largest village of the area scheduled for imminent resettlement was in rebel hands, the first battalion of the Blue Berets converged at once on Zolanga. Among the officers of the modern school it was sacred doctrine that in this type of rural warfare—the towns were another matter—the employment of minimum force incurring the minimum of destruction to civilian life and property was the sine qua non of final victory. As the most experienced of Chastenet's company commanders, Andre Laval was able to persuade the Colonel that the recapture of Zolanga by a force of only company strength was both feasible and imperative. At 1415 hours his company began its approach, and at 1505 it came under rebel fire.
Laval was a veteran and he knew what he was doing. Equally important, he knew what he wanted to do. He wanted, if possible, to take Zolanga using small-arms fire alone. The bombs issuing from his mortars to cover the approach of his leading platoon were smoke bombs; and he "pepper-potted" his second platoon down the track leading into the village with supporting fire from machine guns alone. He moved his company headquarters to high ground which gave him a view of Zolanga as a whole and then settled down to a ten- or fifteen-minute observation of the village through his field glasses: the most indispensable precaution, long experience had taught him, of all.
A plasticine model, a giant's head ... the countryside resided in his nostrils and the scent of timeless flowers gar-landed his memory. The neat rows of mud and bamboo huts, pert and vulnerable, reminded him of Indochina and, beyond, of the French-Canadian log cabins which a pretty Saint-Etienne schoolmistress had once taught him to build out of matchsticks. He had built an entire settlement in honour of her smile and the lost cause of Quebec, which, for reasons he never inquired into, made it shine. The pink dawn of his awakening ... Through the centre of the village ran a wide path of red laterite, flanked by date and palm trees which shaded the roofs of the neighbouring huts. He could see two wells, a bamboo church and a village hall. In the reflective glare of the sun, the four rebel flags were almost invisible; they hung limp and inert, as if spent by the intensity of their initial gesture of defiance. The human hands which had raised them had vanished, had left them to their fate. In Zolanga nothing moved and no cock crowed. Below him, but above the village, the vultures wheeled lazily in the sky. He had seen it often before, this emptiness, this hushed waiting, this posture of sleeping, this pale prelude of death itself.
As he looked, the rebel positions came to him one by one, like gifts.
In the course of this delay Chastenet's feet had got a lot colder. The Colonel's radio set began to crackle with anxiety. Was not the rebel resistance unexpectedly fierce? Did the situation not dictate, after all, a battalion attack? Laval said no. An officer's first duty, Chastenet reminded him, is to his own men. Laval answered, regretting that he had not been to Saint-Cyr and was therefore interested only in winning the war. The ether crackled with invective, curses and threats of courts-martial. Chastenent ordered Laval to withdraw prior to an artillery bombardment of Zolanga; at which a new voice intervened promising additional support from the air. General Cartier had appeared overhead in his helicopter. Chastenet was stunned. He assured the General that there was no need, that the artillery would be sufficient. But Cartier had his new fighter-bombers and he intended to use them. Seized by a rage of incredible intensity, Andre Laval cast away all discretion and intervened to point out that an air attack would be butchery and that for every rebel killed twenty more would be created. But Cartier, weak man that be was, wanted to rub in the lesson that he was more to be feared than Maya. Laval cursed his stupidity with exemplary violence.
He withdrew his men; he had to. He withdrew four hundred metres and the village was lost to his field of vision. Jagged prongs of lightning danced before his eyes, the muscles in his cheek ticked furiously, he drenched his subordinates in invective, and he spoke darkly of a night of the long knives in the boudoirs and ministerial corridors of Paris where the Carriers earned their epaulettes. He stood, like a Druid stone, scanning the sky to the north and waiting for the planes to appear like the first dots of lights on a television screen. It was a long wait and the planes came suddenly, scattering their fireworks with exuberant imprecision on the village, the fields, the surrounding jungle. When they dived a second time they had matured a little, and their gaiety was tinged with seriousness; on the third run-in Zolanga took the full load. The brush of fire began to caress the blue spaces of the sky; above the sacrificial altar a tapestry of blood and smoke carried its message of the crucifixion to the surrounding countryside, and its promise of resurrection. Suspended from Hades by invisible chords, the General's beetle spun its laughing fangs and tiptoed over the scene of carnage like a fastidious vulture.
It took two days to bury the dead.
Amah was lucky to get away, to escape. But the surgery took place, the inhibition was amputated; he returned through the jungle dreaming of the young Parisians whose throats he would slit. And Maya had reason to be satisfied: within a week most of the surviving young men of the Zolanga district were treading the same jungle path as Amah, towards Maya's army.
From this path Amah did, on the fourth day, allow himself to be diverted, or driven, by passion; and he broke out knee-deep in maize. In the hot fertility of the Jukarta Plain, besieged by ghosts, by the desecrated women, the men stripped of life and the children flung by the far-reaching, mechanical hand of modern hatred into communal graves__
graves dug suddenly where yesterday they had played. walked, now, alone, like a minstrel of death among an oblivious, toyland people, a man made leprous and unclean by suffering, an armed Gulliver among Lilliputians who knew of the war as they knew of the moon. Here on the honeyed plain, all life smilingly worshipped a single sun of benevolence, the cultured and elegant Madame Trignon, notable for her devotion to the philosophy of enlightened paternalism practised in his lifetime by the greatest landowner of Eastern Province, the late and lamented Monsieur Trignon. Here you could stop any man, any peasant, and ask him: "When your wife was with child, was there a doctor?" "Of course, Madame sent one." And then he would offer you wine and olives and discuss the new schools and Madame's notorious refusal to take precautions, to guard herself against the terrorists.
Amah made a study of the lady's movements. Her daily routine proved to be as regular and uneventful as the marsh-mallow lives of her toy people—a sheltered enclave whose crystal bowl he was resolved to shatter. In the late afternoon he concealed himself along Madame's favourite path, and waited.
In the cool of the woods the moral aspect hurtled like a meteor across his mind and burned up in the outer atmosphere of Camille's hopeless resignation and in the question which an old man's eyes had asked as Carder's steel birds made their third descent on Zolanga. Madame Trignon liked to follow a shaded grove in the russet evening, with a book and her white, fluffy dogs. He killed her servant with a single shot from behind; the lady, when she turned, stilled his fever, his tremors, mothballing him at once in a nostalgia of autumn libraries, volumes bound in leather, the comfort of a warm chair when there is wind and sleet in the street outside.
He said, in French, "It is well known that you treat your people well, and that they love you. But you are an exception."
"Is there no room in your world," she said, close to tears for her dead servant, "for exceptions?"
"Nine colons out of ten exploit and rob their peasants.
And nine urban employers out of ten exploit and rob their native workers. Coppernica is bled dry of its mineral wealth ,y foreigners, and its people are denied elementary justice and the right to live where they choose by a brutal army of occupation. That is the ugly reality."
She lacked, he saw, height, but she was crowned in towered silver, and her dignity reminded him that she was a widow and that she had not crumbled or fled after the thin paint of commiseration had begun to peel, the paint planted by the last dry kiss of the last departing relative. For a moment, overshadowed by her upright pines, he was again a Frenchman with an oblique vision of a ruined cemetery near Caen.
She said: "My husband and I always hoped that others would follow our example. You will not improve the worst by cutting down the best."
"We need your natives on our side. But your benevolence is their ignorance."
She nodded, sadly. "Did mankind ever solve its problems by force?"
"You must ask your own generals."
"There are no generals here," she said reproachfully, bending for a terrible moment his eye, compelling him, almost, to kill her in the instant of his bending; and so to bear for a lifetime, like the sheep's stupid stigmata, the shame of a sullen act.
"Force," he said, "is the midwife of history."
"I had not known."
"You are ignorant then. A colon."
"You must judge, young man. You carry the gun." Her smile was like the meeting of lemon and weak tea.
"I have just come from a village," he said, "which you bombed."
Her doubts withered like weeds under the lime of the dead servant's body and her knees gave suggestion of the coming fall. When she spoke again, her voice was a tin drum. "I know this much: the world divided long ago between those Who love people and those who love mankind. Heaven help Us if those who love mankind ever reign supreme. The Universe will be one vast concentration camp."
"Your Coppernica already is."
"No! You are wrong. You are too young to distinguish between the agonies of a birth and the agonies of a death We are here to build, to educate. One day we will go. But you are not yet ready."
He came to within a few feet of her and pointed his revolver at her heart. She could not help giving the weapon one glance, and he enjoyed her sense of shame, of exposure, more than the fear it reflected.
"It's too late," he said, "to educate the French officer who tortured my sister for a week, raped her with a bottle and finally killed her."
She flinched. "I do not believe that."
And so it was the intellectual in him (it seemed) who pounced on the one crime meriting death: ignorance. The ignorance of those who look away. What happened to the body and face of this old lady when he shot her he found disgusting. The details of her death remained with him long after he had buried other horrors in the deep vaults of time forgotten.
Amah sat one morning with two colleagues in the dingy offices of the Bimba Beer Company and waited for his first meeting with the leader of the National Liberation Movement. It was a small, brown office, not at all impressive, situated in the most squalid district of the native cite, close to the famous Rue Katalanga. The street outside was filthy and the stench from the blocked drains churned the stomachs of men who had passed two years in the sweet-smelling jungles, maize fields and orange groves of Eastern Province. The gutters and pavements were covered with human excrement; diseased, rabies-slavering pie dogs ran wild, and the hopelessness in the saucer-empty eyes of the children produced in Amah a lowering rain cloud of pessimism. In the Beer Company office, two long flypapers, heavy with victims, dominated the scene. In one corner, a few beer crates; ii another, a heap of posters, advertisements; on the walls, luric representations of Bimba girls drinking ice-cold beer while walking the street, lying in the sun and embracing wealthy-looking gentlemen. Tukhomada was already twenty minutes ate. Amah looked at his watch, mopped his face and stared about him gloomily, in the half-acknowledged hope of finding an unopened bottle of Bimba.
A stranger in his own town, he sat passively and allowed his mind to revolve like a windmill on an almost airless day. In the opaque sea of memory, the sunken ship of a law of anticlimax suggested itself, then vanished. On the map of Coppernica, the red stain had spread remorselessly. Living off the fruits of its own labour, and steadily swelling its ranks, Maya's army had gradually enveloped, in a two-prong pincer thrust, the Seurat mine belt. In Paris, there was pandemonium, a change of government. The massive offensive launched by Cartier to recapture these, the first mines to have fallen to Maya, finally foundered on the rock of the European soldiers' reluctance to die five thousand miles from home. In Paris, there was renewed talk of negotiations, an abortive coup and the imprisonment of the Keller group. Suddenly Thiersville was in a state of unrepressible rebellion. Hundreds of thousands of chanting Africans marched through the streets. The police made no attempt to intervene. The Army—even the Blue Berets—stared dumbly into the cold eyes of a truth. Then, somehow, it remained only to negotiate, to retreat, to lie down like flattened corn under the gale of unkind destiny.
Against this day Maya, shrewd as the proverbial peasant, had carefully prepared. As he had foreseen, from beneath the straw of turmoil there emerged birds of moderation, each outbidding the other to sing "compromise and reason" in the ear of the mangled pussy which was France. That three wise and holy men would bring him the model of independence he desired on a gold plate was not a fantasy which Maya had ever entertained. Instead, he maintained a sharp watch on the despised "town scum" and "gutter rats," the "native Frenchmen" scattered throughout his army, studying reports on their attitude and fighting record and cautiously incorporating into his staff those whom he judged to combine high personal aptitude with a genuine devotion to the cause of the peasant soldier. Now, under temporary cease-fire conditions, he despatched the most trusted of these aides into the major towns to watch, listen and negotiate at their discretion. Only when he had found the man and the party he wanted to lead the nation would he consent to begin negotiations with the French. For this role, he had never considered himself suit-able.
A fly, wary of the overcrowded graveyard hanging like an ochre snake from the ceiling, alighted on the safer reaches of Amah's nose. He looked again at his watch and prepared to leave; the moment came when delay attributable to accident took on the form of a contrived insult. But when, a moment later, Tukhomada did arrive, all thought of pride was swept from Amah's mind by the man's astonishing appearance. Tall, very tall indeed, and beanstalk-thin, his skeleton frame topped by a small head fronted by a soft, babyish face, he resembled an aggrieved dinosaur. He wore a shirt with the texture of paper, a sky-blue suit which shimmered in the most alarming way and a red-and-blue bow tie of the made-up type. In judging this unnerving getup, Amah's peasant years came away like orange peel.
"I'm betrayed already," Tukhomada announced, opening without ceremony, handshake or introduction four bottles of Bimba. "Liwele turns out be in Ybele's pay. And Ybele is in the pay of the French."
Froth streamed from the opened bottles.
"I know Ybele well," Amah said, appeased by the cool caress of the beer in the furnace of his throat. "He defended, or pretended to defend, my sister."
"Camille Odouma?" The quick words did not bring the soft face with them. Amah understood, then, that the man's huge pride was tempered with shyness. Tukhomada sat down convulsively and his legs filled the room.
In the uncomfortable silence which followed, here in the jam-packed, seething heart of the self-centred metropolis, Maya's five-point doctrine, like Maya's distant army itself, assumed in Amah's mind the dimensions of a tragic irrelevance.
Nine Coppernicans out of ten are peasants.
The Coppernican peasant is poor.
Coppernica is rich.
Eight-tenths of Coppernica's wealth lies in the mines.
fhe nine-tenths must inherit the eight-tenths.
Amah shifted on his hard wooden chair. He put the empty bottle on the stained linoleum floor beside him and wondered when, if ever, the leader of the MLN would look him in the face. Sad almost to the point of tears, besieged by the same flooding bewilderment as when he had set out from this town on a truck carrying bricks and water jars, he took refuge in aggression.
"Who in your opinion should be the first leader of this country?"
"Me."
"What system do you propose?"
"All the best elements will gather in the MLN. The MLN will rule."
"You expect to negotiate with the French?"
"Of course."
"You anticipate a general election?"
"It's imperative."
"What would be your first steps after taking office?"
"To hand Coppernica over to Coppernicans."
"To be a little more specific ..."
Raymond Tukhomada did, now, confront him, fully acknowledge his existence, with eyes which twinkled like a tap dancer's feet. The smile, when it came, seemed to surprise itself, as a man emerging from a pothole into daylight, and its engaging quality derived from its promise to endure, to live securely within the walls of honest endeavour. He could afford to say—and few could without exciting distrust—that a specific politician is a foolish politician. But the massive, leonine shadow of Maya's burden and of Maya's wrath lay across Amah, and he found himself increasingly sour in the face of the other's champagne gaiety.
"What are your promises to the Coppernican peasant?"
"A fair deal for him."
"Is that afl?"
Tukhomada's gaunt shoulders, bearing their shimmering load of ill-cut cloth, rose to the level of his large ears. "Isn't that enough? The peasant is poor; he must be better off. He has no education; he must be taught. He is sick; he must have medical care."
"But how?"
"The French ask me the same question. I would be a fool to answer it."
Amah said: "Nine people out of ten in Coppernica are peasants. If you are going to win an election you are going to have to carry them with you. In two years they have shed a lot of blood. They will want to know why."
"They will follow me."
"Why?"
"Because the situation has clarified. There are only two camps now, Ybele's and mine."
"You are out of touch. Every townsman believes the universe ends at his city walls."
"I was born a peasant, Odouma, don't forget that. In Upper Varva. I worked in my father's fields until I was eighteen. Can you say the same for yourself?"
Amah felt piqued. This man's slender hands were not calloused; his stomach and thighs did not still bear the electrode's scars; he had not seen a village die in the time it takes to boil an egg; he had not lived off maize and fruit for two years. And what was known about him? A beer salesman enjoying an enormous, mushrooming popularity in the towns. Certainly he had been in prison once—for embezzlement.
"Why do you imagine," Amah began with a new passion, "that we are on the verge of independence?"
"We tore it from them."
"We?"
"Each of us made his contribution."
"You do not speak so equivocally to the crowds in the streets."
"I will not be insulted." But he said this easily, without feeling.
"The answer," Amah said, "can be contained in two words: 'Maya's army.'"
"Ah!" The tall man leaped up in a state of intense excitement, almost frenzy, and began to pace the tiny room like a caged giraffe, his head keeping the flypapers in perpetual motion. As if previously waiting in the wings for this moment 0f the raised curtain, he suddenly blazed with the energy of die successful politician. "I knew this was coming! I knew it! What does he want, what are his terms? The Ministry of War, the Foreign Ministry, Vice-Premier?"
"No, sir," Amah said quietly, almost enjoying his brief, quasi-patrician disgust. "General Maya has more power than ambition."
"Yes?" Raymond Tukhomada stood frozen with disbelief.
"If he wanted the highest office in the land, he would take it." Tukhomada flinched visibly, as if struck in the face. "His sole concern, his single aim, is to ensure that the revolution is not, in its moment of triumph, betrayed. No man can effectively negotiate with the French until Maya has endorsed him. Maya isn't the type to be taken in by vague promises. You will have to incorporate his programme in your own. Not as a tactical manoeuvre, but with passion and conviction. And you will, of course, have to meet the General as soon as possible."
"Yes, let him come and see me. I'll be honoured to receive him."
"I'm sorry if this is for you a matter of dignity and prestige. Maya couldn't possibly risk coming to Thiersville now."
Tukhomada laughed nervously. Pride and calculation danced naked around the room. When Amah politely but firmly insisted that he visit Maya's headquarters, Tukhomada leaped to his feet, inadvertently setting the flypapers in motion.
"I shall have to consult my executive committee," he said.
But he came all the same, in one of the cars presented to him by Bimba Beer, and accompanied by an impressive retinue of advisers, young men who watched Amah with clannish suspicion. They were followed by the Surete police for more than a hundred kilometres until they were Waved down by one of Maya's outposts on the bridge spanning the Varva at Choussy. The French had to turn back. It Was obvious to Amah that Tukhomada was deeply impressed
by this display of power, yet wished to conceal his admiration, to show sang-froid.
After some thought, he said solemnly: "We shook them off."
TEN
rr was some time before Chester Silk and his brother-in-law noticed the Negro poised deferentially on the end of his own shadow. Chester sighed; his life was a saga of endless trouble. Between the rebukes of his wife, Amanda, and the sermons of Powell Bailey, he chose, unhesitatingly, a scotch and soda.
"So what is it, Powell?"
The three men stood in a tight knot a yard or two clear of one of Ybele's water sprinklers.
"News has come through of two Government decrees," Bailey said.
"Well?"
"Foreign technicians are coming in to run the mines; and all French and foreign military personnel must leave the country within thirty-six hours."
"So I was telling the Ambassador," Soames said.
Bailey stood his ground. "And more still," he said.
The two white men glanced at one another.
"I've gathered clear proof of an imminent plot, sir, to overthrow the Tukhomada Government."
"Jesus Christ," Silk said. "And this is the dangerous age for men. So what? Powell, you're going to tell me that this thing, this plot, has got to be stopped and that we ought to stop it, is that it?"
"That's correct, sir."
The Ambassador raised his arms to Heaven, took a step backwards to protest his universal innocence and recoiled from the obscene tickle of Ybele's laughing water sprinkler* "Goddam it," he said, trying to dust the tiny specks of water from his sleeve. They smeared.
"I was explaining to the Ambassador," Soames said, "that our best policy is to sit tight and do nothing. Very soon Tukhomada will have the mines running again. That will be that. Myself, I shall sell shoelaces outside the Savoy. It's traditional."
"But not if Tukhomada is kicked out of power," Bailey
said.
"Precisely," Soames said.
"Important to distinguish, perhaps, between the interests of Amcol and those of the United States."
"Hey there, Powell, hey," complained Chester Silk, longing for a stiff scotch and a fishing holiday on Lake Michigan.
"I should have thought that the interests of Amcol were identical with those of the United States," Soames said, wrestling for Chester Silk's soul. "To this fact, surely, we can attribute the felicitous appointment of Mr. Silk as Ambassador. Besides, how can your country have an interest in propping up a regime which arbitrarily seizes private property on a gigantic scale?"
"That's so, Powell," Chester Silk said gravely, lighting a cigar.
"Need I remind you, sir, that Ybele commands only thirty-eight seats in the National Assembly."
Silk nodded sadly. "That's true. Back in the State Department there are people who are going to get morbid about that kind of statistic. Softies, eggheads, I know, but there they are. If Fernand Ybele starts playing snakes and ladders now, these guys are gonna want to know why."
Soames' hatred for the Negro was now intense. But he didn't intend to lose his temper. A bluff man himself, Chester Silk had always admired sophistication in others. And it was on Chester Silk that his own fortune now depended.
"Perhaps Mr. Bailey intends to stop the coup with his own bare hands," he said.
Chester Silk at once seized upon this idea and made it his own.
"Listen, Powell, aren't you forgetting one small thing? I'm just asking you whether there isn't one small thing you're overlooking. These guys, these French guys, are most of them just about nuts. I mean, determined. How in hell's name are you and I going to stop a bunch of crazy cowboys?"
"Exactly," said Soames, drawing on his cigar and inhaling deeply. It had always been the flush of hope rather than the stab of gloom which had inspired his tobacco hand.
"I did not of course propose that we should embark upon a fist fight in the Avenue Foch," said Bailey dryly. "But if Washington were to apply pressure, the strongest possible pressure, on Paris, at once, then I believe the coup could be halted. And that is precisely what you and I, sir, are duty bound to advise. Without delay."
Silk looked careworn. Soames saw that the Negro's star was again in the ascendant, that Chester's public conscience, his image of what he ought to be, threatened to prevail over all private considerations, over family loyalty, reason, the dictates of his own heart.
"Whatever their faults," Soames said, "one must at least credit the French with intelligence. If Washington brings pressure on Paris, the Quai d'Orsay will begin by disclaiming all knowledge; and by the time that its memory has been jogged, the coup will be a fait accompli."
Chester Silk looked from one to the other, doubtfully. The end of his cigar was now wet and badly chewed.
But Powell Bailey knew that he now held the initiative.
"As you gentlemen know better than I, the price of the Union's shares has fallen on the Paris Bourse in the course of a single week from six francs forty to four francs ninety. And it's still falling. When news comes through of Tukhomada's foreign-technicians deal, pandemonium will reign. Just the moment for Washington to lean hard on Paris. Particularly if we offer our good offices to arrange a settlement, a compromise, between the Union and Tukhomada. The Paris Government will be stampeded by the interests of hundreds of thousands of investors. Enough cold air will flow to freeze Plon, Ybele, Keller and the rest solid in their tracks."
Bailey was a lay preacher in the Baptist church on 128th Street, in Harlem, and when the call came he spoke well. The gift of eloquence followed in the wake of the spirit, just as the preaching propeller imparts confidence to the shy sea.
The Ambassador succumbed.
But he felt himself to be the victim of a subversive lynching. Turning away, he fell prey to anger, resentment, a pain the outlines of which Soames could only guess at. For Soames had not yet gathered what lay between the Silk family and the Baileys, what had transformed the sly sniping of the spring, the game of "Monopoly" on the London board, into the animosity of the summer. Chester Silk saw that a hammer had been raised over the fabric of his home and family. As for Bailey, he knew all about his dignity, his nobility of purpose, just as he knew about his son Jason's. The similarity, the calculated imitation, infuriated him: the slim moustache, the excessively upright poise of the head, like a coconut on a fairground pedestal, inviting (he felt) a blow or two. Under the pale African sun, he shivered. Oh, they had honour and dignity, these Baileys. But what honour had there been in Jason's greedy, calculating action, that betrayal of trust, that savage, predatory thrust into the soft belly of a family? Of a girl. Plucking a gentle singing bird from her perch, dashing her to pieces, a broken thing, unfeathered. It reminded Chester Silk, vaguely, of a certain play he'd seen on Broadway, when some guy infiltrated some guy's house and nobody had the guts to kick him out and then this guy burned the house down just like that. How often had he been tempted to send that nigger Jason to ...
"Okay, let's draft this goddam telegram."
Soames took his arm and spoke with extreme urgency.
"My dear Chester, your demarche can only fail. The French will be too quick for you. Ybele's coup will succeed, despite us. Where will we stand then? My professions of friendship for Ybele, and my promise to smooth his way in Washington-"
"You promised him that!" said Bailey.
Soames disregarded him. His hand grew tighter around Silk's elbow.
"Plon will be able to say to Ybele, 'I am your only friend.' We'll be taxed out of existence. My dear Chester, this plot is highly secret. You need not know about it."
"But he does," Bailey said, with cold logic and an expression of unconcealed contempt. "His moral obligations as Ambassador compel him to act. Besides, Mr. Silk knows that if he doesn't put Washington in the picture, someone else will feel duty bound to do so."
Chester Silk sighed. "It's no good, Soames."
Soames watched him stump away, a hippo on the frontier of history, followed at a yard or so's deferential distance by the Negro. Both arses, he noted, wobbled; he had never considered his own. The black's excessive uprightness reminded him of an undersized schoolboy at the annual measuring, and the way he held his shoulders back, of a burlesque guardsman. The Ambassador and his special assistant disappeared from sight.
A servant came from the house with sandwiches and wine. Soames took a fistful, made a slighting remark to the servant and walked slowly across the trim grass towards the veranda.
The French had once again gathered in a tight, cohesive group. They were talking softly, but animatedly: Plon, La-cassagne, Keller, Laval. Ybele was with them; Cartier had disappeared. At Soames' approach they fell silent; suspicion could not have dug deeper into the human countenance.
Soames emptied his mouth of sandwich. A strand of pink salmon clung to the deeper pink of his lower Up. He and Plon bowed to one another, but without compromise, a mere flick of the head.
"I have reason to believe," Soames said, addressing himself primarily to Plon, "that within a few hours Washington will learn of certain impending developments in Coppernica. My own attempts to prevent this have failed. I leave you to draw your own conclusions. However, I trust that you won't account it an impertinence if I stress the advantages of acceleration and of that famous French institution, the fait accompli."
Soames spoke French well—but broadly. He made no attempt to tighten and narrow the vowels.
"C'est vrai?" said Plon sharply.
"C'est vrai."
Soames turned away, but not before searching the face of
Commandant Laval for some indication of recognition, of gratitude. There was none.
On the ash-panelled wall above Raymond Tukhomada's head the electric clock pointed to one forty-five. The question of whether or not to arrest Plon, Ybele, Keller, Tufton and Laval in Ybele's house had now been debated for three-quarters of an hour. Stomachs had grown emptier, tongues drier, tempers more frayed. The wood, Amah now had to acknowledge, had failed to catch alight; damp with inertia and scruple, it smouldered impotently. The Cabinet members argued in circles of diminishing value, parading their slogans like banners on Bastille Day. Certain needles had stuck in single grooves; for Maya, everything was "very convenient, damned convenient"; for Kwandu, every problem resolved itself into the fact that "a police state is precisely what we're here to avoid."
"Why arrest five men when we have a whole people, a unified nation, behind us?" asked Kwandu.
Mounier reminded Amah that the conspiracy theory of history was long since exploded.
Maya continued to assure Amah that he would have his man, his Commandant Laval, when the moment was propitious, thus hinting that personal vengeance was all that the young Minister of the Interior really cared about.
"If we don't arrest these men," Amah insisted, "a police state is precisely what we will have. Within a week."
"Hysteria is no substitute for reason," Kwandu said.
"I'm often accused of thinking in abstract, doctrinaire terms," Amah said, "of being an intellectual. Yet my reasoning on this issue is cogent and concrete; it is you who take refuge behind generalizations."
Kwandu smiled. "You have been heard to insist that violence is the midwife of history, Amah. You can't blame us if we view your specific proposals in the light of your general philosophy—and consequently aim off for wind."
Kwandu looked around the table, smiling and very pleased with himself.
Amah clenched his fists; he was pale with fury.
"The entire achievement of three years of struggle and spilled blood stands in danger, and you score debating points! You're more pleased to gain a cheap laugh than to face your obligations to the people."
Amah raised his hands in despair. "For three years we
"Really-" Kwandu protested.
"Be temperate, Amah," Tukhomada warned, threw bombs, killed policemen, murdered colons, fought the French Army. And why? To achieve our independence, our freedom of action, to become our own masters. And now, when the whole achievement stands in jeopardy, you won't even arrest five men, four of them foreigners!"
He turned to Maya; but Maya was half asleep. Tukhomada's long silence infuriated him; the colossus, it seemed, was fatally flawed by inhibition. Amah knew that the ground had slipped from under him; the prophet was now unarmed. They distrusted his youth, his vitality, his power, his poems. None of them shared his memories of Paris in the early days. Death had scythed through the close-packed generations, and the uncut hair sprouted greenly round Camille's high memorial.
"We must vote," Tukhomada said.
Amah ended as he had begun: without allies. The adjournment was carried like a prayer, whispered, unanimous, self-congratulatory. He sat rooted to his chair until he and Tukhomada were left alone in the room. The light between them bent. For a moment Amah contemplated taking matters into his own hands, making the arrests on his own authority. But the notion withered like an orchid planted in salt. He reached for the telephone and issued a curt order which he struggled not to hear. His body ached.
Time ran across the broken city. The sun had just begun to step down from its arrogant noonday pedestal when Fernand Ybele's guests, their jaws deep in chicken, pate and Riesling, were momentarily disturbed by a sudden outcry of motorcycle engines in the Avenue Foch and by the loud but disciplined departure of the strong police detachment whose presence beyond the gates they had scarcely noticed, so preoccupied had they been with their rapidly maturing plans.
Soames Tufton scooped a mouthful of Russian salad, glanced out of the long window overlooking the Avenue Foch and permitted himself a small grimace.
"I confess I had a slight unease," he said.
Fernand Ybele grinned.
A few minutes later an Army vehicle slipped unobtrusively through the gates and turned towards Camp MacMahon. The African child who had stood all morning in the Avenue Foch with his begging bowl watched open-mouthed as one of the dark bats of history swept out of sight.
PART II
The Contract
"sergeant?"
"Me?" Deedes said timidly.
"Yes, you."
Laval sat in the front, poker-faced, as the 'Jeep' swept down the Avenue Foch.
"Aye, Sergeant retired." Deedes cleared his throat, or attempted to. "I was a PT instructor," he added.
He turned to James Caffrey in the hope of support, yet expecting at any moment the act of betrayal, the first decisive step towards the officers' mess of a foreign country.
"Sergeant Deedes was yi Kenya," James explained.
"Age?" Laval demanded.
James glanced at Deedes, then looked away hurriedly.
"Forty-five," Deedes said.
Laval smiled. His teeth flashed white. "The truth, old goat."
"Fifty," Deedes agreed, compelled.
"Fifty." Laval savoured the English word in his mouth, like an incensed turd. "We won't stand on ceremony," he said. "Your rank is of no account. I am a realist. Death defies formality."
At the gates of MacMahon the State security car which now followed the Commandant on behalf of Amah Odouma had to turn back. They drove through MacMahon and out the other side onto a rough laterite road which they followed for several kilometres. Their destination proved to be an encampment and adjoining airstrip which h
183
out of dense jungle a few days after the celebrations marking Coppernica's independence.
Both Caffrey and Deedes experienced the initial reticence which the individual feels when entering the precincts of a highly organized and self-sufficient social organism with its own codes, laws and purposes. Buoyant knots of mercenaries in khaki tunics and green berets swaggered about, their sleeves rolled high and their gleaming weapons carried like toys. Loud-mouthed masculine fighters, yet disciplined in their anarchy, like giant, red-fleshed ants, they saluted Laval, with a sharp jerk of the head and a stiff swing of the arm climaxing in a rigid, trembling motion above the line of the head and away from it. Following Laval between the rows of camouflaged tents, the two conscripts heard the continuous chatter of weapons of death on the range; the hot air hung with the tang of cordite. James picked out the bursts of rage from automatic and machine guns, the nagging, patient enmity of single-shot rifles, the cosmic wrath of heavy mortars, the cat snarl of splattering grenades. Big trucks pushed down the narrow tracks like elephants in a circus, and red laterite dust coated everything.
Laval halted on the edge of a wide ditch resembling a dried up river bed.
"The assault course," he announced. "We call it le chemin d'enfer."
With blue, impartial eyes James Caffrey examined the walls covered in barbed wire, the barrels, the ropes hanging from trees.
"Looks interesting," he said.
Laval appraised the young Englishman.
"Have you courage?"
James shrugged. "Courage is an activity. The answer can only be an epitaph." He remembered the novel he'd been reading before lunch.
Laval led the way across the compound to a small tent furnished with a table, a few chairs and two sullen clerks.
"Contracts," he snapped. "Advance of pay. Be quick."
He went out.
"Nom, prenom, pays de naissance," one of the clerks began lethargically.
James' hand lightly touched Deedes' elbow.
"What?"
"Your name. He wants your name."
"Deedes," said Deedes.
The clerk glowered at him with the simmering anger of the
tropics.
"C'est votre nom ou prenom—Deedes?"
Deedes turned resentfully to James, who made the necessary translation.
"He wants your date and place of birth."
"September 18, 1910. Edinburgh."
"Britannique?"
"Yes, he's British," James said.
"I'm as British as he is," Deedes told the clerk, suspecting that doubt was being cast on his national status as a Scotsman. Then he heard his tall companion reel off the foundation stones of his own existence with the bright, competent quality of a computer.
"Caffrey, James Arthur, born June 23, 1935, Cairo, Egypt. British subject."
"Cairo?" The clerk asked suspiciously. Deedes was pleased; maybe the pillar of salt wasn't as bloody British as he thought.
"British," James insisted patiently.
The clerk shrugged and made the entry in the contract. A dead cigarette butt hung from his lower lip, apparently unnoticed.
"Sign all three copies," he said.
Deedes withdrew into a corner, clutching his destiny in triplicate, and fumbled for his reading spectacles. He heard one of the clerks laugh. Closely packed print menaced him: "Voluntary Contract between the Alliance Party of Coppernica and Malcolm Deedes (British subject)."
"What's the Alleeance?" he asked Caffrey suspiciously.
Deedes chewed over the notion of opposition. Viewed from any angle it was hideous, the quintessential error, the dire folly of his life—opposition. He peered suspiciously at James' document to ascertain whether it began with the same words as his own.
"Africans, then?" he murmured.
James nodded brightly. Evidently he had no feelings, no fears.
"Opposition, though?" Deedes pressed. "Yes, Tufton supports them, everyone does, the whites, I mean. It's the party of Western civilization."
Deedes nodded and withdrew, decently, a step. He remembered Tufton's villa—those surprised, gilded fish, the princely meals, the servants, the flowing scotch and the precious, oblivious nights. Certainly they had left him to his own devices, and certain barriers had been erected. But while a man who has glimpsed the belly of hell hopes, if he can, to salvage his pride, he will leave umbrage to the birds. All that was gone now, like cellophane wrapping, blown away by the stench of cordite and the raised voices, loud and brutal, of soldiers. From the volcano of his life red-hot premonitions and anxieties rained down on him—leaping, spastic fears, terrible images of what he had become and how limited was his capacity for change.
He turned back to the contract and began to study its provisions. He read:
Contract
Yearly pay—1,500,000 Coppernican francs, plus ruling index divided by 12 equals 136,363 francs; daily indemnity 2,600 francs multiplied by 30 equals 78,000 francs; total 214,363 francs, less social charges 9,893 francs, taxes 19,570 francs; total 29,463 francs; grand total 184,900 francs. Daily meal indemnity, 1,521 francs, multiplied by 30 equals 45,630 francs. Daily danger indemnity (in dangerous zones to be designed according to events) 39,000 francs (1,300 francs multiplied by 30). Family indemnity: if married, wife 27,000 francs. Wife plus one child, 44,020 francs. Wife plus two children, 61,345 francs. In addition, in the case of death on active service, the dependants will receive an indemnity of 13,000,000 (thirteen million francs) plus 1,300,000 (one million three hundred thousand francs) per child. In the case of invalidity/disablement (permanent or otherwise, total or partial) the 13,000,-000 francs (thirteen million francs) indemnity will be paid pro rata determined in the annexed schedule.
Annex I
A. Indemnity in the case of death:
In case of death, the Alliance Party of Coppernica pays the sum of 13,000,000 francs (thirteen million francs) to the dependants of the soldier, plus an amount of 1,300,000 (one million three hundred thousand francs) for each legitimate or natural and acknowledged child. This indemnity is paid when death is the direct and exclusive consequence of active service or within a period of a year following wounds resulting from action with the enemy. Failing nomination of the beneficiary, payment is made to the legal heirs of the deceased.
B. Indemnity in the case of permanent invalidity/disablement:
(1) Total permanent disablement: in the case of wounds resulting in the total and absolute loss of sight, the severance or the total or functional loss of the two hands or the two legs, or pi one hand and one foot, complete paralysis, incurable madness excluding the possibility of work or occupation of any sort, the Alliance Party will pay 13,000,000 francs (thirteen million francs);
(2) Permanent disablement of portion of the body:
(a) For complete and absolute loss, that is in the case of severance or the total or complete functional loss, the following percentages are paid based on the maximum stipulated for total permanent disablement: of the right arm, 75 per cent, left arm 60 per cent, right forearm 65 per cent, left forearm 55 per cent, right hand 60 per cent, left hand 50 per cent, thigh 60 per cent, leg 50 per cent, foot 40 per cent, thumb right hand 20 per cent, thumb left hand 18 per cent, index finger right hand 16 per cent, index finger left hand 14 per cent, middle finger right hand 12 per cent, middle finger left hand 10 per cent, third finger right hand 10
per cent, third finger left hand 6 per cent, big toe 5 pei cent, any other toe 3 per cent, deaf in one ear 15 per cent, deaf in two ears 40 per cent. In the case of left-handed soldier, the percentage applying to the right-handed soldier will be the basis of indemnity.
(b) For the partial loss of any limb or organ enumerated as under, the indemnity will be proportional to the amount determined for the total and absolute loss o; any limb or organ, without however exceeding 60 per cent of this amount.
(c) In the case of any limb or organ established as mutilated or defective prior to any accident occurring to the soldier when on active service, no indemnity for permanent disablement will be considered. Furthermore, if any other limb or organ was totally or partially lost through the same accident, the amount of the indemnity will be determined while not taking into account any limb or organ previously established as mutilated or defective as stated above, the said limb or organ to be considered in terms of this contract as having fulfilled their particular function.
(d) The total amount of the indemnity for partial permanent invalidity/disablement will not, in any case, be superior to three quarters of the capital assured for cases of total permanent invalidity/disablement whatever the number of limbs or organs lost, either totally or partially.
(e) All injuries being the cause of total or partial permanent disability of other limbs and organs than those specified above will entitle the soldier to an indemnity determined by analogy, taking into consideration the above detailed dispositions.
C. Accrual of indemnity:
No type of accident can be liable for simultaneous indemnities of death and permanent disability. The indemnity due for temporary disablement is paid without prejudice of the indemnity due in case of death or permanent disablement.
Annex II
Agreement of Service
This contract is an agreement of service concluded for the duration, being a period of 6 (six) months commencing on the date of signature, and is renewable by written agreement only, unless notice is given 30 (thirty) days prior to the expiration of this contract.
Signed:..............................
James Caffrey signed his name. The clerk inquired whether he had any dependants. He had none. The clerk wearily asked him to name a beneficiary. There was no one: a barren wilderness. He realized why, in truth, he was here. Absurd to name Sara Tufton, only daughter of Croesus. As for his parents, they were not poor. Having lost two of their children, they would not be compensated by £13,000 for the death of the third. He had no friends, really. No friends. He pulled the hair away from his forehead nervously.
"Mr. William Luck, 17 Albatross Avenue, Sydney, Australia." He almost said, "Private Luck," but it wouldn't have mattered. He sometimes wondered whether Luck was a figment of his imagination, and whether his brother, Alec, was, after all, dead.
The clerk was questioning Deedes again. "I never married," Deedes insisted.
The clerk shrugged. These British types seemed to have no families at all.
"Better name a beneficiary, old man," James said diffidently.
Deedes did, mentioning first a spinster called Deedes, and then a married woman.
"Ma sisters," he explained, almost glad to have touched them across the years. It had been so long. And he wondered about Mrs. Standen, who had been kind to him.
The clerk handed him a bulging envelope. Due to some entrenched fantasy about French military life, he at first assumed the envelope to contain contraceptives, and he blushed a deep crimson.
"Your pay," James explained.
Later in the afternoon they were assigned to a tent containing twenty-two men, mainly British, Rhodesian and South African. Throughout the camp men lay on their palliasses smoking and drinking, playing cards, listening to pop on portable radios and boasting about women. Sometimes they talked about money—the prices of drink, cigarettes, petrol and cars in different countries—and sometimes about blacks, and how best to handle them. No man was obliged to reveal his past, but most did. There were a few, like Ernie, a porter from Covent Garden, who related and embroidered their private histories with inexhaustible gusto. Others, like Drake, ex-paratrooper and big-time burglar, would draw aside a curtain briefly and only on rare occasions of longing and nostalgia. Some had been approached personally, but the majority had responded to newspaper advertisements in Bu-lawayo, Johannesburg and London. The hearty giant Denis Diamond, who lost no time in soliciting Caffrey's friendship, carried about the fateful newspaper cutting as if it were a snapshot of his beloved. He had seen it in the Johannesburg Star and he called it "my lucky star." It was only three lines long:
Any fit young man looking for employment with a difference at a salary well in excess of £100 per month should telephone 838-5202/3 during business hours. Employment initially offered for six months. Immediate start.
The tent smelled of booze and cigarette smoke in the evening; of bad breath at night; of musty blankets and shaving soap at dawn; of gun grease and ammunition boxes in the morning; and always of sweat, arrogance and crisp paper money. In this loose fraternity of adventurers, old soldiers, convicts and idealists, time and familiarity proved to be the parents of acceptance. Yesterday's conscripts were today's veterans, lauding it over the newcomers, assessing their reactions and pouncing on the weak with the blind cruelty of children.
On the first evening they baited Deedes. Denis Diamond lay on his palliasse stroking his big, bare stomach.
"The assault course," he trumpeted loudly, "is the worst I've known. A killer. I've seen hardened paras, veterans of Indochina, sick to their guts before they've gone halfway."
"You don't look up to it, Haggis!"
"Whose idea was it to put the alligator in the water
jump?"
"Laval did it. He's in the Blue Berets. They're the ones you don't want to meet on a dark night. Torture their own grandmothers."
"He's bringing in unarmed combat, they say. Compulsory judo, jujitsu, karate, knife fighting, the lot. Laval says he doesn't want anyone around who can't kill with his bare hands."
"Yes," ruminated Denis Diamond, watching the prostrate form of Deedes out of the corner of his eye, "discipline's tightening up. Route marches before breakfast, ten-mile runs with full equipment in the heat of the day."
James, too, was watching Deedes, and he felt that things had gone far enough. Persecution of any sort represented to Deedes what the playful black terrier can mean to the infant toddler—the image of terror. In one respect James' education had fitted him to deal with such a situation: in a perpetual motion of snakes and ladders, he had risen to the top of one institution only to start at the bottom of the next.
He stood up and looked about him. He was tall and broad shouldered.
"My friend Malcolm Deedes," he said slowly, "is a veteran of the war and the campaign against Mau Mau."
"Which war?" Someone tittered.
"He's the sort of man it's best to treat with respect."
"Are you his guardian angel, blondy?" said Ernie, the porter from Covent Garden.
"My name is James Caffrey."
There followed a moment of silence, a judgment, a barrier beyond which he would have to argue with his fists. But he had won the day; the baiting of Deedes ceased abruptly. He was tempted to advise the old Scot to get out while he could to remind him of the futility of earning money in order to pay for one's own funeral. But Deedes' immobile, upturned face was so possessed by sadness, understanding and tragedy that James shrank from saying anything which might be mistaken for rank presumption and youthful naivete.
The lights went out and the tent soon resounded with the hearty, oblivious snores of warriors, of men without women. Deedes lay motionless on his back and his cigarette glowed like a firefly in the darkness.
James, too, lay awake, reflecting on an eventful day. Perhaps he had underrated Soames and Soames' power. His mission, as he understood it, entailed more than common soldiering; he was expected to rise rapidly in Laval's esteem, to work his way into the Commandant's confidence, to ensure that France alone did not benefit from the hard-earned victory of Western civilization. He thought about Laval. The man inspired fear. Deedes stirred restlessly beside him; poor Deedes. How would he survive the assault course? James could amost hear Laval's metallic laugh—the panther's litany to the pig's lameness. Deedes would have to be protected. James Caffrey shuddered briefly, then fell asleep, anxious now to postpone the confrontation which he had impatiently awaited since his arrival in Africa: the iconoclast's visit to his own shrine. As he slept, his life rolled towards him like a coil of barbed wire.
TWELVE
the colonel's bulky shoulders now erupted. The steel shaft of his club flashed under a pale, Anglican sun, and his pinkish eyes, formerly blind witness to the death of an imperium, focused without hope on the flight of a golf ball as it described a drunken arc to the right and vanished into the shadows of a dense copse—almost certainly lost. The Colonel's golfing companion, his elder son, James, refrained from comment or commiseration. It was safer so. For this was a daily pilgrimage, a ritual act of faith in which the arithmetic was everything. Thrusting his rawhide bag at his caddie, Colonel Caffrey began to stomp indignantly towards the offending copse.
James, predictably, had sent his own ball straight down the fairway and within easy reach of the green. Walking across the grass, he ran a hand through his fair hair, pulling it back from his forehead, the automatic gesture of a personality measured by its actions. His younger brother, Alex, had been different, frail and dark, a Greek. Reaching his ball, James selected the appropriate iron for a short, high chip on to the green, poised himself, allowed the basic lessons to run across his mind like stock-exchange ticker tape—then held back. The ball remained perched on its tuft. He looked across towards his father and again flicked back his hair, this time with a trace of nervousness. Alec's death had been the final injustice, a blow from which the family would never recover.
James began to walk towards the copse, where the Colonel's increasingly unmethodical and lackadaisical investigations suggested despondency bordering on despair. The son saw then that his father was already,obsolete, weighed down by a closing universe where fatigue, claustrophobia and the shadow of advancing death competed to consume his shrunken soul. The old man's ball was truly lost.
He had come to love Alec. Yet if James probed the tissue of his memory he could unearth no premonition of the brotherly love which had flared up like hot sulphur; he could discern no evidence of any earlier emotion save perhaps a kind of tolerant surprise at having a brother who was neither physically strong, nor successful in class, nor distinguished according to any of the accepted avenues of advancement. Essay prizes and shooting trophies, inscribed editions of Milton for reading aloud, engraved medallions for military expertise, scarves and blazers for prowess, small cash prizes for character: none of these had come Alec's way. James had stooped to conquer, but Alec, dark of hair and eye, his generous mouth twisted in a smile which hovered between laughter and tears—Alec had harvested only weeds and a brother's distant tolerance. Until suddenly he made the world his own.
On the day in early summer when he crossed the fairway to help search for his father's golf ball, James was an undergraduate of twenty-two and Alec was already dead. Across the ocean of time which five years represents to an adolescent, he remembered another Sunday, a school lunch of wafer-thin roast beef, small, hard potatoes and artificial whipped cream. After lunch he had stood in the main corridor of the "House" over which he ruled, watching the smaller boys file dutifully to their rooms, a feudal lord in the spawning tank of the bourgeois state. The young ones had allowed their rabbit eyes to nibble at his godlike outer shell, inviting simultaneously a rebuke and an embrace.
Then Alec walked past, alone, unwashed, late.
"Alec."
"Yes?"
"You're late."
The boy stood.
"Go to your room, then."
At such moments Alec made him feel as their father had once unguardedly felt in the presence of Gandhi: superfluous. Yet the Colonel had never feared for the Mahatma's soul as James now feared for Alec's, particularly on this day of rest, when the boy's blatant trespasses into the furnace brown of the Berkshire heaths and woods suggested a squalid riot of bacchanalian indulgence whose limits could only be guessed at. Sitting in his Matins pew through another pedestrian sermon ("A few days ago," the preacher began, "I happened to meet a Japanese, a man like you and me . . .") it came to him that his faith had gone. Not that his belie: had ever ventured deep into the spiritual domain; God hac taken His place as an administrative proposition, a linchpin in the absence of which things would fall apart. Now they had the ethics of emptiness took possession of him; and in place of a rational conviction there was suddenly (and perhap belatedly) burning sands strewn with sun-drenched limbs thighs, breasts ... Californian vamps chasing around the sedate quadrangles of the puritan nursery. From across the aisle, Alec's twisted smile mocked him. For the first time he had come erect in chapel; he stood to sing, flushed with shame. Only the unexpected unnerved him, whereas Alec had fretted in the expectation of puberty, doodling charcoal spires on the bathroom wall and endowing mundane objects with the charm of invention.
When Alec smiled at him across the aisle, he was forced to bend. Sitting close to the gold-clothed altar, in the shadow of the pulpit, the boy had for months past taunted James with his pagan smile. Yet Alec had the faith. And James, left with piety devoid of belief, authority without philosophy, rebelled against his brother's manifest sanctity and swore to follow him into the Berkshire wastes, to nail him to his hidden sin.
The after-lunch rest period passed in silence. As two fifteen, the moment of release, approached, his tension grew. He brushed his hair carefully, easing it into perfect position with his hand, then tried to see himself as others might see him, to strip himself of the aura of habitual self-acceptance. Then he followed Alec. They rode iron bicycles into the sighing trees. The Roman pursues the Greek; when he has struck him down, he will preserve his half-finished poem for posterity and build a fine, mannerist grave; the Roman, who will consume what he destroyed, wants to be loved, in spite of his power. James had left the groves of virtue behind him, he had wrapped his strong thighs around Alexander's stallion, women waited in the merest chiffon, waited in cities doomed to fall to his irresistible advance. They travelled slowly, at a distance. Alex's machine had so many faults and vices that it barely progressed, and its dreamy charioteer, clutching a towel, a bag of sin and a book, swayed from one side of the road to the other, amid the streaming violet rhododendrons, the occasional fluffy blossoms. Truancy and debauch. Luxuriant, prodigal flowers, concealing gaudy girls, fecund and waiting. James pedalled. The fingers which gripped the gleaming steel of his handlebars were soap-clean, not olive and nicotine stained, as were Alec's. Taut and white, James longed to be a Brueghelian youth, heavy and brown, lolling in scented pastures with lassitudinous girls.
He felt now the full inferiority which is the pursuer's tribute to his victim. In following, he acknowledged, was possessed, existed for; and was ignored. He recognized in Alec's innocence his freedom, and therefore his superiority. Talent was in pursuit of genius, northern steel of southern wine. Faced with anticlimax and emptiness, the void left by his own growth and his own loss of faith, he chose instead climax and blood, the centurion's grave.
Alec had a pink bicycle with no crossbar, an old girl's bike which had belonged to his sister, Elaine, and which he had rescued, refurbished and rejuvenated six months after her death. His mother's eyes spoke of sacrilege, but no voice was sounded because they understood that according to his own standards of the sacred and the profane he was paying homage to his sister by adopting her iron horse as his own. It was on the same bicycle that Elaine had met her commonplace death. James followed him on a large and efficient black Raleigh, fascinated by his own shadow on the road, the judgment of the sun, and surrendering gradually to the heat of the afternoon, to the multilayer dream cake of hope and ambition, to the sense of being ...
Thus dreaming, he almost missed Alec's first unexpected move. Alec had stopped at a barrow to buy flowers. On reflection, James was not surprised. The flowers ruled out devil worship, parachuting and speleology, and they turned the odds against nudism and masturbation (unless there were hidden depths to Alec at which he could not guess).
He pursued his brother through the afternoon. Alec, though two years younger than himself, had a woman. Once again the sun judged him on the soft, impressionable tarmac. Wasps, dragonflies, tiger-striped bees, cabbage whites and golden emperors spun past them, in a dream. They rode on past pubs and inns and gabled, mock-Tudor hotels serving teas and expensive but unimaginative dinners to the itinerant bourgeoisie. They penetrated a world of toy mansions, of large cars sleeping on broad gravel driveways, of quaint wooden signs, of menacing Alsatians, of rural seclusion supported by a hidden urban toil. The two boys looked, but did not see; it ffas their England.
At the village of Hillthorn, Alec turned off the road and up a rutted gravel track. After a few yards he abandoned the struggle against the incline and dismounted, clutching his flowers, his book, his package and his pink bicycle. At the crest of the hill, beside the parish church, stood a cluster of ivy-grown cottages, thatched and sleepy. Here then, in one of those cosy nests, there waited the living flesh whose honey kisses and scented embraces had seduced an innocent child. James trudged up the hill, his tongue crusted with the dry salt of frustration, of desire interpreted as duty, of impotence disguised as vigilance.
Alec leaned his bicycle against a tree and disappeared into the church. The olive boy pushed open the oak door, stepped down onto cool stone, faced the altar, bent his knee quickly and crossed himself. Deep in the shadows a man was kneeling in prayer; when, some moments later, James cautiously followed his brother in, it was in time to see two meh embrace lightly in the shadows of a sturdy Norman pillar of stone. Then the boy laid his flowers at the foot of the altar; he kneeled and the man knelt beside him. James pressed his warm cheek to the cool of the stone, then released the cotton fibres of his collar from the heat of his neck. Alec and the man were still. A bird sang out, and forgot. The man, whose profile he at last recognized, rose from his knees and went out in sandalled silence, another Greek, returning a few moments later with the parson. They laughed, briefly, as if to stress that God was not offended by laughter. Alec took the parson's hand gravely, then followed the two men outside to the drunken gravestones, the weeds growing strong from the eyes of the dead. James watched from a distance, and he remembered Elaine, Alec's twin, remembered how the horizontal bond between them had proven more real than the vertical link between mother and daughter.
James rode back to school, limp with self-loathing.
"He's gone off," the middle-aged man said to Alec, lighting a cigarette.
"I expect he's still watching."
"No, he's gone."
The man, whose name was Martin Arbuthnot, a schoolmaster by vocation, took a rough-hewn stone and laid it carefully on a layer of soft, gray cement, smoothing the lather over the crevices with a trowel. They were mending a wall. Alec watched the stone come to rest in an ordered universe whose centre of gravity was love. He was sorry that Martin had forgotten that he, too, smoked.
"Perhaps he thought I had a girl," Alec said.
Martin Arbuthnot's eyes danced unhappily, and two chasms opened up to scar his elongated, big-chinned countenance, lines which etched their story from the bridge of a large nose to the corners of a wide, suffering mouth.
Alec said: "I'm sorry, Martin, that was silly."
A hand came to rest, as he had known it must, on his shoulder; the third finger was missing, shot away in 1942. The schoolmaster allowed the silence to spin itself out; thus would he turn the potter's wheel through a long, Christian afternoon, moulding England's future. The parson, sensing torture in the air, began to study the boy as if he were the Scriptures, as if the oval dial of his face, the greenish skin and the black hair were a sacred text. A naturally shy man, the parson had tutored himself to be more direct than was strictly desirable.
"It is good of you both to come," he said, as if they did not know. "To help out."
But the man and the boy were dreaming—the man, of that distant, desert war, when the sands had at first run true for the German dialectic and Rommel's armour had proven too much for English understatement; the boy, of the schoolmaster's daily feasts of Nescafe and biscuits, distributed at eleven in the morning among the more advanced students of history and at nine in the evening among the brethren in Christ, the young Anglicans. Of whom James would have no part.
Martin Arbuthnot laid another stone on the wall; Alec was lagging behind in his work.
"I liked your Luther essay," Martin said, abruptly.
The parson showed signs of interest.
"You grasped something about Luther's quarrel with Erasmus which can easily be missed. I suppose our own prejudices
incline us towards Erasmus, towards free will and optimism. A rational, humanistic approach to faith is something we can't resist whether it's possible or not. Yet it was Luther who guided the Church back to God, to the Scriptures, and not Erasmus. You brought that out well, Alec. Luther was a man in pain; your essay had a rare quality of pain."
Alec thought: "Martin is good, the best person I know. He is spiritual and sensitive. He was brave in the war and he is against war."
Soon Martin went inside the church again, and after what seemed to him a decent interval Alec followed, leaving the parson a solitary mason toiling under a pale, tepid sun. They regarded one another in silence. A wasp entered through the open vestry door, assessed the amenities, and flew out. A fifteenth-century squire, a man of stone, a patron of the church (so the Latin said) and a terrorist (it did not add), returned Alec's scrutiny with an air of timeless patience. Of course, there was a place in the world for soldiers, for James. They had their role—gallant, loyal, fearless—in that richly coloured, finely woven tapestry to which Martin's teaching had introduced him, medieval Christendom. That ordered world of brown monks and rich, subtle prelates decked out in jewels, their hearts (evidently) closer to God and His message than appearances might suggest; of kings concerned with the administration of the realm (how commonplace an error it was to suppose that they had wanted to rule, to dominate); of artisans, journeymen, guilds, turreted, one-dimensional towns and ports with their merchants grown fat on the wool trade, walls and turrets with scaling ladders and vats of hot oil and tiny figures in vermilion-and-orange tights hurtling back into space, rebuffed; and the soldiers, the knights in armour, worried about money and feudal dues, obligations, tithes, annates, payments in kind and payments in money, shares in foreign plunder—James' sphere, James bearing a lance of unimaginable weight.
They had begun to polish candlesticks. It reminded him of polishing the brass of his hated belt and gaiters in preparation for cadet day, for the pain and humiliation of being bossed about in yet another subordinate capacity by Warrant Officer James Caffrey, of being made to crawl across fields and through ditches, mouthing obscenities like "shape, shine shadow, silhouette, movement." Martin had once been a soldier, it was true. But in that distant war banality was conspicuously absent, civilization and cultures were locked in deadly combat. Captain Arbuthnot had been swept into the Armageddon of two Weltgeister; for that, he was to be revered. Alec trembled, and the candlestick almost slipped from his grasp. Eternity was dented.
The Colonel's ball, there could be no doubt, was lost. Even James could not locate it—or would not, his father suspected, chewing the bitter cud of the compounding years.
"I lose a stroke," he grunted irritably, as if hoping that his son would reprieve him by an act of illegal mercy.
He tossed a new ball over his head and, he made sure, on to the fairway.
This weary, hopeless gesture reminded James of weekend meals at home in the days when Alec was still alive. Returning to his own ball, he executed without fuss an economical chip shot, a flick, a bend of the knee, as if wiping a speck of dust from the ground. The ball beat the bunker in the air, spun heavily, hit the green, rolled a few yards and stopped dead within two feet of the hole.
"Christ!" the Colonel said.
Alec would begin the meal with a head inclined in prayer.
"Holier than thou," the Colonel would mutter.
"You make your father angry, Alec," his mother would say.
"It's that damned fellow Arbuthnot," the Colonel would add. "He's supposed to teach you history, isn't he?"
Alec would always begin calmly, like Sisyphus.
"History is the study of the past. In the past men believed in and worshipped God. And it is through these men that God has touched me."
"Through Martin, you mean," James said.
"Luckily Martin does not reciprocate your animosity towards him."
"He is a saint, of course."
"Must you quarrel again?" their mother inquired.
Alec ran a piece of bread around the rim of his plate, absorbing the gravy.
"I'm not the only one who has found Martin worth listening to. If you can't see anything in him, so much the worse for you."
"He simply likes boys."
"Must he be a saint? His love is powerful and expresses itself in many ways. You cannot see that because your spirit is narrow, and so you are afraid."
The pudding arrived and steamed consolingly, while Mrs. Caffrey began to sing of cream and sugar and "have enough".
"What I cannot in my own narrowness of spirit fathom," the Colonel began, when the first intake of hot apple had reached his stomach wall, "is why you believe Christ to be a German."
"A German?" said Alec.
"Is it not the case that Arbuthnot teaches you that the last war was a mistake?"
"He thinks that all wars are mistakes."
"Really? So I suppose I risked my life for nothing?"
"It doesn't help to personalize the issue. Martin, after all, fought in the desert, and lost a finger. He was decorated."
"He doesn't let one forget, it either," James said.
"Of course not."
"Why 'of course'?"
"Because if I advocate the abolition of private property in houses, you will trust my motives more if I am known to own a house myself."
"I'd say you were a bloody fool, in that case," said the Colonel.
"Surely it must be clear to the smallest of minds," said Alec with mounting anger, "that Martin's war record puts his opposition to wars in general in its correct perspective. What might otherwise have been attributed to cowardice emerges as a sincerely held conviction."
"Men grow soft," the Colonel said, "in schools."
"You have to admit," said James, "that Martin's pacifism plus decorations add up to a remarkably alluring image for young chaps in search of a John the Baptist."
"That's well put," said Mrs. Caffrey, leading her napkin across her mouth.
"I stand corrected," Alec said.
"Why must you always adopt that self-pitying tone, Alec," she rebuked him mildly. "Is that how Christ was?"
"I am not," Alec said with the slow emphasis which was a warning signal, "to be likened to Jesus Christ."
"I was always taught that Christ made sacrifices on behalf of others," the Colonel said. "Your action in leaving the School Cadet Force, in abandoning the defence of this country, strikes me as a remarkably selfish action."
"Had it not been for James——" his mother began.
"Yes, yes, James this, James that."
"And what of your National Service?" the Colonel boomed. "What squalid performance are we to expect from you when your time comes?"
"Martin has no doubt fed you the answer," James said.
"As a matter of fact, he hasn't."
"But if all wars are mistakes-"
"They are. But I won't help to prevent them by shirking my service."
"Ha!" bellowed the Colonel. "You don't mind shirking the School Cadet Force."
"National Service is one thing, the Cadet Force is another. Everyone has to do National Service. If it's wrong, one has to fight it some other way. By voting or something. But the School Cadet Force, as Martin points out, is different; its social background is elitist; its atmosphere and its ethic tend to glorify war and the profession of arms."
"If you had been alive and conscious in 1940, my boy, when death was raining down over this country, when one nation after another was falling to Hitler, you'd have been damned grateful for the School Cadet Force, elitist or not." The Colonel was shrouded in cigar smoke.
"And what about the Russians now?" Mrs. Caffrey asked. "Are you going to stand by and leave it to James to stop them from trampling all over us, taking children from their parents and putting them in state farms, abolishing marriage, killing all the religious people like yourself, setting up atheism and materialism everywhere?"
"Be careful not to offend your beloved eldest," Alec said.
Mrs. Caffrey looked blank.
"He is himself an atheist," Alec explained, smiling wanly. His eye rested on James. "Or perhaps you haven't told your mother?"
"Don't be too clever, my boy," the Colonel said. "Do you mind if I smoke?" Alec said. "Because if you do, I'm afraid I'll have to break off this delightful conversation and retire to the garden."
They stared at him, as if for the first time. Then James reached in his trouser pocket and offered Alec a cigarette.
"A fellow turned up at the club today," the Colonel began at lunchtime several weeks later, "in a large white car. A trifle ostentatious. Summer suit, corn coloured, with a red shirt and a flashy Paisley scarf. He looked the place over, very much at his ease, and then he came inside and said he wanted to see the manager."
"Good gracious," said Mrs. Caffrey, "the manager!" "I told him I was the club secretary. Whereupon he announced that he was thinking of taking up golf and joining a club."
Mrs. Caffrey cornered a spray of garlic and pushed it to the edge of her plate, where it evidently belonged. Her face was alive.
"I asked him if he could name three references," the Colonel said. "He gave me to understand that there would be no difficulty about that. Apparently many of the club members are, as he put it, 'clients' of his."
"He sounds to have been very common," Mrs. Caffrey said.
"My impression also. Sort of voice you hear in the Edg-ware Road and among the fruit stalls in Praed Street." "So what did you say?" asked James.
"I explained to him that the testimonials we required should not be based upon any business connection. He wanted to know what was wrong with business connections."
James laughed, an Aryan bell.
"I further put it to him that we required of new members a minimum standard of golfing ability. He said, 'But I join to learn, no? How do I learn, if I don't join?' "
Everyone laughed at the Colonel's assumed accent, except Alec.
"I hope you told him," James said, wiping away the laughter like an excrescence, a depravity, "that rabbits hold up play."
"That is precisely what I did say. 'Rabbits?' he says, 'you have rabbits here?'"
Alec might have laughed; a bond, slender as cotton, had for a moment joined him to his father, to the common environment. Certain shadows deepened across the olive face and were then flushed out and executed.
"So go on," prompted James.
"There seemed nothing for it but to shame him away. Took him out onto the first tee, gave him a driver and a couple of balls and pointed in the direction of the green. A crowd gathered round him in a jiffy."
Five years later, playing on this same course, James Caffrey remembered having laughed; and remembered the brown stare of the ancestor above the sideboard.
The Colonel warmed to his story.
"A short chap, not more than five-five, like a barrel around ^the waist. He grips the driver halfway down the shaft, swings, takes off, misses the ball by ten feet, grinds the handle into his breadbasket and sinks moaning to the ground. Then he went half mad. Big crowd gathered around him. He begins flaying the air and cursing everything in sight. Then Rodney Blake appeared and I knew we'd have a bit of fun. 'Excuse me, sir,' said Rodney, with that debonair charm of his, 'but I think I can make a helpful suggestion, if you will permit.' The yid agreed. 'Well,' said Rodney, 'in golf we have a number of clubs and you are free to strike the ball with any you choose. Take this one, for example—it's called a putter. See how easy it is to strike the ball with the putter.' Rodney stroked the ball about ten yards from the tee. So this bloke seizes the putter and begins to putt his way up the fairway like a madman, running along and sometimes hitting the ball before it had stopped, like hockey. He must have taken at least ninety strokes on the first hole, with everyone running to keep up with him and applauding, and this yid as pleased as punch with himself."
James' laugh was loud and steady, like a hunting horn.
Alec Caffrey muttered, "Reynard the Jew has broken cover. Run, Reynard, run."
But no one heard.
"I took him back to my office and tried to put it as tactfully as I could. Said it would be best if he made the golfing grade first. He asked me straight what I had against him. I said, 'Nothing.' He told me to be candid. I said I was not required to be, either by law or by my own code; it was a private club. We took on those we wanted and turned away those we didn't want. He was persistent, though. Was he perhaps of the wrong social background? I said that we didn't think in those terms at all, and that I personally had a phobia against the damned word 'class.' I assured him that our members were engaged in every type of profession. Well, he just stood there, fat and ridiculous."
"So you brought out your flit-gun?" It was Alec.
"Frankly, he turned rather nasty. He produced a lot of mangled jibberish about a free country and discrimination and all that. His English deteriorated badly. I told him bluntly that it was up to the English to decide what to do with their own country. He told me he had been a British citizen for twenty-three years. I reminded him I was the club secretary and not an immigration officer. He said he would write to his MP. I told him to go ahead; people had tried to blackmail us that way before. Governments might order about private citizens at will where he had come from, but not here. Time he got that straight."
"My God," James said, "what a lunatic the man must be."
"The effrontery of some people," said his mother.
The Colonel had resumed his eating and recharged his glass with claret—the Caffreys had taken up serious wine drinking only after their retirement; an aunt had died, leaving a legacy. As he chewed, he breathed; hot spouts of air forced a noisy passage through the hair-lined channels of his fluorescent nose. Then Alec broke.
"Don't you think that I look rather like a Jew?"
His mother's napkin travelled to her mouth and his father dropped his eating utensils with a clatter. The boy carried a fixed, pained smile which remoulded the contours of his face into an exquisite mask of anguished despair. James saw then that his brother was indeed a Jew. He wanted now to keep out of this, to say nothing, but Alec, as if smelling this sudden secretion of fear, this quick glandular discharge, turned on him.
"This has been all meat and strawberries to you, hasn't it? Blond boy, strong and upright. Clean blood." Alec swung with convulsive savagery towards his father.
"Did they never tell you, sir, that Jesus Christ was a Jew?"
"Don't shout at me, you gutless girl!" bellowed the Colonel.
Mrs. Caffrey began to cry, in earnest, convinced that the hot spurt of sperm from which Alec had sprung had nothing Semitic about it. . §
"Christ—was—a—Jew," Alec repeated, bending towards his father.
"Don't imagine I haven't heard that before."
"Well, then?"
"Well, then, the fellow who turned up today in a corn-coloured suit was not, repeat not, Jesus Christ." The Colonel paused to ruminate. "In fact, it strikes me he was damned like one of the Pharisees who hounded Christ to his death."
"I can't see," James added, "what there is to get worked up about, although I appreciate that Martin teaches the virtues of continuous spiritual passion. After all, the fellow couldn't tell a golf club from a bamboo pole."
But Alec brushed this aside, with contempt.
"Some time ago," he told the Colonel, "you explained to me the tight equation, the Gordian knot, between Hitlerism, Nazism and the German spirit, or soul. You went on to assure me that the last war had in every sense been worth fighting. Yet I was under the impression that the Nazis exterminated six million Jews."
His father removed his spectacles, then replaced them, a gesture of reflection and conciliation.
"I know how you feel, Alec, and it's all to your credit. That sort of discrimination had to be put to an end once and for all. We put an end to it. Although, as I've often said before, it's often forgotten that the Germans' original plan was to send the Jews to Palestine, which was pretty good common sense. Afterwards, of course, things got out of hand. You know that I'd be the last to condone killing a fellow because of his race, creed or—race."
"What sort of discrimination is OK?"
"Now calm down, my boy, or I won't talk to you. No issue is so important that it entitles us to forget our manners. If Arbuthnot hasn't taught you that, so much the worse for him. To answer your question. There's a handy, off-the-peg, ready-to-wear distinction which has stood this island in good stead over the centuries—the distinction between the public and the private life. We have taken in Jews from all over the world. The East End has become one vast ghetto. We have been prepared to accept the consequences. A Jew can become an MP, go to the Palace, be knighted by the Queen. He can, if he wishes, join the Communist party, an opportunity of which, I am told, many avail themselves. He can set up in business and own half the building property in England. He can hog the market and drive everyone out of business. That's one thing. Frankly, I'm for it, though I think that the Jews would for their own sakes be happier in their own country. That's one thing. That's what we stand for and what we fought for in the war, since you ask. Good. Now, my home, my private home, the home I have bought with my own money, my own savings and my own sweat—surely I can invite in whom I like? Am I not a free man? Am I taking away anyone else's freedom? The club is the same; it's private, it's ours, we do as we please and mind our own business. Others can do the same."
"And you agree?" Alec shot at James.
"You can't legislate tolerance," James said.
"But you, James, would you have admitted this Jew to the club?"
"Father obviously has to think of the other members. As secretary, he is duty bound to them."
"Exactly," said Mrs. Caffrey.
Alec lit a cigarette, a gesture to which his parents had of necessity reconciled themselves. He blew smoke from his mouth, upwards, tilting back his head. Then he laughed; the obscenity of it struck them all.
"I hereby declare James Caffrey guilty of the worst sort of cowardice: the cowardice of the German people."
Years later, when Alec was dead, the tall young man would find this verdict stroking his neck, causing him to pull the long, golden hair from his eyes.
Later they journeyed, brother and brother, to the Welsh mountains, gray and sea-lipped. There the mandarin preacher Martin Arbuthnot measured the athlete against precipitous, rain-soaked rock faces and against a brother's vulnerability. Faced with the mountain, the uncompromising death-face shrouded in cloud,' James feared Alec's life, his triumph, almost as sharply as he dreaded his death, the long perspective of the broken insect in the gorge below. He had already remonstrated with Arbuthnot, threatened him with the moral odium of the death of a pupil known to be weak, untrained and nervous. He appealed to his mother's fears, denounced the schoolmaster to his father, even taunted Alec with wanting to be what he was not. Alec smiled, occasionally, and insisted that if he fell, it would be into the arms of the Lord. Privately, with the tender touch of the priest, Martin Arbuthnot explained James to Alec.
"He's afraid, but we should not despise him for that. He loves you, so long as you remain in his eyes what he wants you to be. But he fears the appearance of a new dimension in you, the spirit which carries a man to the summit. The day you scale that peak, he will know himself for what he truly is. He fears God, he fears the unknown, he fears the moral serenity of the weak. He does not want to believe in a spiritual force which can take possession of a man and endow him with all the strength of the muscled athlete. His world will fall apart. He wants to read a carnal link between us, something he can understand and condemn. You bewilder him; in the end it will be you who will have to cradle him through the dark moments of life, when his courage runs into barren pastures. I cannot teach him. His resistance towards me is now total. He will pass his exams, he will make the grade always—his grade. Oxford will take him, gladly. He will excel. He has read all about Luther and the Reformation, out of duty and a certain respect for what has occurred. He sees that Luther had three main motives and three subsidiary motives; that Elizabeth's foreign policy was dictated by three principal factors; that three main causes will explain the coming of the English Civil War and that its drama was played out in three acts. Power and success will mature him, like brandy butter. He will preside over committees, birthday honours will rain down on him, he will discern three main aspects to any question, and three possible solutions, and his wife will charitably prevail upon him from time to time to invite poor Alec to stay for the weekend. I fear he is doomed to live out his life in this world oblivious to the Creator of all things."
They lived in a small stone cottage, under the shadow of Cwyneth, whose north face resembled a witch's grimace, and they constructed log fires and hearty meals with silent, masculine efficiency.
By the time they had reached the region of the mountains, James saw that history was now exacting its price for a protracted freedom. Spartan England, in order to atone for its morbid joys, its cloistered orgasms, had to sacrifice its frailer members on barren hills, in secret ritual. The vague premonition of Greeks and Romans in James' mind had now yielded to one of Aryans and Jews; the congenital Jew would be awarded an Aryan burial among the Druid boulders of the land, the land which can never belong to the Hittites.
Martin's mellow voice became the familiar, binding element for all of them. There were times when it seemed as if he had never worn anything but corduroy breeches, a beard, a windbreaker and boots with rubber studs, as if the remote, dreamy classes in late afternoon, when the ancient world of their forebears mellowed to a hymn and their young hearts embraced papal bulls, the donation of Constantine, Thomas-ian arguments of fine subtlety, salty Elizabethan compromises —as if these aromatic hours had had no other purpose than to prepare them for this trial on the thunder-capped peaks which barred the way impenetrably to the smooth, reassuring sea, to the shallow sands of the Menai Strait, the long hump of Anglesey, the mild promise of Puffin Island. Caged in this wilderness, they dreamed of cafes and cinemas and girls and the homely revelry on Llandudno pier. Alec, in his fear of heights, thought often of these safe delights; and watched a small car wending its way along the gray ribbon road in the valley far below, its occupants safe and warm, within reach of civilization. His brother's stern, watchful kindness quickened his apprehensions. James had a way of giving hints about toeholds and fingerholds, about knots and belaying, which contrived to imply that death was always around the corner. High in the mountains, where the wind spat and snarled and words were lost forever in the gorges, James seemed to be saying that fear was death, that to doubt oneself for a moment was to knit a shroud. Martin, who alone contrived to recharge the batteries of Alec's courage, warned him against James' "physical superstition," against the excessive vulnerability which overcame the athlete who lost sight of any source of comfort or strength beyond muscle, rope and willpower. The schoolmaster's serene confidence, his almost total hold over Alec, drove James into a mood of sullen depression and withdrawal. In the evenings, when they gathered around a fire to smoke and talk, he remained silent, watching the flames lick the passive logs with sly love and implicitly condemning all patterns of words, all elaborations, as effeminate, affected and dishonest.
In the shadow of the mountains, Alec became nervous and strident. He talked too much. He dogmatized about the foundations of the novel and the meaning of the Einsteinian revolution in physics, themes about which he knew little. He branded those who questioned his theories "philistine," and his lips were purple with fear. Now and then, Martin would rebuke him and he would collapse like a paper bag, empty and brown. Of the six on the rope, he was the slowest. Faith failed to develop his muscles; the predictable inadequacy of his body to the exertions demanded of it was apparent time and again. James watched him; and Alec occasionally cursed jtfartin for contriving to humiliate him in front of his brother, j,is "worst enemy," as he put it on one, over-wrought occasion. The power of prayer was temporarily liquidated.
On the final day they faced Cwyneth's supreme test, the dangerous climb known as the Bear. They turned in early; the dying embers of the fire sent ghosts dancing across the ceiling of the darkened room. Watching his brother grope for the refuge of sleep, James felt the boy's taut nerves jerking him back from the brink of unconsciousness. Alec twioted and groaned through the long, coarse-blanketed hours. The fire died, the night's chill invaded them, men and boys snored roughly, sucking in rest as they consumed food—healthily. Alec, James knew, had a neurosis about sleep; on waking he invariably calculated the total in hours, then adjusted himself accordingly, preparing either to feel "worn out" or "good." Martin slept through the night, easily. Lying awake on his back, James felt this to be the supreme betrayal—to have thus abandoned Alec to his torment. He would have liked, now, to have reached out to his brother and said, "I shan't sleep until you do. I'll look after you on the mountain tomorrow because I love you. I always have." But one did not say things like that, unless one were Martin, a gusher.
Theirs was a false God.
At five in the morning, James was still awake. Alec appeared to be dozing fitfully, perhaps from nervous exhaustion. The others twisted and turned against the incoming cold, wrapping themselves deeper in their blankets, hugging their limbs together for warmth, fending off the remorseless advance of a day in the company of death.
Fresh snow had fallen. It lay crisp and thick, carpeting the grass and stones and the mountain itself a Muscovite white. The peak of Cwyneth was lost in cloud, and a sharp wind blew down the valley in persistent lamentation. Prisoners of their own freedom, gaunt, stringy boys, their flesh gray from lack of sun, victims of a dry, pitiless ethic, they pushed back their breakfast of cereal and eggs in silence, afraid of what they might say. Then James took Alec to the door, compelling him to gaze at the mountain and to feel the cutting wind in his bones. The frail boy swayed, a twig; but James had passed beyond the reach of words and knew only the grim ritual of the stones. He felt strongly that Martin, in choosing to sleep the night through, in abandoning Alec to his lonelv vigil had revealed his complete lack of fatherly love.
It was almost two miles to the base of the Bear. Alec arrived pale and exhausted; his skin gleamed yellow and luminous, like parchment, against the paper-white of the snow, and his ebony eyes were large with apprehension. The jagged rock face confronted them now, mocking their premonitions with its real presence, its weight, its blue surface of burning ice. When they began to climb, Martin was in the lead and James in the rear, behind Alec. As he climbed, reached and gripped the bitter rock with frozen fingers, Alec moaned, slipped and trembled. His trembling was no longer the small, resonant vibration of a plucked chord, but the racked shuddering of a beast cornered in the knacker's yard. He never turned back; and when James lifted him from the rock and held him upright, like a broken guy, he refused to acknowledge the hand which sustained him, so fierce was the bond which united him to the schoolmaster now lost from sight in the higher reaches. The black snow clouds began to envelop them; an advance guard of mist, a deceptively fragile veil which stroked the lungs with an ominous, abrasive caress, cocooned them in semidarkness. Suddenly the sheepless valley below had gone; the face of the great Bear leered out of the clouds in a hideous grimace.
In climbing, in defying gravity, James now felt the heavy, brittle armour of Rome, of the Aryan, the failure to understand, to sympathize. Guilt sapped his courage; he could no longer hope to launch on his own initiative the return journey. Paralyzed by the premonition of death, he stared at the Eiger chimney—a narrow, almost vertical funnel in the rock face. At the base of the chimney yawned a gap three feet wide, the open mouth of a chasm, a sheer drop two hundred feet in depth. Blasted by fierce winds, the climber had to balance on a narrow ledge, then ease himself into the chimney by bracing his feet against one wall and his back against the other. Fifteen feet high, the chimney's inner lining was smooth as satin and completely devoid of hand- and footholds. Everything—the climber's life—depended on the tension he could generate in his back, legs and pelvic muscles, on his balance (his head must remain higher than his feet) and on his nerve, his acceptance of the fact that once launched on this climb there could be no turning back. It seemed inconceivable to James that Alec would make it.
They clung to the rock face buffeted by a snarling gale which flung a man's words contemptuously down the gorge into the hidden valley below. Or swallowed them. Above them, lost in the black clouds, the peak of Cwyneth bellowed like a ship bucking through an Atlantic storm.
Martin edged his way back along the rock ledge, crouching to maintain his balance in the wind. From the narrow visor of his Balaclava helmet, his eyes shone with what seemed to James cold curiosity. He took Alec by the shoulders and peered into his face. Momentarily hope revived in James, the emergent faith of a boy in a man. But Martin merely nodded and turned back. In a flash he sensed, or thought he sensed, the force of Martin, the relevance of his teaching; it was as if a pastured valley had opened up amid the cataracts, maelstroms and eruptions of the lowering sky. In that instant he knew Alec as lonah knew the whale. Here, then, man continued man, adding a further stone to the altar of history. Here faith and endeavour fused, as once they had fused among the aesthetic, frost-bitten Northumbrian monks of Lindisfarne, and later among the Danes, with their intricate, beast-ridden code. This England was born out of sword, stone and the coloured art of monks who insisted on the values which separate man from barbarian. In this context, this spiritual climate, Alec saw Martin; it followed, then, that Alec must have excused Martin's desertion into sleep while he tossed in torment as the sublime, oblivious treason of a minor saint.
A new gust of wind, more savage than the last, brought the spitting furies up from the valley; the black snow clouds rolled from the invisible peaks. Martin nodded, perhaps, then stepped without hesitation across the chasm and vanished into the narrow funnel of the chimney, trailing a rope, an umbilical cord. In Alec's glazed eyes, the loved one fell aw it occurred to James then that if Martin were to lose
hold, if the rope failed to check his fall or broke his ba then Alec would be reprieved. Yet the notion (it was never a wish) had scarcely taken root before Martin's woollen head
was seen emerging, monstrous in its triumph, from the ere of the chimney. One boy followed another in quick succe sion into the Eiger; they were all good climbers, and stron James took his brother's hands, now, and began to rotate ant massage his limbs, sending the blood coursing through h frail body. Shouting above the shrieking wind, he warned him not to look down, to close his mind to fear, to breath steadily, to concentrate on his feet, his back, his pelvis. Then Alec was ready; his time had come. On the brink of th chasm, he swung around, as if searching for a last-minute reprieve at the discretion of his brother; in that moment his faith almost broke. But he found only a wooden smile; he saw, then, that James was hideous.
More than three years had passed.
The Colonel had once again bungled his drive from the tee; the ball bounced and tumbled along the hard surface o' the fairway, abruptly vanishing from sight on the near side of the green.
"Bunker, I'm afraid," James said.
The Colonel cursed violently. "What a bloody Jew of a shot!"
And the boy remembered.
They walked, slightly apart, glad of the third presence, the caddie, who relieved them of the obligation to speak. The Colonel's physique had deteriorated since Alec's death; his hair, which had turned a grayish white, had thinned on his scalp into clusters of oily strands, and the flesh had fallen away from his neck, revealing the vertical bones of an old man. Both knew that this game was moribund; and when the Colonel failed on his fifth attempt to extricate the ball from the bunker, they began by mutual consent the long, silent, walk back to the clubhouse.
The father noticed that since leaving the army and going up to Oxford, his elder son had let his hair grow long again, a style which he found irritating and attributed to the affectations prevalent among the jeunesse doree, the self-styled elite of contemporary Oxford.
In the clubhouse the Colonel drank gins.
"You had bad luck," James said.
"Nice of you to say so."
He remembered, then, that he had no "elder" son, only a son, one child. Alec had simply disappeared.
"He was bound to fight us all. It was in his blood."
The Colonel never referred to Alec by his name—always to "he," the faceless ghost whose blood, by some cruel miracle, was his own and whose death appeared to him no less mysterious than his life. He ordered another gin; the cigarettes he chain-smoked caused him to cough. His cheeks reddened and his eyes watered.
"Your mother preferred Elaine, of course," he ruminated. "She has never understood men, really."
Presently he fell asleep, on his fifth gin and tonic. James left him there and drove back to the large, empty house which it now seemed a mockery to call "home." The hallway smelled of polish and dry tears. He climbed the carpeted stairway quietly, taking care to avoid the steps which creaked, and pushed open the door of his mother's room. The stillness, the silence, had the positive quality of a morgue. Photographs of Elaine, Alec and himself hung, as before, on either side of the heavy mahogany wardrobe. The antimacassar on a little Victorian chair purchased in the Porto-bello road years ago, in early marriage, demanded to be smoothed down, as its meticulous owner would have wished, but he was deterred by the fragile motion of the finely embroidered white coverlet over his mother's chest. He could not see her face and he was glad of it now that it had fallen, with the cheeks sagging like water bags on the flanks of a mule. Chez elle: while asleep she ceased to dominate her house with a multitude of fussy, superfluous actions. He withdrew softly, bewildered by the lingering burden of being the one thing left in her life. He found the landing safer; he breathed again at the sight of the green-and-white regency striped wallpaper, the sedate, two-dimensional hunting prints.
In the drawing room he found a family photograph album lying on a chair. Someone, probably his mother, had been soaking up its pale nostalgia. Idly he flicked over the stiS gray pages. Recent photographs depicted him as a spruce young subaltern, tall and starched in his tropical khaki, patrolling the streets of Nicosia, the armed arbiter in a society rent by irremediable schism. On his return home he hac fallen into an involved discussion with his father about the technical aspects of "internal security," the relative merits of square and oblong formations, the use of placards in foreign languages, the dangers of warning shots fired over the heads of the crowd and the difficulty of restraining troops under the provoking circumstances of flying stones and bottles. The Colonel digressed on the "Indian mass mentality," his son on the "Mediterranean temperament." They had never been closer together.
James packed his bag, scribbled a vague, consoling note excusing himself, closed the front door quietly and turned his small sports car in the direction of Oxford.
He felt more than ever before that he had come to terms with life. The nagging unease, the striving for a sensibility foreign to his nature, which had clouded his last years at school, the years with Alec, had dissolved in the lemon groves of Cyprus. The experience on the mountain had proved decisive. In the Army he had rediscovered himself for what he was: a Roman.
On the lip of Cwyneth's chasm Alec had hesitated until a murderous fist of gale toppled him forward. To save himself he leaped with clenched eyes and shrieking nerves, and held fast to the rock ledge beyond the drop. There he swayed in the clutches of the vast sky, a twig praying for membership of an invisible tree. When his legs did eventually reach for the funnel of the chimney—preferring suicide to certain death—they were the pitiful, autonomous limbs of a broken doll; yet somehow the olive boy stuttered upwards into the chimney and out of James' line of vision.
Then he fell. The rope leaped and held, leaving him dangling twenty feet down the chasm. They hauled him up, unconscious and black in the face, and then James took the schoolmaster by the arm, swaying in the teeth of the gale under the black snow clouds, and he shouted, "So much for your God!"
For the first time in years James had begun to cry.
Alec was dead, but he had not died on the mountain. On Cwyneth he had simply failed. His God, his faith, his John the Baptist and his Greek's sensibility had all proven of no avail when it came to the simplest test. A great burden had lifted from James; he would never weep again.
The transition from the officers' mess to an Oxford college had proved almost painless. Among his new undergraduate friends the same ethos prevailed. A graceful and athletic young man with an interest in fashion (checked shirts, tapered cavalry twill trousers, shoes of beige suede, corduroy waistcoats), he had soon won acceptance in the right social circles. In his first year as an undergraduate he dined at the Bullingdon, hunted with the beagles, played rugby, squash and cricket, was invited to one party after another and escorted the most fashionable girls of the year to dances. He took his college scout's reverence for granted and absorbed with restrained pleasure the old retainer's reminiscences about the prewar years when Lord Carnival had held champagne lunches for twenty in college and when a young chap was not a gentleman unless he was responsible for at least fifty pounds' worth of damage a term. Nowadays, with so many people coming up from the grammar schools, things were no longer the same.
He worked quite hard, but without excessive enthusiasm. He got good marks for his essays, but felt under no compulsion to take such matters as history and philosophy too seriously. Faith and certainty were all very well for people like Alec, but they didn't help in "real life." His tutor, Steven Foster, regarded him with growing melancholy.
"You have talent, Caffrey. You must read, all day and all night. You've got a good mind which your school tried to ruin and the Army to annihilate. You came up here looking for a cultured interlude and the modest degree necessary for your future advancement. You've got it all wrong. Oxford today is a think-tank, a laboratory; white overalls and overtime, whole areas of cerebral space which we must be the first to conquer. Your life at present is a banal emptiness, a long weekend."
Steven Foster sat hunched in his chair, dressed in a baggy tweed suit, an old shirt missing its neck button and a pair of devastated brown shoes. His cardigan had begun to unravel around the waist. James was reluctant to take him seriously; the man was an eccentric, a quaint episode, a topic for conversation at parties.
"Did you ever hear of Madame de Stael?" Foster asked him one morning.
"Wasn't she Napoleon's daughter?"
"No, Caffrey, she wasn't. Madame de Stael was the lady who once said, 'I do not know exactly what we must believe, but I believe we must believe! The eighteenth century did nothing but deny. The human spirit lives by its beliefs. Acquire faith through Christianity, or through German philosophy, or merely through enthusiasm, but believe in something.' "
James shrugged. He worked a little harder, but remained sceptical. Foster's increasingly frenetic outbursts were easily absorbed into the smooth flow of his life. When the tutor assigned him an essay on the causes of late nineteenth-century imperialism, he made no attempt to come to terms with the economic arguments on the subject which Foster himself had recently expounded in two long, published articles. James' faith in the underlying altruism of the imperial mission, particularly as practised by Britain, remained unshaken. It was one thing to satirize his father's generation, but it was quite another to question the whole framework of conviction on which their lives had been based. Foster could compound and quote statistics until he was blue in the face. The Colonel, James had cause to know, had brought no treasure out of India. The soldiers, civil servants and teachers who had carried law, religion, hospitals, administration and technical advance to the backward areas of the world had not stuffed their pockets with loot. His own experience in Cyprus convinced him that the British, who were fending off impending communal anarchy, earned nothing for their pains except threats, curses and knives in the back
Steven Foster smiled sadly. "So you do after all believe in something?"
It was the last day of the summer term. Four weeks later news came through of the nationalization of the Suez Canal. And James had no sooner returned to Oxford in October for the new term before a telegram from his father shattered the even tenor of his life. It read:
alec in trouble. proceed aldershot soonest. father.
THIRTEEN
james was awakened shortly after midnight. Someone stood over his palliasse holding a kerosene lamp.
"The Commandant wishes to see you." The officer spoke in French.
"Me?"
"You're Caffrey?"
"Yes."
"Hurry, then."
It was James' fifth night in the camp, and it was as close and hot as the four which had preceded it. Pulling on a shirt, trousers and canvas shoes, he found himself filmed in sweat and mild apprehension. A mosquito whined around his face, its high pitch drilling a hole through the mesh of his broken sleep.
He walked through the darkness. Only the chirruping cicadas broke the absolute silence which pervaded the camp. At the Commandant's tent he paused and braced himself.
Inside the tent a couple of lamps sent shadows dancing on the canvas walls like epileptic poltergeists. Wearing the headgear of a Bedouin Arab, Laval was sitting with his feet on the table, gently massaging his face with a brown stain. He nodded curtly.
"Sit down," he commanded, motioning towards an ammunition box.
"Thanks."
For some moments the Commandant regarded him in silence. The effect of the disguise was uncanny; he was almost unrecognizable. Gradually James became aware of laboured breathing whose source proved to be a large-noset man who was crouching in the corner of the tent on a black tin trunk.
"This is my friend Armand Keller," Laval said curtly. "Armand is my ideological mentor. He is suspicious by nature. He wanted to know what you stood for. I told him, 'Nothing.' Armand wanted me to interrogate you. I said to him, 'Why disturb a baby in his sleep?' But he insisted that you were unlike the rest—a real man, intelligent ant quick."
"The English are finished, but they possess a low cunning," Keller said. He was a morose person, as dark as Laval, with heavy, almost negroid features and a curling nose which mocked the melancholic dignity of his eyes. He spoke slowly and ponderously. "As a nation you are without philosophy and introspection."
Keller relapsed into a brooding silence.
"Armand," explained Laval, "distrusts your patron Tufton. He regards the Anglo-Saxon financiers with deep suspicion. I told him that Tufton was a nonentity. Compared with Plon, he is a child. You look surprised. Now what am I to do with you?"
James shifted uneasily on his ammunition box. In the presence of this man, words withered and died. But Laval, apparently, required only an audience.
"You interest me," he said. "You have education, breeding, class. I can see that. I know England. I would have studied at the Sorbonne myself, had not the war intervened. At that time you were only an infant. And you are good-looking, fair. I like that. My friend Jean Martignac is also fair."
"The English are slow witted," Keller complained. "They are good for only one thing: spying."
Laval laughed. "What use is a slow-witted spy?" He turned back to James, at the same time picking from the table a large, Arabesque knife which he let swing from between his fingers. "Armand is sceptical of your qualities. I described to him your performance on the assault course. My God, superb athlete! I told him how you handled your rifle and equipment like a born soldier, how you vaulted walls, jumped ditches, climbed trees, hung from ropes, slithered beneath barbed wire like the best commando in the Blue Berets. And when the old Scot fell down exhausted and frothed at the mouth, you carried him on your back like some hero of the Greek legends! And behind ali this there is a stern intelligence. I recognize it; I am myself a highly educated and cultured man."
Keller sniffed, and James saw, then, that one man was but the creature, the dependant, of the other. Insects were swarming around the two lamps, battering themselves to death on the hot glass funnels. Laval caught one, as quick as a viper's tongue, but he did not crush it at once. The throbbing of its delicate wings in his hand evidently pleased him.
"Did you ever come across Odouma?" he asked James.
"The Minister of the Interior?"
"Also Minister of National Economy."
"I haven't had the opportunity."
"You will have, soon. I shall entrust him to your tender care. It's time you were given a responsibility worthy of your talents. Odouma wishes to liquidate me. One of his motorized monkeys followed us when I brought you here from Tufton's place. He has a grievance; I dissolved his sister in a bath of sulphuric acid."
Laval laughed.
"You look disconcerted, Caffrey. You have so much to learn about Africa. Come here."
He motioned James towards the table on which were spread out the tin of brown stain, a compass and a map of Thiersville which had been marked at salient points with heavy black crosses. Laval began to explain the map with the tip of his curved knife.
"I'll confide in you. You inspire confidence. If I had only known you longer, I would have employed you tomorrow. But your education is insufficient. Now look at this map: the anatomy of a coup d'etat, perfect in every respect, a blow against black barbarism. Tomorrow is a day of world-historical fulfilment. Is that not the case, Armand?"
Keller nodded sombrely. Laval stepped back from the map, dusting the dead moth from his hand. He tested the blade of the knife against his fingertip.
"Armand always becomes restless before a day of destiny. He is an ideologue, really, not a man born to action, like and I."
"What will take place tomorrow?" James asked, feeling need to break his own silence.
"Tomorrow? The end of Tukhomada. We know that regime is planning a terrible massacre of whites—men, won en and children. We must forestall him. Even so, we may too late."
"You want me to help?"
"Ah!" Laval smiled, resumed his chair and once mo applied the blacking to his face. "I fear that we canno educate a man overnight. Even so, I feel that Armand shou talk to you now. He is the high priest of our movement."
He gestured at Keller, snapping his fingers peremptorily. Keller rose, hesitated, and then swooped on the black tin trunk on which he had been squatting. As he opened the lid and surveyed the contents he let out a sigh which was almost obscene in its degree of gratification.
FOURTEEN
his father's telegram arrived late in the afternoon. He hurried at once to the station.
It was a fine autumn. The days followed one another crisp and clear, without rain. The spires of Oxford gained in stature and definition, as if to prepare the old city for the great crisis of national conscience into which it was about to be plunged.
By the time James' train arrived, darkness had fallen. All the seats were taken. He stood in the corridor and smoked. Disturbing memories reared up from behind the black glass of the carriage window, buried anxieties catapulting at him like grimacing gargoyles in a fairground tunnel of horrors. A pink bicycle . . . two men embracing in the shadows of a
Norman pillar . . . Alec falling from the Eiger chimney into
space____James had last seen his brother in July, when Alec,
now a National Serviceman, had made one of his rare visits home. At his father's insistence, James had tried to persuade him to accept a commission in the Army—but to no avail.
"Alec is adamant," he had reported to the Colonel.
"He still thinks he's Jesus Christ."
James no longer cared; Alec's spiritual serenity, his stubborn adherence to irrelevant moral principles, had long ceased to disturb him. The mountain had put an end to all that.
The train gathered speed.
James lit a cigarette and flattened himself against the window to let a fat man pass down the corridor. His father's telegram—the notion of Alec being once more in trouble-had thrown him back into the old, familiar condition of adolescent dislocation. His maturity fell away like an onion skin. Within the space of a few days world events—the Israeli advance across Sinai, the British ultimatum, the bombardment of Port Said—had generated a moral crisis which shook the ancient colleges to their foundations and brought James face to face with his own mild, instinctive patriotism. In the college hall, dons and undergraduates had gathered in passionate debate. The Master declared himself outraged by the Government's actions; Steven Foster delivered a short but pungent account of the history of British imperialism in Egypt; and the secretary of the Junior Common Room urged the non-violent sabotage of troop trains. How, exactly, such sabotage could be non-violent was far from clear to James; and indeed so vociferous and ill judged were many of the denunciations of British policy that his latent patriotism, his ultimate loyalty to "my country right or wrong," revived to the extent of his applauding a student from a northern grammar school who spoke of Nasser as if he were a roll of toilet paper. James felt keenly the mellow presence of the ancestral portraits hanging from the walls, the bearded, bright-eyed founders, benefactors, former masters and distinguished fellows whose collective voice, taken in its totality, seemed to warn that idealism must trim its sails before the compelling wind of national survival. When an economist rose to speak of oil and lifelines, James felt that an element of sanity was returning to the discussion; and when a spruce, sartorially immaculate young lawyer reminded those in the audience who were, like himself, officers in the Reserve that they owed a profound loyalty to their Sovereign, he found himself silent amid the general uproar of derision and abuse.
He changed at Didcot. The timetable had gone haywire; no sabotage, unviolent or otherwise, was required to disrupt British Railways. A sharp wind cut along the platform. He bought himself a sandwich and a cup of coffee, then stared morosely at the partisan headlines which bellowed from the newspaper hoardings. He followed a woman with pretty legs into the warmth of the waiting room; when she sat down and crossed her legs the nylon sighed on her thighs—the warm semen of love, generative fluid of males. Nervous tension worked in James like an aphrodisiac. He could guess what Alec had done, and he knew in his heart that he disapproved, yet he was hurrying, almost by instinct, to his brother's side.
The connection to Aldershot was more than an hour late. He read an evening paper from cover to cover, becoming in the process an expert on the current value of houses and secondhand cars. Alec would be sleeping in a guarded cell, no doubt, or not sleeping. A hot Sunday afternoon, rhododendrons, dragonflies and mock-Tudor inns, the pursuit to Hillthorn Church. ... The train jogged into its belated stride, past row upon row of semi-detached suburban houses, each one flashing the blue-white light of a television screen from a darkened room. He wondered, with a stutter of apprehension on behalf of Alec, whether Lemmon was still Adjutant of the First Battalion. James had served under him in Cyprus. One Sunday a British corporal had been shot down in a Nicosia street. The First Battalion was sent in to investigate. Lemmon had warned them, "A soldier slow to react will be quick to die." They cordoned off a large area and began a house-by-house search. Suddenly a boy ran from a doorway in a sea-blue vest, a young boy, dark and frail like Alec, and as he ran he was silhouetted against the sun-drenched walls of the whitewashed street. Lemmon shot him dead.
It was still dark when James reached Aldershot. He took a taxi to the barracks. His mind, like his stomach, was numbed and empty. Dirty, unshaven and tired, he felt himself to be a disgrace to the Regiment. The atmosphere of the barracks unnerved him; the polished floor of the officers' mess smelled of the familiar, pungent wax, and the steely portrait of General Chandler continued to dominate the staircase. Only one officer was at breakfast. He glanced up casually and said, "Hullo, Caffrey," with noticeable disinterest and a hint of contempt.
"Where's the Adjutant?"
"In his room, I expect."
When he reached Lemmon's room, he found the door open. Crates, packing cases and trunks were strewn about the room. James stood on the threshold, reluctant to enter; then a lavatory chain was pulled and Lemmon came out buttoning his trousers.
"Ah, Caffrey. Come about your brother?"
"Yes, sir."
"Can you see a goddam blue cummerbund lying about anywhere?"
"It's on the chair by the window."
"So it is. The CO has sworn to dine at the Cairo Club within a week, so it's white tie, regimental trousers and monkey jackets. Taking my guns as well; we used to get some quite good shooting in the Zone. Once we're installed, there's no knowing how long we may have to hang around. Like to come?"
"Not much."
"Thank God. The Regiment is going to pieces. Hundreds of reservists flooding in with chips on their shoulders. Grouse, grouse, grouse. Even the regulars are affected now. As for the officers, it seems a fellow only has to become a civilian for a month in order to forget every goddam thing we taught him. Could you strip down a Bren now?"
"I expect so."
"Keen type, I remember. How's Oxford?"
"I like it."
"Lovely protest demonstrations and sit-downs?"
"Oh yes, all that."
Lemmon fastened his web belt around his waist and found his cap.
"Come on, let's go and see your incredible brother. If you can help in any way we will be in your debt. The CO is dead scared of political scandal. Morale is low enough as it is."
"Is Alec under arrest, sir?"
"Good God, yes!"
They came out of the mess onto the main parade square. James remembered that he ought to march in step with the Adjutant, but decided not to try. The symmetrically spaced beech trees stood in their drab winter nakedness, and the half acre of demoralized winter grass remained, as before, defended from human feet by a neat, white fence. A squad of men came to attention as Lemmon passed.
"As a matter of fact, your brother's platoon are a bad shower. At least three other men have taken the same line of defiance. Your brother's the ringleader, I don't doubt."
"When is the Battalion due to leave?"
"At fourteen hundred hours today."
"Did my father show up?"
"Spoke to him on the phone. Said he would only make things worse. He thought you might do some good."
In the guardroom, the duty sergeant erupted with predictable yells and stamping of feet. The stone corridor smelled of paint, carbolic soap and grudging endeavour. Iron-heeled boots reverberated through the cells; the sergeant unlocked the heavy door and yelled inside "On your feet, 'Shun!"
There Alec stood. He nodded at James, gravely, a friendly condemnation.
The sergeant brought two chairs. Lemmon sat with his legs wide apart.
"Position unchanged, Caffrey?"
"Yes, sir."
"Your brother has come to talk some sense into you."
Alec stared at James, whose eyes fell to the coarse, stained flagstones. The cell was dark; only Alec's skin, it seemed, both absorbed and radiated light.
"As I see it," Lemmon began irritably, "We have orders to proceed to Cyprus by air. Now what do you find so objectionable in that?"
Alec shook his head. "Egypt," he said softly.
"Really? It must be that you, a private soldier, have access to information unavailable to the CO. My congratulations. Perhaps you would care to brief the officers on our ultimate objective."
James remembered Lemmon's blue cummerbund, and the gun. Dine at the Cairo Club. It came as a shock to realize that the Adjutant took his complicity for granted, and that Alec did too.
"Look," Lemmon began again, struggling to control the pitch of his voice, "what sort of an army will we have if every soldier—or officer for that matter—sets himself up as prime minister?"
Alec shrugged. "In this case the health of the army doesn't seem to me the main consideration."
"What does?"
"Our own sanity."
"And what about loyalty?"
"Loyalty to what?"
Lemmon exploded. "To your country, man, to your regiment, to your platoon, to your own mates!"
Alec recoiled now, as always, before violence. Lemmon began to pace the cell, in search of an opening.
"So you're in favour of Nasser, then?"
"The Egyptians seem to be, sir."
"But you're not an Egyptian. You are—God help us—a British subject. As a matter of fact, I myself have a certain admiration for Nasser. But that doesn't mean we have to stand around while he robs us in broad daylight."
"The Canal runs through Egypt," Alec said.
"But the Egyptians didn't finance or build it."
"They certainly built it. Every yard was dug by Egyptians."
Lemmon stopped dead, as if suddenly enlightened.
"Be frank, Caffrey. Are you a Communist?"
Alec laughed. "No, sir."
"Insolence won't help you."
"I'm sorry."
"The breaking of treaties, of international law, at the expense of this country doesn't disturb you?"
"Bombing and invading Egypt are strange ways of paying homage to international law."
Lemmon's pent-up anger, his furious pacing of the cell, reminded James of Steven Foster's mounting frustration when he had tried in vain to convince him that it was the defence of British financial interests in Egypt which had precipitated the scramble for colonies. Was Foster right after all? Would he support Alec's position? Quite suddenly James experienced a deep resentment against the trouble-makers, the nonconformists who continually challenged the established order of things, the accepted patterns of explanation. For a moment he found himself in solidarity with Lemmon.
The Adjutant was staring at Alec with cold anger.
"I haven't time for a full-scale debate, Caffrey."
"No, sir."
"I take it that you agree that we have the benefit of democratic institutions in this country and that the government which orders us to Cyprus, as well as our legal obligation to obey, are both sanctioned by the popular will."
"The majority can be wrong," Alex said calmly.
"But the minority is obliged to obey."
"There may be higher obligations."
"Not for a soldier."
"Would you, sir, criticize the German officers who attempted to murder Hitler in 1944?"
Outside, in the square, a convoy of trucks revved their engines, science's loud answer to a moral dilemma. Diesel fumes invaded the cell; Alec's smile was as faint as hope itself.
"How old were you, Caffrey, at the time of the 1944 plot?"
"Six, sir."
Lemmon smiled coldly and moved to the door. "Exactly. Six." He turned to James. "You've got twenty minutes in which to haul your brother back from the brink of mutiny. Twenty minutes in which to salvage your family name. Twenty minutes in which to enable your father to hold his head up in the world again."
He slammed the door.
Alec sat down and sighed. "It was nice of you to come," he said.
"I expected something like this," James said bitterly. Alec glanced at him quickly. "If you've come to castigate me, you're wasting your time."
"Listen, Alec, you've got to pull yourself together. There are more people involved in this than just yourself." Even as he said this, he felt slightly ashamed. "Apparently you have some supporters," he said in an effort at reconciliation.
"A handful only. Am I betraying my fellow men, my comrades? How can I tell? I hardly know them. England has separated us from the cradle, and done a thorough job. The two nations. The officers say, 'You're all in this together,' but they mean, 'Until some of you become officers.' Well, I walked past that door, and it's something they can't forgive. Maybe you can't forgive it either." James sat down.
"Alec, I need hardly say that the consequences of this could be very serious for you." "Is it me you care about?"
"We're not obliged," James said slowly, "to quarrel." "I agree. So long as you've prepared to accept me as I am. I'm sorry. I realize that all this must seem outrageous to you."
"It seems to me that Lemmon has a point, you know. After all, the battalion has only been ordered to Cyprus. With any luck, you may go no further than that."
He remembered again the Adjutant's cummerbund and his gun, and he felt sick at heart. Anger welled once more, reinforcing his latent determination that Alec should fail, that his resolve should snap, that his passionate faith should carry him no further than it had on the mountain.
"Listen," Alec said with his old, incandescent urgency, "there's a saying that if a cat leaps halfway to a wall, and then halfway again, he'll never get there. With men, it's not so true. The whole art of persuading soldiers to commit atrocities falls into two stratagems: either fill them with hate propaganda, or confuse them with a welter of short-term tasks. Clean your rifle, load your rifle, aim at that man, pull the trigger of your rifle; it's quite another matter saying at the outset, 'Kill that man.' Perhaps you remember what I always think of as the Day of the Jew—the Sunday father turned a Jew away from the club. I recall that you laughed. I hadn't previously thought about the Jews much. I was too busy becoming a Christian. I asked Martin what he thought about it. He pointed out that ignorance is a fertile breeding ground for crime."
"But surely turning a chap away from a golf club is not the same as sending six million people to gas chambers."
"No two actions are the same action, as they would no doubt have taught you at Oxford had you studied philosophy. But there is an internal connection and consistency. Once you separate a man off, once you say, 'He's not like us, he's different,' you set in motion the cattle train to Auschwitz. Of course, it's feasible that someone like yourself who might not be concerned about the golf-club issue would lay down his life to protect a Jew against assault in the street. But most wouldn't. Having decided that the Jew is irretrievably different, they are bound to feel that he has brought the beating upon himself. Being different is in itself an offence. He shouldn't be here. Kick him out. If he won't go quietly, then give him a shove. Too many to shove ... ? Well, then . .."
"Alec, you have a few minutes in which to make perhaps the most important decision in your life. What has it got to do with the Jews?"
"Everything. Every act of political violence in modern times can be interpreted in the light of what happened to the Jews. The Jews, you see, did not resist, they did not fight— not in Europe. Not even when tbey must have known beyond all reasonable doubt what was in store for them. One aspect of this puzzle is increasingly clear to me. The Jew was conditioned to obey, even before the Nazis came to power. The Nazis surrounded the ghettos and said, 'Pack your things, collect your children.' They obeyed. Captain Lemmon tells me to clean my rifle, pack my kit and prepare to move. I obey. Why not? The Jews are told, 'Form a queue and march to the station.' They do. They are stricken with grief and apprehension, but still things may turn out all right. To resist is to court certain death. I am told: 'Embark on this aeroplane.' It smells fishy to me, and maybe it will turn out to be nothing more than a free holiday in the sun. The Jews are ordered to disembark from the trains and to form yet another queue. They are weary now; perhaps they will be among the lucky ones, even if there is a smell of gas and rotting flesh in the air. I land at Cyprus and am given a thousand rounds of ammunition. The CO begins to talk about the geography of Port Said. Who am I to put two and two together and make a fool of myself? I sit tight; an exercise, after all, is only an exercise. The Jews are lined up outside the gas chambers and told to undress. It's ominous, this, but the Nazis are known to be interested in classifying people by their physiques. Some will survive. To resist now is to be shot instantly. I find myself on board a troopship closing in on Suez. What shall I do? If I keep quiet I'll probably live through it without having to kill a single Egyptian. The Jew steps into the gas chamber; I step ashore. What both of us don't know is that we aren't making our decisions any longer; the habit of blind, reflexive obedience has made our thought processes mere symptoms of existence. A moment later the Jew is dead and I have sent a toy mortar bomb crashing into a toy house full of toy women and children."
James felt his cheeks burning. His brother's dogmatic eloquence, the logic and self-assurance of his ideas, stung him to the quick. The whole statement struck him as an arrogant presumption, a personal attack on all those who did not share his views.
"I take it you got all this from Martin?"
Alec shrugged. "If you like," he said quietly.
"The time comes when we have to think for ourselves."
"So they say."
"I suppose you've been seeing a good deal of Martin since you left school," James said, sustaining his belligerent tone.
But Alec refused to be embroiled in a quarrel. He spoke calmly.
"I went back to school in the summer, mainly in the hope of seeing Martin. I had sent him a note well in advance, but there was no reply. I found him in his room, surrounded by a new magic circle. He looked at me as if I were a ghost. We stood around and chatted for a bit—small talk about life in the Army. He made a few jokes, but I didn't understand them. The others laughed. They were private jokes. They stared at my shaven head and rough, khaki clothes. I felt rather as married people must when they meet in the divorce court. He threw me out, really, by silence. His silences had always suggested a sense of the divine; but this silence was a brutal, worldly rejection. When I left, he said, 'Nice of you to have looked in, Alec.' "
"Do you still need his—his help?"
"My serenity of spirit, dear James, does not yet amount to total self-reliance." 3
"I see."
"Yes. It's a common illusion, among those of the same family, that their normal lack of mutual sympathy would disappear in a time of crisis. But that is not so."
"Do you mean father, or me?"
"I mean, truth to tell, my mother." Alec smiled. "But that womb, I fear, is firmly locked against the prodigal son."
James gave Alec a cigarette, then handed him the packet.
"We're not getting anywhere," he said.
"I'm stubborn. And arrogant. The confusions and base fears of the people who have tried to dissuade me in the last forty-eight hours seem proof enough that I am right. I don't mean to be rude. You have been very good, very kind. I'm grateful, really."
A renewed thunder of boots and commands in the passage outside heralded the return of Lemmon. Alec and James rose to their feet; and their eyes would no longer meet; it was as if all their lives had been a rehearsal for this final act, this dramatic climax of sympathy and incomprehension. Now the world stormed the stage, dragging them apart.
Lemmon came in alone.
"Well?" He looked from one to another.
The two brothers stood silently.
"Listen," Lemmon said mildly, sitting down again, "I'm not going to try and argue you out of this. I'm not going to challenge your point of view any more. I'm not even going to preach to you about a soldier's duty to his country. What I do want to press on you is a soldier's duty to his mates, his comrades in arms. You are all in this together. It so happens
that you have the mind, education and background of an officer without an officer's responsibilities. Isn't that so?"
Lemmon had turned to James for confirmation.
"Yes, that's true," James heard himself say.
"What use are you making of your advantages? Having refused to accept the burdens and responsibilities of a commission, you have decided to regard yourself as a creature set apart, a sort of prophet to the multitude, and you have succeeded in leading three men, with much less education than yourself, into dire trouble. You have also sowed doubt and dissension throughout your platoon. What do you hope to achieve? Your own, private salvation?"
Alec was stilled.
"If so, I'm afraid the vast majority of your mates have failed to grasp what kind of salvation you have in mind. As they see it, you're in a blue funk; you don't want to get shot at, and you are using your big words and high-sounding phrases to give it a gloss."
"But that's not the case," Alec said, very agitated.
"You try and convince them."
"It's not my job."
"Isn't it? You won't even accept the consequences of your own actions? Is that your lofty conception of moral obligations? Or do human beings, with their pitiful confusions and prejudices, disgust you?"
"I'm sure Alec doesn't feel like that," James said.
"If the men are fed up, it's because they want to get back to their jobs, not for any moral or political reason," Alec said.
"Precisely," Lemmon said. "Precisely. They want to get back to their jobs. The last thing they want to do is go to the Middle East and get shot at. Your gesture is therefore interpreted as pure funk. They say: 'Caffrey talks like the officers. He can get away with it.' "
Alec turned to James.
"I'm afraid that's what it looks like," James said.
"They can think what they like," Alec said, but weakly.
"It's not your reputation I'm concerned about, strangely enough," Lemmon said. "It's the effect of your action on the men. You and three others have virtually defected. The rest
will go in a state of resentment and confusion. We can look forward to one incident after another. You know what that means? It means that if they should get into any fighting their chances of survival would drop by 50 per cent. It's the fit, quick, confident soldier who survives."
James almost leaped, like one of Pavlov's conditioned dogs. "A soldier slow to react," the Adjutant had said in Nicosia, "will be quick to die." If he told his brother now about the Greek boy in the blue vest, how Lemmon had shot him down as he ran, he knew it would be enough to cement Alec's resolve. But even as this thought touched him, Lemmon had opened the door to let in three other prisoners, a lance-corporal and two privates. James found himself pushed into a corner, a spectator of diminishing status. The three soldiers stood rigid with fright and fatigue, their chins gray with stubble and their eyes glassy and focused. Lemmon prodded the corporal in the stomach with his cane.
"You, Black, tell us why you have changed your mind."
Black's thick, dry lips hesitated to frame words which were destined inevitably to shame or to offend. Then he croaked an apology, of which only three words were intelligible to James: "Me mates, sir."
"You mean," Lemmon prompted him, "that you realize now that you would be letting down your mates if you didn't stick with them and share their risks?"
"Yessir."
Alec stood confounded.
"And you, Henderson?"
"Yessir."
"What do you mean 'yessir'? You were all very eloquent and articulate yesterday, when you were doing your best to wreck the Regiment. Have you lost your tongue—or your self-respect?"
"I agree with Black, sir. I think we got to stick by our mates. All in this together, like."
The small cell was rank with animosity and bad breath. James saw that Black and Henderson were avoiding Alec's eye, while the third man, a curious, shiny, hunched figure, whose name, mistakenly, was Luck, seemed to be devouring Alec, pleading with him to renew his zeal, his belief, his courage by the power of words and conviction. James felt again, as he had so often felt over the resentful years, the power of his brother, the quality which would always be drawn into exhausting intercourse with magnetically opposed but no less intransigent natures. Luck had a large mole on his nose. He was an ugly, awkward man, the authentic working-class radical.
"Well, Luck?" Lemmon's cane was again at work, prodding.
Luck looked to Alec, who looked to James.
"I dunno, sir," Luck whispered.
Lemmon turned white with fury. "My God," he hissed, "you'd better know bloody fast or you'll spend the rest of your days behind bars."
Luck held; his chin jutted and his eyes almost closed. Lemmon's fury appeared so intense that James feared for a moment that he would strike the soldier in the solar plexus. Perhaps it was the other man's predicament which brought home to Alec the full repercussions of his own posture, for it was now that he capitulated.
"IH go," he said.
Lemmon glowered at him.
"Quite sure?"
"Yes."
"You realize that we can't afford to have a repeat performance when we reach the Middle East?"
"Yes."
James found himself torn between relief and an unexpected sadness, to see the olive-skinned boy he loved thus dangling once again at the rope's end, helpless and black in the face. He longed to comfort him, to reassure him that what he had decided to do was not only wise but also strong. But Alec shook him off roughly.
"You've won your victory," he said, turning away and searching for his kit.
"But Alec-"
"Don't let's have too much hypocrisy, please. Your attitude throughout has been perfectly consistent. You've done your bit. I suggest you shove off now."
James stood by the cell door while Alec began to polish his boots. His hands worked frantically, blindly, and his narrow pinched face was scorched by grief and shame.
"If there's anything I can do."
"Nothing."
"Well, I wish you luck, Alec. I only wish it was I who was going instead."
Alec laughed unpleasantly.
"Take things easily," James said.
But no reply was forthcoming. There could be no cleanness to their parting, only a jagged, messy tear. James walked away from the guardroom, across the concrete square, amid bustling men, kit bags, weapons, trucks—a society absorbed in its own purposes. His heart moved more rapidly than was comfortable, and his throat ached. Alec's attitude pained him—the uncompromising rejection, the cynical laugh, the suggestion that James had wanted him to fail in his resolve because he wanted him to fail as a man. Walking away from the barracks, James found his all-night clothes clinging to him with the stale clamminess of the absorbed morning. Finding a pub with an outside lavatory, he pushed open the door and went in, reaching for his fly buttons. A woman with a mop regarded him with an outraged expression.
" 'Ere," she said. His yellowish stream hit the urinal hard and straight and he sighed with relief and comfort until the jet lost its initial power and the fluid fell away in a declining arc. He shook himself. In urinals and bathrooms his thoughts had always oscillated between the sublime and the banal.
Again it was summer, the steady heat of July. Three years had passed since his meeting with Alec in the guardroom at Aldershot, and two years since he played his last game of golf with his father and then crept away from the silent house, with the fragile motion of an embroidered coverlet as proof that his mother would live on in the vaults of everlasting sleep. Chez elle.
James lay on his back, and his fingers explored the girl's slender neck. The bedroom curtain billowed out of deference to a light, aromatic breeze which brought the scent of turf, dung and boat tar from the pastures of Port Meadow. In the kitchen below, Mrs. Baker dropped a plate. The pinkish glow of evening lent modest weight to the arguments of his stomach; after a long afternoon's punting up the Cherwell, he favoured a Chinese meal with a light Moselle. But Sara Tufton's teeth, and the open expectation of an unfailing pleasure which drenched her face in vulnerability, reminded him of his prior duty. Catching her around the waist and bending her high-breasted body across the pillow, he quickly brought her to her climax.
He slept for ten minutes and awoke refreshed, like an athlete, like the authentic male of her dreams.
"James-"
"How about some sweet-and-sour pork?"
"You will come home this weekend, won't you, darling?"
He reached out for the knob of his portable radio, and instantly a commercial station bombarded them with its flush, up-to-the-minute gaiety. It fitted with his manner of life, the tinselled emptiness, the tragic load. No doubt he would go as usual to Tufton Manor for the weekend, idling his days away in elegant, comfortable boredom, faintly amused by Soames' wit, his extravagance and his feline vigil on behalf of his only child. After lovemaking, Sara liked to talk, to measure the man behind the spear, to explore his family, his parents, the mystery surrounding his dead siblings —or to discuss the manifold failings of her cousin Zoe Silk. He would have preferred silence, but it didn't matter, nothing mattered any longer on these dull, dreamy summer days when Oxford became an empty desert (except for the tourists and foreign students) and when the books in the Bodleian Library perspired with the modesty of a Victorian governess. He had come to know by sight the staunch band of research students who occasionally played truant to the British Museum and who took their holiday in the Bibliotheque Nation-ale. They watched each other speculatively, with a dumb mutual pity and loathing. Often James would stare all morning at a great tome with blank, unfocused eyes, at row upon row of figures; and he would see only the wart on Private Luck's nose.
He worked on, a large and muscular blond anachronism (in the libraries he was sometimes assumed to be a sportsman who had failed his exams), learning all there was to know about a single topic, yet lacking conviction about the wider perspective and the meaning of human life. Released from the aesthetic routine, the driving discipline of his final undergraduate year, he had drifted out of boredom and a deep, neurotic disquiet into a life of sensual pleasure and idle stagnation. Saturday after Saturday he lay on the lawn at Tufton, smoking, listening to the click-click of the gardeners trimming the hedges and watching the light clouds chase one another across the sky like Raphaelite cherubs. He possessed everything now, except himself.
Sara laid her head on his shoulder and ran her small, delicate hand across his stomach.
"Darling-"
"Of course I'll come," he said. "I'd love to."
She raised her head and looked into his eyes. "James."
"Yes?"
"Why do you never talk about Alec?"
One day some months after Alec's death, James had climbed the narrow, cobwebbed staircase of the medieval tower in which Steven Foster housed his dust-laden books and his razor-sharp mind. As he waited outside his tutor's door, he pondered the mysterious fabric woven by the wires of time, space and circumstance, the cruel, senseless destiny which had sent Alex plummeting into the champagne sea. Yet the conceptual pylons remained out of reach.
"Come in, come in," Steven Foster called. The tall, bent man, with his long gray hair and his shabby tweed suit, regarded him sympathetically.
"You look tired, Caffrey."
James sank into a chair. "I'm afraid I haven't done an essay this week. I'm bound to say that I have no excuses to offer. Just a case of the centre not holding and things somehow falling apart."
"What has diverted you? The pursuit of eternity—or the tragic sense of life?"
"The second, I think."
"Can an old man help?"
"Perhaps you remember," James began diffidently, "that I once spoke to you about my brother." "How could I forget?"
"You know they said he fell overboard a troopship in the Mediterranean?"
"I remember, yes."
"I think he must have jumped."
Steven Foster halted in midstride, then tapped each pocket in turn in search of cigarettes. He offered one to James.
"You've been re-exploring your brother's state of mind? Let us suppose he was overwrought. Would that in itself not measurably increase the chances of an accident?"
"Either way, he must have bitterly regretted his capitulation at Aldershot. I see now that I wanted him to take the easy way out, and I can't rid myself of the thought that I should have supported him."
"Even though you disagreed?"
"Isn't that precisely the point?" James ran a hand through his hair, pulling it back from his forehead. Dark shadows had settled under his eyes and his hands moved restively over the arms of his chair. "Wasn't it precisely because I disagreed with him about Suez that my duty as a brother became all the more plain?"
"Yet you were confronted by a more subtle dilemma—a soldier's ultimate basis of obligation. How can you blame yourself?"
James fell silent, lost in thought.
"Of course," said Foster, "if you had only accepted my analysis of the origins of imperialism——"
"Unfortunately I didn't," James said a little testily. "And I still don't."
"You can hardly argue that we attacked Egypt last October in order to maintain civilization there and to build hospitals and schools."
James began to lose his temper. He had been over this dead ground far too often.
"We have some rights, damn it! To be a citizen of this country is not to be duty bound to ridicule and denigrate it at every opportunity. I sometimes wonder what would happen to our intellectuals if there were no governments left for them to criticize, if there were no more pretexts for cosmic self-righteousness. We've done a lot for these countries. The very people who have benefited the most are the first to kick us in the teeth, as if their education, their language and their well-paid jobs were not the direct result of English good will."
Steven Foster brought the tips of his fingers together and crossed his long legs. James noticed again that the man had a slight squint.
"What will you do when you go down from here?" Foster asked.
"I've no idea."
"Suppose you got a good degree—a First?"
"I hadn't really thought about it."
"The Civil Service will always welcome you with open arms, I've no doubt."
"One could be a bit more adventurous."
Steven Foster laughed. "How? By going back into the Army? Or do you refer to that external adventure, that realm of risk and enterprise—business? Oil, they say, will soon lubricate us all. Or Buildup for Babies? I'm sure that you have entertained a keen interest in milk products since your earliest years. Is it to be the armaments industry or ladies underwear? Or why not be a historian? It can't do you any harm and you can always give it up."
James was wondering what Alec would have done, would have become. He felt sick at heart; Alec had reached towards him on the rock face, and charity had bent. He had never adjusted to the idea that Alec was no longer alive, that his alert, Greek sensibility was not roaming at large somewhere on the earth's surface.
"After all," Foster resumed, "if you really want to know why Europe grabbed half the world in the space of a few years, you need to investigate the record from A to Z."
James shrugged. "The historians seem to disagree among themselves. Ultimately it may boil down to one's philosophy, one's priorities."
"Caffrey, those words reach my ears like splintering glass. Fortunately our philosophy is in a healthy condition. Its very sanity safeguards it from trying to answer all but the most specific phenomenological questions. Of course, if you want an ideology, a bundle of lies tied up in red ribbon, you can go to any secondhand bookshop with five bob in your pocket and peck about like a jackal among the rubbish heap of Christians, Hegelians, Marxists, existentialists and all the
rest."
"Alec was a Christian," James said.
"I have my prejudices. Anyway, should you decide to do graduate work and to investigate in detail the Egyptian saga, or any other for that matter, you can count on my support."
James rose to leave. "That's very kind of you. I'll certainly think about it."
"Do."
"Sorry again about my essay."
"Don't allow your brother's death to weigh on your conscience. Ninety per cent of the time we human beings labour under a misapprehension. It's one reason why scholars are so cheerful. They know that their colleagues' investigations are futile, so they feel happy."
"I'm not sure I have a scholar's temperament," James said, at the door.
"My dear fellow, who has?"
Soames would appear at dinner in a smoking jacket of scarlet velvet, with gold-inlaid Persian slippers and a Lyonnais silk shirt. His hand glimmered with rings. James found him vulgar almost to the point of absurdity, but he enjoyed his food—the amazing procession of lobster, prawns, cold salmon, sirloins of beef, pheasant and grouse—and he found his conversation invariably entertaining and occasionally perceptive.
Soames liked to talk about himself after lunch in the library or during a stroll before dinner.
"Real wealth, I'm convinced, is the necessary basis for qualitative advance both in the arts and the sciences. Modest wealth is another matter. From the psychological point of view, it amounts to modest poverty. It tends to inhibit experiment and to be culturally impoverishing. Your average Tory is forever looking over his shoulder, digging himself in behind entrenched habits and antiquated ideas. How can his imagination flourish; how can talent be patronized, brilliant young men supported, Eastern art treasures pillaged for our museums and rare books rescued from the clutches of the University of Texas? Myself, I operate on a global scale. I am never on the defensive. I choose my enemies, and choice is half the battle."
Soames talked frequently about his special sphere of interest, Africa. At dinner one night, his elder brother, Lord Wycombe, voiced his fears about future developments south of the Sahara.
"They must be guided to our advantage," Soames said, with his mouth full of caviar and toast. "How?"
"Sense and sophistication."
"We need a government which won't shrink from defending our interests."
"The era of governments," Soames declared, "is over. They are obsolescent. Too often they bow before the crazed contradictions of public hysteria. They bend. That is the lesson of Suez."
Lord Wycombe grunted. "That's where we don't see eye to eye."
"We do, we do. We agree as to ends. You and I both know that what we are defending is worth defending and that we haven't contributed Leonardo and Cezanne to the world for nothing. Neither of us is prepared to abdicate. But we must be realists. Africans will no longer consent to be ruled from London and Paris, and that's a fact we have to face. Nowadays the successful financier operates behind enemy lines, carefully selecting his friends from among the Africans and avoiding at all costs head-on confrontation. That was why Suez was a fiasco."
Sara Tufton saw, then, her lover pull the hair from his forehead, like an itching shadow which would not lift. Later, when the house was quiet, she came to his room and lifted back the single sheet with which he covered himself in summer. Drugged by a light but jealous sleep, his body did not at first respond. "Darling." "Hm?"
"Were you annoyed by what Daddy said about Suez?" He took her chin between his fingers and allowed his eye to wander across the steppes of her body. A certain guilt
always impinged on him, even when in bed—as if he were patching her through a keyhole, as if his interest were lawless and unreciprocated. Never—not even on the foothills of his climax—did he lose the sense of solitude, the burden of self-reproach for failing in his duty to manufacture love. Only afterwards did the prison bars snap; but that was sentimentality.
"Your father talks a lot," he said.
"He means well," she said quickly. "Some people think him rather unusual, but he's really perfectly normal."
James laughed shortly and her eyes flickered. After a moment's hesitation she laid her hand on his smooth thigh and her head on his shoulder. When he did at last consent to kiss her, her hand slid upwards to his groin, nervous with hope. They began to make love.
"You never say anything to me, James," she whispered, compelled to declare it, yet anxious to banish reproach from her voice.
"Say?" He pulled away from her.
Her eyes closed. "Never mind." She embraced him again, pulling him down. But he resisted.
"What is it you expect me to say?"
Something in him welcomed an altercation.
"I don't know. Anything. Whatever you feel."
"Some people chatter, I suppose."
She too was momentarily tainted by anger. "I wouldn't know," she said.
Had Alec ever had a woman? Often he had wrestled with the problem, pondering the imponderable. A thought scraped at the paintwork of his self-esteem—that Alec's mistress would have loved him passionately, with wonder and devotion, overwhelmed by such sympathy, such power of projection, of love, such diffidence and grace. Such eloquence. Suicide? James adopted the assumption which he himself had fathered—a solitary end, torn away from his brethren, cast in upon himself, defeated, bitter-sweet.
James bent over the girl. He felt better suddenly, his irritation and self-doubt gone. His relief that Alec had killed himself shamed him, but no more than the act upon which he was now embarking. In a woman's flesh everything, apparently, became legitimate.
Sara felt, now, his rising, the sudden, reflexive act of animal release whose sources could only be guessed at; an octopus' black ink flooded her heart. Clasping his long, pale athlete's body, she attempted to adjust herself to his abrupt departure, striving to travel with him and, for the first time, to meet him on the way.
"James, James, James."
His silence was his own. He rode silently, precise and rhythmical, as if marching. His face was uplifted and impassive, like a guardsman's, and his features were drenched in the blank serenity of the parade ground.
Suddenly desperate, she reached for his thing. He had never before seemed so far beyond her reach.
His progress, now, was inexorable and self-sufficient. Her very existence was put in doubt. Only his breathing betrayed him.
"Come inside, then," she moaned.
But he rode her thigh—a telescopic sight sliding along the broad, accommodating barrel of a gun.
As if she were not there.
"Come inside, please ..." A whisper.
His back arched, his face tilted farther towards a private moon, his life was in his throat, the open gland, with each stroke he buried her in linen, each thrust asserted his own life at the expense of hers, the warm juice splattered her thigh like an offence, then he spun away deep into his pillow, turning his back.
A hand touched her briefly, in diffident consolation.
Presently she heard the deeper breathing of his sleep. She couldn't bring herself to leave him, to return to her own room—nor, even, to close her eyes.
Lingering over a late breakfast, Soames found himself alone with his daughter. Despite the silver dishes loaded with eggs, mushrooms and bacon which stood on the hot plate, Sara was interested only in coffee and a thin slice of toast. Soames watched her from behind his newspaper.
"You don't look so good," he said.
"I'm all right."
He wiped his mouth with a napkin—a slow, faintly sensual
ritual.
"It doesn't do," he said, "to arrive in Africa under the
weather." "Africa?"
Her voice this morning was small and frail.
"I've booked two seats on the plane for Thursday week."
"Thursday week!"
Soames shrugged. "I've told you many times. It's essential that I be in Coppernica before power is handed over to the Africans. After independence, anything can happen." He poured himself more coffee. "You go," Sara said. "I shall not." She avoided his eyes.
"I see," he said. "When is it to be, then? I shall try not to feel hurt, Sara. In the end, children inevitably treat their parents badly—even a father who has been as close as I have been to you."
"When is what to be?" she said irritably. "The marriage." "What marriage?"
"Well," said Soames, spreading his hands. "I assume that a woman leaves a father only for a husband. A sane woman, that is."
"Oh don't be so silly." She was close, he saw, to tears. "Well," he persisted, "when is it to be? May I not congratulate James? Such a charming girl—and so well endowed." Sara stood up, white and shaking. "Shut up," she said, "just shut up!" She left the room.
After lunch, Soames invited James to the library. "This room," he said, bringing out brandy and cigars, "is my own creation. The Adams fireplace came from an old friend in financial difficulties. He committed suicide the next day. The desk is said to have been used by Mark Twain, but then most desks are. It's a present from my brother-in-law Chester Silk. He has a place on Park Avenue worth half a million. His daughter Zoe, my niece, surpasses the imagination. Sublime beauty. What is it you want from Sara?" James recoiled in his chair and blushed.
"Want?"
Soames regarded him.
"This morning," he said softly, "my daughter informed me that she will not after all be accompanying me to Africa. Wherever I go, Sara comes. This, then, is a precedent of some interest to me. Would it be rash on my part to assume that she wishes to remain with you?"
"I am very fond of Sara," James said.
"Fond?" said Coames sharply. "Are you practising English understatement?"
"Well-"
"Please don't. It can so easily be mistaken for hypocrisy. And then you must remember how readily people adduce base motives in a man sharing the bed of a young heiress."
James stood up, red in the face.
"Sit down," Soames said easily. "I'm not rebuking you. You must know that Sara loves you deeply, that she is entirely at your disposal."
"I assure you that I have no wish-"
"That's what worries me. No wish to marry her, you mean. Tell me, are you interested in money—seriously interested?"
"I haven't thought about it much."
"Then you're not. I ought to admire you for it, but I don't. I never cared for any sort of eunuch. So it must be love. You love Sara. But you don't. I can see that you don't. A father has heightened senses. This affair is one-sided and therefore cruel. Not only are you a thief who is taking from me my most cherished possession but you are a thief who doesn' even do me the honour of wanting what he is taking."
Soames sank back in his chair and relit his cigar, which he had allowed to go out.
"I'm very attached to Sara," James said. "If she loves me I'm honoured."
"Certainly you are. Was it you who suggested to her that she should remain in England while I returned to Africa?"
"No."
"I believe you. But remain she will. What am I to do?"
"Do you mind so much? She's very fond of you."
"I needed a stranger to tell me that," Soames said acidly.
The two men withdrew into themselves, each uncertain of his own demands. James began to think about Sara. She had avoided him all morning, and when he suggested tennis to her after lunch she had brushed him aside with an excuse. She looked tired, even exhausted. He could sense the weight of her emotional commitment to him, the pervasive fire which was now consuming her. He attempted to trace their relationship to its historic source, but soon abandoned the endeavour. He had always, if possible, avoided thinking about Sara. Shame, perhaps. Her body delighted him, and her milieu, the leisurely, pampered retreat which she offered him at weekends. Set against the dull grind of his research work in the Oxford libraries, Sara—or Sara's world—had become an indispensable tonic. But the distinction nagged him. From the outset, a grain of guilt had marred his freedom to enjoy her. Recently the grain had swollen. Did he care whether she accompanied Soames to Africa or whether she stayed behind? James stared at the desk which had "belonged to Mark Twain"; the afternoon sunlight lay like a rod of mild fire across his outstretched legs. A slender margin of carpet separated Soames' slippered feet from his own. Perhaps he did care. He cared enough not to hurt her. He was saddled, now, with her illusions and her wants.
"What do you believe in?" Soames asked. The silence parted, like a stage curtain. "In other words, what are you?"
James shrugged. "Nothing."
"You had a brother?" Soames said quickly.
"Yes."
"About whom you prefer not to speak?"
James sipped at his thimble of cognac.
"Alec committed suicide."
"Why?"
"He felt let down, I suppose."
"Aren't you sure?"
"No, not sure. Not sure, even that he did away with himself. All hypothesis. Neurosis, if you like."
"You're convinced," Soames said.
"Yes, convinced." "Who let him down?"
James stood up and began to pace the room, to tread the soft white carpet. Stretched out in front of the fire, a sleepy Labrador observed his progress without concern. It was true that he had not since his conversation with Steven Foster discussed Alec. He felt the need to do so now. The thing had been turning sour inside him. As for Soames—the man did not so much inspire confidence as command it.
"Alec believed in God. Profoundly. He had faith. For him the love of God began with the love of man. He was always ahead of me, Alec. Even when my mind outdistanced his, he always remained in possession of the truth. He was inspired. One can't compete against inspiration, though it's hard not to be resentful. Alec's graveyard was Suez. In the last resort, I let him down."
"He turned to you?"
"No. I turned to him. Then I let him down."
"But why should he have killed himself?"
"Exactly! Why? Quite often I can distinguish no reaction in myself except anger. So weak, so futile, so effeminate."
"To have loved God more than life?"
"God is merely a v. ord."
"Words are the masters, not the slaves of concepts."
"Listen," James said. "We went climbing once, in the Welsh hills. Alec was never strong physically. For him the effort was appalling. But he refused to back down. He carried on to the very edge of death. And then it was only luck which saved him."
"You admire that more than anything?" Soames said.
"I-Perhaps."
James subsided into a chair.
"May I make a suggestion?" Soames said.
"Of course."
"It strikes me—on no evidence at all, I'm a complete outsider—that you could accept your brother, but only on one condition: that he didn't challenge your system of values. You, like the rest of us, are an expert in survival. In certain circumstances you would no doubt risk your life for the sake of some other living creature. But not for an idea.
Not for God. That disgusts you. It's wet, effeminate, false. Am I right?"
"Yes and no."
"Precisely. And why 'no'? Because you are too intelligent, too sensitive to be quite sure. You are aware, as I am aware, that the masculine universe bends. It is an arc, not a straight line. The tips meet at the point of absolute muscular self-assertion and at the point of absolute spiritual self-abnegation. A monk is real; a nun is merely a woman in black. You suspect, poor devil, that Alec's final renunciation of his own life was not the folly, the effeminate cowardice that it appears to have been. The possibility strikes at the root of your own existence."
James had nothing to say.
"Of course," Soames went on, "your brother, Alec, laboured under a single fallacy. God is dead, undoubtedly. And Man, too, is in mortal danger. Man will die when we cease to believe in him. We have it as our duty to re-create him, to worship him—not the passive, superstitious, submissive man of the Orientals, but Western man, the man who seizes destiny by the throat. We require a spiritual framework for action. Your brother, Alec, had one. That is all that counts. Your way is not his way; and yet it is, it must be, precisely the same. He died; yet the hero cheats mortality by embracing it."
"So?"
"So—come to Africa." Soames resumed his chair, rang the bell and called for more coffee. "Your brother's fate," he continued, lighting a fresh cigar, "was the fate of Western man—tragic humanism."
In James, Soames stirred an ember, nursed a faint glow from an almost defunct brazier. The long hours which James now spent poring over tables of statistics (cotton investments and yields in Egypt, 1877-94) had become unbearably frustrating and tedious. He was anchored to an academic conundrum which he had long since lost the urge to solve. Steven Foster's supervisory reflections no longer interested him. He lacked, as he had suspected all along, the scholar's temperament.
Soames watched him closely.
"Come to Africa," he said.
"Why?"
"You're bored here. And wasted."
"I have to finish my thesis."
"Do you?"
Soames unlocked a sycamore cabinet and brought forth an exquisite scale of a copper mine, complete with processing plant, railway, power unit and acid baths.
"I produce wealth, James. With me, it's an art, a means to an end, never an end in itself. When we are young we consume wealth and we despise it; thirty years later we produce wealth, and we respect it for what it is. In art, too, forms ceaselessly die and give birth to new forms. Notice, for example, the movement of the image of Apollo by way of Gandharva into Eastern art, of the emergence of the Paleo-Christian art out of the residue of the ancient world. There is, I believe, a double path towards the humanism of which I have spoken: through action and through art. Art transforms experience into consciousness, chaos into forms which have meaning; consequently it refuses to accept absurdity. Tragedy speaks to destiny as one equal to another. I'm convinced that your brother was an artist; he had a poet's sensibility. His tragedy was to have pitted himself against chaos and incomprehension through the wrong sphere, the sphere of direct physical action. Alec should have taken up his pen. You are quite different. What he attempted to do, you can succeed in doing. Like Prometheus, you will fight the gods. What does your life amount to at present? Five days a week you pursue the truth about something which is not worth knowing. At weekends you hang about despising yourself, fretting and making my daughter unhappy. We are said to be a scientific civilization. That's wrong; we are a religious one. Our elites make history in the face of the unknown."
James did not see Soames until the following weekend. He attempted to put the whole matter from his mind, to forget about Alec, Soames and Sara, to concentrate on his work. Soames' proposition, the escape to Africa, he dismissed as impracticable. Even so, his restlessness quickened. His concentration lapsed more and more frequently until the dates and statistics on the page before him finally surrendered themselves to a vision of the African desert. Although he found it difficult to recall precisely what Soames had said to him, an impression, almost a spell, had taken root within him. The summer threatened, in passing, his identity.
When they met again at Tufton Manor, Soames seemed cheerful. Over dinner, he began to talk of Pizarro and Cortes. "Our Mexico, our Peru," he said, "lie in Africa. The destiny of the West now lies in Africa."
Sara repeated to James what she had already told Soames— that she was determined to remain with him in England. Soames cautiously broached the subject with James when they were alone after dinner.
"Sara is adamant," Soames said. "While you are breaking her heart, she is crushing mine. All that remains is to complete the circle. How can I break yours?"
James answered diffidently. "So long as I'm a student I can't contemplate marriage. I wouldn't want to be supported by my wife."
"By me, you mean."
"By you, then."
"There's one solution. Work for me. Work for me in Africa. Then we'll all get what we want. I am now approaching one of the most exacting tests of my career. I need at my side a man of real intelligence and understanding, a young man combining in his person strength, speed and beauty, a man of your calibre. A conquistador, a man of the new renaissance."
"I have my thesis to finish."
Soames struck the arm of his chair irritably.
"Oh, for God's sake."
"What would you require me to do in Africa?"
"Re-create man."
"But more specifically."
"Succeed where your brother failed. March to the frontiers of time. Immerse yourself in a world of total action— discover yourself through totalization."
"I know nothing about finance," James said.
Soames laughed. "Hence your great charm."
James bridled. "I suspect that it's Sara you want in Africa, not me."
Soames shook his head solemnly. "Wrong. I have much to learn from her judgment. I want what she wants—you."
"Quite frankly-"
Soames raised a finger. "Think about it. Meanwhile, I notice that your glass is empty."
James returned to Oxford later that evening in a state of mounting indecision. By the time he reached home he was aware of an inner crisis which would have to resolve itself that night; his nature could not tolerate indecision and uncertainty.
On opening the door of his room he found the light on. A man was squatting on the sofa, clutching a cloth cap and staring into space. His nose carried a remarkable wart. Embarrassed, he stood up.
It was Private Luck.
James stared at him as if at a ghost. His heart raced.
"Luck," whispered Luck. "Private Luck."
He wore a gray raincoat with a belt and black shoes which curled up at the toes. Even after three years he contrived to bring with him the dry smell of distrust and despair which had pervaded Alec's cell at Aldershot.
"Have a chair," James said.
Luck sniffed and ran the back of his hand across his nose, as if to punish it. He glanced at James, but quickly, with embarrassment.
"About your brother." The words chased one another like fugitives. "What do you know, eh?"
"He fell overboard."
Luck shook his head with manifest satisfaction; his journey had not, after all, been wasted. He basked under the mild reflected glory which exclusive knowledge imparts to men.
James waited. His impatience bordered on irritation. He hadn't liked Luck at Aldershot, and he didn't like him now. This cocky, self-assertive private soldier, so ready to challenge the authority of his officers, evoked in him a resentment as powerful as it was unreasoning. Whatever report he brought of Alec's death, it would almost certainly shatter the last fine thread of an illusion.
"Do you know what happened to my brother?" he said impatiently.
The man nodded knowingly.
"Why didn't you come earlier?"
Luck looked resentful. He twiddled his cap furiously. "I didn't have to come, mate. I'm only doing you a favour."
"Yes, I see."
"Got a job, see, in Australia. Emigrating Tuesday. Wife and kids. Burn me boats now, I don't care."
"Yes, quite."
"Yeah. Got a bit scared, see. You never know, they can fix you in no time. Wife and kids."
"What happened, then, Mr. Luck?"
"To your brother?"
"Yes."
"You think he fell overboard, eh?"
James rubbed the palms of his hands together, then pulled the hair back from his forehead.
"Didn't he?"
"Mind if I smoke?"
"Not at all."
Luck inhaled deeply. Then sighed. Then sighed again and glanced at his nails nervously.
"We was in Cyprus, you know, for about twelve hours. Then we got the order to move on board the Kyrenia, one of those eight-thousand-ton jobs. Caffrey, your brother I mean, got himself worked up again. He said to me, 'What did I tell you?' I told him to take it easy. Black and Henderson wouldn't have much to do with him; they were scared, see, after what happened at Aldershot. But your brother got himself properly worked up. We was a day out of Fa-magusta, heading east, and he was beginning to raise a stink, your brother. Lemmon got to hear of it. A corporal tipped your brother off. I heard him. He said, 'Lemmon hates your guts, mate, and he's not the only one. I'd look out for myself, if I were you.' "
Luck puffed at his cigarette in quick, nervous spasms. James pulled the hair from his eyes in short, repetitive movements, as if trying to brush away the months of irrelevant recrimination and remorse. How Alec would have
smiled at the thought of those interminable rows of cotton statistics, those dreary, sedentary hours spent in the soporific fog of the Bodleian Library, those wasted months.
"Go on," James said.
Luck sniffed and stared at his nails, which were, indeed, long and dirty.
"Your brother and I was mates, see. He comes to me and tells me that he's been told to report to the night-duty officer at the guardpoint on the deck at twenty-three hundred hours. That's eleven o'clock, after dark. I said to him, 'You're not supposed to be on guard tonight, mate.' He said to me, 'Fishy, isn't it?' I could see he was scared, like, though he wasn't letting on. He had guts, your brother. I said to him, 'Who's the duty officer tonight, then?' He says, 'Lemmon.' "
"Well?" James said sharply, his temper rising. He didn't need this ugly stranger to inform him that Alec had guts. Wasn't there an element of condemnation in all this? Wasn't Luck apparently rebuking him for the stand he had taken at Aldershot?
"We turned in at twenty-two hundred—ten o'clock," Luck said.
"I was once in the Army myself."
Luck sniffed. "The lights went out early on orders from the CO. But I stayed awake, see, on account of your brother. He lay very still on his bunk, never moved once. I thought he'd gone off to sleep, but then he got up, put on his belt and his boots, and went out quiet as he could. I must have stayed awake for another hour at least, but he didn't come back. In the morning there was no sign of him. I remember thinking, 'They've arrested him again.' But the officer came around and said he must have fallen overboard."
"Perhaps he did."
Luck shook his head slowly. "No, mate, I told you, he went to see Lemmon."
"Well, he could have fallen overboard before he reached the guardpoint."
"Could he? Then why didn't Lemmon send for him, to find out why he hadn't reported, like he'd been ordered? I was awake for an hour, mate. No one came." "But, damn it, someone must have thought it a bit suspicious! If Alec had been agitating again-"
Luck grinned at last, a workman's obeisance to the ironies 0f power.
"You bet they did. That was Lemmon's way. After that, he had no more trouble. Not a squeak out of anyone. We was all shit scared. That was Lemmon's way. He was a bastard."
James stood up; the palms of his hands were drenched in sweat. The olive-skinned boy in a sea-blue vest had darted from a doorway in Nicosia, and run . .. Alex plummeting into the sea, his body striking the blue waters amid a froth of champagne bubbles.
"You didn't think of reporting the matter, Mr. Luck?"
"Who to?"
James hesitated. "To the CO."
Luck laughed shortly, as if to say, "You're an officer, you can afford your illusions."
"I had a wife and kids," he said with slow dignity.
"But you have no proof? This is all mere hypothesis."
"Is it, mate? I wouldn't know. Why not go and ask Lemmon yourself? You can tell a lot from a man's face, I always think. A chap like you hasn't anything to lose, has he? I mean, you don't have to worry."
Luck stood up and took his gray raincoat. At the door he hesitated, as if hoping to find some words to convey how he felt about Alec, but none came and he nodded awkwardly, a quick, jerky shake of his neck.
"Here's my address," he said diffidently, "in case you should want it. It's Sydney." He backed towards the door. "Australia," he said.
Then he was gone. The door closed quietly behind him.
James sank into a chair, layered in a thin film of sweat, anchored to his grief by the dead weight oi Alec's fall. He sat for more than an hour without moving, staring at Mrs. Baker's brown tiled fireplace and re-creating again and again the vast black fall into the sea, the lights of the portholes rushing past like shooting stars, and then the huge water, like an iron hand ... Had there been time to think, to remember, to judge?
In the morning James drove to Tufton Manor to see Soames.
FIFTEEN
in the shadowy recesses of Laval's tent, Keller bent over his black trunk and emerged clutching a pile of books, each uniform with the other and similar in every respect except for the title, which had been translated from the original German into a number of languages. Keller was panting with excitement.
"Take one," he urged. When James hesitated, he began to flutter his hands like a conductor. "Take, take, take," he insisted in his cramped English, pacing the tent like a demoniac schoolmaster, haunted and obscure.
The insects continued to batter themselves against the hot funnels of the oil lamps. From time to time Laval caught one and tore off its wings, laying the wingless corpses in a neat pile on the edge of the table.
"Well," Laval snapped impatiently, "educate him." Keller at once launched into a frantic exposition. "The individual," he told James, "belongs either to a particular high culture or only to the human type in general. His destiny must lie either in the zoological field or in the world-historical field. Do you understand? The crime of Tukho-mada and Odouma has been their unnatural attempt to iscard their animal status and to usurp the higher function, ou must come to terms with the logic of time. History is precisely the history 0f distinct, separate and organic cultures. mese cultures rise and fall, leaving nothing, literally nothing, behind. When in the process of decline, they inevitably pass into civilizations, periods when the brain rules because the soul has abdicated. We are faced with such a period now. We must fight it. Down with intelligence! Death to intelligence, long live death!"
Keller broke off, almost delirious with excitement.
Laval looked up from his map and lit a cigarette. Then he pushed the packet across the table towards James.
"You look surprised. Yet I have no doubt that at root you are in complete solidarity with us. All that you lack is the formulation. You English communicate without words—a perverse miracle. If only I could take you with me tomorrow!"
Laval darted around the table and took James' face in his hands. Behind the brown-stained skin, teeth and eyes glowed like white metal. An odour of garlic and furious endeavour reached James; he struggled not to recoil.
"Well," Laval sighed, releasing him, "it is too soon. You shall guard the prisoners. And after that, who knows, greater things. We will have to pacify this country from head to tail. You may prove to be the only Anglo-Saxon worth his pay." He turned impatiently to Keller. "Go on, then, professor, teach him. Teach him his destiny."
For a moment Keller's mouth drooped with uncertainty. Then he burst into activity again, like an animated doll.
"Ah!" he cried, waving a copy of the book, "that's more like it. Destiny! Listen. Our present culture, the Western or Faustian culture, was born in the tenth century ad. There can be no doubt about that. But in the nineteenth century the Faustian culture began to die, to become a civilization. The old sense of style and form was lost. Popular preachers of materialism and scepticism proliferated. These were our Cynics and Epicureans. Socialism—a philosophy of resignation—-began to perform the same function of ethical transvaluation as Stoicism in the classical world and Buddha in China. Parliamentarianism now served to obscure with hollow rhetoric the triumph of money, the triumph of Plon and your patron Tufton. Nevertheless, blood—the sphere of pride and instinct—is about to regain its rights against the overlordship of money and intellect. This process can be enacted only in the course of perpetual wars, in which the leading figures emerge as Caesars, born leaders of men like the Commandant here! This world of the new Caesars contrasts vividly with the drab life at home in which millions of humans are clustered and cramped into vast megalopolises, a shiftless mob whose life becomes increasingly repetitious, coarse and meaningless. This mob is the fodder of socialism. By 'socialism' I mean the vulgar, street-corner variety, not the noble form adopted by the nation in arms. This vulgar socialism is presented to the mob as a sum of rights, not of duties, an abolition instead of an intensification of the Kantian imperative, a slackening instead of a tautening of directional energy. The trivial and superficial tendency towards ideals of welfare, freedom and humanity are negations of the Faustian ethic. Ethical socialism, on the other hand, is the most exalted expression possible of life's aims. It stands not for compassion but for the will-to-power, for energy and outward expansion. It's no longer a matter of choice for you and me, it's a matter of doom, of destiny, something which grips men and forces them into its service, burning up their energy. Freedom now can only mean freedom to fulfil this destiny. Listen-"
Vibrating with passion Keller pulled the book open, apparently at random, and allowed his eye to hurtle down the page like a seventh-floor suicide crashing into a crowd of words.
"Listen, I quote to you, '. . . besides a necessity of cause and effect—which I may call the logic of space—there is another necessity, an organic necessity in life, that of Destiny—the logic of time . . . this constitutes the essence and kernel of all history . . . but is unapproachable through the cognition-forms which the Critique of Pure Reason investigates. This fact still awaits its theoretical formulation.' "
Keller snapped the book shut. His eyes blazed.
"Still," he whispered, "still!"
Offered the book, James hesitated. He felt tired and bewildered.
"Take it," Laval said easily. "It won't bite you."
"You will find the essential passages clearly marked," Keller said. "Master them day and night."
James was in no mood to argue. Steven Foster, he recalled, had once described this book as the "total pig swill of the German psyche" and its author as a "lunatic charlatan." Even so, James now noticed a certain resemblance between Keller's theories and those propounded by Soames. Only the mood, the emphasis, was different; with Soames the notions constituted an aesthetic, with Keller, a cult, a religion.
"You look tired," Laval said gently.
"It has been most interesting, sir."
In the mysterious recesses of the sweltering night, the engine of a truck snarled briefly like a panther, then was silent. A light flickered somewhere, a whisper of clandestine activity rustled through the camp like a breeze, transitory and elusive. Laval stood up, perfectly disguised as a Bedouin Arab chief, sharp and malevolent.
"I like you," he said softly. "You attract me. Go to bed, moti petit. And take your book."
James left the tent and walked back through the silent camp, torn between distrust and fierce elation. Sara Tufton might have been a million miles away.
SIXTEEN
but andrIj laval did not sleep. His premonition of destiny had sharpened his appetite for macabre comedy and baroque massacre. From time to time he leaned forward over his map of Thiersville and marked a black cross with the vindictive determination of a Sulla pricking the names of his victims. So the night passed.
At four in the morning, the Bedouin Sheik Abdullah Laval issued forth from his desert hideout in an armoured car, accompanied by the morose Armand Keller. Driving through the last of the night, the Sheik's thoughts turned to the detested Raymond Tukhomada, to the leather-hard Maya, who now mocked with magnanimity those whom he had vanquished in the jungle war, and, blackest of all, to the glib Amah Odouma, whose deceptive mastery of European ideas concealed the cancerous poisons of his primitive mind. The Sheik remembered also the yellow insect people, threading their way in antlike columns through the rice fields of Indochina, led by small, indoctrinated students devoted to party dogma. He remembered them falling by the hundreds as the Mysteres swooped from the sky with rockets and guns blazing; yet the very blood which soaked the soil had yielded a new insect man for each that had fallen. That, too, would now be avenged. Armed with a dagger, a pistol, an automatic rifle and a handful of grenades, and followed by the now compliant and black-faced Keller, Laval arrived at his rendezvous precisely on time. In a villa set back from the Avenue Foch his fellow conspirators were already assembled: his Faustian brother Aristide Plon, as well as the indispensable native Fernand Ybele and his incredible aide Jean Liwele, a religious maniac and all-purpose gangster whose outlandish appearance sparked surprise in every eye except Plon's (the diminutive, birdlike financier had long since surpassed all emotions save the highest). Liwele, who had been pulled too late from the rabid jaws of a French priest whose protracted sacramental bite had left him apostolically demented, was tarted up like a pantomime general. Meanwhile Keller, who had smothered his face in black boot polish, although neglecting to paint a ring of grayish flesh which bulged above his collar, had begun to warn Plon that it would be a bad day for whites—as if the dwarf genius had ever known a bad day. Plon declined his offer of free boot polish, while Sheik Laval's eyes rested, as a leopard's rest on the neck of a prancing deer, on mein General Liwele's lower lip, which was wet with love for the briefcase at present resting securely between the feet of A. Plon. At the thought of what lay inside—the crisp, stacked notes—General Liwele, although no Faustian and indisputably not a Caucasian, did experience a tautening of directional energy and a marked intensification of the Kantian imperative. "For a rich man to enter Heaven," he was forced to remark, causing Plon to pass the money to Sheik Laval, which in turn prompted Liwele to the reflection that "through the eye of a needle...." Ybele threw him a look suggesting a thousand protracted deaths, each one more protracted than the last. Ybele's papa had eaten a little girl because after nineteen children his virility had flagged, and Ybele never let his subordinates forget it. "You were drinking last night, Jean." The commander in chief of the
Coppernican National Army trembled. "I needed a little courage, Fernand." Ybele turned apologetically to Plon. "He will be all right. Jean is a great actor, a preacher, a dedicated foe of atheism and materialism." Plon grunted rather nastily.
Meanwhile Laval was assuring his former mentor and tutor in political science Armand Keller that the coup dissolving Parliament would indeed be entrusted to him alone and that his blackened face would assist the enterprise greatly. Plon laughed, shortly. "Poor Armand has dreamed all his life of dissolving a parliament. Towards that end, he has plowed through Guizot's edition of Cromwell's incredibly laborious diatribes, while painfully learning to distinguish the Long from the Short, the Short from the Rump, and the Rump from the Barebones; ask him on what date and by what means the Constituent and Legislative Assemblies were overthrown, and he will answer like a computer; ask why Parliament is sometimes dissolved, sometimes suspended and sometimes prorogued, and he will not fail; what he doesn't know about Brumaire 18, December 2 and May 16 is not worth knowing. Poor Armand, little did you know at what level history would summon you to act!" Keller looked sour and might have embarked upon recriminations had not Ybele announced, as weary conspirators do, dreading the violence of the day itself, the bomb-power of the sun, "As for the airport—it must be a showpiece before the eyes of the world." Laval said, "I will take care of that personaEy." Jean Liwele squealed, then, at the notion of a showpiece, a piece of show, a naughty, while Ybele wondered quietly whether he would ever be master of his own—admittedly extensive— house. Plon was mentioning banks, embassies and company offices, Liwele began rehearsing his speech for the evening press conference, Keller pronounced Parliament dead, buried, prorogued and dissolved, and general bedlam was under way when Commandant Laval suddenly silenced them with a single, violent warning, then announced softly to his hushed audience, "Messieurs, I'etat, aujourd'hui, c'est moi, Laval."
When the five conspirators brought together their black, brown and white hands to seal their fraternity, then went their separate ways, the night had not yet flinched before the dawn, the cicadas had not yet given up the morning ghost and a sudden movement in the long grass could still send the calmest of nerves twanging nastily. General Jean Liwele accompanied by his humble Arab adviser, Sheik Laval, went directly to Camp MacMahon itself, to an isolated and heavily guarded briefing room where Laval's brown-skinned brethren had silently gathered, fortunate in being called upon to perform what the great run of mortals merely read about. Beneath his alien mask, Andre Laval was reminded now of so many campaigns and of so many shattered hopes and betrayals—here in Coppernica and in Indochina, and, more remotely, of dawn patrols against the Germans in 1943. He relished and revered this secretive rising up before first light, when the ground was crisp and firm and when a man's soul and feet were clean from sleep. The coming light spoke to the night as God spoke to men; the world assumed wonderful new dimensions of shape and meaning.
The gold-braided general and commander in chief, the seminarist Liwele, had expected to be introduced to these, his subordinates. But instead he found himself unattended in a corner, like some discarded effigy, unable even to say, "Gentlemen, we are gathered together here today . . ." Ybele was no longer with him; in the absence of his chief, his heart turned to stone. Laval was calling the names of those whom he had chosen and called to destiny, his twenty French officers, all veterans of the war against Maya and an independent Coppernica, all members of the party founded and guided by Armand Keller, and all therefore familiar with the Book. Each had signed a contract with the Alliance Party of Coppernica and each had learned to wear the badge of "mercenary" with pride. Like Laval, they were disguised as Arabs—General Liwele, marvelling at the artistry with which this transformation had been effected so convincingly, attempted to test his voice with a view to congratulation, but found his jaws soldered together by fright in its higher, electric form. Also in evidence were a handful of Negro soldiers, native evolues who had fought for France against Maya, sound men who had proven themselves immune to the seductions of racial narcissism and insurrectionary fetishism, reliable sons of the greater France whom Aristide Plon had absolutely convinced of the financial benefits of loving France absolutely. Laval was running lightly through plans rehearsed down to the last detail, like a strong athlete warming his muscles before a race made confident by the heavy training behind him. Gradually his short, pungent and functional word-formulas gave way to more emotive and theatrical stanzas on the themes of "the destiny of France," "the road back to Paris," "the last betrayal," and "the sacred Army." General Liwele's moon eyes filled with tears; the valves of tradition within him were opened and gushed forth in opaque fountains such things as the Gallican Church, the White Fathers, Cluny and Lerins, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, beloved Francois Premier and his Concordat, Anselm and (almost) Abelard, the cathedrals of Rheims, Chartres and Notre Dame. Was not France's Army her Church, and her Church her Army? Ardently he longed to prove himself, before these Arab gentlemen, with a short dissertation on the theme of the guilt of the Jew Dreyfus and of how this very day now dawning would witness the death of heinous laicite, Freemasonry and materialism. The first light now filtered through the grimy windows of the conspiratorial hideout, revealing row upon row of neatly stacked automatic weapons and ammunition boxes. Someone said softly, "The beer has come," and sure enough a huge red truck bearing the inscription "Mamba Biere" had disgorged a thick pipe into the private soldiers' mess hall. Camp MacMahon slept as Mamba shed its giant load.
... Slept until the reveille bugle at five-thirty, then turned over, as a mutinous army does, with a thousand muttered curses in as many lingos and tribal dialects—a terrible opera for a toy general to silence. Who dared claim that the best of Maya's soldiers and the most dedicated of his officers had after the war of liberation returned to their fields, farms, mines, workshops and offices, leaving behind only the riffraff, thugs, criminals and lazy birds willing to be commanded by the very French officers whom they had formerly fought? Through such crude distortions had history become in itself an ignoble and subversive subject—or so Jean Liwele believed. It turned a man's spirit thankfully to the Holy Ghost; and the General's spirit remained in that posture when, at five forty-five, Jean Martignac sounded the alarm bell, a bellow which, like Indian hemp, flooded Liwele with joy and sympathy, although he was not in a position to know that Martignac, ever the dandy Parisian playboy, had enjoyed the blackening of his golden curls and peachy skin less than somewhat. Again the alarm bell sounded; in their barracks the black soldiers stirred in their pits of hell, while Andre Laval tested with ghostly whispers an electronic public-address system manufactured by the heirs and successors of the martyred Walther Rathenau—a machine capable of penetrating the seclusion of every constipated soldier grunting out his agony in however remote a latrine. The alarm bell rang for the third time; then Laval spoke.
"Attention, attention, attention, all officers, NCOs and soldiers of the Coppernican National Army. The day of national crisis has come. The destiny of Coppernica rests now in your hands. Attention! At 0430 hours this morning, the first of several planeloads of invading French troops landed at Thiersville airport. The traitors Tukhomada, Maya and Odouma, who have sold our birthright to the whites for a few pieces of silver and who have week after week withheld your pay, these traitors are now thoroughly exposed. The battle begins now. Aux armes, grande armee! The national hero and regenerator, the great Fernand Ybele, calls upon you to follow his trusted friend, our new General and commander in chief, Jean Liwele. The despicable General Cartier and his treacherous French officers are in flight. We will hunt them down! The whites must suffer for this! Soldiers! Fernand Ybele guarantees to pay you today every centime owing to you. Hurry now to the mess hall. Assume soldierly discipline. The degeneration of our great army is hereby terminated. Hurry now! The invasion continues."
Laval watched the soldiers spilling out from their barracks and doubling across the parade square to the mess hall, a dirty, disorganized rabble dressing themselves as they ran. Cartier's Army! A comedy, indeed. Laval turned to Liwele. "Mon General, everything now depends on you." The Arab affreux saluted the General, who would have ventured upon a small speech had not the Commandant snapped, "What are you waiting for, macaque?" Then the skeleton figure in gold braid and tinsel stepped out boldly across the parade square, followed by his Arab military advisers, some of whom, Laval had to admit, bore themselves with the self-consciousness of actors observed in their costumes by visitors backstage. Laval himself held the steel case within which lay an argument universally acknowledged by all mankind. As the General entered the mess hall such a roar went up as to (briefly) tempt him to truly take the reins in his own hands; then would Ybele bite the dust, Laval manure the soil and Christ reign in this, His promised land. Now the General-Prophet did speak:
"O ye risen dead! Evil spirits cast about our land! [Premature crescendo rejected by larynx.] The Devil is manifest in a thousand spirits of death. Witch doctors and sorcerers hired by Tukhomada are turning black babies into white, and our women are bringing forth children with the heads of dragons. And why? Because God is angered by the filthy apostasy and lucre and fornications of the satanic trinity, Tukhomada, Maya and Odouma. Execrate them! It is they who have brought in the white soldiers from France, brutal tyrants who are at this moment raping and manuring our women with their alien seed and who plan to put each one of you through a thousand torments and a single death. But Christ is risen! Our Regenerator and Holy Angel Fernand Ybele shall make this nation a shrine in which the apostolic army whose disciples you are has its rightful place, second to none, boss over everybody. And he has despatched me to lead you, and through my ministry he has sent you great monies from his privy purse, to soften your labours and lighten your groaning sleeps. Yes. Now listen, you soldiers. I am not yet done. The time draweth nigh when we shall command each other, and each shall command the next, and the next each, and each all, and all each. The time when every each shall draw forth from his mess tin a marshal's spoon, like Napoleon the Bonapartite out of Egypt in the second coming. Then shall ye be a law unto yourselves, that is, as Jesus sayeth, everyone amongst ye. And great shall be our reward on earth, as in Heaven. But first we needs must surmount; and which one of you shall rise as a star to command? I say it is I, whom our Regenerator hath appointed in and out of his infinite wiseness. Also hath he brought forth from the lands of the north, beyond the Gobi desert and the Yellow River and the Mountains of the Moon, faithful brothers of Araby who hath fought the selfsame devils oft times anoft. I mean those who stand behind me now, and they will depart to their land when the battle is won for us. Is won. Follow ye them without question. Only follow and obey. Now stand orderly in your ranks, Israelites before the Red Sea, and gather your earthly due while the waves prepare to part."
Then beer and fried eggs and limitless money drenched the long tables of Negro soldiers who began to cry and cheer anc threaten the absent white invaders; and as they ate and drank, the Arab officers moved among them with silent menace and harsh, practised hands, moulding a brutal soldiery out of an unprincipled anarchy. Water bottles were filled with Mamba beer, in preparation for the hot day ahead; on the public-address system tales of renewed atrocities committed by whites against native people blared forth unceasingly. The men proceeded to the armoury, then to motor vehicles and armoured cars whose engines were already ticking over impatiently on a diet of gasoline and oil paid for by the beneficent but reticent Aristide Plon. By seven, Camp MacMahon was virtually empty; the day's work lay ahead.
Those beery centurions, some three hundred in number, who had the privilege to be commanded by Sheik Abdullah Laval himself, witnessed some unusual happenings and perpetrated many more. Among others: the spectacle of General Emmanuel Cartier running from his villa thinly disguised as a Negro dustman and leaping into an automobile which, naturally, failed to start; and the drowning in the Varva River, an hour and many passionate protests of innocence later, of this same Cartier, who strove without success to unravel the identity of the mysterious Arab officer whose voice was hauntingly familiar and whose parting pleasantry—"You have dishonoured the calling of French officer by your cowardice, vacillation and turpitude"—seemed to come strangely from an Arab. Later, there was the erection, at the Sheik's suggestion, of a roadblock on the Avenue Foch at the very point where Europeans might best be caught in flight. Here, throughout the long and thirsty morning (yet Mamba never ran dry), the wealthy soldiers applied themselves to emptying all cars of their white occupants, to the systematic beating and torture of the males and the haphazard and violent rape of their women, either at the roadside or in the car, but never out of sight of husbands, fathers and children. Sheik Abdullah watched dispassionately; and from time to time he employed his revolver to put the damaged and the demented out of their misery. The rapers and the raped sprawled on the hot tarmac and in the long grass among the bleeding corpses; small children, some choked with anguish, others pale and silent from shock, stumbled in blind circles like caged birds, stricken by the abrupt mutilation of their lives. Towards lunchtime, the centurions grew bored of roadblocks and followed their chieftain (whose periodic disappearances to renew the texture of his skin and hair were not observed) into the center of Thiersville, sitting bravely on their iron horses and shooting up any human creature whose colour, size or demeanour excited their suspicions. The rape and pillage continued fitfully; and in the Convent of the Sacred Heart, in the Avenue Gambetta, twenty French nuns were stripped of their clothing and violated many times over (about this Jean Liwele was later to weep—and to cite this dastardly action as the logical consequence of Tukhomada's cynical and atheistical materialism). Finally, as promised to Plon and Keller, Laval led his men out to the violated entry passage of the mother country—the airport. That no French troops were sighted during the entire operation could easily be accounted for by the cowardice of the whites and the renowned prowess of the Negroes. On reaching the airport (where the supply of outgoing planes remained vastly inadequate to cope with the huge exodus of white refugees), the ever-thirsty beer drinkers embarked upon a new and more violent mayhem, chasing men, women and children up and down the elegant, marble-pillared reception hall, with its huge mosaics and glass walls. Once more, blood flowed, men fell to their knees weeping and pleading on behalf of their wives, only to be clobbered insensible by rifle butts and kicks in the neck. One of the Sheik's more enterprising freedom fighters had a five-year-old child speared on the end of his bayonet. While this operation was attracting widespread admiration and comment, few noticed a trivial incident in which a French civilian, apparently maddened by the raping in public of his pregnant wife, suddenly rushed at the Sheik with the strange cry "Laval!" and attempted to tear away his headgear; and in so doing he was dropped with two bullets through the heart. Meanwhile, in the customs hall, among the leather cases and the heavy trunks, blue-uniformed stewardesses were being laid and had by those soldiers who still retained the capacity. Here and there a too-inquisitive journalist had his head bashed in.
In another part of Thiersville, two hundred braves commanded by the Arab whose real name was Jean Martignac and by the unknown Negro politician whose real name was Armand Keller (and whose neck caused increasing suspicion as the day wore on and the boot black wore off) stormed the Parliament building in the Place de la Victoire and proceeded to arrest all those deputies who belonged to the National Liberation Movement, and a few others besides. The Premier, Raymond Tukhomada, and his Minister of the Interior, Amah Odouma, were beaten on the front steps of Parliament and then rolled down until they bit the dust at the feet of almost fifty foreign newsmen. They lay there for half an hour until finally Jean Liwele arrived and hysterically proclaimed Parliament to be prorogued, dissolved, foreshortened, impeached, attaindered and shut, and he himself to be (predictably) Commander in Chief, National Saviour and President, and (unpredictably) also Archbishop and Chief Rabbi. From the steps of the building he proclaimed martial law, curfew and the reign of virtue. As for General Maya, he had been arrested as a traitor. Armand Keller, deprived of the limelight, sulked in the shadow of an overturned car and vowed one day to make such a speech from the steps of the National Assembly overlooking the Seine. His face, by now, resembled an ink blotter after a long day's writing.
The sun did, mercifully, sink, and the sky became a brilliant orange bowl poised over a city in ruins. As for the soldiers, the instruments of national regeneration, some slept where they found themselves and others congregated in the red-light quarter of the cite, in anticipation of further revelry. Here they were soon joined by the police, who, in response to Archbishop Liwele's encyclical equating prostitution with treason, began wading into the brothels by the conscientious dozens. Liwele himself broadcast almost continuously throughout the night, wearing his advisers (principally Fernand Ybele, Aristide Plon, Andre Laval and Armand Keller) to a state of exhaustion verging in Keller's case on prostration. The General issued some three hundred orders and decrees in a couple of hours, most of which he instantly countermanded; at two in the morning, he began to detect plots against his person and accused his advisers of using him as a mere puppet. When, finally, he ordered Ybele's instant execution, that person held him down in his chair while Laval thrust a needle into his arm, thus cutting short what threatened to become a long night of the long knives. The dose proved excessive; at noon on the following day, Liwele was still asleep, and it was not until evening that he could be persuaded to summon the diplomatic corps and the press to announce that he had entrusted the Government and administration of the country to Fernand Ybele. There were sighs of relief, although it was noticed that the Supremo seemed unsteady on his feet, still clung to many of his assumed titles and continually interspersed his statement with the revelation that he was "just a little old tin drum."
When he had finally stepped down, Fernand Ybele, smart, dapper and calm in one of his twenty business suits, announced a number of interim measures necessary for the safety of the nation and the welfare of its people. Among them, the preparation of charges against Tukhomada and his associates; the indefinite prorogation of Parliament; martial law; the reform and reorganization under General Liwele of the National Army (whose wild onslaught on the European community could now be directly attributed to Tukhomada himself, and to his plan to drive out all legitimate Western interests). Every death, every injury, every rape, Ybele stressed, represented the carefully planned plot put into effect by Tukhomada, Maya and Odouma. At this moment, a question was put to Premier Ybele concerning the Arabs who had been seen leading the troops on the previous day. Ybele nodded gravely; it was terrible to realize that the Prime
of the country had stooped so low as to bring in these hired mercenaries from abroad to act as his agents. However, some had already been arrested; the rest would no doubt soon be detained. No, he could give no precise details as to their whereabouts; security forbade it. Yes, he would answer one further question: how was it that Tukhomada, although the instigator of the disorders, was himself beaten up and arrested by the soldiers under his command? Ybele smiled enigmatically. "It is often said in my country, 'He who rides a tiger cannot dismount.' "
Min
SEVENTEEN
fernand ybele came to power only three days after his associates had gathered in his house on the Avenue Foch in order to finalize their plans for the liquidation of the Year One. Protected by a strong cordon of troops and police, Ybele entrenched himself within the Ministry of the Interior; and when, a few days later, he offered his hand to the Hon. Soames Tufton, it was in the office until recently occupied by Amah Odouma—who had now disappeared.
Ybele approached this interview with mixed feelings. Plon now commanded the situation absolutely; it was he who had masterminded and financed the coup, it was Plon's military agents who had engineered the grand massacre and it was Plon's friends and creatures among the foreign correspondents in Thiersville who had explained to the world that the slaughter of innocent children, the rape of so many women, had been a devilish plot designed by Tukhomada and Odouma to oust the white community from Coppernica. Luckily they had overreached themselves; responsible elements in the Army had intervened and arrested the malefactors; order had been restored among the deliberately incited soldiers.
But Plon had already reminded Ybele of his price—an inequitable taxation system calculated to bring Amcol to its ,nees and Tufton to his senses. Amcol was to be wound up |nd its assets transferred to the Union. Plon, who had no dea that Ybele had already promised Tufton parity of taxation with the Union, was now demanding his pound of lesh.
Ybele's difficulties were acute. The American attitude worried him. In response to the telegram sent by Silk and Bailey on the Sunday, Washington had at once brought pressure to bear on Paris. But too late. Acting on Tufton's advice, Plon had hurried the coup forward by a week. By the time that the first hesitant representations began to filter through from the Quai d'Orsay, Ybele was already installed in power and Tukhomada had vanished. No one knew where.
The Americans, however, had showed no signs of unbending in their adamant refusal to recognize Ybele's regime— despite the fact that Ybele had committed to paper his guarantee that Amcol would not suffer from penal taxation. For this reason Ybele was anxious to interview Tufton.
Soames sank into the proffered chair.
"My congratulations, Monsieur le Premier."
Ybele stared at him gloomily.
"Power doesn't bring you contentment?" Soames asked innocently.
"My government lacks the stability, shall we say, of a British cabinet with a majority of a hundred in the House of Commons."
"Your majority," Soames said, "lies in Plon's pocket."
But Ybele didn't smile.
"You owe me an explanation, Tufton."
Soames offered him a cigar. "A friend brought me back a thousand from Havana. He was buying furniture on my behalf, mainly from the homes of the exiled Cuban bourgeoisie. The prices are very low at the moment. When you next visit England you must allow me to show you the high-backed Spanish-American chairs: innocent and sublime."
"Tufton, you promised me that if I guaranteed Amcol parity of taxation with the Union and put that guarantee in writing, you would secure American recognition of my Government. What have you to say?"
Soames extended his arms in a gesture of outraged inno.
cence.
"My dear Prime Minister, I made no such promise. I carefully limited myself to working on your behalf. I am still working on your behalf. I'm not God. I have no recipe for instant miracles."
Ybele shifted in his chair, chewing on the cigar.
"Plon is pressing me," he said.
"And you want to know which way to jump?"
"If you like."
"Any move against Amcol at this juncture would prove fatal."
Ybele sighed, placing one foot on his desk. Soames saw that his shoes were of Italian calfskin.
"How is Mr. Silk?" Ybele asked.
"In a thoughtful mood."
"I invited him to visit me, but he declined."
"He didn't mean to offend you. He must do as Washington dictates." . ?
"Or as Mr. Bailey dictates?"
"Ah. That's the problem. Bailey believes in majority rule."
Ybele looked at his watch. "There's a plane leaving for Paris in three hours' time. We could solve the problem that way."
Soames shook his head energetically.
"Regard Washington as a rich and sensitive old lady. If you have your eye on her fortune, don't kick one of her sons in the crutch."
"But this thing is crazy! How can Washington seriously back Tukhomada?"
"They have their prejudices, and their fears. Tukhomada had a majority in the Assembly which you have dissolved. No good clean democrat can applaud that. And there's a school in the State Department which argues that your actions will encourage the real extremists."
Ybele thumped his desk with exasperation.
"But what is Tukhomada, if not a real extremist?"
"Well, you have to take account of ignorance. But | sUppose it's arguable that Odouma might outflank Tukhomada; the hotheads might rally to Odouma now."
Ybele went to the window which overlooked the Varva £jver—the river from which General Cartier's soggy corpse had recently been retrieved. These powerful waters twisted and coiled for hundreds of miles, binding the centrifugal nation to their snakelike passage and losing themselves finally in the blue uplands of Upper Varva—Raymond Tukhomada's native province.
"Tufton," he said, "you've let me down."
"On the contrary, I'm labouring night and day on your behalf. But I think you'll have to face one fact: if Washington is to be seduced, the stakes will have to be raised. Remember that Africa is against you; and that weighs heavily in America."
Ybele swung round. "Stakes?"
Soames drew on his cigar. "It's a pity, in a way, that your coup resembles on the surface a coup for France in central Africa."
"For France?"
"Pour notre ami Plon. Plon, c'est la France."
"But, damn it, I have given my word; absolute parity of taxation. What more do you want?"
Ybele glowered across the desk like a sulky Buddha.
"The fact remains," said Soames, "that the Union controls five-sixths of the country's mineral resources. The Americans, as you know, have a nai've reverence for statistics. How can they escape the conclusion that your gain was France's gain?"
Ybele thrust his hands deep into his trouser pockets. His lower lip jutted like that of a petulant child.
"I can wait," he said. "I'm not short of money. If the Americans want to stand aside, I can manage without them."
Soames smiled. "Can you? What makes you so sure they will stand aside? There are, after all, two Great Powers; neither can afford to abstain in so big an affair as Copperni-ca. If they begin to compete for Tukhomada's allegiance, I'd recommend you to choose the West Indies as ideally suited to a lifelong exile."
"What you're suggesting, then, is that I actually take steps to further your interests at the expense of the Union's and that Washington will interpret such a move in a friendly way."
"Perfectly put."
"And what of Plon? Will he send me flowers?"
"Black orchids."
Ybele stood up, to indicate that the interview was ended. He pressed a buzzer and a sceretary appeared almost at once.
"If I were you, Tufton, I'd forget your grandiose schemes and concentrate on finding a way of neutralizing Bailey. Otherwise things may not go well with you." He turned to the secretary. "Show Mr. Tufton to his car."
They shook hands stiffly.
"I'll keep in touch with you," Soames said, rather shaken.
"Do."
The sunlight leaped up at him from the white expanse of the Ministry's courtyard; Africa was a procession of unpleasant contrasts. Having instructed his chauffeur to proceed to the American Embassy, he turned his mind back to the dilemma posed by Powell Bailey. In one sense, Bailey's present hold on Chester Silk was in itself an asset; only under severe pressure would Ybele yield and make the concessions to Amcol which had become the central purpose of Soames' policy. On the other hand, there was a danger that American hostility to Ybele might get out of hand: if Ybele fell and Tukhomada returned to power, it would be worse than walking barefoot on red-hot cinders. But if Ybele deported Bailey, Washington might react badly. What, obviously, was required was some means of bringing pressure on Bailey, some way of persuading him against his conscience to support Chester Silk's view that Ybele was the man for Washington to underpin. If Bailey, a Negro, a professional diplomat, a sincere democrat and a man of scrupulous integrity, should adopt a new line, then his was an opinion which the American Administration would be bound to respect. Bui how could such an unlikely transformation be brought about? As his car swept through the gates of the Embassy—that octagonal miracle of perpendicular glass and surrealist concrete which bore testimony to the genius of the Swedish-American architect Sven Lundquist—a tiny spark of a notion began to glow like a firefly in the complex recesses of Soames' intelligence.
Chester Silk greeted him apathetically. The American didn't look at all good. In New York he had held obesity and sloth at bay by way of lunch-hour swimming, gymnastics and Turkish baths. By strict dieting, by steering clear of vegetable fats, carbohydrates, excess calories and more than one martini before dinner, he had kept his figure trim and the line of his jaw as firm as befitted a rugged frontiersman. All this had gone by the board; he sprawled fat, soft and creased on Lundquist's long, tapering ochre sofa. Hot cigar ash spilled unnoticed down his clothing. He listened to Soames' account of his meeting with Ybele in a mood of profound melancholy.
"Powell Bailey has me on the rack, Soames. Jesus, he's almost convinced me that my interest in Amcol is incompatible with my tenure of the ambassadorship. Now what sort of an idea is that? I'm telling you, I was pretty close to resigning this morning."
"Resigning!"
"Jesus Christ, I know what you're going to say. That if I quit this godforsaken hell-hole, then we're going to lose everything in Amcol. Well, I reckon that figures. So I didn't resign. But I'm no more than a mouthpiece for Bailey now. Every day he drafts a couple of telegrams to Washington, urging non-recognition of Ybele, and every day I sign them."
"There must be some way of bringing him under control. You, after all, are the Ambassador."
Chester Silk gestured helplessly.
"I've thought of everything. I could send off my own despatches and give instructions that no messages except those I sign be transmitted to Washington. Hell, it won't Work. Bailey would find some way of blowing the thing open. Then we'd both be recalled and that wouldn't help at all. Most of the staff here are sympathetic to Bailey. I'm not a diplomat and they regard me as a kind of impostor. What worries me is that if Washington doesn't recognize Ybele damned soon, the whole goddam enterprise may be wound up. You don't maintain an embassy to a government you don't recognize—not for long, you don't."
Amanda came into the room, followed by a servant bearing a silver tray laden with coffee and fruit.
"I was just telling Soames about Powell," Chester Silk said.
"I'd rather cope with Powell than with that woman Lucille," Amanda said, pouring coffee and straightening her back against the sag of the years. "She lords it over me as if this were her home and not mine."
"We had a cable," Chester explained to Soames, "suggesting that we bring all diplomatic personnel into the Embassy compound. We're a bit overcrowded, but I guess it's safer that way. Till things normalize."
"She pokes her nose everywhere and treats our private quarters as if they were public property. She's forever reminding me of her long experience as a diplomat's wife, as if Harlem weren't Harlem, whether your husband works at the UN or as a street cleaner."
Chester Silk flinched.
"Fact is," he said, "the Silks and the Baileys just don't get along."
"And where's Zoe?" Soames asked innocently.
Chester and Amanda Silk glanced at one another quickly— he with an appeal for guidance, she with a warning to guard his tongue.
"She works most of the day in her room," Amanda said. "She isn't through all her exams yet."
"Even when her dear uncle pays one of his rare visits?"
"She rests a lot. She gets very tired."
Soames observed Amanda's dilemma with a certain pleasure. She had always resented his easy, laughing relationship with Zoe. Yet the antagonism between brother and sister was far from one-sided; it had ceased to be so when Amanda began to put it about that his wife, Jane, had been driven to suicide by his bestial infidelities—she even hinted at an unnatural affection for Sara. That was ten years ago. For all his debonair disregard for the conventions, for all his sardonic sensuality, Soames would never forgive this calumny. Jane ,ad died of a brain haemorrhage in a remote villa in Spain; ,e had been alone with her on the night of her death. He had loved her passionately, and the backcloth of her absence, her abrupt and tragic abdication, had never subsequently lifted from his mind. He was too proud to take the trouble to scotch Amanda's rumours, but any discomfort she might suffer invariably delighted him.
"Fact is," Chester said heavily, "we have one hell of a problem."
Soames maintained a discreet silence.
"Can you be trusted, Soames?" Amanda asked.
"Hardly ever."
Surprise visited Chester's face. The remark struck him as flippant. The skin under Amanda's chin stretched; the bony fingers which played with the pearls of her necklace seemed to be conjuring some charmed formula for getting her own
way.
"Perhaps," she said, "you would do us a favour without us having to confide in you."
"It would be out of character."
"We're serious about this," Chester said.
"As you see, I'm determined to exact my pound of— gristle."
Husband and wife laboured silently under the weight of this insult. Soames waited patiently, knowing that their predicament would stifle their pride.
"Soames," Chester said wearily, "Powell and Lucille have a son, Jason-"
"I've met him. You forget."
"Yes, well. Now-"
"I'd better explain," Amanda said.
But Chester waved her down. "I have a right to speak, Amanda. I am not, repeat not, a child. Now, Soames. This Jason's a nice kid. He's nice."
"You don't sound very convinced," Soames said.
"Eh? Oh sure. Well, anyway, he's studying government at Harvard. He's spending the vacation out here with his parents. Trouble is, he's developed a kind of crush on Zoe. Nothing serious, mind, but it's kind of embarrassing." "So Sara told me," Soames said.
Amanda's eyes flashed angrily. "The way Sara is hanging around that young man you brought from England—James Caffrey, isn't it—I daresay she had developed a sharp nose for one-sided crushes."
"Amanda, if you really desire a favour of me, hadn't you better be nicer?"
Chester Silk had turned scarlet. He kept clearing his throat.
"Anyway," he went on, "what with having them all in the Embassy now, things are getting a bit tense. The boy's always hanging around outside Zoe's room, stealing up on her in the garden, and so on."
"That's why she's so worn out," Amanda said.
Soames regarded them both searchingly.
"Why don't you send him back to the States?"
Again the Silks' eyes met; his own firefly was glowing brightly.
"Jason's a free man," Chester said. "I'm not a dictator."
Soames knew that this was not the real reason; yet, still, the truth of the affair—and there could no longer be any doubt that the wound ran deep—eluded him.
"I take it that you want me to receive him into my own house?"
"If you would," Amanda said, averting her eyes, shrinking from the pain of overt gratitude.
"And put my own daughter in peril?" Soames said, unable to resist a last jab.
Chester Silk groaned and shifted on Lundquist's ochre sofa, suffused in embarrassment. These pinpricks, small insults and sarcastic jibes did not become more tolerable with the passing of the years. He didn't, really, care for English people. They weren't friendly.
Soames knew that Amanda had never loved Chester, into whose gold-plated arms her family had thrust her; and he knew also that his own posture of benevolent amusement towards her husband infuriated her. Amanda had been from her youngest days set on edge by an almost physical quality in Soames which plucked at her tense, brittle nerve ends, outraged her senses and threatened her with the libidinous and revolutionary scent of passion. When she said to Zoe, "Soames has no heart," she meant, really, "His heart is like an overripe peach."
"How do you intend to persuade Jason to come and live with me? Or is this a kidnap affair?"
"I'm sure that Zoe can persuade him," Amanda said. "He does whatever she asks."
"But his parents? Will they consent?" Chester grunted. "That's a problem."
"There's a movie in the Embassy this afternoon," Amanda said. "Lucille is bound to go. She'll go to any movie, however bad. Powell will be in his office. Jason could slip away then."
"But won't he tell his parents?" "Not if I tell the little boy not to," Chester growled. "I'll call back for him at three thirty," Soames said, rising. Quite suddenly the whole thing had clicked: he knew exactly how he could neutralize Powell Bailey's influence over Chester and thus work Washington and Ybele simultaneously towards the solution he desired.
Jason Bailey hurried down carpeted corridors towards Zoe's bedroom, towards the sanctuary whose threshold he had never been permitted to cross, and as he hurried his undefended heart moaned in expectation of mercy and a final, absolute loving. Chester Silk had spoken to him with extreme brutality; the Ambassador, evidently, could hardly bear to look at him, so intense was his aversion. Jason knew that his own defences were mere figments of his solitary imagination, the toy erections of his long, brooding hours. If Zoe wanted it .. Even so, it would hurt his mother cruelly, to move out on her without so much as a word. He loved Lucille. And his father. He had always yearned for his father's respect and confidence. But if Zoe ...
He found her seated by the window. Her face was in shadow.
"You knocked very timidly," she said. "You sent for me, Zoe."
She glanced briefly in his direction. Then turned back towards the garden.
"Don't sound hangdog,' she said. "It's so false."
He stood by the door. "It's not false, Zoe. I feel whipped. Sometimes I feel that I'll never climb off the ground. Can you imagine how that feels?"
"You oughtn't to hang around me," she said. "I've suffered it long enough."
"I nauseate you."
"My mother thinks you ought to stay. And then there's your own parents. But I wish you'd go."
The Negro absorbed this. He wasn't at all aware of his surroundings. Only the dimmest, most ephemeral impression of the room, its elegant, Scandinavian sweep, its long expanse of glass, its bed, her bed, stayed with him. The whole of his being was concentrated on the girl. He was burning up.
"You'd better stay with my uncle Soames for the time being," she said.
He remembered the villa and its garden where, a week ago (it seemed a year), she had stood near the almond tree under which he sat, and he remembered how the supplication, the entreaty in his long stare had diverted her from the pond. And how she'd left him, in order to talk to the old Scotsman. That had stung.
"It's arranged, huh?" he said, with a touch of truculence.
"Oh yes," shs said.
"And I'm not allowed to tell my parents, is that it?"
She stared at him coldly, as if this aspect of the problem had scarcely occurred to her.
"If you do," she said, "they may not let you go."
"And then?"
"Then my father might have to send you back to the States."
"I get it."
He still stood by the door. His eyes morbidly followed the full cut of her dress.
"Zoe."
"Well?"
"The months are passing."
She stared at him blankly.
"You won't marry me, Zoe?"
She turned back towards the window, and the line of her neck delineated the year of his torment. His eyes fed on her, storing images against the never-ending days when he would not be permitted to see her. He no longer harboured any doubt that her stamina, the steady distillation of a profound aversion, would outlast his own. So often in the past, as he found himself irresistibly propelled towards her, a part of him, the custodian of his dignity, the keeper of his most secret seals, had warned, "No, no, no!" He ought to leave her now, without a word; he ought to catch the first plane home. The prospect was too bleak. His parents had sold their Riverton apartment, it was no longer possible to live with Haydon, he dreaded loneliness, the places he and Zoe had been together, the prospect of being separated from her by thousands of miles of sea and jungle.
"Zoe."
She would not, could not, relent.
He said, "We haven't really talked since we came out here. That's seven weeks and three days. Zoe, you just refuse to see me. Damn it, I exist!"
He walked across the room towards her. He dared.
"I have some pride," he said.
But stood.
"I beg you, Zoe," he said, falling to his knees. He reached out for her hand, which withdrew into the folds of chiffon. It lay, he saw, across her stomach, across .,.
"Sometimes," he said, "you make me so angry I could kill you."
"It's not yours, Jason, that's something you can never change. I'm sorry for you."
He withdrew, closed the door quietly, blind with loss, trod long carpets, applied himself through a veil of tears to his packing. The impulse to confide in his parents, to unburden himself on Lucille's generous breast, was almost overwhelming. He knew how great a misery he was about to bring down on their heads, but the magic spell still gripped him, he still lived in a trance, he remained walled off from Powell and Lucille by the one thing he'd never told them, the thing which only Zoe herself knew. If he ever told them, the game would be up.
Soames called for him punctually at three thirty. Within an hour the pressure inside Jason's head had abated, and the dry tinder of his hope was once again ablaze. This man in whose car he now drove was, after all, Zoe's uncle. Surely he could help.
Soames had nothing to say to the young Negro. His temper was frayed. He was worried, and the town depressed him. Brief as his contact with the poorer class of African had been, he valued the authenticity of his surroundings, the natural exuberance, colour and style of the native cite. Driving through the shanty streets now, he found the population cowed and apathetic; record players and radios were muted; the streets were virtually empty except for stray cats and mangy pie dogs. The pavements were dominated by soldiers, strutting arrogantly in small groups which carried the promise of sudden violence. The Army ruled. When soldiers passed, civilians stepped into the gutter. The nights were brittle with loud brawls.
In the bars, restaurants, cinemas and nightclubs frequented by Europeans, an equally brash phenomenon had made its appearance since Ybele's coup: the white mercenary. Dressed like cowboys and loaded with knives and pistols, these newcomers moved in packs from one nightspot to another, proclaiming their virility and their hatred of all things African. These were not the veteran regulars of the old French Army, but a raw, alien crew, adventurers and criminal types from all parts of the globe, mercenaries whose mouths were loud with English in this French-speaking city. The thousands of Frenchmen and their families who had stayed on—braving the rough seas of independence and then, believing the recent massacre to have been the work of Tukhomada, looking to Ybele for protection and stability—these colons had forced themselves to overcome their initial distaste and to welcome the foreigners into their homes. The mercenaries accepted the free food and wine and grinned lustily when their host referred to them with cowering familiarity as "les affreux."
His mind turned—reluctantly—to James Caffrey. A jewel cast, no doubt, among swine. Rarely in the last few days had Soames had time to speculate on his protege's present mode of life- He feared only one eventuality: the reappearance of the young man, disillusioned, indignant and prepared, as a vicarious gesture of revenge, to carry off Sara. The girl no longer smiled. Nor did she weep. Her gray silence suggested both a widow's suffering and a daughter's rebuke. Towards the cause of her pain and the object of her love, the father now harboured a burgeoning enmity.
The car turned into the Avenue Foch and the Negro at his side stirred unhappily. What precisely had occurred between Zoe and Jason, Soames had not been informed, but he knew as much as for practical purposes he needed to know. His mind ran nimbly over the whole gamut of his interests. Now, after Ybele's coup, Coppernican politics resembled more than ever a Chicago gang war, and the identity of the A1 Capone was less than ever in doubt. Laval's ruthlessly efficient handling of the coup and the massacre of Europeans had left an indelible impression on Soames. If Plon were to be outwitted in the final resort, it would be by a fine attention to detail, an eye for individual human aptitudes and personal susceptibilities—by an artistry which, he assured himself, the dry, mechanical Frenchman lacked. In bringing Ybele under control he would have to play two cards with consummate skill: Laval and Jason Bailey.
Thirty kilometres to the north, in the Special Force Camp located in dense jungle, James Caffrey sat on an old ammunition box with a Sten gun spanning his legs and an expression of undisguised curiosity occupying his regular features—an authentic face which inspired confidence, and also speculation about the essence of the English character. Closeted with him in a small, poorly lit shed were Denis Diamond, Malcolm Deedes and three Africans who lay trussed and bound on the floor. James regarded with awe and surprise the prostrate figures of Tukhomada, Maya and Odouma, these mythological demigods whose nemesis had been so swift and sudden. The three whites stared at the three blacks like children pushing their faces against the bars of a cage to study the behavioural quirks of chimpanzees. The Africans did not bother to stare back.
James found it impossible to relax. These prizes were his to guard; Laval had committed them to him; it was the challenge he had waited for. If he were to discharge his duty to Soames, he must not fail.
In the dead of night the French officers had returned to camp, their headlights slashing through the black curtain of the jungle. The brown, Arabesque stain was peeling from their skins in peculiar patterns, leaving their faces looking like aerial photographs of flood disasters. Laval had dragged the prisoners from a truck and forced them to kneel, to lick the proverbial dust. James could not judge which had been the crueller beating, Tukhomada's or Odouma's. Tall and frail, Tukhomada crumpled under the blows, then rose instinctively, blinded by his own blood, and tried to speak, to argue, to convince. In the glare of the headlights the mercenaries had gathered around to watch, and to shout.
Then Laval stood before Maya, erect and respectful. "Je suis Laval, mon General."
But Maya only turned away.
At two in the morning, James had once again been summoned to the Commandant's tent.
"What have you been thinking, then?" Laval began at once, as if there had been no interruption since their last conversation. He sat astride his bed with his face washed clean of its dark stain, revealing once more the sallow tan of the Midi. The Arab had dissolved in the laughing sulphuric of public comedy.
"I've heard rumours of a massacre," James said.
Laval nodded solemnly. "It was a slaughter. The women— our women and girls—suffered terribly." He shrugged and lit a cigarette. "Still, we have the swine who engineered it. There will be justice."
"Justice?"
Laval motioned towards a chair. "Sit down. Tell me, when you were in Cyprus, did you ever have occasion to kill?"
"Not personally."
"But you saw death?"
"Yes."
"What did you feel?"
"Regret."
Laval laughed shortly. "England is quite decadent. Why are you here, I wonder? It puzzles me. You are well educated; it cannot be for the money." There was respect in his voice, and a hint of envy. "You watched the prisoners kneeling in the dust, and I watched you. Disgust was written large across your child's face. But disgust for whom? For me?"
"No."
"Are you aware what these criminals have done in their time? Have you heard of the massacres they perpetrated during the so-called war of liberation? Did you know that Amah Odouma killed a white lady of advanced years, a helpless widow, with his own hands? And why? Because she was too much beloved of her servants and the natives who worked on her estates. None of them would leave their work to join Maya's rabble army, so Maya sent Odouma to cut her down. A hired killer—no more. Maya never took prisoners. Our boys were always slaughtered, but not before their eyes and testicles had been removed."
"Yes, I had heard of such things."
Laval shot him a glance and began to pace the tent.
"I am not a hired mercenary. Money had never meant anything to me. If it had, I would not have chosen the profession of arms which France so despises. A mercenary bears arms for money; yet thousands serve in their own national armies for that motive alone—to gain a livelihood. Why are you here?"
"I'm hoping to find myself."
"Yes, yes, but more precisely ..."
"I don't know. One can't know. Men only touch the sublime when they confront the unknown."
Laval stopped in midstride. "You know, but you prefer not to talk. It all burns inside you. This camp is full of loudmouthed braggarts; you are the only one I respect. You and I embody the Northern soul, a soul which has exhausted its inner possibilities—nothing remains now but the passionate desire to create, the form without the content. This soul of ours has Will and nothing but Will!"
Laval threw up his hands in a contained gesture of rapture, like a conductor blessing a moment of triumphal orchestral clarity.
"At the moment," James said, "I don't have enough to do. But I am not complaining."
Laval regarded him. "You want a real task?"
"Yes.
"You are hoping to rise in my estimation? Yes, yes, why protest? Of course you are. Already you are second only to Jean Martignac in my affections. You are both fair-skinned. In the morning you will guard the prisoners. The task will tax your soul to its limits. Don't fail me."
The morning came, dispersing private demons.
Now, watching the prisoners intently from his ammunition box, James struggled to bring the ends of his life together, to relate Soames' injunction to Laval's peremptory command. With luck, he would achieve the place in Laval's confidence which Soames had hoped for. And then he would stand at last on the burning ground from which Alec had been torn.
The prisoners absorbed him. What intrigued him was their climactic hurtling down, their catastrophic change of fortune, the irony of the gods. Men who, only a day earlier, had commanded the resources of a nation, twenty million people, now lay in the dust like beasts in a zoo. Their wounds troubled him. Tukhomada's head was swathed in white bandages stained yellow at the edges by antiseptic cream. He was tall, this demon, and he lay on the floor like a broken giraffe.
Gradually the subtlety of Laval's challenge became apparent to James. The impulse to cut these men free, to commit treason against his civilization, caught him like a blow between the shoulder blades. The Commandant, evidently, was determined to break the lock of his reticence, to incriminate him; t0 Propel him beyond the point of detachment. When his initial surprise had ebbed, James found himself possessed by a single force—happiness.
Squatting by his side, drawing on a pipe with half-closed eyes, Deedes was nodding off, entangled in a soporific dream involving the rubbery iips of a landlady and the incredible promises of an employment agent called Stanley Clough. The three Africans watched Deedes' pipe with a fierce, contained craving. James noted their dignity, and their need. Odouma intrigued him. Towards this sensitive-looking young man he felt both repulsion and kinship, the pull of a generational subculture whose Mecca lay somewhere beyond Solomon's mines. Was it possible that those delicate hands had murdered a defenceless old lady? The hands refused to yield their secret. Towards Tukhomada he felt only awe—that so much malevolence could be contained in so slender a vessel. Millions were said to worship him; he was known to fawn before witch doctors and constantly to invoke magic cults to cripple his political enemies. The whites were unanimous about this. His very name evoked in James images of the Inquisition, of religious fanaticism and sour bigotry. Yet the outward shell of the man suggested none of this; only a certain dignity shone through, the dignity of a man who believed in himself, a man who craved for tobacco but would not speak.
Amah Odouma lay on a carpet of straw and observed the three mercenaries through half-closed lids. Now that the uproar, turmoil and violence had abated, he felt inwardly calm, comforted by his prior certainty that something like this was bound to happen unless rapid preventive measures were taken. He had tried to warn his colleagues in the Cabinet; they had only themselves to blame. His grief was tinged with bitterness—even towards Raymond Tukhomada, whose addicted lungs, he sensed, were being tortured by the billowing smoke from the old red man's pipe.
Amah's cuts and bruises still ached, but they were nothing compared to what he had suffered when Bonaparte and Arab had pulled him unconscious from the radiator in the Rue des Saussaies and then dragged him half alive down the corridor towards the mirror, towards his own formless, unrecognizable face.
He wondered, sometimes, what had become of Dominique. Had she married? Did she still belong to the Party? Did she read about him in the French newspapers, and did she believe all that she read? The Communist party had, ultimately, given its blessing to Coppernican independence-—■ when it became inevitable. Why, then, had she never written to him? Or was it possible that she believed that it was he, and not she, who owed an apology? Or could it be something else, something more complicated than he was prepared to readily acknowledge—a deep, abiding shame, mutual and seamless?
The mercenary holding the Sten gun, a fair man with regular features and thoughtful, inquisitive eyes—was it possible that such men were still capable of reflection?—shifted on his ammunition box and coughed. If an appeal were to be made, it would have to be made to this one. Raymond would be angry; in defeat, Tukhomada was overcompensating for his lack of foresight with an excess of dignity. Amah tried to assess the young man with the Sten. The older, haggard fellow, the one with the pipe, was half asleep; and the big, beefy chap looked a brute, a thug.
Anything to avoid thinking about Laval.
Yet Amah's mind kept coming back to this central obsession. Laval! The Frenchman, whom he had never seen before, but whose destruction he had plotted in a thousand dreams, had hauled him down from the truck by the collar, struck him hard in the stomach, twice, and then forced him to eat dust. Some revenge.
Amah's head had been jerked up towards an angular face grotesquely stained with brown paint. The face of death. Behind it, barely visible, hovered the inane, vacuous masks of jeering spectators.
"I am Laval."
Laval had held him. Just held him. Amah's eyes closed involuntarily. Spittle splattered against his skin, causing him to retch with disgust.
"You want to know where she is?"
Somewhere Tukhomada was screaming.
"Under the cellar stones of Octave, macaque. Her bones. The rest was dissolved in sulphuric."
Octave!
"Octave!"
"Excuse me, Monsieur." Amah addressed himself to the mercenary with the Sten gun.
Who jumped, as if struck, then struggled to collect and steady himself, in the presence of fame and authority—the terrible, ambiguous authority of a captured German general.
"Well?"
"Can you get us cigarettes?"
Deedes' mouth fell open, a chasm of panic. He stared about him wildly, summoned, it seemed, by Murdoch MBE. lis pipe fell to he floor.
Denis Diamond pulled the bayonet from his belt and let it dangle between his fingers. His face contrived a perfect, caricaturist's sneer.
"We don't give a fuck," he said. Then, disorientated by silence, he glanced at Caffrey and resorted in nervous disarray to the high-pitched falsetto imitation he did of a well-known comedian. It was his party turn.
"He's nasty, he bites, ugh, ha ha, ugh, he's nasty." "Shut up," James Caffrey said. "Leave it, Amah," Tukhomada muttered angrily. "Pinhead," said Denis Diamond, preferring not to rise on the second count.
James pushed a purple note of money into Deedes' hand. "Get sixty cigarettes from the mess. And matches." "Wha'?"
Malcolm Deedes was swept by resentment. What right had Caffrey to push him into treason, into the very forbidden action which, measured against the affair of the dead Mau Mau, could land him in Mount Kenya Prison forever? These things were indivisible, the world was a unity.
"Never mind," Amah said patiently. "If it provokes dissension."
"I'd be grateful," James said to Deedes. "The entire responsibility is mine."
"If Laval-"
"Tell him I sent you."
Deedes shrugged and went from the hut, mindful of his heavy bladder.
"Jesus," grumbled Denis Diamond. "Well?"
"Well, hell, man, I mean these fucking niggers would murder their own grannies."
James stared at his feet. He wasn't going to argue in front of the prisoners, and his initial reaction to Odouma's request was one of surprise, of a reluctant identity; the postures of solidarity, the expected divisions, the relevance of the struggle—all this collapsed into a state of flux. He wanted badly to unshackle the Africans. He had felt, for an instant, that it was his brother, Alec, who lay on the floor, dark and troubled, negotiating for a fag.
Deedes did, in the end, come back.
"We have no money," Amah said. "They took it away." His English was substantial.
"We have plenty," James said.
"Bloody hell," growled Denis Diamond. Deedes would no longer look; the transaction was obscene; eons ago he had taken an oath of obedience. The bond which joined Laval to certain officers in Kenya required no explaining.
Amah turned to Tukhomada.
"Do we thank the officer?" he asked.
Tukhomada gathered his long, stork's legs underneath him. His bandaged head sat indignantly on the end of its slender pedestal.
"Are you mad, Amah?"
"But-"
The two Africans stepped back from the precipice of an argument. Both realized that it would quickly transcend the problem of the cigarettes, that it would serve as a waterfall for the dammed-up reservoir of their grief.
"I regret that it won't be possible to thank you," Amah said.
James shrugged, convinced that words would betray him. The Africans lit cigarettes with manacled hands; smoke poured like relief columns from Tukhomada's nostrils and mouth.
"Don't mention it," Deedes said, suddenly overwhelmed by his generosity and by the abiding unity of the human race.
A few minutes later an unbearable and virtually unacknowledged tension in James, unable to resolve itself peacefully, exploded.
"Why did you have to massacre and rape women and children yesterday? What harm were they doing you? If you need Europeans to help you build up this country, why thank them in the most brutal and barbarian way?"
Taken aback, Amah flung the cigarette packets back at him. They lay on the floor, gleaming dully in their cellophane wrapping.
"What did I tell you?" said Tukhomada. "Now I hope
you've learned your lesson."
Amah stared at the mercenary with the Sten gun and saw, to his amazement, that the man's indignation and outrage were genuine.
"You believe that we did that?"
"Listen to that!" cried Denis Diamond, rising threateningly.
"Sit down," James said.
"Enough, Amah," Tukhomada commanded. "It's unworthy to argue with murderous criminals."
Amah was staring at James.
"You really do believe that we organized that slaughter?"
James felt uneasy. One always felt uneasy when an opponent appeared to be supremely sure of his facts.
"I know you did," he said.
"You know. I see. And Laval, what is he—an angel of
mercy?"
James withdrew into himself. Either these men were brazen liars, unscrupulous actors, or else they had evolved in a different universe where causality was a whore. The more he dwelt on the matter, the more closely he examined their faces, the more he became convinced that they belonged to an ethos whose conception of truth, of reality, bore no relation to that of civilized Europe. Perhaps there was something in what Soames had said. Even Keller's ideas assumed a residual relevance in the face of Odouma's blatant failure to comprehend Truth.
James gripped the gun which lay across his legs. He felt convinced that he had been right to come to Africa. Life now was real. He felt grateful to Soames. During all those arid months he had kept on even terms with his dead brother only by superseding an invention of the Army by an equally improbable one of his own. Or so it now seemed. Luck's arrival had thrown him completely off balance; no centre of gravity had offered itself in that crucial moment of confrontation—none except Soames. Now at last he felt integrated and relevant, strong enough to put the olive-skinned ghost behind him forever.
He glanced at Odouma, and immediately his mild euphoria evaporated. In the young African's gaze he found a quality which was familiar and painful. If he and Tukhomada had not engineered the massacre, then who had? Odouma's words sprang to ambush his innocence. "And Laval—what is he—an angel of mercy?" James recalled the night on which the Commandant had summoned him to his tent: Keller's sombre, fanatical diatribe, the insects' battering themselves against the hot funnel of the lamp, Laval's massaging the brown stain deep into the pores of his skin, as if he intended a permanent change of identity. The Arab. Dissolved a girl in sulphuric ... the way he had spat in Odouma's face.
Amah Odouma's eye caught his own. James pulled the hair back from his forehead nervously. Laval. In what furnace had such a man been forged?
EIGHTEEN
it was 1937.
Two or three evenings a week in the summer two citizens of Saint-Etienne sat together in a pavement cafe in the Place Jean Jaures watching the world go by. The short, balding man who had been in the war and limped when he walked was a schoolteacher called Robert Maury. His companion, Guillaume Laval, who worked as a skilled technician in the Manufacture Nationale d'Armes, although aware that Maury was nicknamed I'estropii by his pupils, remained unaware that his own son Andre took the lead in baiting the schoolteacher for his deformity. Guillaume had always accepted Maury's praise for his son at face value.
"He is full of intelligence and ambition, that boy," Maury often reminded him. "How can you expect him to work with his hands?"
"Education means betrayal," the father complained, but not very seriously. He was proud of Andre's attributes and bought more than his share of drinks without rancour. He felt grateful to Maury, who gave vent to occasional, embarrassed apologies.
"What with the Matignon agreements, you fellows are better off than we are these days."
"The intellectuals are pauperized, certainly," Guillaume Laval said dryly, echoing a current Popular Front slogan.
"We can't seize the schools as you people occupied the factories in June," Maury said. "No one would care if we did!"
On the whole they steered clear of political talk and the escalating arguments which could ruin a friendship. Both the Lavals, father and son, regarded Maury's opinions as pathetically vacillating and timid; but the father did not mind and expected no more from a schoolteacher.
"Maury is a lukewarm slob," Andre complained to his father.
"That's no way to talk, boy."
"I have feelings too," Andre said. He liked garlic and wine and fresh bread with cheese.
"You'll be the same," Guillaume said. "When you have your bachot, you'll go off to Paris and spout a lot of stuff. Then you'll become like Maury, a milk-and-water Blum man. Or a little Daladier."
"Ha!"
"I know it."
In summer, the streets of Saint-fitienne sang with the heat, it shimmered like a premonition of Africa in the Rue Bergson and in the station square which would one day be named to commemorate the battle of Stalingrad. Two generations back, the Lavals had come from the grudging earth of the Haute-Loire countryside—from Retournac, where dearth and despair were easing the peasants from the land of their forefathers. Andre's uncle still worked the soil, and in August the whole family left Saint-fitienne to help in the fields. The factories closed completely for two weeks, despite the resentment of the employers, particularly the big steel magnate the Comte de Lacassagne. He took his wife to Cannes, or Capri, or the Antilles.
"It's that Jew Blum," his wife complained, as her hair was being set.
"It's a scandal, Madame la Comtesse."
"I say, 'Better Hitler than Blum.' "
"Madame is right."
At midday the urban Lavals groped for the shaded refuge of the olive trees, to eat their bread, cheese, tomatoes and wine—then sleep. And in midafternoon, the suffocating, gummed-up awakening.
"Too much wine," Guillaume Laval said, shaking Andre.
"Leave me!"
'Ta, ta, ta, temper."
"Leave me!" Andre staggered up, clutching his head and groaning. He detested the countryside and came only because his parents forced him to. Guillaume laughed.
"Andre is a town rat," he announced loudly. The boy's uncle grunted, but without pausing from his work.
"Why do you flare up so?" his mother would reproach Andre in the evenings, when he complained stormily that he couldn't be expected to work with so much noise in the house. "Ask nicely, mon petit, there are other people to consider." Why he alone in the family should have grown up short-tempered and morose she could not fathom. Familiar cliches, the substance of so many desultory family conversations, floated through her mind: "inherited from his greatgrandfather," "had a shock as a baby," "a secret sickness," "born like that," "too much wine."
He was brown like his father, with a sharp, aquiline nose, a mop of raven hair and fierce eyes which glimmered like wet pebbles. Clara loved him even more than his sweet-natured younger sister, Anne-Marie. The girl called him Monsieur le Professeur when she wanted to rile him; she had learned the taunt from her father.
"Very funny," Andre would say dryly. "See—I'm convulsed."
The laughter would drain, then, from the girl's open face.
He had one friend only, a fellow pupil at the lycee called Jacques Pineau. They drank wine in a cafe on the Rue
Blanqui, talked politics with a few acquaintances and recited the current slogans like prayers.
"A bas la Rocque!"
"A bas Maurras!"
"A bas Lacassagne!"
"A bas les deux cent families!"
"A bas les cochons moderes!"
"A bas ..."
They organized petitions protesting against Leon Blum's timidity in refusing to intervene in Spain and in closing the Pyrenees frontier.
"Au secours de I'Espagne! A bas le fascime! A bas Franco!"
"Only eighty planes," Andre liked to say, "and Madrid would have crushed the rebels in a week." He brought his fist down hard on the iron table, causing the glasses to jump. He had a peculiarly vindictive way of saying "rebels."
"The Radicals prevented it," Jacques Pineau would say.
"Les salauds."
"One should join the International Brigades."
"Russia will not let the Republic fall," Andre assured his friends.
"Russia is poor. She has her own difficulties."
"Vive Staline!"
Andre Laval was the chorus master and chief sloganeer. His temper grew darker and his slogans more vehement as the Spanish Republic slowly foundered. One morning Robert Maury, who specialized in the teaching of English and German, entered his classroom to find a slogan chalked on the blackboard: 'Vive I'Espagne rouge! A bas les traitres pa-cifiques!"
"Is this directed at me?" Maury said coldly, limping to his desk. After a long silence Andre Laval stood up.
"Monsieur le Professeur, with all respect, our passion is great."
"Sit down, Laval."
The boy hesitated, then sat down.
"You all want war, then," the schoolmaster said, heaving himself painfully into his high chair. "Do any of you know what war is?" He took off his jacket slowly, and then he
unbuttoned his shirt and pulled the tail up from his trousers to reveal a long, livid scar running at an angle from his shoulder to his waist. His skin was gray-white and his paunch heavy; a boy tittered. "That," he said, "is war. And I was lucky." But the gesture had misfired and the generations parted, like the waves. They understood what war entailed, and they would have gone to Spain had it not been for their exams. The system would not wait for them or make allowances for vacational idealism; and they were ambitious.
Andre's father got fed up with the boy's constant harping on Spain.
"Well, then, go, go to Spain," Guillaume said.
"No, Guillaume, are you mad?" cried his wife, Clara.
Andre gobbled his cheese, garlic and petits pois sullenly, bending over his full plate with predatory fervour.
"If it's a cause he must die for, let him go. Or let him shut his mouth. If I had the guts, I would go. But I haven't, so I don't blabber about it."
Andre stored up his resentments to vent on Jacques Pineau's sister, Simone, whom he met in the evenings in a cafe on the Rue Michelet, a secret haunt hidden from the eyes of his friends and family. He felt secretive about his love life, jealous and possessive about Simone, a comely, demure girl with a perfectly balanced oval face which, he calculated, would later become fleshy. Such speculations consumed him while he sat smoking, waiting for her to appear around the corner in her neat, freshly laundered blouse and skirt, smiling and contrite at being late. She was sixteen, a year his junior.
He stood up stiffly and she pecked him on the cheek.
"I'm late, darling."
"Yes."
She stepped back and read his face.
"I'm sorry."
"Are you?"
"Andre-"
"You are always sorry. Perhaps you think I have nothing better to do than to twiddle my thumbs. Why were clocks invented?"
"Andre, please don't let's have a row."
"Who have you been with, Simone?"
He knew in his heart that she had been working late in the laboratory; but so intense and pervasive was the power of his imagination, and so self-wounding the lines on which it perversely worked, that his self-inflicted torments almost took on the form of realities.
He said, "Next year we may look forward to the award of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Mile. Simone Pineau."
She sat down and regarded him reproachfully. He reached out and took her fingers in his own; they were small and cool and they soothed him; presently he would twist them until the first seismic flicker of pain passed across her face. Only this morning Anne-Marie had said, "Andre will never marry. He's too selfish."
"How can he marry until he knows his way around," his father had said. "He has had no practice yet, you can see that."
"As if I had the time," Andre had snapped.
Now he looked at Simone's breasts, which had blossomed over the years with modest yet exciting persistence until they stretched the yellow cloth of her blouse taut and challenging.
"You always deny me everything," he said.
"If that's your mood," she said sadly and walked away from him down the Rue Michelet, towards her home. He thought, "Let her go," and at once started after her, taking care not to catch up too soon. He enjoyed the agony of their public estrangements, the delicious pain where life and playacting merged. At the corner he bought I'Humanite and became instantly absorbed in the front-page news; he drank down public life like a medicine.
"Hitler's Germany Aids Franco," the headline screamed.
"Les salauds," he said aloud, crossing a traffic junction and ignoring the angry piping of a gendarme's whistle. When he was at a safe distance, he showered abuse on the policeman.
"Flic, lackey of the two hundred families!"
He came up on Simone while she was buying loaves f2 a stall.
"Look at this," he said. "The Senate is trying to bring
Blum down. The Senate! Abolish it. Caillaux! Ugh!" He spat n the gutter, in the manner of a worker, a true comrade. He tissed Simone's pouting lower lip.
"I cannot excuse myself, sweetheart."
"No, Andre, you are cruel to me." —
"It's because I love you."
They sauntered hand in hand down the sunlit street.
"What were you doing at the lavabo?" he said with a hint of renewed aggressiveness. It was his way of referring to her norganic chemistry laboratory. Himself, he concentrated on iterature and languages; English was his speciality. There were times, at home, when he spoke almost entirely in English. It infuriated his father, who called him King George.
"Tomorrow," Simone said, "Professor Frontignac is coming from Paris to talk to us about Marie Curie's work at l'lnstitut du Radium."
"I thought that was physics," Andre said.
"A good scientist understands related fields."
He stopped, bent her backwards, and kissed her hard on the mouth, a long, angry kiss. Two summers ago they had sunbathed at Cagnes on a joint family outing; since then he had not seen her naked and the thought tormented him. When they began walking again, a hot film of desire settled [ike a skin over his hard, bony body.
"You must ask Frontignac," he said harshly, "to declare his position."
"His position?"
"His political commitments, of course."
"Oh that."
"Don't sneer. Everything comes down to politics in the end. There is a class position on everything, even your stinks."
"No scientist would agree," Simone said firmly.
"No scientist would know. This Frontignac may be a Fascist, a complete swine."
They had reached the corner of her own street. Again he stopped, glanced around and then forced her against the wall.
"You know how much I want you, Simone," he said
intently, pressing his body against her own. "You do know,
don't you?"
She withdrew into herself, attempted to divest herself of all attractiveness, like a bird shedding its summer plumage. An impenetrable veil of passivity, of stubborn, silent resistance came between them like a theatre curtain, driving Andre to a frenzy. In his anger at being cheated, at being denied his due, at being taken for a child, he almost forgot his physical desire.
"You know how I feel about it, Andre," she said. His hands tightened around her wrists. He was watching for the first tremor of pain.
"Don't let's have another row about it," she pleaded. "Fine! No row. And you have your way, as always. Never mind my feelings. Never mind how my work is affected, or my health."
She winced now.
"Why do you delight in hurting me, Andre?" "Because I love you." He released her wrists.
"I have to go now," she said. "Mama is expecting me." "Mama," he said, mocking a little girl's voice. "We'll talk tomorrow," she promised. "Always tomorrow!" "Ssh. People will hear."
"Do I care? Why must we always whisper as if we were in a bloody confessional?" "Andre."
She kissed him hurriedly on the cheek, then turned and ran down the street to her house. He felt empty, spent, and as he walked his mind bobbed from one triviality to another. In late adolescence, his body had begun to commit treason on his mind; he found it increasingly difficult to concentrate on his work; instead he thought about famous sports stars, or about the near-naked girls in certain magazines he read, or about the regular cycle of his days: bed, breakfast at home, school, lunch, school, Simone, dinner, homework, bed.
"Andre is clever," Robert Maury told Guillaume Laval over a Pernod. "But I'm worried all the same. He is consumed by politics and by the flesh, by passion and dream. If he is not careful he will fail the bachot."
"Worse things can happen to a man," Guillaume said.
Maury nodded hastily. "Of course. But you know his ambitions. Paris is inscribed on his heart. Afterwards, he hopes to study in London."
"We are not good enough for him here."
"If you want to work with your brain, you want to go to Paris."
"He won't listen to me. I'm only an ignorant worker."
A week later the Government of Leon Blum fell, brought down by the Senate, by the forces of rural conservatism. Within a few days the Comte de Lacassagne, one of the greatest steel magnates in France and a millionaire reputed to have heavy mineral investments in Coppernica, cut wages at his factory in Saint-fitienne. The CGT called a strike.
Andre rode to school in a state of high excitement. He saw the picket lines outside the gates, and the slogans, and his flesh burned for them. "Les Radicaux sont des salauds," he shouted. The men stared back at him with sullen tolerance. Their lives ran deeper.
He entered the classroom dramatically and slammed his books down on his desk.
"We must organize at once! We must constitute a committee of solidarity with the strikers."
His classmates regarded him sceptically, with a keen eye for individual neurosis and the desire for self-assertion decked out in ideological trappings. The examinations were approaching; politics could wait. In the twelve months since the victory of the Popular Front the bad old forces of retreat, compromise and betrayal had reasserted themselves; la Republique des camarades lived again. The young were already cynical.
This smug silence infuriated Andre.
"Which of you are for the workers and which for the trusts, for the two hundred families?"
"You do nothing but talk, Laval," someone said.
"We are sick of committees and resolutions," added another.
Andre encompassed the whole room in his withering ize.
"Have you no compassion, then? No feelings for the suffer-lg and exploited?"
"Shut up, Andre," said Jacques Pineau softly, "and don't lake an ass of yourself." "You too are a Judas-coward!" "Et tu." Someone laughed. "He thinks he's Caesar!" "Ah, mes camarades de classe," Andre cried with ponder-ius irony, "what a generation of petit bourgeois egoists and quirts France can look forward to!"
Robert Maury came in, limping, and took stock of the iituation with guarded tolerance. Andre remained on his :eet, pale and trembling.
"Do you wish to take the class this morning?" Maury isked gently. "I am disgusted, Monsieur." "Again?"
"I find that my fellow human beings lack all sense of altruism, of heroic sacrifice. We are losing the capacity to reach beyond the horizon of our own selfish ambitions."
Maury shrugged. When he spoke, it was in a conciliatory and reasonable tone, as if to an adult.
"A young scholar must work like everyone else. He ought not to regard himself as a perpetual street demonstrator. Besides, later on, when he has passed his examinations, people will listen to him more attentively." Andre snorted with evident contempt. "I recognize the bland and deceptive voice of the bourgeois enlightenment, the insinuating whisper of class betrayal. The rest of the world is moving, Monsieur, even if your friends the Radicals are unaware of it, and we in France must move too before it is too late."
The schoolmaster put on his spectacles and leaned forward over his desk.
"Make speeches in your own spare time, by all means, but if you wish to remain here, kindly sit down and devote your attention to Shelley and Coleridge."
Enveloped in the ringing silence of a solitary yet public confrontation with the forces of law and order, Andre found himself unable to sit down, to capitulate. He knew that he was sinking himself and his future beyond hope of repair, but the dialectic of struggle and defiance now had him in a condition of almost hypnotic dependence.
"I have no wish to remain here, Monsieur. By all means teach these servile dogs to fawn over the English poets while their fathers and brothers struggle in the real world against the trust."
"Get out!" said Maury.
As he went, blindly clasping his books, notebooks and pens, Andre heard himself say, "Oui, Monsieur I'estropie."
He slammed the door to drown the hiss of anger.
Jacques Pineau came after him and tried to take his arm. Andre shook him off.
"Andre, for God's sake have sense. If you go back at once and apologize, I know that Maury will forget the matter."
"Ha! Not likely."
"I realize that it would take courage-"
"Courage! What do you know about courage, Jacques, you who always run with the herd and pipe up, 'Yes, Sir, no, Sir'?"
Jacques inclined his head then and ran a hand nervously through his fine, oak-grained hair. He nodded, partly to himself, and turned away.
"A man must fashion himself out of rock," Andre said harshly, striding towards the main door and the sunlit courtyard beyond. "He must make himself invulnerable to mediocrity and the charms of modesty."
"Sometimes you sound more like a Fascist," Jacques called after him, trembling.
Andre walked the burning streets in a state of epic fury and heroic release. Intoxicated by the glory and self-sacrifice implicit in his action, he soaked in the freedom of the boulevards, with their women and girls, young, rounded and provocative in their thin summer frocks and high-heeled shoes. He had burned his boats; the pavement scalded his feet. Paris, he reflected bitterly, would remain a dream, or a dirty weekend. It would not be to the Sorbonne, nor the Rue d'Ulm that he would go, but to the Place Pigalle, along with the foreign tourists, sweaty with lust and traveller's cheques. Well, a sacrifice was a common, almost an inevitable, feature in the lives of the great heroes. With cataclysmic violence, they suddenly erupted from the ruck, from the common herd, defying social tradition and family expectations, transforming poverty into power. He strode towards the Lacas-sagne works, a boy totally committed to the working class, to socialism, to revolutionary struggle. Struggle! Luscious women and harlots passed him in the street, offered him timid glances of adoration which he affected not to notice. He would have liked some wine now, and some bread, cheese and garlic besides, but it was not the moment to run home to Mama. A man's world. One day, in the industrial suburbs of Paris and Saint-fitienne, they would name a street after him: Rue Laval. Like Lenin, fleshed in steel, harder than Jaures, more flexible and cunning than Guesde, ruthless, uncompromising, ascetic, self-denying, he was a giant on the ladder of history. France needed a new Lenin, a new Blan-qui. A Marat! There was a dream—Marat in his bath, tortured by his skin disease, writing feverishly for the Ami du Peuple, for July 14—Andre Laval in his bath, tribune of the people, preparing for the seizure of power, the dictatorship of the working class! A girl enters, a modern Charlotte Corday, a treacherous Girondin, a Blum-girl, a milk-and-water Socialist, but beautiful, luscious, ripe. She has a dagger, she raises her arm, her breasts swell out, she braces her thighs ... he is quick, a man of steel, he catches her wrist as it descends, the dagger hovers in midair, poison-sharp, hungry for his flesh ... he rises, struggles to balance despite the slippery enamel and steps out, naked and dripping, and flings her against the wall.
"A new Charlotte Corday, eh?"
"You dirty Communist!"
"Assassin!"
"You vile traitor!"
She lunges at him. He catches her wrists and begins to twist them, slowly, watching her face for its moment of supplication. Her legs begin to buckle; she struggles; at last the dagger slips from her hand; she gives a cry; he throws her on to her back, her skirt rides high up her thighs, they are smooth and milky with promise and her stockings cling tightly to her succulent flesh. He descends on her, forcing her legs apart, he himself has become the dagger, potent, up. right, penetrating. She moans for mercy and for love of him. He is quick with her. It is brutal, short, for him alone ... ^
He had reached the steelworks. A large crowd had congregated in front of the gates where a picket line was attempting to deny a passage to a group of "blacklegs" who were insisting on their right to work. The confused reality of social violence dispelled Andre's fanciful dream; surrounded by CGT loudspeakers, police vans, cables and the anxious, bewildered faces of the women, he looked about him wildly, desperately eager to find a means of proving himself and of justifying the irrevocable step he had taken.
"No school today, Andre?"
It was Janine, a worker at the Lacassagne factory and a friend of his father.
"A man has feelings," Andre muttered, moving away.
The factory gates had become the focus of attention. The big men in the picket line kept their arms linked and the gates closed. Already riot police were edging forward to secure a free passage for the blackleg workers. Cries of "jaunes" and "bedouins" went up from the crowd; the striking workers milled around their comrades to form a solid protecting wall of human determination. A stone hurtled through the air and struck a gendarme's helmet; truncheons flashed against the blue sky; a man screamed—an isolated and grotesque cry of pain. A woman began to shriek. Andre heard himself shout hoarsely, "The filthy swine, les flics." Angry words, charges and countercharges were escalated into blind turmoil near the gates. Seeing a policeman turn his truncheon on a defenceless but defiant old man who had been taunting him, Andre elbowed his way through the crowd, panting and cursing, until he was close enough to lunge wildly at the gendarme's face. His fury was like molten rain; it thundered on the roof of his skull. His hand found flesh, messy and soft flesh, and at the same instant his whole body was consumed by an electric spasm of fire whose focal point of combustion he was not able to locate until later, when the back of his neck began to ache and grow stiff. He lost consciousness. He ffas vaguely aware of being dragged kicking and screaming across the square with his arms twisted behind his back and of being bundled roughly into a police van. His wrists were manacled. Twisted her wrist ... it is brutal, short and for him alone ... he tried to rise but was at once knocked down.
"Sit down, little Jew." ^ The words scalded him; the humiliation, the impotence, were unbearable. He came erect, catching the attention of a gendarme who pointed out the boy's discomfiture to his colleague. They laughed raucously. Andre, who sat helpless, with his hands fettered, found his whole development into manhood, into the species of dominance, put in doubt. It was a moment he would never forget—or forgive. He would have liked to have shouted and raged at them, to have forced them into an argument, to have mocked and derided their dirty profession, to have asserted his superior intelligence. But they were beyond his reach, these remote, detached gendarmes, dry men impervious to any language except that of pure action. The lesson scarred his bladder.
He lay one morning on a bridge which spanned the main Saint-fitienne-Lyons railway line, scanning the track with his British binoculars. It was January, 1943, and his fingers despite their mittens, were numb with cold. The early morning mist was gradually dispersing, revealing a long cutting, flanked by high precipitous banks from which the ambush party would rain down their fire as Mark Antony's army had done at Philippi. A German troop train was due in the next half hour. Andre, who had planned every phase of the operation in collaboration with his brother-in-law and former schoolfriend Jacques Pineau, had positioned his men before dawn, then settled down on his stomach to wait, to brave the bitter cold, to wait for an action which, like others before it, appeared to him as a climax of self-realization. Beside him on the bridge crouched Martin, the detonation man, staring at his black box and plunger as if they were the doomsday machine itself.
Waiting in the lifting morning, Andre became conscious of his vendetta with history.
He remembered standing stiff, tired and footsore on a desolate strip of road in a part of France which was totally foreign to him. He was frightened too, a prisoner among prisoners. It was May, 1940.
The German sergeant had kept them standing on their feet for half an hour while awaiting further orders. They asked permission to sit down but he wouldn't hear of it. The sergeant was lean, wiry and small, and he fascinated Andre. He didn't look like a man who would ever get tired or depressed, or understand why people committed suicide. He stood impassive and alert a few feet away from Andre, a part of "them," of the "enemy," the "others," apparently beyond the reach of any emotion or logic other than that prescribed by the machine he served. He might have been a Ftihrer at any level, or so it seemed. Andre wondered how a man contrived to deliver his whole personality to the business of war; was the transference neurotic and exterior to his instincts, or physiological and merely exterior to Andre's? The problem obsessed him, the problem of this race, this people who had juggernauted his own into instant submission. Staring fixedly at the sergeant's hollow features, he forgot temporarily the letter in his pocket, Simone's long, rambling description of life in Saint-fitienne, culminating in the announcement of her pregnancy. So. After the long years of frustration, of the flower turning in on itself, manuring itself, festering ...
"What you must understand about Simone," his mother had told him gently, in the bleeding days after he had first taken a job as clerk in a bank, "is that she is afraid of you."
"He eats too much garlic," said Anne-Marie.
"Very funny, ha, ha."
"You are impulsive by temperament," Clara told him. "You fly off the handle at the least provocation. You're not dreamy and gentle like some boys, like Jacques, for example."
"This eternal chastity is bad for my health."
"She's afraid you will leave her if she gives herself now."
"But she'll make me ill!"
"You must talk to your father about that," Clara said.
Instead he turned to Simone's brother Jacques for advice and comfort. For a period of months after Andre had quit Maury's classroom and thrown over his studies, they had not met. Refusing to betray the working class by mixing with the "nascent bourgeoisie," he had rejected Jacques' nervous overtures. Then Jacques failed his bachot and they were reconciled. Once more they drank wine together in a cafe in the Rue Blanqui, watched the girls walk by and philosophized. The cruel fate which had cut them off from higher education lent their conversation a fierce but twisted intellectual intensity.
"Consider Simone," Jacques would begin. "She is not a Christian, yet as a woman she cannot be entirely oblivious to the traditional teachings of the Church on love and marriage. The Church, after all, is a woman. Pascal must have said it."
"But Simone is a scientist?"
"Of course. But consider. She learns chemistry under an austere and devoted professor of chemistry—a Dreyfusard and a sexagenarian. She learns to treat matter, and particularly the combustion of separate but fusing antibodies, with respect. This respect verges on panic. She is a woman."
"But she must love me!"
"She does. But you are dynamic, and she knows it. In the long run she feels that she must remould you, make you gentler, more considerate, more amenable to family life. Paradoxically, she believes that marriage will prove your reincarnation, for is not marriage the supreme sacrifice, the ultimate giving, the final renunciation of selfishness?"
Andre laughed harshly.
"Also, she hopes you will mellow with age. But consider. Simone looks about her, an angelic girl, serious, benign, spiritual, a woman of the Midi. Her consciousness is like wine—but a dry, sober wine. She notices that the girls who live most promiscuously, the ones who suddenly swell up so that they can no longer sit behind their school desks and so have to leave, are the very ones who pay lip service to religion and wear crucifixes around their necks. She realizes that it is not, as the priests insist, freethinking and science which breed promiscuity, abortions and unhappiness, but rather lack of mental discipline, a superstition which, under the persuasion of bodily turmoil, merges into sentimentality and a sanctimonious sensuality. Open your legs and pray. Naturally this deters her from giving way to you. She becomes more than ever determined to wait."
"All of which means that she doesn't understand me at all."
"She does and she doesn't," Jacques said. "Physical science cannot teach her that certain qualities which would be intolerable in the female have a rationale and justification in the male. A woman with your character, Andre, would be a disaster fit only for a convent or a mental home. And why? Because woman remains ultimately defined by her biological function, which is gentleness. But man is truly a sociopolitical animal, a creature of social evolution as well as of the Darwinian kind. His cruelty and egoism may prove to be the very foundations of his greatness, of his social function. Simone cannot know yet that men like yourself are acceptable when viewed from the marketplace, the factory and the field of battle, however disastrous their behaviour when seen from the family hearth."
"It would bring her to her senses if I were to go with some whore."
Jacques looked unhappy. He ordered more wine, then shrugged.
"Why don't you?" he said, remembering that his father, who mended watches in the Rue des Francs-Masons, had disparagingly referred to Andre as "mm revolutionnaire de poche" after he had stormed out of Maury's class and thrown over his education. "Why marry a bad-tempered clerk?" he had asked Simone soon after she had passed her own bachot and accepted a place at the Marseilles Polytechnique. "You'll find some decent, intelligent fellow later on, and you'll be glad that you left that Andre well alone. He can't come to any good."
But in the end it was compassion which bent Simone, a storm of remorse and sympathy when Andre's life crumbled and her own ran smoothly. She recognized his agony when he came to see her off at the station and was forced to share her attention with her family and friends. She could guess how he
had once dreamed of a different parting, his own departure for Paris, surrounded by an admiring family and an adoring mistress to whom he would generously accord the final, parting embrace as the train began to slide along the platform, carrying him to immeasurable heights of triumph.
The Director of the bank summoned him.
"Laval."
"Yes, Monsieur?"
"What is your ambition, Laval?"
"To serve the bank, Monsieur le Directeur, with all the energy and ability at my command. My knowledge of foreign languages—of English—may perhaps prove useful."
"Ah. London, perhaps, or New York?"
"I hope so, Monsieur."
"And then a directorship, possibly, a Peugeot and a house
by the sea?"
Andre bowed his head modestly. "If God will it, Monsieur."
The Director nodded curtly. "God will not will it until you learn to count. A client writes to complain of no less than eight errors in his account statement. Eight errors! Get out, out, out of my sight!"
Simone's pity swelled to the extent of remorse, then guilt. "Andre," she wrote, "you are such a good and kind person." The notion surprised him. He thought, "Not always." She came home from Marseilles for a vacation and they quarrelled when she refused to sleep with him. They didn't see each other for several weeks, and when they did they quarrelled again. She returned to Marseilles and almost at once Russia signed a pact of non-aggression with Nazi Germany. Guillaume and his son read the news in I'Humanite.
"Stalin knows what he's doing" Guillaume muttered uneasily, to break the silence.
He rose from the breakfast table, wiped his mouth on his sleeve and then made for the lavatory, unbuttoning his braces as he went.
"We are betrayed," Andre called after him.
"Stalin won't let us down," Clara said.
Andre slapped the paper angrily. "Read, woman! No
superstition, please! Read it! The evidence is plain. We are betrayed!"
He stormed out.
War came and Andre's conscription. He didn't see Simone until the following March when he came home for a few days' leave, strong and upright, proud to have known the virile fraternity of men under arms, proud also not to have renounced his communisant scepticism of the Allied war aims. Simone found him quieter, politer, more chivalrous— new qualities which she took to be signs of his greater self-assurance and which melted her completely. She no longer wanted to continue her studies at the Polytechnique; she wished to be his wife, and that would be impossible, she realized, if she stayed on to take a degree. Like her brother Jacques, she must fail, or seem to fail, in order to put Andre at his ease and to purge their relationship of poisonous complexes and rancours. It would entail abandoning her ambition to teach, to have a career and the ultimate independence which a career implied; yet the prospect of total sacrifice on the altar of his pride went to her head like warm wine, injecting her limbs with the same condition of suspended animation she felt when, after long months of saving, she realized that she was about to embark on a wild extravagance. In such moments surrender is the prelude to discovery—or so she hoped.
On a slanting hillside in March, they found a wood, a bare forest whose dead ground had not yet yielded its buds of spring. The wooden limbs of trees gestured in postures of motionless pain, as if miming the human agonies of the battle to come, and the earth beneath them was hard with a winter's frost, parched for the draught of a blood wedding.
"We should make love," Simone said.
A bird sang its responses; for months she had dreamed of this moment, these words, this man's answering face.
: "Here?" he said.
She put her arms around his neck and kissed him.
"Here," she said.
His stillness, his almost frozen stillness, was intelligible to her in terms of his long, frustrated waiting, the years of repression and adjustment, of sublimation and the burial of
hope. In the silence of the wood the virgin voice of her body called out its confidence in the compassion of nature. With closed eyes and a hopeful heart she embraced the stiff, hard man beneath the horsehair uniform, pulling the khaki soldier to the gray-green ground and willing the scab of his reticence to break, the wound of his love to open.
"Andre, Andre, my love, my sweet love."
He lay rigid on top of her, like a fallen tree. The cold earth beneath them was almost dry, yet its frosted months were not yet forgotten. She began to spar with his clothing, his buttons, belts, the mundane contrivances of a frigid civilization.
"Wait," he whispered. His stillness was not yet a truth.
"Andre," she said.
"Eh?"
"I love you, I do, you are so gentle and kind."
His olive face lay crumpled among the mud-buried leaves of a lost autumn.
"Are you nervous?" she said gently.
"Nervous? Why do you say that?"
Had she not known better, she might have taken for anger the force which soldered his jaws together, like a vice.
"I'm nervous," she said, "too."
Adolescence reclaimed him; the soldier was riveted to his body's morbid growth; the woman threatened his mortality; in creating life, he feared the loss of his own relevance.
"Andre."
"Well?"
"Tell me, darling, I only want to know, I won't rebuke you, I promise, but please tell me—has there ever been anyone else?"
He laughed, but without humour, and almost simultaneously his fingers dug into the soft flesh of her upper arms, shifting their grip in search of a vulnerable point, and once again the familiar intensity came into his eyes, the brittle sheen which would not depart until she had confessed to pain. But she didn't mind. Many months ago, when he had pressed her against the wall in the Rue Michelet, the fingers which had punished her for not yielding had quickened her resentment. But now, baptized anew in an infinity of love, she had become a woman beyond the reach of trivial pain.
She made love to him. She tried. She laid his hand inside her blouse against her breast, smothered his face with kisses and wrapped her limbs round his own. It was an agony. A storm as silent, motionless and cold as an Alpine glacier pulled them apart. He seemed incapable of response; the detached double lens of his eyes focused on the clouds beyond the treetops.
He lay still.
"Andre, my sweet, what is it?"
"Nothing."
She leaned over him and stroked his face, his hair, his tension. She kissed him again, slyly pushing through the bud of her warm tongue; but his frosted lips would not yield their jealous claim upon one another.
"Why won't you, Andre?" she whispered. She had almost said, "Why can't you?"
"I'm not roused," he said. His voice was neutral, yet a verdict, a condemnation of herself.
"Is it my fault?"
The chill of the frozen earth began to penetrate her clothing. She sat up sadly and gazed down the funereal vistas of the woods, at the silent trees arrayed in sentinel grief for the coming of the invader. A twig bit the underflesh of her hand; yet the weight was her own.
"I'm sorry," she heard Andre say.
"I cannot understand it," she said. "All these years you have been asking . . ."
"Even animals have their moods."
She nodded. "Never mind," she said softly.
"On the contrary, Simone, we must succeed in this." He sat up abruptly and hammered his fist on the ground, v"France has need of men in this her hour of trial." She felt, suddenly, exiled.
Andre Laval stood up. Watching him, she was reminded of a film she had seen at Cine-Liberte, in which an Indian widow worked herself into a trance before hurling herself on the funeral pyre.
"Simone." Once again the vibration of his nerves broke the stillness around her like the humming wings of a million insects. "Do as I say."
Her face collapsed towards a question.
"Will you do as I say, will you?" He bent down and pulled her to her feet, a short and gentle woman with an oval face whose pleasantness blended naturally with its modestly veiled intelligence. She remembered again what she had decided to give up for him, the only young man she had ever walked out with; if divesting herself of a capacity, a limb, was the price she had agreed on, there was nothing to be gained by deferring the sacrifice.
"Whatever you ask," she said.
His hands retained their grip on her shoulders, and she saw that his intense stillness was that of the hunter whose genius depends not only on skill in pursuit but also on the magic of attraction. He was waiting for something to come, a bird in the wood or a spurting juice shot through his veins by a galvanized gland. She sensed—she could no longer look, his struggle was too private—that if he tried too hard and grew rigid, nothing would happen, that his tension, like an athlete's, depended on a deep relaxation of the muscular substructure. Even so, the violence of his eruption stunned her.
"France is doomed, Simone, condemned to grovel and worship alien energy, doomed to concede that the epoch of feminizing talk is over, the centuries of argument and debate and inaction ... Walk backwards five steps, go on, do as I command, do as I ... Good. Now take off your skirt and blouse, do it, don't tell me it's too cold, do it ... not your stockings, put on your shoes again ... don't stand still, move a little, any way you like, walk .. . hold your shoulders back, look proud, don't cower, look proud, look proud!"
Simone stopped, mystified and almost in tears. Her confusion as much as the sharp air caused her to shiver.
"Andre, what is it you want of me?"
He took a step towards her, but unknowingly. "You promised to do as I commanded."
"Yes, but—"
"No 'buts.' Obey me! You may have passed your bachot, little girl, little rabbit, but from now on you are going to obey me. No more fooling about. Now listen to what I have to say. I shall not repeat it. I am asleep in the wood, right? Look, here I am now lying against this tree, asleep. You are a famous woman, bandit, notorious and fierce, fearless and impertinent. You are stalking through the wood in an angry mood when you see me, asleep. You decide to rob me. Do you understand?"
Simone wrapped her arms across her breast and shivered.
"Yes."
"You must look fierce—and proud. Don't cower. Shoulders back. You are a famous bandit, no longer a little wet chemist. Now, pay attention. At the very moment that your hand finds my wallet, I wake up. Instead of taking to your heels, you are determined to rob me and to kill me if necessary. Yeu seize this large stick, this one here, and you beat my brains out."
"Andre!"
"You must believe in yourself. Don't shiver, Simone, act, act, transform yourself, reach out for a heroic essence, you are no longer the clever little girl hugging her legs together, the spotty brain-box traipsing her virginity like carbon dioxide to choke the lungs of men—you must try and beat my brains out. Really try. With all your might! Don't imagine that I'll let you."
He stared at her body, her underclothes, ravenously.
"Very well," she said.
"Be aggressive," he said, breathing heavily and lying against the tree with closed eyes, faking sleep. "Remember to try and kill me. Don't fake it or I shall notice."
Footsteps sounded softly in the wood. A twig cracked. He waited tensely until he could sense her shadow fall across him. Deft fingers found his wallet, something which was his was being taken from him, his capacity to defend his own was being challenged, the foreign invaders were trampling his face in the mud, spitting on France, he opened his eyes and saw the bandit girl reach for the stick, a girl standing astride him...
He rose at her like an eagle.
She lay beneath him and ceased to struggle, thus breaking the spell and threatening his powers. "Fight," he whispered urgently, angry at having to tell her, at having the illusion of real conflict stilled, at being forced to live on a double plane more complex than his character could command. Her entwining arms almost unwound him to the zero of softness. He fastened his hands around her neck and pressed; instinctively her own reached to divert his wrists. It was enough; the tower was saved. Even so, his anxiety persisted in the absence of a single, sharp rhapsodic cry of defeat. The Indian refused to howl his abrupt death as he hurtled to the ground; her virginity died as men die, slowly and clumsily. The cold earth grew no warmer; and if Simone was left with a residual glow of love, for him only stale tactile values remained to remind him that the attic of illusion is less constant than the cellar of reality.
He pulled out and tucked his thing away irritably, as if it were not an integral part of him but a business partner who had let him down. It rested chill against his thigh.
He turned away while she dressed.
And stared fascinated at the granite German, the sergeant who held the effete French in captive chains. It was now May; two months had passed and the soil of France was no longer frozen or free. Simone had written, "I am pregnant, Andre." A prisoner allowed his hands to fall from above his head; the sergeant barked at him, and metal clinked menacingly on asphalt. At the moment of collapse and rout, the Captain, a Saint-Cyr type, had cried out unexpectedly, "We are betrayed by Communism!" Andre stared at the ser* geant.
In December he was released and sent home. Two weeks after he married Simone, Marie was born.
The Director of the bank shook his hand.
"Bad days for France," he said.
"We were betrayed," Andre said.
The Director blinked suspiciously. "Very probably," he said.
Andre resumed his old life, working as a clerk in the bank during the day and drinking with Jacques Pineau in the evenings. There were no Germans around, but the press was censored and the working class effectively muzzled. Jacques felt that his friend's attitude to social and political matters had changed, an impression which he gathered as much from Andre's glowering silences as from anything he said.
At his parents' house there were quarrels. Clara, who showered him with his favourite foods and eagerly appeased his passion for garlic and onions—almost forgetting, in her anxiety to atone for the spiritual wound which history had inflicted upon him, that he was now married—had hoped that her boy might have mellowed under the impact of the nation's tragedy. Instead, there were quarrels.
Andre provoked his father relentlessly.
"I hear that your pal Maury has been displaying his wounds again and complaining that none of us has a scratch to show for the war."
"This was nothing," Guillaume said, "compared with the last."
"Ha! Last time France was not betrayed."
"It's not your father's fault," Clara said.
"Who was it who said, 'Stalin will not let us down'?"
"Stalin had no option," Guillaume said uneasily. "Chamberlain and Daladier drove him to it. In any case, he's only biding his time. You wait."
Andre filled his mouth. His eyes narrowed and he looked about him sharply, at his parents, Anne-Marie and Simone, as if sniffing for treason. He noticed how they averted their eyes; it gave him a certain gratification.
"If you want to know, Papa, Stalin is a complete swine. Likewise all our domesticated dogs who trot after him obediently licking up his droppings."
Guillaume wiped his mouth and nodded nervously.
"I told your mother, 'Once Andre puts on a white collar, he'll think like a white collar.' You'd better go and join the Government at Vichy."
It was more than ten years before Simone finally acknowledged her mistake and conceded to herself that the act of marriage did not in itself imply a metamorphosis, a final renunciation of selfishness. The shifting kaleidoscope of their physical existence together, and the unpredictability of Andre's temper, had prevented her from ripping away the multiple veils of illusion, hope and deception which sustained her spirit through the war years and their aftermath. Domestic life never appealed to him; one row succeeded another, and sometimes several ran concurrently. He generated friction out of nothing; in a situation which she had taken care to purge of all possible frictions, he would arrive, bringing within him his own storm. Simone was like the seaboard mountains which provoke the gray clouds to rain; he vented everything on her—and on the child.
He interspersed his occasional, frenzied displays of affection for Marie with long periods of disregard and complaint. When, as an infant, she bawled at night, it was always Simone who rose to quiet or feed her, while Andre, whose work demanded no great physical exertion, complained ceaselessly about the loss of sleep. And when he did play with the child, he demanded that she should respond to his mood instantly and without reservation; when she hesitated, he turned away and discarded her like a worn-out doll.
His passions were cold passions. Since the time in the woods, the day of Marie's conception, he had not approached Simone. And when, moved not so much by a need as by an indefinable sense of loss and by the faint hope that this aspect of their marriage might hold the key to Andre's discontent, she finally broached the subject, the harshness of his reply— as usual—staggered her.
"Do you want another brat, then?"
"One doesn't make love only to have children."
He laughed. "I thought that was your motive last time."
"What a swine you are, Andre! For years before we were married you begged me to lie down with you."
"I was a boy then."
"Is impotence the mark of a man?"
He was eating garlic sausages, with fresh bread, cucumber and wine, and he surprised her by answering calmly.
"Desire seizes men in different ways. Some men shed their desire regularly, like horses, like animals. They have big families, they are benign, they are ordinary men, quite useless and contemptible. Others turn to sin and dirt, so ardently do they crave for the flesh of women. They are scum, vermin, destined to be exterminated in the hard battles of life. There are others who have the rare gift of channelling their desires into creative forms of activity—this is the sublime gift of sublimation. These are the great artists, the fighters, the leaders of men. By them alone shall a civilization know itself."
The German train would come in the next ten minutes.
Through the dispersing morning mist he scanned the railway line/ with his British binoculars, while Martin, the detonation man, watched him with dogged devotion, waiting for the signal—the small, gesture of the hand—which would transform the absolute quiet in which they were now cocooned into a bedlam of desperation and death. Andre's heart was thumping heavily, yet he felt calm and completely at peace with himself. At home, in the bank, in the cafes and streets of Saint-fitienne, Laval had become a difficult name to bear; those who resented his rise from the working class had taken to calling him 'Pierre'—a joke someone might have lived to regret had not the Germans erupted across the frontier and occupied the southern zone, setting him free from the job he disliked and from the prison of his family. The Resistance beckoned to the total man in him, offering him a purpose, an identity and a release from the narrow, sectarian squabbles about party and class which had eaten into the fabric of stricken France. Let his father call him traitor; let Maury extol and adulate the men of "fourteen"; the hour of the new France was only dawning. The January frost bit at his fingers. Gently, as if not to disturb the unseen train, he blew on them; only then did Martin feel free to do the same. He remembered with pride how he had translated the technical instructions on the detonation equipment which the British had dropped from the air. Never in his hfe had he felt so necessary, so close to self-fulfillment— to oe a lieutenant already, a commander of men. . tram came hurtling through the mist—exactly on time, there was a moment—the instant before he gestured to Martin—when this aspect of the German character, this punctuality, terrified him.
Andre was waiting to greet his wife and daughter on the platform at Koblenz. He embraced them gravely.
"Welcome to French Germany," he said.
The woman and the girl looked about them with intense curiosity. Andre smiled condescendingly as they made for his car.
"In Germany one finds them almost human," he said.
They drove to a comfortable hotel requisitioned by the Army on Kleberstrasse. Marie, now six years old, pressed her small, dark face against the car window, fascinated by the spectacle of the enemy in their own jungle hideout, while her mother concentrated on assessing Andre's mood. She saw, not for the first time, satisfaction and pride in his face; it reminded her of the shock of disappointment, the acute sense of betrayal which she, his family and his friends had experienced when he had decided to abandon civilian life and to sign on as a regular officer. Eighteen months in the Resistance and a year with de Lattre's First Army had been enough. He had never bothered to explain or to argue; when she protested, he had replied, curtly, "I am what I am, Simone."
On the first evening they dined in the hotel restaurant with Commandant Jeannot and his wife. It was summer, and the evening sunlight poured through the high windows, silhouetting the heads and shoulders of the urchins whose hungry faces were glued to the window. Finally Madame Jeannot could stand it no longer and summoned the waiter.
"It's disgraceful," she told him. "Send them away, right away, tell them they have no right. .. Bitte."
The waiter bowed with dignity. He strode to the window, gestured violently, and the boys fell away from view, like insects toppled from a branch by a strong wind. But as soon as his back was turned, they reappeared.
"Can't you see them?" Madame Jeannot asked the waiter when he returned to the table with roast duck and sauteed potatoes. "I told you to get rid of them, Herr Ober, and I meant what I said."
The waiter turned pink. "My apologies, Madame," he said in faultless French, "but they always come back. They live nearby."
Madame Jeannot glared at him. "You people are much better at giving orders than at taking them. Or have you forgotten who is who now?"
The waiter stood motionless, with head bowed.
Simone had blushed crimson. Andre's face remained pale and impassive; she saw with disgust that he was unmoved.
"You may go," Commandant Jeannot told the waiter.
"One sometimes wonders," Madame Jeannot said loudly, "who won the war."
"Not us," Simone said. The words had flown out on the wings of anger. Andre shot her a fierce, reproving glance.
"The past," the Commandant said mildly, "is a burden which must not weigh too heavily on us. If ever there was a time when it was vital to change abruptly an established pattern of thought and sentiment, it is at the present time."
"Precisely," said Andre.
"I don't understand," Simone said.
"The peril lies in the East," the Commandant explained, taking her naivete at face value and giving the impression that he expected nothing but total ignorance in the young. "Consequently we will have to build the Germans up."
"Build them up!"
"My wife," Andre interposed quickly, "feels very strongly about the occupation."
"Of course, of course," said Jeannot mildly. "So do we all. But we have to be realists, Madame. We collapsed in 1940 because we weren't realists, and we must take care not to repeat our mistake."
"It will be a long time," Simone said, "before I become realistic enough to forget that my husband was tortured by the Gestapo."
The Commandant did, then, look uncomfortable.
"Please forgive my wife," Andre said.
"I agree with her," said Madame Jeannot. "I detest the Germans and always shall. One can only regret that they and the Russians did not wipe one another out down to the very last man."
Simone turned to her in amazement, yet spoke more softly than to the Commandant. Jeannot, noting this, reflected that a woman who dislikes men must be unlucky in her marriage.
"But without the Red Army, Germany would not have been defeated," she protested.
"There are many imponderables," Jeannot said calmly.
"Sometimes I ask myself: are we not just beginning the real struggle to the death?"
Andre nodded his agreement.
"De Gaulle would have found a solution," Madame Jean-not said.
Jeannot shrugged. "My wife," he explained to Simone, "is an ardent Gaullist. She sees things in black and white, as women do. Me—I am more complicated. I ask myself whether a general who disobeys his head of state and his superior officers and embarks on single-handed insurrection— I ask myself whether I should really model myself on him. And then I reflect on history, that fickle lady, and I cannot resist the subversive thought that the Marshal, upon whom everyone spits today, may one day be judged truly."
Later, the Lavals had a row.
"A marvellous beginning," Andre stormed. "You made an excellent impression, contradicting my superior officer every time he opened his mouth and insulting his wife freely."
"To speak one's mind is never insulting. We have suffered too much in these last years to make a virtue of polite silence. I cannot understand how you, who were captured and tortured by the Gestapo, can stomach the company of such people."
"I have no choice."
"It's worse than we feared."
"We? You've been ganging together again, eh?"
"Why pretend? You know how your parents felt when you decided to commit your life to a society which has always epitomized the values which we detest. The war has not changed these people."
"Really? Did no one tell you that four thousand Vichyite officers have been purged?"
"They may have been. To enable the elite to heal its wounds and to close its ranks."
Andre ripped off his shirt and used it as a towel to soak up the sweat running down his body. He flung open the shutters noisily; a scarlet crescent slashed the pastel of the Koblenz skyline and dipped beyond the horizon in pursuit of the sun.
"You'll wake Marie," Simone said.
He stretched out on the bed and lit a cigarette. He pulled at it in short, nervous bursts, smacking his lips as he did so in a way which jarred her nerves.
"So they all sit about criticizing me, my parents, your brother Jacques and his friends, that old doormat Maury, and you. Very pretty. Doubtless you preside over these sessions."
Simone sat on the edge of the bed and gazed sadly towards the reticent German sky.
"I cannot understand," she said softly, "why you risked your life in defying the Gestapo only to gang up with Commandant Jeannot and the Germans in a holy war against the Russians."
"Jeannot speaks for himself. I have my own opinions."
The light dwindled, the room contracted and a strangely restful silence settled between them, as if all their arguments were conducted within the context of an abiding trust and mutual sympathy. She put a fresh cigarette between her lips, lit it and then sat beside him, with his hand resting in hers.
"When I married you," she said, "I thought that our temperaments were in conflict, but not the ideals on which we founded our lives. I gave up so much, really, in that winter of 1940. It was the war, I suppose, and the feeling that time might be running out. I remember walking along the Rue Michelet and trying to picture you in uniform, and the irresistible urge rising in me to give myself, to throw over the Polytechnique and all those years of work and the prospect of teaching . . . We were all mad with patriotism really, even your father, who pretended to think that it was a dirty war. Everyone seemed to be giving up something. And I remember turning the corner into the Rue des Francs-Masons, the corner on which you and I used to say good-bye. I touched the wall where you once hurt me and I thought, 'I'm young, I'm making a mistake.' Then I walked on and I knew that it was a mistake I had to make. And now look at me. A grass widow at twenty-five. I can't even do the work I'm fitted to do."
"There is no reason why you and Marie shouldn't live with me here."
"Marie has seen so little of you. Don't you ever miss
her?"
"Of course, of course, I miss you both. I too have made sacrifices."
"No, Andre, you have given way all along to the demons working inside you."
He said, "Tell me about Jacques." The words came quickly.
"He married Pauline in April. He has a job as local correspondent for France-Soir. He seems very happy."
Andre's hand grew warmer in her own.
"Does he ever speak of—the war?"
"Of course. We all talk of nothing else."
"Does he discuss the ambush and what happened afterwards?"
Simone bent to kiss her husband's brow and to cradle his head against her breast. She felt, at that moment, once again in communion with suffering; the foreign bedclothes and furniture ceased to oppress her; night had inked in the sky, and nostalgia lent relevance to her sacrifice.
"Jacques speaks only well of you, Andre."
Andre leaped up and began pacing the room excitedly.
"Jacques is a good sort, we understand one another, your brother and I. He has the true courage. The Gestapo went for him too, you know. Of course you know that. Perhaps one should not speak of these things."
The chrysalis of love in Simone had begun to stir butterfly wings of desire. Andre's excitement, and his lean, hard nakedness, and his almost embarrassed surrender to the vocabulary of affection, had suddenly toppled the barricade of her resentment and carried her forward to the urgent necessity of consummation. Not for the first time she felt that their physical relationship was more a cause than a symptom of their estrangement, and that the discovery of sexual sympathy might act as a catalyst in bringing harmony into their lives. A woman—Andre's mother—had once told her that all physical problems are at root psychological; Simone guarded the hope that the tunnel ran both ways. In the five years of her marriage she had learned to recognize Andre's coldness for the stricken plant that it was, and to reconcile
herself to the futility of trying to reach him along the quiet avenues of her tenderness. Incapable, it seemed, of "making love," he could, if skilfully stimulated, be provoked to "make war" and to yield himself to that solemn ritual of struggle which had so violated her nature when he first imposed it upon her in the spring of 1940.
Simone's husband paused at the open window, took a last drag on his cigarette and tossed it away, regardless of what might lie below. Then he pulled his shoulders back sharply and snapped his fingers at her.
"These Germans," he said, "one has to give it to them."
Simone's arms encircled him from behind as her teeth dug into the muscle at the base of his neck. A vein in his cheek throbbed into life; she felt the joy in his instant recoil.
"What about the German women?" she whispered.
"Delicious," he said, "a revelation."
The ivory blades cut deeper until he groaned. Short and mild and gentle, she had learned to skirmish with violence as she might have learned a foreign language; and, like a foreign language, the violence she inflicted became more fluent with practice, but never anything but alien to her senses. The gentle, restrained culture of her growing years, of the widower who mended clocks wisely, of books and calculations, of distant incense, of her teachers, of her brother Jacques, of her small and limited limbs—this gentleness always enticed her as persuasively as a native tongue. Yet the springs of Andre's warped desire lent themselves to dramatic initiation and externalized improvisation; she hoped one day to carry him from his stage into her world.
As he turned on her with a face geared to punishment, a lean face hollowed by instant greed, she stepped away, pulled off her dress, and took hold of his denim belt, which lay within reach. Its brass buckles glinted by the city's distant lights as she lashed his stomach; he grimaced and his eyes spoke of gratitude. "So much for your German women," she said and struck him again, surprised to find a glimmer of pleasure in the pantomime, a hint of authenticity in the improvised rules of this artificial war dance. As he drove her backward towards the bed, she caught his abdomen unexpectedly with her foot; his eyes widened in the searchlight beam of her flashing thigh.
He gasped at the second blow, doubled up and swayed, allowing her to throw him to the floor. He caught her slip as he fell; it ripped. As punishment she pressed her knee into his face and brought the belt down on his back; he swore obscenely and defecated an appalling oath. The words shocked her more profoundly than a turd on the carpet, investing an infantile diversion with the general significance of adult morality. For an instant the clockwork in her was jammed, the tempo of her attack was dislocated and shame supplanted pride at the easy way in which she had so far prevailed, at the effortless co-ordination between her spite and her blows—as if some demoniac dream had broken its night chains and possessed her limbs like a drug. Andre, sensing doom in her pause, tried to rise. She struck his face with the buckle of his belt, breaking the skin on the ear and lip.
He rolled onto his back and lay still, subdued, feasting his eyes on her as she stood astride him. She worked the stiletto heel of her shoe between his ribs, and when he groaned she pulled off his trousers, rolled them into a tight ball and flung them away. What was a flexed truncheon she preferred to liken to a spire, thus invoking the ultimate feminine superstition to ward off the danger of a purely magnetic and soulless copulation. The spire reached. Her snake-tongue flashed to mock its divinity; the man's silence was his deep joy. Years ago, in the woods, on the frozen earth, he had been compelled to coax and prompt her, to shatter the illusion which alone prevented him from crumpling like the tower of Babel. Since then, she had matured and learned the actress' power of illusion, of transference, of self-abnegation. The belt came down again, leaving livid welts on his chest and legs. His breathing had surrendered its last vestiges of control; gratitude and admiration were written large in the new, broken shapelessness of his face and in his contrived humility. She took off the last of her clothes slowly, with the elegance of a practised performer, with the studied provocation of the striptease artists and night club girls whom she had never seen and whom he had dared to dangle before her, his wife.
She came down to arrest him and lead him into captivity. Even so, she trembled and it was all she could do as the so-long-awaited-and-imagined thing happened not to capitulate, to beg for a normal life, to fall under him, to ask for gentleness and guidance. In the next room Marie woke up and moaned. Her mother, obsessed by her need for love and desolated by the predictable banality of the animal embrace, sustained her short, circular motions and the contempt in her painted face. Turning her face upward, away from his greedy prostration, she would have liked some white dove to have offered her a branch of relevance and wider meaning in all this. Suddenly his lingers were fluttering like dying birds, failure confronted them, she struggled to recapture her rhythm, he began to die within her, neither dared speak, she seized his neck desperately and banged his head against the floor, Marie started to sob next door as the foreign objects of furniture began to leap and snarl at her through the Teutonic gloom. Simone banged his head again, he revived, came stiff at once, she began to squeeze his throat, to strangle him, his hands reached for the ripe, drooping pears of her breasts, his lips were running wet, a cold, hateful frenzy drove her forward, a bitter hopelessness as his back arched with joy and a great shout from his bowels challenged the layer-cake sobriety of the hotel above and below them, she flooded and kept going desperately hoping, fighting back the waves of inertia billowing through her like a green mist, then his body rose into the heart of hers in a long protracted convulsion whose single cry was in fact compounded of a million sperm-tremors, she fell away into space, on to the carpet, at last something shielded her back, she lay waiting for him, waiting for the tenderness, for the relevance, for the return journey, waiting for something which she already knew could not happen.
Presently Simone rose from the floor, found her dressing
gown and went to comfort her daughter.
* ♦ *
Simone and Clara worked in the kitchen for two days preparing a huge, celebratory feast to mark Andre's return from Indochina. Neither woman voiced her doubts; both were sustained by Marie's rising enthusiasm at the prospect of hugging the father whom she had not seen for three
years.
"Papa is a hero," she kept reminding Clara.
"Of course he is."
"He won three medals, Grandmama."
"I hope he recognizes you, my child," Simone said.
Marie, a tall, lean-limbed girl of thirteen, blushed at the thought of the small, budlike breasts which her father had never seen; like Andre, she was dark-skinned and excitable.
"Grandmama." She tugged at Clara's elbow.
"Careful, darling, this fat is hot."
"Have you seen this photograph of Papa? Please look, please."
"Grandmama has photos of her own," Simone said uneasily. She no longer felt herself to be a young woman; her anxieties now virtually cancelled one another out. Only the cooking and Clara's calm had saved her from hysteria as the day of Andre's arrival approached.
Clara took the snapshot to the window.
It showed three Asians lying dead on the edge of a rice field, while a white officer stood behind them staring at the camera with no detectable expression.
"It's Papa," cried Marie. "He shot them."
Clara returned the snapshot to the girl and sighed. "I must be getting on with my work or your mother will be after me."
"Put them away now," Simone said, "and don't show any of them this evening at supper."
"Why?"
"Because I say so."
When Marie had been a baby, Simone had promised herself never to resort to that superstitious expedient when the child questioned her decisions; nowadays she found nothing more depressing than the steady erosion of the ideals which she had respected in the days of her rationalist youth.
Simone and Marie went to meet Andre at the station. They arrived early and the train was late. While they waited, a gloomy silence settled between them, as if in expectation of anticlimax. The train, when it came, was full of servicemen;
the war in Indochina had just ended. For a moment Simone panicked in case she should fail to pick him out from the crowd.
Andre carried a scar across his neck. His smile did not survive their embrace. He clasped Marie awkwardly; the gir reddened and hung her head.
"And the others?" Andre said.
"They're looking forward to celebrating your homecoming this evening," Simone said. "They thought Marie and I shoulc have the privilege of greeting you alone."
He nodded and told a porter to bring his luggage.
"Hurry, man, hurry," he snapped.
The porter folded his arms slowly. "This is France, my friend, not Indochina."
Andre seized the heaviest of his cases with an oath. Simone and Marie each carried a bag to the taxi rank.
"Still the Place Stalingrad, I see," he said as they drove out of the station square.
Simone took his hand. He stared coldly out of the window.
"We're very happy that you have come home to us, Andre," she said.
"I'm glad someone is. At Marseilles our friends the dockers greeted us with banners demanding 'No More Colonial Wars' and 'Friendship Among Peoples.' The taxi driver who took me to the station said, 'Well, it had to end, didn't it? It was costing too much, and that was the problem.' Then he charged me twice the normal fare."
"I'm afraid that's how people feel."
"That's how certain gentlemen in Paris and Moscow persuade them to feel."
She gripped his hand more tightly.
"Darling, tonight is a celebration. We're all thankful that you've come home alive, and we all recognize you for the brave man that you are. But if politics crops up, I'm afraid disaster will ensue. Promise me .. ."
"Very well, if my father asks me where I've been, I'll say that I've had a job in Nice as a waiter, serving the tourists and making France the great country that she is. And if he wants to know where I got my scar, I'll say that I was bitten by a lady's poodle."
Later, before the guests arrived, he sat calmly drinking a bottle of whisky and listening to Marie's account of her life. Hope did, then, spark in Simone.
"I want to become a teacher, like Mama would have done," Marie said.
"Would have done?" Andre said.
"If she hadn't had me."
"Ah. Is it science you're interested in?"
"Yes, physics, actually, we're only just beginning on electricity-"
"I was good at the humanities, at languages particularly."
"Mama says that physics has become very difficult unless you're very good at maths."
"My best subject was English. During the war, when I was in the Resistance, the English dropped a lot of equipment by parachute. We wouldn't have been able to understand the instructions on it if I hadn't known English."
"Mama told me."
"Did she? Did she ever tell you that I would have gone to study in Paris if the war hadn't intervened?"
Marie stared at him solemnly and made a vague gesture of her head.
"Of course I've told her many times," Simone said, from the kitchen.
"In which case she must have forgotten. Children should remember what they're told," he said to Marie. The girl blushed.
The guests began to arrive at seven-thirty: Andre's parents, Anne-Marie and her husband, Jacques Pineau and his wife, Robert Maury and two of Simone's new friends. Guillaume and Clara Laval brought with them a young steel-worker called Pierre Moriot whom they had taken into their home after his father, a widower, had been killed in an accident at the Lacassagne works. He was an alert young man, ardent and good-looking.
Things went well. Drink flowed and thawed the early ice. Jokes, tales, anecdotes and chatter spun across the heavily laden table. Andre complimented the cooks repeatedly. Delighted, the women laughed. Marie was sent to bed protesting and laden with kisses. The more he drank, the more Andre's stiffness of manner evaporated; he began to lean forward over the table and to interrupt other people; hints of bellicosity appeared, but only to lose themselves in the general bonhomie. Then Clara reminded Guillaume that he was an old man and ought to go to bed.
"I haven't had a word with my own son yet," he protested. No one had noticed how much Guillaume had drunk.
"Andre will be here for three months," Clara said.
Guillaume rose instantly to his feet and winked at his friend Robert Maury. Then he placed his index finger over his lips and winked again.
"Ssssh."
"Don't be such a silly old man," Clara said, with a hint of anxiety.
"Andre must be tired after his journey," Anne-Marie said.
"What? Tired? I thought officers travelled first class these days." Guillaume winked again at Maury. Andre was watching them.
"It's we schoolteachers who remain pauperized," Maury said, "while our pupils live off the fat of the land. Even those who funked their exams."
No one knew why the schoolteacher had said that, least of all Maury himself. He stood shaking and looking wildly from one person to another, a fixed half smile betraying his confusion and distress.
"Jacques may live off the fat of the land," Andre said, "but the reproach hardly fits those who have spent these last years in Asiatic jungle."
"I am fat but poor," Jacques Pineau said lightly.
"Pineau, your sort are ubiquitous, like lice. There were plenty of journalists in Indochina forever protesting their admiration for us and the war we were fighting. But when they got back to Paris—that was another story."
"Jacques has written nothing against you," Simone said, close to tears.
"In that case he must be the only journalist in France."
"A few hard words will not disturb the dead," Jacques
said.
"Precisely, the dead," Andre said, standing at the head of the table and drinking steadily. "You have desecrated the fallen sons of France."
"I was thinking of the others," Jacques said, "the yellow
ones."
"As your former boss," said Maury, striving to make good his blunder, "I order you both to take out your exercise books, open Coleridge at the appropriate page and stop spoiling an excellent reunion."
"Maury, you always were an old hypocrite," Andre said.
"I don't associate myself with that statement," Jacques said.
"Naturally. You have ganged up with all the meek and mild little Leon Blums and Jew lovers in France."
"So now it is to be anti-Semitism," said Anne-Marie hotly. "What a bastard to have for a brother!"
Andre banged the table with his fist, furious.
"Who signed the treaty at Geneva which betrayed France and her Army? A Jew."
"The Chamber was pleased enough when he did," Jacques said.
"The Chamber is the forum, the marketplace and the spittoon of the Jews."
"I have been told, Monsieur," said the young Pierre Mori-ot quietly, "that you were once on the side of the workers and that you fought in the Resistance. I am informed that you even fought against the police outside the steelworks."
Charlotte Corday ...
"That's enough, then," Clara said sternly to Pierre Moriot.
"I'm not against the workers of France, the true workers of France, Monsieur Moriot," said Andre with icy contempt. "We in the Army have not fought to defend capitalism or the trusts. We fought to defend France and our civilization against a new barbarism, and we were betrayed. We fought in the rice fields, and the jungle, in the tall elephant grass, in the hills and the villages; and when we lay down, exhausted and depleted, we would think to ourselves, 'In Paris, they are just coming out of the theatres now. And in Saint-fitienne,
Jacques Pineau is rubbing his tummy and making for his wife's bed. And my father is muttering still, "Stalin will save us."' "
"And what about the people of Indochina?" cried Pierre Moriot.
"Tais-toi, mon petit," said Andre Laval. The boy tried to rise, but Clara held him down. "We were not fighting the people of Indochina; we were fighting a vast hive of sexless insects, dwarfs operated by remote control, by an unseen hand, creatures deformed and dehumanized by a robot machine which corrupts the mind, divests men of their independence and deprives them of any feelings beyond those dictated by the party."
"Pure racism," Jacques said.
"Far from it. We slept with the Asian girls very happily, and we were proud to recognize our Eurasian children. The Anglo-Saxons may be racists; we are not."
Everyone fell silent; even Andre appeared a little sobered by what he had said; no one looked at Simone. Finally she broke the silence herself.
"How many of these wives and children did you acquire?"
"Me? I did not say me," Andre protested with indignation.
"Oh."
"I did not say me. I will not be misrepresented!" He thumped the table. "We have been the victims of systematic misrepresentation!"
"And did you use torture?" Jacques asked quietly.
Andre shot him a glance of peculiar complexity; only Jacques understood the elements of which it was compounded.
"We were confronted by a ruthless and implacable enemy," Andre announced, emptying his glass and reaching for the nearest bottle. His eyes were glazed now, and Simone had the impression that the alcohol was rapidly anesthetizing him to the sensibilities of his audience. "We developed our own methods accordingly. We learned, my friends, we learned. We learned how to control whole populations and to infiltrate villages; we mastered the art of guerrilla warfare and of propaganda; we had the enemy cornered and staggering under our blows when we were betrayed—yes, betrayed—by incompetent generals, slavish politicians, Jewish financiers, hordes of rat-journalists and the Red-indoctrinated proletariat. But next time, I can promise you, next time—and there will be a next time—next time we will win!"
Andre smashed his glass on the floor and stood glowering.
Anne-Marie quickly slipped away with her husband. Clara and Simone had both begun to cry. Robert Maury took his leave hastily, uneasily, red in the face, hardly daring to look at his friend Guillaume, who was sunk in a chair staring at death. As Maury went out, Andre struck him a heavy blow on the back.
"Adieu, ma vieille canaille estropiee."
Clara took Guillaume by the arm and hauled the old boy to his feet.
"Go on, Papa," Andre bellowed, "go and sleep on Stalin's tomb. The enemy is at the gates, but France sleeps."
Guillaume's mouth worked furiously, but no coherent sounds came out. Shepherded by Simone, herself in tears, the parents worked their way to the door. The spectacle of his father's decline infuriated Andre; but before he could coin a suitably abusive epithet, Pierre Moriot intervened.
"Monsieur le Capitaine, we workers at the Lacassagne factory would be honoured to hear the reasons for your change of attitude, any time you would care to address us."
"You're a silly boy, Pierre," Simone said. "Now go home at once."
"You're too young for politics, child," Clara said, tugging at his sleeve.
But Pierre Moriot stood his ground, facing Andre. The two men were of equal height.
"I will confront the swine at any time," Andre said.
The Pineaus were also taking their leave. Jacques held out his hand to Andre.
"I hope you'll both come and dine with us soon," he said.
Andre ignored Jacques' hand; he held on to the table to steady himself.
"I have been reading, Pineau," he said. His words had lost their cutting edge now, and the contours of his face, normally so sharply delineated, were blurred. "Don't think we never pick up a book, my friend, just because we aren't intellectuals. I wouldn't like to think of you lording it over me—not a dog like you."
"If you want a fight," Jacques said, trembling, "I am perfectly agreeable."
"Don't be a fool," his wife said, clasping his arm.
Andre blinked.
"You—fight? You, who have been crushed to death by a pile of statistics. Potbelly."
"I don't hold any brief for myself," Jacques said. "The contrast between our years in the Resistance and what we have become since amounts to a thick encyclopedia of minor tragedies. We are, as you say, soft, and you have remained hard. I don't deny my potbelly; I don't dispute that I have lost that condition of heightened consciousness which is for most of us the only gateway to courage. But I like to believe that I have remained faithful to certain ideals. We used to think that you betrayed yourself when you joined de Lattre's First Army, but recently I have come to the conclusion that you were from your first days doomed to treat the working class as Jacob eventually treated Esau. As for fighting you, one should never step back from a coward."
"He didn't mean that," Simone said hastily.
Jacques looked at his sister with an intense, self-disciplined calm.
"I did mean it."
"How can you say that of a man who survived torture at the hands of the Gestapo? What a despicable-"
Jacques raised his eyebrows slightly, a gesture which silenced Simone and caused Andre Laval, it seemed, to shrink like a plant starved of water. The doorway now stood open; the Pineaus thanked Simone and disappeared into the night. Man and wife were left alone, to contemplate the debris of the feast and of their jagged lives.
During the week which followed, Andre slept, hung about the house reading old magazines, played fitfully with Marie and walked the streets in his uniform, searching simultaneously for admiration and hostility. He was always alone; he had no friends and it never occurred to him to take Simone out for an evening. Although he grumbled spasmodically about the women in his life and behaved like a man worn down by uninterrupted domesticity, he often took advantage of his father's absence from home to visit Clara, whose food he still preferred to Simone's.
At night, he made no approach to his wife.
The breakup came suddenly.
One morning, an hour before lunch, Andre put on a white shirt, gray flannel trousers and a blue tweed jacket, announced his intention of "meeting a friend" at the Cafe Georges in the Place Jean Jaures and closed the front door behind him. From the kitchen window Simone watched him stride down the street with his shoulders held back and a slight breeze ruffling his raven hair. He walked like a soldier, looking neither to right nor to left. She wiped her hands on a towel, listened for a moment to the silence which had settled through the house, and then went upstairs to the bedroom, where his discarded army clothes lay strewn about the room. With deft, rapid movements she ran through his pockets until she found his black notebook. As she opened it, a cluster of snapshots fell to the floor.
Andre returned half an hour late, made no apology, and at once demanded his lunch.
"I met this type," he said, his mouth full of onion soup, "at the Georges. He offered me a job, a big step up in the world for le Capitaine Laval, who, as you know, has no professional qualifications."
Simone sat down opposite him.
"Won't you eat?" he said.
"No."
"So he offered me a job. The idea was for me to put on all my decorations and go from door to door with a box of perfumes, watches, nylons, car accessories, soap powders and God knows what. At the door I bow stiffly. 'Madame, excuse my somewhat rigid bearing, but I have the misfortune to be an old soldier and am therefore unsuited to the subtleties of civilian life. However, Madame, I can vouch for the quality and dependability of this watch, Madame, on the honour of the French Army and of France herself. Madame, an officer is as good as his word.' So I sell her a contraption which costs eight thousand francs and lasts ten days. And why? Because this gentleman offers me twice—precisely twice—my present salary. What do you say, darling wife?"
"Eat your lunch, Andre."
He dropped his soup spoon with a clatter.
"You have been crying," he said.
She nodded; at once the tears began to flow again.
"Well, explain."
She took a snapshot from her apron pocket and pushed it across the table; it depicted him standing beside a young Vietnamese woman who held a baby in her arms. They were both smiling.
"I don't deny it," he said, resuming his eating. "We were all guilty of that small sin. For three years France exiled us to a distant jungle; the women of France are obliged to be tolerant."
"Did you get her to beat you first, or to rob you, perhaps? Or are they so much better at it, these women?"
He shrugged and poured himself some wine. His shirt was rolled up above the elbows, and his brown arms rested on the table.
Simone took back the snapshot.
"I'm thirty-three now," she said, struggling to hold down the rising waves of despair. "Yesterday was my birthday, incidentally. I've had enough, that's all. It always was a mistake, our marriage. We have nothing in common, nothing at all. This picture will get me a divorce. I'm sorry for Marie, but that can't be helped, and she never had a father anyway. Please leave the house as soon as you can."
He laughed uneasily. "It's your house."
"Yes, it's my house."
He shrugged, stopped eating and searched for his cigarettes, even though his meal was only half eaten. She saw his hands shake as he struck a match.
"A soldier has no possessions. That is how France rewards her most faithful sons."
She began to gather the dirty plates with quick, nervous gestures, piling them together brusquely and driving him from the room with her duster and broom. He sat about the house, smoking and waiting for something to occur inside him, for some reaction which would give him the energy to gather himself and to measure his own feelings. When Marie came in from school he was still slumped in a chair. He said, "Your mother has been cooking for you by the smell of things. You're a lucky girl." Marie blinked at him shyly, gauging his mood. Andre sat rooted to his chair, smoking incessantly and waiting for something to click inside him. Presently his mind turned to Jean Martignac, to the golden-haired young lieutenant who had served under him in Indochina and whose parting words at Marseilles had been "Call on us, mon Capitaine, if you ever come to Paris. My wife and I would be delighted." Martignac had impressed him deeply; he had the real Saint-Cyr sang-froid, the authentic flair, the clear blue eyes of courage. Not long before the end they had dug themselves in on the outskirts of a village, waiting for the Viets to come at them through the tall elephant grass. One could see the top of the grass swaying, but nothing more. When the Viets broke cover, they were less than fifty yards from the trenches, and they came in wave after wave, silent and intent, terrifying in their silence. Martignac's line had held; the attackers had fallen in writhing heaps of bone and flesh, but still they kept on coming until the last Vietnamese fell within five feet of Martignac and lay twitching. When Andre had gone down the line to inspect, he had found Martignac sitting in his trench smoking and staring at the dead Vietnamese, whose skull was cleft from ear to ear, disgorging a stringy, gray-white substance into the mud.
"All is well, mon Capitaine," Martignac said.
"You did bravely, Jean."
"This fellow also," he said, indicating the dead Vietnamese. "He knew that his time had come. He looked at me with eyes which seemed to say, 'Kill me.' I killed him. When you come to think of it, mon Capitaine, it is not death which is so terrible, but life. Consider how irrationally, how obses-sionally we all fear death. And now look at that corpse. It lies there, beyond the reach of fear and suffering, of pain and grief, beyond the reach of everything which makes life so burdensome. That corpse has no problems. We're all mad."
Andre liked Martignac and admired him. He enjoyed the deference which the younger man accorded him and the interest with which he listened to his accounts of life in the Resistance. When Andre pointed out to him that the war against the- Germans was in essence a civil war within the orbit of European civilization, whereas the struggle against the Vietnamese could be likened to a conflict between species from different planets, Martignac had thrust a Gauloise between his heavy lips and vigorously nodded his entire agreement.
At six o'clock Andre was still anchored to his chair. When Simone came in with inflamed eyes and inquired sharply whether he would require supper at home, he felt the need to reach out to her, to set in motion a total reconciliation, an ultimate pact of mutual respect and love. But pride intervened and a vague sense of injustice that she had not taken the first step.
"As suits your convenience," he said dryly.
"It's up to you."
"I expect you would prefer it if I ate somewhere else," he said.
"Yes."
She went back into the kitchen. He understood, then, that she was deadly serious, that she would not bend. This second and larger wave hurled him across the sands of illusion, shattering the slow craft of his lassitude on the reef of a concealed truth: the wound could not heal. When Marie came from the kitchen, she hurried past him with averted eyes. He thought, "So easily is a man divorced from his own flesh and blood, from those dependent for their bread on his sweat and toil; such is human fidelity."
By the time that he left the house it was raining and the streets had turned a deeper gray. He disliked eating by himself; he didn't know what to do with his eyes and ears while his mouth was employed, and he had lost the habit of
reading. On an impulse he made for a public telephone and dialled Jacques' number. Even as he heard the ringing tone be had no idea what he wanted.
"Yes, hullo?"
"Jacques—this is Andre."
A long pause followed.
"Yes, Andre?" The voice was cold.
"Look—I thought we might meet somewhere, sometime, and discuss things."
"When?"
"Anytime, anytime, just as you like, I feel-"
"I'm completely booked up this week. I could manage something perhaps at the weekend."
Andre stared out of the window at the rain sheeting down. A bus went past and stopped at a traffic light.
"You're not free tonight, eh?"
"Not tonight, not possibly."
"I see. Perhaps I'll ring you later, then."
He put down the receiver and began to walk through the streets, aimlessly, bewildered by their familiarity and yet their remoteness in time. Saint-Etienne was the lynchpin, the constant factor in his life, the security which made his dangerous existence tolerable and which gave meaning to his long gamble with death. He knew this, he reasoned it out with himself, but the confirming feeling would not come; the streets, the buildings, the smell, the people hurrying past— none of it bore relevance. By the time he reached the closed gates of the Lacassagne works, where the last of the day-shift workers had disappeared, he had come face to face with the fact that he was now a refugee, an alien, a man without social roots, a violent force whose only discernible harness was an ardently cherished idea—a certain idea of France.
He stood in the rain and stared at the iron gates with their huge brass letters: lacassagne. A dog ran past, sniffing. He listened to the rain on the roadway. Just here, a few paces away, he had struck out at the policeman. He stood quite still, until the exact image of young Pierre Moriot rose in front of him like a genie; he lashed with his fist, blood spurted, the face collapsed like a fruit pie, a gendarme leaped on him, his arm was twisted behind his back, he fought with
Charlotte Corday, she was getting the better of him, he came erect, the gendarmes laughed, a deafening chorus, like a witches' sabbath.
A man and a woman walked past, arm in arm, under an umbrella. When they had gone ten paces past him they both turned to stare.
The train stopped at Dijon and the precious gift of an empty compartment was taken from him. A barrel-shaped bourgeois with several chins puffed his way in, followed by a wife and three fat children, bowed to Andre and inquired whether the empty seats were taken.
"No, Monsieur."
The bourgeois smiled. His eyes flickered at the sight of Andre's uniform.
"Many thanks, Monsieur le Capitaine," he said. "Our most
sincere thanks. Forgive us, forgive us. My wife-." He
broke off to struggle with a heavy suitcase. The train began to move again. The bourgeois family settled down to stare at Andre's medals. The woman brought out a hamper of food and offered him coffee and sandwiches. He declined. His heart was hollow for Simone and Marie; he felt lonely and sad. The bourgeois gobbled at the food and kept adjusting the tissue paper to protect his suit. Whenever Andre caught his eye, he nodded and smiled.
The train gathered speed.
Precisely on time, Germanic and punctual, the train had appeared like a snake in the morning mist, coiling through the French countryside with its load of German venom, and then darting down the long, straight strip of track, gushing white smoke, swift, certain, challenging the nerves of its interceptors . . . Andre's hand had moved; Martin's plunger descended. Metal splintered; the hissing iron engine leaped into the air and fell with a thunderous crash on its side. Flame spouted; the air was thick with smoke and the stench of cordite. For a moment the stricken snake-beast of the train writhed and tossed; only afterwards did the gray-uniformed men tumble out in their steel helmets, to be met by a withering crossfire from the bridge, from either embankment, from Jacques Pineau's Bren gun farther down the track. The slaughter, the sweet, total vengeance fascinated and absorbed Andre. This, he later realized, was the basis of his error. The Germans enjoyed an overwhelming superiority of numbers; the ambush party should have made good their escape while they still could; but Andre's absorption in the holocaust had deadened his judgment; suddenly they were surrounded, cut off, there was no escape . ..
"You were in Indochina, mon Capitaine?" the bourgeois opposite him ventured.
Andre nodded.
"Ah." The bourgeois turned to his family, wearing his half smile, as if to say, "You see, there you are, eh, what did I tell you, there you are."
"Are you quite sure you won't have some coffee?" his wife said.
"Quite sure, Madame."
"It was a bad business, that," the bourgeois said. His eyes flickered. "The guilty men have not been brought to justice. I believe, Monsieur le Capitaine, that we . . . you . . . the nation was betrayed. That is my conviction, Monsieur. The French Army is the finest in the world."
"We will win next time," Andre said. For the second time in his life he had been compelled to raise his arms in deference to Nazism. They had been driven to Gestapo headquarters in Lyons. Jacques sat beside him in the truck while a German struck him in the face systematically. But he made no complaint. The Gestapo men who did the questioning wore plain suits and began with plain methods. Andre was the last to be questioned. The others, it seemed, had held out.
The train rushed towards Paris.
"Of course we will win next time," the bourgeois said. He turned to his family. "That is what I have said myself."
As they drew into the Gare de Lyons, the bourgeois extended his hand. Andre found it hard to place him; a lawyer, perhaps, or a deputy.
"I have been honoured, mon Capitaine." , Andre inclined his head stiffly.
Towards midnight they brought out the electrodes.
The Martignacs owned a large, high-ceiling apartment in the Rue Le Chanois, a street joining two of the avenues which radiate outwards like the spokes of a wheel from the hub of the Arc de Triomphe. Andre arrived in a condition of nerves verging on neurosis, but Jean Martignac immediately put him at ease. "Stay as long as you like, mon Capitaine," he said, taking his bags and leading him at once to the chromium-plated cocktail bar. "My wife is away at present, staying with the Marquis de Clavigny at Le Touquet. Water or soda with your scotch?" Martignac's clothes were as expensive as they were elegant; removed from the context of war, of the harsh ethic of the jungle, his debonair manner and easy grace took on a suggestion of vulgarity, almost of coarseness. The bedroom he was given stunned Andre by its lavish decor, its heavy satin curtains, its huge chandelier, the rich brocade of the bedcover, the private bathroom with its shower and pink tiles. In the morning he found a girl at the breakfast table; her heavily painted beauty, the fragrance of the perfume she wore and her Parisian sophistication dazzled him. "You must be Andre," she said silkily, extending her hand. He bowed stiffly to kiss it, and the blood ran to his head. Jean Martignac smiled boyishly and ran a hand through his golden curls, as if to suggest the pleasures and torments of a night without sleep. Later, when the girl had vanished, Andre bared his heart to the younger man, explaining how his marriage had broken up beyond hope of repair, how he had found himself a total stranger in his own town, how he felt stunned, desolated and lacking the flexibility of temperament to bury the past and to pass easily to a new life. Martignac received this black, resentful confession gravely; never at any moment did his respect—the respect due to a superior officer—waver. If he turned out to be more vulgar and nouveau than Andre had imagined, his tact and his Saint-Cyr ethic remained unimpeachable. In introducing Andre to a new world—Madame's politically reliable brothel in the Rue Chansonniere, Armand Keller's extremist Parti populaire de France, expensive restaurants where the bills were settled out of party funds, seedy back streets near the Place Pigalle and in the Cite Universitaire, small halls and rented cinemas packed with furtive businessmen, shopkeepers and old soldiers—Jean Martignac trod a delicate path between the dangers of patronage and the more subtle provocation of obsequiousness. He contrived to advise Andre on the question of divorce and alimony as if he were merely refreshing the captain's own knowledge of the subject; and when, in moments of unseeing grief or rage, his bewilderment brought him to the verge of incoherence and tears, Andre turned to him for comfort, Jean Martignac withdrew into himself, as if overwhelmed by the tragedy whose heroic proportions extended beyond the limits of his own earthbound imagination. Through his grief, Andre became a god. And life on Olympus was rent free. Madame Martignac remained with the Marquis de Clavigny at Le Touquet.
Jean Martignac warmly recommended the brothel's bamboo shoots. "They're as fine and supple and tender as any Nang Lin used on you in Indochina, mon Capitaine. The pain is exquisite and the skin remains unmarked." They began to visit the brothel in the Rue Chansonniere regularly. Shy at first and anxious on behalf of his dignity, Andre soon succumbed to his young friend's discreet and sensitive tastes; in the brothel, as in the jungle, Martignac's touch of coarse vulgarity was absorbed by his environment. "You're perfectly right to persist with Annette," he remarked one night, as they made their way down the narrow street with its noisy bars, its solitary, parading women, its occasional bursts of jazz and cooking smells, its parked cars wedged nose-to-tail, awaiting the return of their pleasure-avid owners, its slanting yellow streetlights. "What a bitch, that Annette, so petite, eh, so compact and vicious, what an actress, quel orage, the real thing and no complaints if you lose your head a bit."
"Like a spitfire," Andre said darkly, in English.
Martignac glanced at him with respect and decided then to introduce him to Armand Keller, who had recently sprung to national prominence as the leader of the Parti populaire de France, an extremist group with more than a dozen members in the Chamber of Deputies.
"Balanced and mature men like yourself," Keller told Andre one evening, with his mouth full of lobster, "are rare today in France. Instead, we are delivered over to intellectual windbags who earn their living by writing open letters to one another and by ranting about the world proletariat, the revolution, freedom and I'esprit."
Martignac, a devoted disciple and fund raiser, nodded vigorously in agreement with everything Keller said and fed him with topics to quench his thirst for didactic monologue. Within a week of meeting the great man, Andre had received instruction on the virtues of Charles Maurras, on la Rocque's other worldly integrity, on Deat's jnerits as an idealogue and on Doriot's potentiality as a French Mussolini. Andre, who absorbed all this intently, soon found himself courted by Keller and his friends.
"You fellows do the fighting, mon Capitaine, while certain elements here in Paris systematically betray you. We have three tasks to perform, and rapidly: to purge the Government, to eliminate the Red fifth column and to bring to the forefront modern-minded officers like yourself. We must dispense with the fanfares, the gold-braided staff officers, the drill displays and the doddering generals who cringe before the vilest and most corrupt beneficiaries of the system."
Some weeks later, in a rented dance hall near the Odeon, Keller, with tears in his eyes, extolled the virtues of "A friend of mine, a gallant officer with us here tonight, a patriot whose name I dare not reveal to you, a devoted husband and father driven from his home and family by hostile elements, expelled from the native soil from which he sprang, a son of France who did not creep home from Indochina with his tail between his legs, who did not submit meekly to the insults lavished upon him by those whose one principle of life is security, who refused to prostitute himself for material benefits and paid holidays and state-subsidized allowances and a house by the sea ... a man without regrets who passionately loves the country which is his ..."
Andre joined the party, secretly. He began to thirst again for action, to chafe at the life of idle luxury which he experienced in Martignac's company in Paris. He paid regularly the sums demanded by Simone's lawyers and resisted Martignac's suggestion that he investigate the legal loopholes.
"I've been a prisoner before," Andre told him with dignity, "twice. The Gestapo wanted information; my wife only wants money."
Towards midnight it must have been, the Gestapo applied the electrodes first to the tongue, then the eyelids, then the penis. "The name and occupation of your immediate superior in Saint-Stienne. . . ." Evidently no one else had talked, not even Jacques ...
Soon after he accepted Keller's proposition that he undertake to organize clandestine party cells in the Army, Andre received the long-awaited notification of his next transfer. He tore the letter open in feverish excitement and hurled his gaze down the page of printed instructions until he came to a single word, hurriedly typed and misspelled: "Copprenica."
His disappointment was acute. "Coppernica," he complained that evening to Keller, Martignac and Keller's German friend Hermann Strauss, "is a paradise for parasites, as calm as a rock, nothing but bathing, games, bridge parties and untaxed drink. As for the blacks ..."
Keller smiled and filled his glass.
"Ever heard of Tukhomada?" he asked casually.
Andre shrugged. "The name is familiar, certainly. There was some scandal .. ."
Keller's eyes flashed sombrely, like those of a St. Bernard coming across a frozen climber buried in the snow.
"Take it from me, mon Capitaine, Coppernica is due to explode any moment now. It is there that France next confronts her destiny. That is why, if you will forgive me boasting a little, I used my influence in the Ministry . .." He gestured modestly. "Jean will follow you there. I have arranged it." He tore hungrily at his inevitable lobster, leaving Andre to simmer with resentment, incensed to discover yet again how malleable were his own superiors to civilian pressure. In addition, he was irritated by Keller's brash German confidante, Hermann Strauss, now an officer in the Foreign Legion, who had once fought with Rommel in North Africa and then on the Russian front.
"Russia!" said Martignac warmly. "That was the war which went wrong."
"Hitler's mistake," Keller said, "was to have dispersed his initial thrust by driving towards Leningrad and the Caucasus as well as towards the primary target, Moscow."
"The Fiihrer was badly advised," Strauss said.
"The Russians would have fallen back behind the Urals," Andre protested.
His three companions glanced at him uneasily—Martignac with consternation. Keller smiled patronizingly.
"Andre fought in the Resistance," he explained. "Old reflexes die hard in such people. They find the European idea difficult to assimilate."
"I was tortured by the Gestapo," Andre said pale and shaking, unable to account for the almost hysterical mood of grievance and self-pity which had overcome him since hearing from Keller that the responsibility for posting him to Coppernica had been his.
"No hard feelings," Strauss said, holding out his hand.
"It was not you who tortured me," Andre said stiffly.
Strauss smiled. "Of course not. But I hereby fully associate myself, as a German, with those who did." His hand remained extended, stubborn and persistent, a big, blond, bullying hand. "I despise nothing more than the feeble attempts of my countrymen to claim ignorance of our national policy during the years of crisis. We live in the age of total war. There were brave men in your Resistance; cowards make torture unnecessary. France is only now beginning to learn these lessons."
Martignac glanced from one to the other, uneasily.
"Take his hand," Keller urged. "He's your brother now, a fellow European."
"I have always viewed my life as a logical extension of what we fought for in the Resistance and not as a repudiation of it," Andre said.
"Fair enough," said Strauss.
Andre offered his hand, grudgingly, and saw a shadow of annoyance pass across Keller's face—as if his mistress had been insulted.
"During the war," Keller said testily, and with an air of dogmatic finality, "France divided over what the nation essentially is. You and your friends were mistaken; the finest and wisest elements rallied to le Marechal. It is for that reason that even today de Gaulle remains an impossibility."
"The name of your immediate superior ... you'll talk in the end, so you may as well save yourself the pain, we're in no hurry ..."
"A suggestion," Martignac was saying brightly and boyishly, "to reconcile our little differences; let us repair at once to Madame's, where each of us may give expression to his private philosophy of life without offending his brother."
"Agreed," said Keller, calling for the bill.
"Good," said Hermann Strauss, heavy and pink.
The taxi raced through Paris like a stag pursued by hounds, the driver hunched forward over his wheel, cursing and gesticulating and pumping his klaxon as if he had never in all his life encountered such insolent behaviour in the streets. Keller sat next to Andre.
"Have no regrets, my friend," he said. "There is a book that I want you to read; I truly believe that, once you have absorbed it, you will become the most dangerous man in Europe. Drieu La Rochelle first introduced me to it; a miracle of thought, divination and poetic insight, a true bible, as relevant today as it was forty years ago when it first appeared. This book teaches us everything—the eternal unities and the eternal animosities which form the only valid basis for action on a world scale. We have a special paper-bound edition available for party members at reduced rates. Read it, Laval, absorb it, master it. Later on, perhaps, you will introduce it to your brother officers in Coppernica."
"A French book?" Andre Laval asked sullenly.
"No. Hermann will tell you the original title, which I forget."
"Der Untergang des Abendlandes," said the German.
"That's it. Der Untergang des Abendlandes. Le Declin-"
"I understand German," Andre said sharply. "And English."
"Of course," said Keller uneasily. "I forgot."
The three Gestapo men rested and lit cigarettes. "You're causing yourself needless suffering, Laval. It is we who are destined to rule Europe, as the Filhrer has said, for a thousand years, because we are modern men, because we understand machines and virtue and discipline and racial purity, because we have the courage to obey blindly. The France you are fighting to defend has already ceased to exist—it was nothing, a bistro, a striptease act, a prolonged argument. It has been assimilated already into the new European Order. The epoch of narrow nationalism is concluded and patriotism has been redefined."
Melancholy lights of Paris, this Paris of the traitors, this self-confident lady so much grander than any of her transitory ravishers. The taxi screeched to a halt, and the driver began a loud altercation with a pedestrian who had dared to cross a road; and Keller's breath, when he moved to intervene, stank of mildewed cheese. The fragments of Andre's life, his childhood, his parents, the streets of Saint-fitienne, Robert Maury and the day of the strike, the war, the German sergeant, the bank, the child Marie, the ambush of the train, the decision to stay in the Army, the period in Germany and the war in Indochina—all this churned confusedly in his head as he was carried heavy-bellied and weary towards Madame's place in the Rue Chansonniere. Yet the jigsaw puzzle of his life was no nearer solution. The constant elements, Simone and he himself, proved to be the least tangible of all. Someone had once said to him: "I know nothing about myself, or what I am, except that when I die everything that I am will also die and everything that I am not will not die. Only at the moment of death shall I know who I am—if then." These words now pushed to the forefront of his consciousness; only twice in his life had he caught a glimpse of the man he truly was: the time with Simone in the woods in 1940, and the time with Simone in Koblenz, after the war. The taxi came to rest outside Madame's. The moment he stepped out onto the pavement and pulled back his shoulders, he had a premonition of being on the brink of a third, definitive encounter with himself. As Keller, Strauss and Martignac pushed into the brothel ahead of him, he realized that the Armageddon of the soul which he had always courted was almost upon him.
He went inside.
In a small upstairs salon, garnished with red velvet cushions and curtains (themselves adorned with gilt tassels and cords) and furnished with mock Louis XIV chairs, Madame unravelled in the economical, sensitive language of the business, the tangled yarn of their collective urge.
When she entered, Annette made straight for Andre, who became erect at once, excited and angered by the milky flow of the girl's exposed breasts and thighs. "How goes it, Captain?" she asked in her coarse, suburban voice, smoky with Billancourt soot. "How many have you executed since I last saw you?" "Five Jews and four Socialists," he said. "Good," she said, "but no workers. Why no workers?" He reached for her but she evaded him. "I can get at them through you," he panted. "In violating you, slut, I violate the proletariat en masse." She laughed. "Bring me evidence of your deeds next time, Captain." "Choose your victim!" Annette examined her breasts in the gilded, oval mirror which hung from a single rusty nail over the "marble" pseudo-Empire fireplace (made, in fact, of plaster). "I want a Negro student," she said, "a black. Catch him leaving a cafe with a white woman some years older than he. She must be beautiful, and a bohemiail. Bring me one of his eyes and the nipple of her left breast." Jean Martignac giggled but Andre disregarded him. "Do you admire me, Annette?" he asked urgently, taking her hand and squeezing it until she squealed. "If the men of France," she cried, "were all of your breed ..."
The three Gestapo men had momentarily left off their beating and allowed him to smoke. "If all Frenchmen had your guts," the senior one congratulated him, "we wouldn't have won so easily. Now tell me what I want to know or I'll bury you piece by piece."
The four girls wore fine-mesh black stockings, caught tensely around their thighs by red garters, black, patent-leather shoes with stiletto heels and otherwise only an elastic support which thrust the breasts up high and tight while concealing no part of them. When Annette lightly slapped the rouged cheeks of the sumptuous Red Head and accused her of being a secret Jewess, the big girl at once opened up an ornate chest of drawers, decorated with mock-eighteenth-century trifles and conceits and bearing on its lid a carved representation of the flyleaf of the first edition of Rousseau's Confessions. Red Head brought out a bunch of snappy bamboo canes, causing Hermann Strauss to cry out, "Destroy her in one! Triumph swiftly, as Guderian did!" Red Head went for Annette, who knelt, begged and retracted. Martignac leaped up in a state of great excitement and powerfully erect. "Strauss and I," he cried, "Hermann and I! To the death!" At once the German agreed to the contest, but contemptuously and with icy self-confidence. Martignac's legs, when Red Head had slipped off his trousers, were seen to be covered in long, golden hair, very soft; Strauss' were bare and white and brutally muscled. Both men bent; Keller's breathing became heavier and less controlled than Andre's as they watched Red Head inflict the bamboo alternately on Martignac and Strauss, the blows mounting in accuracy and venom as she responded savagely to the deep grooves now etched in their inflamed flesh and to the agonized contortions which swept the features of the two combatants. Martignac, who had begun to moan the louder and more pitifully about the "tender mercies of the gentle sex," suddenly leaped up and stood to attention before Andre, flushed, erect and panting. "Mon Capitaine, I formally beg leave to surrender to Hauptmann Hermann Strauss, to victorious Germany, to the Third and final Reich—and to be stripped of my rank and shot." "Permission granted," Andre said. Strauss grunted contemptuously. "Punish the sissy little fleur-de-lis," he ordered Red Head, "for his French impudence." The girls laid the big, blond Martignac on the floor, bound him hand and foot with cord, then soaked the cord in water and kept it saturated. When Red Head bent low over him and kissed him, he begged to be released but she refused and then he shed in three violent spasms and lay moaning happily until they released his hands and feet.
Keller's excitement now came to the boil. "Read the Book!" he bellowed at Andre. "Read it. You dare not! You are a coward!" Andre seized hold of the slender, dark girl whose name was Georges Sand and bent her back with a brutal kiss. "I want Keller punished," he told her. "Punish him on my behalf. Make him shed everything, everything! I desire his complete collapse. You have five minutes only!" Andre made a great show of examining the second hand of his watch. "Only German girls understand torture," Hermann Strauss announced, squatting down to watch with his legs apart and his penis running away from his loins in a triumphant, bananalike curve, a spire worthy of Bismarck's helmet. Keller, stripped of his clothing by Georges Sand, was made to lie on the floor with his feet resting on a low mock-Directorate stool covered in green satin and, according to Hermann Strauss, once belonging to Leon Blum himself. Rage consumed Keller's upturned dial. From a cheaply lacquered cabinet rendered more hideous by its three papier-mache gargoyles, the exquisite and, Laval mused, almost Semitically petite Georges Sand produced a pair of long, tapering jet-black shoes with laces running from the ankle almost to the toe itself. Squeezing Keller's square and (indeed) pedestrian feet into their slender, patrician compass, and stilling his protests with a kiss as enigmatic as the pianissimo touch of the Emperor's hushed pianist, Georges Sand committed all of her frail strength to the lacing of these shoes, throwing off her few garments and causing Keller to thrash and writhe on the floor, his glassy eyes hypnotized by the erotic undulations of the prostitute's provocative limbs. She mocked him. Suddenly Keller cried out, "Enough, enough!" and begged her to relieve the searing pressure on his feet. "No, no," Andre shouted, "he must be compelled to capitulate in the proper manner. Make him shed!" "You're a fiend, Laval," Keller cried, writhing on the floor and failing repeatedly to raise his tongue to Georges Sand's plum-ripe breasts, "A Jew, a Red, a nigger and a pederast!" Hearing this base attack on the impeccable credentials of her master, Georges Sand bit into Keller's neck slowly, relentlessly, while his fingers scurried like hungry rats over her body and his tightly bound feet thrashed Leon Blum's satin stool. Then, as he shed in a single, spouting spasm, he succumbed utterly to Andre's domination and compliantly agreed that he was
ersal
and always had been, secretly, a paid agent of the univ conspiracy.
"I notice," said Hermann Strauss, "that Laval alone has so far avoided punishment. Perhaps the Gestapo permanently eradicated his taste for strong medicine." The light had shone in his eyes all night long, until it felt as if they were bleeding from exposure to the heat. The German, still erect as a raised sabre, was surprised and delighted by the vehemence of Andre's reaction. "You're a kraut fool, Strauss, a Teuton and a numskull. It was I who broke them! They learned nothing from me, nothing! Finally the ridiculous pocket-Fiihrer entreated me to take pity on him lest his superiors punish him. Annette! We will show this Boche what a real Frenchman is made of. Devise a supreme test, for supermen." "Devise any test you like," snorted Strauss, "it will only cast an unkind light on your impotence. I will leave you as pathetic a figure of womanhood as I left Martignac." "Shoot me, mon Capitaine," moaned the spent and happy Martignac. "Let my dishonoured name be erased from the annals of Saint-Cyr."
Under Annette's supervision the two men were stripped naked, bound hand and foot and stood against a wall. A long steel rod, thrust into the electric fire, began at once to glow. Red Head held a tape measure, also of steel, and both girls wore thick gloves. At the sight of Annette's challenging stomach and defiant breasts, Andre became erect and the call of the Constable of France echoed down the Loire Valley from chateau to chateau, the call of the Marne. Both combatants understood the rules of the trial by fire at once though neither was conversant with the medieval dramatic cycles. Holding the red-hot rod at the level of Strauss' own magnificent piston, Annette advanced steadily on the Foreign Legionary from Hesse, who countered his agony by achieving a parade-ground posture and by intoning, soulless-ly, "links, recht, links, recht" to the tempo of the galvanizing goose step he had once had the privilege to witness against the emotively Lutheran backcloth of Nuremberg's cobbled streets. "You cannot succeed, Andre," Keller sighed. "The verdict of 1870 is irreversible." Annette was very close now to the sweating German; it looked as if the burning tip of the rod would at any moment scorch his white flesh. At the last moment his Oktoberfest bellow shook the pseudo-room: "Nein, nein, nein!" Annette at once froze and Red Head hastened to measure the distance from tip to tip, where the rod of steel confronted the rod of flesh. "Four centimetres only," declared Annette harshly. "Let me tell you at once, Captain Laval, that few men can stand less than ten centimetres and that none has previously beaten six." "Hermann has the French national, all-comers, European and world records," murmured Jean Martignac sleepily. "He is the champ."
"I am unable to believe," Strauss announced, staring at Andre with the same remorseless hunger with which von Schlieffen had once examined France's eastern frontier, "that the Gestapo did not amputate your self-respect. Now we shall know the truth." Annette's body was touching Andre's own as she kissed him. He begged her to receive his burden but she refused. "It will only make you weak and cowardly." "Afterwards, then," he pleaded. "Only if you can beat four centimetres. Otherwise Strauss shall do with me as he pleases, while you watch the fourth successive desecration ol: French womanhood by the Hun." Andre trembled. "L'heure allemande est encore arrivee," sighed Martignac. Annette again removed the white-hot steel rod from the fire anc advanced on Andre, her eyes fixed on his and her dark body heaving. At once the sting of the almost unbearable heat evoked in him unnerving memories and his will sagged. In the cruel, apocalyptic light of dawn they had discarded him like an old canvas bag in Jacques Pineau's cell. Jacques had bent over him comfortingly, promising that a doctor would come and that his wounds would soon be healed. Pineau also had been tortured. Less than a metre now separated him from Annette's scalding rod of justice. He groaned. "The electrodes," he moaned. "1 know, I know," Jacques Pineau comforted him, "but you held out." Heat, heat, the ultimate conception of the pure devil-spirit, of the anti-Faust, livid heat, he could take no more, he was not made for ... on to the soft petals of his eyelids the scorpion electrodes descended, too much, too much, he and Pineau had been at school together, Jacques was his wife's brother, his compassion was 4He to confess . . . Annette's scorching flesh was merging with his own, the agony and ecstasy were one, she hissed, "Hold out, hold out," but the voice billowed from his throat like the flame from the pit, the years dissolved, "Non, non, enough, enough, I'll talk, I'll talk." Red Head measured the distance. Annette's scorn withered his guts like the cancerous Billancourt smoke in which she had been raised. "Ten centimetres. Beaten by a clear six centimetres." Andre cried with relief as the burning of his own rod eased. "We are always foutu, foutu," Martignac murmured, and Keller gurgled and then Strauss' trumpet bellowed with the numbing predictability of the victorious general who will, it cannot be doubted, insist that the surrender be unconditional. "Did you hear, did you hear?" Strauss shouted. " 'I'll talk, I'll talk,' that's what he said. So now we know the truth about our little pink maquisard's encounter with Herr Gestapo." Annette spat in Andre's face. "You are finished. I am his now." Tears poured down his furrowed cheeks as the brutal Strauss, parchment white and swollen huge with the long waiting, bent her backwards, smothered her with his Hessian kisses and granted his passage to oblivion on the desolated Sedan of the floor. In Jacques' mild brown eyes there would never be reproach, only pity, the pity of a man who would not give a friend away, would not force him to walk with bowed head in his liberated motherland. Finally the Gestapo man had ripped the electrodes from his eyelids and smacked his lips in triumph and relief. "Shake hands, Lieutenant?" From Strauss there issued a last trombone quaver of satisfaction. He leaped up from Annette and drew himself to attention before Andre. "Shake hands, Captain?"
Three weeks later Andre Laval set out for Coppernica with dry, itching hands. Six months had passed when he encountered Camille Odouma in the basement cell of Octave.
NINETEEN
ybele ushered soames to a chair with elaborate courtesy. A servant brought black coffee.
"The view of the Varva from your window is unrivalled," Soames said.
Ybele nodded distractedly.
"Any more eminent corpses?" Soames asked. "Any more Cartiers?"
Ybele coughed. "Tufton."
"To what do I owe this unexpected summons, Monsieur le Premier?"
"Things are working out badly."
"I'm sorry to hear it."
"Tukhomada is a prisoner but his movement is restive. Arms are coming in from across the border. Eastern Province is in a state of dissidence; Upper Varva is in open rebellion. Even here in Thiersville popular sentiment is disturbingly hostile."
"You must act decisively."
Ybele watched him gloomily, drumming his fingers on the desk.
"Tell me, Tufton. Are the Americans behind this? I mean are they encouraging this shameful anarchy?"
Soames knew that the Americans were not; that American diplomacy, in fact, was in a state of impasse.
"Almost certainly," he said.
"My God!"
"Much hinges on the advice given to Washington by Silk and Bailey. Bailey, I am now in a position to assure you, will soon be completely under control."
"How?"
"Ah."
Ybele nodded nervously. "Good."
"Half the battle," Soames said. "But only half." Ybele sighed. "Go on, then, I'm in your hands. You want 3 to execute Plon."
"America is a business society. What disturbs Washington is not the dominance of French culture and the French language in Coppernica; it is the dominance of the Union and the voice which the Union gives Paris in the formulation of your policy."
"But I'm absolutey independent!"
"Of course."
Ybele leaned back in his chair and sipped at his coffee. Soames had to admire the quality of his shirts. "Go on," Ybele said resignedly.
"Let us suppose that you pass a law, or decree, or whatever one does pass without a parliament, to the effect that no single foreign company or group of companies may control more than three-fifths of Coppernica's mineral resources. Who could object?"
"Plon."
"In order to implement your new law, or decree, it would be necessary to impose a forced sale of one quarter of the Union's present holdings. This could be effected either by a transfer of shares or of the mines themselves. The shares would be preferable. For this purpose, you would create a government holding company which would purchase the shares at a price marginally above their present market value."
"Nationalize the mines! You want to make me do what even Tukhomada shrank from! If I become a Socialist, I will hardly recommend myself to Washington."
"Having created the government holding company," Soames continued gently, "you will then sell it. You will sell a majority control in it to an internationally renowned American bank, an organization whose respectability is beyond question."
"So that you and your friends in Amcol may disguise your own acquisition of the shares?"
"Yes."
Ybele laughed uneasily. "You won't disguise it from my friend Plon. More than once he has promised to be the chief mourner at my funeral."
"An honour for which I would compete most strenuously. However, where can Plon turn? As I have impressed upon you before, your dependence on him should not blind you to his dependence on you. Apart from yourself, there is no one in the Alliance Party who could conceivably run this country. Plon knows it. He can't smear boot blacking over Keller's face again and make him Premier. You are not driving him to desperation by this measure; the Union will retain three-fifths of the mines."
"And you're convinced that this manoeuvre would do the trick in Washington?"
"Absolutely. But further, even Paris may be persuaded to see the light. Without American support, you cannot survive. And if you do not survive, if Tukhomada comes back, that will be the end of French influence. In this connection, there is yet another point."
"Go on," said Ybele, gloomily.
"At the present time the price of the Union's shares on the Paris Bourse is distinctly depressed. A natural response to the unstable conditions here. Ordinary shares priced at seven francs fifty on Independence Day were, an hour ago, passing hands at five francs eighty. You should begin by picking up what you can on the Bourse; then turn to Plon later. If you offer, say, six francs ninety, a lot of small investors are going to love you for it."
"Six ninety! A franc above the market price! Do I borrow the money from Plon?"
"From me."
"My God, you are rich!"
"Alas, not. Mr. Silk and I have our backers."
"Are they mad?"
"Perhaps. They are prepared to pay a little extra for a stable future. I strongly advise you to adopt this course without delay. Time is running against you. I've no doubt that American recognition will be followed by generous short-and long-term credits. You will be impregnable."
"Or dead." Once again Ybele went through the motions of slitting his own throat.
Soames smiled appreciatively.
"We have certainly thought about this," Ybele said. "My cabinet was divided."
"Your cabinet?"
Ybele grinned, he couldn't help himself. "I was divided."
Soames outlined the technicalities of the plan in greater detail. Ybele's scepticism, his intense fear of Plon, gradually succumbed to the weight of the English financier's arguments. Finally Soames played his trump card.
"Suppose, as I suggest, you requisition a quarter of the Union's holdings."
"Well?"
"In other words, approximately six million shares. You will offer six francs ninety. However, the interests which I represent will buy the shares from your government holding company at six francs ninety-five—a difference of five centimes on each share. Don't bother to calculate. A profit of five centimes on sixty million shares represents a total profit of three million francs, or, as I prefer to think of it, £230,000. Chester Silk and his friends would say $644,000. I'm sure that you're equally at home in all three languages."
Soames produced a handkerchief, blood red, and dabbed fastidiously at his brow and chin. The discreet odour of pine needles reached the African. Ybele's lips had fallen slightly apart as he stared out of the window at the clear blue sky, where vultures wheeled throughout the day, scavenging the Varva for its occasional victims.
"Tufton, you're serious about this?"
"Absolutely."
"Three million francs?"
"Three million. I should perhaps add that it is quite customary for the agent who negotiates a deal such as this to take a percentage, a commission. We have advisers who could ensure that the three million passed into your private account—in Switzerland, if you prefer—without publicity."
Ybele nodded. "I also have advisers."
"Quite."
"Please understand. What concerns me is the welfare of my people."
"No one doubts it."
Soames took his leave. At the door they shook hands. The prime Minister's face had set into a faintly distorted mould— as if seen through a fine veil. Surprise had lodged in the crevices of flesh.
"Three million francs?"
Soames smiled. "Enough to keep you in exile, my dear Fernand."
A servant had conducted Jason to his bedroom. The window afforded a view of the sprawling tropical garden, of the round pond and of the almond tree under which he had sat a week ago, stricken by Zoe's indifference. Although nominally free, he now had the uneasy sensation of being a prisoner, and he regretted not having spoken to his parents before leaving the Embassy. Yet Zoe had forbidden it.
He climbed into a hot bath. His limbs were stiff and cold. He shivered. In the bath he dozed fitfully, resting his small black head against the white enamel just above the water line. He dreamed of waking up in Zoe's perfumed and contrite arms, of being told that the whole nightmare had been a game, an exercise to test his fidelity, his love. As he climbed out of the bath, defiance, despair and humility succeeded one another in a dizzy cartwheel of anguish.
He dressed slowly, straightening his black tie many times, glanced nervously at his watch and tried to read a little, but he found it impossible to concentrate on the book. He dreaded going down into the company of Soames and his stiff daughter, who reminded him of Amanda Silk. As for Soames, he had seen his hand advance upwards from Zoe's waist to sustain and explore her breast. And once, many months ago in New York, Jason had seen him kiss her on the mouth.
It was almost dusk now. The outriders of the sun were withdrawing their bloody mantles from the coffin of the sky. Something, perhaps, moved on the surface of the pond where it was deepest. He braced himself for the ordeal.
Soames and his daughter were sitting on the veranda beside a trolley of drinks and English magazines.
"How smart you look" Sara said. "I'm afraid we're very slack about dressing for dinner."
"Oh-"
"No reason why Jason shouldn't show us the way," Soames said. "What will you have?"
"Have, sir?"
"Drink."
"Oh, beer, please—if you have it."
"We have everything," Soames said, disappearing indoors to the icebox.
"You must make yourself feel completely at home," Sara said. "As you did in the Embassy."
She returned to her copy of Vogue. He stood looking at the garden.
Soames came back with the beer.
"Why not sit down," he said, as if Jason were being unnecessarily gauche.
"Thanks, I will."
"So you're studying government at Harvard?"
"That's right, sir."
"You mustn't call me sir," Soames said. "We don't do it in England any longer. It's purely an American custom now.".
"But Mr. Bailey is an American," Sara said, not raising her eyes from Vogue.
Soames smiled. "The older culture must prevail."
Jason laughed uneasily. "I'll try and remember," he said.
"Well," said Soames affably, "you probably find that Thiersville makes quite a contrast with Cambridge, Massachusetts."
"We have plenty of violence at home in the States," Jason said. "I've seen enough of it myself, in New York and in the South, to last me a lifetime. In some ways, it's safer here."
"Is that why you stay?" Sara said.
"We know why Jason stays," Soames said gently.
"Zoe's very beautiful, of course," Sara said.
"Oh she is."
"She's bound to marry a millionaire."
"We must hope that she'll marry Mr. Bailey," Soames said.
Sara stared at her father in amazement. She was furious.
"Perhaps she'll have to," she said.
The blood rushed to Jason's face. Soames intervened hast-
"My life is overburdened with secrets already. When we're young we imagine that our private lives are more shameful and unusual than they in fact are. The very people from whom we assiduously conceal things may themselves be harbouring secrets of unimaginable nastiness."
Sara led them into dinner. Jason saw that whereas Zoe's legs were long and slender, the cousin was short and stumpy below decks. His heart ached for the beautiful creature incarcerated at the far end of the town in Lundquist's brutal glass cage.
"How much longer does your vacation last?" Soames asked, refilling Jason's glass with hock.
"Almost two months."
Jason had almost begun to like the Englishman. He wasn't so bad after all.
"What do you do for money?"
"My father is very generous, sir."
"Not sir."
"Oh-"
"But a little more money wouldn't hurt your pocket?"
Sara wore a strained smile. "Daddy is about to buy you up body and soul, as he did James."
Soames didn't look pleased.
"Sometimes I find myself in complete sympathy with Strindberg's view of women."
Jason nodded appreciatively and wondered how Strindberg would have felt about Zoe. She commanded the heights of every thought.
"I take it," Soames said, "that your appreciation of the situation here in Coppernica corresponds pretty closely to your father's."
"Well, sir, as you know, my father is on the whole opposed to Ybele. The Ambassador, on the other hand—"
"Favours Ybele. But what do you think?"
"Both are opinions I have to respect."
"Equally?"
Jason had stopped eating. He pushed distractedly at chicken bones with his fork while his knife lay, in the American fashion, across the rim of his plate. Soames, florid and benevolent, it now seemed, kept filling his glass with cool hock, while Jason drained it down like water. A mild euphoria was creeping through his shocked limbs, dulling his fears and removing him progressively from the plane of shrewd calculation on which his host was now operating.
"Well, sir, I take Tukhomada and Odouma to be, at base, extremists. I am of course in favour of independence, and although you British have done fine things in your empire— and have been, if I may say so, unjustly abused—I am, as an American, opposed to colonialism. But I hold no warranty for extremism, and I——"
"Sn vou would support Ybele in the present circum-
"Politics, as a great man once said, is the art of the possible."
"Quite so. But to be more precise: would you recommend your government to recognize Ybele's government?"
Jason hesitated.
"Why, sure," he said boldly, as if this conclusion had been manifestly implicit in his attitude from the start. Soames refilled his glass, while a servant cleared away the plates and brought clean ones. Soames lit a cigarette between courses; and Jason, with a hand which shook, reached gratefully for his own.
"Quite frankly," Soames began again on a new key, "who stands between you and Zoe? Who wanted you to leave the Embassy for the time being?"
"I should have thought that was obvious," Sara said.
As the lance found his shoulder, the Negro acquired the baleful charm of a hunted deer, the demented brightness of a creature for whom the illusion of life shimmers like a mirage beyond certain death. He longed to talk, even to these strangers, to re-create the whole affair and to fabricate, by a process of selective reconstruction, a new, more hopeful ending. But he was old enough, despite the intensity of his misery, and despite the drink, to resist the impulse; he had acquired his maturity in the hard school of real pain.
"Do you really think it's Zoe who wanted you to go?"
Jason shot Soames a hopeful glance, a plea for a revelation, for a family secret which would reprieve him. The hard line of Zoe's neck, as she turned away to the window, dissolved; her hands caressed his cheek.
"I know Zoe," Soames said, "and I know her father."
He saw, then, that the boy was his.
"I guess Mr. Silk can't really take the idea of Zoe marrying a Negro," Jason said, fanning his own hope. "I've gotten on his nerves lately."
"I'm afraid Chester shares the prejudices of the circles in which he moves. Zoe is different."
Sara stared at her father—but dared not speak.
"Zoe is wonderful," murmured Jason, "really wonderful."
"But she's devoted to her father. She can't bear to hurt him in any way. If you want Zoe, you must first conquer Chester. He's a man of scrupulous integrity, and in the end he will be fair to you. He needs proof of your absolute devotion to the girl."
Jason nodded solemnly. The euphoria deepened perceptibly.
"In which case why hang about the Embassy twiddling your thumbs? Chester is a worker, a beaver, a Samuel Smiles. Like all Puritans, he believes that God only helps those who help themselves. A savage and bleak doctrine, if ever there was one. No use telling Chester that you're buried in your books, in your studies; his imagination refuses to incorporate that activity within the corral of legitimate labour. If I were in your shoes, I'd set about doing something useful and practical for our cause out here."
Jason stared, and his eyes were alive with expectation.
"For the West, you mean, sir? For democracy?"
Soames wiped his mouth, slowly. "Just so."
"I sure would like to do that. Sir, I'd be very obligated to you if you would provide me with any relevant suggestions."
"Have you done any military service?"
"No, sir."
"No matter. Suppose you join James Caffrey as one of our principal agents in Commandant Laval's Special Force? You would no doubt have to undergo a minimal period of basic training—nothing much, a few days You have no physical defects, I take it?"
"No, sir."
"I need hardly impress upon you how closely this work touches Ambassador Silk's interests, as well as my own. You will have Caffrey for a companion; as Sara will tell you, a charming fellow. As for money, you will receive a salary from the Alliance Party of about three hundred dollars a month—and a further three hundred from me."
"What, exactly, does this work entail, sir?"
"I can't tell you because I don't know. The political situation as it is now developing here bears no relation to the classical models they teach at Harvard. The closest analogy I can suggest is Chicago in the twenties. The over-all balance of power depends on a delicate mechanism which has to be manipulated with art and care by a few men. I can only say that in sending you to join the Special Force, Ambassador Silk and I will be placing you in a position of immense trust—a young man's role which we potbellied monsters cannot perform ourselves."
"My father-"
"Will understand," said Soames.
Jason shook his head solemnly. "He may think I've betrayed him."
"Well, we all have to choose. If you're really sincere in your love for Zoe——"
"I am, I am."
Jason knew that he was about to pitch both his parents into a condition of elemental anxiety. But the consideration passed across his consciousness like a faded negative, remote and inconsequential when set beside the clear, sharp print of Zoe's secret capacity for conversion, for love, and Soames' promise of Chester Silk's gratitude and generosity. It was certainly true that all along he'd taken from the Silks without giving anything in return.
Later, over cognac, Soames brought out his cheque book.
"Would an advance suit?" he asked.
"Thank you, sir."
It gratified Soames to find in the American boy a healthy appetite for the feel of real money. James Caffrey's indifference to money alienated Soames in the same way that he was repelled by mental defectives, men without limbs and sexless cold fish like Plon. He didn't care for any sort of eunuch.
By the time that he retired to bed and to the generously endowed mulatto mistress who had been procured for him by no less a person than Ybele, he felt confident of having brought Powell Bailey to heel. The Negro would lick the dust as soon as he learned that his son had been committed to the charge of Andre Laval.
Chester Silk stared perplexed at his daughter.
Zoe sat by the window with her hands folded on her lap and her eyes resting tranquilly on the envelope of flesh and bone which was her father. Chester felt that talking to her was like making love to a dead woman. Yet he couldn't help himself, his love was so great, and his need.
He regarded her stomach with an almost aboriginal superstition.
"Zoe, honey, I kind of hold myself responsible. We sent Jason away. I asked you to do it. But you wanted it, you know I was thinking of you. Zoe, there's something you've got to know. It's Soames. I've been associated with your uncle for many years, and I can honestly say that I've been blind all this time. I'm blind, Zoe. When I think. When I recall my appointment to this post, my appearance before the Senate Committee, the oath I took, the look of trust in the President's eye ... I'll be frank. I have always believed that what is good for American business is good for the United States. And I do believe that. It's an article of faith—it's virtually written into the Constitution, damn it. Do you know your uncle Soames, do you really know him? He's your uncle, not mine. What is he? An immoralist, a dilettante, a Machiavellian, an adventurer—okay, we know that. But now what? He's crazy, goddam crazy. Not content with having fostered the overthrow of the legitimate government of this country—and I'd remind you that I stuck out against that all along—not content with that, he warps my judgment and seduces my reason in order to get me to agree to a new stratagem just so that he can get even with Plon. Jesus Christ! When Plon sees the decree that Ybele's about to publish, he'll go out of his mind! All hell will break loose. Zoe, listen, honey. You're not being friendly about this. There's worse to come. There's something I've got to tell you. It's about Jason. Look, I never i id like that boy and after what's happened and everything, but goddam it there must be limits—I mean Soames is absolutely crazy. We sent Jason to Soames' place, huh? You know what happened? You want me to tell you? Because I will. I'll tell you. Soames took hold of that kid and this is what he said to him, 'Jason, it's Chester Silk you've got to please, not Zoe Silk. The way to please him is to enroll yourself in the Special Force.' How do you like that? Crazy! The goddam mercenaries! Can you imagine that weedy black boy a mercenary? And the crazy boy does it! Jason, who's never seen a gun in his life. So what does Soames do next? He comes here and tells me to summon Powell Bailey. I said to him, 'The Baileys are going just about crazy with worry for Jason. Powell has gone to the police and God knows who about it. Lucille's been having hysterics up there. She's just about gone out of her mind. But Soames just shrugs and says he wants to talk to Powell. Zoe, I can hardly bring myself to tell you this, if it's not the
lousiest thing I've ever witnessed, then I'm-'Well, Mr.
Bailey,' Soames says, 'how about you and the Ambassador sending a cable to Washington setting out ten excellent reasons for instant recognition of the Ybele government?' Powell draws himself up. 'No, sir.' Soames screws up those blue eyes of his and he leans against the mantelpiece, puffing at a Havana like the bad man in some movie. 'Listen, Bailey,' he says, 'your son Jason is presently in the hands of Commandant Laval, one of the world's uglier customers. Laval spills blood, especially black blood, as you and I turn on the bath tap. As for torture, his appetite is insatiable. If you haven't dispatched that cable within an hour, the torture of your son will begin. If you don't believe it, Laval assures me excellent sound effects can be relayed over the telephone.' Jesus! Zoe, there's no call for you to look at me like that. I was outraged. I'm as outraged as the next man. I feel really sorry for Powell. He had a kind of a fixed smile, like a guy who doesn't know what the hell has hit him. It was weird, that smile. Then he turns to me. To me! He thinks I was a party to this, that I lent myself to this dirty strategem. No man has ever looked at me that way before. I sympathize with Powell but I don't think he had any right to look at me that way. I said to him, 'Powell, upon my word of honour, I had no part in this.' He looks at me as if I were dang. 'You didn't even lenow that Jason was being taken to Tufton's house without my knowledge or consent?' I said to him, 'Powell, I did know, but that was all. And if you want to be technical about it, Jason has already reached the age of consent. He's not a minor, Powell, not any longer.' Zoe, I'm not a dishonourable man. I'm your father. You know I'm your father, damn it. Goddam it, I have faith! So Bailey invites me to repudiate Soames and to order Jason's release.
"I said to him, 'Powell, I've told you, I had no part in this.' 'Okay,' he says, 'order his release.' Jesus, honey, I couldn't. I mean could I? We've already floated this big loan to buy sixty million goddam shares. We're up to our necks in Ybele. We've got to find some way of pressurizing Washington into recognizing Ybele. I agree it was a tragedy. It was an ancient tragedy, if you like. If there'd been a goddam chorus there it couldn't have been worse. You women are all the same: you don't mind spending money, but as soon as any poor sod tries to earn any you turn up your noses. It was all I could do not to have Soames flung out of the Embassy by a US Marine sergeant. Powell said to me, 'If anything happens to Jason, Lucille will break up.' I said to him, 'If Lucille's in any sort of trouble, there's nothing I wouldn't do for her.' Well, Powell looks just about whipped. He went off to draft that cable. Do you imagine that Soames was in any way ashamed? Do you know what that man said to me, Zoe? He said, 'We each of us have only one child, one daughter.' You get it? That guy's a garbage collector of the soul. Do I want to see the end of Jason? Tell me—you tell me—do I? Zoe, I don't like your attitude. We can't read you any longer, your mother and I. For eight weeks you've just sat here in this room and every time either of us comes in you're just staring out of the window as if you were nuts. I want you to see another headshrinker. I've always stuck by you and I want you to do what I ask just this once. Honey, will you please speak to me."
Summoned urgently by Ybele, Soames drained his claret, wiped his mouth, sent his regrets to the creme caramel, comforted Sara with a few consoling words and hurried into the night. His Rolls-Royce swept down the Avenue Foch at great speed. Only eight hours had passed since Premier Ybele " announced the decree which, in effect, requisitioned one quarter of the Union's holdings. According to Soames' calculations, Aristide Plon's heart must have beat 27,800 times since Ybele made his new policy known. In such circumstances something unpleasant was bound to happen.
In the Ministry of the Interior many lights were still burning. At the gate the sentries checked Soames' pass with unusual care. On presenting himself he was shown without delay to the Premier's office—where he found not only Ybele, but also Commandant Laval.
Laval offered no greeting. His dark face was saturnine and angry. He wore camouflage battle dress, high black boots, the blue beret and a denim belt, from which hung a revolver, a knife and a cluster of grenades. Soames regarded the grenades with some misgivings; evidently they were not toys.
"Sit down," Ybele said unceremoniously. "Well, what have you to say, Tufton? Why did I ever listen to you? A fine mess I have to thank you for."
"All is not well?" Soames said laconically, determined to impose his own emotional pattern.
"Ha! I should say not." Ybele was distraught; his arms flayed like windmill vanes. "But for the fidelity, the honour, the integrity of the Commandant here, we would all be dead."
"Vive le Commandant, then."
"Plon has gone mad, absolutely mad, out of his mind!" cried Ybele.
"I hope it's not catching," Soames said.
Ybele thumped the table. "You can joke. Let me tell you, the time for jokes is past."
"Plon is demented," Laval said dryly.
"Can you imagine what he's done?" said Ybele, striding around the room and tugging at his sweat-soaked collar.
"Given birth?"
"Plon has decided to get rid of me. I said this would happen."
"But, my dear Fernand, there's no one in the Alliance-"
"Exactly. So he's taken it into his head to negotiate with Maya." "Maya! But that's absurd."
"I tried to dissuade him," Laval said. "I told him that Maya would remain loyal to Tukhomada and that if he pretended otherwise it would be a trap. But Plon insists that with money, flattery and promises he can make the old general his creature and conjure a new party out of nothing. He admits that his adversaries-—as he now refers to you both—temporarily have the initiative. However, he remembers how another diminutive French commander once revealed his genius in the face of adversity."
Soames lit a cigar. His hand was unsteady.
"We must reason with Plon. There must be give and take."
"Ha!" snorted Ybele. "It's rather late in the day for that."
Laval shrugged. "His mood is sour. He promises that whoever stands in his path will be suffocated, crushed to death, lynched, atomized and buried alive."
"The retreat from Moscow always breeds mental disorders."
"We must be grateful that the Commandant wisely took matters into his own hands," said Ybele, who continually glanced with cringing respect towards Laval. "He realized at once that Tukhomada, Maya and Odouma had to be removed from Plon's grasp."
"You killed them?" inquired Soames calmly.
Ybele groaned. "Mon Dieu, of course not. How many times have I impressed it upon you that I must improve my image in the eyes of the world?"
"It would have been the simplest way," Laval said, fingering his knife. The blade was long and blue.
"What then?"
"I have arranged for their transfer," Laval said. He glanced at his watch. "At this moment they should be reaching their destination."
"Which is?"
Laval scowled. "One thing at a time."
"The Commandant," Ybele explained obsequiously, "quite naturally wants to know where he stands. If he has served you well, Tufton, you ought not to take it for granted. It has required an enormous effort of willpower on his part to separate himself not only from Plon, but from Keller and the vast majority of his colleagues. The Commandant is a Frenchman. He adores France—as we all do. To cut himself adrift, as the situation seemed to dictate, required great moral courage."
"I fully appreciate that," Soames said.
"The situation is precarious," Laval said impatiently. "Keller is now a bought man. It pains me to admit it, but the evidence is plain. His idealism has gone. Money now means everything to him. He sits in Plon's pocket, even if Plon acts in a way liable to damage our cause. Unfortunately Keller still retains his magnetic hold over my colleagues. He has convinced them that they must follow Plon. Only two officers could be persuaded otherwise—Jean Martignac and Henri Sauvigny."
"And you've contrived to remove the prisoners from the camp with their help?"
"Yes."
"A tricky operation."
But Laval refused to be drawn. "We've got them out. By now the alarm will have been given. If I were to return to the camp now—my own camp—I'd be arrested at once and detained."
"Plon is dangerous," Ybele said.
"I have taken one further step," Laval said to Soames. "I gave your man Caffrey a 'Jeep' and told him to collect the old Scot and the black and to drive fast to your villa."
Soames stared at him. "You what?"
Laval looked embarrassed, as if some trait in Soames bewildered him.
"They are your men, Monsieur. I hoped that you would be appreciative-"
Soames regarded the Frenchman with cold anger.
"We must not quarrel now," Ybele muttered uneasily.
"After all," Laval persisted, "if the black boy is a hostage, we must keep hold of him."
Soames' irritation was profound. "I have no need of Caffrey and Deedes. I thought I had made it plain to you that I wanted them out of the way."
Laval watched Soames with a faint air of incredulity.
"Monsieur, their connection with you is well known. If I had left them behind in the camp, I would have been consigning them to their deaths."
"You are very humane," Soames said acidly.
"CafErey is a man," Laval said with dignity.
Soames turned away towards the window. His heavy features were scarlet with anger.
"So what now?" said Ybele with a gesture of despair.
Laval was confident.
"Give me sixty men from MacMahon, and I guarantee to keep the prisoners out of Plon's reach."
Ybele was unconvinced. "Not for long. Plon has his agents
everywhere." 1
"Kill them," said Soames. "Bury them in a deserted spot. Who will know? Five men in all. We can maintain absolute secrecy. No one need ever know what happened."
"Tufton's right," Laval said.
Across the undulating expanses of Ybele's flesh, boldness vied with caution. The reins of power, he knew, were being torn from his hands. The arrogance of white men infuriated him.
"Those who live by the sword-"
"Stay alive," Soames said. "Plon will be completely disarmed. Where can he turn? Sanity and his shareholders will compel him to bury the hatchet. A united front will once again rally behind your government."
A red light glowed at the base of the telephone. Shattering their concave like a voice, it threatened their fragile temple of glass. Ybele snatched the receiver and lit a cigarette. As he listened, his features began to lose their coherence under the harsh yellow light, to drift into unrelated fragments of stricken flesh. Sweat poured down his face.
Finally he sank back into his chair and raised his arms in a pathetic gesture of defeat.
"It's all over," he whispered. "I am finished." Tears poured down his cheeks in a torrent of self-pity.
Laval stood over him. "Explain yourself."
Ybele wept helplessly. "They will kill me."
"Who will kill you, damn it?"
The Prime Minister gestured vaguely. "The assassins, the murderers."
Laval seized him by the collar, jerking the African's stricken face up towards the light.
"Explain, explain!"
"You were less clever than you thought, Laval. You are nothing but a ... an adventurer!"
The Commandant slapped his face twice. Ybele began to explain.
"Your officers were found with their throats cut. Dead. The ambulance had been intercepted, ambushed, a mile short of Octave. Tukhomada and his friends are once again at liberty. And I, I, Fernand Ybele, who have dedicated my soul to this young nation, must now yield up my life."
Laval had taken a step backward into the middle of the room. His face was ashen. Then, slowly, he crossed himself— a motion of reflexive piety which already suggested the outlines of the atonement ahead. His silence was a command. Soames recognized the depth of the man's emotion, his grief; he sensed that Laval was reliving an old drama within himself, tutoring his will to accept a faceless future—a soldier forever distilling the alcohol of revenge out of the scythed corn of fallen comrades.
"Is this Plon's work?" demanded Soames.
Ybele shrugged miserably. "Not Plon."
"Who, then?"
"The most effective communications system in the world," Ybele said, "is the fanatical devotion of Tukhomada's followers to their chief."
"We took every precaution," snapped Laval.
Ybele laughed unpleasantly. "I have no doubt your camp was saturated with MLN militants—your servants, your cooks, your clerks . . . everyone."
Soames and Laval regarded one another, then Soames glanced at his watch.
"The next plane doesn't leave until the morning," Laval said contemptuously.
"I shall be on it," Soames said.
The Commandant was beginning to recover himself.
"I would have expected better of you, Monsieur."
"I'm a realist."
Laval turned impatiently and began to pace the room.
^Vith each step he took, vitality and resolve flowed back into
bis limbs.
"We can still win. It's possible. Throw a dragnet across Thiersville tonight. Flush them out. Remember, we still control the police and the Army. Tukhomada will be forced to head south, towards Eastern Province or Upper Varva. I know this country like the back of my hand. I'll find them. Leave it to me."
"You alone?" said Soames.
"No, no! Give me sixty men from MacMahon and ten vehicles. All I need is enough ammunition, gasolines and pay to last a month. Give me a month."
Ybele shook his head disconsolately. "You'll need white officers. Without them native troops will turn and run at the first shot. Soldiers are always terrified of the fanatical temper of the villagers."
Laval nodded slowly, once again overwhelmed by sadness at the loss of Sauvigny and Jean Martignac, veterans of Indochina, men whom he had loved.
"A solution suggests itself," Soames said quietly.
"Caffrey?"
"Yes."
Laval nodded. "Good. Agreed. And the old Scot also. God, what generals! Still, there is no help for it. Deedes understands weapons. No black ever understands weapons. If the old man falls by the wayside, then let him fall."
Soames was watching Laval.
"I agree," he said deferentially.
"You have no choice," Laval said, paying him back for his earlier rudeness.
"Take Jason Bailey as well."
Laval stopped in his tracks. "What! The black? He doesn't know a rifle from a totem pole."
Soames relit his cigar. "Agreed. But consider, mon Commandant. Only by holding his son in custody can we prevent Powell Bailey from renewing his appeals to Washington on behalf of Tukhomada. Now that Tukhomada is at large the boy is more than ever invaluable. I have no means of locking him up myself. To keep him here in Thiersville is in any case extremely dangerous. Only one solution is possible. He must remain in your charge. You are the man whom his father fears."
Laval stood glowering.
"What Tufton says is very true," Ybele said.
"Intrigue nauseates me," Laval muttered. He slapped his revolver butt. "I am a surgeon. I operate. You cannot guide my hand."
"Of course," Soames said. "But surely you appreciate the force of an argument. Once the United States turns against us, we are finished."
Soames caught Ybele's vagrant eye, which flickered and died.
"You must oblige Tufton," Ybele said weakly.
Andre Laval glowered. "So be it."
Soames extended his hand.
"One further point," said Laval. "When the prisoners are recaptured—how do you wish them disposed of?"
"Bury them," Soames said.
But Ybele's doubts had revived. He couldn't rid himself of the notion that political assassination might turn out to be an ugly precedent.
"You must contact me here," he said. "Do nothing until you have had my advice. We can provide you with a radio set with a range of over five hundred miles."
"But if tonight you intended-"
Ybele became hysterical. "As Prime Minister of this country, I must be allowed to make some decisions!"
Soames rose to take his leave. He clasped Ybele's wet hand.
"I like to think that we're closer together tonight than ever before, Monsieur le Premier."
"I'm afraid so," Ybele said gloomily.
"Perhaps, after all, I might trouble you for a police escort."
The Commandant, a dark, angular bandit in camouflage green, tight muscled and scowling, accompanied Soames down the Ministry's bleak, windowless corridor.
"My men will report to you here, then?" Soames said.
"Within the hour."
"Mon Commandant, how shall I put it-"
"Put what?"
Nothing this man had said or done had served to change Laval's opinion of bourgeois England.
"Suppose we carry our minds forward to the time when your mission will be completed. Your companions will have served their-"
"Purpose."
"Their purpose, if you like. I was going to say their destiny. Suppose that an accident were to intervene, honouring them with the noblest of ends, a soldier's grave. Who could blame you? And who would not discern grandeur in such an epic tragedy?"
Laval glanced at him quickly—but said nothing.
At the end of the corridor they shook hands. Soames insisted on it.
"What will you tell Caffrey, Monsieur?"
The heavy, elegantly dressed Englishman, with his ripe, florid features, sensual mouth, blue eyes and thick, corn-coloured hair, assumed an expression of innocent mystification.
"Tell him?"
"About our mission."
"The essentials, naturally, the factors which make our civilization unique and its survival imperative: our art, our historic burden, our tragic humanism, our heroic struggle on the frontiers of time with destiny, with the conquest of death." '
Soames smiled wanly, as if exhausted, then stepped into the elevator, followed by four security men.
"Bon voyage, mon Commandant."
The doors closed silently, leaving Laval, standing alone in the corridor, with the faint impression that this man might, after all, amount to something more than the narrow interests he represented.
PART III
The Mercenaries
the car sped southwards.
"Go carefully," Amah warned the driver.
"Yes, of course."
Along the pitted laterite roads which linked Thiersville with Eastern Province and Upper Varva, the Peugeot 403 bucked and groaned like a gallant iron horse. It was an old car, badly dented, corroded by rust and now layered with a fine, terra-cotta dust. Amah was reminded of the sleek, feline Peugeot in which the detectives Arab and Bonaparte had conveyed him to the Rue des Saussaies, sweeping down the deserted, early-morning boulevards, past the classical pillars of the National Assembly and across the Seine.
Maya began to cough and his eyes to run. Raymond Tukhomada's answering laugh was abrupt with distress.
"The king fled to Varennes. Now Robespierre follows."
Amah Odouma sat between them.
At each stop—for food, fuel or a quick breath of fresh air—the driver would remain behind the wheel, keeping the engine turning over, while his two armed companions prowled about, discouraging the inquisitive and conveying an inexplicit promise of retribution to those who might later be tempted to inform Ybele's police or the white mercenaries which route the Peugeot had taken.
Maya was preoccupied with the sky.
"What's he doing?" Tukhomada muttered irritably.
He and Maya no longer communicated with one another directly; both relied on Amah as intermediary. Under intense stress, they had fallen apart.
379
"He expects Ybele to send planes after us," Amah said.
"What planes?"
"The Americans have made him a gift of two jets. I heard one of the mercenaries boasting about it."
"An idle boast."
But he quivered—a sick man weakened by bouts of vomiting brought on by deteriorating roads, the Peugeot's ancient springs and a leak in the fuel pump. Burdened by self-accusation and by a kaleidoscopic revolution of events against which no psychological compensations suggested themselves, Raymond Tukhomada sat very still and upright, with his eyes closed, his hands clenched and his small, indignant, dinosaur's head swathed in bandages. Amah understood this reaction very well; to a large extent, he shared it. But he at least had been right in warning his colleagues of the imminent coup and of the need to take instant preventive action; whereas Tukhomada had been duped utterly. And the violence, the beating, the slow, sadistic fury behind Commandant Laval's vengeance—it was not the first time that Tukhomada had suffered physically at the hands of the Europeans, but the shock to his pride had on this occasion assumed traumatic dimensions. In the old days, under the colonial regime, the knowledge of the mortality of Leviathan, however totalitarian its final, spastic death throes, had brought dignity into the lives of its victims. They had known that history was on their side. But even that certainty had evaporated.
On the night of their rescue, Tukhomada had urged that they remain in hiding in Thiersville, among the urban masses whose loyalty was most ardent and steadfast. He insisted that his appearance in the Place de la Nation would bring down Ybele in an hour. But his companions had taken a strong line. Maya had told him bluntly that if it were loyalty he was looking for, he'd better head towards the peasants of Eastern Province. And Amah, too, had not minced words.
"You're underestimating your opponents. To do so once is a misfortune; to do so twice would be a crime."
Tukhomada had begun to weep—he longed to see his and children again. Amah's efforts to console him had without effect. The Peugeot raced through the suburbs of Thiersville at great speed, heading southwards.
"Go carefully," Amah warned the driver yet again.
"Yes, of course."
It had become a catchphrase in the movement—"yes, of course." The militants considered it cool and debonair; no one knew how it had caught on. Amah shared with his chief the sensation of being outpaced by events; the tough guerrillas of the MLN action squad who had ambushed the ambulance and spirited them from their Caucasian bonds had treated them without respect or ceremony—as dockers handle a valuable merchandise.
The Peugeot leaped and bounded, its tires shrieked, its springs groaned and Raymond began once more to clutch his stomach. Amah could offer him no further comfort; the temple of Theseus, he reflected, may not teach the Parthenon to grieve. Even memory was dead, shattered by the mallet of genesis. Amah succumbed to this sense of reincarnation with an almost mystical reverence as they hurtled southward through their own Africa, pursued by demons whose blank, obsessive eyes they now knew. (Maya searching, searching the sky for the burnished specks of aluminium light.) The vast continent was heaving with the effort of childbirth, of self-creation. And always there was the long, flat, empty sky, blanketing the blue hills, the jungles and the neat, plasticine villages, with their fires, their placid, ribbed cattle and their thin, watchful boys shrouded in the fine dust of hunger. Amah felt himself burned to dust by that flat sky which refused to bend with the earth it blistered black. Here the soil was barren. Nothing flowered—not even the mines, the hard shafts, the pistons of European steel which penetrated the mineral depths, thrusting down with vertical greed, guided by steel-helmeted technicians—white men, calm and arrogant, whose senses had been sharpened by gain.
"Amah, I have failed."
The Adam's apple in Tukhomada's throat moved. His eyes had closed, like petals. Sweat had soaked through the layers of his bandage.
"We're only beginning," Amah said, thankful that Tukhomada, whatever his faults, stubbornly refused to mistake his own contradictions for the irrationality of the world. Unlike his enemies, he rejected the monism of mind and matter, the desperate cry "la realite, c'est nous."
What perplexed Amah was why Laval, the architect of the massacre, the most fanatical slayer of all, had resorted suddenly to a desperate expedient which gave the MLN the chance it had been waiting for. Somewhere a new rift had opened . . . Dissolved her in sulphuric. Amah's imagination worked on the heavy paving stones of Octave in a frantic vigil, digging for the bones of the sister who had once reminded him that what binds a slave to his master is more tragic than what separates him. He remembered how Camille had regarded Victor Manoury in the sunlit prison courtyard of Petit-Fresnes, and how, many months later, Victor had celebrated the dawn of the Year One in champagne___
"Take care, then," Amah said.
"Yes, of course."
The red dust was choking Maya. His bladder was full, but he was a soldier and he gritted his teeth. In the semidarkness Amah sat wedged between the two colossi, the reluctant shadow of a possible synthesis. Each man, he knew, ardently desired his support and loyalty, but each was too proud, and too ashamed, to solicit it openly. And his memories refused to discriminate. The Peugeot leaped and screamed. In the lurching heat, the fugitives fought against sleep, against the oncoming nightmare, the haunting spectre of the bright dot on the horizon, the focal point of menace coming from behind, growing larger, always gaining.
Maya awoke gasping.
"Faster!" he bellowed.
Amah laid a hand on his arm, discreetly.
"You've been asleep," he said. He had no doubt that Maya secretly welcomed this enforced return to Eastern province, this reversion to the permanent condition of resistance. A fish out of water in the ministerial corridors of Thiersville, he wished only to reconstruct his peasant army, to revive the tight, unforgettable comradeship of the guerrilla campaigns, to rediscover himself. The earth remained thick under his nails. His eyes, fighting off sleep, now sought the faint blue wash of the hills behind Zolanga, that village of fire which Cartier had razed to the ground and which had since risen again from the dead soil. The new generation, the children of life, had pushed up towards the sun, oblivious of what had gone
before.
Tukhomada looked almost dead from fatigue and nausea.
"We'll stop soon," Amah promised.
The apple bounced like a ball of mercury in the long shaft of Tukhomada's throat.
"Why?"
"At Zolanga——"
"We can't afford to rest. Tell Maya that he can do as he likes. I give him his freedom. You likewise, Amah. I shall continue to Potonou."
Maya grunted and dug Amah in the ribs.
"Remind him that Potonou is five hundred miles away and that we, unlike Ybele's planes, have no wings."
"You may assure Maya," Tukhomada said stiffly, "that I do not intend to relinquish the burden which the people of Coppernica have thrust upon me."
"Tell him," growled Maya, "that I am simpleminded."
Amah turned to the old general. "Raymond doesn't know your people or their language. In Potonou he feels he can begin again."
Maya nodded. "If he ever gets there."
Dusk was falling over the blue hills, weaving the green strands of the jungle around the single blood artery of the road. The heat of the day ebbed grudgingly, as France had done, and the men in the car abandoned themselves to a sense of loss which they could not articulate. Then it was dark.
The accident occurred shortly before midnight.
Andre Laval's convoy swept southwards in its relentless pursuit of a nation. They were drenched now in time and in a red poison dust whose fine particles, as if manufactured by their enemies, inexorably corroded their lungs and their will to continue. The camouflage-green trucks dipped and bucked over the laterite roads, and the blood-sun burnished the metal in their lives furnace hot. The road wriggled like a snake through the jungle wall, and the snakes themselves lay in their path curled like lethal rope, waiting. Vultures hovered in the sky accompanied by smaller birds, the tribe of scavengers; a hawk sprang through the evening sunbowl, and the black juice hovered on Laval's harp-twisted mouth like the blood of a scorpion. When they did, finally, rest, the native soldiers sprawled by the roadside, smoking, oblivious to the stench of burned rubber, of stricken tires, of the spent feet of the West. Laval spat, murdering a family of ants. They reminded him of the working class—the disciplined, labouring column. He took Deedes aside now, as the Scotsman had known all along that he would.
"You were in Kenya, then, a sergeant in the prison service? And you have a crime on your conscience? Why not unburden?"
An iron thumbscrew nestled in his cupped hand, like a dead mouse. Deedes gasped; James Caffrey looked up and across, troubled, reminding Laval of what Tufton had said three nights previously, under the white lights of the ministerial corridor. He turned away from Deedes and wandered into the stricken orbit of the American Negro, through the tall roadside grass, through the empty, flickering prayers of the soldiers whose fate had been vested in the care of a demon.
Earlier, in the floodlit courtyard of the Ministry of the Interior, Jason and James had together examined the contents of the Commandant's jeep, its guns, grenades and dynamite, its batteries and bombs, its reptilian electrical apparatus whose purpose could only be guessed at. Jason had drawn in his breath sharply.
"Absolutely subliminal, Oh Jesus God."
Deedes had sighed and cleared away his eyes.
Now Laval beckoned to the Negro. Fifty yards farther down the road, where the longest of the date branches brushed the powdery earth and the ants built viaducts of dust like minuscule Romans, James Caffrey heaved over in the womb of the African night—the only true soldier Laval had.
"The age of theory is drawing to an end," Laval said.
"In its place is developing even now the seed of a new resigned piety, sprung from tortured conscience and spiritual hunger."
Jason fingered his household gods.
"That certainly appeals to a man of my educational complexion, sir. In my opinion-"
"Your opinion?"
"Well, I guess this is the Harvard view. I mean, the resigned piety of which you speak, sir, is a metaphysical formulation—no offence intended—for the repressed desires and collective neurosis which determine our social behaviour."
Laval watched him.
"Tufton entrusted you to me as a hostage," he said quietly, never taking his eyes from Jason's mobile mouth.
Fifty yards away, Deedes stumbled out of the bush, fumbling with his flies. He shook James by the shoulder.
"Lussen. I went in there, just there, by tha' tree, and then I saw a mun . . ."
James sighed, slipped the safety catch of his FAL, and walked into the bush. A wet rash on the bark of a tree showed where Deedes had peed. When he came back James stretched out in the long grass and closed his eyes.
"Tha' was no hallucination," Deedes complained.
Farther up the road Jason closed his mouth.
"A hostage, sir—Tufton did?" ^
He searched for his cigarettes. Laval's hand reached out and took one. Jason hurried to light it for the Commandant, but his match hand shook and the Frenchman watched him coldly while he fumbled. Finally smoke billowed.
"These people, these natives," Laval said, gesturing expansively towards the surrounding jungle, "are the innocent victims of false ideology and schematic programmes. They lack resigned piety."
In the warm night Jason had begun to shiver.
"Sure, that's about it. I guess Mr. Tufton was joking with you, sir. If the truth be known, I'm in this thing on behalf of Ambassador Silk. In a confidential capacity."
Somewhere else Malcolm Deedes felt compelled to rouse the tin god, the pillar of salt.
"Here."
"More phantoms?"
"That blackie," Deedes said, passing over the jibe, "I'd like to ken what a mun like that is doing here. He's never seen a gun in his life, that blackie. That's no soldier, that Americano."
"He's in love," James said. Deedes thought about this.
"I never was one for the wummin," he said. "In Kenya it was blackie gurls or none. I kept to masel'. I have two sisters, though, in Edinburgh." "I had a sister who died."
Deedes looked surprised. The confession, like the bereavement itself, was too uncharacteristic of the man; and it threatened to let loose the chained words whose confinement was the measure of his own suffering. Then Laval blocked out the moon.
"Have you seen the Russian?" he asked Deedes, standing over him. "Wha'?"
Laval moved his shoulders imperceptibly. "Tukhomada's soul was entrusted some years ago to one of the world's most accomplished practitioners of sedition, contamination and disruption. A Russian. No one knows his name. To him alone can we attribute Tukhomada's ignorance and depravity. Deedes, you shall find him. You must."
Jason had followed in the Commandant's wake, anxious not to be stranded among the wild palms and the coarse soldiers whose dark skins had begun to haunt the street corners of his childhood.
"That's tough." He laughed. His eyes darted in the darkness. Deedes examined him with solemn contempt. "Blackie, you'll never be a soldier," he said slowly. The rising anger in Jason's face quickly brought him to the edge of his own precipice. "Never mind," he warned, wagging his big finger, "never mind, son, don't come anything with Sergeant Deedes, don't try it on with this particular veteran. I haven't been sixteen years in Kenya for nothing. You may not think yourself Mau Mau, but I know for a fact that everyone of your tribe has it in him, this sedition, this quarrelsomeness . . ."
He glanced anxiously towards the Commandant, who had gone.
Laval and Caffrey walked down the road together, with loaded guns.
"What do you make of him, the American?"
"He's afraid," James said.
Laval's hand rested experimentally on his shoulder. "You're empirical," he said. "I have studied your language and literature. But for an accident of history, the war, I would have become a scholar. Instead, I fought for my country. I made my choice. Others made theirs."
"I see."
Pathos crept into the Commandant's voice. Their feet marched in careful harmony.
"The end is nothing. You will learn that. The action is everything. The struggle for us is ultimately hopeless—our duty is to hold on to the lost position, without hope of rescue, like that Roman soldier who died at his post during the eruption of Vesuvius—they found his bones in front of a door in Pompeii."
"But we do have an objective? I mean-"
"Of course." He squeezed James' shoulder.
Time passed like a funeral procession. Laval lashed his mules through their third successive night without sleep along the narrow, pitted tracks of Eastern Province—the graveyard of the Blue Berets. Here they had fought and lost their last battles. Each road, each artery lay like a weight of hot blood on Andre Laval's heart, while the triangle on the map whose jagged stain proclaimed Maya's protracted triumph of cunning and attrition hovered before his eyes like a vulture. Isolated now, hunted by his own brother officers, by Plon, he was determined to prevent Maya from once again fanning the countryside into rebellion.
Jason and James drove together in the same Jeep, in the vanguard.
"He confides in you, huh?"
"Not much."
The long reach of the headlights heightened their sense of the vastness of Africa, its emptiness and self-sufficiency. Insects died on the windscreen.
"I kind of distrust that guy's ideas," Jason said. He didn't at all take to this Englishman, with his chill reserve, his disdainful compassion for those less strong and experienced than himself. Nor did he particularly care to be lectured on
the virtues of modern automatic weapons, their lightej weight and higher muzzle velocity, all that technical jargot which Caffrey foisted upon him, like a gift.
"Why distrust?" James said. "That wasn't exactly the lin< you took with Laval."
Jason laughed cynically. "What was it you were giving me the other day? That art is the touchstone of life, that art forms wax and wane just as civilizations live and die?"
James felt irritated. "That's a vulgarization of what I said."
"Oh sure," Jason said bitterly. "I only study government. As a matter of fact, I feel I've spent an awful lot of time these last two years learning about things like socialism and the British Constitution, and not one sod of it has any relevance."
"A man can't think when he's afraid."
"Meaning?"
"Forget it."
"Jesus! Do you English ever do anything but parody yourselves? My girl Zoe—her mother is English; she's just about as human as a totem pole."
"You're overwrought, Jason."
"You guessed."
"Have a fag."
"Lifesavers, huh?"
"There's nothing to fear, really. We have the weapons, and the certainty. We have the courage of our convictions."
Jason examined him with curiosity. "What sort of a guy are you? Where did you pick up these famous convictions?"
"It's not so much the final end which counts as the praxis of idealism, courage and sacrifice."
"Sacrifice! There you go again. That word bothers me. My mortality weighs me down. I've seen too many street accidents in my twenty-two years. Listen, I was brought up in Harlem, the rusty side of everywhere. As a matter of fact, I have a brother who behaves just like you—he's a lunatic; he thinks he's Jesus Christ. The harder they hit him the better he likes it. A real saint, you know, never mind the harm he does to his father's career—Haydon reckons himself a big hit with the girls."
He subsided.
James tried to conjure out of the night a precise image of Jason's brash and rebellious brother—but failed to surmount a hurdle which insisted on intervening: Alec. It was like walking on marbles. He thought about the lovely Zoe Silk. No doubt at all that Jason was a pathetic dupe of his own passions. Chester Silk was clearly stringing him along. No point in explaining to the Negro; the loss of hope could mean the difference between a rapid, aggressive reflex and an apathetic fatalism, between life and death. What were Soames' motives in this? James' eyelids were now heavy with accumulated sleeplessness. Too microscopic an examination of Soames' motives would, he felt, be alien to the spirit of the new renaissance. The action in itself was self-evidently sufficient—the exhilarating release from the rows of statistics, from the years of morbid recrimination, from the futile arguments with Steven Foster. The alliance which bound Laval to Soames must be authentic.
In the rear Jeep, Deedes' head knocked against the sharp iron ledge of the window. Spittle ran down his chin in greenish rivulets.
Laval tapped him on the shoulder. He sat up with a gasp and stared wildly about him, as if unable to breathe.
"Have you ever encountered a Russian?" Laval asked.
A Russky. Once again interrogation, the demand for a certain truth, their truth, the truth about the Mau Mau prisoners whose broken skulls and haemorrhages ... Somewhere, perhaps in the Digest, he had read about lie-detector tests, the way they strapped you into a chair with electrical wires attached—was that the explanation for Laval's peculiar equipment?—and then asked you questions in carefully prepared series. You couldn't win. Your breathing and your skin temperature gave you away.
"Well?" Laval demanded.
"A Commie, you mean, sir?"
"Of course."
"When I was a bairn, down at Leith among the dock workers, I dinny remember rightly, you ken, men without proper wurrk, and the Polish palaver . . ."
"Odouma is a Communist. They trained him in Paris."
"In Paris, was it?"
"The universal conspiracy relies on hypnotism and Slavic superstitions totally alien to the African soul. You must realize, of course, that the Russian civilization is quite distinct from our own, the Faustian or Western. The Hydra has many heads."
"Aye, it is."
"Did they torture you in Kenya?"
"Wha'?"
"What does Caffrey say about me when he's alone with you? I warn you, tell me the truth."
"He—nothing, sir, nothing, really."
"Did you lie to your superiors in Kenya? Is that why they broke you?"
Deedes stared with pinkish, watery eyes at the headlights, at the columns of white light, a man exhausted by his own epileptic reactions to the sudden movements of the night, the spastic death leaps, the harsh cries, the abiding fear of ambush and a gruesome end. Perhaps, with luck, Laval was mistaken, perhaps Tukhomada and his friends had taken a different route. Again his head struck the iron window ledge. There would be no fighting, in that case, no danger.
The Jeep screeched to a stop. The convoy had halted.
Laval leaped out at once, lightly clasping his automatic and fingering the satin texture of the night. The motionless wall of jungle tautened his spine as he walked down the road past the long line of stationary vehicles. As he approached the front, Jason stepped nervously out of the shadows, clutching his gun awkwardly and staring at the Commandant with insomniac fixation.
"We found something," he confided, barely above a whisper.
"Why shout?" Laval said loudly, walking past him towards the wreckage which was blocking the roadway. A man was running a flashlight over the abandoned car. It was James Calfrey.
"A Peugeot 403," he said. "Broken axle. They had a lucky escape."
Laval climbed inside the wreck and emerged some moments later holding a map and a bundle of MLN leaflets.
"We have them," he said.
They stood around him in an awed, respectful circle, as if listening to the revolutions of his brain.
"Nothing we can do before morning, except sleep."
Accepting his verdict gratefully, they made their way back to the convoy.
"You were right," James said.
Laval glanced at him quickly, almost with affection.
"We carry a heavy burden, you and I," he said. "Maya runs the show now. In Eastern Province Maya is the magician. Had they gone farther south, to Upper Varva, Tukhomada would have prevailed." He shrugged and lit a cigarette. The match hissed in the darkness. We'll have to be quick. Time is on Maya's side."
He took a step forward and grasped Jason's shoulder. The American flinched.
"I wasn't going to strike you," Laval said angrily. Then smiled.
"No, sir, I-"
"Tomorrow, macaque, you'll have your first taste of bloodshed. Let me tell you, it tastes sour, like iron."
He strode away crisply, rousing and organizing his soldiers in harsh, clipped monosyllables, posting sentries and supervising the distribution of rations. For a moment his three subordinates stood together in a hesitant knot, reluctant to commit their single bodies to the unpredictable embrace of the African moon.
Then James pulled the hair back from his forehead and turned away.
"Better get some kip," he said, with the confidence of a man who knew how to make himself comfortable."
Jason's voice reached after him, a little desperately.
"Say, James-"
"Well?"
"How would you translate the word 'macaque'?"
James brought his pack and sleeping bag from the Jeep and laid them out by the side of the road. With neat, deft movements, he attached his mosquito net to the Jeep, creating for himself a protective canopy. He smoothed out his sleeping bag, prodded about for snakes, then began to unlace his boots. He felt tired, and Jason's helplessness merely annoyed him now. The Negro stood waiting for an answer. ?
"It means 'monkey,'" he said sharply—and almost immediately felt ashamed.
TWENTY-ONE
jason was born into the Harlem bourgeoisie. On Sunday his father and mother regularly attended the 128th Street Baptist—one of the largest and most fashionable of Harlem's four hundred churches. They were devout, but they were careful not to allow their faith to become an obsession—unlike certain other Negro people whom Lucille Bailey could, and did, name. Jason went with them to church in a smart Italian suit and a silk shirt, but their elder boy, Haydon, stayed away. It hurt them to have such a son, but whenever they reproached him he began to dance and sing and grimace like a pagan gargoyle:
He robbed his mother, he felled his dad,
Oh my brother, he's bad, he's bad ...
They owned a spacious, third-floor apartment in Riverton, overlooking the Harlem River, but they lived well below their means. Powell Bailey represented his country at the United Nations, and Lucille had come into a tidy inheritance. Had they been white, they would naturally have gravitated towards the seventies, on the East side. The two boys hac been educated at expensive private schools. When Haydon became cynical, Jason liked to remind him of this.
"Look, you're a bright kid, but you're not Albert Einstein. Would you have ever gotten into Columbia if you'd been to a city school, in a class of maybe forty, with a progressive fallback? With maybe one qualified algebra teacher for over
a thousand kids? Would you have made college without your
maths?"
"Jason, you're so selfish, you're sick."
"Big, bleeding heart, huh?"
"If the city schools are that lousy, it's no cause for us to congratulate ourselves."
"Your brother isn't responsible for all the world's injustices," Lucille complained to Haydon. She was a handsome woman with flamboyant tastes, and she had her hair done twice a week on Madison Avenue. She had it brushed back sleek and straight, and she accompanied Powell Bailey to as many diplomatic functions as she could. But her eldest boy disturbed her.
"I don't know why he's so contrary, after all we've done for him."
"It's just a phase." Her husband soothed her, but without conviction.
Most of the time Haydon was at large somewhere in Harlem, standing about at street corners and staring at the white cops who marched in pairs and stayed as near their telephones as they could. Particularly he liked 125th Street— the soapbox corner at Seventh Avenue, where niggers and hardheads exorted one another to "buy black" or "kill whitey" and where tatty posters promised the coming of Mohammed or of Miss Beaux-Arts. Haydon liked to stand about among the rootless groups of young men, the unemployed and the homeless, and to stare through a thin film of hatred at the white affluence passing through. He was careful to frequent only those drugstores, barbers' shops and shoe-shine parlours owned by Negroes. His intense, calculated rebellion against the ethos of the Bailey family even adjusted his stomach to the stench of cooking grease from the all-night shops selling porgie fish, pig's knuckles and the intestines of hogs in the area bounded by 119th Street to the north and 110th Street to the south. Here he moved among the junkies and prostitutes and hoodlums with broad shoulders and empty pockets, and he was safe. To walk through his own nation was a daily challenge which he accepted.
Jason was working his way into Harvard, where he intended to study government. The younger boy modelled himself on his father, and his mother loved him with an intense, devouring love which licked him, as flames cling to coal, warm and all-consuming. She was always worrying about him—worrying that he'd get robbed or beaten up by the gangs who wandered the streets, battling for "turf," worrying that the smart Italian suits she bought him would attract unwelcome attention. Some people, she complained, were eaten up by envy.
Then one evening Haydon came home, washed himself carefully and sat down to dinner in his shirt sleeves.
"Pa, Ma," he mumbled, "I've decided to give up Columbia. Thought you'd want to know."
Powell Bailey laid down his knife and fork, then slowly wiped his mouth with a napkin. As chairman, it was his right to preside over the silence.
"Have you told your professors?" he asked with restraint.
Haydon nodded and ate hungrily.
"But why, why," cried Lucille, "did you have to go and do a crazy thing like that? With your final exams so near and all."
"Perhaps you can pause from your eating long enough to tell us," said Powell Bailey.
"After all," Lucille said, "your father can't have spent less than ten thousand dollars on your education." The thought of so much money brought the first tears to her eyes.
Haydon leaned back in his chair and twiddled a spoon.
"It's like this," he said softly. "I've had my education now, it's all over. All that remains is to collect the medal, the gong. The gong, I would remind you, is what enables young Americans to translate their cultivated and professionally trained minds into hard cash, automobiles and holidays in Florida and Europe. Well, that's what I don't want. Precisely."
"What virtue is there in poverty?" protested Lucille.
"Ma, you ask the Reverend Judson at 128th Street Baptist next Sunday. As a matter of fact, I don't aim to be poor. I just don't want to be rich and important."
"You mean you don't want to become like me," Powell Bailey said.
"Nothing personal in this, sir," Haydon said, furiously rolling the spoon in the pink-brown palm of his large hand.
"Well, if you ask me, Haydon," his mother said, flushed with annoyance, "there are saner ways of playing out an Oedipus."
Haydon groaned. "No, Ma, no. Look, yesterday there were ten thousand would-be leaders of the Negro race in Harlem. Today there are ten thousand and one. That's all you've got to understand."
Jason had been fingering his silk tie impatiently. In the eyes of his parents, Haydon's delinquencies added measurably to his own moral stature; he spoke now under the compulsion to consolidate this new victory.
"If you want to lead, why not join the real leaders instead of the cranks, hedge-preachers, street-corner oracles and one-block prophets?"
"Yeah, I know, the guys who are respected as Americans and not only as blacks. I know, I know."
Powell Bailey said, "We're never going to divide this country in half, one white and one black. Education is indivisible; with a law degree you can really go places and truly serve our people."
"That's hypocrisy."
"Hypocrisy is pretending to be what you're not," Lucille said. "You're a college boy whether you like it or not. It's no good pretending otherwise."
Haydon took himself restively to the window. He sat on a radiator swinging his long legs. The heavy muscles of his thighs pressed outwards against the thin blue cotton of his jeans.
"Things are changing here in America. Hope is dying. It's dying here in New York and in most of the big cities of the North. The South is a powder keg. No more Sunday preachers now. No more respectable Negro citizens setting themselves up as an example. No more crap. If you don't like what I say, just remember that you, who represent this goddam country at the UN, can't have an apartment where you choose, not even in New York."
Powell Bailey shook his head and poured himself a glass of clear, abstemious water.
"Things are improving, Haydon. Have patience. Work patiently."
"Improving? Outside the ghetto the whites are getting richer; inside, the niggers are getting poorer—if that's what you mean. Eighty per cent of the businesses in Harlem are owned by whites who don't live here. Eighty-five per cent of the cops here are white-"
"That's because there are Negro cops downtown-" Jason
said.
"Crap that. In the skilled trades we're getting nowhere. You people only think, you don't feel. Your bellies are too full for you to feel."
"If you turn to violence now," his father said, "you can undo all the patient work built up by self-sacrificing and dedicated Negro people this last half century. We'll go back to lynch law."
It was a spacious apartment, elegantly furnished, situated on the third floor, above the Harlem River. Light poured in on the long summer evenings, lending assurance to their tranquillity. Now the day faded, and the room contracted around them as they sat cocooned in a dull, pervasive gloom, weighed down by the leaden drag of the inevitable. It had always been in the cards that Haydon would do something like this. In the dwindling light, the expensive chair covers shrank and curled at the edges like hot paper. Lucille's universe wobbled.
"There will always be rich and poor, Haydon," she saic with a touch of pathos. "There's white poor too," she added hopefully.
"I prefer not to be superstitious," Haydon said.
"You don't have to give up Columbia now," she said.
"I do, Ma."
"Get your degree, Haydon, and then do what you like," Powell Bailey said.
Haydon shook his head. "I don't trust myself. Once all the cookies come within reach, I don't trust myself not to grab at them. I want to be a dangerous man, you see. And the dangerous ones are those with nothing to lose."
He went out. After a few minutes, Jason put on the light and the Emperor Concerto. The music swelled predictably, flooding him with euphoria. The highway to Harvard stood open before him. Presently he helped himself to a little cognac from the mahogany sideboard—a wedding present from Lucille's father, who had owned and rented two blocks of downtown Harlem.
Haydon quit Columbia and moved into a small apartment on Second Avenue. Jason left school and had a summer to kill before going north to Harvard in the fall. Dining one evening with his parents at Frank's Restaurant on 125th Street, he allowed Lucille to persuade him to join them on their annual junket to the Caribbean; but a few days later a small incident which was hardly an incident at all—the merest glimpse of a girl, a creature of unearthly poise and beauty— nailed his heart to New York and prompted him, against the advice of his father and the tears of Lucille, to take up residence with Haydon.
During that summer of stifling, oppressive heat, Haydon got up early, throwing on jeans and a T-shirt, and brewing himself instant coffee while his brother still slept. Soon after dawn, he strode out on to Second Avenue, to near-empty sidewalks and the roar of the long-bellied trucks thrusting their loads into the insatiable vagina of the city. He had a job on a downtown building site near Wall Street which brought in sixty dollars a week. He always felt a little sad for the women he saw at this hour, pallid creatures, their features pale and puffy in the unflattering light, exhausted slaves of the receding night. He sometimes wondered how many of these wombs waiting at bus stops, crossing empty streets in defiance of the "Don't Walk" indicators and trudging the sidewalks—how many carried freshly fucked seed, the seed of life, and in how many had the promise been murdered by antiseptic.
For a while the brothers led separate lives. Haydon Worked and Jason did very little. Late one afternoon in July, Haydon came in from the building site and dumped himself down on his bed.
"What are you reading?" he asked.
"A guy called Thorstein Veblen."
"Yeah, I know him." Haydon heaved himself up, moved
heavily to the wash basin behind a Chinese screen, cleaned himself noisily, then put the kettle on the stove.
"Coffee?"
"Sure, thanks."
Haydon was a man entirely caught up in his own world; Jason could watch his heavy, masculine movements at leisure, without fear of being caught watching. Haydon lacked self-consciousness.
"How have you been doing lately?" Jason asked,
"Fine, just fine."
"No regrets?"
"Yeah, regrets every day. I push concrete around and my mind goes empty. That's only to be expected, isn't it?"
He poured the boiling water into two cups, layered some brown bread with butter and cream cheese, swallowed the simple meal quickly, intently, then almost at once fell asleep. Jason put down his book and began biting his nails. Often during their childhood he had felt Haydon's life to be richer, fuller and more generous than his own. Whereas Haydon opened up like a sunflower to the warm, bright forces in the universe around him, accepting and dominating without effort the society of other boys, Jason, although yearning for love and admiration, was naturally critical, guarded and competitive in his response to all but the most familiar and reassuring overtures. Jason had to be taught to dance and swim; Haydon just danced and swam. His rapid but profoundly restful sleep created a tension in Jason which was becoming virtually unbearable when Haydon woke up, coughed like a horse, shook his head and said, "More coffee?"
"Sure."
Haydon went to the stove.
"How have you been doing around, then?"
"Not so bad."
"Aha." He sat down on his crumpled bed again, legs apart, bare feet planted squarely on the soiled carpet, and held his coffee in cupped hands. "Look Jason, I've been meaning to say that if you want to bring any girls here in the evening or anytime that suits you, that's fine by me."
"Oh, sure," Jason said.
"No—thing is, the women I know mostly have places
down in the Village, so I can shack up downtown anytime. How's that Dorothy Marshall you were so hot on at school?"
"So, so."
"Harvard boy now, huh? She thinking of marrying you?"
Jason hadn't seen Dorothy Marshall for a couple of months.
"That's just the trouble," he said.
Haydon swallowed the last of his coffee, then shook the cup upside down over the carpet. Jason could see that he was weighing something up.
"Well," he said, "if you're not too busy why don't you come to the Village one night? Lot of nice people there who'd be interested to meet you."
"Okay." Jason nodded curtly. He found it difficult to believe that his brother really liked him. Certainly he had never encouraged such a feeling. And if Haydon's goodwill were inexhaustible and immune to quarrels and insults, then this only deepened his own resentment at the patronage implicit in his seniority, tolerance and greater worldliness. Since moving into Haydon's apartment, he had come to dread evenings spent alone. On his first night, he had walked for half an hour before he came to a restaurant where he felt sure he could go in. But the food was lousy and the tables unwholesome. Next day he walked in the opposite direction for almost an hour. Thereafter he began to make the long trek each evening to the fringes of Harlem. His loneliness reinforced his aversion to other human beings. Sometimes, in order to pass the time and to avoid even the minor contacts involved in travelling by public transport, he would walk home when the sidewalks were still hot from the day and strewn with refuse blown about by the warm vents of air which pushed up through iron grills. There was an emptiness in people's faces, a deadness in their eyes, like the flat, blind windows of the office blocks which rose up on either side to a height where the builder, devoid of any but the most derivative of visions, desperately brought them to a conclusion by way of a tudor roof, or a spire, or a Florentine chapel, or twin Gothic towers, or a castle whose tiny turrets climbed anxiously upon one another's shoulders to consummate their intimacy in a final, anticlimactic plaster nipple.
He let Haydon take him to the Village. On their first evening together they went to see The Threepenny Opera at the 8th Street Playhouse. He enjoyed himself. But two nights later Haydon suggsted that they have something to eat with two girls he knew. Jason wanted this, he needed a woman, but he resented renewed proof of Haydon's easy charm as much as he dreaded exposing his own lack of confidence. After dinner Haydon went off with the prettier of the two girls, a long-legged art student called Nancy Lindsay, leaving Jason to walk the other girl to her bus and then to wander the streets again, consumed by unspent lust and a slow, smouldering resentment. Somehow it hurt him between the shoulder blades as he walked through Washington Square and then up Fifth Avenue—a short, slender man, barely 145 pounds in weight, with his hands thrust dejectedly into the pockets of his raincoat.
In the long, sweltering summer his depression and his doubts deepened. When next Haydon suggested that they go together to the Village, he fobbed him off with an excuse. Finally, in a mood of near-desperation, he called up Dorothy Marshall. He did so without enthusiasm. There was in the whole world only one woman at the thought of whom his soul caught fire; he had never spoken to her, he didn't know her name or where she lived—and she was white. Her failure to be this goddess was not, however, Dorothy Marshall's only crime. Dorothy was a plain and conventional girl, modest in her aspirations, who shared Lucille's values and would have been his mother's choice for his wife had she not been sired by an impoverished schoolteacher. "She's nice, but not your class, Jason," Lucille had said once, and although he had protested at the time, these words had fertilized a patch of doubt in his own mind.
He took her to the movies. She had dressed herself up nicely, and she said the same bright things as always. Dorothy took care not to let her education show, except in matters of social etiquette. After three hours, they came out of the movies and stood on 42nd Street, blinded by the flashing lights.
"How about you coming back to my place, Dorothy?" he said.
She hung on his arm, leaning against him and gazing dreamily into the jostling crowds.
"How about it?" he pressed her. "It's not far. I could take you back home afterwards. We could make coffee, and there's a record player."
"I don't think I should, Jason."
This aimless sauntering out of movie houses into crowded, unpleasant streets was one of the conditions of life which he had come to associate with Dorothy. When he met her in the evening, a movie always appeared to be the only solution. She didn't care for the live theatre, not for concerts; and there was nothing to talk about.
"Why not?"
"I guess I ought to go home, Jason."
"You're a grown-up girl now," he said.
Stale cliches, like every movie he had ever been to. He felt now the vulgar, aggressive force of the lurid advertisements, the drab yet frenzied hopelessness of the epicentre of a great city, with its sad crowds staring bemused at pictures of naked girls and of people kissing, wondering whether to commit two dollars and three hours of their lives to an entertainment whose shallow rules they knew in advance, but whose brittle glamour remained indispensable to their jaded palates. He had no doubt that the woman he revered never saw these sidewalks, never wallowed in this debasing vulgarity; and suddenly Dorothy, who drifted beside him, clinging loyally to his arm, infuriated him by her blank acceptance of all this crushing banality. They had reached Times Square.
"What are you so afraid of, then? How conventional and tied up can a girl get nowadays?"
"Ma and Pa will worry if I don't get home soon."
"Jesus, we can call them. That's no problem."
"What will I say, Jason?"
"Say I've taken you to a party downtown. Say anything."
Shadows passed across her troubled face. The crowd pressed them together. He felt that all her emotions were lived on a minor key. She reminded him of a felt carpet; she would take any beating.
"I don't want to have to tell them a lie," she said.
"Jesus," he said and took a step backwards. A force, a weight, collided with him, and a voice whose owner he could not identify in the jostle hissed in his ear, "What's it this time, a stand-in?" The voice was Irish.
He didn't move.
He took Dorothy's chin between his fingers and forced her to look at him. A spasm of pain registered on her small, round face.
"I shall be four years at Harvard. What do you want from me, Dorothy? What exactly do you expect?"
"Want, Jason?"
"Yeah, want, want."
Her eyes were large and moist. "I don't know, honestly. I hadn't ever thought of it that way."
"No, I bet!"
She tried to break free from his grip—so pathetic and stupid to try to break free from someone you intend to stay with, in the middle of Times Square. He said, angrily, "Will you or will you not come back with me?"
"No, Jason-"
"Okay, go, then, go. I've let you go." He gave her a little push. She fell back a few steps and was at once engulfed by the milling crowd. He saw her lips fall apart and the thought struck him, like a neon sign: "You don't abandon your girl in Times Square." He turned and walked away hastily, pushing through the crowd, expecting at any moment to catch the patter of her breathless approach, the quaver of distressed innocence in her voice; but there was no sign of her.
When he got back to the apartment it was eleven-thirty. He wanted badly to talk to Haydon and was painfully reminded that the men whose opinions about women were of the most consequence weren't generally available to discuss the subject. It was Saturday night. Outside, everyone was having a good time. He opened a bottle of whisky and began to drink it down. "What's it this time, a stand-in?" The liquor coursed like a waterfall of fire through his bowels; it scorched the top of his head. Turning on the radio he found himself tuned in to a late-night party thrown by the inevitable Washington hostess and busybody Ruby Royal. Ruby had some stuffed general in a corner. "Do tell me, General, are we catching up with the Russians?" "Ma'am, I have never doubted we are ahead of the Russians in every way." "Oh good," cooed Ruby, "I'm so glad, isn't that just marvellous?" The bottle was almost empty; the room had begun to revolve around Jason; he felt himself to be on the perimeter of a huge fairground wheel. He switched off Ruby. "Screw her," he said, imitating the intonation of the white film star he had seen that evening, "screw that tiny old piece, that security leak. General, will you kindly screw and leak for our nationwide audience, coast to coast, General ..." He drained the last of the whiskey. His heart pounded. He leaped up and swung hard at the Irishman in Times Square, who folded, licked at a single blow. The titles of Haydon's books shimmered and receded; he lurched towards them, with knotted brow, and already the words were flowing from him, on and on:
"All Irishmen are worn-down travel agents at heart, O'Screw, O'Crap, Lunchtime O'Guzzle, O'Joyce. So I'm a rich black boy, I wanna travel places, I go to the phone, I want miscegenation all over Killarney. The man answers, a hairy, twisted Irishman of a travel agent. 'This is O'Dwyer,' he says. I hang up and call him again. 'Is that O'Boylan?' I say. 'No, sir, this is O'Dwyer.' 'You're very seedy and perverse and white,' I say. 'I won't have you answering back. I'm buying big airline tickets, international stuff, I'm rolling greenbacks up your emerald arse. So get it clear, potato, it's O'Boylan I want to speak to.' He hesitates, this bog. 'Wait a minute, sir,' he says. 'I'll get him.' 'I'm in a hurry,' I warn him. He steps back from the phone, this tit, then picks it up again. 'O'Boylan here,' he says. I have him trained now, I'm Pavlov. Jeez. Next day I ring him up.'Who's that speaking?' I demand. He hesitates. 'O'Boylan,' he says humbly. I have him. 'Admit that a Catholic President of the USA would be a mere lackey of the Sinn Fein,' I insist. 'Yes, sir, that, alas, is the case.' 'I want to buy ten two-way tickets to Tokyo,' I tell him. He salivas. 'Yes, sir, you black gentlemen are truly born to rule the world.' 'Quite right. Now tell me, Mr. O'Prick— that is your name, isn't it?' 'Yes, sir, O'Prick speaking, sir.' 'Tell me-' "
Jason spiralled onto his bed asleep.
There was a girl—a black girl—whose face and body had suddenly mushroomed on the record jackets in the big stores and on the glossy-magazine covers on the newsstands. Her name was Myra Delone, and one evening Haydon took Jason to a cellar in the Village called The Place, to hear her sing. Nancy Lindsay came along too, and Nancy's friend Millie (with whom Jason had learned to make love in a small room on 8th Street) and one or two of Haydon's colleagues in the movement. When she had finished for the evening, Myra Delone joined them at their table. She shook Jason's hand warmly, but with the brevity and lack of commitment which theatre people quickly acquire, if they are successful.
"Hi," she said.
Haydon pulled up a chair beside him. "Great, Myra, great," he murmured.
Her long, mascaraed eyelashes flickered.
"Get me a double scotch," she said. "I'm just about shot to bits with this throat I've got." At close quarters Jason was surprised to discover blemishes, spots and sores beneath the thick crust of makeup and powder; her face lacked the smooth composition of the glossy photos, and her voice proved to be harsher and more strident than her silky singing would have led him to expect.
Haydon put an arm around her shoulder. A strained smile took possession of Nancy Lindsay and stayed, like an unwelcome guest.
"We were just speculating," he said, "how thick the gravy must be running on your plate these days."
Myra Delone reached for her purse and brought out a cheque book.
"Okay," she said, with an actress' stagey weariness, "it's all for the good of the cause, huh? How much do I have to cough up to ease this lousy hulk from your grasp, Nancy?"
There was a short, constricting silence as Myra Delone wrote out the cheque. Haydon took it from her.
"Thank you, Myra."
Jason watched his brother—and remembered waking recently at the wrong end of a Sunday morning, with a sharp hangover, and with Haydon bending over him with a proffered cup of coffee.
"What would you do," Jason had asked at once, shielding his eyes against the light, "if some Irishman knocked into you in the middle of Times Square and said, 'What's it this time, a stand-in'?"
Haydon had laughed. "Taking a poke at a guy in the street never was revolution."
Jason had groaned. "I'm like my dad," he said. "I'm not with you crazy rebels, but I'm not against you either."
"These days the niggers who aren't with us are against us."
"Yeah, I heard it before. Every guy who is not up to his eyeballs in water is a tool in the hands of the enemies of bathing. Don't tell me."
Myra Delone was recolouring her lips pink, with the aid of a small hand mirror. Jason sensed the vulnerability of her life and the urgency behind her instantaneous, one-shot need of Haydon. Watching her, he was visited with a familiar thought, a packaged notion which landed in his mind when certain variables happened not to vary. In the last analysis, you either carried it around between your legs or you didn't. People acted the same, they walked the streets, climbed aboard neuter buses, spoke the same language, entered sexless buildings—yet all the while each midget in this vast, pretending crowd was burning with the life flame of their nature, their sex!
"I'm making fifteen hundred a week," Myra Delone was saying to the table at large, "which ain't much for a six-month queen. It won't be long before you go into a store and say, 'Do you have the latest Myra Delone,' and they'll say, 'Wasn't she the one that got killed in an auto accident?' and you'll say, 'No, that was Bessie Smith and the point is she didn't get killed, she bled slowly to death because she wasn't white.'"
"Still, fifteen hundred a week ain't bad, Myra," someone said.
"I could be getting more," she said, draining her scotch. "I had a job at eighteen fifty at the Alanda, as a kind of sexy chanteuse titillating the white bucks and sending them home hot enough to brave the ice floes of their wives. Boy, did I get sick of that."
Jason was immediately outraged by what he took to be a
<
joyous wallowing in the river of racial animosity, an affecte ritual celebration of the nation's lynching schism. He felt hostile to this painted woman whom it was Haydon's dangerous folly to know; he began once more to resurrect against his brother's revolutionary thrusts the Maginot Line of enlightened conservatism.
"Maybe you just got sick," he said.
They all turned to him, some with interest, others, like Myra Delone herself, with animosity.
"Which country do you come from?" she said.
"A country in which black people and white are going to have to learn to live together."
Nancy Lindsay said, "Do you love this country or something?"
"Enough to stay here."
She laughed. "Heard that somewhere before." She looked to Haydon.
Haydon said, "Jason, do you know what they used to say, and sometimes still do say, to the leaders of the working-class movement in Europe? They said, 'If it's so marvellous in Moscow, why don't you go and live there?' Same way as you say to us, 'If you find it so lousy here, why don't you clear out?'"
"I am not so dense," Jason said, sensing the deepening of a general hostility towards him, "as to get myself hung in the noose of a false analogy. At least these guys you speak of never said they didn't love their own motherland; at least they only said they wanted to change the system. But you people are denying that you are Americans at all, isn't that it?"
"If I pretended I was an American," Myra Delone said, "I'd be outa my mind. They can drop a bomb on this stinking hole anytime and see if I care."
"You'd go down with it too, honey," Haydon said temperately.
Her voice hit a high pitch. "Sure, I'll go down with it, but I don't give a damn what happens to it."
Haydon made a face and reached for his cigarettes. He ordered a fresh round of drinks.
"But you don't mind picking up fifteen hundred a week
meanwhile," Jason said. "Where else could you find that kind
of money?"
"Oh sure," Haydon said gently, "and in Africa they don't j,ave shoes. I know. We're all goddam schizos. Myra earns plenty now, but she's given us a big cheque. She's throwing the money of white Americans back in their teeth."
"If she wants to go back to Africa tomorrow, there's nothing to stop her," Jason said.
"They carried us by force from Africa," said Nancy Lindsay. "They're not going to throw us out now that we no longer wipe their arses for them. That would suit them just fine, wouldn't it?"
"Look at it this way," Haydon said. "We have poured our sweat, our dignity and often our lives into making this country wealthy. Why should we quit now? Why should we, damn it? We want justice, Jason, justice. The hermit wants nothing, he has no acquisitive impulses, that's why he doesn't care about justice, only about God. But we aren't a race of hermits. We're ugly, grasping humans, like the rest. That's why we deserve to be defended."
Myra Delone had laid her slender hand on Haydon's. She spoke with the quick dryness of the stage.
"This little hermit's ready for her bed."
Nancy Lindsay was staring at Haydon with a curious expression—a hope, a plea, a prayer, tempered by trust in his judgment, by a premonition that might be her necessary sacrifice to the cause.
"Care to make a loan of this old heap?" Myra Delone said. "Strictly a one-night stand."
A hush settled over the table. Jason grasped.
"Ma'am, the honour is mine," Haydon said, rising from the table. "And it would be my pleasure to accept were it not for the fact that I am wanted on a certain downtown building site at seven a.m. and must therefore impose on myself nothing more sinful than a night alone with my brother."
"If that's not a sin it sure is a crime," Myra Delone said, fighting back the tears and shrouding her pain with small, fussy movements. She tried to smile, and said nothing about the cheque.
The two brothers set out for home.
"You got yourself out of that one," Jason said.
"She's not a bad kid. Nervous, really."
"How much did she spill?"
"Five hundred bucks."
Jason whistled. They descended into the subway. The stairs were littered with refuse and the vomit of someone who had been eating prawns. After five minutes the train came grudgingly. There were only two other people in the compartment a man in his thirties and a woman perhaps twenty years older. Both were white. The two Negroes looked at them and they turned away, afraid. Guilt pervaded the compartment like a gas. The top of Jason's head came level with Haydon's chin; the elder brother's hair was longer, thicker at the sides and back, balancing the bull-like strength of his neck.
They came out of the subway and began to walk. The night was fine.
"I have always believed," Jason said, "that ours has to be moral revolution. We are not trying to exchange our system of government for another. All we ask is that America live up to the ideals of its Constitution."
"The Constitution was made by slave owners," Haydon said.
"I know."
They turned to cross an avenue and the sign flashed, in red, "Don't Walk." There was no traffic and Haydon began to walk across. Jason caught up with him.
"I know that," he said, "but I don't think I could ever fine the guts to do what you're doing."
"You'd like to, huh?"
They walked the last hundred yards to the apartment in silence. When they got in, Haydon brought out some bourbon and ice.
"You want to fight the bastards, do you?"
"In a way, yes."
Haydon stripped to the waist and began to wash himself. Jason watched the muscles sing in his ebony back. He splashed water about freely, then wiped the mirror with a towel, leaving shreds of cotton clinging to the damp glass. He plugged his razor into a light socket. He always shaved at night, to save time in the morning—and as a gesture to the women in his life.
"Well, you can only fight them one way, in my opinion, and that's root and branch. Don't mistake me, that's not a moral imperative; it's a long, hard look at the society we live in. A lot of what you said to Myra tonight was correct. Of course she hasn't got two feet to stand on. Of course she doesn't want herself incinerated by a Russky bomb. Whatever we say, we'll continue to say it in the English language, and we'll continue to feel at home with dollar bills and cookies and Budweiser in cans. But we can leave the essential bourgeois America behind. If you want to do that, you'll have to write to John Harvard and tell him that instead of studying his government, you've decided to make your own."
"Look, even you didn't quit before you began. I remember you saying, 'I've had my education; it's only the medal, the gong that I haven't got.' Now you want me to throw the whole thing over in advance!"
"Jason, I don't mean to offend you, but you're one guy and I'm another. I always knew I wanted to do something like this, and I always knew I could do it. When I was at Columbia I walked home through Harlem every day. I never forgot. Harvard's a way of life, an ethos. I can see you stomping through the snow in Brattle Street on your way to some liberal-minded professor's small dinner party for twelve. I can just see you: about as dangerous as Robert Frost on Christmas Eve."
Jason sank back on to his bed and stared at the peeling plaster on the ceiling. The seediness of the apartment brought him a final comfort; he had come to Second Avenue from choice and not of necessity; soon he would leave; the world Would recognize him for what he was, a student at America's greatest university. He would go further than his father.
"Trouble is," he said, "I want to be President."
"Yeah," said Haydon slowly, feeling his chin and jaw for recalcitrant stubble, "so do I. I'm pitching for a shortcut."
Jason lit a cigarette. A tremor of excitement—the potent, transitory pleasure which birthday presents had brought him
as a child—ran through him, galvanizing his legs like a mild electric shock.
"You know something?"
"Tell me."
"I'm in love. I'm crazy for a woman."
"It's a woman this time, huh?"
"Seriously. We went to this swell party in Sutton Place, Pa, Ma and me. The liquor was strictly on Her Britannic Majesty. Everyone was talking in there as if they had a hot potato wedged inside. It was all very upper and white and aloof, and I was beginning to hate the whole thing when who did I see?"
"Karl Marx."
"Absolutely the most beautiful, lovely, radiant, delicious, saintly, fragile, exciting, seductive dish in the whole of the
USA."
Haydon climbed into bed, heavily. "A white girl, Jason?" he said casually. Jason's pale palms lay flat on the bed cover. His arms were straight and tense under his blue cotton shirt; he turned his head to Haydon as towards a priest. "Yes, she was white." "Did you speak to her?" "No."
"Did you catch her name?" "No."
"Aha. So naturally you reasoned with yourself: since don't know who this dame is, or where she lives, it figuri that I've got to have a place to lay her. So you deserted yoi old mother and cleaved to Second Avenue."
Haydon switched out the light even though Jason hadn't yet undressed or washed. He had to get up early, and it was his apartment.
"Haydon—have you ever slept with a white woman?"
"With the President's wife on Thursdays."
"Cut that out."
"I never would. I wouldn't want any white to be able to say, 'That nigger makes a lot of noise, but he seems to find our women good enough to sleep with.' And partly because I
don't."
"You don't? How do you mean?"
"I don't like white people."
"Yeah, liking's one thing and-"
"Sleeping's another. Jason, there's only one thing worse than a man whose words are more cynical than his actions, and that's a man whose actions are more cynical than his words. If I screw a woman whom I don't even like, I debase myself. And I don't want to debase myself in any way in the company of a white person."
"Sounds like a kind of racism to me."
"Maybe."
Jason sat up on one elbow. He felt closer to the white girl he had seen at the party than ever before, more confident that he could track her down and make her his own. She was beautiful, rich, powerful.
"Haydon, you're not in with the Muslims, are you? I mean, you're an educated man and they're nuts. Their ideas are scientifically untenable, hocus-pocus, they're as bad as Klan fundamentalists. They're crazy."
"Listen, Jason. I belong to a number of organizations, and I've met these guys, I haven't only read what the goddam whitey papers say about them. I don't say it isn't important to have the courage to live up to your convictions. But these days it's rarer to find guys with convictions worthy of their courage. The Muslims may be twisted, but they're twisted in the right direction. Now go to sleep, will you, and dream about that white princess you're going to marry tomorrow in NY Cathedral."
The sky was the thing. The cold, merciless blue, brittle and Puritan, which deflected a condemnatory sunlight on the church towers, the wooden houses, the white porticoes, the red-brick colleges and the falling leaves of New England. He kept his wire-topped head in a fur hat and his hands in his coat pockets, and he watched the Charles River ice up. His nose ran and letters came from Lucille inquiring also about his eyes, ears and throat. She sent him money. And Boston, the legendary, aristocratic Boston, of Beacon Hill and Dartmouth Street, of James and Santayana and Marquand, offered him an (ice-covered) right of way between its shuttered houses. He could look. His skin progressed, from chilblain to sore to chilblain, to a mid-December condition of reptilian, scaly hardness. All winter long, in Broadway and Holyoke Street and Harvard Square, huge college boys, heroes of the Yale game (all nine hundred of them) strode past him with cropped hair and no overcoat, mocking, it seemed, his layers of wool. Small foreign cars, Renaults and Volkswagens, stood axle-deep in snow and slush; on his way to Widener he splashed from puddle to puddle, on what might have once been either sidewalk or road. He stared at the Radcliffe girls in the libraries, in lecture rooms, in the Coop and in the streets, but the winter hoisted a wafer-thin barrier of transparent ice between these desirable creatures and his own reptilian hands.
Dorothy Marshall began to visit him at weekends.
The Baileys spent Christmas without Haydon. They heard that he had gone south, but they had no address, nowhere to send presents or greetings. The streets of Harlem were piled high with snow—the fresh, crisp snow which fell in the morning—and the gray slush which reduced life to a paleolithic gloom in the afternoon. Lucille had a plumber in for half an hour, and he charged ten dollars. She talked about it for a week. When Jason returned to Harvard in January, his heart was a petrified mausoleum, a hollow vault, a tomb to the girl whom he had glimpsed only once in his life and his love for whom had burgeoned into an obsession. His work began to suffer; he acknowledged himself to be sick. His young tutor, Edgar Hemming, sent him to a psychiatrist. He told the psychiatrist about the girl. The man listened sympathetically, then informed him that the only therapy and cure was to get into bed with a white woman, any white woman. "Get it out of your system," the psychiatrist suggested. Every day, towards lunchtime, he hung around his mailbox, fretted when the postman came late, twiddled the combination lock furiously—and pulled out invariably, a couple of bills and a letter from Lucille. There was nothing else he could reasonably expect. But he expected. Occasionally Dorothy wrote. The sight of her neat, rounded script maddened him. "Jason, honey ..." She had forgiven him Times Square. He let her come; not to have a date at week-ends was to lack a lima
The snow cleared, finally, and they drove out one Saturday in the run-down old Plymouth he had bought for three hundred dollars from a raw, beefy Irish dealer who had shouted at him when he questioned the price and stampeded him into a quick buy. Against such encounters, Lucille had always cushioned him. He had failed to call the dealer O'Prick. They drove north, into New Hampshire and Vermont, and he remembered the beauty of the fall, the russet-purple reds banked high on thickly wooded hills, like a cemetery for worldly cardinals in a black monk's dream. He took her along Route 3, sweeping up into the springtime hills, to Lake Winnipesaukee. His heart ached with longing; he longed to bring the woman he loved here, to show her this kingdom of trees and rivers, to imitate for her benefit a commentary on a plowing contest relayed from Montreal and to watch the quick laughter bend her porcelain neck.
"That's French," Dorothy said, "that commentary."
"You always were the bright kid."
She fell silent after that. They crossed the Connecticut Valley and the Connecticut River to find the gentler pastures of Vermont, the wooden farms and barns and the dead shells of stripped-down automobiles. A voice announced, "Time at CBWS at 120 on your dial."
Dorothy said, "Oughtn't we to be getting back? I've got to change and everything."
"Sure."
He knew that she was afraid of high speeds, and he put his foot down hard, defying the law in his need to crush a girl's spirit.
In the evening they danced. She was proud and happy to be with him—a Harvard man's date—and when she jived, her taffeta skirt swirled high above her knees. She wore a bright, innocent smile. The moment they fell into a slow fox-trot her soap-clean hair pressed against his cheek and she said, "I do love you, Jason. If only four years weren't so long to wait."
At midnight he escorted her back to her hotel. She turned to him in the lobby and kissed him on the mouth lightly, as she always did, while the receptionist smiled comprehendingly from behind her desk.
"Good night, honey. See you in the morning."
He said loudly, "I left my pocketbook in your room."
She looked sour. He watched her bottom as he followed her into the elevator. She marched ahead of him into her room and at once began a busy search for his pocketbook.
"I don't see it anywhere." Her voice had a nagging, complaining quality she had picked up from other girls at school and from the movies. He had closed the door and stood leaning against it. A harsh love-anger, a bittersweet blend of rage and adoration seeped from the recesses of his prolonged anguish at the thought of the glorious white creature who did not deign to lend'him even opportunity.
"Well, I don't see it, Jason."
"It's in my pocket, after all."
He took her in his arms and kissed her. She did not resist; yet she did not collaborate. He kissed her again; the same. He held her away from him. There was nothing of which he could accuse her, except being herself. In the corner of this clean and tidy room, which cost him three dollars a night, stood a narrow bed shrouded in purple cotton. He sat on the bed and extended his arms to her, like a puppet. Inside him there was nothing—for her. She held fast to the centre of the room, and her small, round face was ready to back its stubbornness with tears. He picked her up bodily and laid her on the bed and ran his hand up under her skirt until it rested on the uppermost reaches of her short, chunky thigh. It had been more than half a year since he had lain with Millie in her room on 8 th Street and rejoiced in the hot, wet, pressing joy of the moment of entry and the laughing abandon with which she brought him on, gasping. She had never told him whether he had performed well; he might have lived to pull this truth from her had he not alienated all of Haydon's friends by quarrelling with Myra Delone after she had given five hundred dollars to the movement. After that, Millie had sent him packing.
He said, "I can't wait four years. A man can't wait that long."
Dorothy sighed and pulled his head down to her breast.
"I don't know, Jason," she moaned, "I just don't know, honey."
He began to work her over with his hands, kneading her flesh with his fingers. She didn't protest, and it came to him with a dull despair that nothing he could do would shock her; it was all categorized in her mind as "heavy petting," she was observing his predictable transition from the status of regular date to that of boyfriend. He saw dimly that a brazen society had amputated a young girl's most fragile limb, her mystical reverence for the unknown.
He said: "Are you afraid I won't see you anymore, afterwards?"
She shook her head and stared into the darkness.
"Are you afraid of a baby? I've got some things."
She chose not to say anything.
A memory of Millie, a spasm of undifferentiated lust, drove him to bite her throat. "I want you so much, Dorothy, I've got to have you."
She said, sympathetically, "Honey," as if to imply, "How can we fend off this raging demoniac desire?"
He rolled over on his back and stared at the ceiling. She hadn't moved. He knew that time, the silent drag of the minutes, was on her side.
"Don't you feel anything?" he said with evident irritation.
After a moment, she said, "Sure I do."
"What?"
Surreptitiously she smoothed down her skirt to conceal her exposed thigh. After a while his bad temper got the better of him and he strode to the door.
"Okay, baby, that's it, then."
But he waited. In truth, only his lust kept him.
She sat up, troubled. "Do you want me to undress for you?" she said softly.
"Yes, I do."
She set about it, dutifully. Silk and taffeta rustled; things passed over her head, under her armpits, from her legs. Then she paused and turned to him with a submissive dog's sadness.
"How much shall I?"
He came and sat beside her on the bed. He pulled off her bra and took her breasts in his cupped hands. He really wanted her now. He threw off his coat and shoes and then did it quickly, without ceremony or love play. He came almost at once. Afterwards, sentiment warmed him towards her. He fondled her hair and looked into her tight, closed face.
"Honey, you're okay, aren't you?" he said.
Her tears angered him by their predictability.
"What do you expect me to say?" she said with a passion which took him aback.
"Jesus Christ," he said, and rolled off her. He lit a cigarette and sat on the edge of the bed with his back to her. After a while she said, "I thought you said you'd use something."
"I'm sorry. I am sorry. I got carried away. Hell, it'll be all right. What time of the month are you?"
"What?"
"Forget it."
"I don't understand you, Jason, I really don't."
He turned and bent over her, cradling her head in his arm. She clung to him and cried. He let her weep for a while. Then he sat her up and made as if to dress her, fumbling deliberately with the hooks and eyes on her garments to invest himself with an aura of masculine naivete and inexperience.
"Hell, you'll get frozen," he said. "Come on now, Dorothy, it isn't as if we wouldn't get married if anything went wrong."
She looked at him.
"The man you love can't be as bad as all that," he said.
When she was dressed he put his arm around her shoulder and offered her his cigarette.
"Have a puff," he said.
"You know I don't," she said.
"C'm on now, baby, being married to little ol' Jason won't be as bad as all that."
She leaned her head against his shoulder. "I guess it was all so sudden," she said.
"Sure, I know. I've got a lot to learn. You'll have to tell me about all those smart college boys at Columbia who keep proposing to you as soon as my back's turned."
"Jason!" But she was pleased.
"No good kidding me anymore. Ma wrote to tell me I'd
better look out for myself now that you've become so popular with all the bucks and blades."
She laughed, kicking back her scepticism. She clung to him and they sat for some time in silence. He began to feel that he had given too much away, that he had gone too far, that he had almost stampeded himself into the prison of her life. Her renewed contentment irritated him.
"Do you think a black person and a white person should sleep together?" he said. He turned to her, demanding an answer.
"I don't know. Gee, if they love one another truly .. ."
"Can they ever be really happy, though?"
For some reason they were both whispering now.
"Every person is different," Dorothy said. "You can't generalize."
"Would you ever consider marrying a white man?" he said.
She thought about this. Her lower lip protruded solemnly. She was glad that he considered her opinions worth listening to. Theirs would be a true marriage.
"I don't know, honestly. I suppose that if Mister Right happened along and he was white, well .. ."
"Would you consider it a step up in the world to marry a white person?"
"It would all depend, I guess."
"Yeah, it would, wouldn't it." His voice was harsh now, pinned to its strident key by the long winter of his discontent and by the sickening emptiness which seized him every day as he turned away from mailbox, clutching his bills and his letter from Lucille or Dorothy. "You shouldn't be surprised if a man like myself, a man with talent and a big career in front of him, decided to marry a white girl of high breeding with a fortune to her name."
She folded on the bed, but not instantaneously, not before an aeon of suspended disintegration had spun itself out like a dying star. Finally her legs curled under her and she began to sob hysterically. As he went to the door, the small fear pricked him that she might be driver to do something stupid. At the same time a vague desolation cloaked him; apart from
Lucille's, hers was the only womanly love he knew, or ever had known.
"I'll see you in the morning at eleven," he said evenly. "In my room. Okay?"
She just cried.
"Did you hear me, Dorothy?"
"I heard you."
The strength behind her words reassured him slightly. She wouldn't, after all, do anything silly. He closed the door behind him softly and walked to the elevator. The receptionist looked up and smiled brightly as he strode out of the deserted lobby.
"Find your pocketbook?"
"Oh sure. Good night."
"Good night, sir."
Under the spectacular dome of the Kresge Auditorium the harpsichordist sat alone on the stage, working a miracle in which the fine balance of a static past lent its blessing to the vague but dynamic aspirations of the life to come. Bach, Chambonnieres, Couperin, Rameau and Scarlatti—for Jason, music had never been an end in itself, but rather a stimulus to his visions of power and fame. The harpsichordist's world-renowned fingers danced; the audience held its breath; the police escort preceded President Bailey's Cadillac as it swept through the White House gates ...
An hour later the audience broke into the prolonged but contained applause proper to an academic community. At his side, Dorothy Marshall was bringing her hands together in an energetic simulation of enthusiasm. She had taken herself off to church in the morning; over lunch they had barely spoken. The afternoon concert had come to him as a means of getting through the rest of her stay. By nine on Monday she would have resumed her life as a shorthand typist working for a dubious uptown lawyer on the Avenue of the Americas.
She followed him (he assumed she was following him) in the slow, polite crush of expensive, fur-collared coats up the aisle of Kresge. He glanced again at his watch: there was an hour to kill before he could decently deposit her on the train. Somewhere ahead of him a fruity English voice, a man's voice, said, "She gives him too many baths, commoners are notoriously allergic to hot water." A girl laughed. Jason saw the Englishman, a large middle-aged person with thick corn-coloured. hair brushed straight back from his florid brow, put his arm around her shoulders. As she threw her head back her face came fully into view.
It was the same girl.
A physical sensation as potent and distinctive as the giddy tang of sea water in the lungs almost suffocated him. Adrenalin came pumping through his glands. Shadowing the man and the beautiful girl with a blind, acquisitive intensity, he pursued them like a tent wrenched from its guide ropes and flung into the wilderness by an irresistible gale of emotion. He followed them across the windswept campus of MIT towards the tiny oval chapel of brick which stood in lonely lilliputian grandeur—a twentieth-century homage to the balance of the sixth-century Celtic spirit. Simple and without denomination, the chapel invited those souls oppressed by relativity, or linear movement, or numbers to seek the balm of silence, emptiness and something Other. Inside, an unadorned marble altar stood like a sacrificial stone on rounded steps; daylight, reflected off a narrow moat of water, filtered between outer walls separated at ground level like lips. Crossing the campus, Jason had been hardly aware of Dorothy's voice raised behind him in complaint. When she finally caught up with him, she found him standing a few paces from a white girl, staring at her in a trance.
Dorothy knelt to pray. The Englishman took her gesture in with a hint of compassionate disdain; but the girl, whose sublime beauty and composure gave justification to the gilded effigy which Jason had embalmed in the tomb of his memory, appeared simultaneously to withdraw from and revere the Negro girl's search for comfort.
"Brutality in the hands of genius," the Englishman said loudly, "is called inspiration."
The girl walked out of the chapel, dressed in a simple gray coat. In the shadows she caught Jason's unbending gaze long enough to capture forever the contours of its pain. Demented now by the certainty of imminent loss, of a more terrible renewal of his suffering, Jason stumbled after them, crazed with love for the girl, for her perfect beauty, for the poise of her body, for the inborn superiority which invested her like a bridal veil. As he followed them towards the parking lot, a sharp, February wind stung his cheeks and ears. He saw the man put his arm around her once again, and once again rape her with the sperm of his humour. He reached his own auto and fell into it, exhausted.
Already his tempest of emotions was distilling a saner mood of physical calculation. The same rational madness which had sent him every day for five months to his mailbox in search of a message he could not expect to find, now led him to enter in his diary the number of the girl's silver Porsche. It was hers, he knew, because she had taken the wheel and it bore Massachusetts licence plates. Watching the Porsche ease its way from the parking lot into the main street beyond, the temptation to follow, track her down, became so strong that he already had his engine running when Dorothy appeared, hopping across the campus like a lame sparrow. He switched off the engine.
"You bitch," he said as she came nearer, clutching her hat in the wind, "you bitch, you bitch, you bitch." He pushed the door open for her without getting out. She climbed in, breathless.
"Gee," she said, "it's cold out there. Where were you, Jason?"
"Here."
"What's up with you, then? You sure do look sore."
She blew her nose and adjusted her hat in the mirror. He felt dead, absolutely flat.
"You want something to eat now?" he said.
"If you do, Jason."
"Okay, then."
They drove into Boston and chose a cafe within reach of the station. He ordered tea, toast and cakes, and they sat for a while in silence. Dorothy was folding a paper napkin into as small a rectangle as she could. He glanced at his watch.
"You mustn't worry about last night, Jason," she said softly, intent upon her napkin. "It may never happen, really. You know I'd never force you to marry me against your will."
"Sure, I know," he said sullenly.
The tea came. The waitress pushed the check in front of him. Dorothy poured. "TwO lumps?" she said. "Thanks."
"Jason . . ." She couldn't bring herself to find the truth in
his face. "Yeah?"
"It would be against your will, wouldn't it? Us marrying, I
mean."
"Hell, I don't know. Maybe it'll be all right, like you said." He led her back to his auto, and from the auto to her train. They walked together through the accommodating wastes of Boston North End station, and he put his arm in hers. She knew as well as he that this was the end, that there could not be, after this, another weekend. He heaved her case up on the rack, then came out again to the platform. She leaned through the window.
"Thanks for everything," she said. "It's been nice seeing you, Dorothy." He wished the guard would blow his whistle prematurely. They had five minutes to spare. He didn't know where to look.
"Well," he said, stamping his feet. "Jason, are you cross with me or something?" Why must she? "I'll write to you, he said.
"Couldn't you tell me? I'm not so stupid that I can't understand." Then she added, "I don't like to see you unhappy."
He laughed then, but not pleasantly. "I'll write to you. See you pretty soon. Let me know how things go, huh?"
He reached up and kissed her. He aimed for her cheek but she put her mouth in the way. " 'Bye," he said, then turned
and walked away, without looking back.
* * *
At the Boylston Street traffic lights, the Englishman had aimed for the girl's mouth, but she put her cheek in the way. He withdrew his arm.
"You Americans," Soames said, "were always very conven4l tional at heart. I suppose you do consider yourself an Ameri-i can?"
The silver Porsche leaped forward.
"It's not a passport one throws away lightly," Zoe Silk said.
"Quite so." He seemed to agree with her. She turned off Brattle Street into the driveway of his hotel. For a moment they sat looking at one another.
"It's no doubt become a platitude with you," Soames said, "but it's a terrible thing, to grow old. Almost as bad for a man as for a woman. Worse, perhaps. Personally, I cannot sustain the thought of death. I abhor it. When you are young you acknowledge death as a truth, but not as a reality."
"But meanwhile your niece is as good a lay as any, is that it?"
Soames' face darkened, and she saw that her words had caused him genuine pain. She regretted them.
"I don't know why I said that."
"You are your mother's daughter," he said. "But if you can find it in your heart to avoid reporting to her that I am a dirty old man, I would be grateful."
She squeezed his hand and kissed him. "It's been lovely seeing you, Soames. You're more fun than anyone I know. Come again soon."
"You wouldn't like to join me for a quick scotch or gin, or whatever it is that you barbarians drink at this time of the day?"
"I ought to be getting back, really. I've got to analyze half of Keats by tomorrow morning."
He nodded. The lines of age did, then, slash the smooth, peachlike contours of his sun-tanned face.
"Lucky Keats," he said. "You're a very beautiful woman, Zoe."
He clambered out. From the steps of his hotel he turned and gave her a single wave; and when he had disappeared inside, a small amount of sadness touched her like the memory of a deserted graveyard.
The key fell from her open purse and tinkled faintly, perhaps
Oo the sidewalk, perhaps in the gutter. Some bright bird had sUng from the treetop to unarm her, its beak a perky yellow against the flat blue ocean of the New England sky. She bent to search, but the Negro was there first, proof of instant genesis, sprung from the even darker trunk of the tree and smelling faintly of aftershave and genteel Baptism. "Allow me," he said, and the short hairs of his imitative, presidential moustache threatened to brush the satin of her cheek. She saw the Porsche, her silver-winged cage, unlocked and the door held obligingly open; the rich blue leather inside marshalled her sense of time and posed the problem of her white and wealthy gratitude. He might, when he hurled the steel door between himself and his life, have caught through the grimy window the distortion of her "Thank you." The clutch came out too fast and the exhaust bellowed its dirty message in his face. It would not show. She glanced in the mirror and narrowly avoided a dreaming child. She wore a yellow sack frock, black patterned stockings and the opaque memory of Kresge, of Scarlatti's Latin flights, of the pagan stillness of the chapel and of the Negro's first challenge, before the eternal stone of faith. She parked, but without precision. The lecturer glanced up as she came in and pulled his spectacles down the thirty-one years of his nose; she knew he loved her more than Keats, more even than Browning. After a while she settled and the flush ebbed from her skin; in the night, soon after the clock said two, the black had emerged again from the long swamps of Mississippi, piecing his ancestry and suffering together from the grass-lipped pages of her book, and so began again the long hunt across the marshlands among the enemy people to whom sacred vows forbade her to cry out for help. Yankee girl. Catch me, then, and finish. A debt to Shelley, almost certainly, but not to Coleridge. The English country around Tufton, no swamps, no blacks, only Soames and a jealous cousin and the horses, whom Amanda chose to ride with a superb, unexpected style and strength. Mummy, you are real here, now I know you. Count Volpe came laughing from the boat's shoulder at Syosset and shook himself over her, then took her book away."Listen, this isn't good stuff for a girl!" A girl of twenty-one—almost twice the number of the New York avenues. The brutal gridiron, the inexorable pattern of violence. "How many times have I told you to take a taxi? Have you seen the latest crime figures? No white girl is safe." The grid. Knee-deep in swamp, his breath hot and rasping, the shadow of his hands reaching out across the mango grass, why oh why can't he ever finish . jff "The subway is the worst place of all, I've told you a hundred times, it's a deathtrap after dark." Dark. Sprang from the tree trunk, came north in pursuit, no longer car-riaged in the perpetual dream, came in daylight by subway to the safe, white, Christian retreat of Cambridge. "I've told you, even with an escort its not safe on the West Side after dark. No, Zoe, I don't trust Park Avenue either. Have you no imagination? Does something awful have to happen to you before you'll see sense?" Ten years ago, from the indiscriminate coloured panorama of a bookstand, a novel had selected itself, bringing hordes of shrieking yellow midgets charging from the jungle. Count Volpe had been too young to fight in that war. They passed, the Japs, back into fiction, returned unopened, leaving the girl unscarred and definitely separated by age and sex from the imaginary brothers who had known "combat." Keats' early death. Soames had said, "A truth but not a reality." In Birmingham, serious race riots. A father's advice: "I would regard it as foolish in the extreme, Zoe, should you join this student expedition to Mississippi. The whites won't like you, nor the niggers either." Walking down Sixth Avenue at dusk, a group of three blacks in T-shirts and jeans. "M-a-a-n, I'm gonna find me a ..." Forbid you to go. What's wrong with Long Island? Why not go to Corfu, or Samos, or even Sicily? Safer in Sicily. "Why take the Greyhound when you can afford to fly? Why must you be so perverse? Why must you be always looking for trouble?" What is truly distinctive in the vision and sensibility of John Keats is. Loves me. Without doubt the most enthrallingly beautiful and most sought-after of this year's debutantes on the East Coast is the daughter of the financier Chester Silk. "Please give in your essays as you go out. I'll hand them back to you corrected next week. Miss Silk, would you mind staying behind for a moment?" Titters. Alone with him, he blushes, loves me, wants me to concentrate and marry him. And not only the most beautiful but one of the wealthiest.
ghe plans to study English at Radcliffe this fall and will predictably top the coed popularity ... A pencil-slim moustache, seen him somewhere before, somewhere in New york, at a party, but which? The pursuit of guilt? Emily jiahn said there had been so many assaults and rapes at night in the bookstacks of Columbia that she never went in there without a contraceptive. Crunch of clean Puritan gravel, pure lineage to the founding fathers. Men stare, always, just as a flypaper is encrusted with black corpses, always. Yet the woman's heat is the more lasting attraction, for lust has no winter. The Negro has followed. To the steps of Widener, broad, serene, tasteless. He follows, like the dream man in the swamps, up, up, his breath is measured, down into the stone bookstacks, the echo of iron-heeled shoes on the iron stairs, the musty smell of knowledge, he follows. Time dissolved. Refuge in books, the inner microcosm of madness, the refuge of distilled agony from the wider fear of the impending unknown. Sanctuary. On the Costa Brava, told Miguel and Jean la Rocheford of reading all fifteen volumes of Proust, with hair long and straight that summer to reassure the gendarmes in their tin saucepan hats, gray uniforms and gray Spanish eyes, discreet as the passion of our . . . Miguel said, "Marry me." The Possessed, the demon abroad, the harsh hand of madness across the steppes, under the Tsar's gallows, and in the swamplands where the big buck hangs, hangs, lynched, from the tree. The grid. New York is no place for a white girl now. The South is dangerous. The North is no longer safe. Those unforgettable books. It was late in the evening when K. arrived. The village was deep in snow. The castle hill was hidden, veiled in mist and darkness, nor was there even a glimmer of light to show that a castle was there. They keep spying on me the whole time. The unusual events described in this chronicle occurred in 194—, at Oran. On leaving his surgery on the morning of April 16, Dr. Bernard Rieux felt something soft under his foot. It was a dead rat lying in the middle of the landing. Probably I was in the war. There is a wound behind my ear, an oblong of unfertile flesh ... Alyosha gazed at the coffin for half a minute. In the gilded nursery of Park Avenue, a thick-pile white carpet, double windows to keep out America, silk, satin, a chandelier from France as genuine as Californj. champagne, records, books, toys, dolls, books. Guarded years. Time for lunch. Dear nanny writes from Wales. Twc Puerto Ricans died last night in a rumble on Second. A white girl raped, murdered, found on a disused building site. Your grandmother's pearls. Soames grabbed what he could, of course, before they had laid her under the ground. He drove Jane to suicide. She found him with Sara. Unbearable to think of. Ail over the South, beyond the double windows, and in the North too, this side of the swamps around Jackson, the earth is on fire, the slave people are rising incoherently, marching. In the library, in the Square, in Brattle, on Broadway, always there, watching, standing beside the silver Porsche in his neat, Italian suit, his silk ties, a young man of good background, such a want, such a hunger in his face, such a destiny he carries. Woke up screaming. Gee, what has she to scream about with those looks and all that dough? Books, print, obsessively. Yoknapatawpha, Oxford, take out the guns, hide under Granny's skirts, the slave was faithful. The enemy within the gates: ravaging beast! The women will suffer for the cupidity and pride of the men; the women will reap the bitter harvest of the nation's warped seed of incest and violence. Must run towards the consuming sun, embrace it, anything to avoid the long reach of the angry fingers from behind, to be overwhelmed by the shadow of the multitude, the millions unforgiving and unforgiven. In faultless prose Madame de Lafayette had shown her, stretched on the white pile carpet beside chocolates and a white pile poodle, that the broken, bewitched men who suffered for Madame de Cleves suffered less than the Princess herself. She had told Count Volpe this, when he wept at Syosset, prostrate in shingle and boat tar—told him that every time a young beau laid down his life for her, she died a little. Then the great American writer indicated how, where and at whose hands she mus experience violent justice. And the Negro stood through spring and a summer by the Porsche, waiting.
In the fall of that year Jason travelled north again ten pounds lighter, a man totally consumed by a hopeless, des perate love which fed avidly on rejection and which had jjown to the dimensions of an obsession. A dry, residual jjmbition forced him to work, to concentrate during Professor Schenk's lectures on "Problems of Totalitarian Dictatorship," Professor Hill's "Introduction to Socialism" and Dr. Elliot's probings of the delicate equilibrium achieved over the centuries by the institutions of British government. Jason took notes, produced essays, registered high grades. Dr. Elliot wrote to his old friend Powell Bailey, "Your son has the aptitude and, in my judgment, the will, to achieve the highest office in the land." But nothing, in truth, touched Jason, nothing brought to life his starved soul, except the flickering brilliance of his young tutor Edgar Hemming.
Hemming was a phenomenon. The less he wrote (and nothing could be less than nothing), the more formidable became his reputation. Rumour had it that he was about to blow the foundations of his subject to atoms, leaving nothing but a radioactive tabula rasa in which the only creature adjusted to survival would be the terrible Hemming. Neurosis about this was fairly widespread, since his proclaimed field of study was "Human Behaviour," no less. He shattered the nerves of Jason's amiable but slow Canadian roommate, Carnegie, by telling him that British society was homosexual in character, that the Tory party, which Britons loved best, was a real old queen and that during the long periods of Tory rule the British were in effect queering one another up. "Jeez," moaned Carnegie, "I can't serve that up to Elliot. He'd send me to the headshrinker for sure. They'd have my hands tied in no time."
Jason did not understand all that Hemming told him. But the principles were clear; and so desperately did he need a lifeline, a framework, that he could not long resist the temptation to adopt and champion them as dogma.
"To start the ball rolling," Hemming liked to begin, over a late-night bourbon, biting at his horn-rimmed spectacles, "Descartes comes up with cogito ergo sum. Gamma for him. Big mistake. Real answer: I am, therefore I have desires. The essence of society, now as then, is the repression of these desires in the individual. Similarly, the essence of the individual, as a social man, is the repression of himself. In short, reality frustrates desire. To twist Descartes: I am, therefore I am frustrated. Put it another way. Desires raise the pleasure principle, existence raises the reality principle. The conflict of these two principles generates repression. Now the question arises: what precisely are these repressed desires? Answer: our sexual desires, and those desires which we had in an unrepressed state during childhood. Eros is basically a union with objects in the world. The infant develops the pure pleasure ego which absorbs into an identity with itself the source of its pleasure, the mother. This sets the pattern for all human love. All the objects we love we incorporate into the ego. We may think of a man as a species whose historical project is the rediscovery of his own childhood. We will not put aside our sickness and discontent until we have abolished every dualism, instinctual or otherwise—love and hate, sympa-* thy and aggression, black and white ..."
She was never alone now. Always some smart fellow with her, elegant and charming. It was more than Jason could bear; he gave up the pursuit. He returned home for Christmas and immediately took to his bed. Lucille called several doctors in and denounced the medical profession and what she called the "hypocritical oath" when they failed to diagnose any tangible cause of the malady. From the South, news came of Hayon's third arrest.
"He's proud of it," Lucille complained, "I tellya he is. Does he care what happens to his father, who paid for his education? I told him on the phone. I said, 'Haydon, you know very well that Senator Torrington's committee is just waiting to nail someone like your father.' "
"What did he say to that?"
Lucille flourished her bejewelled hands. "I don't know. I never know what that boy's trying to say." She leaned over Jason's bed, smoothed his pillow and kissed him. Then she sat on the bed and took his hand. "If I let you into a big secret, promise not to tell a soul?"
"Yeah."
"Your father would slay me if he knew I'd told you."
"Hypocritical oath, Ma."
"Oh that. Ever heard of Coppernica?"
"Sure I have. I'm studying government, aren't I? Go on, tell jne—Pa's going to be the first goddam Ambassador next summer."
Lucille looked petulant. Not only had he stolen her punch line, he had got it wrong.
"That's just about what he should have been," she said. "As it is, they've only made him assistant to the Ambassador. I told him that if it hadn't been for Haydon-"
"Aw, come on. These appointments are political. The job goes to some guy who's done a little something for the party, like giving it a million dollars. What's the name of Pa's big white chief?"
She told him and later that evening he had a relapse.
In the New Year the Silks invited the Baileys to lunch at their apartment on Park Avenue. The announcement was now official; Chester Silk's appointment had been endorsed by the Senate. Superficially Jason's condition improved as the day of the Silk's luncheon approached. His temperature abandoned its excessive oscillations, and some of the missing flesh returned to his wasted features. The fire now simmered underground. A feverish calm possessed him. Lucille took the occasion to buy herself a new suit and a pair of blue, crocodile-skin shoes. Jason prepared himself with hardly less care; not only his clothes, but also the problem of his facial expression, of his general demeanour, of what his first words should be, were reviewed time and again. Now that he was once again approaching a peak in the Himalayas of his emotional progression, he cast out all bitter memories and resentments, betraying himself and his long winter of anguish. "Abolish every dualism," Edgar Hemming had said.
A hazard intervened unexpectedly, but one that might be turned to his advantage. Hearing that Jason was studying government at Harvard, Chester Silk had suggested that the young man visit him at his Wall Street office before going on to join the others for lunch.
"Be very respectful," Lucille warned him.
Jason spent the morning dressing himself. He changed his tie so many times that he crumpled his collar and had to find a new shirt. He had hardly slept all night and his hands were hot and damp. Lucille felt his brow.
"Honey, you've got a fever," she said. "You go right back to bed now, and I'm calling the doctor."
The vehemence of his reply shattered her. He had never spoken to her like that before. She retreated, cowed by this terrible business of having grown-up sons. Towards midmorn-ing he began to visit the lavatory at intervals of decreasing duration. It kept coming, flowing from him, and as it splattered against the pink bowl, he said aloud, "I'm buggered if I'm going to go to pieces for a goddam white bitch, she's only a girl, a girl!" Behind the heat of his anticipation there already lurked a chiller premonition of the aftermath, the moment of having to leave, the drab return home, the prospect of a further eternity of hopelessness.
He set out early for Wall Street, which Haydon liked to refer to as the "cesspit of world capitalism," and arrived with half an hour to spare. It was a damp misty day, and the taller skyscrapers shyly shrouded their heads in the low clouds. The new Chase Manhattan building reminded him of the great American virtues: strength, honesty and vitality. As he waited in the lobby outside Chester Silk's office, the men who incarnated this energy but carefully masked their power and purpose beneath a conformist, democratic exterior, occasionally glanced at the ticker-tape machine recording the movement of stocks before returning to the less attainable delights of the Esquire girl in black hose. From the window, he could see a big ocean liner moving cautiously upriver; the Statue of Liberty, which he had never visited, was barely visible in the mist. These new surroundings absorbed him; his nerves were soothed.
An Ivy League man with the acquired bluffness of a small-college Midwesterner breezed out to greet him. It was Chester Silk.
"Glad to meet you, Jason. Ever seen the Stock Exchange? Daresay you don't know a broker from a bankrupt, huh?"
With one hand under the boy's elbow, he guided him to the elevator, throwing out instructions to his secretary as he went. His flamboyant camaraderie reflected a distant unease and a compensating determination to attribute to Jason an ignorance as profound as that of an Alabama sharecropper. They crossed the street and climbed into the visitors' gallery
0f the Stock Exchange. Chester Silk was a man of flesh and
breath.
"Now, Jason, that board there, flashing numbers, that's calling the brokers who are wanted on the phone, see? The screens are marking up the latest prices. Steels look to be pretty firm. Watch that guy there, with the bald pate ... he's a broker. By the look of things, he's just gotten a call from bis firm and he's moving as fast as he can without running to ask the price. Running, verboten. He won't say whether he wants to buy or sell, see, he'll just ask the price. That way he gets a real price. Okay? Let's get a taxi. So you're majoring in government?"
They came out into Wall Street.
"Yes, sir."
"And you're pretty smart, too, by all reports. Do you plan to follow your father's career?"
Someone opened and closed the taxi door for them. Chester Silk dispensed with a green dollar bill and grunted.
"Too many people in this country," he went on, "have been sitting around for too long hoping that things will sort themselves out. Well, they won't. You know something? There aren't more than a dozen Negro brokers in the New York Exchange. What do you think of that? Out of twenty-two million, not more than a dozen."
They drove fast uptown, and to the east. Finally it came to Jason that he had not meant twenty-two million brokers.
"Ever thought of going into business, Jason?"
"Yes, I have, sir."
"The American Negro will become an equal American the day he controls his share of the national wealth. All the rest is talk and pie in the sky. We've got to integrate you people into business and commerce fast. Suppose you get a good degree, and then if you're still interested we could think about financing you through Harvard Business School. There will always be a place for a man like you in our setup, so long as I'm still above ground. Okay?"
"Thank you, sir."
"Don't thank me. I thank you. I need you, just like I need your father in goddam Coppernica, wherever it is. There are a whole lot of ugly realities we've got to face afresh in this
world we live in, and black Africa is one of them. If we don't move fast there'll be no home run. The other side are already jumping the gun. Well, we're not a white nation, and Africans have got to be told that. Listen, are you interested in art, in pictures?"
"Yes, I am."
Chester Silk leaned forward and instructed the driver to proceed to the Museum of Modern Art.
"My daughter, Zoe, had kind of got me interested in this sort of thing. I owe it to her. She has taste. Her mother comes from a very old and cultured English family. They have some very fine paintings, I can tell you."
The taxi pulled to a halt and more dollar bills passed from Chester Silk's pocket. A square, heavy man, taller than Jason, he led the way inside. The attendant saluted him. Remembering to stub out his cigar in the sandbox, he walked around a couple of rooms at a fair pace, according each picture a quick appraisal. It was the pilgrimage of a busy man.
Jason paused in fake admiration of "Arcadia," by Maurice Prendergast. He had always entertained a certain respect for the great classics of music, but painting and sculpture left him stone cold.
"That's a John D. Rockefeller," he heard Chester Silk say of the Prendergast. He moved on, past a Gauguin, a Seurat, a Van Gogh and a Cezanne.
"Lillie P. Bliss, all of them," said Chester Silk in hushed awe. "A great benefactor, Lillie P. Bliss." He stopped opposite "Pierrot," by Pablo Picasso.
"A Sam Lewisohn," Chester Silk said. "Not bad, either, that. Must be worth all of a hundred thousand." He marched on to "Bather," by Henri Matisse.
"Mrs. John D. again. What a very great donor, huh?"
Several Picassos.
"Of course, Mrs. Solomon Guggenheim has become hard to beat, what with that cone-shaped thing they built, you know the one? The Guggenheims have done as much for art in America as any. That is the case."
Finally he paused in modest silence before a Renoir, moving his head slightly in deep appreciation of its beauty. Jason bent to the plaque beneath it and saw the words "Donated by Chester F. Silk."
They caught another taxi. Jason's heart raced. Five minutes stood between his life and his destiny. He wiped the palms of his hands with a clean handkerchief.
"I've always admired Renoir," Chester Silk was saying. "A very great painter, in my opinion. Zoe put me on to him. We have another at home, very similar. Not a bad investment, come to that. My daughter, Jason, is a woman of rare beauty and culture, although I say so myself. Half the eligible young men in America dream of marrying her. She treats them like dirt. The more they grovel, the harder she kicks them. She was hoping to meet you, but a guy who doesn't have to work for his living invited her for a protracted weekend on Long Island. Count Volpe. Not my type, exactly."
He returned to Cambridge early in January and almost immediately his fever returned, bringing acute bouts of sweating and diarrhoea. He lay in bed struggling to control the turmoil in his stomach, engrossed in a personal universe of tactile values—the legs of a fly settling for a siesta on the broad, black expanse of his nose; a broken button on his pyjamas, the patent number ®n an old tin spoon which it was hard to imagine anyone wishing to patent, the shrivelled shrewdness of a businessman's face pictured on a back number of Time. Carnegie sent for a doctor who gave Jason injections which allowed him brief bouts of euphoria and a marked diminution of his critical faculties. During one of these he wrote a short note to Zoe Silk. He covered ten sides of paper and gave up only when his handwriting collapsed and sweat marks on the paper threatened to obliterate all that he had written. He begged Carnegie to post it.
"Are you sure you sent that letter?"
"Sure I'm sure."
"It isn't still in your pocket, Henry?"
He lost track of time; the doctor kept pulling him from his delirium and thrusting a needle into his arm. He slapped Jason's cheeks and peered professionally into his eyes.
"Okay," he said.
"I can't breathe," Jason complained. "Sometimes I wake up and it's hell; I just can't breathe."
"That will have to get worse before it gets better," the doctor reassured him.
Some time later he awoke sweating and unable to breathe. He sat up in bed gasping for air and clutching at the black sky; something very close to him, something warm and soft, cradled his head, miraculously bringing oxygen to his lungs and freedom to his chest. He hovered between illusion and reality like a trapeze artist, afraid that the spell which lent him balance might abruptly be broken, leaving him plummeting down into the pit of illness and loss.
Carnegie was standing over him.
"Jason, there's a lady come to see you."
"A lady?"
Carnegie's eyes were wide with wonder. He could barely speak.
"She has a fur coat," he said. "She's really some dame."
Sweat broke out of Jason's pores like sulphur springs, glossing his skin a deep, inky black. His heart burst open at the seams.
"Can I come into the sickroom?" a woman's voice asked nervously. Carnegie swivelled around, red in the face and flustered.
"Sure, do," he said. He thrust out his hand. "Henry Carnegie," he said. She took it politely, shyly, appraising Jason from a distance.
"Zoe Silk," the Negro heard her say.
"Come in," Jason said. Afterwards he would not be able to recall what his first words had been—or his second. As she moved towards his bed he experienced an ecstatic emotional release, a sense of abiding justice, the elation of a starved soul in the sight of God.
She sat on the end of the bed. So often, when he had waited near the Porsche for hour upon hour, he had dreamed of reaching out to touch her, of resolving his agony on the cool pastures of her skin.
"Nice of you to come," he whispered.
Carnegie was standing by the door. He cleared his heavily.
throat
"Would you care for some coffee?" he asked.
"No!" Jason said.
Carnegie cleared his throat again, not daring to look at so much beauty.
"I'll be pushing along," he said.
Jason did at last look into the face of Zoe Silk. But only for a splintered second—as at the naked sun.
"I apologize for that letter," he said.
"Why apologize?"
Her first words to him—ever.
"It was hysterical."
She thought about this gravely. "I didn't think so," she
said.
"In any case, one shouldn't beg people to come, even when you're pretty goddam sick."
She didn't reply. Instead she looked around his room.
"Carnegie's no housekeeper," he said. "We need a woman here. Should you know of anyone, we offer five dollars a month."
He waited for her to laugh.
"I'm sorry you're not well," she said.
As if preparing already to leave. A silence settled between them like a sea mist—the silence of their mutual knowledge, of the impossibility of an unequal relationship.
He said, "We went to lunch with your parents."
"Oh yes. My mother told me."
"You'd gone to Long Island to stay with Count Volpe."
Without warning, Zoe Silk took his hand. It was the best moment in his life, and he knew it to be. The frost had fallen from her eyes; now they curtsied out of deference to anguish.
"I fled," she said.
Withdrawing her hand. But he grabbed it.
"You mean-"
"I fled, Jason. I was terrified of you."
"I could have died that day. I suppose you know ..."
"Yes." Her lips vibrated from the ghost of a smile. "Of course I know. You want to destroy me."
He was about to deny this hotly, but a spark of jungle cunning checked him. For the first time since she had entered the room, calculation crept into his words.
"I guess love is destruction," he said.
She took her hand away and ran it through her hair—a tree shedding its blossom, a royal scent.
"For a long time after you began to follow me," she said, "I believed that you intended to rape me. Especially when you came after me into the bookstacks of Widener."
"But I never did rape you."
"No."
Their eyes met.
"Maybe it takes less courage these days to rape a white girl than to introduce oneself." He ran his fingers down the sleeve of her fur coat, and suddenly he felt so sad, so consumed by self-pity at what he had suffered, so overwhelmed by relief that she had, after all, come to him, that tears welled in his eyes. He reached for his handkerchief and smiled stoically.
"That's love for you," he said.
She glanced at her watch.
"You're not leaving already?" he said.
"I'll come back—if you want me to."
Again he reached for her hand; but this time his own arrived as an impostor.
"Zoe, stay awhile longer."
"I have an appointment," she said, rising. In an instant his confidence, his euphoria, evaporated. Once again he was ugly and dull, an inferior being who could never hope to arrest the attention of so lovely, serene and self-confident a woman. So white a woman. In her calm blue eyes his imagination read a universe of wealthy, handsome and highly sophisticated men, the universe of Count Volpe, a world of beautiful furniture, large houses and private beaches. Probably, almost certainly, she loved Volpe. Nothing could bind her to a poor Negro, nothing except spasmodic compassion, the occasional charity of a lady for the sick.
"One-sided love is always degrading," he said.
"No love need be one-sided."
He looked at her in astonishment.
"Will you tell me something?" he said.
"I might."
"Do you love Count Volpe?"
She laughed, throwing back her head. The Negro sat in bed, small and pinched, regarding her solemnly. Then she darted at him, took his face in her hands, kissed him quickly on the forehead, turned and ran from the room—a cascade of small, breathless movements which took him so by surprise that afterwards, when he dwelled on the affair, he was quite unable to reconstruct the cycle of events. It had been like an accident.
The room was empty. He was alone. He lay back exhausted.
His room seemed to mock him now by its unwanted familiarity, its banal availability, its pedestrian, petit bourgeois ornaments—a potted cactus, a few books, a formal wedding portrait of his parents standing outside 128th Street Baptist and several pseudo-Persian rugs between which no apparent relationship existed. She must have marked him down for a philistine. For a moment his resentment was directed against his father for not giving him more money to spend on furnishing.
Carnegie came in. Jason closed his eyes.
"She said she'd come back tomorrow, and every day."
Jason stared at him. "Every day?"
"That's what the lady said."
He closed his eyes and fell into an exhausted sleep. When he awoke it was dark and a dim blue nightlight was burning over his bed. In the moment of awakening he remembered the girl, but in the valley which followed he began to wonder whether her appearance had been merely a figment of his fevered imagination. Wrestling with the problem, and feeling more than usually sick, he fell asleep again. Sometime in the morning the doctor came, thrust needles into him and spoke aromatically of things getting worse before they got better. A thin beam of light filtered under the blinds, challenging his perception of reality. Soon he fell into a deep sleep from which he awoke only towards evening.
"You taste of salt," Zoe Silk said.
She was sitting close to his bed, watching him. He struggled to gain his bearings; then, seizing reality by the throat,
he reached out for her, hot with fever, and pulled her to him, a cool, fragile fountain of compassion.
"Zoe," he said. "Zoe, Zoe, Zoe."
His arms were wrapped around her neck. But her silence-even the briefest silence—alarmed him, reawakening his doubts and prompting him to release her. Anxiously he read her face.
"You taste of salt," she said again, bending quickly and kissing his brow.
"This is amazing," he said. "It's a dream."
"Do you really love me, Jason?"
"Love you!" He reached for her again, a wild lunge, but this time the physical effort and emotional expansion instantly threw his bowels into disorder, compelling him to hurry to the bathroom. He dropped to his knees and closed his eyes as a protracted vomit tugged at his guts, filling his mouth with a nauseous, sickly sweet glue. He hoped she wouldn't follow him; he was desperately anxious that she shouldn't see his mess. He washed out the lavatory, cleaned his face with hot water and soap and attempted to sweeten his mouth with toothpaste. Before returning to the bedroom he combed his hair carefully.
"I'm making you some lemon tea," Zoe said.
He saw that she had smoothed and tidied his bed.
"You shouldn't have bothered," he said. He felt very happy.
"Sugar in your tea?"
"Sure."
"I brought you some fruit and candy. And some magazines—if you have the strength to read."
"Only the strength to love," he muttered, climbing back into bed. He hoped she heard that; he repeated it, rather louder. She brought the tea to his bed.
"None for you?" he said.
"Bad for my figure."
He took her hand. "Don't go, Zoe."
For a moment he was afraid he had put the idea in her head. Then she adjusted his pillows and opened the window. A warm breeze ruffled her hair as she stood looking down on the courtyard below.
"What does the doctor say?" she said.
"Never mind the doctor. I've been to headshrinkers as well. You won't believe me, and I'd be the last to blame you, but sometimes a man loves a woman so much that he becomes ill from it."
"Even when he's never even spoken to her?"
"Even then. You can't understand because you haven't ever loved in a spirit of hopelessness. God sent you into the world to generate pain, not to suffer it."
"No, Jason."
"Yes, Jason."
"But it was you who threw your net over me! Of all the white girls in America it had to be me whom you marked down for destruction. I understand what's in store for me. You chose, I was chosen."
"I chose nothing! I set eyes upon you by accident. Instantly I became the prisoner of a terrible passion. It consumed me. In that moment of involuntary witness I became insufficient, a husk, a shell capable of life only within the orbit of your own. I have been walking in purgatory every since."
She came to the bed and embraced him tenderly, shyly.
"Jason, Jason, if I am your saint, you are my church. I'm so much less than I seem to be, so much more like a hollow statue than you could imagine. Apart from you and the terrible demands which you impose on me, my life can be only empty and destructive. I know that to be true; I also have lived through these last months. It has taken me a long time to accept the inevitable, to accept that my ghosts are real."
"Your ghosts?"
She regarded him sadly. "In the end," she said, "you'll grind me to dust."
"Suppose I merely wanted to marry you."
She withdrew a little and folded her hands on her lap. The bright spots returned to her cheeks and her face appeared to retract its commitment to him. She was once again the snow queen, aloof, frosty, dignified.
"You're not Volpe," she said.
His heart pounded with fright. He cursed himself for a fool.
"Just a poor black student, huh?" "No, Jason. Volpe is just a rich white count. You are a god. Gods don't marry."
"I see."
She looked at her watch. "I have to hurry," she said.
"You oughtn't to use that as a weapon, you know."
"Use what?"
"This business of getting up and going."
"But... but I've only visited you twice."
"Sure."
She took her coat and moved to the door. She hesitated.
"I'm sorry if I was rude," he said.
"You weren't," she said politely. "If one rolls down a steep hill, one's liable to end upside down."
Then she was gone.
She came again two days later.
"You didn't come yesterday," he complained.
She sat beside him on the bed and pulled open her heather coat. The swell of her breasts beneath it took him by surprise; he had never allowed himself the profanity of visualizing this ethereal goddess in purely physical terms; he had never permitted—as he had with Millie and Dorothy—his eye to investigate the separate limbs and attributes of her body.
She felt his brow. "How are you, Jason?"
"Better."
"Good."
"Why didn't you come yesterday?"
"I was busy. I'm sorry."
"With Volpe? See how jealous I am. It's obsessive. You went to a party with your white friends and you announced. 'And then this black sat up in bed, smelling of vomit and looking like a corpse covered in coal dust, and said to me, "Suppose I merely wanted to marry you." Merely! How do you like that!'"
"Jason!"
"I love you, Zoe, more than you can know. One symptom: when you are here everything that goes into my head comes straight out of my mouth. I'm a child again. Intoxicated. You haven't kissed me yet."
She did.
"Do I still taste of salt?" "Of sand, of the old slave shore. Shall we go to the sea?"
"Alone?"
"Yes, alone."
"Zoe, I feel as if I had known you for a year. I want to ask you something. The question is not entirely sincere, yet I have to ask it. I mean, if I really thought you would give the cruelest answer, I wouldn't have the courage to ask. Do I repel you? I mean—physically."
"Why, do you have a proposal?"
"Zoe, I'm serious." He held her wrist tightly, so that she winced.
"Let me go," she said. He let her go. She went to the door and slipped the catch, sealing them off from intruders. Discarding her coat and scarf, she ran a hand through her hair, sending it rippling like ripe flax to her shoulders. He watched, with mounting excitement.
"You're ugly," she said, "the ugliest man I've ever set eyes on."
"Zoe."
"Yes, Jason."
"Come here."
"I can't abide invalids," Zoe Silk said, "particularly coal-black ones."
"I might kill you."
"Tomorrow I shall marry Count Volpe in this room. Afterwards you will challenge him to a duel and be killed ignominiously. Volpe and I will spend our wedding night making love on your coffin."
"You really are a bitch," Jason sighed, climbing out of bed and advancing upon her in a condition which his thin cotton pyjamas did nothing to conceal. She backed into a corner, the burnished blue shields of her eyes reflecting his passion in a minute, but exact, image. His mouth folded over hers. He pressed her against the wall, gripping her shoulders and gradually forcing back her head. Her arms broke free and encircled his neck, her hair cascaded around him, they clung together, suffocated by the burden which their love entailed, yet marvelling at their brief, fragmentary contact with the most miraculous of American dreams. He took her hand and guided it to his perpendicular penis; her lungs contracted at the moment of contact, but he held her there until finally she began to tremble with such passion that he lifted her up and carried her to the bed.
"Jason."
"Zoe."
"Do you want me now?"
He reacted quickly, pulling away from her, leaving her stranded on the bed like some beautiful fish cast upon the lonely shore of Eros. He knew what he wanted from this woman, he had known from the moment he first saw her at the cocktail party at Sutton Place. He wanted to endow the whole span of his black life with her white beauty, her wealth, her style, her class, her elegance, her ideas, her friends. He wanted to escape from his condition, the bleak destiny of his pigmentation; in the violent chemistry of metamorphosis, Zoe Silk would be his lifelong catalyst.
"It's not that simple," he said. "I may be your slave, but I'm not your pawn. There are questions of history which need to be answered, insults to be avenged, humiliations to be matched with counter-humiliations before we begin to consume one another in earnest."
"Jason, Jason, you are my destiny," she whispered, and she took him to the sea, as promised, to the wilder Atlantic shores of New England, where the ocean rolled forward and crashed on the rocks in huge, spiralling breakers, sending a fine spray over the boatmen working patiently with paint, tar, nails, and sail cloth on their beached craft. Even here he was jealous.
"Did Volpe show you all this?"
"Volpe is dead," she said. "He died the moment you rose from your bed like a terrible ebony Lazarus, breaking the bonds of your slavery, and advanced on me with that great monument of fertility bared for battle."
He kissed her neck.
"I love you," he said.
"And I you, perhaps."
"The sea is very simple," he said, "but it makes a man feel small."
"But you are not small; you are a lion."
"I can't even swim. I guess I've always shirked an unequal struggle with the elements—except when I saw you. And then, as I've told you, the choice was not mine. I'm like my father; our realm is the centrally heated frontier of the great indoors."
"And your brother?"
"Haydon is different."
"Is he a great swimmer, magnificent and strong in the waves?"
"I guess so."
"And a great lover too?"
"Some seem to think so."
He reached for his cigarettes and lit one by turning his back to the wind and shielding the match with his hands. Even so, he wasted five matches.
"Haydon once told me," Jason said, "that he would never sleep with a white woman because he didn't like whites, and it was debasing to sleep with someone you didn't like. He wanted to avoid debasing himself in the presence of a white person."
She thought about this gravely. He scooped up a handful of shingle and let it run through his fingers. The smaller, damper grains clung to his hand.
"I've broken with Haydon, if you want to know."
"But isn't he courageous and good—doesn't he fight for justice?"
"Oh sure. It takes real courage and goodness to place your father's career in jeopardy, to break the law, to foster the image of the Negro as a delinquent, to mix with Reds and God knows who, people who make a profession, an ethic out of hate. America doesn't mean anything to them."
"And to you?"
Blue eyes, like frost—and sea beyond, in controlled turmoil.
"It's all we've got," he said.
Zoe Silk ran away down the long beach, lithe and slender in her gray, shapeless skirt, thick man's sweater and flat English shoes. She made the boatmen turn and glower at Jason with the superstitious resentment of a Druid chorus. She laughed and threw a stone which landed at his feet. He was surprised by her strength. He went after her, pale with fury at the thought of Haydon and what Haydon might do to this girl with his brutal, insensitive hands. She ran. He chased her along the beach and pulled her down laughing into the long grass of the dunes.
He was already erect. They kissed one another with prolonged intensity. Her body charged him with an almost unbearable desire.
"And you, Jason, do you also hate white women too much to make love to them?"
"Can't you feel?"
"My tutors warn me to distinguish between thought and action."
"Bluestocking."
"Black bull."
He said, "I like your father."
Her face clouded. "I know, he told me. He took you around the Stock Exchange and the Museum."
"Does he ... like me?"
"My father?"
"Your father."
"Listen, Jason, my father wouldn't want you to screw me even if he took you to the top of the Empire State Building. He's not a force for you to reckon with, let me make that abundantly clear. He's a force for you to reckon strictly without."
"I didn't know your voice could sound like that."
"Like what?"
"Like a mistress rebuking her servant."
She pushed her fist gently under his chin. "If I don't shelter myself behind the power and wealth of my parents, I don't see why you should bring them into this. I'm sorry for being angry with you, but I am."
He kissed her again, slowly. She relaxed a little. The temptation to make love to her was terrible.
"Jason."
"Zoe."
"I don't demand anything of you, except that you be yourself and that you take from me what you want to take without ever glancing over your shoulder at 'the only America we've got.'" "A man is always himself. You have your image of me, to which I suppose I must conform."
"Jason," she said with an unbending, open gaze, "take me now, take me now."
"Here?" he whispered. The panic was upon him again.
"Here."
He leaned on his elbows and peered across the windswept dunes of grass, in the direction of the toiling boatmen. They were far away. His mind was empty; he couldn't remember what men did in such a situation, all those hours spent in the movies had taught him nothing. A basic primeval fear of fornication, miscegenation, conception, illegitimacy and punishment anchored his desire in dead ground.
"You might have a child," he whispered, as if they could be overheard.
"I'm wearing something," she said.
He remembered Dorothy Marshall and the careless disregard for her future with which he had thrust into her. He had been lucky that time and consequently felt no guilt. Zoe Silk tormented him; already she was beginning to mock his reticence and to call it impotence. Her dancing eyes seemed to say, "The animal kingdom is endowed with the gift of carnal desire; to reject this joy is to negate our very natures; your inhibitions are petit bourgeois and contemptible. The ability to revel in love making is the true mark of high breeding and strength of character."
Yet she said none of this. It was all in his mind.
His head collapsed on her shoulder, heavy with despair.
"America has done this to me," he said.
He was surprised by her gentleness. Her hands consoled his aching skull.
" 'The only America we've got,' remember?"
He rolled on to his back, relinquishing his claim to her stomach, breasts and thighs, and committed his fragile courage to the opaque clouds blowing fast inland from the west, and to the capricious gulls swerving lower in the wind.
"I'd like," he said, "to wake up a different man in another country."
Zoe leaned over him.
"Jason." "Zoe."
"Will you come away with me? Somewhere where we can be alone, just you and I, just us together."
"Could you fix that? I mean-"
"You mean my parents. You're supposed to be my lover not my chaperone. We can visit my aunt in Washington for a start, very respectable; Daddy's bound to lend me the Cadillac, he's always generous."
"And after Washington?"
"Apres le deluge—nous."
She forced a long strand of grass between his lips, then brushed them with her own, bringing a last spasm of fire to his loins. Climbing on top of him, she bit deep into his neck, and it was all he could do not to throw away everything.
One day in early spring Jason had a chance encounter with his brother in the street, several blocks up from Washington Square. Haydon greeted him warmly.
"I thought you never strayed out of the Deep South these days," Jason said.
Haydon disregarded the sneer. "Yeah, I've got a load of conferences and committee meetings up here. You know— talk, talk and more talk."
Spells in prison had left no visible mark on him. This fact vaguely oppressed Jason.
"Did you hear about Pa's new appointment?"
"Oh sure. I don't expect the climate in Coppernica will help Ma's complexion any."
"I don't suppose your activities will help Pa's appointment any."
"Pa doesn't need any help from me."
"Ever heard of the Torrington Committee?"
"You work for the FBI nowadays? Is the pay good?"
"I've been thinking," Jason said, staring at the sidewalk. "I've learned quite a bit in the last year or two, as a matter of fact. You're wrong in seeking first the political kingdom. You're running short on understanding there, Haydon."
"I am?"
"All divisions—class divisions, race divisions, political splits —have to be traced to their ultimate source in man's personality. The essence of man is repression and neurosis. To heal society, we must first heal ourselves."
"Aha. Well, you're a Harvard man now, and you ought to lenow." He kicked a stone off the sidewalk into the gutter, where it ricocheted and struck the broken fragment of a Coke bottle.
"The pleasure and reality principles," Jason went on with a fierce, didactic urgency, "are at loggerheads. We won't be healed until we have abolished every dualism."
"You mean every time a white cop kicks me in the teeth or some whitey throws me off a lunch counter, I've got to tell myself, 'This bum is just a victim of repression and neurosis?'"
"Just so."
"Look, I'm in town for a few days. Why don't you and I meet someplace for a drink and a meal and maybe talk things over?"
"I'm pretty busy," Jason said. "I'm off on vacation tomorrow."
"Nice way to be busy," Haydon said amiably. "Where are you going?"
"Just bumming around in an old Cadillac with a girl I know."
Haydon whistled. "Hey, it's not that princess you were going to marry in NY Cathedral?"
"The lady's name is Zoe Silk, if you want to know."
"Okay, no offence. I'll be seeing you, then, Jason." He backed away a few paces and raised his arm in salute. Jason called after him, "Don't ever forget what our daddy did for us."
Haydon's eyes closed slowly, in weariness and sorrow. Then he turned and strode away, towards the Village.
at midday the heat of the sun became overpowering. Refusing to contemplate a pause, a siesta, a moment's refuge in the shade, Andre Laval forced his men forward down a narrow jungle trail, determined to reach Zolanga by nightfall. Barbs clung to Jason's clothing and his thighs quivered with fatigue. The separate blisters on his feet had coalesced into a single, burning sore.
"Say, James."
The tall Englishman shortened his stride, with a hint of condescension.
"Yes?"
"How is he so goddam sure they came along here, anyway?"
"It's obvious," James said.
Jason glanced at him resentfully. Caffrey was getting pretty full of himself; he and the Commandant were about as close as jam and bread. But Jason's resentment soon died in the heat; the sun had boiled his brain into a mushy stew.
Laval dropped back to walk at his side.
"The natives use arrows," he said.
"Yeah?"
"The local poisons are fatal. Five minutes of excruciating
agony, macaque, and then-" With a gesture, he summoned
death.
Butterflies fashioned fragile traceries against the sky and the acid bile of fatigue stiffened Jason's limbs to the texture of wood. He sensed Laval's contempt, and his mania, his obsessive determination to redeem some private trauma buried in the black waters of his past. Fear billowed in Jason's guts intermittently, like a smell—he was afraid of the silent, watchful enemy, of his own ancestral people with their terrible hatred rooted, apparently, in an insane yet undeniable
448
justice. An ammunition belt hung across his chest like a broken piano board.
James had taken over Deedes' pack besides his own. Laval sought him out yet again.
"Have you read Sorel?"
"Yes."
"You agree with his comments on the effete liberalism of your race?"
"Simple Anglophobia," James said.
Laval scowled. He didn't like to be contradicted.
"Maya is master now," he said. "In this environment Tukhomada is nothing, a city rat drowned in green slime. I have been here before. In those days Carrier commanded us, a cretin, a coward. I supervised his execution."
"You?"
Laval nodded solemnly.
"I understand Cartier to have been murdered by mutinous African troops."
"Correct."
For some time they marched in silence.
"You were responsible?" James said.
"Naturally."
"For the whole affair?"
Laval laughed shortly. "Innocence is akin to negligence."
Hearing this, Malcolm Deedes felt less than ever in doubt that the tin god, the pillar of salt, had gone over to Laval. It was to be expected; officers stuck together; that conspiracy was truly universal. By now Deedes' legs progressed mechanically, propelled by the elastic of a lifetime's obedience. Warm images of gentle farmlands brewed in his head, and the steady whirring of insects comforted him, as did the purple francs nestling in his pocket, crisp and thick, and the contract lodged in his pack, to be consulted in case of injury, or worse.
"We could rest," he heard James suggest
"Why?" said Laval.
"The others are tired."
"I have to gamble. Maya is capable of raising a popular army in half an hour. Speed is everything. To have left the convoy and the equipment in the care of a handful of native soldiers, without an officer, is in itself a terrible gamble. We are not women."
James glanced back at Deedes, with a hint of compassion.
Laval cut through the dense undergrowth like a destroyer through a March sea.
"Do you have a woman?" he asked James.
"I suppose so."
Laval laughed; for an instant genuine amusement hovered in his brown eyes. "You suppose!" James didn't look pleased.
"In my experience the people who talk the most about women have the least to talk about."
"That's an old myth," Laval said. "Like the notion that all bullies are cowards."
James glanced at him quickly.
"Bailey is doing all this for a woman," he said. "Pathetic, really."
"Is she beautiful?"
"Very."
"An African?"
"She's white."
Laval's face clouded. "I'll tell you something. Man makes history. Woman is history. Woman despises the male sphere of politics, which she can never comprehend and which insists on taking her sons from her. I know that to be true, Caffrey. I have suffered in my life."
James remembered his mother lying upstairs in her darkened room a year after Alec's death, while the Colonel drank gins at the club—and, much later, in the low tide of his confidence, Sara begging him to enter before it was too late.
"Bailey shouldn't be here," he said.
"A hostage," Laval said.
A dragonfly.
Malcolm Deedes trudged behind them, almost bent double by the exertion, even though James had taken his pack, the huge boulder, from his back. He shook his head slowly.
"A hostage," he muttered, "the Americano."
Laval appraised him sadly. "In Kenya you made a mistake, old derelict. Your life assassinated itself, you embraced treason as a man takes a whore, with a dirty conscience.
j,joW you're a fugitive and the hounds are forever at your heels. What occurred?"
Deedes' eyes were alive with despair.
"I'm loyal, sir. I've never gone along with rebellion, the canker of dissent, dinny trust these blackies, sir, Mau Mau to
a man, they're always lookin' for trouble, savages, primitives
»»
"The cancer lies in the breast," Laval said.
No one knew to whom.
Propelled by loneliness, Jason quickened his stride now, passing up the long column of soldiers with averted eyes. They watched him with interest and faint disbelief.
"The Americano," Deedes announced, hoping to christen a jester and to divert attention. He shook his head in ribaldry; or his head shook. Laval waited until Jason drew level.
"So you have a white girl, eh?"
Jason glowered angrily at James.
"Sure," he said.
"And are you now prepared to slaughter your own kind without scruples or regret?"
"My own kind?"
"Les noirs."
"I don't happen to see it that way, Commandant. I've never taken much account of colour, if you want to know."
"Ah." Laval watched him.
"Thing is, I believe that all these divisions—class, race and so on—can be traced ultimately to man's personality. The essence of man is repression and neurosis. We shall not be healed until we've abolished every dualism."
Jason was sweating.
"What do you think?" Laval consulted James.
James hesitated. He saw that Jason's physical batteries had already run down and that he was now keeping going on his nerves alone.
"What he says is very interesting," James said.
Laval looked disappointed. He turned abruptly to Deedes, reaching for his throat.
"The Russian!"
"Wha'?"
"The Russian—where is he?"
Deedes searched the faces around him, then the green jungle wall, miming an investigation, suggesting residual jun-glecraft, a veteran's knack. The column had halted. James stood with hand on hip, watching the Commandant with a troubled frown. Jason had turned away,
Laval held Deedes' chin in his hand.
"Everything tells me that you're contaminated, a spy, a man of ancient treason."
"He's just tired," James said.
"Did I ask your opinion?" Laval snapped.
Their eyes met and sparred with fortune.
"Obedience must be founded on respect," James said in English, in a language which the soldiers could not understand. "Command is a trust as well as a privilege."
In the tall jungle there was no sound except the laboured breathing of men. Laval's hand still held Deedes' chin as in a vice. Only the more experienced of the native soldiers knew that they were under constant observation; veterans of the war of independence, they had the most to fear. James turned away, his part of an implicit bargain, and when he looked back Deedes was once more at liberty, nursing a grievance as large as a bruise. The column moved forward again, and James began to assess the significance of the small incident which had passed. Laval, he had to admit, had begun to flower in his imagination like an exotic plant, the logical extension, it seemed, of Soames. Had not Soames remarked, during their last walk together at Tufton Manor, "Like Cortes and Livingstone, our genius and heroism will be moulded in the face of the unknown."
It occurred to him for the first time that the names of Laval and Lemmon both began with L. He pondered the matter.
Towards evening they had come within a mile of Zolanga.
"These people," Jason was saying, "understand only one sort of language. I know that for a fact."
Deedes nudged him. The Negro recoiled.
"He's got somat on yer, darkie."
"I know what I'm doing," Jason said. "Don't take me for a fool."
Their weariness was like God, the whole universe. Laval would not rest. The anesthesia of exhaustion; their shirts were streaked with white lines of salt, and under their armpits, beneath their belts, the cloth was soggy with sweat. Tomorrow, perhaps it would rot. Once, Deedes gasped and leaped. Feeling a web's light feet tread his skin, he had come face to face with a spider six inches in diameter; he groaned. The jungle heaved and swayed, was soft and yielding, branches whipped into their faces. The soldiers had become tense and unsmiling; they feared death—and capture even more. They remembered the war of independence, and the mood of the peasants.
"Fanatics," Laval warned, "fight bravely."
"Savages," Deedes murmured, shaking. James Caffrey's broad and unbending back began once again to annoy him. His dejection had deepened. The year of rest with Mrs. Standen had evidently been a delusion, likewise the push-ups in Stanley Clough's Mayfair gymnasium. He was back where he started—in the wire cage outside the Superintendent's office, crouching among the Mau Mau, wetting his pants. A cloud of gnats flickered about his hands and face, goaded his hot flesh with tiny bites. Jason was cursing and thrashing his arms, but the big tin god appeared not to notice, so intense was his reverie. Caffrey had gone mad.
Now they forced themselves on in nervous spasms.
... dreaming of Zoe Silk, running south and west along the Jersey shore at sunset, the Atlantic breakers high and salty, those fishermen's eyes and the silver Porsche. Caffrey was the sort of man she might love. For a moment Jason thought of shooting him in the back, the big, unbending back which bore two packs ... She shimmered in the heat, a fragile ghost melting into the trees, embracing the soldiers ... People allowed words to imprison them, even Edgar Hemming, there was no point in pondering the morality of it all, as Caffrey did, swept hour by hour into an insane fanaticism of his own making. Laval just watched him, with his razor-sharp brown face and his black eyes. What had he meant about being a "hostage"?
At the head of the column Laval and James Caffrey dropped to their knees; drifting above the trees in paper-veil whispers, touching their nostrils with an abrasive yet discreet
finger, coiled the smoke of Zolanga. Jason crouched against the dry earth, a man clenched like a fist, closer to naked fear and blind panic than he had ever been before. He waited. A vast silence presided over the condemned playground.
TWENTY-THREE
zoe drove to begin with. They came through the Lincoln Tunnel and stopped at the toll gate.
"Darling, there's money in my purse," she said.
"I can afford it," Jason said.
The toll collector peered through the window. "Hope you're not going far," he said grinning at Zoe and revealing blackened teeth. His eyes were opaque with disappointed lust. Zoe pulled away before Jason could reply.
"Even in New York," she said sadly.
He sat beside her, pale and tense, as they ran smoothly along the Jersey shore. The evening sky was slashed with wheels of merging colour, and the sun hung like an orange balloon behind the distant, scale-model skyline of New York City. Against this immense backcloth, superb feats of engineering and human ingenuity—suspension bridges, refineries, power stations—assumed a functional beauty of their own. And poised like a lantern in the nearer darkness there was Zoe's face, soft and luminous, the torch of all his happiness. She drove the big Cadillac along the crowded, fast-moving turnpike with ease and assurance, and after a while he dreamed of taking the controls.
"That's my little old New York," he said sentimentally.
"Do you know Senghor's poem?"
"Is he an American?"
The embraces of knowledge, she knew, were capricious, and the truth, like God, belonged to everyone. She was not tempted to smile.
"No, he's an African. In his poem he describes how shy he was at first when he came to New York—'confused by your beauty, by those great golden long-legged girls, so shy at first before your blue metallic eyes, your frosted smile ...' But gradually he gets to know and like the town. He goes up to Harlem. 'I saw them preparing the festival of night for escape from the day. I proclaim the night more truthful than the day.'"
"More truthful?" Jason said, a little peevishly.
"It's a metaphor," she said.
"Maybe I was wise to stick to government."
The traffic began to thin out, leaving them in command of the unending silver ribbon of highway. The Cadillac travelled with the consistent rhythm of a train, flashing past the townlets which sprawled at the roadside, enticing the hungry, the tired and the heavy-bladdered with twinkling neon signs: "Miami," "Florida," "Donut City," "Kwik Kooker"— outriders of the South.
After a while Zoe asked him whether he would like to drive.
"Just as you like."
"I don't mind," she said.
"I don't mind either."
She pulled off the turnpike at the next restaurant. "A girl gets tired," she said, leaning her head on his shoulder and feeling in his stiffness the measure of his apprehension. They went inside. Sitting on high stools, they ordered doughnuts and coffee. People stared at the girl, then at the Negro; finally their eyes settled on the girl again, haunted and reproachful.
"Another ninety minutes," he said, "and we should make Washington."
"Maybe we shouldn't try to reach Aunt Laura tonight," Zoe said. "I could ring her."
"Why?"
"There's a motel here."
"So?"
She saw the dryness on his lower lip and took his hand.
"I guess Aunt Laura might be too much too soon. She'll eat us alive. In her loneliness she condemns and devours whole cities, races and tribes. It comes of reading the Old Testament in the bath."
"I thought that was the whole idea—flagellation."
She threw him a look of reproach and reached for her purse.
"I'll pay," he said.
"Darling, I'm your slave."
He liked that; Dorothy would have said, "You wear the pants, I guess." They walked back to the Cadillac hand in hand. He took the wheel and turned the great ship south, towards Washington. After a while his eyes became adjusted to the long corridors of darkness and the flaming arrows of oncoming headlights; switching on the radio, he found a station which supplied a day-and-night service of canned Tchaikovsky. He knew very well why Zoe had wanted to stop for the night at the motel—another manoeuvre to bring him down, to break the seal of their chastity and to reduce his status to that of abject servitude. Could he have resisted her advances? Only an insane, aesthetic ambition shielded him against her soft, creamy skin, her straight, golden hair cut to touch lightly upon her rounded shoulders, her small, high breasts and her long, model's legs. Whatever she wore, whether wool, tweed or fine cotton, she filled his head with a simple, obvious lust; and her exquisitely moulded features contrived to suggest that his inhibitions were both philistine and plebeian. It was easy to lose sight of her own pain—and to cease to know her.
The Silks had several times entertained the Baileys, including a joint expedition to the theatre (a musical which, in Amanda's estimation, they could be relied on to "understand"). And once, amid a flurry of extravagant spending, Lucille had brought the white people uptown to the Riverton apartment. The two fathers approached one another with guarded respect; their professions and mental habits separated them more deeply than did their skins. Zoe reacted to Lucille's effusive, and occasionally backhanded, compliments with reserve; the Negro woman pronounced her "cold as ice." The mothers didn't get on at all; Lucille bridled in the face of Amanda's patronizing politeness, while Mrs. Silk herself privately condemned the "Bailey's people" for imitating a stratosphere of society which they could not hope to understand. Jason treated her with scrupulous courtesy, while manoeuvring to pitch his tent in the heart of Chester Silk. Chester discovered that Jason, like himself, followed baseball in general, the Yankees in particular and the World Series always. When he ventured the "unfashionable" opinion that regular exercise had been one of the cornerstones of the American character, it transpired that he had snatched the very words from Jason's mouth. Together they struck up a robust, philistine front against Zoe's aestheticism, exiling belles-lettres and modern art to the sphere of the eternally feminine. Jason proved to be equally well informed on worldwide investment potentialities and areas of prospective political instability. Bearing in mind the rumours concerning the lawlessness of Jason's brother, Chester found Jason's own aversion to political extremism and violence very reassuring. As for Zoe, her father saw that Jason regarded her with a proper awe and deference, and that she, with characteristic good nature, had determined to be kind to the young man.
"Jason's on the level, and no fool either," he told Amanda.
"He wants to marry Zoe," she said.
"Phaw! Every man who sets eyes on that girl, you say he wants to marry her."
"They invariably do."
"If there's one thing I'd stake my last cent on," said Chester Silk, "it's that Jason won't force his unwelcome attentions on our Zoe."
She said, with taut emotion, "You're blind, Chester. Why do you think Zoe had borrowed the Cadillac?"
"What's so strange? She wants to take the guy to Washington, to see Aunt Laura and to show him the White House and Capitol Hill and so forth. What's wrong with that? You, Amanda, have this goddam suspicious mind which feeds poison into everything. I tell you, it depresses me."
Already a warmer air, a premonition of the South, touched Jason's cheek. The stillness between them deepened; it ceased, somehow, to be voluntary.
They reached Laura Silk's house soon after nine. A Negro servant took their cases. The old lady greeted them thinly on her front doorstep; she was thin and green under the green door lantern, and her hair was rinsed silver, with a touch of pink. Her feet pained her. She clasped Zoe to her coldly, automatically, creating in Jason the impression that she should have been Amanda's sister rather than Chester's. Fi. nally she focused cold, frog's eyes on the young Negro and extended her hand.
"You're a friend of Zoe," she said.
"That's it," he mumbled.
"Come in, then. Did you have difficulty finding us in the dark?"
"Zoe is an excellent guide," Jason said.
She stood and looked at him listening to his accent, weighing and assessing it long after the sound waves had dispersed, like a wine taster whose palate is slow to judge.
"Jack will show you to your room," she said dismissively. He followed the black servant upstairs, then unpacked and washed as slowly as he could, anxious to avoid going downstairs until Zoe had. He combed his hair and straightened his tie several times before accepting the inevitability of the descent.
Laura Silk was folded in a rocking chair, moving as a vulture nods, with intelligence, a frail, wasting woman surrounded by family photographs, potted plants, aspidistras and terra-cotta busts. Chester Silk was reproduced in more forms than one: a photo, a silhouette, a bust—evidently in place of a husband. Long ago, before the talkies, she had been jilted by an uptown lawyer.
"They call me a cave dweller," she was saying, but directing her remarks to Zoe, "because I've been here so long. Nearly forty years." The words came slowly and her accent brought to him the first sharp tang of the South.
"Are you happy here, Aunt Laura?" Zoe said.
"If people came to visit me more often. Chester—your father—doesn't write very frequently, you know."
"I'll chastise him," Zoe said.
"No, dear, don't do that. If he wanted to write, he would." She turned slowly towards the large cactus which stood like a Martian sentinel beside the shuttered window. "A single old woman is just a burden. It's fortunate that I can make ends meet. But for how long, only the powers upstairs know, prices in Washington go up and up."
"Why is that?" Zoe said with luminous innocence.
"People coming in," Laura Silk said. "Foreign diplomats on big budgets. And others too. White people have been forced into certain areas like Georgetown, and here."
"That's a great shame," Zoe said.
"Everything is changing. Governments bow before the least wind of popular pressure these days. Perhaps they have to. I wouldn't know. Personally, I don't think you can force people in their ways."
She pressed a bell and the butler appeared.
"Bring some more ice, Pedro, to freshen the drinks."
Pedro bowed and went out.
"He doesn't understand much English," she explained. "He comes from some Spanish island. I don't recall which. When you consider some of the ideas that are being expressed in the English language these days, I can't find it in my heart to be sorry that Pedro and his wife are cut off from them. These new ideas don't make people happy." Laura Silk turned to Jason. "Don't you ag-ee, Mr. Bailey?"
"Absolutely I agree."
"Does your friend have advanced opinions?" she asked Zoe. For a moment malice, a malice born of frustration, dented Zoe's porcelain cheeks and lent fire to her eyes.
"He's very intelligent," Zoe said.
The old lady moved the whole of her trunk to bring him into line. She said, "Oh," and stared at him mildly, blinking.
"One can be too intelligent," she said. "I've always said that a man can be too clever by half. Have you two known one another long? Were you properly introduced?"
Jason realized that Zoe intended the answer to be his. She moved her legs—he had to look—Aunt Laura seemed to catch him looking. Jacob was wrestling with the angel.
"My father's a diplomat," he said. "He's been appointed to help Zoe's father in Coppernica."
"Yes, but I asked whether you'd been properly introduced." Her neck extended itself by an inch, reminding him of an irate swan. Her quick eyes were exploring his black soul.
"I guess we just ran into one another," he said, barely above a whisper.
"Are you at Harvard?"
"He's studying government," Zoe said.
"Can't he answer for himself?"
Jason cleared his throat. "My father's a diplomat, you see, and I'm planning to follow in his footsteps."
"Really?"
"Yes."
"And how long has it been since that started?"
He hesitated. His hands were hot and damp. He disengaged them. It seemed as if Zoe had removed herself from the theatre of combat and withdrawn into a mood of faintly disdainful abstention; as if her aunt's opinions and his own failure to demolish them mildly disgusted her.
"This is my second year," he said.
"I meant how long is it since they began admitting coloured people at Harvard?"
He badly needed a cigarette, but there was no ashtray in sight. The old lady might regard it as a bad form if he were to smoke; or it might make her cough and die.
"I don't know, exactly."
She stared at him. "I should have thought you would take the trouble to find out."
He drank his scotch down until only the ice tinkled in the tall glass.
"Help yourself to some more," she said at once, but dryly, in condemnation of his thirst.
"No thanks, I'm fine."
"You seem to be very thirsty. Was it the drive?" She turned to Zoe, as if to find out why the Negro was thirsty.
"I expect Jason would like to smoke," Zoe said, "if you wouldn't mind."
Laura Silk regarded him thoughtfully, then pressed the bell.
"Bring the gentleman an ashtray," she told the butler.
"Two ashtrays, please," Zoe called, then laughed, a little flushed.
"Have you been to England?" Laura Silk wanted to know.
"No, I'd like to," Jason said.
"Why?"
He was speechless.
"Zoe's mother is English. Her elder brother is the Earl of Wycombe. One refers to him as Lord Wycombe. We used to visit. We visited Oxford and Henley. There was a time when I knew most of the country houses in the south of England."
"Really," Jason said.
She said, "Do they still have the clubs and fraternities at
Harvard?"
"I don't actually belong to any myself—" Jason began. Zoe cut him short. Two angry spots glowed in her cheeks, like bruises. His heart sank; he could never please her, never. He knew himself—twenty-two years was enough.
"Most of my admirers are clubmen," Zoe told Laura Silk. "It's de rigueur. Larry Darlington—do you know who I mean, the Senator's son?—belongs to absolutely all the clubs."
"Is he your beau, Zoe?"
Zoe's eyes flashed with malice. "He keeps proposing. I don't know, there are so many men in the world."
"Things die out," Laura Silk said. "Not all of them bad things. In my father's day, the poor students at Harvard used to wait on the better-off ones, in order to work their way through college. Does that still go on?"
"You must ask Jason," Zoe said.
"Not that I know of," Jason said. His throat clogged.
"Well, I daresay you'd know if it did," Laura Silk said. "Of course, times are changing. It's perfectly possible to be a wealthy Negro now. I'm told that some exist in New York. Is your family wealthy, Mr. Bailey?"
"We're comfortably off," he said
"Oh."
Zoe said, "Uncle Soames always says that modest wealth is inhibiting, that it cramps a man's style and puts him on the defensive. That only the rich have courage and imagination."
Jason glowered at the potted plants and the terra-cotta busts. His anger was rising. Once again his hostess' mind had darted off at an unpredictable tangent.
"Are you travelling without a chaperone, then?"
"Oh, Aunt Laura," Zoe said.
"What do you mean, 'oh, Aunt Laura'?"
"Don't you think Jason looks trustworthy?"
"He's a man. You're a woman. Hadn't you found out?"
Jason stood up. "If you'll excuse me, Miss Silk, I'll turn in now." He stood waiting to be dismissed.
"What will you do tomorrow?" the aunt said. "You can stay here as long as you like. It's all the same to me."
"We'll have to be getting along," Zoe said.
"Where to?"
Zoe hesitated. "We have some friends—college friends— who live in Princeton. They've very kindly-"
"Your mother never said anything about friends," Laura Silk interposed, "when she rang me."
Jason was backing towards the staircase, clearing his throat and shifting his weight from one leg to the other.
"Well, good night, then."
Laura Silk nodded curtly and Zoe shot him a peculiar, enigmatic smile compounded, it seemed, of tenderness and contempt. He went upstairs in a mood of profound melancholy, pulled off his clothes and flung himself between the crisp sheets of the heavy, four-poster bed with which he had thoughtfully been provided. Presently he heard the two women come upstairs, and eventually the light on the landing went out and the house was silent. Where in hell's name were they going? Back to New York? They had never discussed the matter. Jason, for his part, had imagined that they would remain in Washington for several days; it certainly hadn't occurred to him that Zoe would deliver him into the jaws of a Gorgon from whom immediate escape was the only course. He climbed out of bed and, with the utmost caution, openec the door. Only fifteen paces separated him from Zoe's bedroom, from Zoe. He thought about it; for ten minutes he stood barefooted in the dark, toying with a decision he knew he would not take. Finally he went back to bed and lay wide awake, staring at his life.
In the morning he felt tired and apprehensive. But whenever Aunt Laura addressed him, which wasn't very often, he took care to answer courteously. If Zoe had any definite plans, she was certainly giving nothing away.
At ten o'clock they took their leave. Jason sat behind the wheel and Zoe, not challenging this small act of self-assertion, slipped in beside him, sheathed in a silk frock which clung to her body like cellophane.
"You're sure you'll be all right?" Laura Silk asked her with a mild, ritual anxiety.
"Absolutely sure. Jason's quite tame. He's housebroken and car-broken."
"I hope so," Aunt Laura said, not wishing to be convinced.
They drove down into the centre of Washington and then Jason parked the car. The sky was clouding over and threatening rain.
"You really are a bitch," he said. "Housebroken!"
Zoe looked troubled. She took his hand tentatively. "Jason, this can't go on."
"What can't?"
She sighed and leaned back in the seat, staring at the automobiles streaming down Pennsylvania Avenue towards the Capitol.
"So what next?" he said. "Thanks very much for introducing me to your aunt. A truly charming lady."
"Jason, I've made a decision. It's something I can't go back on; if I did I'd hate and despise myself forever. There was a moment last night when that woman was going for you and you—you just cringed, Jason, and then I thought, do I really love this man? And I knew that there was only one hope."
"Yeah?"
"I'm going south. You can come if you want. I hope you will."
She watched him calmly.
"South! Are you crazy? How far south?"
"To the deepest of the deep, where you've never been."
"You're crazy!"
"Maybe."
"But, Jesus, why? A Negro and a white girl travelling together in the South. Listen, you need treatment."
"Yes, I do. I need exactly that—treatment."
"Just us together, huh, in this glass cage of yours?"
"There's no law against it."
"Law! Did you ever hear of lynch law for example?"
"Are you afraid?"
"I'm scared stiff."
"Your brother went."
"Not with a goddam white girl," he said angrily. "I expect he would—if he wanted to." "Yeah? You'd know all about that, of course, never having met him."
Zoe turned back towards Pennsylvania Avenue. "You'll have to come," she said, "if you want me."
He stared at her incomprehendingly. "What's gotten into you? You're not a sadist, are you? I mean, you don't want to see me torn limb from limb. Sometimes I get the feeling that you really do hate my guts."
She took his face gently between her hands and lightly brushed his lips with her own. "Jason." He was silent.
"Jason, I'm not cruel," she whispered, "I'm not." "I daresay you had this planned out all along." "No, I didn't have it planned out all along. At least not consciously, not in the front of my mind. At any time since we left New York you could have done the one thing necessary to prevent this. But you didn't. And I don't want to give up, I want to fight, I want to build, to create, to do something utterly triumphant and redeeming." He took her arms from around his neck. "What about your parents? You never told them about this, huh?"
"Jason, I've told you before: my parents are a factor you can reckon strictly without. They are my concern, not yours." "Listen—what's this one thing I could have done?" "Oh Jason ..." "Well, tell me!"
She shook her head. "I don't have the words. It's something you can't plan; it has to happen spontaneously or not at all."
"But it's damned sure to happen down in the South, is tha it?"
"Couldn't you speak to me more gently? You did once say, you know, that what you felt for me was love."
He had nothing to say. She took his hand and carried it to her lips.
As they drove into Virginia, the clouds and the threat of rain dispersed, leaving the bright sun sole regent of the sky. A warm breeze blew into the Cadillac, ruffling Zoe's hair and coaxing her eyes towards sleep. Her beauty suffocated him.
Even in prospect the South terrified him, unseen but impending like a vast, submarine iceberg. He kept wondering where the border was, where the line was. His face was set rigid, and he drove with extreme caution, scanning the roadside for enemy territory, the impending iceberg, bracing himself for the sudden impact against the frail hull of his blackness.
"You've been down here before, huh?"
"Twice," she said.
"Where does it start—the South?"
"You'll know when it talks to you."
Everything seemed to him the same—the gas stations, advertising the same brand names, the automobiles, the restaurants called Donut City, Diner, Kwik Kooker. Even the people—the men in white shirts and cotton pants, and the Negroes too—looked no different.
"What a bitch you are," he said. "I could have killed you."
"I'm so young," she said mournfully, "so very young."
"You sure are a bitch out of Hell," he said.
He noticed that the gas in the tank was running low. The needle began to wobble near zero. Half unconsciously he had been putting off the moment of confrontation. But now he was forced into a filling station.
A young white boy walked through the sunlight towards them. His face remained impassive.
"Fill her up, please."
The heat inside the car intensified. Zoe sprawled on the seat, apparently half asleep. Her body mocked him. The gas-pump dial whirled in a familiar way; he felt reassured.
The boy came back. "Four dollars ten," he said.
Jason brought out his wallet. "Keep the change," he said, anxious to leave, to get away. The boy said nothing.
Jason said, "That was okay." He had to say something.
"You were very brave, darling," she murmured.
"You sure are a bitch," he said.
Half an hour later they came into the wide, empty streets of Richmond.
"Stop here," Zoe said.
He pulled to the side of the road. He nodded slowly angrily; his head had begun to ache in the heat.
"Want your shoes shined maybe?" he said.
"I'll drive," she said, getting out and coming around to his side, waiting for him to shift over.
"It helps me," he said with a hint of desperation. "It's therapy."
She tilted her head impatientiy, conveying her exasperation at his childishness. Retreating across the hot leather of the front seat, making room behind the wheel, he felt galled by the inevitability of her victory.
She turned the key and a discreet vibration signified the engine's return to life.
"Well," she said, taking his hand.
"What are we waiting for?" His voice cracked on the last word.
"Jason, Jason, when are you going to stop running? Every man has to be an activity, every patrimony has to be inherited."
"They never told me."
She turned away, and after that they didn't speak for more than an hour. As they headed for Wilmington, North Carolina, almost three hundred miles to the south, the land became lush and swampy, endowed with a sickly, feverish fertility. Crump Creek, the Brook—it was hotter, damper; the vegetation was green and profuse, as in Eden. Automobiles bearing New York licence plates swept north from Florida, carrying his caged fears with them. Drowsy and drained of all resources, he allowed his head to loll on the back of the seat, like a broken doll's.
"Do you want to stop and pee?" she asked eventually.
"No."
"It's your bladder, not mine."
"That's right."
He watched the miles accumulating on the speedometer. This must surely be the Deep. A jolt of renewed fear roused
I «>Look, why don't we talk this thing over?" he said.
"Okay, talk."
"What in hell's name is it that you want? Do you want me to rape you or something, is that it?"
She glanced at him sadly. "Shall I tell you what you're
like?"
"Nothing nice, I hope."
"You're like a man who refuses to eat the food set before him, but keeps insisting, "You want me to smash the plate, is that it?'"
Ahead of them lay a small cluster of single-story brick buildings. There were no people in sight, only a few old autos and garbage cans. He glanced at them casually as they passed. The sign over a door leaped at him like a snapping dog: "Coloreds." The hot white cinders of the road shimmered, and the sky fell on its back, an airless blue. He said aloud, "Oh, Christ." A vein had sprung to life in the side of his temple. Zoe pulled to a halt behind a school bus; little black girls in frilly blue and pink frocks, holding the hands of their small brothers, jumped down and disappeared up country tracks, laughing. He thought, "They have education, they seem happy. Who am I?" Old Negroes wearing slave hats and heavy, dark coats were lifting logs and digging by the roadside, in front of wooden shacks with porches, and women were sitting on the porches, watching and waiting.
Evening crept up on them.
"Tell me if you see a nice place to stop," Zoe said.
"What sort of place?"
He saw that she too was hungry, tired and apprehensive about this, their first crucial test, their moment of absolute confrontation with the forces they were challenging. For his own part, so welded was he to the sanctuary of the Cadillac that he would have been content to sleep the night in it. Except that if they were discovered together ...
A few miles short of Wilmington they entered a small town. Its low brick buildings were depressingly ugly, its shops trashy and its streets empty of life. A vague aura of violence hung over the town.
"Look out for a place," she said again.
A flashing light reflected in the mirror caught his eye; he turned and saw a police car following them through the empty streets. Suddenly it accelerated; the wail of the siren came at them like a blow in the face; the car passed them and waved them down. Two large policemen climbed out with an air of weary resignation, as if their whole lives were a burden, and approached the Cadillac slowly, one on either side.
Jason glanced at Zoe. "Let's stick together over this," he said.
The cops stared in at them, resting beefy arms on the open windows.
"Just passin' through?" one of them said to Zoe.
"Did I do something wrong?"
"Lady, we ask the questions within the limits of this town."
"We hadn't decided," she said.
"Driving licence, insurance."
She reached into her purse. The policeman examined her documents slowly, and with evident resentment at their authenticity.
The policeman on Jason's side said to him, "Is this your vehicle?"
"No."
"In this town, we are generally addressed as officer." The man's face was large and gentle and soft and pale.
The other policeman returned her papers to Zoe. He said, "Do you know what the speed limit is in this town?"
"Thirty, I imagine."
"You imagine? And what speed were you doing back there?"
"I don't know. Under thirty."
"How are you so sure it was under thirty if you don't know?"
Zoe bit her lip. But she didn't turn to Jason. The two policemen were smiling now and Jason's temper rose, burning out his fear.
"The lady was driving at twenty-seven miles an hour," he said.
The policeman on his side leaned farther through the window, bringing his face close to Jason's. His breath smelled 0f onions and beer.
"Passengers aren't valid witnesses," he said, enunciating each vowel with theatrical clarity.
They fell silent, smiling like cats.
"Do you have a charge, officer?" Jason said.
"Do you want one, Mister?" the cop on the far side said, smiling and chewing gum. "Are you from New York?"
"That's right," Jason said.
The policeman nodded gravely. His jaws worked faster on the gum. He smiled elaborately.
"Is it warm up there at present?"
"Do you have any reason for detaining us any further,
officer?"
The cop on the far side looked reproachful. "Your friend is very talkative," he said to Zoe.
She sat exhausted and on the verge of tears. Jason's anger
rose.
"Will you give me your name and number, officer?" he said. "I already have the number of your automobile."
They nodded to one another. The one nearest to him made a face, a grimace, as if to say, "Well, well, well."
"Can you count, then?" he said.
Jason said, "Look, it's plain to me that you are victimizing us. I shall report it."
The cop leaned right through the window and cupped his hand over his ear.
"Come again."
"I said, You are victimizing us.' "
Barely a foot separated their faces.
The cop withdrew his head and straightened his cap. "The bigger the word a nigger uses in this town, the bigger his sentence."
Jason felt Zoe's hand on his; and saw the downward deflection of the policeman's eyes, to record the coupling.
"Pity the lady's driving," he said to the other, through the window and across them. "Rules out a whole number of possible charges: abduction, kidnap, interstate-"
Zoe said, "Can we go now?"
The cop said to Jason, "What's your name?" "Jason Bailey."
"Address?"
He said, on impulse, "Care of Powell Bailey, US State Department, Washington."
"Is your daddy the Secretary of State, maybe, or the guy who sweeps the steps in the morning?"
Jason's throat was clogged with phlegm. "He knows the President."
Zoe's hand had fallen away from his own.
"Gee," the policeman said—his eyes had begun to flicker— "did the President visit the zoo or something?"
Jason reached for the door handle. "I'm going to telephone a lawyer," he said. But the cop leaned his weight against the door.
"Are you, nigger boy? Just where do you think you are?"
For some moments no one spoke; the policemen seemed to fall victim to inertia and anticlimax. Then the one on Jason's side, in a last attempt to rekindle the conflict, stepped back from the door and said, "Okay, black boy, are you gonna phone that lawyer?"
Suddenly Zoe erupted in a fury. She got out, slammed the door and positioned herself between the two policemen. She lashed them.
"Don't either of you have any decency? Don't you know that you are abusing your power? Don't you have families, or anything? Aren't you Christians, with some kindness and charity? I always heard that Southern people were kind-hearted."
"Listen, listen, listen," one of the cops was saying with guilty haste, almost before she had finished, "there's just one thing we won't put up with, see, and that's other folks coming down here and telling us how to live."
"We were minding nobody's business but our own," Zoe said indignantly.
The policemen stared at their shoes, at their revolver holsters, at the empty street.
"Thing is," the one with the gum said, "driving about with that guy in there looks like provocation, see? If ya want a word of friendly advice, miss, you're gonna run into trouble if you're not careful. I mean, folks feel that way around here, and you're not gonna change them overnight."
Gradually they fell back before her beauty, disarmed.
"Tell me," she commanded uncompromisingly, "where my friend and I can both find rooms. We want a hotel."
The policemen glanced at one another. The one with the gum removed his cap and scratched his head.
"Well, lady, there's a man called Jack Wright who runs an establishment the other side of town for both white and coloured. He's a lawyer, and they say he does it on principle. Just keep going the way you came, and you're bound to hit it."
"That's most courteous of you," Zoe said. They watched her climb back in, their legs thrust apart and their hands resting lightly on their hips in a posture of rugged law enforcement and devotion to the principles of justice. She drove through the town until they reached Jack Wright's hotel, a small, run-down building standing in a wilderness of slag, refuse and rubble on the southern fringes of the town. As soon as they went inside, a middle-aged woman behind the reception desk began talking very fast.
"Good evening," she said. "We're not segregated and you can have one room or two just as you wish, and we'd be pleased to hear who put you on to us as Mr. Wright likes to know who's friendly in the district. Are you from New York? We put up a lot of New Yorkers like yourselves. More are coming this way than used to, the Supreme Court decisions are making a world of difference, they give people courage. Mr. Wright has defended a lot of cases recently. You can have dinner too, if you like."
"That's very kind of you," Zoe said. "As a matter of fact, the police put us on to you."
"Oh." The woman adjusted her spectacles. "Two rooms or one?" The fire had gone from her friendship. Her dark raven hair was swept back in a tight knot; Jason had the impression that her life was very intense and uneventful.
"One room," Zoe said.
It turned out to be clean and modest, like his life. In the hotel rooms which he could afford he always had the impression of "slumming," of economizing temporarily, of depriving himself of the standard to which he was accustomed.
"It's no palace," he said, when the woman had gone.
"We're not kings," Zoe said. She drew the flowered curtains, shutting out the painful, blood-soaked road.
"So this is the South," he said, lighting a cigarette.
She lay on the bed and closed her eyes.
"All the time they were baiting us, I kept thinking, 'This man at my side, whose persistent shadow broke my resistance, this stern Negro whose race promises mine with retribution, can he be a nothing, a man without qualities?' And then you got angry and you began to fight them. I became afraid for you, I thought that your scorn and defiance might prompt them to beat you up. Oh, Jason. And then you told them that your daddy worked in the State Department. You even did that. Just like you told Aunt Silk how respectable your family was, and how your father was a high-up diplomat."
"You really are a bitch," he said.
"You didn't say one rude thing to Aunt Silk. You just take everything that comes your way."
"I know, I know," he shouted, "you won't be satisfied until you've seen me behave like a barbarian, like your idea of a black man, that's it, isn't it? It gets under your skin that people like my father and I can behave in a civilized manner; it damages your self-esteem. Well, let me tell you, the way you treated me at your aunt's place was pretty shabby, pretty goddam low. You would never have done that with a white man."
"That's right."
He stood over her. "What do you mean—that's right?"
"I can't treat you as I would a white man, any more than those policemen could. You're just a black, Jason."
He leaned over her in the semidarkness. She lacked now her fresh daytime scent; she was pale and tired, fragile and vulnerable, yet he knew himself to be in the presence of a perpetual siren song tempting him to his doom, to the single precipitate act which would arouse the implacable fury of Chester Silk and of the whole ruling caste of WASPs—the white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants, the purest of American Cau-
■ans. He had not lived on the fringe of Harlem for
caS', ;n„- he knew the tenement on 111th Street where the pottiing:
Bailey family would end.
"So I'm just a black," he said.
"Timid little nigger boy," she said. But she wasn't smiling; it was a wan, tense provocation, anxious and frightened. He saW that she was unhappy. He turned away from her, towards the brittle grimace of the pay-as-you-view television set in the corner. When, a moment later, he turned around, she had pulled off all her clothes and was curled like a cat on the bed. It was the first time he had seen her naked. He couldn't look; even though his awed reverence for her had receded to the extent of permitting him to appraise with wild desire her separate parts—even so, he could not look upon her as he had Millie, or Dorothy Marshall, as a female object, a thing of flesh to be used and exploited in the cold blood of hot lust. The feeling he had for Zoe reminded him of the wild, flustered, sugary love he had entertained as a small boy for girls of his own age, the dizzy intoxication which had led him to stand on his head and lift impossible weights whenever he thought they were watching. He felt for Zoe as a man feels for a rare wine after he has drunk it, an all-pervading presence, a holy ghost, an inner landscape of dreamlike sweep and beauty.
"Why did you do that?" he said querulously. "Why did you have to do that?"
She stretched herself full length on the bed.
"I felt hot."
"You really are a bitch, aren't you?"
"If words could copulate, Jason, you would have fathered the whole world." She lay with her ankles crossed and her hands behind her head. He tried to avoid seeing her, but it was no use.
"Have you a dime for the television?" she said. "That way we may be able to keep your violent passions under control."
"Very funny." He paced the room. "I'm just a toy to you, a golliwog."
"That's it, a golliwog. Your brother is the man."
The words rapped him across the stomach. They stopped him dead.
"You can leave Haydon out of this!"
"I'm in love with him," Zoe said.
"You haven't even met him."
"Your mother showed me a photograph of him in his bathing trunks. What a man, what muscles! I saw at once why women are putty in his hands."
Jason stood over her, furious and unsure. "Ma would never have shown you a picture of Haydon. You're lying. Ma is ashamed of Haydon."
Zoe shook her head. "I said to your mother, 'I hear Jason's brother is very handsome and that he takes after you, Mrs. Bailey.' Her feathers fluttered with pride and she brought out dozens of photos. She said, kind of weepily, 'He's a good boy at heart, and very kind.' "
He stared down at her, unable to determine whether she was telling the truth. She reached up lazily and tickled him under the chin.
"Golliwog," she said.
"I've told you," he said, "Haydon is a criminal. Is that what you want?"
"That's what Negroes in the 'the only America we've got' ought to be."
"You're sick."
She pulled herself up and knelt on the bed beside him and kissed him. Her lips tugged gently at his own, then her snake-tongue flickered cool and wet into his mouth. She pulled away his shirt and ran her hands over his neck and shoulders, then around his back, pulling him to her, so that he felt at last the soft assured presence of her breasts against his chest, and his own arms despite himself, went around her, bending her backwards, and he groaned.
She pulled the Negro on top of her and forced him at last to be silent. The evening growth on his chin, the mild pain as it tore across her cheek, the new, animal incoherence of his mouth as it began to search for its infancy, the groans which rose from his stomach each time her hand slid down the flat black board of his belly and pushed through to his loins, the pressure of his fingers on the soft flesh of her upper arms, the growing strength with which he took possession of her body— this burgeoning of the man within the man cast a veil of tterned happiness across the wastes of her longing. She •losed her eyes; and the strength to dream, to resurrect the fantasies which were more true than the truth, was restored to her like the healing ointment of a faith. A full moon rose in her soul, the hard blue light of the sacrificial hunt which ranged even now through the cotton-rich valleys, across the hills of fragrant pine, and through the fever swamps beyond. Count Volpe dissolved and shrank into a seashell on the shore at Syosset; her father was turned to monumental stone, a benevolent statue; her mother wasted to a stick, then snapped; the long gallery of men in her life paraded past like stuffed effigies, and darts rained into the pupils of their eyes. She felt him at work on her, lean and hard; her fingers searched the power and extent of him, and he answered with the intent, inexorable greed of the black miner working on the crusted surfaces of the white Caucasian quarry. It was happening, it was. The escaped slave of whom she had dreamed ran gasping from the swamps into the barn and took her with the futile yet noble remorse of an animal seeking refuge in sensual oblivion. In mid-Atlantic, his ancestors wrenched at their chains and fetters, maddened by the stink of molasses and the pale stench of their masters' salt-dried flesh. Soon he would rise with dripping loins and kill the first man who entered the barn in pursuit; sometimes she feared that it would be—-it would have to be—her father. And she too would have to die, for the springs behind his yellow eyes had long since surrendered their last drop of trust. "Oh Jesus," groaned Jason, and she whispered in his ear, "Slave, slave," and his mouth sought her breasts, angry that it could not taste and consume them both at once. She had him in her hand now, he was bigger and harder than she had remembered from the day at Harvard; her thighs closed around him, bringing the scattered lusts of his limbs together. His body found its ultimate coherence and stated a single claim. Outside in the street a woman laughed with a touch of hysteria at a man's joke. Jason was on the verge now, he hovered, she wanted the act to be his, the burst of final, destructive justice and power had to spring from his drill, the burden of his history. They were closing on the barn now, her eyes were tight shut, she could hear their footsteps approaching, she felt the tip of him enter her, a sensation more rare and elevating than any in her life, she heard him moan, "You've driven me to this, Zoe, I can't help myself, I want you, I've got to have you, I can't hold off any longer." He was breaking the spell with his words and his reluctance. There was a rap on the door of the barn and Jason held his breath; she felt him freeze halfway into her and then the woman's voice pierced their seclusion like a rasping steel saw.
"I just thought I'd nip up and tell ya dinner's only till nine-thirty, and it's gone nine-fifteen and I thought you'd be hungry after your long drive."
Outside the door the woman waited.
Jason came out of Zoe. She didn't open her eyes but she knew he was looking down into her face. She could feel the blood and hope draining from her body; as in a pantomime, the wicked fairy of tears chased out the princess of joy.
"Zoe," he whispered, "I guess this is madness, we ought to be careful, I mean maybe we ought to go down for dinner."
The woman outside the door thought to add, "The restaurant isn't segregated, you know."
Zoe heard his voice, in the blackness above her.
"Okay, thanks, we'll be right down in ten minutes. Thanks very much."
"Very well."
She heard the men walk away from the barn. It had failed to happen, the corpse had awakened in the graveyard, mortally ill. Jason was lifted from her. She heard his feet beat a discordant and nervous little pattern across the floor, and then he groaned. When she opened her eyes, he was crouched in the corner by the television set, clasping a handkerchief to his loins. His knees were bent and she saw tremors run down him, four times.
laval's small army converged on the village of Zo-langa at dawn. The strutting cocks had already raised their first warning shrieks, and the luminous orange sun hung like a lantern above the treetops as the leading assault party filtered between the trees, ghost men, stiff and sleepless, intoxicated by empty stomachs and the pungent, earthy aroma of peasant Africa, the broken silences, the woodsmoke, the sense of being.
Laval had issued his directives in abrasive monosyllables.
"The Europeans," he reminded James Caffrey, as the young Englishman broke out of a light, tormented sleep, "are tired of their crumbling individualism, tired of themselves."
James reached for a support which was not there; only a moment before, as the gray-pink dawn forced his eyelids apart, Alec had plummeted into the sea. And when James had climbed the attic stairs, he had found not Steven Foster, but Lemmon installed in the tutor's chair.
The first smoke bombs struck the dry crust of the earth, bounced and hissed. Jason, who had lain awake all night, stricken rigid by the unexpected cold, startled by every sound in the surrounding jungle, was squatting on his haunches, licking his lip. His throat ached.
Laval touched his head, pushing his fingers through the wiry hair.
"A human life is worth nothing," he said.
A light smoke billowed through the silent village. Deedes, breaking the eggshell of time like a newly born Rip Van Winkle, red and ravaged, began to cough and to explain away the soldiers gathered around him, tight-lipped and intent, cleaning their weapons, fastening ammunition belts, priming grenades and nerving themselves for the conflict ahead.
477
"That's a lot o' smoke he's using. In Kenya we never used smoke. With the Mau-Mau you had to be quick. No palaver, no messin' aboot. Quick as mice they were."
James watched him anxiously.
Laval had his binoculars focused on the village, the meticulous rows of brown plasticine huts, the new Zolanga risen from the debris of the old, mothered by Cartier's bombing. Fowl scurried and squawked in the fine dust, but of human life there was no sign. He identified this tight, artificial discipline, this careful husbanding of resources, as Maya's work. So they were there, after all, his quarry. He gathered himself like a leopard about to spring; and summoned to his aid a decade and a half of fighting experience, the private gods of the tormented years.
"You never saw a gun in your life, by the look of things," Deedes was telling Jason, regarding the American with bleak suspicion, with the self-renewing animosity of the condemned for the condemned. "He's no soldier, that blackie," he insisted to James.
"Perhaps it doesn't matter."
Deedes threw a long sidelong glance of resentment and distrust.
"You may think yersel' very superior because an officer, Caffrey."
"Yes, yes."
The tin god, the pillar of salt, was intent on the village. His jaw was set and his face calm. He was now as close to Laval, Deedes saw, as cheese to a rat.
"Lissun," Deedes resumed, trembling, "I know these black-ies. Fierce? Aye. You have to ken wha' you're doing. Lissun, in one day I've bagged ten. Twenty."
"Old man," Laval intervened, "I called for silence."
Then he sent James forward with the first assault party, astonished to have discovered that this was a war he could not fight alone. Already he loved the boy; the wound, the gap left by Martignac's slit throat, had to be plugged so that a soldier's iron soul need no longer be alone with itself. Sometimes, when the battle had been won, he would touch the blond Englishman, and perhaps praise him-—alive or dead.
James filtered the first assault party through the lazy,
:ting smoke, weighed down by the Commandant's injunction to capture, if possible, and not to kill. The soldiers ran forward towards an unseen enemy, towards a latent fanaticism they could not match, their palates dry with dust and despair, slipping through the shadows of their own fears with blank, mechanical minds. On the edge of the village itself, still cocooned in silence, James halted on the precipice, stunned by the absolute communal discipline exerted by Maya.
Laval joined him. They lay flat in the long grass.
"Without some form of bombardment, they'll knock us off like pigeons," James said.
"I want them alive, not dead."
Taking stock of the situation, haunted by memories of a life built entirely of uncompleted epitaphs, the Commandant rapped an order—then watched the first batch of gasoline-filled bottles land on the thatched roofs and begin to burn. This smoke had a different smell.
Once more on the precipice, James almost lost his nerve.
"Impossible," he heard a voice say, a disembodied echo from the past, "to foist upon a dynamic civilization moral scruples which bear no relevance to its historical role. The roots of considered action, and of morality, must lie in history."
Laval might almost then have touched him, even before the baptism of blood. But he refrained.
James carried his troops forward again into the burning village. Alec had grasped the hem of that truth.
The village erupted into life. The children scattered first, blown from their tiny habitations in amazing numbers, followed by heavy women clasping their infants, waddling clumsily in retreat, bleating and wailing down the long avenues which Laval's light machine guns covered with mute, salivating muzzles. A handful of men burst out of the forward huts, armed with spears and machetes, and hurled themselves on the soldiers, three of whom fell to the ground, mortally wounded. Laval brought these villagers down with bursts of his automatic, a murderous fire, accurate and discriminating. Pushing his men forward from hut to hut in fierce, hand-to-hand fighting, James experienced an intense, elliptical aversion to the common people of the world, to their noise and vulgarity, their ignorance of the higher spiritual reaches, their dirt. A bullet whipped singing past his face; instinctively he dropped to one knee and swung around; he saw a large woman heel over with a screech and lie twitching in the red-brown dust. A small child slipped from her arms. A soldier, caught in the open, spun like an aimless ballet dancer, arms outstretched, as if acknowledging applause, then suddenly folded up, crumpled. Panicking, his nearest companion ran for cover—and keeled over. Slugs of metal whined past James with the soft whirring sound of insects on the wing. He lay prostrate, waiting for covering fire from Laval, for the chance to retreat.
Ten yards away, the big mammy had begun to crawl in the blood-soaked dust. The infant lay beside her, small as a dead cat.
"You lost five men," Laval said sharply when James reached the safety of the jungle perimeter.
"They lost themselves."
Jason stared at him, open-mouthed. "They have guns, huh?"
Deedes snorted contemptuously. But his eyes flickered from man to man, frantically.
"It amazes me," Jason sighed, trembling.
"Keep silent," Laval snapped.
The mortars thudded again, hurling smoke bombs into the far corners of the village, setting a screen to cover the quick frontal assault which Laval now regarded as the only means of forestalling the escape of the three leaders of the National Liberation Movement. This time he led the assault himself.
He massed his men—every man—and charged, the simplest of all military manoeuvres. While Malcolm Deedes fell to the rear, grappling like a bent Buddhist monk with the inward worm of his pessimism, and Jason found himself hoarsely shouting words of defiance and hatred, James was seized by a tremendous elation. He remembered the anarchist who had come to Paris to end Gambetta's life, and the fictiona hero who had sacrificed himself in his determination to assassinate Chiang Kai-shek. Like the monumental Chris above the harbour at Rio, he could not fall. Laval was in the van, defying death, leading wave upon wave of steel helmeted, iron-jawed Aryan storm troopers across the steppes. Deedes too had begun to stumble forward into the smoke, with legs quivering, towards the distant mimed dance of warders, askaris and Mau Mau.
The villagers came at the soldiers with pou-pou, spears and bows and arrows, wild-eyed and fearless, advancing even when mortally wounded, plunging their steel into the screaming flesh of numbed adversaries. Pitching the tent of violence on a higher, more exacting level, Laval sent a cluster of grenades into the surrounding huts, disembowelling them and bringing decapitated, limbless victims rolling like logs into the sunlight. Sensing the growing despair of his troops, their tottering morale, he began to contemplate the Japanese ethic of suicide, at the same time bellowing to Maya to show himself, to face open combat as once the Saracen had fought the knights of Christendom. Fumbling helplessly with his gun as a giant of a villager bore down on him with raised machete, Deedes launched his death cry—until James' gun spoke comfortingly. The old Scot found himself flung back towards the long grass and the dipping safety of the trees, searching dutifully, but with clenched eyes, for the Russky, for the demon injector who had contaminated the water cart in Mount Kenya, bringing on the haemorrhages, the broken skulls. And Jason, lost somewhere beyond the frontiers of reason, found a young villager, missing an arm, blood spurting from the jagged stump of raw flesh, crawling after him through the dust with reptilian perseverance, cursing him in some appalling, incomprehensible language of the lower depths.
Jason and Malcolm Deedes clutched at one another, fell together.
"Tha'," Deedes gasped.
"Hang on to me," Jason cried.
But abruptly Deedes shook him off. "Lissun, son, I ken what this is aboot. I'm no bairn. Thirty years a soldier, aye. There've been nae faether beds in ma life."
Spittle ran down his chin, and his breathing was hoarse and rasping, as if his lungs were lined with sheet metal. They crouched together behind a tree, on the edge of the village, Wrapped in terror.
The earth shook with stampeding feet, with men running blindly, clutching themselves, hardly able to distinguish be-tween friend and foe. Respect for the ostrich dawned on Jason, while a single word circulated in his head like a paper bag in a windswept courtyard: "schizo." Searching for something, someone he could identify and latch on to in the general chaos, he kept thinking, "Schizo, twoness, black and white, big and little, rich and poor, them and us, brave and cowardly, advanced and backward, brother and brother, split twins, split peas."
He and Deedes crouched panting, drenched in dust and sweat and fear.
For a few moments Andre Laval remained in the thick of the battle, exhorting his men to greater efforts, driving them forward into the flexed jaws of Maya's astute defence. Having chewed for months the acid cud of the earlier humiliation at Zolanga, he realized with horror that Maya stood once again within an ace of victory. Stout and leonine, he could now be seen amid the smoking debris, directing his counter attack, his famed pincer movement, on Laval's flanks and line of retreat. The Commandant almost wept with frustration as his forces dissolved under the terrible sulphuric ol Maya's renowned genius, plunging into a headlong retreat, a stampede, thrashing wildly down unknown jungle paths floundering full circle into the fangs of the silent, jungle-cunning enemy. A few escaped—and fled.
Jason and Deedes hadn't moved when James Caffrey was seen running through the smoke, dappled in damp sunlight, god fully extended. Miming death, both men had hoped to cheat it.
"Up, up, on your feet, get going, get going, you've nc chance at all if you hang about."
"Big boy," Jason muttered, close to tears, and running. Foi several minutes—time dissolved in long beams of sunligh and sound—all three ran back into the jungle. Until James called a halt.
"Enough."
"Who says? Let's keep going, never mind this old man,' Jason cried.
But James held him. Jason struggled.
"You big white prick," he sobbed.
James struck him across the mouth, not hard, but hard enough to jerk his head back sharply. The American cupped his hands, as if expecting his teeth to fall out. His eyelids flickered, and a twisted grimace, saturated with despair, dug into the soft ground of his face.
"I get it," he said.
Deedes had wet himself. With lowered head, heaving chest and an unbroken trail of green spittle hanging from his lips to the ground, he stood panting and coughing.
"I get the type," Jason said, nursing his face. He thought, "Schizo, too, I'm really scared, that's a fact." When Laval sprang through the jungle wall like a panther, Jason leaped and began to sob in earnest. Laval took in the situation with disgust.
"I began the day with forty men. Now I have perhaps ten. How can I win battles with such garbage?"
A heavy pall of smoke hung above the trees; already the vultures had converged on Zolanga and were wheeling above the village, black demons in an innocent sky. Deedes kept on coughing and retching until Laval, who badly itched for a scapegoat, took his chin and pulled up his head.
"Old man, you're a burden to me. I may have to bury you here, old rebel, with that great curse of guilt and cowardice you carry. God made you ill."
Deedes turned involuntarily to James, for protection, for justice. And Jason turned as well, almost.
"He fought hard," James said.
"Yes?"
James nodded.
"A good soldier is not a good lawyer. Nor need we mistake justice for legality, strength for compassion and loyalty for connivance. This man's guilt is engraved on his face like roads and rivers on a map."
They fell back half a mile into the jungle, the four mercenaries and the ten native soldiers. They marched in a subdued silence, alert for sudden attack, until finally Laval called a halt in a large and easily defensible clearing. He posted sentries, then sank to the ground flat on his back, smoking and staring at the sky, keeping himself to himself, brooding in a sullen, ominous silence. Jason knew that it would be dangerous to speak, he saw that James was trying to warn him against it, but he couldn't help himself, his relief at being alive and unhurt was so great. The words broke out between the bars of his teeth like wild mice.
"There's one thing that bothers me. I mean, I'm not throwing any stones in any ponds, but maybe we ought to leave these guys alone. I mean, the way they acted, they fought like crazy-■"
"Hemp," Laval said.
"No, but-"
"Hemp, macaque. Drugged with hemp. Witchcraft."
"Aye, hemp," Deedes repeated solemnly.
Jason was very excited. "Look, don't mistake me, I'm no pink, but what's the big deal here? I mean, what the hell are we doing here anyway?"
Laval was fingering his revolver now. Its muzzle was long and ugly.
"Take it easy," James advised Jason.
"I guess you ran as fast as any."
"We used to dream," Laval said abstractedly, "of making every black a Frenchman."
"I guess that didn't come off," Jason laughed, unable to stem the flow, his hysteria rising to the surface like oil on the sea. "Maybe we're all in search of our childhood. I mean, take the pleasure and reality principles, the two-"
"Negro," Laval said, "if you open your mouth again, 1 shall thrust my gun down it."
Jason subsided. He wore a fixed, painful smile.
Laval stared at his revolver morosely, then broke its back with a vicious jerk and emptied the chamber of all but one bullet. When he spoke it was with uncanny conviction, an irresistible sincerity.
"We see emerging everywhere the prime symbol of the Faustian soul ..." He paused and looked hopefully, almost with a lover's yearning, to James. "Limitless space. And those specially Western creations of the soul-myth called Will, Force and Deed must be regarded as derivatives of this prime symbol."
Laval was licking his wounds, angered by the suspicion, the lack of confidence and trust, in the eyes of the ten soldiers who had stuck with him. He knew that they regarded him as n0 match for Maya, and he knew also that if he were to order a new attack now, they would refuse. He turned on peedes.
"What does that mean?"
"Wha'?"
" 'Limitless space.'"
"Aye." Deedes nodded vaguely, as if he had done all that could be expected of him.
"It means, old man, that we have to renew our efforts, that we can no more suffer lasting defeat than time can be
stilled."
Deedes absorbed this, or tried to—then tumbled upside down into the silence which followed.
"There's wars and wars, that's so. In forty the Italians came. Aye, and fightin' in the streets over a bicycle as a bairn, doon a' Holyrood."
Laval spun the chamber of his revolver like a roulette wheel. Then held the muzzle to his temple and pulled the trigger. It clicked. They watched him open-mouthed.
"Where's the Russian?"
"The Russky?" Deedes raised his eyebrows like a child learning its first words and searched the surrounding jungle. The damp stain on his pants had spread.
Laval turned to James.
"Have you nothing to say?"
James accepted the question at face value. His fair, pink skin was stained with patches of dirt and burned cordite.
"It may be that we're nothing more than the sum of our actions."
Laval regarded him with admiration.
"I understand you perfectly. In Paris, I studied philosophy."
They rested their weary bodies a few minutes longer. Pondering these events in the light of what Soames had once said to him, James felt convinced that life must govern reason, and not reason life. He felt himself, and perhaps his companions too, to be in flight from solitude and despair. Yet he still yearned for a sense of complete fulfilment. Piety, art, action—none were sufficient in themselves—hence the drea of a complete man, a Leon Alberti, a man who would defy his own mortality, his subjection to nature, by insisting that history must be the history of man.
Soon afterwards they resumed their retreat, the long march back to the road and the waiting convoy. Despite the men's exhaustion, Laval drove them on, afraid that if he delayed longer, Maya would cut him off and destroy the vehicles—in which event a covenant with death would have been signed and sealed.
"We oughtn't to quarrel, you and I," James said, falling back to where Jason was walking. Once again James had taken Deedes' pack.
"Oh, sure," Jason said sadly. "You're the big one. You make the rules."
"I'm sorry to have struck you."
"Yeah."
They progressed in silence for some time, harassed by mosquitoes, thorn bushes and their own rising fatigue. The blisters on Jason's feet had opened up once more.
"You know something?" he ventured.
"What?"
"Things don't figure too well. I mean, just what is this? Did you see those goddam women and those kids? Did you ever see anything like that before?"
"I agree."
Jason glanced at him shrewdly, a quick, sidelong appraisal. But the man's steady, regular face gave nothing away. It was, he reflected, I surprisingly empty face. Maybe English faces were like that.
"Tell me something. Just how does all this help Ambassador Silk? I mean, granted that Silk's supporting Ybele ... it just doesn't figure. It figures and it doesn't."
"I should have thought our cause was a general one," James said.
"The Ambassador certainly has a personal interest in these things. Financial, I mean. Maybe it all squares up."
Reflecting on Jason's predicament, James lengthened his stride unobtrusively and worked his way up the column until he reached the head, carrying the two packs without apparent effort. He drew level with Laval.
"Something I'd like to ask you," James said. "You mentioned that Bailey was a hostage. How so?"
"Doesn't Tufton tell you anything?"
James pulled the hair from his forehead. Small furrows had creased his brow.
Laval shrugged. "Simple. They need to apply pressure on his father, otherwise America won't help Ybele."
"They?"
'Tufton and Silk, of course."
"And Bailey doesn't know anything about this?"
"If he did he wouldn't last this heat another hour."
James heaved the top pack higher on his shoulder. "In what way a hostage?" he persisted.
"Why be naive? Jean Martignac was always quick. Charming but sophisticated, the physique of a boy yet the temperament of a man. You have one blemish, Caffrey. As an Englishman you have experienced nothing; England has been a passive spectator to her own nemesis."
James had nothing to say.
Presently Laval put an arm around his shoulder, briefly.
'Two years ago we were here, the Blue Berets," he said. "Maya's men had taken over Zolanga. It was an easy thing to retake it—one company would have sufficed. But Cartier had to raze the place to the ground. Today things are different, the balance of power. Consequently, I shall have to do the same."
"How?"
Laval told him.
"There must be some other way," he said quickly.
"What?"
Late in the afternoon they reached the road where the convoy was found to be intact with its full complement of soldiers. Without further delay Laval began to wrestle with the powerful radio set loaned to him by Ybele, working with 'ttagic fingers on the ugly black transmitter whose long, curving antenna reached, stage upon stage, above the treetops. The red and white cells of this grotesque mobile yielded a rising barrage of crackling until suddenly the storm broke and clear contact was made with Ybele's office in tl Ministry of the Interior.
James walked back down the road to where Jason and Malcolm Deedes were lying in uneasy comradeship, care] to keep their distance yet drawing a faint comfort from one another's existence.
"Hey," Jason said, "what's he planning on now, that Lavalj that pal of yours?"
"Why do you say friend of mine?"
"Sorry, sorry, thought you two were buddies."
"Aye, the big battalions stick together," Deedes said.
"What's on, huh?"
"Jets," James said.
"Come again."
"He's bringing in the two jets. He plans to raze Zolanga to the ground."
Jason thought about this. A ray of hope dawned in his eyes.
"And then we can all go home?"
James laughed rather oddly. "It depends."
TWENTY-FIVE
they were in Charleston; it was Easter. Sunlight blessed the churches, the gay white dresses and the Easter bonnets; even the Negroes picketing a department store with the slogan "Love Your Brother" looked lethargic and cheerful. Jason guided the Cadillac over the cobbles, putting off the moment when they would have to find somewhere to stay. Zoe sat stiff and pale beside him; she declined to speak. In the streets outside, the faces of the women were ashen and waxy, faces drained by a haunting fear. But the trees were a vivid green, the magnolias burned in splendid red and purple and the water lay calm and blue beyond the Battery, where the old cannons maintained their long vigil. Outside the elegant white houses Spanish moss hung in rich and morbid profusion, pointing out to sea, with sudden vulgarity, a signpost announced that Paris lay 4,383 miles across the ocean to the northeast. Jason took this pretext to stop and take a reading, measuring his watch against the sun.
"Pretty damned accurate," he concluded.
But she would not bend. Already she was wandering away, a lovely, slender waif in white, a rich girl lost among the houses of the rich. Then she disappeared from view. He stood by the sea and watched her vanish. The proud and ancient community, from which he was totally debarred, lurking behind its shutters and pillars, had reached out with the speed of a jungle sucker plant to claim its own. Sick with apprehension, he brought the Cadillac after her in slow pursuit, until he came upon her standing in front of the old mart from whose balcony slaves had once been auctioned.
"I'm tired," she said. "Find me a hotel, Jason, or I'll sell you into slavery here and now."
Two Australian tourists stared at them in amazement. Jason went close to Zoe and almost spat in her ear.
"I suppose you think that that's funny? Big joke. Maybe it never did strike you how we people feel; maybe what you need is to have your skin black just for one day of your life."
She stepped back, and there was a narrow, particularist pride in the line of her mouth which intimidated him.
"Take me to the Saunders," she said, climbing into the Cadillac.
He took the wheel. His mood had changed abruptly. Once again he was afraid.
"Yes ma'am, sure will," he said in assumed slavish accents. "For white folks only, ma'am?"
He couldn't bring out the word, the single word neither of them had so far brought into the open; the very thought of it scalded his throat; to him it sounded like "gas chamber."
"Let's find out," she said.
They drove slowly back through the town, in silence. The Saunders proved to be a large and opulent-looking building which dominated a large square lined with palm trees and Parked automobiles. He slid into a parking space at a safe distance from it.
"Bound to be segregated," he said. The word was out, likJ a smell.
Her expression suggested that the hotel was no more than] a flea pit.
"Shall I go and ask," he said, "or will you?"
"You're the man."
He put on his dark sunglasses and walked across the burning white concrete piazza towards the plush, mid-centurjj hotel with its plaster extravagances and coloured blinds. The! people who were coming out were white, and when the doorman at the top of the steps moved discreetly to bar his way, he knew. He cleared his throat and removed his dark classes.
"Excuse me. I'm travelling with a friend, a white person and I wonder if you could tell me of a nice place where we could stay."
The doorman looked at him. "Not here," he said.
"Oh well, thanks all the same."
He walked back to the Cadillac and his mind was empty o: everything but loss. He slammed the door and felt the familiar stifling heat of the automobile enfold him.
He shrugged. "No go."
She sulked. After a while, she said, "I'm waiting."
He drove slowly into the town, passing again the Negro pickets and their banner, "Love Your Brother." Presently he pulled to a halt where a couple of Negroes were gossiping on the sidewalk.
"Excuse me, sir." He leaned out. "Could you please tell me where this lady and I could find nice rooms for the night?"
They were modestly dressed, in jeans and T-shirts, anc they were at first reluctant to examine the interior and the actual phenomenon represented by "this lady." However once they had begun to look properly, they continued to do so for some while. Zoe turned away.
"Yes, sure. Take the lady to the Saunders. Try the Grand View yourself." They consulted for a moment. "Yeah, that's best."
"Could we both stay at the Grand View?"
They peered in again at the beautiful girl, one of them chewing gum, the other a little open-mouthed—obverse solutions to the problem of awe. Finally one dug the other in the ribs and they grinned saucily at Jason.
"Gee, mister, I don't know. Why not use the auto? It's pretty big, I'd say."
He drove away abruptly. He stopped in a quiet street, lined with prosperous houses set back in magnolia-strewn gardens.
"So, all right," he shouted. "So we came. Here we are. What will it take to satisfy you?"
"A man."
He pressed his forehead against the steering wheel. "You're like every other goddam white."
"That's it, Jason."
"You really are a bitch."
Her eyes closed. "Drive me back to the Saunders," she said.
He obeyed. Something in her voice told him not to argue. When they reached her hotel, she said, "Bring my bags, please." She disappeared at once into the hotel. He began to follow with her cases, but the doorman intercepted him again and took them from him.
"Okay," the doorman said.
He walked back to the Cadillac and waited. After a while the intense heat sent him to sleep; it was mid-afternoon when he awoke with a crushing headache, and the first word he heard was "nigger." He leaped up, but it was only two men walking past deep in conversation. Eventually he found a telephone and rang the Saunders.
"So what now?" he said.
Zoe sounded very calm. "I've been invited to dinner this evening by some friends of my parents," she said.
"You'll be going alone, is that it?"
"Do you want to come, Jason?"
He hesitated. "What sort of people are they?"
"White, rich and conventional."
"I see. Is it scheduled that we meet again, or should I get the train back to New York? Pardon my asking, of course."
Now it was she who hesitated. The real doubts, he knew, were hers; his love for her was as constant as his need of food and sleep. He knew also that his own bravado was skin
deep; at the first threat of indifference, his courage crumpled.
"I'm going to the morning service at the Episcopalian Church tomorrow," she said without enthusiasm. "It's at ten. Come, if you like."
"Whites only, huh? White God?"
She said wearily, "I must bathe now, Jason. Leave the automobile outside the Saunders, will you, and I'll see you when I see you."
She put down the receiver. Later he found a room at the Grand View and bought himself a lonely meal there. In the morning he put on his light gray Italian summer suit, with the Italian shirt, tie and shoes which Lucille had paid for and helped him to choose. He had situated himself outside the church by nine-thirty, a spruce, slender young Negro carrying a brown trilby hat, a pencil-slim moustache and an expression of guarded deference towards the elegant white people who were rapidly filling the church. A notice announced that the Reverend Peter Saintsbury would preach on "The Passion of our Lord."
Zoe came with two minutes to spare. She tumbled out of a taxi, dressed in white, her laughing face shadowed by a broad-brimmed hat of white straw with a single red ribbon. As she took his arm he sensed that her mood had once again changed. Wearing her high spirits with fierce determination, she began to pull him through the iron gate and up the steps of the church.
"No black person has gone in there," he muttered.
She wore a fixed smile; she dared not surrender it. He hung back, a dead weight.
"I tell you, it's segregated, Zoe." That word again: "gas chamber." He heard her say, "A good day for them to turn over a new leaf. The Lord is risen, Jason, among these contemptible provincials. I am She and you are He."
From within the dark and incense-tainted chamber of God, J. S. Bach billowed at them, potent and exclusive, a wall of sound almost as persuasive and forbidding as a rebuff from the Almighty. She still had his hand, and she clung to it as two churchwardens converged on them with the savage gentleness of souls for whom the most awful threat is one, lone, dissenting voice. They reacted quickly, confronting the enemy with the decisive calm of the just—as the local newspapers had for many months past recommended. And their eyes bled with the beauty of the woman.
"Excuse me, Ma'am."
"Yes, are we late? Come on, Jason."
"Ma'am, I'm afraid the gentleman cannot enter this church."
"Cannot but will," Zoe said. "I say will. Is he not God's creature like you and I? Would Jesus have turned him away? It is Easter, gentlemen, and God's children are coming together."
She trembled.
"The ruling is by authority of the rector and congregation," the taller warden said, tilting his head reproachfully on one side and with as much regret as the lady's obvious breeding and the exigencies of social peace seemed to demand.
"I'll wait for you outside," Jason whispered urgently, pulling back—and then added, in an attempt to atone for a faintheartedness which he feared she might not this time forgive, "I'll find another church, with a more Christian spirit."
But Zoe had already gone berserk. Seizing a Bible and a Prayer Book, she held them threateningly and began to raise her voice on a mounting scale which promised to climax in a roof-splitting crescendo.
"If you want to throw a Christian woman from the House of God into the street, then go on, do it, but don't expect me to give way to your pride and your ignorance, don't expect me to show Christ's spirit of forgiveness! Pharisees! Monsters of iniquity!"
The wardens exchanged panic-stricken glances and clasped their hands over their mouths in the hope of stilling Zoe's torrent. But she, sensing victory and rather enjoying the impression that she was making on the large congregation, only redoubled her feats of imaginative vituperation. It now transpired that two pews were in fact available at the back, near the door. One of the wardens, turned to salt in the face of the unfaceable, pointed to the seats with an almost epileptic stillness. But the Negro, no doubt touched by some High
Hand, pulled free and cast himself out of where he had no right to enter.
Zoe fell into her pew and began to weep, the forgotten Bible and Prayer Book embalmed in her clenched, white-gloved hands.
The ladies of the congregation, fading Scarlett O'Haras, turned and lingered in their scrutiny and judgment, while their men nibbled at the lettuce of the girl's beauty with quick, rabbity bites of their empty eyes. She was, they saw, an aristocrat.
Outside, the Negro tumbled under the Easter sun.
No sooner was she on her knees than her monthly period, against the onset of which she had taken precautions, announced itself. The blood flowed warmly, and she welcomed it, so little faith had she now in the reality and relevance of her own flesh. Never had she been allowed to participate in the warm, bodily sacraments which she had seen suburban housewives celebrating in their back gardens and kitchens when she passed in the train. To wash up the dishes from which she had just eaten remained for her a hilarious student prank. In the Park Avenue apartment it was only with difficulty that she insisted on bathing and dressing herself— but she permitted Eliza to comb her hair, it was soothing. She needed to be soothed. When Eliza stood behind her admiring her beauty in the gilded mirror, Zoe understood certain things. Her mother, for instance. Amanda was not only rich but utterly at loggerheads with the physical world; she had attempted to wall Zoe off from her own naturally sensual body, to paralyze the flesh with Puritan ice-venom. To be a woman. Her father had wanted a son, at least one son, but Amanda, after Zoe's birth, had seized on the diagnosis of an amiable and easily bought gynaecologist to put an end to the fertility rite. Chester had taken it stoically; and later he smiled bravely when Zoe, at the age of nine, divining his melancholia, sat on his knee and assured him that a girl was worth a hundred dollars more on the Tangiers slave market than a boy. Zoe had sensed the truth about Amanda's dislike of babies from her earliest years. It set her thinking, especially when she read of grand aristocratic ladies and queens in former times who had to risk bearing children in order to give their lords and kings legitimate heirs—an event utterly at variance with the pattern of their sheltered, frail lives. Poor queens, corseted, with their pinched waists and small breasts—how gladly would they have delegated the bearing of their children to hired peasant girls, just as they handed the rearing of the babies to robust wet nurses. For long hours in scented baths Zoe had examined her hips; she became convinced that they would never be wide enough.
Nibbling rabbit lusts. Men had always stared at her. She knew she was a good lay (and she enjoyed the vocabulary of men, earthy and Rabelaisian.) How could she avoid, ultimately, accepting the valuation which the male sex as a whole put upon her head? When her mother was out of the room, Chester told her that she was as rare as a Lima diamond; Soames likened her to a torch which transformed men into fireworks spinning frantically until completely burned out. Count Volpe, prostrate upon the shingle at Syosset, had complained, "You're a Molotov cocktail." And she remembered that the frail Greek boy who had years ago carried her across the sand at Tolon, a deflowered koritzi, had marvelled at the intense heat which he, in his blind moment of claim, had experienced. But she had withdrawn; the thing in itself, divorced from procreation, would not solve her problem; it would involve no effort, sacrifice or pain, no real knowledge of her own body, no integration into the tangible ceremonies of the housewives in their back gardens. Despite the long gallery of brown gallants whose hanging walls extended from New-Port, Syosset and Cambridge to the sands, cliff faces and open-air cafes of the Aegean—despite this permanent revolution of proposal and disposal—none had entered since the Greek boy.
Until Jason. In all her days nothing had been worse than his climactic abdication, his treasonous withdrawal.
The warm blood flooded. She offered herself a grimace at the irony of the timing, the proof of what did not need to be Proven. When the congregation rose to sing a Psalm, she followed, and hummed lightly, but without words. She preferred her own. Strange how large the body—the middle reaches—loomed once the prospect of propagation dawned. No longer merely an object capable of assuming a separate identity when injured or ill, the human body was transformed into a marvellous machine, a delicate mechanism liable to do things on its own, things which would alter a woman's life out of all recognition. Perhaps a man never felt like that. It was a womanly thing, to think of one's body in that way, all the time.
The hymn ceased. Feet shuffled, Christians coughed discreetly. She knelt again, the loveliest carpetbagger of them1; all, and felt for her purse, the white purse in which nestled a red silk bag containing the small device with which she had proposed to confront the deluge of her destiny.
Quite suddenly she realized that if she'd truly loved Jason ? she would have thrown the thing away. The whole affair, then, had been a lie, a charade.
Once more she began to cry. Women turned, wondering! whether the emotion might be religious. And the pale bucks' and blades resumed their nibbling lusts, their furtiveness.
Of course wealth was an evil. She regretted it. Look what it had done to Soames. Now that she was old enough to see him for what he was—it did not occur to her that he too had grown older, suddenly, and had changed—he disgusted her. In her younger days, when they'd visited Tufton Manor for weeks at a time, she'd infuriated her mother by singing his praises and declaring that Soames was the sort of man she intended to marry. It drove Amanda almost out of her mind. Now he nauseated her; when he'd tried to kiss her at the Boylston Street traffic lights, she had found it a struggle not to vomit. Men shouldn't smell like that. She had told him that as soon as the rasoir national set to work on the financiers, as soon as the revolution dawned, she would begin knitting. Terrible girl, he'd said. That angered her. Money, riches, angered her. The occasional hunted look in her father's face disgusted her. As if he didn't have enough already. The poor would inherit the earth. But she found it hard to renounce her wealth all at once, to step into Park Avenue wearing sackcloth and ashes. Even when she came south with Jason, it had to be in the Cadillac. Not that she had made a conscious decision on the matter; Chester had offered the Cadillac and she had accepted. It would have been churlish and childish not to.
Obviously she couldn't rescue herself. She needed to be taken. She needed a man, a black, a poor, brutal, gentle, kind, loving, brutal black. Who would hurt and love her. Who could change her utterly and yet leave her the same—so that it would be she, the original Zoe Silk, who would know that she had been changed. The music in the church made her feel a little sleepy.
She could not hate Jason. He was too small. He would carry like baggage. There was no alternative but to go on now, to resume the journey, the march. To return empty-wombed to the thick-carpeted, dollar-coated, double-windowed suffocation of Park Avenue would signify the total abandonment of a life, the acceptance of eternal imprisonment. She dreaded the smell of the gilded cage, sweet and fragile, and the waiting, familiar books in whose folds she had discovered her destiny. Jason was now dead, his promise had dwindled to pathos. She would carry him with her, as provocateur and irritant, and when the time came, her moment of deliverance, she would watch him collapse and die on the sidewalk like charred paper. He was paper thin, a black paper man.
The Reverend Peter Saintsbury had mounted the pulpit to
preach. He was pale and thin too. She fled.
* * *
They drove northwest now, into Georgia.
They sped along empty roads, past shacks made of black or brown wood with small porches on which rocking chairs rocked slowly, and then past large white villas set back in spacious gardens and parading a galaxy of motorboats and automobiles. The sky was gray and lowering, heavy with the menace of rain and imminent thunder. The earth was flat and stale, swamps and scrub pine stretched for mile upon mile Until they came to the white fluffy wool of raw cotton, and the blacks at work, and the gins. She was witness at last to the terrain of her dreams, and she saw that the textures Pieced together from the compost of her books had a basis in reality, although this was not the Mississippi of her swampland Negro's hot, pursuing breath, but a milder Georgia. The bright sea, the signpost pointing towards Paris, had given way to an inland cavern whose deep recesses promised an impenetrable darkness of rage and ignorance. From the road, ride, labourers and sharecroppers in crazy, battered hats stopped to watch the passage of the automobile, which rein, forced their premonition of a freer universe beyond the encircling hills. Then the rain descended like a sheet of steel, and the waters roared angrily under the belly of the Cadillac! Should they become waterlogged and compelled to stop .. I From the layer cake of her nursery reading, the warning leaped at her with bared teeth: "A nigger get smart with me I'll be on him like white on rice and turn that nigger every way but loose ..."
In Atlanta they found a hotel, frequented by Negroes, which was prepared to take them both in. Jason examined the walls for damp.
"Jesus, we could do better than this," he said.
He sat on the bed and watched her unpack.
She said, "I want to put on something warmer. Would you mind turning around for a moment?"
She began to undress; her frock peeled off, and then her slip. He held her around the waist and began to kiss her face, neck and shoulders. She pushed him away.
"Lover," she said coldly and pulled on her blue woollen dress.
"I thought you wanted it," he said.
"I'm a nun," she said, combing her hair. The swell of her body now maddened him.
"You've been leading me on all this time, is that it? Just a little white cock teaser."
He walked across to where she was sitting in front of the mirror and grasped her shoulders. His hands ran greedily down her body, over her breasts and stomach, then up her thighs. Already he was heavy and stiff.
"You're going to belong to me whether you like it or not," he said.
"You're messing up my hair," she said, smoothing down her skirt and beginning to apply mascara to her eyelashes.
"You don't believe me, is that it? You don't think I'll go through with it?"
"I'm going out now to see the town. You'd better come too."
He turned to the window and beat his fists on the pane, but taking care not to crack it; each violent motion of his arms and fists froze the instant before the impact of flesh and bone on glass.
"You really are a bitch out of Hell," he said.
She put on her raincoat and sorted the contents of her purse.
"Are you ready?"
"You don't mind ordering me around," he said, glaring out of the window at the Negroes in the alleyway below.
"Just as you like." She opened the door and went out. He pressed his face against the glass and craned his neck to observe the sidewalk below, outside the main door of the hotel. The glass was cool and damp and dirty against his cheek. After some moments he was able to see half of Zoe's golden head moving past, towards the main street. He thought, "I shall never forget this, I'm being martyred, I must hang on, in later life I shall congratulate myself on having persevered." He grabbed his raincoat and ran down into the street; he caught up with her just before she reached the bus stop.
The street was thick with police vehicles and security patrols.
"Why did we have to come to this goddam town?" he muttered angrily.
"We've come to demonstrate," she said. "To get ourselves arrested."
They stood together at the bus stop. People stared at them; he felt their long, hostile scrutiny, their scathing condemnation and hatred.
"I suppose you don't give a damn what happens to your father, or mine. You've had your silver spoon, you can afford to bite the hand that fed you, is that it?"
She was silent and upright. When she looked at the people Who were staring at her, she forced them to drop their eyes. But as soon as she had turned away their eyes came creeping back.
"Why don't we walk," he muttered savagely, "or take the automobile?"
Then the bus came. He began to tremble, and she also. The bus came down the broad, clean, tree-lined street and finally he whispered in her ear.
"Please, Zoe, please, I beg you ..."
The bus stopped. The line inched forward. Jason stared through the windows as into a reptile house at the Zoo. His flesh was disintegrating like wet paper. Zoe went up the steps ahead of him with her pink legs. Her legs flashed. She paid her fare. He followed, drenched in despair.
Zoe took a seat in the front of the bus, among the whites. He had known this would happen, but prior knowledge brought no consolation. The seat beside her own, he saw, was vacant. She had made sure of that.
The moment was lost in fire.
Jason took a seat at the back, among the melancholy poor blacks. They sniffed him warily. For a moment he was conscious of the quality and cut of his coat, then the bus lurched forward. His eyes closed; a guillotine had fallen from Heaven; he felt totally estranged from his own species.
Zoe got off the bus opposite the State Capitol and walked briskly up the hill, away from the main street. He followed.
"You had to do that to me, I suppose? If that's the way you treat people you love, I certainly wouldn't like to be someone you hated."
"I don't love you, Jason."
"Thanks for telling me."
"You could have sat in front with me. It was your choice."
"And you could have come to the back with me. That was yours."
On the steps of the Justice Department building he once again took her arm.
"What now?" he said.
"I want to see the courts."
"This is becoming farcical. You're crazy. Why don't we pay a call on the Klan and be done with it?"
He followed her up the steps. The large hall joining the courtrooms had a clean, sterile smell; Negroes slept in ragged clothes on wooden benches, waiting to be called and glancing at the strangers without interest, without real consciousness 0f colour. They saw that Jason was rich.
In the centre of the hall stood a pair of drinking fountains, one marked "Whites Only" and the other bearing no inscription. Zoe stood with her hands in her pockets, looking sad and defiant, being watched lackadaisically by a uniformed white attendant. Jason, sensing trouble, began to move away.
"Jason."
Her voice rang out like a bell; he could not evade it.
"Listen, honey," she said when he came up to her, "I know I've been a bitch to you and I didn't mean what I said about not loving you. If only you would do one small thing to defy them—just once. Do you understand?"
"Yeah."
She stooped to drink from the "Whites Only" fountain, and then stepped back with the water dripping from her mouth and chin. Jason glanced around him nervously; the attendant was watching them intently.
"Do it," Zoe said, "just this once."
He made a rapid, furtive lunge at the fountain, a token gesture which left his throat and tongue almost as dry as before. In the instant of guilt, he forgot about Zoe and his need to please her; it was the prospect of the law, of force and forbearance, which now overwhelmed him. The attendant walked across the stone floor slowly, with his hands clasped behind his back, forcing them by the slowness of his approach to wait for him, to confess their guilt by their tense, stifi waiting. Like a full moon under a telescope, his small, anonymous face began to reveal unexpected lines and gashes. He treated Jason to a long and contemptuous stare.
"You can read?" he drawled.
Jason nodded. His face was mobile with fright.
"What does it say over the fountain from which you have just this moment drunk?"
"Whites Only," Jason whispered.
The attendant shook his head slowly. He was in no hurry.
"Are you white?"
Jason glanced at Zoe, who raised her eyebrows.
"I don't care," Jason said, "do what you like, I don't care."
The white man's brow furrowed and his jaw jutted a little.
"You really are looking for trouble, huh?" He took Jason by his lapels and shook him gently. He was larger than Jason, but not much larger. Zoe Silk turned away. "You do want trouble, do you? Do you? Speak, Mister, speak."
"I don't want trouble, no," Jason croaked.
"You don't?"
"No."
"Where do you come from, nigger?"
"From New York State."
"Yeah, I guessed. But you're not in New York State now, are you?"
"No, sir."
"You'll never show your face around here again, will you?"
"No."
When they reached the street the rain had stopped and the air was warm and steamy. They headed for the main boulevard, walking slightly apart.
"I'll tell you one thing," Jason said. "If you hadn't been born so goddam rich, you'd have made a really prissy school-ma'am, giving marks here and taking them away there. Jesus, you do make me sick."
Zoe walked with the suggestion of a stoop now, and her head was bent towards the sheeny wet grayness of the sidewalk.
"I'm sorry," she said, "truly sorry."
She reached for his hand, but he was in no mood to offer it now. The least sign of affection or uncertainty on her part was enough to reinforce his pride and self-reliance; only when she stiffened did he bend. Both recognized but neither understood this dialectical cycle, the intervening silences, the London fogs of resentment and distrust, which settled between them during the long passages of incoherent conflict Now, as they descended the hill, a situation capable o consuming them both gradually absorbed their attention— pandemonium and violence at the crossroads, a swirling mob of whites, Negroes, students, police vehicles, flashing lights and wailing sirens whose vortex, it gradually appeared, was a small cafe with the name "Dubois" painted in crude gold letters over the door. This, then, was their battle and their passion enacted on a scale which would absolve them not only from guilt but also from the unnerving loneliness of their duality. Neither hesitated; they plunged into the ruck of demonstrators with a sense of total release.
Jason pushed towards the door of the Dubois with Zoe in his wake. Knees and elbows were swinging freely; in the dense crush friend and foe were not easily distinguishable. A woman with a face as gray as a soiled sheet, a pinched, frightened face, plucked Jason by the sleeve. "Why do you people always come here causing trouble?" she screamed at him. "Why do you want to integrate with us? You don't see us going to your places and trying to integrate with you." He pulled his arm free, upset not so much by her attitude as by the intensity of her feelings. Zoe started to reason with the woman, who was about to claw at her face when something resistant in the doorway gave way and the whole mob of people was swept forward into the dingy cafe. Someone called out, "Make sure you've got a dime for a cup of coffee," and a young, cheerful voice came back, "Yeah, we got." The students settled into the available chairs like locusts and sat with their arms on the plastic-topped tables, drumming their feet impatiently on the floor. Zoe and Jason managed to grab seats next to one another, and when she took and squeezed his hand he felt for the first time on this long journey neither guilt nor apprehension. She searched about her, bright with enthusiasm; at last they had found justification and solace among people of their own kind.
A big-bellied man in a striped, butcher's apron, evidently the proprietor Dubois, was pushing up and down the gang-Way urging his waitresses not to serve a single cup of coffee. 'The joint is closed as from now," he bellowed loudly, and he looked at his watch as if to check that now was indeed now. Then he pushed his way to the door and began to reason with a small knot of whites who were spoiling for a fight. 'Thanks, boys, but we can handle this without damage to Property or human life."
"Those sure are sensible priorities!" a Negro's voice called, and the cafe erupted in laughter.
It gradually became apparent to Zoe that the whole orchestra of protest and revolt was being guided by a single conducting hand—by a large Negro, a muscular young man whose unrefined features only added to the impression of integrity which pervaded his every gesture. He wore a white shirt, open at the neck, and a black leather jacket; his voice, which he deployed to bring order and discipline to the revolution, was flat, strong and convincing; Zoe, who had the vaguely disconcerting impression of having met him before— could it be the demon Negro of her swampland dreams?—• was swept by the emotion she experienced during the climactic movement of a great symphonic work, and by the need to serve, to give.
A senior police official had now entered the cafe, a slender, faded man in rimless spectacles. When he raised his voice, it proved to carry an unpleasantly strident quality.
"Now listen in, all of ya. The proprietor here, Mr. Sidney Dubois, the gentleman who owns this cafe, want you all out of here. The cafe is closed. It belongs to Mr. Dubois and he can do what he likes with it. That is one of the principles we all recognize in the United States, whether white or coloured, northern or southern. I wouldn't like to think there were any Socialists among you, no I wouldn't. So I'm giving you just two minutes to make yourselves scarce, or I'm gonna throw every one of you into the city jail. And that goes for the ladies as well."
Someone called out, "You have no right-•"
But the young Negro whose strength and passion now consumed Zoe stepped forward with extended arms.
"Don't argue, brother. America isn't a debating society any longer. Just sit tight."
Jason saw, then, what had happened to Zoe. A dagger slashed the soft lining of his throat. He began to tremble.
The police officer scowled at the big Negro.
"You're the ringleader?"
The Negro ignored him. Instead, he appealed directly to the proprietor, addressing him by name and commanding his attention by his obviously reasonable and conciliatory tone.
"Mr. Dubois-"
"I don't want any trouble, that's the truth," the proprietor said, wiping his gleaming face with the back of his hand and glancing around at the tight, orderly ranks of demonstrators.
"Mr. Dubois, we've planned this thing out. We have wave after wave of people lined up to keep plugging this cafe of yours. If you don't serve us, they'll keep coming here day after day. Your business will suffer, Mr. Dubois."
The proprietor glanced nervously at the police officer—as if afraid of being accused of betraying the cause.
"Will ya leave me alone after this if I serve ya?" he asked.
"So long as you continue to serve coloured people," the big Negro said.
Mr. Dubois nodded resignedly, no doubt calculating that the demonstrations would subside, that the northern students would return home and that things would subsequently go back to normal. Even so, he hesitated. To serve Negroes, even once . . .
"Okay, I'll serve ya."
He waved his heavy, hairy arm at the waitresses.
The Negro stood astride the gangway with his hands on his hips. The police officer withdrew; the representative of the people replaced him in the task of ensuring order and fair play, of guaranteeing that every cup of coffee served earned its dime. Zoe watched him until his eyes were momentarily arrested by her beauty. The strain of the past weeks had shifted her sense of the possible, of normality; in her condition of heightened emotion she didn't doubt that her own destiny was henceforward linked with this stranger's. She need only wait.
His eyes tore themselves from her and-
"Jason!"
He bounded across the room in three long strides and flung an arm around Jason's shoulders. Zoe smelled the leather of his black jacket and the tank of the fresh sweat on his skin as he leaned past her. Jason seemed to wilt under this huge embrace, to collapse totally and finally before the living •mage of what he might have been and what, they both realized, she had always wanted him to be.
"This is Zoe Silk," he confessed sadly. "Zoe, this is my brother, Haydon."
Haydon's arm rested across them both now; warmed by this vast, comforting umbrella, the girl turned her face up wards. She forgot Jason; he fell overboard the ship of her lifi and was quickly lost beneath the waves. In contriving thi introduction he had done her a last, suicidal service in whicl social convention and the knowledge of defeat scratched th< surface of tragedy.
"You had better come into the drawing room," Amanda Silk said.
And stood back, thin and resentful.
It was early June, and more than two months had passed since Jason had left Atlanta for home. She walked ahead of him, tall and bony in turquoise taffeta, a woman whose weekly face-lifting on Madison Avenue had recently failed to bring in a new world to redress the balance of the old.
Chester Silk sat slumped in an armchair. It was at once evident to Jason that the father's pain was the greater. The mother sat down on the edge of her chair and waited with an air of genteel indignation.
"I am a matter-of-fact man," Chester Silk announced. "1 don't beat about the bush. It is not my way. I daresay all three of us will say some hard things this afternoon, however much we may intend otherwise."
Jason nodded politely.
"Let me ask you this," Chester Silk said, reaching for his cigar box. "Do you in your heart know why we have asked you to come here?"
Jason cleared his throat. He was wearing his best Italian suit, his black, pointed shoes were gleaming, his collar anc cuffs were stiff and spotless.
"No, sir. Though I imagine it must be to do with Zoe."
"Imagine!" cried Amanda Silk.
"Darling." Chester raised his hand in restraint. He lit the cigar, puffed at it, then leaned back in his chair. But his hanc shook and the lines under his gray eyes had multiplied.
"I think it will help," he said, "if we are all honest with each other. Let me ask you again, Jason, why have we asked you to come here?"
"I don't know, sir."
The father grunted and glanced at his wife.
"When did you last see Zoe?" he said. "In Atlanta, sir, two months back." "Why did you and Zoe part then?"
Jason stared at the carpet. "She grew tired of me, I
guess."
"And then she took the Cadillac, is that right?" "That's right."
"Did she go alone?" Amanda Silk said quickly. "I guess so," Jason said. "I can't be sure. Why don't you ask her?"
"Try not to be impertinent," Amanda said, "if you can
avoid it, Mr. Bailey." «j »
Chester Silk cut him short. "Zoe is very vague about it all. That's the fact." He stood up and walked to the door as if he were going out, then turned and marched with equal intensity to the window overlooking Park Avenue. Then he shot his question at Jason, jabbing with his smouldering Havana.
"Would it surprise you if I were to tell you that Zoe is not well?"
"I'm sorry, deeply sorry, sir ... Mrs. Silk. I had no idea
9)
• . .
"Yes, but does it surprise you?"
"Why—yes, sir, yes it does. I had no idea."
"None at all?"
"No, none."
Amanda said, "Zoe is with child." And began to weep; or to dab.
"Zoe is pregnant," Chester Silk added. Jason thought about this. The room was very still—an almost positive silence which gained its added dimension from the uproar of traffic in the avenue outside, so miraculously kept at bay. In the silence Jason thought quickly; the months, the years, concertinaed. The light must fly. "Does this surprise you?" Chester Silk insisted. "No, sir."
Chester Silk nodded, miserable and defeated. Jason almost sympathized with him, with his sudden tumble into impotence and bewilderment; at one blow the trappings of wealth and Power, the forces by which he knew himself and through
which the world identified and classified him, were no m than soiled linen flapping in a ghastly, airless breeze.
He turned away from Jason. "You are, I take it, father?"
. Never more pain in a man's words.
"Yes, I am."
"You feel quite sure?" Amanda said, recoiling at the ideal
Jason smiled a little. "Zoe is the one to know."
"My daughter," said Chester, "is capable of a generosity of spirit and a magnanimity, even in a moment of dire adversity, which lies far beyond the confines of your understanding. I don't blame you for that; we are what we are."
"I can't imagine why she keeps up this charade," Amanda said bitterly. "It's so obvious. She lost her head completely. One feels responsible. One feels one failed to drive certaii lessons home when she was a child."
"What do you intend to do now?" Chester said to Jason.
"Whatever Zoe wants."
"You're glib," Chester said with mounting rage, "but you beggars are as shrewd as any. See, there I am getting carried away, just like I said. You must take into account a father's feelings. I never could stand you people, if you want to know."
"I quite understand," Jason said.
"Butter wouldn't melt in your mouth," Amanda said.
"You needn't think you're going to wriggle out of this," said Chester. "I've got you and your family in the palm of my hand, and goddam it I'll keep every son of a bitch among you on his knees until this mess is cleared up, have you got that straight?"
"I'll do whatever Zoe wants," Jason said quietly. A great new hope was flowering within him; the despair behind their anger was as manure to this new prospect.
"I'll be blunt with you," Chester said. "Zoe won't hear of an abortion. I could fix her one but she won't hear of it."
"She is appallingly stubborn," Amanda said.
"She's humane," Chester rebuked her. "She doesn't want to take human life. That's the way she sees it: the foetus is life. The Church also teaches that. It's a point of view you gotta respect. Listen, I've said to her, 'Zoe, you're going to have a
chUd for better or for worse, and every child in this world has a father. That's no rebuke, honey, it's a fact.' She agrees. 'So who is the father?' I say. 'Let me go find him for you.' She won't answer. She just stares into space and shakes her head slowly, from side to side, like this ... I said to her, 'Honey, is this child to be white—or coloured?' Goddam it, I never thought I'd have to ask my own daughter that ques-ton. 'Time will tell,' she whispers, 'time will tell.' We said to her, 'What do you intend to do with this child? It will be a bastard, Zoe.' Well, she hadn't much of an answer to that one, either. 'It will be mine,' she said, 'mine to keep and mine to love.'"
Amanda Silk had, now, begun to weep, aware as she was how foolish it would be to love, and how barren not to—and how impossible to choose. There was a place in Scotland, she knew, where Zoe and her coloured shame-child could live and hide forever.
Let Soames smile.
Chester Silk offered a consoling paw to his wife's shoulder; it came back unopened. The financier instinctively fought his way out of disconcertion through assertion.
"Now, Jason, I don't know—my wife doesn't know—what precisely is in Zoe's mind. Does she want to marry you? If she does—and I suppose we cannot altogether rule out such a . . . such a—if she does, then evidently she is, out of the nobleness of her heart and spirit, giving you the chance to skip out of it like some goddam ... If she does not wish to marry you—and why in hell's name should she?—well, I think that it would be better if she did. Short of an abortion. Hell, I don't know. Miscegenation in my family! Well, I guess that's already chalked up on the brokers' board. So what do you say?"
"I'll have to talk to Zoe, sir."
Chester Silk exploded.
"You will, huh? And you're bloody well going to talk to me, too, you goddam lousy black tool!"
Amanda shuddered—a tidal wave at the climax of her storm of tears.
Jason stood with deliberate dignity, his hopes continuously fanned by the growing delirium of the Silk family. He felt himself to be smiling inwardly at this twist of fate with the gentle, reticent smile of a male "Mona Lisa."
"If Zoe will have me, sir, I would of course be deeply honoured to marry her."
Chester subsided. "You would?" His glassy gray eyes focused briefly on Jason. Then he turned to Amanda. "Naturally he would be honoured, this punk! Honoured! I'll say." He fell back towards the window, then reflected for the benefit of mankind in general, "He's an educated boy, he's got drive and ambition, these are virtues we admire in this country. Maybe we can help him along ... and up. Jesus Christ!"
He sank into the nearest chair, like a heap of rubble.
Amanda had collected herself. After the tears, she seemed more collected than ever.
"As you may realize," she said, "this could not have come at a worse moment. Zoe's lack of thought and consideration for her parents is here shown to perfect advantage. It is absolutely imperative that I accompany my husband to Cop-pernica later this month. He could not possibly manage alone. We will have to take Zoe, although the climate is by all accounts atrocious. For white people. I can't leave the girl alone here. We'll have to hide her away in the Embassy as best we can. You will have to come too. You will stay in Africa for at least the duration of your Harvard vacation. We must hope that a marriage can be arranged—in private."
"Did you have any other plans?" Chester asked, as if interrogating a homicide suspect.
"No, sir."
Amanda's two bony hands had begun to grapple with one another. Her right hand showed signs of triumphing.
"The problem in all this is Zoe. If, when you see her ... if you can persuade her, for her own sake, of the advisability of getting rid of the child ... in one way or another . . . now, preferably. It can be arranged at once, without risk. She might accept such advice from you, the ... father. Failing that, it would be best if the child were adopted soon after its birth by some African woman."
Chester Silk laughed coldly. "That's it, Jason, you tell her all that."
Amanda led the way along the passage, ankle-deep in
LThe Mercenaries 511
et, under priceless chandeliers and past the Post-jmpressionist paintings which Zoe had chosen and Chester had Paid for. They came to a great double door, painted white, with gilded emblems and handles. Here the mother paused to listen. Then she spoke to Jason in a whisper, "You may find her a little unbalanced. She lies in bed all day, dreaming. We have had professional advice, of course."
He nodded sympathetically. The door opened. The large bedroom was in semidarkness. He stepped inside and after a moment heard the door close behind him. Old magazines, books, phonograph records, chocolate boxes, photograph albums, empty perfume flasks, cosmetics, ivory hairbrushes, hand mirrors, high-heeled shoes, chains of pearls and beads, gold bracelets, diamond brooches and seashells lay strewn about the room, on the floor, the dressing table, several stools, the bed . . . Against the stark white of her pillows, the perfect ivory mask of her face gleamed softly in the single beam of light penetrating the heavy green satin curtains. Her eyes were closed. He took a further step towards her.
"Zoe."
She saw him and sat erect, clutching at herself.
Her eyes opened wider. She drew breath so sharply as almost to cry at the pain of it, and he could not tell whether it was her throat or breast which she clutched at as she reached towards him and almost fell from the bed. He ran to support her and her eyes seemed to tear at his face, as if Peeling off the layers of skin in search of a true identity. She sounded his name three times, with the distant, hollow echo of madness, but the second call was fainter than the first and the third was more desperate than the second. The name was not his own.
He pushed her back on to the pillow and took her shoulders gently. Her eyes closed; once again her face shed its vitality, its right to life and feeling, and subsided into an ivory mask. There was silence again, and the sound of his °wn heart disturbed him. He brought his lips lightly on to hers, and then rested his cheek against her own. When he spoke, it was with gentleness, a tolerance and a strength Which were calculated to reassure.
"Zoe, you don't have to pretend for my sake. You don't have to hide anything from anybody in order to shield me. \ know the truth, it hurts, I can't pretend it doesn't hurt, but I'm the only person you've got, the only one you can rely on, it's no good thinking that Haydon will come, he won't, he despises white people. Zoe, I'm going to stand by you come what may, you'll find that my love isn't so despicable after all, and even if you should ask me to marry you and father another man's child, that's a sacrifice ..."
TWENTY-SIX
the jets came unexpectedly, more swiftly than they had anticipated and with a breathtaking freedom of conception, a long, curving sweep of savage beauty. They dived once, experimentally, skimming across the flat bristle of the jungle like the twin shears of an electric razor, and then climbed sharply, almost vertically, into the pale evening sky.
Jason whistled softly. "How do you like that? Isn't that really something?"
He felt comforted. Through these steel birds his own civilization, the urban world with which he was alone familiar, was defining its superiority, its capacity to impose its weight on the sprawling African jungle. His heart reached out to the audacious pilots, whoever they were. He thought, "Our boys."
But James regarded the sky with troubled eyes.
"Squeamish?" Jason inquired brightly.
"This is never the way," James muttered.
"Your pal the Commandant seems set on it. Don't you two see eye to eye any longer? Thought you were great buddies."
"Drop it."
Deedes tittered, gathering fragments of nerve ends into a random knot, and contemplating, lethargically, the compH" cated metabolism of survival.
"I doubt whiiher Laval tiffs this either," Jaigfes said.
All three looked down the road to where the Commandant stood, lithe and erect, hands on hips, scanning the sky.
"It won't cost him any sleep," Jason said.
"I think you're wrong."
"Sorry. Your pal."
He thought, "Schizo, up and down, sky and earth, them and us, big and small—cross loyalties."
The fighters dived in earnest this time. Their rockets struck the village with the impact of a giant's feet; the earth shook for miles around. A dense pall of black smoke rose like a shroud over Zolanga; the sun, briefly, was eclipsed. Deedes nodded sombrely in the face of justice, or truth. He felt hungry and fatigued.
The planes climbed again, circled, sized up their prey, dived again, released a second string of arrowing rockets, climbed once more, then swooped down the road, strafing the refugees from the village. Laval bellowed a curt order and almost immediately the convoy resumed its journey down the road.
The planes disappeared.
"Never said good-bye," Jason said.
"You sound elated," James said.
"Just scared, if you must know. Ever been scared of anything?"
"Better to wet one's pants, like Deedes, than to defecate in one's own mind."
"If you say so. So it's all commiseration and regrets now, huh? Caffrey the gunman becomes Caffrey the angel of mercy. Only two dollars to see it. Frankly, I find that very kinky."
James held tightly to the reins of his temper.
In the front 'Jeep' Laval was appraising Deedes.
"Old man."
"Aye?"
"I assign you to bury the dead."
A fly perched on the balustrade of the Scot's anguished grimace. He remembered the ten Mau Mau whose only crime had been ...
"You can rely on me, sir. I'm verra reliable. I've seen a lot 'n my time. Nae feather beds where I was reared."
Ten minutes later the convoy halted and Laval took his men into the stricken remains of the village by the most direct route—a gruesome journey into the bowels of a nightmare. At the entrance to the village itself Laval anticipated the feeble ambush, the last pathetic token of defiance of a stricken community, with a handful of lobbed grenades which flushed three young Africans from their hideout in scarlet fragments, raw meat which brought Deedes' vomit up like boiling milk.
Laval gripped James by the elbow.
"You cover the western arc. I'll take the east. Search quickly.
"I see."
But no one moved. Every man hung back.
"Allez, allez," snapped Laval, darting ahead into the drifting smoke.
Forcing himself forward, James had gone only a few paces before he stumbled coughing into the ruins of a habitation where lay the decapitated body of a young child of perhaps nine or ten. The mother had thrown herself across the child in a last, abortive gesture of protection. Her face was turned upwards in mild surprise towards a gaping roof and a sky with which previously she had entertained no quarrel. Her left breast had been ripped away by flying metal; flies clustered in dense swarms around her gaping wounds and around the stump of the child's neck. Recoiling instinctively, James forced himself to pause long enough to put a bullet through the woman's head. He pushed forward again through clouds of smoke and found himself among a row of dwellings which had been scythed flat by a rocket. Bodies were strewn everywhere, burned and contorted, protesting some residual primitive innocence whose claims were hard, now that the battle was over, to deny. A child of five, badly burned, with a rent in her face running from ear to mouth, was staring at the still twitching body of a woman who might have been her mother.
"Jesus."
James turned quickly. Jason was standing behind his shoulder, drawn along in the orbit of his courage; his face had fallen into nothingness, like the mask of a drowned man»
James shot both the woman and the child. The child's body leaped, almost joyfully, as if brought back to life by the impact of the bullets. James stepped back.
"Better," he said. His voice cracked.
Throughout the village and surrounding jungle children ran wild in crazed, hunted packs, shrieking with terror and bewilderment, dazed by shock and the suffocating density of the black smoke. Squatting in the long grass to relieve himself— he had to, it ran thin and brown, like muddy water—Deedes found himself confronted by a small child, a wild-eyed, dazed thing, a girl, too frightened to turn and run from the squatting white monster with his hairy haunches. As Deedes rose slowly from his crouching position, muttering reassuringly and hoisting up his trousers, the girl stared at his loins, at the sandy bush of hair, then raised her small hands in a gesture of defence as he advanced on her with outstretched, beseeching arms. At the instant his fingers touched her hot skin, she screamed. Backing away from the girl, Deedes cursed and groped for his rifle.
James pressed on through the village of the dead, guiding his men through an arc of investigation, from corpse to corpse, mortuary to mortuary, until he met up with Laval.
"Maya is dead. Any sign of the others?"
"No, none."
Laval shrugged. "As I feared. Gone."
James followed him into one of the larger houses where Maya lay crumpled in a corner, face downwards, dead.
"Finished," Laval said, prodding the body with his boot and momentarily subsiding, surrendering not so much to inertia as to some private torment, disengaging the needle of his manhood from the disc of his monumental struggle against the forces of barbarism. He turned Maya's body over sympathetically; the bushy black beard was crusted in blood. The eyes remained open.
"I understand this man. I'm not a hypocrite and I won't fawn at his tomb now that he's finished with. I won't pretend that I loved him. But I understand him. The others, Tukhomada, Odouma . . ."
His face jerked back to life, stiff and metallic, like a highly sprung jack knife.
"We must go after them, without delay. Time is on their side. In the river of time the swinish multitude bathe in their millions, and the scum rises to the surface."
James walked into the open. The carcass-strewn floor of the village was now carpeted black with seething vultures.
"We'd better start digging, then," James said.
Laval laughed shortly. "This morning I had forty men, then ten, now perhaps seven. It would take a platoon three days to bury this lot."
"The dead cannot bury themselves."
"Calmness, mon petit. Take it from me, as soon as we depart, friends and relatives will emerge from the jungle to bury them. Elaborate funerals will be staged, witch doctors will thrive. At your age I also felt sensitive. And Jean Martignac—he never shed a certain girlish revulsion at the sight of blood. Which did not prevent him from fighting well." Laval's hand was once again on James' shoulder, like a black claw. His voice dropped. "They tortured me, the Gestapo. I know all there is to know about suffering."
At the far end of the village Deedes wandered through the debris, picking his way among the bodies, searching vaguely for the Russky, besieged by the knowledge that an invisible yet universal bond, a kind of Interpol, linked the powers, the patriots, those who judged, those with education. Everything that Laval said pointed to the fact that the authorities in Kenya had sent the Commandant his personal file, his catalogue of treasons. The upturned, gutted faces were the worst, soft and vulnerable to the beaks and talons of the descending vultures.
Someone screamed. Deedes recognized the American, the Americano, a shriek followed by submissive sobbing. He hesitated; damp sweat broke out fresh as raw onion juice over the crusted layers of dry, salted perspiration. In hesita ting, he pondered the lessons of a lifetime, the advantages o:: lying low. Even so, there blossomed within him a memory o:: himself, of his better years, when he had become a force upon whom others could rely and depend. Almost bent double with caution, he scurried through the ruins like the hunchback of Notre Dame, gripping his rifle, coughing in the smoke, emitting small, spasmodic signals, kicking wildly a the vultures as they pecked at his heels, heavy-bellied brutes, black and resentful.
Then he came upon the Americano.
In the midst of such a holocaust, Jason had chosen to be sick where grass and soft soil would absorb his discharge. Clutching his stomach and retching, he had run beneath the trees, while the vomit billowed pinkish yellow and nauseous through his mouth and nose. Straightening up, he almost fell over an old woman lying on her back, caked in a brown, rusted blood, staring at the trees above her, dead. Vultures were already quarrelling over her remains. Jason backed away, numbed with shock, overwhelmed by the imminence of the encounter, absorbed to the point where he was no longer conscious of his own reactions. Raising his eyes from the dead woman, he saw to his utter terror that he was being watched from the deeper shadows of the jungle, where a young African sat absolutely immobile, propped against a tree. His stillness was uncanny. Jason froze, anchored to the ground by fear and guilt. The eyes were glazed, of marble, the jaws not rigid nor closed but absolutely immobile, the face itself moulded into the uncanny half-real quality of a waxwork effigy. Slowly, fettered by terror, Jason edged across the young man's line of vision. The eyes did not pursue him; he was dead.
Obsessed by the need to find James Caffrey, to get away, Jason turned back towards the village and almost immediately found himself face to face with a thin child, dressed in tattered rags, who was clutching a heavy and primitive hunt-Ing gun. The boy could barely hold the barrel level. Sores ran in long, livid rashes across his face, arms and legs, and his ribs threatened to break through his taut, wasted skin. His belly was swollen and the legs which supported it were like Watchsticks, shapeless and almost devoid of muscle and sinew. Finding the gun painfully raised towards him and an e*pression of the blindest animosity on the child's face, Jason realized in a moment of electric panic that his own hands were empty, that in the shock of stumbling over the dead woman and the young man he'd left his own rifle in the long grass, beside his vomit. He searched desperately for a means °f communication, some way of reassuring the boy that he was a friend, that he'd had no part in the bombing, that He| was merely a witness, a fellow Negro with the same pigmell tation and a common ancestry. The fact of being an Amei.l can, educated and prosperous, suddenly seemed an intolej-. I able misfortune, a cruel twist of fate, a burden which no I Negro ought to have to carry, a passport to constant misun.j derstanding, a curse which must inevitably bring down uponl him, however innocent, the accumulated resentments of hisl own people, his blood brothers. He badly wanted to reach I out to the boy, to tell him of his own innermost loyalties, the I fidelity which his French army uniform cruelly concealed, to I tell him of the heroic struggle which his people were conduct-1 ing against the whites in America. The boy seemed to be sizing him up; the gun wobbled in his hands. Jason dropped to his knees and clasped his hands together in what he hoped would be accepted as a universal gesture of piety in the face of collective disaster. Yet this appeared only to anger the child, who began to wrestle with the gun's heavy iron bolt, and as he did so the gun itself fell to the ground, affording Jason his chance, if he dared, to rush the boy. But he did not dare; so often before he had not dared. He was riveted to the ground by more than physical paralysis; the intervening space, the few yards of stony soil which separated him from the child, repelled him like a minefield, a no-man's-land of summary justice, a zone called purgatory.
The boy had cocked the gun now. Laboriously he levelled it and advanced on the kneeling American. Jason began to sob and to plead, desperate, grasshopper cries whose source he could not identify. It was these which Deedes had heard. The old veteran drifted into his blurred line of vision like a ghost haunted by men; for an agony of time he hesitated* dithered, until a clap of thunder lifted the boy into the air and flung him down several yards away in the long grass. B was like a street accident. Deedes grinned mechanically.
Jason heard the bones crack—the neck.
Half an hour after entering the village, Laval ordered a general withdrawal. The reprieve came none too soon; each man hurried from the ruins pursued by Furies, by minor god* who refused to understand or condone, and each man befl his head under the persistent shadow of the vultures, high and silent on the wing.
Laval took James' arm. A trace of uncertainty was apparent in his approach.
"Wie geht es Ihnen?"
"Intact."
"Nothing is intact. Seven men left, out of forty. Cowards, dogs, they deserve what they get. The villagers will hunt them down at leisure. There can be no escape."
"They lacked conviction."
"They lacked hemp. Listen. Long ago I committed myself to a sacred cause to which I shall remain faithful until I draw my last breath. Nothing can divert me from the path of duty, however painful, except death. Nothing is easy. Camille Odouma, for instance. She fell victim to an alien growth which lodges like a cancer in the breast and brain. It was necessary to wield a scalpel; my pain exceeded hers. Odouma himself was corrupted by the Slav contaminators years ago, in Paris. He intended not only to castrate and torture me, but also to eat me alive. You look doubtful. Ha! You English know literally nothing of what we're fighting. Do you imagine that the massacre which brought Ybele to power gave me pleasure? Do you imagine that I enjoyed the spectacle of black soldiers, brute beasts, raping white women by the roadside? Well?"
James stared at him in astonishment.
"You really did engineer all that?"
"Certainly."
"Tukhomada and Odouma had no part in it?"
"But for their evil policies it would never have been Necessary. The guilt lies on their heads."
James' initial disgust was so intense and all-pervasive that 11 refused to resolve itself into defined crystals of belief, of Conviction. He felt gassed. Laval was watching him anxiously. Once again his hand touched James, but more tentatively.
"Doubts are digging ugly trenches in your face."
"Maybe."
"Always speak your mind."
"There must have been some other way."
"Action ramifies," Laval said shortly. "I see that your friend Tufton has left you in the dark on a number of
issues."
"I'm sure he had no more idea than I-"
Laval thought about this. "It's true that the plan was not explained to him before the event. I have no wish to turn you against your patron. Loyalty is the measure of all things. In any case, we're concerned not with what should happen, but with what will happen. It's more important to remain in control of facts than to become the slave of irrelevant scruples."
The return march soon lost its momentum. Laval experienced difficulty in keeping his exhausted men together and in preventing their limbs from collapsing under them. Only fear of the enemy and of the coming night spurred them on to the safety of the convoy.
Jason walked alone, at the rear of the column, broken and utterly spent. His legs moved mechanically, his willpower had drained away, his moment of terror, his encounter with death, had lodged with him forever. Finally he sought out James.
"Listen," he said urgently, when he was sure that Laval was not within earshot, "I'm getting out of here. I never was the Auschwitz type. I just can't take it. It's the way you're born, it's physiological. I just wanted to tell you that I'm getting out."
"How?"
Jason's face was invaded by distress.
"What's he planning on next?" he asked disconsolately.
"He's going after Tukhomada."
"Farther south, you mean? Farther than ever from Thiers-ville?"
"That's it."
"And you're going with him, huh?"
James offered no reply. A many-turreted castle had collapsed into the squat, brutal form of a prison fortress.
"Maybe he'd give me one of those Jeeps if I told him 1 was going back." Jason kept licking his lip.
"I doubt it."
"Listen, my father happens to be the Assistant to the American Ambassador. You guys may find it hard to grasp, but he's someone. The USA is no flea pit. Jesus, I can count on the protection of Ambassador Silk himself, don't anyone forget that. Who is this Laval, anyway?"
"It won't work," James said.
Jason got flustered and frightened. "How would you
know?"
"I'd prefer not to explain."
"Why?"
"Because you wouldn't enjoy what I told you."
"Kind of a babe in arms, am I? Things figure out nicely. You're going along with Laval and keeping everyone else in line. You share his big, wordy ideas, all that humanism and destiny stuff. Wiping a village off the face of the earth means nothing to you, it's just another day's idealism. I get it."
"You looked pretty pleased when those planes appeared."
"Oh sure," Jason said derisively.
"Your trouble," James said, releasing the pressure of his anger, "is that you have to blurt out everything that comes into your head. Some people don't feel the compulsion to talk all the time. They're even prepared to have feelings which they keep to themselves. That way, the feelings may even clarify and deepen."
"Yeah, very public school, old man."
James reacted violently. At the end of such a day tolerance became a rare commodity.
"If you don't wrap up I'll really thump you. You're beginning to get under my skin."
They walked in silence, Jason trailing a few paces behind on blistered feet, his limbs stiff and sore, his chest weak from exertion. Farther up the column he could see Deedes stumbling along in a daze, looking as if he might collapse at any moment. Yet he kept going. Darkness was pushing through the trees like an inky mist.
"You're sure he wouldn't let me have one of those Jeeps," Jason ventured.
"Quite sure."
"Then I'll walk. Someone'll give me a lift."
"The first man you meet will kill you. Everyone within fifty square miles will be out to get you. You wouldn't last a day."
"So?"
"So we have to stick together."
Both men stared at their own feet as they marched. Somewhere ahead the black ground ran into the black sky: it was all on one plane.
"Suppose you and I and perhaps Deedes got together and went to Laval. I mean we could make our position absolutely clear. He'd have no alternative but to give us a Jeep."
If anything could revive James' sympathy for the Commandant, it was Jason's wailing concern for his own safety. Laval was right; the job had to be completed. To turn back now would imply a total confession of failure, a ludicrously flimsy commitment to the ideal, a pathetic inadequacy on the cold rock face of history. Alec had never turned back. In any case, the victims of Zolanga had not died for nothing, these corpses had to be justified. Some positive force had to be planted in the dead ground. James bolstered himself against Jason's proposition with such considerations; even so, he sensed that the foundation stone had shifted; things could never be the same again.
Jason pressed his case.
"You go to Laval. We'll stand behind you. It'll be three against one."
"It wouldn't work."
"Are you scared, maybe?"
"Hostages have to take what comes to them."
Jason's head jerked back, as if struck. When he spoke, there were tears in his eyes.
"I'm not with you," he whispered. "I guess I'm a bit simple."
The words died in James' throat. The prospect of disabusing Jason, of stamping on his dream of serving Chester Silk, of snapping the fragile rope on which his spirit sustained itself was more than he could face. He had no wish to see Jason hurtle through the void of his own shattered ambitions; no comforting illusion, no safety net, would break his fall.
"We're all hostages," he said.
No sooner were they uttered than the words struck him with a jolt which almost stopped him in his tracks. If Soames had seen fit to deceive Jason . . . Reluctantly, with a kind of dread, James pushed his mind towards the patron on whose guidance and inspiration he had come to depend. The more j,e pondered the man, the more closely he measured his words against his actions, the clearer on the horizon became jjje gray hills of impending conflict.
TWENTY-SEVEN
from a distance of fifteen miles, Raymond Tukho-mada and Amah Odouma watched the jets destroy Zolanga. When the planes had been sighted, glinting in the sky like steel hawks, the driver had immediately pulled off the road. At the summit of their trajectory they appeared to hover motionless, poised like darts. Then they dived, soundlessly. Flames sprang above the trees, the sound followed, the crunch of giant's feet. The earth shook. Black smoke spiralled into the sky.
Tukhomada stood beside the car nodding his small, dinosaur's head. Tears poured down his cheeks.
"You never married," he said to Amah. Emotion choked him. "A married man feels differently about women and children. He knows in his heart that it's his own family, his beloved ones."
The planes had climbcd higher now, describing a wide, searching parabola, until suddenly they swooped and thundered at treetop level down the road, firing their machine guns. The two guards pulled Tukhomada to the ground and flung themselves on top of him just as the roar of the jets devastated them, driving them into the earth like prehistoric skeletons.
Finally the two planes turned away and headed north, towards Thiersville. As the Africans climbed into the car and resumed their journey southwards, Tukhomada's distress made itself felt in a torrent of words.
"My nightmares are always personal, never public. That may surprise you, Amah, but I'm not easily understood. One day they will do something to Sofie and the children, I know it. And I won't be at their side to help them face death, to steady them. I have these visions, you see. I'm on board an ocean liner in high seas; my son, Maurice, slips from my grasp and falls overboard. For a moment I can see his small head bobbing in the waves. His life, my life, what am I to do? I can't swim. You've been wise not to marry. Sometimes I imagine that my Sofie has died, that a terrible accident has befallen her, and I hurry home to calm the children, to comfort them. But they hardly remember who I am. I go down on my knees so as not to frighten them with my height, and I say, 'Maurice, Marie, I'm your papa.' But they turn away and cling to the skirts of their nurse. I find myself condemned to be what I have become through no fault of my own, a public man."
The car, a Citroen hurriedly borrowed from a sympathetic local farmer, lurched and groaned over the worsening roads, its windscreen crusted with dead insects. Red dust shrouded them, coating their lungs. With four hundred miles separating them from the security of Potonou in Upper Varva, they were once again faced by the incessant, day-and night tension of hunted animals.
"I've brought ruin upon these people," Tukhomada said. His tears had dried now, but his features were stricken with anguish and remorse.
"It was Maya who led us to Zolanga," Amah said. "They were his people, not yours."
"I daresay Maya is dead now."
"His capacity for survival is amazing."
"He was your old chief, of course," Tukhomada said, clenching his hands and rubbing them incessantly on his trouser leg until a brown stain appeared. "You're no doubt reproaching me for having taken to my heels while Maya stayed to face the music."
"Whatever you did, I did also."
"You may not be above reproach yourself."
"Maya wanted it this way. He insisted on staying to cover our retreat."
"I'm sorry to have quarrelled with him," Tukhomada said distractedly, barely taking in Amah's replies. "It was a quarrel without substance."
Amah understood how he felt, not only about Maya but about the villagers who had flocked to welcome them like princes, offering food, water, clean clothes—a car. Believing himself unknown and unloved among this tribe, the tall man from Upper Varva had been stunned by the warmth of their greeting and by the absolute, unconditional quality of their loyalty. His pride in being a leader and guardian of the whole nation, of a united people, had no sooner revived than he had been compelled to desert them, to leave them to their fate, to the destruction raining down from the sky.
When they were not glancing over their shoulders for the first sign of the pursuing mercenaries, their eyes were glued to the dashboard. Like everything else, it was soon coated with red dust. The kilometres mounted up with agonizing, tortoiselike slowness, perversely grudging. They found it virtually impossible not to glance anxiously through the rear window every few minutes. While each man felt impelled to do this, to see for himself, the habit in his neighbours soon became irritating. At one stage a pact was made to refrain, a self-denying ordinance. But everyone had broken it within ten minutes.
They were in the heartland of Coppernica now; areas of jungle alternated with small farms, maize fields and banana groves. The cultivated fields, so miserly in their yield, crept hopefully up the hillsides, to stony ground liable to produce no more than two bushelr. for every bushel sown. The peasants straightened their backs to watch the car pass.
"If we'd taken your advice, Amah, and arrested those five men three weeks ago, all this could have been avoided."
"I suppose so."
"You know so. The scruples which we entertained about so small an act of violence look remarkably pathetic against What we have just seen. I don't know why I was so blind that morning. Power dissipates one's alertness. Conviction gives ^ay to overconfidence."
"Sometimes I argue with myself the other way. Perhaps there's a need to define our attitude to violence. We may require an exact yardstick against which to measure our actions."
"The European does it for us," Tukhomada said bitterly "Every year of my life the choice confronting me has been clear cut: give way or fight."
"But isn't that where the moral dilemma begins, rather than ends?"
"It's not a problem for prolonged speculation. Life is too short. I take a more mechanistic view, based on experience. Each man is the compound of his inheritance, and his environment; he will act as he must."
"But one must think, surely."
"Yes, one must think."
"The anarchists, for example, preached that all political activity debases human nature, that the state inevitably corrupts both its rulers and its victims, whether feudal, bourgeois, proletarian or what-have-you."
"It's a point of view," said Tukhomada dryly.
"But if one looks east, and back to 1917, is one not impelled to grant the anarchists a shred of insight which Marx lacked?"
"Marx? You people who have been to Paris always come back babbling about Marx. I'm interested in Africa."
"The argument about power," Amah persisted, "can equally well be transferred to the question of violence. The anarchists did not on the whole make the transference. But it seems to me very plausible to argue that in employing violence against our oppressors we gradually assimilate the most significant feature of their nature as oppressors."
Tukhomada laughed shortly. "If I see a young thug beating up an old woman in the cite and I come to her rescue, do I therefore become the young thug?"
"I don't believe the analogy is relevant. The truth is, individual acts of violence can be solitary, whereas political or collective violence is continuous. Once set in motion, it cannot be broken off. It is always implicit, even when not explicit. Having rescued the old woman and subdued the young thug, you then go your way again. But when we have driven the French from our soil, we assume power and thereby threaten with continual violence all those who challenge our independence."
"Now you are equating violence with power. That the exercise of power implies a willingness to resort to force in the defence of legality is news to nobody."
»It seems to me that the distinction isn't very important. Violence and power are two sides of the same coin, the one 'illegal' and the other 'legal.' They are likely to affect the individual psychologically in much the same way."
"I see. So we may soon count ourselves Fascists?"
"I can't regard even that question lightly," Amah said. "I get the impression increasingly that what we know about the historical process does not marry well with what we know about human beings. Violence may indeed be the midwife of history; we ourselves have felt the magnetic pull of necessity driving us to it. Men come out of inert, asocial groups by way of conflict, struggle and violence; in this way they gain group consciousness, they develop an ideology, they begin to make history as well as being made by it. Once this is proven to be a historical law, a law of progress if you like, it may be futile to shudder or complain. Yet almost all our moral categories must shudder—unless we are to become unbearably schizophrenic."
"These moral categories are no doubt obsolete," Tukhomada said.
"But are they? When you spoke of your feelings for your family, your horror at the killing of women and children, you spoke as any decent man might have done for the last three thousand years. All too often our radicals are to be found tapping Nietzsche on the shoulder and saying, 'Move over, we can match you in our muscularity, our realism, our contempt for all forms of feminism, whether Christian, or Kantian or bourgeois humanist.' That makes me very uneasy. Some of my Communist friends in Paris were attracted towards that line. And yet they, like everyone else, admired arnong their family and friends the most gentle, patient, forbearing people, the ones who turn the other cheek."
"Politics knows no analogies."
"That is what Machiavelli said."
"And Robespierre, too, no doubt."
Amah shrugged. "This man who is pursuing us, what ^ould one do with him if he fell into our hands? A murder-er. a torturer, an unrepentant sadist."
"You wouldn't torture him, Amah."
"But why?"
"Because you understand the legitimate limits of violence."
"If I told you that I once murdered an old lady, a Frenchwoman, in cold blood, would you believe me?"
"There must have been a good reason for it."
"My reason, not hers."
At night the three guards took turns at the wheel; there could be no stopping except for fuel and food. Fuel was always the problem; time and again the petrol gauge sank towards zero and hovered on the brink of calamity before a village with a pump was found. The Citroen performed gallantly, but its speed was limited and extreme caution was demanded if they were to avoid the sort of breakdown which had crippled the Peugeot. Tempers worsened as the hours passed; without proof of tangible evidence, each man fell prey to pessimism, to a foreboding that fate was against them, that their enemies must be gaining ground.
And hope, when it dawned, came as unpredictably as it vanished. It was like indigestion—beyond control.
"There can be only one Reason," Tukhomada said, in a moment of optimism, shaking off the long, inhibiting silence which only deepened the texture of their anxiety. "We owe that lesson to the French. You might say that we derive our whole philosophy from our oppressors."
"I don't think so."
Raymond smiled. "You don't agree with me very often, Amah."
Amah blushed. "If one agrees, there is no discussion."
"So much the worse for philosophy."
"The French like to think that they taught us everything-— except how to be real Frenchmen. That is what they tell themselves in the Cite Universitaire when they're licking their wounds and wondering why they strike a less heroic posture in the world than Carnot and the Jacobins did. Of course they're no worse than the English; Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy has a unique flavour. Certainly we may have listened to Rousseau, Blanqui and Jaures, but the France we have been fighting no longer heeds those voices. It merely records them mechanically in its schoolbooks. The official France has been compelled to discard their philosophy for another."
"Or for none," suggested Tukhomada. "Whenever a Frenchman has struck me, or abused me, or tried to bribe me, I have never felt myself to be the victim of anything more than incoherent rage."
"Incoherent, certainly. There is a kind of metaphysics, a cult of the irrational, behind it all. Their thoughts, like their actions, are scattered and dislocated by anguish. They proclaim simultaneously the sanctity of the individual and the transcendental egoism of the nation. The result is peculiar: 'Deutschland iiber alles, heil Hitler! La France d'abord, vive Keller!' What they have in common, our enemies, is a fundamental pessimism. Even the optimism of the thousand-year Reich was marred by the underlying belief that men can never behave decently. Dreading the stirring of the masses, they appeal wildly to God, or the nation, or civilization, or the supremacy of the white race. Racism is the ultimate confusion."
"I hope you're right. When we proclaim all men to be brothers, it often sounds like an article of faith, and no
more."
"I don't know. Who does? One gropes in the dark. I was in love once with a white girl. We loved one another, no doubt. Absolute equality reigned between us. Then the revolution broke out here. For a while we kept our heads and reasoned with ourselves. On the surface things looked normal, but underneath passions were boiling up which neither of us could contain indefinitely. Then the Blue Berets blew up Bwonpo Chagala and a whole street of the cite, and we responded with the ambush at Belonga. You see, I call it an ambush; the whites regarded it as an atrocity. Well, that was it. Our affair ended on the very morning that the news came through. Afterwards I realized that the break had come about not through passion but through empathy. It wasn't that each of us wanted to justify our own side; far worse, it Was that willy-nilly we were bound by racial affinity to be one side or the other; we had spilled one another's blood, we could no longer share the same bed."
"Some of the worst racists take Negro girls to bed with them. When I was a young man I had some experience of that."
"Negroes and white girls—that's the test."
"Maybe. What you say merely confirms my suspicions about our faith in human brotherhood. We don't say that in a rational jungle, panther and leopard will no longer savage one another. We don't think jungles can be rational, nor panthers and leopards. We perhaps over-estimate man's evolutionary position."
"If there is a sphere of instinct, we can at least recognize it, and in that way conquer it."
"Telling a boy about Oedipus won't prevent him growing jealous of his father."
"Well—a pope once wrote in his diary, 'Concerning chastity in my relations with myself, in immodest intimacies: nothing serious, ever.'"
"Oh, yes, the monks. To conquer an urge is not to remove it. Sublimation only generates new passions to sublimate."
"I am hopeful, all the same," Amah said.
"You're still young," Raymond Tukhomada said.
Potonou—fifty kilometres.
"This is Upper Varva," Tukhomada announced. His back straightened and his small head nodded with pride. The jungle and maize fields beside the road looked much the same as elsewhere to Amah.
"One can tell," he said.
Tukhomada's rising spirits were infectious; gusts of laughter dispelled the constricted silence which had settled over them for long periods, particularly at night. It looked, now, as if their luck would hold.
"If anything should happen to me," Tukhomada said suddenly, feeling, no doubt, that nothing now would, "you must take the reins. We must assume Maya to be dead."
"I see."
"Well, are you ambitious, Amah?"
"Me?"
"Heirs to the throne have always looked much alike to kings."
"I have thought about it, believe me," said Amah solemnly-
"Truly?" Tukhomada was enjoying himself.
"I have emptied myself like a basket of old clothes, searching for the needle of real ambition. I stare into the past, I become part of history. The Bolsheviks, you know, were steeped in the history of the French Revolution to an almost morbid extent. Each eyed his neighbour, assessing his qualities as an emergent Bonaparte. In the end they got it wrong: some thought it must be Trotsky, and Trotsky settled on Bukharin. No one thought of Stalin. But it creeps, this ambition. Caesar put away the crown thrice—no doubt without humbug. I knew a student in Paris who had a rich and ailing father. Every time he thought about his father's money—and what he could do with it—he decided that he didn't care a damn and that his love for the old man was all that counted. Then one night he had a dream in which he pushed his father under a bus."
"I will steer clear of buses," Tukhomada said.
When the Citroen finally gave up the ghost, they were only thirty kilometres from Potonou. Towards midnight the car shuddered, hiccupped and slowed to a stop; its bowels vented metallic complaints. The gearbox had apparently packed up; there could be no hope of examining the trouble and attempting a repair until morning. The next village was three kilometres away. They began to walk.
The night was war n and still; the vast silence was underpinned by the low throbbing of the cicadas. Cultivated fields, lightly touched by a half-moon, lay on either side of the road, and somewhere a stream, perhaps a tributary of the Varva, gurgled softly.
It was a relief to walk, to breathe fresh air, to extend the limbs. Even so, the breakdown was a severe shock, coming as rt did at a moment when their optimism was verging on complacency. The dull metal of time suddenly gleamed like a Jewel and the theory that the mercenaries had called off the Pursuit or turned back to Thiersville lost its redolence. A Premonition of swift tragedy tautened their spines and quickened their stride.
When they reached the village, it was in complete darkness. A dog barked, then another; oil lamps were lit, several men appeared cautiously at their doors; the dogs set up a furore. For a moment Tukhomada stood quite still, as if groping for his own childhood, for the style, the wavelength which would bind these villagers to him. Then he walked alone towards the chief's house, and as he walked a crowd formed around him. Women came to their doors; a whispering tide of speculation rustled through the community like a warm breeze. Lights now blazed. The chief had appeared. Amah could see Tukhomada's head above the crowd, turning from side to side, exhorting, explaining, reassuring. The word "Tukhomada" swept through the compound like a prairie fire. A friendly crowd gathered around Amah and the guards; they nodded and smiled. Amah felt himself to be in a different country, a foreign land; the night was unbearably beautiful.
Tukhomada walked back towards them, followed by the men, the elders of the village, already his self-appointed counsellors. Amah experienced a twinge of apprehension; deaf and dumb, he could easily become superfluous here in Upper Varva.
"We are invited by the chief to stay and eat," Tukhomada said.
"What about a car?"
"A farmer living ten kilometres from here has one. They have sent off their fastest runner."
"Ten kilometres!" Amah glanced towards the road.
Tukhomada was calm. Among his own people he felt, evidently, impregnable. It was not the first time that Amah had seen his leader submit to this dangerous illusion.
"Time is running against us," Amah said.
"We can only wait."
The elders of the village nodded at whatever he said, although they spoke no French. Suddenly two young men lifted him shoulder-high and bore him away, towards the chief's house, followed by a laughing throng of men, women and children. Consciously suppressing his faint irritation, Amah allowed the tide of communal emotion and loyalty to lap over him. His respect and admiration for Tukhomada had never wavered; once again he found himself in the presence of an almost spiritual passion, a popular and persuasive reverence whose origins remained to him a mystery. Indeed, no one, however close in his confidence, knew precisely how Tukhomada had risen from obscurity to become the symbol of a nation. The insults of the foreign press, the journalists' jibes about embezzlement, prostitution and procurement, about a life of crime and rapacity, had to be endured in silence—likewise rumours that he had been certified insane and consigned to an asylum. No one knew; no one dared ask; and Raymond himself reacted to all such charges with absolute disdain. Over a period of time even his most ardent followers began to doubt whether so much smoke could have mushroomed without a spark of fire.
Twenty-four hours later, Amah Odouma lay in a hot bath regarding his toes. They curled in a way which was supremely familiar to him. Steam drifted around his head, a soft vapour into which memories, hopes and imaginary, self-vindicating speeches were tolerantly absorbed. Extreme heat always induced in him a mild euphoria. A servant had brought the two cauldrons of scalding water from the kitchens, on the instructions of his host, the Mayor of Potonou. Through the small window above him the sky was painted a clear, flat gray-blue, its lower levels broken by the baroque turrets and conceits of the Bishop's palace. He felt good, now, and hungry. It was good to be alone for an hour and free of anxiety. The nightmare of the journey from Thiersville had already lost its immediacy; even the destruction of Zolanga and Maya's death now carried no sharper reality and imminence than a black-and-white film seen many months before.
Pulling himself up in the tub, he reached for his towel. The Place de Verdun below glowed like a dull terra-cotta in the evening sunlight. The dust had settled, the square was empty save for a few mules standing in the shade of the long market portico and occasional knots of people, chatting lethargically, reluctant to part for their separate homes. It appealed to his senses, this town of bronze, ochre and mellow stone, with its tightly packed workshops famous for their ironware and ivory carvings. Lacking the elegant French symmetry of Thiersville's wide boulevards with their neatly spaced trees, it lacked also the harsh contrasts between the affluence of the European ville and the squalor of the native cite. Potonou was a unified town, coherent and integrated; the temper of its people and the quality of their culture exercised an immediate attraction for him. Slowly cooling water swilled around his legs, the colour of laterite dust.
The vivid kaleidoscope of the receding day dazed him: the fragile rafters of the coming dawn as they entered the sleeping town, the utter peace in the streets, the pie dogs, the soft veil of the dwindling night. The Mayor, warned of their coming, had welcomed them with open arms; he and Raymond had kissed one another and wept. Through the long morning and deep into the heat of the afternoon Amah had slept, his naked body stretched like an ebony cross on the starched whiteness of the sheets.
Late in the afternoon a vast crowd had gathered in the square to proclaim its allegiance to Raymond Tukhomada.
The cohesion and intensity of the demonstration had deeply impressed Amah. Streaming from their places of work, from the shops, ateliers, warehouses, building sites, markets, offices and municipal buildings, the citizens filled the Place de Verdun with their flags, slogans and rippling, irrepressible laughter. Wearing gaily coloured kente cloths and bearing their smaller infants on their backs, the women came also, in large, segregated groups wild with chatter and speculation. When finally Tukhomada appeared like a pope on the balcony of the Mayor's residence, the thousands below greeted him with a single, climactic cry of welcome. The town shook.
For a few moments he spoke hesitantly, groping for his touch, trying to conjure from an obscure past the habitual magic, the umbilical cord which bound his people to him-Then, as pigeons scatter at a gunshot, his inhibitions were abruptly dispelled by the memory of Zolanga. For the firs time since the coup d'etat which brought down his government, he expounded his case to the world. Indignatioi charged his tongue with eloquence. Pinning the responsibility for the massacre of Europeans in Thiersville on the shoulder of Ybele and his foreign allies, he thrust the carnage °
Zolanga into the same bloodstained hands. It was now known that thirty villagers had been killed and fifty more wounded. And Maya was dead; his body had been found. Tukhomada called for a national day of mourning in honour of the man whom the Coppernican people had the wisdom to follow in their hour of destiny, a great soldier whose integrity matched his passion for social justice. Let those who plotted to enslave Coppernica forever tremble; the second Tukhomada government would not repeat the mistakes, the excessive leniency, of the first. Approaching the climax of his oration and coaxing his audience to a crescendo of feeling, bringing the smouldering anger to the surface in darting flames, he appealed for a general rising throughout the country to overthrow the "murderous puppet Ybele." The entire concourse in the Place de Verdun exploded.
Amah climbed from the bathtub and put on clean linen, lent to him by the Mayor. Anticipating the feast below, he combed his hair carefully and studied himself in the mirror. Long vertical lines of sadness had taken possession of his face. It was impossible, he knew, to grieve forever; equally impossible ever to forget.
He descended the broad staircase with the conscious dignity of a Minister of the Interior and Minister of National Economy. He looked to be what he was—very young. A single thought nagged him like a mosquito in the night: comforting as this great demonstration of popular sympathy had been, he found it hard to believe that the ghost of Andre Laval had been finally laid to rest.
PART IV
A Man and His Memory
laval pitched camp in a jungle hideout some ten miles to the northeast of Potonou. He made three attempts in rapid succession to penetrate the town's defences by subterfuge; each failed. His mood darkened.
A small stream ran through the camp. The water was clear and perfect for drinking. Lacking the normal green slime of a jungle tributary, it sparkled like a mountain brook. Deedes developed a way of looking at it, and listening. He sat for hours, pulling on his pipe, as if hypnotized by its innocent passage. A weight was lifted from him; at last he was able to forget—no one knew what. He didn't speak often, but when he did speak, the edges of his words were clean cut, like the cathedral stones of a master mason. His companions observed his transformation with a certain mute astonishment; even Laval left him alone now.
On the second night, shortly before dawn, James Caffrey Was awakened by a hand laid lightly on his shoulder. Fending off the ghost, groping for the misty womb of renewed sleep, he found it persistent.
"A word with you," Deedes whispered, bending over him.
James sat up and shook himself. The older man had evidently been vested with authority in some invisible ceremony; fatigue, or shame, no longer excused a rebuke. James followed him down the narrow track which bordered the stream. The doe-eyed sentries observed their departure with lethargic apprehension.
James followed; Deedes walked ahead. Both were conscious of this.
539
-
Squatting down on the bank they lit cigarettes a gathered the silence into themselves, like a drug. The Scotsman, it seemed, had at last come to terms with the night; he wore it like a summer garment, lightly.
"This river," he reflected, "reminds me of one when I was a bairn. The Water of Leith—just the same."
James watched him with curiosity. But he thought it inappropriate to ask questions; the years forbade it—or might have done.
"Now you'll be wanting to know," Deedes began, "why your beauty sleep has been disturbed. Perhaps you ken already. It comes to this. Do we go on or not? And if so—where? I'm not speaking of geography, but of the human element. What Laval does next can only be worse. I have some experience of these situations, and one thing leads to another. It's a logic, you ken. Now I've been taking stock of you, Caffrey. I wouldn't want to marry you, but that isn'y serious since I'm a confirmed bachelor. You're a Sassenach, but you have your points. I daresay you ken all aboot them. The English were never as modest as they made out. Look at it this way: you won't soften that Frenchie's heart by tickling his toes."
The river ran between the trees, black in the black earth. It aspired now to speak with one voice, and that voice mocked by its didactic melancholy the rasping trumpets of Soames' world of destiny, of strutting shadows. James crouched on his knees, cupped his hands and splashed cold water on his face.
"Well?"
Deedes offered the ghost of a smile.
"What do you do with a mad dog?"
They regarded one another.
"You're serious?"
Deedes nodded. Evidently he knew his mind.
there are things a man never does see, like his own heart, or his birth. Had she been alive, his mother might have recalled the precise hour when Mrs. Gilzean had heaved her way up the tenement staircase, kicking aside cats and tin cans and avoiding the turds, in order to deliver the thin, kicking red-brown boy with her stern, chapped hands.
"He'll live," she at last conceded, and began to sew up Vera Deedes, though rather carelessly.
"He's bonny," the mother murmured weakly, when shown. And she thought of the three which had preceded him. In the tenements it was a foolish woman who took the life of her bairns for granted; Vera attributed her own good fortune to God's mercy, as befitted one who lived within a stone's throw of the cathedral where Jenny had thrown her stool in denunciation of Laud's papist prayer book. It was an area rich in history. In the summer there were visitors with money to spend who turned up their noses at the stench of the alleyways and flinched from the slogans and the piss stains on the walls of the tenements. They came to see John Knox.
"It's a wee boy," Mrs. Gilzean was reminding the prostrate mother, who had not yet revealed his name.
"Then he'll be Malcolm," Vera Deedes murmured dutifully.
The midwife tasted the word, but did not judge. She began to fill her black bag without, it seemed, much devotion to hygiene.
"Another bairn," she commented non-committally, preparing to leave. "You'll do, then?"
"Aye."
The woman, she saw, was spent.
She descended fatly. Coming out on to the Royal Mile, she ^ould have held her nose had she still possessed one; but
541
after fifty years of squalor there was only the flesh. As she turned downhill in the direction of the royal palace, of Holyrood, she felt, perhaps a wee bit genteel to be a citizen of this stern city whose many spires pricked a clear, guiltless sky—gray spires announcing centres of learning, churches monuments . . . "Malcolm": it was honest, at least.
Two days later, Vera Deedes scurried like a thin anc furtive mongrel along the smooth, granite cleanness of Eaton Terrace, clutching a tattered bag in one hand and clasping baby swathed in rags with the other. She was bleeding from Mrs. Gilzean's haphazard and impressionistic sewing-up, anc from the medically inadvisable exertion. She wore a large shapeless coat, and her pinched, drawn face was gray Reaching number 15, she descended a basement staircase anc then opened the kitchen door as quietly as she could. She paused, held her breath and listened, then with a rapid, guilty movement bared her breast and pushed the baby's face into what there was of it.
Mrs. Murdoch filled the doorway with black silk.
"Is it a boy, Vera?"
"Aye, M'm."
Mrs. Murdoch nodded and kept her distance. Watching the baby fight for life, she felt, briefly, compassionate. But she finally said, "It's three days you've been gone, Vera."
Vera Deedes would have explained had she not been cu short.
"Yesterday I did the vegetables and peeled the potatoes myself. It was very trying. Councillor Murdoch has his complaint again."
Malcolm Deedes travelled shrieking to the other breast
"Oh, the noise!" complained Mrs. Murdoch.
"Ssh, you!" remonstrated Vera Deedes with her bairn, praying that the milk would not cease as it had before, with Helen and Bill.
"You'll not be long, then?" Mrs. Murdoch suggested.
"No, M'm."
The lady withdrew. Malcolm Deedes flung back his tiny, pinched, red face and stared unseeingly at his mother, directly, with love. She hugged him. "You wee bairn," she said, and she cried a little, from exhaustion and the bleeding.
Upstairs, it was breakfast time.
"She looks poorly," Mrs. Murdoch observed to the Councillor.
"Aye, she'll not live long."
He took more porridge, layered it with salt and a little warm milk, and resumed his reading of The Scotsman. She listened to his eating and swallowing. Sipping at her tea, she straightened her back more than ever.
"You shouldn't say that, Angus."
He lowered the paper and the black cloth of his coat was seen to move across his chest.
"I cannot help recognizing TB when I see it."
The little finger of the hand which held her cup arched and curled in discreet recognition of the fact that he was, after all, a doctor, a member of the professional class.
It was in the service of such people that Vera Deedes passed the balance of her otherwise purposeless life. Mrs. Elgin, the floors of whose spacious, garden-fronted house in Belgrave Crescent she cleaned and polished in midmorning, was married to a solicitor, a "writer to the signet"; whereas Mrs. Cannon, for whom Vera peeled potatoes and scrubbed vegetables in time-for lunch, was the wife of a barrister, or advocate. As for Mrs. Ogilvy, in whose interests she worked in the afternoon in the Georgian elegance and blossomed prettiness of Anne Street, high above the Water of Leith and the rank, sprawling slum of Portobello—Mrs. Ogilvy was Wedded to a gentleman who nursed country estates belonging to dead or dying old ladies.
But these distinctions, it cannot be denied, impinged themselves on the consciousness of the young Malcolm Deedes very slowly, and never coherently. The "keelies," the young sans-culottes whose spontaneous, loose-knit mafia was the terror and abomination of all respectable citizens, never took te trouble to consider that the clean, round, pink people Who lived in the curving crescents and who dressed in the best tweed and the finest wool were in reality different, that pne could be distinguished from another by a long and "Mricate professional training. The keelies were insensitive.
Yet feelings did sprout in the jungle of paving stones and cobbles. Of his two sisters, it was Helen whom he respected and Maggie whom he loved to cuddle and, so he assured himself in dreams of wild improbability, to protect from the villains who gushed forth from the Edinburgh Academyj George Watson's, Stewart's, and Herriot's in the late afternoon, wearing posh blazers of crimson and blue.
At the age of three, he slew these dragons in his dreams., At five, more practically, he learned to steal their bicycles; he sold them to a man he knew.
"Ah ken a mun," he would blurt upwards, in explanation, when Helen searched him for the money and slapped his hands till they stung. She would dig into his pockets, too.
"Dinny!" He resented female fingers in such a place.
"Ye'll have us all i' Cannonbridge with yer theevin'," his mother would complain, causing Archibald Deedes to unbuckle his belt, angry that his son should have hidden the money and so reminded the family of the vigour of rampant egoism. When the blows fell, Maggie cried and Vera Deedes turned away. Only Helen watched calmly, sucking her thumb.
Yet the large and leathery paternal hand (to which in later years it became so hard to fit a face) was not always associated with pain and punishment. Swollen and blistered from the crates and sacks of Leith dockside, this same hand swept the young boy along on occasional intoxicating Saturdays, running among the giant legs of the dockers, seamen, builders, carpenters, painters, labourers, tanners, brewers, plumbers, postmen, clerks and tram drivers who marched thick, close and loyal into Tynecastle Stadium to roar away their sorrows and to commit their frozen souls to the scarlet shirts of Heart of Midlothian; to see Dundee or Aberdeen whipped and trounced; to watch the tense battle sway back and forth against the green and white of Glasgow Celtic; or, best of all, to sing and bellow on the terraces urging on the Hearts to humble the pale-blue pride of the great Glasgow Rangers. What days—cold, sharp and aloud; the discordant rattles, the strident cries of boys, the pale silences of defeat, the thunderous goals bringing victory.
One spring morning Helen announced, "Yer faether's deed."
Malcolm was six.
His mother lay broken across the bed, alone. They watched her die, and would always think of it that way. Even as children they sensed how great a burden of solitude their youngness imposed upon their mother; they saw clearly that she had nowhere to turn.
The youngest stared in astonishment.
"Wha'?"
"Yer faether's deed," Helen repeated, as if it were his father alone and not hers as well. Dimly he saw that his elder sister relished the stature which understanding conferred upon her and that she quite forgot her grief in her anxiety to usurp the place of her prostrate mother.
It was spring, and the air was fresh and promising over the Castle esplanade.
When Mrs. Murdoch came up from her kitchen and announced to her husband that Vera Deedes' Archibald had been killed in action, the Doctor laid down his Scotsman with an unmistakable air of aggrievement. A sigh took place as he removed his reading spectacles; the words came to him richly.
"That Nivelle is worse than the rest of them. The French are turning yellow and mutinous, a veritable gangrene of dissent and confusion. They should give the command to Haig and then things will happen. But they've no ear for the truth down Sooth."
He raised his paper again, not to read, but to mask his emotion, as was proper.
Downstairs, in the dark but spacious kitchen, Vera Deedes Was on her knees, scrubbing blindly and weeping into a pail of hot, soapy water. Her youngest watched her, tempted by his wretchedness and incomprehension to some act of nihilistic destruction. He hated his mother for her suffering, for being what the world had made of her, for allowing herself to be mauled, accosted, reduced . ..
Dignified footsteps sounded on the stairway. The boy felt ashamed, in anticipation; his mother had no pride. He hated her.
Councillor Murdoch appeared, clasping the hand of his only son, a small, pink boy of about Malcolm's age. The doctor was determined to bring his heir for a first view of the frontiers of suffering, to broaden his horizon and to harden his will.
The Councillor's speech, when it came, lent dignity to its surroundings.
"Mrs. Murdoch has conveyed the sad news to me, Vera. It is a great loss, to Scotland, to you and to your bairns. You have our sympathy, and your late husband shall be in our prayers."
Malcolm heard money pass.
Vera Deedes swayed.
From the shadows the pink boy was staring at Malcolm; his eyes said, "Go away, you have no right . . ."
"A widow's lot is not an easy one," Councillor Murdoch volunteered, in case she had not guessed.
"Aye, it's not, sir."
Embarrassed by the renewed flow of tears, he advanced on the child standing in the shadows among barrels of flour and dried fruits and laid a hand on his head, firmly, without squeamishness.
'This would be Malcolm, then?"
The pink boy scowled and shifted.
"We have a brother at the front," Councillor Murdoch assured Vera.
"Oh, I ken, sir, I ken."
"Yes."
He grunted pleasantly, benevolently, then left the kitchen, carrying away with him the only son he had, away from the frontier.
Vera Deedes turned wildly on her own. Her eyes were wild.
"Wha' didny ye say sommat? Just standin', eh, dumb or sommat?"
"Wha'?"
"Just standin'!"
He smelled her fear; his guts twisted with loathing.
He grew up tall and strong, yet frail and sickly. The strength was all on the surface, in muscle power and speed of: strike, but it concealed an inner rot, a festering of the intestines brought on by bad food and unchecked disease. His skin was pallid and spotty, his hair thinnish, and he lost most
of his teeth in childhood. He invariably won the fights he picked, while still a boy, with the clean blue blazers, the silver-edged caps and the starched white shirts of the Academy boys; choice was three-quarters of the battle. He terrorized them, hunted them, felled them like a human guillotine, an element in the general terror exercised by the keelies in the no-man's-land of undifferentiated streets where the modestly off lived cheek by jowl with the modestly poor, the dangerous passage which intervened between the schools of the pink boys and their homes. He bloodied their noses, snatched their caps and satchels, then ran. But once safe, his long, stringy limbs would collapse by some gutter and he would vomit from the effort of it; he could not drag the food from their bellies.
At fourteen, Helen had the lines and stoop of a woman of forty. And Maggie's effervescent, russet-haired beauty, to which he was so devoted, barely outlasted her puberty before it began to tarnish and fade. At sixteen, with her first baby, it went—another death. She had married a fitter. But by then the Great War had long since ended and the black-coated politicians who suddenly sprouted in the Royal Mile, holding their breath as best'they could and promising to shorten the Kaiser by a head, had returned to London.
Fucking Sassenachs.
There were things that Malcolm Deedes wanted to know— why, for example, should he not be permitted to play football in a public park on Sunday?
"Wha'?" he asked Vera Deedes.
"The kirk," she said, bending, as always.
"Wha'?"
"The ministers say it's a sin to play aboot on the Sabbath. Ve heed that."
He lacked the words and the precise formulation, but ^ould have liked to have asked why the wives, children, brothers and sisters of these same ministers were to be seen sinning sweatily on Sunday afternoon on private courts and Private courses. Did the Divine Writ not run behind the high ■Ton railings and dense evergreen hedges which served to keep Malcolm and his fellow sans-culottes at bay? Fluffy white ball . . . slip between the railings, thin boy, crouch, wait, run, snatch . . . Run!
Hooves thundered across the lip of the chasm.
"Keelie, keelie, get out, get out, get out, out, out! Dirty, filthy boys, get out! This is private!"
All joys, it seemed, were private, all sorrows public. To be private was to have, to be public was to have taken away, expropriated, distributed. When a friend cast covetous eyes on your ball, bat, or stolen bike, it was time to remind him, "It's preevit!"—then fight on the piss-stained concrete, in dank, fetid alleyways, high treble voices shrill as dying birds, blood and yellow-green snot. ..
He was eleven. At school they flogged him on the hands with a leather strap. There were tanneries in the town—and smoke.
"M'colm, ye'll be needin' wurk soon," his mother reminded him; she had some Dunbar rock for his birthday.
He was grateful but could no longer look at this pallid, decaying boneflesh, whose empty eyes accused no one and everyone, absorbing the harsh rasp of labour as if heaven were a lottery, and chance divine. He buried her face before her body: months before she died he had ceased to see her—could not—and had consigned her to a place of obscurity beside his father, whom he could no longer remember. He knew, in fact, the job he wanted.
He walked in Leith, silently, in tatty shoes, watching the men hanging about in small groups near the dockside, leaning against trucks and cranes and walls, lying on crates, waiting and remembering, dimly, obscurely, the trenches. Once, he saw a man selling his war medals outside a pub. It attracted quite a crowd. People lived on tea, white bread and sweet jams; for luxuries there were tobacco and the occasional football match at Easter Road or Tynecastle. Over the years he walked where once his father had worked before the war, prowled catlike among the long silences of the workless, tensing his limbs and arching his spine at the smell of spasmodic revolts, quick flare-ups and sudden slogans. "Hands ofl Russia!"
Bevin.
A town of brass doorbells, which you pulled, of brass nameplates, polished and private. Gray skies and biting wind off the Forth reddened your cheeks and slashed your lungs as you ran like a jackal past the handsome, spacious, terraced houses of gray granite with their painted railings and water-clean windows . . . the wide, empty crescents and avenues of the West End and the Queensferry Road, beyond the Dean Bridge. Private. Private thoughts swirling like dust around the labour-exchange queues, the tight knots of idle men . . . When he walked, his hands were never still but always employed and slightly menacing—it was a style, a defence, a warning. A private job; however many noses you bloodied, you were fated to lose, you could never drag the food from their bellies. Be canny, keelie.
Sometimes he went with his mother to the Royal Infirmary; he preferred that Helen or Bill or Maggie should go. The smell of ether and disinfectant, of carbolic and cabbage nauseated him; a death shop. Along high, drafty corridors nurses walked, upright, prim, mechanical and stern. Something you couldn't punch. He shrank away from the terrible, unmitigated bleakness of his mother's despair as she sat for hour upon hour on a wooden bench, awaiting her examination and the inevitable censure of the white-coated men. "You're working too hard, much too hard."
"I'm a widder with four."
"You're working too hard."
She might have nodded. There had been a time when she and Archie Deedes walked out of St. Michael's through a panorama of flushed, familiar faces, and flowering confetti. Money in her hair. Oh.
"Ye hear wha' the docturr tol' yer," he complained, marching at her side towards George IV Bridge, but not looking. Never looking.
"Tut, tut," she said, rigid and cold.
There was a brown shop which sold patent medicines; it stood on a corner near the Infirmary and it had dirty windows. Whenever she emerged from one of her examinations, Vera Deedes' anxieties and helplessness drove her towards this shop, with her money. Malcolm never went inside; he sensed that she was squandering the money and he instinctively distrusted the coloured remedies advertised in the window in small bottles: "Bloodliver!" "Heartburn!" "Emptitis!"
She came out gray. Into the cutting wind.
"How mooch was tha'?"
He walked, hands in pockets, like a man.
"It's nae yer concern."
She was a presence only, a black, empty coat at his side. His legs were longer than hers now, and he liked to walk ahead, impatiently. She scurried, head down.
A private job, definitely.
Putting his childhood behind him, his carefree days of Jacobin terror, he saw more clearly what had happened to his father and his mother, how you couldn't win. The immutable fact of his growing years was that the long queues of workless men in Leith remained long and that the water-clean windows of the empty crescents remained water-clean. He probed the other side of the moon.
Sometimes he remembered the pink Murdoch boy.
There was one bright day when the moon spun around, and his mother died. The city was lit with flags, the purple trams hung with bunting, the guns boomed in salute from the Castle above the rock, and men came with brooms and carts to clean up the Royal Mile. There were pictures in shop windows and signs of loyalty everywhere. The Deedes family thronged down to Holyrood Palace with polished faces, Vera in the lead and Malcolm running behind, asking questions out of habit and duty, to comfort them.
"Wha'?"
"It's yer king and queen," Helen said, gray, single and nineteen. He remembered, "Yer faether's deed . . ."
"Where?" he asked, for the sake of it, whereas among his contemporaries and equals maturity and knowledge went with silence.
"Och, shut yer gab," Bill told him.
"Dinny squabble the day," Vera warned them.
Their mother walked in front, almost radiant. She had rouged her cheeks, but crudely, and borrowed high heels; Helen was indignant and loudly cast aspersions.
"At her age, too."
They plunged into the vast crowd gathered opposite Holyrood Palace and held back by police. Malcolm kicked and elbowed his way to the front, then fell into a dream at the sight of Arthur's Seat, on whose gentle, windy, sheep-manured slopes he had so often lain, idling with dreams and bandfuls of dust, watching the smoke drift upwards from the patchwork of roofs and chimneys of the old town. Now he stood and dreamed, like a baby finding sleep; his mouth dropped open.
Cars arrived, elegant, black and assured; their texture burned his heart. Gentlemen in black coats, top hats and striped trousers descended stiffly, took a few bandy steps as if to test their legs, bent their knees and tugged discreetly at their groins. Then ladies stepped down in light pastel shades, flowing chiffons with shortish skirts and flat fronts, laying white-gloved hands on their escort's arms as if such gallantry was the very stuff of their daily lives in Belgrave Crescent, Eaton Terrace and Morningside—whence, the boy knew, they came.
The uniforms caught his eye, set him thinking: a man could enlist, serve the King on the other side of the moon, dress himself in khaki and scarlet. He watched these splendid officers in their tight regimental trousers, their unaccustomed sabres flapping loose and awkward, their moustaches stiff and ginger with pride. And then came the substantial dignitaries of the municipality, more sombre in their dark cloth; Malcolm watched Councillor and Mrs. Murdoch descend from a most extravagant vehicle which they did not, to his knowledge, possess. He watched intently.
The pink boy had been kept at home. Too young.
Malcolm Deedes laughed.
But became serious. A private career as a private? The distant bagpipes turned his head. His feet began to tap, the crowd hugged him; at inside left, Deedes, of Hearts, carries the ball from the centre circle out to his right wing, receives the return pass, sweeps around three defenders, steadies himself, shoots ... the crowd erupts. Slap on back from manager; greenbacks tight and crisp in your wallet . . . Behind one of those palace windows, Lord Darnley, effete husband of Mary, Queen of Scots, had been up to no good, no doubt; °ne might have listened in school, but for wha'?
An imagination inflexible and direct magnified a thousandfold the errors of the mind.
Councillor and Mrs. Murdoch had showed their large invitation cards, had paused to be seen, had been swallowed into the great palace ... to meet Darnley.
Stabbed the pink Murdoch boy after a fight on Arthur's Seat. Single combat, unarmed, with a dagger.
Yes.
Bagpipes swirling, they came, with the kilts and the great kettledrums and the marching feet . . . the stream of cars had subsided to a trickle, there was a new restlessness in the crowd, one could tell from the way the policemen paced up and down dignified and nervous ... He pushed his mind this way and that while his mouth hung open, a little . . . Someone tugged at his elbow, he wrenched it free fiercely but the hand came again and then he heard Helen's voice high with hysteria and shame, there was a ripple of anxiety in the tall people behind him, he fell backwards through the sweaty darkness of their collective body and then his heart exploded and the colours were drained from the day like an oversoaked transfer.
One glance at his mother's face was enough; all the way up the hill he struggled to keep his eyes averted from the thin fluid trickling from her mouth, just as he sometimes fought to stave off a dream he dreaded. People stepped off the pavement as if she were already dead; a man removed his hat and Helen sobbed with fear and chagrin that their mother should have chosen to disgrace them in public, and on such a day.
The bleak tenement staircase at last, damp and fetid, the casket of their growing years.
His own lungs bled with the effort.
They laid her out on the main bed and covered her with blankets and coats. There was no fire, no heating to assuage her fitful shuddering spasms, and in their hearts her children failed now to distill the human warmth which might have softened her passage. They lacked words; they stood back the shadows of the darkened room with its peeling walls, boarded-up windows, leaking ceiling and perpetual stench of cabbage, refuse, sweat and bogus medicines.
Towards evening a doctor did come—to look, it seemed,
and shrug; two shillings was all they could afford. A coma, now, by candlelight; Helen Deedes, haggard, mature and ignorant, received the sighing comfort and shy visits of neighbours, their tears and small gifts, as if it were her own finale, her own tragedy. Malcolm watched a new mother grow and menace him; at last, when a terrible, sleepless night and most of a further day had passed, and still Vera would not die, and they had run out of clean sheets to soak up the bloody phlegm, he could take it no longer and bolted.
He rode across the town, his town.
"Is she poorly, then?" asked Mrs. Murdoch irritably, standing at her door.
"She wus takkin' sickly a' the Palus," he explained.
And wiped his nose.
"At the Palace, Malcolm?" Her bosom heaved at the thought.
Desperation and the freedom of the sky, of his escape, gave him cunning.
"Aye," he said slyly, "we saw you, missus, and Councillor Murdoch too."
She flushed.
"Aye, we did."
She stood contented in the late afternoon sunlight, a stout woman.
"I remember, son, seeing you two days after you were born."
This seemed to give her some obscure tactical advantage, to neutralize his strategy.
He laughed, with pain.
"When will she be coming, then, your mother?" the lady eventually asked. "I'll be needing some help soon, with the floors upstairs in need of polishing and the Councillor's meals to prepare every day."
The boy stared at the woman.
"So 111 have to hire someone new," she added.
He counted three chins now.
"She's verra sickly," he suddenly burst out, his pinched and soiled face livid with fear. "Bleedin', missus, from the mooth, and vomit."
She recoiled. Leaving the door barely ajar, she disappeared inside, and the sedate silence of the bourgeois afternoon again engulfed him, dulling his senses . . . tender, fleecy clouds raced across the blue sky towards the Forth, towards Fife, towards some remote northern idyll about which he had often dreamed. His feet burned.
"Here, then," said Mrs. Murdoch severely, returning with five shillings. "Now don't spend a penny of it on yourself, mind. Take it home, now." She nodded again and smiled shortly. Her fingers, he realized, had not touched his own. i
The door began to close again. He had nothing to lose.
"Ah thought, mebbe, ah thought, missus, that Councillor Murdoch, missus, being a doctorr h'self might . . ."
"My husband, you mean?"
"Aye, quickly, missus, there's nae mooch taem, honest." f
"But Doctor Murdoch does not practice up in the Royal Mile, boy. Have you not your own doctor?"
His hands moved in an expressive, Italianate gesture; in the final crisis Latin eloquence seeped through the northern stone.
"Not a guid doctorr, missus, not a proper doctorr, a private one that costs . . ."
When she saw his tears she found safety in anger.
"You should have saved," she declared, "for a rainy day. But you people will be improvident despite all warnings given you. You bring your own troubles upon yourselves."
He was crying freely now.
"Are you not at work, yourself?" she demanded.
"Still a' schul," he sobbed. "There's nae wurk, m'us, for people."
"A big lad like you should be out working, and helping his mother, instead of hanging about the streets and doing n° good either."
His eyes, she saw, penetrated the darkened hallway, clean, mahogany and discreet, smelling of wax polish.
"The Doctor's out," she said. But he was not convinced. "You heard what I said, boy, the Doctor is out." Through his tears a long, castigating wail rose and sustained itself on a terrible, bleak pitch, a siren. Behind the door he sensed a person of substance lurking; at this the lady retreated and seemed to consult in whispers, to argue timidly, to prevail-
The door was no longer open, yet could not be said to have been exactly closed. He waited and cried noisily, both from a genuinely overwhelming grief and from a determination to spite the Murdochs. A face passed behind a lace curtain, froze and scowled; fingers tapped angrily on the window in urgent little gusts of annoyance. He waited for a reprieve, but the handsome rectangular windows and the heavy blue door with its brass nameplate, brass knocker and brass bell stared back at him impassively.
He understood, then, the meaning of life.
It was late afternoon and the private schools would be emptying; in basement kitchens tea, crumpets and toast were already sizzling, and cherry cake was being cut into generous, triangular slices. Malcolm's tears dried abruptly. He rode fast down the hill towards the Portobello slum and his temper rose with the wind in his hair. Then he braked hard, halfway down the crescent which is flanked on the south side by the steeply precipitous gardens whose foundation stone and eternal song is the Water of Leith. Coming up the hill towards him was a boy much the same age. Neat and dreamy in the blue uniform of the Academy, with its silver laurel wreath and its emblem."EA," and carrying a shiny leather satchel, there wandered the pink boy whose contemptuous stare across the basement kitchen Malcolm had not forgotten. Mrs. Murdoch's wee boy, the Councillor's only son.
Malcolm advanced on him. Over this delicately moulded microcosm of the conciliar visage there passed clouds and shadows reflecting, perhaps, an uneasy embrace of the ego and the id. The boy turned to run, but the vistas of cobble Proved as dispiriting as a high wall; there was no way out. To his credit, the pink boy braced himself for punishment without vocal appeal to the adult world.
The keelie, a stringy vandal with sandy hair, thin legs and bloodshot eyes, advanced with clenched fists and no words, for young Murdoch the day had begun with trigonometry and would end, it seemed, badly. He had time to identify the keelie's face, to embalm it in his memory. Finding the cat silence which lay between them no longer bearable, he uttered a furious insult and lunged at the other's head with his satchel. The keelie dodged; a grin split the seams of his face.
The pink boy's free hand clawed out and a high note escaped from him like steam from a kettle, but again he found only thin air. He closed his eyes, waiting for the bomb to explode in his head. When it came, the noise surprised him, and the smell of metal-leather-musk, the sense of the shifting sea, of disintegration.
His head struck the curb.
All these years Malcolm had born in mind the Gothic palace, the fairy castle, the magnificent school which stood in solitary grandeur on a hill overlooking the Queensferry Road. He had never discussed the project with his mother, because no woman could appreciate the necessity of becoming a groundsman's assistant, even at so great a school. Just a start, of course ... At inside left, Deedes of Hearts begins a masterly run . . . How could a frail woman know about the feel of firm turf beneath your feet, real goalposts, strong verticals of white wood, a private job?
Helen had said: "Yer muther's dead."
His arm still shook from the blow he'd given the pink boy. Surely the police would come for him this time. He gave Helen Mrs. Murdoch's five shillings, for the funeral, and then she pulled back the sheet, enforcing a last look. The sheet was clotted with blood, and his sister's face was gaunt with hopelessness. The dead woman was not his mother; the nose was too big, there had been some mistake.
In death she had claimed her last right—collapse.
They buried her near the foot of Arthur's Seat.
The ten days of the general strike occurred just as he was about to finish school. The lesson finally stuck; there could be only one winning side and it was always the same side which won. No course was open except to join them, to wear their colours, to accept life on its own terms. It would have to be the Army. But first he owed it to himself to visit the dream school, just in case. The barometer of expectation, 01 long-accumulated hopes, went with him, as vulnerable as the society whose dark storms it reflected. Near the main Pa" vilion he discovered the head groundsman, the imaginary dentf* god about whom he had so often speculated. The turf Vr,aS as firm and ripe beneath his feet as he had known it would be, the vast green playing fields were just as enticing, the wind, the freedom, smelled every bit as good. The groundsman looked him over with mild tolerance and faint sympathy.
Malcolm stammered out his request. It didn't take many words—far fewer than he had imagined. Hope had died the moment he opened his mouth.
The groundsman drew on his pipe and gazed across the playing fields thoughtfully, with a hint of sadness.
"I've a lad of aboot your age, as fine and strong as yersel'. Nothing he'd like better than to help his faether heer." The man shrugged.
Malcolm stood.
'These are days, son, when men do the wurk of boys and boys wait to become men."
He nodded dismissively. "Try the Army, son."
Then the years laughed and galloped away, with the wind.
THIRTY
the river ran softly through the jungle. As the first outriders of the coming day appeared above the trees, the separate ripples of water began to glint with occasional lights. James Caffrey sat with his arms around his knees, hunched With fatigue and confusion.
"I'm not convinced," was what he did eventually say.
Raising his eyebrows a fraction, Deedes knocked the bowl °f his pipe against the hard earth. James could not see what came out; it was still too dark.
"Not convinced? How many more corpses will it take to Convince you?"
"It's not a matter of corpses," James said quietly, turning ^eper into himself.
"Of what, then?"
"It's not easy to explain at four in the morning."
Deedes filled his pipe with fresh tobacco. He spoke reflectively, without animosity.
"You're young. The young don't know. There's no substitute for experience."
It was not the platitude which irritated James as much as his inability at this moment to distinguish between wisdom and banality, between the receding night and the advancing day. There were times when he felt sure of nothing except that Alec had proven himself against the solitude and loneliness of man. Alec had shouldered the boulder of self-creation, recognizing himself for what he was and what he might become in a real world held together by a single God. Unable to face failure where Alec had succeeded, James could no longer discern any pilgrim's way except the one upon which he had embarked. To halt or turn back would be to spiral into a bottomless ravine.
"There may be no substitute for experience," he said, "but this experience need not be a matter of time alone. Saint Paul understood everything in an instant; two thousand years flowed from that instant. At Zolanga I suddenly saw the dead as the living. It came to me that their death would amount to more on the balance sheet of history than their life. You have to consider a civilization in its totality."
Deedes was watching the flow of the stream. The sky was growing lighter.
"You have words," he said resignedly. "They mean nothing to me."
James pulled the hair from his eyes.
"Perhaps I was talking to myself." I
"Aye, mebbe."
"Man is, after all, an activity."
Deedes shot him a single glance.
They sat together for some time longer, too stiff and tired to move. A certain sadness possessed Deedes now; as hope dwindled, his neck gradually surrendered its identity to hlS shoulders. He nodded. The chemistry was once again at Work within him, the terrible alchemy where mind and body dance upon one another's graves, the descent into an illness whicf he knew in his bones could only be his last. <
"I'm no philosopher," he declared with a final burst 0 energy, "but I'm not a bairn neither. Dinny forget that, son. You're young. You've had a sheltered life, privileged ... You have family and class, you have education and money besides. I could tell you things which you'll never learn for yourself. Aye, I could."
But he didn't.
James rose to his feet, wearily.
"I should get some more sleep if I were you," he said. He waited for a moment and then, seeing that Deedes had no intention of moving, made his way back along the bank to his tent. He quickly fell asleep.
Deedes continued to contemplate the waters running past.
THIRTY-ONE
a solar furnace, unambiguous as a child's stare, scorched the blistered compound which extended like a miniature Sahara from the gates of Mount Kenya Prison to the one-story detention cells on the northern perimeter. Heat and light were wedded in a blazing noonday consummation. Sweat and grief ran from the scarred torsos of the sixty prisoners drawn up in long files in front of the new physical training instructor. They watched him, these "politicals," Mau Mau detainees with bone-passive faces and shaved heads; they watched and waited in silence for the first error, the first indication of human weakness, the first revelation of the man beneath the conqueror's uncompromisingly authoritarian posture. Warders and askaris stood poised with raised truncheons, desperate to prove themselves in the eyes of the gigantic praetorian, the Mutendi Sergeant Major Henry Kosutu. Absolute silence; the stillness of the conductor before the concert. Now the new PT instructor began the motions made familiar by his predecessor: knees bend, arms stretch, knees bend ... He paused; his small, sandy head, almost as closely cropped as the prisoners', turned to the left, then the right, precise, defined military movements. His voice, too, was not different, the voice of the white man: "One, two, three . . ."
Nothing. Not a man moved. The askaris stirred restlessly; Henry Kosutu's huge chest swelled in anticipation.
Deedes tried again. Nothing. Their defiance of him was absolute. The blood rushed to his head; he was forty-four and nothing like this had ever happened to him before. It was his first day in the prison.
"The Army," the Superintendent had warned him, "is one thing, the Prison Department is another. The morale of a well-run battalion is high; the morale of a well-run prison is low. Mount Kenya, let me assure you, is well run. What you will have to deal with here is the criminal type, the rebel whose small, primitive mind is poisoned beyond repair by half-baked, alien revolutionary ideas."
Deedes "cautioned" the prisoners in Kikuyu. He thought of it this way: "a caution"—a suitably restrained threat. Restraint was the essence of leadership; and firmness; and kindly care. "One, two, three ..."
Nothing. The orchestra would not play.
He had assured himself that a seasoned veteran would surmount each obstacle as he came to it. Theory, he had once heard an officer say, should be a soldier's mistress, not his wife. Since then, he also had said it. He was proud to have no philosophy, only a treasure house of maxims and proverbs gleaned from experience and from those whose upbringing and education had brought them within reach of the deeper truths. He himself did not presume. He was not presumptuous. He would not admit that he was no longer a soldier but a jailer. He was himself. He contrived to fend off the nagging suspicion that only now, in the prison, would he discover the meaning of his long, blameless and conventional career of service and loyalty.
"Sergeant Major!"
The huge Kosutu (six foot three, two hundred and twenty pounds) stamped his highly polished boots in the red dust with a crack like thunder, then strode across the square, heac high, arms stiff as ramrods, his chest heavy with medals. He too had been in the KAR.
"Sah?"
"Make it clear to the prisoners that I intend to be
obeyed."
"Yessah?"
Kosutu turned to the prisoners, his small red eyes darting down their ranks, vindictive and beyond compassion. Then he roared and blazed for several minutes, a real performance, building the edifice of his passion layer upon layer, until his final words were lost in a falsetto screech. The sun shifted in the sky; the great silence came back to the prison compound; across the faces of the prisoners drifted interior shadows, elusive as the notion of equality. He braced himself and grew an inch, as a PT instructor should do from time to time, by way of example.
Nothing. They would not bend their knees, nor stretch their arms. They would not move. They would not acknowledge his existence—nor, what was worse, their own. Kosutu turned to him, a pillar of indignation, requesting loudly "permission to carry on." From the posture of the warders and askaris, Deedes had no doubt as to what Kosutu had in mind. Now, almost three decades after he had seen his mother buried in the shadow of Arthur's Seat, after twenty-six years' service in China, India, Palestine, Egypt and Africa, after a life devoted unquestioningly to Crown and Empire, now the blistered red dust beneath his feet abruptly refused to yield up its wisdom. He was like a tree denied soil and water; and he died.
Peaceful it was, like a ballet in slow motion, and almost soundless except for the crunch of wood on bone and flesh and the occasional groans of those who fell. Deedes felt himself detached, a spectator, an outsider; and if his control Was real, it was also remote. Likewise his responsibility. The prisoners held their ranks but did not resist; they accepted the blows of the askaris as if they were embraces, as if each act of violence bound them closer together in the perfect intimacy of social despair.
Deedes had a shower and then retired to the mess for lunch.
Before lunch Jock McLeish bought him a drink. McLeish Was stores officer and had worked in Mount Kenya for more than a year. He stood several inches shorter than Deedes; his
face had a square set and his hair stood up from his head in thick, rebellious tufts.
"Why did you leave the KAR, then?" he asked.
Deedes shrugged. "Same job, better pay."
"Aye," McLeish drained his glass. "Ever think of going home?"
"Home?"
McLeish laughed, with a hint of bitterness. Deedes ordered two more beers. He had never forgotten the queues outside the labour exchanges in Leith, nor the look in the groundsman's eye when he had turned him away. The Army had brought him security and a modest status, imparting to his life a certain shape and a purpose.
"Cheers," said McLeish.
"Cheers."
"How did you get on, then?" McLeish asked, casually.
"This morning?"
"Aye."
"Not too bad, as a matter of fact."
Deedes was a tall man, upright and well muscled, with a tanned, leathery face, a very ordinary face.
"You let Kosutu and his men beat them, of course?" McLeish asked evenly.
"Aye, to begin with-"
"And then they began to bend their knees and stretch their arms and all that?"
Deedes stared at McLeish in an attempt to sum him up.
"Aye, they did."
"Anyone fall sick then?"
The stores officer from Glasgow had lost his casual tone; a thick blue vein was pulsing angrily in his forehead.
"Three men."
"Malingerers, eh?" McLeish laughed harshly, an ugly, uncomfortable sound. Deedes sought refuge from his own disquiet in anger.
"Look, mun, if ye want to say something, for God's sake get it out straight. Don't beat aboot the bush."
"Apologies. I'm only a stores officer, you understand. I know aboot underwear and electric light bulbs, not aboot human beings."
Again he drained his glass and ordered another round. Sweat stood out from his face in an eggery of gleaming beads; the blue vein pumped faster than ever. A hot, damp silence fell between them. Finally Deedes said, "Do you play soccer, Jock?"
"Aye, wing half. I'm a wizard."
"Rangers or Celtic?"
"The light blues every time, mun."
"1 used to watch Hearts, with my faether."
"You never did have a decent team in Edinburgh."
"I'm fixing up a game for tomorrow afternoon. Do you want to play?"
McLeish stared into his glass and swilled the yellowish fluid.
"Will there be prisoners playing?"
"Aye, that's the whole idea."
"All volunteers, of course?"
McLeish's voice had resumed its uneven note.
"If you want to know, I've told Kosutu to bring only volunteers."
McLeish's eyes did, then, meet his own.
"Very few prisoners want to play soccer," he said quietly. "Certainly not enough to form two soccer teams."
"I've been in this country sixteen years, and I've found Africans to be very keen on soccer."
"Africans? Oh certainly."
"I'm sorry," said Deedes irritably, "I don't follow you. I'm not very bright, you know."
"All Scots are bright, make no mistake. Wait until you've examined the men here closely. Their bodies, I mean. Wait till you have seen what they have to eat. Then they have your PT to cope with, not to mention hours of forced labour. For them soccer is the last straw. But if they don't play, Kosutu breaks their bones. Lovely."
Deedes stared at him blankly. He remembered the three prisoners who had been carried to the prison hospital earlier in the morning; a blind resentment seized him.
"Ever heard of Mau Mau?"
McLeish returned his look and said evenly, "Aye. Tell me aboot it."
"These men here would eat their own granny if she didn't go along with their filthy oaths and mumbo jumbo."
"It's a bad habit, certainly."
Deedes flushed. When the blood came to his head, as it frequently did, it tended to stay there, suggesting a nature at once deep and constant. At this juncture a group of officers entered the mess, and two of them came across to introduce themselves to Deedes. McLeish took the opportunity to slip away.
On the following morning, at five-thirty, Deedes was awakened by a sudden commotion outside his window, in the main compound. On investigation, he discovered four African prisoners lying prostrate in a patch of marram, while a group of warders beat them with savage violence about the head and shoulders. The victims registered their dismay in a ritualized, almost religious chant which might have suggested that their pain was fabricated and the whole scene merely a charade, had not the dry earth been soaking up real blood. He put the incident from his mind, an exercise at which he had grown expert in his long, colonial years. But three mornings later he was again awakened by pandemonium in the compound. On reaching the window, he found the large British officer known as "Tiny" Hamilton leading a group of warders in a brutal beating of twelve prisoners, some crouching on their knees, some splayed out on their backs, all attempting to shield their faces and stomachs from the blows.
He turned away from the window, found a cigarette and fumbled with a match; cries of pain penetrated the room, biting into his soul. He heard Hamilton's voice raised: "Now will you do what you are told?" Even in Kikuyu the loud, flat public-school accent blasted through, arrogant and insensitive. He sat on the edge of his bed and stared at a blank wall. As a professional soldier, he had devoted his whole life to an organism which constantly prepared for violence, war and bloodshed. But it was his conviction, his most cherished belief, that a British soldier fought not to stimulate violence but to crush its fomenters and to bring order, reason and decency to the life of men. The British soldier's mission was a firm but gentle one; confidence could be justified only by compassion.
He had never forgotten the anarchy of the alleyways. With barely a vestige of formal education behind him and devoid of intellectual awareness, he had nevertheless seen clearly that to deprive any man of his dignity was to visit upon victim and violator alike both degradation and despair. Now, as thirty years before, in another country, the worst things were done by those who should have known better. Finding a grain of comfort in this thought, he began to shave in cold water, as was his habit.
Later in the day he issued instructions to Kosutu and his warders that they should on no account beat the prisoners during PT. Kosutu laughed coarsely.
"We'll see," Deedes said. It was weak, he knew, weak.
McLeish, he noticed, was watching from the deeper shadows of the stores. At this moment in time, the prison was composed of oblique silences, long patient shadows and the slow stench of human intolerance. Throughout the morning, he worked and fought with his sixty Mau Mau, worked to demonstrate the virtues of exercise and obedience, fought to persuade them of the benefits of passive cooperation. The sun slashed his skin; Kosutu stood mute with indignation and rage. Again, nothing—the world fell apart slowly in his dry hand. Then he heard a warning; it was his own. His temper rose. The Superintendent was right; they were brutes, animals, impervious to all arguments save the lowest—jackals determined to drag him down into the very degradation he wished to avoid. He refused to bend. For a full hour the spirit of Malcolm Deedes wrestled with the death which had already overcome it; he refused Kosutu permission to strike the prisoners.
After lunch he was summoned to the Superintendent's office.
"We brought you here to exercise the prisoners," Hoare-Stuart said coldly. He was a lean man with a ginger moustache, watery eyes and a layer of thin auburn hair plastered across his skull. He smoked incessantly and his hands, even when resting on his desk, shook violently.
"Yes, sir."
"Well, exercise them, then."
Kosutu, evidently, had registered a complaint. Deedes soon discovered that the Superintendent and the Sergeant Major worked hand-in-glove.
"I'm feeling my way, sir. They're not easy to handle."
"I'd never have guessed."
"I don't like the beating, sir."
"Don't you? It works, doesn't it? When you clobber them, they bend their knees and do their goddam push-ups. Well?"
"Sir, I don't care to see men carried to the infirmary-"
"That's precisely what we have an infirmary for, Deedes."
"Yes, sir."
"Go away, Deedes."
He stood for a moment^ stunned. The walls of the office were quite bare, except for an official portrait of the Queen which hung behind the Superintendent's desk. He had no idea what to do.
"I said go away."
He turned, then, and stepped down from the cool shade of the office into the blazing heat of the main prison compound. Some yards away stood a large wire cage in which there were invariably to be found a number of Africans, mostly men but occasionally women as well, who were waiting to be interrogated. As he began across the compound, he saw Kosutu dragging four young women from the wire cage up the steps of the Superintendent's office. Curiosity getting the better of his discretion, he stopped to watch. Although he was unable to catch Hoare-Stuart's precise words, he could see the Superintendent angrily questioning the women, who shrank into themselves, stricken dumb by fear and bewilderment. Suddenly Hoare-Stuart leaped up from his chair in an almost epileptic condition and began furiously to pound his desk with clenched fists. At once Kosutu grabbed the nearest of the women and clapped his huge hands over her eardrums, causing her to pass her motion with fright. As Deedes walked away across the compound, the damp patch which had spread across her dress insisted on continually reproducing itself in the sand at his feet. He saw that McLeish was watching him from the doorway of the stores.
Fighting back an impulse, Deedes walked on to his own room.
The following day he again permitted the beating of prisoners during PT. Kosutu and his askaris made up for lost time. One of the prisoners folded up like a collapsed balloon, with blood pouring from his mouth and ears.
"Haemorrhage," Jack Randall, the medical officer, told him later, in the mess. Randall and Hamilton were buddies; they affected the same accents, the same mannerisms, the same taste for all forms of gambling.
"I'm sorry," said Deedes quietly.
"Why sorry, old boy? The people to feel sorry for, if you ask me, are the victims of these mickey mice: the farmer's wife whose foetus was obligingly cut out, at eight months, and then drowned."
Randall thrust his spoon into his curry.
"I'm sorry about that as well," Deedes said.
McLeish, he noticed, ate his meals alone, at a table in the corner.
Tempers were boiling up on all sides in Mount Kenya. Within two weeks of his arrival there, he witnessed something approaching a full-scale riot when three hundred political prisoners, mainly Kikuyus, decided to eat no more food cooked by the Luos who had been imprisoned for common criminal offences. Word got about among the "politicals" that they were being poisoned; when the siren sounded at noon they refused to come out into the compound to collect their food.
The alarm bell rang out.
With the Superintendent, Hamilton and a number of other white officers at their head, the askaris stormed the prisoners' quarters, wielding batons, truncheons and knobkerries. The prisoners offered no resistance; they lay limp and took What came to them. Once again Deedes heard the chilling, ritualistic wail, a sustained note of passive suffering which reminded him of the high treble bedlam which filled the alleyways around the Royal Mile in the years of his childhood.
The prisoners were being dragged by their arms and legs mto the compound where they lay inert. Deedes saw Kosutu
kick a man in the genitals, then stamp on his hands. The man's face crumpled, but his scream was lost in the general uproar. Hoare-Stuart was laying about him like a demented soul. Deedes caught the words, "kula kula, eat eat," and then, during a moment's lull, when the attackers had by some common accord paused to survey the debris, "piga tena, mupa mgini, do it again, give them some more."
Later, Deedes found a pretext to visit the stores.
"It's cool in here all right," he said, wiping his face and neck.
McLeish stood between the rows of mattresses, blankets and bianco boxes, a short square man, watching him intentiy.
"It has its advantages," he said.
"I wondered whether you had any Aerosol, Jock," Deedes said, avoiding McLeish's eye. McLeish was the sort of man in whose presence one always felt unaccountably ashamed.
"Are the wee beesties getting you down, then?" The tone was mildly ironic.
"I haven'y been sleepin', I dinny ken why. When you can'y get to sleep you notice these things. The flies sit aboot on your hot skin."
McLeish nodded soberly and produced a bottle of scotch from a steel locker. He poured two generous shots, held them up to the light to ensure absolute equity, then invited his guest to be seated on an old packing case.
"It's not Aerosol you're needing. Cheers."
"Cheers, Jock."
McLeish appraised him slowly.
"It's charming of you to visit me. Been the other side o the hill recently, haven't you?"
"Jock, you're a difficult man."
"I believe you. The whole world can'y be wrong."
"Tell me, what's eating into you?"
McLeish lit a cigarette, then spat lightly on the floor, drowning an insect. He obliterated the corpse with the heel of his shoe.
"Did anyone see you coming here? If they did, I shouldn'y stay too long."
"Och, now listen here-"
McLeish shrugged. "You'll learn."
They sat listening to the world outside. Cries of command came faintly from the prison compound—Kosutu's perennial bellow.
"It's a bad business," Malcolm Deedes said eventually.
"I've seen worse."
"Here?"
"I used to be at a prison in the Highlands—Nubala. It was worse there."
"If you want my opinion, Jock, Hoare-Stuart's a real bastard."
"It isn'y a question of personalities. It's the system."
Deedes remembered that he distrusted generalizations.
"The fact is," he said, "that sometimes these fucking mickey mice drive a man crazy. Look, you don't imagine that I want to hospitalize two or three men every time we have PT. They're bastards, I tell you, real jackals. Give them an inch and they'll take a mile. There's only one language they understand."
McLeish shook his head, then sighed. "I disagree."
Deedes was again irritated by the didactic, cocky quality in McLeish, the pose of knowing everything and being the only person with the least bit of sense.
"You can afford to," he said, "from in here." He gestured around the stores.
McLeish replenished his glass with scotch. Then he sat down again, squarely, and lit a pipe.
"You said there's only one language they understand. You meant violence. The truth is, that's the only language we understand. Wait a minute, hear me out. We're very civilized and gentle so long as they do what we say. But as soon as they begin to argue, we dig our heels in, and when they push a bit we rap them over the knuckles. After all, if we detest violence so much, we only have to give them what they Want."
"And what's that?" Deedes said sceptically.
"Everyone of us knows what they want. We know. We know."
"It's a mess," Deedes said.
"It's more than a mess. Hundreds of these darkies have been detained on the whim of some clerk. That's how a police state works."
"Aw, now come on, Jock-"
McLeish waved him down with a gesture.
"I was in a Jap prison camp," he said. "It wasn't exactly a teddy bears' picnic. When I went in I weighed 160 pounds* when I came out I was down to 110. If you were to ask me for my considered opinion—and I mean considered—I'd say there isn'y much to choose between this and this. Shortly before you arrived a chap who'd been detained for three years without trial wrote to an MP in London. Hoare-Stuart assembled them all and had the man flogged in public as an example. Democracy, of course, is strictly for democrats. I know what's in your mind: where would this country have been without us? I can'y say."
Once again he refilled their glasses. Deedes had the impression that McLeish was a man who would talk forever, given the opportunity. Though his words touched a sensitive nerve, deepening Deedes' sense of failure, his general position was too extreme, too integrated.
"It seems to me," Deedes said, "that you're forgetting one thing—Mau Mau. You put a maniac in a straitjacket, don't you?"
McLeish cleared his throat and drew on his pipe.
"Malcolm, you were a slum boy, weren't you, a keelie?"
"Aye."
"So was I. When I was ten I thought with my fists. I used to smash posh people's windows in Kelvinside and steal what I could from their front halls. It's taken me a lifetime to learn not to kick a man in the groin when I disagree with him. Does that ring any bell with you?"
"Aye, but-"
"Of course," McLeish went on, "it's verra easy to blame one's faults on the world. But we were all like that, all of us kids who were brought up in the Gorbals. Concrete jungles are no different from grass jungles: they breed beasts. The underdogs are as depraved and desperate as the top dogs make them. If you ask me, the brilliance of the system at home lies in this—that it gives one or two keelies the chance to make good, to collaborate with the system. It's not a very wide aperture, of course, but wide enough to forestall a dangerous buildup of social animosity. Out here that lesson has never been heeded. We've turned our backs on every appeal to our common sense. Now it may be too late."
To Deedes this seemed to make a sort of sense; despite himself, he was impressed.
"Tell me, Jock, do you ever regret anything? I mean, you escaped, like you were saying. You collaborated with the system."
"I don't think I've ever collaborated. Certainly I've pushed as far up the ladder as I could go, but I've never lost sight of who I am or where I come from. I've never thought, "A good man makes his way, the rest deserve what they get.' There's nothing worse in the world than the complacency of the self-made man."
"I haven'y your brain, that's the truth," Deedes said.
McLeish's eye flashed. "You haven'y my tongue is what you mean."
Deedes rose. "Thanks for the toddy."
"You'll not be forgetting your Aerosol?"
As Deedes turned to leave, he pulled up short. Neither man had noticed an officer standing motionless in the doorway, and neither knew for how long he'd been standing there. It was "Tiny" Hamilton.
Two years had passed. In the White Highlands of Kenya, in the region of Endasi, an old Bedford truck stood parked in the shade of a copse, shielded from the noonday sun. The copse bordered on a coffee plantation belonging to a farmer called Bob Bendix. Inside the truck, strewn across the hot leather of the front seat, were a whisky flask, a gun and a man. The man, who was white, forty-eight years old and of Scottish descent, was supposed to be supervising the Africans who were labouring on the plantation. For this service Bendix gave him two pounds a week, free board and lodging, and a certain amount of cheap whisky. But he was asleep. Even in repose his face was a tormented one, and his fitful snores were interspersed by groans and shrunken prayers. The sun slid across the curved belly of the sky.
* • *
Three days after their conversation, Deedes heard McLeish's arrest. Called before the Commissioner of Prisons in Nairobi, he was summarily discharged from the department. Although no specific charges were brought against him, he was put aboard a plane at Embakasi airport anc deported under Emergency Regulations within twelve hour of his arrest. On hearing of this, Deedes feared the worst. So acute was his anxiety that he couldn't decide whether he sympathized with McLeish or not.
The following morning "Tiny" Hamilton brought the Super intendent's summons. Together they marched across the empty prison compound.
"Your medical-examination report has come through,' Hoare-Stuart said at once, staring at him glassily. "You appreciate that we took you on provisionally, pending this report?"
"Yes, but-"
"Don't interrupt. The fact is that you're not fit for the job assigned to you. This report makes that clear."
"I was in the hospital in India for five days, sir. Apart from that I've never been ill in my life."
"I wouldn't know about that. Or want to, particularly."
"Can I see the report?"
"No, it's confidential."
"But there must be some mistake, sir. The medical authorities-"
"That won't do you any good."
The Superintendent's icy indifference brought Deedes' temper to the boil. He recalled what he had seen in Mount Kenya within the space of a few weeks: the beating of the prisoners on the murram patch; prisoners sent to the infirmary by Kosutu's askaris; Kosutu clapping his hands over a woman's eardrums in the presence of the Superintendent Hoare-Stuart himself lashing out wildly at the prisoners who would not eat, like a man demented. If they had arrested McLeish, there could be no doubt at all as to what was going on. The brave spirit of his friend came to him now, the courageous core of a man who knew his own mind. Yet when Deedes spoke, his words were tamer than his mood three decades of obedience died hard.
"I shall appeal against this, sir. If necessary, I shall fight it in the courts."
"Do what you like," said Hoare-Stuart. His hand shook violently as he reached for a cigarette. "Go and see the Commissioner of Prisons if you think you've been treated unfairly."
Deedes went first to see Jack Randall, the prison medical officer. He felt at once the ice.
"Nothing to do with me, old boy. Better try Central Hospital."
"But you must have seen my report when it came through."
"It would go straight to the Superintendent, as a matter of fact."
"So you can't help me?"
"Sorry."
He moved out of his rooms in Mount Kenya and took a bed in a cheap hotel situated on the fringe of one of Nairobi's native quarters. There was no hot water and the sanitation was bad. His life savings amounted to £760. He watched them dwindle.
He visited Central Hospital on five occasions before he secured an interview with a junior medical officer, a young man, tanned and athletic, with an easy but superior manner.
"I've been ill only once in my life," Deedes assured him. "I feel fit and I am fit."
"That must surely be for the competent authorities to judge."
"Look, what is wrong with me? Can I see the report?"
"I'm afraid the report is the property of the Commissioner of Prisons. Only he can give you access to it."
"Is there nothing you can tell me? You see—I'm convinced that this is a put-up job."
He searched the young doctor's face for a reaction. There was none.
"I'm very sorry. Why not go and see the Commissioner?"
It took Deedes a week to secure an interview, a week of filling in forms, sitting about in waiting rooms, being forgotten by secretaries and handed from one subordinate to another. No one threatened him, no one alluded to his attitude towards the beatings in Mount Kenya or to his friendship with McLeish and no one showed the least personal interest in his case. They hoped, he realized, to freeze him off. But he persisted; he could hear McLeish urging him on: keep at 'em, don't let go. Then, without warning, he found himsel being marched along a maze of staircases and corridors to the office of the Commissioner himself. It had never occurred to him that this minor god might have a name; he was known everywhere as "the Commissioner," an exceedingly remote and powerful figure responsible to the Government for the whole penal system. The nameplate on the door, when he saw it, blasted a hole through his life.
A brass nameplate.
He stepped inside a large, oval office made splendid by a thick green carpet, formidable portraits of colonial governors and former commissioners, and by a huge mahogany desk at the far end of the room. There was a high case of leather-bound volumes and a particul, discreet smell of good wood and new paper—a smell and a silence which suggested an Olympian haven of impartial judgment and refined sensibility.
The Commissioner was a small, pink man, round and fluffy like a mole, without, it seemed, a neck.
The two men recognized one another; the years did, then, bend.
The heart of Malcolm Deedes thundered.
He had hoped to find his file, his records, the testimony to his years of loyal service and medical fitness, spread out before the single judge of this supreme court of appeal. But there was nothing; the wide, gleaming desk top was quite bare except for a couple of telephones, a penholder and a blotting pad. The Commissioner sat back in his chair and watched the applicant traverse the broad expanse of carpet which separated them; he sat with his elbows resting on the arm of his chair and the fingertips of his small, delicate hands brought lightly together. There was a baby moustache.
"WeH?"
Deedes halted, unsure, and stood breathing.
"My name is Deedes, sir."
"I know." "I've come aboot my dismissal, sir. Perhaps you know of my case?"
"Yes."
"I'd like to discuss it, sir."
"What is there to discuss?"
"I have served my country loyally for twenty-six years, through peace and war. I took part in the Ethiopian campaign against the Italians, sir, and I was mentioned in despatches, twice, by Colonel Granger, who-"
"What is the relevance of all this?"
A tremor passed down his spine; suddenly the world whose rules and codes he had served and respected throughout a lifetime had turned its back on him, had become deaf. Everyone was the same, yet strangely not the same, imperceptibly transformed as if by some invisible ray or gas. Yet even as he struggled to define his bewilderment, his child's sense of betrayal, the familiar accent of this small, rotund official dissolved like an acid the casket of his illusions; again McLeish's ghost stirred within him, like an inspired prophet of the avenging gods.
'The relevance, sir, is that I have been wrongfully dismissed. The reason given—my state of health—is a mere pretext."
The Commissioner smiled. "If you are as loyal and dependable as you make out, who would desire your removal?"
"Do you agree, then, that my health has nothing to do with it?"
"A battle of wits between us," the Commissioner said quietly, "will not be to your advantage, whatever your other qualities."
A long silence lay between them; a silence which only the seated man had the power to break.
"The fact is, Deedes, we have discovered that you have a weak heart."
"A weak-Sir, I'd like to see my medical report."
"Unfortunately the condition was spotted after your latest examination. Consequently it does not appear on your report. In any case, it is not the kind of ailment which is susceptible to strict medical evaluation. If you follow me."
Deedes nodded. The Commissioner sat huddled in hii chair.
"Did McLeish also suffer from heart trouble, sir?"
"Since you ask-yes."
"I see."
"Good. The door is behind you. Perhaps you will consenl to show yourself out."
"So you're hoping that I'm going to leave it at that? Well, I'm not. I shall seek legal aid and I shall fight."
"Do what you like. I couldn't care less; it won't get pas .__ „
me.
Deedes raised his voice. He had nothing to lose. "Is there no law in this country then? No justice, no elementary rights?"
Blood rushed to the Commissioner's face, which became a red balloon. He stabbed at a bell underneath his desk anc seemed unable to compose himself until a young, male secretary came in and stood by the door.
Deedes stood rigid.
"There happens to be a state of emergency," the Commissioner said, on a somewhat higher pitch, "although your sort of person isn't likely to be troubled by a consideration like that."
"My sort of person?" Deedes' voice was harsh.
Councillor Murdoch's only son smiled, faintly. "I seem to recall that you weren't always so squeamish about physica violence, Deedes. Or is it that your animosity is for the innocent and your sympathy for the guilty? If so, it doesn't surprise me. Perhaps one day you will return the five shillings my mother gave you. It belongs to me, after all."
Deedes thought of his £760, already dwindling. He took a sharp pace forward, a final gesture which achieved miraculously its intended effect; for a moment Murdoch's face was bright and shiny with fear, and in his eyes there danced the image of the fist which had sent his head crashing to the curb, high above the Water of Leith.
In the late afternoon, the Highlands farmer Bob Bendix drove in his station wagon to the coffee plantation where he would check the work and call in his men. There was s cigarette smouldering between his lips, and an Australian bush hat was tilted on the back of his head, giving him the appearance of a tough but unorthodox cowboy. A gun lay at his side—an FAL—and his eyes played a perpetual dance of watchfulness on the scrubland on either side of the road. Only a week before, a neighbouring white farmer and his entire family had been cut to pieces in the most revolting circumstances. Bendix was not yet forty and he didn't intend to let it happen to him; he meant to stand his ground and hold on to what was his own.
He saw the Bedford truck parked in the shade of a copse bordering on the plantation. The African labourers in the fields straightened their bare backs to observe his arrival.
The Scotsman was, as he had feared, asleep in the truck. His gun and ammunition belt had fallen free; they lay there, for the taking. Bendix watched the sleeping man; in less than four months he had seen him break up like a gallant old iron ship, the spirit which holds a man together even when the flesh is weak corroded by the acid of mounting despair. Mrs. Bendix argued that the Scot had been unlucky in love, but her husband saw that there was more to it than that; a man had lost faith in the rationality of his own existence.
He opened the truck door and shouted, "Mau Mau!"
Malcolm Deedes screamed.
At six in the morning, as the sun came up over the yellow plain and the flies hovered in clusters around the warming cow dung, Bendix put Deedes and his tattered suitcase on the country bus for Nairobi. Knowing that the fellow was quite destitute, without a penny to his name, he slipped him thirty shillings to cover the fare, a single day's food and a dram of scotch at the other end. The older man scarcely knew what was happening to him; he shook hands abstractedly, nodded fitfully and stared with horror at the open truck packed tight with Africans which was to carry him for nine hours across two hundred miles of broiling scrubland. The bus moved off in a cloud of red laterite dust; the Africans had gathered around Deedes like ants around a dying wasp; Bendix could hear them laughing and speculating and asking questions: "Massah, massah, no car, massah . . . ?" Then they were out of earshot. Bendix stood for a moment on the lonely stretch of road, an FAL under his arm, and brought his limited imagination to bear on what lay ahead for Deedes. He knew that he wasn't fit enough for such a journey: the sun would crack his skull open before noon, the ulcers of which he complained would torment him, his tongue would harden and dry to the texture of leather, his bowels would ache and his stomach would retch at the smell of the closely packed Africans. The basis of racial enmity, Bendix believed, was smell. He turned away and climbed back into his wagon. The one aspect on which he had not allowed his mind to dwell was what he vaguely thought of as the spiritual one; the humiliation of it, the terrible degradation of a white man's soul.
Deedes walked from the bus to the nearest police station.
A young English police officer listened to his story with an air of patient forbearance. When Deedes began to repeat himself and show signs of mental dislocation, he cut him short, took his watch, his bootlaces and his suitcase, and then led him to a small, airless cell reeking of human excrement. There was no bed, only a straw mattress. In the morning an African woman brought him a mug of tea and two slices of bread covered with a grayish fat. Towards midday, the young officer returned with his belongings and led him handcuffed to a police van. Inside the van he found five or six Africans chained together. Their heads were shaved and they fell silent at his appearance. He realized dimly that they took him for an informer. After a few minutes of the drive, the jolting and petrol fumes caused him to vomit; the Africans watched dispassionately. When, some twenty minutes later, the van came to a halt and the rear doors were flung open, he found himself once more in Mount Kenya Prison. Someone whom he didn't recognize led him to the wire cage outside the Superintendent's office. He sat on the ground, keeping himself as far from the Mau Mau suspects as he could. His head and stomach ached, but apart from that he felt nothing in particular—certainly no resentment or related emotion. Nothing had changed; "Tiny" Hamilton went striding across the compound, large, red and beefy as ever; the gigantic
Kosutu was bellowing at a squad of prisoners; and finally Hoare-Stuart himself emerged from his office and walked across to the wire cage. He stared at Deedes without any sign of recognition, issued a sharp order to a subordinate and then returned to his office. An hour later Deedes was taken from the cage to a low concrete building at the northern end of the compound where white convicts were housed. An African warder led him to a shower room and took away his dirty clothes. Then there was a meal of porridge, bread and tea. Next day he was given a little dry meat for lunch, but no vegetables. He didn't say much to his fellow prisoners and kept to himself. He wanted to think things over and take his bearings. Meanwhile he applied for an interview with the Superintendent. He felt justified in asking for a government grant to help him get home to the UK, and he tried to explain to Hoare-Stuart that after his dismissal from the Prison Department he had found it impossible to get a job of any sort in Nairobi. Every door had been closed. Hoare-Stuart stared through him and said vaguely, "All right, I'll see what can be done." A few days later he was set to work cleaning out the kitchens in which the white prisoners' food was cooked; then it was the latrines. There were one or two troublemakers among the prisoners who argued that this was forced labour and contrary to some convention which almost every country in the world had signed, but he refused to be drawn into that type of discussion. He kept to himself. Although his health continued to decline and he found it difficult to sleep, he worked steadily and did not complain. At one stage, after a physical collapse, he was taken to see Jack Randall, who tapped his chest and gave him some dough-coloured pills. "Take one of these every morning after breakfast, old boy, with a drop of water. And if you're faking it, just throw them away. They don't cost us anything." The pills didn't seem to have much effect, but Deedes took them religiously, feeling that it would be his own fault if he failed to cure himself through laziness or unjustified scepticism. After two months, he applied for another interview with the Superintendent, and a week after that he was granted one. "Do you want to make trouble for yourself or what?" Hoare-Stuart said as soon as he entered the office. "You come here a penniless vagrant and we give you free shelter, food and clothing and you do nothing but complain." Deedes said quietly, "I haven't complained, sir. It's just that I'd like to work my passage home, if I can get the permission and some money." Hoare-Stuart's hands shook and his eyes watered; his reddish-brown hair was plastered flat across his skull. Then he said, unexpectedly, "Your papers have been mislaid. You will have to wait. We are not a welfare service or a refugee centre. Go away, Deedes." When he got back to his cell, he experienced a momentary return of the rebelliousness which had been his undoing two years before; he struggled to contain it, to reason with himself that restraint and caution alone made a man trustworthy, but even as he reasoned his hand was working on a long letter to the Colonial Secretary in London, setting out the facts of his case and protesting against his illegal detention. In the morning he felt calmer and tore the letter into fine shreds. He began to undergo lapses of memory. His conversation became thickly punctuated with apologies: "forgive me," "sorry," "my stupidity." Occasionally he wept at night, keeping the other prisoners awake. He visited the prison medical centre on several occasions, and once he was taken by Jack Randall to Nairobi Central Hospital, where he was given a cursory examination and then sent away. There were no mirrors in Mount Kenya, but from time to time he would glimpse his own reflection in a window or in another prisoner's pitying appraisal. Broken, he felt inclined to act the hunchback. Amazingly, his spirit had adapted itself to the mutations of his body. He grasped the painful nettle of his error, his Day of Derangement. He thought of McLeish with horror and disgust, but also with the anxiety of a soldier who can no longer remember what his wife looks like. A common episode in his dreams was to come upon McLeish dressed as a tart, with heavily rouged cheeks. He would follow him home, undress and climb into bed. But when he reached out for McLeish's clitoris, he found instead a penis, which stung him with a fatal poison. He learned to narrow the prism of his mind and, best of all, not to think at all—to turn off. Almost six months after his return to Mount Kenya, he was summoned by the Superintendent. He walked across the compound full of renewed hope. When Hoare-Stuart saw him, he at once spoke in his usual abrupt way. "Can you be trusted, Deedes?" "Yessir." "We'll see. I'm taking you off the kitchens and latrines and putting you on the water cart. This involves daily trips on your own outside the prison; I hope you won't abuse my trust." "Thank you, sir." "Go away, then Deedes." He felt tempted to take the opportunity to ask about his repatriation, but decided against it. He was quite sure that Hoare-Stuart would appreciate his restraint and that if he discharged his new duties in a soldierly manner he would be rewarded. Each morning it became his task to fill a truck with drinking water and then drive it to a site about a mile north of Nairobi where an extensive irrigation scheme was under way. Here he dispensed water to the African labourers, emptied the truck in the evening and drove it back to Mount Kenya. He didn't at first appreciate the exact connection between the Prison Department and the irrigation scheme until one day all the hired labourers were laid off and their places taken by political detainees from Mount Kenya. Deedes was told that this plan originated with the Commissioner of Prisons himself, who intended to break the will and cohesion of the more recalcitrant prisoners. Withdrawing further into himself, he positioned the water cart as far from the irrigation ditches as he reasonably could and attempted to dissociate himself from the struggle of spirit and flesh which raged from the very first day between the authorities and the solid phalanx of prisoners. He was no longer prepared to indulge his qualms and flatter his conscience as the insidious McLeish had incited him to do. When the prisoners refused to take up the picks and shovels laid out for them, he shrank with apprehension, as when he had seen a frail youth provoking a heavyweight to a brawl in a Nairobi bar. He felt now, as then, acute resentment towards the weaker element, whose obstinacy imposed on all innocent bystanders a tormenting crisis of conscience, a choice between self-contempt and an undeserved thumping. When, on the fifth day, the Superintendent brought to the irrigation site an additional forty askaris, raising the total to seventy, Deedes retreated deeper into the shadow of his Water cart, fearing that Hoare-Stuart might associate him with the political prisoners' persistent insubordination. Yet he had to watch. Dark memories, elusive, shadowy questions, furtive, spastic doubts forced him to watch as the askaris, commanded by the Superintendent, "Tiny" Hamilton and Sergeant Major Kosutu, converged on the front rank of the prisoners, who for five days had refused to dig. The perspective also intrigued him, gripping his senses with a quasi-erotic intensity; through the trees, the scrub pines, the sunlight ran like a tubular prism; at the far end the stage was brilliantly lit, but microscopic and soundless. He heard nothing; all was mime and slow motion. When the askaris began to raise and lower their batons, he experienced the most complete and perfect detachment of his lifetime, though he trembled. A sense of unreality flooded him, and of Oriental passivity; each blow of the baton seemed as light as the laying of sword on shoulder during the ceremony of knighthood; when suddenly a prisoners knees buckled under him, and then another's, and then a whole row fell like escalating toy bricks, he felt betrayed. The Superintendent, a tiny but recognizable figure at one hundred and fifty yards, danced gaily and seemed to sing. His arms waved as he leaped. As yet the harmony between master and children was perfect, the conventions of the ritual had been observed. But when a prisoner was seen] to seize a spade and swing at an askari, Deedes experienced a sickening lurch, a thundering of doubt in the face of this] anarchic gesture of defiance. His eyes may have closed. Or; his mind. For when he again focused on the distant stage, a new choreography was in evidence; those of the prisoners] who had not been beaten to the ground had come together,] pressed inwards, bent their collective head and piled upwards; into a pyramid. A new being emerged; fifty Africans became! in an instant of total sympathy and identification one Africa; the new collective being offered up its many heads and shoulders to fortune; each man sought to shield his neighbour. The Superintendent no longer assaulted lonely, solitary men, but a monument, a thing, a shrine. Deedes noticed a column of ants passing in two directions between his legs, orderly, purposeful and productive. He screwed up his eyes to the prism of light; the askaris were rushing the pyramid, battering it, attempting to tear its limbs and members off as fishermen grapple with a freshly captured squid. The silence around Deedes was very great. The notion came to him: "I will live to be an old man, this is not part of me, I am not involved at all, my real life lies elsewhere. On another continent." Then the thing parted, fell away: the centre would not hold, the nerve comple*k had been battered into defeat. He saw microcosmic men stagger, bend, fold, they darted like insects, without cause, then rushed together in frenzied hope, like excavators having come upon treasure in a strange land. Soon even this activity subsided and ceased. From his distant perch, he could sense the stillness; no one moved on stage; the master stood, the children were stretched out, asleep. As he drove his cart down between the trees and on to the stage itself, guiding its thick rubber tires between the debris and ruin, he trembled violently but felt that his sins had been expurgated and his loyalty exonerated. Strangely, after such a conflict, prisoners and askaris milled about together, dazed and disoriented, groping with black tongues for the water cart for its several taps, like calves around the udder of a cow. He saw Hoare-Stuart striding about. Three ambulances arrived; they swung off the main road and bucked over the rough ground like untamed horses at a rodeo; they absorbed what was broken and inert with the casual efficiency of big-city refuse trucks, then departed, leaving behind the empty spaces of death. Moved by a dawning realization of what he had witnessed to a deeper state of agitation, Deedes kept close to the water cart, watching the Superintendent slyly, hoping that his loyalty would not go unrecorded. But Hoare-Stuart was fully absorbed in his own problems; several times he glanced distractedly towards the water cart without taking in Deedes' presence. Then, towards sunset, recognition did dawn in his Watery eyes. He seemed quite disconcerted; his mouth fell open and his face threatened to disintegrate into its component parts. Deedes nodded, a small gesture of sympathy, a token. The Superintendent continued to stare at him as if wondering what to do. Deedes coughed nervously and climbed back into his water cart. Later, when he had returned to Mount Kenya, his agitation gave way to elation, to the firm conviction that the authorities would now be compelled to release him. Even so, the fear of an opposite course refused to be dislodged from the back of his mind. That night he hardly slept at all; passages of blinding happiness alternated with periods of foreboding. He attempted to put his life in focus, to discover a single persistent thread of character and conviction, but found it difficult. He was too ill to think prop, erly. Determined at all costs to be loyal, to prove his absolute reliability, he professed ignorance when questioned by the other white prisoners about the previous day's events. Rumours were spreading like wildfire through the camp. By the time that the expected summons reached him late the following afternoon, he was in a state of paralytic indecision. Marched across the compound to the Superintendent's office, he saw a fleet of black government cars drawn up outside the wire detention cage. The cage was empty today. Chauffeurs, police officers and strained-looking officials stood about in hushed, funereal groups. The deep, private satisfaction of the privileged witness, of the man who had been there, overtook him. Almost immediately he was led inside. The small office was crammed with officials. Commissioner Murdoch was seated behind the desk, with Hoare-Stuart standing thin and red at his side. Everyone watched Deedes intently. When Murdoch addressed him, it was with an evidently contrived restraint. Had he been present at the irrigation site on the previous day? Deedes said he had. The Commissioner asked whether he'd seen anything unusual. Deedes replied that he was most anxious to be repatriated to England and that he hoped his application would now receive immediate consideration. Murdoch repeated his question; his moustache was flecked with moisture and his hands were unsteady. Deedes said that he had slept through much of the day, but not through all of it. The officials glanced at one another uneasily. Murdoch commented that everyone liked a siesta now and again, there was no sin in that. What had Deedes seen when he woke up? And was he aware that ten prisoners had died in one afternoon? Deedes answered that years of tropical service had damage' his powers of memory; things came and went inside him-Murdoch leaned forward over the desk and remarked in a less accommodating tone that it might be as well to be more forthcoming and helpful; that, furthermore, according to the opinion of Medical Officer Randall, the deaths might easily be attributed to drinking poisoned water from the water cart.
Peedes' lips fell apart; he looked about him from face to face, searching the gallery of power for some sign of the fair play and justice which he knew it to be his country's mission to uphold—but he discovered only wax masks. Recovering himself a little, he pointed out that he himself had drunk from the same water cart without suffering ill effects. Murdoch nodded briefly and asked him whether he would like to be flown home at once, at the same time pointing out that such a concession could only be conditional. Were Deedes to take it into his head to open an unauthorized discussion of the affair in England, he would of course be guilty of perjury, contempt and treason. It would be necessary to extradite him to Kenya again, as a witness—in which case he could expect to be detained indefinitely. Total silence settled over the office. Terrified of saying the wrong thing, of incriminating himself, of giving offence, Deedes could only nod his head slowly, rhythmically, in an attempt to suggest stability of judgment. Then Hoare-Stuart broke the silence; his voice struck a higher pitch than usual and his eyes were glazed like marbles. "You weren't there, Deedes, you simply weren't there. Is that understood?" Deedes nodded. "Very good, sir," he whispered. Murdoch nodded energetically. "You saw nothing?" "No, sir." Throughout the room breath was released like air escaping from hermetically sealed cylinders. Deedes stepped backwards, nodding. He was still nodding when he walked from Victoria Air Terminal into a light London drizzle. Putting on the secondhand raincoat which had been given him in Nairobi, he began to walk northwards in the direction of Kensington, but without knowing where he Was going. He had two pounds in his pocket and a few clothes in his suitcase. It had been nineteen years since he had last been in London, but so pervasive was his melancholia, his sense of doom, of playing the moron's role in a contrived charade, that he barely took in his surroundings. The immense distances he had travelled within the space of a few hours remained outside the grasp of his imagination; that he was no longer in Kenya was something he could record but not comprehend. Already he felt himself under observation, a fugitive marked down by shadows for a lonely liquidation. He thought, "I can be trusted, I'm reliable." After a while he began to inquire at boarding houses, but found none whose rent he could conceivably afford. He kept walking north. His liberty failed to convince him; arrest must be imminent. When a policeman approached him with a slow, rolling menace in Notting Hill Gate, he was in no way surprised. He searched for an alibi. The policeman asked him where he was going. He said he didn't know, and was ordered to open his case; the mild rain and the policeman's rough hand fell on two shirts, a pair of socks and some toilet articles. Half an hour later he stopped at a seedy and dilapidated house run, it turned out, by a middle-aged lady called Mrs. Standen. She took him in.
He lived with Mrs. Standen for a year—a year of delirium and tormented dreams. The landlady quickly took stock of the fact that her new lodger was a man with a past. Often he woke up in the night screaming. The other lodgers began to complain, and it was only a residual maternal compassion that induced her to keep him under her roof—especially since he was always in arrears with the rent. Deedes, for his part, made no bones of the fact that he was accustomed to a better standard of life, to a better class of person. With deep distaste he witnessed the polyglot confusion which was spreading like a sore in the environs of Notting Hill Gate. Houses in rampant decay, nigger children running wild from overcrowded tenements, black bucks driving old Chevrolets and Plymouths like madmen, fat mammies queueing in the market for white bread and rotten bananas—through this disaster Malcolm Deedes walked sadly, shaking his head, every other day. In addition, he spoke of much which he did not see: of thugs, razor-slashers, fences and rapists who infested the streets after dark. Even within Mrs. Standen's four walls there was no security for a man's feelings. The expedition to the lavatory was always liable to entail an encounter with some black student or day labourer.
Mostly he stayed in his small room, waiting. Every other day he visited the labour exchange. Once a week he drew National Assistance. His health failed to improve; if anything, the condition of ceaseless mental agitation in which he lived induced a further decline. His ulcers grew more painfuf and his sight deteriorated. In the space of a few years the
tall, upright PT instructor had changed beyond recognition. * * *
One day, on leaving the Onslow Street labour exchange and setting his prow for home (and Mrs. Standen's familiar fare of plaice, chips and custard), Malcolm Deedes met a man. Or the man met him.
"No luck, again?" the man said.
He was a youngish chap, prosperous looking, dressed in a camel coat with ginger suede shoes and brilliantined hair. His face was heavy and smooth.
"Time for a quick pint," he suggested, looking at his watch, "on me?"
"I don't mind," Deedes said dourly. They walked around the corner not exactly separately, but not together either. The young man led the way up to the bar, where he radiated at a stout lady.
"What will it be?" he asked, rubbing his hands as if they were cold.
"A pint."
"Two pints, Sue," he bellowed, "of the best." He smiled and winked at Deedes. "Always the best, eh?"
They sat down and touched glasses.
"Here's to the better luck you deserve!"
"Cheers," said Deedes uncheerfully.
"Now, sir—I hope you won't mind my calling you 'sir,' but I recognize a man who combines maturity with achievement when I see one—the situation, as I see it, is this: they have jobs in there, in the exchange, but not for men of your status, background and... years. Right?"
"Aye."
"Let me see . . . you are, if I am not mistaken, an old soldier?"
"Twenty-six years."
The young man leaned back, out of admiration. "Sir, I shake your hand. Your type of man is all too rarely appreciated in the commercialized society which is unfortunately ours. Now, since your hand is in mine, sir, let me introduce JUyself. Stanley Clough, employment agent.
"Deedes," said Deedes. "Sergeant Deedes, late of the KAR."
"I'm honoured. Have another. No, no, let me."
When he came back from the bar counter with two more pints, Stanley Clough said, "Long experience of Africa, have you?"
Deedes' heart leaped and pounded against his ribs. Who was this chap, in any case? A fishy character, a bit too fluent, a wee bit suspect. Deedes had no doubt that he had been under permanent observation since his arrival in London; he had detected agents watching the house from across the street, and there were aspects of Mrs. Standen's behaviour that aroused his distrust. Then there was the business of the MBE; he had bought a paper one morning after leaving the labour exchange, only to find Murdoch's face staring at him from the front page. They had given him an MBE. That showed where power lay. One couldn't be too careful. But worse, certain elements were evidently still trying to reopen the whole business of the deaths at the irrigation site and to challenge the verdict of accidental death. Questions were being tabled (ominous word—like "carpeted") in the Commons. There might be a new coroner's inquest; people were asking how ten men's skulls and pelvises could be smashed by accident. Deedes was terrified. He was sure that if things got too hot he would be arrested and extradited and that his nightmare would begin all over again. Every night he awoke screaming.
"I do not wish," Stanley Clough said decorously, "to snoop or pry. Mine is a high-class agency."
"Aye."
Stanley Clough sighed. "It's a terrible world we live in, sir."
"Aye, it is," Deedes said. Then he added, suddenly excited by having a man to talk to, "I went at Easter to see these marchers. These nuclear people. A rabble."
"A 'rabble' is the word, sir."
"I saw them, mun. Lads with hair like gurrls and gurrls with troosers like lads. Lunatics, madmen. It shouldn'y be alood. Traitors to their country, every one of them. Riff-raff, troublemakers. What do they know of these important things, compared with the government people?" "Precisely."
"When the Roossians come, there'll be no marching, that's
for sure."
"None at all," said Stanley Clough.
"No loyalty of any sort. All that singing. When I was a lad in Edinburgh, I'm telling you, mun, we believed in loyalty to the King, and we left policy to those as understood it."
"Everything has changed for the worse, Sergeant Deedes."
Deedes nodded and drank.
"Tell me, sir, in strictest confidence, are you fit, potentially?"
"Fit?"
Stanley Clough gestured with his pudgy, ring-covered fingers, as if to soften his question.
"I have something in mind for you, but it would require some stamina. Not much."
There was a desperate note, he saw, in Deedes' eye.
"To be more precise. It would require, sir, less than the standard of fitness required of the ordinary infantryman. Decidedly less. I don't like to ask your age, of course."
"Forty-three."
Stanley Clough- threw his man a sidelong glance—and added ten years.
"You would care to serve again," he asked, "for a consideration?"
"Serve?"
Stanley Clough laughed easily. "I fear I have not explained my position with my usual clarity. I am, as the saying goes, slipping. Ha! To be frank, sir, my agency is at present handling a very important and delicate assignment—and lucrative. But confidential. Highly confidential. A gentleman who prefers to remain anonymous—but I can exclusively reveal to you, sir, that he is one of the biggest financiers in the country—urgently requires a man of your experience and calibre."
"What for?"
"Good question. For work of an essentially military nature. But unorthodox, if you follow me. Special work."
Deedes nodded suspiciously. "Where?"
Stanley Clough glanced about him ostentatiously, then cupped his hand over his mouth and drew closer to Deedes' ear.
"In Africa, sir, Central Africa."
Deedes recoiled, as if struck.
"French," said Clough hastily, vaguely delineating the outlines of this ravaged man's predicament. "A large French colony, sir."
"Not Kenya ... ?"
"No, sir, French." Again he brought his mouth to Deedes' ear. "The name is Coppernica. Keep that to yourself, please."
Deedes looked pale; his lower lip trembled.
"A man of your calibre," said Stanley Clough, "would be foolish to throw away such a chance. I can only speak of this position I am offering as tailor made. Bespoke, what? Ha! A position of responsibility. But not dangerous. A small risk, minimal. Have you dependants?"
"None."
"No dependants is no trouble, I always say. I should add, perhaps, that your pay packet will be in the region of fifteen hundred pounds a year. Handsome, that. And prospects."
Deedes stared into space.
Stanley Clough thumped his stomach. "Well now, lunch calls. Think it over, sir. If you like the idea, give me a ring. Here is my card. Should you feel inclined, we will provide free medical treatment and physical training facilities. Nothing strenuous. No, an extremely expensive treatment. And five hundred pounds down payment. On signature. As soon as you like."
Deedes followed Clough to the door, which the younger man most courteously opened for him. Clough reached for his wallet and extracted some pound notes. When they shook hands, the money found its way into Deedes' fingers. Stanley Clough smiled, broadly. "Give me a ring tomorrow," he said. "Don't hesitate. Our money is real." He vanished into a taxi. Deedes stood anchored to the pavement. A face appeared at the taxi window and smiled; there was a hand, and a glinting ring. The taxi lurched away and was lost in the traffic. Automatically, Deedes began to head for home. But soon a menu displayed outside a restaurant caught his attention. He examined it carefully, thought the matter over, then went inside, clasping Stanley Clough's ten pounds. They were real enough.
He ordered a four-course lunch.
When he arrived at Waverley Station—Edinburgh's gateway to the south—late in August, he had most of fifty pounds in his pocket and a further four hundred and fifty in the bank. He came back to his native city as a person of some substance, travelling in a first-class overnight sleeper as was fitting for one who had served crown and country loyally for twenty-six years. A steward brought him an egg boiled for three and a half minutes, thin slices of buttered toast and scalding tea. He shaved carefully, then stepped out in a state of high excitement to be greeted by a warm, mild day.
He sniffed the air. It was the same.
Flags and bunting were everywhere: the annual festival, of which he had heard, was in full spate. He took a taxi to his hotel, where Stanley Clough had reserved a room for him, and put on a new suit and fresh linen. Then he strode out, smiling.
He purchased a ticket for the military tattoo. The other items on the festival agenda (he had arrived too late for the Highland games) he did not really fancy. But not for one moment did he doubt their value; the spectacle of so great a throng of foreign people walking in Princes Street or labouring like ants up the steep inclines to the Castle filled him with pride. He identified himself with the city totally. It dazzled him. He strode up to the Castle, overtaking squads of panting foreigners and Sassenachs like some crazy Hindu set on showing the white men that the Himalayas are mere baubles. When he reached the esplanade, he was out of breath and (despite Stanley Clough's rehabilitation course) rather sick. He lit a cigarette and the smoke was raw against his lungs. But gradually his body recovered itself and the sight of the city stretched at his feet filled him with a renewed joy. There it was, the complex he had so often dreamed of in the flat, hot, desert wilderness—there was the Firth and, beyond, the hills of Fife; and on the other side, Castle Street, Toll Cross, the Braid Hills, gentle and gorse-grown, the dark, familiar undulations of the distant Pentlands.
In the afternoon he sat in Princes Street Gardens and listened to the band. There were rows of empty chairs about him. He felt no loneliness. He valued his anonymity, his ability to associate with his beloved city on strictly his own terms. But there remained a certain problem which he had pushed from his mind time and again, assuring himself that a solution would suggest itself once he had set foot on the sacred soil. Finally, when the band showed signs of wilting in the face of total non-recognition, he forced himself into a phone kiosk. Of one thing he could be certain; his brother Bill was dead, sunk in a Baltic convoy in forty-three. Almost a relief, really.
Giles, Mr. William Giles, husband of beloved Maggie. His eye ran down the directory page. Nothing. He felt despondent; she was the sister he wanted to see. He still pictured her as a gay and flirtatious girl, not as a grandmother in her fifties. He flipped the pages backwards. Deedes . . . His eyes settled on Deedes, H. A. (Miss), 3 Glenister Terrace, 9. He was of two minds. But he dialled; there was no turning back now. His heart was racing. A regular, conventional ringing tone sounded, very spinsterlike and prim. He half hoped that no one would answer. There was a click and a woman said "Hullo?" in a manner which suggested that telephoning was a grave indecency and a travesty of personal privacy.
"Hullo?" he said.
"Yes, hullo?" The woman was severe.
"Is that, er, Miss Helen Deedes?" He pronounced the last word slowly, to suggest a stranger's unfamiliarity.
"Hullo?" the woman said again.
"Who is that, then?" he said, swallowing hard.
After a pause she said, "Who's calling?"
"I believe you have a sister whom I'm anxious to get in touch with. Would you happen to know her address?"
He was sure his voice had betrayed him. He knew it so well.
He waited.
"Who's that speaking?" the woman demanded harshly, with anxiety.
"Could you mebbe tell me how I could reach her?"
Helen Deedes said, "Is that you, Malcolm?"
He staggered out of the phone kiosk, white and shaking. He had no memory of having replaced the receiver; evidently it had replaced itself, severing his links with his family forever. He fell on to a park bench, horrified by the enormity of his offence. What, after all, were a mere thirty-six years to a patient spinster?
In the evening he took himself to the tattoo. He enjoyed the marching and dancing, the colour, precision and music, the sound of the pipes and drums again, and he experienced an upsurge of pride when an African contingent appeared on the esplanade and went through its paces smartly. He identified himself with whatever moved him. He was everyman and no man. But at root, the day, the whole expedition, was ruined; he felt himself unworthy of his native city, a pariah, an outcast. What he had done to Helen . . . Shame bit him savagely. He drank steadily throughout the proceedings, emptying two flasks of scotch. The night sky began to turn over slowly . . . you could float in that great, black Scots sky, float down into the cradle of the city ... at some stage he rose from his seat and made his way unsteadily down the ramp and on to firm concrete. He headed for the Royal Mile, reeling across the cobbles and talking to himself obsessively. When he came upon the cathedral with the Heart of Midlothian carved in stone at its feet, he spat, as a good Scot should, then spat again. His solitude and anonymity could no longer be regarded as virtues, as assets. He had made contact with the mother-city on his own terms, but they were false terms, he was an impostor, an outcast, hunted through the night by the private demons of his history ... He staggered on down the High Street, vaguely intending to visit his birthplace and to inspect his mother's grave at the foot of Arthur's Seat . . . Then his legs froze and buckled. Climbing the hill towards him was a man whom he recognized with a sharp pang of guilt, a square-faced fellow with gray hair standing up from his head in thick, rebellious tufts. McLeish! He turned in a panic, searching for a means of escape, and ran up the hill until he found refuge in a narrow alleyway. The wall against which he flattened himself was damp and evil-smelling. After what seemed an eternity of waiting, the man passed by in the brightly lit High Street, a short, erec figure, striding crisply. Only ten paces separated them.
The night sky above the city was ablaze and people sang in the wide streets; the walls of the alley began to fall in on him, rushing him to the size of the child he had once been.
Not McLeish, after all. Someone else.
PART V
The Last Supper
white haired and approaching seventy, the Bishop of Upper Varva, Roger Leblanc, waited with dignity and patience for the Archbishop of Thiersville to die. Despite three strokes in rapid succession, the Archbishop clung stubbornly to life. Meanwhile Leblanc persevered with the immense tapestry to which, in a moment of revelation, he had committed the women of his flock. Throughout the length and breadth of his huge diocese, these daughters of the Church had been assigned small sections destined to be woven and dovetailed into a vast, panoramic testimony to the coming of the French and to their enduring work. A new Bayeux.
The local nationalists looked somewhat askance at the tapestry project—but did not interfere. As for the Bishop, who occupied a neo-baroque palace which dominated the Place de Verdun, in the very heart of Potonou, he made no bones of his belief that the Year One was an enterprise as pagan as it was foolish; on the first Sunday after independence he preached for an hour on the theme of elder brothers and younger. Having instructed his priests that membership of Tukhomada's MLN was incompatible with the granting of the sacraments, he listened impatiently to their laments that strict enforcement of this provision would leave his Grace virtually without a flock.
"In France we have the same problem with birth control," he told them with a hint, perhaps, of ambiguity.
On social occasions, particularly at dinner, he liked to dwell on the theme of his own early encounter with the child Tukhomada, how he had wrestled with the demon, the con-
597
suming devil of pride, self-love and self-sufficiency in the boy, and how he had lost that battle. Like other old men, he told the story in a certain way—implying that he did not lose many.
Meanwhile he provoked by every means at his disposal the animosity of the native officials who had taken over the town and the province at twelve noon on the first day of the Year One. But assidiously as he courted his own persecution, he succeeded only when news of Ybele's coup and Raymond Tukhomada's overthrow and imprisonment shook the MLN's serenely confident mood and provoked a tide of anger against supporters of the Alliance Party, the Church and white people in general. From his pulpit the Bishop furiously denounced the massacre of Europeans in Thiersville, which he attributed to the "diabolical ingenuity" of the "hellish heathen" Tukhomada. As for Ybele, Leblanc gave honour where honour was due (but did not allude to the archiepisco-pal aspirations of the hitherto unknown emergent demigod Liwele). As a consequence, the palace in the Place de Verdun was stoned and its incumbent forcibly confined to his quarters in the interest of his own safety. Fragmentary news of the murder of Europeans in the remoter areas of the province merely fanned the flames of his indignation.
Raymond Tukhomada's celebrated escape and arrival in Potonou resulted, however, in a rapid reprieve for the Bishop's waning fortunes. Lulled into a false sense of security by the rapturous welcome which awaited him, the leader of the MLN declared serenely that "truth has nothing to fear from falsehood," and commanded that his former teacher be accorded full liberty of movement and speech. At the roadblocks set up to guard the approaches to Potonou, jubilant, root-chewing MLN militiamen now tapped playfully on the windows of the Bishop's car as it passed, grinning kittenishly at the priests, both European and native, who journeyed to and from the palace in the Place de Verdun.
Only Amah Odouma advised against this permissive policy. Tukhomada derided his fears.
"You must allow me to judge the local situation, Amah. 1 know my own people; we are quite safe."
Amah shrugged. "History repeats itself," he said.
"You talk too much about history," Raymond said, irritated at being reminded of how Amah had been right once beforehand he wrong.
Laval did have a flair for high comedy, for a type of humourless and cruel epic drama based on the art of masquerade and a certain didactic attitude towards the wider audience—the sad, rotting crowds of the Western megalopolises. Thwarted for three days—days during which Aristide Plon might be turning the universe inside out—in his jungle retreat ten miles from Potonou, the Commandant, assisted by his slave Fortune, broke the apparent deadlock (and his own darkening temper) by a stroke which those who witnessed could only describe as one of genius.
For Potonou had resisted Laval's relentless and varied attempts to penetrate its protective crust. A cordon of militiamen—volunteer labourers, artisans and peasants doing part-time duty—had set up checkpoints on every road, path and means of approach to the town; even the wastelands were heavily patrolled at night. Cars, buses and trucks were stopped and searched; "foreigners"—including all natives who spoke an alien dialect—were interrogated by vigilant clerks and students, the young officers of the militia. Aware that Tukhomada had been pursued by white mercenaries, the militiamen were doubly alert for any attempts to infiltrate their defences; and at night they smoked and chatted softly, with high, gurgling ripples of laughter, happy to know that their beloved leader slept safely at the Mayor's residence on the west side of the Place de Verdun—opposite the Bishop's palace.
Through the mottled shedding of a late summer's atonement, the young African cure bent lovingly—and witnessed a pair of boots as black and shiny as God; warm water slopped from his pail and whitewash cascaded like the other Nile, splashing the black boots, which did not move. The cure, trembling, fell back to his small bamboo church, so recently consecrated by Bishop Leblanc, the blessed . . . The French officer smiled, like a crocodile, and there were others, emerging from the dense undergrowth, Negroes with strained, hunted faces. Language, when it was released, unlocked emotion; the beardless priest, offered protection and fifty thousand purple francs, agreed, in short, to everything and ran barefooted and breathless to the road, nursing a proposition and a strange premonition of comedy's smoky face. By six he was kissing the Bishop's jewelled hand, and within an hour the prelate had woven with the spirit's needle yet another incident into the vast tapestry of unfolding justice. At ten Leblanc left the palace in a black, apostolic car, accompanied by the still breathless cure and two large suitcases packed with black cowls.
In this way did the Abbe Laval and his sombre monastic brethren contrive to enter Potonou.
If Leblanc expected gratitude and deference, he got none. Almost as soon as his guests were installed he was overcome by the disabling impression that he no longer commanded his own establishment. Invited to dine at his table, the monks refused, curtly, and proceeded to appropriate several adjoining cellars, one of which, Laval was careful to note, carried electric power outlets. The divine union of the scarlet and the black, which Leblanc had pinned to the Gallican tradition, failed to mature; instead he was instructed to procure enough thick felt cloth to soundproof a cellar, sufficient cooked food for ten, a map of the town, and a brace of oil lamps. In the morning he was informed that his dining room would be required for observational purposes; it overlooked, Laval impatiently explained, the Mayor's residence.
In the damp, airless cellar Laval's diminishing army crouched in a perpetual half-darkness, while water dripped from the ceiling and spiders slithered across the green, mildewed walls. Malcolm Deedes, transitorily revived by the lethargic passage of the jungle stream, had now relapsed into a depression which threatened at any moment to take on the desperate note of delirium. James could no longer help him; Deedes' residual faith in the younger man's integrity had finally lapsed beyond repair. Laval bent over his maps, a scorpion lost in obsessional prayer, while the Negro soldiers squatted around the walls with soldered jaws, pockets stuffed with paper money and eyes glassy with apprehension. James Caffrey paced the cellar ceaselessly, caged and restless, always turning on the seventh long stride. The ring of his iron-tipped boots on the cellar flagstones began to drive Jason crazy. The air was industrial with cigarette smoke and the jaded stench of old stubs and stale sweat.
Jason looked about him in desperation. "Why don't we just call the whole thing off?" he complained, loudly enough to be heard yet quietly enough to seem to be talking to himself—a man pushed beyond the limit of obedience, yet inherently unable to travel. Laval looked up from his maps. He took Jason's chin between his fingers and jerked his head up sharply. The Negro's face crumpled in expectation of a blow. "Listen," Laval said, breaking motion like bread, "you'd better get this clear. Normal life, the flabby, cushioned femininity to which you aspire, will be restored to you when, and only when, I hold Odouma's heart in the palm of my hand!"
"So okay," Jason moaned.
He wore a smile like plaster; it peeled layer by layer until a gray, blotched clay showed through.
James continued to pace the cell. Laval returned'to his maps. Deedes was talking to himself again, casting veiled aspersions about Jason and the elusive Russky, yet cunningly evading any challenge liable to provoke reprisal. Suddenly Jason leaped up; his nerve had snapped.
"All right, then," he cried, staring about him, "if I'm not doing any good, let me out of here, I've had enough, those dead kids at Zolanga, listen, you can count on me never to blow this thing open, I'm only-"
"Be silent, macaque!"
Jason's face was mobile with terror.
"Clear the garbage from your soul," Laval said. "You're nothing but a mere object selected for its vulnerability. We require your father's silence, that is all."
Jason turned on James.
"I get it. Tufton's conquistador, huh? Did it ever come to you, Jesus, that your girl's big pink daddy might just want you out of the way?"
James turned away, contemptuously.
Jason subsided into a public coffin, nursing his mortal Wound.
Swiftly gathering the reins of his temper, Laval reabsorbed
James into the central problem of the maps, of the Mayor's residence, of the project. His arm gripped James' shoulders. They bent together over the map.
"To quarrel over women," Laval said quietly, confidentially, "is to lose sight of the essential priorities. Innocence invests the young. I was married once, I have a child, a grown-up
girl. I never hear from her. Now-" His fingers ran across
the map, probing the Mayor's residence for its vulnerable point. "What do you think? There are only four entrances: the main door, heavily guarded; the kitchens, a possibility; a side door, enigmatic and perhaps dangerous; and a basement apartment occupied by the chauffeur and his wife."
"That may be the way," James said.
"It may."
"You can bribe a chauffeur, but not a padlock."
"Of course. But how does one bribe a man of devotion and integrity? Not by the promise of a gift, but by the threat of a reprisal."
No one doubted what he meant. Or knew, precisely.
"To quarrel over women," he resumed, "is criminally naive. In the last resort they all taste alike. The secret of love is the secret of the last resort. Ultimately one is communing only with oneself—in other words, self-realization, masturbation, what the schoolmasters in their folly call 'self-abuse.' "
He remembered Robert Maury, and Jacques Pineau, and the antimoment when Hermann Strauss had bent___
James Caffrey sighed. They all felt rising within them the urge to break out, to soar upwards, to merge with the teeming daylight crowds, to harvest their laughter and their innocence. They longed for it as dedicated climbers, bivouacked on a precipitous rock face, will dream of warm baths and brightly lit city bars.
The African soldiers sat against the wall, watching the Commandant and dreaming of their wives, of another country. The passive dependence of those around him was a familiar condition to Laval; yet now, confronted at last by a problem which might prove to be beyond his capacity to resolve, his Caesarship assumed a faintly transient and elusive quality, like a smiling woman. His grasp was unsure. A kaleidoscope of sensually appealing values converged to bring his black-booted legs within reach of the spill. He abandoned himself now to a reverie, to dimensions of world-space, to palace chambers with floors of cedar and pine, resilient rafters and beams in attic spaces, spiralled staircases of mellowing woods, the ominous complaint of an oak door. A dream. As the jack-booted officer steps across the threshold, crisply, the old Bishop clasps his genital cross (of wood also) and trembles. The officer is reticent and muscular, hidden-potent. "Come!" Shivering, the prelate descends the staircase, haunted by his own empty palace; the soldier grips and guides his shrunken arm, pauses in the great hall among the unseen ancestral spirits, liturgical precepts and gospel remedies; the Bishop waits and vibrates; the great double doors are flung open, light blazes, candles, candles, monuments of light, a feast! Diadem, cassock, surplice . . . The hosts gather and kneel. Incensed prayer. The Bishop preaches wildly; his tongue is educated and provocative, soft and cultivated; he explores the soldiers' vulnerable secrets with words, as a woman's thigh. He says, "Apoplexy and appurtenance" (pause for effect). He says, "Cherubim and wrench, aisle and desultory, tuberculosis and exuberance, inchoate and haloed, innuendo and debauch, insensate and entrails, quilted and Negroid! Revolution!" The Bishop pauses, panting, as the black monks arrive, Laval, Caffrey, Laval. They stand behind his Grace's throne, or bend smiling, waiting. The guests. Clash of innuendo. Odouma, Tukhomada, disguised as monks, enter, bow, fawn, make light of their light drugged wine. Frantic and uncomprehending, the Bishop resorts once more to verbal violence, les barricades des mots, attempting to reassert his position socially. "Which of you has his bachot? Which evolue, which immatricule? Germinal and blemish, succulent and gouge, chameleon and fecund, germinal and Pungent, gouge and blemish ..." He breaks off, sobbing. Food is brought. Tukhomada springs with a wild, non-Faustian scream and strangles the Bishop. The monks Laval and Caffrey do not move to his rescue; piety, immobilisme. Odouma laughs and tears open his flies; the Bishop's last words— "alluvial and bantering, bantering and spinach, vuluptuary and axiomatic" (eeaough . . .)—bring Odouma up straight and into his sister. The Negro Bailey enters naked and prances, grovels and mimes, confesses his uneducated ignorance. Tukg homada and Odouma spring on him with infuriated yells, maddened by the confession of racial impurity, inferiority, animality. The Last Supper now happens. The monks Laval and Caffrey throw off their cowls and habits and hurl themselves upon their victims. Plucked his heart . . . Who shall betray me, before the (bloody) cock crows thrice ...
Deedes had begun to babble. The effect was uncanny.
"Get him out of here, out!" Laval bellowed.
James bent over the broken Scot. "A doctor must be found," he said.
Laval laughed shortly. "Do you imagine that I intend to confide our presence here to the whole of Potonou?"
Together, James and Jason lifted the sick man from the damp floor and carried him from the cellar into the dry, sweet-smelling upper reaches of the palace. Coming to the surface, they experienced the same relief and elation as sailors who have suffered a prolonged incarceration underwater in a submarine. Servants and priests hurried around them with hot water, soap, towels, clean sheets and grief. Like a mortally wounded queen bee, Deedes was laid to rest on a feather bed, then offered a little tender chicken, jellied ham, submissive asparagus, obliging, boneless fish, and also liniments, warm compresses, drugs to waft in sleep like a breeze, religious comfort in all its manifold generosity.
And the Bishop himself came, with prayers.
James and Jason withdrew backwards, deferentially, from the dry, scented room, beset by the same confusion of responsibilities which men feel when they surrender dying relations to the charge of doctors and nurses. To whom did Deedes now belong? As they reached the door, The Bishop glanced up. 1
"Chretien?" he asked, as if hoping for conversation.
"Ecossais," James said, wondering how one should address a French bishop. Or an English one.
"Ah." Roger Leblanc smiled obligingly, in the way men do when others speak their language, but not perfectly.
"Et votre ami?" he asked.
"Lui? Americain."
The Bishop stood at the head of Deedes' bed, with his hands clasped.
"Adieu," he said.
The two young men backed out of the room, soft-footed, impressed by the old priest's parchment face, pencilled with a fine fretwork of lines, the milder, more comprehending face of white Africa. Closing the door quietly, they found themselves at liberty in a long, lattice-windowed gallery which overlooked the Place de Verdun and the sprawling, tin-roofed town of Potonou. The familiar sunlight illuminated the town in its priceless strangeness—the total perspective which burned the claustrophobia from their chilled bones.
Jason stood at the window gazing down at the black people in the square below. In small backyards, lines of washing flapped spasmodically in the mild breeze; children ran and sprang and kicked and hopped; mothers remonstrated automatically, casually, and the children took no notice. It reminded him of Harlem, a little, of the warm, vibrant Harlem among whose poor and friendly people he had so loved to wander as a child, without fear . . . The sight of women brought his longing to the surface, his yearning for Zoe, the scent and beauty of her, the smile, the comfort in her presence, the arms whose embrace bestowed the priceless gift of singularity, of being chosen. His memory meandered, the truth drifted from his mind like fine smoke. Finally he became conscious of the Englishman standing at his side, taller.
"I'll tell you something," Jason said. "If you were to give me wings..."
"No one will."
In the square below, in front of the Mayor's residence, a street orator had begun to harangue a small, midday crowd. Here and there young men in shorts drifted about lethargically, clutching banners. Watching them, Jason felt drowsy.
"Somewhere in that building," he murmured, "are the men we want."
"Perhaps."
"Looks like a goddam fortress to me. I mean, how are we ever going to get inside those doors?"
"Everything is possible at night."
Jason glanced sideways, with a hint of resentment.
"Tell me something. When we began this business, before Zolanga, you had quite a lot to say. That crazy humanism and destiny stuff, all that spiel. You and Laval were hand in glove. When we got into that goddam village you ran around like Tarzan. We haven't heard so much from you lately. Kind of dried up, huh? I've caught Laval watching you as if he weren't too sure either. Just where do you pitch your tent?"
James shifted his weight from one foot to the other. It was some time before he spoke.
"I daresay we all pitched our tents at Zolanga.
"How so?"
"We proclaimed our mission in blood. We voluntarily abdicated our right to second thoughts. If we hesitate now, we assume the gory hands of butchers. Of bandits. As soon as a crusade begins to question itself, it becomes a criminal rampage."
"Now wait a minute-■"
"Well?"
"That was war. One side or the other had to go under. Besides-"
"I know, I know," James said wearily. "It wasn't your decision, you merely followed orders, you acted in self-defence, you didn't really know what was going on, where in any case is Zolanga, never been to Africa in your life. I know all that because I've run through those excuses myself. M tell you this: for men of our calibre and education there can be no excuses. Only the possibility of total success stands between us and ignominy."
"War is war," Jason muttered.
"No."
"No?"
"The least significant aspects of wars are those they share in common."
Jason said, "Did you ever think about the Jews?"
James looked at him sharply, as if confronted by a ghost. "Why do you say that?"
Jason shrugged. "Nothing, nothing." He leaned forward on the windowsill, gazing solemnly across the tin roofs of Potonou. His mood mellowed, the sun was warm on his head, the dark, airless cellar below and its terrible Minotaur were losing their imminence. In the Place de Verdun below, knots of laughing people were gathering around an orator. Jason felt expansive, he wanted now to be friends with James. A certain mysticism crept through his veins, inducing the sensation of being a part of the world in which he lived, part of those whom he had met and known.
"As a matter of fact, I sometimes think of the Jews. You know, the sequence of events. Escalation. Some day it might happen in the States, to the Negroes. The whites are getting richer and the blacks poorer every day. Eighty per cent of the businesses in Harlem are owned by whites who don't live there. My brother makes that point and I guess he's right. The time for handshakes is over. Haydon and I agree about that. We'll be ready for the fight when it comes. I guess that's why I'm out here, in a way. I mean, it's just too easy if you've got brains, sailing through college, collecting all the honours . . . Did you throw over a career at Oxford to come out here?"
James pondered this.
"I grew bored of sitting on my arse."
"Is that the way you think of scholarship, of history, of the pursuit of truth?"
"I can only judge by my own experience," James said.
"Shall I tell you that what I sometimes think of doing before my own graduation? I'll quit. That really would shake my parents more than a little. Listen, what is it that translates a guy's professional qualifications into automobiles, foreign holidays and big cash? The degree, the Phi Beta Kappa. That's what I don't want to carry with me all my life. I'd rather be one of those with nothing to lose."
James turned away, disgusted. The urge to strike Jason across the mouth with the back of his hand was taking hold of him with increasing frequency. Some trait in the Negro's character, a peculiar fusion of truculence and humility, a vulgar knack of percipience and a derisive cynicism about virtue, brought out a latent strain of violence in himself. He found himself detesting nature's underdogs. As for Alec, with his feminist ethic of indiscriminate compassion . . . The outlines of the misapprehension, the lie, shimmered elusively like the once-familiar name of a friend.
Footsteps sounded from the bowels of the palace, echoing up the funnel of the stone staircase, steel-tipped boots articulating a threat whose mere shadow burned their words and small prayers to ashes.
The Mayor's residence did in fact prove impenetrable. All hope of breaking in and reaching Tukhomada and his friends in their beds had to be abandoned. Time, as Laval never ceased to remind his subordinates, was running against the West. Feeling his life begin to rip, like rotted hemp, the Commandant reacted with characteristic vigour.
In an audacious stroke worthy of conquistadores, Laval, James Caffrey and a few chosen soldiers spirited the chauffeur, Kofi Mensah, and his wife, Melanie, from the servants' quarters of the Mayor's residence. Laval intended to reach Tukhomada through his chauffeur, to force the man to betray the leader of the MLN by divulging his future movements and cooperating in the laying of an ambush outside Potonou. In the cellar of the Bishop's palace, Kofi was questioned under bright lights for two hours. From time to time he was given a slap or a blow to jog his memory, but he refused to talk. His attitude reminded Laval of some of the first revolutionary leaders who had fallen into the hands of the Blue Berets in Thiersville, nearly three years before.
Finally he stepped away and straightened his back.
"Evil," he said, "is pertinacious."
"It's hopeless," James said.
"Hopeless?" Laval said sharply. "You give in easily."
"Only torture could make him talk. I admire his guts. Africans can be very loyal."
"Then we will have to remove his guts." Laval raised his eyebrows. "Yibu look dismayed. Why is it legitimate to kill a man, but not to torture him?"
"In the heat of battle-"
Laval cut him short contemptuously. "You remember those planes we used at Zolanga?"
"Yes."
"Well, child, think about it."
James' mouth was drawn tight. "These things can't always be explained logically."
"Exactly. In the Army one takes orders."
"Yes, but-"
"So you can stay or leave, just as you please. If you prefer it, go upstairs and talk to the Bishop. Or visit your sick friend, Deedes."
James looked about him, at Jason, at the chauffeur and his wife, rigid with terror, and at the African soldiers squatting with blank, obedient faces around the walls.
"What do you have in mind?" he murmured.
"To remain in command."
"Look, you can't-"
"Get upstairs, Caffrey. Take this black American with you."
James could not move. Laval took his revolver from its holster.
"I'm serious," he said. "Tonight I would kill you without compunction." He slipped the catch.
James opened the heavy door and climbed the stone stairs to the upper floors. His legs felt leaden and his heart raced with shame and disgust. He tried to seal his mind like an airtight container, to achieve a vacuum of indifference. Jason followed him, silent with fear.
In the basement below, Laval quickly transformed the cellar into an operating theatre drenched in a remorseless white light, a light so harsh that it drained the Negroes' faces of their pigmentation. Lacking the refined facilities of Octave and the adroit assistance of Petit and Parmelin (no doubt now wallowing in sluggish civilian affluence), he had to dispense with electrodes, crocodile clips and magnets, and had to rely solely on a length of rubber piping, a thumbscrew and a stomach pump. The African soldiers, haunted by their internment in a hostile city and by the knowledge of what would befall them should they ever be taken alive, worked with savage energy. For ten minutes they beat the chauffeur up, kicking him in the groin, knocking his teeth out and thumping his head on the flagstones.
"Kofi!" cried Melanie, the Mayor's cook.
The stench in the cellar became hideous, a stench compounded of half-eaten food, dried urine, garlic-sweat, cigarette smoke, the stale reek of stubs littered on the floor like dead lice, and of splattered excrement. Laval worked on Kofi with a rope soaked in water, exorcising the evil spirits of misplaced fidelity with a terrible, consuming urgency. At last he was alone in a universe populated entirely by blacks. He had been foolish ever to believe in Caffrey; flabby scruples, a chicken-hearted surrender in the face of logic—this was the measure of modern England. Tufton had intimated that he should dispense with Caffrey once he had ceased to be of help; that time had almost arrived, but not quite.
Kofi held out. Half dead, he held out, even when Laval pumped him full of water and leaped on his swollen belly. The chauffeur's nails came out one by one, then blood seeped through the sockets of his eyeballs. But he held out.
Andre Laval set to work on Kofi's wife, Melanie. A small, ugly woman who in normal times laughed a good deal, she squirmed like a piglet under the butcher's knife when the Commandant strapped her to a table and began to cut patterns in her ebony flesh. She screamed continuously while her man Kofi, maddened beyond endurance, heaved and fought with the soldiers who held him down, on his knees, in a pool of his own blood.
Kofi Mensah did finally capitulate. He was staunch in the teeth of his own pain, but his wife's mounting suffering was more than he could endure. The arc lamps bore down on him, to bring a little prescience to his tuition, to the patient, repetitive process of conditioning him, blunting his allegiances, his memory, his human capacity for remorse, his susceptibility to Tukhomada's evil eye, the eye of loyalty. Finally Laval stepped back convinced that his work had been thorough. Kofi was as clay. The ambush could not fail. Later in the night they returned him like a parcel to the servant's quarters of the Mayor's residence, while Melanie stayed behind in the Bishop's palace, a hostage. When the soldiers began to lay hands on her, Laval was furious.
"Have some respect for womanhood!" he snapped.
The soldiers collapsed to the floor, too exhausted to wipe the operating table of its blood and bile, its dead skin, fingernails and excrement. The warriors collapsed to the floor and lay still, their black faces gleaming pallidly like white butter. They begged the Commandant to turn out the lights, but he refused, pacing the cellar floor in a mood of volcanic agitation. Finally he summoned Caffrey and Bailey from the upper floors of the palace, where they had fallen asleep.
As James stepped into the cellar the harsh light struck him like a blow, forcing him to shield his eyes. The scene told its own story; he recoiled and was almost sick. Behind him, Jason edged backwards towards the door.
"Stay!" Laval commanded.
James saw the African woman huddled on the flagstones, sobbing. He understood, then, what he had hurried to escape from; and he understood in the same moment that there could be no escape.
Laval was watching him keenly. He began to shout and gesticulate.
"Disgust, eh? Always disgust! Pretty boy! Martignac had more guts, a hundred times more guts. Listen, we were once like a woman, we of the West. We snored away, heads down, the bats of history, casting away our possessions, our soul, in a rapid, delightful cadence. And the university types, the intellectuals, the writers, offered their soft cheeks to those who were striking us and brandished their ridiculous little fists and screamed like girls at us who were defending their freedom to scream. Look at you! Yes, you! You are the same!"
Laval wiped his brow. The words flowed out.
"I had a big career at my feet, make no mistake. Paris, the university, the Ecole Normale, a professorship. Or the civil service, top grade, the Quai d'Orsay. I had the brains and I had the connections. My father was a lawyer and the mayor of our town—Lyons. He owned several newspapers, his business connections were immense. I could have married a Rothschild. And do you know why I threw all that up for the profession of arms? Because France was in danger. I joined the Army as a private soldier, I would have nothing to do with Saint-Cyr. I was decorated. Later I was tortured by the Gestapo. They had a right to torture me, but I didn't talk. One doesn't have to if one has the courage to die."
For a few moments more Laval and Caffrey stared at one another, obsessed by the immensity of the task which lay ahead, and by the inevitability of a fatal confrontation between them. Finally the fierce lights went out, leaving behinc a translucent glare which burned the darkness to the texture of day. The small woman continued to sob bitterly throughout the night, and once, when James laid a hand on her head to console her, she screamed.
THIRTY-THREE
driven by thirst, Jason pulled the cork from his water bottle and let the precious fluid lubricate the lining of his throat. His black, scaly tongue absorbed it like a sponge. His eyes were closed. The water was warm and oily, but he drank it avidly, obsessively, without regard to the consequences. Deedes, squatting in the long grass, relieving himself, watched him. His haunches trembled as he watched. The Americano lacked a soldier's restraint, a white man's discipline; he was the sort who drained his bottle dry and then battened on other people, relying on their compassion. Deedes resolved to give him none. Now, when the cicadas were driving their wings to a frenetic song in the sundrenched trees and resin ran down the pine bark like honey, and the dry earth rejected the longer shadows, it pleased him to despise the American Negro. His mind meandered, then turned as cargo boats turn, ponderously, to distant days, the pond in Tufton's garden, the wire cage in Mount Kenya, the contract, the bragging mercenaries who were in it only for the money—nobodies.
Squatting, he watched carefully.
Laval had chosen a perfectly concealed enclave, a jungle clearing buried deep in the forests of Upper Varva, more than twenty-five kilometres from Potonou. It was peaceful one could stay here forever, and sleep. Watching the native soldiers erecting a neat row of tents, Deedes experienced a mild flow of hope; his bowels opened in gratitude and he sighed contentedly.
Jason drained his water bottle, then sat down in the shade, leaning against a tree. He was drenched in sweat and his black tongue hung out of his mouth like a dog's. Some twenty yards away, at the far end of the clearing, two Africans lay prostrate on the ground under the full fury of the sun. They were bound hand and foot, and the soldiers kicked them as they passed. When the Commandant appeared from his tent, he walked across the clearing, bent over the younger man and did something to him with his hand. Amah Odouma writhed and groaned.
"He didn't have to do that," Jason muttered.
James lay beside him with his eyes closed and his hands clasped behind his head. His fair hair was thick and matted with sweat; in the last few days dark caverns had appeared under his eyes, his face had shrunk and his cheekbones had assumed unexpected prominence, robbing him of his promise.
"Didn't you hear that?" Jason grumbled.
James lay still, listening to the steady, comforting hammering of tent pegs and wishing the American would go away. The chauffeur Kofi had betrayed Tukhomada and Odouma by driving them into a pre-arranged ambush. For love of his wife. A bitter love. James felt very tired. A hot band of sun severed his legs just above the knee, reminding him of a bus journey he had once made as a boy along the Thames from Richmond to beyond the Tower. He had travelled on the top of the bus, in the front, with his feet propped up on the window-sill. The sun had been very hot that day. When Odouma cried out again, he found that the innocence of the ambush itself, of the beautifully contrived and executed action, was dispelled; the virile fraternity of pure warfare, which had momentarily erased the horror of the Bishop's palace, had now curdled. Odouma's cries were already the sequel to a more shocking atrocity—the instant of disbelief when Laval had taken the chauffeur Kofi and his wife, Melanie, aside, and suddenly they had registered the convulsive despair of cattle before the slaughterhouse door. Laval had broken their necks. He knew how. "A just end for traitors," he had said. "They betrayed their chief."
Jason touched James' arm.
"Cigarette?"
"Thanks."
Deedes crouched, hopped and took one shyly. He sighed.
"I've been thinking," Jason said. "I mean, this is the end of the road, isn't it? We've got these two guys in the bag, so what comes next?"
"I've no idea," James murmured. His eyes remained closed.
Jason's voice took on its habitual sardonic note. "All the same to you, is it? He bombs a village, he tortures women, murders two people . . . why should you care? You have the great tradition behind you, all those medieval castles." James raised himself on his elbows.
"You really do get under my skin. Why don't you buzz off and chatter to yourself?"
Jason's face was wet and mobile. "Strong and silent, huh?"
"I've told you before. Some of us don't feel the need to spill out everything that enters our head." j
Deedes nodded vigorously. "Like a wumman," he said.
James was so tired that he found it almost impossible to concentrate, to distinguish between illusion and reality, inspiration and myth. Images and ideas which refused to yield their interconnections circulated inside his head like butterflies in a summer garden. The blue boy in Cyprus . . . Lemmon packing his cummerbund, Soames gesticulating in the library of Tufton Manor, the scale model of the copper mine, Maya's defiant corpse, Alec plunging into the sea. And Deedes. Regarding the shattered hulk of the man, James found it hard to recreate the astute veteran who had reasoned with him before dawn by the jungle stream, warning him to act before Laval precipitated them all into an avalanche of murders. If the Commandant failed to make contact with Thiersville now, Tukhomada and Odouma would die. Murdered. Even though he had told Jason in Potonou that a moment's hesitation would transform a crusade into a bloody rampage, the enormity of this act, even in prospect, stunned him. The massacre at Zolanga had not affected him in the same way. The carnage had somehow been impersonal, the logic of war. Now, a man and a woman had been tortured and then butchered, vicariously, their necks snapped like twigs. He felt now as he had felt after the news of Alec's death; things had fallen apart.
James stood up. He was shaking.
"You're right," he said.
Jason looked startled. "Huh?"
"You're right. This thing has got to stop. We must act quickly."
Like a woman who had provoked her husband to leave her once too often, Jason felt panicky; the inflatable currency of words was now threatening to convert itself into the harder metal of action.
"That's easy to say," he said.
"He's a psychopath," James said with the violence of sudden conversion.
"Have you got a certificate to prove it?"
"We can't risk half measures. Is that understood?"
Discerning the emergence in Caffrey of a force he had earlier, in a moment of sober folly, tried to encourage, Malcolm Deedes began to scrutinize the jungle with sly, oblique eyes, searching for the obscurer avenues of retreat and fondling the gangling doll of his third childhood—Laval's hated Russian. Measuring the Russky's feasibility in the slanted light of a need, he found his existence proven.
"We must arrest him," James said.
Jason recoiled. He had the look of a man who has witnessed a terrible street accident.
"Are you crazy? Maybe you've seen too many movies."
James squatted down on his haunches very close to Jason. His face had narrowed with anxiety and the knowledge that his resolve had only a limited life.
"Jason."
"Yeah?"
"How often have you told me what a swine the man is? How often have you complained that I don't care? How often have you said that Laval and I work hand-in-glove?"
Jason sulked. He thrust a blade of grass between his teeth, but it fell away, rejected by his vibrating lips.
"You can talk," he muttered.
James turned to Deedes.
"Malcolm, you pointed out to me yourself how things could only go from bad to worse. Surely you remember. That night we sat together by the river. You reminded me of the things you had learned in your life. I took no notice. You must remember."
"I remember," Deedes said, staring at the trees.
"Well, then ..."
But Deedes assumed his demented half smile. Reason lapsed from his eyes.
"Listen," Jason pleaded, "suppose we do arrest him. Suppose we even get the soldiers to follow us. Suppose we pull it off. Will you kindly tell me how we're going to get out of here alive? You said it yourself—we're surrounded by people who'd be happy to eat us for lunch. A big deal. Laval's the only one who can get us out of here. The only one. Don't ever forget that."
Abruptly the taut elastic snapped inside James. He lay back in the long grass and closed his eyes, pushing away the oncoming memories, the yardsticks by which he had measured his own achievements, his own intrinsic value. Everything was sham and illusion. An immense weariness enveloped him; he heard the cicadas singing in the trees, a familiar sound which evoked an elusive yet captivating continuity, and then he fell asleep. He fell asleep with a single word perched on his nose: regret. He flicked at it.
Laval always woke up cleanly, severing the threads of sleep as meticulously as he tore perforated toilet paper. He never rubbed his eyes; he detested ragged ends, notions of hesitation tinged with physical regret. When he awoke, he was erect inside his denims—a dream, like a light Moselle, of Simone in the woods—but he walked out of his tent into the evening sunlight without shame. He stood for a moment, hands on hips, dark and lithe, scowling, taking the situation in, then returned to his tent, unlocked a heavy iron chest and extracted several wads of new, crisp money. He would pay his men—those who still remained—a double wage, the wages of excessive fear.
He locked the chest carefully. The key hung around his
neck like a crucifix; the delicate silver chain had been Jean Martignac's.
Returning to the radio, he began to coax it with tender, practised fingers. His earphones crackled discordantly; initial hope gradually yielded to irritation; his face became longer, sharper, its shadows more defined. Voices rose and waned in the ether like meteors in the night sky. Sweat poured down his face, but his lips remained dry.
Then he heard something which brought the ice to his eyes: two militia patrols were reporting their positions. They were drawing closer. A shadow fell across him. Ripping off his earphones, he turned and brought his revolver up with great speed; Jason staggered and whimpered.
"Macaque," Laval snapped, "you'll get yourself killed."
Jason tried to smile. His face was wet and mobile.
"So what's the score?" His voice carried; it was crippled.
"You have something to tell me?"
"No. I mean, it's just that the longer we hang around here
«
Laval silenced him impatiently. "That's my affair. What is it you want? You want something, I can see."
Jason glanced- around the camp with a robber's dancing eyes.
"I think there's something you ought to know. Frankly, I don't like Caffrey's mood. He's turning sour. He's talking big. I just wanted to tell you, that's all. I mean, I wouldn't want you to think I was in any way associated ..."
Laval lit a cigarette. "What's in his mind?" he inquired calmly.
"May I borrow one of those coffin nails?" Jason said.
"Eh?"
"Your cigarettes, sir."
Laval grunted and handed him the pack.
"What can he do, that child? Decisive and energetic, yes— but scrupulous."
"Oh sure," Jason said doubtfully. "It's just his mood. I thought I ought to warn you."
He backed away, and terror arrested the regular motions of his heart like a hand. Laval's indifference was no doubt a mask; he wasn't the type to take risks—or half measures.
When the Commandant embarked upon preventive action, he amputated the offending limb without compunction. Jason shuddered at the prospect of life alone with Laval. Only now did he appreciate how deeply he had come to depend on James and on James' self-assurance.
For the next hour he watched Laval for signs of a visible reaction. There were none—except that he adopted Deedes, dragging the old man around with him wherever he went. The Commandant continued to work on the radio like an artist, in strenuous, inspired bouts of creativity which gave way to sullen dejection and apathy. The same clear voices, the same hostile planets, constantly dominated the ether; two converging militia patrols sent out from Potonou were bound sooner or later to stumble across the mercenary encampment. Laval was hemmed in on all sides. Time was running dry, like the water.
THIRTY-FOUR
on the fifth floor of the Ministry of the Interior, a number of important gentlemen had gathered in conclave. Hilarity was not general. The air-conditioning system had broken down, the electric fans were no longer working and the elevators connecting one floor to another had likewise capitulated to the evil omens of the day. Cornered, and bellowing like a wounded bull, Fernand Ybele sat behind his desk unshaven and haggard, wearing a collar which had not been disengaged from his neck for three days and a suit so crumpled as to arouse genuine dismay in the Hon. Soames Tufton.
"I will not be dictated to," Ybele insisted from time to time. "You're all in my hands and liable, I may say, to instant liquidation."
"The Army will hold! Vive I'Armee Nationale!" cried
Jean Liwele, saluting, by mistake, the glum politician Ar-mand Keller.
"Shut up!" said Ybele.
Ambassador Silk stood at the window gazing down rather nervously at the demonstrators who were struggling with a detachment of police and troops outside the Ministry gates. Having climbed five flights of stairs, Chester Silk, who sadly missed the lunch-hour gymnastics of his New York days and whose lungs had reacted unfavourably to the ascent, contemplated the disintegration of a nation almost with relief. The nightmare of reconciling his public conscience with his private pocket had proved ultimately unendurable. If Amcol were liquidated or appropriated, not he but Soames would go bust. For Chester Silk, South America had always remained the really thick gravy. The prospect of his brother-in-law's impending nemesis gave him, if anything, some pleasure. The man repelled him. "Tearsville" was a dead loss. Earlier in the day he had given Powell Bailey instructions to supervise the immediate evacuation of the entire Embassy staff. Amanda and Zoe would be by this time safely airborne.
If Soames thought that there was anything to be salvaged, he was out of his mind. Plon, too, had taken leave of his wits—Plon, who had executed an amazing volte-face when news of Tukhomada's appearance in Upper Varva had sparked off a mounting campaign of demonstrations throughout the country. He and Soames had buried their differences and embraced like old buddies, so anxious were they to rally behind Ybele now that Tukhomada had once more become a danger. News from Potonou was fragmentary and episodic; the certainty that Laval had recaptured the Africans had been followed by an agonizing uncertainty as to where he was or what he'd done with them. Ybele waited in the Ministry day and night for news from the Commandant, while his radio operators fought despairingly to pick up a call sign which they were convinced must be his.
Conditions in Thiersville itself had become distinctly unfavourable. No white person dared cross the native cite now, not even in a car. Ugly rumours about the fate of Tukhomada ("The worst thing about them," Soames had remarked to Chester Silk, "is that they can't all be true") brought the artisans and labourers out in the heat of the day on prolonged demonstrations which culminated in the burning of cars, the smashing of shop windows belonging to Europeans and assaults on the police. Soames exaggerated a rather unpleasant incident following an attempt by Ybele to make a public speech by spreading the rumour that the Premier had had to be smuggled back into the fortified Ministry disguised as the first Coppernican astronaut. Meanwhile, the Comte de Lacassagne had made repeated attempts to catch the midday plane for Paris, while Ybele's police, at Plon's instigation, prevented him from doing so. Plon reckoned that the Count's flight would not reassure stockholders at home.
Ybele turned desperately to Soames.
"You must suggest something. After all, you're responsible for this ghastly mess."
"My dear sir," Soames said, dabbing at his damp cheeks with a silk handkerchief, "you credit me with superhuman gifts."
"No, no," Ybele cried, banging his fist on the desk, "you set me against my friend, Plon here, you seduced my mind with sorcery-"
"With the promise of money," Soames said.
Ybele leaped to his feet. "You're under arrest, Tufton, for crimes against humanity. You conspired to set Tukhomada free and to divide ..."
Ybele broke down.
"Never mind," Plon said.
"What?"
"Never mind the past. We must think constructively."
"You're under arrest, too," Ybele said, relapsing into his chair.
At the window, Chester Silk watched the police retreating down the street towards the Ministry gates. Nor did the iron railings, viewed from this angle, look reassuringly high.
"Time's running out," he said.
The phone rang. Ybele stared at the flashing red light, seized the receiver and embarked upon an hysterical altercation with some minor official. Soames wondered in a desultory way about James Caffrey and where he might now be. As the days passed, Sara's constant inquiries had given way to tears.
In the end he'd sent her home to England; his brother, the Earl, had offered to take her on a late summer cruise in the Adriatic. She would forget. Only once recently, in the super-hot bath he favoured, had Soames allowed himself a prolonged meditation on the theme of James Caffrey—a steamy seance which had brought him to the conclusion that James was in truth a young man of more character than charm.
Plon was more at the centre of his thoughts these days. His offer—made this time without consulting Chester Silk—to sell Amcol's entire assets to Plon at three-quarters of their current market price had been greeted with a polite but aggravating smile. Even so, he felt sure that Plon was meditating a gamble and was only waiting for his own nerve to crack completely. The Frenchman intended to complete the business he had embarked on several years ago when he had driven through the chill Buckinghamshire mists to Tufton Manor.
Soames had latterly attempted, but generally failed, to get his own holdings out of the country. The rapidly depreciating Coppernican franc made such a manoeuvre impossible, a factor which, everyone knew, was gravely preoccupying Fer-nand Ybele himself.
With a quick, birdlike movement, Plon leaned forward over Ybele's desk.
"You have absolutely no idea where Laval is or what he has done with Tukhomada?"
"None." Ybele looked ravaged.
"I believe you." Plon said reluctantly.
The Premier tugged at his soaking collar, then extended his arms in a gesture of heartrending entreaty.
"What, oh what, gentlemen, is it you want of me?"
Soames and Plon glanced at one another and then, as if moved by a single divine hand, made for the corridor outside. Everyone else sulked while they were gone. A few minutes later they returned.
"The plan is this," Plon announced in a tone which did not admit of contradiction. "Ybele will leave the country today, using the helicopter belonging to the American Embassy. Liwele here will then make a broadcast to the nation, denouncing Ybele as a scoundrel and traitor, promising to
discard his policy in toto, suppressing all foreign interests immediately and swearing to open negotiations with the MLN."
Liwele leaped to his feet with glazed eyes. "I am ready to assume my finest hour," he cried. "Glory and Hallelujah, the Word killeth, the Spirit giveth life."
Ybele looked quickly around the room.
"You agree to this plan?" he said to Soames.
"With a bleeding heart, I assure you."
"What is your price?" Ybele said flatly.
"For what?"
"For my cooperation."
Plon shrugged. "You cannot leave the country without our help."
Ybele began pacing around the room, his hands extended like a Neapolitan confidence man, searching, evidently, for some gleam of humanity behind those green and purple papier-mache masks.
"I have assets," he pleaded, "a life's work, I have no means at this moment of-"
"How much?" Plon said.
Ybele stopped. His eyes flickered. His lips sparred with fortune.
"Two hundred million francs."
"Halve it," Plon suggested.
"Your parting bequest to the nation," Soames added.
Ybele raised his shoulders and turned to Chester Silk.
"There are those who rob a man when he is prostrate and helpless on the ground."
But Chester Silk's attention was absorbed by the rapidly developing situation in the street below. The first demonstrators had already begun to scale the railings; about ten million threatened to follow. Wiser it would have been to have cut this interview and to have made good his getaway with Amanda, Zoe and the Embassy staff. For the first time, a straight chill of fear passed through him; his bladder flooded.
Plon said, "Decide quickly. I'm prepared to phone any European banker you care to name, with instructions that he should credit you with one hundred million."
Ybele was breathing heavily. "All right," he said, "but may you be answerable to God for this."
Soames lit a cigar. But his hand was unsteady.
"On the contrary," he drawled with affected calm, "you may thank Aristide for easing your passage to Heaven through the needle's dreaded eye."
Plon reached for the telephone.
"One moment!" cried Armand Keller.
And stood heaving like a circus ringmaster.
"Well?" said Plon impatiently.
"One snag in all this, one pitfall," protested Keller, dark and lost.
"What?"
"Liwele—he's mad."
Plon began to wrestle with the Coppernican telephone system and to try to convince the operator on the Ministry switchboard that he was in fact Fernand Ybele. The operator remained sceptical. Plon then admitted his identity; the operator, a man of deep, self-charging moods, became even more sceptical; and when, in exasperation, Plon called Ybele himself to the phone, the operator's scepticism knew no bounds.
"Get me Zurich; Zurich, Zurich, you clown, you bloody— yes, yes, of course I'm Ybele. Who else could I be, phoning from this office? Yes, I know someone else telephoned from this office a moment ago-"
Chester Silk stepped back from the window. He was deadly pale.
"Let's go," he said, rumbling towards the door.
A stampede followed. Marshal Liwele, reaching the door at the same instant as the larger and more ruthless Keller, was felled—and he blocked the entrance. Chester Silk, no featherweight at one hundred and ninety pounds, stepped nimbly on his head. Soames, having checked on the view from the window for himself, was able to confirm the soundness of Chester Silk's instincts, a service to which Plon and Ybele remained temporarily oblivious, engaged as they were in a fairly vicious fight for control of the phone. The operator, hearing one hysterical voice after another, grew increasingly sceptical and silent. Finally Ybele, in his anxiety, pulled the phone clean out of its socket, then burst into tears. Plon
was next to the door, with Soames and the Comte de Lacas-sagne close behind him. A dizzy descent began. The shiny green staircase was of polished marble, on the second floor the two financiers passed Chester Silk, limping and groaning; another flight down, and it was Keller and Liwele, for some reason locked in unarmed combat, who were found rolling in close embrace down and down to the sound of clonking skulls and gnashing teeth.
The refugees scrambled into the capacious American Embassy car, which had already begun to move away towards the back gates of the Ministry when the door was wrenched open and Ybele himself, clutching at Soames' immaculately creased trouser leg, hauled himself inside. Tears coursed down his cheeks.
The car accelerated rapidly. Soames had the presence of mind to pull down the window blinds and to lock the doors from inside. Like a hunted stag, the car pursued a wild, zigzag course through the town, hurling its occupants from side to side as it turned sharply, with screeching tires, and then reversed frantically to evade the hostile crowds. Smal! and dignified, Plon found himself perched on Soames' knee-he made no complaints. The two financiers observed each other's reactions with sober interest, each ready to buy out the other for a song should his adversary's nerve break completely. Meanwhile Keller, maddened by Liwele's hysterical ranting about the impregnability of "I'Armee Nation-ale" and his own claims to supreme, autocratic power, was trying to stuff a dirty handkerchief in the Archbishop's mouth and was calling him a "bloody black pig." Chester Silk and the Count regarded one another morosely while Ybele outlined for their benefit the imminent destitution of his family and begged them for money. There came a terrible moment when the car was forced to a halt and unseen hands began to rock it. Fists hammered on the doors and windows; cries of "Vive Tukhomada!" penetrated the dark, airless dungeon. A vast multitude, it seemed, had gathered around the car like ants around a dying wasp. Keller, rapidly shedding his balance of mind in the face of this humiliating denouement to a career of humiliating denouements, was beseeching the driver to press on, to mow down the putrid rabble, to squash them to pulp—which the driver, eventually, did. The car began to move once again; anguished cries of pain rent the air; the wheels rose and fell as if traversing a ploughed field; Keller, momentarily elated, cried out, "Je suis fasciste revolution-naire. Vive I'international des flics!" At this Chester Silk, who understood no French but whose stretched nerves helped him to gather the gist, swung his large fist forcefully into Keller's chin, inducing temporary amnesia.
The car broke free of the pursuing crowd.
Relieved of his immediate anxiety, Plon slipped off Soames' knee and began once more to ruminate about this most formidable of adversaries, whose comparative composure in the face of danger commanded his respect. In the semidarkness of the car, he glanced briefly, appraisingly, at Tufton. Did he in fact know where Laval held his prisoners at this moment? If so, he had chosen not to divulge the information to Ybele. Yet there might be rationality in that, for of one thing Plon felt certain: Tufton's determination to return to the scene at a later and more opportune moment was no less inexorable than his own.
Plon tapped Soames on the knee, lightly.
"Mon ami," Soames said.
"Tell me one thing," Plon said.
Soames raised his eyebrows; the ghost of a smile played around the corners of his mouth.
"How much did you have to pay Laval? I had foolishly imagined his loyalty to be impregnable," Plon said.
"It was."
"Then-"
"Then you betrayed him."
"But that's ridiculous." Plon gesticulated angrily. "It's a contradiction in terms."
Soames smiled. "One day, perhaps, Keller will explain to you."
When the car finally turned into the gates of the American Embassy, the refugees found reassurance in the sight of a helicopter waiting on the smooth lawn. In the dazzling sunlight, Lundquist's brutal expanses of steel and glass glinted like an empty summer coffin.
Almost at once Ybele took the Count aside and renewed his abortive appeals for "a loan." "Between gentlemen," Soames heard him say. The Count, slender and upright,' seemed embarrassed.
Powell Bailey, looking worn but calm, came out of the Embassy alone and greeted them politely. But almost as he did so, two truckloads of demonstrators came roaring down the street in pursuit, quickly overpowered the sentries at the gate and began swarming over the railings. The nightmare at the Ministry of the Interior was repeating itself.
Liwele was the first off the mark, sprinting for the helicopter. His bony knees kicked high as he ran, and his arms flayed the air wildly. Evidently maddened by this spectacle, Keller, bounding like a black wolf, made after him, bringing him down ten yards short of the helicopter with a rugby tackle. Pausing only to kick Liwele's head, Keller than leaped for the ladder into the heart of the steel bird. Here, however, he experienced the greater weight of Soames Tufton and the by-now-vicious rabbit punches of the Count. While the leading demonstrators scaled the railings and poured across the Embassy grounds in hot pursuit, Soames, Keller and the Count were locked in silent combat at the entrance of the helicopter, whose propellers had already begun to turn. Converging from the rear and finding the gateway to salvation thus blocked, Ybele and Plon saw no alternative but to pull each of the gladiators downwards, by his legs. This they did. Observing five men rolling helplessly on the ground, Liwele scrambled over them, taking care to flick his heel into Keller's mouth in passing, and thereby became the first to enter the helicopter. Soames came next, followed by the Count (bleeding from multiple cuts) and Keller (doubled up and clutching his groin). Plon came in spryly, none the worse for wear, and then Ybele, crying pathetically and babbling about his investments. The helicopter would have taken off there and then had not Soames, with admirable presence of mind, remembered the existence of his brother-in-law.
Chester Silk was halfway across the lawn and making heavy weather of it. The distance separating him from the leading demonstrators was diminishing alarmingly, and a certain, budding expression of despair, such as seizes drowning swimmers, indicated his awareness of the fact. Soames crouched by the door, ready to extend the firm hand of life.
From the Embassy colonnade, Powell Bailey watched the chase with a certain detachment, surprised to discover now, when real danger threatened the Ambassador, how deep his hatred of the man ran.
They had stood together in the shadows of the colonnade.
"You'd better hurry, sir," Powell Bailey had said dryly.
"Okay then, Powell, what are we waiting for? I mean, isn't everything wound up here? Let's go, shall we?"
"I'll stay behind, sir."
"You'll what!"
"We—I mean the United States—will need someone to represent our interests here. And our principles. Many wounds will have to be healed."
Chester Silk gestured towards the demonstrators at the gates.
"Jesus Christ, you're crazy! They'll tear you apart. They're savages, barbarians."
"Your opinion of coloured people is well known."
"But, look-"
"I'll take my chances on it."
"Now listen here, Powell, I'm giving you an order."
The Negro shook his head. "You'd better hurry," he said.
Chester Silk glanced nervously at the gates, then at the helicopter. When he spoke his voice was heavy with contrition and the spirit of reconciliation.
"You're thinking about Jason, isn't that it?"
"No one else is."
"Now that just isn't fair."
"My apologies."
"You know I'm really sorry about that. I told Zoe how sorry I was. It was all a goddam mistake. Tufton was too quick for me, I hadn't the first idea-"
"You really are a bastard, aren't you."
Chester gasped. The words had come at him quietly, but with the impact of a swarm of stinging wasps. Bailey's face betrayed no emotion except contempt; a cold fish.
"Now listen, Powell-"
"You'd better hurry." . "We all feel for our children. It's only natural. Believe me, if I could do anything for Jason right now, I'd stay. I swear to God that if I thought that my staying here could help Jason in any way . . . Look, he'll be all right; there's no reason to suppose . .."
"You heard about Zolanga."
"And you think he'll be all right, huh?"
"Damn it, we've got the armed strength, the planes-"
"We?"
"Isn't the West, and Ybele too, at this moment climbing into that helicopter? Or do my eyes deceive me?"
Chester sighed, took a step forward into the sunlight, and then a vague unease crystallized into a question.
"Did everyone get away all right, Amanda, Zoe . . . Lucille? Did your wife get away all right-"
"As if you cared."
Chester Silk stood dumbfounded.
"You haven't got much time," Powell Bailey said. His lips barely parted this time.
Chester blinked in the sunlight. He thought of extending his hand, but appreciated in time the futility of such a gesture. Then he began to rumble across the grass, galvanizing his heavy limbs into a burst of speed which, alarmingly, began to shed much of its impetus before he had covered half the ground. Confounded by his lungs, he began to roll and buck, his limbs took on the added weight of fear and his movements became sadly uneconomical. Yet memories of a pioneering, frontier society generated a charge of purely spiritual energy, carrying him to the helping hands which stretched down from the helicopter—and almost simultaneously the steel bird rose vertically into the sky.
Someone who had been watching from a second-floor bedroom withdrew from the window and closed the shutters.
Powell Bailey stepped inside the Embassy and locked the double doors. Sven Lundquist's building was now hermetically sealed. He had a little time.
shortly after dusk Jason took over as officer of the guard and strolled casually into the prisoners' tent biting a lighted cigarette and holding a Sten gun as if he'd used one from the cradle. Tukhomada and Odouma regarded him with surprise. They glanced at one another, unsure, fingering the emergent contours of a trap, perhaps, or of a stroke of miraculous good fortune. Amah tried a word or two in French, but Jason only shrugged and moved his jaws as if he were chewing gum. He had no gum.
"Where do you come from?" Amah asked, in English.
"New York," Jason said sullenly, squatting down with the gun between his legs.
"Harlem?"
"I've lived around the city," he said casually. "In my country there are no ghettoes."
"Never seen you before," Amah said. "We remember the others from the camp near Thiersville. The whites."
"Yeah."
"The other one gave us tobacco, the big white boy."
"Yeah."
"Afraid of the Commandant, are you?"
Jason snorted. "Are you kidding?"
He felt that these famous and feared men weren't so great after all, trussed up like chickens on the floor. They looked pretty pathetic.
"You won't give us cigarettes?" Amah said.
"Why chatter?" Tukhomada said irritably. He didn't understand any English, and it got on his nerves. Captured and humiliated for a second time, he had resolved to await his death with dignity (once again Amah, convinced that Laval was in the vicinity, had urged caution; Raymond had told * 629 him curtly that the mercenaries had long ago taken to their heels and were now soaking in the bars of Thiersville).
"Why are you doing this?" Amah said. "Is it the money?"
"Wide of the mark."
"Then what?"
"You can talk, if it helps."
"But you're a Negro like ourselves. What perversity can have induced you to hire yourself to the vilest enemies of your own race?"
"I don't think along those lines. Race is what you make it. If you go about with a chip on your shoulder, you'll get the trouble you're asking for."
Amah looked perplexed. "I wish I understood you properly," he said. "My English is deficient"
"Okay."
Amah watched him keenly.
"Were you at Zolanga?"
"Where?"
"The village they bombed and destroyed."
Jason shook his head. "They did?"
"Listen," Amah said urgently, "we hereby guarantee you a pardon, an amnesty, a passport to return to your own country unmolested."
"You do?" Jason said sardonically.
"What's your name?" Amah pressed. "How did you come to be here?"
"You can talk if it helps."
"Remember that the greatest crime known to a man is genocide. What you are doing, what Laval intends to go on doing long after he has murdered Tukhomada and myself, is only a step short of genocide. There is no word as yet for a total assault on the soul of a people. History will coin one."
Jason glanced nervously at his watch. His guard duty had scarcely begun, hours of grinding tedium and recriminations faced him. The dial of the self-winding, waterproof, shock-proof watch glowed at him in the gathering darkness, one of Lucille's presents, no doubt, to mark his birthday or perhaps hers. He tried to think about his mother and father and what they might be feeling now, but his imagination refused to travel. He had begun to feel like a carcass on a butcher's slab.
"You must have some motivation," Amah persisted, determined not to give up until every avenue of reprieve had been explored. Militia patrols would have begun to scour the area as soon as the ambush and kidnapping was reported. Hope had dwindled now to a tiny spark, but it continued to glow. "You must have some motivation," he said, "or is this holocaust merely an acte gratuit in your eyes?"
"A what?"
"An acte gratuit."
Jason shook his head. "Come again."
"You're an educated man. I can see that."
"Harvard," Jason volunteered, almost involuntarily.
"One of the greatest universities," Amah said. "What did you study?"
"Government."
For some reason the respect of this young African assumed for Jason an immense importance. Yet already he felt intimidated; to open his mouth, to explore himself, would be to reveal regions of naivete and incoherence of which he was painfully aware. It was the big, philosophical problems that flummoxed him. His sense of inadequacy grew as Amah talked, fashioning sentences perfectly tailored to his meaning in a foreign language, groups of words notable for their balance, their symmetry, their rigour. The last strongholds of Jason's intellectual self-confidence disintegrated like rotted teeth under the dentist's pick.
He kept silent and grew sullen. They could talk.
Perceiving that abstract propositions evidently left the American unmoved, Amah began to recall his affair with Dominique Martin in Paris. This solvent proved more powerful than alcohol; Jason's tongue soon came adrift from the moorings of prudence.
"A white girl, huh? A French girl? She didn't mind living with you? I mean, did her family and friends accept the arrangement?"
"Why not?"
"Was she well off, this girl?"
"Very poor." "She didn't have class?"
"Everyone has a certain class."
"But it broke up, it didn't last?"
"When white and black began to slaughter one another here, in Coppernica, it was no longer possible for Dominique and I to share the same bed."
Jason nodded solemnly. "I guess that figures."
"And you—have you faced similar problems?"
Moved by a sense of brotherhood verging on complicity, Jason relented to the extent of lighting cigarettes, which he pushed between the African's lips. They inhaled thirstily and coughed; to untie their hands was a step he still shied away from.
"I had a girl," he said, "a white girl. Funny thing is, she was pretty beautiful, you know, everyone was crazy about her, she was rich, so why did she have to pick me?"
"You're very good-looking," Amah said seriously.
Jason shrugged modestly. "That's as may be." He extended his hands in a contained, Jewish gesture. "Anyway, she did."
"She loved you?"
"Sure she did."
"And you?"
"I liked her quite a bit. You know, if someone's crazy about you, it flatters the male ego. Freud and so on. Anyway, we had problems. She got it into her head that we had to go into the South together. The Deep South! I said to her, 'What are you trying to do, get lynched?' Well, we hit enough trouble. I guess she learned her lesson though."
"What happened?" Amah said. He looked interested.
"Everything, just about. The day the Klan tipped our automobile over, she asked me to marry her. Some of these whites are crazy. There was one place we stopped near Wilmington, a guesthouse run by some white liberal. Anyway, my girl got me into bed straight away, she never could wait for it, you'd have thought they'd have left us alone, but even the liberals can't really take the idea, so up comes this woman and knocks on our door just at the crucial moment. Anyway, my girl became pregnant. Her family were furious. She wanted to marry me, poor kid, but they wouldn't let her."
"Did you want to marry her?"
Jason shrugged. "I was easy."
"Is that why you came out here?"
"Partly."
"To hunt down Africans, to murder, torture and pillage them on behalf of the white imperialists, all because of an affair?"
Jason fell silent. Something in this man touched him directly, in the raw, as only Haydon had done. He felt now much as he had felt when Haydon had lectured and castigated him. Odouma had the same faintly ironic detachment and the same underlying absence of cynicism. Yet he seemed more articulate, more lucid. Jason didn't know how to cope with the man's Frenchness.
Time passed in the darkened tent.
"Why not cut us free?" Amah whispered, despairing of any approach to the Americans save the most direct. "Cut yourself free as well. You surely realize that Tukhomada here symbolizes the struggle of a whole people. His death will castrate and mortify a nation. Whatever you've been told, these whites are only using you. They'll discard you like a rag when they've exploited your goodwill and innocence. In the last resort even Laval is only a stooge."
Jason's shoulders grew heavier. The night ahead sat on them like a boulder.
"Oh sure," he muttered.
"You have a gun."
"No kidding."
Again he took refuge in sarcasm. He found his life shorn of all pretence, of all illusion, all make-believe. He wanted simply to forget, to become nothing. Only the green dial of Lucille's watch joined him to his past, to the mechanized society, the cautious, protected world of a civilized man, a citizen buttressed against naked decisions by routines, schedules, habits and long, straight streets which admitted of no deviation—a mass-produced man hardened in a mould of glass, concrete and dollar bills.
James was due to relieve him in ten minutes' time. Maybe he would come early.
When James entered the prisoners' tent, he found captives and captor alike in a state of high tension, soldered to a field of nervous energy whose sources could easily be guessed. He untied the prisoners' hands and gave them cigarettes. Jason protested, then departed sourly, rubbing his head and muttering about discipline. James squatted down on the floor and watched the flame of a match play across Amah's features. Now, as on an earlier occasion, the African's detached, faintly ironic smile reminded him of Alec— the same protective camouflage for a passionate seriousness.
"Does Laval intend to kill us?" Amah asked. His voice broke on the last word.
"I don't know," James eyes fell. He knew.
"Did you see the dead at Zolanga?"
"Yes, I did."
"The American told us he knew nothing of Zolanga."
"He has a short memory, perhaps."
"Did you find Maya's body?"
"Yes."
Was he—was he badly broken up?"
"He looked very noble in death."
Amah and Raymond Tukhomada glanced at one another. They were now talking in French and Tukhomada understood what was being said.
"You do this for money?" he asked contemptuously.
"Not for money."
"Hasn't it occurred to you that money is at the root of the bond? What interest have your patrons in this country but to plunder it of its wealth?"
"Money is merely a catalyst," James said. His face was hot. The contempt and hatred of these men stung him.
"A catalyst for what?" demanded Amah. "For the murder of a whole village?"
The challenge, the accusation, brought a last, automatic response, half genuine, half retrospective, a final, abortive charge from the lists accompanied by the residual sense o having once been sincerely committed to a highly structured ideal. Even so, the voice was barely his own; as the familiar phrases, the coinage constantly debased by Soames and Laval, issued from his throat, he witnessed with curious detachment
each of them totter and fall, like toy soldiers in an animated cartoon.
"We have never been slaves to the law of numbers. The highest cultural values have always been upheld by elites. A hundred thousand villagers will never paint the roof of the Sistine Chapel nor invent the internal-combustion engine. The battle of the elite against the hordes is at this moment a global one. Once I have perceived this, I have no alternative but to assume the legionary's armour and to accept the logic of my beliefs. Certain of our actions may not conform to a feminized and decadent Christian ethic; to say this is only to say that history moves. I realize that you want nothing so much as for the West to sink without trace beneath the weight of its own material prosperity, fat-bellied, ignorant, slothful, greedy—a juicy sacrifice for your hard altar stones."
Amah sighed. "Did Ybele oaint the Sistine Chapel?"
"Ybele is merely our instrument."
"That's not news," Tukhomada said.
Amah clasped his head in his hands and groaned. "I was a student in Paris, you know, bushman though I no doubt look to you. This half-baked hotchpotch is not new to me. How can you be taken in by it all? We all know about Keller's famous book: in the late civilization even the most convincing illusion of an idea is only the mask for purely zoological strivings. Remember? Marvellous! Thus Keller, Laval and their friends loudly proclaim their own animality while deriding us as barbarians. Not only do they pillage, murder and burn, but they have texts to prove that these actions are those of the highest level of civilization known to man! As for your art, your cultured elites, let me remind you that it is I, not Plon or Ybele or Tufton or Laval, who writes poetry. Their poems are the aeroplanes which decimated Zolanga. That is their humanism. If you wish to understand what is truly human, then watch the birth of a child and the mother's love for the child. And what do you think of those who drown or strangle their newly born babes? Do you applaud them for their "purely zoological strivings"? Shall I tell you what is missing in the heads of so many white men today? The necessary leap of the imagination, sensitivity to the analogy, transference—in short, sympathy."
James had subsided on the edge of the waste ground. Hiroshima could not be rebuilt in the small hours of the morning. Lightly brushing the black sky, the first light of the coming day brought differentiation to the fatigue-racked faces of the two Africans. James was overcome by the total apprehension of the condemned cell; whatever happened, this would be the last, decisive day, a day of reckoning which no human power could now avert.
They watched him in silence, nursing their small victory like a wound.
"Give us our freedom," Amah urged. "You need do no more than that."
"Laval would kill you," James said quietly.
"But he's still asleep."
"He never sleeps."
From the receding night Tukhomada's face leaped at him like a strong flame which, torn from its natural oil once too often, had turned yellow and sour. The heat was there, but no longer the light.
"No doubt you're beyond shame and remorse," Amah said bitterly.
"The heart of a mercenary," Tukhomada said, "is as thin and ephemeral as the paper money with which it was bought."
James recoiled. Yet the spring was almost dry. Fatigue and nervous tension had brought him to the frontiers of impotence. His deepest urge now was to withdraw completely, to wash his hands of the whole episode, to return to England and the safe world which alone promised him comfort and security. Yet there was no way out. Trapped in a hostile jungle five hundred miles from help, joined to a demon, he found himself face to face with total alienation. The longer Odouma spoke, the more persuasively he reasoned, the more vividly did he remind James of Alec. Had it not been the cornerstone of Alec's philosophy that the true humanist and the true Christian alike must be first and last a humanitarian? What had intervened to obscure this? Searching for scapegoats among the debris, James realized suddenly how securely a man is anchored to himself. It seemed, almost, that everything was determined in advance, that there could be no room for manoeuvre, that from the day of his birth a man was moulded and glazed in the hard posture of self.
He pulled the hair from his eyes. He could no longer bring himself to look directly at the two Africans. The day was breaking through the trees like an iceberg from the ocean depths.
Laval was snoring. For over an hour Deedes lay rigid with caution, unwilling to believe that his tormentor had really succumbed to so human a failing as sleep. But the first light clinched the matter, revealing the normally sharp contours of the Commandant's brown face to have sagged like a tennis net after the high tension of a tournament. His mouth was an open cavern now, emitting a trickle of saliva, and his breathing had become as coarse and broken as a panther's snarl.
With painstaking care Deedes raised himself up, almost convinced that he was bound to Laval by an invisible cord which was about to straighten out and jerk him back to life. Terrified of being caught redhanded in the criminal posture of a biped, Sergeant Deedes backed out into the dew of the long grass, clutching his Sten gun and the empty stomach which had taken to protesting in fitful, debilitating spasms. Without sleep for more than a week, his head was crowned in laurels of fire and his body consumed by a multitude of pains whose totality went beyond anything he had suffered before.
In the gray dawn he looked about him, cagily, with cunning, possessed by a single certainty: that his captivity and punishment would endure as long as the Russian remained at large, as long as he, Deedes, failed to atone for the original sin which had brought about his fall in Kenya. The absolute silence and emptiness of this dawn surprised him: a world of the dead, perhaps. Yet cigarette butts glowed like fireflies in the prisoners' tent. The temptation to visit Caffrey was easily resisted; that tin godbox was no good, he let one down, a shell.
Searching the clearing like a man groping in a darkened room, he found himself entwined in the vine of a notion: the native soldiers, the sentries, had all vanished, deserted into the night. He smiled, and stumbled. The track snaked through the jungle, the day began to sing and the steam rose from the damp earth like vapours from a witches' cavern. At moments Mau Mau hung from the branches, detainees with cracked heads full of drinking water, while the rebel McLeish staggered up the High Street full of whisky. Driven down a piss-flecked alleyway into the waiting arms of a stunted childhood, a deformed past. "Tiny" Hamilton rolled into the huge bar (private): "How's your friend McLeish?" "My friend?" Oh that school, that castle, to be a groundsman's boy, a private job.
Deedes moved along, somehow, daunted by the massive predictability of the coming day, by the fact that there would be many more days after he himself had ... No children, no sons, no heirs. Who would care—or know? Helen, or . . . Her name, the name of his favourite sister, had lapsed, fallen from him like the hair which came out in clutches now. Soldier-man, cunning, tough, king and queen and country. Abruptly he paused, coiled himself like a snake (he imagined) , grinned at the trees, pulled the butt of his Sten into his side, fingered the trigger, then sprang around, grinning. Nothing. In the wilderness Deedes stood nodding, an old soldier. He resumed and his legs and abdomen castigated him for the liberty he had taken. A tiny nugget returned to torment him, like a smell: what a man was. One could say, "I lost an arm, a leg, two arms," but never, literally, "I lost my head." The contract made no stipulation for that, except to those dependants whom Caffrey didn't have either, evidently. A cup of tea would come in handy, now. What was "self," the thing which a man couldn't lose and yet still exist?
Sergeant Deedes walked through the jungle.
That Russky. Laval needed his head more than ever, with those soldiers gone, deserted. Gone where to? The thought immobilized his legs; his heart hammered, a motion it could ill afford. Here, perhaps, watching him. Presently he continued, vaguely reassured by the absence of the water cart, by the secret knowledge that Hoare-Stuart was asleep and that Caffrey, for all his stooping pretentions, would never emulate McLeish's cocky plebeian mutiny. Not an officer. Without the Russky's head, the extermination of Tukhomada remained unfeasible; the idea caught him happily and he laughed aloud, a minuscule cackle. The Russian's forehead would give him away, high, bulging, all brain and no muscle, like the villainous professorial species who inhabited other planets in the comic strips. Too clever by half.
Universal conspiracy. That was 1917, Laval had informed him, about the time that Archibald Deedes was dead. She said, "He was a guid man, a guid man, yer faether," and then Helen had said, "He was kilt, stupid," as if the knowledge, the understanding, fully offset her grief. The Red Russkies must have killed him with their bulging cerebral craniums. Sweat sprouted in hot springs from the open pores of his yellowing skin. He knew himself to be dying of cancer.
The track was not friendly, nor distinct. Creepers and thorn bushes impeded his progress; animals, snakes perhaps, began to dart and hiss in the undergrowth, while flies and mosquitoes dug at his face and arms, poisoning his thin blood and draining his resolve, his reason, his sense of mission, his innate veteran's cunning. The jungle, when it laughed, went curiously silent, compelling him to halt and hold his breath and listen to the distant chuckle of the Water of Leith in the valley below, to the wind sighing against the Castle Rock, to the blubbery squelch of Murdoch's pink dial as it received his fist. He shuddered. His bowels opened involuntarily, the stench nauseated him, he coughed, his ulcers screamed. A fever swept through him, surprising in its rapidity, like a rising tide on the sand dunes at Gullane. Momentarily blinded, he hacked wildly about him with his machete and began to warble softly, in order to sustain his morale, about blacks, Sassenachs and Russkies. The daylight had departed, night had returned, dropping a last, definitive shutter across his livid eyes, ushering him into the land of the blind. Some creature, some sky creature, a bat, or a hawk, swooped at him from the sky, through the trees, he could hear its great wings beating the air, he threw himself face downward, felt its curved talons pass over him; he rose to his feet, it dived on him again, he tried to shield his face, a huge wing knocked him over, the large ants invaded him and began to bite, to eat.
He sat weeping in the jungle, waiting for rescue.
Yet he remembered certain things. His mother's prolonged illness and her stoical courage, her determination to feed her bairns until the last passage. He remembered accompanying Vera to the Infirmary, and then to the patent-medicine shop near George IV Bridge, where she spent her savings on coloured fluids. They did her no good. When the King and Queen came to Holyrood, she collapsed and died. The thought angered him, and his heart rose in protest against the poverty which knotted her to suffering and to a life of drudgery and tedium. By contrast his own years had been fruitful, varied and prosperous. Even so, a vague resentment manifested itself, a nebulous sense of initial deprivation, a grudge against the world which drove the Deedeses to strike the Murdochs and enabled the Murdochs to revenge themselves tenfold on the Deedeses.
Again he was walking, stumbling, hacking with his machete. An opaque film of gray light had revived, enabling him with difficulty to follow the snakelike convulsions of the track, an old man blabbering words which he no longer heard, a warrior clutching at a gun, distractedly fingering his cartridges, their smooth, comforting copper rims remotely resonant of the industrial power behind him, a hunter harried by huge, motionless shapes, corpses of elephants and bombed palaces of jungle kings. The smoke of the village, drifting lazily into the still morning, caused him to giggle and sigh in anticipation; for the Russky's hideout-lair, he was convinced, must be here. The humped, squat, sleeping huts lured him, promising him treasure, triumph, a soldier's final vindication, the severed head which would dissipate forever, erase from the annals of recorded time, the original sin of a man who dared to judge the world on his own terms.
A spear travelled through the trees with the speed of light, ending his journey.
"You are a European," Amah was saying, "and Europe, I must remind you, has taken the world by the throat, dominating it with cynicism and violence, refusing solicitude and tenderness, yet talking all the while of Man, of courage and death, of violence viewed as historical self-fulfilment or as sexual rediscovery. What terrible sufferings have we endured after each of your 'spiritual' victories over us!"
James sat on an ammunition box, his large, heavy limbs hunched in misery, his aching head resting in his hands.
"Why do you tell me this?" he groaned.
"Because I hope to shame you. And shame is a revolutionary sentiment. I have told you what Laval did to my sister, but not how beautiful she was, and how upright, nor have I told you about the Frenchman who stood by me and who fought for her release. It's possible, you see. One day I hope to raise a monument to the white men who rallied to us when it took the most courage to do so."
"You will raise no monuments, Amah," Tukhomada said.
"But forgive me," Amah went on excitedly, "if at moments like this I can see in your race only an avalanche of murders, a series of negations of man. Even now, as I talk, you are holding a gun to my head and planning to murder me-"
"But-"
"Never mind. You know very well what he has in mind, and yet you continue to lend him your support. Even your soul."
"My body, I assure youj is at this moment quite divorced from my soul."
"So much for your Total Man! In any case, your state of mind doesn't interest us; your victims know you by their wounds. You proclaim your own personal schizophrenia and thus try to avert attention from the much more serious schizophrenia of the society from which you spring, just as certain wealthy men regard a formal declaraton of bankruptcy as absolving them from all responsibility towards the people they have ruined."
"I'm not offering excuses," James said wearily.
"You would if you could," Amah said, growing even more excited. "There are none. None!"
"Neither excuses nor hope," Tukhomada said with an immense sadness.
"Hope exists only if we can create a new man with a higher and more universal sympathy and comprehension. We must achieve a symbiosis of African and European values."
"Stop preaching, Amah!" Tukhomada cried. "Enough, enough! Why talk to this dumb criminal about your ideas?"
Amah relapsed. "All right. I'm wasting my breath. Enough."
"The leopard doesn't change its spots," Tukhomada said more gently.
Unable to sustain the confrontation any longer, James tied their hands once more and stepped out of the tent into the morning dew. The sun was still low in the sky; shafts of orange light percolated through the trees, conjuring a faintly scented vapour from the damp grass. He breathed deeply and shook himself. The stillness of the small camp was uncanny; gradually it came to him that the last of the native soldiers had slipped away during the night, preferring suicide to certain death.
For more than three hours Amah had worked on him like a human torch, composing an unanswerable indictment, a brilliantly illuminated structure of cause and effect, illusion and reality, a virtually irresistible appeal for atonement. In the pale light of morning, in the open air, the claustrophobic tent, thick with cigarette smoke, darkness and furious diatribes, with the stench of slavery and of men chained, receded like a phantasmagoric encounter with the outriders of Hell. A bird sang, a cry warning of the presence of man—of man the hunter, the killer. Skins peeled away, dead and shrivelled. Turning back towards the prisoners' tent, he was possessed by a marvellous sensation of release, of shattering the shell of a pervasive nightmare. He would cut them free and guarantee their safety with his life. He was drunk with the morning and with the blue sigh of champagne waves as Alec's body met the sea.
Standing alone in the middle of the deserted clearing, James pulled the hair from his eyes.
THIRTY-SIX
powell bailey stepped inside the Embassy and locked the double doors. Sven Lundquist's building was now hermetically sealed. He had a little time.
As the furious throb of the helicopter's engines died away, the ebony and ivory carvings on the polished tables ceased to dance and the glass walls to vibrate. The absolute silence which followed restored his tranquillity, his power to meditate and examine himself. The door of his study stood ajar; he closed it softly, cautiously, anxious not to disturb the ghosts of the men and women who had found communal violence to be the graveyard of a policy they had never understood. A small Union flag stood on his desk, alongside photographs of Lucille and the boys. Resting his elbows on the desk, he leaned forward, let his knees drop and closed his eyes. Lucille—gone now, somewhere in the sky over the ocean, a dot in the void, sick with apprehension and loss. Jason's disappearance had broken her up. She felt herself to have failed her child, to have failed as a human being, and nothing held her together now except drugs. She hadn't wanted to leave. They had carried her to the plane, and she had shouted one thing at him which he would never forget. All his premises to follow her within a few hours had died in the furnace of her eyes. With terrible clarity, she had seen the truth. She knew that he meant to stay. A nurse had thrust a needle into her arm; in that way he had taken leave of her, after twenty-four years—two people, separate, no longer joined into one, as the marriage text had said. She would have Haydon ... no, she would live alone, if at all. Powell Bailey began to tremble, the silence in the large building began to oppress him, tears pushed through; perhaps he'd given way to his own ego and done the cruellest possible thing. He tried to pray; he tried, without success, to remember 128th Street Baptist and the Reverend Judson's precise tone and the look of the Harlem River. He opened his eyes. Jason's portrait face, neat, balanced and watchful, confronted him. And beside it Haydon's, vaguely sardonic, refusing to take the sitting seriously. Jason—he loved him more than anything on earth, even more than Lucille. There had been no alternative but to stay while there was still hope.
A distant but persistent hammering on the outer main door reminded him that his time was limited. Leaving his office, he recalled having turned off the power. The elevators would no longer be working. He climbed the central spiral staircase and felt more keenly than ever his own limitations, his acquired habits of mind, the brittle shell of a character, a personality, which had proven inadequate to the demands made upon it. He had tried to teach his sons how to be black men in a white man's world, and, it seemed, he had failed. Pondering how he might yet change, he had come to realize that there could be no dramatic renunciation, only small acts of adjustment. He could find nothing, precisely, to renounce.
He reached the second floor. His footsteps sounded down the corridor, regular and precise, like the man.
He entered cautiously the bedroom which he had shared with Lucille since Ybele's coup. It was a very modern room of glass and ash, in which he had watched his wife break up. As he closed the door it occurred to him that he could no longer help or protect her.
He dusted his hands, lightly, and sat down on the bed.
"Well, they got away, just," he said.
"What did he say—my father?"
"He asked whether you and your mother had already left."
"What did you tell him?"
"I told him that he'd better hurry."
Zoe nodded distractedly and turned away towards the shuttered window. The flat tonelessness of her voice deepened his depression, and he noticed again the swell of her stomach and the limpness of her hair, as if it hadn't been washed for days. Her skin was gray, and dark wells had entrenched themselves beneath her blank, veiled eyes.
"And you told my mother that I couldn't be found?"
"That's correct."
"And she just went without me?"
"Yes, she did."
He saw that she was obsessed by this action of her mother's; already she had made him repeat his account of it nine or ten times. Determined as she had been to evade Amanda, she had proven to be almost equally anxious that her mother should suffer heartrending agonies as a consequence. Powell walked to the window, glanced quickly out, then fastened the shutters securely. The lawn below was solid with demonstrators.
"Well," he said, loosening his tie, "how do you feel?"
"Okay."
She was wearing a crumpled cotton dress and laddered stockings. Her legs dangled loose over the side of the bed.
"I've never had a chance to talk to you properly," he said.
"Are you going to cross-examine me?"
He flushed. "Of course not. It's just that you've had a pretty hard time, all in all." As soon as he said this, he felt himself to have betrayed Jason. A mild anger rose in him. "And Jason too. Do you ever think of Jason—where he is now, what he may be going through? Do you ever try and get inside his skin?"
Her eyes focused with difficulty.
"I prefer not to," she murmured.
"You find it hurts, you find yourself feeling guilty, responsible, is that it?"
"So you are going to cross-examine me."
They sat in silence for several minutes, listening gloomily to the hammering on the doors and shutters downstairs.
"It's just," he said eventually, "that my wife and I have suffered a great deal these last few weeks. You may not know it, or care, but my wife has gone almost out of her mind."
"It was Soames who sent him away," the girl protested, "not me."
"No, Zoe, it was you. If you really want to know, you treated my son like mud—like only a white can treat a Negro."
Tears welled in the dry sockets of her eyes. "He ..."
Powell stood up again and removed his coat. With the windows closed and the air conditioning no longer operating, the room was stifling. When he dusted his hands again, the palms clung together. Dabbing at his face and neck, he began to pace the room. Zoe never moved.
"My son loved you. You knew that. You knew it."
He stopped behind her. His heart was hammering now. A series of sexual possibilities passed across his mind like a procession of laughing actors, quickly disappearing into the wings of unfeasibility. The ideas were not at all serious, but their appearance disturbed him. He firmly believed what the Lord had said, that even to lust after another man's wife was
to commit adultery. And this girl bore Jason's child. Besides
"What was it you wanted from Jason? In what sense did he fail you? Or was it that you were never serious, that you merely intended to play with him, a little black mouse, a toy, something you could tell your friends about, a rich girl's escapade? And then you made one mistake and you had to live with it. Is that it?"
Her whisper was barely audible. "No."
"Well, maybe he did wrong you with child. But at least he was anxious to marry you, to do the right thing by you, but all you could manage was to treat him like dirt. Of course I know that your parents-"
"One can't plead or argue for love, Mr. Bailey. Either ifs given freely or it's not given at all."
Her moment of strength, an aristocrat's strength, cut through the mooring ropes of his restraint.
"Oh sure! Love! You people don't know the first thing about love. Love isn't just kisses and romance and diamond necklaces. Love is concern and responsibility; it's thought and humanity for others. Believe me, if Jesus were to return to earth tomorrow, it wouldn't be as a white man. Your father knew that Jason had been virtually sentenced to death, and he did nothing about it! You knew also, and what did you do?"
Her head fell forward and her back bent farther. She was breathing, it seemed, with difficulty.
"That's quite true," she whispered. "Anyway, you've had your revenge."
He stiffened indignantly. "How so?"
"You deceived both of my parents today."
"But you asked me to! You pleaded with me! You told me that you couldn't face going back to the States."
"Oh yes. I left you with a dilemma. You knew what would happen to me if I stayed. You knew that. . . and you made your choice."
Zoe broke down in tears.
He sat on the bed again. Sweat had soaked through his clothes.
"I had no thought of revenge. I'm a Christian. I try to live by the Bible."
"They just went. They left me!"
She cried silently at first, and then in long, desperate sobs which sucked the air from her lungs and left her gasping painfully, clutching at her swollen stomach. He found, to his surprise, that she had shifted across the bed towards him, groping for his hand in the darkness. Almost involuntarily his anger evaporated and his feeling towards her was once more a mirror of Jason's agonizing love. The foetus within her, after all, was . . . would have been ... his own grandchild.
He offered his handkerchief.
"I'm not as courageous as you," she sobbed.
"They won't harm us," he said with as much conviction as he could command, but feeling none. The urge to make love to her revived in him more powerfully this time, closer to the plane of the possible, a desire brought on by his own despair, by her admission of vulnerability, of feeling, by their closeness in the face of death. He even contemplated an act of love, a transubstantiation which would be entirely innocent and which would enable Jason, wherever he was, to lay down his head in peace.
"Shall I tell you something, Powell?"
"Yes, Zoe."
"No one else knows, except Jason."
"Yes, tell me." His arm went around her shoulders; her hand rested damply, loosely in his own. He was honoured, really, that a white woman of such beauty, should consent
"I loved your son, and I still love him. I think about him all day and all night, and sometimes his child kicks to remind me. In the bath you can see the child move sometimes. Did you know that? But Jason never could bring himself to face the truth."
"Now that really is a riddle," he said patiently. "Would you mind explaining it to me."
Then she did. She told him.
A town, a big ugly city, in. the north probably, a city like Pittsburgh or Chicago or St. Louis or Boston, with long, hard avenues and solid high buildings and hardly any trees or grass. She didn't know where she was because from the moment that he'd spread himself across her in Sidney Dubois' cafe in Atlanta the darkness of his black leather jacket had never lifted, the outer world through which they travelled had folded in on her like a tent collapsed by the wind. Haydon had embalmed her in a shabby side street in the heart of the city, a street of hard-up shops, prostitutes, garages and drab apartments. He set her down in a small, faded room with a cracked basin, a gas ring behind a curtain, walls stained by fat and egg yoke, a room with a single light covered by a pseudo-parchment lampshade. In the two weeks that followed, she learned the geography and the creeping life of crumbling plaster ceilings and disintegrating walls; inoculated by some miraculous serum, she systematically transformed the physical into the metaphysical, surviving on the high-proof alcohol of distilled hope. Outside the window hung a broken neon sign suspended over the sidewalk, winking regular green phantoms at the corner of the room in which the cracked washbasin stood: "Central Tires". The "i" of "Tires" was missing.
In the mornings she hurried to the local supermarket for food. Otherwise she never went out, fearing that he might return home while she was gone. The traditional pillars of her imagination buckled, leaving her staring hour after hour into the hollow chamber of her dream. Literature, novels and poems, the conscious reproduction and transformation of real life through arrangements of words—in short, the sphere of art—merely scalded the raw flesh of her own predicament. The poet's laughter reached her in the form of a malicious grimace, a frivolity. During the serene and gilded years on Park Avenue she had eagerly sought out the passage from experience to consciousness; now, exiled in the province of pain, she looked for the return journey, for an escape which would smooth her passage into the healing oblivion of sleep. She returned one morning from the public library with an armful of abstraction, works on numbers, logic and philosophy, books which she was able to follow until the author abruptly concluded his deceptively simple sparring with the reader and turned his definitions loose upon one another.
Then she had to capitulate. She owned a portable radio, a small blue box whose musical interludes occasionally allowed her to synchronize her emotional storms with those of the universe itself. She never forgot him, of course; no word, no chord, no line or shadow, no harmony of sound or colour would drive the great Negro from the epicentre of her own, private storm.
He came and went at irregular intervals, usually smiling and gentle and faintly surprised to see her.
"You still here, then?"
"Of course. Do you want food, Haydon?"
"That would be very kind."
"Must you be so polite?"
"I know, I know, my doctors have warned me about it."
He would make her laugh, even as the salt-wet brimmed. She held away from him, racked by love, determined never to fawn as Jason had fawned, yet driven by love to speak first.
"Have you been busy? Is there anything I can do to help?"
He sighed and ate gratefully, with his heavy legs thrust apart and his black leather jacket unzipped. The first glimpse of Haydon's fa.ce had obliterated his brother's from the canvas of her memory; no longer able to recall what Jason looked like, she gained the impression that he had no face at all. Then Haydon would rise to leave, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand and glancing quickly at the titles of her philosophy books. It stung her. But he never said anything disparaging. The Cadillac sat in the street outside. She said again and again, "You use it, you use it."
He looked at her, tested her, then nodded briefly.
"Okay, thanks."
He went out. He was always going out, even at night. He went out far more often than he came in. When he came into the bed he filled it. She tensed, waiting for him to speak, or to touch her; only when it became clear that the mountain beside her was sinking into sleep was she compelled to speak.
"Haydon."
"Yeah?"
"Where did you go?"
"Meeting."
She touched the huge weight-strength-presence of him. The smell, at last, of salt, of the sea.
"Haydon."
"Yeah?"
"I only wish I could help you in some way . . . more concretely."
From the outset of their journey north together, from the first moment that she had him alone, she had felt him slipping away, searching not so much for his freedom as for his self-respect. Her physical beauty, the glitter which dazzled him, had never before seemed so precious, and the tangled blubber of animal beneath so separate, coarse and repugnant. She felt like a woman who, having coated her facial sores with cosmetics, waits with dread for her lover to discover the reality beneath. But he was asleep.
She would stay awake, her stomach alive with ill-digested scraps, seething like maggots. When, in the small hours, a strained and superficial sleep overtook her, she began to wrestle with herself, anxious at all costs to be awake when he rose, washed himself and went out, anxious to serve him. Time and again she would struggle into consciousness and find him still beside her, asleep. Looking at her watch became an obsession; if the hour hand pointed to five, she would lower herself into sleep cautiously, grudgingly, like a non-swimmer stepping down backwards into a cold pool; if it pointed to six, she would drag herself into the gray morning (the sun never came in) and lie for perhaps an hour, waiting for Haydon to wake up fresh and to spring lightly from the bed.
"You look whacked, Zoe. Let me get you some coffee."
"No, I'll get it..."
"Take it easy, easy."
"But I want to be able to do something ..."
Once or twice she slept right through, like the protected child she had so recently been, and awoke at nine to find him gone, her man gone. She stumbled to the window to see whether he'd taken the Cadillac, to see whether he'd acknowledged her existence to the small extent of taking something which he knew to be hers. When desperate, she hoped to reach him through what she owned.
"Central T res." For breakfast, Nescafe and a biscuit.
She got through a bit of desultory sweeping and washed the previous night's dishes under a cold tap. The novelty and glamour of being her own housewife soon wore off. She made the bed then lay on it, combing her hair and examining herself anxiously in a mirror. Against her better judgment she applied thicker layers of lipstick and mascara, shedding the pale reticence of her Radcliffe days, the ethereal, waiflike innocence which had brought the clubmen thundering from their paddocks. Occasionally she remembered, with disbelief, that she was still a Radcliffe girl, that she had time to serve. But she knew that she would return to Cambridge only if Haydon rejected her, cast her off, and thus the whole notion of Harvard festered. Her parents might, of course, look for her; this was a thought that she did not impose on Haydon, fearing that if she burdened him he might grow impatient. When she asked him whether he took her for a tart, he told her that he took her to be a pretty nice girl all around.
"Really?"
"Really really."
She never wore the contraceptive now. Recalling how at one time she had thus armed herself against the deluge, in the stacks of Widener and in the streets of Cambridge, she saw that never until now had she been truly serious, truly committed, truly captivated. If her fate lay with Haydon, it could be in no more tangible and immediate way than through bearing his child.
"Do you hate white people?" she asked.
"Mostly."
"And me?"
"I don't hate you."
"I'm glad. Jason once told me that you'd said that you would never sleep with a white woman because making love to someone you don't like is debasing."
"I did?"
He didn't often smile, but when he did it was like the sun in the spring. She used to watch him while he washed himself, slowly, scrupulously, making a little tepid water go a long way. The size and strength of him transfixed her, and the swell of the muscles in his shoulders as he brought the towel behind his neck.
Once he asked, "Did Jason ever ... ?"
"No, never, I promise you."
She was thrilled that he should care.
"You don't have to promise me anything, Zoe. You don't belong to me."
"A slave's slave is a slave."
He came into her bed, a huge clean presence. Without effort or thought he could discard what Jason had arduously laboured to find. But her persistent anxiety buried that joy; she could only concentrate on what she could give him, and how he reacted.
"Haydon."
"Yeah?"
"When are you planning on leaving me?"
He turned over slowly, to face her, and his hand rested lightly on her stomach. After a while he said, "I'm not planning on leaving you, honey doll."
"I'd prefer to know the truth."
He laughed, a little unkindly. "You mean you'd prefer to hear that I shall not be leaving you."
"That's cruel."
"Yeah, little white pussy cat."
"Haydon-"
"Yeah, yeah, yeah."
She lay still, hardly daring to breathe.
"I'd very much like to give some money to . . . whatever it is you do."
"I'm not after your money."
"It's just that I have more than I can spend."
"That's tough."
"Haydon, please-"
"Okay, you give me as much as you like."
"Haydon, have you ever loved someone more than they like you?"
"I know what you mean," he said gently.
"It's debasing. Not so much debasing to love, as to be tempted constantly to grovel, to please, to shed one's pride and ultimately one's source of attraction."
"Listen. I haven't noticed that with you. Don't worry yourself. You stand very upright." "But inside I'm on my knees all the time."
He came over on top of her and filled her.
In the morning she gave him a cheque for five thousand dollars.
"I'm not trying to buy you," she said. She was pale and tired.
"You're mighty generous."
"I know you'll laugh, but I've always believed that we, the white people, have a lot to answer for."
He nodded gravely. "That's quite true."
Then he went out. In the evening she said, "You know how men sometimes pay women ..."
"It's not unknown."
"Why can't it be the other way around?"
He laughed. "Ever heard of the gigolo?"
"Suppose I pay you a hundred dollars every time."
"Every time what?"
She didn't blush; her face was set and pale. "Every time you make love to me."
His big hand came out. "Done!" he said.
The ravishment and the vengeance which she had courted no longer attracted her. By seven every evening "Central T res" was flashing green near the washbasin, and the taste of suffering—of his absence—did not taste good. The dream about the Mississippi swamplands and the pursuing Negro had banished itself in face of a daylight consciousness whose dimensions of pain far outstripped anything her imagination had conjured up. Life was immanent now. It had always, she realized, been real, but now it was immanent, like the truest moments of her childhood, the moments of physical pain or shock, when she had fallen suddenly, or was pushed from behind, and her head had struck hard stone or gravel, bringing a nauseous singing in the head, a gasping for air, a gradually opening awareness of what must have happened and how acutely unbearable it was. That was immanence. No buffer states of bodily neutrality. Instead, escalation, consequence, the inexorable logic of being. Occasionally, during the long, desolate hours when Haydon was gone, she fingered the notion of Jason's suffering, the frosted year which he had passed standing beside her silver Porsche, the dogged, stoical hurt in his eyes . . . But the notion did not travel, she could not truthfully invest him with the capacity for immanence . . . a hollow reed tuned to its outward sound. Haydon came in and began to pack. She watched him, fearing the torment dammed up behind her closed teeth.
"Listen," he said, "things are getting too hot for me in this town, and I've got to skit. Getting myself in jail won't help this time."
She watched him pack. So few things to pack. In a moment he was ready to leave. She loved him desperately and the word "grovel" began to circulate in her head like waste paper on a windy playground. It was as if the whole of her life before she met him, the years when she felt self-sufficient and happy to be herself, the strange years when she dared to go out for a walk without fear of missing someone, of being left destitute, had been an illusion.
"Are you leaving me behind?" she asked. Her head ached.
He regarded her nervously. "You wouldn't do anything silly, would you?"
"Do you care?"
The heavy implications of his words, the respect which they implied for the extent of her passion, brought the tears streaming down her cheeks. He took her shoulders.
"Of course I care," he said fiercely. "Don't try and pass off any white-race callousness on to me."
"Why must you leave me behind? What harm can I do you?"
He stepped back, shrugging her off. "I have to lie low for a while. The hunt of Haydon, a familiar American pastime. There's someone who will hide me under their bed."
"A girl?"
"Yes, a girl."
"Do you love her?"
"No, I don't love her."
"In this town?"
"No, some other town."
"Won't you tell me where?"
"What good would it do?"
"Are you afraid that I might follow you there? Do you imagine that I have no dignity?" "I have my fears."
"You think I might give you away to the police?"
"I wouldn't blame you if you did. Every woman has the right to be a bitch once in a while."
"Haydon, Haydon, I'm not like that, nothing I've done gives you the right to say that."
She groped towards him, but he retreated to the door and his face was set firmly.
"Thank you for what you've done for me, Zoe, and for what you've given also."
"Do you think I care about that?" she cried.
He opened the door. "Thanks all the same."
"I won't grovel," she said, "to a filthy black monkey."
He nodded. "I'm glad. It doesn't help any."
He stepped back into the corridor.
"Haydon!"
"Yeah?"
"Take the Cadillac, you take the automobile . . . borrow it, bring it back any time."
"I don't really look good in that heap of junk."
His anger was rising slowly, she saw; if only she could obliterate what she'd said.
"Would you like some money? It might help."
"You won't turn me into a louse that easy, white nun."
"I wasn't trying-"
"Don't."
He closed the door and his footsteps sounded on the stairs, brisk and heavy. The distant grunt of the front door reverberated in the bowels of the building. She threw open the window and "Central T res" winked at her feverishly. The noise in the street, the passing automobiles, the cooking and gasoline smells swirled around her in a gray haze.
"Haydon, Haydon!"
He looked up.
"Will you write to me?" she pleaded, "please, oh God, please, please, I beg you."
It was not his hardness or his cruelty which crippled her pride and corroded her dignity, the conventions of self-restraint which had been drummed into her throughout her childhood, particularly by Amanda. It was his flashes of gentleness and tolerance and regret. So total was her concentration on the man standing on the sidewalk below that she lost awareness of height and danger and began to slip over the window ledge, pulled forward by the weight of her head. She caught his sudden alarm; only then did panic infect her. Years ago, when she was very small, years before the Greek boatman at Tolon, she had been fishing about on a warm Italian shore when she took an innocent step backwards and suddenly there was nothing, the water flooded over her face. She came up for air, surprised, only to be confronted by the horror on the face of her elderly English nanny, and that horror transmitted itself and then shock seized her and she began to scream . . . She had the sensation now of turning over very slowly in outer space, lights were revolving like lanterns in the black sky, her fingers were growing numb . . .
Haydon pulled her back into the room. She clung to him, on the verge of collapse. He laid her gently on the bed and knelt over her; she clung to his neck, she knew that it would be all right now, that she'd proven herself, her love, that he would have to take her with him, to recognize that two people had finally fused into one.
"We can find a quiet hotel somewhere," she whispered, "a place for black people where they won't give you away, I can pay, if you'd left me I'd have gone out of my mind, I knew you wouldn't, your chin's so rough, you're such a brute, it's funny, I know, but I wish we could make love now, I'd like that. .."
He sat down on the bed beside her and took her hand.
"Honey," he said sadly, "let me put you on board a train for New York. I shouldn't have walked out on you all of a sudden like that. I'll keep your lousy old auto and drop it by when I'm next in town. We'll go to the movies together, maybe. The best thing you can do is to head for home, right now. I mean that."
Her nerves would stretch no further. She thought about her parents, her father's ponderous philistinism, her mother's nagging, the recriminations, the return to the gilded cage, cut off from the immanence and simple straight smell of people who really lived.
"Come on now," Haydon was saying, "I'll help you get your things packed."
"If you're going to desert me," she said wearily, barely audible, "I'd rather stay here and do away with myself. You can't break a woman's heart and get away with it. You'll have to pay for this, Haydon, I know what you're going to say, you're going to say that you people never got humane treatment from us, you're going to remind me of what I called you, well, I know that's true but that's no reason for you . . . you were ready enough to sleep with me, and if I have your child ..."
He said quietly, "It was your suggestion."
Mascara trickled down her cheeks. She nodded sadly.
"Okay," she whispered, "go now, go."
He straightened up in a state of indecision.
"Let me put you on board a train for New York."
"Where are we anyway, Haydon, where is this city?"
He looked at her in amazement.
"You're hard," she said, "cruel and hard. Nothing can justify that, nothing can exonerate you. It's no use you shielding behind your being black."
"If you won't let me put you on that train, I'll have to scamper. The cops aren't going to give me time to clear up my love affairs."
She looked at him with hatred, her head was splitting, she searched about her desperately for things she normally never bothered with, drink and drugs. There was nothing.
"Don't do anything stupid," he said, from the door.
His tone unloosened her again, she broke down completely, her words were barely audible.
"Will you ever see me again, will you?"
"Sure I will. I'll come to New York and I'll give you a ring."
"You're lying, Haydon."
"I'm not lying, Zoe."
"When?"
"I don't know when. Sometime pretty soon."
"Will you be coming back to this room?"
"I guess not."
"I mean, if I wait here for you, if I just wait for days and days, if I never leave, might you come back?"
"Zoe, honey, you've got to take this easy, you're tearing yourself apart."
"But you don't understand, you can't imagine what you mean to me!"
"Things always look better in the morning," he said
Sprawled across the bed, like a broken doll, she heard the door close quietly, almost deceitfully, and then his footsteps on the stairs. Even now she half-believed that he would come back, that he couldn't really intend to reduce her to the shell of loneliness which she had become without him. The door sounded downstairs, and then the cataract of her own storm drowned everything, the sound of her sobbing and coughing as she lay for hour after hour and the green neon light flashed sedately, unperturbed, unaware that a room which previously housed two people, a union, a warmth, now contained only one, a dead thing. Outside her window no night would fall; it had already fallen; and the daylight of the streetlights would not relinquish their relentless torture until the daylight of the day. She thought to herself, "I'm as miserable and crippled as a human being can be; I can see no light, no hope, yet I know that I won't kill myself; what must people who do commit suicide feel like? There must be hope, of course there's hope, he can change his mind, he can meet me in New York later on, we can fall in love all over again, nothing irrevocable has occurred, he has merely gone off for a while . . ." She stared at the cracked mirror and at the peeling walls by the bed. Immanence. Her watch showed that Haydon had been gone four hours. By now he could be anywhere, hundreds of miles away; the person who had been here, inside this bed, inside her body, his flesh one with hers, was now gone, torn away, restored to himself, to the terrible separateness, the otherness ... He had exploited the world of machines to proclaim his singular identity, to demonstrate the limits of his compassion, to show her that there are times when there is no appeal, no mercy ... At midnight she reached out with closed eyes and said, "Are you there, Haydon, are you lying beside me after all?" She knew that she was hungry, that people would advise her to sleep, to be sensible, and she knew that these people were not suffering, that the normality of their lives, the even tenor of their experiences, had anesthetized them to even the perception of suffering, making their sympathy vacant and their words of solace mechanical. Nothing, not even the externalized notion of herself as a beautiful woman in torment, could deaden the pain or reduce the immanence of her burden. She longed for sleep, yet dreaded waking; she dreaded waking hour by hour hauled into the cold gray waters of the morning, until a permanent insomnia brought her face to face with the fact that martyrdom eludes the vanquished. She dreaded the morning in her life when there would be nothing.
Powell's arm was still around her shoulders, her wet hand, still rested loosely in his. The room had become unbearably hot.
After a few minutes he opened the door leading into the corridor. An uproar of shouting, cracking glass and splintering timber reached them from below. He closed the door again and locked it.
"Don't be afraid, Zoe."
She sat on the bed shaking violently, unable to arrest and control the convulsions which racked her from head to foot. Her teeth chattered.
"I thought that time might heal, but it didn't; every day has been the same. In the end one goes to pieces. It's really as if one's heart and lungs had been cut out, there's nothing left, only emptiness ..."
A stone struck the plaster on the windowsill, flew off at a tangent and cracked the window. She jumped.
He took her by the shoulders.
"I wish Haydon were here now," she said with such intensity that he felt himself, as a father, being urged to dissolve and reincarnate himself as his own son. Suddenly she could no longer get the words out; she struggled and stammered; reason lapsed from her eyes; she turned towards him as towards a father, and he saw that she had gone mad.
He searched for something to say, something which she might still understand and which would afford her a grain of comfort. But what came out was the simple truth—as he saw it.
"It doesn't surprise me that Haydon treated you the way he did. It hurts me to say so, but there's little of God in my eldest son. He thinks only of himself. Jason had qualities more valuable than you could know—honour and courage."
Footsteps sounded on the stairway. The man and the girl clung together as the minutes passed in the darkened room. In the corridor outside, the electric clock had stopped; time stood still.
THIRTY-SEVEN
standing alone in the middle of the deserted clearing, James pulled the hair from his eyes.
"Bonjour."
Andre Laval stood in the shadows of the camouflaged Jeep that housed his precious radio. His voice, with its familiar acid lining, brought the blood rushing to James' face; realizing himself to have been under observation from the moment he left the prisoners' tent, he felt sure that his mutinous thoughts, the guilty cycle of his intentions, must have been blatantly evident to the Commandant.
In an instant the scent of freedom drained from the day. His resolve evaporated.
An hour passed. Laval wrestled with the radio, with time and space.
Coils of vapour no longer spiralled upwards through the trees, and the long grass had yielded its last sap to the arrogant sun. Weakened by hunger and thirst, chewing on biscuits and dried figs which their stomachs would no longer hold, James and Jason—Laval's Grande Armee—stumbled around the clearing in futile, spasmodic investigations, pathetic forays against the inevitable, and then sank exhausted beneath the trees. Joined by a common predicament—
loneliness, claustrophobia, the imminence of death—they could no longer dredge up an ounce of fraternity. There had never been much.
The voices of the MLN militia patrols haunted Laval. He ripped off his earphones in a sullen rage.
"Five hours at most," he snapped. "Say your prayers."
"Five hours?" Jason gasped. He hugged himself like a man kicked in the stomach. Thick, accumulated stubble had almost robbed his moustache of its identity. His finely modelled features, bombarded by forces which he no longer understood, had relapsed into savagery, into a state of nature. His bloodshot eyes glowed from sunken sockets.
He reached for a water bottle. Laval snatched it from his hands. Jason's tongue fell out, black and cracked, like a burned steak.
And then, for the first time, James became aware of an absence.
"Where's Deedes?"
"Gone," Laval said dismissively.
"What have you done with him?" He rose to his feet, trembling.
Laval held out his hands. "He vanished at dawn. I was asleep. He's beyond help, that derelict. His burden was too immense. In Kenya he was imprisoned for rebellion and treason. He sided with the blacks. He confessed it to me."
"You made him confess," James said hotly.
"He confessed, mon petit." Laval shrugged and lit a cigarette.
"I'll go after him," James said.
"Which way will you go?" Laval asked calmly. "There are 360 degrees on the compass."
"But only four paths leading from this clearing."
"Yes, only four." Laval smiled.
James subsided, nursing his head.
Jason's panic now welled up like vomit. He knew himself to have crossed a frontier, the point where the bowels are no longer subject to a directing control—the control by which a man knows himself in the unreflective morning.
"What are we gonna do? I mean, we don't have to sit around do we?"
"We're encircled, macaque."
Jason's mouth fell open. "What's going to happen?" He trembled.
"Death."
Jason stared at James with furious resentment. So calm again, this cold white bastard.
"Well, we could at least make a break for it. I mean there's no point-"
"We can't move the prisoners again," Laval said. "Too risky."
"Jesus, let's go without them. Why don't you just rub them out, huh? What in hell's name do you intend doing with those criminals in there? I mean, that's what you've had in mind all along, isn't it, so why not hurry up ..."
Laval smiled cruelly. "Black boy, when I listen to you, I feel like the Saint Andre after whom my good mother named me."
The jungle was silent. Jason began to weep.
"Go if you wish," Laval said, his face set like an anvil.
Jason just sat, trembling.
Laval glanced at James. "Et toi? Thinking of cutting the prisoners free this morning, were you?"
James reddened. It was the first time that the subject had been raised.
"Why didn't you?" Laval said in a surprisingly sentimental tone. "My own burden has grown too heavy ... I've been so close to the wings of death so often that I almost yearn for their light touch, so tender and definitive. No appeal, no reprieve. They come, that is that. We are mortal. Jean Martignac is gone, no more than dust now. I remember him in Indochina, the Viets came at us, his eyes were so blue ..." Laval had stretched himself out on the ground, passive and forebearing, like a woman in the final stage of labour, breathing with difficulty. "My true brothers have been taken from me by the materialists ... only the ashes remain to be scattered ... such solitude, anguish. I have always revered great music, Berlioz, Wagner. I was a good husband and father, always tender and gentle, I'm a man of deep feeling. It is / who have suffered. You condemn me in your ignoble hearts ... the warrior of France who faithfully serves his mistress—France is a woman, a woman who fights, even when on her back, she fights whoever seeks to ravish her—is now scorned, even by the daughters who should adore him. If I have blood on my hands, the world is to blame and not I."
Suddenly possessed by a new surge of energy, he leaped up, strode across the clearing to his tent and emerged after a few moments clutching a small bundle of books in one hand and a can of kerosene in the other. His long, mournful face twitched once and then resumed its customary, masklike neutrality.
"Keller gave me these," he reflected, "on behalf of the party. For some reason I carried them around. He persuaded me, the bastard."
Squatting to kindle a bonfire, Andre Laval remembered the year of his rupture with Simone and Marie, the year of Paris, of Martignac and Keller, the tempestuous year of Annette and the brothel in the Rue Chansonniere. He doused the books in kerosene and struck a match; the orange flames immediately leaped up at him. The shiny paper covers hissed and curled, surrendering their messages to an acrid smoke. How many had truly absorbed the sacred lessons of these books? Certainly not Keller himself. Certainly not the pathetic children with whom he was now burdened. Martignac, perhaps? And what of the others, the blood brothers? Standing back from the funnel of black smoke, rigid as a guy, he felt sure of only one thing: he was now quite alone in the world. The last Roman legionary at Pompeii. Soon Vesuvius would belch its cinders of death, burying beneath the lava of history the greatest civilization of all—the West. The thought moved him almost to tears.
He stared at the bonfire, watching the titles wither and die: Der Untergang des Abendlandes; Le Declin de I'Occident; The Decline of the West. And the author's name also: Oswald Spengler.
He stood there until nothing remained but ashes and charred paper, which scattered across the clearing, stirred by a sluggish breeze.
"The smoke will bring them to us," he said. "The Reich has crumbled. Nothing shall survive." He spoke solemnly, like a schoolmaster.
The two young men stared at him.
"I'll try the radio once more," Laval said. "Then we must prepare ourselves for God."
He strode away.
"He's crazy," Jason whispered.
They stood for a moment, sickened by the acrid smoke from the books and by the emotive imagery of the ceremony. The presence of Amah had revived in James the need for atonement, for a stroke of vindicating mercy. Only the power to act was missing.
The silence broke. A haunting cry, neither human nor inhuman, rose and fell three times, in quick succession.
"Hell," Jason whispered, breaking out in a cold sweat. "I'm getting out of here." He threw away his Sten gun, pulled off his khaki tunic and trousers, got his foot caught in a trouser leg, fell down and began to curse and moan. James stared at him in amazement.
"You haven't a chance."
"No?"
"By yourself, you're doomed. You can't walk five hundred miles."
The cry rose again, purposeful, menacing, its hollow, other worldly cadence making it impossible to judge its precise direction or to calculate its distance.
Jason was trembling. He stood naked save for a pair of soiled pants and his rotting boots. James reached out and took his arm, but Jason shook him off with hysterical violence.
"Just leave me alone, you bastard!"
"Have some sense. If we stick together, there's an element of hope. We have guns, we have ammunition, we have the prisoners, we can bargain."
"So that's how you see it?"
"What do you mean?"
"You'll take Laval's side against those poor bastards, huh?"
James shrugged. "And you?"
"Listen," Jason said hurriedly, glancing around wildly at the green wall of the jungle, calculating his moment, his line of escape, "you and I were both taken for a big ride. Neither of us knew what the hell we were letting ourselves in for. You were very big and brave, the old soldier. Well, that won't help you in Heaven. That guy Soames Tufton filled your head with rubbish, and-"
He broke off and darted towards the trees. As he did so, James anticipated the movement and blocked his passage, winding his long arms around the smaller man. Jason kicked and fought.
"You white bastard," he cried struggling.
"Have sense!"
Jason burst into tears. "You look after yourself and leave me be!"
"Jason!"
"Listen, you whiteys know you've had it in a big way now. You really have got it coming to you."
"Are you out of your mind?"
"Sure I am," Jason sobbed, digging his teeth into James' hand. "My skin is black, mister, same as the people who live around here; they're my people, my ancestors, that's something you could never understand."
"They'll kill you first and examine your ancestry afterwards."
"Yeah? They'll give me my chance so long as I go among them. Just don't expect anything from me, that's all, after what you've done to my people. Now take your goddam hands off me will ya, it's time you whites stopped pushing us around!"
James stepped back. In a single movement Jason broke free, took to his heels and vanished into the trees, a mirage in the dappled sunlight. James stood panting; the struggle had exhausted him. Time dissolved, the event shed its reality, the sun expanded to a vast orange ball, prompting forked tongues of pain in his head, spasms of fire. The jungle wall rippled and danced in perpetual motion, and when he listened he heard nothing but the monotony of his own heart. Almost involuntarily his failing legs carried him back to the refuge of his tent, to the promise of oblivion in sleep. He knew he ought to visit the prisoners, to take them a cupful of water, to loosen their bonds, but he didn't dare, their contempt was more than he could now face. In the instant that his knees buckled and the floor came up to meet him, a long gallery of black and white masks shimmered before him in the close, stifling heat. He lost consciousness.
As Jason stumbled through the jungle, almost naked, his mind, his directing centre of control, refused to revive. It fizzed on half a battery. Words, excuses and apologies darted through his skull like dragonflies over a weed-strewn lake. For a while the higher leaves shielded his small, wire-topped head from the full fury of the sun. He had to get away. The path ahead slithered like a snake, roots tripped him, his sobs gradually subsided to spasmodic hiccups. His brain barely functioned; impulses were localized in his legs, drunken and erratic. He said, once, "Zoe." An object on the path arrested his progress; a green oyster of saliva. He stared at it, then stumbled forward again into the heat, spurred on by yet another cry, half human, half bird, much closer than before. "Oh Jesus," he sobbed, "oh Jesus, no." He came across a second oyster of saliva, then a long, broken trail of green phlegm. Desperately he summoned his brother, conjured Haydon out of the trees, invoked their close relationship, his special, exonerating link to a man now famous for his efforts in the cause of Negro emancipation. They shared the same parents. In the depths of the jungle, the Assistant to the Ambassador's son gave way to the young agitator's brother. Resolved at all costs to explain about his brother, how his brother was famous and loved and had sent him to Africa on a personal, fact-finding mission, secret and confidential, he groped forward into the dappled day and came up short with a choking cry, like a man being strangled. He stood heaving and coughing, surrounded by swarms of flies. Taking a step backwards, he groaned and sobbed, "Jesus no." On a stake erected in the centre of the path running into a village whose brown roofs he now saw for the first time was something which brought him to the end. Impaled on the stake was Deedes' head. Flies swarmed in squadrons around the nostrils, the eyes, the mouth, the ears, the red blubber of the severed neck.
He turned to run; and as he did so, the faces watching him from between the trees leaped into focus. They were intent, interested faces. He opened his mouth to explain, but checked himself. The words, as he had known all along, would be foreign; postponement had not softened the problem. He couldn't even remember his brother's name now, not any longer, and he felt strange below, as if his bowels were slipping out, as if he were giving birth to his own bowels. A small resentment rose in him, a tiny, defiant, resentment at being judged. Didn't they see his limbs, black and naked, like their own? Didn't they have eyes? His arms wavered outwards, flapped disjointedly, as his legs buckled. Falling to his knees, he searched among their impassive faces for some sign, some clue, some gesture which would enable him to convince them that he was a Negro, an African like themselves. From another tribe, maybe. He wanted badly to explain. His hands had clasped themselves together like the Reverend Judson's in 128th Street Baptist on Sundays.
Sinking into his drugged sleep, James was remotely aware of Andre Laval's existence, of an undefined threat harrying the frontiers of his conscience. But the time of retreat could no longer be deferred; a man was compelled to admit the cyclical, intermittent nature of his capacity; sleep was irresistible. What the actor might have endured, Hamlet could not; abandoned by his lines, he abdicated.
What span of time elapsed before he was hauled back into the day, he could not tell. Finding the obligatory passage to the surface painful, and an iron fist applying a giant's stress to his skull, he fought to retrieve his sanctuary, to ride at anchor once more in the safe harbour of sleep. But his limbs, in gathering themselves, apparently obeyed some remoter control prompted, it seemed, by an anxiety for Deedes and a passing apprehension on behalf of Jason. Now that they had gone, in desperation, he saw them as his children, his trust, the measure of his failure. His arm extended around Alec's slender shoulders. The peculiarly haunting cry which had earlier broken Jason's nerve roused him. It sounded closer, now. Placing his palms flat on the floor and pressing upwards, he managed to rise; clutching the central tent pole, he steadied himself, shook his head and groaned softly. Then he turned towards the outer world and pulled the hair from his eyes. The sunlight blinded him.
The cry rose again. A man screamed—-a terrible, protracted shriek which rent the rotted canvas of James' last delusions like a knife. Breaking his revolver and noting the full chamber, he stepped out of the tent. The spectacle which greeted him crippled his legs. As a wave of nausea rose from his stomach, a flower shed its caged cohesion and petals scattered like the bad conscience of a generation. Moving forward through the bright day, forcing himself towards the single moment of clarity which would redeem him on the scaffold, he caught his life in a condensed image. Despite his painstaking search for equilibrium, success had eluded him. He had not progressed. Too readily had he come to terms with his own world. Balance depended on a marriage of opposing forces, on the resolution of conflict, but he had consistently failed to generate the necessary opposition. Unlike Alec, he had refused an authentic rebellion, refused to grasp the nettle of true singularity; appalled by the faceless crowd, he had ultimately been absorbed by it. This whole notion was caught and trapped in a splintered second, just as Laval's knife flashed again, scything downward, severing the jugular vein of Raymond Tukhomada. The dying man screamed for the last time, and the earth itself moved in protest.
James raised his revolver and took careful aim. Then he made his voice heard—at the third attempt.
Amah had composed himself. Swiftly as the end had come, he was prepared. For years his life had hung by a thread. With so many of his comrades slaughtered, the generations of harvested wheat, with Camille turned to white bones beneath the cellar stones of Octave, his own continued survival had begun to assume in his mind the submerged contours of an accusation. Unlike Tukhomada, he had never been sustained by the conviction that their murder would be a scandal too drastic to be contemplated. He knew. As soon as the tall Englishman let them down, and as soon as Laval's final attempt to reach Thiersville had failed, Amah realized that the end had come and that the incestuous fantasies of Ca-mille's murder would dictate that he be the last to die. How he would die—the details, the elaborations—he preferred not to consider. Two tent poles had been hammered into the ground a few feet apart; Laval bound one prisoner to each. For a moment Amah had the impression that he intended to gather faggots, to burn his victims at the stake. But the knife flashed without more ado, without vulgar speeches and the expected taunts. The Commandant worked like a butcher, with fierce concentration, driving his knife into bone and muscle. Raymond's first, terrible scream caused Amah to close his eyes on the world for the last time.
"Laval!" James Caffrey stood in the centre of the clearing.
The call broke the seal on Amah's eyes, simultaneously reviving the badge of slavery, the residual conviction, buried during the years of war, that salvation from white oppression must ultimately lie in white compassion. He remembered Victor Manoury, and Camille's struggle to stifle her own hope when Manoury spoke to her in Petit-Fresnes. Even she, in the last resort . . .
"Laval!"
The young man had flexed his arm. Determined that his adversary should turn and confront him, that Laval should register in his last moments the identity of his executioner, James held his revolver at eye level, waiting for the Commandant to witness and digest the circumstances of his own death. His arm- was steady. Laval swung around. James fired four times, in rapid succession. A wave of grief rose like a suspended verdict from Amah's stomach; the sun threatened to cleave his skull in two. He saw a submarine shadow glide through green waters, twist slowly and then stubbornly resist the embrace of gravity, the embrace which never sleeps. Caught in the tentacles of violence, the creature hissed, then finally conceded the motions of capitulation, of death. Raymond Tukhomada had slipped to the ground, with blood pouring from his neck in a dark torrent. His eyes refused to close; dazed with disbelief, unable to comprehend his own martyrdom, he watched himself die. The end, it seemed, would never come.
Shadow of wings. Suddenly the sky was heavy with vultures. Cutting Tukhomada free and dragging his body across the clearing towards the Jeep, James found that his own body had finally capitulated. Nothing remained but the will. With mounting desperation he kicked at the pursuing vultures, sickened by their vulnerability to his boot, their acceptance of mortal risk, their consuming greed. No sooner had he hauled Tukhomada's long, broken corpse into the Jeep than a multitude of black birds settled on the roof and engine, scrabbling furiously at the windows, while hundreds more flopped around the wheels, screeching with frustration. The noise was deafening.
Choking, almost sobbing with shock and disgust, he ran back to where his own victim lay surrounded by ravenous birds. Two bullets had penetrated the brain, one had smashed the jaw, and the fourth had passed through the throat. It was enough; the demon lay still, staring upwards without much resentment, a warrior who had despised the human race too much to suffer its company with honour. His perennial angry scowl had given way to the angular, olive-brown disdain of the Midi; yet even now the dead man threatened to spring at James' throat with the last laugh of all.
As the vultures swarmed around Laval, James discovered in himself a deep, unexpected solidarity with the Commandant. He could not regard Laval as mere carrion flesh, to do so would have detracted from the stature of his own achievement. One soul had eliminated another; the flesh, the remains, had at all costs to be salvaged, the integrity of human conflict to be vindicated, the gulf which separated man from animal to be preserved. Yet there was neither sanctuary nor refuge within reach, except the earth itself. The tents, liable to collapse under the weight of the vultures, were too flimsy to provide adequate protection. As for the Jeep, James shrank from the prospect of disposing of Laval's body alongside Tukhomada's. It was out of the question. Under the burning sun he straightened his back; his head swam and his legs threatened at any minute to give way under him. There was nowhere, no refuge. Dredging the shallow reservoir of his willpower, he began to drag the body by the heels into the undergrowth, kicking and shouting at the pursuing vultures. With failing arms he hacked at the dry, hard earth with his bayonet, attempting to fashion a shallow grave, to put a protective layer of soil and stones between the man and the Furies. But the struggle was hopeless, and his confidence in his power to resolve the situation, to sanctify his own action, soon ebbed. Nothing remained now except the empty notion of responsibility, of trust. On the verge of collapse, he gave up. The earth had rejected the offering; the birds darted forward for the feast, shrieking triumphantly.
Time passed, and once more dissolved.
Released from his bonds, Amah staggered and collapsed into James' arms. For some moments the two young men clung together for mutual support, until awareness dispelled their emotion, bringing estrangement and enmity. A fever was rising fast to drain the blood from Amah's feet; the world, his own Africa, heaved him contemptuously into the long grass, beneath the trees, where he lay still.
Clouds came, or formed. It became a little cooler. Yet the sky and the earth below remained carpeted with birds, black and restless.
Long shadows descended, as if to soothe the dead. James dozed fitfully, comforted by the soft breeze which came with the clouds, yet resisting the deeper layers of sleep where ghosts were waiting in bright colours to remind him that a man is part of everything he has seen and done. Periodically he would haul himself into consciousness, gl&nce about him in search of relevance, find nothing, and then fall back into an exhausted prostration. Once, only once, he saw Amah—and glimmered a fourth dimension, a shooting star, a bond ...
Towards evening something happened. James and Amah were no longer alone. The first of the two converging militia patrols reached the scene, attracted by the gunshots they had heard earlier in the day. The militiamen—peasants, artisans and labourers—gathered in silence around the Jeep, the green coffin through whose glass walls the body of Tukhomada was visible. They stared. None dared open the door. Shock numbed their capacity to act, weighting their limbs with the lead of incredulity and superstition. Buried legends sprang at them from the jungle wall, driving them into an impenetrable web of despair.
More clouds came, and longer shadows. The afternoon retreated, and hope with it.
Stumbling about in a stricken torment, they came across a white man prostrate beneath a tree. One of them raised his machete, resolved to exterminate him there and then, but an officer of the militia dissuaded him. And Odouma, whom they salvaged alive, the single, redeeming mercy in a tragic day, was heard to insist that the prisoner should not be harmed. Taking stock of Amah's rising fever, they might have doubted his sanity were not the whole situation beyond the pale of logic—the neat row of abandoned tents, the discarded weapons, the boxes of dry ammunition, the instruments of torture discovered in a black trunk, the piles of paper money. They stared at the money.
The light ebbed.
Bearing Raymond Tukhomada in an improvised sling, the militiamen set out for Potonou before dusk. They carried him tenderly, as if he were still alive. Amah travelled in the captured Jeep, on the seat crusted with his leader's dried blood. His fever caused them all a deep concern; so much, the future itself, depended on this young man's survival. Pushing down jungle tracks towards the road, they watched him intently, with long faces.
Night came.
Commandant Laval's last encampment now stood deserted under a blue half-moon. A profound, exonerating silence pervaded the clearing; the clouds had gone, and the first stars glimmered like jewels in the black velvet of the sky. A wisp of charred paper, the remains of a book, drifted like a whisper between the empty tents. Nothing moved here, nothing lived, not even in the longer corridors of darkness where the last of the heavy-bellied vultures had taken its leave of the fleshless carcass of a man. Only the bones remained, the skeleton, the skull.
Five kilometres away, the militiamen moved towards the road, bearing a nation's tragedy. They marched stoically under the night sky of Africa.
From time to time the lips of Amah's fever parted, and a vague anxiety, a nagging doubt, led him to summon the militia leader. How often he asked the same question he could not tell; always the officer answered calmly and with respect.
"The white man," Amah asked in French, "where is he?"
"The prisoner?"
"Yes, the prisoner."
"We have him."
"Where?"
"At the back."
"Is he walking?"
"Of course."
"He must be tired," Amah murmured.
The militia officer did not reply. Amah fought off the waves of delirium, struggling for clarity, for command, for the heritage which was now his—and the burden.
"The white man," he said again, "where is he?"
"We have him at the back," the officer replied patiently.
"Is he in bonds?"
"Yes."
"Is he—afraid?"
The officer shrugged. "No doubt he has cause to be."
Amah wrestled with a memory, with the past, with the opaque profile of reality. Then he remembered.
"Two others, a white and a Negro, escaped," he said. "They got away. One was British, the other American. They were at Zolanga, they confessed."
The militia officer was chewing root. He spat red juice into the grass.
"They were discovered," he said dryly.
"Discovered?"
"At the nearest village."
"Alive?"
"We found their heads first. The bodies later."
Amah thought about this, particularly about the American. He still couldn't fathom the American. Soon he felt worried again, and sick.
"The white man at the back," he said, "on no account treat him badly. Do you understand me?"
The officer chose not to answer.
"Do you understand me?" Amah insisted.
"Yes, of course."
"It's not for us to judge these things. The nation will judge him. Nothing is simple in this world."
"As you say, Amah Odouma."
'Treat him well. Nothing is simple." "Yes, of course."
The militia officer's voice was steady but his eyes were resentful.
Hydra-Oxford 1963-65
David Caute, not yet 30, is an English novelist and historian and a former Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. During the academic year 1966-67, he was a visiting professor in residence at New York University. Among his books are Communism and the French Intellectuals: 1914-1960, praised by Albert J. Guerard in The New York Times as ". . . indispensable to historians; it is an impressive achievement." His novels are At Fever Pitch, awarded the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize, and Comrad Jacob. The Decline of the West is both his most ambitious and his most important novel—a vast, uncompromising and brilliant examination in fiction of the consequences of colonialism. In England, where the novel was first published, The Spectator has called it "as fascinatingly authentic as a true history of the Congo wars would be, because Caute is as good a historian as he is a novelist."
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