The White Room

by Craig Higginson

She does not try to smile at this.

  I would have thought I’d put you off relationships, she says instead.

  No, he jokes. Only relationships with you.

  Pierre

  He sees his mistake when it is already too late. It is surprising and a bit gratifying to see how easy it is to hurt her still – but when he dares to look in her direction, he finds a new confidence in her, a new clarity of purpose.

  Hannah

  Did your father tell you that I phoned?

  He said something about a journalist who called —

  I phoned the post office in Pouilly. I spoke with a Madame Dupont. Needless to say, she hadn’t the faintest idea at first what I was talking about.

  Sorry?

  She insisted that there were no white families living in Pouilly who had adopted a Congolese refugee. It was only when I started to describe you and told her your name that it all clicked into place. She told me she knew your mother very well – and she trotted out your parents’ number almost at once.

  She had no right —

  We had an interesting exchange, your father and I. Did he tell you what we said?

  Not really —

  As she moves towards him, all the bravado has gone out of him. She would like very much to hit him, and she might have if she didn’t fear, in some ancient part of her, that he might hit her back.

  I always knew something wasn’t right about your story. You simply didn’t strike me as a refugee. As someone whose parents and siblings had been murdered and thrown on a mountain of bodies to be burned. I could see you hadn’t suffered – not properly.

  What do you know about what a person suffers? he snarls, trying to get away from the momentum of her words.

  I told your father that I wanted to write an article about refugees who had been adopted by French families. I said I believed he had an adopted son called Pierre.

  By now he is sitting on the couch, no longer attempting to fight back, like a criminal in the dock awaiting his fate.

  But he told me I’d made a mistake. He said that you were his child, or should I say ‘are’?

  Still, he doesn’t move.

  I must say, though – he sounded more than a little miffed when I asked if he was black.

  Fuck you.

  He says this quietly, decisively – and then gets up, veering towards the half-filled bookshelves.

  He went on to confirm that you were born in Dijon and that you were never adopted. You grew up in the house by the river in Pouilly, the air thick with nightingales.

  He glowers, his hands swollen and twitchy.

  Why did you lie, Pierre? To make me feel sorry for you?

  You have no business doing this!

  Or were you getting off again on being the victim? Cashing in on the suffering of others? What for? To make yourself look more appealing? Like a puppy in a shop window?

  Who the fuck do you think you are?

  Making up stories – tagging me along!

  He moves towards her now, his body jumpy with rage and humiliation.

  You told me to make something up, all right? You said it doesn’t even have to be literally true. So that’s what I did – I made something up!

  From the start, all you wanted from me was sex.

  He wanders off to the furthest chair and sits, his back hunched away from her.

  I wanted so much more from you than that.

  VI

  Pierre

  Throughout his life, Pierre’s father has been telling him stories about the Congo – the Congo Free State/the Belgian Congo/the Republic of the Congo/Zaire/the Democratic Republic of the Congo – and every story has been a sorry tale. Even before the arrival of King Léopold, people were being bartered between chiefs like cowrie shells or nuggets of gold. His homeland has been fought over by the slavers, the colonisers and the corrupt African politicians who came afterwards – most of whom have been little more than pawns for the West, lining their own pockets while the same atrocities have continued under their watch.

  His father has never believed in the idea of civilisation. It has never done their country any good. Hundreds of their people are being killed every day, whole villages are disappearing without a trace, yet still the world pays little attention. And then a couple of years ago, two airplanes were flown into two towers in New York – and not long afterwards half the world wanted to go to war. The people in the West seemed to be fighting for an idea of themselves as good. They believed their civilisation was under threat. Violence must be met with violence – it was too late to talk. But Pierre’s father had already taught Pierre that civilisation had never been there to begin with. It was only ever a show – while the usual barbarism was being carried out backstage.

  His father’s people are from a fishing village north of Lake Kivu and his mother’s people are from a mountain village near Beni at the edge of the Ituri forest. His father’s childhood stories are about mythological creatures coming out of the lake at night, and of rainbow clouds of butterflies and fish. In the dappled emerald light of the forest, his father moved like a leopard. He learned from his older brothers how to trap animals and catch fish – and he has said that Pierre’s love for birds and the river have come from him.

  By the light of a hurricane lamp, the mud school buildings dissolving back into the earth whenever it rained too heavily, Pierre’s father learned French and then English. There was a schoolteacher in the neighbouring village who had trained in Germany and who took a special interest in the prodigious child. She arranged a bursary for him to a private school in Bukavu, and a few years later he won a scholarship to study literature in Kinshasa.

  Around the time the country became Zaire, Pierre’s father moved to Lyon to do his Master’s degree in African literature. When another wave of mayhem and bloody conflict swept through the country, he decided to remain in France.

  His mother’s story, however, is not quite so inspiring.

  Hannah

  Anyway, Pierre says, it wasn’t a lie.

  What?

  It was the truth.

  But the dates —

  And it wasn’t.

  She sighs at him from her part of the room.

  It’s little wonder you’ve never been able to express yourself, Pierre. Or explain yourself. You’re a bloody mess!

  It wasn’t me from the Congo, he says, almost inaudible. It was my parents.

  She waits, sensing something serious weaving its way up towards them, like some foreign sea creature, its mouth bristling with the limbs of dead children.

  My father is from Lake Kivu, which sits between Rwanda and Congo – and he was gone, yes, before the Interahamwe came there to destroy his family. But my mother – her people are from North Kivu, up in the mountains, where there is only one small track leading in and out of the village.

  She can hear the weight of the truth in him at last, and the responsibility he feels in speaking it. All she can do is wait for him to continue.

  Maman says I am the lucky one. It was she whose mother and young sister were raped and dumped into the river. It was her brother’s genitals that were cut out and thrown away for the dogs to eat.

  * * *

  Outside, life continues. A truck reverses and knocks over some dustbins. A cat finds some sunlight on a balcony wall. But inside the white room, neither of them moves.

  * * *

  So you see, he says eventually, I was lying and I was not lying.

  Yes, I suppose I do see that.

  Maman always says – if something bad happens to one person, it happens to every person. If it is not the axe hitting the tree that reaches us, it is the echo.

  * * *

  She wants to move towards him, but both of them are stuck, fixed there by the authority of his mother’s truth.

  * * *

  When Hannah speaks again, it is in a voice he might have heard from her long ago – around the time they first met:

  I can’t say I have ever felt that – connec
tion. When an axe hits a tree in the middle of a forest, do you feel it? Surely you only hear about it?

  My mother says that in Africa you feel it, Pierre says. Maybe it is different – here in Europe.

  VII

  Hannah

  To make such a connection has always been to falsify, to pretend, to join the dance of protesters in the streets, bobbing to a chant whose words you don’t understand, to a song you can’t sing. There was nothing more ridiculous at university than the white kids trying to muscle in on the borders of the student demonstrations – nothing more ridiculous, that is, than the white students like herself who had given up long before the dance had even started.

  Her mother’s travels through some of the most afflicted areas on the continent have usually resulted in stories about failed connections, of self-loathing turned outwards, of people clawing at each other as the dark maw of the earth swallowed them up. The word ‘Africa’ has been inseparable, for Hannah, from the word ‘fear’ – that fear she felt behind every acacia tree as a girl.

  Yet there was never anything behind any of those trees. There was only ever another tree. If the fear endures, it isn’t carried in the trees or the wind or the grass – it is carried by us, in our hearts. It is only we who can relinquish it.

  Pierre

  The trees have memory, he says. Their roots take in the blood of the dead and carry it towards the light. They contain the memory of everything that has passed. When we hit one of the old trees with an axe, we are hitting ourselves.

  She surprises them both by laughing at this.

  You really know how to take the wind out of a girl’s sails, don’t you?

  Hannah

  I’m sorry I lied, Pierre continues. I suppose I was trying to make myself seem more – exotic. I thought that was what you expected from me, desired me to be. I wanted you to notice me and be moved. To believe that there was more to me than the nightingales.

  I did. I do.

  VIII

  Hannah

  You asked me about my twin brother.

  Oliver?

  You said some awful things about us —

  I am sorry —

  But you see, I think he ruined me.

  Ruined you?

  Used me. He handed me over. He took away any identity that I might have had for myself.

  * * *

  How to explain that circle of children and that emerald light travelling up and down her body? She understands only now that Oliver staged that event. He planned it and he brought it about. He used her body to draw those other boys into the room. He wanted to use her body to test his own need against, and he used her to get closer to them, and to his own half-formed desires.

  Oliver was only a child himself. He couldn’t understand what he was doing, or what it was doing to her. But the fact is there was no adult around. Their father was dead, their mother was transfixed by larger horrors, and as children they were left too much alone. They needed protection from themselves and each other. What else was the idea of civilisation for?

  * * *

  I do not understand, he tells her.

  When we were at university, my brother took our mother’s car one night and he drove through a red traffic light. He wasn’t wearing a seatbelt. He hit a pole and flew through the windscreen. He bled to death right there – before the ambulance could come.

  Pierre looks at her.

  I thought it was at that moment that my life ended, and my sickness started. But it happened long before that, when we were children. He started to take me from one house to the next and let his friends undress me. They would do awful things to me, to my body, while he watched.

  He just – watched you?

  He watched them watching me, I think. You see, he thought he was me, and I thought I was him. I didn’t own my own body. He did. And then his friends did.

  I see.

  I think there was something a bit wrong with Oliver.

  Pierre nods, taking this in, looking out of his depth.

  And how old were you?

  Who knows? Seven? Eight? It went on for some years, until we went to boarding school at the age of ten. And there he carried on doing it, although in more subtle ways – through words, ideas, never again so directly. But he made it clear that on some level I always belonged to him, and was answerable to him. But no one should ever belong to anyone else, should they?

  Maybe not.

  I have always loved my brother. I have never been able to hear a single bad word about him. And I have never blamed him for what he did to me. For what he did to both of us.

  But – now you can?

  Maybe he had more of my father in him than I wanted to believe. My father was a very unusual man. Clever, but complicated. Misanthropic, and full of ideas about conspiracy. He killed himself when I was about four years old. He wanted to kill all of us. He had all the morphine in his briefcase to do it. My mother found out and we had to run away from him. That is why we went to South Africa. Not to escape the war, but to escape my father.

  Pierre looks at her. Maybe he is surprised she has horror stories of her own – even if they will never attempt to compete with his.

  I suppose you think me very strange, she tells him.

  It is one of the things I like about you.

  I hope you are using your tenses deliberately?

  Always.

  Pierre

  When he saw her at the Sorbonne, she looked so perfect. The girl in the yellow dress. He watched the way she smiled at everyone. Everyone seemed to like her. She was the English girl, passing through, leaving everything glowing slightly.

  Hannah

  When I first saw you, he says, I wondered what it would take – to get your attention.

  You were enough to get my attention, she says. Exactly as you were. From the day you came in here with those stars in your hair.

  Did you tell my father about my lie? he says.

  I said I must have made a mistake.

  Thank you.

  I liked him, your father. When we spoke.

  You did?

  He wanted me to understand that he had achieved something. You.

  IX

  Pierre

  His father has never been an angry man, even though he has more reason to be angry than most men. He was too interested in the world to be angry with it for long. Which is perhaps why Pierre’s mother has never left him. In spite of the earlier affairs, and the continuing absence and complacency of the man, his father has provided for her a place that is the opposite of bitterness, the opposite of pain. She can disappear into him and emerge out of him again, as if he carries in his care for her the tides of the sea, rendering her visible and invisible and visible to herself again.

  When her family was murdered, Pierre’s mother was already living in the house in Pouilly – with the daffodils and the boy in the kayak, rowing through the stars on the water. She was too afraid to return to the country then and she has never been back. The country Pierre’s parents grew up in is no longer there, his mother often tells him. But he knows she doesn’t believe this. The people her mother grew up with are still where she left them, trying to grow a new generation that might be spared another war. But it is impossible for his mother to return: she will be forever hearing her mother’s voice amongst the voices of the women and she will constantly be looking for her brother playing there amongst the schoolchildren.

  Your future is here in France, she has said to her son. There is nothing left for you there in Africa.

  But his mother will only ever be a shadow of herself in France. His father has been able to get by with his novels and his large talk and his theories derived from Fanon, while his mother was left alone in the damp house, cleaning every room downstairs until it gleamed – and chasing the shadows up to the attic room where Pierre slept.

  Yes, all the shadows were whisked away behind cupboards, under beds, inside coffee mugs, between the grains of salt – and they only came out again at nigh
t, when the house was still, pouring their dark smoke into Pierre’s unsuspecting ear.

  X

  Pierre

  She is sitting on the floor – wearing that tatty yellow dress and peering into one of the boxes.

  I do not want to leave you like this, he says.

  You’re leaving me. I’m like this.

  Hannah

  She extracts some worn paperbacks and hands them across to him.

  Some of my favourite books, she says. You can have them if you like. As a gift. To keep up with the English.

  He looks at the spines and doesn’t seem to recognise the titles.

  These are novels?

  He sorts through them, one by one: Les Grande Meulnes, The End of the Affair, The Idiot, The Famished Road, The Master and Margarita, The Portrait of a Lady, Atonement, The Nice and the Good, As I Lay Dying, A Bend in the River, Disgrace, Mr Norris Changes Trains, To the Lighthouse —

  So these are the ones you stole?

  Perhaps they are the ones I stole for you.

  Pierre

  He laughs at this and she half laughs with him. She looks anxious, somehow, to see him taking possession of her books – but pleased too, and diffident with hope.

  You won’t read them, she says, will you?

  I might.

  Hundreds of years of literacy, and look where it’s got us.

  He stands, knowing that this is her cue for him to leave.

  I wasn’t very good at it, was I? she says.

  The sex?

  The teaching.

  No, he smiles. I think you were too complicated about it.

  The teaching?

  The sex.

  Hannah

  He wedges what books he can into the bag and the rest he holds in his hand.

  * * *

  She has never been much good at saying hello or goodbye. She often finds she isn’t paying sufficient attention. But this moment she knows she will remember: Pierre standing there, itching to go and longing to stay – and her lacking the confidence to guide him in either direction.

  * * *