The Weight of Numbers

by Simon Ings

  Well, let her have her dream of redemption. What does it matter?

  From the sheetrock interior wall of a summer house, fifteen miles north of Maputo, a twisted pin untwists.

  Damp plaster seals the hair-line crack, as the pin corkscrews its way out of the wall, and takes flight.

  It shoots past the door to the kitchen, from which comes the faint but unmistakable smell of leaking bottle-gas – one of those signature smells, inseparable from evenings spent in holiday cottages – past bookshelves stacked with Franz Fanon, Georgette Heyer and yearbooks stretching back a dozen years: Who’s Who in World Trade; UN Factbooks for this region and that; missionary society directories. The books sit up as the pin passes them, at a speed approaching that of sound, accelerating all the time. The books straighten themselves, lining up on the white-painted shelves. From the second shelf up, a second pin unwinds from out the spine of The Wretched of the Earth, and, coming free, flies off.

  And another, and another. From out of the twill of the rag rug they come, hurling themselves into the air. From out of the walls and the ceiling. From out of the back of the room’s centrepiece. Someone’s head: unrecognizable.

  Outside, the sand-lions are undigging their traps. Puffs of sand gather and cone in the air, then fling themselves into the hole where each spider frantically unburies itself before the retreating tide. On BOAC’s night run from Dar to Nairobi, grain factors and irrigation specialists, bankers and fertilizer salesmen, carefully unblend the tonic from their gin.

  The sun has unrisen beneath Zanzibar. To the gathering roar – a great re-threading – shavings of aluminium wire rise in a cloud above the sand. The lethal cloud unshreds everything in its wake, leaf and dragonfly and even bird. It hurls itself at the broken window – and sticks there, blasted and fused into a tight, mosquito-resistant grille, by a flash of pinkish light.

  The bird unnotices the dragonfly.

  In the room, at its precise mathematical centre, the unrecognizable head is repacking itself. The soft innards refold, suck up and re-smear their spilt lubrication; spit out stray shavings and turnings into the ever-faster, ever-hotter air. The head trembles. Vertebrae click and snap together. The meat within them turns from red to white. Sparks fly.

  Julius at the door of his apartment in his slippers: ‘What now, Jorge?’

  A letter from the Phelps Stokes fund.

  His brand-new American girlfriend naked.

  His brand-new American girlfriend getting naked.

  Samora. Marcelino. Alberto. Joaquim.

  The head is not yet whole. It contains many minds.

  A to K and L to Z.

  The white man’s magic!

  General laughter.

  ‘And you know, we have a paper shortage here.’

  The head and body, of a piece once more, rise up: uncanny forward roll. The head snaps forward, a final, sickening crunch as linkage reconnects, vessels rezip themselves and the eyes, regaining their light, spit nails into the air, firing them with the force of bullets at the parcel there, on the desk before the window.

  Within the parcel, a pinkish light.

  The man – it is a man – crouches forward, and the chair tucks itself up under him. He reaches for the open box, and the pinkish light within; the smell of plastique.

  The window mesh zips itself shut.

  Jorge Katalayo sits at his desk, bathed in light.

  The light unfingers his eyes, and his final thoughts form.

  He knows what this is.

  They offered him the north. Let’s draw a line, they said. FRELIMO sits above the line, the Portuguese sit south – where all the money is.

  So history repeats itself, he thought. Tragedy in Korea; farce in Vietnam; in Mozambique: pantomime.

  He told them no. No north and south. No black and white. No rich half and poor half. All his life he has been sealing what should never have been split.

  Dr Julius Nyrere in his slippers – they met at the UN – ‘What now, Jorge?’

  They talked till dawn. Geneva, Stockholm, Kensington Park. The money there for them, the friendly faces – the easy handshakes and their ruinous consequences. How many old friends lived their lives now behind tinted windows, gun-toting relations and foreign contracts?

  We kept each other strong, Julius. Together, we kept our hands by our sides.

  A Chinese delegate congratulated us on our self-reliant approach to revolution; on our belief in our own people’s capacity for autonomous change.

  We sent him away, too.

  A life spent piecing together what should never have been split. What I could never get that oaf Kavandame to understand.

  Kavandame, Mozambique’s great resistance leader, now gone cap-in-hand – this according to yesterday’s phone call – to Cabo Delgado’s fascist governor: Please sir, let me have my square of earth!

  As if clearing the whites out of his personal back yard will make a difference. Prick, thinks Jorge Katalayo, closing the book he has been sent, and the pink fire withdraws, unblackening his hands.

  How funny, how apposite, that it should come in two volumes. That nice boy’s present. Dictionaries do, of course. A to K and L to Z. We split things for convenience, then we mislay the half we need. Not a profound flaw. Not a complex human condition. We just bungle things.

  Where’s the cap to this pen?

  Black and white. A split as deep as language. A split on which his early life was built.

  ‘After my father died, my mother said to me: You must learn the white man’s magic.’

  He thinks: I wish to God I’d never come up with that line.

  White man’s magic! It’s not even true. He’d been nervous – first time in America, big opportunity, the Phelps Stokes fund giving him a shot at the education the Portuguese authorities had tried their damnedest to deprive him of. Even to the point of a PIDE interrogation. ‘You vill say uz vot you bin tot!’

  Makes me sound like an elf, he thinks, irritated, tying the string around the box. Wondering what’s inside.

  His brand-new American girlfriend is taking her clothes off.

  His brand-new American girlfriend calls from the bedroom: ‘Don’t be long.’

  Jorge at his desk: ‘Just want to see what this is.’

  His brand-new American girlfriend: ‘Now?’

  Jorge: ‘Sure.’

  His brand-new American girlfriend is on her way to the bedroom: ‘You coming to bed?’

  This is the house owned by a foreign woman, a friend of Julius Nyrere, where Jorge Katalayo comes in secret, under the very noses of the Portuguese, alone or with his girlfriend, to read, to write his speeches, to swim in the shallows and watch the herons and the bee-catchers. To think. Sometimes, when he can bear it, to remember his wife; which is, of course, to remember what his daughter, tiny and frightened and told what to do, did to his wife; and from there to remember what a ruin it all is, beyond hope of consolation, beyond the healing powers of any girlfriend, beyond the combined healing power of all the girlfriends in America, or even the touch of his grown daughter’s hand, as they each grope blindly for a forgiveness neither can provide.

  A box of books arrives.

  *

  Yelena’s son was fast asleep by the time we reached the house. Carefully, she tucked him into his wicker crib, then went into the kitchen to make a pot of tea. She set the tray down before me. As she poured, she said, ‘I’m glad you answered the call. I mean I’m glad that you’re here. That you’re helping us. That you came to be a cooperante.’

  I said, ‘The main reason I came was to find you. You hid yourself well.’

  She sat opposite me. ‘And now you’ve found me?’

  ‘I don’t suppose I was the only person upset by what happened.’ If she could be suave, so could I.

  ‘No. I don’t suppose you are.’ She was not afraid. ‘Do you know I have been officially pardoned?’

  ‘Does that make you feel more secure?’

  She shook her head. ‘No.’r />
  Well, let her have her tragic mistake. What did it matter what she had meant to do? True, FRELIMO had slid more under Soviet influence, but who was to say whether the paranoiacs running South Africa would have treated their upstart neighbour any differently? It wasn’t as if the Soviets ever achieved much in the region. They didn’t even take Mozambique into their development zone, and the materials they exported in the name of aid were shoddier than even our own meagre home production. So really, in all honesty, what did any of it matter?

  ‘I’m glad,’ she said, ‘that I’ve had the chance to tell you what really happened.’ She imagined she had given me a gift. These days she’d probably say that she was ‘offering me closure’. I was spared that, at least.

  I said, ‘You know I don’t believe you.’

  She shrugged.

  ‘Do you want to know why?’

  I told her what Jorge Katalayo had told me about her mother.

  ‘He’s off gallivanting across Europe, leaving you and Memory to rot in some aldeamento. He never mentions you. He has girlfriends. He makes one inflammatory speech too many, and suddenly – half a world away – there’s a gun being pressed into your hands. Your mother’s lying there on the floor, crippled and bleeding and screaming.’

  ‘You don’t know this.’

  ‘I think you blamed him for that, just as much as he blamed you.’

  ‘You’re not one of the family. You don’t have the right—’

  ‘He made a speech once. About how the men and women of this country hate each other. You see, he understood. This is my gift to you. This is what I came here to tell you. He knew what was coming and he knew, when it came, it would be from you.’

  ‘Samuel Calange says you’re plotting to kill him.’ I had thought our exchange was done, but I was wrong. As I was about to pedal away, Yelena had this gift for me.

  ‘What?’

  Yelena shrugged. ‘He says you paid Redson to stage an accident with the earth-mover.’

  I didn’t know what to say.

  ‘I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you. There’s nothing you can do.’ She closed her door.

  Now it was my turn to be creeping around town at sundown, looking for reassurance.

  Naphiri’s response? ‘Never mind. Anyway, there’s nothing you can do.’

  President Chissano nodded glum agreement from half-a-dozen identical wall posters. Bleeding through the cheap, absorbent paper, like a bad dream resurfacing: ‘RENAMO MOTO’.

  The party administrator’s office boasted seats now, of a sort – old pinto bean sacks stuffed with grass. Together, we demolished a half-bottle of Powers – Malawian cane spirit – paid for with the villagers’ hard-earned kwacha. Another twist of the Goliata economic cycle.

  ‘How much trouble am I in?’ I had a creeping horror of the rural rumour mill. I had heard too many stories, from cooperantes and others, of people being driven into the bush on the strength of some stupid calumny.

  ‘Trouble? None at all,’ said Naphiri, and grinned. ‘If your plan succeeds.’

  She screwed the cap back on the bottle. ‘First watch,’ she reminded me. I fetched my gun and traipsed up the stairs onto the roof. The Italian’s earth-mover was kept under constant twenty-four-hour armed guard.

  Three hours on my own in the dark was more than enough time to convince me that I might be in serious trouble. Naphiri was complacent, full of crazy, romantic dreams about raising Goliata from the rubble: All these streets will be cleared! Sam on the other hand was a clever and experienced provincial politician.

  It was a mistake solely to associate Naphiri with the party, Sam with the matsangas. If Sam was afraid, then there was something for us all to be afraid of.

  Yelena and Naphiri had both told me there was nothing to be done. Of course there was something I could do and, once I had been relieved from my post, I did it.

  4

  Together, Samuel Calange and I made our silent way, under cover of night, towards our assignation. The crocodile of men following us must have made a strange, naive spectacle: fathers seeking news of missing sons; sons who, seeing the way things were going in this war, were thinking of performing a vanishing act of their own. All of us huddled close against the ghouls and vampires who, they say, haunt the graveyards here, so that a meal eaten in such a place is a kind of Hallowe’en.

  Sam and I prepared the braii. When I had gone to see him and agreed to this meeting, something had passed between us: mutual cowardice, nothing more, but it was a bridge between us now, and it made talking easier. Sam told me how, when he lost Goliata to Naphiri and the FRELIMO government, he had expected to find a role organizing the political opposition – and while Rhodesia had control of RENAMO, that was still what RENAMO at least claimed to be. Now, though, under Johannesburg’s ‘Total Strategy’, nothing was making very much sense. RENAMO wasn’t even an army any more. More of a wrecking crew, commanded by soldados simples, grunts, amphetamine psychotics, hopping-mad buggers with silver marbles for eyes and muscular sprinters’ thighs. ‘So where is all this bouncing powder coming from? I am asking. Are they dishing it out like Navy rum now? Or dropping sackfuls from the air? Have they taken to dusting the jungle?’

  I wasn’t in much of a mood to discuss politics. The disfigured faces of the children I’d been teaching had taught me all I needed to know about this war. The villagers who had accompanied us had gathered nervously together a few yards off, where the hill fell away a little, giving them a view of Goliata’s cane town. Sam called them to eat. They came and sat, his obedient flock. It was a strange reprise of Naphiri’s feast and, for a moment or two, the similarities helped me tune out our surroundings: the gravestones, and beyond them, the little unmarked graves.

  When they bothered to turn up, the forces of the Resistência Nacional Moçambicana proved a disappointing lot. The three adults wore burlap sacks over their heads to protect their identities. The effect was more pathetic than frightening. Half a dozen boys accompanied them; not one looked more than twelve. Presumably they had been press-ganged from other towns. They glared at us with a ferocity and a cynicism so extreme it looked rehearsed.

  ‘Where are your students?’ one of the hooded figures shouted. It took me a moment to realize he was talking to me. ‘Why didn’t you bring your students?’

  Before I could answer, the hooded figure to his left piped up: ‘His boots! He is wearing boots! He is in the militia!’

  ‘They’re my own boots,’ I said.

  ‘Where are your students? Why are your students not here?’

  I was – absurdly enough – reminded of my mother. (‘Have you done your university work? Have you much university work to do?’)

  ‘Is this all?’ The third ghoul was pawing over the food we had brought: flat baskets piled with roast chicken, nsima and relish, mangoes, tomatoes: ‘What is this shit?’ He squatted before the feast we had laid, his fingers playing over the dishes as though plucking some big, complicated musical instrument. ‘Where is the meat? We told you to bring us meat.’ His fingers were bony and pale: a skeleton’s fingers.

  ‘Where are the minds you have poisoned, teacher?’

  I tried to shrug. The muscles wouldn’t respond. I was shaking very badly.

  One of the bandit children turned to the hooded figures, weeping with frustration.

  ‘Can I kill him?’

  ‘We don’t want blood tonight,’ said the tallest of the hooded men.

  ‘Please. Just one of them.’ There were tears running down his cheeks. ‘Just him.’ He pointed at me.

  One by one, the villagers were running off. They knew what this was. They could see what it was turning into. I watched them kicking up these crazy zig-zags between the monuments, the wooden crosses; they were afraid of being shot in the back. Soon only Sam and I were left. I don’t know about Sam, maybe he stayed because he felt responsible. I know why I remained: I didn’t have the courage to run.

  The boy begged and begged. ‘Please let me kill hi
m.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘You can take his boots.’

  He stalked up to me.

  ‘Give me your boots,’ he said.

  I smiled at him, the way you smile at a big, angry dog.

  From off his back he pulled an AK half as tall as he was. ‘Take off your boots,’ he said, his finger tight on the trigger. He drove the muzzle into my windpipe. I grabbed it.

  ‘Let go of the gun,’ he screamed.

  I raised my hands.

  The boy pushed the cold muzzle into my throat a second time, much, much harder. ‘If he doesn’t give me his boots, can I shoot his head?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘What is this shit?’ screamed the figure playing with our food. He got up into the middle of the feast and trampled it. He worked his way around every plate until he came to Sam. He did a little dance before Goliata’s prospective mayor, kicking gobs of nsima porridge into his face. ‘Is this all you brought? We will kill them all, you piece of shit! We will crush their skulls!’

  A couple of the kids started shooting into the air.

  Sam opened his mouth to speak, to excuse himself, to apologize. With a striker’s precision, the hooded man kicked him in the mouth. Sam’s head snapped back like a boxer’s punch-ball. Bones snapped.

  I got my boots off at last. The child kicked them away from me and lifted the AK off my neck.

  Sam scrambled to his feet. He staggered about the cemetery, groaning, his hands under his jaw, holding it together.

  The child adjusted his grip on the gun and brought it down on my head. He was about ten years old but the gun was heavy. My whole skull flexed. I must have passed out for a couple of seconds. Something wet landed in my ear. It felt as though the blow had torn my scalp away, above my right eye.

  There was blood in my eyes, over my face and in my mouth. I had bitten through my tongue. I wiped the blood out of my eyes and caught a glimpse of the boy before the red flow blinded me again. He had rejoined his friends. He had his gun in one hand, my boots in the other. I wiped his spit from out of my ear.