2002 - Any human heart

by William Boyd

  The editor was a bearded ex-don, a Scot, who looked a bit like D.H. Lawrence, called Napier Forsyth. Somewhat dogmatic and humourless, I thought at first, though he warmed up when I told him he reminded me of DHL and mentioned that we’d met a couple of times. DHL’s beard was more gingery, I said, and he couldn’t hold his liquor. I think that’s what’s landed me the job, in fact: Forsyth couldn’t believe he was hiring someone who’d actually met Lawrence. For good measure I told him I’d met just about everyone—Joyce, Wells, Bennett, Woolf, Huxley, Hemingway, Waugh. As the names tripped off my tongue I could see his eyes widening and I felt more and more like a museum piece, someone to be pointed out in the Polity offices—‘See that old fellow over there? He knew…’ Forsyth had great hopes for the magazine: good backing, good writers, a world in turmoil that needed to be explained sanely and rationally. I appkuded his zeal—the zeal of new editors of new magazines the world over. As long as the cheques don’t bounce.

  Thursday, 21 August

  La Futina. With Cesare and Enzo↓ gone, one understands the limits of Gloria’s housekeeping talents.

  ≡ Cesare di Cordato died in 1965, aged seventy-seven.

  The garden is overgrown and the dogs have the run of the house. Everything looks battered, scratched and chewed. Gloria suddenly seems old, her face pasty and lined, her body racked by a loose bronchial cough that seems to start at her ankles. I made the mistake of walking into the kitchen and walked right out again. Every surface was smeared with grease and matt with dirt; enamel tins of dog food all over the floor.

  Still, to sit in the cool shade of a terrace playing backgammon, drinking Camparis with the Tuscan sun beating down outside, always soothes the spirit. Two lady friends of Gloria are also staying—visitors from the Isle of Lesbos, I would say, but amusing company for all that. Margot Tranmere (fifties) and Sammie (?) Petrie-Jones (sixties). They have a house in Umbria and live comfortably, I would guess, on a handsome Petrie-Jones trust fund. They smoke and drink enough to make me feel abstemious. Sammie claims to have read The Girl Factory. (‘Disappointing: I was expecting something completely different.’)

  One evening when they’d gone to bed Gloria said to me: maybe I should turn lesbo, what do you think? I practically dropped my glass in astonishment. You? I said. It’s not something you acquire, like a new hat, you have to have a predisposition for it. But I like the idea of a strapping young gel to look after me when I’m old and decrepit, she said. So do I, I concurred, remarking that she—Gloria—was burdened by the fact that she was possibly the most heterosexual person I’d ever met. I was alarmed to see tears shine in her eyes. But I’ve only managed to marry a swine and then a doddering aristo, she said. Well, look at me, I said, beginning to list my misfortunes. Who gives a shit about you? she said. You’ll be fine, you always have been. It’s me I’m worried about.

  Sunday, 14 September

  Ikiri. Term well underway. Gave my third lecture on ‘The English Novel’—Jane Austen (preceded by Defoe and Sterne). Happy to be back in Africa, happy to be in my home, 3, Danfodio Road. The campus is generous in size and laid out with care, with some thought for grand vistas. There’s a main gate, then a wide palm-lined boulevard leading to the group of buildings clustered round a tall clock tower. Here you find the admin, centre, the refectory, the junior common room, the theatre. The style is modern-functional—white walls, red-tiled roofs. Four halls of residence line the main boulevard—three male, one female—and radiating out from this main axis are leafy roads leading to the university department buildings—humanities, law, education, science—and the houses of the senior staff. There is a clubhouse with a bar and a restaurant, three tennis courts and a swimming pool. And on the fringes of the campus lie the villages of the junior staff (for which, read ‘servants’). It is a well-tended, well-managed, slightly artificial world. If you want something more exotic, more real, more Nigerian, you have to drive three miles into Ikiri, or risk the death-trap road to Ibadan, an hour away, where there are other dubs, casinos, cinemas, department stores and some excellent Lebanese and Syrian restaurants—plus all the louche diversions of an African city.

  My house is a low, two-bedroom bungalow set in the middle of a mature garden ringed by a six-foot poinsettia hedge. Casuarina pines, cotton trees, avocado pear, guava, frangipani and papaya flourish indecently, like weeds. The house has maroon concrete floors and a long veranda screened against mosquitos. I have a cook—Simeon—a houseboy—Isaac, his brother—a gardener—Godspeed—and a nightwatchman—Samson.

  When I arrived back from Lagos Airport I was late. We had been stopped three or four times at military roadblocks on the way and the car had been searched. All four of them were waiting for me, anxiously. ‘You family welcomes you, sar,’ Simeon said, as I shook their hands. He was pleased to see me. He was worried that the war might have prevented me from returning.

  Thursday, 25 September

  Posted off my first piece for Polity; an article that tries to analyse and explain why a war that theoretically should have ended in September 1967 with the capture of Enugu, the Biafran capital, is still going ferociously on, two years later. Napier wants something from me every fortnight, he says, which is just about do-able. Cheques are paid to the agency, which banks them in my London account.

  To the golf club in Ikiri this afternoon with Dr Kwaku. We play nine holes and Kwaku wins, three and two. He works the course with more intelligence than I do, firing low skittering iron shots into the ‘browns’ (tar mixed with sand, the truest putting surface in golf). Afterwards we sit on the terrace of the dub house and drink Star Beer—big cold green bottles, misty with condensation. Pondering my artide, I ask him why he thinks the war is still going on. He says that if you have a rebel army fighting for its life faced with another army that doesn’t want to fight—and, moreover, that can only be persuaded to go through the motions fuelled by free beer and cigarettes—then, by definition, you are going to have very protracted hostilities. He shrugs: which side has nothing left to lose? The day is hazy and overcast. The sun, as it sets, is a fuzzy orange ball above the rain forest. Bats begin to swoop and jink above our heads. Dr Kwaku is in his forties with a wide strong face, balding. He’s a Ghanaian, he says, don’t ask him to explain Nigerians.

  [October]

  I miss New York more than I would have imagined. I miss those perfect spring days. Wraiths of steam rising from the manhole vents backlit by slanting early-morning sun. Cross-streets thick with cherry trees in bloom. The way time seems to slow to a crawl in diners and coffee shops. There was a coffee shop near the gallery on Madison where I used to go: I think they had a policy of hiring very old men with hardening arteries to be their waiters. These men moved with a particular slow, rolling gait and spoke very quietly. All hurry ceased, a curious calm pervaded this place—time moved at their behest, not vice-versa.

  All these thoughts of my US years were prompted by a trip to Ibadan with Polly [McMasters]↓ to see Shirley Machine in Sweet Charity.

  ≡ A colleague in the English Literature Department.

  We went to a Syrian restaurant afterwards and ate lamb with raisins and spices. When I dropped her back at her house she asked me in for a nightcap and I knew—you always know—that more was on offer. I said no thanks, gave her a peck on the cheek and went home to Danfodio Road.

  Polly is an overweight, blowzy woman in her forties. Never married, bright (M. Litt on Restoration playwrights) and perhaps my closest friend out here. We are united in our loathing of the Desiccated Coconut↓ but I don’t want to have an affair with her.

  ≡ The nickname of the entirely bald Professor of English at Ikiri, Prof. Donald Camrose.

  However, it makes me realize that the last time I had sex with anyone was with Monday in August 1964. The memory is fresh but somehow I’m not missing it. Getting old? There is the wife of a man in the French Department whom I covet rather. A tall solemn Moroccan or Tunisian woman whom I see at the club with her young kids. She’s a regular on t
he tennis courts and plays a fierce, concentrated game. She comes into the club afterwards, her shirt soaked with sweat, the material semi-transparent, revealing her brassiere beneath. I’ve yet to meet her but she’s begun to acknowledge my smile with one of her own. You old goat.

  Isaac has gone on a two-week holiday back to the east. His parents live in a village near Ikot-Ekpene, an area that has seen a lot of fighting. News came back diat the village had been liberated by the Federal Army and he wants to see if the family home is still standing. Most of the damage is done by indiscriminate bombing rather dian artillery, and it is the Nigerian Air Force rather than die army that seems to draw die civilians’ ire. The air force has a couple of squadrons of Russian MiG 155 piloted by East-German and Egyptian mercenaries. I saw a row of diem parked at Lagos Airport when I came back; tubby olive-drab planes with a gaping intake at the front like an open moudi. The joke going around is diat die pilots have been told that legitimate targets can be identified by die red crosses painted on diem. Hospitals were die air force’s prime target but now die Biafrans have painted over dieir red crosses attention has been turned to markets—also very easy to identify from die air. Incidentally, all this was die subject of my last Polity article. It created something of a stir, according to Napier, and he wants me to go down to Lagos to receive full accreditation from the Ministry of Information.

  [November]

  Lagos. Press briefing at the Ministry of Information. A smart young captain widi an Oxbridge accent blamed this year’s exceptionally rainy rainy season for die Nigerian Army’s lack of progress. A Polish journalist told me diat a Super Constellation flies into Biafra every night packed widi weapons and ammunition. They call it die Grey Ghost, and its deliveries are keeping Biafra alive as die heartland slowly shrinks. In fact die Biafran Army has never been better armed and supplied and now there’s so little territory left to defend the troops are highly concentrated. When he was asked about starving women and children, the young captain denied there was any malnutrition—all Biafran propaganda, he claimed.

  I spend the night at the airport hotel, the Ikeja Arms—I’ll fly back to Ibadan tomorrow. I like this old hotel with its big dark bar filled with off duty aircrew and stewardesses. They provide that little hint of raffishness that the transient always brings to watering holes like this. Add to this a tropical night, copious alcohol, a nation involved in a civil war—1 almost expect Hemingway to walk in.

  Friday, 14 November

  A distraught Simeon came to see me and said that he’d received news from home that Isaac had been taken by a Biafran Army recruiting patrol. They are drafting anyone they find into the army—they’re not fussy. ‘Anyone with a penis will do,’ Simeon said. These men are given a few days’ basic training and are then sent to the front. He asked permission for leave to try to find him: I told him he could take my car.

  §

  Later. Change of plan. I’m going with him. I was taking the 1100↓ down to the garage to fill it up with petrol for Simeon when the idea came to me.

  ≡ LMS had bought his predecessor’s car when he arrived in 1965—an Austin 1100.

  Here was my chance for a Polity scoop. So I filled up and stuffed three extra jerry cans in the boot. Then I went to the bank and drew out 200 Nigerian pounds and returned home to tell Simeon the new plan. I painted PRESS on the windscreen of the car in whitewash and bought a small Nigerian flag that I fitted to the radio aerial. We set off tomorrow, before dawn. We’ll drive on back roads to Benin and then head down the Niger River delta to Port Harcourt and then circle round as close to Ikot-Ekpene as we can reach. I calculate it’s about a 400-mile drive, all told—about two days on Nigerian roads. In Nigeria time and distance have a different relation to each other than elsewhere. For example, it’s about a hundred miles from Ikiri to Lagos but one allows four hours for the journey: a dry-mouthed, hyper-cautious, nerve-racking drive on the most dangerous highway in the world.

  Saturday, 15 November

  Benin. Hotel Ambassador-Continental. Benin was captured by the Biafrans in 1967 on their blitzkrieg drive west in the early days of the war, the only time they managed to seize great swathes of Nigerian territory. I remember the panic even reached the university: Dr Kwaku had a slit trench dug in his garden just in case of air raids. The incursion didn’t last long but the Biafran Army at one stage was only a hundred miles from Lagos.

  In the bar of the hotel I watch news footage on Nigerian TV. Federal forces occupy a Biafran village. Big men with guns—bigger in their uniforms—push around tiny skinny men in tattered vests and shorts.

  The drive here was pretty uneventful and we were only stopped at one roadblock. I showed my accreditation papers, my pass and said ‘Press’ to the young soldier leaning through the window. He said, ‘BBC?’ I nodded and we were waved through. Clearly the magic word. I don’t think ‘Polity’ would have the same ring.

  Simeon explained to me that he was against the war because he’s not an Ibo. He refers to it as ‘the Ibo war’. He is an Ibibio—they speak a different language from the Ibos. So too do the Efiks and the Ijaws, the Ogoni, Annang and many other tribes all subsumed under ‘Biafra’ by the dominant Ibos. They don’t want to be part of Biafra, Simeon said. They don’t want to be the wives to the Ibo husband.

  Simeon is sleeping in the car and I have a room on the third floor overlooking an empty swimming pool. The hotel is busy, full of different nationalities, and most of them aren’t soldiers—Russian engineers, Italian contractors, Lebanese businessmen, British ‘advisors’. I asked a burly-looking Englishman about reaching the front and he said there was no front line, just a series of roads heading for Biafra with soldiers on them. When you could hear gunfire or the soldiers wouldn’t let you proceed further you could assume you had reached the front.

  I had some chicken and rice in the dining room and returned to the bar for a final beer. There were a few drunk Federal Army officers with their girlfriends. I took a sleeping pill and went to bed.

  Sunday, 16 November

  We came through Warn and skirted Port Harcourt. A lot of military traffic on the road and also the bizarre sight of an ocean-going yacht on board a tank transporter—some brigadier’s loot, I suspect, going back to the marina at Lagos. Following Simeon’s directions we left the main road at Elele and headed vaguely eastwards. At Benin we had been told that Ikot-Ekpene had been recaptured by the Biafrans and that the front was now on the Aba-Owerri road. Simeon said that if we could reach Aba he would make his own way to the village by bush path. We had one tricky experience at a lonely roadblock where young soldiers, beer heavy on their breath, ordered us out of the car, waving their guns theatrically. I gave them some money and cigarettes, which calmed them down, and they told us that the other journalists were at the Roundabout Hotel near a town called Manjo, just south of Aba. We arrived at the Roundabout Hotel at four in the afternoon. When I stepped out of the car I could hear the distant thud and mumble of artillery somewhere to the north. Simeon slipped off his clothes, down to a pair of shorts, and said he would leave straight away. I gave him some cash and he set off up a bush path jauntily enough, I thought. I think he was pleased to be doing something—and this was home to him, after all. I told him I’d wait for three days, if possible, then I’d have to head back.

  I checked into the Roundabout and was provided with a mean, insect-infested room of unpainted concrete. The single bed has grey nylon sheets and the electricity is very erratic. The hotel sits to one side of a half-finished roundabout, hence its evocative name. One metalled road comes into this roundabout and the same one leaves. Other junctions that would have given the roundabout a real function have yet to be created. Not far off is a supply depot for the troops who are either retaking—or consolidating their hold—on Ikot-Ekpene. The bar of the hotel, occupying most of the ground floor, is lit with purple and green fluorescent lights and is populated most hours of the day by a dozen or so bored prostitutes with afro hair and very short skirts. From time to time
one of these girls will haul herself to her feet, shuffle over and listlessly proposition you. It’s hot in the bar, most of the roof fans don’t work, but the beer is slightly chilled.

  At about 8 o’clock this evening, a jeep pulled up and deposited the two other journalists. One was the Pole I’d met in Lagos—Zygmunt Skarga—and the other was a lean, twitchy Englishman with long blond hair and mirror glasses. He was obviously put out to see me there and immediately asked if I was working for The Times. When I said Polity, he seemed to relax—‘Good mag,’ he said. His name is Charles Scully. We drank some beer and talked. Scully has been inside Biafra and seems to have a disciple’s reverence for Ojukwu,↓ Zygmunt was more circumspect.