1990 - Brazzaville Beach

by William Boyd; Prefers to remain anonymous

  A neuron transmits a pulse at about fifty times a second, and the impulse travels down the branching tree of the nervous system at a speed of approximately fifty metres a second. This neural timekeeper is never at rest for one instant; throughout our entire life the neural race never quickens or slows. Its regularity and constancy fulfil all the requirements for the definition of a clock.

  If this is indeed how our sense of personal time originates—by the ticking of the neural clock at fifty times a second —then one intriguing consequence of the theory is that other primates—whose neural impulses function identically to ours—should have a similar sensation of personal time also.

  Hope sits in her bright, loud house and looks out into the darkness towards the sound of the waves. It seems strange, but not inconceivable, that Clovis should have had a sense of his life passing by—a finite sequence of present moments—just as she does.

  As the blackness of night slowly cleared I saw that we had been running through a large plantation of teak trees. They were about thirty feet high and their big, flat, wrinkled leaves, the size of tennis racquets, hung motionless in the cool, still air of early morning. There was no undergrowth beneath the trees. The carpet of dead leaves was six inches thick—nothing grew here. I stood up and leant back heavily against the tree, causing the dry leaves above me to rattle. I was facing the way I had been running. All around me I could see the damage done to the level leaf floor by the running boots of the soldiers. None had come very close to me.

  I tested my ankle cautiously. It was slightly swollen, but could just about take my weight. A sprain, then. I dusted myself down, shook the twigs and leaf fragments and other living creatures from my hair and clothes, and limped off to see what lay beyond the teak plantation.

  It took me five minutes to reach the edge. All the way I followed the tracks through the fallen leaves left by the soldiers. Beyond the plantation edge was thick bush. Had Ian escaped, or had they caught him at the boundary? If he had reached the bush they would never have found him.

  The sun was rising on my right-hand side. I turned to face it and walked along the edge of the plantation. After about three or four hundred yards I came to a fire-break in the trees. From the fire-break, running out into the bush was an overgrown track. I set off up it, noticing that nothing had driven down here since last year’s rains. Creepers grew across the twin wheel ruts and the central stripe of turf was thick with weeds and knee-high grass. Every now and then I stopped and listened, but I heard nothing, only the calls of birds, loud and fresh—orioles, hornbills, doves.

  A forest path crossed the track, well-trodden and dusty, like the one we had been running on the night before. I decided to follow it, still heading east into the rising sun.

  The tree cover began to thin after half a mile or so. I passed one or two brackish pools stuffed with reeds. I was thirsty by now, but was not about to risk drinking out of these slime-fringed swamps. I limped on, scratching at my bites, trying to ignore the questions that yammered in my head, trying not to recall the expression on Ian Vail’s face in my last glimpse of him, before he ran away and left me.

  The landscape was changing around me. It was markedly greener and lusher. There were patches of tall, sedgy grasses, thick clumps of rushes and bamboo. One had the sense of a brimming watertable inches below the surface. On either side of the path were groves of palms and palmettas and curious, jagged-looking trees with tortured pale bark and tough viridian leaves that looked as if they had been cut from polished linoleum. We were in the Musave River Territories.

  At about midday, very tired, my throat raw and cracked, I heard a curious clucking in the undergrowth. I crouched down and lifted a trailing branch. It was a scrawny startled hen with three chicks. A hen. I let the branch fall. There must be a village nearby. I continued down the path.

  I saw the sagging thatched roofs some two hundred yards off, but it was suspiciously quiet, even though a few wisps of smoke appeared to be rising from cooking fires. I advanced cautiously. The path merged into the beaten grassless earth of the compound. The place hardly merited the description of village, really; it was just a cluster of huts around an old shade tree. There were no animals, I saw, so I assumed it was deserted, but there was a smell of smoke about, and underlying that a sour nutty reek that was unfamiliar to me.

  I passed the first hut and peered round the corner into the open space around the shade tree.

  Three dead bodies blazed there, tall, pale yellow flames wobbling along their length. The corpses were swollen but already charred sufficiently to make sex or age or manner of death impossible to determine. The smell coming off them seemed to pour down my throat—porky, nutty, sour and mineral all at once—like a foul medicine. I dry-heaved convulsively, three or four times, in an involuntary spasm. I spat copious saliva. Somewhere in my dehydrated body a little fluid remained, clearly. My cracked throat eased, my tongue was slick and moist.

  “Amilcar!” I shouted. “It’s me, Hope!”

  A man came out of a hut. At first I did not recognize him and I felt my body lurch with alarm. But then three of the Atomique Boum team appeared behind him and I gave a little whimper of relief. I limped towards them. I felt like crying; I felt I ought to cry, in a way, but I was too tired.

  “Hope…?” Amilcar said. I could see he was utterly and completely surprised to see me. He smiled, moved his head and the sun flashed off the new silver frames of his spectacles. Everything he wore was new. He looked incredibly smart in a new camouflage uniform, all green, brown and black lozenges, creaking with starch. He wore a funny little kepi-style hat, with a protective sun-flap at the rear, also camouflaged, matching his tunic and trousers.

  “My God,” I said. “What an outfit. Amazing.”

  “I’ve been promoted,” he said, pointing at the pips on his epaulettes. “I’m a colonel now. And this,” he pointed at the three boys, “is my battalion.”

  We laughed.

  We left the village with its still smoking corpses towards the end of the afternoon. We had caught the scrawny hen, cooked her and eaten her along with an old tough yam and some unripe plantain. The three boys were October-five, Bengue and Simon. They were silent and subdued, their faces solemn and watchful. These were the three we had seen making their escape across the kitchen garden. Nobody knew what had happened to Ilideo and the others. “I’m sure they got away,” Amilcar said with breezy confidence. “They’ll be moving back, like us. We’ll meet up, don’t worry.”

  I told him of my own experiences, of the attack and then the chase. Amilcar used my story to bolster the boys’ morale. Look, he told them, twenty men, armed men, were chasing Hope and she got away. The implication being that if I could do it anyone could. The boys said nothing; they looked searchingly at Amilcar as he spoke, as if keen to trap him in any equivocation, but his sincerity and his confidence were manifest. Later, I caught the boys glancing at me covertly, as if my presence guaranteed the safety of the other members of the team.

  I walked beside Amilcar as he led us out of the village. The boys trailed behind us, gunless, hands in pockets, sometimes talking softly among themselves.

  “How did those people in the village die?” I asked.

  He said he didn’t know. Perhaps a patrol. As far as he knew—as far as General Delgado’s intelligence was aware—units of the Federal Army were massing at two roads that led into the UNAMO heartland, but they were miles away.

  “So, it must have been a patrol,” he conceded, with a frown. “But I still don’t understand how they attacked the school. And at night. It’s not like them. Did you see any whites, among the soldiers?”

  I said I hadn’t.

  “There are more mercenaries now, in the army. Maybe it’s them. From Rhodesia and the Congo.”

  He went on speculating. Once all the UNAMO forces had withdrawn behind the huge marshes that fringed the River Territories there would be a stalemate. The Federals could not advance. UNAMO could regroup and rebuild. In any event,
he said, looking at the sky, when the rains came all fighting would necessarily stop.

  And then in the south EMLA would launch their offensive: in the south you could fight during the rains. So the Federals would have to withdraw and the UNAMO columns could move out into the field again.

  I looked at him, smart in his new uniform, as he talked with tranquil confidence about this chain of events as if they were inevitable and preordained. I glanced back at his ‘troops’, the remains of his personal UNAMO column, three frightened and confused teenage members of a volley-ball team, and wondered if all zealots saw the world in this simple way, devoid of any connection to the evidence on hand. Or perhaps he had gone mad.

  Before dusk we came to another deserted village, one without any corpses to burn. We searched the huts for food but found nothing.

  Just beyond the village was a road, tarmac, in bad repair. We climbed up on to it and looked up and down its deserted length. The light was soft and dusty and the first bats were out, ducking and jinking over our heads. Amilcar told me the lie of the land.

  To turn left, north, would take us to the causeway which crossed the great marsh. There we would rejoin the regrouping UNAMO forces. To turn right, south, would lead us to one of the two Federal Army units that were preparing to advance up this road sometime in the next two or three days.

  “And I assume that last bit of information is for my benefit,” I said.

  He shrugged and turned away. “If you want to go you can go,” he said, suddenly surly. “I don’t care.”

  I put my hands on my hips and looked around me. We could be almost anywhere in Africa, I recognized.

  The scene was at once typical and banal. A pot-holed road running straight through low scrubby forest, a scatter of decrepit huts, a strange dry smell in the air of dust and vegetation, a big red sun about to dip below the treeline, the plaintive chirrup of crickets.

  “I’ll stay with you a little longer,” I said, not wanting to walk alone down that road to meet the Federal Army. I punched my fist tiredly in the air. “Atomique Boum!”

  The boys smiled.

  We reached the causeway a mile further up the road, in the last of the fading light. It was about three-quarters of a mile long and ran straight across a wide expanse of marsh. The causeway looked solid and well constructed. The road surface was intact and the gradient of the banks was precise and maintained for its entire length. Here and there beneath it were large concrete culverts to permit the flow of water in times of flood.

  We walked across it briskly. A big white heron took off and shrugged itself effortfully into the evening sky. It was liberating to be in open space again, to have a large sky above and a sense of horizons receding. I began to realize, also, why Amilcar was so confident. It would not be difficult to defend this road.

  Amilcar was preoccupied. “These boys,” he said discreetly, disappointedly, “they are not true soldiers.”

  As we approached the end of the causeway our pace faltered. It was almost dark now. Amilcar told us to wait and walked forward into the gloom. Then we heard him shouting—a password, I assumed. After five minutes he came back, mystified. There was no one there, he said.

  We proceeded onward.

  At the end of the causeway was a small village—the usual huddle of mud huts on either side of the road. One hut had been demolished and its remaining thatch appeared burned. There was no evidence of other damage.

  On either side of the road were abandoned trenches, and in one sandbagged emplacement an anti-tank gun. It had a very long, slim barrel and it smelt new, of milled, turned metal and fresh rubber from its tyres. Its breech mechanism glistened with oil. To one side was a tidy stack of flat wooden boxes. As we explored we found more boxes and crates of abandoned equipment and ammunition. In a hut we discovered a hundred Warsaw pact Kalashnikovs, tied up in bundles of ten like awkward faggots of wood.

  “Where is everybody?” Amilcar wondered aloud. “What happened here?” He sounded baffled and hurt, as if this abandoned village and its profligate waste of weaponry were designed as personal slights.

  We foraged further and came across bags of rice and tins of pickled mackerel from Poland. The boys cooked up an oily stew of fish, rice, cassava and some leaf that Amilcar stripped from a bush.

  Then Amilcar rearmed the Atomique Boum team, giving them each a new Kalashnikov and draping them with shiny bandoliers of redundant machine-gun bullets. “It looks good,” he said. “It makes them feel strong.” He sent October-five out to the gun pit to keep watch on the causeway and the other two volunteered to accompany him. He was pleased at this development.

  “You see,” he said, after they had gone. “Now we are home they will fight.”

  We sat together in a hut, a lantern burning in the middle of the floor. We sat on piles of rubberized, olive-drab ponchos we had found. Amilcar was in talkative mood, and reminisced for a while about his past ambitions. He would never have worked in the capital, he said, not like the other doctors with their private clinics and Mercedes Benzes, all lobbying for jobs in the World Health Organization so they could live in Geneva. He would have stayed in his province, he said, and helped his people.

  “God will return me there,” he said simply. “When the war is over.”

  “God?” I said. “You’re not telling me you believe in God?”

  “Of course.” He laughed at my astonishment. “I’m a Catholic.” He reached into his camouflaged tunic and pulled out a crucifix on a beaded chain. “He is my guide and protector. He is my staff and my comforter.”

  “I never thought for a minute.”

  “Are you a Christian?” he asked.

  “Of course not.”

  “Ah, Hope,” he shook his head sadly. He seemed genuinely disappointed in me. “It’s because you are a scientist.”

  “It’s got nothing to do with being a scientist.”

  We started talking about my life, what I did, what I had done before. I told him about my doctorate, my work at Knap, Mallabar and the Grosso Arvore project. I talked animatedly, in a succinct and authoritative way. It seemed to me as if I were recollecting a vanished world, that I was summarizing some historical research project I had completed a long time ago. Professor Hobbes, the college, the Knap field study, Grosso Arvore and the chimpanzees seemed to have absolutely nothing to do with me any more.

  From time to time Amilcar would interrupt me to make a point.

  “But Hope,” he said at one stage, “let me ask you this. All right, you know a lot. You know many obscure things.”

  “Yes. I suppose so.”

  “So let me ask you this: the more you know, the more you learn—does it make you feel better?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “All these things you know—does it make you happy? A better person?”

  “It’s got nothing to do with happiness.”

  He shook his head, sadly. “The pursuit of knowledge is the road to hell.”

  I laughed at him. “My God. How can you say that? You’re a doctor, for God’s sake. What rubbish!”

  We argued on, good-naturedly. I sensed he was taking up positions for forensic effect, to prolong the debate, so I indulged him. Occasionally he would say things that made me pause, however. At one stage he asked me many questions about the chimpanzees, why we were studying them so intently. He seemed genuinely amazed—and this time I don’t think he was pretending—that I had spent month after month in the bush watching chimpanzees and recording their every act and movement.

  “But why?” he said. “What’s it for?”

  I tried to tell him but he didn’t seem convinced.

  “The trouble with you in the West is…” He thought about it. “You don’t really value human life, human beings.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “You value a monkey more than a human. And look at you: I hear you talk about a tree, about some kind of hedge.” He pointed at me. “You value a tree more than a human being.”

>   “That’s ridiculous. I—”

  “No, Hope, you have to learn,” he kept jabbing his finger at me, “you have to learn that a human life, any human life is worth more than a car, or a plant, or a tree…or a monkey.”

  THE WEIGHT OF THE SENSE WORLD

  I went out walking on the beach today. It was fresh and breezy and my hair kept being blown annoyingly across my face. For some reason, my thoughts were full of Amilcar and his mad moral certainties. I was distracted from them, fairly ruthlessly, when I trod on a fat blob of tar the size of a plum. It squashed between three toes of my left foot, clotted and viscous like treacle.

  The next hour was spent in a frustrating search for some petrol or spirit to clean it off. There was none in the house so I had to hobble through the palm grove to the village. I bought a beer bottle full of pink kerosene from one of the old trading women and, eventually, with some effort and enough cotton wool to stuff a cushion, I managed to remove all traces of oil from my foot.

  Now I sit on my deck, feeling stupid and exhausted, looking dully out at the ocean, a strong smell of kerosene emanating from my left foot, my toes raw red and stinging from the crude and astringent fuel.

  The weight of the sense world overpowers me some days, today clearly being one of them. I seem unable to escape the phenomenal, the randomly human. It’s at times like these that the appeal of mathematics, and its cool abstractions, is at its most potent and beguiling. Suddenly lean understand the satisfaction of that escape, savour something of the acute pleasure it gave to someone like John. All the itch and clutter of the world, its bother and fuss, its nagging pettiness, can wear you down so easily. And this is why I like the beach—blobs of tar notwithstanding. Living on the extremity of a continent, facing the two great simple spaces of the sea and sky, cultivates the sense that somehow you are less encumbered than those who live away from the shoreline. You feel less put upon by the fritter and mess of the quotidian. It is fifty yards from where I sit now to the foam and spume of the last breaker. There is not very much between here and there, you think, to distract you.