I waded across the stream to look for Conrad. I found him twisted and bloody under the mesquinho bushes. His right hand had been torn off at the wrist, and he waved the stump at me in parody aggression. His face was red and pulpy, minced by Darius’s fists and nails. But his brown eyes looked at me as directly as ever. Accusing? Pleading? Hostile? Baffled?
I crouched round behind him, so he couldn’t see me, and fired once into the top of his head from six inches away.
I sat down on a rock for a while. When I stopped shivering I wet my face in the stream. Then I filled a pocket with mesquinho nuts, skirted the bodies of Darius and Pulul and walked back to the village where Joao was waiting patiently for me.
I felt much better. I was glad I had killed Darius and Pulul. I was glad I had been there to end Conrad’s suffering. I recovered my nerve and calm quickly. I knew my conscience would never be troubled, because I had done the right thing, for once.
The chimpanzee wars were over.
EPILOGUE
I look out on the beach. A heavy shower of rain has just passed over. In the sun the warm teak planks of my deck steam visibly, as if a vat were bubbling beneath them. Out at sea the sky is filled with the soft baggy furniture of clouds—the dented bean-bags and winded sofas, the exploding kapok cushions. The wind hurries them away, and leaves the beach to everyone and me, washed and smooth.
My house, you will have guessed a while ago, was Usman’s. His legacy to me. I spent most of my severance pay from Grosso Arvore renovating it and moved in as soon as the roof was on. I had his fine drawings of his horse-fly aeroplanes framed and they hang now on my sitting-room wall above my bookcases. Usman with his vivid dreams of flight…
And they were dreams. I bought a book (I don’t know why—because I missed him, I suppose), a history of the exploration of outer space. On reflection, I should not have been that surprised, but I have to tell you it came as something of a shock to learn that there were no Egyptian astronauts. Not one. There were Vietnamese, Indian, Syrian, Mexican and Saudi Arabian, but not a single Egyptian. But Usman’s lie does not really bother me: the dream enchanted for a moment, which gives it a kind of validity, I would have thought.
Usman has been much in my mind, recently. A week ago, the newspapers were full of a bizarre story. In a Latin American country an insurance claim was filed for a Mig 15 Fagot that had crashed on take-off. When the loss adjusters examined the wreckage it was discovered—from serial numbers on certain components—that this very jet had crashed before, here, in this country, a year previously, victim of a navaid failure while returning from a raid on FIDE positions in the central highlands. The plane had been lost without trace.
It has since transpired that, of the eight Migs lost to navaid failures, the wreckage of only three was ever located. There has been a hum of scandal in the air; the noise is all sour accusation. A former minister of defence has been forced to resign over his business connections with a Middle East arms dealer. Nothing can be proved, but there is a powerful suspicion that, while the war was at its height, these jets were being systematically stolen by their pilots, flown to a foreign country, repainted and covertly sold.
Of course, I realize there were some genuine navaid failures, some genuine crashes, so who can say? Who can be sure of anything? But I have my own strong intuitions, and a curious feeling that one day the former owner of this beach house may pass by to check on the renovations.
And, strangely enough, everywhere I go now, I think I see him. There are many Syrians and Lebanese here, and my glance is always lighting on bearded or moustachioed men (somehow I imagine he would grow a beard…).
It reminds me of that time before I met John Clearwater, when my life was gravid with the anticipation of our encounter; the air thickened with the imminence of that meeting.
I step out on to the deck and squint out to sea, over the refulgent ocean, the sun warm on my face.
John Clearwater.
I had hoped there would be a message in the notebook he left on that stone bench, but there was nothing, apart from some scrawled, runic equations. So I am left with my imagination, and I imagine that he did everything spontaneously, in a matter of seconds. He started to dig and, suddenly, could not tolerate what the future held for him and walked to the pond. It is the future that bears down on the suicide—all that time, waiting.
John selected his slab of stone, eased it out of its mossy socket, hugged it to him and waded out to the centre of the pond and fell forward. One deep, open-mouthed breath would be enough. What cannot be avoided, must be welcomed, as Amilcar had told me.
I look at my watch. I have an appointment with Ginga in an hour. I still work for the project, you might be surprised to learn. I meet people off planes, organize transport and supplies in town for the two research stations. It was Ginga’s idea: now they were twice as large, the project needed a contact here, an administrator. They pay me reasonably well; there is no shortage of funds since the book was published. Primate: the society of a great ape. Look it up, check it out. Read the large footnote on page 74. “We acknowledge here the invaluable work of Dr Hope Clearwater…”
I have not been back to Grosso Arvore—Ginga thinks it prudent to stay away—but I have seen Eugene Mallabar three times, briefly. He greets me fondly, but with a distant pomposity—a false avuncular charm. “My dear Hope…”, “Ah, Hope, bless you…” He spends more time in America these days, lecturing. Ginga and Hauser run the research stations on a day-to-day basis. Nothing has ever been said about that time in the forest. And no one, as far as I know, ever found the bodies of Pulul, Darius and Conrad.
I walk down the steps on to the beach. The heavy rain has levelled the ridges and obliterated the footprints. The sand is dimpled like a golf ball, firm and damp.
What now? What next? All these questions. All these doubts. So few certainties. But then I have taken new comfort and refuge in the doctrine that advises one not to seek tranquillity in certainty, but in permanently suspended judgement.
I walk along the beach enjoying my indecision, my moral limbo. But it never lasts for long. The beach endures, the waves roll in.
Two dogs appear from the treeline and sniff at the tidewrack. My beefy Syrian neighbour jogs down from his beach house in a pair of indigo swimming-trunks. He waves cheerfully at me. “The sea is always fresher after rain,” he shouts, and sashays confidently into the surf. I wave back. A boy watches three goats graze in the palm groves. A crab sidles into its hole. Someone laughs raucously in the village. The webbed shadow of the volley-ball net is sharp on the smooth sand. I examine these documents of the real carefully, these days. The unexamined life is not worth living.
THE END
Table of Contents
PROLOGUE
BRAZZAVILLE BEACH
WHAT I LIKE TO DO
THE MOCKMAN
THE WAVE ALBATROSS AND THE NIGHT HERON
THE ZERO-SUM GAME
NOISE OR SIGNAL?
THE MARGIN OF ERROR
DIVERGENCE SYNDROMES
THE INVERSE CASCADE
USMAN SHOUKRY'S LEMMA
IKARIOS AND ERIGONE
CABBAGES ARE NOT SPHERES
FERMAT'S LAST THEOREM
THE HAPPINESS OF THE CHIMPANZEE
PULUL
THE ONE BIG AXIOM
THE COSMIC DAWN
THE CALCULUS
FAME
THE CLEARWATER SET
DEATH OF A PROPHET
ECT
MINONETTE
THE NEURAL CLOCK
THE WEIGHT OF THE SENSE WORLD
THREE QUESTIONS
FERMAT'S LAST THEOREM II
TWO KINDS OF CATASTROPHE
INVARIANTS AND HOMEOMORPHS
FINESSE
THE LANGUID FIRE
EPILOGUE
&
nbsp;
1990 - Brazzaville Beach Page 34