I walk out into the main concourse which is big and utterly empty; there are no chairs, no flightboards, no people. At the far end of the hall a notice above a little stall tells me that coffee is supplied by the Consumer Unit of the Department of Trade. A second notice tells me that there is no coffee. On the wall is a picture of Comrade Atkins, who wears a tunic which buttons up to the neck and has a high collar; the face is young, boyish, and looks very like that of a fat peacock, the lower lip juts, almost touching his nose which is thin and beaked. Altogether Atkins has a pavonine look about him. The inscription beneath the portrait reads: ‘Comrade Atkins, Number One Peasant.’
Well, what do you think, as you look down on us from your great height, from study or cell or stage or wherever you sit in judgement? No doubt you feel there are things to be retrieved in even the most hopeless and horrible cases because you don’t see things in terms of black and white, as we are constantly being told, but understand that man is meant to be saved. You could, I suppose, if it came to the push, show redeeming qualities even in the Number One Peasant of the People’s Republic of Zanj. I mean maybe he’s good at maths or works tirelessly for the eradication of the tsetse fly, or perhaps he plays the flute with majestic virtuosity, his fingers flying over the stops with the athletic assurance of a spider running? Though looking at that hard, beaky face, I have my doubts. But if you have this in mind you do not speak of these virtues, and the portrait on the wall of the Zanj International Airport gives no credence to such hopes.
Which is putting it mildly.
Outside the airport no expense has been spared in laying out the parking facilities. There are magnificent concrete erections marked Long Term Parking, and Buses, Freight and Taxis, but there’s not a single bloody vehicle to be seen. It’s also very hot and I begin to have my doubts about wearing the swing-coat in dogtooth check, although I’m glad of my black straw picture hat. And Divina’s fluting voice vibrates in my ears: ‘Who says there ain’t no Christmas fairy?/Don’t knock my faith/Suck it and see.’
I put him on hold. This needs serious consideration, here I am in the middle of the bush without a car, contacts or accommodation and the only living soul I know is some guy who doubles up as passport control and customs and excise, if that is not to overstate his claim to sentience. The sun stands upon the distant ring of hills and shows their rocky peaks and for miles there’s nothing to be glimpsed but rock and sand, not a tree, not a blade of grass, not a petal interrupts the sameness of the scene. I feel like the first woman on the moon except that the people on the moon had a radio and a control tower back home in Houston and a lot of folks rooting for them. Moreover, they were properly dressed. I can feel the sweat beginning to trickle down the inside of my thighs, I always sweat there when I’m overcome by heat – and when I’m scared out of my bloody life.
I might have known that Passports and Customs would have another string to his bow. He draws up in a slew of pebbles in a green Datsun Sunny with a large pink plastic butterfly spreading its wings on the bonnet and, more alarmingly, a compass mounted on his dashboard.
‘How was I supposed to get into town?’
He does not answer until he has loaded my luggage and we are bumping down the dirt road.
‘I warned you about the innocence of vehicular traffic. Most persons arriving at the airport arrange to be met. But as soon as I heard the name of your friend, I knew there’d be no one to meet you. It doesn’t matter. I offer a first-class taxi service between the airport and the capital.’
‘But surely just because you haven’t heard of him doesn’t throw his existence into doubt?’
‘Oh, what do I know?’ he asks wearily. ‘I just drive a taxi.’ And that’s all he has to say on the matter.
The road is long, rutted, dusty and empty. A few thorn trees are dotted about here and there and the soil is red and seamed by erosion. We could be on Mars but eventually we get to the outskirts of the city. I know this because there are little shacks of wood and tin dotted around the place, and I mean around the place: everything here seems to spread out, as if the only thing they have plenty of is space. Also lying by the roadside are skeletons and the decaying carcasses of buck, a couple of bush pigs, and what looks like the remains of a donkey. Is this the result of a drought, a blight, a pest?
‘They got shot,’ comes the laconic reply, ‘by bandits.’
‘Why do they kill animals?’
‘These brigands are elements of the Zanjian defence force who can’t accept the lead given in restructuring the army by our leader, Comrade Atkins. They’ve deteriorated into scavengers and dissidents who machine-gun their food wherever they find it. They come from the Wouff tribe, mostly. They’re animists. They worship stones.’
‘Which tribe are you from?’
‘We don’t have tribes any more. Under the new order of Comrade Atkins they’ve been abolished.’
After the business of passport control, then the trick drawer in the customs department, and now the taxi service, I reckon he’s an Ite, and I hear the Redeemer’s voice: ‘A people not worthy to go on two legs, a milky, soppy, preachy congregation of hypocrites.’ But then he’d been pretty ratty about the Kanga as well. ‘All that bowing and scraping to Mecca, and a knife in the back when the praying’s over.’ Only about his own tribe, the Wouff, had he been poetical. ‘A lovely strong community, not since ancient Sparta has there been such a fierce and beautiful people, with a special reverence for poetry and the sacred rocks of their forefathers.’
‘Where are we going?’
‘Kingdom Towers, it’s the Hilton of Central Africa, best place in town.’
When I say ‘town’ I don’t wish to be misunderstood, this place is a cross between a slum, an industrial estate, a bidonville and a mud hut citadel. The place is pure Timbuctoo with Bon Marché making a takeover bid. The houses have mud walls painted with peacock tails and stippled with dotted lines in what I suppose has some aesthetic or religious significance but it gives the effect of painterly perforations, a zippered look as if they are made for tearing into sections. Here and there are attempts to build in what I suppose is regarded as the modern manner, in what I can only call English post-war style, flat roofs and walls in the sort of concrete the rain stains, and in this neck of the woods once the rains have fallen, the storm waters rushing past the foot of the buildings leave a highwater mark perhaps a metre up, a smudge of powdery rouge. Modernity has never amounted to much here, it has been born into the world wearing a flat roof, its edges sharp, its sides square, it has shot up above the mud houses for about the equivalent of two minutes, African time, and then it has turned into a vision of emptiness and despair, deserted bunkers with their windows smashed, their walls covered with posters and paintings and political cartoons. Karl Marx and Lenin and a fat rather jolly man I don’t recognise who looks a bit like Alfred Hitchcock.
‘Who is the tubby bloke?’
‘President Podgorny of the Soviet Union,’ comes the wholly unexpected reply. ‘He made a stop in Zanj when he was on an extended African tour some years ago. He visited one of our diamond mines and there he was presented with an uncut stone of considerable worth which he spat upon and rubbed on his trousers. I think he was just polishing it but there was a terrific debate about the meaning of this. One party said that the President had shown us all how much he hated material things by spitting on the stone. The other party said he had spat on the stone and then rubbed it on his trousers to look at his reflection in it. And this proved he was as greedy for the good things of life as anyone else. The argument led to blows and blood.’
‘You mean people killed each other over this?’
‘It was known as the War of the Stone. It turned mother against son, brother against sister. Of course the Wouff made it even worse. But then what can you expect of these primitives? They decided, on the basis of his performance, that President Podgorny was in fact their long-lost river
god come back to them. But that’s the Wouff all over. Show them a politician from Moscow and they’ve got themselves a new god because his head looks like a river boulder, or whatever, and the next thing you know they’re building shrines all over the place and painting his picture on the walls of houses. The Wouff have gods the way a cow has ticks. Let them catch a glimpse of someone who looks the least like a pebble, or a bit of rock, and bang! They’ve got themselves another deity. I tell you, their heaven must weigh a ton!’
‘A heavy heaven. I’m surprised it stays up.’
‘It doesn’t. The Wouff say that every so often the gods have a clear-out. They throw down to earth the lesser gods. You and I would call it hail, but not the Wouff: they say the gods are clearing out their cellars and the little gods are being hurled down to earth where they turn to water and this water then begins to erode the rock and turn it into new shapes and thus new gods.’
I look up at the sky which is like hot blue steel. ‘It can’t hail here very often.’
‘Once in ten years, maybe. And then you should see the Wouff! They run round with their mouths open and try to catch some of the little gods and swallow them because they believe that some of the divine power will pass into them. The storms here can be very violent. The damage done to the worshippers is pretty bad. Old women and children often die. The Wouff think this is hot stuff. I’m sorry to say that such sad, outlandish beliefs were encouraged in high places in the days before the coming of Comrade Atkins and his Committee of Salvation.’
‘Committee of Salvation?’
‘Right. It’s what we in Zanj call the government. Why are you smiling?’
‘Oh I just think it’s a good name. Maybe your Committee of Salvation can tell me where to find my Redeemer.’
He gets out of the car and fetches my bags, grunting significantly at their weight. ‘Listen, young person, go to other places if you wish spiritual enlightenment. Go to India if you want a guru, go to Kathmandu and get stoned. Go to America and fall in love with a television preacher. But don’t come to Africa looking for redeemers.’
‘Why not? Do you think I won’t find him?’
‘Of course you’ll find him. You’ll find any number of him. Africa has enough redeemers to fill the national football stadium. In Africa you could probably demand one man one redeemer – and you’d get it!’
‘Where are we now exactly?’
‘This is the centre of town. Most of those newer buildings you see across the road from you are government departments. The one there is the Ministry for Water and next to it is the Ministry for Herds and Grazing and then just down the road is the Ministry for Peasantry.’
‘And where would I find the Number One Peasant?’
‘He’s safe and sound in the Presidential Palace, top of the town, Patrice Lumumba Drive, you can’t miss it. You’ll see the guards outside. Walk around town as much as you like, only don’t go into the country unless your trip’s really well organised. It’s quite safe if you know what you’re doing, but as you saw, you get these Wouff bandits ruining the countryside, shooting up things. That’ll be ten dollars American or five hundred Zanj, plus ten.’
‘What’s the ten for?’
‘I told you, you’re overweight.’ He reverently takes the dollars I hand him and perhaps out of some obscure feeling of gratitude says in a loud whisper, ‘Don’t go out after dusk. Our curfew is very strict. And keep that diamond out of sight if you don’t want people to get the wrong impression.’
Kingdom Towers has a curving drive that leads past the front entrance where two dead palms in pots stand on either side of the door like deceased sentries. A doorman should have patrolled the area between the palms and he probably has once done so because on the tip of one of the withered palms hangs his grey top hat and this gives the tree a gruesomely cheerful look, like a skeleton wearing a wristwatch. And the town had architectural pretensions even before the glass stump called Kingdom Towers was built, because across the road are the remains of a nineteenth-century colonial villa, a gracious and pretty place once. The house seems to have been attacked on three fronts. It has been set alight. That’s clear from those big black streaks of soot darkening the crumbling walls which had once been painted a kind of ice-cream pink. It has been fired upon, and the bullets have made craters in the soft powdery pink plaster. And it has been neglected; much of the upper storey has collapsed, leaving only the window frames, which are incongruously protected by heavy wire mesh against which the blue sky presses. A spread of rather tired washing hangs along the balcony rail which runs the full length of the decrepit first floor and tells me that the place is still occupied. A tiny section of roof overhanging this catwalk is propped up by a rotting plank which bulges at several points with termites’ nests. In front of the house runs a hot red river of dust and out of the dust grow tall emaciated shrubs with broad green leaves.
Whatever you do, don’t believe what you hear about the Kingdom Towers. The place is a dump, a pit, a flea-bag. Above all, do not believe what the barman tells you. It is not the ‘Hilton of Central Africa’. The barman’s name is Kwatch and he is, I think, my friend. A little man, a gnome, a mannequin, and he doesn’t seem to have feet because behind the bar he bobs rather as if he were weighted like one of those dolls you can’t knock down, sad whiskers and buck teeth, a most delicate pink nose that you associate with rabbits, and he dresses in olive-green safari suits. His bar is surprisingly modern, smoked glass and a chromium counter, Congolese beer and Egyptian peanuts, beer mats from Albania. The swimming pool has been left to stand and has turned a poisonously milky green, the sort of colour which suggests that if sprayed on fields it would kill locusts or if introduced into the diets of rats would kill those scavengers in their hundreds. It was one of my first suggestions to Kwatch the barman, shortly after my arrival.
‘I haven’t seen any rats.’ He gives a sour little smile.
Kwatch is without doubt the twitchiest barman I’ve ever met. I can’t resist seeing his face lose colour. He does it so quickly! I ask about my father, being careful to spell the name.
‘Never heard of him. I’d remember it otherwise.’ He watches the door.
‘But you must have! He lived here for years. In Waq. He was a friend of the President – the one before the Peasant.’
Kwatch bobs along the bar in some agitation, and leans across. ‘Best not to talk of presidents here. You get people who object – like the police. And worse.’
‘Do you mean the Public Audit Bureau?’
He goes quite pale. I find that very interesting.
A group of little black boys use the swimming pool notwithstanding the venomous olive sheen upon its surface. Almost every day I see them leaving their games beside the rusted railway engines which stand alone in a field not far from us. They slip into the hotel grounds and dive into the poisoned green milk that was once chlorinated water and spit on the notice which says that costumes must be worn in the pool at all times and reserves it strictly for the use of the guests.
Those railway engines in the middle of nowhere really intrigue me, rusting up and waiting for the creepers to crawl all over them. Flowers poke out of their smoke stacks. The little boys clamber all over them from dawn to dusk, hooting and chugging and pretending to pull the bell and steam away into the blue distance, though of course these trains are going nowhere, they’ve come to the end of the line, it literally peters out in the dust beneath their big steel wheels. Perhaps the remaining track has been stolen, levered up and sold. This is Kwatch’s suggestion. Maybe there was a real station here once, he says, or a siding, and the whole damn thing has been lifted. This is Africa, says Kwatch, which is his way of explaining everything. As if that were a way of explaining anything.
The guests don’t miss the pool. They are too few in number. There is the Albanian delegation on the fourth floor, all short hair and smiles, young too, they look like American col
lege boys, with crew cuts, black blazers and red ties. In fact they bear a striking resemblance to the Four Preps; they are bouncy, cheery, and one longs to know if they can harmonise. Instead they go about the place handing out propaganda. Kwatch says that they have been sent over here to subvert the existing order, whatever that is. I think they have merely been abandoned, someone forgot them here, or perhaps there isn’t the money to fly them home so they wander about the marketplace pushing bits of paper into the hands of shoppers. It doesn’t do much good because the next thing you know, these Albanian tracts have been folded into funnels and used to carry salt (which is the way it’s sold here) or they’re bleeding soggily in the arms of a woman who’s just bought a load of monkey meat, or lizard or bushmeat or the variety of brilliantly feathered birds which are eaten in Zanj with great appetite. But I understand why the Albanians visit the marketplace with their propaganda which no one reads: it helps to pass the time.
I pass some of the time by dressing because I believe one is made, almost commanded, to look one’s best whatever the circumstances. I keep myself in trim. So what if I wander about the place exciting curious stares from all and sundry dressed in my Prince of Wales cropped jacket, a fake fur hat and riding breeches? Or if I choose to wear pink leather gloves despite the heat (if we took account of the heat we’d never wear anything). Or if, in the evening, I wear a ruby dress, red suede court shoes and a cummerbund when I wander down to the bar for a drink, who is to say me nay? Certainly not Kwatch. He knows I’m the brightest thing to have hit his bar in light years. But if, by contrast, I set off exploring dressed in a pair of black denim jeans and a silk camisole with shoe-string straps, well then what could be more sensible in this stewing weather?
My Chocolate Redeemer Page 26