My Chocolate Redeemer

by Christopher Hope

  The President is said to be in residence, bored soldiers patrol the entrance, notices appear written by hand, and stuck to the security fence: ‘Number One Peasant, Comrade Atkins, today welcomes the Ambassador of Libya …’, ‘Three Bandits were executed at dawn! Long live the People’s Republic of Zanj!’

  Now this sort of thing is all very well, but it’s simply not enough, is it? So I say again, there is not enough visible matter to hold the so-called universe of Zanj together. The observable material amounts, in my estimation, to no more than about twenty per cent of the total. So where is the missing matter and why can’t we see it? Well, I believe that it exists beyond the confines of Waq itself and that we can’t see it because it is dark matter. This then is my theory. It may sound a little unlikely, but my position is that we can show that my theoretical extrapolations point to a hidden universe, much larger than ours, an invisible neighbour. How can I know this? Well, you will understand that the universe has a propensity for arranging itself in patterns and sequences which have the mysterious power to conform to whatever the observer expects to find. To the anthropic principle that things are the way they are because we are, I add the fairy-tale principle: that things will look just as you wish them to look, so long as we provide ourselves with a special way of seeing. God does not play dice with the universe, someone insisted. My Uncle Claude replied that, on the contrary, the universe plays poker with God, and it’s about to call his bluff. I don’t think either of these things is true, God may not play dice, but I believe he does play hide-and-seek. I don’t expect you to take all this on trust, you will want some scientific proof, a clue, a sign that this hidden universe which I am investigating exists at all.

  My sign comes to me one evening about a month after arriving in Zanj. I am sitting having a drink in Kwatch’s bar. It is his habit to give me change in local currency, converting my American dollars into Zanjian money. Among the notes he hands me is one rather older than the rest, leaf-brown, wrinkled and rather frail, and this leads me to single it out before putting the change in my purse, smoothing it on the bar counter. Staring back at me, without his glasses admittedly, without his cap and without his field marshal’s baton, now with his head crowned, or haloed in a wreath, perhaps of laurel leaves, which gives him a rather Roman look, is Monsieur Brown. Now I know that my Redeemer liveth! And this is no trick, watch my hands carefully, check that I have nothing up my sleeves. The fact is that my friend has sent me a note from the other side. A window opens on the world next door and I am on my way, I am going through that window. Glass and all.

  The question is where to start? Actually that’s not very difficult to decide because, as we know, the universe looks much the same in every direction. I use the astronomical ‘we’ so that it should be understood that mine is a real scientific investigation and to alert the careful observer that my voyage is based upon the firmest scientific principles, for it is clear to anyone but the blind that there is something outside the city of Waq which draws things to it, something or someone, and this gravitational force must have an explanation even if we can’t yet say with any clarity what it is. Or who it is. I pack immediately.

  I’ve not told Kwatch of my plans but I think he knows. He’s taken to following me around the place with a hang-dog expression, the look of someone who hasn’t quite come to terms with himself. I can’t decide whether he gave me the banknote by accident, or was it a Freudian slip? Or did he want me to know? There’s something strange and apologetic about his manner and, although he doesn’t actually apologise, this sorrowing attitude of his worries me and so I make my departure arrangements quietly. Out of the mouths of barmen!

  In a little bag I pack a few changes of clothing, among them a little black cotton tulip-skirted dress with pink spots, a green silk jacket and trousers, a pink crepe button-through dress and rather pretty, dark-blue lycra stockings. I hide my bag of clothes at the back of the hotel on the river bank. On one of these sorties I see soldiers repairing and painting, sweeping and washing the main road that runs from the Presidential Palace to the hotel.

  I’m not exactly bowled over when I see from my window these guys marching up the main steps. They’re soldiers from the Presidential Palace, except they are soldiers no longer now. They’ve taken off their metal helmets and their boots and they wear dark-grey safari suits and carry briefcases. The Public Audit Bureau is on the march. Times change fast in Africa, it’s a matter of hats. I hear the little Roumanian manager shrieking at the auditors.

  ‘But the presidential suite is unfit to receive His Excellency. Please convey my joy at the suggestion, my grief at the unreadiness of the rooms. If only you’d given me some warning!’

  I slip out the back, claim my little travel bag and head for the marketplace. With an hour to run before curfew, I get on the yellow bus called Sweet Little Me, its roof piled at least two metres high with bags, pots, boxes, bicycles and blankets, which gives the bus a distinct list to the left. Climbing aboard with me are about thirty other people all carrying their goods and chattels, hens in baskets, snakes in basins, supplies of bushmeat, manioc and cooked maize. I am dressed for the road in crisp, classic tailoring, a long lean jacket, tapering trousers and fitted blouse; my scarf is covered with turquoise butterflies on a creamy ground and I wear a black straw hat. The beggars who haunt the marketplace give us a rousing send-off. They possess an incredible variety of disabilities, goitres, stumps, ganglions. There are blind old men led by boys, there are limbless babies carried by girls, there are here the champions of the thousand ills to which the flesh is heir, the marketplace is a terrible trading fair of infirmities and deformities. Yet the beggars are surprisingly cheerful, determined and imaginative. One plays tunes from ‘Orpheus in the Underworld’ on a nose flute; another with no eyes but round, milky sockets carries a tape-recorder and has gone high-tech, slipping a tape into his ghetto-blaster and broadcasting at tremendous volume his appeal for alms for the love of Allah. Before boarding the bus I scatter small change like the sower with his seed.

  ‘You’re generous,’ says the driver, who introduces himself as Sessou. ‘You give for the love of Allah.’

  ‘No, just because I feel sorry for them.’

  We take off in a storm of dust into which the beggars dissolve. I can hear the luggage on the roof, tied down with rope and wire, creaking protestingly; our list to the left is even worse.

  I ask the driver what I should pay.

  ‘First stop is Bamba. Where are you going?’

  ‘Wherever you’re going. I want to explore the country. How much, please?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. When you know where you’re going, you’ll know what to pay. You will recognise the place when you get there?’

  ‘Certainly.’

  Perhaps I haven’t dressed very wisely because the bus is twice as full as it should be and smells to high heaven. It’s not only the crush of people and goods, the stale sweat and dust, but one of the anteaters has diarrhoea and the packets of bushmeat give off a strong gamey aroma of blood and skin that make me feel pretty queasy. Mr Sessou speaks English, French and a number of the vernaculars. The people on the bus are a tribal mix: there are Wouff, tall, dark and silent, semi-naked but for little leather skirts, wearing round their necks a small stone with a hole bored through the centre strung on a leather thong. There are Ite, mostly in Western clothes, the women with their heads swathed in bright turbans. And there are the Moslem Kanga in flowing white. I sit beside a lady as wide as she is tall, her feet on a can of paraffin which reeks with that boringly chemical brazenness, so much at odds with the smell of fruit, of cured hide and the excretions of the captive animals around me. My companion carries on her lap a caged monkey, a tiny, beautiful creature which grips the bars of its cage with exquisite hands and stares at me with passionate, bewildered eyes. Because of the pronounced list of Sweet Little Me I tend to lean rather heavily on my companion as we race along the dusty roads, as i
f I were a small white moon captured by her superior gravity, but she’s soft and warm as a bread oven and pays me the compliment of appearing not to notice by keeping her eyes closed. Thirty kilometres or so outside Waq, just as the sun is setting, a golden performance in an utterly empty huge blue sky, we stop.

  ‘Customs post.’ Sessou’s announcement is met with groans and hisses of disapproval from the passengers.

  I walk up to the front. ‘A customs post? So soon? But we’ve only been travelling about twenty minutes. Surely we haven’t reached the border yet?’

  ‘In Zanj,’ Sessou explains, ‘we’ve got customs posts inside the country. They’re all over the place. All over! It’s the way the soldiers and the official cadres gather income. The story says that one day a soldier saw a customs post at the border. He saw them collecting money. And he said to himself, because he was a clever soldier, let me start one! And he did! Now they all go off somewhere and start their own – it’s the soldiers’ industry.’

  A soldier with a rifle climbs aboard and mutters something at Sessou, who commands us to produce our pièces d’identité – travel permits, passports, our papers, our permissions.

  No one stirs. They all regard the soldier warily and he studiously does not return the sullen looks of the bus passengers. The anteater’s diarrhoea continues noisily. The soldier mutters again and stomps off the bus, his steel boots noisy on the stairs. Sessou leaves his seat with a rueful shake of his head. ‘He say all luggage must be unloaded. Taken off the roof. Examined for contraband. All. Everything. On the other hand we must pay him one thousand dollars Zanj in travellers’ levy.’

  It’s clear that ‘on the other hand’ means that this is the hand to be greased.

  ‘Offer him twenty American dollars.’

  I’m surprised by the strength of my voice and its impatience.

  Sessou is swift off the mark. He confers with the soldier, money changes hands, the soldier salutes and we rattle away into the sunset. My fellow passengers are so stunned for a moment that we’ve come through it quickly and painlessly that they gaze at me quite boggle-eyed and then they break into applause. I seize my moment. You see, we live and learn. The alternative is that we die and nature learns. I speak in evolutionary terms, of course. But I really haven’t time for evolution. I’m not a cathedral of bacteria, a cloud of particles, some sort of special plastic material on which nature plays and builds simply to keep itself going. I am me, Bella, now – or never.

  I take out the banknote, the sign from the other world, and show it to my companion and her reaction is a religious spectacle, a missa solemnis of enthusiasm. She throws her hands up to her mouth, then to her ears; she closes her eyes and then opens them again and, seeing that the picture doesn’t change, throws her hands into the air once more and jiggles them in excitement and ecstasy. I get the feeling that if she could she’d go down on her knees but the paraffin can and the monkey prevent that. Her excitement spreads to the other customers who leave their seats and crowd around us, chattering and pointing and touching their hands together in gestures of reverence. The driver Sessou shouts from the top of the bus that the movement of people is adding to the list and making driving dangerous.

  ‘All passengers return to seats. Movement will unroad us!’ When he is ignored he pulls over to the side of the road and comes back to investigate the cause of all the excitement. The passengers are reaching out to touch the frail banknote from whose centre, beneath a circle of laurel leaves, a Caesarian image, my Redeemer glowers deeply at the world. How wonderful to see him so regally displayed. People kiss their fingers and reach out to touch his face and I remember then the stories that he told me about the belief in the healing powers of his person.

  ‘They know him!’ is all I can say to Sessou. ‘Look, they all know him!’

  ‘Naturally they know him. He is the Redeemer, he ruled us. Supreme ruler and great man of Zanj.’ Sessou is pleased and proud to make the identification.

  ‘But in the capital they tell me they haven’t ever heard of him. He doesn’t exist.’

  Sessou shrugs. ‘In the capital they say things because it is ordered. All memories of the Redeemer have been scratched from the mind of the nation. It is ordered from Comrade Atkins. Do you know him? The Number One Peasant? Thus it always goes in Zanj. Our Peasant belongs to the Kanga tribe, but the Redeemer, he was a Wouff, and the Kanga hate the Wouff …’

  ‘Yes, I know. They regard the Wouff as slaves.’

  ‘You know this country! It is true. The Wouff do make quite good slaves. That was once upon a time, but they needed much, much training.’

  I gather from this observation that Sessou is a member of the Ite tribe.

  ‘I have heard it said that the Redeemer was very cruel.’

  His face brightens. ‘He was the cruellest man in the world! This we all knew. God bless him! He was the King of blood and he made us very, very frightened. Oh yes! Now they say in the capital that we may not speak of him any longer. No more. All his pictures are gone. They take his pictures and they throw them in the River Zan: his books, his pictures, his money and his magic, they drown them all in the River Zan saying he is dead forever and no more. We must not say his name or the soldiers come and shoot us. But the people know, they remember, here in the country they know the Redeemer and who he is. They never forget him, never, never!’

  ‘But if he was so cruel why do they think so much of him?’

  ‘Because,’ Sessou explains with superb logic, ‘he showed himself to the people. OK, he maybe say to this one, “You die!” and he died. Or to that one, “Crocodile meat!” and he is meat. But he came before his people and they saw him. He was very, very brave!’

  ‘He came before the people more often than Comrade Atkins?’

  Sessou looks at me as if I am mad. ‘Atkins never comes. Not once in his life. He is frightened, not like the Redeemer who was a great, big man. You can see the Redeemer’s house, there in Bamba, where we are going. This winter palace of the Redeemer – you wait!’

  ‘He had his house in Bamba?’

  ‘His palace. For the winter. The summer, he goes to the capital.’

  Sweet Little Me sways along under a night sky so vast, so mountainous, huge and rearing and brilliantly powdered, crowded and overflowing with stars, so many the sheer multitude makes me feel a little sick. But then I’ve been feeling off colour for some days. Look up and the galaxies are scattered across the heavens like cosmic foam, a billion trillion suns, stars, planets, moons, quasars, bits of cosmic string, black holes, white dwarves, red giants, supernova and interstellar dust, and through all this cosmic ocean the schools of particles stream like plankton: gravitons, muons, gluons, quarks, neutrinos, photons, baryons, as well as light matter, dark matter and anti-matter. All of which my Uncle Claude probes with the grace of a backstreet abortionist and the certainties of a priest of the Inquisition (here’s the funny part), he scours it with the superstitious faith of some Neolithic dreamer looking in terror for the bogeyman who he believes hides in the heavens, but who all the time …

  I think Uncle Claude, who I am sure even now is sweeping the section of the cosmos accessible to his cold eye above La Frisette, feels his telescope to be some kind of a straw through which he draws as much celestial matter as he can swallow at a gulp and then slowly digests it for signs of life, after which it passes through his system like so much waste matter. A scientist is an instrument for converting knowledge into sewage. Oh, Uncle Claude, why don’t you come to Bamba! But he can’t/won’t! Only I come to Bamba on a yellow bus called Sweet Little Me which trundles through the night with a bad list, the good Mr Sessou at the wheel. My large companion is so warm and comfortable that I fall asleep against her shoulder and when I wake I find the monkey playing with my hair, its bright black eyes wide and wild.

  The town of Bamba has seen better days. Nothing works. Water must be carried from the river of th
e same name which runs past the town. The only shop is a table under a tree selling dates, Egyptian cigarettes and Chinese razor blades. The houses are deserted. But this was a centre of substance once, there was a Sofitel hotel on the edge of town and a casino for visiting dignitaries, but both are now smashed and deserted, their windows are gone and their doors carried off. The roads are muddy but here and there a little grey macadam shows through to remind us that they were once paved.

  So what do you wear for a visit to a Redeemer’s winter palace? The expectation is there, whether you like it or not. I go top of the range, eventually, after much thought. A black linen halterneck top and a chocolate linen jacket plus chocolate bermuda shorts. Yes, I know, it is woefully inappropriate. But it’s also cool and convenient. I wash my hair in tepid water and simply comb it back. The comb grates on particles of sand – this is river water!

  The winter palace of the Redeemer is a series of Spanish-style villas set within a compound behind walls which were once pink, the shade of old blood stains, and mounted with spikes. You push on the big gates and they rasp noisily on their rusted hinges. A black boy scuttles out of the compound as I enter and crouches in half appeal, half bow of welcome. ‘Missy, Missy, Missy! Come see, I’ll show you the gaols of the Redeemer. Place of torture!’

  I give him five dollars. He nearly faints and I realise it’s far too much but he reminds me of Clovis and I can’t help it. He must be about twenty, with a beautifully smooth face and cloudy eyes, his skin polished. He stares at me, at my clothes and when he sees my diamond pendant he becomes frantic:

  ‘I will show you things of great cruelty, for the Redeemer was a great monster.’

  Here is the same excitement I heard in Sessou’s voice. To many people the fabled cruelty of their former leader is a source of pride. Because of the nearness of the river the growth in the garden is luxuriant behind the steel gates and the high walls. Lizards peer from the spreading fronds of the encroaching bush, a red bird with a bright green eye looks down its long curved nose at me and nods as if information received is being confirmed. My guide scampers before me, turning around repeatedly and calling me on by throwing out his hand, keeping it low and rubbing the fingers together as if he is spreading breadcrumbs to lure a bird. The palace is now no more than a series of empty, looted rooms around a central courtyard where a stagnant pool covered in green scum moves like a carpet beneath the hovering dragonflies.