The Migration of Ghosts

by Pauline Melville

  He had never taken retaliatory action against his sister for the simple reason that he never thought he could get away with it. She lived in Canada. If she had returned to her own country it would have been different. She would have been within his orbit.

  Standing there in those gracious surroundings, he recalled the successful assassination of one of his political opponents. The man was a popular radical who posed him a considerable threat. He recollected the man’s death with perfect equanimity and with a sense of satisfaction. He had no reservations about the use of power. Power must be used ruthlessly to be effective. He had never suffered a moment’s regret about the murder. In fact, he considered it to be one of his most subtle triumphs.

  The assassination had pleased him because there had been no need for him to do more than express a desire that the man did not exist. He had flung a newspaper down on the table at a ministerial meeting, groaned with mock theatricality and wished out loud that the radical could be stopped from holding these mass meetings at which he made inflammatory statements. Although it was not the meetings that had infuriated him. It was the fact that the young man had referred to him in public as King Kong. He then scribbled down a list of eleven names of those he considered to be potentially dangerous. The revolutionary’s name headed the list.

  ‘Here is a cricket team that is not batting on our side.’ He had looked around the circle of watchful eyes and shrugged with exaggerated regret. ‘The captain is one I could do without.’

  A few weeks later, the man was blown apart in his own car and he, the president, had been able to say, with his hand on his heart, that he knew nothing about it. Although it irritated him to find out that, in a fit of overzealousness, one of his ministers had issued a statement to the press disclaiming all responsibility for the death before it had actually occurred.

  By that time, of course, his henchmen knew how to fulfil his slightest whim. His diet, for instance. He began the day by drinking half a beer mug of orange juice with two raw eggs cracked in it, whisked around with port wine to form a greyish-purple liquid. It was a longevity diet. Occasionally, he swallowed a turtle’s heart while it was still beating so that he could absorb the power of life.

  Remembering his opponent’s violent demise raised his spirits a little. The knowledge that he had got away with it afforded him some relief from the burning and shameful memory of his sister’s denunciation. He pulled up his coat collar, making sure his throat was well protected from the icy weather, then walked slowly down the stairs and nodded politely to the attendant before shouldering his way through the revolving doors and out into the cold once more.

  This time he took a bus to the High Commission. He wanted to find out whether his portrait was still hanging there. He screwed up his face a little. Something about those airbrushed official portraits always made him look a little prissy – the cheeks too plump; the thin moustache resting on his full top lip and short, greying beard on the point of his chin gave him the somewhat pampered look of a man both smug and guarded, possibly a little shy. But it would reassure him to see the picture still hanging there on the wall. He would take one more look before returning to his hotel.

  He walked past the red-brick, bay-windowed building several times. The portrait was gone. It was no longer there. His stomach muscles tightened with anxiety. As he watched they were replacing it with his successor. The solemn face of his deputy prime minister, bumbling Edwin Jeffson, was being hoisted into position.

  He stood in a daze in the street. A small cockney boy, his face marbled with cold, ran past the railings twanging them with a stick. The noise brought him to his senses. There was nothing to do but return immediately to his hotel. He still suffered fits of dizziness. Clearly, he was not fully recovered from the operation. He should go and lie down and try to work out how to return as quickly as possible before his position became irreversible.

  The functional anonymity of the hotel room helped settle his jangled nerves. He lay down stiffly on the bed without removing his overcoat. The trouble was, these patches of fog in his mind. He wondered if they were some unforeseen side-effect of the operation. He could remember more or less everything up until then.

  For a moment he wondered whether Castro had sent a team of doctors to incapacitate him as part of some take-over bid. Unlikely. And if that were the case, why was the portrait of his deputy prime minister, Edwin Jeffson, hanging in the High Commission? Jeffson was a born subordinate. He could not imagine Jeffson being behind any plot to oust him. That was why he had appointed him as his deputy.

  Wrack his brains as he might, he had no idea how he had arrived in London. Could he have been drugged?

  Perhaps he had done something terrible when he was still under the influence of the anaesthetic – made a fool of himself in some way and been discreetly removed for a while. A military take-over was unlikely. The generals and brigadiers were in his pocket. Although, of course, you could never be certain. What kept troubling him was the idea that he might have suffered some kind of mental breakdown.

  He frowned. Suddenly he had remembered his horse. He hoped Jason the groom would care for it properly in his absence. He loved to ride his great white steed arrayed in the splendid leather saddle and harness presented to him by President Lyndon Johnson of the United States. Villagers became used to the sight of him walking the horse between Belfield and Golden Grove. His favourite official portrait showed him mounted in the saddle.

  One thing he did know for sure. He should return soon. It would not be wise to wait for too long. He did not want Edwin Jeffson to become accustomed to the trappings of office.

  Some stains on the scarf that lay beside him on the bed caught his attention. He put his hand to his neck. When he inspected his fingers, he saw that the fluid was a pale pink colour as if there were traces of blood in it. He went into the bathroom, but dazzled by the white tiles and brilliant lights he became suddenly fearful of looking at the wound in the mirror. He stepped hastily back into his room.

  Before he slept, he worried briefly about running out of money. But there was always his watch and the gold signet ring. Back home he had encouraged people to kneel and kiss this ring, pretending always that it was a huge joke, but not liking it when people demurred. He could always ask for money to be telegraphed through to him from his Swiss account.

  The next morning, he decided to brave the icy drizzle and do something that his official position had never allowed him to do before. He decided to visit Madame Tussaud’s. The idea of a hall of notoriety for both the famous and the infamous had always fascinated him. On arrival, he had no choice but to queue in the freezing sleet along with the other visitors in the Marylebone Road. When he came out two hours later, in contrast to the eminent waxworks, secure and almost complacent in their fixed history, he was overcome by anxiety and paced up and down the Inner Circle of Regent’s Park, going nowhere. It was then he decided that he would return to his own country the next day, secretly, via Surinam.

  In his homeland, the president’s official residence had remained empty since his departure, but the lights were still left on there at night to allay the fears of the populace. The attractive, rambling building stood in its own grounds, surrounded by royal palms, and clearly visible from the road.

  The house was uninhabited. Maids and cleaners attended to their duties as infrequently as possible. Nobody wanted to go there. Even relatives had gone in only briefly to collect their belongings and scurry away.

  There were reports that his white horse had been heard moving slowly about in the spacious galleries upstairs. Nobody was sure he was gone for good. The story also gained ground that a black cayman had been seen slithering down the front steps of the residence. On reaching the ground, the creature had stood up in the shape of a man. To cap it all, one of the ex-maids had apparently started to speak with the president’s voice.

  A storekeeper from the village of Vigilance recounted his dream to anyone who would listen:

  ‘One day I w
as walking out on to the street. Gradually, I notice many people standing on either side of the road in small groups and knots, kind of muttering and whispering amongst themselves. As I proceeded, the groups became silent and everybody stood looking backwards down the road towards Belfield. A hearse was coming down the road. President Hercules was sitting in it. He shouted out to a man on the roadside in his usual, loudmouth way, “That business with the house – it fix?”

  ‘The man said no.

  “Stop by my house tomorrow. I see to it.”

  ‘And suddenly the hearse jerked and veered to the left.’ The storekeeper leaned over the counter to his customers. ‘A burial place should be near a fork in the road, you know, so that the funeral party can make a sudden turn and confuse the spirits. So the African legend goes.’ The dream had so impressed him that he continued telling it to each new customer.

  ‘Then I dreamed I found myself near a small church. A priest stood with a baby in his arms as if for a christening. The baby had the face of an old man – sinister. Gradually, I see who the face belong to. It belong to Hercules. I asked my uncle what music was playing.

  “The Dead March”, replied my uncle.

  ‘And then, you know how it is with dreams, I was at home once more in Vigilance looking out of the window. The whole area was flooded for as far as I could see. The water reached right up to the top windows. Then it began to ebb and recede like mist until it was gone.’

  The whole country abounded with rumours and hearsay. There were rumours that President Hercules had been seen in Moscow, in the United States, and now it was even being said that he had been seen standing amongst the waxworks at Madame Tussaud’s.

  It was at just this time, when such rumours were at their height, that the president contrived to return incognito. The whole operation was clandestine. He wanted to get back into his own country secretly and assess the situation. It was best to stay out of the capital where his face was too well known. He would spend time in the interior where there would be less chance of his being recognised.

  It was a warm, voluptuous night when the president once again felt the soil of his own land under his feet.

  The first night of his return he stayed in a disused hut on an abandoned trail outside Orealla. For most of the night he sat in the pitch dark, on a rough wooden plank, planning what to do. Every so often he fingered his neck gingerly. All night long his ring finger itched and he worried that he was developing a nervous allergy.

  It would have been more sensible to travel at night when there was less chance of recognition but he was not accustomed to the bush and feared losing himself. Transportation was clearly going to pose a problem. Regretfully, he decided he must risk going into the capital to fetch his horse.

  Early the next morning, he set off. A storm helped him. He took a lift in a donkey cart. The tropical deluge turned the air grey and allowed him to pull the hood of his green military cape down so that it nearly covered his face. Worst of all was the fear that he had begun to smell. He had not been able to wash properly since leaving England and in this climate, he feared that the wound in his neck would become putrid.

  By nightfall of the next evening he had reached the outskirts of the city.

  It was a clear night. The presidential mansion was open, unguarded and with the lights blazing as usual from the deserted rooms. He walked down the path, through the door and up the steps directly facing him. It was just as he had last seen it except that all signs of his occupancy, his personal belongings and effects had been removed. He walked through every room, his footsteps making a hollow echo on the shiny wooden floors, polished to translucence. He breathed deeply. Then he went out and stood for a while on the verandah, looking out towards the statue of a heroic slave leader who had led a rebellion in the eighteenth century.

  He could just make out the figure of the statue. Even in the dark there was something bleak about the empty, treeless space surrounding it. In the daytime, traffic swirled round the plinth at a distance. Few people went close up to it. Some said that it possessed a force that pushed people away. Others said that the statue had an intimate connection with the president through magical and arcane writings on the back of its head and that they would never be sure that the president had gone for good until the statue fell.

  For a while, he looked out over the city and brooded on what to do next.

  As he stepped back inside, a violent snuffling, snorting noise from the next room startled him. He tiptoed along the verandah back to the main reception room.

  Standing there, head lowered, eyes looking at him, was his white horse. He rushed over to greet it, grasping it by the mane and burying his head it the animal’s neck. He ran his hand down the horse’s flanks. They felt hot and sweaty as though it had recently been ridden. He cursed the groom for not attending properly to the animal which was still steaming with heat. It had not even been unsaddled. On its back sat the magnificent, tooled leather saddle donated by the United States of America and normally used only on state occasions. The president hurried into the next room to see if there was any sign of his purple riding boots. No trace of them. He came thoughtfully back to where the horse waited.

  And then, President Hercules mounted his horse. His head reached nearly to the crystal chandelier. The tops of the landscapes and portraits hanging on the walls came level with his shoulders. He moved the horse slowly through the room and after a little persuasion, the white charger edged itself sideways and awkwardly, with clattering hooves, descended the main stairway.

  Horse and rider walked through the main doors of the house, down the path, past the unoccupied guard-hut on the left, past the ghostly trunks of the giant royal palms and out into the sleeping city.

  He could not resist it. It was three o’clock in the morning. He took a tour. The city was deserted. He rode past the parliament building. There was a slight drizzle and a chill bite to the air.

  ‘Cold. Cold,’ he said to himself. ‘Ice-cart coming.’

  He cantered on through the empty streets, the horse’s hooves throwing up spray from the waterlogged ground. For nostalgia’s sake, he took the road past one particular house. It was one of the enormous old colonial, white wooden houses. The Demerara shutters opened on to the night. Once his father had taken him to this house, explaining that it represented the soul of the country and all that was good in it. He dallied there for a while, almost wistfully, while the horse cropped the grass at the roadside. Then he moved on.

  Dawn came with long streaks in the sky of indigo, grey and pink. Needing to remain unseen, the president spurred his horse into action and galloped between the sleeping villages along the highway out of the city.

  In the half-light, he looked down and noticed that the horse’s white mane had become dark in places. He put his hand out and touched one of the patches. It was damp. He put his finger to his mouth. Blood. The blood tasted like iron on his lips. He lifted his hand to feel the bandages on his neck. They were sodden. Despite the continuous loss of blood, there was no pain and he did not feel dizzy or faint.

  He decided to stick to his original plan and galvanised the horse into a gallop once more. Soon there should be a turning that led to the Arawak village of Hicuri in the bush. It was not signposted but he thought he could recognise it. If he hid somewhere near there, he could seek help should it become necessary.

  He turned down the small track that branched off the main highway. The horse picked its way through the puddles and lakes of the flooded savannah. Feeling too visible in the open country now that it was nearly daylight, the president left the wide trail with its sandy, rutted tracks and guided his horse across a patch of scrub towards the forest stretching away to his left.

  Once under cover of the trees, he relaxed. There was a faint trail and he let the horse pick its own way through the stinging insects and slashing grasses. Not much light penetrated. The morning was humid. Sometimes he ducked to avoid tangled vines and lianas slapping him in the face. The horse stopped
every now and then to chomp noisily on wild vegetation. After a while, they came to a place where the trees thinned out and the horse could wander more freely. Exhausted, the president fell into a profound sleep in the saddle.

  The captain of Hicuri village was drunk as usual. Even so, he had managed to go into town and persuade the only man he knew who could mend televisions to accompany him back out to the village. The contraption he drove was a cross between Stephenson’s Rocket engine, a tractor and a guillotine cart. The video technician, a scrawny East Indian with a straggly moustache, stood in the back. His leg was encased in plaster from ankle to thigh. Every time the vehicle jolted on the pitted red road that led to Hicuri, the man screeched with pain: ‘Ooouw.’

  The only other passenger returning to his village was a young Lokono Arawak called Calvin. Calvin had been working on the dredgers up on the Potaro River when he contracted malaria and had to be sent home. Now he shivered in the back, wracked with fits of icy fever and nausea.

  It was Calvin who pointed out the trail of blood leading to the forest. The captain did not stop.

  ‘You seein’ ning-ning,’ he shouted over his shoulder, thinking that Calvin was suffering the delusions that sometimes come with malaria. He himself, these days, often saw crystal balls and beetles.

  In the village, the technician worked for an hour. When the villagers heard the generator start up, they began to gather under the open-sided palm-thatch shelter which housed the television and video machine. Old and young, everybody came walking across the grey sand, even Calvin, a towel wrapped round his waist and so weak that he had to lean against the shed post for support. They sat in rows on benches. Overhead, a parrot chattered non-stop in the scolding voice of an old woman.

  The screen flickered and applause broke out. The technician inserted the video which he had brought with him to test the machine. He was proud of the video.