The Book of the Heathen

by Robert Edric

  He raised his head. ‘Please, not now.’

  Again, I acceded. ‘I’m beginning to sound like a lawyer,’ I said. I had said the same to him once before, long ago, and he had remarked then that it seemed a profession for which my character was well suited. We had been in the company of the others at the time and they had all agreed with him, listing those of my attributes which suited the profession. As this listing continued I saw that Frere regretted having made the remark, and afterwards he apologized to me. I told him it was of no consequence, but both he and I knew that I had been stung by some of the comments made. It was why my reference to the fact now made him smile and helped release the small tension between us.

  ‘And if you were one, then I would certainly employ you,’ he said.

  I asked him if he had been allowed outside the cell since my last visit, and he said that he had, that Proctor came regularly to take him into the yard. ‘Bone will no doubt insist on parading me around in a similar manner upon my return,’ he said. He dipped a cloth in one of the bowls of water and wiped his face and hands.

  ‘When I was here last,’ I said, ‘you refused to speak to me. I said your name and you behaved as though you were no longer the same man.’

  ‘Nor was I,’ he said immediately. I had anticipated some reluctance from him.

  ‘Meaning what?’

  ‘It would be hard for me to explain, even to you.’ He wiped the last of the moisture from his face with his fingers. ‘Do you recall when we were held up at Port Elys by the failure of the steamer that was meant to take us to the Pool?’

  ‘Three weeks.’

  ‘And how anxious we were to leave the place behind and come onwards into what we still wanted to think of as the Great Unknown, the place where our names were to be made … Well, I remember some advice we were both given there by the Governor General.’

  I remembered the dinner that had been held in our honour, brief diversion that we were.

  ‘He told us to write all our letters, to do all the things we needed to do while we were stuck in the place, and then, upon our departure upriver, to leave our old selves behind. It struck me then as a strange remark to make.’

  I vaguely remembered something of the sort being said. But it was a common enough remark to make – old hands impressing new arrivals, experience impressing itself upon expectation – and I had paid it no mind.

  ‘Do you remember how many letters I wrote in those weeks? To my father, mother, sisters, to Caroline, to our employers, even to my old professors and tutors.’

  I told him I remembered.

  ‘Well, that’s what I was doing. I was leaving myself behind. Not in my essentials, of course; the man who arrived here was the man who left there, you might say, but I felt the need – if that is not too strong a word for it – to establish myself in all those essentials in that place before I left it. Do you understand what I’m saying? I needed there to be a common understanding of that man in Port Elys – of me – of the man who had re-created himself in all those letters before I left the place itself and confronted whatever awaited me here. Did you feel no such impulse yourself?’

  ‘I certainly wrote plenty of letters,’ I said. We had been warned of the irregularity of the mails. At least with the sea still visible at our backs and seeing the great ships coming and going upon it we might still have had some faith in our letters being delivered.

  ‘It was more than that,’ he said, and I saw immediately that I had disappointed him by my imperfect understanding of what he was trying to tell me. We had also been told to dispatch all those letters and then to clear our minds of all thought of the people to whom they were sent, as though the past and its trappings needed to be stripped from us to make us better able to cope with whatever lay ahead.

  ‘Do you think you achieved this?’ I asked him.

  He considered the question before shaking his head. ‘At first I believed so.’

  ‘And afterwards?’

  ‘Afterwards I saw what an impossible task I had set myself.’

  ‘Then why deny your name when I spoke to you last?’

  ‘Because by then the child was dead, and whether you wish to believe it of me or not, I had had a hand in her killing.’

  I felt a sudden chill at hearing from his own lips that it was a girl who had been killed.

  ‘And you believe that by your actions in the matter you were changed?’

  ‘How could it be otherwise? A dead child.’

  ‘And so who – what – do you believe you have become if you are no longer the man who left us all those weeks ago?’

  ‘Fifty-one days,’ he said. ‘Twenty-four since the child died.’

  ‘Do you regret what happened?’ I apologized immediately for the question.

  ‘Regret is an indulgence,’ he said. ‘I will not deny the truth, my part in it all, the facts of the matter.’

  ‘I know that,’ I said. It was the wall which separated us.

  At that moment the outer door opened and Proctor called in to me. My visit was over.

  On our return across the parade ground I gave Proctor more money and asked to be kept informed by him of the arrangements to return Frere. He considered this without answering me and pushed the notes between the buttons of his jacket.

  * * *

  I next saw the deformed boy two days later. He was asleep on the ground outside my chart-room door. As I approached him, he woke and stood up. He considered me for a moment before beckoning me towards him. The gesture amused me. Though his life was lived mostly in silence, I had always imagined him a shy and reluctant near-mute. I was surprised even more when he spoke to me in broken but understandable English as I reached the door.

  ‘Come in?’ he asked me, by which I understood that he wanted to enter the room with me.

  I let him inside, and he stood for several minutes examining the cabinets and the maps and plans arranged around the walls. He moved closer to these, running his hands over them. I imagined they might be incomprehensible to him, things of wonder almost.

  I stood beside him and started explaining the features of the map he studied.

  He stopped me with the word, ‘Wrong.’

  ‘Wrong?’

  ‘No mountains.’ He placed four fingers and a thumb over the cones of five peaks several hundred miles to the north-east, beyond the limits of the Ituri.

  ‘Yet many men have seen them,’ I told him.

  ‘You seen?’ he said.

  ‘Not personally. That is not my map.’ I wondered at his new bravery.

  ‘Wrong,’ he said again.

  ‘Do you know the country?’

  ‘One cliff.’ He drew his arms apart to suggest the extent of this. ‘Then flat.’ He was describing a vast, high plateau. The map was thirty years old.

  ‘Is it grass, forest, desert?’

  ‘Grass.’

  I was about to ask him more when he wandered from this chart to another, a map of the original compound as conceived and built by its first owners. He studied it as though he might once have known it in this state. Only a quarter of the original buildings remained in use, and most of the once-cleared land further back from the river had been lost, first to the grass and then the trees.

  I studied him more closely. His spine was twisted, forcing him to lean both forward from the waist, and then in on himself, and his head was turned at an angle opposing this, as though he were making a constant effort not to have to face the ground.

  I offered him a seat, but even this posed problems for him, forcing him to turn sideways and then lean backwards to face me. I positioned my own chair so he might look directly at me with the least effort. There was no malformation of his arms or legs, though the curve of his spine forced these to stick out at their own ungainly angles. I saw how much more comfortable it must have been for him to lie on the ground or in the bottom of the boat than to either stand or sit in a chair. Because of his bowed and twisted head, I had seldom before seen his full face, but loo
king at it then, I saw that it too was perfectly formed. He avoided my eyes, raising his hand to his mouth when he spoke.

  ‘Frere,’ he said, instantly drawing me to him.

  While the rest of us had previously had little to do with the boy, Frere had allowed him to accompany him on his local expeditions, his crooked back laden with satchels and cases.

  ‘Where are you from?’ I asked him.

  ‘Bassam.’ I guessed from the way he said it that he would never return there. It was Frere who told me how few children survived their first few years in that place, and how those who were even suspected of some infantile sickness or weakness were either killed or left to die by their parents. The deformed boy would not have lasted an hour under such circumstances. His survival had intrigued Frere, and he had quizzed him on it. But the boy had kept his secrets.

  I imagined now that he wanted to know what was happening to Frere, and I started to tell him, but he silenced me by covering his ears.

  ‘I know,’ he said.

  ‘Do you know where he went, what happened to him?’

  He looked up at me, his eyes moving rapidly from side to side, as though he were about to make some revelation, but then their motion slowed and ceased and he shook his head. He was not being entirely truthful with me. I also sensed that he had come to me for some purpose other than to reveal his attachment to Frere.

  ‘Are your parents living?’ I asked him.

  He shrugged.

  ‘I once thought the boatman was your grandfather.’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Where do you live?’ It was a ridiculous question in a place where men lived and slept where they stood and fell. Another shrug.

  And after that, perhaps because he was unwilling to tolerate my questioning any further, or perhaps because his brief visit had achieved its uncertain purpose, he rose awkwardly from his seat and left me.

  * * *

  Hammad’s home stood three miles from the Belgian Station, along a well-kept road, and was surrounded by a high wall, beyond which lay orange and pomegranate orchards, and fields of millet, rice and sugar cane. It was built – as all his homes were reputed to be built – in the Moorish fashion, with a courtyard, colonnades, minarets and high-domed roofs. This particular residence also possessed an ice plant, a series of inter-connected yard pools with water running between them, and was planted along its walls with date palms transported half-grown from the Nile. Whenever one of these trees toppled or succumbed to some disease, then another was quickly sent for to replace it. The trees were a symbol, not so much of Hammad’s wealth, but of his power, of his attention to detail, and of his ability to satisfy his every whim. His wealth was estimated in literally countless millions regardless of currency.

  He inherited his position and his business from his father following his education in London, Paris and Berlin. He had travelled to India and to the United States; he enjoyed proclaiming that his commercial empire spanned the world. Only here did it serve him to be considered a brutal and, occasionally, an uncivilized man. We on this side of the river had all long since understood that, were Frere ever to be located in the wilderness, then he would eventually find his way to Hammad, and then from Hammad back to us. No price would be put on his return – though its cost made plain – and once again we would find ourselves in irredeemable debt to the man.

  I had been only once to visit him on the far side, summoned six months after my arrival. Frere and I had been called together. It was impossible not to be impressed by what we saw there, what we were shown, what we were told and what we were invited to inspect and to sample. Hammad’s wives and servants gathered round us and expressed an interest in everything we said. We had taken gifts with us – including a pair of Wheelock hunting pistols – and saw immediately how inadequate these were. Hammad, however, made a great deal of them, thanking us profusely and then going out into a courtyard to practise shooting with them. We were given gifts in return and invited to what amounted to nothing less than a feast. Hammad, I noticed, behaved as though I had never before met him.

  In truth, it served his purpose to have us – the English – there, just as it had once suited the Belgians to have the surrounding country in thrall to Hammad’s power and reputation. It was an uneasy existence at best, but one from which none of us could now easily withdraw.

  He asked Frere and me on that occasion if there was anything we needed from him, and I told him there was nothing and disappointed him. Frere, however, listed the great number of animals, birds and plants he hoped to collect. He also told Hammad that he wished to meet men of the surrounding tribes who would be prepared to tell him of their ways of life and customs; he wanted to learn about their religious ceremonies, about how they farmed, hunted, built and traded.

  Amon was also present at this encounter, seated behind Hammad, and I saw that he made notes concerning everything that was discussed. I also noticed that whatever Hammad did, his agent mirrored in some way. This was not so obvious or as simple as mere repetition, but achieved by some reinforcing action so as to suggest to any audience that there must be no misunderstanding of his master’s wishes, and that the two of them, master and agent, were, in the manner of these transactions, indivisible.

  The centre-piece of the feast that evening had been a whole roast ostrich, plucked, cooked and then with its feathers ingeniously replaced so as to make the bird look almost alive again. Hammad, I saw, belying his size and weight, ate very little, and I learned afterwards from Amon that his master preferred always to eat alone. As a young man, apparently, one of his rivals in the trade had attempted to poison him, and it had been a lesson hard learned. I saw how much this lesser man fed upon the greater, how his own power was that of a moon orbiting its sun.

  At the corner of his mouth, Amon bore a small scar, a snick across both lips, barely visible other than as a crescent of paler flesh. I had been told by Cornelius that Hammad himself had done this to his newly appointed agent upon overhearing his gossiping about his business. I could imagine in its every clinical detail how the punishment had been carried out, how reasonable Hammad would have made himself appear, and how deserving of this reminder Amon would have declared himself.

  On my every meeting with Amon since, I had found my eyes drawn to the scar, and occasionally I had seen him feel it with the tip of his tongue.

  The feast had been over two years ago, and I had since encountered Hammad, and then only briefly, on fewer than half a dozen occasions.

  Ever since Frere’s return, and learning that Hammad was in some way involved, I had expected to be summoned again by the man, even if only to be made aware of the true nature of our debt to him. Instead of being called for, however, word reached us by a messenger that Hammad intended crossing the river to visit us, and he came scarcely before the news of his coming had grown cold.

  He possessed a fleet of steamers, and he came on the largest of these, accompanied by two others. A space was cleared at our wharves and the work of the day was suspended during the visit.

  Hammad went first to Cornelius and embraced him. Then he went to Fletcher. He called for something to be brought from the steamer. It was a rifle, not a gift, merely something Hammad had recently acquired, and he gave it to Fletcher to test its action, and to ask Fletcher if he would align the weapon’s sights before he left.

  Abbot and the junior quartermasters were ignored.

  I was approached first by Amon, rather than by Hammad himself, and told by the agent that Hammad wished to see me privately later in the day.

  Hammad was accompanied by forty or fifty men and half that number of women. Most carried trade goods and proceeded to unload these and to barter with the traders here. Some of the women, I imagined, were Hammad’s wives, but others I recognized for the whores they were, and they too began to ply their trade, accompanying men away from the river and into the sheds and trees beyond.

  ‘It’s a great honour to have Hammad come to us and not merely to be summoned by hi
m,’ I said to Amon. If the man detected the coldness in my voice, then he did not respond to it.

  ‘A great honour indeed. And one you would do well not to forget for the sake of the child-murderer.’ He smiled as he spoke. Thus was I told everything I needed to know concerning the purpose of the visit, and of my own part within it.

  Amon was then called for and he returned to walk beside his master.

  I was then propositioned by several of the women. They grabbed my hand and pressed it to their exposed breasts and arms. I shouted at them, but to little effect. They continued to pester me as I walked among the boats to see what had been brought. The women painted their eyes with kohl, and anointed themselves with oil. Once, they had been kept out of the compound, and then punished when they were caught selling themselves there, but now there were so many of them, and they came so frequently, that we tolerated them, only now and again making an example of one of the women if she was caught stealing.

  I was forced to wash myself, scour my hands before returning to my maps and awaiting the return of Hammad.

  He came finally mid-way through the afternoon. And with him came Amon.

  Our greetings were as elaborate and as insincere as those earlier.

  Hammad motioned for Amon to remain apart from us, to stay as far from us as was possible in the room. Accordingly, Amon remained in the doorway. He took a small book from his pocket and pretended to read from it, pretended not to overhear every word that passed between Hammad and myself. I wondered how Hammad was served by having this recorder present at all his transactions. Perhaps Amon persuaded him it was necessary; or perhaps it was a way of safeguarding his own precarious position.

  ‘I am so pleased you are able to divert yourself from your work to talk to me,’ Hammad said.

  ‘The pleasure is always mine,’ I said, our strategies opened.

  ‘Particularly under such circumstances, eh?’

  I affected not to understand him, but he dismissed this with a slight wave of his hand. Frere was right: I did underestimate the man.

  He hesitated at my clumsiness, but said nothing. He went to my desk and considered the partially drawn map there.