by Robert Edric
‘The whore!’ Klein shouted. ‘Say it. That was what she was when you met her and defiled her. And that is surely what she went back to being when you abandoned her with her belly already swollen.’
I saw the restraint Cornelius exercised at hearing all this. I saw his fists clenched hard by his sides.
The rest of the congregation continued to watch us in terrified awe. Klein’s snapped stick at his feet had done nothing to diminish their fear of the man.
He saw them looking, pointed to Perpetua, and shouted, ‘She was possessed by devils, many devils, devils that would have defiled her just as this man defiled and abandoned his own woman! There is no place in our new church and mission for women like that or men like him. Is that what you want? Is that what you truly want? To be forever surrounded by such animal evil? Is it? Or do you want to follow me and build anew in the new light of a new age?’
No-one answered him. There was considerable agreement with what he said, but no-one responded directly, preferring instead to nod their concurrence and to either bow their heads or to avert their eyes when he looked at them.
‘She was a whore!’ he shouted at Cornelius. ‘And a bigger whore when you left her. What did you imagine – that I would take pity on her and keep her at the mission, give her work and a home there for her and her bastard child, is that what you thought? We sent her to Port Elys as soon as the child was born. Perhaps we even believed that we might save the child by removing her from her mother, and her from us. Whatever, she was a sickly child, and so who knows?’ He paused to catch his breath. ‘Or perhaps she pined for her mother and that was the reason she was so sickly. Perhaps having a whore for a mother was better than having no mother at all. Perhaps she would have learned to live with the idea just as you learned to live with it. Oh, you did learn to live with what you’d done didn’t you, van Klees, with the lives you’d blighted? Surely you learned to beg forgiveness of the Lord for what you’d done, and then to live with that forgiveness? No? No? What, never?’
Cornelius pulled at the cross until the top was lifted free of the altar and he threw it to the ground.
‘One cross,’ Klein said. ‘Such a resurrection. And your woman, van Klees – don’t imagine that we at Kirasi did not in some way benefit from her departure. Or should I say her sale?’
Cornelius looked up at this, his fists still clenched, his thumbs running back and forth over his knuckles.
Klein seized his advantage. ‘Did you imagine we just gave all those poor, disappointed women away after all the mission had done for them, after all we had provided for them? The Port Elys traders knew where we were, how to reach us. They understood the quality of our goods. Tell me, is that where you hope to go in search of her? Because if it is, don’t bother. Port Elys is only where they start out. No-one lasts long there. From Port Elys they are sold on to Yalata or Petit Coeur, and you know what those places are like. Perhaps you’ve even visited the women there. Of course you have. Rest assured, van Klees, your wretched child was better off not knowing how she came into the world, far better off. And you, too – I imagine you made your own convenient excuses which were easier to live with than the truth of the matter. I pity you, I really do. You’re no different from that wretched man Frere, no different, except that he is to be called to account for his actions and you are left to live damned but unpunished with the consequences of everything you have done.’
I doubted if Cornelius could stand much more of this, and I stood ready to restrain him should he again attempt to reach Klein. Klein, too, I sensed, understood that he had said as much as he dare, and he turned away from Cornelius and Perpetua and raised his hands above his head and started singing, stopping briefly to shout for his congregation to join him, which they did, falteringly at first, but then with growing conviction and enthusiasm, as though they too understood that this was the only release available to them.
Cornelius attempted to get Perpetua to accompany us out of the chapel, but she resisted, and he knew not to insist. He whispered something to her which I did not hear, and she went painfully to stand beside Felicity, who held her in her arms.
‘Whore,’ I heard Klein say behind me, uncertain if he was referring to either of the ‘nuns’ or again to Cornelius’s lost woman.
Seeing that neither Perpetua nor Felicity would accompany us, Cornelius moved away from them, knowing that upon our departure they would again become the targets for Klein’s rage.
I told him we ought to leave, and he nodded his agreement. The singing grew ever louder as we passed back through the body of the singers to the chapel door.
Once outside, I said to him, ‘He was lying about your daughter’s mother.’
‘Was he?’ he said, and left me.
I looked back at the chapel and saw Klein come to the doorway and stand there looking out at me. Perpetua and Felicity stood on either side of him, Perpetua with her arms folded over her naked breasts. Klein held the altar cloth, which he looked at distastefully for a moment before throwing it to the ground at his feet.
‘There may still be time to save yourself,’ he called to me, laughing loudly and attracting the attention of a line of passing soldiers, who stopped to consider what was happening and to gape at the near-naked woman.
30
I took the news of all these events to Frere, but he showed little interest in what I told him. I started to tell him of the contradictory stories Nash had been told, but he insisted he did not want to hear them. He asked me instead if there had been any word of the steamer, but I could tell him only that it was two days from us on a falling river.
I told him of what I had destroyed, and in a voice devoid of all conviction and emotion he said I’d done the right thing.
Looking around for anything further he might want removed and burned, I saw that a great deal had already been taken from his cell.
‘Bone,’ he said. ‘I paid him to destroy what was left.’
‘Was that wise?’
‘I insisted on watching the fire through my window and paid him when he was done.’ He picked up his Bible from the desk. ‘I want you to take this,’ he said. He paused slightly before releasing his hold on it. ‘Is it tainted, do you think?’
I took the book from him. ‘May I send it to Caroline?’ I asked him.
He nodded. ‘It was beyond me to ask it of you.’
* * *
‘I will write to her,’ I said.
‘I know. I imagine you’ve already started and destroyed a dozen letters. Tell her your truths. Make no case for me other than what exists in your heart.’
‘She would never have condemned you,’ I said, knowing that these most distant of connections would never be severed. I took his hand in mine and felt his fingers tighten around my own, and we sat like this for several minutes, neither of us speaking or knowing how to speak, until finally his grip slackened and he withdrew from me.
‘Go,’ he told me. By which he meant that this was our parting, his final act of severance.
I went without complaint and he watched me from where he sat, his hands splayed on the boards of his table.
A bright light shone in on him through the open doorway and I stood to one side to see him fully bathed in its glow. His eyes were closed – though whether against the intensity of this glare or the fact of my departure, I could not tell.
At the outer doorway I paused again and secured the Bible beneath my jacket. Men and women passed back and forth across the garrison yard; Bone and his men performed some perfunctory drill; a tethered goat repeated its child-like bleat. I saw how far I had come in those few paces and seconds from the man alone and adrift at his table.
I walked into the yard and passed through the crowd there towards the river. I was accosted by several traders, but I ignored them all, knowing that if I attempted to speak I would only choke on the silence I had swallowed.
* * *
The following morning both Perpetua and Felicity were found hanging from the same limb
of an ironwood tree a hundred yards from the compound wall. It was a low limb and the two bodies hung barely a foot from the ground. They were close together and the arm of Perpetua was extended towards Felicity as though the two women had held hands during their final moments. Both wore their nuns’ habits, and around the neck of each woman was a sign saying ‘Please Forgive Us’; the same three words, and each sign written in the same careful hand.
I was alerted to the discovery by Cornelius, who had himself been roused by Bone, but we knew nothing of what we were about to see until our arrival at the tree, beneath which the women still hung and twisted on their ropes. Twenty or thirty others knelt in a circle around them, praying, and occasionally falling forwards to clutch the ground in their grief.
Klein stood to one side of this crowd, his head bowed, a book of prayer closed over the fingers of his hand.
No-one turned at our approach, and Cornelius and I stood at the edge of the trees, unable to take our eyes from the bodies. I felt numbed by what I saw.
Cornelius went ahead of me, through the praying circle, until he stood beside the women, and just as he had cut Perpetua from her cross, so he took out his knife and cut her from her rope. He called for help from the crowd, but no-one rose to assist him.
He held Perpetua as she fell loose, and then laid her on the ground beneath the tree. He then did the same for Felicity, laying her close beside Perpetua and folding their arms across their chests. He pulled their long skirts straight and brushed the leaves and dirt from their shoulders. Then he cut the messages from around their necks and took them to where Klein stood. He tore the boards into pieces and threw them in the priest’s face. Klein, though lifting his head to look directly at Cornelius, did nothing to protect himself, merely standing as the pieces of torn card struck him and then fell fluttering to his feet.
I wondered what Cornelius might do next, and I started moving towards him, but as I did so he turned away from the silent priest and came back to me, passing me without speaking.
A detail was sent to remove and bury the two bodies, at which Klein himself insisted on officiating.
I watched this later in the day and saw the two younger women chosen by Klein to become his new helpers, the black-and-white outfits already worn by these grateful, excited novices.
I left the graveyard at the first of the hymns.
Late in the afternoon, the deformed boy ran terrified into the compound and lay on the ground screaming until Fletcher went out to him and shook him into silence. He called the boy our bird of ill omen and told him to leave. But the boy refused to go, and afterwards Fletcher and Cornelius took it in turns to question him until he screamed again and told them of what he had seen.
31
The following two days were spent in an emptiness of waiting. No-one approached Frere, and nor was he seen outside his cell.
The only activity of those days, it seemed, was the removal of our quarry workers across the river in preparation for their work on Klein’s new mission. All around us there was unrest and rumour of unrest, and, closer to our hearts, averted glances, sudden silences, and old hatreds burnished to new points.
A still and earthy atmosphere descended on the place; weeds and grasses grew where men had recently plied their trades; the river fell and its lesser channels were quickly clotted with drifted growth.
On the first morning a succession of canoes passed us by, each filled with standing men, their faces painted with antimony to resemble skulls. They made no attempt to approach us or to divert to the Belgians, merely standing and watching us as they went silently by.
The second day, a native worker was carried into the compound who had been stung over his whole body while attempting to secure a wild bees’ nest. He was attended by four women, and he died in agony where he was laid. The women beseeched us to help him, but there was nothing we could do for him. Fletcher took out a bottle of spirit so that the man might become intoxicated beyond the reach of his pain, but even that seemed a cruel joke to play on him. When he was dead the four women carried him away again, leaving behind a patch of dirt rubbed bare by his thrashing about, and several of his faeces, alive with worms.
Fires burned along the river as our workers dismantled and destroyed their makeshift homes. An explosion at the quarry excited no-one.
We lived among each other like ghosts through those days and nights of overheated uncertainty, and I surely cannot have been alone in believing that the world beyond our close and encroaching view of it had at last ceased to exist, that it had finally changed beyond all recognition and understanding, beyond all we had ever known of it.
* * *
And at the appointed hour – the time only Nash still truly believed the steamer bound for Stanleyville would arrive – Frere was brought under guard from the gaol to the compound and made to await the vessel’s arrival there. Bone and four of his men came with Frere, Bone walking ahead of him, and the others forming themselves into a square around their charge, this unaccustomed formality an echo of Frere’s delivery to us a month earlier. They were joined by Nash, who came to the water’s edge only when his prisoner had arrived there, and when the rest of the compound had been cleared.
Seeing what was happening, and knowing that Nash would not now alter his plans to allow for the late arrival of the steamer, I gathered together Cornelius, Fletcher and Abbot, and the four of us stood and watched the proceedings from a distance. Frere saw us, understood our purpose there, and turned away from us. Bone’s men congregated in a group, and Nash insisted on them returning to their positions around Frere.
It was then late in the afternoon, and clear enough to everyone except Nash that the steamer would not arrive until the following morning at the earliest.
Both Fletcher and I tried to reason with him, but he insisted we were wrong, that we were men who now lived our whole lives in the expectation of delay and disappointment, men who had grown too attached – too attuned – to the formless existences we had so long lived. I started to argue with him, saying that I was thinking only of Frere and the time he would be forced to stand waiting, on display to anyone who passed by, and then afterwards waiting through the darkness, but my pleas made no impression on the man, and eventually Fletcher pulled me away. Nash called out after us that he accepted full responsibility for what happened. The militia men would wait with him, he shouted. He himself would remain armed.
We waited like that for two hours beyond nightfall. A man was sent to stand watch three miles downriver and told to fire a signal at the first sign of the boat.
Bone and his men, tired of standing, now sat and lay on the ground around Frere. Complaining of an ache in his legs, Abbot brought out chairs for us, and took two of these to Nash and Frere, placing them side by side overlooking the river. Bone and his men repositioned themselves accordingly.
I had expected to see Frere taken with some of his belongings, a change of clothing perhaps, clothes for his trial, a final satchel of his papers or letters, but he carried nothing, and he and Nash sat like strangers at a railway station awaiting their long-overdue train.
By then it must have been apparent even to Nash that the vessel would not come. What did arrive, however, catching us all unawares, and adding a further degree of uncertainty to the situation, was a vessel from the far shore, and we all watched as it crossed the river towards us.
I watched with dismay as Amon emerged from the cabin and leaped from the prow. He was followed by Proctor and eight more men, all armed. Others remained where they stood in the vessel’s wheel-house and on its deck, and I imagined that Hammad might be among them, watching us unobserved, our every movement reported to him, there to set his final seal on his own involvement in the matter, to confirm that the train of events set in motion by him all those weeks earlier was at last aimed unstoppably towards its conclusion, there to wash his hands of us, and to applaud himself and all that now awaited him.
Amon paused beside Nash and Frere, but spoke to neither of them
. He told Proctor to position his men mid-way between our two parties and then came on alone to where we waited. He extended his hand to both Cornelius and myself, but neither of us returned the gesture. He asked us what Nash thought he was doing, allowing his prisoner to remain so exposed. I refrained from asking him why he had come to us with so many armed men.
We discussed the late arrival of the steamer, and he told us there were a dozen suitable vessels waiting idle at their own wharves, but that these had not been offered to Nash for fear of the Belgians appearing to be anything other than impartial observers in the affair. I laughed at this and he smiled at me, at his own greater understanding of the politics of the situation. I asked him then why he was there.
‘To offer assistance,’ he said, indicating Proctor and his men. ‘To ensure the whole operation proceeds smoothly.’
‘And to protect Hammad’s investment,’ Fletcher said to him.
‘Perhaps. Who knows? You and I, Mr Fletcher, we are such little men in these affairs.’
I had said all I wanted to say to the man at our last encounter and did not want to again become tangled in his deceits and dismissals. I told him he had no jurisdiction on this side of the river and asked him to leave.
‘Jurisdiction?’ he said, savouring the word and all it implied. He looked around us, at our empty wharves and at the scattered buildings already lost to view in the darkness.
He left us after that and returned to Proctor. He told the armed men to join Bone’s guard on either side of Nash and Frere.
Fletcher wondered aloud what the man was up to, what he feared concerning the handing over of Frere, or, worse, what he was there to provoke. He left us briefly and returned with a rifle.
An hour later there was a false alarm. Someone downriver started beating a drum and we all imagined this was a signal sent by our look-out. Torches were lit along the bank and the wharves. Everyone strained to look and listen for anything approaching, but nothing came to us out of the darkness. It was by then almost midnight, and the river, though illuminated along its surface by the broken outline of the moon, flowed swiftly into the blackness of the trees beyond.