A Single Swallow

by Horatio Clare

  Bertrand produced a small knot of green weed and an empty cigarette packet, which he tore open to make a flat rectangle. Then he worried one edge of the card and blew on it with short fierce puffs. One of the layers of paper of which it was composed began to peel away. Carefully, with more worrying and more blowing, Bertrand stripped it off.

  ‘Et voilà!’ he said, and rolled it into a joint. When we emerged from behind the hut we were both charged up and giggly. The bicycle men and the other travellers had disappeared. We walked into the trees.

  The rainforest grew up in canopies around us, a pavilion of widening, ever-higher green tents. You could not see very far into it; as the plants pushed up they led your gaze up with them, to the sky. It was like being a shrimp at the bottom of a deep green moat. At first we went quite slowly as I marvelled and Bertrand laughed at my amazement.

  ‘Look!’ I cried, ‘Regarde-moi ça! Le papillon!’

  The butterfly was as big as the palm of my hand and deep silken crimson.

  ‘But I have never seen that colour before!’ I breathed. The insect swam across the path in front of us.

  ‘You wait until we meet the Pygmies,’ Bertrand said. ‘You haven’t seen them before, either.’

  We came into clouds of butterflies; lemon yellow, orange, blue and white, lifting off the path like shoals of blossom. The track narrowed to a single path in places and the forest was very quiet, there was barely a bird call and no wind. I noticed twigs bent into strange configurations, crosses and triangles, and wondered if they were Pygmy signs. A person standing still 5 metres away would be invisible to us and though we did not say anything we both felt the forest watching. We came to a stream where small children were playing: they pointed at me excitedly and Bertrand said something which made them laugh.

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘I said the White was going to turn pink!’

  ‘Oh, ha ha!’

  The track climbed out of the trees and took a long curve across a stretch of open ground. The temperature leapt, away from the shade, and the heat was a solid weight. We took turns singing to keep our spirits up. Bertrand hummed and la-la-ed to himself. I sang a random medley (‘Bread of Heaven’, ‘The Big Ship Sails on the Alley-Alley-Oh’, ‘A Fox Went out on a Winter’s Night’, ‘Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes’), then Bertrand talked a spoken equivalent, a free-form chatter of whatever came into his head.

  ‘My father is in the police at Ouesso. You are going to love it there! There will be women and lots to drink. We are going to have some fun! Oh, you White. You have no idea. Do you know what was here a few months ago? Ninjas! A few years ago it was all war here – you would not have been able to walk along this path singing your songs – mais non! They would kill you quick. Do you know what it is like in Congo? No, you do not know. Have you heard of the Colonel? I don’t think so. Listen, there is a colonel. He is in charge of security. If the Colonel asks you a question you answer fast. Because if you do not answer fast the Colonel takes out his pistol. And if the Colonel takes out his pistol he does not put it away until he has used it.’

  ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Don’t worry about that.’

  ‘OK. Aren’t you hot?’

  ‘Yes, but you are hotter. Let’s have some more water.’

  ‘Haven’t you got a hat?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Wait . . .’

  We proceeded, Bertrand wearing one of my shirts wrapped round his head like a turban. We passed some women coming the other way. One of them said something which made Bertrand crow with laughter.

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘She said the White is turning pink!’

  Now the track descended again and the forest reared up ahead. There were huge trees, their great red trunks towering as straight as telephone poles, as wide as oaks at the base.

  The water we drank turned straight to sweat. The path now returned us into the forest; we seemed to tunnel into its dark shade. Now we began to cross wide dark streams, bridged by U-section iron rails. Bicycling across one would be a severe test of nerve; Bertrand and I competed, covertly, in our demonstrations of nonchalance. We came to a village. A group of women were sitting on the ground.

  ‘See?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Pygmies,’ Bertrand whispered.

  ‘Bonjour!’ I said, and raised my hat.

  The women nodded and smiled. They were small, rather than tiny. Clumps of pineapples grew like brambles beside the path and here and there were clusters of bright flowers. A man came slowly up the path towards us.

  ‘C’est un Pygmée,’ Bertrand whispered, unnecessarily.

  ‘Bonjour!’

  The man nodded gravely.

  We caught up with two of our fellow travellers, the young wife and the old lady, who had stopped to rest. As well as her basket the old lady was carrying a satchel: after some protest she let me carry this for her – she did not speak French and Bertrand grinned at our exchange rather than interpreting her Lingala. Her feet were bare, her basket loaded, but her pace was just as fast as mine. Insects swam in lazy clouds at the stream-crossings and I mourned my donated shoes. A blister was beginning to grow on the ball of my right foot. I tried going barefoot but the grains of sand on the hot path prickled under my feet like glass dust. The old lady took up station behind me and gently shooed me along. Bertrand and the young wife chatted in Lingala and we sucked our teeth and laughed a little nervously as the balance-beam water crossings became harder. The young wife giggled and skipped across them as surely as if she were wearing a safety harness. Another DANGER EBOLA sign appeared, my blister burst, water filled one shoe and I wondered in how many ways the disease could be transmitted.

  No one seemed to know how far we had to walk.

  ‘About 15 more,’ Bertrand said.

  ‘But you have done it before?’

  ‘Yes. Another hour or two.’

  We emerged again into an area of high grasses, the trees falling back briefly. There was a flicker of movement above us and I looked up.

  ‘Bertrand!’ I cried. A single swallow shot over our heads and pulled round in a long, controlled skid.

  It circled us once and swept away, slightly to the west of our path. The hair seemed to stand up on my arms and I felt flushed from my stomach to the back of my head with a strange, tingling warmth, as though the bird had cast a spell around us. It gave a brief, chittering call as it turned its circle over our heads.

  ‘Did you see that? An hirondelle – that’s the bird I am following! And it was here – just here!’

  Bertrand grinned, half in encouragement, half in mystification. I was suddenly swept with a wonderful kind of euphoria, an electrifying feeling beside which the mild buzz of the dope, earlier, was as nothing. The whole day, this journey, the decision to come this way, all were cast suddenly in a different light; a different substance in my mind; as if a tentative hope had suddenly hardened into certainty. Suddenly it did not matter that I was so far away from the world as I had known it. This remoteness, the commitment to this track, the helplessness, in which I could only follow, only keep going – all were justified, were confirmed. It was as if I had been blessed.

  We came down the Likouala River as the sun was beginning to lose its grip on the sky. It was still crushingly hot and humid, but the lapping of the deep grey-brown water seemed to radiate relief. The bicycle men were sitting in the shade with the luggage: one asked for a supplementary tax from Bertrand, and there was a debate, which he lost.

  ‘Now I have nothing,’ he said, sadly, but still smiling.

  Having carried my own bag, I was still flush with CFA francs.

  ‘You bargain, I’ll pay,’ I muttered. There were two pirogues waiting on the bank. We loaded slowly, carefully, everyone sweating and heavy-legged. I swept my hat through the water and crammed it onto my head.

  ‘The White is hot!’ laughed our paddler, and pushed us out into the stream. The river unravelled slowly around a bend. T
here were no villages, no paths, nothing but the Likouala gliding through the immense press of trees. We climbed out on the far bank and followed a sandy path to a village. There, sitting under a tree, pointing away from us, towards the north, was another Land Cruiser. This one was in excellent condition, with a heavy-duty cage covering its open back. In a hut, in near-darkness, sitting at a table with a cold bottle of beer open in front of him and dark mirror-shades covering his eyes, was its owner and driver, on whose pleasure we all now depended. This was Chef.

  We went in two at a time. When Bertrand and I entered, Chef bade us sit with a nod of his head. He can have seen very little from behind his shades: to the naked eye there was almost nothing visible in the gloom but eight bright bars of sunlight glowing through slats. Chef required that we drink with him (a sort of alcoholic grape juice from a carton, for us, more beer for him), converse in a civilised way and accept his price. Once that was achieved, he nodded us away: Chef did not handle the money; that was his motorboy’s department.

  Outside I fell into conversation with a small man in a bright red baseball cap.

  ‘So do you like our forest?’

  ‘Yes! It’s incredible!’

  ‘You are a tourist?’

  ‘Sort of . . .’

  ‘Ah, swallows,’ he said, when I had explained. He had no particular stories about them. Like many Africans I met, he could name them, and say when they came and went, and that was all.

  ‘So you are not here to see us?’ he smiled.

  ‘You?’

  ‘Pygmies!’

  ‘Well, it is very good to meet you. Do many people come to see you?’

  ‘I am a guide to the reserve.’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘Yes, we are guides for French tourists, and other kinds too.’

  ‘Is it very expensive to get in?’

  ‘Ah! But you are in!’

  He explained that tourists were flown in and out, staying in a luxury hotel. I asked him why a reserve was necessary.

  ‘Because they are killing the forest,’ he said. He pointed out and named the different kinds of giants whose heads we could see from where we stood. Iroko, known as the African teak, and sapelli, the most magnificent of all, formed an entirely separate realm; green pavilions on red trunks, watchtowers above the forest, a canopy above the canopy.

  ‘To us they are sacred,’ he said, ‘especially sapelli.’

  The countries of the north and west are greedy for their corpses. Parquet floors, guitars, even the interiors of Cadillacs require them. I had not understood that the ancient forest we stood in was one of the few significant tracts remaining in the Republic of Congo: to the west and south of us millions of hectares had long since been destroyed.

  ‘There is still forest in Gabon, and some in Cameroon,’ he said. ‘But you will see.’

  Two motorboys loaded us all into the Land Cruiser. I opted for the cage.

  ‘It’s four hours,’ said the motorboy. ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Yes he’s sure!’ cried Bertrand, who had topped up with tabac congolais. ‘Chef is just having some tabac too,’ Bertrand said, twinkling, ‘to give him force.’

  ‘Well, better stoned than drunk,’ I said uneasily, looking at the Land Cruiser and judging it capable of lethal speed.

  ‘Chef is the best driver,’ Bertrand said, seriously, having met the man only twenty minutes before.

  ‘We will confirm that when we arrive,’ I replied.

  ‘Is the White scared?’ asked the laughing lady, whose name was Mariam. She had a great sack of fruit of which she was even more protective than was the young wife of her son. Before I could think of an adequate riposte, knowing that yes or no would provoke a gust of Mariam’s particularly powerful laugh, the motorboy appeared and swung the charred spine, ribs and belly of a pig onto my feet, followed by two sacks of some sort of bean. He climbed into the cab and drove us to the other end of the village where, exuding immense authority, Chef appeared, shooed the motorboy out of his seat, and we set off, with blasts of our horn and salutes to the waving Pygmies.

  We raced down a red earth track at about 90 km/h. Bertrand whooped and banged down on the roof of the cab. I grimaced, at which he laughed and banged again. Three or four miles outside the village we stopped. Chef dismounted and came around to the back. We all fell silent as he fixed his gaze on me.

  ‘So, are you going to give me a present?’ he enquired.

  ‘A present?’

  ‘Yes. Are you going to give me your hat?’

  There were titters from the travellers. This was theatre, I realised: the point was to entertain.

  ‘Right,’ I said, casually. ‘You’re the driver of this thing, are you?’

  ‘Eh, OUI – !’ said Chef, to the gallery: this was the most stupid question on earth.

  ‘Good. Alors, if you drive well, incredibly well, perfectly, in fact, and if you get us to Ouesso very safely and very comfortably, and if we have enjoyed our journey and never felt that we might die, and if I am in a good mood when we get there – a truly superb mood – then it is just possible that I might give you a present but I can absolutely promise you it WILL NOT BE MY HAT! This is MY HAT, CHEF!’

  The travellers cheered. Laughing, in a concessionary way, Chef climbed back into the cab. It was satisfying but also vaguely unsettling; clearly, and somehow on behalf of the travellers, I had won round one; equally clearly there were more rounds to come. We raced on. Bird-watching Congolese style meant standing at the back of the cage alongside the young husband: the two motorboys and Bertrand took the front, near the cab, leaving what space there was among the cargo in the well of the cage free for the women and children. We ducked and swayed as branches and chicottes whipped towards us at 100 km/h: the chicottes are long feathered grasses like shoots of bamboo.

  ‘Swift!’ I announced, or ‘Swallow!’, though I did not see many of them.

  ‘Toucan!’ shouted the young husband, pointing at a hornbill.

  ‘Chauffe! Chauffe! Chef!’ howled Bertrand, hammering on the roof of the cab – Hot! Hot! – as he urged ever greater speeds, grinning hugely at my discomfort.

  ‘I’m bloody serious!’ I shouted at him. ‘I want to see these birds!’

  The travellers burst into loud comment and I blushed with realisation – for the first time in days I had spoken in English. They laughed. It was as though in speaking my own language by mistake I had fully revealed myself, and they approved. We stopped again. The motorboys jumped down and Chef appeared, hands on hips, directing them to a particular bush, from which they withdrew the body of a fat black pig with maggots oozing out of its head. This they dragged to the back of the cage. The cooked portions of the other animal were shifted and the corpse was heaved up over the tailgate and onto my feet. We all edged away from it as much as possible. It was difficult not to imagine Ebola, like an evil smell, penetrating my shoe, sniffing around my blister and worming its way into the flesh.

  Chef stopped again, another 10 kilometres on, in a village on a hillside. The light was going now; the last swifts and swallows hawked overhead and then vanished as first stars, then fireflies, appeared. Somewhere in the village, Chef was in protracted negotiation, eating, and no doubt drinking and smoking. Bertrand and the motorboys gossiped in Lingala, the young wife fed her boy and Mariam passed around bananas. When it was quite dark, the night thick and pressing on the forest floor, paling only among the stars, Chef reappeared, still wearing his shades and now carrying a powerful torch. With him were a man with a machete and a very small boy. At a command from Chef the motorboys seized the dead pig and laid it down on the track. The man with the machete approached it with great caution.

  ‘Ebola?’ he said.

  ‘No, this is not Ebola,’ Chef asserted. He stretched the animal’s legs and tilted them this way and that, bathing its armpits and stomach in the light of the torch. As his father talked doubtfully with Chef the little boy rushed forward, gurgling with delight, grabbed the pig’s front
trotters and braced his feet against its shoulders. For a moment we all fell silent and stared. The little boy babbled, urging his father on. I believe we all had the same thought: if the pig had Ebola then the beautiful little boy now surely had it too. If he has it, I thought, I do not care if I get it. I do not care about anything any more, if that lovely little boy has been infected; we might as well all die together.

  The father relented and bent forward. He stroked the blade of the machete down the centre of the pig’s chest and the skin split under it. The butchery was completed with wonderful speed and skill and the pig was soon returned to the cage, now in hams, securely tied in sacks. A sack of mangoes was heaved up to join us and we set off again, Chef ’s mobile trading post hurtling like a single bright spark between the toes of the forest.

  We huddled down as it grew colder, into whatever space we could find. We took turns singing, as the floor of the cage bashed up and down, then we fell silent. A long time passed slowly, then there was a commotion and something was thrust at me. The old woman held something flapping in her hands. I switched on my torch. Brown- and cream-barred feathers, long wings and the stunned dark eyes: it was a nightjar, a beautiful bird, the first I had ever seen. I was reaching out for it when the old woman lost patience and flung it over her shoulder, out of the cage. Bird-watching Congolese style . . .

  The forest did not fall back as we descended towards Ouesso, but the darkness did. Villages which had been dark now had oil lights. Then a generator, and electricity, then the blue firelight-flicker of television. Low dark buildings came up around us and side roads, other vehicles and motor scooters, and at last we stopped beside a mass of people milling around a bar. Euphoric to have arrived at last I jumped down, into the hands of the police.

  They demanded my passport with a drunken belligerence. Halfway through an argument about the cost of not having a non-existent tourist permit Chef drove away, taking all the travellers except Bertrand, and, I realised too late, my notebook. In a foul mood and many thousand CFAs poorer I placed myself with very bad grace in the hands of a man who said Bertrand and I were lucky to have found him because he ran Ouesso’s only good hotel. Bertrand confessed that his father did not actually live in Ouesso, exactly, but rather a little way downriver, and wondered if there might be sufficient CFA to get him a bed in a hostel.