The Catastrophist: A Novel

by Ronan Bennett

  I finished the book that night. I did not return to the Public Record Office for almost a week. I stayed in my room and read novels. With one eye I watched the characters rise from the page, with the other I watched my own life. It sounds solipsistic, but reading about imaginary others made me intensely curious about my real self. Before then I had sent few queries in my own direction. Once I started reading I entered a period of introspection and self-examination; fiction referred to me questions I had not even known how to formulate. It was like being forced to stand naked in front of the mirror in a harsh and unflattering light.

  I did not like the reflection cast back at me. I saw vanity, arrogance, self-importance, cowardice, I saw the meanness of my own motives. I started writing, I think, because I saw in words a way to cover myself up. In fairness, I did not try to use writing as reinvention, or as an advertisement, a sign behind which I could hide and say I was better than I was. Instead I rendered everything as a kind of sly joke, including the characters in which I breathed. That way I was only one more joke among many, my failings were invisible. Long before my first efforts at fiction I had substituted James for Seamus.

  At around this time I met Alan at a dinner party. He was a year younger than I and had just got his first job in publishing. He struck me at first as rather bumptious and pleased with himself; I know—he would never admit it now—he thought me prickly and awkward. I probably was. Somehow we got over our initial mutual reservations. At his invitation I sent him some things—unconnected passages, a couple of short stories, a piece of memory. He invited me to his office in William IV Street where he told me he liked them. He liked, he said, the speculation, the moral neutrality, the jumpiness. “Keep it like that,” he advised me. “Personal conscience is fine, it’s flexible and interesting; social conscience is tedious because it’s invariably rigid and predictable.” He told me of a writer whose new novel was coming up for publication. “Boring,” he announced. “A novel is no place to parade your political beliefs.” He reminded me that Stendhal had once said that politics in a work of art is like a pistol shot going off at a concert, and he cited Auden: “The honest truth, gentlemen, is that, if not a poem had been written, not a picture painted, not a bar of music composed, the history of man would be materially unchanged.” The work of writers and artists who persisted in trying to prove the opposite invariably declined. Had I ever read any of Day-Lewis’s Noah and the Waters? His worst work. Embarrassing. Alan knew, he said, of several writers of vaguely left-wing sensibilities who, when it came to their fiction, found that no matter how hard they tried they could not fly the flag for the cause. The reason was simple: politics of that sort demands conviction, fiction demands doubt.

  With encouragement from Alan I completed my first novel in five months. I finished my second in just under a year—I cannot write anything like as quickly now. The advances were small, but with occasional reviews, newspaper and magazine articles, and the odd radio piece I began to make a living. I abandoned my academic career. The notes for my monograph lie in a tea chest in the cupboard where I keep my vacuum cleaner.

  When I was in my early teens things were hard for us. They were hard all over town. The mills were closing, the docks and shipyards were at a standstill, and the workless—cheered on by Siobhan (she had joined, to great family scandal, a communist youth organization)—were rioting. It was after William’s second and final disappearance and my mother was in a distraction over money. One Friday night she clutched us, more for her comfort than ours, as the bill collector shouted through the letterbox. It was then, as we sat in the dark holding our breaths, she noticed my fever. In the panic it was briefly—and wrongly—taken for TB, and I was admitted to a ward of the Fever Hospital in which my grandmother had died. The morning after my admittance my mother, anxiously scanning the newspaper lists, saw that B19617 had been placed in Class I, among the dangerously ill. She hurried to the hospital and would not be turned away. In the mutiny of my senses I was being tormented by ghosts. They were in the windows, they were around my bed. There were devils and angels fighting over me. Outside the wind was howling. Then her voice started to come through, a scented whisper, a rustling, an echo. I could feel my hand in hers. When I opened my eyes I could not make out her features, for her face was in halation and the eerie light around her was glowing, spun, white and foggy. But there was something about her presence, its intensity, its declaration that heaven and earth would be moved if that’s what it came to. I understood love as a child understands it, as a thing that comes to those who are greedy for it, a thing due by right.

  Sometime later, during my convalescence at home, she received a letter from William. We sat together in the kitchen that night. She gazed at the fire in the stove. She was not crying, but she was away, somewhere else.

  “Where have you gone?” I asked gently.

  I was pretending to be more grown-up than I was. She turned to me and smiled—amused, I think, and touched by my pretension—and answered that she was here, nowhere else.

  I asked why she still loved him.

  She took me seriously; for the first time she regarded me not as a child for whom these things are unfathomable and should remain so, but as a kind of companion, as a friend. She was quiet for some moments before she said, “Because he’s a human being and he deserves to be loved.”

  Love was not joy for her, it was not happiness. That’s the way I understood love. And from that day on I could not bear to be around sadness or the people and the rules which made sadness. I had to get away.

  It would be an exaggeration to say that nothing grew in my heart before I met Inès. There were women, and there were good times, happy times. There was fondness and kindness. There were presents and trips and all the things that go with man and woman, including soft words and impossible, felt pledges. But the truth is it was all at a remove; I was always watching the scene, watching myself, and, terrified of sadness, of what the end of love entailed, I made sure of my impregnability by convincing myself that I took nothing too seriously, that nothing deserved to be taken seriously. If I broke a heart, what of it? It would mend, and anyway hadn’t its very predictability turned disappointed love into a well-worn joke? The patterns were so pathetically familiar all you could hope for was some little variation to provide some amusement for someone, somewhere.

  So I walked in and out of others’ lives, always on my own terms. When things started to go wrong, when the demands and dependencies began, I had the capacity to walk away. I could sweep an angry hand over the table, clearing the mess in one go, even at the cost of breaking the good and useful along with the distracting and worthless. I left everything behind on more than one occasion, starting afresh, completely afresh, unencumbered, clean, looking for change . . .

  And of course I was aware of where this was coming from. I could see the face of the man who inspired my actions. The more it went on, the greater my dislike of what I was doing; the greater my dislike of him, and me. And the harder it was to maintain the pretense that I was treating the things around me as a joke.

  When Inès introduced herself at Alan’s party I was at a certain point in my life. Is that why I’m making so much of the failure of our affair? “I am going to change,” William had said, his last words to me. But there is no such thing as a change in people. We think we can change, some people try hard for change, we always hope for it. It is a kind of psychological grail. I suppose it is in our nature to feel dissatisfied with what we are and to cling to the belief, even to the day of our death, that we can in some way be better. We cannot stand the thought of remaining the same. We have to grow, we have to move forward. But we are as we are, and not even the greatest of traumas will change us.

  It could never have worked with Inès. I know that now.

  P A R T T H R E E

  Léopoldville, November 1960

  c h a p t e r o n e

  The ANC colonel tells me things will be better now that Mobutu has taken control. The coup five wee
ks ago was a very good thing. He tells me the U.N. should leave the country, that the reorganized Armée National Congolaise will put an end to Tshombe’s secessionist revolt in Katanga and the tribal fighting in the Kasai. He tells me it would be better for everyone if Lumumba were neutralized. Neutralized? He’s already under house arrest in the Primature. Exiled, the colonel says, to Egypt or Ghana, or the Soviet Union, if that’s what he wants. But we both know exile is not the colonel’s preferred solution. He chuckles as though at a private joke, then he drops like a stone. One second I am talking to a living person, the next I am gazing at a bloody heap on the ground. He is on his back, heedless, abandoned, puzzled, legs splayed and awkward, one arm twisted behind him, the other thrown recklessly out. There is a hole above his left eye.

  There is a second burst of gunfire, a ferocious dry clacking. Only now am I aware there has been a first. I crouch, desperately searching for the source of the shooting and trying to guess the best way out of the field of fire. The ANC soldiers around me scatter for cover behind their armored vehicles, one or two letting off wild retaliatory shots in the general direction of the embassy. But I have poor night vision and cannot make my move quickly enough. The shooting from inside the compound intensifies and I know I have lost the best moment for flight.

  As the ANC men open up I throw myself to the ground and, stranded and exposed, press up against the corpse. It is my head I fear for, that and—shamefully, most unheroically—my arse, which seems preposterously vulnerable. I almost turn to check its visibility before thinking better of it. Oh, I hope I’m not shot there—the indignity. I laugh inwardly; the things that go through your mind . . . The ricochets whine on the concrete and they sparkle on the metal of the armored personnel carriers like the splinters of gold from a welder’s torch. Someone somewhere is whinnying with pain. The air is smoking, the clatter is deafening. There is a moment’s letup and I think about making a run for it. But in which direction? The shooting starts up again, even more fiercely. It’s so absurd. This is not an assault on the fortified position of an opposing army. It is the Ghanaian embassy. The ambassador has been declared persona non grata by the new regime. Now I am lying beside a dead man in the middle of the road, sniffing his sweat and his brains and the thick black blood oozing onto the road from under the matt mash of his once handsome head.

  I cannot see Stipe. He had wandered off somewhere before the embassy guards opened up. There is another prolonged burst. I screw my eyes shut. Three years in the army never brought death so near. I am conscious of my fear but I am conscious too that if I survive I will have a story to tell. A story for the paper, a good story, and a store of narrative and emotional fat for the book writer to live off for a long time to come. The bullets strike the tarmac and concrete around me. They are getting closer. All I have to do is wait it out, wait and hope and survive. I must not panic. But what a bloody farce, what a fucking bloody farce! I draw myself to the warm corpse. Enter it, hide in it, be nowhere. The pointlessness of this! The whole thing has been a farce. Everything since independence has been a sick joke. The bullets crawl around me. I laugh out loud. I start to laugh hysterically. I laugh at the memory of all the things I have seen in this preposterous country. I laugh at the candidate we saw in the Kasai, riding into the village in his black tie and tails and white gloves and leopard skin, saturated with cruelty and power. I laugh at his election promises—Belgian money for crops, the wives of the white men, their houses, their cars. I laugh at poor Cleophas hanging prickless from the tree, at his big, splayed, dusty, gnarled, cartoon feet. There has been so much to laugh about. I’ll say that for the Congo. It might be the death of me but it’s been good for a laugh. King Baudouin of the Belgians—he was good for a laugh. Dressed like some Habsburg princeling on a doomed visit to a Balkan province, being driven into Léopoldville in a huge white American convertible, crowds lining the boulevard, whites cheering, the Congolese bemused. The brazen black youth who dashed to the car and snatched Baudouin’s ceremonial sword. The embarrassed and outraged gendarmes who pursued him and the laughing Congolese who applauded him. Farce. Independence day was good for a laugh, with Baudouin’s silly speech praising the genius and generosity of Léopold. Lumumba’s vitriolic response. We are your beasts no more, the new prime minister declared. Did Inès write that line for him? It had her stamp. She was there that day in the Palais de la Nation. She ignored me, of course. How well she looked, how beautiful. She had gained a little weight, just enough to fill out her figure. Her eyes were shining. People will say this about someone’s eyes, that they are shining, and they never are, but her eyes that day were more than bright. They were shining—light and happiness and fulfillment playing in them. Even her hair looked well, thicker, gleaming. And I knew then there had to be a man. Laugh at that. Why not? If I am to die I might as well die laughing. Why not?

  The corpse moves. The thrown-out arm twitches. Once. Twice. I feel it, sense it rather than see it. Is the colonel alive? But the head wound? No one could survive a wound like that. I turn my face a fraction to see a soldier kneeling at the back of one of the APCs waving frantically to me. He shouts something, urgent and commanding, but it is not French and I can’t make him out. His comrades are staring, making me frightened and paranoid, as if they know something to my disadvantage which I have not yet grasped. The soldier shouts again, but what am I supposed to do? Run for it? It’s twenty yards to the APC. I’d never make it. They’d cut me down.

  I stay where I am, I do not move. The soldier grimaces, giving up on me, and, turning back to the embassy, fires a random burst from his rifle. The corpse moves again and this time I realize what is happening. The colonel is taking more hits. Bullets are thudding into the dead tissue and bone. My shoe is suddenly slashed. I feel something hot, burning. Don’t tell me I’ve been shot in the foot. Shot in the foot! How ridiculous. I mutter, not with fear or pain—there is no pain, not real pain, not yet—but with anger. My foot is burning and I am angry because this is just ridiculous. Where is Stipe? Where is he? He could get me out of here. Stipe!

  Why didn’t I leave when the chaos broke out? Stipe told me to go. He warned me. The day the army of Lumumba’s new republic mutinied, when they poured into Léopoldville, breaking shop windows and looting stores. It was a time of unlawful and enthusiastic self-service, and of general alarm. The Belgians fled. They packed up and they fled. Tens and tens of thousands. Stipe told me it was going to get worse, but I held on. Even when the convoys of hysterical refugees streamed into Léopoldville, I held on. When the public docks were teeming with men and women beyond the reach of reason, I held on. And laughed.

  The firing builds up to an ear-splitting crescendo. The burning in my foot has stopped now. Pain is setting in. If anything, the shooting is fiercer. Thousands of rounds must already have been fired. Two more ANC soldiers are down. I watch a third spin backwards. He lies in the road screaming in agony. Two of his comrades drag him by the ankles back to cover and the screaming gives way to a dreadful, pathetic whimpering.

  I laughed even when I saw de Scheut and his children in the throng at the public docks. I could riot believe it. De Scheut of all people. He would not look at me. A black porter came to help them onto the ferry and Julie screamed at the filthy black monkey to leave them alone. They didn’t hear when I shouted my farewells. The voice in their own heads, white and implacable, speaking weird histories, lurid tales, hideous times, had them in its thrall.

  But at least they survived. Maybe they did the right thing. I am not going to survive, I am not going to survive. There will be no story for me to tell. A bullet will crash into the crown of my head, a bullet will tear into my arse. I press myself into the concrete, into the corpse. How can they miss? Oh Jesus, don’t let me die. I have to run. I can’t stay here like a sitting duck. Run—anywhere, in any direction, it doesn’t matter, just run. Get out of here.

  I am about to spring to my feet when Stipe, pistol in hand, appears by the APC.

  “Stay where you are,
James!” he shouts. “Stay where you are.”

  As though in reply the embassy guards intensify their fire. Stipe shouts something in Lingala to the soldiers, commanding them, organizing them. I cannot bear this anymore. I don’t care what he says, I’m going to make a run for it. Then I hear the roar of an engine, more shouts, more clattering pangs as bullets from the embassy hit the armored vehicle as it moves towards me.

  “James!”

  It is Stipe. He is standing ten feet away. He has got the soldiers to bring the APC into the middle of the road to shield me.

  “Come on!”

  I leap to my feet and rush to him. We crouch and keep time with the vehicle until we have reached the safety of the buildings on the other side of the road. I collapse against a wall. Stipe looks down at me and grins.

  “Jesus Christ,” I mutter. “Jesus Christ.”

  “What would you say to a drink?” he asks.

  He helps me up and we leave the battle behind. We get into Stipe’s car and drive to the Regina for a quiet drink. It’s that simple. It’s only when I am sitting on the concourse, whiskey in hand, that I become aware again of the throbbing in my foot. I tell Stipe I think I’ve been shot. He looks down at my ruined shoe. There’s a light smear of blood.