The Catastrophist: A Novel

by Ronan Bennett

  This is how Inès sees it, because she sees dreams.

  In Léopoldville, two days later, Grant tells us that he saw Lumumba and the soldiers arrive. It was a carnival, he says, a sick and vicious carnival. Mobutu stood with folded arms and watched the soldiers slap and abuse their prisoner. They pulled his hair and threw away his glasses. One of the NCOs sarcastically read out Lumumba’s declaration in which he had affirmed that Mobutu’s coup was illegal and that he was still head of state. When the NCO had finished, he rolled the paper into a ball and rammed it down Lumumba’s throat. Lumumba did not flinch. He stood his ground, bearing the indignities and the pain. He was taken away. Grant and the journalists were not able to see what happened next, but they heard the screams.

  Inès and I go to Gombé, to my house. She waits while I pack. I am done in less than an hour. Then we drive to the public docks and take the ferry to Brazzaville.

  c h a p t e r n i n e

  We are both waiting. She for word from Auguste, I for . . . what? For the end, for the very last moment of our story. She still calls it that. Our story, our affair. I have not corrected her. I never will. Our affair is over, but our story will continue a little longer, until the day there arrives a letter or messenger. Then it will be time for her to go, and time for me to accept what she has told me.

  Brazzaville is not so bad. The shabby, chaotic streets teem with noise and life and incident. On crossing the river we found a cheap hotel and spent the first week in a double room that overlooked the market. We slept in twin beds, but she was not distant from me. She took me to see a doctor, who strapped up my ribs and stitched the gash in my lower lip. We found a house to rent on the riverfront. It has a garden, nothing like as big as the one I had in Gombé, but it is walled and secluded and tranquil. I love to watch the birds in the morning. The bulbuls bicker in the branches and beautiful blue and brown and lilac rollers come to perch on the telegraph wires.

  Inès and I talk a great deal. We talk about the Congo, about independence and the way the Belgians emptied the treasury, bankrupted the country and did everything they could to sabotage Patrice’s plans. We talk about de Scheut and the colonists who fled. We talk about Mobutu and Kasavubu and the U.N. and Tshombe and Katanga. We talk about Stipe and Houthhoofd and the articles I wrote. We even talk about Madeleine and Auguste. There is no acrimony, no blame. It is a review of a shared past, a recension, sympathetic and sad, by two people who were apart but who are, in some uncertain, uneven way, discovering again what they have in common.

  One day we talk about us, about what went wrong. She hugs me and tells me that she knows she was hard but this was because she had to defend herself from herself, from the subversion of her own emotions, her own weaknesses. I clasp her to me and I can’t help myself. I say for the last time don’t turn me away. I bury my face in her hair. She puts a hand to the back of my neck and waits tenderly, patiently, and I think sorrowfully, until I get myself back under control, which I do. I never really thought she would change her mind, but her manner now—so loving, so kind—makes me feel a little better about things, and about myself.

  I have given up writing for the Observer. I see now that everything I did for the paper was tainted by Stipe. My stories were true, they were accurate. But, as Inès would say, truth and accuracy are not always the point. They can be made to serve particular interests just as lies can. She spends most of her time at her desk writing articles about Lumumba’s escape and recapture. She writes with passion, anger, indignation. She protests at his detention with Okito and Mpolo at Camp Hardy. She urges the U.N. to intervene and save the prisoners; she believes Patrice’s life hangs by a thread. She writes a furious denunciation of Mobutu when he orders Lumumba and the two others to be sent to Elisabethville and there placed in Tshombe’s “care and protection.” When nothing is heard of the trio after a week in Katanga, Inès writes a piece in which she says the deposed prime minister and his companions are almost certainly already dead. She quotes from Lumumba’s last letter to Pauline. I am writing these words not knowing whether they will reach you, when they will reach you, and whether I shall still be alive when you read them. Do not weep for me, dear wife. I know that my country, which is suffering so much, will know how to defend its independence and its liberty. Long live the Congo! Long live Africa—Patrice. We do not know for sure if Lumumba is dead, but I say that Pauline might have wanted his last words to her to have been more personal. Inès shakes her head slowly. No, she says, Pauline knows how much he loved her, that when he crossed the Sankuru it was for her. She would always know that and no words he could write could say as much to her now as his action then. Better to use the few words he was permitted to assure her that his life had not been in vain, that the thing he believed in and sacrificed himself for will one day come to pass.

  She finds the silence from Auguste hard to bear. She doesn’t know if he made it to Stanleyville, if he’s dead or alive. Sometimes I see her at her desk, gazing into space, sad, lost. Persa. She tries to conceal these moments of distraction. She knows what they do to me.

  We tend to keep to ourselves in these sequestered days. Others hold little interest for us, and, though we talk, much of our time is touched with silence. We go to walk in the market in the evening when it’s cooler and not so crowded and the last of the vendors offer their wares at bargain prices. I love the fruit here. I buy bananas and mangoes and oranges, pineapples and berries. Inès chooses the vegetables and sometimes a chicken or some fish. It’s harder to find good wine so we buy beer from a young girl who has a little bench at the beginning of the meat market. She overcharges us, but Inès has taken a shine to her and cheerfully pays what is demanded.

  Occasionally Inès will slip her hand into mine. I don’t look at her when she does this. I just give her hand a light squeeze and we walk home together like that.

  After dinner we sit on the patio overlooking the garden and I read to her. She has always liked my voice, though in truth it tends to monotone and because my breathing is untrained I stutter and get into trouble over the phrasing. Sometimes I will look up and see that her thoughts are away somewhere else, with someone else. But after a moment or so she will ask why I have stopped and I smile and start again. We sleep in separate bedrooms.

  One morning a letter arrives.

  Dear James,

  Please forgive my tardiness in writing to you. The delay was due to the usual things—too much going on in the office, a mountain of correspondence to get through, not to mention a neurotic and demanding young author to nurse-maid through his second novel—he seems to think I exist solely to pander to his needs.

  Your book is wonderful—funny, though it shouldn’t be, and enigmatic. Both Peter and Rosamond have read it now and are of the same view. (Part of the reason I held off writing to you was because I was waiting for their reactions.) Rosamond hasn’t stopped talking about it. She thinks it far and away your best work to date. So do I. True, it’s disturbing and hardly optimistic, but in its cold, terrifying way it’s utterly compelling, and the irony is patrician—I mean that as a compliment, as you know.

  I’ve just come out of a meeting with the marketing and publicity people and the plan is to publish in May. Everyone is terribly excited. You will be back by then, won’t you? Your presence will be enormously helpful.

  I don’t know what to say to you about Inès, except that I’m sorry. Are you over it yet? I do hope so. Are you writing anything at the moment? Think about a swift follow-up, won’t you? It would be nice to get a little impetus going.

  Very best wishes and I look forward to seeing you soon.

  Alan

  I take the letter to show Inès. She is in the middle of an article demanding that Tshombe provide proof that Patrice is still alive. She puts aside her work and reads while I stand by the desk. She shows no reaction at first. Then she nods slowly and looks up from her chair. She smiles and gets up and hugs me. Bravo, she says, complimenti. She always took pleasure from whatever success came m
y way. Nothing that has happened between us has changed that.

  Later, after our visit to the market, we walk along the riverfront. The fishermen are coming in and the women and the children are bathing. The sun is low and the river golden. She asks me quietly what I will do now. I say I suppose I will go back to London soon, that there will be the proofs and the cover to look at and various meetings to attend, and a lunch or two, knowing Alan. We walk on, sometimes brushing against each other, sometimes pausing to look across to Léopoldville. The sun slides down. In its last moments the descent is very sudden. We stand together in silence. I am aware only of her breath, her presence. Our thoughts are scattered, there’s no chasing them, no catching them. The night bears them away. Eventually I say it’s dark now, we should go home. She doesn’t move and I ask if she’s all right. She nods and we start back for the house.

  On the patio I seem to lose my voice when I am reading to her.

  “Go on,” she says softly, “don’t stop now.”

  “No,” I say. “I don’t find this book particularly interesting. I think I’ll get an early night.”

  I leave her and go inside. I feel empty. Alan’s letter said all I wanted to hear, but it has brought me no joy. How different it would have been had we still been together.

  I am awake when she comes to me.

  “Is everything all right?” I ask, anxious and confused.

  She sits on the bed. I can’t look her in the face. It’s too upsetting. She runs her hand through my hair and closes her fingers around it and gently tugs at it, as though to pull me out of my silence.

  “Do you really want to go to Stanleyville?” I ask. “Who knows how long Gizenga can hold out against Mobutu? The whole thing could collapse any day.”

  “I know,” she says, “but I have to go.”

  “Why do you have to go?”

  She closes her eyes. She says, “The world divides in two and sometimes I wish I could be in your world, James, where you don’t care about politics, where you can see all points of view.”

  “What’s so wrong with that?”

  “There’s nothing wrong with it. But few people have this privilege. When you are on history’s losing side, when you are poor and cursed to eat bread, to accept your enemy’s point of view is to accept starvation and slavery.”

  I make a sound of exasperation. This kind of vocabulary is too hysterical for me. I take her hand and put it to my lips and I ask if there is anything I can say or do that will make her change her mind. She tells me that she still loves me. For a moment my hopes rise. And then there are those awful words. She says she will love me forever. Ah, that kind of love.

  And yet that night there is love. She does not move to go to her room. She sits at the end of my bed and we talk. As the night wears on she pulls the sheet around her bare legs and shifts closer to me. She leans her head against my chest and I touch her ear and throat and neck. She puts her hand on my arm and brings up her face. We kiss. I lower myself and she climbs on top of me. I pull the dress over her head. I lick her little breasts and push my hands down the back of her panties. She straightens her legs to let me get them off. I say to myself that I will not allow this to stop. I will stay inside her all night, I will never let her get away.

  I think I have been asleep, I don’t think for long. Some seconds. I hope seconds, only seconds—I cannot bear the waste of slept time. The sound of her breathing fills the room. I know her when she’s like this, on her side, curled, her back to me, sleepy and vague and satisfied and wet and in my arms. I know I can please her more and I don’t have to wake her. Rub her gently from behind and whisper things to her, not in a way that will wake her. I don’t want her dreams disturbed. I want her protected and safe and mine, always. I bring my hand up to the nape of her neck. I can smell her on my fingers.

  In the morning she is gone. I leap out of bed and run to her room. She’s not there. She’s not at her desk and she’s not in the garden. I throw on my clothes and, my mind in turmoil, rush out to look for her.

  I find her hurrying through the market on the way back to the house. She has been at the AP office. She holds up a sheet of paper. There has been an announcement about Patrice. She is going to Léopoldville now.

  “You can’t go,” I say. “It’s not safe.”

  She will not hear of my objections.

  “I go.”

  I will not be parted from her, not now. We will risk it together.

  On the ferry she shows me the AP report of a statement released in Elisabethville by Tshombe and the Katangan minister of the interior, Godefroid Munongo. In their version, Lumumba, Okito and Mpolo escaped from captivity soon after their arrival in Katanga. They had abandoned the stolen car in which they were traveling after it had run out of petrol. The Katangan government had offered a reward for their recapture, but before the forces of law and order caught up with them all three men were massacred by the inhabitants of a small village in revenge for the atrocities committed by Lumumba’s troops on the Baluba people. The villagers may have acted somewhat precipitously, the statement went on, but their actions were excusable and they would collect a reward. Neither the village nor the grave site would be identified for fear of reprisals by Lumumbists. When one reporter asked the minister of the interior if he and Tshombe had had anything to do with the deaths, Munongo responded, “I will speak freely. If people accuse us of killing Lumumba, I will reply, ‘Prove it.’ ”

  Today of all days. Couldn’t this news have waited another twenty-four hours? At times like this Inès is never mine.

  “There’s something else,” she says.

  My heart narrows.

  “Auguste?” I ask.

  She nods. I look out over the river, at the boats and the sandbanks.

  “A messenger from the party came to the house this morning when you were asleep. He’s in Stanleyville.”

  “I’m glad he made it,” I say. “Does he want you to join him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you go?”

  She does not say anything. There is still hope.

  Our entry into the Congo without the proper papers is facilitated by payment of a small consideration to the two senior policemen on duty at the public docks. We hurry up to the Regina, intending to talk to George, the U.N. press officer, or, failing that, to Grant or one of the other correspondents. My heart is not in it, but now is not the time to press Inès.

  As we reach the hotel we see a small black woman come out. She wears a dark blue pagne but is naked from the waist up, her hair is shorn and her eyes are downcast. A small crowd of people follow her out of the hotel and stare after her.

  “It’s Pauline,” I say.

  We stop and watch as she makes her way down to the boulevard. Word is spreading. The curious are coming down from the cité.

  “What’s going on?” I ask George.

  “She came to ask if the U.N. would help to get her husband’s body returned,” George replies. “The trouble is, I’m not sure there is a body.”

  Grant, standing among a small group of reporters and photographers, comes up to us.

  “My God. I didn’t expect to see you two here again.”

  He seems genuinely pleased to see both of us. We shake hands and he asks if we’ve heard the news.

  “The story about the villagers is a transparent lie,” he says, “and Tshombe and Munongo couldn’t care less that no one believes them. I’ve been piecing together what happened when they sent Lumumba to Elisabethville. Apparently on the plane, Lumumba, Okito and Mpolo were roped together. The soldiers beat them so sadistically that the Belgian captain had to send the co-pilot back to tell them to pack it in, they were actually endangering the craft. By the time they got to Elisabethville airport—so the Swedish U.N. soldiers there say—Lumumba and the other two could barely stagger off the plane. Then they were forced to run a gauntlet of Tshombe’s soldiers. It seems that night they were taken to a farmhouse owned by a Belgian. I’m pretty sure they were done i
n then and there, though after God knows what kind of treatment. I’m pretty sure too that Tshombe and Munongo were there to watch it. Munongo may even have given Lumumba the coup de grâce himself—a bayonet in the chest is what people are saying.”

  Inès says she wants to go after Pauline.

  A photographer with a London accent asks Grant, “What’s with the black bird having her tits out?”

  “It’s the traditional way women mourn here,” Grant replies icily.

  He suggests we take his car and catch up with Pauline on the boulevard. Inès and I get in the back, one of the other reporters gets in the passenger seat beside Grant.