Brazzaville Beach

by William Boyd

  There was a knock at the door. It was one of the assistant managers, a young Ghanaian called Kwame. He informed me that the hotel was clearing out Mr. Shoukry’s room, and the manager wondered if there was anything I might like to keep as a memento. I was surprised at such thoughtfulness. As we left the room the phone rang: Hauser was waiting in the lobby. He could wait a little longer.

  I stood in Usman’s sitting room looking about me, feeling a little uncertain and troubled. Kwame waited discreetly at the door and behind him stood a couple of chambermaids with cardboard boxes and plastic bags.

  I went to the desk and opened a drawer. I saw Usman’s passport, some documents, some loose change. Nothing for me here. In the bedroom I opened the cupboard. His few clothes hung above four pairs of shoes. I felt strangely panicked. I knew I should take something, that I’d regret it later if I missed this opportunity. But what? I slid the hangers to one side. Did I want that linen jacket? Those ties?…A sudden sensation of nausea overcame me. The whole idea of a memento—a thing—as a substitute for Usman seemed a gross indignity. I pushed another hanger: his official air force uniform, issued to all the pilots, which they never wore. On the shelf above, I saw his peaked cap still in its plastic wrapping and beside it the stiff glossy leather of his belt. The belt? Something useful, at least, that I could wear. I reached up and took it down.

  Clipped to the side of the belt was a neat brown holster. The leather was molded into the shape of a stylized kidney. I unclipped the flap. The holster held his small, compact Italian automatic pistol. I took it out and weighed it in my hand.

  I thought, with a sudden wrenching inside me, of Usman in his swimming shorts, that day at the airport, showing me his plane so proudly.

  His good luck charm, he had said. Why hadn’t he taken it with him? I thought, angry now.

  My fingers traced his initials on the butt.

  I knew at once this was what I wanted to keep. I slid it into my pocket and walked back to the sitting room. It was a foolish thing to do, I told myself, but I had wanted it, the impulse to take it had been powerful. It was the only object in that entire bungalow that brought an image of Usman Shoukry back to me. But I continued my search of the room, however, for form’s sake.

  Opening a cupboard in the sitting room I came across a cardboard box full of the equipment Usman had used for the construction of his horsefly airplanes: scalpels and razor blades, a fly-tier’s vise, slivers of matchwood and balsa, the almost weightless, translucent tissue paper. That sent me back to the desk again, and in a bottom drawer I found a thin file full of delicate drawings of his prototypes. I told Kwame this was what I wanted. As I left the room the chambermaids sidled meekly in.

  “You do look well,” Hauser said again. “No, really well. I mean, you’d never believe…”

  “I feel fine. I’m well rested. Nothing terribly dramatic happened.”

  We had been driving for over an hour. Hauser, to my surprise, had kissed me on both cheeks when we finally met up in the lobby of the hotel. He had looked pleased to see me and was full of compliments. We had conversed carefully at first, diplomatically avoiding contentious subjects, but I could sense the questions massing eagerly in his head. I decided to confront a few of them.

  “How’s Eugene?” I asked, disingenuously.

  “Ah,” Hauser began, his glee almost shamefully evident. He collected himself and made his face solemn. “Good point. Not very well. No, he hasn’t been well. Since you left. We’ve seen very little of him.” He glanced at me. “Ginga’s been more or less running things. I think Eugene…” he paused, choosing his words, “has had something of a, a nervous collapse. Nervous exhaustion, Ginga says.”

  “Well. That’s reasonable, I suppose.”

  “What happened?”

  “When?”

  “That day you left. What went on, Hope? Come on.” He smiled at me. “You can tell Anton, surely.”

  “Well…I’m not so sure.”

  “Everything’s changed. The book’s postponed. The feeding area’s been closed down. What did you do to him?”

  “We had an argument.”

  Hauser looked at me skeptically, and saw I was going to say nothing more for a while. He carried on talking.

  “Of course the whole place has been in uproar since you were…taken. Now that you’re safe, and Ian’s back, we’re almost back to normal. But it’s been odd.”

  “How’s Ian?”

  Hauser grimaced sympathetically. “He’s been trying not to show it but I think he was, you know, traumatized. Poor boy.” He glanced at me again. “I mean compared to you he definitely is traumatized.”

  “Appearances can be misleading.”

  Hauser laughed. His laugh was high and staccato. “No, no, Hope,” he said. “No, no. You’re made of sterner stuff.”

  His amusement was annoyingly contagious, and I found myself smiling back at him. Why had I disliked Hauser so, all these months? The tyranny of first impressions, I supposed. But then I thought back to the incident of the half-eaten baby chimp. I should be more cautious.

  “Why have they closed the feeding area?” I asked.

  “You’re kidding?”

  “What?”

  “They must have told you. The war. The chimpanzee wars they’re calling them. The northern chimps—they’ve been systematically killing the southerners.” He looked for my reaction. “You do know.”

  “I discovered it.”

  There was a long pause. Hauser ducked his head, as if apologizing.

  “Eugene discovered it,” he said.

  “No.”

  “That’s why the book is being rewritten.”

  “I discovered it. That’s why I had to leave.”

  “Look, we all know it was during those days he was out in the field with you. But—” He paused and then said slowly, “Eugene was the one who realized what was going on….”

  “I’d been telling him about it for weeks.”

  Hauser frowned. “That’s not the way—how can I tell you?—that events are being presented at the camp.”

  I felt a tightening in my head, as if a belt were being cinched around my skull. “Jesus Christ.”

  “I’ll be honest. Every one assumes Eugene had made…made some sort of sexual advance to you.”

  “For God’s sake!”

  “We don’t know anything. We see you run off. Eugene effectively disappears. Ginga takes control. You know…”

  “Well, you assumed completely wrong.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m pleased to hear it.”

  “Ask Ian. He’ll tell you. I spotted this weeks ago. Mallabar wouldn’t listen.” I looked at Hauser. “Hasn’t Ian said anything?”

  “Well, no…. He’s not really been working.”

  “Good old Ian.”

  I turned on Hauser with some of my old hostility.

  “Anyway, you should know, too. Incinerating that baby chimp.”

  “Baboon…. No, Hope, I swear. It was a baboon. We were both wrong.”

  I looked out of the window at the passing scrubland. A nice irony. A sense of frustration was building inside me that was making my shoulders hunch and my scalp crawl.

  “Anyway,” Hauser said, his voice placatory, “it’ll be great to have you back. We’ve got two new researchers, but we still miss you, Hope. Really.”

  The last thing you learn about yourself is your effect. I turned to him. “Unfortunately I don’t think I’ll be staying long, somehow.”

  It was unsettling to be back at Grosso Arvore: the place appeared to me simultaneously familiar and strange. We arrived at dusk. The blurry glow of the hurricane lamps shone from the canteen. We went straight in to eat, and Hauser introduced me to the two new researchers—young men, Americans, from Cornell University—who were living in my rebuilt tent-hut. I ate my meal quickly and then went to the census hut to pack up my few possessions. There had been no sign of Eugene and Ginga Mallabar, nor of Ian and Roberta Vail.

  I sat on my bed
in the long gloomy room thinking about the low-key, not to say nonexistent, welcome I had received. Only Hauser and Toshiro had seemed pleased to see me. More beds had been moved into the hut since I had last been here, and the framework of a partition had been erected that would eventually divide the room. Good times were returning to Grosso Arvore, that much was clear.

  I sat on my bed and allowed my swiftly alternating moods to dominate me, unchecked. I felt by turns apathetic, sullen, hard done-by, bitter, frustrated, baffled, hurt and, finally, contemptuous and independent. Mallabar, “nervous exhaustion” or no, was evidently trying to initiate some sort of damage limitation program, to incorporate my discoveries about the chimpanzees into his magnum opus before it was too late. I began to regret my hasty note informing him of my own publishing plans.

  There was a quiet knock at my door. Ian Vail, I thought, as I went to answer it, and about time too. But it was Ginga. She embraced me, inquired about my health and state of mind and complimented me on my fresh and calm demeanor.

  She was wearing jeans and a dark blue cotton shirt. Her hair was held back from her seamed, sharp face by a velvet band. She looked fresh and calm herself, I thought.

  “How’s Eugene?” I asked.

  She paused before she answered, looking down at the floor.

  “He never told me what happened that day,” she said.

  “He tried to kill me.” I paused. “I think.”

  Ginga looked away with an abrupt jerk. She put both hands to her forehead and smoothed it. “I can’t believe that,” she said.

  “He went mad, sort of. He hit me. Violently. If I hadn’t run away…”

  Now she was looking fiercely at me again, as if gathering reserves of energy and determination within her. Then she said, in a quiet voice, “You must understand what this has done to him, Hope, the killings. The attacks, you must try.”

  “Look, I told him. He didn’t want to hear about it. I wasn’t trying to…outsmart him, or anything.”

  “I know, I know. But that didn’t make it any less hard on him. And the fact that someone like you—I mean, a new arrival—should…” She made a flicking gesture with one hand. “Should turn everything upside down.”

  “I suppose…” I checked my spontaneous British reasonableness. No lifelines were going to be offered here.

  “He’s not well,” Ginga went on. “Very depressed. It’s difficult.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Can I see him?”

  Ginga looked suddenly ashamed, all her poise and cool capability gone. I had never seen this emotion on her features before; it looked absurd, wholly out of character, like a false mustache or a clown’s red nose.

  “He won’t see you,” she said. “He refuses.”

  “Oh, great…. So where does that leave me?”

  Ginga’s composure had returned. “Well, you understand…it’s impossible to work on here, my dear.”

  I closed my eyes for a second or two, then stood up and wandered round the room, behaving as if I had some choice in the matter, as if this were a decision that had to be mulled over, thought through. Ginga waited with perfect patience.

  “You’re right,” I said. “It’s impossible. Under the circumstances.”

  “I thought you’d agree.”

  She took some papers out of her bag and laid them out on the desk.

  “It’s just a formal letter of release. If you could sign there…. And I have a check”—she tapped an envelope—“for what is due you for the rest of your contracted period of employment.”

  “Very generous of you.”

  She responded sharply to my sarcasm. “This is nothing to do with me, you know, Hope. We’re friends, or so I like to think. But that doesn’t matter. I have to help Eugene. Grosso Arvore has to keep going. Without him…well, you know how the place works.”

  I wondered seriously, for the first time, about the true extent of Mallabar’s nervous exhaustion.

  I signed. Ginga smiled at me, sadly, I thought.

  “There’s one more thing,” she said. “I’m very sorry.”

  “What?”

  “This is your original contract.” She turned some pages of the document. “Do you remember this clause?”

  I read it. I had to smile. All publications, its gist ran, based on original research carried out at Grosso Arvore, were the copyright of the Grosso Arvore Foundation, unless alternative permission was given. All data gathered was similarly protected and had to be surrendered to the foundation for its archives on termination of employment.

  “No,” I said. “You can’t do this. Forget it.”

  “You will get full acknowledgment in the book. Eugene promises. I promise.”

  “I don’t give a fuck. You can’t stop me.”

  Ginga rose swiftly to her feet. “Don’t say anything more, my dear. You’ll just regret it.” She spoke in her capable, maternal voice. “I’ll see you in the morning before you go. No, please, don’t speak. Martim will drive you back to town.” She smiled bravely at me and left.

  I went outside and smoked a cigarette. Moths bumped and skittered around the lantern that hung above the census hut’s doorway. Three pale, liver-spotted geckos clung patiently, immobile, to the wooden wall waiting for insects to settle. The air was loud with stridulating crickets, and the noise of a laughing argument carried across on the breeze from the kitchen compound.

  I felt an associated amusement—an oddly tearful, resigned amusement—shake my body in a weak chuckle. I paced around, smoking my cigarette ruthlessly, like a condemned man about to face a firing squad, wondering aimlessly what to do next, weighing up the few feeble options available to me. In a strange way I felt relieved, as anyone does who finally acknowledges defeat. At least one can stop struggling now, you say to yourself. At least this episode is over and a new one can start.

  I sighed, I shook my head, I bayed silently at the stars in the black sky. A phrase came into my head that John had learned in America: screwed, blued and tattooed. Yes, I thought, that’s what’s happened to me, I’ve been screwed, blued and tattooed….

  Hauser had invited me over for a drink later, if I felt like it. I did, now, and wandered across Main Street toward his bungalow. The starshine threw the fractured shadow of the hagenia tree across the dusty road. I was thinking: what should I do? Where should I go? Who would go with me?

  Hauser opened his door, smiling.

  “Ah, Hope,” he said. “Got a surprise for you.”

  “No, please,” I said. “I’ve had enough surprises for one night.”

  I stepped over the threshold. Toshiro stood by the meat safe opening a bottle of beer. Sitting at the table were Ian and Roberta Vail.

  It turned out fine, not bad, considering, not nearly as awkward or tense as I had imagined it might be. We talked for hours about the kidnap, about Amilcar and Atomique Boum, the mission school and the attack. I told them about the last days, about the elegant gun and its too-small lilac shells, of Amilcar’s stupid death and the puzzled courtesy of the Belgian mercenaries. And it was a strangely heartening, cheering conversation too, after my depressing encounter with Ginga Mallabar. There was a mild spirit of reunion in that room that night, which was encouraging. Hauser and Toshiro kept supplying us with beer, and the two new researchers—Milton and Brad, I think—were invited over to hear our war stories. Hauser’s radio was tuned to a mid-European, shortwave station playing fifties jazz. Roberta smoked two or three of her menthol cigarettes, unreproved by Ian.

  Ian himself looked thinner, and it surprised me for a moment to see his face clean-shaven again. He managed to maintain a convincing front of composure and self-confidence but I could sense his unease and insecurity massing edgily beneath it.

  He waited until the party broke up, which was after midnight. We all stood outside Hauser’s bungalow, chatting, reluctant to have the conviviality disperse abruptly. Seeing Roberta talking vivaciously to Brad or Derv, Ian chose his moment and drew me a few paces to one side.

 
; The lantern light cast long shadows across his face. I could not see his eyes.

  “Listen, Hope,” he said quietly, his voice deep, half strangled. “That night, when I ran.”

  “Yes.”

  “I was trying to divert them. I was trying to lead them away from you. I wasn’t—” He cleared his throat. “You mustn’t think I was running away. Leaving you. It was to lure them. Otherwise we’d—”

  “I know,” I said simply. “Don’t be stupid. You saved me.”

  I could sense rather than see his entire posture relax. This easing—of his soul, I suppose—seemed to emanate from him like a sigh. He was about to say something more when Roberta interrupted him with a called question about some dean or head of department they had known at Stanford. I touched Ian’s arm reassuringly and turned away. I said good night to Hauser and Toshiro and the others, and walked back across Main Street to the census hut. I had told no one I was leaving the next morning.

  As she had promised, Ginga was there to see me go. Alone. She was firm but sweet to me, like a fond but wise headmistress obliged to expel her favorite pupil. Stay in touch…. What will you do?…Let’s meet in London…. We behaved in an exemplary, civilized, adult way. Ginga let her guard drop for a moment and that strange embarrassment reappeared when she hinted that, when Eugene was “well,” perhaps something could be worked out. I did not ask her to specify what that something might be.

  She held both my hands, kissed my cheeks and said, with almost Eugene-like sentiment, “Ah, Hope, Hope,” and then let me go.

  I decided to drive and Martim moved across to the passenger seat of the Land-Rover. I wanted to experience to the full, and for the last time, that moment when we bumped onto the paved road south at Sangui. I asked Ginga to make my farewells to the others, started the motor, waved and drove off.

  In Sangui I stopped outside João’s house. It was shuttered and closed.