‘Like you, we’re looking for the source of the … Mallory. A great river like this draws men to it.’
She stared at the yellowing waters. Had she worn the shabby bath-robe during her rape by Harare’s men? Like her cropped hair, it was meant to serve as a constant reminder, as harsh as a police photograph, of the crime committed against herself.
‘Nora, I understand … you want to revenge yourself on Harare.’
‘Not only Harare.’ She polished her lantern. ‘There’s talk of a barrage, of a wall of water held back by some kind of restraint.’
‘A barrage?’ I rejected the idea, unable even to consider it. ‘There can’t be a barrage.’
‘Why not?’
‘It would be like applying a tourniquet – to my own arm. It would become gangrenous.’
‘So you really are the river?’
‘Of course. I’m sure of it now.’
She put away the lanterns, regarding me with a first show of sympathy.
‘You’re clearly quite mad.’
For six days I remained a prisoner on board the widows’ ship, locked into my cabin under the bordello ceiling. More undernourished than I had realized, I lay for hours on the mildewed mattress. Each evening my fever returned, as I listened to the roaring of the frogs in the dusk. By morning I would be too tired to do more than sit in a restaurant chair at the edge of the dance floor. In the afternoon the women would allow me to feed the animals in their cages, but I was still too weary even to think of seizing control of the Diana.
Noon and Sanger lay in their cubicles. They and I seemed overcome by a deepening lassitude, as if we were affected by my failure of will, a weakening of the imaginative force which had created the Mallory.
Talking to the macaques, I wondered why the five women chose to remain in this stagnant lagoon, away from the main channel of the river. For all the apparent amity of their new order, their greatest pleasure clearly came from the hunt. Every afternoon I was forced to listen to the unpleasant sounds of their wildfowling. Two of them would go off in the rubber dinghy, standing shoulder to shoulder with a rifle in the stern, and disappear through the papyrus grass into the hundreds of creeks that connected the lagoons. An hour later, I would be woken from my fever by a single shot that marked the end of another marsh bird.
However, they never brought their prey back to the Diana. In my fever I guessed that they hated the birds because they drank from the waters of the Mallory. To the macaques I confided: ‘They’re shooting the birds again … they’re still trying to clip my wings …’
Nonetheless, I was determined to resume my voyage. Watched by Fanny or Louise, I was allowed to see Noon for a few minutes each day, as she gazed at her nightclub sky. I counted her stronger pulse, and noted her clearer eyes and healing gums, again aware that it was she who was assessing me. She watched me as I felt her liver and tapped her chest, clearly measuring my recovery by the degree to which she excited me.
Realizing this, the women kept Noon from me during the few hours when she was allowed on deck. She was penned behind the galley door, kneading the sorghum cakes and picking the snails from their shells for our evening meal.
On the sixth afternoon, the first to leave me free of fever, I was feeding the macaques when the muffled report of a rifle shot sounded from the papyrus islands to the west of the lagoon. Somewhere in the maze of waterways a flicker of movement crossed the palisades of grass, as if a wounded bird was skittering through the tall blades.
I climbed from the starboard rail on to the marmosets’ cage and from there stepped out on to the roof of the restaurant. Around me the endless steaming creeks of this riverine world lay under the sun. Through the yellow haze I could see the distant channel of the Mallory half a mile to the east, the mist like vapour over a tepid vat. Not a single wave or swell crossed the surface, as opaque as amber wax. The immense volume of water was now stationary, the river waiting for me to act. The turning of some kind of inner tide was about to take place, reflecting a choice being made within my mind.
A quarter of a mile to the west, beyond the bank of the lagoon, a line of reeds had collapsed into the water and exposed a section of the levee. Along this narrow causeway a man came running, his head bowed as he tried to hide himself from his pursuers. He carried a fishing spear in one hand, and a rifle slung across his back. Whenever he ducked, the rifle stock rose above his head like the tail of a wounded bird.
Unaware of the Diana, the soldier drew nearer. His ragged uniform and webbing were tied together with string, and I recognized one of Harare’s guerillas. Perhaps he had defected, hoping to return to his village, or was the last survivor of a unit attacked from the air by Captain Kagwa’s helicopter. Although I had identified him, in some confused way I believed that he was bringing a message to me from the source of the Mallory, telling me what 1 should do to restart the silent river.
Without thinking, I lifted my arms above my shoulders and began to wave. Seeing me, and my empty hands against the sky, the soldier stopped and raised his head. He parted the grass, and was peering cautiously at the superstructure of the Diana when a second shot rang out.
The report echoed across the lagoon, taking with it the life of this starving soldier. When I raised my eyes I could see that nothing now moved along the causeway. The wildfowlers had secured their prey and would deal with him at their leisure.
An hour later Mrs Warrender and Poupee emerged from the creek. They had been sweating in the heat, but their faces were composed and emptied of emotion. Standing side by side, they pushed on their oars as the tall reeds opened and fell back around their shoulders.
With Louise and the younger woman, I watched from the rail as they docked the dinghy beside the gangway. In its stern were the rifle and tattered webbing, and a spade whose polished blade shone in the sunlight like a sword.
I climbed down from the cages and stood on the floor in front of Mrs Warrender, like a shy suitor about to ask her for a dance.
‘Good hunting, Nora?’
‘Not too good, doctor.’ She drew the dressing-gown around her shoulders in a brusque and rigid movement, reminding me of her eerie calm in the months after her husband’s death. ‘We were unlucky today.’
‘I didn’t know there was anything to shoot at around here.’
‘There isn’t very much. But if you wait something usually comes along.’
‘I can see you found another rifle.’
‘There was a dead soldier on the embankment. Only a few hundred yards from here.’
‘Poor fellow. He was probably going home to his village. Perhaps I could have helped him?’
‘No – he was quite dead.’
‘Too bad. Anyway, you’ll find better use for his rifle.’
‘I think we will. We buried him under the bank. Your river will bathe his bones, doctor.’
‘Have you buried many dead soldiers here?’
‘Not very many. Though we do seem to find one nearly every day.’
‘I’d noticed that – so many rifles, and so much ammunition.’
‘And so many dead soldiers to bury. Perhaps you could help us, doctor. There’s another dead man who needs to be buried …’
‘Well …’ I followed her eye to the dinghy. As it drifted from the gangway on its mooring line I noticed that the spade was still lying in the stern. A crescent of damp earth lay against the bright steel like the first instalment of another grave.
Mrs Warrender had picked up her rifle, and was smiling at me in an open and full-lipped way for the first time since I had known her. Despite the shabby robe and her cropped hair, she looked as happy as she must have done on her wedding day. I hesitated in the centre of the dance floor, aware that the women had formed a circle around me. Fanny had left the galley and leaned forward with her elbows on the bar, watching me with a not unsympathetic gaze. Only Noon, who had appeared behind the galley door, stared at me with an expression of anger, eyebrows knitted together in warning.
‘We�
��ll go, doctor.’ Mrs Warrender placed her hand on my arm, and I noticed the metal polish under her chipped nails, like those of a tired housewife. ‘That body should be buried.’
‘Digging a grave … I’m not strong enough.’
‘You are, doctor. A shallow grave. Come now …’
‘Well, perhaps a shallow one … my hands are—’
Preparing my palms for the labour to come, I rubbed them against my hips. An open wound stung against my hand. Looking down, I realized for the first time that I was naked. After carrying me aboard the Diana, the women had stripped me of the pus-stained rags that I had worn on the ferry. During the previous days it had never once occurred to me that I was naked, even in the presence of these women. By refusing to see me as a man, they had effectively castrated me.
Trying to rally myself, I looked past the circle of women at the lagoon beyond, at the silent walls of grass. Death hid among the tall palisades, gateways into a labyrinth that ended at the door of a grave. The sunlight pressed upon the stagnant water, preventing it from coming to my help. From the deck of the dance floor rose an intense white light, like the glare from a lamp filled with lime. It blanched the coloured glass of the lanterns behind me, and turned the exposed engine of the Diana into a calcified skeleton. I massaged my diaphragm, forcing the blood into my head, but the light intensified, and seemed to dress these women in their shrouds, as if they were mourners who had arrived early at a funeral. All the anger of these women irradiated this ancient vessel, infecting the bones of its decks and timbers, which now gave off a withering light of their own.
A lantern fell to the deck among the restaurant tables. Startled by the breaking glass, the women looked down at the ruby fragments, whose cheap vitreous glimmer seemed to break a spell. The deck shifted below their feet, as if the bed of the lagoon was stirring through the surface.
‘Fanny … Louise …! We’ve slipped the anchor!’ Confused, Mrs Warrender gripped the bar counter in both hands, trying to steady the Diana. The chairs and tables were beginning to slide across the white planks. The lanterns rattled, and a second fell on to the deck. In their cages the macaques and marmosets chittered in alarm, scrambling frantically across their bars.
‘Fanny, we’re sinking! Poupée!’
The rifle propped against the bar toppled across Mrs Warrender’s feet. A deep judder ran through the ship, and its ancient keel let out a reedy cry, the bones of a corpse racked in torment.
I looked out at the lagoon, waiting for its waters to wash across the deck. The grass towered above us on all sides, exposing the darker roots in the glistening mud of the embankment. Far from engulfing us, the surface of the lagoon had fallen. The Diana was now stranded on the floor, its antique hull no longer supported by its own buoyancy. Already the first sand-bars had broken through the surface, and I could see the submerged banks of the deeper channel down which Mrs Warrender and the women had steered the Salammbo into the centre of the lagoon before abandoning her.
I walked through the sliding tables, pushing them out of my way as I climbed the slight gradient to the port rail. Behind me, Mrs Warrender was leading her rescue of the Diana. Still under the impression that the vessel was sinking, she and her companions were trying to tether the craft to the bank.
I listened to them shouting to each other, a party of confused sea-wives no longer trusting their own feet. The surface of the lagoon had fallen by little more than eighteen inches. Somewhere in the maze of waterways a containment wall had given way, a silt embankment had dissolved and allowed the levels within the system to balance themselves.
Nonetheless, this meant that the Mallory was falling. The great flow of water which I had summoned from its mysterious source had at last begun to falter, as if anticipating my death at these women’s hands.
‘Doc Mal …’
Noon stood behind me, the Lee-Enfield in her small hands, hidden from the women by the animal cages. I remembered her first prodding me on the beach of the drained lake at Port-la-Nouvelle. She was looking at me in the same determined but wary way. I remembered, too, the snap of the bolt within the breech. Had she been given another bullet by Mrs Warrender?
She raised the heavy rifle and aimed the barrel towards the Salammbo, jerking her head as if puzzled by my slow response.
‘Right, Noon …’ I took her arm and lifted her to the rail. Below us the water was little more than knee-deep. I could hear Mrs Warrender beyond the starboard rail, reassuring Sanger as he bleated in alarm from the window grille of his cabin.
I placed my hands around Noon’s waist, smelling the strong odour of her adolescent body that I had missed for so many days. Revived by her, I remembered Mrs Warrender’s idle talk of a barrage. Perhaps a dam had been built, trapping the stream, and the Mallory itself had not failed …
I lifted Noon over the side and lowered her into the water, then handed the rifle down to her. I followed her into the warm yellow liquid, and pointed to the ripples already running from our bodies towards the Salammbo.
‘Come on, Noon. We’ll get there before Mrs Warrender. Someone is trying to steal my river …’
26
The Gardens of the Sahara
Change had overtaken the river, bringing with it the threat of unforeseen dangers. For the first time my footprints remained in the soft sand of the river-bed, giving me away to any sentry or sniper. As I hid behind the trunk of a fallen palm tree, searching for the signs of a guerilla patrol, the imprints of my feet emerged clearly from the shallow water, following the shadow that scuttled between my heels like a thirsty bat. The Mallory had fallen by at least my own height, revealing the roots of the trees along the shore. Baked by the sun, the exposed river-bed had begun to revert to desert.
Fifty yards to my right was the main channel of the Mallory, now little more than half its original width. The sand-bars lay like dunes in the open sun, the first couch grass growing from their crests. A warren of small pools and inlets separated the river from its former banks, and in one to these the Salammbo was now moored, with Noon at watch from the wheelhouse roof.
The detached enamel door of an old refrigerator jutted from the sand, its manufacturer’s medallion gleaming like a chromium cipher in the sunlight. The exposed bed of the Mallory was covered with debris washed downstream from the former French airbase at Bonneville – old tyres, pieces of beach furniture, ammunition boxes and radio spare parts. A few minutes earlier, as I waded ashore, past an aerosol can and a plastic hair-dryer, I had cut my right heel on the broken neck of a wine bottle lying in the shallows.
Limping across the white sand, I left the scanty cover of the palm tree and ran towards the hulk of a small saloon car embedded in the soft slope. Resting against the fender, I listened to the steady rumble of a truck moving along a desert road, and watched the smoke of driftwood fires beyond the palm-covered shoulder of the next river bend. Scores of the white plumes rose into the air, and confirmed that Noon and I had at last reached the centre of Harare’s domain.
However, in the week since our escape from Mrs Warrender and her widows, we had seen only a single armed river-patrol, as if some shift in strategic priorities had moved the centre of conflict away from the Mallory to the surrounding arid scrub. The fishing rafts and trading canoes which we passed had all been abandoned, lying against the exposed stilts of disused landing stages. The small migrant population drawn to the upper reaches of the river in the four months since our departure from Port-la-Nouvelle had mysteriously lost interest in this benign channel. We sailed between the raised banks, now higher than the Salammbo’s wheelhouse, and lined with forgotten windmills and water-hoists, as if the people who had once fished and bathed here had sensed in advance that the river was about to die.
Nonetheless, I regarded the Mallory with caution. Perhaps it was preparing the ultimate trap for me, destroying itself so that Noon and I would perish of thirst. But fortunately the river was still a substantial waterway, a hundred yards wide even in its shrunken form. The current
pressing against the bows of the ferry showed no signs of flagging, and there was nothing stagnant or brackish in the clear, cold liquid that flowed from the mountains of the Massif, whose blue flanks were now only five miles to the north-east. For all my determination to reach the source of the river, I was glad to see that my great rival was still in good heart.
Noon, too, was as determined as ever. At first she had seemed distanced from me, and I regretted the absence of those television images that had so intrigued her earlier in our voyage. Their simplistic fictions would have helped to sustain both of us. But within hours of our escape from the Diana we were working together, the eccentric team that had propelled the ferry all the way from Lake Kotto. As we swam the last yards to the vessel, fallowed by a single shot from the tilting dance floor of the Diana, Noon again became the young woman I had courted from the helm of the Salammbo. Her pale body seemed to draw strength from the leprous yellow water. Ten feet ahead of me, she lifted herself easily on to the car deck, the slim breasts and shoulders of a child transformed into a woman’s. She took the rifle from my hands and hauled me on to the deck with a workmanlike grunt. As she guided me into the wheelhouse I felt the Salammbo sway under our weight, and knew that there were still a few feet of clear water below its keel.
Staying within the deeper channel, whose submerged banks we could see beneath the shallow water, we sailed through the inlet which had first admitted us to the lagoon. An hour later, after threading our way among the creeks and waterways, we at last reached the main channel of the Mallory. The warm air rushed to greet us, its soft breath whispering like a lover upon my naked skin.
Within a day we left behind the marshes and lagoons, and began to cross an area of desert savanna. Free of its cargo of film equipment, and with only the mud-spattered Mercedes amidships, the Salammbo made strong progress against the modest current. Our only fuel consisted of the few gallons which the women had failed to siphon from the tank – enough, I calculated, for another twenty miles. Yet the falling level of the river, and some scent in the wind, convinced me that this would take us to our goal.
The Day of Creation (Harper Perennial Modern Classics) Page 20