by Gavin Chait
He chuckles and pats at the earth to his side, puffs of dust pluming at each strike.
Painted-dog’s child sorts out her paws, which have become nervously entangled, and skips over to the fireside.
‘Forgive me, Great Gaw,’ she says, bowing her head and remembering to keep her tongue inside her mouth, ‘I did not wish to disturb you.’
Baboon smiles warmly and scratches the pup behind her ears. No one has ever done so before, and the pup finds herself involuntarily slapping at the dust with one paw as she goes cross-eyed. Her tongue flops out of her mouth in a happy grin, and she slumps to the ground, leaning on her elbows.
‘You are hungry?’
‘Oh, yes, grandfather,’ says the pup, her stomach joining in with a plaintive gurgle.
‘Aha, aha,’ he says, skewering the lid handle with his sombé and lifting it. An overwhelming explosion of spices and gravy causes the pup’s ears to tremble, and she feels as if she will lose consciousness.
‘Aha, aha,’ sighs Baboon. ‘You are about to learn a valuable lesson in patience.’ He looks down to where Painted-dog’s child is attempting to cover her ears with her paws. ‘It is not yet ready.’
Baboon replaces the lid, shutting away the fragrance, and adds a thick branch on to the coals. Flames creep quickly up the mottled wood and escape into the sky.
‘Tell you what, my child, would you like to hear a story?’
Painted-dog’s child raises one paw and eases a tentative eye open. ‘Will it be one of those stories where I learn what I have done wrong, grandfather?’ she whines nervously, for such tales are common, and she has been doing her best to be good.
‘Aha, aha,’ laughs Baboon. ‘No, my child, I do not tell such tales. Those are best left to the mothers of painted pups,’ scratching her behind the ears again and causing her eyes to cross once more.
‘The story I will reveal to you takes place far from here, in the world of Men.’
‘Will it be a long story, grandfather?’ she whimpers, her belly twisting, and drops her chin on to her forepaws.
He laughs. ‘Patience, pup, for this is a sacred place and – before we may eat – we owe much to Baana, the genii of this ouahe. My story is as much an offering to him as it is a gift to you.’ Smiling kindly, ‘Be gentle, child, for you shall not go hungry.’
Baboon scoops at the dust with his left hand, brings it up to his mouth and whispers to it. Painted-dog’s child trembles as her heart pounds in her chest, for she can feel the magics draining in to this place.
It is Baboon who holds the dust, but it is Gaw Goŋ who blows it into the flames, the red-brown mist glowing in his eyes. A swirling green-grey pool opens above the flames, shot through with flecks of red and black.
Gaw Goŋ motions at the portal, pulling it wider until it fills the space before them. He whispers again, and the pool clears.
-
They are looking into a dark place, claustrophobic and filled with rubble. They hear frightened breathing and the rattle of a chest battling to clear.
Movement, and a frayed, brown-skinned figure squeezes his way between shattered concrete beams. A dusty point of light glows on the grimy and bloodied face of a small boy. He is thirsty and hungry, although both sensations have long since faded into a dazed and bewildered exhaustion.
‘Father,’ he calls out, his voice the dryness of bones.
He rests his head in the light, feeling its caress against his cheek. The first gentle touch in days. His hands and feet tingle, and he weeps without tears.
Eyes darting beneath sunken lids, remembering.
-
Over the radio, resting against his father on the small sofa in their apartment in Kibuye, he had heard that the Kabaka had fled his palace, only across the ring road from their neighbourhood. Distant sounds, as of thunder, and the play of light on the horizon, indicated the advance of the war.
‘Ekyoto ggombolola is no more,’ said a weeping man on the radio. ‘Omuliro gwe Buganda guzikide. The king’s fire has gone out. Agye moukono mu ngabo. The kingdom is undefended.’ Abruptly, the broadcast ended.
His father, exhausted and drained, ‘We cannot stay, my son. The soldiers will want to take the palace. Kibuye is too close. Rest as best you can tonight, and we shall leave before sunrise.’
There was no light or water, for both failed weeks ago, and small solar-charged candle-lights turned the room to twilight. His father had earned nothing again that day. There was little need for a builder when so many had fled their homes. He poured the last of the water from the plastic barrel against the wall into a chipped plastic cup. They shared it along with a small bowl of maize-meal he had been able to buy in the market.
His father unfolded a scratched printed image of his mother, looking sad and lost as he did so. Her body had been returned to them a week before, after she had been missing for two days. Everyone knew it was the Kabaka’s men, taking their revenge against those they saw as betraying them.
They had buried her, finding a small patch of earth in the overwhelmed graveyard, marking her resting place with an old chair leg, her name scratched on to the post. He had wept for her, bewildered at her sudden absence, praying that this all be a mistake.
By then they and most of the city were trapped within the fortifications surrounding Kampala.
The radio had been clear, though: the soldiers had fled, leaving the city stranded between the two fronts.
All through their building, and in the apartments alongside, shadows and sounds of people as they prepared to become seekers. Few of the people he knew remained, most having either paid to escape or been killed trying to break through the cordon of soldiers camped around the city.
Morning did not come.
He was asleep when the drones struck, eviscerating his home. He awoke deep within a shifting, terrifying jumble of concrete, pipes, furniture and clothes.
Crawling from beneath a sofa, in the dwindling candlelight he discovered Mrs Kiwuuwa, the old lady who lived on the ground floor and always gave him sweets as a reward for going to school. Her body was cold.
He shouted until his throat felt bloody and raw. He heard no answer.
The batteries faded, and the light was extinguished.
Complete darkness. Silence except for occasional subsidence followed by howling and tearing as the rubble settled once more.
He felt carefully ahead, his fingers creeping into open spaces, probing. He found sharp edges, sheered rebar, strange textures, torn fabric, splintered wood.
There were bodies. A leg, or an arm, soft and liquid and rancid. He could not see them. The sensation was alien and terrifying.
He could smell damp in the air, feel it in the concrete, but there was none sufficient to drink.
After an age of twisting and pulling and crawling, he sleeps in the caress of light threading through the rubble.
-
He feels his body lifted, held, his brow stroked, ‘My son, I have found you. Rest with me, and I will carry you to safety.’ Relief and warmth in his father’s voice.
He wakes again, alone, in a vast space, light shafting down and across. ‘Did I fall asleep in church?’ he wonders, thinking of the time his mother and father took him to Rubaga Cathedral, and the way the light in the basilica turned the brick to gold.
In the act of reaching between twisted rebar, spotlit high on the tangled mess of rubble he sees his father. His clothes are torn, but his flesh is unmarked, glowing in the light.
The boy wants to cry out, but he is too tired to move.
He watches as his father crosses to a concrete pillar, bent rebar protruding from it like the exposed bones of an elbow where it connects again deep into the broken mass around them. His father crawling until he reaches the end, which begins to bow lower towards where the boy is resting.
His father rocks up and down on the end until, squealing and almost gracefully, it shifts and drops, with him hanging on painfully all the way down. He leaps off as it hits the bottom, and his e
yes fill with delight as he scoops up the boy in his arms.
The boy can feel the warmth and softness of his father’s skin, the steady rhythm of his heartbeat.
‘My father, I thought you were gone,’ he says, softly.
‘I have been searching for you for two days,’ weeps his father. ‘Rest with me, and I will carry you to safety.’
Holding the boy carefully against him, he walks slowly up the ramp he worked so hard to build, and pulls himself and the boy through the opening at the top. They are near the surface now, and the way is easier to see.
His father can see the sky and hear voices calling out, seeking survivors.
He shouts, his voice joyful, and is answered.
Hands lift away the covering debris, revealing him and the boy lying asleep in his arms.
-
‘You are reborn from the earth, child,’ raising him from the clawing rubble. A friendly face, unfamiliar accented Swahili. ‘What is your name, my son?’
‘Isaiah,’ losing consciousness once more, but not before calling out, ‘Father!’
-
A crackle of fire, and orange flames flickering against the trees on a hill outside the city. Joshua returns from collecting firewood, quietly piling branches, trying not to wake any of the sleeping figures clustered about its warmth.
He looks up towards Esther as she slips in behind him, putting her arms around his waist and resting her head on his shoulder. He turns and kisses her on each eye.
‘How is the boy?’ he asks.
‘Asleep, with Rachel and Hannah on each side. The girls are very protective of him.’
‘They take after you,’ he smiles.
‘I have put another drip up for him tonight. That should be the last he needs for now. We will still need to carry him tomorrow.’
Even as the city was pulverized, seekers arrived from the south, and Red Cross carrier craft flew over from the west. The red and white drones have become as much a symbol of the conflict as have the explosions and destruction.
Each drone drops a package of food or medicine. Their supplies are small, but each party of seekers has sufficient to address basic emergencies.
Esther was a nurse at the mining site in Kigoma where they used to live, and now she cares for their small band.
‘How many are with us?’ she asks, nodding at those sprawled under the trees and around their fire.
‘Perhaps fifty more have joined us since we left Kampala. There are maybe three hundred of us.’
‘Too many or too few?’ she asks. Too many to travel quickly, or too few to be safe from attack.
‘We will be moving more slowly,’ he says, ‘but we should still be well.’
It may not have been the red and white drones’ intention, but the seekers are following their homeward path. Somewhere there is a safe place where these vehicles are based, and that is the direction in which they will go.
-
Their group arrived soon after dawn at the outskirts of Kampala. Joshua’s strategy was that they follow a few days behind in the wake of bombing runs. That way they knew where the various warring factions were likely to be, and they were able to track the Red Cross drones which also followed the battle-front.
They had travelled around Lake Victoria from Tanzania, hundreds of thousands of people escaping the collapse, keeping close to water. From Kampala, they would head west to Lake Albert and then into the jungles of the Congo. There were millions of other seekers scattered through the area. At night, you could see their cooking fires all across the horizon.
‘We will give it until dusk,’ Joshua had said as they walked through the broken city. Time enough to see if any amongst the rubble may be rescued, not so long as to be trapped there overnight.
There had been many others similarly helping through the day. Too few had been found alive. And always the risk of finding one so injured that there would be little to do to help.
Close to dusk, with the waters of the bay turning grey and gold behind them, they had heard a man cry out. ‘We are here, please, help us!’
-
‘I heard him. You heard him. I do not understand,’ says Joshua.
-
The boy, Isaiah, was gathered into the body of a man, arms wrapped protectively about him. At first Joshua had thought them both dead. The man appeared to have succumbed almost instantly to his wounds: his neck broken, his chest collapsed. The boy so small and sunken.
Then the boy coughed, and they delivered him from the earth.
-
‘He was long-since passed. Perhaps when the building first fell. And, yet, he spoke.’
Esther leads Joshua to a blanket near the girls. The boy is breathing easily, sheltered between them.
She sits, pulling Joshua down to her, holding him close and speaking quietly.
‘Do you know the story of Casamance, the twice-dead man?’
He shakes his head.
She looks into his eyes, loving him, holding him.
‘There was a story my grandmother told me, about a man called Casamance. There was a flood which swept through his village. Many died, leaving the survivors without shelter, stranded on an island far from the reach of help. Many were certain they had seen him drown, trapped beneath a falling tree. Yet, here he was, alive, his flesh warm and unmarked. His children played with him, his wife knew him and, unfailingly, he caught fish for the survivors and kept them safe.
‘It was many days before rescue came and, on that day, they found Casamance trapped amongst wood and waste. His body was bloated as if he had been long dead in the waters.
‘My grandmother told me that some people who die are sent back by the genii to serve a duty or to protect those they love until they are safe. They know not that they are already dead; have no memory of dying. They are alive and well, but once their responsibility is served they will die, though no new injury befalls them.
‘They are all like Casamance: twice-dead.’
Joshua breathes out in a long sigh. ‘That is a terrible thing for the living to bear, knowing that one so loved is already with their ancestors.’
Esther’s eyes glow in the firelight. ‘Perhaps,’ she says, ‘but there is also the gratitude of having time beyond death to share in love and warmth.’
‘Do you think the boy knew? Before?’
Esther nods. ‘Yes, I think he knew. He is still confused, but I believe he is grateful for knowing how much his father cared.’
Joshua sighs again. ‘It is well. I am glad for him. I am grateful for the twice-dead man.’
18
‘I am Gaïndé-le-lion,’ says a small boy, roaring and raising his hands as if paws.
‘We will be the hunters,’ shouts a little girl.
‘Who will play lion-child?’ asks another.
In delight, they snatch up Tuft and carry her to where they are acting out the story they have just heard, returning to their favourite moments of heroism.
As they run and tumble, Tuft adding to the chasing mayhem, Shakiso smiles in wonder at how children seem only ever to hear the parts of stories that reflect their own naïvety and enthusiasm for life, for Gaw Goŋ’s tale is steeped in sadness.
Gaïndé-le-lion is killed by hunters, leaving his family defenceless and they are soon slaughtered. His only son survives by hiding in a cave where he is buried alive in a rockfall. Gaïndé is returned to life by merciful genii so he may rescue his cub, and the two endure much hardship as they travel through a conflict-ridden plain. Each morning, they awake to birds bringing them food. Each day, they travel towards where the birds have come from. Gaïndé takes leave of his child on the edge of foreign pride-lands as the genii reclaim his second life, leaving the cub to join a new family.
Shakiso turns to the old woman, holding her mug of tea as if drawing warmth there. The woman’s eyes bear the faraway gaze of one who has experienced more pain than any person should ever endure.
In their reflection, Shakiso sees fragments of a di
fferent story. Of a man and his son. Of war and destruction. Of a child born from rubble cradled in the arms of his dead father.
‘What?’ she asks, bewildered. The truth in the old woman’s eyes stills the questions she would ask before she can speak. She looks to see whether the storyteller, this Gaw Goŋ, may have answers, but he has disappeared.
‘Did I hear a different story?’ she wonders, and shivers.
‘In time,’ says the old woman, noticing her struggle. ‘When you are ready, my child,’ and she will say no more, leaving Shakiso watching as the children play.
19
Pazanov crouches as he climbs out of the helicopter, its coaxial rotors slowing above him. One of Uberti’s personal protection guards runs to meet him, putting an arm over his shoulder and shouting his greetings above the whine of the electric motor.
‘It’s not good, Pazanov,’ he says. ‘I have never seen him this angry.’
Pazanov can only nod, his stomach clenched in fear and rage.
They walk across the landing pad towards the grey columns of the main house at Novo-Ogaryovo, its great doors still chained and locked. Even thirty years after his death, few have the confidence to claim Vladimir Putin’s mantle. Like Kuntsevo, Joseph Stalin’s old dacha, it remains shrouded in secrets and paranoia, visited only by the occasional caretaker.
The estate belongs to Rosneft: a gift from the president, both to indicate the favour in which the state regards the company, and also to permanently remind them from where that favour comes.
A small motorized cart takes them under the smothering trees to the house Uberti prefers. They park alongside a group of nervous-looking men in white overalls standing beside two trucks. The doors are open, and furniture and fittings wrapped in plastic are neatly packed inside.
‘You’ll understand,’ says the guard. Pazanov feels little curiosity.
The interior guards move quietly, whispering. The house is in silence.
Pazanov walks through the hall and to the office at the back of the house. The door hangs on one hinge. He knocks anyway and waits until he hears an answering grunt.