God of Hunger

by John Coutouvidis

  Just as the bonnet of the land rover led the descent to shade and water, Bertie saw a fresh set of hoof marks in the earth on his side of the vehicle. Interspersed with the tracks were fresh droppings. Jan raised his hand in a signal to stop. He turned to his clients and said: “They will be down there. In the trees. Get out very quietly and follow me. Tex, I suggest you take one of the .450’s in the rack in front of you. Cindy, the driver will take the other one and hand it to you when you need to use it. It will give you one hell of a kick but it will do the job like no other.’

  He, Bertie, already had a brand new .375 in his hands having removed it from its rack on the windscreen panel and was out of the Land rover without needing to open a door; it had a safari body introduced into East Africa by his father who had bought his original doorless hunting truck at the disposal sale of vehicles used by the Desert Rats and sold in Tobruk after the war. Bertie and the driver helped the two Americans down and the column walked and waddled towards the dark grove. Luckily the breeze was coming off the river and with more luck the sprayings of scent wafting from the bodies of the baby hippos would disperse with the engine fumes back towards the road, away from the fig trees.

  The human hippos were remarkably quiet on their feet. As Bertie counted such blessings he caught sight of a tick bird moving sideways across an invisible surface, dark as the shade his eyes were attempting to penetrate. He stopped and stood motionless with his right hand by his side, palm open to the three in line behind. They complied.

  Bertie then stepped to the side and took a couple of steps backwards towards where Tex stood. “They are right ahead. About thirty yards. If you see it as we move on, take a shot. I will follow up if required. But wait until I move forward again.”

  He took a further step back and spoke next to Cindy, repeating what he had said to Tex, adding only that he would now talk to the driver asking him to stand beside her, rifle at the ready.

  Bertie retraced his steps to the front and moved the column on. He next heard a snort. Then saw a massive head break cover. Neck arched right back, nostrils distended working the wind. Jan came back, beside Tex. Knowing full well that he could not, he asked his male client, “Can you see him?”

  “I sure can,” he lied.

  “Okay. He’s all yours. But wait ‘til Cindy stands beside you.”

  Bertie had Tex to his right.

  The driver then arranged Cindy to the right of Tex, put a soft nose in each breech and handed her the rifle.

  The couple raised arms in unison and fired simultaneously ahead, both falling backwards against the massive recoil of their massive rifles.

  Bertie shot at the same time. The great head reared up and came crashing down. The thunder of shots abated. Bodies straightened. Limbs relaxed. No word was uttered. There was too much sound in the ears for speech. And too much sound in the ears to hear the crash of a charge to Bertie’s left. He only knew of it by the quaking of the earth on which he stood and into which he was ground.

  *

  His mangled body was flown to Dr. Kaska in Arusha. He was a Magyar and when in the laboratory attached to his private surgery there was something of the Transylvanian about him; ‘Look, look, veeruses, leevink veeruses, moovink, moovink’, and he would ask you to look down his ‘meekroskop’ at slides he had prepared to study the damage ‘veeruses’ made to healthy cells and how they could cause tumours.

  There was brilliance in him few locals could recognize and when he talked of a new viral disease that he ‘vas stadee’ink’, a disease unlike any other in its virulence and morbidity that he had ever seen in his long years in ‘Aafrikaa’ none but Father Gabriel took him seriously. What the priest had seen in Theo was considered in London to have been a misdiagnosis; the cause of death was entered on the death certificate as pneumonia after a long treatment for testicular cancer. But he had erred on the right side. Gabriel’s reports of a ‘new form of plague as destructive as any mentioned in the Bible’, may well have been the first reports of the volcanic region’s dreadful new disease, even more destructive of life than its cycles of genocide; a disease which was to become the scourge of Africa, and first described by Kaska as ‘veeral zarcoma’. ‘Look look danzink, danzink … ze danss of det.’

  *

  After Bertie perished, Choco engaged a Zanzibari manager in whose capable hands the operation was left. The safari cum smuggling business was doing a roaring trade. This satisfied Choco’s requirements but was of little interest to the Armenian. He was more interested in Choco as a possible replacement for Theo.

  *

  When Theo died, the Armenian had lost a boy he considered a son. He greatly missed the crazy, gutsy, impetuous killer of buffalo and of loneliness. This, his loneliness, was the lurking, roaming, ruminating threat; it surpassed the most fearful of beasts in its destructive capacity.

  Choco was crazy, impetuous and entertaining but no substitute for the simple pleasure of the naïf Theo; the foil of innocence to the Armenian’s worldliness. Theo to whom the Armenian could teach so much. Talk to and hope to influence. Think about and look forward to. Alone in his castle the Armenian found comfort in the living Theo. In his absence and in his presence. The one kept his mind ticking over and the other racing. In the same way a child takes centre stage in a parent’s life. When even in their absence a child may combat that greatest of threats: the loneliness that corrodes the spirit. But the death of a child, the certain knowledge that a child is dead, lets the ogre in. Only the hope of an after life could keep it at bay. But the Armenian was no believer in fairy tales. Theo was gone. Forever. And loneliness threatened to haunt him. To hunt him. Like a buffalo. It would double back and take him when he least expected. A drink or a drug would provide a sense of security. Bring on a haze of forgetfulness. Block out the day. Or the night. Until, in time, the amnesia vaporised and let in the loathsome pain of loneliness; the tip of the horn that gored the soul.

  To the Armenian, Choco was no Theo. He was too far gone in life. Tainted. But a friend nevertheless whose company Theo found entertaining. Especially when Choco talked of the boys of Sinclair Road. Their lives. Their deaths. Their loves.

  The Armenian wanted to know most about Zak whose love for Angie intrigued him: A hostess. In a night club. Friendly to all. Lover to one.

  “Was it really the case Choco? Was Zak really certain of her love for him alone?’

  “Yeah. He thought so. Believed her when she said that she was his and no one else’s.”

  “Was she faithful to him?”

  “Nah. No way. She let me for one.”

  The Armenian fell silent and then asked: “Why did you not disabuse him of the thought that she was his alone?”

  “You don’t do that to a mate. Sure, if he wasn’t my friend I would have let him know; if an enemy, for sure. But Zak. No. He was a friend. So it was a secret I kept.”

  It was probably that conversation; that admission by Choco, which distanced the Armenian from him.

  *

  The business dealings with Choco were increasingly brokered through intermediaries. The last time the Armenian spoke to Choco face to face was in Dar-es-Salaam.

  Choco had invited his top clients and business associates to a dinner party at his house. On offer were dish after dish of sea-food, courtesy of Feingeld Fisheries of Zanzibar. The delicacies were served with a Riesling that had yellowed in the heat of the store-room it had been kept in; the last of Patel’s booze, well past its best but palatable enough in a country of limited choice.

  In order to impress his guests Choco borrowed Dar-es-Salaam’s one bit of red carpet. It was leant to him because he had friends in every high place; including the Public Works Department, now very much less a public resource than once it was, from whose main store he borrowed, in exchange for a case of Tusker, the state-visit-carpet.

  Down they came along its threadbare surface from the main road and up onto the verandah. Choco’s guests included, with their partners, one mute Chinese civilia
n representative of the Peoples Liberation Army contracted to build the TanZam line, two dour East European trade attaches, two drawling North American staffers, three tall, blonde, tanned Scandinavian do-gooders , a young Turk on secondment from the Foreign Ministry in Ankara, and two tubby , hirsute faced, sun-glass eyed commercial attaches from the Middle East, several permanent secretaries and undersecretaries, the manager of the Yachting Club, Chairman and Secretary of the Greek Club , together with the not officially forgotten founder of the now defunct United Tanganyika Party ; it was a measure of Choco’s relative unassailability as host to the elite that he felt able to include the odd pariah on his guest list.

  Further down that list came the Armenian and Kostas Kokopoulos. KK was Mwalimu’s best white friend and now, in retirement, a minor irritant to the Regional Commissioner in the north who could never shut the old man up because he was in permanent favour with all members of the First Family to whom he, KK, had promised to cede a sizeable bit of land on his coffee estate.

  Kokopoulos, the Armenian and one other were the only unaccompanied guests at the party and found themselves standing in an isolated trio at the start of proceedings.

  The one other was Marisha.

  She had visited Dar-es-Salaam on many occasions.

  *

  On this visit she was guest to the Polish Embassy which had relayed a request to London from the University in Dar-es-Salaam for assistance in organizing historical archives. Marisha had long had contacts with higher education institutions in Africa; she had, after all, started her work in international politics by her involvement with the Poland-Africa Association from which she progressed through the Polish diplomatic service to end her career as a roving ambassador for her country; a long and distinguished career made up of deftly executed shifts in navigating the shifting floes of the century’s seemingly frozen politics.

 

  After work at the State Record Office it was suggested to Marisha that refreshments being served at Choco’s place surpassed any the city could hope to provide. Many of the officials were in any case invited so would she care to join them there?

  She said yes to the great relief of her hosts who fervently wished to attend the only show in town.

  And that is how Marisha found herself in the company of Kokopoulos and the Armenian. The trio remained together for the duration of the party for they soon realized that between themselves they closely knew, nearly all of Tanganyika’s Europeans and raised a glass of addled wine to the memory of the dead who now included Theo.

 

  Jozef

 

  During the years spent in Wroclaw in company with the women from Tanganyika, Marisha was regaled with tales from Africa. Many of which centred on Jozef. Images which made him seem a Tarzan, a handsome, strong, fearless king of the jungle. That he was. Never at home, he would spend days, weeks, in the bush in the Selous game reserve, close to where they lived. He went alone. On foot. Slept in trees. Walked for miles, returning only when the leopard skins he collected were nearing too heavy for him to carry. He would take them by car to Bagamoyo, stopping on the way to be amongst the last East African elephants to wade into the Indian Ocean at a spot only he knew. Then he would hire a ngalawe which he would sail alone to Zanzibar, there to deliver the skins to the Sultan’s agent, a remnant of the slave trade called Suleiman Obama, head of the clan to which Choco’s mother belonged.

  The skins would be taken at night from the boat and laid out in the palace courtyard. Suleiman would always ask why no bullet hole and roar with laughter to the set-piece answer, “because I only aim at the claws.” Suleiman’s interest in the skins was limited by his greater interest in the horns. What made the whole expedition so lucrative for Jozef was rhino horn. The skins would form a sack, stitched along the peg holes left after drying. Into this sack would go the horns. It was these that gave weight to his load and most repaid his efforts in the bush. Maria Theresa thalers. Solid silver. Business done, they would talk into the night about Africa. The Nyika. The Bush. Suleiman would retrace his expeditions from the lakes to Bagamoyo and thence to Zanzibar. He was proud of his slave hunting days. It was no mean feat to bring a string of slaves a thousand miles to market. Jozef listened to every detail. The roundups. The shootings with muzzle loaders. The animals. And the trek. And he, too, enthralled Suleiman with stories of his sorties into the Selous; Africa’s largest game reserve, too big to patrol effectively and big enough to hunt unseen for days on end.

  With the dawn Jozef would set sail for the mainland and home, repeating his expedition two or three times every dry season.

  Now in London all this was but a dream. And he dreamt of going back. But to what? His home and his father’s business, a long established building firm, had been nationalised. He thought of joining Shaun in Angola or going with Phokion to Rhodesia, and there was always South Africa. But none was the Eden he knew and loved.

  Still, the woman he fancied was now with him. And she told him of an adventure he could not but pursue.

  *

  In Poland, after her work on General Sikorski’s diary which had only recently surfaced in Wroclaw, (Vrotswaf) Marisha herself had became drawn to Africa. It was certainly the stories the women told that first interested her. But there was, also at the time, a push by the state to get involved in the continent.

  In April 1961 she reported for Vistula a trade agreement between Ghana and Poland. Quickly followed by a visit to Poland by the Nigerian Minister of Trade and Industry. He asked her out for a meal and back to his hotel where she just laughed at his drunken attempts to pull her down onto the floor.

  Next she reported on the goodwill and friendship mission to Mali, Niger, Senegal and the Ivory Coast, She declined a place on the first official Polish visit to these countries but she wrote up the record for her journal. And became a founder member in 1962 of the Friends of Africa Society. It set up the Patrice Lumumba Scholarship Fund to provide young Africans with grants for higher education in Poland. Next it organised conferences on Africa and initiated visits from Poland to the continent to promote cultural and scientific co-operation to the benefit of both. All sprung from the ‘sympathy felt by the Polish people with the growth of the national-liberation movement in Africa.’ So said its first statute. What it really meant was an opportunity to travel. And Marisha decided it was now her turn.

  The project she had in mind involved Jozef, though he did not yet know of it. In her reading, she found mention of an eighteenth century adventurer, who, it was said, may have been a Pole, one Maurycy Beniowski, the ‘King of Madagascar’ after whom a street in the capital, Tananarive was named. So she applied to the Society for a grant to research this story. It was given without question as was permission for travel arranged through London. And so it was that Jozef became involved. “Would it not be nice to travel together?” She lay in his arms talking the night away. He agreed. What else could he do? He tried to interest her physically but she just talked over his frustrated efforts to overcome her coolness.

  Eventually he proposed a month long trip, sailing from the mouth of the Ruvuma across the straits to Madagascar. All alone in the sun, sea, starlight.

  Jozef desperately wanted the greater physical closeness this journey would afford. But even as they lay naked in bed or on a beach there was no response from her to his heated advances.

  “What is it with you Marisha?”

  “What do you mean?’

  “Mother of God. Surely you can see what is happening and not happening!”

  “Yes Jozef. I can see. But I cannot feel any emotion, physical or mental. I can only feel pain. Before you, I most recently discovered my lack of engagement with feelings when I was working on the diary I told you about.”

  “I returned home from my office to find the women in tears.”

  “They had been reading Sikorski’s diary and wept in unison over his anguish about his son Janusz. This young man was diagnosed as tubercular and sent to the san
atorium in Zakopane where he lived out his life. There he met, in the solarium, a precocious young woman. She, Bogumila, was not tubercular but was sent for a cure of chronic influenza and shared the sanatoriums facilities with the likes of Janusz. Her uncle was a minister in the last administration before the war and so she had access to certain privileges such as use of his automobile which he kept at his holiday villa in the resort.

  “They would take chauffeured trips into the mountains to stay with the local mountain people. It was thought that life with them strengthened weak constitutions. The fact that this was a recipe for further contamination was not then appreciated.

  ‘The relationship between Janusz and Bogumila blossomed into a romance vividly described in the diary. Eventually, Janusz’s condition weakened. Bogumila was at his bedside when he died.’

  ‘I asked the women why they cried so.’

 

  ‘They replied: ‘Oh Marisha why are you so hard. Cannot you see how sad and how beautiful this episode is? Their love for each other: parents and son and he for Bogumila.’

  ‘I did not say so to them, but to myself I said what is there to cry about?’

  *

  Jozef was taken aback by this response. Yet her beauty overwhelmed his wanting to discuss the matter further. He kissed her on the forehead and they went on together. The journey was long.

  In bits and pieces which he carefully stored and put together in his mind Jozef came to know this woman who captivated him. But never satisfied him.