Chapter Thirty-Two
The pygmy village was picturesque in a way that Martin had not anticipated. It was in a pleasant clearing in the forest, not so far off the main road that it made journeying to it particularly arduous or uncomfortable, even for the wide-beamed German woman who was waddling along so slowly immediately in front of him that it was all that Martin could do to stop himself punching her in his impatience to hurry past, and there was even a helpful sign - written in three languages - and a guiding arrow, to reassure the bold adventurer that he was still travelling in the right direction.
Before entry was permitted into the circle of low, thatched huts, which comprised the main village complex, each visitor had to solemnly hand over a five dollar bill - the amount clearly indicated on the printed board of tariffs - to an elderly pygmy man, who collected the notes eagerly before tucking the booty into a conspicuously Western-style bum-bag which he had concealed beneath a more traditional-looking hide loin cloth - the only item of clothing that he was wearing. In the distance, other members of his tribe were sitting around, looking bored at the prospect of the day’s batch of fresh visitors. Martin saw one young pygmy boy drinking from a can of Diet Coke, before another man - clearly from a different tribe, evident from his superior physical stature - clipped him solidly around the ears, and with a gesture, all too obvious, signalled for him to hide the telltale sign of consumer decadence.
Martin turned to Mona puzzled, “Is this where you live?”
Mona smiled, slightly wistfully, “No. I just wanted you to see this first.”
The three other tourists - Martin did not apply the same description to himself - who had journeyed with Martin and Mona from Kisangani, milled around the pygmy compound interestedly, poking their heads into the doorways of the various huts blissfully unaware of any invasion of privacy, and pointing their cameras at the diminutive inhabitants every time one of them showed any inclination towards ‘traditional’ activity. Each time a photo was taken, or a sanctuary violated, one of the members of the taller tribe would step forward and demand a sum of money, pointing angrily at the board of tariffs when met with any hint of refusal. It was a thoroughly dispiriting scene.
Mona explained, “The taller tribe, the Lese, they have recognised the pygmies’ value as a natural resource. Tourists, they will come a long way, and pay a lot of money just so they can say they have seen a real life pygmy in the jungle, and the Lese are exploiting this fact, except, of course, this is nothing of the kind. It is a charade. None of these people actually live here, it is like a stage set.”
“Pygmyland.”
“Yes, if you like.” Mona coughed suddenly.
“Are you okay?” asked Martin anxiously.
“Yes, just a little tired.” She smiled again, “I’m okay. It is very hot today, yes?”
Martin agreed, but he continued to look at his companion, concerned.
A young pygmy woman had approached the two Europeans unnoticed by Martin as he watched Mona. The first moment he spotted her was when she was standing directly in front of him, and was in the process of lifting up the front of her T-shirt - which appeared to display the faded logo of the 1998 Coupe du Monde - to reveal her bare breasts beneath. At the same instance, he felt a strong hand take his elbow, wheeling him around so that he was facing the dark features of one of the Lese villagers, who said in good English, “She will take off. Authentic photo. Only five dollars.”
Martin waved them both away, annoyed, turning to Mona, “Why are we here?”
Mona pointed to a familiar-looking poster, tacked to a wooden support on one of the village houses. “You said that you were looking for Ghiliba, for the Mancala movement, right?”
“Yes.”
“It is all that I have heard these people talk about for months now. These posters,” she tore down the paper sheet, “they have gone up everywhere. The name Ghiliba has swept through the Ituri Forest quicker than a wildfire.”
Martin pointed at the name of the location of the proposed grand Mancala meeting, as written on the poster. “And Goma is close to here?”
“Quite close.”
Martin recalled the description from his divination prophecy, “A place of lakes and volcanoes?”
Mona coughed again before answering, “Yes, that would be fairly accurate.”
Martin found himself instinctively glancing to where he would normally have been wearing a watch, before asking, “And do you know what day it is?”
“Today? Day or date?”
“Either.”
“No. Not a clue. How about you?”
“No idea.”
“Nice, isn’t it?”
••••••••••
When Martin considered his last, serious girlfriend, he realised that it must have been Jenny Cook in 1996, when he was just twenty-one. A lot had happened since then. He had lived with Jenny, on and off, for the best part of a year before they had eventually split up; the parting - amicable, but not without its necessary emotional upheaval - had been part of the reason that he had decided to depart English shores in the first place. During his employment as Garnet Wendelson’s carer, there had not been the time to form any close attachments to a ‘special other’, although he had come to a mutually-beneficial arrangement with a female stewardess employed by American Airlines, and who was based in Manhattan when she was not jetting around the globe, for matters of physical ‘servicing’ - no emotional baggage attached. During his lengthy sojourn in Pyongyang, though, even this arrangement had lapsed.
It was strange really, should he ever have been asked, Martin would have said that he considered himself quite a conventional person, someone that believed in the sentiments of marriage - if not exactly the actual practice entrenched in Christian doctrine - imagined himself having children, being a father at some stage; settling down; career, mortgage, slippers, retirement, golf? - no never that - but safely nuzzled into middle class obscurity certainly, and yet, here he was, already past his prime - some would say - without job, prospects, friends, lost in the middle of a Central African jungle, and with a contract out on his life. He had taken a seriously wrong turn somewhere on the life path. In his youth, when he had been down on his luck, he had managed to surround himself with people doing significantly worse than he was himself - Brian Bilger, came instantly to mind: unfortunate name; unfortunate bloke - and in the reflection of his acquaintances’ collective failings he had managed to feel better about his own situation. Now there was not even someone else against whom he could measure himself, advantageously or otherwise.
It was not exactly as though he could call Mona his girlfriend either. True they had shared a bed, but out of necessity rather than as a result of any instantaneous sexual attraction, nevertheless, he found that he could not help but consider Mona in terms other than as an intimate and close friend, irreconcilable with the short duration of time they had actually been acquainted with one another. In idle moments, he caught himself experimenting with combinations of names in his head: ‘Mona and Martin’, ‘Martin and Mona’, they both sounded pretty good; ‘Mona Meek’, quite nice, punchy and neat, a nice, even, rounded sort of a name; ‘Martin and Mona Meek and their three children Maurice, Mabel and Martha’, no, he was going too far now. It was nice to have someone to care for again though: for too long, now, he had been thrown back on his own devices and company, and that was not a healthy situation should it continue indefinitely. And Mona was certainly in need of some care at the moment. What had started as a mild cough, had developed into something obviously more serious. After they had left behind the touristic travesty of the faux pygmy village, Mona had led Martin on a hike of several days’ duration, deeper into the magnificent forest, and ultimately to the settlement that she had come to consider home and the pygmy tribe who had adopted her as family.
During the course of their journey, Mona’s physical condition had deteriorated: it was obvious that she had a fever, and
although she had tried to disguise the fact from Martin, he had caught her being sick on several occasions. The cough was worse now too, and would rack her whole body in an uncontrollable spasm, and she had to regularly request Martin to halt, so that she could sit down because she was feeling dizzy. As with so many in the medical profession, Mona did not make a good patient, repeatedly denying her symptoms and refusing to take anything to aid her discomfort. Martin repeatedly entreated her to rest, but felt powerless to insist when the young Italian woman seemed determined to press on to the pygmy settlement, telling him that she would be able to look after herself far better once they were there. The dark, forest nights were the worst times: Mona’s chesty spluttering and sudden, unconscious feverish cries mingled with the nocturnal sounds of the jungle, to form a lunatic’s chorus, and Martin found himself holding his hands over his ears, and rolling himself into a tight, foetal ball in his makeshift hammock, to block out the horror. The horror.
By the time they had eventually reached Mona’s adopted tribe, the young woman was barely capable of supporting herself upright, and was babbling incoherently, her temperature still racing. Martin felt scarcely better himself: no longer on account of his own earlier fever, but from the guilty knowledge that it was almost certainly from him that Mona had caught the disease which currently ailed her, and also that if she had not used up all of the drugs she had been carrying in her travelling first aid kit to treat him, she might have been able to ease her own suffering. For a further two days and two nights Martin stayed beside Mona constantly, as the young woman lapsed in and out of consciousness. During this time, the pygmies maintained a respectful distance, going about their own business, as if by closing their eyes to the problem they could ignore the fact that sickness had presented itself at their own door. By the third day, Mona appeared, superficially, to be a little better. Her temperature was slightly reduced and she was able to open her eyes and talk to Martin reasonably lucidly, but her pulse was still worryingly slow, and she had lost a lot of weight, her face looking particularly gaunt, her big eyes haunted hollows, and her normally tanned complexion sallow and jaundiced. Martin pushed away some stray strands of black hair from where they had fallen across her face, the hair sticking together, damp with sweat, feeling like seaweed, slimy.
“I ache all over,” Mona said, looking up into Martin’s face.
“Just lie still. It’ll be all right,” he said, trying to sound more reassuring than he felt. “Is there anything I can do?”
Mona ignored Martin’s enquiry, “Do you know that the first man ever diagnosed with SIDA* was here in Congo.”
“Really.”
“Strictly, no, that is not true. It was the first ever sample of VIH positive blood that was taken here.”
“VIH?”
“Le virus d’immunodéficience humaine. Oh, of course. Sorry, English. I’m talking about HIV.”
“Oh, okay.”
“It was in Leopoldville. I like that name. For all that the Belgians may have screwed this country, I like the names they left behind. Kinshasa, as is now.”
Martin tried to silence the young woman, “Shouldn’t you be resting. You can tell me this later.”
Mona continued though, “No. That was back in 1959. You’ve probably heard all the theories? For a while it was proposed that the virus could have resulted from the mass polio vaccinations in this region during the late fifties. The theory was that the CHAT vaccine, some of the samples of which were grown on chimpanzee kidneys, had allowed a crossover between species of the chimp disorder, Simian Immunodeficiency Virus, and which then manifested itself in humans as HIV.”
Martin nodded, although the information was new - and of only marginal interest - to him, but since he could see the look of seriousness in his companion’s face, he allowed her to continue her monologue uninterrupted.
“The idea was subsequently largely discredited, admittedly by the Americans, who had a vested interest in seeing it quashed since they had been responsible for developing the vaccine in the first place, but nevertheless quite convincingly, when computer extrapolations back of the mutations that would have had to occur in the DNA sequences between the SIV virus and the HIV virus, indicated that the crossover must have occurred significantly further back in time, perhaps in the 1930s. Is this boring you?”
“No, no,” Martin lied, indulgently.
Mona winced, clutching her side. She breathed deeply, regaining her composure before continuing, “I just want to explain to you the reason why I came out here.”
“There is plenty of time for this another time,” said Martin.
“No,” said Mona firmly. “You don’t understand. There was blood in my stool this morning. You did not see, but I know. There is nothing you can do. Not here.”
“What?” asked Martin, alarmed.
“It can happen like this with typhoid. I have seen it before. A punctured intestine. It leads to peritonitis. You know, a burst appendix. There is nothing we can do.”
“No.”
“It is all right. I just want to explain.”
“I’m listening.”
“It got me wondering what was happening out here at that time. If there was something that had contributed to the birth of this virus.”
“And what did you find?” asked Martin, suddenly intrigued, wondering if this young Italian woman had made some major discovery in this remote and largely unexplored jungle: a place almost unique in the modern world, where Western man had not made significant inroads, and wild imagination was allowed free, unfettered roam; where wild animals remained unclassified and unknown* and where life carried on today in a fashion unchanged in millennia.
“Nothing,” said Mona, the single, disappointing word escaping from between her lips like a final breath of life, or the last air in a deflating balloon.
“Nothing?” Martin felt slightly outraged, despite his best attempts at empathy with his stricken patient.
Mona tried to elucidate, “There were big refugee camps at that time on the border with Rwanda. The Belgians had introduced compulsory passes for Rwandans in the 1930s in an attempt to differentiate between Hutu and Tutsi. I don’t know if you know, but ethnically the two ‘tribes’ are not different, they are both Banyarwanda. The division is purely on lines of wealth; the Hutu being the peasant farmers, the Tutsi the dominant land owners.”
“Not much different to feudal Europe then,” said Martin.
“So the Belgians must have thought. Anyhow, as you can imagine, in these circumstances, there were revolts by the Hutu and there were counter-revolts. Many Hutu fled to Uganda, many to Congo, close to where we are now.”
“So?”
“Have you ever been in a refugee camp?”
“No.”
“I worked briefly for Medecins Sans Frontieres on the Jordan Iraqi border before I came out here. Nearly four years after the end of the Iraqi War and they still hadn’t managed to resettle all of the displaced people. The squalor in the camp was appalling; diseases were rife; it was not somewhere that you would ever want to be. I couldn’t stick it, I’m ashamed to say.”
“And this is better?” asked Martin, disbelievingly, his gaze casting around the muddy encampment and primitive living conditions.
“Oh, infinitely so,” said Mona. She winced again; a long shudder convulsing her body as a pain which seemed to begin in her lower abdomen shot up through her whole torso.
“You need to rest,” said Martin.
Mona allowed herself to lay flat, the shooting pain seemingly having knocked the last vestiges of battle out of her. She still continued to talk, quietly though, as if voicing private thoughts to herself, rather than attempting to communicate anything to Martin. “They think that Spanish ‘flu may have begun in Etaples, in the French camps during the First World War. It was just a possibility. If I could have discovered a link between the camps here in the thirties. It was just a possibility.” Mona began
to ramble. “But it was just a crossover from an animal. Chimpanzees. That’s all.”
Martin folded up a thick, coarse-haired blanket into a bundle and slipped it beneath Mona’s head as a makeshift pillow. He touched the tip of his finger to her lips and told her to be quiet. “Sleep now. You can tell me later.”
••••••••••
Mona’s condition deteriorated quickly. She talked about death during every lucid moment.
“It is okay. I used to imagine what my funeral would be like. I guess that everyone does, right?”
Martin didn’t like to disagree, but privately thought that it revealed a slightly morbid predilection on the part of his companion. Out loud he said, in an attempt to lighten the mood, “Personally, I always used to imagine my Oscar acceptance speech.”
Mona looked confused, “But you are not an actor, are you?”
“No,” said Martin, “That’s the point.”
Mona gasped suddenly and gripped her side. There were fresh beads of sweat on her forehead and her eyes looked suddenly terrified as though she had glimpsed something horrific awaiting her at the end of a long tunnel. She reached around, almost sightlessly, trying to find Martin’s hand. “Hold my hand, will you,” she asked.
Martin entwined his fingers with the young woman’s. “Is there anything I can do?” he asked, feeling helpless. “Is there a prayer, you would like me to say. I don’t know how it is with your religion.”
“I have no religion,” said Mona simply.
“Is there...?”
Mona interrupted Martin, “Just hold my hand and tell me nice things.”
“I don’t understand.”
Mona said, “I once heard about a whale that was stranded on a beach. It was a big whale, weighing many tonnes, and it must have misjudged the tide and found itself in shallow waters from which it could not escape. You know, a whale can survive out of water for some time, and soon this one was surrounded by a great group of people who lived close to the beach. The sea was so close that they thought that if they all pushed the whale together they would be able to manoeuvre it back into the water again. They pushed and they pulled but the whale was just too heavy and they could not budge it one inch, and they all sat around despairing of what to do.”
“I think I’ve heard this story,” said Martin.
“Except for one little girl,” said Mona, “She sat beside the whale, and she stroked it, and she talked to it quietly and told it nice things. They both knew that the whale was going to die, but she just told it nice things.”
Martin pushed the hair away from Mona’s face and told her to close her eyes. He stroked the back of her hand, and started to talk. He told her about the trees, and about how the wind was rustling through the branches and moving every leaf. He told her about the birds and how he could hear their song. And he talked about the insects and the noise as they hovered past. He found himself that he was no longer in the middle of a Congolese jungle describing the exotic plants that surrounded him on all sides, effectively blocking out the light of the sun above, instead he had been transported back to a beautiful, summer day in England. He was laying on his back in a green meadow of wild flowers, immersed amidst the smell of freshly cut grass, the sound of an invisible honey bee buzzing close at hand, and in the distance the tuneful twittering of sparrows and thrushes, with the sun feeling pleasantly warm on his face and glowing yellow through the barrier of his closed eyelids, and far overhead was the faint noise of an aeroplane. Passing over.
Interlude
Occasionally the greatest gift that can be bestowed is a temporary relief from the burden of having to think.
When I lost my first son during Operation Desert Storm, he being one of the first combatants killed whilst liberating Kuwait from its Iraqi invaders during 1991, my Christian faith was tested beyond endurance. I thought that God had deserted both me, and him, and I saw no way forward in a religion that could allow such misery to befall my family. When I lost my second son, in similar circumstances, and in the same field of conflict, twelve years later, during the Iraqi War of Liberation, I realised how mistaken I had been to depart from my faith. During those intervening years, between the two grave tragedies which struck my family, I had been seduced by the easy appeal of a faith commonly referred to as the aeroplane religion - it seemed appropriate to me: my first son had been a pilot, flying Apache helicopter gunships. If ever there was a divine sign, then surely this was it.
My life began to return to normal: it is true what they say, that Time is a great healer. My first son had had a traditional Christian burial with full military honours and, unlike some of his comrades, I thanked myself fortunate that his body had at least been identified and flown home, so that I could visit his graveside, where, despite my waning faith, I could at least draw comfort from the proximity of his mortal remains.
When my second son was killed, a victim of unexploded ordnance from a Coalition forces’ cluster bomb - a so-called ‘friendly fire’ casualty - I realised how much my Christian faith had supported me before, and to what extent the Church of the Higher We had deserted me now. They had no set procedure for dealing with grief; no words to ease the pain. I was left to make sense of my own emotions, without guidance, direction or leadership. It was hard at a time when I needed it to be easy.
I am only grateful that I was able turn to the wise words of another great leader for hope and inspiration in my hour of need, and it is through my love and belief in our noble president, George W. Bush, that I have finally rediscovered my faith in Christianity. It is President Bush who has given me that greatest gift, at a time when I needed it most: the relief from ever having to think. I believe in our president’s ‘Divine Plan’ and I have found consolation in my personal loss in knowing that my sons’ sacrifice has furthered our country’s rightful purge on evil religions and the regimes that harbour them, and has brought the world closer to living in peaceful Christian harmony.
God bless America.
(Extract from Notes to Self Upon the Death of a Son by Emily Weir.)
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