Rogue's March (28 page)

“Did she push you politically?”

“She was an influence, the way most women are. I'm not sure about her ideas.”

“You still keep in touch with her?”

“She writes, yes.”

“Still active in the party?”

“She was never very active in the party. Her father left her a little money—he manufactured plumbing appliances—and she lives as she pleases, generous with both her life and her money.”

“What's she doing now?”

“I'm not sure. The last time I heard from her she was living with a blind man she met on a train.”

Reddish looked up, annoyed.

“These are trivial questions,” Masakita said. “Why do they matter?”

“They matter. Don't think they don't. I want to tell my people something about you. The only thing they've got is secondhand.”

“Biographies are always false, always fictitious. Why create another?”

“For Christ's sake,” Reddish muttered in dismay, closing the notebook. “Go ahead, tell it your own way.”

There was little to tell.

He hadn't been brought to France by the FLN but had gone there on his own, to Paris, to finish his education and find work in heavy industry. Later he'd met a few Algerians at a small cafe off Rue Cadet, where he'd taken rooms, just as he'd met a few communists at the evening study groups held periodically at a small socialist reading room nearby, including the woman he later lived with for a few months. But all these were temporary arrangements. He'd helped the FLN because he sympathized with their goals and they trusted him; but more importantly because he was free to move about, as they weren't. The associations he'd formed with the Algerian Exterieur Division of the FLN would be useful for the decolonization of his own country and all of sub-Saharan Africa. He thought the Algerians he'd met were committed to far more than their own national struggle.

He'd associated with communists and socialists, true, in the small study groups and elsewhere; but his studies in Paris went far beyond the study of Marxist texts.

One night that first winter he was sitting at the front table of the socialist reading room—where he went to escape the cold, his isolation, and the poverty which allowed him few newspapers and fewer books—when a little Frenchman paused near his chair, pulling on his beret and scarf and looking scathingly at the books and newspapers on the table—Kautsky, Lenin, Rosenberg's
History of Bolshevism
, Souvarine's
Stalin
, among others. The old man was as small as a dwarf, his fingers stained with nicotine. “There is much more to our bookshelves than what you have on your table,” he'd told Masakita censoriously, and with that pulled a small book from his pocket, very dog-eared, the spine torn, the title unreadable. Masakita thought he meant merely to show him the book, but he gave it to him. It was a copy of Pascal's
Pensées
. He never saw the man again, but he kept the book and read from it too, just as he read from the old editions of Montaigne and Saint-Simon he'd brought with him from Brussels.

“Why'd you leave Belgium in the first place?” Reddish interrupted.

“I was expelled from the university.”

He had been sent to Belgium to study engineering, but had changed to the economics faculty the third year. The summer before he was to receive his degree, he'd joined in a student demonstration in Brussels, was arrested and released to the university officials, who ordered his expulsion. His passport was withdrawn and he was put on a ship to be returned to the Congo. He jumped ship at Dakar and two months later reached Spain, smuggled in with a group of Senegalese workers bound for France. They were led over the Pyrenees in early autumn by their Corsican
passeur
when the first snows were on the peaks but not yet in the passes. In Paris he shared a room in a bidonville with a fellow Congolese, sleeping in shifts on a single cot. He found work in a slaughterhouse, hauling away the bloody skins from the butchering rooms, while he continued to search for work in heavy industry. With a little money saved, he found a room in Rue Cadet. A few weeks later he left the slaughterhouse and took a job as a sweeper and laborer in a foundry that cast linings for industrial furnaces.

At the university in Belgium, abstract notions of property and capital had no more meaning for him than the oppression of an industrial revolution long over—the smoke of Birmingham or Düsseldorf, the cotton mills of Lancashire, workers moving home by gaslight, up frozen lanes and canals, filing into lifts on bitter winter mornings, cold and hungry, despising their condition.

As an African, he'd found it impossible to understand what his socialist or Marxist colleagues were saying when they talked of the socialist embryo in the bourgeois womb or the socialization of the productive process that would shape a new social character. Imperialism, like hatred or exploitation, was easier to understand. As an African, he could explain the misery of his own country as the product of Western wealth, artificially created by the division of labor forced upon colonized Africans by the industrial metropoles that denied them the rewards of their own resources and labor, but his knowledge was incomplete.

He'd sought work in heavy industry to bring those abstract ideas to life, to feel on his own shoulders the crushing burdens of capital, to know himself the socialization process that followed.

“Fancy words,” Reddish muttered in irritation.

“Of course—just words.”

“So what happened? Did you find out what Marx was talking about?”

Masakita was slow to respond. “Many things,” he said finally. “I worked in the foundry for two years. After the rebellions here, I went back there for a few months—the factory, the room in Montmartre, the small socialist library. The Algerians were gone by then; their work was finished.” He shrugged. “I was naive in those days, believing that change was simply doctrinaire, as finite or as manageable as the linings we cast at the foundry.”

Late one February evening he happened to catch sight of himself as he passed a bakery window. He saw a wretched figure wrapped in a woolen coat, scarf hiding the African mouth, the dark face above as gray as a corpse's, mantled with the dust of the annealing rooms at the foundry, the boots on his feet shapeless lumps of leather warped by rain and snow and sucked dry again by the heat of the catwalks above the furnaces. Was that the man he'd hoped to become—miserable, deprived, oppressed? To anyone passing him in the streets at that moment, probably; but what did he feel? He felt fortunate merely to be there, a man like any other, suffering through that winter cold as generations of Europeans had before him in the same frozen streets and alleyways.

But the foundry closed. Two weeks later he abandoned France and his life there to go to Cairo to take a position on the newly created Afro-Asian Secretariat.

“This was the first time?” Reddish asked.

“Yes, the first time.”

“So what had you learned for all those years?”

“Simple things,” Masakita answered.

He'd gone to Europe to study engineering but had discovered Marx and trade unionism. He'd gone to escape those Jesuits who'd taught him at the mission school at Benongo, convinced, as the village elders were, that certain books of the Bible had been carefully edited or eliminated to deny to Africans those secrets to wisdom and self-respect which enabled the white man to rule, and he had discovered Montaigne and Pascal.

Before he'd left the mission school, an old chief had sent him an elaborately carved box, a receptacle for those secret books Masakita would discover in Belgium and return with to his village.

What should he have put in the box? he now asked Reddish. Marx? Montaigne? Pascal? Perhaps the latter two, since their message was simpler than that of Marx, simple enough even for the chief at Funzi to understand: this European civilization that Africans looked upon with such awe and respect was as fragile as their own.

Tired and disappointed, indifferent to riddles, Reddish lifted himself from his chair to stalk the room. “You say you knew a few communists in Paris. Did anyone ever try to recruit you?”

“Of course not.”

“What about during your trips to the Soviet Union? You haven't talked about those.”

“No.”

“China?”

Masakita didn't answer.

Reddish turned to see the look of silent scorn. “Tell me something about China—what you saw, the facilities you visited, the dog and pony show they put on,” he continued stubbornly. “They didn't take you to their nuclear testing facility, did they? I think it's in Sinkiang.” He looked again at Masakita's immobile figure. “For Christ's sake, make it interesting this time!” he shouted, suddenly angry. “Something I can get my teeth into for a change.”

It was late autumn when Masakita reached Peking, traveling under the auspices of the Afro-Asian Secretariat, which had sent dozens of Africans and Arabs to Chinese guerrilla camps. In Peking he was received by officials from the African Solidarity Committee and the Peking Institute of Foreign Affairs. He was given a week's familiarization course at a guerrilla training center at Da Kien, near Linchow. The techniques taught weren't original or even useful for Africans. The evening hours were spent repriming old cartridges and melting down old lead for new bullets for the firing range. He visited Nanking and was given ten days of medical training. With a group of workers from Canton, he was taken to Mao's birthplace and then flown to Manchuria, where his army hosts drove him to the Korean border near Pusan on the Yalu, where the Americans had been defeated during the Korean war.

The mountains were covered with snow, the wind savage, the landscape forbidding, as silent and empty as the thirteenth-century landscape the Mongols had crossed on their great drive toward the Danube in 1241. Listening to his Chinese guides explaining the tactics which had led to the American defeat, he'd felt nothing but the cold, a cold so numbing that the mind was annihilated, the body a burden to be escaped at any cost, even death, which came like a warm breath. Standing inside his thick quilted Chinese jacket with the fur parka, the Asian snow in his face, ice in his nostrils, gazing out across those frozen mountains and river, he found himself incapable of mental or physical response.
How had they done it
? His guides continued to congratulate themselves, like schoolboys, as if their victory had occurred that morning.

Returning to the Chinese army post in the closed jeep, their elation was gone, their faces blank again, Masakita again a stranger; and he saw in their expressions the same neuter self-absorption he'd seen in the guerrilla instructors at Da Kien as they retreated from the blackboard, the tactical lesson over: a lump of racial indifference no ideology could thaw.

At the end of his visit to China he decided that the soldiers he'd seen that day on the Yalu were no different from those of any other army, moved as much by boredom, apathy, fear, and blind obedience as anything else, their condition no more measured by the slogans of the cultural revolution that festooned the walls and rattled in the wind outside his Peking hotel room than Russian success could be judged by Soviet mathematics or the corridors of the Moscow subway.

High over China, with the sunlight flooding the nearly deserted cabin of the Pakistani jet returning him to Cairo, he'd tried to understand the Chinese, wise when his own ancestors were still puzzling over iron smelting or the phases of the moon. His hosts had been considerate, always gracious; yet even at the airport their formality and politeness seemed exaggerated—an ancient people on a vast land mass welcoming a black stranger still grappling with the first pangs of political birth.

What best summed up the Chinese were a few lines scrawled on the blackboard of a classroom in Peking, written by the Chinese instructor who taught English. Masakita knew a few words of English, but the lines didn't make sense, not even after his guide had translated them, and it wasn't until a few minutes later that he understood them. They were simple lines, almost an ideograph, but what they expressed about the Chinese was expressed in no other way. The lines, English in origin, read:

When Yenan was a market town

London was Derry Down
.

“So they didn't take you to Sinkiang,” Reddish summarized wearily, anxious to bring the talk to an end. “You didn't see anything very interesting except a nursery rhyme on a classroom blackboard, and the ice and snow, which just about wiped you out. I was in Korea too and got clobbered one night by a bunch of Chinese firemen blowing bugles. I'll tell you about it sometime. It wasn't snowing.”

Nothing Masakita had told him would be of the slightest interest to his headquarters, not even enough to qualify him for a free plane ride to Frankfurt.

Masakita was silent.

“So you worked as a foundry laborer, read Marx and Montaigne, did a few jobs for the FLN, knew some French communists, but got fed up and hired on with the Afro-Asian club in Cairo, a Third World neutralist drafting agenda papers that wouldn't hurt anyone.” He looked over his glasses at Masakita. “Right. Then you came back here to teach school in the Kwilu after independence, led a guerrilla war against the central government, but broke with the rebels and went into exile.” He hesitated again, but Masakita made no comment. “Then the President offers you a sub-cabinet job at the same time the rebels-in-exile wanted you to head up their own government abroad, but you came back here—not as a Marxist, not as a revolutionary, not as anything else I can understand.

“What the hell are you? No one recruited you or even tried. Did they know you were there? You've been to Moscow, Leningrad, Frunze, Peking, Da Kien, and a few other places, all of them interesting to you, but nothing you can make very interesting to anyone else. All right. That happens too. People carry things around in their head so long they don't even know they're there, not until someone pries them loose. Others know they're there, but don't want you to find them.” He lifted his eyes from his notebook. “What are you hiding?”