Rogue's March (46 page)

But one name was missing; and as they went out into the dark courtyard, Reddish asked him about Pierre Masakita. “I understand he was a student here once. Do you remember him?”

Frère Albert stopped to light his pipe. “Oh yes, I remember him. Everyone remembers him.” The gray face flared in the light of the match and was hidden again. He waved the dying match, still standing on the path, looking up at the night sky.

“You didn't mention him.”

“No. He was different, very different. In some ways, he was the most extraordinary student who was ever here. The fathers will tell you that, those of us who remember. Then he went off to Belgium, got into trouble—anarchists, communists, I don't know what. They don't talk about him. He came back once, I remember, and they don't talk about that either. He came back once, that was all. He brought a small wooden box for Father Joseph, who was the prefect then—a wooden box carved by the Bolia up the lake. It seemed that the chief there had asked Pierre to bring back certain texts from the Holy Scriptures, those they thought had been deliberately withheld from them. You probably know the superstition. So after his return from Europe that first time, he gave the box to Father Joseph. In it was a copy of Montaigne. Yes, Montaigne. Two other books too, but I've forgotten their titles—books on science, on skepticism, I believe. Yes, he was remarkable, the most remarkable of all.”

“But they don't talk about him.”

“No, hardly at all.”

“What do you remember best about him?”

They stood at the foot of the gallery steps. Frère Albert considered the question silently before he removed his pipe. “I remember the boy in him, not the scholar. The boy in the machine shop and the sawmill, curious about everything. Just the boy, but that was unique too. You knew that when he left these lakes and forests they would take that away from him too, the way they take everything else, and so they did.”

Standing in the African darkness, Reddish saw Masakita's face, half hidden by a scarf, gray with annealing dust, looking out into the winter night from a bakery shopwindow in Paris near the Rue Cadet.

He didn't sleep well. He finally drifted off to awake again long after midnight, hearing the crash of surf against the beach, and he saw the ghostly white curtains standing away from the window. Rain swept across the wooden gallery and against the screen. He sat up. Across the wet planks of the gallery floor he saw the oblong of yellow light from Gabrielle's room next door and knew she'd finally awakened. He got up, pulled on his trousers, and slipped out the door. Outside the window he heard the intermittent click of her portable typewriter. She was wearing a cotton shift, sitting in a chair with the typewriter on a second chair pulled near, the kerosene lamp on the table to her right.

He called to her, and she sat up startled. “It's me,” he said, opening the door. “How long have you been up?”

“Just a few minutes. I couldn't sleep.”

“I tried to wake you three times yesterday evening. Are you hungry?”

“No. Please.”

As he came closer, she quickly rolled the page from the carriage and got up; but she knocked her leather writing portfolio from the chair, spilling the typewritten pages across the rug.

“What's the trouble?”

“Nothing. Please—it's all right.” She kneeled to snatch up the typewritten pages from the floor near his feet.

“You type fast. Did you type all of that—”

“Yes. Yes, I did. Please, I'm very tired.” She lifted her face, still frightened; her cheeks and forehead, saddled with fresh sunburn, exaggerated the hollows of her eyes.

“You've been up a long time, haven't you?” She couldn't answer, and Reddish understood why. “You were writing about the trip, weren't you? About our talk with Masakita.”

“Yes—no! Don't ask, please. It's personal, just personal.”

“You said you wouldn't write it. You told me that.”

“I knew you would think that!” she cried. “But it's only for me—no one else!”

He turned and went out.

By morning the storm had moved to the east, but the clouds were low over the trees and a fine drizzle was falling. As she left the room, she saw that the wicker table on the gallery contained only a single cup, napkin, and plate. Looking in through Reddish's doorway, she saw that the bed was made, the mosquito netting neatly folded over the canopy, his bags gone.

The serving boy who brought hot water, Nescafé, and a croissant from the refectory told her that Reddish had eaten breakfast very early in the dining hall and had gone off in the Italian jeep.

She sat alone at the wicker table, looking out over the desolation of the road and lake, able to eat but barely able to swallow, unable to separate herself from the gray overcast and the sodden trees and road. Benongo was ugly in the rain, now another of the desolate, futile places she'd sought out and then fled from, alone again. The memory of the past two days had become a nightmare for her, the small wretched village under the trees even more wretched on a morning such as this, the ruined cottage just a meaningless rubble of mortar and weeds.

She heard the sound of a vehicle on the beach road. Turning mechanically, she saw the Italian jeep splash through the puddles at the gate as it turned into the mission compound and stopped at the gallery steps, only the roof visible. She sat paralyzed as Reddish climbed the stairs, a wet slicker over his shoulders, his head bare. She thought he'd forgotten something. He would pass the wicker table on his way to his room, and she knew she hadn't the courage to speak to him. She sat forward and emptied her cup quickly, then rose from her chair to return to her room.

“It's all right,” he called out as she turned away. “Take your time. We've got a few minutes yet. Are you packed?”

“Packed? Not really.” Her voice faltered.

“We'll be going by boat. The plane's not coming.”

He'd gone to check on the plane's arrival. The flight had been canceled, and he'd booked passage on the boat to Lutu at the head of the lake. She ran to her room to pack her luggage.

“Have you ever been on a paddlewheel before?” he asked as they went down the gallery steps for the last time. “It's an all-day trip, not too bad. Worse at night.”

She didn't know what to say.

The gangway was greasy, like the decks. A fine rain was still falling as the old paddlewheeler churned away from the dock. They stood at the rail outside the cabin watching Benongo until all they could see were the palm trees that hid the Catholic mission house and the commissioner's lakeside villa.

“I thought you'd gone,” she managed to tell him finally, when there was nothing left to say. “This morning I saw your empty room and I thought you'd gone.”

“Gone? Gone where?”

“After last night.”

“Last night you said it was personal. I hadn't slept well. I shouldn't have come in like that.”

“No, I understand why you did. It was rude of me.”

The shore retreated in the distance, pressed down by the overcast, a single sedimentary stratum.

“What did you learn last night,” he asked, “writing it all down?”

She was slow in responding. “I'm afraid I simply confused myself. With some things it takes me a long time to understand. I think I'm very slow that way, my mind late in catching up.”

“Which way?” They were alone at the rail below the wheelhouse, shrouded in mist.

“Understanding why I feel certain things the way I do, understanding what my emotions mean. Sometimes I'm not very clever that way.”

“Maybe you'll catch up at fifty, like your friend Stendhal.” They stood at the railing looking out through the mist, thicker now, fully obscuring the coastline. Patches of fog hid the lake ahead of them. “What was it he said—that at fifty it was high time he got to know himself?”

“You remembered. Yes, I suppose he was trying to catch up too.”

“What did he say when he finally did?”

She considered the question silently, looking out toward the shore, but there was nothing there. “The last page was sad”—she remembered at last—“as if he were finishing a long overdue letter to an old friend and suddenly realized that it was too late, that he had nothing to say, that his friend was dead.” Reddish turned to look at her. “‘I'm very old today,' he wrote, ‘the sky is gray, I'm not very well.'”

He waited for her to continue, still watching her face, but she said no more. The fog had enveloped them now, obscuring the wheelhouse, the bow and stern, the paddlewheel, which had stopped suddenly as the boat glided forward. The mist hung suspended in a fine feathery vapor, chilling their faces and bringing each surface nearer: the beaded railing, the curve of her upper lip, the drops in her dark hair.

“That was all?”

She hesitated as he waited, as if he might misunderstand. “No, one thing more. He said, ‘Nothing can prevent madness.' Those were his final words.” She seemed to smile. “But I don't think that's what he meant at all, not madness.” She lifted her eyes to his calmly, her self-consciousness gone. “What he meant was that you can't live your life over. That was what he had discovered.”

The day ended as strangely as it had begun. The night was dark as they disembarked, the steamer late, the fog far away, but the rain that had prevented the plane's arrival still drifted down across the muddy lanes and eroded banks of the village at the head of the lake, puddling the compound at the water's edge where the shipping line maintained a few primitive guest accommodations for lakebound travelers. The double cottage to which Gabrielle and Reddish were led was bare, the beds hard, the linen musty. There was no restaurant nearby, no hotel, no meals to be found except at the Italian atelier and depot which served as a kind of caravansary at the terminus of the overland and water routes.

They found their way through the dark lanes along the hillside to the atelier and its enclosing compound, but no lights showed and Reddish guessed that, like everything else, it was closed for the night. They entered nevertheless, like refugees, through a muddy passageway where goats and cats foraged, and found themselves suddenly surrounded by live shadows, shoulders and heads turned away, watching through the mizzle a wide window of light against the far wall which opened miraculously to Saharan dunes, soldiers in kepis, and isolated Moroccan forts, scarred by the cracks and imperfections of the ancient film and the stuttering lens frame of the battered projector itself, which stood near the center of the compound, draped over by an improvised tarpaulin suspended from a truck bed. Several dozen spectators crouched, stood, or sat there—truck drivers, mechanics, warehousemen, Italian fathers, stranded visitors, and rural officials, all immobilized, despite the rain, by the thirty-year-old film.

To the side, off a narrow verandah, was a plain common mess with wooden tables and benches. The meal was over; yet the plump African cook, still in the kitchen, recognized what had brought Gabrielle and Reddish there and silently fetched soup bowls filled from the simmering pot-au-feu which served all guests, drivers, mechanics, and laborers alike. At the far end of the plank table where they sat, a dark-skinned Indian or Pakistani sat hunched over his bowl, an ancient copy of
Time
magazine lifted in front of his devouring eyes. The soup was hot and filling; the bread, left from the earlier servings in the small woven baskets on the table, was dry and hard. They ate in silence; a pair of tabby cats prowled the table legs, brushing their ankles. Outside, the mist drifted, the rectangle flashed with shifting images, the laughter lifted and fell.

As they finished and stood up, Gabrielle searched the room silently for some evidence of their host. The African woman was in the kitchen rattling her kettles, humming to herself. The dark-haired Asian read his magazine. She looked at him silently:
I have no idea where I am or what I'm doing here
, her look seemed to say.
Do any of us
? He left franc notes on the table.

As they recrossed the courtyard, she paused in the lee of a truck cab, sheltered from the drizzle, to look at the film, her curiosity aroused by the laughter. It was an old French comedy, one she'd seen in her youth. She turned away at last, still scanning the silent silhouettes over her shoulder as they entered the narrow passageway, Reddish's flashlight probing the path ahead of them. It was as if no one had seen them enter, no one seen them leave.

The generators at the guest compound had been shut down by the time they returned. He left her there and went down the hill in the darkness to the police post to check on the plane.

Her room was strange at first, as those others had been, growing no more familiar as the candles burned down. She waited uneasily for his return, standing near the window, holding the last of the brandy from the flask. She saw his flashlight on the path and ran to unlock the door.

“The plane will be here,” he told her, shaking out his slicker, “the weather's clearing to the east.” She held out the paper cup. “That's for you,” he said. “Mine's finished.”

“No, please. You look chilly.”

His bag was on the floor near the door, his room waiting across the porch, but he took the cup. “It's a little silly,” he said, looking back at her, “putting you to bed again like a maiden aunt.”

“Was it deliberate?”

“Maybe at first.”

“Then your style is like mine, a little old-fashioned.” She was smiling. “We never seemed to have much time for ourselves, did we.”

“Not before, no.”

They stood in silence and then he put aside the cup and brought her to him. Her mouth tasted of brandy. His face was cold with the rain, and he felt her shiver as she withdrew, her face still lifted.

“You're cold too,” he said. “Finish the brandy.”

“Not now.”

There was nothing more to say. The candles burned down. They were lovers that night in the chilly cottage at the head of the lake. In the darkness the mist at the windows brought the sounds of the water nearer, brought the fragrance of smoke from the village fires, as at Benongo or the village above the swamp, but by then they both knew where they were.