The Book of the Heathen (6 page)

‘Did Proctor say anything to you?' Frere asked me. He feigned indifference, but I caught his concern.

‘Regarding what?'

‘The powers that be –
their
powers that be – wish me to be returned across the river.'

‘Then surely that's good news. I've been trying myself—'

‘Good news?'

‘For you to be with us, there, among friends, among your countrymen, than to be held here—'

‘Among the heathens?'

‘To be held here where you have no voice. What else do you know?'

‘Only that there have been changes in the government on the coast.'

‘There are tales of changes every month.'

‘But I suspect these are to be believed. I was visited yesterday by the almighty Hammad, who informed—'

‘And you believed a single word of what he said? A man motivated solely by greed? A man who, by common consent, has done more to counter the stability and proper government of the place than – than…'

He waited for my anger to subside.

‘Of course not. I know him for what he is, and he, of course, understands that. You have always underestimated him, James.'

I acceded to this in silence.

Hammad had been there long before the Belgians, slave-trader, unofficial governor and war-lord of a region so vast that his hold over it was beyond all understanding.

‘And whatever you think of him, he is a reliable source of information. He has been in Brazzaville recently. He came here only to negotiate the sale of some of his assets.'

And to take delivery of you from the feather-trader, I thought, but said nothing. Hammad had always seemed to me to be a man surprised by his ability to make money, and then afterwards one intoxicated by it. I had heard accounts of his achievements and excesses on the voyage out. He was a man either venerated or despised by all who knew him. His cruelty to his native employees was well known, and yet they had never truly risen in revolt against him, nor even deserted him in the numbers and with the regularity ours now left us. It concerned me to see how much faith Frere still had in what the man said, but I was unclear in my own mind how much this concern was simply the result of hearing that which I did not wish to hear, and how much it was born of my belief in Frere and his own judgements.

‘Delegations are meeting even as we speak,' Frere said. ‘Balances of power going up and down.' He made scales of his hands as he spoke.

‘And what bearing will all that have on you?'

‘Quite simple. I may soon – if indeed I am not already – be eligible to stand trial in the country – in the new nation, say – in which I am accused of committing my crime. Imagine that – tried here and not in my own country.'

There was no alarm in his voice, but rather a growing excitement, as though he were rising to another of his challenges. I did not know what to say to him, everything having raced so far ahead of my expectations in coming to see him.

‘In short, again according to Hammad, my presence here – here among the benevolent Belgians – has become something of an embarrassment. Steps are being taken to have me removed.'

‘Have you brought across to us, you mean?'

‘In the first instance, yes.'

Again, I could not help but feel relief at the prospect. It did not then occur to me to ask him why he had not been brought to us directly.

‘Where,' he went on, ‘I shall presumably become an even greater embarrassment and liability. To be handed over to a native court – and there are lawyers and judges among these men, James – by the Belgians, despised corrupters of this fabulous paradise that they are, is bad enough, but imagine being forced to be handed over by your own countrymen.'

I could think of no answer. A galaxy of flies circled above us. The sound of distant men came faintly into the room.

After several minutes, he said, ‘And all of which, never let it be forgotten, will acquire a considerably greater significance in the eyes of the watching world than my crime itself. Hands will need to be washed, copy-books kept clean.'

I had known since the time of the first of the stories that he was the last man among us to deny anything he had done, and that whatever this was, he refused to speak of it now for my sake alone.

‘There are too many conflicting tales,' I said.

‘I imagine there are.' He put his hand on my arm to impress his meaning upon me. ‘I shall tell you, James Charles Russel Frasier, but it would serve neither of us for me to tell you now. I imagine the details of what happened are already being rendered superfluous to the greater purpose they might soon serve.'

‘Then tell me one thing,' I said.

He withdrew his hand.

‘Did you kill a child?' It was the most I could ask of him.

He breathed deeply and bowed his head.

‘A death in which you – however indirectly – were in some way involved, and for which you are now being held solely responsible?'

He raised his head. ‘Please, not now.'

Again, I acceded. ‘I'm beginning to sound like a lawyer,' I said. I had said the same to him once before, long ago, and he had remarked then that it seemed a profession for which my character was well suited. We had been in the company of the others at the time and they had all agreed with him, listing those of my attributes which suited the profession. As this listing continued I saw that Frere regretted having made the remark, and afterwards he apologized to me. I told him it was of no consequence, but both he and I knew that I had been stung by some of the comments made. It was why my reference to the fact now made him smile and helped release the small tension between us.

‘And if you were one, then I would certainly employ you,' he said.

I asked him if he had been allowed outside the cell since my last visit, and he said that he had, that Proctor came regularly to take him into the yard. ‘Bone will no doubt insist on parading me around in a similar manner upon my return,' he said. He dipped a cloth in one of the bowls of water and wiped his face and hands.

‘When I was here last,' I said, ‘you refused to speak to me. I said your name and you behaved as though you were no longer the same man.'

‘Nor was I,' he said immediately. I had anticipated some reluctance from him.

‘Meaning what?'

‘It would be hard for me to explain, even to you.' He wiped the last of the moisture from his face with his fingers. ‘Do you recall when we were held up at Port Elys by the failure of the steamer that was meant to take us to the Pool?'

‘Three weeks.'

‘And how anxious we were to leave the place behind and come onwards into what we still wanted to think of as the Great Unknown, the place where our names were to be made … Well, I remember some advice we were both given there by the Governor General.'

I remembered the dinner that had been held in our honour, brief diversion that we were.

‘He told us to write all our letters, to do all the things we needed to do while we were stuck in the place, and then, upon our departure upriver, to leave our old selves behind. It struck me then as a strange remark to make.'

I vaguely remembered something of the sort being said. But it was a common enough remark to make – old hands impressing new arrivals, experience impressing itself upon expectation – and I had paid it no mind.

‘Do you remember how many letters I wrote in those weeks? To my father, mother, sisters, to Caroline, to our employers, even to my old professors and tutors.'

I told him I remembered.

‘Well, that's what I was doing. I was leaving myself behind. Not in my essentials, of course; the man who arrived here was the man who left there, you might say, but I felt the need – if that is not too strong a word for it – to establish myself in all those essentials in that place before I left it. Do you understand what I'm saying? I needed there to be a common understanding of that man in Port Elys – of
me –
of the man who had re-created himself in all those letters before I left the place itself and confronted whatever awaited me here. Did you feel no such impulse yourself?'

‘I certainly wrote plenty of letters,' I said. We had been warned of the irregularity of the mails. At least with the sea still visible at our backs and seeing the great ships coming and going upon it we might still have had some faith in our letters being delivered.

‘It was more than that,' he said, and I saw immediately that I had disappointed him by my imperfect understanding of what he was trying to tell me. We had also been told to dispatch all those letters and then to clear our minds of all thought of the people to whom they were sent, as though the past and its trappings needed to be stripped from us to make us better able to cope with whatever lay ahead.

‘Do you think you achieved this?' I asked him.

He considered the question before shaking his head. ‘At first I believed so.'

‘And afterwards?'

‘Afterwards I saw what an impossible task I had set myself.'

‘Then why deny your name when I spoke to you last?'

‘Because by then the child was dead, and whether you wish to believe it of me or not, I had had a hand in her killing.'

I felt a sudden chill at hearing from his own lips that it was a girl who had been killed.

‘And you believe that by your actions in the matter you were changed?'

‘How could it be otherwise? A dead child.'

‘And so who – what – do you believe you have become if you are no longer the man who left us all those weeks ago?'

‘Fifty-one days,' he said. ‘Twenty-four since the child died.'

‘Do you regret what happened?' I apologized immediately for the question.

‘Regret is an indulgence,' he said. ‘I will not deny the truth, my part in it all, the facts of the matter.'

‘I know that,' I said. It was the wall which separated us.

At that moment the outer door opened and Proctor called in to me. My visit was over.

On our return across the parade ground I gave Proctor more money and asked to be kept informed by him of the arrangements to return Frere. He considered this without answering me and pushed the notes between the buttons of his jacket.

*   *   *

I next saw the deformed boy two days later. He was asleep on the ground outside my chart-room door. As I approached him, he woke and stood up. He considered me for a moment before beckoning me towards him. The gesture amused me. Though his life was lived mostly in silence, I had always imagined him a shy and reluctant near-mute. I was surprised even more when he spoke to me in broken but understandable English as I reached the door.

‘Come in?' he asked me, by which I understood that he wanted to enter the room with me.

I let him inside, and he stood for several minutes examining the cabinets and the maps and plans arranged around the walls. He moved closer to these, running his hands over them. I imagined they might be incomprehensible to him, things of wonder almost.

I stood beside him and started explaining the features of the map he studied.

He stopped me with the word, ‘Wrong.'

‘Wrong?'

‘No mountains.' He placed four fingers and a thumb over the cones of five peaks several hundred miles to the north-east, beyond the limits of the Ituri.

‘Yet many men have seen them,' I told him.

‘You seen?' he said.

‘Not personally. That is not my map.' I wondered at his new bravery.

‘Wrong,' he said again.

‘Do you know the country?'

‘One cliff.' He drew his arms apart to suggest the extent of this. ‘Then flat.' He was describing a vast, high plateau. The map was thirty years old.

‘Is it grass, forest, desert?'

‘Grass.'

I was about to ask him more when he wandered from this chart to another, a map of the original compound as conceived and built by its first owners. He studied it as though he might once have known it in this state. Only a quarter of the original buildings remained in use, and most of the once-cleared land further back from the river had been lost, first to the grass and then the trees.

I studied him more closely. His spine was twisted, forcing him to lean both forward from the waist, and then in on himself, and his head was turned at an angle opposing this, as though he were making a constant effort not to have to face the ground.

I offered him a seat, but even this posed problems for him, forcing him to turn sideways and then lean backwards to face me. I positioned my own chair so he might look directly at me with the least effort. There was no malformation of his arms or legs, though the curve of his spine forced these to stick out at their own ungainly angles. I saw how much more comfortable it must have been for him to lie on the ground or in the bottom of the boat than to either stand or sit in a chair. Because of his bowed and twisted head, I had seldom before seen his full face, but looking at it then, I saw that it too was perfectly formed. He avoided my eyes, raising his hand to his mouth when he spoke.

‘Frere,' he said, instantly drawing me to him.

While the rest of us had previously had little to do with the boy, Frere had allowed him to accompany him on his local expeditions, his crooked back laden with satchels and cases.

‘Where are you from?' I asked him.

‘Bassam.' I guessed from the way he said it that he would never return there. It was Frere who told me how few children survived their first few years in that place, and how those who were even suspected of some infantile sickness or weakness were either killed or left to die by their parents. The deformed boy would not have lasted an hour under such circumstances. His survival had intrigued Frere, and he had quizzed him on it. But the boy had kept his secrets.

I imagined now that he wanted to know what was happening to Frere, and I started to tell him, but he silenced me by covering his ears.