The Catastrophist: A Novel (18 page)

She was from a place where there was no such thing as not knowing anyone. She could not bear the loneliness of England. I can dimly recall the night we sat in the waiting room at Liverpool docks. The boat would take us to Belfast. My legs and feet were cold. It was foggy; it is possible that sailing had been delayed, for it seems to me we waited a long time. Siobhan and I sat either side of our mother in our identical fawn coats, snuggling against her, the family baggage piled before us.

At least Belfast was not lonely. She came from a cheerful family, though one well fastened by the boundaries they lived in and never sought to extend. My mother’s heartbroken return was, I believe, for her brothers and sisters an object lesson in staying with what you know. She had breached some unwritten rule of her small world, had in some way got above herself, and had paid the penalty. Now she was manless, an unusual condition in that place in those days unless it came through spinsterhood or widowhood. She felt it acutely. Her confidence crashed, it never really recovered. She became terrified of saying or doing the wrong thing. She worried about conventions and appearances. “Don’t let them know you live in a corporation house,” she told Siobhan, whose school friends had invited her to a party. And she worried about money, about what would happen to us.

When I was ten or eleven there was a reconciliation. William showed up on the doorstep one day. He presented her with a bunch of lilies. My mother sent Siobhan and me out to play and by the time we came in for tea she had taken him back. It lasted almost two years. He was as hopeless as ever, and as cruel to her. After one argument he followed her into the kitchen, where Siobhan and I were trembling by the stove, and punched her in the ear. After he stormed out of the house my mother asked us to fetch a neighbor. He drove her to the hospital and my father took to making “business” trips. Sometimes he’d arrive home with flowers and presents, and he’d take my mother out to dinner. But the trips got longer and longer. One day he just never came home.

I don’t think it sentimental to say he never found anyone to replace my mother. When he tracked me down to my room in Islington and launched on his tall stories I didn’t challenge him. Perhaps I should have. But it is hard to strip a man naked, even the weakest, most despicable man, and parade him for all to see and mock. Everyone, I suppose, deserves some cover. So, for all its transparency, I did not challenge William’s cover that day. Instead I listened to his lies.

My new post-graduate life went well, went very well. I had a circle of friends who liked my company, who were amused by me. In those days I was capable of holding the dinner table’s attention with stories and mimicry. I could tell jokes against myself, I could be a clown. I didn’t mind looking silly as long as I was entertaining.

I completed my thesis in four years. The
British Journal of History
and the Royal Historical Society accepted parts of it for publication. I began work on a monograph whose principal argument would be that the great political and religious upheavals of the sixteenth century owed little to ideology or doctrinal conviction and everything to the Tudor state’s perpetual need for cash, a need exacerbated by the effects of the European-wide price inflation. Like all young bloods I was out to make a name for myself—I stated my case provocatively; I loftily dismissed Weber and Tawney. I had a famous and powerful enemy at Balliol whose books were littered with anachronisms about “the rise of the bourgeoisie” and “capitalist modes of production,” and he said something about the poverty of empiricism in connection with my approach. But I had defenders as well. I took a job as a teaching assistant while looking around for a suitable full-time post.

Then one bright afternoon I left the Public Record Office with a vague sense of needing some distraction. I had been cramming in my research during the Easter vacation; the Exchequer figures were crowding me, and my head felt cluttered and stupid. I thought I might have a spring cold coming on. I wandered down Chancery Lane and up the length of Fleet Street to Ludgate, and near St. Paul’s I found a dusty old bookshop where, out of idle curiosity, I picked up a nineteenth-century French novel. It had been a very long time since I had read fiction. I stood on the creaking bare boards of the floor and glanced over the first couple of pages with only passing interest, thinking at the end of each paragraph to put down the book and go on to explore the history shelves. Instead I kept reading. It seemed to me that I knew the people in the story, knew them firsthand. The more I read the more I recognized their voices, the way they walked, the houses in which they lived. I knew their banality, their pretensions, their selfishness. It was almost as if the story had been set in the world of my childhood. Why had I not read this before? Why had no one told me?

I finished the book that night. I did not return to the Public Record Office for almost a week. I stayed in my room and read novels. With one eye I watched the characters rise from the page, with the other I watched my own life. It sounds solipsistic, but reading about imaginary others made me intensely curious about my real self. Before then I had sent few queries in my own direction. Once I started reading I entered a period of introspection and self-examination; fiction referred to me questions I had not even known how to formulate. It was like being forced to stand naked in front of the mirror in a harsh and unflattering light.

I did not like the reflection cast back at me. I saw vanity, arrogance, self-importance, cowardice, I saw the meanness of my own motives. I started writing, I think, because I saw in words a way to cover myself up. In fairness, I did not try to use writing as reinvention, or as an advertisement, a sign behind which I could hide and say I was better than I was. Instead I rendered everything as a kind of sly joke, including the characters in which I breathed. That way I was only one more joke among many, my failings were invisible. Long before my first efforts at fiction I had substituted James for Seamus.

At around this time I met Alan at a dinner party. He was a year younger than I and had just got his first job in publishing. He struck me at first as rather bumptious and pleased with himself; I know—he would never admit it now—he thought me prickly and awkward. I probably was. Somehow we got over our initial mutual reservations. At his invitation I sent him some things—unconnected passages, a couple of short stories, a piece of memory. He invited me to his office in William IV Street where he told me he liked them. He liked, he said, the speculation, the moral neutrality, the jumpiness. “Keep it like that,” he advised me. “Personal conscience is fine, it’s flexible and interesting; social conscience is tedious because it’s invariably rigid and predictable.” He told me of a writer whose new novel was coming up for publication. “Boring,” he announced. “A novel is no place to parade your political beliefs.” He reminded me that Stendhal had once said that politics in a work of art is like a pistol shot going off at a concert, and he cited Auden: “The honest truth, gentlemen, is that, if not a poem had been written, not a picture painted, not a bar of music composed, the history of man would be materially unchanged.” The work of writers and artists who persisted in trying to prove the opposite invariably declined. Had I ever read any of Day-Lewis’s
Noah and the Waters
? His worst work. Embarrassing. Alan knew, he said, of several writers of vaguely left-wing sensibilities who, when it came to their fiction, found that no matter how hard they tried they could not fly the flag for the cause. The reason was simple: politics of that sort demands conviction, fiction demands doubt.

With encouragement from Alan I completed my first novel in five months. I finished my second in just under a year—I cannot write anything like as quickly now. The advances were small, but with occasional reviews, newspaper and magazine articles, and the odd radio piece I began to make a living. I abandoned my academic career. The notes for my monograph lie in a tea chest in the cupboard where I keep my vacuum cleaner.

When I was in my early teens things were hard for us. They were hard all over town. The mills were closing, the docks and shipyards were at a standstill, and the workless—cheered on by Siobhan (she had joined, to great family scandal, a communist youth organization)—were rioting. It was after William’s second and final disappearance and my mother was in a distraction over money. One Friday night she clutched us, more for her comfort than ours, as the bill collector shouted through the letterbox. It was then, as we sat in the dark holding our breaths, she noticed my fever. In the panic it was briefly—and wrongly—taken for TB, and I was admitted to a ward of the Fever Hospital in which my grandmother had died. The morning after my admittance my mother, anxiously scanning the newspaper lists, saw that B19617 had been placed in Class I, among the dangerously ill. She hurried to the hospital and would not be turned away. In the mutiny of my senses I was being tormented by ghosts. They were in the windows, they were around my bed. There were devils and angels fighting over me. Outside the wind was howling. Then her voice started to come through, a scented whisper, a rustling, an echo. I could feel my hand in hers. When I opened my eyes I could not make out her features, for her face was in halation and the eerie light around her was glowing, spun, white and foggy. But there was something about her presence, its intensity, its declaration that heaven and earth would be moved if that’s what it came to. I understood love as a child understands it, as a thing that comes to those who are greedy for it, a thing due by right.

Sometime later, during my convalescence at home, she received a letter from William. We sat together in the kitchen that night. She gazed at the fire in the stove. She was not crying, but she was away, somewhere else.

“Where have you gone?” I asked gently.

I was pretending to be more grown-up than I was. She turned to me and smiled—amused, I think, and touched by my pretension—and answered that she was here, nowhere else.

I asked why she still loved him.

She took me seriously; for the first time she regarded me not as a child for whom these things are unfathomable and should remain so, but as a kind of companion, as a friend. She was quiet for some moments before she said, “Because he’s a human being and he deserves to be loved.”

Love was not joy for her, it was not happiness. That’s the way I understood love. And from that day on I could not bear to be around sadness or the people and the rules which made sadness. I had to get away.

It would be an exaggeration to say that nothing grew in my heart before I met Inès. There were women, and there were good times, happy times. There was fondness and kindness. There were presents and trips and all the things that go with man and woman, including soft words and impossible, felt pledges. But the truth is it was all at a remove; I was always watching the scene, watching myself, and, terrified of sadness, of what the end of love entailed, I made sure of my impregnability by convincing myself that I took nothing too seriously, that nothing deserved to be taken seriously. If I broke a heart, what of it? It would mend, and anyway hadn’t its very predictability turned disappointed love into a well-worn joke? The patterns were so pathetically familiar all you could hope for was some little variation to provide some amusement for someone, somewhere.

So I walked in and out of others’ lives, always on my own terms. When things started to go wrong, when the demands and dependencies began, I had the capacity to walk away. I could sweep an angry hand over the table, clearing the mess in one go, even at the cost of breaking the good and useful along with the distracting and worthless. I left everything behind on more than one occasion, starting afresh, completely afresh, unencumbered, clean, looking for change . . .

And of course I was aware of where this was coming from. I could see the face of the man who inspired my actions. The more it went on, the greater my dislike of what I was doing; the greater my dislike of him, and me. And the harder it was to maintain the pretense that I was treating the things around me as a joke.

When Inès introduced herself at Alan’s party I was at a certain point in my life. Is that why I’m making so much of the failure of our affair? “I am going to change,” William had said, his last words to me. But there is no such thing as a change in people. We think we can change, some people try hard for change, we always hope for it. It is a kind of psychological grail. I suppose it is in our nature to feel dissatisfied with what we are and to cling to the belief, even to the day of our death, that we can in some way be better. We cannot stand the thought of remaining the same. We have to grow, we have to move forward. But we are as we are, and not even the greatest of traumas will change us.

It could never have worked with Inès. I know that now.

Léopoldville, November 1960

The ANC colonel tells me things will be better now that Mobutu has taken control. The coup five weeks ago was a very good thing. He tells me the U.N. should leave the country, that the reorganized Armée National Congolaise will put an end to Tshombe’s secessionist revolt in Katanga and the tribal fighting in the Kasai. He tells me it would be better for everyone if Lumumba were neutralized. Neutralized? He’s already under house arrest in the Primature. Exiled, the colonel says, to Egypt or Ghana, or the Soviet Union, if that’s what he wants. But we both know exile is not the colonel’s preferred solution. He chuckles as though at a private joke, then he drops like a stone. One second I am talking to a living person, the next I am gazing at a bloody heap on the ground. He is on his back, heedless, abandoned, puzzled, legs splayed and awkward, one arm twisted behind him, the other thrown recklessly out. There is a hole above his left eye.

There is a second burst of gunfire, a ferocious dry clacking. Only now am I aware there has been a first. I crouch, desperately searching for the source of the shooting and trying to guess the best way out of the field of fire. The ANC soldiers around me scatter for cover behind their armored vehicles, one or two letting off wild retaliatory shots in the general direction of the embassy. But I have poor night vision and cannot make my move quickly enough. The shooting from inside the compound intensifies and I know I have lost the best moment for flight.

As the ANC men open up I throw myself to the ground and, stranded and exposed, press up against the corpse. It is my head I fear for, that and—shamefully, most unheroically—my arse, which seems preposterously vulnerable. I almost turn to check its visibility before thinking better of it. Oh, I hope I’m not shot there—the indignity. I laugh inwardly; the things that go through your mind . . . The ricochets whine on the concrete and they sparkle on the metal of the armored personnel carriers like the splinters of gold from a welder’s torch. Someone somewhere is whinnying with pain. The air is smoking, the clatter is deafening. There is a moment’s letup and I think about making a run for it. But in which direction? The shooting starts up again, even more fiercely. It’s so absurd. This is not an assault on the fortified position of an opposing army. It is the Ghanaian embassy. The ambassador has been declared
persona non grata
by the new regime. Now I am lying beside a dead man in the middle of the road, sniffing his sweat and his brains and the thick black blood oozing onto the road from under the matt mash of his once handsome head.

I cannot see Stipe. He had wandered off somewhere before the embassy guards opened up. There is another prolonged burst. I screw my eyes shut. Three years in the army never brought death so near. I am conscious of my fear but I am conscious too that if I survive I will have a story to tell. A story for the paper, a good story, and a store of narrative and emotional fat for the book writer to live off for a long time to come. The bullets strike the tarmac and concrete around me. They are getting closer. All I have to do is wait it out, wait and hope and survive. I must not panic. But what a bloody farce, what a fucking bloody farce! I draw myself to the warm corpse. Enter it, hide in it, be nowhere. The pointlessness of this! The whole thing has been a farce. Everything since independence has been a sick joke. The bullets crawl around me. I laugh out loud. I start to laugh hysterically. I laugh at the memory of all the things I have seen in this preposterous country. I laugh at the candidate we saw in the Kasai, riding into the village in his black tie and tails and white gloves and leopard skin, saturated with cruelty and power. I laugh at his election promises—Belgian money for crops, the wives of the white men, their houses, their cars. I laugh at poor Cleophas hanging prickless from the tree, at his big, splayed, dusty, gnarled, cartoon feet. There has been so much to laugh about. I’ll say that for the Congo. It might be the death of me but it’s been good for a laugh. King Baudouin of the Belgians—he was good for a laugh. Dressed like some Habsburg princeling on a doomed visit to a Balkan province, being driven into Léopoldville in a huge white American convertible, crowds lining the boulevard, whites cheering, the Congolese bemused. The brazen black youth who dashed to the car and snatched Baudouin’s ceremonial sword. The embarrassed and outraged gendarmes who pursued him and the laughing Congolese who applauded him. Farce. Independence day was good for a laugh, with Baudouin’s silly speech praising the genius and generosity of Léopold. Lumumba’s vitriolic response. We are your beasts no more, the new prime minister declared. Did Inès write that line for him? It had her stamp. She was there that day in the Palais de la Nation. She ignored me, of course. How well she looked, how beautiful. She had gained a little weight, just enough to fill out her figure. Her eyes were shining. People will say this about someone’s eyes, that they are shining, and they never are, but her eyes that day were more than bright. They
were
shining—light and happiness and fulfillment playing in them. Even her hair looked well, thicker, gleaming. And I knew then there had to be a man. Laugh at that. Why not? If I am to die I might as well die laughing. Why not?

The corpse moves. The thrown-out arm twitches. Once. Twice. I feel it, sense it rather than see it. Is the colonel alive? But the head wound? No one could survive a wound like that. I turn my face a fraction to see a soldier kneeling at the back of one of the APCs waving frantically to me. He shouts something, urgent and commanding, but it is not French and I can’t make him out. His comrades are staring, making me frightened and paranoid, as if they know something to my disadvantage which I have not yet grasped. The soldier shouts again, but what am I supposed to do? Run for it? It’s twenty yards to the APC. I’d never make it. They’d cut me down.

I stay where I am, I do not move. The soldier grimaces, giving up on me, and, turning back to the embassy, fires a random burst from his rifle. The corpse moves again and this time I realize what is happening. The colonel is taking more hits. Bullets are thudding into the dead tissue and bone. My shoe is suddenly slashed. I feel something hot, burning. Don’t tell me I’ve been shot in the foot. Shot in the foot! How ridiculous. I mutter, not with fear or pain—there is no pain, not real pain, not yet—but with anger. My foot is burning and I am angry because this is just ridiculous. Where is Stipe? Where is he? He could get me out of here. Stipe!

Why didn’t I leave when the chaos broke out? Stipe told me to go. He warned me. The day the army of Lumumba’s new republic mutinied, when they poured into Léopoldville, breaking shop windows and looting stores. It was a time of unlawful and enthusiastic self-service, and of general alarm. The Belgians fled. They packed up and they fled. Tens and tens of thousands. Stipe told me it was going to get worse, but I held on. Even when the convoys of hysterical refugees streamed into Léopoldville, I held on. When the public docks were teeming with men and women beyond the reach of reason, I held on. And laughed.

The firing builds up to an ear-splitting crescendo. The burning in my foot has stopped now. Pain is setting in. If anything, the shooting is fiercer. Thousands of rounds must already have been fired. Two more ANC soldiers are down. I watch a third spin backwards. He lies in the road screaming in agony. Two of his comrades drag him by the ankles back to cover and the screaming gives way to a dreadful, pathetic whimpering.

I laughed even when I saw de Scheut and his children in the throng at the public docks. I could riot believe it. De Scheut of all people. He would not look at me. A black porter came to help them onto the ferry and Julie screamed at the filthy black monkey to leave them alone. They didn’t hear when I shouted my farewells. The voice in their own heads, white and implacable, speaking weird histories, lurid tales, hideous times, had them in its thrall.

But at least they survived. Maybe they did the right thing. I am not going to survive, I am not going to survive. There will be no story for me to tell. A bullet will crash into the crown of my head, a bullet will tear into my arse. I press myself into the concrete, into the corpse. How can they miss? Oh Jesus, don’t let me die. I have to run. I can’t stay here like a sitting duck. Run—anywhere, in any direction, it doesn’t matter, just run. Get out of here.

I am about to spring to my feet when Stipe, pistol in hand, appears by the APC.

“Stay where you are, James!” he shouts. “Stay where you are.”

As though in reply the embassy guards intensify their fire. Stipe shouts something in Lingala to the soldiers, commanding them, organizing them. I cannot bear this anymore. I don’t care what he says, I’m going to make a run for it. Then I hear the roar of an engine, more shouts, more clattering pangs as bullets from the embassy hit the armored vehicle as it moves towards me.

“James!”

It is Stipe. He is standing ten feet away. He has got the soldiers to bring the APC into the middle of the road to shield me.

“Come on!”

I leap to my feet and rush to him. We crouch and keep time with the vehicle until we have reached the safety of the buildings on the other side of the road. I collapse against a wall. Stipe looks down at me and grins.

“Jesus Christ,” I mutter. “Jesus Christ.”

“What would you say to a drink?” he asks.

He helps me up and we leave the battle behind. We get into Stipe’s car and drive to the Regina for a quiet drink. It’s that simple. It’s only when I am sitting on the concourse, whiskey in hand, that I become aware again of the throbbing in my foot. I tell Stipe I think I’ve been shot. He looks down at my ruined shoe. There’s a light smear of blood.

“Doesn’t look so bad,” he says nonchalantly. “Have another drink and I’ll take you to a doctor.”

I feel surprisingly calm. Not even the wound alarms me. I feel pleased with myself. I have my story, I have my fat. I have the kind of authenticity which experience like this confers. I feel quite the intrepid reporter.

When Stipe returns with the whiskies I tease him. “You must be pleased with the way things are going. Mobutu’s good for the Americans.”

“Good for the Congo,” he replies with a wink.

“How much longer do you think Mobutu can keep Lumumba under house arrest?”

“Not much longer. He needs to find a permanent solution to the Lumumba problem.”

“The colonel was telling me something along the same lines before he got his head blown off,” I say. “What would this permanent solution be?”

“Gizenga’s in Stanleyville but he doesn’t have Patrice’s following or charisma. Without Lumumba, the revolt in Orientale will fizzle out. But if Patrice gets to join him there it would tear the country in two. It would be full-scale civil war.”

“What would happen to Lumumba if Mobutu could get at him?”

After Lumumba was placed under house arrest, the U.N. put a cordon of troops around the Primature—the prime minister’s residence in Gombé—very close to my own house—to protect him. Mobutu suspected that the U.N. might allow Lumumba to escape, so he placed an ANC cordon around the U.N. one.

Stipe says simply, “If Mobutu’s men got through the U.N. cordon, I don’t think we’d ever see Patrice Lumumba again. And to be frank, it would be no loss to anyone.”

Stipe has never admitted, even to me, the extent of his involvement with Mobutu’s coup. But it doesn’t take much imagination to work it out. On September 10th, Mobutu, the ANC chief-of-staff appointed by Lumumba himself, held a pay parade at Camp Léopold, personally handing out the soldiers’ overdue wages. Lumumba’s government was bankrupt—the Belgians had made sure of that—and the soldiers’ indiscipline was largely due to the arrears in their pay. Where had the money to buy the army’s loyalty come from? No one could say for certain, but Stipe’s presence at Camp Léopold raised suspicions.

Four days later I was with Grant and Roger in the Regina when Mobutu walked in and announced that the army had taken power. Lumumba’s tenure as prime minister had lasted less than three months. We dashed for the phones and telex offices. Later that night I went to look for Stipe and found him at the Zoo having dinner with his ambassador, Timberlake. They were in good and generous spirits and invited me to join them. Timberlake, whom I had not met before, struck me as a crude man, a Cold War warrior of the most extreme type. He seemed too loud to be a diplomat. Perhaps he was being open with me because he knew of my friendship with Stipe, or perhaps it was simply because he had been cheered by the events of the evening. He was openly celebrating the coup. Kasavubu had been hopeless, he said, impossible to spur on to action. Mobutu was altogether different. He was tough, efficient, capable, dependable, honest and not anti-West, unlike—and this is how he referred to the deposed prime minister throughout our meeting—the awful Lumumbavitch. Lumumbavitch was commie through and through. When I suggested that he was more of a pan-African nationalist than a communist, Timberlake dismissed the distinction as meaningless. Lumumbavitch, if not an actual commie, was playing the commie game. He had called on the Soviet Union and China to send military aid. He had accepted a flight of Ilyushin jets. He had accepted eighty Zim lorries for his troops fighting in the Kasai, he had taken the communist Gizenga into his cabinet . . .

We were joined by another American, a ruddy-faced little man with thinning fair hair and pale blue eyes to whom Timberlake referred as Dr. Joe from Paris. I had not seen Dr. Joe before. He did not seem to me to have much of the general practitioner’s or surgeon’s manner. If he had ever been a doctor—which I was inclined to doubt—I imagine he was struck off early in his career for something unsavory. When I asked how long he’d been in Leo he gave me a vague reply, and he was evasive about every other direct question I put to him, no matter how mundane. I got the impression Stipe was not pleased about my running into Dr. Joe, an impression confirmed some minutes later when he made a transparent excuse to take the doctor off. In their absence Timberlake rambled on. Lumumbavitch’s allies and supporters, even the lowliest clerk with Lumumbavitch sympathies, would now be rounded up and thrown in jail. Too bad Gizenga had already escaped to Stanleyville, but they would get the others: Okito, Mulele, Mpolo, Smail, and—this took me by surprise—Auguste.