The Catastrophist: A Novel (9 page)

There is no cheering from the blacks, nothing at all. Perhaps the end has come too abruptly, perhaps cheering and clapping are not their way. Perhaps it is simply because they feel the extent of this their most recent defeat.

Lumumba disappears into the house, escorted by Janssens. It all seems terribly anticlimactic. The whites relax and resume their idle chattering while I wonder again about the extent of Stipe’s influence: with Auguste, with Janssens, with the Sûreté, with Lumumba. It seems to go far, and in all directions.

We stand in the avenue, midway between the two crowds. Stipe surveys the scene. The blacks wait where they are; I can’t tell whether Lumumba’s speech has calmed or inflamed their feelings. The whites start drifting away, the play over, though I get the feeling they are disappointed with the denouement.

“So, what do you think?” Stipe asks. “Are you interested in writing something?”

“You’re certain the Belgians are going to capitulate on independence?”

“Within six months.”

It is a good story. I think of Alan, my publisher in London. He likes to see my byline. I also think of the fee and the possibility of more work, and I think of Inès. She will take notice. At the very least it will give us something to talk about.

“I’ll write something,” I say.

“Need any help getting it placed?”

“No.”

“If you want anything else, facts or figures, give me a call. I know you’ll be careful how you source it.”

A great cheer suddenly goes up from the blacks. Lumumba has appeared at the gates of the house with Janssens and a party of soldiers. His hands are chained behind his back. The crowd starts chanting:
Depanda, depanda!
Janssens leads his prisoner to a military lorry. The soldiers haul him up and push him into a seat between two armed guards.

The blacks send up a deafening cheer, one of triumph almost. The chant changes to
Patrice, Patrice!

“It’s so predictable, but no one ever seems to learn,” Stipe says, waving a hand over the black crowd. “Half these people weren’t even MNC supporters this morning. The more demonstrators you shoot down, the more leaders you lock up, the more people flock to the cause. But I hardly have to tell you that.”

Puzzled, I look to him for an explanation.

“Isn’t that what happened in Ireland after your Easter Rising?”

“It wasn’t my Rising,” I say tightly, hoping Stipe isn’t going to turn out to be one of those maudlin Americans who has discovered he has Irish ancestors who arrived in the New World on the famine ships, “and anyway, the situations are hardly comparable.”

He responds to my defensiveness with a chuckle and gives my back a parting slap. “That’s what every colonial power always says: ‘You don’t understand—things are different here, the situation’s more complicated.’ ”

Looking for Inès I bump into Smail. The handsome diamond trader shakes hands warmly.

“I suppose you will want to write something about this?”

“About what?” I ask abruptly.

He is a little taken aback by my harshness.

“The arrest of Patrice, what happened at the river yesterday.”

“I don’t think so,” I say, again in a rather uncompromising tone; then, seeing his look of puzzlement, I add: “Inès will write about it, and she does that kind of thing so much better.”

He wishes me well and says he hopes we will be able to have a drink soon.

I pick Inès out on the other side of the boulevard, the black side. I start to cross the road. Then I see that she is crying. Next to her is Auguste. She looks at him and sniffs. He puts a thumb to the corner of his eye and carefully rubs away a tear of his own.

My presence would be an intrusion. I leave them to their sore tears and clotted grief and drift away with the last of the whites.

I work on the novel in the mornings after Inès has left, and again for a couple of hours in the early evening, but I like to sit out the electric afternoons of the rainy season at the Colibri, where I have become friendly with Anna, the owner. She is a tough old woman who pretends to be more cynical about men than she really is. Why she likes me I do not know. She says I make a change from her usual clientele—Sabena pilots and Otraco employees, lawyers and officials. She even defended me after
Courrier d’Afrique
and
L’Avenir
picked up my article. Their editorials were not friendly and they commented with withering sarcasm on my newness to my subject and to the colony. I had not expected anything like the hostility I was to encounter, in print and in person.

Had I known what I was letting myself in for I doubt I would have agreed to write the piece. At the Sabena Guest House, having oysters one night with Stipe and de Scheut, a Flemish woman spat in my face and pummeled my chest with fat and ineffectual fists. She accused me of wanting to see the Congo destroyed, she screamed that I was advocating a communist takeover. I replied coldly that I was an advocate of nothing, precisely nothing, that I was neutral in this, that I was merely painting the picture as I saw it. De Scheut, unflappable, genial and unassuming, remonstrated with her in his fatherly way and led her struggling and shouting back to her husband.

“Handled with admirable aplomb,” Stipe said to me, topping up my wine.

“I want to remind you I am quite detached from this, and so can look on it calmly,”
I replied with a smile.

I do not normally pull quotations out like this, but I’d had a little to drink and was overcompensating to cover up what I have to admit was my shock. The truth is that though writers like to think their words have meaning and importance in the world beyond the printed page we are not used to being held so directly and emphatically accountable. I had not experienced anything like this before. But then I asked myself if the woman’s display of outrage was really so unforgivable. If the pen is mightier than the sword, as we tell ourselves every day, can the wielder of the pen complain when one he has struck retaliates with her fists—a much inferior weapon by our own account?

“Joseph K.,” Stipe said, identifying the quotation, “very good.”

We had by then spent many evenings over tall drinks talking of books and writers. We had discussed Flaubert and Sand, we had discussed Jonson’s masques and the irony in
Mansfield Park,
but he had not mentioned Kafka as a favorite; nor—to a disappointment I tried my best to conceal—had he raised again the novel of mine he had read. I began to wonder if he had read it at all. But if he hadn’t, how had he known about it? And why would he have mentioned it?

The woman continued to fire salvos from her table, turning heads throughout the restaurant.

“The liberals and socialists in Brussels have no use for us,” she shouted. “We’re an embarrassment. But if they try anything, we’ll fight them. We have the guns. We’ll show them what we think of independence!”

Stipe grinned. “Some people take things very seriously.”

“Not us,” I said, raising my drink.

Stipe clinked my glass with his.

“When people like this good lady start talking about taking up the gun you know the revolution is in trouble,” Stipe said. “You’ve read
A Sentimental Education
? And Baudelaire
—‘Mon coeur mis à nu
’?”

“The revolution
was charming only because of the very excess of its ridiculousness
.”

“The middle class has many talents but insurrection isn’t one of them.”

De Scheut, when he rejoined us, was embarrassed and full of apologies for the behavior of his fellow-countrywoman. He and Stipe, and also, to my surprise, Bernard Houthhoofd, were my principal defenders in the controversy the piece provoked. Their varied influences helped keep the bad feeling from spilling over into anything nastier and after a week or so the stir died away. I must not exaggerate. The story was moving and soon left me and my article behind. The Belgians had inaugurated a roundtable conference in Brussels to which all the independence leaders—except Lumumba, who was in jail for his part in the disturbances—were invited. In the pages of
L’Unità
Inès asked sarcastically what kind of settlement was possible when the most prominent figure in the independence movement was denied a place at the talks?

I wrote a second piece for the
Observer
when a leaked copy of the colonial administration’s report into the shootings at the river was delivered anonymously to the apartment. I assumed Stipe was responsible, and though he did not confirm my suspicion, neither did he do much to deny it. The report absolved the Force Publique, though it said that the actions of one or two soldiers had “bordered on the reckless.” Responsibility for the deaths was fixed squarely on Lumumba and the organizers of the illegal march and on the demonstrators themselves. The pockets of several of those killed were found, on examination by the soldiers, to contain stones. The Force Publique had acted with restraint against the determined provocations of a riotous mob.

I know Inès read my articles, but she never talked to me about them.

I find her working at the little table when I arrive back after a long afternoon at the Colibri with Stipe. She is not often home so early. I ask her how her day went and she says fine. I cannot get her to say anything more. The typewriter clacks, she gets on with her work. This is not unusual. Today—I don’t know why, perhaps because I have drunk an extra couple of glasses—it is more than I can stand.

“Talk to me!” I scream.

“About what?” she says in a bored voice without looking up.

“You know about what.”

She continues her typing.

“Inès, I can’t go on like this anymore.”

There is no break in the rhythm of the keys. In fury, I spin her round and pull her up, holding her wrists fast.

“Can you hear me? I can’t go on like this.”

Does she care? She looks at me without tenderness.

“You are going through a confused period in your life,” is all she says.

And I want to hit her. Hatred boils up inside me. I am not much, but I have been her lover for two years and I deserve better than this. I am on the verge of tears of rage and self-pity.

“I’m not confused,” I shout at her. “I am clear. I want to be with you. It’s that simple. I want to be with you, Inès. With
you
. Forever. There’s nothing confused about that.”

“I can’t talk about this now, there’s too much happening.”

“So you keep saying.”

She does not respond to me. I let her out of my grip.

“What’s happening?” I ask in a tone of spite and pettiness. “What’s happening here that’s so important? It’s a grubby little squabble about which bunch of power-hungry, corrupt, venal little men will end up being in the most advantageous position to line their own pockets.”

“Are you saying Patrice is power-hungry and corrupt?”

“I’m saying that politics stinks. I’m saying that it’s not important. I’m saying it’s a spectacle, a farce we’ve seen a thousand times. The set varies, the actors change, the plot twists in different ways, but it’s always the same story and you always know the ending. And who cares anymore? Politics is boring. Who cares?”

“I do, for one. I care, and if you can’t see what’s happening here with your own eyes, then there is nothing more to say.”

“Come back to London with me,” I say as calmly as I can.

“Please.”

She says nothing.

“Inès, I love you. I have waited all my life to love the way I love you. I’m afraid I will never love like this again.”

“You will,” she announces matter-of-factly. “I don’t believe there is ever just one person in the world for us.”

“I don’t want to hear that!” I scream. “Don’t you know what it does to me hearing you say that?”

“Things have changed.”

“Don’t say that!”

“They have changed.”

“For you maybe, but not for me. They haven’t changed for me and it’s tearing me apart.”

I bow my head and close my eyes to collect myself. I take deep breaths. I hadn’t meant to get into this, but I can’t stop myself. I hadn’t exaggerated: I can’t go on like this. It is more than I can bear.

I let some moments pass. At least the keys are not hammering, at least she has not gone back to work.

When I look up she is staring at me, and now there is tenderness. At last she sees my hurt. We stand together in silence. I put a hand out to her, not knowing if she will let me touch her. How that stabs at me! When once I could at any time have put my fingers to her breast, to her arse, between her legs and she would have been yearning for my touch. Now I cannot even be sure she will allow my hand to touch her face. I am shaking. She smiles hopelessly and sadly, as though looking at the victim of an accident who lies on the roadside and will not survive. I stroke her hair. It seems to be getting thinner and more brittle every day. I can see the gray of her scalp.

“You look so tired,” I say. “You are out running around all day, you never eat, you come home so late. You have to look after yourself.”

“I’m fine,” she says. “You’re the one who needs to look after yourself, especially with Stipe.”

She doesn’t understand anything about Stipe and me. I laugh scornfully. She springs at me. I brace myself as if for an assault. Instead she takes my hands in hers and pumps my arms.

“Listen to me,” she says urgently. “Stipe is an enemy. All you have to do is look at him to see this. The way he is, the way his body is. Everything about him hates this country and the people in it. You can see it in his eyes, in the way he moves.”

It’s preposterous, so absurd.

“You’re wrong, Inès.”

“Just because that day in Houthhoofd’s garden he said he liked your book you trust him.”

“Oh come on, Inès. Give me some credit.”

But of course there is truth in what she says. I feel pathetic, my craving for praise exposed. The minor writer—the very minor writer—is always susceptible; he can be bought and sold with a single line of flattery.

“He probably hasn’t even read your books. De Scheut probably mentioned to him that you’re a writer.”

It’s horribly plausible.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I say.

I have an awful headache. The drink, the anger, the hurt, the heat.

“Stipe is working against Patrice,” she goes on. “Don’t trust him.”

“If he’s working against Patrice why did he give me the information for the article?”

“The Belgians aren’t going to give independence. They murdered the demonstrators and lied about it. They’ve arrested the leaders and thrown Patrice into the Central Prison. Stipe knows everything in the article was a lie.”

“What did he have to gain from it if it was a lie?”

“It was to undermine support for Patrice and the MNC.”

“Stipe is Lumumba’s friend. He’s doing all he can to help. I was there when he tried to persuade Lumumba to go across to Brazzaville after the demonstration.”

“The article Stipe manipulated you to write was saying to the people the Belgians are going to give in anyway so you don’t have to be mobilated.”

Mobilated
. I smile but I don’t correct her.

She pulls gently at my arms. We are holding each other, our foreheads touching. She puts a hand to my face.

“You look tired too,” she says quietly and kisses me on the cheek.

We take our clothes off and go to bed. We kiss, we caress, but we cannot make love. It is my fault. I wish I could say it was the whiskey, but it is worse than that. There is no hunger in her, no passion. Her dryness withers me. The last thing I had for her—the physical me—is gone.

When first we met she saw my silence as something she would penetrate. She believed she would find hidden meaning in my blankness. I tried to tell her, many times, but it only deepened my mystery for her. There once was a time when she admired me. I am not all bad, and sometimes in my writing I come close to showing something good. In the evenings, in the Camden flat, she would read the pages I had written that day and she would say, “Don’t hold back, don’t hold back. Be honest. Let your true feelings come into your words.” But my third eye, my writer’s eye, monitors every word and gesture. It makes me fearful of my own censure. I can only hold back.

She once admired me. She once believed in me and was intrigued by me. Not now. She penetrated, and found nothing.

This thing is dying. Soon I will have to accept it. I feel so sad.