Rogue's March (42 page)

Reddish slept for only an hour or so, defeated by the hellish heat of the cabin, and spent the remainder of the night in a canvas chair behind the wheelhouse watching the white billows churned up by the paddlewheel. On the deck below dark figures lay sprawled on mats. He fell asleep finally, but awoke to watch the dawn leach the horizon, draining it blood-red at first, then pink; soon the night was gone and the silver bowl of sky was the color of mackerel from the gulf.

The packetboat docked at Benongo, south of Funzi, in the early-morning sunshine. A crowd of fifty or sixty Africans waited on the collapsing wooden pier as Reddish crossed the timbers, climbed the path up through the palm trees, and carried his bag down the dusty lakeside road to the old mission house, where the Catholic brothers were expecting him.

Two hours later he was at the grassy airstrip south of town. The small twin-engine plane circled the field twice and drifted in from the lake, kicking up dust and chaff as it scuttled across the field. He watched from the shadow of a tulip tree as the plane unloaded, his rented Italian jeep behind him with the other vehicles from town. Near the metal utility shack lay the weed-grown hulk of a T-26 trainer used during the rebellions, the victim of a foul-weather landing and a permanent reminder of the lake country's unpredictable weather.

Two Belgian priests came alert as the door opened. Two provincial officials alighted first, followed by Gabrielle, who paused uncertainly, her eyes searching the faces waiting near the wing. The two Belgian priests saw her too and dropped their thumb-crushed cigarettes into the dust. “Tiens,” the shorter one exhaled sharply.

“
Mais non, non—pas possible
,” said his companion.

He was right. As Reddish reached Gabrielle, a stout Belgian sister left the cabin door, sharp-chinned and sharp-eyed, her face as yellow as a brick of cheese. She carried a small medical bag and wore white stockings over her bulging calves.

It was dark and the equatorial heat lay like a blanket over the second-story gallery where they sat—Reddish, Gabrielle, and a Catholic brother—looking out over the black lake. The trees hung still, their leaves motionless. Not a breath stirred. The chairs were wooden, with stiff cane seats, dressed from the logs cut and planed in the sawmill at the rear of the station. The floor was wooden, like the gallery, which traveled the length of the brick mission house two degrees south of the Equator.

Frère Albert described the recent raid on the police post at Funzi—a local dispute, nothing more. The policemen at the post had confiscated smoked fish and beer from a passing truck, and the villagers had retaliated, making off with the police rifles.

He was Flemish and spoke French with careful precision, like an old servant handling ancestral china not his own. He was lean and gnarled, with gray teeth, a gray beard, and bright brown eyes, as bright as those of the hawks they'd watched with Gabrielle's binoculars on the marshes that afternoon. He smoked a pipe, a thumb-worn briar held loosely between his calloused fingers, oil-stained by the repairs he'd been making in the mission generator room. The current pulsed feebly through the naked bulbs overhead.

Beyond the mission gate the native women plodded by on the dusty road, black shadows swaying against the moonlit lake. Heavy wicker baskets bent their faces into the road. Their backs were laden with firewood gathered along the shore and in the stump-filled fields nearby.

“You've been here a long time?” Gabrielle asked cautiously.

“Since nineteen thirty-two.” He'd made only two trips to Belgian since then. One to visit his dying mother. The other? He'd forgotten—a lung infection perhaps. But he was content here. Where else could a man his age go these days? As a young man, he'd visited North America. He nodded toward Reddish and said he'd forgotten that during their last talk. When was that, two years ago?

“North America?” Gabrielle asked.

North America, but not the United States—his English was much too poor for that. Quebec City and Montreal were the two cities he'd visited. The recollection of that frozen, sepulchral countryside had haunted his imagination ever since. He would like to see the snow again before he died, but he supposed that was impossible. The purity perhaps—that was what had haunted him, seeing that virgin frontier as the first French missionaries and trappers had seen it. As a young man, he'd read of the martyrdom of the first Jesuits by the Hurons and Iroquois. That was what he'd wanted to ask Reddish. Were there Hurons and Iroquois near his home? “Where was it—Wisconsin?”

“Wisconsin.” Reddish was surprised he'd remembered.

Frère Albert turned toward the women moving along the road. The country had changed since he'd left the boat at Matadi so many years ago. Perhaps he had changed too. He'd seen many strange things—lightning bolting from a blue sky to strike an isolated hut at the edge of a village where an old sorcerer lay ill. Did madame believe the impossible? The impossible sometimes happened. There were many things not written, many things witnessed by the priests themselves, who refused to write about them. That merely meant they hadn't been understood. One found in books only answers for which an age, epoch, or civilization had questions. But the minds of those Africans out there in the road carried another civilization, richer in many ways than their own. Much remained to be explained—ways of perception, for example. Two days before Reddish's message had arrived, the wash boy in the scullery had told him that he would be coming.

His chair creaked. His gray pipe smoke lifted into the flickering yellow light. The husbands of the lake tribe killed their wives with labor and fished only sporadically now. The lake was poor in fish. There was no way to evacuate their meager catches. The Portuguese trader in town had a dozen flatbottom scows that arrived three times a week with wares, all the scows equipped with new outboard motors. A virtual monopoly. Remarkable entrepreneurs, these Portuguese.

Reddish remembered that AID had supplied outboard motors for the fishing cooperative they would visit tomorrow.

The bell from the refectory rang for dinner. Gabrielle and Reddish followed Frère Albert across the porch and watched him go down the outside stairs. He invited them to join him if they returned early from the commissioner's dinner. He had a bottle of brandy. They would see his light.

“He's lonely,” Gabrielle said. “Could we walk along the lake? Do we have time?”

They left the compound and crossed to the beached dugouts and canoes where a few fires still smoldered and the fishermen were folding their nets. She walked to the end of the small jetty, looking up at the stars. The moon was a full, brimming silver disc high over the lake. The far shore was hidden from them.

“It isn't what I imagined. It's different—strange—but so lovely, so peaceful.”

“Stagnant.”

“I would hate it if it were like the capital. There's life here, but it's gentler. Would you change everything?”

“No, not everything.”

Their adjoining rooms off the second-floor gallery of the mission house were identical: whitewashed walls, high narrow beds covered with mosquito netting, wash tables, and tin shower stalls. Lodged adjacent to Reddish was the Belgian sister.

Gabrielle was ready before Reddish and stood in his doorway waiting, her hair combed, wearing a white dress, conscious too of the sister who sat next door in the lamplight reading from a small book.

“What are you doing?” she called in a whisper.

He was studying a typewritten list in the light of the table lamp. “It's a list of provincial officials,” he explained. “They're going to ask me for everything from nylon nets to Landrovers.”

The sister next door noisily cleared her throat.

“
Shhh
—” Gabrielle whispered.

“So I want to know who I'm dealing with. What's the matter?”

A black sedan waited in the sand road at the foot of the gallery steps, sent by the district commissioner. His
chef du protocol
was extravagantly servile, holding the rear door open for them. “
M'sieur l'ambassadeur
,” he breathed, bowing into the dust.

Reddish felt obliged to correct him. Correcting him now would reduce the size of everyone's expectations.

Smoking flambeaux flared in the shadows beyond the verandah of the district commissioner's lakeside villa where the guests gathered on overstuffed chairs brought from the salon. Gabrielle sat with the women, across the verandah, Reddish to the right of the commissioner. His black tribal cane leaned against the table in front of him, where the drinks were being poured—great whacks of whiskey, uniced, dumped into tall glasses by native hands accustomed to serving up Fanta, lemonade, or beer. Both the commissioner and his wife were from a region far to the east, five hundred miles away, as much strangers to the local people as Gabrielle or Reddish.

The talk was about N'Sika, the new council, and the perfidy of the dead President and his regime. None mourned him, despite their appointments under his administration. Reddish was regaled with tales of malfeasance and murder. Why had the Americans waited so long, when a gentle push would have done in the old hypocrite years ago? A black cleric showed Reddish his scarred black wrists, lacerated by iron manacles from a month in the jail at Lutu.

The commissioner's plump face was needled with tribal scars. He wore a dark Nehru jacket and trousers. Had Reddish been at Martyr's Square when le
président
had made his speech?
Incroyable
! There was a great chief for you! What dignity! What courage! He'd given the Belgians a hiding, hadn't he! Lashed the skin from their backs, broken the whip across their shoulders, and then thrown it at their feet! He'd taken back the country from the foreigners—no more
vin rouge
!

Slyly he touched Reddish's hand with his fingers. “But he hadn't done this alone, eh? The Americans had said,
ça va
, right?” He winked at Reddish. “‘Ç
a va
?' Isn't that what the Americans had said?” The Americans were omnipresent, omnipotent. Weren't they sending an astronaut to the moon?

During the dinner toast, the commissioner catalogued his needs—trucks, Landrovers, tractors, nylon nets, a freezing plant for the fish. The police needed jeeps. How could they patrol the old guerrilla trails bringing guns from the Cuban training camps in Brazzaville without vehicles? The new minister of interior must come to Benongo to see for himself how the district had been forgotten by the old regime. Reddish must persuade him. Then Reddish must persuade the new President to come. They must both come together.

As the commissioner bade Reddish and Gabrielle farewell at the foot of the front steps, he apologized for being unable to accompany them to the fishing cooperative at Funzi. He had been summoned to the provincial capital, as had all district commissioners. Regrettably too, since he'd not visited Funzi for almost six months. He shrugged. No vehicles.

It was after eleven when the commissioner's car returned them to the mission guesthouse. Frère Albert's light was out, and they silently carried their chairs to the far end of the gallery, facing the lake, away from the visiting sister's window.

They had a nightcap, Gabrielle silent as she gazed off into the darkness. “Do they truly think you can do all that?” she asked finally. “That you can supply all those things he mentioned?”

“No, not really. But they feel they have to ask. It's a ritual now. It also helps them explain why nothing gets done.”

“But they're all strangers here. None of the wives I talked to was from this region. All of the officials are from elsewhere.”

He explained that the old President had managed the interior that way in attempting to break up the tribalism of internal politics.

The wind had risen on the lake; they could hear the sounds of the surf stirring against the beach. “In a way, they feel abandoned out here,” he continued, “like Roman consuls at the outposts of the empire. Antioch, Palmyra, Tyre. They don't even feel that these lake people are part of their nation, unless it's an inferior part—not Romans at all, just Syrians, Jews, barbarians.”

She sat in silence as he brought the two lanterns from their rooms. He filled their wells with the kerosene Frère Albert had left for him and set the wicks.

“That would never have occurred to me,” she murmured finally, lifting her head, “what you just said.”

He didn't see the African at all, didn't hear his footsteps down the gallery until he heard Gabrielle's small cry. He turned and saw a man standing halfway between their chairs and the staircase. His face was hidden, blocked out by the wash of light from behind him.

“
Mbote
,” Reddish called.

“
Mbote, patron.
” He didn't move. “
Ozali Reddish
?”

“
Ehh. Nazali.
”

The man nodded. “
Buku na you.
” He said he had Reddish's book and came forward, his hands extended, head lifted, not bowing as he gave Reddish the book, the way most villagers would, but standing stiff and straight, his small shoulders thrust back. He was short and wiry, also barefooted. His tattered shorts and shirt smelled of smoked fish and gasoline.

Reddish looked at the book Pierre Masakita had borrowed from the flat in the capital. “Where's the man who gave you this?” he asked. “
Azali wapi
?”

“Lobi—tomorrow we go.”

“Tomorrow I go to Funzi.”

“
Namsima
. After Funzi.”

“How?”

“Pirogue.”

“The man who gave you this book is your friend.
Azali moninga na yo
?”

“
Ehhh. Ndeko
—my brother.” He nodded to Gabrielle, then Reddish; he moved backwards as lightly as a shadow and went down the steps. They both went to the gallery rail and looked down into the darkness, but he was gone.