M. Shayne Bell
The two Belgians stood to leave the hut. Carlier, a riverboat captain whose greatest skill lay in the unassisted consumption of bottle after bottle of Antwerp brandy, lifted back the hide hung across the opening for Camille Delcommune, Managing Director of the Great Civilizing Company. Carlier followed Delcommune out and let the hide flap back against the mud walls. I was too sick to follow them—and was not sure I would have followed them anymore had I been well.
They had brought me no water, food, or medicine. They let a fly into the hut, and I regretted that most of all. I heard it buzzing above me in the shadows, and I knew it would crawl on me. I was too weak to brush it off.
The Belgians must have thought I could not hear them. They stood just outside the opening and whispered about me. “Conrad will die in one or two days,” Carlier said.
“Then he is a waste of time. Why does the company persist in sending frail wrecks to us? We need strong men for the work out here.”
“He is not one of us,” Carlier said.
Carlier was right. I had never been one of them: I had never wanted that. They started walking away. I called out to them for water, but if they heard me they did not slow their pace. “He’ll cost the company plenty,” Delcommune said, distantly. “He carries a manuscript of a novel, of all improbable things, that we’ll have to send back with everything of his we decide not to keep. The weight of it will cost the company, and he’ll leave us no money to cover the cost.”
I listened to their retreating footsteps. If they came back, it would be only after a few days to see if I was dead.
I resolved not to give them that pleasure.
But I could do nothing to help myself then. I would have to help myself later. I felt sleep descending over me, and I could not move even to wipe the sweat out of my eyes or to brush the fly off my right arm. I would dream shortly, and I knew who I would see there. All the while I had had this fever in Africa, I had dreamt only of her.
Of my mother. In the dream that day, I was a five-year-old boy again, standing with Mother and our three trunks of clothes, blankets, dishes, and twenty-seven books on the steps of the way station in Vologda, Arctic Russia. It was the first day of hundreds we spent in that city so far from the Poland my parents had tried to free from Russia. The Russians had exiled Father, and Mother took me and we went with him into exile. A dense and shadowed pine forest surrounded Vologda, and the heavy scent of pines burned in the air. The muddy road lay rutted with wheel and horse tracks, and Mother pulled me back from walking in the mud to follow the meltwater that flowed in silvered streams down the tracks our carriage had left. Time passed, and the daylight waned. That far north, evening and night had no clear division. The day eased gently into a starry darkness.
The police had taken Father to question him and assign us a place to live. Mother and I waited for him in the cold. Snow fell lightly and dusted our trunks and my mother’s black coat with white. We did not know what else to do but wait. We could not leave the way station without police permission, and we knew no one in Vologda. I asked Mother if she thought the Russians would keep Father much longer, but she did not answer me. She watched down the road for him.
I grew hot with fever and sat on a trunk. I touched the white snow on the trunk, and it melted on my fingers. I rubbed the cool water on my forehead.
And felt cool water on my forehead that day in Africa, and rough fingers there, brushing back my hair and dabbing water over my forehead, eyelids, and dry lips.
An old African woman had come to me. Her face looked kindly, but tired. “Water,” she said, in French. She held up a gourd for me to see, as if I had not understood her one word. Water dripped down the sides of the gourd. I had gone a whole day without water. I tried to sit up, but she had to help me. I gulped down all the water, and the woman went to the river for more. I listened to the buzzing fly circle the ceiling of the hut, and I tried to see the fly, but it kept to the shadows above me. Suddenly, I heard not just the fly but the woman’s breathing. She had returned, and I had not heard her draw back the skin and enter the hut. She dabbed more water on my lips.
“Did Monsieur Delcommune send you?” I asked. I thought the Belgians had sent her to help me.
“Your mother sent me,” she said.
I did not understand. “Mother died in exile in Russia when I was six years old,” I said. This African woman was somehow mistaken.
“Where are the Belgians?” she asked me. “Why are they not here to help you?”
“They did not send you?”
“Your mother sent me,” she repeated, more firmly.
I could not understand and did not try, then. A sick riverboat captain would make the Belgians no money, and that is what they valued most: money. Money was the sum of their ethics. I did not tell the old woman that, or that the Belgians would not come back till I had died or gotten well. I was of no consequence to them sick.
For a time I could not speak to the woman at all. My thoughts came only in Polish, and this African woman spoke to me in French with an accent that made the French sound alien and exotic and I could not speak French then. But I could say one word I knew she would understand: the Lenje word for thank you. “Thank you,” I told her. I must have said it many times, because she put her hand over my mouth to make me stop.
“I will come back to you tomorrow for your mother’s sake,” she said.
I will crawl to the river tomorrow for my own sake, I told myself. I will collect my own water, get well again, and go back to England.
I did not tell myself I would be going home. I had left home at five when Mother and Father took me with them into exile. I had had no home since then. The Russians did not know they sentenced me to a life of wandering when they exiled Father. I had lived whole years on the stateless sea.
When I opened my eyes again, the woman was gone. She had left; feathers scattered around me on the floor in a pattern I could not discern: random groupings of four feathers with a sharpened stick placed across them. It was a protection. Evil would come to me from somewhere or some time counted in fours: four days, or four years, or from four lands away. Maybe she believed my fever would climax in four days: the stick warded away the coming evil, whatever it was or wherever it came from. I let the feathers and sticks lie where she had left them.
The fly buzzed around and around the ceiling. It never rested, but kept flying there, searching for what I could not tell.
* * *
I did not want to dream of Vologda again, but I did. Mother opened one of our chests and called me to her on the way-station platform. “Joseph,” Mother said. “Let me wrap this around you, then sit here with me.”
She wrapped me in a blanket and felt my forehead. It was night. The police had not yet let Father return to us.
The way-station attendant blew out the lamp in his office. We had sat in the light that shone in four squares through his one window, but now there was only light from the stars and snow. The attendant locked his door and walked up to us. He was a big man with a long, brown beard and strong arms and legs, yet he took soft, almost apologetic steps toward us, as if he did not want to startle us. I was not afraid of him.
“This interrogation is taking too long,” he said.
Mother nodded.
“I have waited as long as I could. I will drive by the police station to tell them they must hurry this matter for your sakes. You need to get indoors out of the night.”
“May we ride with you to the police station?” Mother asked.
The man looked about. Even as a child, I knew he must have been trying to decide whether the police would be angry with him if he helped us. “I will take you,” he said finally, and he brought his wagon and drove us to the station. He did not just leave us there, but waited for us and Father, to drive us to our new house. I liked him even more. The police made Mother and me come into their building. The police did not look like good men. Father was not in the room they took us to. A policeman sat there at a desk we stood in front of. “What is your name?” the policeman asked me. He was young, maybe my mother’s age, with black hair and a black mustache. I did not answer him. He looked up. “What is your name?” he asked me again. I could not answer him. I was too afraid to speak. He reached across his desk and shook me. “Where is my father?” I shouted.
I felt hands on my face, and looked up in shadows at an African woman’s face above me. The policeman was gone. I knew I had been dreaming again, but the transformation in what I thought I saw was so sudden I lay there startled. The woman repeated a harmless question, but I could not answer her. “What is your name?” she asked me a third time, in French.
I shook my head.
“Try,” she said.
I had to think: should I tell her my English name, the name I used because no one in the land where I lived could pronounce my Polish surname? Or should I say the Polish? I settled on that. “Joseph Korzeniowski,” I said.
She did not repeat it. It seemed she had mostly wanted me to speak to her, that my name did not really matter. She kept her hands on my face. If she were blessing me, I needed her blessing. I let her keep her hands on me.
“What is your name?” I asked her.
“Sililo,” she said.
I knew enough Lenje to know that her name meant born during a relative’s funeral. “Who died when you were born?” I asked.
She took her hands away and looked at me. “Drink,” she said.
She helped me sit up, but it was not water she gave me: it was dark tea with feathers floating in it and black bark on the bottom of the gourd. It tasted bitter and the liquid was gritty, but I drank what I could because it was liquid and cool, then I lay back down. She walked to the river to rinse the gourd, then filled it with water and set it next to me.
“Eat this,” she said. She pressed a slice of African fruit to my mouth: something bright red, almost bloodred, and sweet. I did not know the name of that fruit, and I never saw it or ate it again after the day she fed it to me. So much in Africa was new to me: after six months I felt I was still getting only glimpses of the rich life it held. She passed me pieces of the fruit, and I ate them all.
“No one died,” she said.
For a moment I did not understand what she was talking about, then I remembered her name. “Why did your mother call you Sililo?” I asked her.
“A wise woman of my people held me first when I was born, before even my mother. She told Mother I would see the world die, so Mother named me Sililo.”
I was quiet for a time. The wise woman had been, in a way, correct. The world Sililo had been born to was dying— was already dead in much of Africa. It had not been able to resist the coming of the Europeans. What had happened to her people was probably much like what had happened to mine when the Russians took over Poland. “What has happened to your family?” I asked her.
“The Belgians cut off my husband’s ears because he did not bring them as much rubber as they wanted him to, though he is an old man. My son went with the Belgians up the river and has not returned. The son of my good friend who did return told me the Belgians cut off two of my son’s left fingers because he ate a handful of the Belgians’ food after he had gone three days without food. Last year, the Belgians took my two grandsons to the coast, and they have not returned. I must go to them.”
I said nothing to her. I could think of nothing to say. We had too much in common.
“I must bring my grandsons out and follow my son up the river before the world ends,” she said.
I looked at her. She did not think that all she had suffered in her land occupied by a foreign power was an end: the end she waited for was still to come. “What world will end for you, if it has not already?” I asked.
“This world where people do not live as they believe. A judgment is coming on all who live that way.”
I thought how people had waited through all time for that day. I believed we had a long time yet to wait.
“I have listened to your missionaries,” she said. “They talk of being kind to others, of treating others as you would want to be treated, but they and all the Belgians have not done that here. Your mother told me how the people with power did not do that in your land, either. The strong of this world do not believe what they say they believe: they have oppressed the weak, but soon they themselves will be oppressed. I must bring my grandsons out before then—with everyone else who will come with me—and go into the forest. Only there is safety.”
“Why do you talk of my mother? She has never been here to speak with you.”
“We talk in dreams. Your mother knows what is coming.” Sililo pulled back the hide and walked out. The hide flapped back against the side of the hut. I lay there thinking of dreams and judgments and my mother who died in exile in a cold land, foreign to her, so many years before.
* * *
For two weeks, Sililo brought me water and food and blessings. My strength returned. Soon I could sit up without her help to eat and drink. When I could walk to the river, she stopped bringing me water but still brought food. She sat and talked with me while I ate. She did not have to do any of these things. She was just being kind, and I loved her for it, even if she claimed to speak to my dead mother and to know the future.
In those days of healing, I left my hut early in the morning to sit in grass on the riverbank before the heat of the day. Hippopotami wallowed in an eddy upstream. They grunted there, contented, like great pigs in mud. The far banks of the Kongo were dim and shadowy green.
One morning I fell asleep in the grass and dreamed the last time in Africa about Mother. It was the day the police forced Mother to leave her brother Thaddeus’s, my uncle’s, estate in Volhynia. The police had granted Mother a three months’ leave to go there, and she had taken me with her. They ignored all pleas of her illness: she had to go back to exile with Father at the appointed time.
On that day, she whispered with Uncle Thaddeus in the long hallway, and they did not know I was on the stairs and could hear them. “I’ll look out for the boy,” he told Mother.
She said something I could not hear. Then Uncle Thaddeus said Father “might surprise us: he might live a long time.”
“My son will,” she said. “He will do great things.”
They stepped quickly down the hall, and before I could move they saw me on the stairs. We looked at each other and said nothing at first, then I ran to Mother and hugged her. She and Uncle had been talking as if she and Father would die. I was too young then to understand all that that would mean for me, but I did not want to find out.
The dream shifted, and Mother and I were in the police carriage. Mother looked straight ahead, to hide her tears, but I turned around in the seat and waved at everyone standing in the driveway—Uncle Thaddeus, my cousin Josephine, and Grandmother, who had come from Polish Russia to see Mother.
Then Sililo walked onto the veranda, dressed in a white dress and red shawl.
“Sililo!” I shouted and waved, but she did not wave back. She looked worried and pointed up at the sky. I looked up and saw only the sun there, and clouds. She kept pointing up, and I watched the sky long after the carriage entered the main road and I lost sight of Uncle’s estate and everyone Mother and I loved there.
I woke gently and looked at the sky and clouds. Mother died four months after the day I dreamed about. Father died four years later. I remembered Sililo’s four feathers, and thought how my troubles had much to do with the number four. I heard the grass stir and looked. Sililo sat there. She held out a sweet fruit. “Eat,” she said.
* * *
As soon as I could, I walked unsteadily into Kinchassa. I bathed in the Belgian compound. No one spoke to me. I said nothing to the Belgians. There was nothing more for me to say to them. I found Camille Delcommune sitting in his office cooled by fans circling in shadows above him. Flies flew among the blades, which struck the flies one at a time and knocked them dead onto Delcommune’s desk and papers. He brushed them to the floor as they fell. Always, more flies replaced those the fans had killed. “We do not pay men for days spent sick in huts,” Delcommune said, before I could say a word.
“Then I need the work the company promised me.” I did not tell him I would work only as long as it took to save money to buy my passage to England.
“You were sick too long. I gave your commission to Captain Carlier. You must wait now till another appears.”
I stared at him. The Belgians expected no new boats on the river for a year. I would be out of work that long.
“I will honor my company’s contract with you,” Delcommune said, “then.”
I left his office without another word. I had money to buy a canoe and food, and did so. “There are the rapids below us!” said the man who sold me the canoe. “You will never reach the coast.”
“I am a better captain than that,” I said.
Sililo met me at the river, bundles in her arms. “I am sorry,” I told her. “I did not know what was happening here in your country when I took this work. I will not stay another day in it.”
“Take me to the coast,” she said.
I took her arm. “I will help you free your grandsons from the Belgians.”
“You will escape the coming judgment,” she said.
I held the canoe while she climbed in, then I shoved it out on the river and jumped in. I was weak physically, but determined to leave. The river lay dark and powerful before us. I felt the raw strength of it as the current seized the canoe and sped us west toward the coast.
I wanted Sililo to be right. I wanted a judgment to come on the strong of our world, a judgment that, like this river, would bear all the oppressed away to a better place and leave behind, irrelevant, the oppressors.
* * *
Only the darkness of a new moon saved us. Matadi lay black and quiet, and as we first steamed toward it we thought the city government might have ordered all lights out at night to not attract Martians—but we had not expected Martians in this part of Africa yet.
Jessie, my English wife of four years, took my hand. “We have come so far,” she said. We spoke softly.
I turned to the men around me. “Cut the engines,” I said. Two men rushed to do so. The sudden quiet seemed at once more ominous and more convincing of danger near us. Matadi lay utterly quiet. Not even a dog barked there. No birds called from treetop nests. The air was thick with smoke, though the city had not burned.
“Let the ship drift back into the shadows,” I said. “We’ll anchor under the trees.”
Sudden movement, if the Martians had observed us, would prove our end. Movement attracted them, and they could move quickly to attack, even through the sea—this river would mean nothing to them. One week before, we had seen two of their great craft stride out through the deepening sea from São Tiago, in the Cape Verde Islands, to train their heat-rays on the hundreds of vessels fleeing south from Europe. That we did not die then was not from lack of trying on the Martians’ part: they burned the Portuguese Mãe de Deus sailing slightly ahead of us, then a French warship heading north probably to protect France itself, and the sudden cloud of smoke from the two doomed vessels rose up to hide us from the Martians, who turned to fire on ships behind us.
We rescued five men from the Portuguese ship—the only survivors to escape before it sank—and sailed on. The Martians did not pursue us. We found Accra and Lagos brightly lit and alive—and panicked at reports of Martians in the Sahel, Martians at sea, Martians in the Ethiopian uplands and heading west. No one knew where to run to escape them.
Except me. I remembered Sililo’s words: “I must bring my grandsons out before [the world ends] and go into the forest. Only there is safety.” And I remembered her feathers placed to protect me from something to do with the number four: when I first read about the Martian Invasion, all I could think of was that Mars is the fourth world from the sun. When it came time for us to flee, I found work on a ship in Dover and brought my Jessie, little Borys—then only two years old—and all these others from dying England to a place I knew filled with fevers, and disease of all kinds, yet rife with a vigorous life hidden under vast forests—and one woman who had maybe seen what was coming and thought her great forest would protect us.
With Sililo, or at least in her forest, we might survive for a time. That had been my hope.
We floated under a canopy of great trees spreading out over the river and gently lowered the anchor. The ship ceased all movement. The night was very still. I felt water on my face, then on my arm. I looked at the branches above us, and saw clouds moving above them, blowing in from sea. Rain spattered the surface of the river. Everyone pulled on coats and hats or took cover. Jessie touched my arm. “There,” she said, pointing.
Starlight glinted off the gleaming metal of a Martian machine striding toward Matadi from upriver. It explained the city’s silence. The Martians had undoubtedly sprayed their black smoke over Matadi. Nothing lived there now.
If the Martian had seen us or heard us, we would not have lived long either.
Everyone on board stepped quietly to the railing to watch. The Martian stopped in the harbor and rotated there, surveying the black land. Its heat-ray pointed at us, then swung away in a wide arc, burning nothing. It must have heard us, but evidently could not detect us now. It stood there waiting, I believed, for us to move. It could wait there till first light, I realized, when it would see us under the shadows.
Yet we could not move. Distinct sound would bring it upon us, and everyone there understood that. No one on deck moved. I heard water lap against the side of our ship, and the falling rain, and nothing more for some time. Perhaps the Martian will go back upriver from where it had come, from whatever work we had stopped it from rushing toward, I thought. If it left, we could slip back out to sea and wait there—for what I did not know. We had nowhere to run now.
“Joseph.”
Someone spoke my name. I looked around. Everyone on deck looked back at me, wondering. “Joseph,” the voice said again.
The voice came from shore. I walked to the shoreward railing and looked into the shadows under the trees there. I saw nothing distinguishable in the deep blackness—then a flash of white, the sound of movement in the water, the dipping of paddles—and a canoe gliding up to our ship. Sililo sat in it, dressed in a white robe, with men around her guiding the canoe. I recognized her two grandsons from the day I helped them escape the Belgians; I thought the man without fingers on his left hand must be her son.
“I came back for you,” she said.
I did not question how she knew I would come. We spoke softly, and the rain covered the sound. “I remembered your words,” I said.
“Bring your people,” she said. “And bring your writings. Come with me to see the world end.”
For her the end had not yet come: London destroyed, Paris— probably Brussels. Matadi a lifeless shell, and still she waited for the true end of the world. I could not imagine what she thought it would be.
I took off my shoes, tied the laces together, and hung them around my neck. Everyone on deck did the same. Three or four of us at a time stepped quietly into the wooden canoe and went to shore. After a time, all seventy-nine of us were walking in the great forest away from the Martian. No one spoke. I carried my writings, as Sililo had asked: an unpublished manuscript about her land, Heart of Darkness; an unfinished novel, Lord Jim, among others. I felt the pages expanding in the humidity, and when I touched them the ink smeared. I did not know if I could preserve them—or if it mattered anymore.
Sililo seemed in no hurry. She led us at a leisurely pace, walking arm in arm with Jessie and carrying Borys for a time. With dawn we saw what the Martians had done to her land. They had burned away vast stretches of forest. Sililo led us along a sooty trail, stopped above a ravine, and pointed into it: a downed Martian machine boiled there, steam still rising from where it lay, its feet caught in vines and logs. “They can’t walk through the forest,” she said. “They tried burning a way through, but it was too slow. They walk up the rivers, but we keep a watch and move back from them. They have not gone past the rapids yet.”
We walked on, hidden under a leafy canopy, into the heights the Kongo flowed through, past the rapids Sililo and I had fought our way through ten years before. In breaks in the forest, we looked out over the broad land below, smoky with the Martians’ fires. Smoke wafted out over the sea and obscured the great river. It was a surreal walk that day, with an old woman I somehow expected to meet here.
“You have a part to play in the world’s end, Joseph,” she told me. She touched my manuscripts, and I wondered.
After two weeks of walking, we climbed a hill and saw Kinchassa. The Martians had not reached it yet, as Sililo had said. The city had grown in the ten years since I left Africa, blighting the land along the river with the temporary shacks of Europeans come here for money and nothing else. Vast though it was, it seemed impermanent. This cannot last, I thought.
Kinchassa was filled with Europeans anxious for any news we brought from Europe, none of it good. Camille Delcommune still worked there. He looked at me through jaundiced eyes. “Africa almost killed you before,” he said. “Death drew you back, for certainly the Martians follow you.”
But they did not. I had hoped to go on into the forest, but the Africans let no European leave Kinchassa. Thousands of Africans surrounded the city, camped in armed groups, and they brought from upriver every Belgian.
“You have been like Martians to us,” Sililo told them. “When they have gone, you must go.”
When she said that, I began to understand how the world would end. I worried that the Belgians would panic and fight, and tried to shame them from it. I told anyone who would listen the stories of what the Russians had done to my family and to Poland. Others told similar stories—a man from Alsace-Lorraine, a Moroccan trader whose family remembered Andalucia, a German Jew with grandparents murdered in a pogrom. Some read Heart of Darkness in manuscript, turning the pages carefully to keep the ink from smearing, and afterward they looked at the Africans among us, troubled.
We knew the Martians, after all. We knew them well. They did no new thing among us, and to them all the great nations meant nothing more than Poles, Jews, Moors, or Africans had meant: the Belgians, English, Chinese, and Russians were now peoples to be swept aside. I began to hope that the shock of what the Martians had done to us was so great that, if we somehow survived, we could no longer treat each other that way. The world would truly have ended then, for the Earth would be a new place.
Sililo came to me early in the morning. “It is over,” she said. “The Martians are dead, and all of you must go now.”
Twenty of us followed her to the coast to see. We found the Martians rotting in their machines, a vast destruction along the coast. Everywhere the forest had been burned. The European cities were leveled, but under trees near Matadi I found the boat, undamaged. We flagged a passing ship, whose captain told us the same thing had happened in South Africa and Angola. We could only assume it had happened, or was happening, everywhere.
We hurried back to Kinchassa, for the last time. I took Borys in my arms when I got there. “Come out,” I said to the Europeans. “The world we knew has ended. A better one must now be born.”
Some followed Sililo and me to the coast because they were ashamed of what men had done to each other and knew it must stop. Others came because the Africans surrounded them by the thousands, but they all came.
The land was healing as we walked through it. Green grass rushed up through the ashes, and everywhere flowers bloomed. We made temporary camp on the coast, and shortly I took the first boatload of Belgians back to Ostend.
Sililo stood with Jessie and me that morning, and she held Borys for the last time and smiled at us all. “The world has ended,” she said.
“I hope so,” I said.
“You will see. The Belgians are first to change. Your England will follow, then all others.”
She handed Borys to Jessie, and we boarded the ship.
I almost wrote that the new world was born more quickly than Sililo could have imagined, but she somehow knew so much that I doubt that. Jessie spent our first weeks back recopying my manuscripts, trying to reconstruct pages damaged in the tropical wetness, while I wrote accounts of Sililo and what we had seen in Africa. My stories played a part in the Great Change, and the stories of all the oppressed played their part and sundered the world from its violent past. Earth is not perfect yet—there are still many wrongs to right—but in the years since the Martian Invasion, I have wondered what this world would have been like, what horrors it would have known, if the Martians had not come to shame us into living according to our highest ideals.
Jessie and I live most of the year in rebuilt London, where I sit as free Poland’s delegate to the Council of Earth, but we have a house in Poland, outside Berdichev, near the house my parents rented when I was born. The first night in that house, I dreamt of Mother.
She held Borys and walked with me along a quiet road shaded by tall trees, and I remembered in that dream that when I was a baby she walked with me there often. Now I was a man taller than she. She smiled and took my hand, and we came to a place in the road that led down to a beautiful valley and the white houses there. Not far down the road, Sililo stood with Father, Grandmother, Uncle Thaddeus, and so many others I had loved and lost to death.
“I want to go with you,” I told Mother.
She kissed Borys and handed him to me. “Take your son back to the new world,” she said. I watched her walk to Father and Sililo and all the others, and they went on into their beautiful valley. I turned with Borys to go back and saw that the valley behind us had become just as beautiful.