18

The next day I went to see Frere to tell him what I had attempted.

‘Stay away from Hammad,’ he said angrily.

‘It seems I have no choice.’

‘No-one has any choice around that man.’

‘Meaning you give credence to Proctor’s story that Hammad may one day play some part in governing the place?’

He laid down his pen. ‘Do you still harbour doubts?’

More of his journals were scattered around the room. Others must have taken them to him. I saw, too, that a Bible sat solidly at the centre of his desk. I looked surreptitiously to see if he had any of his precious photographs with him – of his parents, of Caroline, perhaps – but saw nothing.

He saw my surprise at seeing all this.

‘Cornelius came. I asked him. And when no-one comes, I ask the boy.’

‘I can do all this for you,’ I told him.

‘I know you can, but—’ He stopped abruptly.

‘What?’

‘I was going to say that you already have your suspicions concerning me, and that soon, if these are confirmed, you may want to – you may need to – sever yourself from me completely.’

‘Babire,’ I said, marking the centre around which we were both circling.

‘Do you imagine I went back there when I left you?’

‘No, not there. But I imagine you went in search of something similar. I imagine it formed part of your purpose in leaving us.’ He said nothing to stop me. ‘You asked me for the journal because it was beyond you to offer the clue to any of the others, even Cornelius. In here you can hide it amid all these others, bury it deep. But I was there with you. I know what you were truly searching for. I know what others can only guess at.’

He held up his hand to me.

‘And did you find what you were searching for on your wanderings?’

‘Before I fell ill and into the hands of those men and then Hammad? Yes, I found it.’

‘And you detailed all this in the pages Hammad holds?’

‘That was the purpose of my journey, of my deserting you. What more do you need to know? Because whatever I tell you, I will only sink further in your estimation.’

‘And you went without telling any of us – without telling me – so that none of us would be implicated in what happened. You detached yourself completely.’

He nodded once.

I was about to suggest that he had done nothing else but abuse our friendship, when someone shouted outside and I recognized the voice of Klein commanding his singers into position.

‘They come most days,’ Frere said, resigned to what he must now endure.

The singing began, the same few hymns I had heard when sitting with Bone.

‘Is there nothing anyone can do to stop the man?’ I said.

‘I imagine he believes he serves his purpose. My redemption, salvation – call it what you will – may not be so impossibly out of reach as most imagine.’

‘But it is not something you yourself believe in?’

‘I need neither to believe in it nor to insist on others believing in it.’

‘Which is a polite way of telling me to stop quizzing you on it. Do you know about Klein and Cornelius, about his dead daughter and the child’s lost mother?’

‘He told me. He wanted to apologize to me for Klein being here and punishing me instead of him. He offered to try and rid me of the man and his sheep, but I told him not to get involved again, that he’d be gone soon enough. Besides which, I imagine Klein has his own good reasons for being here.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning he’ll be trying to work out where he and his new mission best fit into the coming scheme of things.’

‘What possible part will he have in anything?’

‘The man’s a puppet. He may be of great value to someone who needs to take advantage of whatever influence he has, of what he still represents here, of who he represents.’

It did not surprise me to see how swiftly we had come from one path onto another, from mine to his, where something unexpected – something I had not even begun to consider – lay around each bend.

I had been with Cornelius on several occasions recently when we had encountered Klein, and when Cornelius had made a point of ignoring the priest completely, to the extent now of refusing even to return his greeting. On each of these occasions, Klein had been accompanied by Perpetua and Felicity, and the women had remained silent, as instructed by him. Klein spoke to me openly about Cornelius, and within Cornelius’s hearing. He made remarks which might have provoked another man – Fletcher, say – into attacking him, but which Cornelius, though clearly angered by the remarks, affected to ignore.

I told Klein that he was mistaken if he believed I would act as an intermediary and that my allegiance and sympathies lay wholly with Cornelius. At one point, when he accused me of being as blind as all the others, when he accused me of clinging to a power I no longer possessed, I told him I despised him as I had despised no-one before. I was trembling as I said this. Cornelius told me not to rise to the priest’s bait and led me away from him. Klein stood with a smile on his face and watched us go. I saw how distressing this was for Perpetua and Felicity.

When we were beyond his hearing, Cornelius told me that Klein regularly beat the two women, that all three of them considered it part of their religious instruction, and that this was one of the reasons he dressed them in their heavy outfits. I looked back to where the two women stood in the distance, their heads bowed in supplication as Klein berated them.

‘So you think Klein will make himself useful to whoever comes to power?’ I said to Frere as the hymn-singing rose around us.

‘Oh, indispensable, I’d say. The Lord’s mouthpiece.’

‘Is there nothing to be gained – by you, I mean – in submitting to any efforts he might be persuaded or bribed to make on your behalf?’

He laughed at this – whether at the suggestion itself or at my naÔvety in making it, I could not tell.

‘Will what Hammad possesses condemn you so completely?’ I said.

‘Way beyond any notion of salvation or redemption our friend out there might have.’

The singers paused briefly, rested in the emptiness of their own dying echo, and then resumed even more loudly.

‘And doubtless it will not be so straightforward,’ he said.

‘You’re saying they’ll make an example of you, that your punishment will be an expedience, done for the wrong reasons.’

‘They’ll flex their new muscle for the first time. After all, I did what I am accused of doing.’

‘You did nothing thousands of others haven’t done before you, aren’t doing still.’

‘Stop,’ he said. ‘You’re making yourself sound ridiculous. I did it, me. Me. That’s the difference. That’s what you – and you alone, I’m afraid, James – have not yet fully grasped.’

Neither of us spoke after that. Close enough to him to embrace him, and yet I could not even bring myself to look in the same direction he looked.

I had gone to him wanting to talk of Caroline – as much, if not more, for my own sake as for his – and of my parents and other sisters and the times we had spent together with them. But I saw now what a false and contrived note this would sound and said nothing. I saw too what reward and punishment such shared fond remembrance might simultaneously be in the minds of two men – something sweet to one man and yet bitter to the other for precisely the same reasons.

The noise from outside grew louder yet, and ever more discordant in its rising volume, and I went to the small window, showed my face there and shouted for them all to shut up. My words had not the slightest effect whatsoever, and few even glanced up from making their racket to acknowledge my presence. But Klein saw me, and knowing that I was with Frere doubtless added to his pleasure at this pious assault upon the man.

*   *   *

After that we did little but wait for the coming men, our days filled with empty whistles and false alarms. ‘Empty whistles’ was the term we gave to signals from those boats which did not come to us, but whose masters sounded their whistles or horns or rang their bells at every indication of habitation along the shore, we looking at them, they at us, seldom even waving or calling out to each other during these passing encounters – constant reminders, despite our mirror image across the river, of the vast and mostly impenetrable emptiness amid which we otherwise sat.

During that week – an omen almost of what was afterwards to befall us – there occurred a partial eclipse of the sun. Cornelius warned us that it was coming, saying that it would unsettle our employees, that some among them would refuse to work while this crescent of black – this, to their minds, paring of the unimaginable – lasted. This break in the day’s operations was of no consequence to us.

Reports arrived of men approaching us from all directions.

We fastened our collars and pulled straight our jackets, so to speak, and waited. And when these false alarms passed we returned to our unobserved lives almost with a sense of having been cheated.

We learned in the middle of the week that Dhanis’s expedition to Fashoda had ended with the mutiny of his three thousand Batetela porters. Some accounts said that Dhanis himself, along with all his Belgian officers, had been killed, and that these three thousand disaffected men were armed and rampaging across the north of the state, causing the factories and the stations there to cease operating, and in some cases to be abandoned when they came under attack.

Later the same day, we heard that Dhanis alone had survived and that he had fled and was now back in Stanleyville. It was said the Batetela were approaching the place with the intention of plundering it. With Stanleyville gone our own major line of trade and communication no longer existed. If the news caused us concern, then we could only imagine what terrors it struck into the hearts of Dhanis’s countrymen across the river, many of whom had families living in Stanleyville.

The following day I was with Fletcher when he killed and butchered a small black pig he had bought. He killed the animal by stunning it and then slitting its throat to bleed it. Afterwards he cut open its belly to disgorge its innards, but then, as he paused to sharpen his knife, the creature came miraculously back to life, struggled to its feet and ran squealing around the compound with its innards trailing behind it in a single glossy piece. I helped him chase the animal, both of us helpless with laughter. We called for the assistance of some of our nearby workers, but they refused to intervene, and instead watched wide-eyed as the small pig continued running and squealing. Eventually, the animal succumbed and Fletcher carried it twitching back to the table where he was finally able to butcher it.

At Abbot’s insistence we raised a crisp new flag up our pole.

Klein and his congregation marked the ceremony with a service and more singing, and Bone insisted on his men firing a salute.

Thus did we compose and prepare ourselves, and more forcibly than ever before did the wilderness surrounding our swept-out buildings and laundered flag strike me as something more permanent and invincible than anything else I could imagine, something as potent and as indestructible as evil or truth itself, and something waiting only for our departure to reassert itself and to prove once and for all the insignificance of our brief and unremarkable existence within it.