25

I went outside for the first time two days later. I had imagined myself sufficiently recovered and strong enough to resume my part in the slow life of the place, but even the simple act of crossing the compound exhausted me, forcing me to pause every few steps, and then to rest on an empty case before reaching the water’s edge.

I was surprised to see all our wharves and jetties empty, with not even a single small boat tied up there. The river had fallen during my illness, and I had anticipated a back-log of traffic, but other than a pair of fishing boats unloading their meagre catch directly onto the bank, there was nothing.

Other men and women congregated in the shallows and beside the path leading to the quarry. I recognized the dismissed workers among them. They watched me sitting on the case, just as they had watched my painful journey from my room, but no-one approached me.

A canoe left the main channel of the fallen river and came to where I sat. I shielded my eyes and recognized the old boatman and the boy. The boy leaped out and splashed in his usual ungainly fashion towards me. He asked me how I was feeling. The old man looked up at us, but made no attempt to join us.

The boy told me that Hammad had been visiting all the nearby villages and settlements, nailing up posters and calling for everyone to come and read them. He took a piece of folded paper from his pocket and gave it to me. The writing was in no language I understood. The boy took it back and translated for me. A new nation was being born, a nation governed by its own people. A census was being taken and land was being surveyed. Everyone was exhorted to rejoice in these coming changes and to participate in them. That was all. I asked him if Hammad’s name appeared anywhere on the announcement, but it did not.

He and the old man intended leaving, he said. He wanted to go to the coast and live in one of the new cities there. They were towns calling themselves cities. I asked him what the old man would do. Live somewhere on the river until he died, he said. He pushed the announcement back into his pocket and took out several coins. He insisted that I took these and I asked him why. They were the coins I had thrown into the canoe the last time I had crossed the river. The old man had refused to retrieve them and they had laid untouched in the water there until I was spotted. I told him I felt ashamed at what I’d done.

I asked him if he’d seen or heard anything of the unrest along the river. At first he was unwilling to answer me, hoping to avoid the question by shrugging his deformed shoulders, but when I insisted, he said that many of the villages along the Lomami had recently been abandoned for no good reason, and that only the previous day smoke had been seen pouring into the sky above the trees surrounding the Kirasi mission.

As we spoke there was a commotion among the fishermen and women. I looked down and saw several of the men pointing into the water a short distance away. I thought at first that a crocodile or hippopotamus had been spotted, but when I looked more closely I saw that it was a corpse in the water that had attracted their attention. Then a further shout went up, and following that, another. There was more than one corpse – five or six, all floating together, all travelling in the same slow current. From where I sat, these were nothing more than indistinct shapes rising and falling at the surface of the water. I considered it unlikely that so many bodies would have been carried so closely together, and that a mistake had been made in their identification.

The old man in his canoe remained apart from the fishermen, watching as the body which had been spotted first was retrieved by a man throwing a rope from the shore.

I followed all this as closely as I could. My vision was beginning to blur, and I depended on the boy to tell me what was happening. He told me that the first body had been secured and was being pulled ashore, and that the others – he was certain there were five more – were following it.

This first corpse was laid out and a rope was found tied to its ankle – the rope to which the remaining bodies were attached. One of these was missing both its arms, another both its legs from the knees down.

Slaves, the boy said.

I made some facetious remark about the new nation and its people, but he remained oblivious to whatever connection I hoped to suggest. The women washed the bodies and started their wailing.

A short while later, attracted by all the noise, Cornelius arrived. He was surprised to find me out of my bed. He told the boy to leave us, and he went without speaking, first to look more closely at the laid-out corpses, and then back to the canoe and the old man.

I told Cornelius about the proclamation. He said they had also appeared in the Station and nailed to the trees along all our trails. I told him Nash had been to see me, but he knew that, too, having contrived to leave the man alone with me. He told me he had just come from the garrison, where he had gone in the hope of seeing Frere, but that Frere had refused to see him.

‘What did you expect?’ I asked him. We had forsaken Frere in unequal measure, but however we might now prefer to see it, we had forsaken him all the same.

He watched the men and the women and the corpses in the mud without speaking.

Afterwards he helped me back to my room, turning away from me at the door as I made my way inside.