The Book of the Heathen Read online

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘He surely won’t be allowed to stay here.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  He paused. ‘What will you do?’

  Like Cornelius, he harboured some notion of Frere’s contagion; unlike Cornelius, he did not understand the true nature of that contamination.

  ‘Someone ought to keep a full record of events,’ he said, looking away from me as he spoke, almost as though the suggestion had not been his, merely something he was repeating. And meaning that he had already started to keep that record.

  I looked pointedly at the satchel at his feet.

  ‘It’s the proper thing to do,’ he insisted.

  ‘I know.’

  My insincere concession exasperated him further. ‘He killed a child, for God’s sake,’ he said.

  ‘We don’t know that.’ I kept my voice low and even.

  ‘Everyone says so. And worse.’

  ‘Is that what you’ve already written?’

  He picked up the satchel and held it to his chest.

  ‘Even you can’t close your eyes to what’s happened. Why do you insist on defending him?’

  ‘He may not require defending,’ I said, knowing this was untrue, but not in the way he had meant it.

  ‘I have to go,’ he said. He was a man of hourly appointments, again at his own contrivance. Hourly appointments in a place where others counted month to month on their fingers.

  ‘Of course,’ I said, relieved to see him go.

  I waited until he was out of sight before following the same curving path back down the hillside.

  * * *

  It rained heavily through the night. I set out my containers and watched the water pour in. I checked that my charts and books were safe from this assault, and then waited to ascertain where new inroads had been made. Old leaks dried up and new ones appeared. It was Cornelius’s task, as our Senior Quartermaster, to ensure that our dwellings and the Company offices remained habitable, but where these downpours were concerned there had long existed a policy of partial defeat and compromise.

  Earlier, I spent the afternoon with Cornelius and his warehousemen. We played cards, and they drank the liquor they either distilled themselves or bought from the Manyema traders who delivered it in pails, the variable potency of which could never be truly ascertained until long after it had been consumed.

  The warehouse in which we sat and waited out the rain was better protected than most, containing as it did the more profitable of the Company’s dry goods, our own provisions included. Periodically, Cornelius and I rose from the game and made a brief tour of inspection, pausing to listen for the noise of the water where it could not be seen. Small birds flew back and forth in the high roof above us. Water ran in sheets over the unglazed openings along the lower walls and gathered in puddles on the floor.

  Outside, men came and went through the downpour as though it were not happening.

  Upon our arrival here together, I had helped Frere set out his rain gauges and had accompanied him on his rounds to record their findings. On one such outing, after a particularly heavy downpour, we came to each of the delicate instruments to find them smashed and useless. I expected him to be distraught at the discovery, but he merely remarked on his own stupidity at not having better protected the glass phials and funnels. It occurred to me then that some agent other than the rain had caused the damage, that the instruments had perhaps been regarded as unwelcome totems or fetishes and had been accordingly destroyed.

  Less than a month later, Frere called on me to help him set out his new gauges. These were made of tin and wood and were considerably larger than the original instruments. He showed me the plans he had drawn up in designing and constructing the boxes. Each was as precisely drawn and measured as the vital parts of an engine might be drawn, and as accurately sketched as any of the countless thousands of beetles or butterflies he had drawn since.

  It was clear to me that Cornelius had taken me away from the card-players to discuss Frere. I knew that of all the others, he alone came closest to sharing my concern for the man. He and Frere had shared a great many interests, and both had formed an attachment to the place beyond that demanded by the terms of their employment. Regardless of his own doubts, I knew that Cornelius alone might be my only ally in attempting to achieve something on Frere’s behalf, even if neither he nor I yet understood what that might be, and how little, in reality, it might amount to.

  ‘About Frere…’ he said, prompting me.

  ‘Whatever happens, the facts of the matter will need to be separated from all the wild tales and speculation,’ I told him, forcing conviction into my voice.

  ‘And you believe that is possible, you truly believe that the two can be separated, one from the other, like so much chaff from grain?’

  ‘Perhaps not, but it will be our responsibility to try.’

  He remained unconvinced.

  Upon first being introduced to Cornelius van Klees, he looked to me – perhaps because of his age and his meticulously kept beard and moustache – like someone who might once have been painted by van Eyck or Holbein, a courtier perhaps, a wealthy merchant or ship-owner. Despite the length of time he had lived there, his face bore none of the more usual signs of the place. He was a quietly efficient and courteous man, who treated his workers well, who knew when to indulge them, and how afterwards to recoup that indulgence.

  ‘Ought we not to expedite matters by sending him directly to the coast?’ he said.

  ‘And let them deal with him there?’

  ‘It might be the correct thing to do.’ The more agitated he became, so the more pronounced his accent became, along with the formality of his language. He must have known that the Company directors would not countenance the removal of Frere from the Station.

  It occurred to me then what he was having such difficulty in saying to me.

  ‘You think I should question him, draw up a report?’

  He stopped pacing. ‘You are his closest friend here.’

  Neither of us spoke for a moment. Everything that needed to be said had been said.

  ‘I’ll go and see him, of course,’ I said. ‘And, hopefully, return with him.’ We had our own gaol, for the exclusive use of Company employees, and our own gaoler in Sergeant Bone.

  ‘You think that wise?’ he said.

  ‘It will at least remove him from the scrutiny and condemnation of others.’

  The gaol across the river, built originally by Hammad to house his slaves, was little more than an underground warren in which more men died than lived, and in which dead men had remained manacled to the walls for days after they had died.

  ‘Which of the tales do you believe?’ I asked him.

  He shook his head. ‘I merely wonder at their details, at the way they are so consistently and insistently repeated.’ There was a warning in his words and I heeded it. ‘We live too close to the new era,’ he said, slapping his palm against the tin wall and causing it to shake.

  The remark, and the violence of his gesture, surprised me.

  ‘What new era?’

  ‘This, all this, Africa. Once it was all a game, a board upon which to play, but all that has gone.’

  I regretted this sudden turn in his pleading. I told him I didn’t understand him, but in truth I understood half of what he was telling me.

  ‘I mean that once we did all this unnoticed, unwatched, forgotten.’

  ‘And now the eyes of the world are on us?’

  ‘The greedy eyes of the world. Everything we do is examined, sifted and sorted for its countless other meanings and significances.’

  He had lived in the country for forty years, arriving as a nineteen-year-old. It was said that he had returned home to Belgium only once in all that time, three years after his first sight of the place. It was rumoured that when Cornelius finally went or died, then the Belgians would close their fist on the last of our concessions here.

  We were distracted from our thoug
hts by calls from the card-players to return to them.

  The men had finished their first pail of drink, and another sat at their centre. They dipped their cups into this – some scooped out the liquor with their hands – and with their increasing drunkenness, so their gambling became ever more theatrical and reckless.

  We sat with them but declined their entreaties to rejoin the game. A few notes and coins lay on the ground beside the empty pail, but the substance of the gambling now lay more in the noisy expectation and soon-forgotten promises which littered the place, and which were added to with the turn of each torn and dirty card.

  2

  A further three days passed before I crossed the river to visit Frere. The water at the Station was too high and the boatmen who plied the crossing awaited their customers a mile upriver, negotiating the rapids and exposed bars while being carried downriver as fast as they were able to pole and row across the flow. Crossing in this way, one invariably arrived on the far shore soaked from head to foot, and steaming in the heat. One of the first lessons I was taught by Cornelius was to learn to judge the river and then to walk as far upstream as I deemed necessary. There would always be someone waiting, he told me, and invariably there was.

  I left my room before dawn, wanting to be beyond our outer perimeter before the first light of the day fell in on us. I told no-one of my intended visit, knowing only that by then everyone expected it of me. Little further news of Frere had reached us during those three days. I followed a trail through the tall grass. The smoke of early scattered fires hung low around me, in places so perfectly level and unmoving that it might have been so many ponds.

  * * *

  I studied the river as I went, reassuring myself that I understood the vague calculations I was making. In truth, whether the water was high or low, fast or barely moving, I frequently walked to the same low promontory where the same old boatman was waiting.

  I passed several others asleep in their vessels. Some had their wives and children alongside them, all sleeping in the river mud and against the banks, all appearing more animal than human in that half-light.

  I arrived at the promontory and saw the man and boat beneath me. The man was awake and waiting, facing the river. Beside him squatted a child whom I recognized as the deformed and stunted boy who frequently inhabited the compound, and who was employed by some of us to undertake those menial tasks upon which we would not waste our own time. He excavated and then later emptied our cess pools; he scraped our specimen hides; he cleaned dirty rubber and tended its choking fires; he sang and danced for us; he gathered up our spent cartridges and sold them as charms.

  The boatman and the boy were often together, but I was not aware of any family connection between them, and it was only as I saw them there that morning, outlined against the sheen of the river, that I realized I knew neither of their names.

  At my approach, the man identified me and then stood aside from the path to his boat. The boy went immediately to the vessel and pushed it into the water. Seeing the orchestrated simplicity of their actions, it was not difficult to believe that they had been waiting for me.

  I offered my greeting to the man. He was formal in his response, nodding but saying nothing. And then he raised the short stick he held and pointed to one side of me. The deformed boy, who was mostly devoid of language, made a blowing sound and rubbed his arms vigorously, as though warming his muscles for the task ahead. We all called him a boy, though I suspect his size and shape belied his true age and he was much older – perhaps eighteen or nineteen, say – than any of us imagined or wanted to imagine. I was distracted by this sudden noise, but then drawn back to the boatman by the jabbing motion he made with his stick.

  I looked to where he pointed. Another man sat further along the bank, again distinguishable only in outline in the half-light, and by the glow of the cigarette he smoked. As I looked, he rose and came towards us. He called out to me by name. Bone. I felt myself tense at the voice. It was clear that he too had been waiting for me, and I cursed my predictability. The boatman, having served his warning, pushed his stick into the mud at his feet and picked up his long oar instead.

  ‘What kept you? Been here two hours,’ Bone said. ‘Fletcher said you’d wait for a quiet day and make an early start. Five, he reckoned. Five. Been here since four. Just me, him and the idiot.’ He clapped his hands. I imagined the boatman had watched him come and had then stood and watched him in silence until my own arrival.

  ‘Shall we go?’ he said.

  ‘Is it any business of yours?’ I said to him.

  ‘What?’ He seemed genuinely surprised by my rebuke. But I knew even as I spoke that, of all people, he, Bone, would have some small official, judicial part to play in the proceedings, and that his involvement could not now be avoided. I conceded all this, and what it might mean for Frere, as he continued towards me, his expression changing from one of amusement to surprise and then to anger as he came.

  ‘What business is it of mine?’ he said. ‘What business is it of mine?’ It was clear to me that this prodding remark masked his own uncertain grasp of the situation.

  ‘My apologies,’ I said. ‘Of course I need your advice on the matter.’ It was my intention to have Frere transferred from the Belgian gaol to our own, and it occurred to me only then that Bone alone – however unwitting of it he might have been – possessed the paper authority to effect such a move.

  ‘I would have reported back to you later,’ I said to him. He now stood directly in front of me. ‘I merely wanted to make this first visit to ascertain what condition Frere might be in.’

  ‘What difference will that make?’

  ‘I don’t know. I simply wanted to find out before any official proceedings were started.’ Merely and simply: soft gloves of words.

  ‘What proceedings? What are you talking about?’

  ‘I’d hoped you could tell me. I assumed you would be the man responsible.’

  ‘Me?’ He reassessed the situation as quickly as he was able to, and it amused me to see his anger turn back to surprise, and then, as the thing became clearer to him, to something approaching pride.

  ‘You,’ I said, driving home this sudden idea of responsibility.

  It was by then much lighter, but still dark along the line of the river. A larger vessel passed us silently at the centre of the channel, distinguishable only by the lights it carried and by the dull clanking of its bell. The old boatman turned to watch its progress. I imagined him to be following it so that he might better assess our own course, but even as the vessel drew level with us, and the noise of its engine and the smell of its soot reached us, he turned away from it and back to where Bone and I stood.

  ‘What did Fletcher say?’ I said to him.

  ‘Nothing. Said you’d go and see the murderer and get him brought back to us.’

  ‘Did he think I’d succeed?’

  He nodded reluctantly.

  ‘Even though everyone else wants him to rot – to die, preferably – where he is?’

  He nodded again.

  ‘And so they dismiss completely your own involvement in the proceedings. Did none of them ask your advice on the proper course of action now to be undertaken?’

  He considered this provocation. With Bone, you were either his friend or his enemy; the middle-ground, to his mind, was forever filled with people facing one way or the other.

  ‘Presumably because they understand where the responsibility and, ultimately, censure will fall.’ I made a point of appearing disinterested as I spoke, but at the same time I pointed my finger directly at him.

  ‘Me?’ he said.

  ‘Perhaps. Perhaps not. Perhaps the whole situation is already so far beyond any of us that we would all be well advised to stay away.’

  He must by then have been aware that I was manipulating him into the position which best served my own interests, but, equally, he could not entirely dismiss from his mind the fact that he might have had some significant role of his own
to play: Frere was still a Company employee, and Bone was still the arbiter of justice on behalf of the Company – a role in which some small but unassailable power might yet be wielded.

  He turned away from me to consider all this without allowing me to read his face.

  Without waiting for him, I went to the boat and climbed into it. The boatman followed me.

  ‘Are you coming?’ I called to Bone.

  He came immediately.

  The boy pushed us away from the shallows, wading until the water reached his chest. Bone and I sat together at the centre of the boat. The boy climbed aboard and shook the water from his limbs. The boatman made the first of his slow, assured pushes with his pole. The water rose within inches of the craft’s low sides, and already it seeped into the bottom around our feet. Tin cans lay scattered the length of the floor.

  We moved further out and I felt the tug of the current to which we abandoned ourselves. The steamer which had passed us earlier was by then out of sight, its more certain passage marked now only by the fading rattle of its bell. I shielded my eyes to await the sun rising out of the growing brightness, but was foiled by the canopy of the trees, and by the river which turned us one way and then another on our passage across it.

  * * *

  The story of Frere having killed a child came to us first from a feather-trader who had heard the tale from one of his gatherers at the confluence of the Lomami and Pitiri rivers. There was a small Station there, little more than a guard hut, manned only during the trading season. Frere, apparently, had arrived at the Station and gone into the forest beyond. The country was mapped along its main watercourses, but the ranges beyond these remained uncharted. It was assumed that the hills rose and fell west and east until they reached Boendie Post in the west or Port Francqui on the Kasai to the south, and it was upon hearing these names that I recalled Frere long ago expressing an interest in the place, in the fact that it remained unknown and unappealing, and, more significantly still, that it was reputed to be the home of cannibals even fiercer than the Matari.

  The feather-trader said his collector had been present when the girl had attempted to rob Frere of one of his journals, and Frere had grabbed her arm and then swung her so violently against a nearby tree that he had broken her neck, killing her instantly. Apparently, Frere was either suffering from a sickness or had just then been woken from a delirious sleep, perhaps by the child herself lifting the journal from his lap. The girl’s father had witnessed the whole incident. In fact, it was said that it was he who had encouraged the girl to become a thief, the pair of them having come across the sleeping Englishman so far from where any Englishman had been before. And so the delicate crystals of the story grew.