My Chocolate Redeemer (30 page)

‘Where are we going?'

‘Kingdom Towers, it's the Hilton of Central Africa, best place in town.'

When I say ‘town' I don't wish to be misunderstood, this place is a cross between a slum, an industrial estate, a
bidonville
and a mud hut citadel. The place is pure Timbuctoo with Bon Marché making a takeover bid. The houses have mud walls painted with peacock tails and stippled with dotted lines in what I suppose has some aesthetic or religious significance but it gives the effect of painterly perforations, a zippered look as if they are made for tearing into sections. Here and there are attempts to build in what I suppose is regarded as the modern manner, in what I can only call English post-war style, flat roofs and walls in the sort of concrete the rain stains, and in this neck of the woods once the rains have fallen, the storm waters rushing past the foot of the buildings leave a highwater mark perhaps a metre up, a smudge of powdery rouge. Modernity has never amounted to much here, it has been born into the world wearing a flat roof, its edges sharp, its sides square, it has shot up above the mud houses for about the equivalent of two minutes, African time, and then it has turned into a vision of emptiness and despair, deserted bunkers with their windows smashed, their walls covered with posters and paintings and political cartoons. Karl Marx and Lenin and a fat rather jolly man I don't recognise who looks a bit like Alfred Hitchcock.

‘Who is the tubby bloke?'

‘President Podgorny of the Soviet Union,' comes the wholly unexpected reply. ‘He made a stop in Zanj when he was on an extended African tour some years ago. He visited one of our diamond mines and there he was presented with an uncut stone of considerable worth which he spat upon and rubbed on his trousers. I think he was just polishing it but there was a terrific debate about the meaning of this. One party said that the President had shown us all how much he hated material things by spitting on the stone. The other party said he had spat on the stone and then rubbed it on his trousers to look at his reflection in it. And this proved he was as greedy for the good things of life as anyone else. The argument led to blows and blood.'

‘You mean people killed each other over this?'

‘It was known as the War of the Stone. It turned mother against son, brother against sister. Of course the Wouff made it even worse. But then what can you expect of these primitives? They decided, on the basis of his performance, that President Podgorny was in fact their long-lost river god come back to them. But that's the Wouff all over. Show them a politician from Moscow and they've got themselves a new god because his head looks like a river boulder, or whatever, and the next thing you know they're building shrines all over the place and painting his picture on the walls of houses. The Wouff have gods the way a cow has ticks. Let them catch a glimpse of someone who looks the least like a pebble, or a bit of rock, and bang! They've got themselves another deity. I tell you, their heaven must weigh a ton!'

‘A heavy heaven. I'm surprised it stays up.'

‘It doesn't. The Wouff say that every so often the gods have a clear-out. They throw down to earth the lesser gods. You and I would call it hail, but not the Wouff: they say the gods are clearing out their cellars and the little gods are being hurled down to earth where they turn to water and this water then begins to erode the rock and turn it into new shapes and thus new gods.'

I look up at the sky which is like hot blue steel. ‘It can't hail here very often.'

‘Once in ten years, maybe. And then you should see the Wouff! They run round with their mouths open and try to catch some of the little gods and swallow them because they believe that some of the divine power will pass into them. The storms here can be very violent. The damage done to the worshippers is pretty bad. Old women and children often die. The Wouff think this is hot stuff. I'm sorry to say that such sad, outlandish beliefs were encouraged in high places in the days before the coming of Comrade Atkins and his Committee of Salvation.'

‘Committee of Salvation?'

‘Right. It's what we in Zanj call the government. Why are you smiling?'

‘Oh I just think it's a good name. Maybe your Committee of Salvation can tell me where to find my Redeemer.'

He gets out of the car and fetches my bags, grunting significantly at their weight. ‘Listen, young person, go to other places if you wish spiritual enlightenment. Go to India if you want a guru, go to Kathmandu and get stoned. Go to America and fall in love with a television preacher. But don't come to Africa looking for redeemers.'

‘Why not? Do you think I won't find him?'

‘Of course you'll find him. You'll find any number of him. Africa has enough redeemers to fill the national football stadium. In Africa you could probably demand one man one redeemer – and you'd get it!'

‘Where are we now exactly?'

‘This is the centre of town. Most of those newer buildings you see across the road from you are government departments. The one there is the Ministry for Water and next to it is the Ministry for Herds and Grazing and then just down the road is the Ministry for Peasantry.'

‘And where would I find the Number One Peasant?'

‘He's safe and sound in the Presidential Palace, top of the town, Patrice Lumumba Drive, you can't miss it. You'll see the guards outside. Walk around town as much as you like, only don't go into the country unless your trip's really well organised. It's quite safe if you know what you're doing, but as you saw, you get these Wouff bandits ruining the countryside, shooting up things. That'll be ten dollars American or five hundred Zanj, plus ten.'

‘What's the ten for?'

‘I told you, you're overweight.' He reverently takes the dollars I hand him and perhaps out of some obscure feeling of gratitude says in a loud whisper, ‘Don't go out after dusk. Our curfew is very strict. And keep that diamond out of sight if you don't want people to get the wrong impression.'

Kingdom Towers has a curving drive that leads past the front entrance where two dead palms in pots stand on either side of the door like deceased sentries. A doorman should have patrolled the area between the palms and he probably has once done so because on the tip of one of the withered palms hangs his grey top hat and this gives the tree a gruesomely cheerful look, like a skeleton wearing a wristwatch. And the town had architectural pretensions even before the glass stump called Kingdom Towers was built, because across the road are the remains of a nineteenth-century colonial villa, a gracious and pretty place once. The house seems to have been attacked on three fronts. It has been set alight. That's clear from those big black streaks of soot darkening the crumbling walls which had once been painted a kind of ice-cream pink. It has been fired upon, and the bullets have made craters in the soft powdery pink plaster. And it has been neglected; much of the upper storey has collapsed, leaving only the window frames, which are incongruously protected by heavy wire mesh against which the blue sky presses. A spread of rather tired washing hangs along the balcony rail which runs the full length of the decrepit first floor and tells me that the place is still occupied. A tiny section of roof overhanging this catwalk is propped up by a rotting plank which bulges at several points with termites' nests. In front of the house runs a hot red river of dust and out of the dust grow tall emaciated shrubs with broad green leaves.

Whatever you do, don't believe what you hear about the Kingdom Towers. The place is a dump, a pit, a flea-bag. Above all, do not believe what the barman tells you. It is not the ‘Hilton of Central Africa'. The barman's name is Kwatch and he is, I think, my friend. A little man, a gnome, a mannequin, and he doesn't seem to have feet because behind the bar he bobs rather as if he were weighted like one of those dolls you can't knock down, sad whiskers and buck teeth, a most delicate pink nose that you associate with rabbits, and he dresses in olive-green safari suits. His bar is surprisingly modern, smoked glass and a chromium counter, Congolese beer and Egyptian peanuts, beer mats from Albania. The swimming pool has been left to stand and has turned a poisonously milky green, the sort of colour which suggests that if sprayed on fields it would kill locusts or if introduced into the diets of rats would kill those scavengers in their hundreds. It was one of my first suggestions to Kwatch the barman, shortly after my arrival.

‘I haven't seen any rats.' He gives a sour little smile.

Kwatch is without doubt the twitchiest barman I've ever met. I can't resist seeing his face lose colour. He does it so quickly! I ask about my father, being careful to spell the name.

‘Never heard of him. I'd remember it otherwise.' He watches the door.

‘But you must have! He lived here for years. In Waq. He was a friend of the President – the one before the Peasant.'

Kwatch bobs along the bar in some agitation, and leans across. ‘Best not to talk of presidents here. You get people who object – like the police. And worse.'

‘Do you mean the Public Audit Bureau?'

He goes quite pale. I find that very interesting.

A group of little black boys use the swimming pool notwithstanding the venomous olive sheen upon its surface. Almost every day I see them leaving their games beside the rusted railway engines which stand alone in a field not far from us. They slip into the hotel grounds and dive into the poisoned green milk that was once chlorinated water and spit on the notice which says that costumes must be worn in the pool at all times and reserves it strictly for the use of the guests.

Those railway engines in the middle of nowhere really intrigue me, rusting up and waiting for the creepers to crawl all over them. Flowers poke out of their smoke stacks. The little boys clamber all over them from dawn to dusk, hooting and chugging and pretending to pull the bell and steam away into the blue distance, though of course these trains are going nowhere, they've come to the end of the line, it literally peters out in the dust beneath their big steel wheels. Perhaps the remaining track has been stolen, levered up and sold. This is Kwatch's suggestion. Maybe there was a real station here once, he says, or a siding, and the whole damn thing has been lifted. This is Africa, says Kwatch, which is his way of explaining everything. As if that were a way of explaining anything.

The guests don't miss the pool. They are too few in number. There is the Albanian delegation on the fourth floor, all short hair and smiles, young too, they look like American college boys, with crew cuts, black blazers and red ties. In fact they bear a striking resemblance to the Four Preps; they are bouncy, cheery, and one longs to know if they can harmonise. Instead they go about the place handing out propaganda. Kwatch says that they have been sent over here to subvert the existing order, whatever that is. I think they have merely been abandoned, someone forgot them here, or perhaps there isn't the money to fly them home so they wander about the marketplace pushing bits of paper into the hands of shoppers. It doesn't do much good because the next thing you know, these Albanian tracts have been folded into funnels and used to carry salt (which is the way it's sold here) or they're bleeding soggily in the arms of a woman who's just bought a load of monkey meat, or lizard or bushmeat or the variety of brilliantly feathered birds which are eaten in Zanj with great appetite. But I understand why the Albanians visit the marketplace with their propaganda which no one reads: it helps to pass the time.

I pass some of the time by dressing because I believe one is made, almost commanded, to look one's best whatever the circumstances. I keep myself in trim. So what if I wander about the place exciting curious stares from all and sundry dressed in my Prince of Wales cropped jacket, a fake fur hat and riding breeches? Or if I choose to wear pink leather gloves despite the heat (if we took account of the heat we'd never wear anything). Or if, in the evening, I wear a ruby dress, red suede court shoes and a cummerbund when I wander down to the bar for a drink, who is to say me nay? Certainly not Kwatch. He knows I'm the brightest thing to have hit his bar in light years. But if, by contrast, I set off exploring dressed in a pair of black denim jeans and a silk camisole with shoe-string straps, well then what could be more sensible in this stewing weather?

I'm not here to wait, among my virtues you won't find patience, I'm here to look, to seek, and I do a fair amount of seeking. Without much luck so far. I haven't a car, and no transport is available outside the city of Waq except for a fleet of dusty yellow buses that arrive each morning in the marketplace with peasants stuffed into every corner, carrying their produce, yams, monkeys, snakes and anteaters tied up with string. The anteaters are a local delicacy. I hate the way their snouts are bound, the string wrapped round and round, giving them the look of mummies or muzzled dogs, and their eyes are wild and sad. The buses depart each evening belching black smoke, scattering chickens and urchins as they race across the huge baked floor of the marketplace. The people are a cheerful lot and jabber away in a local vernacular. I believe there are twenty-three languages in all, according to Kwatch. Alas, I do not understand a single one of them. Though a few of the people do speak English. The people in charge are the soldiers who drive around Waq towards sunset when the curfew is about to come into force, a bunch of arrogant bastards, they loll about in their jeeps. A soldier will ride through town with one leg thrown over the side, a green helmet cocked over one eye, thumbs hooked in his belt, machine gun on the seat beside him. The soldiers signal the beginning of the curfew by firing their guns in the air and everyone scatters to their shanties, tenements, holes, or they run down to the river where some of them live in houses perched on stilts. The River Zan flows through the town of Waq, a dull swirl of brown water, whipped to a dirty cream when there are rains up-country. There are supposed to be thousands of miles of navigable waterway in Zanj but the uncertain levels of the water make this an unreliable asset.