The Weight of Numbers (19 page)

‘That's not fair,' I said.

‘Why can't you go to work for somebody sensible, for Christ's sake?'

How was I supposed to answer?

‘I mean,' said Hayden, waving his hands about in exasperation, ‘what does your outfit actually
do
?'

In order to fund its latest hobby horse –
Africa: a Way Forward?
– the Society had embarked on an operation to ‘realize its assets'. This was Miriam's important description for the jumble sales she ran, every month or so, in the building's basement. A small, forbidding sign tied to the railing the week before (‘Bring Your Own Bag') was her sole advertisement, but she need hardly have bothered. The same dowdy regulars attended these sales as religiously as they attended the Society's talks, seminars and ‘tape/slide presentations'.

The first jumbles were ambitious (‘Sale & Auction' the sign announced). There was an old Underwood typewriter. A couple of card-index cabinets from the library – fine examples of the sort of eccentric, looks-useful-but-isn't cabinet-work that these days crawls away to Portobello Market to die. A kilim with a pale-brown stain on it – dried blood? An adjustable couch with brass handles and a smell of horse hair under the perished leather – less like a seat, more like a deluxe operating table.

By the second sale, we were reduced to recycling our waste paper. At the absurdly inflated prices Maureen wanted to charge, the Society's past publications were slow to shift, even among the regulars. There were boxes of old programmes: Dr J. R. Rees lectures on the work of Ugo Cerletti and Lucio Bini for the Drill Hall Open Programme on Mental Infirmity and the Arts. Sir Richard Gregory speaks on ‘Science and World Order'. There were little pamphlets on the semantics of Korzybski, the poetry of Mayakovsky, the paintings of Kazemir
Malevich. There was a box, never opened, sealed with tape so brittle it crackled to pieces when you tried to pull it, which turned out to contain mint copies of a wartime spiritualist self-help book called
You Can Speak With Your Dead
.

Miriam's third sale was advertised with a justified baldness: ‘Clearance'. The first box I unpacked promised much: a set of padded leather straps and a rubber gat carrying unmistakable bite marks. This was a dimension of the Society's business I had not suspected: I imagined Kinseyite sexual experimentations.

The second box contained framed photographs of a European city between the wars. Looking closer, I saw the shop signs were spelled out in a language I did not recognize: not Vienna, then, as I had at first thought, but a place long since swallowed up into Soviet anonymity.

These were the highlights of the sale; the rest amounted to no more than some bizarre bric-à-brac: a leather hat box; a foot-long stuffed alligator; an able seaman's uniform.

The rest of my time I spent watching as modern Africa invented itself, scribbling itself out on paper napkins in cafeterias all over London. I remember sitting in a greasy spoon on Gray's Inn Road, among squeezy ketchup bottles and mugs of half-drunk orange tea, with Tariq Ali and Vanessa Redgrave. With Joseph Nyrere. Kenneth Kaunda getting drunk with Margaret Feeny in a guest-house kitchen in Gower Street. It sounds strange to recall now, I know. The libretto of a comic opera by Doris Lessing. The future of a free Africa, drawn up on a napkin. These good men, with their fragile dreams: all the ironies of their educated, depatriated condition.

And there, in the corner, trading literary recommendations with Sally's husband Robert, a bald little man in a grey suit – the Soviet negotiant.

You had to admire the man's bulldog determination, the weeks and months he spent making friendly overtures and warm promises to the
future masters of Mozambique. But Jorge Katalayo and the FRELIMO council had agreed upon a trenchant policy of non-alignment. This policy, put into action in the cafés of east London, gave Katalayo ample opportunities for mischief. Witness the conversation he started, the day following a party at the Chinese embassy.

‘Weren't you invited?'

‘No,' replies the Soviet purseholder, sulking already.

‘The Chinese ambassador congratulated FRELIMO on its self-reliant approach.'

Guarded: ‘Yes?'

‘He praised our belief in the people's capacity for autonomous change.'

Big eyes now: ‘Really?'

Katalayo smiles his trademark smile.

Sweating now: have his paymasters been gazumped? ‘What did you tell him?'

‘I told him where to stick it. Much as I keep telling you.'

We laughed.

No one took him seriously.

Miriam's sales had by now taken on a life of their own. No room was spared, no cupboard, no shelf. The atmosphere – the desire to shrive – achieved a Lutheran intensity. Chandeliers vanished from under dusty ceiling roses. The cork message board disappeared from the entrance hall, leaving a bright magnolia square on the tobacco-stained wall. At last, Miriam's Lenten ritual drew near to the Society's holy-of-holies – its library.

Towards the end of every afternoon, Miriam and a couple of elderly regulars combed the shelves of the library for volumes to discard. They were like people eating mussels, who start by picking out the choicest shells and end up consuming the lot. The philosophy behind the Society was itself so smudged by the passage of years that even these old hands had trouble deciding which volumes were necessary to the collection
and which were not. If
Winged Love
and
Wellington Wendy
had no place here, what case was there for retaining an incomplete set of John Lehmann's
New Writing
? What did the poetry of Keith Douglas have that the short stories of James Hanley did not? If illustrated catalogues of Henry Moore deserved shelf space, who was Graham Sutherland that he should be excluded? And what kind of philosophical society was it that gave shelf space to Arthur Koestler, while expelling J. B. Priestley and J. D. Arven?

I stopped what I was doing. I took the volumes out of the box again and laid them side by side on the table.

‘A to K' and ‘L to Z'.

A dictionary of philosophy, in two parts.

By then, Jorge Katalayo had left London for Tanzania. He had given me a forwarding address. I wrote to him on the flyleaf of the first volume: ‘You actually learned English from this tosh?'

I posted the dictionary off the same day, and forgot all about it.

Jorge Chivambo Katalayo: former goatherd, former UN researcher, freedom fighter, doctor of anthropology. I never saw him again.

My abiding memory is of the afternoon before his speech at the Women's Institute. We spent it in a greasy spoon on the Roman Road, cramming doughnuts into our faces, hoping that the sugar might substitute for inspiration.

‘Before we do anything,' Jorge declaims, ‘we have to get our own people working with us.' Ring, jam, chocolate icing: it's all one to him. ‘Fragmentation is our biggest problem,' he says. ‘At the moment, one village barely knows another.'

I say to him, ‘Your audience won't understand that. That won't mean anything to them. How can neighbours not be aware of each other? Roads are like trees to us. Like grass. The idea you have to build a road before you know what's at the end of it – it's not in the Home Counties vocabulary.'

‘Home Counties?'

‘I mean it won't play to the women of the W.I.'

He makes a note.

‘We cannot begin to build' – he tries again – ‘while our men and women live in hate and fear of each other.'

‘Meaning what?'

‘Meaning, on any ordinary day under the Portuguese system, two cattle trucks might pull up in the middle of a work village – an
aldeamento
. The men are told to board one truck, the women are told board the other. The men are driven off to work the fields. The women are going to mend the roads. These men and women, from the same village, married, some of them, sweethearts, brother and sister – they may never see each other again. It's not a deliberate policy, exactly. It's just the soldiers lose track of where they've been. It's a big country. Everybody looks alike. The soldiers don't speak Chichewa and the authorities have made damned certain the locals don't learn Portuguese. So the soldiers can't keep track. In the evening, they drive you to the nearest
aldeamento
and dump you there. Where's your wife? Where's your girlfriend? No one knows. No one cares.'

He looks at me.

‘Well?'

I nod.

‘What does that mean?'

‘Yes.'

He lifts his gaze to the ceiling. ‘Help me with this, Saul.'

‘I just don't think they're going to believe you,' I tell him. ‘They grew up with Kipling. They think law and order is a European invention. Whatever else the Portuguese visited on the black man, they've surely been making the trains run on time.'

Sometimes, when Jorge Katalayo is out of inspiration, when he has drunk too much coffee, and eaten too much sugar, and especially when he is nervous, all you can do is make him angry; see if a spark will catch.

He shouts at me: ‘You think we have some sort of enlightened master–servant bond? Mozambique isn't the Raj. Even the Raj wasn't the Raj, but let that go…'

He has an idea: ‘In the forties there were only about three thousand whites in Mozambique. Now there's two hundred thousand of these idiots dragging their knuckles across our country, thinking they're better than we are because of the colour of their skin. Which, I might add, is like diarrhoea.'

‘Jesus, don't say that.'

‘The point is, the junta's bankrupted a generation and robbed them of an education. If it leaves them at home, they will topple the government. So it exports them. It sends them to lord it over us.'

He drains his coffee. He looks pleased.

‘I thought this speech was supposed to be about the role of women?'

He shoots me a sour look. Silence while he sluices the dregs of his coffee round his cup. ‘Better the devil you know, I suppose,' he sighs. ‘When my father died, my mother said to me—'

‘That's not about women. That's about you.'

I have pushed him about as far as he will be pushed. ‘No,' he says, ‘it isn't. Listen. Our educated men do not know what women are. They barely know their own mothers. Like me, they had to leave home to go to school – and I really mean leave, journeying for miles, departing for other countries even, just to get some schooling.'

‘Meaning what? For the women?'

Katalayo holds my gaze. In a soft voice: ‘Meaning we hate them.'

‘God, you're not going to say that, are you? They'll tear out your liver with their teeth. Those that still have them.'

‘Why shouldn't I say it? It's true. We hate our women. We blame them. They are our scapegoat. They represent what we would have become, had we not got away. Do you know I have a girlfriend, Saul? A white American girlfriend? Why do you think I have a white American girlfriend, Saul? I know. She knows. We're not stupid. We know what this is.'

‘So do I – and it's still about you.'

‘For the ones who don't get away,' he goes on, ignoring my interruption, ‘what of them? What's the point of falling in love, in trying to start a family, in making any real human connection across the sexual divide, if any given day the trucks can pull up and make your mother, your wife, your daughter, disappear? It's the same for the women, too. Men and women are learning to have nothing to do with each other. We are being taught this. Our children are growing up with this. This is what slavery does. This is what slavery is.'

Finally, we are getting somewhere.

It is not the greatest speech of his career, but from the back of the meeting hall I can feel the audience responding to him.

‘The future of our country rests with its women,' he says. The girls of Lourenço Marques, for instance. They have a reputation that runs up and down the entire eastern seaboard of the continent. Now, though, they are running away. Every day, another woman flees into the liberated provinces, through minefields, every once in a while a pretty foot blown off at the ankle. ‘We're building them their own barracks,' he says. ‘We're putting them to work in the fields. We are teaching them to read.'

I am so proud of him.

The day after his speech at the W.I., very early in the morning, Jorge Katalayo hammers on the door of this little flat I have got for myself over a chip shop near Regent's Canal.

He says the walls of his guest-house in Bloomsbury are so thin you can hear everything that goes on in the neighbouring rooms, every whisper, the sweet and the not-so-sweet, every tear of foil, every condom snap. ‘I just need a sit-down,' he says, having walked all the way through Fitzrovia, past King's Cross. ‘Can I have a cup of tea?'

I know there is more to this visit than meets the eye, and when he mentions the letter he has received from FRELIMO's Paris office, I
figure this is it. Katalayo hands me the letter over the crumb-littered breakfast table. I am teaching myself Portuguese. I have a knack for languages.

Portuguese soldiers have ransacked a mission near Beira which they suspected of harbouring FRELIMO soldiers. They stumbled into an arithmetics class. The pupils were teenagers and young men. The soldiers marched them down the beach and into the sea. They ordered the students to clap their hands. When the students clapped their hands, the soldiers shot them.

Katalayo reminds me that atrocities like these are the last acts of a dying regime. Young conscript officers are returning home to Portugal, broken by what they have seen. You find them in the bars of Lisbon and Porto fomenting revolution under the very noses of the PIDE. The Portuguese army wants out of Africa. The generals saw the writing on the wall back in 1961 when India seized Goa. Dr Salazar didn't listen to them then, and now their poor bloody infantry are paying the price in costly colonial wars in Mozambique and Angola.