The Weight of Numbers (20 page)

Katalayo refuses to be intimidated by force of Portuguese arms. The scourge of colonial might is a theme he leaves to others. He has learned how to turn the brute material of his harassment, imprisonment, and even his torture, upon itself. Each arrest, beating and midnight visitation adds one more blackly hilarious episode to his repertoire of amusing autobiographical tales. He is the David Niven of black power.

This morning, for instance, he tells me about the time a protest by Swedish missionaries got him out of a PIDE gaol in Nampula. By the time he got to South Africa, he tells me, the security forces were waiting for him. The men parked outside his apartment building got so sick of him coming over to bum cigarettes from them, they started dropping full packets into his mail slot each evening.

It was during this strange moment of unlicensed
rapprochement
that a bunch of drunken PIDE men in black-face had burst into his home,
gang-raped his wife, surprised his ten-year-old daughter as she returned home and pressed a loaded pistol into her hands.

‘“You don't have to kill her,” they said, “just aim at her knees.”'

I am making toast under the grill when he tells me this. I have my back to him. I am afraid to turn round. ‘What happened?'

‘After an hour or two of that sort of thing, they persuaded her to put a bullet through Memory's head.'

Memory was his wife.

‘My daughter's in Tanzania. She must be nineteen now. Twenty.'

I turn to look at him. He is wearing an expression I have never seen before. He looks utterly helpless.

‘She disappeared,' he says. ‘She ran away. Now she has come back. She says she wants to see me.' There are tears in his eyes and I know, in that moment, that I am not, and never can be, what I most want to be: Jorge Katalayo's son.

I come to the airport to see him off. ‘It will not be long,' he tells me. He means the war of liberation. He wants me to join him, when the time is right. FRELIMO needs educated men. The party has such ambitious plans.

All summer long over plates of doughnuts, over pots of tea, over mugs of instant coffee, Jorge Katalayo, FRELIMO's first president, has been sketching out for me his plans for the future of Mozambique – a colour-blind, gender-blind, ideologically fluid Utopia. A land without hate. A land of total literacy and high levels of general education.

It has not escaped my notice that he has been describing Sweden.

‘I'll see you in Maputo!' he says, at the gate.

Maputo is the local name for the capital, Lourenço Marques. In 1968 it is still a Portuguese stronghold.

‘Write to me,' he says, and I promise I will. He has given me his daughter's address in Dar es Salaam—

*

‘His daughter's address?'

They sat up. They looked at each other. Suddenly the polite, buttoned-down young men of the Mozambican consulate were taking notice of me.

The one nearest me put down his tea mug. ‘His
daughter
, did you say?'

On 21 July 1969, details of Apollo Eleven's successful moon landing pushed Jorge Katalayo's assassination deep into the bowels of
The Times
. The half-page article devoted to his killing was short on political analysis, but rich in forensic detail. The explosives used were ‘characteristically Japanese', whatever that means. The brown paper wrapper in which the bomb arrived had originated in London. The bomb itself was secreted in a hollow cut into a large reference work.

Someone had intercepted my gift of encyclopaedias.

A to K and L to Z.

Someone had knifed out the knowledge and laid death in its place.

It is 10.30 a.m. local time in Lourenço Marques, the capital city of colonial Mozambique, and so far this is a morning like any other. The street-sellers are setting out their wares: pyramids of peppers and potatoes, expired medicines and Chinese prints. It is Sunday, 20 July 1969. Today, a man prepares to set foot on the moon, another will have his head blown off by a bomb.

Three floors above the street, in the tiny offices of a cash-strapped educational charity, project director Gregor Dimitryvich is startled by the arrival of his sole remaining employee.

Indeed, Anthony Burden's arrival has so surprised him, Gregor Dimitryvich jumps up from behind the table. Now there is a cloth spread over this table – a fancy, frilly Portuguese lace tablecloth – and on it are arranged a bizarre and evocative assortment of batteries, wires, clock parts and scribbled notes. Gregor has tucked an end of the tablecloth into his trousers, presumably to catch stray parts of the watch mechanism he's dissecting. When he jumps, a spool of wire falls to the floor; a clock, and a pencil. A hand magnifying glass follows, shattering on the bare boards of the room. A notebook slides after; a soldering iron; a spool of solder. Another pencil.

Had he burst into the office brandishing a gun, Anthony Burden could not have made a stronger impression.

‘Get in!' Gregor barks.

Anthony closes the door, deposits his walking stick in the antique umbrella bucket and lowers himself gingerly into his customary seat, opposite his employer.

Gregor remains standing with the tablecloth spilling from his trousers like a long, white tongue. ‘I am expecting a package. A man will deliver
this package. A sailor. When the sailor arrives you can wait in the next room.'

This is the name Gregor gives the toilet. The Institute has no other rooms.

‘Or I could simply go,' Anthony offers. ‘If it's inconvenient—'

‘This would not be best.'

‘Oh?'

‘Please. Sit down.'

Anthony shrugs – he is already seated. The gesture makes him wince: his back is bad today.

‘I mean stay seating. I mean…' Sighing, Gregor gives up his attempt to correct his mangled English, and releases himself from the tablecloth.

All of which is disturbing enough, but not at all surprising.

The moment he hobbled off the plane in Lourenço Marques, Anthony Burden guessed that this ‘institute' he was supposed to be working for was nothing more than the cover for yet another moribund KGB field station. There should have been a driver waiting for him at the gate, holding up a cardboard sign with his name on it. But the teenage factotum sent to collect him felt so under-used, he instead approached Burden,
sotto voce
, by the newspaper kiosk, slipping a hand under his arm as he did so.

When, rather angrily, Anthony Burden shook him off, the boy responded as if electrocuted, every muscle tensed for action, his hand already inside his coat. ‘You are the teacher, yes? You teach the little nigger kiddies?'

Lubyanka's finest.

Pathetic.

Since 1951, when he left the Migdal Tikvah kibbutz, mathematician and communications expert Anthony Burden has been working within the nascent aid industry. With a CV like his, and omitting mention of his treatments for manic depression, a fifty-two-year-old ex-academic of Anthony's stripe should have been able to carve out for himself a small
but profitable niche in a top-flight Western NGO. Instead, Anthony has trodden a steeper, stonier path. In reaction to his unhappy years in Israel – the gulf that opened up between his own socialism and his wife's Zionism; their eventual separation; the company he kept in Haifa; the trouble it got him into; finally, his ignominious expulsion – Anthony's political leanings have slid ever leftwards, condemning him, since the Cold War became truly global, to a life of straitened living and unsatisfying piece-work. The latest of the many half-hearted, left-leaning ‘friendly institutions' to have employed Anthony Burden is this Soviet-sponsored and practically penniless ‘Institute of Field and Distance Learning'. No doubt his old friend John ‘Sage' Arven – wartime scientific guru to Whitehall and a lifelong communist – would appreciate the irony of his situation.

He does not expect to be stuck here much longer. Given the wobbly state of the junta in Lisbon, it is a wonder the police have not closed them down already.

Meanwhile, outside the urban strongholds, the forces of black liberation are gaining strength and reputation. From friendly Tanzania, FRELIMO guerrillas are conducting a successful military campaign against Portugal's conscript forces. Their behaviour towards the imperialists – if you believe the pirate radio stations – is positively ethical. On the front line, revenge attacks are forbidden. Soldiers killing white civilians are trucked back to Tanzania for political re-education. Portuguese land-holdings are not targeted. The soldiers of the liberation are not permitted to confiscate food, and so they eat what the peasants eat – millet, a crop in which the Portuguese have no economic stake.

Unsure how much of this to believe, Anthony turned – not unreasonably, he thought – to his colleagues. But all they cared about were the women who walked the promenades above Maputo Bay. The gaudiest fabrics Macao could supply found their way around the waists of those girls. To Anthony's enthusiastic enquiries about the new socialist independent state, surely just around the corner now, the
staffers – deadbeats and fumblers, mice-men with grey flannel trousers and myopic, light-frightened eyes, ‘the intelligence community' – well, they simply sneered.

Peeved, he started quoting the pirate broadcasts at them: ‘There won't be girls on the bluff much longer.' This caught their interest. ‘They're running through the minefields to get to the FRELIMO line. FRELIMO are building them their own barracks. They are putting them to work in the fields.' Acidly: ‘They are teaching them to read.'

‘What do they need to read for?'

‘“Ensure all air is expelled from the teat. Do not re-use.”'

The men were too bored and demoralized even to laugh at their own jokes.

Oafs, thought Anthony, steering carefully around the idea that he was like them, one of them, another Comintern discard.

He'd known he was in for a rough ride when he discovered that the office of this ‘distance learning institute' had no short-wave radio. There was a telephone, but it rarely worked – the area exchange kept ‘borrowing' the line. There was a very limited stock of paper, and when Anthony set to work drawing up some of his ideas for discussion, he was told, in no uncertain terms, to obtain his own supply. His enthusiastic descriptions of distance learning techniques; his suggestion that short-wave radio communications might cast ‘nets of political mentorship' across the disadvantaged communities of this huge and empty country: these things were greeted with humourless incomprehension.

So he has sat, day after day, nursing the knot in his ruined back, at this big, heavy antique table, covered with a smutted, ink-stained linen cloth; to his left, a heavy German-Gothic sideboard; to his right, a grandfather clock that would not have looked out of place in a railway station ticket hall; behind him, a wrought-iron safe in which all official papers are kept, and to which he has no access. Such furniture might, in another context, generate a pleasant atmosphere for a gentleman's
study. Alas, since the room itself is a featureless concrete cube on the top floor of a recently finished towerblock, these wonderfully heavy, lustrous objects have taken on a dejected aspect, like old lags in a cell.

Talking of which.

‘He is a British sailor,' Gregor confides to Anthony, around half-past one. There are bags under his eyes. He hasn't shaved for days.

The men sit facing each other across the table.

They wait.

Silence.

‘Please don't. I'll be all right.' The words grate and quiver in Anthony Burden's schoolboy throat. At the back of his tongue, the taste of silver foil. ‘I promise I won't do it again.'

It is 10 p.m., Valentine's Day 1930, and in the gymnasium of Stonegrove College, a cash-strapped Derbyshire grammar school, twelve-year-old Anthony Burden is struggling to explain away the belt around his throat and his trousers round his ankles.

John Arven, fourteen years old, captain of Anthony's dorm, nurses the side of his head where the younger boy's legs, flailing spastically against the wall bars, delivered their inadvertent kick. ‘Who did this to you?'

Choking and blubbering on the floor of Stonegrove College gymnasium, his throat on fire, his thighs wet with piss, how is Anthony Burden to explain that he did this to himself? How is he to put into words that this is what he wants, however much his drab, ungainly boy's body fought to keep him living in this world? Even more daunting: how is he to explain that it is not despair that drives him, but hope?

‘Who was it? Tell me. Don't be afraid.'

Little Anthony Burden bursts into tears.

Anthony Burden has a secret. Every few months or so come days of bubbling energy and nervous agitation, days when nothing seems impossible and everything takes too long. Then, with a burst of exhilaration indistinguishable from terror, Anthony receives a vision of Paradise.

Paradise is a city. A municipal fantasia of great public works: fine temples, massive aqueducts, embankments, statuary, formal gardens,
parklands, bandstands, amphitheatres and parades. A sunlit urban masterpiece, glittering and fine. In the very centre of the city there is a wooded glade, criss-crossed by geometric paths, where deer graze beneath tall, mathematically perfect trees. A girl in a shimmering cotton pinafore dress plucks flowers. A gardener in a wide-brimmed straw hat, his shears in his hand and a little dog at his feet, stands beside a dark lake whose fountain sends a crystal jet into the air like a glittering whip, spreading coolness all around. Above the treetops rises the ornamental outline of a magnificent castle.

How often has Anthony wished that he could carry his physical body into this land! Alas, since that one farcical schoolboy attempt, Anthony has had to content himself with visiting his Heaven disembodied, a soul
sans
flesh.