The Weight of Numbers (36 page)

I asked Lichenya where he hailed from.

‘Oh,' he said, shrugging. ‘That's a difficult question. I'm from all over.'

Ah, a man of mystery. I elected to dislike him.

The pilot and his mate – two boisterous Soviet airforcemen – turned up to inspect our aircraft with incredulous fascination, as though it were some sort of exhibit. After some persuasion, the engines turned. There were no seats in the Dakota. The captain and I settled opposite each other on sacks of pinto beans.

‘Sit on two sacks,' Lichenya said.

‘I'm fine.' At forty-two I was older than him by at least fifteen years, and an experienced traveller. I didn't need him to nanny me.

He turned his hand into a make-believe pistol and pointed it into the air; he pulled the trigger. ‘Two sacks will stop a bullet.'

I moved to higher ground. This put me closer to the doorway than I wanted, given the plane had no doors.

We swung a lazy arc over Beira's harbour. The curl prolonged itself, turned full-circle, repeated… The pilots were wasting fuel, and it was not hard to see why. At the horizon the sea was a vivid bluish green, as distant waves caught and refracted light from a sun that had yet to rise. The green spread as though a lush prairie were unfolding itself across the ocean. A couple of seconds later, as the sun's first arc came into view, the prairie burst into flames of red and gold.

Nice to know that even Russian pilots have the souls of poets. Content, they changed course and hurled us inland and up, out of range
of RENAMO's heat-seeking missiles, and into the strange, marble world of thunderheads and cloud columns that awaited us, five thousand feet above my adopted country.

Jorge Katalayo's assassination had not fractured the liberation movement, nor did it delay the colonists' inevitable defeat. Victory over the colonial power had been achieved by 1974 – much sooner than expected – when a coup in Lisbon cut the Portuguese imperial project off at the root.

So FRELIMO had found itself in the disconcerting position of a dog that's been chasing after a speeding car: once it's caught it, what on earth is it supposed to do with it?

With tiny resources, few personnel and next to no education, FRELIMO found itself with a country to run. Worse, a
Portuguese
country. Even then, the situation might have been saved, had it not been for the exodus.

Boats arrived from Lisbon and carried whole harvests away. What the settlers couldn't carry, they destroyed. These were acts of pure spite. Tractors were driven into the sea. Job-loads of concrete were poured down the lift-shafts of half-finished beachfront hotels.

Once these moral pygmies had returned to the motherland, burped and bedded, their tummies swollen with home-stewed
bacalhau
, the Africans they had so laughably ‘governed' for five hundred years took stock. In the words of Yelena Mlokote,
née
Katalayo, bereaved daughter of FRELIMO's first president:

We have nothing to learn, because there is no one left here to teach us. We have nothing to buy because there is no one here left to sell us anything. We have nothing to do because there is no one who can pay us for our labour. We have nowhere to go because no one here knows how to drive a train. Very soon we shall have nothing to wear. Already in the country you find people weaving jerkins and skirts out of tree bark.

This comes from a standard letter Yelena sent me in the summer of 1975. Well, it was her signature printed on the bottom. How many hundreds of these things must they have posted to contacts and friends in Britain, Sweden, America? In it, she invited me (‘dear friend', ‘valued colleague') to assist the struggling administration:

For as long as anyone can remember, bureaucracy has been the black man's only route to preferment. No one here knows how to operate a seed drill; no one here can afford to buy a seed drill; but everyone with a primary education knows what the requisition form would look like. At the moment of liberation, we have the skills required to operate a tin-pot fascist backwater. These skills, and no others. God protect us from our strengths.

It didn't take much exegesis to discover, behind her words, the writings of her father. Did she read his speeches now? Did she search out his words in the back numbers of obscure Marxist periodicals? In foreign newspapers, microfiched at the SOAS library in London? In correspondence with helpful, if bemused, journalists from Sweden and Japan?

Though I kept her letter, as you might keep a wisdom tooth or a gallstone, I figured there was nothing to be gained by replying to her. Then, a couple of weeks later, on a whim, I bought a postcard of a Beefeater and scribbled this on the back:
‘A to K or L to Z?'

It was the most compact, brutal way I could think of to tell her what I knew about her father's assassination. What FRELIMO's serious young men had told me, visiting my flat that day in 1969.

About a month later, a second letter arrived. It was very different from the first: much shorter and entirely personal. Yelena is changing bed-pans in a clinic in Lourenço Marques (‘We call it Maputo now'). She spends her nights studying in a rented room by the light of a paraffin lamp: ‘
My father understood that the greatest threat to black power in
post-colonial Africa is the educated black. Home rule that side-steps revolution – he appreciated that threat far better than I did. I realize that now
.'

She was trying to locate herself in history. To present her acts in the light of the complex circumstances. ‘
It was a mistaken path
,' she wrote. (She had acquired the rhetoric of her father's generation: the road; the path; the long march.) She wrote: ‘
I believe I took a wrong turning
.'

I took this to be her confession.

‘
By day, I perform menial duties at the hospital. I dress cuts and bruises. I hand out aspirins, when we have any, to the chronic cases. I empty bed-pans in the fever ward. I study at night
.'

She wanted every mistake she had made to yield a valuable life lesson.

‘
Come to Maputo
,' she wrote.

The cold shook Captain Lichenya out of his sleep. He'd looked so vulnerable, curled up on his sacks, that I had laid a blanket across him. Some sort of a blanket, sewn together from burlap relief sacks. He pulled it up around himself and blinked. ‘Christ,' he said – the
lingua franca
of blasphemy – and added, in English: ‘I hate flying.'

Holding the blanket around himself, he climbed off the sacks and began pacing stiffly back and forth along the hold.

‘Do you know Goliata?' I asked him.

‘I know Goliata.'

I let the silence – or what passed for silence in a doorless prop aeroplane – drag on for as long as I could stand. ‘I'm the new teacher there,' I said.

‘I know who you are.'

The view out of the open doorway seemed to mesmerize him: storm clouds over the purple carpet of the earth. He stopped to stare, for all the world as if he were surveying the view from the balcony of a hotel. ‘Where have you been working?' he shouted back at me.

‘Maputo,' I told him. ‘Tete. Beira, a few times.'

I had been doing this kind of work for nearly ten years now: arithmetic, literacy, hygiene, a smattering of
Marxismo-Leninismo
. I was a valuable commodity: an educated foreign worker allied to FRELIMO's socialist administration. A
cooperante
.

‘Nampula?'

‘No. It's odd.' Nampula was Mozambique's northern capital. ‘I've never been.'

‘A pity.'

‘Yes?'

Engine noise filled the hold, and there was a worrying smell of petrol.

‘You've never worked in the countryside before?'

‘No.'

He nodded. He had guessed as much.

‘Is it safe?' The words were out of my mouth before I could stop them.

The captain turned back to the open doorway, the world of strange currents and inversions giving way now, as we dropped towards cloudbase, to a clearer view of the land.

Looking down, I scoured the landscape for its human component. A smallholding, a field of rice or cassava, a stand of cashew trees: the eye leapt to one, then to another, as to a major landmark. Most of the time, there were no tracks in view and no villages worth the name. Rocky bluffs and acacia trees jumbled the landscape like a deliberate camouflage: an outrageous sculptural scatter-painting in purple, white and yellow-green. People lived here, but this was not an ordinary human landscape. It was not carved out, the way the land in other countries is carved and parcelled, cleared and divided. The human parts of the landscape had not agglomerated, the way they had elsewhere, into the ribbons and clumps – villages, roads – which humans usually make on their nation's petri dish. Down there (we had reached the district of Zambezia) it was as though the humans had been scattered evenly over the land in a fine drizzle, and had made do wherever they landed.

Many of the people didn't even know that their country was called Mozambique. The RENAMO contras were just bandits to them –
matsangas
. Socialism was another word they couldn't spell. If they had heard of South Africa at all, it was as a distant place of fabulous wealth. They tilled their land. They wanted to be left alone. They left each other alone. This was the problem: it was virtually impossible for men like Lichenya to defend them.

Of course it wasn't safe.

The T-shirt was frayed. It had been washed many times. Across the front of the blouse, glass and concrete towers reached into a sky that must have been blue once, but time and frequent washes had bleached it to pale green. In front of the towers, a beach stretched away in naive perspective: a distant headland, a bikini-clad sunbather, a parasol, a long iced drink in a glass beaded with sweat. Splashed across the sky in big pink letters: Sunny Beirut.

The sunbather's midriff stretched and tore, the glass broke: the Tshirt's wearer inhaled. ‘They burned the school, stole the books and used the children to carry the furniture over the border.' Goliata's FRELIMO administrator was a big woman. It was in her face that the hardships of the two-year drought were written: it was shrunken and bruised-looking, like a fruit that has been left out in the sun too long.

Beirut?
The top was older than the children I was here to teach.

‘Then they sliced off the boys' noses and fed them to the girls.'

Entering this room, I had feared the worst: ‘RENAMO MOTO' smeared on the walls in sump oil. ‘Moto' meaning fire. But even as we talked, a boy came in silently, unacknowledged, and began pasting frayed posters of FRELIMO President Chissano over the slogan. (The glue smelled foul – his own concoction?)

‘One of the girls, she was eight years old, refused to eat her brother's nose. The captain wanted to make an example out of her so he tried to rape her.'

This was Naphiri Calange's office. Naphiri herself stood facing me across a desk knocked together out of crates. We didn't sit down; there were no chairs. Above our heads, the room's central light was missing, along with the fitment, and a jagged tear in the ceiling plaster, from the middle of the room to just over the door, marked the path of the
electrical wire: this too had been torn out. The floor of the room was a crumbling skein of cement.

‘She was too small for him, so he widened her with his machete.'

The windows had neither glass, nor the cheaper, more common and practical mesh grilles. More ominous still, the windows had no sills or frames, for these too had been ripped away. Their regular shape distinguished them from the artillery holes which had otherwise colandered the town.

‘Welcome to Goliata.'

There were two windows. Naphiri stood with her back to one. The other was to her right. Through the window behind her, no building stood tall enough to look me in the eye. Most had been reduced to stubs and slopes of dusty scree, bound already by weeds and creepers. The ones that remained standing – either roofless, or sporting a recent, disreputable-looking greenish thatch – had fared little better.

I asked, ‘What happened to all the roofs?'

‘Stolen,' Naphiri replied. She told me how RENAMO had kidnapped villagers to carry zinc roofing sheets out of Goliata, across empty cattle pens and through the bush, to the border crossing with Malawi, where the metal was bartered for motorcycle spares, radio batteries, oil, sugar, salt.

Through the other window, bright afternoon light came into the room dappled and scented by shade trees – flame, jacaranda – which grew in the grounds of the old Portuguese church. These were the last trees in Goliata. The RENAMO guerrillas had not touched the church. It was completely undamaged. To stand with a view of both windows was to see in tableau the recent history of the town: the before and the after.

‘Come.' She motioned me over to the window overlooking the ruins.

From this distance it was impossible to tell what building was useable, what was a ruin. She pointed down the street towards what must once have been the pretty end of town. The shops – they must at one time have been shops – still sported pillared arcades, shading their frontages from the sun.

‘The new school.'

I wondered whether to thank her.

‘If you find any cases of gin hiding there, let me know,' she said. ‘It used to be the tea-planters' club-house.'

Naphiri wasn't giving me the whole building, just the veranda – at least, the half of it that had survived RENAMO's occupation. I glanced over the collapsed part. It had not been hit by artillery, as I had thought at first. It had been chopped up by hand, and to such a fineness, only a psychopath would have had the patience.

‘Well?'

I quickly adjusted. The location made sense. There was shade; we were separated a little way from the street; we could see who was coming. Elsewhere, the grass grew to the levels of the walls. ‘Thank you,' I said.