The Weight of Numbers (37 page)

What could be taken away, RENAMO had taken away: roofing sheets, copper wiring, furniture, vehicles. Even the street signs were gone. What could not be carried had been smashed. Vehicles waiting for repair had been set on fire. Water and drainage pipes had been dug out of the earth and broken open with a hammer. A decorative pavement ran under the frontage of an old barber's shop; every tiny tile had been methodically splintered.

More seriously, every generator and water pump serving the town had been hammered to scrap, set on fire, then laid into with axes: bright flecks showed where metal had met metal.

‘All this will be cleared!' Naphiri declared, leading me through the town.

And after the clearance – what? Everyone was calling it an occupation, but the truth was RENAMO had razed the town. There were no pipes to lay in place of the ones that were smashed, no bails of electrical wire to restring the unstrung town. Even the shade trees that had once lined the
avenidas
of the elegant quarter had been cut down and burned.

‘All this will be cleared!' Naphiri insisted, with something like desperation. ‘With the earth-mover, we will sweep the street. Many streets are cleared now. It is a good vehicle.'

‘It's still here?' It was my understanding that the Italians had left the area as soon as they'd finished repairing the airstrip.

Naphiri sucked on her lower lip. ‘It broke down,' she said. ‘It was most unfortunate.' She caught my eye and smiled. ‘Our friends had to leave it behind.'

Every couple of weeks, and at great risk, a truck driver ran the gamut of National Highway Number One to bring fuel to Goliata.

We had little enough use for it. The town blacksmith was still working away at his replacement generator, gathering parts from spoil heaps and burnt-out vehicles; bartering for motorcycle spares across the Malawian border; whittling a flywheel out of wood. So most of the fuel ended up in the belly of the Italians' earth-mover.

It could never have broken down. Had it ground to a halt, who here would have had the resources to fix it? By the little hints she kept dropping – ‘Most unfortunate. The damnedest thing. The day they were leaving' – Naphiri let me in on her chicanery. How she had got this valuable item all to herself. She was pleased with her cleverness. It was at this point – with Naphiri revealed as a thief and a cheat – that I began to like her.

I had been suspicious at first, and particularly of the feasts Naphiri held every few evenings by firelight, between reed fences, in Goliata's ‘cane town'. Everyone was expected to bring something to the meal: a chicken; a flat basket piled with tomatoes or chard; a woman dressed in a rough red shawl arrived with skewers of what looked like satay, but turned out to be roast field mice. It wasn't the food that disturbed me; it was the money. Naphiri saw to it that everyone, no matter how poor, dropped a donation into her old aluminium paint-can.

My neighbour at the feast was a comparatively old man – I guessed mid-forties – whose lips had been cut off by the RENAMO rebels during
the occupation. In halting Chichewa, I asked him what the collection was for. ‘For FRELIMO,' he replied, as best he could, sucking the spittle back through his teeth. ‘A donation to the party.'

What was Naphiri doing, shaking the tin under the noses of people who had nothing?

The man next to me passed me the pot, and I looked inside. It wasn't Mozambican currency. It was Malawian. ‘Why
kwacha
?' I asked him, indicating the pot. ‘Why foreign money?'

He shrugged. ‘You can buy things in Malawi.' He tilted his head back to swallow, so the food would not fall out of his destroyed mouth. ‘There are shops in Malawi.'

Naphiri sat with her arms folded, glowering at me. It occurred to me I had not made a donation. I had some hard currency in a bill-fold. I dropped a ten-dollar bill into the pot, slowly enough that people could see.

Ten dollars was an unimaginable amount of money. Nobody reacted. Nobody cared. Even my neighbour seemed not to notice.

I sensed that, with their circumstances this reduced, money had ceased to mean very much to the people here. The food they had brought to the feast had more value to them than currency they could not spend.

Naphiri jumped to her feet. ‘Where is Samuel?' she cried.

Silence fell across the feast.

‘Where is he?'

All around me, people were exchanging awkward glances.

‘This is our banquet.' Naphiri stretched her arms wide, measuring her magnanimity. ‘Why is my brother not eating with us?'

The villagers stared into their dinners. We were using leaves as plates; big and leathery and so practical for the purpose, I had barely registered the oddness of it until now.

‘Has he somewhere better to be?'

My Chichewa wasn't nearly good enough to follow this performance.
Happily, my neighbour knew a few scraps of Portuguese and – probably as a way of sidestepping the row that was brewing – he muddled up a translation for me.

‘Sam is gone.'

This much I had gathered.

‘Sam is gone to the graveyard.'

‘Why would anyone be going to a graveyard at this time of night?' I asked.

‘Because he is eating with the
matsangas
,' my neighbour replied, and pulled the rough reddish jerkin around his matchstick chest, as against a chill.

We were overheard. Around us, the conversation turned to vampires. Only ghouls and the undead, it was agreed, would break bread in a graveyard.

It was my prissiness that had prevented me from understanding Naphiri. Once that wore off, I even began to admire her. Without Naphiri, there would be no Goliata. Naphiri was the only employer in town. Whatever money you dropped in her paint can one evening, you earned it back the next day, scrubbing RENAMO's slogans from the walls, thatching roofs, lifting rubble into the bucket of the earth-mover. When it wasn't being used to clear the cement town, the Italians' abandoned vehicle was dragging gimcrack ploughs through new fields to the west of the cane town. As far as I could see, Naphiri didn't charge for these services.

She was Goliata's inescapable first principal. She was more than our ‘administrator'. She was our chief, our
régulo.

So, imagine Samuel's feelings.

Imagine Sam, former
régulo
of Goliata under the Portuguese colonial administration. A headman deposed by his own sister.

I grilled my neighbour for information. ‘So FRELIMO put Naphiri in charge, in her brother's place?'

He unskewered a field-mouse, necked it and wiped his ruined mouth. ‘Why not?' he said, sucking spittle back through his teeth. ‘Naphiri can read.'

True, Sam's education at the hands of the Portuguese must have been pitiful, in comparison with the education Naphiri had received from FRELIMO in Dar. Sam had no official status any more, and he didn't know much about
Marxismo-Leninismo
.

What he had, in abundance, was an instinct for small-town life. Ever since I'd got here, he and his cronies had been haunting Goliata like a bad smell. The town's old power-brokers had returned from obscurity: a couple of popular
curandeiros
, a former local agent for the Ford motor company, a local landowner who had made his fortune in the mines of Johannesburg. They were shaking hands, they were building bridges. With a casual cynicism, they stirred the rumour mill against Naphiri and the party: FRELIMO has banned private ownership! FRELIMO is demolishing monuments in the cemeteries!

Had I known nothing of this, the way Sam first approached me would still have got my back up: all glad-hands and pat-heads for the kids I was in the middle of teaching, and a patter of twisted subordinate clauses and long loan-words for me.

‘Tell me, sir, what is your specialism?'

It was a slick performance, and the level of polish probably counted for a lot in this land without books, where oratory is everything. It had exactly the opposite effect on me. I replied in my dreadful Chichewa, keeping my distance, letting him know my dislike.

‘Why don't you come eat with us tonight?' he asked me, coming straight down to business. No prizes for guessing who ‘we' were. RENAMO contras still controlled much of the surrounding countryside. Yet he had delivered his invitation in elegant Portuguese as though offering me supper at the Ritz.

I thought about Goliata's spacious new cemetery, and declined Sam's invitation with a shudder. Sam shrugged. It was all one to him. He had
felt the wheel turn beneath him. He knew it was only a matter of time before he wore cotton again.

Sam was not the lean, hungry creature I had been expecting. Though they shared a mother only, the family resemblance between Sam and Naphiri was striking. Sam's face was a more evolved version of Naphiri's; his frame lankier and less clumsy. His eyes, far from burning with a wicked flame, crinkled charmingly with every smile. Should he ever be handed back his old mantle as head-man of the town, I could imagine his response: the modest amusement with which he would rehearse all the twists and turns that had brought him back to power: ‘Well I never!'

He lingered on the steps of the veranda, listening to me teach. I made a point of ignoring him, so every couple of minutes he grunted his approval, making sure I knew he was there, a sympathetic presence. How long did he intend to keep this up?

Just then, the earth-mover rounded a corner into the main street. It rattled towards us, wreathed in eddies of smoke. The children leapt up cheering and rushed to the balustrade.

Any minute now they would jump into the street and mob the vehicle and tease the driver – Redson, a man who'd driven machines bigger than this in the mines of South Africa. And Redson, obedient to the rules of their cheerful game, would brake sharply, start off again with a jolt, throw gears, brake, start forward and brake again, shaking kids from the scoop as fast as they could clamber on.

Sam Calange just laughed.

‘Have you ever seen such a ridiculous contraption?' he said, appealing to me, tears of mirth in his eyes. He was using Chichewa now, so the children would understand. ‘Listen to it! The old rust-bucket! I give it another week.'

The children, mortified, turned to me, awaiting their teacher's spirited defence of the village's earth-mover.

Sam pressed home his attack: ‘Still, my sister, she is only a woman.
How can we expect her to know what engine oil is for?'

I stared at the vehicle, lumbering smokily up the road, and hunted furiously for an adequate retort. True enough, it was not the most impressive machine of its sort: a tractor with a detachable scoop bolted onto the front, and the scoop was already badly buckled – but I had been here long enough that it had begun to make an impression on me: a valuable mascot of the party.

‘Listen to that engine! It's tearing its guts out! Look!' Sam pointed. ‘If someone doesn't align that wheel soon…' Gripping an imaginary steering wheel, he mimed the earth-mover's drunken progress. The kids whooped and applauded as Sam wove across the veranda, his face twisted in comical terror: man on runaway machine. When it came to working an audience, there was no competing with Sam Calange. He leapt from the balcony and capered about in the street, running up to the earth-mover; shying away. Redson had to swerve to avoid him, which only made Sam caper the more.

How the children laughed. Even the ones without noses.

The worst thing was, I couldn't stop him. Sam had succeeded in wrenching me back to a place behind my eyes where I could see the earth-mover for what it was: a dinky little plaything with a life of approximately one more month – if we were lucky – before it seized up for good. That, in its turn, was what made Sam's performance so purely cruel. He wasn't saying, ‘I will oil your tractor.' He wasn't saying, ‘My friends in the bush can get you spares for that buckled axle.' He wasn't offering us anything. He was simply belittling what he didn't control.

‘Redson!'

Redson looked up, harried and red-faced, from the wheel of the earth-mover. Sam's ridiculous ballet had brought his vehicle to a stand-still.

‘Redson,' I shouted, at the top of my lungs, seized by a sudden inspiration, ‘
run him over!
'

The children gasped.

Redson frowned.

‘Run him over!' I yelled, scenting an advantage. ‘Come on!' I rallied my students. ‘Man versus machine:
let's see who wins
!'

Redson was a serious man. Clowning was not his style. Scowling, he climbed down from the tractor and tried to remonstrate with Sam. Naturally, it only took a few seconds before Sam had managed to charm him. What could I do but stand there, powerless, while Redson, arm in arm with Sam, the Old Boss, laughed along with his jokes?

The kids, disappointed and uneasy, sat back down. I did my best to smother the seeds of their doubt.
Amo amas ama; c
is ‘kuh' before
a, o, u;
‘sss' before
e
or
i. Eu nasci em mil e novecentos e cinquenta e cinco.
Pay attention in the corner.

And all the while I could feel Samuel's smile boring into the back of my neck.

No one was meant to win this war. It existed for one purpose only: to turn a sovereign nation into a no man's land of burnt schoolhouses and decapitated nurses, mine-littered roads and unharvested crops. In line with the Total Strategy coming out of RENAMO's paymasters in the Transvaal, nothing was to replace what had been destroyed. And just as South Africa had no real intention of letting RENAMO take over Mozambique, so RENAMO's bandits had no intention of handing Goliata over to Samuel Calange.

A couple of weeks before a regrouped RENAMO launched their second big offensive in the region, it dawned on Sam – much, much too late – just who he had been breaking bread with.

‘Please come with me to the feast,' he said to me, not for the first time. This time, however, his invitation was not a piece of public show. He had knocked on my door in private, and after dark. ‘Please.'