The Weight of Numbers (38 page)

I had been issued a freshly thatched brick blockhouse, more or less intact after hurried repairs, right on the border between the cane town and the cement town. It was a prime location, so Naphiri had given me
an AK-47 for protection. The rifle hung off one arm, my lantern swung from the other, as I swaggered back into the living room, leading Sam inside. If he could play-act, so could I.

I was surprised that Sam was moving around the village after sundown. Apart from the obvious risk of attack or a mugging, it was too easy to trip and break your neck on an overcast night like this. Though we were in the middle of the village, no light showed. Even the household fires you'd normally expect to burn on after supper-time were snuffed out early, in case the unwelcome dinner guests hiding out in the bush got ideas. Myself, I kept the windows shuttered tight. To be walking around at night, Sam had to be feeling very desperate.

‘Please,' he said.

It was the usual deal. You turn up to the meal with a contribution of food, clothing, money: tribute, in other words.

‘No,' I told him. I knew I had him over a barrel. The rebels were relying on him and his friends to bring influential villagers over to their side. The price of failure was likely to be high. I set the lantern down in the middle of the floor and sat myself down in the room's only cane chair – I had been over the Malawi border and bought it for myself – with my AK-47 across my knees.

There was a lot of bluster to begin with. Sam's appeal to nostalgia – to the imaginary ‘good old days' before FRELIMO's uppity socialists took over – had served him in good stead in the past, and old habits die hard.

‘I think it is important – and I feel sure that an educated man like yourself will agree with me – that we should have the ear of the rebels, if only to barter for our own safety.' All week, stories had been flying around town: how the bandits were increasing in numbers; how they had hammered their way into Yelena Mlokote's house, brazenly, without fear of resistance; that they had taken everything of value away with them: goats, clothes, batteries, even a mirror in a metal frame.

‘Stop,' I said. He had become almost painful to watch. ‘Whose house, did you say?'

‘What?'

I couldn't conceal my irritation. ‘The goats and the mirror. Whose house?'

Sam blinked. ‘Yelena Mlokote's. What? Do you know her?'

‘I thought you said someone else,' I said, waving the matter away. I strung him on a while longer –
Tomorrow night, did you say? What should I bring? What should I wear? –
before kicking him out of my house.

The next day I borrowed Naphiri's bicycle and cycled out past parched fields of cassava and pineapples and neglected, overgrown shacks to Yelena Mlokote's house.

By local standards, it was a mansion: a brick house surrounded by cashew trees and mangoes; a paved path lined with herbs. It was isolated, though; much further from town than I had expected. There were other houses nearby, sprawled under the shade of the jacaranda trees, but most had been boarded up. Her neighbours had left, she told me, afraid of what RENAMO might do to them if they stayed. They were sleeping rough now, under the few surviving porticoes of Goliata's cement town.

‘And you?'

Yelena shrugged.

We were sitting in her kitchen. Walls of wood and iron sheeting; a cement sink for washing clothes – ‘only that I still go to the bathing pool to wash my clothes, so that I meet people.' The weird, finicky rhythms of her Chichewa disguised, for a moment, the fact that she had not answered my question.

She didn't bear much resemblance to her father. Until we got talking, I couldn't be sure it was her. She was attractive, in an ironed-out sort of way. She was pushing forty by then, and the recent famine had taken its toll.

She was damned if she was going to be kicked out of her home.

‘They took my radio,' she said. ‘I had three goats, they took the goats.'

‘For God's sake,' I said.

‘They went away,' she shrugged.

‘They'll be back.'

‘Samuel Calange is talking to them. The
curandeiros
are with them now, treating their injured. They are hungry, out in the bush.'

‘What are you saying?'

She was doing the only thing she could do. She was trying to come to terms.

‘Look,' I said. ‘There's room in my house for you. There's room with me.'

The clumsy fixes of white men: she shook her head and smiled.

It was wash-day, so we walked together to the stream that had once fed Goliata's municipal bathing pool.

While Yelena slapped the screwed whip of a
capulana
against a rock, to agitate it clean, and her baby boy Mateu, indifferent to us both, lay on his rush mat, waving his arms about as though conducting something difficult and modern, I sat dangling my legs over the edge of the old bathing pool, thinking through the chances that had led me to this place and moment. This opportunity.

The pool was dry. The pipe supplying it with stream-water had been smashed, and the pool's every decorative blue tile – fish, shellfish, seaweed, sailing boats, windmills – had been cracked. The bandits had demolished the changing blocks, too, which had once preserved the modesty of the planter and his children, the hairdresser and his family, the driving instructor and his wife: the petty white elite of a bygone Goliata. So that now, sitting here, we had a clear view down the hill, past the stubs of the changing blocks, right across Goliata, to the brown scar of the airstrip – and further yet, the air was so clean and clear today, over the Malawian border to the Mulanje plateau.

I watched Yelena wrap up her son in the
capulana
, which was quite dry now, from the fierce sun of that morning, and seeing her tie her son to her, I noticed the trembling of her hands. She gave Mateu a look of hopeless yearning.

‘What is it?'

She shrugged. ‘I am remembering a friend of mine,' she said.

I waited for more.

‘Come with me,' she said. ‘We will visit her grave. I like to visit her, to talk to her.'

She led me down the hill to the cemetery. By day there was nothing to fear. In one part of the cemetery there were stones raised for those whose manner of dying left no body to be buried. Yelena had raised such a stone for her husband:

JOSEPH ALEXANDER MLOKOTE
1951–1983

His dates saddened me. ‘He was so young.' He must still have been a teenager when Yelena married him.

‘He died driving a truck along the corridor,' she said.

Behind his stone lay a plot full of tiny graves, which I assumed at first must be the graves of stillbirths. Yelena corrected me: ‘They're for limbs,' she said.

The graves contained legs. Bits of feet. Knuckles of bone and sinew. There were so many little graves, so many piecemeal burials, I wondered where the cripples were. I had not see them on the streets.

‘They work their fields,' Yelena told me, leading me to a larger mound of earth: an adult burial. ‘What else can they do?'

‘What about the mines?'

‘What about them?'

I wondered if any cripples visited their own graves.

Then Yelena led me to the grave of her friend. There was no headstone. ‘Kesi,' she said, to the mound, ‘this is Saul. He was a friend of my father.'

I looked at Yelena. She smiled at me. ‘I do not know why he has come to visit us, but I can guess.'

I had expected to find her unprepared for our meeting; to have the
advantage over her.

‘Your friend,' I said, so as not to show the hit, ‘who was she?'

‘A nurse,' she said. ‘A citizen. According to her husband, she was six months pregnant when the
matsangas
attacked.'

I steeled myself. I was becoming familiar with the nature of these stories.

‘They tore it out of her womb and threw it into her hearth-fire. Saul.'

She took my hand.

From the swaddled shadows of her capulana, Yelena's son blinked at me.

‘You know,' she said, ‘I received your postcard. I know what brought you here. I know what it is you think I did.'

She walked me out of the cemetery and back up the hill to her house, and, as we climbed, she told me the tale of her brief, fatal involvement in world affairs.

‘It was never supposed to go off,' she told me.

A devil's alliance of PIDE men and tribalists opposed to RENAMO were already planning Katalayo's assassination. When news of the attempt filtered through to FRELIMO, Yelena, Jorge's alienated daughter, saw an opportunity to play
agent provocateur
and make a name for herself within the movement. Playing up her alienation from her father, she sent the cabal the encyclopaedias I had sent her, and gave them the idea for the book bomb.

‘You did this alone, of course.'

Yelena sighed. Apparently I was being boorish. ‘FRELIMO is a big organization. There are factions. Groups.'

This faction of hers figured it would be an easy matter to follow the British seaman entrusted with the device; easy to lift it from him in Lourenço Marques; easy to arrange its disarmament at the hands of an old KGB operative, who for long months now had been twiddling his thumbs in some redundant field station in Lourenço Marques.

‘So you were working for the Russians?'

Easy, once the bomb had been disarmed, to deliver it to her father: a present as harmless as it was terrifying.

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. ‘Why on earth would you attempt anything so stupid?'

Why? Because, once Jorge Katalayo had
survived
his assassination, FRELIMO's leadership – this was the theory – would have been shaken into a more radical agenda and a more positive alignment with the Soviet Union.

Katalayo's daughter spoke with the melancholy of someone who, after years of interior struggle, has made peace with herself.

The bomb should have been intercepted, she told me. It should have been re-routed and defused, before ever being delivered. Only that, in her haste to get away while her mark was sleeping, the woman they'd hired to steal the bomb from the British sailor forgot where she'd written down the KGB man's address. After an hour's fruitless wandering, in a panic, she abandoned the parcel on a park bench –

– where, seeing the package, an elderly Portuguese man (this is what Yelena wanted me to believe) picked it up. He recognized the address, he lived out that way himself, and that evening he stopped by to deliver it. He must have been taken aback when the addressee turned out to be a black man. Perhaps he thought Jorge was a servant…

I could stand no more. I shut her up: ‘You can't possibly know any of this.'

‘Not the last part, no. We can't know how the bomb left the bench and ended up in my father's hands. The rest we know.'

‘The woman who stole the parcel—'

‘She was telling the truth.'

‘You don't know that.'

Yelena threw up her hands. ‘What is the point of this?'

‘What was Jorge's address doing on the package in the first fucking place? It wasn't going in the mail.'

‘What is the point?'

The point, as far as Yelena was concerned, was that the bomb was meant to fail. It was supposed to manipulate and to frighten. It was not meant to kill. She touched my hand. ‘You know,' she said, ‘if I could turn back time, I would.'

Well, let her have her dream of redemption. What does it matter?

From the sheetrock interior wall of a summer house, fifteen miles north of Maputo, a twisted pin untwists.

Damp plaster seals the hair-line crack, as the pin corkscrews its way out of the wall, and takes flight.

It shoots past the door to the kitchen, from which comes the faint but unmistakable smell of leaking bottle-gas – one of those signature smells, inseparable from evenings spent in holiday cottages – past bookshelves stacked with Franz Fanon, Georgette Heyer and yearbooks stretching back a dozen years:
Who's Who in World Trade
; UN Factbooks for this region and that; missionary society directories. The books sit up as the pin passes them, at a speed approaching that of sound, accelerating all the time. The books straighten themselves, lining up on the white-painted shelves. From the second shelf up, a second pin unwinds from out the spine of
The Wretched of the Earth
, and, coming free, flies off.

And another, and another. From out of the twill of the rag rug they come, hurling themselves into the air. From out of the walls and the ceiling. From out of the back of the room's centrepiece. Someone's head: unrecognizable.

Outside, the sand-lions are undigging their traps. Puffs of sand gather and cone in the air, then fling themselves into the hole where each spider frantically unburies itself before the retreating tide. On BOAC's night run from Dar to Nairobi, grain factors and irrigation specialists, bankers and fertilizer salesmen, carefully unblend the tonic from their gin.

The sun has unrisen beneath Zanzibar. To the gathering roar – a great re-threading – shavings of aluminium wire rise in a cloud above the sand. The lethal cloud unshreds everything in its wake, leaf and
dragonfly and even bird. It hurls itself at the broken window – and sticks there, blasted and fused into a tight, mosquito-resistant grille, by a flash of pinkish light.

The bird unnotices the dragonfly.

In the room, at its precise mathematical centre, the unrecognizable head is repacking itself. The soft innards refold, suck up and re-smear their spilt lubrication; spit out stray shavings and turnings into the ever-faster, ever-hotter air. The head trembles. Vertebrae click and snap together. The meat within them turns from red to white. Sparks fly.

Julius at the door of his apartment in his slippers: ‘What now, Jorge?'

A letter from the Phelps Stokes fund.

His brand-new American girlfriend naked.