The Weight of Numbers (40 page)

I smiled at him, the way you smile at a big, angry dog.

From off his back he pulled an AK half as tall as he was. ‘Take off your boots,' he said, his finger tight on the trigger. He drove the muzzle into my windpipe. I grabbed it.

‘Let go of the gun,' he screamed.

I raised my hands.

The boy pushed the cold muzzle into my throat a second time, much, much harder. ‘If he doesn't give me his boots, can I shoot his head?'

‘Of course.'

‘What is this shit?' screamed the figure playing with our food. He got up into the middle of the feast and trampled it. He worked his way around every plate until he came to Sam. He did a little dance before Goliata's prospective mayor, kicking gobs of
nsima
porridge into his face. ‘Is this all you brought? We will kill them all, you piece of shit! We will crush their skulls!'

A couple of the kids started shooting into the air.

Sam opened his mouth to speak, to excuse himself, to apologize.
With a striker's precision, the hooded man kicked him in the mouth. Sam's head snapped back like a boxer's punch-ball. Bones snapped.

I got my boots off at last. The child kicked them away from me and lifted the AK off my neck.

Sam scrambled to his feet. He staggered about the cemetery, groaning, his hands under his jaw, holding it together.

The child adjusted his grip on the gun and brought it down on my head. He was about ten years old but the gun was heavy. My whole skull flexed. I must have passed out for a couple of seconds. Something wet landed in my ear. It felt as though the blow had torn my scalp away, above my right eye.

There was blood in my eyes, over my face and in my mouth. I had bitten through my tongue. I wiped the blood out of my eyes and caught a glimpse of the boy before the red flow blinded me again. He had rejoined his friends. He had his gun in one hand, my boots in the other. I wiped his spit from out of my ear.

Far behind us, down the hill, in the town, came a scream, then some shouting, and another scream, then some children screaming. The sound didn't stop. It swelled.

The feast in the cemetery had only ever been a ploy, to separate us. By reducing the number of menfolk in the town, they had made Goliata easier to attack.

I took off my shirt, wadded it up and pressed it tenderly to my head. Unable to see, I was forced to listen. There was very little gunfire in the cane town. Whatever the
matsangas
were doing, they were doing it with knives and clubs. The villagers' screams were running into each other now: one long, continuous death-squeal. With a loud concussion that forced my eyes open, an orange fireball rose above the town. I blinked the stickiness away and stood up. Beside the fire, muzzle-flashes illuminated the roof of Naphiri's concrete blockhouse. The earth-mover was on fire. I watched the rooftop guns sputter, and thought of the miserable, dull nights I had spent on that roof, armed with a gun I hated
and did not know how to use. One by one, the guns went out. Soon, smoke was pouring from the windows of the blockhouse.

Sam, wailing, blood pouring between his fingers, staggered towards the brow of the hill, fell against a gravestone and crumpled.

The hooded men wandered casually over to him. One grabbed him by the hair and pulled his head over the edge of the stone. Another sat on his legs, pinning him there. The third took out a machete and chopped his neck open. Then, muttering, blaming his tools, he tried to use his machete like a saw. The boys gathered round to watch.

No one was paying any attention to me. I edged away. The men at the gravestone separated and Sam fell to the ground. His head was still attached to his shoulders, but only barely. In the light of the
braii
we had lit together, preparing for the feast, Sam blinked at me. His tongue flapped uselessly. ‘Gah,' he said.

They brought him over to me. I turned to run, trod with my bare feet on a sharp stone, fell over and grazed my knees. They dropped Sam in front of me. The boy who had taken my boots fired a clip into Sam's neck to loosen the linkage there. The sound tore through my wounded head.

Once they got it off, they played football with it a while, then passed it to me. ‘Carry it,' they said.

By then it didn't look very much like Sam, or a head, or anything.

I picked it up.

‘Watch this.'

Two of us ran away in the night, another was shot trying to escape.

‘Look at this.'

Three collapsed under the loads they'd been given to carry and were shot through the head where they lay. The
matsangas
used the seventh, Naphiri, for demonstration purposes, working at her strenuously until long after she was dead.

‘Pay attention.'

We learned very quickly to obey the
matsangas.

‘Watch. Look at this.'

Whatever else it was, it was undoubtedly an education. Following their attack on the town on 15 October 1984, RENAMO soldiers had walked sixteen prisoners of war out of Goliata. Six weeks later, the nine of us who survived reached our journey's end.

The camp was not isolated. There were other RENAMO camps nearby, and even villages. Soldiers in misbegotten headgear rode downhill into camp on motorbikes, churned the site to a muddy slough and sped off again. Peasants walked uphill into camp, bearing food. Incredibly, once they had delivered their supplies, they were permitted to walk out again. The women weren't always so lucky, but among the girls forcibly ‘made women' by the bandits, some seemed to have won back their freedom. They walked out of camp in the morning, and back in again at sundown. I wondered after a while whether I too might not be free to go. They were not even teaching me how to kill any more. Most of my days I spent with about a dozen others in a chicken coop, my hands behind my head. At sundown, we were allowed to take our hands off our heads. An hour after that, we were allowed to lie down. At first light, they made us kneel again and after a breakfast of
nsima
, with occasionally a relish of turnips or rotten fish, they told us to put our hands on our heads again. It was as if, after the initial excitements, our captors had run out of imagination. After a couple of months, they weren't even making us kneel.

I leaned my forehead against the wire of the chicken coop, looking out. No one seemed to be paying the least attention to us. Maybe we were not prisoners at all. It might be all in our heads, now. It was the logic of the place.

It was not too difficult a puzzle, working out where we were. Only Gorongosa boasted so many RENAMO militia. Mount Gorongosa was RENAMO's headquarters in Mozambique, a mountain fastness the overstretched FRELIMO military could not possibly overrun, and dead
in the centre of the country, within easy striking range of the Beira Corridor. Only the Corridor could throw up the sort of spoils carried through our camp, uphill, to RENAMO's officer elite. Truck-loads of flour, crates of batteries, barrels of oil. Soldiers rattled back and forth in jeeps, in Toyota trucks, on motorbikes, on bicycles, even. They wore uniforms stolen from dead government troops. The uniforms often had tears in them, and terrible bloodstains. The soldiers grinned and strutted in the dead men's clothes, showing off their ‘wounds'.

The RENAMO command proper rarely came down from the mountain, and preferred to communicate by radio. They surrounded themselves with camps of bandits. The bandits, in turn, buffered themselves with kidnapped villagers. The displaced villagers must in their turn have come to some unspecified agreement with the locals living in the shadow of the mountain, because everybody on the mountain got fed sooner or later.

Every few weeks or so a new batch of soldiers would come dancing into the camp and slash at their chests with knives
– zsa! zsa! zsa! –
and a man on stilts and a stylized leopard mask rendered them immune to bullets by splashing their wounds with a secret herbal preparation. Men without hands would enter camp to beg from the men who had mutilated them. The old man who fed the chickens had a scar the width of my thumb running right across his throat. A scalped girl shambled from one side of the compound to the other with her broom, intent, it seemed, on sweeping away the very foundations of the houses.

Then, just as I was getting comfortable, they moved me down the hill and I was placed in one of the villages nestling in the shadow of the mountain. Rather than raze it, RENAMO had decided to control it. I limped after the village's
régulo
, up to a drab cement blockhouse in a dusty, unshaded lot behind the marketplace.

I asked, ‘What is this?'

He blinked up at me as though I were stupid. ‘It's a school,' he said. He showed me inside.

On the desk at the front of the immaculate room sat an unopened box. ‘What's that?' I said.

The
régulo
shrugged. No one told him anything. I opened the box. It was full of brand-new textbooks, printed in Maputo, ferried north at great expense, bound at one time for a place like Goliata. The books were another of RENAMO's spoils, plundered from some hijack on the Corridor.

I studied them. I turned to the
régulo
, incredulous: ‘You want me to teach from these?'

The
régulo
shrugged. ‘They're books, aren't they?'

Certainly they were books. History books, printed in Sweden, edited by an academic friendly to FRELIMO's socialist cause. There were whole chapters on Marx, Lenin, the evils of apartheid and the glory of the anti-colonial struggle. There was a foreword by FRELIMO's first president and chief political martyr, Jorge Katalayo.

I held my tongue.

Every day for the next seven years, RENAMO sent their children marching into school to have me teach them about Marx, Lenin, the evils of apartheid and the anti-colonial struggle. In all that time, no one ever questioned me or stopped me. Not the
régulo.
Not his minders. Not the dignitaries (RENAMO's honoured guests) who came by, once in a while, to witness the renaissance of learning in this liberated, liberalized, free-market corner of capitalist Mozambique.

They had never met a teacher before. They figured I knew what I was doing.

The walls of the old iron bathtub rise around her, white and smutted. It is early Tuesday morning, 30 August 1983, and Stacey is getting ready for the funeral of her last grandfather, her mother's father, Harry Conroy.

She lies in the bath, staring down at herself, lost in contemplation of the way the water has split her in two. There is the upper part of her: her knees, her chest and her head, of course, mustn't forget her unseen head; this is the tanned, air-breathing part. Then there is the other part, the bigger part by mass, her back, her bum, her feet and halfway up her calves: the pallid, aquatic part.

She lies there, a little shaky. She is fourteen years old and they are burying her grandfather, the man who stepped in when Mo was incarcerated, who for eight years has been a solid presence in her life. But she is fascinated, none the less, by the way she can will this change in her nature, transforming parts of herself by lowering and raising them in the water.

She dips her hand in, slowly, watching her fingers tilt as they enter this other world. It looks as though her fingers are broken. She knows this is refraction because they have been doing this in class. Light entering water changes course. Light always takes the quickest path, and water, being dense, is slow compared to air. So light changes direction, bends, seeking the quickest way through the water. Light is clever.

Her body is too gross a thing, too meaty and massive, to finesse the water this way. It lumbers through air and water the same, insensate, especially now that the bath has cooled to blood heat. Her fingers can barely detect the difference between the air and the water – only this
little tingle as her skin passes from one medium into the other. This trembling line like a blade held sensually, edge on, to the skin.

Her mother calls: ‘Are you out of the bath yet, Stace?'

‘Hang on!' Stacey shakes out of her reverie and reaches for the soap. Her mum says she spends too much time in the bath. It is one of those things that mothers say, but today is not a day to argue.

Stacey remembers how when she was little, for a special treat, Mo would let the bathwater run until it reached all the way up to her neck. She remembers looking down and thinking: this blue-green thing. It seemed amazing that this swimmy alien body was actually attached to her head.

Her name is Stacey Conroy. This is the name on her birth certificate, her mother's maiden name, the name she goes by at school. She does not like the name, and in her TV work she does not have to use it.

Stacey appears in advertisements, and has been doing so, off and on, since she was about six years old. Money has not been a motivation; Harry's wrestling promotion has expanded through syndication to the point where the two suits he employed to run it full-time don't even bother taking a salary any more. Stacey's own stock options – Christmas and birthday gifts from her granddad, held in trust until her twenty-first – will see her through college and long beyond.

Deborah, her mum, has not been pushy, either. If anything she has tried too hard to manage her daughter's expectations, discouraging her keenness for the camera. The push has come from Stacey herself. She loves dressing up. She has grown up among costumes, among capes and masks, the whirr of sewing machines, the sour flop-sweat smell of trailers and toilets and dressing rooms. She knows, and can identify by smell, every one of a hundred different make-ups, alcohol rubs, unguents and deep-heat preparations; let loose among the caravans on fight night, she has been found, come evening's end, wrapped in bandages like a mummy, in sequinned gloves and a padded sparring helmet several tens of sizes too big for her four-year-old head, weeping
with frustration because she has got herself inextricably tangled in some visiting fighter's Stars and Stripes cape.