AK Page 3

  When the rains ended the camp started to break up, and the Warriors were sent to new schools in their own tribal homelands, where these were known. Michael came out especially to talk to Paul about his future. He picked him up in his own Land-Rover, with a uniformed driver and a uniformed guard in the back seat. Both carried AKs. As soon as they were out of sight of the camp the Land-Rover stopped, the driver moved to the backseat, and Michael drove on out into the bush. He stopped on the crest of a low hill, right up on the skyline, a target for miles. That didn’t matter any more.

  The soldiers stayed in the car and smoked and listened to Radio Dangoum while Michael spread a picnic out on a flat-topped rock. They ate with their legs dangling over its edge, looking northeast across the Oloro valley with its belt of lush green forest to the bush country beyond, green too after the rains, but by next month back into its dry-season colour, the colour of lions. Michael ate only a few mouthfuls, then lit a thin cigar and smoked, gazing out over the valley.

  “So short a season,” he said. “In Europe it’s green nine months of the year. A lot of the fields are green all winter.”

  “But the snow is white?” said Paul. “Really white?”

  “Didn’t snow at all the winter I was there. You want snow you’ve got to go to Switzerland.”

  “Switzerland where the money’s going?” said Paul.

  “What money? Who told you that?”

  “Just joking in the camp. About we get up the taxes and pass the money to the NDR so they can send it to Switzerland.”

  “Not true,” said Michael.

  He stubbed out his hardly smoked cigar and tossed it down the slope.

  “Next time you hear this,” he said, “tell them it’s not true. Tell them from me, Michael Kagomi.”

  “I can tell them the NDR are okay?”

  “Didn’t say that. Just we’re getting them tied so they can’t get their hands in the mealie bag, the way da Yabin let them. Who’s been starting these stories, d’you know?”

  “Just talk. Comes from nowhere. Like water in the river.”

  “River comes from somewhere. How many left in your school now? It was getting on two fifty when Malani came.”

  “Bit under a hundred left, maybe.”

  “What did you make of them? Get on with them all all right? Some of them had had a really rough time, you know.”

  “There’s a few of them act like they were dreaming—bad dreams, like I used to get, only they’ve got them all the time. They’re in a special class and there’s a nun who tries to help them. There’s some just had it tough. I’ve got a friend—his name’s Quaab—his commando wasn’t like ours, more like government soldiers. If the men found women or girls in the bush they’d rape them soon as look at them, and then just leave them. If they couldn’t get women they took the Warriors to bed with them. I didn’t guess how lucky I’d been, finding you, till I talked with Quaab.”

  Michael nodded and sat silent.

  “There’s another lot, call themselves the Leopards,” said Paul. “They act like the war wasn’t ended. They come marching into class like as if they were on drill parade. I tried to get talking with one of them once when I got him alone—mostly they go around three or four together. I got a feeling he’d like to talk, but he didn’t. Made no difference—next day he’d been knocked about. None of them said anything to me. Just looked.”

  “What do they say in political classes? You have political classes?”

  “Mondays and Thursdays. They don’t say a thing, just sit yawning. They’re all Baroba, and they talk Baroba among themselves, but it isn’t just that.”

  Michael took out another cigar, lit it, and drew silently on the smoke. Just another change from the war, when three men would share a cigarette, stubbing it out between puffs so that it would last longer. Cigarettes were still short in the camp, but Michael seemed to have cigars to throw away.

  “Yeah,” he said. “You get that after a revolution. These kids are just copying their men. There were some real hard-line Maoist groups up among the zinc mines. Now they think whatever settlement we’ve got isn’t enough and they want to go on fighting. Let them have their way and you’ve got Cambodia.”

  Paul didn’t know about Cambodia, so he just nodded. Michael took a pad out of his pocket and made some notes.

  “They’ll have seen you come out with me,” he said. “Maybe you’d best keep clear of them till I’ve got you shifted—that’s what I’ve come to talk to you about.”

  “Provided it’s near you.”

  Michael shook his head.

  “I’ll be mostly stuck in Dangoum,” he said.

  “Aren’t there any schools there?”

  “Sure, but it’s not where I want you. Two reasons. For a start you’d hate it. Dangoum’s got everything wrong a city can have wrong, flat and hot and stinking. Right in the middle there’s the stupid great palace Boyo had built for himself, and around that there’s a few decent buildings, modern high rises, and around that there’s what’s left of the town the British built, all tatty and broken up, and around that there’s the shanties. You should see the shanties. It’s happening all over Africa. You get farmers on the land but there’s never enough land and anyway the living’s dirt poor, so they head for the city looking for a better living. Of course they don’t find it, but they don’t go back home and new ones don’t stop coming, so the city grows and grows till it’s millions of poor people with nothing to live on. Then the government has to keep food prices down to stop the riots, and to do that they squeeze the farmers, so the farmers can’t make a living and decide to head off for the cities, and meanwhile the economy gets shot to hell and the foreign debts go up and up … at least in Dangoum we’ve got the Flats to make getting there difficult, but people are still coming across somehow. We’ve got to stop it. And for that we’ve got to set an example, not fetching our own families in all the time.”

  “And I’m your family.”

  “That’s right, and I’m going to do the best I can for you. That’s the second reason. We’re planning to start some special schools for the most promising kids, and we’re deliberately not putting them in Dangoum. We’re spreading them around the country. Where do you think your home is, Paul?”

  “I don’t know. Wherever you live, I suppose.”

  “A twelfth-story apartment in a Dangoum high-rise?”

  “Then my home is the bush.”

  “That’s over. What I’m trying to tell you is you haven’t got a home yet, though you will have one one day. But for the moment I’m not doing you any wrong if I ask you to go to school at Tsheba, up beyond the marsh country.”

  “In Fulu!”

  “And while you are there you will learn Fulu, and how the Fulu live and what their needs and hopes are, and Fulu children will go south into Naga and east into Baroba and learn about them. And at the same time the people of these countries will feel that they can trust the other tribes, because the other tribes are trusting them with their children …”

  “I’m going to be a kind of hostage?”

  Michael sighed.

  “If things go very badly it may come to that,” he said. “Tsheba will be a good school, Paul. An Italian aid group is paying for the buildings. There will be good teachers … You know, I’m beginning to think it was a mistake at Independence calling this country Nagala. We should have given the others a look-in.”

  “There’s a lot more of us Nagai.”

  “You’re not Naga, Paul.”

  “Don’t know about my own people. I’m your son now.”

  “Well, I’m not Naga either. I’m Nagala. Anyway, I’m asking you if you will go and get your schooling in Tsheba, among the Fulu.”

  “Will I know anyone there?”

  “There’ll be some from the camp school, certainly. From our own commando just you and Francis.”r />
  “Is Papp in the government too?”

  Paul was surprised. Papp had been Francis’s uncle, but he’d never been interested in politics. He was important in the commando because he was the best tracker and really understood the bush, but he was fighting because government troops had cut down the tree where the ghosts of his ancestors nested in the form of weaver birds, and when the clan had tried to stop it the soldiers had murdered them.

  “Papp’s gone back to the bush,” said Michael. “He’ll be useful there, for explaining things to his people. But Francis is a very bright boy, which is why we want him at Tsheba. If things go right for him he will be Prime Minister one day. The Right Honourable Dr. Francis Papp, Prime Minister of Nagala.”

  Paul laughed aloud at the picture of little Francis, with his round, still baby-like face, standing among his grown-up ministers and telling them what to do. Michael laughed too.

  “If you were my actual son,” he said, “I would simply tell you to go to Tsheba, whatever you thought yourself. As it is I can only ask you. You must choose.”

  Paul didn’t hesitate.

  “My name is Paul Kagomi,” he said. “I am your son. I will go to Tsheba.”

  The school looked southward over the marshes. Behind it, to the north, lay hundreds of miles of stony desert. Sister Mercy had a photograph of the desert in flower, sheets of garish pink and yellow and purple, but that only happened about once in seven years when a rain-belt went off course and strayed up from the southwest. Then the desert flowers would grow and flower and set seed inside six weeks, and the seeds would bury themselves among the scorching pebbles and wait for the next chance rains. At other seasons not even Papp could have lived more than a few days there.

  In front of the school, eight miles away, lay the great marsh basin. The Oloro flowed into it from the south and the Tan and the Djunga from the east, and there their waters lay and mingled and steamed among the reed beds and then somehow, imperceptibly, found their way west and became a river again, still called the Djunga, which flowed toward the ocean. At its point of outflow it was half the size of any of the three rivers where they flowed in. All the rest of the water, eighty-five percent of it, Sister Mercy said, had gone up in steam.

  There was a picture of how the school would look when the Italians had finished building it, like a low, sparkling white cliff with sheets of glass beneath its overhangs, just below the ridge of the gentle slope of hills with which the desert ended. Meanwhile the children lived and were taught in tents again. But now they had proper exercise books, and printed books to read from, and calculators and geometry kits and a microscope, and two battery-powered computers (which didn’t like the humid heat from the marshes so only worked some of the time).

  Paul was not completely pleased to find that little Francis had been promoted into his class after the first two weeks and was sitting beside him. It took him another few days to realize he was lucky Francis hadn’t been sent on still higher. Francis didn’t seem to find anything difficult, and loved the schoolwork, partly because he was so good at it but partly, Paul guessed, because filling his mind with it helped him forget the horrors he’d seen. (Unlike Paul he seemed to remember things right back to when he was almost a baby.) He missed Papp too. Some of the other boys resented knowing that someone so young was cleverer than they were, and said cruel and stupid things to him. Paul found him crying one day and tried to cheer him up by telling him what Michael had said.

  “If you’re going to be Prime Minister,” he said, “you’ll need a bodyguard. I’ll do that.”

  “My thanks,” said Francis, totally serious.

  “I’m not going to do it forever, mind,” said Paul. “When I stop school I’m going to be a game warden in a National Park.”

  About half the children were Nagai, a third Baroba, and the rest from other tribes, except Fulu. They all learned English, and the three main languages, which they were supposed to practise on each other, but because there were no Fulu in the school a bus took them down twice a week to the Strip, so that they could team up with Fulu children and practise there.

  The Fulu Strip. This was the name the English had given the belt of rich land between the marshes and the hills. To Paul it was the most extraordinary place he had seen. So many people! Such cramped, reeking, bellowing, busy, secret lives! Such work! Paul used to think that the camps were crowded, after the stealth and emptiness of life in the bush, but they were nothing compared with the Strip. When he’d seen pictures of New York or London or Tokyo in magazines he’d tried to imagine himself living in a big, rich city, but in its own way the Strip seemed stranger. Maps marked the Fulu territory as reaching back into the desert, and right across the marshes, and down into the jungly country to the west, but more than nine tenths of the Fulu lived along the Strip.

  Near Tsheba it was only a few miles across, but east and west it widened into a plain, patterned green or yellow or almost black, according to whether the crops were growing or ripe, or the soil had just been dug and sown for yet another crop in the tiny, crazy-shaped fields. The land was too precious to build on, so the Fulu houses with their round sharp-pointed reed roofs fringed the Strip on both sides, some along the lowest slopes of the hills but many more on stilts in the water.

  At dawn the Fulu left their houses. The children herded the buffalo into the marshes while the adults worked in the fields through the daylong, reeking, fly-buzzing haze. The Fulu boast that they are the best farmers in Africa. They need to be. Jilli’s family, where Paul and Francis went to practise Fulu, owned shares of five separate fields. In a normal year a field would grow three crops, but they took turns with their co-sharers, which meant they were entitled to seven crops in all. They needed between five and six to live on, so if no crop failed they had food to sell. If one failed they were all right. If two failed they were a bit hungry. If three failed they began to starve.

  Jilli was a girl, a bit younger than Paul. Like all the Fulu she seemed from a distance to be a strange, pale yellowy grey, but meeting her close you saw that this was because her whole body was smeared with a fine clay paste. She wore no clothes except for a grass belt with an apron of blue and white beads. Every fifth day her mother washed and scraped all the old paste off and put on a fresh layer next day. Between pastings she had to stay indoors or wear a special red blanket wrapped around so that only her eyes showed. If a man were to see her body without its paste, either she’d have to marry him or else her father would have to pay him to set her free. Sister Mercy said that the Fulu did get malaria, but not as badly as most people. Living so close to the marshes for generations they’d built up immunities, but the clay was supposed to help too. (Paul and the others were made to smear themselves with mosquito repellent before they went down to the Strip.)

  Jilli’s father saw no reason why his daughter should speak anything but Fulu, so the school paid him to let her stay at home and talk to the boys. Jilli herself, without telling her father, wanted to learn both Naga and English, so that in two years’ time, just before he was due to choose a husband for her, she could run away and become a waitress at the Dangoum Hilton. So mostly they talked Naga, sometimes guiltily slipping back to English. Francis had actually wanted to learn Fulu, but Paul and Kashka had overruled him. Fulu was much too difficult, all cooings and twitterings. At least Naga and Baroba had the same shape of sentences and a lot of the same-sounding words.

  Kashka was the other member of the team. He was Baroba, and back at camp he’d been one of the Leopards, but separated from the others he was forced to be a bit more friendly. He was two years older than Paul, with the very black skin colour and narrow face most Baroba seemed to have. He never smiled.

  Kashka already knew enough Naga to get by, and he wouldn’t have taught the other two Baroba if Francis hadn’t insisted and got Paul to back him, but that was up at the school. On Fulu mornings the bus would drop them by the roadside and they’d file alon
g a path by an irrigation ditch to Jilli’s part of the straggling village, and then across a creaking gangway over the black marsh mud to the first house. The houses were mostly empty now, with everyone out in the fields or the marshes, but if there was anyone at home they would call out, and Francis would answer with the proper Fulu greeting and the person inside would call back, giving the boys permission to use the narrow walkway which ran around the edge of each house to the next gangway. Jilli’s house stood right out over the water. They’d find the old blind grandmother sitting in the doorway and Francis would greet her and she’d reply, and then Jilli would come smiling out and lead them with her long-legged strut around to the platform on the far side of the house, where they’d sit all morning practicing their English and looking out over the steamy marshes.

  Behind them the endless noise of the Strip flowed on, the wheeze and clack of bucket wheels lifting water from the ditches, the flop-flop of winnowing, the slower thud of corn being pounded down to meal, the cries of ploughmen to their buffalo teams, and the lilt of other voices calling the news and gossip from field to field. The Fulu didn’t need to shout. They used a kind of yodelling note which carried a long way. Dr. Gonzales, who organized the language visits, said that a really juicy piece of news would get from one end of the Strip to the other, eighty miles away, in less than a morning.

  For Paul’s last birthday Michael had given him a radio. (It wasn’t his real birthday—nobody knew when that was—but the anniversary of that day when a small boy, starving, wild as a jackal, had been caught stealing some of Michael’s porridge meal while he slept.)

  “Listen to the BBC World Service,” he’d said. “Here, or if the signal’s bad try here. I’ll send you the times of the English lessons, but you listen to anything else you can find.”

  Paul took the radio to Jilli’s house for their visits, and during the English-by-radio programs they’d mouth the sentences together. Sometimes they’d get the World News, and understand bits of it. Francis would have listened to anything—science, medicine, arts programs, politics—even when the names and places meant nothing to him. He had only to hear a word once and he could use it.