AK Read online

  “I don’t understand.”

  “May you not. About this afternoon—everyone in Dangoum goes to sleep for two or three hours in the heat of the day. You don’t have to do that here, provided the air-conditioner doesn’t pack up, so I’ve got you some rock videos to look at. Then about four you could go out and look around. I’ll be back around seven—what would you like to do then?”

  “Can we go to the Hilton?”

  “If you want. Why?”

  Paul explained about Jilli. Michael laughed aloud, the way he sometimes used to in the bush.

  “Half the girls in Nagala are after her job,” he said. “Tell her she’ll be much better off learning to type. A good secretary can earn as much as a cabinet minister in this crazy place. Then tomorrow morning Peter can take you down to the market when he goes shopping. I’ll give you some gura to spend, and I’ll tell him to do a side trip into the shanties.”

  The videos passed the afternoon, slowly. Paul raided the refrigerator again and again, till he had drunk so much Coke he thought he would burst with bubbles. That you should somehow get cold out of heat, this heat—the kitchen wasn’t air-conditioned—was more magical than any elevator or gun. Later he went out and strolled down through the Old Town. The air was full of town smells, the streets just coming to life after the midday rest. Heat still lay on everything, weary and dusty, but laughter and argument rose from the dark innards of the houses, the bars were coming to life, snacks sizzling on the food stalls down the avenues. Paul watched a couple of police stroll up to one of these and chat affably with the food seller, who smiled and twinkled and nodded to them while she shaped a couple of paper bowls with deft fingers and ladled in rice and curry. They clapped her on the back like old friends and took the food without paying. The moment their backs were turned her smiles became angry mutters.

  That evening the dinner at the Hilton was more than Paul could eat, and more delicious than he could have imagined. The waitresses were all quite as pretty as Jilli. The head waiter, who’d hovered and smiled all through the meal, was startled and a bit affronted when Michael insisted on paying. He was used to important government officials wanting to be fed for nothing. Michael sighed when Paul told him about the policemen at the food stall.

  “You can change the laws,” he said. “That’s easy. But how can you change whole ways of life? You were right about Switzerland, by the way.”

  There’d always been a market in Dangoum, Michael said. Even before the British had built the town there’d been two or three stalls there, selling salt from the Flats and the dried bodies of yellow lizards to be used in anti-witch charms, and things like that. The aquifer had been just a conical hole in the ground then, with a muddy pool at the bottom, but it was the only water in the Flats so two trade routes had crossed there.

  Now a blind man using his ears could have found the market from a mile away. The noise was as loud as a battle. Most of it came from an enormous sound system, loudspeakers hoisted onto the trunks of a group of old palms near the centre and belting out music full volume all day long. An old man with no legs sat beneath the trees to change the tapes. He was stone deaf from the drumbeat. Around the palms was a wide space, several hundred yards square, filled with stalls. Some of them had their own sound systems, playing different music. Others simply added to the noise with the shouts of the traders and the cackle and bray of animals. Doctors thrust bottles of coloured stuff under the noses of passersby and bellowed about cures. Beggars wailed prayers. Over in the metal-smiths’ section the clatter of hammers was loud enough to drown the music from the main speakers—the noise was a sort of element, like air itself. You felt that if it had stopped the market would have died, unable to breathe.

  Peter threaded his way through the racket, buying what he wanted at half a dozen stalls, haggling for minutes over the odd gura. They came out on the far side of the market, which must once have been sited at the edge of the town, because now beyond it stretched the shanties.

  “Can’t think why the boss wants you to see this rubbish,” said Peter. “All just deadbeats and no-goods from now on.”

  He strutted along a winding track between tiny shacks, patched together from anything the builders could lay hands on. The morning was hot by now and the air stank. There were no drains. Most huts had reeking latrines, but elsewhere human dung dried in the sun. Lean dogs nosed around. One had evidently died and a dozen kites were squabbling over the body. And everything, the huts, the dung, the dogs and kites, the listless people, was covered with a thin grey film, the salty dust of the Flats on which the shanties were built, endlessly stirred by human movement and endlessly settling again. In the old days, Michael had once told Paul, when a Naga was dying the witch doctor would paint the sick body all over with ash and have it carried to the compound around the spirit house so that the blind spirit could find its way to its new home. The grey dust was like that ash. The shanties were that compound. All these tens of thousands of people were just waiting to die.

  There was no space between the huts. They were crammed tight together. They spilled out into the roadways, often blocking them down to a narrow footpath.

  “Old Chichaka, he used to send the bulldozers through,” said Peter. “Clear the roads, see? This new government’s too soft for that.”

  “Why do they have to build so close? There’s plenty of room on the Flats.”

  “Got to be near the stand-pipes, see? Government can’t put water in for all this trash, all over the Flats. Show you.”

  He led the way to where a line of people waited their turn to fill their containers—plastic flasks, jerricans, net-slung gourds, and pots—at a single tap. There was no jostling, no teasing, no anger. Dully they waited in the broiling sun. Even the babies slung at their mothers’ hips were filmed with the death dust. Paul could see in their faces, in their gestures, in the way they stood, that they knew nothing good was going to happen for them from now on, ever. Full of hope they had left their starving villages, made it somehow across the terrible Flats to Dangoum and the promise of a new, rich life, and this was what they’d found. Paul was glad when Peter asked if he’d seen enough.

  Just beyond the edge of the shanties Peter said “Wait here,” and darted into a dark doorway. The house had no windows onto the street. Paul settled into the shade of its wall. After a few minutes a couple of men came out the door and strolled off, glancing at Paul as they passed. Their eyes rested on him for half a second longer than seemed natural, as if they weren’t just noticing him, but looking at him on purpose. Paul wasn’t bothered. Peter was obviously vain of his job with Michael, and must have told everyone he was showing the great man’s son around Dangoum, but if so why hadn’t he taken Paul into the house with him to show off still further? The men had worn jeans and blue T-shirts with notes of music stencilled on, and a little later another three went into the house, wearing the same uniform.

  “Some kind of rock group?” he asked when Peter at last emerged, but Peter just laughed.

  During the war it was the sort of episode he would have reported automatically on returning from a mission, but Michael didn’t get home till after midnight, and anyway the war was over.

  The next few days passed dully. Paul found the most amusing thing was to go back to the market and wander around, looking and listening. Michael approved of this. “Best thing about Dangoum,” he said. “We’re encouraging it all we can. For me it’s a kind of symbol—it’s what I want for Nagala, that life, that energy, that freedom.”

  He gave Paul money to spend. Paul bought a few tapes, and a hunting knife, and had his fortune told by a magic-man who smoked squares of glass over a greasy lamp and peered at the sun through the swirled shapes for messages. Paul was going to be rich and lucky and have five wives and a big Ford car. On the third morning he heard rising above the standard racket an even greater uproar and made his way toward it. The noise came from the barbers’ area, a
space with a few orange crates for customers to sit on, some cracked mirrors, and boards pasted with faded photographs of hair styles. Two of the barbers had quarrelled and were now circling each other in a half crouch, cutthroat razors in their hands, spitting insults and challenges while their customers waited half shaved and the watchers roared them on. A couple of market police with their long truncheons lounged up and stopped to see. The fight never reached bloodshed because one of the deserted customers, a large, calm-looking man in a European suit, tired of the fun, rose from his crate and seized his barber from behind by his left ear and his razor wrist. The other barber, spotting his chance, rushed in to slash at his enemy, but the customer booted him contemptuously in the stomach and he doubled up and dropped to the ground while the customer dragged his own barber away to finish his shave. The audience laughed and cheered.

  The laugh at Paul’s elbow was so like Jilli’s that he swung around, expecting to find her there, but instead it was a different Fulu girl, two or three years older and in European clothes, but with her hair done into a Fulu topknot and with tapering hands like Jilli’s.

  “Hello there,” he said in Fulu.

  Her eyes widened, and she answered in the same language.

  “Sorry,” he said, “that’s all the Fulu I know. Where did you get these clothes?”

  She looked down at her orange satin blouse, tight jeans, and high-heeled silver shoes, showing them off to him.

  “What’s that to you?” she said.

  “Only I’ve got to go back to Tsheba next week, and there’s a friend there I’d like to take a present for. She’s not quite as big as you.”

  “What’s her name?”

  Jilli’s full name was her own and then her mother’s and then her grandmother’s and so on. He told the girl as much as he could remember. She laughed.

  “Sounds funny from a Naga,” she said. “Okay, let’s go and look. You got some money?”

  They chose a purple blouse for Jilli, good jeans, and purple shoes to go with the blouse, and a wide gold belt. Paul bought a silver belt for the girl for helping him. It was nice to have something to spend Michael’s money on.

  Michael bellowed with laughter when Paul showed him the clothes, and Paul laughed, too, and tried to explain but that only made Michael laugh still more.

  On the fifth day, early in the morning, they drove to the airport and boarded a light plane, taking their bush clothes and a haversack of stores and Michael’s big new camera. The sun had not yet risen as they taxied for takeoff, but they roared up into its light with Dangoum still in shadow below. The pilot took the plane on a wide circle around the town, gaining height as he did so. Paul gazed down at the sprinkle of lights, still just visible in the dawn shadow, until the sun’s rays shot across the plain and drowned them. From up here you could see the whole pattern of the city, as the British had planned it, with Boyo’s palace glittering in the middle, surrounded by the ring of high rises, and the avenues radiating out like spokes through the checker-pattern roofs of the Old Town.

  When the plane headed west Paul craned to watch the landscape wheeling below. They were following the line of the railway, so it was easy for him to get his bearings and fit it all into the map of Nagala which he carried in his head. They finished with the Flats and roared along above the endless bush. After a while Paul tapped Michael on the shoulder.

  “Look,” he said. “That’s where the war ended. That’s where I buried my AK.”

  “Could be. It’s big country, though—easy to get things wrong.”

  “No, look, over there, the passing place for the trains. That’s where we were heading to attack.”

  “Yes. You’re right. If we could have looked into the future that day we’d have seen ourselves flying over right now.”

  Later still the note of the engine changed as the plane drifted lower. It circled, rose, came down farther on, and circled again. The pilot saw what he’d been looking for, made a thumbs-up sign, and put the nose down. They landed bumpily on a strip of cleared ground and climbed out into the familiar dusty heat of a bush morning. Paul took huge lungfuls of the clean, dry air. His nostrils crackled with the pleasure of it. He was home.

  Three men came running across from where they’d been waiting in the shadow of a grove of umbrella thorns. They carried hunting spears and wore nothing but tattered khaki breeches. The one in the middle was Papp. He threw his arms around Michael and hugged him and laughed aloud while Michael laughed, too, and slapped his back. Michael and Paul shook hands with the other two men, who were Papp’s half brothers but spoke no Naga or English. The pilot joined them and they opened some of their stores and ate. Papp’s brothers were suspicious of the city food, but kept the cans to use. Together they turned the plane around and watched it take off, then trekked away to meet the rest of Papp’s clan.

  Three wonderful days followed, just like the war but without the tiredness and tension. They woke in the crisp dawns and breakfasted, and then one of the bush people would guide them off to find a good place by a water hole or feeding ground where they could lie up through the heat of the day and watch the comings and goings of birds and animals and insects, and take photographs. On the second afternoon they joined a hunt, tracking a group of wild pig and surrounding the stand of bitter grass where they were resting, setting fire to the dried stems, and spearing the piglets as they broke cover, everyone screaming with the joy of the hunt lust. A feast that night around a huge fire, and singing, and the buttock-swinging dances of the bushmen.

  On the morning of the fourth day Papp took Michael and Paul alone to a different part of the bush and showed them a large tree, almost dead except for a few dark spear-shaped leaves at its twig ends. Everywhere else the gaunt silver-grey branches were festooned with the nests of weaver birds. Papp made the other two wait fifty yards off while he crawled to the tree and knocked his head against the trunk and chanted and drew signs with his bush knife in the earth between the spreading buttresses that led down to the roots. Some of the lumps among the branches didn’t look like nests, more like bits of carcass a leopard might have dragged up there, but not that either.

  “It’s his ancestor tree,” said Michael. “The clan puts things up there for the ancestors to look after.”

  “But Papp’s a Christian.”

  “He says if our Lord had lived in the bush he’d have needed an ancestor tree. Look, isn’t that an AK?”

  He pointed. Squinting into the strong light Paul saw the familiar barrel and foresight protruding from a fork.

  “He’s made his war history,” said Michael. “That’s what we’ve all got to do.”

  “How do you tell people?”

  “Any way you can. You have an amnesty, and you pay them to bring their guns in. Then you make it a crime to own one, and catch a few people and give them stiff sentences so everyone gets the message. Then you have another amnesty and try again. It’s not been going too badly. I don’t think there’s a lot of guns left in Dangoum.”

  When Papp came back to them he said nothing, but led them off to the airstrip, where they ate and talked while they waited for the plane.

  “Tell Francis my prayers are for him,” said Papp. “Tell him to work hard.”

  “I don’t have to tell him,” said Paul.

  “I’ll arrange to get him flown down to you next holiday,” said Michael. “I’m sorry I didn’t think of it this time.”

  “If he wants to come. But maybe it would be better if he forgot me. He can’t belong in this kind of life. He’s going to be a great man.”

  “Even great men need something behind them,” said Michael. “Something they can reach out and touch with their minds and know it is real, basic, uncorruptible. Don’t you think?”

  “You think Malani has that?”

  “Malani isn’t a great man. He was a good military leader, but peace is too complicated for him.”
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  “I think the NDR is having too much say. You’ll have to do something, or we’ll lose what we fought for.”

  “Arrangements are being made. We’ve got to get this OAU heads meeting out of the way. Then you’ll see.”

  Papp nodded slowly.

  “Year ago you were eating porridge with me in the bush,” he said. “Now you’ll be banqueting with the heads of the Organization of African Unity. Sounds just as dangerous.”

  “Everything is a risk—doing nothing as much as taking action. There’s the plane.”

  Papp rose and moved out into the sunlight, shading his eyes and peering at the eastern sky.

  “You didn’t hear any of that,” said Michael.

  “All right,” said Paul.

  “Before you go I’ll give you a packet, just money and an address. Maybe a password. I won’t say anything about it then, because I’m not sure I can trust Peter. I don’t want to fire him now—if he’s innocent it wouldn’t be fair and if he’s spying on me it will alert his bosses. What do you think of him?”

  “I don’t know. But that day he took me to the market —on the way back from the shanties he told me to wait while he went into a house. I would have told you, only I thought it was something to do with some kind of music group.”

  “Why?”

  “The men who came out of the house were wearing shirts with music notes on them.”

  “Blue T-shirts?”

  “Yes. What does it mean?”

  “Deathsingers. Chichaka set up a sort of private army of hooligans to beat up anyone in Dangoum who was giving him trouble, so it didn’t look as if the police or army were doing it, though everyone knew they were working close with the DDA. Secret police. You’ve got to have secret police. We’ve kept the DDA going. Weeded them out, of course, but it’s still a problem keeping them in control. They should have known that Deathsingers were going about openly in the Old Town. Perhaps they did know.”

  “Is it bad, Michael?”

  “Just a bad sign. But at least I now know where I am with Peter. What you’ve got to do is listen to your radio. If things go badly wrong people may come and pick you up, then try and use you to put pressure on me. So be ready. Make plans. Get Francis back here to Papp if you can.