Night of Fire Page 5

  Vincent, Julian, Ross and I might have drawn closer, remembering those Athos days. Instead, insensibly, we cooled to one another, as if reluctant to see ourselves transformed out of that sunlight into the drab strictures of the seminary.

  In my mind, too, the memory of Ross’s blunder faded, and might have grown almost forgotten were it not for his own closure and silence. At lectures and workshops, as usual, he barely spoke; but in prayer services too, where he used to interject a fervent note of praise or wonder, I saw him shut away. He was always seated at the back now, and his face had the pallor of a mask behind which his real features had withdrawn. I think he purposely avoided me. He avoided us all. And my habitual reluctance to intrude on others, along with my own preoccupation with work, reproaches me still.

  Vincent too seemed restless. Once he came to my room, more gaunt and intense than usual, and reiterated that it was time to do God’s work in the field. The world’s people were spiritually perishing out there, he said, while we spent our time pondering the exegetics of the Mosaic covenant. ‘In the summer break,’ he suddenly asked, ‘will you join me abroad? It’ll be hot, Tanzania, and getting there expensive. But someone I know is working in a refugee ministry, and they need help.’

  I said unthinking: ‘What about Julian? I think he could afford it.’

  ‘He wouldn’t be able to stand it.’ Vincent laughed: his short, dry cough. ‘You would.’ He thrust out his hand for me to shake. I took it automatically, at once flattered and alarmed: it felt like a sealed promise.

  Neither of us mentioned Ross.

  Within two weeks the world outside had brightened into late spring. Daffodils appeared along the seminary lawns, and in the nearby streets the girls went in sleeveless dresses, with glimpses of distracting legs as they bicycled to work.

  In afternoon seminars we began to study pastoral theology. It was an undemanding course, taught by a sad-faced tutor whose stress on sacred duty was laced with droll jokes. I started to settle once more into an eventless routine, while the journey to Tanzania receded into the future.

  Then one morning somebody asked: ‘Have you seen Ross?’

  I realised that he had not attended morning service, nor breakfast. And now his seat in the lecture hall was empty. Julian motioned me to slip away and joined me outside Ross’s room. Its door was locked. We called his name, but our voices rang out unanswered, loud in the silence. I strained my ears for a murmur, a cry of sickness, or even from an overdose. But nothing came. Our knocking on the door became strident, finally weak. I think we both then knew what had happened. I wondered whether to call a teacher, but Julian shouted out once more, ‘Ross!’ and nudged the door with his shoulder. It didn’t give. He looked at me mutely, and the fear in his face chilled my blood. Then he said: ‘Shall we?’ and we rammed the door together.

  The lock snapped and it floated open. We froze in the doorway. For a moment I imagined that Ross was standing on his desk, fixing a light bulb. His head was turned away from us. Then I saw his feet touching nothing. The disturbed air from the open door began to turn his body, and we watched as he revolved to face us, like an accusation. I shut my eyes against his stare. The tip of one finger was caught in the wire noose, as if at the last moment he had changed his mind. We rushed to hold him up, but his body was heavy and cold. The hand that tapped against my cheek was cold too. He must have hanged himself early that night.

  This happened, of course, in another time, in a time of secrecy. Several years before I held Ross’s body in my arms – we cut him down with a pair of blunt secateurs – the Wolfenden Report had decriminalised the man he might have become. But the stigma of so-called perversion ran fathomlessly deep. Barely a century before, homosexual practice had been punishable by death. In Ross’s time, legal same-sex partnerships were still unthinkable, and gay culture not even a glimmer on the horizon. The Church clung to Leviticus, St Paul and the destruction of Sodom, and it would be fifty years before a gay partnership was sealed on consecrated ground. Ross was born too early, and too frail: one of those whom Oscar Wilde lamented when he wrote that the way forward would be red with sacrifice.

  In the seminary the shock was steeped in bewilderment. Ross’s sweetness and accessibility – people imagined him transparent – bathed him in an aura of innocence. His self-violence was all but inexplicable. Some students even imagined that he had hanged himself by mistake, or was the victim of a dementing disease. Others struggled with the lessons of the early Fathers, with the condemnation of St Augustine and even of Thomas Aquinas, and feared that a suicide, without chance of repentance, dies in sin. But I described to them Ross’s uplifted hand, plucking at the noose, and ventured a last-moment contrition for his act, that he continue in a state of grace. I tried vainly to imagine this. But most often I imagined his own terror as he consigned himself to the extinction in which he had said he believed.

  I never knew precisely how Vincent and Julian responded to the principal’s interrogation, or to that of the police. Julian had returned to his sometimes cryptic self, but was tinged by a new world-weariness, which might have verged on despair. I often wonder what became of him. Vincent continued as stringent and focused as usual, and perhaps only Julian and I recognised an undertone of pensive regret.

  For myself, when summoned to the principal’s office, I was overcome by a blind loyalty to Ross. I realise that I validated his shame by barely mentioning what happened on Athos. Facing the principal – a man in whom I expected no understanding – I baulked at all hypotheses. My naivety must have been obvious to him, but my resistance went undetected. I even felt sorry for him. But when he asked me: ‘Did you notice any change in Ross’s behaviour?’ I could only say yes. Something was afflicting him, I admitted. Something he found unbearable, that violated his faith. I felt too that he had a profound desire to be like others. Beyond that, I could not tell.

  The next question, which I dreaded, never came. Why didn’t you talk to him? Why didn’t I? Why didn’t I even broach it? Because I was young, and embarrassed, of course. People were, in those days. Perhaps I even feared it somewhere in myself. And I neglected Ross, banally, because I was struggling to understand divine command theory, and was falling behind with my essays.

  The principal always surprised me when he lapsed into sympathy. Perhaps it was only his appearance – that face of a wizened adolescent – that made me recoil. But suddenly he said: ‘This has been hard for you, Stephen. I know you and Ross were good friends. Now Vincent has asked me if he can take early leave this May. He wants to go to Tanzania, to something called the Pentecostal Church of Good Tidings. I don’t know this place. We can’t help you there. The people will be refugees from Rwanda. War refugees, Tutsis. He says you will go with him. Do you want that?’

  ‘Yes, I think so.’ I welcomed this now. I welcomed anywhere but here. ‘Yes.’

  I had never heard of the Tutsis, nor could I know that I was about to enter a region that thirty years later would be laid waste by genocide. For a minute before dismissing me the principal scribbled some notes on a pad. As I stood up to leave, I blurted out: ‘Has he gone to Hell, sir?’

  The principal looked suddenly very tired. ‘I can’t say. He didn’t give God much chance to forgive him, did he?’ Flippancy came unnaturally to the principal, but perhaps he simply wanted me to go. He mumbled without looking up: ‘The God you wish for is not necessarily the God that is.’

  These were words that rankled for a long time afterwards. I found them vaguely insulting, although I think he meant them kindly. Sometimes they intruded on my prayers.

  It was Howell who gave the sermon in chapel that Sunday, his bulk overflowing the pulpit. A month before, his sermon had never directly cited Bradley, but now he met Ross’s suicide head-on. His red hands massaged the pulpit’s rim. He looked flushed, almost angry. No one had the right to abrogate to themselves the power of God, he said. ‘For to God alone belongs the judgement of life and death.’ And the Sixth Commandment was as valid for the killi
ng of the self as it was of others.

  Whereas Bradley’s defection had aroused anxiety and latent anger, Ross’s death filled us all with diffused guilt, and the faces gazing back at Howell looked as tense and young as schoolboys’. They wanted comfort. But as his talk went on, Howell’s voice darkened into a different regret. Suicide, he conjectured, was rarely the crime of the grossly worldly. It tempted more delicate psyches, less suited to the world’s harshness. Ross, by all accounts, was such a man. There were those, even in the early Church, who took their lives to escape evil. Theirs was, in a way, a purifying act – a deliverance from the sins of others and perhaps of the self. (I wondered then if Howell had sensed more of Ross than he declared.) Nothing in the Gospels condemned suicide, he went on. Christ Himself had gone knowingly to his human death.

  What had begun as condemnation smoothed into compassion. God, who knew the death of a sparrow, would surely be careful of Ross. And who were we to judge? To judge him would be to repeat his own sin: to steal the divine prerogative. At the end, exhausted by his own oratory, Howell fell back on quoting Donne, leaning forward and glaring at us all, released at last into the tide of another’s words: ‘Thou knowest this man’s fall, but thou knowest not his wrestling; which perchance were such that almost his very fall is justified and accepted of God.’

  * * *

  The road was a ribbon of pink earth laid straight to the horizon. On either side the country undulated in shallow hills, blurred by yellow fescue grass. Here and there a shrub or acacia tree showed still green from the vanished rains, and left a silhouette in the haze. Even in the land’s dryness, the air felt humid. Our Land Rover bumped and groaned over the track. The driver sang soft Swahili songs. Whenever we stopped to stretch our legs, the silence crept in on us. There was no wind, and no birdsong. Everything was still.

  Neither Vincent nor I had known anything like this. The farthest south I had been was Greece, which had enclosed us in the stark divides of sea and mountain. But here the land might have been limitless. Close at hand it was broken into a low, shapeless confusion: hillocks peeled to a rose-coloured soil under the grass, and speckled with dying shrubs. But beyond, the whole continent appeared to wane into infinity. It was beautiful and alien. Range upon range of huge, static clouds overspread it, and looked as solid and permanent as anything below. It seemed a country that was waiting to become something, or that had long ago been so, then fallen asleep.

  We travelled like this for more than a hundred miles, exhausted already by the twenty-four-hour journey from Dar es Salaam, and by the dazing heat. Our throats were dry with dust. Once a herd of antelope shimmered and stopped in the distance, poised between curiosity and alarm. And once a rust-coloured patch of ground had been cleared before a group of huts, and a lone woman was walking beside the track.

  I watched this land with a feeling of detached release. Vincent must have felt the same. He said out of the blue: ‘We were right to come here.’ The claustrophobia of the seminary was starting to lift, replaced by this heartless and sanitising emptiness in which everything – grief, guilt – became lost and small. Even my remorse over Ross began to shrink into a kernel of shame which has never left me. Because of this guilt, I think, I never purely mourned him.

  We saw the refugee camp from a long way away. It swarmed unprotected over a plateau: a whole town of thatched mud dwellings, circled by a no-man’s-land of stubbled maize. We drove into it down streets split by gullies of waste water. The compacted ground glared red. Nothing was quite as I had expected. No children rushed to beg from us, and whatever tents had once composed the place had been redeployed to insulate its roofs or hung torn in the doorways. A gang of boys was playing in a clearing among the huts, kicking a football of scuffed rubber, and some women in brilliant skirts queued at a water pump.

  The Pentecostal Church of Good Tidings was built of clay like the rest, long and low and washed blue. Powdered in pink dust, we arrived to find the pastor waiting for us in its doorway. He may have been standing there for hours. He was a mahogany-skinned Rwandan, important in a dazzling white jacket, smiling welcome. But Vincent’s friend Alan was not here. He was recovering from malaria in another village, the pastor said, and would not return for a week. But we shouldn’t worry. In the dry season, malaria was rare.

  Our room was a neighbouring hut. Our beds were quilts laid on its clay floor. There was a single window, and no furniture. We would wash from an enamel basin filled from the nearby pump. Vincent was unperturbed, even perversely exhilarated. Later we were to hammer nails into the mud walls and suspend our mosquito net across. Our suitcases became our wardrobes. A huge padlock on the rickety door gave us some security.

  Walking in the early evening, we could barely compass the camp. Its alleys were compacted mud underfoot. The dwellings were thatched above lattices of sticks or corrugated iron, and our way was overhung with drying clothes and threadbare blankets. Barely a window showed. Four thousand people lived here, the pastor said, many of them widows and children. But there were young men too. Some remained listless under their makeshift porches, and watched us in calm enigma. Their unsmiling gaze began to unnerve me. They had witnessed unspeakable things. Perhaps they had also committed them. Others were walking in the streets, as if they had somewhere important to go, and sometimes came to clasp the pastor’s hands, even the older men calling him Papa. He answered them affectionately, with a tinge of self-importance, his white jacket shining among them like a lodestar.

  What were they wanting of him? Vincent asked.

  ‘They want to go home.’ The pastor’s English was deliberate, newly learnt. ‘They ask me for news. But I have no news.’ He frowned. ‘They wait. They do nothing. There is nothing to do. Maybe a little farming.’

  Vincent said: ‘But in the end they’ll go back?’

  ‘That is in God’s will.’ The pastor stared at the ground. ‘Some of us may never go back.’ He pointed behind us. ‘You see that building? That is United Nations. They feed us. We have just enough. Twelve kilos of maize per person per month. And cooking oil. No beans now, no sugar. They say we will be here for long haul. The Jesuits have made a primary school also. And there are four other churches. And a clinic, with nurses. But the hospital is three hundred miles away.’ He waved to the south. ‘God has not decided when we go home.’

  The people passing us were of near-uniform poverty. War and flight had all but levelled them out. But the women went in their bright native dress, and a few glittered with salvaged jewellery. Once an elderly man went by – a former civil servant, the pastor said – wearing a linen suit, with a white shirt and frayed tie, and talked to nobody.

  We ate in the pastor’s home that night. It was grander than most, its courtyard enclosed by a brushwood fence. He owned a Bush transistor radio and a broken sofa. We ate by the light of a paraffin lamp, squatting on the clay floor before a dish of boiled maize and a little spinach, which we scooped in our fingers. His wife served us in smiling silence, and did not eat with us. His adopted daughter – a twelve-year-old war orphan – stood in a corner and watched.

  They had inherited French Christian names – the pastor was Olivier – and French words seeped into his English. ‘But the Belgians abandoned us five years ago,’ he said. ‘They turned us against the Hutus, then left us. In my village everyone I know was killed. Even our church there, the Hutus come inside and kill us.’

  He did not say how he had escaped, and we did not ask. But he started talking about the camp in a vivid, guttural rush, and often laughed. Their troubles were all of idleness, he said. They had no work here, no future. So they took to adultery and theft. There was no electricity, nothing by night to show up crime and betrayal. Many families were headed by young widows, and some by teenage children. There were murders, which the Tanzanian police could never unravel. The camp would close against them.

  ‘The word “refugee”, it is a very ugly word. We are all ashamed. People take refuge when they are weak. But we Tutsis are not slaves
, we are un peuple fier. You will be with us six weeks, but many of us have been here five years . . .’

  That night, too tired to pray, somehow too tired to sleep, I stretched out on the thin quilt and gazed into the dark. Vincent lay a yard away, restless too. The air was cool and no mosquitoes whined around our nets.

  I said in the silence: ‘I don’t understand Olivier. He seems happy.’

  Vincent’s voice came back: ‘I don’t know what he is. I asked him how he counselled people wanting to return to Rwanda. And of course he said he counselled patience, that God has a purpose, that we are all part of God’s purpose. But I think he was laughing at me.’

  Outside, from the quietness of the camp, everyday sounds became unaccountable in the night: the faraway clatter of an enamel dish dropping on to a clay floor; the rustle of something close in the thatch, like a rodent stirring (but none would survive here). In the disembodying dark it was easier to talk to Vincent. I imagined his laser stare dissipating into nothing. After a while I braced myself to ask: ‘Do you think about Ross?’

  For a long time I thought Vincent would not answer. Then his voice said: ‘I worry about where he can be. He died in sin.’

  ‘I think he is with Our Lord,’ I said. (Strange to remember these words, after fifty years. Words uttered by another person, even then unsure.)

  Vincent said tautly: ‘Our Lord will be the judge.’ He sounded curiously like Olivier.

  I wanted to ask: Do you feel no regret? The way you moved Ross’s hand away, so cold, like the judgement of God . . .

  But then Vincent said: ‘Goodnight, Stephen.’