Night of Fire Read online

In these few days I had lost control over what was happening to me. My haggard features repelled me in the mirror. I continued to teach Bible classes, but the faces that confronted me seemed more mysterious than before, as if they understood things that I had forgotten. I walked compulsively, but hoped to meet nobody I knew. Often I went with my eyes on the ground, like those unnerving youths who tramped the streets unsmiling. Sometimes the orphan Raphael tried to accompany me, folding his hand into mine, but he had taken to whispering, ‘Papa, Papa!’ at me in a mantra that seemed to comfort him, but to mock me.

  Only once or twice, during this numbed penance of my walking, something shocked me into fear or pity. One such sight has never left me. Perhaps they were among those whom Chantal said were kept from view, in case they brought a curse on the community. I saw a small girl leading an old woman, whose hand clutched her shoulder. The woman walked with the short steps of a frightened child; the child with the hunched anxiety of the old. Both of them were blind. They groped their way along the street, ignored. Nobody knew why they were blind, or what atrocity their eyes had last witnessed. But I watched them from a well of despair, because I knew that in this darkness they were for ever inconsolable, and that no faith could heal them.

  All my life I have been prone to romanticise suffering. It has sometimes led me into impetuousness, then retraction and even betrayal. When I knocked at Chantal’s door next day, there was no answer. But I knew that malaria was cyclical – it could fade and return within two or three days. I imagined her in exhausted sleep, and I left. At night my head teemed with plans. After my time here ended, I would hire a driver and take her to Dar es Salaam. Her mother would survive that better than a train journey. I would rent an apartment for her, and she would find work as a teacher, and I . . .

  But I wondered where her people were. What was left of them? Was she quietly paralysed here, still hoping to return across the border? It was only twenty miles away. How vulnerable was a single woman in the great city? How much would it cost? And when I imagined her there, any sense of our future failed me. I had only a heady dream of loving her, as if she was an actress on a stage of my own making; and as the night wore on, my imaginings wandered into make-believe, and died beyond the tent of the mosquito net, where Vincent was snoring, and the African stars were shining in through our lone window, and nothing was quite real.

  But Vincent’s anger had gone. His office work was finished. By daylight he was visiting homes in the way he thought Olivier neglected. He took with him an eager youth who translated his schoolboy French into Bantu, and gave out simple messages of Christ’s redeeming love. Sometimes I would see him emerge from the homes of the sick or diseased, holding their children’s hands. He heard that many babies born in the camp had never been baptised, and together with the deputy priest he held ceremonies in the church porch, in which an enamel basin served for a font. These people had to be saved, he said, they had to have the clear knowledge of their redemption, otherwise it was better never to have known the Lord. He looked more expansive and purposeful than I had ever seen him. People came to our hut, even late at night, to ask his advice. I think of him still as a mature man, middle-aged almost, for ever senior to me. Yet he was only twenty-seven.

  One event emerges from that time whose explanation I have searched for with no answer. Vincent and I were taking our breakfast – a mess of spinach and sweet polenta – when he said: ‘There is something I want you to take.’ He reached across to his rucksack and unwrapped a thin packet. Then he handed me the icon that Ross had given him on Athos.

  He said: ‘You know I don’t like these things. I don’t have the feel for them.’

  I held it in confusion: the almond-eyed Virgin of Tenderness, cradling her child. A poor thing, mass-produced. The memory of Ross came back in a tremor of loss and accusation. I blurted out: ‘But he gave it to you.’ I wondered: did Vincent feel guilty after all?

  ‘Ross made a mistake.’

  ‘Yes.’ I was not sure which mistake Vincent meant. I didn’t know what more to say. Vincent hated mistakes, of course. Perhaps he was trying to clean away anything from his life that confused or smirched it in his eyes: anything that hindered his project for the world’s salvation. He wanted to become pure crystal, perfect for God’s work.

  In the end I murmured: ‘Thank you’, and laid the icon aside, awaiting whatever it might do to conscience and memory.

  When I tapped at her door, I was surprised that it eased off its latch into darkness. I stepped softly inside. I saw and heard nothing, at first. The quiet and dark of evening seemed to have infiltrated the hut. But there was an acrid smell in the air, of something sulphurous burning. After a moment I made out the rectangle of the broken window hanging in the night, and I heard a voice barely two yards from me. It was a man’s voice, but high and strident. It seemed to be asking questions which nobody answered.

  I could see him now, a silhouette massed over Chantal’s bed. The questions rose again – shrill and incantatory – and again, after each one ended, silence fell. Then the man shifted position. I heard the rustling of something like a snake over the mud floor. As he moved around her bedside, the dim flame of the paraffin stove appeared, with its tin of embers. Its glow illumined her closed eyes. One of her hands was trembling, and a braid of sweat glistened along her hairline. In the shadows above her, replacing the silhouette, there hovered a masked face. So dark was the man’s dress that the white circle, with its black mouth and eyeholes, leered there disembodied.

  Then I saw the blood trickling from Chantal’s forehead. I was suddenly furious. I pushed forward, shouting wildly, and kicked over the stove, which toppled in a spurt of flame. In its glare I saw the mask slip from an old, frightened face, whose owner snatched up some utensils – a deer’s horn, a small knife – and ran crouching past me into the night.

  I battered about in the dark until I found the lamp. I could hear her mother coughing in the far bed. In the brightened light Chantal was streaming sweat, and the tiny incision across her hairline was still bleeding. I found water again, and a handkerchief. A white paste had been pressed into her cut – it looked like kaolin – and I bathed it clean. I washed her neck and shoulders, feeling a fading alarm. She gave off a hot scent. She went quiet, before another spasm shook her, but each was lighter than the last.

  I said: ‘Who the hell was that?’

  She answered: ‘I don’t know. My mother asked him in. She knows these people.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have let him.’

  ‘I too weak. Then I thought: my mother have her way. It don’t matter.’

  As I cooled her, she fell into exhausted sleep, but woke up soon afterwards to her mother’s hacking cough and desultory talking. The old woman sounded angry.

  ‘What is she saying?’

  ‘She is saying that the Christian God has no power . . . not for this . . .’

  ‘We don’t cut people open for malaria.’

  ‘He did that to let out the spirit.’ She touched the cut. ‘My mother thinks an uncle is stealing my blood. She thinks we forgot to offer him food, and so he has become one of the abazimu – I can’t translate that. He always liked sorghum beans. But we have none here.’ She was staring at the ceiling. She did not smile. ‘This is old people’s talk.’ Her mother’s voice started again, then broke down into wheezing. ‘She says we have starved our ancestors.’

  I wanted to joke about this, to hear her laugh, but I said: ‘Who was this uncle?’

  ‘He was my father’s brother. A mean man.’

  ‘He wanted to marry you.’ I was guessing.

  ‘Yes. But I did not want. He died soon afterwards. He had stomach cancer, but my mother said he died of bitterness. She said that after death he became an abazimu, and put a stop to my children.’

  I said, not knowing: ‘You may still have children.’

  ‘My children never started. There was something wrong. My mother wanted to blame somebody. She chose this dead brother. I should not be tellin
g you this, Stephen. I cannot tell it to anybody else.’

  I felt a moment’s rush of warmth. But of course I did not belong in her world, I thought, and perhaps I did not count.

  She said: ‘It is very hard, to give no child. That is unhappy to think of, that my husband left without continuing. He was a river that died in the sand.’ Her eyes were moistening. ‘I always be ashamed for that.’

  ‘You loved him.’

  ‘He was my husband.’

  All this time I was touching the handkerchief to her face and neck, although her sweat was drying and her skin no longer burned. My touch had become a caress. Sometimes I smoothed the cloth over her eyes, for the pleasure of seeing them close and open again, and of stroking their lids.

  But it was hard – always – to know what she was thinking. Sometimes, as now, when she turned to me on the stained quilt, her expression sharpened and glittered; but after a minute this would always fade, leaving me momentarily lost. Then she seemed to retreat into indifference, as if whatever had happened to her had turned her vision back into herself, and left those strange, tilted eyes to dream over a world no longer important to her.

  At least that is how I romanticised her.

  I said: ‘You told me you would never go back.’

  ‘Not to my home town. It is Hutu now. And I don’t believe in my people no more . . .’

  ‘They weren’t your people.’

  ‘Mine been killers too. They imagined new things. Once the Tutsi ruled again, they thought, there would be no more taxes or hunger, and the spirits of the ancestors would return from their graves.’ She suddenly laughed, a throaty sound, too much like her mother’s. ‘Do we seem children to you? Alan, Monsieur Vincent’s friend, said once we were children.’ I shook my head. ‘But here in the camp we cannot grow up.’

  I appealed: ‘You must go to Dar es Salaam.’ She eased herself up and turned to me. All the problems of the night were forgotten in her gaze. I said: ‘I’ll hire a car and take you. We’ll find the Rwandan community there. There must be one. We’ll find a flat and a job for you, interpreting.’

  She laughed again, quite gaily. ‘What can I interpret? The Tanzanians speak Swahili and English. Perhaps I will learn to sew or do hairdressing. I hear that people want their hair straightened now.’ She threaded her fingers through her own. ‘Africans want to be like Indians who want to be like Europeans.’ Her laugh petered out. ‘Maybe I make Europeans of us all.’

  My handkerchief was still soothing her temples, her cheeks. Tonight, I thought, I will sink my face in it, I will inhale its scent. I whispered, as if her mother might hear and understand – but she was sleeping: ‘Do you want to stay here for ever?’

  Softly: ‘No.’

  ‘In three weeks my time here will be over. I will get you both out.’ My promise filled me with tenderness for her. My hands held her shoulders. They no longer pretended. She was staring at the ceiling again. When the white slip began to drop from her arms, she did not return it.

  She said: ‘Yes, if my mother well enough.’

  ‘We will go gently.’

  ‘You are kind.’ She seemed to say this to herself, her tone wondering.

  ‘I’m not kind,’ I said. ‘I love you.’

  Only once before had I said this, on an English summer night. The words carried their intoxication now, like self-fulfilment. My hand was descending the dark slope of her body, easing the slip away, until I held one breast. I bent to kiss her lips, the flared wonder of them, but she tilted her face fractionally away. Then her hand came up and covered my own at her breast, pressing it there, her long fingers enveloping mine, and we remained like this, cradling her like a shared possession, until the wind opened the door where the witch-doctor had gone, and her mother stirred.

  How strange it seems now. I did not even know if her people kissed. I went away with my fingers hot from their cradle between her hand and her breast, and the confused memory of her eyes.

  Three days later, a United Nations jeep stopped outside the church office, and a man lurched out. It was Alan. He looked like the ghost of himself, Vincent said. Malaria and the aftermath of jaundice had pared him to tendons and bone, and he moved with the stupor of a sleepwalker. But once he had sat down with us, a tired authority surfaced, and we listened to him because every sentence cost him strength. He had returned to gather his few possessions, and some documents. He was not going to stay here, he said, and nor should we. During his journey from the north, the villages had been aswirl with rumours. A Hutu militia had crossed the border thirty miles to our west, and was advancing on the camp. Some of the Tutsi refugees here, everybody knew, had joined armed incursions back into their homeland, and the Hutu were bent on annihilating them.

  For a moment we were stunned. Olivier must have known something beforehand, because the meagre office files were stacked for removal, and the walls were now bare except for a yellowed photograph of the Tanzanian president. He said: ‘I been talking to a fellow in Tabora. He’ll find a truck for us.’

  Alan said: ‘We should go before nightfall.’ His stare took us in almost sorrowfully. His eyeballs were shiny orange. ‘They say the Hutu are on foot, but they go fast.’

  The assistant pastor, quiet until then, murmured something in Kinyarwanda. It sounded like a meek petition. ‘He asks what will we do about our congregation,’ Alan said. ‘Won’t we stay and protect them.’

  Olivier seemed visibly to bulk out in his white jacket, and his hands fastened over his knees. We could not protect them, he said. The churches in the past had been sites for massacre. His tongue hung loose between his lips. It was hard to tell how frightened he was. He would find any transport he could, he said, so people could get away, but the nearest town with trucks was a hundred miles off, and there was nothing beyond that at all. He was talking over his Bakelite telephone as we dispersed.

  Outside, something had changed. At first a deathly silence had lain over the camp. But now, as if the news had spread telepathically, people were crowding into the streets and doorways, and children were being gathered in by their mothers. On my way to Chantal, I twice encountered young men with rifles and revolvers. Some were riding bicycles. They said they were going to fight the Hutus, but they looked scared. Here and there a family was clustered round a transistor radio, tuned to Radio Rwanda, but there was no news at all, nor hope from the Tanzanian army.

  When I entered Chantal’s hut, she was not there. Her mother groaned in her bed against the wall, and did not understand my questions. I calculated I had six hours left. In the United Nations compound the workers were locking their storerooms against looters, and preparing to leave in their two jeeps. They were Tutsis, and frightened. The nearby Jesuit school was in darkness. In the camp clinic the three nurses had heard nothing, and ran away to their family huts when I told them. My heart was cold and hammering in my chest. All the islands of security were disappearing. On the western outskirts I stopped to catch my breath, and scan the bush. Several families were grouped here too, gazing out to where the Hutus would appear. The scrub was a yellow underbrush, thinned almost to transparency, and flowed to a skyline of low, irregular hills. A faint haze blurred the land. It looked empty.

  On the camp’s fringe the Tanzanian flag was flying over the police post, where four officers were usually to be seen lounging outside. But this morning, when I approached, a voice shouted at me to stay back. Two heads moved above the toy parapet, and a rifle glistened. I called up in English, asking did the army know there was a raid imminent? But I was warned away, without answer.

  When I returned to our hut, Vincent was sitting on the floor, his knees at his chin and his long arms thrust in front of him. I think he was praying. He had already packed my belongings into a rucksack, but his own were scattered defiantly round the room. An unfocused anger seethed under his wretchedness.

  ‘You know, Stephen, this place could have been these people’s salvation. Somewhere far from the city, even with Olivier. There are worse things
than maize farming. But now Alan says they’ll just go out into the bush and wait, unless the Hutus find them.’ Suddenly his hands covered his face. ‘They’re crowding outside the church now, calling for help. They want us to shelter them. They ask what God’s plan is.’ He got up and began hurling his clothes into a case. ‘I can’t face them.’

  I asked: ‘Are the trucks coming for them?’

  ‘There aren’t any yet. The lorries have to come from a hundred miles away, and Olivier says there’s a petrol shortage.’ He turned to face me. ‘I asked Alan if you and I might stay. We’re not Tutsis, after all. If the congregation sheltered in the church, if you and I stood guard at the door, I thought . . .’

  My blood froze. I sat down on the floor.

  He went on: ‘. . . But Alan said a church full of Tutsi would be an invitation to slaughter, and that we’d probably be butchered as well. These Hutus aren’t even regular soldiers, they’re mostly vigilantes with machetes and clubs.’

  I could sense in him a deep, shamed relief at his plan’s rejection, and a shaky exoneration. He was no longer looking at me. He had proposed this, I thought, under the compulsion of his God and father, but longed for the cup to pass from him. His lips were drawn back tensely from his teeth all the time he spoke.

  Just ten minutes ago, he said, a woman had arrived from an outlying farmhouse close to the border, where a few Tutsis had taken their chances as farmers. The Hutus had slaughtered her menfolk before her eyes. For more than twenty miles she had fled headlong to the camp, and her descriptions of their executions did not bear retelling. As Vincent said this, his face drained of its colour, and I felt myself paling too, and faint, and closed my arms around my knees.

  I thought: I must find Chantal, wherever she’s gone. But when I emerged into the sun, something in the air had changed. An incoherent noise was rising from the camp, like nothing I’d ever heard. It was the noise of thousands of muted voices and movements, of windows being boarded up, of things lifted and discarded, of doors closing. It was the sound of departure.