The Day of Creation (Harper Perennial Modern Classics) (9 page)

Even Kagwa seemed to recognize this wounded but still threatening object. He gave a grimace of distaste and spat into the water.

Between the last of the trees we swept forwards across the broad back of Lake Kotto. The white bed had vanished. From horizon to horizon the landscape was engorged with water. The great oaks that lined the banks of the lake now stood on narrow causeways of mud only a few feet above the surface. A tide of brown water had overwhelmed Port-la-Nouvelle. Waves lapped to within a few feet of the wharf below the police barracks. Arms of the lake filled the streets, and a squad of soldiers were laying duck-boards from the barracks to the forecourt of the Toyota garage, which was now the army motor pool and gasoline store. My trailer sat outside the clinic, oily water swilling around its hub caps.

We tied up at the police wharf. Moored alongside were the car ferry
Salammbo
and the French landing craft. On the freight deck of the ferry stood an elderly Mercedes limousine, presumably purchased with the money I had given to Captain Kagwa. Beside it were six drums of diesel oil for the ferry’s refurbished engines. With pride Kagwa surveyed the car, whose polished but dented bodywork reflected decades of service in provincial motorcades and funeral corteges. I easily imagined him reclining in its passenger seat as the ferry, guarded by the helicopter and landing craft, made its imperial progress towards the source of the river.

The Captain disembarked and strode into the barracks with a flourish, first making sure that I was three steps behind him. In his eyes I was a mere mission doctor, attached on sufferance to his court. During my convalescence at the breeding station all my medical supplies and surgical equipment had been moved from the clinic and were now stored in a room next to Kagwa’s office, sharing the shelves with his modest library of video cassettes.

He scanned the sunlit waters of the lake from the window of his office, waiting for the helicopter which would take him on an aerial inspection of his domain. In the orderly room next door I treated the two soldiers. Both had been injured while manhandling the Mercedes on to the ferry. Playing with the controls of the heavy limousine, the sergeant had released the handbrake and thrown the two men against the diesel drums. I dressed the abrasions on their scalps and shoulders, and tried to calm their fears at being involved in this waterborne traffic accident.

Later, as I washed my hands in the corridor sink, I looked down into the internal courtyard of the barracks. Among the military stores, bales of barbed wire, and chickens in bamboo coops was a large packing case filled with electronic equipment – the monitor screens, control panels and cameras that I had seen beside the Dakota.

I assumed that Sanger had abandoned his farcical mercy mission, but I was surprised that he should have left Port-la-Nouvelle without his travelling studio. I turned to question Captain Kagwa, and knocked the lid from a mess-tin which an armed soldier was carrying down the corridor. He replaced the lid on a dish of sweet potato and boiled fish, and let himself through the locked door beyond the medical storeroom.

Following him, I glanced over his shoulder into a windowless cell lit only by the dusty fanlight in the ceiling. A mattress lay along the wall, beside a stained slops pail. An emaciated European was asleep on the mattress with his face to the grey brickwork, bearded chin resting on a pillow of his rolled-up jacket. On a card table below the fanlight lay a collection of half-plate photographs of Captain Kagwa in his best uniform, some of which I recognized as stills from the interview that Sanger had conducted on the day of his arrival. Others were police academy photographs of Kagwa graduating with his cadet class, and of the Captain saluting from the passenger seat of his helicopter. Before losing interest in the project, or becoming too ill to pursue it, the prisoner had been arranging the photographs on to a wooden frame, constructing a crude story board of a documentary about the illustrious career of this provincial policeman.

‘Doctor …’ Kagwa’s strong hand gripped my right elbow, his fingers deliberately bruising the ulna nerve. He closed the cell door on the soldier, who had placed the mess-tin on the floor beside the European and was about to remove the slops bucket. ‘Your duties now are complete. You may return to your clinic and finish your packing.’

I let him steer me along the corridor to his office. ‘The beard – I couldn’t see the man. Was that Sanger?’

‘Of course not – he has left Port-la-Nouvelle, many weeks ago.’

‘His film equipment is here.’ So, I surmised, when Kagwa embarked on his expedition a documentary would record his proconsular progress. ‘If that isn’t Sanger, who is it?’

‘A drug smuggler, awaiting trial. A most dangerous man. You will go now, doctor.’

‘First, I ought to see him. A month in that airless room …’

‘Dr Mallory!’ Kagwa punched my shoulder with the palm of his hand. He stared down at me, trying to establish in what strange organ my compulsion to be a nuisance resided. ‘Doctor, I have considered your position – Lake Kotto is now an operational war zone, for your safety you will leave tomorrow with Mrs Warrender. Your resident’s permit is now withdrawn.’

I started to protest, but the clatter of an approaching aircraft sounded through the window, shaking the galvanized roof of the tobacco warehouse into a cacophony of frenzied tin. Captain Kagwa’s helicopter had arrived. As it hovered above the car ferry, I noticed that a light machine-gun had been fitted in the cabin floor beside the pilot. Attached to the starboard landing rail was a cylindrical pod once armed with rocket flares, the empty orifices now stuffed with rags.

While the navigation light rotated, flicking its small beam across the floor of Kagwa’s office, the young French pilot peered down at the soldiers running on to the quay. Waiting for them to get out of his way, he set off slowly along the shore, the down-draught from the helicopter’s propeller sending up a storm of dust and cigarette packets.

Ignoring me, Kagwa shouted over the noise of the engine, summoning a squad of soldiers from the orderly room, where they lounged among their weapons, picking their teeth and playing with each others’ transistor radios. They clattered down the stairs and ran along the quay, following the remote-control camera mounted between the landing rails of this chimeric machine, like the devotees of a new televised religion.

13

I stood in the dusk beside the trailer, watching the last cerise bars of the sunset sink into the western rim of Lake Kotto. The forest drew closer to the abandoned town, the palm fronds dipping over the tin roofs. Within the heavy, green darkness the water seemed to rise above the containing banks, as if the huge swells that rolled across its surface were about to inundate everything around me, immersing my mind within its amniotic dream. I stared at the broad mouth of the river, which had incorporated even Lake Kotto into its channel, feeling an undimmed pride in having played my part in its creation. The task of halting this immense mass of water was clearly an impossible one. I realized that I could no longer hope to defeat the river by tackling it here at its mouth – I needed to trace its course towards the borderlands of Chad and the Sudan, and then find its source in the mountains of the Massif du Tondou. Besides, I now wanted to explore the river, which I had brought into the light from its subterranean tunnels. I had freed it from the dark and steered it towards the day. Now the sun and the air would take over from me, and I was eager to see how it would grow and change.

I held the broken door of the trailer. The wooden panel bore the imprint of a rifle butt, and the contents of the cabin had been looted repeatedly by Kagwa’s off-duty soldiers. I looked down at the flattened tyres, submerged in the pool of water that ran through the open doors of the clinic and washed the floors of the ransacked office and dispensary.

Somehow I needed to find a truck strong enough to take me more than two hundred miles up-country, with enough fuel for the journey. Yet if I tried to stay on in Port-la-Nouvelle I would be imprisoned by Kagwa. If I left with Mrs Warrender and her party the next day it was likely that we would be sent, not to the provincial capital, where we could talk to the press and the UN agencies, but to some remote village, held under house arrest by one of Kagwa’s cronies.

Over the water’s edge, a strange creature hovered in the darkness. Its long tail swung to and fro between its claws as it hung above the lake, like some reptilian bird washed by the river from its fossil resting-place.

I left the trailer and walked through the shallow water, curious to see this macaw or parakeet released from Mrs Warrender’s breeding station. As I reached the bank, I realized that I was looking at the skin of a small crocodile suspended by its nose from the tip of a bamboo pole. Below it, Noon sat in her coracle, oar in one hand, the pole in the other, moving the skin to and fro in the darkness.

Paddling along the shore, she continued to wave the skinned reptile. No doubt she had heard from the sentries outside the barracks that I was leaving the next day, and this curious gesture was an attempt to keep me at Port-la-Nouvelle, to commit myself again to the river.

A hundred yards from the barracks, when we reached the first of the wharves, she let the coracle run aground on the beach. She sat in the darkness, surveying me with the same grave eyes, as if understanding all my motives.

Careful not to unsettle her, I watched the crocodile skin swaying in the night air, its armoured plates lit by the kerosene lamp on the barracks steps. Rifle over his shoulder, the sentry argued in a desultory way with two fishermen who squatted on the wharf beside their display of dried carp. Behind them, in the darkness, the high sterns of the car ferry and the restaurant barge rocked on the evening swells. Captain Kagwa was spending the night at the airstrip beside his beloved helicopter, and only a small guard unit manned the barracks.

I knelt next to Noon in the warm sand. Taking the bamboo pole from her scarred hand, I lowered it into the coracle.

‘Right. But I can’t take you with me. Now, where’s the rifle?’ I placed the oar against my shoulder, aiming the handle at the sentry.

‘The rifle? You hid it somewhere, Noon …’

When she ran off into the darkness I held the bamboo pole in my hand and listened to the distant murmur of the river as its waters met the lake, the deep reverie of a drowsing giant into whose mouth I was about to slip.

Within an hour she returned from the forest, weighed down by a damp parcel of matting and plastic sheet. While she crouched below the beach road, keeping watch on the barracks, I unwound the old Lee-Enfield from the camouflage jacket in which she had wrapped the weapon. I dismantled the bolt and felt the intact firing pin, remembering Noon’s attempt to shoot me on this same beach. Satisfied with the trigger mechanism, I released the rusting magazine. The girl had been given two cartridges with which to defend herself, but had forgotten to drive one of them into the breech.

Had Noon known this at the time? She scuttled down the beach and squatted beside me, gazing with pride as I handled the rifle, the first show of emotion I had seen in her face. Did she think I could slay the river with these two bullets? Since our first meeting, her motives had been as unreadable as my own. At times she had defended the river, at others she seemed to provoke me into destroying it …

The camouflage jacket over her shoulders, she paddled away into the darkness. I waded through the shallow water below the wharf, while she sat in the coracle fifty feet from the beach. As the fishermen argued with the sentry, patting the dried carp with their hands, I slipped between the sterns of the car ferry and the restaurant barge. The current pressed between my legs, drawing the hulls from the jetty.

Below the wheelhouse of the ferry there was cargo space for three vehicles. Despite the weight of the Mercedes limousine, barely a foot of freeboard separated the waterline from the metal deck. The dark lake-water flowed around my waist as I loosened the starboard mooring lines and let them sink below the surface. I climbed aboard, hidden from the police barracks by the square bulk of the wheelhouse. When the port lines fell away into the water one of the fishermen looked around, but the young soldier on sentry duty was demonstrating his looted calculator watch. The ferry swayed sideways and drifted against the white hull of the restaurant barge, but the truck tyres hanging from its sides muffled the soft impact. Urging on the current, I leaned across the gap between the two vessels and pushed at the barge’s ornamental railings.

The ferry slipped from its berth, drifting forward into the darkness, where the girl sat in her coracle, small face reflecting the distant light of the kerosene lamp on the barrack steps. She looked up at me as I moved past, her wan face creased by a shy smile. She gestured with the crocodile skin, as if still hoping that I might take her as a passenger.

There was a shout from the wharf, and the soldiers and the two fishermen ran across the wooden planks. The ferry was only fifteen feet from the wharf, drifting slowly into the current. Rifle above his head, the soldier clumped down a flight of stone steps and waded into the shallow water.

The surface broke around his thighs. Within an arm’s length of the propeller, he reached up to the truck tyre hanging from the stern rail. Although the steel vessel weighed some thirty tons, the soldier was strong enough to hold the craft until the men sleeping in the barracks came to his aid.

I waved helplessly at the air, trying to start the huge diesel in its pit below the helm, following the laborious sequence I had watched from Kagwa’s office. I primed the carburettor of the gasoline starter-motor, switched on the magneto and began to hand-crank the small engine. When it came to life I could release the clutch and engage it with the main diesel, then in turn connect the drive-shaft of the propeller.

Seeing me inside the wheelhouse, the soldier raised his rifle and leapt forward through the water. He shouted to me when I tried to hide behind the helm, and then strode alongside, beating the rifle butt against the ancient plates of the hull.

Crouching behind the fuel drums, I levelled the Lee-Enfield at him. In the darkness twenty feet away Noon stood in her coracle, waving the crocodile skin in an attempt to distract the soldier, who was now trying to climb on to the moving deck.

Raising the sights over his head, I drove the bolt forward, ramming one of the two cartridges into the breech, and then fired a single shot at the kerosene lamp on the barrack steps. In the roar of noise the soldier fell back across the water. He stumbled through the ferry’s lace-like wake, his eyes lit by the flames playing among the broken glass and the pieces of dried carp. His attempt to mount the ferry had given the vessel a parting impetus, and it drifted out into the lake, as the light flickered in the swinging tail of the skinned crocodile.

A few desperate minutes later, as the last wild shots from the barracks crossed the water, I had started the engine of the
Salammbo
and was heading at a steady three knots towards the entrance of the river. The beat of the heavy diesel jarred the metal deck beneath my feet, drumming at the wooden helm as I steered into the silver mouth of the channel. The smooth surface lay in the moonlight like the gateway to a continental highway, whose first toll-gate I had passed without payment.

‘N’doc …!’

Looking down at the dark water beyond the starboard rail, I saw Noon in her coracle. She paddled furiously with her small oar, arms smothered by the camouflage jacket. She barely kept pace with the ferry, and the coracle was already filling with water washed from the
Salammbo’s
bows.

I stepped from the wheelhouse and waved her away, although I knew that Kagwa’s men would shoot her on sight if they saw her again.

‘Go back! Hide with Mrs Warrender!’

‘Doc Mai …!’

Necessity had taught her another word. The coracle collided with the ferry for the last time. The metal hull and the rushing water crushed the bamboo frame as 1 reached down and took the girl’s hand. Upended, the coracle vanished into the wake, chopped to matchwood by the blows of the heavy propeller as it beat the water. I swung Noon on to the deck, surprised by her lightness. A moment later, as the water spilled from my shirt and trousers, she already stood on tip-toe beside the helm in the wheelhouse, gazing at the approaching mouth of the river. She tapped the glass and pointed to an island of floating trees behind which we could hide, to the first of the sand-banks that might seize our keel, and to the great root of the old oak lying in our path, the amputated head of the beast from whose loins the waters of the Mallory had sprung.