Seven Houses in France

VIII

THE PARTY RETURNED in the first week of October, a few days later than expected. When they entered the compound and marched into the European section, Lalande Biran was at their head; bringing up the rear was Chrysostome, his rifle on his shoulder; and in the middle came the askaris, the sappers and the porters. The latter were carrying the elephant tusks and leading along a group of live mandrills, linked together by a rope tied about their necks, as if they were a line of slaves.

Lalande Biran ordered his men to halt before they reached the Place du Grand Palmier, and the women employed in the slaughterhouses and the stores ran out to receive his commands. Five askari guards also approached, followed by a black NCO, and then another ten askaris. Striding after them came Donatien.

Half-hidden between the slaughterhouse and the storeroom was the hut where weapons and munitions were kept. Van Thiegel was observing the scene from one of the hut’s mean little windows and trying to understand what he was seeing. You didn’t have to be particularly bright to realise that the expedition had met with problems. Apart from the delayed return, two askaris and four or five of the porters who had set out with the group had not come back. There was something else too. Lalande Biran looked positively haggard, as if he had suddenly lost ten or even twenty pounds in weight. In his rain-sodden uniform and with several days’ growth of beard, he seemed a different person, older and almost ugly. Chrysostome, for his part, had lost the swagger with which he had strolled into Yangambi carrying that rhinoceros horn, although he still wore his shirt collar unbuttoned to show off his blue ribbon and gold chain. Beneath his hat, his hair had grown almost down to his eyes, but, thought Van Thiegel scornfully, there was still no sign of any hair on his chest.

‘Poofter!’ he spat out.

Lalande Biran gave an order, and the askaris guarding the mandrills bawled out the same words, brandishing their chicottes. Immediately, four porters came forward carrying by the legs the apparently heavy corpse of a cheetah. Lalande Biran shouted again. He was in a very bad mood indeed.

The porters carried the cheetah into the slaughterhouse, and Van Thiegel waited to see what would happen to the mandrills. Perhaps they had been captured for their meat, although none of the white officers, with the exception of Richardson, were particularly fond of it. The mandrills, however, weren’t taken to the slaughterhouse, but to the firing range. The porters who had been carrying the cheetah joined those carrying the elephant tusks and, accompanied by about ten askaris, headed down to the river.

As they passed the hut, Van Thiegel counted twelve tusks and twenty-six porters, and as so often happened, his mind split in two. One part thought how pleased Christine would be when she learned that her husband had collected all that ivory, and how her joy would only be multiplied when she found out that he himself had amassed more than six hundred mahogany logs. The other part of his mind was more malevolent. The four missing porters, he thought gleefully, must have eluded Chrysostome’s vigilance and escaped.

This second thought cheered him a little. Perhaps that was why Lalande Biran was so angry, knowing that, at the crucial moment, faced by the threatening world of the jungle, the poofter had turned out not to be such a good shot after all. As Van Thiegel always said, it was one thing to aim calmly at a target on a firing range or in the area around Yangambi, but quite another to do so when one was being watched constantly by the enemy. The rebels were not as biddable as the rubber-tappers.

Donatien ran over to the Captain, followed by an askari triumphantly waving a bag. Van Thiegel realised what must have happened. They had thought the bag was lost, and the soldier was pleased to have found it. This find, however, did nothing to improve Lalande Biran’s mood. He made an abrupt gesture, and the askari raced off towards the slaughterhouse. Donatien said something to the Captain, pointing up at Government House. This, Van Thiegel knew, meant that coffee had been prepared. Whenever Donatien sensed trouble, he always made coffee. Richardson called him le géant du café, the coffee giant, because he was six foot five tall and made rather a good waiter. Lalande Biran ignored the offer and followed the other men down to the river.

Van Thiegel put on his hat and slipped out of the hut by the back door. Before he joined Lalande Biran, he wanted to know what was in that bag and, in passing, take a look at the cheetah.

One of the women working in the slaughterhouse showed him the creature’s head. There was a bloody hole just above its left eye. A single shot; a single cartridge. Van Thiegel swore loudly.

The bag lay in one corner of the slaughterhouse, next to a clay oven. When he emptied it, three hands fell out. Just three. And yet four porters were missing, which meant that one had got away. The poofter might be a good shot, but one escapee, one out of four, meant a twenty-five per cent loss.

He left the slaughterhouse and headed for the river. Down below, near the jetty, he saw someone swimming. He assumed it must be Lalande Biran.

A black servant was coming up the hill, and Van Thiegel stopped him.

‘Donatien told me to take these to Government House,’ said the servant, showing him the two bottles of Martell brandy he was carrying.

‘One of the bottles would be better off in my office. I drink more than the Captain,’ said Van Thiegel, laughing. ‘When you’ve done that, bring a couple of towels down to the beach and leave them on one of the mahogany logs.’

The servant looked doubtfully back at the beach.

‘Oh, leave them where you like, but put them where we can see them and not underneath the logs.’

Before proceeding, Van Thiegel made a gesture with his hand as if shooing away a mosquito.

The water in the river was flowing at the ideal rate, very gently. Lalande Biran and Van Thiegel swam about a hundred yards against the current towards the pile of mahogany logs near the jetty, then turned turtle and swam back, allowing themselves to be carried almost effortlessly to their starting point, opposite the Club Royal.

The two men had very similar styles, their movements equally measured and rhythmic, heads and arms emerging simultaneously from the water. They turned at the same time too. Their thoughts, however, were very different.

Van Thiegel was wondering how the fourth porter had managed to get away, and whether it had been Chrysostome’s fault. In that ever-divided mind of his, he was also concerned by the Captain’s mood. He couldn’t understand why he was in such a foul temper when the hunting had clearly gone so well — twelve elephant tusks and a cheetah — and when he, Van Thiegel, had amassed the six hundred mahogany logs that lay cleaned and placed in neat piles on the shore.

Lalande Biran could think of nothing while he was swimming upstream. The current was gentle enough, but he had little energy left after almost three weeks in the jungle, and it took all his strength to reach the jetty and the mahogany logs. When he drifted back downstream, gazing up at the sky, he was concentrating on writing the lines of a poem: ‘It is not a lived-in heaven, but a desert; it is not Michelangelo’s heaven, peopled by angels and saints, and with the figure of God greeting Adam …’

Lalande Biran felt so uninspired that he slapped the water hard. Van Thiegel glanced at him, but received no response.

As if the noise of the slap had awoken his muse, Lalande Biran suddenly knew how to continue the poem: ‘This heaven is a cave, blue only in appearance, a refuge for bats. Hanging upside down in there is the Hope of which the Master spoke; there, too, hang Love and Youth …’

Unhappy with the direction the poem was taking, Lalande Biran ducked under the water and stayed there for a while. Van Thiegel swam on, but very slowly, without leaving the Captain’s side.

‘Biran,’ he said, ‘if there’s something worrying you, I’d like to know. I’m your friend as well as being your second in command.’

They were opposite the Club Royal now, next to the small dock for canoes. Lalande Biran stood up. The water came to his waist. ‘You’re also my associate,’ he said. ‘Allow me to congratulate you on your success with the mahogany.’

His answer to Van Thiegel’s question went no further than that, but it had its continuation — its coda, one might say without stretching the metaphor too far — in Lalande Biran himself. He was feeling increasingly annoyed with Christine. She was always demanding more: more ivory, more mahogany, more effort. Not content with being the owner of six houses in France, one of them a villa in Biarritz that had once belonged to a Russian prince, she wanted another, a seventh house, in St-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, one of the most expensive places in the civilised world. And the price he paid was to spend seven years in the Congo, two more than the five they had initially agreed. Seven years beneath that deserted sky, seven years listening to the screams of the mandrills and the chimpanzees. Her demand for more would mean another hunting party, perhaps not as gruelling as the one he had just returned from, but it would certainly not be without its problems. Hunting parties were risky whether in the dry or the rainy season, and there were always unforeseen incidents. He could not help thinking, too, that he wasn’t getting any younger, that he was not the man he was, and that three weeks in the jungle had left him utterly drained. His body was covered in bites and scratches, and although they hadn’t encountered any tse-tse flies or red ants, he couldn’t be sure he had avoided catching one of the infinite diseases lurking in the jungle. He found it very hard to understand Christine’s insistence. Nor could he understand his own dejection. This was why he couldn’t write any poems. Because his muse could not hear or see well in that tangle of negative feelings: disquiet, rage, the troubling sense that he was being far too indulgent with his wife.

He set aside the poem about the sky in Yangambi and started thinking about another that had been going round and round in his head during the hunt: ‘When he reaches camp, the weary hunter falls, exhausted, but before he sleeps, out of his tiredness slips the truth, like a white egg from a black bird: enough, it’s time to seek the company of friends …’

His muse’s words did not convince him, but it soothed him to remember them.

‘Shall we take a look at the timber?’ said Van Thiegel. They were swimming again. Lalande Biran did not respond, but swam towards the shore.

Seen from the river, the piles of mahogany logs on the beach looked like the wagons of a train that had stopped there. Unfortunately, the real train, the one that Stanley — Mbula Matari — had helped build by dynamiting hundreds of rocks, only went as far as Léopoldville, and the valuable cargo from Yangambi would have to be transported there by river.

‘We’ll need three barges to shift this lot, but the load should reach Antwerp by the end of November,’ said Van Thiegel. His eyes were flicking from pile to pile, looking for the towels the servant should have brought. He felt uncomfortable in his nakedness.

‘It’s a lot of wood,’ said Lalande Biran.

Again, the answer inside his mind was more complex. Yes, it was a lot of wood, and he had brought back more ivory than expected, but it wouldn’t be enough for Christine. Another letter would come, insisting yet again that she must buy that seventh house in France and demanding more mahogany and more ivory, forcing him to go back into the jungle in search of more elephants. And the day would come, perhaps on that hunting trip, perhaps on the next — because Christine would keep asking for more and more — when his luck would run out and he would stay in the jungle for ever, struck by a stone flung by some fleeing porter or badly wounded by a shot from a rebel rifle, and then he would be trampled underfoot by a herd of stampeding elephants, elephants weighing eight tons apiece, which would kill him, leaving only his crushed remains, remains that would become food for vermin and insects …

He paused to take a breath. The scent from the mahogany resin was a pleasure to the nostrils; the pinkish, reddish colour of the wood a pleasure to the eyes. Mahogany was a benign wood. It helped drive away negative thoughts.

‘Ah, there they are!’ exclaimed Van Thiegel. Two white towels lay neatly folded on the jetty. ‘I told him to leave them on a log, but that was obviously too much to ask.’

He went over to the jetty and returned with one of the towels tied about his waist. Lalande draped the other round his neck.

‘I was worried Chrysostome might be prowling around somewhere, and I didn’t feel safe with my arse on view,’ said Van Thiegel. His lips parted in a half-smile, but beneath his puffy lids, his gaze was like that of a snake. The blue of his irises was dark, almost black.

‘Chrysostome stayed behind with the men cleaning the ivory. I get tired, but he doesn’t.’ Lalande Biran put his head in between two logs and inhaled deeply.

‘I have some good news, Biran,’ said Van Thiegel after a silence. There was a tremor of excitement in his voice. ‘I’ve been waiting for the right moment to tell you.’

Lalande Biran removed his head from between the logs and looked at him.

‘There’s more than a million francs on this beach, Biran!’ Van Thiegel shouted, spreading his arms wide. ‘When you add in what we’ll get from the ivory, that’s a million and a half!’

Lalande Biran closed his eyes.

‘How much did you say?’ he asked, opening them again.

Van Thiegel picked up a twig from the ground and wrote the figure in the sand: 1,500,000. His eyes were once again very blue.

A light breeze from the river set the branches of the palm trees swaying. The air in Yangambi suddenly filled with good omens. On one side of the sky, the round sun was shining brightly, as if the rainy season had ended at that very moment. The mandrills were quiet. There were no bats.

‘Why?’ he asked, although he guessed what the answer would be and wasn’t surprised when Van Thiegel explained what had been happening on the European markets. Mahogany had tripled in value since the previous shipment, and the rise in the value of ivory had been even greater.

‘When I got back from Lomami with the mahogany, I found a letter from my mother. She sends me newspaper cuttings. I have them up at the club. I’ll show you.’

‘That’s really excellent news!’ cried Lalande Biran.

‘I know, Biran. A real stroke of luck.’

They started walking up the beach towards the Club Royal. They were two white men in Africa, one totally naked apart from a towel slung around his neck, the other half-naked, with a towel tied round his waist, and both were breathing in the smell of the mahogany resin, listening to the murmur of the river, and feeling all around them the presence of the endless jungle. Seen from a distance, they could have been taken for two figures in a classical painting. In reality, though, and to put it in somewhat sentimental terms, their hearts were beating like those of two adolescents. Even Van Thiegel’s heart, because having that information in your head was not the same as putting it into words. When he spoke it, verbalised it — ‘There’s more than a million francs on this beach, Biran! When you add in what we’ll get from the ivory, that’s a million and a half!’ — it became more real, became flesh. Especially when he saw the figure written in the sand: 1,500,000. It was so exciting that their bodies reacted. They both had goose pimples. A million and a half! 1,500,000!

It seemed so impossible that Lalande Biran wanted to hear it again.

‘Have I understood you right? A million and a half just for us, without counting the part that goes to Monsieur X.’

Van Thiegel replied very precisely: ‘800,000 francs for you, 650,000 for me, 50,000 for expenses.’

Lalande Biran felt a deep thrill of excitement. You didn’t have to be good at maths to understand what that sum of money meant. There would be no need for another expedition or another shipment. He and Toisonet would never have to discuss the sordid topic again. And, above all, Christine could buy her seventh house on the peninsula of St-Jean-Cap-Ferrat and be contented for a good long while.

They went into the changing-rooms at the Club Royal and took their clothes and boots out of their lockers. While they were getting dressed, Lalande Biran was still pondering the consequences of that unexpected bonanza. He wouldn’t have to stay in Yangambi for another year. After Christmas, he would accompany Toisonet to the Stanley Falls and, once the statue of the Virgin had been put in place, he would ask one of the journalists present to take a photo of him with his Kodak camera, and thus bring to a close his contribution to the Force Publique. By spring, perhaps as early as May, he would be back in Paris. And if Christine moved quickly and bought that villa, they could spend the summer months in St-Jean-Cap-Ferrat in their seventh house.

‘The grasshoppers sing all summer!’ he exclaimed jubilantly, sitting down on the bench in the changing-room to put on his boots. ‘Les cigales chantent tout l’été!’

Even though he was sitting next to him, also pulling on his boots, Van Thiegel failed to notice the Captain’s joyful outburst. An anxiety had taken hold not just of one part of his mind, but of both. He was shocked by Lalande Biran’s response — or, rather, lack of response — to his insinuating comment about Chrysostome. ‘I was worried Chrysostome might be prowling around somewhere, and I didn’t feel safe with my arse on view,’ he had said, and Lalande Biran had ignored his words. Was it that he respected Chrysostome as a hunter even more than he thought, and that he was prepared to forgive him everything else? Such a possibility infuriated Van Thiegel and spoiled a moment that should, in principle, have been a source of both military and economic joy.

Lalande Biran continued to sing as he tied his laces. ‘The Grasshopper, having sung all summer …’ — ‘La Cigale, ayant chanté tout l’été …’ This time, Van Thiegel understood. The Captain was very happy, indeed, he couldn’t ever remember having seen him so happy. On festive days, the other officers often burst into song, inspired by the convivial atmosphere and by the palm wine, but the Captain never joined in.

Lalande Biran threw his head back and rubbed his cheeks. His beard, which had remained unshaven during the whole hunting trip, was making him itch.

‘That’s one good thing about Yangambi, Cocó,’ he said at last. ‘When we first came here, we were happy-go-lucky grasshoppers who gave no thought to winter. Now we have become ants.’

Van Thiegel opened his locker and took out a letter. He shook his head. ‘It’s true that I’ve been very good while I’ve been in Yangambi and sent a lot of money home to my mother,’ he said, ‘but I’m no ant. As soon as I get back to Europe, I’ll revert to being a grasshopper. My mother knows this and squirrels away everything I send her. She says I’ll have to torture her to get her to confess which bank she’s put it in.’

‘Are you thinking of going back then, Cocó?’ asked Lalande Biran.

‘I spent eleven years with the Foreign Legion, and I’ve been with the Force Publique for nine. That’s quite enough, I reckon.’

Van Thiegel gave the letter to Lalande Biran.

‘Where will you go, do you think? Antwerp?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘It’s my last year here too,’ said Lalande Biran. ‘I had my doubts, but they all melted away with the news you’ve just given me. I’m going back to Europe.’

‘You’ll find the newspaper cuttings in the envelope. They explain about the rise in value of ivory and mahogany.’

Lalande Biran read the sender’s name: Veuve Marie-Jeanne Van Thiegel — Widow Marie-Jeanne Van Thiegel — and the address in Antwerp. Her writing leaned to the right, like Christine’s.

‘I imagine my wife and your mother are rather alike,’ he said. ‘They should go into business together.’

Lalande Biran was holding the little pile of cuttings in his hand. Van Thiegel chose one neatly folded piece of paper.

‘This is the best article, from Le Soir. It gives a really clear explanation for the rise in value.’

The cutting, once unfolded, resembled the bellows of an accordion. ‘HOW IVORY AND MAHOGANY WERE TRANSFORMED INTO GOLD,’ said the headline.