Seven Houses in France

XIII

AS SOON AS they had crossed over to the opposite bank, Donatien and the four askaris set off in the direction of the larger mugini, following a path that neither the undergrowth nor the trees had managed to erase completely. They had barely gone two hundred yards when the shrill cry of a monkey broke the silence and a flock of birds took noisy flight. The four askaris were immediately on the alert.

‘Who is it?’ asked Donatien.

The four askaris raised their rifles. Donatien stood behind them. Again they heard noises, this time the sound of voices.

‘Je crois que ce sont des enfants,’ said one askari, lowering his rifle slightly: ‘I think they’re children.’ They all listened hard and agreed that he was right. They were light, young voices.

Out of the undergrowth emerged three girls of eight or nine and a very tall girl of about fifteen, so light-skinned that she didn’t appear to come from that part of Africa. They were speaking gaily, as if telling each other amusing stories. The tall girl stopped abruptly, and the younger girls walked on, immersed in their conversation.

Donatien opened his eyes very wide. The tall, light-skinned girl was wearing earrings. Green earrings. They looked like emeralds. He raised his rifle and fired.

The tall girl screamed, and a monkey echoed her scream. All four girls broke into a run and vanished into the dense vegetation. Donatien roared, his throat almost bursting:

‘Get that girl!’

He plunged into the jungle, along with the other men. A few yards ahead of him, the girl’s head appeared above the bushes, and on that head was an ear and in that ear glittered an emerald. Donatien fired again.

The head bobbing above the bushes suddenly veered into a darker part of the jungle, and Donatien followed. Sometimes he would lose sight of her for a few seconds, then he would catch the green glint of an emerald, sometimes once, sometimes twice, and would quicken his pace, ducking now and then to avoid the lianas. The tall girl was a good runner, much faster than him. He cursed himself for being such a bad marksman. If he had even a fraction of Chrysostome’s skill, those earrings would now be in his pocket.

The glints of green grew more numerous, as if he had before him twenty heads and forty earrings, and he slowed his pace. The signs continued to multiply. Soon there were fifty heads and a hundred earrings, and a moment later, a hundred heads and two hundred earrings.

He came to a complete halt, breathing hard. Before him lay thousands of glittering green lights. They were not emerald earrings, however, but the tiny round leaves of a plant. Some distance away, a monkey shrieked. He looked around him and couldn’t recognise the trees. They weren’t mahogany trees or teak, they weren’t draped in long lianas like the rubber trees from which they extracted the sap. He was lost.

He called out to the askaris, but the only answer came from the monkeys. He raised his rifle to fire again, because he still had ten cartridges, but stopped. Lalande Biran would forgive him the two cartridges he had spent and even the ten still in the magazine, because he wasn’t particularly strict about ammunition, but if he fired again, would the askaris come to his aid, or was it more likely that the rebels would make an appearance to find out what was going on? When they saw him there completely alone, they would fall on him and drag him off to their lair. Then they would chop off his limbs with a machete or beat him about the face until he was blind. Van Thiegel had told the younger officers that if ever they found themselves in that situation, it would be best to give themselves a relatively pleasant death by shooting themselves in the mouth.

Donatien peed in his trousers. His heart was beating so hard, he could feel it in his mouth. He tried to retrace his footsteps, to escape from those thousand small green leaves, but his legs felt as if they were made of wood.

A bird flew out of a tree and over his head. Someone was approaching.

Donatien’s legs were like two wooden stakes stuck fast in the ground; he couldn’t even run and hide behind a tree trunk. The sounds grew clearer: a twig breaking, a foot stepping into a puddle, a branch being sliced off with a machete. A figure took shape among the little green leaves. This time the pee ran down as far as Donatien’s knees.

‘Monsieur Donatien, voulez-vous une anisette?’

Before him stood Livo, a broad smile on his face. Tears sprang into Donatien’s eyes and he felt an impulse to embrace his assistant from the Club Royal, but something held him back. He didn’t give Livo boxes of biscuits, as Lieutenant Van Thiegel did, but he did let him into the storeroom. Had he in some way already repaid this favour? He stopped where he was.

‘I was visiting my daughter in the mugini and I heard shots. That’s why I came over,’ said Livo. ‘What happened?’

‘Oh, nothing special,’ answered Donatien.

He was still so agitated that his words were barely comprehensible: ‘Rianparculie.’

‘I have to get back to the club,’ said Livo. ‘If you like, we can go together.’

Donatien wondered if he should promise him a box of biscuits. He was, after all, doing him a big favour and deserved some reward, but wouldn’t that be setting a precedent? If you give someone one box of biscuits, they will demand another and another and another. That was what had happened with Van Thiegel. Livo was always asking him for biscuits, sometimes for his daughter, sometimes for the children in the mugini or for the witch doctors who supplied him with herbs, and Van Thiegel always said Yes. And that wasn’t right. Van Thiegel wasn’t responsible for the storeroom and so didn’t care, but Donatien knew the value of those biscuits. There were many things in Yangambi, but the only sweets available were bananas and sugar cane. That’s why biscuits were so highly prized.

‘Have you seen the four askaris who came with me?’ he asked.

‘I saw them heading down to the river. They’ll be waiting for you there,’ said Livo.

‘Let’s go, then.’

On the way back, his heart having resumed its regular rhythm and his whole body functioning normally again, he thought once more about the tall girl with the pale skin. He had been so astonished to see her in possession of the emerald earrings that he hadn’t known what to think. It was the strangest thing he’d ever seen in Yangambi. A white officer making a gift of jewellery to a native girl! And the white officer wasn’t just any officer, he was Chrysostome!

The intelligent brother appeared to him as they were crossing the river. He was in laconic mood.

‘It’s hard enough to get information, but even harder to hold it in reserve for the right moment. Don’t waste it, dog.’

It was good advice, but he didn’t really have much choice. Yangambi was a garrison, and his superiors, especially Lalande Biran, were always demanding news. If he kept quiet and they later found out that there had been news, which he had then kept from them, he would be sent straight to the dungeon in Government House or, worse, to the rebel-infested part of the jungle. It would therefore be wisest to tell the Captain the truth. Chrysostome wasn’t a poofter. He had a girlfriend on the other side of the river, a young half-white, half-black girl, as tall as a Watusi.

Lalande Biran would receive this news without a flicker of surprise, as was his way, but then he would immediately sit down on his chaise longue to ponder it.