Game of Stones Page 10

  ‘Stripped off and waded most of the way,’ Cameron said. ‘Fortunately it wasn’t in flood and I didn’t have to worry about the crocodiles that ANC guerrillas had to brave as they came across the Limpopo from Zimbabwe. Thank God I had taken my passport with me when I went to meet Lynn. I also had a credit card from a bank in Amsterdam in my assumed name. I eventually managed to get back to UK with my tail between my legs a week after I left Cape Town.’

  ‘You haven’t been in touch with Lynn since?’ Brian asked. ‘Not even after the unbanning of the ANC and the end of apartheid? Was there any fall-out for Mark?’

  ‘Where Mark was concerned, there was no fall-out,’ Cameron replied. ‘I went to meet him when the ship got back to Southampton. He said that a car had arrived on the quay-side with two men in it sometime on that Tuesday morning and that they had sat and watched the ship but made no attempt to come on board. Presumably they were posted there once it became clear that I wasn’t going to show for the meeting. Mark said there were people watching the ship 24/7 until it sailed. We concluded that they had probably not gone on board because they didn’t want to create an international incident, and thereby alienate the owners of the one cruise ship that wasn’t adhering to the boycott. You just have to be able to point to one highly visible boycott-breaker to be able to pooh-pooh the effectiveness, indeed the very existence, of a boycott.’

  ‘It’s late and I’m exhausted,’ Cameron went on after a pause, ‘it’s time to go home.’

  ‘And Lynn?’ Brian prompted. ‘What about Lynn?’

  Cameron, who had stood up to go, sat down again with a sigh.

  ‘Every waking minute of that two-day drive was spent feeling gutted about Lynn,’ Cameron said. ‘She had been my support, and a lot more than that, when Jules left me. I’d abandoned her without even saying goodbye – though I did try to phone her when I got to Cape Town. I’d implicated her, among other ways, by living with her before I left. I had been told that they detained her after I left, and I had no idea what they had done to her. Whatever it was must have been literally unbearable if it was bad enough to make her agree to act as bait in their trap. I suspected that she would have to bear the brunt of van Zyl’s anger and frustration at being outsmarted. I was also worried about Mark. I had no idea what kind of mayhem the Security Branch might cause on the ship. It wasn’t impossible that they could have found out that the Dutch citizen Mark Redfern, who was responsible for the ship’s education and entertainment programme, was actually the Mark Fern who was wanted in South Africa for evading conscription. But Lynn was a much more haunting preoccupation.’

  ‘Conrad’s words from Nostromo kept going round and round in my head,’ Cameron went on: ‘”A man haunted by a fixed idea is insane. He is dangerous even if that idea is an idea of justice; for may he not bring the heaven down piteously upon a loved head?” Trying to bring an end to apartheid was nothing if not an idea of justice, but Lynn’s was another “loved head” my fixed idea had brought a whole heap of crap down on – first Jules and Hilton and Nicky, and now Lynn.’

  Cameron stopped talking for so long that Brian, apparently concluding that he wasn’t going to say anything more, drained his glass and started to get up.

  ‘I obviously couldn’t contact her without getting her into more trouble, but I got a letter from her a few months later,’ Cameron resumed. ‘She had asked the university friend who contacted me about Jules’ accident to post it. It was the most wrenching letter I’ve ever received. She said she felt so bad about the inexcusable part she had played in van Zyl’s attempt to trap me that she didn’t want me ever to try to contact her again – she felt too ashamed and humiliated. It wasn’t an excuse – you can’t excuse the inexcusable, she said – but they had detained her for several weeks in solitary confinement. They used every trick in the book to break her down – sleep deprivation, stress positions, sexual humiliation, beatings. What finally made her agree to help van Zyl trap me was his threat to allow a man called Viljoen, the most sadistically brutal of her interrogators, who sounds to have been a carbon copy of Venter, to rape her if she didn’t co-operate. What in God’s name made her think I could ever blame her for that?’

  ‘Lynn said part of her reason for writing was to warn me that van Zyl had an obsessive grudge against me and that I should never ever let him arrest me. I was not intending to go back to South Africa, but I knew he had agents in England so I had to watch my back very carefully until Mandela was sworn in as President seven years later. Lynn ended her letter by asking me please never to tell anybody about what she had done. And here I am betraying her by not honouring even that very minimal request. But I haven’t tried to contact her again.’

  ‘Jesus, Cameron – where does one begin?’ Brian said. ‘It is far too late and we have drunk far too much to embark on a complex discussion of the ethics of betrayal – although I have to say that for someone who hasn’t drunk alcohol for twenty odd years you have been sounding remarkably coherent. I can see why you have never talked about any of this before. If Lynn loved you, and it sounds as if she really must have, she could surely not resent your talking about it, if doing so could help to stop you from going round the bend. And even if your commitment to the struggle did make life difficult for Jules and your children, that doesn’t mean that it was insane. If nobody had tried to do anything about apartheid, you can bet your life that it would still be thriving.’

  ‘And here we are in 2008,’ Cameron said, ‘and the majority of black people in South Africa are not one iota better off materially than they would be if apartheid were still thriving. But you are right, it is time to go home. Time to turn my attention back from the bastards who didn’t follow me on my last road-trip through South Africa to the one who, bizarre as that may sound, seems destined to follow me back to my nondescript terrace house on Manchester Road in Sheffield, where I live out my wholly unthreatening life. I’m going to get a taxi. Are you in a fit state to ride that death trap of yours back up the hills?’

  ‘Of course,’ Brian replied. ‘Try not to feel bad about telling the story. You’ve honoured Lynn’s request for the better part of twenty years, and you needed to tell it. I hope you aren’t going to feel too hung-over in the morning.’

  Chapter 8

  Cameron woke late to discover that the world had regressed towards winter. He could hear the wind forcing a metallic stutter from the flap on the ventilator pipe above the shower. When he opened the curtains to see what was happening, flurries of light snow were to be seen scudding sporadically past the window towards the city centre. April seemed to be making a belated attempt to be the cruellest month after all – excepting only that the bright spring sunshine of the past few days would have inflicted a lot more pain on the dull ache behind his eyes.

  With only one late-afternoon lecture to worry about, Cameron decided he need to go for a walk in the wind. Fortified by a bowl of muesli and a mug of strong coffee, he put on his more or less rainproof windcheater and a flat cap and headed up the hill towards the Peak District. His trousers would just have to get wet.

  Forcing a fast walk into the freezing wind was part pick-me-up and part penance. Penance for breaking a record of twenty years of rigorous abstinence – abstinence that had started out as penance but relatively soon became something he could pride himself on. That was down the tubes now. Penance also for breaking his promise not to tell anyone what had happened. It was so long ago, and Lynn could never know, but Cameron felt somehow stained by having told the story. He could tell himself that he had made the promise to himself, not to Lynn, and that he had, at least, respected her plea to him not to try to contact her. But that didn’t help.

  Nor did it help to tell himself that Lynn wouldn’t mind, because telling the story had been important for his mental health. After all these years there was no reason whatever to suppose that Lynn gave a damn about his mental health. That, in the end, was the most depressing thought of all. If
the penance was supposed to be making him feel better about having told the story, it wasn’t working.

  The pick-me-up part worked better. Considering the amount he had drunk in his only tumble off the wagon in twenty years, Cameron was surprised to find that he wasn’t feeling a lot worse. Brian almost certainly would be. The wind felt cold enough to numb his brain altogether, but, by the time he got back to the warmth of the house – or rather the relative warmth of the house, given that the heating had been turned off weeks before – his headache had gone.

  A little after dark, just as he was slicing chestnut mushrooms to make himself an omelet, Cameron was surprised to hear a tentative knocking on the back door. In all the time he had been in the house nobody had ever approached it along the alleyway at the back, which was intended for the bin collections. The tentativeness of the knocking didn’t sound remotely threatening, but that could be deceptive. Cameron slipped quickly upstairs to the study from where he could see the back door. A hooded anorak made it difficult to identify who was knocking, but the flash of a brightly coloured bangle on a black wrist as she raised her hand to knock again suggested that it must be Mutoni. Hurrying down to open the back door, Cameron was just in time to catch her as she turned away.

  ‘Come in Mutoni, come in,’ Cameron said. ‘I’m sorry to keep you waiting. It is good to see you.’

  ‘I’m sorry to surprise you,’ Mutoni said, stepping quickly into the kitchen and unzipping her anorak. ‘There’s a man in a car just up the street and I didn’t want him to see me. When I saw you last you said I could sleep here. I can’t go back to where I live, and I think the allotment is being watched. I don’t have anywhere else to sleep tonight.’

  ‘You are most welcome,’ Cameron replied. ‘You can use my sleeper couch for as long as you like. Have you had anything to eat? I was just about to make myself an omelet.’

  ‘Thank you very much,’ Mutoni said, ‘but it will only be for one night, I have two other friends in Sheffield I can stay with, but they aren’t at home today, and I can always go back to Leeds. It is safest not to stay in the same place for more than one night at a time.’

  ‘Aren’t you hungry?’ Cameron asked. ‘I’m sure you won’t have eaten properly if you are on the run.’

  ‘I don’t know “on the run”.’

  ‘It means running away from something, being a fugitive’ Cameron said. ‘Can I make you an omelet?’

  ‘Yes, please,’ Mutoni said. ‘But I do not want to cause you trouble.’

  ‘I suspect the trouble involved in making an omelet may well be the least of our troubles,’ Cameron said. ‘Why don’t you sit down at the table? I’ll make you a cup of tea before I start cooking, and we can talk. If you want to wash your hands first, the bathroom is upstairs, the middle door on the landing.’

  ‘Thank you, Cameron,’ Mutoni said. ‘You are a very kind man.’

  ‘There’s a cameraman in Sheffield with a smashed face who wouldn’t agree with you about that,’ Cameron said.

  Mutoni was away for longer than Cameron expected. He had had time to boil the kettle, make two cups of tea, finish chopping the mushrooms – supplemented by more from the fridge – grate the cheese and whisk the egg-mix before she arrived back and sat down at the table. She looked tired and drawn, so Cameron decided it would be better to let her get some food inside her before he tried to find out what was going on. The speed with which she finished a three-egg omelet suggested that she must have been very hungry.

  When they had finished eating, Mutoni offered to do the washing up. Cameron wouldn’t hear of it. Apart from the fact that Mutoni was obviously very tired, and the washing up wouldn’t take more than a couple of minutes anyway, the prospect of the white South African man sitting with his feet up while the black African woman did the washing up for him was a caricature he wanted no part of. He washed the dishes, made them each a cup of coffee and suggested that they should go through to the lounge.

  ‘Last time you were here,’ Cameron said, after they had sat down, ‘it was Amhoro’s birthday and you didn’t feel able to tell me what had happened to you in Rwanda. I don’t know if you feel able to now – you are obviously tired, and I don’t want to put you under any pressure.’

  ‘No, it is alright,’ Mutoni said. ‘You are a good man and I may be putting you in danger just by being here, so I’ll try to tell the story. But please forgive me if at times I find it difficult. How much do you know about the genocide?’

  ‘A little, but not nearly as much as I should, I am embarrassed to say,’ Cameron replied. ‘I’m afraid I couldn’t even tell you exactly when it started.’

  ‘It was in 1994,’ Mutoni said, ‘I was teaching in the junior school in Ntarama. Early in April…’

  ‘Where exactly is Ntarama?’ Cameron asked.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Mutoni replied, ‘it could have been anywhere in Rwanda. In point of fact, it is in Bugesera district, just south of Kigali.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Cameron said. ‘I don’t know where my obsession with detail comes from. Please go on.’

  ‘History is just a pile of details, one on top of the other,‘ Mutoni said by way of exoneration. ‘By April that year, there was a lot of tension. Some of the Hutu newspapers were saying horrible things about us Tutsis, and there was a Hutu radio station that called us inkotanyi, cockroaches, and said all cockroaches needed to be killed. It called itself Thousand Hills Free Radio and Television – but in French, of course. It got so bad that we went to school to teach during the day but we were too afraid to sleep at home, so we slept in the bush. Then the plane was shot down and we knew things were going to get really bad. But we never imagined they could get as bad as they did.’

  ‘What plane?’ Cameron asked.

  ‘President Habyarimana’s private plane,’ Mutoni replied. ‘The crash put an end to the life of the most popular President in the history of the universe. He had been re-elected unopposed the year before: 99.98% of voters voted for him.’

  ‘Or maybe he was just the most successful rigger of elections in the history of the universe,’ Cameron said. ‘I shouldn’t say “just”. Given how competitive that particular field is, it might even be a greater achievement than being the most popular President in history.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Mutoni agreed. The slight twitch at the corner of her mouth was the closest Cameron had ever come to seeing Mutoni smile. She always seemed to greet what life decided to throw at her perfectly equably, she never came across as upset or miserable, she just didn’t do smiling. So much for the colonial stereotype of the ever-smiling black Sambo figure.

  ‘Anyway,’ Mutoni went on, ‘the radio said it was Tutsi rebels who had assassinated the President and called on Hutus to take revenge. So we knew all Hell was about to break loose – I think that is how you would say it?’

  ‘We didn’t know what to do or where to go,’ Mutoni continued in response to Cameron’s affirmative nod, ‘so we went to the church. First, twenty or thirty of us, then hundreds – and it wasn’t a big church. Whenever there had been troubles before, people always went to churches for protection and the churches had always kept them safe. We took what food we had, and I took my son Sebahive, who was five, and my little girl Amahoro, who was three. Sebahive means “bringer of good fortune” in Kinyarwanda and Amahoro means “peace”.’

  Mutoni’s voice faltered. She sat looking down at her clasped hands, expressionless.

  ‘The same ages as Hilton and Nikki were when I last saw them,’ Cameron said to break the silence.

  ‘My children weren’t well named,’ Mutoni said eventually, her voice barely audible. ‘But I don’t want to talk about what happened to them. After a few days in the church we heard the interahamwe – the Hutu militia – arriving. They were shouting and singing, and then we heard the sound of gunfire and knew that Hutu soldiers had arrived. Some of our men had gathered stones to throw at any Hutus w
ho might try to attack the church, but they were useless against the soldiers’ guns, and the spears and machetes the interahamwe used for their killing – what the radio referred to as their ‘work’. They used grenades to blast the doors down and make holes in the church walls. And then they came into the church and hacked everyone they could reach to pieces. It was like the place where they kill the cattle – blood and bits of flesh everywhere – except that it was wasn’t the blood of cattle, it was the blood of little children and women and old people. I’ll never forget the smell. I saw a man with a machete slicing the head off the brightest and kindest little boy in my class. He used to pick flowers to bring to school for me. He was called Hakizimana, which means “it is God who saves”. He wasn’t well named either.’

  ‘When the doors were exploded,’ Mutoni continued after a few seconds, ‘there was a rush for the back of the church. I was separated from my two children when I fell between two pews and was almost crushed to death, but I managed to escape through one of the holes that had been blasted in the wall. I ran towards the river but couldn’t bear to leave Amahoro and Sebahive behind so I tried to hide in a clump of trees to see what was happening. I could see the men who were organizing the attack and sending the interahamwe in to do the killing, but there was nothing I could do. At first people were too interested in what was happening in the church to look around but then some of them noticed me and I had to run on down to the river and hide in the papyrus.’

  ‘How long did you have to hide by the river?’ Cameron asked.

  ‘A month,’ Mutoni replied, ‘but it wasn’t “by the river” it was in the river, or, rather, in the mud where the papyrus grew. All day, every day, we lay in the mud with just our faces uncovered while the interahamwe carried on with their “work” of killing us. They tricked some people into coming out and hacked them to pieces. Many of the little children couldn’t stand the mud and the hunger and started crying, so the interahamwe found them and stopped them crying. Many of our number, particularly the older ones, grew weak and died and just lay rotting in the mud. It was hot. Our faces greeted very many mosquitoes, even during the daytime. At night we came out of the mud and tried to find food and, if it was raining, tried to wash ourselves. If the RPF forces – the Rwandan Patriotic Front – had arrived to drive the interahamwe away even a week later I’m sure that everyone who had found shelter in the papyrus would be dead.’