The Mission Song Read online

  To which, without the smallest hesitation, she declares her nationhood to me: “I am from the region of Goma in North Kivu, by tribe a Nande,” she murmurs. “And this poor Rwandan man is the enemy of my people.”

  And I will tell you as a matter of unadorned truth that her half-drawn breath, the widening of her eyes, her urgent appeal for my understanding as she says this, declared to me in a single moment the plight of her beloved Congo as she perceives it: the emaciated corpses of her relatives and loved ones, the unsown fields and dead cattle and burned-out townships that had been her home, until the Rwandans swarmed across the border and, by appointing the Eastern Congo the battlefield for their civil war, heaped unspeakable horrors on a land already dying of neglect.

  At first the invaders wanted only to hunt down the genocidaires who had hand-killed a million of their citizens in a hundred days. But what began as hot pursuit quickly became a free-for-all for Kivu's mineral resources, with the result that a country on the brink of anarchy went totally over the edge, which is what I strove and struggled to explain to Penelope, who as a conscientious British corporate journalist preferred her information to be the same as everybody else's. Darling, I said, listen to me, I know you're busy. I know your paper likes to stick within family guidelines. But please, on my knees, just this once, print something, anything, to tell the world what's happening to the Eastern Congo. Four million dead, I told her. Just in the last five years. People are calling it Africa's first world war, and you're not calling it anything. It's not a bang-bang war, I grant you. It's not bullets and pangas and hand grenades that are doing the killing. It's cholera, malaria, diarrhoea, and good old-fashioned starvation, and most of the dead are less than five years old. And they're still dying now, as we speak, in their thousands, every month. So there must be a story in there somewhere, surely. And there was. On page twenty-nine, next to the quick crossword.

  Where had I got my uncomfortable information from? Lying in bed in the small hours, waiting for her to come home. Listening to the World Service of the BBC and remote African radio stations while she met her late-night deadlines. Sitting alone in Internet cafes while she took her sources out to dinner. From African journals purchased on the sly. Standing at the back of outdoor rallies, clad in a bulky anorak and bobble cap while she attended a weekend refresher course on whatever it was she needed to refresh.

  But the languid Grace, suppressing an end-of-shift yawn, knows nothing of this, and why should she? She didn't do the quick crossword. She doesn't know that Hannah and I are participating in a symbolic act of human reconciliation. Before us lies a dying Rwandan man who calls himself Jean-Pierre. At his bedside sits a young Congolese woman called Hannah who has been brought up to regard Jean-Pierre and those like him as the sole perpetrators of her country's misery. Yet does she turn her back on him? — does she summon a colleague or consign him to the yawning Grace? She does not. She calls him this poor Rwandan man and holds his hand.

  “Ask him where he used to live, please, Salvo,” she orders primly, in her Francophone English.

  And again we wait, which is to say Hannah and I stare at each other in dazed, out-of-body disbelief, like two people sharing a celestial vision that nobody else can see because they haven't got the eyes. But Grace has seen. Grace is following the progress of our relationship with indulgent attention.

  “Jean-Pierre, where did you live before you moved to Hampstead Heath?” I ask in a voice as determinedly dispassionate as Hannah's.

  “Prison.”

  “And before prison?”

  It is an age before he provides me with an address and a London phone number, but eventually he does, and I translate them for Hannah who again gropes behind her ear before writing in her notebook with the fibre-tipped pen. She tears off a page and hands it to Grace, who sidles down the ward to a telephone — reluctantly, because by now she doesn't want to miss anything. And it is at this moment that our patient, as if roused from a bad dream, sits bolt upright with all his tubes in him and demands in the coarse and graphic manner of his native Kinyarwanda: my mother what is wrong with me and why did the police drag him here against his will? — which is when Hannah, in an English weakened by emotion, asks me to interpret the precise words she is about to say to him, not adding or subtracting anything, Salvo, please, however much you might wish to do so personally out of consideration for our patient — our patient being by now a paramount concept to both of us. And I, in a voice equally weakened, assure her I would not presume to embellish anything she ever said, regardless of how painful it might be to me.

  “We have sent for the Registrar and he will come as soon as he can,” Hannah is pronouncing deliberately, while also pausing in a more intelligent manner than many of my clients to allow me time for my rendering. “I have to inform you, Jean-Pierre, that you are suffering from an acute blood disorder which in my judgment is too advanced for us to cure. I am very sorry but we must accept the situation.”

  Yet there is real hope in her eyes as she speaks, a clear and joyful focus on redemption. If Hannah can handle news as bad as this, you feel, then Jean-Pierre ought to be able to handle it too, and so should I. And when I have rendered her message as best I can — precise words being somewhat of a layman's delusion since few Rwandans of this poor man's standing are conversant with such concepts as acute blood disorder — she gets him to repeat back to her via me what she just said so that she knows he knows, and he knows he does too, and I know both of them know and there's no fudging of the lines.

  And when Jean-Pierre has gruffly repeated her message, and I've again rendered it, she asks me: does Jean-Pierre have wishes while he waits for his relatives to arrive? Which is code as we both know for telling him he will very likely die before they get here. What she doesn't ask, so I don't, is why he's been sleeping rough on the Heath and not back at home with his wife and kids. But I sense that she regards such personal questions as an intrusion upon his privacy, just as I do. For why would a Rwandan man want to go and die on Hampstead Heath if he didn't want to be private?

  Then I notice that not only is she holding our patient's hand but she's holding mine too. And Grace notices it and is impressed, though not in a prurient way, because Grace knows, as I know, that her friend Hannah is not given to holding hands with just any interpreter. Yet there they are, my calf-brown, half-Congolese hand and Hannah's authentic all-black version with its pinky-white palm, both of them entwined on an enemy Rwandan's bed. And it's not about sex — how can it be, with Jean-Pierre dying between us? — it's about discovered kinship and consoling each other while we're giving our all to our shared patient. It's because she's deeply moved, and so am I. She is moved by the poor dying man, even though she sees such men all day and every day of her week. She is moved that we are caring for our perceived enemy, and loving him according to the Gospel she's been brought up to, as I can tell by her gold cross. She is moved by my voice. Each time I interpret from Swahili to Kinyarwanda and back again, she lowers her eyes as if in prayer. She is moved because, as I am trying to tell her with my eyes if only she will listen, we are the people we have been looking for all our lives.

  • • •

  I won't say we held hands from then on because we didn't, but we kept our inner eyes on each other. She could have her long back to me, be stooping over him, lifting him, caressing his cheek or checking the machines that Grace had fixed to him. But every time she turned to look at me, I was there for her and I knew she was there for me. And everything that happened afterwards, with me waiting beside the neon-lit gateposts for her to finish duty, and her coming out to join me with her eyes down, and the two of us not embracing in our Mission children's shyness, but walking hand in hand like earnest students up the hill to her hostel, down a cramped passage that smelled of Asian food to a padlocked door to which she had the key, it all flowed from the looks we had exchanged in the presence of our dying Rwandan patient and from the responsibility we felt for each other while a shared human life was slipping ou
t from under us.

  Which was why, between passionate bouts of lovemaking, we were able to conduct discussions of a sort unavailable to me since the death of Brother Michael, no natural confidant having until now presented himself in my life with the exception of Mr Anderson, and certainly not in the form of a beautiful, laughing, desiring African woman whose sole calling is to the world's sufferers, and who asks nothing of you, in any language, that you're not prepared to give. To provide factual accounts of ourselves we spoke English. For our lovemaking French. And for our dreams of Africa, how could we not return to the Congolese-flavoured Swahili of our childhoods with its playful mix of joy and innuendo? In the space of twenty sleepless hours Hannah had become the sister, lover and good friend who had consistently failed to materialise throughout my peripatetic childhood.

  Did we do guilt — we two good Christian children, brought up to godliness and now five-star adulterers? We did not. We did my marriage, and I declared it dead, which I knew for a certainty it was. We did Hannah's small son Noah, left behind with her aunt in Uganda, and we jointly longed for him. We did solemn promises, and politics, and swapped memories, and drank cranberry juice with sparkling water, and ate take-in pizza, and made love right up to the moment when she reluctantly puts on her uniform and, resisting my entreaties for one last embrace, skips down the hill to the hospital for an anaesthetics class she's attending before beginning night shift with her dying patients while I go hunting for a taxi because, due to the bombings, the Underground is part-operational at best, and the bus will take too long, and Heavens above, look at the time. Her parting words, spoken in Swahili, were nonetheless ringing in my ears. Holding my face between her hands, she was gently shaking her head in joyous marvel.

  “Salvo,” she said. “When your mother and father made you, they must have loved each other very much.”

  3

  “All right if I open a window?” I called out to Fred my white driver.

  Snug in the rear cushions of the Mondeo as it wove expertly through the dense Friday-evening traffic, I was enjoying feelings of liberation bordering on euphoria.

  “Please yourself, mate,” he responded lustily, but my needle-sharp ear immediately spotted beneath the colloquialisms the trace of an English public school accent. Fred was my age and drove with aplomb. I liked him already. Lowering the window, I let the warm night air wash over me.

  “Any idea where we're heading, Fred?”

  “Bottom end of South Audley Street.” And assuming my concern to be directed at the speed of his driving, which it wasn't: “Don't worry, we'll get you there in one piece.”

  I wasn't worrying but I was taken aback. My encounters with Mr Anderson had until now occurred at his Ministry's headquarters in Whitehall in a richly carpeted dungeon set at the end of a labyrinth of green-painted brick corridors guarded by sallow janitors with walkie-talkies. On its walls hung tinted photographs of Mr Anderson's wife, daughters and spaniels, interspersed with gold-framed testimonials awarded to his other love, the Sevenoaks Choral Society. And it was in this dungeon, after I had been summoned by confidential letter to a series of “test-interviews” conducted above ground by an enigmatic body calling itself the Linguistic Audit Committee, that he had unveiled to me the full majesty of the Official Secrets Act plus its many threatened punishments, first by reading me a homily which he must have delivered a hundred times already, then by presenting me with a printed form with my name and date and place of birth electronically pre-entered, and addressing me over his reading spectacles while I signed it.

  “Now you won't go getting big ideas, will you, son?” he said, in a tone which irresistibly recalled Brother Michael's. “You're a bright lad, the sharpest pencil in the box if all they tell me is true. You've a cluster of funny languages up your sleeve and a Grade A professional reputation that no fine Service such as this one can ignore.”

  I wasn't sure which fine Service he was alluding to but he had already informed me that he was a Senior Servant of the Crown, and this should be sufficient for me. Neither did I ask him which of my languages he considered funny, although I might have done if I hadn't been on such a cloud, because sometimes my respect for people flies out of the window of its own accord.

  “That doesn't make you the centre of the universe, however, so kindly don't think it does,” he went on, still on the subject of my qualifications. “You'll be a PTA, that's a Part-time Assistant, and you can't get lower than that. You're secret but you're fringe, and fringe is what you'll remain unless you're offered tenure. I'm not saying some of the best shows aren't fringe, because they are. Better plays and better actors in my wife Mary's view. Do you understand what I'm telling you, Salvo?”

  “I think so, sir.”

  I use “sir” too much and am aware of it, just as I said Mzee too much when I was a child. But in the Sanctuary everyone who wasn't a Brother was a sir.

  “Then repeat to me what I've just told you, please, so that we can both be clear in our minds,” he suggested, availing himself of a technique later employed by Hannah to break the bad news to Jean-Pierre.

  “That I shouldn't be carried away. I shouldn't get too—” I was going to say “excited” but checked myself in time. “Enthusiastic.”

  “I'm telling you to douse that eager gleam in your eye, son. Henceforth and for evermore. Because if I see it again, I'll worry about you. We're believers but we're not zealots. Your unusual talents aside, what we're offering you here is normal meat-and-potatoes drudgery, the same as you'd be doing for any client on any wet afternoon, except you're doing it with Queen and country in mind, which is what you and I both like.”

  I assured him — while careful not to appear over-enthusiastic — that love of country ranked high on my list of personal favourites.

  “There's a couple of other differences, I'll grant you,” he went on, contradicting an objection I hadn't made. “One difference is, we'll not be giving you much in the way of a background briefing before you put on your headphones. You'll not know who's talking to who or where, or what they're talking about, or how we came by it. Or not if we can help it, you won't, because that wouldn't be secure. And if you do come up with any little suppositions of your own, I advise you to keep them to yourself. That's what you've signed up to, Salvo, that's what secret means, and if we catch you breaking the rules you'll be out on your ear with a black mark. And our black marks don't wash out like other people's,” he added with satisfaction, although I couldn't help wondering whether he was making an unconscious allusion to my skin. “Do you want to tear up that piece of paper and forget you came here? — because this is your last chance.”

  Upon which I swallowed and said, “No, sir. I'm in — really,” with as much cool as I could muster, and he shook my hand and welcomed me to what he was pleased to call the honourable company of sound-thieves.

  • • •

  I will say at once that Mr Anderson's efforts to dampen my ardour were futile. Crouching in a soundproof cubicle, one of forty, in a secure underground bunker known as the Chat Room with suave Barney our floor manager in his coloured waistcoats watching over us from his cantilevered balcony — and he calls it meat and potatoes? Girls in jeans to fetch and carry our tapes and transcriptions and, contrary to the known rules of political correctness in the workplace, our cups of tea as well, while one minute I'm listening to a top-ranking Acholi-speaking member of the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda plotting by satellite phone to set up a base across the border in East Congo, and the next sweating it out in Dar-es-Salaam docks with the clatter of shipping in the background, and the cries of hawkers, and the in-out hum of a wonky table-fan that's keeping away the flies, as a murderous bunch of Islamist sympathisers conspire to import an arsenal of antiaircraft missiles in the guise of heavy machinery? And the very same afternoon being sole ear-witness to a trio of corrupt Rwandan army officers haggling with a Chinese delegation over the sale of plundered Congolese minerals? Or bumping through the honking traffic of Nairobi in the c
hauffeured limousine of a Kenyan political mogul as he wangles himself a massive bribe for allowing an Indian building contractor to cover five hundred miles of new road with a single paper-thin surface of tarmac guaranteed to last at least two rainy seasons? This isn't meat and potatoes, Mr Anderson. This is the Holy of Holies!

  But I didn't let the gleam show, not even to Penelope. If only you knew! I would think to myself, whenever she slapped me down in front of her bosom friend Paula, or went off for one of her weekend conferences that nobody else seemed to attend except her, and came back very quiet and content from all the conferring she'd done. If only you knew that your stuck-in-the-rut, toy-boy husband was on the payroll of British Intelligence!

  But I never weakened. Forget instant gratification. I was doing my duty for England.

  • • •

  Our Ford Mondeo had skirted Berkeley Square and entered Curzon Street. Passing the cinema, Fred pulled up at the kerbside and leaned over the back of his seat to address me, spy to spy.

  “It's down there, mate,” he murmured, tipping his head but not pointing in case we were observed. “Number 22B, green door hundred yards up on the left. The top bell is marked HARLOW like the town. When they answer, say you've got a parcel for Harry.”

  “Will Barney be there?” I asked, momentarily nervous at the prospect of confronting Mr Anderson alone in an unfamiliar environment.

  “Barney? Who's Barney?”

  Chiding myself for asking unnecessary questions, I stepped onto the pavement. A wave of heat rose at me. A swerving cyclist nearly knocked me over and cursed. Fred drove off, leaving me feeling I could have done with more of him. I crossed the road and entered South Audley Street. Number 22B was one of a row of red-brick mansions with steep steps leading up to their front doors. There were six bell buttons, dimly lit. The top one read HARLOW like the town in faded ink. About to press it I was assailed by two conflicting images.