BEYOND THE PALE

SHORT STORIES AFTER 8 (PT 2)

Photo by Khamkéo Vilaysing on Unsplash

As a river, the Congo is everything anyone could ever imagine it to be, and then some. I don’t know if that makes any sense, but in the distance, where the shoreline and the sky meet—where the haze and glare melt into one and make the horizon a smear that looks like a Reynold’s watercolour left out in the rain—the sky takes on a texture, and almost looks like a velvet drapery hanging in the evening dusk.

As we made our way east, the shore started closing in around us and the jungle sat upon us thick and heavy, like a veil of uncertainty. We found ourselves locked within a shroud of mist that hung about us for days.

There’s a lot of diversity and economy in the jungle; if you dare yourself to look for it, only then will you see it. You’ll see birds of every colour imaginable, all of them keening freely, crying like they were tenants turned away from a sham funeral—until you realize they have freedom of a different kind as they wing their wiles overhead. The monkeys are chattering in the treetops as if they’re nosey neighbours talking to one another across the distance of the jungle—they scream to be heard but can’t hear for their screaming. And upon occasion, we’d see some silent colossus rippling the clear waters beneath us, anonymous and soundless, nothing more than a lazy shadow somewhere in the river’s depths—as frightening and as dark as a silhouette in the night. Huge hippos laze in the equatorial sun, lounging in the mud and watching us pass with what amounts to a skeptical look of unease, if not outright distrust. Further upstream, crocodiles take to the water as a herd of antelope approach the shore. They look to be sleek prehistoric monsters, torpedoing through the river— leaving a silent wake that made me want to cry in alarm.

In an ongoing attempt to keep us safe, the Captain had restricted the white passengers to the upper decks, while keeping the more than two hundred Congolese locked up in steerage below.

“Europeans don’t mix well with the Congolese,” Richard said to me. Explaining, really. “Congo is, and always has been, a segregated country—and as much as it might appear to be a modern city, with its universities, hospitals, and even its industries, it’s only the whites who prosper—and rightfully so,” he added, a touch of mischief to his voice so that I didn’t know whether to believe him or not. And not having an answer, I reached up to brush his hair back from his forehead, forcing an unsure smile.

That night it was clear, cool, and crisp, the stars a dazzling mess in the darkness where the Milky Way emblazoned a path across the sky, almost like one could imagine a child’s splatter painting done with a toothbrush. I didn’t recognize any of the constellations tracking their way across the night sky, finally realizing that the Equator offers a different view of the world I am familiar with. I heard a violent cry in the still of the night—a night punctuated by the steady chugging of the ship’s engine—and moved closer to Richard who smiled, wrapping his arm around me as if to reassure me. 

“Is there anything you want to tell me about your father?” he asked after a moment of stargazing.

“My father?” I turned my head, looking up at him.

“About his death, I mean? It’s bound to have affected you. I know how it affected me after Annie died.”

I smiled, looking at his profile in the dull light of the ship’s frosted dining room windows. I brushed his hair back and shook my head.

“Must you?” he asked, seizing hold of my arm.

I smiled, telling myself it was something I’d do for all the days of our lives, if he gave me the chance. It was a habit borne of necessity, much the same as I had the habit of tucking my own hair behind my ear, it seemed natural. He would never think to do it himself.

“The difference, is that she was your wife, and you loved her,” I said, looking out at the shadows of the night. “That’s the way it’s supposed to be. My father made it hard for anyone to love him, even my mother. He was a firm believer in that old adage of ‘Spare the rod, and spoil the child’. If I feel anything at all, I think I feel sorry for the love we—no, that’s not true either.”

“What isn’t?” he asked.

“I was going to say that I feel sorry for the love he didn’t let us share with him. But when I think of the sort of man he was, I have to tell myself he didn’t deserve our love. I don’t think he should’ve ever had children if he wasn’t going to love them. I suppose, us being girls, we were a disappointment to him. He never said it to us—Mother would’ve never put up with that from him—but it was obvious he was a man who should’ve had sons.”

“How can you say that?”

“Because he was my father,” I said in all seriousness.

“As your father, he had to love you.” Richard said it with the self-assuredness of a man who has no idea what it meant to have a father such as mine. I find that to be true with a great many people.

“Oh Richard,” I smiled up at him, stroking his cheek gently, tenderly I suppose. “I wish that was true. It’s obvious your father loved you and your sisters, while I couldn’t wait to get away from mine. That’s why I married Everett when I did. I was barely eighteen when I married him. And having Gerald when I did, well, I was still a child myself, wasn’t I? But Everett died at Dunkirk, did I tell you that? I must have,” I said, distracted for the moment. He smiled and nodded at me.

“It doesn’t seem like the sort of thing I wouldn’t want you to know,” I said. “But I thought my life was over. I suppose, in a way, it was. You see, my father expected me to move back home with him—our mother died some six years earlier. He asked me how I expected to raise a child on my own. And he meant it, too. Perhaps a lesser person would’ve moved back in with him, and maybe he was thinking I would, because he thought I was weak? I may have been that before I met Everett, but...”

I fell silent for a moment, listening to the steady chugging of the engines in the strange silence, enjoying the warmth of his arm around me.

“But?” Richard prompted me.

“But I’d changed,” I said. “People change—well, that’s what they say. When you fall in love, you change. That’s what it means to fall in love; that’s what’s supposed to happen. But the girl I was when I was with Everett, and the woman I became as a result, they’re not the woman you met. And why would they? I mean, well, there’s been twenty years in between, hasn’t there? One would hope I’ve changed. I’ve raised a son without being saddled with a husband—”

“Is that what you think being married is?”

“Oh, darling, no,” I laughed lightly. “I never meant anything of the sort. If it wasn’t for Gerald introducing us in the first place, I’d still be teaching in England instead of being here with you. I’d have never thought to leave hearth and home and come out here. I mean, honestly, Congo? Deepest, darkest, Africa? I can see why Conrad called it ‘The Heart Of Darkness.’ But could you picture me here alone? Well, neither could my father. He told me it would be the end of me if I did—of us actually—if we came out here to teach.”

“Why would he say that? He didn’t even know me? I only met him twice.”

“Because that’s the sort of man he is—or was, I should say. He couldn’t understand how I’d be willing to give up two years of my life to teach in Africa. It made no sense to him. You say Europeans don’t mix with Congolese? Well, my father would’ve fit right in with that.”

Photo by maxime niyomwungeri on Unsplash

Stanleyville, from what I could see, appeared to be a city of green, open parks, wide streets, and magnificent government buildings fronting the river and reminding me of a European holdover from the previous century. A lot of it reminded me of London’s waterfront before the War, before the Blitz. I stood beside Richard on the ship’s deck, overcome with emotion. The realization of having finally arrived was overwhelming to me. I felt Richard’s arm around my shoulder and let myself melt against him in the morning heat, the memory of our lovemaking last night still fresh in my mind.

He’d proven himself somewhat tentative in his ministrations toward my needs, which was something I was willing to overlook. I’d assumed it to be his state of mind concerning my father’s death—his thinking how could I want carnal relations under such circumstances? But emotional anxiety often leads to intimacy, or so I’ve learned over the years, which, like I said, may not have been the sentiment Richard was seeking. 

Instead of holding me in his arms after methodically working himself into me; instead of me falling asleep nestled in his arms after him spilling his seed into me, he rolled away and fell asleep. He left me staring at the darkened walls, listening to the chugging pistons of the engine and feeling the gentle vibration of the ship. I told myself things will be better in the morning.

The skies quickly filled with the discordant chatter of a thousand different birds, the deckhands running about as the Edgewater Fortune hove-to in mid-river and a line was thrown to a waiting tug. I pulled myself away from Richard, leaning over the port side railing and looking back toward the stern. I could see the dark waters churning wildly behind the tug, the river frothing like foam, and found myself looking down at the excited faces of children pointing and laughing.

I looked back at the city again, studying it anew. The buildings appeared to be a blend of both old and new, and while I may have been expecting to find a primitive city, I was impressed to find such modernity. I thought I’d find dirt and squalor—grass huts and naked natives—but instead I found riches. Richard explained that even though the state provided many of the services one might expect to find in any other modern society, many of the Missions, local industries, and agricultural co-ops, provided most of the up-to-date medical services.

“And what about the schools?” I asked. It seemed a reasonable question under the circumstances. We were coming here as teachers. I leaned out over the port rail again, smiling down at the Congolese children who were too excited at the process of docking to think about looking up at me.

“Primary education is well funded,” Richard said cautiously, and something in the tone of his voice made me look at him.

“Well funded? You mean by the State? It’s State funded?” I said, turning away from the children below and leaning against the railing. I couldn’t help but notice the cryptic change in his tone. I watched him struggling with his unease. His smile was forced, and weak.

“Well,” he began softly, and there was something in his tone again that told me I might not like what I was about to hear. “The schools here are segregated of course—”

“Of course,” I replied, my voice cool and unemotional.

“Yes, and most of the primary age children attend State supported, Catholic Mission schools.”

“Catholic schools? Yes, I believe you told me that, too,” I said. And he had, I remembered.

He nodded slowly. “By design, the education they receive is more along the lines of vocational training and agricultural discourse, rather than academic—”

“‘By design’?” I said, latching onto the word and mulling it over in my mind. I was looking over Richard’s shoulder at the children on the docks throwing lines to fishing boats and helping with the day’s catch. “Oh my God,” I said when I realized what he was trying not to say. “They want to keep them as their own labour force. All of them. Like it was at the turn of the century.”

“The government doesn’t want to risk creating an elite class of the population that might demand its independence—”

“And so they withhold their education?”

He held up a hand. “Admittedly, there are too few students who have gone on to secondary school—and fewer still that have gone on to university. For some years now, the Europeans have wanted to create a non-confrontational citizenry that will do as they say and be dependent on them to help run things in the future.”

“Dependant on them? And what of their independence?”

“I don’t put any stock in all this talk of independence. The Europeans want to keep their cities—like this one, and Leo,” he added, almost sounding apologetic. “But at the same time, they want to carry on with their strict policy of racial separation. That’s why Bulongo Station is so important. Parents send their children there; it’s not State run, and it’s not an orphanage.” 

Somehow, as I looked out over the city, it didn’t appear as beautiful as I had first thought it to be. The modern city that stood in front of me just moments before, had given way to a primitive evil lurking below the surface. The squalor I was expecting to see, I now realized was a squalor of the heart, a blackening of the soul. I couldn’t wait to leave, and we hadn’t even docked yet.

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