It dawned on her that Matteous was asking her to teach him to write. A letter that would say what he had thought and lived through during all those years. A letter explaining his life, a letter home, to his mother, Kate imagined. Writing: arranging the words so that they would say what he wanted to tell his mother, although he could hardly expect her to be able to read his letter. But somebody could read it to her. And Kate pictured his mother listening to what he had written, a letter resembling a musical score, a Congolese dance, a prayer for rain, or a song for the dead. “She won’t be alive anymore, Miss, will she?” he had said the day before, making it sound halfway between a statement and a question.
Would he like something to eat or drink, she asked, for she was persuaded that he was always hungry or thirsty. She could not resist making the offer, and he said yes so as not to have to say no. “No” was a word he said with difficulty, not wishing to sound disrespectful. He was wearing an old jumper of Oscar’s which she had given him, and black army trousers from the hospital. Matteous had approached her with great caution, his tread as soft as if he were stalking a wild animal. So he was asking her for help: teach me to write, then I can go back home.
Kate went to the kitchen, made tea, put some homemade biscuits on a plate and brought it all through on a tray to the balcony.
“Come, let’s sit outside.”
Two chairs and a small table were all the balcony could hold. Matteous stood waiting for Kate to take a seat, and did not sit down until she urged him to. After a while she said that, yes, she would be happy to teach him for as long as he liked, for as long as he stayed in England. Was that alright with him? And she promised him that the day would come when he would write that letter.
She had not known it was possible to weep so noiselessly. It was not weeping in the usual sense, for his face was unchanged, there even seemed to be a hint of a smile. The tears spilled from his eyes as though following a logic of their own. He did not try to check them, they ran down his cheeks in rivulets, his head held high, his hands on the armrests of his chair as he faced her. She returned his gaze, made no move to console him or take his hand. She made no gesture whatsoever that might discomfit him. She saw the young soldier, the boy in the forest, the man far from home, the wounded patient in bed. She saw the son of a mother who had disappeared.
Events he had only touched upon in the past now came out in the open, in fits and starts.
“Suddenly they were there, Miss, they stormed into the houses and killed everybody they could find. My father shouted for me to run away into the forest. ‘Don’t look back, Matteous, don’t look back,’ he said. I ran, but I also looked back, and then I saw him standing there, surrounded by men raising their axes against him.”
He had joined a band of children roaming the forest, in flight from their village and what had taken place there. He might have been seven years old. He had forgotten a lot, the worst had been washed away. He did not know how he had ended up in Élisabethville. Who had helped him, who gave him food, how he came out of that forest alive – it was all a great gap in his memory. He took huge leaps across time: at one moment he was seven, at the next seventeen, now he was playing in his village, now in the dancing halls of the city. Élisabethville. The way he said the name gave it something equivocal: there was wistfulness, and also a hint of a shudder, at least to a sensitive ear. To Kate’s ear. She heard everything. He had never spoken in this way before. Between nostalgia and horror, in bits and pieces, a story that had neither end nor beginning. He floundered, broke off, began again. His childhood, his years in the copper mines of Elisabethville, the daylight that he only saw on Sundays. He had done what everybody did: kept his head down. They were years of hardening the heart, and of denial. Years of slow preparation for – well, for what? Matteous groped for the words. And what he had been unable to say yesterday now poured out of him all of its own. That saving the officer’s life had not been a question of courage, but more one of despair. He thought he would run into a knife, or a gun, or a bayonet, get killed in action. He had nobody left anyway, they were all dead and gone. And when the bullets hit him he had almost been glad. His time had come, all would be forgotten. Hoisting the officer over his shoulder had not been hard, he had carried the man as a father would his child. Run, Matteous, don’t look back, go and hide in the impenetrable forest, in the darkness where nothing is.
