‘Tell me about that hard little pea making you so uncomfortable,’ Martin says, taking out a Rooster. He lights the match with one hand, a little party trick.
I look steadfastly at the text of The Promise. The resurrection of the heart, the wisdom that comes only from loss. Ha ha ha.
‘Then don’t talk.’ Martin leans in, blows smoke into my face. ‘Let me buy you a beer. Drink, look pretty. That’s enough for me.’
Intent, I turn a page.
Now he laughs, ‘Are you still ticked off about the other day? What did you expect me to do? What did you do? Did you save her? Did your crying and feeling oh-so-bad save her? Ha ha ha.’
It’s impossible to read now. I can smell the beer on his breath, his cigarette smoke smarts my eyes. When I glance up, he yells out, ‘Gladness! Mbili!’
She brings over two beers. She is looking at me in a way that I feel might be hostile.
‘Okay, princess. I can see you are on the edge of your seat.’ Martin drinks, settles in. ‘It’s really quite interesting, my story, from an objective point of view, if you didn’t have to live it. I can see you’re ready, you’re fascinated. Ha ha.
‘So, I was a pilot for the Ukrainian Air Force. Are you impressed? In the early nineties, the Ukraine sold off a lot of its old shit equipment to stupid African governments. Who else would take it? Only a dumb coon dictator so he can repaint it and parade it around. And, hey, the bombs still worked. As long as you could get the plane up, you could drop the bombs out the window and they would explode.
‘In 1991, three mates and me, we get an offer to fly three MiG-3s to the Congo. Oh, excuse me: Zaire. Fucking joke. They should just deal with the issue once and for all and call it The Republic of Total Stinking Shit.
‘These MiGs, let me tell you, princess, they were real pieces of crapola. Only one of us has working nav equipment, so we had to follow him, like little ducks in the sky.
‘We plan to stop in Uganda, at Entebbe. An hour, just to refuel. But some busybody from the American Embassy hears about us, and before we know it the planes are embargoed, our money and our passports are confiscated by the authorities. The Ukrainian Government denies all knowledge of the planes and us. And Mobutu? President for all Eternity of the Republic of Total Stinking Shit. What’s he going to do? Send us a check?
‘So, first, we sell our watches, then our T-shirts, then our hats. We sleep on bits of cardboard under the planes. We get bitten to hell. We get malaria. We have to eat fucking posho. You’ve never eaten posho, have you, princess? We come up with stupid plans. How we’re gonna steal the fuel or walk to Nairobi. We plan to hijack an airliner. It’s all we do, come up with stupid plans. Viktor sells his shoes to a guy selling bananas and I take the money and go into town and make a phone call but I can’t get through to Ukraine. I keep trying. I reach my cousin, he promises to send money through Western Union.
‘Every day I go into Kampala to the Western Union, but there’s never any money. When my shoe fund is finished, Dimitri sells his shoes to the banana guy and we try all over again with his cousin. Fucking Ukrainians are all fucking liars. The money never arrives.
‘And there we are — you get the picture — we have our flight suits and one pair of shoes, and one night, this Angolan comes out to the planes. He says he’s got jobs for us. The man had these black eyes, so you couldn’t see the pupils. Hyena eyes. My baburya would have said he had the evil eye. But what do we care after three months of sleeping on fucking cardboard and shitting in the bushes and wiping our assholes with banana leaves. Ha ha ha. Three fucking months of posho and we are ready to lick the evil eye if it will get us the fuck out. And so, princess, we begin our lives as mercenaries in Africa. Twenty-five years now. Whatever you can imagine, whatever hell, your worst nightmare, I’ve seen it and I’ve certainly smelled it. And you know what I’ve come to realize, after all of it?’
He pauses now. He knows I’m listening, I can’t help myself. His North Sea eyes never shift, never even blink.
I look at him, and wish I hadn’t. ‘What? What have you come to realize, Martin?’
‘There’re always more of them.’ He smiles at his revelation and affects amazement, almost perplexity: ‘No matter how many die or how they die. Burning, screaming, guts falling out, whatever. There’re always more of them.’
I wait for a moment. ‘Are you done?’
He laughs again, a belly laugh, as if I’m very, very funny. ‘You’re offended,’ he says. ‘Poor princess.’ He reaches over and clinks his bottle on mine. And then he leans in, like a lover about to kiss, and whispers in my ear. ‘Very easy to be offended by a little pea. But so very difficult to make anything better in this world of shit.’
I’m careful not to move.
Finally, he smiles, lingers, just so I know he’s in complete control. Then he taps the book. ‘I know this one. It doesn’t have a happy ending.’
That night Martin Martins hires a hooker.
At least, I assume she’s a hooker.
I listen to them, it’s impossible not to.
Every detail of their fucking.
And when they’re done, and when she’s left, I hear him smoke his cigarette, smell the tang of it.
Finally, I hear his breathing downshift into sleep. And I listen to him sleep, for hours, his soft, baby breaths, he doesn’t even move. I remember Tom saying that when he first started working in Rwanda he couldn’t sleep. Stories and images, voices, sobbing, screaming — he couldn’t clear them from his head. He told me that very few perpetrators had trouble sleeping; the same psychological mechanism that allowed them to commit terrible crimes allowed them to justify their crimes completely.
Guilt, he said, is seldom felt by the guilty.
Arnau, March 17
I found an empty cup in the kitchen sink. I had not put it there. It seemed oddly emboldened. Proud cup looking up at me with its remnant puddle of coffee. Black, no sugar. I placed the cup on the table. I supposed I should be frightened. Someone had been here.
Down the stairs, I knocked on the Gassners’ door. Mrs Gassner opened it a fraction, keeping the chain on the latch as if to suggest she feared for her life. ‘Kindermörderin,’ she hissed and slammed it shut. The word was everywhere, now, whispered like a mantra in the grocery store, the chemist, as I walked down the street. I was no longer sure if it was being uttered or if I was simply hearing it in expectation.
Kindermörderin.
‘Mrs Gassner,’ I said through the door. ‘Do you know who has been in my apartment?’
There was no answer.
I knocked again, even louder, and tried my bad German. ‘I know someone was there. Haben Sie die reingelassen?’ Just in case I’d said it wrong, I added, ‘Did you give them a key? That’s against the law.’
She responded only by turning up the volume on the TV.
I raised my voice. ‘I’m going to call the police.’
This was an empty threat. Because of course the phone was disconnected. And I had taken no measure toward its reconnection. There was no one to use it. The unpaid bill was still in my handbag. MAHNUNG!
I walked down the road to a phone box. In Switzerland, public phones still exist and they always work. I called Tom’s mobile. Elise answered.