Текст книги "Jimfish"

Автор книги: Christopher Hope

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Christopher Hope
Jimfish

To Bella, Blake, Antony

Like much else in Jimfish, not only are many events all-too real – the collapse of ex-Yugoslavia, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the red berets of the Fifth Commando in Zimbabwe with their zeal for massacres, Mobutu’s many palaces – but also, more by luck than judgement, I was there for a lot of them. And made notes. Because what I saw of the facts easily outstripped fiction.

Jim Fish: an insulting term for a black man; also used as a form of address.

Oxford Dictionary of South African English

Men will always be mad, and those who think they can cure them are the maddest of all.

Voltaire

CHAPTER 1

Port Pallid, South Africa, 1984

In the mad middle years of the 1980s, in Port Pallid on the Indian Ocean, the old skipper of an inshore trawler, the Lady Godiva, was standing on the harbour wall one day, watching a line of leaping dolphins slicing through the waves, when he felt a tap on his shoulder.

‘When I turned around,’ he told Sergeant Arlow, ‘there stood this boykie on the lip of the sea wall, looking at me with sea-green eyes. He might have come right up from the water, he was that close to it.’

‘Better haul him in and let me see him,’ said Sergeant Arlow, a great bear of a man, who decided all moral questions in Port Pallid. ‘We will make a plan.’

The people of Port Pallid caught, thought, bought and sold fishes and weighed, sorted and grouped them into neat little piles; and they did much the same with people, adhering to the religion of Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd, a Dutch visionary who taught that people were happiest when coralled in separate ethnic enclosures, colour-coded for ease of identification and tightly controlled. All moral questions were matters for the police, and since Sergeant Arlow was the entire police force in Port Pallid it was he who decided to which group people belonged and whether their papers and passes and permits were in order.

And so the old skipper did as he was told, collected the boy and took him to the police station.

‘Where you from, Jimfish?’ the sergeant asked.

‘When I was a baby I was stolen and taken away by some people to their village and worked as a slave in the fields,’ the boy said.

‘That’s his story,’ said the skipper.

‘Believe that, you’ll believe anything,’ said the sergeant. He stuck a pencil into the boy’s hair, as one did in those days, and waited to see if it stayed there or fell out before he gave his verdict.

‘He’s very odd, this Jimfish you’ve hauled in. If he’s white he is not the right sort of white. But if he’s black, who can say? We’ll wait before classifying him. I’ll give his age as eighteen and call him “Jimfish”. Because he’s a real fish out of water, this one is.’

The old skipper asked: ‘What must I do with him?’

The sergeant shrugged. ‘What would you do if you landed a catch the wrong size or colour?’

The skipper looked at the boy. ‘I can’t throw him back.’

‘Put him on ice until his family comes forward,’ said Sergeant Arlow. ‘Until then, he can work in my garden.’

No one came forward to claim Jimfish and he remained impossible to classify. In some lights and to some eyes he looked as white as newly bleached canvas; others saw him as faintly pink or tan or honey-coloured; there were even some Pallidians who detected a faint blue tinge to the boy.

Jimfish lived in the house of the old skipper and each morning he waved goodbye when the Lady Godiva chugged into the Indian Ocean, heading for Cape Infanta, the Agulhas Bank or the Chalumna river mouth, chasing shallow-water hake or east-coast sole. When he returned from these trips the old skipper told the boy stories about strange creatures hauled up from the deep. One story above all others the boy asked for again and again.

‘It was 1938 and I was a youngster like you, crewing on the trawler Nerine under Captain Goosen. One day we found in our nets this great big fellow. Blue as blazes with dabs of white. But this fish had four little legs. It turned out to be a coelacanth, which everyone thought had been dead for millions of years, but the one we caught was alive and kicking. The coelacanth can do handstands. And swim backwards. Folks say that humans come down from apes. But millions of years before that, Old Four Legs wandered ashore and decided to stay. Result? Us. And here we are, still fish out of water.’

Jimfish longed to join the fishing boats, but his permit allowed him to work only as a gardener. And so, when he felt sad, Jimfish would tell himself that even if he wasn’t a proper person, and even if his family never came forward, one day he’d be a brother to this coelacanth.

‘Bright blue, with four legs. It can stand on its head and swim backwards. A very queer fish. Like me.’

Each morning Jimfish went to work in the garden of Sergeant Arlow, whose wife Gloriosa kept on so many servants it was rumoured she assigned one to each hand when her fingernails needed attention.

Jimfish was set to work under the gardener, Soviet Malala, a most fiery man whose mother had been influenced by the Russian Revolution, hence the name she had given her son.

The Arlows had a lovely daughter, whose name was Lunamiel, and she had chestnut hair, green eyes and a complexion as soft as a downy peach. They had a son, too, named Deon, whose neck grew out of his collar like the trunk of a baobab and whose sole ambition was to become a policeman as large and loud as his father. It was also rumoured that even in starting a family Gloriosa had relied on a degree of in-house domestic help. But rumour-mongers were careful to keep their gossip from the ears of Sergeant Arlow, because policemen were encouraged to shoot troublemakers on a regular basis.

Soviet Malala felt sorry for young Jimfish and soon became the boy’s teacher. This gardener, who had never been to school, taught himself to read and write. He studied the works of Karl Marx, Mikhail Bakunin and Kim Il-sung and then wove their ideas into his philosophy, which he named ‘prolo-fisc-freedo-mism’, and he explained its theories with boiling enthusiasm to his young apprentice.

‘Anger ignites. It is the antidote to sickness, cynicism and doubt. Fury fires the masses and blasts them towards the right side of history. Rage is the rocket fuel of the lumpenproletariat.’

In this same year, 1984, a new, choleric, finger-wagging president took charge of the country. He was known as ‘Piet the Weapon’, because of his passion for guns, tanks and fighter jets, and for crushing all who dissented, demurred or disagreed. When he one day paid a visit to Port Pallid, every white person turned out to hear him speak.

Spying an oddly coloured boy in the crowd, the President asked: ‘And what’s your group, young man?’

Jimfish did not hesitate: ‘I’m with the fish, sir. That’s my name and that’s my calling.’

The President was impressed. ‘Good for you, Jimfish. If we all stuck to our own school, shoal, tribe, troop and territory we’d be a lot happier. Those like Nelson Mandela, who oppose me, will stay in jail. There will be no mixing of the colours, no turning back and no going forward. In fact, no movement of any sort, not while I am in charge.’

The loyal Pallidians cheered him to the echo and felt very lucky to be led by a man so strong, so well-armed, so furious, and they sang him on his way:

Good old Piet, he’s the one;

We die for him till kingdom come;

Given to us by God’s own grace:

Viva the champion of our race!

And off went the new President to buy more weapons and do more crushing of anyone who dissented, demurred or disagreed.

‘See what we are up against?’ Soviet Malala asked his pupil. ‘War is on the way. We will drive the colonial settler entity into the sea. Take back what he stole from us. Confiscate his farms, reclaim the mines, nationalize the seas and abolish the banks. Viva the struggle! Viva the lumpenproletariat!’

When Jimfish said he wasn’t sure if he qualified for the lumpenproletariat, his teacher told him: ‘Think of the insulting name hung around your neck and you’ll be as angry as a snake in no time at all.’

Jimfish promised to do his best and walked home longing to feel true rage, but knowing he was more fish than snake.

One day the Lady Godiva sailed back to port without its old skipper and Jimfish heard that he had been washed overboard. But in his dreams Jimfish saw the old man swimming with the coelacanth in deep-sea caves, where the two of them were doing handstands and paddling backwards. And he hoped that one day he could do the same.

He tried to tell Soviet Malala why he so loved the fish. ‘It’s bright blue, dabbed with white. It’s got four legs and can stand on its head and swim backwards. A very queer fish. Like me.’

But the gardener shook his large head until his Lenin cap wobbled, and advised him to dream of revolution instead.

‘When it happens we will nationalize the oceans and the fish will belong to formerly disadvantaged people like you.’

One afternoon Sergeant Arlow’s daughter Lunamiel was walking in the orchard when she saw Soviet Malala sitting under a mulberry tree with one of her mother’s maids, a vibrant girl named Fidelia, whose daily task it was to paint the fingernails of her mother’s left hand. The gardener and the maid were so tightly entangled that Lunamiel, who loved botany, was reminded of the clutching tendrils of the strangler fig, but she had never seen two people in a such a binding embrace and she longed to try the experiment herself.

The very next day, after a long lesson from Soviet Malala on prolo-fisc-freedo-mism, Jimfish was walking through the sergeant’s garden when he saw Lunamiel lazing on a red picnic rug beneath a mulberry tree. She asked Jimfish to sit beside her and he was happy to do so. Their hands touched, their breathing quickened, their clothing loosened, and soon Jimfish and Lunamiel were as tightly entangled as the tendrils of the strangler fig.

At that moment Sergeant Arlow came by, and when he saw the entangled two he pulled out his truncheon and began whacking Jimfish all over his body, much of which was exposed.

‘You odd, foul fish!’ he shouted. ‘My daughter is as white as a wedding cake! Her family tree is Aryan to the nth degree!’

Lunamiel’s mother, woken from her nap by the noise, overcame her exhaustion and marched into the garden, ready to give her daughter a good hiding, but she had forgotten which servant usually wielded the whip. Sergeant Arlow seized his service revolver to shoot the boy and Jimfish ran to Soviet Malala’s room, where his teacher hid him under the bed until Sergeant Arlow, denied the chance of doing his duty, thrashed several of his servants instead.

Jimfish’s relief did not last long. Soviet Malala warned him it was only a matter of time before the sergeant shot him and dragged his body behind his police van, a tradition among the constabulary. And if her father failed to kill him, then Lunamiel’s brother Deon was also very keen to do so, having taken an oath on the family Bible that he would never let his sister dally or tangle with a black man.

‘I am not exactly black,’ said Jimfish.

‘You’re not exactly anything and that’s your trouble,’ his teacher pointed out. ‘The best thing for you is to escape to the outside world.’

Soviet Malala found a map and pointed to the country north of the Limpopo river.

‘Zimbabwe is the perfect place for you. Everyone is free, happy and fed. Its leader is a true revolutionary and a friend of Kim Il-sung of North Korea. He has done away with imperialists and he will soon send the settler entity packing. Zimbabwe is where South Africa will one day be.’

And so, that very night, Jimfish left Port Pallid on a long march north. Every now and then he checked his temperature, hoping to feel it flare into revolutionary rage, the rocket fuel of the lumpenproletariat that blasts the masses towards the right side of history.

CHAPTER 2

Zimbabwe, 1985–6

After walking for many weeks Jimfish reached the broad Limpopo river, on the far bank of which lay the country of Zimbabwe. He was weak and exhausted, but across the water he could see the outside world, and he silently saluted Soviet Malala for his escape, though he was unable to forget the lovely Lunamiel, left far behind in Port Pallid.

Some ferrymen, using rudimentary rafts of oil drums roped together, now offered to carry him to the other side of the river. Jimfish thanked them for their kindness, but said he would swim across.

‘As you like,’ they told him. ‘But the water is full of crocodiles. They have eaten many refugees fleeing from the terror in Zimbabwe.’

‘You are clearly mistaken,’ Jimfish replied. ‘I know for a fact – and my friend and mentor Soviet Malala has confirmed it – that across the Limpopo lies the land of the free, ruled by a kindly man, Robert Gabriel Mugabe, great friend of the eternal leader of North Korea Kim Il-sung, to whom all oppressed people look up, as living creatures look up to the sun.’

‘If you believe that, you are in for a sad surprise,’ said the ferrymen of the Limpopo. ‘Then again, the ignorance of South Africans is limitless and legendary and nothing can help it. But if you truly wish to find out what lies across the river in Zimbabwe, you will need to arrive on the further bank without being eaten. For a modest sum we will carry you over.’

When Jimfish told them he had no money, the boatmen very kindly accepted his wristwatch in full and final payment, and, at nightfall, they paddled him across the Limpopo. The moment they deposited their passenger on the far bank they hurried back to the South African side of the river, as if their lives depended on it.

‘How odd,’ thought Jimfish, ‘to wish to flee from the land of the free.’ And he set off with a happy heart.

He had not gone far when a jeep packed with heavily armed soldiers wearing red berets drew up beside him.

‘What are you doing on this road in broad daylight?’ the soldiers demanded, astonished by Jimfish’s lack of fear.

‘I’m on my way to the capital where I hope to meet Robert Gabriel Mugabe, the Great Leader of this free land, comrade-in-arms of Kim Il-sung, dear leader of North Korea.’

‘You’re a lucky man,’ the soldiers told him. ‘We are the Red Division, a secret Zimbabwean force trained by those very same North Koreans to serve as the iron fist of our own great dear Comrade Leader. You are a most welcome volunteer to fight shoulder to shoulder with us against the filthy dissidents in this province of Matabeleland.’

Jimfish did not remember volunteering, but he was too polite to disagree when the soldiers pulled him into the jeep and drove him to their camp. There they fed him and gave him a bed and Jimfish was happy to be in a land where the colonialists had melted away, the settler entity would soon be no more, and the masses rejoiced in freedom and peace.

The next day he was shaken awake at dawn and sent on a route march of many miles to a rifle range where he was taught to use a gun, and then marched back to the camp, singing a revolutionary hymn, adapted from a Korean original:

Homage to Peasant Number One!

Beloved Leader, bright Messiah,

Whose holy light outshines the sun’s;

Whose eyes are lakes of liquid fire —

Like rats his enemies succumb

And roast upon their funeral pyre.

When Jimfish asked who precisely was being honoured in this tribute, the soldiers explained it was the battle hymn of the Red Division, sung at sunrise, to honour either Kim Il-sung or the Great Leader of Zimbabwe. It did not matter which, since the two were interchangeable.

Before sunrise the next day, though grateful for his training, his food and his bed, Jimfish decided it was time to be on his way and left the camp quietly, not wanting to wake anyone. He had not gone far when a helicopter swooped low overhead, bullets peppered the red dust around him and he was arrested, manacled and flown back to the camp of the Red Division, where he was charged with desertion. Each day he was bound to a tree with barbed wire and whipped with electric flex until the flesh of his back ruptured. Then he was locked in one of the giant metal shipping containers that were used as classrooms or brothels or holding cells for suspected spies and dissident members of the Division.

Jimfish was dismayed by this treatment and knew he should be angry, but try as he might he could not feel revolutionary fury that was the rocket fuel of the lumpenproletariat. After some days, bruised, bleeding and close to dying of thirst, he asked his captors why he should be treated in this manner. They replied that he was lucky not to have been summarily shot. Instead, he was being reorientated, according to a method popular among the liberation movements of Southern Africa. If he survived re-education, he would join the ranks of the Red Division for their upcoming operation, dubbed ‘The Storm that Drives the Rats from the Maize Fields’. Then they locked Jimfish in the shipping container again and left him to stew in the heat, flies and his own filth, while the Red Division went off to destroy a variety of villages across Matabeleland, whose inhabitants had failed to show proper respect for the Great Leader, brighter than the sun.

When the soldiers arrived back at the camp, after a day of rape and hut-burning, Jimfish told them that, rather than face another minute in the shipping container, he preferred to be shot. This they agreed to do, though they accused him of rank ingratitude. Jimfish was blindfolded and made to kneel. The firing squad had levelled their rifles when there rode by, in his regimental jeep, an officer built like a mahogany sideboard, his chest covered in golden medals and rainbows of ribbons.

‘Who is this prisoner?’ he demanded.

‘A boy from south of the Limpopo,’ the soldiers explained. ‘He came in search of the sun itself, Kim Il-sung, of whom our Great Leader is the heavenly twin. But he failed to respond to reorientation.’

‘Anyone south of the Limpopo, who is a champion of our own Comrade Leader in Harare, shows far more good sense than we ever expect from people down that way,’ replied the officer. ‘Release the prisoner immediately.’

The soldiers leaped to obey and Jimfish was taken to his saviour’s ambulance, which followed him everywhere. There his wounds and abrasions were treated and, after many days of careful nursing, he recovered. His rescuer commended him for having the good sense to flee South Africa for the land of the free, and introduced himself.

‘I am called General Jesus. Because I have the power to redeem or reject. I save or I damn. I am a military Messiah.’

The power of General Jesus was clear to see because his troops began treating their former prisoner with the utmost deference, commissioning Jimfish as an officer in the Red Division, placing on his head the prized red beret, and assuring him that any pain he might have felt when they beat him and locked him in the shipping container would soon be forgotten in the glory of hunting dissenters, rebels and traitors throughout the province of Matabeleland and bringing them the gift of correct reorientation. When Jimfish asked if there were dissidents who declined the gift, the soldiers were mightily amused at his simple-mindedness. Under the leadership of General Jesus, who took his orders directly from the Comrade President, only two classes of citizen were found in Matabeleland: the correctly reorientated and the recently deceased.

CHAPTER 3

Led – or rather, overseen – by the fearsome General Jesus, whose jeep followed at a sensible tactical distance, the Red Division advanced on the terrified villagers of Matabeleland. Men were few, and women and children scattered like chickens at the first glimpse of a red beret. What a splendid sight it is to see a full division of seasoned soldiers, armed with AK-47s, bayonets at the ready, trained in the Democratic Republic of North Korea, whose beloved leader dazzles like the sun, attacking a village of mud and thatch huts, with mortars, machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades.

When the soldiers tired of merely shooting people, they devised more recreational activities for passing the time. Jimfish watched as two pregnant girls were gunned down, soldiers slit open their bellies with bayonets and held up the still-living foetuses. Even though Jimfish pulled his beret over his eyes to block out the sight, nothing could muffle the screams of the dying girls.

Next, the survivors were interrogated and each was asked to list his grievances regarding the actions of the Red Division. In the interests of transparency, General Jesus ordered that prisoners who refused to answer must have their grievances beaten out of them. Jimfish listened to a catalogue of rape, torture and the murder of family members carried out by the Red Division. But then all who claimed to have suffered these crimes were immediately ordered to deny it publicly. Next, the prisoners were given the Anthem of the Sun and made to sing the words:

You are the One

Bright as the Sun;

And we are thine

From the start of time

Till kingdom come!

Who closes his eyes

And blots out Our Sun;

Deserves to die:

By my machine gun!

Once the interrogations and listing of grievances were done, the soldiers herded the prisoners into their huts, secured the doors and set fire to the thatch roofs. The screams of the burning men were such that Jimfish was again obliged to cover his ears as best he could with his red beret.

Being somewhat confused by what he saw, he approached General Jesus, who sat in his jeep watching the conflagration, and, apologizing for his ignorance, Jimfish asked: ‘Is this cruelty intended to propel these villagers to anger and then to rage, which is the rocket fuel of the lumpenproletariat? In order that they rise and expel white colonial imperialist settler forces from the country?’

General Jesus smiled at his question. ‘Those old bugbears were long ago booted out of Zimbabwe and we are free. Our leader in Harare is the choice of the people, and will be so until the last trumpet. But, alas, some in this province of Matabeleland refuse the hand of friendship and continue to harp on imaginary grievances. People here are tribalist, obstructionist and capitalist. Dissidents stalk the countryside. They must be firmly reoriented if they are to arrive on the right side of history.’

Hearing this, Jimfish felt a little happier because it reminded him of the words of his teacher Soviet Malala. But the air was so pungent with scorched flesh that he could not stop himself asking General Jesus: ‘But what if some of those being burnt alive are already on the right side of history?’

The general smiled his jovial smile: ‘We eradicate them anyway, because we can’t say who is a dissident and who is not. History will know its own.’

The scene of suffering was too much for Jimfish (there is only so much you can mask with a red beret) and when the Division broke into a triumphal chorus of the national hymn – as the last huts and those trapped inside them burnt to ashes – Jimfish took the opportunity to slip away. Having walked for several hours through the bush he came to a village, which, from the tattered flag raised above the compound, he knew to be a loyalist community, linked by tribe and tradition to the faraway regime in the capital, Harare. Here was no smoke and no fire, but a deep and terrible silence. Arms, legs and heads lay scattered like broken dolls. In this village it had been the Matabele dissidents themselves who had fallen on the loyalists and hacked them to pieces, and the destruction was no less terrible than the one he had just fled.

As Jimfish lingered beside this field of carnage, debating in his heart whether any of these pitiful victims were on the right side of history, he was again taken prisoner by the Red Division, which had pursued him relentlessly since his escape. This time General Jesus was determined to show him no mercy.

Jimfish was imprisoned, along with dozens of Matabele prisoners whom the Brigade had rounded up – a crowd as thick as chaff on a threshing floor. They were made to stand on the banks of the nearby Cwele river and were summarily mown down with bursts of automatic fire. But so close was the press of bodies that, by a miracle, Jimfish was not touched, although he was buried under the weight of other victims and almost suffocated. He lay hidden until nightfall, when General Jesus ordered his troops to begin dumping the bodies down a nearby mineshaft. This was hard labour and the troops worked slowly; they complained about the weight of dead bodies, took frequent rest breaks and did not concentrate on their grisly work.

It was now that Jimfish again took the chance to escape. He walked through the night and the following day, thirsty, hungry and downhearted, knowing that the more distance he put between himself and his pursuers, the better was his chance of saving his life. He begged lifts from passing cars, and he was lucky to be picked up by a truck driver from Uganda, ferrying goods to the capital of Kampala, where, the driver told Jimfish, people were suffering terribly from army brutality and political stupidity.

‘Our ex-President, Milton Obote, was an intellectual tyrant. He was chased away to make room for President Idi Amin. He was the boxer tyrant who enjoyed public executions. But he was chased away, too, and now we have Milton Obote all over again. He has an Academy where he gives people an education they never recover from – they graduate to the grave.’

The driver left him on a street corner in Kampala, where crowds were milling about. Some people were wildly happy; many were terrified and everyone was thin. When Jimfish asked what was going on, they told him there had been another coup and President Milton Obote had fled for a second time, taking with him all the money in the national bank.

‘We have seen Idi Amin flee, only to be replaced by the dictator who came before him, Milton Obote. Now he has gone once again. Who is next? Is history a revolving door? Do despots always win? And, by the way, what tribe or species of creature are you? How is it that you are not white or black, neither man nor boy, fish nor fowl? Are you with us or against us?’

Jimfish had no answers to these question and he said simply: ‘My name is Jimfish. I believe there is a right side of history and I hope one day to arrive there.’

This infuriated the crowd and they set the dogs on him for being neither for nor against them, neither completely black nor sufficiently white but all the shades in-between, and Jimfish ran for his life. Sore and starving, he arrived on the edge of town and sat in the gutter beside a rubbish dump. An Asian gentleman named Jagdish saw his distress and took him home, gave him the run of his house, ran a bath for him, fitted him out with fresh clothes and set on the table a simple supper. When Jimfish thanked Jagdish for his kindness, the good man said he was sorry he could not do more. He had once been very rich, but the dictator before the dictator who had just fled had expelled all the Asians from Uganda. Most of his family had gone to England, but he had stayed and now he gave away what money he still had to those who had none.

‘I am an African,’ he said. ‘I’m at home here in Uganda, and so I stay.’

Jimfish was very taken with this Asian who seemed not to care if he was on the wrong or right side of history, lacking the spark of anger that kindles the rage that is the rocket fuel of the lumpenproletariat. He stayed some days with the good Jagdish and when he had recovered with clean clothes on his back and some cash given him by his rescuer, he went to explore the town.

Beside the very rubbish dump where, not long before, he had sat down to beg, he saw another poor wretch, as thin as a flagpole and lying in the gutter, so deathly still that he might already have passed away. And in one hand he held what looked to Jimfish like a dried-out beetroot.