‘The Chinese, who comprise one quarter of humanity, have begun to stand up. The Chinese have always been an industrious people. It is only in modern times that they have fallen behind, and this was due solely to the oppression and exploitation of foreign imperialism and the domestic reactionary government ... We have united ourselves and defeated both our foreign and domestic oppressors by means of the People's Liberation War and the people's great revolution, and we proclaim the establishment of the People's Republic of China. …. Our nation will never again be an insulted nation. We have stood up.’
‘Can you see what Mao is saying? China is determined to be a leading power and much depends on interpreting correctly China’s role in world affairs’
‘I think China is on the move. Again. People forget that Chinese sea-borne exploratory expeditions reached Northern Australia, India, East Africa, Have you ever been to Gedi near Mombassa?”
“Yes. We went there on the way to Malindi. I remember the Chinese plates, white and blue, pressed into the walls of ruined houses …”
“Well spotted. But there is more to Chinese travel: they were in the Iranian Gulf and the Red Sea and the South Atlantic and could have reached Europe. But since the fifteenth century China displayed no interest in this outside world. A world which treated China roughly. Knocking her down. But no more.’
‘China's emerging status as a major power should not be in doubt. Two years after his speech, two years after victory in China, Mao’s army took on the Americans and fought them to a standstill.’
‘Korea?’
‘Yes. What about Korea? You should know.’
Theo remained silent.
‘Good for business. The Korean War has made fortunes for the Greeks who were into sisal. War and revolution require rope. So dear Theo…plant sisal. It does not grow in China. Plant sisal and make your fortune and spend it on your party.
*
Theo left the Armenian’s castle his brain aching from its pounding from history. He went to find his cronies who would have made for the Club. He reported what he had been told by the oracle on the mountain and most took the piss.
“It will take ten years for you to establish sisal at Ndareda. And before you make a cent you have got to set up a factory to make the rope. Do you know how much that will cost? Not only that. Sisal is losing its appeal to something called nylon. You could end up bankaroot.”
They all laughed, including Theo. So how and where was he going to make his bucks?
Phaedra
On the 30 of June 1960, the Congo was declared independent. All hell broke loose. The temporal battle was tribal. It was fought between the federalists led by Joseph Kasavubu, head of ABAKO, his Bakongo tribal party and the MNC, led by Patrice Lumumba, His Mouvement National Congolais stood for a unitary centralized state. A deal between them was done and undone by their decision to leave the army under the control of Belgian officers; a mutiny broke out on 4 July. The Belgians flew in troops to the main towns to protect their human and material interests. A week later, on 11 July, Katanga declared its independence under Moise Tshombe. Here was the main source of the Congo’s mineral wealth. Lumumba went wild. Car loads of Belgians streamed into Tanganyika and at the Safari Hotel in Arusha revealed rape, murder and mutilation unseen on this scale and ferocity by its local mid-morning coffee clientele. Not even on trips to Nairobi hospitals and mortuaries during the height of Mau Mau.
If it meant anything now to Theo, the Congo crisis was an opportunity to exploit. He was, after all, going to heed the Armenian’s advice to exploit a crisis whilst it was hot.
He went in his Chevy pick-up from Arusha to Mwanza across the Serengeti and from the lake to Kigali in Rwanda and entered the Congo at Goma, close to the Ugandan border. Nothing was unfamiliar as Swahili bridged the frontier. But he went no further. They came to him. Held him down. And raped him. Several times over one weekend. And left him for dead.
*
‘Kir ee e Eleyson’ were the first words he heard after ‘Mtombe’, ‘Kuma la Mama yake’. ‘Mkundu Neyupe’ . Fuck him. His Mother’s cunt. White Arse. Takataka Nyeupe. White Trash.
He came to in a white washed room without a ceiling, the paraffin lamps casting shadows all around and across the corrugated iron roof. The shadows danced slowly around and back again. There was a face close to his. Its mouth spoke to him in Greek invoking God’s explanation. My child, my boy, what have they done to you. Oh my God, why? What is happening? Why?
He lost consciousness and returned to the same sights and sounds. Again and again. Each time his senses functioned a little longer before returning to the void.
Next he was aware of daylight. Razor thin bands through the closed shutters. It was hot. He did not feel hot. But he could hear the tin roof grinding under the sun just as it did at his farm house at Ndareda. But he sensed he was not there. The scents were not the same. Ndareda smelt of the maize stored in guniyas (hesian sacks) in what could have otherwise passed as a dining room. This scent was like the coffee beans he smelt stored at his father’s farm. Yet the voice was like his mothers. He held onto consciousness, and saw her cross the room towards him. She was carrying a jug and a glass.
‘Petheemu, Petheemu,’ my child, my child.
He felt her hand touch his arm and saw her face for the first time. It was large plain and round, framed by a mass of tightly curled hair which blotted out half the light in the room. He shivered at her touch and voice.
‘Mee fovase. Mee fovase. Karthia mou. Mee fovase. Do not be afraid, my heart Me lene Fedra. Eese sto speetaki mou. Tha se prosexo. Tha gheenees kala. Mee fovase. I am Phaedra. You are in my little house. I will look after you. You will get better.’
The shivers ran like waves approaching the shore and subsided to the central stillness of a deep dark lake. Cold, cold, cold. He shook again and she gently cradled his upper body in her broad hands and arms. One behind his back. The other lightly across his ribs. Her face in the nape of his neck; her breath penetrating the gap between his shoulders and the mattress. He responded to her presence by relaxing into her gentle embrace which enveloped him until he slipped into sleep.
Whenever it was he awoke she was beside him again, this time urging him to drink.
‘Ghalla, tha sou kanee kalo. Milk, it will do you good.’
He moved his head further up the pillow and then raised himself on his elbows in an attempt to shuffle up the wall behind the bed. She could see the paucity of the effort and quickly intervened to allow him success in sitting up. Broken as he was, a sense of normality in the act of sitting up and drinking briefly returned to him. And for a moment the stupor in his mind gave way to a clear vision of compassion. ‘My name is Phaedra’, she told him again, encouraging him to tell her his. But he made no reply, closing his eyes to drift into the void once more.
Each awakening brought more shared words and by the end of a week he managed a brief exchange about his whereabouts. She told him that he had been brought to her by Father Gabriel to whom he had been delivered in the dead of night by devout villagers from Kabale, in neighbouring Uganda, where there was a thriving Afro-Greek Orthodox community and where she managed a coffee farm; her husband had left her to visit his family in Thesaloniki never to return. She had decided to stay in Uganda and gave freely of her time to supporting the priest, Gabriel, in his ministry. He sent to her the ‘in extremis’ needy; as for example the maimed for whom the trip to the capital, Kampala, would prove too much.
She had over the years accumulated skills and provisions to deal with most emergencies.
Phaedra gave succour to him and he would lapse in and out of the void under her watchful gaze. The days passed. The masika (small rains) came. And went. And still he remained inert apart from taking the occasional drink of milk and rizoghalo rice pudding and the more occasional flow of talk. But she knew that his brain was no longer properly tethered. It rolled about his skull on the ebb and flow of pain and settled only upon the mud
banks of depression. And there it eventually rested. Refusing to speak, he only, and only occasionally, accepted her milk offerings. In the course of time he shrunk to a skeletal shadow of his former self. Exposed above the bed sheet the skull suggested an adult. But she saw only his eyes hugely enlarged in their sockets and saw in them the frightened child; the son she never had.
Then one day Father Gabriel arrived with the young man’s father; Kostas Kokopoulos had finally tracked him down and had come to take Theo home. Phaedra and the priest said as much as they could and explained as much as they knew none of which had prepared him sufficiently for the sight of this bed ridden spectre.
‘The e mou, The e mou’, he repeated, my God, my God. He knelt beside the skull whose eyes made no effort to reflect recognition. He felt for a hand but found a bundle of sticks.
Kokopoulos fell away slowly and silently onto the floor and wept and wept and wept before crawling away through the open door onto the verandah. My son, said Father Gabriel, gather yourself up. Your son cannot be moved. He is in the care of God’s hand maiden. If he is to recover he will best do so here. Kokopoulos looked across at Phaedra. Koree mou. Panaghia mou. The e mou. Sose mas: My daughter. My mother of God. My God. Save us. And burst into the tears of a man who had not cried since childhood; a strange high pitched garbled gurgling which made the dogs bark.
The priest led him away into the heat of the day, the sun reflected in the flash of chrome and glass as the mission car reversed and set off away from the compound. Phaedra waved to the dust cloud of the departing fathers and went in to see to her son’s needs.
Theo, as she now called him, turned his head towards her as she came in and, for the first time since his arrival, gave her the ghost of a smile. She thanked God: Thoxa see The e Mou and asked her son whether she could wash his body. He nodded his assent.
Preparations were carefully made. The door and window shut to prevent any chance of a draught, thought by all maternal Greeks to be the cause of much affliction. Though there was not a breath of fresh air, the precaution had to be taken; from the mountains of Epirus to the tropical highlands of East Africa the cry went up, “Matia Theka. Prosexete na meen kanee revma. Tha kreeosee to Pethee”. Keep ten eyes open. Take care that the child should not chill with a draught.
Water came, hot and cold, in two white enamel jugs and was mixed in a porcelain basin standing on a metal table by the matching bedstead. A set given as a wedding present and transported from Piraeus on the honeymoon voyage to Mombassa. From thence up the Uganda Railway where the bridegroom told her at Tsavo about the man eaters of Tsavo. In the absence of lions he threw himself at her neck and growled, Egho eeme to leontharee I am the lion. And undid his flies to reveal a sight she had never beheld before and wished that she had still not seen. Worse, the rampant organ swayed by the movement of the carriage next approached her face. ‘Faghe to rungu mou’ eat my knoberrie he growled as though presenting his mate with the best bit of kill. And kill it did. She screamed and turned her face into the antimacassar embroidered East African Railways & Harbours while he thrust around her exposed buttocks, lifting her more squarely to the seat by the straps of her girdle. He clawed at this until it slipped onto the underside of her knees and plunged into her bellowing like the king of beasts on heat. The act stopped as the train screeched to a halt at Voi Station, throwing them both down onto the floor of their compartment away from any casual look from the outside. She froze in fear and shame as he arranged his flaccidity once more into his trousers, unencumbered, in the Greek fashion, by underwear. He stood triumphant while she struggled on the floor to lift her inner garment and suspended stockings and pull down her dress which had spiralled around her waist. She then knelt against the seat beside her and stood shakily to adjust her hair and makeup reflected in the rectangular mirror below the luggage net. She could see him standing behind her and felt his hands caressing her buttocks. Mee. Tha se skotoso .. Zo on. Don’t .. I will kill you .. Animal. She turned to face him and spat up at his face and left the compartment for the privacy of the toilet.
There she stayed. Locking herself in for the rest of the remaining long journey. After which the marriage ended. He farmed and displayed his rungu to other women. She found solace in the work of the church and in reading poetry. She knew by heart ‘Peace’, by Yiannis Ritsos which she often recited to the recuperating Theo:
The dreams of a child,
A mother’s dreams,
The words of love beneath a tree in summer,
That is Peace.
It is the scent of food on the evening breeze,
when the halting of a car brings no fear,
when a knock on the door signifies a friend
and when heaven floods in through an open window
feasting our eyes on its peals of colour; the sound of bells.
That is peace.
Peace is the glass of warm milk and an open book
set before the
awakening child,
when the horizon is but a garland of light, a
blessing to the day
whose passage evokes no regrets.
A day whose roots feed the leaves of happiness
through the night
and gives sleep to the just.
Peace is the alphabet of sweet dreams.
It is the firm clasp of hands, the warm bread at the breakfast table.
Peace is a mother’s smile.
Only that.
Peace is nothing else.
Invariably, at this line, he would drift off into nothingness. So on days of the bed bath no poem was read. Instead the silent poetry of caress after caress.
That day as she bathed him she noticed that his back was infested with regular lumps down the spine; a lump either side of the column, one between each rib.
She sent for Father Gabriel who came that evening, apologising for the delay which was due to a baptism at a remote village in the interior; his African flock was burgeoning, so much so that the Patriarch of Alexandria in whose diocese East Africa lay was coming to visit.
Gabriel peered at Theo who was asleep and took her at her word about the raised glands. Tha eine karkinos; it will be cancer. He had seen such symptoms many times before. “I will return home and send for his father. Prepare the boy’s things for his journey to Tanganyika. That is if he is still alive …”
K.K. arrived two days later. Took his son, not to Arusha, but to Nairobi where the private hospital was reckoned to be up to top European standards.
The consultants there had little hope of saving Theo but “if he were to go to Geneva or London or New York, who knows?” They offered to find a placing and together they decided on the Royal Marsden. The next day, Theo, accompanied by a nurse left Eastliegh airport for Heathrow on a private charter.
*
In between treatments, Theo lived at a hotel in South Kensington, owned by an Asian from Uganda. He had correctly read the tea-leaves in Kampala and had decamped to London well before the enforced exodus of Asians from Uganda many years later. His was an act of true intelligence; he could see the way the wind was blowing and got off the good ship Uganda before it became a ship set to sink in the gathering storm.
In fact Mr. Padhvani and family had considered sailing out of Mombassa by the B.I. liner of that name, the S.S. Uganda. However, the liner was fully booked and tickets were found on the Union Castle liner, The Windsor Castle; the choice was always between the white ships with black funnel of the British India line or crushed pink with plum funnels of Union Castle. That was still in the days when there were scheduled sailings out of Africa to Tilbury. You could go via the Cape, calling in at Dar-es-Salaam, Beira, Lorenco Marques, Durban, East London, Port Elizabeth, Capetown, St. Helena and then north to Europe. Or by way of the Suez Canal and Home. Home to Britain. Home to civil servants on leave aboard the Windsor, Llangiby, Dunnoter, and other British castles, home on the sea to the expats and their families on a triennial tour of du
ty. The prospect of mixing it with them did not worry the Madhvani family unduly. After all they were wealthy, philanthropic, well established and well liked in Kampala where the gymkhana club listed them among its members, something which would not have happened in Nairobi. White settlers there kept themselves quite separate from Africans and aloof from Asians whereas in Uganda, Indians were the settlers. They had come to work on the great railway from coast to lake. Many lost their lives through accident and by the appetite of man-eating lions. And when the railway was complete they took to business as only Indians can. The Madhvani’s did very well. And read the tea-leaves correctly.
There were German Jews who did the same. Misha had related to Theo how some got out before 1933 when Hitler came to power when it was already clear at the hustings prior to the elections of 1931 that Jews were to become the scapegoats for all the ills in Weimar.
“Why didn’t the ones who left early warn the rest?” Theo asked Misha.
“That is a tough one Theo. I feel strongly that they should have done. I remember speaking to one of the leaders of the Berlin Jews. A man called Schlep. We all knew of him for his hospitality to the young struggling Einstein. When I heard that he, Schlep, was leaving for England I asked him why he did not warn the rest. He did not reply. But as I now reflect on it I realize that a mass exodus was impossible. Who would take us all? Later, the French offered Madagascar and the British, Uganda. Too exotic by far. Mind you, had New York, the Jerusalem of our dreams, been on offer, we would have parted the Atlantic Ocean with our supplications and walked across!’