The Angels Weep - Smith Wilbur - Страница 142

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The two of them moved in on the approaches to the nearest drift. They moved an inch at a time, searching and listening, sweeping the dense riverine scrub and the tangled lianas beneath the water-fattened trunks of the forest. The guide's touch alerted Tungata, and they lay shoulder to shoulder on a bed of damp leaf-mould, utterly still but tense as coiled adders. It was only minutes later that Tungata realized that beside him the guide was snuffling the air. When he placed his lips on Tungata's ear, his whisper was a breath only.

"They are here." Gently he drew Tungata back, and when they were clear he asked. "Did you smell them?" Tungata shook his head, and the guide grinned. "Spearmint. The white officers cannot understand that the smell of toothpaste lingers for days." They found the next drift unguarded, and waited for darkness to take the children across, making them hold hands to form a living chain. On the far bank the guide would not let them rest. Although the children were shivering with cold in their sodden clothing, he forced them on.

"We are in Zambia at last, but we are not yet safe," he warned.

"The danger is as great here as it is on the south bank. The kanka cross at will, and if they suspect us, they will come in hot pursuit."

He kept them marching all that night, and half the following day, by which time the children were dragging and whining with hunger and fatigue. In the afternoon, the path brought them suddenly out of the forest to the wide cut of the main railway-line, and beside the track were half a dozen crude huts of canvas and rough-hewn poles. In the siding stood two cattle trucks.

"This is the ZIPRA recruiting-post," the guide explained. "For the moment you are safe." In the morning while the children were embarking into one of the cattle trucks, the skinny guide came to Tungata.

"Go in peace, Comrade. I have an instinct for those who will survive, and for those who will die in the bush. I think you will live to see the dream of glory fulfilled." And he shook hands, the alternate grip of palm and thumb which was the sign of respect. "I think we will meet again, Comrade Tungata." He was wrong. Months later, Tungata heard that the skinny little guide had walked into an ambush at the drifts. With half his stomach shot away, he had crept into an ant bear hole and kept them off until his last round was fired. Then he had pulled the pin of a grenade and held it to his own chest.

The camp was two hundred miles north of the Zambezi. There were fifteen hundred recruits housed in the thatched barracks. Most of the instructors were Chinese. Tungata's instructor was a young woman named Wan Lok. She was short and broad, with the sturdy limbs of a peasant.

Her face was flat and sallow, her eyes slitted and bright as those of a mamba, and she wore a cloth cap over her hair, and a baggy cotton uniform like a suit of pyjamas.

On the first day she made them run forty kilometres in the heat, carrying a forty-kilo pack. Equally burdened, she kept easily ahead of the strongest runners, except when she doubled-back to harangue and chivy on the stragglers. By that evening Tungata was no longer supercilious and scornful of being taught by a woman.

They ran every day after that, then they drilled with heavy wooden poles, and learned the discipline of Chinese shadow-boxing. They worked with the AK assault rifles until they could field-strip them while blindfolded and reassemble them in under fifteen seconds. They worked with the RPG-7 rocket-launchers and the grenades. They worked with bayonet and trench-knife. They learned to lay a land mine and how to boost it with plastic explosive to destroy even a mine-proofed vehicle. They learned how to set a mine under the black top of a macadamized highway by tunnelling in from the verge. They learned to lay out an ambush on a forest path, or along a main road. They learned how to make a running defence in front of a superior fire force while delaying and harassing it, and they did all this on a daily ration of a scoop of maize meal and a handful of dried kapenta, the smelly little fish from Lake Kariba, that looked like English whitebait.

Zambia, their host country, had paid a high price for supporting their cause. The railway-line to the south that crossed the bridge over the Victoria Falls had been closed since 1973, and Rhodesian task forces had attacked and destroyed the bridges into Tanzania and Maputo, which were land-locked Zambia's only remaining lifeline to the outside world. The rations offered the guerrillas were sumptuous fare compared to those of the average Zambian citizen.

Starved to the leanness of greyhounds, and worked to the hardness of iron, half their nights were spent in the political rallies, the endless chanting and singing, and shouted massed responses to the commissar's catechism.

"What is the revolution?" "The revolution is power to the people."

"Who are the people?" "Who is the power?" After midnight they were allowed to stagger away to the thatched barracks and sleep until the instructors woke them again at four o'clock in the morning.

After three weeks, Tungata was taken to the sinister isolated hut beyond the camp periphery. Surrounded by instructors and political commissars, he was stripped naked and forced to "struggle." While they shrieked the foulest abuse at him, calling him "running dog of the racist capitalists" and "counter-revolutionary" and "imperialist reactionary', Tungata was driven to strip his soul as bare as his body.

He shouted aloud his confessions, he told them how he had worked with the capitalist tyrants, how he had denied his brethren, how he had doubted and back-slid and harboured reactionary and counter-revolutionary thoughts, how he had lusted for food and sleep, and had betrayed the trust of his comrades. They left him utterly exhausted and broken on the floor of the hut, then Wan Lok took him by the hand, as though she were his mother and he her child, and led him stumbling and weeping back to the barracks.

The next day he was allowed to sleep until noon and awoke feeling serene and strong. In the evening at the political rally, he was called to take his place in the front rank amongst the section-leaders.

A month later, Wan Lok summoned him to her sleeping hut in the instructors" compound. She stood before him, a dumpy squat figure in her rumpled cotton uniform.

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