Yet despite the carnage in the tapestries, the atmosphere seemed to Jimfish softer and less brazenly opulent than he had found it in the rest of the palace.
After a little while, the door opened and in came his guide, leading by the hand a woman, who held before her face a carnival mask. Jimfish jumped to his feet when she entered. There was something about her that made him sink back again on the sofa, his heart hammering his ribcage. At a sign from her attendant, the lady lowered her mask and there she was: his beloved Lunamiel, as lustrous and luscious as the day he had seen her last in faraway Port Pallid, when, lying on the red picnic rug in her father’s orchard, he and she had become as entangled as the tendrils of the strangler fig.
It was all too much for poor Jimfish, still dizzy and exhausted by the events of the past days, and he fainted. When he came to, he was stretched full length on the sofa, his head in Lunamiel’s lap, struggling to make sense of it all, while she dabbed his lips and temples with a handkerchief dipped in cooling cologne.
‘But they told me you were dead,’ Jimfish whispered. ‘That you were in church one Sunday when a bomb blew you to bits.’
‘But for the grace of God I would have been blown to bits,’ Lunamiel said. ‘Such outrages were common in our country in the mad mid-1980s when everyone was at war. Whites were shooting blacks, blacks were bombing whites and each side was ready to destroy the other. But as it happened, I wasn’t in church that day — thanks to a miracle. My brother, Deon — who you will remember vowed to shoot you if ever he found you — had the luck to meet a rich Zairean businessman who promised him the deal of a lifetime if he would travel to the Congo to meet the Great Leopard, at the time dealing secretly with our government. Deon was offered exclusive mineral rights — cobalt, copper, gold, diamonds or all of them — if he provided strategic advice to the leader of Zaire, who had a problem very common across Africa. The President was immensely rich and his people were starving. The question that plagued Sese Seko Mobutu and dozens of leaders like him was easy to state but hard to solve: how does a Big Man deal with the needs of poor people and still keep everything he has?’
‘Certainly, that is a hard question,’ Jimfish agreed. ‘And I’d say impossible to solve. You can have either one or the other.’
Lunamiel agreed. ‘But that was the test: if my brother came up with the answer he’d be a millionaire.’
Jimfish was pleased: perhaps Deon Arlow had some qualities he’d not heard of back in Port Pallid. ‘And your brother agreed to help?’
‘He did. But it took a considerable struggle with his conscience. He is a real white South African who had been taught, ever since he was very, very small, to distrust and dismiss other black Africans. But when it came to business, Deon was a great adapter and he could turn his coat quicker than anyone I ever knew. Whenever Deon crossed the South African on business he behaved in a manner so refined you might call it almost human. Deon knew his duty was to do business in Zaire, though of course he said nothing to our father, wishing to spare his feelings. And that is why, when the bomb exploded beneath the altar of my church in Port Pallid on that Sunday morning, ripping to shreds any number of worshippers, my brother and I were sipping champagne in first-class seats, high above the Victoria Falls, on a flight to Kinshasa.’
‘It’s a miracle!’ said Jimfish.
‘Someone has to pay for other people’s miracles,’ said Lunamiel. ‘Sadly, my father, believing I was indeed dead, set off to punish those he suspected of planting the bomb, shooting many of them, just as he would have shot you, my dear Jimfish, had you not fled the garden that day we sat together. As it happened, the men he killed were not the perpetrators of the attack. Agents of our own government had planted the bomb in church with what they regarded as the laudable intention of laying the blame at the door of black terrorists.’
‘How sad and ironic,’ said Jimfish.
‘Exactly so,’ said Lunamiel. ‘As you will see when I tell you that the very next Sunday, when my father and mother went to church to pray for me, they were themselves blown to bits by a bomb, placed beneath the altar, by the remaining members of the black liberation movement whom my father had not managed to shoot.’
‘How terrible!’ Jimfish was horrified at the painful symmetry of these violent acts.
‘And sad and ironic,’ Lunamiel agreed with a wan smile. ‘Both sides in our homegrown war now felt it was quits, at least for a while. But how did you come to be here, my dear Jimfish? I want to know everything that has happened since you fled Port Pallid for Zimbabwe and the outside world.’
So Jimfish hugged her tightly and told her of his travels in Matabeleland, his work as a bio-robot on the roof of Reactor Number 4 at Chernobyl, of the treacherous murder of the good Jagdish and the death of Soviet Malala, his unforgettable teacher. And, hearing his adventures, Lunamiel was moved to tears more than once.
‘Do you think it’s the fate of South Africans to end badly?’ he asked Lunamiel.
She sighed. ‘Since arriving in this country I’ve heard it said over and over that the only good South African is a dead South African. And when I tell you what has happened to me, you may ask yourself whether death is not a desirable option.’
And with Jimfish hanging on her every word, side by side on the red sofa, she told him her story.
CHAPTER 14
‘My brother Deon is not only flexible in his principles and pragmatic in his business practices, he is positively elastic in family matters. We had not been in Zaire more than a few days when he enlightened me as to my role in his business.
‘“You are not merely my dear sister,” he explained. “You are going to play a vital role in the deal I’ve signed with a Big Man in the court of the Great Leopard. No less a personage than his Minister of Mines.”
‘When I asked, very gently, why I had not been consulted before he signed the deal, Deon explained my great good fortune to me.
‘“Not many people get the chance to change the world. And the world I’m talking about is the one that condemns white South Africans as incorrigible racists who despise black people. You will prove them wrong, my dear sister, by showing how eager we are to engage constructively with our African compatriots. In doing so, you will also improve our own balance of payments.”’
Lunamiels’s eyes flashed, as they did when she was angry.
‘I must admit I was rather impatient and demanded to know how a girl from Port Pallid would improve anyone’s balance of payments.
‘“Perfectly simple,” said Deon. “The Congo of the Great Leopard has lots of cobalt, copper, cadmium, petroleum, diamonds, gold, bauxite and tin, just to mention some of its riches. For a percentage, I’ve arranged for you to engage with the Minister of Mines most constructively, day and night, and the idea excites him hugely.”
‘My brother had no sooner introduced me to the Minister of Mines than I understood the nature of this excitement, because he flung me down on a nearby bed, saying that he had always wanted a white South African woman. All this I suffered in the cause of constructive engagement and to show my white compatriots in a better light.’
Jimfish again hugged her close, feeling within him the very first stirrings of anger.
‘My darling Lunamiel, a prisoner of this man’s lust! How long has this been going on?’
But she reassured him sweetly. ‘Not long at all. Luckily for me, a few days later, the Minister of Mines died suddenly during a diamond dealers’ conference held here in the palace at Gbadolite.’
‘He had some sort of accident?’ asked Jimfish.
Lunamiel sighed at the memory. ‘He was shot to death with poisoned arrows by a squadron of pygmies, which the Zairean army keeps for the purpose. But my relief did not last long. I soon discovered that I had been designated the bedfellow of the Minister of Education, who had arranged for his colleague’s accident in a very Zairean cabinet reshuffle.’