as if I were waking into a dream that had slept within me since my childhood. I remembered the derelict kitchen garden of the house my father had bought in Kowloon, a miniature wilderness where I had played as a boy among tomato and cucumber frames overgrown with wild sugarcane. Rats and small snakes infested the deep grass, but I had made my child’s world there until, at the age of seven, my father had brought in a local contractor, cleared the ground and built an asphalt tennis court. However, even as an adolescent playing with my friends, I could still sense the lost jungle of the rubbish tip around me.
I waded in the silvery water, washing the dust from my arms and face. In my fancy I imagined that this stream was a forgotten tributary of the primordial river in the desert gorges of central Africa, where man’s primitive ancestors had broken their pact with the tree, the giant river which had descended beneath the Sahara and lain dormant for thousands of years.
Perhaps aware of the refreshing light in this waking forest, others were also drawn to the stream. By night Harare’s guerillas haunted the upper reaches of the channel, now and then firing a mortar shell into the deserted streets of Port-la-Nouvelle. By day Kagwa’s soldiers walked naked in the cool water, washing their clothes and hunting for gold.
Even Sanger had crossed the runway to inspect the stream, and twice a day would fill a flask of water for the boiled rice on which he and his two aides subsisted. Abandoned in disgust by the journalists and the freelance film crew, who had soon realized that this risible mercy mission was merely a publicity stunt, he now lived on at the airstrip, waiting for the Dakota to return and collect his broadcasting studio.
Stranded in Port-la-Nouvelle until Air Centrafrique received payment from his sponsors in Tokyo, Sanger camped with Mr Pal beside the control shack, surrounded by his bags of rice, the cameras and recording equipment, and the dismantled sections of his satellite dish, an electronic dream already overgrown by the runway grass.
He was now his own famine victim, benefactor and documentary historian, a self-contained one-man television disaster area. Once he came down to the dispensary and borrowed money from me, ostensibly to purchase supplies from Captain Kagwa’s quartermaster, but I saw him hand the cash over to the Japanese photographer, who had already threatened to leave. She lived alone in her pup tent, below the wing of her aircraft, refusing to share her supplies. It was clear that Sanger’s documentary needed a radical change of script, some new theme that would revive the project and satisfy the Tokyo networks.
While I worked with my spade, I noticed that Sanger was listening intently to Mr Pal. The slim-shouldered Indian stood beside the beached skiff and kept up his endless commentary, now and then glancing at me in a knowing way, as if I had already suggested to him the germ of a new wild-life programme, perhaps on the subject of amateur dam-building. Even Miss Matsuoka had begun to point her camera at me when she had no other subject in view. I was all too aware that this intense young Japanese saw me as one of the odder denizens of the forest.
Irritated by this air of small conspiracy, I threw the clods of earth at their feet.
‘Sanger – tell Miss Matsuoka to aim her camera at someone else.’
‘You’re careless of life, doctor.’ Sanger instantly came forward when he saw that I was waiting for him to go. ‘Like all your profession, you dismiss everything that doesn’t fit into some punitive scheme of things. That’s why the public venerates you.’
‘Why don’t you leave Port-la-Nouvelle? There’s nothing here for you.’
‘There’s nothing for me anywhere else.’ Sanger shrugged, with one of the displays of frank despair to which he often treated me, as if testing me in some way. ‘I’m waiting for funds to be telexed. I need to lease a big plane for the rice. People don’t realize what all this charity weighs.’
‘Then leave the rice here. Go to Gambia, make a tourist documentary about crocodiles.’
‘It’s been done too many times. The natural realm is exhausted, everyone got there first in the sixties. Nobody wants to know how the world is, they want emotion and imagination rolled across it like a soft carpet. Believe me, Dr Mallory, you need new ideas these days. Just as we need new vices.’
‘What you really need is a new set of lies.’ I said this without malice – in an unexpected way, I found myself drawn to this amiable imposter. I thrust at the oozing mud between my feet. ‘Still, that shouldn’t be too hard to find.’
‘Very hard.’ Sanger held my shoulder, oblivious of the flecks of mud on his suit. ‘You are wrong again, doctor. Television doesn’t tell lies, it makes up a new truth. In fact, the only truth we have left. These sentimental wild-life films you despise simply continue that domestication of nature which began when we cut down the first tree. They help people to remake nature into a form that reflects their real needs.’
‘And that justifies any invention?’
‘No. It must chime with their secret hopes, their deep-held belief that the universe is a kindly place. Besides, everything is invented and then pondered upon. God rested on the seventh day in order to look at the rushes. These trees, these leaves, flowers and roots, are fictions invented to trap the sun, catch an insect, suck the water. Look at your river – that’s a complete invention.’
‘A television company might even have thought it up?’
‘Perhaps it did. And what difference? Sooner or later, everything turns into television. Consider, Dr Mallory, you may already be the subject of a new documentary about a man who invents a river …’
A cascade of gravel fell on to the bank beside me, splashing into the water at my feet like the pellets of a shotgun. The sharp stones stung my arms and neck, and I dropped my spade into the mud. I turned to see the Japanese photographer standing above me on the crumbling face of the runway, the stone chips falling from her flight boots. She had listened to Sanger and now fixed me in the viewfinder of her camera, already accepting that I was her new project.
Sanger was kneeling at the water’s edge, filling his flask as Mr Pal pushed the skiff into the stream. The clear liquid poured into the chromium flask, its silvery reflection dancing happily in its private vault. Sanger wet his hands, and then raised his sunglasses and bathed his tired eyes, as if they had already seen enough of my real motives.
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