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 duty. 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!’
“Like the Red Sea?”
“Yes.”
“What do you mean about New York being Jerusalem?”
“Of our dreams, Theo. In our prayers we would beg to return to the city of our kings. … The city of David. … Jerusalem. But we dreamt only of New York. That was the place to be. That is the place to be. …”
*
One day, passing his time in the television lounge Theo overheard a conversation at reception. He swore it was the voice of one of his school mates from Kongwa. He heard him greet a woman called Marisha, explaining to her that he had arranged a room for her at his place ….
“Hey, Jozef. Jozef!. It’s me. Theo Kokopoulos. We were at Kongwa together!”
He called, as loud as his weakened lungs could bear.
“Shit, Theo. What the hell has happened to you …?”
Jozef recognized only the face he saw before him. Luckily, the face had puffed out since the Congo episode. Under the influence of chemotherapy and gold injections a certain normality returned. But the bald head and skinny neck and arms belonged to the starving Jozef had once seen at an abandoned lepers’ colony near Iringa.
Theo explained that he was between treatments at the Marsden. He went back for a week each month and then rested at the hotel.
“Now we have met, please find me again. Here or at the hospital. I know that you are busy now. Good luck with her, Jozef.”
Jozef smiled. ‘You must meet her one day, Theo. She’s quite a chick. I will take you to meet her when she’s settled in at my place.’
*
Jozef lived with other guys from Tanganyika at 41 Sinclair Road, between Olympia and Shepherd’s Bush.
A room had become vacant after the death of Cranty from hypothermia. Jozef immediately contacted Marisha at her hotel. Where he had met Theo.
Marisha moved straight in. She took to it like a duck to water. Certainly as at home in her new surroundings as the duck on the table to its former home: the water in St. James Park, a favourite hunting ground of the Sinclair Road gang adapting their African skills as poachers in London’s top spots for a potential roast.
It started at Trafalgar square where the new arrivals could not believe their eyes at such easy meat. All you needed was a noose threaded through the sleeves of your army jacket and a bit of corn. “Croo, croo” and away into the tunnel. Ducks required more elaborate preparation. Same principle but into a bag slit along its base. This allowed a hand to hide in the paper tunnel and as soon as a beak pecked at bread at its mouth, quack. The best bags, tall, strong and stiff, came from the US Military PX store next door to no.41. When food ran out somebody would get a temporary job as bag boy to the Yank women, in town from their base for cut price shopping. Everybody else at Sinclair road would get whatever free provisions they fancied. Big tins of boef stroganov were a favourite, but after a few days anything in a tin tasted almost like anything else in a tin. So it was time again for a hunt. As easy and skilful as an Albanian in town to pick pockets.
Hajo, in the basement, was an Albanian. Though not a pick pocket he looked like one; a jackal eyed shiftiness to his thin long nosed face gave him the look.
On the ground floor lived two ladies of the night. One brunette haired called Dot and the other, a blonde called Daisy. They made a lot of money, sporadically, by leaping stark naked out of a cardboard cake at parties.
Above them lived Gina the hairdresser. Sorry. The Stylist. Her room had a bar with plastic grapes and empty straw clad Chianti bottles hanging above it. And on the wall a painting of the bay of Naples with Vesuvius smoking in the background. Stylish. She left no.41 to be replaced Rumpa from the Philippines.
*
Most, of the boys at Sinclair Road were virgins when they arrived in London after Tanganyika’s independence in 1961. None more so than Adi Wexler who lived next door to Borisov Zakran. Here were athletes. ‘Zak’ had run the hundred yards at school in just a little over ten seconds. He was the only one in spikes which brought him much kudos.
Adi was equally adored. At school he excelled at the discus, posing, whenever eyes were upon his body, like a Phidean statue. Junior boys called him Charles Atlas as he did the course every day. And one day discovered that lessons six to eight were missing. All hell broke loose. Everybody was blamed. But lost they remained.
Luckily he came to London soon after and his first outing was to Charles Atlas in Dean Street, Soho. He walked up the stairs flexing his plexes; his torso vee shaped and taut in his black nylon polo neck. Then he came to a landing. Empty but for a hatch. Pasted over it was a hand-written notice which said ‘Please ring the bell for attention’. So he did all the time flexing. Up on his toes. Calves like gourds. Arms tensed showing rope-like muscles straining out of rolled up sleeves. Bull neck tense. Jaws clenched and pumping like James Dean, another of his heroes. Then the hatch opened.
“Can I help you?.’ ‘Yeah. I have come to see Charles Atlas. I want to shake his hand and ask him for lessons six to eight which I have lost. I am from Africa.”
Eyes slit. Looking for admiration. Finding only mirth all around the office. There it was. Charles Atlas. Just a room full of women typing. The one who came to the window said.
“Not to worry, lovey. I will get you the lessons you want. Here you are.’ At that moment a section of Adi’s mental construct of the world crumbled into dust.
But he continued to do his exercises being particularly proud of his arse. Of its perfect half-moon silhouette with dimples.
One day, at Sinclair Road, he started what became a long standing discussion on the merits of arse muscles in sport.
Jonah and Kaz who excelled in long distance walking, also held definite views on the subject. Jonah claimed that a rounded arse was best for running. Kaz had a flat arse but he could out-run Jonah. The argument went on and on and infected the habits of the others in the building, every one of whom looked in whatever reflective surface there was to check out the shape of their arses. And when Frashka came round for the rent his opinion was sought; he too developed the fixation.
*
Frashka worked for a letting agency owned by the bookshop managed by Klucicki ‘The Key’. He was owned by the Polish Government. Amongst many other deals in medicines, coffee and nylons, The Key, housed apparatchiks coming to London. He had allocated a decent bed-sit for Marisha na Actonye; she was as yet not senior enough for a place v Ealingu. In the event, when Jozef learnt that Marisha was coming to London he did a deal with Frashka whereby he would fix the guttering at No. 41 if Frashka would allow Marisha to take Cranty’s old room. “No problem”.
Cranty was an itinerant habitué of No 41. Like several others who had joined the British Army in Nairobi in order to get a free lift to London. There they did the bunk. Got caught and eventually discharged. With one exception. That of Jonjo who was put on a bus to Sandhurst, hated it, but ended up as aide de camp to an antipodean Governor General, retiring as a colonel and in retirement stalked deer and poachers on large Hampshire estates. As ever, it was always back to basic skills. Learnt in Tanganyika.
Cranty, Shaun, and Phokion, all ex-military; each ended up in Sinclair road. Not for long. Cranty died soon after. Shaun went as a mercenary to shoot commies in Angola, only they shot him first. Phokion went to Rhodesia via the Hammersmith College of Art and Building.
*
Cranty, who died of cold, survived as long as he did by joining the student rag week at Phokion’s college, collecting for Imperial Cancer and taking the blue tins back to his room. He kept the room warm by rigging up a paraffin heater made of ex-PX strogonov tins and fuelled by oil from warning lamps collected on his nocturnal journeys around the centre of town. Always via the new Hilton on Hyde Park Corner to gawp at the TV screen set up outside to show hopefuls Bunny Girls walking around the casino.
His most expensive entertainment was going to the cartoon theatre in Leicester Square where you could, for two-and-six, watch Looney Tunes for hours in the warmth. Then, on the way back he would decant a few red lamps set around road-works into his army water bottle and head for home.
That winter he caught flu and took to his bed. The heating oil ran out and he froze. Someone heard him whimpering loudly one night when the sound of Rumpa had faded. One lad broke into Cranty’s room. Two others were called to the scene and it was decided to roll the sick boy into the loose rug on the floor and place him into the armchair while a fire was lit in the small hearth in which the defunct heater stood behind the redundant gas heater which had been torn away from its fittings, coin box long broken on a frantic search for cash. The fire consumed the bedside cabinet and the drawers in the chest before it was realised that Cranty had kicked the bucket. Poor bloke. Memory of his passing proved quite useful; after Cranty’s death the answer to debt collectors was ‘he is dead’ regardless of whom they sought.
*
Phokion too had arrived from Nairobi as Army recruit.
He was a boy who loved his home and was loved by all his family, so much so that, Kleo, his Greek grandmother, died on the night of his departure. Of heartbreak.
Kleo, who so loved her grandson, was present in the boy’s mind as he flew the nest. He could see her sitting on her baboon skin covered arm chair telling all and sundry how Napoleon had met Cleopatra at the opera in Smyrna and how she had legs and a bosom to match hers …
“Vre papse pia, shush, cried out Grandfather, tee pothia kai tee steethos? At which she would thrust out her one breast, the other having been surgically removed, and say, ‘Ne mor e, me thelane oulee. Tee eethela egho kai se peera? ‘Yes indeed. All the men wanted me. Why on earth did I choose you?’ She would then stand up and draw up her dress to her knees and show her legs at whose sight he would wince and shut his eyes, especially if the scene included the undoing of her bun allowing her hair to drop almost to the floor.
She would then say in the lilting Greek of Chesmelites, natives of Tsesme:
“Ya thes malee. Kamia ehee tetia malia, kai esee anthroulee mou kleenees ta matakia sou. More Andras pou eese. Kreema ta nyata mou …” Just look at it. None other has hair like mine and you dear hubby close your little eyes. What a man you have turned out to be. Shame to have wasted my youth on you. And if anyone else were in the room she would go into the detail of her toilette.
“Water”, she would proudly say, “never touches my body. I wipe it all over with oil and kolonia. And I comb my hair through with black tea.”
The joke was Kleo was only a little taller than a dwarf and the sight of her demonstrating her beauty caused all, except her beloved, to laugh.
Phokion smiled in his sleep, waking only on the approach to land. A land entirely foreign to him.
Dressed in shorts and short-sleeved cotton shirt he had embarked with, he walked down the steps of the Britannia into the cold of Christmas of 1963; the harshest British winter since 1947. No one was at the airport to meet him and after begging for help by the public telephones he got someone to connect him to the Reading number he had on a letter only to be told that transport would be delayed by the weather and that he would have to wait.
The transport never arrived and, if it had, it would not have found Phokion. He got chatty with a young West Indian who was also waiting to be met. No one came and together they went to an address in Harlesden; a number given, ‘just in case’ by an old auntie back home in Jamaica. By such tender mercies a bed was had for the night and for tens of following nights.
Phokion, who was so well liked, such a sweet and inoffensive boy, came to be called George. It may have crossed a mind or two to name him a rude derivative of Phokion. But no one ever did. He was called George because that sounded better than Yezi which is what his mother called him.
In the evening he would do the washing up, a ritual in England that was unheard of in Africa. It struck him as strange how much was made of it. Domestic life seemed fixated on the issue of who would wash the dirty dishes after the evening meal. Phokion volunteered to break the impasse on the day he found the bath with the aftermath of a party and did so without complaint. He also washed up in the morning. And then went for a walk. It was a long time before he got just a little used to the surroundings. The drabness of the houses. The drabness of the people. What was this? Was it the poor quarter of London? The Kaloleni of London? It was grim and grimy, especially during that winter when pavements sang out a frozen tune to his footfall and all was covered in icy filth. But he had a warm room and a warm family to return to. And they laughed. And played loud music. And smoked ganja. And let him join in. One thing led to another and then to a job at Cadby Hall where all who needed a job in the Harlesden household found employment. Also warmth and sustenance; Cadby Hall was a huge red-brick complex of bakeries making cakes for Lyons.
It was only a matter of time before Phokion made contact with the habitués of Tanganyika House in Sinclair Road, en route to Cadby Hall from the bus stop at Shepherds Bush. One morning in February he walked behind a figure who, by his crew cut hair, he half recognised and then fully so by the voice which said out loud:
‘Cacking mafee la umbwa.’ Unmis