Anastasia ran across the road, pulling her T-shirt out of her jeans. She contained herself for just long enough to find some privacy and tear down a handful of banana leaves before she dropped her pants and squatted. It was only when she was finished and pulling her clothes back into position that she paused to laugh at herself. Privacy from whom? The whole fucking delta was empty, apart from the army Esan belonged to and the village of Malebo — both more than a day’s hard travelling distant. In opposite directions. On the far side of the river. But then her laughter stilled and she frowned as she thought again about the road. Face folded in a thoughtful scowl, she pulled the Victorinox from her pocket and cut down a hand of the ripest-looking bananas she could reach. She banged it against the ground to make sure there were no nasty surprises lurking in it, and she put it on her shoulder. As she recrossed the road, she paused, leaning against the surprisingly solid sign, looking both ways and glowering as her mind raced over a range of unknowable possibilities. Then she went on across the grass verge and scrambled back down to the river’s edge.
An hour later, all but the greenest bananas were gone, their bright yellow skins floating away downriver like strange lilies — though Anastasia noticed that Celine had hardly touched anything while Esan packed away enough for a small army — and the banana plantation had been well watered and fertilized one way or another. Both Celine and Esan had been harder for Anastasia to deal with, right from the start, in fact. The wounded woman had needed a great deal of help to get up the bank — and even to meet the calls of nature, forcing Anastasia, one way or another, into much more intimacy than she had ever dreamed of enjoying. Esan presented the opposite problem — how to allow him enough rope to permit privacy without giving him an irresistible chance to escape. But a tightly knotted loop round his throat seemed to answer the conundrum. It allowed him freedom to use his hands and feet while presenting him with something he could hardly have untied even had he been able to see it. Which, of course, he could not. The only problem, as it turned out, was that Anastasia couldn’t untie it either. So she ended up cutting it free with the trusty Victorinox. And, against her better judgement, she was impressed by the way the boy calmly let her saw away at the cable, the spine of her blade moving back and forward across his jugular. She might not yet trust him, but it seemed that he was ready to trust her.
As soon as Esan was free, Ado suggested that he had been tied up for long enough. It was time for less trussing and more trusting. Anastasia reluctantly acquiesced — though she kept both the knife and AK close at hand, still firmly in charge. ‘As I see it, we still have very limited choices,’ she said, her glance sweeping round the other three. ‘We relaunch the boat and hope we can get it to Malebo. Get help, make contact with the outside world, see if we can get the authorities to help us rescue our people from your people…’ This last to Esan. Who sat and watched her like an anthracite statue.
‘The downsides, of course, are the time it will take, and the difficulty it will present,’ Anastasia continued after a while. ‘We can only just all fit in the boat in the first place and it’s at least another day to the village. We can’t rely on coming safely ashore near food and shelter like this whenever we want to. Certainly not with me at the tiller. We can’t stock up the boat with two days’ supply of food and water. It would simply swamp us — even if we could come up with containers for the water and be content with a diet of bananas. We can’t rely on the river to run clean — particularly after we get past Citematadi. And talking of Citematadi, Celine and I at least know the big problem there. The road bridge across the river collapsed years ago. It’s effectively a man-made set of rapids now. They’ve had trouble getting Nellie safely past it every time I’ve been downriver; it was the only bit Captain Christophe wouldn’t let me steer the boat through. And this rowboat is nowhere near the vessel that Nellie is. I quite honestly think we’d be lucky to survive, even if the petrol lasted that far and we could rely on the motor to push us through.’
‘We drift,’ suggested Esan. ‘Drift downstream and only use the motor to keep us safe or to bring us ashore or to try and avoid these rapids you talk of.’
‘It will take too long!’ countered Anastasia, her voice tense with frustration. She did not add that Esan’s plan relied on them trusting him absolutely. No one else would be able to guide the boat in the way that he suggested. ‘Drifting might take us four days to reach Malebo,’ she said instead. ‘Your army will have moved; vanished. Our people will have vanished with them — those that haven’t been butchered. We would never be able to find them, let alone get them back again.’ She did not add that it was also her burning ambition to see the men who ran the army brought to justice. Or simply executed at the earliest possible moment.
‘There is another problem with time,’ interjected Ado suddenly.
‘What?’ asked Anastasia.
Ado simply pointed with her chin in the Matadi fashion. Celine was slumped over and shaking. Her blouse was transparent with perspiration. ‘Madame Celine may not have much of it,’ she observed.
Anastasia felt Celine’s forehead. She was running a very high temperature indeed, and it seemed to have sprung up since the pair of them had climbed up to the banana grove and back. Her heart sank. ‘We’d better not move her too far anyway,’ she decided. Then she looked around. ‘But we can’t stay down here either. If it rains or if the river rises at all, we’ll all be washed away. We have to get her back up into that banana grove. Find some way to keep her warm. Light a fire, maybe.’
Then the afternoon turned for Anastasia into a living enactment of a puzzle she lad loved as a child. One of Kordemsky’s famous Moscow Puzzles — where a farmer has to row a piglet, a goat and a wolf across the river in a boat only big enough to take two animals. The goat and the piglet are friends. The goat and the wolf fight if they are left alone. The wolf eats the piglet if they are left alone. This time the conundrum concerned a fit — if exhausted — woman with a knife and a gun, a sick woman who needed to be moved, a girl whose loyalties were beginning to shift and a boy soldier who just might be planning to slaughter the lot of them — especially if he could get his hands on the gun or the knife.
Eventually, Ado and Esan helped Celine back up the bank while Anastasia followed with the AK. Then Ado made her teacher as comfortable as possible on a bed of banana leaves while Anastasia watched Esan pull the boat further ashore and secure it to a solid-looking tree — with the AK cradled across her breast. Then, as darkness gathered, the increasingly active and decisive youngsters moved confidently through the grove and the jungle surrounding it. They made Celine’s bed, though Anastasia sacrificed her T-shirt as a pillow while Esan offered his combat jacket as a rudimentary blanket. The torsos thus revealed could hardly have been more different on one level — more similar on another. His was smoothly muscled, deep-chested, marked with the scars that told of his initiation into Poro jungle society. Hers was scrawny but strong, modestly breasted — her bra verged on being an unnecessary vanity. And, like his, her skin was covered in the marks that proclaimed her membership of certain societies. A leopard was tattooed across her belly, seeming to leap out of her jeans, its ear-tips brushing the lower curves of the loose black bra, level with its fore-claws. Its snarl filled the hollow of her solar plexus. And, when she turned, a silverback gorilla stood guard on her back, clutching an AK-47. Each of them looked askance at the other, then came to terms with such primitive ritualism with a shrug.