Burley Cross Postbox Theft Read online

  I’VE A GOOD MIND TO HAVE A WORD WITH REVEREND HORWOOD ON THE MATTER – NOT THAT I’M MUCH GIVEN OVER TO SPEAKING WITH MEN OF THE CLOTH, BUT I KNOW HE STILL HOLDS SOME PALTRY SCRAPS OF INFLUENCE IN YOUR CORNER. PERHAPS HE MIGHT BE ABLE TO TALK SOME SENSE INTO YOU! BETTER STILL, PERHAPS HE MIGHT FEEL INCLINED TO BASH YOUR TWO SILLY HEADS TOGETHER! I CERTAINLY FEEL INCLINED THAT WAY MYSELF!!

  IF YOUR OWN DEAR MOTHER COULD SEE WHAT A WILD COURSE YOU PAIR HAVE TAKEN OF LATE SHE WOULD BE TURNING IN HER GRAVE! I’LL NOT PRETEND HERE THAT ELIZABETH AND ME EVER HAD SO MUCH AS A CIVIL WORD TO SAY TO EACH OTHER, BUT THAT’S HARDLY THE ISSUE, IS IT?

  THE ISSUE – POINT OF FACT – IS THAT INFERNAL DUCK OF YOURN! I CALL IT A DUCK BUT IT’S THE SIZE OF A GOOSE AND IT KNOWS IT AN’ ALL! THAT DUCK IS A WRONG ’UN. IT HAS THE EYES OF A KILLER.

  WALTER FRANCIS SAID THE THING ATTACKED HIM WHILE HE WAS CHECKIN’ OVER SOME EGGS AT MRS RHODES’S STALL. HE SAID THE WRETCH CAME DOWN ON HIM OUT OF THE SKY LIKE AN EAGLE! HE SAID IT POOPED ALL OVER HIS JACKET. HE DROPPED THE EGGS IN SHOCK AND BROKE THREE OF ’EM. HE SAID HE DIDN’T FEEL INCLINED TO PAY FOR ’EM AFTER THAT, GIVEN AS THEY WAS BROKE, BUT THEN MRS RHODES CAME CHARGIN’ OUT OF HER HOUSE AN’ GIVE HIM A PIECE OF HER MIND FOR’T! HE SAID, ‘I’M HARDLY GOIN’ TO PAY FOR THAT WHICH IS ALREADY BROKE, MADAM!’ SHE SAID, ‘WELL THEY WASN’T BROKE BEFORE YOU HAD ’EM IN YOUR THIEVIN’ HANDS, THANK YOU VERY MUCH, MR FRANCIS!’ THEN ALL HELL BROKE LOOSE OR SO I’M TOLD.

  NEXT THING I HEAR THE DAMN THING HAS BROUGHT DOWN THE GUTTERING ON BRIAN BREWSTER’S EXTENSION. THEN HE GOT INTO MRS LOOSE’S KITCHENETTE AND IS FOUND MAKIN’ HISSELF AT HOME IN HER WASHING UP BOWL! SHE SAID IT GIVE HER THE HORRORS WHEN SHE SAW IT SITTIN’ THERE WITH ITS BIG RED FACE ALL DISFIGURED LIKE IT WAS SCALDED. I SAID THAT’S AS HOW THE BREED IS MEANT TO LOOK, MRS LOOSE – UGLY AS SIN, AND FULL OF SIN AN’ ALL. IT MAKES YOU WONDER AT THE KIND OF HUMAN MIND THAT COULD CONCEIVE SUCH A SIGHT WAS WORTH THE LOOKIN’ AT! SHE SAID I DON’T EVEN CARE ABOUT THAT, KEN, I CARE ABOUT THE POOP WHICH WAS ALL OVER MY COUNTER. SOME OF IT HAD EVEN GOT INSIDE MY SECOND-BEST TEAPOT!

  IT’S GREEN POOP, SHE SAYS, AN’ IT STINKS TO HIGH HEAVEN!

  THIS VILLAGE IS IN COMPLETE UPROAR OVER THAT DAMN BIRD. I’VE NEVER SEEN OWT LIKE IT IN ALL MY NINETY-FOUR YEARS. IF YOU DON’T TAKE A PAIR OF SHEARS TO ITS WINGS THEN I’LL SURE AS DAMMIT DO IT M’SELF.

  I’M AT THE END OF MY TETHER, OR THEREABOUTS.

  DON’T SAY AS I DIDN’T WARN YOU, LADIES!

  YOURS SINCERELY,

  KENNETH CRANSHAW (SR)

  Find enclosed: letter 7 by Edo Wa Makuna (of Bleachers) in some weird Franco-African lingo (completely incomprehensible) followed by the translation I commissioned (7a), in some kind of deranged, haut-bourgeois English (equally incomprehensible).

  The translation costs amounted to the princely sum of £897. Given that the translation is almost twice the length of the original, I am at least confident that we got our money’s worth,

  Loz

  [letter 7]

  Bleachers

  The High Street

  Burley Cross

  Wharfedale

  20/12/06

  Oh my dear Brother!

  Every year the same, old charade, eh? Every year our mother’s first-born puts pen to paper – his hand growing shakier, his French getting clumsier – in the pathetic hope that his brother – the second-born – will receive his letter and hungrily devour it with his crazy, shit-coloured eyes and be born to him again.

  We both know the truth, eh, Bro’? We both know the truth, too well. But every year…

  Where are you, my brother? I see you, as of old, sitting on the thick stump of that rotted acacia outside the Catholic Orphanage in Leopoldville! Your sunken cheeks! Your quick, angry laugh like the yap of a hyena! Your long legs sticking out like twigs from a pair of tattered shorts. Those brown knees pinkened with scars! Those brown arms chalked a ghostly white with streaks of sweat.

  How loud you were! How you stank! A maniac! A fiend! Stolen mango pulp festooning the gaps between your gnashing teeth! You always were the greatest thief! A terrible liar! A vagabond!

  How mad you made me – eh?! Blowing on that whistle that you kept hung on a piece of string around your neck. What became of that whistle, dear Brother? What became of you? Why did they take you from me? So suddenly? Where did you go to? Where did they carry you?

  Ah, no – no. Too painful!

  Let me just fill my glass and toast you, Brother-mine. Let me fill…

  Your health, Brother! Long life, Brother! God save you!

  Eh? What’s that you say? My hearing’s not… Eh?!

  How am I, you ask? Me? Edo? How’s Edo? Edo’s fine! Edo’s always fine, Bro’. I told you my story last year, did I not? The year before… Remember?

  Nothing changes, see? Nothing ever changes here. The sky is still grey. The grass is still green. My wife is still gone. My heart is still sore (but not for her. Ha! Don’t make me laugh! You know me better than that, dear Blood!).

  I must confess that it pains me sometimes when I think of the old times… Does your heart ever pain you? My memory is still bad. I try not to think about things from the past. I try not to…

  Although sometimes I think about my journey to The Gambia. Sometimes I think about my escape from The Helmsman (the tight ship he steered! A ship now sunk!), and all the wicked things he made me do. Sometimes I think about those stinking beaches at Banjul.

  Oh ho! Good times, Bro’! Good times! Me, in my tiny swimming trunks and my scuffed old panama hat. With my lean, muscled body and my ready smile. Quite the catch, I was!

  And at night? Out on the town! In my pink, wide-collared shirt, my flared brown pants… I was irresistible! They called me ‘The Congolese’. Women would ask for me by name! And why not?! I was all the talk in the European hotels.

  How happy I was back then! If only I had known it! I should have stayed. I should have taken a stake in that beach-side bar. I should have swallowed my pride and smoked fish for a livelihood – sold it on the market.

  There was a special girl who worked there, Bro’. She covered her head with a polka-dot cloth. A modest girl. I broke her heart. But that was my profession, Brother dear, or, at least, that was one of them. There were others…

  These habits are hard to break, eh? Remember – always remember, Bro’; scratch it deep into the bark of your heart – one brief show of weakness and all is lost! No room for tenderness! No room for compassion! Pain is quicker, eh?! Easier to control. Start off small – a mouthful of ice, a slight adjustment to the balance of a chair (an inch off the front legs, Bro’, that’s all, nothing more!) – then gradually, over time, augment, expand, increase…

  Never flinch. Never waver. Be consistent. Be unyielding. Let them know, up front, to expect the worst. It’s always kinder that way in the end, eh? Eh?!

  Oh, Brother, sweet Brother-mine! Whoever would have guessed it? Whoever could have imagined that Edo – shy Edo, bookish Edo, the boy who always led the procession to mass – should have developed such a cruel and deadly skill as this? It’s always the unlikely ones, they say – the cold ones, the quiet ones – who end up embracing a course most vehemently. But me? Me?! Edo? A child of God? I was always the gentle one! I was always the peacemaker!

  What happened, Bro’? What happened to poor Edo? Did Edo get taken too, Bro’? Did Edo become you, Bro’?

  No. No. No…

  In the end, it was only fate that drew me. And insolence. I never took pleasure in hurting others, but I needed to find out. I needed to know. And there was a hunger in me, Bro’, once you were gone. There was an appetite that could not be satisfied. There was an anger and a recklessness and a lethal arrogance.

  The Guide saw it in me. He sensed it in me. He could read people like that. It was my curse – his genius.

  But let’s not get caught up in all these details, now. It is done. It is over. It is long forgotten.

  Other news, you say? What?! Stop kicking out your feet! Why all
this fidgeting? Do you tire of me already?

  Well… okay… (impatient boy! Impertinent boy!) I have started carving again (I say ‘again’, although you were always the better carver, were you not? Always fighting! Always whistling! Always spitting! Always whittling).

  Well, now I am the carver, Bro’. It happened quite suddenly. My dear friend, Tilly – my new Guide, my sweet, English apothecary – has brought out this hidden urge in me. There is something about her… She is different from the others. She is more transparent. Cleaner. Like fresh rainwater caught in an old enamel cup. She is wilder. She resembles the Blue Gum: skin white like the trunk, eyes blue-grey like the leaves.

  We work together, in silence. It is a great relief to me. There is no need to talk.

  She has a sister. The sister is fierce – powerful. Strong as an ox. There was an old pastor, lately retired, who the sister admired (a vengeful man, full of bile, like Brother Francis – remember Brother Francis, who beat us so? After you were taken and I joined the Force Publique I had him dispatched. The act of a moment. Strange, really, to think about it now…).

  Well, this pastor, a man called Horwood, came to the kitchen where I was carving last week – a figure on a cross, a nkondi. He asked me if he could look at it. He admired it for a while. It pleased him. I told him that I had yet to finish it – to pierce the chest with nails (because how else might the fetish work otherwise?).

  ‘The chest?! Surely just the hands?’ he said, winking. I merely laughed.

  He asked if he could have it.

  ‘Take it, Pastor,’ I said, ‘and pray for me.’ He nodded. He took it away with him. The next thing I know he’s hung it up in the church. In the front portal – the fool! – for all the village to gawp at!

  The new pastor – Reverend Paul – comes to pay me a visit in my home. He wants to confer with me about the nkondi.

  ‘Would it offend you terribly,’ he asks, ‘if I took it down?’

  ‘Mortally,’ I say, with a ferocious scowl. Then I laugh. He laughs with me, nervously, the way the English do.

  (What do I care, Bro’? Eh?)

  ‘It’s just that Reverend Horwood hung it up without consulting me,’ he says. ‘Members of the congregation have been complaining. It’s not that they don’t like it, as such. But the church is Anglican – there are certain, unspoken rules about decoration… We tend to prefer the plain cross over the crucifix—’

  ‘Crucifix?’ I interrupt him, smiling. ‘But it isn’t a crucifix, Reverend Paul. It’s a nkondi.’

  He stares at me, blankly.

  ‘A fetish,’ I say. ‘It’s the figure of a man I tortured, a man I hung on a cross. He comes to me in my dreams and he haunts me, so I made the nkondi to frighten him away, that’s all.’

  ‘What happened to this man?’ the priest demands.

  ‘Was he killed? Did he die?’

  ‘Oh no,’ I shrug, ‘he was cleverer than that. He confessed.’

  Then I laugh again. After a long moment the pastor laughs with me. There are beads of sweat on his lip – on his brow.

  ‘It’s all right.’ I grin, and slap him on the shoulder. ‘Just a joke!’ I say, then I offer him a drink. To my surprise he accepts one. A whisky.

  As he sits and drinks it he ponders something for a while and then he says, ‘Jesus was just a man, a mortal man, like you and me, hung and tortured on a cross…’

  Then he laughs. And I laugh.

  ‘We all nailed him up there,’ he says, ‘every one of us.’

  His eyes are suddenly full of tears.

  ‘A touch of water?’ I ask.

  ‘What?’ He blinks.

  ‘The whisky? A touch of water?’ I repeat.

  ‘God bless you,’ he says, passing me his glass. Happy Christmas, Brother.

  I miss you, my Blood.

  May God keep you.

  May God love you.

  May God forgive you, and all of us.

  Edo

  [letter 7a]

  121 Juniper Street

  Pevensey Bay

  Pevensey

  East Sussex

  28th January, 2007

  Dear Sergeant Everill,

  Further to our earlier telephone call (26/01/07), I have enclosed the commissioned copy, finally complete. I’m sorry that it took me longer than I had originally estimated to turn it around, and I hope you’ll forgive the delay. As I said on the phone, I like to think that I provide SOMETHING ABOVE AND BEYOND over and above what might generally be considered ‘a standard translation service’.

  You are probably aware of the fact that I have translated some crucial items of evidence for the police on several previous occasions (I believe a translation of mine was critical in the arrest and deportation of a group of Congolese pygmies who were planning an environmental protest against the headquarters of a European multinational mining and logging company, in London, 1998. In 2004, my testimony was considered fundamental to the incarceration of a woman – a former sex-slave with the Hutu militia, no less – who was trying – and with some success! – to run an illegal cleaning company in Stoke).

  Perhaps you may find it illuminating if I briefly let you in on a few ‘tricks of the translator’s trade’, so to speak (if you aren’t sold on the idea, then feel free to skip the next couple or so pages, recommencing the letter at ‘But enough of my grandstanding…’. I won’t mind in the least).

  By and large, a good translator often finds that rather than translating a given manuscript ‘piecemeal’ – or word for word – it’s far more important to try and recreate the general ‘ambience’ of the piece, to let the piece – a letter, in this case – ‘chime within you, like a bell’.

  A successful translation doesn’t so much depend on the factual details (i.e. the pitch of the bell, the size of its ringer etc.) as on ‘the rich beauty of the song itself’ (this ‘bell/song’ image is not my own – alas! – but borrowed from my esteemed varsity linguistics tutor, the legendary Dr Rendl Gull PhD, author of the Translator’s ‘Bible’: The Vagrant Affirmation: Yes! Mais Oui! Da!).

  Bearing the above in mind, the proficient translator generally seeks – so far as they are able – to mimic the rhythm of the language, its subtle innuendos, its gentle cadences. They hope to recreate a profound and abiding sense of ‘mood’, of ‘atmosphere’.

  A translator’s most important duty is to hear the person’s ‘voice’, to absorb it and be true to it. We must be compassionate. We must be flexible. Above all, we must be empathetic.

  It’s undoubtedly an art, Detective, since ‘communication’ – in its deepest and most abiding sense – is often embedded in the smallest details: those light brush strokes, those ‘minor notes’ (to extend Dr Gull’s bell/song simile). Translation is – to all intents and purposes – a kind of archaeology. Meaning is buried (preserved and entombed) in a person’s ‘little ticks’, their stylistic ‘nuances’, their quirky mannerisms and idiosyncrasies.

  Indeed, one generally finds that a translator’s skill lies as much in making explicit what is not being said (and why) as what is being said (right there, on the page, in irreducible ink!).

  An almost impossible task you may think, Detective (and you wouldn’t be far wrong), but I still find myself happy – excited, even – to engage with the challenge of it: to pull on my translator’s battle-suit and wrestle with the imponderables, to confront the vagaries of language, head-on, and to try (wherever necessary) to subdue them, to wrangle them – as best I can – into a new and more compliant form.

  It can be an emotional journey – a dangerous journey, at times – full of treacherous by-roads and frustrating cul-de-sacs.

  The implications, as I’m sure you can imagine, are often wide-ranging and profound.

  The letter you kindly sent me (3/1/07) certainly proved no exception to this rule. I found myself perplexed and confounded – from the very start – by its ‘playful’ tone, its elusive character, its informality of style and heavy reliance upon ‘the vernacul
ar’.

  I have naturally endeavoured – so far as is possible – to keep some of these elements in place during my translation, while, at the same time, struggling to dredge a more ‘conventional’ narrative out of the mire.

  As always, there’s that niggling disparity a translator always feels between the urge for something to ‘make sense’ (to the average reader), and one’s own deep and abiding drive towards professional veracity (the scrupulous need for accuracy, in other words).

  It’s a delicate balance, Detective, and quite a hard one to sustain (I can’t begin to count the number of times I’ve fallen prey to the nagging anxiety that something might have been ‘missed along the way’ – or Lost in Translation, as I believe the saying goes).

  It’s broadly for the above reasons that I have seen fit to ‘interrupt’ the letter’s narrative at certain points (something I am generally loath to do, although I have done it before) with some pithy interjections of my own to illuminate some of the more obscure and intangible elements in the writing (the emergence of an ‘unconscious backstory’, for example, and some other things which, to the untrained eye, might seem utterly unremarkable, but which, to the translator, with their greater expertise in language and its Byzantine psychology, offer invaluable ‘clues’ to the overall meaning/thrust of the piece).

  Of course it goes without saying that I am well aware that my role as translator begins – and ends – with the meaning of the printed words on the page (and that’s exactly as it should be). It would be nothing short of a travesty, for example, if I allowed an over-weening inquisitiveness on my part to stand in the way of the voice of my subject (the integrity of ‘the voice’, as I’ve already stated, is always, always paramount).

  But enough of my grandstanding! Let’s get down to ‘the brass tacks’ now, shall we? ‘Lokele’s letter’ (as I’m calling it, mentally, given that you have obscured his real name for reasons of confidentiality) is most certainly a linguistic hotchpotch, a puzzle, an intellectual minefield, written in what I like to call a kind of ‘corroded French of the old, Colonial style’. Just to make my job especially difficult, there’s the odd word of Lingala thrown in for good measure (Lingala became the national tongue of – as was then – Zaire – now the Democratic Republic of Congo – about thirty-odd years ago. It was introduced by President Mobutu, aka Joseph Désiré Mobutu, the Father of the Nation).