The Weight of Numbers Read Free Page A

happy to talk to a countryman and, when I offered to buy him a beer, he plucked a Carlsberg off the shelf and led me to an outdoor table.
    His name was Nick Jenkins. I told him something about myself. I mentioned Gorongosa, and it surprised me how much I was prepared to relive of that time, merely to feed a casual chat.
    We talked about the war, and when I explained how, in spite of my politics, I had come to work as a teacher in RENAMO’s apartheid-funded heartland – how I had fomented Marxist revolution among my seven- and eight-year-olds under the very noses of the party hierarchy – Jenkins chuckled.
    My own life, eventful as it might have appeared from the outside, had been dictated by the sweep of political events. Nick Jenkins, on the other hand, like all true adventurers, had somehow sidestepped the big events of his day. This was his second time in Mozambique. The first, the late sixties, had seen him working the merchant lines out of Maputo when it was stillLourenço Marques, the colonial capital. From there he’d gone to the Caribbean, where he’d built up a small import-export concern. ‘It was my second time there, and all,’ he laughed. ‘I can’t seem to make up my mind.’
    I did a quick mental calculation. ‘You must have been young the first time, then. Your first time in the Caribbean. When was that? Early sixties?’
    â€˜Damn right.’ He nodded. ‘A bloody kid.’
    It was when he told me about Cuba that I began to doubt his tale.
    â€˜Six bloody battalions,’ he sighed, reminiscing. ‘Fifteen hundred men. Christ!’
    â€˜You were in the Bay of Pigs landing?’
    â€˜Not “in” it. We just happened to be berthed in Puerto Cabezas for a refit. The boat was chartered. We came with the boat. We were deckhands, not squaddies.’
    The enormity of this new anecdote, artfully shaped out of hints and hesitations and the occasional buzz-word, took my breath away. That a seventeen-year-old boy from the fens should have washed up on the beaches of Havana in 1961 seemed incredible.
    He did not stop there. A couple of years later, he told me, one night in October 1963, he found himself washing glasses in the very nightclub where Yuri Gagarin, hero of the Soviet Union and the first man in space, was celebrating the first leg of yet another world friendship tour. Jenkins had a gift for detail. The motley quality of Gagarin’s official retinue – every suit an arms supplier or party dilettante – was lent added spice by the invective he had saved up for their wives: monstrous, shot-putting hags obsessed with translating Neruda and Borges into Russian. He even had it in mind that the Playa Girón – the bay where a band of coral had, he said, been fatally mistaken for seaweed – later gave its name to the national honour the Cuban president Fidel Castro awarded Gagarin during this goodwill trip.
    â€˜He showed it to me, right there in the bar. Yuri did. His medal. And I showed him my scar. And Yuri laughed and told me, “You too wear the Order of Playa Girón!”’
    I was tempted to ask what language they had used, that Jenkins could converse so freely with a Russian cosmonaut. Together with his highbrow literary references, so lovingly mispronounced (‘Georgie Borkiss’), his story convinced me that I was in the company of a gifted imposter.
    It was night by the time we were done, and the kerosene was running low in the lamp. I waited for Jenkins to lock up, and walked with him to where our vehicles were parked. My deepening silence should have warned him that the evening’s game was up, but Jenkins could not resist further embroidery.
    â€˜Seaweed!’ he laughed. ‘Fuckers in American intelligence had it down for seaweed. Fucking
coral
, more like. I felt the deck lurch, the whole bloody boat started to roll, and I didn’t hang around, I can tell you. I jumped, and