News From Berlin by Otto de Kat

in his memory. He took huge leapsacross time: at one moment he was seven, at the next seventeen, now he was playing in his village, now in the dancing halls of the city. Élisabethville. The way he said the name gave it something equivocal: there was wistfulness, and also a hint of a shudder, at least to a sensitive ear. To Kate’s ear. She heard everything. He had never spoken in this way before. Between nostalgia and horror, in bits and pieces, a story that had neither end nor beginning. He floundered, broke off, began again. His childhood, his years in the copper mines of Elisabethville, the daylight that he only saw on Sundays. He had done what everybody did: kept his head down. They were years of hardening the heart, and of denial. Years of slow preparation for – well, for what? Matteous groped for the words. And what he had been unable to say yesterday now poured out of him all of its own. That saving the officer’s life had not been a question of courage, but more one of despair. He thought he would run into a knife, or a gun, or a bayonet, get killed in action. He had nobody left anyway, they were all dead and gone. And when the bullets hit him he had almost been glad. His time had come, all would be forgotten. Hoisting the officer over his shoulder had not been hard, he had carried the man as a father would his child. Run, Matteous, don’t look back, goand hide in the impenetrable forest, in the darkness where nothing is.
    But he had pulled through it all, willy-nilly. The Belgian officer, the strange white man with his gloves and his watch and his good shoes, had thanked him and vowed that his rescuer in turn should survive. Matteous had laid him carefully on the ground before collapsing at his side, overcome with pain. That was how they had been borne away, side by side on narrow stretchers, beyond the range of the enemy, beyond the range of death at any rate. He had not set eyes on the white man again.
    He had been shipped to London for reasons he did not understand. The Belgian government-in-exile would take care of him, he was told. But that government was not his, it had nothing to do with him. He had drifted from Africa to Europe on tides of randomness, just as he had been sucked into the advance northwards, with an army of strangers set to fight another army of strangers.
    Matteous lapsed at last into silence, his eyes fixed on Kate. She had not understood everything, but she had heard his story, told in the language unique to him, complete with gestures and stammerings and bits of words.
    In the street beneath them life went on as usual with itseveryday sounds, with sunshine and the screech of gulls high above the buildings. He touched the sleeve of her cardigan, pressed her arm. Kate had a strange sensation of blankness in her head, could feel the blood rising to her cheeks. It was as if somewhere far away, in the unconscionable depths of her being, parcels were being unwrapped, mysterious envelopes torn open, stacks of papers riffled through. Why was it just as if Roy was sitting there, clasping her arm? Roy, who had been dead for so long, and buried in a bottomless pit. The Roy of all those mornings on their balcony in Rome, just off the Corso.
    “I’ve sat down, Kate, come and join me.” The invariable invitation. Ten o’clock in the morning, church bells ringing out all around them, a fraction off synchrony. Always lovely weather, always together. In his arms, beneath him, on his knee, his hands in hers, his body in complete abandon. Nothing lasts, nothing stays the same, nothing is lost. Where had they been that last time? She thought it was the Caffè Greco, the café which had become too highly recommended in the guidebooks, but which was largely unspoilt in their day. They had stopped there on their walk to the railway station. He would be away for a couple of days, she would not accompany him. The café was all but deserted at thisearly hour. They chose a two-seat banquette upholstered in