A Night in Tunisia Read online

  By ten o’clock, his speech had become pretty slurred. And by eleven, he was fast asleep, his head lain on the table.

  When precisely the same happened the next evening, it became pretty obvious that Ivan had a problem.

  Astrid might have been a freer spirit than her neighbours, but she was still Swiss. And so, the next day over washing-up, she apparently felt obliged to try an explanation.

  So she told me Ivan’s story.

  He was by birth Jewish, and while still in his twenties he had emigrated to Israel. There, he’d settled happily until he was conscripted. He didn’t like the army much, but things were to get even worse. The Yom Kippur War came along, and he found himself in the thick of the fighting.

  A gentle and cerebral man, the sights and smells of battle sickened him. So, once it was all over, he decided he was moving to America instead.

  Remember the date? 1967? Like a lot of people who live a life of the mind, Ivan wasn’t paying attention to his surroundings properly when he visited the US consul.

  “You’ve got military experience, I see?” an attaché asked him, glancing down his application form.

  Ivan got his citizenship in something near to record time. Flew out to New York. Put his hand over his heart, recited the Oath of Allegiance.

  And, as soon as the last word of it had dropped from his lips, he found himself conscripted again. He was off to Vietnam.

  “You know who were the worst amongst his comrades, yes? Those white, clean-cut, college football types? They’d shoot people for no reason and think that it was funny. Or they’d cut a prisoner’s head off and play catch with it. Only the black soldiers were decent. That’s one of the reasons Ivan enjoys seeing Robert.”

  A year of this awfulness came to a head with Ivan being captured by the Viet Cong. And how did they treat this mild, pensive, cultured man who didn’t even want to be there in the first place?

  Astrid’s face turned away slightly and her voice went very stiff.

  “They buried him alive for three days. Not even in a box, you understand? In the raw earth, with just a bamboo pipe to breathe through. By the time they dug him out again …?”

  She could only sigh and shake her lowered head. “He’s a good man. But finished.”

  I could scarcely take in what I had just heard. Tried to imagine how it must have been for him during those seventy-two hours. Dead yet not dead. Clutched in the grip of the very earth itself, entirely unable to move. The soil pressing in at your mouth, your nose, your eyeballs, and your head all filled up with a soundless scream.

  I tried to imagine it for a long while. Then I tried to stop.

  How’s this relevant? You’ll see.

  Robert was modest, didn’t disclose a lot. And so I found out most about his career by buying up his records and then reading the sleeve notes.

  He had played with Archie Shepp and with Sonny Stitt. He was acknowledged, in fact, as one of the founders of ‘free-jazz,’ although later on he was disparaging about that whole adventure. He’d started as a flautist before switching to the saxophone. And he’d had a string of three hit albums with Atlantic in the Seventies.

  Like so many African-American jazzmen before him, he had finally tired of the urban USA and made the exodus to Europe, leaving behind an ex-wife and three children. He’d lived in Paris first, for a few years, before moving to Lausanne.

  He and Birgit had a kid too, but they finally split up.

  Before he started on his jazz career, he’d had a brief spell as a boxer. He only mentioned it in passing, and the subject never came up again. Except once.

  One day he was in London, maybe six years after that night in Tunisia, and I casually mentioned the recent, infamous Chris Eubank-Michael Watson fight. The one that finished up with Watson seriously brain-damaged.

  Robert’s normal calm expression disappeared beneath a furious scowl.

  “Both of those guys black?” he asked me, with rather more sharpness than he usually would ask me something.

  Mildly puzzled, I stared back at him.

  “Two black guys whalin’ on each other till they’re almost dead!” he burst out fiercely. “Oh yeah, white folk just love to watch that!”

  So I suppose it doesn’t take much of a genius to figure out why he gave up on boxing.

  There’s something else you have to understand, if you don’t already know it. Robert was the first jazz musician who I became friends with, but not the only one. Usually, I’d get to know them the same way, go over and congratulate them after a good set, or else I’d know someone who knew someone who knew someone well known.

  But the point about them is that when it comes to times, dates, places, life in general, they are flotsam, they just mostly drift. Bump into you or not. Linger for a while, or wander off elsewhere. There’s no rhyme or reason to the way they live their lives – they’re as impetuous and improvisational as their music can be.

  Lauren picked up Time Out one day, about ten years after Tunisia, goggled at the ‘music listings’ page, then told me, “Robert’s coming over! He’s playing the Jazz Café on …”

  She read the date, and looked severely disappointed. By this time, she had already got that same job that involved a lot of foreign travelling, and she was out of London the whole week.

  But the point is this. He was playing one of the best venues in town and, although he’d call us on the phone on the most casual of whims, it hadn’t even occurred to him to actually let us know.

  I turned up at the Jazz Café some half an hour before the set was due to start. Scoured the whole ground floor of the place. Couldn’t see him anywhere. And so I went on upstairs to the balconied section.

  There he was, sitting at a table with his new quartet, all black American exiles like himself. As I approached, he caught sight of me in a wall mirror and looked smoothly around.

  I’d expected him to be surprised, but he simply wasn’t. Not a bit of it. There was no trace of startlement or puzzlement in his happy, mild expression.

  Like … we lived around the corner from each other, and he’d been expecting me to show up the entire time.

  “Hey, man!” he grinned. And pointed to an empty seat. “Set yourself down. What’re you having to drink?”

  What I’m really getting at is that, if jazz musicians never let you know what their plans are, it’s generally because they have none. I wouldn’t understand how important that was until just before the end.

  He visited us in London several times. Firstly at the fourth-floor walk-up that we had in Bayswater, but after that in West Hampstead, on the first floor of a vast Victorian Gothic house just off West End Lane. It had a double bedroom that was ours, and a much smaller second bedroom half-filled with the big, grey-painted metal office desk that I still write at. There was a futon sofa-bed in there, and he was quite happy with that. The few nights we remained at home, he’d turn in early, maybe ten o’clock. And sit there for the next couple of hours, writing down new music scores that he’d later perform. He didn’t need a harmonica, or even a tuning fork. The music would simply pour from his head straight down onto the lined paper.

  But mostly we’d visit him in Lausanne, a miniature Paris set on a low mountaintop. He lived at number 6 Rue du Haldimand, around the corner from the University.

  The first time that we went there, he met us at the station and then led us through the town’s bustling centre. We went up the stairs and in through the front door. And I stopped, looking round surprisedly.

  It was a studio apartment. A large one, with an elevated section for the bed. But a studio apartment nonetheless. Where were we going to be staying, exactly?

  Robert took in my numb expression. Grinned, then told me, “You guys take the bed. I’ll sleep on the couch.”

  But we were here the entire week.

  I opened my mouth to protest, but the look in his eyes forbade it. And that’s the way it was for the entire seven days, without the slightest grumble or complaint, not a hint of it, o
n his part.

  In the mornings, Robert would teach class at the local music school, which gave us a chance to do some sightseeing. He’d be back by one in the afternoon, and then we’d spend the rest of it hanging round some bar or other, bumping into his numerous friends, or else we’d take the funicular Metro down the entire way to the lakeside at Ouchy, an Edwardian spa-town in its day.

  In the evenings, we’d usually dine at the little green-frontaged bistro just around the corner, and then go up through the Old City, across the Pont Charles Bessières, and stride along the Avenue Mon Repos to the Black Note Club, where Robert played.

  We’d head home come three in the morning, the town completely quiet around us now. The streetlights made the paving stones look amber-coloured. And it would strike me, occasionally, that perhaps we were abroad on some nocturnal Yellow Brick Road. A nightlife road. A jazz one.

  Leading to some bright, jewelled city? No. In jazz there is no destination, only the road itself.

  “Hey, did you hear? Dex is dead!”

  “It happens to us all sometime. You can’t stay here, man – they won’t let you.”

  He looked faintly sad a moment. But then that grin of his came flooding back. Neither of us had actually known Dexter Gordon. He might be gone, but we were still here, and that was the only thing that really counted so far as he was concerned.

  There was a little more grey around his temples than the last time that I’d seen him, but otherwise he was exactly the same. The precise same person that I’d met those many years back in Tunisia. He led me through into his kitchen, where he was preparing an early supper, mussels cooked Provencal-style, on pasta. We chatted generally as we ate it, then went to a local bar. But it was almost empty, very quiet and dull, and so we only stayed some forty minutes before heading back.

  He’d given up smoking by this time so, every half an hour or thereabouts, I would go out onto his small balcony, smoke a Gauloise and gaze at the vast surface of the lake below me in the darkness. And then pitch the finished butt over the railings, watch it explode like orange fireflies on the paving stones below. And then go back in, and resume our discussion.

  We talked about what we were doing these days – he had quit his job at the école and founded his own music school, devoted just to jazz. He told me about his kids – both the grown up ones back in the States, who he spoke of with genuine pride, and the newer one in Bern. And then we set about putting the entire world to rights.

  When we finished up at last, it was about four in the morning. He pulled out the sofa-bed for me, and both of us turned in.

  The next morning was bright and pleasant. He rode with me on the tram to the station. He had work to do, and his stop was the next along.

  I got off with my overnight bag. Turned around as the doors hissed closed. Raised a hand and waved to him as the tram pulled away.

  He did likewise, flashing me that same infectious grin I’d seen when I’d first met him.

  And then the tram-rails moved off at an angle. The morning’s soft, clear light made the glass turn reflective. He was lost from view.

  I turned around and crossed the road towards the station, never realising once that this was the last time I’d ever see him.

  The next time I was back in Lausanne it was very early in the Spring. Unseasonably warm and bright though, with a lot of trees already bearing blossom. I was grinning as I walked down the hill from the station – for once, I’d not phoned ahead, and I was planning to surprise him.

  I turned right at the Avenue de Cour, and a few minutes after that was outside his apartment block. I reached out for the buzzer, and then noticed the front door had been left open. So I went inside.

  There was something not quite right. Don’t ask me how, but I could somehow sense it. It simply didn’t feel as if Robert was still around.

  I looked at his letterbox, and that confirmed it. His nametag had been replaced by a new one, a Swiss-German name.

  I buzzed up all the same. Several times. No answer. The whole while, the truth of it was sinking slowly in. He’d been talking about moving the last time we’d met. And now, he’d gone and done it and, in typical fashion, hadn’t thought to let us know.

  He’d mentioned, several times, the possibility of setting up in Fribourg, Germany, for a few years. He’d even toyed with the idea of Geneva itself. I tried both cities through directory enquiries, and got no result either for a Robert Biko or a Royston Hoyle. We’d long ago lost touch with his one-time fiancée, Birgit. Astrid and Ivan had emigrated to a small Greek island several years back. And the Black Note club had, by this time, closed down.

  All of which was bad enough. But a couple of months later, Lauren and I moved as well. We left a forwarding address with the couple who bought our flat, but it was all that we could do.

  We’d scour Time Out occasionally to see if Robert’s name turned up. And, any time we were in mainland Europe, I’d look through the entertainment sections of the papers in case he was featured on their list of dates.

  There was nothing. We had no way of knowing where’d he gone.

  Life – and especially life in a city like London – simply moves on like a steamroller at break-neck speed. We had our work and other friends, places to go and people to see. And in time, memories of Robert were slowly jiggled to the hindmost of our thoughts. I’d still play his albums every so often, and wonder where he’d got to. But then remember that I had a dozen other things to do. The phone would ring. I was due out somewhere. I had the last draft of a new story to complete.

  It was only about four years later – I was putting together my own website – when it suddenly occurred to me that perhaps, by this stage of the game, Robert had a website of his own, or at least was mentioned somewhere.

  I was surprisingly nervous as I worked the keyboard. Those numerous memories had suddenly come flooding back. And could it be …?

  On Google, I typed in “robert+biko”. A list of addresses almost instantly popped up.

  I clicked on the first one. And two seconds later, his photo was right there on my screen.

  That infectious grin was still there, but his hair had turned enitrely white. My eyes slipped across the bio underneath his photo, taking in the fact that he was twelve years older than I was. Somehow, I’d never really noticed that, it had not even occurred to me, before.

  He had not moved to Germany or to Geneva. He had gone back to New York instead. He was teaching one day a week in Boston, and playing gigs the rest. And was living in the Village, down on Bleecker Street. One more call to directory enquiries and I had his number.

  It was six o’clock in the evening. Which made it, in New York … midday? I punched the digits in.

  A feeling overtook me as I listened to that slow bell ringing on the far side of the ocean. There was something definitely not quite right again. The ringing sounded … far too shallow, flat in tone. Like there was something missing.

  This was happening so quickly, and I tried to tell myself that I was being stupid. But the last time I had felt that instinct, it had been inside Robert’s block on the Avenue de Cour, when I had known deep in my gut that he was no longer around.

  Someone picked up.

  “Yes? Hello?”

  It was a black woman’s voice, a reasonably young one in so far as I could tell. He had a new female friend, I tried to tell myself. But …

  “Who is this?” I asked her.

  “This is Kisha Biko,” she replied.

  I recognised the name immediately. We had never before spoken, but this was Robert’s eldest daughter. He had mentioned her a whole lot that last evening in Lausanne, telling me proudly how well she was doing for herself. I think she worked in the Mayor’s office, or something like that.

  “To whom am I speaking, may I ask?”

  I explained to her who I was and how I knew her father. But I couldn’t help noticing that the information didn’t seem to be sinking in properly. Her responses were rather vague. She sounded
very distant, and it wasn’t just the line.

  “I’m here picking up a few of Daddy’s things. The funeral was yesterday and –“

  Funeral?

  The sole reason I could believe what I was now hearing was that my instincts had already warned me of something like this.

  I felt the carpet dropping out from underneath me all the same, and I could scarcely keep my balance.

  “You didn’t know?” Kisha was saying.

  I reminded her – my voice stumbling and hoarse – that Robert and I had been out of touch for a few years.

  “Ah,” she murmured. “I’m sorry to have to break this to you, then.”

  Taking a few moments more to gather herself properly, she told me what had happened.

  He’d been perfectly fine. His usual self, the way I’d always known him. He had gone up to Cape Cod to play a small festival there. Checked into the hotel they’d booked him, still perfectly fine. Gone into the restaurant for his evening meal, and then decided to turn in early.

  He had never woken up again. His heart had simply stopped.

  Then Kisha told me where the funeral had taken place. How many people had attended. And how emails, telegrams, and flowers had turned up from half around the world. All the friends that he’d made. The people who had known him and admired him.

  She had started crying softly by this point.

  “I’m so sorry,” I could only mumble. “If I’d only …”

  What? Thought to use the Internet a little sooner? That wouldn’t have prevented anything. Except this sudden awful emptiness, perhaps?

  There came back a faint snorting noise, like she had wiped a palm across her face and tried to pull herself together.

  “Thank you,” she said. And then, “Oh! That’s odd!”

  I waited, my head still spinning, for her to continue.