Mahesh’s eyes hopped about the table. Spoiling the effect of the words that I had found so wise, he said, “We’ll carry on. It will be all right. The new President’s not a fool. He isn’t just going to stay in his house like the last man, and do nothing.”
She said, “Carry on, carry on. That’s all I’ve been doing. That’s how I’ve spent my life. That’s how I’ve lived in this place, among Africans. Is that a life, Salim?”
She looked at her plate, not at me. And I said nothing.
Shoba said, “I’ve wasted my life, Salim. You don’t know how I’ve wasted my life. You don’t know how I live in fear in this place. You don’t know how frightened I was when I heard about you, when I heard that a stranger had come to the town. I’ve got to be frightened of everybody, you know.” Her eyes twitched. She stopped eating, and pressed her cheekbones with the tips of her fingers, as though pressing away a nervous pain. “I come from a well-to-do family, a rich family. You know that. My family had plans for me. But then I met Mahesh. He used to own a motorcycle shop. Something terrible happened. I slept with him almost as soon as I met him. You know us and our ways well enough to know that that was a terrible thing for me to do. But it was terrible for me in another way as well. I didn’t want to get to know anybody else after that. That has been my curse. Why aren’t you eating, Salim? Eat, eat. We must carry on.”
Mahesh’s lips came together nervously, and he looked a little foolish. At the same time his eyes brightened at the praise contained in the complaining words; yet he and Shoba had been together for nearly ten years.
“My family beat up Mahesh terribly. But that just made me more determined. My brothers threatened to throw acid on me. They were serious. They also threatened to kill Mahesh. That was why we came here. I watched for my brothers every day. I still do. I wait for them. You know that with families like ours certain things are no joke. And then, Salim, while we were here, something worse happened. Mahesh said one day that I was stupid to be watching out for my brothers. He said, ‘Your brothers wouldn’t come all the way here. They’ll send somebody else.’ ”
Mahesh said, “That was a joke.”
“No, that wasn’t a joke. That was true. Anybody could come here—they could send anybody. It doesn’t have to be an Asian. It could be a Belgian or a Greek or any European. It could be an African. How am I to know?”
She did all the talking at lunch, and Mahesh let her; he seemed to have handled this kind of situation before. Afterwards I drove him back to the centre of the town—he said he didn’t want to take his car in. His nervousness disappeared as soon as we left Shoba. He didn’t seem embarrassed by what Shoba had said about their life together, and made no comment about it.
He said, as we drove through the dusty red streets, “Shoba exaggerates. Things are not as bad as she believes. The new man’s no fool. The steamer came in this morning with the white men. You didn’t know? Go across to the van der Weyden and you’ll see a few of them. The new man might be a maid’s son. But he’s going to hold it together. He’s going to use this to put a lot of people in their place. Go to the van der Weyden. It will give you an idea of what things were like after independence.”
Mahesh was right. The steamer had arrived; I had a glimpse of it when we drove by the docks. It hadn’t hooted and I hadn’t looked for it earlier. Low-decked, flat-bottomed, it was almost hidden by the customs sheds, all but the top of the superstructure at the rear. And when I stopped outside Mahesh’s shop, which was opposite the van der Weyden, I saw a number of army vehicles, and some civilian trucks and taxis that had been commandeered.
Mahesh said, “It’s a good thing Africans have short memories. Go and have a look at the people who’ve come to save them from suicide.”
The van der Weyden was a modern building, four stories high, concrete and straight lines, part of the pre-independence boom; and in spite of all that it had gone through, it still pretended to be a modern hotel. It had many glass doors at pavement level; the lobby had a mosaic floor; there were lifts (not reliable now); there was a reception desk with a pre-independence airline advertisement and a permanent Hôtel Complet (“No Vacancies”) sign—which hadn’t been true for some years.
I had expected a crowd in the lobby, noise, rowdiness. I found the place looking emptier than usual, and it was almost hushed. But the hotel had guests: on the mosaic floor there were about twenty or thirty suitcases with identical blue tie-on labels printed Hazel’s Travels. The lifts weren’t working, and a single hotel boy—a small old man wearing the servant costume of the colonial time: short khaki trousers, short-sleeved shirt, and a large, coarse white apron over that—had the job of taking the suitcases up the terrazzo steps at the side of the lift. He was working under the direct supervision of the big-bellied African (from downriver somewhere) who normally stood behind the reception desk cleaning his teeth with a toothpick and being rude to everybody, but was now standing by the suitcases and trying to look busy and serious.
Some of the hotel’s new guests were in the patio bar, where there were a few green palms and creepers in concrete pots. The terrazzo floor here sloped from all sides to a central grille, and from this grille there always came, but especially after rain, a smell of the sewer. In this smell—not particularly bad now: it was dry and hot, a triangle of sunlight dazzled on one wall—the white men sat, eating the van der Weyden’s sandwiches and drinking lager.
They wore civilian clothes, but they would have been a noticeable crowd anywhere. An ordinary bar crowd would have had some flabby types and would have been more mixed in age. These men were all in fine physical condition, and even the few grey-haired ones among them didn’t look over forty; they could have passed as some kind of sports team. They sat in two distinct groups. One group was rougher-looking, noisier, with a few flashy dressers; two or three very young men in this group were pretending to be drunk, and clowning. The men in the other group were graver, cleaner-shaved, more educated in face, more conscious of their appearance. And you might have thought the two groups had accidentally come together in the bar, until you saw that they were all wearing the same kind of heavy brown boots.
Normally at the van der Weyden the hotel boys drooped around. The old ones, with their squashed and sour little faces, sat on their stools and expected only to be tipped, wearing their shorts and very big aprons like a pensioner’s uniform (and sometimes, in their great stillness, hiding their arms below their aprons and looking like men at the barber’s); the younger, post-independence boys wore their own clothes and chatted behind the counter as though they were customers. Now they were all alert and jumping about.
I asked for a cup of coffee, and no cup of coffee ever came to me more quickly at the van der Weyden. It was a tiny old man who served me. And I thought, not for the first time, that in colonial days the hotel boys had been chosen for their small size, and the ease with which they could be manhandled. That was no doubt why the region had provided so many slaves in the old days: slave peoples are physically wretched, half-men in everything except in their capacity to breed the next generation.
The coffee came fast, but the stainless steel jug the old man brought me had only a stale-looking trickle of powdered milk. I lifted the jug. The old man saw before I could show him, and he looked so terrified that I put the jug down and sipped the awful coffee by itself.
The men in the bar had come to do a job. They—or their fellows—had probably already begun. They knew they were dramatic figures. They knew I had come to see what they looked like; they knew the boys were terrified of them. Until this morning those hotel servants had been telling one another stories about the invincibility of their people in the forest; and those hotel servants were men who, given an uprising in the town, would have done terrible things with their small hands. Now, so quickly, they had become abject. In one way it was good; in another way it was pitiful. This was how the place worked on you: you never knew what to think or feel. Fear or shame—there seemed to be nothing in between.
I went back to the shop. It was a way of carrying on, and a way of passing the time. The flamboyant trees were in new leaf, feathery, a delicate green. The light changed; shadows began to angle across the red streets. On another day at this time I would have been starting to think of tea at the flat, squash at the Hellenic Club, with cold drinks afterwards in the rough little bar, sitting at the metal tables and watching the light go.
When Metty came in, just before four, closing time, he said, “The white men came this morning. Some of them went to the barracks and some of them went to the hydro.” This was the hydroelectric station, some miles upriver from the town. “The first thing they did at the barracks was to shoot Colonel Yenyi. It was what the President asked them to do. He doesn’t play, this new President. Colonel Yenyi was running out to meet them. They didn’t let him talk. They shot him in front of the women and everybody. And Iyanda, the sergeant—he bought that bolt of curtain material with the apple pattern—they shot him too, and a few other soldiers as well.”
I remembered Iyanda with his overstarched uniform, his broad face, and his smiling, small, malicious eyes. I remembered the way he had rubbed the palm of his hand over the cloth with the big red apples, the proud way he had pulled out the rolled-up notes to pay—such a small sum, really. Curtain material! The news of his execution would have pleased the local people. Not that he was a wicked man; but he belonged to that detested slave-hunting tribe, like the rest of the army, like his colonel.
The President had sent terror to our town and region. But at the same time, by terrorizing the army as well, he was making a gesture to the local people. The news of the executions would have spread fast, and people would already have become confused and nervous. They would have felt—as I began to feel—that for the first time since independence there was some guiding intelligence in the capital, and that the free-for-all of independence had come to an end.
I could see the change in Metty. He had brought quite bloody news. Yet he seemed calmer than in the morning; and he made Ferdinand calmer. Late in the afternoon we began to hear guns. In the morning that sound would have panicked us all. Now we were almost relieved—the guns were far away, and the noise was a good deal less loud than thunder, to which we were accustomed. The dogs were disturbed by the strange noise, though, and set up a barking that rolled back and forth, at times drowning the sound of the guns. Late sunlight, trees, cooking smoke: that was all we could see when we went out to the landing of the external staircase to look.
No lights came on at sunset. There was no electricity. The machinery had failed again, or the power had been deliberately turned off, or the power station had been captured by the rebels. But it wasn’t bad to be without lights now; it meant that at least there would be no uprising during the night. People here didn’t like the dark, and some could sleep only with lights in their rooms or huts. And none of us—neither Metty nor Ferdinand nor myself—believed that the station had been captured by the rebels. We had faith in the President’s white men. The situation, so confused for us in the morning, had become as simple as that now.
I stayed in the sitting room and read old magazines by an oil lamp. In their room Metty and Ferdinand talked. They didn’t use their daytime voices or the voices they might have used in electric light. They both sounded slow, contemplative, old; they talked like old men. When I went out to the passage I saw, through the open door, Metty sitting on his cot in undershirt and pants, and Ferdinand, also in undershirt and pants, lying on his bedding on the floor, one raised foot pressed against the wall. In lamplight it was like the interior of a hut; their leisurely, soft talk, full of pauses and silences, matched their postures. For the first time in days they were relaxed, and they felt so far from danger now that they began to talk of danger, war and armies.
Metty said he had seen the white men in the morning.
Ferdinand said, “There were a lot of white soldiers in the south. That was a real war.”
“You should have seen them this morning. They just raced to the barracks and they were pointing their guns at everybody. I never saw soldiers like that before.”
Ferdinand said, “I saw soldiers for the first time when I was very young. It was just after the Europeans went away. It was in my mother’s village, before I went to stay with my father. These soldiers came to the village. They had no officers and they began to behave badly.”
“Did they have guns?”
“Of course they had guns. They were looking for white people to kill. They said we were hiding white people. But I think they only wanted to make trouble. Then my mother spoke to them and they went away. They just took a few women.”
“What did she say to them?”
“I don’t know. But they became frightened. My mother has powers.”
Metty said, “That was like the man we had on the coast. He came from somewhere near here. He was the man who made the people kill the Arabs. It began in the market. I was there. You should have seen it, Ferdinand. The arms and legs lying about in the streets.”
“Why did he kill the Arabs?”
“He said he was obeying the god of Africans.”
Metty had never told me about that. Perhaps he hadn’t thought it important; perhaps it had frightened him. But he had remembered.
They went silent for a while; I had the feeling that Ferdinand was examining what he had heard. When they spoke again it was of other things.
The gunfire went on. But it came no nearer. It was the sound of the weapons of the President’s white men, the promise of order and continuity; and it was oddly comforting, like the sound of rain in the night. All that was threatening, in that great unknown outside, was being held in check. And it was a relief, after all the anxiety, to sit in the lamplit flat and watch the shadows that electric lights never made; and to hear Ferdinand and Metty talk in their leisurely old men’s voices in that room which they had turned into a warm little cavern. It was a little like being transported to the hidden forest villages, to the protection and secrecy of the huts at night—everything outside shut out, kept beyond some magical protecting line; and I thought, as I had thought when I had had lunch with the old couple, how nice it would be if it were true. If in the morning we could wake up and find that the world had shrunken only to what we knew and what was safe.
In the morning there came the fighter plane. Almost as soon as you heard it, before you had time to go out and look for it, it was overhead, flying low, and screaming at such a pitch that you barely felt yourself in possession of your body; you were close to a cutting-out of the senses. A jet fighter flying low, so low that you clearly see its triangular silver underside, is a killing thing. Then it was gone, and was soon hardly visible in the sky, white with the heat of the day that had just begun. It made a few more passes over the town, that one plane, like a vicious bird that wouldn’t go away. Then it flew over the bush. At last it lifted,and just a little while later, at some distance, the missiles it had released exploded in the bush. And that was like the thunder we were used to.
It came back more than once during the week, that single plane, to fly low over the town and the bush and to drop its explosives at random in the bush. But the war was over that first day. Though it was a month before the army began to come back from the bush, and a full two months before the van der Weyden began to lose its new guests.
In the beginning, before the arrival of the white men, I had considered myself neutral. I had wanted neither side to win, neither the army nor the rebels. As it turned out, both sides lost.
Many of the soldiers—from the famous warrior tribe—were killed. And afterwards many more lost their guns and over-starched uniforms and the quarters they had spent so much of their money furnishing. The army was reorganized by the President, far away in the capital; in our town the army became more mixed, with men from many tribes and different regions. The men of the warrior tribe were turned out unprotected into the town. There were dreadful scenes at the barracks; the women wailed in the forest way,
lifting their bellies and letting them drop heavily again. A famous tribe, now helpless among their traditional prey: it was as though some old law of the forest, something that came from Nature itself, had been overturned.
As for the starveling rebels of our region, they soon began to reappear in the town, more starved and abject, their blackened rags hanging on them, men who only a few weeks before had thought they had found a fetish powerful enough to cause the guns of their enemies to bend and to turn bullets to water. There was bitterness in their wasted faces, and for a little while they were withdrawn, like people slightly crazed. But they needed the town they had wanted to destroy; as Mahesh said, they had been saved from suicide. They recognized the new intelligence that ran the country from afar, and they returned to their old habit of obedience.
For the first time since I had arrived there was something like life at the van der Weyden. The steamers brought up not only supplies for the President’s white men, but also very plump and fantastically dressed women from the downriver peoples, beside whom the women of our region, polers of dugouts and carriers of loads, looked like bony boys.
Eventually we were allowed to drive out to the dam and the hydroelectric station, near where there had been fighting. The installations were untouched; but we had lost one of our new nightclubs. It had been started by a refugee from the Portuguese territory to the south (a man avoiding conscription), and it was beautifully sited, on a cliff overlooking the river. It was a place to which we had just begun to get accustomed. The trees were hung with small coloured bulbs and we sat out at metal tables and drank light Portuguese white wine and looked at the gorge and the floodlit dam; it was like luxury to us, and made us feel stylish. That place had been captured by the rebels and pillaged. The main building was basic and very ordinary—walls of concrete blocks around an unroofed dance floor with a covered bar at one side. The walls still stood (though they had tried to set the concrete alight: there were fire marks in many places); but all the fittings had been destroyed. The rage of the rebels was like a rage against metal, machinery, wires, everything that was not of the forest and Africa.
A Bend in the River Page 9
