Frank was grinning at her as he wrestled the Land-Rover to a stop on the slippery macadam incline running down to the water. “Forgot to tell you about this,” he said. “The ferry over the Nzoia. Little adventure to tell your grandchildren.”
Suspiciously studying the ferry, which was inching this way from the farther shore, Ellen said, “You sure I’ll have grandchildren?”
“I’m willing to do my part,” he said.
She looked sharply at him, but saw that he was merely joking and not making a pass. “I’ll think of something funny to say,” she said, “when we reach the other side.”
The ferry was merely a large square raft, with a filthy greasy big engine bolted to it on one side. A thick cable attached to metal stanchions on each bank dangled across the river and through the raft’s engine so the ferry could slowly and agonizingly winch its way across the stream. In addition, another higher cable was slightly upstream, a third cable, one end of which was attached to the upstream side of the raft, was noosed around this higher one to keep the ferry from drifting too far downstream, thereby creating too much stress on cable number one as it was fed through the engine. Friction between the wire noose and the cable it was to slide along made the ferry move in slow uncertain fits and starts, like a very sleepy drunk.
The ferry had metal pipe railings on both sides, and twin narrow metal ramps for vehicles jutting out at front and back. At the moment there were about a dozen people standing clustered in the middle of the thing, dressed in red and white and yellow and pink, most holding umbrellas, forming a bright-colored temporary geodesic roof. More foot passengers waited on this side of the river; the monotony of their wait had been broken by the unexpected arrival of a Land-Rover containing two white people. Ellen stared back, but she grew bored before they did.
The man who ran the ferry was short, with a stout torso but spindly arms and legs like a spider’s. Also spider-like in his movements, he crawled and swarmed over his engine, making a great complicated to-do about the landing, with the metal ramps scraping up onto the macadam.
Despite the ferryman’s angry shouts and warnings, most of the passengers had jumped off and gone on about their business before he’d finished docking to his own satisfaction. Then there was a semi-comic moment when the waiting passengers all rushed on and the ferryman had to order them off again, with many yells and curses and flailings of his spindly arms, so the Land-Rover could be carefully maneuvered into position first. Ellen, feeling vaguely guilty that she was inside in the dry while all those people were out there in the wet, smiled apologetically at everybody whose eye she met, while Frank cursed under his breath at the contradictory instructions of the ferryman, who kept waving Frank to turn this way and that, when obviously the sensible thing to do was merely drive up the ramps and onto the ferry and stop.
Well, he did, at last, and the foot passengers followed, and the ferryman collected everybody’s fare. The vehicle was charged four shillings—about fifty cents—while from watching the ferryman make change, it seemed to Ellen foot passengers paid far less.
“This is the most relaxing part of the trip,” Frank said as the ferryman threw his engine into gear and the metal ramps scraped back again off the macadam. Suiting his actions to his words, he leaned back in the seat, folded his arms over his chest, closed his eyes, and smiled in lazy comfort.
And the strange thing was, he was right. The motion of the ferry, the combination of hesitant forward motion with the constant sideways thrust of the river, was oddly soothing, the physical equivalent of a lullaby. Their progress was slow, easy, soporific, and out of their hands. The river was so narrow that even with its rapidity and muddiness it didn’t look really dangerous, and the other passengers under their roof of joined umbrellas seemed pleased by their presence, as being an entertaining break from routine. The far shore, which was much steeper, approached slowly through the rain, and Ellen found herself relaxing more than she had done in a month. The tensions went away; the frustrations faded; the uncertainties grew less important. “I want to stay here forever,” she murmured, and beside her, Frank comfortably chuckled.
The routine between frantic ferryman and disinterested passengers was repeated on the opposite bank, and so was that between ferryman-as-incompetent-direction-giver and Frank-as-long-suffering-driver. But at last they were off, and spurting up the muddy slope, people ducking out of the way of the great gobs of maroon gunk thrown back by the tires straining for purchase. They reached level ground and a much narrower road, arched over by rows of trees. “That was fun,” Ellen said. “Thanks.”
“You don’t get any of those in—Where are you from, anyway?”
“Everywhere. I was an Army brat. Air Force, really. My father was a pilot.”
“You learned from him?”
“Starting when I was fourteen. He’s flying for PSA now.”
They talked awhile about cities and countries where Ellen had grown up, finding that while they’d both lived in several of the same places, it had never been at the same time. But Ellen loved meaningless coincidences as much as anybody, and was pleased whenever it turned out that Frank had been such-and-such a place three years after she’d been there, or two years before.
At a fork in the muddy road they turned left, and very soon overtook a monstrous sagging lumbering smoke-snorting truck, its load covered with tan canvas tarpaulins. The springs on its right side were completely shot, so that at all times it seemed in the process of falling over; even if the road had been wide enough to pass, that tottering hulk would have intimidated most drivers.
“Shit,” Frank said. “They’re supposed to be there already; they left two hours before us.”
She had no idea what he was talking about. “Who?”
“Charlie,” he said in disgust, pointing at the truck. “They can’t take the ferry, so they came around the long way, through Sio.”
“They have something to do with us?”
“That’s our work crew,” Frank said, and despite his annoyance he grinned. “We didn’t come out here just to play might-have-been.”
“Oh,” Ellen said, suddenly realizing. “The smuggling capital.” Of course this had to do with the coffee caper; for some absurd reason it spoiled things a bit that this expedition wasn’t merely an outing for its own sake.
“That’s right,” Frank said. “The smuggling capital; that’s good. Did you read in the Standard about the outboard motors?” The Standard was a Nairobi newspaper, also available in Kisumu.
“Outboard motors? No.”
“You know Lake Naivasha? It’s two hundred miles east of here, big lake. Already this year, every outboard motor on that lake was stolen; at least, every outboard motor that wasn’t locked away in somebody’s house.”
“Is that true? Why?”
“To come here for the smuggling. Uganda’s breaking down. This year, there’ll be more import-export by smuggling than by regular trade.”
Ellen suddenly had an image of them all—herself, Lew, Frank, Balim, even Isaac Otera—as carrion eaters, buzzards or hyenas, waiting on the sidelines for some stricken creature to die. It was a discomfiting vision. She said, “It seems tough on the people.”
“Around Lake Naivasha? They’ll recover.”
“No, in Uganda.”
“Uganda!” He seemed truly astonished. “We aren’t screwing the people,” he said, “they’re the ones doing the smuggling. They’re getting out from under their government, that’s all, the best way they can, poor bastards.”
“What’s going to happen next?” she wondered. “In Uganda, I mean.”
“What usually happens, I suppose,” he said. “Things’ll get worse.”
Port Victoria looked like the cowtown in Western movies. Not the big town with the saloons full of fancy women, but the little nothing-town where the stagecoach changes horses. The dirt road—mud road, really—ended in a large scraggly weedy square with low stucco or cement buildings on three sides. Most of the buildings feature
d verandah roofs over mud or cement walks, above which were false fronts. Peeling old political posters glued to the walls looked like wanted posters from those same Western movies. A dozen or so adults and children lounged in the comparative dryness under the verandah roofs. Low hills surrounded the village on three sides, adding to the sense of frontier isolation. Only the presence of a small white British Leyland truck parked in front of what seemed to be a general store took the scene out of the American nineteenth century and put it in the African twentieth.
Was there a sense here of unfulfilled destiny? In this sleepy village did there still dream the egg of the merchant metropolis that had never been born? It was probably merely that she’d heard the history of the place from Frank, but it nevertheless seemed to Ellen that there was something vaguely sad about the town, sad in a way other than the sadness endemic in rural towns everywhere, more than that usual sense of personal loss, of stunted promise and missed opportunity. Here it was no mute inglorious Milton that was evoked, but the image of an entire city that had failed to be. The missing railroad yards, warehouses, docks, movie palaces, bars, mansions, slums, vitality, purpose; all seemed to hover minimally and unnoticeably in the air behind the reality of the town, the aura of a ghost too weak even to haunt the place.
And the second subtext here, of course, was the underworld: Port Victoria’s secret life as a smuggler’s haven. In addition to the bland reality of surface appearance, in addition to the ghostly echo of what might have been, there was also the hidden face of corruption. Everyone she saw might be a smuggler or a thief; every building might conceal booty. Smuggling always leads to further crimes, to bribery, theft, or murder; in losing its original destiny, Port Victoria had become something strange and fascinating and in a way pathetic, almost like a failed person. Looking around her, Ellen said, “It’s a Graham Greene character as geography.”
Frank glowered. “What?”
“Nothing. Never mind.”
Frank had grown more and more angry at that groaning truck out in front of them, and once they reached the town’s weedy square he took the immediate opportunity to yank the Land-Rover in a wide sweep around the other vehicle, honking furiously. “Stupid bastard!” he yelled, but since the windows were closed against the rain, nobody could have heard him but Ellen.
A bumpy muddy lane led downhill on the right side of the square, beginning like an afterthought between two of the verandahed buildings. Frank charged through there as though daring the Land-Rover to hit one of those walls, then skittered and skewed and sideslid down the long muddy slope between tiny flat-roofed houses that were more Caribbean than Wild West.
The lake was out ahead, at the bottom of the hill, with a strange large round cane-and-reed hut off to one side. Ellen thought, Now we’re in the South Pacific. To the left, near the shore, was another huge truck like the one now lumbering down the lane after them. As Frank slued around and parked behind this second one, its doors opened and two men climbed down, wearing shabby raincoats and straw hats.
“Time to kick ass,” Frank said, with clear satisfaction. Pulling on his shiny black plastic rainhat, thus completing once again his Kabuki demon costume, he kicked open the Land-Rover’s door, splashed out into the mud, and stood with arms akimbo in the very ideogram of rage as the second truck wheezed and sagged around in a great semicircle and came to a stop beside its brother.
Ellen also climbed out of the Land-Rover, wearing her red rainhat and dark-blue raincoat and faded blue jeans and black knee-high boots, and heard the two men in the straw hats jabber away at Frank in Swahili. “Ah, shut up,” he told them, and called across the Land-Rover’s hood at Ellen, “The stupid bastards won’t learn English!”
“Very good English,” one of the men said indignantly.
“Then talk English,” Frank told him.
The man hesitated, frowning mightily, apparently having thoughts about his dignity; then he rattled off some more words in Swahili.
“Shit,” Frank answered, and turned to the two men who had emerged from the other truck, one of whom was Charlie. “Where’ve you been, you guttersnipe?”
“Oh, it’s a very heavy load completely,” Charlie said. He was the only one present not dressed for the weather, and already his filthy white shirt and baggy black trousers were soaked and clinging to him. He seemed neither to notice nor care.
“Double shit,” Frank commented. “You gonna go to work now?”
“Absolutely,” Charlie said, and turned to speak Swahili to the three other men, all of whom answered at the same time, each obviously pleading his own special case. Charlie went on blandly talking through their answers, and Frank turned away, shaking his head in disgust. “Come on down to the lake,” he called to Ellen, who was still standing on the other side of the Land-Rover, “before I forget myself and stomp these clowns into the turf.”
They walked down the slope together in the rain, their hands in their raincoat pockets. Pulled up on the bank were several long narrow rowboats, brightly colored, most with a flat board at the back for mounting an outboard motor. Ellen said, “This is your natural harbor?”
“Sure.” He waved an arm away toward the right. “Berkeley Bay in there.” Jutting his chin forward, he said, “That’s Uganda.”
Straight ahead, a low hill rose out of the water, surprisingly close, looking like an island. Flying over Uganda with Frank, back when Lew was captured, Ellen had had no particular feelings about the land itself, but now that dark featureless hill in the rain, looming up out of the water, did bear an aura of menace. “It doesn’t look pleasant,” she said, and shivered inside the coat.
“The funny thing is,” Frank said, “it is pleasant. The land, I mean. It’s the lushest, richest part of the entire continent of Africa. Stanley said Uganda was the pearl of Africa.”
“A pearl with a curse on it,” Ellen said, and Frank laughed. Then he said, “You want another quote? This is from Sir John Gray, used to be Chief Justice in Uganda when the British had it. He said the history of Uganda is ‘a crime to which there have been no eyewitnesses.’”
“But if the land is so rich—”
“Only man is vile.”
Ellen turned away from that low hill across the water and looked back upslope, where Charlie and the other three men had pulled the tarpaulins off one of the trucks and had started to unload masses of concrete blocks by the simple method of standing up on top of the load and tossing them down into a messy muddy pile. When they landed on one another they chipped and broke, but the men didn’t seem to mind. Ellen said, “What’s that all about, anyway?”
“The hotel,” Frank said, grinning with another secret joke.
“Hotel? Here?” She looked down at the shoreline, which was mud and weeds and grass; hardly a tourist’s beach.
“Sure,” Frank said. “Regional development. Build the joint up. Next thing you know, you got Elizabeth Taylor and Bianca Jagger dropping in. Paparazzi at Port Victoria.”
Ellen laughed at the idea, then said, “Come on, Frank. What’s up?”
“Balim had a little chat,” Frank said, rubbing his thumb and the side of his first finger together in the universal sign language for a bribe’s being passed, “with a fellow at the Ministry of Tourism and Wildlife.”
“The Ministry of what?”
“Have I ever lied to you?”
“Probably,” Ellen said. “Is there really a Ministry of Tourism and Wildlife?”
“Sure. Think about it; you’ll see it makes sense. When the tourists come to Kenya, it’s to see the wildlife.”
“Not much wildlife around here,” Ellen said, glancing around again, “apart from Charlie.”
“Look at those idiots,” Frank said. Crack, crack, the concrete blocks were bouncing off one another.
“Frank, why a hotel?”
“Okay.” Looking away toward Uganda, he said, “When this fucking rain stops, we’re gonna go over there and get ourselves several tons of coffee. We’re gonna need boats to ship i
t over here. We’re gonna need trucks to get it to the plantation.”
“The Jhosi plantation,” Ellen said, with a sudden surprising spasm of misery.
“Right,” Frank said, not noticing. “We’re gonna need work crews here to load and unload. We’re probably gonna need storage facilities, because the coffee’ll come in quicker than we can truck it out. Now, you see what this town looks like. How much traffic you think they get on that road, the average day?”
“Not much.” Coming in, they’d met that one blue bus, and had seen three men riding bicycles laden down with huge burlap sacks; Frank had said those were smugglers.
“That’s right. Sometimes a truck or two, even a legitimate delivery to the market. But not heavy traffic. A lot of smuggling goes through here, but it’s all small-time.”
“Of course.”
“Now,” Frank said, “not everybody on this old planet is as easygoing as you and me. Here and there you’ve got busybodies. Here and there you’ve got people who might even rat to the cops when they see something they don’t understand.”
“I’m beginning to get the picture,” Ellen said.
‘‘For the next couple months,” Frank told her, “there’ll be trucks going in and out of here every day. There’ll be work crews. There’ll be construction materials, including all the wood we’ll need to make the rafts to bring the coffee over. There’ll be storage facilities.”
“But at the end,” Ellen pointed out, “there will be a completely useless hotel.”
“Paid for by international development funds.”
“Oh. I see.”
“Cute, huh?”
Ellen nodded. “Balim is very very clever, isn’t he?”
“Balim is a fucking genius,” Frank said.
The only fly in the ointment, Frank explained, was that he was going to have to spend a lot of time here, making sure the work was done right, the supplies weren’t stolen, and the truth about their plans didn’t come out prematurely. “Originally I’d figured Lew for this job,” he explained, shaking his head in disgust, “but I got to admit I’m the one to do it. I know how to deal with these Bantus.”
Kahawa Page 21
