Kahawa

by Donald E. Westlake

  “A shower? At a moment like—”

  “Please.”

  Responding at last to the urgency in her face and voice, he permitted himself to be dragged from the bed and herded into the bathroom, where she turned on full-blast both the hot and cold faucets in the shower, then turned, smiling, to say, “Now we can talk. The microphones can’t hear us.”

  “Oh, my Lord,” he said, blushing like a boy, his face and neck suffusing, becoming thoroughly red. “I completely forgot about those blasted things. Chase warned me, of course. My, we have given them an earful, haven’t we?”

  “On purpose,” she said.

  He leaned closer, apparently believing he hadn’t heard. “What was that?”

  “It was my job to get you to talk,” she said, looking him directly in the eye. Her own eyes felt skinned; they burned with every tear she’d left unshed her whole life long.

  He studied her as though he were no more than a kindly counselor, to whom she had brought a small but nagging problem. “So you are a—It sounds ridiculous to say it, the word itself is ridiculous.”

  “I am a spy.” She pronounced the word carefully and distinctly, to rob it of ridiculousness.

  “I’d wondered, of course,” he told her, sadly shaking his head. “I will admit it crossed my mind. But to spy on me?”

  “I did. I was ordered to.” She held tight to his forearms. “I gave you drugs to make you talk. I have been performing for the microphones.”

  “Hardly that,” he said, smiling wanly at her. “I can see where I must appear a doddering old fool, but—”

  “No!”

  “—but I can’t believe it has been entirely performance. Were it, you wouldn’t tell me now.”

  “Of course not.”

  “I haven’t known many secrets, have I?”

  She managed to return his smile, saying, “Absolutely none. Has there ever lived such an innocent?”

  “Keep me innocent, Patricia. Marry me.”

  “Please—”

  “Stay with me for whatever years I have left. Live with me where you will. São Paulo, London, somewhere else. Wherever you prefer. But not in this country.”

  “Not in Africa!” she said, startled by her own vehemence.

  “I agree.”

  “But we can’t; this is just fantasy. You and I—”

  “The age?”

  “And the race.”

  “Nonsense,” he said, dismissing that. “Day after tomorrow, this annoying transaction will be at last completed. I shall leave Uganda, and you shall come with me.”

  “We can’t just—”

  “Hush,” he said, and hushed her by kissing her. “Shall I let you go, now I’ve found you? Let us have that shower while there’s still hot water left, and go to sleep, and dream whatever we dream, and talk again tomorrow.”

  “All right,” she said, too drained to go on arguing.

  “Somewhere without microphones,” he said. “If there is such a place in Kampala.”

  36

  Wednesday night, Lew couldn’t stand the silent house, so he went for a drive westward along the gulf shore, not realizing until he was passing the place that he had repeated his route that time with Amarda. The memory of her, slippery and agile in the humid car, with the steam on the windows and the rain chuckling on the roof, came back to him alone in this other car now in the night like a physical presence, angering him and making him feel stupid. What Ellen had said about the rain was true—the rain and the long wait when nothing really was happening—but without Amarda they would have survived. Even to remember Amarda now, much less to remember her erotically, showed how little he could trust himself. “I am a fool,” he muttered, glowering out the windshield, “and I do have to go on living with me.”

  The African roads at night were populated, people strolling along singly or in groups, walking at the edge of the road itself because the verge was too uneven or too overgrown. They walked in darkness, lit only by stars, and suddenly appeared like apparitions in his headlights. He had to keep steering around them. None hitchhiked or even acknowledged his presence, except that if they were walking toward him they lowered their eyes against his lights. Mostly they were raggedly dressed and walked slowly, ambling along as though to no particular destination. Their society is so mysterious to me, Lew thought, that I don’t even know why they go for walks at night.

  Not wanting to return past the Amarda spot, he continued on until he found a rutted stony dirt road leading away to the right. This too was dotted with strollers, and eventually it led back to the main road, the B1, which in turn brought him to Kisumu and home, where he found Frank and Young Mr. Balim getting drunk in his kitchen. “We brought you beer,” Young Mr. Balim said, smiling like a used-car salesman.

  “And drank it,” Frank said. “We figured you needed to get cheered up.”

  “But you weren’t here,” Young Mr. Balim said. “So we started without you.”

  “I’ll catch up,” Lew promised, understanding at once that this was exactly what he needed.

  There was lots more beer in the refrigerator. It was already well after midnight, but for the next three hours they drank together in the kitchen, telling one another stories, many of them about women. (Ellen wasn’t mentioned; Lew didn’t feel like talking about her, and the others respected his silence.)

  Young Mr. Balim described the tragedy of his life. “Women love me,” he explained. Like his father, he had the ability to smile in various sad and unhappy ways. “They find me irresistible,” he said, and sighed.

  “That must be tough,” Frank said, looking surly.

  “Yes, it is,” agreed Young Mr. Balim. “For what they love is my exoticism. Not eroticism, exoticism. To most women—except to Indian women, of course; I’ll have nothing to do with them—I am something different, an exotic specimen. They must have me. They want to know what I’m like.”

  “How come Indian women?” Lew asked. I am not thinking of Amarda, he told himself. “How come you got nothing to do with them?”

  “First I tell you about these other women.”

  “The ones who love you,” Frank said, looking increasingly surly. “All these cunts finding you irresistible.”

  “Those precisely. ‘What is this Bathar Balim really like?’ they ask themselves. ‘He is very pretty,’ they say.”

  “Mp,” said Frank, and took a long swig of beer.

  “So they pursue me,” Young Mr. Balim said. “And how can I refuse them?”

  “Get to the point,” Lew said, because he wanted to go back to the question of what was wrong with Indian women.

  “Well, they seduce me, don’t they?” Young Mr. Balim asked, but went on without waiting for an answer. “And they find I am merely a man, don’t they? Not exotic at all. Erotic, certainly, but not mysterious, not dashing, not romantic. Not a hero. I cannot help but disappoint them. And so they reject me for being ordinary after all.” He sighed, and smiled in utter dejection and drank beer.

  “You ain’t ordinary,” Frank told him. Lew could tell that Frank was thinking about getting into a bad mood. “You’re a prince.”

  “No fights in my kitchen,” Lew said.

  Frank gave him an indignant glare. “Who’s fighting? I just said he was a goddam prince; am I right, Bathar?”

  “We are all friends,” Young Mr. Balim said. He blinked a lot, as though trying to get himself under control.

  Lew said, “Tell me about these Indian women.”

  “What about them?”

  “You said you wouldn’t have anything to do with them.”

  “Oh, that’s right. Absolutely.” Nodding in agreement with himself, gazing at his brown glass beer bottle, Young Mr. Balim fell silent.

  Amazed at his own patience, Lew said, “How come?” And then, because he feared a certain discontinuity in Young Mr. Balim’s thought processes, he laid the whole question out again. “How come you won’t have anything to do with Indian women?”

  “Oh,”
he answered scornfully, “it’s because with them it’s nothing but fuck-fuck-fuck.”

  Frank, who had been nodding, sat up straight. “What’s that?”

  “Yes, that’s all they care about,” Young Mr. Balim said, dismissing all Indian women with a disdainful shrug. “Just fuck-fuck-fuck and that’s all.”

  “Bathar, pal,” Frank said, “I don’t get your objection.”

  “Well, what are we to them? Nothing, just a penis.”

  “A what?”

  “Cock,” Lew translated for Frank.

  “They don’t care about men at all,” Young Mr. Balim explained, becoming more earnest, more doleful, less cynical, as he warmed to his subject. “It’s a society of women, is all, with men on the outside looking in.”

  Frank glowered, apparently dubious. “You mean they’re dykes?”

  “No, no. It’s all fuck-fuck-fuck with men, but the rest of their lives is women. In India it’s the same, and here, and everywhere you find our Indian culture. The young man marries, he brings his young wife home; right away the important relationship is between the mother-in-law and the daughter-in-law. They talk together; they live together; they have secrets together; they are the true loving pair. And then the young wife sees her husband, and she says, ‘Oh, yes, fuck-fuck-fuck, make babies, now go away,’ and she wipes herself off and goes back to the mother-in-law and they talk secrets together and giggle behind their hands.” He drank beer, and became so extremely sad that the smile was hardly visible at all. “It is terrible to see your culture from the outside,” he said. “Very disheartening.”

  It seemed to Lew that Young Mr. Balim’s complaint was somehow an inversion of the social structure American women recently had been criticizing, with the sexes reversed, but the idea was too tenuous for him to try to put it into words. Besides, he was more interested in trying to make Young Mr. Balim’s opinions about Indian women cast some light on his own relationship with Amarda. (He’d forgotten he wasn’t thinking about her.) The fuck-fuck-fuck part was alright, but what about the rest of it? Did it alter his view of what had been going on in that small hot stuffy room in her house the last time he’d seen her? Amarda and her grandmother; he tried to visualize those two giggling together behind their hands, talking sexual secrets about men. Strangely enough, it was easier to see the grandmother that way, and what did that mean?

  Soon Frank fell asleep, his head bouncing on the table. “I gotta go to bed,” Lew announced, struggling to his feet, agitating the table so half the empties fell over and Frank snorted and opened one red eye.

  “I shall take Frank home,” Young Mr. Balim said. He seemed as neat as ever, but a bit less ironic and more human. Drink apparently was good for him.

  “Do what you want,” Lew suggested. “I’m going to sleep. I got a war to go to in the morning.”

  At eight-thirty, worn out and hung over, Lew arrived at Balim’s buildings to find Balim’s old canvas-covered trucks in the yard in back, with his forty-eight troops messily loading the food and bedrolls and clothesline and cable and tarpaulins and empty oil drums and cartons of tools and all the other miscellaneous supplies. The forty Evinrude outboard motors Lew had got in trade for the fifty-seven missing sewing machines were already loaded.

  Frank appeared unaffected by last night’s debauch, except that he seemed to be having a bit of trouble with his balance, as though something had gone agley in his middle ear. He would sway every now and again, while standing perfectly still on an unmoving flat surface. Otherwise, he was the usual Frank, bellowing and belligerent, slowing the loading process by repeatedly confusing the troops.

  As for Young Mr. Balim, he was nowhere to be seen, but a hint to his condition might be garnered from the reproachful look Mazar Balim gave Lew when he came out at one point to check their progress. Lew gave him back a sickly smile, and tried to act as though he for one had had little to drink and a full night’s sleep.

  Finally they were ready to go. All the men except for the drivers and two assistants were seated in lumpy crowds in the beds of two of the trucks, and all the supplies had been jammed into the other two. Frank and Isaac and Balim had a little private conversation while Lew sat on the running board of one of the trucks and drank the coffee Isaac had kindly brought out to him. Then Balim and Isaac both came over to smile at him and shake his hand and wish him luck. And then they really did leave.

  Frank rode as passenger in the first truck, Lew in the second. The theory was that they would look like work crews and supplies for the hotel being built at Port Victoria. Frank was generally assumed by those locals who had seen him to be an engineer or architect or some such thing, and Lew should be able to slip through under the same mantle.

  The first part of the trip was relatively smooth, and Lew fell asleep before they were even out of town. He had a wonderfully healing and restful snooze for an hour and woke up when he was almost thrown through the windshield. “Yike!” he cried, and the bucking cab bounced up again, slamming him back into the seat. He clutched at the door and dashboard for handholds, while staring at the driver, who gave him a huge slant-toothed grin and said, “Sorry.”

  Lew got his body under control, and the driver got the truck under control. They were now on dirt road, or rather rock road, a kind of washboard surface made by scraping away the thin topsoil. The thrown-up dust from Frank’s truck just ahead was already clogging Lew’s throat. The usual streams of pedestrians watched them drive by, and presumably then died horribly in the great cloud of orange dust the four trucks must leave in their wake.

  Lew studied the driver, a youngish man with long muscular arms and protruding crooked teeth and large cheerful eyes. “You speak English?”

  The driver smiled at him again and shook his head. “Some words,” he said. Then he faced front, watching men in the truck ahead hilariously try to play a game of kalah—the stones kept flying out of the cups at every bounce—while he proceeded to recite for Lew’s benefit the English words he did know: “Money. Whore. Policeman. Boss. Fuck. Beer. Dead. Pissed-off.”

  It went on like that. He knew about a hundred words in all. Well, it was a kind of conversation.

  Port Victoria reminded Lew of Ellen, because she’d been the one who’d described it to him, after her jaunt here that time with Frank. Without knowing its strange history—or non-history—it seemed to him nobody would think the place remarkable. It was just a little market village, that’s all, like hundreds of others, with some fishermen’s small houses along the steep road down to the shore. He didn’t see any aura of strangeness or loss, but maybe that was because he was once again feeling the loss of Ellen. He dismounted from the truck when they arrived at the work site, eager to have something to do to distract himself.

  Frank was now very cheerful. His problem with balance seemed to be gone, so maybe he too had had some sleep in the truck. He said, “What do you think of the place?”

  The hotel was truly abuilding. The concrete-block exterior walls were virtually finished to their completed height of two stories, with rectangular openings showing where doors and windows would someday be placed. To the side, some sheds made of cardboard and rusty metal housed supplies and workmen. Just beyond, Charlie was pissing on a bed of lilies.

  “I can’t believe that hotel,” Lew said. “We’re actually building a goddam hotel.”

  “After this is over,” Frank said, hooking his thumbs in his belt, “a couple years, maybe I’ll come back, stay in this joint, sit on the terrace up there with my vodka-and-tonic and just look out over the lake at where we did it.”

  “You drink beer,” Lew reminded him meanly.

  “After this caper I’ll drink vodka,” Frank assured him. “And fuck college women.”

  Charlie came over, shaking the last droplets off his cock, which he then stuffed inside his disreputable pants. “All ready to go,” he said.

  “Don’t tell me,” Frank snapped. “Tell those other assholes. Start unloading. Shit, man, we got our fortunes to make.”
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  Lew looked for the first time out over the water. He’d seen the maps, so that low green range of hills over there was Uganda. I am here, he told himself, to steal a train.

  He found himself grinning.

  37

  For lunch, the engineer and the fireman ate sandwiches and drank beer on a pleasant sunny knoll overlooking the swift-moving Albert Nile. During the meal they were both bitten by various disease-bearing insects, but apart from the occasional itch they suffered no ill effects. They had been bitten by these creatures ever since infancy, as had their parents and their parents before them. Various low-level fevers and agues had struck them in their early childhood, and they had been among the minority in their age group to survive. They were immunized now, by nature’s method, which is wasteful of life but effective, and which leaves the body permanently weakened, like an automobile that has been in a frame-wrenching accident.

  When the engineer and fireman strolled back to the Pakwach East yards, the four freight cars—which they would call “goods wagons,” in the British style—were just about filled with the sacks of coffee. They signed papers, and then phoned ahead to Lolim, their next stop, to say they were leaving Pakwach and to give an estimated time for arrival at Lolim. They had to do this by public telephone because Uganda Railways had no communication system of its own—certainly no radios in the locomotive cabs—except for hand-cranked field telephone sets at the signal boxes, whose wires were generally strung from tree to tree along the rail line, when they weren’t stolen.

  By the time they had steam up, the cars were ready and sealed. It was only fifteen miles to Lolim; the fireman delayed them for a moment, but merely to go buy two more bottles of beer. Ugandan beer, brewed from bananas, is very gassy, very tasty, and very strong. The train with its four cars pulled out of the Pakwach East yards, rejoined the main track, and rolled up the slight incline northeastward toward Lolim.

  Neither the engineer nor the fireman was political; nor was either particularly religious, though both had come from Christian families. The engineer was a member of the Basoga tribe, which in the old days had ruled the land just east of the Baganda and were very nearly as advanced. The fireman was a Karamojong, from one of the few families to have come south and abandoned that tribe’s traditional nomadic cattle-herding drought-plagued hand-to-mouth existence in Uganda’s far northeast. Neither of them thought of himself first in terms of tribe or religion or politics. They had been railroad men all their adult lives, and they would go on being railroad men.