by Gavin Young
‘I am always bein’ thrown out of bars for preachin’,’ the American said, draining his beer. ‘It always happens, so I know the pattern. They tell me to shut up, but I go on preachin’. I’m one hell of a preacher. I stood up for God when I was five. I was reborn aged five. I was being devoured by mosquitoes; the bites I could see, but not the mosquitoes. Can you imagine that? That’s how I knew I was reborn. An’ now I jest go on preachin’ the fuckin’ Word of God in bar after bar.
‘Some guys’ – he leaned forward and lowered his voice – ‘some guys look as if they’re goin’ to zap me. Their fists start comin’ at me, then they stop in mid-air. God has stopped those fists. Then the bartenders say, “We won’t serve you,” so I move on, and it starts all over again in another bar.’
‘Are you going to start preaching in here?’ I asked.
‘No. This ain’t the right bar. God tells me – know what I mean? Just talkin’ to you may be all He needs tonight. He knows. He’ll tell me what to do. Like, I might maybe visit the White House and tell the president to move over. If God tells me to.’
The engineer’s blue gaze had settled on the American’s nose. I waited to see if God would catch his fist in mid-air.
‘So far God ain’t told me to do that. So far I’ve jest brought God back to the ship. Other day, the captain called me up and said, “Boy, they tell me you’ve brought God back aboard again. I’d bin wondering where the hell He’d got to.” He said, “I sure as hell see the fuckin’ Will of God movin’ in you, boy.” That’s what he said. Yes, sir. The captain’s seen the light. Now that he sees God movin’ in me, he says he ain’t never goin’ to let me out of his goddam sight.’
He got up and moved unsteadily to the bar. The engineer didn’t bother to watch him go. ‘Are you flying to London tonight?’ I asked again.
‘I shall endeavour to,’ he said mournfully. ‘Nice word, endeavour.’ His face twitched, and he demanded in low, furious tones, ‘Endeavour to what? Eh?’
‘Endeavour, if you’ll excuse me, to get us both another drink.’
Nothing would stop the engineer from drinking himself into oblivion. Perhaps the agent would come to collect him soon.
*
In the Harbour Bar of the Taprobane a jumpy figure on a stool knocked his glass of arrak to the floor. He had a young, grey face, which, although not exactly sour or malevolent, was uninviting. He might have been on drugs. He was about to step down shakily from his stool onto the splinters of the glass when I pointed them out to him. He sneaked off, muttering, ‘Zank you,’ sounding French.
The next day he was back in the bar, and we sat on adjoining stools and began to talk. He was excessively nervous, and there was an aggressive furtiveness about him. His lips shook, and he sipped his arrak convulsively, swallowing with a gasp. Behind us two Englishmen talked in businessmen’s tones. ‘Ah, that’s a good drop of beer after a walk,’ one said. ‘Yers. Yers, indeed. Hits the spot. I say it hits the spot. Realler does,’ said the other.
The Frenchman talked jerkily of Paris. I told him that I sometimes lived there. ‘There’ll be trouble there this winter. An uprising.’
‘Do you mean of those hooligans who call themselves autonomes?’
‘I am an autonome,’ he cried, suddenly sitting up straight, ‘and I am not a hooligan. We are very, very serious. We are very, very numerous.’ His voice rose, and his hand fumbled toward his glass. ‘The struggle is growing. It is only just beginning…. Perhaps a holocaust.’ His eyes seemed to grow larger in a face so pallid that it might have been raised in a cellar like a mushroom. The little mouth turned down, half baleful, half pleading, seeming to say, Please believe me – and also, Watch out.
Autonomes had made their appearance in the streets of Paris in recent years. They are anarchists, mainly middle-class, extremely violent wreckers with no definite left-wing ideology but dedicated to the destruction of property, even by bombs. Parisians had seen them rushing about in commandos – peeling off from peaceful and legal demonstrations of, say, trade unionists, to engage the police in pitched battles and to wreck cars and shop windows. Their attitude, it seemed from their spasmodic statements to the press, was: destroy everything – then let’s see.
From behind us, English boardroom voices came to me in snatches. ‘Werll them, what’s the problem?’ … ‘So I said, “Now look here, just you look here….”’ ‘Go werst, young man, go werst, eh? Huh, huh, huh.’ One of them was laughing.
At the bar the big eyes looked at me intensely. ‘What do we want, we autonomes? We want work for all. Minimum wages. No more support for Idi Amin and for fascist colonels in South America. Idi Amin’ – his face contorted in disgust – ‘was a sort of black Englishman. Uganda was a new British colony, with Amin at the head.’
‘But he was hated and ridiculed in England.’
‘I know all about it. You’re wrong.’ He spoke fiercely. ‘Britain wants to control the riches of South Africa – the gold and the copper. They want to use it to make the black peoples poorer. Everyone knows that. It’s well known.’
‘Where do you find this unquestionable truth?’
‘From the newspapers. Luckily, all important problems in the world are quite simple. Black and white. It’s all so clear when you come from the ranks of the deprived.’ He was beginning to shout.
The imperturbable voices behind me never faltered: ‘… In a bit of a merss, I’ll be bound….’ ‘Well, he ran off to – where was it? – somewhere beginning with “s”. Bromley; that’s it….’ ‘Bromley doesn’t begin with “ers”. Something wrong there. Same again?’ ‘Why not? Hits the spot….’ ‘God blerss.’
I said, ‘All right, calm down. You’d better eat something.’
Over lunch, the autonome – his name was Jean-Marie – quietened down. He was a dropout, he said, and lived with his parents, who ran a restaurant near the Rond Point on the Champs Elysées.
‘You’re hardly one of the deprived, then.’
He let that pass. ‘A poll taken by Student magazine in Paris recently showed that fifteen per cent of the students are with us. There’ll certainly be a big upheaval. Oh, certainly we can’t take power in France, but by violence we can push the system into an extreme fascist reaction. We can force people to make the choice: the fascist system or us.’
‘Do your parents worry about you?’
‘They worry about me not having a job.’
‘What do you do for money?’
‘I steal. I love going into those big stores and taking things under the nose of the guards. Then I give a lot of it away, just hand it to people in the street, for fun.’
‘If you’re deprived, why are you here? How can you afford it?’ He was wearing an expensive watch.
Jean-Marie shrugged without answering. ‘I liked Mexico. The people have dignity there. Poor, but dignified. Here they’ve no dignity.’
‘Hospitable and friendly, though.’
‘I don’t want that. I can’t stand sentiment, although I like dogs. In Ceylon a dog bit me.’
‘A hard one, are you?’
‘I’m a cyclopath.’
‘A what?’
‘A cyclopath.’ He made an up-and-down movement with his flat palm. Mad for bicycles? Smiling a Mona Lisa smile, he held out his arm. ‘Look.’ I saw a thin grey arm, nothing more. Impatiently he jabbed with a finger at a faint line or two across the wrist. ‘I wanted to kill myself.’ It was a proud declaration. (Ah, a psychopath.)
‘Recently?’
‘In July. That was the third time.’
‘Slash your wrists each time?’
‘First two times I tried gas.’
‘The restaurant’s oven?’
‘The gas ring in my room.’
‘And?’
My sister noticed I was in that kind of state, so she was keeping her eye on me. She turned off the gas twice, and bandaged me up in the bath the third time.’
‘In the bath?’
‘That’s where I did it.’
/>
‘Please don’t try again now.’
‘No, no, I don’t feel like that any more. Not now that the uprising is coming. I’ll be ready for it. In February or March.’
‘To the berst of my knowledge,’ a familiar English voice floated across our chopped paw-paw, ‘it wasn’t a shotgun wedding so much as a popgun wedding.’
‘Werll, God blerss my soul. Oh, wine. Thanks much-ler.’
February or March is a year ago, more or less, so Jean-Marie is still waiting for his upheaval. I hope his poor sister hasn’t had to save his life yet again.
*
Admiral Kadirgamar had advised me to visit the harbour master. It was good advice that worked like magic to dispel my problems.
The Port Authority building lay below my window at the Taprobane. In a spacious Victorian office, all dark wood and polished brass, Captain George Henricus murmured, ‘Take a pew. Cup of tea?’
A slender man, he wore a white shirt and shorts, high white stockings and black slippers. A telescope hung on a wall; wide windows looked down on the harbour. On his door was a sign, MASTER ATTENDANT.
There are only two Master Attendants in the world; one is in Colombo, the other in Singapore. All other ports have harbour masters. It is not clear why. In ‘The End of the Tether’, Joseph Conrad writes of the Master Attendant in Singapore:
A Master Attendant is a superior sort of harbour master … a Government official, a magistrate for the waters of his port, and possessed of vast but ill-defined disciplinary authority over seamen of all classes. This particular Master-Attendant was reported to consider it miserably inadequate on the ground that it did not include the power of life and death.
It was impossible, I soon discovered, to imagine the gentle Captain Henricus, descended from a Dutch Baptist ‘burgher’ (the term for Dutch or Portuguese colonists of Sri Lanka), pining for such powers. (In an old book about Ceylon I read that ‘the Portuguese came with sword and cross; the Dutch with ledger and law-book; the British with roads and railways’. The dates it gave for their respective periods of supremacy were 1500–1650; 1650–1800; 1800–1950: a hundred and fifty years each.)
A servant with a wall-eye poured tea from a large brown teapot, then wound a brass-fronted wall clock with a heavy key. A board listed the names of all Master Attendants since 1815; mostly they were captains in the Royal Navy. A chalk scrawl reminded Captain Henricus that the liner QE2 would arrive on 7 March 1981. ‘We like to know in advance,’ he said, smiling.
The captain’s duties were contained in a copy of the Legislative Enactments of Ceylon, 1956 edition, which lay on his table. He could, for instance, ‘penalise captains who threw overboard stones or ballast or rubbish, or any other thing whatever likely to form a bank or shoal or to be detrimental to navigation’. (Fine: two hundred rupees.) He could claim as government property all anchors recovered and not claimed within twelve months. He could enforce prohibition of diving for money. (Penalty: one month in prison.)
Further, the master attendant raised wrecks impeding navigation and gave assistance to ships in distress. He also licensed bumboats and their tindals. Tindals were the men in charge of the bumboats, and bumboat is the term for private boats, perhaps carrying laundrymen or ships’ chandlers with stores alongside vessels, or jolly boats or gigs carrying passengers about the harbour.
Oil pollution? ‘That will be part of my duties soon,’ said Captain Henricus. ‘But even now I don’t hesitate to say to captains, “Look, you know what you’ve just done – now clear up the mess you’ve caused.” I don’t hesitate.’
Captain Henricus confirmed that it was useless at this time of year to look for sea transport to Trincomalee or Madras. ‘Why don’t you take a look around the harbour?’ he suggested. ‘There are a couple of Tamil sailing ships in from Tuticorin.’ That name again….
He gave me a pass, and I set out to wander around the walled harbour, visiting the old breakwater and its lighthouse, pausing by the ancient steam tug with a long funnel that still whirred and panted about the harbour. In their very names, old landmarks advertised their age and the international maritime history of Colombo: the Ley den Bastion, the Delft Warehouse and the Baghdad Gate (an old and still-existing trade with Iraq accounts not only for this name but also for the Muslim population of Colombo).
There were two schooners at berth, as Captain Henricus had said, and I stared at them and stared again at these magnificent ships. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Great heavy-timbered three-masters, with soaring thick black masts like sooty columns in a burned-out temple, and mainsails that arced up, Arab style, from the deck on sickle-shaped spars. They looked as I imagined those ships the great Captain James Cook first went to sea in, the Whitby colliers. These had broad decks covered with coils of ropes, tarpaulins and sails, and a swarm of very black men with muscular limbs who gathered around me pointing and laughing when they spotted the camera around my neck.
A man in shirt and trousers, an agent’s representative, I suppose, asked if he could help me, and then said, ‘Yes, these ships will be sailing to Tuticorin as soon as they’ve loaded a cargo of seeds. A few days more, depending on the weather.’ Did they take passengers? What about me? The men laughed, and the agent’s man said he doubted if it would be comfortable for a passenger like me. They had no engines, only sails. ‘Very primitive.’
‘I don’t mind that.’
‘Well, you could talk to our office about it. Ceylon Shipping Lines, Apothecary Buildings.’
I thanked him and made for Apothecary Buildings, my heart pounding. Soon I was talking to the general manager of the Ceylon Shipping Lines, a young, courteous man, who was surprised and amused by my request.
‘You’re not afraid of taking one of those sailing ships, Mr Young? There’s a risk….’
‘Can you arrange it?’
‘Well, actually, it is not we who, strictly speaking…. I’ll just use the telephone if you’ll excuse me … to the man who….’
He dialled, and soon a voice sounded faintly on the other end. ‘I have a Mr Young here,’ the general manager said, and explained the circumstances. Laughter followed at both ends of the line. In a moment he rang off.
‘Mr Missier says the last European passenger he allowed on one of those ships turned out to be wanted by Interpol. Are you wanted by Interpol, Mr Young? In any case, Mr Missier is waiting for you.’
Mr Missier’s office was even harder to find than Mr Umbichy’s had been; it was deeper into the tumultuous maze of muddy streets around the old port. I had to squeeze between roaring trucks, under the snuffling noses of oxen in shafts, and against the sweat-streaked skins of coolies in sarongs knotted at the hips who heaved at long iron-framed barrows and still found the breath to shout, ‘Helloo, sir.’ I ended up at the corner of a narrow cobbled lane carpeted with squashed coconut tops, mango skins and ox dung. Here and there a dead rat lay in the gutter.
Mr Missier’s office was in a small rectangular loft at the top of steep wooden steps. You approached it from the street through a long shadowy room at the entrance of which clerks with the Hindu spot on their foreheads tabulated the weighing of sacks of small onions, potatoes, green and red chillies, dried prawns and peanuts. Sacks of these commodities were stacked against the walls. In an aroma of onions an old woman squatted in a corner chewing betel and squirts of betel juice marked the floor.
As my head slowly rose above the level of the office floor where Mr Missier made his living, I registered two pairs of legs, two waists and finally two pairs of hands stretched out to help me up the last three steps. An elderly voice said, ‘Hullo, sir. Well, well….’
Mr Missier was sitting at a desk, looking at me over his spectacles. An elderly man with a long, thin face and nose, he stretched forward a bony hand. ‘Please be seated.’
The clerks and the teaboy who had helped me up now offered a rickety wooden chair, and placed before me on the desk a small glass, a bottle of fizzy, sweet barley water, a packet of cigarettes and a box of match
es.
A telephone on a high, old-fashioned cradle rang and Mr Missier answered it.
‘Yes, yes,’ he said into it, waving at me to drink the barley water. ‘If … if … for the sake of argument … the documents, there’s some hitch. Can the goods be shipped back…. I mean with no fuss and that sort of thing?’ His face set into a sterner expression, although it was not a face that could be very stern. ‘No, no, impossible…. Exchange-control regulations…. That would never do…. Quite, quite.’ As he rang off his face cleared again. A kind face. I liked Mr Missier even before he arranged everything for me.
He pushed a card across the table, and I pushed mine back. His read:
R. Missier and Co.
Sole Agents for Ceylon Shipping Lines Ltd,
Sailing Vessels, Shipping Clearing and
Forwarding and Customs House Agents
A sketch of a sailing ship like the ones I’d seen in the harbour was printed in blue under the lettering.
The basic contents of Mr Missier’s headquarters were whitewashed walls, a single overhead fan, two wall calendars, a tiny safe, a filing cabinet, three tables and six people, one of them a teaboy. There were other objects, of course: his desk, covered in black leatherette with a ziggurat of torn files; an umbrella hanging from the top of the plastic curtain over the bottom half of a window with rusty bars. The window opened outwards, and a large crow perched on the frame, cawing loudly. One of the clerks poked at it every now and then with the umbrella, and it flew off, returning a moment later to continue its cawing.
A wax Virgin and Child in a glass case, lit with one small bulb on the wall behind Mr Missier’s head, attracted my attention. He said, ‘Formerly, Mr Young, our family was Hindu. We were converted by Francis Xavier when he came to Tuticorin. We’re all Catholics in this shipping business – one hundred per cent. My father-in-law owned sailing vessels in Tuticorin, but he became very old and so gave it up. We came here many years ago now, in 1926.’
The crow let rip with a string of caws that were like the harsh noise of a man wrenching the fender off a bus. Mr Missier’s soft voice disappeared under the sound for a while, although his lips continued to move.
