A Bend in the River (14 page)

All the people—like the health officials—who performed services for ready money were energetic, or could be made so: the customs people, the police, and even the army. The administration, however hollow, was fuller; there were people you could appeal to. You could get things done, if you knew how to go about it.

And the town at the bend in the river became again what Father Huismans had said it had always been, long before the peoples of the Indian Ocean or Europe came to it. It became the trading centre for the region, which was vast.
Marchands
came in now from very far away, making journeys much more difficult than Zabeth’s; some of those journeys took a week. The steamer didn’t go beyond our town; above the rapids there were only dugouts (some with outboard motors) and a few launches. Our town became a goods depot, and I acquired a number of agencies (reassuming
some that Nazruddin had had) for things that until then I had more or less been selling retail.

There was money in agencies. The simpler the product, the simpler and better the business. It was a different kind of business from the retail trade. Electric batteries, for instance—I bought and sold quantities long before they arrived; I didn’t have to handle them physically or even see them. It was like dealing in words alone, ideas on paper; it was like a form of play—until one day you were notified that the batteries had arrived, and you went to the customs warehouse and saw that they existed, that workmen somewhere had actually made the things. Such useful things, such necessary things—they would have been acceptable in a plain brown-paper casing; but the people who had made them had gone to the extra trouble of giving them pretty labels, with tempting slogans. Trade, goods! What a mystery! We couldn’t make the things we dealt in; we hardly understood their principles. Money alone had brought these magical things to us deep in the bush, and we dealt in them so casually!

Salesmen from the capital, Europeans most of them, preferring to fly up now rather than spend seven days on the steamer coming up and five going down, began to stay at the van der Weyden, and they gave a little variety to our social life. In the Hellenic Club, in the bars, they brought at last that touch of Europe and the big city—the atmosphere in which, from his stories, I had imagined Nazruddin living here.

Mahesh, with his shop just across the road from the van der Weyden, saw the comings and goings, and his excitement led him into a series of little business ventures. It was strange about Mahesh. He was always on the lookout for the big break, but he could spend weeks on things that were quite petty.

He acquired at one time a machine for cutting out or engraving letters and numbers, and he acquired a stack of the very tough plastic plates on which the numbers or letters were to be engraved. His idea was to supply nameplates to the town. He practised at home; Shoba said the noise was terrible. Mahesh, in his flat and in his shop, showed off the practice nameplates as
though it was he, rather than the machine, that had made the beautiful letters. The modernity and precision—and, above all, the “manufactured” look of the plates—really excited him, and he was sure it would excite everybody else as well.

He had bought the equipment from a salesman who had stayed at the van der Weyden. And it was typical of Mahesh’s casual approach to business that when it came to getting engraving orders, he could only think of crossing the road back to the van der Weyden—reversing the trip of the salesman who had sold him the equipment. He had pinned all his hopes on the van der Weyden. He was going to redo the room numbers, all the
Hommes
and
Dames
signs, and he was going to affix descriptive plates on almost every door downstairs. The van der Weyden alone was going to keep him busy for weeks and pay back for the machine. But the van der Weyden owners (a middle-aged Italian couple who kept themselves in the background and hid behind their African front men) didn’t want to play. And not many of us felt the need to have our names on triangular sections of wood on our desks. So that idea was dropped; that tool was forgotten.

Mahesh, broaching a new idea, liked to be mysterious. The time, for instance, he wanted to import a machine from Japan for cutting little flat wood sticks and spoons for ice cream, he didn’t say so right out. He began by offering me a sample spoon in a paper wrapper which the salesman had given him. I looked at the little shoe-shaped spoon. What was there to say? He asked me to smell the spoon and then to taste it; and while I did so he looked at me in a way that made me feel that I was going to be surprised. There was no surprise: he was just demonstrating to me—something I must say I had never stopped to think about—that ice cream spoons and sticks shouldn’t taste or smell.

He wanted to know whether there was a local wood which was like that nice Japanese wood. To import the wood from Japan with the machine would be too complicated, and might make the sticks and spoons cost more than the ice cream. So for some weeks we thought and talked about wood. The idea interested me; I got taken up with it, and began to look at trees in a different way. We had tasting sessions, smelling and tasting different kinds
of wood, including some varieties that Daulat, the man with the trucks, picked up for us on his runs east. But then it occurred to me that it was important to find out—before the spoon-making machine came down—whether the local people, with their own tastes in food, were ready for ice cream. Perhaps there was a good reason why the ice cream idea hadn’t occurred to anybody else; and we had Italians in the town, after all. And how was the ice cream going to be made? Where were the milk and the eggs?

Mahesh said, “Do you need eggs to make ice cream?”

I said, “I don’t know. I was asking you.”

It wasn’t the ice cream that attracted Mahesh. It was the idea of that simple machine, or rather the idea of being the only man in the town to own such a machine. When Shoba had met him he had been a motorcycle repairman; and he had been so flattered by her devotion that he had not risen above that kind of person. He remained the man who loved little machines and electrical tools and saw them as magical means of making a living.

I knew a number of men like that on the coast, men of our community; and I believe people like that exist wherever machines are not made. These men are good with their hands and gifted in their own way. They are dazzled by the machines they import. That is part of their intelligence; but they soon start behaving as though they don’t just own the machines, but the patents as well; they would like to be the only men in the world with such magical instruments. Mahesh was looking for the wonderful imported thing which he would own exclusively, the simple thing which would provide a short-cut to power and money. So that in this respect Mahesh was only a notch or two above the
marchands
who came to the town to buy modern goods to take back to their villages.

I used to wonder how someone like Mahesh had survived all that he had survived in our town. There was a kind of quiet wisdom or canniness there, no doubt of that. But I also began to feel that he had survived because he was casual, without doubts or deep anxieties, and—in spite of his talk of getting out to a better country (standard talk among us)—without deeper ambitions. He suited the place; he would have found it hard to survive anywhere else.

Shoba was his life. She told him—or by her devotion showed him—how fine he was; and I believe he saw himself as she saw him. Outside that, he took things as they came. And now in the most casual way, with almost no attempt at secrecy or guile, he became involved in “business” deals that frightened me when he told me about them. He seemed unable to resist anything that might be described as a business offer. And most of those business offers came to him now from the army.

I wasn’t too happy with our new army. I preferred the men from the warrior tribe, for all their roughness. I understood their tribal pride and—always making allowance for that—I had found them straight. The officers of the new army were a different breed. No warrior code there; no code. They were all in varying ways like Ferdinand, and they were often as young as Ferdinand. They were as aggressive, but without Ferdinand’s underlying graciousness.

They wore their uniforms the way Ferdinand had at one time worn his lycée blazer: they saw themselves both as the new men of Africa and the men of the new Africa. They made such play with the national flag and the portrait of the President—the two now always going together—that in the beginning I thought, after all that the country had gone through, and all that had happened to them, the officers, all the lucky accidents that had taken them where they had got, in the beginning I thought these new officers stood for a new, constructive pride. But they were simpler. The flag and the President’s portrait were only like their fetishes, the sources of their authority. They didn’t see, these young men, that there was anything to build in their country. As far as they were concerned, it was all there already. They had only to take. They believed that, by being what they were, they had earned the right to take; and the higher the officer, the greater the crookedness—if that word had any meaning.

With their guns and jeeps, these men were poachers of ivory and thieves of gold. Ivory, gold—add slaves, and it would have been like being back in oldest Africa. And these men would have dealt in slaves, if there was still a market. It was to the traders in the town that the army turned when they wished to clear their gold or, more especially, the ivory they had poached. Officials
and governments right across the continent were engaged in this ivory trade which they themselves had declared illegal. It made smuggling easy; but I was nervous of getting involved, because a government that breaks its own laws can also easily break you. Your business associate today can be your jailer or worse tomorrow.

But Mahesh didn’t mind. Like a child, as it seemed to me, he accepted all the poisoned sweets that were offered him. But he wasn’t a child; he knew the sweets were poisoned.

He said, “Oh, they will let you down. But if they let you down, you pay up. That is all. In your costing you make allowances for that. You just pay. I don’t think you understand, Salim. And it isn’t an easy thing to understand. It isn’t that there’s no right and wrong here. There’s no right.”

Twice, miraculously interpreting a nonsense telephone call from him as an appeal for help, I had to take away things from his flat.

The first time, one afternoon, after some inconsequential talk from him about tennis and the shoes I had asked for, I drove to his flat and blew my horn. He didn’t come down. He opened a window of his sitting room and shouted down to me in the street, “I’m sending the boy down with the tennis shoes for you. Right, Salim!” And, still standing before the window, he turned and shouted in patois to someone inside. “ ’
Phonse! Aoutchikong pour
Mis’
Salim!”—aoutchikong,
from
caoutchouc,
the French word for rubber, being patois for canvas shoes. With many people looking on, the boy Ildephonse brought down something roughly wrapped in newspaper. I threw it on the back seat and drove off without hanging around. It turned out, when I examined it later, to be a bundle of foreign bank notes; and it went, as soon as it was dark, into the hole in the ground at the foot of my external staircase. To help Mahesh like this, though, was only to encourage him. The next time I had to bury some ivory. Burying ivory! What age were we living in? What did people want ivory for, apart from carving it—and not too well these days—into cigarette holders and figurines and junk like that?

Still, these deals made Mahesh money, and he acknowledged
my help and put me in the way of adding to my little store of gold. He had said that there was no right. It was hard for me to adapt to that; but he managed it beautifully. He was always cool and casual, never ruffled. I had to admire him for it. Though the casualness could lead him into situations that were quite ridiculous.

He said to me one day, with the mysterious, over-innocent manner he put on when he was about to tell about some deal: “You read the foreign papers, Salim. Are you keeping an eye on the copper market? What’s it like?” Well, copper was high. We all knew that; copper was at the bottom of our little boom. He said, “It’s that war the Americans are fighting. I hear they’ve used up more copper in the last two years than the world has used in the last two centuries.” This was boom talk, salesmen’s chat from the van der Weyden. Mahesh, just across the road, picked up a fair amount of that chat; without it, he might have had less idea than he had of what was happening in the world.

From copper he turned to the other metals, and we talked for a while, quite ignorantly, about the prospects for tin and lead. Then he said, “Uranium—what about that? What are they quoting that at now?”

I said, “I don’t think they quote that.”

He gave me his innocent look. “But it must be pretty high? A chap here wants to sell a piece.”

“Do they sell uranium in pieces? What does it look like?”

“I haven’t seen it. But the chap wants to sell it for a million dollars.”

That was what we were like. One day grubbing for food, opening rusty tins, cooking on charcoal braziers and over holes in the ground; and now talking of a million dollars as though we had talked of millions all our lives.

Mahesh said, “I told the general it could be sold only to a foreign power, and he told me to go ahead. You know old Mancini. He is consul for quite a few countries here—that’s a nice line of business, I always think. I went to see him. I told him straight out, but he wasn’t interested. In fact, Mancini went crazy. He ran to the door and closed it and stood with his back
against it and told me to get out. His face was red, red. Everybody’s frightened of the Big Man in the capital. What do you think I should tell the general, Salim? He’s frightened too. He told me he stole it from some top-security place. I wouldn’t like to make an enemy of the general. I wouldn’t like him to think I hadn’t tried. What do you think I should tell him? Seriously, seriously.”