A Bend in the River (25 page)

Rustic manners, forest manners, in a setting not of the forest. But that was how, in our ancestral lands, we all began—the prayer mat on the sand, then the marble floor of a mosque; the rituals and taboos of nomads, which, transferred to the palace of a sultan or a maharaja, become the traditions of an aristocracy.

Still, I would have found the journey hard, especially if, like Ferdinand, I had to share a cabin with someone else, someone in the crowd outside who had not yet been let in. But the steamer was not meant for me or—in spite of the colonial emblems
embroidered in red on the frayed, much laundered sheets and pillowcase on Ferdinand’s bunk—for the people who had in the old days required certificates of civic merit, with good reason. The steamer was now meant for the people who used it, and to them it was very grand. The people on Ferdinand’s deck knew they were not passengers on the barge.

From the rear end of the deck, looking past the lifeboats, we could see people going aboard the barge with their crates and bundles. Above the roof of the customs sheds the town showed mainly as trees or bush—the town which, when you were in it, was full of streets and open spaces and sun and buildings. Few buildings showed through the trees and none rose above them. And from the height of the first-class deck you could see—from the quality of the vegetation, the change from imported ornamental trees to undifferentiated bush—how quickly the town ended, what a narrow strip of the riverbank it occupied. If you looked the other way, across the muddy river to the low line of bush and the emptiness of the other bank, you could pretend that the town didn’t exist. And then the barge on this bank was like a miracle, and the cabins of the first-class deck an impossible luxury.

At either end of that deck was something even more impressive—a
cabine de luxe.
That was what the old, paint-spattered metal plates above the doors said. What did these two cabins contain? Ferdinand said, “Shall we have a look?” We went into the one at the back. It was dark and very hot; the windows were sealed and heavily curtained. A baking bathroom; two armchairs, rather beaten up, and one with an arm missing, but still armchairs; a table with two shaky chairs; sconces with bulbs missing; torn curtains screening off the bunks from the rest of the cabin; and an air conditioner. Who, in that crowd outside, had such a ridiculous idea of his needs? Who required such privacy, such cramping comforts?

From the forward end of the deck came the sound of a disturbance. A man was complaining loudly, and he was complaining in English.

Ferdinand said, “I think I hear your friend.”

It was Indar. He was carrying an unusual load, and he was
sweating and full of anger. With his forearms held out at the horizontal—like the fork of a fork-lift truck—he was supporting a shallow but very wide cardboard box, open at the top, on which he could visibly get no grip. The box was heavy. It was full of groceries and big bottles, ten or twelve bottles; and after the long walk from the dock gates and up all the steamer steps, Indar seemed to be at the end of all physical resource and on the verge of tears.

With a backward lean he staggered into the
cabine de luxe,
and I saw him drop—almost throw—the cardboard box on the bunk. And then he began to do a little dance of physical agony, stamping about the cabin and flexing his arms violently from the elbows down, as though to shake out the ache from all kinds of yelping muscles.

He was overdoing the display, but he had an audience. Not me, whom he had seen but was yet in no mood to acknowledge. Yvette was behind him. She was carrying his briefcase. He shouted at her, with the security that the English language gave him here, “The suitcase—is the bugger bringing the suitcase?” She looked sweated and strained herself, but she said soothingly, “Yes, yes.” And a man in a flowered shirt whom I had taken to be a passenger appeared with the suitcase.

I had seen Indar and Yvette together many times, but never in such a domestic relationship. For a dislocating moment the thought came to me that they were going away together. But then Yvette, straightening up, and remembering to smile, said to me, “Are you seeing someone off too?” And I understood that my anxiety was foolish.

Indar was now squeezing his biceps. Whatever he had planned for this moment with Yvette had been destroyed by the pain of the cardboard box.

He said, “They had no carrier bags. They had no bloody carrier bags.”

I said, “I thought you had taken the plane.”

“We waited for hours at the airport yesterday. It was always coming and coming. Then at midnight they gave us a beer and told us that the plane had been taken out of service. Just like that. Not delayed. Taken away. The Big Man wanted it. And no
one knows when he is going to send it back. And then buying this steamer ticket—have you ever done that? There are all kinds of rules about when they can sell and when they can’t sell. The man is hardly ever there. The damned door is always locked. And every five yards somebody wants to see your papers. Ferdinand, explain this to me. When the man was totting up the fare, all the de luxe supplements, he worked the sum out twenty times on the adding machine. The same sum, twenty times. Why? Did he think the machine was going to change its mind? That took half an hour. And then, thank God, Yvette reminded me about the food. And the water. So we had to go shopping. Six bottles of Vichy water for the five days. It was all they had—I’ve come to Africa to drink Vichy water. One dollar and fifty cents a bottle, U.S. Six bottles of red wine, the acid Portuguese stuff you get here. If I had known I would have to carry it all in that box, I would have done without it.”

He had also bought five tins of sardines, one for each day of the journey, I suppose; two tins of evaporated milk; a tin of Nescafe, a Dutch cheese, some biscuits and a quantity of Belgian honey cake.

He said, “The honey cake was Yvette’s idea. She says it’s full of nourishment.”

She said, “It keeps in the heat.”

I said, “There was a man at the lycée who used to live on honey cake.”

Ferdinand said, “That’s why we smoke nearly everything. Once you don’t break the crust it lasts a long time.”

“But the food situation in this place is appalling,” Indar said. “Everything in the shops is imported and expensive. And in the market, apart from the grubs and things that people pick up, all you have are two sticks of this and two ears of that. And people are coming in all the time. How do they make out? You have all this bush, all this rain. And yet there could be a famine in this town.”

The cabin was more crowded than it had been. A squat barefooted man had come in to introduce himself as the steward of the
cabine de luxe,
and after him the purser had come in, with a
towel over one shoulder and a folded tablecloth in his hand. The purser shooed away the steward, spread the tablecloth on the table—lovely old material, but mercilessly laundered. Then he addressed Yvette.

“I see that the gentleman has brought his own food and water. But there is no need, madame. We follow the old rules still. Our water is purified. I myself have worked on ocean liners and been to countries all over the world. Now I am old and work on this African steamer. But I am accustomed to white people and know their ways well. The gentleman has nothing to fear, madame. He will be looked after well. I will see that the gentleman’s food is prepared separately, and I will serve him with my own hands in his cabin.”

He was a thin, elderly man of mixed race; his mother or father might have been a mulatto. He had conscientiously used the forbidden words—
monsieur, madame;
he had spread a tablecloth. And he stood waiting to be rewarded. Indar gave him two hundred francs.

Ferdinand said, “You’ve given him too much. He called you
monsieur
and
madame,
and you tipped him. As far as he’s concerned, his account has been settled. Now he will do nothing for you.”

And Ferdinand seemed to be right. When we went down one deck to the bar, the purser was there, leaning against the counter, drinking beer. He ignored all four of us; and he did nothing for us when we asked for beer and the barman said, “Termine.” If the purser hadn’t been drinking, and if another man with three well-dressed women hadn’t been drinking at one of the tables, it would have looked convincing. The bar—with a framed photograph of the President in chief’s clothes, holding up the carved stick with the fetish—was stripped; the brown shelves were bare.

I said to the barman,
“Citoyen.”
Ferdinand said,
“Citoyen.”
We got a palaver going, and beer was brought from the back room.

Indar said, “You will have to be my guide, Ferdinand. You will palaver for me.”

It was past noon, and very hot. The bar was full of reflected river light, with dancing veins of gold. The beer, weak as it was, lulled us. Indar forgot his aches and pains; a discussion he started with Ferdinand about the farm at the Domain that the Chinese or Taiwanese had abandoned trailed away. My own nervousness was soothed; my mood was buoyant: I would leave the steamer with Yvette.

The light was the light of the very early afternoon—everything stoked up, the blaze got truly going, but with a hint of the blaze about to consume itself. The river glittered, muddy water turned to white and gold. It was busy with dugouts with outboard motors, as always on steamer days. The dugouts carried the extravagant names of their “establishments” painted in large letters down their sides. Sometimes, when a dugout crossed a patch of glitter, the occupants were all silhouetted against the glitter; they appeared then to be sitting very low, to be shoulders and round heads alone, so that for a while they were like comic figures in a cartoon strip, engaged on some quite ridiculous journey.

A man teetered into the bar on platform shoes with soles about two inches thick. He must have been from the capital; that style in shoes hadn’t reached us as yet. He was also an official, come to check our tickets and passes. Not long after he had teetered out, panic appeared to seize the purser and the barman and some of the men drinking at tables. It was this panic that finally distinguished crew and officials, none of them in uniform, from the other people who had come in and palavered for their beer; and it meant only that the steamer was about to leave.

Indar put his hand on Yvette’s thigh. When she turned to him he said gently, “I’ll see what I can find out about Raymond’s book. But you know those people in the capital. If they don’t reply to your letters, it’s because they don’t want to reply. They’re not going to say yes or no. They’re going to say nothing. But I’ll see.”

Their embrace, just before we got off, was no more than formal. Ferdinand was cool. No handshake, no words of farewell. He simply said, “Salim.” And to Yvette he gave a nod rather than a bow.

We stood on the dock and watched. After some maneuvering the steamer was clear of the dock wall. Then the barge was attached; and steamer and barge did a slow, wide turn in the river, the barge revealing at its stern tiers, slices, of a caged backyard life, a mixture of kitchens and animal pens.

A departure can feel like a desertion, a judgment on the place and people left behind. That was what I had been accustoming myself to since the previous day, when I thought I had said goodbye to Indar. For all my concern for him, I had thought of him—as I had thought of Ferdinand—as the lucky man, the man moving on to richer experience, leaving me to my little life in a place once again of no account.

But I didn’t think so now, standing with Yvette on the exposed dock, after the accident and luck of that second goodbye, watching the steamer and barge straighten in the brown river, against the emptiness of the far bank, which was pale in the heat and like part of the white sky. The place where it was all going on after all was where we were, in the town on the riverbank. Indar was the man who had been sent away. The hard journey was his.

It was past two, a time when, on sunny days, it hurt tobe in the open. We had neither of us had anything to eat—we had only had that bloating beer—and Yvette didn’t reject the idea of a snack in a cool place.

The asphalt surfacing of the dock area was soft underfoot. Hard black shadows had pulled back to the very edges of buildings, buildings which here on the dock were of the colonial time and substantial—ochre-washed stone walls, green shutters, tall, iron-barred windows, green-painted corrugated-iron roofs. A scratched blackboard outside the closed steamer office still gave the time of the steamer sailing. But the officials had gone; the crowd outside the dock gates had gone. The market around the granite wall of the ruined monument was being dismantled. The feathery leaves of the flamboyant trees made no shade; the
sun struck right through. The ground, hummocked around tufts of grass, scuffed to dust elsewhere, was littered with rubbish and animal droppings and patches of wet which, coated and bound on the underside with fine dust, seemed to be curling back on themselves, peeling off the ground.

We didn’t go to Mahesh’s Bigburger bar. I wanted to avoid the complications—Shoba hadn’t approved of Yvette’s connection with Indar. We went instead to the Tivoli. It wasn’t far away, and I hoped that Mahesh’s boy Ildephonse wouldn’t report. But that was unlikely; it was the time of day when Ildephonse was normally vacant.