A Bend in the River (38 page)

I had my ticket and it was in order, but my name wasn’t on the passenger list. Some francs had to pass first. And then, just as I was going out to the plane, a security man in plain clothes who was eating something asked for my papers and decided that they had to be examined more closely. He looked very offended and sent me to wait in an empty little inner room. This was standard procedure. The offended, sideways look, the little private room—this was how middle-rank officials let you know they were going to take some money off you.

But this fellow didn’t get anything, because he played the fool and kept me waiting in that little room so long, without coming to collect, that he delayed the flight and was bawled out by an airline man, who, clearly knowing where I was to be found, burst into the little room, shouted to me to get out at once, and sent me running across the asphalt to the plane, last man in, but lucky.

In the front row was one of the airline’s European pilots, a small, middle-aged family man; beside him was a little African boy, but it was hard to tell whether there was any connection. Some rows behind there was a group of six or eight Africans, men in their thirties, with old jackets and shirts buttoned right up, who were talking loudly. They were drinking whisky, straight from the bottle—and it was nine in the morning. Whisky was expensive here, and these men wanted everybody to know that they were drinking whisky. The bottle was passed to strangers; it
was even passed to me. These men were not like the men of my region. They were bigger, with different complexions and features. I couldn’t understand their faces; I saw only their arrogance and drunkenness. Their talk was boastful; they wanted the rest of us to know that they were men who owned plantations. They were like people who had just come into money, and the whole thing struck me as odd.

It was a simple flight, two hours, with a halfway stop. And it seemed to me, with my experience of intercontinental travel, that we had just begun to cruise above the white clouds when we began coming down for that stop. We saw then that we had been following the river—brown, rippled and wrinkled and streaked from this height, with many channels between long, thin islands of green. The airplane shadow moved over the forest top. That top became less even and tight as the airplane shadow grew bigger; the forest we came down to was quite ragged.

After we landed we were told to leave the airplane. We went to the small building at the edge of the airfield, and while we were there we saw the airplane turn, taxi, and fly away. It was needed for some Presidential service; it would come back when it had done that service. We had to wait. It was only about ten. Until about noon, while the heat built up, we were restless. Then we settled down—all of us, even the whisky drinkers—to wait.

We were in the middle of bush. Bush surrounded the cleared area of the airfield. Far away, a special density about the trees marked the course of the river. The airplane had shown how complex it was, how easy it would be to get lost, to waste hours paddling up channels that took you away from the main river. Not many miles from the river, people would be living in villages more or less as they had lived for centuries. Less than forty-eight hours before, I had been in the overtrampled Gloucester Road, where the world met. Now, for hours, I had been staring at bush. How many miles separated me from the capital, from my own town? How long would it take to do the distance by land or by water? How many weeks, how many months, and against what dangers?

It clouded over. The clouds grew dark and the bush grew
dark. The sky began to jump with lightning and thunder; and then the rain and the wind came, driving us in from the verandah of the little building. It rained and stormed. The bush vanished in the rain. It was rain like this that fed these forests, that caused the grass and bright green weeds around the airfield building to grow so high. The rain slackened, the clouds lifted a little. The bush revealed itself again, one line of trees behind another, the nearer trees darker, the further trees fading line by line into the grey colour of the sky.

Empty beer bottles covered the metal tables. Not many people were moving about; nearly everyone had found the place where he was going to stay. No one was talking much. The middle-aged Belgian woman whom we had found in the building waiting to join our flight was still absorbed in the French paperback of
Peyton Place.
You could see that she had shut the bush and weather out and was living somewhere else.

The sun came out and glittered on the tall, wet grass. The asphalt steamed, and for a while I watched that. Later in the afternoon one half of the sky went black, while the other half stayed light. The storm that began with vivid lightning in the black half then spread to us and it became dark and chill and very damp. The forest had become a place of gloom. There was no excitement in this second storm.

One of the African passengers, an elderly man, appeared with a grey felt hat and a blue bathrobe of towelling material over his suit. No one paid him too much attention. I just noted his oddity, and thought: He’s using a foreign thing in his own way. And something like that went through my head when a barefooted man turned up wearing a fireman’s helmet with the transparent plastic visor pulled down. He was an old man with a shrunken face; his brown shorts and grey check shirt were ragged and soaked through. I thought: He’s found a ready-made dancing mask. He went from table to table, checking the beer bottles. When he decided that a bottle was worth emptying he raised the visor of his mask and drank.

It stopped raining, but it remained dark, the darkness of late afternoon. The airplane, at first only a brown smoke trail in the
sky, appeared. When we went out to the wet field to board it I saw the man with the fireman’s helmet—and a companion, also helmeted—standing unsteadily beside the gangway. He was, after all, a fireman.

As we rose we saw the river, catching the last of the light. It was gold-red, then red. We followed it for many miles and minutes, until it became a mere sheen, a smoothness, something extra-black between the black forests. Then it was all black. Through this blackness we flew to our destination. The journey, which had seemed so simple in the morning, had acquired another quality. Distance and time had been restored to it. I felt I had been travelling for days, and when we began to go down again, I knew that I had travelled far, and I wondered how I had had the courage to live for so long in a place so far away.

And then, suddenly, it was easy. A familiar building; officials I knew and could palaver with; people whose faces I understood; one of our old disinfected taxis; the well-known lumpy road to the town, at first through bush which had distinguishing features, then past the squatters’ settlements. After the strangeness of the day, it was like organized life again.

We passed a burnt-out building, a new ruin. It had been a primary school, never much of a place, more like a low shed, and I might have missed it in the dark if the driver hadn’t pointed it out to me; it excited him. The insurrection, the Liberation Army—that was still going on. It didn’t lessen my relief at being in the town, seeing the nighttime pavement groups, and finding myself, so quickly after arrival, something of the forest gloom still on me, in my own street—all there, and as real and as ordinary as ever.

It was a shock, a puncturing, to find Metty cold. I had made such a journey. I wanted him to know; from him I had been expecting the warmest welcome. He must have heard the slam of the taxi door and my palaver with the driver. But Metty didn’t come down. And all that he said when I went up the external staircase, and found him standing in the doorway of his room, was: “I didn’t expect to see you back,
patron.”
The whole journey seemed to turn sour then.

Everything was in order in the flat. But about the sitting room and especially the bedroom there was something—perhaps an extra order, an absence of staleness—that made me feel that Metty had been spreading himself in the flat in my absence. The telegram that I had sent him from London must have caused him to retreat. Did he resent that? Metty? But he had grown up in our family; he knew no other life. He had always been with the family or with me. He had never been on his own, except on his journey up from the coast, and now.

He brought me coffee in the morning.

He said, “I suppose you know why you come back,
patron.”

“You said this last night.”

“Because you have nothing to come back to. You don’t know? Nobody told you in London? You don’t read the papers? You don’t have anything. They take away your shop. They give it to Citizen Théotime. The President made a speech a fortnight back. He said he was radicalizing and taking away everything from everybody. All foreigners. The next day they put a padlock on the door. And a few other doors as well. You didn’t read that in London? You don’t have anything, I don’t have anything. I don’t know why you come back. I don’t think it was for my sake.”

Metty was in a bad way. He had been alone. He must have been beside himself waiting for me to come back. He was trying to provoke some angry response from me. He was trying to get me to make some protective gesture. But I was as lost as he was.

Radicalization: two days before, in the capital, I had seen the word in a newspaper headline, but I hadn’t paid attention. I had thought of it as just another word; we had so many. Now I understood that radicalization was the big new event.

And it was as Metty had said. The President had sprung another of his surprises, and this surprise concerned us. I—and others like me—had been nationalized. Our businesses had ceased to be ours, by decree, and were being given out by the President to new owners. These new owners were called “state trustees.” Citizen Théotime had been made the state trustee of my business; and Metty said that for the last week the man had actually been spending his days in the shop.

“
What does he do?”

“Do? He’s waiting for you. He’ll make you the manager. That is what you have come back for,
patron.
But you will see. Don’t hurry yourself. Théo doesn’t come to work too early.”

When I went to the shop I saw that the stock, which had gone down in six weeks, was displayed in the old way. Théo hadn’t touched that. But my desk had been moved from its place next to the pillar in the front of the shop to the storeroom at the back. Metty said that had happened on the first day. Citizen Théo had decided that the storeroom was to be his office; he liked the privacy.

In the top drawer of the desk (where I used to keep Yvette’s photographs, which had once transformed the view of the market square for me) there were many tattered French-African photo-novels and comic books: Africans shown living very modern lives, and in the comic books they were drawn almost like Europeans—in the last two or three years there had been a lot of this French-produced rubbish around. My own things—magazines, and shop documents I had thought Metty would need—were in the two bottom drawers. They had been handled with care; Théo had had that grace. Nationalization: it had been a word. It was shocking to face it in this concrete way.

I waited for Théo.

And when the man came I could see that he was embarrassed and his first impulse, when he saw me through the glass, was to walk past the door. I had known him years before as a mechanic; he used to look after the vehicles in the health department. Then, because he had certain tribal connections, he had risen politically, but not very high. He would have had trouble signing his name. He was about forty, undistinguished in appearance, with a broad, dark-brown face beaten up and spongy with drink. He was drunk now. But only on beer; he hadn’t yet moved on to whisky. Nor had he moved on to the regulation official dress of short-sleeved jacket and cravat. He stuck to trousers and shirt. He was, really, a modest man.

I was standing where my desk used to be. And it occurred to me, noticing how sweated and grimy Théo’s white shirt was, that it was like the time when the schoolboys, treating me like prey,
used to come to the shop to try to get money out of me in simple ways. Théo was sweating through the pores on his nose. I don’t believe he had washed his face that morning. He looked like a man who had added fresh drink, and nothing else, to a bad hangover.

He said, “Mis’ Salim. Salim. Citizen. You mustn’t take this personally. It has not come about through any wish of mine. You know that I have the highest regard for you. But you know what the situation was like. The revolution had become”—he fumbled for the word—
“un pé pourrie.
A little rotten. Our young people were becoming impatient. It was necessary”—trying to find the right word, he looked confused, clenched his fist and made a clumsy cuffing gesture—“it was necessary to radicalize. We had absolutely to radicalize. We were expecting too much of the President. No one was willing to take responsibility. Now responsibility has been forced on the people. But you will suffer in no way. Adequate compensation will be paid. You will prepare your own inventory. And you will continue as manager. The business will run as before. The President insists on that. No one is to suffer. Your salary will be fair. As soon as the commissioner arrives, the papers will come through.”

After his hesitant start, he had spoken formally, as though he had prepared his words. At the end he became embarrassed again. He was waiting for me to say something. But then he changed his mind and went to the storeroom, his office. And I left, to go and look for Mahesh at Bigburger.

There it was business as usual. Mahesh, a little plumper, was pulling coffees, and Ildephonse was jumping about and serving late breakfasts. I was surprised.

Mahesh said, “But this has been an African company for years. It can’t be radicalized any more. I just manage Bigburger for ’Phonse and a few others. They formed this African company and they gave me a little part in it, as manager, and then they bought a lease from me. That was during the boom. They owe the bank a lot. You wouldn’t believe it when you look at ’Phonse. But it’s true. That happened in a lot of places after Noimon sold out to the government. That gave us an idea which way the wind was blowing, and some of us decided to compensate
ourselves in advance. It was easy enough then. The banks were flush with money.”