Sir Vidia's Shadow (15 page)

“The jungle is moving in.”

We left Kigali in the heat and traveled back the way we had come, on the winding rutted road, to the crossroads at Ruhengeri. Again the road was almost impassable because of all the pedestrians.

“This road is black with people,” Vidia said.

At the same café, Vidia sat under a beer sign and ordered another cheese sandwich. I thought, Vegetarians eat an awful lot of cheese. I ate an enamel plate of stringy chicken and rice. We were watched by kneeling Hutus as we ate. When we left, we took the road that led west, to the border town of Kisenyi, on Lake Kivu. The place was famous for its smugglers' dens. Like most of the Congo's border towns, it was said to have an air of intrigue because it was also the haunt of white mercenaries, who had names like Blackjack and Mad Mike and Captain Bob. There was often trouble in the Congo's large eastern province of Kivu and in the southeastern province of Shaba. When fighting broke out, refugees fled across the border. From time to time, angry expatriates or white mercenaries would take over a Congolese town, causing a panic flight of people into Rwanda.

The people on this road could well have been refugees, for there had been fighting near Goma in the past month. But after a while there were no people at all. The empty road cut through yellow woods that gave way to greener, denser forest, and the car labored on stony inclines that were the foothills of more assertive volcanoes. On one of the bends of this road stood a man in a white shirt and dark pants, holding a basket. He waved as we approached him.

“Don't pick him up,” Vidia said.

But I had already begun to slow the car.

“Why are you stopping?”

“Maybe he has a problem.”

The man leaned at the window. “
Pouvez-vous m'emmenez à Kavuma? J'ai raté le bus
,” he asked. Can you take me to Kavuma? I missed the bus.

“Get in,” I said, in English and then in Swahili.

Sliding into the back seat, the man apologized for not speaking English.

Vidia said, “
Mon français n'est pas particulièrement bon, mais bien sur c'est comme ça. J'ai peur que vous ne soyez contraint à supporter cet accent brisé
.” My French is not particularly good, but of course that is the way it is. I am afraid you will have to endure this corrosive accent.

“
Vous parlez beaucoup mieux que moi
,” the African said. You speak much better than I do.

Vidia protested this, even a bit crossly, and then he fell silent, and so did the African. Vidia was angry. He had not wanted me to pick up the hitchhiker. He believed that Africans often took advantage of expatriates.

Ten miles down the road, the African said, “
Mon village est près d'ici
.” My village is near here. Getting out, he once again complimented Vidia on his French, and he vanished into the trees.

Before Vidia could say anything, I said, “I spent two years in Africa without a car. I hitchhiked everywhere. People picked me up. That's why I picked him up.”

Vidia said, “Let the idlers walk.”

He sniffed and made a sour face, twisting his lips. The man's pungent earthen odor lingered in the car. I said nothing for a few miles.

“This is the bush. People depend on each other.” I could see that he was not impressed. “Anyway, it's my car.”

What was his problem? Years later Vidia said to an interviewer, “I do not have the tenderness more secure people can have towards bush people,” and he admitted that he felt threatened by them. But who were “bush people"? Anyone—African, Indian,
muzungu—
seeing the dusky distinguished author V.S. Naipaul standing beside any road in East Africa would have grunted, “
Dukawallah
.” Shopkeeper.

We got to Kisenyi in the late afternoon, having had to go very slowly on the hilly road. Kisenyi was a lakeside town of villas and boarding houses and several hotels. We chose one at random, the Miramar, which was run by an elderly Belgian woman. She had untidy hair and wore a stained apron, but she seemed a kindly soul. You knew what such people were like from the way they talked to their African servants. She spoke to her staff in a polite and patient way that was clearly masking her exasperation.

Belgians—just one family, but a large one—filled the dining room, and, being related, they were uninhibited: they shouted, they worked their elbows, they reached across the table for more food. We ate at the same table, family style. Vidia winced and seemed to lose his appetite as he watched the display of boisterous manners, the chewing, the squawking women, the shouting, growling men.

The Miramar was more a boarding house than a hotel, with an intimacy, a disorderly domesticity, the shared facilities meaning intrusions on privacy—the bathmat was wet most of the time, bedroom doors were usually left ajar. Vidia, intensely private, hating proximity and confidences, disliked the place from the first and found the dining table, this common board, unbearable for its quarreling, gnawing Belgians. He hated their appetites. He said the Miramar smelled. He loathed the Belgians for their being big, pale, overweight, loud, ravenous, unapologetic. “Potato eaters,” he called them.

By contrast, the Africans here were tall, dark, skinny, whispering, and whipped-looking. I mentioned to Vidia that I thought they were Watutsi.

“Toot-toot-Tutsi, goodbye,” he said. “But you wonder how they stand these Belgians.”

He had hardly touched his food. He had eaten the fish. He disliked salad. “What kind of a vegetarian hates salad?” the Major had muttered to me. The Belgian food was heavy and meaty.

“I think we've done this,” Vidia said.

We left the dining room early, before dessert was served.

“I don't think I could stand watching these Belgians having their pudding.”

It was his first experience of the true bush settler in Africa. I had seen such people in Malawi and Zambia and Kenya, but these Belgians were the apotheosis of the type. You knew their days were numbered. They were farmers and mechanics and operators of heavy equipment—tractors and road graders. They were clever at fixing cars. They mended machines with the simplest tools. They drove the largest trucks. They had maintained the colony but, newly independent, the black republic would find them too expensive and ornery and would send them away. Without these simple capable folk keeping it maintained, the country would begin to fall apart. Although I always doubted it, I often heard that there was idealism in colonizing; but really, whenever the word “colony” was mentioned, especially in Africa, I thought of these simple-minded mechanics. And I suspected that when Africans talked about whites, it was the mechanics and their attitudes they were usually denouncing.

“Let's get out of here.”

We went for a walk in the darkness, keeping to a path near the lakeshore. At the far end of the road, the Congolese town of Goma was visible. Goma was better lighted than Kisenyi.

“This deteriorating road. These crummy houses,” Vidia said.

I told him my thoughts about colonials as mechanics.

“My narrator mentions how a society needs to be maintained,” he said.

“Your novel,” I said, “is it based on a sort of political memoir?”

“Not exactly. I had to find a form for it. It was terribly difficult.”

We had walked through the center of town, past a bandstand, an abandoned fun fair, and some banners and lights strung across the main street. We came to a part of the road that was severely potholed and with villas that were shuttered and rundown.

“I suffered over it,” he said. “I wasn't sure how to tell the story. One day it came to me, the structure. I was so pleased. I called Patsy at her school. I said, ‘I've got it.'”

It was easy to imagine Vidia doing this, but I could not see myself on the phone, calling my wife and telling her about my unwritten book. Anyway, I had a book, but where was my wife? The whole business seemed enviable, someone caring that much about my writing. I had been working in the dark, just groping, until I had met Vidia.

“When I started out, I found it so hard to write I got sick,” he said. “I couldn't do it. I couldn't perform the physical labor of it. It exhausted me.”

I knew better than to tell him that I did not find the process of writing difficult. I sat, I wrote, the words came. I did not suffer. But he distrusted writing that was so fluent. “When it comes easily, throw it away. It can't be any good,” he said. There had to be an element of struggle in all writing, which reflected a struggle in life. It was also why he hated hitchhikers.

Writing was a relief to me. Everything else was a struggle. I knew that I was nowhere—just a teacher living alone in the middle of Africa. It had been my luck to meet Vidia, but now he spoke all the time about leaving. He made it sound as though he were going to the center of things, back to his house, his friends, parties, his publisher, his wife, his life. I did not envy him his fame, or the glamour, but I admired the life he had made for himself.

“This is already starting to go back to bush,” he said. “Look, the jungle.”

As in Kigali, the sidewalks were erupting. The glass-spiked walls around the lakeside villas were cracking. Some walls had been vandalized, others had been painted with slogans or had political posters stuck to them. It was tropical Belgium, suburban Brussels gone jungly, penetrated by rubber trees and fungoid growths. Colonial decrepitude depressed Vidia, but it fascinated me—the crumbling houses, the chipped cornices, the remnants of the dead past, the Africans squatting against the nigh walls that were scorched and blackened by their cooking fires.

I told him this.

“Horror interest,” he said.

We walked on.

“I am going to see André when I go back,” he said.

André Deutsch was his publisher. He was still thinking about his novel, thoughts I had provoked with my questions about writing.

“I am going to say, André, I want a thousand pounds for this book.'”

It seemed a great deal of money to me, yet it was less than I earned in a year on my Uganda government contract.

“I think he'll understand,” Vidia said. “I think he'll give it to me.”

We were still walking in the empty rubbly road, the fallen leaves and blown papers unswept, in the middle of Kisenyi, among the darkened villas, hearing the lap of lake water where the night was blackest.

The dogs did not warn us—perhaps they were watching, waiting for us to walk closer. At first there was no barking at all. But it was soon clear that we had gone too far into the residential part of the town, for we were at once beset by a pack of dogs, panting in fear and effort, and only when we were surrounded did they begin to bark. They barked horribly, all their teeth bared, their neck fur bristling. They made odd choking noises. They slavered near my ankles and sounded crazy, as though they were going to kill us and eat us—that hunger and cruelty and strength were in their barking.

“They've been trained to attack Africans,” Vidia said.

He was calmer than I expected. I retained a childhood fear of aggressive dogs. “They know you're afraid,” people had said. “That's why they're barking.” That was crap. Most dogs were wolfish and reactive and pack-minded, which is why they barked. Their owners were the alpha males, encouraging this behavior in the dog, their weapon, their slave.

“
Kwenda! Kwenda!
” I yelled—Go away!—believing they might know Swahili. This only maddened them more.

Vidia was careful not to turn his back to the dogs, which were perhaps both guard dogs and strays. He lunged at them and made as if to punt them.

“What they need is a kick.”

The dogs scattered, moving back but still barking fiercely.

“If they felt this
veldshoen
on their hide, they'd know it.”

He was wearing his heavy shoes and swinging his walking stick. His bush hat was crammed on his head. Seeing the dogs react, he went after them again, driving them further back. I was impressed by this small man in the dark street of a remote African town, taking on the dogs.

They did not stop barking. In fact they barked louder, protesting, after Vidia intimidated them. But now we were able to move along. I was grateful to him. He had not been fazed in this showdown. He was frowning.

“Another one-whore town,” he said.

The Belgian family were still quarreling when we got back to the Miramar. They were in the lounge, drinking coffee and shouting amid the glaring table lamps. There were armchairs and doilies and footstools and little porcelain shepherdesses on shelves and framed lithographs of Liège and Ghent and Antwerp. An African servant stood in the hallway, doing sentry duty, holding a tin tray, waiting to be summoned.

“It's all so crummy.”

Yes, I saw that, but I also felt it was a glimpse of the colonial past, a curious antique that was now worn out and broken. I did not really think that the jungle was moving in, as Vidia had said. I felt that this Belgian culture would be displaced by Rwandan culture and that we had no way of anticipating what it might be.

“Is your business always this bad?” Vidia asked the Belgian proprietress of the Miramar, in his challenging way.

The big woman shrugged and matched his directness, saying, “Business is good whenever there is a revolution in the Congo.”

The next day we drove across to Goma and had lunch at a café on Lake Kivu. Cheese sandwiches again: Africa was an unrewarding place for a vegetarian.

“I will meet you at ‘the coffee,' they say in France and Italy and Spain. Even quite educated people make that simple mistake.” He saw that I was only half listening. He said, “You are thinking about your writing.”

“No,” I said. But I had been—the simple problem. How did I get from where I was to where he was?

“Are you sure you want to be a writer?” he asked. “It's a terrible profession. Yes, you have your freedom. But it can kill you if you're not up to it.”