A Bend in the River Page 6

  Always, sailing up from the south, from beyond the bend in the river, were clumps of water hyacinths, dark floating islands on the dark river, bobbing over the rapids. It was as if rain and river were tearing away bush from the heart of the continent and floating it down to the ocean, incalculable miles away. But the water hyacinth was the fruit of the river alone. The tall lilaccoloured flower had appeared only a few years before, and in the local language there was no word for it. The people still called it “the new thing” or “the new thing in the river,” and to them it was another enemy. Its rubbery vines and leaves formed thick tangles of vegetation that adhered to the river banks and clogged up waterways. It grew fast, faster than men could destroy it with the tools they had. The channels to the villages had to be constantly cleared. Night and day the water hyacinth floated up from the south, seeding itself as it travelled.

  I had decided to let Ferdinand be. But in the new term I noticed a change in his attitude to me. He was less distant with me, and when he came to the shop he wasn’t so anxious to leave me for Metty. I thought that his mother might have given him a talking to. I thought also that though he had been cool when he had gone to his mother’s village for the holidays, he had probably been shocked by his time there—how, I wondered, had he spent the days?—and no longer took the town, and the life of the town, for granted.

  The truth was simpler. Ferdinand had begun to grow up, and he was finding himself a little bit at sea. He was of mixed tribal heritage, and in this part of the country he was a stranger. He had no group that was really his own, and he had no one to model himself on. He didn’t know what was expected of him. He wanted to find out, and he needed me to practise on.

  I could see him now trying on various characters, attempting different kinds of manners. His range was limited. For a few days after Zabeth came to town for her goods, he might be the son of his mother, the marchande. He would pretend to be my business associate, my equal, might make inquiries about sales and prices. Then he might become the young African on the way up, the lycée student, modern, go-ahead. In this character he liked to wear the blazer with the Semper Aliquid Novi motto; no doubt he felt it helped him carry off the mannerisms he had picked up from some of his European teachers. Copying one teacher, he might, in the flat, stand with crossed legs against the white studio wall and, fixed in that position, attempt to conduct a whole conversation. Or, copying another teacher, he might walk around the trestle table, lifting things, looking at them, and then dropping them, while he talked.

  He made an effort now to talk to me. Not in the way he talked to Metty; with me he attempted a special kind of serious conversation. Whereas before he had waited for me to ask questions, now it was he who put up little ideas, little debating points, as though he wanted to get a discussion going. It was part of the new lycée character he was working on, and he was practising, treating me almost as a language teacher. But I was interested. I began to get some idea of what was talked about at the lycée—and I wanted to know about that.

  He said to me one day, “Salim, what do you think of the future of Africa?”

  I didn’t say; I wanted to know what he thought. I wondered whether, in spite of his mixed ancestry and his travels, he really had an idea of Africa; or whether the idea of Africa had come to him, and his friends at school, from the atlas. Wasn’t Ferdinand still—like Metty, during his journey from the coast—the kind of man who, among strange tribes, would starve rather than eat their strange food? Did Ferdinand have a much larger idea of Africa than Zabeth, who moved with assurance from her village to the town only because she knew she was especially protected?

  Ferdinand could only tell me that the world outside Africa was going down and Africa was rising. When I asked in what way the world outside was going down, he couldn’t say. And when I pushed him past the stage where he could repeat bits of what he had heard at the lycée, I found that the ideas of the school discussion had in his mind become jumbled and simplified. Ideas of the past were confused with ideas of the present. In his lycée blazer, Ferdinand saw himself as evolved and important, as in the colonial days. At the same time he saw himself as a new man of Africa, and important for that reason. Out of this staggering idea of his own importance, he had reduced Africa to himself; and the future of Africa was nothing more than the job he might do later on.

  The conversations that Ferdinand, in this character, attempted with me had a serial quality, because he wasn’t always well briefed. He took a discussion up to a certain point and then dropped it without embarrassment, as though it had been a language exercise in which he would do better next time. Then, returning to old ways, he would look for Metty and leave me.

  Though I was learning more of what went on in the lycée (so quickly colonial-snobbish again), and what went on in the mind of Ferdinand, I didn’t feel I was getting closer to him. When I had considered him a mystery, distant and mocking behind his mask-like face, I had seen him as a solid person. Now I felt that his affectations were more than affectations, that his personality had become fluid. I began to feel that there was nothing there, and the thought of a lycée full of Ferdinands made me nervous.

  Yet there was the idea of his importance. It unsettled me—there wasn’t going to be security for anyone in the country—and it unsettled Metty. When you get away from the chiefs and the politicians there is a simple democracy about Africa: everyone is a villager. Metty was a shop assistant and a kind of servant; Ferdinand was a lycée boy with a future; yet the friendship between the two men was like the friendship between equals. That friendship continued. But Metty, as a servant in our family house, had seen playmates grow into masters; and he must have felt himself—with his new idea of his worth—being left behind again.

  I was in the flat one day when I heard them come in. Metty was explaining his connection with me and the shop, explaining his journey from the coast.

  Metty said: “My family used to know his family. They used to call me Billy. I was studying bookkeeping. I’m not staying here, you know. I am going to Canada. I’ve got my papers and everything. I’m just waiting for my medical.”

  Billy! Well, it was close to Ali. Canada—that was where one of my brothers-in-law had gone; in a letter I received shortly after Metty joined me I had heard about the anxiety of the family about that brother-in-law’s “medical.” That was no doubt where Metty had picked up the talk about Canada.

  I made a noise to let them know I was in the flat, and when they came into the sitting room I pretended I had heard nothing.

  Not long after this, on an afternoon of settled rain, Ferdinand came to the shop and abruptly, wet and dripping as he was, said, “Salim, you must send me away to America to study.”

  He spoke like a desperate man. The idea had burst inside him; and he clearly had felt that if he didn’t act right away, he might never act. He had come through the heavy rain and the flooded streets; his clothes were soaked. I was surprised by the abruptness and the desperation, and by the bigness of his request. To me, going abroad to study was something rare and expensive, something beyond the means of my own family.

  I said, “Why should I send you to America? Why should I spend money on you?”

  He had nothing to say. After the desperation and the trip through the rain, the whole thing might just have been another attempt at conversation.

  Was it only his simplicity? I felt my temper rising—the rain and the lightning and the unnatural darkness of the afternoon had something to do with that.

  I said, “Why do you think I have obligations to you? What have you done for me?”

  And that was true. His attitude, since he had begun to feel towards a character, was that I owed him something, simply because I seemed willing to help.

  He went blank. He stood still in the darkness of the shop and looked at me without resentment, as though he had expected me to behave in the way I was behaving, and had to see it through. For a while his eyes held mine. Then his gaze shifted, and I knew he was going to ch
ange the subject.

  He pulled the wet white shirt—with the lycée monogram embroidered on the pocket—away from his skin, and he said, “My shirt is wet.” When I didn’t reply, he pulled the shirt away in one or two other places and said, “I walked through the rain.”

  Still I didn’t reply. He let the shirt go and looked away to the flooded street. It was his way of recovering from a false start: his attempts at conversation could end with these short sentences, irritating observations about what he or I was doing. So now he looked out at the rain and spoke scattered sentences about what he saw. He was pleading to be released.

  I said, “Metty is in the storeroom. He will give you a towel. And ask him to make some tea.”

  That was not the end of the business, though. With Ferdinand now, things seldom ended neatly.

  Twice a week I had lunch with my friends Shoba and Mahesh in their flat. Their flat was gaudy and in some ways like themselves. They were a beautiful couple, certainly the most beautiful people in our town. They had no competition, yet they were always slightly overdressed. So, in their flat, to the true beauty of old Persian and Kashmiri carpets and old brassware they had added many flimsy, glittery things—crudely worked modern Moradabad brass, machine-turned wall plaques of Hindu gods, shiny three-pronged wall lights. There was also a heavy carving in glass of a naked woman. This was a touch of art, but it was also a reminder of the beauty of women, the beauty of Shoba—personal beauty being the obsession and theme of that couple, like money for rich people.

  At lunch one day Mahesh said, “What’s got into that boy of yours? He’s getting malin like the others.”

  “Metty?”

  “He came to see me the other day. He pretended he had known me a long time. He was showing off to the African boy he had with him. He said he was bringing me a customer. He said the African boy was Zabeth’s son and a good friend of yours.”

  “I don’t know about good friend. What did he want?”

  “Metty ran away just when I was beginning to get angry, and left the boy with me. The boy said he wanted a camera, but I don’t think he wanted anything at all. He just wanted to talk.”

  I said, “I hope he showed you his money.”

  “I didn’t have any cameras to show him. That was a bad business, Salim. Commission, commission all the way. You hardly get your money back in the end.”

  The cameras were one of Mahesh’s ideas that had gone wrong. Mahesh was like that, always looking for the good business idea, and full of little ideas he quickly gave up. He had thought that the tourist trade was about to start again, with our town being the base for the game parks in the east. But the tourist trade existed only in the posters printed in Europe for the government in the capital. The game parks had gone back to nature, in a way never meant. The roads and rest houses, always rudimentary, had gone; the tourists (foreigners who might be interested in cut-price photographic equipment) hadn’t come. Mahesh had had to send his cameras east, using the staging posts that were still maintained by people like ourselves for the transport (legal or otherwise) of goods in any direction.

  Mahesh said, “The boy said you were sending him to America or Canada to do his studies.”

  “What am I sending him to study?”

  “Business administration. So he can take over his mother’s business. Build it up.”

  “Build it up! Buying a gross of razor blades and selling them one by one to fishermen.”

  “I knew he was only trying to compromise you with your friends.”

  Simple magic: if you say something about a man to his friends, you might get the man to do what you say he is going to do.

  I said, “Ferdinand’s an African.”

  When I next saw Ferdinand I said, “My friend Mahesh has been telling me that you are going to America to study business administration. Have you told your mother?”

  He didn’t understand irony. This version of the story caught him unprepared, and he had nothing to say.

  I said, “Ferdinand, you mustn’t go around telling people things that aren’t true. What do you mean by business administration?”

  He said, “Bookkeeping, typing, shorthand. What you do.”

  “I don’t do shorthand. And that’s not business administration. That’s a secretarial course. You don’t have to go to America or Canada to do that. You can do that right here. I am sure there are places in the capital. And when the time comes you’ll find you want to do more than that.”

  He didn’t like what I said. His eyes began to go bright with humiliation and anger. But I didn’t stay for that. It was with Metty, and not me, that he had to settle accounts, if there were accounts to be settled.

  He had found me as I was leaving to play squash at the Hellenic Club. Canvas shoes, shorts, racket, towel around my neck—it was like old times on the coast. I left the sitting room and stood in the passage, to give him the chance to leave, so that I could lock up. But he stayed in the sitting room, doubtless waiting for Metty.

  I went out to the staircase landing. It was one of our days without electricity. The smoke from charcoal braziers and other open fires rose blue among the imported ornamental trees—cassia, breadfruit, frangipani, flamboyant—and gave a touch of the forest village to a residential area where, as I had heard, in the old days neither Africans nor Asians were permitted to live. I knew the trees from the coast. I suppose they had been imported there as well; but I associated them with the coast and home, another life. The same trees here looked artificial to me, like the town itself. They were familiar, but they reminded me where I was.

  I heard no more about Ferdinand’s studies abroad, and soon he even dropped the bright-young-lycée-man pose. He began trying out something new. There was no more of that standing against the wall with crossed legs, no more walking around the trestle table and lifting and dropping things, no more of that serious conversation.

  He came in now with a set face, his expression stern and closed. He held his head up and moved slowly. When he sat on the couch in the sitting room, he slumped so far down that sometimes his back was on the seat of the coach. He was languid, bored. He looked without seeing; he was ready to listen, but couldn’t be bothered to talk himself—that was the impression he tried to give. I didn’t know what to make of this new character of Ferdinand’s, and it was only from certain things that Metty said that I understood what Ferdinand was aiming at.

  During the course of the term there had come to the lycée some boys from the warrior tribes to the east. They were an immensely tall people; and, as Metty told me with awe, they were used to being carried around on litters by their slaves, who were of a smaller, squatter race. For these tall men of the forest there had always been European admiration. Ever since I could remember there had been articles about them in the magazines—these Africans who cared nothing about planting or trade and looked down, almost as much as Europeans, on other Africans. This European admiration still existed; articles and photographs continued to appear in magazines, in spite of the changes that had come to Africa. In fact, there were now Africans who felt as the Europeans did, and saw the warrior people as the highest kind of African.

  At the lycée, still so colonial in spite of everything, the new boys had created a stir. Ferdinand, both of whose parents were traders, had decided to try out the role of the indolent forest warrior. He couldn’t slump around at the lycée and pretend he was used to being waited on by slaves. But he thought he could practise on me.

  I knew other things about the forest kingdom, though. I knew that the slave people were in revolt and were being butchered back into submission. But Africa was big. The bush muffled the sound of murder, and the muddy rivers and lakes washed the blood away.

  Metty said, “We must go there, patron. I hear it is the last good place in Africa. Y a encore bien, bien des blancs côté-qui-là. It have a lot of white people up there still. They tell me that in Bujumbura it is like a little Paris.”

  If I believed that Metty understood a quarter of
the things he said—if I believed, for instance, that he really longed for the white company at Bujumbura, or knew where or what Canada was—I would have worried about him. But I knew him better; I knew when his chat was just chat. Still, what chat! The white people had been driven out from our town, and their monuments destroyed. But there were a lot of white people up there, in another town, and warriors and slaves. And that was glamour for the warrior boys, glamour for Metty, and glamour for Ferdinand.

  I began to understand how simple and uncomplicated the world was for me. For people like myself and Mahesh, and the uneducated Greeks and Italians in our town, the world was really quite a simple place. We could understand it, and if too many obstacles weren’t put in our way we could master it. It didn’t matter that we were far away from our civilization, far away from the doers and makers. It didn’t matter that we couldn’t make the things we liked to use, and as individuals were even without the technical skills of primitive people. In fact, the less educated we were, the more at peace we were, the more easily we were carried along by our civilization or civilizations.

  For Ferdinand there was no such possibility. He could never be simple. The more he tried, the more confused he became. His mind wasn’t empty, as I had begun to think. It was a jumble, full of all kinds of junk.

  With the arrival of the warrior boys, boasting had begun at the lycée, and I began to feel that Ferdinand—or somebody—had been boasting about me too. Or what had been got out of me. The word definitely appeared to have got around that term that I was interested in the education and welfare of young Africans.