A Bend in the River Read online

  Young men, not all of them from the lycée, took to turning up at the shop, sometimes with books in their hands, sometimes with an obviously borrowed Semper Aliquid Novi blazer. They wanted money. They said they were poor and wanted money to continue their studies. Some of these beggars were bold, coming straight to me and reciting their requests; the shy ones hung around until there was no one else in the shop. Only a few had bothered to prepare stories, and these stories were like Ferdinand’s: a father dead or far away, a mother in a village, an unprotected boy full of ambition.

  I was amazed by the stupidity, then irritated, then unsettled. None of these people seemed to mind being rebuffed or being hustled out of the shop by Metty; some of them came again. It was as if none of them cared about my reactions, as if somewhere out there in the town I had been given a special “character,” and what I thought of myself was of no importance. That was what was unsettling. The guilelessness, the innocence that wasn’t innocence—I thought it could be traced back to Ferdinand, his interpretation of our relationship and his idea of what I could be used for.

  I had said to Mahesh, lightly, simplifying matters for the benefit of a prejudiced man: “Ferdinand’s an African.” Ferdinand had perhaps done the same for me with his friends, explaining away his relationship with me. And I felt now that out of his lies and exaggerations, and the character he had given me, a web was being spun around me. I had become prey.

  Perhaps that was true of all of us who were not of the country. Recent events had shown our helplessness. There was a kind of peace now; but we all—Asians, Greeks and other Europeans—remained prey, to be stalked in different ways. Some men were to be feared, and stalked cautiously; it was necessary to be servile with some; others were to be approached the way I was approached. It was in the history of the land: here men had always been prey. You don’t feel malice towards your prey. You set a trap for him. It fails ten times; but it is always the same trap you set.

  Shortly after I had arrived Mahesh had said to me of the local Africans: “You must never forget, Salim, that they are malins” He had used the French word, because the English words he might have used—“wicked,” “mischievous,” “bad-minded”—were not right. The people here were malins the way a dog chasing a lizard was malin, or a cat chasing a bird. The people were malins because they lived with the knowledge of men as prey.

  They were not a sturdy people. They were very small and slightly built. Yet, as though to make up for their puniness in that immensity of river and forest, they liked to wound with their hands. They didn’t use their fists. They used the flat of the hand; they liked to push, shove, slap. More than once, at night, outside a bar or little dance hall, I saw what looked like a drunken pushing and shoving, a brawl with slaps, turn to methodical murder, as though the first wound and the first spurt of blood had made the victim something less than a man, and compelled the wounder to take the act of destruction to the end.

  I was unprotected. I had no family, no flag, no fetish. Was it something like this that Ferdinand had told his friends? I felt that the time had come for me to straighten things out with Ferdinand, and give him another idea of myself.

  I soon had my chance, as I thought. A well-dressed young man came into the shop one morning with what looked like a business ledger in his hand. He was one of the shy ones. He hung around, waiting for people to go away, and when he came to me I saw that the ledger was less businesslike than it looked. The spine, in the middle, was black and worn from being held. And I saw too that the man’s shirt, though obviously his best, wasn’t as clean as I had thought. It was the good shirt he wore on special occasions and then took off and hung up on a nail and wore again on another special occasion. The collar was yellow-black on the inside.

  He said, “Mis’ Salim.”

  I took the ledger, and he looked away, puckering up his brows.

  The ledger belonged to the lycée, and it was old. It was something from near the end of the colonial time: a subscription list for a gymnasium the lycée had been planning to build. On the inside of the cover was the lycée label, with the coat of arms and the motto. Opposite that was the principal’s appeal, in the stiff and angular European handwriting style which had been passed down to some of the Africans here. The first subscriber was the governor of the province, and he had signed royally, on a whole page. I turned the pages, studying the confident signatures of officials and merchants. It was all so recent, but it seemed to belong to another century.

  I saw, with especial interest, the signature of a man of our community about whom Nazruddin had talked a great deal. That man had had old-fashioned ideas about money and security; he had used his wealth to build a palace, which he had had to abandon after independence. The mercenaries who had restored the authority of the central government had been quartered there; now the palace was an army barracks. He had subscribed for an enormous amount. I saw Nazruddin’s signature—I was surprised: I had forgotten that he might be here, among these dead colonial names.

  The gymnasium hadn’t been built. All these demonstrations of loyalty and faith in the future and civic pride had gone for nothing. Yet the book had survived. Now it had been stolen, its money-attracting properties recognized. The date had been altered, very obviously; and Father Huismans’s name had been written over the signature of the earlier principal.

  I said to the man before me, “I will keep this book. I will give it back to the people to whom it belongs. Who gave you the book? Ferdinand?”

  He looked helpless. Sweat was beginning to run down his puckered forehead, and he was blinking it away. He said, “Mis’ Salim.”

  “You’ve done your job. You’ve given me the book. Now go.”

  And he obeyed.

  Ferdinand came that afternoon. I knew he would—he would want to look at my face, and find out about his book. He said, “Salim?” I didn’t acknowledge him. I let him stand. But he didn’t have to stand about for long.

  Metty was in the storeroom, and Metty must have heard him. Metty called out: “Oo-oo!” Ferdinand called back, and went to the storeroom. He and Metty began to chat in the patois. My temper rose as I heard that contented, rippling, high-pitched sound. I took the gymnasium book from the drawer of my desk and went to the storeroom.

  The room, with one small barred window set high, was half in darkness. Metty was on a ladder, checking stock on the shelves on one wall. Ferdinand was leaning against the shelves on another wall, just below the window. It was hard to see his face.

  I stood in the doorway. I made a gesture towards Ferdinand with the book and I said, “You are going to get into trouble.”

  He said, “What trouble?”

  He spoke in his flat, dead way. He didn’t mean to be sarcastic; he really was asking what I was talking about. But it was hard for me to see his face. I saw the whites of his eyes, and I thought I saw the corners of his mouth pulling back in a smile. That face, that reminder of frightening masks! And I thought: Yes—what trouble?

  To talk of trouble was to pretend there were laws and regulations that everyone could acknowledge. Here there was nothing. There had been order once, but that order had had its own dishonesties and cruelties—that was why the town had been wrecked. We lived in that wreckage. Instead of regulations there were now only officials who could always prove you wrong, until you paid up. All that could be said to Ferdinand was: “Don’t harm me, boy, because I can do you greater harm.”

  I began to see his face more clearly.

  I said, “You will take this book back to Father Huismans. If you don’t, I will take it back myself. And I will see that he sends you home for good.”

  He looked blank, as though he had been attacked. Then I noticed Metty on the ladder. Metty was nervous, tense; his eyes betrayed him. And I knew I had made a mistake, saving up all my anger for Ferdinand.

  Ferdinand’s eyes went bright, and the whites showed clearly. So that, at this terrible moment, he seemed like a comic in an old-time film. He appeared to lean forward
, to be about to lose his balance. He took a deep breath. His eyes never left my face. He was spitting with rage; his sense of injury had driven him mad. His arms hung straight and loose at his sides, so that they seemed longer than usual. His hands curled without clenching. His mouth was open. But what I had thought was a smile was no smile at all. If the light had been better I would have seen that at the beginning.

  He was frightening, and the thought came to me: This is how he will look when he sees his victim’s blood, when he watches his enemy being killed. And climbing on that thought was another: “This is the rage that flattened the town.”

  I could have pushed harder, and turned that high rage into tears. But I didn’t push. I thought I had given them both a new idea of the kind of man I was, and I left them in the storeroom to cool down. After some time I heard them talking, but softly.

  At four o’clock, closing time, I shouted to Metty. And he, glad of the chance to come out and be active, said, “Patron,” and frowned to show how seriously he took the business of closing up the shop.

  Ferdinand came out, quite calm, walking with a light step. He said, “Salim?” I said, “I will take the book back.” And I watched him walk up the red street, tall and sad and slow below the leafless flamboyants, past the rough market shacks of his town.

  4

  Father Huismans wasn’t in when I went to the lycée with the book. There was a young Belgian in the outer office, and he told me that Father Huismans liked to go away for a few days from time to time. Where did he go? “He goes into the bush. He goes to all those villages,” the young man—secretary or teacher—said, with irritation. And he became more irritated when I gave him the gymnasium book.

  He said, “They come and beg to be admitted to the lycée. As soon as you take them in they start stealing. They would carry away the whole school if you let them. They come and beg you to look after their children. Yet in the streets they jostle you to show you they don’t care for you.” He didn’t look well. He was pale, but the skin below his eyes was dark, and he sweated as he talked. He said, “I’m sorry. It would be better for you to talk to Father Huismans. You must understand that it isn’t easy for me here. I’ve been living on honey cake and eggs.”

  It sounded as though he had been put on an especially rich diet. Then I understood that he was really telling me he was starving.

  He said, “Father Huismans had the idea this term of giving the boys African food. Well, that seemed all right. There’s an African lady in the capital who does wonderful things with prawns and shellfish. But here it was caterpillars and spinach in tomato sauce. Or what looked like tomato sauce. The first day! Of course, it was only for the boys, but the sight of it turned my stomach. I couldn’t stay in the hall and watch them chew. I can’t bring myself to eat anything from the kitchens now. I don’t have cooking facilities in my room, and at the van der Weyden there’s this sewer smell from the patio. I’m leaving. I’ve got to go. It’s all right for Huismans. He’s a priest. I’m not a priest. He goes into the bush. I don’t want to go into the bush.”

  I couldn’t help him. Food was a problem for everybody here. My own arrangements were not of the happiest; I had had lunch that day with the couple from India, in a smell of asafoetida and oilcloth.

  When, a week or so later, I went back to the lycée I heard that just two days after our meeting the young Belgian had taken the steamer and gone away. It was Father Huismans who gave me the news; and Father Huismans, sunburnt and healthy after his own trip, didn’t seem put out by the loss of one of his teachers. He said he was glad to have the gymnasium book back. It was part of the history of the town; the boys who had stolen the book would recognize that one day themselves.

  Father Huismans was in his forties. He wasn’t dressed like a priest, but even in ordinary trousers and shirt there was something about him of the man apart. He had the “unfinished” face which I have noticed that certain Europeans—but never Arabs or Persians or Indians—have. In these faces there is a baby-like quality about the cut of the lips and the jut of the forehead. It might be that these people were born prematurely; they seem to have passed through some very early disturbance, way back. Some of these people are as fragile as they look; some are very tough. Father Huismans was tough. The impression he gave was of incompleteness, fragility, and toughness.

  He had been out on the river, visiting some villages he knew, and he had brought back two pieces—a mask and an oldish wood carving. It was about these finds that he wanted to talk, rather than about the teacher who had gone away or the gymnasium book.

  The carving was extraordinary. It was about five feet high, a very thin human figure, just limbs and trunk and head, absolutely basic, carved out of a piece of wood no more than six to eight inches in diameter. I knew about carving—it was one of the things we dealt in on the coast; we gave employment to a couple of carving families from a tribe who were gifted that way. But Father Huismans dismissed this information when I gave it to him, and talked instead of what he saw in the figure he had picked up. To me it was an exaggerated and crude piece, a carver’s joke (the carvers we employed did things like that sometimes). But Father Huismans knew what the thin figure was about, and to him it was imaginative and full of meaning.

  I listened, and at the end he said with a smile, “Semper aliquid novi.” He had used the lycée motto to make a joke. The words were old, he told me, two thousand years old, and referred to Africa. An ancient Roman writer had written that out of Africa there was “always something new”—semper aliquid novi. And when it came to masks and carvings, the words were still literally true. Every carving, every mask, served a specific religious purpose, and could only be made once. Copies were copies; there was no magical feeling or power in them; and in such copies Father Huismans was not interested. He looked in masks and carvings for a religious quality; without that quality the things were dead and without beauty.

  That was strange, that a Christian priest should have had such regard for African beliefs, to which on the coast we had paid no attention. And yet, though Father Huismans knew so much about African religion and went to such trouble to collect his pieces, I never felt that he was concerned about Africans in any other way; he seemed indifferent to the state of the country. I envied him that indifference; and I thought, after I left him that day, that his Africa, of bush and river, was different from mine. His Africa was a wonderful place, full of new things.

  He was a priest, half a man. He lived by vows I couldn’t make; and I had approached him with the respect that people of my background feel for holy men. But I began to think of him as something more. I began to think of him as a pure man. His presence in our town comforted me. His attitudes, his interests, his knowledge, added something to the place, made it less barren. It didn’t worry me that he was self-absorbed, that he had been indifferent to the breakdown of one of his teachers, or that he scarcely seemed to take me in while he was talking to me. To me that was part of his particular religious nature. I sought him out and tried to understand his interests. He was always willing to talk (always looking away slightly) and to show his new finds. He came a few times to the shop and ordered things for the lycée. But the shyness—that wasn’t really shyness—never left him. I was never easy with him. He remained a man apart.

  He explained the second motto of the town for me—the Latin words carved on the ruined monument near the dock gates: Miscerique probat populos et foedera jungi. “He approves of the mingling of the peoples and their bonds of union”: that was what the words meant, and again they were very old words, from the days of ancient Rome. They came from a poem about the founding of Rome. The very first Roman hero, travelling to Italy to found his city, lands on the coast of Africa. The local queen falls in love with him, and it seems that the journey to Italy might be called off. But then the watching gods take a hand; and one of them says that the great Roman god might not approve of a settlement in Africa, of a mingling of peoples there, of treaties of union between Africans and Ro
mans. That was how the words occurred in the old Latin poem. In the motto, though, three words were altered to reverse the meaning. According to the motto, the words carved in granite outside our dock gates, a settlement in Africa raises no doubts: the great Roman god approves of the mingling of peoples and the making of treaties in Africa. Miscerique probat populos et foedera jungi.

  I was staggered. Twisting two-thousand-year-old words to celebrate sixty years of the steamer service from the capital! Rome was Rome. What was this place? To carve the words on a monument beside this African river was surely to invite the destruction of the town. Wasn’t there some little anxiety, as in the original line in the poem? And almost as soon as it had been put up the monument had been destroyed, leaving only bits of bronze and the mocking words, gibberish to the people who now used the open space in front as a market and bivouac, with their goats and crated hens and tethered monkeys (food, like the goats and hens), for the two days or so before the steamer sailed.

  But I was glad I didn’t speak, because to Father Huismans the words were not vainglorious. They were words that helped him to see himself in Africa. He didn’t simply see himself in a place in the bush; he saw himself as part of an immense flow of history. He was of Europe; he took the Latin words to refer to himself. It didn’t matter that the Europeans in our town were uneducated, or that there was such a difference between what he stood for in his own life and what the ruined suburb near the rapids had stood for. He had his own idea of Europe, his own idea of his civilization. It was that that lay between us. Nothing like that came between me and the people I met at the Hellenic Club. And yet Father Huismans stressed his Europeanness and his separateness from Africans less than those people did. In every way he was more secure.

  He wasn’t resentful, as some of his countrymen were, of what had happened to the European town. He wasn’t wounded by the insults that had been offered to the monuments and the statues. It wasn’t because he was more ready to forgive, or had a better understanding of what had been done to the Africans. For him the destruction of the European town, the town that his countrymen had built, was only a temporary setback. Such things happened when something big and new was being set up, when the course of history was being altered.