A Bend in the River (15 page)

“You say he’s frightened?”

“Very frightened.”

“Then tell him he’s being watched and he mustn’t come to see you again.”

I looked in my science magazines and children’s encyclopaedia parts (I had grown to love those) and read up on uranium. Uranium is one of those things we all hear about but not many of us know about. Like oil. I used to think, from hearing and reading about oil reservoirs, that oil ran in trapped underground streams. It was my encyclopaedia parts which told me that oil reservoirs were of stone and could even be of marble, with the oil in tiny pockets. It was in just such a way, I suppose, that the general, hearing of the immense value of uranium, had thought of it as a kind of super-precious metal, a kind of gold nugget. Mancini the consul, must have thought so too. My reading told me of tons and tons of ore that had to be processed and reduced—but reduced to hefty blocks.

The general, offering a “piece,” might have been duped himself. But for some reason—Mahesh might have told him he was being watched—he never troubled Mahesh again. And not long afterwards he was posted away from our town. It was the method of the new President: he gave his men power and authority, but he never allowed them to settle in anywhere and become local kings. He saved us a lot of trouble.

Mahesh went on as coolly as before. The only man who had had a fright was Mancini, the consul.

That was what we were like in those days. We felt that there was treasure around us, waiting to be picked up. It was the bush that gave us this feeling. During the empty, idle time, we had
been indifferent to the bush; during the days of the rebellion it had depressed us. Now it excited us—the unused earth, with the promise of the unused. We forgot that others had been here before us, and had felt like us.

I shared in the boom. I was energetic in my own modest way. But I was also restless. You so quickly get used to peace. It is like being well—you take it for granted, and forget that when you were ill, to be well again had seemed everything. And with peace and the boom I began to see the town as ordinary, for the first time.

The flat, the shop, the market outside the shop, the Hellenic Club, the bars, the life of the river, the dugouts, the water hyacinths—I knew it so well. And especially on hot sunny afternoons—that hard light, those black shadows, that feeling of stillness—it seemed without further human promise.

I didn’t see myself spending the rest of my days at that bend in the river, like Mahesh and the others. In my own mind I separated myself from them. I still thought of myself as a man just passing through. But where was the good place? I couldn’t say. I never thought constructively about it. I was waiting for some illumination to come to me, to guide me to the good place and the “life” I was still waiting for.

From time to time now letters from my father on the coast reminded me of his wish to see me settled—married to Nazruddin’s daughter: that was almost like a family commitment. But I was less prepared than ever for that. Though it was a comfort on occasion to play with the idea that outside this place a whole life waited for me, all the relationships that bind a man to the earth and give him a feeling of having a place. But I knew that it wasn’t like that really. I knew that for us the world was no longer as safe as that.

And again events caught up with my anxieties. There was trouble in Uganda, where Nazruddin had a cotton-ginning business. Uganda up till then had been the secure and well-run country Nazruddin had tried to excite us about, the country which received refugees from neighbouring countries. Now in Uganda itself a king was overthrown and forced to flee; Daulat
brought back stories of yet another army on the loose. Nazruddin, as I remembered, lived with the knowledge that, after all his luck, things were going to end badly for him; and I thought that his luck had run out now. But I was wrong; Nazruddin’s luck was still with him. The trouble in Uganda didn’t last; only the king suffered. Life there went back to normal. But I began to fear for Nazruddin and his family, and the idea of marriage to his daughter ceased to be the idea of a correct family duty. It became a more oppressive kind of responsibility, and I pushed it to the back of my mind as something I would face when I absolutely had to.

So in the midst of the boom I had my anxieties and became almost as dissatisfied and restless as I had been at the beginning. It wasn’t only outside pressures, or my solitude and my temperament. It also had to do with the place itself, the way it had altered with the peace. It was nobody’s fault. It was something that had just happened. During the days of the rebellion I had had the sharpest sense of the beauty of the river and the forest, and had promised myself that when the peace came I would expose myself to it, learn it, possess that beauty. I had done nothing of the sort; when the peace came I had simply stopped looking about me. And now I felt that the mystery and the magic of the place had gone.

In those days of fear I felt we had been in touch, through the Africans, with the spirits of the river and forest; and that everything had been full of tension. But all the spirits seemed now to have left the place, as, after Father Huismans’s death, the spirits appeared to have left his masks. We had been so nervous of the Africans during those days; we hadn’t taken any man for granted. We had been the intruders, the ordinary men, they the inspired ones. Now the spirits had left them; they were ordinary, squalid, poor. Without effort we had become, in a real way, the masters, with the gifts and skills they needed. And we were so simple. On the land now ordinary again we had arranged such ordinary lives for ourselves—in the bars and brothels, the nightclubs. Oh, it was unsatisfactory. Yet what else could we do? We
did only what we could do. We followed Mahesh’s motto: we carried on.

Mahesh did more than that. He pulled off a coup. He continued to consult catalogues, fill in coupons, write off for further information; and at last he found the package he had been looking for, the thing he could import whole and use as a short-cut to business and money. He got the Bigburger franchise for our town.

It wasn’t what I was expecting. He had been running an odd little shop that dealt in ironmongery of various sorts, electrical goods, cameras, binoculars, lots of little gadgets. Hamburgers—Bigburgers—didn’t seem to be his thing. I wasn’t even sure that the town would go for Bigburgers. But he had no doubts.

He said, “They’ve done their market research and they’ve decided to make a big push in Africa. They have an area office now in one of the French places on the west coast. The chap came the other day and measured up and everything. They don’t just send you the sauce, you know, Salim. They send you the whole shop.”

And that was what they did. The crates that came up on the steamer in a couple of months did contain the whole shop: the stoves, the milk-shake machines, the coffee machine, the cups and plates, the tables and chairs, the made-to-measure counter, the stools, the made-to-measure wall panelling with the Big-burger design. And after all this serious stuff there were the toys: the Bigburger cruets, the Bigburger ketchup containers, the Bigburger menus and menu holders, and the lovely advertisements: “Bigburgers—The Big One—The Bigwonderful One,” with pictures of different kinds of Bigburgers.

I thought the Bigburger pictures looked like smooth white lips of bread over mangled black tongues of meat. But Mahesh didn’t like it when I told him, and I decided not to say anything disrespectful about Bigburgers again. Mahesh had been full of jokes about the project; but as soon as the stuff arrived he became deadly serious—he had become Bigburger.

Mahesh’s shop was structurally quite simple, the standard concrete box of our town; and in no time the local Italian builder
had cleared it of Mahesh’s shelves, rewired, put in new plumbing, and fitted up a dazzling snack bar that seemed to have been imported from the United States. The whole prefabricated business did work; and it was great fun to be in Bigburger, to leave the sewer smells of the street, and the dust and the rubbish, and to step into this modern interior, with the advertisements and everything. So Mahesh did, after all, pull it off.

The prettiness had an effect on Shoba too. It made her energetic and brought out something of her family business talents. She organized the place and soon had it running smoothly. She arranged for the deliveries of meat from our new supermarket (the meat came from South Africa, like our eggs now) and she arranged with an Italian for the loaves. She trained the boys and worked out their schedules.

Ildephonse, the houseboy, was taken from the flat and given a Bigburger chef’s cap and a yellow Bigburger jacket and put behind the counter. It was Mahesh’s idea to give Ildephonse a label for his jacket with his name and the designation—in English, for the extra style—Manager. Mahesh did little things like that sometimes which showed you that, casual as he was, he knew instinctively how to operate in our town. He said he called Ildephonse the manager to ward off African resentment of the new, rich-looking place, and also to attract African customers. And he made a point of leaving Ildephonse in charge for some hours every day.

It was strange about Ildephonse, though. He loved his Bigburger costume and he loved his new job. No one was quicker and more friendly and more anxious to please than he was, when Shoba or Mahesh was around. They trusted Ildephonse; they boasted of their trust in him, in his presence. Yet as soon as he was left alone he became a different person. He went vacant. Not rude, just vacant. I noticed this alteration in the African staff in other places as well. It made you feel that while they did their jobs in their various glossy settings, they were only acting for the people who employed them; that the job itself was meaningless to them; and that they had the gift—when they were left alone, and had no one to act for—of separating themselves in spirit from their setting, their job, their uniform.

Bigburger was a success. The van der Weyden, across the road, was content to make money from its beds and rooms. The service and the kitchens there drove people out to look for food, and Bigburger was perfectly placed to capture that refugee trade. Bigburger attracted a lot of African officials and army people as well—they liked the décor and the modernity. So that Mahesh, from running a nondescript little hardware shop, found himself at the centre of things in our town.

All this happened quickly, in less than a year. Everything happened quickly now. It was as though everyone felt he had to make up for the lost years, or as though everyone felt that time was short, that the place might close down at any moment again.

Mahesh said to me one day, “Noimon offered me two million. But you know Noimon. When he offers two, you know it’s worth four.”

Noimon was one of our local big Greeks. The new furniture shop—doing fantastic business—was just one of his ventures. The two million he offered were local francs, which were thirty-six to the dollar.

Mahesh said, “I suppose your place is worth a lot now. Nazruddin offered it to me, you know. A hundred and fifty thousand. What do you think you’ll get for it now?”

You heard that kind of property talk everywhere now. Everyone was totting up how much he had gained with the boom, how much he was worth. People learned to speak huge figures calmly.

There had been a boom before, just at the end of the colonial period, and the ruined suburb near the rapids was what it had left behind. Nazruddin had told a story about that. He had gone out there one Sunday morning, had thought that the place was bush rather than real estate, and had decided to sell. Lucky for him then; but now that dead suburb was being rehabilitated. That development or redevelopment had become the most important feature of our boom. And it had caused the big recent rise in property values in the town.

The bush near the rapids was being cleared. The ruins which had seemed permanent were being levelled by bulldozers; new avenues were being laid out. It was the Big Man’s doing. The
government had taken over all that area and decreed it the Domain of the State, and the Big Man was building what looked like a little town there. It was happening very fast. The copper money was pouring in, pushing up prices in our town. The deep, earth-shaking burr of bulldozers competed with the sound of the rapids. Every steamer brought up European builders and artisans, every airplane. The van der Weyden seldom had rooms to spare.

Everything the President did had a reason. As a ruler in what was potentially hostile territory, he was creating an area where he and his flag were supreme. As an African, he was building a new town on the site of what had been a rich European suburb—but what he was building was meant to be grander. In the town the only “designed” modern building was the van der Weyden; and to us the larger buildings of the Domain were startling—concrete louvres, pierced concrete blocks of great size, tinted glass. The smaller buildings—houses and bungalows—were more like what we were used to. But even they were on the large side and, with air conditioners sticking out in many places like building blocks that had slipped, looked extravagant.

No one was sure, even after some of the houses were furnished, what the Domain was to be used for. There were stories of a great new model farm and agricultural college; a conference hall to serve the continent; holiday houses for loyal citizens. From the President himself there came no statement. We watched and wondered while the buildings were run up. And then we began to understand that what the President was attempting was so stupendous in his own eyes that even he would not have wanted to proclaim it. He was creating modern Africa. He was creating a miracle that would astound the rest of the world. He was by-passing real Africa, the difficult Africa of bush and villages, and creating something that would match anything that existed in other countries.

Photographs of this State Domain—and of others like it in other parts of the country—began to appear in those magazines about Africa that were published in Europe but subsidized by governments like ours. In these photographs the message of the
Domain was simple. Under the rule of our new President the miracle had occurred: Africans had become modern men who built in concrete and glass and sat in cushioned chairs covered in imitation velvet. It was like a curious fulfilment of Father Huismans’s prophecy about the retreat of African Africa, and the success of the European graft.