A Bend in the River (21 page)

This was so like what I felt, that I said, “Yes! None of us in the town liked putting up the old photograph. But it is different seeing the new photographs, especially in the Domain.”

Raymond permitted this interruption. His right hand was being raised, though, to allow him to go on. And he went on.

“I thought I would check this. Just last week, as a matter of fact. I ran into one of our students outside the main building. And just to be provocative, I dropped some remark about the number of the President’s photographs. The young man pulled me up quite sharply. So I asked him what he felt when he saw the President’s photograph. You will be surprised by what he said to me, that young man, holding himself as erect as any military cadet. ‘It is a photograph of the President. But here on the Domain, as a student at the polytechnic, I also consider it a photograph of myself.’ The very words! But that’s a quality of great leaders—they intuit the needs of their people long before those needs are formulated. It takes an African to rule Africa—the colonial powers never truly understood that. However much the rest of us study Africa, however deep our sympathy, we will remain outsiders.”

The young man, sitting now on a mat with his girl, asked, “Do you know the symbolism of the serpent on the President’s stick? Is it true that there’s a fetish in the belly of the human figure on the stick?”

Raymond said, “I don’t know about that. It is a stick. It is a chief’s stick. It is like a mace or a mitre. I don’t think we have to fall into the error of looking for African mysteries everywhere.”

The critical note jarred a little. But Raymond seemed not to notice.

“I have recently had occasion to look through all the President’s speeches. Now, what an interesting publication that would make! Not the speeches in their entirety, which inevitably deal with many passing issues. But selections. The essential thoughts.”

Indar said, “Are you working on that? Has he asked you?”

Raymond lifted a palm and hunched a shoulder, to say that it was possible, but that he couldn’t talk about a matter that was still confidential.

“What is interesting about those speeches when read in sequence is their development. There you can see very clearly what I have described as the hunger for ideas. In the beginning the
ideas are simple. Unity, the colonial past, the need for peace. Then they become extraordinarily complex and wonderful about Africa, government, the modern world. Such a work, if adequately prepared, might well become the handbook for a true revolution throughout the continent. Always you can catch that quality of the young man’s despair which made such an impression on me so long ago. Always you have that feeling that the damage can never perhaps be undone. Always there is that note, for those with the ears to hear it, of the young man grieving for the humiliations of his mother, the hotel maid. He’s always remained true to that. I don’t think many people know that earlier this year he and his entire government made a pilgrimage to the village of that woman of Africa. Has that been done before? Has any ruler attempted to give sanctity to the bush of Africa? This act of piety is something that brings tears to the eyes. Can you imagine the humiliations of an African hotel maid in colonial times? No amount of piety can make up for that. But piety is all we have to offer.”

“Or we can forget,” Indar said. “We can trample on the past.”

Raymond said, “That is what most of the leaders of Africa do. They want to build skyscrapers in the bush. This man wants to build a shrine.”

Music without words had been coming out of the speakers. Now “Barbara Allen” began again, and the words were distracting. Raymond stood up. The man who had been sitting on the mat went to lower the volume. Raymond indicated that he wasn’t to bother, but the song went faint.

Raymond said, “I would like to be with you. But unfortunately I have to get back to my work. Otherwise I might lose something. I find that the most difficult thing in prose narrative is linking one thing with the other. The link might just be a sentence, or even a word. It sums up what has gone before and prepares one for what is to come. As I was sitting with you I had an idea of a possible solution to a problem that was beginning to appear quite intractable. I must go and make a note. Otherwise I might forget.”

He began to move away from us. But then he stopped and
said, “I don’t think it is sufficiently understood how hard it is to write about what has never been written about before. The occasional academic paper on a particular subject, the Bapende rebellion or whatever—that has its own form. The larger narrative is another matter. And that’s why I have begun to consider Theodor Mommsen the giant of modern historical writing. Everything that we now discuss about the Roman Republic is only a continuation of Mommsen. The problems, the issues, the very narrative, especially of those extraordinarily troubled years of the later Republic—you might say the German genius discovered it all. Of course, Theodor Mommsen had the comfort of knowing that his subject was a great one. Those of us who work in our particular field have no such assurance. We have no idea of the value posterity will place on the events we attempt to chronicle. We have no idea where the continent is going. We can only carry on.”

He ended abruptly, turned, and went out of the room, leaving us in silence, looking after where he had disappeared, and only slowly directing our attention to Yvette, now his representative in that room, smiling, acknowledging our regard.

After a little Indar said to me, “Do you know Raymond’s work?”

Of course he knew the answer to that one. But, to give him his opening, I said, “No, I don’t know his work.”

Indar said, “That’s the tragedy of the place. The great men of Africa are not known.”

It was like a formal speech of thanks. And Indar had chosen his words well. He had made us all men and women of Africa; and since we were not Africans the claim gave us a special feeling for ourselves which, so far as I was concerned, was soon heightened by the voice of Joan Baez, turned up again, reminding us sweetly, after the tensions Raymond had thrown among us, of our common bravery and sorrows.

Indar was embraced by Yvette when we left. And I was embraced, as the friend. It was delicious to me, as the climax to that evening, to press that body close, soft at this late hour, and to feel the silk of the blouse and the flesh below the silk.

There was a moon now—there had been none earlier. It was small and high. The sky was full of heavy clouds, and the moonlight came and went. It was very quiet. We could hear the rapids; they were about a mile away. The rapids in moonlight! I said to Indar, “Let’s go to the river.” And he was willing.

In the wide levelled land of the Domain the new buildings seemed small, and the earth felt immense. The Domain seemed the merest clearing in the forest, the merest clearing in an immensity of bush and river—the world might have been nothing else. Moonlight distorted distances; and the darkness, when it came, seemed to drop down to our heads.

I said to Indar, “What do you think of what Raymond said?”

“Raymond tells a story well. But a lot of what he says is true. What he says about the President and ideas is certainly true. The President uses them all and somehow makes them work together. He is the great African chief, and he is also the man of the people. He is the modernizer and he is also the African who has rediscovered his African soul. He’s conservative, revolutionary, everything. He’s going back to the old ways, and he’s also the man who’s going ahead, the man who’s going to make the country a world power by the year 2000. I don’t know whether he’s done it accidentally or because someone’s been telling him what to do. But the mish-mash works because he keeps on changing, unlike the other guys. He is the soldier who decided to become an old-fashioned chief, and he’s the chief whose mother was a hotel maid. That makes him everything, and he plays up everything. There isn’t anyone in the country who hasn’t heard of that hotel maid mother.”

I said, “They caught me with that pilgrimage to the mother’s village. When I read in the paper that it was an unpublicized pilgrimage, I thought of it as just that.”

“He makes these shrines in the bush, honouring the mother. And at the same time he builds modern Africa. Raymond says he doesn’t build skyscrapers. Well, he doesn’t do that. He builds these very expensive Domains.”

“Nazruddin used to own some land here in the old days.”

“And he sold it for nothing. Are you going to tell me that? That’s an African story.”

“No, Nazruddin sold well. He sold at the height of the boom before independence. He came out one Sunday morning and said, ‘But this is only bush.’ And he sold.”

“It could go that way again.”

The sound of the rapids had grown louder. We had left the new buildings of the Domain behind and were approaching the fishermen’s huts, dead in the moonlight. The thin village dogs, pale in the moonlight, their shadows black below them, walked lazily away from us. The fishermen’s poles and nets were dark against the broken glitter of the river. And then we were on the old viewing point, repaired now, newly walled; and around us, drowning everything else, was the sound of water over rocks. Clumps of water hyacinths bucked past. The hyacinths were white in the moonlight, the vines dark tangles outlined in black shadow. When the moonlight went, there was nothing to be seen; the world was then only that old sound of tumbling water.

I said, “I’ve never told you why I came here. It wasn’t just to get away from the coast or to run that shop. Nazruddin used to tell us wonderful stories of the times he used to have here. That was why I came. I thought I would be able to live my own life, and I thought that in time I would find what Nazruddin found. Then I got stuck. I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t come. If you hadn’t come I would never have known about what was going on here, just under my nose.”

“It’s different from what we used to know. To people like us it’s very seductive. Europe in Africa, post-colonial Africa. But it isn’t Europe or Africa. And it looks different from the inside, I can tell you.”

“You mean people don’t believe in it? They don’t believe in what they say and do?”

“No one is as crude as that. We believe and don’t believe. We believe because that way everything becomes simpler and makes more sense. We don’t believe—well, because of this.” And Indar waved at the fishermen’s village, the bush, the moonlit river.

He said after a time, “Raymond’s in a bit of a mess. He has to keep on pretending that he is the guide and adviser, to keep himself from knowing that the time is almost here when he will
just be receiving orders. In fact, so as not to get orders, he is beginning to anticipate orders. He will go crazy if he has to acknowledge that that’s his situation. Oh, he’s got a big job now. But he’s on the slippery slope. He’s been sent away from the capital. The Big Man is going his own way, and he no longer needs Raymond. Everybody knows that, but Raymond thinks they don’t. It’s a dreadful thing for a man of his age to have to live with.”

But what Indar was saying didn’t make me think of Raymond. I thought of Yvette, all at once brought nearer by this tale of her husband’s distress. I went over the pictures I had of her that evening, ran the film over again, so to speak, reconstructing and reinterpreting what I had seen, re-creating that woman, fixing her in the posture that had bewitched me, her white feet together, one leg drawn up, one leg flat and bent, remaking her face, her smile, touching the whole picture with the mood of the Joan Baez songs and all that they had released in me, and adding to it this extra mood of moonlight, the rapids, and the white hyacinths of this great river of Africa.

It was on that evening, by the river, after he had spoken about Raymond, that Indar began to tell me about himself. The evening that had excited me had enervated and depressed him; he had become irritable as soon as we had left Yvette’s house.

Earlier in the evening, as we had walked across to the house for the party, he had spoken of Raymond as a star, someone close to power, the Big Man’s white man; but then, by the rapids, he had spoken of Raymond in quite another way. As my guide Indar had been anxious for me truly to understand the nature of life on the Domain, and his own position there. Now that I had seized the glamour of his world he was like a guide who had lost faith in what he showed. Or like a man who, because he had got
someone else to believe, had felt he could let go of some of his own faith.

The moonlight that made me light-headed deepened his depression, and it was out of this depression that he began to speak. The mood of the evening didn’t stay with him, though; the next day he had bounced back, and was like the man he had always been. But he was more ready to acknowledge his depression when it came; and what he outlined that evening he returned to and filled in at other times, when the occasion suited, or when he drifted back to that earlier mood.

“We have to learn to trample on the past, Salim. I told you that when we met. It shouldn’t be a cause for tears, because it isn’t just true for you and me. There may be some parts of the world—dead countries, or secure and by-passed ones—where men can cherish the past and think of passing on furniture and china to their heirs. Men can do that perhaps in Sweden or Canada. Some peasant department of France full of half-wits in châteaux; some crumbling Indian palace-city, or some dead colonial town in a hopeless South American country. Everywhere else men are in movement, the world is in movement, and the past can only cause pain.