In a Free State (30 page)

Bobby turned into the dirt road. At once there was dust. At once all that the rear-view mirror showed was dust, dense and
billowing, like the yellow smoke from a fierce fire. Bobby closed the windows; but as he drove along, obliterating what he had seen, bush, tall trees, an empty wooden hut, the dust in the car became thicker. He saw a large corrugated-iron shed standing in a junkyard, old grease black and thick on dust; and next to this, behind two or three starved shrubs in hard earth, a white concrete bungalow on low pillars, squarely exposed to the afternoon sun.

Bobby stopped and rolled down his window. Dust billowed slowly around the car. When Bobby sounded his horn, a lanky Indian youth opened the front door of the bungalow. He looked at the car, and beckoned. Bobby hesitated. The boy stood where he was, between verandah and inner room, a puzzled intermediary between Bobby and someone inside.

Bobby went into the bungalow. The verandah, an afternoon sun-trap, heat reflected from white walls and rising from the floorboards, was empty. In the suffocating little drawing-room, among paper flowers and paperbacks, chairs with chromium-plated metal frames and Hindu deities in copper-coloured plastic, Linda appeared to be having tea. With bared teeth she was biting the very tip of a pickled chili.

Bobby ignored the middle-aged Indian, Linda’s host, and said, ‘We don’t have too much time now.’

Linda said, ‘I’m having a little tea.’

‘Well, I suppose there’s no rush. I suppose I’ll have a little tea too.’

‘Yes, yes,’ the middle-aged Indian said, and went out of the room.

Neither Bobby nor Linda nor the tall boy spoke. It was very hot. Linda was red; Bobby began to sweat. A young woman in a green sari brought a plate of pickles and an extra cup, and went out again.

‘Nice place you have here,’ Bobby said, when the middle-aged man returned.

‘Mrs McCartland,’ the man said, sitting down and rocking his
legs from side to side. ‘She sold up in a hurry when she went South. House, furniture, books, business, everything.’

Bobby said, ‘Nice books.’

‘You want a few?’ His legs still, the man leaned towards the bookcase and pulled out a handful of paperbacks with his left hand. ‘Take.’

Bobby shook his head. ‘Are you going South too?’

The man giggled and pushed the books back in place. ‘I am thinking of cloth business in the United States. Or Cairo. I am starting a juices-parlour in Cairo.’

‘What’s that?’

‘These Egyptians, you see, are drinking so much of the fresh fruit juices. As soon as I can get my money out, I will go. My brother is already there. Where are you going?’

‘I live here,’ Bobby said. ‘I’m a government officer.’

Slowly, the man’s legs stopped rocking. He giggled.

Linda got up. ‘I think we should be starting.’

Bobby smiled and sipped his tea.

‘You knew Mr McCartland?’ the man asked, after a time.

‘I didn’t know him.’ Bobby stood up.

‘He died when he was very young,’ the man said, following Bobby and Linda out into the yard and the road, where the dust was still settling. ‘He was a great racer. He used to drive early in the mornings from here to the capital at a hundred miles an hour.’

Bobby, walking slowly, looking up at the sky, not acknowledging the man’s farewells, said, ‘That’s what we’ll have to do now to get to the Collectorate before the curfew.’

They got into the car. The Indian went up to his verandah and watched them reverse in the garage yard. The dust began to billow again. When they drove away dust blotted out the road.

Linda said, ‘Do you believe that man drove to the capital at a hundred miles an hour?’

‘Do you?’

‘I wonder why he said that.’

At the junction the shops were as closed and blank as before. The bleached Africans on the tin advertisements grinned; shadows had lengthened below the eaves.

They turned into the highway and rolled down their windows. The sun slanted through the scratched dusty windscreen. Everything in the car was coated with dust; on the dashboard every little grain of dust cast a minute shadow. On the soft tar, on the righthand side of the road, Bobby saw one of the tracks he had made when he had driven back to the village. All his other tracks had been obliterated, by treads of a chunkier pattern. More than one heavy vehicle had passed, keeping more or less to the left, heading towards the Collectorate.

Bobby drove cautiously. He came again to the stretch of subsidence where the road, soft tar on an uneven surface, appeared to billow and melt. Here was where he had stopped: something still remained of the curving tracks where he had turned.

‘Are we very late?’ Linda said.

‘We’ve only lost about half an hour. But I imagine you’ll smile sweetly at them and they’ll give us a cup of tea.’

They both smiled, as though they had both won.

At first with private smiles, and then with fixed faces, they drove through the hot afternoon air, shadows beginning to fall on the road, slanting towards them from the right; and neither of them exclaimed when, abruptly, they saw Leopard Tor again, nearer now and larger, half in sun and half in shadow, its vertical wall less sheer, its sloping side, tufted with forest, more jagged.

Linda said, ‘Do you believe he’s really going to Cairo?’

‘He’s lying,’ Bobby said. ‘Everybody lies.’

She smiled.

Then she saw what Bobby was gazing at, at the end of the road: the column of army lorries whose tyre-tracks they had been following.

H
E HUNG BACK
. He speeded up. He hung back again. Neither he nor Linda spoke. Leopard Tor, rising out of bush, was always to the right, its forested slope in shadow. The vegetation beside the highway had subtly altered. It was still scrub; no crops grew on it; but it was acquiring a rainy tropical lushness. They came nearer and nearer the lorries, a column of five, their slanting shadows falling just over the asphalt and jigging along the irregularities of the verge. Sometimes, through a break in the vegetation, Bobby and Linda could see the purely tropical land beyond the Tor, the territory of the king’s people, a vast sunlit woodland, seemingly empty, with only scattered patches of a browner haze to show where, in that bush, the villages were.

The green-capped soldiers sitting with rifles at the back of the last lorry scowled at the car. The faces of the soldiers behind them were in shadow. Then Bobby saw the driver. His face and his cap, shakily reflected in profile in the wing-mirror of the cab, made a featureless black outline against a background of dazzle. Sometimes, when the lorry bumped, or when he turned to look at the mirror and Bobby, the face caught a yellow shine from the sun.

So for a time Bobby and Linda drove on, keeping at a fixed distance from the last lorry. Behind the tailboard, with its heraldic regimental emblem, the soldiers continued to scowl. Intermittently Bobby felt the gaze of the driver; every now and then that face in the mirror shone.

Linda said, ‘If we go on at this rate we’ll certainly be late.’

‘It’s not easy to overtake on this road,’ Bobby said. ‘It winds so much.’

They drove on. The soldiers continued to stare.

Linda said, ‘We’re probably making them anxious.’

Bobby didn’t smile.

They came to a stretch of road that was straight and undeniably clear.

Bobby sounded his horn and pulled out to overtake. The soldiers became alert. Bobby, accelerating, looked up at them, looked away, too quickly, and was dazzled by the sun. He began to overtake, sounding his horn. The lorry moved to the right. Spots streamed before Bobby’s eyes; he raced; he was already almost off the road. The lorry continued to move to the right. Bobby was driving beside it. He felt his right wheels mount the verge. The ditch came close. He braked and the car bucked and bumped. The lorry pulled away. The soldiers’ faces creased into friendly smiles. The cab-mirror reflected the driver’s laugh: suddenly he had a face. Then that reflection was lost. The car was askew on the verge. The lorry moved further away, fell back into line. The soldiers’ faces became indistinct. A khaki-clad arm came out from the driver’s cab and flapped about awkwardly, hand swinging from the wrist: it was a signal to overtake.

Linda said, ‘When you meet the army, play dead.’

The back of Bobby’s shirt was wet. His face began to burn. He felt the heat of the engine, the bonnet, the windscreen. The air was warm; the floor of the car was warm. Hot sweat broke out afresh all over his body. His eyes pricked; his trousers stuck to his shins.

He started the car and took it off the verge. Once more he followed the tracks of the lorries, chunky zipper-patterns on the soft asphalt. He drove slowly, never more than thirty-five miles an hour; and still from time to time they saw the lorries. The Tor grew larger; haze softened its shadowed forested slope. The afternoon light grew smoky.

And now the highway opened up, and for miles ahead was as straight as a Roman road, swinging from hill to hill. The army lorries, small in the distance, climbed, disappeared, and then were
seen to climb again. They were entering the territory of the king’s people; and the highway here followed the ancient forest road. For centuries, using only the products of the forest, earth, reeds, the king’s people had built their roads as straight as this, over hills, across swamps. From far away Bobby could see the small whitewashed stone building, a police post, that stood at the boundary of the king’s territory. But the flag that flew there today wasn’t the king’s flag. It was the flag of the president’s country.

Near the stone building the lorries turned off the road, and the road was empty again. But Bobby didn’t drive any faster. There was no longer any point; it was past four, the hour of the curfew. Soon they could see the low, sprawling modern building, glass and coloured concrete, as bright as beads, that the Americans had built in the bush as a gift to the new country. It had been intended as a school, and symbolically it straddled the king’s territory and the president’s. It had been visited but never used; there had been neither pupils nor teachers; it had remained empty. It had a use today. The cleared space in front, partly bushed-over again, was full of lorries. And in the shade of the lorries there were groups of fat soldiers.

No barrier stood in the road here; no one waved them down. But Bobby stopped: the school, the lorries and the soldiers to his left, the stone building, over which the president’s flag flew, across the road to his right. The soldiers didn’t look at the car. No one came out of the stone building. Beyond the Tor was bright woodland, extending to the horizon through a deepening smoke haze.

‘Do we wait for them here?’ Linda said.

Bobby didn’t reply.

‘Perhaps there’s no curfew,’ Linda said.

A soldier was looking at them. He was shorter than the soldiers he stood with, near the open tailboard of a lorry. He was drinking from a tin cup.

‘Perhaps the colonel got it wrong,’ Linda said.

‘
Did
he?’ Bobby said.

The soldier moved away from the group by the tailboard, shook out his tin cup, and walked slowly towards the car. His head was shaved and bare. His stiff khaki trousers were creased below his paunch and down the round thighs that rubbed against one another. He sucked at the inside of his fat cheeks and bunched his lips and spat, carefully, leaning to one side to let the spittle drain out from his lips. He smiled at the car.

Then they saw the prisoners. They were sitting on the ground; some were prostrate; most were naked. It was their nakedness that had camouflaged them in the sun-and-shade about the shrubs, small trees and lorries. Bright eyes were alive in black flesh; but there was little movement among the prisoners. They were the slender, small-boned, very black people of the king’s tribe, a clothed people, builders of roads. But such dignity as they had possessed in freedom had already gone; they were only forest people now, in the hands of their enemies. Some were roped up in the traditional forest way, neck to neck, in groups of three or four, as though for delivery to the slave-merchant. All showed the liver-coloured marks of blood and beatings. One or two looked dead.

The soldier smiled, wet hand holding the wet tin cup, and came near the car.

Bobby, preparing a smile, leaned across Linda and, with his left hand freeing the wet native shirt from his left armpit, asked, ‘Who your officer? Who your boss-man?’

Linda looked away from the soldier to the whitewashed stone building and the flag, the Tor and the smoking woodland.

The soldier pressed his belly against the car door and the smell of his warm khaki mingled with the smell of the sweat from Bobby’s open left armpit and his yellow back. The soldier looked at Bobby and Linda and looked into the car, and spoke softly in a complicated forest language.

‘Who your boss-man?’ Bobby asked again.

‘Let’s drive on, Bobby,’ Linda said. ‘They’re not interested in us. Let’s drive on.’

Bobby pointed to the stone building. ‘Boss-man there?’

The soldier spoke again, this time to Linda, in his language.

She said irritably, ‘I don’t understand,’ and looked straight ahead.

The soldier behaved as though he had been slapped. He gave a sheepish smile and took a step back from the car. He shook out his tin cup; he stopped smiling. He said softly,
‘Don’ un’erstan’. Don’ un’erstan’.
’ He looked down at the body of the car, the doors, the wheels, as though searching for something. Then he turned and began to walk back to his group.

Bobby opened his door and got out. It was cool; the sweated shirt was chill on his back; but the tar was soft below his feet. He could see the prisoners more clearly now. He could see the smoke from the woodland beyond the Tor. Not haze, not afternoon cooking-fires: in that bush, villages were on fire. The rebuffed soldier was talking to his comrades. Bobby tried not to see. His instinct was to get back in the car and drive without stopping to the compound. But he controlled himself. Quickly, right hand swinging, he crossed the bright road into the dusty yard and the shadow cast by the stone building, and went through the open door.