The Drifters (89 page)

‘Forget Cato. He was an instrument of my self-abasement.’ She continued with an analysis so turgid that her listeners could not understand any of it.

‘I think you ought to go to sleep,’ Gretchen said, and Joe helped lift the girl back into her own bed, where, as soon as she felt Cato’s body, she began mumbling, ‘Wake up, you dark Greek god, and humiliate me.’ She pestered him until he wakened, and for a long time Joe and Gretchen, lying a few feet below, could hear them making impassioned and athletic love.

Target of the trip north was an unusual island. For five centuries it had stood less than a mile offshore from an area that had remained nothing but a primitive hinterland, populated with savage animals and Stone Age blacks, while
the island had flourished as a center of government, sophistication and culture. It was famous as one of the world’s most beautiful islands, not because of its physical attributes but because it contained, over almost every square foot, buildings dating far back into history, spacious squares dedicated to the heroes of Portuguese navigation, and broad avenues lined with flowering trees. At the end nearest the mainland stood an ancient church which St. Francis Xavier had known, and at the opposite end, a forbidding fortress set inside massive walls which had been constructed as long ago as 1545. Repeatedly foreign troops had tried to wrest this fortress from Portugal, but always a bare handful of resolute Portuguese had withstood the invaders for a year, or two, or three. The sieges were fearful, no quarter given, and often Dutch invaders would control ninety-five per cent of the island, but invariably when the siege ended, the fortress would still be occupied by Portuguese troops who would move out cautiously from the walls to reconstruct the rest of the island.

Ilha de Moçambique with its fortress was a shrine in Portuguese history, the most sacred overseas possession, and the roster of great Lusitanians who had served here was endless, led by that one-eyed seaman who had sat on a stone bench at the south end of the island scribbling the verses which were later to be issued as the epic of Portugal,
The Lusiads
of Luis Vaz de Caões.

The wanderers first saw the island from a slight rise on the road that had been cut through long miles of mainland bush. They saw the great gray fortress, the long straight bridge erected recently, and the flowering trees. ‘It was worth the trip,’ Joe said, and Monica agreed: ‘All my life I’ve heard of Moçambique Island. It stands like a sentinel in African history, but I never thought I’d see it.’

Joe was surprised that a girl on heroin could be as lucid as Monica. With Cato it was different. The drug had a decidedly depressing effect on him, and even when he had just popped a shot, the effect was down rather than up. But the major surprise was that the drug, for all its powerful properties, still left them both in apparent control of their capabilities most of the time.

‘The beginning user,’ Gretchen pointed out when Joe discussed his observations. ‘These kids are just starting, and we don’t know how much they’re taking or what the final effect is going to be.’

‘We know that it permits some pretty torrid love-making.’

‘Who needs that?’ Gretchen asked. ‘I mean, who needs the extra stimulus?’ During the last week there had been little evidence of heroin in the pop-top, but twice Monica had spoken of the Indian pusher who controlled the traffic on the island, so Gretchen feared they would have trouble now that they had arrived.

The drive across the long bridge, whose pilings were sunk deep in ocean water, was exciting, for now the young people could see the island clearly and could guess what it held in store for them. ‘Look at those beaches!’ Cato cried. They bordered both sides of the island and ran practically into the center of town. ‘And the trees!’ Monica added. ‘Nobody ever told me they had so many trees on Moçambique.’

Then they were on the island itself, driving along a handsome boulevard lined with casuarina trees and overlooking the Indian Ocean. At a corner they met a black policeman, and Gretchen asked in English, ‘Have you a camping?’ and the policeman, who could speak no English, caught the key word, left his post and walked beside the car for a block, pointed finally to a large and handsome public park.

‘Camping,’ he said.

‘For automobile?’ Gretchen asked, and the man nodded. ‘For sleeping?’ she asked, making a pillow of her hands and resting her head upon it. Again he nodded, pointing to where they would find water.

Even though the camping at Lourenço Marques had been ideal, in some ways this surpassed it, not because it fronted on the Indian Ocean, nor because of the flowers, but because it was situated right in the heart of the city. You lay in your bed and around you passed the wild and varied life of a strange community. Joe maneuvered the pop-top under a huge flowering tree, and a crowd of residents—black and white—gathered to make them welcome. Speaking no English, they showed the girls where the markets were and the stores that gave good bargains. Children explained the beach and the best locations for bathing. Another policeman stopped by to show the men how to buy gasoline and where city hall was, in case of trouble. Then, to the amazement of the group, a rotund Portuguese businessman came by in freshly pressed whites
to invite them to a nearby bar for a welcoming drink.

‘This is Bar Africa,’ he said in patois—part Portuguese, part French, part English. ‘Over there, the hospital. Down there, the Catholic church. A little more, the mosque.’

‘Is the island Muslim?’ Gretchen asked.

‘Eighty per cent,’ the Portuguese said. He paid for the drinks and was about to leave, when Cato said unexpectedly, ‘A lot of my friends in Philadelphia are Black Muslims. Could I see the mosque?’

‘I wouldn’t be the best guide,’ the Portuguese said. ‘I’m Catholic. But I know who would be.’

He dispatched a black boy to run to the post office, and within a few minutes the child returned leading a tall elderly Arab dressed in gray caftan and turban. He wore a small beard, had a deeply lined face and compelling eyes, with which he now studied the young people, paying particular attention to Cato.

‘This is Hajj’,’ the fat Portuguese said, placing his hand affectionately on the arm of the old man. ‘He is our saint.’

‘Hajj’ what?’ Gretchen asked.

‘Just Hajj’,’ the Portuguese said. ‘He had an Arabian name, of course, but for the past fifty years he’s been just Hajj’… the holy one who made the pilgrimage to Mecca … only man of his generation to get there.’

Two Arabs, passing the bar, saw Hajj’ and stopped, asking his blessing, which he gave with a bow of his turbaned head. ‘And now I leave you in his hands,’ the Portuguese said in French, after which he disappeared.

At first the young people were uncomfortable to be with an Arab, for they did not know his language, but Hajj’ smiled and said, ‘I speak English. And even though I am a Muslim, I will have a little of your wine, which is something else I learned from the English.’

He told them of his hajj: ‘In those days it was not easy to get to Mecca. We took a small boat north to Zanzibar. It’s always been a center of Islam, a great center. And we waited there for several weeks till a pilgrimage was arranged and we sailed together to Mogadiscio, which was terribly hot, and we waited there for a couple of weeks, then sailed up to Djibouti for some more pilgrims, and from there to Jidda, where there was almost no water. We walked on foot to Mecca, so many miles that older people died along the way and younger people thought they would die. It was just after the war—the big war—and I
remember the automobiles that whizzed past us, throwing dust in our faces, and one broke down, and as we overtook it we laughed at the rich people sitting inside, but pretty soon it was fixed, and when they drove past us again they not only laughed, their tires also kicked pebbles at us, but when we got to Mecca we saw them again, and the car was broken again, so we could not decide who had the best of it.’

‘Was it worth it?’ Cato asked.

The old man turned, studied Cato’s dark face, and said, ‘Worth it? For me it’s been the difference between living and dying. When I returned, everyone knew me as the hajji, the pilgrim who had made the great hajj. Later two other men tried to reach Mecca, but they died. I was the hajji. Ship captains knew me as Hajj’ and brought me business, but so did God. Mecca inspired me to be a saint, and although I fell short, I have borne testimony to saintliness.’

As he spoke, other visitors came for his blessing, which he gave with his hands together and his fingers pointed downward. Gretchen asked if this was the custom of his church, and he said, ‘It’s a habit I fell into. There is no one else on this island now who is a hajji, so I remind them that Mecca is still there … at the end of a very long and dangerous journey. This is what pilgrimage accomplishes. Now shall we see the mosque?’

He led them to the waterfront and along the bay to a handsome green building topped by a minaret. At the door the Americans started to kick off their shoes, but he restrained them, saying, ‘You do that inside,’ and he showed them the racks for shoes and the line of eight basins for washing hands. He took them to the prayer room, a large, clean area with its mihrab indicating Mecca. Then they climbed to the roof, from which he explained the island’s structure. ‘There by the bridge that you crossed, six or seven native compounds looking exactly as they did when my forefathers came here more than a thousand years ago. Grass huts with grass roofs and a thousand people jammed together where a hundred ought to be. In this area around the mosque, our middle class, mainly Arab. Up toward the fort, the big homes of the Portuguese Catholics. And see how narrow the island is. From one waterfront to the other, not more than three city blocks. We are living on a precious little jewel, one of the treasures of this earth.’

‘Is that a rickshaw?’ Gretchen asked as a black man hurried past toward the center of town pulling a two-wheeled vehicle containing a Portuguese woman.

‘For five hundred years that’s how we traveled … before the bridge brought us the automobiles. People still prefer rickshaws, so we allow no taxis.’

In succeeding days, Cato often sought out this agreeable Arab, who kept a small home overlooking the harbor where he had worked for sixty years. Every day people concerned with shipping stopped to chat with him, but he always found time for Cato. ‘You ought to attend services at the mosque,’ he said, ‘because Islam has been the salvation of your people. Look at the map of Africa. Wherever the blacks of a nation have a strong attachment to Islam, they have good government. Where they are ignorant of Islam, they are powerless to stand up against the white man. In America you will be powerless, too, until you embrace Islam.’

He had many beliefs about the good that Islam could bring to black people, for he held that Muhammad had expressed a special concern for blacks and had constructed in his religion a special home for them. ‘There have been many Muslim leaders who were black,’ Hajj’ said, ‘and there will be more. When I was at Mecca it seemed that half the pilgrims were black. I am told that in America your finest Negroes are followers of Muhammad.’

He invited Cato to attend the Friday services and to see for himself the companionship that existed on this island between the black Muslims and the white, so on Friday noon Cato had lunch with the old man, at the home of a family of Muslims who had come to the island from Pakistan, and Cato observed that all the other guests were Caucasian—either Arab like Hajj’, or Indian like the host—but when he got to the mosque, he saw that most of the worshipers were black. It was a pregnant moment when all in the mosque knelt shoulder to shoulder, regardless of color, and prayed with their faces directed toward Mecca, which lay so far away and across such rough and burning waters.

After prayer a visitor harangued the meeting in a mixture of Arabic, Portuguese and the local bush language, and he became quite excited with the news he had to report. He was a short, florid man, apparently half Arabic, half native, and his dark face grew flushed as he repeated
certain phrases with great fury. Cato asked Hajj’ what the topic was, and he replied gravely, ‘He says that we may have to send men and money to Arabia for the great jihad against the Jews who burned the Al-Aqsa Mosque. He says that black Africa can never know freedom until the Jews have been driven out. He says that a holy war is inevitable, and we must all play our part.’ It was a heady broth the visitor brewed, and the good Muslims of Moçambique listened with many noddings of the head as he explained how Islam was on the verge of greatness again and was deterred by only one thing, the presence of Jews in the holy places.

During the next week Cato visited Hajj’ often, and with the aid of old maps, retraced the pilgrimage to Mecca seven or eight times, until he could visualize the harbor at Zanzibar, the customs officials at Mogadiscio, the automobiles abandoned on the desert route to Mecca, and the fellowship as thousands marched around the Kaaba, that ebony monument at the heart of Islam. And the more Hajj’ expounded his religion, the more clearly Cato understood its appeal to the black people of America. It was a religion of universal brotherhood, as much at home in Africa as in Arabia, and it spoke directly to the problems of the black man, in that it was above all else a religion that made revenge respectable. Dozens of passages in the Koran justified the man who bided his time to correct a wrong, so that gradually Cato came to see Islam as a movement specifically created for blacks who had old scores to settle. He was not drawn to the religion himself, for he supposed it to be as bad a racket as Christianity, but he did perceive that it might be an agency of terrible power for his people, and for this reason he kept returning to Hajj’s quarters near the mosque to talk about the number of black people throughout Africa who had enlisted under the green banner of Islam. Once Hajj’ showed him a magazine article displaying the new flags of Africa and proudly pointed out the new states that showed the crescent—nations like Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Mauritania—or the bright green, which appeared in almost a score of flags. ‘We are the new force in the world,’ the old man said, ‘and in our parade there is a noble place for you.’