A Bend in the River (17 page)

Discovering the ways of pain, the aging that it brings, I wasn’t surprised that Metty and myself should have been so close just at that moment when we understood that we had to go our separate ways. What had given the illusion of closeness that evening was only our regret for the past, our sadness that the world doesn’t stand still.

Our life together didn’t change. He continued to live in his
room in the flat, and he continued to bring me coffee in the mornings. But now it was understood that he had a whole life outside. He altered. He lost the brightness and gaiety of the servant who knows that he will be looked after, that others will decide for him; and he lost what went with that brightness—the indifference to what had just happened, the ability to forget, the readiness for every new day. He seemed to go a little sour inside. Responsibility was new to him; and with that he must also have discovered solitude, in spite of his friends and his new family life.

I, too, breaking out of old ways, had discovered solitude and the melancholy which is at the basis of religion. Religion turns that melancholy into uplifting fear and hope. But I had rejected the ways and comforts of religion; I couldn’t turn to them again, just like that. That melancholy about the world remained something I had to put up with on my own. At some times it was sharp; at some times it wasn’t there.

And just when I had digested that sadness about Metty and the past, someone from the past turned up. He walked into the shop one morning, Metty leading him in, Metty calling out in high excitement, “Salim! Salim!”

It was Indar, the man who had first brought out my panic on the coast, confronted me—after that game of squash in the squash court of his big house—with my own fears about our future, and had sent me away from his house with a vision of disaster. He had given me the idea of flight. He had gone to England, to his university; I had fled here.

And I felt now, as Metty led him in, that he had caught me out again, sitting at my desk in the shop, with my goods spread out on the floor, as they had always been, and with my shelves full of cheap cloth and oilcloth and batteries and exercise books.

He said, “I heard some years ago in London that you were here. I wondered what you were doing.” His expression was cool, balanced between irritation and a sneer, and it seemed to say that he didn’t have to ask now, and that he wasn’t surprised by what he had found.

It had happened so quickly. When Metty came running in
saying, “Salim! Salim! Guess who’s here,” I had at once had an idea that it would be someone we had both known in the old days. I thought it would be Nazruddin, or some member of my family, some brother-in-law or nephew. And I had thought: But I can’t cope. The life here is no longer the old life. I cannot accept this responsibility. I don’t want to run a hospital.

Expecting, then, someone who was about to make a claim on me in the name of family and community and religion, and preparing a face and an attitude for that person, I was dismayed to find Metty leading Indar into the shop, Metty beside himself with joy, not pretending now, but for that moment delighted to recreate something of the old days, being the man in touch with great families. And from being myself the man full of complaint, the man who was going to pour out his melancholy in harsh advice to a new arrival who was perhaps already half crushed—“There is no place for you here. There is no place here for the homeless. Find somewhere else”—from being that kind of man, I had to be the opposite. I had to be the man who was doing well and more than well, the man whose drab shop concealed some bigger operation that made millions. I had to be the man who had planned it all, who had come to the destroyed town at the bend in the river because he had foreseen the rich future.

I couldn’t be any other way with Indar. He had always made me feel so backward. His family, though new on the coast, had outstripped us all; and even their low beginnings—the grandfather who was a railway labourer, then a market money-lender—had become (from the way people spoke) a little sacred, part of their wonderful story. They invested adventurously and spent money well; their way of living was much finer than ours; and there was their unusual passion for games and physical exercise. I had always thought of them as “modern” people, with a style quite different from ours. You get used to differences like that; they can even begin to appear natural.

When we had played squash that afternoon, and Indar had told me he was going to England to a university, I hadn’t felt resentful or jealous of him for what he was doing. Going abroad, the university—that was part of his style, what might have been
expected. My unhappiness was the unhappiness of a man who felt left behind, unprepared for what was coming. And my resentment of him had to do with the insecurity he had made me feel. He had said, “We’re washed up here, you know.” The words were true; I knew they were true. But I disliked him for speaking them: he had spoken as someone who had foreseen it all and had made his dispositions.

Eight years had passed since that day. What he had said would happen had happened. His family had lost a lot; they had lost their house; they (who had added the name of the town on the coast to their family name) had scattered, like my own family. Yet now, as he came into the shop, it seemed that the distance between us had remained the same.

There was London in his clothes, the trousers, the striped cotton shirt, the way his hair was cut, his shoes (oxblood in colour, thin-soled but sturdy, a little too narrow at the toes). And I—well, I was in my shop, with the red dirt road and the market square outside. I had waited so long, endured so much, changed; yet to him I hadn’t changed at all.

So far I had remained sitting. As I stood up I had a little twinge of fear. It came to me that he had reappeared only to bring me bad news. And all I could find to say was: “What brings you to the back of beyond?”

He said, “I wouldn’t say that. You are where it’s at.”

“ ‘Where it’s at’?”

“Where big things are happening. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here.”

That was a relief. At least he wasn’t giving me my marching orders again, without telling me where to go.

Metty all this while was smiling at Indar and swinging his head from side to side, saying, “Indar! Indar!” And it was Metty who remembered our duty as hosts. He said, “You would like some coffee, Indar?” As though we were on the coast, in the family shop, and he just had to step down the lane to Noor’s stall and bring back the little brass cups of sweet and muddy coffee on a heavy brass tray. No coffee like that here; only Nescafe, made in the Ivory Coast, and served in big china cups. Not the same kind
of drink: you couldn’t chat over it, sighing at each hot sweet sip.

Indar said, “That would be very nice, Ali.”

I said, “His name here is Metty. It means ‘half-caste.’ ”

“You let them call you that, Ali?”

“African people, Indar.
Kafar.
You know what they give.”

I said, “Don’t believe him. He loves it. It makes him a great hit with the girls. Ali’s a big family man now. He’s lost.”

Metty, going to the storeroom to boil the water for the Nescafe, said, “Salim, Salim. Don’t let me down too much.”

Indar said, “He was lost a long time ago. Have you heard from Nazruddin? I saw him in Uganda a few weeks ago.”

“What’s it like out there now?”

“Settling down. For how long is another matter. Not one bloody paper has spoken up for the king. Did you know that? When it comes to Africa, people don’t want to know or they have their principles. Nobody cares a damn about the people who live in the place.”

“But you do a lot of travelling.”

“It’s my business. How are things with you here?”

“It’s been very good since the rebellion. The place is booming. Property is fantastic. Land is two hundred francs a square foot in some parts now.”

Indar didn’t look impressed—but the shop wasn’t an impressive place. I felt, too, I had run on a little bit and was doing the opposite of what I intended to do with Indar. Wishing to let him know that his assumptions about me were wrong, I was in fact acting out the character he saw me as. I was talking the way I had heard traders in the town talk, and even saying the things they said.

I said, attempting another kind of language, “It’s a specialized business. A sophisticated market would be easier in some ways. But here you can’t follow your personal likes and dislikes. You have to know exactly what is needed. And of course there are the agencies. That’s where the real money is.”

Indar said, “Yes, yes. The agencies. It’s like old times for you, Salim.”

I let that pass. But I decided to tone the whole thing down. I said, “I don’t know how long it’s going to last, though.”

“It will last as long as your President wants it to last. And no one can tell how long that will be. He’s a strange man. He seems to be doing nothing at all, and then he can act like a surgeon. Cutting away some part he doesn’t like.”

“That’s how he settled the old army. It was terrible, Indar. He sent a message to Colonel Yenyi telling him to stay at the barracks and to welcome the commander of the mercenaries. So he stayed on the steps in full uniform, and when they arrived he began to walk to the gate. They shot him as he walked. And everybody with him.”

“It saved your bacon, though. I have something for you, by the way. I went to see your father and mother before I came here.”

“You went home?” But I dreaded hearing about it from him.

He said, “Oh, I’ve been there a few times since the great events. It isn’t so bad. You remember our house? They’ve painted it in the party colours. It’s some kind of party building now. Your mother gave me a bottle of coconut chutney. It isn’t for you alone. It is for Ali and you. She made that clear.” And to Metty, coming back then with the jug of hot water and the cups and the tin of Nescafe and the condensed milk, he said, “Ma sent you some coconut chutney, Ali.”

Metty said, “Chutney, coconut chutney. The food here is
horrible,
Indar.”

We sat all three around the desk, stirring coffee and water and condensed milk together.

Indar said, “I didn’t want to go back. Not the first time. I didn’t think my heart could stand it. But the airplane is a wonderful thing. You are still in one place when you arrive at the other. The airplane is faster than the heart. You arrive quickly and you leave quickly. You don’t grieve too much. And there is something else about the airplane. You can go back many times to the same place. And something strange happens if you go back often enough. You stop grieving for the past. You see that the past is something in your mind alone, that it doesn’t exist in real life. You trample on the past, you crush it. In the beginning
it is like trampling on a garden. In the end you are just walking on ground. That is the way we have to learn to live now. The past is here.” He touched his heart. “It isn’t there.” And he pointed at the dusty road.

I felt he had spoken the words before, or had gone over them in his mind. I thought: He fights to keep his style. He’s probably suffered more than the rest of us.

We sat, the three of us, drinking Nescafe. And I thought the moment beautiful.

Still, the conversation had so far been one-sided. He knew everything about me; I knew nothing about his recent life. When I had first arrived in the town I had noticed that for most people conversation meant answering questions about themselves; they seldom asked you about yourself; they had been cut off for too long. I didn’t want Indar to feel that way about me. And I really wanted to know about him. So, a little awkwardly, I began to ask.

He said he had been in the town for a couple of days and was going to stay for a few months. Had he come up by the steamer? He said, “You’re crazy. Cooped up with river Africans for seven days? I flew up.”

Metty said, “I wouldn’t go anywhere by the steamer. They tell me it’s horrible. And it’s even worse on the barge, with the latrines and the people cooking and eating everywhere. It’s horrible-horrible, they tell me.”

I asked Indar where he was staying: it had occurred to me that I should make the gesture of offering him hospitality. Was he staying at the van der Weyden?

This was the question he was waiting to be asked. He said in a soft and unassuming voice, “I’m staying at the State Domain. I have a house there. I’m a guest of the government.”

And Metty behaved more graciously than I. Metty slapped the desk and said, “Indar!”

I said, “The Big Man invited you?”

He began to scale it down. “Not exactly. I have my own outfit. I am attached to the polytechnic for a term. Do you know it?”

“I know someone there. A student.”

Indar behaved as though I had interrupted him; as though—
although I lived in the place, and he had just arrived—I was trespassing, and had no right to know a student at the polytechnic.

I said, “His mother’s a
marchande,
one of my customers.”

That was better. He said, “You must come and meet some of the other people there. You may not like what’s going on. But you mustn’t pretend it isn’t happening. You mustn’t make that mistake again.”

I wanted to say: “I live here. I have lived through quite a lot in the last six years.” But I didn’t say that. I played up to his vanity. He had his own idea of the kind of man I was—and indeed he had caught me in my shop, at my ancestral business. He had his own idea of who he was and what he had done, the distance he had put between himself and the rest of us.

His vanity didn’t irritate me. I found I was relishing it, in the way that years before, on the coast, as a child, I had relished Nazruddin’s stories of his luck and of the delights of life here, in the colonial town. I hadn’t slapped the desk like Metty, but I was impressed by what I saw of Indar. And it was a relief to put aside the dissatisfactions he made me feel, to forget about being caught out, and to give him a straight admiration for what he had made of himself—for his London clothes and the privilege they spoke of, his travelling, his house in the Domain, his position at the polytechnic.

To give him admiration, to appear not to be competing or resisting, was to put him at his ease. As we chatted over our Nescafe, as Metty exclaimed from time to time, expressing in his servant’s manner the admiration which his master also felt, Indar’s edginess wore off. He became gentle, full of manners, concerned. At the end of the morning I felt I had at last made a friend of my kind. And I badly needed such a friend.