In a Free State (31 page)

As soon as he entered he knew he had made a mistake. But it was too late to withdraw. In the cool dark room, with its desks and chairs pushed to the walls, with the new photograph of the president on the green noticeboard, among old notices about rates and taxes and wanted criminals and other printed and duplicated lists, there was no officer, no policeman. Three soldiers with shaved heads were sitting below the window on the concrete floor, their caps on their knees. They all stood up as Bobby entered.

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

‘Sir!’ one of the soldiers said, and they all stood to attention.

‘Who your officer? Who your boss-man?’

They didn’t reply and Bobby didn’t know how, after his good start, to continue.

They saw his hesitation and they ceased to be nervous. They relaxed. Their faces became full of inquiry.

The soldier in the middle said, ‘No boss-man.’

Bobby felt he had used the wrong word. He looked from the soldier in the middle to the soldier on the right, the fattest of the three, the one who had called him sir. ‘You give pass here?’

The fat soldier’s cheeks rode up to his small liquid eyes. He waved his right hand slowly in front of his face, showing Bobby the palm.

‘No pass,’ the soldier in the middle said.

Bobby looked at him. ‘Mr Wanga-Butere
my
boss-man.’ Smiling, he held his hands in front of him to indicate an enormous paunch, and he pretended to stagger under the weight. ‘Mr Busoga-Kesoro my
big
boss-man.’

They didn’t smile.

‘Busoga-Kesoro,’ the fat soldier said, studying Bobby’s face, and working his cheeks and lips as though gathering spittle. ‘Busoga-Kesoro.’

‘You no have curfew?’ Bobby said.

‘Car-few,’ the fat soldier said.

The soldier in the middle said, ‘Car-few.’

‘What time you have car-few? Four o’clock, five o’clock, six o’clock?’

‘Five o’clock,’ the fat soldier said. ‘Six o’clock.’

Bobby held out his wrist and pointed to his watch. ‘Four? Five? Six?’

‘You give me?’ the fat soldier said, and held Bobby’s wrist.

Black skin on pink: they all looked.

The fat soldier moved his thumb over the dial of the watch. His eyes were friendly, womanish. His cheeks and lips began to work again.

The soldier in the middle unbuttoned the pocket of his tunic and took out a crushed, half-empty packet of cigarettes. It was the brand which, in the advertisements, laughing Africans smoked.

Outside, lorries were revving up. There was chatter and shouting. Boots grated on asphalt; cab-doors slammed. Lorries whined away in low gear.

‘I no give you,’ Bobby said. ‘I no have no more.’

He had made a joke. They all laughed.

‘No have no more,’ the fat soldier said, and let Bobby’s wrist drop.

‘I go,’ Bobby said.

He walked towards the door. He had a view of the sunlit road, the dusty yard with its diagonal line of shadow, the insect-spattered front of his car.

‘Boy!’

He stopped; it was his error. He turned, to face the dark room.

It was the soldier in the middle who had spoken. He was holding out an unlit cigarette, very white, between his middle and index fingers.

‘I give you cigarette, boy.’

‘I no smoke,’ Bobby said.

‘I give you. Come, I give you.’

And Bobby walked from the door and the brightness towards the soldiers, preferring that what was going to happen should happen here, in the dark room, rather than in the open, before the others.

The soldier’s hand was outstretched still, open, palm down, the cigarette perpendicular between the middle and index fingers. Then the fingers widened, the cigarette fell, and in that same movement of finger-widening the palm came up at Bobby’s face, only clawing, it seemed, but then landing hard on his chin. The other hand tore at the yellow native shirt.

‘I report you,’ Bobby said, falling back. ‘I report you.’

The other soldiers were behind him, to support him as he fell, to seize and twist his arms with practised hands; and it seemed then that the soldier in front of him was maddened not by his words but by the sound and sight of the torn shirt. He tore again
and again at the shirt and the vest below the shirt, and with the right hand that had held the cigarette he clawed with clumsy rage at Bobby’s face as though wishing to seize it by the nose, chin and cheeks alone.

‘I report you,’ Bobby said.

His arms were twisted harder and he was thrown forward, and when he was on the concrete floor, feeling the boots thump him on the back, the neck, the jaw, he saw, with surprise, that the legs of two soldiers were quite still. It was the fat soldier, grunting as he squatted, tight in his khaki, who was beside him, seizing him by the hair, banging his head on the floor, rubbing his face hard on the floor, now this side, now the other. Bobby knew he was losing skin; but still he noticed that the other soldiers remained where they were.

He had thought at first that the soldier with the cigarette wished only to humiliate, denude, disfigure; and he had half understood, half felt sympathy. But they had gone too far; and now he felt that the fat soldier, who had asked for the watch, intended to kill. He thought: I must protect myself, I must play dead.

Sprawling on his front, he made himself heavy, his left arm jammed against the side of his head. The boots probed his ribs, his belly, probed and kicked. Bobby tried not to move; he didn’t think he moved; the fine grit on the smooth plaster of the floor stuck to his wet skin. He didn’t open his eyes, fearing to find that he might not be able to see. Then he felt the boot hard on his right wrist, and he could have cried then, at the clear pure pain, the knowledge of the fracture, so deliberate, the knowledge that what had been whole all his life had been broken. He shut out everything to concentrate on that wrist. He felt it grow numb; he felt the swelling come. And then he was on the road again, in a bright landscape, nervous at his own speed, his tyre-tracks and the wet, billowing road.

He awakened. He thought he would open his eyes. His whole face burned. He could see. He could see that in the dark room
there were no more khaki legs. He waited to make sure. He felt it was important to act at once, while he was lucid, while the strength that had come back to him remained. He sat up, leaning on his wrist. He had forgotten that injury; he remembered now. He stood up, and he was steady. He didn’t look at himself. Walking, he remembered to look on the floor. But he didn’t see the cigarette the soldier had dropped.

The light was yellower. Shadows had spread and were less harsh. There was more dust and smoke. The sun caught the windscreen of a lorry, a window of the school. Soldiers squatted or sat around small twig fires, eating out of tin plates, drinking out of tin cups, unhurried, deliberate, their eyes and voices bright with the pleasure of food: forest people, kings of the forest, at the end of another lucky day. Some way behind them, in the sun, the bound black prisoners lay on the ground and didn’t move.

A soldier saw Bobby and stared. The soldier’s eyes glittered. Without turning his head he spoke to the man beside him, and the whole group looked. Bobby held his hands at his side and stood in the doorway, allowing himself to be examined. He began to walk to the car, which remained where he had left it, quite exposed on the open road, the wheels slightly sunk in the asphalt. The soldiers went back to their food.

Linda, still in her seat, leaned to hold the door open. No one came to the car. The engine answered. Bobby rested his right hand on the steering-wheel. No one stopped him from leaving. The afternoon light made every scratch on the windscreen gold. The almost perpendicular side of Leopard Tor was also gold; the shadowed side was blurred, the forest on its lower slopes now like part of the surrounding bush.

Four or five hundred yards away, over the brow of the hill, they came to the roadblock. The soldier with the rifle, his face just black below his cap, waved them down with the awkward flapping African gesture. But even before they stopped, the man in the
flowered shirt and dark trousers and his hair in the English style, on the other side of the road, signalled to them to go on.

Bobby drove in and out of the white barriers and then slowly past the vehicles halted on the other side of the road, vehicles going out of the Collectorate: the Peugeot taxi-buses, the broken-down vans and African cars. The passengers were on the verge. Some were holding duplicated foolscap sheets, their passes; but others were already sitting down or lying on the grass, half naked, their clothes torn; the fully clothed soldiers moved among them. Some of the African women were in Edwardian costumes. So the first missionaries had appeared among the king’s people; and so, ever since, but in African-style cottons, the women of the king’s people had dressed on formal occasions or whenever they made a long journey.

The road continued straight, from hilltop to hilltop, a strip of asphalt in a wide swathe through the bush.

Linda said, ‘Let’s stop for a little, Bobby.’

He pulled up on the road, just like that.

She tried to dust his hair, to straighten the rags of the yellow shirt. There was little else she could do. He didn’t allow her to touch his face.

She said, ‘Your watch is broken.’

Bobby closed his heavy eyes and, in that darkness, thought, with sudden passing sorrow for her, for whom so much had also gone wrong: but these are the hands of a nurse.

He opened his eyes and saw the road. They drove on. The sky above was dark blue; the light was beginning to go. The tufted forest glowed where the king’s villages were burning.

They were a people who lived, vulnerably now, in villages along their ancient straight roads: roads that had spread their power as forest conquerors, until the first explorers came. The villages were close together; the highway was normally full of pedestrians and cyclists. But the road now was empty; and the villages they
passed were empty, dead, burnt-out. The villages that blazed were in the dirt tracks off the main road.

Linda said, ‘I wonder if they’ve burned down the compound.’

But there was no other place to drive to.

The road dipped; they lost the view of the burning villages. The bush was tall and dark in this depression. They had entered forest, and the road, a straight black cutting, swung away between walls of forest, up and down, and then up to a high horizon. Bobby’s wrist ached; he felt his eyes grow heavy. And then he was in a white storm. Like flakes of snow they came out of the forest, butterflies, white, on the asphalt, on the grass, on tree trunks, in the air, millions and millions of white butterflies, fluttering out of the forest. And the storm did not stop. They were crushed by the car wheels; they touched the bonnet and fluttered on the hot metal and died; they stuck to the windscreen.

Linda worked the washer; she turned on the wipers.

The road rose. The butterflies stopped as suddenly as they had begun. The forest ended. The sky above was the darkest blue. In the distance they saw the villages burning around the small town, showing in the quick dusk as a few broken lines of lights.

Bobby said, ‘I believe something’s happened to my wrist.’

‘I wish I could drive.’

He heard the panic in Linda’s voice, and he didn’t care. The road continued empty, the villages they passed gutted. Collapsed huts of mud and grass would have seemed part of the bush; corrugated iron made a ruin. Here and there women and children had returned to the ruins, the women plump in the manner of the women of the king’s people, looking over-dressed in their Edwardian costumes. The car drove itself; and it didn’t surprise Bobby, now only following the headlights of the car, that the women, shiny-faced with fatigue, should be where they were; or that in the little industrial estate just outside the town there should still be electricity and illuminated signboards; or that where once,
behind its high double walls, the king’s palace glowed dully there should be darkness.

The walls had been breached; there was destruction inside: lorries, soldiers, campfires. To that ancient site, less than a hundred years before, the first explorers had brought news of the world beyond the forest. Now the site had its first true ruin, a palace built mostly in the 1920s, the first palace built there of materials less perishable than reeds and grass.

Between the palace and the colonial town was an open, indeterminate area: caravanserai, rubbish dump, pasture-land, market place, shanty town. Few lights burned there. Wholesale warehouses, traffic lights: road signs became complicated. Army lorries and jeeps stood at some intersections. Sometimes the headlights picked out the green cap and shining face of a dazzled soldier. But no awkward hand waved Bobby down. In the main street, where half a dozen three- or four-storeyed concrete buildings rose above the old pioneer wooden structures of the original Indian-English settlement, some Indian furniture shops had been looted. But most of the shops were boarded up and whole.

After the main street the town was open again: a park, looking across to the scattered lights of the main residential area; a roundabout, with soldiers; then, straight ahead, going out of the town again, into the darkness again, towards the glowing sky, another nondescript African area, houses and huts and roadside standpipes, motor-repair yards with decrepit lorries, shops and stalls and backyard vegetable plots, stretching all the way to the compound. Usually this road was busy, and at this time of evening dangerous with drunks or Africans from the deep bush who hadn’t yet learned to assess the speed of motor vehicles. Now it was clear. But the road was rough, potholed after the rains, and bumpy with asphalt that had melted and run together and grown hard. At every bump Bobby grew weaker.

Trees screened the compound from the road. At the end of the short drive two dim globes burned above the pillars of the iron
gates. The gates were closed; the red-and-white wooden barrier was down. Bobby stopped. A torchlight flashed inches away from his face, and just outside the dazzle he saw lorries and soldiers.

The torchlight played about the windscreen, smeared with the yellow-white mess of mangled butterflies, and rested on the compound pass stuck on the inside.