My Other Life (3 page)

In this story about Uncle Hal and the psychiatrist, the analysis went on for about a year, and then after listening to so many of these sad, strange tales, the psychiatrist became depressed, canceled the remainder of the sessions, and killed himself.

Uncle Hal vanished so completely we thought that he had died. People wondered about him, and then even the stories stopped. We moved. There was no word of him. Better not to ask, we said. We got on with our lives, feeling steadier and more certain now that he was gone.

He was not dead. How silly of us not to have realized what he had been doing all this time.

When Uncle Hal's novel was published it was praised for its humanity, its luminous subtlety, its sense of fun, its quiet wisdom. It was, everyone agreed, a masterpiece of sanity and elegance.

B
OARDING THE TRAIN
in the African darkness just before dawn was like climbing into the body of a huge, dusty monster. I rejoiced in the strangeness of entering it, and I felt safe and happy inside, curled up half asleep on a wooden bench. After sunup it did not seem so huge. And in harsh daylight the dirty walls confined me, the bars on the windows became black and apparent, and my coach began to stink in the heat. I had a book on my lap, a new translation of Kafka's
Diaries.
I read only a few pages, in the way you nibble a sandwich, knowing it will have to last; and then I glanced around.

The unpainted seats had been brought to a rich mellow shine, the wood buffed by years of ragged bottoms. The whistle blew, we started to move, and on the first bend I saw the gasping boiler of the steam engine, the locomotive drooling oil and water, looking wounded. It was just another old colonial train.

Once we were out of town, in ten minutes or less, the huts beside the tracks were poorer—thatched roofs instead of tin, and clusters of them, the simplest villages, showing their skeletal framework of sticks through the mud and daub like the bones of their occupants, who squatted near them, watching us pass by. When I caught their eye they looked fearful and apologetic.

The trees along the tracks were thin, the soil was poor, and this stony land became flatter and drier as the train labored north, snorting. When the sun was above those spindly branches, slanting into the gaping windows of the train, it heated the rusty bars and the battered interior, and the coach became very hot. And now I could see the peanut shells, the orange peels, the spat-out mass of bitten and chewed sugar-cane stalks on the floor. A woman in the next seat was nursing a child, but the child was seven or older and so this act of suckling seemed like incest, awkwardly sexual instead of maternal, because she was young and small and the child was large and greedy.

Dust stirred by the locomotive and the front coaches floated through the windows with sticky smoke clouds, reeking of burned coal. The locomotive dated from the British period—the war perhaps. This thick engine smoke left a layer of soot and greasy smuts everywhere, and it soon blackened my bare arms. I sweated and smeared it. I had not thought to bring food. I had nothing to drink. And I was alone on this first day of October, known in Malawi as "the suicide month" because of the intense heat.

This trip should have been miserable. It was magic.

It was my first taste of freedom in Africa; it was drama, it was romance, too. I had the sense that I had successfully escaped in this big clumsy train. Although I had not published any of the poems I had written, this trip made me feel like a writer. It was something about the risk I was taking—into the unknown—but it was also the sense that I was making discoveries. The train was carrying me away from the only Africa I knew, a demoralized place of bungalows and shanty settlements, the white club, the black slums, the Indian shops, a town that was no more than one wide street. I had come to dislike Blantyre for its being ordinary. I needed something darker, stranger. I needed risk—danger, even.

For almost a year I had been teaching at a small school just outside the town, and the more time I spent at the school the more tame it had seemed. I had grown used to it, but I had wanted more. All this time I had wanted to travel in the bush. Now was my chance.

"Going upcountry?" my friend Mark had asked the day before I left. He was English, from Southern Rhodesia.

"Upcountry" said it all.

This was my vacation work. We Peace Corps teachers were told to get jobs or to do something useful during the African school holidays. I could have stayed at my school and catalogued books, or led a team of brush cutters for the new sports field. I could have invented a job, or made any excuse to stay at the school. Then one of my students mentioned that he was from Central Province, near the lake shore. He told me the name of his village and said it was on the way to the mission hospital, Moyo.

"The leprosarium," he said.

I had never heard this English word before and I was bewitched by it and grateful to the student who taught it to me.

My student went on to say that at this mission the priests and nuns were
mzungus,
like me.

I wrote to the Father Superior and said that I wanted to visit during the long school holiday. I could teach English, I said. Father DeVoss replied, saying that I would be welcome. For the next few weeks I thought of nothing else.

Everything about the trip excited me. I would be traveling by steam train to a remote part of the country. I would be in the bush alone, in a leper colony. I would be leaving behind politics and order and dullness. It was what I craved, a place in Africa that was wild. Wilderness was paradise, where you could begin again.

"Leprosarium" was a fascinating word. I was tantalized by the name of the disease, by the remoteness of the place. It was not just unusual, I felt; it verged on the bizarre. Leprosy was a primitive and dark disease, like an ancient curse. It suggested the unclean, it called to mind outcasts. There was something forbidden about it. It was an aspect of old unsubde Africa. Leper, leper, leper. I was sick of metaphors. I wanted words to have unambiguous meanings: leper, wilderness, poverty, heat.

These were my thoughts. The tropical sky was vast and pale. I liked the heat. I was grubby and comfortable, buying food from old women at the stations where we stopped, and sitting in the sooty coach, peeling oranges, eating peanuts, like the rest of the passengers.

Such a journey had been my object in coming to Africa. I was twenty-three years old. I wanted to make my living as a writer. I yearned to know the inside of the continent—its secrets. I was disappointed in my town, Blantyre. I hated its muddy main street.

These towns in central Africa had been laid out by the British, and they had the look of garrisons. There were bars and there was a movie theater and a fish and chips shop. But I had not come to Africa to drink beer and go to the movies. There were girls who hung around the bars and they went home with anyone and never asked for money. Prostitution and political tyranny were in the future. These were years of innocence in Africa.

I looked up from my book and out the window of the train and saw that we were penetrating the bush. I was happy.

Besides Kafka's
Diaries,
in two volumes, which had recently been sent to me, I had my own writing, a folder of poems, my notebooks. I planned to work in the daytime and be a poet at night, the way I lived at my school. This was like a voyage. I had prepared for it as though I were going to sea, and that was how the bush seemed to me, like an ocean.

I had never been in a train that moved so slowly. It made the trip especially strange, this ponderous movement. After three hours the train seemed not clumsy and old anymore but venerable and important, and the image of the bush as an ocean that had come to me earlier was part of it, the train like an old vessel plowing this ocean. It stopped often and everywhere, not always at a station or a platform but in the middle of nowhere, in the yellowy bush, the spindly tree limbs stuck against the window, and the wall of foliage so close that the locomotive's racket echoed against it. There seemed no point in these stops, fifteen or twenty of them before noon, and several times the train hesitated, rolled backwards for half a minute, lurched, and then started up again. I was not dismayed. Like the slow speed, the sudden stops and reverses made the whole business odd and agreeable.

This African train, burning wood and coal in its firebox, clattered deeper into Africa. The children in the coach stared at me. The older people were polite, even a bit fearful. I dozed, and was wakened at one of the stops by the anvil clang of the coupling—and I smiled when I looked out at my black arms, from the soot and smuts settling on my skin.

I compared arms with the small boy next to me.

"Mine is blacker than yours."

"My arm is not black," he said.

At one that afternoon we came to the town of Balaka, where dogs slept in the middle of the street. Balaka, a railway junction (another line went to Fort Johnston and Monkey Bay), was hotter and flatter than any place I had ever seen. Walking along the platform to ask the conductor what time we were leaving ("Not before tree," he said), I saw that one of the forward coaches had a good paint job and shuttered windows. A shutter rose as I watched and a small blue-eyed child looked out—it could only have been a missionary's child—and I realized that I was looking at a first-class passenger. I had not known about first, the one good coach on the train, shutters down, doors locked.

I had no desire to hide in there and travel with my fellow mzungus, first class on soft seats. I did not want to listen to them complain. "Shocking train," they would say. "Filthy weather..." "Bloody Africans..."

That was expatriate life in Blantyre. I wanted wooden seats and strangeness. I imagined the mzungus behind the locked doors of their first-class coach, grumbling, hiding, killing time by reading the yellow-bound copies of the
Daily Mirror,
months old, that were sent sea mail to Malawi from London.

There was an African restaurant behind the goods shed at Balaka station, and for four shillings and a tickey—threepence—I was given a chipped enamel bowl of chicken and rice. Afterwards I sat in the shade of the verandah, watching the hot street and the white sky, the earth like pale powder, and everything still except the insects. I walked into the sun and immediately felt the weight of it on the top of my head. I stood alone in the middle of the street on the small black island of my shadow, and thought: I am where I want to be.

The whistle blew at about two-thirty and after some hesitation—shunting in the Balaka tracks—the train set off again, north, through the dusty landscape of yellow bush and low skinny trees and the elephant grass that was taller than the Africans. On this blazing October afternoon there was no movement. Nothing stirred, no birds, no people, nor any animals. The bush was dead still and looked stifled of air. The train was the only moving thing in that whole hot world. We raised dust and smoke and noise, but after we passed—I could see out the back window of the rear coach—our commotion subsided and all was still again.

No animals, no people, not even any gardens or huts. Just miles of sunburned bush—"miles and miles of bloody Africa," the mzungus said. And the howl of insects, like a fever; a high temperature, going higher.

The sun had made an arc over the train, rising above the windowsill on the right when we left Blantyre, drumming on the metal roof of the coach at noon, and now it had slipped sideways again and was shining through the windows on the left-hand side. I nodded and dozed to the clanking of the wheels on the long, straight rails, hammering more insistently where the rails butted, and at each stop there was the clutch and clawing sound of the brakes, the screech of metal against metal.

I had never been on a train like it, and it did not seem to me like a train at all. My earlier impressions of it as a vessel were truer. But not a ship—it was more like a paddle steamer with its gasps and its shrill whistle, rattling along a coast and then penetrating the land by plunging up a narrow river that led sinuously through the bush. Here and there a station or a siding appeared, like a man-made feature on a jungly riverbank.

Most stations were wooden sheds with tin roofs and no sign giving their name. On their dirt platforms, packed hard by all the tramping feet, women and small girls sold greasy dough cakes and bananas and peanuts, carrying them in tin basins on their heads. They were skinny, ragged, barefoot, and the farther north we went the more naked the women became. Now most of them were bare-breasted on this hot lake-shore plain. It was the Africa of my imagination at last.

I sat at the window, squinting through the coal smoke at Africa, and waited and watched and went deeper. Through the late afternoon I saw shadows rippling in the trees like phantoms, Africans whispering, watching the train, and I knew they had seen my white face. They were like glimpses of strangeness. On a passing embankment I saw a funeral procession, a mass of chanting people marching behind a wooden coffin. I saw naked children. I saw two people, a man and a woman, rolling on the ground in panic away from the train, startled in the act of love.

Now the sun was below the tattered trees, and dusk was gathering in shadows under a briefly bluer sky.

"Ntakataka," an African said to me.

That was the station for Moyo.

It was almost six. I had been traveling in a state of great happiness for over twelve hours.

Father DeVoss met me. He was tall and gaunt, and although he was not old he was gray. He wore a dusty white cassock and looked at me—fondly I thought—with a sad smile.

"Good to see you," he said. "You play cards?"

The dark house on the only high ground here looked haunted, one of its windows lit by an overbright pressure lamp, the rest of the windows shuttered or in darkness. Its shadows and its size and its crumbling stucco gave it a ghostly wolfish look. But I soon realized that was misleading. The house was mostly empty, a relic of an earlier time when the mission had been much bigger and there had been more lepers and more priests. It was like the rubbly ruin—of a fort or a palace—that lay neglected and overgrown in the African bush. Inside, the priests' house seemed forlorn.