One afternoon I saw that Raymond and Yvette’s house had a new tenant, an African. The house had been closed since I had come back. Raymond and Yvette had gone away; no one, not even Mahesh, could tell me where or in what circumstances. The doors and windows of the house were wide open now, and that emphasized the shoddiness of the construction.
The new man, barebacked, was forking up the ground just in front of the house, and I stopped to have a chat. He was from somewhere downriver, and friendly. He told me he was going to grow maize and cassava. Africans didn’t understand large-scale agriculture; but they were passionate planters in this smaller way, growing food for the house and liking to grow it very close to the house. He noted my car; he remembered his bare back. He told me he worked for the government corporation that ran the steamer service. And to give me some idea of his standing, he said that whenever he travelled on the steamer he travelled first class and free. That big government job, this big government house in the famous Domain—he was a happy man, pleased with what he had been granted, and asking for nothing else.
There were more households like his in the Domain now. The polytechnic was still there, but the Domain had lost its modern, “showplace” character. It was scruffier; every week it was becoming more of an African housing settlement. Maize, which in that climate and soil sprouted in three days, grew in many places; and the purple-green leaves of the cassava, which grew from a simple cutting even if you planted it upside down, created the effect of garden shrubs. This piece of earth—how many changes had come to it! Forest at a bend in the river, a meeting place, an Arab settlement, a European outpost, a European suburb, a ruin like the ruin of a dead civilization, the glittering Domain of new Africa, and now this.
While we were speaking, children began to appear from the back of the house—country children still, bending a knee at the sight of the adult, before coming up shyly to listen and watch. And then a large Doberman came bounding out at me.
The man with the fork said, “Don’t worry. He’ll miss you. He can’t see very well. A foreigner’s dog. He gave it to me when he went away.”
It was as he said. The Doberman missed me by about a foot, ran on a little way, stopped, raced back, and then was all over me, wagging his docked tail, beside himself with joy at my foreigner’s smell, momentarily mistaking me for somebody else.
I was glad for Raymond’s sake that he had gone away. He wouldn’t have been safe in the Domain or the town now. The curious reputation that had come to him in the end—of being the white man who went ahead of the President, and drew on himself the bad things that should have fallen on the President—that reputation might have encouraged the Liberation Army to kill him, especially now, when the President was said to be planning to visit the town, and the town was being made ready for that visit.
The rubbish hills in the centre were being carted away. The corrugated streets were being levelled and graded. And paint! It was everywhere in the centre, slapped onto concrete and plaster and timber, dripping on the pavements. Someone had unloaded his stock—pink and lime and red and mauve and blue. The bush was at war; the town was in a state of insurrection, with nightly incidents. But suddenly in the centre it seemed like carnival time.
17
Citizen Théotime would come in in the mornings, red-eyed and tormented-looking, high on his breakfast beer, with a couple of comic books or photo-novels to see him through office hours. There was an informal system of magazine exchange in the town; Théo always had something new to look at. And oddly, his comic books or photo-novels, tightly rolled up, gave him a busy, businesslike air when he came into the shop. He went straight to the storeroom, and could stay there without coming out for the whole morning. At first I thought it was because he wanted to be out of the way and not to be any trouble. But then I understood that it was no hardship for him. He liked being in the dark storeroom with nothing in particular to do, just looking at his magazines when the mood took him, and drinking his beer.
Later, when he became easier and less shy with me, his storeroom life became fuller. He began to be visited by women. He liked them to see him as a real directeur, with a staff and an office; and it pleased the women too. A visit could take up a whole afternoon, with Théotime and the woman chatting in the way people chat when they are sheltering from the rain—with long pauses and long hypnotized stares in different directions.
It was an easy enough life for Théotime, easier than anything he could have imagined when he was a mechanic in the health department. But as he gained confidence, and lost his fear that the shop might be taken away from him by the President, he became difficult.
It began to worry him that as a directeur he didn’t have a car. Some woman had perhaps given him the idea, or it might have been the example of other state trustees, or it might have been something he had got from his comic books. I had a car; he began to ask for lifts, and then he required me to drive him to and from his house. I could have said no. But I told myself it was a small thing to do to keep him quiet. The first few times he sat in the front; then he sat in the back. This was a four-times-a-day duty.
He didn’t stay quiet for long. It might have been my easiness, my wish to appear unhumiliated: Théotime was soon looking for new ways of asserting himself. The trouble now was that he didn’t know what to do. He would have liked to live out his role in fact—to take over the running of the shop, or to feel (while enjoying his storeroom life) that he was running the shop. He knew, though, that he knew nothing; he knew that I knew he knew nothing; and he was like a man enraged by his own helplessness. He made constant scenes. He was drunken, aggrieved and threatening, and as deliberately irrational as an official who had decided to be malin.
It was strange. He wanted me to acknowledge him as the boss. At the same time he wanted me to make allowances for him as an uneducated man and an African. He wanted both my respect and my tolerance, even my compassion. He wanted me, almost, to act out my subordinate role as a favour to him. Yet if, responding to his plea, I did so, if I took some simple shop document to him, the authority he put on then was very real. He added it to his idea of his role; and he would use that authority later to extort some new concession. As he had done with the car.
It was worse than dealing with a malin official. The official who pretended to be offended—and bawled you out, for instance, for resting your hand on his desk—was only asking for money. Théotime, moving quickly from a simple confidence in his role to an understanding of his helplessness, wanted you to pretend that he was another kind of man. It wasn’t funny. I had resolved to be calm about my dispossession, to keep my mind on the goal I had given myself. But it wasn’t easy to be calm. The shop became a hateful place to me.
It was worse for Metty. The little services that he had done for Théotime in the beginning became things that he was required to do, and they multiplied. Théotime began sending Metty out on quite pointless errands.
Late one evening, when he returned to the flat after being with his family, Metty came into my room and said, “I can’t take it, patron. I will do something terrible one of these days. If Théo doesn’t stop it, I’ll kill him. I’d rather hoe in the fields than be his servant.”
I said, “It won’t last long.”
Metty’s face twisted with exasperation, and he did a silent stamp with one foot. He was close to tears. He said, “What do you mean? What do you mean?” and went out of the room.
In the morning I went to collect Théotime to drive him to the shop. As a well-to-do and influential local man, Théotime had three or four families in different parts of the town. But since becoming a state trustee he had (like other trustees) picked up a number of new women, and he lived with one of them in one of the little back houses in a cité yard—bare red ground intersected with shallow black drains all down one side, scraped-up earth and rubbish pushed to the edge, mango and other trees scattered about, cassava and maize and clumps of banana between the houses.
When I blew the horn, children and women from the
various houses came out and watched while Théotime walked to the car, with his comic book rolled up. He pretended to ignore the watchers and spat casually on the ground once or twice. His eyes were reddened with beer and he tried to look offended.
We drove out of the bumpy cité lane to the levelled red main road, where the buildings were freshly painted for the President’s visit—each building done in one colour (walls, window frames, doors), and each building a different colour from its neighbour.
I said, “I want to talk to you about Citizen Metty’s duties in our establishment, citizen. Citizen Metty is the manager’s assistant. He is not a general servant.”
Théotime had been waiting for this. He had a speech prepared. He said, “You astonish me, citizen. I am the state trustee,appointed by the President. Citizen Metty is an employee of a state establishment. It is for me to decide how the half-caste is to be used.” He used the word métis, to play on the adopted name of which Metty had once been so proud.
The vivid colours of the buildings became even more unreal to me. They became the colours of my rage and anguish.
I had been growing smaller and smaller in Metty’s eyes, and now I failed him altogether. I could no longer offer him the simple protection he had asked for—Théotime made that plain during the course of the day. So the old contract between Metty and myself, which was the contract between his family and mine, came to an end. Even if I had been able to place him in another establishment in the town—which I might have been able to do in the old days—it would have meant that our special contract was over. He seemed to understand this, and it made him unbalanced.
He began to say, “I am going to do something terrible, Salim. You must give me money. Give me money and let me go away. I feel I’m going to do something terrible.”
I felt his pain as an extra pressure. I mentally added his pain to mine, made it part of my own. I should have thought more of him. I should have made him stay away from the shop, and given him an allowance from my own salary, while that lasted. It was, really, what he wanted. But he didn’t put it like that. He involved it in that wild idea of going away, which only frightened me and made me think: Where is he going to go?
So he continued to go to the shop and Théotime, and became more and more tormented. When he said to me one evening, “Give me some money and I will go away,” I said, thinking of the situation in the shop, and trying to find comforting words, “It isn’t going to last forever, Metty.” This made him scream, “Salim!” And the next morning, for the first time, he didn’t bring me coffee.
That happened at the beginning of the week. On Friday afternoon, after closing up the shop and driving Théotime to his yard, I came back to the flat. It was a place of desolation for me now. I no longer thought of it as my own. Since that morning in the car with Théotime I had felt nausea for the bright new colours of the town. They were the colours of a place that had become strange and felt far away from everywhere else. That feeling of strangeness extended to everything in the flat. I was thinking of going to the Hellenic Club—or what remained of it—when I heard car doors slam.
I went out to the landing and saw police in the yard. There was an officer—his name was Prosper: I knew him. One of the men with him had a fork, another a shovel. They knew what they had come for, and they knew exactly where they had to dig—below the external staircase. I had four tusks there.
My mind raced, made links. Metty! I thought: Oh, Ali! What have you done to me? I knew it was important to let someone know. Mahesh—there was no one else. He would be at his flat now. I went to the bedroom and telephoned. Mahesh answered, and I only had time to say, “Things are bad here,” before I heard footsteps coming up. I put the phone down, went to the bathroom, pulled the lavatory chain, and went out to see the round-faced Prosper coming up alone, smiling.
The face came up, smiling, and I retreated before it, and this was how, not saying anything, we moved down the passage before I turned and led Prosper into the white sitting room. He couldn’t hide his pleasure. His eyes glittered. He hadn’t yet decided how to behave. He hadn’t yet decided how much to ask for.
He said, “The President is coming next week. Did you know that? The President is interested in conservation. This is why this is very serious for you. Anything might happen to you if I send in my report. This is certainly going to cost you a couple of thousand.”
This seemed to me very modest.
He noticed my relief. He said, “I don’t mean francs. I mean dollars. Yes, this is going to cost you three or four thousand dollars.”
This was outrageous. Prosper knew it was outrageous. In the old days five dollars was considered pretty good; and even during the boom you could get many things done for twenty-five dollars. Things had changed since the insurrection, of course, and had become very bad with the radicalization. Everyone had become more greedy and desperate. There was this feeling of everything running down very fast, of a great chaos coming; and some people could behave as though money had already lost its value. But even so, officials like Prosper had only recently begun to talk in hundreds.
I said, “I don’t have that kind of money.”
“I thought you would say that. The President is coming next week. We are taking a number of people into preventive detention. That is how you will go in. We will forget the tusks for the time being. You will stay in until the President leaves. You might decide then that you have the money.”
I packed a few things into a canvas holdall and Prosper drove me in the back of his Land-Rover through the brightly coloured town to police headquarters. There I learned to wait. There I decided that I had to shut out thoughts of the town and stop thinking about time, that I had as far as possible to empty my mind.
There were many stages in my progress through the building, and I began to look upon Prosper as my guide to this particular hell. He left me for long periods sitting or standing in rooms and corridors, which gleamed with new oil paint. It was almost a relief to see him coming back to me with his chunky cheeks and his stylish briefcase.
It was near sunset when he led me to the annex in the yard at the back, where I had once gone to rescue Metty, and where I now had to be fingerprinted myself, before being taken to the town jail. The walls had been a dusty blue, I remembered. Now they were a brilliant yellow, and Discipline Avant Tout—“Discipline Above All”—had been freshly painted in big black letters. I lost myself contemplating the bad, uneven lettering, the graining of the photograph of the President, the uneven surface of the yellow wall, the dried yellow spattering on the broken floor.
The room was full of young men who had been picked up. It was a long time before I was fingerprinted. The man at the table behaved like an overworked man. He didn’t seem to look at the faces of the people he fingerprinted.
I asked whether I couldn’t get the ink off my hands. It wasn’t a wish to be clean, I decided after I had asked. It was more a wish to appear calm, unhumiliated, to feel that the events were normal. The man at the table said yes, and from a drawer brought out a pink plastic soap dish with a slender-waisted wafer of soap streaked with black lines. The soap was quite dry. He told me I could go outside and use the standpipe.
I went out into the yard. It was now dark. Around me were trees, lights, cooking smoke, evening sounds. The standpipe was near the open garage shed. The ink, surprisingly, washed out easily. A rage began to possess me when I went back and gave the man his soap and saw the others who were waiting with me in that yellow room.
If there was a plan, these events had meaning. If there was law, these events had meaning. But there was no plan; there was no law; this was only make-believe, play, a waste of men’s time in the world. And how often here, even in the days of bush, it must have happened before, this game of warders and prisoners in which men could be destroyed for nothing. I remembered what Raymond used to say—about events being forgotten, lost, swallowed up.
The jail was on the road to the Domain. It was set a good way back, and in the
space in front there had grown up a market and a settlement. This was what registered—the market and the settlement—when you drove by. The concrete jail wall, no more than seven or eight feet high, was a white background. It had never seemed like a real jail. There was something artificial and even quaint about it: this new jail in this new settlement, all so rough and temporary-looking, in a clearing in the bush. You felt that the people who had built it—village people, establishing themselves in a town for the first time—were playing at having a community and rules. They had put up a wall just taller than a man and put some people behind it; and because they were village people, that was jail enough for them. In another place a jail would have been a more elaborate thing. This was so simple: you felt that what went on behind the low wall matched the petty market life in front.
Now, at the end of the lane, after the lights and radios of the little huts and shacks and stalls and drinking booths, that jail opened to let me in. A wall taller than a man is a high wall. Below electric lights the outside wall gleamed with new white paint; and again, but in large black letters about two feet high, was Discipline Avant Tout. I felt damned and mocked by the words. But that was how I was expected to feel. What a complicated lie those words had become! How long would it take to work back from that, through all the accumulated lies, to what was simple and true?
Inside, behind the jail gates, there was silence and space: a large, bare, dusty yard with rough low buildings of concrete and corrugated iron arranged in squares.
The barred window of my cell looked out on a bare courtyard, lit by electric lamps high up on poles. There was no ceiling to my cell; there was only the corrugated-iron roof. Everything was rough, but everything held. It was Friday night. And of course Friday was the day to pick people up: nothing would happen over the weekend. I had to learn to wait, in a jail that was suddenly real, and frightening now because of its very simpleness.