A bend in the river

clear duties. Ferdinand and myself and the porter made a noticeable group (Ferdinand much taller than the men of the region), and we were stopped about half a dozen times by people who wanted to see our papers. Once we were stopped by a woman in a long African-style cotton dress. She was as small as her sisters who poled the dugouts in village creeks, and fetched and carried; her head was as hairless and looked as shaved; but her face had plumped out. She spoke to us roughly. She held Ferdinand's steamer tickets (one for the fare, one for the food) upside down when she examined them; and she frowned. Ferdinand's face registered nothing. When she gave him back the tickets he said, 'Thank you, _citoyenne__.' He spoke without irony; the woman's frown was replaced by a smile. And that seemed to have been the main point of the exercise--the woman wanted to be shown respect and to be called _citoyenne__. _Monsieur__ and _madame__ and _boy__ had been officially outlawed; the President had decreed us all to be _citoyens__ and _citoyennes__. He used the two words together in his speeches, again and again, like musical phrases. We moved through the waiting crowd--people made room for us simply because we were moving--to the dock gates. And there our porter, as though knowing what was to follow, dropped his load, asked for a lot of francs, quickly settled for less, and bolted. The gates, for no reason, were closed against us. The soldiers looked at us and then looked away, refusing to enter into the palaver Ferdinand and I tried to get going. For half an hour or more we stood there in the crowd, pressed against the gate, in the stinging sun, in the smell of sweat and smoked food; and then, for no apparent reason, one of the soldiers opened the gate and let us in, but just us, not anyone behind, as though, in spite of Ferdinand's tickets and my own dock pass, he was doing us a great favour. The steamer was still pointing towards the rapids. The white superstructure, with the first-class cabins, just visible above the customs-shed roof, was at the stern end of the steamer. On the steel-plated deck below, just a few feet above the water, a range of iron-clad barrack-like structures ran all the way to the rounded bow. The iron barracks were for the lesser passengers. And for passengers who were least of all there was the barge--tiers of cages on a shallow iron hull, the cages wire-netted and barred, the wire netting and bars dented and twisted, the internal organization of the cages hidden, lost in gloom, in spite of the sunlight and the glitter of the river. The first-class cabins still suggested luxury. The iron walls were white; the timbered decks were scrubbed and tarred. The doors were open; there were curtains. There were stewards and even a purser. I said to Ferdinand, 'I thought those people down there were going to ask you for your certificate of civic merit. In the old days you had to have one before they let you up here.' He didn't laugh, as an older man might have done. He didn't know about the colonial past. His memories of the larger world began with the mysterious day when mutinous soldiers, strangers, had come to his mother's village looking for white people to kill, and Zabeth had frightened them off, and they had taken away only a few of the village women. To Ferdinand the colonial past had vanished. The steamer had always been African, and first class on the steamer was what he could see now. Respectably dressed Africans, the older men in suits, the evolved men of an earlier generation; some women with families, everyone dressed up for the journey; one or two of the old ladies of such families, closer to the ways of the forest, already sitting on the floor of their cabins and preparing lunch, breaking the black hulls of smoked fish and smoked monkeys into enamel plates with coloured patterns, and releasing strong, salty smells. Rustic manners, forest manners, in a setting not of the forest. But that was how, in our ancestral lands, we all began--the prayer mat on the sand, then the marble floor of a mosque; the rituals and taboos of nomads, which, transferred to the palace of a sultan or a ma-haraja, become the traditions of an aristocracy. Still, I would have found the journey hard, especially if, like Ferdinand, I had to share a cabin with someone else, someone in the crowd outside who had not yet been let in. But the steamer was not meant for me or--in spite of the colonial emblems embroidered in red on the frayed, much laundered sheets and pillowcase on Ferdinand's bunk--for the people who had in the old days required certificates of civic merit, with good reason. The steamer was now meant for the people who used it, and to them it was very grand. The people on Ferdinand's deck knew they were not passengers on the barge. From the rear end of the deck, looking past the lifeboats, we could see people going aboard the barge with their crates and bundles. Above the roof of the customs sheds the town showed mainly as trees or bush--the town which, when you were in it, was full of streets and open spaces and sun and buildings. Few buildings showed through the trees and none rose above them. And from the height of the first-class deck you could see--from the quality of the vegetation, the change from imported ornamental trees to undifferentiated bush--how quickly the town ended, what a narrow strip of the riverbank it occupied. If you looked the other way, across the muddy river to the low line of bush and the emptiness of the other bank, you could pretend that the town didn't exist. And then the barge on this bank was like a miracle, and the cabins of the first-class deck an impossible luxury. At either end of that deck was something even more impressive--a _cabine de luxe__. That was what the old, paint-spattered metal plates above the doors said. What did these two cabins contain? Ferdinand said, 'Shall we have a look?' We went into the one at the back. It was dark and very hot; the windows were sealed and heavily curtained. A baking bathroom; two armchairs, rather beaten up, and one with an arm missing, but still armchairs; a table with two shaky chairs; sconces with bulbs missing; torn curtains screening off the bunks from the rest of the cabin; and an air conditioner. Who, in that crowd outside, had such a ridiculous idea of his needs? Who required such privacy, such cramping comforts? From the forward end of the deck came the sound of a disturbance. A man was complaining loudly, and he was complaining in English. Ferdinand said, 'I think I hear your friend.' It was Indar. He was carrying an unusual load, and he was sweating and full of anger. With his forearms held out at the horizontal--like the fork of a fork-lift truck--he was supporting a shallow but very wide cardboard box, open at the top, on which he could visibly get no grip. The box was heavy. It was full of groceries and big bottles, ten or twelve bottles; and after the long walk from the dock gates and up all the steamer steps, Indar seemed to be at the end of all physical resource and on the verge of tears. With a backward lean he staggered into the _cabine de luxe__, and I saw him drop--almost throw--the cardboard box on the bunk. And then he began to do a little dance of physical agony, stamping about the cabin and flexing his arms violently from the elbows down, as though to shake out the ache from all kinds of yelping muscles. He was overdoing the display, but he had an audience. Not me, whom he had seen but was yet in no mood to acknowledge. Yvette was behind him. She was carrying his briefcase. He shouted at her, with the security that the English language gave him here, 'The suitcase--is the bugger bringing the suitcase?' She looked sweated and strained herself, but she said soothingly, 'Yes, yes.' And a man in a flowered shirt whom I had taken to be a passenger appeared with the suitcase. I had seen Indar and Yvette together many times, but never in such a domestic relationship. For a dislocating moment the thought came to me that they were going away together. But then Yvette, straightening up, and remembering to smile, said to me, 'Are you seeing someone _off__ too?' And I understood that my anxiety was foolish. Indar was now squeezing his biceps. Whatever he had planned for this moment with Yvette had been destroyed by the pain of the cardboard box. He said, 'They had no carrier bags. They had no bloody carrier bags.' I said, 'I thought you had taken the plane.' 'We waited for hours at the airport yesterday. It was always coming and coming. Then at midnight they gave us a beer and told us that the plane had been taken out of service. Just like that. Not delayed. Taken away. The Big Man wanted it. And no one knows when he is going to send it back. And then buying this steamer ticket--have you ever done that? There are all kinds of rules about when they can sell and when they can't sell. The man is hardly ever there. The damned door is always locked. And every five yards somebody wants to see your papers. Ferdinand, explain this to me. When the man was totting up the fare, all the de luxe supplements, he worked the sum out twenty times on the adding machine. The same sum, twenty times. Why? Did he think the machine was going to change its mind? That took half an hour. And then, thank God, Yvette reminded me about the food. And the water. So we had to go shopping. Six bottles of Vichy water for the five days. It was all they had--I've come to Africa to drink Vichy water. One dollar and fifty cents a bottle, U. S. Six bottles of red wine, the acid Portuguese stuff you get here. If I had known I would have to carry it all in that box, I would have done without it.' He had also bought five tins of sardines, one for each day of the journey, I suppose; two tins of evaporated milk; a tin of Nescaf?a Dutch cheese, some biscuits and a quantity of Belgian honey cake. He said, 'The honey cake was Yvette's idea. She says it's full of nourishment.' She said, 'It keeps in the heat.' I said, 'There was a man at the lyc?who used to live on honey cake.' Ferdinand said, 'That's why we smoke nearly everything. Once you don't break the crust it lasts a long time.' 'But the food situation in this place is appalling,' Indar said. 'Everything in the shops is imported and expensive. And in the market, apart from the grubs and things that people pick up, all you have are two sticks of this and two ears of that. And people are coming in all the time. How do they make out? You have all this bush, all this rain. And yet there could be a famine in this town.' The cabin was more crowded than it had been. A squat barefooted man had come in to introduce himself as the steward of the _cabine de luxe__, and after him the purser had come in, with a towel over one shoulder and a folded tablecloth in his hand. The purser shooed away the steward, spread the tablecloth on the table--lovely old material, but mercilessly laundered. Then he addressed Yvette. 'I see that the gentleman has brought his own food and water. But there is no need, madame. We follow the old rules still. Our water is purified. I