myself have worked on ocean liners and been to countries all over the world. Now I am old and work on this African steamer. But I am accustomed to white people and know their ways well. The gentleman has nothing to fear, madame. He will be looked after well. I will see that the gentleman's food is prepared separately, and I will serve him with my own hands in his cabin.' He was a thin, elderly man of mixed race; his mother or father might have been a mulatto. He had conscientiously used the forbidden words--_monsieur__, _madame__; he had spread a tablecloth. And he stood waiting to be rewarded. Indar gave him two hundred francs. Ferdinand said, 'You've given him too much. He called you _monsieur__ and _madame__, and you tipped him. As far as he's concerned, his account has been settled. Now he will do nothing for you.' And Ferdinand seemed to be right. When we went down one deck to the bar, the purser was there, leaning against the counter, drinking beer. He ignored all four of us; and he did nothing for us when we asked for beer and the barman said, '_Termin?.' If the purser hadn't been drinking, and if another man with three well-dressed women hadn't been drinking at one of the tables, it would have looked convincing. The bar--with a framed photograph of the President in chief's clothes, holding up the carved stick with the fetish--was stripped; the brown shelves were bare. I said to the barman, '_Citoyen__.' Ferdinand said, '_Citoyen__.' We got a palaver going, and beer was brought from the back room. Indar said, 'You will have to be my guide, Ferdinand. You will palaver for me.' It was past noon, and very hot. The bar was full of reflected river light, with dancing veins of gold. The beer, weak as it was, lulled us. Indar forgot his aches and pains; a discussion he started with Ferdinand about the farm at the Domain that the Chinese or Taiwanese had abandoned trailed away. My own nervousness was soothed; my mood was buoyant: I would leave the steamer with Yvette. The light was the light of the very early afternoon--everything stoked up, the blaze got truly going, but with a hint of the blaze about to consume itself. The river glittered, muddy water turned to white and gold. It was busy with dugouts with outboard motors, as always on steamer days. The dugouts carried the extravagant names of their 'establishments' painted in large letters down their sides. Sometimes, when a dugout crossed a patch of glitter, the occupants were all silhouetted against the glitter; they appeared then to be sitting very low, to be shoulders and round heads alone, so that for a while they were like comic figures in a cartoon strip, engaged on some quite ridiculous journey. A man teetered into the bar on platform shoes with soles about two inches thick. He must have been from the capital; that style in shoes hadn't reached us as yet. He was also an official, come to check our tickets and passes. Not long after he had teetered out, panic appeared to seize the purser and the barman and some of the men drinking at tables. It was this panic that finally distinguished crew and officials, none of them in uniform, from the other people who had come in and palavered for their beer; and it meant only that the steamer was about to leave. Indar put his hand on Yvette's thigh. When she turned to him he said gently, 'I'll see what I can find out about Raymond's book. But you know those people in the capital. If they don't reply to your letters, it's because they don't want to reply. They're not going to say yes or no. They're going to say nothing. But I'll see.' Their embrace, just before we got off, was no more than formal. Ferdinand was cool. No handshake, no words of farewell. He simply said, 'Salim.' And to Yvette he gave a nod rather than a bow. We stood on the dock and watched. After some maneuvering the steamer was clear of the dock wall. Then the barge was attached; and steamer and barge did a slow, wide turn in the river, the barge revealing at its stern tiers, slices, of a caged back-yard life, a mixture of kitchens and animal pens. A departure can feel like a desertion, a judgment on the place and people left behind. That was what I had been accustoming myself to since the previous day, when I thought I had said goodbye to Indar. For all my concern for him, I had thought of him--as I had thought of Ferdinand--as the lucky man, the man moving on to richer experience, leaving me to my little life in a place once again of no account. But I didn't think so now, standing with Yvette on the exposed dock, after the accident and luck of that second goodbye, watching the steamer and barge straighten in the brown river, against the emptiness of the far bank, which was pale in the heat and like part of the white sky. The place where it was all going on after all was where we were, in the town on the riverbank. Indar was the man who had been sent away. The hard journey was his.
CHAPTER 11
It was past two, a time when, on sunny days, it hurt to be in the open. We had neither of us had anything to eat--we had only had that bloating beer--and Yvette didn't reject the idea of a snack in a cool place. The asphalt surfacing of the dock area was soft underfoot. Hard black shadows had pulled back to the very edges of buildings, buildings which here on the dock were of the colonial time and substantial--ochre-washed stone walls, green shutters, tall, iron-barred windows, green-painted corrugated-iron roofs. A scratched blackboard outside the closed steamer office still gave the time of the steamer sailing. But the officials had gone; the crowd outside the dock gates had gone. The market around the granite wall of the ruined monument was being dismantled. The feathery leaves of the flamboyant trees made no shade; the sun struck right through. The ground, hummocked around tufts of grass, scuffed to dust elsewhere, was littered with rubbish and animal droppings and patches of wet which, coated and bound on the underside with fine dust, seemed to be curling back on themselves, peeling off the ground. We didn't go to Mahesh's Bigburger bar. I wanted to avoid the complications--Shoba hadn't approved of Yvette's connection with Indar. We went instead to the Tivoli. It wasn't far away, and I hoped that Mahesh's boy Ildephonse wouldn't report. But that was unlikely; it was the time of day when Ildephonse was normally vacant. The Tivoli was a new or newish place, part of our continuing boom, and was owned by a family who had run a restaurant in the capital before independence. Now, after some years in Europe, they had come back to try again here. It was a big investment for them--they had skimped on nothing--and I thought they were taking a chance. But I didn't know about Europeans and their restaurant habits. And the Tivoli was meant for our Europeans. It was a family restaurant, and it served the short-contract men who were working on various government projects in our region-- the Domain, the airport, the water supply system, the hydroelectric station. The atmosphere was European; Africans kept away. There were no officials with gold watches and gold pen-and-pencil sets, as at Mahesh's. While you were at the Tivoli you could live without that tension. But you couldn't forget where you were. The photograph of the President was about three feet high. The official portraits of the President in African garb were getting bigger and bigger, the quality of the prints finer (they were said to be done in Europe). And once you knew about the meaning of the leopard skin and the symbolism of what was carved on the stick, you were affected; you couldn't help it. We had all become his people; even here at the Tivoli we were reminded that we all in various ways depended on him. Normally the boys--or citizen waiters--were friendly and welcoming and brisk. But the lunch period was more or less over; the tall, fat son of the family, who stood behind the counter by the coffee machine, superintending things, was probably having his siesta; no other member of the family was present; and the waiters stood about idly, like aliens in their blue waiters' jackets. They weren't rude; they were simply abstracted, like people who had lost a role. The air conditioning was welcome, though, and the absence of glare, and the dryness after the humidity outside. Yvette looked less harassed; energy returned to her. We got the attention of a waiter. He brought us a jug of red Portuguese wine, chilled down and then allowed to lose its chill; and two wooden platters with Scottish smoked salmon on toast. Everything was imported; everything was expensive; smoked salmon on toast was in fact the Tivoli's plainest offering. I said to Yvette, 'Indar's a bit of an actor. Were things really as bad as he said?' 'They were much worse. He left out cashing the traveller's cheques.' She was sitting with her back to the wall. She made a small arresting gesture--like Raymond's--with the palm of her hand against the edge of the table, and gave a slight tilt of her head to her right. Two tables away a family of five were finishing lunch and talking loudly. Ordinary people, the kind of family group I had been used to seeing at the Tivoli. But Yvette seemed to disapprove, and more than disapprove; a little rage visited her. She said, 'You can't tell about them. I can.' And yet that face, of rage, still seemed close to a smile; and those slanting eyes, half closed above the small cup of coffee which she was holding at the level of her mouth, were quite demure. What had irritated her about the family group? The district she had judged them to come from? The job the man did, the language, the loud talk, the manners? What would she have said about the people in our nightclubs? I said, 'Did you know Indar before?' 'I met him here.' She put the cup down. Her slanting eyes considered it and then, as though she had decided on something, she looked at me. 'You live your life. A stranger appears. He is an encumbrance. You don't need him. But the encumbrance can become a habit.' My experience of women outside my family was special, limited. I had had no experience of dealing with a woman like this, no experience of language like this, no experience of a woman with such irritations and convictions. And in what she had just said I saw an honesty, a daringness which, to a man of my background, was slightly frightening and, for that reason, bewitching. I was unwilling for us to have Indar in common, as Indar and she seemed to have had Raymond in common. I said, 'I can't tell you how much I liked being in your house that evening. I've never forgotten the blouse you wore. I've always been hoping to see you in it again. Black silk, beautifully cut and embroidered.' I couldn't have touched a better subject. She said, 'There hasn't been
