A bend in the river

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 the occasion. But I assure you it's still there." "I don't think it was Indian. The cut and the work were European." "It's from Copenhagen. Margit Brandt. Raymond went there for a conference." And at the door of the Tivoli, before we went out again into the heat and the light, during that moment of pause which in the tropics is like the pause we make before we finally go out into the rain, she said to me, as though it were an afterthought, "Would you like to come to lunch at the house tomorrow? We have to have one of the lecturers, and Raymond finds that kind of occasion very trying these days." The steamer would have been about fifteen miles downriver. It would have been travelling through bush; it would have passed the first bush settlement. There, though the town was so close, they would have been waiting for the steamer since morning, and there would have been the atmosphere of a fair until the steamer passed. Boys would have dived off dugouts and swum towards the moving steamer and barge, trying to get the attention of passengers. Trading dugouts, poling out from their stations on the bank with their little cargoes of pineapples and roughly made chairs and stools (disposable furniture for the river journey, a specialty of the area), would have been attached in clusters to the sides of the steamer; and these dugouts would be taken--were being taken--miles downriver, to paddle back for hours, after that brief excitement, through the fading afternoon, dusk and night, in silence.