‘When will this welding be finished?’ I asked, and was told: ‘Not welding, bwana, they are fixing the engine.’
‘How long have they been working on it?’
‘For some days.’
Night had fallen. Glaring overhead lights had come on, making it impossible to see anything. It was now more than five hours since I had arrived, breathless, at the pier, imagining that I was about to board a departing ferry. Mr Joseph said: ‘Don’t worry, sir.’ The customs agent said, ‘We will take care of you.’ These men were also teasing each other, greeting and bantering like big fat boys, as men do in such jobs that involve long delays — on docks and in depots and loading bays. But I believed them. I took comfort in their reassurance.
In the moonless lakeshore night the mud stink rose like part of the darkness and so did the mosquitoes and lake-flies. Two more hours passed.
‘How long does it take to get to the other side of the lake?’ I asked the customs agent.
He said, ‘Me, myself I cannot know, sir. I have never been there in my life.
Mr Joseph was listening. He shook his head, he laughed to express incomprehension, he said, ‘To sleep on water. Eh! Eh! I have never done it. It must be very strange.’
Seven hours after I had arrived at the pier, Captain Opio of the MV Kabalega said to me, ‘It seems we will not leave tonight.’
‘Really?’ My heart sank: terrible news.
‘Really,’ he said solemnly. ‘Therefore, let me introduce you to Captain Mansawawa, of the Umoja.’
‘Are you leaving tonight, captain?’
‘Yes, when the freight cars arrive from Kampala to be loaded.’
That was a detail. The important thing with a ferry or any ship was to get on board, secure a berth, and get your feet under the table in the galley. Then a delay did not matter: you just went to bed and if the vessel was still at the pier the next day you read a book. This was preferable to sitting on a bench at the customs house, or pacing on the pier for seven hours.
‘May I come with you?’
‘Karibu,’ the captain said. Welcome. His saying it in Swahili made the word seem more sincere.
The captain was a serious and hard-working man from Musoma on the lake, who also spoke Chichewa. I had learned this Bantu language in the Peace Corps, in order to teach in Malawi. The captain had learned it as master of the passenger ship Ilala on Lake Nyasa.
‘You are our guest,’ the captain said climbing up the gangway. ‘This is Alex. First Engineer.’
A man in a skullcap stood at the top of the stairs, smiling, one eye fixed on me, his other eye drifting off. His lazy eye made him look lost and lovable. He said ‘Karibu,’ too, and he pulled my bag out of my hands. He shook my hand and said, ‘You take my cabin. It is forward.’
He hurried to the bow and unlocked the cabin door with a brass plate attached that read First Engineer. He did not open the door at once. He looked at me with one eye and gave me instructions.
‘We must first put off all lights. This one and this one.’ He flicked off the lights on the deck. ‘There are sea-flies. They like the lights. But they don’t bite.’
He opened the door quickly, he pushed me in, then he squirmed inside himself and slammed the door. We were in darkness.
‘Don’t be fearing,’ he said, switching the cabin light on.
The room was filled with whirling insects, gnat-sized, clouds of them revolving around the light and smacking the cabin screens. Dead insects littered the bed. Alex swept them from the yellow sheet and the gray pillow.
‘Doodoos,’ I said, the generic term for insects.
‘These doodoos will not bother you,’ Alex said, sweeping more of them aside with his hand and stuffing my bag on a shelf. His squiffy eyes made him seem more efficient, able to scrutinize two sides of the cabin at the same time.
‘So they don’t bite?’
‘No. We eat them,’ he said, and smacked his lips. ‘They are very sweet.’
‘The doodoos don’t bite you, but you bite the doodoos?’
He laughed and said, ‘Yes! Yes!’ and then, ‘This is your cabin.’
‘Where will you sleep?’
‘Somewhere!’ He bowed and left.
This was perfect for an aptly named ferry — umoja was the Swahili word for unity or oneness. Never mind that the cabin was rusted and bad smelling, the bed unwashed, and the sea-flies a bother. This was harmony, privacy, and the sort of seedy comfort I craved. The cabin was large, with an armchair and a lamp. There was a stopped clock on the wall, and last year’s calendar — a picture of rhinos. A table was set against the hull. In the drawer was a rubber stamp that said, 1st Engineer, M. V. Umoja. I shared a cold-water shower with the adjoining cabin. I could read, I could write, I could listen to my radio. I did not care if this crossing of the lake took two days or twenty days.
A half-hour later, I was writing my notes — To sleep on water. Eh! Eh! It must be very strange — when there was a knock at the door, Alex calling me to the galley. The deckhands and the second engineer joined us, with the captain, for the freight cars still had not arrived from Kampala.
‘You like nyama ya kuku?’ the captain said, placing a chicken leg on my plate. Alex heaped some rice beside it, with a lump of mashed avocado.
‘You have pili-pili sauce?’
‘Too much,’ Alex said, knowing that he was making a joke.
‘You have beer?’
‘For you, yes.’
‘I’m in heaven,’ and toasted them. They were on duty and couldn’t drink alcohol.
‘You are welcome Mr Paul.’
Alex was of the Sukuma tribe. The WaSukuma lived at the southern end of the lakeshore, in what was known as Greater Unyamwezi. These people were on my mind. In Nairobi I had seen a giant wooden marionette in a shop. A doll about five feet high, with a plump torso and conical breasts and a spooky staring face, it was old and beautifully made, with articulated arms and legs. It weighed about forty pounds. ‘From the Sukuma people,’ the Indian shop owner said. He had bought it from a bush trader in Tanzania. I bought it from him on condition that when I returned home I would notify him and he would send it to me.
‘They use them in the villages,’ Alex said.
He called it a vinyago vibubwa (a large doll), a benevolent figure that was paraded around the village at harvest time. He was pleased to talk about it but had the urbanized East African’s self-conscious tendency to dissociate himself from any sort of superstitious ritual.
‘Just in the bush,’ he said. ‘The far bush.’
It occurred to me, sitting there, that no one at the dock or on the ferry had asked to see my passport. No one had looked at my letter, authorizing my trip. There was no mention of money, no one had asked for references, or a ticket. I had merely been introduced. It was just: Climb aboard, as the driver of the cattle truck had said to me north of Marsabit on the shifta road, before we were ambushed.