I had the feeling this was criticism rather than praise.
We left at eleven in the morning. About twenty miles south of Dar we came to a tunnel, the first tunnel I had seen in East Africa — a long one, cut under a big hill, because the point about Chinese railway building was that obstacles were blasted through and the tracks laid straight.
On the other side of that tunnel was the bush, nothing but deep grass and flat-topped trees, everything green from the recent heavy rain. Yet the day was sunny and warm. Though Michel, the Congolese man, did little else but sleep — he was a great heavy fellow with a sick mother in Lubumbashi — the others were chatty and informative.
Three hours after we set off, speeding south, we came to a halt. ‘There is something wrong. We should not be stopping here.’ Four hours later we were still there. ‘See what I mean?’ It seemed there was a problem with the track. ‘The heat of the sun has caused the iron rail to expand and buckle. We must wait until it cools.’ This was an unconvincing explanation.
Killing time, two Africans, a pair of muscular boys, were standing on their heads beside the track. They dropped to their knees and did back flips. Then one climbed on to the other’s shoulders and somersaulted to the embankment. It was unusual in the East African bush to see such strong Africans with well-developed muscles. But they told me they were professional acrobats.
‘We are going to Botswana,’ one told me. ‘There is no work here for acrobats.’
A young blonde woman sat by the track reading a thick, torn paperback — one I recognized.
‘What do you think of that book?’
‘Fantatic. It’s about this bloke in Africa, shagging all these African women.’
‘But it’s a novel.’
‘Reckon so.’
‘Funnily enough, I wrote it.’
‘Get out! Did you?’ She had a lovely smile and her accent had a soft South African slant. She called out, ‘Conor, come here!’
A young energetic man hurried over and confronted me, saying, ‘Kelli, is this bloke touching you up?’
Then he laughed — accusing me of fondling his wife was his matey way of greeting me. He was Irish, his wife from Cape Town, but both now lived and worked in San Francisco. They were on their way to South Africa, they said, traveling in the next carriage.
Because many passengers had spilled on to the line I could size them up: Most were Africans returning home, but there were a scattering of European backpackers, some aid workers, a shocked-looking Finnish woman, a white missionary couple traveling with small barefoot children, some Indian families, and many Tanzanians heading out of the country to seek their fortune.
‘They’re waiting for the track to cool,’ Conor said. ‘Do you fucking believe it?’
Yet as dusk gathered, and the air grew cool, the train whistle blew and off we went.
Sunset is breath-taking but so brief in East Africa that it seems fast forwarded — the sun descends into the risen dust of day, the clouds above it blaze and the whole western sky becomes a canopy as hot pink as molten gold, fringed with orange and purply blue, with beaky faces and filigree, a scattering of mashed hyacinths, a shattered syllabub, a melting light show. Or it might be corporeal, incarnadine, a great bleeding liver slab of sky that slips into separate slices, discoloring, drying into crisp fritters, and fragments of friable light, before being spun into cotton and vanishing. You can look only at parts of the sunset, because the whole is too wide. But this magic enchants for a matter of minutes and the best of it lasts seconds before darkness falls.
The sun was gone but the sky was alight, the backcloth of the color of Tanzania’s unique gem, the bluey-lavender tanzanite, and strands of yellow, braids of thick golden sky light illuminating the bush.
Peering into shadows by the track, what I took to be a tall slender tree was a giraffe and just as I saw it I heard the Swahili word from the corridor, ‘Twiga.’ There were two more, loping among the trees. We were passing a wilderness area, where animals were gathering at waterholes in the fading light — warthogs, a couple of elephants, some bush buck, so beautiful painted in the unexpected afterglow of the sunset, purples and yellows, mauve warthogs, golden elephants.
Then night fell, the animals dissolved into darkness and there was silence except for the frogs’ gleep-gleep.
Wandering through the train later that night I came upon a lounge car. Loud American rap music was being played — angry obscenities, accusations, incomprehensible slang. The place was full of drunken shouting Africans. One stuck his sweating face into mine and demanded that I buy him a beer, ‘Kesho, kesho,’ I said; tomorrow, tomorrow, and my saying it that way took the edge off the confrontation.
I was about to leave when I saw Conor and Kelli drinking Tuskers at the far end. They invited me to join them and their friend, the Finnish woman, who still seemed shocked. She was pretty, but her pinched expression of worry made her beauty look somewhat alarming.
‘This is Ursula,’ Kelli said. ‘Paul’s a writer. His Secret History book’s all about this guy shagging African girls.’
Ursula winced. It was a sensitive topic. She was working on an AIDS project in Zambia, heading back there, but not for long.
‘Before I left Finland I understood the problem of AIDS in Zambia and I thought I had some good solutions,’ Ursula said. She rocked back and forth slightly as she spoke, another cause for concern, but somehow part of her faintly sing-song Finnish accent. After I got to Zambia I realized that it’s more complicated than I thought. Now I don’t understand the problem so clearly. It is all so complicated, and I don’t know about any solution.’
‘What did you find out in Zambia that you didn’t know before?’ I asked.
‘The behavior,’ she said, and rolled her eyes. ‘There is so much sex. It is all sex. And so young!’
‘How young?’
‘As if you don’t know,’ Kelli said, teasing me.
‘Ten years old is common,’ Ursula said.
‘But with their own age-group,’ I said, using the term I had learned in the Chalbi Desert, from the Samburu man.
‘Not with their age-group — anyone with anyone,’ Ursula said.
Conor said, ‘Sounds like fun. Just joking!’
Ursula shook her head. ‘It is horrible. There is no sex education. No one will talk about sex, but everyone does it. No one will talk about AIDS and everyone is infected. We were sent an anti-AIDS film and we showed it. But people in the villages said it was shameful — too indecent — and so it was withdrawn. What could we do?’
‘Did you talk to them about it?’
‘I tried to.’
‘And what happened?’
‘They wanted to have sex with me.’
Conor covered his face and howled into his hands.
‘The men follow me. They call me mzungu. I hate that — always calling out to me, “Mzungu! Mzungu!’
‘Racial-profiling,’ Conor said, trying to lighten the mood. ‘Shouldn’t stand for it, if I was you, not a bit of it.’
But Ursula did not smile. For her it was more than outraged decency — it was despair, a recognition of futility, a kind of grief even, along with anger.
‘They ask me for money all the time. “You give me money” — just me, because I am white.’
She was trembling and silent after that, sitting barracked by the hideous rap music and the yelling drunks.
Conor and Kelli had just come from what they had hoped would be a tour of the game parks. It had not been a success.
‘I wanted to leave Arusha almost as soon as I got there,’ Kelli said. ‘Some people saw a thief and chased him. “Thief! Thief!” They caught him and knocked him down and right there they beat him to death. It made me sick.’