Well, he did, at last, and the foot passengers followed, and the ferryman collected everybody’s fare. The vehicle was charged four shillings—about fifty cents—while from watching the ferryman make change, it seemed to Ellen foot passengers paid far less.
“This is the most relaxing part of the trip,” Frank said as the ferryman threw his engine into gear and the metal ramps scraped back again off the macadam. Suiting his actions to his words, he leaned back in the seat, folded his arms over his chest, closed his eyes, and smiled in lazy comfort.
And the strange thing was, he was right. The motion of the ferry, the combination of hesitant forward motion with the constant sideways thrust of the river, was oddly soothing, the physical equivalent of a lullaby. Their progress was slow, easy, soporific, and out of their hands. The river was so narrow that even with its rapidity and muddiness it didn’t look really dangerous, and the other passengers under their roof of joined umbrellas seemed pleased by their presence, as being an entertaining break from routine. The far shore, which was much steeper, approached slowly through the rain, and Ellen found herself relaxing more than she had done in a month. The tensions went away; the frustrations faded; the uncertainties grew less important. “I want to stay here forever,” she murmured, and beside her, Frank comfortably chuckled.
The routine between frantic ferryman and disinterested passengers was repeated on the opposite bank, and so was that between ferryman-as-incompetent-direction-giver and Frank-as-long-suffering-driver. But at last they were off, and spurting up the muddy slope, people ducking out of the way of the great gobs of maroon gunk thrown back by the tires straining for purchase. They reached level ground and a much narrower road, arched over by rows of trees. “That was fun,” Ellen said. “Thanks.”
“You don’t get any of those in—Where are you from, anyway?”
“Everywhere. I was an Army brat. Air Force, really. My father was a pilot.”
“You learned from him?”
“Starting when I was fourteen. He’s flying for PSA now.”
They talked awhile about cities and countries where Ellen had grown up, finding that while they’d both lived in several of the same places, it had never been at the same time. But Ellen loved meaningless coincidences as much as anybody, and was pleased whenever it turned out that Frank had been such-and-such a place three years after she’d been there, or two years before.
At a fork in the muddy road they turned left, and very soon overtook a monstrous sagging lumbering smoke-snorting truck, its load covered with tan canvas tarpaulins. The springs on its right side were completely shot, so that at all times it seemed in the process of falling over; even if the road had been wide enough to pass, that tottering hulk would have intimidated most drivers.
“Shit,” Frank said. “They’re supposed to be there already; they left two hours before us.”
She had no idea what he was talking about. “Who?”
“Charlie,” he said in disgust, pointing at the truck. “They can’t take the ferry, so they came around the long way, through Sio.”
“They have something to do with us?”
“That’s our work crew,” Frank said, and despite his annoyance he grinned. “We didn’t come out here just to play might-have-been.”
“Oh,” Ellen said, suddenly realizing. “The smuggling capital.” Of course this had to do with the coffee caper; for some absurd reason it spoiled things a bit that this expedition wasn’t merely an outing for its own sake.
“That’s right,” Frank said. “The smuggling capital; that’s good. Did you read in the Standard about the outboard motors?” The Standard was a Nairobi newspaper, also available in Kisumu.
“Outboard motors? No.”
“You know Lake Naivasha? It’s two hundred miles east of here, big lake. Already this year, every outboard motor on that lake was stolen; at least, every outboard motor that wasn’t locked away in somebody’s house.”
“Is that true? Why?”
“To come here for the smuggling. Uganda’s breaking down. This year, there’ll be more import-export by smuggling than by regular trade.”
Ellen suddenly had an image of them all—herself, Lew, Frank, Balim, even Isaac Otera—as carrion eaters, buzzards or hyenas, waiting on the sidelines for some stricken creature to die. It was a discomfiting vision. She said, “It seems tough on the people.”
“Around Lake Naivasha? They’ll recover.”
“No, in Uganda.”
“Uganda!” He seemed truly astonished. “We aren’t screwing the people,” he said, “they’re the ones doing the smuggling. They’re getting out from under their government, that’s all, the best way they can, poor bastards.”
“What’s going to happen next?” she wondered. “In Uganda, I mean.”
“What usually happens, I suppose,” he said. “Things’ll get worse.”
Port Victoria looked like the cowtown in Western movies. Not the big town with the saloons full of fancy women, but the little nothing-town where the stagecoach changes horses. The dirt road—mud road, really—ended in a large scraggly weedy square with low stucco or cement buildings on three sides. Most of the buildings featured verandah roofs over mud or cement walks, above which were false fronts. Peeling old political posters glued to the walls looked like wanted posters from those same Western movies. A dozen or so adults and children lounged in the comparative dryness under the verandah roofs. Low hills surrounded the village on three sides, adding to the sense of frontier isolation. Only the presence of a small white British Leyland truck parked in front of what seemed to be a general store took the scene out of the American nineteenth century and put it in the African twentieth.
Was there a sense here of unfulfilled destiny? In this sleepy village did there still dream the egg of the merchant metropolis that had never been born? It was probably merely that she’d heard the history of the place from Frank, but it nevertheless seemed to Ellen that there was something vaguely sad about the town, sad in a way other than the sadness endemic in rural towns everywhere, more than that usual sense of personal loss, of stunted promise and missed opportunity. Here it was no mute inglorious Milton that was evoked, but the image of an entire city that had failed to be. The missing railroad yards, warehouses, docks, movie palaces, bars, mansions, slums, vitality, purpose; all seemed to hover minimally and unnoticeably in the air behind the reality of the town, the aura of a ghost too weak even to haunt the place.
And the second subtext here, of course, was the underworld: Port Victoria’s secret life as a smuggler’s haven. In addition to the bland reality of surface appearance, in addition to the ghostly echo of what might have been, there was also the hidden face of corruption. Everyone she saw might be a smuggler or a thief; every building might conceal booty. Smuggling always leads to further crimes, to bribery, theft, or murder; in losing its original destiny, Port Victoria had become something strange and fascinating and in a way pathetic, almost like a failed person. Looking around her, Ellen said, “It’s a Graham Greene character as geography.”