“New people. From Canada.”
“Infies,” he said. “Doesn’t it make you hate all Canadians?”
I said no, and Pat laughed.
“Well, it would make me hate them,” Naipaul said. “Do you speak to them?”
“Sometimes.”
“You should cut them.”
“You mean not speak to them?”
“I mean not see them. You walk past them. You cut them. They don’t exist. Nothing at all.”
Not even the G. Ramsay Muir treatment — you just walked on.
The point about the rocking, squeaking hobbyhorse of a bed was that when I heard it, its first murmurs and jerks and hiccups, hesitating, just foreplay, nothing rhythmic yet, I prepared myself, and soon it was swaying and calling like a corncrake, and the woman was urging this late-night plowing. Then, almost against my will, I became aroused and woke Yomo and we made love.
One of those nights Yomo turned me away, hugged herself, and said she was really ill.
“You might be pregnant,” I said. “You have to see the doctor.”
“I don’t want the doctor. I don’t need him.”
“He’s good. He’ll need to examine you.”
“Indian doctor,” she said. “Bloody shit.”
Dr. Barot was a Gujarati, Uganda born, trained in the Indian city of Broach, who in the past had treated me for gonorrhea and for malaria. I asked him if he would see Yomo. He said of course, that he was also an obstetrician, and that it was important that he see Yomo soon.
Sleepy-eyed, reluctant, slightly sulky, Yomo finally agreed. She always took pains to dress up before leaving the house, but this was a greater occasion than most. She put on her brocade sash, her expensive cloak, her best turban. I loved seeing her dress up, and she became haughty and offhand when she wore her elegant clothes.
The February heat was oppressive. In the car Yomo said, “You don’t know. Black people get hotter than white people. It’s our skin.” I wondered whether this was true.
Dr. Barot greeted her and took her into his examining room. I heard the scraping sound of her disrobing, stiff colorful clothes sliding away, of her folding them. If she was going to have a baby, I would be happy. It was not what I had planned, but really I had no plans. There was something wrong with the very idea of a plan, and anyway I half believed that my life was prefigured — perhaps, as people said, like the lines on my palm. My random life was pleasant enough, and everything good that had happened to me had come accidentally. I just launched myself and trusted to luck. Mektoub—it is written.
I sat waiting, thinking of nothing in particular. When the examining room door opened I smiled, having just been reminded of why I was there.
“What’s the verdict?”
“Four months pregnant,” Dr. Barot said.
Yomo looked shyly at me and slipped next to me as we watched Dr. Barot write his bill on a pad. While he wrote, he said that Yomo was healthy and that she should see him regularly from now on so he could monitor her blood pressure.
In the car, sitting on the hot upholstery, I said, “How can you be four months pregnant? You’ve only been here three months.”
I felt innumerate and confused and was not blaming her but rather trying to explain my bewilderment.
Yomo said, “I had a friend in Nigeria before I came here to see you.”
Now it became harder for me to drive. The road was full of obstacles, and it was much hotter in the car.
“What are we going to do?” I said.
She was silent, but I could see she was sad, and her sadness seemed worse because she was dressed so beautifully.
“Do you think you should see your friend?” I asked.
She said nothing. She did not cry until that night, when her clothes were neatly folded on the chair, all that stiff cloth in a deep stack. She was in bed, hiding her face, sobbing.
I did not know what to say. I did not have the words. I loved her, but I had just discovered that I did not know her. Who was this friend, and what was this deception? It must have been obvious to her that she was at least one month pregnant soon after she arrived in Uganda.
“I want to go home,” she said in a voice that broke my heart, and it was awful to hear the Canadians upstairs fooling around and calling out.
“This is your home.”
“No,” she said, and went on weeping.
Yomo was one of only three passengers on the plane from Entebbe to Lagos a week later. Her posture was different, her sadness making her slower and giving her a halting way of walking, and she sighed as we moved towards the barrier, where I kissed her goodbye. It seemed a kind of death, because it was as though we were losing everything.
“I liked it when you read that story to me,” she said. She began to weep again.
The road from Entebbe to Kampala was known for its frequent fatal car accidents. I drove it that day feeling fearless and stupid, not caring if it was my turn to die on this road, because hadn’t everything else come to an end? I was numb, but when I got to my house I knew that I had lost my love and would have to begin again, and all that helped was my knowing that for Yomo it would be worse. So I helped myself by sorrowing for her.
Naipaul asked me where I had been. He had not seen me in the painful week that had just passed.
“Oh, God,” he said. “Oh, God.” His voice cracked, his face was tormented. “Are you all right? Of course you’re not. Paul, Paul, Paul.”
He was truly upset. He was sharing the burden. That was the act of a friend.
He took my hand and turned it over and studied it again, this time tracing it with his finger, and this time he spoke.
“You must not worry. You’re going to be all right.”
“Thanks, Vidia.” It was the first time I used the name.
“That is a good hand.”
3. The Kaptagat Arms
IT WAS THE MONTH of bush fires, smoky skies, black hills, fleeing animals; the season of haze and hawks.
With all my love lost, I lay in the bedroom alone where we had slept together, staring at the long-nosed stains on the ceiling, goblins with the voices of the yelling Canadians upstairs. I was sorrowful without Yomo and her laughter. Naipaul — Vidia, as I now called him — was kind, but kindness was not enough. I needed a more intimate friend or else no one at all, just the consolation of the African landscape, which was a reminder to me that life goes on.
It was the season when Africans set fire to the bush, believing the blaze to be helpful to next year’s crops. I set off for the north, drove almost to the Sudan, and walked among the elephant palms to the shriek and twang of the same insects the people ate there; then I drove on to Arua, in West Nile province, on the Congo border, with its scowling purplish Kakwa people, of whom the chief of staff of the Uganda Army, Idi Amin, was the stereotype.
Hawks hovered above the grass fires and swooped down on the mice and snakes and other small creatures that were roused and panicked by the flames. There were hawks all over the smoky sky. Something about the wildfires and the hovering birds and the scuttling mice spoke to me of sex and its consequences.
At Kitgum, in the far north, I hiked in a hot wind, sinking in sand to my ankles, kicking at dead leaves to scatter the snakes. Each night in the village where I stayed a toothless old woman squatted on the dirt floor of a hut and sang a lewd song in an ululating voice. “She is beautiful and has a neck like a swan, but she has stroked the spear of every man in the district” was the way her song was translated for me. It was coarse and upsetting, but this hidden corner of Africa was peaceful for being hot and remote. Black water tumbled over Karuma Falls. To justify my trip to my department head, I traveled southwest and slipped between the Mountains of the Moon and visited schools at Bundibugyo, where Yomo and I had planned to lose ourselves in the bush. One night after rain I went outside and found thirsty children licking raindrops off my car.