It was a long journey. We talked about everything. After circling through the terraced gardens and stepped fields of the Virunga foothills, we came to Kabale, which lay in a steep green gorge. I stopped at the White Horse Inn, which was known for its hospitality. It was mid-afternoon, and we had hardly stopped since leaving Kampala in the early morning.
“I’m hungry,” I said.
Vidia did not move. “You go ahead.” He smiled. “I’ll wait here.”
“Aren’t you hungry?”
He yanked his bush hat lower on his head and said, “Please go on. Don’t worry about me.”
“Vidia,” I said. “This might be a good place to stop for the night.”
“Oh, no. Not that. Not that.”
I could not understand his reluctance. I said, “The only places between here and Kigali are two really tiny towns, Kisoro and Ruhengeri. The border might be closed by the time we get there.”
“We’ll stop at Kisoro then, at the Traveler’s Rest.”
“What’s wrong with this hotel?”
At first he hesitated. Then he said, “I couldn’t possibly stay here. I’ve quarreled with the manager.”
“You were here before?”
“With Patsy.”
This was news to me.
“Quite a while ago. You were in the north. We stopped for lunch. I was quite taken with the place. It’s Oldie Worldie, isn’t it? But”—he made his disgusted face, his sour mouth—“it was a mistake. I said I wanted to talk to the manager. When he came to our table, I said, ‘You have very strange rules here.’
“‘Strange rules? What do you mean?’
“‘Rules governing the condition of your staff uniforms,’ I said.
“‘We have no such rules. Only that they wear them.’
“‘Don’t you have a rule saying that all staff uniforms must be dirty?’
“‘No,’ he said.
“‘Oh,’ I said, “I thought that, because they were all dirty, your staff must be obeying a rule.
“The manager glared at me. But I was not through. ‘The other rule I noticed was the one about serving. Whenever a plate or bowl is brought to the table, the waiter has his thumb stuck in the food. That’s surely a rule, because they all do it.’
“The manager fumed and said that if we did not like it, we could leave. I said, ‘With pleasure.’ But you see, he wanted to have a row. I’m afraid I obliged him. So it’s better that I stay here. Take your time. Enjoy your lunch.”
But lunch had ended, so an African waiter told me. The manager confirmed this. He was a thin, irritable-looking man in a crumpled white shirt and club tie and black trousers.
“I’ll have tea, then.”
“You’ll have to take it in the lounge. We require a jacket and tie in the dining room.”
Over two hundred miles from Kampala, in the Virunga forest of wild Kigezi, among the pissing, monkey-eating Bachiga, where gorillas were commonplace and bird squawks filled the air, where everyone went barefoot and many women bare breasted, I could not enter the dining room of the White Horse Inn without a tie knotted around my neck.
Sniffing defiantly at me, the manager shuffled papers and was gone. I had tea in the lounge: cookies, sandwiches with the crusts cut off, and fruitcake. An elderly African hovered next to me, pouring tea through a silver strainer, adding hot water to the teapot, smoothing the napkins.
“Did you see him?” Vidia said when we were under way again.
“Yes. He was rude to me. He said I needed a necktie to eat in the dining room. He stuck me in the lounge.”
“Infy.”
Before Kisoro, misreading a sign, I took a wrong turn. We traveled down a narrowing road that seemed to be going nowhere except into deeper forest, one that had only thickened and risen and never been cut, where there were no huts, no straying chickens. Such a place, like the Ituri and the woods near Lake Edward and some others, was distinctive for its darkness, the green-black shadows of dense ferns under a tall canopy of foliage.
After twenty minutes in that dark forest we came to a border post with a wooden shed, a barrier, and a few men wearing colorful shirts. They were drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. I saw the pack in one man’s shirt pocket with the name Belga. It was Primus beer. Congolese brands. We were on the wrong road.
“Bienvenue à la frontière congolaise,” one man said, swigging beer and welcoming us.
Vidia was delighted. The Congo! He spoke to the man in beautifully accented French. “Incroyable! Nous n’avons aucune idée que nous nous dirigeons vers le Congo!” he said. We had no idea we were headed for the Congo!
“Monsieur, vous êtes au Congo,” said the beer-drinking man with the loudest shirt, its pattern of big red poppies like a mark of his authority. The Congo is here, sir. His foot was propped on the barrier, a rusty horizontal pipe.
They bantered for a while and Vidia finally said, “C’est dommage que nous allons à Rwanda.” It’s a shame that we’re going to Rwanda.
“Rwanda est par là,” the man said. Rwanda is that way. “Mais re-tournez un jour et visitez le Congo.” Come back sometime and visit our country.
I reversed the car and drove away from the shed, heading back the way we had come. This was the easternmost border of the Congo, as distant as it was possible to be from Leopoldville. I kept thinking of that Congolese frontier post, the little shed, the tiny postern to a great and enigmatic castle of a country.
“They seem far less foolish when they’re speaking French,” Vidia said. “It doesn’t sound like rubbish in French.”
At the Rwanda frontier the formalities were cursory, and Vidia muttered the French words the soldiers used as they examined our papers, repeating their mispronunciations.
As we left the border post I said, “I forgot to ask them what side of the road to drive on.”
“Oh, God.”
Just then a large trailer truck approached, throwing up dust, traveling down the middle of the road. In Uganda we drove according to British custom, on the left, but Rwanda-Burundi had been a Belgian colony, and surely they drove on the right.
“The moment of truth,” I said, and swerved and began driving on the right.
The truck, a beer truck, carrying a load of loudly jingling empty bottles in wooden crates, passed us in a fury of noise and gravel, and a dust cloud obscured the road for the next two hundred yards.
The dust settled like a view in a telescope twisting sharply into focus, and the looming scene was that of a mob, the road filled with people moving like a ghost army through the sifting-down dust particles in a distortion that was splashed with light. They were tall and thin, the women carried bundles, there were many children and some animals — dogs and goats. It was the sort of exaggeration for effect that could have been a stock scene in a Tarzan movie — a crowd of toothy implacable natives, and a terrifying sight because the whole road was claimed by them. There was no space for us to proceed.
“What is this?” Vidia was nervous.
The mob parted slowly, reluctantly, as my car penetrated it like a dinghy nosing through an ocean of breaking chop. Passing the car, the people peered in, screwing up their faces and pressing against the windows.
“Probably the market just closed and they’re heading home,” I said, trying not to sound as alarmed as I felt.
“They’re blocking the road, man.”
He was very jittery, whispering wildly — a whole crowd of Rwandans compressed into a narrow road and no other traffic, just my little car inching along against the chop of gaping people.
“I don’t like mobs at all,” he said.
But even after I got past them and the road cleared — although there were always crowds of people on Rwanda’s roads — it was still slow going. The road was a deeply rutted track lined with elephant grass. Farther on, we went higher and could see Mount Muhavura close up: the intensively cultivated slopes, the masses of mud huts. I told Vidia that Rwanda was the most densely populated country on earth.