He saw the roots of a banyan forcing their way into the paved sidewalk and pushing at a wall, the knees and knuckles of the roots visible in broken masonry and paving stones.
“The jungle is moving in.”
We left Kigali in the heat and traveled back the way we had come, on the winding rutted road, to the crossroads at Ruhengeri. Again the road was almost impassable because of all the pedestrians.
“This road is black with people,” Vidia said.
At the same café, Vidia sat under a beer sign and ordered another cheese sandwich. I thought, Vegetarians eat an awful lot of cheese. I ate an enamel plate of stringy chicken and rice. We were watched by kneeling Hutus as we ate. When we left, we took the road that led west, to the border town of Kisenyi, on Lake Kivu. The place was famous for its smugglers’ dens. Like most of the Congo’s border towns, it was said to have an air of intrigue because it was also the haunt of white mercenaries, who had names like Blackjack and Mad Mike and Captain Bob. There was often trouble in the Congo’s large eastern province of Kivu and in the southeastern province of Shaba. When fighting broke out, refugees fled across the border. From time to time, angry expatriates or white mercenaries would take over a Congolese town, causing a panic flight of people into Rwanda.
The people on this road could well have been refugees, for there had been fighting near Goma in the past month. But after a while there were no people at all. The empty road cut through yellow woods that gave way to greener, denser forest, and the car labored on stony inclines that were the foothills of more assertive volcanoes. On one of the bends of this road stood a man in a white shirt and dark pants, holding a basket. He waved as we approached him.
“Don’t pick him up,” Vidia said.
But I had already begun to slow the car.
“Why are you stopping?”
“Maybe he has a problem.”
The man leaned at the window. “Pouvez-vous m’emmenez à Kavuma? J’ai raté le bus,” he asked. Can you take me to Kavuma? I missed the bus.
“Get in,” I said, in English and then in Swahili.
Sliding into the back seat, the man apologized for not speaking English.
Vidia said, “Mon français n’est pas particulièrement bon, mais bien sur c’est comme ça. J’ai peur que vous ne soyez contraint à supporter cet accent brisé.” My French is not particularly good, but of course that is the way it is. I am afraid you will have to endure this corrosive accent.
“Vous parlez beaucoup mieux que moi,” the African said. You speak much better than I do.
Vidia protested this, even a bit crossly, and then he fell silent, and so did the African. Vidia was angry. He had not wanted me to pick up the hitchhiker. He believed that Africans often took advantage of expatriates.
Ten miles down the road, the African said, “Mon village est près d’ici.” My village is near here. Getting out, he once again complimented Vidia on his French, and he vanished into the trees.
Before Vidia could say anything, I said, “I spent two years in Africa without a car. I hitchhiked everywhere. People picked me up. That’s why I picked him up.”
Vidia said, “Let the idlers walk.”
He sniffed and made a sour face, twisting his lips. The man’s pungent earthen odor lingered in the car. I said nothing for a few miles.
“This is the bush. People depend on each other.” I could see that he was not impressed. “Anyway, it’s my car.”
What was his problem? Years later Vidia said to an interviewer, “I do not have the tenderness more secure people can have towards bush people,” and he admitted that he felt threatened by them. But who were “bush people"? Anyone — African, Indian, muzungu— seeing the dusky distinguished author V.S. Naipaul standing beside any road in East Africa would have grunted, “Dukawallah.” Shopkeeper.
We got to Kisenyi in the late afternoon, having had to go very slowly on the hilly road. Kisenyi was a lakeside town of villas and boarding houses and several hotels. We chose one at random, the Miramar, which was run by an elderly Belgian woman. She had untidy hair and wore a stained apron, but she seemed a kindly soul. You knew what such people were like from the way they talked to their African servants. She spoke to her staff in a polite and patient way that was clearly masking her exasperation.
Belgians — just one family, but a large one — filled the dining room, and, being related, they were uninhibited: they shouted, they worked their elbows, they reached across the table for more food. We ate at the same table, family style. Vidia winced and seemed to lose his appetite as he watched the display of boisterous manners, the chewing, the squawking women, the shouting, growling men.
The Miramar was more a boarding house than a hotel, with an intimacy, a disorderly domesticity, the shared facilities meaning intrusions on privacy — the bathmat was wet most of the time, bedroom doors were usually left ajar. Vidia, intensely private, hating proximity and confidences, disliked the place from the first and found the dining table, this common board, unbearable for its quarreling, gnawing Belgians. He hated their appetites. He said the Miramar smelled. He loathed the Belgians for their being big, pale, overweight, loud, ravenous, unapologetic. “Potato eaters,” he called them.
By contrast, the Africans here were tall, dark, skinny, whispering, and whipped-looking. I mentioned to Vidia that I thought they were Watutsi.
“Toot-toot-Tutsi, goodbye,” he said. “But you wonder how they stand these Belgians.”
He had hardly touched his food. He had eaten the fish. He disliked salad. “What kind of a vegetarian hates salad?” the Major had muttered to me. The Belgian food was heavy and meaty.
“I think we’ve done this,” Vidia said.
We left the dining room early, before dessert was served.
“I don’t think I could stand watching these Belgians having their pudding.”
It was his first experience of the true bush settler in Africa. I had seen such people in Malawi and Zambia and Kenya, but these Belgians were the apotheosis of the type. You knew their days were numbered. They were farmers and mechanics and operators of heavy equipment — tractors and road graders. They were clever at fixing cars. They mended machines with the simplest tools. They drove the largest trucks. They had maintained the colony but, newly independent, the black republic would find them too expensive and ornery and would send them away. Without these simple capable folk keeping it maintained, the country would begin to fall apart. Although I always doubted it, I often heard that there was idealism in colonizing; but really, whenever the word “colony” was mentioned, especially in Africa, I thought of these simple-minded mechanics. And I suspected that when Africans talked about whites, it was the mechanics and their attitudes they were usually denouncing.
“Let’s get out of here.”
We went for a walk in the darkness, keeping to a path near the lakeshore. At the far end of the road, the Congolese town of Goma was visible. Goma was better lighted than Kisenyi.
“This deteriorating road. These crummy houses,” Vidia said.
I told him my thoughts about colonials as mechanics.
“My narrator mentions how a society needs to be maintained,” he said.
“Your novel,” I said, “is it based on a sort of political memoir?”
“Not exactly. I had to find a form for it. It was terribly difficult.”
We had walked through the center of town, past a bandstand, an abandoned fun fair, and some banners and lights strung across the main street. We came to a part of the road that was severely potholed and with villas that were shuttered and rundown.
“I suffered over it,” he said. “I wasn’t sure how to tell the story. One day it came to me, the structure. I was so pleased. I called Patsy at her school. I said, ‘I’ve got it.’”