PART TWO. THE WRITER’S WRITER
5. Christmas Pudding
JUST BEFORE he left Kampala, Vidia released me. He looked one last time at my much-slashed and — amended essay on cowardice, which was already scheduled to be published. He said that it was finished, though I guessed that it still did not seem quite right to him.
Move on to something new, he said; the new thing would be better for what I had learned from him. I was sorry to see him go. I had come to depend on his reading and his friendly advice. Needing him to put his whole philosophy into a sentence, I mocked myself by thinking of the man who asked Christ, “Good Master, what good thing shall I do that I may have eternal life?” Christ gives him a quick summary of the essentials, beginning with “Do not kill” and ending with “Sell everything you have.”
I found a way of framing the question and managed to stammer it to Vidia.
Vidia’s answer was “Tell the truth.”
And there was his dream, the one I had written down. It went this way.
Vidia and his brother, Shiva, were staying with a family in which there were two other children, a boy and a girl. Shiva hated the boy, and one day when Vidia, his brother, and the boy were on an outing, an argument started. Shiva set upon the boy and killed him.
“Look what you’ve done — you’ve killed him!” Vidia said.
Vidia and Shiva dug a hole and hid the corpse of the boy in it.
Now it so happened that the boy was to have been away for several days; there were no questions or suspicions when Vidia and Shiva returned to the family. They were feeling horribly guilty for the murder, however; they could not screw up their courage sufficiently to tell the truth. They knew that the body would be found and that they would be blamed.
A few days later the newspapers were full of the story of the disappearance, and the body was soon found. During this time the child’s father underwent a severe change — he remembered various petty cruelties he had inflicted on the boy, and he began blaming himself for the crime. He said, “I know what happened… I made him cut his throat.” Naipaul and his brother remained silent — guilty but so far not blamed. They did not speak of the crime, and yet they were not off the hook. End of dream: night sweats, terror, anxiety, guilt.
I was impressed because it revealed so much. It amazed me that a dream that reflected no credit upon him, that showed him as guilty and sneaky, depicting his brother as a killer, was one he told me coldly and in detail.
Vidia was in London, and I was alone in a land that now seemed dustier and flimsier and fictitious. I had grown used to being alone in Africa: the solitude had sharpened my concentration, and this intensity served my writing. But for the first time I was lonely and felt listless with disappointment. Africa had once seemed limitless and powerful and liberating. Vidia had left me with doubts. He had belittled the politicians, ridiculed the currency, sneered at the newspapers, and Africa now seemed tiny, self-destructive, and confining. It was full of crooked opportunists and it was dangerous. It was ruinous and random. Do you notice how they make their own paths everywhere?
In the Senior Common Room and the Staff Club and the Kampala Film Society, the word “infies” rang in my ears. On Sundays I went for long bird-watching walks up the Bombo Road and in the bush. Nothing has a name here — it is always “hill,” “tree,” “river,” “bird.” They don’t differentiate. There is no drama. They don’t see.
My habits were the same: work in the morning in my office, do some teaching, eat lunch at home or at the Hindoo Lodge. After a nap, writing in the afternoon, then into town through the big iron gates under the Makerere motto, Pro Futuro Aedificamus. At the gates and in the road and in Bat Valley and in town I heard: This will go back to bush. The jungle will move in. Look, already it has started.
At the Staff Club people inquired insincerely about Vidia.
“What do you hear from your friend Naipaul?”
Their insincerity was tinged with sarcasm, because for the whole period of Vidia’s stay in Kampala I had been his shadow. He had been my friend, not theirs. They saw it as my abandonment of them — I had rejected them and become Naipaul’s friend. It was true: I had rejected them, but I thought it was my secret. In being Naipaul’s shadow I had revealed myself, revealed my literary ambitions most of all. Until then I had been seen as a village explainer, indulging myself. I knew, even then, that a writer lives in his writing. I suspected I had given myself away, perhaps had shown my ambition, certainly had exposed my wound. That was all right with the Staff Club. It was okay to be a local writer, but in befriending Naipaul it appeared that I was getting above myself, looking to London for approval. Expatriates both hated and hankered for London. I had ignored them. Naipaul had ignored them. They knew his contempt, his indifference; they knew his insulting word for them.
To most of them he was a bird of passage, the most undesirable expatriate: an enigma, a mocker, a complainer, someone who would bolt when things got bad. Some had bolted when the Kabaka fell. People flew in and said all sorts of things about Uganda, and like Vidia even mocked it. When they left, we mocked them. What did they know? This was our home, our place of work, our risk. We lived here because we liked it. It was regarded as bad form to jeer at Africans or to speak slightingly of the students. It was dangerous to laugh at the government. Vidia had broken most of the unspoken rules. No one had openly disagreed with him — indeed, in our hearts many of us agreed — but he was resented for trying to demoralize us. Africans said he was typically English. The English expatriates called him typically Trinidadian. The Indians in Kampala called him a typical Brahmin. A number of people said he was a settler type, which was the worst you could say about anyone.
Naipaul also gave the appearance of being a snob. He ridiculed our beer drinking and our bad wine and the power that our servants had over us. He had no faith in the students. The news had circulated that he had awarded only one prize, Third Prize, to Winston Wabamba, and no one found it funny. Some of his scorning observations were repeated. People said, “I feel sorry for his wife.” “Patrician” was the kindest word I heard used for him. The Staff Club was noted for its foul language, and Vidia was described in the crudest anatomical terms. The local Indians generally felt he had been browbeating them when he had talked about their days being numbered and nagged them about their exit strategy.
Dust devils, those furious little whirlwinds, were common on our roads and in the dry fields. Vidia had appeared like a dust devil, had sternly questioned every received opinion and demanded answers, and then, like a dust devil, he had whirled away — shivered into the distance, leaving a small scoured trail in the earth.
After Naipaul left I had to explain him, and, exposed as someone aspiring to be like him, I was regarded with suspicion, as unreliable, a secret mocker, like him. I would never again be a Staff Club hearty, taking turns as barman.
“I used to like you,” an expatriate woman said to me one night in the club’s bar. Her name was Maureen. She was drunk and truthful. “I don’t like you anymore. I think you’re a shit. So does Brian.”
Brian was her husband, a mathematician who taught Boolean algebra. He also did the Staff Club accounts. Hearing Maureen denounce me, he said, “Fucking Yank.”
He seemed to lose his footing as he spoke, but instead of regaining his balance he kept falling. He was drunk too, and he brought down one of the bar stools with him as he fell. Maureen had not moved; she still glared at me.