We are looking through the window of a little house. A bungalow, hard pink with a red roof, boxed in by a waist-high stucco wall, pink too, draped in bougainvillea, a hotter pink, near purple. The finest thing to see out there—with a squint, beyond the emerald colored bushes and the rusty road—is the biscuit-maker’s factory. See it? Like an old gray shoebox on the flat brim of a lake whose skin reflects a glowing empty sky. That building was once yellow, like delicious lemon filling. A Nanji-Creem, you know them—biscuits for our tea. Those blackish streaks are soot. In between, those decorative words so tricky to make out? Graffiti, hostile, brave. We see: the words of workers from that factory, commentary on the biscuit-making Nanji clan which is not all it promised. Freedom-fighters of a fiercer kind have written down-with-so-and-so and offered new names for the country. And, as usual, there is the crotch-related work of uninspired men. Below the walls, the shallows. In the silvery light a family of hippos bathes pearly in the sun. Plump and shining beasts with excellent, hard skin. And in the air the promise or the memory of a dear tea-time treat. Hippos. Biscuits. Sky. A happy combination. But that sweet and interesting view is there, outside this office window.
Across the way where we are standing, here on the cracked tiles, the push and pull of days is not for biscuits but electric power drawn from wind. And things are less appealing. Mind this: sweetness there, here, power. Hydrolight’s town office. Here, where despite the neat house-front the paint inside is chipping and unwisely chosen ceiling beams are poised to rot and sunder, a telephone will ring.
§
The special double bell was serious, rare, signaling a trunk call. Bent over a tea-pot in the hallway—a bloated silver thing which someone years before had stolen from the first class dining car of the defunct British Rail and which someone else had sold and yet another actor purchased at the market—Zarina the tea-girl gave a start and nearly dropped the china.
Zarina. A slight thing, not even sixteen. A girl with sharp clean eyes, forty braids in an elastic flowered band at the base of her long neck, a tiny crucifix on a cheap chain dangling close to two small breasts hidden by a t-shirt pinker than the walls. Zarina. Hard of bone, always thinking of the future. Often musing deep on curious things (how life had better take her far from days-like-this-right-now and show her better times), she was given to surprise: when the phone rang out, she gasped. Daydreamer, yes. But she was not bad at her job: the teacup wobbled in its saucer only, did not hit the floor.
Mr. Kamba, shaven, compact, looking round but in fact square and strong, well dressed (sporting one of his three handsome ties, today’s exemplar wide diagonal green stripes cut through by thick bright bands of gold) was not long ago arrived. Number one assistant to the mixed-up European who’d brought Hydrolight to town (a Mr. Bastian Van de Wereld coming to you soon) Mr. Kamba was a forward-looking man, always ready to accomplish things a person could be proud of. Hard-working and reliable, he was also genuinely moved by thoughts of what wind could bring out there, to the islands and the hills. Blood-testing equipment, electric microscopes, televisions, freezers, telephones, dangling lights for parties, massage beds for the elderly. Better lives for everyone, a little bit of ease in that tenacious hardship that was life, in Mr. Kamba’s view and his experience, outside of the towns.
Eager to do well, Mr. Kamba liked to know exactly where things stood. He had just sat at the table in the meeting room and opened up a file: “Lake Island Station 1.” He was about to sink into the world of wind farms, turbines, and small newfangled generators that functioned without fuel when the black thing in the office trilled and rattled on the desk. He looked slowly up, saw Zarina through the open door, and said, “You. Zarina, weh. Where is he?” Zarina on most mornings seemed to know exactly where the boss was, what he’d drunk the night before, what he’d dreamed about and other things. But Zarina only looked at him and frowned.
Although from the middle of the road out there the ringing could have been a cyclist’s bell or the call of a hot bird, Erasmus, the old man who kept Hydrolight’s car clean, was standing in the driveway and heard the telephone ring, too. Erasmus turned his head towards the slatted window. The black thing rang. And rang again. Inside, Mr. Kamba and Zarina looked at one another. Zarina hadn’t moved.
Eventually the caller quit. Steam rose from the thermos and Zarina found the cap and screwed it tightly on. She was not overly concerned. Business—this one, with the telephones and papers, which she thought of as men’s work—she didn’t let affect her. She moved on to something else. As she took a step towards Mr. Kamba, thermos firmly on the tray, she began to think about her fingernails, the half-moon look of them. She thought how bodies could contain a universe: planets, stars and rivers. How what one knew went on inside oneself compared to what one didn’t was just a small, unsettling blade in a tangle of high grass.
Mr. Kamba asked again, “Where is he?” but Zarina—not certain just then exactly where she was, let alone her surly boss—did not answer him.
There was something going on, she’d known it for some time. But Zarina did not want to say, ‘My footing’s not as sure as it once was.’ And could certainly not add what she had sensed but not admitted to herself: ‘His drunkenness has been so strange these months he’s really frightened me.’ Mr. Kamba liked to know things; Zarina liked to keep them to herself.
In a moment, as if the caller’s need could change the machine’s sound, the fat phone rang again, each ring longer than the last. Zarina stepped into the meeting room and came to rest against the wall, tea tray at her hip. She liked to see the under-boss upset. Mr. Kamba rubbed his face. He tugged twice at his tie and looked out of the window as if he could find help there. The ringing stopped and then began again, faster, fiercer, more insistent, and this time Mr. Kamba stepped into the office, wiped his damp hands on his tie, and moved to pick it up.
Bastian’s man—so he was called by the people at the Bank, and by the councilors and chieftains on the islands of the lake and sometimes by Zarina, who liked to make him feel that he was not his own—spoke English. But he preferred to read it, write it, even, was very good at memoranda and newsletters with zing. He took pleasure in his hand, in script, which he had learned from big scrubbed Scottish nuns, which had once earned him a prize! But the English in his mouth was always a translation of what he spoke at home, a poor approximation of what, in his own tongue, was a terrific skill (People in his neighborhood admired him, What a speaker, listen to him go! No wonder the fat white man snatched him up and keeps him in that place. Off to Europe next, our man in the office!). Talking on the telephone, with a man he couldn’t see, a man who didn’t understand that he spoke beautifully in a language of his own, made that black handset no tunnel to another room but a parapet over an abyss.
But Mr. Kamba thought he knew what duty was. Straightening himself and blinking, gulping, Mr. Kamba said, “Hello? Hello? Yes? New Life Hydrolight.” The connection was not good. The distant caller was confused, upset: Did. Not. Want. Him. “Where is Van de Wereld?” A Western European voice, stilted English with the accent that was hard and smooth like dried bread and soft butter, that came out of the throat, said sharply, “No.” Dissatisfied, again. “No.” A pause, correction. “This is New Life Hydrolight. This is New Life Hydrolight. From Schipralt. This is the Head Office! Van de Wereld. Van de Wereld. Is he there? Your Head. Quarters. Schipralt. Do you understand?”
Of course he understood, it was saying so was hard. But he did his best, did well. “Just a moment, please. We will fetch him for you. Call back fifteen minutes from now, please. Fifteen.” Mr. Kamba was delighted to hang up. He was sweating hard, but he would not look a fool. The next time that phone rang he wanted Bastian on it. Mr. Kamba wiped his fingers on his trousers and made a sharp sign to Zarina. Get him.
Zarina liked to win. She’d show Mr. Kamba that however he might think of what went on in her hot heart, she, not he, could bring Van de Wereld out. That there was an advantage, power, to being as she was. She put the tea-box back into a cupboard and slipped her street shoes on. In the spotty mirror pinned above the hallway sink, Zarina checked her blouse and hair and walked into the world, head high. Mr. Kamba (through the window) and Erasmus (from the drive) watched Zarina go—Mr. Kamba thinking, what can be going on, and wondering if the feeling that he’d had that something was awry was going to prove true; Erasmus—who often said he didn’t care what white people did so long as they had cars for him to clean and keep in tip-top shape—with each amazing sway of bright Zarina’s hips was thinking of his youth.
§
Still in bed, Bastian Van de Wereld was suffering from an excess that had been building in him, and which he had, until not too long ago, thought himself able to contain. In decline, perhaps, from the moment of his birth, he was now, firmly in adulthood, on the edge of an irreversible collapse. Here is how he was, this Bastian: drunk still, not simply from the night before but from a row, a length, a continent of nights whose individual effects were no longer discrete but had inexorably, dismally, accumulated and were not distinguishable from days.
A wide wreck of a man, he was squandered in his bed, remembering and sick. There was an itching in his skin, his brow more pulsing, altogether, than any single vein. Some ropey thing inside his belly was all worked up and twisted. He was dimly awake, and—although from afar a person might have missed it—shaking. He could not get out of bed, could not go to work, though in some corner of his mind despite his awful state he did know that here he was the boss and had nothing to fear. He knew that it was good for bosses to show up, at least, to shake a big fist in the air and boom with a loud voice. He liked to say—he was a crass man—things like without me in this shit hole you’d be eating rats and fucking in the trees. Such was his view of history. But this morning found him wasted: big, ugly as he always was, a danger. His mouth tasting of blood.
In the rising day, that silver light—the lake’s fault—intensifying, as it should, filled his little room. Bastian cringed against it. His skin hurt. With the light there came inevitable sound. Invaders: the clattering of pots. A cow’s complaint, rickshaw on old wheels, the rattle of an ancient Scout, flip-flops scuffing the red earth. The scratch of brooms on wet cement was worst, was murder.
He touched his face and found it busted like a fruit. He closed his rotting eyes but still the light came through. In two red ears the sound of his own breathing was a roar, a horrid, foamy tide. The wind out there—a light thing, a good breeze, lifting the hibiscus blooms (another bright, uncreditable pink), nuzzling ankles, the stiff grass, caressing children’s cheeks—tapped at Bastian’s shutters. His room’s air was bad. What had he done the night before? He had a thought of hippos roaring in slick mud, of broken glass embedded in a slope. Of the Congolese bar-tender’s regal oval face, urging him to something. The Egyptian owner rescuing a skinny metal chair that had tumbled to its back. Most of all, a darkness in his head, a sense that all the hidden rot in him had spilled out from his mouth and heart and he was powerless to gather all of that bilge up and secret it again.
Zarina did not knock. With the key that he had given her the year before in return for an unkindness, she made her business-like way in. He heard her moving through the kitchen, stepping down the hall in her Easter Sunday pumps. Another aching sound, the clicking of her feet. He shuddered. Groaned when she sat down on the bed.
“Bastian.” Zarina’s weight beside him hurt his back, his head. “Fuhkoff,” Bastian said. Hand tensed, his thick arm pushed her from him. He nearly sent her off the bed and would have if his limbs from drunkenness had not been so soft. But Zarina, on a mission, wasn’t easy to upset. She had a reputation, too. Shy when in the office, deferent to his immediate wishes when Bastian was alert, she would do all he asked of her for money, even if it hurt. She would sometimes at the height of his abominations offer him a kiss. Be sweet beneath a slap. But all that was in private. She would not be seen with him in daylight if he was soiled and sick.
“You must get dressed,” she said. From the end of the damp bed she gave him a long look, bent over him a little. It was the look she had when kneeling to unbuckle his belt and fiddle with his loins: head tilted to the side, dark eyes round, and her mouth open just enough so he could see her pink tongue ending in two hillocks before pitching down into the gulping blackness of her throat. He didn’t want her mouth just then, couldn’t feel his sex at all, but that look brought him back. It reminded him of things, of how she always returned when other girls had not, how in the end she always showed him what she’d filched and thanked him for it as if it had been a gift so he would not feel bested, and how that was something to protect. Bastian’s arms went slack. “Whatyouwant?” he asked, testing how the light felt on his eyeballs: gritty, sharp, but not like a white blade. His mouth was caked and dry.
Zarina wished to ask him where he’d been, why he’d disappeared, not been there for a week every night she’d come. Part of her was angry. Had he turned to someone else? And another part, knowing that if she did lose him it would not be to a woman but to whatever madness buckled in him, was becoming anxious. But she wanted to show Mr. Kamba and Erasmus that she was still in charge. Zarina did the smart thing. She came a little closer and when he did not snarl at her she said, very clearly, softly. “You’ve got to change your clothes and come in to the office. There has been a call. From Europe. Hydrolight. The Head Office. Your people.”
Her voice did quell the roar. She smelled good, like coconuts and powder. He surrendered to her. Zarina slipped the shirt off him and for a moment Bastian laid his filthy head against her chest and moaned. Wise, Zarina did not say anything sweet. She pushed him off her and bent to loose his trousers, noting, as the fouled stiff things came off, the bloody scrapes at both his knees and bruising on his calves. She found a clean pair in the dresser, set them down beside his red and freckled thighs. “Put these on,” she said. “Don’t worry.” She went into the courtyard for a cloth and bowl of water.
Bastian, as he could after weeping, felt a mildness in his heart. He let her wipe the oil and crusted matter from his cheeks and mouth. How fine her skin was, Bastian thought: dark like patches on a goat, pretty, glossy in the light. How the curve of this girl’s cheek was an upended drop of rain. The humid mass of her thick hair when she pulled it from its bands was an electrifying forest. Zarina, supple, lean—and that was what he liked in her, that softness that could turn into a fight—held his elbow with one hand and pressed up from his shoulder with another. “Your sunglasses,” she said. He sometimes thought he loved her. How good she was to him.
By the time she’d locked the door and they had stepped into the road, Bastian had his posture back, was looking more like a big boss and as he thought a white man should. A cocky cyclist passed him and in greeting gave a tinkle of his bell. Bastian felt it in his gut. At the wall, angered by the color of it and the flowers which were merry in the sun, Bastian shook Zarina’s hands away. “I’m all right,” he said. “Get off me.” And Zarina, proud of what she’d done, stepped cleverly away.
The moment Bastian stepped into the office, the phone rang out again. Its cry, as if he had strangled it, was cut short by Bastian’s chapped red paw. His other hand bore all his weight as he listed at the desk. With his brow he made a sign that Mr. Kamba and Zarina ought to close the door. In the hall, they waited, watched each other. Heard the rumble of the boss’s voice in the language he’d been born to. And in another burst of sound, just as each one had begun to think that things might get back to normal, what they heard instead was Bastian Van de Wereld falling utterly apart. This is how things end—in other people’s hands, without a person having any say. Hydrolight, Bastian was unceremoniously informed, was dead.
Through the telephone, from that far place to the North, Bastian heard: “Beyond our control and yours.” A sudden cut in funding. A new fashion in the world of aid, a folder plopped on the wrong side of an accountant’s desk. A Minister’s dumb whim, absurdity. “Wrap up there. Come back safe. We’ll see you in six weeks.” He could not believe it and he wished to vomit on the desk.
Outside the office door, Mr. Kamba was surprised, then nearly sickened, too. Was that Bastian Van de Wereld, the biggest man Mr. Kamba had ever seen in life, whining and outdone? Indeed it was, but it did not last long. Just a few of these: “Are you sure? Listen, damn it, have you gone completely mad?” He swore, used all the words he sometimes yelled at Mr. Kamba, at Erasmus, at Zarina in private. “How can you do this?” Whoever it was, calling from that chilly coastal capital of Parliaments and Banks, this boss’s bigger boss, hung up then. When Bastian put the phone down it was much more than a rough, curt snap of the connection. In one great move—Zarina sensed it even from behind the door, and the wave of terrified desire it brought out nearly buckled her—Bastian brought the telephone up to his face. All of it, the handle and the wooden box that held it and the panel that was bolted to the desk.
A vast splitting of wood. His face went redder than the drink had made it and the veins throbbed at his brow and he lifted the phone high above his head then in one motion like a kingfish diving for a flapping thing below sent it crashing to the floor. “Come back?” he roared. “Come back?”
§
In the hall, the air tightened around them. Well before poor Mr. Kamba set his teacup down and stepped forward to get news, Zarina understood. She looked at Mr. Kamba in pity and annoyance—how slowly his mind worked!—and then sped away from the closed door, grabbed the public yellow flip-flops from the stone slab in the yard and sought refuge in the outhouse. Erasmus in the driveway, too, heard the desk crack and took heed. He’d seen Van de Wereld break things during meetings, throw teacups at the wall, hit Mr. Kamba with a binder, knock buckets from the shelves. And they all knew what he did to Zarina. Erasmus had no interest in it. He folded the wet washrag neatly and laid it on the hood, firmed his toes in his tire-rubber thongs, checked his pocket for tobacco, stood a moment at the gate deciding on which alleyway to choose, then went sprightly on his way.
In the office, Bastian turned into the bull he often liked to be. He was not finished hanging up. Following the telephone’s thick cord—it was the sort embedded right into the plaster, wires fastened in cement—he pulled the coated serpent from its channel in the wall and left a crater there. He kicked over the chair then picked it up and threw it. When he pulled open the door, he shook the very house.
Mr. Kamba—who, because he cared so deeply about people could not read the signs—moved towards Bastian mousely and asked if he could help. At which Bastian Van de Wereld reached back for the fallen chair and brought it down on Mr. Kamba’s silly helpful head. Silence. The thought that Mr. Kamba might be dead stilled something in Bastian and he slowed, wished Zarina at his side.
He strode into the yard to smack the outhouse door, but she would not come out. “You’re insane, you have had a short! You’ll kill me!” Zarina played with violence sometimes and had so far survived, but she did not want to die. In daylight, without the private promise of a kiss, this was something else. Her resolve undid him. Bastian swore half-heartedly and started, in his slothful but inexorable way, to think.
Mr. Kamba was not dead. In the hallway he’d begun to whimper then to yowl. The sight of his own bone poking from his shirt was an unbelievable surprise. Too much to bear in silence, and his yelping rose out into the hall and through the windows to the yard and out into the street. Perhaps the hippos heard it. Bastian listened for a moment and then spit. This place. This enterprise. A waste. He hadn’t wanted to come out here anyway. And it had ruined him. Just see.
§
A few days later, Zarina’s anger had gone cold. Hovering near his kitchen door in her nicest dress she asked the neighbors what they’d seen, but no one there had news. She went into the house. Things were as they’d been when she had fetched him, she saw nothing missing. Why did she have the feeling that something large was gone? Where was he? Down at Hydrolight, she found the outer gates locked tight and no one there to call.
Mr. Kamba, whom Erasmus took kindly but without commitment to the Baptist clinic on the hill, stayed in the ward a week and then was fetched home in an ox-cart. Without her closeness to the boss to lord over Mr. Kamba, Zarina felt renewed respect for her older colleague, some compassion. He was a good man, after all, a leader in his place. She took a bus out to his little house beyond the biscuit factory and asked after his health before letting the blow fall. She’d heard it from Erasmus, who, wiser in the ways of men, had asked in the right places. Bastian Van de Wereld had not been seen for four long days at the lively Hippo bar, where he’d been usual for years. The Italian had not seen him—and, he’d told Erasmus, “If you do see him, tell me. He’s got a fancy bill to clear here, that big beast.” And more patent, more concrete: the old Rover was gone.
Zarina told Mr. Kamba what she knew, then asked him, “How long will he be gone?” For once, Mr. Kamba was more perceptive than Zarina. He understood things she did not about Northerners and money. But he did not answer her. He walked Zarina down the street a bit, thanked her for the visit and once back home he wept. Later, more collected, he sent someone for Erasmus, dispatching the mechanic with a message to the bank. The tellers all confirmed it. Foreign. Accounts. Closed. They would not be paid.
In the back shed of the pink lot by the lakeside, turbines sat unmoved. The shiny cabinet’s freshest files stayed unread and fresh. And miles away on unlit islands in the lake, three mills that were half-built pointed at the sky like fingers, stiff, alone, and dumb.
Ten days later the delivery truck back from its run south arrived. The two drivers found locked doors and no pay. Mr. Kamba felt well enough by then to express his outrage. “I’m through with jobs in town,” he told his neighbors. “I’ll look after my cows and rent videos on the side.” He’d survive, of course, he’d take care of himself. But the white man’s leaving them like that still smarted. He sometimes asked his friends, though no one had an answer, “Why are such things allowed?”
§
Where did Bastian Van de Wereld go, with that good Rover and the cash? Bastian took a trip. At the edge of town, he bought a case of Castle Lager from the Goan shop. And though he promised to return the bottles, his big tip let the owner know he had other plans. Which turned out to be true. Bastian drank their contents as he drove, then dropped the vessels out the Rover’s open window. Made of excellent, strong stuff, those were. Not a bottle broke. They landed, many of them upright, remaining in the ditches and in the sides of hillocks like mile markers or gravestones, testaments to Bastian Van de Wereld’s passing. A person looking for him might, for some miles, just have sought the bottles, thread on monster’s tail. But no one knew exactly where to start. And having the man back might be worse than facing what he’d done and sadly moving on.
He drove at night and in the day, and did not stop until the case of Castle, empty, was just a cardboard box. He didn’t know where he was going, not exactly. He only had the vaguest sense—and a sharp desire to get out. Get out but not get home. Men like him don’t have homes—they’re satisfied nowhere. So he stopped in little towns, red-earth mounds on hills that overlooked deep forests, some of them so small that they held no more than a water pump and bus stop. At these he drank and stood a while before starting out again.
In larger towns, where people congregated to sell cattle and drink beer, where shops sold cloth or shoes, there was usually a bar. In these, he rented rooms above scarlet-walled saloons and spent his days downstairs, plastered to the oily counters, often drinking there until a fight broke out and big men with better balance told him he should go. In one, he spent three days asleep while blisters broke out on his face and hands. At most stops he could find a whole room for himself, sometimes with a window onto the town square, from which he could watch men going to and fro, and through which children tried to catch a glimpse of him, to be scattered by his roars. At most stops women sought him out, thin-faced and quick-fingered, sent by the bartenders below to coax him into spending. They got nothing willingly. He’d shout, he slapped one woman’s face. She hit him with her shoe, then skittered down the stairs, triumphant, brave, to say the white man didn’t have it in him. That day he paid the night watchman at a sundries shop to let him sleep between the flour sacks and crates.
After these red towns, Bastian Van de Wereld entered a deep valley. He felt the weather cool. He glimpsed flamingos, once, in cawing, clumsy flight. Still on his vague, determined way, he drove into a camp run by a Danish botanist and was allowed to stay two nights in an extra tent. Three young students in green jerseys attempted to describe their research but they tired of him quickly. The red-haired leader, a quiet woman with strong calves, attempted to seduce him, but his paw on her brave chest, succeeded by a grunt and that uncivil craving in his eye, chilled something in her heart and she went to sleep instead in the camp’s truck, locking all the doors, and in the morning sent him on his way. A student gave him a canteen. He kept moving East. In his wake he left only the impression that there was something dangerous in him, that those he met and took things from were better off without him. “Something wrong with that one,” many said. Another thought, “A poison to himself.” And one old woman, shelling groundnuts on a stoop, felt a badness in him and no shame when with a shiver something in her wished him dead. She’d seen men like him before. “The world is full of them,” she said. So where do we go now?
