A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [137]
He began to say, “I am going to do something terrible, Salim. You must give me money. Give me money and let me go away. I feel I’m going to do something terrible.”
I felt his pain as an extra pressure. I mentally added his pain to mine, made it part of my own. I should have thought more of him. I should have made him stay away from the shop, and given him an allowance from my own salary, while that lasted. It was, really, what he wanted. But he didn’t put it like that. He involved it in that wild idea of going away, which only frightened me and made me think: Where is he going to go?
So he continued to go to the shop and Théotime, and became more and more tormented. When he said to me one evening, “Give me some money and I will go away,” I said, thinking of the situation in the shop, and trying to find comforting words, “It isn’t going to last forever, Metty.” This made him scream, “Salim!” And the next morning, for the first time, he didn’t bring me coffee.
That happened at the beginning of the week. On Friday afternoon, after closing up the shop and driving Théotime to his yard, I came back to the flat. It was a place of desolation for me now. I no longer thought of it as my own. Since that morning in the car with Théotime I had felt nausea for the bright new colours of the town. They were the colours of a place that had become strange and felt far away from everywhere else. That feeling of strangeness extended to everything in the flat. I was thinking of going to the Hellenic Club—or what remained of it—when I heard car doors slam.
I went out to the landing and saw police in the yard. There was an officer—his name was Prosper: I knew him. One of the men with him had a fork, another a shovel. They knew what they had come for, and they knew exactly where they had to dig—below the external staircase. I had four tusks there.
My mind raced, made links. Metty! I thought: Oh, Ali! What have you done to me? I knew it was important to let someone know. Mahesh—there was no one else. He would be at his flat now. I went to the bedroom and telephoned. Mahesh answered, and I only had time to say, “Things are bad here,” before I heard footsteps coming up. I put the phone down, went to the bathroom, pulled the lavatory chain, and went out to see the round-faced Prosper coming up alone, smiling.
The face came up, smiling, and I retreated before it, and this was how, not saying anything, we moved down the passage before I turned and led Prosper into the white sitting room. He couldn’t hide his pleasure. His eyes glittered. He hadn’t yet decided how to behave. He hadn’t yet decided how much to ask for.
He said, “The President is coming next week. Did you know that? The President is interested in conservation. This is why this is very serious for you. Anything might happen to you if I send in my report. This is certainly going to cost you a couple of thousand.”
This seemed to me very modest.
He noticed my relief. He said, “I don’t mean francs. I mean dollars. Yes, this is going to cost you three or four thousand dollars.”
This was outrageous. Prosper knew it was outrageous. In the old days five dollars was considered pretty good; and even during the boom you could get many things done for twenty-five dollars. Things had changed since the insurrection, of course, and had become very bad with the radicalization. Everyone had become more greedy and desperate. There was this feeling of everything running down very fast, of a great chaos coming; and some people could behave as though money had already lost its