A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [39]
The men in the bar had come to do a job. They—or their fellows—had probably already begun. They knew they were dramatic figures. They knew I had come to see what they looked like; they knew the boys were terrified of them. Until this morning those hotel servants had been telling one another stories about the invincibility of their people in the forest; and those hotel servants were men who, given an uprising in the town, would have done terrible things with their small hands. Now, so quickly, they had become abject. In one way it was good; in another way it was pitiful. This was how the place worked on you: you never knew what to think or feel. Fear or shame—there seemed to be nothing in between.
I went back to the shop. It was a way of carrying on, and a way of passing the time. The flamboyant trees were in new leaf, feathery, a delicate green. The light changed; shadows began to angle across the red streets. On another day at this time I would have been starting to think of tea at the flat, squash at the Hellenic Club, with cold drinks afterwards in the rough little bar, sitting at the metal tables and watching the light go.
When Metty came in, just before four, closing time, he said, “The white men came this morning. Some of them went to the barracks and some of them went to the hydro.” This was the hydroelectric station, some miles upriver from the town. “The first thing they did at the barracks was to shoot Colonel Yenyi. It was what the President asked them to do. He doesn’t play, this new President. Colonel Yenyi was running out to meet them. They didn’t let him talk. They shot him in front of the women and everybody. And Iyanda, the sergeant—he bought that bolt of curtain material with the apple pattern—they shot him too, and a few other soldiers as well.”
I remembered Iyanda with his overstarched uniform, his broad face, and his smiling, small, malicious eyes. I remembered the way he had rubbed the palm of his hand over the cloth with the big red apples, the proud way he had pulled out the rolled-up notes to pay—such a small sum, really. Curtain material! The news of his execution would have pleased the local people. Not that he was a wicked man; but he belonged to that detested slave-hunting tribe, like the rest of the army, like his colonel.
The President had sent terror to our town and region. But at the same time, by terrorizing the army as well, he was making a gesture to the local people. The news of the executions would have spread fast, and people would already have become confused and nervous. They would have felt—as I began to feel—that for the first time since independence there was some guiding intelligence in the capital, and that the free-for-all of independence had come to an end.
I could see the change in Metty. He had brought quite bloody news. Yet he seemed calmer than in the morning; and he made Ferdinand calmer. Late in the afternoon we began to hear guns. In the morning that sound would have panicked us all. Now we were almost relieved—the guns were far away, and the noise was a good deal less loud than thunder, to which we were accustomed. The dogs were disturbed by the strange noise, though, and set up a barking that rolled back and forth, at times drowning the sound of the guns. Late sunlight, trees, cooking smoke: that was all we could see when we went out to the landing of the external staircase to look.
No lights came on at sunset. There was no electricity. The machinery had failed again, or the power had been deliberately turned off, or the power station had been captured by the rebels. But it wasn’t bad to be without lights now; it meant that at least there would be no uprising during the night. People here didn’t like the dark, and some could sleep only with lights in their rooms or huts. And none of us—neither Metty nor Ferdinand nor myself—believed that the station had been captured