A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [40]
I stayed in the sitting room and read old magazines by an oil lamp. In their room Metty and Ferdinand talked. They didn’t use their daytime voices or the voices they might have used in electric light. They both sounded slow, contemplative, old; they talked like old men. When I went out to the passage I saw, through the open door, Metty sitting on his cot in undershirt and pants, and Ferdinand, also in undershirt and pants, lying on his bedding on the floor, one raised foot pressed against the wall. In lamplight it was like the interior of a hut; their leisurely, soft talk, full of pauses and silences, matched their postures. For the first time in days they were relaxed, and they felt so far from danger now that they began to talk of danger, war and armies.
Metty said he had seen the white men in the morning.
Ferdinand said, “There were a lot of white soldiers in the south. That was a real war.”
“You should have seen them this morning. They just raced to the barracks and they were pointing their guns at everybody. I never saw soldiers like that before.”
Ferdinand said, “I saw soldiers for the first time when I was very young. It was just after the Europeans went away. It was in my mother’s village, before I went to stay with my father. These soldiers came to the village. They had no officers and they began to behave badly.”
“Did they have guns?”
“Of course they had guns. They were looking for white people to kill. They said we were hiding white people. But I think they only wanted to make trouble. Then my mother spoke to them and they went away. They just took a few women.”
“What did she say to them?”
“I don’t know. But they became frightened. My mother has powers.”
Metty said, “That was like the man we had on the coast. He came from somewhere near here. He was the man who made the people kill the Arabs. It began in the market. I was there. You should have seen it, Ferdinand. The arms and legs lying about in the streets.”
“Why did he kill the Arabs?”
“He said he was obeying the god of Africans.”
Metty had never told me about that. Perhaps he hadn’t thought it important; perhaps it had frightened him. But he had remembered.
They went silent for a while; I had the feeling that Ferdinand was examining what he had heard. When they spoke again it was of other things.
The gunfire went on. But it came no nearer. It was the sound of the weapons of the President’s white men, the promise of order and continuity; and it was oddly comforting, like the sound of rain in the night. All that was threatening, in that great unknown outside, was being held in check. And it was a relief, after all the anxiety, to sit in the lamplit flat and watch the shadows that electric lights never made; and to hear Ferdinand and Metty talk in their leisurely old men’s voices in that room which they had turned into a warm little cavern. It was a little like being transported to the hidden forest villages, to the protection and secrecy of the huts at night—everything outside shut out, kept beyond some magical protecting line; and I thought, as I had thought when I had had lunch with the old couple, how nice it would be if it were true. If in the morning we could wake up and find that the world had shrunken only to what we knew and what was safe.
In the morning there came the fighter plane. Almost as soon as you heard it, before you had time to go out and look for it, it was overhead, flying low, and screaming at such a pitch that you barely felt yourself in possession of your body; you were close to a cutting-out of the senses. A jet fighter flying low, so low that you clearly see its triangular silver underside, is a killing thing. Then it was gone, and was soon hardly visible in the sky, white with the heat of the day that had just begun. It made a few more passes over the town, that one plane, like a vicious bird that wouldn’t go away. Then it flew over the bush. At last it lifted,and just a little