A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [86]
The light was the light of the very early afternoon—everything stoked up, the blaze got truly going, but with a hint of the blaze about to consume itself. The river glittered, muddy water turned to white and gold. It was busy with dugouts with outboard motors, as always on steamer days. The dugouts carried the extravagant names of their “establishments” painted in large letters down their sides. Sometimes, when a dugout crossed a patch of glitter, the occupants were all silhouetted against the glitter; they appeared then to be sitting very low, to be shoulders and round heads alone, so that for a while they were like comic figures in a cartoon strip, engaged on some quite ridiculous journey.
A man teetered into the bar on platform shoes with soles about two inches thick. He must have been from the capital; that style in shoes hadn’t reached us as yet. He was also an official, come to check our tickets and passes. Not long after he had teetered out, panic appeared to seize the purser and the barman and some of the men drinking at tables. It was this panic that finally distinguished crew and officials, none of them in uniform, from the other people who had come in and palavered for their beer; and it meant only that the steamer was about to leave.
Indar put his hand on Yvette’s thigh. When she turned to him he said gently, “I’ll see what I can find out about Raymond’s book. But you know those people in the capital. If they don’t reply to your letters, it’s because they don’t want to reply. They’re not going to say yes or no. They’re going to say nothing. But I’ll see.”
Their embrace, just before we got off, was no more than formal. Ferdinand was cool. No handshake, no words of farewell. He simply said, “Salim.” And to Yvette he gave a nod rather than a bow.
We stood on the dock and watched. After some maneuvering the steamer was clear of the dock wall. Then the barge was attached; and steamer and barge did a slow, wide turn in the river, the barge revealing at its stern tiers, slices, of a caged backyard life, a mixture of kitchens and animal pens.
A departure can feel like a desertion, a judgment on the place and people left behind. That was what I had been accustoming myself to since the previous day, when I thought I had said goodbye to Indar. For all my concern for him, I had thought of him—as I had thought of Ferdinand—as the lucky man, the man moving on to richer experience, leaving me to my little life in a place once again of no account.
But I didn’t think so now, standing with Yvette on the exposed dock, after the accident and luck of that second goodbye, watching the steamer and barge straighten in the brown river, against the emptiness of the far bank, which was pale in the heat and like part of the white sky. The place where it was all going on after all was where we were, in the town on the riverbank. Indar was the man who had been sent away. The hard journey was his.
11
It was past two, a time when, on sunny days, it hurt tobe in the open. We had neither of us had anything to eat—we had only had that bloating beer—and Yvette didn’t reject the idea of a snack in a cool place.
The asphalt surfacing of the dock area was soft underfoot. Hard black shadows had pulled back to the very edges of buildings, buildings which here on the dock were of the colonial time and substantial—ochre-washed stone walls, green shutters, tall, iron-barred windows, green-painted corrugated-iron roofs. A scratched blackboard outside the closed steamer office still gave the time of the steamer sailing. But the officials had gone; the crowd outside the dock gates had gone. The market around the granite wall of the ruined monument was being dismantled. The feathery leaves of the flamboyant trees made no shade; the sun struck right through. The ground, hummocked around tufts of grass, scuffed to dust elsewhere, was littered with rubbish and animal droppings and patches of wet which, coated and