The Drifters (15 page)

By Monday, of course, the faculty had got wind of the wager and its successful termination, and by Tuesday morning poor Mr. Dankerly had been fired and Monica had been sequestered in her room till I could fly in from Geneva. The headmistress was livid and said she should not have listened to my blandishments after the Cirencester escapade. ‘I’m afraid Monica is a depraved little delinquent, and you’ll have your hands full in the years ahead. What do you propose doing with her?’

‘I’m sending her back to Africa. On tonight’s plane.’

‘Good decision. She’s not ready for England.’

‘Or vice versa.’

I was most gloomy as I drove Monica to the airport to put her aboard the Air Vwarda plane; it was preposterous that so small a nation should presume to have its own airline flying to London and New York, but of course it consisted of only one Pan American plane and crew on lease to Vwarda, as arranged by Sir Charles. By stipulation,
one Negro assistant rode in the cockpit, but what he did, no one knew—the pilots and engineers were invariably from Texas.

When the time came for me to bid Monica farewell, I saw that she was peering over my shoulder to see whether any attractive men were flying south, and before I left the airport she had snuggled up to a rugged South African football player who was buying her some sweets for the long trip home.

I was not aware of it at the time, but when I shipped Monica back to Vwarda—which she reached after a five-day detour to South Africa with her football player—she was returning to her father’s care at a time when that poor man was facing a major crisis. When the March Riots exploded across Vwarda they struck real fear into the hearts of Europeans who had great hopes for the new republic.

When I read about the riots in a Geneva newspaper, I fell prey to the apprehensions of my superiors, who had seventy-two million dollars committed to the Vwarda Dam and now saw it vanishing in the aftermath of the killings. From what I could piece together from the
London Times
and various diplomatic reports which the Swiss foreign office let us see, it became obvious that the March Riots were long overdue and had occurred simply because the Negroes had grown tired of waiting.

Vwarda had now been a sovereign state for eleven years. It had a Negro president, a Negro cabinet and a Negro as chairman of the state bank, but anyone could see that the good jobs were still held by whites, especially jobs commanding substantial salaries. The judges of the supreme court were white, as were the appeals judges. All jobs pertaining to the economic control of the country were in the hands of men like Sir Charles Braham, who had stayed over from the colonial administration. The top general of the army was a Sandhurst man, and the well-paid pilots of the Vwarda jet were Americans. This condition prevailed far down into the hierarchy, and it was not surprising to me that the Negroes had rebelled.

In the first two days of the rioting they killed sixteen white men, burned some warehouses, and issued a series of inflammatory pronouncements. To many in Europe, it
seemed as if the great African revolution, which white men feared, had started and must soon spread to neighboring countries like Tanzania, Zambia, the Congo and Swaziland, but this did not happen, and when order was restored my directors ordered me to Vwarda to report on the status of our investments.

When my plane crossed the high swamp in which the Vwarda River found its origin, I felt that I was back in a country of which I was a citizen, for I had worked in its forests so long that I seemed a part of them, and the dark faces that had recently burned and killed were the faces of my brothers. When we landed at the capital I saw the same trees covered with late flowers, the same broad avenues lined by Victorian houses which had once been populated with Englishmen and their finicky wives, the same corrugated-iron shacks that had both depressed and exhilarated me when I first saw them. It was a fine African city, destined to become finer with each passing year as the shacks were replaced by stucco houses. In some ways it was the most primitive of the Negro capitals; in others it was the most representative, for it was a city in growth, a land where a once depressed people made its bid for self-government.

When I arrived, Sir Charles, as I might have guessed, was deep in the jungle inspecting the area where most of the killings had occurred. In his black suit, his tie carefully knotted and tight about his sweating throat, he was plodding along jungle trails, assuring the local chieftains that there was no cause for fear. He, for one, was not alarmed and the great dam to the north was proceeding as usual. ‘None of the European engineers have fled,’ he told me on the radio, ‘because things must go forward. There has been trouble. There have been regrettable assassinations, but all countries have hotheads, and Vwarda will know how to handle ours, won’t we?’ In that difficult period following the riots, Sir Charles was the typical English colonial servant doing his best to quieten things down. ‘We don’t want a revolution on our hands, do we?’ he told the jungle chiefs. ‘Mettra fect, who would be hurt by such folly? Your sons, not mine, and we don’t want that, do we?’

From the capital I reported to my superiors in Geneva: ‘The recent events have been termed riots. I would call them a rampage, a blind senseless rampage which has subsided as quickly as it started. In this district the disaffected
Negroes made three demands—Negro judges immediately, the nationalization of the diamond diggings, and Negro pilots to fly the Vwarda plane. The government has agreed to do something, and quickly, about the first two demands, but the third has its comic aspects and will be forgotten. When the Negro agitators captured the airport, they surrounded the Boeing jet that was loading for its flight to New York and shouted, “Reginald Huygere must fly it! Reginald Huygere to the controls!” Huygere, a bright young fellow who has had about fifty hours of ground training from the Pan American instructors and who barely knows the fuel system, let alone the controls, stuck his head out the cockpit window and shouted. “Who, me?” And everyone broke up into laughter and the plane took off as scheduled.

‘I know you want my harshest appraisal of the riots. They were inevitable. They were justified. They were unimportant. At periodic intervals during the next two decades they will be repeated. And nothing very bad will grow out of them. I judge Vwarda to be where Mexico was in the period from 1910 through 1927, and you well know what a stable country developed out of that revolution. As to the dam, every man and woman in Vwarda knows the nation needs it, and if the sensible elements of the government appeal to us tomorrow for the additional eighteen million dollars, which I figure they need, give it to them. It’s as safe here as it would be in Detroit.’

In the days when I was composing this report I saw a good deal of Monica, who was now seventeen. She had had, so far as my records showed, three lovers: the chocolate salesman, Mr. Dankerly the music teacher, and the South African football player. Yet she gave the impression of an unspoiled young woman; her dark charm was extraordinary and her capacity to use other people to her advantage uncanny. Looking at her in her father’s house, I concluded that it would have been ridiculous for a child as knowing as this to have been kept in a girls’ school. She was at least ready for university, and she knew it.

As I talked with her, she showed for the first time a deep disrespect for her father. ‘Old Tremble-chin,’ she called him, because of the uncontrollable trembling that overtook the lower part of his face during any crisis. ‘Old Tremble-chin is out in the jungle, playing the role of British
raj. “Chin up, boys,” he’s saying, while his own chin shakes like a woman’s.’

‘Your father’s a courageous man,’ I protested.

‘Courageous and stupid,’ she said.

‘He spent a lot of his time bringing you up.’

‘And look at the result.’

Her bitterness was so unexpected that I suggested, ‘You feel the guilt of having busted out of school and you’re throwing it onto your father.’

‘Not at all,’ she corrected, lighting a cigarette. ‘I’m appalled at the prospect of my dear father, about to be heaved out of Vwarda, doing all sorts of contemptible little things to preserve his position. He’d do anything to hold on … another year … another month.’

‘This has been your father’s life. It’s natural for him …’

Savagely she pointed with her cigarette to a statue that stood on the front lawn. ‘Lord Carrington Braham, my grandfather. One of these nights the Negro radicals will come along this street and knock the old man off his pedestal. They should. We ought to get out now, but Father insists upon holding on. Can’t you see … he lacks dignity.’

‘What would you do … after a lifetime of service to a nation that still needs you?’

‘I know exactly what I’d do. I’d put on my full uniform, all my medals, all the reminders of my grandfather … I’ll admit the Brahams did good work here and I’m proud of it, but our day is past and to grasp at straws is degenerate.’

‘But what would you do?’ I repeated.

‘In full regalia I’d march into the office of President Hosea M’Bele, throw my contract on his desk, and tell him, “Ram it up your ass.” ’

I am never able to control my shock at the vocabulary of young people these days and I must have blushed, for Monica wagged her finger under my nose, an act which permitted me to smell the cigarette she was smoking. ‘Is that marijuana?’ I asked.

‘Want a drag?’

‘You little fool,’ I said with considerable anger. ‘What are you trying to do? live all your life in one year?’

‘I’m tired of everything my father stands for,’ she said with a kind of languid grace. Falling into a large chair, with her lovely legs hooked over one arm, she lost her previous animosity and said reflectively, as if she were
already in her sixties, ‘I’ve seen Vwarda at its best—the end of the old, the beginning of the new—and it’s time we Brahams departed. The killing was no problem. Any white man who got his head chopped off did so by sheer accident. And the burning was of little consequence. It can be rebuilt. But the death of the idea …’ She trailed off into silence, took several deep puffs of her cigarette, and said, ‘You know, Uncle George, I very nearly married the chap in South Africa. He was pleasant and we had a marvelous time in bed. You know why I didn’t?’

‘Because you’re only seventeen and couldn’t get a license.’

‘Because on the race issue they’re such bloody fools. They’re heading for terrible retribution, and who wants to be part of that?’ She took several deep drags on her cigarette, then concluded: ‘Father’s almost as bad, in his sweet, clumsy way. He knows it’s time to get out, but he can’t bring himself to leave.’ Then, grinding the cigarette into a tray and hiding the remains in her pocket lest her father see them when he returned, she said, ‘I’ll get out! I will not compound the idiocies of your generation.’ And she walked slowly from the room.

‘You must promise me one thing,’ Monica said in early March of 1969 as she tied her father’s tie for his climactic interview. ‘Tell him, Uncle George. He must not cringe. Father, you’re not to beg.’

‘I intend to present the case unemotionally and to abide by his decision.’

‘What I’m saying is,’ she warned, ‘don’t make an ass of yourself.’

‘Monica!’ I protested, for Sir Charles was already nervous at the prospect of what he must do and his daughter’s unfair assault made him worse.

‘I don’t want a Braham to grovel,’ she snapped. ‘And certainly not in Vwarda.’

‘I’m not going to grovel,’ Sir Charles promised. He was now dressed in his best dark suit, with one ribbon in his lapel buttonhole. It had been given him by the King for meritorious service during the war, but in spite of his finery he looked barely presentable, for March was summer in Vwarda and he was sweating about the face. His
clothes did not fit properly, nor could they have, for his bulk was ill-disposed and made any jacket look too tight. Also, his bottom waggled when he walked. But his worst feature was the lower part of his face, which was already twitching with anxiety. ‘Do I look acceptable?’ he asked us hopefully.

‘You look perfectly awful,’ Monica said, and then, to our surprise, placed one of her mother’s summery hats on her dark head.

‘Where are you going?’ Sir Charles asked in a petulant voice, well aware of the answer.

‘With you,’ she said. ‘I’m not going to let you make a damned fool of yourself.’ As I was thinking that I’d like nothing better than to give her a sound spanking, she turned on me and said, ‘You’re not to lie on his behalf. State the facts and that’s that.’

‘You’re not directing this expedition,’ I said.

‘Oh, but I am! I’m the last of the Brahams in Vwarda and I shall protect Lord Carrington’s memory.’ She pointed to the statue and said, ‘Grandfather would have known how to act on such an occasion.’

The Rolls-Royce was brought to the garden gate and the three of us walked mournfully toward it: Sir Charles sweating and running with little-girl steps; Monica striding purposefully, the weight of a notable family on her shoulders; and I plugged along, a sixty-one-year-old trouble-shooter from Geneva by way of Indiana and the University of Virginia. We drove along the gracious residential roads of the capital, across the business section with its three skyscraper hotels, and on out to the edge of town where the presidential palace stood, an august Victorian edifice long occupied by the lesser sons of British noble families sent here to serve as the King’s representatives. At the entrance, where Scottish soldiers in kilts had once stood guard, two Negro soldiers saluted briskly and waved us forward. At the stately doors, where generations of Englishmen had come to sign their names in the book, proving that they considered themselves an honorable part of empire, a young Negro graduate from Cambridge greeted us and said, in polished accents, ‘President M’Bele is waiting for you,’ but when we reached the pompous Salle des Audiences, where European merchants and black natives had once cowered before the majesty of English power, the president was not visible and we stood in a
pathetic little cluster waiting for him while the stucco cherubs adorning the high ceiling smiled down at our discomfort.