The Drifters (92 page)

Gretchen finished her drink, folded the letter, and smiled as she visualized dour Mr. Holt trying to remain indifferent to Britta while she wove about him an increasingly intricate web of love. Raising her empty glass, she toasted aloud, ‘To Britta,’ then walked back in the fragrant shade to the pop-top, where she distributed the mail, telling the others that they could share her letter from Britta when they had finished their own. Joe’s letter read:

Yigal’s letter to Cato had been mailed to the Alamo in Torremolinos and had been forwarded from there. It read:

At My Grandfather’s  

1188 Esplanade          

Grosse Pointe, Michigan

August 12, 1969        

Dear Cato and Gang,

When my grandfather hauled me away from Pamplona, I was so mad I could have strangled him, but now that we’re home, Mr. Holt and his god-awful music and those wild times at Bar Vasca seem very far away. I’m beginning to appreciate something Mr. Fairbanks said when he was arguing with me that last miserable day. He said that America was the lodestone of the world right now, the magnet against which you had to test your strength. He was right. This is where it’s happening and I suppose my biggest job is to get it into focus, because until I do I won’t be able to judge England and Israel, and as I told you that night in Alte, one of these days I’ve got to make up my mind.

Actually, I suppose I’m making it up each day. I see now that this is one hell of a country, and I respect it. You’d be interested in the one thing that holds me back. Television. I don’t mean the programs, which I can take or leave, but the
advertisements. No matter what’s happening in the world, even the moon walk, which was something, believe me, the ads come on and show illiterate men and stupid women all excited about the most trivial aspects of living, and you honestly begin to wonder if that isn’t the real America.

You wouldn’t believe my grandfather. He’s a wonderful old geezer and I hope I have at fifty the vitality he has at seventy. He gets wildly excited over what General Motors has done during the last sales year, and he isn’t even with the company any more. You’d think he was president or general or something and the fact that GM sold more cars than Ford or Chrysler was a staggering victory, surpassing Waterloo and Zama combined. But that isn’t all. What gives him a real lift is that within GM it was Pontiac that accounted for the big success. He calls all the Pontiac men and says, ‘By God, Harry, you’re doing even better than we used to in the old days. I knew you had it in you when I picked you out of Replacement Parts.’

I report to Case next month, and from what I’ve been hearing, it must be a drag. They seem to teach science like we taught it in Israel six years ago, so you wonder where this great technology that America boasts about is coming from. Don’t be surprised if you see me on your doorstep one of these days. I’ve had Detroit and I doubt if Cleveland will be much better.

I’m not much impressed with the Negroes in Detroit, and if your boys don’t pull up their socks they’re going to be behind the eight-ball throughout eternity. I’ve concluded they need about a dozen guys like you, and sooner or later you ought to come back here and do some stirring up, because you had constructive ideas. The big idea at present among the Negroes is to eliminate Jews, which seems to be so screwy it doesn’t merit consideration, but grown men keep saying that if they can only eliminate Jews, everything will be all right. I’d like to talk to you about this some more, because I can’t believe the Negroes have swallowed the Goebbels pill so long after it was exposed.

Big news right now is a Swedish movie called
I Am Curious
(
Yellow
). I haven’t seen it, but some of the fellows told me it featured a Swedish bombshell who is crazy about sex, and sometimes I tell them that I knew a Norwegian bombshell. Give her my best and tell her to watch those GIs in the bar.

Yours,        

Yigal  

P.S. Christ, am I tired of being Bruce!

The finest thing that happened to them during their visit to Moçambique occurred, as was so often the case with this generation of young people, because of their love for music.

The opening of the school year in America had come and gone without creating apprehension among the drifters. The autumn season, when jobs ought to be pinned down in England and the States, was upon them, but they were in Moçambique, where spring was just beginning, and mentally they looked forward to an endless summer. No one had to bother about money so long as Monica’s father continued her allowance, Gretchen’s inheritance arrived on time, and Mister Wister sent Cato his regular checks. It was an age of pilgrimage, and they intended to enjoy it.

And Ilha de Moçambique exceeded their hopes. It was nepentheland, an enclave in history where days drifted by under a flawless sun, beside a controlled sea. The camping grew more interesting every day, for the people who stopped by to talk with them, or to bring fruit, seemed an evocation of all who had lived on this fortunate island since the beginning of history—not Vasco da Gama’s truncated history, which had begun only when the island was already two thousand years old, but the true history which ran back to aboriginal times.

For Cato this daily procession posed a dilemma, because among the blacks who came to stare at the pop-top and to wonder how four grown people slept inside, and in what arrangements, appeared a special group of Negro women. They were big, handsome black women, true African types, not intermixed with white blood, as was so often the case in America. Cato once calculated that he was at least three eights white, and in Philadelphia he knew almost no pure-blooded blacks, but on Moçambique Island he was seeing the unspoiled African. Unspoiled, that is, except for one thing! In woman’s eternal quest for beauty, these handsome blacks covered their faces with paste made from the chewed root of a leafy plant, which, when it dried, became a white mask. Throughout the community he would spot black women of unusual dignity and physical charm, dressed in lovely gold and yellow cloth, but when they turned, their faces would be a ghastly white.

‘They’re not dumb,’ Monica teased. ‘They know that to be really beautiful you’ve got to be white.’ It seemed that way. Once, seeking refuge from Monica’s goading, he left the pop-top to find Hajj’, and asked the tall Arab to serve as interpreter while he questioned a group of black women. Why did they smear the paste on their faces?… To be beautiful. Why did they use white?… Because it was beautiful. Could a black woman be beautiful without the paste?… She might be attractive, but to be beautiful she had to take pains. Did they think that this black woman coming down the street was beautiful?… She was attractive but it was a shame she hadn’t whitened her face. He tried repeatedly to find out why they had chosen white for their ghostly makeup, and the best they could tell him was that their tribe had always known that white made a woman beautiful, and as they said this, Cato pointed to a Portuguese woman who was fat, dumpy and ill-complexioned. Did they think she was beautiful?… Not like us, but she is white.

‘I don’t think Africa will make it,’ he grumbled to himself when Hajj’ and the women had gone. ‘Unless Islam saves the black race.’ He continued to feel that in this religion Africa would find its salvation, but again this assessment had its teeth pulled when Gretchen, in her usual straightforward way of searching for evidence on her own, pointed out that the Muslims of Moçambique maintained two cemeteries, one for white men on the island, another for blacks well hidden on the mainland.

Among the citizens of Ilha de Moçambique who developed the habit of stopping by the pop-top to watch the young visitors and to talk with them occasionally was the rotund Portuguese businessman in the white suit who had welcomed them that first night and introduced them to Hajj’. In idle conversation one evening he discovered that they had been to Silves, and he cried joyously, ‘I come from Portimão!’ and they spent some time just reciting the well-remembered names of Algarve: Albufeira, Lagos, Faro and, with a certain reverence, Alte; and Gretchen, nostalgic for that village in the mountains with its plaza watched over by the stone poet, brought out her guitar. And the plaza quickly filled with Negro women, their white faces glowing in the sunset.

Gretchen sang for nearly an hour to an audience which appreciated every note she offered, and when she put down
the guitar, the Portuguese businessman said, in his fearful patois, ‘How good it is to have music at the end of the day,’ and he insisted that they accompany him to Bar Africa for drinks, and as they were chatting idly, he said, ‘Of course, you plan to visit our great game sanctuary at Zambela.’ When they replied that they hadn’t considered it, he summoned a man who could speak English and together they told of the extraordinary game refuge that lay about three days’ travel to the west.

‘You must see it,’ the two Portuguese agreed, the fat man adding, ‘We know you’ve heard of Kruger Park in South Africa and Serengeti in Tanzania, but Zambela is something quite special, because there you have a concentration of wildlife that is unbelievable. I don’t mean that you’ll see some Cape buffalo. I mean that you’ll see five thousand of them, perhaps at one time. Can you imagine five hundred hippopotamuses crowding one small island?’

The two men were so persuasive that the travelers decided that night to make a detour to Zambela, and next day they reluctantly packed the pop-top and said their goodbyes to some of the kindest people they had encountered in their travels. When the white-faced Negro women realized that the campers were about to leave, they wept, and several came to kiss Monica and Gretchen farewell. The fat businessman in his white suit reported, ‘Zambela will be my gift to you for the music you made.’ When old Hajj’ came to give them his final blessing, as if they were pilgrims departing for Mecca, they felt a sense of sorrow, for it was apparent that he and they would not meet again. He took Cato aside for some last-minute instructions on Islam, but the others were impatient to depart, so he had to be content with placing his hands on Cato’s shoulders and saying, ‘Remember, the answer to your problems lies within reach of your hand,’ and he said a prayer in Arabic.

The vast, unfenced park to which the pop-top headed lay along the western border of Moçambique on the shores of Lake Nyasa, and the road they now chose took them along no curving beaches, but inland through bush country, where for whole days they saw only the dusty kraals and Stone Age blacks. For these near-savages there was no Portugal, no United Nations, not even an Africa.

At evening on the third day, while Joe was driving,
they came to a pair of wooden pillars that marked the entrance to Zambela, and as soon as they had crossed into the sanctuary they felt that they had exchanged the world of reality for a dream. On the side of the road stood the painted sign:
Beware of Elephants
, and in the middle of the road lay an even more pragmatic sign: an enormous ball of brownish-black manure dropped a few minutes earlier by one of the elephants, whose tread they could hear not far off.

At the camp, which lay ten miles inside the gates, they saw something which caused them to shout with pleasure: a set of rondavels, well constructed and located amidst flowers; and they had barely checked into the two assigned them—one for the girls, one for the boys, an arrangement that would be honored only in the official register—when a lean, ruggedly handsome man, in his mid-sixties and dressed in khaki, knocked on one of the doors and said, ‘I understand that Sir Charles Braham’s daughter is here.’ When Monica appeared, he introduced himself, ‘John Gridley, Salisbury. I used to work with Sir Charles in Vwarda, and now I’m here on loan from the Rhodesian government.’ He was punctilious in acknowledging each of the young people, even though Cato’s blackness and Joe’s scraggly beard must have disconcerted him.

He said, ‘Government in Lourenço Marques sent us a signal that you’d be coming and to look you out. They also forwarded this letter to you, sir,’ and he handed Joe an official envelope from the American consul in the capital.

‘Final draft notice,’ Joe said, handling the envelope as if it were a time bomb, which it was.