The Tomorrow-Tamer (3 page)

Suddenly, I thought I did understand. With me, he could never outgrow his past, the time when he had wanted to be another kind of doctor–a doctor who dealt in charms and amulets, in dried roots and yellow bones and bits of python skin. He knew I would remember. How he must have regretted betraying himself to me when we were both young.

I wanted to tell him that I knew how far he had travelled from the palm hut. But I did not dare. He would have thought it condescension.

He was talking about his parents. Kwaku, he said, was working in Takoradi. He was getting old for domestic work, but he could not afford to retire. None of the sons or daughters had made or married money.

“And your mother?” I asked him.

“She died three years ago. She had hookworm for years. She was a Christian, as you know, but she still bought bush
mattermatter medicine and charms instead of going to a doctor. I couldn't persuade her. She became very weak. When she got typhoid she didn't have much chance.”

For a moment I could not speak, could not believe that Yaa was really dead. It seemed wrong that I should learn of it this way, so long afterwards. And wrong, too, that I had thought of her these past years as unchanged, as though I had believed she would keep on during all my lifetime, shouting her flamboyant abuse to the sellers in the market, and gathering each successive generation of children into her arms.

“I–I didn't know,” I stumbled. “No one told me–”

“Why should they tell you”–he smiled wryly–“if an old African woman dies?”

Pain and anger spread like a bloodstain over my whole mind.

“You know as well as I do,” I replied harshly, “that she was more mother to me than my own mother.”

Kwabena looked at me as though he hated me.

“Yes,” he said. “I shared my mother with you, in exchange for your cast-off khaki shorts.”

There was something in it that shocked both of us, and we were uncomfortably silent.

“I did not mean to say that,” Kwabena said finally, and there was shame in his voice, but no withdrawal.

I could not help thinking of the two boys who had both been born on a Tuesday, and of the woman, immense, bad-tempered, infinitely gentle, who had said, “You are brothers anyway.” I found I was not angry at Kwabena any more. It was no one's fault that life had allowed us a time of illusion, and that the time was now past.

“Never mind.” I felt very tired. “It doesn't matter.”

“What do you think of the country”–he seized on the first topic to hand, as Englishmen seize on the weather–“now that you're back?”

“Mixed feelings,” I said. “Independence is the new fetish, and political parties are the new chieftains. I'm not sure that much is gained.”

“A chieftain in a Kente cloth–you prefer that to a politician in a business suit?”

Whatever subject we touched seemed to be wrong. But I no longer cared.

“Quite frankly, yes. I think it's more genuine. I don't see anything very clever in all this cheap copying of western ways.”

“So–” Kwabena said thoughtfully. “You would like us to remain forever living in thatch huts, pounding our drums and telling pretty stories about big spiders.”

I stared at him, hardly able to comprehend what he had said. “You forget,” he went on, “that the huts were rotten with sickness, and the tales made us forget an empty belly, and the drums told of our fear–always there was fear, fear, fear–making us pay out more and more to the fetish priest–”

He broke off and looked away. When he spoke again, it was calmly, almost coldly.

“That was one thing about your father. He did not like us–that is true. He did not understand us. And we did not like or understand him. Nearly everything he did was wrong. But at least he did not want us to stand still.”

“As I do?” The words dried my throat, for I had meant them as irony, but they had not come out that way.

Kwabena did not reply. Instead he looked elaborately at his watch, like a doctor dismissing a demanding patient.

“I must not keep you any longer,” he concluded. “Also, I have to be back at work by one o'clock.”

I did not see him again.

 

Since then very little has happened to me. I do my job adequately but not brilliantly. My post is to be given to an African soon.

I married on my last leave. My wife is slight and fair, quite good-looking. She does not like Africa much, and she is always telling me that the servants have no idea of cleanliness. I do not argue with her. Quite probably she is right. She is looking forward to the day when we will have a semi-detached house in England's green and pleasant land.

And I? I thought of Kwabena's words for a long time. He was right about me, I suppose. But I wonder if I can ever forgive him for it. No man wants to know that the love in him is sterile.

To reject the way of a lifetime is not easy. It must have been hard for Kwabena, and now in another way it is hard for me. But at last I know, although I shall never be able to admit it to him. It was only I who could afford to love the old Africa. Its enchantment had touched me, its suffering–never. Even my fright had stopped this side of pain. I had always been the dreamer who knew he could waken at will, the tourist who wanted antique quaintness to remain unchanged.

We were conquerors in Africa, we Europeans. Some despised her, that bedraggled queen we had unthroned, and some loved her for her still-raging magnificence, her old wisdom. But all of us sought to force our will upon her.

My father thought he was bringing Salvation to Africa. I do not any longer know what salvation is. I only know that
one man cannot find it for another man, and one land cannot bring it to another.

Africa, old withered bones, mouldy splendour under a red umbrella, you will dance again, this time to a new song.

But for me it is different. Now the wind in the casuarina trees is only a wind. The drums at night are only men pounding on skins stretched over wood. The Drummer of all the world is gone. He no longer drums himself, for me. A spider is only an insect, and not the child of Ananse. A deserted hut on the shore is only a heap of mud and dried palm leaves. Death no longer keeps such a simple establishment.

I shall be leaving soon. Leaving the surf that stretches up long white fingers to clutch the brown land. The fetid village enclosed and darkened by a green sky of overhanging palm trees. The giant heartbeat of the night drums. The flame tree whose beauty is suddenly splendid–and short-lived–like the beauty of African women. The little girl dancing with her shadow in the stifling streets. The child sleeping, unmindful, while flies caress his eyes and mouth with the small bright wings of decay. The squalor, the exultation, the pain. I shall be leaving it all.

But–oh Kwabena, do you think I will ever forget?

 

THE PERFUME SEA

N
o question of it,” Mr. Archipelago said, delicately snipping a wisp of hair. “I am flotsam.”

“Not jetsam?” Mrs. Webley-Pryce asked, blinking sharply watchful eyes as the scissored shreds fell down onto her face. “I always get the two confused.”

Outside, the small town was growing sluggish under the sedative sun of late morning. The one-footed beggar who squatted beside Mr. Archipelago's door had gone to sleep on the splintery wooden steps. Past the turquoise-and-red façade of Cowasjee's Silk Bazaar, in the rancid and shadowy room, the shrivelled Parsee sat, only half awake, folding a length of sari cloth and letting the silk slip through his fingers as he dreamed of a town in India, no less ill-smelling and dirty than this African one, but filled with the faces and speech of home. At the shop of K. Tachie (General Merchant), Tachie himself sat beside his cash register, surrounded by boxes and barrels. Kinglike, he perched on a high stool and roared abuse at his court of counter-clerks, while at the same time he managed to gulp a lurid carbonated grape beverage called Doko-Doko. At the Africa Star Chemists, a young shopgirl dozed, propping
her brown arms against a carton of Seven Seas codliver oil. Down the street, in the Paradise Chop-Bar, a young man recalled those arms as he sloshed a rag over the tables in preparation for the customers who would soon be lifting the striped bedspread that hung across the doorway and shouting for beer and
kenkey
. In the Government Agent's office, and in the offices of Bridgeford & Knight, Exporters-Importers, Englishmen sighed and wilted and saw from their watches that they could not yet legitimately leave for lunch. Pariah dogs on the road snarled over a cat corpse; then, panting, tongues dribbling, defeated by sun, they crawled back to a shaded corner, where their scabrous hides were fondled by an old man in a hashish dream. Footsteps on the cracked and scorching pavement lagged. Even the brisk shoes of white men slackened and slowed. The market women walked tiredly, their headtrays heavy, their bare feet pressing the warm dust into ripples and dunes. Babies slung on their mothers' backs allowed their heads to loll forward and whimpered at the sweat that made sticky their faces. A donkey brayed disconsolately. Voices droned low. Laughter like melted honey poured slowly. Down by the shore, under a few scattered palm trees, the wives of fishermen drowsed over their net-mending. Only the children, the fire and gleam of them greater even than the harsh glint of sun, continued to leap and shout as before.

Mr. Archipelago riffled a comb through the winter straw of the lady's hair, and nuzzled his rotundity against her arm for the lightly spiteful pleasure of feeling her recoil. He moved back a decent pace. Under his white smock, the red and gold brocade waistcoat quivered with his belly's silent laughter.

“Flotsam, dear lady,” he said. “I looked it up in the Concise Oxford.”

On the other side of the room, Doree glanced up from
the lustrous green with which she was enamelling the finger-nails of her thin white hands, knuckle-swollen from years of cleansing other women's hair. Her mild myopic eyes were impressed, even awed. Her mouth, painted to emulate hardness, opened in a soft spontaneous astonishment.

“Can you beat it?” she said. “He looks up words all the time, and laughs like the dickens. I used to read the telephone book sometimes, in the nights, and wonder about those names and if they all belonged to real people, living somewhere, you know, and doing something. But I never laughed. What'd it say for flotsam, Archipelago?”

Mr. Archipelago beamed. His shiny eyes were green as malachite. He stood on tiptoe, a plump pouter-pigeon of a man, puffing out his chest until the brocade waistcoat swelled. His hair, black as ripe olives, he only touched from time to time with pomade, but it gave the impression of having been crimped and perfumed.

“Wreckage found floating,” he said proudly. “It said–‘wreckage found floating'.”

“The very thing!” Doree cried, clapping her hands, but Mrs. Webley-Pryce looked aloof because she did not understand.

The air in the shop was syrupy with heat and perfume, and the odd puff of breeze that came in through the one window seemed to be the exhalation of a celestial fire-eater. Mrs. Webley-Pryce, feeling the perspiration soaking through her linen dress, wriggled uncomfortably in her chair and tried to close her eyes to the unseemly and possibly septic litter all around her. The shop was not really dirty, although to the fastidious English minds of lady customers it appeared so. Doree swept it faithfully every evening at closing time, but as her sight was so poor and she would not wear glasses, she often
missed fragments of hair which gradually mingled with dust and formed themselves into small tangled balls of grey and hazelnut brown and bottled blonde. The curl-papers, too, had an uncanny way of escaping and drifting around the room like leaves fallen from some rare tree. Doree chain-smoked, so the ashtrays were nearly always full. Mr. Archipelago found her cigarette-butts charming, each with its orange kiss mark from the wide mouth he had never touched. But the ladies did not share his perception; they pushed the ashtrays away impatiently, hintingly, until with a sigh he emptied them into a wastepaper-basket and watched the ashes flutter like grey flakes of dandruff.

Sweat was gathering on Mr. Archipelago's smooth forehead, and his fingers were becoming slippery around the comb and scissors.

“The morning beer,” he announced. “It is now time. For you, as well, Mrs. Webley-Pryce?”

“I think not, thanks,” she replied coldly. “Nothing before sundown is my rule. Can't you hurry a little, Mr. Archipelago? At this rate it'll be midnight before my perm is finished.”

“Pardon, pardon,” said Mr. Archipelago, tilting the beer bottle. “One moment, and we fly to work. Like birds on the wing.”

Out came the solutions, the flasks of pink and mauve liquid, the odour of ammonia competing with the coarse creamy perfumes. Out came clamps and pins and curl-papers, the jumbled contents of a dozen shelves and cupboards. In the midst of the debris, stirring it all like a magic potion, stood Mr. Archipelago, a fat and frantic wizard, refreshing himself occasionally with Dutch ale. He darted over to the mainstay of his alchemist's laboratory, an elaborate arrangement of electrically-heated metal rods, on which he placed the heavy clamps. He
waited, arms folded, until the whole dangerous mechanism achieved the dull mysterious fire which was to turn Mrs. Webley-Pryce's base metal, as it were, to gold.

“You should sell that lot,” Mrs. Webley-Pryce remarked. “Any museum in Europe would give you a good price.”

At once he was on the defensive, his pride hurt.

“Let me tell you, dear lady, there isn't one beauty salon in the whole of Europe could give you a perm like this one does.”

“I don't doubt that for one instant,” she said with a short laugh.

Doree stood up, an emaciated yellow and white bird, a tall gaunt crane, her hair clinging like wet feathers around her squeezed-narrow shoulders. With her long hesitant stride she walked across the room, and held out her green lacquered hands.