Sir Vidia's Shadow

by Paul Theroux

  “Bienvenue à la frontière congolaise,” one man said, swigging beer and welcoming us.

  Vidia was delighted. The Congo! He spoke to the man in beautifully accented French. “Incroyable! Nous n’avons aucune idée que nous nous dirigeons vers le Congo!” he said. We had no idea we were headed for the Congo!

  “Monsieur, vous êtes au Congo,” said the beer-drinking man with the loudest shirt, its pattern of big red poppies like a mark of his authority. The Congo is here, sir. His foot was propped on the barrier, a rusty horizontal pipe.

  They bantered for a while and Vidia finally said, “C’est dommage que nous allons à Rwanda.” It’s a shame that we’re going to Rwanda.

  “Rwanda est par là,” the man said. Rwanda is that way. “Mais re-tournez un jour et visitez le Congo.” Come back sometime and visit our country.

  I reversed the car and drove away from the shed, heading back the way we had come. This was the easternmost border of the Congo, as distant as it was possible to be from Leopoldville. I kept thinking of that Congolese frontier post, the little shed, the tiny postern to a great and enigmatic castle of a country.

  “They seem far less foolish when they’re speaking French,” Vidia said. “It doesn’t sound like rubbish in French.”

  At the Rwanda frontier the formalities were cursory, and Vidia muttered the French words the soldiers used as they examined our papers, repeating their mispronunciations.

  As we left the border post I said, “I forgot to ask them what side of the road to drive on.”

  “Oh, God.”

  Just then a large trailer truck approached, throwing up dust, traveling down the middle of the road. In Uganda we drove according to British custom, on the left, but Rwanda-Burundi had been a Belgian colony, and surely they drove on the right.

  “The moment of truth,” I said, and swerved and began driving on the right.

  The truck, a beer truck, carrying a load of loudly jingling empty bottles in wooden crates, passed us in a fury of noise and gravel, and a dust cloud obscured the road for the next two hundred yards.

  The dust settled like a view in a telescope twisting sharply into focus, and the looming scene was that of a mob, the road filled with people moving like a ghost army through the sifting-down dust particles in a distortion that was splashed with light. They were tall and thin, the women carried bundles, there were many children and some animals—dogs and goats. It was the sort of exaggeration for effect that could have been a stock scene in a Tarzan movie—a crowd of toothy implacable natives, and a terrifying sight because the whole road was claimed by them. There was no space for us to proceed.

  “What is this?” Vidia was nervous.

  The mob parted slowly, reluctantly, as my car penetrated it like a dinghy nosing through an ocean of breaking chop. Passing the car, the people peered in, screwing up their faces and pressing against the windows.

  “Probably the market just closed and they’re heading home,” I said, trying not to sound as alarmed as I felt.

  “They’re blocking the road, man.”

  He was very jittery, whispering wildly—a whole crowd of Rwandans compressed into a narrow road and no other traffic, just my little car inching along against the chop of gaping people.

  “I don’t like mobs at all,” he said.

  But even after I got past them and the road cleared—although there were always crowds of people on Rwanda’s roads—it was still slow going. The road was a deeply rutted track lined with elephant grass. Farther on, we went higher and could see Mount Muhavura close up: the intensively cultivated slopes, the masses of mud huts. I told Vidia that Rwanda was the most densely populated country on earth.

  “What are these people like?” he asked, returning the stares of the people passing.

  “Pretty violent,” I said, and told him how, four years before, at independence, there had been a gruesome uprising, the Hutus against the Tutsis. The Hutu people had been a despised underclass, and their tremendous resentment erupted into a massacre. A journalist friend of mine had actually witnessed Hutus torturing Tutsis. They hacked the Tutsis’ feet off and forced them to stand up. Then they cut their legs off at the knees and laughed as the Tutsis were propped on their bleeding stumps. More mutilation followed: the cutting off of ears, of noses, eye gouging, castration, all of it while the victims were alive. Hundreds of thousands of Tutsis had been butchered in this way, and so the country had been partitioned, the Tutsis taking Burundi, the Hutus Rwanda.

  Vidia listened, horrified, grimacing. The car filled with dust that whirled into the open windows. To close the windows would have suffocated us. Now Vidia had started humming a tune.

  “Toot-toot-Tutsi, goodbye,” he sang in an Al Jolson voice. “Toot-toot-Tutsi, don’t cry.”

  We came to the crossroads of Ruhengeri. To the left was the road climbing to Kigali, to the right was the way to Kisenyi and Goma. We sat and pondered this in the slanting sun. Vidia ate a cheese sandwich and drank a cup of coffee from a thermos. Even in this remote place, where food was scarce, he kept to his strict dietary rales.

  “There’s a better chance of finding a place to stay in Kigali,” I said, and he agreed: it was, after all, the capital. We had no reservations, no prearranged route; we were simply on safari, winging it in the bush.

  Dusk like ground fog obscured the road as we entered Kigali, but even so, we could see that the town, though crowded, was very small. That was the Rwanda problem: so many people, so little space. There were three or four hotels, none of them good. We stopped at each one. Vidia expressed first amazement that we were stopping at all—“Such low places”—and then, inevitably, discouragement. There was no room for us.

  “They’re filthy,” he said.

  “Maybe they just look dirty.”

  He did not laugh. “What are we going to do?”

  “Let’s try the U.S. embassy.”

  It was now past seven in the evening, and after more than thirteen hours on the road it now seemed that we had no place to stay. The embassy was closed, but we found an American woman on the premises—the duty officer, she said, dealing with a consular problem.

  “We are totally stuck,” I said, and explained that I was an American, a lecturer at Makerere University. “We have no place to stay in Kigali. Is there anything you can suggest?”

  “We have a guesthouse,” she said. “You can use that.”

  I then introduced my distinguished friend, the visiting lecturer and writer V. S. Naipaul. The duty officer had not heard of him, but never mind, there would be no problem. She drew me a map to the place, which was near the center of town. So we were saved, and we each had a room. She even suggested a restaurant where we might eat. Vidia relaxed—I could sense it from a few feet away, what he would have called a vibration. Cleanliness and order were everything to Vidia. He was relieved and consoled by this sudden intervention.

  “This is perfect,” he said at the embassy guesthouse, yet he sounded sad, and I guessed that he was tired.

  On a back street in Kigali we found the restaurant, which had a pompous French name, something like La Coupole. Vidia still looked melancholy, perhaps because we had been so lucky here. He had once told me how he had a cynical Hindu nature and that he was suspicious of good luck, believing that it attracted bad luck.

  The restaurant was small, and warm with aromas of good food, herbs, and fresh bread. It was full of people, Africans and whites, all of them talking. The manager was a thin Belgian woman in late middle age. She was clearly harassed yet gentle and helpful, entirely at our service, apologizing for being so busy. She brought us a bottle of wine. Vidia tasted it and said it was first rate and grew even sadder as he spoke of how amazing it was to find a great wine in such a crummy town. The woman, flattered by Vidia’s praise, became even more solicitous. She chatted with him, complimenting him on his fluent French. I had a glimpse of Vidia’s sympathy and compassion. He was moved by the good nature of the woman, who was struggling to run a decent restauran
t in this remote place. He admired her the way he admired the Major at the Kaptagat, seeing someone fighting to overcome the odds, bringing order to chaos, a sort of colonizer. The woman moved among the tables, setting out dishes, filling glasses, advising waiters, folding napkins, rearranging forks. Where was this fish from? Vidia wanted to know. Lake Kivu, she said.

  He praised the woman with feeling. He watched her work. Then he looked around and said, “In a few years, this will be jungle too.”

  He had not ceased to be melancholy. He ate his fish. I tried to draw him out on the subject of vegetarianism, but he was monosyllabic and unwilling. He drank most of the wine. It was a good bottle, he repeated. Why was he unhappy?

  “You Americans are so lucky,” he said at last. “You come from a big, strong country. You are looked after. If there was trouble here or in Uganda, serious trouble, your government would send a plane for you. You would be airlifted out.”

  “They were promising that during the Emergency and the curfew,” I said. “But I was having a good time.”

  “You’re a writer. That’s why you don’t go insane. You can define and order your vision. That is so important. If you didn’t, your life in Kampy would be insupportable.”

  It vitalized me to hear him say this. What had I written? Poetry, some essays, part of a novel. What had I published? Hardly anything. Yet to V.S. Naipaul, a writer I admired, I was a writer. He had seen it as much by reading my essay as by reading my palm.

  “What’s all this about being airlifted out?”

  “The embassy here, man. Your embassy. We had no place to stay. They provided it. Don’t take it for granted.”

  “What would have happened if we’d gone to the British embassy?”

  “Nothing, man. Nothing.”

  “I’m sure your country would help you if you were stuck.”

  “I don’t have a country,” Vidia said.

  Now I knew why he was sad.

  Kigali, not anything like a capital, was pitiful even by African standards. There were few streets and no buildings of any size. It had no breadth, it had no wealth, and it was dirty. The paved road ended at the edge of town. Yet Kigali swelled with people, who had flocked to find work and food, to feel safe in a crowd. The Hutus thronging the place had the watchful covetous gaze of hungry people, and when they set their eyes on me they seemed to be looking for something they could eat, or else swap for food. They lingered near the market, along the main street, and at the church that was called a cathedral. Easily seen from the main street were slums and shantytowns on the nearby slopes.

  “I think we’ve done this,” Vidia said.

  He said he did not want to see the cathedral. Churches filled him with gloom. He wanted to avoid the market. Mobs, he said. The crush of people. The danger, the stink. The colonial architecture, the shop fronts, the high walls of yellow stucco with glass shards planted on the top, the tile-roofed houses, all these Belgian artifacts, he said, were already looking neglected and would soon be ruins.

  He saw the roots of a banyan forcing their way into the paved sidewalk and pushing at a wall, the knees and knuckles of the roots visible in broken masonry and paving stones.

  “The jungle is moving in.”

  We left Kigali in the heat and traveled back the way we had come, on the winding rutted road, to the crossroads at Ruhengeri. Again the road was almost impassable because of all the pedestrians.

  “This road is black with people,” Vidia said.

  At the same café, Vidia sat under a beer sign and ordered another cheese sandwich. I thought, Vegetarians eat an awful lot of cheese. I ate an enamel plate of stringy chicken and rice. We were watched by kneeling Hutus as we ate. When we left, we took the road that led west, to the border town of Kisenyi, on Lake Kivu. The place was famous for its smugglers’ dens. Like most of the Congo’s border towns, it was said to have an air of intrigue because it was also the haunt of white mercenaries, who had names like Blackjack and Mad Mike and Captain Bob. There was often trouble in the Congo’s large eastern province of Kivu and in the southeastern province of Shaba. When fighting broke out, refugees fled across the border. From time to time, angry expatriates or white mercenaries would take over a Congolese town, causing a panic flight of people into Rwanda.

  The people on this road could well have been refugees, for there had been fighting near Goma in the past month. But after a while there were no people at all. The empty road cut through yellow woods that gave way to greener, denser forest, and the car labored on stony inclines that were the foothills of more assertive volcanoes. On one of the bends of this road stood a man in a white shirt and dark pants, holding a basket. He waved as we approached him.

  “Don’t pick him up,” Vidia said.

  But I had already begun to slow the car.

  “Why are you stopping?”

  “Maybe he has a problem.”

  The man leaned at the window. “Pouvez-vous m’emmenez à Kavuma? J’ai raté le bus,” he asked. Can you take me to Kavuma? I missed the bus.

  “Get in,” I said, in English and then in Swahili.

  Sliding into the back seat, the man apologized for not speaking English.

  Vidia said, “Mon français n’est pas particulièrement bon, mais bien sur c’est comme ça. J’ai peur que vous ne soyez contraint à supporter cet accent brisé.” My French is not particularly good, but of course that is the way it is. I am afraid you will have to endure this corrosive accent.

  “Vous parlez beaucoup mieux que moi,” the African said. You speak much better than I do.

  Vidia protested this, even a bit crossly, and then he fell silent, and so did the African. Vidia was angry. He had not wanted me to pick up the hitchhiker. He believed that Africans often took advantage of expatriates.

  Ten miles down the road, the African said, “Mon village est près d’ici.” My village is near here. Getting out, he once again complimented Vidia on his French, and he vanished into the trees.

  Before Vidia could say anything, I said, “I spent two years in Africa without a car. I hitchhiked everywhere. People picked me up. That’s why I picked him up.”

  Vidia said, “Let the idlers walk.”

  He sniffed and made a sour face, twisting his lips. The man’s pungent earthen odor lingered in the car. I said nothing for a few miles.

  “This is the bush. People depend on each other.” I could see that he was not impressed. “Anyway, it’s my car.”

  What was his problem? Years later Vidia said to an interviewer, “I do not have the tenderness more secure people can have towards bush people,” and he admitted that he felt threatened by them. But who were “bush people"? Anyone—African, Indian, muzungu— seeing the dusky distinguished author V.S. Naipaul standing beside any road in East Africa would have grunted, “Dukawallah.” Shopkeeper.

  We got to Kisenyi in the late afternoon, having had to go very slowly on the hilly road. Kisenyi was a lakeside town of villas and boarding houses and several hotels. We chose one at random, the Miramar, which was run by an elderly Belgian woman. She had untidy hair and wore a stained apron, but she seemed a kindly soul. You knew what such people were like from the way they talked to their African servants. She spoke to her staff in a polite and patient way that was clearly masking her exasperation.

  Belgians—just one family, but a large one—filled the dining room, and, being related, they were uninhibited: they shouted, they worked their elbows, they reached across the table for more food. We ate at the same table, family style. Vidia winced and seemed to lose his appetite as he watched the display of boisterous manners, the chewing, the squawking women, the shouting, growling men.

  The Miramar was more a boarding house than a hotel, with an intimacy, a disorderly domesticity, the shared facilities meaning intrusions on privacy—the bathmat was wet most of the time, bedroom doors were usually left ajar. Vidia, intensely private, hating proximity and confidences, disliked the place from the first and found the dining table, this common board, unb
earable for its quarreling, gnawing Belgians. He hated their appetites. He said the Miramar smelled. He loathed the Belgians for their being big, pale, overweight, loud, ravenous, unapologetic. “Potato eaters,” he called them.

  By contrast, the Africans here were tall, dark, skinny, whispering, and whipped-looking. I mentioned to Vidia that I thought they were Watutsi.

  “Toot-toot-Tutsi, goodbye,” he said. “But you wonder how they stand these Belgians.”

  He had hardly touched his food. He had eaten the fish. He disliked salad. “What kind of a vegetarian hates salad?” the Major had muttered to me. The Belgian food was heavy and meaty.

  “I think we’ve done this,” Vidia said.

  We left the dining room early, before dessert was served.

  “I don’t think I could stand watching these Belgians having their pudding.”

  It was his first experience of the true bush settler in Africa. I had seen such people in Malawi and Zambia and Kenya, but these Belgians were the apotheosis of the type. You knew their days were numbered. They were farmers and mechanics and operators of heavy equipment—tractors and road graders. They were clever at fixing cars. They mended machines with the simplest tools. They drove the largest trucks. They had maintained the colony but, newly independent, the black republic would find them too expensive and ornery and would send them away. Without these simple capable folk keeping it maintained, the country would begin to fall apart. Although I always doubted it, I often heard that there was idealism in colonizing; but really, whenever the word “colony” was mentioned, especially in Africa, I thought of these simple-minded mechanics. And I suspected that when Africans talked about whites, it was the mechanics and their attitudes they were usually denouncing.

  “Let’s get out of here.”

  We went for a walk in the darkness, keeping to a path near the lakeshore. At the far end of the road, the Congolese town of Goma was visible. Goma was better lighted than Kisenyi.