by Mary Morris
A sore-throated rooster woke us at dawn. We thanked the people for their kindness and as we clambered into our dugout we found that they had put a pile of fish and cassava there as a present to us.
* * *
We drifted and paddled leisurely onwards, ran up against a submerged sandbank, climbed out and pushed, glided on, then hit another sandbank, climbed out and pushed again, but every inch only wedged the dugout tighter and higher on the sand. Soon it was stuck firm. The water was only a few inches deep. We pushed and pulled and dug away the sand from underneath, but got nowhere. A strong fisherman paddled up, gave our dugout a hearty shove, refloated it, and handed us another fish.
In a short time, we were out of the sandbanks and onto a fast straight stretch of river. We raced along feeling elated with the wind blowing through our hair as we sped the paddles in short rapid strokes through the water. We zigzagged among the clumps of hyacinth which floated spinning lazily in the swirling movement of the current. Then the surface of the river suddenly erupted and we shot head-on into the bank. The surface of the river could change abruptly; one moment the water would be flowing strongly but placidly, and the next instant it became a raging, bubbling mass of wide circles which spun with uplifted edges. I presumed that they must have been caused by the powerful underwater currents hitting rocks or shoals on the riverbed, and as the current veered to a specific angle, so the surface erupted in turmoil. The local people called them whirlpools. Many were permanent whirlpools, like the ones round every headland, some were small and weak, others were very large and very strong. Being caught in them produced a feeling similar to driving a car on ice; suddenly you were out of control, skidding and sliding weightlessly.
To begin with we were not very good at managing the dugout; we spent a lot of time hurtling downriver broadside or backwards, both shouting instructions to each other that neither could hear. We were growing expert at spreading out our soaked belongings to dry in the sun. The tarpaulin was constantly wet because it lay in the bottom of the dugout, and as soon as we dried it, something unfortunate would happen. Accidents such as once when Lesley was carrying the freshly dried tarpaulin down to La Pirogue, which had moved out slightly from the shore. Lesley took two paces in ankle deep water, and at the third step she fell up to her neck in the river. The tarpaulin was soaked again, and we laughed until we cried.
Nights were less horrifying after Lesley suggested that we try sleeping on the shore in the breeze and not too close to the water’s edge. The first night we tried that we found a riverside glade on the Zaire bank and made camp there. Within half an hour three men arrived in a dugout, and one, who claimed he was a member of the militia, came ashore. He wanted to see our papers and examine our boat. We were rather anxious because we didn’t have visas for Zaire, but we needn’t have worried—he didn’t know how to read. After looking intently at the pictures he turned to La Pirogue, started pulling all our gear out of the tin trunk and ordered us to tell him what it was for. We knew from experience that if we explained the items then every time he saw something he fancied he would demand it. So we offered him coffee and sat chatting with him instead. He was very pleasant and he left after dark. We dug the tent poles into the ground, draped our mosquito nets over them, and settled down to sleep. The mosquitoes invaded us but it was not as bad as before. Then it started to rain so we got up to pull the tarpaulin over the dugout. The rain was followed by the noise of monkeys fighting, squealing in anger and throwing nuts at each other which landed on us. Finally, there was peace and quiet, except for the eerie howling of a wildcat hunting nearby in the forest.
In the middle of the night the militia man returned. This time it was a social call—he had brought a huge smoked catfish to eat as a midnight feast. It was delicious, but the man showed no signs of going away. I had an inspiration. I started to scratch. I scratched my arms and legs and head as though I was thick with fleas; Lesley joined in. It had a potent psychological effect and after five minutes the militia man bade us goodnight.
Our second visit to Zaire was more fun. We stopped at a village to refill our giant water container which was almost empty and we found that the local water supply was of course the river. The river was a muddy brown colour from the rains which were falling here and to the north, but if the villagers could drink it then so could we. A huge crowd had gathered round us the moment we stepped ashore, the atmosphere was friendly, but they stared and stared. The bolder ones spoke to us in simple French and asked if they could touch our hair, exclaiming with wonder at its softness. Others peered curiously at the colour of our skin, assuming that the whiteness was due to a disease. Several people wanted to know if we were girls. Then they brought out two stools, sat us down, and stared at us for a long time. I was equally curious about them. Most of the people wore grass skirts, and I noticed some remarkable tribal brands, including many narrowly-spaced parallel lines which gave their faces a weird stripey look. At first I felt embarrassed about wanting to stare at Africans, I had always considered it impolite. But in Africa it is not rude to stare and by tradition a newcomer was usually expected to sit or squat while he was scrutinised for half an hour. When the people were satisfied having looked at his appearance, they would formally demand to know his tribe and destination.
“What tribe are you?” asked a big man standing at the front.
“English,” I answered.
“Where are you going?”
“To Brazzaville.”
A murmur ran through the crowd, and the big man who was obviously their chief observed (in all seriousness) that we would not reach Brazzaville before nightfall, so we had better stay the night in his village.
They were gregarious affable people; they wanted to know about the countries we came from and why we were paddling down the river. Lesley noticed a young girl with some infected sores on her arms and asked if she could help her. Our medical kit consisted only of aspirin, nivaquine and a tube of antibiotic cream, but Lesley couldn’t bear to see untreated injuries or people in pain. The girl took us to her parents’ hut where we boiled some water and someone brought a piece of cloth to tear into bandages. Then someone else came and requested Lesley to go and look at his sick father, and several people turned up who seemed to have malaria, so Lesley dispensed some nivaquine to them. Quinine was the only cure for malaria; I was surprised to learn that quinine trees did not grow in Africa. For white people malaria could be a killer, but it seemed that the Africans had adapted to some extent and only suffered from a mild form of it.
A tiny man whose chin only reached to the height of my waist asked in gestures for Lesley to come and attend to someone who had been wounded by an elephant. It was quite a long walk, inland from the river on a small path through the forest which was very overgrown with vines and creeper that wrapped itself round our necks and ankles. Every plant had thorns. Many of the trees had claws like large rose bushes which grew all over their trunks and branches. Other trees had spikes; the vines had thorns, the bushes had barbed prickles, the undergrowth was a tangle of brambles, briars and thistles. The little pygmy man slipped through the forest as though it was silk, but Lesley and I got lassoed, tripped up, and clawed by every plant we passed.
He took us to a pygmy village where huts were simple grass shelters in contrast to the mud and thatch of those of the river tribes. Pygmies seemed to live a hunter-gatherer style of existence, moving from place to place in search of a fresh supply of food. Six pygmies were standing beside one of the shelters, the tallest of them was about four feet high. They weren’t dwarfs—but they looked like miniature people. They were wearing loin cloths and a couple had quivers of arrows slung over their shoulders, but all six of them vanished off among the trees when they saw us.
The man who had been hit by the elephant was lying in the shelter; he had a deep gash in one leg, but Lesley said it wasn’t serious. He watched her every move as she cleaned and bandaged the wound, and when she finished he smiled and chanted a sing song speech. The forest
was quiet. No one was going to return to the settlement while we were there, and since it was probably getting late we hurried back to the river village. The chief welcomed us back, and sat us on stools outside his hut. The crowd gathered to watch what we did. I felt like an animal on display and wished that I could perform tricks for them. My only trick was to fill and smoke my pipe, which startled them as effectively as if I had done a series of cartwheels.
During a supper of hot peppered fish and spinach, I asked the chief about the pygmy tribe. He told me they seldom came to the river (none of the pygmies were river people) and they never inter-married with other tribes. Other tribes considered the pygmies equivalent to animals. He added that we would see a few more of them in the morning because it was market day and they would bring dried antelope to trade in the village. Lesley and I shared a wooden bedstead in our hut; it wasn’t sprung but the mattress was made of bundles of rushes and was very comfortable.
The morning market was a good time for us to stock up our food supplies which had dwindled to half a loaf of bread, jam and three maize cobs. It was not a busy market—it was more a village social gathering. We walked around chatting to people as we tried to decide what to buy. There was no need to buy anything because all the villagers came up to say thank you to Lesley for helping their sick families, and they gave us presents of plantain and sweet bananas, maize, smoked fish, cassava and pawpaw in such quantity that the centre section of the dugout was too full for us to move from front to back unless we balanced on all fours and clambered along the rim of the sides. We shook hands with everyone and just as we were casting off the little pygmy man came running down to give us a chunk of antelope. Then we set off and the people lined the bank to wave goodbye.
I enjoyed our stopovers in villages, but most of all I loved the free feeling of being alone with our dugout floating downriver, watching the day roll past, and threading our way at random among the islands. By now I had realised that I was wrong in assuming that tourists always paddled dugouts to Brazzaville. My original mistake was in thinking that there were other tourists, for as Lesley pointed out, Central African Republic was hardly an attractive resort. The astounded reactions of the fishing folk made it obvious that they had never seen white girls before and the nature of the river made it clear that this was not to be an easy jaunt. Lesley said she had known this all along.
“Then why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.
“Because I didn’t think you’d listen,” she replied.
Neither of us had any wish to change our mind, not that it would have made any difference if we had as we couldn’t go back. The thought crossed my mind that this was certainly a good way to learn about taking responsibility for one’s actions. We didn’t regret our impulsive undertaking, not even at nights when we suffocated in sweat baths tortured by the mosquitoes, and when the ants tunnelled inside our mosquito nets, and when we were drenched by rainstorms, or during the day when we stopped on fly-infested islands, and when crocodiles plunged from the shores into the river where we had just been swimming.
The river was now a couple of miles wide, and every day it provided us with a fresh challenge. It alternated from glassy calm to raging roughness in storms that whipped up out of the blue in a matter of seconds, and it took us to extremes of paradise, hell, exhilaration and fear.
With the heavy rainfall upstream the water level in the Oubangui and Congo basins rose, releasing acres of previously trapped hyacinth weed. Some of the hyacinth floated in single plants, each with its decorative purple flower; sometimes it came in clumps which were the size of small islands. Some days there was little hyacinth, while on other days such as this one the surface of the river was thickly coated in it. I deduced that the daily quantity of weed was equivalent to the amount of rainfall upriver; I smiled at its simple logic, then turned to stretch my arm down to the rudder and disentangle a clump of weed which had become wound around it. A gust of wind blew more hyacinth against one side of the dugout and I had no sooner freed the rudder than it became entangled again. The wind that had blown the weed against the dugout was still blowing and pushing both the weed and the dugout over into the main current, but we could do nothing to prevent it because the harder we pushed away from the build-up of weed the further we moved into the fast main channel. More weed jostled against the dugout and when a large clump bumped into the stern the dugout swung broadside. Everything happened very rapidly. The dugout was heavier and floated more slowly than the weed, so the weed quickly accumulated against the upriver side, pushing hard, trying to force its way underneath, and the dugout began to tip.
“It’s going to roll us over,” screamed Lesley. We both threw our weight to counterbalance it and tore at the plants with our hands. We grabbed them to throw them aside but they slipped through our fingers in sludgy disintegration, and every moment more weed was massing up against us. It was moving so fast that the already tightly packed plants doubled up and wadges of hyacinth cascaded into the dugout. The dugout had become a barrage and was creating a backwash of water that roared underneath it from the free side, and it needed only one more push to flip it upside down. The danger girded us into a desperate balancing act on the upper rim of the dugout and with frantic efforts we bailed out the slimy plants. But we knew we didn’t stand a chance of freeing the dugout from the wall of weed that mounted steadily higher over it. I glanced forwards and noticed that the river was swinging into a bend; the current swung wide round the curve digging the bend deeper into the forest; it had eroded under the banks and many of the giant trees had fallen out across the river. We smashed through the branches of the first. They ripped us to shreds but we didn’t stop, our wall of weed pushed us through and on, sweeping us under the low-lying trunk of another tree which I hadn’t seen. It knocked me flat and passed within an inch of my head. Then there was the grinding splintering of wood followed by oaths from Lesley. The dugout halted and I looked up to find that we were firmly stuck in the middle of a tree. The weed was left behind lodged against a strong branch in a monstrous bulwark of green foliage. The current was still forcing us on under low branches and in the pandemonium of swirling water and cracking wood we hacked our way forward, chopping at smaller branches with our paddles. In a last desperate effort we freed La Pirogue, drifted into a quiet cove, and came to a gentle stop on the sand.
Several sharp lessons were necessary before we learnt how to cope with the hyacinth. By paddling hard we could travel at the same speed as the hyacinth; we found we could keep control, and where shallow backwaters were choked with the weed, we cut down a sapling to use as a punt pole.
One afternoon as we floated lazily downriver, resting and sunbathing in the sweltering heat, I heard a noise that sounded like a series of grunts. There, sticking up above the water, was a pair of ears. Then a hippo surfaced, and a second one, a third, fourth. The dugout jolted abruptly and seemed to bounce backwards. Neither of us had noticed the hippo in our path and now we had forced ourselves on his attention. He turned, remarkably swiftly for such a bulky animal, opened his massive jaws, showed an amazing display of tusklike teeth, and went for us. We backpaddled frantically, steered hard right, and raced for the other side of the river. A storm broke overhead. We reached the shore, sheltered between the roots of a tree, and watched the hippos. The rain poured on and on, but we got tired of waiting, so we decided that if we ignored the weather it might give up and go away.
At sunset the sky cleared, and the river turned to molten gold. We made camp on a small sandbank with one tree, sat contemplating the beauty of the endless river horizons between the islands, and drank some more of the whisky. Lesley was so tipsy that when she went to fetch her mosquito net from the dugout she fell overboard.
We had spent exactly one week on the river.
ANDREA LEE
(1953–)
When Andrea Lee’s husband accepted a fellowship to study in Russia for ten months, she began a diary of the life she shared with him. A journalist and novelist, she set
about writing a series of vignettes that offered an insider’s look at Russians from the markets to the public baths to the nightclubs. Written before glasnost and perestroika, Lee’s account of an Easter celebration intuits the decline of Communism and the resurrection of a new Russia. Born in Philadelphia, she is author of one novel, Sarah Phillips, which recounts the reckless life of a middle-class black woman. She lives in Italy.
from RUSSIAN JOURNAL
April 12
EASTER
We’ve returned from our stay in Leningrad to a Moscow transformed by the approach of spring. The skies are a limpid blue filled with strands of cloud as thin and fine as thistledown, and the sidewalks around the university are swamps of mud and grit and the odd debris left at the tide line of receding winter. Last week, three days before Easter, I went to the peasant market near the Byelorussian train station and found it thronged with people shopping for the holiday, the day the State grudgingly permits to be celebrated but does its best to suppress. Instead of durable winter vegetables—big pale cabbages, waxed turnips, giant, mud-covered carrots—the counters were heaped with the fresh spring greens that were just beginning to make their frail way into the world: sorrel, dill, dandelion leaves. A babushka, perhaps the oldest in the world, with earth-colored wrinkles closing in on themselves so that her tiny gleaming eyes were scarcely visible, and skinny fingers as yellow as beeswax, sold me a bunch of herbs, mumbling, “Now, this will make you a fine Easter soup!” After her trembling fingers had counted out the kopecks in change, she crossed herself,
At outdoor booths in the sunny market courtyard, vendors were selling brightly painted Easter eggs; I bought several from a short man with cheerful blue eyes and frostbite marks on his cheeks. The eggs are all exuberantly painted with naïve scenes that suggest a religious and secular rejoicing at the fullness of new life awakening in the world: they show squat onion-domed Orthodox churches, ducklings in baskets, young suitors hurrying along with bouquets of flowers, bearded peasants clutching enormous sturgeons. All of the eggs bear the inscription XB, the Russian abbreviation for Khristos Voskres—Christ Is Risen. One of my most amusing eggs bears the XB inscription and, underneath it, the message: “Happy Easter, dear Comrades!” Wishful thinking. Easter and comrades in fact don’t mix at all. It was pleasant to walk out into the balmy afternoon with my net bag filled with green leaves and Easter eggs, but on the subway I began to notice the people staring at the colorful paint, and I started to feel that I was openly carrying contraband. Later I heard that the market had been raided, and the Easter eggs, absurdly enough, seized by the police.