A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [35]
Mahesh said to me: “What do you do? You live here, and you ask that? You do what we all do. You carry on.”
We had the army in our town. They came from a warrior tribe who had served the Arabs as slave-hunters in the region, and had later, with one or two nasty mutinies, served the colonial government as soldiers. So the pattern of policing was old.
But slaves were no longer required, and in post-colonial Africa everybody could get guns; every tribe could be a warrior tribe. So the army was discreet. Sometimes there were trucks with soldiers in the streets—but the soldiers never showed their weapons. Sometimes there was a ceremonial coming and going at the barracks—the palace built by the great man of our community, which now had women’s washing hung out in the partitioned verandahs upstairs and downstairs (a Greek had the laundry contract for the soldiers’ uniforms). The army was seldom more provocative than that. They couldn’t afford to be. They were among their traditional enemies, their former slave prey; and though they were paid regularly and lived well, they were kept short of equipment. We had a new President, an army man. This was his way of policing the country and controlling his difficult army.
It made for a balance in the town. And a well-paid, domesticated army was good for trade. The soldiers spent. They bought furniture, and they loved carpets—that was a taste they had inherited from the Arabs. But now the balance in our town was threatened. The army had a real war to fight; and no one could say whether those men, given modern weapons again and orders to kill, wouldn’t fall into the ways of their slave-hunting ancestors and break up into marauding bands, as they had done at independence, with the collapse of all authority.
No, in this war I was neutral. I was frightened of both sides. I didn’t want to see the army on the loose. And though I felt sympathy for the people of our region, I didn’t want to see the town destroyed again. I didn’t want anybody to win; I wanted the old balance to be maintained.
One night I had a premonition that the war had come close. I woke up and heard the sound of a truck far away. It could have been any truck; it could even have been one of Daulat’s, near the end of its hard run from the east. But I thought: That is the sound of war. That sound of a steady, grinding machine made me think of guns; and then I thought of the crazed and half-starved village people against whom the guns were going to be used, people whose rags were already the colour of ashes. This was the anxiety of a moment of wakefulness; I fell asleep again.
When Metty brought me coffee in the morning he said, “The soldiers are running back. They came to a bridge. And when they got to that bridge their guns began to bend.”
“Metty!”
“I am telling you, patron.”
That was bad. If it was true that the army was retreating, it was bad; I didn’t want to see that army in retreat. If it wasn’t true, it was still bad. Metty had picked up the local rumours; and what he said about the bending guns meant that the rebels, the men in rags, had been made to believe that bullets couldn’t kill them, that all the spirits of the forest and the river were on their side. And that meant that at any moment, as soon as someone gave the correct call, there could be an uprising in the town itself.
It was bad, and there was nothing I could do. The stock of the shop—there was no means of protecting that. What other things of value did I have? There were two or three kilos of gold I had picked up in various little deals; there were my documents—my birth certificate and my British passport; there was the camera I had shown Ferdinand, but didn’t want to tempt anyone with now. I put these things in a wooden crate. I also put in the wall print of the holy place my father had sent me by