The Other Shore. Michael Jackson

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СКАЧАТЬ and I must have looked ridiculous, soaked to the skin, with our shoes awash in the floodwater sluicing down the street.

      The woman at the window was joined by others. They laughed and shouted down at us.

      “We don’t speak Krio,” Pauline shouted back.

      “Wait,” the first woman said, “I dae kam.”

      They all traipsed down, dressed in miniskirts, shrieking with laughter. They held beach umbrellas above their heads to protect their jet-black wigs from the downpour.

      They wanted a dash.

      I dug in my pockets and came up with some English coins. The women took them gleefully and ran around to the front of the hotel, beckoning us to follow.

      The lobby was feebly lit. Off to the left was a deserted saloon bar. Ahead was a flight of wooden stairs. The prostitutes clattered up the stairs in their high heels and fishnet stockings, gales of laughter going into the darkness, the smell of cheap perfume lingering in the clammy air.

      When the hotel porter emerged from the shadows, bleary-eyed from his interrupted sleep, I explained that we had come in on the London flight and wanted a room.

      “Kam we go,” he ordered. Dragging a bunch of ancient keys from his pocket, he started to climb the stairs, using the banister to pull himself up. Pauline and I lugged our suitcases after him.

      Our room was at the end of a dingy corridor on the first floor. It was furnished with a double bed under a torn mosquito net, two chairs, and a chest of drawers. The room stank of mildew and excrement.

      I went into the bathroom. The toilet hadn’t been flushed, nor would it flush. When I pulled the chain, there was a noisy gurgling in the pipes and a mess of paper pulp and shit disgorged into the stained bowl.

      We were too tired to care. I bolted the door and we stripped off our wet clothes, toweled ourselves dry, and crawled under the mosquito net onto the bed where we lay jarred and spent from our journey. I thought: We have done what Alex wanted us to do. I can write him tomorrow and say we have experienced Greenland in all its seediness. Then we can find somewhere else to live.

      We woke at first light to the jangle and blare of hi-life music. I went to the louvered window and looked down into the street. Several Toyota and Datsun taxis were parked at an angle to the curb, and the drivers were washing their cars with buckets of sudsy water. I was reminded of the way young men in the Congo used to wash their bodies, soaping themselves until they were all but invisible for lather.

      Beyond the intersection, over laterite stonework and rusty roofs, I glimpsed the sea. Far out, a sunken freighter showed only its funnel and mastheads above the surface of the ocean. It must have gone down during the war, when Atlantic convoys used to assemble in the harbor. I made a mental note to mention this in my letter to Alex.

      “What are you looking at?” Pauline asked.

      I told her about the taxi drivers and the sunken freighter on the sand bar. Then I asked if she felt like getting up and going downstairs, to try to find something to eat.

      “Don’t even talk about food,” Pauline said. She was suffering from morning sickness. She felt as if she were going to throw up.

      “We’ll move out of here,” I said.

      “At least let’s get a room with a toilet that flushes. I’m going to try to get some more sleep,” Pauline said. “If you go out, try not to make too much noise when you come back.”

      I lifted the mosquito net and kissed her on the mouth.

      I went out of the room thinking we should not have come to Africa. I felt sick in the stomach at the thought of Pauline pregnant and having our baby in such a place. I should have called it off, this year in Sierra Leone doing fieldwork for my Ph.D. I should have come alone or not at all.

      In the downstairs dining room, some retired Krio clerks were eating breakfast. No one looked up as I walked in.

      When the waiter asked if I wanted an English breakfast, I made the mistake of saying yes, and was served braised spam, glutinous eggs, and chips fried in rancid oil. The cook had been with the hotel since colonial times. Like the ex-clerks in their English serge and bowlers, his menu parodied the world that Sierra Leoneans had once been encouraged to emulate.

      I had no appetite for the food in front of me and was beginning to think that my dream of returning to Africa, which had sustained me for five years, had been as absurd and anachronistic as the idea of Empire. When I tried to imagine myself in a remote village, speaking an African language, asking people to tell me about their lives, a terrible sense of despair came over me, such as Malcolm Lowry described in his story ‘Through the Panama’: “the inenarrable inconceivably desolate sense of having no right to be where you are.”²

      In the days that followed, I filled my notebooks with such misgivings, panicking whenever I thought of the journey I had embarked upon. And each night I was tormented by the same dream, in which I wandered disoriented in an immense building, looking for a room where I was supposed to enroll.

      Pauline grew impatient with me, and recollected the series of events that had brought us to Freetown together—the month we had spent in Copenhagen where she did an intensive course in Danish, the modern language most akin to Old Icelandic, the weeks in Paris waiting for a sailing from Le Havre to West Africa, and finally the flight back to London when she fell ill, and where, in the course of an operation to remove an ovarian cyst, she was found to be six weeks pregnant. “I want to be here,” she assured me. “I want to have our baby here, in this climate, with you!”

      Vultures wheeled high above the city. In the street markets, peddlers cried, “Biscuit dae! Five five cents.” We tried out our Krio, “Omus for da wan dae? Omus for dis,” buying pineapples, bunches of bananas, and scoops of groundnuts wrapped in funnels of brown paper. We went to Immigration to get our visas. In the piss-soaked alley outside the Immigration Department, a sign had been posted: URINATING PROHIBITED IN THIS AREA. We found a pharmacy with the improbable name of Vulga Thera.

      Beggars crowded around us. Some leaned on staves, their legs like burnt matchsticks. Paraplegics sat in little carts and shoved themselves along on their knuckles.

      Pauline pressed coins into the fingerless hands of a burnt-out leper. In the street, a Toyota Coaster moved slowly through the traffic, a logo above the cab saying SWEET ARE THE USES OF ADVERSITY.

      Now reconciled to remaining in our hotel, we sat on the hotel balcony in the cool of the evening, drinking tonic water and writing postcards home. The sad-eyed Swiss proprietor, who had run the hotel in Graham Greene’s time, limped to and fro behind the bar.

      Our waiter was a thickset man with a coarse-featured, morose face. He derived unending pleasure from prying caps off bottles of Star beer with a grand and sweeping gesture, then watching as kids scrambled around his feet, fighting for possession of the bottle tops. If there was a blue star printed under the cork inlay, you won a prize.

      “Fortunes are precarious here,” I wrote to Alex. “We met a deaf mute boy on the street today who thrust a scrap of paper under our noses and urged us to read what was written on it: ‘Good morning I am no hable to spick and I can not find chob Please will you help me Tankyou God pless...’”

      I was going to add something about the inescapability of poverty when I became aware that a boy was standing close to me, watching me write.

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