‘Sell that one cheaply, then,’ I suggested. ‘That is good practice in business, too, to have something cheap amongst the more expensive.’
‘Excellent,’ said the Minister, ‘You are more worldly than I had imagined.’
I HAVE left instructions with the Syrian and with Duni, the ironmonger, and all those that know me in the market, that when I die they should burn my body and take my ashes in a vase to the village of my uncles. There they should bury me beneath the acacia. Duni asked me about my Sins and Virtues, but I explained that I had lived such a solitary life that I had none.
‘What, not even a little minor failing once in a while?’ he asked.
‘No, nothing,’ I said. ‘My conscience is clean.’ The sin-lister, I reminded him, must be free from sin. It is the custom and the regulation.
I PASS between my various desks with very little purpose now. Occasionally I take out ink and paper, just for old times’ sake, and doodle for a while. But I am not interested in letters. The quest for Meaning in Form belongs to an age long past. I often draw a forest of trees, almost bare and leafless, with the moon hovering on the horizon. Is it dawn or dusk? Soon we all shall know.
SIX. Electricity
‘NEGLECT,’ says Awni, the Rest House warden. ‘For one hundred years we have been neglected. Now we are remembered!’ And who claims credit? Warden Awni does. ‘My petitions worked the trick,’ he says. He displays carbon copies. Anyone is welcome to read his fawning paragraphs, to ministers and civil servants. Now the town supplicant has turned braggart. ‘You will be pleased to learn that electrical power is to be installed in your town during the Dry,’ informs the framed ministerial letter which Awni has tacked to the veranda wall. The Rest House is amongst the first dozen buildings to be equipped with sockets and fittings.
We know better. Awni’s petitions are not the cause: they are too frequent and too dispersive. He petitions for a road surface, for a petrol licence, for a landing strip, for the removal of the schoolteacher (‘Honoured Minister, we have amongst us one who, like a kittle beetle, disseminates anxiety…’). He petitions for a transfer elsewhere, to the town or the coast or the salt lake resorts. He is ignored. No, it is the Minister’s personal secretary who deserves our gratitude. His neighbour is landowner Nepruolo. They own adjacent houses in the city’s New Extension. They have vacation cottages on the Mu coast. Their wives are stalwarts of the same club; their children bicker at the same school.
We can construct their conversation: Nepruolo calls upon his neighbour to present a basket of fresh candy gourds ‘grown on my land in the Flat Centre’. Our land. ‘They would be larger and sweeter,’ he says, as the Secretary’s children sever the fruit from the creeper and slice the crisp white flesh. ‘But … well, do not let me bore you with farming talk. Without good water pumps during the Dry, the gourds take siesta. Electric pumps are best, but we do not have electricity, so … small fruit.’ The Secretary squeezes a lime over his crescent of fruit and commiserates: ‘I should not want land there without electricity … but if there were electricity then the thought of a small gourd farm with a comfortable lodge is attractive.’ ‘Land I can provide cheaply to a friend and neighbour,’ says ‘Nepruolo. Electricity I cannot.’ The Secretary enjoys his fruit. Soon he will have larger, sweeter candy gourds of his own. He will add another document to the Minister’s endorsement file, with a pencilled cross for his signature. He will stamp the document ‘PPi’ (top Project Priority) and then he will talk terms with Nepruolo.
All that Awni can construct is his letter of thanks. Copies are tacked to the veranda wall. ‘Honoured Minister and Friend, We thank you for the gift of Progress through Electrical Power…’
GOOD TO its word, the government has erected pylons. It has laid cables. It has wired the hospital, the school, government buildings, Nepruolo land. In a few weeks we will have electricity. The Rest House is to be hung with glass lanterns in lemon and green and orange. ‘They will be mangoes of light,’ says Awni. ‘Mangoes of light all along the veranda.’ Electricity becomes familiar to us, domesticated as shining mangoes.
More strange are the electricians, clean workers with hard fingers, who have come from the city in neat trucks and taken up noisy residence in Awni’s best rooms. Hear these men sing and argue as they work! They bury flayed mechanical limbs of wire deep into wall plaster. They handle the tendons and sinews, the long red arteries, the blue veins, with the intimacy of surgeons. The children stand close to dive and wrestle for snips of wire and plastic which fall to the ground. How will it be, they ask, when the Minister and the President of the Company arrive to switch on the current? Will the electricity flow like water, first lighting dull lamps and spinning slow fans close to the generator, then running through those thin and shiny filaments to the police station, the school, along the Rest House veranda — mango by mango — until it reaches the hospital to drip and spurt, like a farmer’s furthest tap, amongst the sickbeds? Not like water, explain the electricians. ‘But strong and all at once.’
The children do not understand. How can electricity be instantaneous, no sooner in the town centre than on its fringes? How can it be so heedlessly rapid when it has been so slow, when it has taken so many years to reach us here at all?
‘Which is nearest to your brain, your nose or your arse?’ tease the electricians. Children slap their noses. ‘But which can you twitch first? Let’s race. Boys, be noses; girls, be bums. And when we say Now send a message from your brain, to twitch and shake. Who will win?’ Boys and girls — and old men, too — twitch and shake. The noses cannot beat the bums. ‘So now you understand,’ say the electricians. ‘It takes exactly as long for a message to travel from here to here’ (an electrician’s fingers span the prettiest girl’s face from forehead to nose) ‘as it does from here to here!’ (Now he stoops and stretches, touching her buttocks and head.) ‘Electricity is like that. Like a message from the brain, no sooner sent than received.’ The President of the Company presses a lever and every light on the veranda will shine. The hospital will be bright as soon as the police station. The fan in the schoolhouse will turn no sooner than the wheel of the water pump on Nepruolo land. At home that night, by candlelight, mothers and fathers gravely twitch and shake for their educated children.
‘BEWARE OF electricity,’ says the schoolteacher. ‘You will become addicts.’ His comments are directed at Awni, who has been polishing his mangoes and listing the electrical equipment which he has ordered (cheaply and furtively) from the electricians: a modern icebox, table lamps, a liquidizer for expensive drinks. ‘Kittle beetle,’ he says, but the teacher persists. He has lived in the city; he has travelled abroad and trained in Denmark. He is playful in the European manner, joking but not laughing. He alone in the town has lived with science and light. ‘Beware, beware.’
What must it be like to have sharp, strong light at hand, on the flick of a finger? To have cool fresh air fanning the Dry middays? To have ice in every drink? To be visited, like other towns, by the cinema truck? ‘Addictive,’ repeats the teacher. He recalls for us a day in Denmark. ‘I was reading in the conservatory,’ he says. ‘I was alone in the house. Jens was teaching. Lotte was teaching. Their children, Christoffer and Kirsten, were at school. I was being economical at the request of the Minister of Power, who complained daily in the newspapers and on the television that Danes had become reckless with electricity. All that comforted me was fire, a radio and a reading lamp.’ He shows how the appliances were ranged around him, how leads led to plugs, how plugs fitted tightly into sockets on the Jorgensen walls. He demonstrates with a saucer how the energy disc on the electric meter was spinning as gently as a seed mast, its calibrations individually distinct. The saucer turns precariously on the teacher’s finger.