Linda said, 'They hadn't moved into the boulevard when I was here the last time.'
As she spoke, she stumbled. A pebble skidded away. An African stood up in the verandah, thin bare legs and ragged jacket silhouetted against the fire. Linda and Bobby looked straight ahead.
When they had passed the house, Linda said, 'He's right. They'll kill him.'
They passed the filling station; the tourist shop; the cinema, still blank and closed. They came to the end of the boulevard and continued into the tree-hung lane from which the running soldiers had come out earlier that evening. There was no asphalt· surface on this lane; their feet fell on wet sand, pebbles, leaves. The blackness grew intense very quickly. The pale walls of villas set far back in gloomy overgrown gardens were barely visible; verandahs were like part of the surrounding blackness. There were no fires here. The trees were low above the lane; the sense of openness had gone.
A dog barked, a low, deep sound; and then it was beside them, big and growling. They walked on, the dog shepherding them angrily past his lot. Dogs barked on either side of the road ahead. And soon they were walking between dogs that obeyed no boundaries. A faint electric light, not a campfire, burned in an inside room of a villa. From that villa, too, dogs came bounding, without a bark, paws ripping through undergrowth and then, over the low twisted wooden fence, beating lightly on the sand of the road, scattering small pebbles. And always, from the black road ahead, came the sound of more dogs. No voices called to the dogs.
'This is nonsense,' Linda said.
They turned back. But where before the dogs had only been keeping them to the centre of the lane, now the dogs crossed in front of them and behind them. Paws pattered on the sand and made an almost metallic sound; growls were deep, abrupt, never loud. Always there was barking in the distance. The pack grew.
'Oh my God,' Linda said. 'These dogs don't have any owners.
They've gone wild.'
'Don't _talk,'__ Bobby said. 'And for God's sake don't stumble.' And their speech did madden the dogs more. Now the dogs occupied the lane completely and their movements were thick and. flurried. They were waiting for a signaclass="underline" the first leap by the bravest in the pack, a sudden gesture from Bobby or Linda, a dislodged pebble. But, steadily, the boulevard and the light came nearer.
'You said your mother's dog left those two parallel lines on your calf?' Linda said.
Rage overcame Bobby. 'I'll kill them. I'm wearing these steel-tipped shoes. I'll kill the first one that attacks me. I'll kick its skull in. I'll kill it.' The anger stayed with him and was like courage. And it was as if the dogs responded to his anger. They began to keep to the edge of the lane; they began to fall behind. But the boulevard was near; the darkness was thinning in the fluorescent light; and the boulevard was the boundary the dogs recognized.
Bobby was trembling. Slowly on the boulevard the sense of time came back to him.
Linda was saying, 'They say you have to have fourteen injections for tetanus.'
'They brought these dogs here to attack Africans.'
'All right, Bobby. They're attacking everybody now.'
'They trained them to attack Africans.'
'They didn't train them very well.'
'It isn't funny.'
'How do you think I feel?'
They walked back to the hotel without talking. They didn't look at the campfires they passed. In the hotel the bar lights were still on; there was no light in the colonel's room, next to the office. In the verandah Linda appeared to wait for Bobby to say something. He said nothing. He set his face, turned away from her, and went alone into the bar. She went down the verandah to the passage; he heard her go up the stairs to her room. It was just past nine. The adventure had lasted less than half an hour.
Bobby sat on a barstool and drank Dubonnet. The fear drained out of him; the moment of panic in the dark lane became remote. The anger turned to exhaustion, and melancholy at his own solitude, in that bar, beside that vast African lake. Vacantly considering the dusty head of the barboy in the red tunic, Bobby thought: poor boy, poor African, poor African's head; and tears began to come to Bobby's eyes.
'I read French book,' the barboy said, showing a tattered book in very limp covers.
Bobby heard but didn't understand. He looked at the boy and remembered the dogs and thought: poor boy.
'I read geometry,' the barboy said, lifting another tattered book from below the bar.
And Bobby understood that the barboy was trying to start a conversation. It was what some young Africans did. They tried to start conversations with people they thought were visitors and kindly; they hoped not only to practise their English but also to acquire manners and knowledge. It moved Bobby to be singled out in this way; it moved him that, after all that had happened, the boy should show such trust; and it distressed him that he had allowed himself to be influenced by the colonel and had so far not looked at the boy, had seen only an African in uniform, one of the colonel's employees, part of the hateful hotel.
'You read geometry,' Bobby said. 'You show me where you read.'
The barboy smiled and danced up and down on his toes. He pressed his elbows on the bar and at the same time turned the first few pages of the book, gathering up each page with the whole of his palm. The pages he turned were black and furred, the edges worn.
'I read here,' the boy said. Still hopping, he placed a palm across two pages and shoved the book towards Bobby.
Bobby put the book in the middle of the bar. 'You read here?
The three angles of a triangle together make one hundred and eighty degrees?'
'I read here.' The boy leaned sideways across the bar. 'You teach me.'
'I teach you. You give me paper.' The boy brought out a chit-pad.
'Look, I teach you. I draw straight line. That straight line make one hundred and eighty degrees. Hundred eighty. Look now. I draw triangle on straight line. Like that. That angle here and that other angle here and that angle up there, all that make hundred eighty degrees. You understand?'
'Hundate.'
'You no understand. Look, I teach you again. I draw circle here. Circle make three hundred and sixty degrees.'
'Hundate.'
'No. No hundate. Three hundred and sixty. Three hundansixty. I show you hundate. I draw line through circle. Hundate up there. Hundate here.'
'I read French.'
'You read plenty. What for you like read so much?'
'I go school next year,' the boy said, showing off now, looking down his nose, sticking out his lower lip, and pulling back the geometry book with the fingertips of both hands. 'I buy more schoolbooks. I get big job.'
The words had echoes: Bobby understood that someone must have passed this way before. Adventure was not in Bobby's mind; adventure was what he had ceased to hope for that day. But now, with sadness for the boy who might have had a previous teacher, he saw that adventure was coming; and, as so often, it was coming when it was least expected, so that it seemed just, like reward. Teaching the boy, he had not studied him. Now he looked at the boy's head, dust adhering to oil; he looked at the lean, tough neck. And the boy, knowing he was being appraised, looked down gravely at his French book, moving his swollen lips.
'What's your name?' Bobby asked, looking at the boy's ears. 'Carolus.' The boy didn't look up.
'You have nice name.'
'You teach me French.'
The French grammar, its limp red cloth cover stained and sticky and bleached and curling, had been written by an Irish priest and printed in Ireland.
'How far you reach? You reach here? Partitive article?'
'Partitive.'
'In English you no have partitive article. You no say, "Bring me some ink.", Bobby paused: language teaching had unexpected difficulties. 'In French you always say, "Bring me _some__ ink.", _'Some__ ink.'
'That's it.'
Bobby looked at the boy, and the boy looked down at the book and moved a thick tongue slowly between his lips.