In A Free State

'Why didn't you?'

'You go out driving with Sammy Kisenyi, making educated conversation, and you see a naked savage with a penis one foot long. You pretend you've seen nothing. You see two naked boys painted white running about the public highway, and you don't talk about it. Sammy Kisenyi reads a paper on broadcasting at the conference. He's lifted whole paragraphs from T. S. Eliot, of all people. You say nothing about it, you can't say anything about it. Outside you encourage and encourage. In the compound you talk and talk. Everybody just lies and lies and lies.'

'You know why you came. You can't complain.'

'It's their country. But it's your life. In the end you don't know what you feel about anything. All you know is that you want to be safe in the compound.'

'You came for the freedom, though. You adjust very easily, remember?'

'No doubt we look at these things differently, Bobby.'

'It doesn't matter now what you think, though.'

'Every night in the compound you hear them raising the hue and cry, and you know they're beating someone to death outside. Every week there's this list of people who've been killed, and some of them don't even have names. You should either stay away, or you should go among them with the whip in your hand. Anything in between is ridiculous.'

'Is that Martin? Or the colonel? I can't keep up with you, Linda. All those lovely weekends in the capital, with all those lovely open fires. Somehow I was expecting more. I was astonished at your taste, Linda. "I adjust very easily." Very nicely spoken, but it's nobody's fault if the people we find are just like ourselves. You've all been reading the same books. Of course, we read a lot, don't we? We mustn't let our minds grow rusty, among the savages.'

'It isn't for you to talk like this, Bobby.'

'I'm disqualified, am I? You should have told me. But I thought you wanted a houseboy to spread the news. I thought you wanted someone to' excite by your screams in bed.'

'That is one of Doris Marshall's absurd stories.'

"Let's get Bobby to witness. He is one of Denis Marshall's." ' He was moving his head up and down. ' "Let's get Bobby. You can do what you like with Bobby."

"That's a nice shirt you're wearing, Bobby." Very funny. But you chose the wrong man.'

"This is nonsense.'

'Is it?' He took his right hand off the steering-wheel and tapped his head. 'I notice everything. It's all there.'

'I always thought you were a romantic, Bobby.'

'You chose the wrong man.'

'I wish it was the way you tell it. You can't have looked very carefully at the people in the compound.'

'That's just it. It's nobody's fault if the people you find are just like yourself.'

'Let's stop this, Bobby. I take back everything.'

'You talk about savages and whips.'

'I take that back.'

'There are so many like you, Linda. We mustn't let our minds grow rusty. We are among savages and we need our cultural activities. We are among these very dirty savages and we must remind ourselves that we have this loveliness. Do we use our vaginal deodorant daily?'

'This is ridiculous.'

'_Do we? Do we?__ What brand do we use? Hot Girl, Cool Girl, Fresh Girl? Girl-Fresh? You're nothing. You're nothing but a rotting cunt. There are millions like you, millions, and there will be millions more. "I'm very adjustable."

"I hope they've done nothing to the poor wives." I don't know who you think you are. I don't know why you think it matters what you think about anything.'.

She leaned back in her seat and looked out of her window. A village again: dusty shacks, tropical backyard vegetation, a dirt side road: a vista of sun, dust and trees there; and then bush beside the highway again.

'There are millions like you. And millions like Martin. You are _nothing__.'

'Please stop the car. I will get out here. I don't want to say anything more. Please stop the car.'

He braked with a squeal on the hot road. The wind stopped rushing through the windows. The beat of the engine was like silence. Trees were throwing squat shadows across the ditches. The sky was hot and high.

Linda said, 'You were right. It wasn't a good idea.'

'You're a fool. You'll get into trouble.'

'I'm very foolish.'

'This is your idea, remember.'

'I'll make other arrangements. I'll probably get 'a taxi or something.'

As she turned to open the door he saw that the back of her shirt was wet. He was aware then that his own shirt was wet, and felt cold. For a second, stepping out on the road, Linda appeared to be without a sense of direction. Her dark glasses masked her expression. She steadied herself. Bobby watched her start back towards the village they had just passed.

He called, 'Your suitcase?'

She didn't turn. 'You can take that.'

He opened his door and stood up on the road. The sense of the moving road remained with him. He felt dizzy in the still hot air; he had again that sensation of the overcharged, exploding head. 'Linda!'

She continued to walk away with her brisk little steps, looking down, so alien on the high embankment of the empty road, so accidental-looking, the colours of her trousers and shirt suddenly so bright and noticeable that vivid colour seemed to come as well to the road and fields and sky, and the scene had something of the unreal quality of a colour photograph.

He got back in the car, slammed the door shut and, drove off, rubbing his dry palms on the steering-wheel, studying the black road, feeling the heat thrown back from the bonnet, where the sun was reflected in a little ring of scratched glitter.

Minutes later, aware all the time of the declining sun, the black shadows of trees, the empty fields, the empty car, the roar of the engine and the wind, he began to have the sense of nightmare.

The colonel and the hotel, the soldier beside the wide riverbed, the white boys breaking out into the road like heraldic animals and running in slow, silent motion, Linda on the road: the pictures were clear, they had a sequence, but they were like things imagined.

He needed to be calmer. Acknowledging the need, he became calmer. The sense of nightmare was reduced to a memory of his own violence and a foreboding of danger. He was alone; he was inviting reprisal. But still he raced. There was danger at the end of the road, danger in his solitude. But still he allowed time to pass.

The car jumped, came down hard again on the road, and. the steering-wheel momentarily kicked itself free of his hands. The road here had subsided. The thin asphalt crust, soft and melting in the afternoon sun, rose and fell. It was a stretch of road Bobby knew. He took his foot off the accelerator. Another bump, another slither, but he was in control. He stopped, and again was aware of the silence, the light, the heat.

He turned to go back. The road was as empty as before. On the wet tar he saw the tracks he had just made. In his panic, the road and the fields had been like things he was imagining. It astonished him, going back, to find he had seen it so clearly and remembered so much. His car had made perfect tracks, quite ordinary.

There was no sign of Linda on the highway. The little village that had been built all on one side of the highway, about the dirt road, looked shut up and evacuated. No one appeared when Bobby sounded his horn. The two or three shops, crooked wooden structures, were the colour of their bare, dusty yards. On tin advertisements nailed to the closed doors, the sheets of tin robbed by the sunlight of all colours except black and pale yellow, a laughing African woman in a turban-type headdress held up a jar of eczema ointment and a laughing African man smoked a cigarette.

Bobby turned into the dirt road. At once there was dust. At once all that the rear-view mirror showed was dust, dense and billowing, like the yellow smoke from a fierce fire. Bobby closed the windows; but as he drove along, obliterating what he had seen, bush, tall trees, an empty wooden hut, the dust in the car became thicker. He saw a large corrugated-iron shed standing in a junkyard, old grease black and thick on dust; and next to this, behind two or three starved shrubs in hard earth, a white concrete bungalow on low pillars, squarely exposed to the afternoon sun.