An enthusiastic staff of boys run the hotel for the benefit of the staff. They live like princes. They dress up for dinner and eat sharply at eight. Guests must eat before them or after them. The least request they greet with howls of laughter. They have a communal girlfriend. She is supposed to be the barmaid. More often she can be found on the floor in an agony of laughter. She then has to go home to change. The boys dance most of the night to gramophone records sent from Guinea. They’ve been dancing here for centuries.
The graffiti are wonderful and worth a special visit to Timbuctoo alone. They range from the simple boy meets boy—‘Mahomet aime Yahya’— to the overtly political—‘Chinois sont les Cons’. Happily they are all in neat copybook handwriting and in French.
There are still two bookshops. The Evangelical Library and the Librairie Populaire du Mali glower at each other across the principal square. Sales cannot be high. Above the Evangelical Library a placard reads ‘La Crainte de L’Éternel est le Début de la Sagesse’—fine words for a people who live sensibly in the Eternal Present. The complete works of Billy Graham are for sale and some postcards.
The Librairie Populaire runs two periodicals – La Femme Soviétique and Les Nouvelles de Moscou. Newspaper is at a premium, and is very useful for wrapping fish, meat or vegetables in the market. More serious and substantial ideological books, such as the complete works of V. I. Lenin, Mao Tse-Tung, Marx or Engels are allowed to collect dust a little longer before their pages are passed on to the market. They are used for wrapping little packages of dye, chile pepper, snuff, chewing tobacco, the crushed leaves of the baobab tree used as an abortive, or charms to counteract djinns. Never throw stones at dogs in Timbuctoo. The lean hounds that skulk in the thorn bushes by day may be the djinns that will haunt you by night. A djinn starts as a small black spot in the comer of your room and ends up as big as the house. If you believe in djinns and the ability of holy men to fly of their own volition, the miracles of the jet age are amateur bungling. ‘How long would it take me to fly from here to Mecca?’ an old man asked. He might do it in under a day, I told him. He was unimpressed. Local saints regularly take off on a Friday morning and are back the same afternoon. He also knew of a people called the Mericans who claim to have flown to the Moon. ‘That is impossible,’ he said. ‘They are blasphemers.’ The inhabitants of Timbuctoo are Arabs, Berbers, Songhoi, Mossi Toucouleur, Bambara, Bela, Malinke, Fulani, Moors and Touaregs. Later came the English, French, Germans, the Russians and then the Chinese. Many others will come and go, and Timbuctoo will remain the same.
1970
II
STORIES
MILK
The young American put his head down to the milk-bowl and the milk darkened, from white to grey, as his head blocked out the light. The bowl was a half calabash. He held it in his palms and felt the warmth coming through. There were black hairs floating on the surface and a faint smell of pitch. He tilted the bowl till the froth brushed against his moustache. ‘Shall I?’ He paused before his lips touched the milk. Then he tilted it again and gulped.
He drank quickly and with concentration, watching the level sink down the wall of the calabash. The globs of milk cleared his dry, dust-clotted throat. It was stronger than milk in America and left a bitter taste on the tongue.
‘Be careful what you eat, Jeb.’ The voice was sharp and pleading. ‘And don’t, whatever you do, touch the milk. The milk’s tainted in them countries.’
In his mind Jeb Andrews saw the careful white clapboard house and the drawn face of his mother.
‘I know you’ll be all right, Jeb. But that shan’t keep me from worryin’. If you was goin’ to Europe, I shouldn’t be worryin’, but Africa, Jeb, and them blacks.’
He drained the bowl and turned it over. White drops splashed on his rawhide boots, now red with dust. The outside of the calabash was a warm golden colour and the surface scratched with drawings of animals and plants. It had broken in two places, but the woman had sewn it up with tarred twine. That was what gave off the pitchy smell. Jeb Andrews thought the calabash a lovely thing.
It was mid-day and the sky was hazy and white hot. Sweat streamed inside his shirtfront and down the small of his back. The blood ran into his feet and they felt as if they’d burst his boots.
The women were Peuls. They sold milk to bus travellers under the speckled shade of an acacia. It was the one shade tree for miles. They were lean and angular, as nomad women are. They wore shifts of indigo cotton and the blue rubbed off on their glistening brown skin. Big brass rings weighted their earlobes down.
‘Another,’ Jeb said to the woman.
He felt for a coin in his damp pocket. The woman set the bowl in the dust and ladled it full. A baby sucked at her nipple, its pink fingers clawing at her breast. Jeb watched a dribble of milk run from the comer of the baby’s mouth.
The woman grabbed the coin and tied it in a knot of cotton. She flashed her teeth and then hid them. Her companions looked on, amused and disdainful, gaping at the thin boy in the dusty whites, his golden hair spilling round the half sphere of the calabash.
‘Like it’s feeding time at the zoo,’ Jeb thought. ‘Like I’m the animal.’
‘And another thing, Mr Andrews, I advise you not to drink unboiled milk. The French veterinarians have reported outbreaks of brucellosis all along the northern zone.’
Jeb could hear again the flat voice of the Peace Corps doctor and see the disapproving lips and untanned face above a spotless overall. The doctor had given him sterilising tablets and packets of dehydrated food. He had not used them. Jeb drank the milk in spite of and because of the doctor.
Set apart from the others was a small shrunken woman, her legs reduced to spindles, her lips cracked, her hair scabbed and matted and her breasts shrivelled to leathery purses. She crouched with her sex uncovered, not caring, or shuffled round the women, picking up pieces of old calabash. Jeb watched her arrange them in piles as if, by fitting them together, she could repair her broken womb.
He had been three weeks on the road. The strangeness of Africa had worn off and somehow, in the heat and light, Africa was less unbelieveable than home. It was winter in Vermont. He tried to picture it, but the picture kept slipping from focus, leaving only the heat and light.
Still, he worried about Old Herb. In the fall they’d stood on the bridge below the store. They’d been lumbering all day and the leaves fell, red over yellow, into the river.
‘Sad you’re goin’,’ Herb had said. ‘Shan’t last the winter through. That’s how I’m feelin’ anyways.’
‘I’ll be back, Herb.’
‘Don’t mind me, Jeb. You got to go. And don’t mind your mother none. You can’t sit back home with her fussin’ you. You’re grown enough to know your mind.’ There was a lump in his throat. The snow would be piled up round Herb’s cabin and it troubled him to think of it.
Jeb Andrews found his body thinning and hardening all the time, and the old prejudices stripping away. The Africans fascinated him—the mammas, the big cheerful grain-filled mammas; and the Hausa men, their faces scarred like cat whiskers and their shiny skins reflecting the blue of their clothes and the blue of the sky so it was the colour of night without a trace of brown; and the Peul boys strutting about with swords and black leather kilts and ostrich feathers in their hats. Jeb was beginning to feel how they looked. He even learned to spit like an African ‘Yiakchh ... ptoo ...’ and the ball of saliva would roll in the dust and disappear.
He loved the smell of fresh-flailed millet in the villages and the bulging mud granaries and rhythmic thumping of pestles; the termitaries splashed white by vultures and the red laterite road streaking through the thorn savannah. The bark of the bushes was orange or pale green and their spines were long and white as icicles. In the heat of the day the Peuls’ cattle roamed among them. They had rippling brown coats and white lyre-shaped horns. Jeb thought them the loveliest animals in the world. He did not believe their milk could be diseased.
T
he driver called the passengers back to the bus. The road forked north away from the river. The earth became less red and the baobab trees fatter and more stunted. They reached the town late in the afternoon and stopped outside a bar called Le Lotus Bleu. A mad boy was whirling in the street. In the bar-room some Africans were drinking. Jeb ordered a beer from the owner, a squat Vietnamese woman with her head in a flowered scarf. A man came in selling meat on a metal tray. She prodded it with her pudgy fingers.
‘The meat’s too tough,’ she said.
The Africans laughed.
‘You be the one that’s tough, Mamma, not this meat.’
The old woman liked being teased and squealed with pleasure. Jeb compared her happy face with Vietnamese women in magazines.
‘Have you a room?’ he asked.
‘This is a bar,’ she said, ‘not a bordel.’ And the men laughed again. ‘For a bed you must go to the campement. There is a white woman in the campement.’
Jeb walked between mud walls to the edge of town, and then up an alley of acacias, now black and leafless in the dry season. On a hill was a low whitewashed building with rounded arches. Once it had been the legionaires’ mess. There was a tennis court, now cracked and pitted, with the net frayed off. The white woman was hanging her laundry on the wire. She had red hair out of a bottle and her eyelids were painted black and green. Her skin hung loosely in a collar round the base of her neck. Jeb thought she looked a bit like a goldfish.
‘Madame Annie?’
‘Oui.’ She stared coldly, without surprise or welcome.
‘Est-ce que vous avez une chambre?’ he said slowly.
‘I have a room,’ she replied in English. ‘Come this way please.’
Under the arches were metal chairs and tables covered in green plastic. He followed her into the courtyard where there was an aviary with doves and a caged monkey. Some bougainvillaea straggled over a trellis. She called, ‘Osman. Key for number five,’ and an old Touareg shuffled over. She unlocked a green door. The room was bare but for a cot bed and tattered mosquito net hanging from the ceiling. The whitewash was peeling and there were pale geckos on the walls.
‘A thousand francs a day,’ she said. ‘Service included.’
‘Have you anything cheaper?’
‘The cheapest,’ she said unhelpfully.
The room was expensive but he was tired and took it. He had slept three nights by the roadside.
Jeb stripped. He stepped out of his pants and left them in a heap on the floor. The red dust had caked on his skin. He lay naked on the bed. A cooler wind came in off the desert and through the shutters. He felt the sweat drying on his parts.
It was dark when he woke. He dressed and walked under the arches to the pissoir. Passing Madame Annie’s room he heard creaking springs and the sighs and whimperings of love. The blind was not fully drawn and he caught sight of a sinuous black body laid over a pile of pink flesh.
He washed and went out onto the terrace. Insects were whining round a single electric bulb. Another white woman sat drinking. She was very thin and tragic-looking. Her blonde hair hung in rat-tails, and her face was lopsided from a broken jaw. One arm was in a sling. The monkey had bitten her hand.
‘The Madame is sleeping,’ she said.
‘Not sleeping exactly,’ Jeb said.
‘Is disgusting,’ she said. ‘She makes love with Africans so they will not call her racist. Her husband leave her when she go with Africans. Now I think she hates white men.’
The woman’s name was Gerda. She came from Alsace and was stranded without money. Once she had worked as a journalist and had exposed French atrocities in the Algerian War. She had great sympathy for Arabs and great hatred for blacks and Jews. She said France was overrun by Jews. Even de Gaulle was a Jew. Jeb knew about anti-Semitism but he had not heard the words ‘pestilence’, ‘bacillus’, ‘infection’ and ‘cancer’ used for people.
She said Madame Annie treated her as a servant. She got no reply to her letters for help. She had called the postmaster a dirty drunk and he had called her a Nazi Imperialist. She suspected him of burning her mail.
The door of Annie’s room opened and a boy in bright blue jeans trod limberly across the yard. He nodded to Madame Gerda who ignored him.
‘Is disgusting,’ she said.
Madame Annie followed the boy out, composed and undishevelled in a tartan skirt. She asked Jeb if he wanted dinner and called to Osman to roast a pintade. Madame Gerda sat pretending to read a newspaper.
The pintade was tough and the Algerian wine went to Jeb’s head. Later some of Annie’s regulars came up to drink her whisky. It was the only whisky in town. There were several Africans in European dress and an ex-legionnaire, a small, heat-wrinkled man with grey hair en brosse.
The whore who lived in the campement heard the noise and came out to join the party.
‘Mamzelle Dela,’ the legionnaire greeted her. ‘La Belle de la Brousse!’
She was a Peul. She had a Peul woman’s wonderful high cheekbones and chiselled lips, and long straight gleaming legs and a short body flexible as a hinge. She wore a tight pink dress in one piece. She put her elbows on the table and gazed in Jeb’s direction. He felt her huge black eyes undressing him.
The men sang a song with a refrain ending ‘Annie et son whisky!’ and Annie began a discussion on whether Adam forced the apple on Eve or Eve prostituted herself for the apple.
‘Why don’t you drink?’ the legionnaire called across. ‘What are you, some kind of Englishman?’
‘I’m an American.’
‘Ha! Ha! L‘Équipe CIA! Boom! Boom! Come and drink some whisky. Annie, give this young spy some whisky.’
‘I don’t drink whisky,’ Jeb said.
‘You must drink whisky,’ Annie said. ‘For the bacterias. Whisky massacres bacterias. Osman.’
‘Madame.’
‘Whisky for the young man.’
‘A very small one,’ said Jeb.
‘You pour what you like. Osman does not like to pour whisky. He is a Mussulman and he hates the drink. One day I give him pastis for his throat and he is drunk. I do not think he forgives me.’
Osman fetched the bottle, holding it gingerly as a bomb. He passed it to Jeb, who poured out half an inch.
‘More,’ said Annie. ‘More.’
She took the bottle and filled the glass over half. She kept her own Johnny Walker beside her on the table. She gave herself another and marked the level with a pencil.
‘I cannot live without whisky,’ she said.
‘It’s tea,’ whispered Mamzelle Dela darkly. Jeb was troubled and excited when she looked at him.
‘This hotel is not my métier,’ said Madame Annie. ‘Soon I shall retire to the bush. I shall take a pretty black boy. I shall build a hut and sell my jewels to pay for the whisky. Some people die in a convent and I shall die in the bush.’
Jeb agreed it was better than a convent.
‘I have seen many jungles,’ she said, ‘and the worst jungle is a convent. Very unhealthy place. In a convent people hate each other all the time. In the jungle they hate each other sometimes but not always.’
‘Mon Dieu, que ce garçon est beau,’ said Mamzelle Dela.
‘She says you are a beautiful boy.’
‘She’s pretty nice herself.’
‘Et il est américain?’
‘American.’
‘Je l’adore.’
‘She says she loves you.’
‘I love her too.’
‘You never say you was American,’ said Annie.
‘I thought you knew.’
‘I think you was English. Very hypocrite people, English. I was many times in England, in the war, after the war. Terrible! Once I was in English city. The name of this place is Hull. I am coming from Germany with my German lover. We go to a boarding house and the woman is so nice and polite and say how much she likes the Germans, which is not at all true because English hate Germans. She thinks we are Germans both, and s
he shows the room. Nice room. All flowers à la manière anglaise. Then she says with a charming, really a charming smile, “Of course you are married?” And I say, “Mais non, Madame. Certainement pas!” and this woman, which is smiling, is now smiling not, but screaming, “Out of my house. This is a nice house. You have not business here. Go to the bordel where you belong.”’
‘I never went to England,’ Jeb said.
‘I tell you, my God, they are very hypocrite.’
‘I heard that.’
‘They are dirty and they think they are clean. Hull is bad, my dear, but Londres is worse than Hull. This German man and me, we go to a film. Un film cochon. I don’t speak lies. Old people naked. Gens de soixante ans tous nus. Doing things you can’t imagine. Then they invite us to sing a hymn to the Queen. And in Hyde Park, my God, under the trees! Feet, my God! Que des pieds!’
The men fed the juke-box and played Togolese rock. The legionnaire stumbled to his feet and dragged Mamzelle Dela by the arm and tried to dance. She put on a long-suffering look and winked at Jeb.
He winked back.
‘You have loved an Africaine?’ asked Annie.
‘Never,’ Jeb said in an even voice. He had never been to bed with a woman, but he did not want to show this.
‘You must go with Mamzelle Dela. She wants it.’
Jeb turned red and felt his self-confidence running away.
‘Listen,’ she said protectively. ‘I speak with you as a mother. You are afraid to go with her because you have heard bad things. I tell you, African women are cleaner than white women. They are très pudique. And they are much more beautiful.’
‘You think I should?’
‘I know it.’
The legionnaire was too drunk to dance and stood with his arms round her buttocks. His head nuzzled her breasts, but he was slipping gradually to the floor.
‘Down,’ he spluttered. ‘Down ... down ... down ... down ...’
‘Down where?’