In a Strange Room: Three Journeys Page 0,44
and pulpy at the centre. Just before they get to the border he pulls over in a cane-field and lights up a huge joint. To calm me down, he says, before I deal with these bastards.
It turns out he’s smuggling twenty thousand dollars’ worth of Afghan rugs under two oil drums in the back. These are destined, he tells me afterwards, for one or another official at the American embassy in Dar es Salaam, they are one of the reasons he’s making this trip. Charles sweats and trembles like a junkie as they go across the border, but afterwards he affects a bored composure. No problem if they were found, he says breezily, a quick fifty dollars and they’ll look the other way. I know these chaps, I speak the lingo.
When they arrive at Dar es Salaam in the evening he takes them to a vast house in one of the more exclusive suburbs, with a metal fence and a security guard outside. It’s the residence of some high-up official in the embassy, a plump middle-aged woman with glasses who comes out to meet them, smiling broadly.
She agrees to let them stay over, and he finds himself in a luxurious bedroom, drapes and thick carpets and a bathroom tiled to the ceiling. It’s unreal to him, but not as unreal as dinner that night, which they have with the Romanian ambassador to Tanzania. For some bizarre reason there is a portrait of Lenin on the wall and the ambassador makes a sign of the cross in self-defence when he sees it. I am silent under the weight of this surreal situation, and glad to be alone in bed not long after. In the passage outside the door a radio crackles and burps all night, leaking American voices talking in code.
The next day they drive to Mbeya and put up in a hotel. Since leaving Kenya Charles hasn’t called me anything, but that night, in the bar, I hear him saying, Noel, Noel, and when I look around Charles is speaking to me. Why he’s fixed on this name it’s hard to tell, but I feel too weary to correct him. By this time there is a high level of irritation between them and being called Noel is just part of the deal.
By the next day, when they enter Malawi, the irritation is teetering on the edge of argument. When they miss a turning somewhere Charles starts to berate him, you’re supposed to be watching the road signs, Noel, and he has to force himself to stay silent. Later Charles expatiates on what lies beneath the Malawians’ smiles, they’re pretending to be innocent but they’re a crafty lot, I’ve seen this before. Don’t be fooled, Noel, I’ve got their number.
It’s time to move on and the next morning, when they get to the lake, he says goodbye. Charles is alarmed, why don’t you hang around for a while, he doesn’t want to be left alone with the crafty Malawians. But the South African shakes his head, in two days he can be back at home, his mind wanders constantly northward, to Greece. Oh all right, Charles mutters defeatedly, go then. But write your address in my book, in case I ever come to Cape Town.
I hesitate with the book in hand, not knowing what to write. But after a moment I print my new name, Noel, and an old telephone number, I will never hear from Charles again.
From here the return journey goes swiftly, Noel jumps from one bus to another, only pausing to overnight in Blantyre. In another two days he is back in South Africa, in Pretoria. It has taken him six days to get back from Mombasa, half the length of the continent.
The whole way home he has thought of nothing but what it is he wants to do, he has been consumed by the desire to get to Greece. But now something happens to him. Back among familiar things again, the objects and faces that are the icons of his usual life, a kind of apathy comes over him. It’s as if he’s in shock. Did I really do that, he thinks to himself, did I really go chasing them all that way. And instead of rushing out in a continuation of his old momentum to book tickets and make plans, he finds himself sitting in the sun, brooding about what’s happened. He feels even less sure than before about the meaning of it all.
By imperceptible degrees,