Paul Theroux - Sir Vidia's Shadow - A Friendship Across Five Continents

“They seem far less foolish when they’re speaking French,” Vidia said. “It doesn’t sound like rubbish in French.”

At the Rwanda frontier the formalities were cursory, and Vidia muttered the French words the soldiers used as they examined our papers, repeating their mispronunciations.

As we left the border post I said, “I forgot to ask them what side of the road to drive on.”

“Oh, God.”

Just then a large trailer truck approached, throwing up dust, traveling down the middle of the road. In Uganda we drove according to British custom, on the left, but Rwanda-Burundi had been a Belgian colony, and surely they drove on the right.

“The moment of truth,” I said, and swerved and began driving on the right.

The truck, a beer truck, carrying a load of loudly jingling empty bottles in wooden crates, passed us in a fury of noise and gravel, and a dust cloud obscured the road for the next two hundred yards.

The dust settled like a view in a telescope twisting sharply into focus, and the looming scene was that of a mob, the road filled with people moving like a ghost army through the sifting-down dust particles in a distortion that was splashed with light. They were tall and thin, the women carried bundles, there were many children and some animals — dogs and goats. It was the sort of exaggeration for effect that could have been a stock scene in a Tarzan movie — a crowd of toothy implacable natives, and a terrifying sight because the whole road was claimed by them. There was no space for us to proceed.

“What is this?” Vidia was nervous.

The mob parted slowly, reluctantly, as my car penetrated it like a dinghy nosing through an ocean of breaking chop. Passing the car, the people peered in, screwing up their faces and pressing against the windows.

“Probably the market just closed and they’re heading home,” I said, trying not to sound as alarmed as I felt.

“They’re blocking the road, man.”

He was very jittery, whispering wildly — a whole crowd of Rwandans compressed into a narrow road and no other traffic, just my little car inching along against the chop of gaping people.

“I don’t like mobs at all,” he said.

But even after I got past them and the road cleared — although there were always crowds of people on Rwanda’s roads — it was still slow going. The road was a deeply rutted track lined with elephant grass. Farther on, we went higher and could see Mount Muhavura close up: the intensively cultivated slopes, the masses of mud huts. I told Vidia that Rwanda was the most densely populated country on earth.

“What are these people like?” he asked, returning the stares of the people passing.

“Pretty violent,” I said, and told him how, four years before, at independence, there had been a gruesome uprising, the Hutus against the Tutsis. The Hutu people had been a despised underclass, and their tremendous resentment erupted into a massacre. A journalist friend of mine had actually witnessed Hutus torturing Tutsis. They hacked the Tutsis’ feet off and forced them to stand up. Then they cut their legs off at the knees and laughed as the Tutsis were propped on their bleeding stumps. More mutilation followed: the cutting off of ears, of noses, eye gouging, castration, all of it while the victims were alive. Hundreds of thousands of Tutsis had been butchered in this way, and so the country had been partitioned, the Tutsis taking Burundi, the Hutus Rwanda.

Vidia listened, horrified, grimacing. The car filled with dust that whirled into the open windows. To close the windows would have suffocated us. Now Vidia had started humming a tune.

“Toot-toot-Tutsi, goodbye,” he sang in an Al Jolson voice. “Toot-toot-Tutsi, don’t cry.”

We came to the crossroads of Ruhengeri. To the left was the road climbing to Kigali, to the right was the way to Kisenyi and Goma. We sat and pondered this in the slanting sun. Vidia ate a cheese sandwich and drank a cup of coffee from a thermos. Even in this remote place, where food was scarce, he kept to his strict dietary rales.

“There’s a better chance of finding a place to stay in Kigali,” I said, and he agreed: it was, after all, the capital. We had no reservations, no prearranged route; we were simply on safari, winging it in the bush.

Dusk like ground fog obscured the road as we entered Kigali, but even so, we could see that the town, though crowded, was very small. That was the Rwanda problem: so many people, so little space. There were three or four hotels, none of them good. We stopped at each one. Vidia expressed first amazement that we were stopping at all—“Such low places”—and then, inevitably, discouragement. There was no room for us.

“They’re filthy,” he said.

“Maybe they just look dirty.”

He did not laugh. “What are we going to do?”

“Let’s try the U.S. embassy.”

It was now past seven in the evening, and after more than thirteen hours on the road it now seemed that we had no place to stay. The embassy was closed, but we found an American woman on the premises — the duty officer, she said, dealing with a consular problem.

“We are totally stuck,” I said, and explained that I was an American, a lecturer at Makerere University. “We have no place to stay in Kigali. Is there anything you can suggest?”

“We have a guesthouse,” she said. “You can use that.”

I then introduced my distinguished friend, the visiting lecturer and writer V. S. Naipaul. The duty officer had not heard of him, but never mind, there would be no problem. She drew me a map to the place, which was near the center of town. So we were saved, and we each had a room. She even suggested a restaurant where we might eat. Vidia relaxed — I could sense it from a few feet away, what he would have called a vibration. Cleanliness and order were everything to Vidia. He was relieved and consoled by this sudden intervention.

“This is perfect,” he said at the embassy guesthouse, yet he sounded sad, and I guessed that he was tired.

On a back street in Kigali we found the restaurant, which had a pompous French name, something like La Coupole. Vidia still looked melancholy, perhaps because we had been so lucky here. He had once told me how he had a cynical Hindu nature and that he was suspicious of good luck, believing that it attracted bad luck.

The restaurant was small, and warm with aromas of good food, herbs, and fresh bread. It was full of people, Africans and whites, all of them talking. The manager was a thin Belgian woman in late middle age. She was clearly harassed yet gentle and helpful, entirely at our service, apologizing for being so busy. She brought us a bottle of wine. Vidia tasted it and said it was first rate and grew even sadder as he spoke of how amazing it was to find a great wine in such a crummy town. The woman, flattered by Vidia’s praise, became even more solicitous. She chatted with him, complimenting him on his fluent French. I had a glimpse of Vidia’s sympathy and compassion. He was moved by the good nature of the woman, who was struggling to run a decent restaurant in this remote place. He admired her the way he admired the Major at the Kaptagat, seeing someone fighting to overcome the odds, bringing order to chaos, a sort of colonizer. The woman moved among the tables, setting out dishes, filling glasses, advising waiters, folding napkins, rearranging forks. Where was this fish from? Vidia wanted to know. Lake Kivu, she said.

He praised the woman with feeling. He watched her work. Then he looked around and said, “In a few years, this will be jungle too.”

He had not ceased to be melancholy. He ate his fish. I tried to draw him out on the subject of vegetarianism, but he was monosyllabic and unwilling. He drank most of the wine. It was a good bottle, he repeated. Why was he unhappy?