Грэм Грин - The Comedians

'I sometimes envied you, but perhaps she's not your type.' It was like stripping a bandage from a wound: the more slowly I pulled the longer the pain would last, but I lacked the courage to rip the bandage right away, and all the time I had to watch the difficult road.

'Old man,' Jones said, 'every girl's my type, but she was something special.'

'You know she's German?'

'The frдuleins understand a thing or two.'

'As well as Tin Tin?' I tried to ask in a casual clinical way.

'Tin Tin was not in the same class, old man.' We might have been two medical students boasting of rudimentary experiences. I didn't speak again for a long time.

We were approaching Petit Goave — I knew the place from better days. The police station, I remembered, was off the highway, and I would be supposed to drive there to report. I hoped the rain was still heavy enough to keep the police in their quarters — they were unlikely to have militia posted here. Dank huts wobbled in the headlights beside the road, the mud and thatch broken and bedraggled in the rain: no lamps burned, there was no human being to be seen, not even a cripple. In the small yards the family tombs looked more solid than the family huts. The dead were allotted mansions of a better class than the living — houses of two storeys with window-embrasures where food and lights could be placed on the night of All Souls. I couldn't let my attention wander until we had passed Petit Goave. In a long yard beside the road there were rows of little crosses with what looked like tresses of blonde hair looped between, as though they had been ripped from the skulls of women buried below.

'Good God,' Jones said, 'what was that?'

'Only sisal drying.'

'Drying? In this rain?'

'Who knows what's happened to the owner? Perhaps he's shot. In prison. Fled to the mountains.'

'It was a bit eery, old man. Sort of Edgar Allan Poe. It looked more like death than the cemeteries do.'

Nobody was about in the main street of Petit Goave. We passed something called the Yo-Yo Club and a big sign for Mиre Merlan's Brasseries and a boulangerie belonging to someone called Brutus and a garage owned by Cato — so the stubborn memories of this black people preserved the memories of a better republic — and then to my relief we were in the country again, tossing from rock to rock. 'We've made it,' I said.

'Nearly there?'

'We're nearly half-way.'

'I think I'll take another drop of whisky, old man.'

'Drink what you like. You'll have to make it last a long time, though.'

'I'd better finish it before I join the boys. It wouldn't go far

with them.'

I took another pull myself to give me courage, and yet I postponed the final unambiguous question.

'How did you get on with the husband?' I asked him cautiously.

'Fine. I wasn't stealing any greens of his.'

'Weren't you?'

'She doesn't sleep with him any more.'

'How do you know?'

'I have my reasons,' he said, taking the bottle and sucking at it loudly. The road again required all my attention. Our speed was practically reduced to walking-pace now: I had to thread between the rocks like a pony at a gymkhana.

'We ought to have had a jeep,' Jones said.

'Where would you find a jeep in Port-au-Prince? Borrowed it from the Tontons?'

The road branched, and we left the sea behind us and turned inland, climbing into the hills. The track for a while became plain laterite and there was only the mud to clog our passage. It was a change of exercise. We had been going for three hours — it was close to one in the morning.

'Little danger of militia now,' I said.

'But the rain's stopped.'

'They're afraid of the hills.'

'From which cometh our help,' Jones quipped. The whisky was loosening him up. I could wait no longer and I pushed the question home. 'Was she a good lay?'

'Re-markable,' Jones said, and I clung to the wheel to keep my hands off him. It was a long while before I spoke again, but he noticed nothing. He fell asleep with his mouth open, leaning back against the door where Martha had often leant; he slept as peacefully as a child, innocently. Perhaps he really was as innocent as Mr Smith, and that was the reason they had liked each other. Anger soon left me: the child had broken a dish, that was all — yes, a dish, I thought, is just how he would have described her. Once he woke for a moment and offered to drive, but I felt enough danger in our situation without that.

And then the car gave out altogether; perhaps my attention had wandered, perhaps it was just waiting for one extra heavy lurch to shake its innards out. The wheel whirled in my hands as I tried to recover the road after bouncing off a rock: we struck hard against another boulder and came to rest, the front axle cracked in two and one headlamp smashed. There was nothing whatever to be done — I couldn't get to Aux Cayes, and I couldn't go back to Port-au-Prince. I was tied for that night anyway to Jones.

Jones opened his eyes and said, 'I dreamt … why have we stopped? Are we there?'

'The front axle's bust.'

'How far are we, do you suppose, from — there?'

I looked at the mileage and said, 'A couple of kilometres I'd say, perhaps three.'

'Shanks's pony,' Jones said. He began to haul his kitbag out of the car. I put the car-keys in my pocket, I didn't know why — I doubted whether there was a garage in Haiti capable of mending the car, and anyway who would trouble to come down this road to fetch it? The roads round Port-au-Prince were littered with abandoned cars and overturned buses; once I had seen a breakdown van with its crane lying sideways in a ditch — it was like a lifeboat broken on the rocks, a contradiction of nature.

We began to walk. I had brought a torch, but it was very rough going and Jones's gumboots slithered on the wet laterite. It was after two, and the rain had stopped. 'If they are following us,' Jones said, 'they won't have much difficulty now. We're a bloody advertisement for human existence.'

'There's no reason why they should be following us.'

'I was thinking of that jeep we passed,' he said.

'There was nobody in it.'

'We don't know who was in the hut watching us go by.'

'Anyway, we have no choice. We couldn't walk two yards without a light. On this road we'd hear a car coming a couple of miles away.'

When I flashed the torch towards either side of the road there was only rock and earth and low wet scrub. I said, 'We mustn't miss the cemetery and walk bang into Aquin. There's a military post in Aquin.' I could hear Jones breathing heavily, and I offered to take his kitbag for a spell, but he would have none of it. 'I'm a bit out of condition,' he said, 'that's all,' and a little further on he said, 'I talked a lot of nonsense in the car. I'm not always exactly trustworthy.'

It seemed to me an understatement, but I wondered why he made it.

At last my torch picked out what I was looking for: a cemetery on my right, stretching uphill into the dark. It was like a city built by dwarfs, street after street of tiny houses, some nearly big enough to hold ourselves, some too small for a new-born child, all of the same grey stone, from which the plaster had long flaked. I turned my torch to the other side where I had been told there would be a ruined hut, but mistakes are always made in the plan of a rendezvous. The hut should have been opposite the first corner of the cemetery we came to, standing alone, but there was nothing except a slope of earth.

'The wrong cemetery?' Jones asked.

'It can't be. We must be near Aquin now.' We went on down the track and opposite the further corner we did find a hut, but it didn't seem ruined so far as I could tell in the torch-light. There was nothing we could do but try it. If anyone lived there, he would be at least as scared as we were.