What Am I Doing Here? Read Online Free

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    Around noon, the jeep came back. A lithe young woman jumped out and started screeching orders at an infantry platoon. She was wearing a mud-stained battledress. A nest of plaits curled, like snakes, from under her beret.
    â€˜So,’ said my companion. ‘The new colonel.’
    â€˜An Amazon colonel,’ I said.
    â€˜I always said it,’ he said. ‘Never trust a teenage Amazon colonel.’
    He passed me a cigarette. There were two in the packet and I took one of them.
    â€˜Thanks,’ I said. ‘I don’t smoke.’
    He lit mine, and then his, and blew a smoke-ring at the rafters. The gecko on the wall hadn’t budged.
    â€˜My name’s Jacques,’ he said.
    I told him my own name and he said, ‘I don’t like the look of this.’
    â€˜Nor I,’ I said.
    â€˜No,’ he said. ‘There are no rules in this country.’
    Nor were there any rules, none that one could think of, when the corporal came back from conferring with the Amazon and ordered us, also, to strip to our underpants. I hesitated. I was unsure whether I was wearing underpants. But a barrel in the small of my back convinced me, underpants or no, that my trousers would have to come down - only to find that I did, after all, have on a pair of pink and white boxer shorts from Brooks Brothers.
    Jacques was wearing green string pants. We must have looked a pretty couple — my back welted all over with mosquito bites, he with his paunch flopping over the elastic — as the corporal marched us out, barefoot over the burning ground, and stood us, hands up, against the wall which the vultures had fouled with their ash-white, ammonia-smelling droppings.
    â€˜ Merde!’ said Jacques. ‘Now what?’
    What indeed? I was not frightened. I was tired and hot. My arms ached, my knees sagged, my tongue felt like leather, and my temples throbbed. But this was not frightening. It was too like a B-movie to be frightening. I began to count the flecks of millet-chaff embedded in the mud-plaster wall . . .
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    I remembered the morning, five years earlier, my first morning in Dahomey, under the tall trees in Parakou. I’d had a rough night, coming down from the desert in the back of a crowded truck, and at breakfast-time, at the café-routier, I’d asked the waiter what there was to see in town.
    â€˜Patrice.’
    â€˜Patrice?’
    â€˜That’s me,’ he grinned. ‘And, monsieur, there are hundreds of other beautiful young girls and boys who walk, all the time, up and down the streets of Parakou.’
    I remembered, too, the girl who sold pineapples at Dassa-Zoumbé station. It had been a stifling day, the train slow and the country burnt. I had been reading Gide’s Nourritures terrestres and, as we drew into Dassa, had come to the line ‘ Ô cafés — où notre démence s’est continuée très avant dans la nuit . . . ’ No, I thought, this will never do, and looked out of the carriage window. A basket of pineapples had halted outside. The girl underneath the basket smiled and, when I gave her the Gide, gasped, lobbed all six pineapples into the carriage, and ran off to show her friends — who in turn came skipping down the tracks, clamouring, ‘A book, please? A book? A book!’ So out went a dog-eared thriller and Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de nuit , and in came the ‘Fruits of the Earth’ — the real ones – pawpaws, guavas, more pineapples, a raunch of grilled swamp-rat, and a palm-leaf hat.
    â€˜Those girls’, I remember scribbling in my notebook, ‘are the ultimate products of the lycée system.’
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    And now what?
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    The Amazon was squawking at the platoon and we strained our ears for the click of safety catches.
    â€˜I think they’re playing games,’ Jacques said, squinting sideways.
    â€˜I should hope so,’ I muttered. I liked Jacques. It was good, if