What Am I Doing Here? Read Online Free Page A

one had to be here, to be here with him. He was an old Africa hand and had been through coups before.
    â€˜That is,’ he added glumly, ‘if they don’t get drunk.’
    â€˜Thank you,’ I said, and looked over my shoulder at the drill-squad.
    â€˜No look!’ the corporal barked. He was standing beside us, his shirt-front open to the navel. Obviously, he was anxious to cut a fine figure.
    â€˜Stick your belly-button in,’ I muttered in English.
    â€˜No speak!’ he threatened.
    â€˜I won’t speak.’ I held the words within my teeth. ‘But stay there. Don’t leave me. I need you.’
    Maddened by the heat and excitement, the crowds who had come to gawp were clamouring, ‘Mort aux mercenaires! . . . Mort aux mercenaires!’ and my mind went racing back over the horrors of Old Dahomey, before the French came. I thought, the slave-wars, the human sacrifices, the piles of broken skulls. I thought of Domingo’s other uncle, ‘The Brazilian’, who received us on his rocking-chair dressed in white ducks and a topee. ‘Yes,’ he sighed, ‘the Dahomeans are a charming and intelligent people. Their only weakness is a certain nostalgia for taking heads.’
    No. This was not my Africa. Not this rainy, rotten-fruit Africa. Not this Africa of blood and slaughter. The Africa I loved was the long undulating savannah country to the north, the ‘leopard-spotted land’, where flat-topped acacias stretched as far as the eye could see, and there were black-and-white hornbills and tall red termitaries. For whenever I went back to that Africa, and saw a camel caravan, a view of white tents, or a single blue turban far off in the heat haze, I knew that, no matter what the Persians said, Paradise never was a garden but a waste of white thorns.
    â€˜I am dreaming,’ said Jacques, suddenly, ‘of perdrix aux choux.’
    â€˜I’d take a dozen Belons and a bottle of Krug.’
    â€˜No speak!’ The corporal waved his gun, and I braced myself, half-expecting the butt to crash down on my skull.
    And so what? What would it matter when already I felt as if my skull were split clean open? Was this, I wondered, sunstroke? How strange, too, as I tried to focus on the wall, that each bit of chaff should bring back some clear specific memory of food or drink?
    Â 
    There was a lake in Central Sweden and, in the lake, there was an island where the ospreys nested. On the first day of the crayfish season we rowed to the fisherman’s hut and rowed back towing twelve dozen crayfish in a live-net. That evening, they came in from the kitchen, a scarlet mountain smothered in dill. The northern sunlight bounced off the lake into the bright white room. We drank akvavit from thimblesized glasses and we ended the meal with a tart made of cloudberries. I could taste again the grilled sardines we ate on the quay at Douarnenez and see my father demonstrating how his father ate sardines à la mordecai : you took a live sardine by the tail and swallowed it. Or the elvers we had in Madrid, fried in oil with garlic and half a red pepper. It had been a cold spring morning, and we’d spent two hours in the Prado, gazing at the Velasquezes, hugging one another it was so good to be alive: we had cancelled our bookings on a plane that had crashed. Or the lobsters we bought at Cape Split Harbour, Maine. There was a notice-board in the shack on the jetty and, pinned to it, a card on which a widow thanked her husband’s friends for their contributions, and prayed, prayed to the Lord, that they lashed themselves to the boat when hauling in the pots.
    How long, O Lord, how long? How long, when all the world was wheeling, could I stay on my feet . . . ?
    Â 
    How long I shall never know, because the next thing I remember I was staggering groggily across the parade-ground, with one arm over the corporal’s shoulder and the other over Jacques’s. Jacques