Eddie Signwriter (21 page)

Then he reaches the border, and the car pulls over, and the people unpack themselves slowly from the benches, then stand at the side of the road as the baggage boys crawl over the roof, untying the possessions strapped to the bus, and throwing them down.

He waits his turn watching, twenty paces off, a queue taking shape in front of a shed, while small birds colonize the trees beside them, chirping madly.

From the other side of the shed, people with stamped passports begin making their way across the hundred meters or so of no man’s land to the next border post. Dangerous-looking boys mill about, accosting strangers, offering their help, grabbing hold of bags and suitcases, shouting and altercating.

Looking dead ahead, he tries to make himself unnoticeable. And it works. Nobody approaches him. His passport is stamped and he moves on by foot towards the other side, where he joins a group of women traveling with small children, busy in negotiation with a taxi driver.

He can see a small mosque behind a tree on the Burkinabe side. A couple of dilapidated stalls line the street. He notices the small traders cycling lazily by, passing through the borders unhindered.

Then a second taxi pulls up. The women split up with their children, and he travels on with one group. They drive to the second border post and get out. From here on he will be a foreigner, connected to nothing.

And that is how it is, later that afternoon, as the streets of Ouagadougou pass by, and he thinks of his father, and chooses not to stop.

Four days more to Bamako—through Sabou, Boromo, through Bobo Dioulasso, where mango trees line the streets and for a night he stops, and sleeps in a room made from a steel transport container, in the shade of some trees in a mission yard.

Then on through San and Ségou to Bamako—towns and villages that pass from the back of a car in a haze of red dust, and the heat rising from the road—different cars, station-side hotels, the tightly packed bodies of different strangers.

In Bamako he spends the night in a dormitory bed at the Carrefour des Jeunes. A luxury of clean sheets he allows himself before the final leg by train to Dakar.

This is the part he has heard of from before. Everything before Bamako is just the beginning.

HE GETS TO
the station well before time. Already there is a crowd. He fights his way along the platform and onto the train, through the other passengers, well-wishers, through ambulating vendors, beggars, hustlers, touts, con artists, pickpockets, and into the seat of a third-class carriage. The appointed departure time approaches, then passes. The crowd continues to mill about. The carriages fill up. Baggage is stowed. People settle in for the journey. Then the sound of a whistle and the first jarring shunt on the old rusty line. The city begins unraveling around the train, and soon the train is out in the country, and the soft weaving light comes round, and spirits the landscape
away. Everything is still to come: Kati, Diamou, Kayes, Kidira, Tambacounda, Kaffrine, Guinguinéo, Diourbel, Thiès, Dakar. Outside the window there is only his own reflection, and that of the lights in the ceiling and the crowded bodies sharing meals, talking, settling down for sleep, a single shifting surface of flesh, but for those who’ve arrived too late, and are standing still and will for much of the next two days. The train picks up speed. Its movement is endless. Its voice constant. Sometimes a squeal, sometimes a whistle as of escaping air, and a lower, briefer tick—like a match catching; and then its main voice—a high-pitched whirr, like the sound of metal shearing through bone, until the speed is so fast that it all mixes, like water rushing past incredibly fast—a single, even sound, to which all movement is an accompaniment. All through this time his thoughts have been narrowing. The world apart from movement, apart from sound, begins to recede, the world apart from what the eyes can see. He has a wall to lean against, and a window, scratched and scored by fingers, luggage, by washing rags wet with water full of dirt. The night draws on. People talk less, though many are not asleep who are silent, and he imagines that they, like him, are gathering strength—because only a few hours have passed and still two days lie ahead and already the body aches with discomfort and the anticipation of endless discomfort. People curl round their bags to sleep, though it’s not only theft that they fear, but the closeness of strangers, the tangle of flesh, the arm that you see but don’t feel as your own; the smell of food, the inconsolable babies, the short tempers, the animal warmth that covers them over already (though still the sun hasn’t risen yet) and fills the carriage, and takes him to sleep, then out again. Dawn has broken. Soft light lies over the still carriage. The fresh smell of morning. A light chill on the skin. In his dream they were all stumbling from the carriages, thick-eyed, full of sleep. From the whole length of the train people were pouring. The arcs of the electric lights were full of insects darting, dust rising from the ground where they walked. Families, young men, traders, soldiers, businessmen, mothers with their babies bundled into them, children pulled along by the arm. The train was still warm with movement. The breathing of the
engine throbbed through the wheels. He cast a look back as he joined the stumbling crowd. The train’s weak lights glowed dully, and suddenly he was afraid to separate. Afraid of being left in the night. Except he realizes, as he wakes, that this was no dream. That the border was crossed, his papers were stamped. He feels his back pocket. They’re there where he left them, his papers, and he let himself wake. The dark conch of a woman’s ear drifts in and out of focus. Small bubbles gather at the corner of her mouth, multiply, pulse in the air of her breath. In the fold of her eye a crust of mucus the colour of mother-of-pearl. The train is stopped on the tracks. It purrs like a fridge. It seems so innocent—you’d never know its strength. But then it jerks. Eyes snap open inside the carriage. The expanse of flesh shudders. Somebody exclaims in indignation—ah! The train is hardly moving, but the purr deepens, a sound from the throat. Then the first tug of unevenness catches in the movement, like a stone against tin, though it’s not just a sound, but something stronger that registers in the body. A small jolt, and then another, and another. In the walls against the seat, in the glass, in its frame, in the light fittings in the roof, all these parts of the body capable of sound. The wheels pick up a heavy double beat: da-
DA
, da-
DA
, and somewhere in the train another set answers, more softly, da-
DA
, faster and faster as the whole train starts picking up the music. The wheels, the walls, the windows, the track and the horn braying—a sound of warning; but not only that—of pure pleasure—on through the day, the first endless day, too endless to resist, as hard as he tries. But silence is patient, is always waiting at the end of each sentence, which falls into nothing, though throughout the day people try to talk. To pass information. To remain themselves. To be people coming from somewhere, going somewhere, to have stories. Someone has left a husband. Someone is fleeing war. Someone doesn’t know a soul in the place where he’s going. Someone wants to achieve something with his life, who has never been beyond the compound of his parents. Someone recounts the beauty of his woman (don’t worry, a voice comes from the other side of the carriage, you’ll find her again in Dakar, and other voices laugh). Some who have traveled before have advice, encouragement, and in softer voices,
stories to tell. Of time in foreign countries. Time spent getting there. Time in jail. In the no man’s land between borders, penniless, unable to go forward or back. Stories of traffickers, and scam artists, and the brotherhoods that make life possible in the towns they hope to reach. Some have come to trade, some to work, some come to steal, some just to see. From all the capital cities, all the large towns. Wherever people are hungry. Wherever the young are brave. For some, Dakar is the end of the journey, for others, a stop to somewhere else. By ship, by land, by air, but always north. Some, they know, will be thrown from cargo boats to the ocean. Some will die of thirst in the desert. Some will suffocate in the back of vans, be beaten to death in the mountains of Algeria, or die on their own of filth and desperation. Some will be stopped at the border, at the passport desk, on the quayside. Some will be caught, then return, and be caught, then return, as many times as it takes. Some will reach refugee camps, prisons. But many will make it through to the coasts of Spain, of Italy, France, Britain, through seaports and airports and on, to cook fast food, sell handbags, sweep streets, stack boxes, pick fruit, hawk watches, hats, perfume, in a thousand towns and cities—wherever a living can be made, wherever existence can be justified. But only so much can be said, before the journey takes them back again, and he loses himself, becomes part of the passage, his energy dissolving into it. The sun is everywhere. All that matters is the water he takes to survive. The heat is breaking him down. His clothes are warm and wet with him. Dirt covers him. Sweat comes out of every part of him. His body is giving up its water, giving him up and he can’t stop it as the train carries on racing across the land. Or for no reason stops in the middle of nowhere—although everywhere now is the middle of nowhere. But still, people rise out of the land with their wares, shouting their wares, their food, their drink, their plastic hangers. Where do they come from? Where is the settlement he cannot see? The settlement of these people pressing against the glass, so many words flowing from them, so many words for just a few eggs, just a few packets of water. And then they disappear, one by one. He doesn’t notice it until, somehow, they’re gone, and the next night is already beginning to
settle in, coming from the distant horizon, and here he is, still going nowhere. Passengers start leaving the train to stretch their legs, and look about them, to see what it’s like to be nowhere, and he jumps down too, and when the need takes him, goes to the back of the train and empties his watery guts under the carriage, squatting as the sun finally dies into the sand. And then without warning the train starts to move. A mother screams, and a child cries steadily, and men shout. But the train does not stop for the separated family. Goods are thrown from a door. The woman and the children jump down. And then he sees the lost child standing at the tracks, paralyzed with the prospect of being left behind. But the train cannot stop. Doesn’t know to stop. And it leaves them behind, a family lost along the way, in a strange place, with not so much as the language. And now he hates the train, until it starts lulling him again, with its rolling and jolting, with a soft rocking that comes up through the cushion of the seat, and he falls asleep. A second night. When he wakes again, he is covered in leaves and the fresh smell of sap. (They have ridden through some bushes at night, and the branches have whipped the train, and windows have torn the ends of the branches. He remembers now the sound of it from his sleep, the scraping and ripping.) Gray light sits upon the land. A second morning. Birds are circling over a tree, where something must be dead. Mosquitoes drift in. Most people still sleep, the women like rolling hills, children bundled into the crooks of them. A few talk softly in a far corner. His shoulder is wedged against a bench. He feels a screw against his hip, that must have been there all these hours. He doesn’t feel he can move his body, all the suppleness is out of it. His right arm, lying across his left, is covered in bites. Somebody turns a radio on, a handset they hold against their head, and there’s a whisper of voices, a thread of sound coming out of the static that still reaches him, somewhere out here, between the world he’s come from, and the one he’s going to. A light wind brings the smell of fuel. Then the landscape of flesh around him begins to unfasten itself. The hills rise and unfold, and the children are lifted out of the valleys and folds of flesh, some oblivious, some still asleep, limp and pliable in mothers’ arms, others howling. The train sounds
its horn. The last hours are arriving. The movement starts again. Today, a grinding, circular motion, as if milling corn beneath the wheels, and something else new: in the clatter of the carriages before and behind, soft and steady like the sound of rain. Diourbel … Thiès. The towns start approaching. Rubbish is piled beside the track, hills of it, fluttering in the wind and full of stench—a thin, bitter smell. In places the earth is claiming it back, soil growing up into it, creepers clinging to it, trying to hold it down. But still it gets loose and catches in the thorn bushes, or is held down, and becomes part of the ground. Patterns appear through the bush. A fence swings down to accompany the track. Roads appear in the distance, maybe more than one, and begin to bend in towards the approaching town, pulled like gravity. Animals—a donkey, sheep, more than one sheep, a cow tethered to a tree. The town is still approaching, it must be drawing close. The thorn bushes start coming down to the track, lining it, then suddenly break away, and there are shacks, people sitting on their porches, watching. He sees a father lift his son in the air, and the boy shriek with happiness, but they fly by in an instant, and then a horse is drinking water that’s collected in a tire, there are goal posts in a dry river bed, and small children in a yard, jumping and shouting and waving at the train, men carrying heavy sacks and a row of small naked boys, squatting in a yard and chatting away as they shit. How many hours to Dakar, he does not know, but the endless landscape is behind, there are baobabs now, and the land is lime-green with a thin covering of grass. People notice, sit up. There is shuffling in the benches. The sea appears—just for a moment, before the land rises above it again, and houses begin to intervene, but there it was: a sliver of blue—bluer than the sky—and rocks, and a road, along which there were buses driving, each behind the other, as in a child’s cartoon. Now the houses are coming in thick. Markets. Roads. The land is overrun by the city. Already he’s in the city. Only the station remains. People are gathering their goods, those who know the route, while those who know nothing observe and do likewise. Some have already found their way towards the exits. Young boys open the door and hang out, scooping the moving air with their arms. Now the
train enters the station, which at first is no more than a ragged concrete platform. Then he sees the station building in front. The high roof, and the whole city gathered round. He can hear traffic, he hears music and shouting as the people stream from the doors. So many people—he can’t believe that so many people have come this far. The porters hustle round. The conductors with their whistles and their uniforms flapping round their midriffs. All he has is a single kit bag as he moves quickly through the crowd, feeling the solid ground beneath his feet. The smell and the sound and movement of the city is everywhere, as he steps beneath the doors of the station into Place de la Gare, and Dakar opens up to take him in.