The Two Hearts of Kwasi Boachi: A Novel (24 page)

I could not bear to watch! Those dreadful smears and stains! Now and then he took a crumpled ball of paper and swabbed his painting with it, the way we had seen Raden Saleh do with a cotton rag. But Raden Saleh had been using oil paints on canvas, and our watercolours were wholly unsuited to such treatment. Dabbing wet paper just makes a mess. Once Kwame had painted his sheet all over, making the composition utterly chaotic, he put his paints aside and set to work with chalk, adding highlights, shadows and little touches to indicate perspective.

Both of us came under the spell of nature. I wanted to know its secrets, I wanted to dig, to determine, to expose its riches. I began to understand the growth patterns of even the most developed species of plants, in which I was especially interested on account of the perseverance and resourcefulness with which they had survived the ages. I learned to distinguish the characteristics of the different families, and made a sport of classifying unusual specimens with great precision. Kwame took a broader view: his eye was drawn to the vanishing point of a country lane, to the swathes of colour in a field of wild flowers. He did not concern himself with stamens or corollas, but would perceive contrasts in a shady distance that to me was simply greyish.

Incomprehensible though it may seem, at the end of the day, despite the chaos of Kwame’s brushwork, there would be a picture that somehow captured the essence of the place we had visited. It was infuriating, but true. Kwame’s paintings were useless to a biologist, and yet people were moved by them. They inspired in many viewers a sense of nature as God’s dearest, most wondrous mystery. My own efforts to sort out the wonders of nature on sheet after sheet of painstaking depiction did not appear to matter to anyone.

We met Sophie only once that summer. It was at a soirée in a private house. We had not been invited as friends of the host, but as curiosities. The hostess kept urging us to play more music, until Kwame asked out loud if she had mistaken him for the young Mozart. But even after that we did not get a chance to talk privately with the princess. She exchanged a few civil words with everyone present. She glanced in my direction from time to time, which I took to mean that she would much rather be running about in the garden with us. I signalled back that I agreed, and to demonstrate the bond between us I behaved exactly as she did, responding to people left and right as if they had said something highly intelligent.

There was no mention that evening of the elderly king’s intention to wed his adored but unsuitable lady-in-waiting, although the subject was on the tip of everyone’s tongue. The conversation revolved around the festive welcome that had been given throughout the land to heir apparent Willem Alexander and his bride. Sophie mentioned that her brother Prince Alexander was away visiting his relatives in St. Petersburg, and that she herself would pay a second visit to her aunt Maria Pavlovna in Weimar in the autumn. She would be spending the winter in the south of Holland. I could tell she was sorry that we would be separated for so long. Later on, during a quadrille, she whispered to me: “On the last Wednesday of August I shall be in Scheveningen. It will be quiet there. Professor Everard has prescribed seawater baths for Mamma.” That was all.

After she left the party a footman brought me a small volume bound in red vellum, containing the stories of
Atala
and
René
by Chateaubriand. It was Sophie’s personal copy. She had marked certain passages in pencil. The enigmatic inscription on the flyleaf, in her own hand, read: “Friends in the Bond of the Creeks.”

The next morning Kwame and I went out into the countryside again, but we did not paint or draw. We read each other the stories celebrating the life of nature led by North American Indians.

At daybreak on the last Wednesday of August, a farm cart took us to the royal residence. From there we walked to the Queen’s Pavilion in the dunes at Scheveningen. Princess Sophie received us as if she owned the place. Anna Pavlovna stayed in her room, where fresh tubs of sea water were delivered every hour. She suffered from indeterminate ailments, which she blamed on the Dutch climate. She was also absent from the light summer meal that was served on the terrace. Monsieur Cavin read out a few poems by Herr von Goethe, in connection with Sophie’s impending visit to Weimar. It was his aim that she should surprise her aunt with her knowledge of the work of the great poet, who had served as tutor to both her uncle Carl Friedrich and her cousin Carl Alexander. We escaped into the dunes with Sophie at the earliest opportunity.

Sophie had everything planned. She and I were Muskogees and Kwame was a Seminole—as the Indian tribes were called in the story of
Atala
. The three of us crouched under a teepee made of leaves. The Seminoles, she declared, had to seal a bond with the Muskogees. She pronounced the names reverently, as if they had magical powers. The Bond of the Creeks! Sophie took all this very seriously and made us swear an assortment of oaths—even that we would live our lives in the wild according to the laws of nature. She pulled out a hairpin, making her curls cascade over her face, and stabbed the pin into her fingertip to draw a drop of blood. But the point was too blunt, and she went off in search of a suitable thorn, leaving Kwame and me on our own.

He was being exceedingly difficult. One minute he was silent, the next he was hurling abuse at me. He didn’t want to play Sophie’s game at all. But he was too shy to tell her, and demanded that I should convey the message to her. I had no intention of doing so. I thought it was all rather fun. Then he ran off into the dunes, so angry and upset that I ran after him. I think he must have been hiding from me, because I could not find him anywhere. Back in the teepee Sophie and I sealed our bond, but she thought it didn’t really count without a Seminole joining in too. I had to urge her to prick my finger, and once I was bleeding we found we didn’t know quite what Muskogee did next. She suggested sucking the blood, although it was a disgusting thing to do. In the end we caught a few droplets of each other’s blood in the bell of a flower, shook it around and then buried the crushed vial in the sand.

She never mentioned our bond again. But I never forgot what it felt like to belong together, to be alone without Kwame: lonely yet exhilarating.

How long did we lie there in our leafy arbour—a quarter of an hour, an hour, the whole afternoon? In later years I began to doubt whether she really had looked the way I remembered, said what I heard her say, did what I remembered her doing. At the time I believed we were cementing our bond by lying still like that, by keeping silent, close together. Probably we barely touched. Or not at all—but that’s the kind of trick an old man’s memory plays.

Her white summer frock is sprinkled with traces of brown, dried blood. She blows on them, scratches a persistent crust with her nail and flicks it into the breeze. Takes my finger and studies my sacrificial wound. Wipes it. Squeezes my finger. There is no more blood. She holds on to my fingers with both hands, as if they are big, strange objects. Her eyes scrutinizing my skin. Her fingertips on the back of my hand, rubbing this way and that. Comparing the skin to that of her own hand.

“You can see the pores much better,” she says, “a jigsaw puzzle of a hundred thousand tiny black cells.” Then she turns my hand over. Like turning a page of a book, to continue reading. The palm is a pool. Cracks in the bleached earth. The dark water has seeped away. The pigment remains along the edge.

“They’re pink on the inside, white even.”

She turns them over and over.

“Black, white, black, white,” she laughs. “The outside is still African, and the inside is steadily turning Dutch. Don’t you agree?” She lays my hands in my lap. Sits facing me. Reaches out her arm. Her fingers touch my lips. Pulls down my lower lip: “Pink, too!”

That’s how livestock is valued, I reflect, and try to banish the thought at once. She raises my upper lip with her fingers and stares at the gums. That’s how slaves are valued.

“Indeed yes! Your tongue, too!”

I clamp my mouth shut, grind my teeth. Then I explode with laughter, she lets go of my face and hangs her head, giggling uncontrollably. She has not replaced her hairpin. Her curls fall loosely forward, hiding her face. I want to see her eyes, and stretch out my hand to draw the curtain aside. The hair slides softly along my throbbing fingertip.

Extract from a letter I wrote some years later to Kwame from Weimar:

With each step forward, civilization leaves a footprint behind.
We have, unwittingly, come a long way. The distance we have
yet to travel is impossible to gauge. So we keep hoping that the
goal we can see on the horizon will prove to be the final one and
also the highest, and that we will find shelter there before nightfall. If we turn to look back we can distinguish no more than a
few footprints. Forty, fifty paces behind us the path we have been
at pains to follow loses itself in the ploughed earth. We are glad
to have come this far, and wish to pursue our course. Yet our
thoughts are drawn to what lies behind us, more than to the
uncertainty that lies ahead. There are moments of nostalgia for
the valleys that our people claimed long ago. At the same time we
are aware that the plains we have cleared and the forests we have
burnt o fer no challenge. To live is to engage with the impossible.

That is what stimulates us and keeps us going. So we look
ahead and persevere. We find consolation in the notion that we
carry our past within us. But from time to time we are obliged to
shed some of the burden weighing us down—possessions dear to
us, now irretrievably lost. Our personal e fects consist of memories. And the more we value our memories, the less of a burden
they are. So the course of man’s development, Kwame, bears a
marked resemblance to the course of your life and mine.

You and I are in the unique position of having travelled this
enormous distance at an accelerated pace. We ran all the way.
There was barely time to catch our breath while we covered the
same ground that took Western civilization thousands of years
to cover.

Due to the speed of our journey many things eluded us. But if
we have learned anything about the soul of European civilization, it is that its bent is nostalgic. No di ference there from the
sentiment you and I are so familiar with. So when we are confronted with envy of what is taken to be our uncorrupted state,
you and I should be the first to understand.

The more man is tamed, the more he longs for the pure state
of nature. The new and the old are thus condemned to coexist.
Throughout history people have been nostalgic about the past. In
art, fashions of dress, furniture and architecture, poetry, indeed
in his faith, man always harks back to a previous golden age.
Even the ancient Greeks, who were envied by all those who came
after them for their natural simplicity and their direct knowledge
of the sources of our existence—even they regretted the loss of
the true Arcadia of old.

Since civilization does not advance at the same pace all over
the world, but flares up at di ferent times and in di ferent places
rather like an epidemic, there is throughout history the recurrent
shock of discovering a people, a tribe or an individual that has
fallen behind the march of progress. Such lone stragglers came to
personify man’s estrangement from nature. Such natural beings
were envied for what they had retained. Underlying their harsh
daily struggle there was believed to be a primeval guiding force.
The absence of shame betokened a carefree spirit. Their naive
customs touched the European heart, just as the innocence of a
stammering child endears it to the listener—reminders of what
has been lost for ever. Is not that sentiment, sweet and melancholy, closely linked with love? And can you begrudge others the
love they feel for you?

You can hardly blame Sophie for admiring us for being what
she perceived to be “people, just emerged from the hand of God,”
as she wrote to me once, echoing Seneca—although by then her
childish enthusiasm had long been supplanted by mature friendship. She pointed out many other authors, from Virgil and Montaigne to Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and Swift, who celebrated
man as formed by nature, far removed from the perverting influence of civilization. As though mankind were a cut of meat and
civilization a sign of decay. Their celebration of natural man
arises from their ignorance of other cultures. The decay is there,
too, but the signs are not the same.

Voltaire’s
Zaïre
was one of many works in the pastoral tradition beloved of philosophers and utopians, in which Christians are bowled over by the innocence of natural man. It made a
deep impression on Sophie, for she read it at the very time she
discovered feelings of love in her heart. Her elders approved of
her fondness for books, and she was promptly given Marmontel’s
study of the Incas to read, as well as
Odérahi
and
Paul et Virginie
, the illustrated works of Marc Casteby and the accounts of
explorers such as William Bertram and Jonathan Carver.