When the soldiers had attacked the crowd in front of the workshops on the first day of the strike, Sounkaré, the chief watchman, had fled at the sound of the shots, and all that night he had been awake and watching. His infirmity and his loneliness had made him bitter, and in his innermost thoughts he was jubilant about what had happened to the workmen. When they came back to work he would be able to say, ‘I told you so.’
He had a little store of rice, and for two weeks after the battle in the streets he never once ventured his crushed and battered nose beyond his own door. He lived alone in the midst of the complex of warehouses and workshops, in a cabin put together from scraps of steel sidings and leftover timbers. Its furnishings consisted of a bed, made of old shipping cartons and covered with the sacking from bags of coal, and another large carton, on which there were two books in Arabic, a tin basin for washing, and a string of prayer beads. Two long tunics hung from a nail in the wall at one corner. The door was a sheet of rough cloth from an unstitched bag.
Sounkaré was sitting on the bed, his useless leg stretched out before him, his torso listing awkwardly to one side, his cane within easy reach. The old watchman had aged so much in the past weeks that he was almost unrecognizable; his eyeballs had whitened into lifelessness, his heavily lined face had crumpled until it looked like a dried-out fig, his enormous ears stood out from the sides of his head as if they wanted to leave it altogether, and his skin had taken on a dirty gray color. He was accustomed to loneliness, but this absolute solitude was gnawing at his mind. For a long time the only people who had come to see him had been some of the old workmen, those of his own generation, and little by little time had weeded out most of these. But now no one came; he was entirely alone.
Supporting himself on the cane and the side of the bed, he got up and put his feet into a pair of slippers so old and worn that they no longer covered the cracked, whitish skin of his heels. Bent almost double, as though his head was too heavy to be supported by an empty belly, he made his way out of the cabin, moving with the jerky, awkward steps of a sleep-walker. When he paused for breath and straightened up a little, he saw that he was in the machine shop, a vast, hangar-like building with large windows, cluttered with lathes, planes, drill punches, soldering torches, and a dozen other tools whose names he didn’t even know. The silence and the immobility were absolute, and an impression of enormous sadness seemed to spread through the room like a tangible thing. The only sound Sounkaré could hear was his own breathing. Looking slowly around him, from one to another of the dead machines, he saw that the spiders had already woven thick, gigantic webs from the driving belts to the flywheels, from the electric bulbs to the switches. He inhaled deeply, and nothing came to his nostrils but the cold scent of iron and steel; the human odor of sweat had vanished. And yet hundreds of men had worked here. As if in a dream, it seemed to him that he could still hear their shouts and laughter and singing, punctuated by the hammering of the tools and the roar of motors. The sounds brought life back to the building, and the strong, warm bodies again gave out their steamy, powerful smell. Then the vision disappeared, and the gears, the pistons, the axletrees, the connecting rods, and the open jaws of the vises were motionless again. The old watchman felt his heart shrink within him. There were too many bonds between him and this sleeping metal.
Four rays of sunlight filtered through the smoky windows, two of them slanting across the cement floor and breaking up in the pyramids of refuse and steel shavings, and the others resting on the workbenches. A flash of light caught Sounkaré’s attention. Through a thousand motes of dust dancing in the sun’s rays he saw a piece of copper tubing, still held between the teeth of a vise. He walked toward it, and on the sheet of greasy dust that covered the bench he saw the marks of tiny feet. ‘There are rats,’ he murmured. ‘If I can catch one, I’ll have something to eat.’ Then he recognized this particular bench. ‘It’s Yoro’s place … the one who is always grumbling. I knew his father …’ He rested his tired body against the hard wood of the bench. ‘I’m getting very old. I was here when all of these machines were installed … They have a big advantage over us – they can be repaired, recast, made new again. I knew the ones that were here before these; in the days when the line from Dakar only came as far as this. People said that some day the “smoke of the savanna” would reach as far as Bamako, but no one really believed it. But you could never swear that a thing wouldn’t happen, if those red-eared men wanted it to happen! I remember my father telling me the story of Mour Dial, the tribal chief everyone called Greed. He swore that the rails would never cross his lands and make him lose the tribute he collected from travelers, but the red-eared men weren’t interested in anything he swore or anything he lost. Their chief – the one who wore a round cap with a flat crescent of black leather at the front to shield his eyes from the sun – just put some of his soldiers in the railway cars and took them to where Mour Dial’s lands began. When they got there they fired a few shots and there were bodies stretched all over the ground, but they were on Mour Dial’s side of the ground because the shots came from only one direction. Mour Dial was arrested and taken to Saint-Louis and then to Dakar, to the big council hall of the toubabs. People who saw that hall said that it was entirely red. After that, people never talked about Mour Dial any more, except with their mouths glued to their neighbor’s ear, and no one ever knew what had become of him.’
The flood of memories dried up, and Sounkaré realized that he was cold, in spite of the hour and rays of the sun; an icy liquid seemed to flow through his veins and drip through the bones in his back. And the cold brought another memory. A few nights before, sleepless and a prey to the constant nagging of hunger, he had been huddled in his bed, and a kind of prayer had formed within him.
‘Lord,’ he had said, ‘Oh Lord who loves me, I am alone on the only road I know. Having suffered as much as I have, I am still at the beginning of suffering. Does this mean that I am damned? Lord, what are You doing for me? You do not prevent the wicked from doing as they will, nor the good from being crushed beneath the weight of their misery, and by Your commandments You stay the arm of the just man when he would lift it to repair the evil. Do You really exist, or are You just an image? I don’t see that You show Yourself anywhere. Lord, You are a God of goodness, and You have given me Your grace; is it I who have failed? Forgive me, and help me, Lord, for I am hungry, I am very hungry. Do something in my behalf, oh Lord who loves me, for I am worthy of Your help.’
At this point, Sounkaré’s litany had ended, but all that night he had thought of nothing but death. He had trembled with fear at every breath of wind that moved through the old cloth across his door. How long that night had been, and how he had been haunted by the thought that soon he would die! The memory of it revived the icy trembling in his back and kidneys, and it seemed to him that the silence in the vast deserted shop was suddenly pervaded by a whispering from another world. He shivered again, but this time it was because he had been thinking of the first strike at Thiès, in September 1938.
He could still see the corpses strewn around the square, lying in the grotesque, obscene positions in which they had fallen; the little pools of blood, drying in the wind; the earth littered with sandals and sneakers and workmen’s caps and fezzes. And now the men who were the sons of those corpses were on strike again. They were bullied, they were beaten, they were starved and even killed, but they would not give in. How strange it was! Sounkaré was one of the oldest employees of the company, but he no longer understood all this. The other men teased him constantly because he always made mistakes in the dates when someone asked him how long he had worked on the Dakar-Niger. Was it thirty-five years, or was it fifty? He had worked on the line all through his youth and middle age, and then a watchman in the shops had died and he had been offered the job. He had always been grateful to the company for this, because it was a good job for a man who was disabled and growing old, but what was to become of him now? He had never before worried about the future; at the school where he had learned the Koran he had been taught to live in the present and to leave tomorrow in the hands of God. The only thing that had been certain in this teaching was that he would live again after death, but the thought of death still frightened him.
Suddenly Sounkaré was startled out of his musing by the appearance of a rat at the other end of the bench where he was sitting; a rat as big as a man’s forearm. He was as frightened as the watchman and sat stock-still, his nostrils twitching. Sounkaré could not take his eyes from the animal. He had never eaten a rat, but he was so hungry that he could already taste it. This one had a good solid rump, firm and fat. Boiled, he would surely be very tender, and it was said that the meat of rats had a flavor that was a little strong, but not at all disagreeable. Another one appeared now, on the floor between the bench and the shelves of tools. It must be the female; her coat was a lighter color than the male’s. She didn’t seem to notice Sounkaré and began cleaning her snout with her forefeet. Very slowly, moving only his hand and never turning his eyes from those of the male, the old man loosened the vise and seized the heavy copper tube. But the rats were quicker than he was, and at the same moment he hurled it they vanished. The piece of metal rolled across the floor, echoing noisily in the deserted shop.
Sounkaré sighed and got to his feet, leaning heavily on his cane. As he made his way back to the cabin he remembered how he used to go to the house of Dieynaba. For years he had taken his meals there and was almost a part of the family. Sometimes the young apprentices had brought food to him at his cabin, and then he had paid for it with bundles of firewood he had made up during the night, and in which he occasionally hid a bottle of oil stolen from the shops. Since the strike he had prepared all of his meals himself – rice, nothing but rice, and now even that was gone. No one had come to bring him a morsel of anything to eat; no one had even come to see him. ‘I am abandoned,’ he thought, ‘like an old dog who is no longer worth his keep.’
*
In the shade of a freight car which was serving now as a house, three women were gathered, surrounded by children. At a little distance from them, Maïmouna, the blind woman, sat cross-legged on the ground, in the manner of camel drivers, intoning one of her endless ballads in a sorrowful voice. Dieynaba chewed on the stem of her pipe and listened absently to her neighbor, a big, very black-skinned woman whose ears were slashed in the old manner.
‘There is only enough left to eat for one night – two pounds of rice for twelve of God’s bits of wood, and eight of those children. What the strike committee gives out isn’t enough.’ She lifted a corner of the handkerchief on her head and scratched angrily at her hair. ‘Oh, these lice!’ Then she said, ‘It seems that there are some merchants who have come in from Djourbel, and apparently they have rice to sell, but no one has any money to buy it. I wonder why the committee doesn’t give a larger share to people who have more children. It isn’t fair, Dieynaba.’
‘I don’t know any more what is fair and what isn’t. That’s as hard to decide as to separate cold water from hot in the same bowl. I saw Samba N’Doulougou, and he told me that for the moment there was nothing they could do. The money they got from France and from Dahomey and Guinea and some other country whose name I forgot is gone. Bakayoko sent the money for the last distribution of food from Kaolack. If nothing more comes in, I don’t know what they’ll do, but right now the treasury is empty. That’s all I know.’
‘I wish these lice would go on strike,’ the big woman said, still scratching.
‘Buy some of that powder from the Syrian – it’s good.’
‘Good or not good, I don’t have the money.’
It was at this moment that the old watchman appeared. The three women stared at him in amazement. They had completely eliminated Sounkaré from their thoughts, they had even forgotten his existence, and at the sight of him now they hastily rearranged their clothing.
‘Is this group at peace?’ the old man asked.
‘And only at peace,’ the three women replied.
‘Alham Doulilah – God be thanked,’ Sounkaré said, and with some difficulty he seated himself on the ground, within their circle.
His presence made the women uneasy, and their conversation ceased abruptly. They glanced at each other awkwardly, and then the two younger ones got up and went into the freight car, leaving Sounkaré and Dieynaba alone.
‘Hé, Uncle Sounkaré, things are going badly,’ the woman said, on a note of timidity that was nothing like her normal voice.
Disconcerted by her attitude, the watchman just mumbled, ‘It is the way of things – the will of God.’ Then he belched.
Dieynaba looked him straight in the face, and Sounkaré lowered his eyes.
‘Uncle Sounkaré,’ she said, ‘there is nothing here. Less than two pounds of rice for all of us, and you know that we are many.’
The watchman had understood. He was being sent away. His lips came together over his teeth and he murmured, ‘I can wait, Dieynaba, and perhaps you could spare a little of the rice?’
The woman got up, and the shadow of her massive body blotted out the meager figure of Sounkaré. ‘I don’t have enough for everyone. You are still working; you have never left the shops. The men are on strike, but you aren’t. What do you do with the money you earn? Go and ask Dejean to give you money for food!’
The last words, spoken loud and hard, brought the other women out of the wagon again, and they formed a silent group around the old man. Leaning on his cane, he got slowly to his feet.
‘Go see the other men,’ Dieynaba said. ‘They are all at the union hall.’
Sounkaré tried to hurry, but it was hot and he was feeling very weak. There was an aching in his belly, and his legs would scarcely carry him. He crossed the market place, thinking that he had never seen so many beggars in Thiès. He seemed to pass one at every step – cripples, lepers, naked children. He would have liked to do as they did: sit in the shade at the foot of a tree and hold out his hand. But he was the oldest employee of the company, and he couldn’t do a shaming thing like that.
At last he arrived at the shop of Aziz, the Syrian, behind the Place de France. But he had no more than opened the door when a voice called out, ‘Yalla! Enough beggars for today! No, no, don’t even come in!’
Aziz was seated behind the counter of the store, with his father-in-law and his wife, who covered her face with a fine muslin veil when she saw the old man.
Since Sounkaré had not moved from the threshold, the Syrian cried out again, ‘Yalla! Have pity on me! I am not the only merchant in Thiès – go someplace else!’
The old watchman seemed not to have heard him. He could see nothing but the shopkeeper’s father-in-law, a fat man who was literally stuffing himself, putting enormous morsels of a green, dough-like substance in his mouth and following it with a great chunk of bread. Sounkaré watched the movements of his hands and jaws, the swelling in his cheeks, like a dog waiting beside a table. When he had finished scraping his plate, the man thrust his little finger into his mouth and scratched at his teeth and gums. The woman, watching Sounkaré from the shelter of her veil, spoke a few words in Syrian, and the man stopped what he was doing and belched loudly. Aziz rose, came out from behind the counter, took the watchman by the shoulders, and thrust him back into the street.
Sounkaré was alone again. He was not far from the office of the strike committee, but he hesitated to go there, for fear of meeting with a third rebuff. A burning, tingling sensation seemed to be climbing up from his loins and running through his shoulders down the length of his arms to the tips of his fingers. Twice he almost lost his cane. ‘That would be the end,’ he thought. He paused for a moment in the shade of a mango tree and then started off again. Old memories and visions floated through his head like clouds of flies, and he was powerless to brush them away. His childhood, soft and gentle as a sheet of silk; the marriage arranged by his father, and the savings carefully put aside from his first earnings, in provision for the payment for his bride … Then there had been that stupid accident – a sudden burst of flame from the firebox, which had made him jump from the locomotive. He had broken a hip. The bonesetters had worked over him for months, and all the money had gone – but worse than that, the accident had left him impotent. ‘To die without leaving anyone behind, with no one to bear your name; to have your whole line die with you …’
A shadow came between the sun and him. ‘Ah,’ he said surprised, ‘it’s you, Bakary?’
Bakary and he belonged to the same generation, but the meeting brought little comfort to the old watchman. ‘He will make fun of me,’ he thought. ‘He is on the side of the strikers. They are the ones who have caused all of this, but they are eating.’
‘Do you have peace?’ Bakary asked, in the old fashion, and then added, in the idiom of his young friends, ‘How are you?’
‘God be thanked, I am well; thanks to His goodness,’ Sounkaré replied, tapping nervously at the ground with his cane, ‘But I no longer go out at all. With this affair …’ He did not want to use the word ‘strike’, ‘one cannot be sure of anything, and you need strong legs to run.’
Bakary tried to repress a fit of coughing. ‘I have no need to avoid the soldiers,’ he said, rubbing his sunken chest with the palm of his hand. ‘With my lungs as they are, I haven’t far to go in any case.’
Sounkaré was beginning to feel a trifle more calm. ‘And our young warriors?’ he said. ‘How are things with them?’
‘They are fighting like men. Seeing them, I almost envy them and find myself wishing that all of this had happened in our time. They are at the office, working day and night, and, you know, they have received money from all over the world and hundreds of letters. I am going to have to learn to read French!’
‘The dog!’ Sounkaré thought. ‘Now he is singing the praises of these strikers – and he knows that I am hungry! The good Lord should sweep all of them away, along with me!’
But all he said, aloud, was, ‘Learn French? At your age? For what little time is left, you would do better to put your soul at peace with the Lord.’
Bakary had opened his mouth to answer when another fit of coughing seized him, doubling him up with pain. He brought a bit of cloth from beneath his tunic and wiped his eyes and his forehead.
‘The body,’ he said at last, ‘is the dwelling place of the soul. How can you expect to save the soul if you know nothing of the body – if you don’t even know what causes its suffering? Right now, it is true that things are hard, but the only thing we can do is have confidence in these youngsters. I think we will get our pension as a result of what they are doing, and then our bodies, and our souls, too, will be at peace. You will receive it, of course, like everyone else, and you will have it longer than I. I am only good for the refuse heap – not even for the repair shop!’
This conversation disheartened Sounkaré strangely. He had had enough of it. Silently he cursed his friend and he cursed the strike.
‘I must go back now,’ he said. ‘Pass your days in comfort and in peace.’
‘God be thanked. And you. Come to see me the next time you come out. I am always at the union office … with the young men.’
Sounkaré’s thoughts were bitter as he walked slowly back to the workshops. ‘He might have said, “Come with me to the office – they will give you a little rice.” But instead of that he was just making fun of me.’
He was still caught in the tangle of his memories when he went into the motor repair shop. Here, too, there was only silence. The massive diesels, their copper still gleaming, were formed in solid ranks, standing clean and powerful, and remote as gods. This building was their temple, and the acrid odor of hot oil their incense. Here they were ministered to and worshiped by the best mechanics in the land, working amid the thunder of the forges and the rolling whisper of the lathes. Pistons, wrenches, gears, and flywheels passed from hand to hand like votive offerings, and everything that was worn out was replaced. Not far from here, the locomotives stood idle, in a great circle in the yard, like monstrous children of cast iron and steel, frozen in a round of play.
Just a few feet from where Sounkaré stood, there was a grease pit, and suddenly he realized that the two rats were sitting on the other side of it, watching him. The female was preening the feeler hairs at either side of her sharp little face; the male was crouched beside a pile of greasy cloths. The old watchman was seized with dizziness, a violent cramp wrenched at his stomach, and his vision clouded. It seemed to him that the pit was moving toward him, then slowly drawing away. The icy liquid was running down his back again. The cane fell from his hand and clattered briefly on the ground; the two rats leaped away and then resumed their waiting.
Sounkaré bent over to retrieve his cane, but the effort to straighten up again was too much for him and he pitched forward into the pit. His skull struck against the gray cement, and his body twitched oddly; for an instant his arms beat at the air and slid across the greasy floor. One hand contracted around the cane; his legs seemed to fold up beside him, then slowly straightened and lay still.
The two rats descended cautiously into the pit, led by the female. She stopped before the naked soles of the feet, hesitated for a moment and sniffed, and then her sharp, white teeth bit into the cracked and grayish flesh.
As if the news had been carried to them by some mysterious telepathy, other rats began to appear, always in couples, and they, too, slipped down the walls of the pit. They circled the body in a curious kind of ceremony, and then two of the hardiest climbed up to the head and face. They began their work with the lips and the eyeballs.