West with the Night Read Online Free PDF

alive, an hour or so more of delay on my part could result in a tragedy that would not be less because of the comfort Bergner might find in my visit.
    Somewhere, just beyond Nungwe, the little doctor must at that moment have been pouring oxygen into the lungs of another man, if that man were still alive.
    Death, or at least the shadow that precedes him, seemed to have stalked far and wide that morning.
    I pulled up a chair and sat in it near the head of Bergner’s bed and tried to think of something to say, but he spoke first.
    His voice was soft and controlled, and very tired.
    ‘You don’t mind being here, I hope,’ he said. ‘It’s been four years since I left Nairobi, and there haven’t been many letters.’ He ran the tip of his tongue over his lips and attempted a smile. ‘People forget,’ he added. ‘It’s easy for a whole group of people to forget just one, but if you’re very long in a place like this you remember everybody you ever met. You even worry about people you never liked; you get nostalgic about your enemies. It’s all something to think about and it all helps.’
    I nodded, watching little beads of sweat swell on his forehead. He was feverish, and I couldn’t help wondering how long it would be before the inevitable delirium overtook him another time.
    I don’t know what the scientific term for blackwater is, but the name those who have lived in Africa call it by is apt enough.
    A man can be riddled with malaria for years on end, with its chills and its fevers and its nightmares, but, if one day he sees that the water from his kidneys is black, he knows he will not leave that place again, wherever he is, or wherever he hoped to be. He knows that there will be days ahead, long, tedious days which have no real beginning or ending, but which run together into night and out of it without changing colour, or sound, or meaning. He will lie in his bed feeling the minutes and the hours pass through his body like an endless ribbon of pain because time becomes pain then. Light and darkness become pain; all his senses exist only to receive it, to transmit to his mind again and again, with ceaseless repetition, the simple fact that now he is dying.
    The man on the bed was dying like that. He wanted to talk because it is possible to forget yourself if you talk, but not if you only lie and think.
    ‘Hastings,’ he said. ‘You must know Carl Hastings. He was a White Hunter for a while and then he settled down on a coffee plantation west of Ngong. I wonder if he ever married?’ He used to say he never would, but nobody believed him.’
    ‘He did, though,’ I said. It was a name I had never heard, but it seemed a small enough gesture to lie about a nebulous Carl Hastings — even, if necessary, to give him a wife.
    In the four years Bergner had been away, the town of Nairobi had swelled and burst like a ripe seedpod. It was no longer so comfortably small that every inhabitant was a neighbour, or every name that of a friend.
    ‘I thought you knew him,’ Bergner said; ‘everybody knows Carl. And when you see him you can tell him he owes me five pounds. It’s on a bet we made one Christmas in Mombasa. He bet he’d never get married — not in Africa, anyway. He said you could boast about living in a man’s country, but you couldn’t expect to find a marriageable woman in it!’
    ‘I’ll tell him about it,’ I said; ‘he can send it by way of Kisumu.’
    ‘That’s right, by way of Kisumu.’
    Bergner closed his eyes and let a tremor of pain shake his body under the flimsy blanket. He was like a storm-trapped man who seeks shelter in the niche of a wall from a passing fury of wind and then hurries on until the next blast drives him to cover again.
    ‘There’s Phillips,’ he said, ‘and Tom Krausmeyer at the Stanley Hotel. You’ll know them both — and Joe Morley. There are a number of people I want to ask you about, but there’s lots of time. Ebert said you’d be staying over. When I