Text: “The Train From Rhodesia”

The train came out of the red horizon and bore down towards them over the single
straight track.

The stationmaster came out of his little brick station with its pointed chalet roof,
feeling the creases in his serge uniform in his legs as well. A stir of preparedness rippled
through the squatting native venders waiting in the dust; the face of a carved wooden
animal, eternally surprised, stuck out of a sack. The stationmaster’s barefoot children
wandered over. From the grey mud huts with the untidy heads that stood within a
decorated mud wall, chickens, and dogs with their skin stretched like parchment over
their bones, followed the piccanins down to the track. The flushed and perspiring west
cast a reflection, faint, without heat, upon the station, upon the tin shed marked “Goods,”
upon the walled kraal, upon the grey tin house of the stationmaster and upon the sand,
that lapped all around, from sky to sky, cast little rhythmical cups of shadow, so that the
sand became the sea, and closed over the children’s black feet softly and without imprint.
The stationmaster’s wife sat behind the mesh of her veranda. Above her head the
hunk of a sheep’s carcass moved slightly, dangling in a current of air.
They waited.
The train called out, along the sky; but there was no answer; and the cry hung on:
I’m coming…I’m coming…
The engine flared out now, big, whisking a dwindling body behind it; the track
flared out to let it in.
Creaking, jerking, jostling, gasping, the train filled the station.

Here, let me see that one—the young woman curved her body farther out of the
corridor window. Missus? smiled the old man, looking at the creatures he held in his
hand. From a piece of string on his grey finger hung a tiny woven basket; he lifted it,
questioning. No, no, she urged, leaning down towards him, across the height of the train
towards the man in the piece of old rug; that one, that one, her hand commanded. It was a
lion, carved out of soft, dry wood that looked like spongecake; heraldic, black and white,
with impressionistic detail burnt in. The old man held it up to her still smiling, not from
the heart, but at the customer. Between its vandyke teeth, in the mouth opened in an
endless roar too terrible to be heard, it had a black tongue. Look, said the young husband,
if you don’t mind! And round the neck of the thing, a piece of fur (rat? rabbit? meerkat?);
a real mane, majestic, telling you somehow that the artist had delight in the lion.
All up and down the length of the train in the dust the artists sprang, walking bent,
like performing animals, the better to exhibit the fantasy held towards the faces on the
train. Buck, startled and stiff, staring with round black and white eyes. More lions,
standing erect, grappling with strange, thin, elongated warriors who clutched spears and
showed no fear in their slits of eyes. How much, they asked from the train, how much?
Give me penny, said the little ones with nothing to sell. The dogs went and sat,
quite still, under the dining car, where the train breathed out the smell of meat cooking
with onion.
A man passed beneath the arch of reaching arms meeting grey-black and white in
the exchange of money for the staring wooden eyes, the stiff wooden legs sticking up in the

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air; went along under the voices and the bargaining, interrogating the wheels. Past the
dogs; glancing up at the dining car where he could stare at the faces, behind glass,
drinking beer, two by two, on either side of a uniform railway vase with its pale dead
flower. Right to the end, to the guard’s van, where the stationmaster’s children had just
collected their mother’s two loaves of bread; to the engine itself, where the stationmaster
and the driver stood talking against the steaming complaint of the resting beast.
The man called out to them, something loud and joking. They turned to laugh, in a
twirl of steam. The two children careered over the sand, clutching the bread, and burst
through the iron gate and up the path through the garden in which nothing grew.
Passengers drew themselves in at the corridor windows and turned into
compartments to fetch money, to call someone to look. Those sitting inside looked up:
suddenly different, caged faced, boxed in, cut off after the contact of the outside. There
was an orange a piccanin would like…. What about that chocolate? It wasn’t very nice….
A girl had collected a handful of the hard kind, that no one liked, out of the
chocolate box, and was throwing them to the dogs, over at the dining car. But the hens
darted in and swallowed the chocolates, incredibly quick and accurate, before they had
even dropped in the dust, and the dogs, a little bewildered, looked up with their brown
eyes, not expecting anything.
—No, leave it, said the young woman, don’t take it….
Too expensive, too much, she shook her head and raised her voice to the old man,
giving up the lion. He held it high where she had handed it to him. No, she said, shaking
her head. Three-and-six? insisted her husband, loudly. Yes baas! laughed the old man.
Three-and-six?—the young man was incredulous. Oh leave it—she said. The young man
stopped. Don’t you want it? he said, keeping his face closed to the old man. No, never
mind, she said, leave it. The old native kept his head on one side, looking at them
sideways, holding the lion. Three-and-six, he murmured, as old people repeat things to
themselves.
The young woman drew her head in. She went into the coupe and sat down. Out of
the window, on the other side, there was nothing; sand and bush; and thorn tree. Back
through the open doorway, past the figure of her husband in the corridor, there was the
station, the voices, wooden animals waving, running feet. Her eye followed the funny
little valance of scrolled wood that outlined the chalet roof of the station; she thought of
the lion and smiled. That bit of fur round the neck. But the wooden buck, the hippos, the
elephants, the baskets that already bulked out of their brown paper under the seat and on
the luggage rack! How will they look at home? Where will you put them? What will they
mean away from the places you found them? Away from the unreality of the last few
weeks? The young man outside. But he is not part of the unreality; he is for good now.
Odd…somewhere there was an idea that he, that living with him, was part of the holiday,
the strange places.
Outside, a bell rang. The stationmaster was leaning against the end of the train,
green flag rolled in readiness. A few men who had got down to stretch their legs sprang on
to the train, clinging to the observation platforms, or perhaps merely standing on the iron
step, holding the rail; but on the train, safe from the one dusty platform, the one tin house,
the empty sand.
There was a grunt. The train jerked. Through the glass the beer drinkers looked
out, as if they could not see beyond it. Behind the flyscreen, the stationmaster’s wife sat
facing back at them beneath the darkening hunk of meat.

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 There was a shout. The flag drooped out. Joints not yet coordinated, the segmented
body of the train heaved and bumped back against itself. It began to move; slowly the
scrolled chalet moved past it, the yells of the natives, running alongside, jetted up into the
air, fell back at different levels. Staring wooden faces waved drunkenly, there, then gone,
questioning for the last time at the windows. Here, one-and-six baas!—As one
automatically opens a hand to catch a thrown ball, a man fumbled wildly down his pocket,
brought up the shilling and sixpence and threw them out; the old native, gasping, his
skinny toes splaying the sand, flung the lion.
The piccanins were waving, the dogs stood, tails uncertain, watching the train go:
past the mud huts, where a woman turned to look up from the smoke of the fire, her hand
pausing on her hip.

The stationmaster went slowly in under the chalet.

The old native stood, breath blowing out the skin between his ribs, feet tense,
balanced in the sand, smiling and shaking his head. In his opened palm, held in the
attitude of receiving, was the retrieved shilling and sixpence.
The blind end of the train was being pulled helplessly out of the station.

The young man swung in from the corridor, breathless. He was shaking his head with
laughter and triumph. Here! he said. And waggled the lion at her. One-and-six!
What? she said.
He laughed. I was arguing with him for fun, bargaining—when the train had
pulled out already, he came tearing after…One-and-six Baas! So there’s your lion.
She was holding it away from her, the head with the open jaws, the pointed teeth,
the black tongue, the wonderful ruff of fur facing her. She was looking at it with an
expression of not seeing, of seeing something different. Her face was drawn up, wryly, like
the face of a discomforted child. Her mouth lifted nervously at the corner. Very slowly,
cautious, she lifted her finger and touched the mane, where it was joined to the wood.
But how could you, she said. He was shocked by the dismay of her face.
Good Lord, he said, what’s the matter?
If you want the thing, she said, her voice rising and breaking with the shrill
impotence of anger, why didn’t you buy it in the first place? If you wanted it, why didn’t
you pay for it? Why didn’t you take it decently, when he offered it? Why did you have to
wait for him to run after the train with it, and give him one-and-six? One and six!
She was pushing it at him, trying to force him to take the lion. He stood astonished,
his hands hanging at his sides.
But you wanted it! You liked it so much?
—It’s a beautiful piece of work, she said fiercely, as if to protect it from him.
You liked it so much! You said yourself it was too expensive—
Oh you—she said, hopeless and furious. You…She threw the lion onto the seat.
He stood looking at her.
She sat down again in the corner and, her face slumped in her hands, stared out of
her window. Everything was turning round inside her. One-and-six. One-and-six. One-
and-six for the wood and the carving and the sinews of the legs and the switch of the tail.
The mouth open like that and the teeth. The black tongue, rolling, like a wave. The man
round the neck. To give one-and-six for that. The heat of shame mounted through her
legs and body and sounded in her ears like the sound of sand pouring. Pouring, pouring.

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She sat there, sick. A weariness, a tastelessness, the discovery of a void made her hands
slacken their grip, atrophy emptily, as if the hour was not worth their grasp. She was
feeling like this again. She had thought it was something to do with singleness, with
being alone and belonging too much to oneself.
She sat there not wanting to move or speak, or to look at anything even; so that the
mood should be associated with nothing, no object, word, or sight that might recur and so
recall the feeling again….Smuts blew in grittily, settled on her hands. Her back remained
at exactly the same angle, turned against the young man sitting with his hands drooping
between his sprawled legs, and the lion, fallen on its side in the corner.

The train had cast the station like a skin. It called out to the sky, I’m coming, I’m coming;
and again, there was no answer.

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