Authors: Wole Soyinka
‘Yes, I am the owner of the Irish pub,’ said I, hoping I did not sound boastful.
‘Monsieur Bentchartt will see you soon,’ she said, with an attempt at a smile.
This is how I now find myself ensconced in a chair in this office, facing the small, dark-haired bespectacled man who goes by the name of Bentchartt, and who, a week ago, surprised me by sending me a letter summoning me in a matter concerning his client, Mr Brandenberger. Unfortunately for me, today is not an easy day to see this man, who is now leafing through an enormous file, and who, so far, has not said a word to me beyond a greeting. I am supposed to be at the pub, quelling a protest, which may very well flare up into some sort of third world war. All my five bartenders are threatening to resign and, from the glares I got last night when we last discussed the matter, especially from the guy from Burkina Faso and also the one from Guatemala, some are likely to resort to violence. I haven’t paid them last month’s wages, and we are now well into the middle of another month.
When I came up with the idea of opening an Irish pub ten years ago, after losing my job at Hope for Humanity, there were all the indications that I had made an excellent decision. My bank did not hesitate to support me with capital – a quarter of a million francs – with which I rented the premises on Rue de Lausanne, opposite the old Catholic church of Notre Dame. Although it was a one-man business, I went ahead and called it the Three Little Boys Irish Pub, believing, as it were, that the name gave it an Irish air, and that customers would have no reason to think that the owner of the pub was neither Irish nor that he had never been to Ireland. This, I told myself, was not deception. It was business. I assume you don’t need to first visit China to offer Chinese cuisine in your restaurant, or to visit Italy for you to obtain a licence to sell pizza. And I presume any outfit that sells pizza or pasta reserves the right to call itself an Italian restaurant, or whatever nationality the owner wants the restaurant to be identified with, because, as anyone may agree, over his business an individual is sovereign.
The tiny community of Malawians to which I belong was obviously disappointed, but I did not mind. Naming my business the Malawian Bar would signify that I was angling for a slice of the market that comprised African expatriates as customers, and there was already a joint on Rue de Monthoux – the Nairobi Bar – enjoying the lion’s share of that clientele. Mamadou Niang, a fellow I once made the acquaintance of, opened a Senegalese Bar on Rue de Berne a few blocks from the Nairobi Bar, and Mamadou’s was way better than the Nairobi, as it was more spacious and had two washrooms, but he was unable to attract many clients from the African community, and he found himself compelled to close shop a few months after opening. So, in my case, I had a choice to call it the Malawian Bar, and struggle to build the business – seeing that nobody I met on the streets of the city seemed to be aware of Malawi as a country – or to make a decision that made more business sense.
I did some things to make the place resemble some of the Irish pubs I had been to. I put shamrocks on the walls, fixed television screens in every corner to show football games, piped in the music of Chris de Burgh and other Irish musicians, sold Guinness on tap, and made sure that the atmosphere in the bar was conducive mostly for conversation, with alcohol only as a lubricant. From time to time I tried my best to ensure that some of my bartenders were Irish students looking for opportunities to make an extra buck.
For a while I believed I had hit the jackpot. Not only did I have the whole of Ireland under the roof of my bar, but also clients from mainland Europe flooded in, such that it became necessary to make minor improvements, in the form of interspersing Irish music with classical hits. We were probably among the best Irish pubs in Switzerland. Until a year ago, that is, when real Irish fellows opened a pub right next door. Now I consider myself lucky on those nights when as many as seven customers turn up, and on many nights nowadays the clientele is entirely Malawian. I am even considering renaming the pub the Malawi Bar. I guess I have no choice. I figure I could wrestle business from the Nairobi Bar. I will bring Anna-Maria Ramirez, the girl from Santo Domingo who serves at the Nairobi Bar, to my pub. I will make her an offer she cannot refuse, as they say. I will stop playing Mozart and Mahler, and fill the room with Fela Kuti and Allan Namoko. I anticipate that with such a remake I will stand a chance of attracting more than seven customers. In this awfully expensive city of Geneva, a bar cannot run on the custom of seven people. All my savings have gone towards the rentals and the replenishment of stock and the taxes. I am no longer as lucky with the banks as I was ten years ago. Now things are getting out of hand, as the boys have lost their patience.
In the middle of the brewing riot I was forced to come here. I am curious why this lawyer wants to see me.
‘Monsieur,’ he is now speaking. ‘I act on behalf of the estate of our client, Mr Brandenberger.’
‘So you said in your letter,’ I say.
‘Your name is rather unusual. Where do you come from?’
‘What is a usual name to you?’
‘I mean no offence. It’s simply unusual because I am failing to pronounce it. Which country do you come from?’
‘Malawi.’
‘Mali,’ he smiles. ‘I had a friend once who came from Mali—’
‘I said Ma-la-wi.’
‘
Je me suis trompé
. Where’s that?’
‘Have you heard of Mozambique?’
‘Yes, I have. There was a war.’
‘Two wars, actually, before and after independence. We share a border.’
‘I see. And what do you do in Switzerland?’
‘I own a pub.’
‘A pub?’
‘Yes. The Three Little Boys Irish Pub on Rue de Lausanne.’
‘Why Irish?’
‘Why not Irish?’
‘I’m just curious.’
‘That’s a business secret.’ He does not laugh.
‘So,’ says the man, getting down to his business. ‘How did you know Mr Brandenberger? How close were you?’
‘Why?’ I say. ‘What has happened to him?’
‘Maybe you should first answer my question. Did you know him?’
‘I know him, of course.’
‘Would you mind telling me on what grounds?’
‘But, sir, what do you want to know? What has happened to Mr Brandenberger?’
‘First answer my question please, Monsieur. The information you will share is very important for me.’
‘Is it to do with the police?’
‘The police? Not at all, Monsieur.’
‘Ah, Mr Brandenberger . . .’
Tall, lean and feline, Mr Brandenberger was an old man who came to the pub every Friday night, always at seven on the dot, and always in a pair of blue jeans and a white shirt, his white hair combed backwards, his chin clean-shaven, with a pair of large spectacles resting on his nose. There is a corner – the one whose window faces the Notre Dame church – where frequent patrons of the pub avoided sitting on Friday nights, and new customers were discouraged from occupying. It was this corner Mr Brandenberger would walk to at the appointed hour and sit without a word, drinking carafe after carafe of Cabernet Sauvignon Syrah at an alarming but steady rate. He was always alone. He would sit there the whole night, except when he made occasional trips to the washroom, at which point one of us would make sure that his drink was secure until he returned to the table. I never saw him wave or smile at a familiar face. I never saw him tap his foot to the music that filled the air until two in the morning when the bar closed down. As soon as the clock struck two he would take out money from his wallet, and, whatever the number of carafes he had drunk, he would count the cash accurately. He would then add five francs on top as a tip, the meanest tip of the week, all of which he left on the table, put a carafe on top of it, as though he feared some wind might blow it away, after which he walked out of the bar without a word.
For nine years he did that. New bartenders were discouraged from attempting to engage the man in conversation. It was clear his preference was to be left alone. I personally made sure that every Friday night Mr Brandenberger’s wine was adequately stocked. If there was none in the nearby Denner shops, suppliers in neighbouring France would be called. The most reliable of them was in Ferney-Voltaire.
About nine months ago, Mr Brandenberger stopped coming. It was a Friday and his corner was reserved but he did not arrive. Other customers asked, ‘Where is the old man today?’ But nobody knew the answer. He failed to come the following week, and the week after that, and the month after that, to this day. I concluded that he, too, had followed the others to the real Irish pub.
‘Is that all?’ Monsieur Bentchartt interrupts.
There is more. There were some nights, though such were few and far between, when he would try to outdo himself. On average he drank six carafes a night, which makes three bottles of wine. But on those rare nights he would attempt to take eight or more carafes, after which he would throw up in his corner.
We took care not to reprimand him. He was an old man, about the same age as my father back home. We would at once call for a taxi. I would personally take him to his apartment on Avenue Pictet-de-Rochemont across the lake, where he lived on the eleventh floor. This was how I got to know his name, more than a year after he had started drinking at our bar. I noted on his door that the name panel read ‘V. Brandenberger’. I never found out what the V stood for. On some of those nights, he was in no position to pay for what he had consumed, but we never brought the bill to his attention the next time he showed up. We wrote it off. For the trips to his apartment, we met the taxi bills from the bar’s takings.
There was one night when, on arrival at his apartment, he seemed to have recovered a reasonable slice of his sobriety. He insisted that I should come in. He asked me my name and where I came from. To my surprise, not only did he know my country, but he also knew the name of its founding president. ‘Hastings Kamuzu Banda,’ he said. ‘A charming fellow, wasn’t he? Always going about carrying a white horse-tail for a flywhisk. Why did he do that?’ In a city where nobody knows whether your country exists at all, finding someone who knows it well is like chancing upon a man from home. I was in a hurry to return to the bar as it was after the ungodly hour of 2 a.m., but I accepted a shot of whiskey, as he himself reached for tonic water. His apartment was spacious, but its furniture was cheap. There was an old piano in the corner, a painting of a woman on the wall, and lots of books in German, French and English.
‘How did you come to know about my country?’ I asked.
‘Well, when youth and blood were warmer, I used to travel a lot,’ he said. ‘Somebody spoke of the rare beauty of your lake. I decided to visit Malawi with Tatiana, my wife, God bless her soul. We went to other parts of Africa, to the beautiful national park in Kenya, Masai Mara, and to the Lalibela Temple in Ethiopia. We also travelled to other continents in the thirty-nine years we were together, but it was Africa whose diversity never ceased to astonish us. In all the seventeen years that Tatiana has been dead I have never been outside the canton of Geneva. I see no reason for travelling anywhere alone.’ His voice was becoming sad.
I had to leave. The boys would be getting impatient, as they could not leave without handing over the night’s takings to me. And on Friday nights, after closing the bar, they descended on Déjà-vu and other nightclubs where girlfriends were waiting to dance with them until sunrise.
One may be deceived into thinking that when he next showed up at our pub, Mr Brandenberger would greet me like a long-lost cousin. But no, he went straight to his usual corner and ordered carafe after carafe, until he paid his bill, added the five francs on top, and left.
In fact we never had another conversation. When I met him on the tram, he looked at me as though he had never seen me in his life before. I once dropped off at the same stop with him on Rue de la Terrassière. He was carrying many things in paper bags, groceries it seemed he had bought from Migros. As he was struggling, I approached to offer to help him carry them to his apartment, a block away, but he refused as though I was a suspicious-looking stranger. He did not seem to recognise me at all. ‘
Pas de souci
,’ he said, ‘
pas de souci
.’ He left without adding, ‘
C’est gentil
.’ I went away having resolved not to offer to help him again, except on those nights of madness in our pub.
It was probably a year after the groceries incident that he stopped coming to our bar. At first, we thought the pub next door had stolen him from us, like they had most of our customers. But we ventured on spying missions to the bar on many Friday nights, and never saw Mr Brandenberger there.
‘Why are you asking me all this, anyway?’ I say to Monsieur Bentchartt.
‘Well,’ says the man, ‘Mr Brandenberger died nine months ago.’
‘Oh, God!’
He takes from his file a copy of the
20 Minutes
newspaper. ‘Man bequeaths ninety-five per cent of fortune to charity,’ reads the title above a black-and-white photograph of Mr Brandenberger, in all likelihood taken when he was younger than the last time I saw him.
‘And he has bequeathed the remaining five per cent, which is three million francs, to your bar,’ says the lawyer. ‘He says you were, in the later years of his life, the only family he knew.’