The Impressionist (59 page)

There is far too much equipment for Jonathan to carry on his own, so he simply abandons most of it, piling a few things under a tree, then giving up altogether, stuffing some canned rations into his pack and picking up a blanket, a gun, essential items. The camp seems to lurch away from him, and with a jolt he is stumbling off up the path, moving on to wherever he was going. Where was he going? He walks on, and the packed mud of the path crumbles into broken ground, stone scree which is hard to walk over. It is getting difficult even to put one foot in front of another. The sun lances down on to his bare head (Where is his hat? Did he drop his hat?), and eventually his vision is so blurred and his head swimming so fast that he sits down for a moment, just to rest, and before he knows it he is lying down, staring up at the sky, a tree branch creeping into his circle of vision, like a crack in a blue pane of glass.

He thinks, Maybe I am dying.

His dusty body is baked dry of sweat. Chills sing through him, sine waves of cold that propagate up his aching arms and legs, heading in a nauseating rush towards his centre. There are hallucinations. High up on the escarpment an old man clings to the cliff face, dressed in red boots and a red hat. Jonathan’s vision magnifies, and he sees that the man is crouched like a spider, scuttling headfirst down towards him. Sometimes the man stops scuttling and leans back to apply a white powder to his hands from a pouch on his belt. Sometimes, almost nonchalantly, he hangs from one arm, suspended over a drop of hundreds of feet. He is moving quickly, coming straight down, the red of his cap and boots impossibly rich and bright… and the next thing he knows the blue pane is crowded with Fotse faces, liquid-eyed men etched with spirals of fine scars, and many hands hold him up, and the scars swirl, and he tries weakly to sit up, but all that comes out of his body is a shivering vibration. He is given water, and the blue pane of sky jolts left and right, left and right to the sound of men’s low voices, singing the same work-song pattern, round and around and around. The sun bakes his skin, tightening and scorching it. The sky jogs and shivers until, in an instant, it disappears entirely, and all is cold and flickering firelight on stone, and he knows – the only clear thing – that he is now under the ground.

His Fotse carriers take him far into the body of the earth and set him down in a place where there is a crunch underfoot, and the ceiling is like a dome. Under the firelight he sees that the cave is decorated with thousands of red handprints, a dome of red hands suddenly obscured by heads which bend down close to him, one in a red cap, the old man who shakes a bone rattle in jerky spider figures and chants low in his ear. Hands lift him and then, slowly, he is stripped, fingers tugging unfamiliarly at his buttons, hands pulling down the waistband of his shorts. He is too weak to resist, as his ankles are gripped and his legs held apart, as fingers rub and pinch every part of his skin, parting his buttocks, lifting his scrotum, opening his mouth, blowing into his nostrils and his ears, peeling back his foreskin, lifting his arms and feeling through his hair. All the time the energetic red-capped face bobs in and out of his vision, the rattle clattering by his ear, the chant circling around, pausing for a second to bring something forth out of itself, cycling on and down and on. The hands cover him from head to toe in mud, which dries, caking him like a new kaolin skin. The hard clay rim of a bowl grates against his teeth; his head is held upright and he is made to drink a bitter liquid, which runs down his chin.

He sinks back against the ground.

Then he rises up towards the ceiling, while his body rolls in the dust, arching its spine, gnashing its uninhabited teeth in unfelt pain, because his spirit is racing out of the uterine darkness of this cave, out of its mouth in the Lizard’s Back escarpment, and over the land, far away, the scrub shooting beneath it like stars. Then, as suddenly as it started, this flight is arrested, and he hovers for a second over the expedition camp, looking down at a row of sullen faces staring into the fire, faces which shudder and blur as he is thrown into reverse, sucked back down through the top of his head into his body, now caked in hard mud, a clay mould inside which all is molten, formless and in flux.

He lies there for many hours or days, while torches burn out and are replaced, and the patterns of hand prints move along preordained trajectories, like constellations in a planetarium. Sometimes young novices come to feed him, spooning porridge into his mouth and dosing him with the bitter-tasting medicine. He looks at the dome of hands and feels the rock breathe in and out, and hears the old man chanting, and finds that he can turn his head, and that his hands respond to him. He feels the floor on which he lies, the crunch of it, and with his new searching fingers picks up a white sliver, holding it up to his new eyes to recognize a piece of bone. The strangeness of it; being able to fly, and being encased in clay, and lying on a carpet of bone in the body of a great living rock.

People come and go, but the old man is always there, rattling his rattle, chanting his chant, maintaining a single continuous ritual before a niche in the rock. In the niche is an altar, crammed with objects of all kinds. Gourds hold the sticky remains of libations. There are beaten copper blades, bunches of herbs, a dog’s skull wrapped in dried grass. The niche is spattered with chalk and blood and millet beer, which makes it hard at first to see the other things: the penknife, the hand mirror, the empty tins of beans, and the two dolls which he has not thought about since the day he bought them in the port, the little colonists with their long noses and bulbous hats – all stolen from the camp and brought here to the caves of the dead.

Young men come and kneel before the old man, giving and receiving messages or blessings. Jonathan watches and grows to believe that he is in a secret command centre, that the altar is a campaign map of a disputed territory, its motley collection of objects a magic triangulation of Fotseland, of his body, of the caves. The old man realizes he is awake, and casually puts the ritual aside, as if it were some ordinary task he was performing, mending a tool or preparing food. Together they start to communicate, and though it is fragmentary, and there are long pauses and many difficulties of understanding, the old man slowly gives him to understand that all the dead are present at their conversation, and will hear whatever is said.

He sits up and drinks some water, and together they pause and silently listen to the breathing of the rock. Then the old man tells him about the ancestors, and how they no longer come out to ride the women in the ceremony, and how time has fractured into before and now and it is all the fault of sorcerers. He tells him how beautiful the world would be if there were no sorcery in it to disrupt the lives of peaceful people, and how men have imagined this beauty, and incorporated themselves, men from all clans and lineages, across all the age sets and the secret societies, into a new society, the most secret of all, named for the tough flat-bladed grass the Fotse call needle grass. The part of needle grass that is underground has no beginning and no end, a mat of fibres which lies hidden under the earth, but which can shoot forth points sharp enough to cut you if you are so stupid as to walk through a stand of it. Thus it is with the needle-grass society, which has no head, no centre, which runs under the earth of Fotseland, and when the time is right will shoot up and destroy sorcery for ever.

The old man tells him all this, and he drifts in and out of sleep, cold waves of fever stealing him away and bringing him back again. Little by little the old man makes him understand that everything about sorcerers is upside down, that for them good is bad and right is wrong, and that the time for the destruction of sorcery is now and the sorcerers the Fotse are preparing to act against are camped down in the valley. Before the morning, all the white men will be dead.

The old man tells him another thing. Sorcerers have marks on their bodies, which unfailingly reveal their evil nature. He has examined his body for those marks, and found none. Even though he looks like a sorcerer, with his upside-down skin, and his gun that shoots hard witch substance into people from a distance, appearances can be deceptive. It sometimes happens that a person is foolish about his travelling companions, and does not take the right magical care, or falls asleep in a dangerous place. Then spirits can crawl inside their empty bodies and take them over.

Gently, the old man lets him know the worst: that he has been possessed by a European spirit. Soon the needle grass will rise up through the earth and kill the other white men and grind their bones to dust, but the old man does not think death will be necessary in his case. Instead (though it will be painful) he can draw the spirit out.

He becomes very afraid, and begs the old man not to do it. Please, he says, I am not evil. I am not a sorcerer. If you draw out this spirit, there will be nothing left. The old man pats his shoulder reassuringly and hands him a gourd containing a thick, bitter drink.

As soon as he takes a mouthful of the liquid his guts go into spasm and he vomits it back on to the floor. The old man makes him drink again. Again he vomits. The process is repeated until after some time he notices that his spittle-slicked hands seem very far away. The distance increases rapidly, as if he is being stretched up towards the ceiling. After that there is some confusion. Though he remains in the cave, lying down in the centre of the white chalk figure the old man has drawn on the floor, he also travels up, out of the mouth of the cave, and down the hill towards the white men’s camp. The land skims beneath him as he rushes over it, white as bone in the moonlight.

On ground covered with ashes, they sit and watch him with their lifeless eyes. They spoon food into their large mouths, scratching themselves with yellow fingernails.

Behind the Professor is a huge pile of crates, a lifeless ark which over the last few weeks he and Gittens have carefully and meticulously filled. They have taken one of everything in Fotseland: water pots, hoes, oracle dice, Fo necklaces… They have made photographs of what they cannot take, and packed the plates alongside the artefacts, the light imprisoned in them a final record of a place they have already consigned to history, to the dead.

He hovers overhead, watching. He sees the crawling warriors, rows of undulating black backs converging on the orange point of the fire. He sees the eating white men. Everything about them is upside down.

*

The old man shakes his rattle and chants his chant, and novices hold the patient’s arms and legs, anointing his face and shoulders with ashes. The novices heat metal brands in a brazier, because this has to do with skin, and the way it can deceive, unless space and time are fixed in it so its owner will never lose his way. It cannot be done without drums, because spirits communicate through patterns of sound, and so the drums thud and whoop, arcing over each other, filling in those patterns, threading and doubling as a mask is passed over the patient’s head to coax the spirit out. One by one the brands are placed on his body: at the small of his back, at the nape of his neck, his thighs, shoulders and chest, orientating him, linking him irrevocably to the time and the place these marks are being made, so that wherever he may drift or fall asleep, he will always be in relation to this instant.

At the touch of the brand he screams, and once again finds himself rushing over the land, which has become a land of horrors. He passes over a place where a wooden frame has been set up, on which the bodies of the porters, Idris, Ali and Danjuma, have been flayed, their stomachs opened and their intestines rolled out on sticks in search of witch-substance. He is sucked down into the valley, where hundreds of figures are now creeping through the darkness, needles rising up through the earth, making their way to the margin of the sorcerers’ firelight.

He can feel the spirit begin to loosen its grip. Florid and rapacious, it tugs at his organs, destroying the integrity of his body and sending pieces of it flying in all directions, gobbets of flesh that stream away in bloody rivers. As he is pulled apart, the world is pulled apart with him and he screams again, because without anything to screen it reality is unbearable and he is an abyss, and the thing he thought was himself is plucked out and flung away, leaving only a nightmare, a monstrous disorder.

The warriors rush into the circle of firelight, the white men’s bullets turning to water against their magical armour. Their arms rise and fall, chopping and twisting. Blades grate against bone, snapping sinew and spilling guts through khaki shirts on to baggy-shorted laps. Gregg’s grinning head lies on its side in the ashes. The Professor feels the thing that reminds him of no other thing as his split skull flowers brains and his face is beaten to an unrecognizable pulp. Gittens begs, Morgan looks quizzical and Marchant swears as they are eviscerated. By the time the sun comes up there is silence in the valley, and in the caves of the dead.

Week by week the Fotse become accustomed to a world without sorcery. People go back to their ordinary ways: the farmers to their fields, the smiths to their forges, the Daou to mediating between his warring wives and the griot to work on a song-cycle telling of the victory of good over evil.