The Pop’s Rhinoceros (97 page)

Now an oil-lamp sputtered. It was dark outside, gloomy in the hut. The three brothers avoided their sister’s eye.

“So?” Gbujo challenged her sullenly.

“None of them know anything, except this ‘Pope.’ Why else does he send these White-men? What does he tell them to bring him, eh? Tortoise? Baboon?”

“They remember nothing because there is nothing to remember.”

“So Nri-men want to forget, too. There are ashes in the fire outside. Rub them on your face and you will look like White-men as well as forget like them.
Such forgetful brothers I have. Forget to keep White-men in the boat, forget their sister, forget Ezodu. And now look, White-men in the
obiri,
sister come home, and Ezodu. …”

“Ezodu is a story that mothers tell their children. …” Gbujo’s voice was dismissive.

“Nri-women remember. Nri-men run around like chickens with their heads cut off. They want to feel important, round up all the other chickens, and have a big palaver together. Very nice, all squawking through the neck and strutting about together. You know what White-men are. Nri-people have known what White-men are ever since Eri took a blade from an Awka-man. Nri-people have been waiting for the White-men since Enyi and Ezodu. …”

“Enough, Usse! These are old stories, taboo stories. …”

“Taboo stories? Children sing them! And don’t you plan to tell them to the Bini-people? The Ife-people? And what about the Ijaws? They like stories, too. Why this big palaver when Nri-people already know what these White-men are? This is Nri business; it began with Nri. Now it comes back to Nri. You want to tell all of them about that? Think how big and important you could look. ‘O Forest-peoples! Nri-men once broke their own taboo. O Saltwater-peoples! It was long, long ago, in Eri’s time. O River-peoples! Nri-people stained the earth. …” It makes a good speech, eh, my brothers? Everyone listening with their ears pricked up.” She glared at the four of them.

“You are so certain, Usse?” Namoke spoke more gently than her brothers. “You are so sure this is why the White-men have come? So sure this is truly what they are?”

“Why they have come?” she echoed him. “They do not know themselves. What they are? Yes, I am sure. I have lived amongst them, as you have not. Why should I care if believing it makes your head ache?” She turned to her brothers. “Believe our father. He sees them even now in his dreaming. Soon he will know them, too. And when he knows them, you will know them, too. Or do my three wise brothers see further than their father, more clearly than the Eze-Nri himself?”

She fell silent then. Namoke watched her pull her legs from under her and stretch them out on the mat. Whose curiosity, he wondered, would compel him to ask her to explain this? Her feigned indifference was laid over a true one, he thought, so certain she was, so certain of what she knew or believed she knew. The palaver seemed very far away and himself clear of its noise now: insects buzzing on the far side of a stream she had led them across. She does not need to understand herself, he thought. It would only sap her strength.

“It is nonsense,” Gbujo said calmly. “Our father. … You know this, Usse. The iron is broken. It was broken before you left. Our father was already …” His words petered out.

“Dead,” she said bluntly.

Namoke heard Apia suck in his breath sharply. His own shock surprised him,
at the blow dealt by the word itself—to spit such a word on the face of the Eze-Nri.

“What you say is nonsense,” Gbujo repeated coldly. “The iron is broken, as I said, and as my sister must have said, for I do not hear my sister when her mouth is clogged with dung. It is nonsense because our father never saw the White-men, and never will, and if you brought those three at his bidding, as you claim, then that proves only that you are his dutiful daughter. …” He stopped again. “You did well, our sister, to bring them this far. We your brothers salute you, you, the Eze-Ada. To bring them so far only to see them perish is a hard blow. To carry so heavy a load only to spill it at the door—”

And there he was forced to break off, for his sister’s drawing up of her knees, the clasping of her arms about them, her rocking back and forth, and the escape from her lips of little mews and sighs, all these signs broke out of her then not as sobs of her bitter disappointment—they had been waiting for that—but as harsh guffaws of mirth. She was laughing at him. She was laughing at all of them: Gbujo, Apia, Onugu, even himself. Namoke frowned in puzzlement, recalling how he had lunged for her, fearing the power in the
ofo
-staff she brandished before the seething crowd, thinking it would burn her hands to stumps, impale her, seed itself within her, and its branches would burst out of her flesh, rip her open. … He had reached forward, and the great mass of men had reached with him, the wall she held them behind crumbling and their bodies pouring forward. … They had chased the three men into the forest, where they would die. White-men did not know how to live in the forest. All she had done was for nothing. And now she was laughing at them.

“Poor Gbujo!” she burst out. “You think I do not know that you led them to the
obiri?
Poor Apia! You think I did not hear you when you shouted for the men to chase them? And you, Onugu, my baby brother, you think I did not see you hand them clubs over there behind the coco-palms? You think I did not guess the clubs would be there? Oh, my foolish, foolish brothers: you do not listen, so how can you understand? Imagine that what I say is true—let your heads ache just a little now—imagine that they are just what I tell you. Do you think that the Alusi will let you spill their blood? Do you think they will let Nri-men stain the earth again?”

The three of them would not look at her. Yes, Namoke thought, she is indifferent. She knows they do not matter. Try as they might, her own brothers would play no part in this. She leaned forward, talking into their faces, choosing to take their shock for incomprehension or stupidity.

“Two hundred men chase three sweating White-men into the forest. And the White-men escape. Tell me now, my clever brothers, how does that happen? Do they run like leopards? Fly like birds? Disappear? Three ignorant White-men, who can hardly walk without falling over, who crash about like buffalo. …”

She turned between them, barking the question at each of them in turn.

“Tell me how?”

Her brothers were silent.

“Iguedo has them,” she said flatly. “It does not matter what you believe. They live. And soon they will be in Nri.”

Every nastiness has its pathology. Minor streams and tributary rivers spill off distant uplands and watersheds, then branch through the forest watercourses carrying and depositing meager alluvial washes of precious black mud along their lushly vegetal banks, a rank double ribbon of rushes and reed-beds where herons and red-legged ducks blunder about in search of fish, a green and stringy palisade, a fertile fringe rooted in fine-grained friable soil. And thus a deception, for three strides back the dirt turns thin and sandy, the forest starts, and outlying knobbly cables of vast shallow root-systems undulate, rise, and plunge back into the leached and gravelly ground in a long-distance quest for phosphates on behalf of massively trunked sasswoods and greenhearts, mahoganies and ironwoods, gumcopals and
obechi
-trees, the forest giants and their enormous sucking appetites that drain the already poor soil for miles around and feed nothing more useful than an overweening urge to be taller than their neighbors.

The roving roots of these hydra-footed monsters (Salvestro is about to trip over one) pump tree-food a hundred feet or more into the sky, where a glossy canopy of leaves soaks up supplementary sunlight like a fat green sponge and produces brightly colored flowers, most of which are small and exquisitely engineered. Birds enjoy these very much. Everything else is underneath, groping around in the gloom for whatever gleams and glints of growth-promoting sunshine drip down from the light-hogging canopy high above, the strongest contenders here being fifty-foot balsams, smooth-grained satinwoods, locust-trees with feathery leaves and long pendant seed-pods, densely packed stands of false date palms, fibrous aji-trees, crabwoods, all of which sprout sun-hungry leaves of their own, sopping up the remaining little rays and fugitive shafts until the forest floor is lit only by the vaguest dapplings and glows, the leavings and leakage of those on high. Ferns grow here and sometimes cotton-plants. Lianas lassoo their way up, entangle themselves, and rappel down again. Lichens and mosses actually thrive, and the trees themselves drop seeds whose saplings barely have time to form thickets of impenetrable scrub before their parents starve them to death. The soil down here is overcrowded and sucked out by the competing hungers of these monsters, while the sun far above plays expertly on their edaphic insecurities to lure them farther and farther from their washed-out foundation, reaching higher and higher in a desperate competition to choke off everything around, until finally the roots can no longer supply the crown, the leaves turn papery, then brown, then fall off and drift slowly down to the forest floor, where mulching promptly begins at the foot of one hundred feet of perfectly useless already rotting tree-trunk, which sooner or later—the inevitable finale—crashes
through its victorious neighbors, a thrashing smashing catastrophic scaffold of dead trunk, branchwork, twigs, and epiphytic trailers: a gigantic tree-corpse. Termite food.

But sometimes—or rarely, or hardly ever—the canopy breaks. A sunlit haven opens. Speargrass springs up and lives in happy amity with little shrubs and flowering bushes, bright red rhododendrons, for instance, the odd wild yam. Things flower and run to seed, and a respectable percentage of these seeds produce puppyish versions of whatever flowered in the first place, not enough to choke the neighbors, but sufficient for a modest self-perpetuation. The nutrient problem is solved by unspoken subsoil negotiations resulting in a just apportionment satisfactory to all parties. Unhurried bees buzz and bobble about, pollinating without fear or favor within this little paradise—albeit walled in by the scowling cliffs of the surrounding, pressing forest—this happy ecotopia where cowbirds hop about regardless of the absence of cows, where lovely flowers might be gathered by the armful but never are, where the parasitic liana fails to worm its way in and so never strangles or corrupts anything, where all is pristine and peaceable and nice.

Then twenty-five tons of rotting tree-trunk wielding a fifty-foot scourge fashioned from its own dead branches and six different species of creeper crashes down from nowhere and flattens everything in sight, vicious little saplings shoot up to tent the area in a light-absorbent leafy mattress, killing everything underneath, and the nasty norms of the forest reassert themselves; these, from the insufficient soil to the inadequate sun, from taproot to topmost crown, being slow starvation, infanticide, arboreal cruelty, and greed. Thus the vertical.

Sideways, though, sideways. … Giant black trunks rise out of the mottled humps of the lower tree-crowns and support the hollow domes of those above. Fruit-pigeons and guinea fowl drill through the groundless and skyless slice of airspace suspended between these sub- and supercanopies. “Above” is somewhat lighter than “below,” but both are composed of insubstantial greenery, as though one were the identical reflection of the other, mere images stretching the length and breadth of the forest. Dimensional confusion reigns in this interstitial zone (what exactly
is
height?), where squirrels, lizards, the smaller monkeys, and chimpanzees climb and descend without making any obvious distinction among these radically different maneuvers and, far from providing the missing coordinates, the orgulous trees carry on obliviously with their decades-long games of homicidal leapfrog. Small wonder that the fruit-bats sleep upside-down: “up” and “down” themselves are all adrift and a-quiver, swapping position, pulling the vertical axis out of true and into serpentine loops, kinky twists, lemniscate turns and returns. … The vertex is no good up here, and it’s not much better down there, either.

Which is where Salvestro is, under the underneath, at ground level, or even level with the ground, having just tripped over one of those troublesome gnarly hard-to-spot tree-roots. Alerted by the thud, a chaffinch peers down and sees what appears to be a very large and unconvincing brown-and-white crab lying
motionless in the dirt. A small hamsterlike creature with tufty ears extends a twitching nose out of its burrow and notices a single grimy toe visible through the hole in the sole of Salvestro’s shoe. Salvestro has winded himself, and somehow managed to get soil in his mouth, which tastes acidic and extremely gritty. Lacking for the moment the breath to spit it out, he swallows it. The hamsterlike creature retreats back into its burrow. The chaffinch realizes its mistake and loses interest. A lost soldier-ant carrying a piece of twig in its mandibles encounters a large and particularly confusing obstacle. Salvestro coughs. Earthquake? wonders the ant. It jettisons the twig. Starting with the toes, Salvestro begins to move his various limbs, checking each in turn for possible cuts and fractures, taking his time over this primarily because he is still winded and could not stand up if he tried, also because the last sounds of pursuit faded into silence several hours ago, and last because ever since that moment he has been hopelessly lost in the middle of a forest thousands of miles from home (whatever that is), and having no idea where he is at present, he sees no urgent reason to go somewhere else, where he will similarly not know where he is. Being found appears to entail being clubbed to death by a small army of shouting black men led by Usse’s brothers. A lynch mob. He seems to attract them.