The Witch Doctor's Wife (17 page)

At last Mamu Ugly Eyes removed the glass stick and held it up to the window, where she proceeded to squint at it as if it might suddenly change shape before her eyes. Finally she smiled.

“No fever. Perhaps it is just something you ate.”

“That is a relief,
mamu
. I was afraid it might be malaria. Still, I ask permission to return to my village.”

“Of course. I will send Protruding Navel to get Captain Jardin. He can drive you.”

“Oh no,
mamu
. It is not necessary, I assure you. I am not so sick that I cannot walk.”

“And I’m not so busy that I can’t walk with you.”

Cripple’s heart raced. It was hard enough not to draw attention to oneself when one was the size of child and waddled like a duck, but to be accompanied by a white woman—well, one may as well dance naked on the roof of the men’s palaver shed.

“No,
mamu
. I will walk by myself.”

“Nonsense. What if you collapse along the way? In my country we have a saying; don’t look a beast of burden accompanied by gifts in the mouth.”

“Forgive me, Mamu Ugly Eyes, but that saying is nonsense.”

“Hmm. Yes, perhaps it didn’t translate well. The point is, when someone offers you something, just accept it.”

“And if they offer you a snake?”

“Cripple, stalling will do you no good. I intend to walk you home, and there will be no more discussion about this.”

Unfortunately there was very little discussion of any kind on the walk up the hill. If she had to be seen with the woman, Cripple had hoped that at least they could converse about many things that she’d been wanting very much to know. For instance, what did foreign women do when they had their monthly bleeding? Did they also have a communal woman’s hut with a dirt floor, where they kept themselves secluded until their time was over? If not, what did they do about the blood?

And why was it they bound their breasts? Cripple had seen one of the devices used to hold the breasts in place; it had looked very uncomfortable. Did their men find this attractive? And why did they wear a garment like pants—but much shorter—under their dresses? An ignorant person might conclude that unless white women wrapped themselves tightly, they were in danger of breaking apart, like peeled bananas.

Cripple had many more such questions, but no sooner had they joined the main road than they were mobbed by village children. Dozens of them, and none of them afraid.

“Look! It is Mamu Ugly Eyes,” they shouted, and repeatedly, as if it were an anthem.

“
Mamu!
” Cripple was annoyed that she too must shout, or not be heard. “I will walk alone from here.”

“No, I forbid it.”

“You cannot forbid me,
mamu
.”

Cripple edged through the crowd of children, many of whom were taller than she. Wisely, the
mamu
did not try to follow. It was the first time Cripple could remember that she was not taunted.
In fact, no one paid her any attention, so focused were they on the exotic creature from America. What freedom there was in nonexistence. What joy!

But as she rounded the hill and could see the top, Cripple felt the happiness drain out of her, like the water from the
mamu
’s bathing tank.

F
landers had to hurry. Fortunately the OP was stupid enough to keep the key to his filing cabinet in his desk’s middle drawer. But you wouldn’t believe how jam-packed the filing cabinet drawers were; every time you opened one, files would spill out.

Fortune, however, had not deserted him. When he opened the third drawer, a familiar file literally landed on his feet. It was the same one that had been lying on the OP’s desk when the postmaster dropped by yesterday.

Flanders knew the file well—after all, he’d been the one to type the pages and pages from squiggly handwritten notes, ones that may as well have been written in Chinese, maybe even by a Chinese doctor. He’d had to bother his boss a million times to
help him figure out words, but even the OP had been unable to decipher some of the scribbles.

The gist of the report concerned a newly discovered deposit of gem-bearing gravel in a canyon about twenty kilometers away. As far as Flanders knew, no copies of the report had yet been sent to Brussels. This was an odd state of affairs, given that the home office had made it clear to Flanders that they were unhappy with profits. And yesterday they had made that clear to the OP with their aerogramme. Why didn’t the old fool send back a report detailing his new discovery? What was he waiting on?

If he was waiting on the new deposit to turn a profit, he was hanging himself. That certainly wasn’t going to happen in time to save his neck. First, he had to build a road. Then he had to build barracks for at least one hundred workers, and then—
mon Dieu!
It wasn’t that at all; the OP’s delayed response had nothing to do with the potential to increase production.

The OP was waiting to see the monstrous diamond that the Walloon postmaster had babbled about yesterday. Flanders had heard only snatches of the conversation, but it sounded like the wishful thinking of an ex-pat—and probably a drunk one—in a dead-end job.

He’d been warned about this type of man by the CEO. Congo Dreamers, they were called. They came in all stripes: some searched relentlessly for the fabled elephant graveyard that was supposedly littered with thousands of valuable tusks; others prospected for gold, some for uranium; and even a few were more concerned with fame than with fortune, and as such set their sights on locating the mythical Congo dinosaur. The last quest was really not as far-fetched as it sounded: there were still thousands of square miles of unexplored rain forest, and as late as 1901 the first European laid eyes on the okapi, a large mammal that looks like a cross between a zebra and a giraffe.

Flanders flipped open the file he now held on his hands.
Across the top of the report, the clueless OP had scrawled, “Possible major find—Dupree.” Just four words, but enough to prove that the man was both an idiot and a dreamer. How had such a slow-witted man made it this far in the corporate world? Perhaps he had something on the CEO. That would certainly explain why the CEO was taking his sweet time in giving the OP the ax. And, if indeed there was something to this theory, Flanders might rise to the top faster than he’d thought possible.

But not too fast. Africa was fascinating; there was still so much more to see, so much to learn, so much to love. The other whites at Belle Vue were cretins who didn’t give two francs about the local culture. They were like white pustules on the face of Africa.

Last night Flanders had lain awake for hours, listening to the village drums. They were obviously talking drums, given the varied rhythms coming from various parts of the village. He’d asked Monique what they meant, but she claimed not to know. These drums were different from the ones she’d grown up with—she said. In the morning he’d asked his houseboy, an
évolué
named Julian, what the drums were saying. Julian, however, had refused to tell him anything illuminating until he was given a ten-franc note.

“Muambi Ask Questions”—that was Flanders’s African name—“the drums speak of the day when this land will again be ours. They tell of the riches that will be ours at this time.”

“How will you get the riches?”

“We will kill you and take them,” Julian said, and despite his initial reluctance, he didn’t even bat an eyelash.

No doubt the other whites would have been horrified by Julian’s declaration, possibly even incensed, but not Flanders. If only he had more time. This evening he would ask Julian a slew of questions. Did they plan to kill all the whites? What about the mulattoes? Even the women and children? By what means?
Would there be the opportunity to negotiate first? And if so, before he had to leave, could he possibly visit the village—not as a white Belgian, but just as an interested man? So many questions that even Monique couldn’t answer.

Flanders froze as he felt the hot breath on his neck, even before he heard the voice. “Flanders!” the OP roared.

What was Their Death to do once they reached the village? Baby Boy couldn’t talk, so he couldn’t very well tell Monsieur Dupree where he’d found the stone. After all, you can’t get pineapple juice out of a manioc tuber, no matter how hard you squeezed. As for Second Wife, she was a good mother and a hard worker, but she had never been one for details.

Most probably the stone had come from the manioc field, and it was possible that the older children, in whose care Baby Boy had been entrusted, might remember where they were when he first put the stone in his mouth. One of them might even have found it and given to the baby. Their Death had not questioned the children, because children cannot be trusted with secrets. In no time at all, word would have spread through the village like a savanna fire, and people would have dug up their family compounds with
lukasu
, the short-handled weeding hoes.

But neither can most adults keep a secret. If M. Dupree had been able to keep a secret, Their Death would not be seated beside him in an automobile, wondering what to do next. On one hand, it was a relief to have a partner, especially a white man who was knowledgeable in the ways of the world. Yet, as much as Their Death liked his employer—who was now his partner in the diamond business—he knew that ultimately it all boiled down to race.

If they were caught and accused of stealing, M. Dupree could point the finger at Their Death and say that it was all his fault.
There was nothing Their Death could say to exonerate himself. No one in authority would believe a black man over a white. Absolutely no one.

That meant Their Death had to be as clever as a jackal, which, although it can hunt small animals on its own, prefers to sneak food away from other, larger, predators.

Heilewid felt strangely rejuvenated by the morning chill. For the first time since her twin sister’s tragic death she enjoyed the act of waking up, drowsing off, and waking up again. But it was a guilty pleasure, one that she would stop when she was awake enough to attend to her morning needs.

Geete would also have reveled in a day like today. She would have seized it with both hands and not let go until she was spent with joyous exhaustion. And had things somehow been reversed, Geete would have grieved as hard as anyone, although at the earliest opportunity, she would have weaned herself from the addiction of anguish and gotten on with her life. But that was Geete. That was part of who she was. That wasn’t Heilewid.

Heilewid, as everyone in Belle Vue knew all too well, was weak. Heilewid didn’t have the strength of character to recover from grief. Heilewid had folded up, as some blossoms do at night, and refused to open again in the morning. Heilewid was a drunk who ignored her husband and lay comatose beside a swimming pool that she lacked the energy to enter.

Today was different; today she had energy. The cold had brought life back into her. But it was only a pilot light that had been rekindled; there would be no full-blown flames—God, how awful the pain must have been! The terror.

Heilewid splashed water on her face. Again. And again, as if to douse the images in her mind. It was constantly like this. Ordinary thoughts turned into memories of tragedy. Pain. Flames.
Screams. Pain. It was never going to end. Not unless—well, the thoughts of it had been with her all along, but she’d not had the strength. Not until today.

Today. Heilewid smiled at her dripping face in the bathroom mirror. It was Geete’s smile too. So was the long blond hair that framed her face. And that’s how she would remember Geete, this, her last day on earth. She turned away from the mirror and dressed quickly before other thoughts eroded her resolve.

B
ut Muambi, the village is across the river.”

The postmaster inhaled through clenched teeth. “Yes, but Senhor Nunez lives down this road. Perhaps his wife knows something—she’s got to know something. Be in on it somehow.”

“Yes, certainly,” Their Death said.

In truth, women always knew what their men were doing, although often they pretended not to. It was the old women in the tribe who one went to for knowledge, not the men. Women saw everything, and they thought about everything. The result was wisdom. For men, this was a frightening state of affairs, which is why they insisted on holding on to power.

But there was among the Bajembe tribe a woman chief. A queen. She was said to be very powerful, and the men listened to her. This was, of course, the exception. But if the Baluba were ever to have a queen, Cripple would make an excellent candidate. She would rule with a firm hand, dispense mercy when appropriate, and always be just. If only Cripple…

“Their Death, you haven’t heard a word I said!”

“
Oui, monsieur
. For that I apologize.”

“Don’t apologize. Just come in with me.”

“Into the
house
?”

“Of course the house, you imbecile.”

“
Oui
, monsieur, but I—I—”

“Are an African? Come to think of it, I have noticed that before.”

Their Death laughed nervously. Contrary to what most people thought, the white man did possess a sense of humor. It was just difficult to recognize. This, however, was clearly an example.

“Monsieur Dupree, perhaps Madame Nunez will object to my presence.”

The postmaster knocked loudly on the front door. “Let her object. What can she do about it? Now that her husband is a thief, and on the run, she will be shipped back to Portugal on the next plane. You have my word on that. And by the way, when speaking to her, you should refer to her as senhora, not madame. Otherwise that Latin temperament—on second thought, never mind. Her objections no longer matter.”

The door was opened by an
évolué
in a starched white uniform.
“Bonjour, monsieur.”

“
Bonjour
, Francois Joseph. We have come to see Senhora Nunez. Is she in?”

“Just a minute, sir.”

For Their Death the minutes stretched into eternity. While they waited he studied the details of the stone porch: the heavy
wooden rafters, the corrugated roofing, the cracked mortar that held the stone floor together, the scarlet bougainvillea that spilled from a trellis and engulfed the railing on one side. It was odd that the French language contained numerous words for red. In Tshiluba there was just
kunze
, which sufficed for yellow, brown, red, even purple.

Looking slightly deflated, the
évolué
returned. “She says to come in.”

Their Death felt the postmaster gently push him. “
Après vous
.”

The servant’s eyes widened. “No, no.
You
may come in, sir, but not the other.”

“The
other?
”

“
Oui
, the tribesman.”

“And which tribe would that be?”

“Monsieur, judging by his primitive features, I would guess that he is a Mupende.”

“I am a Muluba,” Their Death said, his pulse racing in anger. “And so are you.”

“Perhaps. But I am civilized, as you can see.”

Speaking in their mother tongue, Their Death responded immediately. “Yes, I can see that you have become the white man’s monkey. When our day of independence arrives, where will you go then? To Belgium with your masters? Oh, forgive me, I have forgotten. In your case it would be Portugal.”

The muscles in Francois Joseph’s jaw twitched. “You will be sorry, Their Death. And you will not need to wait until Independence Day to get what you deserve. Now come with me.”

Today the colors were brighter. The edges of leaves were crisp, so well defined that Heilewid could have counted every emerald leaf on every mango tree, and every pea-green leaf on every jacaranda tree, and every flower on every sprawling mass of purple bougain
villea—except that bougainvillea flowers weren’t flowers at all, but modified leaf bracts. Nevertheless, she could have counted them as well—
if
she’d had the time.

Today odors were especially intense. From somewhere nearby, or perhaps even far away, came the overpowering scent of a gardenia bush in bloom. Even the dust had an odor today; like chalk powder with a hint of your grandmother’s bath salts. Not too unpleasant, really. And what was that strange smell? Perhaps carrion? Belgian men were fond of running down jackals at night (when the jackals stared dumbly into headlights) and leaving them to rot in the elephant grass at the side of the road. Sometimes they left the carcasses right in the road.

Belle Vue must be the only town in the world that had a sign that read, J
ACKAL CARCASSES MAY NOT BE DEPOSITED CLOSER THAN THREE METERS FROM THE ROADWAY
. F
AILURE TO COMPLY WITH THIS RULE COULD RESULT IN A STIFF FINE
. How stiff? As stiff as a tumbler of Irish whiskey—straight up. The OP was far too genial, so that a round of drinks at the club had been known to soften just about every stiff fine.

Oh, the sounds! Birdsong had never been so sweet. And the noises of the village across the river; the happy shouts of children at play, the odd timing of a rooster, the chatter of women at their chores. How was it possible to hear these sounds above the roar of the falls? Well, today Heilewid could. That’s all that mattered.

Today Heilewid cut through yards and gardens, rather than follow the roundabout boulevard. Boulevard! Ha! Only an egomaniac like the OP would built a dirt road in the Congo and declare it a boulevard. That was like christening your bathwater, then calling it Lake Heilewid. Never mind, that was his foolishness.

But the Kasai River was genuinely a river, and the Belle Vue Falls were certainly a falls. Of course the OP had no part in naming them. The amount of water that surged over the rock
lip of the precipice was staggering when you heard the numbers, but then was quickly forgotten, because who remembers numbers anyway?

The important thing, the compelling thing, to remember is that the Kasai River poured into the Congo River, which, in turn, emptied into the Atlantic Ocean. Eventually it mixed with the salty blue waters of the South Atlantic, and they mixed with the North Atlantic, and they lapped against the coast of Belgium, where Heilewid and Geete had spent their summers with their grandparents in a rented chalet. So in a sense, if you stuck your big toe into the Kasai River, you were also touching Belgium—and the past.

Were both Africans and whites staring at Heilewid as she walked across the bridge? Did they stare as, halfway up the hill, she veered from the main road? Did they watch as she followed a gravel lane to the entrance of the white cemetery? Did they observe her pass between the tallest pair of whitewashed pillars, the ones that were topped with crudely molded plaster cherubs?

So what? Let them stare. What harm could stares do? Perhaps plenty, if you were a young German soldier, and the Dutch stared at your crotch, which is what the Dutch did to unnerve their Nazi occupiers. But you had to be alive in order to be affected by people staring at you. At least alive enough to care.

Heilewid knelt on the carpet of fallen leaves that blanketed Geete’s grave. There was supposed to be a caretaker, one whose primary task was to sweep clean the concrete slabs that kept the European dead from being exhumed and robbed by needy villagers. The caretaker, however, was afraid to step foot in the cemetery ever since he’d been accosted by the ghost of a Belgian old-timer, who—to hear the groundskeeper tell it—had beaten him about the head and shoulders with a length of hippo hide. He had the scars to prove it.

In the end it didn’t matter if the cemetery was tidy or not. Or
even overgrown. The dead had moved on—well, most of them. Geete was most certainly not here. Maybe never even had been. An African had been killed in the fire as well, but the charred lump buried beneath the concrete slab might just as well have been the remains of an antelope. Having a marker, a place to focus one’s thoughts, that’s what was important.

“This time I’m not going to say good-bye,” Heilewid said in Flemish, her mother tongue. “This time it’s more like hello.”

She stood, brushed the leaves from her skirt, and glanced around. Over there, by the ostentatious monument erected by a grief-stricken government official whose wife and two children had all died from malaria, was a path that led through some bushes before joining the road to Luluaburg, The intersection was above the village, on the crest of the hill, and from it one could see in all directions. To the east was savanna, to the north forest, to south scrubland, and to west, across the mighty Kasai River, was the town of Belle Vue, nestled in its mango and jacaranda trees. From up there, Heilewid knew from past experience, she could even pick out her own house.

The path was a shortcut between the village, where the caretaker lived, and the cemetery. Now that the current
mulami
was afraid to do his job, elephant grass was reclaiming the trail with a vengeance. For Heilewid the sharp blades that whipped her arms and the exposed parts of her legs were more fascinating than aggravating. See how the shallow cuts on her arms drew fine streaks of blood, too fine to form droplets, so that the blood dried in threadlike lines? And the flies! How quickly they found her blood.

Geete’s blood too. When they were nine or ten—yes, it was their tenth birthday—they’d received a breeding pair of Flemish giants as a gift. Of course these were a breed of rabbits, not exceptionally large humans. Soon after this the twins sneaked into the garden of an abandoned house on their street to look for wild
greens for their new pets. The children had been told many times by their parents to stay away from the property, but Heilewid could talk Geete into doing anything. Before they could gather even one small apronful of mustard leaves, Geete tripped on a stone, gashing her forehead open on a brick. The wound was not serious—requiring just two clamps to close—but it bled profusely. The flies appeared almost instantaneously then as well.

When asked for her version of the story, Geete immediately took full responsibility, claiming it had been her idea, and that she’d been acting silly. She’d deserved to fall. That’s the way Geete was: quick of mind, and expansive of heart. Despite having just come from the doctor’s office with metal in her head, Geete was sent to bed without any supper, and was made to wash dishes by herself for a week. But Geete was always like that, always willing to take the fall for her twin.

So what would Geete think of Heilewid’s plans, were she still alive? No doubt she’d disapprove. She might even try to stop her. But ultimately she would understand. She always did.

“And now the path has joined up with the road,” Heilewid said aloud, still in Flemish. “You might recognize the place where we are now; you spent almost an entire roll of film trying to capture this view. To the right is the savanna where you—uh—” She couldn’t utter the words needed to finish her thought. “To the left is—oh, my God! I can’t believe what I’m seeing. Thank you, Geete, for answering my prayer.”