by Edna O'Brien
*
The women returned very early the next morning as they had promised. When I told them what had happened they looked at each other and conferred and then the one who spoke English said I must come with them. It took only moments to leave, as our belongings were so few. Babby yelled for a wooden spoon that she had grown attached to and one of the women went back to get it.
BUTTERFLIES SCUDDING ABOUT, some across my face, others alighting on the stumps of horse dung on the ground. Two of the women had to hoist me by the elbows, up the steep hill towards the settlement. We had to sit a few times on the journey. It was a great distance, first through forest and then more open bush, with the sun boiling down on us. We avoided the villages.
Droves of children came running down in excitement, the littler ones almost naked, except for their thin vests. Mothers followed with still more children. At the very summit, I was put to sit on a stone. The floor was sandy and the beehive huts with their straw roofs and bamboo posts were the same sunny colour. An old woman came and sat by me. Her face contorted with pain as she kept gesturing, in order for me to know she had a toothache. Then a younger woman, possibly her daughter, appeared from one of the huts with two small bowls of milk, one for me and one for Babby. It was lukewarm and oversweet. The woman who rescued me told me that Madara was the name for milk and in my mind I called her that. I drank small sips, because I did not want to seem ungrateful. Babby was given hers from the thin lip of a calabash spoon. She was then carried around to be introduced to everybody. A few hens scraped uselessly in the sand and the elderly kept looking around vacantly.
Hordes of children surrounded me, still unsure of my presence. A little girl, who wore a glass earring, touched me, then scuttled off in terror. Within seconds she was back, her hands on my toes, pinching them hard.
I asked the Madara woman what was wrong and she said the little girl was afraid of me.
‘She thinks you are maybe a witch,’ she said smiling and the little girl, who guessed that we were saying something concerning her, stood with her hand on her hip, trying to decide what punishment she might next inflict on me. The whites of her eyes had the mildness of milk, but the pupils were darting and plotting.
I was certain that I was about to faint again. The three women brought me inside, the door so low that they had to stoop to edge in. The hut was cool and as they laid me down on a narrow bed, with a white mosquito net above it, I thought it the kindest moment I had lived in a long time. On a big dresser there were painted enamel pots with shiny lids. Small strips of red carpet were thrown over a sagging sofa. I guessed that this was the woman’s kitchen and also her bedroom and that she was about to give it up to me. She felt my forehead, then my pulse, and conferred with the others. She said I had fever and maybe a little bit of malaria, but that I must not worry. They had many remedies to make me better.
First I was brought to a washhouse and stood in a basin of water. Pails of water were poured over me. It was ice cold and made my teeth rattle. I was mortified at being naked, the fungus and mange of the forest upon me and my legs roped together in shame.
Back in the room, they gave me medicines. First it was a brown liquid that was viscous and tasted bitter. Then pink powders, which I had to swallow one at a time with a sip of water in between. They painted a paste all over my body. The three of them did it, with deft strokes and almost at once it began to harden. Then they wrapped me in cloths, layer upon layer, so that I was covered to my chin, and stiff like a mummy. I tried to talk, but I couldn’t.
‘You will have terrifying dreams … you will be sucked into them … but you will come back,’ my Madara said.
She told me not to be afraid because all the impurities would be drawn out, the fever would subside. She gave me a cowbell to ring, in case I got too frightened.
They tiptoed out.
My dreams, as she foresaw, were grotesque. I could see the militants, every single one of them, changing shape and size, mutating into creatures, half man, half beast. Third eyes spooled from their foreheads, their grins were lipless and their different beards floated on a thin, bloodied soup. I knew that in my dreams, these encounters, awful though they were, had to be lived out in order to exorcise them. I am running, running, but they have surrounded me and I am caught. Then one breaks loose from them and whispers in my ear, ‘I friend you.’ He squashes me into an empty gas cylinder and follows, so that he can ‘friend’ me, except there is no bottom to it and I crawl out onto upturned earth, alive with insects. A little girl pops up. She might be me, or she might be the little girl who followed me, half fascinated, half mischievous. She is gabbling away – ‘I left my hoe at the farm. I wish to have my ears pierced.’ ‘But your ears are pierced,’ I say and I remind her of the long glass earring that she is wearing. Then another voice interjects, ‘He did not declare his HIV status,’ and I think it must be one of the girls up at the swamp. I see again the butterflies, landing as they did, on the khaki-coloured nuggets of fresh horse dung, with warm steam rising up from it. Something gauze-like flitted across my throat. Perhaps it is one of the butterflies that I saw as they carried me up. Everything I have known and seen and lived is pushing its way into those dreams and there are moments when I want to ring the cowbell, but pride stops me. The dream goes on and on. I see a sign on a door that swings back and forth in the forest and reads ‘No Admittance’. Then I see my parents in the church and I run to them. They draw back from me, appalled, and are turned to stone. ‘What crime have I committed,’ I am asking, shouting, and brought awake by my own intemperate screaming. My Madara is by my bed, her hand on my forehead so reassuring. I ask her how long it has been.
‘A long time,’ she answers.
I am seeing with new eyes – the dresser full of painted pots with their shining lids. She lifts one lid to show me something. Inside it is a second pot that fits snugly into its appointed space and then more pots and still more, a family of pots contained within their primal mother. The cloths wrapped around me are wringing wet and so is my hair and she says it is a good sign, it means the potions have worked.
Babby is carried in to be placed in my arms, but she is more interested in the mosquito net than in me. Soon she is doing her goo-goo gurgles, her fingers agitating to be brought back out.
*
There is a certain place for me to sit. It is on a rock covered with a mat. A feathery weed of tenderest green separates the dwellings from the field beyond that is dotted with dark bushes and tall trees that stand alone. Every tree in its own slumberous empire. I am no longer afraid. There is so much activity around. Women sweeping and weaving, others washing clothes and wringing them out, still others carrying buckets of water up from the river. Many of the younger women are in the small gardens digging and hoeing. Without their gardens they would have nothing to vary their diets. But milk, as she says, is the mainstay of their lives; their cattle are everything to them. According to myth, their world was created from one huge drop of milk. Doondari, their God, came down from heaven and created stone, which led to iron, and then to fire, and fire created water, and water created air, and so the five elements were made for man to be created.
As herders they had difficulties. They were not wanted in the forest. They had friction with farmers who often insisted that the cattle destroyed their crops. It led to feuds and even to blows. Some of their young men, wild and passionate and so used to a nomadic way of life, sometimes lost their tempers and a young boy on impulse took a knife to a farmer, and harmed him. Luckily he was not killed. It resulted in the elders having to go to the court in the city, where they were not welcome and as a result had to pay enormous fines, which they could not easily afford. They had to sell some of their goats and also some sheep, because there was a saying among them – ‘If you kill my cow I kill you.’
Since then, the government were less willing to issue the permits for their certificates of occupancy. As she was telling me I felt ashamed at being a burden on them, but I was unable to say i
t. I could see that the cattle, the ones who had not gone with the herds, did not have much milk and also they needed spare milk to barter in the village for grain, dried fish, sugar and sometimes medicine.
The children are no longer pestering me. They play, and by her cries Babby yearns to be included. Their toys are all of clay and mostly dolls. They poke these figures with thin sticks, to make eyes and ears and nose and mouth. The boys look across and shrug. The boys have their own game. They run old tyres down the hill and have races at rolling them up. The little girl who feared me hangs around. Her mother tells her to stop staring and to bring me a flower. She runs off and comes back with the tiniest sprig of blossom, drops it on the ground and is gone again. The moment I pick it up the petals shed. Her mother says she is only ten, but already betrothed to a boy from a tribe in another village. She will marry in three or four years and they will obtain a piece of land and move away and start their own herd. They will not move too far away, because it is essential that they all keep together.
Someone whom I imagine to be their chief is being helped out from one of the larger huts. He walks on two sticks and is led across towards me. He is a tall man, a scion of tall men, and in his eyes, weak though they were, I see an unquenched pride. I want to thank him for allowing me to be there, except he has already launched into a recitation, which a young boy translates, as he knows it by heart. Before he sits, the old man points with one or other of his sticks to hallowed spots on the surrounding hills:
That is where my father is buried.
That is where my grandfather is buried.
That is where my great-grandfather is buried.
That is where all my ancestors live.
We will never give up this way of life.
Once the old man has sat down, the young boy, with vaunting pride, recounts a summary of their history. It is for my benefit:
We are nomads from North Africa and sub-Sahara. We had resided since the fifth century in these lands, the curse of Oba Egbeka was upon us but with God’s instrument, we prevailed. We prevailed against Hausa kings who were not following the teaching of the Prophet. They were imperfect Muslims. We launched a Jihad in 1804, under the banner of Usman dan Fodio.
*
My Madara and I have grown closer. I knew how busy she was and yet she made time, so that I would not be lonely. It was by the river, just the two of us and the sound from the river so happy and musical as it purled along until it had to clamber over a set of rocks, where it tumbled and left a foam of lace behind it. Bits of that foam followed down into the water with the lightness of feather and these feathers grouped into little islands of idleness.
For a while we were silent and yet I knew, or rather I guessed, that there was something she wanted to say to me. Even her voice was different, more confiding:
He was the tallest man I had ever seen. He stood inches above my father. The blue of his head cloth was a regal blue. He and my father were in deep discussion. Somehow I guessed that it was about me. I was mending and patching at the time, under the trees where I always went to do my needlework. He had not seen me, since it was forbidden, and yet he must have sighted me somewhere.
Afterwards, my father came alone to talk to me and I said, ‘I like that man,’ and my father asked did I mean yes and I answered, ‘YES,’ with an eagerness. My mother was also happy. It was time I married. She bought two new wrappers at the market and a bracelet made of coral beads. On the following evening, the head man from my future husband’s settlement came with three white heifers, in return for my hand.
The following morning I left home. Young girls walked me halfway until we met girls who had been sent to escort me. Everyone shook hands and parted. I never fully saw my husband’s face until I was alone with him. He delighted in every aspect of me. Earlier, an older woman, who had dressed my hair, told me that his previous wife had died young of fever, as there was no way of getting her to the hospital in time. They did not have transport and they did not have stretchers. He mourned her for the best part of a year.
The young men were not permitted to see me at first, but as soon as I was noticeably pregnant, I was allowed outside. Women schooled me about many things, taught me the necessity of patience and good temper. My children would be my life, just as for the men their riches were in their herd. I had four children in a short space of time, the last being Shehu, your little tormentor. But passion wanes, and when after a period a husband sees a beautiful young girl, who will bear beautiful children, he goes to her father to seek her as a wife. It is how it is. If I had said or done bad things, bad things would have resulted. If I had shown jealousy, I would have been punished for it. The elders would have told him to stop coming to me. If I had persisted with these bitter humours, I might have been sent back to my parents and that would be the most damning punishment of all.
Then very earnestly, and so that I would remember it, she said, I am happy wherever I am set down. I have my place on this beautiful earth, as everybody has.
*
Word came that the cattle and the men would be home by evening. A boy in torn clothes came running up the hill and no sooner had he spoken than he lay down, exhausted, his mission done. His teeth were very white and the grey-black slit on his face became sharply defined under the sun. It was a mark that every boy and every girl was given at the youngest age. It was done with a razor, then covered in charcoal which is what gave it a darkish hue. Some deemed it a mark of valour, and others a mark of beauty, saying every incision was different.
*
I heard the cattle long before I saw them. It was a sort of thudding, the rapid clomping of the hooves on ground as they moved across the vast plains. Then they came into view, hundreds of them, a ravishing patchwork of colour, white and brown and mottled, blending together in one flowing, moving mass. They had boomboxes around their necks and the music, even at a distance, was blaring and shrill. Their great horns forked towards the heavens, as if they were inscribing their homecoming to the sky. The excitement at the camp was infectious, everybody busying and Shehu running in different directions, willing the cattle and the men to hurry on. Somewhere, she had acquired a slide for her hair.
All day the preparations were hectic. There were pots of soup, simmering. They had been made from peppers and onions, with different leaves for flavouring. In the dairy, women were busy making cheese balls, a speciality which they knew the men loved. The older women were washed and given clean head ties. Young women took turns braiding each other’s hair and teasing one another. They let me sit among them. We could not communicate, and yet I was happy, content. Although I wanted to go home to my mother and our house, I was reluctant to leave. The place and the peaceful way of life had made me tranquil.
We lost the herd for a time when they had come on a valley that was flooded, and though they revolted at having to swim, they were made to do it, and boys who could not swim clung to the forking horns for dear life. Amidst a great hysteria with shouting and moaning and music they reappeared and were driven in a gallop across the road. They baulked at the trench – the same trench that I had been carried over – but then close to home, they cantered up the hill, boys chasing and coaxing them and calling them by their names that were identical to children’s names. The few that strayed had to be chastised and brought back and one dug her front legs into the ground, refusing to budge. Two boys got her up, then thwacked her, scolding her all the way, until they reached the hilltop where all the older men had come out to look at them and welcome them home. So carefully did they study them, feeling their bones and their bodies for thinness and making various enquiries of the herders. Then there was the ritual of milking. Certain cows were taken out from the group and the men milked them into ornamental calabashes, which the women took and ritually carried up the hill.
The men were fed first in a hut while the women waited outside. Then the women ate, and afterwards the men came out and sat on the ground, but as yet there was hardly any conversation among them.
Soon boys began to tell of their adventures and everyone listened intently. I could not understand the stories, but from their movements, with raised fists and jowl to jowl, I guessed it was about scrapes and tussles they had encountered in the six weeks they had been away.
Then a young boy who had been guarding the herd in the pens came in, holding something in his hands, and everyone went quiet. It was a newborn calf. There was jubilation. The youngest child was presented with it and her mother had to help her to hold it as the little calf trembled so much. The old men gathered around.
The shy messenger who had brought the news earlier in the day took a pipe from between folds of cloth and came forward to play. The notes, so soft and timorous it drew sweetness out of the grassy slopes all around and the cattle in the pens began to moan softly.
Once he had finished, he withdrew into the shadows, but the men were already jumping up, their arms swinging and the women answering with deep, avid chortles. Then they stole under the men’s arms and faced them, inviting them to dance. Two drummers had already settled themselves on stools and the music, so stirring, sent a summons across the valley, even to the revered places where the ancestors lay. Everybody danced. Children rubbed the sleep out of their eyes and sought out their mothers so that they could dance with them. The reserve I had seen earlier between men and women had gone. This was how they met. This was their way of expressing themselves to one another.
Then a young girl whom I had not seen before came running in. She wore a red wrapper and big metal hoops hung from her ears, her nostrils, her ankles and from her snakethin braids. She was from the next village and had heard the cattle come home. The women welcomed her and shook hands with her. Once she got her breath back, she joined the dance. She swirled and moved from group to group, like a girl in a trance and yet she did not seem to acknowledge any one of them. She danced for the dance itself. Her effect on them was so stunning that gradually they drew back and began to watch. Even the flute player came out of the shadows to admire her. He couldn’t not. The talkative young men went on their knees, moving nearer and nearer to her. They teased the shy man and dared him to dance opposite her. They kept goading him, pushing him in her direction, and finally, gathering his courage, he stood up and said, ‘I like your dancing.’ My Madara translated it for me. The girl did not respond but she had heard it.