The Pop’s Rhinoceros

by Lawrance Norflok

  “Whhhth?”

  “He is praying,” said Salvestro, “and does not wish to be disturbed.”

  A waist-high conical volcano coughed thin blue plumes of smoke out of its top. The damp sods enclosing its sides hissed, and twists of steam peeled off the turf. Within, smoldering wood crackled when the fire reached the knots in the logs. The turf was to keep the air out, and keeping the air out meant the wood burned slowly, and burning the wood slowly made charcoal. Apart from watching it, there was very little to do: adding an extra sod of turf when the smoke escaped through the sides and giving it an aerating poke with a stick when the smoke began to thin. The fire must not burn too freely. The fire must not go out. Making charcoal bored him.

  The boy poked listlessly with his stick, a fire-blackened pole of iroko-wood longer than himself. He added a sod of turf. He listened to the muffled hiss and fizz deep inside the cone. It would be dark soon. He would pile on the remaining sods and return to the old man’s compound. Nothing grew in the shade of the crabwood trees that ringed the clearing except ground-creepers that snaked and slithered downhill, presumably in search of water. The ground fell away and formed a cut through which ran a stream. The old man’s place was on the other side, outside the village proper. Earlier he had chased off a chimpanzee. Now a wood owl hooted. It was intended that he learn bronze-casting, and the old man was supposed to teach him. So far he had only made charcoal.

  He gave the sods a poke, then dawdled around the edge of the clearing. His feet crunched down on the leathery leaves of the ground-creeper. His pole trailed behind him. The sky was a bowl of deepening blue fringed by the ragged canopy of the trees. The village rested in a broad-bottomed defile defined by five steep-sided hills. It was rather longer than it was wide, a place of shade and shadows even in daylight. There was a ju-ju on the ridge above and others to either side of it: a protective ring to warn off intruders, though there never were intruders. Only Nri-people would dare to enter Nri. The old man’s place had a mud wall around it that looked as though it would collapse with one good kick. No one had ever bothered him, as far as he knew. The boy thought about creeping up and pulling down the crumbling palisade. The mmo-men did that if someone misbehaved, and he would join the mmo-men when he was older. That would show him. He looked up again and saw the quarter-moon hanging far above him. The fire hissed and smoked: a squat, grumpy little charcoal-god. It was time to pile on the rest of the sods and go home. He did not like making charcoal. He did not like the old man, either.

  Below the clearing, the stream rushed between several very large cotton-wood trees. The ground curved down steeply for the last few feet on either side, but if you took a running jump, you could clear the water and scramble up the other side without wetting your feet. After that the ground leveled off, and then there were some stands of coco-palms that belonged to Iguedo. The old man’s place was somewhere behind them—“somewhere” because, try as he might, he could never quite fix the location. There was a long-abandoned termite-mound and some scrubby bushes with long purplish leaves, then some more trees. … It was back there somewhere, though a “somewhere” he never had any difficulty finding. The old man’s whiny croak scraped his ears at a hundred paces, and his cackling was even worse. Like a hornbill having its feathers pulled out. There it was now, meaning Iguedo was inside, meaning supper. He pushed forward through the undergrowth.

  The door to the compound was a sagging assemblage of sticks bound together with raffia that stood permanently half-open. Iguedo was boiling yam over the fire in the center of the courtyard. He could smell the sharpness boiling away as the old woman pounded the yam to a mash.

  “Yeh, the boy’s back!” she called out as he slid reluctantly past the ramshackle door. An incoherent grunt sounded from the hut, then the old man appeared in the doorway: a bag of twigs with skin hanging off the elbows and a thatch of white hair on top. He was drunk again, standing there bent forward at the waist in an effort to squint through the gloom. At least he behaved as though he were drunk. The boy had yet to see him actually drinking, but there were wine-jars behind the heap of clutter that the old man called his tools. He gestured impatiently for the boy to come inside. He looked stiff-legged when he walked, yet the boy had seen him leap across the stream with two bundles of charcoal over his shoulder, then scramble up the other side like a billy-goat. He was a spry, lean, sinewy, old man.

  “You think Iguedo’s going to eat it all without you, eh? An old stick like her?” said the old man. “Stop looking in the pot and come in here.”

  Iguedo looked up and belched. The old man laughed.

  There was a small mound of wet clay sitting under the old man’s bench. Two palm-oil lamps flickered and smoked. The old man clapped him on the back and pointed at the object on the bench.

  “What do you think of that, boy?”

  The old man appeared to take great delight in pointing out his variously real and imagined defects. Thus his chest was hollow as the inside of a calabash, his legs bandy as a baboon’s, his feet slow as tortoises—and with considerably less cunning. His farts were less sonorous than a fruit-pigeon’s, and his penis might be taken for a rat’s tail. Such remarks were doled out with only the old man’s cackle to sweeten them. Yesterday he had observed that the boy walked as though he had a snake stuck up his arse, then laughed uproariously at his own wit. It was all very amusing. He was long and thin, but no more so than any of the other boys. He walked normally and at a normal speed. His penis was larger than a rat’s tail. But the dried-up old man would have few pleasures indeed if insulting himself were denied him, the boy reasoned, and so, faced with the indicated object, he decided neither to give the monkey-faced cackler a good clout about the ear (his first impulse) nor fill it with goat-dung (his second impulse), but to bear such insults with a lofty fortitude and treat them with the contempt they deserved. This latest was obscurer than usual but nevertheless of a piece with all the others. He took one look at the thing, restrained himself from dashing it to the ground or throwing it at the old man, but simply curled his lip into an unimpressed sneer and said, “So?”

  It was a carefully modeled clay penis, at least eight inches long, standing upright on its base with a shaft, a head, and a fat vein winding up its side like a half-submerged python.

  “So? What do you mean, ‘So?’What do you think of it, boy?”

  “Nothing.”

  Iguedo walked in, took one look at the thing, and began hooting with laughter.

  “What’s this, then, old man?” she gasped between guffaws. “Your eyes going the same way your balls did?” She picked up the penis and began waving it around. “You make this to keep me company, old man?”

  The old man was cackling away as she jabbed it at him. “Careful,” he protested. “It’s not … it’s not …” He couldn’t get it out.

  “It’s not hard yet? That what you want to say?” It set her off again. “Not hard yet. Oh dear, it hasn’t been hard since Eri’s time.”

  They both collapsed, laughing too hard to stand now. The boy looked down at them. It was rather disgusting, two old people behaving in such a manner. As though they were drunk. They might as well roll around naked together right there in front of him. Something like this seemed to happen every night. He stood there wondering if it would not be better just to leave, but gradually the two of them calmed down, their laughter and ribaldry turning into snorts and snuffles, grunts and groans. The old man rolled his eyes.

  “He doesn’t approve of us, Iguedo. Look at him looking down at us, eh?”

  “Who could approve of you, old man?” she retorted, getting up to bring in the food.

  They ate sitting down on raffia mats, the old man shoveling handfuls of yam into his mouth and complaining about its bitterness as usual.

  “You’ve got a thousand years of monkey-dung in your mouth, you lazy old pig,” Iguedo barked back, “that’s why it tastes bitter. Why not wash your mouth out?”

  The old man gathered a ball of mashe
d yam in his mouth and spat it out the door.

  “Anyway, you’ll be cooking for yourself tomorrow, if you can manage that without poisoning yourself, so eat what you like and do your complaining on your own.”

  The old man stared at her. “Cooking? Me?”

  “Going to Onitsha,” Iguedo said shortly.

  The boy ate steadily, looking at the two of them as little as possible. They were going to have a fight again, he thought, so he stared at his food, chewed, swallowed, and did not look up. Most of the men were at Onitsha. There was a meeting there that had something to do with the Onye-ocha—the White-men— whom everyone had been talking about and no one had seen. If he had joined the mmo-men, then he would be in Onitsha, too, discussing what to do with the White-men, although in the privacy of his own thoughts he still muddled them up with lepers because people discussed both only in whispers and the words for both sounded almost the same. Instead he was here, idling his life away over a charcoal fire, listening to an old man bellyaching.

  “What do they want with a scrawny old woman in Onitsha?” the old man protested. “Why are you going over there?” A whine had entered his voice.

  Iguedo spoke more curtly than before.

  “Usse’s back.”

  The boy’s head came up in surprise.

  “Ooh, look at his ears prick up!” hooted the old man. “You fancy a little bit of her, do you, boy? Hmm? You’d better watch out with that one else she bites your little balls off!” He nudged the boy, which made him scowl.

  “Someone bit yours off years ago,” Iguedo snapped at him. “They were rotting there anyway, you hadn’t used them in so long.”

  “That must be why your breath is so bad”—the old man laughed—” since you were sucking them as soon as you could reach.” He farted loudly.

  Iguedo glared at him for a second, then reached over and calmly emptied the contents of her bowl into his lap. The boy looked from one to the other, certain that this time they would come to blows. The old man looked down at the steaming mess. Then he looked at Iguedo. Iguedo looked back at him. He scooped up a handful of sludge, inspected it, dropped it from one hand into the other, and deposited it in his mouth. He chewed and grinned.

  “Stupid old man,” said Iguedo.

  All three ate on in silence.

  “I thought Usse was dead,” said the boy after a decent interval.

  Iguedo shook her head. “Ijaw men found her down by the coast.”

  The old man broke in again then, prattling, taunting him, winking as though he had confided some great passion. He ignored it as best he could, still eating, remembering how Anayamati’s rather fearsome daughter would stalk about the village in sullen silence or fight her brothers until all three were bloody-nosed. He and his friends had been scared of Usse. They were little boys, and she was the daughter of the Eze-Nri. Then, one day, she had walked out of the village and never come back, and their mothers had started scolding them with her example, not to go here and not to go there because “that’s what Usse did and you know what happened to her. …”

  But really no one knew anything at all. “Usse” was like the boy in the story who would not hoe his mother’s oil-palm patch, ran off into the forest, grew a tail, and was changed into a monkey. What happened to him? the boy wondered. He never came back. And Usse had not left because she would not hoe, or draw water, or chop wood, or even make charcoal. She had disappeared because of the White-men. And now she was coming back again. For the same reason, perhaps, or perhaps for her father, who had been trapped in his dreaming for years. … Or something else entirely. No one ever knew what she thought about, the Eze-Ada.

  Iguedo began scraping out the pot. The old man patted his stomach and let a series of soft belches escape into the room.

  “Well, we’ll be eating adu and drinking pit-water tomorrow,” he grumbled to himself. Then he addressed the boy. “How tall is your charcoal pile now? Tall as you?”

  He shook his head. The charcoal was heaped in a corner of the courtyard. The old man knew very well how big it was. If today’s labors produced the usual two bundles, then, he estimated, the current pile would top his head. And that would mean the end of charcoal-burning, and that might mean he could go to Onitsha, a place he had never been before. He had never been anywhere except the village.

  The old man got up and went to the back wall where a lot of sacks hung suspended over stacks of wooden trays that looked like badly made chi-shrines with their handles and little compartments. Suddenly he turned and tossed a large white rock across the room. The boy ducked and it thumped on the floor in front of him. The old man was trying to kill him now?

  “Beeswax,” he said, walking back with the empty sack. “You want to make this instead of charcoal?”

  The boy glared up at him.

  “Calm down, calm down. With old bare-bones here out of the way we can get down to work in peace. That wax, pick it up—go on—that’s for the model. You’ll get the trick of it. And this”—he picked up the clay phallus—“will be inside it, just like this”—he moved as though to open his wrap—“will be inside old Iguedo. Eh, Iguedo?” He started cackling, louder and louder, and Iguedo started shrieking, though whether in outrage or happy surprise was far from clear. “Eh, Iguedo? Heh heh heh heh …”

  The boy dropped the wax and seized his chance to stalk out. They were crude and stupid. But tomorrow, he thought, tomorrow he would learn bronzecasting. Unless the old man was lying.

  “Heh, heh, heh …”

  “Go outside and use your hand.”

  “What? Beat on my belly when I have a drum? Heh, heh, heh …”

  The sounds from inside the hut grew more raucous, then gradually subsided. A low chuckle might have been either of them. A few grunts followed. He would not listen to them. Usse was the one they all had wanted and whom none had dared to approach. He reached tentatively down to his groin, but at that moment a guttural wail started up in the hut, a breathy growl that sounded as though it began deep in the stomach, then rose up the body, and erupted finally through the nose as a high-pitched squeak: “Urgh … reee! Eurgh … reee! Eeyare … reee! Aer … reee!”

  It was Iguedo’s voice. He tried to shut it out, but then the old man started grunting along with her, perhaps even trying to drown her out himself, for his noise was at least as loud. He recalled Usse’s face, but all that came to mind were her ichi-scars. She would look different now in any case, he reflected. He reached down to his groin again. He had gone soft.

  Her hair had been braided in locks that shot out of her head in all directions, then fell about her face like the stems of a fleshy carnivorous plant, stiff and dyed red with cam-wood. Dark blue welled in her ichi-marks where uli-berries had been rubbed into the scars. She had chewed them, too, darkening the inside of her mouth until her teeth flashed white as ivory when she spoke. Her brothers stood behind her, impassive and unsmiling.

  “Come. We go now.”

  Salvestro, Bernardo, and Diego variously concealed their shock at her transformation. She did not appear of this place, or anywhere, for that matter. They trooped down to a large pirogue manned with nervous-seeming paddlers who bobbed their heads at her approach. Soon they were cutting through the water, the paddles slicing down to pull them forward, then stilled and dripping in the hands of the men, then stabbing down again, a dozen blades and a dozen wounds a second in the unprotesting liquid that healed itself effortlessly behind them.

  Usse watched the first sandbanks appearing, low humps of gritty mud exposed by the River’s falling flood. The land farther upriver sent down its flotsam, which beached itself upon them: broken branches, rafts of river weed, drowned livestock that the crocodiles would tear up and lodge in grim stores beneath the surface. The voices in the River were all jumbled and unlimbed. The gaws of Gao a few weeks upstream threw their gods into the flood each season, and they were in there now, damaged, discarded, powerless down here. She paid them no attention: Baana, Gangikoy, Moussa, Mama Kyria the leper.
The White-men sat forward of her, placed there to keep them away from the paddlers, who feared their touch but were too scared to tell her directly. All around them was the slow churn of the River, a vast slack muscle whose mischievous twitches reminded her that it might—if it chose—sweep all before it in a single wave, splintering forests, smashing mountains, turning the land back to its original mud. Where would Eri be then? Nothing kept this from happening, unless Nri. The White-men were a warning. Namoke had understood that and had said nothing. It was she who had dived into the blinding water, let it wrench and pummel her as it pleased. She undrowned herself and came back; the River’s voice drummed in her ears, a voice she alone had dared to hear. She was painted and armored, moving her own mass against the current.

  Behind her, her brothers talked obliquely amongst themselves of the meeting at Onitsha, using odd turns of phrase and obscure proverbs so that the village men would not understand. They were excited and anxious; she heard that much in their voices. Last night she had hardly slept, so insistent were they to hear of her time with the White-men, all three of them wide-eyed, asking after their shrines (vast and built of stone, but filthy), their priests (richly robed and powerful as their own), their kings (of whom she knew nothing). Were they a warrior-people, or a smithing-people, or a farming-people? They were all of these, all mixed together with hardly an idea of any of them. They lived in huge cities, almost as huge as that of the Bini, and their houses were built of stone, but— again—quite filthy with dogs wandering in and out of them and fouling the floors. They washed only rarely. She did not mention Fiametta’s fondness for baths. Their food was very rich and stank. The winters were ten times colder than harmattan time, but they could not follow her description of snow. She caught them looking at one another in disbelief, and then she realized that they had not changed at all. She spat on the floor in front of them, her three foolish brothers. There had been no time to ask what was happening at Onitsha. The village women had braided her hair, their nervous fingers tugging and pulling out the strands, then rubbing in the thick cam-wood dye. She was clearheaded now, strangely weightless. She had not sought her father’s dreaming spirit, and if it had sought her, it had not found her. She had told her brothers the stories they wanted to hear, and she had told them of the men sitting in front of her now. They had nodded in the manner of wise old men, all three together.