The Pop’s Rhinoceros

by Lawrance Norflok

  “Ow!”

  Except Salvestro. Hat lost, toes stubbed, legs scratched, dirt in his mouth, hole in his shoe, ragged, sweaty, hungry Salvestro as yet looks like nothing else in the forest. There was a time—a long time ago and a long way away—when he would have been at home here. The trees and bushes, thickets of cedar-scrub and thorn-breaks, evoke another forest, damper and colder but still recognizable in this monstrous and exaggerated version. Can he sink back into that? Can this forest in some sense be that one? He’s dirty and disheveled, his hair, wild and clotted with burrs. If he could just forget how to speak again, blend and merge with the little rustles and crashings, the whooshes and whirrs, the creaks and croaks and coughs, lose himself in this forest as though it were that one … Can he go back to what he was then? What exactly was he running from a few hours ago, when all three of them charged into the forest, split up to confuse their pursuers, and crashed forward with not a whither or whence between them? Salvestro, fleeing the scene of the crime yet again with the righteous mob in full cry after the thief who stole himself away from under their very noses. He cannot go back, can he?

  No, it’s either too far or not far enough. If he’s going back anywhere, it’s not to the forest. Not that one and not this one, either. He owes himself elsewhere and to different creditors. …

  Anyway, the ant bites Salvestro, and Salvestro squishes the ant. Then, the afternoon waning, the cool interior of the forest growing even shadier, he wanders among the giant trunks or clambers over their finlike buttresses, kicks his way through banks of ferns and drifts of bright yellow cotton-plants, clambers up and down little ravines through which tiny creeks splosh and gurgle, looks up to see the branchwork high above festooned with lilac convulvulus and webbed with woody lianas, follows the little bare-earth paths that lead in all directions to junction from which more little paths set out, not really going anywhere as far as he is aware, just moving through the forest, sniffing and misidentifying the fleeting odors of earth, tree mold, pig dung, fungal spoors, wild garlic, sour-sweet ground peppers, the ground rising in a long shallow slope that he seems to have been climbing for eternity, then leveling off, and some new scent comes curling through the trees, sharpish, familiar, filtering through the forest to fill his twitching curious nostrils with. … Wood-smoke.

  The scent trail twists and turns, leading Salvestro by the nose around a copse of flowering bushes twice the height of himself. He creeps and advances, carries on sniffing. Then he stops.

  Ten thousand dangling men hang in the branches of the ofo-tree. Their arms and legs and heads and trunks are sticks joined together by nodes and swollen boles approximating elbows, knees, ankles, knobbly shoulders, groins, the body’s junctions and twiggy terminals. Corpses of the fallen lie in heaps around the moderate trunk. Small black flowers grow sparsely amongst the branchlets. Ofo-trees bleed when cut, but no one cuts them, or touches them at all, or even approaches the groves where they grow.

  But Salvestro does not notice the ofo-trees. A long plump lizard is roasting over a cooking fire attended by an ancient woman, a lively bag of skin and bones who hops about prodding and clucking, alternating between the lizard over the fire and, sitting on the ground, two men who seem to be doing nothing at all except staring blankly into the flames. It is almost completely dark now, but the fire casts an adequate light over the two men’s faces. He walks forward, toward the old woman, the lizard, and his motionless companions. The lizard smells surprisingly good. Red-faced from the fire, Bernardo and Diego both look rather glum. No doubt his reappearance will cheer them up, thinks Salvestro.

  Afterward he came to believe that it began with the wax. Of course it really began much earlier than that, but for him it began with a lump of off-white wax. The old man chipped at it until he had two pieces the size of his fists. They looked yellow in the lamplight, then red when he carried them nearer the firelight, and in the melting-bowl they took on the color of the earthenware, which was black as soot. He peered in from above and saw his own face staring back at him.

  “Such a pretty boy,” cawed the old man. “We need a bucket of water now. Go admire yourself in that.”

  The boy waited for the usual accompanying cackle, but this time it did not come. The old man had grown quieter and less annoying in the past few days, though still annoying enough. His mockery had become halfhearted, almost sullen. Without Iguedo he had no one to play to; perhaps that was the reason. Or perhaps it was because they would soon begin casting, for unlike wood, or clay, or wax, bronze lasted forever, so casting was a serious matter. The Eze-Nri could find one another when they finished their dreaming, first to last, Eri to their own Anayamati. Their mmuo never died, but their bodies did. They had to shed them to end their dreaming, so the bronze-casters made an image for Nri-people to remember them by. The Eze-Nri carried his ancestors’ memories in his head and their bodies in a piece of bronze so they would not be lost in that way, either. Bodies were important, too.

  He walked beneath the canopy of the trees, swinging the bucket by its handle. The leaves on the bushes looked black instead of purple. It was almost dark. He gave the termite mound a good clout. Anayamati’s sprawling compound was several hundred paces downstream from here, though no one had entered it in three years or more and the council of the Nzemabua met in Namoke’s place. He had always thought that the Eze-Nri lived at the very back of the village. He was in there now, waiting for Usse to come. Drawing the water, he looked back through Iguedo’s coco-palms. Beyond the termite mound the bushes and trees appeared as an impenetrable thicket, although the passage through them was quite easy. Perhaps that was why he had never known of the old man’s compound before his strange apprenticeship had begun, although the deceptive thicket did not explain how he invariably arrived at the ramshackle door no matter what path he took. Bronze-casters were secretive and odd. It was well-known.

  “Fenenu.”

  He looked up, startled as much by the use of his name as by the sudden appearance of Iguedo. She was standing by the edge of the coco-palms.

  “For the wax?” she asked as he drew nearer. The heavy bucket pulled him sideways with each step. He nodded. They began to walk in silence between the enormous trunks of the cottonwoods.

  After a while, his curiosity overcoming him, the boy asked, “Have you returned from Onitsha, then?”

  Iguedo looked at him quizzically before grunting that she had, but she chose to say no more.

  The boy held his tongue for a minute or so. He was hungry for news of the palaver there, of the Nri-men and the other peoples or anyone else who might have arrived.

  “So what are they saying about the White-men?” he inquired lightly. The query sounded ridiculous for some reason. His voice, perhaps. Iguedo began to chuckle softly, and the boy felt the familiar rush of annoyance mixed with bafflement. It was tiresome to be mocked whenever he opened his mouth. The village boys would form little gangs and chant insults at one of their number, himself sometimes, or sometimes he was one of the gang. Singly, however, no one acted in this way. Alone, he had thought vaguely, the old woman would behave differently. He flushed and looked away, stomping through the bushes with the bucket slopping water onto the ground. Then the old woman confounded him.

  “Do you want to see one, Fenenu?”

  He turned sharply, at first suspecting that a joke was being played on him. Iguedo put her hand on his shoulder, and both of them came to a halt. She was not laughing, or not at himself. He nodded warily.

  “Not yet,” she said, “but soon.” Then, seeing the mistrust on his face, she added, “There are three of them. Three men that Usse brought.”

  “Where are they?” he asked. They were whispering for some reason.

  “Here,” she said. “Here in Nri.”

  The old man looked up from the melting-bowl as he carried in the bucket. His mouth was already open to deliver the customary insult when Iguedo appeared in the doorway.

  “So you’re back,” he said sourly. “Took your time
, didn’t you?” It was unclear whether he was addressing one, the other, or both of them. He waved his hand as though wafting away flies, clearly torn between complaining further and getting down to work. The bowl hung over the fire was now full almost to the brim with melted wax. His other hand held the obscene stump of clay, with which he thumped the floor beside.

  “Get these mats out of the way and set the bucket down here,” the old man commanded. “Hurry up, boy, if you want us to get any sleep tonight.”

  He did as he was told, glad of the chance to rest his arm. If he rubbed the muscle, the old man would make a comment about his puny shoulders, so he folded his arms stoically and waited to see what would happen next. Iguedo was still standing in the doorway. He thought he heard her speak, but when he looked up all he saw was a glance passing between them, a question and its answer, but wordless and in the blink of an eye. He turned and looked askance at the old man. The old man grinned and raised the clay stump, waggling it in front of his nose.

  “To work.”

  His role in “the work,” it soon transpired, centered not about the melting-bowl, or about the wax in it, or the clay stump, or even the fire. His role was centered about the bucket.

  The old man took the stump and, holding its base with his fingertips, dipped its length very quickly into the melting-bowl, as though he were stabbing the molten wax; then, keeping its “head” pointing downward, he brought it straight up, swung his arm sideways, and plunged it into the bucket. When he pulled it out again the clay was coated with a thin sheath of wax. The old man held the shaft still while drops of water slid down its sides, shook the last few back into the bucket with a single motion of his wrist, then dipped the stump back into the wax to begin the procedure again. The wax formed a sheen over the dark red clay, then a milky coating as the wax thickened. The old man dipped, swung, plunged, raised, and shook the object, while with his other hand he fed the fire, burying the new wood under piles of embers to keep the flames low under the melting-bowl.

  The boy’s job was to watch for droplets of wax that would drip off the shaft before the old man could plunge it into the bucket. When these hit the water they formed smooth white beads and quickly sank to the bottom. He was supposed to fish them out and throw them back into the bowl without interfering with the movements of the old man or interrupting his rhythm. Iguedo was somewhere outside, he assumed, for she had shrugged at the old man’s cantankerous greeting and when the boy looked up again she was gone.

  The old man rocked back and forth, his arm moving forward and back, and the two of them fell into a rhythm that hardly wavered and that lulled the boy. The hut was warm. The fire glowed and faded between red and black in accordance with the movement of the air over the embers. They worked together in a silence disturbed only by the faint hisses and crackles of the fire, so the boy thought, until he gradually became aware of a murmuring or mumbling, at once very faint and very close. The old man’s lips were moving, but whatever he was saying was quite inaudible or too jumbled for his ears to disentangle and make sense of. It distracted him. He looked over at his work-partner and slid a hand into the bucket for the hundredth time. As he retrieved the little bead of fallen wax his wrist knocked against the old man’s arm. The old man stopped and looked him in the eye. He was expecting a comment on his clumsiness or inattention.

  “Layers,” said the old man. “Smooth even layers.”

  The clay stump was the core, and the clay in which they would later encase the wax was the mold. The wax itself was the image of the casting, and the casting was of the Eze-Nri, who was not one man but many, each one encasing the last all the way back to Eri.

  “Difficult to get them all in,” he grumbled. “Gets more difficult every time.”

  When the layers had reached the thickness of a man’s arm, the old man had dipped the wax into the water for the last time and bade the boy fetch the basket that held his modeling tools, which were little sharpened sticks and short-bladed knives as far as he could see. It was very late and his head ached with fatigue, though the old man had done almost all the work and seemed as lively as ever.

  “Eri sat on an anthill,” said the old man, “and all around him the land was soft as mud. Useless. Couldn’t grow a thing in it. … Are you listening, cloth-ears?”

  “Yes,” he mumbled. “Eri sat on an anthill.”

  Everybody knew this story. He was supposed to be learning bronze-casting, not listening to tales his mother had told him when he barely reached her knee. The old man’s hands were moving busily around the wax, turning it this way and that while he hacked and pared at great speed, barely glancing at what he was doing.

  “So the Eze-Nri sits down, because of Eri and his anthill. Look”—a fat plug of wax flew off—” this will be his lap. Knees here. What happened next?”

  “He took a blade from an Awka smith. He used the blade to harden the land.”

  “How?”

  He recited by rote, “Eri cut rivers to drain the land, one to the east and one to the west, and where they met he cut a third to the south, which is the greatest River of them all.”

  “So he did, so he did. Hard work, eh, boy? Harder than carrying a bucket of water. Harder than burning charcoal.” He turned to the door and bellowed, “Harder than boiling yam, too!” No answer came back. The old man shrugged. “Anyway, he cut the rivers. So?”

  The boy thought. “We give him a blade.”

  “Where?”

  “In his hand.”

  “Which one?”

  “Right.”

  “Otonsi-staff goes there. Without otonsi the yams won’t grow.”

  “Left, then.”

  “Enyi-tusk goes there. That story comes later.”

  “When?” He felt his curiosity struggle up through the numbing fatigue, but the old man shook his head impatiently.

  “Later. And you’re thinking like a wood-carver.” He spat in the fire to indicate his contempt. “Eri’s already cut the rivers. He doesn’t need a blade, and the Eze-Nri carries no weapon, and anyway, casting something like that is too difficult. It always looks like a stick. Forget the blade. We give him big shoulders instead, strong spine down the back. All that hard work. …” The old man chuckled. “Now, what about his ears?”

  So it went on. The old man picked, scratched, gouged, and whittled, swapping the wax from hand to hand, working usually with two tools gripped between his fingers and the rest in his lap, keeping up a constant commentary on the significance of this or that feature and prodding the boy to respond. A seated figure emerged gradually from within the smooth wax. To the otonsi-staff and Enyi-tusk the old man added a bundle of ofo-twigs, which were placed between the figure’s feet. A breastplate in the shape of a leopard’s head grew out of the chest, and a headdress of coiled and braided cord strung with beads sprouted from the top of the head. The old man added wristbands and necklaces, or rather scratched away at the wax until they suddenly appeared as though he had dug them out of the ground.

  “Eri is always there,” he murmured. “Scratch the land, you find Eri underneath.”

  But the boy’s head lolled. His eyelids drooped. The night, and the work that filled it, seemed endless. He no longer answered the old man but only nodded whenever prompted. He did not understand how he could still be awake.

  Eventually the old man took a tool he had not used before, a knife whose blade was worn so thin that it more closely resembled a needle. Holding the figure in his lap, he began cutting long thin lines, each one beginning at the ear, running over the cheekbone, and stopping only at the edge of the mouth. He turned his wrist to widen the lines into grooves. The boy watched as the ichi-marks multiplied to cover both sides of the figure’s face.