One morning Benny promised his three friends a special trip to a beautiful spot by the river for a swim, and many surprising things, including mushroom harvesting. The eyes of his three friends narrowed. Benny never planted mushrooms, and refused to believe that mushrooms could be planted by people.
‘Tomorrow there will be some,’ he said confidently.
The three boys looked at each other with doubt.
‘How do you know that there will be mushrooms tomorrow?’ Frank asked.
‘I just know. You seem not to believe me.’
‘We will believe you tomorrow if we find mushrooms,’ Risto replied.
‘Okay then, be ready tomorrow at 5am sharp. We will go to pick mushrooms.’
The three town boys slept with their eyes wide open, afraid that the day might wake earlier than them. The first rooster sang. Then the second one and the third, which, as Benny had taught them, announced 4am sharp. At 4:30, the lamp had chased away the darkness in the small hut. Risto grabbed his toothbrush and his small cup, filled the cup with water, and went outside to wash his face and to clean his teeth. He was surprised to see Benny coming from the barn where the cattle stayed at night.
‘Where are you coming from?’ he asked.
‘From the cattle, I went to open up their compound. We might return late, better let them go in the bush alone; I will find them when I come back.’
Benny, like the other villagers, respected cattle very deeply. Cattle gave them milk and meat, and so they gave their cattle food and water.
‘Where are Frank and Ombeni?’ he added.
‘Still sleeping,’ said Risto.
‘No, we are awake!’ cried Frank as he came out of the hut.
‘Are you ready? It is time to go,’ Benny said.
The compound door flung open and swung slowly shut again as the four boys found their way into the cassava fields. The fields were wet with cold dew, a sign of the invisible dry-season rain that gracious heaven gave to the water-craving plants, a rain that softened soil and allowed vegetables to keep their green even in the baking sun. After five minutes, the boys were as wet as if they had been walking in the rain.
The cassava trees were taller than the boys, and as they walked slowly through them, they left the trees waving as if calling the land-owner to say that there were intruders in his field.
Benny warned his friends to walk cautiously, not to smash any trees, otherwise they would get in trouble. The owner of the field was a witchdoctor, a man who called thunderclaps and spoke with the wind. He might have been there in the fields; but he wouldn’t cause any trouble if his fields were treated with care.
Benny stopped at a point where different fields met and split into smaller fields. Wild fig trees and shrubs grew nearby. The other three boys stopped too, eager to see which way Benny would take. The many footprints on the ground revealed that the place received many visitors.
‘This is the place! Check near the shrubs. Everywhere you will find mushrooms, I promise you,’ Benny assured them.
Everyone went to search.
‘Here is one, two, and another one!’ It was Benny, in a low soft voice, like someone who didn’t want to be heard by many people. All the boys rushed towards him. Benny had three white mushrooms in his hands.
‘How did you get them?’ Ombeni asked, surprised and rather envious.
Benny laughed. ‘Haven’t you got any?’
‘We have searched, but we can’t find any.’
‘You know what, this whole place is full of mushrooms; open your eyes and you will find them.’
‘I won’t go alone, I will follow you. You know where to find them,’ Ombeni said, like someone who has lost something valuable.
Meanwhile, Frank was a little way off and keeping very quiet.
‘Have you seen something, Frank?’ called Risto.
‘Two big ones,’ he answered.
The boys ran to Frank’s side. He had two big mushrooms, opened like umbrellas.
‘No, no, don’t pick that one!’ Benny shouted as Frank reached out to pick another very small mushroom.
‘You know, when you pick mushrooms, you can’t take a small one like this,’ Benny explained. ‘It is the small one that calls the bigger ones. If you take it, you will never get mushrooms anymore. Leave it!’
Frank was reluctant to leave the mushroom, but did as Benny advised. He still had two big ones in his hands.
‘Now Frank, you have to cut off a small piece of one of your mushrooms and drop it on this ground.’
Frank’s eyes widened. ‘Why?’
‘Just do it, and then say, “Thank you, tomorrow I will come again,” ’ Benny insisted.
‘To whom am I going to say that?’ argued Frank.
‘It is up to you; otherwise you will never get mushrooms here anymore. This land doesn’t know you; this is the first time you have come to this place to get mushrooms. The land loves you, but you have to show that love as well, and thank the spirits of this land.’
Frank did as he was told.
The days went by as the moon appeared and disappeared, a fire-ball hanging in a blanket in a dark sky. The song of crickets was the regular evening lullaby in the quiet nights in Bugobe village. Risto and his friends became accustomed to the peaceful night pierced only by the whispering fire and the roaring of distant rivers. At dawn, they woke to the sound of the villagers’ footsteps tramping the rhythm of daily life. Risto’s holiday was a discovery of life without fear and boundaries. They went where they pleased and did what they wanted.
Months passed, and the school holiday was nearing its end. The sun’s early gleam one morning announced already the rage it would have once it reached its zenith. As usual at that time during the dry season, the soil was hot, like a pot on a stove. It burned whoever wasn’t wearing shoes. The town boys were used to playing soccer with their shoes on, but in the village, this wasn’t the case. The village boys were shoeless and so the visitors were obliged to take off their shoes in order to be part of the game. Playing barefoot wasn’t an easy thing for them. They could not stand the burning soil. They couldn’t understand how the village boys played with such ease on such hot soil; maybe their skin was burn-proof, the town boys thought.
The boys’ plan for that day was to bring the cattle to the river. There, they would swim and catch crabs. There were beehives to be harvested that night at Risto’s grandfather’s plantation. The meeting was set, the business of the beehives was not to be missed.
The way was long, and with the cattle eating whatever green leaves they could find, the journey seemed endless. Everywhere beside the paths, the leaves wore the same khaki colour that predominated in the area because of the dry season.
The warmth of the village was clear in the smiles of its people. Handshaking and news met the boys along the way; everyone they passed greeted them. They tried to be the first to greet people, as advised by Benny.
Here people knew even what one another ate; there were no secrets. The village was not like the town, where people went about with their own issues. Here things belonged to the whole village, to the community. A visitor was the visitor of the entire village. Everyone knew when a visitor came and where he was staying, and people came freely to greet him. If the visitor was a child, they would come with a bag full of fruit – avocados, bananas, plums, oranges, guavas, lemons. Others came with papaya, pineapples, sugar-cane. If the visitor was an adult, they would come with a calabash full of local beer, the kasiksi, or some kind of local banana juice, the mutobe, for example.
The boys arrived at the river before the sun reached its zenith. Risto thought it was a beautiful place, like a pilgrim site. The birds were singing as the river played music. The limpid water reflected the pristine blue sky above the trees. On one big stone in the river, the flowing water became a multitude of stars that disappeared and reappeared like mysterious lights.
They let the cattle wander in the pastures nearby, losing themselves in dances with their shadows i
n the river. Benny threw himself in the water and Frank followed him. But Ombeni and Risto stayed on the riverbank. They were happy to play with the water, but swimming was too frightening for them. They played ricochet instead, picking up small stones, throwing them into the water, and looking in amazement as water spurted up.
Frank and Benny enjoyed swimming, splashing, chasing one another. Sometimes they came up onto the riverbank, counted from one to three, and then threw themselves into the river like the stones that their two friends were throwing, but they splashed far more water.
Eventually they went a little further downstream, where the river narrowed through rocks. Benny said this was where they would catch crabs.
‘Have you ever seen a crab?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ they replied without delay.
‘Where?’
‘At the open-air market and sometimes on the television,’ said Risto.
The game seemed simple: lifting rocks at random from the narrow bed of the river.
‘Many of these rocks are dwellings for crabs,’ Benny told them.
They began the hunt, wading around, lifting rocks. Suddenly, something was moving underneath the rock that Benny had partly lifted.
‘There is one! There is one!’ screamed Ombeni as he looked on from the bank where he stood.
‘Be careful with your finger, it can cut it off. Don’t put it in its alligator pincers!’ Benny yelled at Risto. Risto moved his hand stealthily towards the crab and picked it up by its back. Then he held its claws and legs. His fear vanished; he could examine every single movement.
He took a stone and hit the crab on its head.
‘We don’t treat crabs like this!’ Benny exclaimed. ‘We hold them and disable their pincers, that’s all. Your way of doing things makes them suffer. Do you know the pain it is feeling now?’
‘But you told me that it could cut off my fingers!’
‘It still didn’t deserve such treatment.’
‘I didn’t know, I am sorry,’ Risto apologised.
‘You know, God always watches our actions. If we mistreat his creatures, we will be treated the same. Like this crab, if we torture it, then the next time we come to look for other crabs, we will never find them; God will hide them from us. That is why if we catch one, we must treat it with respect,’ Benny lectured while the boys hung their heads and stared at the motionless crab.
Later it was time to look for the cattle. Benny led them through the forest. He knew it like the backs of his hands. He knew how and when the river was born, and where it ended.
The boys walked towards unknown endings. They walked in secret leaves and dew. Sometimes, they felt peculiar temperature changes as they passed, somewhere else, an unusual scent. The things to discover were uncountable – different scents to smell, voices and echoes without owners. These were the secrets of the forest.
After some time, they reached the edge of the forest and soon the edges of some small farms. There were plenty of them.
‘How on earth can these plants have green leaves in the dry season? The sun is shining at its peak; it is a dry season, no rain. How can these farms look so fresh?’ Risto asked Benny.
‘Risto, the village has it secrets. It holds them in its womb like the night holds its mysterious secrets from our faces,’ Benny replied.
They found all their cattle and decided to retrace their path homewards. The sun was about to hide in its cave, its strength was already gone. After a long walk, they came across some cattle. Their own cattle diverted directly into this herd. The town boys tried to stop them, but Benny advised them not to waste their time. They were worried that they might not be able to recognise their own livestock as some of their goats and cows looked like the ones they had met.
The shepherds tending these strange cattle were a little way ahead of them. They had a camp near the mountain. Benny knew them, and as he approached them, they greeted him in their mother tongue. Laughs and jokes followed as the three town boys stood listening; they understood what was said, but weren’t confident enough to talk.
‘These are my brothers from Bukavu town, they came this side for a holiday,’ said Benny proudly. The gleaming eyes of the shepherds revealed the questions that floated in their minds. There was a short silence, followed by whispers in a language that the town boys could not understand. By listening closely, they worked out that it was a mother tongue that had been twisted into a local lingo, a slang of some kind. Sentences were shortened, with words said in reverse. Surely this is some gossip, the visitors thought.
Benny finally bridged the gap: ‘Ombeni, Risto and the other one is called Frank,’ he introduced his cousins from town.
The shepherds looked at them, then spoke, with much laughter. The boys didn’t know why.
‘They understand Mashi, but they are not good at speaking it,’ Benny explained to the shepherds, who switched to Swahili, the language considered the town boys’ language. They spoke it very well, with only the Mashi accent revealing that these guys didn’t grow up in town. The boys understood them perfectly.
Soon the shepherds asked Benny to compete with them in their sticks game. Benny agreed, even though his friends were unlikely to succeed in the village game.
‘You are on my side,’ he told the boys. ‘It is about keeping the stick on the tip of one of your fingers without holding it or allowing it to fall. If it touches another part of your body, it means that your turn is over. If you hold the stick with your hands or if it falls, your turn is over. The longer you hold it on the tip of your finger, the higher the mark you get.’
The first time Risto got the stick, he wanted it to be the same colour as Benny’s stick, a yellowish-black colour. He peeled off its bark and tied a spiral of banana bark around it before hitting it gently on the rocks in the shepherds’ fire. It came up with a double colour, a snake-like curl of yellow around the black stick. The black mamba stick, he called it.
He took it to start the game. Ombeni decided not to play. There were three contestants on both sides. Benny rounded up his men, a song started, his friends grasped it within seconds; a song to sing when they would be juggling. Benny’s advice was simple, ‘Look only at the top tip of your stick and not at your fingers.’
A referee was there with his watch. Risto was the first to juggle, his song vibrating all the way to the top of the hill.
‘A shepherd’s stick does not fall, a shepherd’s stick stands!’ He repeated these words over and over again. His friends were afraid that he might bite his tongue. Finally his stick fell down.
‘One minute and twenty seconds,’ the referee announced, looking at his big clock-like plastic watch. Risto was confused; was his time a success or a failure? Nevertheless, he was happy; he felt he hadn’t done badly for his first time. A shepherd from the other group took his stick: ‘Two minutes, thirty-five seconds.’ Then Frank: ‘One minute.’ On the other side: ‘Two minutes, forty-five seconds.’ Benny’s turn arrived. He spat on his hand, and then he started with the song and the game. His voice sounded like soft waves on the peaceful Lake Kivu; it seemed to glue the stick to his fingers, floating it from finger to finger in a gentle rhythm. His eyelashes remained still. It was real magic. ‘Eight minutes, fifty seconds,’ the referee said at last. The last person from the other group started: ‘Four minutes, ten seconds,’ the referee announced.
The town boys couldn’t hide their happiness, they had won. ‘Viva, Benny, viva!’ They were as excited as little goat kids just released from a pen.
It had been a long day, full of excitement and with many good surprises. In the bag that Ombeni was carrying were crabs and many other amazing things that they had picked up along the way. It was starting to get dark when they arrived home. Benny enquired about the harvesting of the beehives, and was told that the business had already started. Ombeni and Frank were too tired for another adventure, but Risto went along with Benny.
There were only two men in the fields, one in his early fifties and one in his
twenties. They shook hands after Benny explained that they were coming to help as grandfather had promised. The men’s hands were as strong as iron, and they had twilight smiles, which glowed as the darkness hid their faces. The next step was to undress. The men wore only shorts, while Benny and Risto were in coats. The two men had four big basins, each of which could have swallowed Risto entirely. The two men in shorts lit torches tied to their foreheads and moved closer to the murmuring bees.
The beehives were in a small nyassi house. The young man started a fire on a small cloth soaked with coconut oil. He walked towards the beehives, and dropped the burning cloth in the small house. After a while, smoke started emerging. It disturbed the bees. Their quiet humming song became the endless roaring murmur of a lion. The two men approached and got their hands inside the hives. The buzz of the bees grew again to the hum of a strong rain; they flew in all directions. Benny went over to the hives to fetch some honey. He came back, his hands dripping with sweetness. He gave some to his friend to enjoy.
‘Didn’t they sting you?’ asked Risto in amazement as he licked his fingers.
‘Yes, but I couldn’t feel anything,’ said Benny.
The bees were all around them; Risto and Benny could feel them in the air as they stood in the dark. Risto wanted to run, but Benny advised calm.
The two beehive specialists were half-way through harvesting the first beehive when Benny shouted, ‘Put on your coat properly!’ Once they were finished, Risto and Benny would take the basin from them.
‘I am going to help them to harvest the last beehive. You can come if you want, it will make us real men,’ Benny told his friend.
Risto hesitated. The bee buzz was frightening; harvesting the beehives would be like putting one’s hand in a glowing fire. Benny went ahead as Risto waited.
Time passed, and he grew impatient. Wasn’t it his biggest wish to prove his manhood in the village, to be called a man, to do a man’s work, to have a story to tell in town? A boy from town who wanted the crown of a real man in the village couldn’t stay behind any longer; adrenaline was flowing and his heart was beating fast. His legs felt strong, although they shook a little. It was time to be a man in the village.
The Great Agony & Pure Laughter of the Gods Page 2