Bound to Secrecy

by Vamba Sherif

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You are befriending the Chief to save your skin.’

  The Lebanese hurled vituperative accusations at the policeman. He told William that the corporal had once connived with the carpenter to oust Old Kapu from the chieftaincy.

  The corporal agreed that their action had been wrong, but that it could only be explained in relation to Tetese, the man who had triggered it all. Old Kapu, the town chief, had failed to intervene when Tetese had mistreated the townspeople.

  ‘Tetese was a sham, Chief,’ he concluded. ‘Everything he ever did, ‘the storyteller he claimed to be and the bargain he struck with Baldhead were all a sham.’

  The Lebanese did not interrupt him, and when William spoke he felt the pain from his wound: ‘How did you know that?’

  Corporal Gamla answered that there were a host of instances to prove his point, but he chose to refer to the night Tetese arrived at the Lebanese’s shop to tell his stories. Out of obligation to uphold the law and the wish to cooperate, he was about to tell Mr Mawolo what perhaps had been the turning point in the history of Wologizi.

  CHAPTER 9

  It was a moonless night, Corporal Gamla recalled, and the darkness was so absolute that houses were mistaken for anthills. Word had reached the corporal, as it had everyone else in Wologizi, that the bald Lebanese had struck a bargain with Tetese, but no one could trace the source of the rumour which seemed to have always existed but was only then manifesting itself. It was as if the whole of Wologizi had come out to listen to Tetese.

  At first the Lebanese had been hostile to the point of revulsion at the presence of such a large crowd in his shop. ‘You will dirty my floor and purchase nothing, you bunch of riffraff,’ he had shouted at the people, but in the end had succumbed to the inevitable: he could not chase them away.

  To prepare for the night, the Lebanese had filled up his generator with enough gasoline because there was a power cut that night. He came down to join the crowd, wearing an ivory-white caftan lined at the edges with golden filigree, his grey moustache dyed jet-black, his bald head smoothed over with lotion.

  Earlier that week some people had seen Tetese rehearsing the stories as he strolled the streets. He had told them that he intended the stories to complement each other, to be situated in different periods in Wologizi’s past, with the lives of townspeople, their secrets, shames and loves, woven together in a single tapestry.

  Old Kapu, who graced the evening with his frail presence and was allocated a place befitting a chief, right at the head of the seated and standing crowd, would often claim that he was not really interested in Tetese or his stories: ‘I was merely there to witness him make a fool of himself.’ Even Tetese’s father-in-law, Boley, was present that night. But on more than one occasion he was reported to have said, as if to justify his presence: ‘I was on my way to persuade my daughter that it was in her best interest and in the interest of Makemeh to once and for all divorce that fool, when I saw the crowd.’

  Tetese was the last to enter the shop. The crowd watched him edge his way to a spot in the middle of a circle of people. Many would recall later that he had been wearing black trousers and a faded red shirt which he had claimed he had bought at a port somewhere in the world. ‘Of course he was just showing off, Chief,’ the corporal told William, ‘because I had seen him purchase that very shirt at the local market.’

  Something was amiss, for no sooner had Tetese begun than he broke into a fit of coughing that shook his body down to his toes. As the crowd looked on he struggled but failed to tell his stories. His eyes were bloodshot, his lips tremulous, and his breath heavily stale – characteristics of a seasoned drunkard. Minutes after he’d started telling his story he gave up and left the shop. The crowd began to boo him as he edged his way through a throng of people.

  It was raining and the night was as dark as pitch, but now and then lightning would sketch irregular stripes against the firmament. These stripes of light had guided Tetese on his way to his home, part of which he had roofed with the corrugated iron the Lebanese had given him a week before.

  The crowd grew restless. It began to blame the Lebanese for Tetese’s failure to live up to the bargain. The Lebanese, afraid that their anger might boil over into violence and he might end up losing some of his products, tried to calm the crowd down. But after a while Tetese fortunately showed, but this time he was not alone.

  Corporal Gamla saw him and his wife emerge out of the cover of darkness and come into the light of the shop. Meanwhile, the crowd had been busy recalling various episodes from his life. Someone whose name the corporal could not recall now had reminded the mirthful crowd of a particular period in Tetese’s childhood when he had locked a cat in a box and had torched it. Moreover, the fire which had once burned down the hut which Tetese had shared with his mother had been ignited by him. For, as the entire community struggled to put out the fire and save the mother caught in the flames, the child Tetese had stood under a tree, bearing a serene expression on his face. Such was Tetese as a child.

  The crowd roared with laughter when it saw Tetese being led into its midst by his wife. She was a giant of a woman, the corporal told William, big-boned and taller, much taller than her husband. It was rumoured and even ascertained by some, including the corporal himself, that she thrashed him in every domestic squabble. She entered with her husband, whose arms were tied behind him, and she was so close to him that her breath poured down his cheek as she said: ‘You are going to tell those stories tonight, Tetese. Especially those ones with which you once beguiled me into falling in love with you, thereby defying my father and the expectation of the town. Despite your alcoholism, I chose to stick with you. Finally, when commissioned to do what you’ve always claimed to be best at, telling stories, you feign failure. I don’t want to hear it.’ And she forced him to sit down.

  ‘No one saw what I then saw then, Chief,’ the corporal told William with conviction. ‘No one but me saw those flames. And that smile, as though Tetese was mocking the townspeople, mocking us for our failure to see through the mask he had worn for years: the mask of a failure, the mask of a man subjugated by his wife.’

  It was at this point that corporal Gamla turned to the Lebanese, as if to inquire whether he wanted to add something, or to contradict him, but the Lebanese was silent, so the corporal went on.

  ‘That night, Tetese told us his stories, Chief. Stories full of violence and internecine conflicts which I don’t have the stomach to repeat. The next day he vanished into thin air.’

  This account baffled William. Tetese had been portrayed as a caring father by his daughter, but from what he had heard from the Lebanese and the corporal, he was a fool and a failure. William wondered which of the portraits was authentic.

  ‘You sound as if he was more than one person, Corporal,’ he said.

  ‘But that’s what he is and more, Chief,’ the Lebanese said, joining the conversation. ‘He could surprise us this very minute with a sudden appearance, and we would be left as dumbfounded as before. The man is and remains a deep mystery, Chief.’

  In this the two men seemed to agree. But William was not satisfied. He was missing an aspect of Tetese, a deeper understanding of the man and his motives, especially how he had made it from a mere failure to paramount chieftaincy, the highest post in the forest region. And then there was the problem of the auditory phenomenon at night and the question whether it had to do with Tetese.

  He turned to the Lebanese. ‘Were you disturbed out of your sleep last night by strange sounds?’ he asked.

  ‘You are going on again about the Poro, Chief,’ the corporal said. The Lebanese did not answer. His gaze moved from William to Gamla, and it was evident that he was hiding something.

  ‘Corporal,’ William called the policeman.

  Corporal Gamla drew himself to full attention with an exaggerated click of his army boots, and he saluted.

  ‘Yes, Chief,’ he boomed.

  ‘Assemble the m
ilitia at once. We are going to pay Old Kapu a visit,’ he said and walked out of the shop.

  The Lebanese was bewildered by the sudden turn of events. He rushed after a man he had hoped to befriend, but to no avail. As he stood before his shop, he watched William walk with proud steps, as if the very ground beneath his feet belonged to him.

  CHAPTER 10

  Corporal Gamla was right, William thought as he waited on the roadside for the policeman to return with the militia. What he, William, had experienced the other night could not be the work of the Poro. The incident was too extraordinary to be ascribed to that secret society that had survived for centuries in his part of the world but that nowadays ‘only had a ceremonial function,’ as the carpenter had aptly put it.

  William was himself an initiate. Years ago, as a young man, he had been taught the basic principles of the Poro with the goal of crossing over from childhood to adulthood, or, in other words, being reborn. Rebirth, the cleansing of a man to prepare him for the hard world, was the essence of the Poro. But what he remembered foremost from that ephemeral period were not the archaic and elaborate rituals performed as a prerequisite to being accepted as a full-fledged member of the society, but the sight of a naked woman spread out on a bamboo bed. She had been employed to teach the initiates the rudiments of sex.

  It was night. He sat with a bunch of frightened boys before a hut, all silent and anticipatory. Each initiate would enter upon the woman and emerge without sharing his experience, as if what occurred in that hut forbade speech. Then it was his turn. On pushing open the reed-door of the hut, he could not see her at first because her charcoal hue had blended with the darkness. Then his eyes became accustomed to the dark. He saw her stretched out in bed, a very big woman, her knees slightly parted. She flashed him the whiteness in her eyes, and although she breathed heavily, a deep but regular rise and fall of breath that betrayed fatigue, her gaze was indifferent. She gestured to him, and he approached with some hesitation. Only then did he catch a smell, not of sex because he was yet to know how it smelled, but of sweat and of fear, and of the cloak of innocence abandoned by others in that room. She reached for his member, and he shivered only to begin to feel a strange but pleasant sensation between his legs, followed by a sudden, gratifying release.

  Whatever he had experienced last night must be the work of some men in Wologizi who wanted to scare him off. Old Kapu would know more about it, he thought, and was determined to get it out of him.

  The militia finally showed up, marching to the raspy voice of the policeman. The men followed William without questioning his motives, because he represented a power beyond their grasp. Therefore he needed no introduction or a rousing speech of any kind, for an allusion to that power alone in whatever way, even in his silence, especially in his silence, was enough to convince them of his authority. The men had become, like their commander, his private army.

  How he wished then that his aunt was there to see him leading these militiamen, this group of people who had put an end to his idyllic life in his town of birth. She would have applauded him, heaved a sigh of relief, and sung his praises. It was not the joy or the satisfaction that he’d had his revenge that welled up in him, but a more powerful feeling: the reality that he had evolved from a boy whose future was once confined to a small town to a man who commanded an army.

  Wologizi at that hour of the day was shrouded in a shimmering haze as after a forest fire, the skies a panoply of dark clouds which seemed to have merged with the haze. Somewhere a stray dog broke out into a fit of barking. Others followed, and the forest town was suddenly overwhelmed with howls. Clouds of dust swept across the streets, whispering blasphemies, gathering force until they joined with the skies. Another gust of wind rose hard on the heels of the first, an impetuous wind of dust which hit the men flush in their faces, including William.

  The incident was witnessed by none other than Hawah Lombeh. She was sitting with a group of old men under the breadfruit tree. On seeing William, she rushed over to him to help dust him down. What was a woman doing in the midst of such old men, William wondered.

  In daylight, Hawah Lombeh seemed surer of herself than the pleading woman of last night. She moved her rough hands across his clothes and face with an effusive tenderness that got on his nerves. She admonished him: ‘Why let the dust stain those nice clothes of yours?’ What was it that prevented him from stopping her? He loved women, loved them with all his heart, because they were an extension of his existence, the group with whom he felt safe, secure and in his element, the ones in whose world he was brought up, thanks to his old aunt. Hawah Lombeh was an exception, however.

  Gazing at her, the cracks between her lips stained with dried blood, her face scarred with hardship, William berated himself for falling into the trap she had obviously set for him.

  The old men, the militia and Corporal Gamla looked in amusement, while Hawah Lombeh fired questions at him. ‘Why is your face bandaged? Did you fall? Tell me!’ Her whole face was deeply furrowed with concern. She added slowly so that only William could hear her: ‘You should take better care of yourself in this town, otherwise incidents much worse than the one with the wind of dust or the fight with the carpenter might befall you.’

  Because he remained silent, she opened her mouth as if to say something. He thought he heard her whisper Makemeh’s name but was not sure, and so he asked what she’d said.

  ‘Why the militiamen?’ she asked, now loudly.

  She sounded like his old aunt, concerned about his well-being, adroitly playing the maternal role. That was the problem with some women, he thought, assuming roles not cut out for them.

  ‘I’m going to meet your husband.’

  He said it to spite her.

  ‘You don’t need the militia for that. What you need is to use your senses properly in this town, to open your eyes.’

  ‘I need the militia to protect me.’

  ‘But there are things the militia cannot help you with.’

  ‘I should be the judge of that.’

  ‘What are you going to do with my husband?’

  ‘You’ll see,’ he said.

  ‘Please don’t hurt him.’

  This made him laugh, for why should she care whether a husband who obviously did not love her and whom she had betrayed the other night was hurt or not? He left her and called the militia to follow him. Corporal Gamla seconded his order by shouting angrily at the men, who formed a single file behind them. Hawah Lombeh followed closely at the rear. At one point he turned to her with a piercing gaze that rooted her to the ground, and she did not move until William and his men reached her husband’s home. Then she broke into a run in another direction. The old men resting under the breadfruit tree gaped at her, bewildered by her strange behaviour.

  Old Kapu’s compound was cloaked in a peculiar silence, which caused William and his men to stop and listen for a while, as though something terrible was about to happen, before he mounted a crude flight of steps to the veranda and went through the long corridor to the rear of the house where he met some members of the household.

  ‘Old Kapu has taken ill,’ a woman said.

  The old man had left the mansion at dawn and had come in trembling with fever. ‘He cannot see you now,’ she added.

  From one of the rooms, as if to confirm her words, a grunt issued from someone who seemed in the throes of death. This sent some women rushing into the room only to emerge screaming, their hands on their heads in a gesture of grief, their raucous cries throwing the entire household into panic. William entered and met Old Kapu spread out on a mat with various medicines scattered about him, including some tablets and herbs. Two women were attending to him. One was soaking a piece of cloth in warm water and spreading it across the length of his back, and the other was feeding him a herbal concoction.

  ‘So you’ve come,’ the old man said.

  Old Kapu turned around on his back and gestured to a chair, which one of the women fetched. He asked William to take a s
eat.

  ‘My backache has returned,’ Old Kapu grunted, and he looked so frail that William thought that another jolt of pain would be enough to dispatch him to the other world. ‘When the pain returned last night I left because I did not want to disturb your sleep,’ he said, gritting his teeth, and after a while he asked: ‘Have you had your breakfast?’

  William shook his head.

  ‘Ask the women to prepare some food for you. A hungry guest is a curse to a household,’ he said, breaking into a fit of coughing.

  William decided to leave.

  ‘Stay a bit longer and keep me company.’

  ‘You need rest,’ William insisted.

  The room stank of pungent herbs, and of impending death. On leaving it, William took in a long breath of fresh air, certain that the old man would not survive the day. He crossed the corridor and was almost outside when he heard a voice say – ‘Fetch me my breakfast. That Mawolo man does not realise he’s ‘playing with fire.’’

  It was Old Kapu. William could hardly believe his ears. Was the old man feigning his illness? But why? And what did he mean by playing with fire? If the old man thought he was a fool, then he would prove him wrong. He entered the room again, this time accompanied by his men, to confront the old man and compel the truth out of him.

  Old Kapu seemed not in the least surprised to see him.

  ‘So, Mr Mawolo, this time you chose to return with the militia. You remind me of someone I knew and loved once upon a time.’

  ‘You lied to me, old man!’

  ‘You are the one who came to us claiming you were just a passer-by. Now you confront me with the militia.’

  Old Kapu sat up on the mat, and dismissed the women with a sucking of his toothless mouth, followed by a practised hiss.

  ‘When did you find out why I had come to Wologizi?’

  ‘Does it matter?’ Old Kapu asked.

  ‘Tell me!’

  ‘The first time I saw you.’

  ‘Tell me everything.’