The Butterfly Heart

by Paula Leyden

  Bul-Boo

  In the bright light of the morning, talking to Fred’s great-granny didn’t seem like such a good idea. How would you start a conversation like that with a renowned witch? And anyway, what was I going to ask her to do? I remember reading somewhere that if you ask for intervention from a witch, you have to ask for something specific otherwise you leave her with too many choices. A witch with choices, they say, is not a good thing.

  I spoke to Fred about it, and you’d have to know Fred to understand his response. He believes in so many things that he finds it hard to keep track of them all. He believes, for example, that if you turn around twice in front of a door, good things will happen to you when you open it. Or that if you put the tea in your mug before the milk, the milk will sulk and that’s when it curdles. Or that your bed has to face the sunrise otherwise you might not wake up at all. And thousands of things like that. He lives his life by little rules, most of which make no sense.

  So at breaktime I told Fred I had to talk to him and we went down to the bottom of the playground to the fallen tree. No one else goes there because a girl in Grade Four once saw a snake there and ran screaming up to the gate. It’s the best tree for sitting on because the trunk is so thick. Sister Leonisa says it was struck by lightning one afternoon after two girls in the school wrote rude things about her on the chalkboard. With the things she says, she is almost as bad as Madillo and Fred. When she told us that story, I asked her whether the two girls had been sitting under the tree when it was hit (just to see how far she would take it) and her answer was, “No, they weren’t. But they might have been – and then they would have been sorry.” Sister Leonisa may be a nun, but sometimes she has a strange attitude when it comes to things like hope and love.

  “Fred, I’m thinking of asking your great-granny to solve this Winifred thing,” I said.

  He shook his head. “Bul-Boo, you’d better be very, very careful asking her. She’s old now – perhaps the oldest person in Zambia – and while her powers are getting stronger and stronger every year, her memory isn’t. She could just forget that it was you who asked her to put a curse on the old man and think instead that the old man asked her to put a spell on you. Then you could find yourself turned into a chameleon, and that wouldn’t help Winifred at all.”

  “A chameleon? Why a chameleon?”

  “That’s her favourite creature, and she was saying the other day that there don’t seem to be many around any more. She wants one for the garden, so she’d probably put you in a box and then bring you out now and again.”

  So suddenly I’m going to be a chameleon locked up in a box? And his great famous witch granny has a bad memory?

  “I’m not listening any more. You told us she was the greatest, most powerful witch ever, but I don’t believe she’s even a witch – whatever a witch is when it’s at home. You just made it all up. This is a stupid conversation anyway.”

  Fred looked at me and said, in his most solemn voice, “You should believe me, Bul-Boo. All I am saying is that her memory is not as good as it was and she gets confused. She’s old. Dad says that even when he was small she was close to a hundred. Old people are entitled to lose their memories, even witches. You’re a non-believer, anyway, so I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to ask her anything at all. She’ll know you don’t believe in her and then you’d be lucky to get away with becoming a chameleon – she might just decide to teach you a lesson and turn you into a dung-beetle. How about that? You’d spend the rest of your life rolling balls of dung around, then feasting on them.”

  That’s the other thing about Fred: he finds himself very funny. While he was telling me this he was creeping about on the ground pretending to be a dung-beetle. Snuffling and slurping, which, as I told him, made him look more like a warthog. I knew I had lost him then. And even though I didn’t believe anything he was saying, asking his great-granny for help was starting to look like even more of a bad idea.

  When Fred had finished being a dung-beetle he started scratching in the dirt with a pen that had lost its ink and humming the Zambian national anthem. But he’s still my favourite friend who’s a boy, even if he makes up bad stories and pretends they are real.

  Ifwafwa

  The windows of the bus carry the soil of my land. I do not know the world beyond this red earth and the trees that spread their branches wide like umbrellas. I do not know the lands that my grandmother spoke of, the Kola kingdom to the south of us, the kingdom that ends at the sea. The pictures I have seen of the sea make my stomach feel empty. There is no end to the water, it carries on until there is nowhere to go. My grandmother told me that it ends in the middle of the earth, where the water is so black that nothing can be seen. That creatures live there who do not know the air. I do not want to go there if I cannot see the end of it.

  I know the water inside Zambia, the lakes that are quiet except when the rains come, the brown rivers that cover the crocodiles’ heads. I know where you need to look for their eyes because the water can’t hide those.

  A woman sat next to me on the bus, she looked tired and her body seemed weak. She spoke to me of her first-born child, who is in prison for stealing. She was going to visit him. She told me she thought he would die there because he had the thin body of the prison disease. She had no food to take him and I had nothing to give her. Her face had already seen his death.

  At Kasama I saw Chitimukulu. He has grown older and his walk has become slow, but his thoughts are not yet old. He told me that sometimes we have to do wrong to do right. That if something crosses our path and it is placing pain in the heart of a child, we must help that child. I will do that.

  Winifred

  My ma doesn’t walk straight any more. Her back is bent and her eyes look at the floor. When she talks to me it’s as if she doesn’t want me to hear. It’s because of what’s happening, I know that. She doesn’t know how to tell my uncle to take this thing away, to chase the old man out of the house. To send him back to the tavern so he can drink till he is dead. That is what I want: I want him to die so he can’t look at me any more. I want him to disappear so I can be Winifred again. So I can go to school without feeling this big weight dragging behind me.

  Bul-Boo says they’ll help, but she does not know life like I know it. It all went wrong when Dad became sick. He died so slowly. Every day a little bit more of him went. I think it should be called the melting disease, because that’s what happened to him: he melted like a candle, a bit each day until there was nothing left. When he got too weak to stand he would lie in the bed looking at you with eyes that were too big for his head. I could see all the bones in his body. I hadn’t even known there were so many.

  My mother told me that maybe he would get better, but I knew he wouldn’t.

  Then he was gone and my uncle came. He didn’t come here when Dad was sick, but sometimes I saw him near the house. Waiting. He only came when there was death in our house and Ma was weak. He is loud and his voice is ugly. I know it’s wrong to say, but I do not mind if they both die, him and his friend. There will be no hole left in this earth when they go. But there is a hole left in my body without my dad. I don’t think it will ever be filled.

  I know that I cannot be married unless my mother’s brother permits it. But my mother has no brothers left now, she is alone. That is why my uncle thinks he can do this, he has no one to fear.

  I wish I could wake up tomorrow morning and know that all this has gone away. I want to feel free to go to school and laugh and play with Bul-Boo and Madillo, or walk with them and Fred, listening to Madillo and her funny counting. I want to be free from these thoughts of this old man, but I can’t. I want Sister Leonisa to look at me and ask me questions, but she doesn’t any more – even though I am the only one who knows all the answers. Bul-Boo knows most of them and Madillo does too – except that the answers she gives sometimes are wrong in a funny kind of way. Like when Sister asked why Zambia was called a landlocked country. Madillo told her that it wasn�
��t in fact landlocked because you could follow the Zambezi river all the way to the sea, and if you made a small boat out of tree bark and put it into the river, it would, one day, get to the sea. So that’s not locked at all. Which is true. But there is no part of Zambia that touches the sea.

  I wish that was all I had to think about right now.

  Bul-Boo

  As we walked past Fred’s house on the way back from school today, I could feel someone watching us. There’s a line of bushes at the end of his garden that is very thick. If someone stands behind them, it’s hard to see who it is. (Unless it’s Fred’s dad, who is so big he could hardly hide anywhere.)

  Madillo was way behind me, so I couldn’t ask if she’d noticed, and as I couldn’t see anything I just carried on walking. Then I heard my name: “Bul-Boo, Bul-Boo, Bul-Boo.” A whispering voice. I looked and saw a very small hand waving through the bushes. It blended into the branches and looked as if it was growing. Only Fred’s great-granny has a hand that small. Even his little brother, the one Madillo thinks is a hermaphrodite, has bigger hands than she does.

  I felt a small lump of terror inside me as I remembered Fred’s words. I was not ready to experience life as a dung-beetle. Not even as a chameleon, although I love them and their funny dinosaur ways. I love the way they change colour to suit where they are. I’ve always wanted to be able to do that, although not necessarily as a chameleon. The voice got louder. “Come here, little girl. It is me … Nokokulu … grandmother of Fred’s father. I want to tell you something.”

  I find it hard to ignore anyone. If someone calls me, I have to answer them. Madillo doesn’t seem to have that problem: in fact I think she likes ignoring people. But she wasn’t there, so I stopped and approached the small hand. “Yes?” I said, hoping my voice would reach her as I didn’t want to go too close.

  “You are worried about your friend? The little girl with the smiling face?”

  “Well … a bit worried.”

  “Bring her to me. I will fix everything,” she said. Then the hand disappeared back into the bushes and it was as if it had never been there. I suppose she is so small that her footsteps aren’t loud on the grass.

  Now I don’t know what to do. What do I say to Winifred, “Come and meet Fred’s great-grandmother, an ancient witch with a bad memory, she’ll sort everything out”? But if I don’t tell her, the great-granny may get into a wild twitching rage and that’s me done for.

  Madillo had caught up with me by then and I found out the reason for the delay – she held out her hand and there, clutching her finger, was a tiny chameleon.

  “It was trying to cross the road. I rescued it. I think we’ll have to keep it, as it’s too small to look after itself. I found the mother squashed.”

  I felt ill. Perfectly ill, as if I was about to fall over right then and there. It was like the time I fainted when we had to go to Mass at school. The church doors were shut and it was so hot I couldn’t breathe. I remember looking at the priest and he seemed to get bigger and bigger, then the air around me went red. He loomed. The same thing had started to happen: the little chameleon grew and grew on Madillo’s finger, so I closed my eyes and waited. I didn’t faint, and once I had started breathing again I told Madillo to leave the chameleon on the hedge outside Fred’s house because the great-granny was looking for chameleons and she would take it in. Sometimes Madillo can see when I’m not going to give in and she just does what I say. Not very often, but today it happened like that.

  I wish I was back to my rational self: when I didn’t believe in things I couldn’t see. When I didn’t start sacrificing small helpless chameleons on the altar of the great-granny. Life was easier then.

  Ifwafwa

  I will go to the girls tomorrow when I get back. I have a story for them that they will like. I hope they have not yet done anything about Winifred.

  I know the boy who lives next to them, through Nokokulu. When I look at him I think he sees things in the same way as she does. She did not pass this on to her son or his son, the big one who makes a lot of noise. But I think the small boy has it. He does not know this yet and maybe he will never know it, but it is there – I can see it in the way his eyes watch me. I only met Nokokulu when I came to Lusaka, and it was then I learnt that she knows what will happen before it does; that she feels no fear. She knew me when she met me on the road for the first time and she called me by my birth name, Chishimba.

  I was named for the falls near Kasama, for the guardian spirit that stays in the cave near the bottom of the falls. This cave is a place of peace and rest, a place without hatred or vengeance. I try to live up to my name, but there are times like now when I have to put it aside. The old woman reminds me of my name when she sees me. She is the only one in this new life of mine who knows it. To everyone else I am Ifwafwa or the Snake Man.

  Bul-Boo

  Ifwafwa came today. It seems so long since we told him about Winifred and I wanted to ask him many things. But if you ask him too many questions he closes his face up and you know he won’t answer any of them. He told me once that if I am too impatient, my life will be ended before it has even started. Which is a slight exaggeration, as I have already had several years of my life, a little more than a start. I’ve learned not to be impatient with him by creating an imaginary wall in my brain. It is a stone wall that cuts off the question area. And it is very high, too high for questions to climb over. Today I had to put a roof on as well, otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to help myself.

  Ifwafwa mostly sits in the same place: just near the gate to our house, next to a large rock that Dad put there when we moved in. Dad liked the shape of it and Ifwafwa does too, because it warms his back when he sits against it. Sometimes, when the sun is very hot, he sits in the shade of the muombo tree that grows outside the garden. He told me that its red leaves, which arrive before the rains come, bring hope. Today his snake bag was empty.

  “I have brought you no snakes today, but I have a story you will like,” he said to Madillo. “It is the story of the Kariba Dam.” Then he turned to me and tilted his head to one side. “And you, too, will like the story but you must be silent if you want to hear it.”

  As if I’m the noisy one!

  “This is a sad story told by the BaTonga people who live up along the banks of the great Zambezi river. The river was home to Nyaminyami, which in English means “meat meat”. Not a beautiful name for a river god, but a real name. He was a kind god who lived peacefully in the river with his beloved wife.”

  “What was her name?” asked Madillo, excluded from the keep quiet rule.

  “What would you like to call her?” said Ifwafwa.

  “Mahina, maybe? There is a Tonga-speaking girl in our class who told me that’s the name of the moon. I like moons.”

  “A good name for her. So they lived in peace and harmony, troubling no one. When the rains were slow to arrive and the land was dry and thirsty, Nyaminyami would come slowly to the surface of the water and allow those who hungered to cut pieces of meat from his long, snake-like body. He was a creature of many forms: fish, snake and dragon, all in one body.

  “One year, before any of you were born, Nyaminyami swam to one end of the Zambezi river and his wife, Mahina, swam to the other. They did not know what was about to happen, they were just enjoying a good slow swim. If they had known, they would have stayed together.

  “Men came to the river with machines and they closed it off. They built a wall to stop its flow and they created a giant sea where before there had been nothing. The BaTonga people were forced to move from their homes, the animals ran away and the trees that had been there for thousands of years wept and died.

  “Nyaminyami was angry that his wife was trapped many miles away. He stirred up the waters and the floods came. But when they died down, the men returned with even bigger machines and continued their work. Nyaminyami tried again and this time the wall broke and the machines were washed away. But the men did not give up.

  �
��Meanwhile the BaTonga people were saddened because men had died in the floods. They begged Nyaminyami the river god to stop causing the floods, and he agreed. Which meant that he was never to see his wife again. Never to swim with her in the cool depths of the Zambezi, never to jump out of the water to greet the sun. Mahina had been the one who would heal Nyaminyami after he had fed the people, but she could do this no more. Without her he was lost, so he said farewell to the BaTonga people and disappeared silently, never again to show himself.

  “But there are times when this great false sea shakes and shivers, when loud tremors come from the deep, when men hide in their homes for fear of the dark waters. That is Nyaminyami reminding them that he will always be alone without the bright light of Mahina to shine on him. He is letting the people know that he has not forgotten what they did. He is there, down among the drowned roots of the ancient trees. Remembering.”

  Ifwafwa sat back and closed his eyes, as he always does when he gets to the end of a story. Like I said before, I don’t think he has ever told us one with a happy ending. Here we were left with an eternally sad creature lurking at the bottom of the Kariba Dam, its only thrill in life being to throw a few storms.

  I then waited to see if Ifwafwa would mention Winifred. He didn’t. I decided I had to ask the question, otherwise I’d never sleep. “Ifwafwa … do you remember what we asked you about?”

  He looked at me with disappointment in his eyes. “Little one, don’t be asking me. I remember everything.”