by Lucie Wilk
Iris’s aunt speaks. About him, most likely, because she lowers her voice, speaks in hushed tones as though he can understand. He listens to the meaningless words, tries at least to pick out the general tone. He watches the face of the woman in the corner, for evidence that she is softening with Iris’s aunt’s words, but she remains stony and clutches her daughter’s shoulders as tightly as ever. It is hot in this hut, and his body here seems oversized, overgrown from the excesses of his Western existence, barely held together by his fragile skin.
After a long exchange, the woman and her child move forward from the corner, come a few feet closer, and stop. Iris’s aunt gestures toward this woman and says, “Alile.” Then toward the child: “Mkele.” When Alile fixes her yellow gaze on him, Henry feels his pulse beat through to his skull and when she murmurs “Muli bwangi” to him, he cannot respond with anything but a nod of his head. “Dili bwino,” he finally manages when she has already moved on, when she has already moved past him. He whispers it to her hair, which is cropped to follow the curves of her skull and which he can still smell, a strong scent of herb and smoke.
They all follow her to another corner of the room where an array of food has been laid out on a mat. Bowls of tomato and kidney bean relish, chicken meat, small flat fish piled up like silver dollars on a plate. They all settle in around the food. Iris hands him a small plastic bowl containing water and instructs him to use it to wash his hands. A plate of nsima is placed before him, somehow still steaming hot. He looks at it, a creamy mound of cooked maize, perfect in its smooth roundness like the shell
in his pocket.
At first they eat in silence, sounds of chewing and swallowing and smells and flavours of tomato bean relish sour and sweet fill his senses. A chicken was also cooked for the meal and the picked-clean bones pile up on a plate in the centre of the circle. Gradually the women begin to talk and Henry listens to the cadence of it, busies himself with the task of eating this good food. Following the lead of the women, he uses the nsima to soak up the remaining relish. He is suddenly and overwhelmingly grateful for this meal and he blurts out, “Thank you,” and none of the women respond. They acknowledge it, though, with a brief pause in their conversation.
Henry and the child have been stealing looks at each other. Each studies the other when they are afforded a chance, when the other is busy with food. She looks to be about six years old by his estimation, although he has found that he is terrible at guessing age here. Time, in general, eludes him and confuses him.
The girl sits there with a dancer’s poise and looks knowingly at him, like she understands something about him that he doesn’t. She lacks the playfulness of the other children from the village. Iris had said earlier that children and elders are the closest to spirit, and now he feels it: the familiar deep pang of anguish. The first in a long time. His food sticks in his mouth.
The girl is about the age Emma would be, had she survived. This thought, appearing so suddenly and before he could suppress it, comes and then goes. He reaches for some water to force the food down and the thought is already gone.
He watches Mkele’s narrow fingers reach down to pick up the last of the nsima from her bowl and then her mother’s hand reaches over to place more food in it. Alile touches her daughter’s hand. A brief, reassuring touch and a gentle reminder that she is here with her, that they are here together.
Iris sits beside him remarkably quiet. She has returned to her prior self, the Iris he knows well—surly and silent. He almost reaches over to touch her hand or her shoulder, but holds back. He looks over at her, tries to catch her eye but if she senses it, she does not let him know. She stares resolutely at her empty plate.
When the meal is over, Iris’s aunt and Alile begin softly singing as they tidy up. He remains sitting, not sure what else to do. Iris has risen and has joined the other women in the clean-up, but not in the song. She has that stubborn look on her face again, Iris of the old days on the ward, and Henry is swept over with warmth. He watches her move around the hut as though she’s always lived there and maybe for a good portion of her life she has. He knows almost nothing about Iris. He did not even know she was not born in Blantyre until today. How long has she lived there? When did she leave the village? He wants to ask her all these things, but here is not the place, and now is not the time, and she has shut him out again. Him and everyone else, it seems. She has curled up into her self, showing only her hard back like a cowrie shell, and with this thought Henry places his hand in his pocket again. It is there: round, smooth and reassuring.
Strange for a shell to be here, in a landlocked country. Henry squeezes the shell, closes his eyes briefly and imagines its history. How many generations, how many tribes, how many villages, how many hands have passed it on, how many stories has it told, how many decisions has it made, how many fates has it sealed?
The shell, still in his pocket, begins to feel warm, as hot as his hand. Henry places two fingers on the shell, as though taking its pulse. He feels its heat through his fingertips, he feels like he is touching someone’s wrist, or hand. The shell almost has the texture of skin. He pulls the thing out of his pocket. His hand is trembling. It is still just a shell and it gleams in the light of the lantern. He closes his eyes, leans back against the wall of the hut, feels the shell throbbing in his palm, and waits for the women to finish.
Chapter 13
Iris goes behind the hut with the dirty dishes. She knows there will be a basin there, a place to wash the bowls, and when she arrives, she finds it where she expects to. The rhythm of village life has begun to beat within her. She has mechanically joined the beat, joined in the dance with the other women. But she cannot bring herself to join the songs. The feeling of union would be too much and she would be overcome. She does not wish to lose control. This she has inherited from her time in the city. This stifling self-awareness. But this seems a strange concept here, and if it were not for Dr. Bryce, sitting there in the corner, she would have already succumbed. She would have joined the song. She would have fallen to her knees, melted into the earth of this village, bathed in the blood of her ancestors.
She wants to die here. This thought comes suddenly and here, alone in the yard of her aunt’s home under the moonless sky, she nearly buckles under the weight of it. The idea of dying in the city and being buried among a wide spread of nameless graves. She has never been to one of the city graveyards, but she can imagine the feeling she would have there. The numbers of unsettled spirits, shifting and moaning in their graves, forever separated from their ancestral homes.
It would be bone-chilling. Dangerous, even. Who knows what the discontented dead can do?
Her ancestors are buried here. Generations and generations of them, and they all remain a part of the village life. They watch the goings-on, react to the behaviour of the villagers, communicate if they are pleased or displeased, and advise where necessary. They share the wisdom of the beyond with those who struggle through the hard tangibility of this existence. How vital this wisdom suddenly seems.
Her grandmother’s grave is here, just beyond the borders of the village, in a wooded thicket. Her father’s mother died when she was only five, and yet she still feels her pull. Stronger since she arrived. And she has not yet had the chance to visit her kachisi. She has not had a chance to pay her respects, to offer a gift. Today, her grandfather had been kind and understanding and welcoming. He treated her as though she were injured. Without speaking it, made her feel like her mother had made a terrible mistake, and she has been cast adrift.
Iris continues to scrub the bowls. She squats beside the hut in the semi-darkness. The goings-on of the village are all around her. She can hear her aunt’s neighbours in their nightly routine. The women singing, the men talking, laughing, the children murmuring to each other in bed, nearly asleep. All of this is happening around her, within her, above her and below her. Soft, barely audible, but there, part of her and she, with th
e gentle clink of her dishes, the pouring of her water, with her sighs and rustlings, is part of it.
She puts down the last bowl and rests for a moment. There is no moon tonight and the stars shine astonishingly bright. The past, what led to the path her mother took, remains in darkness. Yet the memories since their arrival in Blantyre return to her in sharp painful jabs. The home they moved into and the maze-like alleys they had to navigate to find it, tucked in and abutting all the others. And the gangs of city children—skinny legs and smeary faces and narrow eyes snickering behind their hands at all the men their mother bedded. And the ritualistic paint on her mother’s face—the bright red on her lips, blue over the eyes like two shiny bruises. Iris dreaded this ritual because it meant the the door would be closed behind her mother when she left and the lock would be turned and she would be trapped in a place where she did not feel safe. Her brother and sister felt the same—she saw the size of their eyes, how they huddled together despite the heat.
All this is still so acute, as if it happened a few days ago. But the village life—all these memories are gone. Iris gathers up the bowls and moves back into the hut. The light of the paraffin lantern shifts and changes the shadows on the walls and the hut is filled with its pungent smoke. Everything is more vague inside the hut. Iris’s aunt and the woman Alile sit in one corner on a straw mat, chatting in hushed tones. The girl is curled up in the corner of the mat like a cat, asleep. Dr. Bryce is slumped against the wall, eyes closed, his breath coming in large, patient heaves of his chest.
Alile turns toward her, and her eyes fix on Iris’s face through the haze. It is in this look, in the eyes that take her in, deliberately unapologetic. This is when Iris realizes something important. Something she must have known all along. Iris feels her face twist and brings her fists to her forehead. She turns and runs out of the hut, through the yard, and into the darkness of the village. She hears her name being called, now faint and far behind her.
When she has run out of breath, Iris slows down. Her shoes are slipping off her feet, her toes and heels raw where the shoes were rubbing. She stops to remove them and carries them as she continues to walk. She takes in the appearance of the village at night. The huts are spread far enough apart for privacy, but close enough together to maintain a sense of safety and community. Trees spread a weave of branches above the huts. She walks past one hut and then the next, trying to remember who lives in each. Sometimes she recalls a face, sometimes a name, sometimes nothing. Even though there is no moon, she can see enough to navigate the village. She walks until she arrives at the thicket, just beyond the final group of huts. The graveyard, the spirit-place. Yes: she knew she would arrive here tonight. She stops in front of the low grass fence that marks her grandmother’s grave and her kachisi.
She can’t see much beyond the fence. A warm wind pushes past her face, originating from within the thicket, moving on to elsewhere.
Iris steps in through the fence. She knows she is breaking protocol, but the urge is too strong, she has been away too long and so she takes a few more steps. It is even harder to see within the compound; the wood is dense and only the fallen branches are harvested. She takes five more steps and then stops. Breathes. Waits. There is the sweet and sharp odour of ku-konda mowa souring inside the offering pots buried in the sand. Remnants of previous offerings, food and drink left by others before her. Villagers who have paid their respects and deposited their nsembe in the pots.
Iris kneels down on the ground. The burial site of her grandmother is beneath her and she can feel its energy warm the ground that touches her folded legs. The smell from the clay pots—two of them, buried almost completely before the heap of rocks—is stronger now. She leans forward and places her hands, and then her forehead on the earth in front of the pots.
She feels tears roll off the bridge of her nose and drop onto the ground. They come from the blackness of her mind, from the burning emptiness there. She is an endless landscape of fissured, cracked scales, and the last drops of her are for her grandmother. They join the earth, they sink between the kernels of soil and slip underground to nourish her. This is all she has to offer.
Eventually, she pushes herself up, stares at the kachisi, and the rocks that form her burial site, now a place of prayer. Iris stares, waiting. Nothing. Her grandmother’s kachisi is pale and unresponsive in the starlight. She has been away too long. She can no longer go beyond the mind, let its cloth fall away. It remains on her, tied around her head, a hangman’s hood. This is Education.
She misses her grandmother: her crooked body and her soft whispers. She almost feels the warmth of them now, the tickling feeling of breath just a hair away. Her grandmother used to pull her close, hug her and tell her things. This was always out of earshot of her mother, who would not approve of what was being said. It became a game, telling her these things when only she could hear them, listen, believe. When she was still very young, she just listened to the sounds that hissed near her ear. She heard: “sss … ss … sssss … ss.” And she would close her eyes and imagine that important things were being moved into her body in this way, secretly, through her ear and into her heart and mind. When she was older, she listened more carefully and knew that her grandmother said she was showing signs of a healer’s ability, like her grandfather. And her grandmother felt the openness in her, the vulnerability that was required to hear the whispers of the mzimu, the ancestors. A few times her grandmother pulled away, looked at her slyly: “Those were not my whispers.
You know that, don’t you, sister?” Sister. This is what her grandmother called her, as though they were twins.
There is a rustle. Close by, deep in the thicket. Movement through dry leaves. Soft as a whisper and she sees the tail of it before it disappears into the undergrowth. A python. Iris hugs herself and begins to cry. It was right there, right beside the kachisi. It might have been studying her, smelling her with its flickering tongue. Kantu ndi aka kawa mu maso. What she sees with her eyes is a real thing. She is frightened by how much she wants to believe that her grandmother came to witness her return.
Iris stands. She kisses her hands and then places them gently on the stones of the kachisi. She turns and leaves the compound. She walks until she reaches her grandfather’s hut and he is standing at the threshold, waiting for her when she arrives. Without speaking, he leads her into his hut and to a mat he has laid out for her where she lies down, still in her nurse’s uniform, and falls asleep.
She dreams of flightless moths. The creatures bat their useless wings and crawl in patterns, around and around in lines and loops, and if Iris could only get far enough away, if she could only gain enough distance from the crawling moths, she would see the pattern described in their moving paths, she would see what they are trying to tell her.
When she wakes, she is bitterly disappointed in her dreams. They communicated none of the symbols, none of the prophetic messages she was hoping for. All they told her was what she already knows: that she is lost.
Chapter 14
Henry wakes up to the cries of roosters. Loud and self-important, they boast to each other across the village, first one, then another and another until all are roused, the whole group of them joining in a cacophony of rigorous, excited calls. Henry listens in the darkness of the hut. He is lying on a mat by the wall, probably the very same mat where they shared dinner the previous night. He must have fallen asleep while the women were cleaning up. The roosters fall silent and Henry shifts on the mat and looks around. He sees the sleeping forms of the women and the girl, over on the other side of the hut. Iris’s aunt lies on her side with her back to Henry. Her rib cage lifts and falls with the deep breath of sleep. Beside her, Henry can see the girl, tucked in the concavity of her mother. Her mother’s shape rises behind her, her hip and shoulder the highest peaks. Her arm curls protectively around her daughter. Moving his gaze up past her arm, past the slumbering face of Mkele, Henry now sees Alile, eyes open, watching him
with a steady gaze. They lie on their respective mats and watch each other in the dim light. And then her child stirs and murmurs and they are far away when Alile tucks her head into her daughter’s hair, hugs her closer and whispers something Henry can barely hear. But still he strains to hear it, to hear the soft, reassuring murmurs. He rolls on to his back, lies there for a moment, and then gets up and leaves through the open doorway of the hut.
The sandy ground of the yard is white. He steps into a patch of sunlight. The sun off his skin is blinding. He squints to the piercing pain in his eyes, then keeps them closed, stands there and observes the red glow of sunlight through his eyelids, the wafting, flickering lights that drift across his visual fields.
Beyond the yard, he can hear the goings-on of early morning village life. His watch is inside the hut, with his backpack, and he stifles a compulsion to go back to the hut to check the time. It is the thought of the woman Alile, with her light brown eyes, that stops him. And so he starts for the fence, feeling her gaze hot like the sun on his back until he is on the other side.
He walks past women carrying bundles on their heads—water urns, woven trays of vegetables, bundles of sticks. They smile warmly at him. “Muli bwanji,” they murmur as they pass. One child races up to him. “Muli bwanji!” He shouts and then joins Henry in step, trailing him by one pace. Soon he is followed by a throng of children. They burst into laughter whenever he turns around, so he does it again and again, puts a mock expression of surprise on his face each time and each time they burst out in laughter. They pass a group of older boys kicking around a football. They kick it over to him and he hoofs it back. It is made of plastic bags, bound up with twine and it bounces heavily off his foot. His shot is poor; it misses the boy he’d sent it to by a few feet, and the boys laugh. He shrugs his shoulders in apology.