by Tamar Myers
“Master, yet you do not believe the legends of our people.”
Cripple had sometimes observed that her employer, Mamu Ugly Eyes, turned the color of ripe guava flesh when she was angry. Now in the moonlight she watched the priest’s face turn dark with anger.
“Baba, you are possessed with demons.”
“Nasha. I came to comfort you, a lonely and smelly foreigner in a woman’s dress, and you repay me with insults! Is it no wonder—”
They were interrupted by a loud groan and a shaking of the ground so intense that it threw Cripple into the arms of the odiferous European. Surely such a deep and eerie noise was the sound of the earth giving up her dead as if in childbirth, and movement beneath her feet was that of a thousand hills shuddering in pain. Then the dead commenced to scream, and the hills began to writhe and shake violently. Such signs could only mean one thing.
“Behold, it is you who are possessed!” cried Cripple.
The priest pushed Cripple away, practically knocking her over backward. “Me? How dare you, a heathen, accuse me, a priest of the Holy Roman Church of being possessed? In the olden days I could have had you flogged.”
Cripple was justifiably outraged. Their Death had often repeated comments such as this that had been said to him. But a woman of no account like herself—one who lived her life exclusively in the village—was not privy to these harsh pronouncements. And although Cripple had lately begun working for the young American mamu, the missionary was an unusually kind woman. Thus it was that Cripple’s small body surged with adrenaline.
Cripple reared back as much as her twisted body would allow, so that she might lock eyes on the taller man. Her fingers were twisted as well, but that didn’t stop her from wagging one in the white man’s jowly face.
“You are a most ungrateful man,” she said. “Yes, I am a heathen, but did I not send to you a man by the name of Jonathan Pimple so that you might convert him to your strange beliefs? Tell me, white man—for I will no longer call you master now that I know it is your wish to beat me—why it is that Christians, whether Catholic or Protestant, must pay money after they convert?”
Cripple saw that the priest’s face registered intense emotion, and since she was not a spiteful woman, she felt compelled to offer soft words as well. “It cost not one centime to be a heathen,” she said, “unless, of course, one needs the services of a good witch doctor.”
But the priest did even smile. “You are the one who sent the Mupende man, Jonathan Pimple, to me?”
“Eyo. But let it be known that I do not approve of his taste in meat.”
Again, the man from Mputu—the great afar—remained as impassive as stone. “Did he tell you who he ate?” he said, his voice barely louder than a whisper.
There was now much noise from the crowd standing on the hill in front of the place where the whites buried their dead. The gods of creation had denied Cripple a well-proportioned body, but one of the many ways in which they had compensated her for that act of cruelty was by giving Cripple an extraordinarily keen sense of hearing.
“He did not give me a name, mua—na,” she said. She had caught herself just in time, and skillfully managed to change the word master into child. Surely the priest heard her, for she spoke loudly, knowing that he was old and that under the best of circumstances, one must speak Tshiluba slowly and loudly to the foreigners if one wishes to be understood.
But if the priest had taken offense, he showed no reaction. “Did this man, Jonathan Pimple, give you any details concerning the man he—tch—ate? Any details at all?”
Cripple could no longer look this white man in the eyes. Besides, his was a very unattractive face, as were his neck and hands, which were the only other parts of him not covered by coarse black cloth. This did not include the rest of his gray sweaty head, with the strange fine hair that resembled the down feathers of a mangy chicken, and which smelled just as bad. Based on what she could see, as hard as she tried, Cripple could not imagine eating any part of the Catholic priest, no matter how tasty the gravy in which he might be cooked.
“He was a white man,” she said.
The impassive face of the priest, which had earlier been dark with the blood of anger, now gleamed in the moonlight. He was like a ghost—a mukishi—come from the burial place behind him to haunt her.
“Was he a Catholic priest?” He said this without moving his lips.
“E, he was a Catholic priest.”
She watched, transfixed, as his thick hands, with fingers bent from age, clutched at his black dress. “How could he be sure? He was just a little boy!”
“I do not know, master. I only relate the words of Jonathan Pimple.”
A soft moan escaped from his lipless mouth, but almost immediately the sound was drowned out by the sound of a thousand drums; it was the deep sound of hollow logs, the thumping of a thousand elephants, although Cripple had only ever seen one. The sound, the vibration—Cripple imagined that the heavens were being ripped from the earth, and that she was in danger of falling into the great nothingness in between. Such is what she imagined; what she did not imagine was the great roar of approval from the three thousand throats gathered on the hill in front of the place where the whites buried their dead.
Neither did she imagine seeing the last pillar of the bridge crumple and slowly give way. More important than that even, she quite clearly beheld Captain Jardin’s truck, which had been racing across the bridge, take to the air like a francolin and fly across a gap that was at least twice its length. Upon landing, two of the tires exploded, but the truck did not come to a full stop until it was completely off the approach of the once mighty structure. By then there was both smoke and steam billowing from the engine, and the police captain was trying to get everyone as far away from the vehicle as quickly as possible.
When Cripple realized that one of the occupants of the blue pickup was her employer, the American missionary Amanda Brown, she shrieked in protest to the gods.
“Aiyee! This young woman has done nothing to deserve your anger. She is kind and gentle. At the most she is simpleminded. Can you not take a cruel Belgian instead?”
Madame Cabochon sat on a wooden bench in the back of Pierre’s pickup truck next to the monsignor. The young American sat opposite them, beside the OP and his wife. Pierre was indeed correct: the road was treacherous. The pretentiously named Boulevard de Roi, which was normally a wide dirt road with a flower-filled median, was now a brown river of mud crisscrossed by deep-cut channels. Despite Pierre’s expertise as a bush driver, the rear passengers found themselves constantly thrown against each other.
So in the end, did it really matter who initiated what? Madame Cabochon could not help but gasp when the truck lurched, and Monsignor Clemente—half Italian that he was—could not help being gallant and placing a steadying arm around her shoulder, and perhaps giving her a reassuring squeeze from time to time. Besides, they were childhood friends, were they not? Not to the mention the fact that they were in a public place and in full sight of two very sour and disapproving faces, so there was absolutely not the slightest chance of an impropriety. And who should know better than a monsignor, who lived in Rome and was practically the pope?
When the truck lurched past the Club Mediterranean—where Monsieur Cabochon no doubt sat in a drunken stupor—Madame Cabochon, clenching the monsignor’s hand so that she wouldn’t fall, gave freedom to her voice. First she addressed her drunken excuse for a husband.
“You bastard,” she raged. “When the revolution comes and our cook poisons us, you won’t even get sick, much less die. You no longer have any blood in your veins; they bleed only Johnnie Walker Red.”
She paused a minute, taking in the smell of an earth washed clean in the way that only the tropics can deliver; and the sound of a hundred muntuntu—the giant white crickets that were so tasty when cook sautéed them in palm oil; and the sight of a moon bi
gger than all of Belgium.
She swayed wildly before waving her free arm about, not unlike an American rodeo contestant. “And you Africans—you Congolese—just who do you think you are, telling me that I don’t belong in the country in which I was born? This is where I grew in my mother’s womb, this is where I took my first steps, this is where I was weaned from my mother’s milk—these sounds, these smells, this night, these are all mine, just as much as they are yours! Yes, you will have to kill me, because you will not be able to drive me from this land on your own accord.”
Then she made a fist. “And this is for you, Monsieur Communist Headman from Léopoldville! Come and get me; I dare you to! I will be waiting for you with my own machete; chop, chop, chop!”
Make no mistake, Madame Cabochon had a great deal more to say to the headman, but the steadying hand of the monsignor was also a restraining hand, and it yanked her down into the bed of truck. There, with her nose pressed so close to the floorboard (and in spite of the clean air rushing past), poor Colette Cabochon was privy to the lingering stench of decaying elephant meat. That too, make no mistake, was Africa.
“Don’t be a fool,” the monsignor growled. “Defiance is one thing; stupidity, quite another.”
“My thoughts exactly,” the OP said.
“Shut up,” Madame Cabochon said, and popped back to her feet like a punching bag.
“My thought has always been to stay alive,” the OP said. “My grandmother was an American—one of their red Indians. On account of that—my racial impurity, I mean—I had to keep a very low profile during the German occupation. But that accounts for my dark complexion.” He sounded eerily calm, meek even, totally unlike the wicked little slave driver Madame Cabochon believed him to be.
Surprised, Madame Cabochon looked at Madame Fabergé, the OP’s wife, for some kind of confirmation. When it finally registered with Madame Cabochon that the OP’s wife was gazing at her with something akin to adoration—perhaps even lust—she glanced away too quickly and sat down heavily, one cheek sliding off the side of the monsignor’s lap.
“Excusez mois,” she gasped as she rolled over onto the other cheek.
“Why, Madame Cabochon,” the monsignor said, “how lovely to see you again.”
No one laughed. No one dared to laugh; he was the monsignor, after all. Still, he shouldn’t have said such an inappropriate thing. But it was Africa, late at night, and they had just been threatened by a crazy headman; chop, chop, chop.
The truck braked suddenly; if Madame Cabochon had still been standing, she might well have been sent through the window into the cab—after all, there was no longer any glass separating these two parts of the vehicle.
“What is it?” the OP’s wife, Madame Fabergé, demanded in her irritating voice, which somehow managed to be simultaneously a whisper and a shout.
“How am I supposed to know?” her husband said. “I’m not God.” He pointed with his chin at the monsignor. “He’s certainly not God. And she—she’s nothing more than a whore.”
Madame Cabochon was not surprised by the OP’s words, but she was stunned by his vehemence. There were always men who disapproved of her flirtatious ways, but nonetheless they couldn’t help but find her charming. What had she done to the OP to deserve such contempt, except to quietly despise him? It was not like she’d waged a campaign against the man aimed at getting him fired—although, speaking of God, he alone knew why such an incompetent imbecile had been put in charge of one of the Congo’s most valuable assets in these, the waning days of colonial rule.
“Shut up!” Amanda Brown said. Although she was sitting in the cab, apparently her young, healthy American ears had heard the OP sink to his lowest level yet.
Perhaps it was true, as Madame Cabochon had often heard said of late, that Americans—particularly their young people—had a strong sense of fairness. Bon! If she and the girl were to become friends, she would have to become very clever about the way she went about seducing that handsome young police captain of hers. Very clever indeed! But every woman needed a girlfriend, especially in a backwater town like Belle Vue. Now, Coquilhatville, where there were several hundred whites to choose from—that was a bit different.
But Madame Cabochon had very little time to plan her social life, for the very next second the young captain stuck his head through the opening.
“Hang on to the side of the truck as tightly as you can with one hand, and the person next to you with the other. No matter what, don’t let go of that person. I will count to three. When I get to three, you will close your eyes and pray. You too, Monsieur Fabergé!”
“Oui, mon capitaine.”
“Un, deux, trois!”
Chapter 23
The Belgian Congo, 1935
What is your name?” the tall soldier asked the boy before he was taken from the fat man’s village.
“I have no name,” the boy said. “Only ‘boy.’ ” Indeed, he did have a name, which he would never divulge, for it was the only thing that truly belonged to him.
The soldiers laughed.
“You are no longer a boy or a slave,” said the short soldier. “You have need of a new name. We shall have to think of something that befits you.”
“He is covered with pimples,” said the tall soldier. “Let us call him Pimples.”
The boy squirmed, but he did not protest. Everything happened in its own time, and eventually everything would sort itself out the way it was meant to be. Just look how far he had come already! He had survived an attack on his village, and the man whose buttocks he’d been forced to wipe had been killed at his suggestion. In the meantime, he’d witnessed other slaves being starved, raped, or beaten to death. He had even heard about a place called Arabia, which was many days travel beyond the sunrise, where many Congolese boys were taken to be sold, and from where none ever returned. An unpleasant name, therefore, meant nothing to him.
Chapter 24
The Belgian Congo, 1958
It was with great interest that Jonathan Pimple beheld the wise woman, Cripple, speaking in earnest to the Catholic priest. This was a most unexpected development, for it was well known that the witch doctor’s wife was a staunch heathen who had no use for the white man’s religion; likewise, the Catholic priest openly disdained what he called “wicked heathen practices.”
Then the first of two great wonders happened: the hand of God reached down from the sky and plucked the white man’s bridge from its moorings. Yes, Jonathan had seen the hand of God; he was sure of it. It wasn’t a white hand either, as in the pictures he’d seen; it was black—like his own hand. God was a black man!
The second great wonder was that the blue truck belonging to the chief of police, Captain Jardin, had flown across the gap formed by the missing portion of the bridge. This was a miracle; there was no denying it, for he had seen it with his own eyes. It was not the same as reading about it in the dank, yellowed pages of a book printed in Mputu—“the faraway land.”
What was the meaning of all this? Surely the wise woman named Cripple would know. No doubt it was not by chance that it was while she stood talking to the Catholic priest, a white man, that the black hand of God reached down from heaven and destroyed that structure which best symbolized Belgium’s vanity: the Belle Vue Bridge. “The Pride of the Kasai,” they named it, but it was the white man who took pride in it, and on the backs of the black men who did the actual labor.
So it was that after the heavens closed, and the blue truck landed, spilling out its passengers, and Cripple and the Catholic priest disappeared into the mango grove where the whites bury their dead, Jonathan Pimple beseeched his ancestors. And it came to pass that Jonathan Pimple’s ancestors heard his prayers, and he was given just enough courage to follow the mysterious pair into the haunt of European ghosts. For it is a well-known fact that Europeans—that is, anyone whose skin is not black—are not happy being buried so far fr
om the lands of their birth. Indeed, many are heard roaming through this copse at night, their moans and cries disturbing the villagers whose misfortune it is to live closest to this, the healthiest spot for hundreds of kilometers in any direction. Even more unpleasant is the fact that a few—as many as three, and all said to be men—have been seen in the streets of the village and have attacked and beaten those villagers who were unable to quickly find shelter.
One old man, Mulumiana (which is what one calls a man whose name you have forgotten or cannot be bothered to mention), observed a pair of men’s shoes emerge from the trees at the cemetery’s edge one moonlit night when he had gone out from his hut to relieve himself. The shoes—empty of feet—walked directly up to Mulumiana and then something, perhaps unseen fists, began to beat him about the head and then pummel his abdomen. The next morning Mulumiana was found unconscious, his body draped across the concrete pad that protected one of the white gravesites. It was the grave of Monsieur Toussaint, who had, coincidentally, once employed Mulumiana.
Of course Jonathan Pimple was no man’s foolish younger brother. Before entering the haunted grove of mango trees, he prayed to the white man’s Jesus Christ and to the spirits of his ancestors, asking all of them to protect him from the vicious ghosts that surely roamed this place where the whites buried their dead. Then he crept as close as he dared to the old priest and the witch doctor’s wife. When at last he had gone as far he could go without being discovered, he realized that he was standing next to the grave of Madame Heilewid, the wife of the former OP. It was then that Jonathan Pimple truly felt his blood begin to thicken with fear.
Although Madame Heilewid had burned to death in a savannah fire, and all that had been buried was a charred stump, it was said that on certain nights her stump would roll out of the grave and into the village, seeking the men who had set the fire. The next day the entire village would smell of charred flesh; this part of the story was incontrovertible, as dozens of people would complain of the odor.