Tefuga

by Peter Dickinson

  Anyway, that’s what I thought I understood, then. I saw it quite clear, as tho’ part of me belonged to the Kiti creature. But with another bit of me—the white bit—I had one of my ideas. “The spirit is in Azikoflo,” I said.

  It seemed so obvious. I knew Ted was bothered about the Kitawa not respecting the new Emir ’cos of the ceremony not being good enough, but if they thought he’d already got as much spirit as KB had had there shouldn’t be any trouble, should there?

  One of the women started to mutter to Femora Feng, but she pushed her away. She was in charge. Everyone else was listening, holding their breaths, it felt like. So still.

  “And now the White Man sends this child with the spirit of Kama Boi back to the place of the ancestors,” said Femora Feng.

  “Yes. The White Man is your friend,” I said.

  “Good.”

  And that was all right. They started breathing again.

  “I would like to make a picture of you in your beautiful paint,” I said—just for something to say, really. “May I do that?”

  Silence again. Femora Feng stared at me. Her eyes were very round.

  “You made a picture at Sollum,” she said. “A picture of the dream.”

  “Yes. I dreamed the dream too, so I made a picture. This time is not like that time. We are women. We must do what we do with one mind. I will not make my picture if you do not want it.”

  Murmurs and whispers. I stood there smiling. I realized I absolutely longed for them to say yes. It mattered dreadfully, I didn’t know why.

  Femora Feng drew herself up.

  “Make your picture for us,” she said.

  So I trotted off to the rest house and left a message for Ted and got my pad and my small paint-box and went back to the mat place and settled down in a corner. It became rather a special morning, a bit like the time I did KB’s wives in his harem. Bodies are terribly tricky—naked ones I mean—and of course there was nothing like that at school. But they’re much the most interesting, look how all the best painters have wanted to do them. I’d tried a few fishermen, but most of the river people wear clothes and this was my first real chance to have a go at complicated poses. I didn’t feel I was ready for a whole picture so I just did studies, but even so it was like the time in the harem ’cos I had the same feeling of something, some power, flooding through me, in at my eyes and out down through my fingers and brush, something to do with it being that stifling crowded place, and full of us women. They were lovely to paint, standing poised or moving so gracefully spite of the crush, caressing each other with long flowing movements to make the stripes—they did all their painting with their fingers. It was almost like a dream—you know for instance when you’ve been blackberrying all afternoon and at bed-time the berries and brambles come back and make patterns over and over inside your closed eyelids. Same now, hands floating across bodies, leaving their trails of paint. I caught them and dashed them down, a hand and wrist on a shoulder-blade, a neck and face craned sideways to squint at an effect, a leg and foot up on someone else’s knee to have the ankle ringed, the bright-blotched swoop of a bosom, and hundreds of hands, black, thin-fingered, pink-palmed, making their paint-magic. I felt I was being let in on something very special, their gift to me, allowing me to see at all. And tho’ they were only snatches, my little studies were good, real. They had that something, that power, it was there, in spite of sometimes being a bit clumsy ’cos of me not having had much practice at the nude, but that doesn’t matter when the power is in you. I’d filled four whole pages, crammed them with legs and arms and hands and heads, before I looked at my watch and saw I was late for lunch already.

  Soon as they saw me packing up everything stopped again. They wanted to see what I’d done. I passed my pictures round. They were amazed. I was pleased about that for a mo, till I realized that actually they were terribly worried. I asked Femora Feng what was the matter, but I knew before she spoke. I should have thought.

  “Why all these pieces?” she said. “What does this mean?”

  She was so serious I didn’t laugh.

  “When I go to my hut,” I said. “I will take a big paper …” (no word for paper of course—had to use the English) “and I will put these pieces together and make a picture of beautiful whole women. I cannot do it now. I am not ready. I must wait.”

  Femora Feng looked at the sheet she was holding for a long time.

  “Good,” she said, and handed it back. I collected the others and slipped away.

  I was a bit late for lunch but I found Ted feeling rather pleased with life. He said the palaver had gone well and Elongo was being very sensible and he thought everything was going to turn out better than he’d expected. I didn’t show him my studies—he would have been embarrassed. Then we lay in hammocks in the shade for a bit and watched the last Kitawa coming past. Ted said even he hadn’t realized there were so many, practically everyone in the whole tribe must be there. We rode off towards the hill in the middle of the afternoon. We wanted to be there before the Emir and his lot, still so’s everyone could see we weren’t part of that gang.

  At first the bush was empty, just as usual—that feeling of Africa stretching for miles and no one else in it—but soon as we were about half a mile from the hill it changed. Every little clearing, anywhere you could see the top of the hill from, had a little camp of people in it. The scrub thins out as you get nearer the hill, tho’ never quite completely, still a few bushes dotted about, and then we began to see how many there were. And the river bed when we reached it—just about where I’d painted my picture and listened to Femora Feng—stretching away to the far dry bank and right along for more than a mile, separate clumps and huddles of people, dotting the whole brown level with black blobs, like the spots on a leopard. We had to wind our way through to our place near the bottom of the hill where the main dancing-floor was. Ted had sent Mafote out in advance with our folding chairs and parasols, and he took the horses away and tied them by some bushes and we settled down.

  First we knew the Emir’s lot was coming was a drum, far away. Then another from somewhere else, and another and another answering … There seemed to be drummers all over the plain beating the message to and fro, just a mess of noise at first, deep thuds like heartbeats with plinks and rattlings on top, but then the heartbeats got together and then—this was really exciting—somehow they made a kind of wave of thudding so that the heartbeat seemed to start at one edge of the plain, right out in the distance, and come rolling towards you like a huge soft wave and on out across the river bed and then start rolling back. When it was right out there it was drowned by the plinks and rattles going on round you but somehow you could still feel it and then you began to hear it and your nape prickled and your hair tried to stand up as it came nearer and nearer and your own heart joined the thudding and your skin went cold as it rolled over—no, through you and out the far side and on, and you knew every single person in all that mass was feeling the same thing.

  Then the Emir’s procession came picking their way through. You couldn’t hear their squeaky trumpets but they looked magnificent. Whatever else is wrong about them the Hausa really know how to put on a parade. Brilliant robes and turbans and tasselled spears and the Emir’s lovely leaf-shaped sunshade and gaudy brollies twirling either side and everybody getting a chance to show off their horsemanship ’cos of the horses being half-crazed with the drums—thrilling. And little Azikofio at the middle of it, with his sad big eyes.

  Before the procession reached the open space the first dancers came out to meet them, men (I think—you couldn’t see) in grass spirit-suits ten feet high, pale swaying pillars with ogre-masks at the top. That did it for two of the horses, which bolted, but the rest moved on with the dancers swaying and twirling round them, with the dust rising ’cos of the way they stamped. And they went on twirling and stamping while the Hausa dismounted and set up under their awnings to watch.
The wave of drumming had stopped—I hadn’t noticed—and the dancers made their own “music” with rattling calabashes and a waily thing, until they danced off in and out among the crowd further and further away so’s everyone got a chance to see them in the end.

  That’s how it went on. Everything happened terribly slowly, with long gaps while the Hausa chewed kola and Ted and me had tea from my thermos. It must have been utterly exhausting for the dancers. Long after the first ones, the grass giants, had left us, I noticed them right out across the river bed, still at it. Ted said a kind of dancing madness gets into natives which keeps them going, so that they collapse completely when they stop, and often go into a coma or even die of exhaustion. I’m afraid some of it seemed rather boring tho’ I realized it would have been more interesting if I’d understood what the dances meant. I could see the dancers were all supposed to be different things, spirits or animals or ancestors, but I didn’t know what.

  My women were much the best. Lizards. I’d been right about that. Or snakes. Their music was just a few old women sitting and clapping (v. cleverly, tho’). They came on in little lines, three in each line, holding the hips of the woman in front and bending flat. The lines wriggled about among each other in wavy patterns. Then they started to “eat” each other by joining up, fewer but longer, and soon as the lines were long enough they very cunningly made the “body” of the lizard ripple up and down as they moved. Then there were only two lines left and they did a sort of dance-fight (or mating?) which finished with them coiling inward side by side in a tight clump in front of the Emir. I thought they’d have to unwind backwards but then a head came through under the arms of the outside ring and a whole line of women slithered through and wriggled its way round the arena and off. Like a conjuring trick with people instead of rabbits. I kept trying to see which was Femora Feng but I couldn’t under the paint.

  I’d have loved to laugh and clap but it would have been like clapping in church. It was all deadly serious. Even the boring bits—there was one dance which was just men jumping up and down in the same place holding sticks with black feathers in the ends—but the Kitawa concentrated like mad on that too. Sometimes the ones nearby did join in by shouting or clapping, but that was all part of the dance—they were meant to. The Hausa looked bored by the whole thing. The little Emir kept picking his ear till I longed to go over and slap his wrist away. I could see how utterly they despised my Kitawa.

  Well, we got through that bit in the end. The sun was quite low by the time all the dancers came back from doing their turns among the crowd and danced their way up the hill. The Emir climbed into a special chair with poles, which four of his people started to carry up the hill. Ted got up.

  “Well, here goes,” he said. “You’re well out of it, Rabbit.”

  “Shut your eyes, darling. Nobody’ll be watching you.”

  “I might, at that.”

  He walked off up the hill with Elongo close behind him. I set up my easel but I didn’t feel like painting. I kept having imaginary chats in my head, trying to break it to him about me being pregnant, making it easy for him. Funny thing—I know him so well that usually I’m pretty certain which way he’ll jump over anything, but I wasn’t this time. He’d hate the idea of me going—it matters so much to him. Part of me tried to persuade the rest of me I wouldn’t mind if he got himself a native woman, specially if I’d told him he could, but actually I would mind, dreadfully. The thought of him coming back to me, after somebody else … But he’d be pleased about the baby, I knew. He’d be sure it was going to be a boy. Not so interested in a daughter—silly, he’d adore a daughter soon as she’d stopped being a baby. I didn’t think I minded. Anyway, once you’ve started there’s not much point in stopping at one, supposing you could afford more. Really, I didn’t want either. My life had been pretty mouldy from the time Mummy died till I met Ted, and then there’d been a few exciting months, but now I was going to get myself trapped again. Babies, lodgings, my man thousands of miles away, no one to shield and cosy me. Horrible.

  When you’re in that sort of selfish mope you don’t notice anything outside you. I really don’t remember anything between watching Ted starting to climb the hill, with Kitawa going up all round him, and then me sort of waking up feeling something was wrong. Everything far, far too still. No one anywhere near me, when before there’d been thousands. And getting dark, just the glitter of the last rays of sun on the tree-tops up the hill. Pricks of yellowy orange under the trees, where they’d lit the torches. I couldn’t think for a mo where everyone had gone. Then I saw the hill was different. Black, and soft, and smooth all over, almost as tho’ there’d been a black snow-storm in just that one place. It was packed solid with Kitawa from the trees almost to the bottom, pressed tight against each other, tight as a swarm of bees, all one mass, those tens of thousands of people. You couldn’t see heads or shoulders or anything in the almost-dark, only a tassely fringe of legs along the very bottom. I’ve said once or twice about the Kitawa sometimes talking as tho’ they weren’t separate people but all just parts of one big animal, it was like that.

  And so still. They’re a quiet people, anyway, but you didn’t feel any of them was even breathing. They were alive, tho’, snapping tense, waiting. Still. I felt my own heart thud, and thud. I got up—not on purpose but I was sort of drawn. I had to go forward to join them, to press myself against the lowest row, to be part of the animal.

  Then there was a yell. I heard it before I’d moved a step.

  Women, lots of them, shrieking together at the tops of their voices. Men shouting, almost drowned by the shrieking, not as tho’ it was part of a ceremony, which the shrieking might have been. More like yelling orders. Then shots—two, or three. They only made the screaming get louder. I’d no idea what the screaming meant. I just stood there, with my hair prickling. I knew the best thing was to go over to the horses so I could get away if I had to, but it was no use. I sort of stuck.

  Something had happened to the crowd on the hill. I couldn’t see but I could feel. It had stopped being one thing. People were shouting to and fro with ordinary voices, questions, answers. I didn’t see the crowd starting to break up but it must have ’cos suddenly a big Bakiti came rushing at me and banged into me as tho’ he hadn’t seen me, knocking me clean over. Before I could get right up it happened again, and while I was lying flat another one came and tripped right over me and took a terrific tumble but got straight up and rushed on. I started to crawl sideways towards a tree so’s I could shelter behind it, watching in case another one came so’s I could try and dodge. Had to do that several times before I got there. Extraordinary thing—the one who’d tripped over me had kicked me pretty hard just under my arm. It hurt, but that didn’t bother. What I was chiefly worrying about was the baby, and getting kicked there. I didn’t want the baby, I thought it was almost the most dreadful thing that had ever happened to me, but I couldn’t help trying to keep it safe.

  Anyway I got to my tree and crouched behind it and tried to see what was happening. It was almost dark now—I still couldn’t make much out, just people coming down off the hill and going away. They weren’t all running. I saw three women go past with several small children. They were hurrying the children and looking back over their shoulders as tho’ something might be chasing them, but they weren’t panicking like the men. I called out to them to ask what had happened but they didn’t answer, tho’ I knew they’d heard ’cos of the way they looked at me.

  Mafote came up with the horses. He’d had a struggle to reach me, coming across the streams of Kitawa rushing away. I took Beano off him so he could try and quiet Tan-Tan who was wild with fright. Having a horse to hold and gentle and calm was a help. I kept looking towards the hill. I could just see something different happening. What had made it so difficult till now was all the people being so black you couldn’t make anything out they were doing, but now they’d mostly moved away from the top, tho’ there were
quite a few sitting or lying on the slope under the trees. Shot, or trampled, I thought. Straight towards us some not so black were coming, all in a mass together, shouting in a different kind of voice. The screaming hadn’t stopped but it had sort of split up, going different ways, which meant I could actually hear some of what these other people were shouting—mostly “Out of the way” in Hausa. They barged their way down. The Kitawa didn’t seem to be fighting back. I couldn’t see Ted but I thought he must be there so I said, “Come on” to Mafote and started to lead Beano that way.

  He came running out of the dusk, gasping for breath. “You all right, Rabbit?”

  “Yes. Are you? What happened?”

  “They went mad. The women.”

  “What happened?”

  “Tell you later. Hang on here. Get ready to make a dash for it. Don’t wait for me.”

  “What happened?”

  “Later. Got to try and cool the Hausa off. They might …”

  And he’d swung himself up onto Tan-Tan and dashed away. The Hausa had almost reached their own horses. They were shouting, furious. I’ve never heard them like that. Usually they’re rather calm. Ted rode himself between them and the horses and started shouting back. Nobody else paid the slightest attention. Kitawa were moving past me in the almost-dark, arguing in low voices, frightened but excited. A flaming torch came towards me, a white pillar below, Elongo.