Finn reached into the supplies closet for the petrol funnel and poured ten liters into the tank. Not many people on the island attached themselves to cats, or even allowed them inside their homes. There were too many of them to be considered pets. The prophet Mohammed had liked them, so they flourished under his protection, eating and breeding and prowling along the beach. But they were nothing you wanted in your home. Most of the islanders were good enough Moslems to leave them alone.
In the local café, Finn often stared at a piece of driftwood that hung on the wall. Into its soft, sea-worn surface the owner had carved his own proverb, as if to give direction to the many discussions that took place under his thatched roof. It read: Individuals divine history; some create and some destroy. Over strong, sweet coffee, the men who frequented the café agreed without exception that Mohammed was a shining embodiment of the former group: he had given them the blessed Koran. Mohammed, a man who could neither read nor write, had transcribed the text of the Koran in its entirety, as it was told to him by the Lord. It was one of the miracles of creation. The other group, the destroyers, was represented by Satan and his legions of nonbelievers. This group was harder to determine, especially as their once simple island grew more complex. For instance, it was a matter of contention to which group of individuals Finn’s father belonged. In his time on the island, the sacrilegious Swede had both created and destroyed. Shop owners, fishermen and hotel workers debated vigorously in the cool morning hours, tossing Henrik Bergmann’s fate into the air among them like a coin. As a boy, Finn sat and listened. Fatima made certain that he was allowed to hear all the arguments. With her instruction, he came to understand the honor of being told the truth about this man who was many things, the most distant and least probable, his own father.
Shop owners, who had the most time to debate, often raised the topic. “Bergmann knew about the cats, yet he did not understand.”
“If he did not understand about the cats,” another continued, “how could he understand Mohammed?”
“Had he understood,” still another said, “boss man Bergmann might still be around.” About this, there was consensus and, for a moment, peace.
“Bergmann was ignorant, not evil,” a hotel worker volunteered when the peace grew dull. (Hotel workers were more generous with Bergmann than the others. After three decades, they still prospered from the industry he had created.)
The orthodox and elderly opposition refused to accept this. “Bergmann was possessed by majini,” an old man croaked. “The evil spirits of Satan.”
The man next to him nodded and spit. “He was infected with ghaflah.”
“The Lord has mercy,” a hotel bartender said. “So should you. Forgive the man!”
“He has suffered enough,” someone else murmured.
“It is we who are suffering under his legacy,” a hotheaded youth asserted. “Our island is crawling with the unfaithful.”
The conversation turned into a pell-mell forum for general opinions, many of which were spoken simultaneously. “We work to increase their pleasure. And what of our pleasure?”
“Our pleasure is with our faith. Only those who look away from the Lord are weakened.”
“We have gotten stronger since Bergmann, and richer. How could I afford two wives before I worked at Salama? I toast to Bergmann!”
“We are their slaves!”
Later, in the dead afternoon hours on the beach, a few fishermen still argued. They lay side by side under their long thatch shelter like cigars, their voices swelling and floating back into the village.
Finn heard all the stories in time. On such a peaceful island, stories of conflict were welcome. Each story pushed Finn’s father further and further from his own life until he became a fable that even his son could tell. It went something like this:
When Henrik Bergmann first arrived on the island, his face had aged enough for strangers to know what kind of man he was. It was a face on which everything was written: distant burrowing eyes, so deeply set they were sensed more than seen; a high brow that fell in bony planes down to his stubborn cliff of a jaw; thick, blond hair brutally and unevenly cropped. (Later, the islanders were not surprised to see Bergmann hack away at his own hair with a pair of blunt shears.)
But the tall blond man came speaking Swahili, which made it hard for the islanders to remember what they had seen in his face before he spoke. He came wanting to build something large: a hotel, he said. A nice place for foreigners to stay on vacation. A place for them to renew themselves.
“A holy place?” one of the men asked.
“Sort of,” Bergmann answered. Sawa sawa. The men nodded. Some of them smiled. He needed one hundred men. He would pay them to work for him. The wages he offered were high. Men volunteered. They had never made such a wage.
Materials arrived from other places. Doorknobs, plates of glass, things never seen before on the island. At the docks, Bergmann sat under a broad-brimmed hat and waved a long mangrove branch as if he were a conductor. As crates were off-loaded, he married the strongest men to the heaviest boxes and then rode at the rear of the groaning donkey train, humming all the way back to the building site. Forty more men were sent by dhow to Tomba Island to cut blocks of rag coral, while the remaining forty hauled baskets of sand from the dunes. In one month, the men completed the sprawling foundation that included ten luxury bungalows as well as a central structure with additional rooms, an expansive dining room, a kitchen and indoor and outdoor bars. The men realized with some unease that they were building a structure bigger than the biggest mosque.
This mzungu, this white man, was rich. Very rich. In the wooden crates that came on the big dhows from Mombasa were linen and silver, yards of fine white cloth and exquisite glass bottles. In the heaviest crates were mahogany and brick. Chocolate and chewing gum started drifting back from the site into the village and the children quickly devised a barter system for these new delicacies. Bergmann’s ability to produce such goods gave him a status that rivaled that of any of the three village chiefs. For a year, he continually produced things no one had known existed.
It was two years later when Bergmann left the island and returned soon after with a small, yellow-haired child. He gathered the island’s male volunteers and, holding his curly-haired infant, announced that he needed workers, permanent workers, for the hotel: men to cook, clean, serve, sail boats, pour drinks. The first hundred volunteers had priority if they were willing to learn a little English. There was some mumbling of protest about this. English was the language of the unfaithful. Bergmann disarmed the men by smiling. He went on to explain that the men who had contact with the guests would have to be able to say a few things—they would have to be able to greet and answer basic questions. Nothing much. A few of the men nodded in understanding.
For the sake of simplicity, Bergmann continued, they’d have to make up names for themselves that English-speaking people could pronounce and remember; easy names like Jackson, Johnson, Hamilton. They weren’t real names after all.
“What is the name of the child?” one of them asked.
“Finn,” Bergmann answered.
“Finn?”
“A name from the north.”
“Can we be named Finn?”
“I’d rather not,” Bergmann replied.
“So there will be only one Finn on the island.”
“Yes, just one.”
“Here we share names! Many of us have the same name. Abdul, Habib, Ali.”
“And you can do the same with your hotel names.”
Most of the men shrugged and chose the same few names Bergmann suggested that sunny afternoon.
“Who is the child?” they wanted to know. “Where is its mother?”
“The child,” Bergmann told them with his eyes on the sand, “is my son. His mother is no longer with us.” Then Bergmann turned and walked away.
After they were trained, the men shuffled to work in white uniforms and shoes they had crushed at the heels. They did
n’t fasten their pants properly. Bergmann told them they looked like delinquent hospital workers. They shrugged—what did they know of hospitals?—and neither fastened their pants nor pushed their feet all the way into their shoes. They respected Bergmann, but there was a limit to the compliance he could demand. The pants were not so comfortable between the legs and the shoes made their feet sweat. Though the work itself wasn’t hard, the pants, the shoes and the unfamiliar hours made it strenuous. The hotel didn’t operate on the same clock as the village. Late nights were like the pants and the shoes. So were late mornings and the occasional missed prayer. A few months later, so was the occasional late-night beer. All these things traveled from different places, but arrived together somehow. Alcohol wasn’t normally allowed for Moslems, but working until eleven or twelve at night wasn’t normal. Together, the beer and the hours formed a nucleus separate from the life the men shared with their families and their village. Around this hard little seed, a new organism began to grow.
Bergmann called his hotel “Salama,” the Swahili word for peace. It sat perched above the Indian Ocean like a tropical bird, with the bulk of the structure flanked by two wings of private bungalows. Each bungalow was surrounded by lush, exotic foliage that blocked out everything but the sea before it. Sweet frangipani, jasmine and wild orchid scented the air. Above, coconut palms swayed and rustled like gentle protectors.
No one had really believed “guests” would come to the hotel, or that people would come to Salama from so far away, arriving by yacht and by seaplane. The word spread in Nairobi among the expat crowd and soon weekend forays to the coast became fashionable. From farther afield, Europeans and Americans came to swim in the warm sea and rid themselves of safari dust. The hotel workers sniggered at the pith helmets worn by these pale, perspiring hunters.
Bergmann paid his workers every week, and one hundred steady incomes launched the island into its first complex economy. Two more shops opened up and carried, along with grains, flour and sugar, the kinds of things the people at the hotel liked. Once or twice a day, rich hotel guests would wander back into the village, where they explored the mosques and bought things from the shops. Now some of the crates from Mombasa went back to the shops in the village, where they were stocking Fanta, Big G bubble gum and four kinds of Cadbury chocolate. Island children learned to run to the beaches when they heard the distant hum of a motor.
Bergmann trained his five most responsible employees to run the place in his absence, teaching them about telephones, accounting, ordering forms and the many strict standards to which Salama would always adhere. In beautiful italic script, Bergmann himself inscribed two handsome pieces of wood with meticulous lists in both English and Swahili. The lists hung in the office like manifestos, describing everything from room cleaning to the slicing of breakfast fruit. Finally, he showed them how envelopes came from Sweden with papers inside that represented money, that the money came from his partner at the bank in Stockholm. The men marveled at the fact that this single piece of paper transformed into one hundred salaries. They wondered among themselves if this could be called magic. “Everything is set up,” Bergmann told them. “All you must do is keep perfect records and you will continue to get your money from the bank. If you do a good job, that money will increase and you will become rich. But,” Bergmann said gravely, “if you break a single rule or neglect to follow a single instruction, the whole system will fall apart and the first thing that will happen is you will be fired. My partner at the bank has all your names and knows everything about you. If I am not here to fire you, he will. But you will do nothing to deserve that. You are the proud chiefs of this hotel. You have power that you must use wisely. If you are wise, nothing will go wrong. You will all go to heaven,” Bergmann added, “or wherever it is you want to go.”
After two years of smooth operation, Bergmann’s vigil over his workers eased. They performed admirably. Bergmann rewarded them generously, according to merit. The rank-and-file system had turned them into conscientious, industrious members of hotel society, leaving Bergmann finally free to smoke his Dunhill Partagas and spend some time with his guests. It was at this point that he let himself relax and reconsider aspects of the island he was living on. One troubling aspect was the encroachment of felines on the hotel kitchen and garbage area. They had recently started to invade the bungalows through open windows, spreading their fleas and contaminating the polished floors with their damp, sandy paws. They had started lapping up the milk left on early-morning tea trays outside the bungalows. It was both unhygienic and unacceptable.
Islanders believed that it was often in peaceful, idle moments that the majini, the evil spirits, crept into the human soul. They must have invaded Henrik Bergmann in this way, slipping into his daydreams, singing lullabies into his lazy ear as he lolled in his hammock. Build something else, they whispered. A structure much smaller than the hotel, so simple one man could build it by himself. When the idea took hold, Bergmann set up shop in a hotel storage shack, where he worked alone when the rest of the island was either sleeping or praying.
“What is it?” his houseboy, Abdul, asked.
“It is a raft,” Bergmann answered.
Abdul considered this. “A raft for what?”
“A raft for the water.”
“Small enough for baby Finn,” Abdul suggested.
“No, it’s not for Finn.”
Abdul watched, squatting, arms crossed. After a while he got bored and went away. Bergmann had cut down twenty evenly sized mangrove poles and bound the long, lean trunks together with twine, rope and banana leaves. No one knew what he was doing, or how he was doing it. They only reconstructed it later, after it was too late. Boss man Bergmann worked at night, his craggy brow furrowed and, at times, demented with purpose.
At the end of the week, the raft was completed. Bergmann constructed a large box next to the raft, with the leftover mangrove poles, with roughly the same surface area as the raft. He covered it with a thick layer of banana leaves, which, bound to four horizontally laid, 90-degree mangrove poles hinged by sisal on one side, served as a lid.
Bergmann owned a racing yacht that had won an Olympic medal for the Danish sailing team in 1928. The boat was flawless. Bergmann kept it moored in the harbor, where it swung with the tide like a dancer. He planned to charter it personally for the guests, take them for sunset meals and serve them fresh prawns and endive salad. But when he rowed his dinghy out one choppy morning, he gave the boat only perfunctory attention. He had come for something else. For those who might see him from the beach, he put on a deceptive little show. He wiped a few surfaces, polished the wheel, a few brass fittings. When he left an hour later, he took along with him a thick canvas sail bag, which he folded into a square and sat on while he rowed back to shore, as if to cushion his behind.
It was with this bag that he stalked the cats that night, finding them where they ate, slept, and shat around the hotel, picking them up by the scruff of their necks, dropping them into the bag. He collected cats until they became heavy and noisy and then he headed back to his hut. By the flicker of a storm lantern he emptied the contents of the bag into the pen where he had earlier dumped hotel dinner leftovers and a couple of fish he had bought from little Boni that morning. Bergmann closed the lid and waited. Screeches quieted into guzzling, chewing sounds. He went out for another bagful.
He gathered forty-two cats before he nailed the lid shut. It was a sizable number, a respectable first load. With the thick rope he had attached to two sides of the raft, he dragged the weighty box to the sea like an old mule.
It was a moonless night and a dark sea that swallowed the raft. The current of the ebb tide was as strong as a river, and the raft picked up speed and moved swiftly away from him like a shadow. Watching it, he sat back on the sand and lit a cigar.
Henrik Bergmann knew a lot about the island, but he did not know everything. He had only heard about a mganga—a healer more powerful than a witch who lived in the village. He did not
know that the mganga was an albino woman. He had not looked into her pale eyes or seen her hair in the sunlight. Even in the village, few saw her. As a child she had escaped the traditional communal attention village children received. The baby with crossed blue eyes had been kept inside for as long as possible. Eyes like that cursed whatever they looked at. No one but the family saw the child and even then they did not look her in the eye. The fate of the child was determined one silvery night when she wandered to the center of the village and stopped in front of the head chief’s hut, where she stood in the doorway, moonlight shining on her bright hair. She stood a long time in silence and then started to make a faint whining noise. The chief’s wife woke and saw the white-haired child with its crossed eyes and closed mouth. The whining sound emanated from somewhere around her head. Her ears? The chief’s wife covered herself and tried to rouse her husband. Their baby was sick with malaria and was sleeping for the first time in hours. When the child stopped whining and went to the back of the hut, the baby started to cry. The baby’s mother leapt out of bed, but the child reached the baby first and put her pale, ghostly hand on its forehead. It was hot with fever. The mother watched, her hands at her mouth. Soon, the baby stopped crying. The albino child curled up on the ground and slept. By morning the baby’s fever was gone.
The next rainy season, when malaria came again to the village, the child was sought out by the head chief and taken from her home. After she had saved two more infants from fever, a large hut was built for the girl, and those with fever came to sleep in the hut. What had been suspected was true: the child was a mganga, a healer. She went from mat to mat and held her dry hands on burning cheeks and foreheads. She slept occasionally, wound around herself like a salamander. In the day, she vanished to the alcove in the back of the hut and saw no one.
An Obvious Enchantment Page 5