A Spy in Time

by Imraan Coovadia

  We went past them into a large gallery. The ceiling was a hundred feet up, secured by scaffolding. The walls were twice as far apart. In the middle of the space, an elevator shaft ascended through the ceiling, an engine at work bringing big iron buckets down and sending them back up on the other side. Strings of colored light bulbs looped along the walls, dimmer and brighter in unison with the engine. Coal smoke was thick in the unventilated space, reviving my cough.

  The young woman steered me to a table on which there were many calabash cups and pitchers covered with pieces of cloth. She poured out a full cup of what looked like fermented milk, as thick as porridge, and brought it to my lips. Then she motioned to me to open my mouth.

  When I demurred, she pried my mouth open with her fingers, and poured it down my throat until I choked. She stopped, giving me the chance to take a breath, and then decisively poured down the remainder.

  The potion tasted of mint, and then of something sweeter and more fatal which reached to the nerves that kept my heart beating and forced my breath to refresh itself. My body sank to the ground, the rank sweetness of the milk filling my nose and head until I bowed before my poisoner and vanished from the scene.

  In the underground, there was no boundary between the dreamtime and the hidden lights of the mining galleries and passageways. I woke to find myself spread-eagled on a board, hands and feet trussed with rope. The blue light of gas flames shivered on the walls. Fermented milk was thick in my mouth.

  Close by me, tied on a board of his own, was the boy who had once been my guard in a faraway prison. He was still asleep, and he didn’t look well. There were bruises and abrasions on the side of his head, red scrapes on black skin. I didn’t want to attract attention by calling him again. Nearby were a dozen strangers also bound and restrained.

  Around us moved laughing men in all manner of dress: overalls and dungarees, bowler hats, dinner jackets, and oilskin raincoats. Some wore belts with big buckles, or bandoliers over their chests, feathers tucked into their trousers.

  For the most part, the women wore the uniform of old Sahara, robed from head to foot. Others brandished rifles and pole-axes. They didn’t pay attention to us, coming close without trying to talk. The sweet-and-sour scent of their bodies made itself felt when they were nearby, but I could only imagine how I smelt and looked to our jailers.

  And to us what were they? Who were they? I had no doubt as to what was passing in front of my eyes. My cheeks burnt to recognize these ragtag men and women, these painted cannibals and pygmies. They were my ancestors. In not so many years as I liked to think, they were destined to inherit the Earth.

  I saw the boy was awake and managed to attract his attention.

  “Do you still think I am a prophet? Do you still hold on to your superstitions which have brought us nothing but misery as a species? What could I know that you don’t know?”

  “You have your own path. You are entering the time to be tested.” The boy waited until there was nobody close. “I have heard that every prophecy must be tested before it is ready to be heard by the world.”

  “How do you think they’re going to test me?”

  “Sir, I fear the worst.”

  I would have told the boy that nobody could draw the line and say where the worst ended and the impossible began. How would we know when we were at the worst? There was always the likelihood of another trapdoor. But he had closed his eyes, and I didn’t want to bring him back to the hateful world. After a while, he raised his head and smiled blindly in my direction.

  “They left you to us as a prophet, sir. You will reveal the secrets of the future. The still-hidden secrets of the past. Give us the hope we need to survive.”

  “I’m not your prophet. I am certainly not their prophet. I am an ordinary case officer caught in this situation. I have never uttered a word to anybody about the future. You should have left me out of your superstitions before blood flows.”

  “They also said you would say that. They are far ahead of you. That is my only consolation.”

  There was no opportunity to pursue the question. Men wearing hide drums on their stomachs cleared a space on the floor and began to beat out a rhythm. The noise was deafening. The leader wore a serge cap, setting the pace for increasingly irregular loops of drumming.

  I lay with my fists clenched, wishing I could depart from the course of my prophecy and find myself returned to the corridors of the Agency. Instead, a woman came around to pour more of the sour milk into our mouths.

  I considered trying to spit it out but it was safer to drink. This time the liquid was warm. It went into my chest, warming me immediately under the ribs. It made me drowsy and very happy. I laughed out loud despite myself. Then I laughed at hearing myself. I was as giddy as a drunkard.

  Women were dancing around the musicians as I became even giddier. At a certain point, the drums stopped along with the engine. With the motor stopped, a final bucket descended gradually from the shaft above. There were sparklers burning on its sides. It swung, showing decorated sides.

  I had to strain against my ropes and crane my head to get a proper view. Coming closer and lower, the iron bucket finally settled on the ground in the very center of the great hall. The lead musician inserted a crank into the engine, stopping the motion of the chain. Then he undid two bolts and lay on his back in front of the bucket, the stitched top of the kettle drum protruding upwards.

  The side of the bucket opened over him. The man inside rose to his feet, revealing an imposing figure of six foot and more. He was broad -houldered, covered in animal skins, and took some time to stretch to his full height. He straightened his wig, thick as a lion’s mane, and walked over the drummer and through the assembled men and women to the podium. I laughed out loud again, unable to stop myself, from sheer joy in the apparition.

  On his way to the podium, the man passed me, pausing to look down at my body and the others nearby without changing his expression. I saw that a pair of gold-framed sunglasses hang around his neck.

  Beneath his neck, the skins parted to reveal an inch or two of his coiled black hair and skin open all the way to the top of his penis. From the podium, he summoned men and women to his side, took them indiscriminately in his arms, leant to kiss them on their heads, put his hands on their hips.

  The music started up. Drums were supplemented by trumpets and horns, castanets on the women’s hands, an accordion, and the slurry speaking of mouth organs and a Jew’s Harp.

  The unholy milk had gone to my head in its full intensity. Under its influence, as if in the ear of a seashell, I heard ten thousand years of caravans coming to the coast, men and women in shackles, boys and girls, beaten and broken on whip and wheel. I heard centuries of blood and iron, slave bells and church bells, and the dream of a world turned upside down, on the day when dark-skinned men took the chance to play the master.

  That may have been the only time in my life when I heard prophecy, or imagined I heard it. The first would be last. The last would be first, the dream of a black emperor such as the world had never seen. In the midst of the men and women, their leader whirled round and around. The strands of his wig flew about his head while women pressed their mouths to his belly and feet.

  The boy whistled at me. His head and shoulders were covered in dust.

  “Do not worry, sir. In the end they cannot harm a hair on your head. You are the prophet. You were sent to bring us hope for tomorrow. Therefore, today you have nothing to fear. You have nothing to fear.”

  I couldn’t believe him. But try as I would, the milk I had drunk made it impossible to feel fear. Instead, I was filled with courage.

  “Do you remember the old world? Do you know the surface and its beauty?”

  “I was born under the sun, sir, but I can only remember it in my dreams. That’s when I think of yellow light. The space to run around. Free air to breathe. Tonight, I will be in the s
unshine again. I will have room to breathe. I will have a lot of room. I will eat raisins all night into the day.”

  He didn’t say anything more. Another hour went by, or what seemed like an hour, before they came to prepare him. More sour milk went down his throat, at first willingly, when he drained the jug and then by force when he was drowned to the mouth.

  In the background, verses were read out from some scripture I didn’t recognize. The boy was untied, then stripped of his clothes, revealing his painfully thin frame, ribs visible. His head lolled on his chest.

  Several women in clean white habits took charge. They lifted and moved him to a four-poster bed which had been brought into the hall, not far from where I lay. The women tied up the lace netting on all sides, exposing a satin mattress. They stretched out the boy’s limbs, holding each to a corner of the bed, and began to paint methodically.

  One of the women poured the white dye onto his skin. She took it from a row of tiny heated pots which stood on a plank over a Bunsen burner, while two more of their number stood back and burnt cubes of incense, adding to the flask drops of some liquor which evaporated on contact.

  The boy hardly trembled or showed any sign of life as their labors proceeded in full view of the onlookers. The dye was smoothed into his skin as if they were kneading dough. He was rolled over and his back was painted, inch by inch, until in place of the boy there was a shining white cocoon.

  In a stone oven, a fire had been built and was being banked. On either side stood men with bellows, forcing the flames higher. Sparks flew from the mouth of the oven into the crowd, rousing the dancers to greater frenzies. When the boy had been properly prepared, he was moved again from the mattress to a wheelbarrow and pushed past my position. I thought he might be smiling as he went by.

  The man in charge of the wheelbarrow wore only a loincloth and a single turquoise feather in his hair. At first, he passed the wheelbarrow swiftly in front of the oven, as if to warn its occupant. Then he let it stand in the rising heat, the air rising so fast it rippled, pushed it away, and then back to stay, the metal handles becoming too hot to touch.

  The undersides of the boy’s feet twitched a few times and stopped moving altogether. The musicians took up a spare melody, and formed a circle around the oven.

  At the end of the song, the chieftain lifted the body by himself and presented it in his arms. He went along the lines of musicians, allowing people to run their hands on the skin of the burnt boy. Some kissed him on the face, pressed his eyes with their hands, put their eyes against his burnt head as if they were trying to see what only the body had seen for itself.

  The chieftain laid the body back on the four-poster bed where a topless woman in a short bead skirt applied a long curved knife to the neck as if she were cutting a bolt of fabric, the tops of her thighs showing behind her.

  For some reason, I couldn’t look away as she pursued her task. Blood ran from the bed onto the floor. I wished very much that I had never thought to leave the century in which I was born. I was done with adventure. I wanted to hear the sane advice of a brasshead, consider its ranking of possibilities and likelihoods.

  The woman in the bead skirt completed her task. She held up the entire dyed white skin for everybody to applaud. It was not nearly so large as I imagined, not large enough to contain a life and a history. She submerged it in a basin and then wrung it out with her strong hands. The sound of the trumpets faded in my ears as I lay down, unable to keep my eyes open, and fell into a swoon.

  Someone was trying to wake me up. He or she was insistent but not forceful.

  I was trying to remain asleep in a world of safety. I was warm. There was a blanket over my sore legs. I was so close to my old life that I had only to open the right door to find myself in front of the automatic barista at the office. I could be waiting for the day’s reports to arrive and complaining to a fellow cadre about the brassheads in a low voice, although in theory the machines heard and processed everything which might fall to their fiduciary responsibility.

  No more than the merest width of a page of paper separated me from the Agency where I had been bored for the lack of adventure. I had looked for adventure and I’d thought I would never find it.

  When I opened my eyes, however, I found the man who had descended from the ceiling to preside over a skinning. He was dressed in the whitened skin, placed like a waistcoat on his arms, and gave off the strong smell of peppermint.

  “Sleeping Beauty has arisen. Sleeping Beauty, Sleeping Beauty.”

  He opened my mouth before I could tell him he was the second person to apply the name to me. He pressed my tongue as if he were checking its firmness, pulled on my teeth, making sure that none of them were loose, and in the process got a sample of my breath.

  The man winced and produced a spray from his pocket which he used several times on the inside of my mouth. He untied my arms and legs, and pulled me to my feet. He was so powerful I thought he was about to lift me into the air. Instead, he let me adjust, motioning to me to wait, while he spoke into a handset connected to a thin cable snaking down from above. I couldn’t tell what language he was speaking.

  We were the only two occupants of the hall, which had been tidied and deserted, although the huge iron buckets continued to cycle almost noiselessly and empty now from the ceiling to the floor and back again. The heat had gone down so that it was almost cold. The four-poster bed had been removed to a corner and covered with a tarpaulin. Water ran unabated along the walls, making dank pools on the floor.

  The only sign of the men and women who had been captured and bound beside me were the twelve bone-white skins pegged to a nearby washing line to dry. I shivered. I had never been so frightened in my life to end up a skin on the line.

  The man misunderstood my action and placed a pelt over my shoulders. He put his telephone on the ground and a hand on my shoulder, leaning forward and cocking his head as if to continue the inspection.

  “A man’s mouth is the very expression of his health.”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t follow…?”

  “In a man’s mouth it is possible to see without prejudice what only the Good Lord can see. Is he healthy? In good condition? Is he about to die? Assuming you have the appropriate knowledge of the mortal gum and the mortal tooth, it is possible to make a prediction.”

  “What do you see in me? Where am I going?”

  “No.” He removed his hand. “You are not about to die. On the other hand, Ferguson is no prophet. But, he thinks, neither are you a prophet, my friend. Neither are you, perhaps.”

  I wasn’t sure what to say to this. The man took me by the arm through the hall to a doorway covered by a bead curtain, shards of a mirror in the beads shimmering in the draft. We went along a corridor in which the rock had been covered in red velvet drapes, creating the unexpected sensation of entering the stage of a theater. A curtain at the end let us into a tiled bathroom. Lockers lined the walls. There were short benches on one side next to a full-length mirror. I elected not to look at myself and my reflection.

  Five shower heads stood next to one another, each with a tulip-shaped soap dish. I sensed the heat from the geyser in the roof. The man took off his skin and hung it on the locker, taking as much care as if it were a dinner jacket. Then he took off his clothes and folded them. He waited while I changed, switched the water on. Steam rose around us.

  I stood under a shower and couldn’t tell whether I was more frightened or pleased by the chance to be clean. Indeed, was grateful for the soap and water, continuing to stand under the shower even when the man got out and dried himself. He sat on one of the benches and spread out his legs.

  “In a former life, he was a dentist. Ferguson the champion dentist. He could take out an entire set of a man’s teeth and replace them with ceramics in under an hour. In Sandton, one of the shopping malls that is probably no more than a hole in the ground today. He saw rich b
usinessmen and housewives, lawyers and politicians, but the one thing he learnt is that a man’s condition is reflected in his mouth. What goes into it, what comes out of it, that is reflective of his entire life. So he wanted to see for himself the mouth of the so-called prophet.”

  “I am still not a prophet.”

  “And it is the fact that certain people believe you are a prophet which interests Ferguson. According to the boy whose skin is hanging here, you are a prophet from another time and place. You arrived in the company of certain individuals who presented you as the harbinger. According to Ferguson, it is the only reason you escaped today with your hide. The only reason.”

  I didn’t know if he was threatening me. I turned off the shower and dried myself. Ferguson had provided me with a robe, socks, shoes. I changed alongside him. I was no less frightened than before, but I thought I was better prepared to meet whatever challenge would come. I was somebody’s prophet. I deserved my own skin.

  Meanwhile, Ferguson smoothed ointment over his face, turning it white. He did the same with his hands, up to his wrists, until, peering in the mirror, his appearance satisfied him. He settled a necklace of teeth around his neck.

  He had me follow him back in the direction we came. We went into a corridor which was made of nothing but bare rock and the occasional piece of wooden scaffolding, here and there a naked electric bulb to shed light on the shifts in direction as the entire passageway changed course, turning to the right or the left, in general, from what I could tell, ascending to the surface. There were guards posted in shifts of three at some of the doors, using the same handsets I had seen Ferguson use.

  Every so often we passed a man sleeping on the floor, swaddled in blankets, or small groups of men and women grilling meat on a fire in a steel barrel. They greeted Ferguson enthusiastically, although he didn’t stop to speak.