Possessing the Secret of Joy Part 2

TASHI.

CAN YOU BEAR TO KNOW what I have lost? I scream this at the judges, in their stupid white wigs. And at the lawyers-my own and the one hired to prosecute me. They are both young, dapper African men who would not look out of place in London, Paris or New York. I scream it at the curious onlookers for whom my trial is entertainment. But most of all, I scream it at my family: Adam, Olivia, Benny.

No one responds to my question. The prosecuting attorney suppresses a smile because I have lost control. The judges rap their pencils on their tea trays.

But on the morning of the twelfth of October last did you not make a point of buying several razors at the shop near the Ombere bus station?

Once upon a time there was a man with a very long and tough beard... I began without thinking. Stopping only when it dawned on me that the entire courtroom had burst into laughter. Even Olivia, when I cast a glance at her, was smiling. Oh, Tashi, her look seemed to say, even here, on trial for your life, you are still making things up!

If you would be so kind as to answer the question, says the dapper young attorney, and not attempt to indulge and distract the court with your fantasy life.

My fantasy life. Without it I'm afraid to exist. Who am I, Tashi, renamed in America "Evelyn," Johnson?

The razor to me was always a.s.sociated with men, with beards and barber stools. Until I went to America it would never have occurred to me to pick one up, to shave my legs and underarms with it.

Yes, I say to the attorney, I bought three razors.

Why three? he asks.

Because I wanted to be sure.

Sure of what?

To do the job properly.

You mean to kill the old woman?

Yes.

That is all, Your Honors, he says.

That night in my cell I suddenly remembered the large razor I saw at the old man's house in Bollingen, when Adam took me there. It was truly huge, as if it had belonged to a giant. I thought: How could a man's face be so large; it would be almost like shaving one's face with an axe. It was lying outside in the loggia, near the fireplace, and the old man used it, along with a large machete, to shave off slivers of wood for kindling. It was black and ancient, with Chinese dragons engraved in greenish bronze on its sides. The blade was exceedingly sharp. I couldn't keep my eyes off it. The old man, noticing my fascination, placed it tenderly in my hands, closing my fingers over it protectively. It is beautiful, isn't it? he asked, but I thought he observed my clutching of the thing with a quizzical look in his eye.

I held the razor and looked out over Lake Zurich. Marveling that after our long trip, Adam and I had indeed arrived there.

We had flown first to London, where Olivia was speaking before the Theosophy Society, and then to Paris, and then on to Zurich, a remarkably clean and somnolent city. In fact, from the airplane window the whole of Switzerland seemed to be quietly sleeping. Everything neat and trim, safe. There was an air of thrift, of husbandry, even before one touched the ground. I could see that the forests were carefully tended: where trees were taken out, seedlings were put in. It seemed a country in miniature, where every slight wrong might be corrected, without much trouble.

I remarked to Adam how odd this was: that the people's characteristics, easily discerned, were imprinted on the landscape.

But that is true everywhere, he said. Everywhere some people go they wreck the land, he said. But this is the land of people who've stayed home. Mountains, he said, gesturing at the magnificent Alps, make a wonderful fence.

We were circling the airport. It was in the middle of a field. There were cows and, as we descended closer to the ground, white clover and yellow wildflowers.

There was a train to Bollingen, and we took it. It ran noiselessly on its track, its conductor a redfaced, jovial fellow with graying flaxen hair. We looked out the window at the chalet-style houses, the acres of grapes, the family plots of corn. Gardens everywhere.

I had never imagined a warm Switzerland. In my imagination it was always snowing. People were on skis. The ground was white. There was hot chocolate. To feel the intense heat of the sun, to see people in summer pastels, to glimpse an ice cream vendor in one of the stations, amused me. I felt that my child self, who'd so loved to imagine snowy northern landscapes, especially while I was growing up in equatorial Africa, was experiencing a treat.

Adam seemed somewhat nervous as the train neared the station. Departures and arrivals always upset him. I remembered when we first arrived in America. His excitement to be, finally, "safe" and back home. And his shock at being constantly hara.s.sed because he was black.

No, no, he used to correct me. They behave this way not because I'm black but because they are white.

It seemed a curious distinction at the time. I was in love with America. I did not find Americans particularly rude. But then I had not been steeped in the history that Adam's father had insisted he and Olivia study, in preparation for their return home. I felt I was able to see everything in a much more expansive way. For I saw everything fresh, and with wonder that I was in America at all. If a white person was rude I simply turned and stared. I never acknowledged the system that sanctioned rude behavior, but always responded directly to the person. How uncivilly you have been brought up! was the message of my stare.

We were so intent on reaching the end of our long journey that we missed the station and rode on, oblivious, to the one beyond it, Schmerikon, a pleasant hamlet close to the sh.o.r.e of the lake. Hot and fl.u.s.tered, we clambered down from the train and made our way to a small cafe just by the station. Adam ordered a sandwich-for we'd had no food all day-and I ordered cheese on a roll, a green salad, and lemonade.

There we sat, in the shade of a linden tree, two rotund black people in advanced middle age, our hair graying, our faces glistening with sweat. We might have been models for a painting by Horace Pippin.

ADAM.

THE FIRST THING I NOTICED was the flatness of her gaze. It frightened me.

As soon as we returned from England, my aunt and father securely married, I tore off across the country in search of Tashi. It was a long journey that took several months, because I was frequently on foot and had little idea where I was going. During the final month I found myself following a trail whose markers consisted of crossed sticks and odd configurations of rocks piled near watering holes. Then, when I finally dragged my ragged and weary body into the Mbele camp, I was seized by the warriors who stood watch over the encampment, and taken to an isolated compound for interrogation.

Such a possibility-that I might be captured by some of Africa's liberators-had not occurred to me, innocent that I was. I had thought, also, that the Mbeles, if they existed at all, would all speak Olinka, or at least KiSwahili, a smattering of which I knew. But no, these freedom fighters were obviously from different parts of Africa. There was even, I was to learn later, a European woman, a European man and several American blacks of both s.e.xes in the camp. Since my interrogators spoke neither Olinka nor English, it was a long time, perhaps a week, before I was able to make them understand I meant no harm but was merely looking for someone. Even after a week of sign language and the drawing of figures on the ground I could see they were not convinced. For one thing, they were suspicious of my shoes. A pair of stout English sandals I'd brought from London. And of course my wrist-watch, with its gold Spandex band, was the kind of luxury item only a white person, in their opinion and experience, could afford to wear. I offered to give them both watch and shoes in exchange for my freedom. But it soon became clear that if they decided I was indeed harmless, that is to say, not a spy, they planned to recruit me. Once I realized this, I rested a bit easier. For I discovered that, face-to-face with these cold black men, I was stricken with the most craven fear. They were all "business." They neither joked among themselves nor smiled. I had never seen blacks like my captors before.

There was a flicker in the eye of one of them one day when I rambled on to them in Olinka. I think it was the word for water that caused it. In Olinka the word for water is barash, and I was constantly having to ask them for more. It was hot where we were, in a canyon surrounded by ma.s.sive rock cliffs that soaked up the broiling sun all day long. I felt I would die of thirst. I knew they resented bringing the heavy jar of water to my hut. Partly because it was heavy, and had to be brought a good distance from the river, but also because the carrying of water was not a man's job. It was a woman's job. However, since I was a prisoner, and interrogating a prisoner in strictest secrecy was a man's job, the bringing of the water had also, of necessity, become a man's job.

It was not long after I saw the flicker in the guard's eye that a young man from Olinka was brought to talk to me. He said his name was Banse, and when we'd talked a bit I remembered him slightly. It was really his parents I remembered, for they were staunch Christians and supporters of my father and the church. When last I'd seen Banse he was a small boy. He was still quite young, fifteen or so, with a high square forehead and wary, veiled eyes. He said there were many Olinkans in the camp. Women as well as men. He said of course Tashi was among them, but he believed her to be indisposed.

It was difficult to maintain my composure when I heard this. I clenched my teeth with the effort. It was enough that she was alive, I thought. After the grueling journey, which I had feared I'd never complete, it was nearly impossible to imagine that Tashi, riding her donkey and walking, had survived it as well.

When I had been vouched for by Banse, the manner of my guards immediately changed. Their stiff, absurdly militaristic posture-as if learned from Hitler himself-collapsed into the graceful melted-bones stride of the ordinary unhurried African. They smiled, they joked. They offered me tea.

Tea, they explained, came from the Europeans in the camp, one of whom was a son of the owner of a vast tea plantation that had displaced the homes of a thousand nomadic Africans. Bob, this son, had grown up on the plantation until he was ten, then had been sent to England to boarding school. The only blacks he'd ever seen around their place had been servants.

This was all I learned of Bob, the bringer of tea. I found it bizarre that he knew exactly where they were and had access to their hiding place. Indeed, I was to learn he had his own hut among them and lived in it most of the time.

Good tea! My captors laughed, liberally lacing it with sugar, and toasting me with their overflowing mugs.

The Mbele camp was a replica of an African village, though considerably spread out and camouflaged. No hut was in the open, but rather each was nestled close to the base of large trees or towering rocks. The pens of the animals likewise hugged the base of the cliffs. It was all reminiscent of the ancient settlements of the cliffdwelling Dogonese, photographs of which I had seen. Nothing, however, except a wisp of smoke perhaps, would have indicated human habitation, if one were in a plane looking down from above.

Tashi was in a rough bower made of branches. Lying on a mat made from the gra.s.s that grew around the camp. And as she lay there, her head and shoulders propped against a boulder that resembled a small animal, she was busy making more of these gra.s.s mats. I could not tell if she was happy to see me. Her eyes no longer sparkled with antic.i.p.ation. They were as flat as eyes that have been painted in, and with dull paint. There were five small cuts on each side of her face, like the marks one makes to keep score while playing tic-tac-toe. Her legs, ashen and wasted, were bound.

Her first words to me were: You should not be here.

My first words to her were: Where else should I be?

This reply appeared to leave her speechless. While she struggled to control her expression, so revealing of her hurt, I crawled on my knees to where she lay, took her in my arms, and sighed.

TASHI.

HE HAS COME FOR ME, I thought. He has finally come, G.o.d alone knows how. He is ragged and dirty and his hair is that of a savage, or of a crazy person isolated in the bush. He is here. And I can see as he looks at me that he does not know whether to laugh or cry. I feel the same. My eyes see him but they do not register his being. Nothing runs out of my eyes to greet him. It is as if my self is hiding behind an iron door.

I am like a chicken bound for market. The scars on my face are nearly healed, but I must still fan the flies away. The flies that are attracted by the odor coming from my blood, eager to eat at the feast provided by my wounds.

PART THREE.

EVELYN.

YOURS IS THE PAIN of the careless carpenter who, with his hammer, bashes his own thumb, says The Old Man.

He is no longer actively practicing his profession as doctor of the soul. He is seeing me only because I am an African woman and my case was recommended to him by his niece, my husband's friend and lover, the Frenchwoman, Lisette. It is hard for me to think about the conversations Adam and Lisette must have had about me over the years, on his twice-yearly visits to Paris and her annual visit to California. Often, while she is visiting, I have had to be sedated. On occasion I have voluntarily checked myself into the Waverly Psychiatric Hospital, in which, because it is run by a man affiliated with Adam's ministry, I am always given a room.

I liked The Old Man immediately. Liked his great, stooping height; the looseness of the ever-present tweed jacket that hung from his gaunt shoulders. Liked his rosy pink face and small blue eyes that looked at one so piercingly it was difficult not to turn one's head to see what he was viewing through it. Liked, even, that he himself had at times a look of madness to match my own-though it was a benign look that seemed to observe a connection between whatever held his gaze and some grand, unimaginably s.p.a.cious design, quite beyond one's comprehension. In other words, he looked as if he would soon die. I found this comforting.

ADAM.

AT FIRST SHE MERELY SPOKE about the strange compulsion she sometimes experienced of wanting to mutilate herself. Then one morning I woke to find the foot of our bed red with blood. Completely unaware of what she was doing, she said, and feeling nothing, she had sliced rings, b.l.o.o.d.y bracelets, or chains, around her ankles.

EVELYN.

I DID NOT FEAR HIM partly because I did not fear his house. Though medieval European in its outer aspects, particularly its turrets and small slate courtyard, it had at its center a stone hut, round, with a large fireplace and flagstone hearth. He knelt there, his old knees creaking, to light the morning and evening fire, over which he cooked; and seemed to me, at times, an old African grandmother, metamorphosed somehow into a giant pinkfaced witchdoctor on this other, colder continent. He almost always wore an ap.r.o.n of some kind. Of leather, when he chopped wood or carved the stone pillars that stood near the lake across from the loggia, or a thick cotton one when he cooked the wonderful Swiss pancakes and sausages with which he delighted to feed us.

His hair was as wispy and pale as thistle; I would sometimes, late in our visit, creep up behind him-as he sat smoking with Adam and looking out over the lake-and blow it. This caused him to reach up behind him, grasp both my arms, pull me forward against his large back and shoulders, hug me to him with my head like a moon above his own, and laugh.

We used to tell him, Adam and I, Mzee (Old Man), you are our last hope!

But he would only look from one to the other of us-a grave look-and in his heavily accented English he would say, No, that is not correct. You yourselves are your last hope.

EVELYN.

HE SET ME TO DRAWING. The first thing I drew was the meeting of my mother and the leopard on her path. For this, after all, represented my birth. My entrance into reality. But I drew, then painted, a leopard with two legs. My terrified mother with four.

Why is this? asked The Old Man.

I did not know.

EVELYN.

BENNY TELLS ME there is a lot of discussion now in the newspapers and on the street about whether, since I've been an American citizen for years, the Olinka government even has the right to put me on trial. He thinks there is a possibility I'll be extradited back to the United States. He sits tensely, reading me notes he has made on the subject.

Sometimes I dream of the United States. I love it deeply and miss it terribly, much to the annoyance of some people I know. In all my dreams there is clear rushing river water and flouncy green trees, and where there are streets they are wide and paved and in the night of my dreams there are lighted windows way above the street; and behind these windows I know people are warm and squeaky clean and eating meat. Safe. I awake here to the odor of unwashed fear, and the traditional porridge and fruit breakfast that hasn't changed since I left. Except my dishes are fresh and appetizingly prepared, thanks to Olivia, who has made herself welcome, through bribery, in the prison kitchen.

And if I am extradited to America, I say, will I have a second trial?

Benny says he does not know for sure, checking his notes, but that he thinks so. He is tall and gangly, a radiant brown, usually. At the moment, fear has dulled him.

To go through all of this again in America doesn't appeal to me.

The crime they say I committed would make no sense in America. It barely makes sense here.

EVELYN-TASHI.

THE OBSTETRICIAN BROKE two instruments trying to make an opening large enough for Benny's head. Then he used a scalpel. Then a pair of scissors used ordinarily to sever cartilage from bone. All this he told me when I woke up, a look of horror lingering on his face. A look he tried to camouflage by joking.

How did that big baby (Benny was nine pounds) even get up in there, Mrs. Johnson? That's what I'd like to know. He grinned, as if he'd never heard of the aggressive mobility of sperm. I attempted a smile I was incapable of feeling, first in his direction and then down at the baby in my arms. His head was yellow and blue and badly misshapen. I had no idea how to shape it properly, but hoped that once the doctor left, instinct would teach me. Nor could I imagine asking him for any instructions at all.

Adam stood beside the bed, too embarra.s.sed to speak. He coughed whenever he was embarra.s.sed or nervous; now he cleared his throat repeatedly. With my free hand, I reached for him. He moved closer, but did not touch me; the sound in his throat causing my own to close. After a moment, I withdrew my hand.

TASHI-EVELYN.

I FELT AS IF there was a loud noise of something shattering on the hard floor, there between me and Adam and our baby and the doctor. But there was only a ringing silence. Which seemed oddly, after a moment, like the screaming of monkeys.

TASHI-EVELYN.

SO THIS IS HOW there could have been an immaculate conception, he'd said bitterly, when I told him I was pregnant; meaning it literally, Bible scholar that he was. After three months of trying, he had failed to penetrate me. Each time he touched me I bled. Each time he moved against me I winced. There was nothing he could do to me that did not hurt. Still, somehow, I became pregnant with Benny. Having experienced the pain of getting Benny "up in there," we were terrorized waiting for his birth.

No matter how sick I became during the pregnancy, I attended myself. I could not bear the thought of the quick-stepping American nurses looking at me as if I were some creature from beyond their imaginings. In the end, though, I was that creature. For even as I gave birth, a crowd of nurses, curious hospital staff and medical students gathered around my bed. For days afterward doctors and nurses from around the city and for all I know around the state came by to peer over the shoulder of my doctor as he examined me. There was also the question of what to do with "the hole," as I overheard him call it, making no attempt to be euphemistic for my sake.

At last Adam put a stop to the sideshow my body had become and for the last three days in the hospital I held Benny close, gently and surrept.i.tiously stroking his head into more normal contours (work I instinctively felt should be done with my tongue); or, when the nurse had taken him away, I turned my face to the wall and slept. I slept so long and so hard it was always necessary for the nurse to shake me when it was time for a feeding.

My doctor sewed me up again, much as I'd been fastened originally, because otherwise there would have been a yawning unhealable wound. But it was done in such a way that there was now room for pee and menstrual blood more easily to pa.s.s. The doctor said that now, also, after giving birth, I could have intercourse with my husband.

Benny, my radiant brown baby, the image of Adam, was r.e.t.a.r.ded. Some small but vital part of his brain crushed by our ordeal. But thankfully, during the period I spent in hospital, and even for years afterward, I did not recognize this.

ADAM.

THEY HAD DUG out a little hole in the dirt beneath her, and that was her personal latrine.

She was on her moons when I arrived, there was only one old woman, M'Lissa, from Olinka, to help her, and there were flies, and a slight but unmistakable odor.

M'Lissa grumbled about the lack of everything. In the old days, she said, Tashi would have wanted for nothing. There would have been a score of maidens initiated with her, and their mothers, aunts and older sisters would have taken charge of the cooking (important because there were special foods one ate at such a time that kept the stools soft, thus eliminating some of the pain of evacuation), the cleaning of the house, the washing, oiling and perfuming of Tashi's body.

I had never spoken to M'Lissa other than to say h.e.l.lo. I knew from Tashi that M'Lissa had brought her into the world. I knew that, among the Olinka, she was a prized midwife and healer, though to those Christianized ones who also turned to Western medicine, she was shunned. I was surprised to see her in the Mbele camp. More because she was old, and limped, than for any other, more ideological, reason. How had she, dragging her lame foot, dressed in rags, come so far from home?

It was only in the late afternoons that she could talk, arriving breathless after a day of tending others in the camp, as she shifted Tashi and washed and oiled her wound, which she invariably referred to not as a wound but as a healing. She told me she had at first been in a refugee camp over the border from Olinka; a horrible place, she said, filled with dying Olinkans who fled the fighting between the Mbele rebels and the white government's troops, most of whom were members of the black minority tribes that hated the dominant Olinkans. They had been cruel beyond anything she'd ever seen, specializing in hacking off the limbs of their captives. In the camp she had been in demand, though she'd had nothing beyond her two hands to work with. There had been no herbs, no oils, no antiseptics, not even water at times. She had delivered babies in the dark, set bones, and used stones to smooth the protruding gristle of amputated limbs. There was nothing to a.s.sist her beyond her patients' grim endurance. It was in the refugee camp, she said, that her hair turned completely white, and where, eventually, she lost it. Now, she said, running a gnarled hand back and forth over it in self-derision, I am as bald as an egg.

The other women in the camp, according to M'Lissa, had all been initiated at the proper age. Either shortly after birth, or at the age of five or six, but certainly by the onset of p.u.b.erty, ten or eleven. She had argued with Catherine, Tashi's mother, to have the operation done for Tashi when she too was at the proper age. But, because Catherine had gone Christian, she'd turned a deaf ear to her. Now, M'Lissa said, with a grimace of justification, it was the grownup daughter who had come to her, wanting the operation because she recognized it as the only remaining definitive stamp of Olinka tradition. And of course, now, she added, Tashi would not have the shame of being unmarried.

I wanted to marry her, I said.

You are a foreigner, she said, dismissing me.

I still want to marry her, I said, taking Tashi's hand.

M'Lissa seemed confused. Nothing in her experience had prepared her for a possibility such as this.

I never saw the other women in the camp. M'Lissa told us they were all on missions of liberation. Tashi said she thought it was the women's task to forage for food and to conduct raids against the plantations, most of them now left in the hands of loyal African retainers. A primary use of these raids was to recruit new warriors to swell the ranks of the Mbele rebels.