Possessing the Secret of Joy Part 3

The operation she'd had done to herself joined her, she felt, to these women, whom she envisioned as strong, invincible. Completely woman. Completely African. Completely Olinka. In her imagination, on her long journey to the camp, they had seemed terribly bold, terribly revolutionary and free. She saw them leaping to the attack. It was only when she at last was told by M'Lissa, who one day unbound her legs, that she might sit up and walk a few steps that she noticed her own proud walk had become a shuffle.

It now took a quarter of an hour for her to pee. Her menstrual periods lasted ten days. She was incapacitated by cramps nearly half the month. There were premenstrual cramps: cramps caused by the near impossibility of flow pa.s.sing through so tiny an aperture as M'Lissa had left, after fastening together the raw sides of Tashi's v.a.g.i.n.a with a couple of thorns and inserting a straw so that in healing, the traumatized flesh might not grow together, shutting the opening completely; cramps caused by the residual flow that could not find its way out, was not reabsorbed into her body, and had nowhere to go. There was the odor, too, of soured blood, which no amount of scrubbing, until we got to America, ever washed off.

OLIVIA.

IT WAS HEARTBREAKING to see, on their return, how pa.s.sive Tashi had become. No longer cheerful, or impish. Her movements, which had always been graceful, and quick with the liveliness of her personality, now became merely graceful. Slow. Studied. This was true even of her smile; which she never seemed to offer you without considering it first. That her soul had been dealt a mortal blow was plain to anyone who dared look into her eyes.

Adam brought her home to us just as we were about to leave for America. He married her, our father presiding, even as she protested that, in America, he would grow ashamed of her because of the scars on her face. The evening before the wedding, Adam had these same Olinka tribal markings carved into his own cheeks. His handsome face was swollen; his smile, because of the pain involved, impossible. No one spoke of the other, the hidden scar, between Tashi's thin legs. The scar that gave her the cla.s.sic Olinka woman's walk, in which the feet appear to slide forward and are rarely raised above the ground. No one mentioned the eternity it took her to use the w.c. No one mentioned the smell.

In America, we solved the problem of cleaning behind the scar by using a medical syringe that looked like a small turkey baster, and this relieved Tashi of an embarra.s.sment so complete she had taken to spending half the month completely hidden from human contact, virtually buried.

PART FOUR.

TASHI.

ON VERY WARM DAYS The Old Man took us sailing on his boat, up and down and all around Lake Zurich. His ruddy face eager before so much sun, his large hands moving deftly in a contest with tide and wind. His age suddenly amounting to no more than his head of wispy white hair. I would stand hugging the mast, or else sit low in the boat and feel the spray cool and refreshing on my skin.

The Old Man and even Adam seemed mesmerized by my absorption in the water of the lake, which was to me a small sea. I felt their eyes on me, approvingly.

Ja, The Old Man would say to Adam. Your wife is glowing.

Ja, I thought to myself. Perhaps that is a good sign.

TASHI-EVELYN.

AT NIGHT THE OLD MAN played music for us. Music from Africa, India, Bali. He had an amazing record collection that occupied one wall of his house. He showed us grainy black-and-white films, made on his trips. It was during the showing of one of these films that something peculiar happened to me. He was explaining a scene in which there were several small children lying in a row on the ground. He thought, first of all, that they were boys, which I could see straight off they were not, though their heads were shaved and they each wore a scanty loincloth. He a.s.sumed, he said, he had inadvertently interrupted a kind of ritual ceremony having to do with the preparation of these children for adulthood. Everything, in any case, had stopped, the moment he and his entourage entered the ritual s.p.a.ce. And what was also odd, he said, was how no one spoke a word, or even moved, as long as he and his people were there. They literally froze as the camera panned the area. The children on the ground in a little row, lying close together on their backs, the adults simply stopped in midactivity, unmoving, even, it appeared, unseeing. Only-he laughed, relighting his pipe, which had gone out, as it frequently did, while he talked-there was a large fighting c.o.c.k (which we now saw as it stepped majestically into the frame) and it walked about quite freely, crowing mightily (it was a silent film but we could certainly perceive its exertions), and that was the only sound or movement while we were there.

The film ran on, but suddenly I felt such an overwhelming fear that I fainted. Quietly. Slid off my chair and onto the bright rug that covered the stone floor. It was exactly as if I had been hit over the head. Except there was no pain.

When I came to, I was in the guest bedroom upstairs in the turret. Adam and the old man were bending over me. There was nothing I could tell them; I could not say, The picture of a fighting c.o.c.k, taken twenty-five years ago, completely terrorized me. And so I laughed off my condition and said it was caused by too much happiness, sailing in the high alt.i.tude.

The Old Man looked skeptical and did not seem surprised when, the next afternoon, I began to paint what became a rather extended series of ever larger and more fearsome fighting c.o.c.ks.

And then one day, into the corner of my painting, there appeared, I drew, a foot. Sweating and shivering as I did so. Because I suddenly realized there was something, some small thing the foot was holding between its toes. It was for this small thing that the giant c.o.c.k waited, crowing impatiently, extending its neck, ruffling its feathers, and strutting about.

There are no words to describe how sick I felt as I painted. How nauseous; as the c.o.c.k continued to grow in size, and the bare foot with its little insignificant morsel approached steadily toward what felt would be the crisis, the unbearable moment, for me. For, as I painted, perspiring, shivering, and moaning faintly, I felt that every system in my body, every connecting circuit in my brain, was making an effort to shut down. It was as if the greater half of my being were trying to murder the lesser half, and as I painted-by now directly onto the wall of the bedroom, because only there could I paint the c.o.c.k as huge as it now appeared to be: it dwarfed me-I dragged the brush to paint each towering iridescent green feather, each baleful gold fleck in its colossal red and menacing eye.

The foot grew large too. But not nearly as large as the c.o.c.k.

When The Old Man looked at it he said: Well, Evelyn, is it a man's foot or a woman's foot?

The question puzzled me so profoundly I could not answer, but only held my head between my hands in the cla.s.sic pose of the deeply insane.

A man's foot? A woman's foot?

How could one know?

But then later, in the middle of the night, I found myself painting a design called "crazy road," a pattern of crisscrosses and dots that the women made with mud on the cotton cloth they wove in the village when I was a child. And I suddenly knew that the foot above which I painted this pattern was a woman's, and that I was painting the lower folds of one of M'Lissa's tattered wraps.

As I painted I remembered, as if a lid lifted off my brain, the day I had crept, hidden in the elephant gra.s.s, to the isolated hut from which came howls of pain and terror. Underneath a tree, on the bare ground outside the hut, lay a dazed row of little girls, though to me they seemed not so little. They were all a few years older than me. Dura's age. Dura, however, was not among them; and I knew instinctively that it was Dura being held down and tortured inside the hut. Dura who made those inhuman shrieks that rent the air and chilled my heart.

Abruptly, inside, there was silence. And then I saw M'Lissa shuffle out, dragging her lame leg, and at first I didn't realize she was carrying anything, for it was so insignificant and unclean that she carried it not in her fingers but between her toes. A chicken-a hen, not a c.o.c.k-was scratching futilely in the dirt between the hut and the tree where the other girls, their own ordeal over, lay. M'Lissa lifted her foot and flung this small object in the direction of the hen, and she, as if waiting for this moment, rushed toward M'Lissa's upturned foot, located the flung object in the air and then on the ground, and in one quick movement of beak and neck, gobbled it down.

ADAM.

DEAREST LISETTE,.

How much I would like to see you, to hold you, to hear your wise words. All night long I have not slept, and I am writing outside in the loggia by the light of a candle, just as the sun is rising over the lake. It is so beautiful here, and so peaceful! Sometimes Evelyn and I are able to enjoy it, along with the agreeable conversation of your charming uncle. At least the two of them get along. As you know, I had feared they would not; Evelyn does not take easily to doctors of any sort, and has, over the years, tended to leave her therapists prostrate in her wake.

As you suggested, the fact that I am here with her, and that this is an isolated, quiet and beautiful spot, seems to calm her. She seems also to like the fact that your uncle is old. She is sometimes merry just at the sight of him, and thinks of him, I believe, as a kind of Santa Claus. As such, he is another representative of the exotic Western and European culture she so adores.

But why, I can hear you wondering, am I up at this hour, and have been up all night? I will tell you. A few nights ago, while your uncle was showing some of his old films of his trip to East Africa-the ones that mesmerized you as a youngster and were the impetus behind your trip to Africa, where we met...! Anyway, he was showing these films to us after a day of picnicking and sailing as far south as Schmerikon and as far north as Kusnacht. We'd feasted, when we arrived back at the house, on a fine dinner of roast pork and potatoes that your uncle had managed to leave cooking for us in the old fireless cooker left to him by his grandmother-perhaps, this fireless cooker, the most intriguing example of his magic, as far as Evelyn is concerned! To be brief, near the end of one of these films, she fainted, her body rigid as death, her teeth clenched in a fierce grimace and, most strange of all, her eyes open. So of course we thought for a moment she'd died. When she came to later she tried to laugh the whole thing off and said she wasn't used to so much activity-sailing and walking and eating-in the unfamiliar alt.i.tude.

Though we have a room in a hotel in Schmerikon, we sometimes spend the night with your uncle, especially when he and Evelyn are working particularly well together, and so we stayed the night in the guest bedroom the night this happened. Evelyn slept badly. In the morning she rose early and began, even before breakfast, to paint.

She began to paint a chicken. Over and over. On larger and larger paper. She grew frenzied as the size of the paper she held in her hand seemed to shrink in comparison to the monstrous bird she had in her mind. Then there was the question of how to blend the paints she had-which your uncle had kindly given her-to make something she called a black chromium green. She was frantic to manufacture this color, and this color alone, for the tail feathers of the beast. Her mood was impatient, foul, as she tore the smaller drawings into bits and tore her hair as well, all the while oblivious to the presence of your uncle, who sat on a canvas chair out by the lake, reading, or pretending to; or of my distracted attempts to repair a broken pot that I'd noticed tossed in a corner near the hearth. It looked pre-Columbian, and I handled the shards, and the glue, carefully.

Abruptly, she left us, taking her paints and brushes along. There was a loud snap as she closed the shutter of the upstairs bedroom. And then there was quiet. Only the lapping of the water, the chirping of birds, the rustle of wind in the trees. I fixed the pot, as well as I could do considering a third of it was missing. The Old Man's book now rested on his knees; he was sound asleep.

When night came, I avoided going up to bed. All seemed quiet up there, and I did not want to cause any disturbance; I hoped Evelyn had yielded to exhaustion and drifted into one of her deep, coma-like sleeps that could last for days. But when I finally found myself on the stairs, I noticed a light underneath our door. Opening the door, I was confronted with Evelyn, still busily painting, after twelve hours or more! And now painting a humongous feathered creature-for it was too menacing and evil to be given the simple appellation of chicken or c.o.c.k-directly onto your uncle's formerly pristine white walls.

She looked about to drop. But, hearing me enter, she turned and stared. Unseeing, certainly, for she neither spoke nor acknowledged me further. Merely whirled back to her monstrous painting, and appeared to fling herself at it.

I was chilled to the bone. Not only by the wild, ill, distraught look of her; I was used to that; but by the damage she was doing, uncaring, to your uncle's house, and by the painting itself. I did not know its meaning to her, of course, but even without knowing it, I felt the evil she was encountering deep in my own soul.

So, Lisette, that is why I am up so early after a sleepless night.

I trust you are well and that you will continue to write to me care of your uncle. Your letters sustain and comfort me, as they have all these years. I count it the great blessing of my life to be able to call you friend.

Yours, Adam TASHI.

WHEN AT LAST I completed my painting of "The Beast," as the three of us would subsequently refer to it, my mind and body were beyond exhaustion. I fell backward onto the bed and slept. It was late evening of another day when I awoke to the sound of the wind in the trees, the waves of the lake lapping the sh.o.r.e, and the muted sound of voices. I felt no inclination to stir. I lay as I had fallen, merely turning apprehensive eyes slowly left, toward the wall, to look fully into the wicked gaze of my creature. It no longer frightened me. Indeed, I felt as if I were seeing the cause of my anxiety itself for the first time, exactly as it was. The c.o.c.k was undeniably overweening, egotistical, puffed up, and it was his diet of submission that had made him so.

I gazed at the foot. Lame, subservient, mindless-as if disconnected from the body of the woman above it. M'Lissa. Here the serenity of my mind sharply decreased. I felt my emotions surge painfully toward the hem of her wrapper. Overcome with grief, I shifted my tearfilled gaze at just the moment Adam's handsome head appeared at the door, followed by Mzee, who carried a tray.

They brought oxtail soup, rye bread, carrot sticks, a sprig of parsley, a cup of warm cider and a bouquet of flowers. They propped me up in bed with gentleness and a mildly expectant air. As I ate they entertained me by telling of the culinary adventure they'd had preparing the meal. The Old Man had concocted the soup, from his memory of his mother's recipe; Adam had made the bread. The parsley, carrots and flowers were from the garden behind the house. Mzee apologized for the woodiness of the carrots that had been left in the earth too long; but I enjoyed them best of all. Their fibrousness scrubbed and refreshed my mouth in a coolly resistant, pleasant way.

I must apologize for all this, I said, indicating my beast.

It is certainly large, said Adam. He was quiet after saying this, because he knew the two of us would talk later.

You must not apologize, said Mzee. He looked at it close up, then turned and walked to a chair by the window across the room. From there he looked at it again.

Remarkable, he said, after nearly an hour contemplating it.

He came forward, finally, and took the tray. I had eaten everything, and this pleased him. He was wearing one of his cotton ap.r.o.ns, and there were signs of his soup-making from his mother's recipe all over it. A small bloodstain glowed maroon near his waist. I looked at it calmly. I had been afraid of the sight of blood for such a long time. And then there had been a period when, if I cut myself, whether accidentally or on purpose, I didn't notice it.

This is the way I should have been working all along, said Mzee, as if to himself, after Adam had left us. Healing is not a bourgeois profession. Sighing deeply, he sat next to me on the bed and reached for my hand.

The silvery blackness of my hand against the parchment rosiness of his was pretty. He looked at our hands thoughtfully for a moment.

I am curious about something, he said.

Ja? I said, in my fake Swiss accent, which always tickled him. Except for The Old Man, I thought the Swiss sounded quite unintelligent when they spoke. But perhaps that is because the rest of the world pokes fun at them for their peculiar accent and curious yodeling. Anyhow, I liked to say ja. It sounded ridiculous in my mouth and made Mzee smile.

He was searching now for his pipe, which stuck out of the breast pocket of his ap.r.o.n.

Are you better for having done it? he asked, finding and lighting his pipe. Do you feel better in yourself?

Immeasurably, I said without hesitation. The tears that had evaporated at Mzee's and Adam's appearance now drained heavily from my chin. By the time I finished painting it, I continued in a steady voice, quite as though I were not weeping, I remembered my sister Dura's...my sister Dura's.... I could get no further. There was a boulder lodged in my throat. My heart surged pitifully. I knew what the boulder was; that it was a word; and that behind that word I would find my earliest emotions. Emotions that had frightened me insane. I had been going to say, before the boulder barred my throat: my sister's death; because that was how I had always thought of Dura's demise. She'd simply died. She'd bled and bled and bled and then there was death. No one was responsible. No one to blame. Instead, I took a deep breath and exhaled it against the boulder blocking my throat: I remembered my sister Dura's murder, I said, exploding the boulder. I felt a painful st.i.tch throughout my body that I knew st.i.tched my tears to my soul. No longer would my weeping be separate from what I knew. I began to wail, there in Mzee's old arms. After a long time, he dried my face, stroked my hair, and comforted me with a motherly squeeze that coincided with each of my hiccups, as my weeping subsided.

They did not know I was hiding in the gra.s.s, I said. They had taken her to the place of initiation; a secluded, lonely place that was taboo for the uninitiated. Not unlike the place you showed us in your film.

Ah, said Mzee.

She has been screaming in my ears since it happened, I said, suddenly feeling weary beyond expression.

The Old Man was relighting his pipe, which seemed to have been doused by my tears.

Only I could not hear her, I sighed.

You didn't dare, said The Old Man.

I did not understand him; yet what he said somehow made sense.

He stroked my forehead thoughtfully, got up quietly and left me to the continuation of a very long sleep.

MZEE.

NO ONE HAS CALLED ME Mzee since the natives of Kenya did so spontaneously over a quarter of a century ago. Even then my hair was graying, my back beginning to stoop. I wore gla.s.ses. And yet, somehow I felt it was something other than my age that they were noting, when they called me "The Old Man." Some quality of gravity or self-containment that they recognized. Perhaps I flatter myself, as whites do when blacks offer them a benign label for something characteristically theirs, but which they themselves have failed to acknowledge; deep in our hearts perhaps we expect only vilification; the name "devil," to say the least. It used to amaze me that, wherever I lectured, anywhere in the world, the one sentence of mine which every person of color appreciated and rose to thank me for was "Europe is the mother of all evil," and yet they shook my European hand, smiled warmly into my eyes, and some of them actually patted me on the back. The Africans chose names for us that were suggested to them by our behavior. "Impatient" became the name of a colleague who was always hurrying. "Eats a Lot," the name of the greediest of our crew. "Night Moon," they called the blackest man in their own group, and, indeed, it was the brightness of his blackness that one saw.

It is a new experience having a patient staying across the hall from me, in my own house. In my own retreat! The secret place I come to heal myself. Only your entreaties could have gotten me into this. Yet now that Adam and Evelyn are here, it is as if they were meant to be here from the beginning. Sometimes, when I am sitting outside by the lake and happen to glance into the gloom of the house, at just the moment Evelyn is looking out, I am struck by the rightness of seeing her black face at my window. Watching Adam attempt to fix the spring in the grandfather clock, as he sits in a flood of sunlight on my doorstep, awakens in me a yearning that is practically a memory.

They, in their indescribable suffering, are bringing me home to something in myself. I am finding myself in them. A self I have often felt was only halfway at home on the European continent. In my European skin. An ancient self that thirsts for knowledge of the experiences of its ancient kin. Needs this knowledge, and the feelings that come with it, to be whole. A self that is horrified at what was done to Evelyn, but recognizes it as something that is also done to me. A truly universal self. That is the essence of healing that in my European, "professional" life I frequently lost.

In any event, I must ask Evelyn why she does not seem to fear my turret/tower, and what she would say to the gift of a very large bag of clay!

Yours in wonder, Your uncle Carl

PART FIVE.

OLIVIA.

THE PRISON TO WHICH TASHI was taken was built during the colonial period, some thirty years before independence. It was old even before it was made, as African-American Southerners of a certain age say about Death. It was built on the "native" side of town at a time when the town was quite small. A few short streets of wooden houses built in the Victorian plantation style-with deep, shady verandahs-around a small central square where, one imagines, white ladies in silk dresses and carrying matching parasols endlessly paraded. What else was there for them to do, having conceived and then reproduced the master of the house? There is, in fact, running diagonally across from the park in the direction of the more imposing houses, a pa.s.sageway that is still called White Ladies Lane, though few white people of any sort, other than tourists, stroll on it now. The houses are used as offices by government officials and civil servants. In the early days, just after Independence, black people moved into them but moved out again, as soon as they were able to construct larger and more private compounds further out from the town, which was already becoming a hodgepodge of a typical African city. White Ladies Lane, for instance, soon led not to an immaculately kept (by African peons) park used only for strolling or sunning one's pale offspring, but to the market, with its colorful, ramshackle stalls, smoky braziers from which appetizing aromas arose, vendors hawking their wares in a cacophony of persuasive voices, and the squeal of resistant small animals being sold for matter-of-fact slaughter.

One side of the prison, from a distance, looks down on this, over the rooftops of several rows of shanties and the row of government offices. One reason it had been built on a hill, according to the legend about it that, in the earliest postcolonial days, had been posted near the entrance but was now barely decipherable from age, was because it was also a garrison and command post designed to intimidate and to actively suppress any uprising among the Africans. There had been bunkers around its base, and artillery stations, right in amongst the dusty shrubbery, bougainvillea, jacaranda and hibiscus blossoms.

I had never even seen the prison before I went with Adam to visit Tashi. From outside, its formerly white exterior now streaked with brown, with patches of gray cement and bits of black girders poking through at the corners, many of its windows broken or gone entirely, it hardly seemed habitable. And of course it really was not. Still, it was crammed to the rafters with prisoners. All sizes, all shapes, all ages. Both s.e.xes. One left the comparative silence of the street and immediately encountered a wall of noise. And stench. The second floor had been turned over to a mounting number of AIDS victims, sent to the prison rather than to hospital because the hospital, being small, was swamped. For almost a year the government had said no such thing as AIDS existed in the country; now its presence was acknowledged grudgingly, though there was no official speculation about what might have caused it printed in the news. There was no noise whatsoever from this floor, as men, women and children, all stricken, dragged themselves about, attending each other, or else lay quietly, so emaciated as to appear already dead, on straw mats on the floor. When we looked in, no one appeared to notice.

As we ascended the steps to the third floor, I turned to Adam and said, attempting a joke, I want to go home.

So do we all, he replied, grimly, with the downcast, helpless look of a man bound to a woman and to circ.u.mstances perpetually beyond his control.

BENTU MORAGA (BENNY).

IT IS ONLY MONEY that changes anything or makes anything happen, I said to my mother, glancing at my notes.

You mustn't think that, she said, gazing out the window. It's so New African.

But look at what you have here, I said, gesturing at the freshly painted walls of her cell. Her bright red plastic chair, her desk, writing materials and books.

I can't be guilt-tripped, she said, smiling. I'm already in prison.

I smiled with her. I liked the person my mother was in prison. She was warm and comfortable, as if she were an entirely different person than the driven, frowning mother I'd always known.

Not many of the other prisoners have a private cell, I said.

No, she agreed. Only the bigwigs who will soon buy their way out and escape punishment altogether. She frowned, and for a moment looked like her other self.

We heard the bigwigs down at the other end of the corridor. All day long they played cards, kept their radios blaring and drank beer. Unlike my mother's, their cells were never locked, and so they visited each other far into the night. They would sometimes visit us, and bring my mother an occasional beer, which she accepted.

I had not understood "bigwig" until I saw the judges at my mother's trial. Sure enough, they wore huge white wigs, with curls at the sides and a queue down the back. My mother laughed at them, which I thought they certainly noticed and which I felt sure they'd punish her for. I wrote a note to myself about this as I sat observing the proceedings in the courtroom.

There are a lot of things I can't do-drive a car, for instance-or even think about. I used to feel there was something mysterious about the way I could never quite keep up in school. I almost made it, but then there would come a point at which I felt myself literally slipping back down the slope. It was a relief, finally, to have it explained to me-not by my mother or my father but by a teacher-that I was a bit r.e.t.a.r.ded, something to do with memory, which meant that just as some people are tall and some are short, some people can think longer or shorter thoughts than others. Not to worry! said my teacher, Miss MacMillan, laughing. You have the attention span of the average American TV viewer. And so I was spared the feeling of being, as my father phrased it, negatively unique.

And yet, there were times when I wished I could remember the name of something for which my mother sent me to the store. I wished I could do without the lists. A list for the market. A list for school. A list of what things to take and bring back from an afternoon of playing in a neighbor's yard. A list of street names by which to steer myself home. Nothing that I was asked to do stayed in my mind. Nor could I even remember I'd been asked. Only the look of exasperation on my mother's face held my attention, but only for a moment. Then I forgot even that.

One of my mother's favorite expressions was: It's a wonder you don't forget I'm your mother! But I never did. Perhaps it was because I felt connected to her scent. Which was warm, lovely, soft. I felt I could quite happily have spent my lifetime under one of her arms. This, however, I never mentioned because I sensed it would offend her. My mother bathed constantly, as if to rid herself of any scent whatsoever; to her an agreeable odor was that of Palmolive soap, Pond's cold cream or Nivea lotion. To smell like herself seemed beyond her ability to accept. Even now, in middle age, I like to snuggle her, though contorting my lanky body into a shape that fits cuddly under her neck is something of a feat. She barely tolerates it, though, and immediately moves away.

If I want to talk to her or to my father about anything, I have to write notes about the subject to myself. I have to practice what I want to say and how I want to say it. As others might prepare for an exam whose subject matter is unknown to them, so I must study, cram, for every conversation with my folks.

ADAM.