A Girl Named Disaster (22 page)

I
am
not
your mother,” the woman said crossly. Nhamo sank into happy oblivion again. If Mother wanted to disagree, that was her business.
She
was not mistaken about the braided hair decorated with beads. She recognized the flowered dress. They were exactly like the photograph.

Nhamo dozed, woke to be fed, and dozed again. Never had she been so contented. After a while an old man dressed in a white robe sat by her bed and murmured charms. “Are you my grandfather?” she asked. The old man looked startled.

She snuggled into the bed, which was softer than anything she had ever known. A woman-spirit stuck a thorn into her arm. It hurt, but Nhamo accepted it as part of the strange rituals of the spirit world. Then the old man was back with a black book, which he read with his lips moving.

“Oh, Grandfather. I’m so glad to see you,” Nhamo murmured. “
Ambuya
said I would meet you someday. Did you know Mother can read? She’s so clever! Is Aunt Shuvai here? I miss her…”

“Sh. You must rest,” said the old man.

Nhamo obediently went back to sleep.

She talked to Mother, sharing with her things that had happened since the picture was destroyed. “Poor Rumpy. He never had any
luck,” she sighed. “I wonder whether he was really a human who had eaten his totem. Do you know?”

“He was only a baboon,” said Mother firmly.

Gradually, Nhamo became more aware of her surroundings. The woman-spirit was called Sister Gladys.
*
She was kept busy mixing things up in bottles and writing in a book. She was very respectful to Mother. The old man was called
Baba
Joseph and he often came to talk. She didn’t understand half of what he said, but it didn’t matter. His voice was very soothing.

And gradually she became aware that she wasn’t dead after all and that
Baba
Joseph wasn’t her grandfather. But she stubbornly refused to give up on Mother. Other people might call her Dr. Everjoice Masuku. Nhamo knew differently.

She was so sleepy! It was all she could do to keep her eyes open more than a minute. She lay in the soft bed, and now and then drifted off into dreams.

“What’s wrong with her?” said an unfamiliar man’s voice.

“What
isn’t
wrong with her? Malaria, bilharzia, malnutrition, ” said Mother. “When I picked her up, I could have sworn her bones were hollow.”

“Her feet are scarred.”

“That’s an old burn. You should feel the soles. They’re like hooves.”

“How long was she out there?” the man asked.

“Months. She keeps raving about water spirits and a dead boatman and a baboon she thinks was human.” The woman sat next to the bed. Nhamo could smell the soap she used.

“Is she insane?”

Insane! Nhamo was insulted.

“She was alone an awfully long time,” said Mother.

Nhamo opened her eyes to protest when she saw the man. He was an enormous whiteman with a bristling beard. His arm was as big as her waist. “No!” she yelled, scrambling
out of bed. She fell to the floor with the sheet wrapped around her and tried to crawl away on her hands and knees.

“Stop that!” Mother cried. She hauled Nhamo back.

“No! No! No!”

“She doesn’t seem to like you, Hendrik,” Mother said as Nhamo tried to squirm out of her grasp.

The whiteman shrugged. “At least she doesn’t think I’m her mommy.” He lumbered out of the room, and Nhamo’s breathing became regular again.

“Why are you so afraid of Dr. van Heerden?” Mother asked.

Nhamo told her about the man with the dogs and gun. She didn’t mention Long Teats or killing the dog, however. She didn’t want to be accused of being a witch.

“That’s terrible! You probably don’t know this, but not long ago we had a civil war here—white people against black. Some of the hatred is still around. I wish I knew the man’s name. I’d set the police on him.”

“How could he hate black people when his junior wife was black?” Nhamo asked logically. She described the house and the wonderful dinner.

Mother laughed. “Englishmen aren’t allowed more than one wife, and anyhow they almost always marry Englishwomen. That was a servant.”

“Is Dr. van Heerden English,
Mai
?”

“Don’t call me
Mai.
I’m not your mother.”

“Yes, Dr. Masuku.”

“Dr. van Heerden is Afrikaans. It’s a different kind of white person. He doesn’t like to be bothered by children, so stay out of his way.”

“Yes,
Mai
—Dr. Masuku.”

After a few days Nhamo was allowed out of bed. She was given a new dress-cloth because the old one was torn and foul with dog blood. Sister Gladys had burned it. Nhamo’s bag of gold nuggets had disappeared during the period when she believed herself dead. She was afraid to complain.
Dr. van Heerden must have taken it to pay for my supplies, she decided.

She was delighted with the new cloth, though. It was green and red with a pattern of
jongwe
, or roosters. “That’s my name,” she told Sister Gladys proudly.

Nhamo went to the long mirror at the end of the hospital corridor to admire herself. She stood there a long time. Then she folded up on the floor and burst into tears.

“Now what?” said Sister Gladys.

“I’m—I’m so
ugly
,” Nhamo hiccuped. The creature she had seen in the Englishman’s house wasn’t a moving picture after all. It was
her.
She looked like a wall spider with a burr stuck to its head.

“You’re only thin,” the nurse said kindly. “Anyhow,
Baba
Joseph says the important thing is the soul.”

This did not make Nhamo feel any better.

As soon as she was strong enough, Nhamo volunteered to help. Sister Gladys was pleased to have someone to scrub floors. She taught Nhamo how to make beds and how to use the electric stove to prepare
sadza.
Nhamo was enchanted by the stove. No more collecting firewood. No more worrying about leopards creeping up on her in the forest. She loved electricity!

It was made by something Sister Gladys called a
generator.
Dr. van Heerden fed it a kind of smelly liquid, and it hummed away as it made the lights shine and the stove hot. Late at night the generator was turned off, and then they had to use lamps like the ones Joao had at the trading post.

Nhamo quickly saw that she had landed in a very strange village. It was called Efifi and was stuck in the middle of a wilderness. There were vegetable gardens, cattle and goat pens, and fields of lucerne
*
for the animals. There were the usual huts and granaries, but along with them were large buildings devoted to what Mother (Dr. Masuku, Nhamo reminded herself) called
science.

Nhamo learned new words every day.
Science
was the
kind of work people did in Efifi. It consisted of catching and destroying tsetse flies.

Tsetse flies carried a sickness that killed cattle, horses, pigs, goats, and donkeys. The livestock at Efifi had to be given medicine every few weeks or they would die. Normally, no one would have kept domestic animals in such a lethal place, but the creatures had a very special purpose.

They were bait. Every day they were driven into the underground chamber Nhamo had seen, and a huge fan blew their smell through the forest. Tsetse flies came from miles around. They landed on the trap, crawled inside to find something to bite, and couldn’t get out again.

Dr. van Heerden brought live insects back to his science house (which Nhamo learned was called a
laboratory
). There he let them bite animals that had been painted with poison. The whiteman was also trying to put the smell of cattle into a bottle. He wanted to bait traps all over the forest.

Everyone at Efifi had something to do with science. Dr. Masuku was looking for a disease to make the tsetses sick. Nhamo was amazed to learn that flies could get sick, just like people.

Baba
Joseph was in charge of the animal building. He cared for herds of
guinea pigs
, which resembled small dassies. The guinea pigs squealed shrilly when he brought them food. After a few days he let Nhamo feed them, too. She covered her ears when the little creatures streamed out of their smelly pens, but she was charmed by the confident way they nibbled lucerne from her hands.

Baba
Joseph had several pets: a duiker antelope, a bush baby, a large tortoise, and an enormous warthog that waddled after him, begging for treats. Nhamo realized that the old man was a very great
nganga.
He could get wild animals to obey him. He was also in charge of a small crocodile Dr. van Heerden insisted on keeping. Neither Nhamo nor
Baba
Joseph liked the crocodile. It eyed them in a most calculating way and once, when Nhamo teased it with a stick, it rose up with its yellow mouth open wider than she had dreamed
possible. She clawed herself halfway up the wall.
Baba
Joseph laughed so hard he had to sit down and wipe his face.

Other people at Efifi concerned themselves with farming, herding, and carpentry. Two men were detailed to drive away an elephant that liked to raid the fields. Every night they patrolled, calling out “
Iwe! Hamba!
Hey, you! Go away!” The elephant was well aware that no one was allowed to shoot him. He went where he pleased, and the only thing that could move him on were the large firecrackers the men threw at his feet.

They had to be extra careful,
Baba
Joseph said, because it was never certain whether the elephant was going to run away from or
toward
them.

Sister Gladys took care of the inevitable accidents.

The one thing Efifi did not contain was children, and there were almost no women. Everyone had another home where he kept his family, and which he visited regularly. Nhamo thought this was a strange arrangement, but Mother explained that Efifi wasn’t a healthy place for children.

N
hamo worked steadily for whoever would allow her to help. She walked a fine line between staying invisible (no one would notice her and send her away) and being useful (they would think she was valuable enough to keep). She was determined to live at Efifi—if only to feast her eyes as often as possible on Mother.

Dr. Masuku, for her part, was often impatient with the little shadow she had acquired. “Go haunt someone else!” she would cry. “You hang around like a tsetse fly!” And Nhamo would fade away, only to reappear later when she thought Mother wasn’t looking.

Nhamo observed Dr. van Heerden as he picked up dead flies with a pair of tweezers and put them into bottles. She was a little afraid of him. He was so big and hairy! His legs were like tree trunks, and nestled in the top of one of his long socks was a comb. Nhamo wondered if he used it to comb his legs. Dr. van Heerden warned her not to make any noise or touch anything or get in his way.

Once she had satisfied these conditions, though, he was willing to let her watch. In fact he became so absorbed he often forgot about her altogether. If he was feeling sociable, he called her his Wild Child and insisted she had been raised by jackals. “I saw your brothers near the goat pen, Wild Child. Tell them I’ll make a rug out of them if they get any ideas.”

Nhamo explained gently that she came from a proper village full of people.

“We’ll see what happens when the full moon arrives. I bet you’ll run through the forest with your tongue hanging out.”

There was no shaking him. She knew he was trying to be funny, so she didn’t take offense.

When Dr. van Heerden’s work went badly, his beard fluffed out like Fat Cheeks’s mane. “What are you smiling at?” he rumbled, peering at her over his bottles.

“I am happy,” said Nhamo.

“Go be happy somewhere else, Wild Child.”

The only person who never chased her away was
Baba
Joseph. He was stern, as an elder should be, but always welcoming. The fate of the old man’s guinea pigs upset her, though. Dr. van Heerden painted them with poison and put them under little wire baskets. The baskets fitted so tightly the animals could hardly wiggle as cages of tsetse flies were placed over them. They yelped and cried as they were bitten. The tsetses swelled up with blood until they looked ready to burst. It made Nhamo sick.

“It’s cruel,” agreed
Baba
Joseph, “but one day the things we learn will keep our cattle from dying.” He stuck his own arm into a tsetse cage. Nhamo covered her mouth to keep from crying out. The flies settled all over the old man’s skin and began swelling up. “I do this to learn what the guinea pigs are suffering,” he explained. “It’s wicked to cause pain, but if I share it, God may forgive me.”

Baba
Joseph talked a lot about God. He and a number of the other villagers dressed all in white on Saturdays. The men shaved their heads and carried long wooden poles with a crook at the top. The women wore white head scarves. They met in the forest on Saturday afternoons to sing and pray.
Baba
Joseph was their leader.

“Excuse me,
Baba.
Are you Catholic?” Nhamo asked him.

“Catholic! Whatever gave you that idea?” The old man was affronted, and Nhamo was too overcome with embarrassment to say anything more.

“There’s more than one kind of Christian,” Sister Gladys explained. “
Baba
Joseph is a
Vapostori.
Those people don’t believe in medicine—if they get sick, they’d rather die than take a pill. I think they’re idiots.”

Whatever their opinion of
Vapostoris
, everyone deferred to
Baba
Joseph, even Dr. van Heerden: “The old man looks at you with those luminous eyes,” the Afrikaner told Mother, “and you find yourself saying, Yes,
Baba.
You want me to stand on my head with a flower up my schnozz? You got it,
Baba.
”

In the evening, the doctor sat outside his hut and drank beer. It wasn’t the stuff the villagers brewed. It came in brown bottles, like the beer Joao had given Grandmother long ago. Dr. van Heerden drank seven or eight, and the sweat poured off him like a river. At such times he let Nhamo lurk in the bushes while he talked to visitors.

It was a lot like the men’s
dare
, although Mother and Sister Gladys sometimes attended, and Nhamo learned a great deal from the conversations. Unlike her own village, Efifi was a mixture of Shona, Tonga, and Matabele, with one Afrikaner thrown in. The language was generally Shona, but smatterings of other tongues cropped up when people became excited.

Dr. Masuku was Matabele. At first this bothered Nhamo. She had been taught that the Matabele, traditional enemies of her people, were as cruel as hyenas. But she couldn’t imagine Mother doing anything bad. She knew it didn’t make sense that she, a Shona child, had a Matabele mother.

Mother wasn’t married, either, and never intended to be. “It’s just another name for slavery,” she declared. Nhamo thought this was astounding. How could you become an ancestor if you didn’t have children? How could you become
anything
without a husband? But Mother insisted that marriage was the worst thing that could happen to an intelligent woman.

She and Dr. van Heerden argued about it frequently. “What you need is a nest of little babies, Everjoice,” the Afrikaner would announce after his fourth beer. “I can see
them cheeping, ‘Mama! Mama!’ You’ll go all soft like a pat of butter. You’ve got motherhood written all over you.”

“I’d rather swim through a pool of starving crocodiles,” Mother said.

“Even the Wild Child knows.” Dr. van Heerden held a bottle of beer against his face to cool off. “She follows you like a little shadow.”

“The Wild Child has
imprinted
on me. I was the first thing she saw after her ordeal in the forest.”

Nhamo didn’t know what
imprinting
was and she didn’t bother her head about it. Her spirit told her Mother’s true identity. That was all that mattered.

Her life drifted on in an aimless fashion. She knew she ought to ask about nuns. She knew it was important to locate Father, but she couldn’t bring herself to leave Mother. Sometimes, when she was washing sheets at the hospital or gathering vegetables for the guinea pigs, a great craving came over her. She carefully put down her work and trotted off to the laboratories.

Ah! There was Mother with her eye pressed to a metal tube called a
microscope.
Nhamo would watch for a while, suffused with happiness. Dr. Masuku would eventually look up and say, “Stop sneaking up on me! You made me break a slide!”

Little by little Nhamo took over
Baba
Joseph’s chores. He was grateful to let her handle things that had become difficult for his old body. He watched her carefully and instructed her in new duties when he thought she was ready. She worked willingly, even feeding the warthog, which snorted alarmingly when she approached. The only animal she could not bring herself to care for was the crocodile. It was given an occasional fish and the bodies of the guinea pigs when they died.

She was particularly helpful on Saturdays. Saturdays were sacred to the
Vapostori.
They weren’t allowed to work all day.
Baba
Joseph always worried that he had not left enough food and water for his animals, but now he could relax. Nhamo looked after everything—except the crocodile. It can
dry up like an old cow patty for all I care, she thought privately.

When she was finished, she helped Sister Gladys, and then she hurried to the forest to spy on the
Vapostori.

They spent the afternoon in a clearing. The men sat on one side and the women on the other with an aisle in between. One or another of the worshippers would stand and begin the singing:

“Kwese, kwese,

Tinovona vanhu hamuzivi Kristu…

Everywhere, everywhere,
We see people who do not know Christ…
”

This was, Nhamo learned, a call for the
angels
to come down from Mwari’s country and hover over the gathering. She had asked
Baba
Joseph if angels were the same as ancestral spirits, and he had been vague about it.

Next, the
Vapostori
knelt in the direction of the rising sun and extended their arms with the palms upward.

“
Mwari
komberera
Africa, alleluia
!

Chisua yemina matu yedu.

Mwari
, Baba, Jesu utukomborera…

Mwari save Africa, alleluia!

Hear our prayers.

Mwari, Father, Jesus bless us…
”

Nhamo understood why one would pray to Mwari and one’s father, but Jesus was an
ngozi.
She didn’t think it was at all wise to attract his attention.

Sometimes
Baba
Joseph would pace the aisle between the men and women and tell them stories or scold them if they hadn’t been good. He warned them about drinking or taking other men’s wives. “Doing these things is like making a telephone call to Satan,” he cried. The others would echo his
words or make their voices sound like drums or musical instruments backing up his sermon—although the
Vapostori
used no actual instruments in their ceremonies.

The whole thing was extremely pleasant to listen to.

After a while Nhamo left to check up on the animals. She lifted the tortoise from its pen and let it lumber across the animal house for exercise. “You mustn’t drink alcohol or take one another’s wives,” she commanded the guinea pigs, who watched her hopefully for vegetables. “I won’t warn
you
about making phone calls to Satan,” she told the crocodile. “I’m sure you’ve done it many times.”

Nhamo sat with her back against the duiker stall and surveyed her kingdom. She hadn’t told a story for a long time—not since Mother’s picture burned up. She had been too absorbed with watching Dr. van Heerden’s beard fluff out like Fat Cheeks’s mane or with the warthog trailing around after
Baba
Joseph. Besides, if Nhamo wanted to talk, Mother was easy to find—although often unwilling to listen.

Now Nhamo’s spirit moved with the desire to speak. She paced between the cages as
Baba
Joseph did between the men and women of the
Vapostori.

“Once upon a time there were three kings who went to Mwari and asked for the ceremonial stone that brings rain when needed,” Nhamo said. “They lived in Mwari’s country, so I think they were probably
angels.
Anyhow,” she said, stroking the duiker, which confidently thrust its nose at her, “Mwari refused them, saying, ‘I cannot give this stone to you because only your people would prosper. Rain is for everyone.’

“The kings became angry and said, ‘We thought you were God, but it seems you were only fooling us. We don’t believe you have any power. We won’t obey you any longer.’

“Mwari said, ‘I will give you each a sign so that you may know I am God.’ He told the first king, ‘You will die because your fingers will drop off. I give you the disease called leprosy.’ To the second king he said, ‘You will die because you will fall into the fire. I give you epilepsy.’ And to the third king he said, ‘You will die because your flesh will be consumed.
I give you tuberculosis.’ Then Mwari cast them out of his country.

“The first king washed himself in a river and sacrificed a goat. His disease, leprosy, transferred itself to the goat, which was devoured by a crocodile. Since that time crocodiles have been able to give leprosy to humans.

“The second king put his spittle on the wings of a Namaqualand dove. Ever since then, the dove has been able to give epilepsy to humans.

“The third king breathed on a basket of wheat. His disease blew away with the chaff. This is why wheat chaff is able to give people tuberculosis.”

Nhamo retrieved the tortoise, which had wedged itself between two guinea-pig pens. She pointed it in the opposite direction and gave it a trail of lettuce leaves to follow.

“I hope
Baba
Joseph has never touched that ugly crocodile, ” she said as she dangled a sprig of lucerne over the guinea pigs to see if she could make them stand on their hind legs. “I’m sure it’s loaded with leprosy.” In the far distance she heard the voices of the
Vapostori.
They were really getting into it. Sometimes they got so carried away they didn’t even use words. They yodeled any strange thing as loud as they could, and the next day everyone came to work with sore throats.