Interior Design (10 page)

But at her cluttered desk she can barely concentrate on her list of culinary dos and don'ts—a pregnant woman cannot eat forest snails, palm nut sauce must be prepared on rest days. She stares at the blank computer screen—how is she ever going to translate the complexities of the last year and a half into chapters, footnotes, and references?

Behind her, as if roaming the winding mud alleyways of the village, Martin takes yet another distracting tour of their small apartment. He returns and writes a sentence or two, then wanders the rooms again. Finally he says, “I'm going out for a minute. We're out of coffee.”

Barbara looks out the window at Martin walking down the sidewalk and imagines him setting off for the farming fields, leaving her alone again in the village. She and Martin had thought they were so clever, dividing the Isono between them; but as an outsider Martin—to his great frustration—wasn't allowed to enter the fields, and during the planting season there was almost no one left in the village during the day for Barbara to speak to. She often wandered among the compounds, but those irregular networks of mud houses and courtyards were eerily empty: no women pounding yams, no men lazing in the shade gulping palm wine, no shifting groups of playful children.

She was so happy when she finally met Yani. With a newborn, Yani could rest in the village and take care of her infant for months. Wait, Barbara thinks—she turns from the computer screen and pages through a notebook until she finds that first conversation and remembers sitting in Yani's compound. The dark plaits of Yani's hair had glistened in the sun, and she bent her soft face over her daughter Amwe while Barbara administered drops in the red, crusty eyes of the whimpering infant. Yani sang a few lines of a song in a sweet, high-pitched voice, and Barbara asked Yani what the song was about, a question she had to repeat in her imperfect Isono.

Yani lifted her eyes and said, “Do you see the clear sky? It's a song to ward off drought.” She spoke slowly, so Barbara could translate and write the words down:

Yani looked with amusement at the frantic movement of Barbara's hand, then cradled her suddenly restless, wailing baby, and Barbara ventured to make her first joke in Isono: “Maybe that's not Amwe's favorite song.”

“No,” Yani murmured, loosening her cloth wrapper. She fit a breast to her baby's wide mouth. “She's crying over some mistake she made in her last life.”

“Last
life?” Barbara said, thinking she misunderstood.

“Yes, all babies can remember their past lives,” Yani replied, again speaking slowly enough for Barbara to follow. “When they cry, they're remembering a sadness; when they laugh, an old happiness.” She looked down at her quietly nursing daughter. “When they're silent, no one knows what they're thinking.”

“Could she tell you when she grows up?” Barbara asked, scribbling more notes, delighted with this talkative young woman.

Yani swatted a fly away from her baby's face and continued. “When babies finally speak their first word, they make their choice for this life. They forget the past.”

“But how do you know they forget?”

Yani paused, seemingly entranced at the depths of ignorance revealed by Barbara's question, and then she said, “If I could remember my past life, I wouldn't have made the mistakes I've made in this one. If my eyes are open, why should I stumble?”

Now Barbara turns back to the blank screen. Why indeed? she thinks, and types, “The Isono's chain of lives is divided by an unbridgeable gap of memory.” Barbara pauses, wonders what her friend might make of this sentence, and as she continues to write she worries whether she's moving closer to or farther away from the Isono.

*

Martin chews his pen and stares at the latest version of his latest sentence: “The Isono practice an agricultural expressionism at odds with their usual social constraints.” Where should he go from here? Barbara's swift clacking at the computer behind him sounds like the collective scraping of hand hoes against the ground, and when he closes his eyes he could still be sitting at the edge of those clearings in the forest, unable to enter, watching lines of men and women scraping and piling soil into small pyramids where yams would soon grow.

Occasionally Martin had touched a sandaled toe to a tiny corn stalk for a secret thrill when no one was looking. Why couldn't that have been enough for him—when he did manage to sneak into those fields, what good had it done him?

If only someone had answered his questions! “Why plant corn here, yams over there?” he once called out to Busu, a frail- looking elder who somehow worked harder than anyone else. But the old man merely said, “You would only understand if you were an Isono,” adding with a wry smile, “and then there would be no need to speak.”

Martin tried Kwamla, hoping he would be as talkative as his wife, Yani. “Why do you arrange your fields differently from Goli and Aia?” he asked. Kwamla averted his eyes, staring down at the soil, and said, “That's our custom.”

At Martin's exasperated frown Kwamla grinned and put down his hoe. The elaborate scarification marks on his stomach were dark sweaty beads, and he looked so healthy then. He mimicked holding a notebook and wagged a finger across an invisible page. “Why do you always make marks on paper?”

Martin laughs quietly now, as he did then. He picks up his pen, murmurs, “It's our custom,” and tries another sentence: “The crop organization of the farming fields is an unusual form of individual expression in a society of such tight social constraints.” But wait, he thinks, didn't I just write something like that?

He looks over to Barbara. Her head is bent toward the computer, all those little green words shining back at her on the dark screen—how easy it is for her to write.

“Barb, I'm going to stretch my legs outside for a bit.”

She barely nods, keeps clacking away.

He wears a jacket this time, zipped up tight before he hits the sidewalk. Intent on walking nowhere in particular, Martin continues block after block, past clusters of shops and apartments. Down a side street, he stops: near the back of a restaurant an old man in a frayed, dark coat is poking through a dumpster, dropping who knows what into a plastic garbage bag. What will happen to him when it's really cold—isn't there a shelter to go to?

Martin backs up, turns down another street, and sees a shining movie marquee. He realizes with some surprise that he and Barbara still haven't been to a movie since their return. But no one's in the ticket booth, and he can see through the glass door that the concession stand is deserted, too. The last show must be ending and the employees are puttering around in the office. He slips inside and can just make out muffled car squeals and gunshots, a pulsating soundtrack. Why not take a quick peek? He hurries through the empty lobby, glancing back and forth nervously.

“Hey, you!” someone shouts behind him. Martin pushes through swinging doors into the darkened theater and a spectacular, technicolor car crash. Half stumbling down the aisle, he ducks into the first empty seat.

As his eyes adjust to the darkness he watches an usher pace halfheartedly with a flashlight. The minimum wage certainly isn't worth any possible trouble from finding me, Martin thinks, and anyway, for all he knows I'm just a homeless guy looking for a little warmth. All around him faces are turned up to the giant screen. Martin can't imagine what an Isono villager might make of the swift pace of images: cars give chase, cars collide, cars overturn. Martin eases into his chair and breathes in the salty essence of popcorn.

*

Still awake in bed, Barbara listens to the click of the front door, then Martin's footsteps to the edge of the bed—he's back from wherever. She's insulted that he assumes she's asleep: it would be nice if he said Hello, or at least whisper Good Night. But when he lies down beside her his palm cups a shoulder blade, squeezes. His fingers slip along the smooth bumps down the ridge of her spine, and this reminds her of the Isono scarification marks: those little raised knobs of flesh forming unpredictable swirling patterns, interwoven arcs and circles. Martin traces patterns against the tight muscles of her back and she stirs, slowly pressing her ankle up the length of his leg.

In the morning Barbara pages through her folder of the Isono scarification designs, laughing when she thinks that at first she and Martin called them beauty marks, a kind of jewelry that lasted a lifetime. How lucky she'd been one morning, when during her route of greetings she came upon a tense village meeting. The elders sat upright in a semicircle of wooden stools, wearing colored robes slung over the shoulder, facing two young men she had never seen before, dressed in sleek, well-tailored shirts and pants.

Something secret was up, because just as one of the young men began speaking rapidly to the elders—the cigarette dangling from his mouth obviously an act of bravado—an old woman came up to Barbara and offered to show her a stash of traditional cloth. To refuse an invitation was extremely impolite, so Barbara pretended she misheard. “Tomorrow? Yes, I'll come, then. Many thanks,” she said. But before she could ease away, a thin, firm hand was on her shoulder: the old woman spoke slowly and clearly, determined to be understood.

When Yani came by later that day for more medicine—her frail daughter was ill again—she sat down by the desk under the palm frond veranda and anxiously watched Barbara spread cream over Amwe's rash. “I'm afraid that my cousin is bewitching my child. Her own child was born breech and died—she's surely jealous…”

Yani recounted her fears while Barbara made careful notes on what types of relatives could bewitch each other. Yet when Yani was done, Barbara couldn't help asking, “Who were those two men at the trial this morning?”

Yani was silent. She cradled her child and stared off at the huge wall of trees surrounding the village, until finally Barbara said, “Yani, we're friends. How can I truly understand you if I don't understand your people?”

Yani stood up. “I don't think I can talk with you any more,” she said sadly. “Our farm isn't strong this season, and I need to work in the fields more.”

It was true that the sporadic rains might not produce the best harvest, but Barbara would not let herself lose Yani. She took a handful of bills from her pocket, blushing at her own bravado. “This won't make the rains come, but it can help pay for medicines and divinations for your daughter's illness. Take these,” she pleaded. “In my country, words are valuable.”

Yani hesitated, glancing about her, and then, with perhaps an admiring smile at Barbara's argument, took the money and slipped it under the waistband of her skirt. She sat back down on her stool.

“Who were those men?” Barbara asked again, but still Yani sat mute, though now she fixed her eyes carefully on the battered manual typewriter on the desk. Barbara understood: the Isono considered the clatter of typing ugly—the noise kept most villagers from the courtyard. She slipped a piece of paper in the typewriter and began pounding away Yani's name, the date, and the question she had just asked, and then she tapped comma after comma across the page while she waited.

Yani flinched at the sound, but it was her protection. “They were born in this village, and their families worked hard to send them to the university.” Yani spat, one of those marvelous arcs the villagers were so good at. “Now, because they live in the city and work in a government office, they think they aren't Isono.”

Barbara typed this out and asked, “Why do you say that?”

Yani looked away, tucked her baby closer to her breast. “They have told the elders they won't allow themselves to be scarred in this year's ritual.”

“Oh. But why is that so terrible?”

Yani hesitated. Marking time, Barbara banged away plus and minus signs until Yani said, “They won't be able to marry an Isono girl.”

“Why?”

“Because they will never become Isono.”

“Really? What
will
they become?”

“They will become no one.”

“Why?” Barbara asked again. She pressed the space bar until the bell pinged and Yani finally said, “Every Isono has a spirit living within.” Avoiding Barbara's startled gaze, Yani looked away. Then she said, so slowly, so quietly, “When I feel an itch, it's the spirit rubbing against me inside. Our scarification designs reveal our spirits' paths.”

Exhilarated, Barbara typed out Yani's answer and then a barrage of exclamation points. Listening to the happy squeals of children running down the convoluted alleyways of a nearby compound, she wanted to join them, hooting with pleasure.

Instead she asked, “But why are the designs only on the stomach?”

“A spirit travels everywhere in the body, but its true home is here,” Yani said, gesturing from her chest to her waist. “It wants to be born, just as a baby kicks in the womb.”

Again Barbara clattered away, asking, “What happens during the ritual?”

“The diviner sees, from the points that itch, the hidden design. But why ask any more questions? You can see the women's initiation tomorrow.”

Now Barbara regards the pages of this interview: a typed crazy quilt of oddly spaced questions and answers and repeated punctuation marks of all assortments. How different this looks from her sparse notes on the ritual.

She had stood among the silent crowd and watched the young girls of the village lying on their backs, eyes tightly closed, waiting. The diviner was Mokla—the same old woman who had led Barbara away from the trial—and she was dressed in white, kneeling before an animal skin and arranging a knife, small chunks of charcoal, a pile of ash. When she noticed Barbara she scowled. Barbara set her notebook and pen down on the ground and stepped back a few paces, until Mokla turned away from her.