Stand on Zanzibar (50 page)
Authors: John Brunner
“Let go, you’re hurting!” she panted past the grip he had taken on her slim throat.
“I’m terribly sorry!” Frantic, he helped her to regain her balance, steadied her with a hand on her arm as she swayed. “But you shouldn’t have come in like that—one never knows what’s liable to happen nowadays!”
“I certainly wasn’t expecting that,” she said wryly. “I thought I heard your voice and realised you’d been put in the room next to mine. I’m sorry. I only wanted to surprise you.”
“That you managed,” he said grimly. “Oh—that must be my call. Sit down. I’ll be with you in a moment.”
He darted back to the phone, which was making ill-defined grunting sounds in Yatakangi. The speaker was not, as he had hoped, the local stringer he was to visit, but the stringer’s partner, who didn’t know when his colleague would be back and declined to do more than take a message.
Donald told him where he was staying and cut the circuit.
Swivelling his chair, he looked at Bronwen and gave a wry grin.
“Know something? For a sick girl, you’re strong.”
“It’s only in the preliminary stages,” Bronwen muttered, looking at the floor. “My husband diagnosed it immediately before they killed him.”
Now he had a chance to take in her appearance. She must have gone straight to the paper clothing dispenser and fitted herself out with a set of Yatakangi garments; she was in a pale grey shareng and a short stiff yellow coat.
She noticed him looking, and fidgeted, plucking at her waist. “These things are awful,” she said. “Worse than what we get at home, and that’s bad. I was only going to ask you if you could spare a little while to help me buy some cloth dresses instead of paper like this.”
Donald made some quick mental calculations. Coming to Yatakang, he had picked up time; it was local morning, evening back in California. Yatakangi custom decreed a sort of siesta between noon and three poppa-momma; he would not be able to make his appointments for earlier than three, therefore, and that left a couple of hours free.
“Sure I can,” he said. “Just let me make a few calls and I’ll be with you.”
“Thanks very much,” she said, and returned to her own room without closing the door.
In there, the closet swung open instead of sliding as his did. He noticed this almost at once, because on resuming his seat at the phone he could see the reflection of a reflection in the mirror which had shown him the silently opening door. He kept his eyes on the glass absently as he waited for his call to the government information office to go through.
In that fashion, he saw her pause and glance down at herself in the drab grey and yellow paper and make a moue.
“Yes?” said the phone.
“Overseas correspondents liaison section, please.”
“Wait one minute.”
She put her hands up to her breast as though to tear off the offending garments, but the paper was too tough, being reinforced with plastic against Yatakang’s frequent rain. Defeated, she slipped off the little coat and balled it up angrily, tossing the crumpled remains on the floor.
“Overseas liaison,” the phone said.
“My name is Donald Hogan and I’m accredited to you by Engrelay Satelserv. You should have had notification of my arrival from my head office.”
“Please repeat the name and I will see if that is so.”
The upper part of the shareng, automatically pre-pleated by the dispenser into a rough approximation for her size and height, unfolded from her with a rustling noise. Donald caught his breath. She was wearing nothing under it, and her breasts were like small brown pears with nipples of bright carnelian.
“Yes, Mr. Hogan, we have been notified about you. When will you wish to come and register with us for official journalistic status in Yatakang?”
“If three this afternoon is not too early—?”
She had unwound the three turns of the shareng from her waist and was bending over to sort out the complicated slots and tags that made up the portion between her legs. Her breasts hardly moved as she doubled over.
“I will consult the appointment schedule for the appropriate official. Hold on, please.”
She must have managed to put the garment on, but it was taking her a great deal of trouble to get it off. She turned, still bending, as though to get a better light on what her hands were doing, and her small shapely buttocks loomed round in the square of the mirror. Light caught the tuft of black hair at their parting.
“Yes, three today will be acceptable. Thank you, Mr. Hogan,” the phone said, and clicked off. Donald rose, his mouth a little dry and his heart hammering, and went through the doorway.
With her back to him, she stepped aside from the ruin of the paper shareng and said, “I knew you were watching, of course.”
He didn’t say anything.
“I think sometimes I’m mad,” Bronwen said, and there was a slight high edge of unborn hysteria on her voice. “And then again sometimes I think I’m not mad, but very sensible. He taught me to love my body—my husband. And there may not be very much time left for me to show that love.”
She turned at last, slowly, pivoting on one delicate foot of which the sole, Donald saw now, was tinted with pinkish dye to match the paint on the nails.
“I’m sorry,” she said abruptly. “It’s no special compliment to you. It’s just … Well, I’ve never had an American, so I’d like to. While I can. That is, if you want to.” The words came out with a strange flatness, like a machine talking. “I’m quite—how does the pun go? I’m quite impregnable, isn’t that it? They sterilised me just in case leukaemia of my sort is hereditary. I’m absolutely and
completely
sterile.”
“So am I,” Donald said in a tone that shocked him with its gruffness, and tugged loose the comb that held her long black hair, spilling it down her in a tressy waterfall of forgetfulness.
SMALL WANTS AND THOSE EASILY SATISFIED
When his TV went wrong and would show nothing but a field of irregularly wavering grey lines interspersed with dots which moved like dust suspended in liquid and examined under a microscope to demonstrate Brownian motion, accompanied by a white-noise hiss from the speaker, Bennie Noakes thought about having it repaired. After an hour or two, however, he discovered that the random patterns and the noise were themselves psychedelic. What was more, reality didn’t intrude those annoying and disgusting bits about people killing people. Digesting himself down to a unit of pure perceptivity, he continued to watch the screen. Occasionally he said, “Christ,
what
an imagination I’ve got.”
The Bight of Benin! The Bight of Benin!
One comes out where forty went in!
There was no direct express service to any point in Beninia. The country could not afford to build one of the huge five-mile concrete pans that the planes required, let alone the ancillary services. From the sleek modern womb of the express Norman was decanted at Accra and put aboard a tiny, ancient, wobble-winged Boeing that ran the local services via Port Mey to up-country Nigeria. It could not have been built more recently than 1980 and it was serviced by trucks carrying not lox and hydrazine but kerosene. Their hoses leaked, as he could smell, and he thought wildly of outbreaks of fire.
The Bight of Benin! The Bight of Benin!
The chiggers burrow beneath your skin!
The pressure-cooker heat of Africa pasted his clothes to his skin with a mixture of sweat and steam.
The Bight of Benin! The Bight of Benin!
Blackwater fever and pounds of quinine!
Arrogant officials in what he did not at first recognise as uniforms—the xenophobia of the end of last century had eliminated European rank-symbols like peaked caps and Sam Browne belts, to replace them with militarised counterparts of tribal dress—welcomed the chance to show their contempt for their black American cousins, children of Africans who hadn’t had the sense or skill to hide from the slavers.
The Bight of Benin! The Bight of Benin!
The rain never stops and it waters the gin!
Passed through alleys of wire-mesh like cattle on the way to the slaughter-house, the party from GT with Norman and Elihu at its head proceeded to join the line waiting for transfer to the Port Mey flight. Five centuries blended into a confused stew of impressions: fat matrons swathed in gaudy cotton with matching turbans, progressive young girls in the pre-European garb of skirtlet, beads and earrings who sometimes looked on Norman with vague approval, businessmen probably from South Africa whose Western clothes contrasted with their negro colouring, a doctor—local style—carrying a vast bundle of ritual objects each with its precisely defined function in remedial psychiatry and most possessing their own distinctive aroma, an imam from Egypt in friendly professional conversation with a dog-collared Episcopalian priest …
The Bight of Benin! The Bight of Benin!
Godforsaken since God knows when!
The announcements about arrivals and departures which were uttered at intervals over booming loudspeakers were in English of a sort, but it took Norman several minutes to realise that fact. He had known intellectually that the language left behind by the colonial government was breaking up as Latin had done after the fall of Rome, but he had thought of it as happening more in Asia than Africa, to which despite everything he had certain emotional ties. Between the spoken announcements there was a never-ending susurrus of recorded music. Out of curiosity he counted the beat-pattern of one of the numbers and identified it as being in seventeen-four time, the ancient Dahomeyan rhythm of
hun
against
hunpi
, child against mother drum. He mentioned this to Elihu for want of anything else to say.
The Bight of Benin! The Bight of Benin!
You go in fat and you die there thin!
“That’s something we wished on the paleasses, anyhow,” Norman said.
“No,” Elihu contradicted. “Complex rhythms like that were among the things that the Europeans took away from us along with the rest of tribal culture. Jazz rhythms were from military marches and French dances. Modern rhythms are from Europe too—five-four from places like Hungary, seven-four from Greece and the rest of the Balkans. Even the instruments they’ve naturalised in the West are things like the sitar, from India, rather than the cora.”
“Whatinole is a cora?”
“Half a gourd with a skin stretched over it as a resonator, and a frame carrying harp-strings and bits of metal that vibrate in sympathy at the correct frequencies. You will see it around here but it hails from further east; the best players are still Sudanese, as they’ve always been.”
The Bight of Benin! The Bight of Benin!
Made us beasts instead of men!
“Did you check up on the African side of your ancestry?” Elihu inquired. “You said you were going to, I believe.”
“Never had time,” Norman muttered. But he looked at the people around him with sudden interest, thinking:
maybe some of these people are my relatives—they took a lot of slaves from here.
“You won’t be able to tell by looking,” Elihu said. “Can you tell an Ibo from a Yoruba, an Ashanti from a Mandingo?”
Norman shook his head. “Can anyone?”
“There are types, the same as there are among people of European extraction. But there are black-haired Swedes and blond Spaniards, and here you don’t even have those nice obvious traits to go by.”
The Bight of Benin! The Bight of Benin!
Godamercy on a child of sin!
“They’re calling our flight,” Elihu said, and moved forward as the gate they faced was dragged open squealing on its hinges.
During the flight to Port Mey, a man carrying a musical instrument made from a stick, an old wooden box and some tongues of scrap metal tuned to a pentatonic scale, struck up a song in a wailing voice. Norman and his companions, except Elihu, found it embarrassing, but everyone else liked the idea of some home-made music and joined in.
“He’s a Shinka,” Elihu said. “From Port Mey. Telling everyone how glad he is to be going home after visiting Accra.”
A fat woman carrying a child of less than a year had taken maximum advantage of the duty concession on liquor and passed a quart bottle of arrack around among her seat-neighbours. Norman refused her offer, trying to smile, saying very slowly and clearly that he was a non-drinking Muslim—whereupon she insisted that he take a piece of majnoun instead, from a box she had tucked into the folded cloth at her bosom. That much he consented to, thinking that the hashish it contained would not be much different from the pot he was accustomed to at home, and before they landed he was in a far more cheerful mood. The man with the musical instrument rose and went from seat to seat inviting improvised contributions of a verse for his song: Elihu, obliging after some thought, did so in good Shinka and the man fell on his neck with joy. Norman was almost disappointed at the loss of a chance to do the same himself, in English, and felt a sudden wave of astonishment at what had happened to him.
Worried, he whispered to Elihu when he had the opportunity, “Elihu, I feel very odd. Would there have been something in that candy apart from—?”
“They’re Shinkas,” Elihu said, as though that explained the entire universe, and went back to the discussion he had started with the musician, in the language of which Norman was totally ignorant.
At a loss, Norman pulled out an advertising leaflet for the airline from the pocket beside his seat, and found he was staring at a conventionalised map of West Africa which made the various countries look like slices of pie wedged into the northern coast of the Bight. Narrowest of all was Beninia, a mere sliver compared with RUNG or Dahomalia.
“Jack Horner,” he murmured, half-aloud, and Elihu cocked an eyebrow at him inquiringly.
“Nothing.”
But the idea seemed very funny, and he giggled without intending to.
