Stand on Zanzibar (58 page)

The entire class of children rose to their feet and waited for the teacher to walk past, take station at their head, and lead them over towards the car.

“Good morning, gentlemen,” the fat young man said affably. “My class has requested permission to put a few questions to you. Since they have little chance to travel about themselves, perhaps you’d indulge them.”

“Certainly,” Gideon said with only the trace of a sigh.

“Thanks awfully. First, may we know where you come from?” The teacher turned and held out his hand expectantly to one of the older pupils, who gave him a rolled map in bright colours and simplified outlines. Those children who were not too much attracted by the car or the preparation of the corpse craned to see whereabouts in the world Gideon would point to.

When his finger stabbed down in the area of New York, there was a concerted sigh.

“Ah, you’re American!” the teacher said. “Sarah, we learned about America, didn’t we? What do you know of that great country so far away?”

A serious-mannered girl of thirteen or so, one of the oldest pupils, said, “America has over four hundred million people. Some of them are brown like us but most of them are Cock…”

She hesitated.

“
Cauc
…” corrected the teacher.

“Caucasian,”
Sarah managed. “The capital is Washing-ham—”

“Washing—?”

“Washing
ton
. There are fifty-two states. At first there were thirteen but now there are four times that number. America is very rich and powerful and it sends us good seed for planting, new kinds of chickens and cows which are better than the ones we used to have, and lots of medicines and disinfectants to keep us healthy.”

She suddenly smiled and gave a little skip of pleasure at her own success in the brief recitation.

“Very good,” Gideon approved.

A boy next to Sarah, about her own age, raised his hand. “I should like to ask you, sir—”

Norman felt inclined to let his mind wander. No doubt this was one of the regular public-relations jobs Gideon had to cope with when he went about the country in this incredibly informal manner—which struck Norman as absurd: the First Secretary of the U. S. Embassy stopping off at random in an isolated village and chatting with children! But he had his mind too full trying to organise his perceptions.

He had discovered why organising them was so difficult a few seconds ago. The sight of a corpse being made ready for burial, matter-of-factly in the view of everyone, was a shock to him. In sterile modern America one was intellectually aware that death could be a public event, from heart-failure or more messily through the intervention of a mucker, but hardly anyone had actually seen a mucker on the rampage, and emotionally and for all daily purposes one assumed it was something that took place tidily in a hospital out of sight of everyone except experts trained to handle human meat.

But people do die.

In the same way, Beninia was a continuing shock. Taken in by eye and ear, the canned information supplied by Shalmaneser and the GT library was manipulable, digestible, of a familiar sort. Confronted with language, smell, local diet, the sticky hot early-summer air, the clutch of mud around his shoes, he was in the same plight as a Bushman trying to make sense of a photograph, exhausted by the effort to bridge the gap between pre-known symbol and present actuality.

Yet it had to be done. Isolated in the air-conditioned GT tower, one might juggle for a thousand years with data from computers and pattern them into a million beautiful logical arrays. But you had to get out on the ground and see if the data were accurate before you could put over the programming switches on Shalmaneser from “hypothetical” to “real”.

His attention shot back to here and now as though a similar switch had been pulled in his own mind. He had heard, in memory, the rest of the boy’s question.

“—how the Chinese can do so much damage in California!”

Gideon was looking baffled. “I’m afraid I don’t quite follow you,” he said after a moment.

“You must forgive the child, sir,” the teacher said, plainly embarrassed. “It’s not the most tactful subject—”

“I’ll answer any question, tactless or not,” Gideon said. “I didn’t quite follow, that’s all.”

“Well, sir,” the boy said, “we have a television set here, and teacher makes us older ones watch the news programme after school before we walk home, so we see a lot about America. And there’s often a piece about damage done by Chinese infiltrators in California. But if Americans are either like you, or like English people, and the Chinese are like what we see on television, with their funny eyes and different skins, why can’t you recognise and catch them?”

“I get the point,” Norman said gruffly. “Like me to handle that, Gideon?” He pushed himself away from the roof of the car where he had been leaning and approached the group of children, his eyes on the questioner. Not more than thirteen at the oldest, yet he had phrased his inquiry in first-class English with a slight British inflection. Learned off one of the Common Europe news-commentators, probably. Still, it was an achievement at his age.

“What’s your name, prodgy?”

“Simon, sir. Simon Bethakazi.”

“Well, Simon, you’re probably old enough by now to know how it feels when you do something silly you wouldn’t like other people to find out about. Not because you’d be punished, but because people would laugh at you—or because they thought of you as one of the cleverest boys in the school and a clever boy oughtn’t to have done such a stupid thing. Catch?”

Simon nodded, face very intent.

“Only sometimes things happen which are too big to hide. Suppose you—hmmm! Suppose you knocked over a jug of milk and that was all the milk in the house? And it was your fault but you’d been doing something silly to make it happen, like seeing if you could hang by your feet from the rafters.”

Simon looked blank for a second and the teacher, smiling, said something in Shinka. His face cleared and he had to repress a grin.

“Well—you might try and put the blame on someone else … No, you wouldn’t do that, I’m sure; you’re a good boy. You might try and blame it on a pig that tripped you up, or a chicken that startled you and made you fall over.

“The Chinese would have to be very clever indeed to do all the damage they’re supposed to. But because America is a big and rich and proud country we don’t like admitting that there are some people who aren’t happy—who are so unhappy, in fact, they want to change the way things are run. But there are only a few of them, not enough to make the changes happen. So they lose their tempers and they break things, same as people do anywhere.

“And there are some other people who would also like to change things, but who haven’t got around to using bombs yet, or setting houses on fire. If they thought there were many more like themselves, they might decide to start too. So we like to let it be thought that it’s really someone else’s fault. Do you understand?”

“It may be a trifle sophisticated for him,” the teacher said aside to Norman.

“No, I understand.” Simon was emphatic. “I’ve
seen
somebody lose his temper. It was when I went to stay with my cousin in the north last year. I saw an Inoko lady and gentleman having a quarrel.”

Incredulous words rose to Norman’s lips. Before he could utter them, however, Gideon had coughed politely.

“If you’ll excuse us, we have to get on our way,” he said.

“Of course,” the teacher beamed. “Many thanks for your kindness. Class, three cheers for our visitors! Hip hip—”

*   *   *

Back on the road, Norman said, “And what would State think of that—uh—presentation?”

“It was honest,” Gideon said with a shrug. “It’s hardly what they’ll hear over the TV, but it’s honest.”

Norman hesitated. “There was something I wanted to ask, but it seems foolish … The hole! Why was young Simon so eager to stress that he’d seen someone lose his temper?”

“That’s a very bright kid. And sophisticated.”

“Anyone could see he’s no simpleton! But I asked—”

“He could say that in English. He couldn’t have said it in Shinka, which is his native language, and that’s good for a boy barely into his teens, isn’t it?”

Norman shook his head in bewilderment.

“Ask this linguist—what’s his name? The one you brought with you.”

“Derek Quimby.”

“Ah-hah. Ask him if you can express the idea of losing your temper in Shinka. You can’t. You can only use the word which means ‘insane’.”

“But—”

“I’m telling you.” Gideon guided the car around a wide curve, seeking a route between potholes. “I don’t speak the language well myself, but I can get along. Facts are: you can say ‘annoyed’ or even ‘exasperated’, but both those words came originally from roots meaning ‘creditor’. Someone you get angry with owes you an apology in the same way you’re owed money or a cow. You can say ‘crazy’ and put one of two modifiers on the front of it—either the root for ‘amusing’ or the root for ‘tears’. In the latter case, you’re talking about someone who’s hopelessly out of his mind, sick, to be tended and cleaned up after. In the former, you’re inviting people to laugh at someone who’s lost his temper, but will return to normal sooner or later.”

“They regard anger as being literal insanity?”

“They don’t regard it as being important enough to have a separate word to label it, that’s all I can say.”

“But people must lose their tempers occasionally!”

“Of course they do. I’ve even seen Zad lose his temper. But that wasn’t
at
anybody—it was the day his doctors told him he must retire or die. Did him a power of good, too, like any catharsis. What they don’t do is go crazy-mad and smash things that they’ll regret later. I’ve been here more than two years and I haven’t seen a parent hit a child. I haven’t seen a child hit another child. Trip him over, yes, or jump out at him from around a corner and pretend to be a leopard. You know what the Mandingo used to say about the Shinka in the old days?”

Norman gave a slow nod. “They were magicians who could steal the heart out of a warrior.”

“Right. And the way they do it is by dodging passion. I don’t know how they manage it, but there’s the record. A thousand or more years in the same spot, not bothering anyone, and like I said the day you arrived they swallowed up the Holaini and the Inoko and Kpala immigrants … Shall I tell you something you really won’t believe?”

“You already did.”

“I mean
really.
Laying out that corpse and painting its face white reminded me. The first Christian missionary to come here was a Spanish friar called Domingo Rey. You know the Spanish had a trading post not far from Port Mey, an outstation for Fernando Po? There’s a marker on the site you could go and look at if you have time.

“Anyway, this friar did a very un-Christian thing. He went out of his mind and drowned himself after he’d been here seven years. He was convinced he’d been trapped by Satan. He’d learned enough Shinka to start preaching, and started off with some of the parables and highlights of the gospel, and to his dismay the people he talked to said no, you’ve got that wrong, it wasn’t anyone far away called Jesus but our own man Begi who did that. You know about Begi?”

“I don’t think I do,” Norman said after a pause.

“Any briefing on Beninia that leaves Begi out of account isn’t worth having,” Gideon grunted. “I guess you’d call him a folk-hero, a sort of Jack character, or maybe like this Anancy that you find in the West Indies. His name apparently means ‘winter-born’, and they say he always used to carry a blunt spear and a shield with a hole in it—to look through. And as you might expect the stories about him were more to the Shinka taste than those about Jesus.

“The one which allegedly drove the poor friar out of his skull—want to hear it?”

“Sure, go ahead.”

Gideon eased the car down a particularly rutted stretch of road, avoiding potholes. “Well, the stories say he’d reached a ripe old age and enormous popular esteem because he’d made wizards look foolish and overcome a sea-monster and even got the better of his grandfather’s ghost, so everybody used to bring problems to him. And one time the boss Holaini, the Emir—which the Shinka turned into ‘Omee’, incidentally, meaning ‘indigestion’; they love bad puns—the Emir, anyway, got sick of the way the Shinka kept outsmarting their lords and masters. Like for instance they’d imposed a swingeing tax and people went to Begi and complained, and he said why don’t you drive your fertile cows into the Holaini bull-pens and give them back their own calves when you pay the tax? Which sort of tickled their sense of humour. And, by the way, he said, according to the story, ‘Give the Emir what belongs to the Emir!’”

“Render unto Caesar?” Norman muttered.

“You’ve hit it. So finally the Emir sent messengers to demand who was playing these underhand tricks, and Begi owned up and off he went, and the Emir pegged him out on an anthill in the traditional style. And when his old blind father the chief came to visit him in his last moments, he said the Shinka shouldn’t hold his death against the Holaini because they were too stupid to see the point of what he had said to them.”

“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do?”

“Your being raised as a Baptist saves me explaining a lot of things to you, doesn’t it? I guess if Friar Rey had been a bit more sophisticated he’d have thought of the possibility that some Christian legends had reached here on the grapevine, like the story of Buddha is supposed to have got to Rome and led to his being canonised as St. Josaphat—you heard that one? But I guess the climate of ideas wasn’t on his side in those days.

“Well, what it boils down to is that Begi already enshrined the Shinka concept of a perfect man, tolerant, level-headed, witty—the whole shtick. It wasn’t till some more broad-minded missionary hit on the notion of saying that Begi was a prophet sent to the Shinka that Christianity made any progress here. And nowadays you’ll hear Shinkas saying that Begi had better sense than Jesus because he brought his teaching to people who understood it, while Jesus overreached himself and preached to people like the British who can’t have understood or they wouldn’t behave as they do.”