The Impressionist (57 page)

The cycle of the dance continues, pair after pair stepping up to the drum, then giving way to the next. The rhythm becomes more intense, patterns doubling, the bass drum grumbling and booming like a discomforted giant. One by one the women fall out of step, spinning around with their arms held out, staggering, their bodies bucking and shuddering in the grip of trance.

Then the music stops.

It is as if something flows into the silence. In an instant, the bodies of the women snap into new forms, and they start to rush from side to side, shouting and moaning. Each one of them is in the grasp of something individual and specific; one hobbles around and wags a finger at the audience, another rubs her haunches lasciviously with the palms of her hands. Some of these personalities are comic, others threatening.

‘Ah yes, the ancestors,’ begins Gittens, turning to Jonathan authoritatively. ‘According to most accounts –’

Jonathan nudges him, pointing to a group of dancers whose movements appear different to the others. ‘What about them?’

Everything about these new arrivals is stiff. The women they are inhabiting move with a rigid, pompous gait, swinging their arms swiftly to the side, or holding them behind their backs. One clutches something square in its hand, slapping it and waving it at the audience. Others hold sticks, jamming them against their shoulders and aiming them like rifles.

‘My God,’ breathes Gittens. ‘I think that’s us.’

No one in Fotseland can say exactly when the European spirits first arrived. New spirits have come before, out of the desert or up from the coast, but there were never so many of them, and they were never so angry. Some, like Massa-Missi, scold and give orders. Others, like Sahjat, take hold of people and try to carry them off. They are hard and unpredictable, and to many Fotse they are a sign that the old times have gone, and the new ones will be bitter.

In the past nobody left Fotseland, or, if they did, they went down on to the plains and vanished into the villages there, never to be seen again. Now there are Fotse who have gone and come back, with strange stories of travelling over water or digging under the earth. Always the white men are at the root of it. The white men’s spirits move them to build huge granaries and slaughter one another like bridegrooms killing goats before a marriage feast. Somehow those spirits must have crawled into Fotse men while they were asleep, and travelled back with them.

Certainly the European spirits have brought changes, unless the changes brought the spirits. That is one of the questions which trouble the Fotse elders, when they discuss the new times in the shade of the fruit trees outside their farmsteads. Which of the two, spirits or changes, came first? Before, no one would have spoken like that, or even spoken of old and new times, because there were no such things. Time was just time. People followed the ways of the ancestors. They ate only the clean parts of their animals and harvested their millet after making the millet sacrifice. They avoided sexual intercourse before their newborn children were weaned, and, when it was right and proper to do so, they made Fo with each other. In return for all of this obedience, the ancestors kept turning the year and bringing forth more harvests, which fed more children, who became adults and then died and became ancestors in their turn, helping to spin the year, the ancestral force always growing stronger, powering the Fotse world through a kind of mythic perpetual motion.

Now the machine has broken. Now there are the old times, and the new.

Maybe the missionary brought the past and future with him in his saddle bags, when he rode through the land talking about the high god and the dead god and the end of time. He left little else but that: the idea of a beginning, and an imminent end. He told people to think about their own endings, and about where each of them would be when there was no more time. Instead of asking the ancestors, ‘What is right for us to do?’ people started to say, ‘What is right for me? What will happen to me now, in these end times?’

Government white men came and gave the Daou a magic stick with a silver tip, and gave other chiefs sticks tipped with brass. The chiefs were proud, but then in return for the sticks the government took many Fotse men away with them, and some were away for a long time, and they could not harvest their crops, and their wives ran away with other men.

People began to say, ‘Life was not like this before.’

‘The white men warned them about sorcery, which seemed natural: Fotse doctors and rainmakers do the same. No one in Fotseland likes sorcerers, but they are a fact of life. Everyone has jealous neighbours, which is a good reason to live far apart from one another. If spells fly back and forth, that is only to be expected.

If your pregnant goat dies, or your child is bitten by a snake, you can consult oracles to find out the name of the person responsible, and make them pay you restitution. Sorcery can be reversed, or turned back on the sorcerer. Charms can protect you. Only in the most serious cases, when ill-will brings people to the point of death, does magic ever become a public matter.

Yet some people have been asking, what if the new times were brought on by sorcerers? What if upside-down people banded together and changed things for the worse? Would it not be a good idea to eradicate them once and for all, and live in a world free of sorcery? Then maybe there would just be time again, with no old or new.

These are frightening thoughts, full of change and upheaval; they are new-time thoughts. Lately the oracles have been working hard. Fresh sorcerers are discovered every day, and people are dealing with them harshly.

There are some who have another idea about sorcerers. The world beyond the borders of Fotseland is a confused place, where sorcery is ordinary, right is wrong and people walk upside down. The evil of the outer lands has always been known, and the new Fotse travellers confirm that the further away you go, the worse it gets, until you reach freezing places where the living people are crammed together while the dead ones lie out on open fields.

Who comes from the outer lands to take the Fotse men away? Whose troublesome spirits ride the women before the great drum, so that even if, in desperation, they dance in front of the caves of the dead, the ancestors rarely emerge to take them over, and leave them to the stamping and marching possession of Sahjat and Massa-Missi?

Who could be more upside down than white men?

Some time before morning, Jonathan and Gittens walk back down the hill to the camp. They are not sure how to interpret what they have seen. Jonathan is troubled, but Gittens seems relieved. Just a festival, he says. Just their way of celebrating our arrival.

When they tell him, Professor Chapel is not at all pleased. He ignores Gittens’s excited description of the possession ceremony and makes a blustering speech, using words like ‘escapade’, ‘flagrant’ and ‘willy-nilly’. Any interaction with the Fotse should, he says, have been sanctioned by him. He is the leader of the expedition and will not have his authority challenged. From the other side of the hearth comes Marchant’s loud, insolent laugh. Impotently furious, Chapel turns on Jonathan.

‘
As
for you, I thought you had a job to do,’ he snarls. ‘Isn’t it time you stopped wandering around camp and went on tour?’

The next day Jonathan sets off, crossing the dried-up creek bed below the Daou’s compound with three porters to carry his files and camping equipment. The porters’ names are Idris, Ali and Danjuma, and, as he gives them the order to follow on, he realizes he is afraid of them. They speak softly to one another in Hausa and watch him with blank, dispassionate faces. They are the first natives it has been his sole responsibility to command. It is a relief to be leaving the shadow of the escarpment, but quite how he is to go about the census is a mystery to him. Most of the government instructions deal with such matters as village councils, sub-chiefs and Arabic lists, but since the Fotse (being highly decentralized, and more or less deregulated) do not live in villages, have no obvious system of local government and do not write in Arabic, none of this seems relevant. Until Gregg and Marchant finish their work there will be no accurate maps of Fotseland, and the only records the Fotse keep are the necklaces which list Fo transactions, and these are destroyed once a trade is finalized. When asked how many people he rules over, the Daou habitually uses the word a hundred and ten, which is a common Fotse expression for ‘quite a lot’. As work on Fotse mathematics (Chapel 1913a) has demonstrated, their system can accommodate very large numbers, as well as abstractions like fractions; Jonathan gets the impression the chief is being uncooperative. The griot puts the figure at ‘as many as the wild goats which clamber on the Lizard’s Back’, which is also not very helpful. When the griot asks rhetorically why anyone would be so foolish as to want to count the number of wild goats on the Lizard’s Back, Jonathan has no answer.

So he begins with the first homestead he comes to, and marks it down on his list as number one.

It is not a very good system.

Mostly the residents hide from him, and he has to send his men to look for them in their granaries, or their animal pens, or out in the bush. The porters search half-heartedly, and usually come back alone. Jonathan develops a system of estimating the number of people living in a farmstead by the number of eating bowls. When the owners are found, they are sometimes too scared to speak and huddle together in their yards, pleading forlornly with him to go back to the outer lands. If he can get them to calm down, they often do not understand what he wants, or say obviously ridiculous numbers (‘Three? I can see at least ten’), or try to bribe him to leave them alone, offering him goat meat and millet beer, and whispering to their children to clutch on to the fabric of his shorts and sob. It works. If there is one thing he cannot cope with, it is being tugged at by crying children. When it gets to that stage he usually leaves, scribbling down whatever figures seem most likely.

By end of the first week he has covered thirteen farmsteads.

He tries various tactics to make his visits less traumatic. He smiles. He sings. He gives the coloured census chits out to the children to play with, and does not ask for them back. Nothing makes the people less frightened or his job more pleasant. His servants hate the Fotse and dislike touching them, complaining of various kinds of disease and pollution. When they have to drag reluctant farmers out of their hiding places, they show their distaste by handling them roughly. First Jonathan orders, then asks, and finally begs them to be gentle, but they ignore him. When Idris slaps a man round the back of his head in front of his wives and children, Jonathan realizes he cannot go on.

He pitches camp that night under the shade of a large tree. After the porters have gone to sleep, he sits out in his creaking canvas chair and tries to think. He knows that he has come to the end of something. It is a shock, like diving off the high board and touching the bottom of the pool with your hands.

Why should he do this?

As the hours wear on, the heat of the day seeps back out of the earth and out of his limbs, until he is chilled through, and finally faces the possibility that what he has found the bottom of is himself.

Why count the Fotse? Who could be so upside down? Of course he knows why – for God and England and the Empire and Civilization and Progress and Uplift and Morality and Honour. He has it all written down in his notebooks; but though it is in his notebooks, it is not in him. He finds he does not really care about any of those words. He does not feel them, and that lack of feeling marks the tiled bottom of the pool. Jonathan Bridgeman can go so deep but no deeper. If he felt the words, he would have the will to count the people, and the will to transform them according to his counting.

He does not feel the words.

Self-pity sets in with the cold. He starts to mutter to himself. It was supposed to be an adventure. Bridgeman would find it an adventure. By now he would be an imperial hero, dashing and wise: Beau Bridgeman of Fotseland, the most English man in Africa.

What is he doing here?

Since he has been Jonathan, he has tried never to think like this, never to imagine that the fit between the two of them could be anything less than perfect. Whenever there was doubt, he shook it off.

What would he do anywhere else?

The Khwaja-sara, unfurling new selves like conjurer’s flags. Jonathan has learnt the trick. People care about outward forms: the width of a cuff, the sound of the labial-dental fricative ‘v’. Becoming someone else is just a question of changing tailor and remembering to touch the bottom lip to the ridge of teeth above. Easy, except when that becoming is involuntary, when fingers lose their grip and the panic sets in that nothing will stop the slide. Then becoming is flight, running knowing that stopping will be worse because then the suspicion will surface again that there
is no one running.
No one running. No one stopping. No one there at all.

The night presses down on him. For a while he considers blowing his brains out with his hunting rifle. At least he could die as Bridgeman. It would be an elegant and English solution, though it would involve taking his shoes and socks off. When he bends down to undo his laces, he discovers that the strength of will to commit suicide was also one of Bridgeman’s qualities, not his own. In despair he digs into the breast pocket of his safari shirt and takes Star’s engagement ring from its secret place next to his heart. Cursing and howling, he turns it over and throws it into the distance.