Michael Bishop: No Enemy But Time

Nights were never icy in Lolitabu, which was tucked away in Zarakal’s southwestern corner. Instead of bells-on-bobtails you heard elephants trumpeting, hyenas laughing, and maybe even poachers whispering to one another. Babington took pains to insure that Joshua and he never ran afoul of these men, for although some were woebegone amateurs, trying to earn enough money to eat, others were ruthless predators who would kill to avoid detection.

The big cats in the park worried Joshua far more than the poachers did. They did not worry Babington.

He would walk the savannah as nonchalantly as a man crossing an empty parking lot. His goal was not to discomfit Joshua, but to school him in the differences among several species of gazelle and antelope, some of which had probably not even evolved by Early Pleistocene times. Joshua tried to listen, but found himself warily eying the lions sprawled under trees on the veldt.

“We do not have an appetizing smell in their nostrils,” Babington told Joshua. “The fetor of human beings is repugnant to lions.”

“So they will not attack us unless we provoke them?”

Babington pushed a partial plate out of his mouth with his tongue, then drew it back in. “A toothless lion or one gradually losing its sense of smell might be tempted to attack. Who knows?”

“Then why do we come out here without weapons and walk the grasslands like two-legged gods?”

Said Babington pointedly, “That is not how I am walking.”

During this extended period in the Zarakali wilderness Joshua dreamed about the distant past no more than once or twice a month, and these dreams were similar in a hazy way to his daily tutorials with Babington. Why had his spirit-traveling episodes given way to more conventional dreaming? Well, in a sense, his survival training with Babington was a waking version of the dreamfaring he had done by himself his entire life. With his eyes wide open, he was isolated between the long-ago landscape of his dreams and the dreams themselves. He stood in the darkness separating the two realities.

One day Babington came upon Joshua urinating into a clump of grass not far from their tree house.

Joshua was powerless to halt the process and too nonplused to direct it away from his mentor’s gaze. At last, the pressure fully discharged, he shook his cock dry, eased it back into his jockey shorts, buttoned up, and turned to go back to the tree house.

“You are not yet a man,” the Wanderobo informed him.

Joshua’s embarrassment mutated into anger. “It’s not the Eighth Wonder of the World, but it gets me by!”

“You have not been bitten by the knife.”

It struck Joshua that Babington was talking about circumcision. A young African man who had not undergone this rite was officially still a boy, whatever his age might be.

“But I’m an American, Babington.”

“In this enterprise you are an honorary Zarakali, and you are too old to live any longer in the nyuba .”

The nyuba , Joshua knew, was the circular Kikembu house in which women and young children lived.

“Babington!”

But Babington was adamant. It was unthinkable that any adult male representing all the peoples of Zarakal should proceed with a mission of this consequence—the visiting of the ngoma of the spirit world—without first experiencing irua , the traditional rite of passage consecrating his arrival at manhood. If Joshua chose not to submit to the knife (which Babington himself would be happy to wield), then Babington would go home to Makoleni and White Sphinx would have to carry on without his blessing.

On a visit to the park in early September, Blair learned of this ultimatum and of Joshua’s decision to accede to it—so long as Joshua could impose a condition of his own.

“I don’t want a Band-Aid string like Babington’s,” he told the Great Man. “I think I can put up with the pain and the embarrassment, but you’ve got to spare me that goddamn little casing pull.”

Although less than six feet tall and possessed of a pair of watery blue eyes whose vision had recently begun to deteriorate (a circumstance insufficient to make him wear glasses), Blair was still an imposing figure. His white mustachios and the sun-baked dome of his forehead and pate gave him the appearance of a walrus that had somehow blustered into the tropics and then peremptorily decided to make the region its home. He seemed to be swaggering even when sitting on the sticky upholstery of a Land Rover’s front seat, and his voice had the mellow resonance of a bassoon. In the past ten years his appealing ugly-uncle mug had graced the covers of a dozen news magazines and popular scientific journals, and for a thirteen-week period three years ago he had been the host of a PBS program about human evolution entitled Beginnings , an effort that had rekindled the old controversy between paleoanthropologists and the so-called scientific creationists and that had incidentally served to make Blair’s name a household word in even the smallest hamlets in the United States. By now, though, Joshua was used to dealing with the Great Man, and he had no qualms about voicing his complaints about Babington’s plans for the circumcision rite.

Blair assured Joshua that educated Kikembu, especially Christians, also regarded Ngwati with distaste, and that Babington would not try to make him keep the “small skin” if Joshua were vigorously opposed to it.

“I am,” said Joshua, but he neatly parried the Great Man’s many well-meaning proposals for sidestepping the circumcision rite altogether. He felt he owed Babington, and he wanted to earn the old man’s respect.

Apprised of Joshua’s intentions, Babington declared that the ceremony would take place two days hence, in the very grove where he and his protégé had their tree house. Blair then informed Joshua that in order to prove himself he must not show any fear prior to the cutting or cry out in pain during it. Such behavior would result in disgrace for himself and his sponsors. Moreover, to lend the rite legitimacy, Babington had sent messages to several village leaders and asked Blair to invite some of the Kikembu from the outpost village of Nyarati as onlookers. Once the knife glinted, they would applaud Joshua’s steadfastness or, if he did not bear up, ridicule his public cowardice.

“Onlookers!”

“It’s traditional, I’m afraid. Of what point are the strength and beauty of a leopard if no one ever sees them?”

“Of considerable point, if you’re the leopard. Besides, we’re not talking about leopards. We’re talking about my one and only reproductive organ. Onlookers be damned!”

“They’re for purposes of verification, Joshua.”

“Maybe Babington ought to circumcise a leopard, Dr. Blair. I’d love to see them verify that .”

“Now, now,” said Alistair Patrick Blair. “Tsk-tsk.”

Joshua spent the night before his irua at the park’s sprawling Edwardian guest lodge with Blair. At dawn he bathed himself in a tub mounted on cast-iron lion’s paws, donned a white linen robe, and, in company with the paleoanthropologist, set off for his rendezvous with Babington aboard a Land Rover driven by a uniformed park attendant.

They arrived in the acacia grove shortly after eight o’clock and found it teeming with young people from Nyarati, both men and women. The women were singing spiritedly, and the boisterous gaiety of the entire crowd seemed out of proportion to its cause, the trimming of an innocent foreskin. Blair pulled off Joshua’s robe and pointed him to the spot where the old Wanderobo would perform the surgery.

“You’re not to look at Babington, Joshua. Don’t try to watch the cutting, either.”