Owen Sheers - The Dust Diaries

But that is not really where Tendai’s memory begins. That is just where he thinks it does. Really it was his mother who told him about the dark, wet rock, the bats and the giant hand of the explosion. His own memory begins afterwards, outside the cave, in the searing midday sun, when he feels his mother’s scream through her chest. Then looking out from behind her arms to see his father, crawling out of the other cave with his hands clawing at the ground and the red, red blood, like the blood of the goat, gushing where his legs should have been.

His father was a proud man. He made brass in their village, melting the spitting, sparking metal in his furnace. He was the only father who knew how to make brass and that is why he was a proud man. But in Tendai’s only memory of him he is a begging man. Begging the white men who stood over him to shoot him with their rifles. But they would not, so Tendai watched him die slowly instead, his mother holding his head in her hands and crying, screaming along with the other women who held their own husbands in their arms, already dead or dying.

♦

Since then Tendai has lived with his mother at Wreningham, sleeping in her rondavel, helping her with her farming and going to Baba Cripps’ school. But now he is not allowed to sleep in his mother’s rondavel anymore. The elders have told her he is too old and he must sleep with his cousins in another rondavel instead. And that is really why Tendai has not gone to bed tonight. Not because he wants to wait for Baba Cripps, but because he doesn’t like sleeping with his cousins. They are older than him and roll on top of him in the night, or kick him out of the way, or claw him with their toenails. He misses sleeping with his mother. The warmth of her body, the smell of peanut-butter oil on her skin, the way she sings him to sleep, quietly, so only he can hear. But even she says he must sleep with his cousins now. That he is too old to sleep with his mother, that he must become a man.

So instead of going to bed Tendai has decided to wait for Baba Cripps and tell him the n’anga is here to see him. He waits there, outside the rondavel, as the sun sinks and the light drains from the day. Every now and then he creeps to the edge of its wall to look at the n’anga and he is always there, in the same position, motionless. Crouched on his haunches, his elbows inside his knees, staring across the mission compound at the sky through the trees. Even in the dim light Tendai can see the black empty sockets of the baboon’s head, and the sharp teeth of its upper jaw, crowning the n’anga ’s stern face. The baboon skin terrifies him, but there is something pleasurable in the fear and he finds himself looking at the blank eyes, the sharp teeth, again and again.

It is dark by the time Baba Cripps returns and Tendai, who has been falling asleep against the rondavel wall, his chin dropping to his chest, again and again, only sees him when he is very near. Rubbing his eyes he watches the shadowy figure approaching. He looks hard, checking it is indeed Baba Cripps, then gets up and jogs towards him, saying softly, ‘Baba, Baba, the n’anga is here to see you.’

♦

Arthur is surprised when Tendai comes running out of the darkness towards him, but he is tired after his walk and he says nothing as the boy tugs at his jacket, pulling him towards his rondavel. Once there, however, he understands the child’s excitement. Gufa the n’anga is sitting on the ground waiting for him. He has never spoken to Gufa before, but he has seen him and he has heard about him from the villagers around Wreningham: a diviner and a chemist, a herbalist who, for the right price, will cure most ills.

Arthur pulls his stool out of his rondavel and places it before Gufa. He sits down, feeling exhaustion wash through him like a swelling tide, and tells Tendai to go to bed. Then, turning to Gufa, he asks how he can help.

Gufa speaks but Arthur cannot understand him. Arthur asks him to speak more slowly, ‘ Taura zvishoma , ’ but it does no good. Even when the shaman articulates his words as if he is deaf, still he cannot understand him. He turns around. As he thought, Tendai has lingered at the edge of his rondavel. Arthur calls him over.

‘ Handinzwisisi. Unoti chii neChiShona? Ungadzokorere here? ’ (‘I don’t understand. How do you say this in Shona? Could you repeat?’)

Tendai frowns, comes closer and crouches beside Arthur. He looks intently at the n’anga as he speaks, then slowly, he begins to translate, whispering into Arthur’s ear in the pauses between the n’anga ’s speech.

As Arthur listens to Tendai’s steady translation he suspects he knows why he could not understand Gufa. The n’anga can speak perfectly good Shona, but he does not want Arthur to be able to understand him. He wants him to feel like an outsider, and so he has chosen to speak in a local dialect instead. Arthur listens as Tendai continues, his lilting voice soft as ash in his ear.

‘He says he has seen the white n’anga lying in the bush in his red and black, like a rain spirit, but the white man is not a real n’anga . The white n’anga cannot make magic from the plants. He cannot read the bones. He cannot make lightning strike a rondavel. He cannot stop the sun setting with stones. He cannot test a wife with water or speak with the spirits or know the land. He says he has seen the white n’anga walking the paths that bend like the river and that everyone knows n’angas do not walk on these paths. Real riangas go in straight lines. Like the birds that fly and the elephant that walks.’

♦

That night, after he has watched Gufa’s baboon-covered back disappear into the darkness, Arthur falls asleep fully clothed on the mattress in his rondavel. His body feels light and yet heavy; the blister on his heel burns and his shoulders ache, but he sleeps a deep sleep. And all night he dreams. Of n’angas walking through trees, of the sun setting like a stone, of flannel trousers flapping in the breeze, of lions jumping out of flags and prowling through towns, of wives with their hands in water, of light across roads and of the sound of a gramophone, impossibly far away, playing the scratched record of a dead queen’s waltz.

‘ Zwinorwadza papi? ’

Fortune is washing him. Through his one good ear he can hear her hand dropping into the calabash bowl of river water and swilling the cloth around, then the run of drips from the cloth into the bowl, fast then slower as she lifts her hand out. Then from sound to sensation as she slaps the cloth to his body, squeezing it so the water spreads and rushes over his skin. It is cold, but the shock of its coldness is good. It wakes his flesh, brings it back from the stupor of the night’s heat. Her hands are gentle but thorough, scrubbing across his naked back, sending the water running down his spine like a cool, dark shadow.

He is sitting on a low stool outside his rondavel. He can feel the morning sun reflected off its pale walls onto his back, and a slight tingling on his skin as the water evaporates.

‘ Zwinorwadzapapi? ’ she asks again. ‘Where does it hurt?’

He knows she is probably speaking loudly, but her voice comes to him through a fog of thickened sound. Some things he can still hear well, but voices seem to get lost, and he has to work hard to make them out.

He points to his stomach. ‘ Zwinorwadzaapa ’, he says. Then he points to his head, ‘ apa ’, and his legs, ‘ apa ’, and his back, ‘ apa ’. He starts laughing, still pointing all over his body. ‘ Apa, apa, apa .’