Barbara Kingsolver - The Poisonwood Bible

The market around them is crowded with sellers and buyers. Women from the villages have walked for days to narrow their eyes at this city market. They stack their oranges into careful pyramids, then squat on thin legs, resting their angular wrists between their knees. And the city women, who wrap their skirts only a little differently, come to bargain on feeding their families. Hoping to lower the price they scatter insults over their sisters’ wares, like irritating handfuls of harmless gravel. What horrible oranges, I paid half as much for better last week. The orange vendor deflects this nonsense with a yawn. She knows that, in the end, every need finds purchase.

The mother and daughters move like oil through the clear dark fluid of this crowd, mingling and then coming back to itself. Foreign visitors are rare here but not unknown. Narrowed eyes follow them, summing possibilities. Little boys chase with hands extended. One daughter opens her purse and finds coins, another daughter clutches her purse more tightly. Older boys with colorful stacks of T-shirts collect and follow in a swarm like bottleflies. They leap in front of each other to attract attention to their goods, but the visitors ignore them, stooping instead to examine ordinary wood carvings and beaded jewelry. The boys are baffled and shove each other more noisily.

Drowning out all other noise is the music that blares from many sidewalk shops of the cassette vendors. This music is so familiar it does not seem foreign. The little boys, the visitors, the village women all move their heads to the tightly strung voices of three different singers, popular ones from America, whose wrecked ancestors, captive and weeping, were clamped in iron bracelets in the

hold of a ship at a seaport very close by. Their music has made a remarkable, circular trip. That fact is lost on everyone present. This ruin must be called by another name. What would have been is this

instead.

The woman and her daughters are looking for something they will not find. Their plan was to find a way back to Kilanga and finally to the sister’s grave. It is the mother’s special wish to put a grave marker there. But they are stalled. It’s impossible to cross the border. In the six months since they began to plan their trip, the Congo has been swept by “war. A terrible war that everyone believes will soon have been worth the price. A good boil, they say here, a good boil purifies the rotten meat. After thirty-five years the man Mobutu has run away in the night. Thirty-five years of sleep like death, and now the murdered land draws a breath, moves its fingers, takes up life through its rivers and forests.The eyes in the trees are watching.The animals open their mouths and utter joyful, astonishing words. The enslaved parrot Methuselah, whose flesh has been devoured now by many generations of predators, is forcing his declaration of independence through the mouths of leopards and civet cats.

On this same day at this hour of early morning the man Mobutu lies in bed in his hiding place.The shades are drawn. His breath is so shallow the sheet drawn across his chest does not rise or fall: no sign of life. The cancer has softened his bones.The flesh of his hands is so deeply sunken the bones of his fingers are perfectly revealed. They have assumed the shape of everything he stole. All he was told to do, and more, he has done. Now in his darkened room, Mobutu s right hand falls.This hand, which has stolen more than any other hand in the history of the world, hangs limp over the side of the bed. The heavy gold rings slide forward to the knuckles, hesitate, then fall off one at a time.They strike the floor with five separate tones: a miraculous, brief song in an ancient pentatonic scale. A woman in white hurries to the door, believing against all reason that she has just heard the ailing President playing a song on the fealimfea.When she sees him, she covers her mouth with her hand.

Outside, the animals sigh.

Soon the news will reach every city and lodge like a breath or a bullet in all the different breasts. The flesh of General Eisenhower consumed by generations of predators will speak aloud. The flesh of Lumumba, also consumed, will speak aloud. For a time the howl will drown out everything. But right now the world is caught in that small blank space in which no one has yet heard the news. Lives proceed for one last moment unchanged. In the marketplace they buy and sell and dance.

The mother and her daughters are stopped short by the sight of a woman they seem to recognize. It is not the woman herself they know, but her style of dress and something else. Her benevolence. They cross the street to where she sits on the sidewalk with her back to a cool north wall. Spread out around her on a bright cloth are hundreds of tiny animals carved from wood: elephants, leopards, giraffes. An okapi.A host of tiny animals in a forest of invisible trees. The mother and daughters stare, overtaken by beauty.

The woman is about the age of the daughters, but twice as large. Her yellow pagne is double-wrapped and her ornate bodice cut low on her large bosom. Her head is bound in sky blue. She opens her mouth, smiles broadly. Achetez un cadeau pour votre fils, she orders them sweetly. There is not a trace of pleading in her voice. She cups her hand as if it were full of water or grain as she points to the small, perfect giraffes and elephants. Having used up her single French phrase, she speaks Kikongo unabashedly, as though there were no other language on earth. This city is far from the region where that language is spoken, but when one of the daughters answers her in Kikongo, she does not seem surprised. They chat about their children. Too old for toys, all of them, a bit. Grandchildren, then, the woman insists, and so after more deliberation they pick out three ebony elephants for the children of the children. It is the great-grandmother, Orleanna, who buys the elephants. She studies her handful of unfamiliar coins, then holds all of them out to the vendor. The woman deftly plucks out the few she needs, and then presses into Orleanna’s hand a gift: the tiny wooden okapi, perfectly carved. Pour vous, madamc, she says. Un cadeau.

Orleanna pockets her small miracle, as she has done for the whole of her life. The others stand half-turned but unwilling to go. They wish the woman good luck and ask if she comes from the Congo. Of course, she says, A bu, and to come here with her carvings to sell she must walk all the way, more than two hundred kilometers. Sometimes if she is lucky she can buy a ride on a truck. But lately without the black market not so many commercants cross the border and it will be difficult. It may take her a month to get back to her family in Bulungu.

Bulungu!

Ee, mono imwesi Bulungu.

On the Kwilu River?

Ee-of course.

Have you heard any news lately from Kilanga?

The woman frowns pleasantly, unable to recall any such place.

They insist: But surely. It is Leah who does the talking now, in Kikongo, and she explains again. Maybe the name was changed during the authenticate, though it’s hard to imagine why. The next village down the river, only two days’ walk on the road that goes through there. The village of Kilanga! Years ago, there was an American mission there.

But no, the woman says. There is no such village. The road doesn’t go past Bulungu. There is only a very thick jungle there, where the men go to make charcoal. She is quite sure. There has never been any village on the road past Bulungu.

Having said all that needs to be said, the woman closes her eyes to rest. The others understand they must walk away.Walk away from this woman and the force of her will, but remember her as they move on toward other places. They will recall how she held out her hand as if it were already full. Sitting on the ground with her cloth spread out, she was a shopkeeper a mother a lover a wilderness to herself. Much more than a shopkeeper, then. But nothing less.