The Expedition to the Baobab Tree (8 page)

For that reason I felt relieved that I had not yet fallen pregnant again.

And thankful that I did not belong to the eldest son, whose nature was so utterly different from his father’s, for the stories of maltreatment were not just stories. I myself had seen the open raw weals on the shoulders of some of his slaves, and had stealthily nursed them. It was as if the eldest son took out his annoyance on men in particular – in fact he had no slave girls. Not that he would find need for them in his father’s house, but still I thought it strange. We, the slave girls, scarcely existed for this surly young man with his cane eternally in his hand. He had a blunt way of talking to us when he really had to, for example when he had to ask one of us to pass a dish at table, and he did not partake in the amusing man-to-woman pleasantries of the writers. He sat there shyly, half-leaning on a cushion, nibbling, and all that really animated him was talk about the history of other countries. Then his eyes glowed beneath the thin line of his eyebrows. And then he closed his eyes. The eyelids looked defenseless with their short
curly lashes when his face relaxed so unexpectedly, and like a child he scratched in his ear with his little finger, and shook his head, and his eyes opened in a stare.

A good thing I had so little to do with him. To me he seemed clumsy, closed off. A good thing I could never have dreamed I would one day spend such a long stretch of my life in his company: and even after that, after he had shamefully abandoned us and taken along everything left over, even after that I could not fathom him. He had a habit of bumping the slaves, or tripping them and grinning when they fell with a heavy pack of provisions. Maliciously he beat the sanga cattle till the stranger intervened and virtually came to blows with him and wrestled with him. He made me shudder. Whether he left me alone because slave girls scarcely existed for him, or whether he did not dare assault me because I was at the time the stranger’s property, I did not know. Do not know even now. I felt protected in the company of my stranger.

Distracted with despondency, I accosted the stranger the first time he came after the youngest son’s death and begged him to buy me before I was disposed of at the market. That is what I feared would happen to me, that I would again have to go and stand in that place of shame. I remember how I gestured hysterically, how shrill my voice sounded, and later how tremulous; then I shut up. Too anguished, too tired out by struggling in the grip of uncertainty. Overconscious of being obtrusive, rash. The short interval before he answered was laden with my intensity, my violent beseechings were an indecorous wrangling with his reserve, my clammily waving hands helpless feelers
before his face, my kneeling attitude a too obviously toadying trick.

When he assured me I would not be auctioned off, how lovely the flash of transition from uncomprehended relief at first to comprehension and calm. I brought a corner of my garment to my mouth to stifle my indecorously unrestrained sobs, and, to all appearances calmly thanked him while choking on my feelings and wanting to scream and rejoice crazily. Subdued I left him.

For he came again as I believed he would; but this time there was a motive I could not guess, for I assumed without thinking that he had come to do his everyday business, come to buy up iron and copper in exchange for rolls of silk and cotton, come on the trade wind at the head of the little fleet of dhows under his command as of old, come from afar across the rippling blue-green where other trading cities on other coasts shrouded themselves in a haze of strangeness – that is how I thought. That he and his crew had come to unload one cargo and take on another.

I could not know that this time he would temporarily relinquish his command over the sailors and hand it over to a subordinate in order to undertake a journey in the opposite direction from the white flutter dance of the brown-veined butterflies over mountains and plains, nobody knew whither, nobody knew why. And no one knew why he had allowed himself to be talked into it. He provided no reasons. He went. I accompanied him, his recently acquired latest possession. I became part of the extensive organization that kept him and the eldest son busy and had them doing calculations till late at night by oil
lamps and had them unraveling the possible, the probable, the actual and the enigmatic and weighing them up against each other till one grew bored. The possible and the impossible fell, rose and hovered in balance. The particulars heaped up and up, and an idea suffocated, and new ideas were sought, and eventually the question why was of absolutely no importance. Fancy and the profit motive. Childish dreams. Longing for the faraway. Elaborate estimates. A rebellious streak. Perhaps the last.

So. For that reason we departed for the frontiers of the spirit. Invertebrates about to change homes, that is what we were. Shellfish sliding over the sand. A colony of sea anemones slithering over dry rocks on their single feet. Fish walking on their fins. Wobbling salt-scaled coelacanths. Wailing dugongs.

Our procession of bearers and cattle and sedan chairs with passengers on the shoulders of bearers wound into the interior on the way to the great ocean that booms at the uttermost limits of the world. It could not be too far, as determined by the eldest son and the stranger, rationally, with the help of their maps. It could not take a lifetime, they calculated. Taking everything into account, it ought in fact to be a shortcut to the land of the able mariners who had recently called at the city and boasted of their hardships on the billows of an immense unknown sea, and who could prove on the evidence of the numerous cases of scurvy among the crew that they came from the utmost limits of the utmost limits.

To us it seemed as if they suddenly appeared out of nothing, as if they slowly came shifting across the foil of the sea, oh so slowly,
in bulky caravels driven by a mass of patched sails in the tackling of which we saw the crew scrambling with apelike agility. We were not impressed. Or did not make it apparent. But in spite of this gathered on the beach or climbed to the terrace roofs. If you were rich you ordered a sedan chair, if you were a perky child you climbed the bow of a coconut tree, if you were a carpenter you dropped your tools and forgot your commissions and stood up, if you had a suspicion of new trade connections you locked up your trading house and with a small retinue of scribes sauntered, calm, chatting, exchanging greetings, pretending boredom, to the spot, more or less, where they would drop anchor in our treacherous bay. What can they offer that we do not have? was the general feeling, and the city did not seethe with excitement, not so that it could be seen, and the new arrivals were nonchalantly made welcome, not suspiciously, but still … Not so that it could be seen.

The eldest son was the first to be invited aboard the flagship. He asked the stranger to accompany him because of his greater knowledge of marine matters. I remember how noble the stranger looked in his green-striped robe with green headdress, how he towered above the bearded newcomers as he stood on the commander’s deck and he and the eldest son tried to make themselves understood in sailors’ language, with plenty of gestures and headshaking, up and down, back and forth. We all waited on the report. We learned about a land at the other end of the earth’s disc and about voyagers who had sailed as far as here all along the edge of the world and about the mighty storms with which the gods tried to drive them over the edge and
plunge them into nothingness, and about voices they heard in the howling wind warning them to turn around, and about monsters on land where they wanted to fetch fresh water, about short rests to repair broken yards, about beacons they had erected and about hostile backward peoples, and they pointed, so we learned, at a red sign on their yellow sails and explained that they sailed for their king, these stocky hairy men in thick peculiar garments.

Unnoticed as the birth of a wave an idea came into being and swelled unnoticed. The city’s richest merchant’s as yet unmarried eldest son, he with the interest in far places because of which he felt attracted to the stranger and kept pestering him with his questions, he who now after his father’s death had inherited the most important trading interests, this very person hurriedly got married on the eve of his departure for a destination which according to everyone existed only in his imagination and about which he was secretly laughed at.

Only one did not laugh, namely the stranger, whom he persuaded to seal his fate thus: to cease, temporarily, one presumed, voyaging over the high seas from one land mass to another and back, voyaging across a too well-known water mass afflicted with cyclones, blessed with monsoons, and to essay the unknown of a land journey with a vague goal. A gaze accustomed to the nervous riffling of water would have to accustom itself to the green of forest and marsh, to ravines veiled in old man’s beard and steep cliffs, to plains and sluggish rivers and a horizon of dome-shaped hills. The stars no longer teemed over an unstable water surface but over the stability of resistant earth, and looked relatively calmer and of surer course in the wide night. The
stars of the earth would look stiller. The night look thicker. Everything would look more dependable.

I suppose it was the spirit of adventure. I can’t be bothered with what made him embark upon something so silly that would provide him with a trivial death in the heart of the wilderness, lamented by his last possession, myself. I was the only one left to pace up and down the river bank calling anxiously, plaintively, urgently, hopelessly, and to feel mocked by the fish eagles that wove the strip of air above the river from tree to tree with their screeches and proclaimed it forbidden territory by order of the giant crocodile.

Come to his end in the belly of a reptile. There are times when I really can’t help laughing at it. It is after all a particularly laughable death. One is so used to regarding other inhabitants of the earth as food, to accepting them, as it were, as self-evident sources of food, and to putting whatever is edible in service of one’s digestion, to raising the ingestion of food to an art by adding condiments and tastefully serving up dishes that go together, to making a huge fuss of a meal and to developing customs around it that ossify into rituals, to making a whole rigmarole of the utterly natural bodily function of eating – one is so used to it that it seems terribly funny when other-consuming man is himself eaten. The untouchably mighty, revealed to be nothing but food, was knocked into the water with a well-aimed flick of the tail – actually not well aimed, actually executed with unconscious perfection – and drowned and devoured.

Did his spirit perhaps escape in bubbles? Did my companion the water spirit grow jealous and demand him as hers?

Then I grew afraid of pursuing my thoughts. I who am of water never wished it on him, and however ridiculous, he is no longer among the living, however laughable to be passed out as crocodile manure, as if it were less ridiculous to be buried and eaten by worms. He perished. He is no more.

From then on I thought carefully about the nature of his death, and I thought of it as a normal incident, I disguised it from myself, I concealed the circumstances from myself and I told myself a completely different story. Even when in my loneliness I bitterly cursed him and his nobility, or, as I was to decide, his stubborn rectitude, I used a figure of speech in which the name of my great spirit never appeared. Curse the ground that drank his blood, I preferred to say; trying to expel the abomination into the earth, or I made it stick to hyena and vulture. I brought an offering to the dark hippopotamus pool where the ruler of the crocodiles lived. Solemnly I threw my ivory bracelet in. It sank noiselessly, leaving scarcely a ripple. Harmony was restored and in the silence brought by the wind there was only the screech of the fish eagles, guardians of the stretch of water.

Could I but know whether I too am destined for a watery death! I long for it. Perhaps I had to understand that water would be his fate where he was untrue to the great water by which he lived.

I swear I will be true. Every time I plunge my ostrich eggshell into the bubbling of the stream, I mutter:

The water in the stream tastes sweet. I am thankful I wandered here after the stranger’s disappearance. In humility I thank my water spirit for guiding me. And for the thunderstorms that wash the baobab nice and clean and spur him to bud and all at once thrust out all his leaves and hang up his great flowers one by one on twigs, white and crumpled, to be fertilized by the bats, white, crumpled and malodorous.

When the tree blooms, then I cannot feel somber. Then I see the journey as a confusion I had to undergo, then I do not try to unravel it and make sense of it. I say the name of the tree aloud, the name of water, of air, fire, wind, earth, moon, sun, and all mean what I call them. I say my own name aloud and my own name means nothing. But I still am.

One time I fled from the tree. I ran aimlessly into the veld, trying to get out of its sight by hiding behind a high round rock, and I opened my mouth and brought out a sound that must be the sound of a human being because I am a human being and not a wildebeest that
snorts and not a horned locust that produces whistling noises with its wings and not an ostrich that booms, but a human being that talks, and I brought out a sound and produced an accusation and hurled it up at the twilight air. A bloody sound was exposed to the air, with which I tried to subject everything around me. To be able to dominate with one long raw sound.

At night I hear lions roar. Every now and again I get up to throw wood on the fire. Sometimes I see eyes shining greenishly in the firelight. In the mornings I bake tubers that the little people have brought me in the ashes, break open a hard-shelled monkey orange with a stick and scoop the flesh with the stick into my mouth. A gulp of water, baked bulbs, and I am ready to resume my struggle against time. We fight in an endless roundabout circle. I do not manage to divide him up and segment him, so as to form a pattern and control him, in spite of my ingenuity with the beads. I sometimes get confused and forget when I linked what to what. Green and black mixed up in accordance with my mood. I cannot shake time off me. He squats continually before my tree. Everything that has been in my life is always with me, simultaneously, and the events refuse to stand nicely one after the other in a row. They hook into each other, shift around, scatter, force themselves on me or try to slop out of my memory. I have difficulty with them in the necklace of my memory. I am not a carefree little herder of time at all. Day and night pass. Summer and winter, another summer, and here is winter again. This is easy, but not the time that had made of me what I am and that lives within me with another rhythm.