“But people must lose their tempers occasionally!”
“Of course they do. I’ve even seen Zad lose his temper. But that wasn’t at anybody—it was the day his doctors told him he must retire or die. Did him a power of good, too, like any catharsis. What they don’t do is go crazy-mad and smash things that they’ll regret later. I’ve been here more than two years and I haven’t seen a parent hit a child. I haven’t seen a child hit another child. Trip him over, yes, or jump out at him from around a corner and pretend to be a leopard. You know what the Mandingo used to say about the Shinka in the old days?”
Norman gave a slow nod. “They were magicians who could steal the heart out of a warrior.”
“Right. And the way they do it is by dodging passion. I don’t know how they manage it, but there’s the record. A thousand or more years in the same spot, not bothering anyone, and like I said the day you arrived they swallowed up the Holaini and the Inoko and Kpala immigrants … Shall I tell you something you really won’t believe?”
“You already did.”
“I mean really. Laying out that corpse and painting its face white reminded me. The first Christian missionary to come here was a Spanish friar called Domingo Rey. You know the Spanish had a trading post not far from Port Mey, an outstation for Fernando Po? There’s a marker on the site you could go and look at if you have time.
“Anyway, this friar did a very un-Christian thing. He went out of his mind and drowned himself after he’d been here seven years. He was convinced he’d been trapped by Satan. He’d learned enough Shinka to start preaching, and started off with some of the parables and highlights of the gospel, and to his dismay the people he talked to said no, you’ve got that wrong, it wasn’t anyone far away called Jesus but our own man Begi who did that. You know about Begi?”
“I don’t think I do,” Norman said after a pause.
“Any briefing on Beninia that leaves Begi out of account isn’t worth having,” Gideon grunted. “I guess you’d call him a folk-hero, a sort of Jack character, or maybe like this Anancy that you find in the West Indies. His name apparently means ‘winter-born’, and they say he always used to carry a blunt spear and a shield with a hole in it—to look through. And as you might expect the stories about him were more to the Shinka taste than those about Jesus.
“The one which allegedly drove the poor friar out of his skull—want to hear it?”
“Sure, go ahead.”
Gideon eased the car down a particularly rutted stretch of road, avoiding potholes. “Well, the stories say he’d reached a ripe old age and enormous popular esteem because he’d made wizards look foolish and overcome a sea-monster and even got the better of his grandfather’s ghost, so everybody used to bring problems to him. And one time the boss Holaini, the Emir—which the Shinka turned into ‘Omee’, incidentally, meaning ‘indigestion’; they love bad puns—the Emir, anyway, got sick of the way the Shinka kept outsmarting their lords and masters. Like for instance they’d imposed a swingeing tax and people went to Begi and complained, and he said why don’t you drive your fertile cows into the Holaini bull-pens and give them back their own calves when you pay the tax? Which sort of tickled their sense of humour. And, by the way, he said, according to the story, ‘Give the Emir what belongs to the Emir!’”
“Render unto Caesar?” Norman muttered.
“You’ve hit it. So finally the Emir sent messengers to demand who was playing these underhand tricks, and Begi owned up and off he went, and the Emir pegged him out on an anthill in the traditional style. And when his old blind father the chief came to visit him in his last moments, he said the Shinka shouldn’t hold his death against the Holaini because they were too stupid to see the point of what he had said to them.”
“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do?”
“Your being raised as a Baptist saves me explaining a lot of things to you, doesn’t it? I guess if Friar Rey had been a bit more sophisticated he’d have thought of the possibility that some Christian legends had reached here on the grapevine, like the story of Buddha is supposed to have got to Rome and led to his being canonised as St. Josaphat—you heard that one? But I guess the climate of ideas wasn’t on his side in those days.
“Well, what it boils down to is that Begi already enshrined the Shinka concept of a perfect man, tolerant, level-headed, witty—the whole shtick. It wasn’t till some more broad-minded missionary hit on the notion of saying that Begi was a prophet sent to the Shinka that Christianity made any progress here. And nowadays you’ll hear Shinkas saying that Begi had better sense than Jesus because he brought his teaching to people who understood it, while Jesus overreached himself and preached to people like the British who can’t have understood or they wouldn’t behave as they do.”
There was a period of silence except for the humming of the motor and occasional complaints from the suspension. At last Norman said, “I told you I’d never seen a dead body before. I don’t know how I could have said that.” He swallowed enormously, his throat seeming to be blocked against the admission he was trying to make. “Because … Well, the other day I killed somebody.”
“What? Who?”
“A Divine Daughter. She took an axe to Shalmaneser. She’d already chopped the hand off one of our technicians.”
Gideon thought that over. He said eventually, “There’s a Shinka proverb.”
“What?”
“You have many years to live—do things you will be proud to remember when you’re old.”
tracking with closeups (20)
THE OLD LADY UNDER THE JUGGERNAUT
The decision to schedule it for clearance and development
Was taken at a meeting with all the due formality
By the people’s democratically elected representatives
None of whom had been inside—only to the doorstep
Briefly during canvassing for the last election
Which was when they smelt the smell and knew they didn’t like it.
A junior executive from the Health Department
Said it was unthinkable that children and old people
Should nowadays exist in such Victorian squalor.
He named fires with open flames, he named splintered wooden floorboards,
Windows with single panes, toilets without airtight lids.
Committee members shuddered and agreed on the removal.
Notices were sent to sixty-seven heads of families—
The list compiled from records of electoral returns.
A date was fixed for transfer to brand-new accommodation.
Objections could be entered as the law demanded.
If the number of objections exceeded thirty-three per cent
The Minister of Housing would arrange a public hearing.
Not included in the data was a woman called Grace Rowley.
In accordance with instructions the electoral computer
Having failed to register her form for three successive years
Marked her as non-resident, presumed removed or dead.
However, to be certain, it did address her notice.
No answer was recorded before the scheduled date.
* * *
It happened to be the morning of her seventy-seventh birthday.
She awoke to noises that she had never heard in her life.
There were crashes and landslide sounds and engines roaring.
When she got up, frightened, and put on her greasy coat
Over the unwashed underclothes she always slept in,
She found two strange men going through her other room.
The passing years had filled it with mementoes of a lifetime:
Shoes that had been fashionable when she was a pretty girl,
A gift from a man she had often wished she’d married,
The first edition of a book that later sold a million,