“Thank you,” he said.
Lovely words, she thought, as she went down the path through perfumed light and shadows towards the river; lovely in the man’s soft, precise accent. When their team of three had first been put together, at the Base on Ankara, she had been drawn to Ramchandra, a direct, powerful, unmistakable attraction of sex. She had suppressed it, with self-mockery and some shame, for the man was cold, holding himself ostentatiously apart and untouched. And then there was Bob, big beautiful blond Bob, lean tanned tough Bob, perfect hero of male wish fulfilment, irresistible. Why resist? Easier to give the easy pleasure he expected; easy, pleasant, a little depressing, but never mind that. Don’t look down into depressions. You might fall in. Live life as it comes, etc. She and Bob would come together inevitably. But they hadn’t; for the three of them had come to Yirdo, and met Yirdo’s inhabitants, the Ndif.
The Young Women of the Ndif—all females between age twelve and age twenty-two or -three—were sexually available, eager, and adept. They had bright wavy hair of gold or russet, long tilted eyes of green or violet, slender waists and ankles. They wore soft garments of slit pandsu leaves, clinging, modestly parting to reveal the merest glimpse of buttock or nipple. The under fourteens danced the hypnotic saweya dance in long lines, chanting in their soft, light voices, their round faces mischievously serious. From fourteen to eighteen they danced the baliya, leaping naked, one at a time, into the circle of swaying, clapping men, twisting their sinuous bodies into all the postures of practised eroticism, while the girls waiting their turn to dance sang the pulsing chorus, “Ah-weh, weh, ah-weh, weh…” After they were eighteen they no longer danced in public. Tamara left it to Bob to find out what they did in private. After forty-one days on Yirdo he was indubitably an expert in that.
She saw now that though she hadn’t wanted him, the promptness, the flatness of his loss of interest in her had hurt. Even last night she had been flirting at him; competing; trying to be a dancing girl, with short wiry hair, shit-brindle eyes that tilted the wrong way, muscular wrists… Stupid, stupid her self-mockery, her self-abasement, her self, self, self, swept away now like veils of cobweb as she followed the forest path downward to the washing place at the river thinking, How beautiful the bridge of Ram’s nose is. He can’t weigh much more than I do, maybe less; fine-boned. Thank you, he said. “Askiös, Muna! How’s the baby? Askiös, Vanna! Askiös, Kara!” How beautiful thy nose, my beloved, like unto a promontory between two wells of water, and the water thereof is exceeding black and cold. Thank you, thank you. “Hot today, no?”
“Hot today, hot today,” all the Middle-Aged Women agreed enthusiastically, as they trampled out the village laundry in the shallow, laughing water. “Put your feet in the river, you’ll get cool,” Vanna encouraged her. Brella patted her shoulder affectionately, murmuring, “Askiös!” as she went by to lay out her portion of the village laundry on a rock to dry.
The Middle-Aged Women were between twenty-three and (forty? data still uncertain), and some of them,in Tamara’s opinion, were more beautiful than the Young Women, a beauty which included missing teeth, sagging breasts, and stretchy bellies. The gapped smiles were blithe, the drooping tits held the milk of human kindness, the pregnancy-streaked bellies were full of belly laughs. The Young Women giggled; the Middle-Aged Women laughed. They laughed, Tamara thought watching them now, as if they had been set free.
The Young Men were off hunting poro (the pursuit of the fanged hot dog, she thought, and she too, being a Middle-Aged Woman of twenty-eight, laughed); or they were sitting goggling at the saweya and baliya dancers; or they were sleeping. There were no Middle-Aged Men. Males were Young till about forty, when they stopped hunting, stopped watching the dancers, and became Old. And died.
“Kara,” she said to her best informant, while she took off her sandals to put her feet in the cool water as Vanna had suggested, “my friend Ram is sick in the belly.”
“Oh me, oh dear, askiös, askiös,” the nearby women murmured. Kara, who looked to be pretty nearly an Old Woman, her knotted hair thin and greying, demanded practically, “Is it gwullaggh or kafa-faka?”
Tamara had never heard either word before, but translation was superfluous. “Kafa-faka,” she said.
“Puti berries, he needs,” said Kara, slapping a loincloth on a wet boulder.
“The food we eat here, he says it’s very good, too good.”
“Too much fried poro,” said Kara, nodding. “When children eat too much and spend all night shitting in the bushes, you feed them puti berries and boiled guo for a week. It tastes all right, with honey. I’ll boil Uvana Ram a pot of guo as soon as the washing’s done.”
“Kara is a beautiful noble person,” Tamara said. It was a stock phrase, the usual Ndif way of saying thank you.
“Askiös!” said Kara, grinning. That was a much commoner, and more difficult, expression. Ramchandrahad arrived at no set translation for it. Bob had suggested German bitte, but it covered even more ground than bitte. Please, you’re welcome, sorry, wait a minute, never mind, hello, goodbye, yes, no, and maybe, all seemed to fall within the connotations of askiös.
With her questions about kafa-faka and how to wean babies and when you had to stay in the Unclean Huts and what was the best kind of cooking pot, Tamara was always a welcome excuse for a conversation break. They sat around on hot boulders in the cool water and let the river wash the laundry and the sun dry and bleach it, while they talked. With a part of her mind Tamara listened to Heraclitus telling her that you shall not step twice into the same river; with the rest of it she sought information concerning birth control among the Ndif. The subject once opened, the women discussed it leisurely and frankly, but there wasn’t much to discuss. There were no devices or systems of birth control at all. Nature provided for the Young Women: for all their single-minded devotion to erotic practice, they did not become fertile till they were over twenty. Tamara was incredulous, but the women were perfectly certain: the dividing line between the Young and the Middle-Aged was, in fact, fertility. Once the line was crossed their only protection against perpetual pregnancy was abstinence, which they admitted was boring. Abortion and infanticide were not mentioned. When Tamara cautiously suggested them, heads were shaken. “Women can’t kill babies,” Brella said with horror. Kara observed more dryly, “If they get caught at it, the Men pull out all their hair and send them to the Unclean Huts to stay.”—“Nobody in our village would do such a thing,” Brella said. “Nobody got caught at it,” Kara said.
A group of Juvenile Males (nine to twelve) came whooping down to the river to swim and fish. They ran right over the drying laundry; the laundresses scolded, unauthoritatively; and the conversation ceased, because the ears of Males were not to be polluted with Unclean talk. The women rescued the laundry and set off back to the village. Tamara looked in on Ramchandra, who was asleep, and went on to take some photographs of Juvenile Males playing bhasto. After supper—communal, cooked and served by the Middle-Aged Women—she saw Kara, Vanna, and old Binira go into Ramchandra’s hut, and followed them.