Entering the smoke smell of Gala’s compound, Hock saw only one lighted window at the front — the door shut, no one on the porch, Gala’s chair empty. The lantern light in the room threw the figures into relief, enlarging them, turning them into the silhouettes of three people, hunched over, not moving, not speaking, the shadows as sharp as black paper cutouts.
They were praying. Hock caught some of the words, Gala leading the others in slow imploring moans.
Clapping his hands to announce himself, Hock plucked the slumping door and dragged it open. The praying stopped. The three women he’d seen through the window, looking naked in the echo of their pleading, were ranged around a mat on the floor. The only sound now was from the figure on the mat, unrecognizable, wrapped in a striped towel, lying face-up, sighing softly. The face was bruised, the head enlarged, and one of the women was bathing the raw cut flesh, patting it with a wet cloth. Big winged beetles swung in circles around the lantern light.
“My God,” Gala said, dithering at the sight of Hock. She said it again. Goad.
But Hock was peering at the figure lying flat. It did not look like Zizi; that was not her face. But who else could it be?
One of the ceremonies mumbled in the dark — forbidden by the missionaries in Hock’s time — had been the spilling of chicken blood on the head of a crudely carved foot-high idol — misshapen, foreshortened, the head the size of a coconut. The larger the carving, the more clumsily it was made, with bits of glass inserted in the eye sockets that gave it a blind, half-alive stare. And the blood wrung from the beheaded chicken was so sticky, a fuzz of pin feathers adhered to its wood. This secret fetish had no name that could be uttered aloud because, smeared with the dried blisters of blood, it was an ugly potent thing capable of repelling evil.
The blood gave it subtlety and strength, simplified its hacked angles as if with thick paint, the coated splinters and plastered-on feathers making it more artful, with an aura of power, the gleaming blood lending it the sinewy density of bruised meat.
That was what Hock saw on the floor, a dark swollen head, the scalp split in places, with the chopped-apart raggedness of torn fabric. Puffy eyes, purple lips, the whole skull crusted in darkened drying blood that looked sacrificial.
Only the extreme grief of the women conveyed to Hock that it was not a big stiff fetish doll — that it might be human. The wide helpless hands and feet, their familiar size, the way they lay in repose, told him the bloody thing was Zizi.
“How is she?” He was far too fearful to ask the blunter question, whether she was alive.
“She was beaten,” Gala said. “And worse.”
Wuss meant everything. And now he heard a groan — she was alive. She opened her eyes, saw Hock in the lantern light, and began as though hiccupping to cry.
Yet her tears made him hopeful. He sensed life in her explosive sobs, a kind of self-awareness, the sobs coming from deep within her, from a part of her that was not broken.
Hearing her cry, Snowdon, peeking at the doorway, began to chuckle, as if the tears from someone in worse shape than he was provoked him to mock.
“Get out!” Gala said, and spat at him, as the dwarf limped to the door and cowered, covering his mouth. She repeated the cry distractedly in Afrikaans, as older people in the Lower River sometimes did, perhaps for its force: “Voetsak!”
Zizi was alive, she was murmuring, she shifted on the mat for a better look at Hock. He frowned, thinking that she had never looked younger, more childlike, less sexual; that an injured body aroused no desire in him, inspired only the wish to protect, and an acute fear for its appearing so vulnerable. She had cuts on her hands, and there was blood on the covering cloth and the old towel; the sheet was dotted with blood spatter. The woman who had been bathing her face began to dab her cuts with gentian violet. They wiped it on all the wounds, painting her purple.
“They found her near the boma, two women who are known to me,” Gala said. “They were form-two students here. Thanks be to God, they rescued her.”
“How did they bring her here?”
“They didn’t have a lift all the way. They were dropped by one of the fish trucks on the road, and they walked, just footing the rest. That is why she is so tired.”
This talk reassured Hock. He had not had to ask the dreadful question of whether she would live. She was badly injured, but he gathered from what Gala said that she would make it. And in the short time he’d been in the room, Hock could see that she’d begun to stir.
“Tell me what happened,” Hock said.
“Don’t trouble her,” Gala said in a whisper. “She is hurt. She is weak. And she is ashamed.”
It was apparent that she’d been attacked — she looked as though she’d fought off an animal. She is hutt. Baboons disturbed in the night would bare their doggy teeth, and bite and scratch. Hyenas were nocturnal and would attack a solitary person if they had the advantage. Worst of all — in the Lower River, anyway — were the packs of wild dogs, which snarled, circled their prey, and closed in, snapping their jaws.
But if it was any of these animals, none of the women said so; and he’d had the suspicion since entering the hut and hearing their sorrowing that it was a peculiar attack that went beyond a beating. They were grieving for her pain, and for something that had been lost: she had been violated.
She is ashamed meant only one thing. Zizi owned nothing, not even shoes, had no money, no ornament; not even the cooking pots were hers. She was a stick figure with no spare flesh, wrapped in a faded purple cloth. But she was a namwali; she had the glory of her virginity. She was known in the village for her aloofness, and it was this, in the beginning, that made her a prize for Hock — Manyenga’s prize. Her wholeness gave her power, made her desirable, and was perhaps a devious test for Hock. He knew this, which was why he had resisted, for in resisting he had proven himself stronger than them.
Besides, he knew that in her eyes he was hardly human, an old beaky mzungu in flapping trousers and a torn shirt. He would see himself with her eyes and be disgusted. All he could offer her was his protection. And he had made a point of keeping her safe, until three days ago, when out of desperation he’d floated the idea of mailing the letter at the boma at night. She’d been afraid, knowing it was the only thing he wanted, yet she’d set off alone. And now she was back from the boma, lying in her own blood. Bloodstains were stiffened in places on her cloth in dark, disc-like patches.
She seemed to rally a little since he’d arrived. She was inert, yet she followed him with her weepy reddened eyes.
“I think she’ll be all right,” Hock said to Gala, looking for reassurance.
“With God’s help,” she said, which left the question unanswered.
Hock crouched, about to kneel, when Gala tapped his shoulder, cautioning him, and she turned, making a downward gesture of her hand, paddling the air, urging him away.
The dwarf limped from the door, seeing Gala beckoning Hock onto the veranda. Zizi became fierce, her face set in anger, her lower jaw protruding. He had never seen this expression. She was indignant, refusing to die, clearly insulted — the abuse was apparent in the welts and scratches on her body — but something else showed through: the strength of her anger. She was trying to speak to Hock through her bruised lips.
She muttered a word Hock could not understand.
“Come away, Ellis,” Gala said, tugging his shoulder.
Turning from Zizi’s pleading, Hock followed Gala to the veranda. In the distance, at the edge of the slant of light thrown by the lantern at the open window, Snowdon knelt, scratching the scabs on his arm and murmuring — Hock guessed—“Fee-dee-dom.”