Later, when I was a teenager, I rebelled in a more vehement way against another of Jeannette's ill-advised attempts to impose order on my random experience. And both of us suffered.
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Lolitabu National Park, Zarakal
July 1986 to February 1987
For
nearly eight months Joshua lived in a remote portion of Zarakal's Lolitabu National Park, where an old man of the Wanderobo tribe taught him how to survive without tap water, telephones, or cans of imported tuna. Although hunting was illegal in the country's national parks, President Tharaka granted a special dispensation, for the success of the White Sphinx Project would depend to an alarming extent on Joshua's ability to take care of himself in the Early Pleistocene.
Despite having lived his entire life among the agricultural Kikembu people (Zarakal's largest single ethnic group), Thomas Babington Mubia had never given up the hunting arts of the Wanderobo. In 1934 he had taught a callow Alistair Patrick Blair (today a world-renowned paleoanthropologist) how to catch a duiker barehanded and to dress out its carcass with stone tools chipped into existence on the spot. Now, over half a century later, Blair wanted his old teacher to communicate these same skills to Joshua—for, although considerably slower and not quite so sharp-eyed, Babington had lost none of his basic skills as stalker, slayer, and flint-knapper.
Babington—as everyone who knew him well called him—was tall, sinewy, and grizzled. In polite company he wore khaki shorts, sandals, and any one of a number of different loud sports shirts that Blair had given him, but in the bush he frequently opted for near or total nudity. Welts, scars, wheals, and tubercules pebbled his flesh, in spite of which he appeared in excellent health for a man belonging to
rika
ria Ramsay
, an age-grade group that had undergone circumcision during the ascension of Ramsay MacDonald's coalition cabinet in England. For Joshua, the old man's incidental bumps and cuts were less troubling than a deliberate vestige of that long-ago circumcision rite.
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Ngwati
, the Kikembu called it. This was a piece of frayed-looking skin that hung beneath Babington's penis like the pull tab on a Band-Aid wrapper. It hurt Joshua to look at this “small skin.” He tried not to let his eyes shift to Babington's crotch, and, for reasons other than Western modesty, he did his darnedest not to shed his shorts or make water within the old man's sight. He was half afraid that to be looked upon naked by Babington would be to acquire
Ngwati
himself.
Until his circumcision Joshua's mentor had attended a mission school run by Blair's Protestant Episcopal parents, and he knew by heart a score of psalms, several of Shakespeare's soliloquies, and most of the poems of Edgar Allan Poe, a great favorite of the old Wanderobo's. Sometimes, in fact, he disconcerted Joshua by standing naked in the night and booming out in a refined British accent whichever of these memory-fixed passages most suited his mood. In July, their first month in the bush, Babington most frequently declaimed the lesser known of two pieces by Poe entitled “To Helen":
"
But now, at length, dear Dian sank / Into a western couch / of thunder-cloud; / And thou, a
ghost, amid the / entombing trees / Didst glide away. Only thine eyes / remained. / They would not
go—they never yet / have gone. / Lighting my lonely pathway home / that night, / They have not
left me (as my hopes / have) since.
”
Sitting in the tall acacia in which he and Babington had built a tree house with a stout door, Joshua looked down and asked his mentor if he had ever been married.
“Oh, yes. Four times all at once, but the loveliest and best was Helen Mithaga.”
“What happened?”
“During the war, the second one, I walked to Bravanumbi from Makoleni, my home village, and enlisted for service against the evil minions of Hitler in North Africa. I was accepted into a special unit and fought with it for two years. When I returned to Makoleni, three of my wives had divorced me by returning to their families. I was Wanderobo; they were Kikembu. Although Helen was also Kikembu, she had waited.
“We loved each other very much. Later, a year after the war, she was poisoned by a sorcerer who envied me the medals I had won and also my Helen's Elysian beauty. I lost her to the world of spirits, which we call
ngoma
. On nights like this one, dry and clear, I know that she has fixed the eyes of her soul upon me. Therefore, I speak to her everlasting world with another man's poignant words.”
This story touched Joshua. He could not regard Babington as a ridiculous figure even when, during the arid month of August, he stood one-footed in the dark and recited,
"
Hear the sledges with the bells—
/
Silver bells!
/
What a world of merriment their melody
foretells!
/
How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,
/
In the icy air of night! ...
”
Nights were never icy in Lolitabu, which was tucked away in Zarakal's southwestern corner. Instead of bells-on-bobtails you heard elephants trumpeting, hyenas laughing, and maybe even poachers whispering to one another. Babington took pains to insure that Joshua and he never ran afoul of these men, for although some were woebegone amateurs, trying to earn enough money to eat, others were ruthless predators who would kill to avoid detection.
The big cats in the park worried Joshua far more than the poachers did. They did not worry Babington.
He would walk the savannah as nonchalantly as a man crossing an empty parking lot. His goal was not to discomfit Joshua, but to school him in the differences among several species of gazelle and antelope, some of which had probably not even evolved by Early Pleistocene times. Joshua tried to listen, but
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found himself warily eying the lions sprawled under trees on the veldt.
“We do not have an appetizing smell in their nostrils,” Babington told Joshua. “The fetor of human beings is repugnant to lions.”
“So they will not attack us unless we provoke them?”
Babington pushed a partial plate out of his mouth with his tongue, then drew it back in. “A toothless lion or one gradually losing its sense of smell might be tempted to attack. Who knows?”
“Then why do we come out here without weapons and walk the grasslands like two-legged gods?”
Said Babington pointedly, “That is not how I am walking.”
* * * *
* * * *
Joshua was powerless to halt the process and too nonplused to direct it away from his mentor's gaze. At last, the pressure fully discharged, he shook his cock dry, eased it back into his jockey shorts, buttoned up, and turned to go back to the tree house.
“You are not yet a man,” the Wanderobo informed him.
Joshua's embarrassment mutated into anger. “It's not the Eighth Wonder of the World, but it gets me by!”
“You have not been bitten by the knife.”
It struck Joshua that Babington was talking about circumcision. A young African man who had not undergone this rite was officially still a boy, whatever his age might be.
“But I'm an American, Babington.”
“In this enterprise you are an honorary Zarakali, and you are too old to live any longer in the
nyuba
.”
The
nyuba
, Joshua knew, was the circular Kikembu house in which women and young children lived.
“Babington!”
But Babington was adamant. It was unthinkable that any adult male representing all the peoples of Zarakal should proceed with a mission of this consequence—the visiting of the
ngoma
of the spirit world—without first experiencing
irua
, the traditional rite of passage consecrating his arrival at manhood. If Joshua chose not to submit to the knife (which Babington himself would be happy to wield), then Babington would go home to Makoleni and White Sphinx would have to carry on without his
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blessing.
On a visit to the park in early September, Blair learned of this ultimatum and of Joshua's decision to accede to it—so long as Joshua could impose a condition of his own.
“I don't want a Band-Aid string like Babington's,” he told the Great Man. “I think I can put up with the pain and the embarrassment, but you've got to spare me that goddamn little casing pull.”
Although less than six feet tall and possessed of a pair of watery blue eyes whose vision had recently begun to deteriorate (a circumstance insufficient to make him wear glasses), Blair was still an imposing figure. His white mustachios and the sun-baked dome of his forehead and pate gave him the appearance of a walrus that had somehow blustered into the tropics and then peremptorily decided to make the region its home. He seemed to be swaggering even when sitting on the sticky upholstery of a Land Rover's front seat, and his voice had the mellow resonance of a bassoon. In the past ten years his appealing ugly-uncle mug had graced the covers of a dozen news magazines and popular scientific journals, and for a thirteen-week period three years ago he had been the host of a PBS program about human evolution entitled
Beginnings
, an effort that had rekindled the old controversy between paleoanthropologists and the so-called scientific creationists and that had incidentally served to make Blair's name a household word in even the smallest hamlets in the United States. By now, though, Joshua was used to dealing with the Great Man, and he had no qualms about voicing his complaints about Babington's plans for the circumcision rite.
Blair assured Joshua that educated Kikembu, especially Christians, also regarded
Ngwati
with distaste, and that Babington would not try to make him keep the “small skin” if Joshua were vigorously opposed to it.
“I am,” said Joshua, but he neatly parried the Great Man's many well-meaning proposals for sidestepping the circumcision rite altogether. He felt he owed Babington, and he wanted to earn the old man's respect.
Apprised of Joshua's intentions, Babington declared that the ceremony would take place two days hence, in the very grove where he and his protégé had their tree house. Blair then informed Joshua that in order to prove himself he must not show any fear prior to the cutting or cry out in pain during it. Such behavior would result in disgrace for himself and his sponsors. Moreover, to lend the rite legitimacy, Babington had sent messages to several village leaders and asked Blair to invite some of the Kikembu from the outpost village of Nyarati as onlookers. Once the knife glinted, they would applaud Joshua's steadfastness or, if he did not bear up, ridicule his public cowardice.
“Onlookers!”
“It's traditional, I'm afraid. Of what point are the strength and beauty of a leopard if no one ever sees them?”
“Of considerable point, if you're the leopard. Besides, we're not talking about leopards. We're talking about my one and only reproductive organ. Onlookers be damned!”
“They're for purposes of verification, Joshua.”
“Maybe Babington ought to circumcise a leopard, Dr. Blair. I'd love to see them verify
that
.”
“Now, now,” said Alistair Patrick Blair. “Tsk-tsk.”
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* * * *
They arrived in the acacia grove shortly after eight o'clock and found it teeming with young people from Nyarati, both men and women. The women were singing spiritedly, and the boisterous gaiety of the entire crowd seemed out of proportion to its cause, the trimming of an innocent foreskin. Blair pulled off Joshua's robe and pointed him to the spot where the old Wanderobo would perform the surgery.
“You're not to look at Babington, Joshua. Don't try to watch the cutting, either.”
“I thought that would be part of proving my manhood.”
“No. Rather than being required, it's prohibited.”
“Thanks be to Ngai for small mercies.”
Naked and shivering, he entered the clearing beneath the tree house, sat down on the matted grass, and averted his face from the ladder that Babington would soon be descending. Blair, his aide, could offer him no physical assistance until the rite was concluded.
The songs of the Kikembu women, the bawdy masculine repartee at his back, and the anxious hiccupping of his heart isolated him from the reality of what was happening. This was not happening to him. Only, of course, it was.
Then Babington was there, kneeling before him with a knife, and Joshua put both fists to the right side of his neck, placed his chin on one fist, and stared out into the savannah. The cutting began. Joshua clenched his teeth and tightened his fists. Doggedly refusing to yip or whimper, he caught sight of a pair of tourist minibuses rolling over the steppe from the vicinity of the guest lodge. That morning while boarding the Land Rover, he recalled, he had seen them parked inside a courtyard next to the lodge. Somehow the tour guide had learned of the approaching ceremony. When the minibuses pulled abreast of the acacia grove, clouds of dust drifting away behind them, Joshua wanted to scream.