The Poisonwood Bible (59 page)

The trouble with my family is that since we hardly ever see each other, we have plenty of time to forget how much personality conflict we all have when it comes right down to it. Leah and Adah and I started bickering practically the minute we met up in Senegal. We could never even agree on where to go or stay or what to eat. Whenever we found any place that was just the teeniest step above

horrid, Leah felt it was too expensive. She and Anatole evidently have chosen to live like paupers. And Adah, helpful as always, would chime in with the list of what disease organisms were likely to be present. We argued about positively everything: even communism! Which you would think there was nothing to argue about. I merely gave Leah the very sensible advice that she should think twice about going to Angola because the Marxists are taking it over.

“The Mbundu and the Kongo tribes have a long-standing civil war there, Rachel. Agostinho Neto led the Mbundu to victory, because he had the most popular support.”

“Well, for your information, Dr. Henry Kissinger himself says that Neto and them are followers of Karl Marx, and the other ones are pro-United States.”

“Imagine that,” Leah said. “The Mbundu and Kongo people have been at war with each other for the last six hundred years, and Dr. Henry Kissinger has at long last discovered the cause: the Kongo are pro-United States, and the Mbundu are followers of Karl Marx.”

“Hah!” Adah said. Her first actual unrehearsed syllable of the day. She talks now, but she still doesn’t exactly throw words away.

Adah was in the back, and Leah and me up front. I was doing most of the driving, since I’m used to it. I had to slow way down for a stop sign because the drivers in “West Africa were turning out to be as bad as the ones in Brazzaville. It was very hard to concentrate while my sisters were giving me a pop quiz on world democracy.

“You two can just go ahead and laugh,” I said. “But I read the papers. Ronald Reagan is keeping us safe from the socialistic dictators, and you should be grateful for it.”

“Socialistic dictators such as?”

“I don’t know. Karl Marx! Isn’t he still in charge of Russia?”

Adah was laughing so hard in the backseat I thought she was going to pee on herself.

“Oh, Rachel, Rachel,” Leah said. “Let me give you a teeny little lesson in political science. Democracy and dictatorship are political systems; they have to do with who participates in the leadership. Socialism and capitalism are economic systems. It has to do with who owns the wealth of your nation, and who gets to eat. Can you grasp that?”

“I never said I was the expert. I just said I read the papers.”

“Okay, let’s take Patrice Lumumba, for example. Former Prime Minister of the Congo, his party elected by popular vote. He was a socialist who believed in democracy. Then he was murdered, and the CIA replaced him with Mobutu, a capitalist who believes in dictatorship. In the Punch and Judy program of American history, that’s a happy ending.”

“Leah, for your information I am proud to be an American.”

Adah just snorted again, but Leah smacked her forehead. “How can you possibly say that? You haven’t set foot there for half your life!”

“I have retained my citizenship. I still put up the American flag in the bar and celebrate every single Fourth of July.”

“Impressive,” Adah said.

We were driving along the main dirt road that followed the coast toward Togo. There were long stretches of beach, with palm trees waving and little naked dark children against the white sand. It was like a picture postcard. I wished we could quit talking about ridiculous things and just enjoy ourselves. I don’t know why Leah has to nag and nag.

“For your information, Leah,” I informed her, just to kind of close things off, “your precious Lumumba would have taken over and been just as bad a dictator as any of them. If the CIA and them got rid of him, they did it for democracy. Everybody alive says that.”

“Everybody alive,” Adah said. “What did the dead ones say?”

“Now, look, Rachel,” Leah said. “You can get this. In a democracy, Lumumba should have been allowed to live longer than two months as head of state. The Congolese people would have gotten to see how they liked him, and if not, replaced him.”

Well, I just blew up at that. “These people here can’t decide anything for themselves! I swear, my kitchen help still can’t remember to use the omelet pan for an omelet! For God’s sakes, Leah, you should know as well as I do how they are.”

“Yes, Rachel, I believe I married one of them.”

I kept forgetting that. “Well, shut my mouth wide open.”

“As usual,” Adah said.

For the entire trip I think the three of us were all on speaking terms for only one complete afternoon. We’d got as far as Benin without killing each other, and Adah wanted to see the famous villages on stilts. But, wouldn’t you know, the road to that was washed out. Leah and I tried to explain to her how in Africa the roads are here today, gone tomorrow. You are constantly seeing signs such as, “If this sign is under water the road is impassable,” and so forth. That much we could agree on.

So we ended up going to the ancient palace at Abomey, instead, which was the only tourist attraction for hundreds of miles around. We followed our map to Abomey, and luckily the road to it was still there. We parked in the center of town, which had big jacaranda trees and was very quaint. It was a cinch to find the ancient palace because it was surrounded by huge red mud walls and had a very grand entryway. Snoozing on a bench in the entrance we found an English-speaking guide who agreed to wake up and take us through on a tour. He explained how in former centuries, before the arrival of the French, the Abomey kings had enormous palaces and very nice clothes. They recorded their history in fabulous tapestries that hung on the palace walls, and had skillful knives and swords and such, which they used to conquer the neighboring tribes and enslave them. Oh, they just killed people right and left, he claimed, and then they’d put the skulls of their favorite enemies into their household decor. It’s true! We saw every one of these things—the tapestries depicting violent acts and the swords and knives and even a throne with human skulls attached to the bottoms of all four legs, plated with bronze like keepsake baby shoes!

“Why, that’s just what I need for my lobby in the Equatorial,” I joked, although the idea of those things being the former actual heads of living people was a bit much for three o’clock in the afternoon.

This was no fairy-tale kingdom, let me tell you. They forced women into slave marriage with the King for the purpose of reproducing their babies at a high rate. One King would have, oh, fifty or a hundred wives, easy. More, if he was anything special. Or so the guide told us, maybe to impress us. To celebrate their occasions, he said, they’d just haul off and kill a bunch of their slaves, grind up all the blood and bones, and mix it up with mud for making more walls for their temples! And what’s worse, whenever a King died, forty of his wives would have to be killed and buried with him!

I had to stop the guide right there and ask him, “Now, would they be his favorite wives they’d bury with him, or the meanest ones, or what?”

The guide said he thought probably it would have been the prettiest ones. Well, I can just imagine that! The King gets sick, all the wives would be letting their hair go and eating sweets day and night to wreck their figures.

Even though Leah and I had been crabbing at each other all week, that afternoon in the palace at Abomey for some reason we all got quiet as dead bats. Now, I have been around: the racial rioting in South Africa, hosting embassy parties in Brazzaville, shopping in Paris and Brussels, the game animals in Kenya, I have seen it all. But that palace was something else. It gave me the heebie-jeebies. We walked through the narrow passages, admiring the artworks and shivering to see chunks of bone sticking out of the walls. Whatever we’d been fighting about seemed to fade for the moment with those dead remains all around us. I shook from head to toe, even though the day was quite warm.

Leah and Adah happened to be walking in front of me, probably to get away from the guide, because they like to have their own explanations for everything, and as I looked at them I was shocked to see how alike they were. They’d both bought wild-colored waxcloth shirts in the Senegal market, Adah to wear over her jeans and Leah to go with her long skirts (I personally see no need to go native, thanks very much, and will stick to my cotton knit), and Adah really doesn’t limp a bit anymore, like Mother said. Plus she talks, which just goes to show you her childhood was not entirely on the up-and-up. She’s exactly as tall as Leah now; too, which is simply unexplanatory. They hadn’t seen each other for years, and here they even showed up wearing the same hairstyle! Shoulder-length, pulled back, which is not even a regular fashion.

Suddenly I realized they were talking about Father.

“No, I’m sure it’s true,” Leah said. “I believe it was him. I think he really is dead.”

Well! This was news to me. I walked quickly to catch up, though I was still more or less of a third wheel. “You mean Father?” I asked. “Why didn’t you say something, for heaven’s sake.”

“I guess I’ve been waiting for the right time, when we could talk,” Leah said.

Well, what did she think we’d been doing for the last five days but talk. “No time like the present,” I said.

She seemed to mill it over, and then stated it all as a matter of fact. “He’s been up around Lusambo for the last five years, in one village and another. This past summer I ran into an agricultural agent who’s been working up there, and he said he very definitely knew of Father. And that he’s passed away.”

“Gosh, I didn’t even know he’d moved,” I said. “I figured he was still hanging around our old village all this time.”

“No, he’s made his way up the Kasai River over the years, not making too many friends from what I hear. He hasn’t been back to Kilanga, that much I know. We still have a lot of contact with Kilanga. Some of the people we knew are still there. An awful lot have died, too.”

“What do you mean? Who did we know?” I honestly couldn’t think of a soul. We left, Axelroot left. The Underdowns went all the way back to Belgium, and they weren’t even really there.

“Why don’t we talk about this later?” Leah said. “This place is already full of dead people.”
     
 

Well, I couldn’t argue with that. So we spent the rest of our paid-for tour in silence, walking through the ancient crumbling halls, trying not to look at the hunks of cream-colored bones in the walls.

“Those are pearls that were his eyes,” Adah said at one point, which is just the kind of thing she would say.

 
“Full fathom five thy father lies,” Leah said back to her.
    

What the heck that was about I just had to wonder. I sure didn’t see any pearls. Those two were always connected in their own weird, special way. Even when they can’t stand each other, they still always know what the other one’s talking about when nobody else does. But I didn’t let it bother me. I am certainly old enough to hold up my head and have my own personal adventures in life. I dreamed I toured the Ancient Palace of Abomey in my Maiden-form Bra!

Maybe once upon a time I was a little jealous of Leah and Adah, being twins. But no matter how much they might get to looking and sounding alike, as grown-ups, I could see they were still as different on the inside as night and day. And I am different too, not night or day either one but something else altogether, like the Fourth of July. So there we were: night, day, and the Fourth of July, and just for a moment there was a peace treaty.

But things fall apart, of course. With us they always do, sooner or later. We walked into the little town to get something cool to drink, and found a decent place where we could sit outside at a metal table watching the dogs and bicycles and hustle-bustle go by, everybody without exception carrying something on their heads. Except the dogs weren’t, of course. We had a few beers and it was pleasant. Leah continued her news report about the all-important boondocks village of our childhood fame, which in my opinion is better off to forget. I was waiting for the part about what Father died of. But it seemed impolite to push. So I took off my sunglasses and fanned myself with the map of West Africa.

Leah counted on her fingers: “Mama Mwanza is still going strong. Mama and Tata Nguza, both. Tata Boanda lost his elder wife but still has Eba. Tata Ndu’s son is chief. Not the oldest one, Gbenye—they ran him out of the village.”

“The one that stole your bushbuck,” Adah said.

“Yep, the one. He turned out to be the type to constantly pick a fight, is what I gather. Lousy for a chief. So it’s the second son, Kenge. I don’t remember him very well. Tata Ndu died of fever from a wound.”
          

 
“Too bad,” I said sarcastically. “My would-be husband.”

Adah said, “You could have done “worse, Rachel.”
     

“She did do worse,” Leah declared. Which I do not appreciate, and said so.

She just ignored me. “Nelson is married, can you believe it? With two daughters and three sons. Mama Lo is dead; they claimed she was a hundred and two but I doubt it. Tata Kuvudundu is gone, dead, a long time now. He lost a lot of respect over the... what he did with us.”

“The snake, you mean?” I asked.