She realized now what the forest was afraid of: change.This surprised her, because although it was in the nature of men to fear change, change did not affect the forest. Like water, it could be stirred up: like water, it could be moved around, but like water it would al-ways return, eventually, to its own level, and all the things that a man had done to it in his lifetime would, sooner or later, be erased.
“I tell you what it is,” a young man called Bayanna said.“They have come to kill the leopard.”
There was a general nodding. Of course—the leopard. For some months now there had been sightings of a leopard in the val-ley, causing those with young children great anxiety. If the white men had come to hunt it, everyone would benefit—well, perhaps not the leopard, but everyone else: the white man who killed it would be able to make a tunic of the leopard’s skin, while the villagers would be safer. The only person in their own village who had ever killed a leopard was Tahomen, their headman, and that was twenty years ago, when he was a young man.Although he still
wore the animal’s skin on occasion, it had been eaten over the years by grubs and other insects, and these days it was looking somewhat the worse for wear.
Because they wanted the leopard to be the reason the white men had come, there was general hope it was. Hope quickly turned to agreement, and agreement to certainty, so that soon everything was settled except who would show the strangers where the best places to hunt for a leopard were.
The forest told Kiku that the white men were not interested in leopards, but it did not tell her what they were interested in. Perhaps she had not heard the forest correctly, or perhaps the for-est did not know; perhaps the white men’s forest was so far away that understanding was taking time to travel, as a gust of wind took time to pass from one side of the valley to another. So for the time being she kept her own counsel.
Just then
they heard the sound of crashing and clanking, followed by an irregular thumping on the path as two people wearing boots, and a third who was not wearing boots but who was equally unused to walking through the forest, approached the village. The villagers were astonished, and in some cases alarmed. Some of the women seized their children and hurried into their huts for safety; others took their children and hurried outside, the better to see what was going on. The crashing had by now been augmented by the sound of voices, booming and guttural, speaking words the villagers could not understand.
“It be here somewhere, sah,” one voice was saying.
“I expect they’ll have fled intae the trees, in any case,” another said confidently. “Your native mind, Wallis, does not function like your working man’s back home. It has been proven that their blood is considerably thinner, and their methods consequently more lethargic. Och, what’s that in there?”
“It looks to me as if we have found their habitation, Hector.”
The villagers watched, nonplussed, as three men strode into the clearing.Two were immensely tall, white-skinned, with outlandish clothes: one of these was rendered even more alarming by his bushy red beard, while the other was wearing a suit of green alpaca wool and a white pith helmet. The third man, a dark-skinned Adari, wore a robe of patterned cloth and was carrying a long stick, and he looked about him with a haughty demeanor.
“Berrah well,” he said, gazing contemptuously at the villagers. “Who be headman this savage place?”
“Just a minute, Jimo,” the red-haired man said. He strode forward.“Nae listen, all of ye,” he boomed.“We have come here,” he pointed at the ground, “to grow coffee.” He pointed at the coffee which one of the surprised villagers was drinking from a wooden cup.“If you work for us, and work hard, you will be well paid.”
There was a short silence. Bayanna said, “I think he wants cof-fee before he goes to shoot the leopard.”The villagers nodded, relieved. Of course! Bayanna said helpfully to the visitors,“I will lead you to the beast.”Aware that they did not understand what he was saying, he pointed to Tahomen’s leopard tunic and mimed throwing a spear.“Dish-dash?” he said hopefully.
“Dish-dash, is it?” Hector chuckled. “Excellent—I thought we would be able to strike a deal with these fellows.Tell them: tomorrow we chop forest.” He began miming the actions of a man chopping a tree, or possibly beating a mortally wounded leopard to death with a club.
Another young man was by now disputing Bayanna’s right to lead the white men to the leopard. “Me! Me! I take you to the leopard!” he interrupted, jumping to his feet. He pointed at himself, then began enthusiastically miming the clubbing of leopards.
“Capital,” the red-haired man boomed.“It appears we have our first woodsman.And you, sir? Yes? And you?”
Other young men were now pushing themselves forward, eager
to be among the sizeable group who would be handsomely rewarded simply for leading the white men to the leopard.“You see, Wallis?” the red-haired man said, turning to his companion. “Observe the action of a simple contract upon the savage mind! Observe the universal language of Commerce, breaking down the barriers between species in an instant! It’s a braw sight, is it not?”
“Absolutely,” the other white man said doubtfully.“Er—should we explain to them that we have bought this land? That we are now, so to speak, their landlords?”
“I doubt whether that’ll be a concept their primitive minds can grasp.” Hector pointed to the woods with both hands.“Forest—all of it—chop!” he shouted.
The hunting party understood that their advice was being sought on whether to seek the leopard in that direction, to the east. Many agreed, encouraging Hector with nods and smiles. Others, mindful that the leopard was actually to be found to the west, were of the opinion that it made more sense to go that way. After all, they suggested to the first group, the white man would hardly be happy if he was taken many miles on a fruitless journey. Those of the eastern faction retorted that, on the contrary, it would be deeply impolite to tell the white man he was an ignorant idiot on their first meeting: the correct thing was to agree with him, even if he was plainly wrong.A vigorous debate ensued, dur-ing which the eastern party happened upon an unanswerable argument: if the white men were taken to the west, and actually found the leopard, they would soon be gone, whereas if they were taken to the east as they had requested, they would need to go on subsequent expeditions to the west, thus making further payments
of
dish-dash
a much more likely prospect.
Jimo was moving among the young men, dispensing cards. Each card, he explained, was divided into thirty days. Each day the men chopped trees, they would have their card marked, and when they had accumulated a full month’s worth of marks they would
be paid. The young men of the hunting party understood him perfectly—these were the tickets that proved you had been chosen as a champion leopard tracker. Some of those who had been cho-sen broke into a dance, in which they leapt up and down energet-ically and mimed the leopard’s death.
“Aha!” the red-haired man cried. “We have been here only a few moments, but see how we have galvanized them! We shall have this glen cleared in no time!”
“It does seem as if we might,” the other man said.
Kiku was watching these preparations with an increasing sense of anxiety. It looked to her as if the white men were actually talking about chopping down trees, rather than killing leopards. It was not that which bothered her—the villagers chopped down trees themselves, if they needed green wood for building huts. No: what was bothering Kiku was the fact that when she looked at the two white men, she could see quite clearly that they were both, in their different ways, enchanted.And if she was not mistaken, at least one of the enchantments was a powerful charm of love.
That night
the young men of the village held a dance, to bring good luck to the hunting of the leopard. The more noise they made, the more likely it was that the
ayyanaa
would hear them and bless their enterprise, so they deliberately made as much as possible, hollering and whooping, helped by plenty of fermented beer. “Christ, what a din,” Hector, half a mile away in his camp-bed,
grumbled.“Don’t they realize they’ll be working tomorrow?” “What do we do if they don’t turn up?”
“They’ll turn up.You saw how keen they were for
dish-dash.
” “Yes.” In his own camp-bed, Robert was silent for a moment.
“Odd, isn’t it, that they’ve never tried to cultivate this coffee themselves?”
“Odd? Not really.Why should they? They’ve never had anyone like us to show them how.”
“But nothing they do is remotely like farming, is it?” he persisted.“Or at least, not the sort of farming we do.They don’t seem to have any desire to . . . tame the jungle. I’m just wondering why not.Whether perhaps they’ve tried it and found it hasn’t worked. You know—almost as if they might know something we don’t.”
Hector snorted. “You’re looking at it the wrong way round as usual, Wallis. It’s us that knows something they dinnae.” He reached out to the pressure-lamp, which burned dimly on the packing-case table between them.“Time to turn in.”
The hiss of the lamp died; darkness filled the room.The drums and shouts from the native village seemed louder than ever.
“Good-night, Hector.” “Gu’night.”
He dreamt
of Fikre: of her slender black body crouching above him, her clear pale eyes holding his as nameless pleasures flowed back and forth between their loins. “Soon,” she whispered in that lilting accent.“Very soon.When Bey leaves Harar.” He half woke. In the darkness, an animal laughed at him. Down in the village, the endless throb of the drums was like a new heartbeat, echoing the pulse in his groin.
The villagers
were getting drunk, and their thoughts too were turning to sex. The young men enthusiastically danced the dance of leopard-killing, but really they were dancing to impress the young women, who in turn were dancing the great cheer that women made when the body of a leopard was brought back to the village, which was really a dance of encouragement to the men.
Kiku sat to one side, watching. Dancing was best left to the younger girls, in her opinion—once your breasts started to flap up and down rather than jiggle invitingly, leaping into the air was no longer quite so attractive. In any case, she already knew who would be leaving his spear outside her hut that night. Bayanna had made a great show earlier of bringing her food, reminding everyone who was watching that they were sleeping together. She did not mind, partly because he was an energetic lover, if a little pleased with himself, but also because she had her own reasons for sleeping with Bayanna.
At that point one of the reasons came over and sat down next to her.
“You do not dance,”Tahomen said.
“I’m too old to dance,” she answered casually.Which, from her tone, one might have thought a remark of no more consequence than Tahomen’s. In fact, it was pushing the conversation neatly right to the nub of their disagreement.
Tahomen grunted. “Of course you’re not. Who told you that?
It’s ridiculous.”
You
told me that,
she wanted to say.
Not with words, but when you took Alaya as your second wife.
She looked across the fire to where the girl danced with the rest of the younger women. Curse her— her breasts were like little half-formed gourds, and when she jumped they scarcely moved.
“Alaya dances well,” she said.
“Yes,” Tahomen agreed gloomily. He too knew exactly what was behind his problem with Kiku.
Why are you being so unreasonable?
he wanted to say.
Of course I have taken another wife. How could I not? First, because I am the headman—whoever heard of a headman with only one wife? Second, because I have to have children, and you have not provided me with any.
But he did not say any of these things, because he knew that Kiku already knew them. Instead he said mildly, “Bayanna’s spear has been spending a lot of time outside your hut.”
Kiku scratched a zigzag in the dust.“It is a very busy spear.” “And he is a good spearman.” Tahomen left the briefest of
pauses.“He says.”
Kiku did not want Tahomen to think that he could undo the hurt he had done her with a few clever jokes at her lover’s expense, so she hid her smile by looking down at the pattern she was still scratching.
“And thus you have been too busy to come to my hut,” Tahomen observed.
“As you have been too busy to come to mine.”
“Even if I wanted to visit you, Bayanna’s spear has been there.” “But you have not been to visit me, so it makes no difference.” “How do you know I have not?”
Because I was listening for you,
she wanted to say. “Because you have been too busy with Alaya, of course.”
“ ‘A new wife is like a coffee bush: both must be picked quickly,’ ” he quoted.
“Exactly.” And then, because she could not help it, she quoted another proverb back at him:“ ‘A man has many wives, but a wife has many lovers.’ ”
He nodded. Like many of their proverbs, the one Kiku had just spoken expressed the importance above all of
saafu
—balance and reciprocity.“But you know, that proverb does start by saying ‘a man has many wives.’ ”
Aware that she had just blundered into a trap, Kiku bridled.“Of course. No one is saying that you should not have wives. Have three. Have four! Have all the wives you like!”
Tahomen sighed.“Just because I have taken Alaya as my wife, it does not mean I think any the less of you.You are still the senior wife.”
“What do you mean,‘still’? I was never the senior wife before.
I was the
only
wife.”
“I meant, you will always have respect.”
Respect.
What good is respect,
Kiku thought,
when what you want is breasts, babies, and to be adored? What good is seniority, if it means you are too old to be loved?
Tahomen sighed again. “Perhaps when Bayanna takes his spear somewhere else, then.”
They sat in silence for a time.Tahomen said,“This leopard.” “Yes?”