‘E?’ the old man said. ‘Why do you tell me?’
‘Because you know,’ I said. ‘These are some doings of yours.’
My uncle lay still on his mat, his neck in the curve of his head-rest and his eyes never changing, though his mouth twisted a little, moving over his gums. ‘My nephew,’ he said, ‘
ku sasop
’.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘It is you who are lying, O Dipapa.’
‘Will you speak like that?’ he said.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I will speak like that.’
Then it was so quiet that I noticed a pigeon in the bush beyond the village, and I could have forgotten about the old man, almost, wondering what was in the pots that his women had left untended in front of their houses.
‘Good, then,’ he said at last. ‘Now tell me: what are these doings of mine?’
‘I do not understand them. But I think Metusela understands.’
‘Then speak to Metusela,’ he said, ‘not to me. I am an old man. I sleep all day.’
‘And in the night?’ I said.
‘And in the night, too,’ he said, ‘I sleep.’
I looked down into his old face, which was like a lizard’s, and into his old sorcerer’s eyes that would soon be blind.
‘My uncle,’ I said, ‘I have waited a long time. Perhaps I will not wait till the end.’
Then I saw a sort of smile in his eyes, but not in his face, because his lips were sliding around as he sucked his gums and his face was like water, no longer clear.
‘Wait a little,’ he said. ‘A little more.’
‘For what?’ I said.
‘Perhaps for nothing,’ he said. ‘Who can say? In a little, my nephew, perhaps there will be nothing for you.’
You would have thought from his words that he was angry, but his voice was soft, and while he was speaking his eyes closed again. He slipped back into sleep like a dying man, and as I was opening my mouth to answer him his mouth opened too, and a little snore came out of it, like you might hear from some small animal rooting in the bush at night.
It is my opinion that the VC BOITOKU is the most obviously untrustworthy witness. Unlike anyone else involved in the case, he talks a great deal, I think on the principle of the octopus and the cloud of ink. To pay much attention to him would distort the picture that emerges from the evidence of more reliable witnesses, by whom I mean principally BENONI, SALIBA, and several women from Olumata and Obomatu, though I do not believe that even these have told me more than an inescapable minimum of the truth. BOITOKU’s contribution seems to be aimed at excusing himself and taking the pressure off DIPAPA, who will not speak at all. If he were believed, he would deserve sympathy. He draws a moving picture of himself as a simple country policeman reading the Riot Act to Genghis Khan.
However, there seems no doubt that there was nothing premeditated about the events in the early evening of October 31st. The opportunity may have been seized, but it was not created by BOITOKU or any of his companions. It arose out of a misunderstanding, which is excusable, on the part of the boys of Olumata regarding the intentions of a band of girls from Wayouyo who suddenly descended on them in the heat of a
katuyausi
or courting expedition.
The girls came into our part of the village twittering like bats and screaming like lories. All their skirts were new, and when they circled round me it was like a whirlwind smelling of bwita flowers and sulumwoya.
‘Salib’,’ they called to me, ‘come with us to Olumata.’ They were dressed to look beautiful for the boys of Olumata, and they felt beautiful and wanted me to see.
‘No,’ I said, ‘not this evening.’ I was standing over the cooking-pot and I knew that the smell of the smoke would be in my hair and on my skin. ‘I am cooking for my aunt,’ I said.
‘O, come, Salib’,’ one girl said. ‘You are not an old woman yet.’
But I said: ‘No,
des’,
another day.’ And because I was not happy, not like them, they all looked at each other and were tired of me, and ran away laughing over the green ground.
I went and sat on a stone by my aunt’s yam-house, and watched the pot and thought my thoughts, while the light went out of the sky and the palms turned blue and grey.
It was nearly dark when the girls came back. My aunt and her husband and I were beginning to eat, at the door of the house, and my aunt said: ‘What is that crying?’ and we stopped eating to listen, towards the path. We heard the girls calling out, and then their feet running, and then they burst into our part of the village, angry like gulls. ‘The Olumata boys insulted us,’ they shouted. ‘They seized us. They beat us.’ All kinds of things like that they were shouting, and after that they ran on, still screaming, to another part of Wayouyo.
All the boys and young men of our part had heard that, and were standing up or coming out of their houses.
‘It is nothing,’ I said to my aunt’s husband, who had growled. ‘I will tell you how it was. They met the boys on the path and were provoking to them and then ran away. So the boys chased after them and seized them, and the girls slapped the boys, and they all had a fight. It is often like that,’ I told him.
But our boys and young men were shouting that they would go and beat the Olumata boys. And my aunt’s husband went into the house and brought out his shotgun, the iron part, that he uses to hit people over the head.
‘Now there will be war,’ said my aunt with a sigh.
‘E, truly,’ I said. Because already boys from the other part of Wayouyo were running through our part carrying sticks and clubs and torches, and more were gathering on the path to Olumata, with the girls behind them, yelling that the Olumata boys were bush-pigs and rapists and unnatural.
‘You stay,’ my aunt said to her husband. But he looked away from her angrily, and went off to join the younger men, swinging his heavy gun.
‘I will go too,’ I said. ‘It will make me laugh, this war.’
And so I thought it would and was already laughing at my aunt’s face and her sad noises. So when I saw Benoni hurrying towards the path I jumped up and ran after him, screaming like the other girls. ‘O Benoni!’ I shouted. ‘O Benoni! I have been raped by forty Olumata boys. It was like a dream, Benoni–O!’
‘Crazy woman, Salib’,’ I said to her. But she could not make me laugh at her then, with the boys so angry and beginning to march, and the girls swearing and crying out all around them. I left her behind and pushed my way through the men, trying to talk to them, to make them peaceful. ‘It is bad,’ I told them, ‘war between villages.’ But they were excited, and would not listen to me. They began to call
ulululu
! and to whoop, swinging their sticks and torches. Then some began to run, and soon everyone was running, boys and girls together, and I was caught up in them and had to run too. It was nearly dark then, and in the light of the torches the palm-trunks beside the path sprang out of the shadows of the bush like men or spirits, very pale.
The men of Olumata must have heard us or seen our lights from a long way, or perhaps they were waiting for us, because certainly the girls, whatever had happened there, would have run away threatening them that we would come. Halfway between the villages, where another track goes off towards Rotten Wood, we saw the torches of the Olumata people burning in the grass and against the low fronds of new palms, throwing a green light like fireflies, but growing red as the holders of the torches stood up and moved together and waited in a line across the path.
I was trying to force my way to the head of the Wayouyo men, to hold them back and to speak to the Olumata people before the fighting began. But the bodies were so thick in the path, boys and girls too, that I could not get to the front, and they were shouting very loud and would not hear me. Then some of the men behind me left the path and ran through the bushes and came out ahead of the others, whooping and shouting insults. When they saw that, the men I was among broke into a fast run, and all the voices came together in one scream, and Wayouyo and Olumata met like two seas across a reef.
The Wayouyo girls scattered from the path to the bushes and the grass, as the Olumata women had done on the other side of the track to Rotten Wood. The Wayouyo girls and the Olumata women were screaming at each other, like white cockatoos in two close trees.
The noise of the fighting men was deeper. Some were calling out challenges, and others were grunting and groaning. The boys who had torches had given them to girls, and the girls were running up and down among the bushes, trying to see the fighting on the path but making everything dark by not being together.
Some Wayouyo men had hung back from the fighting as if they were afraid. Benoni was one of them. But with him it was not fear. Benoni was shouting and shouting through his hands but I could not hear what he said, and nobody else could have understood a word in his sounds because of the shrieking of the women.
A boy came staggering through the bushes where I was standing. Blood was running down his face, and shone in the light of my torch. He fell in the grass and lay there and was groaning. So I went to him, holding the torch above his head, and looked and saw that he was an Olumata boy, the same age as I.
‘It hurts?’ I said. ‘It is a bad hurt?’
‘E,’ he said, ‘it hurts.’
‘You lie there,’ I said. ‘Lie quiet. It is madness, this.’
‘You say,’ he said, spitting and swallowing. ‘Ssss. Women.’
Then he heard something, on the path, towards Wayouyo. ‘
Avak
’?’ he said, sitting up, and looking at me, not trusting me.
‘I do not know what it is,’ I said. ‘What did you hear?’
‘A conch,’ he said. ‘Tell me—more men will come?’
‘I do not know,’ I said. And then we heard the conches very clearly, more than one, and coming quickly from Wayouyo.
‘I will go back,’ the boy muttered to himself. ‘What do they want? They will harm the village?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘no,’ pushing him back in the grass. Blood was over all of his face and over most of his chest by then, and his voice sounded feeble. ‘Lie there,’ I said, ‘it is not war like that.’
‘Then,’ he said, ‘you go and look. There, by the path. You look out and tell me.’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘Now you see. I was not one of those girls.’
When I told him that he smiled at me, weakly. ‘My thanks,’ he said. ‘O, Salib’, did you think I did not know you? That night in the cookhouse at Rotten Wood, when the lamp went out, that was me.’
‘E, truly?’ I cried out. ‘Then, what is your name?’
‘Later I will say,’ he said. ‘Go now, Salib’. Keep watch.’
But when I stood up, taking the light away from him, his eyes followed the light and me, and looked lonely and even a little afraid. So I hesitated, but he said: ‘Quickly,’ and lifted his arm to point where I should go. So I did what he said, though looking back at first, watching the light slide down him, and his body and the grass turning into darkness.
It was the Olumata women who heard and saw first. Before I could hear anything, the women were running out of the bushes with their torches and clustering on the path towards Olumata, until their men were between them and what they were pointing at and calling out about, which was behind me somewhere, a long way.
As I was turning to see, the conches whooped. Not one but six or more of them together, and after them the high ululating of a crowd of men. Then the conches broke out again, booming and droning. On the palm-trunks leaning over the path I began to see the glow of moving torches, and later the flash of torches through gaps in the bushes. I saw the torches coming towards the last bend. The light spilled out ahead of them on the straight path. When the flames burst into the open, we saw who had come.
I thought: I do not know these men, what men are these? Their faces were painted white with black eyes and mouths. They had made their bushknives shine, like tin. They ran side by side, in line, four men after four men. As they ran, they howled.
Behind me everybody was quiet, the fighting had paused, there was only a little whimpering from the Olumata women.
I did not know one of them. They were coming towards me with their black eyes staring and the light on their white faces; coming from Wayouyo, yet there was not one I had seen before. They were all the same. Every man in a white yavi, every man with a silver bushknife, every man with a torch or a white conch in his other hand. They were all black and white, wearing tusks and arm-shells and garlands of white flowers, with white dancing-feathers shaking in their hair. As they ran they lifted their knees and stamped, and the conches blew. While they stamped, they howled.
I ran too, going towards them, shouting: ‘Who? Who?’ and spreading my arms in front of them, to stop them, to keep them from the fight. But the first men threw me out of the way, and others pushed me while I was stumbling, so that I fell and was lying in the deep grass at the side of the path. When I sat up, the last of them were going by me. I saw that the last ones were not young, and for the first time I understood what they were chanting. They were calling: ‘They will come.’ And then: ‘They will come here.’ And then: ‘They will come, the star-people.’
The painted men smashed through the young men on the path. Wayouyo boys and Olumata boys, they all went sprawling. Not that the painted men hit them, they just came at a run, with a howl, and drove through. All the time the torches of the women dodged among the bushes and the voices of the women came out of the leaves in little wails of excitement and fear.
I could hear then what the painted men were calling. ‘
Bi meise
!
Bi meise besa
!
Bi meise Mina-utuyam
!’
Benoni had stood up and was staring down the path at the moving bodies and torches. I came beside him with my light, and he started.
‘It is I,’ I said.
‘Who are they?’ he said. ‘Did you see?’
‘They were moving,’ I said, ‘and they were painted. But I think I knew some. I think the old man Boitoku is there.’