The Poisonwood Bible
Page 189
At the river they eat their picnic lunch, then move downstream to shriek in the cool water. The noise they make frightens away a young okapi. He had just lately begun to inhabit this territory on the edge of the village. If the children had not come today, the okapi would have chosen this as his place. He would have remained until the second month of the dry season, and then a hunter would have killed him. But instead he is startled today by the picnic, and his cautious instincts drive him deeper into the jungle, where he finds a mate and lives through the year. All because. If the mother and her children had not come down the path on this day, the pinched tree branches would have grown larger and the fat-bodied spider would have lived. Every life is different because you passed this way and touched history. Even the child Ruth May touched history. Everyone is complicit. The okapi complied by living, and the spider by dying. It would have lived if it could.
Listen: being dead is not worse than being alive. It is different, though.You could say the view is larger.
On another day the same woman leads her children through a market. Now she has white hair and only three daughters. None of them walks with a limp.They do not stay in line, as they did before. One of the daughters often strays away to handle bolts of fabric and talk with the merchants in their own language. One of the daughters touches nothing, and clutches her money to her breast. And one daughter keeps her hand on the mother’s arm, guiding her away from dusty craters in the pavement. The mother is bent and betrays the pain in her limbs. They are all surprised to be here, surprised at themselves and each other. These four have not been together in one place since the death of the other. They have come here to say good-bye to Ruth May or so they claim. They wish to find her grave. But in truth they are saying goodbye to their mother. They love her inordinately.
The market around them is crowded with sellers and buyers. Women from the villages have walked for days to narrow their eyes at this city market. They stack their oranges into careful pyramids, then squat on thin legs, resting their angular wrists between their knees. And the city women, who wrap their skirts only a little differently, come to bargain on feeding their families. Hoping to lower the price they scatter insults over their sisters’ wares, like irritating handfuls of harmless gravel. What horrible oranges, I paid half as much for better last week. The orange vendor deflects this nonsense with a yawn. She knows that, in the end, every need finds purchase.
The mother and daughters move like oil through the clear dark fluid of this crowd, mingling and then coming back to itself. Foreign visitors are rare here but not unknown. Narrowed eyes follow them, summing possibilities. Little boys chase with hands extended. One daughter opens her purse and finds coins, another daughter clutches her purse more tightly. Older boys with colorful stacks of T-shirts collect and follow in a swarm like bottleflies. They leap in front of each other to attract attention to their goods, but the visitors ignore them, stooping instead to examine ordinary wood carvings and beaded jewelry. The boys are baffled and shove each other more noisily.
Drowning out all other noise is the music that blares from many sidewalk shops of the cassette vendors. This music is so familiar it does not seem foreign. The little boys, the visitors, the village women all move their heads to the tightly strung voices of three different singers, popular ones from America, whose wrecked ancestors, captive and weeping, were clamped in iron bracelets in the hold of a ship at a seaport very close by. Their music has made a remarkable, circular trip. That fact is lost on everyone present. This ruin must be called by another name. What would have been is this instead.
The woman and her daughters are looking for something they will not find. Their plan was to find a way back to Kilanga and finally to the sister’s grave. It is the mother’s special wish to put a grave marker there. But they are stalled. It’s impossible to cross the border. In the six months since they began to plan their trip, the Congo has been swept by “war. A terrible war that everyone believes will soon have been worth the price. A good boil, they say here, a good boil purifies the rotten meat. After thirty-five years the man Mobutu has run away in the night. Thirty-five years of sleep like death, and now the murdered land draws a breath, moves its fingers, takes up life through its rivers and forests.The eyes in the trees are watching.The animals open their mouths and utter joyful, astonishing words. The enslaved parrot Methuselah, whose flesh has been devoured now by many generations of predators, is forcing his declaration of independence through the mouths of leopards and civet cats.
On this same day at this hour of early morning the man Mobutu lies in bed in his hiding place.The shades are drawn. His breath is so shallow the sheet drawn across his chest does not rise or fall: no sign of life. The cancer has softened his bones.The flesh of his hands is so deeply sunken the bones of his fingers are perfectly revealed. They have assumed the shape of everything he stole. All he was told to do, and more, he has done. Now in his darkened room, Mobutu s right hand falls.This hand, which has stolen more than any other hand in the history of the world, hangs limp over the side of the bed. The heavy gold rings slide forward to the knuckles, hesitate, then fall off one at a time.They strike the floor with five separate tones: a miraculous, brief song in an ancient pentatonic scale. A woman in white hurries to the door, believing against all reason that she has just heard the ailing President playing a song on the fealimfea.When she sees him, she covers her mouth with her hand.
Listen: being dead is not worse than being alive. It is different, though.You could say the view is larger.
On another day the same woman leads her children through a market. Now she has white hair and only three daughters. None of them walks with a limp.They do not stay in line, as they did before. One of the daughters often strays away to handle bolts of fabric and talk with the merchants in their own language. One of the daughters touches nothing, and clutches her money to her breast. And one daughter keeps her hand on the mother’s arm, guiding her away from dusty craters in the pavement. The mother is bent and betrays the pain in her limbs. They are all surprised to be here, surprised at themselves and each other. These four have not been together in one place since the death of the other. They have come here to say good-bye to Ruth May or so they claim. They wish to find her grave. But in truth they are saying goodbye to their mother. They love her inordinately.
The market around them is crowded with sellers and buyers. Women from the villages have walked for days to narrow their eyes at this city market. They stack their oranges into careful pyramids, then squat on thin legs, resting their angular wrists between their knees. And the city women, who wrap their skirts only a little differently, come to bargain on feeding their families. Hoping to lower the price they scatter insults over their sisters’ wares, like irritating handfuls of harmless gravel. What horrible oranges, I paid half as much for better last week. The orange vendor deflects this nonsense with a yawn. She knows that, in the end, every need finds purchase.
The mother and daughters move like oil through the clear dark fluid of this crowd, mingling and then coming back to itself. Foreign visitors are rare here but not unknown. Narrowed eyes follow them, summing possibilities. Little boys chase with hands extended. One daughter opens her purse and finds coins, another daughter clutches her purse more tightly. Older boys with colorful stacks of T-shirts collect and follow in a swarm like bottleflies. They leap in front of each other to attract attention to their goods, but the visitors ignore them, stooping instead to examine ordinary wood carvings and beaded jewelry. The boys are baffled and shove each other more noisily.
Drowning out all other noise is the music that blares from many sidewalk shops of the cassette vendors. This music is so familiar it does not seem foreign. The little boys, the visitors, the village women all move their heads to the tightly strung voices of three different singers, popular ones from America, whose wrecked ancestors, captive and weeping, were clamped in iron bracelets in the hold of a ship at a seaport very close by. Their music has made a remarkable, circular trip. That fact is lost on everyone present. This ruin must be called by another name. What would have been is this instead.
The woman and her daughters are looking for something they will not find. Their plan was to find a way back to Kilanga and finally to the sister’s grave. It is the mother’s special wish to put a grave marker there. But they are stalled. It’s impossible to cross the border. In the six months since they began to plan their trip, the Congo has been swept by “war. A terrible war that everyone believes will soon have been worth the price. A good boil, they say here, a good boil purifies the rotten meat. After thirty-five years the man Mobutu has run away in the night. Thirty-five years of sleep like death, and now the murdered land draws a breath, moves its fingers, takes up life through its rivers and forests.The eyes in the trees are watching.The animals open their mouths and utter joyful, astonishing words. The enslaved parrot Methuselah, whose flesh has been devoured now by many generations of predators, is forcing his declaration of independence through the mouths of leopards and civet cats.
On this same day at this hour of early morning the man Mobutu lies in bed in his hiding place.The shades are drawn. His breath is so shallow the sheet drawn across his chest does not rise or fall: no sign of life. The cancer has softened his bones.The flesh of his hands is so deeply sunken the bones of his fingers are perfectly revealed. They have assumed the shape of everything he stole. All he was told to do, and more, he has done. Now in his darkened room, Mobutu s right hand falls.This hand, which has stolen more than any other hand in the history of the world, hangs limp over the side of the bed. The heavy gold rings slide forward to the knuckles, hesitate, then fall off one at a time.They strike the floor with five separate tones: a miraculous, brief song in an ancient pentatonic scale. A woman in white hurries to the door, believing against all reason that she has just heard the ailing President playing a song on the fealimfea.When she sees him, she covers her mouth with her hand.
