The Ghosts of Eden Read online

  With a growing unease Michael leant across and said, ‘Excuse me.’ There was no response. He pressed a finger into the man’s podgy hand and released it. The thready capillaries failed to refill. He slipped his fingers around the wrist to feel for a radial pulse. Not a flicker. The ruddiness had drained from the man’s face. His eyes were not completely closed – drying slits.

  Then he remembered the man’s last attempt at conversation and hastily withdrew his hand. Was this his magic trick? If so, it was impressive. Michael undid his seatbelt and turned towards his patient, noticing as he did so how his own breaths came more easily now that he had a pressing clinical problem to solve. He gently lifted an eyelid. The pupil was dilated, as if the essence of the man had left through its wide aperture. He pressed two fingers into the neck below the angle of the jaw. No carotid pulse.

  I’ll be damned, he thought, shaken; the man had quietly expired. No fuss. And if a magic trick, whose? The sweat patches under his arms turned icy. Michael sat there for a moment taking control of himself and considering what to do. Stand up and shout for help? Stretch him out in the aisle and start resuscitation? He knew it would be futile. The man had been motionless for well over ten minutes. The pupils were fixed. He pressed the call button above his head.

  The stewardess sprung from behind the cabin curtain, all smiles, and tripped towards Michael. He could see she had been waiting for him to call, had rehearsed soothing words. She started to ask how she could help but Michael interrupted. ‘Excuse me, this gentleman’s dead.’

  She looked from Michael to the man and back again. He met her eye but she seemed temporarily stumped, unable to decide between smiling warily at their practical joke or running down into economy to fetch a colleague. Her hand hovered, trembling, over the back of the seat.

  ‘Very peacefully,’ Michael added, to soften the shock, suddenly aware that his professional calm might appear inappropriate.

  The stewardess shook the man’s shoulder.

  ‘Sir! Sir! We’ll be landing soon.’

  The man’s arm dropped and hung dead in the aisle. The stewardess’s hand went to her mouth. Michael saw he had to take charge.

  ‘I’m a doctor, a surgeon. He must’ve had a massive heart attack.’

  Massive heart attack always seemed a reassuring thing to say, combining no-one-could-do-anything-about-it with must-have-gone-in-a-painless-instant. Other possibilities, such as pulmonary embolism or cerebrovascular haemorrhage, seemed less consoling, too coldly technical.

  The stewardess straightened up uncertainly, then leant towards Michael, a quivering of her lips and cheeks threatening to fracture her finely set facial features, and whispered, ‘Shouldn’t we do something? Umm . . . confirm he’s actually . . . this is my first time . . .’

  A necessary familiarity with death enabling him to fast track past the surprise, coupled with a certain weariness at the emotional incontinence of others, prompted Michael to run an alternative script. What about making an announcement? One of the passengers has died of witchcraft. Please check your neighbour for signs of life in case it’s not an isolated case.

  But he said, ‘It’s OK. He’s definitely gone. Just leave him as he is. Let your colleagues know, of course. I’m sure the captain will alert the authorities. No need to worry the other passengers.’

  ‘I’ll tell the captain.’ She hesitated, looking at the dead man again.

  ‘No rush. He’s not going anywhere,’ Michael said, and smiled faintly.

  She shot him a censorious look, turned abruptly and disappeared through the curtain. He regretted his flippant remark – an empty-headed, and therefore uncharacteristic, faux pas – and put it down to the rush of euphoric relief at the easing of his claustrophobia.

  Michael leant across and replaced the man’s arm in his lap, now washed by a sense of unreality, and a little guilt that he had not engaged him in conversation. He hoped that the man had no one who loved him too much. There was peril in excessive love. He was relieved that he would not be breaking the news himself to a wife or a daughter. When it fell to him at work (in some hastily vacated side room with chairs that were too low to sit in with any decorum), he felt that a sluice gate retaining a torrent of tears was about to burst. That puzzled him: it was not as if he let himself get too emotionally involved. After all, he had many other patients to attend and it was expected of him that he kept a reasonable detachment, remained composed.

  He tidied the dead man’s hands one over the other, creating some dignity. Something dark lay on the man’s knee: a black feather, a cockerel’s, he guessed, with a bronze sheen along its vanes, its barbs unbroken. The man’s curse came to mind. But the feather must have been a prop in his trick; it had probably fallen out of his sleeve. He slipped the feather into his pocket as a small act of defiance against superstition.

  Kaaro Karungi – The Beautiful Land, Rift Valley: 1958

  Alas! This spear lies cold

  O Aligo! O hunter!

  This spear that I once trusted

  Now lies cold

  Acholi Dance Song

  One

  In the regions of the Great Rift Valley, a thousand years and more before Europeans in stout khaki had found their fever-punctuated way into the interior, the illustrious Arab explorers and geographers (in robes of rippling silk, and of such fame as Abu Abdallah Muhammad bin Muhammad Abdallah) reported tales of Africa’s bright heart: great foaming fountains lying between mountains whose snowy peaks were as luminescent as the moon. Those who looked on them were unable to look away and so, fixated, they stood there until they died. Beyond the mountains, reported the survivors, spread a limitless sea that evoked a deep yearning, a joy, an abandonment, so that men would throw themselves into the waters from the steep slopes.

  Below the highest peak Am Kaam, King of Egypt, built a palace, and fashioned eighty-five statues of gleaming copper from whose mouths the waters of the Nile gushed, making their way by cataract, ravine, swamp, quicksand and flood down to thirsting Alexandria. In the deep forests of the region pygmy peoples lived all their lives amongst blades of light from the leaf-fragmented sun, while on the sun-blasted and thorny plains warrior peoples lived by spear and ritual, their goats and children periodically devoured, even in the brightness of the day, by the hideous brute called Nundu which roamed where it pleased.

  When darkness fell some men changed into beasts of prey. To ward off these terrors the priestesses of the female spirit Nyabingi beat their drums to gather the people from every direction out of their conical grass dwellings, to dance in unison and so create the sound of a ceaseless stamping of feet that became even louder than the pounding of the drums, and so to drive away the evil of the night. Such were the stories of the fear and darkness in the native’s soul that the Bazungu children overheard.

  The Bazungu, a tribe from far away, shocked the inhabitants of these parts into acquiescence, for they appeared as if they had been skinned – all raw and red – and, what is more, the native children overheard that they had been known to feed on human flesh. The Bazungu mapped the valleys, hills and rivers; cut roads from outpost to outpost; created gardened hill stations with fired-brick buildings set by rule and plumb line in a land that had never, in all the ages, seen a perfect perpendicular; and erected English church steeples with metal sheeting that glinted as signals of a new order under the equatorial sun.

  In those days the Bahima, who roamed the rich grasslands of Kaaro Karungi, did not measure the passing of time by dates but by the passage of events. By the same paradigm the passage of each day was marked entirely by happenings, not clocks. In such a world a young boy like Stanley Katura had no need for haste, but there was a rhythm of duties, matching the requirements of that world, which he and his older brother, Zachye, adhered to from their earliest years. It was a rhythm they would have continued to keep until they died on the calf skin rugs in their dwelling, and were buried with a terrible but storm-short grief in the dung heap at the edge of the kraal, were it not for t
he timing of their births – occurring as they did in an age when the meaning of time itself changed for ever.

  Their day divided into fourteen occasions. First came enkoko yashubirira, when the cock had crowed – the cock that had been placed for this purpose on a shelf in the hut. This was shortly followed by akashesheshe, the arrival of a thin dawn light that washed the sky of its blackness. Then came in dependable succession ente zakomoroka – cattle go out of the kraal; ente zazagira – cattle stand outside the kraal in the open space; ente zasetuka – cattle move off to pasture; abasetuzi bagaruka – the herdsmen return; abantu baza omu birago – men go to their mats; abeshezi baza aha maziba – waterers go to the wells; amasio gatsyoro – herds run down to water; amasio gakuka – herds finish watering; amasio gairira ebibanga byamaka – herds come close to the vicinity of the kraals; enyana zataha – calves enter; amasio gahaga – herds are finished milking; and, at the end of the day, abantu batarama – when men visited each other; when neighbours would sit together under the darkened sky to tell in conversation and in formal recitation of the magnificence of their cattle and the greatness of the deeds of their ancestors.

  At ente zazagira the hot beery breath of Bejuura Kagunga, chief herdsman, and the cud-steamed exhalations of the cattle formed warm pockets through which Stanley and Zachye moved in the cool morning air as they prepared to leave the kraal for herding.

  ‘Take them to Kwayana hill,’ said Bejuura as he prodded Stanley hard with his staff. He swung the staff to point west. ‘And don’t disgrace your father again.’

  Bejuura jutted his jaw towards Stanley and jabbed at him repeatedly. His left eye was set rigidly on the boy while his right eye, damaged at birth by the same malevolent spirit that gripped his mood, wandered and rolled uncontrollably in its socket. The incident Bejuura referred to involved Stanley, who was short-sighted, confusing a harmless jackal for a threatening hyena while tending his father’s calves, taking fright, climbing a tree, the herd running off, so that a party of men had to be out all night in dangerous country rounding them up. The next day his father, Kaapa Katura, had told him the story of Runuza, the young warrior who had protected thirty cattle on his own against three famished lions in a hard drought. Stanley had heard his father recount the story before but still his father told it, and then dismissed him with no embroidering admonishment. Kaapa Katura spoke little but always in parable, as did all the elders of the clan.

  The cattle guided the two boys out into the wide plain of red oat, star and lemon grasses, now aflame in the radiant light of the morning. The boys had no need to shout or curse, for the cattle were wise and knew their destination, the boys merely their guardians. The older boy was strong, and firm in his tread for one who was not yet a man. Stanley, following closely behind, had to lengthen his stride to step in the faint impression of his brother’s footprints in the thin dust, his legs like slender saplings on which his knees formed bulbous tumours, his oversized head wobbling awkwardly on lean shoulders, out of rhythm with his gait.

  ‘Keep moving, The One With The Blaze On Her Forehead,’ Zachye coaxed.

  ‘You’re the laziest calf of the whole clan,’ Stanley said, light-heartedly, and then added, ‘I think She Who Lifts Up Her Horns Brown As The Enkurigo Tree is the toughest.’

  This was the calf given to him when he cut his first teeth, for he cut his lower teeth before his upper and so, as was the custom, he had been placed ceremonially on the back of the calf and gifted her to nurture and cherish. He had heard of those ancient warrior-herders who had grieved three days for their deceased wife but five days at the death of their gifted cow.

  Zachye shook his head and said, with the confidence of an older brother, ‘She Whose Horns are Like Polished Reeds will be the strongest when she’s fully grown.’

  ‘But mine had The Strawberry One as a mother,’ Stanley said. A calf mooed knowingly.

  ‘If her mother had been She Whose Horns Are For No Mere Display, I might agree,’ Zachye replied.

  Stanley looked at his favourite and thought that her already magnificent horns, firm flanks and black, tufted tail were more than a match for Zachye’s favourite, but he said, ‘She’s finer than any cow of the Abasita clan.’

  Zachye spun his spear above his head so that it buzzed like a wasp. ‘Today, I have two secrets to tell you.’

  Stanley’s heart skipped. The days when Zachye had secrets to tell were the best. Zachye had told him many hidden things: who killed old Rutaaba on his bed, where the diviner found his herbs, how to build a beehive, the colour of a red woman’s nipples. Their mother often said, ‘Zachye, you know too much for one who still drinks only blood and milk.’

  Zachye spoke again. ‘But one of those secrets is no little secret. It concerns my youngest brother.’

  ‘Your youngest brother?’ Stanley asked, and then, after a few paces, ‘Is that not me?’

  ‘Yes, of course. Who else? The ghost of the dead one?’

  Stanley risked treading on a snake concealed in the grass beside the track in order to draw alongside Zachye. He did not understand. How was it possible for there to be a secret about himself? He knew everything about himself, unless it related to an occurrence of the night when a boy’s spirit might fly elsewhere. He felt afraid.

  ‘What is this secret?’

  ‘I said that there were two. Which do you wish me to tell first?’

  Stanley hesitated. ‘Do not tell me any if it will make me frightened.’

  Zachye said quietly, as if he spoke to himself, ‘It is I who fears.’

  ‘Do not tell me then.’ Stanley dropped back behind Zachye again. He had never heard Zachye say such a thing before.

  The cattle spread out to graze on Kwayana Hill, a low hump on the plain, while the boys played beside a granite boulder, collecting twigs and dry grass to make a small bed of kindling in the overhang of the rock. Stanley took a leaf-wrapped package from his cowhide sling and peeled back the leaf layers to expose a blackened metal pot. He spat on his fingers before lifting out three small lumps of charcoal, and placed them in the hollowed centre of the kindling. He blew smoothly into the brittle wood. A thin stream of smoke curled up the side of the boulder between breaths; soon a faint red glow appeared. He held the kindling against the glow until it flared into a tiny flame that spread in a crackle of heat and light. Dizzy, he lay back and watched as Zachye added more twigs. Fire could be created from the laborious spinning of a fire stick, but far better to carry the fire concealed as a dusky spirit in the heart of the blackened wood; to entice out the flame with the persuasive ghost in their breath.

  ‘I’ll tell you something you don’t know,’ Zachye said, as he squatted by the fire. ‘There’s a clan that’s kept fire alive in one coal since the days of their fathers’ fathers.’

  ‘How do they do that?’ Stanley asked, wide-eyed.

  ‘No one knows. It’s a clan secret.’

  ‘Is this one of those two secrets you have for me?’

  Zachye smiled slowly. ‘I’m ready now for one secret.’

  Zachye motioned to Stanley to come near. Stanley understood; they could not risk the spirits in the boulder behind overhearing.

  ‘The clan’s medicine man takes the coal to a certain big rock at midday when it’s too hot to touch. He places the coal on the rock. The hot spirit in the rock enters the coal. They say that when the spirit leaves the stone it turns cold – as cold as the springs in the forest.’ Stanley shivered. ‘And I’ll tell you something else. If anyone touches the rock after its spirit has gone into the coal, their blood runs like a cold stream.’

  Stanley hugged his knees and leant a little towards his older brother, staying close, watching his fingers move amongst the flames, expertly turning the grass and wood to nurture the heat in the coal, as sure in this delicate task as he was in guiding a spear to its soft target.

  Soon they turned to play, building a miniature kraal, breaking off thorns from an acacia to make a fence to enclose the huts. The stems of dry reeds se
rved as walls while the roofs they thatched with grass. Zachye found a wafer-thin cowpat to carpet the floors and sweeten the air of the huts. They carefully smoothed the kraal’s compound with the side of their palms. Zachye pinched an ant that was heading for his hut and flicked it away.

  ‘Die cursed rat! You shall never enter the house of King Zachye.’

  They leant back against the boulder, twisting grass and twigs into cow shapes and placing each in the stockade, until their wealth grew and they became the richest of the Bahima, and all the clans spoke highly of them and praised the splendour of their cattle.

  Whilst they continued to play Zachye said, ‘Now I’m going to tell you the other secret.’ Stanley held his breath. ‘Our father is sending you to school. He says you must have the Bazungu’s Education.’

  Stanley stared at the model kraal. He tried, but failed, to picture how this other future would look constructed in grass, stick and stone. ‘Why me?’

  Zachye popped a little air through his lips as if to indicate it was a trifling question. ‘Perhaps because you’re the crafty one and were born in a waning moon, so you’ll have luck.’ He became busy, pushing his hut towards the centre of the kraal and placing a bull beside it.

  Stanley sensed that Zachye regretted telling what he knew, but a pressing bafflement made him bold. ‘I don’t understand. You’re the older brother.’

  ‘Well, it’s nothing,’ Zachye replied forcefully, stabbing a finger through the bull. ‘It’s because you’re puny so can’t look after the cattle on your own.’

  The insult stung Stanley, not because it was not true but because Zachye had never spoken harshly to him before. He let the hand that held his model cow drop to his side and was about to turn away when Zachye said, less unkindly, ‘You’ll learn to read.’