Ezequiel
HEAVY RAIN HAS STRIPPED the oak tree in the front yard of its last leaves and the wind has funnelled them into the walkway I share with my neighbour. I know he will be upset. It’s my tree. I should rake the leaves up before the snow falls.
A child’s cry, the same wailing that kept me up through the night, starts again. The renters upstairs have brought home another child. I haven’t seen the couple for months and didn’t know she was pregnant.
There is nothing we can do to make Mother Anke feel better about our lives in the mission. Every day she pleads with Papa to leave.
“Anke, please. We’re going around in circles with this. It’s nonsense,” he tells her.
Outside Papa’s office door, I slide down to sit on the floor and press my back against the wall.
“You are away so often. You don’t see it, Gilberto.” She has to pause to catch her breath. Portuguese is not her language of anger. She told me she met Papa when she was eighteen. Her parents were Dutch missionaries looking to set up a mission in Mozambique. They didn’t last but Mother Anke stayed with Papa.
“The planes are getting louder. I place my head on the pillow and hear land mines exploding in the distance.”
“Anke! It’s your imagination playing tricks.”
“I can smell the sulphur, Gilberto.”
“You’re tired. We’re all tired,” Papa says, “but this will pass. This is our home.”
“They will take everything we have. They hate us for our skill, our ability to organize, the way we make things work.”
“Soon you’ll say they hate us most because their magic doesn’t work on us. So we allow terrible men to lead us, defend our right to make money off their sweat, their blood.”
“You always take their side.”
I can hear the defeat in her words.
“No. I simply don’t believe that the blacks are whetting their knives to slit our throats while we sleep.”
“The Liberation Front is gaining momentum. There will be a war.”
“What would you have me do?” Papa says. “Our workers take refuge here.”
“You talk as if we cannot be touched. You have the boy believing it too. He sees a helicopter and thinks it is a toy. All the Portuguese can do is dig land mines in the thousands, and the only ones hurt are the farmers and their children who step on them. Can’t you smell the fires burning?”
“Our flock is loyal to God and to us.”
“And your loyalty to me? You promised me if I did not feel safe here we would return to the Netherlands, back to my parents’ home.”
“This is our home. This is my home, and I will protect what we have built,” Papa says, his voice tired and cracking.
“They will turn, but then it will be too late.”
She locks herself in her bedroom. I slip into Papa Gilberto’s office to take my spot on the rug in front of his big desk. The night is filled with sounds, with insects and frogs and the low murmurings of cattle. These sounds are familiar and yet every night I’m surprised by how close they are.
Papa Gilberto sets aside his work and pours himself a glass of port. He places his new record on the turntable. I like the scratching and popping sounds of the record player, when the needle hits the record and skips, almost as much as the music itself. Papa has tried to explain how the needle works on the record album. I’m only interested that its tip is made of diamond. There is one song that begins like a stutter, as if the needle is caught in the record’s groove. Then the song builds and rises; it makes me feel like I have climbed a mountain and am looking down as only a bird can. I wonder how something so beautiful could come from something that sounds gloomy, as if the woman singing is lost and can’t find her way back. Papa’s feet poke out from underneath his desk. His shoes are worn and crinkled. He lets me buff his shoes every day, and when I do I like to add up all the things that have contributed to them looking so old. Time plus dirt plus bends, so that the creases in the leather are just so.
The song ends. Papa lifts the arm back to the beginning. When we’ve listened to the song at least ten times, he cranks the record player once more and lets the rest of the album play out. He lies on his back beside me. He is large and warm. He clasps his hands behind his head. I copy. I am part of him and he’s part of me.
“That song is beautiful,” I say.
“I’m glad you think so.”
“Is the woman sad?”
“I’m not certain, filho. It’s in German,” he says. I can’t see his face.
Why can’t I see his face?
“Papa!”
The panic jolts me from my dream. I kick the sheets off and look around the room.
As I sit on the couch the basement door opens. I hold my breath. A large woman walks in, her hospital shoes so quiet she appears to float.
“How you feeling today?” she says, dropping her closed umbrella and purse on the La-Z-Boy.
I stare at her as she bends down to place slippers on my feet. “These floors are too cold. You’ll get sick.” The little light that comes through the window stretches her shadow as she goes to the refrigerator and unsticks a note. She stands in front of me, the note held a foot away from my face—HELEN, scrawled in thick marker.
Helen takes a sip from a paper cup. I close my eyes and breathe in her coffee breath. She moves around the apartment, shutting cabinets, clanging pots, wiping counters.
A wave of loneliness fills me; my guts turn inside out. But Helen’s calm voice and the way she places her purse on her lap as she sits in the chair reassure me.
“Sure is getting chilly out there.” She smiles. Perfect teeth. “I brought you a book. It’s exotic,” she says, like it’s a dirty secret. I want to sleep. “It takes place in the jungle. Thought you’d like me to read some of it to you.” She wiggles into the chair like a hen in its nest. “It might bring back memories of home.”
I’m fearful of what my long ramblings, fits of disappointment, sparks of excitement might have revealed.
“They’re in the jungle, you see, and this man is pulling a piece of rope attached to a trolley which his wife is standing on.”
My cheek twitches.
“Imagine that!” Her eyes wide. “Crazy as loons, I know. But I can’t put it down.”
This woman sitting in front of me does not know my pain, the anxiety that digs its nails into me every day. She cradles two pills in her outstretched hand. I open my mouth, stick my tongue out like an eager boy taking communion.
I try to think of when a visitor sat there last. Three or four different nurses rotate throughout the week but there have been no visitors. Helen’s reading glasses rest on the end of her nose. I turn away to look out the rain-slicked window. The wind has kicked more leaves into a small heap that blocks precious autumn light.
“What I am about to tell,” she begins, and there is nothing I can do to stop her. I brace myself for the welcome burn of my medication. I want to return to Mount Gorongosa with a feeling of calm. I’m not certain what will soon play out in my head. Is it something I experienced or simply recreated? I don’t think I’ll ever understand.
My eyes close just enough that I can see my lashes webbing the light.
“Pó drinks the rain,” I whisper.
I can’t swallow. I gasp, struggling with the rights words.
Helen grabs hold of my hand and squeezes. “We will be giants once again.”
I ran for nine months, with nothing more in mind than to create distance between myself and the Commander. I kept safely away from the sporadic homesteads and ruined farmhouses that dotted the landscape. A few times I dared onto fields, ready to eat whatever I could find. If I was lucky I’d catch a guinea fowl or trap a rabbit.
I sailed along the shoreline on unsuspecting ships, from island to island, and when it was time to come ashore, I thought only of how far I had come, how much farther I needed to go. Sleep was not my companion. It eluded me as it had for years.
In the blueness of a November morning, I enter a stretch of fever tree blossoms as bright as their trunks. Only when I come through their shade do I see a mountain rising into mist.
A cane rat appears from behind a panga panga tree. It stops in the middle of the path and looks straight at me before scurrying up the slope. I follow.
The forest is cool. I walk on a carpet of flowering balsam plants and bamboo grass. The songs of the forest birds, some of which I have never heard before, echo in the wind. Everything on the mountain appears contained, kept from the rest of the world, as if under a glass dome. For the first time in months, perhaps in years, I feel joy.
I lean over the pool. The water moistens my lips, my chin, the cool rush of water running down my throat. I want to giggle like the boy I once was.
I curl into myself, let the birdsong drown out the sound of gunfire, always present in my mind. I catch a glimpse of scuffed boots that have snuck up beside me. They are the boots of a soldier, their toes sinking into the mud by the pond’s bank.
I close my eyes and draw in a deep breath. It’s all over.
A cloth brushes against my cheek. I remain still. A sheet is draped over a pair of bare legs, cinched at the waist. I see the face of a woman standing over me.
“Pó,” she says, the word like a puff of smoke.
She moves away when I stir. I want her to stay close.
She does not take her eyes off me. I remain quiet, careful not to move and frighten her. She is not my captor.
She climbs over mosses and ferns, never once slipping. She calls from somewhere deep in the forest, “Follow me.”
I navigate the steep hillside and clamber over a rock ledge. I climb up onto a jungle plateau halfway up from the foothills. Pó sits on a fallen log, waiting for me. She wears red sheets wrapped around her body, one over each shoulder. I have seen young Maasai men dressed like this, but never a woman. An albino. Pó crosses her leg over one knee and unlaces one boot, then the other.
“My name is Ezequiel,” I say, undoing my boots too. “What do you call this place?”
She ties her laces together and tosses the boots over her shoulder, raises the water jug to her head and stands. “Only men need names,” she says in rough Portuguese. She turns away to climb a steeper part of the mountain where a narrow, worn path of earth cuts along the slope. It is second nature to her. I struggle, hoisting myself up by grabbing the fronds of giant plants.
We arrive at a pristine pool fed by a waterfall a hundred or more feet high. A small group of warthogs are drinking by the water’s edge. They scurry away, as do the monkeys and baboons.
Pó lowers the water jug from her head to kneel on a large stone by the falls. She reaches down to splash water on her face and neck. Her skin is pale and paper-thin. Her nose and cheeks are crowded with freckles, the only marks on her translucent complexion.
She continues up the steep ascent until it gives way to a gentler slope. We walk out of the jungle onto the granite of one of the lower massifs. I stand next to Pó and look out from the mountain’s peak. The flood plains, dry and golden, spread across the horizon, teeming with movement.
“You are safe here,” she says.
I drop my head to my chest, let the rifle I had bought from a merchant slip from my shoulder to the ground. I allow my breathing to slow.
When I open my eyes, Pó is standing in front of me. “The rains are coming,” she says.
A dozen or so rondavels are arranged in a circle, the entrances of the mud huts facing a clearing in the middle. We move slowly, cutting between two huts, and enter the clearing. The women and children, who had been going about their business, stop. An older boy sucks in his breath as if a snatch of something was about to come out of his mouth. Some of the women secure their grips on their idle machetes. Some Ndau had worked at the mission. I recognize the jewellery one woman wears around her neck. The children gawk. Some are urged to enter the nearest hut, but they freeze and stare at me and the rifle strapped across my shoulder, almost sensing I am part of some bigger story.
I am disappointed that we are not alone.
“That is Machinga,” Pó says, pointing. “Vasco, the stone grinder, is her husband.”
The villagers who remain in the clearing veer from our path, waiting for me to pass with Pó. Some raise their machetes. An older woman, her crinkled hair piled high above her round face, does not move.
“Stay close,” Pó says, taking my hand. “Machinga. This man will stay with me,” she says. It is all I understand of her Portuguese dialect.
The woman says something in her own dialect that mixes her nasal clicks with Portuguese. She refuses to look my way, stands proudly in her bare feet.
“Yes, he is a stranger, but he will not harm us,” Pó says, releasing my hand. She looks toward the worn path. She is asking me to follow it.
Halfway up the path, I turn back and see the centre of the village, thick smoke rising from the fire. The villagers’ curiosity is focused on the conversation between Pó and Machinga. Some of the women are huddled around the fire, carving up a small antelope carcass, and have resumed their song. Naked children take up play again with sticks and what looks like a ball, poking at it rolling in the dirt. They catch me watching and turn giddy. I can’t imagine how I must look. They must think the war has brought me to their mountain. What do they know of men like me? How much contact have they had? Do I look different to them? I must represent uncertainty in their world, which in every other way knows only sameness. One woman draws her child to her side. Another woman lifts her infant and swings him to her hip before slipping into a hut. The rest remain in a state of cautious curiosity.
A very old man, the only man I see in the village, is bent over a grinding stone. He presses the tip of a spear to the rim of the stone, grinding the metal in a rhythmic sweep across its surface. Machetes and a few spears lean against the wall of the straw hut.
Pó catches me staring, and with a gentle wave of her wrist urges me to keep walking. She walks from the clearing and winds her way to meet me. I walk ahead. At the end of the path, set apart from the village, is a small mud hut.
“Has it been settled? Is it safe here?”
“Wait,” she says, before lowering herself into the entrance and drawing the flap of skins behind her.
Sitting against a tree stump, I drift in and out of sleep. Every so often, the sun breaks through the cloud cover and beats down on me. I need water. I try to get up, move toward the jug Pó has set by the hut’s entrance, but my knees buckle. I notice a child walking up the path, his arms outstretched. I use the tree stump to get up, stagger and fall. The child now stands above me. Some of the other children and a few women have wound their way up the path behind the boy, the same boy who had wanted to speak earlier. He bends down and stabs at something on the ground. I reach for my rifle but it is not there. I see it lying in the sand a few yards away. I hold up my hands. The boy skewers the ball the other children had been playing with, and only then do I realize it is an animal’s eyeball, perhaps plucked from the butchered antelope.
“Kwazi,” the boy says, pounding his chest.
“Zeca,” I say.
Thunder roars in the distance. Kwazi looks up, surveys the sky. I dig into my pocket and draw the harmonica out. My hand cups and quivers to make the first note reverberate. Kwazi seems intrigued by the sound.
Pó emerges. I stop playing. Her arms are covered in wooden bracelets, her head topped by an Englishwoman’s hat. A massive collar of coloured beads and shells circles her neck and rests on her shoulders. Like everyone else, I remain silent.
As I slip the harmonica back into my pocket, Pó goes back into her hut and with some effort backs out with a rusted wheelchair, a strange object on a mountain. However it got here, its effect is instant. The crowd hurries down the path to take their places in the clearing. What I see next is even more surprising. Underneath a black umbrella secured with twine to the back of the chair sits a woman. She wears a lace veil over her head, but I can see her thick hair, grey-streaked and straight. I had seen many women like her in Tanzania, dressed in silks—turquoise and fuchsia—with tiny mirrors sewn around their hems. She sits proudly in her battered chair with armrests made of branches. Her toes poke out from underneath her tangle of saris. Her fingers flick the beads of her rosary. Pó pushes the woman down the path and into the middle of the village. They begin to circle the fire in the clearing. The woman cranes her neck from under the umbrella’s brim to look up to the sky. One of the chair’s wheels is crooked and with every turn makes the sound of a whining instrument.
Pó does not speak to the woman she is pushing. They both look up. At first, I think they are looking for the distant drone of warplanes and helicopters. I have grown sensitive to their droning. The sky rumbles and scythe clouds shift. Rain pours down in sheets of silver that disappear into the earth. Pó slips off her hat, and it rests on her back tethered to a string around her neck. She lifts her chin and opens her mouth to drink.
Everyone stretches out their arms and is drenched by the rain. My head stops throbbing. The noises from the children, the thanks from the women, Pó’s laughter are silenced in my mind by the way the woman in the wheelchair studies me.