A Dual Inheritance (18 page)

“I don’t want to force—
n’est pas
?” said Etienne right then, gesticulating far more wildly than his tone, as if his hands were doing the real talking, “but, maybe—I wonder, Charlie—we might … begin to
promote
ze idea of dancing?”

Charlie didn’t take his eyes off the cattle.

“I see,” said Etienne, and he expertly—almost medically—wrapped his head in a scarf. “
Bien
. I will go and I will ask them myself.” Etienne walked off, shaking his head and calling for Nhial, their patient interpreter, a lean man of thirty years who had—years ago—evidently gone to university in Nairobi. Despite Etienne’s sense of urgency, Hugh had a feeling his first stop would be to secure their dinner source, as Charlie had been in charge the previous night and the scrawniness of the chicken had sent Etienne—who had actually spent years at a time living in the bush—into an out-and-out panic.

When the cattle and the young men and Etienne were all out of sight, the village took on a sudden and eerie quiet, punctuated by the sounds of women sweeping insects from their cool mud floors. Charlie sat in the dirt, with his legs crossed beneath him, and watched the absence of the cows in what looked like a kind of trance, and Hugh knew better than to speak to him. He knew to simply accept the Bolex camera (which Charlie seemed to enjoy rather formally handing over, as if trusting Hugh to use it was an official assignment) and to listen to his mentor, though Charlie rarely offered much in the way of instruction. “Well,” Charlie said, before wandering off with his own, more-cumbersome Arriflex, which was more like a third arm, so deeply was it a part of him, “you might want to shoot some dung.” And Hugh understood that he was supposed to make himself scarce until late afternoon, when the cattle
would come flooding back. The cattle’s cycle—back and forth from village to pasture, from freedom to tether—was the perfect embodiment of repetition in landscape, so strongly did it resemble a tide, and Charlie wanted as much coverage as possible. And though it seemed as if the cattle were slaves to this cycle, the Nuer people in fact revolved around them. The cows were sung to, blessed—all but literally worshipped.

Looking across the dusty expanse, past the wooden stakes now empty of cows—aside from one lone heifer who remained tethered and crying, presumably for its mother—Hugh saw a young woman emerge from one of the conical huts in the distance, covered in a worn brown sheet. She made her way slowly toward the heifer, carrying a slender jug. After approaching the calf, she held its face in her hands.

He had an overwhelming sense that he was about to do something shameful, like a wave of needing to relieve himself or maybe even vomit, but then he realized he was thinking of his own mother, although
thinking
was too precise—too sane—a word for what this was. How could he
think
about someone who was a mother to him as a baby, as a toddler, but who drank so much that there was no other conclusion but to think that she had been a miserable mother, a mother without hope or relief or joy, a mother who could have easily killed him each and every time they were left alone? He’d gone most of his life without dwelling on her absence and its cause, and now that he was as far away from home as he could ever get, he could not get her out of his head. And because he had only that one real memory of the fogged-up glass, even though she was in his head, he couldn’t actually picture her. Genevieve Conrad Shipley. He’d been told his whole life not to dwell on such a troubled soul, and he had listened.

It did occur to him that his increasingly unquiet mind was punishment for not having given her the consideration she’d deserved just for bringing him into this world. Here—after all—here on this dusty patch of earth, life was lived for one’s ancestors; every act of the living was meant—if not to honor and delight them—to appease them. It did occur to him that he was being haunted.

The young woman in the distance held her trusting calf’s face. Then she gradually tilted back its head and slowly poured the contents of the jug down the heifer’s throat.

Instead of the Bolex, Hugh instinctively took up his Leica, through which he’d done his best looking for years, memorizing every detail of not only Helen but Ed, too, of the weeds and flowers that littered the roadsides of, the snow and slush and evening lights of, the utter familiarity of Cambridge, Massachussetts. The woman with the cow called to mind an afternoon by the pond this spring: He’d been lying with his head in Helen’s lap. She’d said,
Open up
, before putting a wine bottle to his lips, and the wine had slid down his throat. When he’d looked up at Helen, she was blocking out the sun; he’d snapped a picture. There were so many afternoons by that pond, in the townhouse; they rushed through his mind before he fell asleep. But now, as his subject was framed in this lens he knew so well, he had to turn away. The young woman was intensely beautiful. Her beauty wasn’t shocking—on the contrary, these were overwhelmingly superb-looking people—but the effect of her beauty was. As she tended to the cow, as she’d let the sheet fall, Hugh felt as if he’d been kicked in the gut. She was bare-breasted and encircled in ivory at her arms and waist. She also was covered with oozing sores. He’d never felt so physically attracted to a woman and at the same time so repelled. Which was worse? The sheer fact that he was watching her at a distance, turned on like some pervert at a peep show? Or that he was repulsed? He honestly didn’t know.

They’d known about the possibility of smallpox, but nothing could have prepared Hugh for the dominance of this disease. With one hand stroking the calf’s neck, the young woman held it gently, and her expression was no less than adoring, as if only helping the calf could afford her some relief. Perhaps in an effort to distract from the powerful attraction he felt for this Nuer girl—whom he couldn’t help but try to imagine free of sores—his Yankee brain conjured up Mr. Cantowitz. Right there in Ethiopia—
Hello, Mr. Cantowitz, it must be a hundred fucking degrees, yes, that’s true
—Hugh remembered how Ed’s father supposedly resented
all the attention paid to children. Hugh wondered if there was some poor bitter Nuer equivalent who found himself wrestling with this:
What exactly is so great about these cows?

He watched the girl and the calf until the girl walked off, huddled under her foul cloth, most likely toward the swamp—the only water source, where everyone in the village (including the interloping film crew) also procured their drinking water—to wash and ease her disfiguring sores.

The sun was high in the sky. He hadn’t shot a single photograph.

He thought of setting off for the swamp but was plagued with the notion that he was observing what he shouldn’t. He knew he needed to get over this
—obviously
—because why else was he here? Why had he put off marriage and refused to get a job, refused to begin—at the very least—a graduate degree? Why had he endured the dusty gutted roads in the overloaded Land Rover with the busted rear springs, lost muffler, and gasoline leaks? Why had he waited out the essential rebuilding of the vehicle every few miles in sharp, stultifying heat or sometimes in the pouring rain? Why had he waded knee deep in mud and cow shit as Etienne refused to speak English and then refused to speak at all while Charlie shouted every curse word he could think of at whoever challenged his ideas? Why had he risked his life hailing the gangster truck driver who—for a steep price—had dragged them to this very village? Why had he done all of this if not to watch?

The Nuer weren’t afraid to watch
them
. With early evening came the dung fires, and with those first wafts of vaporous smoke came the crowds outside their tents. Their tents were—stupidly—brightly colored, and so even though they had originally positioned themselves at a respectful distance from the far-sturdier homes of the Nuer, those tents might just as well have been the circus. There was never any bartering, only yes or no.
Give me that flashlight
was a typical greeting. And despite countless warnings from Charlie (first by letter, then on Air Afrique, and throughout their cursed two-day drive from the airstrip), Hugh was polite to the point of sycophantic, and by the second nightfall he’d predictably given away his flashlight in addition to nearly all of his allotment of cigarettes
for the following day. And since cigarettes were never requested by the Nuer, only demanded, and since at least once each day they were simply taken right from Hugh’s pocket, Hugh was going to have a personal crisis if he didn’t learn to say no.

Their most frequent Nuer visitors were unmarried young men just like him (though, en masse, far more confident), men who clearly had plenty of time to socialize and make demands. These demands were unending and there was never a moment of privacy, no matter how many times Charlie told Nhial and Nhial told the Nuer men that they would like a moment’s peace.

“Please,” Charlie had said yesterday evening, as they were gnawing on that scrawny chicken’s bones. “Please, Nhial, I’m beggin’ you. Tell them we’d like some privacy.”

Hugh started giggling, until he was howling with laughter that even he immediately recognized as unhinged.

Charlie sputtered, “Why are you laughing?”

“Listen to yourself! We’ve come all this way to try to know them and you’re shooing them away!”

“Go fuck yourself, Shipley,” said Charlie, but he was laughing, too.

Nhial finally said a few words to the small crowd, and then Etienne whispered something to Nhial.

“Etienne?” asked Charlie, with a chicken bone between his teeth. “What are you up to?”

“I am only asking him,” said Etienne, after an audible exhale, “about the possibility of a dance.”

This only made Hugh laugh harder.

“Stop it,” said Etienne. “You are acting like imbeciles.”

“It’s impossible to take a shit around here,” mused Charlie. “Have you noticed that?”

Hugh nodded, laughing so deeply that he risked taking an accidental piss right then and there.

“The term
vanishing point
has a whole new meaning. I swear I walk farther and farther away every time.”

“The Nuer have the advantage,” Hugh managed to say. “No clothing
to remove.” He’d seen old men walk down dips in the landscape, crouching until they were invisible. He’d seen women stroll off toward the horizon, squatting behind a tree. And then there were those on the periphery of his vision, wavering in the heat like desert chimeras. These men, women, and children were usually alone and clutching their pox-fouled sheets. They’d emerged from houses only to wander toward the horizon, in search of a place to relieve themselves. They were searching, it seemed, for more than such a place; to see them pushing through their pain, pressing wretchedly away from their loved ones into the most barren places for
privacy
—Hugh’s laughter took a sudden turn toward tears snaking up from his chest, tears starting before he even recognized them for what they really were.

“You okay?” asked Charlie. “You all there?”

“Sure,” said Hugh, forcing a cough. “You bet.”

The heat became oppressive. A couple of weeks in and the hills in the distance floated on the hazy air as Hugh took part in the daily struggle for subsistence: boiling water, filling bottles, securing food and firewood. Without a chair and table, these tasks—to say nothing of basic camera maintenance—were far more difficult than he would have imagined. The Nuer system of living seemed, by contrast, pretty much unassailable. Hugh looked out toward their homes: packed-mud floors swept clean or at least (mostly) insect-free, the insides kept cool by the slanting grass roofs, an opening to enter and exit. When the floodwaters came, the Nuer would leave all these homes behind, all the jugs and pots and utensils, returning only when it was dry to start up all over again. Hugh’s eyes stung, he blinked away mosquitoes, and he realized he was looking for that same diseased girl. He’d become possessed with the idea of at least managing to preserve—if not the girl’s life—her image, however devastated, in silver, on paper, on celluloid. When he’d asked Charlie about the girl and the calf, Charlie had told him that Nuer women poured water down calves’ throats as much for personal pleasure as for
the needs of their calves and that only women did this work; they had the softer hands.

Once he’d filled enough bottles of water, Hugh set off for the swamp. After two days of looking for her, he was becoming not only impatient but also a little bit desperate, so when a group of young boys approached him, arresting his momentum, he prepared himself for the onslaught of their demands, geared up for what he had come to perceive as a specifically Nuer wellspring of self-interest and a profound certainty of knowing exactly what they deserved.

But these boys weren’t making material demands. All they wanted, for now, was his attention. Pointing grandly toward themselves, calling out louder and louder, as if they were seasoned vendors in a marketplace and not naked eight-year-olds, they presented miniature clay cattle. And their craft—if not their subject matter—was extraordinary. He touched the charcoal and ash shadings, the detailed udders, the pebble decorations hanging from little necks and horns, no different from the real ones in their fathers’ world. As Hugh offered his sincere admiration, he recalled how Charlie, in one of his more loquacious moods, had once told Hugh about seeing Margaret Mead in a coffee shop on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. She’d eaten a tuna salad sandwich and an entire pickle before Charlie—seated right beside her at the counter, drawing out his already drawn-out coffee-drinking—had screwed up the strength to introduce himself. They’d had, according to Charlie, a perfectly wonderful conversation. Mrs. Mead eventually explained how she’d never been psychoanalyzed, because she didn’t need to be, owing to the fact that she’d lived a life of observing children. When this had struck Hugh as rather simplistic, Charlie had cocked his head in that quintessential way he had of making Hugh feel as though his skeptical response revealed nothing but Hugh’s own personal flaw.