A Girl Named Disaster (12 page)

N
hamo was walking in a strange place. It was very beautiful, with trees full of fruit. Cattle grazed in thick grass that rippled about their legs, and goats with fat udders wandered with clanking iron bells tied about their necks. On either side she saw hillocks covered with pumpkin vines, while beyond stood row upon row of ripe mealies.

She, herself, felt unusually light. Her feet barely brushed the ground, and when she jumped, her body moved through the air in a slow, dreamy fashion.

Is this Zimbabwe? No wonder Mother was sorry to leave, she thought. Nhamo followed a path that wound through the hillocks. The earth was soft beneath her feet. Presently, she came to a cluster of huts in a clearing: fine huts that looked as though they had been built yesterday. The thatching was evenly trimmed, the walls freshly plastered, the ground smooth without the print of a foot.

Two girls sat on a bench outside. Nhamo’s spirit leaped. People! And what wonderful ones! They were even lovelier than Masvita before her illness. Their skin shone with oil. Their hair was woven into an intricate pattern, more like the scales of fish than like any style Nhamo had seen. They smiled at her with even, perfectly white teeth.

“
Masikati!
Good day!” said Nhamo.

“
Masikati!
” responded the two beautiful girls.

“Have you spent the day well?”

“We have done so if you have done so,” they answered politely. Around their necks and looped over their arms were many, many strands of black beads. These rippled like drops of water when the girls moved.

“Your village is very fine,” Nhamo said, uncertain how to strike up a conversation.

“Come and eat with us,” they called. Nhamo needed no second invitation. She quickly settled herself on the ground. The girls produced plates of
sadza
, white as gardenias, and pots of steaming relish. Nhamo clapped in thanks before accepting a bowl.

She dredged a morsel of
sadza
with relish, lifted it to her mouth—and sprang to her feet, knocking everything to the ground. Crocodile Guts suddenly stood in the doorway of the dark hut!

“
Maiwee!
A ghost!” she cried. The girls twined around her; their long arms held her prisoner. “Please don’t hurt me,” Nhamo moaned.

“As if I would hurt you, little Disaster,” Crocodile Guts said cheerfully. He sat down on the bench and helped himself to the food. He smacked his lips and scratched his neck with long, dirty fingernails. Even in death, his hair swarmed with lice—or ghost lice.

The fisherman belched satisfyingly. “I see you have my boat, little Disaster. Well built, isn’t it? You have to remember to bail it out every morning, though. I never did get all the cracks filled.”

Nhamo felt tongue-tied. What was the polite way to address a ghost?

“I carved it out of
mukwa
wood,” Crocodile Guts continued. “That’s the best. The termites won’t touch it. But after many years, even a good boat gets cracks. I used to plug them with sap from the
mutowa
, the rubber tree. Most of the time it was easier to bail the thing out.”

“
Baba
…,” Nhamo began uncertainly.

“Yes, little Disaster?”

“Forgive me,
baba
, but aren’t you…dead?”

The fisherman roared with laughter. “Of course! Why else would I be in this fine place with two beautiful
njuzu
girls to wait on me?”

Njuzu!
Water spirits! Nhamo felt the long arms of the girls twining around her—or were they arms? She was afraid to look.

“Most people wander on land between the time they die and the
kugadzira
ceremony, when their family welcomes them home,” the fisherman explained. “I was so fond of water, I came here instead.”

“I—we—are
underwater
?”

Crocodile Guts pointed up.

For a moment Nhamo didn’t know what she was seeing. The sky rippled as though the wind had become suddenly visible. Above hovered a small, dark shape.

“The boat!” moaned Nhamo, struggling against the girls. They slithered around her with a whispering, rustling sound. Their faces were still those of beautiful humans, but their bodies had turned into long, black snakes! Nhamo screamed. The
njuzu
shrugged themselves off and rippled over to Crocodile Guts.

“You mustn’t be afraid of
njuzu
, child. They taught me everything there is to know about water.”

But Nhamo screamed again and again, and stretched her arms toward the distant boat.

“I’m drowning!” cried Nhamo. She flailed wildly, and the sky rocked back and forth. Mother’s jar rolled on its side. In spite of her panic, Nhamo automatically grabbed it before it could fall into the water—

—in the bottom of the boat. She was still in the boat! She wasn’t drowning. It had only been a dream. Nhamo was flooded with relief. She had been soaked by the water that seeped in overnight, and that must have been what gave her the nightmare. “It was so real,
Mai
,” she told Mother. “Those girls…and Crocodile Guts…”

The sun was nearly overhead. “
Maiwee!
I’ve slept a long time!” she said, shielding her eyes from the glare.

She lay on the soggy grass bed and went over all she had heard about
njuzu.
They lived in bodies of water and kept these from drying out. They were far wiser than humans. For this reason, they often instructed
ngangas
in their craft. Occasionally, they pulled unwilling people into their pools. Sometimes they took the shapes of humans, and sometimes of snakes or fish or, if they were bent on evil, crocodiles. They could melt from one form to the other.

If the
njuzu
offered you food, you must refuse it or be doomed to stay forever in their watery realm. Nhamo shivered. She had come
that
close to eating the
sadza
and relish.

She sat up and looked around. A mist lay over the horizon. Only a few yards away, the river faded into a haze. She dipped her calabash over the side and noticed that the water didn’t look quite the same. The stream by the village had been clear. The Musengezi was dyed the color of tea, although it tasted perfectly clean. This water was blue-green. Or perhaps it was only the hazy light.

Nhamo remembered tying up to the reeds the night before. She crawled to the stern and pulled on the rope. It came up easily. The loop at the end had a single broken reed still attached.

Nhamo stared at the rope and then at the water. She was drifting! The motion had been so gentle, she hadn’t noticed it. I must have crossed the sandbanks into a side channel, she thought. She began to paddle against the current, but the movement was so slight she couldn’t keep track of the direction. For all she knew, she was traveling away from, not toward, Zimbabwe. “It’s better to wait until I can see the shore,” she decided.

Nhamo drank water and munched a few of the fish she had dried at the guinea-fowl camp. The clear area around the boat gradually widened out, and still she couldn’t see the edge of the river. She listened for birds, but there was only the light slap of water against the hull. The air was empty of the smell of plants or flowers. Nhamo became uneasy.

Presently, a breeze stirred. The haze dispersed, and Nhamo realized she was in a far worse situation than she could ever
have imagined.
The shoreline had completely vanished.
This was no side channel. This wasn’t even the Musengezi. The boat had been scooped up and dropped into a boundless ocean. It had to be the country of the
njuzu.
“I didn’t eat the food. I didn’t!” she told the water spirits. But perhaps by merely accepting a bowl from them, she had fallen into their power.

As the breeze freshened, small ripples became wavelets; the wavelets grew into swells. Nhamo yelled when the boat began to sway. “Oh,
njuzu
, I didn’t mean to insult you by screaming,” she cried. “I’ve always been afraid of snakes. Please forgive my rudeness!” She begged and wept, but the boat continued to pitch, with Nhamo clinging to the sides.

When the craft leaned over, she could see right into the water. It was deep, so deep! The
njuzu
girls were coiled up in the depths, watching her with bright, human eyes. Mother’s pot rolled; the mealie bag shifted. Nhamo desperately opened the bag with one hand as she clung to the boat with the other. She retrieved the pot and stuffed it inside.

“I think your pool is beautiful, Spirits of the Water. I am so lucky to be allowed to see it. Please don’t drown me!” she cried. “I’m sorry I didn’t ask permission to use your boat, Va-Crocodile Guts. I didn’t know how.”

You mustn’t be afraid of
njuzu,
child. They taught me everything there is to know about water.

“You’re already dead,” Nhamo wailed. “You don’t have anything to be afraid of!” But her mind began to work very fast. What would Crocodile Guts do in this situation? He must have encountered it. People said he went everywhere, even Lake Cabora Bassa. She grabbed the oar. Every time the boat tipped, she tried to push it back. This didn’t work very well. Eventually, she discovered she was in less danger of capsizing if the prow faced into the waves.

Now she could slide up and down the swells without tossing the contents of the boat around. It was hard work, and the waves made her queasy. If she tried to rest, the craft swung sideways with a terrifying seesaw motion. On and on Nhamo forged, not knowing where or for how long, only
that she had to keep going or die. Her head swam with fatigue; the sunlight glittering off the water made her eyes ache. She noticed a patch of whiteness ahead.

A dip in the waves revealed the top of a rock. Ah! She veered away before it could rip out the bottom of the boat. Suddenly, white foam frothed all around her as other rocks made their presence known. Nhamo was bewildered by so much danger. Directly in front of her was even more whiteness, a ring of it, and in the center a low shelf of land almost hidden in the glare of sunlight. It was an island!

Nhamo discovered she wasn’t quite out of energy. She made for the island, and when her oar struck bottom, she jumped out and dragged the craft onto shore. The boat wasn’t light. Nhamo had no idea she was strong enough to lift it, but terror gave her supernatural strength. She pulled the boat away from the foaming water and collapsed on the warm stone. Then she must have fainted, because the next thing she noticed was the sun, lying very low in the west. All around her was the
slap-slap-slap
of waves.

“Thank you,
Va
-Crocodile Guts,” she whispered. “Thank you,
Va-njuzu.
” She didn’t know whether they had anything to do with her rescue, but it was safer to be polite. She watched the shadow of the boat lengthen and the sunlight creep away from the rock. She sat up.

It was a very small island, hardly a man’s height above the waves at its tallest point. As far as Nhamo could see, there was not another speck of land in any direction. And her new home had not a bush or a tree or a blade of grass.

N
hamo stretched out with the mealie bag for a pillow. Mother’s pot was wedged into a crevice at her side. She slept heavily, without interruption. In one sense, it was the safest place she had been since she left the village. No leopards could creep up on her here. No hippos would be attracted to a grassless rock.

The wind died in the night and so, then, did the waves. A haze blotted out the stars, and when dawn came, the sky turned a milky pink. Nhamo opened her eyes briefly onto a glory of shining mist.

When she finally awoke, the sun was a furious, white ball in the east, the air already unpleasantly hot. Nhamo stood up and stretched.
Hezvo!
*
She had never imagined so much water was possible. Twenty long steps took her from one end of the island to the other; fifteen steps took her from side to side. She hunkered down to consider the situation.

She had tied up within sight of Zimbabwe. The river had been flowing rapidly all around her, and if the rope came loose there (or was untied by an
njuzu
, she thought uneasily), the boat would have been rapidly swept downstream. She had slept soundly. Perhaps she had sailed all the way back past the guinea-fowl camp and the stream that went by the village.

What had Grandmother said? The Musengezi used to flow into the Zambezi River until the Portuguese dammed it up. Now the Zambezi had become a huge lake.

Lake Cabora Bassa.

You couldn’t see across Cabora Bassa. Even Crocodile Guts had approached it with caution because of the great waves that sometimes arose. Nhamo felt slightly happier that this was a real lake and not the ghostly realm of the
njuzu.
Still, water spirits no doubt inhabited the place, as they did any body of water.

She couldn’t stay here long, that was certain. The island was barren. Her fish trap was useless without a narrow channel, and no birds ventured this far from shore. The thought of leaving filled her with dismay. The lake was calm now, but who could say how long that would last? Meanwhile, her stomach felt as if its two sides were glued together. She ate more of the dried fish and drank as much water as she could manage. For a few moments her belly felt comfortably stretched, but the sensation quickly vanished. She was afraid to eat the uncooked mealie meal:
Ambuya
said raw flour swelled up inside and made your stomach burst.

Nhamo laid out the matches to dry. She unrolled Mother’s picture and saw that it had survived the journey unharmed. “Well,
Mai
,” she sighed. “We don’t have many neighbors in our new home—unless you count the
njuzu.
I imagine there are a lot of
them
around here. I’ll make you some tea, and we can talk.”

Nhamo pretend-boiled the tea and poured it into pots. She didn’t have the heart to cut bread and spread it with margarine. She placed the fish trap over Mother’s head so she wouldn’t get too hot.

“Grandmother told me a story once about a man who had many wives and sons, but no daughters.” Nhamo sipped her tea as though it were really hot. “The man called his sons together when he was dying. ‘I have no money to buy you wives, or daughters to exchange for them,’ he said. ‘All I have is a single black bull and the friendship of the
njuzu
who lives in the river.’

“You can listen, too,” Nhamo told the snake-girls under the water. “This story is about your people.

“The old man said, ‘My sons, I can give you only good advice. Before you do anything important, sprinkle mealie meal on the black bull’s head. If he shakes it off, it means I agree with your plan. I will speak through the bull. As for getting enough money for
roora
, you must jump into the deepest pool in the river!

“The old man died. His sons thought he was making fun of them with his advice. They planted their crops and toiled in the fields. Not one of them made enough money to buy a wife.

“One day, when they were discussing the problem, the youngest boy, who was called Useless, said, ‘Don’t you remember? Father told us to jump into the river.’

“‘You have the brain of a flea, Useless. If you jump into the river, you will drown,’ said the oldest.

“Useless went to the black bull and sprinkled mealie meal on his head. ‘O Bull of the Ancestor, I am going to jump into the river. Do you think that’s a good idea?’ The bull shook his head vigorously. ‘That means yes!’ cried the youngest son.

“‘That means we will have one less mouth to feed around here,’ replied the oldest.

“All the sons went to the river to watch Useless throw himself in. The boy sank like a stone. His brothers waited and waited. All day they waited, but Useless never returned. They went to the boy’s mother and told her what had happened.

“His mother wept and cried. She put on the bark cord of mourning and refused to cut her hair anymore. The older brothers hired themselves out to other farmers. They worked for many years to earn enough to marry the farmers’ daughters. ‘Still, we are more clever than our youngest brother,’ they said. ‘His bones are rolling around in the mud somewhere.’

“One day Useless’s mother went to the river to get water. She found a beautiful girl sitting on a rock. ‘Cut your hair and put on your finest clothes,’ the girl told the astonished woman. ‘I will give you a horn full of oil.’

“The mother didn’t understand, but she obeyed. Soon she saw a great herd of cattle, goats, and sheep approaching with many servants. Leading them was a handsome young man dressed in a lion skin and wearing a crown of reeds. On his right side hung a sword and on his left a bag. He carried an animal tail and a black horn full of oil. Behind him walked the beautiful girl who had been at the stream.

“‘Mother! Mother! Don’t you recognize me?’ called the young man. ‘I am your son, Useless!’

“‘Oh, my son! What happened to you?’

“The man explained that he had turned into a tiny fish when he threw himself into the river. He went through a crack in the rocks and found himself in an underground country as big as the earth. It had fields and cattle and houses.

“‘I lived there,
Mai
, with a giant snake as big as a river. Plants grew along his back, and my job was to weed them. He was the
njuzu
Father told us about. He told me I must eat only mud and never touch mealie meal. If I ate real food, I would be trapped forever in his country. Finally, he gave me a horn of oil to cure people and a bag of medicine. He gave me a crown of reeds and a sword to rule my brothers with. Last of all, he gave me an
njuzu
bride.’

“Useless had learned how to be an
nganga
from the water spirit. He became a great chief, and his mother, who had been mistreated by everyone, was treated like a queen from then on.”

Nhamo lay on her stomach and watched the waves lap against the shore. The wind was rising. She had been wise not to venture out in the little boat. She gathered up the matches before they could blow away, and stored Mother’s picture in the pot. When this was done, a heavy feeling of despair fell over her.

It had been all right when she was telling the story. Somehow, she was transported away. Mother had been there; even the
njuzu
girls had listened from their watery houses. Now she was all alone on a tiny island. The waves foamed around the shore and the rocks that lurked beneath the surface.

“If I threw myself in…,” she began. But with her luck,
she wouldn’t find any underground country. She would merely drown, and her spirit would wander without any hope of rejoining her relatives.

The spray left Nhamo feeling damp and irritated. She would like a bath. It was unfair to be surrounded by bathwater and unable to use it! She squatted next to the shore and doused herself, using the calabash. Then she took out her treasures from the boat and went over them.

She had one box of matches, five pots, the calabash, Aunt Chipo’s old head scarf, the red cloth (minus a corner) she was supposed to wear for her marriage ceremony, Uncle Kufa’s broken knife, the lamp she had used to light her way from Grandmother’s hut, four wooden spoons, a few glass beads, a packet of salt, dried chilies, the bag of mealie meal, a small bag of dried beans mixed with ash to discourage weevils, and the sturdy rope Crocodile Guts had left in the boat.

And around her neck was the red cloth bag containing
Ambuya
’s gold nuggets.

“If I was in the village…,” Nhamo said dreamily. “Well, I wouldn’t be in the village. I’d be at Zororo Mtoko’s house. I’d be stamping mealies for his three wives. They would be sitting indoors with pots of
maheu.
” Nhamo imagined the sour, rich taste of
maheu.
Her mouth watered. “They wouldn’t give me any, oh no! They’d make me eat rotten porridge and wormy fruit.”

Nhamo closed her eyes, seeing the three angry women inside the hut. Their skin was blotched with disease. Their heads were almost bald. “Their children are rude and stupid,” Nhamo went on. She didn’t know this, but it gave her spirit pleasure to imagine it. “They fight among themselves. Zororo can hardly bear to look at them. They’re ugly, like him. He comes home drunk and swings his knobkerrie
*
in all directions. His wives think about putting poison in his food, but they don’t dare.”

Nhamo felt satisfied with the dismal scene she had imagined.
“And I am not there! I, Nhamo, am visiting the country of the
njuzu.
They will tell me their secrets and send me home with cattle and goats.”

But when she opened her eyes, she was still alone in the middle of a vast lake. The lonely-sickness came over her again, and she pressed her fists to her temples to force it away.

You mustn’t be afraid of
njuzu,
child. They taught me everything there is to know about water.

“What can I learn, Va-Crocodile Guts?” Nhamo cried.

For one thing, swimming.

Now where had that come from? Nhamo so badly wanted to hear a voice, she wasn’t sure whether someone had actually spoken or whether she had imagined it. She considered the shoreline. The lake was shallow where she had pulled up the boat, and farther out were clusters of rocks. She waded in, keeping a sharp eye on the bottom. By slowly feeling her way around—and scrambling back onto shore when a large wave came through—Nhamo staked out a sizable area where the water reached no higher than her chest.

She perched on the island again and rewarded herself with a few tiny dried fish and a pinch of chili powder.

Njuzu
took the shapes of snakes and fish and—ugh!—crocodiles, Nhamo thought. How did they move? She tried to wriggle like a snake. No, she wasn’t long and thin enough. Crocodiles floated. She knew how to do that. But they moved along by swishing their tails from side to side. She didn’t have a tail.

She tried to remember how other animals swam. Most creatures didn’t venture to try if they could avoid it. The ones that did—hippos and elephants—were too dangerous to spy on. Very occasionally, Uncle Kufa threw a stick into the stream for one of his dogs to retrieve. The dog swam back with its legs going as though it was racing across a field. It looked relieved to get back on land—not that she could blame it. Even dogs understood about crocodiles. But wait! There was one animal who swam readily, even joyfully. The otter, or
binza.

Nhamo had often observed
binza
hunting in the stream.
They skimmed along the bottom and turned over rocks to flush out frogs and fish. They caught these in their hands just like people, rose to the surface, and ate while treading water. Again and again they dove with restless energy until, sated, they bobbed around on top with their heads out of the water.

They were fascinating, but dangerous. An enraged otter would hurl itself at an enemy far larger than itself. One of Uncle Kufa’s hunting dogs had been drowned by a mother protecting two cubs.

But they certainly knew how to swim.

Nhamo waded out on the shallow shelf of rock. She practiced floating like a crocodile. She kicked her legs like an otter. She trotted like a dog running across a field. Little by little she began to understand how a creature could maneuver in such a treacherous medium. She practiced until dark, by which time she was exhausted. For dinner she had two small fish and another pinch of chili powder. She drank two calabashes of water to stretch her stomach.

Days passed; Nhamo lost count. After the dried fish were gone, she suffered from gnawing hunger for a day before a new plan occurred to her.
Ambuya
had told her often enough of the dangers of eating uncooked flour and beans. She no longer had a choice in the matter. She soaked a handful of mealie meal in a pot. Hopefully, if it swelled enough
outside
, it wouldn’t swell
inside
and burst her stomach.

The beans provided a more hopeful solution to the problem of food. Until now, Nhamo had only considered cooking them, but they could be soaked, too. And would begin to grow. The young plants were perfectly edible.

Why didn’t I think of it earlier? she wondered.

She changed the water frequently, but the mealie meal spoiled anyway. When she touched it with her finger, ropes of slime pulled away from its surface. Even so, Nhamo attempted to eat a small portion. It made her vomit, and she threw the rotten meal away.

The beans sprouted. She devoured them as soon as she dared and set the rest to soak. The future was too terrible to contemplate, and so Nhamo didn’t. It was like the time she
had cared for Grandmother on the Portuguese trader’s porch, an endless present. She spent the day telling stories to Mother and the
njuzu
girls. She talked to Crocodile Guts, too, in case he was visiting down below.

When the lonely-sickness came over her, she plunged anew into the blue-green waves. Danger kept her from despair. Farther and farther out she swam. She clung to submerged rocks and lifted her head above the water. She ventured out beyond the safe shallow area. She skimmed along under the surface like an otter. As long as she kept busy, she didn’t think. But at night, in the middle of the night, she woke up without any defenses and cried hopelessly until dawn showed in the sky.