Possessing the Secret of Joy (5 page)

Her first words to me were: You should not be here.

My first words to her were: Where else should I be?

This reply appeared to leave her speechless. While she struggled to control her expression, so revealing of her hurt, I crawled on my knees to where she lay, took her in my arms, and sighed.

H
E HAS COME FOR ME,
I thought. He has finally come, God alone knows how. He is ragged and dirty and his hair is that of a savage, or of a crazy person isolated in the bush. He is here. And I can see as he looks at me that he does not know whether to laugh or cry. I feel the same. My eyes see him but they do not register his being. Nothing runs out of my eyes to greet him. It is as if my self is hiding behind an iron door.

I am like a chicken bound for market. The scars on my face are nearly healed, but I must still fan the flies away. The flies that are attracted by the odor coming from my blood, eager to eat at the feast provided by my wounds.

Y
OURS IS THE PAIN
of the careless carpenter who, with his hammer, bashes his own thumb, says The Old Man.

He is no longer actively practicing his profession as doctor of the soul. He is seeing me only because I am an African woman and my case was recommended to him by his niece, my husband’s friend and lover, the Frenchwoman, Lisette. It is hard for me to think about the conversations Adam and Lisette must have had about me over the years, on his twice-yearly visits to Paris and her annual visit to California. Often, while she is visiting, I have had to be sedated. On occasion I have voluntarily checked myself into the Waverly Psychiatric Hospital, in which, because it is run by a man affiliated with Adam’s ministry, I am always given a room.

I liked The Old Man immediately. Liked his great, stooping height; the looseness of the ever-present tweed jacket that hung from his gaunt shoulders. Liked his rosy pink face and small blue eyes that looked at one so piercingly it was difficult not to turn one’s head to see what he was viewing through it. Liked, even, that he himself had at times a look of madness to match my own—though it was a benign look that seemed to observe a connection between whatever held his gaze and some grand, unimaginably spacious design, quite beyond one’s comprehension. In other words, he looked as if he would soon die. I found this comforting.

A
T FIRST SHE MERELY SPOKE
about the strange compulsion she sometimes experienced of wanting to mutilate herself. Then one morning I woke to find the foot of our bed red with blood. Completely unaware of what she was doing, she said, and feeling nothing, she had sliced rings, bloody bracelets, or chains, around her ankles.

I
DID NOT FEAR HIM
partly because I did not fear his house. Though medieval European in its outer aspects, particularly its turrets and small slate courtyard, it had at its center a stone hut, round, with a large fireplace and flagstone hearth. He knelt there, his old knees creaking, to light the morning and evening fire, over which he cooked; and seemed to me, at times, an old African grandmother, metamorphosed somehow into a giant pinkfaced witchdoctor on this other, colder continent. He almost always wore an apron of some kind. Of leather, when he chopped wood or carved the stone pillars that stood near the lake across from the loggia, or a thick cotton one when he cooked the wonderful Swiss pancakes and sausages with which he delighted to feed us.

His hair was as wispy and pale as thistle; I would sometimes, late in our visit, creep up behind him—as he sat smoking with Adam and looking out over the lake—and blow it. This caused him to reach up behind him, grasp both my arms, pull me forward against his large back and shoulders, hug me to him with my head like a moon above his own, and laugh.

We used to tell him, Adam and I,
Mzee
(Old Man), you are our last hope!

But he would only look from one to the other of us—a grave look—and in his heavily accented English he would say, No, that is not correct. You yourselves are your last hope.

H
E SET ME TO DRAWING.
The first thing I drew was the meeting of my mother and the leopard on her path. For this, after all, represented my birth. My entrance into reality. But I drew, then painted, a leopard with two legs. My terrified mother with four.

Why is this? asked The Old Man.

I did not know.

B
ENNY TELLS ME
there is a lot of discussion now in the newspapers and on the street about whether, since I’ve been an American citizen for years, the Olinka government even has the right to put me on trial. He thinks there is a possibility I’ll be extradited back to the United States. He sits tensely, reading me notes he has made on the subject.

Sometimes I dream of the United States. I love it deeply and miss it terribly, much to the annoyance of some people I know. In all my dreams there is clear rushing river water and flouncy green trees, and where there are streets they are wide and paved and in the night of my dreams there are lighted windows way above the street; and behind these windows I know people are warm and squeaky clean and eating meat. Safe. I awake here to the odor of unwashed fear, and the traditional porridge and fruit breakfast that hasn’t changed since I left. Except my dishes are fresh and appetizingly prepared, thanks to Olivia, who has made herself welcome, through bribery, in the prison kitchen.

And if I am extradited to America, I say, will I have a second trial?

Benny says he does not know for sure, checking his notes, but that he thinks so. He is tall and gangly, a radiant brown, usually. At the moment, fear has dulled him.

To go through all of this again in America doesn’t appeal to me.

The crime they say I committed would make no sense in America. It barely makes sense here.

T
HE OBSTETRICIAN BROKE
two instruments trying to make an opening large enough for Benny’s head. Then he used a scalpel. Then a pair of scissors used ordinarily to sever cartilage from bone. All this he told me when I woke up, a look of horror lingering on his face. A look he tried to camouflage by joking.

How did that big baby (Benny was nine pounds) even get up in there, Mrs. Johnson? That’s what I’d like to know. He grinned, as if he’d never heard of the aggressive mobility of sperm. I attempted a smile I was incapable of feeling, first in his direction and then down at the baby in my arms. His head was yellow and blue and badly misshapen. I had no idea how to shape it properly, but hoped that once the doctor left, instinct would teach me. Nor could I imagine asking him for any instructions at all.

Adam stood beside the bed, too embarrassed to speak. He coughed whenever he was embarrassed or nervous; now he cleared his throat repeatedly. With my free hand, I reached for him. He moved closer, but did not touch me; the sound in his throat causing my own to close. After a moment, I withdrew my hand.

I
FELT AS IF
there was a loud noise of something shattering on the hard floor, there between me and Adam and our baby and the doctor. But there was only a ringing silence. Which seemed oddly, after a moment, like the screaming of monkeys.

S
O THIS IS HOW
there could have been an immaculate conception, he’d said bitterly, when I told him I was pregnant; meaning it literally, Bible scholar that he was. After three months of trying, he had failed to penetrate me. Each time he touched me I bled. Each time he moved against me I winced. There was nothing he could do to me that did not hurt. Still, somehow, I became pregnant with Benny. Having experienced the pain of getting Benny “up in there,” we were terrorized waiting for his birth.

No matter how sick I became during the pregnancy, I attended myself. I could not bear the thought of the quick-stepping American nurses looking at me as if I were some creature from beyond their imaginings. In the end, though, I was that creature. For even as I gave birth, a crowd of nurses, curious hospital staff and medical students gathered around my bed. For days afterward doctors and nurses from around the city and for all I know around the state came by to peer over the shoulder of my doctor as he examined me. There was also the question of what to do with “the hole,” as I overheard him call it, making no attempt to be euphemistic for my sake.

At last Adam put a stop to the sideshow my body had become and for the last three days in the hospital I held Benny close, gently and surreptitiously stroking his head into more normal contours (work I instinctively felt should be done with my tongue); or, when the nurse had taken him away, I turned my face to the wall and slept. I slept so long and so hard it was always necessary for the nurse to shake me when it was time for a feeding.

My doctor sewed me up again, much as I’d been fastened originally, because otherwise there would have been a yawning unhealable wound. But it was done in such a way that there was now room for pee and menstrual blood more easily to pass. The doctor said that now, also, after giving birth, I could have intercourse with my husband.

Benny, my radiant brown baby, the image of Adam, was retarded. Some small but vital part of his brain crushed by our ordeal. But thankfully, during the period I spent in hospital, and even for years afterward, I did not recognize this.

T
HEY HAD DUG
out a little hole in the dirt beneath her, and that was her personal latrine.

She was on her moons when I arrived, there was only one old woman, M’Lissa, from Olinka, to help her, and there were flies, and a slight but unmistakable odor.

M’Lissa grumbled about the lack of everything. In the old days, she said, Tashi would have wanted for nothing. There would have been a score of maidens initiated with her, and their mothers, aunts and older sisters would have taken charge of the cooking (important because there were special foods one ate at such a time that kept the stools soft, thus eliminating some of the pain of evacuation), the cleaning of the house, the washing, oiling and perfuming of Tashi’s body.

I had never spoken to M’Lissa other than to say hello. I knew from Tashi that M’Lissa had brought her into the world. I knew that, among the Olinka, she was a prized midwife and healer, though to those Christianized ones who also turned to Western medicine, she was shunned. I was surprised to see her in the Mbele camp. More because she was old, and limped, than for any other, more ideological, reason. How had she, dragging her lame foot, dressed in rags, come so far from home?

It was only in the late afternoons that she could talk, arriving breathless after a day of tending others in the camp, as she shifted Tashi and washed and oiled her wound, which she invariably referred to not as a wound but as a healing. She told me she had at first been in a refugee camp over the border from Olinka; a horrible place, she said, filled with dying Olinkans who fled the fighting between the Mbele rebels and the white government’s troops, most of whom were members of the black minority tribes that hated the dominant Olinkans. They had been cruel beyond anything she’d ever seen, specializing in hacking off the limbs of their captives. In the camp she had been in demand, though she’d had nothing beyond her two hands to work with. There had been no herbs, no oils, no antiseptics, not even water at times. She had delivered babies in the dark, set bones, and used stones to smooth the protruding gristle of amputated limbs. There was nothing to assist her beyond her patients’ grim endurance. It was in the refugee camp, she said, that her hair turned completely white, and where, eventually, she lost it. Now, she said, running a gnarled hand back and forth over it in self-derision, I am as bald as an egg.

The other women in the camp, according to M’Lissa, had all been initiated at the proper age. Either shortly after birth, or at the age of five or six, but certainly by the onset of puberty, ten or eleven. She had argued with Catherine, Tashi’s mother, to have the operation done for Tashi when she too was at the proper age. But, because Catherine had gone Christian, she’d turned a deaf ear to her. Now, M’Lissa said, with a grimace of justification, it was the grownup daughter who had come to her, wanting the operation because she recognized it as the only remaining definitive stamp of Olinka tradition. And of course, now, she added, Tashi would not have the shame of being unmarried.

I wanted to marry her, I said.

You are a foreigner, she said, dismissing me.

I still want to marry her, I said, taking Tashi’s hand.

M’Lissa seemed confused. Nothing in her experience had prepared her for a possibility such as this.

I never saw the other women in the camp. M’Lissa told us they were all on missions of liberation. Tashi said she thought it was the women’s task to forage for food and to conduct raids against the plantations, most of them now left in the hands of loyal African retainers. A primary use of these raids was to recruit new warriors to swell the ranks of the Mbele rebels.

The operation she’d had done to herself joined her, she felt, to these women, whom she envisioned as strong, invincible. Completely woman. Completely African. Completely Olinka. In her imagination, on her long journey to the camp, they had seemed terribly bold, terribly revolutionary and free. She saw them leaping to the attack. It was only when she at last was told by M’Lissa, who one day unbound her legs, that she might sit up and walk a few steps that she noticed her own proud walk had become a shuffle.

It now took a quarter of an hour for her to pee. Her menstrual periods lasted ten days. She was incapacitated by cramps nearly half the month. There were premenstrual cramps: cramps caused by the near impossibility of flow passing through so tiny an aperture as M’Lissa had left, after fastening together the raw sides of Tashi’s vagina with a couple of thorns and inserting a straw so that in healing, the traumatized flesh might not grow together, shutting the opening completely; cramps caused by the residual flow that could not find its way out, was not reabsorbed into her body, and had nowhere to go. There was the odor, too, of soured blood, which no amount of scrubbing, until we got to America, ever washed off.