The Tomorrow-Tamer (19 page)

Gradually, the dwarf's health improved. He would never be anything but fragile, but the exhausting cough disappeared and he seemed to find breathing less a burden than it had been. His skin, mercifully, lost some of its crinkled sogginess. Moses no longer found him repulsive to look at, but whether this change was due to an actual improvement in Godman's appearance or merely to an acceptance born of familiarity, Moses did not know. He brought home bottles of codliver oil and samples of vitamin pills for the ex-oracle. He was not prompted by sentiment or any real concern. But a pharmacist could not allow an obvious case of malnutrition and vitamin deficiency to remain untreated in his house. Besides, as Godman grew stronger, he was able to earn his board by doing some of the household tasks. Moses prided himself upon being a practical man.

And yet, one night when Godman went out to buy cigarettes for Moses from a trader woman who had a stall across the road, and did not return, Moses set out to look for him. He finally found him near a cluster of roadside stalls some distance away, crouched in a gutter, unable to fend off the stick-thrusting urchins who were tormenting him. The trader woman near the house had closed her stall, and he had not wanted to return without the cigarettes. Moses slapped and swore at the boys, who seemed stunned at his sudden and furious descent upon them. Then he picked up Godman and carried him home like a child.

In the months that followed, Godman became quite adept at cooking. He often spent most of the day preparing
some favourite food for Moses–groundnut stew, soup with snails, ripe plantain cakes.

“I like to see you eat,” he said once, as Moses took another helping. “What an appetite you've got! No wonder you are such a strong man. Now, I'll tell you how I learned to make this dish. The big woman upstairs–you know, the big big one, wears an orange cloth patterned with little insects, they look like dung beetles to me, just the thing for her, her breath stinks, no wonder, she's always eating sweets, what can you expect–well, she showed me. She put her charcoal burner on the stoep outside our window and she saw me watching her, so she offered to show me just how she made the soup. The cocoyam leaves must not be boiled too long, that's the thing. And when you take the snails out of their shells, you wash them in water with lime juice. Clever, eh?”

“Very clever,” Moses said, with his mouth full. “If you learned man's work half as well as you learn women's, you would be a great success.”

Godman looked offended. “The white men have men for their cooks, and you are more important than any white man. Of course, if you do not want me to make soup for you–”

“I was joking,” Moses said hastily. “I'm sorry. The soup is fine. I have never tasted better.”

And Godman, mollified, sang to himself in an un-musical croak as he cleared away the dishes.

Moses bought several pieces of tradecloth for the dwarf, to replace his flimsy rags. When Godman saw them, he seized one and draped it around himself at once. Then he rushed around the room to the dresser, scrambled up, and stood for a long time, silent, looking into the mirror, awed by his own splendour.

“Oh, I am a chief, a king. See there, the fishes on the cloth, that blue one, he with the tail like a palm leaf–oh, and
the red of his eyes! The greatest of all fish, isn't he? And the snail, see, just like the ones I put in the soup. Oh, did any person ever see such a fine cloth as this?”

Moses turned away, feeling a sense of sadness and shame at how little this richness had cost him.

That same week, Moses first met Mercy Ansah. Mercy was a teacher in a primary school. She was pretty and intelligent; her family was reasonably well off, but not so rich that Moses need feel the girl was out of his reach. He began to take her out frequently, and several times he went to her home for dinner. He wondered if it would be proper to invite her to his place. He had no family here, but Godman would prepare the meal.

Godman. Moses felt sick. Could he say to Mercy Ansah–“There is a certain dwarf, formerly an oracle, who shares my dwelling–”? Mercy would think he was insane. The situation had gone far enough. However helpless, Godman would have to go.

But if Godman went, Moses would have to go back to preparing his own unappetizing meals. Either that or buy his food in some grimy chop-bar. All at once Moses saw that he was wondering not how the dwarf would manage alone, but how he himself would manage without Godman.

Moses was so distressed by the realization that he refused to think about it. He invited Mercy for dinner, and he explained nothing. Mercy, far from being repelled by the dwarf, seemed to find him interesting. Perhaps she regarded Godman only as a curiosity–Moses could not tell. But she praised the little man's cooking, and when Godman had left the room, she spoke of him again.

“You are quite lucky, Moses, to have such a good servant.”

Moses blinked. Of course. That was why Godman's presence had not seemed strange to her. She had simply assumed Godman was his servant.

“Yes,” he said slowly, “perhaps I am lucky.”

“Do you pay regular wages for such a small man?” Mercy laughed.

Moses did not reply.

When he returned after taking Mercy Ansah home, Moses found Godman still awake and waiting for him.

“What a fine woman she is! What a splendid choice! Is her father rich? You will marry her? She has a good heart–in her voice and her eyes, it was plain. She is gentle. You must marry a gentle woman, not one of those shrewish ones who nag and yelp. What a pair you will make! And oh, my master, what children you will have!”

Moses sat down tiredly.

“Godman, listen to me. I cannot afford to have a servant, and anyway, I do not want one. Somehow I had not seen until tonight–it happened so gradually–the work you do–”

“Do I not work well? Are you displeased with me? The groundnut stew–oh, I prepared it carefully, carefully, I swear it–”

“Yes, yes, it was a fine stew,” Moses said impatiently. “Only–you do not know some things about living as a man. A man–a man has to work and be paid for it. I cannot pay you, Godman.”

“Sometimes you speak so strangely. It grieves me when I do not know what you mean. Pay? You do pay me. You protect me. What could I do alone? Without you, I am nameless, a toad that the boys stone. Oh, I bless your strength–have I not said so? Where is there a man like my master?”

“Stop it!” Moses shouted. “You must not call me that. You are not my servant.”

“I have called you master before, many times,” Godman said reproachfully, “and you never became angry. Why are you so angry now?”

Moses stared. “Before? You said it before? And I did not even–”

“Anyway, what does it matter?” Godman continued. “It is all foolishness, this talk. Why should I not call you master? You are my master–and more–”

Then he capered like a dusty night-moth.

“Oh, I see it now!” he cried. “Of course you are angry. I am stupid, stupid! My head is the head of an earthworm, small and blind. Every servant says ‘master' and what does he mean by it? Nothing. But for me, it was not that. Did you not know–can you not have realized what I meant?”

“What are you trying to say? Say it.”

“You are my priest,” Godman said. “What else?”

Moses could not speak. Godman's priest, the soul-master, he who owned a man. Had Godman only moved from the simple bondage of the amber-eyed Faru to another bondage? And as for Moses himself–what became of a deliverer who had led with such assurance out of the old and obvious night, only to falter into a subtler darkness, where new-carved idols bore the known face, his own? Horrified, Moses wondered how much he had come to depend on Godman's praise.

“Godman, try–try to understand. That is a word you must not speak. Not to me. Never, never to me.”

Godman looked puzzled.

“You saved me,” he said. “You cannot deny that you saved me. I would have died if I had stayed there much longer. You lifted the lid of the box and let me out. It was no other
man. You were the one. Who else, then, should protect me? Who else should I serve? Who else's name should I forever bless? You freed me. I am yours.”

Moses put his head down onto his hands.

“There is more to freedom,” he said, “than not living in a box.”

Godman fixed ancient eyes upon Moses.

“You would not think so if you had ever lived in a box.”

Moses raised his head and forced himself to look at the dwarf. He and Godman were bound together with a cord more delicate, more difficult to see, than any spun by the children of Ananse. Yet it was a cord which could strangle.

“You have been here too long,” Moses said dully. “The time has come for you to go.”

The little man, seeing from Moses' face that he was in earnest, began to moan and mourn, hugging his arms around himself and swaying to and fro in an anguish that was both ridiculous and terrible.

“Why, why, why? What have I done? How have I offended you? Why do you forsake me? Oh, I did not know you had such a sickness in your heart. And I am not ready to go–I am not ready yet–I will die, certainly–”

Moses felt a saving anger.

“No one is ever ready,” he said. “And you will not die.”

But later, after the arguments and the explanations he knew to be useless, when at last he locked his door and turned off his lamp and could hear only the sound of his own breathing, Moses no longer felt certain. All that night he lay awake in case there should be a faint rustling at his door. But none came.

 

In the next few weeks, Moses worried a good deal and asked himself unanswerable questions and sometimes saw in
dreams the oracle as he had appeared in that first glimpse–a fragment of damp and flaccid skin, a twist of rag on the festering straw. Then Moses would waken, sweating and listening, and would smoke one cigarette after another until he was able to push the picture from his mind. But after a while he thought of Godman less and less, and finally he thought of him scarcely at all.

One evening, about a year later, when he returned after work to the whitewashed bungalow that was his home now, his wife Mercy handed him that day's newspaper.

“Look, Moses–”

It was a large advertisement for a travelling troupe of jugglers, snake-charmers and sleight-of-hand magicians. In one corner was a photograph of a very small man, a man not three feet tall, a toy-sized man dressed in an embroidered robe and a turban. Moses read the words under the picture.

 

Half god                                  Half man

SEE REAL LIVE ORACLE

Hundreds of years old

Smallest man alive

–Foretells future–

 

Moses put down the paper. “An oracle–it was the only thing he knew how to be. Half man–did you see? A halfman.”

“Moses–don't blame yourself.”

Moses turned on her. “Who else? I should have known no one would hire him for any proper work.”

“He really couldn't have stayed,” Mercy said primly. “It was all very well when you were a single man. But I could not have stood it for long–to have him running around the house like a weird child, wrinkled and old–”

“That is not why I made him go,” Moses snapped. “It was–something else.”

“I know,” Mercy said at once. “Yes, I know. You told me.”

It was true that he had told her. But she did not know. No one knew, least of all Godman himself.

“I thought I was doing what had to be done,” Moses said. “But now–I wonder who owns him this time?”

“Will you go there?” Mercy asked.

“No,” Moses said fiercely. “I don't want to see him.”

But of course he did go. The show was in a great grey flapping tent at the edge of town. Moses pushed and elbowed his way through the crowd that waited to be admitted, shouting young men and their gay-talking girls. Inside the tent was a long stage, and there sat Godman, flamboyant as a canna lily in scarlet turban and green robe. When the little man saw Moses, he jumped down and ran towards him.

“Mister Adu! It is my old friend! I never thought to see your face again. Here–come and sit down behind this curtain. We can talk until the people come in.”

“How are you, Godman?” Moses asked uncertainly. “Do they treat you well?”

“Oh yes. They give me money, you know, and the food is plentiful. Moving around all the time, I find it is hard on my lungs–different air in each place, so the lungs have trouble sometimes. My old cough comes back in the rainy season. But I cannot really complain. Do you like my robe? I have four, all different colours, and a silk turban to go with each.”

“You are still an oracle,” Moses said tonelessly. “You have not changed much.”

The little man looked at him in surprise.

“What did you expect?” he said haughtily. “Did you think I would turn into a giant? Lucky for me I am alive at all,
after the way you treated me. Oh, I don't hold it against you now, but you must admit it was cruel, almost as cruel as Faru, whose eye still burns at me when I sleep. I stayed under the
niim
tree outside your house that night–you never knew I was there. I could not move my legs. They were dead with fear, two pillars of stone. But in the morning I crawled away, and oh, the things that have happened since that day–it would take me a year and more than a year to tell you. For I ate cat, and slept cold, and trapped cutting-grass, and shrivelled in the sun like a seed. And I drank palm wine with a blind beggar, and pimped for a painted girl, and sang like a bird with a mission band for the white man's god. And I rode a blue mammy-lorry with a laughing driver who feared the night voices, and I walked the forest with a leper who taught me to speak pidgin, and I caught a parrot and tamed it and put into its mouth the words ‘money sweet' and we begged together until I tired of it and sold it to an old woman who had no daughters. And–the rest I forget.”