Various Flavors of Coffee (37 page)

“I have said nothing to her, of course, and would not do so without your permission. But I find that she and I have many interests in common, and she is such delightful company—a credit to the way you have brought her up, if I may say so.”

Pinker raises his eyebrows.

“I was wondering if I might be permitted to get to know her a little better,”Arthur explains.

“Permitted?” Pinker says, barking cigar smoke like some furious dragon. “Permitted? You want my permission to woo my daughter?”

Arthur, holding his nerve, nods.“That is correct.”

Abruptly Pinker’s face creases into a smile. “My dear fellow, I was hoping that you already were.”

[
fifty-nine
]

he rains had come at last. A great deluge of gray water poured from the sky as if from a gigantic waterfall.

Meanwhile, the villagers discussed the question of what to do with Massa Wallis.The Tamils took little part in these discussions. Now that the farm had no effective master, and they had no certainty of being paid, they slipped off into the jungle in ones and twos, looking for other plantations to work on.

The water got into the farm buildings, so the villagers took them apart and used the wood to construct round huts with thatched roofs which they knew would be waterproof. The rain softened the ground, so they took up some of the diseased coffee seedlings and put down yams and maize.After all, there was plenty of coffee in the jungle already, and a man could not fill his belly with coffee.

It seemed, however, that one man was going to try. Massa Wallis stayed in Kiku’s hut, existing only on coffee and
khat,
sleeping for a few hours at a time before waking again, sometimes sobbing and banging his head against the ground in his madness.

“The enchantment is wearing off slowly,” Kiku said to the

others, “and there is little we can do to hurry it. So he might as well chew, if it helps the pain.”

Only once
did Massa Wallis rouse himself from his torpor, and that was when a trader arrived at the farm, an agent for one of the new companies that were bringing goods in and out of the jungle. He was accompanied by two mules, each of which had strapped to its back a hefty wooden crate.The trader, a Somali, was dressed in the clothes of a white man, a thing the villagers had never seen be-fore.

“I am delivering the goods that Mister Wallis has ordered,” he informed an astonished Tahomen.“Where is he?”

Tahomen was further astonished to see Massa Wallis emerge from Kiku’s hut, his eyes bright.“My guns!” he shouted.“The guns have arrived.”

The crates were unloaded from the mules, and Jimo was set to work levering the crates open with the edge of an axe.There was a note, which Wallis opened and scanned.

Wallis,

I am sending twelve of the latest Remingtons, as requested. If you think you can sell more, send more money.

Yrs, Hammond

“Sell more?” Wallis muttered. “Of course I can sell more. Get that open, will you Jimo? At last—”

He stepped forward and pulled something heavy out of the crate. Quickly he unwrapped it from its oilcloth covering.

It was a device such as the villagers had never seen the like of— four rows of buttons set on levers, and then above those, a wide semicircle of teeth, which gave the machine the appearance of be—

the various flavors of coffee
*
351

ing topped by a grinning jawbone. For a moment Wallis seemed quite stunned. Then he put the machine down and started to laugh. For long minutes he continued to cackle, doubled up as if in pain, tears streaming from his eyes. The villagers smiled politely, unsure of the exact nature of the joke but ready to be amused.

“Hammond, you bloody fool,” Wallis gasped. Looking at Tahomen, he spoke a series of words that were incomprehensible to the headman.“He’s sent me a dozen bloody typewriters.”

After the arrival
of the crates, the white man retreated once more to Kiku’s hut. It was as if he had been placed under a new spell of death: he simply turned his face to the wall.

“Will he die?”Tahomen asked his wife.

“Perhaps, if he wants to. It’s not like having a curse put on you by a sorcerer—Massa Wallis has cursed himself. Only he can decide if he will let it be lifted.”

Every morning she made him coffee, thick and dark, murmuring the old prayer as she ground it:

Coffee-pot give us peace

Coffee-pot let our children grow Protect us from evil

Give us rain and grass.

But Massa Wallis left the coffee untouched, and only chewed more
khat
.

I will ask
the forest what to do, Kiku decided. She went into the jungle and sat very still, listening to the myriad whispers of the
ayyanaa
. Already the land that had been cleared for the coffee

plants was thick with weeds: soon the trees would start to spread inward from the jungle, and eventually the great hole in the forest would close up again, as skin grows back to close a healing wound. As so often, the forest did not give her any answers directly.

Instead, it allowed her mind to settle, until the answer became obvious and she realized that it had been staring her in the face all along.

[
sixty
]

“Medicinal”—a secondary coffee taste sensation related to “harsh.”

—lingle,
The Coffee Cupper’s Handbook

*

hey carried Massa Wallis into the hut that was re-
served for healing and laid him on the floor. The hut contained a firepit, but no smoke opening in the roof. In the firepit Kiku had heaped up a good mound of leaves and bark from the iboga bush. There was coffee, too, because coffee made the iboga

more powerful, and a paste made from crushed iboga roots.

As the acrid iboga smoke filled the hut, Kiku cut away Massa Wallis’s clothes and painted his body with the patterns of his age-clan.Then she took the bowl of paste and carefully smeared some on his lips and gums, before doing the same to herself.

“What are you doing?” he murmured.

“Where we are going, we will go together,” she promised him in Galla. Then she sat down beside him to wait, her hand resting lightly on his wrist so that the
zar
spirits would not come and fly off with him without taking her as well.

• • •

Time in the
dream hut was rarely the same as time on the outside, but even so it seemed to Kiku to be an unusually long while be-fore she felt the tapping of the spirits on the roof as they arrived. Massa Wallis stiffened, and lifted a few inches off the floor as the
zar
tried to hoist him on their shoulders, but Kiku held him firmly until they deigned to notice her.

“Who are you?” one of the spirits asked her threateningly. “I am his guide, to see he is safe.”

“Why? He does not belong to you.” “He is our visitor. I must look after him.”

She could hear the
zar
conferring amongst themselves.“We are not your
zar,”
they said at last. “We have come a long way to take this man.This has nothing to do with you.”

“You are not our
zar,
but this is our hut, and he is under the protection of our hospitality. He has been painted with our markings.”

“We have far to travel, and you will not be able to turn back.” “Even so, I am ready to come with you,” she answered.

They floated up,
over the valley, and for the first time Kiku was able to look down and see the changes that the white men had made—not just the physical ones, like the clearing of the forest, but the complex webs of kinships and clan bonds that the iboga paste made visible, and which had been even more savagely deci-mated than the trees. Though the forest would heal itself, she did not know if the tribe’s social structure had the same resilience.

On and on they flew, over Harar and over the desert, over the great sea and mountains locked in snow.They flew to a place that was strange even by the standards of iboga journeys, a place full of

gray stone boxes and many straight lines, and she understood that this was the white man’s village.

The
zar
tried to separate them, but with an effort of will Kiku held on to Massa Wallis, turning as they dropped down so that he was riding on her back, so she saw what happened next as if through his eyes.

A middle-aged
woman stands at a table. She is working her way through a great pile of leaflets, folding them and placing them in a neat stack. Just as it looks as if the stack must topple, another woman, rather younger, comes in and takes them, removing them to another table where they are matched with envelopes. It is clear they have been working this way for some time.

Both women have the multicolored outlines people acquire af-ter you have taken iboga, but it is possible to tell that this younger one is well featured. From the way Massa Wallis catches his breath at the sight of her, Kiku realizes that this woman is important to him. So they move over to the second table, where they watch her putting leaflets into envelopes.

The woman cannot see them, but her delicate nostrils flare and she turns in their direction, a puzzled expression on her face. For a moment she seems to sniff the air.

“Mary?” she calls.

The other woman looks up. “Can you smell coffee?”

“No. Only printer’s ink. And I have cut my fingers three times on these dratted leaflets. Shall we stop for some tea?”

“Yes, you must certainly stop,” a man says, entering the room. “It will be our first piece of legislation—no one shall fold constituency leaflets for more than two hours without a tea-break.”

“In that case we shall have to work on. Because we have only

been doing this forty minutes,” the younger woman says drily. But her face lights when she speaks to the newcomer.

“I’ll put the kettle on,” Mary says. As she passes the younger woman she murmurs,“I may be a while—that kettle is a slow one.” When she has gone there is a silence. Kiku might not understand the white people’s words, but their silence is another matter altogether. In Galla there are many kinds of silence, from the awkward pause to the companionable hush, and she sees immediately

that this particular silence is one of flirtatious anticipation. “There is a meeting tonight,” the man begins.“I am afraid I am

expected to attend, but I was wondering—if you are not too tired—if you could bear to come with me, as my guest.”

“What is the subject?”

“Home Rule.” He spreads his arms.“We must find a way to get a bill through the Lords. As it stands, the landowners have made it clear they will block any attempt to settle the Irish question.”

“I should like that very much, Arthur.” “Really? You would not be bored?”

“I should be fascinated,” she assures him. “Will Sir Henry be there?”

“He is the main speaker.”

“I will look forward to it, then.They say he is a wonderful ora-tor, and in any case, it will be a pleasure to accompany you.”

On Kiku’s back, Massa Wallis gives out a terrible sob.

Wallis was
getting heavy now, and the outlines of the people in the room more colorful. It was time to leave. Kiku felt the
zar
placing strong hands under her arms, lifting her. But they had come too far and stayed too long:Wallis was so heavy, and Kiku so tired, that the
zar
could not raise them. For a moment it seemed they would not be able to leave. It happened in some cases, she knew: people fell into the iboga trance and for one reason or other

never returned, condemning their spirits to wander the earth forever, invisible and homeless.With a great effort she launched herself into the air. She felt the
zar
tugging, and then they were airborne again, drifting over the seething termite nest that was the white man’s village, slowly at first, and then with mounting speed over the sea.

Back at the
healing hut, Massa Wallis fell into a deep sleep. Kiku spoke the charms that thanked the
zar
for their help, wishing them a safe journey back to where they had come from.Then she took a sharpened porcupine quill and carefully dipped it, first into the iboga ash in the firepit, and then into the tribal markings on Massa Wallis’s chest. The sharp tip pierced the skin: the gray ash, still slightly toxic, would make the skin raise and harden in the dotted pattern that described Robert Wallis’s initiation into his age-clan.

While Wallis
slept, Kiku went to seek out Tahomen.“I have had a thought,” she said diffidently.

He knew her too well to believe that it was really only a thought.“Go on.”

“I think Massa Wallis should have Alaya as his servant.” Tahomen tried to digest this.“Why Alaya?”

“Because she is the prettiest of the young women.” “You want her to share his bed?”

She shook her head.“I think he is too sick for that just now. But a pretty face will be good for him. And it will give her something to do.”

Tahomen looked into the distance, still busy digesting. Even by Kiku’s standards, this suggestion was a lot to get one’s head round. “If Alaya does become the white man’s servant,” he said, “she

will not be there when I wish to go to her.”

“Then it is lucky that you have another wife.”

“So Bayanna’s spear will no longer be outside your hut?” “Bayanna’s spear . . .” Kiku said thoughtfully, “does not always

fly quite as straight, or as far, as he would like to think.”

Tahomen cackled. “Are men so very simple,” he asked, “that a pretty face alone can lift a curse?”

“Are you saying my suggestion is obvious?”

“Of course not,”Tahomen said hastily. “Just simple.Which is a very different thing.”

“Hmm,” she said, mollified. “Well, yes, men are simple. But so are women, when it comes down to it.”

“Why? What do women want?”

“They want . . .” She paused. “They want never to be asked what they want.”