A Girl Named Disaster

33

I am not your mother,” the woman said crossly. Nhamo sank into happy oblivion again. If Mother wanted to disagree, that was her business. She was not mistaken about the braided hair decorated with beads. She recognized the flowered dress. They were exactly like the photograph.

Nhamo dozed, woke to be fed, and dozed again. Never had she been so contented. After a while an old man dressed in a white robe sat by her bed and murmured charms. “Are you my grandfather?” she asked. The old man looked startled.

She snuggled into the bed, which was softer than anything she had ever known. A woman-spirit stuck a thorn into her arm. It hurt, but Nhamo accepted it as part of the strange rituals of the spirit world. Then the old man was back with a black book, which he read with his lips moving.

“Oh, Grandfather. I’m so glad to see you,” Nhamo murmured. “Ambuya said I would meet you someday. Did you know Mother can read? She’s so clever! Is Aunt Shuvai here? I miss her…”

“Sh. You must rest,” said the old man.

Nhamo obediently went back to sleep.

She talked to Mother, sharing with her things that had happened since the picture was destroyed. “Poor Rumpy. He never had any luck,” she sighed. “I wonder whether he was really a human who had eaten his totem. Do you know?”

“He was only a baboon,” said Mother firmly.

Gradually, Nhamo became more aware of her surroundings. The woman-spirit was called Sister Gladys.* She was kept busy mixing things up in bottles and writing in a book. She was very respectful to Mother. The old man was called Baba Joseph and he often came to talk. She didn’t understand half of what he said, but it didn’t matter. His voice was very soothing.

And gradually she became aware that she wasn’t dead after all and that Baba Joseph wasn’t her grandfather. But she stubbornly refused to give up on Mother. Other people might call her Dr. Everjoice Masuku. Nhamo knew differently.

She was so sleepy! It was all she could do to keep her eyes open more than a minute. She lay in the soft bed, and now and then drifted off into dreams.

“What’s wrong with her?” said an unfamiliar man’s voice.

“What isn’t wrong with her? Malaria, bilharzia, malnutrition, ” said Mother. “When I picked her up, I could have sworn her bones were hollow.”

“Her feet are scarred.”

“That’s an old burn. You should feel the soles. They’re like hooves.”

“How long was she out there?” the man asked.

“Months. She keeps raving about water spirits and a dead boatman and a baboon she thinks was human.” The woman sat next to the bed. Nhamo could smell the soap she used.

“Is she insane?”

Insane! Nhamo was insulted.

“She was alone an awfully long time,” said Mother.

Nhamo opened her eyes to protest when she saw the man. He was an enormous whiteman with a bristling beard. His arm was as big as her waist. “No!” she yelled, scrambling out of bed. She fell to the floor with the sheet wrapped around her and tried to crawl away on her hands and knees.

“Stop that!” Mother cried. She hauled Nhamo back.

“No! No! No!”

“She doesn’t seem to like you, Hendrik,” Mother said as Nhamo tried to squirm out of her grasp.

The whiteman shrugged. “At least she doesn’t think I’m her mommy.” He lumbered out of the room, and Nhamo’s breathing became regular again.

“Why are you so afraid of Dr. van Heerden?” Mother asked.

Nhamo told her about the man with the dogs and gun. She didn’t mention Long Teats or killing the dog, however. She didn’t want to be accused of being a witch.

“That’s terrible! You probably don’t know this, but not long ago we had a civil war here—white people against black. Some of the hatred is still around. I wish I knew the man’s name. I’d set the police on him.”

“How could he hate black people when his junior wife was black?” Nhamo asked logically. She described the house and the wonderful dinner.

Mother laughed. “Englishmen aren’t allowed more than one wife, and anyhow they almost always marry Englishwomen. That was a servant.”

“Is Dr. van Heerden English, Mai?”

“Don’t call me Mai. I’m not your mother.”

“Yes, Dr. Masuku.”

“Dr. van Heerden is Afrikaans. It’s a different kind of white person. He doesn’t like to be bothered by children, so stay out of his way.”

“Yes, Mai—Dr. Masuku.”

After a few days Nhamo was allowed out of bed. She was given a new dress-cloth because the old one was torn and foul with dog blood. Sister Gladys had burned it. Nhamo’s bag of gold nuggets had disappeared during the period when she believed herself dead. She was afraid to complain. Dr. van Heerden must have taken it to pay for my supplies, she decided.

She was delighted with the new cloth, though. It was green and red with a pattern of jongwe, or roosters. “That’s my name,” she told Sister Gladys proudly.

Nhamo went to the long mirror at the end of the hospital corridor to admire herself. She stood there a long time. Then she folded up on the floor and burst into tears.

“Now what?” said Sister Gladys.

“I’m—I’m so ugly,” Nhamo hiccuped. The creature she had seen in the Englishman’s house wasn’t a moving picture after all. It was her. She looked like a wall spider with a burr stuck to its head.

“You’re only thin,” the nurse said kindly. “Anyhow, Baba Joseph says the important thing is the soul.”

This did not make Nhamo feel any better.

As soon as she was strong enough, Nhamo volunteered to help. Sister Gladys was pleased to have someone to scrub floors. She taught Nhamo how to make beds and how to use the electric stove to prepare sadza. Nhamo was enchanted by the stove. No more collecting firewood. No more worrying about leopards creeping up on her in the forest. She loved electricity!

It was made by something Sister Gladys called a generator. Dr. van Heerden fed it a kind of smelly liquid, and it hummed away as it made the lights shine and the stove hot. Late at night the generator was turned off, and then they had to use lamps like the ones Joao had at the trading post.

Nhamo quickly saw that she had landed in a very strange village. It was called Efifi and was stuck in the middle of a wilderness. There were vegetable gardens, cattle and goat pens, and fields of lucerne* for the animals. There were the usual huts and granaries, but along with them were large buildings devoted to what Mother (Dr. Masuku, Nhamo reminded herself) called science.

Nhamo learned new words every day. Science was the kind of work people did in Efifi. It consisted of catching and destroying tsetse flies.

Tsetse flies carried a sickness that killed cattle, horses, pigs, goats, and donkeys. The livestock at Efifi had to be given medicine every few weeks or they would die. Normally, no one would have kept domestic animals in such a lethal place, but the creatures had a very special purpose.

They were bait. Every day they were driven into the underground chamber Nhamo had seen, and a huge fan blew their smell through the forest. Tsetse flies came from miles around. They landed on the trap, crawled inside to find something to bite, and couldn’t get out again.

Dr. van Heerden brought live insects back to his science house (which Nhamo learned was called a laboratory). There he let them bite animals that had been painted with poison. The whiteman was also trying to put the smell of cattle into a bottle. He wanted to bait traps all over the forest.

Everyone at Efifi had something to do with science. Dr. Masuku was looking for a disease to make the tsetses sick. Nhamo was amazed to learn that flies could get sick, just like people.

Baba Joseph was in charge of the animal building. He cared for herds of guinea pigs, which resembled small dassies. The guinea pigs squealed shrilly when he brought them food. After a few days he let Nhamo feed them, too. She covered her ears when the little creatures streamed out of their smelly pens, but she was charmed by the confident way they nibbled lucerne from her hands.

Baba Joseph had several pets: a duiker antelope, a bush baby, a large tortoise, and an enormous warthog that waddled after him, begging for treats. Nhamo realized that the old man was a very great nganga. He could get wild animals to obey him. He was also in charge of a small crocodile Dr. van Heerden insisted on keeping. Neither Nhamo nor Baba Joseph liked the crocodile. It eyed them in a most calculating way and once, when Nhamo teased it with a stick, it rose up with its yellow mouth open wider than she had dreamed possible. She clawed herself halfway up the wall. Baba Joseph laughed so hard he had to sit down and wipe his face.

Other people at Efifi concerned themselves with farming, herding, and carpentry. Two men were detailed to drive away an elephant that liked to raid the fields. Every night they patrolled, calling out “Iwe! Hamba! Hey, you! Go away!” The elephant was well aware that no one was allowed to shoot him. He went where he pleased, and the only thing that could move him on were the large firecrackers the men threw at his feet.

They had to be extra careful, Baba Joseph said, because it was never certain whether the elephant was going to run away from or toward them.

Sister Gladys took care of the inevitable accidents.

The one thing Efifi did not contain was children, and there were almost no women. Everyone had another home where he kept his family, and which he visited regularly. Nhamo thought this was a strange arrangement, but Mother explained that Efifi wasn’t a healthy place for children.

*Nurses are called “sister” in Zimbabwe. Sister Gladys is not a Catholic nun.

*lucerne: Alfalfa.