A Girl Named Disaster

34

Nhamo worked steadily for whoever would allow her to help. She walked a fine line between staying invisible (no one would notice her and send her away) and being useful (they would think she was valuable enough to keep). She was determined to live at Efifi—if only to feast her eyes as often as possible on Mother.

Dr. Masuku, for her part, was often impatient with the little shadow she had acquired. “Go haunt someone else!” she would cry. “You hang around like a tsetse fly!” And Nhamo would fade away, only to reappear later when she thought Mother wasn’t looking.

Nhamo observed Dr. van Heerden as he picked up dead flies with a pair of tweezers and put them into bottles. She was a little afraid of him. He was so big and hairy! His legs were like tree trunks, and nestled in the top of one of his long socks was a comb. Nhamo wondered if he used it to comb his legs. Dr. van Heerden warned her not to make any noise or touch anything or get in his way.

Once she had satisfied these conditions, though, he was willing to let her watch. In fact he became so absorbed he often forgot about her altogether. If he was feeling sociable, he called her his Wild Child and insisted she had been raised by jackals. “I saw your brothers near the goat pen, Wild Child. Tell them I’ll make a rug out of them if they get any ideas.”

Nhamo explained gently that she came from a proper village full of people.

“We’ll see what happens when the full moon arrives. I bet you’ll run through the forest with your tongue hanging out.”

There was no shaking him. She knew he was trying to be funny, so she didn’t take offense.

When Dr. van Heerden’s work went badly, his beard fluffed out like Fat Cheeks’s mane. “What are you smiling at?” he rumbled, peering at her over his bottles.

“I am happy,” said Nhamo.

“Go be happy somewhere else, Wild Child.”

The only person who never chased her away was Baba Joseph. He was stern, as an elder should be, but always welcoming. The fate of the old man’s guinea pigs upset her, though. Dr. van Heerden painted them with poison and put them under little wire baskets. The baskets fitted so tightly the animals could hardly wiggle as cages of tsetse flies were placed over them. They yelped and cried as they were bitten. The tsetses swelled up with blood until they looked ready to burst. It made Nhamo sick.

“It’s cruel,” agreed Baba Joseph, “but one day the things we learn will keep our cattle from dying.” He stuck his own arm into a tsetse cage. Nhamo covered her mouth to keep from crying out. The flies settled all over the old man’s skin and began swelling up. “I do this to learn what the guinea pigs are suffering,” he explained. “It’s wicked to cause pain, but if I share it, God may forgive me.”

Baba Joseph talked a lot about God. He and a number of the other villagers dressed all in white on Saturdays. The men shaved their heads and carried long wooden poles with a crook at the top. The women wore white head scarves. They met in the forest on Saturday afternoons to sing and pray. Baba Joseph was their leader.

“Excuse me, Baba. Are you Catholic?” Nhamo asked him.

“Catholic! Whatever gave you that idea?” The old man was affronted, and Nhamo was too overcome with embarrassment to say anything more.

“There’s more than one kind of Christian,” Sister Gladys explained. “Baba Joseph is a Vapostori. Those people don’t believe in medicine—if they get sick, they’d rather die than take a pill. I think they’re idiots.”

Whatever their opinion of Vapostoris, everyone deferred to Baba Joseph, even Dr. van Heerden: “The old man looks at you with those luminous eyes,” the Afrikaner told Mother, “and you find yourself saying, Yes, Baba. You want me to stand on my head with a flower up my schnozz? You got it, Baba.”

In the evening, the doctor sat outside his hut and drank beer. It wasn’t the stuff the villagers brewed. It came in brown bottles, like the beer Joao had given Grandmother long ago. Dr. van Heerden drank seven or eight, and the sweat poured off him like a river. At such times he let Nhamo lurk in the bushes while he talked to visitors.

It was a lot like the men’s dare, although Mother and Sister Gladys sometimes attended, and Nhamo learned a great deal from the conversations. Unlike her own village, Efifi was a mixture of Shona, Tonga, and Matabele, with one Afrikaner thrown in. The language was generally Shona, but smatterings of other tongues cropped up when people became excited.

Dr. Masuku was Matabele. At first this bothered Nhamo. She had been taught that the Matabele, traditional enemies of her people, were as cruel as hyenas. But she couldn’t imagine Mother doing anything bad. She knew it didn’t make sense that she, a Shona child, had a Matabele mother.

Mother wasn’t married, either, and never intended to be. “It’s just another name for slavery,” she declared. Nhamo thought this was astounding. How could you become an ancestor if you didn’t have children? How could you become anything without a husband? But Mother insisted that marriage was the worst thing that could happen to an intelligent woman.

She and Dr. van Heerden argued about it frequently. “What you need is a nest of little babies, Everjoice,” the Afrikaner would announce after his fourth beer. “I can see them cheeping, ‘Mama! Mama!’ You’ll go all soft like a pat of butter. You’ve got motherhood written all over you.”

“I’d rather swim through a pool of starving crocodiles,” Mother said.

“Even the Wild Child knows.” Dr. van Heerden held a bottle of beer against his face to cool off. “She follows you like a little shadow.”

“The Wild Child has imprinted on me. I was the first thing she saw after her ordeal in the forest.”

Nhamo didn’t know what imprinting was and she didn’t bother her head about it. Her spirit told her Mother’s true identity. That was all that mattered.

Her life drifted on in an aimless fashion. She knew she ought to ask about nuns. She knew it was important to locate Father, but she couldn’t bring herself to leave Mother. Sometimes, when she was washing sheets at the hospital or gathering vegetables for the guinea pigs, a great craving came over her. She carefully put down her work and trotted off to the laboratories.

Ah! There was Mother with her eye pressed to a metal tube called a microscope. Nhamo would watch for a while, suffused with happiness. Dr. Masuku would eventually look up and say, “Stop sneaking up on me! You made me break a slide!”

Little by little Nhamo took over Baba Joseph’s chores. He was grateful to let her handle things that had become difficult for his old body. He watched her carefully and instructed her in new duties when he thought she was ready. She worked willingly, even feeding the warthog, which snorted alarmingly when she approached. The only animal she could not bring herself to care for was the crocodile. It was given an occasional fish and the bodies of the guinea pigs when they died.

She was particularly helpful on Saturdays. Saturdays were sacred to the Vapostori. They weren’t allowed to work all day. Baba Joseph always worried that he had not left enough food and water for his animals, but now he could relax. Nhamo looked after everything—except the crocodile. It can dry up like an old cow patty for all I care, she thought privately.

When she was finished, she helped Sister Gladys, and then she hurried to the forest to spy on the Vapostori.

They spent the afternoon in a clearing. The men sat on one side and the women on the other with an aisle in between. One or another of the worshippers would stand and begin the singing:

“Kwese, kwese,

Tinovona vanhu hamuzivi Kristu…

Everywhere, everywhere,

We see people who do not know Christ…”

This was, Nhamo learned, a call for the angels to come down from Mwari’s country and hover over the gathering. She had asked Baba Joseph if angels were the same as ancestral spirits, and he had been vague about it.

Next, the Vapostori knelt in the direction of the rising sun and extended their arms with the palms upward.

“Mwari komberera Africa, alleluia!

Chisua yemina matu yedu.

Mwari, Baba, Jesu utukomborera…

Mwari save Africa, alleluia!

Hear our prayers.

Mwari, Father, Jesus bless us…”

Nhamo understood why one would pray to Mwari and one’s father, but Jesus was an ngozi. She didn’t think it was at all wise to attract his attention.

Sometimes Baba Joseph would pace the aisle between the men and women and tell them stories or scold them if they hadn’t been good. He warned them about drinking or taking other men’s wives. “Doing these things is like making a telephone call to Satan,” he cried. The others would echo his words or make their voices sound like drums or musical instruments backing up his sermon—although the Vapostori used no actual instruments in their ceremonies.

The whole thing was extremely pleasant to listen to.

After a while Nhamo left to check up on the animals. She lifted the tortoise from its pen and let it lumber across the animal house for exercise. “You mustn’t drink alcohol or take one another’s wives,” she commanded the guinea pigs, who watched her hopefully for vegetables. “I won’t warn you about making phone calls to Satan,” she told the crocodile. “I’m sure you’ve done it many times.”

Nhamo sat with her back against the duiker stall and surveyed her kingdom. She hadn’t told a story for a long time—not since Mother’s picture burned up. She had been too absorbed with watching Dr. van Heerden’s beard fluff out like Fat Cheeks’s mane or with the warthog trailing around after Baba Joseph. Besides, if Nhamo wanted to talk, Mother was easy to find—although often unwilling to listen.

Now Nhamo’s spirit moved with the desire to speak. She paced between the cages as Baba Joseph did between the men and women of the Vapostori.

“Once upon a time there were three kings who went to Mwari and asked for the ceremonial stone that brings rain when needed,” Nhamo said. “They lived in Mwari’s country, so I think they were probably angels. Anyhow,” she said, stroking the duiker, which confidently thrust its nose at her, “Mwari refused them, saying, ‘I cannot give this stone to you because only your people would prosper. Rain is for everyone.’

“The kings became angry and said, ‘We thought you were God, but it seems you were only fooling us. We don’t believe you have any power. We won’t obey you any longer.’

“Mwari said, ‘I will give you each a sign so that you may know I am God.’ He told the first king, ‘You will die because your fingers will drop off. I give you the disease called leprosy.’ To the second king he said, ‘You will die because you will fall into the fire. I give you epilepsy.’ And to the third king he said, ‘You will die because your flesh will be consumed. I give you tuberculosis.’ Then Mwari cast them out of his country.

“The first king washed himself in a river and sacrificed a goat. His disease, leprosy, transferred itself to the goat, which was devoured by a crocodile. Since that time crocodiles have been able to give leprosy to humans.

“The second king put his spittle on the wings of a Namaqualand dove. Ever since then, the dove has been able to give epilepsy to humans.

“The third king breathed on a basket of wheat. His disease blew away with the chaff. This is why wheat chaff is able to give people tuberculosis.”

Nhamo retrieved the tortoise, which had wedged itself between two guinea-pig pens. She pointed it in the opposite direction and gave it a trail of lettuce leaves to follow.

“I hope Baba Joseph has never touched that ugly crocodile, ” she said as she dangled a sprig of lucerne over the guinea pigs to see if she could make them stand on their hind legs. “I’m sure it’s loaded with leprosy.” In the far distance she heard the voices of the Vapostori. They were really getting into it. Sometimes they got so carried away they didn’t even use words. They yodeled any strange thing as loud as they could, and the next day everyone came to work with sore throats.