Child of the Journey (40 page)

A tall, sinewy-muscled Black who had been staring at Erich put a hand on Bruqah's shoulder. Bending, he whispered in the Malagasy's ear. Bruqah nodded, and the man stepped back.

Erich feigned disinterest.

"What did
he
want?" Perón asked irritably, but quietly.

Bruqah leaned across the table toward Erich. "I tell you, Herr Oberst, if you promise you don't go fly off the stove." Apparently not expecting Erich to answer, Bruqah said, "This man and the others...they want to see your hand."

"It's none of their goddamn business." Erich spoke without emotion. As was his habit, he held his right hand over his left.

"They think your hand is magic."

Erich moved both hands off the table without revealing his dead fingers and unsnapped the holster strap of his pistol. Fear and anger displaced curiosity in the faces around him.

Leni touched his forearm. "They mean no harm." She flashed him a look that said,
Stay calm. For me.

He slid his left hand beneath his leg and snapped his right fingers for another beer. Another infantile female contradiction, he thought. She would be more impressed if he controlled himself than if he sent the bunch of them hurrying outside so there could be some peace and privacy inside. Women relied on men for protection, then condemned them for taking a stand against a possible threat.

The Blacks drew together. Some were murmuring. Suddenly, everyone was quiet. Erich followed the tallest one's gaze outside.

A bare-breasted woman with enormous buttocks came padding down the dirt street. A crowd of followers seemed to be encouraging her to do something.

Leni stood up and trained her camera on the woman, who raised her arms, heavy with bracelets, over her head.

Fingers interlocked, the woman began a slow, shuffling dance, weaving in and out of the lacy shadows of an acacia tree. A gray-haired Black threw a smoldering stick onto the ground; others added twigs and small branches...the beginnings of a fire.

Without looking away from her camera, Leni felt for her camera bag, opened it, and handed Erich various pieces of equipment. He wiped off the table with his sleeve before setting them down.

"Herreros and Bushmen don't usually dance together," Leni said with excitement.

"Here in Lüderitz, oh yes," Bruqah said. "When German people take this country, the Herreros flee into the Kalahari. Many died--no water. Five and fifty thousand out of seventy thousand. Bushmen helped many survivors. So they be friends here, now."
  

The crowd around the woman began to clap and sway. The woman, her head uptilted and only the whites of her eyes visible, stamped her feet against the dust. She was chanting softly. Her huge buttocks jiggled beneath her loincloth, and dust puffed around her.

"Janha Janha Jan-ha!"
the crowd chanted. She snaked her hands over her breasts, neck, face. Her fingers gripped her peppercorn hair, released it, started again; breasts, neck, face, hair...

Linking arms, the crowd started moving in a circle, clockwise first, counter-clockwise, clockwise...

Leni crouched as if on a battlefield, and scurried close, jabbing and feinting with the camera as she tried to snap pictures between legs.

"What's happening?" Erich attempted to follow her as she wormed her way through the growing crowd, but she was too agile. The press of spectators quickly filled up the empty space she had created. He tried to peer over everyone but couldn't see a thing. Wrinkling his nose at the Negroid stench, he pushed his way after her, his hands together like a wedge.

One Black looked down at Erich's hand and anxiously leaned away to let him by. Soon the others were nudging each other, intent on letting him through without their touching the mangled hand. About time it came in useful for something, he thought, easing his way through the crowd.

The tall, very black Herreros gave way to an inner group--tiny brown Bushmen with thick, flattened noses and small perforated gourd-rattles around their calves.

Four Bushmen, imitating young gazelles by holding
gemsbok
horns against their foreheads, jumped through the inner ring and into the center of the circle. Gyrating, they approached the woman and retreated, approached and retreated. Pelvises pulsing and shoulders rolling, they yowled and grunted and gesticulated to the moaning of the other Bushmen and the pounding hands and feet of the Herreros, who rushed from the outer edges of the crowd to the inner circle to throw imaginary spears at the dancers.

"Watubai na! Ha! Watubai na!"

Her breasts bouncing as she rolled her head, the woman in the center patted herself as if she were cooling flames breaking through her flesh. She made a nasal sound and clicked her tongue.

Leni repeated the sounds. Without taking her eyes off the woman, she motioned Erich to hurry forward.
 

"What is it!" Erich shouted above the noise of the dancers as he pushed his way toward her. The Bushmen were more difficult to get through despite their smaller size.
 
His hand did not seem to trouble them.
  

Leni drew a word in the dust:
n/um.
"I think that's what she's saying!... The slash represents the tongue click." Her eyes shining with excitement, Leni pronounced the term, clicking her tongue in the middle of the word. "It's a fire-hot power they claim boils up from their bellies," she said as she stood up, nearly having to shout for him to hear her. "Fills their heads like steam. Helps them talk with the gods and perform healings.
Kai
-healing, it's called."

"Crazy," Perón said, having reached them.

"To you, perhaps, but not to them! Try to watch with an open mind and then tell me how crazy it is."

From the direction of the sand spit that formed Lüderitz's western end, there emerged two men carrying a ratty stretcher. On it lay a small naked boy. The crowd parted and the bearers passed between the Herreros and the inner ring of Bushmen, who threw dried crushed leaves mixed with dust onto the prostrate figure. While the Herreros continued their spear-throwing motions, the Bushmen in the middle of the circle leapt high into the air and fell on their knees, twitching and trembling and rolling their eyes upward, their chanting more rhythmic now except for the occasional wail that rose into the branches of the acacia tree like the cry of an exotic bird.

Erich edged forward to look more closely at the patient. The boy was a classic case of malnutrition: his belly distended, arms and legs thin as sticks, face so gaunt it seemed all eyes.

"Kai!"
the woman screamed, toppling to her knees.
"Kai!"

"KAI
MEANS...," Leni started to yell in Erich's ear. Abruptly everyone was quiet. "...pain. Now watch."

"You appear to know a lot about them," Perón commented.

"A director can't film unless she knows
what
to film."
 

The woman wrapped her arms around herself and tilted toward the flames, beside which the stretcher bearers had laid down the boy. Her nose and forehead were among the embers. When she lifted her head, smoke plumed from her hair. Her face was unscathed.

"It's not possible," Erich said weakly as the woman crawled toward the boy and laid her hands gently on his cheeks. "Some kind of trick."

The stretcher was withdrawn. The woman lay beside the boy, her arms around his shoulders and his head cradled against her chest; she began groaning and wailing. Her limbs jerked uncontrollably. Four squatting male dancers surrounded her. One massaged her with dust. The second rubbed sweat from his armpits onto her body, while the third dipped into a small tortoise shell held by the fourth and rubbed herbs into her scalp.

When they stepped away, a hush came over the crowd. The circle tightened.

"She's near death," Leni whispered. "The others are trying to bring her back from the spirit world."

All of this time there had been no sign of life in the boy. Now Erich could see tears emerging from the outside corners of the child's eyes and rolling down the sides of his face.

The woman opened her eyes and raised her head. Leaning over the boy, she scraped his cheeks with her fingernails--a cat sharpening its nails against a piece of bark. She was purring softly, her trembling less violent, like a woman after lovemaking.

The boy's head moved slowly side to side. When it was stilled, his mouth opened and Erich saw something twitch inside. One of the male dancers seized it and, with a milking motion, drew it slowly from between the boy's lips.

Erich's stomach turned over as he watched a two-meter-long worm emerge from the boy's mouth.

"Tapeworm." Leni kept snapping the shutter.

"Sleight of hand!" Erich insisted.

"Believe what you want."

The four males drew knives from sheaths attached to their legs and hacked at the worm, cutting it into a hundred pieces. The crowd began to depart. Two women, one elderly and one in her late teens, lifted the boy to his feet. With their help, he walked away.
    

The male dancers collected the pieces of tapeworm and, crossing the street, pitched them into the harbor. One of the men returned to kick apart the small fire. Lifting a stick on which a flame continued to burn, he glanced at the woman. Her hips bucked once and she lay still, one arm crooked beneath her cheek, the other stretched out above her head. She appeared at first to be asleep; but apparently sensing the man's presence, she opened her eyes and looked up at him.

"Hamba Gashle,"
she said.

"Salamba Gashle,"
he answered, and wandered off, leaving her where she lay.

"What did they say to each other?" Erich asked Leni.

"Hamba Gashle,"
Bruqah said, coming between them. "Go softly." He gave Erich a tolerant smile.
"Salamba Gashle."
He took a swig of beer. "Return softly."

"What about the woman?" Erich asked. "Are they just going to leave her there?"

"She might as well rest there as anywhere."

Erich checked his watch. "I'd better get back to the ship pretty soon."

"Then it is time to begin our farewells. You take care of that young Frau of yours," Perón said amiably, lifting his beer bottle as though in a toast. "If you two need to get off that island,
ever
, you know what to do."

Erich settled back in the chair. The ship, and Miriam, could wait. He glanced at the line of dirt along the nape of Leni's neck and wondered why it added to her attractiveness. He wished she were going on to Madagascar now, instead of weeks, maybe months, from now. And Perón. Erich hated to see him depart, too, though he was uncertain if he genuinely liked the Argentinean or whether it was a matter of Perón being an ally in a ship filled with enemies.

Perón would accompany Leni as far as Windhoek, help her and her crew hire the native guides and rent the trucks they would need for the Kalahari, then board the train for Walvis Bay, where a Spanish freighter waited to take him to Buenos Aires.

One last beer, Erich decided, and he would call for the tender to take him back to the ship. He tipped his chair back slightly against the stucco wall. Evening was coming on quickly. The acacia's shadows lengthened, ribbing the street like the scarifications he had seen on some of the Negro faces. Cicadas began to shrill.
  

"The Bushmen believe the moon is hollow, and that's where their souls go when they die," Leni said, her camera pointed toward the darkening sky. "What a wonderful sense of eternity, to feel that on desert nights you can reach up and touch Heaven."

Erich glanced up. "If what I saw today was an indication of Heaven, I'd rather live in Hell." He sucked at the beer and looked at Perón. "That spectacle reminded me of Luna Park."

"What we witnessed was hardly what I would call an amusement," Leni said. She turned to Perón. "What would you call it?"

A heated discussion ensued, about Left and Right wing politics, as it inevitably did when those two got together. Not wishing to get involved, Erich shut his eyes. The cooler temperature relaxed him, and he found the sounds of the insects strangely satisfying. He thought about a girl he had kissed at Berlin's Luna Park. That same girl, a woman now and waiting in his cabin aboard ship, had grown all too quiet of late. He had almost welcomed her outburst this morning, when he told her that he would not allow her ashore.

A warm hand touched his cheek, moved down his neck, and returned to caress his forehead and massage his closed eyes.

"I'll miss you, Leni," he said softly, and kissed her palm.

She ran her fingertips over his nose and up and over his left ear. The gesture was more playful and exploring than erotic, filling him with a drowsy comfort rather than with urgency. He felt no need to open his eyes or lift his arms to embrace her. His mind slid with the ease of an otter through a wealth of memories and pleasant imaginings. He saw a white moon, large as he remembered his first wafer at Eucharist to have been, and beneath its brilliance a heavily mustached man in parka and mittens, standing with outstretched arms on a bald mountaintop. Below, as far as the eye could see, was jungle.

Benyowsky,
he heard his subconscious say. He opened his eyes.