This Side Jordan

by Margaret Laurence

  ‘And what’re you doing with – him?’

  Scorn poured out in Victor’s voice. He detested Lamptey. The Highlife Boy, hearing it, edged away. Lamptey was afraid of Victor. No wonder. Victor was about twice his size and would have welcomed the chance to beat him.

  Nathaniel raised one hand like a priest giving a benediction, and the chaos began to recede from his mind.

  ‘No –’ he said. ‘Don’t, Victor. Don’t be mad at Lamptey. He’s just kept me out of jail, maybe. He’s just done for me what – what no other man could have done.’

  It was true. He could see Lamptey smirking at Victor’s puzzled face. And yet – it was true. Of all the people he had ever known, of all the people who had ever cared what happened to him, only the Highlife Boy could have saved him then. And in that way. In that way. With that one girl, out of all the girls who ever walked the streets. It seemed to Nathaniel that she was a human sacrifice. And he had allowed it. He had been relieved that there was someone who could be sacrificed.

  – Here, Kyerema, here is one more skull to decorate your drum, for I have embraced what in my ancestors I despised.

  He was Esau. He had sold his birthright and now could not take up his inheritance. Independence was not for him. Free-Dom was not for him. He would not go to prison. But what could gain him his release from the prison of himself?

  How had it happened? He did not know.

  – The Drummer’s bitter voice thudded like ‘ntumpane’ in his head. Other men, in their anguish, might burn or slay. But not you, Nathaniel. For you, only a mouthful of spittle on a plaster face. For you, only a shove at the body of an enemy, a little shove, palms outspread, woman’s way. Your sister would have done more. That leopard would have gone magnificently to the cage, clawing her hunters.

  Nathaniel looked up at Victor and began to stretch out his hands. Then he drew them in to his sides as though he had no right to seek his friend.

  ‘Victor – ’ he said, ‘I’m going back.’

  Victor forgot to mock. His eyes were troubled.

  ‘You’re crazy, man. Going back where?’

  ‘You know where,’ Nathaniel said. ‘This isn’t my home, this city of new ways, this tomorrow. You know where I belong. The village – back there, far back, where a man knows what to do, because he hears the voices of the dead, telling him. Here, I spoil everything. And I don’t know why –’

  He could not go on. His body slumped in the chair and he buried his head in his arms.

  Spider Badu’s band still beat out the highlife. But Nathaniel, although he was conscious, no longer heard.

  The girl hesitated at the top of the stairs, then walked slowly into the room. Awkwardly, Johnnie Kestoe followed her.

  She seemed no more sure of her surroundings than he, as though the room were unfamiliar to her, too. Her uncertainty irritated Johnnie. He wanted her to mock him with herself. Like Victor Edusei’s girl, the one he had danced with that time. Or like Saleh’s serpent-eyed daughter, laughing at his unacknowledged desire.

  Johnnie looked quickly around the room. It was no more than a cell. A look of utter impersonality characterized it. Many people had used the room, but none had lived in it.

  The air was laden with the smell of former brief tenancies: the coarse woodsmoke-and-sweat smell of bush Africans; the cloying memories of two-shilling perfume. Beside the iron cot stood a wash-stand with a basin half full of swampy-looking water, chiefly for the benefit, no doubt, of visiting Muslims. Johnnie regarded it with distaste, wondering how many conscientious sons of Islam had to perform their post-love ablutions there before the water would be changed.

  Christians were catered for, too. On the table lay a stout black Gideon Bible. In case repentance should be immediate, the demands of the spirit as suddenly urgent as had been the demands of the flesh? The Book’s incongruous presence made Johnnie want to laugh. And immediately he felt fine, strong, capable, uncaring.

  The room’s squalid quality no longer bothered him. Dust-streaked, mauve and faded orange mammy-cloth curtains fluttered in the feeble night wind. The one chair was broken and lame-legged. The ashtray on the table had not been emptied for some time. The white enamel chamber pot under the wash-stand was encrusted with sulphurous yellow. In the ceiling, one bulb glared, dispelling shadows.

  A framed picture in full colour decorated one wall. It was a portrait of Nkrumah, and the caption consisted of one word: ‘Freedom.’

  The girl waited. Johnnie’s appraisal of the room had taken only a minute, but now he felt as though he had been looking at it for hours. Did she think he was stalling? He turned towards her angrily. She smiled at him but she did not move.

  She was waiting to be told what to do.

  Her supple brown fingers sought the cover-cloth draped over her shoulders. She pulled it tight around her, as though, like a prisoner with his blanket, it was her sole home. Then, seeming to fear that Johnnie would misinterpret the gesture, she let the cloth drop to the floor.

  It occurred to Johnnie that he might be her first white-man. Perhaps, like Whiskey’s child-wife, she wondered if whitemen were like black in any way at all, even this way. But this girl could not refuse him.

  She was very young, not more than sixteen, he guessed, perhaps younger. He wondered what her experience had been and where she had come from.

  No. None of that was his concern. She was an African whore. That was all he needed to know about her, all he wanted to know.

  If only she weren’t so quiet. He took a step towards her and grasped her shoulders.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  Why bother to ask that? What did it matter to him, her name? She was an unknown brown girl in the anonymity of this room, on a night that would be conveniently forgotten.

  Her eyes questioned him. She frowned and shrugged. Her soft laughter was that of embarrassment. Then she said a few words in her own language.

  Johnnie was startled, then he understood. She did not speak English, not even pidgin English.

  The drape-suited spiv hadn’t given him much of a bargain. A little brown duiker of a girl. Johnnie felt cheated. All at once he became positive that Nathaniel Amegbe and the spiv had arranged the situation. This was Nathaniel’s revenge – to find the most stupid, the most cowlike streetwalker in all Accra, an animal, a creature hardly sentient, a thing. And they would be sitting downstairs now, laughing their hoarse laughter while the highlife blared and moaned.

  It seemed to Johnnie then that his ears were filled with the sound of blackmen’s laughter. Victor Edusei’s deep raucous laugh, daring him to be angry. The tittering clerks in the office. The breast-heaving laughter of the big trader-mammies at the newness of a whiteman who could not tell whether they were joking or not.

  He drew the girl close to him and twisted her body against his own. Under her voluminous green cloth, her breasts and hips were full and rounded. Deliberately, he released her.

  It occurred to him that she might be in on Nathaniel’s game, that her silence and her seeming uncertainty might be only an act, a role in which she had been carefully instructed.

  Roughly, he pulled at her cloth. The length of material that served as skirt, reaching from her waist to her feet, came away in his hand. The blouse, only cobbled together, tore easily. Her eyes widened, as though she were horrified by such a waste of material. But she made no move to stop him.

  She stood before him naked. For a moment he could only look at her. She showed neither shame nor wantonness, neither skill nor the lack of it. Her face was expressionless, and her body, beautiful and young as it was, was blank. It spoke nothing – not desire nor coldness; not violence nor simulated tenderness; not even the professional hope for further payment.

  Involuntarily, Johnnie glanced at the iron cot. Without a word, she walked over to it and lay down.

  Her easy acquiescence became to him something detestable. She lay spreadeagled, sheeplike, waiting for the knife. She might as well have been drugged, lying there, or dead. T
he laughter of Africa sounded again in Johnnie’s ears.

  As he took off his own clothes, a tremor passed over her body, a rippling of the dark skin. Her eyes were blank no longer. In them was an inexplicable panic.

  She was a whore – why should she look like that? But he was glad she did. Her slight spasm of fear excited him. She was a continent and he an invader, wanting both to possess and to destroy.

  It was then that he discovered the fantastic truth. If there had been a trick, it was not hers. Her doubt was not a studied role. She was, quite simply, a virgin.

  The stark shock of it, the ludicrous irony, almost unmanned him. Then, suddenly, he did not care. The dark skin was warm against his in the warm night. Sweat made slippery their bodies. His urgency returned. And something else.

  There was no challenge in her, but now it did not matter. Now he knew how he could hurt her. And he did.

  Then it was over. All the time, the girl had not moved. Once she had cried aloud with pain. That was all. Johnnie got up, lit a cigarette, and began to dress. A black girl. For a moment he could think of nothing but that. A black whore. But he’d sold himself just as much. To the spiv – for this.

  No. He had wanted to frighten Nathaniel, and he had wanted to imagine Nathaniel in jail. But even in his most intense anger he had known it was unrealistic to think of going to the police. They were Africans. They would take Nathaniel’s word against his any day. The schoolboys would be unlikely to give evidence against a fellow African. And as for tonight – he could not afford the luxury of bribed witnesses. He had realized it even before the spiv came up and whispered to him. So there had been nothing to sell.

  But Nathaniel hadn’t known that, when he sent his emissary.

  Johnnie finished dressing and stubbed out his cigarette in the crowded ashtray. He did not want to look at the girl again. He started towards the door, but some vague uneasiness made him turn.

  She lay as he had left her, her body limp. Her eyes were open, but she seemed not to be aware of his presence. She began to speak in her own tongue, a low rhythmical keening sound. Her voice rose for an instant and then shattered into incommunicable anguish. Frightened, Johnnie stared at her. It was then that he saw the blood, seeping into the quilt. A clot of blood on a dirty quilt. He closed his eyes, and the sight was momentarily blotted out, but not the memory.

  Johnnie retched. Then panic. Why should it be like that – and so much? He forced himself over to the iron cot. Now that he was close to her, his nausea subsided, and he was able to examine her almost clinically. The reason was not hard to discover. He remembered having heard that some tribes still practised female circumcision. It was one of those scraps of information about Africa that every whiteman picks up. He had always thought it exaggerated. But it was not. Among certain peoples, the clitoridectomy was performed at puberty. By a bush surgeon – some fetish priestess, perhaps. Some of them were said to use the long wicked acacia thorns as needles. The wounds often became infected and did not heal for a long time.

  The scars had opened when he savaged her.

  He understood now the reason for her fear. He did not want to think of what the pain must have been like. Yet she had cried out only once. Perhaps she was afraid of displeasing him.

  He knew nothing about her, but she no longer seemed anonymous to him. He noticed for the first time that her face was fine-boned, her hands slender and smooth as though they had not been coarsened by too much heavy work. Had she been sold by her family, or stolen, or had she elected to come here? He would never know. He could not speak to her. They had no language in common.

  But it did not really matter who she specifically was. She was herself and no other. She was someone, a woman who belonged somewhere and who for some reason of her own had been forced to seek him here in this evil-smelling cell, and through him, indignity and pain.

  He looked down at the girl. Her eyes pleaded with him. She knew she had not been skilful, and she was afraid that he was not pleased. She begged him, silently, not to betray her to her employer.

  She saw from his face that she had nothing to fear from him now. She looked again, more closely, as though surprised. Then – astonishingly – she reached out her hand and touched his. She smiled a little, her eyes reassuring him, telling him she would be all right – it was nothing – it would soon heal.

  He took her hand and held it closely for an instant. Then he stooped and picked up her crumpled green cloth from the floor. Very gently, he drew it across her body. It was all he could do for her, and for himself.

  He drove his car to the edge of the city, beside the lagoon, and parked it in the grove of coconut palms. He put his head down on the steering wheel and sobbed as he had not done for nearly twenty years.

  THIRTEEN

  The cockerels crowed the brash dawn, and Johnnie wakened. He lay very still and listened to the morning. The slow rusty groan of a door, then Whiskey’s hoarse and irascible muttering as he cursed at his two wives for his own sterility. Bare feet shuffling across the compound. A key rattling in the lock, as the old man entered the bungalow kitchen. A cymbal-clashing of angry sound – Whiskey attacking the kerosene stove, daring it not to burn. And all the while the low reiterated mourning – ‘Why God give pickin for all man and me He give none? Why God do so to me?’

  From the servants’ quarters came the clunk and thud of earthen bowls being unstacked and charcoal placed in the burner. The shrill quaver of the old wife as she scolded and nagged at the young one. Then the girl, taking the water bucket to the outside tap and singing to herself in a high clear voice, patient and lonely, like a single bird lost from its forest.

  Johnnie closed his eyes and tried to sleep again, but he remained awake.

  Then Miranda was bending over him, her dark hair loose around her shoulders.

  ‘You must have come in late last night,’ she said. ‘I didn’t hear you.’

  He reached out a hand tentatively to her face.

  ‘Are you still speaking to me?’

  ‘Yes. Are you to me?’

  ‘Manda – I shouldn’t have walked out like that. You weren’t wrong. James did trust me, and I –’

  ‘Never mind,’ she said quickly. ‘It’s over. Don’t think about it. I had no right to cast it up to you.’

  He gripped her hands tightly, and she looked startled and apprehensive.

  ‘Listen, Manda – ’ he said urgently, ‘after I left the bungalow –’

  She drew away one of her hands and placed it on his mouth.

  ‘I don’t want to hear,’ she said. ‘Please, Johnnie, whatever it is, I don’t want to hear it.’

  She lowered her head to his. Her long hair brushed across his body.

  ‘I don’t want to probe any more. Just to accept.’

  And because he had wanted this gift from her for so long, he could scarcely refuse it now.

  After the rains, the Cunninghams’ garden looked more unkempt than ever. The bougainvillaea was a matted crimson forest. The thin branches of the Pride of Barbados bent under their red-gold flowering. Dark leaves of the castor-oil plant were like giants’ outspread hands. Clumps of prickly pear shone lime-green and needled. Huge zinnias, mauve and yellow and ferocious pink, grew rank as weeds. Unhurriedly, the garden-boy with his machete chipped away at this wilderness like a sculptor at a marble mountain.

  Helen was sitting on the stoep, keeping a nervous eye on the children playing in the dust below.

  ‘Brian – what have you got there?’ Her voice, as so often, was on the verge of panic.

  ‘It’s only a toad.’

  ‘Are you quite sure?’

  Johnnie knew that if anyone were to mistake a scorpion for a toad, a snake for a lizard, it would certainly not be Brian.

  ‘Of course I’m sure,’ the boy said. ‘Silly.’

  ‘Well, dear, it’s just that – oh, hello, Johnnie. I didn’t see you. I know I must seem a terrible fusser, but I can’t help it. Would you like some orange squash? Take that chair
– the other’s broken and no one ever gets around to mending it.’

  When the steward brought the glasses, Helen leaned over the low stoep wall and handed one to each of the children. Kathie drank hers, but Brian’s attention was still fixed on the toad.

  ‘Come on, dear,’ Helen said, ‘you really must. You need it.’

  She turned to Johnnie.

  ‘It’s a constant struggle to get enough liquid into him. I always think of cystitis. He had it once, and he was in agony. Of course, that fool of a doctor did virtually nothing; sometimes I think he only knows of two remedies, whatever ails one – quinine for the inside, and gentian violet for the outside.’

  ‘Miranda seems to like him.’

  ‘Oh, I daresay he’s all right. Don’t pay any attention to me. I’m not in a charitable mood.’

  She gave Johnnie a sharp glance.

  ‘Did you come over to commiserate with us?’

  ‘I wondered if Bedford was sick, that’s all, as he wasn’t at work this morning. What do you mean – commiserate?’

  ‘He got his notice,’ Helen said simply. ‘Yesterday.’

  ‘Oh. I didn’t know –’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it’s all over but the shouting, and there’ll be precious little of that. We knew, of course – we’ve known it would come –’

  She sat down, clumsily, her cotton skirt bunched between her thighs. Johnnie thought she was going to cry, but she did not. Her eyes were blank as blue glass.

  ‘It’s odd, you know,’ she said, ‘when a calamity actually happens, one is always so much more calm than at any point beforehand. I think Bedford was afraid I’d stage hysterics. He was so relieved when I didn’t.’

  ‘Where – ’ absurdly, Johnnie’s voice was nearly a whisper – ‘where will you go?’

  ‘Bedford’s put in for a post with a firm in Nigeria,’ she said, half defiantly. ‘He knows the assistant manager – met him at the Club here. There’s a fair chance he’ll get it.’

  ‘Nigeria –’