Tongues of Fire

by Peter Abrahams

  Neimy sat in the entrance to the tent, sharpening a knife on a flat stone. Her head was in the shade but her hands were not. The blade flashed little suns in his eyes as it scraped back and forth.

  “A woman came looking for you,” Neimy said. He heard a wariness in her tone that made him want to look closely at her face. All he saw were flashing golden suns.

  “What kind of woman?”

  “A Turk.” The noise of the scraping grew louder.

  He knew a Turk could be any foreigner, or even someone from the government. “Is she from Khartoum?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What did she want?”

  “To talk to you.” A spark flew off the stone and vanished in the air.

  “What about?”

  “I don’t know. She went with Hurgas to find you. She will come back.”

  He tethered the horse to a stake driven into the ground beside the tent. “When?”

  “I don’t know.” She leaned aside to let him pass. He went into the tent and lay down. The golden suns faded from his eyes. It was dark and very still. He listened to steel scraping on stone. For a while there was nothing else to hear; then from somewhere in the distance came the noise of a motor. It grew louder. The scraping stopped. He rose and went outside.

  An open jeep was approaching between the rows of tents. A woman was driving. Hurgas sat beside her. Although she drove slowly, Hurgas was very nervous. The Mahdi could see that he was leaning forward with his hands on the dashboard, peering anxiously through the windshield. The jeep rolled up in front of the tent. Hurgas fumbled for a moment with the door handle, and then climbed over the side. “That’s him,” he said to the woman.

  The woman opened the door and got out. She was white. She had thick chestnut hair streaked yellow by the sun. She wore khaki trousers and a khaki shirt with big pockets; a camera hung around her neck.

  “Are you the man they call the Mahdi?” she asked in Arabic, looking at him. Her eyes were pale blue. It had been a long time since he had seen blue eyes; he could not stop staring at them. She lowered her eyelids.

  “I am,” he said.

  “I’d like to talk to you.” She spoke Arabic very well, but with a faint trace of an accent he thought was American. “I’m a reporter.” She handed him a plastic card.

  He glanced at it. He saw her photograph, her name—Gillian Wells, and a list of newspapers and magazines in the United States and Europe. All the print was in English. “I don’t read this language,” he said, giving it back to her.

  “It’s my press card. It just says that I’m an accredited journalist and where my articles appear.” She named the newspapers and magazines.

  “I don’t think I have anything to say that would interest people so far from here.”

  Her eyes sought his and he felt her pale blue gaze. He was accustomed to brown eyes that he could look into and read. When he looked into her eyes he could not see past their blueness. “If you are really the Mahdi they will be interested,” she said.

  “He is the Mahdi,” Neimy said in a clear, deliberate voice behind him. He turned and looked at her sitting in the shade by the entrance to the tent. She was watching the white woman.

  “Then you’ll answer a few questions?” the white woman said to him.

  He thought of his father, if he was alive, opening a newspaper in some far-off place and finding her article. He did not believe his father was alive, and he had seldom seen him reading a newspaper, but he said, “Yes.”

  “Good. Is there somewhere we can go to talk?”

  “Here,” the Mahdi said, sitting down. “This is my wife and her brother. I have no secrets from them.”

  The woman sat on the ground opposite him. Hurgas stood by the jeep. Taking a notebook and a pencil from the pocket of her shirt, the woman said, “I understand that you have not always lived here, among these people.”

  He glanced quickly at Hurgas. Hurgas was gazing down at his feet. The Mahdi turned to the woman and saw that she had followed his glance. Already he regretted he had decided to talk to her. “That’s true,” he said. “I am an orphan. For a while I lived with other nomads in the north. But I am a Baggara. Look at me.”

  She looked at him. So did Hurgas and Neimy. Their stares did not bother him. He was used to people staring: He was big and well formed. And he was the Mahdi.

  After a pause she said: “Apparently your coming here was foretold many years ago.” The blue eyes watched him closely.

  He kept himself from glancing again at Hurgas. “So they say.”

  “Do you believe in prophecy of that sort?”

  “How can you ask a Muslim if he believes in prophecy?”

  “But we’re living in a scientific world. Doesn’t all religion, Islam included, have to change with the times?”

  “Islam does not change,” he said. “It makes change.”

  “What about science? Surely expanding scientific knowledge changes everything?”

  The Mahdi looked beyond her at the rows of tents away into the distance. The sun had dipped a little lower in the dusty sky and was starting to turn it red. “Where is this science that you talk about?”

  The blue eyes flickered; and he knew that soon they might be like any other eyes he had known: windows to the thoughts inside. He found himself trying to imagine the life he would be living if he had never left North America. The woman wrote in her notebook and said nothing. He watched her face. The sun had tanned it and stretched the skin tightly across her bones. The tip of her nose had burned and peeled many times, leaving a small pink spot on which he saw one or two tiny scab-covered fissures. They made him think there was something fragile about her. Fragility was much more exotic than cameras or journalists or white skin. Here fragility died young.

  Suddenly he was conscious of a half-forgotten smell in the air. He inhaled deeply through his nostrils and smelled it: her smell. It was soap and apples. He remembered a bushel basket of red apples on the kitchen floor at Lac du Loup.

  Behind him the knife scraped on the stone. He forced himself to stop thinking about apples or Lac du Loup. It was harder to stop thinking about the woman—there wasn’t an ocean between them. “Do you have any more questions to ask me?” he said to her.

  She looked up from her notebook. “Yes. But I’d like to see something of the camp first.”

  “Very well. Hurgas will take you where you want to go.”

  “If you don’t mind I was hoping you would show me the camp yourself. It will be more interesting for the readers.” Her white lips curved up in a little smile. The smile told him the answer was no.

  “Yes.”

  The woman got into the jeep. The Mahdi walked around to the passenger side and manipulated the door handle in various ways until she leaned across the seat and opened the door from the inside. She turned the key and put the car in gear. They rolled off. In the rearview mirror bolted to his door he saw Hurgas and Neimy watching them drive away. Hurgas seemed happy to have been spared another ride in the jeep. Neimy didn’t seem happy at all.

  They drove through the camp. Everyone watched them go by. He showed her the tents of the different tribes, and took her outside the camp to where the cattle grazed on the sparse yellow grass growing beyond the shallow depression. For a while they drove across the plain looking at bony cattle; then the woman turned the jeep in a wide circle and brought it to a stop at the edge of the depression. They watched women filling calabashes from the little pool and carrying them away on their heads.

  “The water level seems low,” she said. He didn’t answer. She reached in front of him and opened the glove compartment. Every time she moved the apple smell was stronger. She found a map. As she closed the glove compartment he thought he saw a silver gun barrel glinting deep inside.

  She studied the map. After a few moments she said, “Why aren’t you camped by the Bahr el Arab? It’s marked in blue.”

  “Drive,” he said. “I’ll show you the Bahr el Arab.”

&n
bsp; They turned north, beyond the last of the cattle. The yellow grass turned black. Then it disappeared. They came to a winding watercourse and parked beside it. It was about twenty feet wide and half as deep. There was nothing in it but cracked red clay and a trail of polished stones. “The Bahr el Arab.”

  The woman took out her notebook. “You said Islam makes change. What do you want to change?”

  “The lives of my people,” the Mahdi said. “I want them to be free from thirst and hunger. It is not impossible. It costs money. We have no money, but some of the other Islamic nations are very rich. I want them to share.”

  “What makes you think they will want to share?”

  “That isn’t the problem you think it is. When we are all united they will want to share.”

  “We?”

  He smiled. “Not you. Us. The Muslim world.”

  He saw that the pale blue eyes were gazing at his mouth. He stopped smiling. The woman bent her head and wrote a few lines in her notebook. He tried to read them upside down, but could not.

  She raised her pencil and held it poised above the page. “People have been talking for a long time about Muslim unity, and it hasn’t happened yet. Why should it happen now?”

  “Because of me.”

  Again the blue eyes flickered: down to his mouth, up to his eyes. She didn’t speak. Her apple smell spoke for her. It would be for Paul, he decided. It was owed to him. She looked into his eyes. “What are you thinking?” he asked.

  When she answered her voice was very low. “I’m thinking that you are the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen.”

  He started to lean toward her, to kiss her and put his arms around her, but before he could her hand had darted under the hem of his jubba, slipped up his leg, and found his penis, shocking him into hardness. She rubbed him. He rubbed her, through her khaki trousers.

  She moaned. “Hurry.” They got out of the jeep, pulling off their clothes. She lay down on the dusty bank of the Bahr el Arab and opened her legs. He looked down at her slender body—firm little breasts that had never nursed a baby, pale unscarred skin, and a vagina so unlike the vagina of Neimy or any of the other Baggara women: No midwife had cut into it with a knife and sliced away the clitoris and the outer lips. He stared at the unfamiliar flesh, glistening in the red light of the evening sun.

  “Hurry,” she said again.

  It was owed to Paul. A taste of the life he could have had. He fell on her. His penis struck against her pelvic bone. She reached between them and took it in her hand. “Here,” she said, guiding him inside her. Suddenly she laughed, a husky laugh deep in her throat. “Is this why they call you the Mahdi? The guided one?”

  He laughed too, as the head of his penis touched her hot wet skin. And then he realized that she had spoken English.

  His penis wilted: a soft comma in her hand. Had she heard his laugh? Had she really spoken English? He felt her pause.

  “What’s wrong?” she said in Arabic.

  The evidence against him was in her hand. “I’ve never been with a foreign woman before,” he said. He closed his eyes very tightly to squeeze out the memory of what had just happened. He thought only of her hand around his penis and the pink lips against its tip. He grew hard. He drove himself inside her. She cried out and pushed back at him.

  They pounded their bodies together in the dust.

  It was almost night when they left for the camp. The blue eyes and the yellow streaks in her hair dissolved in the darkness. Only the white lips remained distinct. “It’s too late for driving,” she said. “I’ll have to stay the night.”

  “Of course. We have a tent for guests.” He thought of going there while the camp slept.

  She shook her head. “Thank you. I’ll sleep in the car. I’m used to it, and I’ve got everything I need here.”

  Ahead the camp came into view, a shadow with one or two dull orange eyes, spread across the plain. As they drew nearer more eyes opened until there were thousands: weakly glowing fires of dung and bits of wood. She stopped the jeep by a low clump of bushes.

  “Good-bye,” she said. “I’ll be gone as soon as it’s light.” He felt her move toward him and turned to receive her kiss. Instead she put her hand on his penis. “Good-bye.” He got out of the jeep and walked back to camp.

  Neimy sat by the fire in front of the tent. He sat down beside her. She spooned his meal from the black iron pot hanging over the fire into a calabash and handed it to him. Millet covered with strips of stringy goat meat. Quickly, hardly taking the time to chew, he swallowed it all. She gave him more. He ate that too. She watched him, her face impassive in the dim red firelight. Still hungry, he laid the calabash on the ground, not wanting to ask for more. Neimy picked it up and filled it again. As she held it out to him she said, “Where is she?”

  “Who?” He wrapped his fingers around the bowl to take it, but she did not let go.

  “The Turk.”

  “She’s gone.” Neimy let him have the bowl. She went inside the tent. He ate.

  Afterward he stayed outside and watched the fire slowly die. He thought about Neimy. Was it the woman’s whiteness that bothered her? Was it her camera or her jeep or that she knew how to read and write? Or was it because she knew the world beyond Kordofan, beyond the Sudan, beyond Africa, and was at home in it as Neimy could never be? Around him the other fires began to wane. Soon the camp was dark and still and hot.

  He entered the tent, removed his clothing, and lay beside Neimy on the bedstead. He felt the heat of her skin. He closed his eyes. The first image that came into his mind was the woman touching him through the cloth of his jubba and saying good-bye. It was enough to make him hard. He reached for Neimy. She turned away.

  For some time he lay there remembering how it had been by the Bahr el Arab. Then, very quietly, he stood up.

  “Where are you going?” Neimy said.

  “I can’t sleep.”

  He put on his clothes and left the tent. For a few moments he gazed at the dull embers of the fire and breathed slowly and evenly, trying to make himself relax. But in his chest his heart was beating faster, spreading excitement through his body. He started walking through the camp; at first at a normal pace, later with strides that grew longer and more hurried until he was almost running. He reached the edge of the camp and peered through the darkness beyond, looking for some sign of the low bushes and the jeep parked beside them. He saw a faint yellow light shining, not far away, and realized it was the dashboard of the jeep. Instantly he thought of her husky laugh and the joke she had made in English.

  And his laugh.

  Slowly and very softly he walked toward the faint yellow light. His heart was still pounding inside him, but the breathless sexual urgency had gone.

  As he came closer to the jeep he heard her talking in a low voice. She was alone. He could see her face in the glow of the dashboard light. He also noticed a silvery gleam in the air above the jeep. When he drew nearer he saw that it was a tall aerial, mounted on the hood.

  Taking his weight on the balls of his feet, he crept silently to the side of the jeep and stopped just behind her, a few feet away. She was sitting in the driver’s seat, talking into a small black box plugged into the hole for the cigarette lighter.

  “Wasn’t there an immigration card?” she was asking in English. Her words were rushed, and spoken in a voice not much above a whisper. “But I don’t think there’s much more time. The whole of the western Sudan is gathering around him, and he won’t be able to stay here much longer. I’m going to remain in the area for a few more days, then return to Khartoum. If you have Rehv’s photograph, send it there.”

  She pressed a button on the black box and tapped her fingers on the steering wheel, as though organizing her thoughts.

  With one stride he could be on her, his hands around her neck, squeezing tight. But he didn’t want to do that. He thought of the silvery glint at the back of the glove compartment, and knew how it had to be done.

  The woman seem
ed to make up her mind about something. She pressed the button on the black box. He stepped forward and laid his hand on the windshield. A high-pitched cry leaped from her throat. Her head whirled around. Her eyes—he could not see their blueness now—opened wide. He did not move at all. He gave her time to see the dwindling options in his eyes. He gave her time to reach for the gun.

  She reached for the gun. He let her rip open the glove compartment, grab it, and swing it toward him. Only then, very swiftly, did his hand swoop down on her wrist and turn the gun away. She fought him. She was strong, but he was far stronger. He leaned over the side of the jeep and fell on top of her, feeling the hard metal between them. She struggled to turn it against his chest. She made animal noises deep in her throat. She bit his face. He did not feel the pain. Still holding her wrist, he felt slowly up the handle of the gun with the tip of his index finger, until he found her finger curled around the trigger. He laid his finger over hers and forced the gun around. She fought him with all her strength, but there was nothing she could do. Very lightly he squeezed her finger. The gun went off.

  She bit his face very hard. Then there was no strength in her bite at all. A burnt smell filled the air, overwhelming the smell of apples.

  It was self-defense.

  He let go of her wrist and climbed out of the jeep, leaving her slumped on the seat and holding the gun against her breast. He removed the aerial from the hood, folded it, and put it under the passenger seat. He unplugged the little black box and laid it beside the aerial. Then he searched the jeep.

  He found canned food, bottled drinks, water, and gasoline. He found her camera and a leather purse containing a few hundred Sudanese pounds, a few hundred American dollars, and her notebook. Holding the notebook by the dashboard light he read what was written inside. There were straightforward notes of several interviews, including the one with him. He closed the notebook and put it back in the purse.