by Dilman Dila
Moti stopped a couple of paces in front of Songo.
“You learnt nothing in jail,” Moti said.
“Look,” Songo replied in a husky voice, pointing at the four dots in the horizon. The officer followed his finger, cautiously, squinting, and then he saw the lights. He turned back to Songo with raised eyebrows. Apparently, he already knew about them. Unable to speak, Songo turned the easel to show Moti the painting, the angel jumping out of the water and a light materialising into a Pyramid.
Moti’s eyes grew wider. His pupils flared with an intense brilliance, his skin became so tight that Songo feared it would break. His lips parted with a click.
“There are no Pyramids in Hell,” Moti said, breathless.
“It’s not Hell,” Songo said. “It’s all lies.”
“Shut up.” Moti raised the gun a little higher pointing it at Songo’s chest. “I could send you to Hell right now, you blasphemous infidel.”
Songo’s eyes fell on the weapon, on the red bulb that emitted death rays. His hope flickered. If they were to be killed, that bulb would have already flashed.
“Follow us,” Moti said, and leapt into the air. He hovered above Songo, still aiming the gun at them.
Silently, Kimi climbed into the bruka. Songo packed up his tools, his unfinished painting, and in the next minute they were in the clouds. Two abasura flew in front, three on either side, four behind. Kimi applied kalo on her skin as they flew over the wilderness, more out of habit than to hide her color. He told her about kalona, the truth about her skin. His voice low, barely a whisper, crackling with pain, as he rationalised the decision he and Kama had made. He tried to paint a glorious picture of them rising against the system, but instead of revolutionary rhetoric, it sounded like the petty experimentation of drunken youth. She did not look at him. He saw her image in the window, tears leaving tawny-brown tracks on her cheeks. She did not wipe them off. The silence returned, thicker than ever before.
An hour later, they entered the great city. They soared high above the clouds to avoid the pandemonium of the metropolis, where millions of ornithopters swirled about in chaotic formations. It took them nearly half an hour to get to the middle of the city, and then they swooped down into a valley that housed the University of Understanding, the place for prisoners. It had three Pyramids no taller than a thousand feet, each a different color, built in a triangle around a black building, said to be the first temple of Jok, supposedly built ten thousand years ago when Mojech had just returned from slavery.
Inside one of the Pyramids, as they followed Moti through a long corridor carpeted with synthetic leopard skin, Songo held Kimi’s palm. It was warm, slimy with kalo oil, damp with sweat. She did not flinch as he had feared. Instead, she squeezed his hand tight, and he knew that she was afraid. He could feel her pulse - a buffalo stampede.
“It’ll be alright,” he whispered. The confidence in his voice surprised him. He thought it would have come out husky, reflecting the miasma of the impending doom that gripped him.
“I love you, daddy,” she said.
Tears pricked his eyes. Words came to his throat, declarations of love, pleas for forgiveness, assurances that they would live happily ever after, but none of it spilled out of his mouth. Nothing but a groan. It left the taste of bile on his tongue. He squeezed her hand so tight that she cried in pain.
“In there,” Moti said, nodding at a blue door.
It had no writings on it, but Songo knew the room it led to. A black chamber bare of furniture, with murals depicting the Emperor’s dogma, the first place prisoners entered on the journey to change their minds, to make them understand. It increased Songo’s hope. If they were to be killed, they would not have bothered to bring them into this black room. He put his hand over Kimi’s shoulder, to usher her through the door.
“Not her,” Moti said. “Only you.”
Songo pretended he heard not heard. He hurried on through the door, as though that would save them from the inevitable. Two officers wrenched her off his hold. He did not let go. He hugged her. She wrapped her arms around his neck, so tight he feared she would strangle him. They clung to each other, until Moti punched him in the face. An explosion of light. A sudden silence. Next thing he knew, he was on the ground, supine, Kimi vanishing through the door, her screams bouncing off the murals, and then there was darkness. And silence.
When he regained consciousness, he was back in his diiro. His family and closest friends were gathered in the kisenge, sitting on goatskin mats, drinking mwenge from large calabashes, a sign that seven days had passed since her death. Paintings of Kama and Kimi now hung on the walls. Candles glowed, lending warmth to the chill of the sunset. The chatter of conversation came to him as though from a long way off. He wondered if he had been in a coma for seven days, but if so, he would have woken up in a bed, not on this three-legged stool. He must have turned into an automaton of some kind, a sleepwalker, with a living body but a dead brain. He must have spoken, sung at her cremation, and scattered her ashes into the clouds, but he could not recall any of that. And now that he had awoken, he did not think about her. He thought about the four lights in the ocean.
Silently, he left the mourners and wandered into his studio. He found his unfinished painting on an easel. The lights wiped off, the angel erased, leaving the beach empty, the river flowing in silence into the sea. Maybe the Emperor had commissioned Soma, the only other artist capable of bringing imaginary creatures to life, to finish the task. He understood it as the reason they kept him alive. Only the two of them were able to paint monsters and make it look like the work of a camera. They would keep him alive until they found a replacement. Now he also knew why his mentor did not have a family, and why he had never talked about the past. The Emperor needed people like them. They were essential to the propaganda machine. They had probably given him time to mourn Kimi, maybe in line with the official cause of death. They would not want it known that she had visited the ocean, or that she was a shade lighter than everyone else. They would wait for ten days, and then quietly take him back to the University of Understanding, to spend many years in solitary confinement, a propagandist slave bringing monsters to life for the benefit of the system. The old man must have succumbed to a similar fate.
As he looked at the unfinished painting, the idea that had gripped him at the beach returned with such vividness that he picked the pencil and started to sketch. He worked the whole night and completed the painting just before dawn. Instead of an angel, a girl jumped out of the water in an endless loop. Kimi. Her last moments of happiness immortalised. He added colorful fish and shells playing with the girl. The four lights zoomed out from the distance and materialised into Pyramids, with millions of little girls playing in them. They were not all tawny-brown. He created the illusion that each had a special shade of her own. Green, blue, yellow, red, a rainbow of people. At the top, he titled the painting The Rainbow Sea, and at the bottom he wrote, Kalona – the face of sadness.
He hid the picture and slept through the day. At midnight, as the family held the last funeral rituals, he sneaked out disguised as a cleaner. He spotted the abasura watching his apartment, but they paid no heed to the old man waiting to catch a public bruka back home. Ten minutes later, he broke into his brother’s printing factory, and by morning he had made three hundred thousand copies of the painting, each no larger than a page from a little girl’s school book, but each clear enough, vivid enough, powerful enough to bewitch the beholder.
He packed them into three huge boxes, and lugged them into a transport ornithopter. He flew away just as the first workers arrived for business. Hopefully, they would not notice the missing bruka until he had carried out his revenge. His first stop was Ojoma district, where the middle class lived. He waited for a good strong breeze, and then he emptied one of the boxes. The vidipapers fluttered in the air, and the wind carried them to hundreds of Pyramids. They flew into windows, landing on breakfast tables like newspapers, or they just floated about waiti
ng to be plucked out of the air.
He sped to the Black Flower suburb, where the lower classes lived, the uneducated, the casual labourers, the poor. The spybrukas were now hunting for him, but they would not know which bruka released the painting until he did it again. He quickly emptied the second box and sped on to the third suburb, where the intellectuals and artists lived. Half way there, they finally picked him out of the millions of brukas. The blue light lit up his craft. He kicked out the third box, and was glad to see its contents scatter in the wind before a death ray vaporised it.
He had a smile in those final moments. Thousands of copies of the painting had already found their way to citizens. Maybe someone had already uploaded it to the netweaves, and tens of millions of people were watching as Kimi played in the ocean, as the four lights turned into Pyramids full of happy girls, full of a rainbow of deliriously happy girls. Maybe it would spark off the awakening.
A Wife and a Slave
Kopet sat on the papyrus bed, watching his wife sleep. He had not touched her in five years. The last time he tried to kiss her, she had reported him to the abasura and they had jailed him for three days of hard labor. He ogled at her breasts. They rose and fell with her breathing. She snored lightly, oblivious to the noise of the waking Pyramid, to the crowing of electronic roosters, the flapping of ornithopter wings, the blaring of angry horns. The sun flowed in through cracks in the window, making her face glow with a love she could no longer give, filling the room with the warmth that she had failed to provide.
The wine had made him oversleep. He wanted to take a bath and rush to work, but he could not bathe himself. His wife had to do it. He tugged at the goatskin blanket to awake her. It slid off her body. She did not stir.
“Akello,” he said.
She did not respond. He grabbed her shoulder, and shook her. Still, she did not awake. Her skin was so smooth it felt like shea nut butter. She once had a light color, a golden brown like fried chicken, but she had used Kalo lotion to darken it into the fashionable, pure black of coffee. It gave her a glossy texture, a perfect look, like the surreal models in the magazines. His fingers ran over her skin, causing desire to rush through his veins like the rapids of the Nile. But he quickly withdrew his hands to stifle the temptation he felt rising in him. He did not want another three days of hard labor.
He crept off the bed and tiptoed to the bathroom. He locked the door, masturbated, and then took a quick shower. He walked back to the bedroom a short while later, towelling his body, she was awake. Panic showed on her face. She fell on her knees.
“My husband,” she cried. “Please forgive me. I overslept. Why didn’t you awake me?”
He hated that she no longer called him by name, that she knelt whenever they talked. He hated that she was no longer his lover. He wanted to tell her that he had enjoyed bathing on his own, but such a statement could send him to jail.
“You needed a rest,” he said, forcing a smile. “But you can still dress me.”
He sat on a three-legged stool. She hurried to a giant reed basket to choose his clothing. He eyed her with a mixture of hatred and longing. She was naked. Her ebony hue glowed in the warm beam of sunrise. Her lips were thick and inviting, her nipples fat and juicy. Though she had four children, she still had the voluptuous curves of a teenager. The sight tortured him. He could ogle, but not touch.
He glared at the mural opposite him. It covered every inch of the wall. He blamed it for destroying his marriage. He often wanted to rip it off, but that would send him to the firing squad. The mural depicted what was supposed to be life in Africa before the Europeans came. Kopet wondered if it really had been like this, if wives had washed and dressed up their husbands the same way mothers fussed over children, if sex was strictly for procreation. Unlike the pictures in his childhood, this mural had motion, like a silent movie in the endless loop of an irritating commercial, a thousand different movies playing at the same time on the same screen. Instead of decolonizing the mind, as the Emperor claimed it would, it enslaved the people. It depicted women with unnaturally long necks, men with weird heights and warrior looks. The faces were pure black with ghoulish white teeth and white eyes. It enforced the idea that Africa had a single identity, a single language, a single culture. Whoever painted it did not know that they were promoting stereotypes, and the misconceptions and misinformation that the Europeans had of Africa. Maybe they knew, but they still pasted the propaganda on every wall in every household to keep a firm grip of power. The greatest lie they told, the one that turned Kopet into a seething volcano waiting to erupt, was that romance and sex for pleasure was not African culture. His wife did not question the mural. With religious fanaticism, she obeyed its instructions on how she was supposed to live her life.
She brought him a bark robe and loincloth. After she had dressed him, she gave him a goatskin bag and a straw hat. He thanked her and hurried out to work.
“What will you eat,” she said as he vanished through the door. “Milk and katogo?”
“Surprise me,” he said, walking briskly through the living room to the garage.
“But you must tell me,” she said, following him. She covered up her nakedness with the blanket. “Please, my husband, what food should I bring for your breakfast?”
“Milk and katogo,” he said.
She stopped following him. He walked into the garage. Four ornithopters gleamed in the darkness. They looked like eggs with wings and wheels. His was the yellow one, the smallest. The biggest, brown in color, belonged to his wife. The two green ones were for the children. He flipped a button on the wall and the front door whirred as it slid open, letting in the brilliance of the sun, revealing the rush hour madness outside. Tens of thousands of brukas hovered about, some returning from night shifts, others heading out for work. The traffic abasura were overwhelmed. The air was so thick with flyers it seemed impossible to get out of the confusion.
Kopet slid his bird out of the garage. A solar engine in the tail enabled him to fly with closed wings. Most of the brukas stuck in the confusion were older models. They had no engines. Their twelve-foot wings made it difficult to navigate out of the jam. Kopet needed very little space. He steered the machine downwards, staying very close to the surface of the building.
His home was about two thousand feet above the ground, roughly situated in the middle of the Pyramid, which he shared with five thousand other families. These skyscrapers did not look like their ancient namesakes. They were gigantic versions of the peasant huts that once graced rural Africa. They were called Pyramids because the Emperor believed he was the reincarnation of Tutankhamun, and his Bito Empire was the new Egypt.
The traffic was less heavy at about fifty feet off the ground. Kopet increased speed. He skimmed the treetops, keeping low to stay clear of the jam, until he was out of the city. He then soared into the skies and opened his wings to gain maximum speed. He shut down the engine for he loved to peddle. It was the only exercise he had to keep fit.
He reached his workshop at seven. He loved it there, a secluded place behind the hills that formed a natural wall around the city. His nearest neighbor, a fish factory, was over a mile away. He loved the reclusive atmosphere, the sound of birds and insects, of the wind in the trees. Sounds which could no longer be heard in the cities. He loved that his workshop was on the ground, that he could smell the soil after a rain, and that he could choke in dust during the dry season. It was an outmoded building, constructed using red bricks, with a corrugated iron-sheet roof. It reminded him of his childhood, of life before the Emperor’s madness, of the love that once flourished between him and Akello.
Kopet had inherited the shop from an old man whose entire family had vanished in the war. Being an orphan in a refugee camp, he had formed a grandson-like relationship with this old man, who taught him about art and sculpture. At the time the old man died, shortly after peace had returned and they were trying to start a new life, a small town flourished around the shop. But then, about fifteen years
back, the Emperor built his Pyramids and everyone went to live in them. The town died. The bushes grew tall, swallowing up the abandoned buildings, wiping off the road, enclosing Kopet’s workshop in a sea of reclusive bliss. The only visitor he had was his wife. She brought him food twice a day. She once asked that he abandon the old fashioned place and set up his workshop in a Pyramid within the city, but he told her that he was holding on to memories of his foster grandfather. He did not tell her about the secret hole beneath the floor.
That morning, the moment he stepped out of the bruka, he knew that someone had invaded his hermitage. A windowpane was broken. Had a burglar had come in the night?
Once inside, he pulled a string drawing the curtains and filling the room with daylight. He checked the cash box, which he kept in the back room. It was intact, the little money and cheap jewelry was all there. Frowning, he looked around. Nothing seemed to be missing. Clay artworks sat on the shelves, statues and sculptures stood on the floor, half-done pieces were on the tables, everything was as he had left it the previous day. Everything but the broken pane. Maybe a bird had crashed through the glass?
Kopet examined the window, and the shattered glass on the floor. That is when he saw the stone. It was not a bird. Someone had broken the pane with the stone. Was it a burglar? Why then was nothing missing? Had someone discovered his secret hole? He inspected the green shelf that hid the trap door. Since he opened it regularly, he could not use the dust to tell if the intruder had moved it. He was certain his secret was intact. If someone had discovered it, the abasura would have already arrested him. But what did the broken window mean? Did the burglar find nothing worth stealing?
He gave up the mystery. He switched on an electric broom. It sucked the broken glass and flushed it through pipes to a garbage pit in the backyard. Then, he saw something else on the floor. He turned off the broom, dropped to his knees and examined the red smudge. Blood. Fresh, not clotted. He noticed a few more drops, and his bones turned into ice. Did the burglar bleed? He did not stop to think that the intruder might still be inside, hiding somewhere. He hurried to the vidisimu to call the abasura.
