Limbo

by Bernard Wolfe

  The leader was startled. “I’ll be damned,” he said. “No. Don’t tell me you speak English?”

  “Oh, yes,” Ubu said. It made him feel good to be able to please the stranger. “I have studied English, I know many words. Prognosis, electronic, bohemian, cobra, rampart.”

  Now he remembered that he was supposed to explain his knowledge of English and he hurried on to tell the story: Johannesburg, school, long time ago, and so on.

  “That’s interesting,” the stranger said. He held out his hands as he had seen Ubu do. “Peace,” he said. “My name is Theo.”

  “Mine Ubu. Is.”

  “I’m very glad to know you, Mr. Ubu.” The stranger was studying the old man’s face, politely but with interest. “Tell me, Mr. Ubu, are your people in any way related to a tribe called the Bantus? There’s something in your faces. . . . Your island isn’t indicated on any of our maps, we haven’t been able to find a reference to it anywhere.”

  “There is some of Bantu in us. Likewise Malay. Likewise Arab. Many things. We are the Mandunji.”

  “Mandunji? That’s a new one on me.”

  “Few people on the outside know of us, we make no trouble.”

  “Where did you get your name?”

  “Easy to explain. In our language Mandunji means literally, those whose heads are without devils. You see, we have also a word Mandunga, it is a verb meaning to chase the devils from the head, it refers to some of our old ceremonies, our name comes from the same root. Among us there are also some people called Mandungabas, this means those from whose heads the devils have been chased. However.” The thought occurred to him that he might be talking too much, he felt Martine’s eyes on him. “To make a free translation, perhaps in English one would say Mandunji means simply the sane ones, the normal. Among us it is considered a very good idea to be normal, we have a great respect for it.”

  “Fascinating, fascinating,” Theo said enthusiastically. “My people too have great respect for the normal, and they also hope that war will stay on the other side of the river, all rivers. We have a lot in common.”

  “Your people?” Ubu said courteously. “By what name are they known?”

  “We are Inland Strippers. We come from a place called the Inland Strip.”

  “It is a big island?”

  Theo laughed, not at all offensively. “Big as hell,” he said. “Used to be called America. You’ve heard of it?”

  “Oh, indeed. Many times, when I attended school.”

  “Well, the Inland Strip is the only part of America that’s inhabited now. You see, there are many fewer people there now, since the Third. . . . Oh, excuse me, I mean the third war, that’s the way we refer to it. You know about the war?”

  “Ah, rumph, yes, some men came in a ship many years ago and told us of the terrible events. EMSIAC, hydrogen bombs, radiological dust, supersonic ships, I remember many things. They said Johannesburg was an ash heap.”

  The old man stopped in confusion: his muscles were stiff with tension, it was such a horrible effort to lie. Especially to a person as pleasant and friendly as this Theo. He longed to put away all the subterfuges and talk frankly with the good man, tell him everything. But, aside from other deterrents, Martine was listening.

  “Yes,” Theo said soberly. “For a short time during the war I served in Africa. I saw with my own eyes what happened to Johannesburg. Johannesburg and many other cities.”

  He noticed that Ubu was staring at his body.

  “Oh?” he said. “You haven’t heard about Immob?”

  “Immob?”

  “Yes. That’s what’s behind these arms and legs.”

  “Is it that you and your friends were injured in, in the Third? In some hydrogen explosions?” Ubu said sympathetically.

  “No, no, nothing like that. Immob has to do with a very great effort to keep the war, the steamroller of war, on the other side of the river. Forever.”

  Theo was obviously pleased with himself for having found exactly the right formulation for his thought. He moved several steps closer to Ubu. “Mr. Ubu, I’d like to tell you why we are here. We come in friendship, with no desire to upset the life of your village. You see, my comrades here are all athletes. You know what athletes are?”

  “I remember from school,” Ubu said uncertainly. “Running and lifting weights and walking on the hands. Things like that.”

  “Exactly. Men who engage in sports must train, practice, and that’s what we are now doing—we’re on a training cruise, and we stop here and there on our travels to see new sights and meet different peoples. We’d like very much to know your island better, especially since it’s not charted on any of our maps, we’d like to collect some data on your flora and your fauna, too—for example, my hobby is butterfly collecting. Our intention is to establish a base at the other end of the island, where we won’t be a bother to you, and make some surveys.”

  “You will stay long?”

  “I myself must leave in a few weeks, but the rest of the party will stay for some months. They’ll be making some more expeditions around.”

  “Good. We shall talk much and tell each other many things.”

  “That’ll be just wonderful. We’d like to know all about your people, and it may interest you to hear about the Immobs. We’ll be friends.”

  “You come in peace, Mr. Theo,” Ubu said, “and you are welcomed in peace. I shall send to you a present of some sweet cassava, it is what you call tapioca, I believe. Relieves intestinal tonus, very excellent for the bowels.”

  “Thank you,” Theo said. “Perhaps you would like some pistachio ice cream.”

  The two men looked at each other with mutual respect. They ceremoniously extended their hands toward one another again, Theo’s flickering. Then the white man turned and, accompanied by his friends, retreated across the clearing, disappeared into the newly cut pathway.

  Ubu stood for some time, looking thoughtfully at the mouth of the tunnel; some of the bushes and plants were still smoldering from the searing fire of the flame-throwers. Then he faced about and went to Martine’s house.

  The doctor was standing in the doorway, staring at the hole in the jungle down which the strangers had vanished. Brachycephalic as hell, skull at least as broad as it was long, cranial proportions at least 10:10, he was thinking. And Immob? What, for God’s sake, was Immob? Nonsense syllable. But his pulse had never before been sent racing at 120, at least 120, by a nonsense syllable.

  “You heard?” the old man asked.

  “Most of it.”

  “You feared for no reason.”

  “Maybe.”

  “But this Mr. Theo is such a nice, friendly man! There is no harm in him, he would not trouble a spider.”

  “The guy certainly spoke well enough, but that whole line about training cruises and flora and fauna—it sounds fishy to me.”

  “You see fish everywhere, Doctor, it is the characteristic of tonicity.”

  Martine turned his head—Ooda, standing in the shadow inside, quiet and anxious. He reached out, drew her close to him. “I see something else: a great fire-shooting arm and a great sharp-toothed hand. These could be very nasty weapons. Worse than a slingshot. Or a steamroller.”

  “What suspicious is there in all this? It seems to me very simple: all the men from your country are in love with machines, they make all kinds of machines, very good, these arms and legs are just more of the toy machines they like to make.”

  “You once saw what such toys can do. Or don’t you remember what Johannesburg and Durban and Cape Town looked like after my people got through playing with them?”

  “No connection,” Ubu insisted. “Mr. Theo says his country wants only to keep the war on the other side of the river. However. If they want to collect some plants and insects, why not?”

  “Let them go swishing their butterfly nets all over the place,” Martine said absent-mindedly. “Maybe they’re all harmless as rabbits. In any case, their coming here complicates matters a
good deal.”

  “I do not follow.”

  “I mean just this: under no circumstance can they learn about my work here. I absolutely insist on that. All Mandunga ceremonies must be suspended completely. All us devil-chasers are out of work, Ubu, let’s face it.”

  “Suspended?” Ubu said dully.

  “More: the cave must be sealed up, with all the records and research data. All the experimental animals must be destroyed—if we turned those four-footed pacifists loose in the jungle our visitors would certainly come upon them and wonder at their scars and strange behavior. Besides, you can’t keep all the Mandungabas under cover indefinitely and Theo’s men would soon see a connection between their scars and the scars on the animals. Remember: you must all act as though Mandunga does not exist and never existed. Or Martine, either.”

  “You, you, you,” Ubu echoed. “Always you say you, not we. What of yourself?”

  “I was thinking about that,” Martine said. “Obviously I can’t stay here.”

  He felt Ooda’s shoulders stiffen, he held his arm tighter around her.

  “Why not, Martine? We could hide you, maybe in the cave.”

  “For months? I’d go nuts with boredom. Besides, these are smart, observant people, if there were a white man on the island they’d find out about it one way or another. Especially since our people aren’t good liars. You yourself were ready to blab the works just a few minutes ago, weren’t you, when you were talking to the nice man? No, I’ve got to disppear, there’s no other way.”

  Before Ubu could say anything, before Ooda could find words for the fear that was spilling into her eyes, Rambo came across the clearing and approached his parents’ hut.

  “You sent for me, Father?”

  “Yes,” Martine said. “I have a job for you. I want you to go to the camp of these strangers.”

  The boy’s alert eyes widened, but he said nothing.

  “You will carry a basket of sweet cassava, tell them it is the present Ubu promised. No doubt they’ll be very polite, ask you to stay and eat or drink. Accept, and in the course of the conversation, without showing any unusual curiosity, ask them certain things about their country which I must know. Do you think you can do that, Rambo?”

  “Yes.”

  Martine began to enumerate, item by item, the things he wanted to find out, going into careful detail about those matters which could not mean very much to the boy: passports, routes of travel, currency, clothes, and so on. When he was through the boy nodded, promised to report as soon as he returned, and left.

  Ubu hardly heard the exchange between Martine and Rambo. “Disappear where, dear friend?” the old man said now with some agitation. “Komoro? Madagascar? If these strangers can find you here, they can find you anywhere in the archipelago.”

  “I know that,” Martine said. “I’ve thought the whole thing out. I can disappear only in one place—where all the other people look like me.”

  “Martine. . . .”

  “I’ve got to go to America, or whatever’s left of it. Incognito, of course. You should understand that: all the normal Mandunji live with each other all their lives incognito.”

  “You must not go,” Ubu said in a trembling voice. “They think you dead, do not change their minds. Besides, you cannot leave us, your friends. . . .”

  “Maybe you’re friends of another one of my incognitos.” But there were tears in the old man’s eyes. “Don’t go dramatic on me, Ubu,” Martine said gently. “That’s another thing about low tonus, it makes you sentimental as hell, your emotions get as flabby as your muscles. It’s just that I’m curious about what’s been happening back there, now that I’ve seen these soft-spoken monsters. I want to examine their flora and fauna.”

  “If you go you—you will not come back,” Ubu said. “You will forget us. How shall we live without you now?”

  “This is my home. I’ll come back, count on it.”

  Ubu was silent for a long time. Martine could feel Ooda’s body quaking in his arm as though she had a chill. Finally the old chief said in a low voice, “When shall you leave, Martine?”

  Martine held Ooda tight. “The sooner the better,” he said. “Tonight, if it’s possible.”

  chapter four

  THEY LAY on the slabs of foam rubber (salvaged from the seats of a cocktail lounge in Pretoria), their bodies just touching. After a while she reached out and lit another cigarette of ganja.

  The moonlight streaming in through the aperture in the far wall, spray of pearl dust, cut across their bodies just above the knees; he studied the juxtaposed shanks. Hers was a tawny brown, brown of chestnuts and dried tobacco leaf, sprinkled with bronzing; his, for all the years of exposure to a brutal sun, remained a white man’s leg, low in melanin, chalky, cheeky. Smug leg. Arrogant. Wore its bleach like a white badge of asepsis, a halo. The white man’s burden was first of all whiteness.

  Her body was still trembling, he could feel it. With her, agitation always took a motoric turn. She had it bad this time.

  And so, finally, after centuries of sahibism, these two legs, hatched and stained in opposite hemispheres, one in the leafy suburbs of Salt Lake City, the other in a jungle some hundreds of miles southeast of Antananarive, now lying side by side on a mattress of foam rubber in the middle of the Indian Ocean. One filled with the messianic blood of Mormons, the other with a pacifist Bantu-Arab-Malay brew called Mandunji. A coupling to shatter a Kipling. . . .

  She made a hissing sound as she pulled the smoke into her lungs, inhaling kinesthetic ease, trying to.

  . . . . Meet. He had never genuinely met anybody before, he thought with surprise. Nobody back home, certainly: not his father or mother, not his friends and fellow students—had he ever really known Helder, his “closest” friend, after all those years of living with him?—not his ex-wife Irene; oh, Irene least of all. They were all strangers, he and they had just made stereotyped sounds at each other and that passed for intimacy. But here, lying next to him, brown and intense and cringing now in misery, was the one being in the world whom he could claim to know a little. The introductions had somehow been made: the light-years that gape between any two skins, no matter what color, had somehow been spanned, superegos had crawled toward each other, glands had gushed, two sets of psychic feelers had prowled and locked, vibrations had been stirred up between their parasympathetic nervous systems—whatever wizardry of sense or essence had turned the trick, they had met, on levels deeper than words.

  “Have you been happy with me?” he said.

  She took another puff on the cigarette and passed it to him. He sipped as she had taught him; held the smoke as long as he could, then let it out in dabs which he immediately sucked up again and swallowed. He felt the tingling in his viscera, in his toes, in his fingers, the stuff was as penetrating in its way as diathermy.

  “I mean really happy,” he said. “All the way. So you feel there is nothing more.”

  . . . . Two wondrous weeds grew on the Isle of the Mandunji, one full of emotional helium, the other an emotional steamroller. Hemp, the sharpener of sense and whetter of appetite, the spreader of glow, and rotabunga, the blunter of feeling and carrier of coma. One to leaven, the other to lull. Mutually negating flora, gift of the ambivalent gods. It was a real clue to the Mandunji personality that, having stumbled upon a garden of such pharmacological riches, it quick outlawed ganja and made rota an official beverage. But Nature went on planting its contraries, not only in the weeds of every jungle, but in the creatures of every village. That was the trouble, really, there were liberal dosages of both ganja and rota in all human clay. Every man was, at least incipiently, a bit of a blowtop and a bit of a somnambule, squirming simultaneously toward Eros and Thanatos, the berserk and the vegetative. Rule: every blob of protoplasm teems with ambivalence, yearns at one and the same time to freeze and to blow up. A community committed to stupor might decree all excitants to be illegal, drive them underground and force-feed their devotees with sedatives and anesthetics,
but riot will out. In a sense these two logger-headstrong plants were only symbols of the two linked psychic poles: the Dionysian, the blowtop, the oceanic, headed for abandon and the ultimate in sensation and all-engulfing consciousness; and the Apollonian, bedded down in mildness and limit and order and even-tempered restraint and a certain programmatic heavy-liddedness. Despite all pharmaceutical totems and taboos the twain would always and everywhere meet, in every jungle, in every village, in every cell of every body—every neurone, every muscle strand, every synapse. More Siamese twins. . . .

  He handed the cigarette back to her. He had to deliver a lecture tonight, he had just this moment decided on it, it would be tricky, he would need his wits about him.

  “Well?” he said. “Have you?”

  “Happy?”

  He understood the sullen question in her voice. Many times, in the early days, he had asked her the same thing, and always her answer had been: “The word has no meaning for me. It is a sound, like water running. When my people mean it goes well they say it is peaceful, quiet—is that what you mean? No, it has not been peaceful.”

  “I am not talking about peace,” he said. “You were not meant for peace, you did not have peace before I came.”

  “No, but I was alone. I did not live near others. There was no one close enough to hurt me. When I felt a hurt it came from inside, not from another. . . . Now the hurt comes from you. You are near but many times I feel alone. . . .”

  “I want to know: in your life with me, do you use yourself up? All of you? You feel that what is in you comes out, you like the feeling? Do you yawn?”

  She took a long drag on the cigarette, held her breath. “No,” she said, sulky, as she exhaled. “I do not yawn.”

  “Is it good not to be sleepy?”

  “This is how I would have it, not the regular way. With you it is very low one moment, very high the next, always the going up or down. I would not like it to be the same always. Although when we are low—when you go away from me and into yourself—it is sometimes very bad. It does not bother me too much.” He felt her body begin to tremble again, worse than before. “Now we are down far, to the bottom. I feel a hurt that will make me crazy.”