The Binding

by Nicholas Wolff

  Ramona leaned into it, making little circles as she slowly half stepped along the counter. When she was done, she went back with a clean end of the T-shirt and wiped off the milky residue that lay on the chrome. Then she put the Comet and the T-shirt under the counter, next to the garbage bags and the cat litter for her aunt Zuela’s cat, Jasper. She wiped her brow and felt the need to sleep rise behind her eyes like a dark wave. But instead of heading upstairs to her bedroom, she went to the fridge. The light spilled out onto the dark floor, and she took out the Diet Coke Lime that she’d bought on the way down from Massachusetts, knowing her aunt wouldn’t buy the stuff. Sugar won’t hurt you, Mona, Zuela would say. Imagining her aunt’s disdain, Ramona huffed. Yes, it will. Wartham hadn’t made her anorexic by any means—she still ate what she wanted—but being up there with all those skinny white girls did tend to focus the mind on calories and all related matters.

  She went to the dining room table and sat. She took a sip of the soda and laid her head on the crinkly red-and-white-checked tablecloth. This, too, was the same as her childhood—or a replacement that smelled and felt the same. The refrigerator was a big, old GE, and when its motor kicked in, it flooded the room with a low hum that Ramona loved. It was like hearing her mama’s heartbeat. Here is where she’d spent half her childhood. The curtains had always been open then as her mother cooked one of her West Indian specialties, and she could watch the neighbors hang their laundry on their backyard lines. Or, at night, listen to the Brambles, the Jamaican family next door, laugh and play their lover’s rock records, old Desmond Dekker and Peter Tosh tunes. The window had been her jukebox and her air conditioner, too.

  But as the afternoon light turned dusky, the window and the curtains were closed tight.

  Right now, she didn’t want to see out. And she didn’t want outside coming in.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Nat had landed on a site called sacpasse.net, which seemed at a glance to be dedicated to essays on Haitian culture. A lot of first-person reports on Haitian food, the Creole language, compas music. The piece he’d clicked on was by Professor Helen Zimmerman, and it looked to be a travelogue about her search for the true origins of voodoo practices, particularly relating to the idea of the undead. The first thing Nat noticed was that she refused to use the word zombie throughout the piece and instead substituted the term nzombe. Is that African? Nat wondered. Swahili, maybe? Are we talking about the same thing? He shook his head and started reading.

  I spent five years tracking the nzombe phenomenon all through West Africa.

  I even drew maps: purple for deepest belief, orange for moderate, and so on. And I found the heart of the nzombe tradition was in a thin strip of territory that didn’t, of course, correspond to any of the modern states that had been superimposed on the area during colonialism, but that ran generally north to south from Senegal to Liberia. This was where the belief had been born, where it was oldest and most rooted in the lives of the people. The Nzombe Belt, some people called it.

  I have no idea how this belief began. Perhaps it was a response to the epidemics that swept through the bush villages back in prehistory. Perhaps some of those illnesses reduced the sufferers to a waking death—comatose, in other words—and the first sorcerers were those village men who were able, by hook or by crook, to bring them back to life, or to appear to. Clearly it had a great deal to do with the spirit life of the people, who saw life and death in many living things, and in some things that did not live. Spirit in those parts of Africa isn’t a black-and-white affair, if you’ll pardon the pun. It’s a permeable frontier. People go through and come back. Their spirits haunt the places they died, or haunt the people who caused their deaths. The soul exists in a continuum that the real, physical world only connects to here and there. Death is not really death, not as we understand it.

  This was hardly groundbreaking news. But what I found was that the ability to bring the dead back to life, to create nzombes, was different from the other parts of the people’s belief systems. The sorcerer was the key to the whole tradition. And here’s where I made two discoveries, both confirmed by several oral traditions from discrete parts of the belt.

  The first is that sorcerers, good sorcerers, are born, not made. They’re incredibly rare. The idea that any village medicine man can create a nzombe would be laughable to any true believer. It’s a talent, and in order to perform the highest work of the tradition—raising the dead—you need to be a genius. I came to think of it this way. I brought three things into the bush with me: antimalaria tablets, a beat-up Sony tape recorder to document my interviews, and Mozart cassettes to play on it during the nights when I wasn’t transcribing. And I began to think of the great West African sorcerers as rarities on the order of Mozart. They were the flower of thousands of years of genetics and belief. They were able to harness the spirits in ways others were unable to.

  You can wait many generations for a sorcerer who can create a nzombe. And there are many limitations on what he can do. He has to be close to his victim—physically close. You can’t control a nzombe from five hundred miles away. And that control is extremely difficult. The women I interviewed—and later the men, when I had been there too long to ignore them anymore—were adamant about this. They insisted that the human spirit isn’t so easily mastered. There are times when the nzombe becomes aware of his own strangeness in the world, when he breaks free from the thought stream of his master. When he wanders, searching for an answer to what has become of him or her.

  He senses he is among the dead, but he cannot break free. He wanders back and forth across the line of consciousness and individual action, until the master reasserts control. That was the second thing I took from Africa.

  The rest was taught to me by a man named Tshompa, a Guinean healer in his forties who I’d been told by reliable contacts was a sorcerer. I met him one day in 2001 in Conakry. I had sent word through an intermediary that I wanted to talk about nzombes. After many false starts and refusals on Tshompa’s part, I offered to bring him a bottle of his favorite whiskey: Johnnie Walker Green Label, which was practically unobtainable in Guinea at that time.

  When he first walked into the house where I was meeting him—a shack off the main road in Conakry roofed with sheets of tin—I immediately felt a presence. The air seemed to hum, as if I were standing beneath one of those huge overhead power lines. Brimming with something powerful.

  He appeared younger than I’d expected. Small eyeballs behind thick eyelids, a sloping forehead, balding with tufts of hair cut close to the scalp. Wide mouth, lined all around with a small gutter, an indentation, which gave every movement of his mouth, every expression, a subtle power.

  I will recount here from my notes the essence of that conversation.

  “Tell me about the nzombes,” I began. He’d looked at me with contempt. I took the bottle of Johnnie Walker out of my bag and offered it to him.

  “What do you want to know?” he’d said with mocking courtesy in his surprisingly good English.

  “Everything.”

  He’d snorted with laughter as he held the bottle in his hands.

  “I’ve read something about your zombies,” he said, his eyes blooming and his lips opening wide as he pronounced zom-beez, in cartoonish disgust. Then he made the African sound of dismissal inside his mouth. Tssssshhh.

  “What was wrong about what you read?”

  “Everything!” he roared. He twisted the cap on the Johnnie Walker, took a dirty glass, and poured some whiskey into it. As he drank, his eyes studied me. “This at least you can do right, you murungu. Making whiskey. Ha-ha.”

  “Tell me about nzombes.”

  “In this book I read, a murungu book, it said the sorcerer creates the nzombe to work for him. To plow the fields, to plant his beets! Is this true?”

  I nodded. “I’ve read those books, too.”

  Tshompa laughed sourly. “To work in his f
ields! Is that all an African can do? I can get a worker in Kasama for one dollar a day. One dollar! You think a sorcerer would exert himself for that price? Tsssshhh. You think even our great men are nothing more than animals.”

  “I’m not sure what you read, but that isn’t all—”

  “You are another slanderer. Perhaps I will show you what being a nzombe is, ha? Just a touch?”

  “I came here for information, not to be insulted.”

  “You can learn nothing,” he said dismissively.

  “Perhaps there’s nothing to know.”

  “What?!” the man said, angrily.

  “You talk about everything the sorcerer doesn’t do, but nothing he does. Perhaps you don’t know. I can’t tell you how many pishers I’ve met. Have I wasted good whiskey on you?”

  “Ah?” he said, turning his head as if he were hard of hearing. “What is this pisher?”

  “Charlatan. Faker.”

  The eyes now. And I felt as if the darkness behind him moved, as if shapes had been rearranged there.

  “You insult me? Why do you ask about the nzombe?”

  “Because I want to know.”

  “You are not worthy of this knowledge.”

  “Because I am murungu?”

  He made a face. “You think only Africans can make a nzombe? Only the Haitians? We are the only ones who will admit to it.”

  “Murungu can make a nzombe?”

  “Oh, yes. But he will do it his way. In secret.”

  “Tell me why you make your nzombes, if not to work for you.”

  “This”—I didn’t catch the word the first time, but I wrote out pam-way in my notebook blindly, in the darkness—“is not possible to explain.”

  “What did you call it?”

  “This pamwe. This . . . binding.”

  “Tell me.”

  “The nzombe, how can I tell you? It is the most difficult thing in the world. This is the first thing no one understands, not even these chickens—” He gestured outside, meaning the passersby, the poor peasants dressed in greasy, torn clothes. “Listen, murungu. Sorcery is a world bigger than this world. And sorcerers seek out the nzombe because it is the final thing in their world. The pinnacle, yes? A test of who is a master. You understand? They do this not because it is easy. Only because it is difficult.”

  He was staring at the ground.

  “I will talk so you can understand. You Westerners, you love your houses. I’ve seen the pictures, eh, these enormous houses with the cars parked in front. So the human, you can say she is a house. A dark house you come to at night across a broad field, no stars shining. You can feel its size in the night. A great human, a . . . a . . . a significant person, is a big house. A mansion! And when you come close, the lights lit up for holidays. Like the British used to have here, you understand, for their Christmas parties? This could be the soul of the poorest man in the village. When the sorcerer approaches his soul, he sees the dimensions. And the richest man—” Tshompa spit. “He could be a hut, a simple dwelling. Unworthy of the sorcerer. He will pass him by.” Laughter, sinister in the gloom.

  “Unless he has use for him.”

  “Perhaps.” Tshompa stared at the ground and hugged his arms to his chest. “The second thing you must understand is that a door must be left open. Why does the sorcerer sometimes strike at the moment of death? Because it is then the door has been left open! Why do the gullible fall? Because their defenses are weak. He needs this, because the work of entering another soul is not easy. So! Say a man is sick, getting close to his death. Well, then, a small door opens. Juuuuust a crack. The sorcerer slips in. He doesn’t want a dead man—a sorcerer already knows death, he practices death! It’s life he wants. Entrance, entrance into another’s life. To bind with another soul in order to have that soul and walk in new worlds. Pamwe. The binding. This is what gives him new life.”

  He stopped for a moment, considering what he’d said. “But sometimes in life, this door is left open. You understand?”

  “How?”

  “Ah. Sometimes the person wants it, wants to become a nzombe. You don’t believe, I see, but it’s true. Maybe they are curious about the other side of the world, or maybe the sorcerer whispers a story in their ear, tells them the things that will come to them if they allow the binding.”

  “So a living person can become a nzombe?”

  “Of course! But someone who already has this open window. Perhaps it is in their past, an ancestor who played with the sorcerers, no? Or there is a wish to come over to the other side, and then they are trapped.”

  “By ‘the other side,’ ” I said, “you mean death?”

  “Death and everything beyond death.”

  I took a minute to take that in, but Tshompa barely noticed.

  “They are curious!” he said with a guttural laugh. “They want to know! And, how do you say, curiosity, it killed the cat.”

  He paused. I saw the bottle of whiskey twist and lift, the green-and-gold Johnnie Walker label flashing in the semidarkness, and heard the tink of bottleneck on glass edge. He slurped.

  Tshompa held the glass in his right hand, his left arm across his chest, held tight. He looked down at the ground, contemplating.

  “So! The sorcerer goes inside. He is like a . . . What do you call it?”

  “A thief.”

  “No!”

  “A trespasser.”

  “Yes. Okay. And it is something I can’t really describe to you. Poor murungu, your English does not have the words I need.”

  “Try, Tshompa. And before you finish my bottle.”

  “Ha. Mean woman.”

  Tshompa stared at me.

  “You bind with another soul,” I prompted.

  “Yesssss. You can smell what her mother cooked for her when she was a baby, you can smell it in your own nostrils, do you understand? Memories she cannot have anymore, memories she has forgotten for years. You walk and you walk and you hear and see everything. The evil things in her heart, the evil things she has done, the deaths she wishes on those around her, like black powder smoke curling up, enough to choke you. And any one of these things, you can make her remember, you can make real to her again. Imagine a house with two million rooms. Some sorcerers have become lost in their own nzombes! They are trapped in their own bindings. Do you understand? It is dangerous. It is travel to another world. And what you can set in motion in this world!”

  “So you don’t control the nzombe? You aren’t pulling the levers.”

  Another snort. “Murungu, you are so crude. You think this because you believe Africans are beasts. We walk around with our mouths open like AAAAHHHHH.” He stood, his arms in front of him, his mouth open and his head tilted to the side. “AHHHHH!” he cried, louder. Then he gave me a sharp look and sat back in his chair. “A poor sorcerer has only a little control. It’s like a young boy getting into his father’s car and touching the gas pedal and—” Tshompa shot back in his chair, his arms coming up to shield his eyes. “It wants to go. And it goes. But you have pointed the way. You have found the evil thing that will make the nzombe yours. But a great sorcerer? Ahhhh. This . . .” He wagged his finger, head twisting toward the ground. “This is something.”

  “You’re saying a great man can control the nzombe completely?”

  He looked at me disapprovingly. “What is ‘completely’? Even the great men are still men, huh? So the host may escape the sorceror’s mind for a moment or two and come back to himself. But the sorcerer will capture him again.”

  “And what happens when the nzombe dies? Does the sorcerer die, too?”

  Tshompa shook his head. “The great ones, they leap from nzombe to nzombe. We call them travelers.”

  It took me a minute to absorb this. “These travelers . . . they inhabit different bodies over time?”

  “Yes.”
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  “And what do they do in their new bodies?”

  “Do?” Tshompa snorted. “The ones I have heard of, they have a mission beyond merely living. They seek revenge for crimes committed against them. Old enemies disappear, and their children and grandchildren suffer strange accidents.”

  I got the feeling Tshompa was becoming impatient with the subject, but I pressed on. “So this is about vengeance?”

  “It can be. Or the traveler, he simply wishes to defeat death, to become the only human creature to escape death. This is what I have heard. But for myself I cannot say.”

  “Why not?”

  “This is the great mystery, eh? No, the great joke.”

  “I don’t get the joke.”

  He stared at me; then his eyes dropped. His voice was quieter now. “Because for some reason, the evil ones make the best travelers, the only travelers. Look at me. I am not bad enough. I have only peeked in the doorway of a few houses. Eh?”

  He brought the glass up for another sip, gulping back the last two fingers of whiskey. He coughed, then looked at me levelly.

  “The world doesn’t want good sorcerers doing this. It saves the power for the dark men.”

  * * *

  With the sound of sleet tapping on the picture window of the condo, Nat slowly read through the rest of the piece. Tshompa went on to say that salt can protect you from the lower-order nzombes, but that little else works. And that in order to kill a nzombe, you have to surprise the host body. You have to surprise it and kill it before the sorcerer can bind with another. When the host dies, the traveler inside him goes, too. If you’re quick enough. And when the traveler dies, his nzombes go back to their former state. If he raised it from the dead, the nzombe dies again. If he possessed a living person, the person simply wakes up as if after a long sleep.