Vera raised her hands, shaking her head, and she whispered, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Binti, I’m sorry!”
“Move away from her,” I heard one of my uncles say. “Everyone.”
“Kai!” someone exclaimed. “What is that?”
I saw my four-year-old niece on the other side of the round table drop her drumstick of chicken and bury her face against the leg of my oldest brother, Omeva. He didn’t notice her do this because he was staring at me, his mouth agape. People fled the room, covered their eyes, cowered in corners. I met the blank eyes of my mother and held them for a long time and that was when I realized what was happening. My okuoko. They were writhing atop my head, again.
“What has happened to my harmonizing daughter?” I heard my father softly ask. “The peacemaker? She spits in her older sister’s face.” He pressed his right hand to his eyes; the joints were so gnarled.
I let go of the edan in my pocket and pressed my hand to my chest. The rage in me retreated. “Papa, I . . .”
“What did that place do to you?” he asked, still covering his face.
I couldn’t stop the tears from falling. I didn’t know what it all had done to me. It was there sometimes, and then sometimes, it wasn’t. I was peaceful, then all I could see was war. My siblings had been attacking me. How was peace going to help? I wanted to say these things. I wanted to explain to them all. Instead, I fled the dining room. I left my family to continue talking about me in my absence as they had since I’d left. As I ascended the stairs, I heard them start in. Vera began, then my brothers.
I slammed my bedroom door behind me and just stood there. My entire body was shuddering. I’d traveled so far to come home and rest in the arms of my family and now I’d just cast myself out. “Even a masquerade has its people, only a ghost wanders alone,” my father liked to say. I have to fix this, I desperately thought. But my mind was too full of adrenaline and fury to think of anything.
The gift on my bed caught my eye. I unwrapped it and unfolded the silky wrapper, matching top and veil inside it, all the deep orange color of otjize. “Beautiful,” I whispered. Lovely light weather-treated material that would make walking in the desert under the noon sun like standing in the shade. A girl’s or woman’s pilgrimage clothes were the most expensive and treasured clothes she would have until her wedding day.
I laughed bitterly. These would probably be the most expensive and treasured clothes in my life. “No marriage for me,” I muttered. My words made me snicker to myself and then I laughed harder. Soon, I was laughing so hard that my belly muscles were cramping.
When I calmed down, I listened, still hearing my family talking loudly in the meeting room. I shook out my pilgrimage clothes and laid them on my chair. I brought out my astrolabe and edan and placed them side by side on my bed. I shut my eyes and was about to do one of the breathing exercises Professor Okpala had taught me when my astrolabe chimed. Someone was trying to reach me. I paused, my eyes closed, going through a list of who it could possibly be.
My sisters? Probably.
My father? No.
My mother? Possibly.
My uncles or aunties? Likely.
I opened my eyes and saw Dele’s face filling in the circular screen of my astrolabe. He was looking down at his hands, as he waited for me to accept his call. “Dele,” I said and the notification chimes stopped. He looked up, seeing me, and we stared at each other. We hadn’t spoken since I left. He wouldn’t answer or return my calls and he had never called me. He looked older, now . . . and wiser.
“You have a beard,” I blurted. It was light and fuzzy, but a beard it was.
“I’ve joined the Himba Council.” He didn’t smile as he conveyed this news. Then he just stared at me. I stared back. The Himba Council? Was he next in line to apprentice for Council Chief? Dele? Council apprentices weren’t allowed to leave Himbaland. When had Dele become so . . . rooted? From downstairs, they still talked, voices raised. Now, I heard my mother speaking. Shouting?
“How have you been?” I finally asked.
“Here,” he said.
More silence. “What . . . what do you want, Dele?”
“Your sister messaged me to call you immediately,” he said. “What’s going on?”
“This is why you finally reach out to me?”
“You were the one who left, not me.”
“So?”
Silence.
“Dele . . . I couldn’t tell you,” I said. “Everyone . . . you just assumed I wasn’t going, that I wasn’t supposed to go. I wanted to, Dele. So badly. Haven’t you ever wanted something with all your heart, yet . . .”
“Yet, not one person in my family, in my entire clan, wanted it for me? No, Binti, never. That would be selfish. I’m not Khoush.”
Dele and I had known each other since we were babies and as we grew older, Dele had begun to lean more and more toward embracing the deep Himba way. We used to joke and argue about it, but our friendship always won out over the laws, rules, and mores. Plus, back then, his traditional leanings made him seem so strong and important, despite my dislike of it. Now, he’d grown a beard.
“You’re too complex, Binti,” he said. “That’s why I stayed away. You’re my best friend. You are. And I miss you. But, you’re too complex. And look at you; you’re even stranger now.” He pointed into the camera. “You think you can cover those things with otjize and I won’t see them? I know you.”
I sat down hard on my bed, feeling breathless again. Had my sister told him about my okuoko? Could he really see them through the camera? They weren’t even moving.
“What are you trying to accomplish with all this?” he asked. “I can see it in your face, you’re not well. You look tired and sad and . . .”
“Because of what just happened!” I said. “Why don’t you ask me about that? Instead of assuming the greatest choice I’ve ever made for myself is making me sick? Home is making me sick! I was fine until I got here.” This wasn’t all true, of course, but I needed to make my point clearly.
“We all love you,” he said. “You don’t know how your leaving made your family suffer. Your father’s business may have increased because of you, but his health has decreased. That doesn’t bode well for our village. He’s more our leader than our chief! He’s master harmonizer! And people here . . . ask your younger sisters, girl cousins how they get treated. You’ve stained them. Marriage won’t be . . .”
“None of that’s my fault!”
Dele paused and shook his head, chuckling softly. Then, again, we were staring at each other.
He waved a hand at me. “I can’t help you, Binti.”
“Can’t help you, either,” I snapped.
“I hear you’re going on pilgrimage tomorrow,” he said. “You have strange timing, but good luck.”
“Thanks,” I said, looking away.
“I trust you will take care of yourself,” he said, coolly. Then Dele was gone. And for the first time, it really sunk in. No man wanted a girl who ran away. No man would marry me.
I pushed my astrolabe and edan aside, lay on my bed, curled up, and cried myself to sleep.
Night Masquerade
I awoke hours later with a face crusty with tears, dried otjize, and snot. I went to the bathroom, blew and wiped my nose, and looked at myself in the mirror. Old otjize was flaking from my cheeks and forehead, leaving patches of clear brown bare skin. I needed to remove it all and reapply. I’d feel more myself, I knew. I didn’t pause on the knowledge that my current batch of otjize was made with clay from another planet. As I stared at my haggard face in the mirror, I glanced at the window facing the back of the house and remembered Okwu was out there.
I tiptoed downstairs and peeked into the main room. There were a few still awake, softly chatting in a corner, my sister Vera one of them. Many were curled up on flat pillows and mats. I snuck out the back
door and nearly walked right into Okwu.
“It didn’t go well,” it said.
“No,” I said, stepping around it to go look at its gas-filled tent. The tent’s tall puffy girth reminded me of a giant Meduse. Maybe that’s what my father was going for when he set it up.
“Your father came out to check on me,” Okwu said. “He seemed upset.”
I grunted, but said nothing more of it. “Do you want to go see the lake?” I said.
Okwu exhaled out a great amount of gas and I coughed, fanning the air around me. “Yes,” it said, its voice so clear that the vibration of it made my head ache.
My home village Osemba was a palette of dusty browns from the dirt roads to stone and sand-brick buildings. The oldest buildings were groupings of several solid stone structures, like the Root with its many traditional conical roofs. The Root sits at the very edge of Osemba. About a mile west, the sand dunes begin threatening to reclaim the clay-rich land. In the opposite direction, straight down the main dirt road, past other homes and a small area reserved for the western morning souq, is the lake. The rest of Osemba spreads along the lake’s edges.
Okwu and I walked up the road in the dark of deep night. We, Himba, are a people of the sun. When it sets, we retreat. The night is typically for sleep, family, and reflection. Thus, Okwu and I had the road to ourselves and I was glad. I used my astrolabe to light our way. I glanced at Okwu every so often and noted how as it floated beside me, it turned this way and that, observing Osemba; the first Meduse to ever do this, in peace or war.
“I can smell the water,” Okwu said, minutes later.
“It’s right in front of us,” I said. “Those tables and wooden medians are for the souq that’s here every morning; it’s similar to the marketplace on Oomza, but with just humans, of course.”
“Then that’s not like Oomza Blue Market at all,” Okwu said.
“No, the setup. People sell things outside. Come, the lake is just past it.”
“How can the air smell of water?” Okwu asked in Otjihimba. The awe it felt was clearer when it spoke in my language. I smiled and walked faster, enjoying Okwu’s rare excitement.
When I stepped onto the sand, Okwu beside me, I quickly took a deep breath and held it. Phoom. Okwu’s gas plumed so thickly around me that for a moment all I saw was the line of my astrolabe’s light tinted lavender. I took several steps from Okwu, fanning the gas away until I reached breathable space. Still, I coughed, laughing as I did. “Okwu,” I gasped. “Calm down—”
But Okwu wasn’t there. I quickly flashed my astrolabe’s light around me and noticed two things at once. The first was that Okwu was floating to the water, moving swiftly as if blown by a strong wind. The second was that I didn’t need my light to see this because the light from the lake was more than enough. Light from the water, I slowly thought as another thought competed for my attention. Can Okwu even swim? Salt is in water, too.
“Okwu,” I shouted, running toward the water.
But Okwu floated into its waters and quickly sunk in. Then it was gone. I splashed in all the way to my knees, the warm buoyancy of the water already feeling as if it wanted to lift me up. “Okwu?” I shouted. Around me was blinking electric green light. It was clusterwink snail season and the water was full of the spawning bioluminescent baby snails, the tiny creatures each flashing their own signals of whatever they were signaling. It was like wading into an overpopulated galaxy.
I waded farther into the water looking for Okwu. I paused, wondering if I should dive in to search for it. I couldn’t swim, but because of the high salt content, I couldn’t drown; the water would just push me to the surface. Still, if I went after Okwu, the water would wash off my otjize. And if anyone saw me, if my people didn’t think I was crazy yet, they certainly would after word spread that I’d been outside otjize-free.
“Okwu?” I shouted one last time. What if the water just dissolved its body? I looked at the glowing water and braced my legs to throw myself farther in and paddle out to find Okwu. Then yards into the water, within the twinkling green stars, I saw a swirling galaxy. Okwu’s silhouette surrounded by swirling twinkling baby snails. “What?” I whispered.
Then Okwu’s dome emerged; Okwu was adeptly swimming, half-submerged. It came toward me, but stopped when the water got too shallow for it to stay half-submerged. “My ancestors are dancing,” Okwu said in Otjihimba, its voice wavering with more emotion than I’d ever heard Okwu convey. Then Okwu swam back into the water. For the next thirty minutes, it danced with the snails.
I sat on the beach, my long skirts covering my otjize-free legs, in the twinkling green of my home lake. Traditionally, it’s taboo for a Himba woman or girl to bathe with water, let alone openly swim in the lake. I’d developed a love for bathing with water in the dorms on Oomza Uni. Though I’d only do it when I was relatively sure no one was around. As I sat there, watching Okwu dance with its god, I thought about how strange it was that for me to swim in water was taboo and for Okwu such a taboo was itself a taboo.
I remember thinking, The gods are many things.
* * *
I don’t know why I was doing it.
Even after seeing Okwu dancing with its god, some of the fury and pain from my dinner with family still coursed through my system. So an hour later, there I sat on my bedroom floor working my fingers over my edan’s lines as I hummed to it as Professor Okpala had taught me—mathematical harmonizing plus the soft vibration waves from my voice sometimes reached normally unreachable sensors on some edans.
My window was open and outside a cool desert breeze was blowing in from the west, pushing my orange curtains inward. The current of the breeze disturbed the mathematical current I was calling up. The disturbance caused my mind to weave in a tumble of equations that strengthened what I was trying to do instead of weaken it.
As I hummed, I let myself tree, floating on a bed of numbers soft, buoyant, and calm like the lake water. Just beautiful, I thought, feeling both vague and distant and close and controlled. My hands worked and soon I slid a finger on one of the triangular sides of the edan. It slid open and then slipped off. Inside the pyramid point was another wall of metal decorated with a different set of geometric swirls and loops. Professor Okpala described it as “another language beneath the language.” My edan was all about communication, one layer on top of another and the way they were arranged was another language. I was learning, but would I ever master it?
“Ah,” I sighed. Then I slipped the other triangular side of the pyramid off and the current I called caught both and lifted them into the air before my eyes. “Bring it up,” I whispered and the edan joined the two metal triangles. They began to slowly rotate in the way they always did, the edan like a small planet and the triangles like flat cartwheeling moons. A small yellow moth that had been fluttering about my room attracted to the edan’s glow flew to it now and was instantly caught up in the rotating air.
Was it the presence of the moth, tumbling and fluttering between the metal triangles? I do not know. There was always so much I didn’t know, but not knowing was part of it all. Whatever the reason, suddenly my edan was shedding more triangle sides from its various pyramid points and they joined the rotation. What remained of my edan hovered in the center and from the cavernous serenity of meditation, I sighed in awe. It was a gold metal ball etched with deep lines that formed wild loops but did not touch, reminiscent of fingerprint patterns. Was it solid gold? Gold was a wonderful conductor; imagine how precise the current I guided into it would move. If I did that, would the sphere open too? Or even . . . speak?
The moth managed to break out of the cycle and as soon as it did, my grasp slipped. As Professor Okpala would have said, I fell out of the tree. The mathematical current I’d called up evaporated and all the pieces of my edan fell to the floor, musically clinking. I gasped and stared. I waited for several moments and nothing happened. Always, the pieces rear
ranged themselves back into my edan, as if magnetized, even when I fell out of the tree.
“No, no, no!” I said, gathering the pieces and putting them in a pile in the center of my bed. I waited, again. Nothing. “Ah!” I shrieked, near panic. I snatched up the gold ball. So heavy. Yes, it had to be solid gold. I brought it to my face, my hands shaking and my heart pounding. I rubbed the pad of my thumb over the deep labyrinthine configurations. It was warm and heavier than the edan had ever felt, as if it had its own type of gravity now that it was exposed.
I was about to call up another current to try to put it back together when something outside caught my eye. I went to my window and what I saw made my skin prickle and my ears ring. I stumbled back, ran my finger over the otjize on my skin, and rubbed it over my eyelids to ward off evil. My bedroom was at the top floor of the Root and it faced the west where my brother’s garden grew, the backyard ended, and the desert began.
“May the Seven protect me,” I whispered. “I am not supposed to be seeing this.” No girl or woman was. And even though I never had up until this point, I knew exactly who that was standing in my brother’s garden in the dark, looking right at me, pointing a long sticklike finger at me. I shrieked, ran to my bed, and stared at my disassembled edan. “What do I do, what do I do? What’s happening? What do I do?”
I slowly stepped back to the window. The Night Masquerade was still there, a tall mass of dried sticks, raffia, and leaves with a wooden face dominated by a large tooth-filled mouth and bulbous black eyes. Long streams of raffia hung from its round chin and the sides of the head, like a wizard’s beard. Thick white smoke flowed out from the top of its head and already I could smell the smoke in my room, dry and acrid. Okwu’s tent was several yards to the right, but Okwu must have been inside.
Binti, The Complete Trilogy: Binti ; Home ; The Night Masquerade Page 15
