Tefuga

by Peter Dickinson

  What was awful was that he didn’t believe me!

  I don’t mean he really thought I was lying. Of course not. At least … Oh, how can two people trust each other absolutely and then suddenly not? I started it, wondering if he was being straight with me, and now it’s the other way round.

  Pull yourself together, Bets.

  Of course he was terribly nice about it. He is a nice man, but that doesn’t help. I explained how difficult it had been for me, ’cos of her whispering and me having to pretend to paint. I didn’t want him to think I was making out I knew anything I didn’t. I kept saying I couldn’t be sure. He’d started filling his pipe but then he just sat teasing the baccy to and fro in his fingers. When I’d finished about them burning the village I waited for him to say something. He took a long time. He looked hard at me, then away.

  “Oyalirri? Or something like that?” he said.

  “I think so. She only said it once, at the start, before I knew it might be important. I never got a chance to ask.”

  “Anyway, not Fadum.”

  “No, I’m pretty certain. Longer than that.”

  “You’ve never heard of Fadum?”

  “No. Why?”

  “That was in ’seventeen. It’s up in the north. It was a Tuareg raid, but apart from that it was exactly as you describe. We had a diplomatic dust-up with the French, who were supposed to be keeping the Tuareg in order, but I doubt if much was done.”

  “But this was only two rains ago, darling. I asked her specially.”

  “Alright. Go on.”

  I tried. I was doing my best about the beating and the murder, and what a muddle it was but I was sure it was something wicked and only just this rains, but in the middle of that I suddenly saw why he’d asked if I’d ever heard of Fadum. I might have been making it all up. Why, there mightn’t have been any women at all!

  I don’t think that now. I mean if he did think something like that it was only for a mo. But when it happened it was perfectly awful for me. I stuck, with my mouth wide open. He stared at me and I stared at him. Then I managed to go stammering on.

  When I’d finished he gave a great sigh.

  “Do you want me to send for this woman, Rabbit? She could presumably be found.”

  “I don’t think it would do any good.”

  “Oh?”

  “She wouldn’t tell you anything. She thinks you are on Kama Boi’s side. I told her she ought to go to you, but …”

  “Alright. But I have to make this clear, Rabbit. Officially I am not allowed to listen to complaints against the N.A. except in the presence of a representative of the N.A.”

  “But then they’ll never tell you anything! They’re terrified as it is!”

  “You are never going to educate the native to a concept of justice until he is persuaded that a complaint openly made against someone in authority will be fairly investigated and if found justified the culprit properly punished.”

  “But what actually happens is that somebody starts trying to complain but before he gets anywhere near you he’s beaten to death and his body’s left lying by the path for everyone to see. That’s the concept of justice they’re being educated in!”

  “Let’s take that case, Rabbit. Suppose it came to my ears …”

  “Which it has.”

  “… that something like that had happened I would, of course, look into it. In order even to begin I would need something to go on, a location, the name of the victim. You understand that?”

  “Would you tell Kama Boi what you were doing?”

  “Unless I had reason to believe he was in some way personally involved I would not be prepared to go behind his back.”

  “Then no one is going to tell you anything.”

  “I can’t accept that, Rabbit. They will come to me, or to my successors, in the end.”

  He stuffed his baccy into his pipe at last as tho’ he was shutting the argument off. But I didn’t feel like giving up.

  “I haven’t quite finished telling you,” I said. “Course I saw it would be harder for you if they only told me about things which had happened miles away, so I asked what about Tefuga, and the one called Femora Feng was going to tell me, I think, but the other two stopped her. Then they all ran away. They were absolutely terrified.”

  “I can well believe it. For a peasant to bring an accusation against a powerful noble must be an alarming experience, all the more so if the accusation is false.”

  “Darling! But why on earth …”

  “I’ve warned you before about attempting to read the mind of the native, but I can suggest a number of possible reasons. For instance, in the peasant mind the N.A. is not merely an instrument of taxation, it is taxation. These women might well believe that if they can discredit the N.A. their husbands might no longer have to pay tax.”

  “I don’t believe it. In fact, I think that’s why Zarafio’s so set on stopping me talking to anyone, ’cos he thinks they might tell me things like this. I suppose you told him I was going painting.”

  “As a matter of fact, yes. But I think you are doing him an injustice. The Hausa have a very strong sense of propriety, and it is simply not in his eyes proper that a person of importance, which you are, should roam about the bush unescorted.”

  I felt utterly miserable, not just about Ted perhaps not believing me and then saying the women were lying, but about me letting them down when they’d been so brave (I’m sure it was a frightful risk for them) and been so sure I could do something. Usually I’m quite good at hiding my feelings (practice with Daddy) but it must have shown. I mean, even Ted noticed.

  “Cheer up, Rabbit,” he said. “It’s not the end of the world. It’s something you have to get used to. Africa’s full of things we haven’t a hope of understanding and which our system simply isn’t geared to dealing with. I really think you’d best try and put all this out of your mind for the moment, and I promise you that I’ll keep my eyes and ears open and if I come across the slightest hint of anything of the sort I’ll be on to it like a terrier after a rat. I’ve got to be off, now. Don’t brood on things, Rabbit. We’ll go for a ride this evening, shall we?”

  “Lovely,” I managed to say.

  Well, I’ve not been brooding. I’ve been writing instead, to get it clear in my mind, and in a funny way I think Ted’s right. Not his way, tho’! But I’m going to let him think I’ve done what he said and stopped worrying about it, ’cos I can’t do anything about it till I can talk to some Kitawa all alone, and that’s not going to happen this tour.

  But am I? Going to stop worrying, I mean. Am I going to do anything? What can I do? She said, “We speak to you, Betty Jackland.” She thought I could, ’cos if she’d been me she’d have been able to.

  You know, suppose it had been a man who’d come to Ted with what I told him—no more, same kind of muddle and not being certain. He’d have taken it a bit more seriously, wouldn’t he? Even a man he barely knew, when he knows me so well. Or does he? At all? I wonder. What does it mean, knowing someone? But I think I understand Ted much, much better than he’ll ever understand me. He doesn’t have to, you see. It’s his world, so it’s the shape he makes it, and I have to fit into the bits left over, so I’ve got to understand where that is. It was the same with Daddy. I hated him, but I had to watch him and think about him a lot so I’d know how I could go on living my own secret life without him noticing. I hated Daddy and I love Ted, but in a funny way that doesn’t make much difference.

  Anyway, I am going to do something for those women. I haven’t got much to work with, only Ted. For instance, I could stop being nice to him till he did something himself. Dangerous. He’s got such a strong sense of honour. If he thought I was trying to blackmail him with that … Not much fun for me, anyway. And too soon. I do see there’s precious little he can do at the mo, till we find out more. Better the other
way. If he thinks he needs me so much he doesn’t mind what else happens … he’s half way there already.

  You know, I ought to feel sneaky and horrid and disloyal thinking like this, but I don’t. You have to have a life of your own, and the way things are that means it’s got to be a secret life.

  And anyway, it’s more interesting.

  Seven

  The trucks boomed north along the great K.H.P. road for thirty miles, then took a spur westwards. The tarmac surface ended suddenly, not in any chosen geographical location but at the point where the money had run out. A rough track continued westward. Where the bush was open enough to allow it the trucks drove in wedge formation to avoid the heavy reddish dust-trail churned up by the leader. Occasionally the one carrying Pittapoulos would surge ahead so that he could film the other two coming past. They had no need for these sequences in the film, though possibly they might find a place later in Jackland’s series, but it is apparently ordained that where two or three trucks are going through bush together one must stop to film the others. And conceivably the shots, with those taken at Tefuga itself, might mollify some accountant fretting over the cost of the unbudgeted expedition. It was early afternoon by the time they reached Tefuga, the heaviest heat of the day in this supposedly cool season, but that had to be endured if they were to make the round trip before nightfall.

  The drivers were steering directly for the huts when Miss Tressider, who had been conducting her interview with Miss Boyaba in the back of the lead car, leaned forward and said, “Don’t let them go right in, Nigel.”

  Jackland spoke to the driver, who pulled aside into the shade of a clump of flat-topped trees, their trunks gnarled with annual grass-burnings­. The other cars followed. The technicians, so calloused by the long delays of their trade that no arrival on location could now excite them, certainly not another bunch of grass-roofed huts in flat bush, climbed down, lit cigarettes, picked desultorily over their equipment. The petrol feed on one truck had been playing up; the three drivers gathered round the open bonnet and discussed the mystery without enthusiasm. The others, nine in all, walked towards the village through the heavy, hazed sunlight. Black people wearing only grass belts, and in the case of the women plaited grass collars, had appeared in front of the huts to stare at the visitors.

  “Hold it,” said Burn. “We don’t want a great gang crashing in on them. Jalo, you go ahead and sort it out. They’ll know what we’re up to—Trevor was out here last month. All we want is some long-distance shots of the hill. One or two of the village too, maybe.”

  “Perhaps Miss Boyaba might go too,” said Jackland. “She speaks Kiti.”

  “Oh, no! I’ve forgotten it all, almost. But I’d love to go.”

  The white group watched their two black emissaries cross the thirty-yard gap. The villagers, all elderly, had the look of genuine primitives. There was no hint that they had dressed up, or rather down, for their visitors, or that crumbs from the table of consumer civilization (a radio, an old bike, an aluminium cooking-pot) had been brushed out of sight into the huts. The gap between them and Miss Boyaba seemed vastly greater than that between Miss Boyaba and, say, Miss Tressider.

  “Nice sexy walk, that,” said Pittapoulos.

  The comment caused a faint alteration in the currents that existed between the members of the group, easing some because it gave voice to what most of the men were probably thinking, heightening others because Miss Boyaba had arrived as Jackland’s protégé and Jackland already generated certain currents because of his relationship with Miss Tressider, inevitably the focus of the group’s interest in matters sexual. Miss Tressider actually glanced at Jackland, but he seemed not to have heard. He was watching intently as Miss Boyaba said her first words to the villagers. They smiled and answered. She laughed. Miss Tressider pinched Jackland’s forearm, using her nails to make it hurt. He looked down.

  “I’ve got something else in common with your mum,” she said.

  “Oh?”

  “We’ve got the same ideas about harems.”

  She made no show of keeping her voice down.

  “I will endeavour to respect your prejudices,” said Jackland. “Did Annie tell you what happened after my mother left Kama Boi’s palace, that day she painted his wives?”

  “No.”

  “There’s a level of irony I’d missed. Good thing, probably. You can’t get it all in, ever. I’ve promised to show her the diary.”

  “Haven’t you got a typescript?”

  Jackland didn’t answer. He seemed absorbed by the encounter in front of the huts. The interpreter, Jalo, who despite his claims had turned out to speak no Kiti at all, was evidently trying to negotiate in Hausa. Three old men were listening; their tribal scars made it impossible to tell whether they were as bewildered as they looked. Miss Boyaba had moved slightly apart and was engaged with a mixed group, using as much body-language as speech. A sense of surprise and cheerfulness emerged strongly from around her. Suddenly she broke off and ran back—an absurd, incompetent, high-kneed gait dictated by the heels of her shoes. She snatched Jackland by the hand.

  “Come and meet them,” she said. “I think I’ve found a cousin. I told you I could still say hello.”

  “A strong spirit in Annie Boyaba.”

  “And a strong spirit in Nigel Jackland.”

  She repeated the sentence in what was evidently Kiti, musical syllables that seemed to slur into each other, making the shape of each individual sound very hard to pick out. Her intense, unforced excitement at this twenty-five-per-cent homecoming—her other three-quarters belonging genetically elsewhere in Nigeria—was easy to share, seeming almost to colour the oppressive pale light around her. Prattling away she dragged Jackland off to be introduced to the villagers. Burn and Pittapoulos went to join Jalo—the three old men, it turned out, spoke perfectly adequate Hausa. The others followed Jackland, and Miss Tressider found herself included in the introductions in a marginal fashion. She showed no resentment, and may well have been pleased and amused to find herself in a community where her name, though repeated several times, meant nothing whatsoever.

  After the first two or three introductions she made an attempt at Kiti, but despite her gifts and training must have managed to say something else, happily inappropriate. The villagers laughed, and laughed again as she repeated or perhaps compounded the error. She mimed stupidity and shame, clowning precisely enough to let her audience realize that she was as amused as they were and they could continue to laugh without offence.

  “I will teach you,” said Miss Boyaba.

  “No. You stay and help Nigel make friends.”

  Miss Tressider beckoned to two old women and drew them aside for a lesson. In the main group Miss Boyaba continued to unearth shards of her childhood vocabulary. Jackland, characteristically, moved outside the group to watch. Pittapoulos came up to him.

  “We’ve got a problem,” he said.

  “Oh?”

  “Notice something? It’s a geriatric community.”

  “That’s what tends to happen. The younger ones head off for the towns.”

  “You don’t have to tell me. Seen it again and again. Only you can usually find one or two who’ve not been bright enough to clear out. Can’t see ’em here.”

  “We’ll do without. It’ll be ten seconds’ screen-time, if that.”

  “Unless we can persuade yon dusky charmer to strip off.”

  “Wrong colour. She’s supposed to be dark brown.”

  “I’ll use a filter. Do you mind asking her, Nige?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact, I do.”

  Pittapoulos raised a bushy eyebrow and glanced with deliberate lack of tact at Miss Tressider, intent on her Kiti lesson. Though he had worked successfully with Jackland before, they could not be said to have liked each other. It might have seemed that this was simply because Pittapoulos thought Jackland a sn
ob, and Jackland thought Pittapoulos a vulgarian. Though this was probably true, other tensions arose in their attitude to their work, Pittapoulos being uninterested in ideas of any kind that could not find expression in a visual image, and also being prepared to fake that image to any extent he needed. To him the picture shown on the screen was in itself the truth, or at least a truth, whereas Jackland was invariably dissatisfied by its failures, distortions and omissions. To use one of his own favourite images, the world was a fish that invariably got away; all he could do was come home and stretch his arms across the screen to show the size of it.

  This time there was a further mild cause of tension. Pittapoulos’s hobby was the compilation of a tape, already several hours long, of naked women, filmed by himself, the subjects being unaware of the event. He was not interested in professional models, but was as it were a visual rapist, adept at manoeuvring events to suit his purpose, using both the patience and the ingenuity of the wildlife photographer. He did not only pursue his hobby in remote areas where nakedness was the norm. His tape was said to include a brief clip from a royal event in the English shires.

  He had early expressed disappointment at the way Jackland’s script respected the superficial reticence of the diaries, with its asterisks and circumlocutions. Not that Pittapoulos would have included in his tape anything shot for public viewing, but there would have been moments in the preparation for such scenes when a camera would somehow have been left running. Miss Tressider would hardly have minded, but Jackland probably would. Perhaps the fact that Jackland was currently enjoying an actuality to which even Pittapoulos would not have claimed the screen image was preferable added to the desire to needle.

  Jackland followed his glance, apparently unruffled. Miss Tressider seemed by now to have mastered the sentence. Her tutors’ giggles had changed to clucks of approval. They swapped greetings a couple of times more, and then Miss Tressider turned. Her face became her version of Betty Jackland. She spoke the brief phrase, experimentally, to empty air. The final syllables were the name “Femora Feng”.