lt the breath of God
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grow cold on my skin. "We never should have come here," I said. "We're just fools that have gotten by so far on dumb luck. That's what you think, isn't it?"
"I will not answer that."
"Then you mean no. We shouldn't have come."
"No, you shouldn't. But you are here, so yes, you should be here. There are more words in the world than no and yes."
"You're the only one here who'll even talk to us, Anatole! Nobody else cares about us, Anatole!"
"Tata Boanda is carrying your mother and sister in his boat. Tata Lekulu is rowing his boat with leaves stuffed in his ears while your father lectures him on loving the Lord. Nevertheless, Tata Lekulu is carrying him to safety. Did you know, Mama Mwanza sometimes puts eggs from her own chickens under your hens when you aren't looking? How can you say no one cares about you?"
"Mama Mwanza does that? How do you know?"
He didn't say. I was stupid not to have figured it out. Nelson sometimes found oranges and manioc and even meat in our kitchen house when nothing was there the night before. I suppose we believed so hard in God's providence that we just accepted miracles in our favor.
"You shouldn't have come here, Beene, but you are here and nobody in Kilanga wants you to starve. They understand that white people make very troublesome ghosts."
I pictured myself a ghost: bones and teeth. Rachel a ghost with long white hair; Adah a silent, staring ghost. Ruth May a tree-climbing ghost, the squeeze of a small hand on your arm. My father was not a ghost; he was God with his back turned, hands clasped behind him and fierce eyes on the clouds. God had turned his back and was walking away.
Quietly I began to cry, and everything inside me came out through my eyes. "Anatole, Anatole," I whispered. "I'm scared to death of what's happening and nobody here will talk to me. You're the only one." I repeated his name because it took the place of prayer. Anatole s name anchored me to the earth, the water, the skin
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that held me in like ajar of water. I was a ghost in ajar. "I love you, Anatole."
"Leah! Don't ever say that again."
I never will.
We arrived at the opposite shore. Someone's rescued hen fluttered up to the bow of our boat and strutted placidly along the gunwale, its delicate wattles shaking as it plucked up ants. For the first time that night, I thought of our poor chickens shut up for the night in their coop. I pictured their bones laid clean and white in a pile on top of the eggs.
Two days later, when the rebel army of tiny soldiers had passed through Kilanga and we could go home again, that is exactly how we found our hens. I was surprised that their dislocated skeletons looked just the way I'd imagined them. This is what I must have learned, the night God turned his back on me: how to foretell the future in chicken bones.
Book Four
5EL AND
THE SERPENT
Do you not think that Bel is a living God?
Do you not see how much he eats and
drinks every day?
BEL AND THE SERPENT, i :6
Orleanna Price
SANDERLING ISLAND
THE STING OF A FLY, the Congolese say, can launch the end of the world. How simply things begin.
Maybe it was just a chance meeting. A Belgian and an American, let's say, two old friends with a hunger in common, a hand in the diamond business. A fly buzzes and lights. They swat it away and step into the Belgian's meticulously polished office in Elisabethville. They're careful to ask after each other's families and profits, and to speak of how they are living in a time of great change, great opportunity. A map of the Congo lies on the mahogany table between them. While they talk of labor and foreign currency their hunger moves apart from the gentlemanly conversation with a will of its own, licking at the edges of the map on the table, dividing it between them. They take turns leaning forward to point out their moves with shrewd congeniality, playing it like a chess match, the kind of game that allows civilized men to play at make-believe murder. Between moves they tip their heads back, swirl blood-colored brandy in glass globes and watch it crawl down the curved glass in liquid veins. Languidly they bring their map to order. Who will be the kings, the rooks, and bishops rising up to strike at a distance? Which sacrificial pawns will be swept aside? African names roll apart like the heads of dried flowers crushed idly between thumb and forefinger