ators will speak aloud. The flesh of Lumumba, also consumed, will speak aloud. For a time the howl will drown out everything. But right now the world is caught in that small blank space in which no one has yet heard the news. Lives proceed for one last moment unchanged. In the marketplace they buy and sell and dance.
The mother and her daughters are stopped short by the sight of a woman they seem to recognize. It is not the woman herself they know, but her style of dress and something else. Her benevolence. They cross the street to where she sits on the sidewalk with her back to a cool north wall. Spread out around her on a bright cloth are hundreds of tiny animals carved from wood: elephants, leopards, giraffes. An okapi.A host of tiny animals in a forest of invisible trees. The mother and daughters stare, overtaken by beauty.
The woman is about the age of the daughters, but twice as large. Her yellow pagne is double-wrapped and her ornate bodice cut low on her large bosom. Her head is bound in sky blue. She opens her mouth, smiles broadly. Achetez un cadeau pour votre jlls, she orders them sweetly. There is not a trace of pleading in her voice. She cups her hand as if it were full of water or grain as she points to the small, perfect giraffes and elephants. Having used up her single French phrase, she speaks Kikongo unabashedly, as though there were no other language on earth. This city is far from the region where that language is spoken, but when one of the daughters answers her in Kikongo, she does not seem surprised. They chat about their children. Too old for toys, all of them, a bit. Grandchildren, then, the woman insists, and so after more deliberation they pick out three ebony elephants for the children of the children. It is the great-grandmother, Orleanna, who buys the elephants. She studies her handful of unfamiliar coins, then holds all of them out to the vendor. The woman deftly plucks out the few she needs, and then presses into Orleanna's hand a gift: the tiny wooden okapi, perfectly carved. Pour vous, madamc, she says. Un cadeau.
THE POISONWOOD BIBLE 542
Orleanna pockets her small miracle, as she has done for the whole of her life. The others stand half-turned but unwilling to go. They wish the woman good luck and ask if she comes from the Congo. Of course, she says, A bu, and to come here with her carvings to sell she must walk all the way, more than two hundred kilometers. Sometimes if she is lucky she can buy a ride on a truck. But lately without the black market not so many commercants cross the border and it will be difficult. It may take her a month to get back to her family in Bulungu.
Bulungu!
Ee, mono imwesi Bulungu.
On the Kwilu River?
Ee