22

However, by the late afternoon a chill had grown between them, not because their disposition toward each other had changed but because they had put many issues on hold, issues that could no longer be ignored.

Kamltl tried to answer questions that must have been bothering Nyawlra; the letter he had left behind for her had been cryptic.

“Not that I knew what prompted me to turn my back on healing, divination, and the money, to embrace the life of a hermit in the wilderness,” Kamltl struggled to explain.

He spoke in an even tone, neither high nor low, neither sad nor joyful, a little introspective, perhaps, as if in addressing Nyawlra he was holding a dialogue with himself.

“Maybe there were many reasons; maybe there was only one; the truth is that nothing is very clear in my mind. I did not choose to play at being the Wizard of the Crow. I was thrust into it. You know how this whole business began. What was his name—I mean the police officer who chased us across the prairie that night? Arigaigai Gathere. A.G. What a name! Arigaigai! Had you ever come across such a name before? It was A.G. who set me on the road to sorcery. My own troubles made me all too willing. At first I thought that I was merely playing a role, briefly. I was proud that I never once dispensed magic that could harm anyone; and I never really lied to my clients. I never employed conjuring tricks to mesmerize. I worked with thoughts and images already in their own minds. But still I pretended to be what I was not. Did I not heal under falsehood? Imagine going to a doctor only to learn afterward that he has no training in his craft, no license to practice? I was a quack of a wizard. But that is beside the point. My divinations were an appetite for evil. Take Tajirika and his ilk; did I not breathe new life into him, increasing his self-confidence in doing evil? Protected by magic as he now imagines himself to be, is he not now free to rob with impunity? Did my divination not facilitate his thievery? I was an accessory to the very evil that revolted me.

“Maybe at the very beginning I harbored the illusion that there might come to me one or two who would be bold enough to see the error of their ways and say, I have a blemish, help me remove it. This might have given my role some worth. But no, they were all driven by greed and hatred.

“They were interested in only two things: to be empowered and to cripple their rivals. Yes, when it came to greed, they were clones of one another. Their greed stank. Even as I asked them questions about their afflictions, the smell of evil and greed oozed out of their every pore and made it difficult for me to breathe. For a time I was able to endure the ooze by sniffing the scent of flowers that you always left behind. But Tajirika’s rot proved more terrible than any that I had experienced before: a black man celebrating the negation of himself. This final blast of foul air was unbearable.

“I don’t know where I got the strength to do it, but I eventually did find myself outside the door, and still the foulness pursued me. I panicked. Whenever I had gone out into the open I had been able to rid myself of their stench and breathe fresh air. This was now not the case. I collapsed. When later I came to my senses I felt that I did not want to go back to the shrine, but I managed to force myself into the house to write you the letter. By then I had already made up my mind.’’

“To do what?” Nyawlra asked.

“Flee Eldares. Abandon human community for the wilderness.”

“In your letter, what did you mean by the words I am going to find myself?” Nyawlra quizzed him.

“I don’t want to say that at the time of writing the letter I was in a position to convey all my thoughts in words. Say I just wanted to escape the stink. I told you that when I went outside the house I felt that the rot had followed me and as if it were now oozing through my clothes, my body, me, and I had never felt like that before. I asked myself: If I start stinking like them, what will be the difference between them and me?”

“And the rot that you talk about so movingly—what do you suppose will bring it to an end?”

“The affairs of the people are too heavy a burden for me to carry”

“Did you yourself not say that the needs of the many call for more than the hands of a single person? Is that not why they say that many hands make work light?”

“I just want to stay in the wilderness to find myself. I want to know what I really want from my life. Maybe the blood of the hunters in me is calling.”

“You mean it is telling you to run away from the people? To heal yourself?”

“One must find oneself before one can try to help others.”

“Physicians do not heal themselves. And our people say that even the most skilled barber needs another to cut his hair. To strike a fire you need tinder and a stick. The problems of the country are ours. Nobody can bear them alone. We cannot run away and leave the affairs of the land to ogres and scorpions. This land is mine. This land is yours. This land is ours. Besides, in Aburlria, there is nowhere to run. As you’ve said, even these forests are threatened by the greed of those in power.”

“What am I to do? Return to divination?” he said, as if repeating questions he had already posed to himself.

“The power to divine is a gift. No matter how hard I may try, I don’t think I can settle cases with the wisdom I have seen you display. It is as if you can see into the hearts of people as well as read the very thoughts in their minds. Like the way you dealt with Tajirika and Vin-jinia. Who would ever have thought that wishes could so afflict the body and mind? What an affliction it was! A white-ache so deep-seated that it almost made him lose his business!”

Kamltl looked away to the hills far in the distance.

“What is it?” Nyawlra asked anxiously.

Kamltl did not answer immediately. He slowly turned to face Nyawlra again.

“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing, really, but I hope that a day will come when we can talk about everything …”

“Let’s talk now,” Nyawlra said encouragingly, “even about that which you call nothing. Didn’t you ask me a minute ago what a person can do? Let me ask you. If you found a grown man taking food from a child by force, would you just stand there and watch the drama?”

“No. What do you want?” Kamltl asked her. “You didn’t come here just to be with me.”

“Marching to Heaven will swallow our land. Where shall we take shelter from the sun and rain? It will snatch water from the mouth of the thirsty and food from the mouth of the hungry. Skeletons will people our country. How shall we get back the body, the mind, and the soul of the nation?”

Nyawlra now told him about the secret plans of the Ruler: that they had chosen a day in which to dedicate a site to the project of Marching to Heaven. She told him of the State’s sinister intentions to use the queues in Eldares to convince the Global Bank mission that the people were fully in support of the project.

“For a time we in the movement thought of campaigning against the queuing, but given the level of unemployment in this country, there was no way we were going to stop the mania. So instead we are going to make our own procession of protest. All of us men and women of Aburlria must join hands in opposing this madness of Marching to Heaven. We oppose the right of might with the might of right. We want you to be one of us. Use your God-given powers of divination for the benefit of the people, the movement.”

Kamltl stood up and once again stared beyond the hills. When he turned to her, his eyes shone with a light Nyawlra had not seen, a light more of sorrow than joy, the light of one burdened with a knowledge he would rather not possess. He sat next to Nyawlra and put his arm around her shoulder, and Nyawlra felt a tremor in her body as she awaited his response.

“In truth, something other than the stench of corruption drove me from Eldares,” Kamltl started. “A combination of events forced me to look within myself, and I saw no clear purpose in my life. My only goal had been to educate myself so as to earn plenty of money to make good my parents’ sacrifice. As you know, this dictated my choice of business studies as my main subject. The irony was that although I was doing well in my studies, I did not feel that I really wanted a life in business.

“In India, by studying the art of healing through plants, I suppose I had also a hazy notion of becoming a physician of wounded souls. But as to who my patients-to-be were, I hadn’t a clue.

“I was drawn to the religions of the East. I wanted to learn more about the prophets and the teachers from the East like Buddha, Jain’s Mahavira, Guru Nanak of the Sikhs, and even Confucius of China. Some of their beliefs, like the doctrine of karma, are close to what I have heard you say about human deeds and actions as determinants of life on earth. The Buddhist karma is a deed, physical, oral, or mental, containing within it a potential power. Each of our actions results in the good or bad effect and influences our future. A good deed repeated accumulates the good, and its potential power will affect the future as a beneficial influence. Each person has his own karma, his own potentiality for good or evil. Like the chi among the Ibo.

“Our ancestors tell us that a builder can only build you a house with the building blocks you bring him. You bring him stones? You get a house made of stone. You bring him wood? You get a house made of wood. You bring defective stone, wood, iron, or steel, you get a defective house. The chief difference between your position and the religions I’ve studied concerns belief in the transmigration of souls. If you do beastly deeds in this life, then in your next life you will be born a greedy hyena or an ugly warthog or simply a beast. A person should lead a life of good works to ensure that in his next cycle of being he or she is reborn as a superior being.

“The Buddhist attitude to property attracted me. A person who chases after fame and wealth and love is like a child who licks honey from the blade of a knife. While tasting the sweetness of honey he risks damaging his tongue. But what fascinated me most was the notion of nirvana. I understand that the word literally means to blow off.’ It is a state of perfect light, a state in which all human defilement and passion have been completely extinguished through practices and meditations based on the right wisdom. Buddha means the enlightened, the one who has found the light.’ And it was not lost on me that Gautama Buddha himself reached this state in his old age, lying between two large trees in a forest.

“When I returned to Aburlria my spiritual preoccupations yielded to necessity: I had to find a job. There was a time when I thought that maybe a person could do business in a righteous way—you know, without greasing palms—and so remain incorruptible. As it turned out I did not even have the opportunity to find out if that was possible. The rest you know.

“I’ve come to believe that there is a power outside of us that drives human affairs. It is the power hinted at by the religious when they say that God works in mysterious ways, His wonders to perform. You and I had not chosen to meet when we did. The same power has brought you here. There is a purpose to all this.

“Nyawlra, please don’t go back to Eldares, back to the corruption. Let’s build a shelter here; listen to what the trees and the animals have to tell us. Long ago, my ancestors, the hunters, believed that the sun was our god because it was the source of fire and light. When we were children and we captured its heat in pieces of glass, we believed we’d captured a bit of its power. Let’s stay here and find out the secrets of the heat of the sun and the light of millions of stars.”

Nyawlra could not quite believe her ears. She had not expected this response. He was asking her to turn her back on Eldares, Aburlria, the people, so as to become a hermit, one of the children of the new-millennium Buddha in the Aburirian forest, searching for the meaning of life. Without thinking of what she was doing, she removed Kamltl’s hand from her shoulders.

“Maybe we are different. You are drawn to the ministry of wounded souls, I to the ministry of wounded bodies. I may not know which is the better ministry. But this I know: human beings are free to choose how they use the gifts given to them by God, nature, sun, fate, call it what you like, I mean that transcendent power that you say governs our lives, whether to use it to seek personal salvation or a collective deliverance.”

It was not a question, but again Kamltl squirmed under its implication.

“When I look into the distance of time I see only a kind of darkness, a mist, smoke, nothing clear. Nyawlra, I smell tears and blood …”

“Whose tears and blood?”

“I don’t really know. I will not ask you and your friends to give up the plans you have for disrupting the rites at the site of Marching to Heaven. However, on my part I don’t feel ready for the task. I still want to hear what the animals, plants, and hills have to tell me. I need to find myself.”

“For us,” she now said as she stood up, “we see Marching to Heaven as means of turning our earth into hell, and we have chosen to do something about it.”

She started collecting her things, ready to leave. She did not pack the boxes of matches, the kettle, or the pot.

Then she suddenly remembered something at the back of her mind that she had not yet voiced.

“Tell me,” she said, “what happened to the three bags of money? What did you do with them, or rather with the money?”

“I buried it,” Kamltl said, exhausted.

“You buried the money?” Nyawlra asked, as if she had not heard the words clearly. You should have given it to us!” she said. “The movement would have made good use of the money against these criminals.”

“I will tell you where it is. It is all yours. But be forewarned: that money is cursed.”

“There is no money that is blessed or cursed,” Nyawlra said. “It depends on the uses to which it is put,” she added, and then suddenly paused.

She recalled that the three bags of money almost took her life the day she returned to the office to collect her handbag and ran into Tajirika’s gun. The three bags had provoked white-ache in Tajirika.

“Forget the whole thing,” she said. “I don’t even want to know where it is buried. Our movement believes more in the actions that people do than in the money that people give. So let us leave the money bags to red ants and termites. It is time I returned to my lair in the city.”

“The sun is about to set. Why don’t you stay for the night and leave in the morning so you can cross the prairie by the clear light of day?”

“No, I will start right away. I have to report to work tomorrow.”

“I will see you across the prairie,” Kamltl offered.

“No, no. Let me do the prairie alone. That way I will get to know it better. The wild beasts of the prairie are less cruel than the beastly humans embarking on Marching to Heaven.”

“But don’t burn your bridges. What is the saying? One may find oneself back to places one had thought that one had left for good. I am now a dweller in the forest. If ever you come back, please leave a piece of your cloth here in the cave or on any rock in the forest and I am confident that I shall find you.”

“Thank you, but I have no intention of returning to these parts anytime soon. Eldares calls me.”

They walked in silence to the foot of the hills where the prairie begins. Kamltl watched Nyawlra cross the expanse of the land until she became indistinguishable from the acacia in the distance.