Acts of faith (20 page)

Authors: Philip Caputo

BOOK: Acts of faith

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He returned to Suleiman’s compound, where an underfed goat greeted him in the little courtyard formed by a ring of five tukuls. Everything seemed oddly normal and domestic. Two of Suleiman’s wives were preparing a pot of doura in the cooking hut. The third wife, a beauty of eighteen or nineteen, her plaited hair trailing to her waist, stood in the doorway of the women’s quarters, nursing a baby. She offered Fitzhugh a dazzling smile.

In the hut that was Suleiman’s exclusive domain, Douglas sat stripped to the waist on a worn leopard skin while Suleiman attempted to tweeze out a tick embedded in his side. Their quest had been unsuccessful, Douglas said. They’d found plenty of good level ground, but a few pokes with Suleiman’s stick revealed that it was all soft black-cotton soil under a fragile crust incapable of bearing an airplane’s weight.

“Speaking of planes . . .”

“Saw it,” Douglas said.

“A wonder it didn’t bomb the town.”

“Oh, they do not try to destroy us,” Suleiman remarked airily. “Only to make our lives a misery so we come over to their side.”

How unnaturally pale the American’s skin looked, contrasted with the black of Suleiman’s hand, carefully manipulating the tweezers. Fitzhugh took a seat on a crudely carved chair, against the wall on which the curved sword of Suleiman’s great-grandfather hung in a cracked leather scabbard.

“They told me the thing they need the most is for the war to end,” he said. “It’s what one old man said to me. We can bring in all the tools and seed and clothes we want, but it will mean nothing if the war goes on.”

“What did you say?” Douglas asked.

“Nothing. What can you say to that?”

“I have got him, all of him, and the head, too,” Suleiman exclaimed, his left eye twitching as he held up the tweezers to display the blood-gorged trophy.

Fitzhugh opened his notebook on his lap and began to rough out the report he would present to Barrett. Figures for the number of malnourished children, for this year’s crop yield. He drew up columns for the items and commodities that were in short supply and jotted a reminder to tell Barrett that a shipment of Unimix would be needed to supplement the children’s diets. The feeling that had dogged him since before leaving Loki, of being a twig in a current, was dissolving. He felt strong, purposeful. This was his work, the only work he knew how to do, and he stopped wondering why he was doing it. Did his father wonder what was the point of managing a hotel for tourists? The point was obvious—it won bread for his table. At least Fitzhugh’s work possessed a moral dimension that his father’s lacked. It wasn’t only for himself; it won bread for the other man’s table as well as for his own. But was it worth the sort of danger that had brushed him today? The sort of hardship he’d endured two nights ago?

A
FTER ANOTHER MEAL
of doura, the nazir came around to tell Their Excellencies that a dance was to be held that night in their honor. The Kowahla hadn’t had much cause to celebrate in the past year. Douglas and Fitzhugh’s visit had given them one.

They were delighted to find out that Suleiman’s hut had a shower: a perforated calabash hanging from a peg in an alcove, with a pull-cord attached. One of Suleiman’s younger sons, a boy of eight or so, filled the calabash from a rusty jerry can. Douglas stepped in, the boy staring at him, wonder-struck by the sight of a naked white man.

“All yours, Your Excellency,” Douglas said when he was finished.

Fitzhugh bowed. “Thank you, Your Excellency.”

The kid refilled the calabash. It held less than a gallon and succeeded only in turning five days’ accumulated grime into a silty film, but he gloried in the cool water splashing on his overheated skull, trickling down his chest and arms. He shaved in a pocket mirror, combed his thinning hair, changed into his spare T-shirt and shorts, and with his similarly spiffed-up partner, went into the courtyard to wait. Suleiman and the rest of his family were gone, and Fitzhugh noticed that the sword was missing from the scabbard on the wall. A distance away, a crowd was gathering in the twilight on a broad pitch, where wood had been stacked for a bonfire and drummers were tuning up, loosing staccato bursts.

In a fresh jelibiya, the nazir appeared, preceded by a man holding a paraffin lantern, followed by a retinue of tribal elders, and flanked by two sword-bearers, one of whom was Suleiman, the polished blade once honored by British and Egyptian blood held vertically in front of his face. The nazir motioned to his guests to join the procession. Everyone looked so solemn that if he didn’t know better, Fitzhugh would have thought they were going to an execution. They marched to the pitch. Two chairs had been set out for them, a table with clay jars on it to one side, the musicians to the other—half a dozen drummers sitting cross-legged on the ground, one man standing behind a crude xylophone made of hollow wooden tubes. The moon had risen, a pale fruit with a sliver sliced off one side. Four or five hundred people ringed the pitch, the bonfire rose high in the middle of the circle, and the oiled limbs of twenty young dancers, ten men and ten women, gleamed in its light.

Setting his lamp on the table, the lantern-carrier passed a jar each to Fitzhugh, Douglas, and the nazir, who sat on a mat beside Suleiman and the other sword-bearer. The nazir drank. Douglas raised his jar, then hesitated, looking sidelong at Fitzhugh, who took a healthy swig to assure him that the thick, white liquid was safe to drink. The American sampled it, licked his lips, and frowned.

“What
is
this?”

“Fermented sorghum.
Marissa,
it’s called.”

The female dancers had lined up at one end of the pitch, the men at the other, and the musicians broke into a fast, thrilling rhythm, the quick heartbeat of Africa itself, a sound that reached back to the first ages of the human race. Straight-backed, their breasts thrust forward, the women moved toward the men with a foot-stomping strut. Wound into hundreds of plaits, their long hair swished back and forth, their bead and coin necklaces rattled and jingled, their feathered skirts swung with their hips to make a rustling sound. They danced past the fire, then stopped and stood, swaying to the beat, and with graceful gestures of their hands and arms, they beckoned to the men, who advanced on them, pounding their feet on the ground in time to the drums. The two lines met, separated, and moved away from each other, and then the pattern was repeated. As the women stood swaying near the fire a second time, the whole crowd began to sway with them and took up a chant, male voices singing a chorus, female answering with a high, lilting refrain that ended in a short, shrill ululation, like the warbling of a thousand birds, before the men responded with another chorus. The dancers met once more and parted to begin the cycle anew. It went on for ten or fifteen minutes without stopping. Fitzhugh took another drink. His flesh tingled as voice, drum, and choreography fused into a harmonious whole that summoned him out of his separate self, called to him to unite himself with it, and his pulse quickening to match the pulse of the drums, he swayed with the people all around him. They had become one thing, a single being proclaiming in the union of sound and movement concordant joy in a divided, joyless land. The human spirit will endure, cried this being composed of many beings drawn into a circle; war and suffering will pass away.

The music abruptly stopped. The male dancers fled the stage. The xylophone played a rill of light, swift notes, and the drums began again, sending flurries of wild, syncopated throbs across the circle, stirring the women into a new dance. They snaked around the fire twice, and a third time, and then wound toward Fitzhugh and Douglas, strutting as before. The spectators broke into another communal chant, and in that flickering, enclosed world, its effect was almost hypnotic. The women drew closer and closer till they were barely a yard away from where Fitzhugh and Douglas sat with the nazir. Suddenly one girl leaped in front of the old man and, with a violent toss of her head, flung her braided hair over his head. He jumped up, wrapped one arm around her waist, and pressed his cheek to her forehead. His legs briefly recovered their youth as he danced with her in that posture; then he raised his free hand, snapped his fingers, and sat down again. Fitzhugh realized that this was a demonstration of what to do, for in a second one of the dancers came to him and covered his face with her hair while another did the same to Douglas. The American got into the spirit of the thing; he was on his feet and dancing. Fitzhugh remained in his chair. The woman paused in her movements and looked at him as if he’d insulted her. His heart rapped against his ribs, whether from ecstasy or fear or a little of both he couldn’t tell. His partner was Suleiman’s junior wife, and he didn’t know if dancing such a sensuous dance with her would provoke a fit of jealous rage. Suleiman had that sword at his feet.

The nazir appeared to sense his quandary. He grinned and told him, “
Shuu!
Your friend, do as he is!”

Douglas couldn’t quite get the beat or the steps, but he was trying, whirling and stomping like an American Indian, to the crowd’s delight. Fitzhugh knew he could do better. He’d been a good dancer in the tourist discos of Mombasa. Of course, he wasn’t in Mombasa and this wasn’t a disco, but when Suleiman’s wife again threw the canopy of waist-length braids over him, he was out of his chair, all self-consciousness gone. The drumming took control of his limbs as he embraced her slim, taut waist with his left arm and lay his cheek to her forehead, the musk of her sweat and of the oil that made her legs and arms gleam intoxicating him as all the marissa in the village could not have done. He danced till he was breathless, then raised his right hand above her head, clicked his fingers, and let her go. She gifted him with that smile of hers, and he heard the throng laughing and cheering its approval. He was relieved to see Suleiman laughing and cheering right along with them.

Douglas and Fitzhugh tried their hand on the drums, then danced some more, caught up in the jubilant atmosphere. The celebration was an act of rebellion, no less than firing a shot; it rebuked the dour, violent ascetics who ruled this country. After the fire had burned down to embers, Michael emerged from the crowd to remind Their Excellencies to get some sleep; he intended to start for the airfield well before dawn. Suleiman picked up his sword and escorted them home.

In a state of happy weariness, Fitzhugh flopped onto his sleeping bag and smoked a last cigarette. “I think the old man was wrong,” he said to Douglas.

“What old man?”

“The one who told me that if the war doesn’t end, it won’t make any difference how much stuff we bring in here. He’s wrong.”

“There’s my man.”

Douglas

It is the day after his fifteenth birthday, and he is in his room with a pencil and spiral notebook, writing down six goals he is to achieve in the coming year. This exercise has been ordered by his father to sharpen his mental discipline and give him a sense of direction. He did poorly in his freshman year at the public high school he attended here in Tucson; next month he will be packed off to a rigorous boarding school a continent away—Milton Academy, his father’s alma mater. Dad had to pull strings to get him in, but he is being admitted on condition that he repeat ninth grade, an experience Douglas is not looking forward to.

It’s the middle of August, the rainy season in Arizona. There was a downpour last night, and the scent of the desert after a rain has seeped in through the air-conditioning vents—a tang of creosote bush. The cacti have bloomed, and summer poppies spill down the hillsides and through the forests of saguaro, spiny arms pointed skyward. The beauty outside his bedroom window distracts him. So does Pink Floyd, piped through the earphones plugged into his cassette player. So do the model planes that surround him. Prop planes and jets, fighters, bombers, and airliners climb and bank on plastic pedestals; they hang from the ceiling on slender wires, stirred into an imitation of actual flight by the air conditioner and the paddle fan twirling overhead. He pictures himself in a cockpit, alone, in complete control, answerable to no one.

Why six goals and not five or ten or some other number that makes sense?

He forces himself to concentrate and, when he’s finished, goes down a long corridor to the study, where his father is studying blueprints. Weldon Braithwaite, a tall man with the fleshy but still powerful physique of the aging athlete, is CEO of Web-Mar Associates, a development firm that has covered vast swaths of Arizona with strip malls, fairways, and retirement communities bearing faux Spanish names like “Rio Vista Estates.” Douglas announces himself with a cough. Weldon looks up. His son says, “Here it is,” and hands him the sheet of looseleaf.