The Poisonwood Bible (33 page)

“But Tata Boanda has to give it away, because fish won’t keep. If you don’t get rid of it, it’s just going to rot and stink to high heaven.” Anatole smiled and pointed his finger at my nose. “That is just how a Congolese person thinks about money.”

“But if you keep on giving away every bit of extra you have, you’re never going to be rich.”

 “That is probably true.”

“And everybody wants to be rich.”

 “Is that so?”

“Sure. Nelson wants to save up for a wife.You probably do, too.” For some reason I couldn’t look at him when I said that.”Tata Ndu is so rich he has six wives, and everybody envies him.”

“Tata Ndu has a very hard job. He needs a lot of wives. But don’t be so sure everyone envies him. I myself do not want his job.” Anatole laughed. “Or his wives.”

“But don’t you want lots of money?”

“Beene, I spent many years working for the Belgians in the rubber plantation at Coquilhatville, and I saw rich men there. They were always unhappy and had very few children.”

“They probably would have been even more unhappy if they’d been poor,” I argued.

He laughed. “You might be right. Nevertheless, I did not learn to envy the rich man.”

“But you need some money,” I persisted. I do realize Jesus lived the life of poverty, but that was another place and time. A harsh desert culture, as Brother Fowles had said. “You need enough to pay for food and doctors and all.”

“All right then, some money,” he agreed. “One automobile and a radio for every village.Your country could give us that much, e-e?”

“Probably. I don’t think it would really make a dent. Back in Georgia everybody we knew had an automobile.”

“A bu, don’t tell stories. That is not possible.”

“Well, not everybody. I don’t mean babies and children. But every single family.”

“Not possible.”

“Yes, it is! Some families even have two!”

“What is the purpose of so many automobiles at the same time?”

“Well, because everybody has someplace to go every day. To work or to the store or something.”

“And why is nobody walking?”

“It’s not like here, Anatole. Everything’s farther apart. People live in big towns and cities. Bigger cities than Leopoldville, even.”

“Beene, you are lying to me. If everyone lived in a city they could never grow enough food.”

“Oh, they do that out in the country. In big, big fields. Peanuts and soybeans and corn, all that.The farmers grow it, then they put it on big trucks and take it all to the city, where people buy it from the store.”            

“From the market.”

“No, it isn’t a bit like the market. It’s a great big house kind of thing, with bright lights and all these shelves inside. It’s open every day, and just one person sells all the different things.”

“One farmer has so many things?”

   “No, not a farmer. A storekeeper buys it all from the farmers, and sells it to the city people.”

“And so you don’t even know whose fields this food came from? That sounds terrible. It could be poisoned!”

“It’s not bad, really. It works out.”

“How can there be enough food, Beene? If everyone lives in a city?”

“There just is.Things are different from here.” .. 

 “What is so different?”

“Everything,” I said, intending to go on, but my tongue only licked the backs of my teeth, tasting the word everything. I stared at the edge of the clearing behind us, where the jungle closed us out with its great green wall of trees, bird calls, animals breathing, all as permanent as a heartbeat we heard in our sleep. Surrounding us was a thick, wet, living stand of trees and tall grasses stretching all the way across Congo. And we were nothing but little mice squirming through it in our dark little pathways. In Congo, it seems the land owns the people. How could I explain to Anatole about soybean fields where men sat in huge tractors like kings on thrones, taming the soil from one horizon to the other? It seemed like a memory trick or a bluegreen dream: impossible.

“At home,” I said, “we don’t have the jungle.”

“Then what is it you have?”

“Big fields, like a manioc garden as wide and long as the Kwilu. There used to be trees, I guess, but people cut them down.”

“And they did not grow back?”

“Our trees aren’t so vivacious as yours are. It’s taken Father and me the longest time just to figure out how things grow here. Remember when we first came and cleared out a patch for our garden? Now you can’t even see where it was. Everything grew like Topsy, and then died. The dirt turned into dead, red slop like rotten meat. Then vines grew all over it. We thought we were going to teach people here how to have crops like we have back home.”

He laughed. “Manioc fields as long and “wide as the Kwilu.”

“You don’t believe me, but it’s true! You can’t picture it because here, I guess, if you cut down enough jungle to plant fields that big, the rain would just turn it into a river of mud.”

“And then the drought would bake it.”

“Yes! And if you ever did get any crops, the roads would be washed out so you’d never get your stuff into town anyway.”

He clucked his tongue. “You must find the Congo a very uncooperative place.”

“You just can’t imagine how different it is from what we’re used to. At home we have cities and cars and things because nature is organized a whole different way.”

He listened with his head cocked to the side. “And still your father came here determined to plant his American garden in the Congo.”

“My father thinks the Congo is just lagging behind and he can help bring it up to snuff. Which is crazy. It’s like he’s trying to put rubber tires on a horse.”

Anatole raised his eyebrows. I don’t suppose he’s ever seen a horse. They can’t live in the Congo because of tsetse flies. I tried to think of some other work animal for my parable, but the Congo has none. Not even cows. The point I was trying to make was so true there was not even a good way to say it.

“On a goat,” I said finally. “Wheels on a goat. Or on a chicken, or a wife. My father’s idea of what will make things work better doesn’t fit anything here.”              

“Ayi, Beene. That poor goat of your father’s is a very unhappy animal.”

And his wife! I thought. But I couldn’t help picturing a goat with big tires stuck in the mud, and it made me giggle.Then I felt stupid. I could never tell if Anatole respected me or just thought I was an amusing child.

“I oughtn’t to laugh at my father,” I said.

 “No,” he said, touching his lips and rolling his eyes upward.

 “I shouldn’t! It’s a sin.” Sin, sin, I felt drenched and sick of it. “I used to pray to God to make me just like him. Smart and righteous and adequate to His will,” I confessed. “Now I don’t even know what to wish for. I wish I were more like everybody else.”

He leaned forward and looked into my eyes. His finger moved from his lips toward my face and hovered, waiting for a place to plant its blessing. “Beene, if you were more like everybody else, you would not be so beene-beene.”

   “I wish you’d tell me what that means, beene-beene. Don’t I have a right to know my own name?”

His hand dropped to the table. “I will tell you someday.”

If I never learned my French conjugations from Anatole, at least I would try to learn patience. “Can I ask you something else?”

He considered this request, his left hand still holding his place in his book. “Yes.”

“Why do you translate the sermons for my father? I know what you think of our mission here.”

“Do you?”

“Well, I think I do. You came to dinner that time and explained how Tata Ndu doesn’t like so many people following Christian ways, instead of the old ways. I guess you probably think that, too, that the old ways were better. You don’t care for the way the Belgians did the elections, and I don’t think you’re even so sure about girls teaching school.”

“Beene, the Belgians did not come to me and ask, Anatole Ngemba, how shall we make the election? They merely said, ‘Kilanga, here are your votes. You may cast them in this calabash bowl or that calabash bowl, or toss them all in the river.’My job was to explain that choice.”

“Well, but still. I don’t think you’re very keen on what my father aims to accomplish here.”

“I don’t entirely know what he aims to accomplish here. Do you?”

“Tell the stories of Jesus, and God’s love. Bring them all to the Lord.”

“And if no one translated his sermons, how would he tell those stories?”

“That’s a good question. I guess he’d keep trying in French and Kikongo, but he gets those mixed up pretty bad. People probably never would get it straight what he was doing here exactly.”

“I think you are right. They might like your father more, if they couldn’t understand him, or they might like him less. It’s hard to say. But if they understand his words, they can make up their own minds.”

I looked long and hard at Anatole. “You respect my father, then.”

“What I respect is what I have seen. Nothing can stay the same, when somebody new walks into your house bringing gifts. Let’s say he has brought you a cooking pot. You already had a cooking pot you liked well enough, but maybe this new one is bigger. You’ll be very pleased, and gloat about it by giving the old one to your sister. Or maybe the new pot has a hole in the bottom. In that case you will thank your visitor very much, and when he is gone you’ll put it in the yard for feeding fish scales to the chickens.”

“So you’re just being polite. You don’t believe in Jesus Christ at all.”

He clicked his tongue. “What I believe in is not so important. I am a teacher. Do I believe in the multiplication tables? Do I believe in la languefrancaise, with its extra letters hanging onto every word like lazy children? No matter. People need to know what they are choosing. I’ve watched many white men come into our house, always bringing things we never saw before. Maybe scissors or medicine or a motor for a boat. Maybe books. Maybe a plan for digging up diamonds or growing rubber. Maybe stories about Jesus. Some of these things seem very handy, and some turn out to be not so handy. It is important to distinguish.”

“And if you didn’t translate the Bible stories, then people might sign up to be Christian for the wrong reasons. They’d figure our God gave us scissors and malaria pills so He’s the way to go.”

He smiled at me sideways. “This word beene-beene, you want to know what it means, then?”             

“Yes!”

“It means, as true as the truth can be.”

I felt a tingling blush in my cheeks, and the embarrassment made me blush more. I tried to think of something to say, but couldn’t. My eyes returned to French sentences I found I couldn’t translate.

“Anatole,” I said finally, “if you could have anything in the world, what would you want?”

Without hesitation he said, “To see a map of the whole world at once.”

“Really?You never have?”

“Not all of it at once. I can’t work out whether it’s a triangle, a circle, or a square.”

“It’s round,” I said, astonished. How could he not know? He’d gone to plantation schools and served in the houses of men who had shelves full of books. He spoke better English than Rachel. Yet he didn’t know the true shape of the world. “Not a circle, but like this,” I said, cupping my hands. “Round like a ball. Really you’ve never seen a globe?”

“I heard about a globe. A map on a ball. I wasn’t sure I understood it correctly because I couldn’t see how it would fit on a ball. Have you seen one?”

“Anatole, I have one. In America lots of people have them.”

He laughed. “For what? To help them decide where to drive the automobile?”

“I’m not joking. They’re in schoolrooms and everywhere. I’ve spent so much time staring at globes I could probably make one.”

He gave me a doubting look.

“I could. I mean it. You bring me a nice clean calabash and I’ll make you a globe of your own.”

“I would like that very much,” he said, speaking to me now as a grown-up friend, not a child. For the first time ever, I felt certain of it.

“You know what, I shouldn’t be teaching math. I should teach geography. I could tell your boys about the oceans and cities and all the wonders of the world!”

He smiled sadly. “Beene, they would not believe you.”

Rachel

THE DAY AFTER. MY BIRTHDAY, Axelroot came over and we went for a walk. I more or less knew to expect him. His routine was to fly out to his mystery destination on Thursdays, come back Mondays, and come to our house on Tuesdays. So I’d put on my tulip-tailored poison-green suit, which has now officially faded to poison drab and lost two of its buttons. For the first half of last year I prayed for a full-length mirror, and the second half I praised the Lord we didn’t have one. Still, who cares if my suit wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t a date, just a make-believe date for appearances. I planned to walk with him around the village, and not a speck farther. I swore to Mother I would not set foot into the forest with him or anywhere out of sight. She says she doesn’t trust him as far as she could throw him, and believe you me from the look in her eye I think she could throw him pretty far. But he is polite and has cleaned up his style. Standing in the doorway waiting for me in his regulation Sanforized wash-and-wear khakis and pilot sunglasses, why, he very nearly almost looked handsome. If you could ignore the telltale signs that he is a certified creep.

So we strolled out into the unbearable heat of August twenty-first, Nineteen-thousand-and-sixty. Bugs buzzed so loud it hurt your ears, and tiny red birds perched on the ends of long grass stalks beside the road, all swaying this way and that. Outside our village the elephant grass grows so tall it meets above the road to make a shady tunnel. Sometimes you can start thinking the Congo is almost pretty. Almost. And then, don’t look now but a four-inch-long cockroach or something will scurry across the path in front of you. That is exactly what happened next, and Axelroot kind of jumped on it and smashed it. I couldn’t bear to look.The sound was bad enough, honestly. A cross between crackle and squish. But I suppose it was a civilrous gesture on his part.

“Well, I do have to say, it’s nice to be protected for a change,” I said. “Around my house if a giant cockroach turns up someone will either tame it for a pet or cook it for dinner.”