The Tomorrow-Tamer (18 page)

Moses had heard ventriloquism in England, but never a performance like this one. The oracle's priest was facing them squarely. His mouth was clamped shut and his jaw rigid, not a flicker of movement. He was–it had to be admitted–a master.

Kobla Oware, the childless one, sat perfectly still. Not wanting to see the look of tremulous exultation that changed and lightened the villager's dour face, Moses looked away and as he did so he found himself staring straight into the tiger eye of the priest. Moses glared angrily, but the priest's gaze never
faltered. Then, as Moses handed Kobla Oware the money for the dead goat, he could feel the ravenous eye slipping away from himself, losing interest, coming to rest on the notes in the villager's hand.

Faru joked and laughed with the village men as he led them out of the room. Moses, who had just deposited his share of the oracle's fee in the brass
kuduo
, was about to follow when something stopped him.

The box coughed once more, a gentle apologetic sound.

Moses swung around, feeling both foolish and terrified.

“Who–what is it?” he whispered.

There was a flutter of movement inside the box.

“I beg you, I beg you, I beg you,” the small voice gasped, “let me free!”

Hardly knowing what he was doing, or why, but moved by the urgency of the voice, Moses stepped quickly over to the box and began wrenching at the lid.

“Hurry, hurry, before he gets back,” the voice pleaded. “The latch is on the other side, stupid.”

Moses found the latch, fumbled at it and finally raised the lid. He forced himself to look inside. There lay the man-forsaken little god.

The creature's face was old, as old as Africa, as old as all earth. But it was not the leathery oldness of health. The skin of this face was pouched and puffy; it had a look of unpleasant softness, like skin soaked too long in water. The eyes were so sorrowfully wise they seemed not to own the ludicrously stunted body, palpitating with panic under its tangle of rags.

Moses could not move a muscle. He could only look and look. The creature, now struggling weakly to rise from the straw-lined box, was certainly a man, but it seemed impossible
that he possessed the same component parts as other humans. Everything about him must surely be different–his liver a frail mauve like a wild orchid, his heart as green and trembling as a blade of grass.

“Quick, quick,” the little creature squeaked. “Open that window and put me outside. You go out the door. I will meet you on the road. Oh, hurry!”

There was no time to think. Moses could hear the priest's heavy voice, still talking with the villagers. He opened the window and thrust the oracle outside into the darkness. Then he walked rapidly out of the room.

Moses never knew how the creature managed to scuttle across the road and past the villagers without being noticed. But when he himself had finally reached the car, his heart thundering, the oracle was there before him. They climbed in, and Moses, despite the rain and the treacherous road, drove away from the village as though he were being pursued by demons who rode the black wind.

When they were at a safe distance, Moses slowed the car. Immediately, the little man, who was still shaking like a withered moonflower in a storm, began to babble his gratitude.

“Oh, I bless your name, I bless it! He kept me there–oh, a long time, I cannot remember how long. I will bless your name every day of my life. There were holes in the box but I had to breathe very small and small and small. Oh, you would not believe how foul the air was–it has ruined my lungs; lately I cough all the time. I heard the servant child say it was a stranger coming, someone not of the village. Not many strangers come. The last was a Dagomba man–Faru knew his language, a little, but I did not. I was afraid you might be the same–a different tongue–but then I heard you speak, and I knew you would save me. Oh, I bless your name.”

“Who are you?” Moses asked.

“I am Godman Pira,” the ex-oracle replied. “One of the
pirafo
, you know, a dwarf. Can I help it? Does that make me any less a man? I am different, maybe, but I am as much a man as any of them. Do you think so? Do I seem that way to you? To one who has lived in a box for so long, it is sometimes hard to tell–”

“You are a man,” Moses said gruffly. “Of course you are.”

He wished he could look at the creature without feeling a slight shock of revulsion. Perhaps it was the humidity in the box that had given the waterlogged appearance to the creases of the face.

“I want to be a man,” Godman Pira said. “I have always belonged to some priest, you see. Before this one, it was another, and before him, another. Always the same thing. It is a very hard life, to be an oracle. Some of the
pirafo
used to be court jesters to the kings of Ashanti. But not any more. No one wants to laugh any more, perhaps.”

“Why did you never reveal yourself to one of the villagers?” Moses asked. “Why did you not tell them you were human?”

“It would have been no use,” Godman said. “They would not have known what to do. They are afraid of Faru, and anyway, they would not have believed I was a person like themselves. If I am an oracle, they know how to act with me. They pour libation, and ask questions, and I stay in my box and they do not have to approach me very closely. But if I am a man, what are they to do with me? It would only have confused them. They are good people, but they do not like to look at things they have not seen before.”

Moses remembered the owner of the goat.

“Godman, why did you tell Kobla Oware his wife would conceive?”

The little man laughed softly.

“Easy,” he boasted. “It is not so difficult to astound people by prophesying. She has conceived already, but Kobla does not know it yet. We had information, you see. Two of the village crones. Faru was the clever one. The things I could tell you–”

He chortled again, hugging his short arms around himself.

“I wouldn't have thought,” Moses said stiffly, “that you would find much in Faru to admire.”

“Oh, I didn't!” Godman cried. “I hated him. You cannot know how much I hated him. Every day I used to pray to the real gods that his bowels would be knotted and closed until he died of putrefaction.”

Then the little man began to tremble once more.

“How angry he will be when he finds the box empty! Maybe he will follow me and find me and take me back. Or else he will kill me. You will not let him? You will keep him away? Say you will keep him away!”

“I do not think he will dare to follow,” Moses said. “And if he did, how could he find you in the city?”

“He sees through walls,” Godman quavered. “His eye sees everywhere. So he used to say.”

“You don't really believe that, do you?”

“I don't know–” Godman hesitated. “Now that I am with you it seems–oh, it is hard for me to know. Do you think all he said might have been lies? I thought so sometimes, but when you are in a box, you are not sure what you think. Sometimes it seems that you are only dreaming you are awake, when all the time you sleep and sleep–”

“He lied to you,” Moses said firmly. “You do not need to be afraid of him any longer.”

“Do you really think so? Tell me once more, then I will believe it. He might not bother to follow me. He knew I was growing ill, and he thought I would die soon. I would have died, too, if I had stayed there. Perhaps he will journey and find another dwarf–it would pay him better. Yes, I think that is what he will do. But–oh, what if he does seek me out? You will not let him take me back?”

“There are police in the city,” Moses said reassuringly. “I will go to them, if you like, and explain about Faru. Perhaps they–”

“Oh, I have just remembered!” Godman cried. “If there are police where we are going, I think Faru will not approach that place. He was once put in a prison, a long time ago, and he would never allow himself to be put there again. He is like a leopard, you know–he could not endure a cage.”

“Yet he kept you in one.”

“He did not think that was the same thing,” Godman said simply. “And after all, he did buy me.”

“But,” Moses protested, “don't you realize? A man cannot buy another man. A law forbids it. Why, that is as bad as the slavers, in the old days. People are not allowed to do that sort of thing now.”

“Really?” Godman said. “There–you see? I am learning so much from you already. Soon I will know everything about how to live as a man.”

“What–what are you planning to do, once we reach the city?” “I do not mind,” Godman said promptly. “You are clever. You will think of something.”

“I mean–where will you go?”

Godman Pira settled himself more comfortably on the seat of the car.

“Wherever you are going,” he said. “I will go with you, wherever you go.”

Moses looked at him, appalled.

 

Moses often thought afterwards that he ought never to have allowed Godman to know where he lived. But when they reached the city, the little man seemed on the point of collapse with exhaustion and the excitement of his escape. Moses had previously rented two frugally furnished rooms; they were not large, but neither was Godman, so Moses reluctantly granted him shelter, telling him emphatically that he must leave as soon as he was rested. The next evening, however, Godman was still there. Moses tried to reason with him.

“You will have to find some kind of work. That is what men do–they work. You cannot stay here. It is impossible.”

The little man coughed and shivered, and his sickly damp-looking face took on an expression of calculated pathos.

“What could I do?” he asked, lowering purplish-lidded eyes but managing to watch Moses' face all the time. “Alone, what could I do? I know only how to be an oracle. I swear it–I will be no trouble to you. I will eat no more than the bird that picks at the teeth of the crocodile. I do not take up much room. I will be so quiet you will forget I am here–yes, as quiet as the little lizards who never waken you when they run across your walls at night. And I will help–I will wash your clothes, and if you get another broom, not that monstrous thing there, I will sweep your house for you. Oh, you will see how well I will work–”

Moses snorted. “You? Sweep the house? You haven't the strength.”

“There, you see,” Godman twittered, waving his hands, “you have said it yourself. What work could I do in this city where everything is so big? If you turn me out, I will die. Oh, the pity–to be freed only to die like a mouse–”

“But, Godman, you're not my responsibility. I have work to do, troubles, worries.”

“You brought me here,” Godman said sulkily.

“You asked me to bring you!” Moses cried.

“I did not know it would be like this,” Godman said miserably. “So many people, and the noise, and those high buildings–”

He turned to Moses and held out both his hands.

“Oh, I am so frightened in this unknown place. How shall I know what to do, unless you are with me, to tell me what to do?”

“All right, all right,” Moses said grudgingly. “A week, then, until you are more accustomed to the city. Perhaps you will be stronger by then, too. But whether you are or not, you must go. Do you understand?”

“Oh yes!” Godman said gaily. “I understand. When I am with you, I understand everything.”

At the end of the week, the scene was enacted all over again. And once more Godman stayed.

Only a child is agile enough to be small. Inside the house, Godman managed fairly well, but on the street his stump-legs stumbled with his fear. At first he could not be persuaded to go out alone at all, and when finally he ventured out timidly, he refused to go more than a few blocks away. The cars and bicycles, the jostling market women with their huge wheel-like head trays, the quick children whose voices could so easily turn to jeering, the high and heavy shops white-blazing in the sun, the streets close and tangled as vines, streets
where anyone might easily lose the way and where a very small man might conceivably never find it again–all these, and the eyes of the city's curiosity, were terrifying enough to Godman, but they were not all.

“I know Faru will never find me in this place,” he said gravely to Moses one evening. “I know it very well. But–somehow, I know it so much better when you are with me.”

So for the most part the dwarf remained indoors, waiting all day for Moses to return from work. Despite the promise of silence, after the restricted years Godman's loquaciousness knew no bounds. The moment Moses arrived home, the voice began to chirp and never ceased until Godman went to sleep. Moses would try to read and would angrily tell Godman to keep quiet. But concentration would still be impossible, because Godman in abject apology would squeeze and fold himself together until he seemed no bigger than an embryo and would maintain a silence so plainly sorrowful that Moses would finally throw down his book in disgust and tell the little man he might speak. Immediately, Godman would jump up, put on the tea-kettle, and come marching back, wearing a chaplet of leaves and carrying in his hand a lime stuck on a twig.

“Omanhene, great chief, see–I am your soul-bearer, and here is my staff.”

And Moses would laugh despite himself, and be annoyed at his laughter. When Moses stripped himself to bathe, Godman would be there, perched like a great-eyed owl on the dresser that held the wash basin, admiring with gentle clucking exclamations the immensity of Moses' parts compared with his own, until Moses, embarrassed, and annoyed at his embarrassment, would order him out of the room. And always Godman would go, humbly, never knowing what his offence had been but never questioning that Moses was right.

A hundred times Moses was on the point of telling the little man he must leave. But where could he go? What would he be able to do, by himself, in this city of giants? Moses could imagine Godman squashed like a cockroach under the heedless tramping feet of the markets and streets.