Wizard of the Crow (68 page)

“Nyawlra,” Vinjinia called her by her name. “Let’s not play games. I did not want to say your real name inside the shrine.”

“When did you find out?” Nyawlra asked in her normal voice.

“Every time I have come here I would go home with a feeling that I knew you. But when this very morning my husband told me that he left the Wizard of the Crow in jail and that he is still in Sikiokuu’s hands, it dawned on me that it was you playing the role of the Wizard of the Crow. I felt I had to come and tell you about the danger you face. I wanted you to come out into the open for, as they say, even walls have ears. But I also wanted to confirm my suspicions by watching your gait, how you carried yourself.”

And as they resumed their walk, Vinjinia told Nyawlra the whole story of her second abduction by Kaniürü and his thugs. Without hesitation, she told her how she had saved herself.

Nyawlra felt both elated and depressed. What, she asked herself bitterly, had once attracted her to Kaniürür

“I just came to tell you of the danger I have put you in, because even if your companion is still in jail, Kaniürü and his men may still want to come here to find out exactly who the other wizard is with whom I’ve been consulting. I can’t presume to tell you what you ought to do; you must decide for yourself. I must go now. But before I do, I want you to know that I am very grateful for all that you have done for me, going so far as to risk your life. All the same, I don’t believe in your kind of politics. But if there is anything I can do for you …”

Nyawlra stood silently, holding back tears with difficulty. She was struck by Vinjinia’s generosity of spirit: she had fought the fatigue of a sleepless night of torture in order to come and warn her of danger. She had walked from the dark into the light: Nyawlra had just witnessed the coming into life of the new, more assertive Vinjinia.

Vinjinia said farewell and started to walk away. As in previous visits, she had left her car on the side of the road quite a distance from the shrine. Nyawlra caught up with her and said: “Please, don’t think that I was silent because I am angry with you. I am grateful for what you have done: endangering yourself to warn me. I am moved to know that you have never disclosed your suspicions about me to anyone. Don’t worry too much about what took place at Bed Biver last night. I know how to take care of myself, but I will keep in mind your offer to help. Let’s agree on a code.”

They discussed various names they might use should communication between them become necessary, with Vinjinia, no longer a passive recipient of other people’s ideas, fully participating.

“Let’s use the name Dove,” suggested Vinjinia finally.

“That’s good,” Nyawlra agreed. “Dove is the messenger of peace and salvation.”

“I must ask you a question,” Vinjinia felt emboldened to say. “I won’t mind if you don’t want to answer.”

“Go on.”

“The other Wizard of the Crow. Is he still in jail?”

“No. He was when Tajirika was in prison. He is now in America.”

Vinjinia gaped with wonder and disbelief.

“In America?”

“The Ruler is ill. He sent for the Wizard of the Crow.”

It was the unbelieving look that Vinjinia gave her that brought back a suspicion she always harbored: was the illness a ruse to get the Wizard of the Crow? As Nyawlra stood at the gate irresolutely, watching her friend disappear in the distance, a song she once heard sung by the girls of the village popped into her mind, a silent lullaby to herself. She went inside the shrine and took out her guitar again. She sat on the veranda and, now, almost miraculously, the strings responded to the touch of her fingers. She played and hummed the melody softly, her eyes now set on a distance far away.

She thought of him, the Wizard of the Crow, in America, in the care of the dictator, no longer sure that she would ever see him again.

A record of the Ruler’s illness exists in a paper by the distinguished Harvard professor Din Furyk. The professor had hoped to read it at the annual conference of the Euro-American Medical Association and duly sent them an abstract, but the description of the illness sounded so unbelievable that he was not allowed to present it. The professor did not give up. He sent the paper to a famous journal in England,
Nature
&
Nurture,
and on reading it the editors who earlier had shown interest in it changed their minds. They said that since the illness in question involved the head of state of a friendly country, the publication of the paper would almost certainly strain the relations between Britain and Aburlria to the detriment of cooperation between the two countries in matters of science and technology. Another journal returned the paper to the author, recommending instead a disreputable publisher of science fiction!

A copy of the professor’s diary in which he describes how he came to write the paper fell my way, and I will draw on it freely to supplement my other sources.

It seems that the Ruler’s body had started puffing up like a balloon, his whole body becoming more and more inflated, without losing the proportion of parts.

Dr. Wilfred Kaboca, the first to examine him, immediately called for Machokali as a witness to his dealings with the sick man. Ma-chokali in turn called in all the other ministers, including security personnel, who stood around flabbergasted at the uncanny sight. Not only did the Ruler seem on the verge of bursting, but he had also lost the power to speak.

The ministers retreated to a meeting to plan how to deal with the Ruler’s illness and the multitude of problems it generated. Where would they put him?

He would sit and sleep on the floor, it was decided. What would he wear? As his hypertrophy proceeded, his clothes were ripping at their seams; the Ruler appeared to be dressed in rags. They covered him in bedsheets. But what to do about the Ruler’s unrelenting inflation? How to stop it, how to slow it down?

Dr. Wilfred Kaboca had tried everything within his knowledge and experience to contain the process but had now reached the end of his tether.

Should they take him to a hospital? they debated time and again. But how to prevent the news from spreading? They authorized Dr. Kaboca to seek the help of a specialist willing to apply himself only in the Ruler’s suite. Dr. Wilfred Kaboca contacted Dr. Clement C. Clarkwell, a New York specialist in obesity and the like, but when Clarkwell saw the body visibly expanding before his very eyes, he dialed Professor Din Furyk for help.

“I came to know about the illness,” writes Din Furyk of the Harvard Medical School in his diary, “because Dr. Clarkwell was a former student and whenever he came across difficult cases he would often call me for advice. His description of this particular case so aroused my curiosity that I dropped everything and went to New York. I was taken past security right to the Ruler’s suite, the top three floors of the Fifth Avenue VIP Hotel, where I quickly consulted with Dr. Clarkwell and Dr. Kaboca, and the gravity of the situation was accentuated by the shaking of their heads from side to side in disbelief saying that, according to the preliminary exam, everything about the Ruler, except for his swelling up, seemed normal. I entered the Ruler’s room. I would ask other questions only after I had seen the patient.

“The patient was seated on the floor, his back to the wall. I felt his forehead, took his temperature, listened to his heartbeat. All was normal, though he seemed to be panting a bit from fatigue. But his eyes, those eyes, I have never encountered a look like that in an adult. They looked scared and helpless, like the eyes of a child stricken with fear at the unexpected and the unknown.

“The Ruler, as his followers invariably called him, seemed to have lost the power of speech. Fortunately he could still read what was put in front of him and he would then nod for
yes
or shake his head for
no.
But even these gestured yeses and
nos
were rare and rather abrupt.”

Din Furyk tells of how he asked for blood samples to be taken to find out whether the patient exhibited symptoms of hyperthyroid-ism, nephrotic syndrome, polycystic kidney disease, or some form of Cushing’s syndrome brought about by cortisal hormones in the blood, or any disorders associated with obesity known to science. He was also concerned about the possibility of steroid-induced obesity, despite Dr. Wilfred Kaboca’s assurances that the Ruler had never taken any steroids, that Viagra was the only drug for which he had shown an insatiable appetite.

Furyk then describes his attempts to get a sense of the Ruler’s medical history from his entourage of ministers and security folk. “No one was able to shed any light on the matter. When I asked them a question, such as When did the illness strike?’ or When did you first notice signs of the illness?’ they would look in the direction of the Ruler, then at one another, and would say that they did not know. Africans, or shall I say black people, in general, are strange.”

At this point the professor digresses to discuss the African character. The diary is full of phrases like “faces that cannot be easily read,” “a face like a mask,” and “the ministers could not look me in the eye; they had a shiftiness suggesting mendacity.” The Ruler’s own personal physician is also questioned, and he is described as being no different from the ministers, volunteering bits of information grudgingly and only when he was outside the hearing of others.

The only person praised in the diary is the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mr. Machokali, who spoke without an accent and was direct in his manner. He was presumed to have been educated in the West. “A rare mind, this, quite exceptional. Could easily have been a product of Harvard or another Ivy League school.”

“Because they were all hopeless,” Professor Furyk writes, “I thought it better simply to wait for the results from the lab.

“Imagine my shock when they showed that everything about him was functioning normally! How was this possible? Why this continued self-induced expansion of the body? His belly was as taut as a drum, and whenever I tapped it a sound issued from the mouth.
Crr,
or was it
coral
or
crawl
or
cruel”?
I took Dr. Clarkwell and Dr. Kaboca outside for a conference. What could the Ruler be signifying by
coral
or
crawl
or
cruel?
Dr. Kaboca’s response was strange: he was a physician of the body, not a decipherer of words; it was better to ask the ministers because they were politicians and politicians are known for their words.

“I confronted the ministers. All turned their eyes to Machokali.”

Machokali himself flinched inwardly. It was bad enough to have this case, of a body spluttering meaningless words, on his hands. Now he had to deal with accusatory looks: You arranged this visit; get us out of this predicament. How did he, a highly educated individual with a BS in economics from the University of Aburlria, an MA in political science from Michigan University, and a PhD in the psychology of power from Uppsala University in Sweden, find himself in this mess?

He needed to buy time. So he said at the meeting that he needed to go back to the Ruler to elicit more words that might help him to interpret the three words. As soon as he got new information, he would convene another meeting.

So with a boldness he did not feel, Machokali marched into the Ruler’s room and said only, “How are you!” The Ruler stared blankly past him as if he had not seen him or heard his greetings. So Machokali backtracked, and as soon as he was outside the room he darted to his own room, locked himself inside, and knelt down to pray for divine intervention.

Suddenly he heard a knock at the door. He jumped up and hesitated before opening the door. It was one of the Ruler’s security men. Had the Ruler’s condition worsened? Or … Or … worse than that?

“I wanted to see you alone,” said Arigaigai Gathere, alias A.G.

“What’s the matter?” Machokali asked him after he had gestured for his visitor to take a seat.

“I really don’t know where or how to start, but I want to begin by begging you not to take lightly what an underling like me … Do you know the story of Elephant and the thorn?”

“Please spare me the wisdom of folktales,” Machokali said, forcing himself to laugh as if he had been joking, but in his heart he was burning with anxiety, for another thought had crept into his mind: had Sikiokuu seized power?

“Let me tell you the story all the same. Elephant felt something sharp in his foot, and when he removed it and saw that it was a tiny
thorn, he was very angry. How can such a tiny thing prevent a big animal like me from walking? He pushed the thorn back into his foot and walked on, stamping the ground with defiance. The infection that later developed in the foot killed Elephant. Hence the saying ‘Never look down upon the small.’ True!
Haki ya Mungu!
I, too, ask you, Don’t despise the messenger, however lowly, or take lightly the message, however strange.”

“Say whatever you have come to say,” Machokali said.

“I know of a man who can handle this illness.”

“A doctor more qualified than Professor Furyk?”

“Well, he is not a doctor in the ordinary sense. He’s a sorcerer.”

“A sorcerer?”

“Well, a diviner.”

A diviner? A sorcerer? In New York?”

“In Aburlria. His name is the Wizard of the Crow.”

“True!
Haki ya Mungu,”
A.G. would say when he later narrated what happened during that fateful visit to the USA. “Right from the time it first struck, I knew that it was no ordinary illness. I also knew that there was only one person who could wrestle it to the ground. But I did not want to volunteer my knowledge. Who would believe my claims that the Wizard of the Crow could succeed where the masters of science from the West had failed? So I held back the information to give the ministers time to see what their Western doctors could do. The ministers had more education than I, but you all know, don’t you, that too much education can make men blind to what’s around them. “But when I heard that the Ruler had started to hallucinate, uttering words that nobody could tell the meaning of, I said to myself, That’s it. I will speak out or forever hold my peace. It was clear to me that whites were at the root of this illness. Do you know how white people hate it when a black man comes up with an original idea? And what could be more original than our Ruler’s vision of Marching to Heaven? These whites! Wherever they are, whoever they are, they all
stink of racism. I had made up my mind, and the only thing remaining for me to figure out was how I would speak to these ministers in a manner that would bring them around to my view of the problem.