Wizard of the Crow (85 page)

Yes, it is true that he is still in America, others would say, but not in jail, unless you consider schools and colleges to be prisons. The man had simply enrolled in a school of sorcery, and he was working his way to a PhD in comparative sorcery, ancient and modern, and, really, what is there to entice him back here? Aburlria of crooked roads, robberies, runaway viruses of death, hospitals without medicine, rampant unemployment without relief, daily insecurity, epidemic alcoholism? Yes, an Aburlria whose leaders had murdered hope? He should stay in America and acquire the sorcery that invented the fax and the Internet and e-mail and night vision and labs that grow human organs and even clone whole animals and humans, the magic of objects that propel themselves to war and other worlds, the sorcery by which the dollar rules the world! Amen, some would say, and even this would sometimes generate more arguments among them: Why do you say amen? Amen to what?

The different versions of the Wizard of the Crow in America would vie with one another for dominance, but all were united in their common attempt to explain why, despite the posters of the Wizard of the Crow all over the country, he could not be found. Where in Aburlria, they asked, could the man have hidden himself so as to elude the Ruler’s ubiquitous eyes, ears, noses, legs, and hands?

Okay, okay, a few would scream, let’s not have too many cooks dipping their spoons in the broth. Let’s hear the stories, one after the other, but we urge the tellers to know that too much salt makes food difficult to swallow.

The problem in deciding if there was any truth to any of the rumors lay in the fact that the original source of most of them was A.C. himself. And even when the stories differed, A.C. would swear that all of them were true, arguing that just as an ocean feeds on different rivers with sources in diverse hills and mountains, allowing
one to talk of streams, rivers, seas, and oceans though in each case one is talking about water, it was the same with narratives.

This would revive all their interest and quest for certainty: What happened? people would ask, all eyes on A.G.

When Kamltl, the Wizard of the Crow, came back to Aburiria from America, he wanted to go straight home and be with Nyawlra. He was homesick and felt as if he had been away for years. Still, he could not help recalling the nightmare that had become his life even before he had left for America. He had been arrested, forced to share a prison cell with Tajirika, released from prison, and put on a plane for the USA, where he had been unable to rejoin the Ruler’s entourage. And in New York he had seen and experienced things that he had never dreamed. Now that I am back, he asked himself, will I be able to resume my life and not be drawn into the mess of the Ruler and his ilk? Will the Sikiokuus and the Machokalis leave me alone? He just wanted to be with Nyawlra and continue to heal those in need. That was the vision that Kamltl had in mind as he rode a bus from the airport to the center of Eldares, where he took a
matatu
to Santalucia.

Some passengers were talking about the visit of the Ruler to America and how well it was going. How would they react, he wondered, were he to tell them that the Ruler was suffering from some kind of self-induced expansion? What if I were to tell them that I have just come back from America, that I have just left the Ruler and his entourage at the VIP Hotel between Fifth and Sixth avenues in Manhattan, near Washington Square and New York University?

It was early in the morning when he got to Santalucia. The bliss of a future with Nyawlra possessed him, and now, at the nearness of their reunion, he wondered how he would react on seeing her and how things had gone at the shrine. Should he run and embrace her, or should he hide behind the hedge and then walk stealthily behind her and put his hands over her eyes?

About two hundred yards away, he suddenly stopped and rubbed his eyes. Was he not seeing properly? He looked again. Did I take the wrong turn? But surely even if he were blind he would still know the way home. He hurried along. But the closer he got to the site, the more he felt strength draining from his legs and arms. He now stood dead in his tracks.

The site where once stood the house that he and Nyawlra had built together, his home, his shrine, was a mass of burnt black debris.

A cat stood some yards away, staring at him with green eyes as he walked about listlessly, picking up one thing and another and then letting them drop. Where do I begin the search for her? he asked himself as he sat down again to work out what he would do next. And what if the fire had not been an accident?

He would ask his neighbors what had happened, but the nearest were some distance away. He had to approach them circumspectly so as not to raise suspicions about who he was and his interest in the matter.

The reactions of the neighbors he approached were all disconcerting. He would start with greetings, which were met with friendly responses, but the moment he mentioned the shrine of the Wizard of the Crow, their faces and demeanors would change—friendly eyes would assume the look of fear. I don’t know what you are talking about, they would say as they scampered away or reverted to their chores or shut the door in his face. He stopped knocking at people’s doors and took to the streets.

He met an old man carrying a parcel dangling from one end of a stick over his shoulder. Kamltl dispensed with politeness and asked him about the burned-down shrine. The old man took to his heels, shouting as if he wanted the whole world to know that he was running: My heels are smoking; witness my heels smoking from the swiftness of my running! In happier times, Kamltl would have burst out laughing.

He sat down on a mound of earth and covered his face with his hands as if to hold back tears. He felt defeated. He had called her from America but had found the line dead, not unusual for telephones in Aburlria. He had thought nothing of it. Now he wished he and Nyawlra had taken advantage of mobile phones.

Suddenly he became aware of a presence near him. He opened his eyes and was startled to see the old man standing there; he had heard no footsteps.

“Why did you ask me about that house?” the old man asked.

“I just wanted to know what happened,” Kamltl answered.

“Why? Can’t you see that the house is burnt down?”

“Who burned it?”

“Do you believe in God?” the old man asked.

Kamltl was about to say something rude, but he restrained himself.

“Yes, I do.”

“And you believe that he is the Lord, Ruler of Heaven and Earth?”

“I am not into religions, but that’s correct.”

“Praise the Lord,” the old man said, raising his voice as if he wanted passersby to hear him.

“Was it an accident or arson?” Kamltl asked irritably.

“Accident? Praise the Lord,” the old man repeated.

“Were there any casualties?” Kamltl asked, thinking that the man was crazed.

But instead of answering him the old man bent forward a little, looked Kamltl in the eye, and spoke in whispers.

“Didn’t you just now say that you believe in God, the Lord above?”

“Why? How many Gods are there?” Kamltl asked impatiently.

“That’s the question. There is only one God. But there are many Lords. Have you ever thought about that?”

“Please don’t speak to me in riddles. Say directly what you are trying to tell me.”

“I just wanted to assure you that the God above is just and wise.”

“And therefore?”

“He works in mysterious ways.”

“So what?” Kamltl asked desperately.

“Praise the Lord and thank the Almighty that dwells high above us,” he mumbled, and started walking away, shouting, “Praise the Lord!” He soon disappeared.

What was the man trying to tell him? The Lord could be heavenly or earthly. The people who had burned the shrine down had some connection to the Ruler. Praise the Lord. There had been no casualties: so Praise the Lord. This interpretation was a relief. Nyawlra was very much alive. But where was she? Was she hurt or not? Was she in the hospital, or had she been captured? How would he find out? Where would he begin his search? But if Nyawlra had been captured, the story would have been in the newspapers. He combed through the archives of the
Eldares Times
in vain: no recent references to Nyawlra, the Movement for the Voice of the People, or arson. He went to the police headquarters under the guise of a reporter from the
Eldares Times
to learn of recent arrests or accidents in the different regions of the country, but again he came up empty. He visited hospitals only to learn nothing.

As the days and weeks of his search went by, he grew thin and began to look a far different person from the one who had come back home from America. Because his search had yielded no bad news, there were times when he was certain that Nyawlra was alive and free. At other times, he wondered whether she was in the custody of the secret police controlled by Minister Sikiokuu. When he had divined for Sikiokuu he always saw Nyawlra as ending up in a crowd, and so he started looking for her wherever people gathered to do good.

He visited Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox churches; Muslim mosques; and Hindu, Sikh, Jain, and Jewish temples throughout the country: there were no signs of Nyawlra in these places of worship.

It was then that he came across some queues, slow, inexorable processions, and he did not know if they were new or a continuation of the old ones. But whether old or new, it did not matter to him: he saw only a gathering of people where the spirit of Nyawlra might dwell and so started looking for her among them. He himself did not fall in line. He ran beside each queue, his face turned to the right or
left depending on which side of the line he ran along. Since every day and everywhere the queues were multiplying, this severely strained his neck.

Once he bumped into a procession that seemed better organized than any he had come across so far, its clear sense of purpose expressed in a song:

The scene changed daily; increasingly he met more people singing about the people’s voice and heading for Eldares. Still, he persisted in his search, tagging along most of them but, like the motorcycle riders, finding that they had no beginning or end.

It came out of nowhere: What if Nyawlra had left him and taken up with another, maybe one of her young comrades? He recalled how Margaret Wariara, later a victim of the deadly virus, had left him. Was there something about him that drove the people he most loved away from him? But try as he might, he could not imagine Nyawlra leaving him without saying good-bye. But then again, had he ever imagined that Wariara, a homely woman, would prostitute herself among tourists in big hotels?

This image of Wariara jolted him into looking for Nyawlra in the bars mushrooming all over the country. They sold all brands of beer and liquor, and fights often erupted as drinkers made claims and counterclaims about the superiority of their brand. He felt awkward just standing around or sitting in a corner without a drink, at least a soda.

He started having a little taste now and then to blend with the drinking crowd. At first he confined himself to one glass a day. But with every passing day, the amount of alcohol he consumed grew. The beer was now his temple. On waking up from a drunken stupor, his reality threatening to engulf him, he would rush back to the temple for salvation. Alcohol never disappointed, always keeping his worries at bay.

His resources were depleted, and he now spent his days looking for cheaper but more potent brew instead of Nyawlra. He would come to think of Nyawlra and even the Wizard of the Crow as characters in a dream in another country far away and long ago. He now had new friends, drunkards like him, and when he had no money he would beg them for a shot or two.

There was much storytelling and ribald joking among the drinking crowd. One day in a bar he found a man reading to a crowded bar from a book he called
Devil on the Cross.
Whenever he emptied his glass, he would stop and announce that his beak needed wetting. He would resume only after his glass had been replenished by those around him. Inspired by the man’s success in procuring free drinks, Kamltl himself became a talemonger. He told how once he had left his body in a garbage dump and flown high above it as a bird before returning to it just as garbage collectors were about to bury it. The crowd was not impressed with Kamltl’s tales, except for a drunk who always sat by himself in a corner as if in hiding. He who hardly ever said anything now suddenly raised his voice: What did you sayr

The other drunks were surprised to hear the man’s voice, and they asked one another: Has Baalam’s donkey found his voice at lastr Thinking that he was finally beginning to attract an interested audience, Kamltl repeated his story. The drunk, known as Mr. Walking Stick—he sported one with a cross-shaped handle—walked over and gazed at him with something like terror in his eyes, shook his head, and walked back, mumbling, No, it cannot be, he does not carry a bag on his back like the other one. And he has no horns. Nevertheless, the drunk, who had been a permanent fixture in that bar, changed location and thereafter moved from bar to bar, saying to inquisitive tongues, Too long a stay in one seat tires the buttocks.

On another occasion Kamrö told the same drinking crowd how he became a bird and visited all of Africa and the Caribbean Islands, and this was too much for his listeners, who told him to take his naked lies to gullible fools elsewhere. Somehow his stories or the manner of their telling lacked the power that carried people to worlds they had never visited, that showed them wonders they had never seen, that made them forget, for a time, the familiar milieu of endless misery, and so they did not bring many replenishments of drinks. He gave up storytelling, though grudgingly. With not much flowing into his glass,
he sometimes left the bars early for what had now become his home, his razed shrine, where he would wake up to find a cat snuggling against him, the same cat that he saw when he first came to the charred ruins. As on that day the cat would mew once and walk away, leaving him wondering if he should follow it but without once bringing himself to do so.