скачать книгу бесплатно
“Mwita,” I quickly said. “Meet Luyu, Diti, and Binta, my friends. Luyu, Diti, Binta, meet Mwita, my friend.”
Diti snickered at this.
“So Onyesonwu is a good enough reason to come here?” Luyu asked.
“She’s the only reason,” he said.
My face felt hot, as the eyes of all four turned to me.
“Here,” he said, giving me a book. “Thought I’d lost it but I didn’t.” It was a booklet on human anatomy. When we’d last spoken, he’d been bothered by how little I knew about the many muscles of the body.
“Thanks,” I said, feeling annoyed at my friends’ presence. I wanted to tell them again that Mwita and I were just friends. The only type of interaction Luyu and Diti had with boys was sexual or flirtatious.
Mwita gave me a look and I returned it with a look of agreement. After that, he only approached me when he thought I’d be alone. Most of the time he succeeded but sometimes he was forced to deal with my friends. He was fine.
I was always happy to see Mwita. But one day, months later, I was ecstatic to see him. Relieved. When I saw him coming up the road, an envelope in hand, I jumped up. I’d been sitting on the house steps staring into space, confused and angry, waiting for him. Something had happened.
“Mwita!” I screamed, breaking into a run. But when I got to him, all my words escaped me and I just stood there.
He took my hand. We sat down on the steps.
“I-I-I don’t know,” I babbled. I paused, a great sob welling up in my chest. “It couldn’t have happened, Mwita. Then I wondered if this was what happened before. Something’s been happening to me. Something’s after me! I need to see a healer. I …”
“Just tell me what happened, Onyesonwu,” he said, impatient.
“I’m trying!”
“Well, try harder.”
I glared at him and he glared back, motioning his hand for me to get on with it.
“I was in the back, looking at my mother’s garden,” I said. “Everything was normal and … then everything went red. A thousand shades of it …”
I stopped. I couldn’t tell him about how a giant red-eyed brown cobra slithered up to me and rose up to my face. And then how I was suddenly hit with a self-loathing so deep and profound that I started raising my hands to gouge out my own eyes! That I was then going to tear my own throat with my nails. I am awful. I am evil. I am filth. I should not be! The mantra was red and white in my mind as I’d stared in horror at the oval eye. I didn’t tell him how a moment later an oily black vulture flew down from the sky, screamed and then pecked at the snake until it slithered away. How I snapped out of it just in time. I skipped all this.
“There was a vulture,” I said. “Looking right at me. Close enough for me to see its eyes. I threw a rock at it and as it flew off, one of its feathers fell off. A long black one. I … went and picked it up. I was standing there wishing I could fly as it did. And then … I don’t …”
“You changed,” Mwita said. He was looking at me very closely.
“Yeah! I became the vulture. I swear to you! I’m not making this …”
“I believe you,” Mwita said. “Finish.”
“I … I had to hop out from underneath my clothes,” I said holding my arms out. “I could hear everything. I could see … it looked as if the world had opened itself to me. I got scared. Then I was lying there, myself again, naked, my clothes next to me. My diamond wasn’t in my mouth. I found it a few feet away and …” I sighed.
“You’re an Eshu,” he said.
“A what?” The word sounded like a sneeze.
“An Eshu. You can shape-shift, among other things. I knew this the day you changed into that sparrow and flew into the tree.”
“What?” I screamed, leaning away from him.
“You know what you know, Onyesonwu,” he said matter-of-factly.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I clenched my shaking fists.
“Eshus never believe what they are until they realize it on their own.”
“So what do I do? What … how do you know all this?”
“Same way I know all the other things,” he said.
“How’s that?”
“It’s long story,” he said. “Listen, don’t go telling your friends about this.”
“I didn’t plan to.”
“Firsts are important. Sparrows are survivors. Vultures are noble birds.”
“What’s noble about eating dead things and stealing meat from chopping blocks?”
“Everything must eat.”
“Mwita,” I said. “You have to teach me more. I have to learn to protect myself.”
“From what?”
Tears dribbled from my eyes. “I think something wants to kill me.”
He paused, looked me in the eye and then said, “I’ll never let that happen.”
According to my mother, all things are fixed. To her there was a reason for everything from the massacres in the West to the love she found in the East. But the mind behind all things, I call it Fate, is harsh and cold. It’s so logical that no one could call him or herself a better person if he or she bowed down to it. Fate is fixed like brittle crystal in the dark. Still, when it came to Mwita, I bow down to Fate and say thank you.
We met twice a week, after school. Mwita’s lessons were exactly what I needed to hold back my fear of the red eye. I’m a fighter by nature and simply having tools to fight, no matter how inadequate, was enough to take the crippling edge off my anxiety. At least during those days.
Mwita himself was also a good distraction. He was well spoken, well dressed, and he carried himself with respect. And he didn’t have the same type of outcast reputation I had. Luyu and Diti were envious of my time with him. They took pleasure in telling me about the rumors that he liked older married girls in their late teens. Girls who’d completed school and had more to offer intellectually.
No one could figure Mwita out. Some said that he was self-taught and lived with an old woman to whom he read books in exchange for a room and spending money. Some said he owned his own house. I didn’t ask. I knew he wouldn’t tell me. Still he wasEwu and so every so often, I’d hear people mention his “unhealthy” skin and “foul” odor and how no matter how many books he read, he’d only amount to something bad.
Chapter 7 (#ulink_e2fde591-03ad-5a73-8dd2-c337bbbe9171)
Lessons Learned (#ulink_e2fde591-03ad-5a73-8dd2-c337bbbe9171)
I TOOK MY DIAMOND FROM MY MOUTH and handed it to Mwita, my heart beating fast. If a man touched my stone, he’d have the ability to do great harm or good to me. Though Mwita didn’t respect Jwahir’s traditions, he knew I did. So he was careful taking it.
It was a weekend morning. The sun had just come up. My parents were asleep. We were in the garden. I was exactly where I wanted to be.
“According to what I know, whatever you’ve turned into, you retain the knowledge of it forever,” he said. “Does that feel right to you?”
I nodded. When I focused on the idea, I felt the vulture and the sparrow just below my skin.
“It’s right there, under the surface,” he said, slowly. “Feel the feather with your fingers. Rub it, knead it. Shut your eyes. Remember. Draw from it. Then be it.”
The feather in my hand was smooth, delicate. I knew just where it would go. In the empty shaft on my wing. This time I was aware and in control. It wasn’t like melting into a pool of something shapeless and then taking another shape. I was always something. My bones softly buckled and cracked and shrunk. It didn’t hurt. My body’s tissue was undulating and shifting. My mind changed focus. I was still me, but from a different perspective. I heard soft popping and sucking sounds and I smelled that rich smell that I only noticed during moments of oddness.
I flew high. My sense of touch was less, for my flesh was protected by feathers. But I saw all. My hearing was so sharp that I could hear the land breathing. When I returned, I was exhausted and moved to tears. All my senses buzzed, even after I changed back. I didn’t care that I was naked. Mwita had to wrap me in my rapa as I cried on his shoulder. For the first time in my life, I could escape. When things felt too tight, too close, I could retreat to the sky. From up there, I could easily see the desert stretching far beyond Jwahir. I could fly so high that not even the oval eye could see me.
That afternoon, as we sat before my mother’s garden, I told Mwita much about myself. I told him the story of my mother. I told him about the desert. I told him about how I’d gone somewhere else when I was circumcised. And I finally told him the details about the red eye. Mwita wasn’t shocked even by this. That should have given me pause, but I was too enamored by him to care.
It was my idea to go to the desert. It was his idea to go that very night. It was my second time sneaking out of the house. We hiked across the sand for several miles. When we stopped, we made a fire. All around us was darkness. The desert hadn’t changed since I’d left it six years ago. We were so at peace in cool quietness around us that we were speechless for the next ten minutes. Then Mwita poked at the fire and said, “I’m not like you. Not completely.”
“Eh?” I said. “What do you mean?”
“I usually just let people think what they think,” he said. “You were like that to me. Even after I got to know you. It’s been over a year since I saw you in that tree.”
“Just get to the point,” I said impatiently.
“No,” he snapped. “I’ll say this the way I want to say it, Onyesonwu.” He looked away from me, annoyed. “You need to learn to be quiet sometimes.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Yes, you do.”
I bit my lower lip, trying to keep quiet.
“I’m not completely like you,” he finally said. “Just listen, okay?”
“Fine.”
“Your mother … she was assaulted. My mother was not. Everyone believes an Ewu child is like you, that his or her mother was attacked by a Nuru man and he succeeded in impregnating her. Well, my mother fell in love with a Nuru man.”
I scoffed. “This is not something to joke about.”
“It happens,” he insisted. “And, yes, we come out looking the same as children of … of rape. You shouldn’t believe all that you hear and read.”
“Okay,” I softly said. “Go … go on.”
“My aunt said that my mother worked for a Nuru family and their son used to talk to her in secret. They fell in love and a year later my mother was pregnant. When I was born, the news that I was Ewu got out. There’d been no attacks in the area, so people were perplexed as to how I came about. Soon the love between my parents was discovered. My aunt said that someone saw my mother and father together just after my birth, that my father had snuck into the tent. I’ll never know if it was a Nuru or Okeke who betrayed us.
“A mob came and, again, I don’t know if it was of Nurus or Okekes. They came for my mother with stones. They came for my father with fists. They forgot about me. My aunt, my father’s sister, took me to safety. She and her husband kept me. My father’s death seemed to absolve my existence.
“If one’s father is Nuru, then the child is. So I was raised as a Nuru in my aunt and uncle’s home. When I was six, my uncle had me become the apprentice of a sorcerer named Daib. I guess I should have been grateful. Daib was known for often going off on exhibitions. My uncle said he was once a military man. He knew literature, too. Owned many books … all of which would eventually be destroyed.”
Mwita paused, frowning. I waited for him to continue.
“My uncle had to beg and pay Daib to teach me … because I was Ewu. I was there when my uncle begged him.” Mwita looked disgusted. “On his hands and knees. Daib spat on him saying that he only did the favor because he knew my grandmother. My hatred of Daib fueled my learning. I was young but I hated like a middle-aged man at the end of his prime.
“My uncle had begged liked that, humiliated himself, for a reason. He wanted me to be able to protect myself. He knew my life would be rough. Life moved on, years passed somewhat pleasantly. Until I was eleven. Four years ago. The massacres started again in the cities and swiftly spread to our village.
“The Okeke fought back. And again, as they had been before, they were outnumbered and outarmed. But in my village, the Okeke people burned hot. They stormed our house, killing my aunt and uncle. I learned later that it was Daib and anyone associated with him that they were after. I said Daib had been in the military—well, there was more to it. He was, apparently, known for his cruelty. My aunt and uncle were killed because of him, because of me being taught by him.
“Daib had taught me how to make myself ‘ignorable.’ This was how I escaped. I ran into the desert, where I cowered for a day. The riots were eventually stamped out, every Okeke in the village killed. When I went to Daib’s home, hoping to find his corpse, I found something else. In the middle of his half-burned house were the clothes he’d been wearing the last time I’d seen him, scattered on his floor as if he’d melted into thin air. And the window was open.
“I packed what I could and traveled east. I knew how I’d be treated. I hoped to find the Red People, a tribe of people who are neither Okeke nor Nuru, living somewhere in the desert in the middle of a giant sandstorm. It’s said that the Red People know impossible juju. I was young and desperate. The Red People are just a myth.
“I made money along the way working idiotic bits of sorcery like making dolls dance and children levitate. People, Nuru and Okeke, are more comfortable with Ewu folk who play the fool, dance about, or do tricks, as long as you avoid eye contact and move on when you’re done entertaining. It’s only by chance that I ended up here.”
When Mwita stopped talking, I just sat there. I wondered how far Mwita’s village was from what was left of my mother’s. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry for us all.”
He shook his head. “Don’t be. It’s like saying that you’re sorry that you exist.”
“I am.”
“Don’t belittle your mother’s trials and successes,” Mwita said darkly.
I sucked my teeth and looked away, my arms around my chest.
“So you wish to not be here right now?” he asked.
I said nothing to this. At least his father wasn’t a beast, I thought.
“Life isn’t so simple,” he said. He smiled. “Especially for Eshus.”
“You’re not Eshu.”
“Well, for any of us, then.”
Chapter 8 (#ulink_a86c7c93-f5ab-56a8-8e71-279fde2fe38d)
Lies (#ulink_a86c7c93-f5ab-56a8-8e71-279fde2fe38d)
A YEAR AND HALF LATER, it was by chance that I heard the two boys talking as they walked by. They were about seventeen. One had a bruised face and a bandaged arm. I was reading a book under the iroko tree.
“You look like someone stepped on your head,” the unhurt boy said.
“I know,” the hurt boy said. “I can barely walk.”
“I tell you, the man is evil, not a true sorcerer.”
“Oh, Aro’s a true sorcerer,” the hurt boy said. “Evil, but true.”
My ears pricked at the name briefly mentioned the night of my Eleventh Rite.
“That Ewu boy’s the only one good enough to learn the Great Mystic Points, apparently,” the hurt boy said, his eyes wide and wet. “Makes no sense. One’s blood is supposed to be clean to …”
I got up and walked away, my thoughts clouded with rage. I angrily searched the market, the book house, I even went to my house. No Mwita. I didn’t know where he lived. This angered me even more. As I left my house, I saw him coming up the road. I strode up to him and had to restrain myself from punching him in the face.
