Storyteller Page 3

  Before sunset the following day, they came to the outskirts of an inhabited village and their appearance caused considerable excitement. A lone boy came upon them as they were emerging from the woods and immediately, as if news of the arrival had been communicated telepathically, children from the village swarmed ’round, poking the elephant with sticks and leering and making faces at Bedpinny as if she was something grotesque and unnatural. The elephant turned aside the assault on its person without comment, but when the children began threatening Bedpinny with their sticks, it stepped forward, sheltering her between its legs, and trumpeted a warning, instantly widening the perimeter by several yards.

  The general tumult emptied the village and soon the clearing was filled with people. One of the older boys, excited to rash action by the possibility of imminent death, was still taunting the animal, lunging from a safe distance, jabbing, retreating. Upon arrival, with a gesture, his mother put an end to the exercise.

  Presently the crowd parted and Cosima, the headman of the village, stepped into the clearing.

  “It’s an elephant,” observed Twal, the chief’s right-hand man.

  Cosima withered him with a glance.

  He stepped toward the intruders, but the elephant sharply warned him away. He stepped back. “Where do you come from?”

  Bedpinny pointed up the path behind her.

  “Where did you get the elephant?”

  Bedpinny did not respond. She’d done nothing wrong. Somehow, she felt the elephant had always been with her.

  “I haven’t seen one in a very long time,” said the chief.

  Bedpinny wondered when was the last time he’d eaten meat, but she didn’t know where the thought came from.

  “Where are you going?” the chief continued. Probably no more than forty-five, he looked seventy. His features were marked by the wrinkled, faded dignity that comes with the realization that one’s authority extends only to the edge of the village, and how large was the world beyond those borders. To Bedpinny, though, he just looked old and imposing. Flesh sagged from his bones in miserly folds, as if there was no adhesive of fat to connect his skin to his sinews.

  Bedpinny shrugged again. She was going in the direction of her next meal, that was all. Of course she hadn’t thought to hoard sugarcane against the journey. She was only three. She hadn’t eaten all day and her head was light, her knees weak. Familiar sensations.

  “Stay with us. We have rice,” said Cosima. Some of the women mumbled protest, but the chief silenced them with a wave of his hand. “Come.”

  Bedpinny followed the headman, the elephant followed Bedpinny, and the villagers followed the elephant, who seemed unconcerned by the hunger in their eyes.

  Returning to his tukl, the chief found an unexpected guest, a British missionary lady of advanced years and kind heart. With the promise that any day now—perhaps tomorrow—he would convert to Christianity, he had been harvesting the resources of this pleasant woman to the tune of a new well, twenty bags of seed, and seventeen chickens. He would play fast and loose with his salvation until he was assured her bag was empty then . . . well, there were many missionaries in the area. He was a desperate man, and as far as he knew, his soul was his only marketable commodity.

  Despite the missionary’s advanced years and failing eyesight, she noticed the elephant. “What have we here, Dada Cosima?” she said, employing the patriarchal term of respect. “An elephant? Are they returning to Sudan?”

  “So it would seem,” Cosima said, a little nervously. He leaned close to her and whispered. “If you stay, we will have meat soon. Praise God.”

  “And who’s this?” said the woman, ignoring the implication for the moment. Her name, befitting a missionary, was Mary. “I haven’t seen you here before, have I, my love?” She knelt so that she was looking Bedpinny more or less in the eye. “No, I’m sure I haven’t.” She lapsed into Arabic. “Where are you from?”

  Bedpinny had never seen a white person at close range. She had seen people with diseases that turned patches of their skin this awful, sickly pinkish color, but never a whole person completely consumed by it. She backed away a step, and would have retreated further, but for the elephant’s leg.

  “Is that blood?” said Mary, lifting the corner of the t-shirt that constituted Bedpinny’s entire wardrobe. Bedpinny looked down, then up at the lady’s kind, gray eyes.

  “The elephant came with her,” said Cosima. “It is a gift from God. Hallelujah!”

  “Hallelujah!” said several of the villagers, practicing grace.

  “Indeed,” said Mary. She’d been a missionary a long time and knew the hearts and minds of those among whom she labored better than they thought she did. She also knew the hunger that motivated them. Feeling it important that she understand their suffering, she had, early in her ministry, fasted for forty days and forty nights, as exemplified by the founder of her faith. However, the exercise had not lead to heightened spiritual awareness, as she had hoped. All she thought about was food. Indeed, things she had never considered in that light began appearing on her mental menu. She dreamt of it. Wept for it. Ached for it. Still, in her depths, she knew there were those to whom she could appeal for food at any time and in minutes a feast would appear before her.

  Not so for the villagers. They woke with the fist of hunger pressing hard on the hollow around which they orbited; lived throughout the day tossing leaves, beans, bugs, any organic matter that came to hand into the massive hole that defined them; slept with dreams of food while the hunger ate away at their lives. Those were the good days. Other times they feasted on memories.

  “She’s starving.”

  The chief looked at the elephant as if to say ‘not for long.’ The missionary discerned his intent. She had no Bambi complex. If she thought that elephant steaks would save the villagers, she’d have killed it and cut it into bite-sized pieces herself, without a qualm. But, as a nurse, she knew the sudden infusion of elephant meat into their diet would make most of the villagers sick. Some would glut themselves and die. Most of the animal would rot and be wasted. She racked her brain. There had to be a better idea, some way to turn the animal to advantage. She said a quick mental prayer and received divine inspiration in reply.

  “This elephant can earn you money, Dada Cosima,” she said. “The NGOs are clearing the forest for farmland. The stumps and roots are impossible to remove. If this elephant could be trained to do it, they would pay you every day.”

  “Elephants cannot be trained,” said Cosima. He had heard of elephants in India being trained to work, but African elephants were too wild. “It is not possible.”

  Mary didn’t know anything about elephants, but this one seemed docile enough. She argued her point. The possibility of a daily income was a powerful inducement.

  Cosima considered. Intellectually the plan had appeal and he could see its long-term benefits. But it was telling the drowning man that a ship could be expected in a day or two. Mary understood the dilemma. She fished through her pocket and produced a 20,000-schilling note*, which she had intended to give him anyway.

  “I’ll pay you for today. Bring the elephant to the YWAM compound and we’ll put it to work.”

  Contrary to his impulse, Cosima didn’t lunge for the note, but received it with stern dignity—a jungle god receiving his due offering—and folded it in his palm, where he gripped it like salvation. “It may be a good plan. The animal seems tame, but as to its working on command, I make no promises.”

  “Of course not,” Mary replied, hoping that, for its own sake, the animal would perform. “I’ll go tell them to expect you. We’ll have hay for it. In an hour?”

  Cosima glanced at the sun and nodded gravely. Mary climbed into her road-ravaged Landcruiser and drove away. The rearview mirror reflected a world under control.

  It was not.

  No sooner was the missionary out of sight than Cosima made two decisions. First, he gave the money to his wives and sent them to Yei, four miles distant,
for food. Secondly, he appointed Twal to take the elephant to the YWAM compound. What followed would have appeared comedic to an outsider unaware of the villagers’ desperation. Twal approached the elephant with the intention of taking it by the ear and leading it away. The elephant flapped its ear, lifting Twal off his feet and depositing him in a pile several feet away. He cast an appealing glance at his chief. Cosima, cloaked with authority, ducked into his tukl. The order had been given.

  An hour later, despite the application of teak switches, shouts, threats, and insults, the elephant hadn’t moved. Twal, dripping sweat, stood outside Cosima’s door and waited for permission to enter. This formality observed, he burst in almost in tears.

  “It won’t move! It’s grown roots and started to eat the roof off my house! There is nothing I can do, Dada Cosima. It is a willful and obstinate beast.”

  Cosima looked past Twal at the still life framed by his door. The elephant, the semicircle of dejected, defeated villagers dropping their sticks and prods to the earth in exhaustion, the strange little girl sitting at the edge of the clearing eating a fistful of cold rice. He began to wish she’d never brought the elephant.

  Then it occurred to him. She had brought it!

  “It will follow her,” he said aloud, unaware that he was speaking.

  “What did you say, Dada?”

  Cosima stood and raced to the door. “The elephant will follow the little girl. You lead her to the compound and it will follow.” It sounded too simple as he said it, but sensible all the same.

  And it worked. Twal took the girl by the hand and led her down the road, and the elephant tagged along.

  And so from this humble and inauspicious beginning grew the curious career of Bedpinny and the elephant. It happened that whatever task Bedpinny could be made to understand, she could communicate to the elephant with a gesture. Early on, those who hired the elephant’s services from Cosima learned that instructions had to be very specific. A slight misunderstanding on Bedpinny’s part could result in the wrong tree being uprooted, or an entire tukl or fence being trod down before the startled owner could get his tongue back and protest. All in all, though, the arrangement worked well. Cosima’s village became Bedpinny’s home—though she lived apart, beneath a thatched lean-to of her own, always within reach of the elephant—and prospered to a modest extent. The village women took good care of her, without grudging, though always a little in awe of her inexplicable control over the elephant that haunted the environs of the village like a spectral mountain, and would allow no one else near. The children left her alone and she them. This was not the place she belonged, it was simply the place she was.

  In time they ceased to cause a sensation, except among newly-arrived relief workers, and became a fixture in the woods and fields around Yei. They worked long, hard hours through both the dry and rainy season, and farmers and NGOs in the area found more than enough for them to do.

  And so the years tumbled by. The war had become distant and only now and then made itself known when a plane or helicopter would drop a bomb into someone’s backyard or blow a gaping, pointless cavity in the forest. Villagers ducked, dove into ditches and waited, then crawled out, buried the dead, and lived their lives.

  Bedpinny was nine years old and the people called her the elephant walker.

  “What is this? A great beast,” said an old man. He sat beside the road on a stump and inclined his ear rather than his gaze toward Bedpinny and the elephant. “And a child.”

  Bedpinny stopped in front of him. The elephant stopped behind her. Though she’d often traveled this road, she’d never seen the man before. He was wrinkled, like Cosima, but his eyes were white, like a dog of her acquaintance. “Are you blind?” she asked.

  “In my eyes, yes,” said the man. “But not my ears or my nose. That is an elephant?”

  “Yes.”

  The man smiled and nodded. She watched the wide, floppy brim of his hat go up and down. “He is very heavy on the ground. And the smell. Only an elephant smells like an elephant. It has been a long time, but it stays in the mind.”

  Bedpinny didn’t notice the elephant had any particular smell, but she lived in its presence. She was reminded of something Mary had said about sin: “The longer you live with it, the less obvious it is. It even seems homey after a while. As comfortable as home cooking.”

  “Where are you going?” asked the man. His light blue cotton shirt was clean, with long sleeves that protected against mosquitoes, as did his blue jeans and beige Timberland boots. His hat was of irregular design and cast a shadow that made his black face impenetrable.

  “To Miriya,” Bedpinny replied, nodding up the road.

  “That is where I am going.”

  “Were you resting here?”

  “No. I was waiting for someone to guide me. The roads are so bad. If I fell in one of these potholes,” he gestured at the road, “I might never be seen again!”

  Bedpinny considered. The road was bad? She had nothing to compare it to. The elephant didn’t seem to mind. But the holes were deep. “We will guide you.”

  He put his weathered hand on her shoulder and so began the second magical encounter of Bedpinny’s short life.

  As they walked they talked of this and that, inconsequential things as strangers do, to begin with. But before long, in response to the blind man’s guileless questions, Bedpinny had surrendered all she knew of her life’s story.

  “And before the day the elephant found you, you don’t remember anything?”

  She shook her head.

  “Nothing at all?” He was insistent on this point.

  “I remember eyes in dreams sometimes. But that’s all.”

  The blind man reciprocated briefly with tidbits from his own life he thought the girl might find entertaining. She was a good audience. Very accepting of everything he said, however unlikely. Not that being unlikely made it untrue.

  Eventually they lapsed into a companionable silence.

  “Bedpinny,” the old man said.

  She looked up at him, and he sensed it.

  “That’s an unusual name.”

  Was that so? Bedpinny had never thought about it. She didn’t know anyone else called Bedpinny, that was true.

  “I knew a woman once, and a man in a village far from here who had a child called Bedpinny,” said the blind man.

  Bedpinny accepted this. “Where was the village?”

  “Far away,” said the man. “It’s not there anymore. Everyone is gone. Dead. Sold.” The statement could be made of countless villages in the region. “Gone.”

  “Gone,” Bedpinny echoed. “Even Bedpinny?”

  The man shrugged. “No one knows what became of her. Too bad. Her family came from kings.”

  “From kings, like Cosima?” She had told him about Cosima.

  “Cosima? A king?” the blind man laughed. “Cosima is only a village headman. No. Bedpinny came from kings who ruled the world!”

  “Tell me.”

  There are no words a storyteller loves more. The blind man, like Homer, rose to the occasion, dipping into a past no one could recall . . . or challenge. He spoke of ancient days when Nubian kings held mighty Egypt in their grip, of the battles in which his Bedpinny’s royal lineage was forged, of alliances poorly formed and revenge hopelessly plotted; of the collapse of kingdoms; of heinous treachery and selfless fidelity; of love and betrayal. The magic of his language brought generations of the girl’s colorful ancestors—men, women, boys, and girls—dancing and surging to life, spinning and swirling until the air was choked with them and Bedpinny could hardly breathe. The next instant, they were swept away by the onslaught of a new generation. Even greater warriors, even lovelier princesses, even more star-crossed lovers, as the blind man fell under the spell of his telling.

  Adventurers, too, leapt and bounded across the telling, weaving wondrous, frightening strands that struggled against the pattern of the whole; white explorers from Europe, a continent of eccentrics, with the
ir strange ways, mighty deeds, and pointless wanderings. Arab traders and slavers from the north, and from Zanzibar, that bloodthirsty island where souls were bought and sold and the devil gleefully totted up the score. Of gods and goddesses that, lusting for blood and fear, warred ruthlessly for the soul of the continent. The stroke of the blind man’s brush swept through history in broad, daring strokes, making of the blank canvas of his Bedpinny’s past a grand, tumbling tapestry of human endeavor, peopled with human beings whose love, and hurt, and joy, and pain, and hope, and fear, and loss were enlarged in the throes of their battle with destiny, sanctified, baptized, and made noble.

  Bedpinny didn’t know the emotion that seized her when the blind man came to the end of his telling with the very parents and grandparents of the little girl. She had never been envious before. Oh, to be the blind man’s Bedpinny. To have a place not only in the present, but in the past! A strong foothold for the future. Where was this fortunate girl? The blind man must find her. She must be told. She must know. It was impossible to think she might be going through life unaware of the greatness that coursed in her blood!

  “Ah, there,” said the old man as they reached their destination and prepared to part ways, “how can she be found? As I said, everyone is gone. All I know is that, before he died, her father, the last king of his line, gave her a cloth hat with the first letter of his name sewn on it.”

  “A ‘B’!” said Bedpinny breathlessly. “Was it a ‘B’”?

  “Why, yes, it was,” said the blind man, seeming surprised. “His name was Bebijay. How could you know?”

  Bedpinny began rummaging madly through the bag she carried on her back. She pulled out the baseball cap. “Here,” she said, thrusting the cap into the blind man’s hands and forcing his fingers over the embroidered letter. “It’s a ‘B.’ It’s a ‘B!’” Mary had taught her letters.