Part 11 (1/2)

I am n.o.body, I say. You made sure of that.

Stop feeling sorry for yourself! she says. You are like your mother. If Dura is not bathed, she said, no one will marry her. She never seemed to notice no one had ever married me, and that I lived anyway. This was even before the white missionaries left. Being bathed did not kill me, she said. And my husband has always been patient with me. Well, M'Lissa snorts, your father spread himself among six wives; he could afford patience.

As soon as she heard the new missionaries were black, she felt certain the village would be returned to all its former ways and that uncirc.u.mcised girls would be punished. She could not imagine a black person that was not Olinkan, and she thought all Olinkans demanded their daughters be bathed. I told her to wait. But no. She was the kind of woman who jumps even before the man says boo. Your mother helped me hold your sister down.

Stop, I say. Even if she were lying, as I now knew she often did, I could not bear to hear it.

But she says, No, I will not stop. You are mad, but you are not mad enough. Don't you think your mother might have told you how Dura died? She didn't, did she? That she was that one in a hundred girls so constructed that the slightest scratch made her bleed like a stuck cow. She had noticed this herself, from trying to stop the bleeding of the scratches your sister got while playing. When I bathed you, this was something of which I thought.

And yet you said nothing, I say, though you might have killed me just as you killed Dura.

You'd come so far, and were so foolish, says M'Lissa. Besides, by then I did not care.

PART TWENTY.

ADAM.

FATHER, HEAR MY CONFESSION.

It is in vain that I tell the young man I am not a priest. He has been waiting among the rest to die, since we first visited Tas.h.i.+ in the prison. His face is covered with purple lesions, his head is bald, his slight frame little more than bones. What distinguished him from the beginning, when I hunkered down to speak to him, was his insistence that he was a medical student: ”With many years in university,” he'd said, with a weak, superior flutter of his hand. This, and the fact that as he grew even weaker, his large brown eyes bruised with fear, he took to drawing himself up on his haunches and crossing his elbows on top of his head. He would remain in this odd position, whimpering, for hours; until he fell over in weariness or was pushed over by someone moving past.

I had always resisted intimacy with the victims. It was as if my heart, under the burden of my own suffering, and having already witnessed so much human devastation, had gone numb.

However: My name is Hartford, he said, with a grimness to match my own. And yet, because of the unexpected a.s.sociations evoked by his name (an elk, an American city in Connecticut and an insurance company), I smiled. He seemed charmed, as a child might be, by this response, and appeared to savor it, as a little child might a sweet. Wonderingly he withdrew the clawlike hand that had snagged my sleeve, and placed it against his own cracked, unsmiling lips.

Everything he said and did was in slow motion; it was several minutes before he spoke again.

In the old days, he said, whispering, there was more harmony in the world between man and creature. I have heard this said: in truth, how can I know? In the not so old days we people were hunted down and killed or stolen from our land and families to work for other people far across the sea. Hunted we were, like we hunt the monkey and the chimpanzee.

Here Hartford groaned and closed his eyes. Bubbles of perspiration burst on his skin. It was as if, suddenly, his body became a fountain. I mopped his skin with the tattered towel I carried with me, and when the sweating stopped, placed my hand on his swollen knee, which, protruding beneath the skin of his leg, was like a black coconut.

Father, he said, I am not a medical student. That is a lie I have told to salvage my self-respect.

I patted his knee, somehow startled at the intensity of his remorse; how difficult it was for him to disgorge these few words of shame. Besides, I honestly did not care.

Being a medical student, becoming a doctor, was only a dream I had, he sighed. When the pharmaceutical company offered us local boys ”positions” in their factory, I thought my dream was on the way to becoming reality.

We did not know anything about these men. They were strange. They always wore white, so that they looked like the doctors we saw in films and on TV. They did not see you when they looked, that we knew. We felt we did not exist to them any more than they did to us. We could feel how strange we were to them, as well. We had always hunted monkeys and chimpanzees, they reminded us. What they were asking was nothing new. Only now there would be money, and, of course, often there would be meat. Both to eat and to sell.

So it began.

At first I was in the rainforest, hunting with the other boys. We loved our guns. We trapped and dragged back to the factory more monkeys and chimps than I'd even thought there were. I grew to identify, and sometimes mimic, chimp and monkey behavior. Monkey gestures. The mother always placed the baby behind her body, the little one's arm reaching around to her breast; the father always fought, then screeched a warning to others as he ran away. If we captured his mate and child, he would often follow so closely and with such disregard for his own safety it was easy to shoot him. This we often did, laughing.

He was not needed anyway. We were told this by the pharmaceutical company, but we soon saw it for ourselves. Only the females and the babies were wanted. Very soon, no new monkeys or chimps were needed because the factory was at last complete. The local boys and I had filled it. With the help of only a few males, the females were forced to breed. This they did in cages hardly large enough for the act of mating.

Hartford swallowed. I held a gla.s.s of sweetened water to his lips. Suddenly his eyes rolled back in his head and his head dropped to one side. His pulse, when I took his arm, was faint as the heartbeat of an embryo.

At last he opened his eyes.

They were being raised for their kidneys, he said slowly, in a flat tone. Now that there was no longer a need to hunt them, I was a.s.signed the job of decapitating them.

He paused, his eyes stormy, strong, and large enough to swallow me.

The screaming of monkeys, he said, musingly, studying my face as if he'd read a subtle change in me, is really unlike the scream of the peac.o.c.k, which, as you know, is very human. But somehow, because of the chimps' and monkeys' faces, their screaming is even more human. Everything they think, everything they fear, everything they feel, is as clear as if you'd known them all your life. As if they'd slept in the same bed as you!

Do not disturb yourself, I said, gently, and still with a certain detachment. Even this horror could not penetrate to the level of numbness at which I dwelled. After all, I thought, how could he have antic.i.p.ated the evil of civilization, having been indoctrinated from birth to believe it the only future.

The factory was vast, he said. Vast. For they were manufacturing vaccine to sell to the whole world. I discovered this when I read some of the literature they received written in English. Most of it was written in some other language. Perhaps German or Dutch. On the other hand, there were often Americans about. Australians and New Zealanders. Hearty fellows, always enthusiastic; as if they were on the track of a cure for all mankind.

A fit of coughing now shook Hartford's emaciated frame. A spray of blood and mucus covered the rag I held to his mouth.

I had smiled jauntily, myself, the first year I worked for them, he said, as he lay back, resting, after the coughing fit. We were paid good money, and of course we ate or sold those animals who became-usually out of concern for their stolen families-meat. But soon I could not smile. I stood kneedeep in monkey heads, chimpanzee torsos...

Small boys with small knives were trained to make the slit...and haul the kidneys out. It was on these kidneys the men in white coats grew their precious ”cultures.”

The vaccine left the factory at the other end from where the monkeys and chimps were raised and slaughtered. It left in small clear bottles with blinding white labels and s.h.i.+ny metal caps.

As Hartford's voice became barely audible, a whispery rasp, an unbidden glimpse of what he was describing invaded my mind. I closed my eyes tightly to banish the sight. It was too late. I felt as if a whole other world of grief and disaster had just been dropped on my soul. I groaned in agony, almost exactly as he had done. The sound of my own sorrow was shocking to me. But, surprisingly, my sorrow made Hartford look, finally, released.

Father, thank you for hearing my confession, he said, savoring my pained expression with the same wonder with which he'd enjoyed my smile. As if he'd waited until certain he had transmitted the full horror of his existence to someone who could still feel, Hartford began to breathe the shallow, rustling wheeze everyone on the AIDS floor knew so well.

There were things to do. In the morning I would lose my wife and friend forever. Where were my sons? I wondered. Or my sister, Olivia, for that matter; whom, I suddenly realized, I had always depended on to be the feeling side of me; it was she who had first noticed the weeping that would stain my wife's life. Perhaps they were with Tas.h.i.+. I could not move to look for them. I sat where I was until, an hour after the death rattle began, Hartford-whose African name was perhaps lost forever-medical student and killer of monkeys and chimps, was dead.

Though not a priest, I am a man of G.o.d, even now. I could not bear a life lived without belief. But this I know: There is for human beings no greater h.e.l.l to fear than the one on earth.

TAs.h.i.+-EVELYN-MRS. JOHNSON.

I CONFESSED because I grew weary of the trial. Sick of sitting next to my attorney. He was always so dapper; so impeccably dressed. Smelling of Aramis. Loving the sound of his own mouth. The opposing attorney annoyed me as well.

I am old enough to be your grandmother, I thought, watching him prance and preen; and you stand there arguing for my death. In truth, it made me pity him, and see him as a fool.

I said to my attorney, in a moment when he was not twirling with a beringed finger one of his greasy curls, Let me take the stand. Though he was against my doing so, I took it anyway. As soon as I was seated, even before the Bible was brought, I said loud and clear so there could be no mistake: I did it.

How did you do it, Mrs. Johnson? asked the judge nearest me.

That, I said, is none of your d.a.m.n business.

But do you think my confession stopped the trial?

No, it did not. For days afterward they were still talking about finding my razors in the ashes of M'Lissa's house, and speculating on the gory ways I chose to mutilate and dispose of her. Their imaginations, I found, were even sicker than my own.

PART TWENTY-ONE.