Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [258]
Paris hesitated still. Tabakali was a fighting woman, prompt to action or decision when confronted with the need; but he did not know how to discuss feelings of anxiety or foreboding with her as this involved some appeal to shared expectation and she lived far more closely from hour to hour and day to day than he did, making her – at least in his view of things – a natural victim of those who saw further. In this, as in a number of other ways, she had remained alien to him. He knew little of her past before enslavement, and she had no concept of his. And the lingua franca that had developed among them, derived from the trade pidgin of the Guinea Coast, though it had provided the only possibility of a common language, offered small register for feeling.
The tendencies that worried him most – the growth of trading partnerships and the increasing rivalry and secrecy of their operations – he could not find words for. He began to speak to her of something more tangible and immediate, the forthcoming Palaver at which Tongman was to defend Iboti against the charge of witchcraft brought jointly by his woman Arifa and Shantee Hambo, who was Arifa’s other man. A number of things about this case troubled him, not least among them the fact that Hambo was a fellow-tribesman of the powerful Kireku. Accusations of witchcraft were rare these days; most disputes concerned property or trade. Even in the early days there had been nothing like this. Some disputes concerning the evil eye there had been, born of jealousy and soon settled. Since then the nature of life in the settlement, the variety of language and race among the negroes, above all the violence done to traditional morality by the need to share women, had wrenched the people away from their accustomed styles of thinking, ideas of the supernatural had been driven below the surface.
There was, moreover, a disturbing aura of domestic intrigue about this case. Iboti was very slow in understanding and already one of the poorest people in the settlement, depending on Arifa for some of his necessities. If he lost the case Arifa would be entitled to deny him admittance to her hut and he would have to pay compensation to Hambo. If he won with Tongman’s help, he would avoid disgrace but he would have to pay Tongman’s fee. Either way he would be impoverished. This was not the first time that Tongman had spoken on someone else’s behalf at a Council …
‘Tongman big man for Palaver,’ he said. ‘He talk clever. Tongman is a good advocate.’
‘Avokka, what dat?’
‘Avokka talk in de Palaver, talk any way, say any ting, dis way, dat way, never mind de trut.’
‘Avokka,’ she repeated. ‘Man talk clever pas’ other man, dat his work. Docta sabee medsin pas’ other man, trappa make trap pas’ other man, dat dem work. Dat same-same ting everywhere.’
‘Docta an’ trappa, dey don’ change you head,’ Paris said with a smile. He was amused and strangely reassured by the invariably non-moralistic quality of her judgements. She admired all outstanding achievement of whatever kind.
‘Tongman no ken change you head cos you sabee he a talkin’ man,’ she said now, answering his smile with a triumphant one of her own. ‘You say hum-hum, dat jus’ Tongman agin. When he don’ talk, dat danger time. Okpolu by de water, you no ’fraid. Okpolu climb fence, den you watch out.’
‘What is okpolu?’
‘Okpolu is frog.’
Paris nodded gravely. ‘Okpolu,’ he said, as if in serious intention to remember it, and this made her laugh and look down and raise a hand to her mouth in the strange gesture, half modest, half superstitious, with which she always covered her laughter.
He laughed a little in response, moved by tenderness and renewed desire at this familiar and strangely helpless movement of hers. She sat carelessly, exposing her inner thighs below the short skirt – modesty and indifference were blended in her in a way he had never understood. With the sensitivity that she showed in