of much future pleasure and many descendants.”
A portly, middle-aged tour guide with a florid complexion used a megaphone to make himself heard over the singing and hand-clapping Africans.
The cutting had begun again. Joshua shut out the man’s spiel to concentrate on the waves of pain radiating through him from the focus of the knife.
The eyes of the female tourist nearest the guide, Joshua noticed, had grown huge behind her thick-lensed glasses. She was a stout ruin of a woman whose magenta head scarf resembled a babushka. Her body appeared to sway in time with those of the svelte, graceful Africans. Her swaying and the guide’s ceaseless patter distracted Joshua from the pain of the circumcision rite.
“Finished,” Babington announced.
“Don’t leave Ngwati,” Blair countered. “Remove it, please.”
Babington snorted his contempt for this command, but swiftly removed the offending string of flesh.
In celebration of the successful irua, a chorus of voices echoed through the grove and across the steppe. Now Joshua could look down. He saw blood flowing from him into the grass like water from a spigot. Blair steadied him from behind and wrapped the immaculate white robe around his shoulders.
Now people were dancing as well as singing, extolling the initiate’s courage as they wove in and out among the trees in a sinuous daisy chain of bodies. Some of the tourists had joined the conga line, and the two groups, Africans and foreigners, were suddenly beginning to blend. The Kikembu waved their arms in encouragement, and more tourists—sheepish old white people—snaked their way into the celebration.
Joshua, afraid he would faint, held the front of his robe away from his groin to keep from staining the garment. The woman with the magenta scarf approached him from the edge of the grove and addressed him in the flat, Alf Landon accents of a native Kansan.
“I’ll give you twenty dollars for that robe.”
Joshua gaped.
“Tell him twenty dollars for the robe,” the old woman commanded Blair. “Another five if he’ll let me take a Polaroid. Our tour guide said to ask before I took a Polaroid.”
“Mrs. Givens!” Joshua exclaimed. “Kit Givens from Van Luna, Kansas!” He had last seen the old woman at his grandfather’s funeral fourteen years ago, piously occupying a rear pew in the stained-glass, apricot-and-umber ambiance of the First Methodist Church. She was seventy-two if she was a minute. Her withered cheeks and chin were tinted all the iridescent colors of a mandrill’s mask.
“I’ve never seen him before,” Mrs. Givens told Blair, as if sharing a confidence. “I don’t know how he could know my name.”
“You pulled my hair in my grandfather’s grocery when I was a baby.”
The old woman rallied. “You’re an impudent little nigger. I wouldn’t pay you five dollars to mow my yard.”
Defiant despite his weakness, Joshua doffed his robe and handed it to Mrs. Givens. “Here. I want you to have this. Take it back to Van Luna—the sooner the better.”
Mrs. Givens took the robe from the bleeding man, backed away from him clutching it, and turned again to the paleoanthropologist. “You’ll walk me back to the tour bus, please. I’ve never met this man in my life.”
“Of course, Mrs. Givens.”
As Blair directed the old woman through the rowdy throng to the bus, Babington helped Joshua climb the ladder into the tree house. Many of the Kikembu from Nyarati had brought banana leaves to the ceremony, and the old Wanderobo had already arranged the leaves into a pallet upon which Joshua could rest without fear of exacerbating his wounds. His penis would not stick to the banana leaves as to linen or other sorts of bedding, and the wounds would therefore heal more readily.
Lying on this pallet, Joshua saw Babington’s creased face staring down at him. A face that seemed to have been created in the same way that wind sculpts sand dunes or rain erodes channels into the hardest rock.
“Everyone wants a piece of the sacred,” Joshua whispered. “Even if it isn’t sacred. Dreaming makes it so, and the dreaming goes on and on until it’s a habit.”
“Go to sleep, Joshua,” the old man said.
* * *
Three weeks passed before Joshua felt strong enough to resume his survival training. For two nights, despite the antibiotics that Blair had brought to Lolitabu from the hospital at Russell-Tharaka Air Force Base, he was delirious. In his delirium he was visited by the lacerated ghost of his adoptive father, as well as a gnomish Spanish woman who opened her blouse and let him nurse like a baby, a young black