The Child's Elephant (33 page)

Dawn had broken when they found themselves stepping into a slight clearing in which a circle of small domed dwellings had been built around a central barrier of brush. The sunlight filtered down through the forest canopy, catching the smoke as it spiralled from a big central fire. Around it a small group of people were squatting, warming themselves and sleepily blinking. They all turned to look at once: first briefly at the children, and then, much harder and longer, at the elephant.

The children, however, were thinking only of food. They could smell it. They could see it in front of them. Handful after handful the boys ate from a calabash of rice while Muka, propped up by the women who gathered chattering around her, swallowed weakly at a broth that was being dribbled down her throat. A draught of bitter liquid was poured into three little leaf cups and given to all of them. When Gulu shook his head, they just pressed it to his lips until he had drunk. And then,
a short while later, and with a great deal of excitable argument, the children were led towards one of the strange domed huts.

It was made of nothing more substantial than a framework of bent saplings covered with leaves; but the three of them, guided towards three small beds, their stick frames bound by vine thongs, were ready to collapse. They lowered themselves onto mattresses of stretched goatskins. ‘Are we safe now?’ murmured Muka; but the boys had already fallen asleep.

All day and all through the next night the children remained in their makeshift cots, hearing only the never-ending sound of the forest; the rustling of a stream that flowed not too far off; the chattering of the pygmy people in whose village they were staying. The pygmies seemed to talk all the time, jabbering and laughing and arguing in voices that rose and fell like running water, ringing back and forth between the clustered huts. And as evening drew in and their banter got slower and drowsier, the children lay listening to the strange hollow wail of their music, the sound of their singing rising and falling and drifting slowly away through the endless spaces of night. Sometimes, when Bat woke, he thought he was still sleeping. He thought he was back in the army camp, dreaming of life in Jambula. His head was so confused. But then slowly, as his new reality seeped giddily into him, as he gazed up at the roof swirling hazily above, he would feel his whole body suffused by a sense of rest and relief.

It was dawn on the second day when Gulu finally rose and sat on the edge of his cot. Through the open
doorway he could see the clearing jungle mists. He could hear people moving about.

‘This is not our camp,’ he said blearily.

Bat rose up on one elbow and smiled.

A woman came in. She wore nothing but a piece of bark cloth round her waist. Its end hung down, a long flap that brushed the ground behind her as she stirred up the fire which had been kindled the previous evening to warm them.

‘Who is she?’ cried Gulu as she disappeared with a grin.

Bat grinned back. ‘Just one of the little people,’ he said. His mind which for so long had felt muddled and bleary, was now suddenly clear. ‘Just one of the pygmies who live in the forest. Village people often laugh at them,’ he said. ‘They say they are puny because they are so small. They call them monkeys and say that they even have tails. But the tails are just the cloths that they wrap round their waists; and though the villagers mock, my grandmother once told me, to the little people it is us who seem funny. They think we are too large. They say we are clumsy as buffalo as we go blundering through the bush.’

‘They made the medicine which we gave to Meya when she was bitten by a mamba.’ It was Muka who was now speaking. The boys both turned at once. She looked thin as a famished rat, but her fever appeared to have passed. Her limbs were no longer trembling. There was no sweat on her brow.

‘My head has stopped throbbing,’ She smiled as she too sat up on her cot.

A man entered. He was not the one who had led them through the forest; but he looked the same, the children thought. He had the same neat round head, wide-set eyes and broad flat nose; but the belt round his waist was elaborately braided and, though the other pygmies all seemed to wear caps made from banana leaves, he sported a hat made from a spotted cat-skin.

‘Eat,’ he said, handing them a piece of honeycomb.

The children gaped, astonished. He was speaking in their tongue.

‘Eat!’ he urged them. ‘It’s the best food in the forest.’

They didn’t need telling twice. They stretched out their hands and ate greedily, the wax gluing their teeth.

Then the man held up a bowl of water. ‘Drink,’ he told them. ‘This isn’t like the water in the villages, which is dirty. Here in our forest you can drink from any stream.’ And folding his hands over his chest, he watched them with satisfaction as they washed down the cloying mouthfuls of sweetness with great gulps from the calabash.

‘My name is Yambabo,’ the man said at last. ‘It was my kinsman who found you in the forest. He had been following you for some time. But now you are welcome in our village, you and your elephant, because my people and the elephant have always shared a home.’

He squatted down on his haunches and stirred at the fire. ‘In the days of our ancestors,’ he said, ‘my people and the elephant walked the forest paths together. It was the elephants who showed us how to live, who
opened the thick brush so that our plantations could flourish, who found water holes to drink from and made trails that led between them, who kept dangerous predators at a safe distance; and it is in honour of this ancient memory that we now welcome you and your she-elephant.’

‘She’s called Meya,’ Bat said, struggling to remember the manners that his grandmother had taught him, to accord this man the respect that an elder of the village deserved. ‘I saved her when she was a baby. Then she came to save us. Now she is taking us home.’

The man nodded. ‘She will find the way. The elephants know this land. They know it even better than my people. They roam far beyond the forests in which we like to stay. They can find places to drink even when all the streams run dry. They remember where the fruit trees grow. And it’s said that there are great caves hidden far in the mountains in which, at times of great hardship, they can always find safety. They say there are caverns so secret that no man has ever found them since those far-off days when our forebears followed the elephants’ tracks. Yes, your elephant will know how to lead you back to your tribe. Meanwhile, stay with us until you and the animal are stronger. Besides, it’s not safe to be wandering about in the forest. There are evil men with guns.’

The children looked at each other and then at him and then at each other again. No shared language was needed to understand the feelings of which their faces now spoke. They had been running alone through the wilderness for so long. They had been so tired, so
desolate, so frightened, so sick. Now they had been found by these people and they were offering to care for them. Tears of gratitude rolled down Muka’s cheeks.

The children stayed with the pygmies for several weeks. All day the men-folk would be away from the encampment. They left early in the morning with their nets, spears and bows, always singing a hunting song before they departed, clapping their hands and leaping extravagantly, imitating the animals which they hoped to kill. Then they would slip off into the shadows with long graceful steps. It was the only time they were quiet. When they were not hunting, they would be constantly prattling and laughing and singing. It warned away the animals, Yambabo told them: the leopards which lay in wait upon overhanging branches, the buffalo that would attack sooner than pause to think.

While the men were away the women would bathe and draw water; then, sitting outside their huts, their legs stretched straight out in front of them, they would cook: roasting green plantains in the hot ashes, stewing the roots and the creepers and the fluffy pink mushrooms which daily they went out into the forest to collect. The older children liked to hunt too. One day, as he was prowling the clearing, watching constantly about him as he always did, Gulu saw a boy who stood barely higher than his chest kill a starling with a slingshot from at least thirty paces. Even he, who had been handling a rifle since the age of eight, was impressed. But to the boy it felt as natural as it would have to a chameleon whipping out its long sticky tongue for a fly. How Gulu
coveted that skill! He wanted to ask the child to teach him, but in his time in the army he had forgotten how to ask for anything – he had forgotten that there were people in the world who would give – and so, with a carefully manufactured look of indifference, he just studied him quietly through lowered eyelashes.

At night, the whole village sat round the fire and ate, all the families sharing the same dish and gossiping constantly, teasing and bantering and arguing and squabbling, until finally they had finished and it was time to sing.

‘What do your songs mean?’ Bat asked Yambabo one evening.

Yambabo looked up from the piece of wood he was whittling into a bow. Sweat ran in trickles down his polished skin, but he still wouldn’t remove his little spotted fur cap. ‘Our songs are very simple,’ he said. ‘They tell the forest that it is good. Normally everything goes well in our world; but sometimes at night, when we are sleeping, harm comes. Army ants invade the camp; leopards come in and steal a hunting dog; and now strange bands of people are seen prowling about. They have darkness in their eyes. And then we know that the forest is sleeping; that it is not looking after its children as it should. So what do we do? We wake it up; we wake it up by singing to it, because we want it to be happy when it awakes. Then everything will be well and good once again.’

Yambabo turned and made a comment to the others and they all looked up and smiled, and one of them pointed at Meya drowsing at the edges of the clearing and shouted out something which was obviously funny
because he broke into laughter and clutched his hands to his side. And the more he thought about it the funnier it seemed to become to him. Soon he was lying on the ground, squirming helplessly, tears pouring down his cheeks.

Bat and Muka didn’t understand him; but they couldn’t help giggling too. Only Gulu remained silent. Gulu, Bat noticed, would never join in, and though he would glance up warily when the pygmies called out to him, he would return to his brooding again as soon as they left him. Often he would whittle at a stick as he sat by the fire, and even when the little people looked directly at him, his eyes would stay fixed on his hands.

‘What are you thinking about?’ Bat asked him one evening.

‘I try not to think,’ Gulu said.

‘But the longer you try not to think, the longer the days in which you have time not to think will start to feel,’ Bat replied.

Gulu just shrugged.

A long pause fell over them.

‘Tell us about your village,’ Bat eventually coaxed.

‘Tell us about your family,’ Muka encouraged.

Gulu just turned away, drawing his thin legs up towards his shoulders, clasping and unclasping his constantly restless hands. He had never spoken to them of his life before the army. It remained a secret locked inside his head.

‘He doesn’t want to remember,’ Muka said later when she and Bat were alone.

‘But he has to,’ Bat answered. ‘Your memories are
what you are made of. How can you have a future if there is no past?

‘If you want to go forward you must first go back,’ he told Gulu the next evening as the three of them sat eating. ‘Don’t you want to go home? Don’t you want to get back?’

The boy shook his head. His hands knotted and unknotted. ‘I can never go back,’ he whispered.

‘But you must!’ Muka urged him. ‘You must go back. You must find your past life so that you can move on.’

Gulu looked down at the ground between his feet. ‘My past is lost,’ he murmured, ‘and once you’ve lost your past, you’ll never find your way forward into the future again.’ For a long while he just stayed there, not moving, not speaking. Then he got up abruptly and wandered off into the night.

Then, one evening, late, long after the chattering had slowed, and the elders begun yawning, long after the pygmies had straggled back to their shelters and their last hurled taunts had faded into the night, Gulu began to speak. The children were crouched round the fire in their hut. The smoke was drowsy and thick, but through it Bat could see Gulu who, without even pausing to take a breath as people do at the start of a story, started talking. It was as if he was picking up on a tale that was already halfway through in his head.

‘They called me Gulu,’ he whispered, ‘because that was the sound the stream made as it ran through our village. My mother wanted my life to flow as bright and clear. And it did. I used to make little cars out of twisted wires. I was the best in the village. I would even
attach an old bicycle spoke so that you could stand up and still steer them. And my mother would sell them in the market. They fetched a good price. And sometimes I made their passengers too . . . little people sewn from cloth. I had my own special man that I always kept. He was a soldier. He wore a camouflage uniform and I painted a big smile on his face with charcoal because I hoped that one day I would be like him and drive a car like that. I wanted to be a soldier. But I never thought that dream would come true in the way it did.’

He faltered and swallowed, and started speaking again.

‘We had all heard the rumours,’ he said. ‘But it wasn’t until the refugees started passing through our village that we began to wonder if we should really believe them. Whole families would arrive. They had been walking for days. And we could tell they were frightened: the children would jump at the noise of a dog barking; the adults would drift off in the middle of a conversation. They couldn’t stop worrying. It was something much more than just tiredness that was troubling them, but when they tried to tell us what this was, when they spoke about armies of children coming down from the forests, raiding their shambas and killing their cows, burning their houses and shooting anyone who argued, we just couldn’t accept it. We didn’t believe them. We tried to be kind to them. We would offer them food. We would tell them they could stay with us, but mostly they refused; they said that the army would eventually reach our village too.