The massage became erotic. Yepe’s hands slid under her and cupped her breasts and rubbed her nipples with her thumb and moved to the buttocks and pushed the flesh hard up and down and pressed her fingers against the anus. The women on the mats were making a good deal of noise now, their bodies no longer passive but pushing up against the hands. Some of the women on the mats tried to reach between their legs or turn over but they were not allowed. Bo nun, someone said. Not yet. Yepe returned to her hearth and with a forked stick lifted steaming stones from the pans and placed them on a strip of bark cloth and brought them back. The women on the mats flipped over all at once. They cried out as the stones were rubbed with oil.
‘Well, you can probably imagine the rest,’ she said.
‘No, I can’t. I have an awful imagination.’
‘Yepe placed a stone here.’ She undid a few of the white front buttons of her blue dress and put my hand flat on her stomach. ‘And moved it in slow circles.’ Her skin was still oiled, still warm. I kept my circles small and slow on her taut belly, though I wanted to touch every bone, every patch of her. I wanted every part of her pressed against me.
‘Slowly, she pushed it up, up and along the collarbone.’ I did what she said and my hand, passing through, grazed her breasts (no brassiere today), which were fuller than I’d guessed, and traveled the ridge of her collarbone several times. ‘And down again, back and forth across the nipples.’ She watched me. I watched her. Our eyes had not lowered or shut. So often a woman’s pleasure felt to me a mystery, the slightest wisp of a thing you were meant to find, and she having no better idea of where to look than you did.
‘Then she turned the stone on its side and brought it down—’
I kissed her. Or, as Nell later claimed, I leapt at her. I could not touch enough of her at once. I don’t remember removing clothes, hers or mine, but we were naked and laughing at our groping and when she reached down and felt me she smiled and said it wasn’t quite a stone, but it would do.
‘Well, that’s a relief,’ she said as we lay stuck together, mottled in bugs and dirt.
‘Is it?’
‘Remember elephants in large boots?’
‘The ink blot?’
‘That was the sex card. You’re supposed to see something sexual. And you said elephants in large boots. It had me worried. Listen to that.’
Sounds came from every direction — the beach, the gardens, the fields behind the women’s road.
If I hadn’t understood, I might not have said it was human.
‘Lots of sex tonight,’ she said. ‘The men are a bit threatened by the stones, apparently. The night of the minyana they need to be reassured that their women still want them.’
‘Reassure away.’
We did not sleep that night. We moved to my mat and talked and pressed our bodies together. She told me the Tam believed that love grows in the stomach and that they went around clutching their bellies when their hearts were broken. ‘You are in my stomach’ was their most intimate expression of love.
We knew that Fen could return at any moment, but we did not mention it.
‘The Mumbanyo kill their twins,’ she told me close to morning, ‘because two babies meant two different lovers.’ It was the only time she alluded to him or her pregnancy.
We did not hear Bani come up. He must have been standing there awhile, trying at first to give our spirits time to return to our bodies, for when he did rouse us his voice was loud and fed up. ‘Nell-Nell!’ His lips were touching the thin ghostly netting. ‘Fen di lam,’ he said. ‘Mirba tun.’
She leapt up as if a snake had bitten her. Bani went back down the ladder. ‘He’s halfway across the lake.’
‘Bugger.’
‘Yes, bugga,’ she mimicked. I touched her back as she groped around for her dress, and she stopped and kissed me, and I felt, stupidly, that it would all be okay.
We needn’t have hurried. When we reached the shore the boat was still far off. We could have stayed in bed, made love one more time.
‘He’s cut the engine too soon.’ I knew I’d now find any fault with him I could. ‘It wouldn’t disturb anyone from all the way out there.’ He’d tried to sneak up on us, I suspected.
Nell was shielding her eyes with her hand, though it was not a bright morning. There seemed to be no sun at all in the low metal-colored sky. It wasn’t raining, but it felt like we were breathing water. I wanted her to reach for me, claim me, but she stood rigid as a meerkat, focused on the boat, still a blemish, coming slowly toward shore. I touched the back of her neck, the short hairs that had come loose from her plait. I felt as wide open and undefended as a man can be.
‘Please dear God don’t let him have that flute,’ Nell said.
The outlines of the figures in the boat sharpened: one seated in the stern, one standing amidships. But they were still so far away. I wanted to go back to bed with her and resented this standing and waiting I had to do before he took her back. And I resented Bani for stealing these last minutes from me, even though Fen might have found her lying in my arms.
Bani and a few other boys were farther down the beach, talking boisterously and laughing, reliving, I was sure, the night before, rehearsing their stories for Xambun.
Nell was squinting. She’d left her glasses behind. ‘What do you see?’ she asked. ‘They’re saying it was a good hunt. They’re saying they’ve got something big, a boar or a buck.’
For a few moments that’s what it looked like: a good hunt, an animal slumped over the bow of my thin canoe.
And then one of Bani’s friends let out a scream. And I saw what he saw.
The standing figure in the middle was not a man but a long thick pole, the paddling figure in the stern was Fen, and what had looked like an animal carcass was Xambun draped diagonally in the bow.
‘What is it, Andrew?’ Nell wailed. I think it was the only time she ever said my first name.
I wrapped her in my arms and told her quietly in her ear. Behind us the screaming began and never stopped. The sides of my canoe were streaked with blood. When the boat came close enough, Bani and the other boys waded out up to their necks to reach Xambun. They lifted his body up off the boat and carried it high in their arms toward land.
Fen was saying the same thing over and over: Fua nengaina fil. I didn’t know what it meant. There was splashing and wailing and Xambun was handed over to Malun, who had come running and shrieking onto the beach. She sank to the wet sand with her son, his blood no longer running and his skin the color of driftwood. Nell pulled away from me and went to her. She wrapped her arms around Malun, but Malun threw her off. She hollered and shook Xambun, tears, spit, and sweat coming off her as she moved, as if she believed that with enough force she could bend back the universe.
Fen squatted in the shallows beside Nell. His face was narrower than I remembered, a blade slicing the air, his forehead white but the rest stained with blood. His shirtfront was caked with it as well.
‘Fua nengaina fil,’ he cried out to them, as if he were still in the boat and they were hundreds of yards away. He spoke directly to Malun and tears cut pale lines through the dried blood on his face. Malun, when she registered him, screeched like an animal that had been bitten. With her two arms she shoved him away from her son’s body.
‘It wasn’t my fault, Nell. They ambushed us. Kolekamban ambushed us.’
I could see the arrow wounds: one in the temple, one in the chest. Clean, precise shots.
More and more people were coming onto the beach, encircling us, pressing in to see Xambun. I could barely breathe. From somewhere behind us a slit drum started up, awful, powerful, drawn-out knells loud enough for every person and spirit on the lake to hear. The sound shook through me.
I crouched next to Fen. ‘Did they see it was you?’ I said.