It made no sense. It made even less sense to stand here and try to make it make sense. He was not normally the type who couldn't think what to do, and so his confusion now was all the more intense. His code said Stay , like a sea captain, stay to sort through the crime and bring back, if not his wayfarers, then at least a full accounting of their demise. The economy of fear said Run. Save what life could be saved. But run which way and save which life? That was the excruciating choice. Cleopatra waited in one direction in her lotus position and white light. Kora waited in the other, perhaps not as surely. But hadn't he just heard her song?
His light ebbed to brown. Ike forced himself to rifle the pockets of his dead passengers. Surely someone had batteries or another flashlight or some food. But the pockets had been slashed and emptied.
The frenzy of it struck him. Why shred the pockets and even the flesh beneath them? This was no ordinary robbery. Stopping down his loathing, he tried to summarize the incident: a crime of rage, to judge by the mutilations, yet a crime of want, to judge by the thievery. Again it made no sense.
His light blinked out and the blackness jumped up around him. The weight of the mountain seemed to press down. A breeze Ike had not felt before brought to mind vast mineral respiration, as if a juggernaut were waking. It carried an undertone of gases, not noxious but rare, distant.
And then his imagination became unnecessary. That scratching sound of nails on stone returned. This time there was no question of its reality. It was approaching from the upper passageway. And this time Kora's voice was part of the mix.
She sounded in ecstasy, very near to orgasm. Or like his sister that time, in that instant just as her infant daughter came out of her womb. That, Ike conceded, or this was a sound of agony so deep it verged on the forbidden. The moan or low or animal petition, whatever it was, begged for an ending.
He almost called to her. But that other sound kept him mute. The climber in him had registered it as fingernails scraping for purchase, but the torn flesh lying in the darkness now evoked claws or talons. He resisted the logic, then embraced it in a hurry. Fine. Claws. A beast. Yeti. This was it. What now?
The dreadful opera of woman and beast drew closer. Fight or flight? Ike asked himself.
Neither. Both were futile. He did what he had to do, the survivor's trick. He hid in plain sight. Like a mountain man pulling himself into a womb of warm buffalo meat, Ike lay down among the bodies on the cold floor and dragged the dead upon him.
It was an act so heinous it was sin. In lying down between the corpses in utter blackness and in bringing a smooth naked thigh across his and draping a cold arm across his chest, Ike felt the weight of damnation. In disguising himself as dead, he let
go part of his soul. Fully sane, he gave up all aspects of his life in order to preserve it. His one anchor to believing this was happening to him was that he could not believe it was happening to him. 'Dear God,' he whispered.
The sounds became louder.
There was only one last choice to make: to keep open or to close his eyes to sights he could not see anyway. He closed them.
Kora's smell reached him upon that subterranean breeze. He heard her groan.
Ike held his breath. He'd never been afraid like this, and his cowardice was a revelation.
They – Kora and her captor – came around the corner. Her breathing was tortured. She was dying. Her pain was epic, beyond words.
Ike felt tears running down his face. He was weeping for her. Weeping for her pain. Weeping, too, for his lost courage. To lie unmoving and not give aid. He was no different from those climbers who had left him for dead once upon a mountain. Even as he inhaled and exhaled in tiny beadlike drops and listened to his heart's hammering pump and felt the dead close him in their embrace, he was giving Kora up for himself. Moment by moment he was forsaking her. Damned, he was damned.
Ike blinked at his tears, despised them, reviled his self-pity. Then he opened his eyes to take it like a man. And almost choked on his surprise.
The blackness was full, but no longer infinite. There were words written in the darkness. They were fluorescent and coiled like snakes and they moved.
It was him.
Isaac had resurrected.
Have you ever been at sea in a dense fog, when it seemed as if a tangible white darkness shut you in, and the great ship, tense and anxious, groped her way toward the shore... and you waited with beating heart for something to happen?
– HELEN KELLER, The Story of My Life
2
ALI
North of Askam, the Kalahari Desert, South Africa
1995
'Mother?'
The girl's voice entered Ali's hut softly.
Here was how ghosts must sing, thought Ali, this Bantu lilt, the melody searching melody. She looked up from her suitcase.
In the doorway stood a Zulu girl with the frozen, wide-eyed grin of advanced leprosy: lips, eyelids, and nose eaten away.
'Kokie,' said Ali. Kokie Madiba. Fourteen years old. She was called a witch.
Over the girl's shoulder, Ali caught sight of herself and Kokie in a small mirror on the wall. The contrast did not please her. Ali had let her hair grow out over the past year. Next to the black girl's ruined flesh, her golden hair looked like harvest wheat beside a salted field. Her beauty was obscene to her. Ali moved to one side to erase her own image. For a while she had even tried taking the small mirror off her wall. Finally she'd hung it back on the nail, despairing that abnegation could be more vain than vanity.
'We've talked about this many times,' she said. 'I am Sister, not Mother.'
'We have talked about this, ya'as, mum,' the orphan said. 'Sister, Mother.'
Some of them thought she was a holy woman, or a queen. Or a witch. The concept of a single woman, much less a nun, was very odd out here in the bush. For once the offbeat had served her well. Deciding she must be in exile like them, the colony had taken her in.
'Did you want something, Kokie?'
'I bring you this.' The girl held out a necklace with a small shrunken pouch embroidered with beadwork. The leather looked fresh, hastily tanned, with small hairs still attached. Clearly they had been in a hurry to finish this for her. 'Wear this. The evil stays away.'