The cheap coffin was splintered and crushed, the drums were punctured, clothes and shoes littered the Mata’s enclosure, but a tinny voice nearly deafened me, and it came from right behind me. I put away the mananga’s arms in their sockets.
I turned, light-headed. His voice was a note higher than I remembered. He had barely stirred, but he was coming fully out of the trance. It was no hallucination, then. I abandoned the mananga and scrambled up the embankment on my hands and feet. From the Mata’s house, a thunderstruck Questionnaire emerged, bearing two singate heads like holy relics. I looked at the Mata. It seemed evil to call a man this old back from the grave. His eyes were milky, almost undifferentiated between pupil and whites. I searched the drawn face for a familiar expression. Then he spoke, and it was Mata Nimito of the Great Calm. It was not evil, then, it was right, to live.
‘Worie.’
‘Dobemu,’ I replied.
He fell silent at my voice. Then he asked, ‘Ama Zanda mu chei?’
‘Zanda mu chei.’
His eyes closed, and he was breathing regularly again. I bowed, condemned by the silence. When I left, he’d had a Menai nation to care for him. I had not meant for this to happen, that the Mata would face his death alone, among strangers so impatient for him to go.
‘My apologies,’ said Questionnaire. ‘You’re certainly not a stranger to the old man.’
‘Yes,’ I said, not looking at him. ‘And where you were grave-robbing before, now you are a common thief.’
‘You misunderstand me completely. Listen, this is extremely important.’ He was climbing up to us. ‘I’d like to talk to the old man about these. Can you interpret for me?’ He took my shoulder to turn me around. I resisted, protecting my tears from sight, but he was strong, and I turned with him, pushing him away, sending him tumbling down the pavilion, bronzes flying. I wiped my cheeks and bent over the old man.
‘Jons miena qua?’
‘Jonszer amie gonzi.’ There was no point in hiding anything from the Mata. ‘Minsa qua na Agui.’
He turned towards the tidal creek, which sat lower in its bed than I had remembered. He looked at me. His eyes were so milky, I wasn’t sure, now, how much he could see. ‘Amazi manasi ungheu.’
I felt the shame but no surprise at his perfect recollections, for he carried millennia of Menai history in his head. I was away for six and a half years and he picked up as if I had just returned from the stream. His eyebrows lifted, and I followed his eyes to the huddle of wine gourds assembled for the burial. He could see well enough, then.
I filled two brown glasses and brought them over. He stared. I remembered and scrambled for water. Water was primal, water was first. I gave him a gourd, which he took with a hand that trembled. ‘Amis andgus.’
‘Andgus ashen,’ I replied and drank from the same gourd. I drank deep, quenching a sudden thirst not for water but for custom. It was true, then: all the healing in the world was in the gourd of water.
‘This is old water,’ I said in the Menai equivalent of small talk, dodging the weighty things that had to be said.
‘The sky pissed it when the world was young,’ he agreed.
An age passed. The sun was going down, so I pivoted the sun shelter until he was looking into clear skies. His hand—leathery, insubstantial—fell on my head, and a shroud of gooseflesh wrapped itself around me, stubbling my skin. I began to remember. Flakes of memory began to coalesce around the water in my guts. I served his wine and joined his eyes in the skies.
There was no ‘ordinary’ sky. Each one was unique. Every hour’s pattern was a perfect, never-to-be-repeated arrangement of shades, wisps, and auguries. For a cloudcaster like Nimito, a sky—day or night—was not just a densely scripted tome to be studied, deciphered, and decoded but a backdrop on which to project and encode a mata’s legendary memories of the past and deductions of the future. For me it was just a ceiling for life, but in his presence it acquired a grandeur that it normally lacked.
I found myself stealing glances at his riveted face, trying to glean something of the psychosis that had kept this man so long and consistently in this groove. His eyebrows were the most animated part of him, the one organ that seemingly refused to atrophy, gaining, instead, a second sight that stymied the first. The muscles of the brows were still as limber as a tongue. I watched the emotions course through them. A flash of sly. A pucker of small surprise. And then—thirty-five minutes after our ritual drink of water—an electrifying dilation that swamped the orbs and spread, through stiffening, corded muscles, through his wasted body.
His face fell slowly from the skies until his eyes held my gaze. There was a look of ineffable sadness in them. I knew it was time to mourn Jonszer. Yet by killing himself he had fallen foul of the great taboo. The Mata could not sing the tanda ma of his man Friday.
I went to the mananga, wondering whether I dared.
Jonszer’s last words came back to me, his disgust amplified by the pathos of his suicide, by the passion of an excellent swimmer who dived into a creek with a cord and roped himself to a mangrove root under the surface.
A nervous hand hovered on my shoulder, and when I turned, Amana was standing there. Her clothes were soiled and her hair generously supplied with twigs and burrs. She was looking at the old man, who had fallen back onto the platform. I put away the mananga’s arms and gathered him up carefully. He was breathing lightly, his body weighing little more than old rags. He smelled of childhood memories and brackish creeks.
I stepped down from the embankment with my burden. As I turned away, Questionnaire was emerging from the Mata’s house, without the bronzes, his lips a thin, angry line.
She swallowed. ‘Where are you taking him?’
‘Home,’ I said.
‘But Ma’Calico—’
‘Home,’ I repeated.
MATA NIMITO
Kreektown | 18th March, 2005
Aiyegun Yesi Yemanagu
You see that nation in the mists
among the hills, beside the scented trees.
You see her maidens’ comely walk,
her handsome sheep,
her finely sculpted men.
You hear the long language that comes like song,
and love her pleasant ways,
and do not know her name?
Her name is Menai.
We are Menai.
Our land is lost.
Our love, our soil, our soul.
But we’re one clan, one nation, and one folk,
pulled by the root from the soil of our hearth.
And we are not made any more for planting towns.
We are one folk, one cloth, one destiny, one kin,
pulled by deceit from the soil of our hearth.
We are not made any more for planting towns.
Living lightly on the land,
planting crops for trees
and tents for houses . . .
Our hearts are planted
in the country that we lost,
and