The Expedition to the Baobab Tree Read Free

playing with me, they taught me, so that eventually I would remember the rapture and the torment, but inwardly remain untouched, remain whole, remain myself. I call you up in my memory. I cannot remember your faces but that does not matter. I remember your wonderful affection. I wonder whether you are now old and sad, and whether you still live in that house that was your destination, and whether you remember me, one of the multitude entrusted to your special soft playful care, and whether you ever tried to find out what happened to all of us. Whether you minded.
    I never forgot your lessons, and even now I could laugh lewdly if I had to, and even now I could, like a cat, snuggle up lithely or wriggle free, and temper or increase my intensity as the situation demanded; but that has all become superfluous.
    Now I live in a hollow with sleep the dense solution. I live in time measured by myself, initially with three beads, later with more and more till I chose the best of the green ones for my arrangement. So, to begin with, there passed in cycle a green day and two black days, later just a string of green days. Later I grew tired of green days and varied them with black in any conceivable pattern and number, as determined by mood and chance. My days became grouped. It was already a method to counter the vagueness of time hiding behind the course of nature. Time threatened me. It wanted to annihilate me. I thought I cheated it by changing my system every so often. Never did time know what I was going to try next, where even in the morning when light and chirruping awoke me I did not know what I was going to try with time, where I looked for firewood as and when necessary, fetched water when my supply was up, searched for food when I had to, and ate when I felt hungry, slept when drowsiness made my limbs heavy. And I dreamed and nodded through rose quartz.
    I was reaching a stage of forgetting my counting toys, which then numbered only three and were gradually beginning to bore me, on the knot on the inner wall of the tree, when one day I picked up in various places more potsherds and beads as well as copper wire, and brought all this back. I added the rest, sherd and bead, to the heap, these leavings of inhabitants whom I wished ill because they couldleave no more than this, potsherds that would not fit together and become a whole roundness, pitiful decorations that I irritably strung on stalks and carried around my neck, rusty copper-wire rings, thick and heavy as shackles, with which I could do nothing, and nothing more in my vicinity. Nothing more – or was I roaming over graves? Nothing more – or was I roaming over walls submerged in dust and overgrown with plants? Was I perhaps roaming over courtyards and squares, fortifications, terraces, conduits, halls and shanties, settlements and streets crumbled into insignificance, taken over by the winters and the summers? Was I roaming over the place that we aimlessly came looking for, purposefulness long ago relinquished in the pitiless sun? Place of strips of underbrush and prickly grass, of a river off to one side hidden behind ripine trees and creepers, of hills with flattened crests on which gigantic round rocks piled in fantastic shapes, place of my towering baobab? Tableaus through which we roamed dazed, frightened? Place of predator and prey?
    I imagine bloody wars of extermination. Droughts. An epidemic. I think of unflagging zeal, followed by collapse and despair. And then nothing, just a tiny residue that does not help me however much I make believe I have found a way of warding off the danger of timelessness through order. Because I resisted becoming a mere yawn in the lazy passage of the days, a mere transitory draught of air, a subordinate beat in the rhythm, a phantom within a rupture in eternity.
    Too scantily endowed to fashion something myself, I used the artefacts of forgotten people to while away time, to coagulate time, with the bitter realization that it