Well, I just blew up at that. “These people here can’t decide anything for themselves! I swear, my kitchen help still can’t remember to use the omelet pan for an omelet! For God’s sakes, Leah, you should know as well as I do how they are.”
“Yes, Rachel, I believe I married one of them.”
I kept forgetting that. “Well, shut my mouth wide open.”
“As usual,” Adah said.
For the entire trip I think the three of us were all on speaking terms for only one complete afternoon. We’d got as far as Benin without killing each other, and Adah wanted to see the famous villages on stilts. But, wouldn’t you know, the road to that was washed out. Leah and I tried to explain to her how in Africa the roads are here today, gone tomorrow. You are constantly seeing signs such as, “If this sign is under water the road is impassable,” and so forth. That much we could agree on.
So we ended up going to the ancient palace at Abomey, instead, which was the only tourist attraction for hundreds of miles around. We followed our map to Abomey, and luckily the road to it was still there. We parked in the center of town, which had big jacaranda trees and was very quaint. It was a cinch to find the ancient palace because it was surrounded by huge red mud walls and had a very grand entryway. Snoozing on a bench in the entrance we found an English-speaking guide who agreed to wake up and take us through on a tour. He explained how in former centuries, before the arrival of the French, the Abomey kings had enormous palaces and very nice clothes. They recorded their history in fabulous tapestries that hung on the palace walls, and had skillful knives and swords and such, which they used to conquer the neighboring tribes and enslave them. Oh, they just killed people right and left, he claimed, and then they’d put the skulls of their favorite enemies into their household decor. It’s true! We saw every one of these things—the tapestries depicting violent acts and the swords and knives and even a throne with human skulls attached to the bottoms of all four legs, plated with bronze like keepsake baby shoes!
“Why, that’s just what I need for my lobby in the Equatorial,” I joked, although the idea of those things being the former actual heads of living people was a bit much for three o’clock in the afternoon.
This was no fairy-tale kingdom, let me tell you. They forced women into slave marriage with the King for the purpose of reproducing their babies at a high rate. One King would have, oh, fifty or a hundred wives, easy. More, if he was anything special. Or so the guide told us, maybe to impress us. To celebrate their occasions, he said, they’d just haul off and kill a bunch of their slaves, grind up all the blood and bones, and mix it up with mud for making more walls for their temples! And what’s worse, whenever a King died, forty of his wives would have to be killed and buried with him!
I had to stop the guide right there and ask him, “Now, would they be his favorite wives they’d bury with him, or the meanest ones, or what?”
The guide said he thought probably it would have been the prettiest ones. Well, I can just imagine that! The King gets sick, all the wives would be letting their hair go and eating sweets day and night to wreck their figures.
Even though Leah and I had been crabbing at each other all week, that afternoon in the palace at Abomey for some reason we all got quiet as dead bats. Now, I have been around: the racial rioting in South Africa, hosting embassy parties in Brazzaville, shopping in Paris and Brussels, the game animals in Kenya, I have seen it all. But that palace was something else. It gave me the heebie-jeebies. We walked through the narrow passages, admiring the artworks and shivering to see chunks of bone sticking out of the walls. Whatever we’d been fighting about seemed to fade for the moment with those dead remains all around us. I shook from head to toe, even though the day was quite warm.
Leah and Adah happened to be walking in front of me, probably to get away from the guide, because they like to have their own explanations for everything, and as I looked at them I was shocked to see how alike they were. They’d both bought wild-colored waxcloth shirts in the Senegal market, Adah to wear over her jeans and Leah to go with her long skirts (I personally see no need to go native, thanks very much, and will stick to my cotton knit), and Adah really doesn’t limp a bit anymore, like Mother said. Plus she talks, which just goes to show you her childhood was not entirely on the up-and-up. She’s exactly as tall as Leah now; too, which is simply unexplanatory. They hadn’t seen each other for years, and here they even showed up wearing the same hairstyle! Shoulder-length, pulled back, which is not even a regular fashion.
Suddenly I realized they were talking about Father.